Popular Music - September 2017

Tori Amos

• Y Kant Tori Read
• Little Earthquakes
• Under the Pink
• Boys for Pele
• From the Choirgirl Hotel
• To Venus and Back
• Strange Little Girls
• Scarlet's Walk
• Abnormally Attracted to Sin
• Native Invader

Bat for Lashes - Two Suns
Deborah Conway - Bitch Epic
FKA twigs - M3LL155X
Patty Griffin - Living With Ghosts
Joni Mitchell

• Song to a Seagull
• Clouds
• Ladies of the Canyon
• Blue
• For the Roses
• Court and Spark
• The Hissing of Summer Lawns
• Hejira

Thrice - Major/Minor
Rachael Yamagata - Happenstance
Rachael Yamagata - Chesapeake

Buried at the end of one of these long lists is the arrival of Tori Amos' new album, Native Invader. Which I am not quite ready to talk about.

Shortly after it arrived I made a small observation, that I now had 17 Tori Amos studio albums and 17 Joni Mitchell albums. This isn't strictly correct unless you use some slightly creative counting (one example appearing in the next paragraph), but it was good enough for me to start on another one of my "projects", pairing albums from the two artists. During September I got through 8 such pairs.

What happened shortly before Native Invader arrived was the surprise re-release of Tori Amos' first album Y Kant Tori Read (strictly speaking, the self-titled album of a band) on iTunes. Which I bought immediately, not because I think it's something amazing (it's enjoyable, but over-earnest and occasionally embarrassing) but because this was the first time owning a genuine copy was practicable. Tori had indicated shortly beforehand that the album would be released in a few months (which, given how long it's taken me to write this, I can say turned out to be referring to a physical CD release), so the progress of the album from embarrassing past history to officially embraced album was quite sudden.

Another new purchase was FKA twigs' EP, M3LL155X (reportedly to be pronounced "Melissa"). It's electronica, and often weird and glitchy electronica at that. I think I find it to be the strangest of all of FKA twigs' work so far, but I also found it sufficiently compelling to buy.

Classical Music - August 2017

Bach, J.S. - Bekennen will ich seinen Namen (I will acknowledge his name)
Barber

• Dover Beach
• Overture to 'The School for Scandal'
• Cello Sonata 

Beethoven

• The Creatures of Prometheus
• 12 German Dances for orchestra, WoO 8
• 12 Contredanses for orchestra, WoO 14
• Two arias for "The Beautfiul Shoemaker's Wife" 

Brahms - Piano Trio No.1
Bridge

• Mid of the Night
• Serenade (orchestral version)
• Valse Intermezzo à cordes
• Chant d'espérance
• Phantasie String Quartet
• Novelletten
• 3 Pieces for string quartet, H.43

Debussy - Cello Sonata
Debussy - La plus que lente (cello arrangement) 
Dvorak - String Quartets 2 to 5
Haydn - Symphonies 26, 42 and 65
Holmboe - Notturno
Holmboe - Hymn to the Sun 
Holten - Puder og skår (Pillows and Shards)
Lorentzen - National-Fanfare
Medtner - Skazki, opp. 8, 9, 14 and 20
Mozart

• Symphonies 29 and 30
• Piano Concerto No.5
• String Quintet No.1 

Nielsen - Symphony No.1
Nielsen - Two Fantasy Pieces for oboe and piano 
Nørgård - Symphonies 3 and 8
Poulenc

• Cello Sonata
• Serenade from Chanson Galliardes (cello and piano version)
• Bagatelle from Le Bal Masque (cello and piano version)

Rachmaninov - Six songs, op.38
Rachmaninov - Variations on a theme by Corelli
Schoenberg - Pelleas and Melisande
Schumann

• Carnaval
• Symphonic Etudes
• Symphony in G minor, 'Zwickau' 

Scriabin

• Piano Sonata No.7
• 3 Pieces, op.2
• 10 Mazurkas, op.3
• Fantaisie, op.28
• 4 Preludes, op.31
• 2 Poèmes, op.32
• Valse in A flat, op.38
• 8 Etudes, op.42

Sibelius - Songs/Lieder, opp. 36, 37, 38 and 50
Villa-Lobos - Bachianas Brasileiras No.9 (strings and choral versions)

I've fallen behind again, so I won't say an enormous amount about this list. In a lot of ways it's a continuation of the July listening pattern, with the surveys of various composers. I also started a Brahms chronological survey, and possibly I started that in July with the others, but as the earliest Brahms work I own is opus 8 it might not have registered.

The Sibelius songs are worth mentioning, because I was surprised by how good they were. While I had no doubts about Sibelius' quality as a composer, his reputation is almost entirely based on his orchestral work. But there is more than enough in these songs to repay the listener, and I was often struck by how modern they are.