April 2013 - Classical Music

[Note: I wrote much of this post several months ago, but then haven't been in a position to finish it until now. The normal levels of patchy service will now be resumed.] 
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Bach, J.S. - French Suite No.4
Beethoven - Mass in C major
Dvorak - String Quartet No.7
Faure - La bonne chanson
Haydn - Symphony No.99
Holmboe

• String Quartets 1 to 20
• Symphony No.5
• Chamber Symphonies 1 and 3
• Violin Sonata No.2 

Janacek - Capriccio, 'Defiance'
Liszt - Festklänge (Festival Sounds)
Poulenc

• Three Pastorales
• Valse-Improvisation on the name of Bach
• Melancolie

Well, it happened again.  I went completely and utterly Holmboe-crazy.

It might only take a few lines in the above list, but the focus of that craziness was the complete series of numbered string quartets.  No sooner had I listened to the last 4 works (which form a sort of a group) that I impulsively decided I wanted to listen to all of them, in chronological order, to get a better grasp of the music.

So I did. Over most of the month of April.

No sooner had I finished this that I decided I wanted to listen to all 20 of them again, this time not in chronological order, to further develop my sense of the individual works.  I polished off a dozen of them in about 36 hours, before slowing down and listening to the rest a few days later.

At the start of this Holmboe frenzy I was also listening to a few other works, and along the way the 3rd chamber symphony marked the point where I had finally listened to all of the Holmboe discs I bought last year (having expanded my total collection from 6 discs - the symphonies - to 17).  I already have my eye on about half a dozen more.

Those quartets are quite a body of work. They span 36 years of creative output, and that's starting from when Holmboe was already 40 years old! I won't pretend to love them all equally, but I didn't get tired of listening.

Favourites? Well no.11, subtitled ''Rustico", is probably top of the list and it's about the only quartet that could really be called happy.  I've also got an instinctive soft spot for no.2 and no.7.

I listened to a Haydn symphony after I heard that the conductor Sir Colin Davis had died, because it's his set of the 'London' symphonies that introduced me to that music and also it's the only set of Davis recordings I own. I now know that he's considered to have left a greater legacy with some other recordings, but I'm pretty happy just from having that one slice of lovely, warm-hearted music-making from him.

August 2012 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S. - Ich hatter viel Bekümmernis (I had many afflictions) - 1720 version
Bach, J.S. - Der Himmel lacht, die Erde jubilieret (The heavens laugh, the earth rejoices)
Bach? - Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele II (Praise the Lord, O my soul, No.2)
Beethoven - String Quintet
Beethoven - Piano Sonatas 16 to 18
Heller - 25 Melodic Etudes, Op.45
Holmboe - Violin Sonata No.1
Holmboe - Sinfonias 1 to 4
Liszt - Venezia e Napoli

This list includes the vanguard of what has since become an avalanche of new classical music.  I still haven't finished that collection of Bach cantatas I bought back in March, and yet I decided to burden myself with a wealth of new Holmboe and Faure, along with a dash of Heller.  Well, alright, not really 'burden'.

One of the first purchases was Holmboe's Kairos.  No, you won't find it on the listening list above.  But in fact you will.

Kairos is a fairly rare construction of 4-pieces-in-1.  Or perhaps 4-into-1, as there's good reason to suppose that at least the first 3 were conceived as separate pieces first.  Each of these Sinfonias for strings is a single-movement work, perfectly listenable to on its own.  Which is how I listened to them during August.

A few years later, though, Holmboe wrote a fourth Sinfonia which is multi-movement, and a little bit different in character to the others.  I also listened to this on its own... but split it up and wrap it around the other three, and hey presto, you've got a single work: Kairos.

As I understand it, the concept derives from the difference betwen 'psychological' time, or the right moment (kairos in Greek) and 'chronological' time (chronos in Greek). It seems to me that Holmboe is deliberately illustrating the effect that music sounds different depending on what you've heard before it.  Which thrills me no end, because it's something I've been hammering on about for years (not least on Tori Amos forums - my apologies to anyone who's heard this broken record too many times).

The human brain really isn't terribly good at judging absolute values.  It's difficult for us to correctly judge speed, temperature, decibels, or pitch.  Whereas we're extremely good at measuring relative values.  Faster/slower, hotter/colder, louder/softer, higher/lower.

So take a block of music and put it in a different context, and it will mean something slightly different.  If the opening of a piece becomes the opening of the 4th movement, it won't come across in quite the same way.  If there's 15 minutes of music in between two movements that used to be next each other, the lead-in to the second of those movements has become completely different and will affect how it's heard.

Of course, none of this makes a huge difference to the quality of the music, but on listening to the Sinfonias as separate pieces they've got all the characteristics of Holmboe that make me so enthusiastic, particularly the sense of a line carrying right through a piece - although that's less true of the 4th, which is broken up and considerably more quirky.  Given that this is all string music, it's important that he keeps the interest up rather than having a generalised mass of sound. Each piece has changes of pace and of texture that kept me interested.

So, I like them on their own.  It remains to be seen what I'll think of them together.

December 2011 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S.

• 'Triple Concerto' for Flute, Violin and Harpsichord
• Triple Harpischord Concertos 1 and 2
• Oboe D'Amore Concerto in A (reconstruction - BWV 1055R)
• Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C minor (reconstruction - BWV 1060R)

Bach/Vivaldi - Quadruple Harpischord Concerto in A minor, BWV 1065
Barber

• Dover Beach
• Three Songs, Op. 10
• Unpublished songs

Beethoven - Symphony No. 6 'Pastorale'
Beethoven - Mass in C
Faure - Barcarolle No. 3
Holmboe - Symphonies 1 to 8
Holst - The Planets
Mozart - Piano Sonatas 10 to 12
Mozart - Symphony No. 35 'Haffner'
Pisendel (?) - Saraband in C
Strauss, Richard - Metamorphosen
Vivaldi

• Violin Sonatas in C minor, D minor, G minor and B flat, RV 5, 15. 28 and 34
• Laudate peri in C minor, RV 600
• Laudate peri in A, RV 602 plus revised Gloria from RV 602a
• Gaude mater Ecclesia (Rejoice, mother Church)
• Salve Regina in C minor, RV 616
• Salve Regina in G minor, RV 618
• Sanctorum meritis, RV 620
• Vos aurae per montes (You breezes through the mountains)
• Ascende laeta (Gladly climb)
• Cur sagittas, cur tela, RV 637

Nearly at the end of my bulk classical purchase - just a few Bach and Vivaldi pieces to go! Then I can start going back and remembering more of it.  As far as Vivaldi is concerned, there are a few fragments that have stuck in the mind, so it's not all been a wasted exercise.

My obsession with Vagn Holmboe flared with a vengeance this month.  The 8 symphonies mentioned above are just the things that are in my collection. I've been laying my hands on every Holmboe fragment I can find - samples on iTunes, and thanks to the Swedish record company BIS I've listened to about another 10 pieces in full online. I expect to greatly expand my Holmboe CD collection sometime soon.

Just what is it that causes me to obsess about a moderately obscure 20th century composer? It really started with what I read about him, primarily in the Penguin Guide to classical music. The qualities it talked about - his sense of structure, argument and development, plus his vague similarities to Sibelius - drew my attention, as well as the glowing terms constantly used to describe the quality, power and imagination of the music.  And then, when I finally got around to buying the set of the symphonies... I could hear what the writers had been talking about!

Not always, immediately, mind, because some of the symphonies are more accessible than others.  Only a few of the earlier ones could be regarded as 'tuneful' in any conventional sense.  But even in some of the 'non-tuneful' ones it didn't take long to hear how little pieces of music would grow and merge and swell into larger structures.  It's music that always sounds like it knows what it's doing and where it's going.

Okay, not always - I don't think every single thing is amazing. The choral Symphony No. 4 doesn't work all that convincingly.  But hits are far more frequent than misses and for a composer who's not terribly famous, it's pretty impressive stuff. And I want more of it.

Year in Review

Unlike the pop music list, the classical one is complete and tells me I've listened to... 438 different classical recordings!  There's some double-ups there, and some things that are only fragments, but it's still about 400 different classical works.

Which sounds like a lot more than the pop music list, but some of these 'works' are only a couple of minutes long while only 20 or 30 of them would be equivalent in length to a pop music album.

In terms of sheer number of compositions, Vivaldi ends up the winner - not a surprise given recent months! There are also fairly healthy doses of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Faure, Handel, Haydn, Holmboe, Mozart, Scarlatti, Schubert, Schumann and Telemann.  None of which is a great surprise to me personally. My classical collection actually isn't that enormous in terms of the composers represented.  There are certain composers for whom the collection is quite 'deep' and then many others, including some fairly famous names, aren't represented much or at all.  It's no different to pop music really, in that not every big name appeals to me. That still holds true even though, for classical music, there's been a much longer period of time over which lesser composers have been winnowed out and our culture has decided who's worth holding onto.

The spreadsheet claims I've actually managed to listen to around 40% of my classical collection during the year, which does surprise me.  I suspect it's due to how much the collection expanded during the year (with 2 big purchases, one right at New Year's and then the box sets a few months ago) and my efforts to listen to what I bought.

And I've got designs on buying more...