August 2013 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S.

• Christus, der ist mein Leben (Christ, who is my life)
• Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz (Search me, God, and know my heart)
• Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz (Why are you downcast, my soul)
• Keyboard Partitas 1 to 6
• Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue

Barber - Second Essay for Orchestra
Barber - 2 Songs, Op.18
Beethoven - Symphonies 7 and 8
Beethoven - String Quartet No.11, 'Quartetto Serioso' 
Bridge

• There Is A Willow Grows Aslant a Brook
• Sir Roger de Coverley (A Christmas Dance) - full orchestra version and strings version
• 2 Songs of Rabindranath Tagore  (orchestral versions)
• Vignettes de Danse
• 2 Intermezzi from 'Threads'
• 2 Entr'actes (Rosemary, Canzonetta)

Dvorak

• String Quartet No.4
• String quartet movement in F major
• 2 Waltzes for string quartet (arranged by Dvorak from piano pieces) 

Faure

• Songs, opuses 76, 83, 85 and 87
• Melisande's Song (from incidental music for Pelleas and Melisande)
• Papillon for cello and piano
• Sicilienne for cello and piano
• 8 short pieces for piano
• Impromptu 'No. 6' for piano (transcription of impromptu for harp)

Heller - 30 Progressive Etudes, Op.46
Janacek

• Sinfonietta
• Taras Bulba
• Lachian Dances
• Pohadka (Fairy Tale, for cello and piano)
• Presto for cello and piano 

Liszt

• Orpheus
• Heroide Funebre
• Die Ideale
• Two Episodes from Lenau's 'Faust' 

Minkus/Delibes - La Source (The Spring)
Mozart

• Symphony No.38, 'Prague'
• Piano Sonata No.14
• Fantasia in C minor 

Poulenc

• Suite Francaise (piano version)
• Francaise
• Promenades
• Improvisations 13 and 14
• Piece Breve on the name of Albert Roussel
• Bourree for the Pavillion of Auvergne
• Feuillets d'album (Album leaves)
• Capriccio for 2 pianos
• Elegie for 2 pianos
• L'Embarquement pour Cythere for 2 pianos

Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No.1
Ravel - Menuet Antique
Schumann - Papillons (Butterflies)
Schumann - Davidsbundlertanze (Dances of the League of David)
Vivaldi - Filiae maestae Jerusalem (Mournful daughters of Jerusalem)
Vivaldi - Non in pratis aut in hortis (Neither in meadows nor in gardens)

That's a pretty long list! Although many of the works are quite short.

I suddenly realised during the month that I had abandoned Mozart some 18 months ago, leaving him hanging mid-chronology. I suspect this was mostly due to shifting my focus to other composers when I bought new CDs, but it may have also had to do with the Sonata and Fantasia in C minor, works with which I'm relatively unfamiliar.  And that, in turn, is mostly because I simply don't like the Fantasia very much. I still don't, but it turns out that I quite like the sonata on its own. From now on I'll be more likely to ignore the traditional pairing of the 2 works.

The Bach cantatas are back. I acquired another 10 CDs worth, which still, amazingly enough, means that I have less than half of the total.

Just when I start thinking that this might be overkill and my fetish for complete sets might be unwise in this instance, there's some magical little bit of music that makes me think it's worthwhile exploring all this Bach.  Christus, der ist mein Leben (BWV 95 in the standard Bach catalogue) has this amazing tenor aria in it that I found myself listening to repeatedly - in fact I've just put it on again while writing this. I would post a link if I could find a version that I enjoy as much as the one that I have, which is by Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan.

My listening to the orchestral works of Frank Bridge has recently reached the 'late' works, and There Is A Willow Grows Aslant A Brook is a piece full of eerie magic. The title is a line from Hamlet, the beginning of the description of Ophelia's drowning, and the music fits this imagery wonderfully well. Special mention for atmosphere must also go to Janacek's Pohadka, which I found completely enchanting from the very beginning.

Liszt, too, managed to engage me a couple of times this month. Heroide Funebre (somewhat difficult to translate - one version I've seen suggested something like 'funeral letter to a hero') is one of the more moody symphonic poems, and so is rescued from Liszt's tendency for blustering. But even more successful were the Two Episodes from Lenau's 'Faust'.  The second piece is much better known on its own as the first Mephisto Waltz, but I found both of them to be quite satisfying and Liszt explicitly wanted them treated as a pair.

The two Vivaldi works I listened to are both introductory works for a Miserere, a psalm setting used for Good Friday, but the Miserere itself is lost.  Both of the introductions are, not surprisingly, also quite moody!

August 2013 - Popular Music

Tori Amos - Boys for Pele
Tori Amos - Abnormally Attracted to Sin
Missy Higgins - The Ol' Razzle Dazzle
Jars of Clay - The Long Fall Back to Earth
John Mayer - Born and Raised
Pearl Jam - Vs
Seal - Human Being

 It's taken me a long time to get around to listening to The Long Fall Back to Earth.  It is yet another of the CDs that I bought in the latter part of last year in a huge binge, knowing that it might take some time to work through them all.  And in this case it had to at least wait until I had absorbed an earlier Jars of Clay release, Redemption Songs.

On first listen I had thought that my reaction to The Long Fall Back to Earth might be similar, one of mild disappointment at the level of inspiration.  That would make several Jars of Clay albums in a row that hadn't been overly impressive, and to be honest during some of that first listen I was beginning to wonder if it was time to 'let go' of the band and just accept that I was no longer going to find their new work all that satisfying.

But then I started hearing things that I responded to. Partly it was that some tracks in the second half of the album made a better impression, but then as I listened to the whole album a second, third, fourth time, I enjoyed more of the songs throughout the record.

I think part of my difficulty was that this is very much a 'pop' record, perhaps the most pop one of Jars of Clay's career. They've never exactly been far from the mainstream anyway, but here they are supplying songs that are unashamedly in the pop mould, and borrowing particularly heavily from the 1980s. A song like 'Heaven' (actually one of the more rock-oriented tracks) could have been planted by a time traveller into a radio broadcast circa 1984 and few people would have noticed.

And on that basis a lot of the songs work. Yes, in some ways their lyrical ideas are simpler and less subtle than in what I would consider the best of the band's songs, without the beautiful turns of phrase, but only a few of the songs veer into sounding trite.

There's enough here to make me continue to be interested in the band's 'future' work - they released a new album last week, so I'm still a couple behind. In truth I'm not sure I've ever felt they are a band that delivers albums without weak points (other than their 3rd album, If I Left the Zoo), but so long as the strong tracks outweigh the poor I'll probably keep listening.  And make one hell of a 'best of' mix for myself at some point.

July 2013 - Classical Music

Dvorak - String Quartets 7 to 14

After a couple of false starts, I finally realised my intention of listening to all of Dvorak's 'mature' quartets.

Except deciding just where the maturity begins isn't really any easy task. I've seen all sorts of opinions about which works are the ones worth listening to.  The last 3 are universally listed, but those were all written in the 1890s.  It's less obvious to decide where to place a boundary between quartets 5 (1873), 6 (also 1873), 7 (1874), 8 (1876), 9 (1877), 10 (1878/9) and 11 (1881).

I decided to start with number 7 for a couple of reasons. One was that number 6 is a work that Dvorak felt the need to revise but never finished revising. So it was something he himself was somewhat dissatisfied with. Another reason is that number 7 was the first to be published, and also (a few years later) the first to be performed at a public concert.  So this is where people were sufficiently impressed to become interested in Dvorak as a composer.

I have a vague plan for sometime in the future to work through these quartets backwards rather than forwards, and see at which point I start feeling that the level of engagement has dropped.  Because it's fairly clear to me that Dvorak's earliest quartets, while having a lot of nice tunes, really show him struggling to know what to do with those tunes.  The music tends to ramble on without clear contours or contrast.

But all the works I listened to in July had a fair amount of reward. I'm not entirely sure I could identify one as a personal favourite yet... possibly number 10? Recollection is already a little tricky.

I'm more sure that number 12, the 'American' quartet, is not my favourite. I don't dislike it, but I don't think it's typical Dvorak and I think it's one of those pieces where the popularity derives at least partly from a memorable gimmick (not unlike Shostakovich's 'autobiographical' 8th string quartet, which is one of my least favourite in that composers' quartet series). I wouldn't say it's not worth listening to by any means, but I think it's a shame that it has become so popular as to overshadow the other works.

July 2013 - Popular Music

Tori Amos - From the Choirgirl Hotel
Tori Amos - Abnormally Attracted to Sin
Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel...
Bryan Duncan - Mercy
Nik Kershaw - To Be Frank
Mark Lizotte - Soul Lost Companion 
Something for Kate - Leave Your Soul To Science

I've written once before about From the Choirgirl Hotel, here.  Basically I want to expand on what I said then, because the power of this album still amazes me in a way very few other albums do.

I said last time that I was often drawn to listen to Choirgirl when I'm in a dark, angsty mood. This is still true. But it's not merely that. It's that when I'm in a dark, angsty mood, quite frequently this is the only thing in my entire collection I can find that provides the kind of catharsis I'm looking for.

I don't know if other people ever go trawling through their music trying to find something to match their mood, and spend a while thinking "nope, that's not it... nope... nope...think, think, what are you hearing in your head? What does it feel like?".  It's certainly something that I do from time to time, having a moment when I feel the desire for something really specific.  To me this is one of the reasons for having a large music collection, to cover as many different nuances of mood as possible.

Time and again, Choirgirl can be relied upon to be the best possible album for a particular kind of angst-ridden mood.  Nothing else I own possesses the same kind of power and drama.  No-one else sings to me - no scrap that, sings for me - about trying to hold back glaciers, about balloons not staying up in a perfectly windy sky, about boys who can't be men, about screaming at cathedrals, about just feeling that there's something wrong and not knowing how to fix it.  Song after song hits these kinds of marks with pounding beats and soaring melodies. It's intoxicating.

I know it's not healthy to be in that kind of place for long periods. But it's certainly easier to bear that kind of place when you can give it a fantastic soundtrack, and for me at least, being able to find an articulation of the mood is the kind of therapy that can help me move on.

And 54 minutes of music is a lot cheaper and more readily accessible than a counselling appointment of the same length.

June 2013 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S. - Keyboard Partitas 1 to 3
Dvorak - String Quartets 7 and 8

There's not really much to say here, other than there were 2 sets of classical works I decided to take with me on my travels, and at first I didn't get terribly far with listening to them.

Travel can be very exciting and adventurous, but fundamentally it's a disruption of your normal routines.  And I kept finding that I wasn't in the mood for listening to much music.  Anytime I took my headphones thinking that I might listen to some music while I was walking around, it didn't happen.  My normal habit of listening to music at night was almost entirely abandoned, and if I did listen it would only be when I was really tired and I would fall asleep before the end.

Eventually I worked out that the best time to listen was when I was travelling between cities, on a plane or train or bus, and had little else to do except perhaps stare out a window.

Even then I was quite liable to fall asleep, particular on a bus or train. A bit of gentle rocking motion and I would soon be nodding off.

So really, the story of the month was not listening to music. I got very stuck on the second Partita, and I lost count of how many times I started listening to Dvorak's 7th quartet but didn't reach the end.  This isn't really a reflection on the music, it's a reflection on the circumstances.

June 2013 - Popular Music

Tori Amos - Scarlet's Walk
Tori Amos - Past the Mission single, Parts 1 and 2
Bat for Lashes - The Haunted Man
Marc Cohn - The Rainy Season
Gomez - How We Operate
Radiohead - In Rainbows

I was travelling throughout the month of June.  I wasn't necessarily going to mention that on this blog, but it's an important piece of context for what I decided to write about.

One of the things I occasionally do while travelling is wander into music shops. Not generally with that much intention of buying anything (especially not when the luggage is already excessively full...), but I find the exploration to be a nice little diversion or time-filler on days when I don't have a set plan.

I don't know if anyone else does this, but I tend to 'test' the quality of a music shop by looking for certain things. Favourite things, ever so slightly obscure things. Does this shop have a good range, or is it a generic store full of the same CDs as every other big brand store? Is there some depth here?

It probably comes as no surprise that one of the most frequent tests is looking for Tori Amos material.  This clearly isn't because I have much need to buy more Tori Amos. I have most of what I really want, and indeed a fairly large proportion of everything she's released.

Imagine my astonishment, then, when I walked into a music store in Toronto called Sunrise Records and not only found a couple of albums on LP, but one of the few CD singles I hadn't acquired yet.  In the second-hand section they had Past the Mission.

It originally came as two separate parts. Record companies are always trying to make more money out of you, of course.  The gimmick was that one part had space for both CDs, but the second slot had a cardboard placeholder instead of the actual CD - which you had to buy the second part to get.  Sure enough, the copy in the shop had both CDs.

Apart from the studio version of the song, there are a total of 7 live performances taken from Tori's 1994 tour.  At the time of release, the performances were about 2 months old at most and the tour was still going. So it's a nice little time capsule.

There was no way I was passing it up. I think it was only about 10 dollars as well.  So congratulations, Sunrise Records.  You are officially the most impressive music store I've encountered in a while.

You shouldn't have such sticky labels on your products, though. I hate that, and I'm sure the corner of the CD's original cardboard packaging suffered damage as I tried to get one of the stickers off. Ironically the sticker said 'quality guaranteed'.

May 2013 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S. - French Suite No.6
Beethoven - Piano Sonata No.27 (2 versions)
Bridge

• Lament
• Two Poems for Orchestra after Richard Jeffries
• Two Old English Songs
• Thy Hand In Mine
• Mantle of Blue
• Blow Out, You Bugles
• A Prayer

Dvorak - String Quartets 7 and 10
Faure

• Nocturnes 6 and 7
• Barcarolles 5 and 6
• Valse-Caprice No.4
• Theme and Variations for piano
• Sérénade du Bourgeois gentilhomme
• Pleurs d'or (Tears of Gold)
• 2 Songs, Op.76

Holmboe - String Quartets 2, 4, 9, 12 and 17
Janacek - Concertino
Liszt - Hunnenschlacht (Battle of the Huns)
Poulenc

• 5 Impromptus
• Napoli
• Badinage

Most of these Bridge pieces were short, the exception being A Prayer which is his only work for choir and orchestra.  I don't, from this distance, recall any of these works grabbing my attention the way that his Dance Poem did, but neither did I dislike any of them. There's a consistent level of enjoyment from these pieces.

My Faure chronology took me into some of the music that made me fall in love with this composer in the first place, the piano pieces he wrote in the 1890s.  The fifth Barcarolle is an astonishing piece - even more astonishing once you try to learn to play it, as I have, and realise just how fiendishly complex it is.  In some sections the harmony changes constantly, in others the melody keeps changing octave/register (at times between every note) and creates an intricate ballet between the pianist's two hands that a listener should hear as one seamless flow. It's strange and it's beautiful.

(This isn't the recording I have, but it's not dissimilar in approach.)

And then there's the sixth and seventh Nocturnes, perhaps the greatest works in his piano output. The 7th is a piece I know how to play, and indeed it's one of my very favourite things to play. In the past I've often listened to them together, but in reverse order, with the darker, struggling 7th finding a peaceful resolution before the 6th takes its beautiful, dream-like flight.

They make a lovely pair, but they also represent what is, at least in the piano music, something of a turning point. In early Faure, the melodies soar easily. In late Faure, the melodies often don't soar at all, but instead crawl doggedly upwards.  Here in the middle it feels like the music is just beginning to forget how to take flight. And the results are some wonderfully complex music.