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ARSC Journal
A Discography of the Choral Symphony by J. F. Weber In previous issues of this Journal (XV:2-3; XVI:l-2), an effort was made to compile parts of a composer discography in depth rather than breadth. This one started in a similar vein with the realization that SO CDs of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony had been released (the total is now over 701). This should have been no surprise, for writers have stated that the playing time of the CD was designed to accommodate this work. After eighteen months' effort, a reasonably complete discography of the work has emerged. The wonder is that it took so long to collect a body of information (especially the full names of the vocalists) that had already been published in various places at various times. The Japanese discographers had made a good start, and some of their data would have been difficult to find otherwise, but quite a few corrections and additions have been made and some recording dates have been obtained that seem to have remained 1.Dlpublished so far. The first point to notice is that six versions of the Ninth didn't appear on the expected single CD. Bl:lhm (118) and Solti (96) exceeded the 75 minutes generally assumed (until recently) to be the maximum CD playing time, but Walter (37), Kegel (126), Mehta (127), and Thomas (130) were not so burdened and have been reissued on single CDs since the first CD release. On the other hand, the rather short Leibowitz (76), Toscanini (11), and Busch (25) versions have recently been issued with fillers. -
THE POETIC MUSE: GOETHE, SCHUBERT and the ART of SONG Lorraine Byrne Bodley Anyone Who Ventures Into the Vast Regions of The
THE POETIC MUSE: GOETHE, SCHUBERT AND THE ART OF SONG Lorraine Byrne Bodley Anyone who ventures into the vast regions of the 19th-century Lied meets a powerful presence almost immediately. Time and again the text is by Goethe, whose lyric imagination left an indomitable imprint on European music history. Even a cursory glance at Friedlaender’s Das deutsche Lied bears testimony to multiple settings of Goethe’s poems and the range and variety of this abundant repertoire is immediately striking. Ernst Challier’s Grosser Lieder-Katalog gives further evidence of the musicality of Goethe’s language and its location of meaning at the cradle of the Lied. Schubert’s first masterpiece, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, was a setting of a dramatic scene from Goethe’s Faust. The earliest songs of Reichardt, Spohr, Loewe, Brahms and Wagner were to texts by Goethe, which raises the question as to the reasons for the poet’s influence. Yes, Goethe was a supreme lyric poet. The binding force of form and meaning, or rhythm and sense, that characterizes Goethe’s lyric poetry offered composers a wealth of material with which to cut their compositional cloth. Yes, Goethe was an object of admiration, even veneration, throughout the 19th century and the sheer quantity and variety of music his poetry has inspired signals the huge fascination exerted by his writing and his personality. Yet the steadfastness of his occupancy of the Lied goes beyond these explanations. Deeper currents must explain why Goethe’s poetry goes hand in glove in our musical heritage. From the time he burst onto the literary scene with the publication of Die Leiden des jungen Werther in 1774 until long after his death in 1832, Goethe was a catalyst for many composers who wanted to challenge what song could be. -
Duke Ellington Kyle Etges Signature Recordings Cottontail
Duke Ellington Kyle Etges Signature Recordings Cottontail. Cottontail stands as a fine example of Ellington’s “Blanton-Webster” years, where the band was at its peak in performance and popularity. The “Blanton-Webster” moniker refers to bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, who recorded Cottontail on May 4th, 1940 alongside Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Chauncey Haughton, and Harry Carney on saxophone; Cootie Williams, Wallace Jones, and Ray Nance on trumpet; Rex Stewart on cornet; Juan Tizol, Joe Nanton, and Lawrence Brown on trombone; Fred Guy on guitar, Duke on piano, and Sonny Greer on drums. John Hasse, author of The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, states that Cottontail “opened a window on the future, predicting elements to come in jazz.” Indeed, Jimmy Blanton’s driving quarter-note feel throughout the piece predicts a collective gravitation away from the traditional two feel amongst modern bassists. Webster’s solo on this record is so iconic that audiences would insist on note-for-note renditions of it in live performances. Even now, it stands as a testament to Webster’s mastery of expression, predicting techniques and patterns that John Coltrane would use decades later. Ellington also shows off his Harlem stride credentials in a quick solo before going into an orchestrated sax soli, one of the first of its kind. After a blaring shout chorus, the piece recalls the A section before Harry Carney caps everything off with the droning tonic. Diminuendo & Crescendo in Blue. This piece is remarkable for two reasons: Diminuendo & Crescendo in Blue exemplifies Duke’s classical influence, and his desire to write more grandiose pieces with more extended forms. -
Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss
Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2010 Octavian and the Composer: Principal Male Roles in Opera Composed for the Female Voice by Richard Strauss Melissa Lynn Garvey Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MUSIC OCTAVIAN AND THE COMPOSER: PRINCIPAL MALE ROLES IN OPERA COMPOSED FOR THE FEMALE VOICE BY RICHARD STRAUSS By MELISSA LYNN GARVEY A Treatise submitted to the Department of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Music Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2010 The members of the committee approve the treatise of Melissa Lynn Garvey defended on April 5, 2010. __________________________________ Douglas Fisher Professor Directing Treatise __________________________________ Seth Beckman University Representative __________________________________ Matthew Lata Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members. ii I’d like to dedicate this treatise to my parents, grandparents, aunt, and siblings, whose unconditional love and support has made me the person I am today. Through every attended recital and performance, and affording me every conceivable opportunity, they have encouraged and motivated me to achieve great things. It is because of them that I have reached this level of educational achievement. Thank you. I am honored to thank my phenomenal husband for always believing in me. You gave me the strength and courage to believe in myself. You are everything I could ever ask for and more. Thank you for helping to make this a reality. -
Richard Strauss's Ariadne Auf Naxos
Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos - A survey of the major recordings by Ralph Moore Ariadne auf Naxos is less frequently encountered on stage than Der Rosenkavalier or Salome, but it is something of favourite among those who fancy themselves connoisseurs, insofar as its plot revolves around a conceit typical of Hofmannsthal’s libretti, whereby two worlds clash: the merits of populist entertainment, personified by characters from the burlesque Commedia dell’arte tradition enacting Viennese operetta, are uneasily juxtaposed with the claims of high art to elevate and refine the observer as embodied in the opera seria to be performed by another company of singers, its plot derived from classical myth. The tale of Ariadne’s desertion by Theseus is performed in the second half of the evening and is in effect an opera within an opera. The fun starts when the major-domo conveys the instructions from “the richest man in Vienna” that in order to save time and avoid delaying the fireworks, both entertainments must be performed simultaneously. Both genres are parodied and a further contrast is made between Zerbinetta’s pragmatic attitude towards love and life and Ariadne’s morbid, death-oriented idealism – “Todgeweihtes Herz!”, Tristan und Isolde-style. Strauss’ scoring is interesting and innovative; the orchestra numbers only forty or so players: strings and brass are reduced to chamber-music scale and the orchestration heavily weighted towards woodwind and percussion, with the result that it is far less grand and Romantic in scale than is usual in Strauss and a peculiarly spare ad spiky mood frequently prevails. -
A Culture of Recording: Christopher Raeburn and the Decca Record Company
A Culture of Recording: Christopher Raeburn and the Decca Record Company Sally Elizabeth Drew A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sheffield Faculty of Arts and Humanities Department of Music This work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council September 2018 1 2 Abstract This thesis examines the working culture of the Decca Record Company, and how group interaction and individual agency have made an impact on the production of music recordings. Founded in London in 1929, Decca built a global reputation as a pioneer of sound recording with access to the world’s leading musicians. With its roots in manufacturing and experimental wartime engineering, the company developed a peerless classical music catalogue that showcased technological innovation alongside artistic accomplishment. This investigation focuses specifically on the contribution of the recording producer at Decca in creating this legacy, as can be illustrated by the career of Christopher Raeburn, the company’s most prolific producer and specialist in opera and vocal repertoire. It is the first study to examine Raeburn’s archive, and is supported with unpublished memoirs, private papers and recorded interviews with colleagues, collaborators and artists. Using these sources, the thesis considers the history and functions of the staff producer within Decca’s wider operational structure in parallel with the personal aspirations of the individual in exerting control, choice and authority on the process and product of recording. Having been recruited to Decca by John Culshaw in 1957, Raeburn’s fifty-year career spanned seminal moments of the company’s artistic and commercial lifecycle: from assisting in exploiting the dramatic potential of stereo technology in Culshaw’s Ring during the 1960s to his serving as audio producer for the 1990 The Three Tenors Concert international phenomenon. -
Industrialism, Androids, and the Virtuoso Instrumentalist
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Performing the Mechanical: Industrialism, Androids, and the Virtuoso Instrumentalist A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Musical Arts by Leila Mintaha Nassar-Fredell 2013 © Copyright by Leila Mintaha Nassar-Fredell 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Performing the Mechanical: Industrialism, Androids, and the Virtuoso Instrumentalist by Leila Nassar-Fredell Doctor of Musical Arts University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Robert S. Winter, Chair Transactions between musical androids and actual virtuosos occupied a prominent place in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instrumentalists and composers of instrumental music appropriated the craze for clockwork soloists, placing music in a position of increased social power in a society undergoing rapid technological transformation. The history of musical automata stretches back to antiquity. Androids and automata, vested by audiences with spiritual and magical qualities, populated the churches of the broader populations and the Renaissance grottos of the aristocracy. As ii the Industrial Revolution began, automata increasingly resembled the machines changing the structure of labor; consequently, androids lost their enchanted status. Contemporary writers problematized these humanoid machines while at the same time popularizing their role as representatives of the uncanny at the boundaries of human identity. Both instrumental performers and androids explored the liminal area between human and machine. As androids lost their magic, musical virtuosos assumed the qualities of spectacle and spirituality long embodied by their machine counterparts. In this process virtuosi explored the liminal space of human machines: a human playing a musical instrument (a machine) weds the body to a machine, creating a half-human, half-fabricated voice. -
Keeping the Tradition Y B 2 7- in MEMO4 BILL19 Cooper-Moore • Orrin Evans • Edition Records • Event Calendar
June 2011 | No. 110 Your FREE Guide to the NYC Jazz Scene nycjazzrecord.com Dee Dee Bridgewater RIAM ANG1 01 Keeping The Tradition Y B 2 7- IN MEMO4 BILL19 Cooper-Moore • Orrin Evans • Edition Records • Event Calendar It’s always a fascinating process choosing coverage each month. We’d like to think that in a highly partisan modern world, we actually live up to the credo: “We New York@Night Report, You Decide”. No segment of jazz or improvised music or avant garde or 4 whatever you call it is overlooked, since only as a full quilt can we keep out the cold of commercialism. Interview: Cooper-Moore Sometimes it is more difficult, especially during the bleak winter months, to 6 by Kurt Gottschalk put together a good mixture of feature subjects but we quickly forget about that when June rolls around. It’s an embarrassment of riches, really, this first month of Artist Feature: Orrin Evans summer. Just like everyone pulls out shorts and skirts and sandals and flipflops, 7 by Terrell Holmes the city unleashes concert after concert, festival after festival. This month we have the Vision Fest; a mini-iteration of the Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT); the On The Cover: Dee Dee Bridgewater inaugural Blue Note Jazz Festival taking place at the titular club as well as other 9 by Marcia Hillman city venues; the always-overwhelming Undead Jazz Festival, this year expanded to four days, two boroughs and ten venues and the 4th annual Red Hook Jazz Encore: Lest We Forget: Festival in sight of the Statue of Liberty. -
07 – Spinning the Record
VI. THE STEREO ERA In 1954, a timid and uncertain record industry took the plunge to begin investing heav- ily in stereophonic sound. They were not timid and uncertain because they didn’t know if their system would work – as we have seen, they had already been experimenting with and working the kinks out of stereo sound since 1932 – but because they still weren’t sure how to make a home entertainment system that could play a stereo record. Nevertheless, they all had their various equipment in place, and so that year they began tentatively to make recordings using the new medium. RCA started, gingerly, with “alternate” stereo tapes of monophonic recording sessions. Unfortunately, since they were still uncertain how the results would sound on home audio, they often didn’t mark and/or didn’t file the alternate stereo takes properly. As a result, the stereo versions of Charles Munch’s first stereo recordings – Berlioz’ “Roméo et Juliette” and “Symphonie Fanastique” – disappeared while others, such as Fritz Reiner’s first stereo re- cordings (Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 with Ar- thur Rubinstein) disappeared for 20 years. Oddly enough, their prize possession, Toscanini, was not recorded in stereo until his very last NBC Symphony performance, at which he suf- fered a mental lapse while conducting. None of the performances captured on that date were even worth preserving, let alone issuing, and so posterity lost an opportunity to hear his last half-season with NBC in the excellent sound his artistry deserved. Columbia was even less willing to pursue stereo. -
Franz Schubert Written and Narrated by Jeremy Siepmann with Tom George As Schubert
LIFE AND WORKS Franz Schubert Written and narrated by Jeremy Siepmann with Tom George as Schubert 8.558135–38 Life and Works: Franz Schubert Preface If music is ‘about’ anything, it’s about life. No other medium can so quickly or more comprehensively lay bare the very soul of those who make or compose it. Biographies confined to the limitations of text are therefore at a serious disadvantage when it comes to the lives of composers. Only by combining verbal language with the music itself can one hope to achieve a fully rounded portrait. In the present series, the words of composers and their contemporaries are brought to life by distinguished actors in a narrative liberally spiced with musical illustrations. Unlike the standard audio portrait, the music is not used here simply for purposes of illustration within a basically narrative context. Thus we often hear very substantial chunks, and in several cases whole movements, which may be felt by some to ‘interrupt’ the story; but as its title implies the series is not just about the lives of the great composers, it is also an exploration of their works. Dismemberment of these for ‘theatrical’ effect would thus be almost sacrilegious! Likewise, the booklet is more than a complementary appendage and may be read independently, with no loss of interest or connection. Jeremy Siepmann 8.558135–38 3 Life and Works: Franz Schubert © AKG Portrait of Franz Schubert, watercolour, by Wilhelm August Rieder 8.558135–38 Life and Works: Franz Schubert Franz Schubert(1797-1828) Contents Page Track Lists 6 Cast 11 1 Historical Background: The Nineteenth Century 16 2 Schubert in His Time 26 3 The Major Works and Their Significance 41 4 A Graded Listening Plan 68 5 Recommended Reading 76 6 Personalities 82 7 A Calendar of Schubert’s Life 98 8 Glossary 132 The full spoken text can be found on the CD-ROM part of the discs and at: www.naxos.com/lifeandworks/schubert/spokentext 8.558135–38 5 Life and Works: Franz Schubert 1 Piano Quintet in A major (‘Trout’), D. -
Goethe's Faust Essay Prize for Sixth-Formers Further Resources
A German Classic: Goethe’s Faust Essay Prize for Sixth-Formers Further Resources Urfaust and Faust, Part II Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Urfaust (1775) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil (1832) Faust before Goethe Johann Spies: Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (1592) Faust after Goethe Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus (1947) Faust as film Faust, dir. by F.W. Murnau, with Gösta Ekman, Emil Jannings and Camilla Horn(silent film, 1926) Faust, dir. by Alexander Sokurov, with Johannes Zeiler, Anton Adasinsky and Isolda Dychauk (Russian film, 2011) Faust and music Franz Schubert: Gretchen am Spinnrade (Lied, 1814) Hear Kiri Te Kanawa sing Gretchen’s love song ‘Meine Ruh ist hin’ (‘My peace has gone’) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY0eeotSDi8). You may also wish to have a look at – and listen to – this course on Schubert’s settings of Goethe’s poems: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/history-art/schuberts-lieder- settings-goethes-poems/content-section-0 Hector Berlioz, La damnation de Faust (opera, 1846) – see the production by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010xwhh) Charles Gounod: Faust (opera, 1859) Ferruccio Busoni: Doktor Faust (opera, 1924) Faust to go In case you’re in need of some light inspiration, here is a summary of Faust I. Don’t worry if you can’t even begin to keep up with Michael Sommer’s German – he speaks extraordinarily fast and uses slang and rather specialised allusions. But you should be able to work out -
GREGOR PIATIGORSKY Written by S
AN IMPORTANT NOTE FROM Johnstone-Music ABOUT THE MAIN ARTICLE STARTING ON THE FOLLOWING PAGE: We are very pleased for you to have a copy of this article, which you may read, print or save on your computer. You are free to make any number of additional photocopies, for johnstone-music seeks no direct financial gain whatsoever from these articles; however, the name of THE AUTHOR must be clearly attributed if any document is re-produced. If you feel like sending any (hopefully favourable) comment about this, or indeed about the Johnstone-Music web in general, simply vis it the ‘Contact’ section of the site and leave a message with the details - we will be delighted to hear from you ! GREGOR PIATIGORSKY written by S. and S. Applebaum for Celloheaven GREGOR PIATIGORSKY PART A – Biographical Details By Celloheaven One of the pre-eminent string players of the 20th century, Gregor Piatigorsky was born in Ukraine in 1903, and died in Los Angeles in 1976. His international solo career lasted over 40 years, and especially during the 1940's and early 1950's he was the world's premier touring cello virtuoso -- Casals was in retirement, Feuermann had died, and the three artists who were to succeed Piatigorsky (Starker, Rose, and Rostropovich) were still in their formative stages. His one true peer, Fournier, was limited in his travelling abilities by polio. Thus, Piatigorsky had the limelight almost to himself. He was gregarious, loved to travel and perform anywhere, and he hobnobbed as easily with farmers in small towns as he did with Toscanini, Stravinsky, Rubenstein, and Schoenberg.