Four years ago I wrote about a very interesting collection called Miserere, subtitled "Music For the Holy Week Litugy." It includes the famous "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri, a setting of Psalm 51:

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

and a number of other appropriate works.  Here's the link to that post. Earlier today I discovered that the entire recording is now on YouTube. This link is to the first track. I think it will be followed by the others though you may have to use the "Watch On YouTube" button to get them. 

I have a rule to which I stick pretty closely: I don't write about a piece of music until I've heard it three times. That applies whether it's a three-minute pop song or a ninety-minute Mahler symphony (sometime in the next month or two I'm going to say something about his Sixth). After I'd heard this concerto three times I began this post as follows:

"I don't quite know what to say about this concerto. I like it a lot, and in that I seem to be in agreement with a great many people, as Wikipedia says it's frequently performed and recorded, and has been performed 192 times at Carnegie Hall. And yet...I feel that I should like it more. Why? It's the first movement: my head says that I should love it, but my heart doesn't follow along."

But in the process of writing I changed my mind. I kept going back to that first movement to refresh my memory, ended up listening to it twice more, and now I love it. And the whole concerto. 

I can't describe it like the Wikipedia author does:

The first movement opens with the solo piano, playing simple chords in the tonic key before coming to rest on a dominant chord. The orchestra then enters with the same theme, in B major, the major mediant key, which is in a chromatic mediant relationship to the tonic. 

And so on in that vein, and I can't say much more than "ok fine whatever" to most of it. It isn't that I don't understand any of the terms at all--I know what "tonic key" and "dominant chord" mean. But I'm lost at "chromatic mediant relationship." Even if I understand these descriptions, I don't hear them--that is, I don't hear that what was stated in G is restated in B.

Still, I'll risk embarrassment by saying that I'm a little puzzled by that description of the opening. Simple chords? Well, I guess that's right. But what I hear is an energetic and really fairly simple tune presented by the piano alone, so simple that it could almost be called a motif (or in my more familiar vocabulary, a riff or maybe even a lick): only three notes of the scale in a distinctive rhythm: 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 3. (I don't think those accents are really there, but my brain supplies them anyway.) In that respect it made me think of the opening of the Fifth Symphony, the supreme motif in its combination of simplicity and power. Very catchy. 

The orchestra enters and soon gives us a more typical, you might say a more melodious, melody, a lyrical one, and there follows fifteen minutes or so of fascinating and affecting interplay, with that initial rhythm appearing and disappearing throughout. What didn't affect me on those first three hearings somehow blossomed on the next two. It's relatively subdued, by which I mean that it never seems to be striving for passion and grandeur, as Beethoven sometimes seems to be; not that it lacks these, but it's lyrical, in an almost dignified way. And, naturally, continually interesting.

The very brief second movement fascinates me. In fact, on my first couple of hearings I found it far more involving than the first movement. By "very brief" I mean it's a little under five minutes long in the recording I have, the same Alfred Brendel one that I listened to for the first three concertos. (I see that some recordings are around six minutes--I want to hear one of those.) For most of it the piano and the strings (alone, no other instruments) alternate, not playing together at all. The strings play, then stop, and the piano responds. I hear the string part as a sort of doleful march, and didn't know until I read it in the Wikipedia article that it's based on the traditional Dies Irae chant. The piano responds mournfully. It's almost spooky. The strings gradually fade away. The piano sounds more and more as if it's strayed into a Chopin piece, and for a few moments, to my ears, as if it had flashed into a time warp and spent a few bars in 1901. I love this movement but I don't understand what it's doing in this concerto. It's almost desolate.

The second gives way without pause to the third, which is like the final movement of the first three concertos, fast (mostly) and exhilarating. The absence of space between the second and third must signify something, but personally I think I'd like a few moments of reflection between them. 

The Fourth Piano Concerto was written around the same time as the Fourth Symphony, and strikes me as similar in one very broad way: its relative modesty as compared to some of Beethoven's later work. The Fourth Symphony is one of my favorites, so its not surprising that I like this concerto quite a lot. Now on to the 5th, the "Emperor." I heard it a few times, long ago, and don't recall anything about it except an impression that it's *really* Beethoven-ish.

When I wrote about Tallis's Lamentations of Jeremiah a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the LP I had was a 1969 "rechanneled for stereo" reissue of a recording originally made in 1955. Rechanneling was a gimmick used for a while in the earlier days of stereo, when purchasers paid a significantly higher price for stereo. As I recall, it was 20-25% higher--I think monaural LPs sold for about $4, stereo for $5. 

Audiophiles really hated rechanneled stereo. And maybe not just audiophiles, if by "audiophile" we mean people with exquisitely sensitive hearing who pay extremely close attention to sound reproduction and have extremely high standards. Also, frequently, rather high incomes, as the equipment needed to satisfy those connoisseurs is generally quite expensive. I didn't know much about that debate, but have always had the impression that the techniques used to split a single recorded track into two channels sometimes produced undesirable effects audible to non-obsessive but attentive listeners. 

Out of curiosity, I decided to test that judgment. I mean test it on myself--I'm certainly willing to believe that the problem is real, as it's been well attested to since the '60s. But is it a problem for me? Do I actually hear those effects? And if so how much do they matter?  

The only way to do that, obviously, is to compare two recordings, one mono and the other a rechanneled version of the first. Before the internet, it wouldn't have been practical for me to do that. Not impossible, but not practical--it would have taken too much trouble to locate and purchase the records. But now we have the wonderful web service Discogs, which is not only a vast storehouse of information (discographies), but a marketplace where used record dealers all over the world can sell ti customers all over the world. I was able to identify a 1972 monaural pressing of the Deller/Tallis recording, with at least half a dozen available to buy.

Just for fun, I picked one in mint condition--meaning unopened, still in the shrink wrap. It was only a couple of dollars more than several in near-mint condition, and still under $10, though shipping charges were as much as the purchase itself. (The seller was Satellite Records in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I recommend them. Yes, the shipping charge was high, but not unusual for a single LP, and the record was very well packaged, and arrived more quickly than I expected.)

"Mint" and "Near-Mint," by the way, are official or at least conventional terms, with agreed-upon definitions. Descending from there, you have VG+ (Very Good Plus), VG, G, F(air), P(oor). 

If you looked back at the previous post on this (or have a good memory), you'll notice that the cover of this LP is different. The performance was originally released under the Vanguard label, and issued on that label more than once, then later on the Bach Guild label, which was a Vanguard subsidiary. 

So what about the test? Well, I'll state outright that I don't regard it as conclusive. I did hear a difference, but it was not huge, and I don't have either the sensitive hearing or the vocabulary to describe it in any detail. But for what it's worth, here's my impression.

Most TVs and computer monitors have controls for adjusting brightness, contrast, color, and sometimes more esoteric parameters. Many have presets by which you can choose a predefined  combination of these adjustments meant to be optimal for movies, games, sports, and so forth. When you switch these, you may be startled by a fairly dramatic difference in what you see. You may not be able to pinpoint exactly what's changed, at least if you aren't any more interested than I am in trying to figure it out. You may even have trouble deciding whether it's better than the previous setting. But it's obviously different. 

That's what it was like when I listened to the mono version of this LP after listening to the rechanneled stereo version. I certainly had not been conscious that there was anything wrong with the latter. But the mono version seemed more vivid and more present. This is exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen with mono and stereo: the whole point of stereo is to use two channels to create an illusion of three-dimensional sound, in which not all the components of the sound reach your ears at exactly the same time. (If you want a good explanation, read the Wikipedia article.) You should, if the recording and the equipment are right, have a sense of the sound being produced by something located in the space between the speakers. At best, you should "see" the performers. It's very pleasing when it works properly.

But, as I said, with these two recordings, it was the mono and not the "stereo" one that seemed more  present. The mono one didn't have the three-dimensional quality of real stereo, but it was...and I'm having trouble describing this...more solid. The pseudo-stereo image was spread around and vague. The mono image was actually more, not less, defined. 

I wonder how many rechanneled-for-stereo LPs I have. As I write this it is crossing my mind to find them and replace them, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole. Almost certainly they are things I've listened to three or four times at most in forty or fifty years.

I can't vouch for the attribution, but there's way too much truth in this. 

The misty delicately flowering branch of this album cover is an excellent visual representation of its sound:

Some music forces itself on your attention by volume and busy-ness, and in pop music a steady and very assertive beat. Some does it by quietness and simplicity, causing you to grow quiet and attentive yourself--as if a mockingbird has come and perched on the railing of your porch, and you don't even take a sip of your coffee or turn the page of your book, lest you scare it away. On my first hearing of "Tomorrow," the first song on this album, I found myself similarly stopped cold, hanging on a finger-picked guitar pattern. A simple repeated figure in the bottom strings supports the song, the top strings comparatively faint. A distant electric guitar adds very restrained accents. Then the singer begins:

We drive for the longest time
We don't have a destination

Gradually through the song other sounds emerge and increase. Halfway through, distant backing vocals are added, and the electric guitar steps forth briefly. 

The lyrics introduce an uneasy note: 

Maybe there will come a time
When we can speak about it

Uneasy and mysterious: no more is said about this thing that they--the "we" seems to be two people--are not going to speak about now or anytime soon, possibly ever. Are they a romantic couple, or some other sort of pair? We don't know; we only know that there is some kind of intimacy between them. 

That uneasy note appears often throughout the album. After I'd heard it a couple of times I was sure that many of the songs were hinting at and talking around some really severe trauma. My chief argument for that view was "Song for Susanna":

He took me
Over the line
Locked in the back
Of his truck

But I retreated from that when I noticed on the album's Bandcamp page a note that the song is about the experience of "being an immigrant in the United States." So the journey in the truck was not an abduction, but a clandestine journey across (presumably) the southern border, in the hands of strangers to whom the passenger, severed from her home, is cargo transported for a fee.

Still, there is an awful lot left unsaid in these songs, and I can't shake the feeling that behind that reticence there is something quite painful. Or perhaps not a thing, but several things. "The Waterfront Is Safe" is pretty clearly about some kind of domestic violence situation, though it seems to be someone else's story: it's all "you" and "she," not "I." 

Or maybe I'm way off base, and these are just the ordinary troubles of ordinary life. If so, if the atmosphere here is merely subdued, it is certainly more melancholy or somber than otherwise. It's all very intimate and personal, yet reserved. Shy, even. 

Musically, variations from the basic approach of that first song are pretty slight, but are enough to keep it interesting, at least if you're listening closely. On several tracks a strong but restrained backing vocal is provided by Mark Kozelek, who also produced the album. He is, I'm told, the mastermind of the very widely respected band Red House Painters. (I think "widely respected" tends to suggest that the artist is more admired by critics than by the masses, which is often a good thing.) I've only heard a little of their work but would like to hear more, and of Kozelek's later band or project, Sun Kil Moon. I'll venture a guess that his involvement is indicative of the regard in which Cerbone's music is held by her fellow musicians. 

"Mary's Face" has a touch of percussion: a single heavy drumbeat and another, lighter sound that I can't identify. There's a bass and a decorative banjo. In "You Led Me Down to the Water" the guitar is strummed; it's the most vigorous rhythm on the album. The only other song where the guitar is strummed is the title song.

Offhand I can't think of another artist whose music is as quiet and simple as this. In comparison, a gentle band like the Innocence Mission is like metal. Thinking of the Innocence Mission brings out another comparison: on hearing the first notes of Lisa Cerbone's voice, I immediately thought of Karen Peris's: both have a slightly little-girl quality. Words like "delicate" and "fragile" naturally come to mind, but they're misleading: this kind of delicacy requires strength. And though the singing on this album is restrained, sometimes almost whispery, the voice can be more powerful, as you can hear in this live performance of "Tomorrow," which seems all around somehow tougher than the album version--far from aggressive, but still not quite as retiring.

Most of the songs are at least in part addressed to another person, a "you" who remains somewhat mysterious to the listener, though that person surely knows what the speaker isn't saying. Most mysterious is Natalie, to whom "You Were Wrong About Me" is addressed. Who is Natalie? Friend? Sister (my guess)? Something else? And in what way exactly was she wrong? Maybe it's just me, but I think I hear the rhythm of a familiar childhood taunt in the title, which is also the chorus: "NAH nah NAH nah NAAHna." The next-to-last syllable is longer than the others:  "YOU were WRONG aBOUT me." 

But the "you" is most often someone to whom the speaker is expressing love and gratitude, notably in "You Led Me Down the Water" and "Cold Dark Night," the latter of which carries that suggestion of trauma:

I am so happy
you were here...
Where would I have gone
If not for your quiet kindness
I don’t think I’d survive

But no more is said of that.

Whatever trouble lies behind these lyrics, it has been overcome. Not necessarily defeated, but endured, accepted, and put in its place, as the title song, "We Still Have Sky," which closes the album, says:

We still have sky
The sun, the stars on our side
You know,
You know,
We have it so much better

I find that I've emphasized the lyrics here. They seem to be what really sets the album apart, as it is not unusual or extraordinary in purely musical terms. Someone who doesn't respond to it as I did might say it's a fairly ordinary singer-songwriter, voice-and-guitar work, though it is exceptionally well produced in a minimal, subtle way. But the lyrics make it take hold, which I guess is because they fit the music so well. I don't mean that in the sense of perfect construction; in fact they have a sort of artless quality--they don't rhyme very often and are strung somewhat casually across melody and rhythm. What I mean is: the other day I felt obliged to explain to my wife that I haven't sung "Desolation Row" several times recently because I'm depressed, but because the structure of the song--the surging  quality of the rhythm and the chord changes, the fit of the lyrics to the tune--makes singing it feel very satisfying. These songs are not like that.

But they compel in a different way, and not by the words alone--it's just as much the voice that sings them. I wasn't sure on first hearing that I was going to like the voice, but now I can't imagine the songs in any other. And I can say with something very close to certainty that if you like "Tomorrow" you'll like the whole album

A little background: I had never heard of Lisa Cerbone before I got an email from her announcing the release of this album, but she has been releasing music for some thirty years, five albums since the early 1990s. She has, obviously, never achieved great fame, but has not been entirely ignored, either:  according to her Allmusic biography --proof in itself that she isn't completely unknown--she has had some very appreciative fans who have good reason to be glad she persevered, even though she doesn't make a living at it. She works as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher at Mt. St. Mary's University and Seminary in Maryland. 

I don't remember where I picked up this odd bit of information, since my acquaintance with mathematics is very slight, but one of the great ones, Carl Friedrich Gauss, had as motto for his published works the Latin phrase pauca sed matura--few but ripe. I suspect that description applies to Lisa Cerbone's recorded work. Certainly, if others are in a class with this one. I'm especially interested in hearing Ordinary Days, which is also a collaboration with Mark Kozolek.

Web site

Bandcamp page (buy the album!)

I've listened to this several times since the beginning of Lent, as it seems appropriate to the season. That, plus a sort of mood that made it seem appealing (and thus hardly penitential), plus a desire to make another attempt at grasping Renaissance polyphony, prompted me to get out this LP, which I've had for many years.

The recording was originally made in the mid-1950s by the Deller Consort, a vocal ensemble led by Alfred Deller, who in my youth (the decade after the '50s) was known as an important proponent of the counter-tenor voice (his own) and of early music. According to Discogs, it's been re-issued a number of times, including several on CD in the '90s, so apparently it still has, or at least thirty years ago still had, admirers.

I am a little ashamed to say that I don't really get Renaissance polyphony, in the same way that I don't entirely get the fugue. It has something to do with my brain's inability to follow, in a sense even to hear, more than two voices, two melody lines, simultaneously. And it has something to do with the basic nature of the music, which is about the interplay of multiple--four or five--melody lines. In the style generally, and in this instance particularly, the movement of these lines results in a very ingenious  and continually shifting interplay of voices and the rhythms of the text (almost by definition, this style is the setting of a text). I don't mean rhythm in the  sense of a beat, but in the way a unit of text--a sentence, say--is woven among the voices, each one proceeding separately from the others, not generally on the same syllable at the same time, or for the same length of time, all coming together on the final syllable of the sentence. 

And I admire it, but am not often touched by it. My basic problem reveals something lacking in my response to music. It's simple: I want a tune, or to start with a tune. I mean of course not just something that is technically a melody, but one that is appealing in itself. And in this kind of music I don't often get it. That coming-together of the voices in a sustained chord is usually the part I most enjoy. 

Here's an interesting video of a performance of the first part (of two) of the piece by the Tallis Scholars, who seem to be widely considered one of the best ensembles working with this music. The video moves through the score with the singers, so you get a visual image of the weaving of the voices. 

Here is the King James version of the text:

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!

She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.

I don't like this performance as much as I do the Deller one, in part because it doesn't seem as balanced among the voices. The lower men's voices are not as prominent, which seems to flatten the piece, even though the Tallis Scholars are a larger ensemble. The small Deller group (five people, one voice per part) makes the music less grand, in a good way--more personal. Something I ran across while looking for information on the work suggested that it may not actually have been intended for formal liturgical use, but for small groups gathered in a home. The writer--and I'm sorry I didn't make a note of his or her name and that of the web site--thought that Tallis, having remained Catholic through the religious revolution of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, might have found the Jeremiah text particularly appropriate for such use.

And I actually prefer the counter-tenor to the women's voices in this piece. Back in the early days when I first bought that LP and first heard the counter-tenor voice, I thought it was more or less a freak and didn't care much for it. Now it seems most appropriate for much of this kind of music. Perhaps that's partly because it makes for a more smoothly blended (and darker) color across the separate threads, reinforcing the perception of every moment of the piece as a unity? At any rate that's the way it seems to work for me in this performance of this piece. 

The Deller recording was monaural, of course, but my LP is one of those "rechanneled for stereo" releases of which there were many after stereo had become the norm and mono was considered obsolete, or at least treated that way by record companies. (Not to mention that for many years there was a price difference--the record company could charge more if they could put the "stereo" label on the jacket). I got the impression at the time that audiophiles hated the "rechanneled" sound, and now I'm curious about the difference. On Discogs I found several inexpensive copies of the original mono release, and I'm actually going to order one, just out of curiosity. 

If you're interested, here's a knowledgeable discussion of rechanneled i.e. fake stereo.

Well, this is more like it--more what I hoped for from a Beethoven concerto. More like Beethoven, I would even say. I mean, if Beethoven had died in, say, 1802, when he had written only the first two symphonies and the first two piano concertos, he would certainly have been remembered, but he wouldn't be Beethoven, the giant we know. I don't feel that I'm listening to that giant in the first two concertos, but I do in this one, though he's just getting started. The first two seem to me as if they could have been written by Mozart, but not the third. 

I guess, now that I think about it, it's especially the first movement that makes me say that. I think its structure is unusual: there is a long (several minutes) orchestral introduction in which a strong, but not bombastic, theme alternates with a more sweeping, almost pastoral one--a march alternating with a dance, and this introduction closes with something that sounds very much like a finale to me.

For a naive listener like me who doesn't understand or appreciate much of what's going on technically, a work in sonata form stands or falls on its principal themes--they have to touch me in order for me to find the changes wrought on them interesting. This movement certainly makes the grade in that respect. It's a vigorous and varied piece of music, not on the awe-inspiring level of the works that would come later, but certainly one that I'll want to hear again from time to time. I especially like the way it closes: the cadenza* is pretty close to the end, and is as spectacular as one could wish, closing with quiet trills that fade into equally quiet orchestral stirrings that quickly rise toward a fairly typical movement-closing resolution of loud chords. The transition takes only just over a minute and the effect is striking. Personally I would have preferred the fadeout, but the power chords seem to have been close to obligatory for a century or more.

The cadenza is apparently Beethoven's; the notes on my recording seem to assume so. The pianist, Alfred Brendel, makes these remarks:

In most of his cadenzas, Beethoven the architect turns into a genius running amok; almost all the principles of classical order fall by the wayside.... Breaking away in an alien manner from the style and character of the movement does not bother Beethoven at all, and the most adventurous harmonic detours are made with relish. No other composer has ever hazarded cadenzas of such provoking madness.

And right on, I say.

The second movement is mainly a lovely melody that seems almost hymn-like. The third is high-speed and high-spirited, even light-hearted--not as wildly energetic or as striking as that of the first concerto, but in the same vein. 

No, this concerto did not fly up straightaway into the higher reaches of my musical favorites, but neither will it be checked off and filed away, likely never to be heard again, considering my age.

The recording was from the same 5-CD set as the other two:

I don't have anything to say about the performance, having nothing to compare it to, but I have one complaint about the recording. As you can see from the cover, it's "live" (those quotation marks make it seem as if the term were questionable), recorded in 1983 and issued on CD in 1997. And the record company decided to include the applause at the end of each concerto. It's really loud, and quite intrusive and annoying. 

* In case you don't know the term, a cadenza is a virtuoso section for the concerto's featured instrument alone.

I heard a story many years ago that Mick Jagger objected to the popular impression that he had corrupted the angelic-looking young Marianne Faithfull. He claimed it was the other way around. Whether that story is true or not, she was certainly a very enthusiastic drug user for some large part of her life (at least), and just generally a mess. And as a singer and a person she became something very, very different from the teenager who sang "As Tears Go By" (which as you probably know is a rather uncharacteristic Rolling Stones song).

For years in the 1970s she was apparently lost to heroin, other drugs, and general breakdown. You can read an overview at her Wikipedia entry, and I'm sure there is no lack of obituaries online giving more details. She came back in 1979 with a dark, bitter album called Broken English which I heard once at the time--a friend brought it over, saying "you're not going to believe this"--and never since. For reasons which I don't remember and which now puzzle me, I read her autobiography, Faithfull, when it appeared in the 1990s. Most likely I saw it on the new book shelf at the library and picked it up out of curiosity; I certainly didn't buy it. It is not an enjoyable read. 

She became a sort of cabaret-style singer, with a world-weary decadent vibe and a fondness for German songs by Kurt Weill and others, as on her 1996 (?) album 20th Century Blues, which I like, but not as much as I like Strange Weather, from 1987, which includes several gloomy and sometimes ironic takes on various folk and Tin Pan Alley songs. The title song is by Tom Waits, or rather I should say Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. Taking out the LP yesterday and listening to it for the first time in some years, I was struck by the names of the other people involved: for instance, the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, a name I probably didn't know at the time but who can now be fairly described as "revered." It was an all-star production--other names are Garth Hudson (also recently deceased) and Mac Rebennack ("Dr. John"). It includes a revisiting of "As Tears Go By." RIP.

1967:

1987:

***

Perhaps it seems a little odd that I've marked Marianne Faithfull's passing but not that of David Lynch, who died a couple of weeks ago and is much more significant to me. That's mainly because there is so much that I might say about Lynch that a quick and brief note seemed impossible. There was a bit of discussion on the occasion in comments on this post from 2022, about the passing of Julee Cruise.

I still have not seen several of Lynch's most famous works, including Blue Velvet, because of their reputed violence and perversity. That doesn't really make sense, because I don't think they're worse than Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, or for that matter Twin Peaks: The Return. The fact that both Lynch and Faithfull were only two  years older than me suggests that if I'm going to watch these others I'd better not keep putting them off. 

But then Twin Peaks--the whole package, including the music--really is David Lynch for me. I can't remember whether I've posted this picture before: in 2019 I actually visited the Double-R Diner in North Bend, Washington. The waterfall (Snoqualmie Falls) and the lodge are not far away. You could call it a pilgrimage, I guess. 

Goodbye, Agent Cooper.

Well, maybe this concerto plan of mine--getting to know the five Beethoven piano concertos--just wasn't a good idea. Or maybe this just isn't the right time for it. It's not you, I say to the second concerto, it's me.

I listened to it once inattentively, then three times attentively, or as attentively as I could. And it just never touched me. There's nothing wrong with it, nothing I dislike; I just fail to respond with anything more than a mild and somewhat detached interest. I heard it in a way similar to the way I have sometimes heard certain progressive rock bands or tracks: it's interesting, it doesn't bore me, but it doesn't really engage me, either. (Sorry, I can't think of an example, but I know it has happened.)

I mentioned when I wrote about the first concerto a  weeks ago that I had heard a little of it on the radio and thought it was Mozart, but with something a bit different about it, and discovered when I checked the radio station's log that it was Beethoven. Now I wonder if I was mistaken about which Beethoven it was, because this one, which was actually composed before #1, seems even more like Mozart than the other. There are a couple of bits in the last movement--I can't tell you exactly where or what they are--that may have been the things that seemed un-Mozartean to me. 

Well. Be that as it may, I am saying farewell to this concerto for the time being. Perhaps I'll run across it sometime in the future and find that I really like it. In some of the progressive rock instances I've mentioned, I later came to like the music quite a lot. So that may happen. But now I'll move on to the third and see what happens.

I don't listen to the radio very much, but sometimes when I'm making the ten-mile drive into town and don't want to bother picking out music to play from my phone, I press one of three presets on the radio. The three stations are: the one that claims to be "alternative," but doesn't really go very far in that direction; the Classic Raahhhk station; and the local classical+NPR station. It doesn't usually work out very well, partly because I switch away from the first two whenever a commercial or a song I don't like comes on, which is frequently, only to find that the grass is just as brown. And whatever's playing on the classical station is either already in progress or, if I catch the beginning, won't be finished before I get where I'm going. Or maybe I won't get either the beginning or the end. And then after 3pm the annoying ladies of NPR take over.

One day a few weeks ago I jumped to the classical station and found a piano concerto in progress. "That's one of the Mozart concertos," I thought, though I had no idea which one; to tell you the truth, they...well, I'd better not say they all sound the same, but most of them are quite similar, unless you're comparing a very early to a later one. But then it took a turn which of course I can't describe but which seemed rather off the beaten Mozartian path.

I was very curious about its identity, but when I got to where I was going the piece was still in progress. Happily the station posts its log on the web, so when I got back home I was able to find out what it was: Beethoven's first piano concerto.

Well, that was intriguing, and now I wanted to hear the whole thing. Moreover, I decided that the time had come for me to get to know all five of the concertos. I'm not sure I had ever before heard the first three, and it has been many years since I heard the fourth and fifth. I've had for years, but never listened to, a set of the five played by Alfred Brendel with the Chicago Symphony conducted by James Levine. Where it ranks in the opinion of connoisseurs I don't know, but I thought surely it must be at least respectable.

So. I enjoyed this work but it isn't going to be a great favorite. The first movement begins with the martial or processional Beethoven which is the Beethoven I am not very fond of. In general I found the entire first movement continually interesting, especially the exciting cadenza, but not deeply engaging. The second movement is slow and pretty, as expected, but didn't strike me as especially memorable. But the third--oh man. It's a joyful blaze. It has an instantly memorable tune which I sort of want to call a riff, and is almost treated that way, recurring frequently. I don't know how often I'll go back to the entire work, but a few days after hearing the entire work several times I went back and listened to the third movement alone--twice. It's that much fun. 

I also revisited the second movement, and found that hearing it in isolation instead of as a lull after the lengthy and vigorous first made it more appealing. It's really quite beautiful. It was like meeting a quiet and mild-mannered person in a crowd and not getting a very strong impression of...well, I was going to say "him or her," but really in that figure I'm envisioning a woman, if only because the movement is pretty and graceful, and men are not pretty and graceful. So, her--and later on conversing with her alone and finding that she's more charming and interesting than you had thought from that first impression. (I think I've used that analogy before, but I can't remember where. I'll attribute that to old age.) 

But about my initial idea that what I was hearing on the radio was Mozart: I can't figure it out now. I don't know which part of the concerto I heard that day in the truck, but in general it doesn't sound much like Mozart to me, though it was written only four years after Mozart's last piano concerto, #27 (1795 and 1791 respectively). In hope of getting some notion of what I might have been hearing, I listened to #27, and I don't hear much resemblance to the Beethoven. So...I don't know. 

On to the second concerto. Which by the way was written before the first. 

Though this is one of my favorite Christmas works, I hadn't heard it for five or six years. This year I'd been thinking about it, but didn't have a chance to hear it until a couple of days after Christmas, and then I listened to it twice in as many days. As we're still in Christmastide, it's not too late for you to listen to it while it's seasonally appropriate.

It's a glorious work, one I've been fond of since I acquired this recording somewhere ca. 1970. 

It's a setting of mostly medieval, mostly Christmas-themed texts, scored for harp and a small choir. Originally the choir was meant to be for "treble" voices, to be performed by children--a boys' choir, in my recording. It's a glistening sound palette that inevitably, given the subject, sounds wintry. But the mood is far from chilly. Britten also produced a version for mixed choir. I haven't heard it, but would like to.

The choir in this performance consists of boys and girls. They're charming though a little distracting to watch. A group called The Tewkesbury Choral Society has thoughtfully provided an online version of the texts, which really helps a lot. Though they're more or less intelligible to the eye, they're somewhat less so to the ear: you can probably guess what "wolcom yole" means when  you read it (in the context of Christmas), but you might not get it from hearing alone. At least I wouldn't. 

Who? 

If you're asking that question: The Call were a band who were moderately successful in the 1980s. Only moderately successful, but respected by both critics and musicians to a greater degree than their general popularity would indicate. If my memory is correct, which it may not be, I heard of them because there was a brief period in the late '80s when we subscribed to cable TV, and I sometimes watched MTV late at night--a guilty pleasure, because I detested MTV on principle. There I heard a song which became at least a minor hit, "Let the Day Begin." Here's the fuzzy "official video" which must be the one I saw:

I liked the song enough to buy the album, also called Let the Day Begin (1989), which is a bit surprising because I didn't have a lot of "disposable income" at the time. It wasn't a disappointment, even though the cover is a bit off-putting.

As I mentioned a month or two ago, I sometimes knowingly and unapologetically act on prejudice. I realized in my youth that sometimes the cover art of an album had a definite effect on my reaction to the music. The very nicest thing I can say about this cover is that it's dull. The worst...well, it certainly never would have tempted me to buy it. Could someone not have come up with something more imaginative? 

But the music is very good, very straightforward rock: vocals, guitar, bass, drum, keyboards, without instrumental fireworks--no flashy screaming guitar solos, no keyboard acrobatics, no complex vocal spectacles. In fact it's so straightforward that it's hard to describe. It's not heavy, not folky, not bluesy, not goth, not industrial, not punk, not post-punk, not new wave, not indie, not psychedelic, not anything musically that specifically ties it to the 1980s (though maybe the haircuts do) . It's not hard rock, but it rocks hard. It's also really well produced and recorded, with a very big sound.

To pick one adjective as description: it's intense. Most of it is up-tempo and driving, and even the slower songs are passionate. The guy more or less in the center of that picture, Michael Been, seems to have been the source of the passion. He's the vocalist, bass player, and main songwriter. Although his voice is not as striking as, say, Bono's (to pick another band popular at the time) it's very powerful and expressive. 

And, always a major plus for me, even a necessity (with exceptions for a few special cases like the Cocteau Twins), the lyrics are well-crafted and substantial. I saw one of their albums in someone's list of Top 25 Christian albums, which is a bit surprising but not inappropriate, as most of the lyrics deal explicitly or implicitly with matters of spiritual depth and often seem to come from a clearly Christian point of view. The cover of Reconciled (1986) may or may not be intended to suggest the idea of being born again:

Whether or not that's the case, the first track, "Everywhere I Go," certainly seems to be addressed to God, and is very much in the tradition of Christian devotional language:

The back cover is a grim picture of a tornado touching down on a very flat landscape. Perhaps it's Oklahoma, as described in the song "Oklahoma," which is an account of a tornado which becomes a sort of apocalypse in which it seems that "the hearts of many are laid bare."

Tornado hit and the roof gave way
Tornado hit and all we could do was pray
How was I to know what I was to think?
How was I to know what I was to feel?

Been was from Oklahoma and so may have been describing something he actually saw.

I'm discussing these three albums more or less in the order in which I heard them, not the order in which they were released.  The cover of Into the Woods (1987) is so much more attractive than those of the other two that I fully expected it to be my favorite of the three, perhaps fulfilling what seemed to be the promise of the others, with a cohesive work on the Dantean theme suggested by both cover and title.

That turned out not to be the case--at least so far. Overall, I don't find the songs to be quite as appealing as most of those on the other two albums, and the theme suggested by the title is not consistently pursued. But my view of the songs is probably just my personal taste--I can't say they are any less well-crafted--and I like half of them as much as I do anything on the other two. The first track, for instance:

Is that as good as anything U2 ever recorded? I say yes. Another comparison with U2 comes to mind: I think a lot of their music is great, as good as rock music gets, but I've never liked any of their albums in their entirety--they're always a mixed bag for me. But these three by The Call are remarkably consistent; there are, to my taste, no tracks that might as well not be there.

They released several other albums, none of which I've heard, and one of them, Red Moon, is said by the reviewer at AllMusic to be their best. So I'll give that one a listen sometime.

Looking around on the web for information I kept running across descriptions like "underrated," "highly regarded," "critical favorite," and the like, the sort of things people say about bands that deserve more attention than they get. The most emphatic of these is at a site dedicated to the band, which is not shy about saying "THE CALL is possibly the most underrated band in the history of music." Well, I don't know, maybe they are. Anyway, if you've never heard them, and you like the tracks I've posted, it's pretty certain that you won't regret investigating them further.

Michael Been died of a heart attack in 2010. His son, Robert Been, is part of a band called Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, of whose music I've heard enough to want to hear more. Here's a video of BRMC performing "I Don't Wanna." Notice that R. Been is also a singer and bass player. 

One night at least a month ago, perhaps two, I was browsing in my 22,469 mp3 files*, looking for some classical piece to listen to before bed--something no more than fifteen minutes or so in length, and not overly intense or demanding. This album caught my eye: not the image, but the words "solo viola."

The dates on the files tell me that I acquired this album in 2007, probably for next to nothing. But I had never listened to it. I had barely heard of Max Reger, and had only a vague idea that he was an early 20th century composer. But I do like the viola quite a lot, so I gave it a try, half-expecting it to be half-listenable early 20th century hostility to the ear.

What a happy surprise! The first suite is in G minor, with four movements. The first movement is slow and somberly melodic. It immediately put me in mind of Bach's cello suites, and I have no doubt that Reger meant that it should. The second movement begins energetically and tunefully, goes to a section more like the first movement, then back to energetic. This was definitely interesting and not at all inaccessible music. I listened to the whole suite, which is only a dozen or so minutes long. I liked it, and returned to it the following night, and then again, and with every hearing I only liked  it more. 

I went on to the second and third suites, and over a period of weeks I must have listened to all of them at least half a dozen times each. As of this moment I think I like the third one, also in a minor key (E minor) best. But that may change the next time I listen to one of the others.

I don't suppose these suites measure up to Bach's. I don't know that Reger expected them to, though, as I said, he surely must have been inspired by them and intended the association. Perhaps they're not as profound and complex. But they do possess a similar atmosphere. Rather than flail around trying to describe the music, I can offer you the opportunity to hear it for yourself, thanks to YouTube.

The suites are perfect for the sort of occasion on which I first discovered them, a quiet time when you want to hear some music that's interesting and thoughtful but not dramatic and stimulating. Or long. They're like a late-night conversation with a good friend, reflective and unhurried, sometimes lively but not contentious, and not without humor.

For the first several hearings of all three suites, I listened to the recording I have, the Kobayashi one pictured above. It's a strong, even forceful, performance with very clear and close sound. Then I began to wonder about other performances, and thanks to Idagio I had a number of choices--though the suites had been unknown to me, they are well-known and well-regarded enough that there are a fair number of recordings to choose from. I liked this one best. It's more lyrical than Kobayashi's. 

The question now, obviously, is: what other music by Reger would I like? And would I like it as much as I like this? That would be nice.

* Exact count (maintained by the software, Media Center from J. River)

Today, November 22nd, is St. Cecilia's feast day (and also that other day that many of us remember). Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern observes the occasion with Dryden's "Song For St. Cecilia's Day," a wonderful poem which you should read. Read it twice, actually: once slowly and perhaps haltingly for comprehension, making sure you've straightened out the sometimes complex or roundabout syntax, then again with a natural flow. It's not so much about St. Cecilia as a brief history of the cosmos, from birth to death, in terms of music--really. That last line is wonderful.

The poem made me recall that Handel wrote an Ode For St. Cecilia's Day, which I had never heard. Well, now I have, only once, but that was enough to show me that it will be worth getting to know better. Here, plucked from YouTube's initial offerings and without knowledge of the ensemble, is the second movement, containing the first stanza of the poem. The first movement is an instrumental overture. 

I'm downright amazed at the way Joseph Bottum and Sally Thomas keep putting out these wonderful posts at the rate of five a week. The poems are always at least interesting, and the commentaries are both erudite and sensitive. As I think I said last time I mentioned the site, it's a continuing education. You should subscribe, preferably a paid subscription, but you don't have to have that in order to read it. 

This really should have been a day-after-the-symphony post. The Mobile Symphony played on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and the program consisted of this work, Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony, and a contemporary work by a composer I'd never heard of--not that whether or not I'd heard of him says anything very significant, but contemporary classical music is, in general, not on the same level as what we call "the classics." 

I wasn't exactly on fire with enthusiasm for the concert. I knew this concerto (generally known as the triple concerto) existed, but as far as I could remember never heard it, or had much desire to hear it. My reaction to the idea was "that must be a ponderous jumble." Moreover, as I've had more than one occasion to remark here, Beethoven, great as he is, is not the composer I love most. But I did plan to go, especially as we have season tickets, so there was no decision to make about whether the concert might be worth the price or not. 

Then came a terrible discovery: the Alabama-LSU game, which I knew was on Saturday, would be a night game. I had to choose. When I mentioned the conflict to my wife, she seemed to think it pretty straightforward that the concert would and should lose. But I was undecided, and I could always go alone, if she didn't want to. The game might even still be in progress when the concert was over. 

I really couldn't get excited about hearing a Haydn symphony, even one of his better ones. Poor Haydn--everyone likes him, but few seem to love him dearly. Nor could I get excited about the contemporary piece. So I thought I should listen to the triple concerto and see whether the prospect of hearing a live performance of it was attractive enough to tip the balance.

I picked a performance more or less at random from the many available on Idagio: Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, and the Berlin Philharmonic under Guilini. I wasn't much taken with it; it seemed ordinary, Beethoven in his less inspired moments. I asked Terri, my classical music guru, about it, and she was unenthusiastic. She's also an Alabama fan, and said, given that MSO program, she would opt for the game. I wavered. I consulted Dave Hurwitz, editor of Classics Today and author of an enormous number of YouTube videos. He pronounced it "Beethoven's dullest major work" (click here for the video), and with a sort of well-if-you-really-must attitude recommended this recording:

So I listened to it, and this time I liked it much more. But I had to decide, and a situation had come up in which we could help out another couple by giving them our tickets. So we did. Decision made.

A couple of days later I listened to the concerto again--that's three times, which is my minimum for expressing anything close to a definite opinion about any piece of music. And my definite opinion is that I like it, quite a lot.

I'm very happy to be able to say that it's not ponderous and not a jumble, and most definitely not dull. It's really a very engaging work, as a matter of fact. It is a bit on the lighter side for Beethoven; in fact I would call it sunny. Of course there are sunny moments in many of Beethoven's great works, but at least in the symphonies they often seem to me a bit heavy-handed, as if they aren't really representative of the composer's real mood or temperament. 

One certainly might imagine--as I did--that the combination of three "solo" instruments and orchestra would be a muddle, but what we really have is almost an alternation between a string trio and a full orchestra. When the trio plays, the orchestra mostly slip into the background, and the conversation is mostly within the trio, not between the trio and the orchestra. And the trio sections are delightful.

It's Opus 56, which I guess makes it more or less mid-period. The Third Symphony is Opus 55, and, with its stormy heroic grandeur, is a pretty striking contrast. (I should admit here that I am not the greatest of enthusiasts for the Third.) The concerto definitely doesn't sound "early," in the sense that, say, the early piano sonatas do, as if they aren't yet Beethoven in full voice. And yet it has that lighter quality of some of the earlier work. At several points I found myself thinking that the feeling--not really the sound as such, but the vibe--is Mozartean. Yet there isn't that frothy quality which a great deal of Mozart's music has. More solid, you could say. The Fourth Symphony is Opus 60. I haven't heard it for many years, but it's a more modest affair than the Third and Fifth, and from what I recall I think this concerto may have more in common with it than with the Third. 

The structure is a little unusual. The first and third movements are roughly equal in length, in the fifteen-minute range. The second is very short, less than five minutes in most performances, and consists of a very beautiful largo for, mainly, the violin and cello, which only lasts three minutes or so. That's followed by a sort of prelude to the third movement, which then follows without any interruption. One could fairly say that it's a two-movement concerto, except that the largo is left behind completely in the rest of the very energetic, but not heavy-handed, smile-inducing final movement. 

If you don't know it, give it a chance. 

Do I regret skipping the concert? No, not really. Even though I didn't attend, it caused me to get acquainted with this work, which I might very well never have done at all.

Alabama won, very decisively. Surprisingly so. 

At first glance, and even more at first hearing, this acoustic folk-ish duo might make you think of Gillian Welch ("a two-person band named Gillian Welch," according to Gillian Welch the person). And you would be quite right. The comparison is apt and, more importantly, not an over-reach. I'm pretty much in love with this song, the first track on the most recent of their three albums.

They are a husband-and-wife team, Pete and Crystal Damore. The Louisiana-looking setting of the video is not a pose, as they live there, and Crystal at least is from there. Their work is very rooted in place and people. You can read more about them and hear more music at their web site. They write and sing--I think she is the major songwriting voice, at least lyrically, and obviously the vocal center--about the things which seem ordinary but have profound significance. That sort of thing is often and fairly said of various songwriters and poets, but some do it much more powerfully than others. 

"We always tell people we named ourselves Ordinary Elephant because there’s no such thing as an ordinary elephant." And the implication is that everything is an elephant--nothing is really ordinary if you look at it right.

I heard them Saturday night, at the suggestion and in the company of my friend Stu, in a very small venue called The People's Room of Mobile. And it was great: a very small audience--I wish for the sake of the owner and the performers that it been somewhat larger--crystal-clear sound at a nice listenable volume, beautiful music from gifted artists with no show-biz airs or gimmicks, just great music and almost intimate talk about the music and the experiences behind it. There were several songs in the set that struck me, on a single hearing, as on a par with "Once Upon A Time," which I had listened to online a few times before the show.

Normally I experience a slight revulsion for anything called "The People's...." It has associations ranging from the ridiculous, as in the once-famous People's Park in Berkeley CA, to the evil, as in People's Republic of China. Apparently The People's Room was originally called The Listening Room, but was threatened with lawsuit by a Nashville place with the same name. Or so I read somewhere a day or two ago, though I can't find the link now.

But I detected no sign at all that the owner has totalitarian ambitions, unless you count the fact that he's pretty adamant that the place is a listening room. Not a drinking or eating or talking or dancing or looking at your phone room, though they will provide you with a beer or a Coke or a bottle of water. Wine, too, maybe?

I even bought a t-shirt.

Thanks to Stu for the photo. 

I'm not a great fan of the banjo, especially of the frantic bluegrass style, but I like the way Pete uses it, playing mostly single-note lines that made a nice bright contrast to Crystal's mellow guitar. He also plays an instrument that looks like a small arch-top guitar with eight strings, doubled as in a mandolin, which he says is called an octave mandolin.

I will admit, somewhat defiantly, that I sometimes consciously operate on prejudice, especially with regard to the arts, and more especially with regard to music. It's generally not pure prejudice; I usually have at least some reason for supposing that my opinion of this can reasonably, or at least not unreasonably, be extended to that, which resembles it, or seems to be of the same species. One of these prejudices is against recordings of classical music which have words like "gala" or "festival" in the title. If the cover includes a picture of fireworks, it's worse. If the title includes an exclamation mark, it's much worse.

The germ of justification for this prejudice is that I think such recordings are likely to be fluff--a collection of brief and showy works of superficial appeal but small substance, yoked together for precisely those reasons. Or perhaps the pieces are more worthwhile than that, but are mere pieces in the other sense, appealing parts of significant works pulled out of their context and yoked to others similarly extracted.

(This is what I think about collections of opera arias, especially. On the one hand, I'm not an especially avid listener of opera, and it's true that certain arias are the tastiest parts of a work which might not be of the greatest interest without them. So as a matter of taste I'm not really averse to the practice. It's a bit like making a best-of album from the work of a group which has a relatively small amount of material that you really like. On the other hand, I feel some sense of duty to the composer to at least give him the opportunity to show me the aria in its dramatic context.)

And I think that broad prejudice is at the root of a more specific prejudice, which I realize I've had for a long time without noticing it, against the popular works of Ottorino Respighi. I believe, though I don't have any specific instance, that I've seen his name on recordings of that sort. Or perhaps not--perhaps it's only that one of his frequently played and recorded works is "Festivals of Rome." Now that I think about it, I notice that I also have a mild prejudice against program music, music intended to depict some scene or event, even though Smetana's "The Moldau" is such a piece and was one of the first works of classical music that really excited me. (Another was Schonberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." That pairing says a lot about my musical taste.) Program music tends either not to work at all--i.e. the thing depicted would probably never have occurred to you if you hadn't been told--or to work too well, seeming contrived and gimmicky.

Prejudice is not necessarily a bad thing. Most people are prejudiced against snakes, because a few species are deadly. I am prejudiced against Great Danes, and strongly prejudiced against two Great Danes together, having been quietly but seriously threatened by a pair of them. And knowing of a case where a pair of them killed a foolish harmless little dog that crawled under a fence into their yard to say hello.

But one ought not to take prejudice so far as, for instance, to kill on sight any snake which happens to cross one's path. And most prejudices should remain open to exceptions and even the possibility of abandonment. 

I was not thinking of any of that a few weeks ago when I was looking for a relatively short, relatively light piece of music to listen to late one night, and "Pines of Rome" caught my eye. I think I noticed it because it happens to be the first piece in that collection of 104 MP3 tracks of Eugene Ormandy's conducting, "The Original Jacket Collection," which was offered on Amazon some years ago for the absurdly low price of $9.99. But it only took one hearing to dispel my prejudice and win me over completely.

"Pines of Rome" is a delightful work. Yes, it is fairly light, but it isn't cotton candy. Nor does it have that sort of stiffness or heaviness that I sometimes feel in the work of German composers when they try to be light. It's fresh and vivid, and leaves no sense that the composer wants it to be either more or less than it is, like a woman who doesn't seem to be making an effort to be charming but who simply is charming--and whether the latter is the product of greater artifice, who knows? (I said "a woman," because the word "charming" doesn't generally occur to me in relation to men. But of course it does to women.) At any rate, this is a charming work, and I've enjoyed it several times since that first hearing, more each time. Not everything has to be profound, complex, and intense. There's a place for straightforward, not-overly-demanding music that simply gives pleasure.

The program is really quite elaborate, as this explication at Wikipedia shows. I can't imagine most of that occurring to a listener, even one who knows the places depicted in the four sections: pines of the Villa Borghese, the catacombs, the Janiculum, and the Appian Way. I've never seen them and in fact was not even sure what the first and third were until I looked them up. Still, in a broad way the titles are suggestive and not intrusive. If the first one put any image at all into my mind, it was of a clear day with a fresh breeze. The second suggests no picture, just a somber atmosphere. The third is peaceful and, if you didn't envision some natural scene, the song of the nightingale would make it clear that you were meant to. The fourth title is maybe the most successful as a directive to the listener. The music is meant to depict not just the ancient road itself but the passage of ancient Roman legions upon it, and it's certainly martial enough.

I'm looking forward to hearing the other two works in this set, "Fountains of Rome" and "Festivals of Rome," though this one seems to be the most popular. 

This is the original jacket. It does not appeal to me. It stirs that prejudice I mentioned. It looks a little festive and includes the word "festivals."

Supposedly, I don't buy music on physical media anymore. There are various reasons for that, lack of storage space being the major one. But I listened to this album once on Pandora and then ordered the LP. (I assumed my local record stores would not have it, which perhaps I should not have done.) And the main reason was not so much to own the object as to support the artist. When I like something as much as I like this, I don't want to just more or less freeload on a streaming service, for which the artist only gets a fraction of a penny for every play. (See this chart for the grim reality.) I want to lay out some cash as a gesture of support, and because the artist deserves to be compensated for her work. 

For those who don't recognize the name, Beth Gibbons is the singer for the band Portishead, providing the distinctive voice which is an absolutely essential element of their sound. (Those who don't recognize the name Portishead should fill that gap in their musical interests as soon as possible. Well, at least check them out, as I recognize they are not to everyone's taste. Here's a link to "Sour Times," from their first album, Dummy.)

Apart from Gibbons's voice, the music on Lives Outgrown has almost nothing in common with Portishead's. It's a subdued and I think entirely acoustic album, but hardly the simple, possibly bland, "folkie" affair that description might suggest. The songs are melancholy and in themselves not very remarkable. By that I don't mean they aren't good, because they are, but that it's not their quality as songs that stands out. That is, they are not the kind of composition that can stand alone performed by, say, one ordinary singer, strumming a guitar in an ordinary way--great songs no matter who sings them or how. That one singer would probably have to be Beth Gibbons to make it work. It's the brilliant arrangements, which are of a piece with the material, that make the entire artifact, so to speak, brilliant. 

Two names that I don't recognize, James Ford and Lee Harris, seem to be, along with Gibbons herself, in some large degree responsible for those arrangements. Harris shares songwriting credit on four tracks. Judging by the credits it would be fair to call the album the work of a group and give them a collective name. 

The instrumentation is generally sparse and low in pitch, which contributes greatly to the subdued quality. Tempos are mainly slow to moderate. There's a lot of percussion, but it's mostly deep and resonant--the standard drum kit is not present at all, as far as I can tell. In fact there are a lot of instruments, period, but they're deployed with a lot of space. The credits often list a dozen or more instruments for a track that doesn't sound in the least busy. There are (bowed) strings, also sparse and carefully, almost minimally, placed. The word "careful" could apply throughout, and yet in general the arrangements strike me as very imaginative. 

The overall coloring is dark, both musically and lyrically. The lyrics and general emotional tone run from wistful to near-despairing, as in "Rewind":

And we all know what's coming
Gone too far
Too far to rewind

It tends toward the darker as it goes along. The next-to-last track, "Beyond the Sun," has something close to a driving beat, and includes a brief passage which I can only describe as a free-jazz freakout, the only bit on the album that could be called noisy. And the lyrics end with

The loss of faith
Filled with doubt
No relief
Can be found

But the sun comes out with the last song, "Whispering Love," where a gentle and pretty flute tune evokes, for me, some of the more innocent and  hopeful music of the late '60s--something by Donovan, maybe. The lyrics take a hopeful turn:

Leaves of our tree of life
Where the summer sun...always
Shines through...the trees of wisdom
Where the light is so pure....
          (the ellipses are in the printed lyrics)

And the album fades away into bird calls and other natural sounds, which some might find gimmicky, but I don't.

Enough talk. This is the first track, and not necessarily the best, but representative.  

Back in February, a couple of months before the album was released in May, a video for "Floating On A Moment" appeared. I wrote about it here. If I had to choose a "best" from the album, that might be it, though I didn't like the video (which is included in that post). It includes a haunting chorus of children sweetly singing "All going to nowhere," a striking and slightly chilling effect.

In 2003 Gibbons released another non-Portishead album, Out of Season, a collaboration with "Rustin Man," who apparently is Paul Webb. I don't think I heard it until maybe ten years after it was released, and although I liked it I was not nearly as enthusiastic about it as I am about this one. I took it out again to see if my opinion had changed. Not really. It's very good, but Lives Outgrown strikes me as great. 

Quite a few years ago, though within this century, I heard this concerto performed live. As I recall, I didn't have a strong reaction to it, which was disappointing, because I had expected, being a great lover of some of Sibelius's symphonies, to like it very much. And though I don't remember it well at all and I don't recall having listened to it since then, I assumed it would reasonably have a place in this tour of great Romantic violin concertos that I began a while back. First it was just the Germans: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, and Brahms, in response to a remark by the famous 19th century violinist Joseph Joachim in which he compared them, calling the Mendelssohn "the heart's jewel." Those done, I included other Romantic concertos: Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and now Sibelius.

Or what I thought to be Romantic concertos: the Sibelius, I discovered immediately, really doesn't belong with the others. "Post-Romantic" or even "early Modern" would be more accurate. This is a somewhat strange work. I listened to it once and, as with that long-ago concert performance, felt that I had heard quite a bit of music, most of which, apart from a few lovely melodies, had swept by leaving little impression.

Then I listened to it again, and it began to open up somewhat. Then once more, and I really enjoyed it. On a fourth hearing (all these over a period of two or three weeks) I was totally carried away, getting up out of my comfortable listening chair, walking around the room excitedly and muttering about how great it was. (I would have said "jumping up" out of my chair, but I'm not really capable of that anymore. In my mind I jumped.)

Compared to the others, this concerto is darker--brooding, uneasy, restless, often stormy. The first movement is intense, with shifts of tone, tempo, and mood that may be part of the reason why it seems different structurally, from the others--less conventionally ordered, though certainly not chaotic. The violin itself is often electrifying, especially in a sort of cadenza that occurs well before its usual place toward the end of a concerto. 

I listened, as I sometimes do, with a pad and pen handy for jotting down impressions for a future blog post, and among those jottings is the phrase "cry or scream." Some pop music fans may recognize that from the Dire Straits song "Sultans of Swing," which says of a chord-oriented jazz guitarist that "he doesn't care to make it cry or scream." Well, Sibelius, in the hands of David Oistrakh, very definitely makes it cry and scream (more about the recording in a moment).

The orchestra is prominent, often featuring very powerful brass. I was reminded of Mahler at several points. The movement ends in a way that I can only describe as "punchy." Instead of the drawn-out finale so typical of 19th century orchestral works, this one comes quickly: it's full-on until the very end, which comes abruptly in two loud chords. 

Mahler came to mind again in the second movement. Yes, it's an adagio, as usual, but most of it's not pretty and serene. I wrote "hesitant" and "questioning." And again the word "uneasy" comes to mind. But it does end peacefully.

During the third movement, I wrote only "totentanz" and "scary harmonics." If the concerto as a whole should be described as a bit strange, this movement is the decidedly strange part. "Totentanz," as you probably know, means "death-dance" in German, which I only know because it turns up in other 19th century contexts, though offhand I can't tell you where. (Liszt, maybe?) It certainly seems to be a sort of dance, and it struck me as a dark one. It's followed by sunnier passages. The ending is exhilarating, similar to that of the first movement, brief, pointed, and somehow joyful. 

As for the scary harmonics--I'm referring to what I think of as high notes with a sort of whistling sound, which I think are not natural tones but, if they're like harmonics on the guitar, made by touching a string but not pressing it down. At any rate, in the context of this movement, they sounded wild, almost deranged, breaking out in the midst of the death-dance as if trying to jack up the somewhat frenzied atmosphere.

I generally try not to read anything about an unfamiliar work before getting acquainted with it directly, without too many prejudices or expectations. So I avoided reading the liner notes on the LP until after that fourth hearing. I had wondered if I was making too much of, or even making up entirely, the dark quality of that third-movement dance. No, it's not just me:

It is undoubtedly an exciting dance, far showier than the other movements, but there is a curious unease beneath the wild prancing.... Sibelius himself referred to the movement as a danse macabre. 

The notes are credited to Bill Parker, whose name I don't recognize. 

Like much of Mahler's work, this concerto seems caught between the 19th and 20th centuries, as if looking over a wall separating them, with a view of the other side which is indistinct but which makes him uneasy. I was surprised to learn that it was written soon after the Second Symphony, which is very much in the Romantic tradition and, as far as I recall (haven't heard it for a while) pretty conventional.

This is the recording I have, and the only one I listened to:

This is not, however, the cover of my edition, which is ugly, featuring a very grim bust of Sibelius, with closed eyes, looking like a death mask. Back in the '60s Angel Records had some kind of distribution deal with Melodiya, the official Soviet recording company (if "company" is the right word). There were a lot of these joint-venture LPs around then. As best I can tell from Discogs, this performance was originally issued by Melodiya in 1965, with the Angel/Melodiya edition coming out in 1967. Somehow it made its way onto the budget label Quintessence in 1982, and that's the edition I have. In spite of the unattractive cover, it's a gem. The sound is fantastic and to my ears so are the orchestra and soloist. I don't recall having heard the conductor's name before. Even the liner notes are very good, which is unusual with budget labels. As with the Dvorak and Tchaikovsky concertos, I felt, and feel, no need to seek out another performance. 

The back cover, by the way, quotes a 1968 reviewer in High Fidelity as saying that Oistrakh's playing "risks, but always misses, technical disaster," and is a "virtuoso flirtation with danger." Doesn't sound that way to me.

I haven't listened to the two Humoresques that fill out the second side of the LP. When that third movement ends, I don't want to hear any more music for a while. 

"The piece was written in Clarens, a Swiss resort on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Tchaikovsky had gone to recover from the depression brought on by his disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova. "

So says Wikipedia. The poor man. And poor Antonina, too. It seems to be a generally accepted view that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. Whether the marriage was ventured upon as a way of covering up that fact, or he really thought it could work, or she knew and accepted the situation for reasons of her own, I will leave to those who are more interested in the biography than I am. I mention it because one would suppose that the concerto would be deeply melancholy, at least. But it isn't. It isn't exactly sunny, either, but it doesn't come near the heartbreak and gloom of, for instance, the Sixth Symphony. But then, whatever Tchaikovsky felt about the ending of the marriage, it probably wasn't heartbreak. 

In one very broad aspect it resembles the Beethoven and Brahms concertos: its first movement is much longer than the other two, roughly as long as the second and third combined. Maybe there was some sense of what a concerto is supposed to be that plays a part in this, but if it was not unusual it wasn't exactly a convention, either, as Mendelssohn and Bruch and Dvorak didn't follow it. 

The first movement includes two "big tunes," as I think of them: grand, beautiful, memorable, often famous melodies. These are, to put it flippantly, played around with in various ways until there is a climax which brings them together in what the Wikipedia article describes as an "arrival," a good term, and one of those heart-grabbing, possibly tear-jerking, moments which any music lover loves. Not the tears of pathos, but the good tears similar to those produced by eucatastrophe, the term invented (it seems) by Tolkien to describe a sudden unexpected turn for the good in a story. I'm partial to cadenzas, and this one is wonderful, including a passage of those high-pitched whistling tones which I think are harmonics and which must be extremely difficult to play. 

The second movement is a deeply mournful theme, turning into a sort of slow gentle waltz which seems to me to convey resignation. Here, perhaps, is something connected to the marriage. There is no break between the second movement's Andante and the third's Allegro vivacissimo, and I will venture to complain about that. It's too sudden and startling, downright unpleasant in my opinion. I'll get used to it. Or perhaps implement my own pause as I listen to it on CD or MP3. At any rate, if there is any connection between the concerto and the marriage, this movement suggests that the composer got over his distress about the latter. As with the Beethoven, this movement seems a bit of a letdown to me, which seems a possibility built into the dominance of the first movement. 

The recording I listened to is, in fact, on MP3. It's an older one: Isaac Stern, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. As with the Dvorak, I felt no need to investigate other recordings, though I probably will eventually. As best I can tell from Discogs it was originally recorded in 1959, which makes its outstanding sound even more impressive. It's part of the MP3 version of a boxed CD set, a set of boxed sets, called The Original Jacket Collection, this being the Ormandy and Philadelphia box, a 10-CD set, presumably someone's idea of the best work of that conductor and orchestra. Some number of years ago, greater than five and less than twenty, an MP3 version was offered for some ridiculously low price, probably on Amazon, and I grabbed it. It's 104 separate files of absolutely wonderful music. I haven't heard all of it, but I'm sure it's wonderful.

I had a very minor little argument online recently with someone of the age classified, in that silly system that we seem to be stuck with, as "Generation X", on the subject of the music of the 1980s. "Boomers" like me, he said, could not understand, could not "relate to," that music as people of his age do. We Boomers had been simply too old for it to have made on us the kind of impression that it had on them.

Well, in some ways that's true. As anyone who's at all susceptible knows, the popular music of one's youth, like everything else in one's youth, makes an impression, has an intense impact, in a way that later similar experiences generally do not. The reason is obvious: the experience is, for that person, the first of its kind, and the person is still newly alert and sensitive, still in some sense a child.  People speak of the popular music of their youth as "the soundtrack of my life," a phrase which I understand but find a little disturbing for its implication that one's life needs or ought to have a soundtrack. Still, that's the condition of life in a culture where recorded music is everywhere.

Tears for Fears, the band we were discussing, said my acquaintance, simply could not be for me what it was for him: the soundtrack of his formative experiences as he passed through adolescence and into adulthood: his first love, his growing awareness of the world, and so forth. And, again, that's obviously true. I was already in my mid 30s, married with children, when Tears for Fears was popular. Nevertheless, some of the music of that time did get thoroughly bound up with my life--was, in a necessarily more limited way than when I was in high school or college, the soundtrack of my life. Tears for Fears was part of it, though not a large part: a friend included some of their stuff on a mixtape, and although I have not heard that music for thirty years or so I still recall a few excellent songs, and their somewhat bitter lyrics:

I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
          ("Mad World")

For the most part that soundtrack played when I was in the car, commuting back and forth to work or on the occasional long drive alone. And R.E.M. is one of the bands I think of first when I recall those times. I found their first two (full-length) albums, Murmur and Reckoning, as exciting as the music of the mid- and late 1960s had been. That was true of other bands of the time as well: Big Country, U2, Ultravox, the Psychedelic Furs, others whose names don't spring quite as readily to mind. 

But time went on, life went on, pop music went on, with the flood of inexpensively available music making it possible for me to range far more widely in my listening. And I realized recently that I have not heard most of that music for thirty-plus years, and wondered if it was as good as I remembered. It was time to give it another listen.

Murmur was the first I chose. I would have put it near the top of my list of favorites of the time. It was a peculiar album: the music catchy, and yet having an odd emotional seriousness, partly as a result of Michael Stipe's voice, which really didn't sound like anyone else's. It had a bit of a back-to-basics feel, with a touch of '60s folk-rock, influenced no doubt by the punk impulse but sounding nothing like any punk rock I ever heard. It wasn't bluesy at all, wasn't aggressive at all, miles away from the hard rock and glam metal that dominated guitar-based rock. In comparison to those, it seemed relatively gentle, though it was very energetic, even hard-driving. And it had a mysterious quality, which was not entirely due to the lyrics that were only partially intelligible at best (and even when intelligible not making much sense).

So. Listening to it again--in the vinyl that I bought so many years ago--was a bit like running into someone who had been at one time a good friend but whom you haven't seen for a long time, and realizing that you don't really have a lot to say to each other anymore. Nothing especially negative, no hostility, just a certain distance. I haven't changed my opinion of this album,  I would still rate it very highly, but I don't respond to it as I once did. I enjoyed hearing it, but I don't know whether I'll ever hear it again--as it might be with that friend, whom you enjoy seeing but make no plans to see again. 

"Radio Free Europe" is the first track on the album, an instant grabber, and one of my favorites

I find myself wondering: have I finally, at age 75, outgrown rock-and-roll? Of late, by which I mean recent months, I seem to want to hear only classical music. It could be just a phase I'm going through.

I've been rather busy for the past week or so, and will be for several more days, so I'm going to make this brief.

Continuing my tour of the great 19th century violin concertos, sparked by Joseph Joachim's judgment of the four great German ones (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Brahms), I've branched out from the Germans. I was only vaguely aware that Dvorak had even written a violin concerto. Apparently, according to Dave Hurvitz (see video below), my ignorance was until relatively recently not that unusual: all the attention went to the cello concerto. Well, people were really missing something.

I described the Brahms concerto as being somehow larger than the other three named by Joachim. By a similar measure, I would describe the Dvorak as somehow smaller than the Brahms and Beethoven. It is in length literally smaller than those: three movements of comparable and modest length, very unlike the, so to speak, front-loaded Brahms and Beethoven, with their very long first movements. It's also lighter than the Germans, including Bruch and Mendelssohn. It doesn't seem to strike as deeply as the others, in their most intense moments, do. In spite of the fact that it's in a minor key, it's more bright and fiery than somber in the first movement, very sweet in the second (which flows without a pause from the first), and in the third simply joyous. And in that third movement it stands out from all the others. 

In all the others the third movement is either a little less impressive than the first and second, perhaps just a bit of a letdown, or, in the case of Beethoven, a definite letdown. But this one is possibly, depending on your mood, the best of the concerto. I don't see how anyone can listen to it without being lifted up into its high spirits. It makes me smile.

Is this a great work? Well, maybe not in that quasi-physical sense of the term which I applied to the Brahms. But in the sense of being a classic, a work that stands with the best work of its time as deserving of attention and commanding love, yes, it's great. 

I was going to go to Dave Hurvitz for advice on which recording to try, but as it turned out I didn't listen to his recommendation until I had heard the concerto several times. That was because I discovered that I have a recording, an LP from 1980--this one:

As far as I recall, I had not even heard of this violinist before. I figured I would listen to the LP once, then see what Hurvitz would recommend and probably try it (or them). But I just kept listening to the LP. It's perfectly satisfying to me. What can I say, with my limited vocabulary? It's just beautiful, crystal clear, lively, sure, and precise. 

I did finally listen to Hurvitz, just a little while ago, and learned, as I mentioned, some things about the concerto which I hadn't known. I found Hurvitz annoying when someone first recommended him to me, but I've come to like him now. Perhaps I'll listen to the recording he recommends, a Supraphon recording from the '60s, Josef Suk, Karel Ančerl, and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Or perhaps not. 

I see that there is no lack of performances of the concerto on YouTube. I will leave you to pick one of those if YouTube is your preference.

Now on to Tchaikovsky.

With this concerto, I've finished what I call my Joachim project: to get to know the four concertos named by Joseph Joachim (the very famous 19th century violinist) in this remark:

The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.

And possibly, with hesitation and deference, to see whether I agreed with him. The answer is: well, not exactly. I wouldn't say I disagree, exactly; I'm only going to say that his description of the Mendelssohn is not mine, nor would I pick any of the four as a "heart's jewel."

You will note that Joachim's statements are not rankings. He's not saying that there is a semi-objective superiority of one over the others. Yes, he does say that Beethoven's is the greatest, but considering what he says of the others, I don't think he means absolutely superior, but rather the grandest, the largest. By virtue of their inclusion in his list, all four are "great" in the more casual sense. But Mendelssohn's, it seems, is especially beloved. To say that one has a favorite flower does not disparage other flowers, and it seems reasonable to say that this was Joachim's personal favorite.

In truth, my most accurate response to the question "Which of these is your favorite?" would be "The one I'm listening to now." But I'll put it another way with another question: if you had to pick one, if could only ever again hear one, which would it be? Right now I would pick Brahms, and it's not only because it's the one I heard most recently. That was a couple of weeks ago, so I'm not under its immediate influence. My reason may be the same thing that Joachim sees in the Beethoven. The word "majesty" occurred to me several times as I listened. It just seems somehow a little larger, a little more powerful, perhaps a little deeper, than the others, while lacking nothing in basic musical appeal when compared to them. 

I would probably declare myself unable to choose between Beethoven and Brahms except that I'm not fond of Beethoven's third movement. Like the Beethoven, the Brahms is way out of balance in favor of the first movement, which in both is as long or longer than the second and third two combined. This is not true of the other two concertos. That makes me wonder whether Brahms was consciously emulating Beethoven or not. A biography might answer that question. 

Joachim's list completed, I'm now extending the project to include two other great Romantic violin concertos, those of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius. Wait, Dvorak wrote one, too, which as far as I remember I haven't heard. Joachim's list was limited to German composers, so Dvorak's absence is not necessarily significant. So, three others.

I'm glad to see that it seems to be generally acceptable now to say "concertos" instead of "concerti." The latter, at least when I tried to use it, always sounded pretentious or snobbish. But if I didn't use it I felt like a hick who just didn't know any better. The word has long completed the journey to full Anglophone citizenship, and can be pluralized like other English words. Or so I say. 

I was a little surprised, when reading Bleak House a few months ago, to see "restaurant" italicized, as is normally done with foreign words and phrases that remain foreign. I don't know when that ceased. I'm amused by the idea that the concept was apparently foreign. England certainly had long had its pubs and other places where one could have a meal (Samuel Johnson frequents a "chop house"), but there must have been something different about the French approach. 

It seems to be the practice these days to leave out the second "the" and refer to the work as The Art of Fugue. I don't know the reason for that. The German title is "Die Kunst der Fuge," which according to my high school (and little bit of college) German is literally "the art the fugue." (I don't know how English came by that second "u," or why the German doesn't include one of those "of"-type words, like "auf.") The two recordings of it or parts of it that I have, by Glenn Gould and Gustav Leonhardt, were made in 1962 and 1969 respectively, and reissued in the 1980s, and both say "the fugue." I assume there is some good linguistic reason for  discarding the "the," though it sounds off to me. I also assume that's why this article by Jonathan Gaisman, in the May issue of The New Criterion is called "The Heart of Fugue."

I have a sort of compulsion, which I'm trying to break, to read every magazine to which I subscribe from cover to cover, in order. It was hard for me not to defy that compulsion in this case, as the fugue article is the last one in this issue, and I was eager to read it, because I have a problem with the fugue as a musical form and am always vaguely hoping for some sort of breakthrough in that difficulty.

I've always found the form somewhat...I hate to use this term...dry. Almost inaccessible. Around this time last year I started the project of listening thoroughly to the entire Well-Tempered Clavier (see this post). My intention was to listen to every prelude-and-fugue pair at least three times. I knew I would like the preludes, in general, but had my doubts, based on past experience, about the fugues:

With a few exceptions, the form has left me cold. It seemed dry, abstract, academic. You get the statement of the subject--which is frequently not all that interesting in itself--three or four times, and at that point I usually lose the thread: the piece just becomes a lot of wandering counterpoint, with the subject emerging from time to time. 

I don't think I ever reported on the completion of that project, but I did complete it, with many stops and starts, probably six months or so after I started it. And I very much enjoyed it. And the pattern of very much liking the preludes and being unenthusiastic about the fugues continued throughout. I did, as my listening continued, find that I was enjoying the fugues more, but still they continued to seem, well, all the things that I just mentioned.

The New Criterion article pointed me toward a possible resolution of the problem: just give up. I think it's an excellent brief introduction to the form, and to The Art. But it makes clear to me that a true appreciation and enjoyment of it is beyond me, because my ears and brain are not capable of grasping the structures that make it so impressive and fascinating to those who can grasp it.

I'm very well aware that there are subtleties and complexities in most classical music that I don't and can't grasp. And that some of these are accessible only to those who have substantial training in music theory and very good ears. That undoubtedly limits but does not present a major obstacle to my enjoyment; to be brought to raptures by a piece of music is sufficient, even if I'm missing a lot.

Why is the fugue different? The opening of the article is a simple observation:

Many people, if they wonder how music is made up, suppose that it consists of a tune and an accompaniment. The paradigmatic guitarist in front of a campfire croons the melody, while his hands create the harmonies that give it color.

Well, yeah, but I'm more sophisticated than that, I thought, mildly annoyed. But Gaisman goes on with more elaborate examples: 

Frédéric Chopin admired Bellini, and his nocturnes reproduce the same model: the right hand unfurls a line of singing melody on the piano, and the left provides (in his case) exquisite harmonic support.

Yes, a long way from the campfire guitar, but the basic concept is there in Chopin. Counterpoint, on the other hand, is:

... a compositional method in which there is not a dominating tune and a subsidiary accompaniment, but contrariwise a democratic parity between the voices. (They are called voices even when they are instrumental, not sung.) A choral piece by Johann Sebastian Bach or Handel typically shares out the elements equally between soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, so that the distinction between melody and harmony does not apply; every line contributes to both.

This may seem pretty obvious. It is pretty obvious, in essence. But in this case, as often happens, I had missed the implications of the obvious: on reflection, I realized that almost all the music that I really enjoy exhibits to some degree that voice-and-accompaniment relationship. I would call it, in more elaborate music, a foreground and background relationship. The foreground usually involves melody, a single distinct line or perhaps a mingling of multiple lines, which may be one or two instruments or a whole section of an orchestra or even the orchestra as a whole, with harmony and/or subordinate melody and/or rhythm less prominent. There may be and often is a lot going on in this supporting stuff, but it isn't generally the center of attention. The relationships between foreground and background are far more complex than Gaisman's first simple voice-and-guitar instance, but they do participate in a structure where not everything is of equal prominence (I don't say "importance"--that's no doubt a tricky judgment). 

"... the distinction between melody and harmony does not apply...." That's the key, I guess. When I listen to a fugue, my ears keep searching for that prominent voice, the stirring tunes sailing over an ever-varying sea of harmony and rhythm, passages connected by transitions that in themselves keep my interest. And not only do my ears not find those things, they don't really grasp what they do hear. They hear a great many notes, but they don't grasp, they don't feel, the interrelationships among them.

All the fourteen fugues and four canons in The Art of Fugue derive in some way from a single theme or “motto” in D minor, but, following an initial treatment that almost wilfully eschews the usual devices, their ingenuity and increasing complexity amount to one of the great intellectual and artistic achievements of Western civilization...

Alas for me, I cannot hear that "ingenuity and increasing complexity." 

If this interests you at all, please read the whole article. It does make me wish I could experience what the author describes. The credit on that article, by the way, says only that "Jonathan Gaisman is a King’s Counsel, practicing in commercial law." Having gone into law after obtaining an undergraduate degree in music, perhaps. 

If you read all the above and think you deserve a reward, here it is. If you didn't, my feelings are hurt, but here's your reward anyway. I didn't bother making notes of which pieces in the Well-Tempered Clavier I especially liked, but I think the F minor prelude and fugue from Book 2 were among them.

I have underrated this concerto. I've listened to it three times over the past week or so, as part of my little project involving Joseph Joachim's view of the greatest violin concertos:

The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.

I had not heard it for many years, and though I remembered liking it I thought of it as above all a technical showpiece, impressive but not necessarily deeply affecting. And on the first of these three hearings that expectation was, if not fulfilled exactly, then not contradicted, either. 

As far as I could recall, I did not own a recording, so I went to Idagio and settled on one, one of very many: Arthur Grumiaux and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw conducted by Bernard Haitink. I enjoyed it, of course, but in a casual sort of way. Very impressive. Oh, that's lovely. I like that tune. Great finale. But I was pretty sure it was not going to end up at the top of my Joachim ranking. 

Thinking I would try a different recording, just out of curiosity, I went to Classics Today and found a recommendation for another Grumiaux recording, this one with Heinz Wallberg conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra. (The recommendation, by the way, is from David Hurwitz, whose reviews on YouTube I've mentioned before. I've also mentioned that I found him a little annoying to watch and listen to, but he's grown on me. I've begun to enjoy his quirks, his humor, and his generally unpretentious style.)

My reaction to the second Grumiaux recording one was pretty similar: beautiful, not a rival to Mendelssohn's. 

Then I discovered, while looking for something else, that I have an LP that includes this concerto. How did I not know that I have it? Well, two reasons: one, it has both the Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos, and I never know how to shelve multi-composer recordings. I have a good many of these, probably between fifty and a hundred, and they're shelved in very rough chronological order, since such albums usually include works of more or less the same period. That doesn't work very well, though it's better than nothing. And two: several years ago I came into possession of several hundred LPs that were going to go to Goodwill if I didn't take them (see this post). And most of those have hardly been organized at all. Or played. This was one of them: 

(Image from Discogs; my copy is STEREO, to be played only with a stereo cartridge and needle to avoid damage)

The New Philharmonia Orchestra is not the same as the Philharmonia Orchestra though they are related (seems to be a long story). I don't know whether it was just the fact that this was my third hearing of the concerto within a week or so, or the nature of the performance, or my state of mind at the moment, but this time I was bowled over. It's a great concerto, fully worthy of Joachim's placement of it among the greatest. "Richest, most seductive"? Not the adjectives I would choose, but very powerful in any case and certainly among the greats.

This is a 1961 recording, and as I mentioned, it's an LP: analog all the way. The other two I heard were digital, though they're old enough that they were probably recorded in analog. And they weren't at the highest possible resolution. Whether any of that had to do with my reaction I can't say. Maybe it was Milstein himself. 

Now on to Brahms. I've heard that one fairly recently, and really thought that there had been a discussion about it here, but I can't find it. I already know that I love it. I think it's going to be hard to say that I prize any one of these over the others. 

Also, I'm adding Sibelius to this project, which at that point will put me outside of Joachim's list by nationality--he did say "the Germans"--and although the composition of the Sibelius concerto just barely falls within Joachim's lifetime, we can assume he never heard it. I've heard it, but only once or twice, and I didn't feel like I had really gotten it. Maybe I should add Tchaikovsky, too?

I was not always a fan of prog ("progressive") rock. In its early-to-mid 1970s heyday I was in fact dismissive of it: pretentious, over-complicated, sacrificing good songwriting for an emphasis on virtuosity not really suited for rock music. In short, it seemed to be trying to be something that rock music isn't and shouldn't be: of interest on purely musical grounds, where it was never going to be able to compete with jazz and classical. It was twenty years later that I gave it a second look, for a non-musical reason: my then-adolescent children had gotten interested in popular music (i.e. rock) and I was trying to steer them away from the uglier stuff. 

That didn't work, but it did change my mind. That is, my basic criticisms were justifiable and remained intact, but I enjoyed the music anyway, which led me to listen, in most cases for the first time, to Yes and King Crimson, and to develop quite a liking for them. There were a few others, but I only made a point of hearing most of the 1970s work of those two. And of them, KC seemed to have had the most interesting post-'70s career. 

But that's not really fair. Yes was a band with a fairly consistent lineup and a very consistent sound, at least through their first decade, and seem to have faded away after that, with the exception of one commercially successful and reportedly very atypical album in the early '80s. King Crimson, on the other hand, has not been a proper band at all through much of its fifty-plus years, but rather the ever-changing musical project of Robert Fripp, in which he has included various other musicians as suits his interests and purposes. It's been the exact opposite of consistent lineup and sound--Fripp tended to disband the group, at least partially, after every album or two, and reassemble it, at least partially, and go off in a somewhat different musical direction.

As a band, King Crimson was officially dead as of about 1975. But after half a decade or so Fripp revived the name for a group  of instrumental virtuosos consisting of himself, guitarist Adrian Belew, bass player Tony Levin, and drummer Bill Bruford (formerly of Yes). This band recorded three albums, Discipline (1981), Beat (1982), and Three of A Perfect Pair (1984). 

I would suppose that fans of progressive rock in general and King Crimson in particular were disappointed in these. One of the hallmarks of prog is long compositions with a lot of virtuoso instrumental work, and, despite the very high level of technical skill of all four players, that's not what these albums are. Most of the songs are in fact songs, of fairly typical pop song length, of a piece, with little instrumental stretching out. But that doesn't mean they're simple. They're not great songs as such--you don't come away humming them, or moved by the combination of words and music. But they're interesting. Rather than the complex twists and turns more typical of prog, or the basically simple and repetitive chord changes and beat of most pop, these songs have a static sort of quality--complex, and shifting slowly rather than driving forward. If I felt more confident of my technical understanding of music I would try to describe that more precisely. 

But I can say with confidence that one fairly constant feature is the use of complex repetitive hyperactive guitar figures that slowly shift rhythmically. I find it very hard to follow them for very long. I think I've got it and then suddenly it's wait, where did the accent go? "Frame by Frame," from Discipline, is a good example.

The bass and drums are also doing a lot of complicated things with rhythm there. It's as if the whole emphasis on complexity which characterizes the progressive rock concept is focused on rhythm. Basically, this band invented "math rock" (from Wikipedia) : "a style of alternative and indie rock with roots in bands such as King Crimson and Rush. It is characterized by complex, atypical rhythmic structures (including irregular stopping and starting), counterpoint, odd time signatures, and extended chords. " A week or so ago I found a YouTube video in which Adrian Belew explains this sort of thing, the way the guitar parts shift in and out of phase, so to speak, with one player starting one of these figures, the other playing it but with one note left out, and so on, so that the beat begins to float. But I just spent thirty minutes looking and can't find the video now. 

All this may seem a long way from the long and elaborate suites so often found in '70s prog. But if you listen to "21st Century Schizoid Man," the very first track on the very first KC album, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), you find that the connecting thread is very clear. 

To call a work of art "interesting" is sometimes to damn with faint praise, at least on my part. And the word does pretty well summarize my opinion of these three albums. But I mean it quite literally. This is not my favorite music, but it is in fact interesting, interesting enough to return to now and then. There seems to be a consensus among critics and fans that the chronological sequence of the three albums is also the sequence of their quality, the first (Discipline) being the best. I agree with that. But if one likes the style at all, they're all worth hearing. 

A group consisting of Belew, Levin, Steve Vai (a name known to anyone interested in rock guitar), and Danny Carey, drummer of the band Tool, is doing a tour under the name BEAT performing this music. They're not coming anywhere very near me, but if they did I'd go. 

In German: "Helden."

I never heard of Andrea Schroeder until a few weeks ago when I was looking for cover versions of this famous song. You know it, right? If not, click here.

I was never much of a David Bowie fan. I didn't care for the whole glam rock, sexually androgynous thing, but, more importantly, I just didn't care that much for most of his music. I had a slightly annoying conversation about this on Facebook around the time of Bowie's death. I said more or less what I just said, and several younger people explained to me that it was a generational thing, and I Just Didn't Understand. 

Nonsense. Look, y'all (I said): David Bowie was a bit older than me. It had nothing to with age and everything to do with musical taste. I heard Ziggy Stardust several dozen times while I was working in a record store, and never cared much for it, though I had liked his earlier album, Hunky Dory, quite well. And I never listened to him much after that.

But somehow or other I did hear "Heroes," a basically very simple song which seems to have a mildly addictive effect on a lot of people. And, maybe in part because it's basically simple, yet deeply appealing, it seems to lend itself to some very varied ways of performing it. And maybe also because of the lyric, with its odd combination of defiance and despair. "Yes we're lovers" but "nothing can keep us together." And:

Though nothing will drive them away
We can beat them, just for one day
We can be heroes, just for one day

You can read the English lyrics here.

I like covers of well-known songs which rework them substantially. Or rather I should say they interest me, as of course they're not always successful. This one, I think, works spectacularly well. I like it just as much when I'm not looking at the screen with the beautiful Andrea Schroeder gazing deeply into my soul eyes.

I must definitely hear more of her music. She's German, obviously, and AllMusic doesn't say a word about her, nor does Wikipedia, but her own website has some impressive recommendations. 

My next-favorite cover of "Heroes" is by the metal-ish band Motörhead, and as you might suppose it is night-and-day different. I don't recommend listening to this one immediately after Andrea Schroeder's. If at all. It's hard rock.

Lemmy Kilmister, 1945-2015, RIP. One wonders, if one is a Christian, where such an apparently purely heathen soul goes.

I've started to follow through on my idea of listening to the four violin concertos praised by Joseph Joachim, one of the great violinists of the 19th century:

The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.

To these four I plan to add the Sibelius concerto, which of course came after Joachim's time. I've heard them all at least once,  but I want to get to know them better. And also to see whether I agree with Joachim. 

Mendelssohn I just recently heard (see this post), and that was what led me to this little listening project. I'm taking them in chronological order, so Beethoven is first. My usual procedure in getting to know any piece of music, classical or other, is to listen to it three times within some relatively small span of time--a week or so. In this case I listened to three different recordings: Heifetz and Munch, ca 1960; Christian Ferras and Karajan, 1967; Perlman and Guilini, 1981 (in that order).

In the past I have been less than enthusiastic about this concerto. On the basis of one or two inattentive hearings, I just didn't think it was, for Beethoven, an especially remarkable piece. (I said so to my violinist son, and he was horrified.) Well, that's...in the past. I now consider the first movement to be among my very favorite Beethoven works. As far as I'm concerned it could be a standalone work. It's substantially longer than the other two movements combined, and seems to me complete and satisfying in itself.

The second movement, though comparatively brief, stands with it in quality, and leads directly into the third without a pause. It's there that the concerto as a whole falls down a bit. It's a vigorous "happy ending" to a work which has had a distinctly reflective, if not melancholy, spirit. And to me it's a bit of a letdown, the opposite of its intended effect. This is no doubt in part a result of a sense, which I've mentioned before, of temperamental incompatibility between me and the great composer. It's the energetic Beethoven, who sometimes seems to me a bit unconvincing, a bit overemphatic. For that reason, when (or if) I decide to rank these concertos, I don't think Beethoven's will be at the top.

About the recordings: I don't think anyone could criticize Heifetz's performance except on the grounds that it's too perfect. It seems effortlessly perfect, and for that reason a bit chilly in comparison to others. I didn't think that until I heard Ferras, and was struck by a sense of emotional warmth and depth which I didn't feel in the Heifetz. 

Those two were on LPs that I own. For the third listening, I decided to look for recommendations. A while back my friend who's a classical music expert had brought to my attention to the YouTube channel of Dave Hurwitz of Classics Today. He has roughly 1,000,000 videos on YouTube, including a long series on reference recordings: the one, or maybe the few, recordings of some work that he considers to have set the standard. His choice for the Beethoven violin concerto is the 1981 recording by Itzhak Perlman and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Carlo Giulini. So that's the third one I listened to (via the IDAGIO streaming service), and, "reference" or not, I definitely prefer it to the others. 

I find Hurwitz a little annoying to watch and listen to, but his opinions are worth hearing. Here's the one where he names the Perlman/Guilini performance as his top choice. (There is a grotesque figure of speech at about 6:10. What was he thinking?)

Though I only heard this song a few times fifty years ago, it's come back to my mind now and then over the years, and often over the past weeks and months, for reasons which will not be mysterious when you hear the lyrics.  

I heard this version by Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the original San Francisco hippie-psychedelic bands, around 1970 or so, and not since until today. The band was fairly well-known at the time, mentioned along with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but never achieved the kind of fame that some of the others did.

They didn't write "Pride of Man." That was a guy named Hamilton Camp, who had some modest success as a folk, or perhaps I should say "folk," artist in the mid-'60s (and after). I have just learned, thanks to Wikipedia, that the song was connected with Camp's involvement in a religious movement called Subud. 

I was aware of him because when I was in high school I owned this album, a sampler from the then-new and innovative Elektra label:

There's a wonderful range of music on it, and I listened to it many, many times. Some of the artists had long and successful careers, others pretty much disappeared, or just remained obscure. Some died fairly young. The duo called Kathy and Carol is among those who remained obscure, releasing one album and going their separate ways. Their track on the album was one of my favorites.

Coincidentally, my girlfriend at the time was named Kathy. Or rather Cathy.

My copy of the album disappeared many years ago. Someone has compiled a YouTube playlist which replicates the album, and that's nice. But I really would like to hear, and handle, and read the back cover of, the LP, and I see that it can be had very inexpensively from sellers on Discogs. I guess there's no harm in adding one more to my hoard.

(Cathy dumped me, by the way.) 

I've never ventured very far into the Bach cantatas, having heard mostly the "greatest hits," such as BWV 140, "Wachet Auf" (which my mental ear insists on hearing as "Watch Out!"). There are just so many of them, and--I hope you will excuse me if this sounds blasphemous or at least disrespectful--there seems to be a fair amount of music in them that is less than great. I mean, for instance, chorales that don't seem particularly distinctive. 

But thanks to an article by Ken Myers in the most recent issue of Touchstone (the article is not available to non-subscribers), I sought out a recording of this one: "Christ Lay In the Bonds of Death," based on a hymn by Luther. I recognized the title but am not sure I'd ever heard it before. It seems to me a standout. I'm posting it as the one acknowledgement of Holy Week that I plan to make here--I won't be online very much for the next week or so. I would say that I hope you enjoy this but I feel fairly confident in saying that you will enjoy it, if you listen to it and you don't have an aversion to classical music, or classical choral music. 

From Myers's article, here's an interesting bit of musical analysis that even I can grasp:

And the musical device Bach introduces here—a succinct motif that pervades the entire work—is the simplest of melodic gestures: a descending half step. Play an A on a keyboard, followed by a G-sharp. It’s the tightest of intervals possible in Western music, but that short descending sigh becomes, in Bach’s development of Luther’s hymn, an emblem of death.

In the melody of Luther’s hymn, the first two notes are a descending whole step, from A down to G. That’s how generations of Lutherans had heard and sung the opening notes of this hymn. It’s the interval borrowed from the chant on which the melody is based, and then heard in dozens of compositions for choir and for organ based on this tune. Bach had the musical-theological shrewdness to recognize in this slight (but radical) alteration in the melody a musical resource that would enable him to more powerfully convey both Passion and Resurrection.

As the BWV number suggests, this is thought to be an early work, written around 1707, when Bach was in his early twenties. You can read a great deal about it on the Wikipedia page. But you'd be better off listening to it first. The performance is by those baroque workhorses, Gardiner, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Monteverdi Choir.

I don't as a rule especially like watching musicians up close, or for that matter at all, when they're performing, but I did enjoy watching these. 

It occurred to me after I typed that title that A Night to Remember was a book about the sinking of the Titanic. Book and film, I find on checking.

But I didn't change the title, because it is perfectly accurate. You can be assured that this night with the Mobile Symphony was not a disaster. On the contrary, it gave me, by means of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, one of those rare almost-ecstatic musical experiences. This was of course the E Minor concerto--I didn't know until today that it was actually his second, the first having been written when he was thirteen (!). The violinist was Simone Porter, of whom I had never heard, though that doesn't mean anything much. Here's the bio from her web site. 

I've heard the concerto on record several times, and may have heard a live performance twenty or more years ago, but I'm not sure. I've always liked it but have never been affected by it as I was this past Saturday night. I can't discuss the performance intelligently in the sort of detail that real music reviewers do; all I can say is that I was swept away from the very beginning, and didn't come back until the final notes had faded. I'm often critical of what seems to me the ovation-inflation in which audiences give a standing ovation to almost every performance, and am hesitant to join in if I don't feel that degree of enthusiasm. But in this case I was one of the first out of my seat.

I used to think those too-easy ovations were a reflection of the gratitude felt by our our local audiences for the infrequent opportunity of hearing live classical music and especially of hearing top-notch soloists. But according to this article in The Guardian it's a widespread phenomenon. (Note: I used the term ovation-inflation above before I read the Guardian article. Really, I did.)

The concerto was the second piece. The first was a somewhat peculiar work by Arvo Pärt, "If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper." I had never heard it before and was not especially taken with it, though I consider myself a fan of the composer. Perhaps if I listened to it again I'd like it better. The conductor gave an elaborate explanation of the title which I didn't entirely catch. And the piece also incorporates an elaborate game or puzzle or exercise based on Bach's name, but that sort of thing is over my head. Here's what the program notes say:

Borrowing an old form of musical tribute, Pärt created a cipher on the word “Bach” by spelling the Baroque composer’s name using the German musical alphabet: B (equals B-flat in the German musical alphabet) - A - C - H (B-natural in the German musical alphabet). He then created a formula based on this cipher that results in the close intervals that he desired for Tintinnabuli. The violas play “Bach” (B-flat - A - C - B-natural), while the cellos simultaneously start on A, the f irst violins on C, and the second violins on B-natural (H), each following with the same melodic intervals as the violas. The effect of these closely stacked, dissonant intervals is a harmonic ringing tone, that buzzes like a bee. To further evoke the buzzing insects, the string players perform tremolo, rapidly moving their bows up and down (literally trembling) against the string. The result is truly the sound of a swarm of bees.

I'm like, whatever. Being literal-minded, I object to that last sentence, but there is certainly some buzzing involved.

The after-intermission work was Schumann's Symphony #3, the "Rhenish." As far as I recall I had only heard this work once, and that was about two weeks ago in preparation for this concert: I put it on while I was doing something else, just to get some idea of what it's like. It didn't reach out and grab me, though I didn't dislike it, either. That was repeated in the concert: listening reasonably closely, I enjoyed it, but it didn't rouse any great enthusiasm in me. A little sunny and major-y for my taste, perhaps.