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kultural korner (a kwik reflektion)
Each year, the BBC Proms inspire in me a fit of dissatisfaction with anything other than "classical" music that lasts for a couple of months before I return to my usual mixture of Meat Loaf and Monteverdi, Loreena McKennitt and Alison Kraus, Shostakovich and Bob Seger . . . You get the idea.
This year, though, my "classical" binge has gone on for far longer than usual: between the end of the Proms and now, I'd be surprised if I've played a half-dozen non-"classical" albums. I've discovered that, beyond the Beeb, there are sites galore which allow you to listen to music by composers of whom you -- or, to be more accurate, I -- have never heard, some of whom prove to be astonishingly damnfine. Just for starters, try last.fm and, astonishingly, myspace.com.
In the midst of this binge, I've discovered some Truths. Here are a few:
(1) While bits of Mozart are astonishingly wonderful, far too many of them are just plain irritating.
(2) Whatever it was that Schoenberg so wonderfully discovered about sound, Berg didn't.
(3) Beethoven should have left vocal composition well alone.
(4) At least 50% -- probably more like 70% -- of the very best of liturgical compositions are Stabat Maters.
(5) There are more Bachs in heaven and earth, Horatio.
(6) Most of Hovhaness's audiences are stuck in elevators.
(7) If you have not heard Gliere's Symphony #3 , anything by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, the sonatas of Anna Bon, Arutiunian's Trumpet Concerto, and several hundred other things whose names and composers I cannot offhand remember (think Boccherini, Tartini, Druschetzky, Cherubini, Dutilleux, Graupner), your life is emptier than it should be.
(8) Richard Thompson is not without his merits.
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(3) Beethoven should have left vocal composition well alone.
Strange. I think that Berg's "Lyric Suite" is really the best thing that the original 3 twelve-toners produced (Copland's 12-tone stuff is really quite brilliant as well).
Also, excepting the end of the 9th Symphony, AGREED on the Beethoven bit. We . . . like to pretend that "Fidelio" doesn't exist. Other than the overture.
We also like to forget Mozart Koechel numbers before about 300.
I tend to go diving for French composers between about 1875 and 1950. There's a LOT in there that isn't Ravel or Debussy (although I love 'em as well).
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I think that Berg's "Lyric Suite" is really the best thing that the original 3 twelve-toners produced
How funny! That's exactly the piece of Berg I was playing today when it occurred to me I was getting nothing out of it that I'd expect to get from a piece of Schoenberg. Different strokes, I guess.
I go warm and cool about Copland.
Me, I don't get on with the end of Beethoven's 9th -- or with that symphony at all, really (yet I adore all his others with the qualified exception of the 5th). I do love, though, his Missa Solemnis; the exception which proves the rule that, er, I'd forgotten about it when typing my original post. I recently (re)discovered his quartets/quintets and was knocked out.
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Richard Thompson is smashing. We took a friend along to see him in concert: didn't know anything about him, wasn't that excited, came along anyway. "Oh," he said, after the first half-minute, and in mild shock, "he can play guitar then."
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Richard Thompson is smashing.
I know this . . . and I'm sure that sooner or later I'll be playing his CDs again. But at the moment, for some reason, even Richard Thompson seems less appetizing of a morning than . . . hm, *scans pile* . . . Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Variations on an African Air, I think it'll be . . .