What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[Toccata]

[radio times]

BBC Radio 3 are doing a week of Gabrieli ( Venetian renaissance) at 12.00pm everyday. Glorious stuff.

[cma29]

Just hearing this music for the first time...

Bach, J S: Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, BWV1001-1006
Ning Feng (violin)



...and I don't find these pieces as appealing as Bach's cello suites, but it's a lot to take in one hearing. The Channel recording is good (not SACD). Played on a 1721 Stradivari violin, known as the ‘MacMillan’

[bart]

Originally Posted by cma29

Just hearing this music for the first time...

Bach, J S: Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, BWV1001-1006
Ning Feng (violin)



...and I don't find these pieces as appealing as Bach's cello suites, but it's a lot to take in one hearing. The Channel recording is good (not SACD). Played on a 1721 Stradivari violin, known as the ‘MacMillan’

Carlos, believe me, if you give these works a chance, the innumerable musical treasures will reveal themselves more and more with each listen.

[cma29]

Originally Posted by bart

Carlos, believe me, if you give these works a chance, the innumerable musical treasures will reveal themselves more and more with each listen.

Thanks for the encouragement, Bart.

You are a pal.

[cma29]

More recommendations from Bart and other connoisseurs here...

Abaco, E: Sonatas, Op. I Nos. 2, 5, 4 & 8, etc.
Insieme Strumentale di Roma, Giorgio Sasso



A Baroque music delight played a small ensemble including a cembalo (harpsichord).

[bart]

Originally Posted by cma29

Thanks for the encouragement, Bart.

You are a pal.

Even when Belgium will play Panamá or Argentina?!

[bart]

Good to be back from a seminar abroad with music through my Dali Katch (which is an absolute delight to travel with!).
But listening to our living room system is so much nicer...


Tartini - Senti lo mare - Sonatas for solo violin
Matthieu Camilleri, violin
Qobuz 24/88.2




New release, and I love it.
Listening to it for the second time.
Touching works.
One is sung also.

Out of around 350 works which are attributed to Tartini today, a group of sonatas, along with their isolated themes, sketches and hastily-jotted-down ideas stands out by virtue of the very long period of editing which they underwent (from the 1750s up to the composer's death twenty years later); their deliberate collation into a single manuscript by the author (never published in spite of its gobsmacking richness); but also by virtue of their unique instrumentation, with a solo violin, but no bass at all, either written or suggested. They seem to indicate a kind of intimate conversation with their author, who never intended to share them with anyone. He dubbed them "little sonatas", a name which probably owes as much to false modesty as it does to affection to these pages, whose experimental nature is made clearer at every turn. A number of other pieces, as well, remain annotated in the form of sketches, phrases thrown down on the page in a moment of inspiration, and a few of these phrases are taken up by violinist Matthieu Camilleri, to distil a very original ensemble of improvised pieces. He notes, though, that these improvisations have been "fixed" to an extent, on paper; and these are recording sessions, not a concert, so the artists can choose the best from several takes. The guided improvisation inspired by Tartini and in the style of the great musician, who was said to have conversed with the Devil. Camilleri gives us a number of reference points, in the form of a few sonatas originally 100% written by Tartini in this famous manuscript, which also involve a few moments of this improvised-noted element. It's a fascinating juxtaposition of two imaginations, two and a half centuries apart! © SM/Qobuz

[bart]

Bach - Harpsichord Concertos vol. 1
La Risonanza
Fabio Bonizzoni, harpsichord & direction
via Qobuz




I have multiple versions of these splendid works.
But I listen to this for the second time in one week.
It is very very good. Maybe because of the special instrument (cf. infra).
Sound excellent, as can be expected from Challenge Classics.

One might be forgiven for thinking: "meh, a thousandth recording of Bach's harpsichord concertos". And you wouldn't be wrong, necessarily, but some soloists have the intelligence to offer people a good reason to pay attention to the new version. Fabio Bonizzoni's reason is the harpsichord he is using: a contemporary copy of an extraordinary harpsichord by Ioannes Couchet, an Antwerp instrument from the period 1640-1650. A sound that even the harpsichord's most fervent detractors would surely find intriguing, rich, ferocious, and both wooden and metallic: a great success, including on the part of the copyist. Bonizzoni and the ensemble La Risonanza have also done a job of musicology, returning to the earlier manuscripts, knowing that the majority of Bach's harpsichord concertos are in fact transcription (by the Cantor himself, of course) of earlier concertos for violin, oboe or other melodic instruments, which naturally entails a number of differences in the ornaments and the discourse for the soloist. We are eagerly and impatiently awaiting the second volume. © SM/Qobuz

[bart]

John Adams - On the Transmigration of Souls
New York Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel
via Qobuz




A recommendation by Ed.
One track of 25'.
Intriguing, touching, moving.
I must have heard it before on the radio, but it was not such a conscious listening session as now, around midnight...

After John Adams turned 50, one of his biggest developing influences turned out to be a fellow New England native, the iconoclastic Charles Ives. Ives' mystical bent, best-known from his enigmatic mini-masterpiece "The Unanswered Question' turned up in Adams' Naive & Sentimental Music (1999) -- and when he was asked to compose a piece for the New York Philharmonic as a memorial for the appalling events of September 11, 2001, Adams once again turned to Ives for inspiration. Hence On the Transmigration of Souls -- a disturbing, at times eloquent, mystery laden collage for orchestra, chorus, and tape that owes its soul to Ives' meditation upon an earlier historical tragedy, the sinking of the Lusitania, in the third movement of his Orchestral Set No. 2. The Adams piece opens with the taped low-level roar of New York City, distant sirens, and the names of the dead and missing in the World Trade Center as a chorus gently enters and an orchestral undercurrent evokes "The Unanswered Question." The full resources of the orchestra are permitted to erupt only in a brief spurt of anguish in the center and extended agitation near the end of the piece; otherwise the volume is quiet -- and all the more disturbing for it. The chorus is eventually asked to sing descriptions of the missing taken from the New York Times' "Portraits of Grief" series, as transformed into Adams' peculiar, stylized, conversational choral style. This turned out to be the first recording for the then-newly established team of Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic -- a brave statement of enterprise -- and the 25-minute work was released all by itself in what amounted to an overpriced ($13.99) CD-single. It's hard to see this becoming a repertory piece, given its complex combination of resources, the very specific time and place it was meant to commemorate, and the painful emotions that the event generated. But do hear this work if you can; its atmospheric afterglow will stay with you for hours. ~ Richard S. Ginell