Music Minus One Piano: Arensky 6 Pièces Enfantines, op. 34; Stravinsky 3 Easy Pieces (Dances; Book & CD)
Renewable Music (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
I was really looking forward to spending time this Winter with Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music (five volumes, now available in paperback with a reasonable discount). I have long admired the author's work, especially for his willingness to question received wisdom as when he has famously and fearlessly entered controversies on "historically informed performance practice"...
Renewable Music (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
One of my standard post-concert cocktail party jokes has been about someday writing a history of music based entirely on the use and development of the fermata and the caesura , bearing the name Birds' Eyes and Railroad Tracks . But, lo and behold, what piece of musicological obscuria should have just landed in my mailbox but a history of the accent, Orchestral Accents (1960) by one Richard Korn. Yep,...
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Blog (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Last week I went along to the opening of the Philharmonia’s re-rite installation on the Southbank. It’s a very hard thing to describe but its esentially an installation which allows you to get inside Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Each room of the fantastically atmospheric bargehouse (behind the OXO tower) is devoted to a different [...]
From Beyond the Stave (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
The weekend newspapers in the UK were full of articles on Alan Bennett, celebrating his new play, The Habit of Art , which opens this week. His subject is an imagined meeting between W H Auden and Benjamin Britten as both approached the end of their lives (in reality, they went their separate ways in the early 1940s). Auden’s relationship with Britten reached its creative peak in the 1930s, producing...
Renewable Music (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
Stravinsky conducting, Paris, late 1920's. Silent film.
Classical Iconoclast (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
At the ENO, there's a new ballet of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring ( read about it in The Times ) Stravinsky's music was revolutionary in 1913, and so was Nijinsky's choreography. It almost caused a riot, as innovation often does. Everything about it seemed "wrong", heresy against all that was sacred in music, dance and design. Only seven performances were held. The following year the First...
Classical Iconoclast (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is so dramatic it hardly needs staging. Stravinsky wanted the text in Latin, deliberately distancing the text from listeners, to further strengthen the idea of ancient, impenetrable mystery. So a story of ancient Greece, written first in French by Jean Cocteau and back-translated into Latin. Setting this performance in Japanese pre-history extends the idea that this saga is...
Londonist (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
Carlos Acosta in Agon. Photo by Bill Cooper If you're not heading out to a fireworks display in London this week, there are still plenty of whizzes and bangs coming from other forms of entertainment in the capital. Here's some recommendations. Let us know if we've missed anything too... Be There First: London Shows Opening The Royal Ballet is staging Agon / Spinx / Limen at the Royal Opera House from...
SLSO Blog (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Next up, Chris at Confluence City gives us Miro, and spends time in Stravinsky's dreamscape. Click....
Violinist.com (Free subscription) | 10/28/2009
By Bram Heemskerk: Again a violincompetition till 27 year with Paganini, Ysaye and Bach in first 2 rounds and well known pieces in the final: -Bartók: Violin Concerto No.1+2 -Beethoven: D major, Op. 61 -Brahms: D major, Op. 77 -Prokofiev: D major, op. 19+ Tsigane Ravel -Prokofiev: G minor, op. 63 -Paganini 1 -Schostakovich: A minor, op. 99 -Sibelius: D minor, op. 47 -Tchaikovsky: D major, op....
oboeinsight (Free subscription) | 10/24/2009
Director Robert Lepage is doing Stravinsky’s Song of the Nightingale. With singers. And puppets. And a pit full of water. Really. And it’s a hit, too. This is part 1 (of many) of Lepage talking about the production: The orchestra is on the stage; obviously they couldn’t play in the pit!
Messages from the Ether (Free subscription) | 10/24/2009
Rate My Band has a mugshot photo of Stravinsky, apparently taken after he was arrested for rearranging God Bless America. Stolen copy below:...
I'll think of something later (Free subscription) | 10/09/2009
They write Rachmaninoff according to the composer's preferred transliteration in the USA and Europe, I write Rachmaninov, but I couldn't get on better with the passionate souls of the Rachmaninoff Society. Some of these set-ups - mentioning no names - are peppered with fanatics who always know best and can't string a sentence together about their chosen hero in their hand-typed journals, but the RS...
Song of a Reformed Headhunter (Free subscription) | 10/05/2009
A basic and helpful introduction to music for someone like me, i.e., no music training beyond playing the pianica in primary school, and strumming the guitar round campfires in high school. In this book first written in the 1930s, Copland distinguishes between listening on a sensuous plane (mere enjoyment of the quality of sound) and on expressive and sheerly musical planes. While not slighting the...
Entartete Musik (Free subscription) | 10/04/2009
Until this point the composer has stood behind his composition, but here he comes up front to tell us exactly how he feels about it all and how we should feel, as if there had ever been any doubt about how anyone felt.Igor Stravinsky on Wozzeck
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