Concert: Allentown PA

This week I traveled to Allentown, PA to visit family and friends. We went to a recital at St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church, featuring local organist Stephen Williams and the Monocacy chamber orchestra. This is the program, recreated from YouTube links (not with this ensemble).

Toccata Festiva - Samuel Barber
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC4zz5tP22M&feature=related

Concerto in F - Josef Rheinberger
The Trinity Cathedral is similar to St. John's, though the organ set-up seems larger and more prominent in these videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xfe_Y-1IJo Movement I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhrYOZVyQ-Y Movement II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExT8N4JhmO0 Movement III

Divertimento in D, K.136 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Tough choice of recordings - the  Youth Orchestra of the Americas is represented on YouTube, but the recording is a bit fast for my taste. That recording is here if you want to take a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXzWjaTCO38 Here is a different recording at a more laid-back pace. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb5d5qQpCdA and the IIIrd movement http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y447ddkRNM4

Concerto in G minor - Francois Poulenc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yiq-QcBHXM

Best Links

Over the past 6 years, I have collected an extensive list of useful sites related to music and academia. Here are some of my favorites, by category.

Free Sheet Music

Imslp.org The sine qua non of all free classical music, IMSLP now has a “search by melody” linked section and categories by genre, era, and instrumentation. Various legal challenges have been brought in the past against IMSLP’s public-domain collection, but the site is still going, and stronger and more useful than ever.

http://www.music-scores.com/useful collection featuring Sibelius Scorch playback and score previews, with music for all skill levels drawing on the classical canon, unusual pieces, and new compositions. Some scores require a subscription to print, but the playback section is always free.

https://urresearch.rochester.edu/viewInstitutionalCollection.action;jsessionid=BC940326E443F1ABB943E6C46A04863B?collectionId=25 The Sibley library at U Rochester has a great database of scanned music (i.e. no Creative Commons work) and is especially useful for piano repertoire and turn-of-the-century works. Much of their collection is now duplicated to IMSLP, but the number of unique holdings at Rochester are still worth searching if IMSLP doesn’t turn up enough for you.

http://www.mutopiaproject.org/browse.html#byComposer All typeset using Lilypad, Mutopia’s various works are fewer and more mainstream than the others mentioned here, but the editions are cleaner and nice to play from. Sometimes an odd gem will appear, so I check the new listings every so often.

CPDL.org Good choral music site, wiki-based for ease of use. Most of the collection is cross referenced along with IMSLP at Wikipedia, so if you look at a composer bio linked from IMSLP, you might find a different set of results at CPDL.

http://icking-music-archive.org/index.php The Werner Icking music collection is also linked frequently at Wiki, and generally is good for Baroque or organ repertoire.

Honorable mentions: 

The Smithsonian collection and the National Library of Australia both feature limited full-color scans of 20th century editions, generally popular prints but also some lesser known music. These sites are good as reference, but not for printing or downloading.

Recordings

Classiccat.net is great for downloading free classical music recordings. This site does not host any recordings, but archives them from around the web categorized by composer. The quality can be hit and miss, and the same for the coverage overall for each composer, but I've found some gems here as the sites referenced often contain large, quality collections and other links.

Naxos Music Library has an extensive listing of labels and records both famous and truly obscure, all worth sifting through and updated frequently.

Classical Music Library and Classical Scores Library are two halves of an excellent archive which fills in important gaps in Naxos and IMSLP's collections. The recordings at CML are not as many as Naxos but I have often found recordings there of artists not listed with Naxos, or historical records from an era not yet available to stream at NML. The scores database in some cases extends past 1923, so the scores are not always public domain; the downside is that you cannot download them (though printing is allowed and if you have a "print to" option such as PrimoPDF you may be able to download a copy in that manner).

Academic Research

These are the databases which my school subscribes to, but some of their functionalities are available for general use.

EBSCO I generally use this database to collect the first few articles on my topic, because EBSCO covers a wide range of topics and levels of focus (i.e. scholarly articles, opera reviews, newspaper editorials).

JSTOR‘s collection overlaps with EBSCO but contains many unique periodicals and subject coverage. Large full-text collection available.

Project MUSE Another full-text database, MUSE is for the arts and offers citations and downloads for their collection.

Grove Music This database covers the serious, in-depth articles of Grove and the quick-reference entries of the Harvard and Oxford Dictionaries and the Oxford Companion to Music. Also available at this site is Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, which is good for a long read or a reference for what you know and should know on the subject.

Opera blog : Likely Impossibilities

http://likelyimpossibilities.blogspot.com/ A great read about all things opera- thanks for posting!

Paganini's Ubiquitous Theme

An inspiration for works by Liszt, Brahms, Schumann, and most famously Rachmaninov, the last caprice of Paganini’s 24 (opus 1) has had a well-cited life over the last century and a half. Other composers, less famous today but celebrated in their time such as Mark Hambourg and Ignaz Friedman also wrote paraphrases on the theme. This theme continues to be “varied” today, with the “Song and Dance” of Andrew Lloyd Webber being a famous example, and influence is seen in numerous other rock/pop writers. The 24^th caprice itself is in theme and variations form, lending itself to new interpretations and homage. Theme and variations is perhaps my favorite form because of the different twists and colors each new composer adds to the original, while still remaining recognizable. Here are some of my favorite takes on the 24^th caprice, both famous and less well-known.

To start off, here is Itzhak Perlman with the original. Perlman is possibly my favorite violinist ever (not a group I’m terribly familiar with, but regardless), with impeccable technique and considerable, friendly charm. Paganini’s 24^th caprice is in A minor, fast and agile, and presents numerous technical demands on the violinist. When transplanted to a different instrument or orchestrated, the caprice’s theme loses some of its diabolical technique but none of its explosive energy and hair’s edge precision. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM3Qfhd7dAw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9zYrBW9jVQ + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZJtwdFOoi8&feature=related Ignaz Friedman opens our set of Paganini variations, quoting the theme and varying it in 17 concert studies in A minor. Friedman was a fantastic Polish virtuoso pianist who often wrote concert transcriptions of opera arias or canonical repertoire. He lived from 1882 to 1948, making him a contemporary of the next composer on the list: Sergei Rachmaninoff, who wrote perhaps the most famous piece based on the Paganini caprice.

Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini” gets a lot of airplay on today’s “easy listening” classical radio stations, and still gets featured in film soundtracks. The most memorable use in film (for me) was in the 1980 film “Somewhere in Time” with Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve, set in a grand turn-of-the-century hotel. Here’s a clip of the music itself as it appeared in the movie, as Reeve is musing on the lovely actress Seymour. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4N1mxN5JbU He happens to have fallen in love with her across time, but time travel is no match for their love (though doomed). The film is based on a Richard Matheson novel Bid Time Return and uses the 18^th variation, a theme with long lines and sentimental grandeur made for Hollywood (which Rachmaninoff knew, calling this variation “a theme for my producer”) though the equivalent in Matheson’s novel is a Mahler symphony. Interestingly, Matheson is better known for having written I am Legend. The 18^th variation is the most famous of Rachmaninoff’s set, which follows a loose concerto form (fast-slow-fast, with the introduction and 1^st variation placed before the theme appears) and features a piano soloist. Rachmaninoff, like Friedman, brings a virtuosic element to the piano, and casts the homage to Paganini in gigantic Rachmaninoff concrete-and-steel style. When the 18^th variation arrives, the piece has moved in the slow section to Db major and the theme is inverted; it is still a massive, crashing section in terms of what the piano is actually doing, but the orchestra softens the edges and creates the lush romantic atmosphere for which we love this piece. 

Finally, no less a composer than Johannes Brahms (unlike others mentioned here including Paganini himself, a composer of “serious,” German non-”brillant” music) wrote a set of variations on this theme. http://www.kellydeanhansen.com/opus35.html Here is a link with extensive detail regarding each variation, and links for Evgeny Kissin’s rendition on YouTube. Brahms’ variations are of the same cloth as Rachmaninoff’s – the piano here has a big and dense sound, with many shadings of color and sound. These variations are also entitled “Studies,” a title that draws attention to the various pianistic challenges in this work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fihjGJ0Brw0

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcOeXpV5uzU&feature=related

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw3VjY4rda8

The Lost Operas of Palais Garnier

It all started for me with Phantom of the Opera.  I have always loved Broadway shows (and operetta, starting in 2003) and after listening to the original cast soundtrack and reading Phantom 3 times in a row cover to cover, decided to try listening to a real opera. The first operas available to me were Lucia di Lammermoor,  Don Giovanni,and Dido and Aeneas.  But as soon as I could get to a Borders bookstore, I bought myself a copy of Faust,  because this opera is central to the plot of Phantom.  Christine sings the role of Marguerite, Faust's virginal victim, in this most famous of Gounod's operas (or entire works). Faust was the most popular and first opera at the Metropolitan Opera House when it opened in 1883, and continues to be performed today because of its dramatic story and archetypal characters. But there were other operas mentioned in Leroux' novel: La Juive,  by Halevy; Le Prophete, by Meyerbeer; and more. These operas, blockbusters in their day, survive today on excerpts albums or curiosity revivals. If Meyerbeer is thus represented, what of the countless other operas  which premiered in this era of luxury and grand 5 act dramas only to be forgotten by the newer trends? 

This question has intrigued me since I first listened to Faust,  in 2006. Some time I would like to find a list of performances in the 1870s-1900s at the Paris Opera, and research the scores and composers who have become obscure. There may be better reasons for their disappearance than changing tastes, but the librarian in me would love to properly archive them in order to facilitate research and possible revivals. 

Here is an aria which made it out of obscurity into recent renown when Placido Domingo performed it at the original Three Tenors concert, 1990.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TscVCfHAJvc  O Paradis, from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine sung by 20th c. tenor Jussi Bjorling

Gilding the Lily? Additions to Classic Pieces

What do Edvard Grieg and Ignaz Moscheles have in common? Aside from being European composers of the second half of the nineteenth century, they both felt certain classics of the solo piano repertoire could use a supplemental second piano. Grieg wrote a second piano part to three Mozart piano sonatas, and Moscheles practically rewrote 10 preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier, conceiving of

Atonal Counterpoint from Norway: Fartein Valen

Valen (1887-1952) lived his entire life a bachelor in the country of Norway, but made important strides in the field of 20^th century music despite his relative isolation. His particular atonal “dissonant counterpoint” was developed in all likelihood completely unaware of Schoenberg’s work, though based on the same recognition of the need for a solid ground when leaving tonality behind. Valen was fond of the polyphony of Bach and worked out contrapuntal solutions which, while not tonal or based on consonant intervals, are as intricate and complex a system as that of the old masters. Interestingly, Valen studied composition with Max Bruch about ten years after the latter had mentored Ernst Mielck (see Friday’s post).

Much of Valen’s work is available at IMSLP, which is where I first encountered this fascinating composer. Recordings are available through Naxos for most of his work including the pieces written after 1923 which are not yet in the public domain. In addition, here is a taste of Valen’s unique style, from YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7kPHBiB0Lc Nachtstuck, from a set of 4 piano pieces

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q2rBzyPzhM Glenn Gould plays the 2^nd piano sonata (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hrz-vSBpVw&feature=related (part 2)

Sources: Grove, Naxos, links from Wikipedia