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What are you listening to? Part III
- Thread starter S.B.G
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It's Bastille Day so... [damn I am behind on my chores and no time to dig up appropriate music]
Y'all do the honors so I can close out the day later with a good selection.
What about Yann Tiersen? Edith Piaf? Paris Combo? Alain Bashung?
It's Bastille Day so... [damn I am behind on my chores and no time to dig up appropriate music]
Y'all do the honors so I can close out the day later with a good selection.
...no?
ok - taking on your suggestion - i threw a quick play list together - lol
Plus I am going to check out Scepticalscribes suggestions
Debussy - what a brilliant idea. Timeless.
And my mother loved Saint-Saëns - Carnival of the Animals, and also Danse Macabre.
And - should one wish to explore further - there is also the inimitable and quite wonderful Erik Satie.
Listening to "The Swan" from Carnival of the Animals (a piece of music my mother loved - she loved The Carnival of the Animals, especially The Swan - in fact, I made a point of obtaining the CD for her almost 20 years ago) - by Camille Saint-Saëns, in keeping with the French theme of this evening and today.
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I remember practising that on the Cello many, many years ago until my fingers bled. The Swan really is a fantastic piece of music.
This evening I've been listening to Faith No More. A great band, and Mike Patton is quite possibly one the greatest vocalists ever. The original of this song is by the Commodores, but this is one of the cases where the cover is better than the original. In my opinion, of course.
This worked out great.. better than Apple Music... put in request, head back to the chores list, come back in a couple hours and there's a custom playlist waiting, already reviewed, ready to roll. Happy Bastille Day!
Ah.
And now, I have graduated to listening to my own (rather than my mother's) preferences (though I do revere, respect and honour hers.)
First up, a serious favourite: "Laetatus Sum" by Claudio Monteverdi. (Yes, I do love this Baroque stuff, and its Renaissance ancestor).
(Dear Divinity, at times, I loathe the spell check in this machine).
And next: One of my personal - all-time - favourites: Piano Concerto No 20 in D Minor, K 466, Movement No 2, Romance - by W A Mozart.
lol - ha ha - thx - it was fun to think about! - and happy Bastille Day
Happy Bastille Day:
But, now, as sometimes happens with music, I have moved far beyond France to the other end of Europe.
And, just now, I am listening to Sergei Rachmaninov, specifically, his Piano Concerto No 2, in C Minor, Movements Nos 1 & 2: well, I ask you: Are there more exquisitely heartbreakingly haunting pieces of music in the (er, cough) western - or, sort of western - canon of music?
But, now, as sometimes happens with music, I have moved far beyond France to the other end of Europe.
And, just now, I am listening to Sergei Rachmaninov, specifically, his Piano Concerto No 2, in C Minor, Movements Nos 1 & 2: well, I ask you: Are there more exquisitely heartbreakingly haunting pieces of music in the (er, cough) western - or, sort of western - canon of music?
Love this thing. You must be breaking in your new system...
This one I was listening to on Spotify on the computer... I did however tonight buy the record on Discogs.com. I'll put it on the system promptly when I receive it.
At the moment, I'm listening to Norah Jones, Come Away With Me on vinyl and it sounds wonderful.
I can never quite decide which is more embarrassing, my own typos or the over-eagerness of the spell check to interpret my next tap on the spacebar as approval of whatever nonsense it elected to make of my most recent mistake. Meanwhile I meant no such approval, was just racing ahead with my usual approach to typing, full speed ahead and proofread it later... maybe.
On your latest music picks this evening, I too love Mozart's D minor piano concerto, the #20.
That's one of the ones for which Mozart didn't write a cadenza for the first movement. It's always interesting in a concert (or a new recording) to see if a performer picks a well known cadenza, has penned an original or actually elects to improvise in performance. I think the most commonly chosen ones for Mozart's #20 are by Beethoven and by Brahms.
I was surprised to learn that the composer and classical / jazz pianist Chick Corea once improvised a cadenza for Mozart's #20 in a collaborative recorded performance (1996: The Mozart Sessions). The recording was done with Corea at piano and with jazz vocalist and conductor Bobby McFerrin , featuring their take on Mozart's #20 and #23 plus the adagio from #2. File under "you just never know."
Anyway if a pianist wants to use the Corea cadenza for Mozart's #20 again, he'll have to reverse engineer the score for it so to speak, as Corea just did what jazz players do and created a riff on the fly. I have not heard these performances, so no clue what they were like. I read that save some improvised introductions they were pretty standard fare. I suppose the orchestra used for the occasion may have made that more or less necessary. It's one thing to sit there and watch a pianist wing any cadenza, but quite another for an orchestra to follow a jazz artist's flights of fancy with the body of a classical concerto. Not to say Corea's not a contemporary classicist regarding some of his own compositions. But getting an orchestra to ditch time-honored ways of playing Mozart's #20, well... probably not gonna happen without a bigger budget for such a recording.
