What Are You Listening To Now?

[JA Gardiner]

A LIVE recording on Orfeo of Carlos Kleiber conducting LVB's 7th with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester - fantastic energy and electricity if not perhaps quite the finesse and spaciousness of his landmark Deutsches Grammophon recording. Be interested to hear more expert comparisons if anyone's listened to both. Now if they can come up with a live recording of him conducting the 9th......

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Beethoven the Man!

[Peter]

Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence - some quite wonderful music. I have it on the Naxos travel DVD with accompaning images of Florence - all in eagre anticipation of my forthcoming trip there in May.

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'Man know thyself'

[JA Gardiner]

Originally posted by Peter:
Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence - some quite wonderful music. I have it on the Naxos travel DVD with accompaning images of Florence - all in eagre anticipation of my forthcoming trip there in May.

Ah yes those DVD's are good! I have the one of Venice - lots of Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Corelli etc. and stunning photography. Just got back from there myself having had a wonderful trip, amongst the highlights of which was getting to participate in sung mass at both San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore as well as taking a very atmospheric trip out to Torcello - one of the more remote islands which has a wonderful church with incredibly impressive early Byzantine mosaics. Hope you have a wonderful time in Florence - that's next on my list but I'm unlikely to get there until next year due to a small matter of a set of Council Elections and a long anticipated period of extended leave which will mean I get to spend September doing the Great Americam Road trip

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Beethoven the Man!

[Rod]

Handel's Brockes Passion with Nicholas McGegan conducting. A reasonable effort. Find extracts in WMA format at my site: http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/handelforum/

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"If I were but of noble birth..." - Rod Corkin

[atserriotserri]

After a weekend in which I listened at Schiff and Gould (1st recording, live in leningrad, and last recording) play the Goldberg variations, I'm having a lot of fun with the Jazz from Jacques Loussier Plays Bach 3 & 4, including works such as the italian concerto BWV 971, Inventions BWV 772,784,779,785 & 786, Fantasy BWV 906, Fantasy and fugue BWV 542, Chorales 721, 645, 684... (is very peculiar in the chorales the formation organ, piano, bass, drums).

[Johan]

Ludwig van Beethoven: Die Neunte Symphonie
E. Schwarzkopf, Elsa Cavelti, Ernst Haefliger, Otto Edelmann. Festival- Chor (der Luzerner Festspiele), Philharmonia Orchester. Dir. Wilhelm Furtwängler
(22.8.1954)

[HaydnFan]

Schubert's 5th...nice!

[robert newman]

Rachmaninov 2nd Symphony (Andre Previn/LSO)

and

Beethoven 'Missa Solemnis' Otto Klemperer/VSO

[Hofrat]

Joachim Raff:
Symphony number 2 in C major.


Hofrat

[Joy]

Today on radio was Richard Goode playing Beethoven's passionate, moody Piano Sonata "Les Adieux" at the Schwetzingen Festival in Germany. (Sonata no. 26 in E-flat, Op. 81A)also Beethoven's Moonlight was played.
Yesterday on NPR they played
Joseph Kraus and they described him as an almost exact contemporary of Mozart. "The Swedish Mozart, although he was German, Kraus spent most of his brief career in Sweden". The concert performance was of Kraus's Symphony in C Minor. Andrew Parrott led the Swedish Radio Symphony. I don't know, it was nice but sounded rather inferior to Mozart IMO.

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'Truth and beauty joined'

[This message has been edited by Joy (edited 04-20-2006).]

[robert newman]

Dear Joy,

I think it's now widely appreciated that the Kraus C Minor Symphony is one of the greatest of the late 18th century and was recognised as such even during the lifetime of Kraus. Comments such as the following can be seen on it from various online sources -

1.Symphony in C minor VB 142. The minor key and the mood of Symphony VB 142 seem to be a reminiscent of Haydn's "Sturm und Drang" period around 1770, comparable with his earlier minor key works. In any case, Haydn had a very high opinion about the work. Many years after Kraus' death, Haydn remarked to a common friend, Swedish diplomat Fredrik Silfverstolpe: "The symphony he wrote here in Vienna especially for me will be regarded as a masterpiece for centuries to come; believe me, there are few people who can compose something like that."

2.Including Olympie Overture, VB29; Symphony in E flat-major, VB144; Symphony in C-major, VB139; Symphony in C-minor, VB142

"The performances here are full of life and strongly committed" - Gramophone

"On this new CD we are given excellent performances and a lucid recording of three superb symphonies" - BBC Music Magazine

3.In literature, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther marked the movement's culmination. Musically, Sturm und Drang meant passionate, almost violent, outbursts, lots of writing in minor keys, an irresistible rhythmic drive, and a general rawness of sentiment undiluted by classical good manners, all traits that dominate Kraus' Symphony in C minor.

3. 'In 1775, before he composed his Symphony, Kraus wrote a treatise explaining how to adapt the ideas of Sturm und Drang to music. In 1778, he moved to Stockholm, hoping to gain employment at the court of Gustavus III, the Swedish monarch. Gustavus was a great patron of music and the arts - he built the Dröttningholm Court Theater, the charming, intimate opera house where Ingmar Bergman filmed his version of Mozart's Magic Flute - and Verdi fans might recognize him as the king who gets assassinated in Un ballo in maschera. To test the young composer, Gustavus sketched an opera libretto and asked Kraus to set it. The work pleased the king, who hired Kraus as his deputy director of music (Kapellmästre) and sent him on a five-year tour of Europe. Kraus' goal, from the outset, was to get to Vienna and meet the composer Christoph Willibald von Gluck, a pilgrimage the young composer finally made in 1783. The Symphony in C minor was performed in the Austrian capital during that visit, and Haydn was so impressed that he took the work back to Eszterháza for more performances.

Gluck casts a long shadow over Kraus' Symphony. Gluck's music had such a profound effect on composers such as Kraus because of its monumentality and its austerity, which sometimes bordered on severity. The first movement, especially, breathes the same classical air as Gluck's overture to Iphigénie en Aulide, one of his operas that attempted to strip away the frippery of Italian opera seria, with its castrati and vocal fireworks, and return to the essence of Greek tragedy.

Kraus' Symphony only took on these classical dimensions after a process of thorough revision and recomposition. The work started life as a Symphony in C-sharp minor, conceived on a chamber scale by Kraus during his first few years in Stockholm, sometime before 1781. The unexpected expressive twists and turns of the C-sharp-minor work place it squarely in the Sturm und Drang tradition. These are smoothed out in the C-minor Symphony. From the agitated, unstable thematic fragments that characterize the earlier work, Kraus developed long-breathed themes that unfold at an almost epic (at least for the 18th century) pace. Kraus also replaced the flutes of the original with oboes, doubled the number of horns, and removed the tinkling harpsichord continuo, giving the orchestra a darker, weightier sonority. Finally, he suppressed the third movement, a brief minuet without the proper trio a Viennese audience would have expected.

The work that emerged from these revisions is full of the turbulent passion one would expect from a student of the Sturm und Drang and, at the same time, makes the kinds of monumental gestures that mark Kraus as a devoted Gluck worshiper. We find the former in the tumultuous first theme of the opening movement's allegro and in the pulsating accompaniment that recurs throughout the finale, giving the movement its unstable atmosphere. The slow unfolding of the first movement's larghetto introduction and the dignified second-movement andante both display Kraus' debt to Gluck.'

None of this will make you like the piece more Joy but I think it will explain that here Kraus is demonstrating a style for a work he wished to show others such as Haydn. Just as you would not judge Mozart opera by the style you hear in, say, Idomeneo, I think it fair not to judge Kraus by the few symphonies which have survived in a style of the Sturm and Drang - many others widely agreed to have been either lost or used by 'other' composers. The man had formidable musical talent only a small part of which is attributed indisputably to him. He knew perfectly well in the 1780's this style (the one we hear hear) was already being superseded. But he wrote the piece in the 'Sturm and Drang' style with Haydn and other listeners in mind.

Very best regards

Robert

[Joy]

Hi Robert, thanks for that information. It was a pleasant piece, nothing wrong with it. I think I would have to hear more of him to give a proper critique, that was the first piece I've heard of him. They also commented on Hadyn saying this piece will be enjoyed for centuries to come. He thought highly of him and his compositions.

Regards,

Joy

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'Truth and beauty joined'

[robert newman]

Hi Joy,

It's amazing how much I've been reading of the 18th century lately - all this stuff about Mozart/Kraus, then a biography of Captain Cook, and now (you will laugh) a biography of Thomas Paine.

How are your trees ? How is your Beethoven coming along ?

[Joy]

Originally posted by robert newman:

Hi Joy,

It's amazing how much I've been reading of the 18th century lately - all this stuff about Mozart/Kraus, then a biography of Captain Cook, and now (you will laugh) a biography of Thomas Paine.

How are your trees ? How is your Beethoven coming along ?

My 'Beethoven' is doing just fine, thank you! As a matter of fact just yesterday I heard his magnificent 7th Symphony, love that second movement.



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'Truth and beauty joined'

[Hofrat]

Jan Vaclav Hugo Vorisek (1791-1825):
1. Symphony in D.
2. Variations bravoure for piano and orchestra.
3. Introduction et Rondeau brillant for piano and orchestra.


Hofrat