Musings

I’ve posted here before about a music service I subscribe to, namely eMusic. The service used to be a huge bargain with thousands of classical music albums on sale at very affordable prices. However, the attractive pricing plans were changed late last year, and while it’s still cheaper than equivalent purchases at Amazon or in brick-mortar CD shops like HMV, it’s no longer the bargain it once was.

The net effect of the price changes is that these several months now I’ve become a lot more careful about what music tracks I purchase, since albums now cost typically about USD4.80 in their MP3 versions. That means I should leaning towards acquiring new classical compositions I haven’t heard before. But ironically a good amount of my most recent purchases are still old compositions!

There’s a couple of works I’ve fallen in love of late with revisits, and in the last 2 years have picked up several performances, two of which I’ll mention here. There’s Bach’s six French Suites that he wrote for the clavier but commonly recorded today on the piano. I first heard the work on an old Decca CD recording performed by András Schiff. Most of the several dozen short pieces in the suites were unknown to me (my only exposure to Bach as a piano learner 25 years ago was his Preludes and Fugues), but the Gavotte from the French Suite No. 5 in G has a wonderfully sprightly and melody that I remember from the very old but popular Hooked on Classics albums with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from the early 80s. A Youtube recording of the Gavotte is below.

My most recent acquisition of this composition was just over the weekend was a performance by German-American pianist Wolfgang Rübsam. By far though my favorite performance of the work comes off a recording before a live audience by Simone Dinnerstein, an American-born pianist I’ve blogged about a year ago here.

The other work that I’ve spent a lot of time listening to are Mendelssohn’s two Concertos for Two Pianos. These are far less frequently recorded than the Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or other late romantic equivalents, but they’re some of the most amazing works demonstrating collaborative keyboard artistry. There are perhaps six performances of these two concertos available for online purchase anywhere; I’ve got four of them already and I still haven’t tire of listening to them! This is music I could set to Repeat on my music player and not get tired of listening to them for hours. My favorite performance of the four sees Swedish pianist Roland Pöntinen and Love Derwinger supported by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta conducted by Lez Makiz, an ensemble who also recorded another one of my favorite performances of Mendelssohn’s twelve string symphonies.

Nearly a year ago I wrote a series of posts on wedding music. Even though our own event was 3 years ago, whenever I listen to a music composition, my subconscious self still goes on appraisal mode to see if it’s good music for weddings. So, here’s an update to my wedding music post from last September with new additions:

Father of the Bride – Opening Title – by Alan Silvestri

Father of the Bride – Annie’s Theme – by Alan SIlvestri

Father of the Bride is an old comedy from 1991 starring comedian Steve Martin as George Banks, a nervous dad whose daughter Annie is getting married. George is worried about everything: wedding expenditure, the future son-in-law, and losing Annie.

I didn’t think much of the film in previous years (it was light hearted, enjoyable but didn’t leave much of an impression), but now that Hannah’s in the picture, I better rewatch the film at some point… because 25 years from now, I’m going to be in exactly George’s shoes!

Anyway, the film was apparently successful enough that a sequel followed shortly with the cast returning to another adventure, this time with George facing the impending birth of his first grandchild.

It’s hard to listen to the film’s music by American composer Alan Silvestri (who has a very large body of work now) and not immediately associate it with a warm American, romantic or family drama. The music from end to end is optimistic, sunny, rich in melodies – the stuff you’d put onto your CD deck in the car, and play back to calm yourself when someone cuts into your lane.

The two tracks I’ve listed here are the best exemplars of Silvestri’s music for the two films. The first is the opening title music, and is grand, perfect for recessional, and stylistically similar to music you’d hear in Yuletide. The second track, Annie’s Theme, personifies George Bank’s daughter. It’s a lovely piece with a lyrical melody introduced by oboe and supported by other wind instruments. A great possibility for processional.

The links above BTW play back 30 second samples of each piece.

I’ve blogged about wedding music last year, and in the pair of posts noted that one of my choices for Ling’s Processional was “I’ll Always Go Back to that Church”, better known as “Kip’s Lights”, from The English Patient by Gabriel Yared.

The original motion picture soundtrack on CD has a marvelous recording of this track. For those of us who don’t mind picking up an alternative recording of the same music, Naxos has just released a soundtracks CD of film music performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Carl Davis – and one of the tracks is an arrangement of the piano solo theme from The English Patient and “Kip’s Lights”. Easy way to pick up two very lovely pieces of music at a go.:)

The MP3 version of the track is available at Amazon here for those of us with US Credit Cards. Alternatively, you can pick up the track for free at eMusic as a trial subscriber, or just USD0.20 in my case as a current subscriber.

Either way, it’s well worth the acquisition.:)

There comes a point in time listening to the classics that you start being able to distinctly tell by listening who’s the person singing a particular role. Funnily, the two vocal ranges I have difficulty with singer identification are Alto and Tenor. Soprano and Bass is easy – I wonder why LOL.

In any case, there several Sopranos I enjoy listening to: there’s Kiri Te Kanawa, Kathleen Battle, and Eva Lind. By far though, the singer I most admire is Lucia Popp. Her voice isn’t expansive and at times almost seems a little ‘small’. But there’s an incredible elegance and passion evident in her voice, and of a very distinct timbre.

She’s especially well-known for handling lyric coloratura soprano repertoire. When she sings in operas of the comedic variety, there’s infectious fun in her voice. Of the recordings I have of her, everyone of them is a favorite: her part as the feisty Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro which I’ve blogged about here before, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, and Rosalinde in Johann Strauus II’s comic opera Die Fledermaus.

Called “one of the most gifted, attractive and intelligent singers of her generation”, she sadly passed away from brain cancer in 1993 at the age of 54.

Of all the classical music there is out there that’s composed for solo instruments, I’m guessing that the piano got the largest heap. Haydn wrote 62 piano sonatas; Mozart wrote 18 (plus a huge number of other solo piano works), and Beethoven wrote 32. And there’s Chopin’s waltzes, etudes, and polonaises.

Funnily, I didn’t enjoy solo piano music very much. Certainly not when I was learning the piano – I dread those Clementi sonatas and I struggled with the Beethoven ones – and even when I started seriously listening to classical music, I stayed clear of piano works.

My first CDs of sonata music was a five disc set of Mozart’s piano sonatas performed by Hungarian pianist Jenő Jandó in 1996 who recorded a number of other piano music albums for the Naxos Records label. The music was enjoyable, but outside a couple of works that I’d played as a teenager, the music didn’t especially leave me with an impression, as great as Jandó’s artistry was.

My favorite piano music today, strangely, lies elsewhere. I played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C as a Grade VIII exam piece, and all those hours of drilling and practice then left an indelible impression! So it’s ironical today that the piano works I listen to most often are Bach’s.

There’s an album of Bach’s music I recently picked up on eMusic, and this one’s an interesting one: The Goldberg Variations, a set of music comprising an aria followed by 30 variations which, interestingly, does not follow the melody line but the bass line instead:

The Variations isn’t actually all that unfamiliar even for persons who don’t listen to the Classics. It’s the piece that’s heard in the background in Hannibal Lector’s cell in Silence of the Lambs, and also in The English Patient. In fact, the lovely final credits music of the latter seems a variation of these Variations itself.

The new album of The Goldberg Variations I got is performed by Simone Dinnerstein in her breakout recording. What’s interesting is that Dinnerstein wasn’t a recording artiste but a Brooklyn piano teacher who raised her own $15,000 to make the recording. Her performance shot straight up to #1 on the Billboard classical music charts, and been compared to Glenn Gould’s 1955 album which listeners regarded as the standard to which all Goldberg Variations recordings are compared to.

This Myspace web site has embedded recordings of her two pieces from her albums: including the Aria from the Variations here. The first piece that plays off this web site though is the Gavotte from Bach’s French Suite No. 5 in G, recorded at a live Berlin concert – the Gavotte is my favorite piece of piano music, anywhere.:)

Alternatively, here’s a video of Dinnerstein sharing about how she learnt the piano, and about her family. The Aria from the Variations is also heard in the video.:)

Highly recommended.:)

There was an interesting if very short news article in this morning’s The Straits Times; where an amateur singer took to the stage in Britain’s Got Talent 2009 – I’m guessing the UK version of American Idol – and received standing ovations.

The strangest part of it was that this was a 47 year, frumpy looking church worker from Scotland who’s never kissed, never had a boyfriend. And when she got on stage and gave her introductions, there were sniggers from the audience. Even Simon Cowell looked irritated.

4 minutes later, they weren’t laughing. I’ve seen the video of her performance, and it’s absolutely stunning.

The video is spreading on Youtube now, with this following one already viewed 11 million times. The video cannot be embedded into the post, so it’s here on the link instead.

Tears will well up.:)

One way I get introduced to classics I haven’t heard before is, surprisingly, through science-fiction movies. Specifically, there has been over the years a bit of use of the classics in the Star Trek movies and TV series. And whenever I hear a piece of music from a Star Trek episode or movie, I’d look it up and go for it.

Star Trek Voyager was especially memorable as there were several pieces I was introduced to. For example, Mahler’s Symphonies through one episode in Star Trek Voyager, where one powerful alien race liked playing Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 as background music while they subjected the space vessel to a search for contraband. The ever-singing hologram Doctor had several scenes throughout the seven year series where he’d break out in opera. That’s how I got acquainted to Verdi’s Rigoletto and especially the tenor aria “Questa O Quella”.

There’s also chamber music. In the movies with Picard’s Enterprise, several scenes involved string quartets. I’ve never quite had an interest in string quartet music before, but after watching a scene in Star Trek: Insurrection where the ship’s musicians play a segment of Haydn’s String Quartet in D, Op. 64 No. 5, I’m in love! Shopped for it right away on eMusic, and made the purchase.

More information on String Quartet music in the Star Trek movies and productions here. I’ll do a post on soundtrack and film music soon too.:)

Continuing on my series of posts on large vocal classical works. I’ve blogged about two of Handel’s oratorios: this entry is about both of Haydn’s oratorios.

Haydn is also one of those lucky composers to have lived a long life. Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, Chopin… all of them died in their prime and at about in their 30s to 40s, but Haydn lived to a relatively ripe old age of 77. As a composer, he is far better known for his symphonies. His last twelve of 104 symphonies, called the ‘London’ symphonies, are standard repertoire in any classical music listener’s collection, as also are his string quartets.

That said, I don’t think Haydn’s music has the same amazing ingenuity as say, a contemporary like Mozart. But in comparison to Handel, Haydn’s music is at least refreshing (Handel had a bad habit of scavenging and on occasion plagiarizing his own music to create new works). Funnily, Haydn was an admirer of Handel’s oratorios, and apparently in one of his frequent visits to London, may have heard a performance of Israel in Egypt and became inspired to write his own large vocal works.

His output of two oratorios are pretty different in setting. Die Schöpfung, or The Creation, is based off biblical text including Genesis and Psalms; while his next oratorio, Die Jahreszeiten, or The Seasons, is entirely secular.

Now, Die Schöpfung is the better known and more widely performed and recorded of his two oratorios, I acquired Die Jahreszeiten first early on in my classical music collection. This was in the mid 80s, and the set was a two cassette collection with the BBC Chorus & Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis. Cassette tapes degrade pretty quickly with fungus growth in Singapore’s humidity, so as soon as CDs became the fashionable thing from the late 80s onwards, I kept an eye for the CD recording of this work but could never find the CD equivalent of this cassette tape set.

So, in the mid-90s, I settled for the work performed by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and Sir Neville Marriner that was also published on Philips CD releases. I thought it was hard to go wrong with this London-ensemble especially after picking up their recording of Messiah that I’ve blogged here last week, and I wasn’t disappointed.

As for Die Schöpfung, one of the most highly regarded performances of this work was a live recording conducted by the legendary American conductor Leonard Bernstein (above picture), and just a few years in 1986 before his death. I picked up the highlights disc from Deutsche Grammophone, and that was my only recording of the oratorio for many years.

Strangely though, while I think Bernstein’s recording is heavy and too ponderous for its own good these days, I was mesmerized by the energy in segments of the large choral numbers and returned to these numbers frequently as an alternative to Handel’s choral works.

As soon as I started subscribing to the eMusic service late last year, more recordings of Haydn’s two oratorios were among my first picks, and I’ve since acquired three more recordings: with Helmut Rilling and the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart in Die Jahreszeiten, and both oratorios with Roger Norrington (pictured here) and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (links here and here).

And I have new favorites now: the Norrington performances are just terrific! There’s zest aplenty in both the soloists and choirs blessed with great sound balance that puts the soloists center stage but not dominating the sound scape still. There’s a pleasant reverberation throughout, courtesy of the concert hall. The recordings were made live, and there’s welcomed sounds of audience applause at the end.

Heck; these two performances would be easily at the top of the heap of all my vocal recordings collection were it not for the fact that there’s a maddening amount of audience coughing throughout the performance. They ought to have shooed out the fellow who was coughing LOL.

Maybe technology one day will make it possible to somehow remove those noises retroactively, but in the mean time, these two are amazing performances of that really show Haydn’s style of music works. Recommended for listeners who one day get tired of listening to Handel.:)

Handel: Israel in Egypt

If I had to select a single favorite single number from a large choral work, it’d have to be “Sing Ye to the Lord”, the finale from Handel’s Israel in Egypt. This oratorio isn’t as well-known as Messiah. I don’t think the morning choirs at Wesley have attempted numbers from this work for sure – I hear “For Unto Us a Child is Born” and “Hallelujah!” from Messiah often enough.

Handel wrote Israel in Egypt in 1738, and he composed off passages from Exodus and Psalms, with several songs drawn from verses recounting the plagues inflicted on Egypt. Unfortunately, the work was not well-received by the London audiences, who were apparently not used to hearing an oratorio that comprised so many choruses rather than arias.

Truth to tell, it’s this respect of Israel that draws me more to this work rather than Messiah. Moreover, the chorus numbers were scored not for one but a double chorus even.

I got into this work rather late I remember; about in the late-90s when I was starting to wind down my classical music acquisition. The CD album I picked up was released by Decca featuring the Choir of Christ Church Cambridge & English Chamber Orchestra under Simon Preston. Simon Preston is actually a pretty famous organist. He was in Singapore in 1988 to perform with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at the Victoria Concert Hall, a concert I attended while as a JC1 student at Anglo-Chinese Junior College.

As it was, there weren’t many CD recordings of this work, compared to the gazillions I can find of Messiah. So, the ECO / Preston performance was the only one I had for years until this year when I had a revival in interest in choral music. Scouting around eMusic found me three recordings of the oratorio, and I bought two of them: by The Sixteen & The Symphony of Harmony conducted by Harry Christophers; and by the Aradia Ensemble and conducted by Kevin Mallon.

Between the latter two, I’d be hard press to choose a favorite! The Christophers’ ensemble reminds me the old Deutsche Grammophon recordings of Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; they were famed for perfect articulation of each note in each of their recordings. The Aradia Ensemble recording sounds a little smaller in size and the singing I thought didn’t have the same tight discipline as The Sixteen.

That said, there’s still an inexplicable charm in the Mallon recording, and the video below of a recording session for their interpretation of Israel in Egypt shows. The number they’re singing is “He gave them hailstones for rain” from Act II.

Both are greatly accomplished performances that I alternate listening to.:)

As I remember it, the first oratorio I acquired in my classical music recollection wasn’t Handel’s Messiah, but Haydn’s Die Jahreszeiten. The latter was a 1970s recording with the BBC Chorus & Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Colin Davis, and came on an old two cassette tape box set issued by the music division arm of Philips (reissued on CD here).

Between the large vocal type of works i.e. oratorios/masses/requiems vs operas, I still marginally prefer operas, if only because there’s significant theatrical elements, narrative and interaction between characters. And outside a couple of the most well-known of these vocal works of this type, most casual classical music listeners don’t really listen to these.

So, putting together a list of some of my favorite recordings of oratorios and masses, and starting with the most well-known of all oratorios…

Handel: Messiah

Recordings of Handel’s Messiah seem to fall into one of three types: the old big, bombastic performances with huge orchestras and choirs, like in the first recording of Messiah I got in the 80s was also a cassette box set performed by the the John Alldis Choir & London Philharmonic Orchestra and Karl Richter, which I picked up on CD reissue years later; and also another CD set I got with the London Symphony and Colin Davis again.

These big performances were gradually out of fashion from the mid-80s onwards, with performances moving towards the other two types: small, nimble orchestras either on modern, or on authentic instruments. Of the former, there’s the 1981 recording with Richard Westenburg and the Musica Sacra, but the audio quality on the CD was wretched that I didn’t listen to it more than a few times. And also, an early 80s recording with famed but late choir conductor Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Chorus on Telarc Digital.

By far though, my favorite recording with a modern and small orchestra and chorus remains a 1970s Decca CD set with the Academy and the now 80-something Neville Marriner. Unfortunately, this recording was based on a rearrangement by Mozart and there are some differences between the rearrangement and the more widely performed original score, especially in the closing chorus “Worthy is the Lamb”.

But what an amazing and jubilant interpretation of this final chorus it is! Even though this recording was made more than 20 years ago, the whole 2 hour performance still sounds as though it is being performed right in front of you in your living room. Of all the choral recordings I have, the synergy between the Academy chorus and orchestra is just breathtaking. The chorus timing on each note with the accompaniment is impeccable, and each number is exhilarating.

I don’t enjoy the authentic-instruments performances as much, but most recent recordings are of this type now. Still, there are three such recordings in my collection: by the Boston Baroque with Martin Pearlman on an expensive Telarc Digital set years ago, with the Academy of Ancient Music and Christopher Hogwood performing on instruments that are less knife-sharp sounding than the Boston Baroque, and finally my most recent acquisition last week: with the Cambridge Choir of Clare College & Freiburger Barockorchester and René Jacobs. The Jacobs performance has lots of nuances with plenty of dynamic markings that that actually perked me up, as jaded a listener of Messiah I am. The chorus and orchestra doesn’t have the powerful adrenaline of the Academy, but the because of those little changes in phrasing, the experience of listening to Jacobs’ recording is refreshing.

So, of the eight recordings of Messiah in my collection, René Jacobs’ is at the top of my list; followed closely by Neville Marriner’s performance with the Academy. Both are amazing performances though and it’s hard to go wrong with either. If one wants to go with the big traditional performances, then I’d suggest Robert Shaw’s recording.

Next post, other vocal works by Handel… when I get to it.:)