The Art-Music, Literature and Linguistics Forum
March 29, 2024, 08:24:04 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
News: Here you may discover hundreds of little-known composers, hear thousands of long-forgotten compositions, contribute your own rare recordings, and discuss the Arts, Literature and Linguistics in an erudite and decorous atmosphere full of freedom and delight.
 
  Home Help Search Gallery Staff List Login Register  
  Show Posts
Pages: 1 ... 66 67 [68] 69 70
1006  ARCHIVED TOPICS / Performance and technique / Re: Virtual performance of Sorabji on: November 13, 2011, 12:26:39 pm
So far, just one of Sorabji's seven piano symphonies has been performed and recorded (the fifth and shortest).

I've been personally responsible for programming and promoting Sorabji premieres in Moscow, even to the extent of hosting the soloist in my own home for these events.

The halls in which these have been performed have not been the largest - but at each one we've had to put out extra seating.
1007  Assorted items / How we were before all the "musicians" turned up / Re: Time, Forward! on: November 12, 2011, 04:40:55 pm

I was curious to read about Czech long-distance runner Emil Zatopek. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Z%C3%A1topek

Hmmm, yes, I looked at that too.  But I can't find an opera libretto in his life, somehow.  "A man runs".  But maybe I'm wrong.  Perhaps there are unknown nuances?   
1008  Assorted items / How we were before all the "musicians" turned up / Re: Time, Forward! on: November 12, 2011, 08:36:33 am

I think there are plans to have her opera aboutCzech long-distance runner Emil Zatopek  to be staged.


I don't see any kind of libretto in his story?  This is a trap a lot of young composers fall into when writing operas.
1009  ARCHIVED TOPICS / Theory and tradition / Royal Opera House releases iPhone game about Stage-Managing an opera on: November 10, 2011, 09:35:19 pm
[urlhttp://www.thestage.co.uk/news/newsstory.php/34166/royal-opera-house-launches-iphone-game]Royal Opera House releases iPhone game about Stage-Managing an opera[/url]
(The Stage)

The venue has collaborated with game developer Hide and Seek on the app, The Show Must Go On, which has been designed for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Priced at 69p, it is available from Apple’s app store from today.

The app contains five games in which the player has to retrieve sheet music, assemble props, build the set, light the show and dress the chorus with only limited time before the curtain goes up. Tasks include keeping actors lit with a spotlight without running out of power and remembering the prop master’s instructions.
(more)

1010  Other Subjects / Television / BBC refuses to pay 5000 pound fee to rescreen THE SINGING DETECTIVE on: November 10, 2011, 09:26:04 pm
BBC4 will not screen a planned re-run of Dennis Potter's legendary tv drama THE SINGING DETECTIVE - because the Beeb refuses to pay a difference of 5000 pounds asked by Potter's estate   :-\



5000 pounds would not, in fact, pay for the creation of even 5 broadcast minutes of tv drama these days.

But the BBC has always pooped liberally on its own talents - viz the way they have rebroadcast pieces by Harold Pinter (not).

1011  Assorted items / How we were before all the "musicians" turned up / Re: Time, Forward! on: November 10, 2011, 06:52:43 pm
Different time and different take on the same idea I suppose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathilde_Wesendonck

Personally I'm more inclined towards the view of Nabokov's novel that it's a masterly literary experiment - an exercise in how far we are prepared to believe a narrator?  The narrator Nabokov is reading us the words of the narrator Humbert. But the first thing Humbert tells is that "everything I have ever said is a lie".  And then we are supposed to believe his outrageous stories?  Perhaps it's all an exercise in self-delusion and malicious, vicarious grotesque fantasy? 

And I speak here as someone who has read the novel "in the original" :)

I have to admit to being left on the sidelines by TRISTAN & ISOLDE ;)
1012  Assorted items / How we were before all the "musicians" turned up / Re: Time, Forward! on: November 09, 2011, 10:23:00 pm
I didn't think that they would still stage operas with plot like in Not only love.   


I think it was mainly staged for Schedrin's 70th Birthday celebrations :)

His opera LOLITA gets staged even in W European countries - but I suppose the plot-material makes it easier to sell than NOT ONLY LOVE? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8y9oBNBrOk

(I think the Russian cast - who were from Perm' Opera - were better performers than above, especially the amazing Lolita of Tatiana Kuinji - yes, she's the painter's granddaughter, and she is about 4'7" tall, and can jump and turn cartwheels, and sing Schedrin's music too! Oh, and she's a qualified psychologist too.)
1013  Assorted items / How we were before all the "musicians" turned up / Re: Time, Forward! on: November 09, 2011, 07:45:43 pm
It is great that Rostropovich left his memories.

I heard in an interview with his wife that they have founded a opera school and theater in Moscow.

I was very impressed with the hall. Also they were talking about Mussorgsky museum and that he left his archive to the museum. Do you know anything about it.

Ah yes, they built a big opera centre and theatre, right on Ostozhenka - the priciest real estate in town!  I have no idea who paid for it - I doubt it was them personally.  But I'm not at all impressed with the work of the opera centre.  I've seen some of their productions - a particularly bad performance of THE TSAR'S BRIDE (R-K) which was so dull I fell asleep. I don't think Vishnevskaya is personally involved in the teaching there.  But I know the theatre - our orchestra played for performances of Schedrin's NOT ONLY LOVE, although the production was miserably weak too - luckily I was not involved personally.

NOT ONLY LOVE is archetypal soviet realism - a story about a female Collective Farm Manager, who falls in love with one of the workers... but he's a drinker and a gambler, and finally she is forced to fire him, although she loves him... she puts her duty to the Five-Year Plan before love.  :D  Plisetskaya came, but she was clearly very unimpressed.  But the theatre is fantastic, it has superb facilities for staging opera - a big orchestral pit large enough for all but the more outrageous R Strauss operas, a big deep stage, modern computerised lighting, a computerised hydraulic rig (!), all kinds of trap-doors and special gear.  But I think there are about 8-10 performances there per year - the rest of the time it sits dark.  This could only really happen in Moscow :(  It's very depressing, really.

I'm afraid I don't know anything about the Musorgsky Museum - it must be in St P, I suppose? 

I feel sorry for Schedrin.  Everywhere he goes, people ask him what it's like to be married to Maya Plisetskaya  ;D  And never anything about his work as a composer! On the other hand, I have sat through his rotten schlocksploitation opera LOLITA, and I'm not surprised people don't want to talk about it!  :D
1014  Assorted items / Individual composers / Re: Beethoven's contemporaries - languishing in the shade? on: November 09, 2011, 06:14:09 pm
Here's a taste of Spohr's ZEMIRE ET AZOR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaQfgShcWmI
1015  Assorted items / How we were before all the "musicians" turned up / Re: Time, Forward! on: November 09, 2011, 04:58:19 pm
I have to say that it was easy to think like that if you were average Soviet citizen. He was sanctioned composer after all, state supported etc and he went abroad.

Although DSCH went on foreign trips - mainly organised by the Culture Ministry to promote soviet music abroad - he always came back at the end of them, and he never emigrated as others did.  Nor did he have his citizenship or passport cancelled while he was abroad - as happened to Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya.

In the end I think DSCH was a patriot, and that he instinctively believed in Socialism - but not the corrupt form of Socialism practiced under Stalin. Gerard McBurney quotes Rostro on this topic, although I don't know McBurney's source for the quotation:

Rostropovich: "I has sitting having tea with Dima one afternoon - we'd been playing some music, and then listening to records. We were having a nice chat but then the telephone rang. Dima's face went white, and he sat down with telephone. He covered the receiver and whispered "It's the operator, from the Kremlin. She says to hold the line - Comrade Stalin is coming on the line!".  And then Dima began to speak with Stalin -or rather, to listen to him. "Yes, Comrade Stalin, it's me, Dmitry Shostakovich...  Yes, Comrade Stalin. Yes, of course. It is a great honour for me. But when I go to America, how shall I explain that my music is played there, and not here?  I see, Comrade Stalin.  Yes, of course, I agree with you, Comrade General Secretary. I shall do as you recommend.  I am grateful for the personal call, Comrade Stalin. Thank you. Goodbye.". Then he sat down, like a man whose soul had been torn out of him. They were sending him to America to rubbish his own music.  He had to go, of course.  He knew what would happen to his family, if he disobeyed in any way."
1016  Assorted items / Individual composers / Re: Beethoven's contemporaries - languishing in the shade? on: November 09, 2011, 03:36:02 pm
Beethoven's Equali are exceedingly duff, are they not?

Oh, I dunno... to me they have a kind of spare elegance and nobility as funereal music, although you'd barely guess whose work they were :) Trombonists are almost always glad to have something actually written for their instrument by a serious composer (ie not Glazunov).

I don't know Dussek's music well, probably because I'm a weak pianist - but I like what I've heard. Spohr, Cherubini, Marschner and Mayr are other names worth exploring in the opera field. I suppose we should properly include the omnipresent Salieri, too :)
1017  Assorted items / How we were before all the "musicians" turned up / Re: Time, Forward! on: November 09, 2011, 03:20:30 pm
It would be good to translate it. This was interesting clip.

I think the most valuable aspect of this clip is that there is no superimposed value-judgment by an external narrator telling you "how terrible it all was" (as the BBC etc love to do). Instead it represents a series of important musical figures from the era, telling the story of the times in their own unedited words.  As such its a valuable historical primary source document (although of course, the choice of clips inevitably offers the editor the chance to skew things to their own liking).  Even so, it would great if this were to be subtitled properly - it would be a great resource for music students, who often come to this topic with, err, rather different preconceptions ;)

Indeed, I remember being told on another forum by a practicing musician that Shostakovich was a well-known Stalinist stooge, and that the proper thing for all right-thinking people to have done during the period of Stalinist rule would have been to leave the country.  All 132 million of them.  ;D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_I4WgBfETc
1018  ARCHIVED TOPICS / Performance and technique / Re: Two Flautists on: November 09, 2011, 03:09:52 pm
Are we to understand that in certain parts of the world flautists are considered inferior to viola players and drummers?

There's a whole sub-genre of anecdotes about Bass Clarinetists (and the idleness thereof). In Russian orchestras "Bass Clarinet" is a full-time job - I know two of them, and neither plays the conventional Bb clarinet. One doesn't even have a conventional clarinet. As you can imagine, most of the anecdotes are along the lines of "354-two-three-four, 355-two-three-four"...
1019  ARCHIVED TOPICS / Performance and technique / Two Flautists on: November 09, 2011, 11:36:06 am
Two flautists are coaching each other for a Music Theory Exam.

FIRST: "What's the sub-dominant of F-major?"

SECOND: "Nah, it's a trick question! F-major is already the sub-dominant!"
1020  Assorted items / Individual composers / Beethoven's contemporaries - languishing in the shade? on: November 09, 2011, 10:53:11 am
It takes nothing away from the genius of Beethoven to mention that many another great composer shared the earth's surface with him as a contemporary.

Yet we hear far too little of these gentlemen!  And in fact Beethoven himself held them in high esteem - he even left a request in his Will that Hummel be asked to compose the music for his funeral. (In fact I believe Beethoven's own music was played - including his funeral Equali for three trombones?). Who do board members rate highly amongst the contemporaries of Beethoven?

I have a personal interest in "Mr Bee" (Hummel).  His Trumpet Concerto is widely played - primarily because of a dire lack of other pre-C20th concertos for the instrument  - but I find the music in his piano concertos (which Hummel performed himself) to be greatly superior. There's a generosity of spirit in that enormous orchestral exegesis, which other pianist-composers might not have permitted themselves? :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vihBwt6suqE
Pages: 1 ... 66 67 [68] 69 70
Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy