That's all, folks! (for now)

Time for a break.  Many, many thanks for all your comments over the past five years!

Back in a few months.  I'll leave you for now with some of the most perfect, timeless piano music ever written, in my favourite rendering by French pianist Pascal Roge, recorded 1983 and released the following year.

 

Happy new year to everyone, and here's hoping your 2021 is better than 2020 (not a high bar to clear, I guess).

Cheers,

AB

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pw: sgtg

Steve Hackett - There Are Many Sides To The Night (1995)

Steve Hackett live and acoustic, from the Palmero Teatro Metropolitan in December 1994, supported only by keyboards from Julian Colbeck.  Steve's on sparkling form, and in jovial spirits, frequently teasing bits of his old classics (and even tracks from his time in Genesis) before claiming to have forgot them all.  He does open with Horizons, and touches on his earliest solo records (links below) with Kim and a re-arranged Ace Of Wands.  The rest of the set highlights his acoustic records as might be expected, plus a nice bit of Vivaldi, a blues where he drops the guitar in favour of harmonica, and a cover of Andrea Morricone's Cinema Paradiso.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Voyage Of The Acolyte
Please Don't Touch
Defector

Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenberg, Houston Chamber Choir - Rothko Chapel (2015)

This album came up in the comments a short while back, so as promised, here it is.  Asked to curate a programme of music for a 40th anniversary concert at Rothko Chapel in 2011, Sarah Rothenberg, pianist and leader of the Da Camera organisation for chamber music in Houston, TX, chose to frame Morton Feldman's unique Rothko-inspired work with pieces by John Cage and Erik Satie.

The connection, Rothenberg explains in her lengthy liner note to this collection of 2012-13 recordings of the pieces in the programme, was that the three composers 'form a triumvirate of original creators who were each closely tied to the visual art of their time'.  And besides that, on this ECM New Series CD the programme just sounds great as a flowing, 70-minute immersion in some unique, inspired music.

Feldman's Rothko Chapel, written in tribute to the painter's great work just after his death, is the obvious opener to this collection.  Its sombre, eerie choral drift, piano backdrop and viola lead remain the perfect musical expression of Rothko's diffuse hints of colour on black backgrounds that graced the inner walls of the Houston chapel.

The remainder of the programme alternates between Rothenberg on solo piano playing inspired choices from Satie's Gnossiennes and Ogives, and the Houston Chamber Choir performing works by John Cage.  I hadn't heard any choral work by Cage prior to this disc, and the pieces here, Four², ear for EAR and Five, sit really well with the main Feldman work.  The programme closes with one of Cage's finest piano pieces, In A Landscape.

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George Shearing - The Shearing Piano (1957)

Some wonderfully mellow jazz piano for your weekend.  Well, jazz with a generous dollop of classical, but this is no corny crossover - it's a seamless blend of songbook standards (for the most part avoiding the usual ones you'd expect) and tasteful quotations of little bits of Rachmaninov, Satie, Mozart and Poulenc.

George Shearing (1919-2011) was born in London, and didn't let lifelong blindness get in the way of him setting up home in the US as an acclaimed quintet leader.  This is one of his rare (at least for this period in his career) solo recordings, and from a superb meditation on Stella By Starlight onwards, it's unique, exquisite stuff indeed.

I did mention early on in this blog that I tend to shave off bonus tracks, preferring to focus on just the original album; no chance of that happening here.  The ten tracks on The Shearing Piano are followed on CD by another ten that are every bit as good, and end with one purely classical piece in Debussy's Reverie - far from being a bunch of outtakes just for the sake of it, it's effectively The Shearing Piano Volume 2.  That's what I call good value.

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Henryk Górecki - Beatus Vir (rec. 1993)

From the same Oxfam trip as the previous album.  I really should dedicate both of these posts to the person who donated a pair of rare-as-hen's-teeth Polish Górecki CDs two years ago - dziekuje!

Beatus Vir is a 32-minute, self-contained choral/orchestral work which is a bit more lively than the 3rd Symphony, and for me brings to mind some of Arvo Part's large-scale pieces from the 90s.  Beatus Vir was commissioned by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, and premiered in 1979, by which time he'd became Pope John Paul II.  It's also less widely recorded than the 3rd Symphony, and is best known from a 1993 Argo release.  This Polish CD didn't even have a discogs entry when I bought it.

The two supporting works on this album date from earlier in Górecki's repertoire, and provide early pointers to the substantive works from today and yesterday.  Ad Matrem (1971) was when Górecki started getting in to sacred music. 'Trzy utwory w dawnym stylu na orkiestrę smyczkowa' ('Three Pieces In The Old Style') was composed in 1963, and was one of the first times Górecki moved away from prevailing avant-garde trends towards weaving old Polish melodies into a memorable cycle.

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Henryk Górecki - III Symfonia (1976, rec. 1978)

There's a few classical works where I own two different recordings, maybe even three; in this case it's no fewer than seven.  I first got hooked on Górecki's 3rd Symphony "Piesni Zalosnych" (Sorrowful Songs) via the HMV Classics release when I bought it in the late 90s.  Many solitary hours during my fresher year were spent just letting these huge, icy waves of melancholy wash over me, whilst using this hip new thing called 'the internet' to read up on the inspirations for the work (of which so much has been written that I won't retread here, as I wouldn't do it justice).

Wanting to hear more renderings of my new favourite symphony (which remains one of my most treasured orchestral works that I've ever heard), I first plumped for the equally stately Philips release then the brilliant Naxos (Antoni Wit can do no wrong as a conductor to my ears) and so forth.  And yes, everything you read about the Nonesuch version, particularly if the words 'classic FM' or 'dinner party' or suchlike are used, is pretty much on the money - you won't miss anything by skipping it.  It does of course deserve recognition for breaking the symphony into the wider public consciousness, and without its impact you could argue that some later recordings might not have come about.

And so it came to pass, almost exactly two years ago, that my local Oxfam Music completely excelled themselves.  What initially looked on the shelf like a budget release that I didn't think would be worth picking up turned out to be, on inspection, the holy grail - the CD reissue of the original 1978 recording on Polskie Nagrania Muza.  So here it is, for your downloading pleasure - IMO, the most stunningly beautiful, rawest version of all, taken at a fair pace too (the first movement lasting barely 26 minutes). It's of course a bit of an assumption to make that this premiere recording is closest to Górecki's original intent - but I reckon this is as good as it gets.

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Morton Feldman - Piano and String Quartet (1985, rec. 2011)

After all that excitement, let's take the tempo down... right dooowwwwwnnnn.  Morton Feldman's late work in particular is an acquired taste, and it really takes work to adjust your brain to take it in.  If a normal album or even a regular symphony is like watching a river flow past, or like crashing waves, music like this is akin to watching an Arctic glacier for signs of movement.

I had already heard the Kronos Quartet/Aki Takahashi recording (1993) of Piano and String Quartet some time ago, but on buying this 2011 disc by the Eclipse Quartet last year I've found it much more satisfying.  Just 80 minutes of pensive piano lines and pointilistic strings to get lost in, or to do the washing up to - the latter being part of my first experience of the Kronos version.

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Pierre Boulez - Le marteau sans maître (1954; rec. 1972)

R.I.P. Pierre Boulez: 26 March 1925 - 5 January 2016

Sad to learn of Boulez's passing today, but a few months short of 91 years old is a good innings by any standards, and he leaves behind a great legacy of masterful conducting and some uniquely single-minded music.

I've been listening to this 1954 work a lot recently, trying to get a handle on the initially uninviting serialism.  I liked the instrumentation right from the start, which encouraged me to persevere with the work - Stravinsky famously likened it to "the sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass", which was all I could think of for a while when listening to it after reading that; it's a great metaphor.  You could perhaps extend that metaphor as far as becoming accustomed to this music being like ice cubes in a glass of single malt whisky - it's definitely an acquired taste, but one worth persevering with (or so I hear, as a non-drinker!).

Le marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master) takes as its text the surrealist poetry of René Char, sung against flute, guitar, vibes, viola and everyone's favourite percussion instrument, the xylorimba.  There's nothing quite like it, and it's well worth acquiring the taste.  This 1973 Columbia album (sourced from this box set, which I'll be returning to shortly for more posts) adds 'Livre pour Cordes', two forms of a short work for strings that makes for a nice palate cleanser.

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