Alfred Schnittke - Symphony No.1

Sometimes you come across pieces of music that you just love instantly, for whatever reason. Schnittke's Symphony No.1 is one of those pieces for me because it's just so much fun and so chockful of different genres and references that you cannot help but be amazed and shocked every couple of minutes. It's an absolutely mad piece but for some reason it works really well. Here's Alex Ross's spot-on description (taken from this article about Schnittke on The Rest is Noise, which is definitely worth a read)

Bedlam erupts in the very first bars of this symphony, and never really subsides.  Jazz combos do not merely add flavor to the texture, as they do in many urbane twentieth-century scores, but actually take charge of the piece for considerable stretches.  From time to time the full orchestra attempts to bring the madness to a halt, with a loud minor chord heavy on the interval of the third.  This warning goes unheeded.  The second movement opens with a lampoon of mindless Baroque music that falls quickly into disrepair.  At the outset of the fourth, a trumpet plays the lilting second theme from the funeral-march movement of Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2, significant in the annals of musical satire for its refurbishment as kitsch in Erik Satie's Embryons desséchés.  The Chopin tune is the fanfare for an unrestrained five minutes of mayhem, in which Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto (among other works) fights like a wounded animal against a fusillade of sound that recalls and exceeds the most anarchic moments in the music of Charles Ives.  

Thankfully someone has uploaded one of Rozhdestvensky's recordings of this symphony onto youtube;

Alfred Schnittke - Symphony No.1 (all 4 movements: I Senza tempo moderato, II Allegretto, III Lento, IV Lento. Allegro)

Played by the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra, cond. Gennadi Rozhdestvensky.

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was a Russian composer. He was born in the Soviet Union but educated in Vienna, and was never particularly popular with the Russian rulers (but then again, not many composers were). In 1990 he moved to Hamburg where he died 8 years later, and he did get a state funeral in Moscow. Even though his early works were very influenced by Shostakovich, his later works are incredibly diverse and 'polystylistic'. This polystylistic nature of his music means that not only is it difficult to define/pigeon-hole, it's also very exciting and constantly surprising music. He was ill a lot but still composed many works, including 9 symphonies, 9 Concerto Grossi, 15 Concertos, and a whole lot of chamber music. From what I've heard of his music (which I am admittedly still quite new to) his Symphony No.1 is my favourite but I also adore his Requiem and his Concerto for Viola and Orchestra. 

On Wednesday (the 30th of October) I will be seeing this piece in concert, played by the London Philharmonic and I am so excited, I imagine it will be amazing to hear this live. Though I am slightly worried that I might giggle too much...

Orango at the Southbank Centre.

The Philharmonia and Esa-Pekka Salonen's performance of Shostakovich's Orango (and the Symphony No.4 of course!) is less than a week away (May 16). I've been looking forward to this concert since I bought the ticket in September and I cannot adequately express how excited I am for it. I wrote about the recording and also the history of Orango in this post, but here's a little something extra. The Philharmonia Orchestra made a promotional video for the concert, with lots of information and interviews and music, and it is fantastic and makes me even more giddy with excitement. 

Shostakovich's Opera: Orango from Philharmonia Orchestra on Vimeo.

If you live in the London area (or anywhere in England, it's worth a trip, really) I urge you to go to this. There are still tickets available, including student tickets (50% off) and it will be an unforgettable evening. Get those tickets here.

Bohuslav Martinů - Symphony No.3

There are so many composers still on my to-listen list, but thanks to The Rest is Noise Festival I can strike one of them off: Bohuslav Martinů. Last week I saw the London Philharmonic Orchestra play his Double Concerto, which was amazing (you can read my review here, they also played Berg, Bartók and Webern). It was an incredibly moving and exciting piece, and so of course I had to seek out more of his music. My favourite so far? The Symphony No.3:


Bohuslav Martinů - Symphony No.3: I Allegro Poco Moderato
Played by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Vaclav Neumann

Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959) was a Czech composer. He studied at the Prague Conservatory for a while but was dismissed because he preferred to study and explore on his own. Eventually he studied composition under Josef Suk for a few years, after which he left and moved to Paris. He was really interested in different styles of music and of course Paris at that time was an absolutely fantastic place artistically speaking. His composing style continued to develop, but it wasn't until after his move to the US in 1941 that he wrote his six symphonies. He composed many pieces (almost 400!) throughout his life, apart from the symphonies there are many ballets, 8 pieces for piano and orchestra, a whole bunch of other concertos, and a lot of chamber music, including 12 string quartets.

Symphony No.3 contains three movements and was composed in 1944. The piece wasn't commissioned but it was dedicated to and premiered by the Boston Symphonic Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky (premiere was in 1945). It's an energetic and loud piece, but honestly it's also quite unlike anything else I've heard before (even though it fits squarely into the genre of loud 20th Century symphonic music that I love so much). The piano has a prominent place in the symphony, perhaps similar to Stravinsky's Sympony in Three Movements. At the same time it has some stunning writing for woodwinds, and some wonderful percussion. Basically, it's really fantastic and you should listen to it. If you like the first movement, here are the others: II Largo and III Allegro - Andante.

Favourite albums of 2012

Now that it is January 2013 a post about my favourite music of 2012 is probably appropriate. In a couple days I'll write about my favourite concerts, but for now I want to highlight two CDs that were released in 2012 that were definitely the highlight of my musical year. Both involved Esa-Pekka Salonen; one CD is his "Out of Nowhere" with the Violin Concerto and Nyx, and the other is his premiere recording of Shostakovich's Orango as well as Symphony No.4.

I wrote about Salonen's Violin Concerto here, and I hope you've all listened to and loved the piece. The CD recording is actually spot on as well, never too clean and it's just very dynamic. Leila Josefowicz is a star in her own right and of course her playing is stunning. In that earlier post I lamented about Nyx not being on youtube, but now it is! It's fast growing to be my favourite Salonen piece, so listen and enjoy:



The Shostakovich CD by Salonen is something else altogether. Orango is an unfinished opera by Shostakovich of which 30 minutes survives(he and the librettists decided it wasn't a good idea to continue with in their current political climate). Some of the music will be very familiar to Shostakovich-lovers, however, as he re-used quite a bit of it for his ballet The Bolt (and rightly so, it's fantastic music). However, there's still lots that was never played or released before and it's such an honour to be around for its rediscovery.

In 2004 Olga Digonskaya, a Russian musicologist, found the piano score of Orango in a museum in Moscow. Because of her research we now know that it was commisioned by the Bolshoi Theatre in 1932, and that Alexei Tolstoy and Alexander Starchakov were to write the libretto. Tolstoy and Shostakovich together decided to make it "an uproariously irreverent squib, a satirical farce taking potshots at all kinds of aspects of contemporary culture" (CD liner notes by Gerard McBurney). The story tells of some sort of weird experiment of breeding a cross between men and apes to produce a hybrid (named Orango). This hybrid then becomes a successful soldier, a wheeler-dealer and a press-baron (quite a career!). Only the prologue survives both in word and music, as all involved decided to abandon the project. It's raucous piece, with probably the loudest percussion I've ever heard (and that includes Varèse), it's full of irony and humour but there's darkness in the music as well. All in all, it's an absolutely amazing work and it's sad that there are only 30 minutes left, though that's certainly better than nothing. There's nothing on youtube with the music, but here's Esa-Pekka talking about Orango:



Salonen and the LA Philharmonic's recording of Shostakovich Symphony No.4 has very much reaffirmed my belief that Salonen understands Shostakovich. Or perhaps I should say, he understands Shostakovich in the same way I understand him. The performance is absolutely and entirely spot on. There's not one thing I can say that I'd like to see differently (and this is usually the case with Shostakovich recordings, especially the Fourth of which I have too many so there's usually something I disagree with). Even though I will probably forever be loyal to Rostropovich and especially Kondrashin's recordings, Salonen comes really really close to my favourites. The recording is crystal clear but still has enough depth (which you definitely need in the Fourth). So if you're in the mood to buy some music; get these albums!

Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No.11

I apologise again for a long absence from this blog. For those who didn't know; I recently moved to England to pursue a PhD in philosophy which has been both exciting and exhausting, and obviously very distracting. I'm definitely going to try to post more regularly from now on though.

Right now I want to talk about a piece that I've avoided posting in here for several reasons; Shostakovich's Symphony No.11. It is, together with the 4th, my favourite Shostakovich symphony but not everyone praises it. I've read comments ranging from calling it too cinematographic (yeah, I don't know why that's a bad thing either) to kitschy, from superficial to bland. Basically, a lot of people find it so over-the-top that it loses all emotional impact. It's pretty much the opposite for me, I'd say it's the single most emotionally laden piece of music I know. It reduces me to tears every time I listen to it, and there are two moments in particular that literally make me unable to breathe.

There are many 'objective' features of the symphony that I could argue make it so good; it has some of the most beautiful soft and slow movements of any Shostakovich piece, there's a beautiful balance between the loud and the quiet, the melodies will stay in your head for days, and the ending is quite possibly the best finale Shostakovich ever wrote. But it all comes down to what you feel when you listen to it, so I won't bore you too much with details. Some history of the piece is interesting, though. It was written in 1957, and has as a subtitle "The Year 1905" (thus in memory of the Russian revolution of that year). There are all sorts of rumours about why Shostakovich gave it this subtitle, and indeed many people think that he originally had it as "The Year 1906" - the year of his birth. In a way, the symphony is a requiem which I think makes the ending all the more powerful, the chiming bells are very creepy and ominous.

The four movements have subtitles as well; "The Palace Square", "The Ninth of January", "Eternal Memory" and "The Toscin". The second movement, which is my favourite, refers to Bloody Sunday - when at least 1000 peaceful demonstrators were shot and killed by the Tsar's army. You will hear this in the music - at some point the percussion and brass sections go berserk and then everything is quiet....

If you have 50 minutes to spare, I recommend you listen to this recording, by Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic:



But if you're in a hurry, here are movements 2 and 4.

(stick around until the 13-minute mark, that's when the madness happens)

Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No.4

And once again it's been quite a while since I've posted in here. It's not really for lack of inspiration but rather that most of my inspiration is Shostakovich-related and this isn't supposed to be a Shostakovich blog (I also don't know how to make a post about how there are too many old people/not enough young people at concerts without being offensive...). But I've decided not to care that much and instead to post another one of my favourite Shostakovich symphonies: Symphony No.4.

This is the first Shostakovich piece I ever heard and it completely changed my life (it really, really did). A couple of years ago, I think 2005, my parents and I went to a Zondagochtendconcert at the Concertgebouw, where the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra were playing this piece, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. I hadn't heard it but the description said something about how it was louder than Mahler so I figured it would be my cup of tea. And oh boy was it my cup of tea. The amount of different emotions running through me for that hour was astonishing, at times I burst out laughing because well, some parts are kind of silly, at other times I wanted to cry my eyes out, at other times I wanted to jump up and down from excitement etc etc etc. What I experienced when I first heard this Fourth Symphony is something I only get when I see (some of) Shostakovich's symphonies live. I don't know what it is, but there's something about them that makes them so much more extraordinary than any other piece of music ever written. And the Fourth is perhaps the most extraordinary of them all.

It's difficult to post here because it's so long. My favourite movement is the first - I think it has absolutely everything I would ever want a piece of music to have, but as such, it's half an hour long. And even if I would only post the first movement I would feel bad, because the Fourth Symphony is such a complete work of music. So I'm going to ask all you readers for a favour, and that is to take one hour of your time and listen to this symphony in its entirety (and yes, this will include a lot of clicking on youtube links, sorry). Don't think about the music too much, just let it affect you however it will, let it sweep you away, let it make the world dissapear for one hour (headphones are recommended).

Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No.4.Played by the London Symphony Orchestra, conductor Bernard Haitink.

Movement I: Allegretto poco moderato, part 1.

Gustav Mahler - Symphony No.9

Oh Mahler symphonies. It's a bit embarrassing that there's been no talk of Gustav Mahler on this blog yet, as he was one of the greats! But, yesterday I found out that I have a ticket to see Gergiev conduct his 9th symphony in Rotterdam in september and I'm really very excited. So, here it is:

Gustav Mahler - Symphony No.9: III Rondo-Burleske: Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig, part 1.

Symphony No.9: III Rondo-Burleske: Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig, part 2 and the beginning of IV Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend.

Performed by the New York Philharmonic, cond. Leonard Bernstein

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was an Austrian composer. During his lifetime he was also quite a popular conductor and his creative output is therefore no as exhaustive as you might think. He wrote 9 complete symphonies (he died before he was able to finish his 10th), a whole bunch of songs (my favourites are the Kindertotenlieder, so beautiful, I'll definitely post about them some other time) and a handful of chamber music pieces. Despite all this he is still one of the most performed composers in the 20th and 21st centuries, mostly because of the incredible popularity of his symphonies. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory, in 1897 became the director of the Vienna Court Opera, and he also held positions at the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic, among others.

The 9th symphony was written in 1908-1909, and consists of four movements. Mahler died in May 1911 and unfortunately never heard this symphony performed. It is often said that the last movement of the symphony, Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend (very slow and reserved) is actually a sort of goodbye, it sounds like an elegy, and as wikipedia says "The work's ending is usually interpreted as being a self-conscious farewell to the world", but this isn't the last work he wrote, he still worked on his 10th symphony in 1910. Still, it's undoubtedly a beautiful and depressing finale to an amazing symphony. Mahler wrote incredible melodies and for some reason his use of massive orchestras never seemed over-the-top, just necessary.

Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No.10

Hi everyone. Sorry that it's been so long since I've posted in here! I was in France for a week and then got sucked into writing my thesis again (and listening to Woven Hand) so I was a bit distracted. I did write another review for Bachtrack.com in the meantime: Britten's War Requiem at De Doelen. Feedback is still very welcome!

Anyway, onto music. I realised that I've not yet posted any of Shostakovich's symphonies in here, which is rather odd because I love them more than anything else, ever. Seriously. My favourite symphony tends to change (currently it's still the 11th, in the past it's been the 13th, 4th, 10th, 8th, 5th) but in general I love all of them. Here's one of the most exciting pieces of music from his symphonies/one of the most exciting pieces of music ever written:

Shostakovich - Symphony No.10: II Allegro. 

Played by the Australian Youth Orchestra, cond. Sir Mark Elder. (Needs to be played loud!)

Dmitri Shostakovich no longer requires an introduction on here, right? So I'll just talk a bit about this particular piece, the 10th symphony. It was first performed in december 1953, by the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, cond. Evgeny Mravinsky (as usual). It has four movements, three rather long ones (around 24, 12 and 14 mins), and one, the second movement, which is short and fast. The 10th symphony is one of the first and important works in which Shosty's DSCH (his initials in music notes, the English notation would be D, E flat, C, B) theme appears. I can safely say that the 10th is really one of the most incredible symphonies every written, it still blows my mind every time I listen to it. You should check out the entire thing; Mvt I: Part 1, Mvt I: Part 2, Mvt III, Mvt IV. These performances are all conducted by Mariss Jansons who is an awesome Shostakovich-conductor, I highly recommend his complete symphonies (though my favourite's still Kondrashin). Also, for fun you should check out Gustavo Dudamel conducting the second movement, one of the youtube comments rather aptly describes it as: "He seems to be having an epic sword battle with a ghost... and it looks like he's winning".

(Oh and for those of you in The Netherlands that are going to the Lowlands festival this summer; The Hague's Residentieorkest is going to be performing this symphony there, so you have to go!)

Johannes Brahms - Symphonies

Sorry that it's been a while since my last update but I've been quite ill and unable to properly write anything. Because I've been having such headaches and been so tired, the past few days I've really only listened to music that comforts me. And one of the most comforting things to listen to are Brahms' symphonies. Usually I like my symphonies loud, violent and slightly spastic and Brahms is pretty much the opposite of this, but sometimes that's exactly what I need. There's something soothing about the simplicity (for lack of a better word) and beauty of his symphonies. Here are my favourite movements:

Brahms - Symphony No.1: IV Adagio (part 1, here is part 2)


Brahms - Symphony No.3: III Poco Allegretto


Brahms - Symphony No.4: I Allegro non troppo (part 1, here's part 2)

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a German composer. He was friends with lots of big names, like Joseph Joachim, Franz Lizst and Robert and Clara Schumann (with whom he may or may not have been involved, as wikipedia says: "The question of Brahms and Clara Schumann is perhaps the most mysterious in music history, alongside that of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved." Whether they were actually lovers is unknown, but their destruction of their letters to each other may point to something beyond mere privacy". His most famous work might be the German Requiem (which is beautiful), but he also wrote four symphonies, two piano concertos, a violin concerto, a violin and cello concerto and a whole bunch of chamber music (including lots of songs and piano pieces). Unfortunately, I've really only heard his orchestral works (apart from the symphonies, you should also listen to his Violin Concerto and the piano concertos aren't half-bad either). If you enjoy the pieces I've posted (I really hope you will) you should really just listen to the rest of of the symphonies!

Pjotr Ilyich Tchaikovksy - Symphony No.4

For some strange reason I've yet to post a symphony on here. And because I should wait till I post more Shostakovich, here's my favourite symphony that's not by him:




Tchaikovsky - Symphony No.4: I Andante sostenuto 
Played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, cond. Daniel Barenboim. 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovksy (1840-1893) was a Russian composer, probably most well-known for his ballets The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty as well as the Serenade for Strings and 1812 Overture (and maybe the Marche Slave as well?). I think he was an incredible composer mostly because his melodies are really beyond comparison. He was quite succesful during his lifetime although apparently rather miserable (partly, or mostly, because he was a repressed homosexual). He wrote 3 ballets, 10 operas, 8 symphonies (although only 6 of them are numbered), 3 piano concertos and whole bunch of other amazing things.

This fourth symphony is definitely one of my favourite symphonies ever. Quite a lot has been written about it, not least of all by Tchaikovsky himself who wrote in his correspondance with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck (to whom this symphony is also dedicated) that the first theme is actually Fate, "this is that fateful force which prevents the impulse to happiness from attaining its goal, which jealously ensures that peace and happiness shall not be complete and unclouded, which hangs above the head like the sword of Damocles, unwaveringly, constantly poisoning the soul. An invincible force that can never be overcome—merely endured, miserably". He also said that: "this is the first time in my life that I have attempted to put musical thoughts and images into words, and I cannot manage to do this properly. I was extremely depressed during the winter when writing the symphony, and it rather echoes my feelings at that time... They remain, in general, memories of most terrible and dreadfully difficult times". But even so, it's certainly not *that* gloomy to listen to, and it ends on quite a high note (though slightly bitter). You really should listen to the entire symphony, here's Mvt II: Andantino in modo di canzona, Mvt III: Scherzo, Mvt IV: Finale.