If Music Be The Food Of Love, Play On: The Music Thread: What Are You Listening To?

Looking for some peace. So, the late Robert Shaw, his Chamber and Festival Singers, some tracks from album O Magnum Mysterium.

Tracks I especially like include de Victoria's O Vos Omnes, the Rachmaninoff Vespers Op.37, three different composers' settings of O Magnum Mysterium, and I'm also fond of two Thomas Tallis pieces, If Ye Love Me and A New Commandment.

cover art Robert Shaw - O Magnum Mysterium.jpg​

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lizkat said:
Not the only change in the world of classical music. The Metropolitan Opera and Anna Netrebko have also parted ways... she will not sing at the Met this season nor next.

www.nytimes.com

Anna Netrebko, Russian Diva, Is Out at the Metropolitan Opera (Published 2022)

The Met said she would not appear for two seasons, and possibly more, after declining to comply with its demand that she repudiate her public support for Putin.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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I am neither fan or admirer, but she could often deliver, in an OTT way. Still, in December her Lady Macbeth at La Scala was pretty gruesome — let's be kind and say, approximate vocally and hammy acting. The production seemed to have been Mafioso/Oligarch inspired.

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Anna Netrebko has been accused of dodgy nationalist politics and has always been an outspoken admirer of Putin (if some of the gossip is to be believed, more than an admirer)… but way back when… oh… last month or so? No one cared. Least of all the Met. They dragged their feet over Levine, so obviously are now all alacrity itself.

She fired off a string of (deleted) Tweets so no one really knows where she stands.

😬 Yeah, I dunno.

Now, Gergiev? He was a decent conductor in the mid 90s (remember when Russia was "opening up"?), and his star rose with Putin. But he slowly became shoddy and lackadaisical as he became more corrupted.

Won't mind him gone.

Strange how these things work… over the weekend I was listening to Shostakovich Symphony No.11 "The Year 1905" and I felt half guilty. Still. Sublime music.

lizkat said:
Looking for some peace. So, the late Robert Shaw, his Chamber and Festival Singers, some tracks from album O Magnum Mysterium.

Tracks I especially like include de Victoria's O Vos Omnes, the Rachmaninoff Vespers Op.37, three different composers' settings of O Magnum Mysterium, and I'm also fond of two Thomas Tallis pieces, If Ye Love Me and A New Commandment.


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I've added this to my Spotify "to-listen-to list". 👍
 
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lizkat said:
Looking for some peace. So, the late Robert Shaw, his Chamber and Festival Singers, some tracks from album O Magnum Mysterium.

Tracks I especially like include de Victoria's O Vos Omnes, the Rachmaninoff Vespers Op.37, three different composers' settings of O Magnum Mysterium, and I'm also fond of two Thomas Tallis pieces, If Ye Love Me and A New Commandment.


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Arkitect said:
I am neither fan or admirer, but she could often deliver, in an OTT way. Still, in December her Lady Macbeth at La Scala was pretty gruesome — let's be kind and say, approximate vocally and hammy acting. The production seemed to have been Mafioso/Oligarch inspired.

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Anna Netrebko has been accused of dodgy nationalist politics and has always been an outspoken admirer of Putin (if some of the gossip is to be believed, more than an admirer)… but way back when… oh… last month or so? No one cared. Least of all the Met. They dragged their feet over Levine, so obviously are now all alacrity itself.

She fired off a string of (deleted) Tweets so no one really knows where she stands.

😬 Yeah, I dunno.

Now, Gergiev? He was a decent conductor in the mid 90s (remember when Russia was "opening up"?), and his star rose with Putin. But he slowly became shoddy and lackadaisical as he became more corrupted.

Won't mind him gone.

Strange how these things work… over the weekend I was listening to Shostakovich Symphony No.11 "The Year 1905" and I felt half guilty. Still. Sublime music.


I've added this to my Spotify "to-listen-to list". 👍
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I've had these moments of, what can I say, almost "guilt" for wanting to listen to Russian music (especially modern - i.e. 19-20th century Russian classical music), giving rise to internal debates of the - quoting W B Yeats - :how can one tell the dancer from the dance"? sort of thing.

But, this is silly.

Anyway, I believe that one can ("I am large I contain multitudes" - well, now, I find myself reaching for Walt Whitman) both love Russian music (and I love the music of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev,Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, indeed Khachaturian) and deplore the invasion of Ukraine. Simultaneously.

This business of burning books, discarding CDs, changing names of well known deeply rooted traditional working class cuisine ("Poutine") is ridiculous.

Name it, and love it or call it out. You can love elements of the actual culture while deploring and despising mcuh of the political culture.

And, on that rock, or ridge, or hill, I will make a stand.
 
I have a few recordings of Netrebko from long ago, I about wore out a couple of the Rachmaninoff tracks on The Russian Album (and yes, Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra did that one with her). Divine voice for the music at hand.

I don't get her politics, that's for sure. I'm certainly not giving those recordings up, nor for that matter any of the other Russian composers' music that I have collected or played over the years.

It's true I'm currently interested in cancelling the culture of certain guy who thinks it's ok to go up on the porch of someone else without an invitation, but far be it from me to know why Netrebko declines to condemn Vladimir Putin even while having decried (at least briefly in public) the invasion of Ukraine. Past my pay grade. She has dual citizenship Russian and Austrian and apparently it was not simple to come by the Austrian one, required special permissions etc.

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cover art Netrebko The Russian Album.jpg​
 
lizkat said:
I have a few recordings of Netrebko from long ago, I about wore out a couple of the Rachmaninoff tracks on The Russian Album (and yes, Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra did that one with her). Divine voice for the music at hand.

I don't get her politics, that's for sure. I'm certainly not giving those recordings up, nor for that matter any of the other Russian composers' music that I have collected or played over the years.

It's true I'm currently interested in cancelling the culture of certain guy who thinks it's ok to go up on the porch of someone else without an invitation, but far be it from me to know why Netrebko declines to condemn Vladimir Putin even while having decried (at least briefly in public) the invasion of Ukraine. Past my pay grade. She has dual citizenship Russian and Austrian and apparently it was not simple to come by the Austrian one, required special permissions etc.

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I think the world of Russian "culture" - full of appalling and awful (soul wrenching), perfectly ghastly compromises (how do you save your soul, your life, your art, not put your family & friends under threat, and yet still live with yourself in a totalitarian - and I think that Russia, in the past fortnight - has moved the dial from the position of "authoritarian" to that of "totalitarian" - state?) is something that we find difficult - if not impossible - to imagine.

I remember reading the autobiography of Galina Vishnevskaya (the leading soprano in the Bolshoi, and wife - and life partner - to Mstislav Rostropovich) which was an extraordinary book.

In it, she recounted how when Sergey Prokofiev died - with tragic timing, on the same day as Stalin (whom he had loathed, and whose death would have been an occasion for rejoicing), Rostropovich - who greatly admired Prokofiev, and was friendly with him - could find no flowers to place on his grace, as all flowers in Moscow had been reserved for Stalin.

She also wrote of how Solzhenitsyn - to whom they had given sanctuary and shelter - a home, basically, at a time when Solzhenitsyn had fallen foul of the authorities (yet again) - but who, also, with characteristic intolerance and judgemental rigidity, demanding insane standards from his friends, openly despised Shostakovitch - another friend of theirs, because Solzhenitsyn felt that Shostakovitch had compromised his principles, in essence, sold out, to the authorities.

While the book reads like an extraordinary "who's who" of high Russian culture in those years, it is also extremely insightful (and humane and sympathetic, recognising human dilemmas, even though Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich both ended up in exile) of the compromises some of those involved felt obliged to make, as they tried to save both their careers and their souls, while the state made a play for both.
 
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Scepticalscribe said:
While the book reads like an extraordinary "who's who" of high Russian culture in those years, it is also extremely insightful (and humane and sympathetic, recognising human dilemmas, even though Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich both ended up in exile) of the compromises some of those involved felt obliged to make, as they tried to save both their careers and their souls, while the state made a play for both.
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Quite a few of the Russian composers I do happen to like, of the ones who wrote during the Soviet era, can be heard clearly to have written in vastly different styles from time to time (I mean aside from what one might consider a particular composer's private or natural evolution), and their works have also had uneven critical reception.

This variance was as you noted, primarily due to the political pressures of their time. There ware years when they were relatively free to compose as they wished, oddly enough during World War II, and then were those other times --worst of all from 1948 forward when a bunch of them were officially denounced for "formalism" and western decadence. Some of them were fully aware this would be noticed not just by party members but by their professional peers, and a few of them wrote stuff that may have gone over the government's head and was gleefully satirical, e.g. parodies of expected forms that were good enough to pass muster politically but that were innovative in their musical structure.

I have read that Prokofiev managed some discreet connections fairly high up in the Soviet culture-monitoring department... connections that let official reviewers overlook impact of his time in Paris, for instance, on his compositions. Anyway he made out better with some riskier (western-influenced) compositions than some contemporaries did, as far as dodging run-ins, bans or worse that could have ended his career and livelihood, although even he was officially denounced at least once. But he too cranked out some on-demand settings of patriotic poems and the like. Schubert, they're not.

Dmitri Shostakovich also had very high level political connections, but not so much luck as he was denounced several times and withdrew at least one of his symphonies prior to first official performance, which debut was not until the early 1960s. He was a party member and so was expected not only to conform but to lead. in demonstrating the kind of music the party leaders wanted. Hence some of the eye-roll all-for-country works now gathering deserved dust except as a matter of music history. On the other hand he wrote a satirical cantata that was not performed until 1989 and which mocked the anti-formalist government decrees he was charged to observe and to model. I keep meaning to get a biography of Shostakovich and read more about the course of his work vis a vis changing attitudes towards the arts within the Soviet era, because on a technical level I liked some of his post-Mahler explorations of dissonance, or at least what has escaped the dust bins. His son Maxim defected (along with his own son) to West Germany after a concert there in 1981, because he was fed up with the USSR's interference with his orchestra, the repertoire, the members, etc. He later lived and worked in the USA, but still later returned to St.Petersburg, and has played, conducted and recorded many of his father's works.
 
The incomparable Luciana Souza, singing Morrer de Amor (To Die of Love) on the album All One offered up in 2006 by a fellow Brazilian, the bossa nova leader, arranger, composer, guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves (1940-2013). In this track Don Grusin is on piano, Charlie Bisharat on violin.

This is no bossa nova track though, this is a torch song, a fossa, still performed today by Brazilian performers following in the footsteps of Maysa Matarazzo (1936-1972) who first sang this composition by Castro-Neves. This video is audio only of a studio performance, with still photos of Luciana Souza.

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Actually, - you know the way that some nights, only music from a specific composer or group will suffice?

Well, tonight, it is The Shadows: Several tracks from The Shadows: Guitar Tango, The Savage, Man of Mystery, Wonderful Land, Peace Pipe, and - but, of course - Apache.
 
I don't listen to a lot of country music, but I heard this song the other day and I loved it:

Midland - Burn Out

 
A selection from the sixties:

Kites, Castle in the Sky, (Simon Dupree & The Big Sound); Hey Bulldog, (The Gods); No Milk Today, (Herman's Hermits); The Air That I Breathe, Bus Stop, (The Hollies); Mr Armageddon, (The Locomotive); World Spinning Sadly, (Parking Lot), Tin Soldier, (Small Faces); For Your Love, (The Yardbirds); The Israelites, (Desmond Dekker); and Where Do You Go To (My Lovely), (Peter Starsted).
 
Scepticalscribe said:
A selection from the sixties:

Kites, Castle in the Sky, (Simon Dupree & The Big Sound); Hey Bulldog, (The Gods); No Milk Today, (Herman's Hermits); The Air That I Breathe, Bus Stop, (The Hollies); Mr Armageddon, (The Locomotive); World Spinning Sadly, (Parking Lot), Tin Soldier, (Small Faces); For Your Love, (The Yardbirds); The Israelites, (Desmond Dekker); and Where Do You Go To (My Lovely), (Peter Starsted).
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Wow, I didn't even start trying to "catch up" with the music of the 60s until sometime in the 80s or 90s, and it's clearer than ever to me now that I'll be running behind on it forever. Some of those mentions I have not even heard of, and some of the others I do know of but didn't realize they were from the 60s.

So much for being buried in classical music for half my life up front. I don't regret it but there was a price!

Thanks for additional material to look into, I may never catch up but I'll have fun with it anyway.
 
Scepticalscribe said:
A selection from the sixties:

Kites, Castle in the Sky, (Simon Dupree & The Big Sound); Hey Bulldog, (The Gods); No Milk Today, (Herman's Hermits); The Air That I Breathe, Bus Stop, (The Hollies); Mr Armageddon, (The Locomotive); World Spinning Sadly, (Parking Lot), Tin Soldier, (Small Faces); For Your Love, (The Yardbirds); The Israelites, (Desmond Dekker); and Where Do You Go To (My Lovely), (Peter Starsted).
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Love The Air The I Breathe. Their sound there reminds me of The Verve.
 
The (excellent) soundtrack from the movie "Absolute Beginners".

Seriously good stuff from the 1980s.

The title track, of course, comes courtesy of the legendary (late) David Bowie (and the accompanying video is nothing short of superb).
 

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