Reiner conducts Ravel "Pavane pour une Infante Defunte"

[AMAC48]

Reiner -Chicago: say no more, listening is all - most exsquisite!

[eyreisheyes]

Forever haunting and beautiful and my favorite of his. Thank you for sharing.

[TaiMaiShu0k]

one of my favorites, no doubt. thanks for uploading.

[cliffworks4321]

what does the text say at the end? thank you!

[OLDLITTLEWING]

Fabuleux, fantastique, les mots manquent....Reiner est génial. Et dire que c'est une oeuvre de jeunesse de Ravel. Certainement une des plus belles version avec celle de Boulez.

[WimGrundy]

YouTube is the grandest since Gutenberg

[VladimirKhrobystov]

My favorite piece in outstanding performance. Reiner is the best conductor of all times! And CSO with him was really the best orchestra of all the music history!

[BernardProfitendieu]

défunte is usually translated as deceased, not dead... and since the French don't refer to princesses as infantes, as only the spanish do a more precise translation might be 'Pavane for a Deceased Spanish Princess' --- regardless, Reiner's is a lush recording of this pavane

[upchilled]

best version of the pavane ever recorded. i'm looking for this on vinyl...

[professor501]

This was used in the 1988 documentary, "JFK: In His Own Words", with great emotional effect. It was perhaps the most powerful when used as background music during the scenes which showed Kennedy's funeral procession. I first saw this in '88 when I was five, and it made a JFK/Ravel fan out of me. My most favorite classical work, without a doubt.

[wisjoh]

to hear this sublime recording after many years --

Thank you.

[adw5552]

This piece reminds me of a pastel painting, Where everything, lines and colors seem to blend together harmoniously, its very beautiful, and I enjoyed playing it, even though I found it was difficult to get the right emotion without sounding too defined or harsh.

[caijpp]

You know what is really strange?

The performances that I never get tired of listening are those that remain 'constant', continuous, like an unbroken train of thoughts that never seemed to have a beginning or an end...you want to go back to it, and every time, there is always something new you haven't discovered before...lke seeing yourself for the first time again and again...

[Sinfoniette]

Random note:

Nights, Smith. Its 12:15 in here.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

I like to think of sexuality as a lovely vine of roses covering a trellis...

[Sinfoniette]

If sexuality was a vine of roses, I would focus more on the needles.

[scorpio888]

@Sinfoniette I would focus on the stamens. And the pollen.

[caijpp]

Dear Smith,

I don't see your remark on sexuality has anything to do with Ravel's Pavane.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

My comment on being made to love women whom I didn't like has nothing to do with Ravel's Pavane-but the interpretation of it here.This interpretation makes me feel like that experience.

[caijpp]

I see...a battle between subconsciousness and consciousness

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Yes Joyce...or to my way of thinking: a battle between my senseless eternally infinite soul and my unknowing ego of this corporeal world.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu and Joyce,I think the notion that 'Ravel should be found in this music' is a strange culturally encouraged delusion.That's like saying we should still try to find the midwife in the child 92 years later.This rhetoric has it's own life.

Certainly-it's elements should be respected-BUT looking for a person's fleeting state of mind in it? I think that it's objectively impossible and see no value in it even if it were.

[Sinfoniette]

Smith, please do not play tricks with human minds, or rather, play with common sense; its not like you.

I am very sure it has its own live, but I cannot help myself to find the elements of its parent, although you are able to discard the connections of the 'feelings' of the music to the composer, and in some pieces, that is acceptable. But why?

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,I'm quite serious here,BUT-I'm always prepared for a laugh! (Ö!Ö( Does 'It' have an independent life outside of the mind of a conceiver? Methinks each idea has it's own identity that is forever changing and then yet-not at all.Why should any of it's identity be seen in the light of a mere transgient circumstance of where it was the moment it arose again in this realm?

[Sinfoniette]

If you are suggesting that it is a completely separate "it" from the realm it was risen from, I have to disagree with you. I haven't seen a single "it" that does not remind me of the realm it came from.

And Smith; all of us are ready to laugh in a page of pixels like this. We can fleet away like ghosts in here and zoom back here any time.

P.S. Please explain how the idea changes forever and yet never does. Seems ridiculously ironic to me.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,The premise of constant flux against,within,and from without staticum is one of the pre-eminent premises of this realm.Look at yourself.You've changed constantly-yet not at all.THE pre-eminent spirit premise of this realm is the nature of simultaneously co-exisating antithesises everywhere.Everything is a mass of contradictions unfolding.'Irony' is one of our primary reactions emotionally to all this.

No...nothing is 'seperate'-and yet everything is.

[Sinfoniette]

So we live in a world of distortion, Smith?

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Yes Min-Gyu,Beautiful Distortion inextricable from infinite clarity shielding us from the blinding totality of our own infinity.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Hello All! You know-growing up in an American family oriented to Classical culture I grew up with what I as a boy always innocently regarded as 'American' conductors(One actually turned out to be) like...Kubelik,Szell,

Ormandy,Walther,Bernstein,and of course...

Reiner.Looking back,I'm struck by how much that era (irrespective of individuality)preferred a certain view of 'Classical' music. It was all very beautific,elevated,dignified,e­legant,and

glamorous beyond measure etc...and so is this.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,How do you appraise this performance?

[Sinfoniette]

I'm not going to write much, but I do like it because its not oversentimental, like some Ravel renditions. In my opinion, its almost in the money. And I do like the orchestra; the harp. It has an impeccable clarity that I have not heard in many other Pavane recordings.

Smith, have you listened to the last 2 minutes of this? It almost seems how Ravel wanted it (or at least, what I truly love), a little "giocoso" elements used properly.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,Perhaps you know that I'm a big fan of sentiment,nostalgia,romance & above all lovely feminity.That said...I find Ravel to consistently be like Viktor;so dear-so distant.And perhaps in the case of Ravel's music androgynous too.Resultantly like you I usually find that if Ravel is 'warmed up a bit-it fails,because it loses that vital tension between the contrast I detect.Ravel can only be warm childishly-or so it seems to me.

I'm not fond of this interpetation,but sadly I love it.

[caijpp]

Dear Smith,

What are your thoughts?

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Joyce,I stated some of m opinions,what are your thoughts about mine?

[caijpp]

Dear Smith,

I one hundred percent agree with everything you said about Ravel. His music is like Renoir's paintings, all in their prettiness and luminosity. But I don't think that's all Ravel is. I think he only gives us an illusion, a sense of what life can be in his fantastic dreams. Truthfully speaking, I do not like this performance because it's veiled, but perhaps that's what Ravel wanted.

[Sinfoniette]

Dear Caijpp and Smith;

If you want a readers digest rendition of Pavane, there are a lot out there. I believe the only way I am going to discover Ravel is to go under the veil, but what am I going to do if there isn't a veil at all? I cannot find Ravel in such a performance.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,I love this like I fell in love with certain girls whom I hardly liked at all,but who were so satisfying disrobed that I fell into my own deserved punishment of loving something that I didn't like.

[Sinfoniette]

Smith,your attempted 'X-rated' so-called-humor is the very opposite of Alessandros. I suggest you to go back to your old ways; I believe you know why.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,I wasn't 'attempting' any X-rated anything.That's always been a part of not only my expression but that of all of our gang here.I can't be a puritan because that would be false.

[alra1975]

- " I think he only gives us an illusion, a sense of what life can be in his fantastic dreams "

Exactly what I feel as being un infante defunte Voodoo doll, cured and saved in sweet Caijpp's hand... It's like being in the E/N

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Alessandro,Yes-I feel that too,although perhaps I value that dreaming differently than you.After all;what is life but stacks of dreams upon dreams? A glorious layering of sediments of chimera to keep us from being blinded by the light of our own eternal mundacities.

[alra1975]

Dear Smith, please,

don't interrupt my idyllium with Cajipp.

My message was only dedicated to Caijpp: she helped me to recover from Voodoo evil magic, with all her love she cured me in her sweet hands.

So please, Smith, don't be jealous but also I kindly ask you to don't interrupt our blessed idyllium.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Alessandro,Of course I won't be jealous! Please have your way with Joyce as much she wants with you (Ö!Ö(

[caijpp]

Dear Smith,

Very kind of you to be so magnanimous again. I'm sure Alra and I both appreciate your leniency. I know I sure have to thank you!

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Deart Joyce,Veiled? I think that it is the victim of Arte-deco minimalism.I don't like it because too many fleeting states of mind (childishness-whimsy-angst-gle­e etc) are thrown on the ash heap in order to create that all important 'elementalism' that was worshipped in 20th century.Those and other elements were sacrificed here to focus on elemental elegant beauty.Like everything Arte-Deco thinking touched:it becomes a caricature.

[caijpp]

Dear Smith,

But none of that "elegant beauty" is real. Art roughly before the 20th century is a beautification or parody of reality. It was not about how each individual artist sees life, but rather how life 'should be seen'. I agree that almost all 20th century art has lost that pristine beauty, but it has become more "real" and meaningful. Of course, you can argue beauty itself needs no meaning or reality, but for me, it's impossible to separate a concept from those that give it its meaning.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Joyce,You're right-it isn't real.I very respectfully submit to you that 20th century classical musicianship is all about beauty and whatever meaning that can deliver.Just look at the evolution of instrument manufacturing and design.All instruments sound far more 'beautiful' than ever before.Musicians themselves are trained to make unremittingly stunning tones all the time.Earlier instruments can be pretty but not as often and not to such and extent.They have more diverse character.

[Sinfoniette]

But to use the diverse character effectively itself requires a stunning player, no?

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,It certainly requires the musician to be as practised in multi-dimensional conception as in technical execution.Did you listen to Samson Francois's play La Forlane here? Or Richter play Memoirs?

[Sinfoniette]

Yes, but what is your favorite orchestral performance of Ravel's music?

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,I don't as of yet have one.I rather suspect that the level of contradictory multi-dimensioning psychologically can better be more readily achieved by a soloist.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Further Min-Gyu,The solitary sense(So important in this rhetoric) seems lost or too 'veiled' in ensemble.

[Sinfoniette]

Damn it, Smith. You and your irony...

I agree with you in a way; I suppose you are talking about pieces originally composed for the piano? I prefer the piano version for the Pavane and the Alborado. The little 'thing' (do you have any idea what that even is?) is somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. However, I found Ravel's orchestral pieces, when played by piano, loses the 'thing' (the orchesetral colors that Ravel uesd?).

[ClassicalMusicReview]

May I also recommend the playing of Robert Stutz and Maurice himself here at Youtube?

[caijpp]

Dear Smith,

No need to be ironic with me. I never said anything about instrument building or their mass production nowadays. I only commented on the subject matter of a piece of art or music, and how it evolved.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Joyce,I used the example of conservatory training & instrumental evolution to highlight how I feel that Classcial music has gone in the opposite direction of meaning in the pursuit of absolute beauty in the last century.

[Sinfoniette]

Smith, a great player can still create meaning in an instrument created for absolute beauty. Sometimes beauty is just a mask for meaningless farces, but one can choose to not wear that mask, and can end up greater.

And frankly, I do prefer the later 'stage'-instruments in the evolution of instruments. Its easier to wreck the beauty and make 'arte-deco' music, but if effectively played on...I cannot describe the results.

[ClassicalMusicReview]

Dear Min-Gyu,It's very true that a multi-dimensioned behavior can somehow against all odds-still come up with great expression.We were talking of generalities.All macro-cosmica is incessantly punctuated by individual excpetions.Your mask analogy is very nice.

[billyguns2]

Great video, by the way; congratulations on your inspired choice of photos.

[billyguns2]

Impeccably played by one of the greatest conductor/orchestra combinations of all time; many thanks for sharing this. I believe I prefer Szell/Cleveland, Ormandy/Philadelphia, and Cantelli/Philharmonia in this music, but only by a hair.