Varese13's channel

Wonderful performance: Bravo to all and thanks for posting.

It has always amused me how people who are not in the least troubled by abstract art respond with "horror" to music which lacks a tonal center. It would appear that in some instances, the ears lag far behind the eyes. As to the recording itself, though the balances between instruments and singer ...

Thanks so much for posting. I wore out two sets of Klien's Brahms complete piano music over the years and despaired at the prospect of never hearing his performances of the early sonatas again.

@sfkcbf But this music was written at the height of the ferment and turmoil of the 20th century, i.e. it was begun in 1918 and resumed in 1921, receiving its first performance ten or so years later. Of course, the 19th century could hardly be described as a period without turmoil, both politicall...

A gorgeous place, where Mahler composed his "Das Lied von der Erde" in 1908.

A wonderful performance of this piece. Thanks for posting

Spectacular stuff. Thanks for posting.

@ itapirkanmaa Sibelius is a Swedish surname, not a Finnish one. Even if his father's family had ancestry in Finland, there have long been ethnic Swedes living within the confines of what is now Finland. Further, his family sent him to a Finnish-language school so that he could learn Finnish. Bu...

@davidhertzberg It might be said that I grew up with these recordings, which I found in a city public library back in my conservatory days. Since then, I have told everyone I know about these recordings, but they are difficult to come by. Currently, I have only the first book on CD (my old LP ve...

Just awful staging. From the perspective of the tape, it looks as though there are puppets onstage. Not crazy about the singing either, but it is not nearly as bad as the really nonsensical staging. One cannot tell much about the conducting, though is whets ones appetite to hear more. The recogni...

@filmneye

@Varese52 They do say that "Geniuses steal from the very best."

Indeed, and they would be correct. But this sort of paraphrasing doesn't really bother me at all. By the conclusion of the film I am always on the verge of outright tears, even if Truffaut mistakenly (in my view) thought ...

"The paradise of storms subsides. Savages ceaselessly dance the nocturnal feast. And, once, I descended into the stir of a Baghdad street, where crowds sang the joy of fresh labours, in the dull breeze, circling without power to elude the fabulous phantoms of the hills where they must have gather...

Just gorgeous. Thanks fir posting!

Sorry folks, Wozzeck is not "tonal', however much certain analysts may strive to make it seem so. The only quasi tonal part of the opera is the "Invention on a tonality ", the d minor section which comes after Wozzeck's death (why would he use this title if the rest of the piece were tonal?) The ...

A wonderful musical document. Mengelberg was one of Mahler's earliest interpreters and one the composer himself admired greatly. I'm not sure it was intended, but Schey's approach to this song makes clear its quasi-klezmer music origins (although for Mahler it was just Jewish folk tradition). Any...

What a wonderful performer he was. He was one of a kind.

@tzeleustremiennost If you read Alma Mahler's Memoirs, they have long since been revealed to be nothing more than self-serving and often inaccurate chronicles of her life with Mahler. To be sure, Mahler had insisted on being the only composer in the house. But this was agreed upon with her before...

@zsinet13 As Schoenberg himself once commented: "my works are not difficult, they are just badly played." Well, this was the breakthrough recording which set a standard for all future performances of the work. For those who think that Karajan was more interested in money and power than music, he ...

@FilmRomMusDrawingWar It is very melancholy music, but so is a good deal of music from the Romantic era. Of course, Mahler came at the very end of that era and his music reflects a sense of loss that certain creative types often undo as the result of the loss of certainty and the fear of the unk...

If I'm not mistaken, this is the symphony that Mahler said was only comprehensible to those who knew his other symphonies, and I take him at his word. In fact, I've always thought that the opening of the Seventh should be viewed from the perspective of the very ending of the Sixth Symphony: for m...

@itsallinallston Not really. Serial killers kill for the fun of it, without remorse. Gesualdo committed a typical kind of killing of the times, where an unfaithful wife and her lover are dispatched, especially if caught in flagrante delicto, which was apparently the case. What may have haunted h...

Thanks so much for posting this recording. I assume that you posted it for Hoffmann, a wonderful singer, but I could not help being drawn to what I found to be one of the most fastidious orchestral accompaniments of the work I have ever heard. Rosbaud has always been a personal hero, and it is u...

Had Horenstein met Debussy he would have found him equally "provincial", opinionated and dismissive of music which had nothing to do with what was most important to his own personal development as a composer (see his "Monsieur Croche; Dilettante Hater"). Generally, composers tend to focus in on t...

Given this film clip and the comment by Schoenberg on the loss of his friend, Gershwin, it amazes me that there are very famous people who write in a different style who claim that Schoenberg was without humor or interest in popular music, that his music is devoid of humanity or warmth, or that h...

Vivaldi as "Blues" composer. This is most certainly one of THE Jazziest baroque performances I've ever heard, and I think it completely appropriate.

@HerrWarja Funny you should ask the question, but what we now call classical ballet comes directly from the court dances of the era of Louis XIV. Louis himself was an excellent dancer who frequently made guest appearances in operas by Lully and others. This was one of the reasons he was so proud...

Thanks so much for sharing this wonderful recording. I own a copy of it myself and have always felt that more people should be made aware of it.

I was unaware that this had a title. I had always known it as "The Porazzi Fragment", begun in Venice when Wagner was at work on the Second Act of Tristan, but not completed until he was at work on Parsifal. It is also said that this was the music that he was playing on the piano the night before...

@cygneboy It was also frequently quoted by Rachmaninoff, even though Gregorian chant plays no role at all in Russian Orthodox liturgical music.

Thanks for uploading. One tires of having to defend new approaches to music, so I just listen and make the effort to understand and appreciate the work on its own terms without preconceptions. It really is similar to listening to a language one doesn't know and gradually working ones way into it,...

@FrancisArief From a description of the program of the piece by Tim Ashley, a music critic from The Guardian: "Der Nächtliche Zug, in which Faust is forced to confront the abysses of his own soul as a religious procession passes him by." So I would assume that this is the reason for the use of th...

How wonderful that you have uploaded performances by Klien, one of my absolute favorite pianists. I grew up with his Brahms set and still think it the best complete set ever (pace Katchen lovers). Many thanks for this, as I have never heard it before, and it is immensely satisfying.

Superb singing, but truly lousy conducting. Christoff clearly wants more time to make his points, and this guy keeps trying to push him into a quicker tempo. What's the hurry, I wonder? An urgent need to empty his bladder?

The image is very reminiscent of the film director, Andre Tarkovsky; in short, it is perfect for this song cycle. Thanks for posting.

Simply spectacular!

@JudgeJulietLit You're absolutely right about her ability with accents. But I think that sort of talent was far more typical back then, as any number of ostensibly American actors had any number of different accents in their repertoire. In fact, a lot of those who started in the theatre used a va...