Messages

Here's the promised poll on whether we should have avatars.

On the whole I'm agnostic (or perhaps indifferent would be a better word) on the issue. I have no great yen to display an avatar myself. I do think that they tend to "dumb down" at least the look if not the tone of a Forum. On the other hand I had never considered Kevin's point about visual identification and I can see that and also his point that my attitude might be construed as being patronising. Which it wasn't meant to be.

I guess it comes down to what they look like and we'd just have to wait and see - I certainly wouldn't want to get into laying down rules for the look of avatars! There aren't many of us, when all's said and done.

There's no work for me, by the way, Alan. Just a couple of clicks would enable avatars. And John, I'd much prefer to have avatars than set up a separate portraits page.

OK, let's have a  poll and I'll abide by the result after, say, a week. I'll post the poll in a moment...

Thanks Ilja, Peter and Jim on the question of why Raff dedicated the Piano Quintet to the King of the Netherlands. I have no idea, but the Nassau link does seem very plausible.

By the way, you're right to highlight the Divox CD - it is immeasurably better than the performance on the MDG disc, even though that has the benefit of a superb performance of the String SExtet as a coupling.

Cheers,

Mark

It seems that cpo have at last woken up to  Brüll. They've announced a new CD with Alexandra Oehler playing some significant piano works: Piano Sonata op.73, Suite No.2 op.71 and the collection 7 Albumblätter für die Jugend op. 33 together with extracts from other collections.

Declamatory, yes Alan, but there's much more melody in the vocal writing than in long stretches of The Ring, for example.

I wouldn't so much say Brahmsian as generic middle-period German romantic. A very attractive work, it is melodically rich and well worth investigating. The Sterling CD which features it, together with the Concert Overture,  Könzertstück for Oboe & Orchestra and the Auf der Wanderschaft Suite is a rewarding investment.

International Record Review is a little UK gem. It's what the Gramophone used to be. Straightforward, open-minded reviews and serious features about composers and recordings. None of the flashy celeb stuff which Gramophone has espoused. It's available on subscription, although I don't know what the US cost would be.

I enjoy reading American Record Guide and Fanfare when I visit the US, but they're far too expensive to buy regularly over here.

Arthur Foote.

You'll come away whistling, Martin...

Yes, I saw the Cliffe/Delius concert reviewed in The Times and it certainly had "Dutton" stamped all over it didn't it? Looks like Sterling might have missed out on that one...

Yes, you are right Alan - but I always get them confused too!

This a mouthwatering in prospect, Alan. Do you know how cpo will couple their symphonies/violin concerto CDs? Presumably Nos.1&3 that we already know about,  another pair of symphonies and then the final symphony plus the Violin Concerto?

I think this is Le Sélam which, although Reyer (1823-1909) called it an Oriental Symphony, is really more of a cantata as it is a large scale (30-40 minute long) choral work with, IIRC, a narrator too. It is clearly inspired by Felicien David's Le Désert. It's a melodic and effective work, safely exotic for Victorian audiences, and very French.

Reyer himself was primarily an opera composer. I have recently acquired recordings of his most famous work, Sigurd, a spectacular grand opera in the Meyerbeer tradition and also Salammbo, which is pretty similar. He has a gift for melody and colourful orchestration which is very appealing and I'm surprised that these three works aren't better known. Well worth exploring.

It's always difficult coming to a debate like this when so many of the points which I thought of initially when I read Peter's post have already been addressed so well. Alan's point about the memorability of material (how tuneful is it?) is very well made and certainly I think is very relevant amongst the listening public. Martin's about the satisfaction to performers of playing a particular work had never occurred to me but I can quite see now that it has an important role to play in deciding a composer's eventual fate. As a choral singer in a modest combo, I can certainly empathise with it. There are works which audiences love and we dislike signing. The conductor soon gets the message and drops them from our repertory.

My contribution to this discussion is going to be rather woolly, I'm afraid. Let's forget about the also rans who were always going to be also rans (no, no nominees from me ) and also the towering geniuses who were always in the end going to be recognised, no matter how long it took (Schubert might be a case in point). Consider the composers on the margin, those highly competent craftsmen who, from time to time, managed to produce a work, or a whole series of works which rose above the technically skilled and exhibited a touch of genius. Maybe Saint-Saëns and Raff might be a good pair to look at. Personally, I'd rank them pretty much on a par, maybe Raff on a slightly higher plane, but I'm not going to argue about it.

So why is Saint-Saëns still played quite frequently and his Organ Symphony is a concert staple, when Raff even now has to struggle for a hearing and his two greatest symphonies are still largely unknown?

I'd contend that it's mostly luck. Saint-Saëns had the luck to be born in France and so became the only really significant orchestral and chamber music composer in that then opera-obsessed country. France needed Saint-Saëns. Raff had to compete with Brahms, Wagner and a host of other similarly excellent composers in the German-speaking world which, in consequence, culturally didn't need him. Saint-Saëns had the luck to lived a very long life (he died in 1920 or so) and, although his reputation had declined around the same time as Raff's, the fact that he was still around meant that his music carried on being performed. Raff was dead at sixty, just as his reputation went into cyclical decline and suddenly there was no reason to perform him any more. Saint-Saëns outlived the rise of nationalism in music and lived long enough to see a return to his brand of classicism. Raff, just a smuch a classicist, died just as nationalism in the shapes of Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and Grieg arrived on the scene to make his music look very staid. Saint-Saëns had the luck to have successors whose compositions were not much of an advance on his own, whereas Raff's symphonies were eclipsed by Brahms' and his stylistic ethos was overtaken by the New-German chromaticism of Liszt and Wagner. Raff had the ill fortune to be caught in the political no man's land between the Liszt-Wagner camp and the traditionalist camp, whereas in France Saint-Saëns could stay out of the debate more easily. It was Raff's misfortune to be born poor and stay poor for most of his life, so he had to write many pot-boiler piano and duo works to keep the wolf from the door. This damaged the standing of his more "serious" music. Saint-Saëns  was born into a prosperous middle class family and money doesn't seem to have been too much of a problem, so his oeuvre is untainted by the whiff of the salon. And so on...

I don't want to labour the point and no doubt holes could be picked in my argument, but in essence I'm saying: tough luck. Posterity's verdict is undeserved in some cases and we do our level best to put things right, but in the cases of many fine unsung composers we shouldn't look for anything more complicated than bad luck.

Peter asked how an unsung composer was defined and Alan answered. I can say where the phrase came from. My son Edward, who is a very bight fellow, coined it when I asked him to describe the sort of composers I'm interested in, eager as I was to avoid pejorative words or clumsy phrases like "unjustly neglected" or "forgotten". I liked it's terseness, aptness and the pun...

On reflection, I think that you are both right! Like Alan, I see no problem with repeating threads in this new setting and that's particularly valuable when you have new members like Peter, who can add valuable insights not present in the earlier thread.

On the other hand, there's no denying that the old Forums did represent a very significant archive of knowledge and opinion and I still intend, when time permits, to try and make them available in an archive format. They certainly won't be available as active threads here I'm afraid because of format incompatibilities.

The key phrase in that last paragraph, by the way, is when time permits. Don't go holding your breath, now!