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Messages - dafrieze

#1
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: Sacheverell Coke
Thursday 06 April 2017, 19:00
Simon Callaghan has recorded some piano pieces by Coke: https://www.amazon.com/Roger-Sacheverell-Coke-Preludes-Variations/dp/B00V872K5W.
#2
I bought, downloaded and listened to this recording over the weekend.  Not quite a French Schubert, although there are some faint similarities, but these are strikingly attractive songs, well performed. 
#3
Composers & Music / Re: James Friskin 1886 - 1967
Tuesday 04 February 2014, 13:41
Is a "mutet" a very, very quiet choral piece?
#4
Composers & Music / Re: Most Memorable Unsung Tune.
Sunday 07 July 2013, 14:21
I don't know if it's a record, but for the last 35 years or so, my favorite "unsung" tune (although it's by a composer with one big blockbuster hit) has been the third movement, Scène de Nuit, from Gustav Holst's Suite de Ballet in E Flat, Op. 10.  It's a gorgeous, long-limbed melody sung by a solo violin and accompanied by string orchestra; there's nothing else quite like it in Holst's output and, as with all unsung works, I have no idee why this wonderfully scored four-movement suite isn't a concert staple.
#5
I was lucky enought to attend that concert - all of it (except for Parry's "Jerusalem") unheard music by more or less heard composers.  The Walford Davies piece runs about 40 minutes and could best be described as "big-boned".  In his pre-concert speech, Lewis Foreman described the composer as one who (unless I misunderstood) was more interested in a good tune than in structural matters.  There weren't a great many good tunes in the symphony, to my ears, but it's certainly worth hearing every so often, in its semi-Elgarian way.  The performance (Martin Yates and the the BBC Concert Orchestra) was superb.  I do hope that Dutton records it - the impression was left at Foreman's presentation that it all came down to money . . .
#6
Composers & Music / Re: Sir Colin Davis dies...
Wednesday 17 April 2013, 01:47
This Bostonian didn't realize that mourning the death of Sir Colin Davis wasn't going to be the lowlight of the week.  Still, I have many fond memories of his tenure as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra back in the 1970's.  There was plenty of Berlioz, of course, much of it already familiar to an orchestra whose music director had been Charles Munch, to my mind the other great Berlioz conductor of the 20th century.  But there was also a good deal of Tippett, including the world premiere of The Mask of Time and the American premiere of the Third Symphony.  In those days, I used to go backstage regularly after the concerts to speak to the performers.  In this case, in addition to getting Tippett's autograph (I remember he was extremely shortsighted and held his eyes a couple of inches over the program), I managed to make a fool of myself by asking Heather Harper not "Was that very difficult to learn?" (as I had intended to) but "Did you really enjoy singing that?"  She gave me a look of appalled amusement and said, "Do you think I would I have sung it if I didn't?"  Sir Colin also led two extraordinarily exciting and inspiring performances of a couple of English symphonies that I, in my twenties, had never heard:  Walton's First and Vaughan Williams's Fourth.  Davis himself was invariably a pleasure to talk to in the green room; he was often to be found perched, feet dangling, on top of the piano and sipping from a large glass of Scotch whisky, and his responses were invariably insightful and pungently funny.  I never had a chance to sing under his baton, but I have many good friends who did, and they adored him.  A few years after his tenure as Principal Guest Conductor, he returned to conduct a stunning performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.  The last time I saw him conduct was two years ago.  I was vacationing in London and heard him lead the LSO in a Beethoven piano concerto with Mitsuko Uchida and a splendid performance of Carl Nielsen's Sixth Symphony, which I had never heard live.  The tone of some of his obituaries (not to mention some of the entries on this site) I find a little bemusing.  He caught me young, I guess; but to me he'll always be one of the great conductors.
#7
It's definitely in the key of B flat major.
#8
May I just say that this is an absolutely delightful (and well-filled) two-disc set of almost completely unsung piano music, sensitively played and superbly recorded?  As an Anglophile American who recently returned from his first trip to Italy, I couldn't have asked for a more sympathetic recording to be waiting on my doorstep when I returned (I ordered it before I flew to Europe).  Apart from one piece by, I think, Arthur Somervell, I had heard none of the almost 40 pieces in the set before, and a number of the composers themselves - Ernest Markham Lee, Eaton Faning, Ronald Swaffield - were quite new to me.  I highly recommend this one!
#9
Berlioz wrote a number of wonderful little choral pieces.  "Le ballet des ombres" is a terrific piece for a decent amateur chorus - challenging but very effective.
#10
The Bergsma won't do you any harm at all - in fact, it's fairly standard-issue, mid-twentieth-century conservative stuff, with no sharp edges to cut yourself on.
#11
Composers & Music / Re: Brahms VC vs Bruch VC3
Friday 30 March 2012, 12:55
Better than all of them, I think, is Bruch's Scottish Fantasy.  Great tunes (even if he didn't invent them all) and a wonderful opportunity for a violin virtuoso with soul.
#12
Composers & Music / Re: British Opera
Monday 19 March 2012, 21:50
I have The Christmas Rose - I'll upload it this evening.
#14
My own list of McEwen's works, assembled from lord-knows-where (perhaps an old issue of the BMS newsletter), lists A Winter Poem for orchestra, from 1922.  Is that a chimera that weaseled its way unbidden into my list?
#15
Try the Symphonic Studies.  I think it's his most memorable piece.