Messages

[lot]

The work of listing 1894-2006 violin concertos is complicated in my opinion by all those concertos that were written for doctoral dissertations, stored in libraries and never performed or recorded (perhaps a few are worth rediscovering, I do not doubt; Prokofiev's first piano concerto and Myaskovsky's first symphony were doctorate works too, of course. So I don't mean to imply otherwise. But a cursory scan with a clever search, of, say, the New York Public Library catalog at http://catalog.nypl.org reveals a ... lot... of violin concertos written in the inter-war years, for example, by, I think, completely unfamiliar names.)

Eric

So far we do have his piano quintet and a set of orchestral variations on CD, unless that's no longer available.  IMSLP has his string trio, quintet, piano trio, and piano quintet in scores and/or parts, for such as are interested (and the orchestral variations too, I think.) Still, there's also two symphonies and a number of other works, and most of the works at IMSLP aren't recorded yet either, agreed.

Eric

Hurwitz gave a complete thumbs down to this one;
http://www.classicstoday.com/review.asp?ReviewNum=12608

Interesting that he comments not only that the sound prevents the color to shine through, but that part of the fault was Boult himself (yet, most people seem to think this is the best preformed version of the various boots floating around as well as compared to the Marco Polo, which some HATE)

Wasn't it Hurwitz who completely trashed the Thuille PC on cpo a while back?

I wouldn't be surprised, regardless of the quality of the Thuille. He's trashed any number of composers and recordings thereof I know I enjoy, and as his columns are opinions only without supporting facts (unlike some happily-remembered Fanfare magazine reviews that enlightened about past recordings and about facets of the scores, and spoke of real attention to detail in writing...), well, those who agree with his biases are likely to continue to agree with them, I suppose.

Judging from Furtwangler's 2nd symphony as conducted by Barenboim, I'm inclined to give Henry Fogel's opinion, that Marco Polo chose exactly the wrong conductor for their Furtwangler series and bollixed it up, some weight. At least, I find the Teldec recording & performance memorable and fairly wonderful, I know that some big-name pianists were interested enough to tackle the symphonic piano concerto decades ago, and I found the one Marco Polo Furtwangler disc I owned (sym 3) considerably less convincing, though not horrible.
(All personal opinion...)

Tangentially- was just reading this this afternoon in The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music, and since this thread reminds me -
Semiramide, opera in 2 acts by Rossini to lib. by G. Rossi after Voltaire's Semiramis (1748)... also subject of about 40 other operas, incl. those by Porpora, Vivaldi, Hasse, Paisiello, Salieri, Meyerbeer, and Respighi. With exception of Respighi's, all were settings of text by Metastasio. - Michael Kennedy
(of Respighi's operas, have heard only part of Belfagor, I think, myself, so otherwise unhelpful I fear. Not the most-set of libretti, but 40 isn't half-bad, either.)

eschiss1, do you have access to that interview?

Best, David

September/October 2005 Fanfare, vol. 29/1, pp. 68-75 "The Old Order Changeth-- Chausson's King Arthur Commands the Field: An Interview with Conductor Leon Botstein", by Adrian Corleonis.  Berenice is referred to (not, as I thought, at great length, but still, much-praised by Corleonis, who calls it Magnard's "supreme masterpiece") on pages 69 and 72 (where Botstein says "Berenice, actually, is on my desk"). (Note- he gives Berenice's date as 1911, not 1909. You're probably right, but any idea where he might have gotten the latter and late date from ?)

Eric

Liszt, often. Though the then-"unsungs" he championed aren't always so "unsung" today (Schumann, Borodin, Glazunov, Wagner, Berlioz...) it was in some cases a very uphill struggle. (But also the help he provided Cornelius, Rubinstein, von Bulow and Draeseke, if maybe less so Raff musically.)

I had a feeling this would be Magnard's year as American Symphony's fall opera composer, but I thought the choice would be Guercoeur.  Nope, it's Berenice of 1909 (after Racine), I guess Guercoeur was too well-known .  Anyone know if this score also had to be reconstructed after the German soldiers set fire to Magnard's house?

David

Botstein talked about Berenice some in a Fanfare magazine interview a few years back, there was no mention of need for reconstruction (unlike Guercoeur), though it's possible.  I don't think he mentioned Yolande or any other Magnard opera (is there another besides those three?) - I'd have to check That said, he was already quite taken with Berenice, it was understandable he'd eventually conduct it.

The second string quartet in D seems to be at British Library at Yorkshire's Library Reference Collections (www.worldcat.org is a reasonably good resource for locating these things, though it's well-known so I mention it just in case.) His opera Sanna is in vocal score at Arizona State University. U California Berkeley has "Die letzten Tage von Thule". No idea who has full scores of the operas; presumably his estate, or possibly the publisher of the vocal scores. Possibly.

(The C minor quartet has recently been republished - 1997 - by Amadeus-Verlag, I think, making it easily his most accessible score anyway.)

There were 9, of which one is lost, apparently permanently.  They're nos. 1 in F op. 12, 2 in D you know, 3 in D op. 62, 4 in C minor you know, 5 in Eflat op. 105, 6 in D from 1823, 7 in G minor from 1824, and 9 in C from 1830.  Wyn-Jones in his book The Symphony in Beethoven's Vienna mentions them briefly, saying among other things that the 3rd seems to be an attempt to capture the success of the second (his descriptions are more detailed than that, from what little I can read on the Google-books available pages; I think the local university library has the book and will check the whole thing there. I know of no other book offhand aside from Padtra's catalog of all of Krommer's works that would even possibly have anything such as a thematic incipit for the 5th-9th symphonies.) There are recordings, that I know of, only of nos. 1, 2 and 4, but I may be forgetting.

Eric

The link http://www2.rozhlas.cz/archivy/index.php?HLEDPO=632110
describes a performance and studio recording (for Czech Radio) of a brief C major symphony by Franz Krommer.  The only C major symphony I know of is his 9th from 1830 (see the list in the Krommer Wikipedia article, for instance), a symphony that's described in the book "The symphony in Beethoven's Vienna" - in a page viewable in Google Books - as "ambitious" - which does not imply 10 minutes long. Does anyone know if there's a misprint somewhere, a misattribution, or something else going on? This is a minor question, not of much interest, but I am interested.

(I have a simllar question also of just passing interest about a possible 5th string quartet by Robert Fuchs, but I'll let that pass for the time being.)

Eric

The concerto's slow movement- but just its slow movement- has been broadcast from an earlier recording (of the complete concerto, coupled with op. 56 die Weihe der Nacht; label "Kuma", 2008 recording, Mario Schwarz cond., Lisa Shnayder vn., Collegium Musicum St. Gallen), I assume, over Radio Swiss Classic a few times already. Quite nice minor-mode songful piece.  (If that earlier recording is commercially available then the cpo is not a premiere, I guess.)

Eric

Not a Boulez lover, but definitely a Schoenberg, Babbitt and Sessions enjoyer, adorer and etc., does that count?  There are some composers I think will land in the dustbin of history (i expect to be proven wrong, but why else to make predictions if not to chance a guess?) but not those three (nor Webern or Berg either.)

Eric

I thought Cherubini's symphony was an arrangement/expansion of a string quartet, not an opera overture? Maybe it's both?

Eric

Glad to see the Widor and Rosenhain concertos included, among other works.  (BSB has a score of Rosenhain's piano sonata in f, and IMSLP has a few other works uploaded, but Worldcat lists only one recording, of Katsaris playing a solo piano work called Morceau de concert sur un thème de La reine de Chypre. I don't think I've seen or heard the concerto yet, at that.)
Eric