I can confirm that cpo will be bringing out Julius Weismann's VC1, with Laurent Albrecht Breuninger and the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie under Alun Francis. No release date as yet, though.
This appears to be the above-mentioned but never released recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNx3KgkNHvo
I uploaded this WDR3 broadcast in 2011 to the members of our forum. I suppose Mr Rufinatscha took it from there and uploaded it to youtube. He didn't ask me. I don't feel comfortable with this because I don't own the rights on this recording. I upload here because I can remove my upload when it becomes available commercially. But when someone crossposts it at youtube or at other sites I have no chance to deal with this.
Oh dear. It wasn't done with our knowledge, let alone approval. Of course, the recording has never actually appeared commercially, after some 13 years...
Quote from: Alan Howe on Wednesday 18 December 2024, 22:32Oh dear. It wasn't done with our knowledge, let alone approval.
No, of course it wasn't. And one cannot check the whole internet every day. ;)
I don't understand why the YT user or YT itself can't be contacted to demand removal of this content? Is there something that prevents such action?
the YT user in question has been banned from this forum so won't see this thread, even if someone were to link it to them.
eschiss I'm sorry that I don't see the connection between what I said and what you said. I'm referring to member "british composer" who I assumed was the aggrieved party. Why can't he contact the YT user or YT to demand removal?
Because he is not a rights holder to the original recording. Only those who are can make such a request. These days, they will often opt to monetize the recording through YouTube rather than request removal. The more so because others may upload the recording again as soon as it's taken offline.
Our forum is a corner of the internet like any other. If you really don't want recordings to be shared wider, it'd be best to not share them here, either.
But who's to say that this is BritishComposer's recording? If he could get it off WDR3, others could as well.
Ah thank you Ilja. I misunderstood as I thought "british composer" had some rights to the sound file. Yes unfortunately copyright control is just about dead these days unless you have 24/7 legal teams that YT actually is concerned about.
Quote from: eschiss1 on Thursday 19 December 2024, 04:06the YT user in question has been banned from this forum
Yes, quite so. This would be another of his nefarious acts.
If this was supposed to be released by cpo, it's about time they got on with it!
To be fair, I don't think there's much legal difference between uploading a recording to UC's forum or to YouTube if you don't hold the rights to that recording. One might even argue that YouTube may be preferable because in that case the recording has a much larger audience and can be monetized by the rights holder (which, as I indicated, is a common thing).
In theory, at least. In practice, these days those uploads often compete with the labels' own releases. First for money, even if they are monetized: they usually pack the entire work into a single upload (unlike labels' practice to divide a work into individual movement streams), further reducing already diminutive sum of money. Secondly in terms of presentation: it simply draws attention away from the label's own upload, and the presentation itself is often decidedly amateurish.
I think there's an ethical way to share music, but it remains something of a minefield.
Ilja,
The issue with YT is that it encourages its users to infringe copyright because it will monetize their infringement with ads. But they piously keep their hands clean by not infringing copyright directly. The income derived from classical music streams is minimal compared to real money makers that have hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers and views. So YT monetization is not a factor for the users that are related to this or other classical music sites, but the constant infringement makes it ever more uneconomical to wring a profit from these recordings.
Classical record labels do release music on a regular basis to YouTube for that reason, though. As I indicated on an earlier occasion the revenue on the big platforms is small but apparently still worth the trouble, the more so because it is usually surplus revenue - meaning, the recording has already been paid for by the point of release. Presto give a good breakdown of the revenue from different services here (https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/articles/6209--announcement-fair-play-how-much-do-different-streaming-services-pay). Short summary: if you want to support he industry, stream via Qobuz or Presto.
However, you're not wrong; if the rights holder doesn't monetize a video, YouTube will do so itself.* And since it's a nightmare to keep track of so many recordings in so many versions on such a chaotic platform, it's fair to assume that the site itself earns far more from these recordings than the actual creators do in ad revenue. The tolerance of infringement has real benefits for them; they're not the only ones on the internet, but they do probably benefit from it the most. It's quite understandable that most labels have adopted a "if you can't beat them, join them" approach.
*unless the channel owner pays them not to. But even that doesn't always work, and YouTube support is really something else.
Perhaps cpo aren't going to release this at all...
Recordings have sat in the vaults for longer than 13 years even in the pop world. The problem is more the intersection of our personal longevity with the date they decide to issue it in some way.
Quote from: Maury on Friday 20 December 2024, 18:24the intersection of our personal longevity with the date they decide to issue it in some way.
Hmm. Well, my personal longevity might well run out before cpo decide to release this...
Anyway, to return to the music: any opinions?
I'm totally charmed by this music. Seems like we have a very interesting composer yet to be explored; and what a list. 3 Piano Concertos + a Suite, 4 Violin Concertos and Concertante works for Cello [2], Wind ensemble, French Horn and Trautonium. And what of his 5 Symphonies... ?!
In response to Mr Howe I took a listen to the Weismann VC and also read a bit about him. I was surprised by it quite frankly. He displays a good idiomatic understanding of violin technique and thus the need to balance the high register with aggressive G string passages. This is something that very few composers realize. I guess because of a pianistic background many composers write very unidiomatically for the violin or confuse orchestral violin parts with soloist parts. In Weismann's case he seems to have actually listened to violins more closely than the usual pianist. The orchestra is also effectively orchestrated if perhaps a bit over busy. The cadenza though a tad overlong (as is the concerto overall) is very musical, more than the usual empty bravura.
In summary I would say this is one of the strongest Unsung Violin Concertos I have heard. He does appear to have resisted modernity almost entirely which may be linked to his bucolic retirement on the German Swiss border. I should add that I was favorably impressed with the musicality of the violin soloist on the recording. The one issue common with Unsungs is that the writing is not strikingly personal to the level you hear with famous composers. But he is not far below either. I would be interested in hearing some of his six operas. Like Rameau he started fairly late in writing them.
Thanks for these thoughts. Above all, the VC is memorable: I can hear that arresting opening in my mind's ear as I type...
Almost from the first note I was captured again...like by the march like beginning of his 2nd PC some 30 years ago.
Why on earth is he so unsung?!
Quote from: JanOscar on Saturday 21 December 2024, 09:20Why on earth is he so unsung?!
A question that we pose rather often here.
In Weismann's case, I would think that the question is rather easily answered. The guy was a rather enthusiastic national socialist, and deeply entrenched in Nazi cultural politics. After Mendelssohn's music was banned, Weismann was commissioned to submit a replacement composition in 1934. Moreover, the success of his opera Die pfiffige Magd (1939), which received much official praise, made him well-known as an exponent of the regime. All that did not endear him to post-war programmers, the more so since his music was hardly avant-garde but for the most part also not all that distinctive. Particularly the stuff from the Nazi years suffers from a distinct lack of individuality, and his earlier works (which are almost all much more interesting, including those written during his foray into chromaticism from the 1920s) were forgotten by extension.
It's interesting to contrast him with Werner Egk, a much more succesful composer after the war. Egk's copybook was much more blotted than Weismann's, but he was able to deal with his Nazi past mostly by ignoring it or suing whoever dared to bring it up. He could do so because he was better protected and remained integrated in the musical establishment in West Berlin, where de-nazification was notoriously lax. Crucially, I think, his rather stern and spare musical style fitted the post-war aesthetic much better than Weismann's romanticism. In Baden, where Weismann was active, the situation was rather different.
FBerwald: two of his symphonies can be heard in recordings that may still be in our Downloads section(s), but not yet the others, I think.
Regarding why the extensive catalog of Unsungs, I think it is mainly due to the narrow commercial base of classical music in general. Very few people listen to Tchaikovsky let alone Shostakovich or Mahler. Classical music constitutes a steady 3-4% of music recording sales. I don't think streaming totals are much different. This is infinitesimal compared with pop (broadly defined) music genres. In any endeavor the top 10 capture an outsize level of interest. Everyone else divides the remainder. There are far more second and third level pop artists and bands that have sizable followings and sales even many years after their heyday. This is because the total amount of revenue is so much greater. So even getting 5% of what the top pop acts get still provides a very comfortable income. Conversely getting 5% of the classical top ten gets a composer into this Forum.
"Very few people listen to..." is taken strictly speaking not actually true, since their music is used in soundtracks that reach a much wider audience (this is even true of a few less sung composers and some very specific works- though the introduction of those works has sometimes led to the increasing popularity of some of those works with the audience to those movies, qv Gorecki symphony no.3 and Barber's Adagio- and potentially works in our orbit too* ). Less literally as you probably intended it, true, but that's why rephrasing for specificity is often a good idea... "knowingly listen to", for say, would have done.
*Who knows- Korngold's violin concerto (opening of the finale) appearing in an episode of "Stranger Things" may yet help that somewhat popular work find a new audience.
I don't want to get too diverted here from Weisman as I was just responding to Jan Oscar. But to be clear the 3-4% sales figure does include the crossover classical music "hits" like Gorecki,, Barber Adagio, the 3 Tenors and any other classical sale derived from soundtrack/ad, radio play or pop song appearance.
There's a line in a novel by a favorite-of-mine late 20th-century British author, I think, which went along the lines of, very much paraphrasing, some things you spend money on to make money, some things you spend money on with the understanding that they'll [almost always] lose money [but that's ok if it's worth it]. It was the opera (as an institution, or opera companies/houses) specifically being referred to - the novel's name is "Maskerade"- but I can't help thinking of this whenever I hear the arts being asked to buck up and do their bit (not by you, Maury, but implicitly by the owners of the record conglomerates.)
Ah well. Don't mind me, this wasn't meant to be a constructive comment, I'm afraid.
What I don't understand and I guess it is shared by others is why you go to the great expense to record an orchestral work and then never spend the small amount that making a CD would cost or the even smaller expense of permitting lossless streaming. I could see it if the performance had serious issues but I didn't hear that. The only other thing is some rights issue but you would assume they wouldn't record in the first place if that were a problem. It's not like the old days when mastering and pressing an LP with its associated large cover had a more significant outlay. Authorizing lossless streaming costs essentially zero once you make the recording.
Has anyone queried CPO about this issue of 13 going on 14 years in the bin?
We've discussed this issue often before. Short summary: cpo's relationships with its regular orchestras (of which the Nordwestdeutsche/NDR Philharmonie is one) is different from most other labels', so it's impossible to say why a delay occurs for outsiders, and 10+ years delays between recording and release have not been uncommon in the past.
Quite so, Ilja. Speaking personally, I'm not all that fond of Weismann's later music - too much 'chromatic sludge', to quote a phrase. This Violin Concerto is something else, though: a really memorable late-romantic work that would adorn any recording project or concert programme - and it's superbly done on this recording. Come on cpo: let's be having you!
My one thought on that topic would have been is if their presentation, including liner notes, were uniformly far superior to that of other labels, I'd understand. And there are times that there is evidence of enough care having been put in, enough information being gathered for liner notes that are informative and fascinating among other things that make the final product (of the CD release, when that was more often the thing) just right, that that would have been my answer. Though there are other labels, like Brilliant Classics, Toccata, and several others that just might. (I have certain standards for the things between recording and release that I agree it's offtopic to discuss here, though they might be worth a thread if it's not a boring topic to others... not cpo-specific, I mean. Was thinking about it yesterday*)
*when reading notes by someone I think highly of- a very deservedly well-regarded note-writer for various labels- but noticed that in a specific case his notes to a quartet 2-disc set I bought years back, were only good-as-far-as-they-went. Not a cpo recording (also not one inside our remit- music of a Swiss composer)- and the immediate impulse for my thinking about this today, actually...
It would be nice if there were liner notes to peruse, but...
Quote from: Alan Howe on Sunday 22 December 2024, 14:41It would be nice if there were liner notes to peruse, but...
I remember someone telling at this forum that the long delay of releases is partly the fault of the writer of the lining notes procrastinating...
QuoteI remember someone telling at this forum that the long delay of releases is partly the fault of the writer of the lining notes procrastinating...
Have they checked for a pulse lately? Why don't they ask one of us to do it in half the time? :)