Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash A lot has changed since I last wrote regularly. A lot has changed in just the past 6 months. But I want to get writing here again. One of the biggest changes is that … Continue reading Listening Lists
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash Hey, remember this? (2023 Editor’s note: I wrote this nearly two years ago, and changed none of it, so here’s this as an attempt to tell myself I’ll start writing here again. Please leave … Continue reading A Return to Writing?
featuring Mike McCaffrey. Listen here or in iTunes. This episode comes at a pretty cool time that I hadn’t planned. I’d planned for it to be uploaded this week (pretty low-fi operation here, so it depends largely on my spare … Continue reading Podcast: Haydn Seek, pt. 2
performed by the Buchberger Quartet, or per the below links We’re just burning through the early Haydn quartets! (Maybe he should have, too! I kid, really.) The opus 17 quartets are as follows: Quartet No. 17 in F major, Op. … Continue reading SQS: Haydn String quartets 17-22, op. 17
performed by the Buchberger Quartet The opus 9 quartets, with links to performances of the works (not by Buchberger), are as follows: Quartet No. 11 in D minor, Op. 9, No. 4, FHE No. 16, Hoboken No. III:22 Quartet No. … Continue reading SQS: Haydn String Quartets #12-16, op. 9
I’m going to start this discussion by talking about bad excuses for Italian food in Asia. Italian food in Asia usually isn’t. It’s Taiwanese, or Japanese, or Chinese Italian food. It’s sufficiently different from the local food that it makes for a nice change of pace now … Continue reading Concert Review: Parabola (Taipei Symphony)
How quickly things happen. Just a few weeks ago, I was able to enjoy my first two-night concert set ever, and who better to enjoy it with than the Vienna Philharmonic? I’d gone to separate concerts back-to-back before, but never the … Continue reading Concert Review: The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
So… the Vienna Philharmonic is a tough act to follow. But I do love our local ensemble, and even though our maestro 呂紹嘉 wasn’t with us, I was still looking forward to the concert. I also have a confession: I … Continue reading Concert Review: NSO- A Fantastic Symphony
The actual music portion. Part one yesterday I suppose was more like a long preface or lead-in to the two concerts that will go down in my books as the most anticipated things I’ve ever attended. But yesterday, all we talked … Continue reading Concert Review: Vienna Philharmonic in Taipei- Part 2
Yes… I am aware. Did you know Bach used teeny tiny paper and/or had huge hands and person? Along with the until-recent absence of works from Josef Haydn, Bach is a composer who has been tragically neglected on the blog, … Continue reading Where’s the Bach?
performed and discussed below by András Schiff, or in this live performance by Claudio Arrau in 1977 I started to feel with the articles on the piano trios that, as I stated there, we are (very obviously) entering a whole … Continue reading Beethoven piano sonata no. 3 in C, op. 2, no. 3
performed by András Schiff (or here by Daniel Barenboim, without the talking) I had been listening to the box set of sonatas from The Complete Beethoven Edition, played by the great Wilhelm Kempff. The above presentation, with performances of the … Continue reading Beethoven Piano sonata no. 1 in Fm, op. 2, no. 1
performed by Mitsuko Uchida second movement third movement As with many of the pieces we have discussed in rapid succession, this piece was written soon after yesterday’s sonata. Do remember the statement we made about the clump of the first four piano concertos: with such little space between them, and from such a young composer, I wouldn’t expect to see any large degree of development or advancement from one piece to another. What I do feel like I see, as mentioned with the juvenile orchestrations, is greater confidence. The young Mozart is, perhaps, getting his sea legs, as it were. … Continue reading Mozart Piano sonata no. 2 in F, KV280
Horns. The fifth in A major has its date between 1760 and 1762. Wikipedia refers to it as a sonata da chiesa and states that this is the reason for its four-movement form, unlike its cousin the third. It also says that because of the very high horn parts, this is some of the most difficult writing for the instrument in Haydn’s oeuvre. And yes, they are high. As a kite. It’s the most striking thing about the symphony at first listen. In the past, the winds (of any kind) had only gotten much smaller kind of background parts, but this is the … Continue reading Haydn Symphony no. 5
The fourth in D major takes us back perhaps to 1757 up to 1761, as well as back to a three-movement form. Presto, 6/8 Andante in D minor, 2/4 Tempo di Menuetto, 3/8 The finale is marked as a minuet, but in 3/8 not 3/4 and lacks the typical trio section. The first movement sounds somewhat like the contrapuntal passages that stood out in the third symphony, even if this one may have been written earlier. It’s what jumped out about the first movement. It has a darker second subject, but it’s still all relatively crisp and delightful, but there is really … Continue reading Haydn Symphony no. 4
The third in G major was written (it is believed) between 1760 and 1762. It shares its orchestration with its predecessors, (two oboes, bassoon, two horns, strings, continuo) but is Haydn’s first symphony to be written in four movements, and one of the earliest in general to do so. The winds in this symphony are also absent from the slow movement, as in the previous symphony. This symphony is more ‘complex’ no only for its four-movement structure, but also for the structure of two of the movements: the minuet is a canon between high and low voices, and the finale … Continue reading Haydn Symphony no. 3
Gonna try to keep this one shorter. The second symphony is believed to have been written between 1757 and 1761. It has the same orchestration as number one from yesterday, and is also in three movements. There’s also something kind of… comforting at the possibility that something this brief (a nine minute symphony!) may have taken him four years to write. Not that he devoted every waking hour (or any regular attention) to the piece, but for any aspiring composer, it’s nice to know that speed isn’t necessarily important. The second is also unique in Haydn’s symphonic repertoire in that … Continue reading Haydn Symphony no. 2
So the thirty-seventh symphony wasn’t the thirty-seventh. The first symphony might also not be. Haydn certainly isn’t the only (or first) composer to switch around the orders of his compositions, or to have begun a piece earlier than another but published it later. As we have also already seen, the cataloguing and numbering and organizing of such a large body of work from so long ago has also proven to be somewhat troublesome. To me, it isn’t terribly important. We’re covering these earliest symphonies together. It’s not like they would be decades apart, so I’m not terribly susceptible to being … Continue reading Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 1
The picture that everyone knows of the composer who looks like George Washington He excelled in every musical genre… He is familiarly known as the ‘father of the symphony’ and could with greater justice be thus regarded for the … Continue reading Influential People: Franz Josef Haydn
performed, as always, by Neville Marriner and the ASMF, or below by Marriss Jansons and the Concertgebouw (apologies for the anime image, but it’s a nice performance) Mini-German: Part 2(I know he’s Austrian) Now for a slight change of pace. Sort of. While this work came a decade after last week’s Beethoven piece, it is… at least to my ears, not as far ahead of its time. That’s no criticism at all. Let me explain.For one, Eroica was just kind of a phenomenal thing. Beethoven was already into his thirties when this piece was written. Schubert was about half that … Continue reading Schubert Symphony no. 3 in D major, D. 200
performed by Nicolaus Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (which seems not to be available online, so we will go with a slightly less favorite but almost equally as wonderful interpretation, and very much along the same lines, our … Continue reading Beethoven Symphony No. 3 in Eb, op. 55, Eroica
Fugue for Thought 