performed by Yvonne Loriod, Jeanne Loriod, and the Orchestre de la Bastille under Myung-Whun Chung, or as below with Roger Muraro, Valérie-Hartmann Claverie, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, also under Chung (cover image by Kai Oberhauser) I asked … Continue reading Revisit: Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie
Welcome back, everyone, to another round of concert reviews, with stuff I always forget to mention, people who don’t know how to behave themselves in public, stunning, stellar music, a later bedtime than I usually have, and the overwhelming feeling … Continue reading NSO: Blazing Masterpieces
performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Maryvonne Le Dizes, Pierre Strauch & Alain Damiens or below by Pianist Matthew Schellhorn and Soloists of the Philharmonia Orchestra: James Clark (violin), Barnaby Robson (clarinet), David Cohen (cello) Never was I listened to with such rapt attention … Continue reading Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps
performed by Peter Hill, or below by Yvonne Loriod, the composer’s second wife (please be aware that you can find the specific times for the beginning of each etude in the description of the above video, which I have copied … Continue reading Messiaen: Quatre études de rythme
performed by Peter Hill, or below by Hakon Austbo “Preludes to what?” is a question that has been asked many a time by someone approaching likely far more often-performed preludes, like those of Chopin, Debussy, or Scriabin, but it is a … Continue reading Messiaen: Huit préludes
…. and there isn’t a music critic around to… anyway.I have been in various series of discussions with various series of people in what is essentially a dead-end, highly subjective and rather useless dialogue with a few different people about… “what is art?”The ‘tree in the forest’ thought experiment is just kind of what comes to mind when you (‘you’ as in ‘I’) begin to think about defining something based solely on a person’s or people’s perception of it.I would embed this video in the actual post itself, but it wasn’t what actually started the debate, and it has nothing … Continue reading If a tree falls in the forest…
This piece has been revisited, and an updated article has been written. Please read it here. I’ll keep the original article (below) for posterity, but I would suggest reading the new article instead. performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly Piano- Jean-Yves Thibaudet Ondes Martenot- Takashi Harada recorded at the Grotezaal, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam in 1992 This “symphony” (referred to by Wikipedia as a “large-scale piece of orchestral music”), was written from 1946-1948, and, like the other not-actually-a-symphony 20th century work I listened to recently, this piece is ALSO a commission from Serge Koussevitsky (thru an organization). Koussevitsky commissioned Turangalîla … Continue reading Olivier Messiaen: Turangalîla-Symphonie
Fugue for Thought 