SUNDAY MORNING CLASSICS ON TBP

A collaboration of: “The Classic Music Mafia”
nkit, and Steve C.

Every Sunday morning we present selections for our TBP family to enjoy.

We present symphonies, ensembles, quartets, octets, etc.

Not all of our music is strictly ‘classical’. We may stray a little, but we strive to make all of our selections ‘classy’.

We offer tips on proper ‘symphony etiquette’ and even some selections that are a bit light-hearted and fun aimed at a younger audience. Those pieces will be so designated, and might be a good way to introduce kids to a world of music that they might not have been exposed to or think of as old and ‘stuffy’.

A full symphony will run as long as it will. We don’t want to cut a symphony short. However, we also include some shorter pieces that we try to keep under fifteen minutes in length. You can sample each and hopefully find one or more that pleases you.

We hope that you enjoy our Sunday selections.

Barenboim Beethoven Symphony 1 and 2

SYMPHONY 1
1: Adagio molto – Allegro con brio – 04:02
2: Andante cantabile con moto – 13:45
3: Menuetto (Allegro molto e vivace) – 20:20
4: Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace – 23:45

SYMPHONY 2
1: Adagio molto – Allegro con brio – 30:47
2: Larghetto – 41:22
3: Scherzo (Allegro) – 52:28
4: Allegro molto – 56:09

The Next Selection Comes To Us Thanks To ursel doran.

Tchaikovsky – Symphony No.5 in E minor

“Heaven Help us.”

The almighty has answered here with your efforts for all the selections, and the VERY important knowledge experience and judgement of your comments for us unwashed masses. THANKS MUCH MUCH.

Just imagine the HUGE money and effort to build the massive concert halls that are so elegant, and most would not be reproducible at todays costs.

The huge talent and costs to produce ALL the instruments, and most importantly all the musicians millions and millions of hours perfecting the performances, and all the time the orchestras must necessarily spend rehearsing the music.

We just get to enjoy all this for the minute cost of some electricity.

A timeless classic worthy of sharing.

Glenn Gould – The Goldberg Variations (Johann Sebastian Bach)

When I last played Glenn Gould, I said I would bring him back to SMC playing Mozart, and I will, but there is some unfinished business with Mr. Gould and Bach that I want to clean up first.

Let’s start with the piece that gained him great notoriety, not only in the U.S, but globally. It is titled “The Goldberg Variations.” The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, is a musical composition for keyboard by Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of an Aria and thirty variations. First published in 1741, it is named after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who may have been the first performer of the work.

Gould recorded this piece in 1955 and was immediately signed to a recording contract with Columbia Records in New York City. The version below is a shortened version that does not contain all thirty variations, for the sake of brevity.

00:00:00 – Aria
00:01:47 – Variatio 3 a 1 Clav. Canone all’Unisuono
00:02:38 – Variatio 6 a 1 Clav. Canone alla Seconda
00:03:07 – Variatio 9 a 1 Clav. Canone alla Terza
00:03:52 – Variatio 12. Canone alla Quarta
00:04:50 – Variatio 15 a 1 Clav. Canone alla Quinta in moto contrario.

Andante
00:06:45 – Varatio 18 a 1 Clav. Canone alla Sesta
00:07:22 – Variatio 21. Canone alla Settima
00:08:34 – Variatio 24 a 1 Clav. Canone all’Ottava
00:09:36 – Variatio 27 a 2 Clav. Canone alla Nona
00:10:30 – Glenn Gould on the Quodlibet
00:11:08 – Variatio 30 a 1 Clav. Quodlibet

Glenn Gould – On the Record

I’ll follow that up with a short documentary titled: “Glenn Gould – On The Record.” This short documentary follows Glenn Gould to New York City. There, we see the renowned Canadian concert pianist kidding the cab driver, bantering with sound engineers at Columbia Records, and then, alone with the piano, fastidiously recording Bach’s Italian Concerto.

This documentary is especially interesting as it features the late, great Howard Scott, the balding musical director who became a good friend of Gould.

In 1946, Mr. Scott was 26 and just discharged from the Army when he got a job at Columbia Masterworks, the label’s classical division. He was soon assigned to Columbia’s top-secret project: developing a long-playing record to replace the 78 rpm disc, which could hold only about four minutes of music on each brittle shellac side.

The project had begun in 1940 and was nearing completion. But its engineers needed someone with musical training — particularly the ability to read orchestral scores — to help transfer recordings from 78s to the new discs, which played at 33 rpm, could hold about 22 minutes a side and were made of more durable vinyl.

Howard Hillison Scott fit the bill.

Born in Bridgeport, Conn., on May 31, 1920, he graduated from the Eastman School of Music in 1941 and had just begun graduate piano studies at Juilliard when he was drafted the next year. Back in civilian life in July 1946, he was hired by Columbia as a trainee.

In the days before magnetic tape came into wide use, the process of transferring music to the new discs (soon to be known as LPs) was complex. Long pieces of music, split among multiple 78 rpm records, needed to be stitched together on the new discs without interruption.

To do that, Mr. Scott and his colleagues lined up overlapping segments of music on 78s, and — with Mr. Scott snapping his finger in coordination — switched the audio signal at just the right moment from one turntable to the other. As the industry began to use magnetic tape, beginning in the late 1940s, such work was no longer necessary.

As a staff producer at Columbia, Mr. Scott worked on hundreds of recordings by most of the major US orchestras, including those of Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati in addition to the New York Philharmonic. He had a particularly close association with Gould, beginning with his historic recording of Bach’s ‘‘Goldberg’’ Variations in 1955.

Glenn Gould – Off the Record

We’ll finish this out with the sister documentary titled: “Glenn Gould – Off The Record.” In this short documentary, Canadian concert pianist Glenn Gould enjoys a respite at his lakeside cottage. This is an aspect of Gould previously known only to the collie pacing beside him through the woods, the fishermen resting their oars to hear his piano, and fellow musicians like Franz Kraemer, with whom Gould talks of composition.

Last week we played a shorter version off this which covered the first ten minutes of this piece. If you wish to not play it again, then skip to the ten minute mark and enjoy the last nineteen minutes. Together, these two mini-documentaries provide a brief glimpse into the life and music of Glenn Gould.

This concludes this week’s dose of Gould and Bach. I hope you found interest in, and enjoyed this week’s work. We will return to Mr. Gould featuring his Mozart work.


Rimsky-Korsakov Russian Easter Festival Overture, Op. 36 Gergiev

Mariinsky orchestra, Gergiev

Ulianovsk, Russia

10/04/07

The Classic Music Mafia – Adding some class to this joint one Sunday at a time.

Heaven help us…

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