The thirteenth musical thrill: what are you listening to?

[Jason]

Too many notes! - The Musical King

[Jason]

[Jason]

[Jason]

RIP headphone users

[Jason]

[trdsf]

Wow. Virgil Fox is quite the entertainer. Here is Don Muro playing the same piece on a synthesiser. He permits only his feet to dance, but boy, do they ever dance.

I quite like synthesisers. Pity that whoever owns the copyright to the stuff Wendy Carlos came up with on the Moog is so militant about it. (Not that I miss out. I think I have all her Bach recordings on CD, and Switched on Bach from when she was still known as Walter on vinyl as well.) It would be nice to make her work better known, and they'd probably generate more sales. I bought quite a few CDs after listening to the publisher's offerings on Youtube.

I agree, and Wendy's keyboard skills are amazing. I keep her versions of the Brandenburg Concertos on my phone for calming listening.

Cameron Carpenter is quite showy too. Did you notice how he actually plays on three keyboards simultaneously at on stage? His thumb casually drops down one while the other four fingers play on the keyboard above and his other hand on the keyboard below. He likes to have fun as well. Here he is clowning around with children.

Carpenter is doing his level best to do for the organ what Tiger Woods did for golf -- make it cool. There's a lot of debate about the "liberties" he takes with some of the canon, but you know, music can evolve.

As for Glenn Gould, I have a recording where the sound engineer didn't bother trying to avoid catching Gould's "sing"along. You can hear it a bit on this piece, which was a kind of mini-lecture in collaboration with Leonard Bernstein.

They played with that in the animated film The Triplets of Belleville:

Youtube is becoming quite a treasure trove of stuff like this. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I'm getting the impression that an increasing number of copyright owners are realising that they actually benefit from being less anally retentive about their rights. Not just with music either. Entire series of documentaries have become available, some of them years after they were first broadcast.

By the way, if you knock off the "s" in the "https" of the Youtube link, it shows up ready to just click on to make the clip play.

Ah, that's why it wasn't working. Too bad I can't go back and edit it now. Thanks!

And yes, I agree, YouTube is becoming quite the gold mine for

[Hermit]

Carpenter is doing his level best to do for the organ what Tiger Woods did for golf -- make it cool. There's a lot of debate about the "liberties" he takes with some of the canon, but you know, music can evolve.

Can? Did I read this right? Can? I love people taking liberties, and I think Back, among other composers, actually demands it. His notations, or rather the lack of them, certainly do, and wasn't he the champion of improvisation? I love the story of the duel that never happened because Louis Marchand was so certain he could not even hope to win that he fled Dresden before "harpsichord at ten bars" even began.

Bach was not the only musician to fight via improvisations. Other well known ones took place between Andrea Gabrieli and Claudio Merulo, G. Friedrich Händel and Domenico Scarlatti, Muzio Clementi and W. A. Mozart and Beethoven had it out with Joseph Wölfl, Josef Gelinek and Daniel Steibelt. Speaking of Beethoven, he actually instructed the soloist to insert his own cadenzas into his violin concerto. These days Fritz Kreisler's effort has become so popular that it is no longer an improv. Someone scored it and half today's performances seem to be a note for note repeat of Kreisler's impromptu.

So, yeah, liberties, schnibberties. They are necessary, and I love them. Which I have more than one recording of each of the pieces I like listening to the most. I just pick one or another, depending my mood at the time. For example, if I want the Brandenburgs with heaps of flash and sparkle and may the devil take "authenticity", I go for Claudio Abbado's version with the Orchestra Mozart. If I want to listen to a more laid back (some might say stodgy - I don't) version, I put on Gottfried von der Goltz directing the Freiburger Barockorchester. Both recordings are available on Youtube. In fact, I bought the CDs after listening to their mp3 versions over there first.

And now for something particularly playful. The last movement of the Coffee Cantata. I've linked to it three times before, but so what?



For those who are interested in the plot: Lieschen loves to drink coffee. Her dad, Schlendrian, disapproves on health grounds and thinks of a way to stop her. It turns out to be blackmail. He tells his daughter that he will not allow her to marry unless she gives up her addiction. Lieschen goes something like "Yeah. All right. Now go and round me up some suitors pronto." While Schlendrian is off on his merry way, Lieschen tells everyone in the audience, which had coincidentally gathered at the Café Zimmermann in Leipzig for the premiere of the half hour long cantata, that she has a cunning plan: She will secretly tell each suitor who is introduced to her that if he is to have any realistic hope of marrying her, he'll have to promise as part of the pre-nuptial agreement that he'll let her drink as much coffee as she likes. The title of the last movement is an analogy: You can't stop a cat from mousing.

[Jason]

[Sean Hayden]

[Sean Hayden]

[Sean Hayden]

[Brian Peacock]

[Sean Hayden]

[Brian Peacock]

[DRSB]