| Sort of a music blog | 
random trip report |
23 Mar 2023
I went (with Lauren) to Davies to hear Alexander Malofeev, a 21-year-old Russian pianist. The program:
Moonlight Sonata: In the first movement he did a bizarre timing thing where he played the bass note 10-100 ms after the treble note. The 2nd mvt was soggy. It needs to be crisp. The 3rd mvt was full of cute little ritardandi. To me, this movement doesn't have to be played super fast, but it has to have a relentless drive (except for the brief recitative).
This felt a bit like German music in a Russian style. Bad combo.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg. sonata #4: I didn't know the piece or the composer. It's a really great piece, very Russian, and Malofeev was suddenly in his element. His playing was clear and precise. The pieces is very contrapuntal, even in the beautiful slow 3rd mvt, and he brought out all the voices.
Malofeev likes to play soft. There were long stretches in the ppp to mp range, and he has total control in this range.
Here's Gilels playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF_2ByJHFWQ Malofeev played it differently, with lower and wider dynamics. His rendition was more exciting. The ending, BTW, is fabulous, almost like that of the Liszt sonata.
Rachmaninoff: sonata #2: After the Weinberg, this piece (which I didn't know well) sounded kind of watery and rambling. But I think he played it well.
BTW: in the 3rd mvt, does anyone else hear a lot of Ravel's La Valse? I'm not sure which one came first though.
Encores:
#1: Pas de Deux from Nutcracker, virtuosic arrangement. Good but schmatlzy. Brian would have loved it!
#2: Precipitato from Prok 7th sonata. This was the high point for me. He played it in a unique way where about 80% of the notes were soft - mp or less - and the other 20% stuck WAY out. The running octaves in particular were very subdued. He maintained this even in the chaotic ending. It was fabulous. The crowd went wild.
#3: I didn't recognize. Chopin-like, but presumably Russian.
As is often the case when hearing really good pianists, the first thing I notice is their dynamic palette: it's really wide, and they use all of it, focusing on the lower end.
Malofeev's technique was bimodal. Mostly it was conventional, but every now and then he'd switch to high wrists and straight/stiff fingers.
Davies is not a great place to hear piano music. In the loge, the sound is muddy and a bit weak.
22 Mar 2023
Songs by Mompou: Variations. A whole set of them.
13 Mar 2023
In case I forget, the sort-of-weird harpsichord piece by Carlo Gesualdo is is here and a recording is here.
Maryse points out another unusual piece: Les Elemens by Rebel.
12 Mar 2023
The Audium is a performance space for recorded audio in SF. It's a circular room with 176 speakers, mostly overhead, with some woofers in the floor. It's pretty much anechoic, and can do really good spatialization. The room is completely darkened during performances.
It was created by Stan Shaff in the 1960s. Gareth wrote an article about it: http://www.audium.org/omhpp.cgi?src=article.cmj.hpp
I went there ~20 years and talked at length with Stan Shaff. At that point he'd been doing the same piece for a while: musique concrete, mostly voices and everyday sounds evocative of childhood. I thought it was absolutely great, and powerful. The spatialization made me feel like the sound sphere was my brain, and the sounds were like memories and thoughts bouncing around inside it.
Last night I went with Maryse. It's moved and is being run by Stan's son Dave, and now features (occasionally) rotating pieces by various composers instead of always the same piece. In this case there were 3 pieces, by Sharmi Basu, Ronald Peabody, and Alex Abalos.
The pieces had some nice moments - especially the 3rd, which had stretches of immersive Gamelan-like bell sounds - but overall I was underwhelmed. Maybe it's a generational thing; the composers were 30-ish. The pieces were loud (I put in earplugs) and bass-heavy (which kind of defeats the purpose of spatialization). They used spatialization but not in a central way. They were mostly synthesized audio, with a bit of recorded sound, mostly speech. The aesthetic was Burning Man, chill room, a little Hearts of Space.
Anyway - I'm glad the Audium (or Odium, as Maryse pronounces it) survives,and is a living thing rather than a museum.The current pieces don't fulfil its potential, but maybe future ones will.
13 Nov 2022
Rich mentioned Alexandre Tansman, a 20th-century Polish composer who moved to France and eventually the U.S. He wrote tonal music incorporating lots of global influences. Here's a collection of short piano pieces by Tansman.
7 Oct 2022
3 July 2022
Yunchan Lim of Korea won the 2022 Cliburn competition. Maryse thinks he's fantastic. Here he plays Rach 3. And Liszt's transcendental etudes (all of them).
14 June 2022
Obscure composer du jour: Melanie Bonis.
29 May 2022
A list of (someone's idea of) the 100 hardest piano pieces, with recordings of parts of each one. Good selection and commentary.
23 May 2022
Berg sent me links to two videos about Rosina Lhevinne and John Browning.
14 April 2022
Arrangements of 11 folk songs by Luciano Berio, sung here by Cathy Berberian.
15 March 2022
David Love pointed out Five lectures on the acoustics of the piano.
4 March 2022
The memorial concert for Nina Lelchuk, at which Berg performed.
25 Feb 2022
Berg points out a
A video by David Bruce
about the Ondes Martenot.
Seth asked "why are there no Mozarts today"
and there has been discussion of this.
Dan C. pointed out that
Alma Deutscher
has been compared (by Stephen Fry) to Mozart (umm, no.).
He posited that the "sweeping emotional gesture" aesthetic
has been replaced by more abstract and meditative aims, e.g.
John Luther Adams.
(Although John Williams kind of belies this).
There was some discussion of why current composers
feel obligated to create new styles,
rather than composing in existing styles (as Rich does to some extent).
Lily pointed out videos by Nahre Sol about composing in the styles of
Schumann
and
Rachmaninoff.
Rich pointed out Tonebase,
a subscription-based source of instructional videos for advanced pianists.
Some of their videos are on YouTube:
e.g.
Ohlsson
and Vardi.
Just intonation
enters the mainstream.
A whole bunch of
radio programs about music by Peter Schickele.
Dave Weinberg pointed out
a movie
about Leon Fleisher.
Self-descriptive songs:
Title of the Song,
The Music Theory Song Intervals Roasting,
and The Song that Goes Like This from Spamalot.
Lily sent around a link to
Speaking Piano
by Peter Ablinger of Austria.
I heard Eliot Fisk (guitar) in SF last night.
He's good.
But David Russell
is amazing.
More jazzed-up classical music by the Jacques Loussier trio:
Bach
(check out starting here
and
Satie.
See YouTube for more.
I love this video
in which Rick Beato talks about his first exposure to Joe Pass
(the great jazz guitarist).
I put my piano arrangement of Bach's Fantasia in c BWV 562
on IMSLP.
Monica points out that Aaron Andrew Hunt put his
24 Preludes and Fugues on IMSLP.
Dan C. pointed out
this article on the use of AI to
write a symphony based on Beethoven's notes for his (unwritten) 10th.
1) OK, it sounds Beethoven-ish in a crude way;
2) I suspect humans had a larger role than AI in the creation of this;
3) this makes me feel queasy; AI is a slippery slope.
Dave W. pointed out
some very impressive double-note technique from
Jeffrey Biegel.
Maryse and I saw "Fidelio" at the SF Opera.
Actually just the first act; it didn't seem that great.
We heard the UCBSO a couple of nights ago,
playing among other things the Ravel piano concerto.
Maryse reports that a part of the 1st mvt is inspired by
the musical saw.
The theme from Schumann's Ghost Variations is partly from his earlier
violin concerto.
Schumann didn't realize this; he thought that the theme had been dictated
to him by the ghost of Franz Schubert.
Lily pointed out:
Avery Gagliano
plays in the current Chopin competition.
She's really good!
Roomful of Teeth
performs Carline Shaw's Partita for 8 voices (from Chelsea).
Daniel Abreu, who plays at BAMC occasionally,
has a nice YouTube page
with some of his recordings.
Jerry Kuderna's performance of
Pitter Patter
by Monica. Her notes:
"I wrote Pitter Patter for my friend Jerry Kuderna,
who premiered it at an event called the Illustrated Pianist
at Old First Church in San Francisco on September 11, 2021.
The format of the event, produced by Nicole Brancato with
visual designer Cory Todd, is pieces inspired by Ray Bradbury’s
short story collection The Illustrated Man.
The short story I chose to write on is The Long Rain,
which takes place on the planet Venus.
I wrote the piece to accompany an invented segment from a BBC documentary
featuring Sir David Attenborough.
In the segment, Attenborough narrates “Here,
we see a group of humans exploring the surface of the planet Venus.
Beset by continual rain and hostile wildlife,
this intrepid group must seek the shelter of a Sun Dome, or perish.
They wear helmets to protect themselves against harshly acidic rainfall.
Without the shelter of the Sun Dome, the incessant pitter patter of the rain
against their helmets leads to eventual insanity.
The incessant pitter patter of the rain.
The incessant pitter patter of the rain.
The incessant pitter patter of the rain.”
This piece draws inspiration from several sources:
the first is an audio recording of my friend Maryse Carlin’s kitchen sink,
the second is the children’s tune Itsy Bitsy Spider
(which in the fast movement also appears as slight reworking of
a Turkish folk dance arranged by Cemal Reşit Rey),
and rather cryptic quotation from the first movement of
Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe."
Dave Weinberg pointed out
a recording by Kapustin
of one of his concert etudes op 40.
Hamelin also recorded them.
... as well as this recording
of a de Scholozer etude by Eileen Joyce, from the 30s,
in a sort of machine-gun stacatto style.
Hamelin
played the same piece in a much lusher way.
He also recommends the Dohnanyi piano etudes.
Rich pointed out this
paraphrase of a
Brazilian song by Kapustin.
Maryse and I are kind of exhausted by listening to Kapustin.
An article on numerology in Bach and related stuff.
Another article about Bach, from Psyche.
Last Saturday's BAMC concert,
featuring Monica's killer performance of Ice Calf.
Chelsea reminded me of
Jacob Collier,
a vocal/composer phenom who has figured out optimal microtonal modulations.
He's playing in SF next year at the Warfield;
when Chelsea learned of this she jumped on her phone and bought tix.
Bruno Monsaingeon
has made a number of documentaries about musicians:
A couple of recent YouTube discoveries:
Every now and then I recall a lecture/demo I heard back in the
late 80s (?) at the SF conservatory (at their old location in the Sunset)
that paralleled the Boulez piano sonata #1 (?) and the fugue
from the Hammerklavier.
And unforgettable event, with only a handful of people in attendance.
Anyway, lest I forget, the pianist was
Pierre-Laurent Aimard; Maryse knows him.
A Hubble image
as musical score.
I proposed instead having 1 sine wave per galaxy
and combining them.
See also
Etudes Australes by John Cage.
Related:
Vi Hart sings
the digits of pi.
The recording of the July 2021 BAMC is
here.
Essa-Matti played an interesting piece by Prokofiev.
The recording of the June 2021 BAMC (featuring the Tenaya Guitar Duo)
is here.
The Cantata Collective
is an SF group that performs Bach cantatas.
Thom Blum interviewed on the Watt from Pedro show.
An article the NY Times
discussed Dan Tepfer,
a jazz pianist who improvises in the style of Bach.
or example, he performed
Goldberg with each variation followed by a corresponding improv.
Maryse points out an earlier
jazz/improv version of Goldberg
by Jacques Loussier, with bass/drums.
Recording of the recent BAMC,
featuring a remarkable semi-improv by Rich
that includes various water-themed pieces and Roundabout by Yes.
Two remarkable singers:
Disturbed: Sounds of Silence
(from Lily) and
Dimash Qudaiberg
(from Monica).
Recording of the last BAMC,
including Hallelujah Junction and Rich's fabulous summary improv.
Ellie's recent Greek Chamber Music concert is
here.
Chelsea told me about a
piano-moving robot
that looks pretty cool.
Silvia Goes performs Tico Tico
at the Berkeley Choro festival.
Robert points out that
Marc-Andre Hamelin
also did an arrangement.
Rich pointed out the interesting
Indianishe Fantasie
by Ferrucio Busoni.
Apparently the "Indian" refers to American Indians,
though I'm not sure I hear this.
Three pieces
for flute and piano by Jehan Alain.
Eric pointed out the passing of synthesizer pioneer
Malcolm Cecil,
who worked with Stevie Wonder.
On the theme of little-known composers,
Rich pointed out "Canada's Mozart" Andre Mathieu (1929-1968).
His Prelude #5.
Another great music group yesterday.
Esa-Matti played
The First Snow by Hannikainen;
Molly played Theme and variations by Lili Boulanger.
Maryse pointed out Jehan Alain, another modern French composer who died young.
Maryse made a recording of water dripping rhythmically into a pan.
Monica, it turns out, had made a piece involving Nalgene bottle, a pistachio jar, and some ceramic bowls.
A great video about Steely Dan.
Paolo played the Bach D minor toccatta and fugue at
yesterday's BAMC,
and said that a) there's doubt that Bach wrote it, and b) it might
have been written for solo violin rather than organ.
The latter seemed absurd to me,
but there is in fact a wonderful
performance by Sergei Krylov
that makes it seem entirely possible.
And here's a version
for solo guitar and the score of the transcription.
I'm "in like" with Fugue in C HWV 610 by Handel.
There are various recordings at all sorts of tempi;
my favorite is this one
but I think I can play it better.
UPDATE: I recorded it.
A great rendition of Bach's Fugue in A BWV 949.
The Cafe Zimmermann
in Leipzig hosted the premieres of many of Bach's works.
Another global group improv, this one on Georgia.
Chelsea Wong finally uploaded her excellent
performance of the Bach Chaconne.
Check out After Bach by Brad Mehldau.
Bach's Prelude in G# min, vol 2,
performed by the Swingle Singers.
I've been playing the Maple Leaf Rag recently.
Here's a
fancier version by Stephanie Trick.
And also The Entertainer,
and some 4-hands blues.
Dave Weinberg points out a couple of items from the Sorabjiverse:
Also, Rich Kraft points out pieces from the
Harriet Cohen International Music Award:
A guy plays the Moonlight Sonata but the bass is a bar late and the melody is two bars late.
Sounds pretty good!
Another guy combines
every recording of Gymnopedie 1.
Also sounds pretty good.
A tribute to Lalo Schifrin:
various people
jamming on the Mission Impossible theme.
Lily pointed out
Nocturn no. 4 op 38
by
Lowell Liebermann,
a modern American composer.
Also check out his Gargoyles.
Zach pointed out that the Goldberg Variations have also been played
on the accordion.
I like this better than the harp.
And here it is for
string trio.
Some guy plays the Goldberg variations on harp. Pass.
Karen Nelson recommended
Christopher O'Brien plays Radiohead.
Monica's fave Radiohead pianist is
Brad Mehldau.
Lily posted
this video by Nahre Sol
about a practice technique where
you make little compositions out of the hard parts:
(Note: Sol has a whole series of videos about practice techniques).
Rich Kraft wrote:
"Yup, this is an idea I picked up from more than 1 teacher I had. The way one of them put it: "Czernification" -- create the exercise that Czerny might compose (and probably did, anyway :-) ) to drill the given technical challenge. Also, "go both under and above" -- 1) Simplify the problem (e.g. decrease a jump to a much smaller one) into one you've already mastered, then 2) gradually increase the difficulty, while keeping / replicating all the *physucal sensations* of the mastered version (emphasis on sensations and NOT necessarily something obvious like hand geometry / positioning, etc) ; until 3) you not only expand to the original objective, but even go *further* that the original. This makes the original objective feel "easy" and builds great confidence. I actually brought this up when I had that talk a while back :-) "
Nikolai Kapustin has died; bummer.
What a fountain of beauty and joy.
If you haven't heard him,
try this.
Some composers mentioned by Maryse:
Justin pointed out that Vikingur Olafson released a
CD with music by Debussy and Rameau.
Other stuff by him:
Bach organ
Pavane in F# minor by Louis Couperin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX2TI8nzBvI
This is a great performance largely because of the ornamentation.
Monica played an amazing piece,
The Battle of Manassas,
by Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins.
I found this
recording of Berio's "Wasserklavier" by Helene Grimaud.
She uses the same "polyphonic time perturbation" technique
as Chiara Bertoglio in Babylon (see below).
With this, the piece becomes contrapuntal rather than chordal.
Amazing.
I stumbled on Six Encores
by Luciano Berio.
They're fantastic; I'm working on a couple of them.
I found the score, which is here.
Two people recently wrote Masters theses about the work:
one from Mills College
and one from
Ohio State.
Lily pointed out this
recording of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata by Sokolov.
We're used to hearing this sound like a horse race,
So Sokolov's rendition is shocking: the tempo is slower,
and there's all sorts of articulation.
But I looked at the score, and Dang! that's exactly what Beethoven wrote.
But it's hard to play this way - how do you finger the LH, 5/5 or 5/4 or what?
In college I wrote a paper about how to play this piece,
and my paper - I now realize - was all wrong.
George Barth observed this at the time.
Anyway, this reinforces my view that Sokolov is the GOAT.
This article
suggests that music is even more a social activity
than you might think.
Monica played a piece on clavichord,
For Rico
by Friedrich Gulda.
It's completely wild, and sounds like a rock solo by the Doors at one point.
The Ligeti link I sent around a while back is from
an opera
which is by turns tedious, irritating, and hilarious; I left at intermission.
But
Peter Sellars really likes it.
We've been discussing pieces that can be played over high-latency
connections.
Monica mentioned:
John Cage,
Winter Music for 1-20 pianos
Ron Kuivila mentioned:
Morton Feldman wrote a whole series of asychronous pieces:
Piece for 4 Pianos (1957)
I heard on the radio
Nardis,
a wild piece by Miles Davis:
György Kurtáis billed as the greatest living Hungarian composer.
I don't know about that, but he transcribed Bach organ music
so that piqued my interest.
Here
he's playing with his wife on a weird piano with a hyper-soft pedal:
Here's
a kind of weird piece
(which I'd enjoy playing with any of you):
Here's
the original for organ
... which initially struck me as boring, but actually is not.
Pictures at an Exhibition on guitar
I'm inspired by the fearlessness and ferocity of his performance,
as well as the dedication and skill evident in the transcription,
which he did at the age of 19.
Aaron Andrew Hunt wrote
24 preludes and fugues
Monica knows him and has played many of these.
A wonderful and often hilarious interview with Poulenc
in which he talks about Ricardo Vines among others.
A friend told me that a pianist named David Korevaar had
discovered a previously unknown set of piano pieces
(25 Preludes) by Liugi Perrachio, and recorded them.
I looked for these on YouTube and didn't find them
(I now have the CD).
But I did find some Bach organ transcriptions by Perrachio.
Allein Gott...
(old recording, amazing) and
An Wasserflussen Babylon
(great performance by
Chiara Bertoglio).
These scores weren't on IMSLP.
So I found Bertoglio's email address and wrote her.
To my delight she replied and sent me a PDF of the score!
I learned Babylon and later performed it at the music group.
Her performance of Babylon fascinates me.
Nothing is simultaneous.
Everything is "rolled", but not necessarily bottom to top.
The times of notes are perturbed in a way that helps separate the voices.
Is there a name for this technique?
How about "polyphonic time perturbation"?
Anyway, this got me thinking about increasing the separation of
contrapuntal voices, and I had
some ideas about spatialization.
Rich Kraft turned me on to Reynaldo Hahn, yet another obscure composer
of the Ravel/Debussy era.
The following are interesting:
Le ruban dénoué --- The Untied Ribbon, 12 Waltzes for 2 Pianos and a Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ncPqQpwWRc
One of a set of 53 Poems in his collection
Mysteries of the Macabre
by Ligeti:
This is the wildly entertaining!!
I'm not sure what the score says about staging.
Here's
another performance
in which the singer doesn't conduct,
but does wield a vacuum cleaner:
And
another one,
with some kind of schoolgirl outfit:
The first half was Chelsea, playing
These were all very good, though Chelsea struggled a bit with the piano,
a Bechstein with a lot of character and resonance, but non-uniform.
Adjacent notes had different characters. It was a cast of 88.
The soft pedal made it more uniform; Chelsea used that in the Ravel
quite a bit.
The 2nd half was Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time",
for which she had recruited Evan Kahn on cello
and two other excellent players.
I heard this piece for the first time last year at Old First Church,
with biblical texts projected on a screen behind the players,
and that left me cold.
But this performance, and the environment, were much different,
and I found it very enjoyable and moving,
especially the piano/cello duet and the final piano/violin duet.
It's long (50 min) - as Chelsea said, it stretches time so as to
suggest the cessation of time - but I was so engrossed that
it didn't seem long at all.
I've been obsessing about this obscure piece (in particular the Prelude)
which Bach wrote for lute, or harpsichord, or
a lute/harpsichord hybrid called a "Lautenwerck".
Everyone plays it differently; a sampling:
Guitar:
Piano:
Lautenwerck:
20 Feb 2022
13 Feb 2022
8 Feb 2022
30 Dec 2021
8 Dec 2021
3 Dec 2021
30 Nov 2021
8 Nov 2021
5 Nov 2021
10/29/2021
10/28/2021
10/27/2021
10/20/2021
10/13/2021
10/12/2021
10/8/2021
9/28/2021
9/20/2021
9/20/2021
9/16/2021
9/13/2021
9/10/2021
8/25/2021
8/21/2021
8/19/2021
8/18/2021
8/12/2021
8/3/2021
7/20/2021
7/13/2021
6/21/2021
5/18/2021
5/17/2021
4/30/2021
4/28/2021
4/25/2021
4/14/2021
4/10/2021
4/10/2021
4/3/2021
3/31/2021
3/21/2021
2/15/2021
2/11/2021
2/10/2021
1/18/2021
12/28/2020
12/25/2020
12/10/2020
11/29/2020
11/15/2020
11/5/2020
11/5/2020
11/3/2020
10/3/2020
9/17/2020
8/23/2020
8/16/2020
8/1/2020
7/16/2020
7/3/2020
7/2/2020
7/1/2020
6/29/2020
6/20/2020
6/4/2020
5/28/2020
5/27/2020
This guy
plays the Goldberg theme - heavily nuanced - and the computer inverts it.
Do the inverted nuances have the same effect?
5/26/2020
5/21/2020
5/17/2020
5/17/2020
5/8/2020
A Luciano Chessa piece for 5 pianos (all on the same part, attached, no recording)
Morton Feldman, 5 pianos(!)
Rzewski,
Les Moutons de Panurge
- "If you get lost, stay lost!"
Long Night by Kyle Gann
Durations 1, for alto flute, piano, violin, and cello (1960)
Durations 2, for cello and piano (1960)
Durations 3, for violin, tuba, and piano (1961)
Durations 4, for vibraphone, violin, and cello (1961)
Durations 5, for horn, vibraphone, harp, piano or celesta, violin, and cello (1961)
5/8/2020
5/2/2020
4/27/2020
4/27/2020
4/1/2020
3/20/2020
3/12/2020
3/12/2020
1/6/2020
I went to Chelsea Wong's Groupmuse at Lukas' house in SF.
- the Schubert Impromptu op 90 #1 (the martial-sounding one).
- Ravel, Tombeau (first 4 mvts)
- 2 of the Crumb Macrocosmos
12/29/2019
this
(some botches, but I like it)
this (Bream, lute; a bit too fast?)
this (tarted-up arrangement by Egon Petri)
this (too fast)
this (ornaments galore!)