Ah, my blog has fallen silent lately. Sorry to all of you who hang on my every word. Other things have come up that are taking up my free time – Christmas shopping, trip-planning, and digging out of this:
Also, listening to new music. To be more precise, listening to old music that is new to me. Is there any really new music worth listening to? My experience over the past twenty years is that while there might be, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack and not worth the effort. So, as Chris Berman says when someone hits a long fly ball, back, back, back I go.
This week I’ve listened to Mendelssohn’s overtures to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hebrides, his E-Minor Violin Concerto, and Tchaikovsky’s D-Major Violin Concerto. The Concerto’s are on the same CD, performed by Isaac Stern with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. A lot of people I respect consider these the best versions. I don’t have the time nor the inclination nor the money to be comparing different performances of the same piece so I always do a little research before I buy new concert music to find the one that’s considered definitive, or at least one that is a very fine performance. One of the benefits of the CD revolution that occurred twenty or so years ago was that record companies went back into their vaults and re-mastered for CD some of the great LP performances of concert music that had been recorded between 1950 and 1980. It cost the companies little to do this so they often sold these re-masters at bargain prices. So quite often you can get a recording of a famous performance for less than a new, not as interesting, performance. So it pays to do the research. I still get excited when I see what is considered a great performance available on Amazon for $8.99.
At any rate, the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream is marvelous. Mendelssohn, who wrote the piece when he was seventeen, was concert music’s other great child prodigy, along with Mozart. (He also, like Mozart, died young, at 38.) He’s been dismissed by some over the years as a lightweight due to his adherence to the classical era forms developed and perfected by Haydn and Mozart, along with his music’s perceived lack of Sturm and Drang, a mark of authenticity in the Romantic period in which he operated. While there is certainly something Mozartian (is that a word?) about his music, I find him to be fully of the Romantic period. The overture to Hebrides, for instance, is unimaginable as a composition of the Classical era. If Mozart had been born fifty years later his music may have sounded something like Mendelssohn’s. I don’t mean to compare the two as equals as Mozart was perhaps the greatest composer of all time. I simply mean that I can hear the Mozart influence in Mendelssohn’s music, along with the Romantic period’s more personal and emotional expressiveness. Mendelssohn did not lack there. He simply had more control over the emotive aspects of his music than, say, Berlioz, perhaps because he operated within the forms that had been handed down to him from his predecessors, whereas Berlioz had only the thinnest knowledge of those forms – his music was all over the place.
I need to listen to the Violin Concertos again before I comment on them. All I can say now is that they are both lovely in parts, deeply emotive, and, of course, brilliantly played by Stern. I will do this sometime today as part of a new plan of mine. I want to, in 2010, learn one new piece of concert music per week. Not just listen, but learn. I have plenty of time to listen to music, during my daily commute, during my workouts, and at home, usually on the weekend mornings. I’ve begun a little early with the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky this week but my plan for 2010 is already in the works. For Christmas I’ve asked my darling wife for the following recordings:
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C-Minor
Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G-Minor
Elgar's Cello Concerto in E-Minor
Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat Major
I am not promising to blog about each piece but I hope to have something to say about them on occasion. I know you’re all dying to hear my views.
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