Night After Night

Parallel lines.

Stephen Hough at Carnegie Hall
The New York Times, February 14, 2009

Did you know that English pianist, painter, poet and almost-priest Stephen Hough has been blogging for London newspaper The Telegraph since December? Jeremy Denk most likely did; for the rest of us, there's no time like the present to catch up.

The vastness of space.

The Emerson String Quartet at Carnegie Hall
The New York Times, February 11. 2009

As promised earlier this evening. Much, much earlier.

Faulty wiring.

André Emelianoff at Merkin Concert Hall
The New York Times, February 7, 2009

Here's an example of a really juicy concert program, thoughtfully conceived and played with real spirit, that got bogged down by extramusical gremlins. With luck, the glitches that afflicted the first half of this program will have been banished when Mr. Emelianoff continues his series with two further Merkin concerts on March 14 and May 6. (Someone should get that latter concert added to the Merkin website, too.)

Nightclubbing.

Anne Akiko Meyers at (Le) Poisson Rouge
The New York Times, February 5, 2009

There's a lot more to successfully bringing classical music into a club setting than just showing up and getting down to work. Here's someone who got everything right: not just what she chose to play, but how she presented the music, and how she connected with her audience. (It probably didn't hurt that she seemed to have a lot of friends on hand.)

Triple play.

Jubilee Trio at Bargemusic, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

and

Felix Hell at the Church of the Transfiguration
The New York Times, February 3, 2009

Three distinguished visitors from Boston mix art songs, spirituals and maverick piano works; Michael Christie conducts innovative Latin American works, with decidedly mixed results; and a young German organ prodigy launches an all-Mendelssohn series. (Learning to write more authoritatively about organs and their repertoire is high up on my to-do list.)

Pumping up The Volume.

The header above isn't a reference to my sniffy review of a famous string quartet in an even more famous concert hall, which ran in The New York Times today. That'll be posted later tonight. Probably.

No, what I'm doing here is publicizing an irony: Your humble host, who can barely manage to update his very own personal blog just lately, is here to announce today's launch of The Volume, a New York music blog brought to you by Time Out New York. Effectively we've taken the music-related content that would previously have gone up on the all-purpose TONY Blog, and given it a ravenously hungry little playpen all its own.

It seems safe to predict that the bulk of the new blog's content will be pop-related, given that I'm only one-fifth of the magazine's music staff. But content germane to the classical-music sphere will definitely appear as often as I can manage—stop snickering!—and I'll be sure to share it here when it does.

Meanwhile, I've added The Volume to the small "Library" blogroll (over to the left) for convenient access. My first contribution is a post about "Scorpion," a new song by the amazing New York indie rapper Charles Hamilton, which I covered to launch a running song-of-the-day feature called "Now Playing." If you'd like to read the post, go here; if you're interested in hearing the song, see below. (The NSFW language is pretty minimal, but be forewarned.) And if you'd like to snag a copy of the song for yourself, it's here.

Felix navidad.

"Mendelssohn Favorites Offer Precision, Grace and Grit"
The New York Times, January 30, 2009.

Yes, I'm playing catch-up again. sigh.

As a reader, I always enjoyed those occasions when a composer's birthday, or some other celebration, brought one of those record-roundup features in The New York Times, for which each of the critics listed his or her favorite related CDs. As a Times contributor, I've found it just as much fun to take part, though selecting just five (or fewer) discs to represent a composer or style is grueling.

Oddly, though, in the case of Mendelssohn it was very, very easy to pick five recordings; it was winnowing it down to four that proved tricky. Here's what I included, with handy e-tail links provided:

VIOLIN CONCERTO IN E MINOR Nathan Milstein, violinist; New York Philharmonic, conducted by Bruno Walter (with other concertos, other performers; Sony Classical 64459, MP3 download; Naxos 8.110977, CD).
(Sony MP3, via Amazon; Naxos CD, via Amazon UK, not available in the U.S. and possibly newly deleted)

SYMPHONY NO. 3, ‘A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM’ OVERTURE AND INCIDENTAL MUSIC Jennifer Vyvyan and Marion Lowe, sopranos; Female Chorus of the Royal Opera House; London Symphony, conducted by Peter Maag (Decca 466 990-2; CD).
(ArkivMusic, Barnes & Noble)

SYMPHONY NO. 5 Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Lorin Maazel (with Franck’s Symphony played by the Berlin Radio Symphony; Deutsche Grammophon 449 720-2; CD).
(ArkivMusic, Barnes & Noble)

PIANO TRIOS NOS. 1, 2 Trio Wanderer (Harmonia Mundi France HMC 901961; CD).
(ArkivMusic, Barnes & Noble)

The two symphony recordings were no-brainers; those are among my favorite orchestral discs, period. A CD of the two piano trios was also vital, and Wanderer had the best mix of grace and gusto far as I was concerned. Picking a single recording of the violin concerto was the most daunting prospect; the four versions I mentioned parenthetically (Kreisler, Campoli, Hahn and Jansen) were the ones that hung me up most, as did the fabulous David Oistrakh recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. But then I came back around to Milstein's version with Walter, and I knew I was finished.

Had there been a fifth slot, as has been the case most times we've run these surveys, I'd likely have awarded it to Giuseppe Sinopoli's Deutsche Grammophon recording of the Symphony No. 4 ("Italian"). But on revisiting that CD, and putting it head-to-head with Maazel's "Reformation," I realized that not only was the latter more compelling, but that the real reason I've cherished that Sinopoli disc is its completely absorbing version of Schubert's Symphony No. 8.

An enjoyable exercise, overall—though truth be told, I've have enjoyed it more had my fingers not detached from my higher cognitive functions for a brief second, causing me to refer to a "Spring" symphony when I quite obviously meant the "Scottish" symphony, about which I'd just written almost an entire paragraph directly above. To clarify a further point, the version of the Milstein/Walter recording that can be downloaded for less than $3 at Amazon is not a CD, but just the recording of the concerto; the other half of that disc is the Beethoven concerto with Joseph Szigeti, and the entire "CD" will run you just under $6.