Night After Night

Playlist.

Various artists - Allston Pudding Localz Only Late Winter Mix MMXVI (Allston Pudding < Bandcamp)

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians - Synergy Vocals, Ensemble Ictus/Georges-Elie Octors (BelAir DVD: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker - Rain - Ballet de l'Opèra National de Paris)

Francis Poulenc - Figure humaine; Charles Koechlin - Les Bandar-log; György Kurtág - Petite Musique solennelle en hommage à Pierre Boulez 90; Maurice Ravel - Daphnis et Chloé - Rundfunkchor Berlin, Berlin Philharmonic/Simon Rattle (Digital Concert Hall livestream)

Karl Amadeus Hartmann - Concerto funebre - Alina Ibragimova, Boston Symphony Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski (WCRB live broadcast)

King Crimson - In the Wake of Poseidon (DGM)

Glassjaw - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence (Roadrunner)

Glassjaw - Worship and Tribute (Warner Bros.)

Glassjaw - Coloring Book EP (self-released < YouTube)

Glassjaw - "New White Extremity" (self-released < Soundcloud)

Grateful Dead - 30 Trips Around the Sun: 1. Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, July 3, 1966 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Coheed & Cambria - The Essential Coheed & Cambria (Columbia/Legacy)

Grateful Dead - 30 Trips Around the Sun: 30. Delta Center, Salt Lake City, UT, Feb. 21, 1995 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Franz Joseph Haydn - Symphony No. 6 in D ("Le matin"); Violin Concerto in G; Symphony No. 82 in C ("L'ours") - Aisslinn Nosky, Handel and Haydn Society/Harry Christophers (Coro)

Grateful Dead - 30 Trips Around the Sun: 29. Boston Garden, Boston, MA, Oct. 1, 1994 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Fred P - FACT mix 511: Fred P (FACT)

Floating Points - Elaenia (Luaka Bop)

Fatima Yamaha - A Girl Between Two Worlds (Magnetron)

The Black Madonna - "A Jealous Heart Never Rests"/"We Can Never Be Apart" (Argot)

The Black Madonna - "We Still Believe"/"We Still Believe" - The Revenge mix/"Say My Name" (Home Taping Is Killing Music)

The Black Madonna - "Alright This Morning"/"Alright This Morning" - Nicholas remix (Home Taping Is Killing Music)

Leisure Muffin - The Bunker New York 001 (The Bunker NYC)

King Crimson - Supper Club, New York, NY, Nov. 12, 2000 (DGMLive)

Jon Hopkins - Monsters (Domino)

Photek - The Hidden Camera (Science)

Photek - "Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu" (Science < YouTube)

KiNK - Cloud Generator EP (Running Back)

Henrik Schwarz - Instruments (Sony Classical)

Honey Dijon - "Check Check"/"Check Check" - Sascha Riot remix (Kinetika)

Honey Dijon & Tim K. featuring Jason Walker - "Burn"/"Burn" - Step Into the Knight Edit/"Burn" - Luke Solomon's Slow Burn Dub Edit (Classic Music Company)

Kansas - Monolith (Legacy)

Grateful Dead - 30 Trips Around the Sun: 2. Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA, Nov. 10, 1967 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Hector Berlioz - Requiem (Grande messe des Morts); Veni Creator; Tantum Ergo; Resurrexit; Nikolai Bortniansky (arr. Berlioz) - Pater Noster; Adoremus - John-Mark Ainsley, Chorus of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal/Charles Dutoit (Decca)

Live review: Coheed & Cambria, House of Blues, Feb. 22, 2016

Coheed & Cambria, by Ben Stas for the Boston Globe

"Coheed & Cambria, unmasked but still heroic at House of Blues"
Boston Globe, February 24, 2016

Long months after I spoke with Claudio Sanchez about The Color Before the Sun, the revealing newest album from prog-punk quartet Coheed & Cambria, for the Rolling Stone website last September, I enjoyed seeing the band play live at the House of Blues on Monday night. Last time I caught Coheed was on the second night of the "Neverender" run at Terminal 5 in New York City -- Oct. 23, 2008, the evening devoted to In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 -- when erstwhile Dillinger Escape Plan drummer Chris Pennie was part of the lineup. This, then, was my chance to see firsthand how much better Josh Eppard's lanky punk-rock clobber suits the band than did Pennie's drum-clinic finesse.

It was nice to hear fans singing along on favorite older songs, but for me the most powerful sequence of the show comprised four consecutive songs from the new album: the set-closing "Atlas," "The Audience," and "Peace to the Mountain," and, opening the encore, "You Got Spirit, Kid."

Also, Glassjaw: This is one of those instances where I'm forced to admit that I somehow completely missed a band of phenomenal import during its initial splash. Not sure why that would have been, but yeah, I wasn't dialed in when Daryl Palumbo & Co. were inventing "post-hardcore" or "screamo" or whatever, and then promptly leaving it behind for something deep, rich, and strange. Palumbo was on sharp form Monday, but the revelations were guitarist Justin Beck -- listening to his buzz, whine, shriek, and warble, I kept wondering why I hadn't heard as much about this guy as I had about Tom Morello -- and the ridiculously lithe yet powerful rhythm section of bassist Travis Sykes and drummer Chad Hasty. Seriously, one heck of a pleased to meet you.

Hung up at the office, I missed the opening band, Silver Snakes -- something I always regret. I did catch a fair chunk of the set by I the Mighty: a solid outing from a younger group that just seemed really, really happy to be there.

Coheed & Cambria setlist, Feb. 22:

Ghost
In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3
Blood Red Summer
Island
Everything Evil
Here to Mars
Key Entity Extraction V: Sentry the Defiant
A Favor House Atlantic
The Hard Sell
No World for Tomorrow
Atlas
The Audience
Peace to the Mountain

Encore:
You Got Spirit, Kid
The Running Free
The Welcome Home

(Trainspotter postscript: For the second show, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, "Devil in Jersey City" replaced "Everything Evil"; "Eraser" was slipped in between "A Favor House Atlantic" and "The Hard Sell"; and "Atlas" was omitted.)

Glassjaw, by Steve Smith on Instagram

Glassjaw setlist, Feb. 22:

Tip Your Bartender
Mu Empire
Pink Roses
Ape Dos Mil
The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports
Jesus Glue
New White Extremity
Shira
Two Tabs of Mescaline

(The set was unchanged the next night.)

Anthony Davis at 65.

Anthony Davis, the estimable American composer, pianist, and bandleader born in Paterson, NJ, on February 20, 1951, celebrates his 65th birthday today. Having declined an invitation to join the Grateful Dead as a 20-year-old Yale student in 1971 (an incident reported in 2011 by George Varga in the San Diego Union-Tribune), Davis initially came to wide renown as a jazz pianist - he's fabulous on the David Murray Octet albums Ming and Home - and for the string of groundbreaking recordings he made for the Gramavision label during the 1980s, on which he combined strains of European and African-American composition and jazz improvisation with pronounced gamelan influences.

These records - in particular Episteme, Hemispheres, Middle Passage, and Undine, plus the glorious I've Known Rivers, a trio with flutist James Newton and cellist Abdul Wadud - are long out of print, languishing along with everything else in the sorely missed Gramavision catalog. (When will someone rescue these lost treasures?!)

Also missing is the Gramavision recording of Davis's milestone first opera, X: the Life and Times of Malcolm X, which was developed by Philadelphia's American Music Theater Festival and had its premiere at New York City Opera in 1986. I suspect that the Koch International Classics recording of his third opera, Tania (1992), a surrealistic spin on the Patty Hearst abduction saga, is also out of print; Amistad (1997), his fourth opera, remains available on a New World recording featuring the Lyric Opera of Chicago led by Dennis Russell Davies. Davis's second opera, Under the Double Moon (1989), was not recorded, nor evidently were his subsequent operas, Wakonda's Dream (2007) and Lilith (2009).

Davis has continued to play in jazz settings, notably with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet, while also keeping up his concert-music and opera output. One terrific relatively recent piece for chamber orchestra and improvising soloist, You Have the Right to Remain Silent (2007), originally composed for Miller Theatre's Pocket Concertos series, is included alongside two older scores, Wayang V (1984) and Notes from the Underground (1988) on a warmly recommended CD by conductor Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

Davis's latest opera, Five, about the Central Park Five case, will have its premiere on Nov. 12, 2016, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, NJ, mounted by Trilogy: An Opera Company. Mark your calendar now.

 

Recommended reading:

"Jazz: A New Anthony Davis," John Rockwell, The New York Times, Oct. 19, 1981

"Anthony Davis - Beyond Jazz," Robert Palmer, The New York Times, Nov. 15, 1981

"For Composer Anthony Davis, X Marks the Premiere of What May Be the First Major Black Opera," Barbara Rowes, People, Oct. 6, 1986

"'Amistad,' a meditation on history and its consequences, fits an epic tale with a soaring libretto into an undersized two hours," Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 1997

"Fleishedik and Milchedik," Francis Davis, Village Voice, May 25, 2004

"Of Coyotes, Men and Tribal Memory" [review, Wakonda's Dream], Steve Smith, The New York Times, March 9, 2007

"At Spoleto Festival, Revisiting a Fateful Chapter in Slavery," Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, May 24, 2008

"Revised Amistad makes its mark," Wes Blomster, Opera Today, May 28, 2008

"By Any Means Necessary: An Activist's Life As Opera," Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, May 13, 2010

"'Lilith' a family affair; in this family you start young," George Varga, San Diego Union-Tribune, Nov. 30, 2009

"Anthony Davis at 60: Jazz, opera and beyond," George Varga, San Diego Union-Tribune, Feb. 13, 2011

 

Recommended listening:

Anthony Davis's most significant work is largely unavailable through authorized channels, out of print and invisible to streamers like Spotify. It's effectively impossible, then, to provide a serious representation of his achievement. Right now on Spotify you'll find under Davis's name just three recordings: Of Blues and Dreams, a 1978 Sackville session with Leroy Jenkins, Abdul Wadud, and Pheeroan ak Laff; the Lyric Opera of Chicago recording of Amistad; and Cerulean Landscape, a terrific duet with saxophonist and former Davis student Jason Robinson, issued by Clean Feed in 2010. A clutch of sideman recordings, including the two essential David Murray Octet albums Ming and Home, are also available via streaming services. One more must-hear you'll find on those services but really should acquire while it's around: the Boston Modern Orchestra Project CD featuring Notes from the Underground, You Have the Right to Remain Silent, and Wayang V.

 

Playlist.

Brian Archinal - self | space (self-released < Bandcamp)
>  Trevor Bača - Poème récursif; Jordan Munson - How Long Is the Coast of France?; Edmund Campion - A Different Kind of Measure; Peter Ablinger - Regenstück 1-6; Trevor Bača - Poème récursif (mix 2)

ProjeKct Three - The Birchmere, Alexandria, VA, March 3, 2003 (DGMLive)

Béla Bartók - Rumanian Folk Dances; Marcus Maroney - Concerto for Orchestra; Ralph Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending; Franz Joseph Haydn - Symphony No. 6 in D ("Le matin") - River Oaks Chamber Orchestra/Scott St. John (live webcast)

Ralph Vaughan Williams - Sinfonia Antartica (Symphony No. 7); Symphony No. 8 - Ralph Richardson, Heather Harper, London Symphony Orchestra/André Previn (RCA)

Michael Tippett - The Rose Lake; Ritual Dances from The Midsummer Marriage - BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Richard Hickox (Chandos)

Caravan - In the Land of Gray and Pink (Deram)

Mason Bates - The B-Sides; Liquid Interface; Alternative Energy - Mason Bates, San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)

Jim O'Rourke - Steamroom 24 (Steamroom < Bandcamp)

Ufomammut - Ecate (Neurot)

Jordan Munson - 47 Chances: Chamber Works 2007 (self-released < Bandcamp)
> Nine Views of a Structure; Graphic #1 for Two Percussionists; 2012; Alone

Kansas - Masque (Sony Legacy)

Derek Bailey - This Guitar (Rectangle)

King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King (DGM)

John Zorn - The Hermetic Organ: St. Bart's, NYC (Tzadik)

Edward Elgar - In the South (Alassio); Symphony No. 1 in A-flat - London Philharmonic Orchestra/Georg Solti (Decca)

Felix Mendelssohn - Violin Concerto in E minor - Alina Ibragimova, Radio Kamer Filharmonie/Philippe Herreweghe (YouTube)

Adrian Knight - Obsessions - R. Andrew Lee (Irritable Hedgehog)

Mija - Reaction NYE 2015 live set (Soundcloud)

Mija - HSMF15 Official Mixtape Series #1 (Soundcloud)

Grateful Dead - Dick's Picks, Vol. 27: Oakland Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, Dec. 16, 1992 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Matthew Revert/Vanessa Rossetto - Earnest Rubbish (Erstwhile)

Christian Wolff/Michael Pisaro - Looking Around (Erstwhile)

Dead & Company - DCU Center, Worcester, MA, Nov. 10, 2015 (Archive.org)

Graham Lambkin - Salmon Run (Kye)

Stefan Thut - un/even and one (fragment) (Intonema < Bandcamp)

György Kurtág - Hommage a R.Sch. - Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer, Amihai Grosz, Hannes Minnaare (YouTube)

Duo Stephanie and Saar - Bach Crossings (New Focus Recordings)
> Johann Sebastian Bach (arr. György Kurtág) - chorale preludes and other works

György Kurtág - ...concertante... - Hiromi Kikuchi, Ken Hakii, BBC Symphony Orchestra/Jukka-Pekka Saraste (YouTube)

György Kurtág - ...pas à pas - nulle part... (selections) - Kurt Widmer, Hiromi Kikuchi, Ken Hakii, Stefan Metz, Mircea Ardeleanu (YouTube)

Edward Elgar - The Dream of Gerontius - Jon Vickers, Constance Shacklock, Marian Nowakowski, RAI Rome Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/John Barbirolli (Archipel)

Kurtág is 90.

The eminent Hungarian composer György Kurtág turns 90 today, and -- it's reported by his publisher, Editio Musica Budapest -- remains hard at work on a magnum opus, the Beckett-based opera Fin de partie. In wishing him robust health, I offer in tribute a small handful of useful links, including an outstanding Jeremy Eichler profile that I'm having permanently extracted from behind the Globe paywall in Kurtág's honor.

 

Recommended reading:

"Hold the Mozart," Alex Ross, The New Yorker, Dec. 4, 2006

"Kurtág lifts the silence," Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 7, 2007

"The purist," Jeremy Eichler, Boston Globe, Nov. 11, 2007

"A guide to György Kurtág's music," Tom Service, The Guardian, March 12, 2013

"Violist Kim Kashkashian finds harmonious blend," David Weininger, Boston Globe, June 15, 2015

 

Recommended listening:

...concertante..., for violin, viola, and orchestra - Hiromi Kikuchi, Ken Hakii, BBC Symphony Orchestra/Jukka-Pekka Saraste

Jatekok, for piano duo - György & Márta Kurtág (interleaved with Bach works)

Kafka Fragments, for soprano and violin - Tony Arnold & Moses Pogossian

Kafka Fragments, for soprano and violin - Juliane Banse & András Keller

... pas à pas - nulle part ..., for baritone, string trio, and percussion - Kurt Widmer, Hiromi Kikuchi, Ken Hakii, Stefan Metz, Mircea Ardeleanu

Signs, Games, and Messages, for solo violin (or viola) - Moses Pogossian

Stele, for orchestra - Berlin Philharmonic/Claudio Abbado

12 Microludes for String Quartet (Hommage à Mihály András), for string quartet - Maxwell Quartet

The best Ben Ratliff is the best.

Ben Ratliff; photo by Kate Fox Reynolds

Last night I had the welcome and happy opportunity to interview Ben Ratliff, the New York Times music critic and a longtime friend and colleague, for an attentive audience at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. The subject was Ben's new book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty, a fascinating, idiosyncratic, and eminently readable new kind of "music appreciation" guide for a time when it seems as if every note and mote ever composed or intoned by humans is available at the click of a mouse.

I won't be reviewing Ben's book officially, and unfortunately I don't have a transcript of the conversation, though I'll recommend that you read this Q&A with Ben conducted by Matthew Guerrieri for the Boston Globe. But what I can share is the script I wrote for myself to introduce Ben last night, which should convey both a strong sense of my esteem and affection for Ben as well as my fascination with his newest book.

==============================

I’ve known Ben Ratliff for something close to 20 years now, as a colleague, a friend, a sounding board, and, not least, as a writer whose work regularly constitutes destination reading for me. So many times, followers of my personal blog, my Twitter feed, my Facebook wall, and other pliable surfaces have read these words: “The best Ben Ratliff is the best.” That’s a tag I’ve used every time something that he has written – more often than not for The New York Times – has stopped me dead in my tracks.

As a prose stylist, he crafts lines and paragraphs of lapidary brilliance, then sets them in a context so unpretentious and conversational that even his most high-flown ideas can seem like personal confidences. As a listener, he has almost no rivals that I know of; routinely what Ben writes about music makes me want to hear not just what he’s heard, but with the aural and intellectual apparatus through which he heard it.

Which brings us to here and now and this book, Every Song Ever – a title that’s somehow both fantastical and commonsensical at once. Personally, I’ve found it a hard book to read – not because the thinking is abstract or its rendering esoteric, but because line after line, paragraph after paragraph contains thoughts about music so elegantly conceived, so succinctly stated, and so handsomely described that I want to hear it for myself, then and there, with Ben’s words still echoing in my mind’s ear. 

On page after page I encountered lines that jolted me with plainspoken provocation. Here’s one, from page 113, about what happened when the salsa singer Marc Anthony signed to Sony: “Most of his new records no longer had much mystery in them. They had less middle, less tradition to engage with or argue against. Real pop destroys middles and traditions. (That is not a value judgement; that is pop’s job.)”

And onward: “Metal is the fanatical generation of myth – it’s all inverse gospel, and the code for listening to it is as complex as gospel’s.” Or, about the virtuoso performer: “They are the son-et-lumière projected onto the pyramids of Giza, a facsimile of inspirational awe set against slow millennia of learning and understanding.”

Ben connects and contextualizes Mozart and Bob Wills, Coltrane and Robert Johnson, João Gilberto and Morton Feldman, Domenico Scarlatti and Outkast. He does it in a way that feels natural and right and inevitable, never ostentatious or merely absurd. He calls “Party in the U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus “a song about listening: one of the greatest ever made,” and if you don’t believe him at face value, you trust him enough to examine the possibility, at least.

At its rock-bottom simplest, the core concern of Every Song Ever is this: When faced with what seems like close to the whole of human musical creative history available to be tapped day and night in seemingly endless streams and torrents – I use that latter word advisedly – how can we start to make sense of it all? 

And when computer algorithms are in place to learn our tastes in order to better predict and commodify them, how can we assert our independence, taking responsibility unto ourselves for what we hear, how we process and relate what we hear, and how we hold onto those processes as something that can and should be intensely personal, even as it has the capacity to also be profoundly communal?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I do know that there is no one I’d rather have as my guide than Ben Ratliff.

Playlist.

George Frideric Handel - Imeneo - Magnis Staveland, Ann Hallenberg, Monica Piccinini, Fabrizio Beggi, Cristiana Arcari, Europa Galante/Fabio Biondi (Glossa)

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica (Straight)

Robert Fripp - ND Ateneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 10, 2007 (DGMLive)

Robert Rich - Filaments (Soundscape)

Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra - All My Yesterdays: The Debut 1966 Recordings at the Village Vanguard (Resonance; due Feb. 19)

James "Blood" Ulmer - Odyssey (Columbia)

Beat Furrer - String Quartet No. 3 - KNM Berlin (Kairos)

Grateful Dead - Dave's Picks, Vol. 17: Selland Arena, Fresno, CA 7/19/74 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Peter Ablinger - Augmented Study - Johnny Chang (Sacred Realism)

Alison Krauss - I've Got That Old Feeling Again (Rounder)

Leroy Jenkins' Sting - Urban Blues (Black Saint)

Paola Prestini - Labyrinth - Cornelius Dufallo, Maya Beiser (VIA Records)

Autumn of Communion - Polydeuces (txt < Bandcamp)

Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith - a cosmic rhythm with each stroke (ECM; due March 25)

Ergo - As subtle as tomorrow (Cuneiform)

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (Warner Bros./Rhino)

Alexander Scriabin - Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor; Nikolai Medtner - Piano Concerto No. 3 in E minor ("Ballade") - Yevgeny Sudbin, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Litton (Bis)

Christopher Bailey - Glimmering Webs - Shiau-uen Ding, Augustus Arnone, Jacob Rhodebeck (New Focus Recordings)

Kristian Bezuidenhout - Mozart: Keyboard Music, Vols. 8 & 9 (Harmonia Mundi)

Suffocation - Effigy of the Forgotten (Roadrunner)

Carcass - Heartwork (Earache)

Hans Abrahamsen - let me tell you - Barbara Hannigan, Boston Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons (WCRB live webcast)

Stefan Mathieu - Before Nostromo (Schwebung < Bandcamp)

Various artists - Gqom Oh! The Sound of Durban (Gqom Oh! < Bandcamp)

Various artists - Gqom Oh! The Sound of Durban sampler EP (Gqom Oh! < Bandcamp)

Robert Rich - Morphology (Anodize)

Franz Joseph Haydn - Symphonies Nos. 78-81 - Accademia Bizantina/Ottavio Dantone (Decca)

Hélène Grimaud - Water (Deutsche Grammophon)
> Luciano Berio - Wasserklavier; Toru Takemitsu - Rain Tree Sketch II; Gabriel Fauré - Barcarolle No. 3; Maurice Ravel - Jeux d'eau; Isaac Albéniz - Almería; Franz Liszt - Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este; Leoš Janáček - In the Mists: No. 1; Claude Debussy - La cathédrale engloutie; Nitin Sawhney - Water - Transitions 1-7

Grigory Sokolov - Schubert//Beethoven (Deutsche Grammophon)
> Franz Schubert - Impromptus (D. 899); Three Piano Pieces (D. 946); Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat (Op. 106, "Hammerklavier"); Jean-Philippe Rameau - Les Tendres Plaintes; Les Tourbillons; Les Cyclops; La Follette; Les Sauvages; Johannes Brahms - Intermezzo in B-flat minor (Op. 117, No. 2)

Riccardo Dillon Wanke - Oxidation States (Glistening Examples < Bandcamp)

ProjeKct Four - 7th Note, San Francisco, CA, Nov. 2, 1998 (DGMLive)

Slayer - Repentless (Nuclear Blast)

Bloodmist - Sheen (5049 Records)

Pacifica Quartet - The Soviet Experience, Vol. 4: String Quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich and His Contemporaries (Cedille)
> Dmitri Shostakovich - String Quartets Nos. 13-15; Alfred Schnittke - String Quartet No. 3

Slayer - Show No Mercy (Metal Blade)

Slayer - Hell Awaits (Metal Blade)

Slayer - Reign in Blood (Def Jam)

Slayer - South of Heaven (Def Jam)

Slayer - Seasons in the Abyss (Def American)

Carcass - Surgical Steel (Complete Edition) (Nuclear Blast)

Testament - Dark Roots of Earth (Nuclear Blast)

Michael Formanek Ensemble Kolossus - The Distance (ECM)

Slayer - Stadium Live, Moscow, Russia, Dec. 9, 2015 (audience video < YouTube)

Kansas - Song for America (Legacy)

Bath Time Lessoning: Hans Abrahamsen.

The Girl's continuing journey through music, with The Dad taking notes.

Barbara Hannigan singing with the Berlin Philharmonic (Photograph: YouTube)

Hans Abrahamsen
let me tell you
Barbara Hannigan, Boston Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons
(WCRB broadcast; 2016)

"Pretty," says The Girl, who is far more intent on jumping, splashing, and soaking papa.

Transcribed Feb. 6, 2016.

Playlist.

Franz Joseph Haydn - Symphonies Nos. 92 ("Oxford"), 94 ("Surprise") & 97 - Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra/Jaap van Zweden (Exton)

Robin de Raaff - Violin Concerto - Tasmin Little, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra/Jaap van Zweden (YouTube)

Samuel Barber - Violin Concerto; Leonard Bernstein - Candide - Overture; Serenade after Plato's "Symposium"; On the Town - Three Dance Episodes - Jaap van Zweden, Flemish Chamber Orchestra/Walter Proost (Sony Classical < YouTube)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Sonata in A for Piano and Violin (K. 526); Ludwig van Beethoven - Violin Sonata No. 5 in F ("Spring"); Johannes Brahms - Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano in E-flat - Jaap van Zweden, Ronald Brautigam, Jacob Slagter (Impogram)

Igor Stravinsky - Petrushka (1911 version); Pulcinella - Concert Suite (1949 version); Symphonies of Wind Instruments - Netherlands Radio Philharmonic/Jaap van Zweden (Exton)

Dream Theater - The Astonishing (Roadrunner)

Robert Ashley - Crash - Gelsey Bell, Amirtha Kidambi, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, Aliza Simons, Tom Hamilton (Lovely Music)

R.E.M. - Automatic for the People (Warner Bros.)

Robert Phillips - Der Hunger von Spiegeln - Ictus Ensemble (Soundcloud)

Franz Joseph Haydn - Symphony No. 7 in C ("Le midi"); Violin Concerto in C; Symphony No. 83 in G minor - Aisslinn Nosky, Handel and Haydn Society/Harry Christophers (Coro)

Jefferson Airplane - After Bathing at Baxters (RCA)

Kansas - Kansas (Sony Legacy)

ZZ Top - Degüello (Warner Bros.)

Antonín Dvořák - Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8 - Houston Symphony/Andrés Orozco-Estrada (PentaTone; due March 11)

University of Texas Wind Ensemble - Wine Dark Sea - University of Texas Wind Ensemble/Jerry Junkin (Reference Recordings; due March 11)
> Dan Welcher - Spumante (arr. Paul Bissell); Donald Grantham - J’ai été au bal; Frank Ticheli - Concerto for Clarinet - Nathan Williams; John Mackey - Wine-Dark Sea

Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 8 in C minor - New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert (New York Philharmonic)

Yevgeny Sudbin - Medtner & Rachmaninov (Bis; due Feb. 12)
> Nikolai Medtner - Prologue from Stimmungsbilder (Op. 1); Fairy Tale (Op. 51, No. 3); Sonata-Reminiscenza (Op. 38, No. 1); Fairy Tale (Op. 20, No. 1); Fairy Tale (Op. 26, No. 1); Canzona matinata (Op. 39, No. 4); Sonata tragica (Op. 39, No. 5); Sergei Rachmaninoff - Prelude in D (Op. 23, No. 4); Prelude in G minor (Op. 23, No. 5); Prelude in G (Op. 32, No. 5); Prelude in F minor (Op. 32, No. 6); Prelude in G-sharp minor (Op. 32, No. 12); Prelude in D-flat (Op. 32, No. 13)

Anders Eliasson - Violin Concerto "Einsame Fahrt" - Janine Jansen, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Daniel Blendulf (RSPOplay video; available until May 27, 2016)

Sarah Kirkland Snider - The Currents, from Currents - Michael Mizrahi (New Amsterdam; due March 25)

Ravi Shankar - In Hollywood, 1971 (Northern Spy; due Apr. 16)