Oh my, is that Kim Kashkashian!, one of those most pleasurable interpreters!? Yes, it is.
Here is the Schoenberg Op. 45 - so seductive, so impassioned!
Does it make you cry?
Why must everyone play this work so violently and not play it to bring out its rich lyrical qualities?
She plays here again with Pogossian, and de Saram on cello, but gosh, where's the rest of it? This is only an excerpt! Unfortunate...
When you got onto Schoenberg and Bartok I took a hike. Just what do you and Mr. Bardamu see in this music? I think I prefer the musicians warming up and tuning their instruments.
Perhaps this music is a challenge to play, but for us died in the wool tonalists who believe in key signatures and eschew the egalitarianism of atonality, it's hard to tell the difference between one performance and another where so much jagged dissonance and discontinuous harmony rules.
I'm not saying these composers don't represent 20th Century Western Civilization well, what with the discontinuous, quantized energy of quantum physics or Dadaist in the art world or better yet the complete destruction of the image by Abstract Expressionists.
It seems in music as well as in physics that law of entropy holds -- of perhaps, whimsically, does not hold -- as increasing disorder becomes the norm. This can be seen in a book by Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers entitled The Evolution of Culture where Roman coins that began as concrete pictures evolved (or devolved, depending upon your point of view) into complete abstractions as the image blew apart further with each minting. In this sense, the evolution of classical music mirrors this movement from the concrete to the abstract because culture is really playing the tune.
Unfortunately, most 20th century atonalities can be explained intellectually by musicologists or cultural anthropologists, but not embraced emotionally by the outsider, and today, when most classical music is composed in academe to prove one's worth among fellow academics, the distance between the composer and his audience has never been greater.
One of my favorite pieces to play for string trio (a violin, a viola, and a cello) is violin virtuoso Sitkovetsky's 1984 arrangement of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Bach bases the variations on the bass line and chord progression of his opening Aria. The variations express a wide variety of moods: sadness, tragedy, whimsy, joy, and triumph; furthermore, they are meticulously thought-out, embodying mathematical patterns that only careful analysis can reveal, like a chess grandmaster staying up late at night! Every third variation (in the series of thirty) is a canon following an ascending intervallic pattern: thus the third variation is a canon at the unison, the sixth variation is a canon at the second (meaning that the second entry begins the interval of a second above that of the first entry), the ninth variation is a canon at the third, and continuing this way up to the twenty-seven, a canon on the ninth. Final variation (thirty) is not a canon at the tenth, but rather a grandiloquent jocular quodlibet which has its basis in various German songs, including "Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben, hätt mein' Mutter Fleisch gekocht, wär ich länger blieben" ("Cabbage and turnips have driven me away, had my mother cooked meat, I'd have opted to stay") - just how I felt about my mom's cooking too! For more info on the quodlibet (closing variation):http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/BWV988-Quodlibet%5BBraatz%5D.htm
The opening aria, which returns (da capo) after the quodlibet, is itself a gorgeous, floridly ornamented melody—a slow sarabande that bookends the variations with a mood of peaceful, mature equanimity.
Furthermore, the other variations, between the canonic ones, have also been patterned as genre pieces of various types, and of a lively tempo, among them three Baroque dances (4, 7, 19); a fughetta (10); a French overture (16); and two ornate arias (13, 25).
Donald Tovey, in Essays in Musical Analysis, says of the Variations, “not only thirty miracles of variation-form, but…a single miracle of consummate art as a whole composition.”
I'll get the opportunity to perform this Sitkovetsky arrangement - in its entirety! - on July 8th at a local art gallery and am looking forward to it! To me, this is the one of the ten pieces I'd have to take with if I were stranded on a desert island and could only listen to ten works of music!
Please enjoy the well-conceived interpretation of Sitkovetsky, himself, along with Gérard Caussé on viola and Mischa Maisky on cello!
Wonderful and thank you for the well thought out and detailed explanation. Are you a musician yourslef? :)
Yes! A bit of violin, and a bit more of viola: my favorite is chamber music; I've played in a string quartet for several years now that typically meets Thursday mornings. Our 1st violinist, is particularly quite a fine player, and was one of the youngest members ever in the 1st violin section of the S.F. Symphony. His name is Bernard Chevalier and has some nice YouTube videos up. We've gone through pretty much all the standard quartet repertoire: all the Haydns, the Mozarts, the Beethovens, the Romantic works, and a bit of the 20th century rep: Sibelius, Barber, some Bartok, all Shostakoviches, Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, some Bloch, Dohnanyi, Nielsen, Zemlinsky, Faure, Szymanowski (just a bit), Walton, Villa-Lobos, a bit of Webern...
and typically work on a quartet for a minimum of three weeks, usually playing three or four quartets every Thurs. morning.
I have also really enjoyed opera, earlier in my life, having played some years with Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Sarasota Opera, Arizona Opera (a bit), etc., I've gotten to experience perhaps 50-75 different operas as a pit orchestra violist, some highlights which include Wagner's Die Meistersinger, Berg's Wozzeck, Strauss's Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg, Verdi's Otello, Rigoletto, La Forza del Destino, Il Trovatore, and many other Verdis, Humperdinck's Der Konigskinder, Britten's Albert Herring, Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts (more for the Gertrude Stein...), Rachmaninov's Francesca da Rimini, Menotti's - The Old Maid and the Thief, Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias and Les Biches, Carl Nielsen's - Maskarade, Puccini's La fanciulla del West, Il Trittico, La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne, The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, and the Marriage of Figaro, Beethoven's Fidelio, Smetana's The Bartered Bride, Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, Bizet's Carmen and Les pêcheurs de perles, Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana paired with Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko, Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen, Vaughan-Williams Riders to the Sea, Haydn's L'Isola Disabitata, and many others such as those by Donizetti, Rossini, etc...
I enjoy playing with symphony orchestras from time to time as well.