Thursday, December 11th
Bach cello festival (day four)
Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat major; Pablo Casals (cello), recording, 1939
**********
lagniappe
art beat
Paul Strand (1890-1976), Toward the Sugar House, Vermont, 1944
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: cello
2014
Wednesday, December 10th
Bach cello festival (day three)
Cello Suite No. 3 in C major; Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello), live, Austria (Salzburg), 2007
**********
lagniappe
reading table
The life of a human being draws back, comes into view like an animal at the edge of the forest, and disappears again.
***
The outside world is too small, too clear-cut, too truthful, to contain everything that a person has room for inside.
***
The only essential thing for life is forgoing smugness, moving into the house instead of admiring it and hanging garlands around it.
—Franz Kafka (Rivka Galchen, “What kind of funny is he?,” London Review of Books, 12/4/14)
2014
Tuesday, December 9th
Bach cello festival (day two)
Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor; Wen-Sinn Yang (cello), live, Germany (Quedlinburg), 2005
Prelude, Allemande, Courante
Sarabande, Minuets 1 and 2
Gigue
2014
Monday, December 8th
Bach cello festival (day one)
Suppose you had twenty-four hours to live. What would you want to hear? These six cello suites, which I’ve been listening to for over forty years, are where I might turn. (Why not go out dancing?)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Cello Suite No. 1 in G major; Denise Djokic (cello), live, Canada (Winnipeg), 2012
Prelude
Allemande
Courante
Sarabande
Minuets 1 and 2
Gigue
2014
Saturday, December 6th
two takes
Need a lift?
Charles Ives (1874-1954), Ragtime Dance No. 4 (1904)
Alarm Will Sound, live, New York, 2013
***
Orchestra New England, recording, 1990
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
As I remember some of the dances as a boy, and also from father’s description of some of the old dancing and fiddle playing, there was more variety of tempo than in the present-day dances. In some parts of the hall a group would be dancing in polka, while in another, a waltz. Some of the players in the band would, in an impromptu way, pick up with the polka, and some with the waltz, and some with a march. Often the piccolo or cornet would throw in asides. Sometimes a change in tempo, or a mixed rhythm would be caused by a fiddler who, after playing three or four hours steadily, was getting a little sleepy. Or maybe another player was seated too near the hard cider barrel. Whatever the reason for these changes and simultaneous playing of things, I remember distinctly catching a kind of music that was natural and interesting and which was decidedly missed when everybody came down ‘blimp’ on the same beat again.
—Charles Ives
2014
Thursday, December 4th
sounds of New York (day three)
If this life of ours isn’t easy, why should our music be?
Alex Mincek (1975-), String Quartet No. 3; Mivos Quartet, live, New York, 2013
**********
lagniappe
reading table
By Emily Dickinson (1830-1886; Franklin 384)
It dont sound so terrible—quite—as it did—
I run it over—”Dead”, Brain—”Dead”.
Put it in Latin—left of my school—
Seems it don’t shriek so—under rule.Turn it, a little—full in the face
A Trouble looks bitterest—
Shift it—just—
Say “When Tomorrow comes this way—
I shall have waded down one Day” .I suppose it will interrupt me some
Till I get accustomed—but then the Tomb
Like other new Things—shows largest—then—
And smaller, by Habit—It’s shrewder then
Put the Thought in advance—a Year—
How like “a fit”—then—
Murder—wear!
2014
Tuesday, November 25th
Thankful I am, two days before Thanksgiving, for things that sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.
Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008), String Quartet No. 5 (“before the universe was born”); JACK Quartet, live, Los Angeles, 2011
2014
Saturday, November 8th
Need a jolt?
Bela Bartok (1881-1945), String Quartet No. 5, excerpt (first mvt.)
FLUX quartet, live, 2013
**********
lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Susan Charlesworth (1947-2013), Unidentified Man, Ontani Hotel, Los Angeles, 1980 (printed 2012), Stills (through January 4th)
2014
Thursday, October 23rd
never enough
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), String Quartet No. 14 (Op. 131, C-sharp minor; 1826); Takács Quartet, live
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Opus 131 . . . is routinely described as Beethoven’s greatest achievement, even as the greatest work ever written. Stravinsky called it ‘perfect, inevitable, inalterable.’ It is a cosmic stream of consciousness in seven sharply contrasted movements, its free-associating structure giving the impression, in the best performances, of a collective improvisation. At the same time, it is underpinned by a developmental logic that surpasses in obsessiveness anything that came before. The first four notes of the otherworldly fugue with which the piece begins undergo continual permutations, some obvious and some subtle to the point of being conspiratorial. Whereas the Fifth Symphony hammers at its four-note motto in ways that any child can perceive, Opus 131 requires a lifetime of contemplation. (Schubert asked to hear it a few days before he died.)
—Alex Ross, “Deus Ex Musica,” New Yorker, 10/20/14
*****
lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), The Poet’s Garden, 1888
2014
Saturday, October 11th
never enough
Is any form of music-making more intimate?
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), String Quartet No. 15, excerpt (1st movt.); Danish String Quartet, live (BBC studio), London, 2013
**********
lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago (lunch hour)
René Magritte (1898-1967), The Lovers (1928) (Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, closes Monday)
music clip of the day 