David Ayers

The future is in high-res streaming. That's what they tell me in the local hifi shop.

Don't think we've got a thread on this. Anyways...just speeding away from seeing Anthony Sher as Falstaff in Henry IV part one in London. Big concert goer here but live theatre a bit patchier for me. Anyone else lured by the sight of boards being trodden?

Warrior.

Very interesting post -- "...that the doubts about the consolations of musical discourse are there from quite early and get written in ever deeper..." in particular. To this RH probably would reply (from his Shostakovich essay): "But what else is there to go on, in works of art, but their artistic workmanship -- in music, the actual notes? All human experience can be encompassed and expressed in music's actual notes, when they show themselves to be capable of containing what's entrusted to them." That is a point of view that has a lot of appeal to me, but I think you're saying "Hey, not so fast." Thanks Larry. It may well be that the lack of colour in Shostakovich's music is in some ways a limitation of his imagination. It may be. If we set Shostakovich's First alongside Prokofiev's the whole difference can be seen. Shostakovich's 1st is good enough, but it would be really hard to see it as the equal of Prokofiev's Classical, which is not only clever and colorful but a perpetually attractive masterpiece. Shostakovich was about 18 when he wrote his, in 1924-5; Prokofiev was about 25 when he wrote his in 1916-17. Both were written in Russia, and the difference in age and in date of composition can't really be used to explain away the difference, though those things are part of it no doubt. If we compare the more or less contemporaneous Shostakovich 8 (1943) and Prokofiev 5 (1944), both war symphonies, then the 'battleship gray' Shostakovich probably should be thought of as expressing things that the Prokofiev keeps under too much control - the spareness of the Shostakovich and the strangled solitariness of many of the parts is a new rhetoric which I would say very effectively evokes disturbed and hopeless feelings. Of course Shostakovich is hard to read and properly situate. The famous first movement ostinato march of the Leningrad may - in its hollowness and bombast - be a very exact refusal of the rumpy-pumpy evocation of war in something like RVW 6 of 1946, although the dates there matter. What to do with the more traditionally symphonic 5 and 10, which were much favored in the West, the 10th even being conducted by Karajan, the fifth touted world-wide in its time as the apotheosis of the 'Soviet symphony'? Re. the fifth, Shostakovich is reported as saying that he had not found a good way to write a finale. He is also quoted in Testimony as saying that the finale of the fifth was a hollow assertion, 'your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing'. That gives us a plain way of thinking about the hollowness of that finale as a dissenting move - but that does not make it listenable. Re. the tenth, the quoted remark that the scherzo was 'a portrait of Stalin' gives us a clue to the purpose of the kinds off remarks assembled in Testimony (wherever they may originate). For the scherzo of 10 surely does not yield any kind of portrait, except a rather cartoonish one. Shostakovich in any case had earlier renounced the tendency in Soviet musical administration to claim that e.g. the bassoon was the capitalist. So the kinds of remarks attributed to Shostakovich in Testimony still participate in that style of public discourse of music, only now they are intended to redeem the author in terms of the new political correctness of the thaw. In the fifth and the tenth then we are left with works that are probably flawed in their adherence to the demands of the Soviet symphonist. That said, Fay recounts the reactions of the original audience to the Fifth. That was all about the slow movement. The audience were even surprised that Shostakovich could write slow music - everything they knew of his work prior to that (and they did not, of course, know the fourth symphony) was more than a little brutal and cold. That slow movement was understood by its hearers to be a reflection of their current situation in 1937, a time of true pain when pain could not be publicly acknowledged or expressed. But that of course is not how we are obliged to feel about this work. I think the coldness and mechanicalness of the satirical early Shostakovich is a key. The clockwork wind-down at the end of the fourth, which appears again in the fifteenth, is a statement about human life and its empty exhaustion. It is a refusal of hope which in the fourth, at least, appears spirited, but which in the fifteenth has become one empty gesture among others. In this sense the later bleakness is drawing out the implications of an attitude to musical discourse, a refusal of its affirmation, which has been present for a long time. None of this obliges us to hear the works in this way. Surely Holloway is right to doubt the comparison of the Preludes and Fugues with Bach (though they are relatively memorable). And a critic who was present at a performance of the fourth which I also attended last year was surely right to state that it was a bit like having Shostakovich sitting next to you and haranguing you. It was at that concert too that an outsider opened a rear door at the auditorium and, as the music sounded, shouted loudly at the shaggy conducter, Jukka-Pekka Saraste - 'Scooby-Doo man! Whooooarrrr!' As the critic I mention noted, the interruption hardly seemed incongruous, just a part of the mayhem. It was a wonderful performance, but the question of what that work really is - and what Shostakovich's music really is - seemed focalised by that weird cry.

I get it. But it's going to cost you a dollar every time. Payable to B3groover.

Lon! A dollar in the box, please, every time you mention how great your system is!

Hope they play some good tune's.

I don't really know Holloway's criticism except for the Shostakovich essay. I do have a view on that essay as I have been thinking about it for a long time. He is surely right at identifying what Shostakovich's works are not - they are not Haydn or Prokofiev, if we want to put it that way. We can't put that in reverse, exactly, by saying that the lack of colour and wit are, say, 'deliberate'. But nearly so. These works are what they are and what they have become, and the frequent harmonic aridity is only one part of their meaning. What they are and how they mean is not part of Holloway's account at all, and probably rightly as the ditchwater dull and intellectually trivial MacDonald-type view had at the time he wrote taken too much hold and it is what Holloway is railing against. For all the things they 'don't have' or - more to the point - eschew, so many of Shostakovich's works are entirely memorable, with every step coming to seem inevitable. That's usually a sign of something. That they make no concession to joy or transcendence, that the doubts about the consolations of musical discourse are there from quite early and get written in ever deeper, is a key that Holloway maybe could have spotted but which is hard to make claims for against the rudimentary marketing around 'Shostakovich vs. Stalin.' A comparison of his Eighth to Weinberg's 19th ('Bright May', a 1985 celebration and memorial of the end of the war) gives pretty clear grounds for judgement, I think. Mind you, that your average Shostakovich symphony in concert is a bit like having your head battered by a piece of 2 x 4 still counts against him

Anyone here have any preparation in Ancient Greek or Latin? I have both and kind of take it for granted, but I know it is not universal by any means. Just curious, not a test.

I'll add that TUM maintain an exemplary website with full artist biographies and so on. You can't order from their site though!

Props for Aaltonen. Like Kalevi Aho, who we discussed in another thread, he was a recipient of one of those lavish fifteen year government arts grants. So no excuse for not being good!

And another euro-label triumph - in this case for the admirably focussed TUM Records in Finland. Their model involves support from music foundations and other sponsors, and mainly releases by Finnish musicians, with some collaborations (such as Occupy the World) and some entirely non-Finnish contributions (such as this one). Yet another euro-label that has found a way to do it....

He doesn't like storms and gets anxious. There's a pattern to how he comes to me and behaves which is very recognisable.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30531060 My dog knows a storm is coming before I do, and I've learned to understand that he is telling me. He only knows maybe an hour before I do though, not a whole day! I'm a sucker for these 'sixth sense' stories about animals and birds, pets or otherwise.

John Coltrane

I dunno. Has the internet devalued reading and writing?

Gave it a quick listen but someone came and knocked at the door and I had to go answer.

I feel we started off on the wrong foot with the topic of Christmas music. Lets mention or post good ones here. No negative comments please.... Bereite dich, Zion, mit zärtlichen Trieben, Den Schönsten, den Liebsten bald bei dir zu sehn! Deine Wangen Müssen heut viel schöner prangen, Eile, den Bräutigam sehnlichst zu lieben!

What Lon said. Or more of the same. Either way, keep racking them up. Years, I mean, not CDs and empty beer bottles. However collectable.

Got it. Thanks.

Is this basically a blowing session or something more interesting?

David, I generally enjoy reading your contributions here and have nothing against you personally - but either you misunderstood what I meant by "leading edge", or you're completely nuts! Oh! I just picked up the general vocabulary, I wasn't thinking about your 'as near as he ever got' qualification - just agreeing with John Litweiler's observation about Miles and mainstreaming.

According to this, the sources are from Tony Williams and Spotlite Dial has had a checkered existence in terms of ownership and the original lacquers have been missing for 60 years. What is remarkable about our set is the work of Steve Marlowe and Jonathan Horwich. Using the best available transfers of the label's current owner, Tony Williams' Spotlite Records, they have done an amazing job of restoring and remastering these masters. Thanks for posting. It seems we are where we are - or already were.

Usually from Mosaic we get a discussion of the sources used and their limitations. We seem not to have had that on this occasion.

To my mind, Miles was all about good musicians marketing an idea of sophistication to audiences who had a few spare dollars - the 1969-1975 groups played palatable jams that could fit in as support for high-earning rock groups. No cutting edge. No one got cut. A few folks took a cut.