7/4

More guitar duets, this time with Joe Beck. Joe Beck & John Abercrombie - Coincidence

French author?

That's a good point; there were some friggin' rocks in my graduating class. Maybe it's just my snobbery showing up, but I kind of doubt many jazz fans were at the bottom of their high school class... You must not know many musicians. Hey, I only said the fans! Yes Sir, you are so right. My boo boo. OK then...in the fan dept., there's me.

That's a good point; there were some friggin' rocks in my graduating class. Maybe it's just my snobbery showing up, but I kind of doubt many jazz fans were at the bottom of their high school class... You must not know many musicians.

As per your suggestion, I've been using it for a couple of days. It doesn't quite do the trick, but I'll give it a bit more time.

thems fighin' words.

He may be the funniest guy on late night these days. Hell ya!

Sounds like my kind of piano.

August 12, 2005 Adventures Outside the Classical Canon: Pathfinding Composers By JEREMY EICHLER Olivier Messiaen 'QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME' Tashi (RCA Victor Gold Seal 7835-2-RG; CD). 'VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT-JÉSUS' Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist (Teldec 3984-26868-2; CD). 'TURANGALÎLA SYMPHONY' Toronto Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa (RCA Red Seal 82876-59418-2; CD). 'DES CANYONS AUX ÉTOILES' Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung (Deutsche Grammophon 471 617-2; CD). 'ST. FRANÇOIS D'ASSISE' Arnold Schönberg Choir, Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano (Deutsche Grammophon 445 176-2; four CD's). ADMIRERS of contemporary classical music will already know Olivier Messiaen, a founding father of the modern avant-garde and one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music. Although he is almost too famous for this roundup, there are undoubtedly some who have yet to encounter his work, and they have an enviable journey ahead. It can be mapped with reference to three compass points that defined Messiaen's world: a nearly mystical commitment to the Roman Catholic faith; an ability to conjure luminous musical colors, which he blended into radiant stained-glass chords; and a love of nature that compelled him to transcribe his favorite landscapes into sonic portraits of rare depth and imagination. Messiaen, who died in 1992, was prolific, and his compositions have been served well on disc. Perhaps the most frequently performed work and the one most people encounter first is the ''Quartet for the End of Time.'' A landmark of modern chamber music, it was written in 1940, after Messiaen, who had been serving in the French Army, was captured and interned in a German prison camp in Silesia. Written for the instruments available in the camp -- piano, violin, cello and clarinet -- it is gripping music, spinning apocalyptic themes across eight movements. There is plenty of masterly notated sonic brimstone, not to mention the ''blue-orange lava'' Messiaen cited in a preface, but the piece ends with a sublime, trancelike meditation for violin and piano, an unforgettable musical prayer. The recording by the ensemble Tashi is still the one to have. In 1944, after meeting the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who would later become his wife, Messiaen wrote ''Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus,'' an epic work for piano structured as 20 ''gazes'' at the infant Jesus. It is some of his most difficult and exhilarating solo music, full of densely packed chords and perplexing rhythms, beatific calm and mystical frenzy. Pierre-Laurent Aimard's version is definitive and frighteningly convincing. But solo and chamber music is just a small part of the picture. Messiaen had a penchant for orchestral grandeur, which he indulged in his huge ''Turangalîla Symphony'' (in his words, ''a hymn to the superhuman joy that transcends everything'') and, much later, in his awe-struck tribute to the canyons of Utah and the stars above, ''Des Canyons aux Étoiles.'' The conductors Seiji Ozawa and Myung-Whun Chung both show great insight into Messiaen's music here. Finally, Messiaen had a famous love of bird song, which he saw as an embodiment of God's perfection. (He once noted dryly that whenever birds sing, you never find ''an error in rhythm, melody or counterpoint.'') He transcribed the songs in travels throughout his life and incorporated them constantly into his music, but never more effectively than in his great opera ''St. François d'Assise.'' The work, triumphantly staged in San Francisco in 2002, is a compendium of Messiaen's compositional techniques, his self-fashioned modes and his flair for glorious sonic anarchy. Kent Nagano's recording, made live at the Salzburg Festival, is enough to whet one's appetite for the real thing. Maybe someday at the Met? JEREMY EICHLER

The monolog from Craig Ferguson had a bit of Danish tonight. Man, he cracks me up.

Well check out that search function and start makin' comments! Stimulate some conversation about dose folks...

Really...I'll have to give a fresh listen to In Praise of Learning. I love that Cow.

The folks at http://thegearpage.net are great for this kind of question.

dusty?

France has Jerry Lewis, Spain has Wynton. The world is puzzled.

Avoid at all costs. Uh oh...too late for me.

any thoughts on this one? Alexander Scriabin: The Complete Piano Sonatas Ruth Laredo, piano (Nonesuch)

Musical Events Inextinguishable The fiery rhythms of Carl Nielsen. by Alex Ross, New Yorker February 25, 2008 Conductors are rediscovering the music of Nielsen, a Danish composer whose symphonies have the brute strength of Beethoven’s. The great Danish composer Carl Nielsen once imagined that music had a voice, and that it spoke in these terms: “I live tenfold more intensely than any living thing, and die a thousandfold deeper. I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it.” True to that eloquent boast, Nielsen’s works often begin with pure musical action, suggestive of bodies in motion and of forces unleashed. The First Symphony, from 1892, starts with a pair of curt chords, bright C major and darker-hued G minor, which land on the ears like a one-two punch. The Third, from two decades later, begins with the note A blasting repeatedly in various registers and accelerating until a takeoff tempo is achieved. The Fourth, subtitled “The Inextinguishable,” written during the First World War, is a melee from the first measure; the Fifth, from the early twenties, emerges from silence with an eerily oscillating interval, then builds to an anarchic climax in which a snare drum improvises against the orchestral mass. With these bolt-from-the-blue beginnings, Nielsen was undoubtedly modelling himself on the ultimate symphonic forebear, the Beethoven of the “Eroica” and the Fifth. Nielsen’s music seldom resembles Beethoven’s directly, but it weighs in with the same brute strength. Given the blazing individuality of Nielsen’s voice, it’s puzzling that he has yet to find a firm place in the international repertory. He is ubiquitous in his native Denmark, where he holds the place of National Composer-Hero; he is a mainstay throughout the Nordic countries and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. For American orchestras, however, he remains a tough sell, despite periodic attempts to whip up the same enthusiasm that has long attended his contemporaries Mahler and Sibelius. Leonard Bernstein tried to set off a Nielsen fad at the New York Philharmonic in the nineteen-sixties, but it didn’t quite take. Orchestral players, percussionists excepted, tend to groan a little when Nielsen shows up on their music stands; his habit of writing furiously fast figures, and then passing them from one section to another, relay style, can make even an ensemble of virtuosos sound like a mess. Audiences, for their part, often go away from Nielsen performances pleased but a little dazed, not sure what hit them. Lately, though, Nielsen has been gaining ground, as notable younger conductors join longtime advocates like Herbert Blomstedt and Simon Rattle in preaching his virtues. Paavo Järvi, the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, has made a strong recording of the Fifth, pointedly pairing it with Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Gustavo Dudamel also recently conducted the Fifth at the Gothenburg Symphony. And, earlier this month, Alan Gilbert delivered a miniature manifesto by presenting two Nielsen symphonies back to back—the Second, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Third, with the orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music. Gilbert’s efforts are of particular interest because the conductor will become the music director of the New York Philharmonic in the fall of 2009. From that historic perch, Gilbert might be able to complete the job that Bernstein left unfinished, and make Nielsen famous in a city that already moves to his helter-skelter tempo. Nielsen, who was born in 1865, grew up in a poor but happy home on Funen, Denmark’s second-largest island. He worked variously as a goose-herder, a cowherd, a wedding musician, and a military bugler before winning a scholarship to the Royal Danish Conservatory, in Copenhagen. His major pieces—which include not only the six symphonies but the operas “Saul and David” and “Maskarade,” a beloved Wind Quintet, and concertos for violin, flute, and clarinet—are grounded in ruddy, earthy, insistently singable melodies; more than a few of his songs have entered Danish folk tradition. (When the composer turned sixty, in 1925, a national holiday was declared, and he woke to find a brass band playing outside his window in Copenhagen.) With savage concentration, Nielsen proceeds to hack apart, reshape, mash together, and rev up his catchy little tunes. In this respect, he resembles Charles Ives, the master of musical collisions, and, more distantly, the neoclassical Stravinsky. He is at his most daring in the Sixth Symphony, which is almost an act of compositional surrealism: naïve pastoral melodies disintegrate, dissonances unnerve like midnight alarms, waltzes are interrupted in wild polyrhythmic episodes, trombones and tuba issue mocking bleats, the percussion rattles around with sinister glee. At times, the work is positively morbid in tone—the late British composer Robert Simpson, a Nielsen devotee, thought that the piercing discords in the first movement were depictions of heart attacks that Nielsen had lately suffered—but the symphony fights its way to a bracingly comical, carnivalesque conclusion, ending on a Bronx cheer of a bassoon note. As in the case of Janácek and Bartók, the other leading folk-modernists of the early twentieth century, Nielsen seamlessly fused his “peasant” and “urban” selves. His habit of flattening the third and seventh notes of the major scale harks back to folk modes, yet it also allows for rapid-fire modulations and polymorphous key schemes. Players need to believe fervently in this music if they are to bring it fully to life. Each phrase must trigger the next in a kind of chain reaction. The difference is clear when you go from, say, the Berlin Philharmonic’s solemn, square-footed 1981 recording of the Fourth Symphony, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan, to a series of live recordings that the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra made in the nineteen-fifties. The conductors—Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, Erik Tuxen—aren’t household names, but they elicit playing of reckless passion. (The disks appear on the Danacord label and are available through ArkivMusic.com or Amazon download. There is also an outstanding CD of the Second and the Fourth on RCA, with Jean Martinon and Morton Gould conducting the Chicago Symphony.) Jensen’s reading of the Fourth is simply one of the most viscerally exciting orchestral recordings ever made. During the timpani duel in the finale, a kind of animal frenzy takes over, the entire orchestra seemingly possessed by the composer’s personal motto: “Music is life, and, like life, inextinguishable.” American orchestral players might have to live for a month in one-room Danish cottages to enter fully into the spirit of Nielsen’s music. But Alan Gilbert demonstrates that it’s possible to obtain arrestingly idiomatic performances after a few days of rehearsal. The first qualification that this conductor brings to bear is the flexible precision of his beat; he indicates tempi with uncommon clarity, yet is hardly metronomic in his approach. His rhythmic mastery was apparent as he led the Philadelphia Orchestra through the first movement of the Second Symphony, which repeatedly teases the ears with metrical ambiguities: the first theme of the movement is in 2/4 time, the second is in 3/4, and the tension between them persists up until the final bars. Gilbert handled the tricky syncopated shifts so that they came across not as awkward transitions but as intensifications, fresh bolts of energy. The achievement was especially remarkable given that musicians often have trouble hearing each other on the stage of Verizon Hall, the acoustically uneven space where the orchestra has been playing since 2001. At the same time, Gilbert produced a performance rich in emotion—and this was heartening to encounter in a conductor who has sometimes been criticized for being too cool in his approach. The Second is subtitled “The Four Temperaments,” the four movements illustrating the choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine moods. The melancholy movement opens with a forty-seven-bar melodic paragraph that should unfold as a single legato phrase. Gilbert displayed another aspect of his exceptional baton technique: he swept his arms in wide, flowing, yet rhythmically incisive motions, drawing out intense lyricism while keeping the ensemble impeccably unified. (Young conductors are often discouraged from waving their arms excessively, because the beat is easily lost.) Gilbert practiced the same art on the students of the Curtis Symphony, who gave a startlingly polished concert at Carnegie Hall on February 12th; in the slow movement of the Third Symphony, the strings spoke in strikingly unanimous, heartfelt phrases. The missing element was feistiness; the Curtis players sounded, oddly, too professional. Gilbert might have reminded them of another of Nielsen’s aphorisms: that great artists give their era a black eye.

note: this is part of Windows, not an aftermarket program.

http://www.oliviermessiaen.org February 18, 2008 Music Review | St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Demystifying Messiaen, With a Little Help From the Birds By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYT As the climate for classical music in America adjusts to challenges (like the decline of arts education in public schools) and opportunities (the instantaneous availability of music on the Web), the role of the music director of a major orchestra is changing as well. It's no longer enough to be a comprehensive musician, a strong conductor and a good schmoozer of potential patrons. The music directors who are making differences in their communities and winning new listeners are also good teachers, proselytizers and speakers, in person and, increasingly, in videos. One of the best talkers about music in the business, and a formidable conductor to boot, is David Robertson, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Robertson brought the orchestra to Carnegie Hall for two programs over the weekend. And at a "Discovery Concert" on Friday night he gave an engaging, informative and unabashedly quirky demonstration of how to demystify a daunting contemporary work for the public. The work was Messiaen's visionary, boldly complex and sprawling "Turangalila Symphony," a 75-minute score composed from 1946 to 1948, when Messiaen was in his late 30s. A practicing Roman Catholic and a musical modernist, he took a fiercely original approach to creating this idiosyncratic work. Written in 10 unconventionally structured movements, "Turangalila" takes its title from a composite of two Sanskrit words with multiple meanings. The piece is a meditation on joy and creation, on love that leads to death as inevitable transcendence of human life and on nature in both its bucolic and violent manifestations. In a 40-minute introduction, with the orchestra onstage to play excerpts, Mr. Robertson described this cosmic score as "the best possible free-association canvas," to which listeners can bring their own imagery. But he kept the metaphysics to a minimum, focusing on the musical particulars. He began by having Cynthia Millar demonstrate the alluring resources of the ondes martenot, an exotic electronic instrument used in countless sci-fi film scores. Notes played on its restricted keyboard can be subjected to eerie prolongations and atmospheric transformations. Explaining Messiaen's fascination with Indonesian gamelan music, Mr. Robertson broke down the chantlike theme that opens the ninth movement, "Turangalila 3," in which the gamelan is evoked by a piano and clattering, delicate percussion, with sundry instruments playing bird calls in the background. To Messiaen, Mr. Robertson said, "birds were truly God's musicians." He gave a detailed explanation of how the rhythmic layout of one fidgety theme in the work is stretched out when it passes from the clarinet to the ondes martenot, then slowed almost to stasis when echoed in the orchestra. His astute observations were fascinating, and his manner and delivery — brainy, wry, almost goofy with enthusiasm — were charming. Speaking of the movement titled "Joy of the Blood of the Stars," an orchestral tour de force, he told listeners to imagine all the stars in the cosmos getting together for one huge, ecstatic party. The sublimely contemplative "Garden of Love's Sleep," with its lusciously consonant sustained string chords, he said, evokes an "Eden from which we will never be expelled," adding that as the father of twins who had turned 5 that day, he appreciated more than ever this ultimate music of repose. After intermission came a complete performance. The pianist Nicolas Hodges gave a dynamic account of the virtuosic solo part, harder to play than most concertos. Under Mr. Robertson the St. Louis musicians played this daunting, multilayered score with technical command, rhapsodic fervor and wondrous colorings. On Saturday night, in a typically creative program, Mr. Robertson began with Brahms's "Tragic Overture" in a weighty, dark-textured yet transparent account that emphasized the intense work's intricacies and often strange strokes. Next came Berg's profound and wrenchingly beautiful Violin Concerto (1935), in a glowing, fearless and inspired performance by the magnificent German violinist Christian Tetzlaff. Mr. Robertson drew impressively lucid playing of this thick-textured score from the responsive St. Louis musicians. And talk about strange, after intermission Mr. Robertson conducted Sibelius's last substantial work, the haunting tone poem "Tapiola" (1926). The composer John Adams has cited Sibelius as a significant influence. So it was fitting to end the evening with the New York premiere of Mr. Adams's new "Doctor Atomic" Symphony, a 25-minute, one-movement symphonic score adapted by the composer from his 2005 opera about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, in a glittering and incisive performance. This is no mere cut-and-paste compendium of orchestra passages from the opera but an adaptation of several extended sections, including the setting of Donne's sonnet "Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God" for the title character, with the baritone part given to solo trumpet. The resulting score invites you to hear the elusive music — driving passages with pounding timpani, quizzically restrained lyrical flights, bursts of skittish fanfares — on its own terms, apart from its dramatic context. The St. Louis musicians are thriving under Mr. Robertson's leadership. He has a reputation among orchestras for talking too much in rehearsals. But he certainly speaks engagingly to audiences.

Hey, it's the Jimi Hendrix chord. It's in Purple Haze, Foxy Lady...C7#9.

There's rumors it's hostile here?

From Wikipedia