Sorry for interrupting your reviewing streak, but I find your log very interesting and quirky! How can you keep up with so much music going around us? (unless you're secretly 168 years old or a gargoyle, then it gets really easy to explain). It's pretty darn cool how you can analyze and update all your ratings and reviews and other mumbo jumbo my man, bright cheers.
Much appreciated. I'm very interested in and passionate about great art. I think, with any thing one is truly passionate about, one's time spent on such an endeavor tends to be met with more energy and doesn't usually become tiresome and difficult. In addition to this, as one's knowledge and experience accumulates, it tends to be something that can be applied and built upon in assimilating further works (for instance, if one has knowledge and experience with Beethoven, then Brahms is easier to get acclimated to and takes less time to assimilate ... It's a "domino-effect" through music/art history).
Sure are a lot of 10s and 9.5s in there. How does this scale compare to your usual one
Not the same. The ratings are in relation to how well done the performance is for the work it is performing.
It doesn't mean, say, Mozart's 35th, is a 10/10 but it does mean that the listed Harnoncourt rendition is the greatest performance of that work on record, standing out above all others (that I know of). More complete explanation is on the "Best Recordings" page (very first page). _________________ Best Classical Best Films Best Paintings
Last edited by AfterHours on 01/02/2018 08:33; edited 1 time in total
Ok glitches fixed. List of "Best Classical Recordings of the Year" can now be seen in full, just a couple posts above this one. _________________ Best Classical Best Films Best Paintings
List and images fixed now for "Best New Classical Recordings of the Year" a few posts above this. _________________ Best Classical Best Films Best Paintings
Perhaps no work by Mozart illustrates his most delicate, sensitive, compassionate, nostalgic, lyrical, "oratory" genius quite in the same miraculous and profound way as that of his Clarinet Quintet. It is impossible for music to become so profound and magical from such understated, humble, effortless means, isn't it?
And if, after 3-5 listens of familiarity, your breath is not swept away in the perfect order and poetry of Mozart's miraculous conception, the whimsical nostalgia, the beautifully subtle phrasing and articulation of Martin Frost/Vertavo String Quartet's amazing recording of this work, I wouldn't know what to say... (not to mention Frost's rendition of the Clarinet Concerto on the same album)
(Frost must be the greatest clarinetist of our time, perhaps ever? Has any clarinetist ever articulated musical phrases quite like this?)
Speaking of the extraordinary clarinet renditions of Martin Frost, I discovered this superb recording of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time yesterday (including amazing work by Frost). Not sure yet about what Id rate it but initial impression was probably 9 for Performance Quality and a 10 for Sound Quality. It is probably the highest quality recording (for sound) of Messiaen's work that I know of and under consideration as the best performance, or one of them. A very vivid account, with strong convictions and expressiveness from all involved.
Just discovered this remarkable quintet (from 1994, but new to me), another amazing work from Osvaldo Golijov... (see his astonishing Cello Concerto "Azul" for another recent discovery)
Klezmer Clarinet and String Quartet "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac The Blind" - Osvaldo Golijov (1994)
"Eight centuries ago Isaac The Blind, the great kabbalist rabbi of Provence, dictated a manuscript in which he asserted that all things and events in the universe are product of combinations of the Hebrew alphabet's letters: 'Their root is in a name, for the letters are like branches, which appear in the manner of flickering flames, mobile, and nevertheless linked to the coal'. His conviction still resonates today: don't we have scientists who believe that the clue to our life and fate is hidden in other codes?
"Isaac's lifelong devotion to his art is as striking as that of string quartets and klezmer musicians. In their search for something that arises from tangible elements but transcends them, they are all reaching a state of communion. Gershom Scholem, the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, says that 'Isaac and his disciples do not speak of ecstasy, of a unique act of stepping outside oneself in which human consciousnes abolishes itself. Debhequth (communion) is a constant state, nurtured and renewed through meditation'. If communion is not the reason, how else would one explain the strange life that Isaac led, or the decades during which groups of four souls dissolve their individuality into single, higher organisms, called string quartets? How would one explain the chain of klezmer generations that, while blessing births, weddings, and burials, were trying to discover the melody that could be set free from itself and become only air, spirit, ruakh?
"The movements of this work sound to me as if written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people throughout our history. This somehow reflects the composition's epic nature. I hear the prelude and the first movement, the most ancient, in Arameic; the second movement is in Yiddish, the rich and fragile language of a long exile; the third movement and postlude are in sacred Hebrew.
"The prelude and the first movement simultaneously explore two prayers in different ways: The quartet plays the first part of the central prayer of the High Holidays, 'We will observe the mighty holiness of this day...', while the clarinet dreams the motifs from 'Our Father, Our King'. The second movement is based on 'The Old Klezmer Band', a traditional dance tune, which is surrounded here by contrasting manifestations of its own halo. The third movement was written before all the others. It is an instrumental version of K'Vakarat, a work that I wrote a few years ago for Kronos and Cantor Misha Alexandrovich. The meaning of the word klezmer: instrument of song, becomes clear when one hears David Krakauer's interpretation of the cantor's line. This movement, together with the postlude, bring to conclusion the prayer left open in the first movement: '...Thou pass and record, count and visit, every living soul, appointing the measure of every creature's life and decreeing its destiny'.
"But blindness is as important in this work as dreaming and praying. I had always the intuition that, in order to achieve the highest possible intensity in a performance, musicians should play, metaphorically speaking, 'blind'. That is why, I think, all legendary bards in cultures around the world, starting with Homer, are said to be blind. 'Blindness' is probably the secret of great string quartets, those who don't need their eyes to communicate among them, with the music, or the audience. My homage to all of them and Isaac of Provence is this work for blind musicians, so they can play it by heart. Blindness, then, reminded me of how to compose music as it was in the beginning: An art that springs from and relies on our ability to sing and hear, with the power to build castles of sound in our memories."
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