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  1. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I'm at work, where I don't actually have a lot of music, so I'm listening to some of the auto-rips from CDs I've bought from Amazon. I'm listening to this again -- Esa-Pekka Salonen's Violin Concerto and Nyx -- and trying, again, to decide what I think of it, and how I feel about it. To my mind...
  2. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    When life gets hard, and the universe seems dark, I listen to Bach. His music makes me realize that humans are capable of extraordinary things and, for a few moments I can almost believe in the possibility of perfection.
  3. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I have loved The Art of Fugue ever since my dad came home with the Marriner/ASMF boxed set 40 years ago. I have more versions of this piece than any other work -- although the Goldberg Variations comes close -- 14 at last count. I have no favourite although, as a pianist, I do come back to this...
  4. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I love Menuhin's reading of Bartok's violin concertos. This isn't much of a surprise, since Menuhin was a great champion of the composer's work. I prefer the "second" concerto (the ONLY violin concerto Bartok published in his lifetime), but the "first" has some great melodies and passages, and...
  5. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I'm in a kind of Schoenbergian headspace today. My spouse teaches at the University of Memphis. I teach at Rutgers University in Newark. That means that we are apart for half the year -- except for a break every few weeks when she come up to visit here, or I visit there. It's a shitty way to...
  6. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I used to take my dad to I Musici de Montreal concerts. It was to repay him for the many, many years of Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, and McGill Chamber Orchestra concerts of my youth. He would always buy a series, and we'd go every week -- often twice. My father encouraged my violin...
  7. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I know almost nothing about this record. There is a bit on Discogs, and a search for the catalogue number turns up just a few things. It was recorded on two consecutive nights at the War Memorial Opera House in January 1960. It sounds like a live performance, and it was released in 1969 -- a...
  8. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    Sergei Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives is a very special piece of music to me. Many years ago, I gave my friend Alexandra the sheet music for Christmas. She was an enormously talented pianist -- far better than me -- who was involved in something of a cross-temporal love affair with Liszt. Azana...
  9. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    Some idiosyncratic Shostakovich and Haydn from one of my absolute favourite concert pianists. I love her slow movement in the Shostakovich... It is so wistful and mournful... slow moving, but full of great emotion, like Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov...
  10. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I just want to say how much I enjoy reading this thread. I get so many great listening ideas from you guys. I spend so much time inside the are of my research -- which IS great music (20th century modernism and avant-garde) -- or inside Bach (my singular passion), that I often neglect other...
  11. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    Re: "guiller likes this." Of course you do. We have pretty much the same music collection! :D
  12. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I have long been a booster of Hindemith's. He doesn't have the same profile as other 20th century composers, probably due to his eclecticism -- his styles and idioms were in a constant state of fluidity -- and due to the fact that his greatest operatic works, like Neues vom Tage, Hin und zuruck...
  13. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    This is a very nice recording of Mantra. It holds up rather well to the Kontarskys' definitive DG record.
  14. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    One of the many largeky neglected American composers. I wrote my MA thesis on Blitzstein and the project to create an authentic American opera.
  15. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I have been listening to Ligeti to mark the end of 2016, one of the worst years that I can remember. It began with the death of Boulez and Bowie, and came crashing to an end with the death of Pauline Oliveros last month, and the one-two of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds this week. Among my...
  16. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I agree completely. The Bournemouth Vaughan Williams symphonies compare favourably to the Boult/RCA (second cycle?) recordings, and my father-in-law gave me a Faletta/Buffalo disc of Bartok's Kossuth suite that I quite like. My in-laws are from Buffalo, so they get to hear the BPO all the time...
  17. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I'm not usually a big fan of Naxos discs. Sometimes, as with the Antoni Wit recordings of Penderecki (especially the St. Luke Passion) or Lutoslawski, Naxos hits it out of the park. Sometimes, like the Danubius Quartet's recording of Mozart's Clarinet Quintets, they are absolutely horrible...
  18. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    ... And I don't know if this is the right forum for this... But if anyone is interested in avant-garde and modern music, please check out my podcast No Sounds Are Forbidden. The latest episode, on modernist Christmas Music, with my guest, University College Cork musicologist Jill Rogers, is...
  19. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I do like dark music. And to mark the anniversary of Boulez's death last January -- one of the first sad events of the annus horribilis of 2016 -- I have been working through my trove of his recordings. Szymanowski's Symphony No. 3 is a brilliant, and often-overlooked work. It is a setting of...
  20. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    Penderecki's Magnificat. I do tend to get into holiday-themed music around this time of year, although not Bing Crosby, exactly.
  21. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    Hindemith's Trauermusik, Britten's Lachrymae, Penderecki's 1983 Viola Concerto. Music to suit my mood, as we come to the end of a terrible year.
  22. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    Morning music. It probably won't come as a surprise that I like dark chocolate and black coffee.
  23. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    Katsaris. Grieg. Holbergs. Nuff said.
  24. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    I had the great privilege to know Oliveros. I interviewed her a couple of times for my research, and she was as warm and decent as she was brilliant. Her recent death was a profound blow.
  25. Doc Friedman

    Today's classical playlist

    Then you have a rare gem. Treat it well.
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