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Posts Tagged ‘music’

Mr. Brahms successfully downsizes: The Complete String Quartets, The Complete Clarinet Sonatas (Philips Duo)

Posted in reseña, tagged , , on February 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »

As an amateur music lover with only a spotty control of the repertoire, it always amazes me when it turns out that a composer whom I’ve come to know via the big works–his symphonies, for example–excels in the small stuff as well.

The Quartetto Italiano does Brahms proud on this Philips Duo recording of his complete string and clarinet quartets. Brahms the late Romantic composer sounds almost modern in these tight, diminutive, four-pieces. Something of the Modernist angst comes in to complement the celebratory reflex of Romanticism itself. One senses that we stand here at the hinge of two artistic eras. (more…)

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because I tried: Lifehouse, Lifehouse

Posted in reseña, tagged , , on February 2, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It may well be that Lifehouse fired their three working bullets on the first tracks of this eponymous and excellent album.

Then again, maybe not. The rest of these tunes are pretty good work. It’s just a little tough keeping up with the right-left-another-right emotional impact of ‘Come Back Down’, ‘You and Me’, and ‘Blind’. Lifehouse could pull a Simon & Garfunkel and disappear after this album and we’d still warm to these first three exquisite and pathos-filled songs twenty years hence. We’d remember who we were when we first heard them.

That’s good music-making. (more…)

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my song, for the asking: Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water

Posted in reseña, tagged , , on January 22, 2008| Leave a Comment »

This masterful album can only be called succulent. And that’s just to start with. The adjectives need to wax ever stronger in order adequately to describe the movement from one classic piece to the next in this eleven-track celebration of some of the 1970s finest music.

Like Seinfeld for the ears, Simon and Garfunkel’s music generates many of the lyrics and observations that are engraved upon the brains of us who grew up in that era and which spring almost unconsciously to the lips when circumstances beckon. (more…)

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budget-music-be-damned, this Tchaikovsky soars: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5; The Storm (Antoni Wit, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Naxos)

Posted in reseña, tagged , , , , on January 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Russian romantic music performed like this in a 1992 recording by Antoni Wit and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra is the reason the Naxos label came out of nowhere to the kind of well-deserved prominence that makes ‘budget music’ seem an irrelevant misnomer.

Tchaikovsky’s great Symphony Number 5 is played with exceptional verve. The stirring Andante tempo that predominates in three of the four movements comes off majestically. If Tchaikovsky teetered on the edge of madness, he managed to transpose whatever chaos gusted in his soul into memorable late romantic lines that occasionally make one almost shudder. This fifth symphony set him up for the unforgettable sixth (‘Pathetique’), in which emotion burst whatever dam was still standing as he wrote this, its precursor. (more…)

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No tengo lugar …: Yasmín Levy, La Judería

Posted in reseña, tagged , , on January 20, 2008| 1 Comment »

Yasmín Levy’s music is a revelation. Blending and sorting influences from Ladino (Jewish-Spanish) culture, Gypsy, and Flamenco music with other Middle Eastern aural aromas, the result is stunning. Levy is the kind of interpreter who could sing about a floor mop in an exotic language and leave you paralyzed by the emotion of it.

Her style is richly sensuous. Accompanied by some splendid Spanish guitar, the Mediterranean sabor of it all splashed a bit of sun on even a winter’s morning in Indianapolis. Yet this is not music for the casual vacationer hoping for a bit of melodic bronzing before lunch.

Levy’s theme is often abandonment. Whether the Gypsy with no country or the lover with no choice but to leave because ‘quiero olvidar el aroma de tu cuerpo, quiero olvidar el sabor de tus labios’, Levy’s song is as often as not a lament.

From an aesthetic point of view, that is just as well. The deep sadness that comes through in this genre accounts for its well-echoing beauty. Even to sing of amor is to weep over love lost or to cringe in the face of its anticipated departure or to cut off a beautiful thing because one knows it will turn bad.

The flamenco touches are gorgeously done, the genre’s staccato clap punctuating a vocal line laid down with superb maturity by the singer. It is not difficult to believe Levy’s reviewers who say that she presents an exquisite live concert.

No one will ever say that Yasmín Levy’s music lacks feeling. Yet there is so very much more here than just passion.

La Judería is indeed a revelation.

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original thinking: Kelly Liebengood, Deep with You

Posted in reseña, tagged , , on January 6, 2008| 1 Comment »

My good friend Kelly Liebengood ran off to Costa Rica shortly after recording this 2003 album. Then, when he had done all the damage he could in that Central American nation, he fled to Scotland, where he is presently jousting at becoming a biblical scholar, to the general consternation of an otherwise splendid old University that lies next to the world’s most famous golf courses.

It is difficult to say with certainty how the world might have been different had Mr. Liebengood continued to devote himself to recording music rather than, say, missionary pursuits in Latin America or a high-fallutin’ academic career across the pond. There are moments in these thirteen tracks that are so raw one is reminded of a train running off the rails and burying an unsuspecting village in its load of cabbage or, say, malt. (more…)

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like a large cigar: Gregorian Chant (The Sunday Times Music Collection)

Posted in reseña, tagged , , , on January 6, 2008| 3 Comments »

At first or early encounter, Gregorian Chant is a bit like a large, quality cigar.

It goes on rather longer than one anticipated, it provides moments for wondering how-did-I-get-myself-into-this, it opens the shutters to glimpses of true beauty, and in the end leaves one longing for the next one. (more…)

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new music: Paint the Sky with Stars. The Best of Enya

Posted in reseña, tagged , , on December 28, 2007| Leave a Comment »

For most of us, Enya didn’t so much introduce us to a new kind of music. It felt more like she invented a genre and then invited us to listen in.

This anthology of sixteen of her hits is appropriately headed by the beguiling ‘Orinoco Flow’, the piece that first caught the public’s attention and remains a compelling, joyous ode in a Celtic-tradition-in-variant-form sort of way. (more…)

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intimate, engrossing: Takacs Quartet, Beethoven String Quartets

Posted in reseña, tagged , , , on December 27, 2007| Leave a Comment »

It is difficult for this amateur music appreciator to imagine a more intimate art music experience than to see and hear (or, if necessary, simply to hear) chamber music played by a quartet as passionate and expert as the Takacs. I first encountered this ensemble in Indianapolis in a concert hall that by its very physical parameters requires an intimate experience. (more…)

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lost in the wide open: Nora Mirsy, Como Lluvia Fiel

Posted in reseña, tagged , , , on December 27, 2007| 15 Comments »

If politics were not what they are, Cuban artist Nora Mirsy would be well-known to North American audiences, her sound refined by some powerhouse recording empire or another, her pockets quite full of royalties in the manner of a medium-sized talent.

Instead, you need to meet and hear Mirsy at a Cuban hotel like the one whose lobby hosted her on a warm night in Santiago de Cuba in 2006 or the Valentine’s Day celebration in public square of that same city two years hence. She reminded me then of a Latin Tracy Chapman and she does still. The resemblance is not close in formal terms. For me, it exists more at the level of the longing and simplicity that find themselves melded in her voice, a quality I take to be practically a Chapman signature.

Mirsy’s music is scored for a simple conjunto of traditional Cuban instruments.

The final of thirteen tracks of Como Lluvia Fiel is an artistically stirring rendition of the revolutionary paean, Hasta siempre comandante, a staple tribute to Che Guevara.

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