Today is all about homework -- writing for this project, writing for that project, studying for Monday's exam -- and generally spending most of my day with at least half my brain in school at all times. (I say, "Hm?" and "What?" a lot.) I hear football downstairs, and the dog barking as people disappear up the stairs without her, and up here, in the next room, my sister is singing along tunelessly with "Hard Candy Christmas" as it plays on the radio, and Tears for Fears do not, quite, drown any of that out. Not that this is a bad thing. Just an observation.
I did discover recordings of not one, but two favorite works that I liked enough to buy from the iTunes Store, which is a very pleasing find. A person develops opinions about work that gets recorded more than once, or by more than one artist, and it becomes difficult to accept otherwise perfectly fine recordings that take certain movements too fast or too slow, for example. So you learn which conductors and which orchestras you like, whose interpretations please or offend you (it's highly personal, this business of interpretation; one maestro's allegro is another's andante is another's too bloody fast/slow, and so on). So sometimes it's a gamble, with varying rates of payoff. This is how a person ends up with three or four recordings of the same piece. It's the "dream cast" theory of music collection. Sometimes that's fun, but sometimes, you just want the perfect (or the really really close-to-perfect) recording in one go.
Getting back to the actual pieces, I purchased a lovely version of Beethoven 7 with Christian Thielemann and the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Mozart 40 (clarinet version!) with Barry Wordsworth and Capella Istropolitana. I was especially pleased with the sound of the woodwinds on the Mozart; if it had been a taste, they would have been tart -- not so much that anything was spoiled, but just enough to make the texture more interesting.
Searches in classical at the iTunes store are still frustrating, when "vienna philharmonic" turns up even more hits for "odessa philharmonic," "stuttgart philharmonic" and "london philharmonic," and displays them first. Or when "Frederica von Stade" is actually "Frederica von Stade, Gabriel Faure" and a host of others, but only Flicka's name shows up, and you have to mouse over the result and wait for the pop-up to know what's really behind it. Don't even ask why "bassoon" returns Anne-Sophie Mutter with Herbert von Karajan and Berlin doing the Mozart violin concerti 3 & 5 as its first result. I can't tell you.
Yes, I do like this recording of Beethoven 7. Very much. I may have to get Thielemann's Beethoven 5 from the same album. But first, I'll need to make sure it does not "correct" Beethoven's scoring in the first movement. We have views on these things, yes we do.
It's too bad you can't buy recordings on approval. "I'm sorry; the first movement was great, but the adagio was far too brisk for my tastes." "I was looking for something with a more robust string section."
Posted on November 25, 2005 to horticulture
Previously: Putting the "Base" Back in "Baseline"
Next Time: Born in the fifties
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