Sunday, April 29, 2012

A Very Interesting Program

I may have to go to Paris in October after seeing this fascinating program at the  Cité de la Musique:


ANDREAS STAIER / ALEXANDER MELNIKOV

PRÉLUDES ET FUGUES

  • DIMANCHE 21 OCTOBRE 2012 / 16:30
  • SALLE DES CONCERTS




  • Andreas Staier  clavecin
  • Alexander Melnikov  piano





  • Johann Sebastian Bach
    Prélude et fugue n°1 en ut majeur, BWV 846
    Prélude et fugue n°12 en fa mineur, BWV 857
    Dmitri Chostakovitch
    Prélude et fugue n°21 en si bémol majeur
    Prélude et fugue n°22 en sol mineur
    Prélude et fugue n°7 en la majeur
    Johann Sebastian Bach
    Prélude et fugue n°5 en ré majeur, BWV 874
    Prélude et fugue n°11 en fa majeur, BWV 880
    Entracte
    Dmitri Chostakovitch
    Prélude et fugue n°15 en ré bémol majeur
    Prélude et fugue n°16 en si bémol mineur
    Johann Sebastian Bach
    Prélude et fugue n°8 en mi bémol mineur, BWV 853
    Prélude et fugue n°17 en la bémol majeur, BWV 886
    Prélude et fugue n°9 en mi majeur, BWV 878
    Dmitri Chostakovitch
    Prélude et fugue n°3 en sol majeur
    Prélude et fugue n°4 en mi mineur






















    I've talked about these preludes and fugues by Shostakovich before, but what a wonderful opportunity to hear them together with the pieces they are emulating, by Bach. Of course, if you have the recordings you can just reproduce the concert at home...


    UPDATE: A thought-provoking comment was left, to which I responded, but I also did a new post on this concert with some further thoughts.

    2 comments:

    RG said...

    "if you have the recordings you can just reproduce the concert at home" Really!? Is this irony? Can you reproduce a live performance from recordings?

    Bryan Townsend said...

    In a sense it is just a trivial observation: If you have recordings of the Bach preludes and fugues and the Shostakovich preludes and fugues then you can mix and match them to correspond to the published program. In that sense you can "reproduce the concert at home" as truly as any recording captures any concert. Except, to be truly exact, you would have to have the works recorded by Staier and Melnikov, the performers who will give the concert.

    However, this is to ignore a number of aspects of a concert. There is another sense in which no recording ever captures any concert in that recordings always miss some dimensions of the sound. Which exactly and how would lead us into a technical discussion that is not so important. But when you are actually there in the hall, the music sounds different. Second, there may be an interaction created by this program: the way Staier plays Bach may influence in some way the way Melnikov plays Shostakovich and vice versa. Third, there is a social aspect to concert-going in which the experience is a shared one, not a separate one as when you listen to a recording.

    But still, a large part of the experience of hearing these works in this particular order could be synthesized at home using recordings...