First off, I see that Tom Service's symphony guide has a new installment and this one actually catches me by surprise! Here is the link. The piece is the Symphony No. 10 by Nikolai Myaskovsky and I freely confess that while I may have run across his name somewhere, I am not at all familiar with his music. It is amazing how much music there is out there. Myaskovsky seems to be the link between the symphonies of Tchaikovsky and the later ones by Shostakovich. Pretty interesting music and I am grateful to Tom for introducing me to it.
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Over at Sinfini Music, the magazine that specializes in "cutting through classical" they are promoting Milos Karadaglic's new recording of the two best-known Rodrigo concertos. He gets the pop-star treatment even down to being known just by his first name: it's Milos! Here's the review of the album. Unfortunately, like nearly all record reviews these days, it is a mere wisp of a couple of hundred words of promotion, with just a hint of critique of the recording ambiance. Someone should really do a few record reviews that show what they should actually be. Oh. Wait.
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I once blurted out that a lot of classical musicians would love to sell out, but nobody's buying! Of course, that was in the old days before people figured out some pretty effective ways to "sell out". But usually, apart from modeling yourself after a pop star and shamelessly pandering to the audience, there aren't many ways to sell out in classical music. One director of a French conservatory has solved the problem. Apparently what you do is approve the admission of Chinese students to your school in exchange for expenses-paid trips to China and Thailand. Norman Lebrecht has the details.
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Also via Norman Lebrecht's blog is news about classical album sales. The Benedictines of Mary album Lent at Ephesus sold 8,160 copies last week, which in the classical world is huge. Here is a promotional video:
Sometimes we forget that there is a significant record-buying public out there that buys spiritually-oriented music. I was surprised by a large response to a post I put up on different kinds of chant.
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And the trend in radio is to play fewer songs more often leading to even more dumbing down of music in the public space and probably to the birth of the antichrist! Here is the link. The number one played song in 2013, Blurred Lines with Robin Thicke, was played about three times as often as the number one song in 2003 by Three Doors Down. Who? Just for comparison, a personal anecdote. Way back in November 1968 I was atypically sitting around listening to AM radio (which I almost never did, even back then) and suddenly at midnight the DJ came on and said "we have it" in hushed tones. And proceeded to play all four sides of The White Album, which had just come out.
That took us to about 1:30 in the morning. Let me just reiterate, this was AM radio, home of the non-stop commercials. And he played all four sides of the just-released album without interruption. Then he came back on, said "wow" and "let's hear that again" and played the whole album through again. On AM radio. What can I say, it was the sixties!
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Here's a weird little item. It is sort of like a social media site just for picking what songs to listen to. One interesting thing is that they give heavier weight to people who seem to be outliers in terms of being aficionados:
What about the obscure songs that have a lot less data attached to them? When someone picks those, it gets assumed that you're a bit more of a music connoisseur and your choice gets weighted heavier. It's an aspect that has more of the human element behind it.
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And finally, another weird little item. Blogger Amelia has discovered some musical notation buried in the famous triptych by Hieronymous Bosch and transcribed it into modern notation. You can hear it on her blog.
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Let's end with what I am listening to these days. The Piano Concerto No. 9 by Mozart, played by Malcolm Bilson on fortepiano with the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner:
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