I guess you could call me a conservative investor in that I have limited time. I think of listening to a recording as being an investment of time so I try to use my time wisely. I look at a recent post by Ted Gioia where he mentions listening to a thousand new recordings this year so he could pick out the top 100 and just the thought of it leaves me breathless. Mind you, I listen to a lot of clips on YouTube, but they are often of old recordings and I don't necessarily listen to all of the clip. I only purchased three CDs this year that I can recall: Igor Levit ON DSCH, Daniil Trifonov, Silver Age and Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and others, Amazone and the latter hasn't even arrived yet. Early in the New Year, I would expect. I did reviews of the first two soon after receiving them and they were as fine as I expected. I listened to excerpts before hand as I have done with the Lea Desandre recording. So, those are my candidates for best of the year. I just don't have time to listen to a thousand others and, just between you and me, the odds are that most of those would be, uh, mediocre. Somehow, though this is rather obviously necessarily the case, it seems boorish to mention it. In fact, apparently one has to gin up an enormous amount of enthusiasm for just about everything under the sun.
I do notice one thing: there seem to be two basic kinds of new music in the US these days that I will call "Brooklyn hammering" and "California Dreaming" for obvious reasons. I might do a post on that!
Here's Andy Akiho, excerpt from Seven Pillars
I have innate sympathy for any percussionist incorporating a Johnny Walker Red bottle into his kit. Not like I closely watched as I listened, but there was a moment when my eye caught that detail...or at least, my mind thinks my eye saw it. I don't think I see Maestro Akiho himself in this video. I think I mentioned him in a previous discussion here about contemporary composers, including my story of being able to talk briefly with Andy Akiho after a performance of his Concerto for Steel Pans, when he was a student at the Yale Music School and I was a local in the audience (with my son, we have been to hundreds of YSM concerts!). I was pretty enthusiastic about how great his piece was, and I told him so!
ReplyDeleteIn contrast to you Bryan, I buy CDs at a rate probably around 2 per week! A few years ago, one of them was an Andy Akiho disc. But virtually none of them are new recordings just this year. Except this one I love, from Brilliant Classics: Renata Dubinskaite (mezzo soprano): "La Voce Solo," a set of music composed by Barbara Strozzi. Gorgeous singing and fine playing of period instruments!
I went through a furious LP buying phase early on in my classical music experience. And a few years ago I went through a paroxysm of purchasing of large boxes: complete Mozart, Haydn, etc. I think the last one was a big box of 50 CDs of Esa-Pekka Salonen. But these days I am super selective!
ReplyDeleteAh, yes. The lure of the big boxes. All of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra's Sony discs for $75. Murray Perahi's complete recordings (60 odd CD's for under $100). 172 discs of Bach for $350. All prices Canadian dollars to boot! Who could resist? Not me. Now, with house downsizing facing me as a reality, I have to think about the unthinkable: culling my owned music collection. I really haven't bought into Spotify as an alternative. I have been spoiled by the sound of my shiny discs and cannot expect to be satisfied with the streamed alternative. Besides, I read somewhere that streaming is destroying the environment with its huge appetite for electricity, most often generated with dirty fuel.
ReplyDeleteBack to Bach (disc 143).
Wishing you a happy and healthy year end holiday season.
I have had to seriously downsize my collections a couple of times: once moving from Victoria to Montreal and, most severely, moving from Canada to Mexico. No more!
ReplyDeleteMy best wishes to you and all my readers and commentators: good food and good friends in the holiday season and a healthy and prosperous New Year!