Late Beethoven Thread - Page 8

Thank you. I made it about half way through that. I'm afraid I have to stick to my blunderbuses on Hayden, with all due respect. He gives me diabetes.

Weird. Last week I dug up my Lindsay discs to rip onto my new work computer.

I'm as big a fan of "difficult" music as you're likely to find, but most of the Groβe Fuge seems to me like a bunch of counterpoint curiosities stitched together into a meandering, directionless slog. It doesn't even particularly work as a fugue (Op. 131 #1 is better in terms of pure fugual execution.)

In terms of slow movements, Op. 135 #3 > teh Cavatina. Those few measures after the return to the tonic major may be some of the most gut-wrenching ever written. The Heiliger Dankgesang is probably Beethoven's best slow movement, although of course the adagio in the ninth is no slouch either. Late Beethoven is really defined by the slow movements, IMO.

Best overall is probably C# min or A min, although F Maj has a lot to recommend itself.

Why is no one commenting on the Op. 106 Adagio? In the right hands it's sheer magic and its clear logic is a welcome counterpoint to the reckless leaps and bounds of the opening Allegro. Also, I sprung for the Pizarro late Sonatas (109, 110, and 111) and they're not quite all I hoped for, but Op. 111 opens with all the fire I wanted. May yet pick up the Richter in Leipzig since I like Richter.

It's nice to see that someone that isn't a musicologist or a career musician appreciates the Grosso Fugue.

At the first performance, the audience demanded an encore of the Cavatina and not the Grosso Fugue.

The Cavatina recording the Buddhapest is one of the things they sent to space a long time ago in that probe for aliens to find us.

Is anyone familiar with this book? I saw it alluded to in something else I was reading the other day.

The Budapest makes it a much more coherent experience-- it is in music like this that their virtues considerably outweigh their deficits.

Actually, Beethoven's metronome markings for the 9th work amazingly well-- except for the 2 misprints, which Norrington plays as printed. Among other small things, you'll note that when played at tempo, the string sextuplets at the very end of the 3rd movement are exactly as fast as the ones a the opening of the 1st. A little cloud passing over the sun as the final benediction arrives. And while I haven't taken a poll, it's my impression that most conductors play the quotes from the first 3 more or less in tempo in the 4th, even if they mangled things earlier on.

I don't know what went wrong with Norrington's recordings. He did a whole series of things in Boston that were far better-- with the Boston Early Music Festival and the BSO. Turns out the BSO musicians didn't like him, but they sounded great when he was onstage. At the BEMF, he did a great Idomeneo, and a Haydn Seasons that was truly remarkable. I also heard/saw a fantastic demo he did with BEMF of classical minuets with dancers that induced me to buy the LCP discs of Haydn symphonies-- which turned out to be pretty mediocre.

Oh, jeez. Imagine being the alien society that hears the Cavatina and then comes to earth to find music dominated by Katy Perry and hip-hop. Whoops, turn around - wrong planet!