Weird lines followed in classical music have led me to a pretty cool 2017 recording.
In the late 80's I was introduced to Chicago Pro Musica through the recording of Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat
https://youtu.be/abxVlB9Ahu8. So, I was a fan of this music when
Make a Jazz Noise Here was released. I didn't know the Bartok, however, and wasn't so interested in that until lately, when I broke out of my Halloween 77 period.
Make a Jazz Noise Here has some of the best playing on it and I was more and more impressed with Chad Wackerman after listening to so much Bozzio, who is featured so well in the new '77 mix. The fantastic selection of orchestral music on the
MAJNH record, especially disc II, makes me hope for a collectors edition of a sequence of those shows so I can hear more of that band playing "Sinister Footwear II" and "Strictly Genteel" and maybe even more of the Oliver Nelson piece, "Stolen Moments," also from that tour.
Anyway, I recently started looking for performances of Bartok's piano concerto no. 3 online and found a Boulez conducted performance from 2009 on Deutsche Grammophon--which is a pretty fucking great release:
http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/us/cat/4778125.
This leads me back to Chicago Pro Musica, whom I saw perform Boulez's "Dialogue de L'ombre Double" (back in Chicago in 88 or 89) in a surround-sound space--set up in what I think was the lounge area for the box-seaters on the second floor. This piece of music is for clarinet and tape and the Chicago Pro Musica leader is the clarinetist, John Bruce Yeh, who performed this haunting and complex piece. (A different performance:
https://youtu.be/zCFjKXEqaVA)
And I have been listening to the three Chicago Pro Musica cds, which include Varese, Paul Bowles (!), Weill among others, for years. In fact, Chicago Pro Musica introduced me to Rimsky-Korsakov's "Capriccio Espagnol," arranged for ensemble, and it is <b>the</b> most enjoyable performance and arrangement in my modest collection--and it's so well recorded:
https://youtu.be/R122RFKf9Uc.
I began to wonder what happened to Reference Recordings, the audiophile label that recorded these three favorite Chicago Pro Musica titles. When I went to their page the other day I found that they are still at it and have released some pretty fantastic music recently. One of them is the Adam Schoenberg:
American Symphony • Finding Rothko • Picture Studies that is truly fantastic. It is playful and accessible modern music. I hear Copland and Adams in the lighter pieces and some heavy Mahler-esque bombast in other moments. Anyway, it's worth checking out:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/adam-schoenberg-american-symphony-finding-rothko-picture/1190720006
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
if you like a jazz feel to your classical this is great.
