Hey, if you tune into WGBH right now (89.7 FM in Boston, streaming on the Web here), you can catch today's live Boston Symphony concert, which this week includes the world premiere performances of Kaija Saariaho's cello concerto, "Notes on Light." If you're keeping score at home, that's two BSO premieres in two weeks. Enjoy it while it lasts. (You can also hear tomorrow night's concert at 8 PM on WCRB.)
Critic-at-large Moe and I got ourselves good and lost in the Sherborn Town Forest this morning, and when we got back to the car, WGBH was rebroadcasting a portion of Garrick Ohlsson's Jordan Hall recital from a couple of weeks back. They were playing the Beethoven op. 22 Sonata, which was my favorite one on the program. It's Ludwig at his most relaxed and human, especially the last movement, which takes the traditional Classical opera buffa-style finale and turns it inside out; a cute number for the lovers that you're hearing from backstage, so you also get stagehands running around, scenery creaking into place, and quarrels among the extras. It's enough to make me wish he hadn't gone all Romantic-heroic on us.
WGBH sent around an e-mail the other day to announce that next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at 9 AM (EST), Cathy Fuller will be broadcasting (and streaming) the 1975 Houston Grand Opera recording of Scott Joplin's Treemonisha. Joplin's a hero around Soho the Dog HQ, so that's information we're happy to pass along.
3 comments:
This is tangentially related to the post, in that it falls in the good-stuff-to-hear-free category that you and your readers might be happy to know about. It also works as a silver lining to the Hatto business...
I followed Alex Ross's post this morning to the Pristine Classical Hatto Hoax page, and found not only the Hatto stuff, which is interesting in a dreary way, but also a wonderful historic recording of Alfred Cortot and Jacques Thibaud the Kreutzer--a 30 minute MP3 that, for the moment, can be freely downloaded.
A little bit more about this at my place.
A very nice blog you and yer dog have--thanks.
Joplin's great, but Treemonisha's a bit of a drag, no?
I love it. The dancing bears alone are worth the price of admission. Even if the plot loses you, though (which is not hard—what little plot the thing has isn't a model of clarity) it's fascinating to hear how Joplin himself heard ragtime translating into vocal music. In the wake of the ragtime revival, we think of it as piano only, but during its time, it was as much song-based as anything.
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