Revelatory Music
Mar. 16th, 2007 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryM. Ward,
I don’t think I can manage five recordings.
I saw 2001 at its initial release when I was 4 years old (the only good thing my father ever did for me was to introduce to the best cinema) and it made an overwhelming impact.
When I was in the fourth grade I got my first pitiful portable picnic player and happened to find the soundtrack of 2001 in the remained bin at a Kressgie’s for 99 cents. My so-called school-mates were already beginning to form their identifies through sub-servience to the latest trends in marketing and advertising (I recall one particularly annoying bastard was becoming keen on Elton John), so it seemed a perfectly natural thing for me to fortify my isolation from their world by turning to a form of music that they already reflexively ridiculed but whose worth was already apparent to me. Also, unlike them (but like yourself) I realized that the music used in the Warner Brothers cartoon shorts was all Classical. So that album led to more of Strauss and then Liszt, and so on.
By the time I was 13 I faciley accepted the idea that opera was inherently tedious, maintaining this even having heard a number of performances on the Met broadcasts and on record. I attribute this to the horrible lifeless Met simul-casts on PBS whose images involved virtually no cutting to speak of—I could see well enough how bad they were as films (by this time I was becoming with the work of Nykvist and other editors) and assumed the music, which I could not quite detach from that context, was no better. This changed when I went to see a double bill of Lousey’s Don Giovanni and Bergman’s Trollflöjten, to which I was attracted by the reputation the latter had built up with me already (this was at the Tivioli before its restoration, perhaps Siamhussein recalls it). This was a truly electrifying experience: I had to stay and see the program a second time and I went back the next day also. After that I wanted nothing but opera. I soon acquired the soundtrack of the Don (Abbado with Raimondi, van Dam, Te Kanawa), and the von Karajan Zauberflötte.
(since this is the internet, after all you might want to look here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073822/usercomments
The first comment seems apt, but the hippy a few down who read the Neoplatonic content of the allegory as Buddhist is hilarious).
And this strange little site:
http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/magic_flute_bibliography.htm
I was going to link to Birgit Nordin’s site, but its evidently been taken down. I wonder if she has died?).
Other than that I can’t think of any particular albums that changed my life, and those are really all films aren’t they? I can’t even say that one particular Authentic Performance Practice recording had a revelatory influence, though for years I rather couldn’t distinguish between Hogwood and God.
My wife will be heartened to hear that you listen to the Cure.
I don’t think I can manage five recordings.
I saw 2001 at its initial release when I was 4 years old (the only good thing my father ever did for me was to introduce to the best cinema) and it made an overwhelming impact.
When I was in the fourth grade I got my first pitiful portable picnic player and happened to find the soundtrack of 2001 in the remained bin at a Kressgie’s for 99 cents. My so-called school-mates were already beginning to form their identifies through sub-servience to the latest trends in marketing and advertising (I recall one particularly annoying bastard was becoming keen on Elton John), so it seemed a perfectly natural thing for me to fortify my isolation from their world by turning to a form of music that they already reflexively ridiculed but whose worth was already apparent to me. Also, unlike them (but like yourself) I realized that the music used in the Warner Brothers cartoon shorts was all Classical. So that album led to more of Strauss and then Liszt, and so on.
By the time I was 13 I faciley accepted the idea that opera was inherently tedious, maintaining this even having heard a number of performances on the Met broadcasts and on record. I attribute this to the horrible lifeless Met simul-casts on PBS whose images involved virtually no cutting to speak of—I could see well enough how bad they were as films (by this time I was becoming with the work of Nykvist and other editors) and assumed the music, which I could not quite detach from that context, was no better. This changed when I went to see a double bill of Lousey’s Don Giovanni and Bergman’s Trollflöjten, to which I was attracted by the reputation the latter had built up with me already (this was at the Tivioli before its restoration, perhaps Siamhussein recalls it). This was a truly electrifying experience: I had to stay and see the program a second time and I went back the next day also. After that I wanted nothing but opera. I soon acquired the soundtrack of the Don (Abbado with Raimondi, van Dam, Te Kanawa), and the von Karajan Zauberflötte.
(since this is the internet, after all you might want to look here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073822/usercomments
The first comment seems apt, but the hippy a few down who read the Neoplatonic content of the allegory as Buddhist is hilarious).
And this strange little site:
http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/magic_flute_bibliography.htm
I was going to link to Birgit Nordin’s site, but its evidently been taken down. I wonder if she has died?).
Other than that I can’t think of any particular albums that changed my life, and those are really all films aren’t they? I can’t even say that one particular Authentic Performance Practice recording had a revelatory influence, though for years I rather couldn’t distinguish between Hogwood and God.
My wife will be heartened to hear that you listen to the Cure.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-16 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-16 02:40 pm (UTC)Are you familiar with Bryn Terfel's creation of Falstaff? There are some youtube clips out there - don't know if you like Terfel's singing or not (you're obviously far more discerning than I; I'm one of those "I know what I like" people), but I like his expressive acting. And his "Va vecchio John" aria is pure satyr play - or so it would seem.
"Ehi Paggio... L'onore! Ladri!"
"Va vecchio John"
Tutto, nel mondo e burla"
I'm slowly learning more about opera. The Zemir et Azor at Opera Theater a few years ago was fun and refreshing, with the "bird-beaast" who hated himself and rent himself with his claws.
Lucky you - to see operatic film on the "big screen" of the Tivoli. I saw "Fantasia" there before it was renovated; that was another example of cartoons as vehicles for classical music.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-17 03:48 am (UTC)I can't say I care for Verdi enough to have anything very meaningful to say about Terfel.
I saw Fantasia there too--a film I used to love, but if I saw it now I am sure I could only be agahst at the Disney treatment--the cultural gap between the music and the images. You know Stravinsky gave serious thought to suing...but its better if I don't get started about Disney.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-17 05:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-17 03:36 am (UTC)My mother lsitened to a top 40 radio station and occasionally a Chuck Berry album--that is why I can quote from memory: "Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news!" Which i always site whenever someone claims popular msuic is not triumphaliist and filled with hatred and derision for the Tradition (much to my wife's annoyance).
My father was evidentlly keen on the kind of jazz you would expect in the case of a pretentious high school student and college frshman in the years 1956-61: Dave Brubeck and a host of others I can't name, all abandoned as he took step by self-destructive step (he sold his album collection a few years ago and the second ahnd dealer gave him as much as 20 dollars a disk at the same time i got 50 cents a piece for my old DG albums). He used to go to a little jazz club in Berekly in the basement of a grocery store (it was was recently renovated into a carwash)where Muddy Waters, ray Charles, ike and tina Turner, and their ilk would perform before becoming nationally prominent.
One album he did have that I listened to was devoted to Poe. It had alternating Jazzy settings of some poems (e.g. The Bells and the Raven) with a drama professor giving really awful readings of others (e.g. Annabel Lee, Ulalume), and still others interpreted through jazz tone-poems. I did not, of course, realize how kitchified the whole thing was at the time. As a result I have the afore said poems memorized (or at least I can recite them for a few days after a quick review of the text--the line order quickly gets mixed up for me, then the half lines); and I also greatly over-rate Poe's worth as a poet (at least according to my wife). Now that I think of it, that record should probably have gone on the lsit of the five albums for the original post.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 05:33 pm (UTC)