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The Radio 3 Boards > The Music Boards > Music Through The Ages > 20th Century > Bridge shows Shostakovich how to write slow movements
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Author Topic: Bridge shows Shostakovich how to write slow movements  (Read 1364 times)
time_is_now
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« Reply #15 on: 01:10:48, 06-05-2007 »
Quote from: oliver sudden on 01:03:39, 06-05-2007
One can only conclude from this that the writer had some unresolved problems with chromaticism.
'Unresolved' being we suppose the operative word ...

Good night Mr Sudden. Enjoy your kippers.
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time_is_now
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« Reply #16 on: 01:25:53, 06-05-2007 »
A question Mr Sudden might answer in a few hours (after tending to his kippers): is there a particular recording he would recommend of the Selva, which we find we don't own? The Hyperion, despite its curious ethics of chromaticism? Or this, perhaps, which we imagine might be 'a good one':
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
oliver sudden
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« Reply #17 on: 08:47:58, 06-05-2007 »
One can hardly claim to 'own' a piece of music of course. Wink

I also thought the Cantus Cölln SM&S likely to be a good one. Alas it turned out not to be so much to my taste - although they are indeed wonderful Baroque voices they're not really such appropriate early Baroque voices for me and don't seem to be able to get their throats around the coloratura. That throat articulation is a tricky business. I see others have liked it though and you should always bear in mind the possibility that I might be a misguided crank.

There's also this one:



It could well be good but I haven't yet had the chance to test it out and well, you know, once bitten twice shy... Wink Anyone else know it?

As far as the individual pieces go the best recordings from what the Poms were doing in the 80s are still the most satisfying for me - so the recordings from the Taverners and that Hyperion disc. The Gabrielis have also managed some very fine things although for me their recent 1610 Vespers is not one of them. (The older Venetian Vespers set is.)

Someone will doubtless be along in a minute to shoot me down in flames for this but for me some of the current Italian Baroque vocal groups are too busy sounding Italian to sound Baroque. The recent Concerto Italiano 1610 Vespers was a disappointment for me that way. It's a matter of taste of course but again when the coloratura doesn't come off that does for me suggest maybe the vocal approach isn't so appropriate.

Chromatic passages: of course I should really have mentioned Marenzio's Solo e pensoso. The upper part consists of a chromatic scale going up and down again.
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Sydney Grew
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« Reply #18 on: 08:14:03, 07-05-2007 »
Quote from: roslynmuse on 20:05:30, 05-05-2007
By coincidence I was spinning a compact disc of Young Frank's Lament for Strings only last evening.

We have listened several times to the Lament which Mr. Roslynmuse was kind enough to mention. Although it is very short, it is like the sextet in that its effect grows on each hearing (the sign of a good composer). And a sense such as Bridge's for the infinite complexities of harmony is so important is it not? Of course by 1915 things were really falling apart. We have the impression that this Lament may be based on a folk-song; does any one know?

Most of Bridge's later works we have so far heard only once, but now we are motivated to listen to them all again.

It is very odd we have always thought that the music of Bridge is so entirely different from that of his most famous pupil. Was it ever actually composition we wonder which young Britten was being taught or something else altogether?
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Sydney Grew
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« Reply #19 on: 08:27:52, 07-05-2007 »
Quote from: oliver sudden on 01:03:39, 06-05-2007
The effect to which we referred may be found in . . . the Selva morale e spirituale . . .

We thank Mr. Sudden for his detailed references to Monteverdi. We are always interested in novel harmonies. Such a strange event occurred yesterday! we were toddling along the street when a total stranger came up, handed us a complete recording of this Selva, and left without a word spoken. People can be so generous! No doubt he was a follower of this thread. The version is that of Cantus Cölln of which the front cover is reproduced by Member Time Now in his message 16.

We confess that a) we have until now considered the music of Monteverdi to be of merely academic interest (one of those composers who wrote in several radically different styles and not very interestingly in any of them we thought - a sort of traitor to polyphony), and b) we had never even heard of this "Selva Morale e Spirituale". We had to look up "selva," and found that it means "wood or forest". So, "the moral and spiritual thicket" - a curious title, or have we gone somehow astray? Apparently there are therein "nearly forty separate works, written over three decades." (Why "nearly" - cannot they be counted exactly?)

Anyway thanks to Mr. Sudden we are now happily undergoing a Monteverdi crash course and carefully listening out for his harmonies going into reverse!
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Baziron
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« Reply #20 on: 14:06:19, 07-05-2007 »
Quote from: Sydney Grew on 08:27:52, 07-05-2007
Anyway thanks to Mr. Sudden we are now happily undergoing a Monteverdi crash course and carefully listening out for his harmonies going into reverse!

Monteverdi - who composed a set of madrigals entitled "Madrigals of Love and War" (madrigali guerrieri and madrigali amorosi, comprising his eighth book of madrigals published in 1638) - fully explored the chromatic scale (both ascending and descending). But this was nothing new at that time - "everybody" had tried to do it!

For those Members who feel uncertain about the concept of "harmonics" they are explained (albeit in rudimentary form) in this graphic:



One hint - it doesn't really work very well upside down!

Baz
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richard barrett
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« Reply #21 on: 15:02:58, 07-05-2007 »
Quote from: Sydney Grew on 08:27:52, 07-05-2007
We had to look up "selva," and found that it means "wood or forest". So, "the moral and spiritual thicket" - a curious title, or have we gone somehow astray?
Now, Sydney, let's go through this bit by bit.
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We had to look up "selva," and found that it means "wood or forest"
Showing a lamentable lack of knowledge of the Italian idiom, if I may say so, and its literature, this word occurring in the second line of Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia, of which I dare say even you have heard:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

"Wood or forest" then. Now,
Quote
So, "the moral and spiritual thicket"
Where exactly does this "thicket" come from? Your own somewhat benighted imagination, I think. Dante, after all, could hardly have lost his way in a thicket, although you certainly seem to have done.
« Last Edit: 15:04:43, 07-05-2007 by richard barrett » Logged
Bryn
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« Reply #22 on: 18:42:41, 07-05-2007 »
As a matter of interest, Richard, how does Tom Phillips translate that passage? (I feel sure you must have a copy of his beautiful translation to hand. I don't, unfortunately. Even my copy of "A Humument" went missing during a house move). Sad
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ahinton
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« Reply #23 on: 21:30:03, 07-05-2007 »
This entire premise of this thread borders on the ridiculous. Bridge and Shostakovich were each wonderful composers, albeit very different from one another, but the premise that the one "taught" the other anything - even unwittingly and at a remove - is patently absurd. Even to begin to take such a notion at all seriously, one would have to assume that the relatively young Shostakovich actually knew Bridge's music and had for some time been following his fascinating development as a composer; now just how feasible or likely is that? So please let's abandon this premise-less nonsense and get on with proper consideration of Shostakovich's art here (and Bridge's elsewhere, if someone wants to start a thread on that). The present posit is surely "a bridge too far"...

Best,

Alistair
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #24 on: 21:35:16, 07-05-2007 »
Selva morale is indeed an odd sort of title; we have seen it translated as Moral and Spiritual Grove, which we find a rather lovely image. Not only somewhere one can wander at random, not necessarily alone, to sample its many delights, but somewhere one can get thoroughly lost.

Indeed, as Member Baziron points out (and he does know rather a lot more about this sort of thing than we), many composers had had a bash at harmonising the chromatic scale. We do however remain of the opinion that Monteverdi's adornments of the descending version are really quite astonishing compared not only with those of such of his contemporaries as we have encountered but with the methods for doing so which have become more or less standard since. (We wonder as well if he might have misread Mr Grew's 'harmonies' as 'harmonics'?)

It must have been at least one or two weeks since we last recommended these compact discs to the assembled Members so we do so again since they both contain rather startling harmonisations of the chromatic scale. The one on the left is startling because the temperament employed gives a mean-tone chromatic scale in which the adjacent semitones are not at all the same size. The one on the right employs just intonation with up to sixteen notes per octave. Both are very cleansing for an ear (or even two) jaded by equal-temperament harmonies.
« Last Edit: 21:48:13, 07-05-2007 by oliver sudden » Logged
Baziron
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« Reply #25 on: 21:46:45, 07-05-2007 »
Quote from: oliver sudden on 21:35:16, 07-05-2007
...(We wonder as well if he might have misread Mr Grew's 'harmonies' as 'harmonics'?)

Yes, he unfortunately did. My apologies to Mr Grew.

Baz  Sad
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Bryn
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« Reply #26 on: 00:46:48, 08-05-2007 »
Re. message 22:
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John W
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« Reply #27 on: 09:47:44, 08-05-2007 »

Moderators have acted upon complaints and edited previous message. Thank you for the alerts.


John W
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Sydney Grew
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« Reply #28 on: 07:05:50, 10-05-2007 »
Another word about the Lament: it was first written for two violas - an odd combination, although Bridge himself was like Mozart a viola player. It was written as a response to the drowning by Germans of one particular child on the Lusitania.

We have been listening with renewed interest and pleasure to the later chamber music, and to the B.B.C. complete set of the orchestral works. Nothing has as yet measured up to that slow movement of the Sextet though; it is the sort of music which stays in the mind for many days after one has heard it.

Bridge would have done well to write symphonies. What a pity he did not turn his mind to that task!
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Reiner Torheit
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« Reply #29 on: 07:20:52, 10-05-2007 »
Quote
Bridge would have done well to write symphonies. What a pity he did not turn his mind to that task!

Perhaps he, errr, needed Shostakovich to show him how?

Wink
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