Category: Music

Not the best recording, but still, if you have ten minutes, it will be well-worth your time and attentions!

This is Franz Peter Schubert’s (January 31, 1797 – November 19, 1828) Symphony No. 8 in B minor (sometimes renumbered as Symphony No.), commonly known as the “Unfinished Symphony” (German: Unvollendete), D.759, was started in 1822 but left with only two movements known to be complete.

Although he died at the impossibly young age of 31, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous “Unfinished Symphony”), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of his music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in Schubert’s work increased dramatically in the decades following his death at the age of 31. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th Century. Today, Schubert is admired as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.

This is how the winter season ought be received: the way Vivaldi conceives and composes it in his Four Seasons.

This set of music was published as the first four concertos in a collection of twelve, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, Opus 8, published in Amsterdam by Le Cène in 1725 by Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (March 4, 1678 – July 28, 1741), nicknamed il Prete Rosso (The Red Priest).

So, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere bracing for the big blizzard that is coming our way later today, play some Vivaldi, especially this Winter concerto and celebrate the beauty of this season!

Yo-Yo Ma’s lovely rendition set to an interesting collage of images.

The Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach are some of the most performed and recognizable solo compositions ever written for cello. They were most likely composed during the period 1717–1723, when Bach served as a Kapellmeister in Cöthen.

The suites contain a great variety of technical devices, a wide emotional range, and some of Bach’s most compelling voice interactions and conversations. It is their intimacy, however, that has made the suites amongst Bach’s most popular works today, resulting in their different recorded interpretations being fiercely defended by their respective advocates.

Alexander’s Feast (HWV 75) is an oratorio with music by George Frideric Handel set to a libretto by Newburgh Hamilton. Hamilton adapted his libretto from John Dryden’s ode Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music (1697) which had been written to celebrate Saint Cecilia’s Day. Jeremiah Clarke (whose score is now lost) set the original ode to music.

Handel composed the music in January 1736, and the work received its premiere at the Covent Garden Theatre, London on 19 February 1736. In its original form it contained three concertos: a concerto in B flat major in 3 movements for “Harp, Lute, Lyrichord and other Instruments” HWV 294 for performance after the recitative Timotheus, plac’d on high in Part I; a concerto grosso in C major in 4 movements for oboes, bassoon and strings, now known as the “Concerto in Alexander’s Feast” HWV 318, performed between Parts I and II; and an organ concerto HWV 289 in G minor and major in 4 movements for chamber organ, oboes, bassoon and strings performed after the chorus Let old Timotheus yield the prize in Part II. The organ concerto and harp concerto were published in 1738 by John Walsh as the first and last of the Handel organ concertos Op.4. Handel revised the music for performances in 1739, 1742 and 1751. Donald Burrows has discussed Handel’s revisions to the score.[1][2]

The work describes a banquet held by Alexander the Great and his mistress Thaïs in the captured Persian city of Persepolis, during which the musician Timotheus sings and plays his lyre, arousing various moods in Alexander until he is finally incited to burn the city down in revenge for his dead Greek soldiers.

The piece was a great success and it encouraged Handel to make the transition from writing Italian operas to English choral works. The soloists at the premiere were the sopranos Anna Maria Strada and Cecilia Young, the tenor John Beard, and a bass called Erard (first name unknown).

Beautiful rendition!

http://youtu.be/OoKq36eKCdY

via youtube.com

Brilliant Bach!

Get your Must Kulunda on!

Enlarge John Cohen/Getty Images

From left, poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), painter and musician Larry Rivers (1923-2002), writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1967), and musician and photographer John Cohen (in mirror) in New York, late 1950s.

John Cohen/Getty Images

From left, poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), painter and musician Larry Rivers (1923-2002), writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1967), and musician and photographer John Cohen (in mirror) in New York, late 1950s.

January 23, 2011

For more than half a century, John Cohen has been taking photographs, making films, recording rural musicians and creating his own music. He’s a co-founder of The New Lost City Ramblers, a string band that set the standard for authenticity in the 1950s’ “folk boom,” and at the age of 78, Cohen is still at it.

A seminal figure in the folk revival of the 1950s, Cohen grew up in New York City. Now he lives in a snug, wood-heated home, about an hour north of the city.

“I live up here in Putnam County on an old farm, like I’m supposed to,” Cohen says, as he shuffles toward an old staircase. “This apparently was an old smoke house and now it’s my music library.”

It’s here, in what Cohen calls his “inner sanctum,” that he keeps the relics and results of his more than 50 years of exploring the stories and lives of others, as a still photographer, filmmaker and sound recorder.

In 1954, while still a student at Yale, Cohen went to Peru, knowing only two words of Quechua. Three years later, he headed for Kentucky, where he met banjoist and singer Roscoe Holcomb.

Holcomb became the subject of a classic Cohen film, The High Lonesome Sound. Sometime after he finished it, Cohen took the film back to the village of Daisy, Ky.

“I was anxious to hear the comments,” he says, “[Then someone said,] ‘Look, Aunt Jane painted her porch!’ That’s all I got from all that political correctness.”

Between visits to Kentucky and Peru, Cohen lived in a downtown New York City apartment, next door to photographer Robert Frank. When Frank shot the iconic beat film, Pull My Daisy, Cohen took the still photographs. When young Bob Dylan came to Greenwich Village, Cohen took photos of him, too, on the roof of the building.

There’s a famous shot of Woody Guthrie, curly hair sprouting from the top of his narrow head, framed by the hulking backs of two acoustic guitarists. That picture was the image used for a show of Cohen’s still photos, films and music at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1997.

Cohen was a musician himself. A banjo player since high school, he began learning the music of the old-timers while he was at Yale, and soon after, he formed the New Lost City Ramblers.

“In the very first notes I wrote for the very first New Lost City Ramblers album, I said there’s a side of ourselves that goes out trying to change the world to our own image, and there’s another side of ourselves trying to find our image in the outside world,” he says. “I think it’s that second one that’s forced me to become who I am.”

It’s through the Ramblers that Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, was first exposed to Cohen’s multifaceted work.

“One of the things you can really see from John Cohen is that you don’t have to pigeonhole yourself,” Rankin says. “You can follow that naive passion of interest, be a participant and be an observer.”

Cohen says, “I’m an artist rather than a documentarian.”

But back in his barn a few years ago, Cohen put the lie to that. Rummaging around, he found footage for his most recent film, a follow-up on Roscoe Holcomb.

“About 20 years ago I made my last film in Peru, and I said I’ve done 15 films, that’s enough. Then I remembered, out in the barn I had all of this footage that didn’t make it into my first film,” he says. “I found some beautiful music and devastating stories from Roscoe, and that what gave me the impetus to make the new movie.”

That film, Roscoe Holcomb From Daisy, Kentucky, has just come out on DVD, along with the original Holcomb documentary. Also out are John Cohen, Past, Present, Peru: A Collection of CDs, DVDs, Photos and Text and a new book about The New Lost City Ramblers.

“I’m 78 years old and I didn’t expect to have this much attention come to my work,” Cohen says. “I’m very happy it’s happening and I’d like people to see it, because it should be seen.”