Schoenberg makes you a better lover
mainThe cover of Barbara Hannigan’s new CD.
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100% correct, it’s an excellent CD.
I like the cover art. Sweet. But what matters is what’s inside and, man, am I ready to hear this record! A serious and challenging program top to bottom. Most welcome.
The cover is ridiculous and I hate it. But then I hated her previous cover as well. In the middle of the “metoo” movement she dances on the table with a group of men looking at her. Lulu? I don’t think so!
Yep. That one was questionable. And the dreadful Gershwin arrangement dragged down the album’s overall worth. That piece was totally unnecessary to have been taped.
Schön.
+ Berg.
Looks like a nice collection of late romantic songs: early works by Schoenberg (op. 2), Webern, Berg, Zemlinsky plus Alma Mahler and Hugo Wolf.
That looks like a great programme for a CD. Berg’s Seven Early Songs are among my favourite works, up there with Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Verklärte Nacht.
PS. I know it isn’t on the disc (obviously), but did anyone else think that the cover art was a nod to Verklärte Nacht?
That’s what I thought when I first saw it. “Oh, songs and Verklarte Nacht – good mix.”
Has anybody ever demonstrated with hard market research data that the cover of any recording has a significant effect on sales??
I actually thought the cover was for “Erwartung”.
Reinbert de Leeuw would be the reason to listen to it, although it’s all been recorded before…
His playing is simply phenomenal. Not exaggerating.
Barbara is a vastly superior conductor over Reinbert de Leeuw and every male conductor on the planet. Beautiful white blonde women are at the very top of the conducting totem pole.
Very unkind to make such fun of women who try to conduct.
Wrong. Actually, her conductorial technique is on the poor side. She is at her rich best when focusing on one thing and one thing only, delegating the multitasking (aka conducting) to others.
Bullshit! Barbara has a superior conducting technique over every single male conductor on the planet.
Clearly a stupid comment. She may just possibly be a decent enough conductor, but please don’t try to tell me that she is superior to, say, Sir Mark Elder.
Beautiful white blonde women? I’m afraid this statement puts me in mind of the infamous ’14 words’: ‘Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.’ You could just have said ‘Women’, but you chose to quality it with ‘Beautiful white blonde’. I have to wonder why. Surely you can see that this sounds kind of racist. Your whole comment is fairly stupid anyway, but I am used to your rather silly comments about female conductors by now. The racist level drags your comment down to a whole other level though. It’s especially stupid as some of the most successful female conductors are actually East Asians. Also Alondra de la Parra, who is definitely a brunette. Are you ok with Slavic women as long as they are blonde?
qualify*
Do you equate successful with good?
@RW2013, no, I don’t equate successful with good, and I didn’t mean to get into a discussion of the merits or otherwise of every female conductor categorised by ethnicity and hair colour. I was making the broad observation that there are female conductors of a variety of ethnicities and hair colours and that talent appears to be distributed more or less evenly. It was not an exhaustive scientific study, I was just pointing out that there is something rather distasteful about claiming that talented female conductors are blonde and white. From your earlier comment I gather that you are in general not a fan of female conductors anyway. Perhaps it’s not surprising that you fail to see that it’s racist to express a clearly unfounded preference for people based on physical attractiveness, ethnicity, and hair colour. Furthermore, you surely cannot pretend to be unaware of the trope of the beautiful blonde white woman in white supremacist and neo-Nazi discourse, e.g. the quoted phrase, ‘the beauty of the White Aryan woman’. Just look at the prominence of beautiful blonde white women in racist propaganda from Nazi Germany to the American South in the Jim Crow era.
“Conducting Feminista” is a very obvious troll whose entire repertory is limited to moronic praises of female conductors.
In a way, he’s just like Bortslap: predictable and boring.
all that grinding and grit of atonality.
I’m not sure if you’ve actually heard the tracks on the CD? None of them are actually atonal.
I don’t know what else is on the disc, but “Verklaerte Nacht” is not an atonal work. It’s heading towards that direction, but there are definitely tonal centers. And yes, the cover must be a ‘nod’ to Richard Dehmel’s poem. How “me-too” to show a hetero couple actually embracing in public! – I think I need to see my shrink.
Nothing enlivens a relationship so much as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgAdYjKR46c
I played this last night. I turned the lights on low. Opened a nice Pinot Noir. Set the mood just right. Then clicked on your link.
My date ran out the door and hooked up with the Uber driver.
Different strokes, John. I think the “Five Pieces” is a really good work. I’m glad I got to play it once (tuba).
Congratulations…… of course it is a great work, especially the first three of the five. For stimulating romantic interests, it may be less suited, but that definitely was not the composer’s intention.
Has any blogger ever actually made love with classical music playing in the background?
You could have stopped at “love.”