Archive for July, 2008
Copland’s Piano Sonata, played by Leon Fleisher
By Daniel Felsenfeld
When I was a young student composer, I was dazzled by Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations. Weren’t we all? Here was the mawkish composer of “cowboy chic” at his most radical, his most, dare I say, atonal. In these sacred variations, he spun a chunk of what I came to later understand as a [...]
Final thoughts on Eugene Ormandy: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I’ve always thought that Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was a mess—a shaggy, wild, unpredictable mess, meant as the highest complement of course. It skitters from stark, bold melody to lilting quiet beauty to rough-and-tumble folk song (and that’s just the second movement). But, true to the work’s name, never has the orchestra [...]
More on Eugene Ormandy: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
As someone who does not celebrate Christmas, I keep feeling compelled to say that these Original Jacket Collections are like Christmas Morning: treats, treats, treats. If you are a classical music lover, you know all about the Philadelphia Orchestra because they were—and remain—the stuff of legend. Leopold Stokowski figures into this mythology of [...]
The Famous Philadelphia Sound
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Take away the actual music, that vast panoply we refer to as the Great Western Canon, and classical music is, like any other art form, a series of handed down anecdotes, labels, and at times clichés. Spend enough time in the business, and you are bound to come across the expression “The Philadelphia [...]
Insomnia
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I’ve listened to the Ahn Trio’s Lullaby for My Favorite Insomniac several times now, and am more and more taken with it each time, especially with Kenji Bunch’s title track. At first listen, it’s a lush and unabashedly gorgeous moment musicale, standing apart from his other pieces on the disc (which are also [...]
Welcome to Sony BMG Masterworks Blog!
First, an introduction, as this is my first post on the Sony BMG Masterworks Blog: for those of you who do not know me, I am Daniel Felsenfeld, composer, writer, teacher, blogger, and I’ve been granted the exciting privilege of writing about a lot of great music as it seeps out into the marketplace, and [...]