I got a $50 iTunes card for my birthday. (Thanks, Dad!) Amazingly, I did not buy any Stravinsky this time. But I did buy:
Pierre Boulez. Le marteau sans maître. I’ve been revisiting the music I loved as an adolescent. I still love it! The Laurel library shelved its audio collection—twelve-inch vinyl albums, naturally—next to the stairs to the atomic fallout shelter, with its curious yellow-and-black symbol, paired with another of black silhouettes hurrying down zigzag steps.
Charles Ives. Holidays symphony. Ives was another adolescent passion of mine. Was I a strange teenager? I suppose I must have been. Perhaps I’m still a little strange…?
Charles Ives. Sonatas for violin and piano. This album actually has a music video! Imagine that—what is the world coming to? I hope that their lungs didn’t suffer too much from that smoke machine.
Witold Lutosławski. Symphonies three and four. After the wars (take I and take II), eastern Europe’s music-making was dominated by the Soviet apparatus, which was just as beneficial to it as it was to art and literature. But some genius did bloom despite all that, and despite the foolish notion of musical progress that gripped both eastern and western Europe.
Witold Lutosławski. Cello concerto. Beauty that astonishes (the best kind). At first, the cellist plays alone, a virtuoso solo part, for a long time, taking the breath away, and the heartbeat, and the thinking mind….
John Adams. Violin concerto. Speaking of foolish notions, I hope that we can also stop prattling on about minimalism, new complexity, and all the other so-called schools of current compositional practice. Why not just listen to the music?
John Adams. Shaker loops. I have to confess, it was the Shaker connection here that first drew me to Adams’s music. In my early twenties, I was fairly obsessed with the Shakers—I blame Michael Dirda’s review of his Apples and pears for this—
Eliot Carter. String quartets two, three, & four. I wonder what’s wrong with the first string quartet that prevented its inclusion here.
Olivier Messiaen. Catalogue d’oiseaux, livres 1–6. For solo piano. What it says on the tin—eccentrically, weirdly even, harmonized renderings of bird calls, nature’s first music (humanity providing nature’s second).