The Rite of Spring

Photo taken at the Lost Garden of Heligan, Cornwall. Now playing - Fazil Say's recording of the four-hand piano transcription of the Rite Of Spring. The starting point of this CD is Stravinsky's own four-hand score for the Rite, but the finishing point is some way away from the composer's original. Not only does Say use multi-tracking to play both piano parts, but he builds up further layers with his own additions to the score mimicking percussion and cymbals, with the different layers using different microphone perspectives.

As if this is not enough Say does a Glenn Gould and offers an interview with himself in the sleeve notes justifying his approach and also justifying releasing a full price CD containing just 31 minutes and 12 seconds of music. (He does threaten a coupling of his take on Verklärte Nacht, but thankfully refrains). Not so much Stravinsky as a technical tour de force, and, surprisingly, it is still in the catalogue at full price eight years after release. Certainly not a first choice or even tenth choice Rite but a fascinating musical and technical curiosity if you don't mind few bangs for your bucks.

More interesting orchestration in my Future Radio programme this Sunday (March 9 - check sidebar for details) in Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra with a score that includes 12 brakedrums, 6 flowerpots, dustbins, a double bass laid on its back and tin cans. The recording is a new one by Madeleine Mitchell and Ensemble Bash.

No short change with this excellent Signum release (sleeve below) which offers 66 minutes of music from Anne Dudley, Tarik O'Regan, Stuart Jones, and Simon Limbrick and a traditional Sengalese drumming piece which I will finish the programme with. An excellent release, but the Fiddlesticks title, with no mention of Lou Harison on the cover, doesn't do it justice. Retailers are saying it would sell far more copies if it had been marketed as a Lou Harrison recording and filed in the browser under 'H'. Signum are best known for their choral recordings, but are doing some interesting things in contemporary music including a new recording of the complete Philip Glass String Quartets.


More Lou Harrison here.
Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The complete works on Future Radio

Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is one of his best known works, and Tudor church music was a major influence on the composer. During 2008 I am playing all the Vaughan Williams symphonies on my Future Radio programme, and this Sunday (Feb 17) it is the turn of the Eighth Symphony. This for many, including me, is one of his finest works, and it certainly destroys the myth of the composer as a backward looking English pastoralist, with its scoring for vibraphone, xylophone, tubular bells, glockenspiel and three tuned gongs.

I'm coupling all the Vaughan Williams Symphonies with choral music from Thomas Tallis. This will be taken from the splendid new 10CD box of Tallis' complete works at bargain price from Brilliant Classics sung by the Chapelle du Roi directed by Alistair Dixon. Tallis also composed a number of instrumental works which are included in the box. They are not of the same peerless quality as his choral works, but are, nevertheless well worth hearing. I paid £30 for the boxed set (texts included on CD-ROM) from an independent record store, but they are available cheaper online. Which rather captures the current lunacy of the classical music industry. The last of the ten Tallis CDs was recorded by Signum in 2004, and they were selling individually last year for £15.

Cue columns of plainsong soaring upwards.
Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm every Sunday and 12.50am every Monday UK time in real time here (convert to local time zones here). Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk