Posted on 12/10/2007 10:37:26 AM PST by NYer
"Giselle" belongs on both sides of the Delibes period, which is why it doesn't rate the same acclaim as the Tchaikovsky scores.
Christmas Carols are not sung in Catholic Churches until Christmas Eve at twilight services!
The liturgical year has four weeks of advent prior to the Christmas celebration. We sing songs such as Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel during the beginning of December.
Jesus was born on Christmas Day as far as the liturgical calendar goes, and we celebrate his coming during the so-called “twelve days of Christmas” up until and including Epiphany on January 6th. That is when we sing Christmas Carols in church.
You are a doctor of music, perhaps?
When I've tried I usually get dizzy and have to sit down.
Click on “Publius” and you’ll know more than you wanted to know about me.
. . . to wild acclaim. Choirmaster and my husband hatched a scheme to record the concert from upstairs in the choir loft with one of those tiny little Sony digital recorders. Amazingly enough, it seems to have worked! So a CD may be available soon . . . .
well, that does explain it then. Are you a fan of the opera?
If you have perfect pitch, you don't even need to watch the ballet to know what Tchaikovsky's intent was.
It goes without saying that the more wine I have, the better I think I can hit that high note. :`)
I am a member of the Commissioning Club of the Seattle Chamber Music Society, and I've been involved in the commissioning of 3 chamber works we premiered at our summer festival.
I applaud your knowledge and your talents. What wonderful, graceful interests you have.
It's a real curse, you have no idea how painful it is when folks are just a little bit off! And when something is transposed, and he's looking at the original score, it sends him into a tailspin.
My interests may be graceful, but I’m not. I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
I ordinarily do not care for Mahler at all, but somebody gave me a recording of des Knabens Wunderhorn with Fischer-Diskau and Schwartzkopf, and darned if I don't like it a lot. Is it atypical of his music, or am I just prejudiced against Mahler's symphonies?
It’s a curse, all right. During my youthful church-going days I could hear that the congregation was anywhere from a quarter tone to a half tone off from the organ. Catholics neither sing loud nor do their organists play loud. (The Protestants knew how to sing!) The low volume on the organ caused the congregation to drift off in pitch during the hymn. It drove me nuts.
I took piano for about a million years, sort of quit in college, then took it back up recently when I had a Steinway fall in my lap (no, it didn't hurt much) and then got hold of a harpsichord. I fool around with the guitar and have sung in church choirs since I was 6. And last year my husband made me a deal that he would sing in the choir if I would ring handbells (they were short on people who read music). I'm enjoying it a whole lot more than I thought I would -- I have the top end, so am in charge of 6 bells and sometimes get a little harried, but it's fun and it's L-O-U-D!
You need to come to our joint. We sing LOUD . . . and while our music director doesn’t like to blow the congregation out of the building, he cranks it up enough to keep everybody on track. Then he blows them out of the building with the postlude . . . I didn’t know anything about the French composers to speak of until I got here, he did a Fulbright at Lyons and he’s a big fan of Vierne, Vidor, Franck, and so forth . . . but thank goodness (since I’m an ex-Episcopalian) he doesn’t neglect Byrd, Tallis, and Gibbons.
I started writing about the symphonies, but I quickly realized I was going to end up with an entry the length of a scholarly paper. I love the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 9th. The 6th and 7th leave me cold, and I have mixed feelings about the 8th in spite of the magnificent choral work.
I would recomend starting with the 1st and listening to it about 5 times to get the shape of the work. If you can, find the 5-movement version with the extra slow movement (Blumine) that Mahler removed at publication time. He quotes from Blumine extensively in the finale, so the 4-movement version doesn't quite add up.
From there, move to the 2nd, which is still my favorite. I could write an entire thread about that symphony and the cross-quoting from his lieder and the work of other composers that he uses as the musical version of literary allusion.
(Dangerous subject to get me started on.)
Lo! How a Rose e’er blooming.
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