by Ken
Now I ask you, is that something, or what?
Maybe I should explain just a little. I've been playing records lately -- well, CDs, to be exact, but to me they're records too. This is pretty unusual in itself, and I thought I might want to talk about it, but not now. I thought I might want to talk about the unexpected reasons and ways I've been listening, but I don't want to talk about that either right now. However, I did want to share this bit of music that, in the course of this listening, practically knocked me off my feet. So that's what I'm going to do: share it. Or rather that's what I've just done, so maybe we should all just get on with our lives.
Of course it might be objected that "sharing" is maybe a tad misleading, inasmuch as this music doesn't belong to me and a person can hardly be said to be "sharing" stuff that wasn't his to begin with, can he? Which is the tip of another story I thought I might want to talk about, but again not now.
What I've been doing is reorganizing/reshelving/interfiling a section of the CDs: the non-operatic by-composer section from A ("Albéniz," to be exact) through roughly Nielsen -- excluding Haydn, Mahler, and Mozart, who have sections of their own. It so happened on this particular afternoon that while I was listening to CDs from this section more or less at random, or maybe at will, I happened to think of two that would be a snap to locate and might be fun to hear for the first time in ages. They were by the same composer, but imagine my surprise when I realized that in my filing system the two happened to be right next to each other! I wound up listening to both, but the part that's relevant to today's story is that when I first put on the first of them, a few minutes or so in it happened -- the near-knocking-off-my-feet, I mean.
It wasn't the music, or at least not just the music, gorgeous as it is. But the music I've heard by conservative estimate dozens of times, and pretty much always loved, but not with this feet-near-knocking-off-of effect. No, there was something more, and I wonder if the little clip I've made will have this kind of effect on anyone else. Which is all I'm going to say about it, except that if one lousy 2:21 audio clip seems a mighty stingy musical offering for a whole Sunday, it could have been worse. My original idea was to offer only the first 37 or so seconds, or maybe just 18 seconds, since really that was all it took to blow my mind. Which isn't to say that things don't get a whole lot mind-blowinger as the full version of our clip, which is to say the whole 2:21 you wrung out of me, blows on.
So this could have gone something like so:
37-second version of clip
18-second version of clip
Instead, however, you got that whopping 2:21's worth. Wanna hear it again? We can do that! (To be strictly technical, I can't actually hear what the clip sounds like, for computer-technical reasons I should probably note for the record but don't, you know, feel up to talking about just now, not even now that there's reason to think we've got the room pretty fully cleared.)
IF YOU'RE THAT GREEDY AND YOU STILL
WANT MORE, GO ON AND CLICK THROUGH
Here's the full movement from which our clip is taken (at roughly 2:57-5:19).
BERLIOZ: Harold in Italy, Op. 16:
i. Harold in the Mountains
William Primrose, viola; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Nov. 13-15, 1951
We've actually heard this music -- the whole piece, I mean -- before, and if anyone's interested, you have only to say the word and I'll dig out the appropriate link(s). For that matter, it would probably be a pretty easy matter to retrieve the performance(s) we heard before, but this takes us into more of that territory I might want to talk about sometime but not now.
I think I'll have more to say about these couple of minutes' worth of music next week. You never know, though. I sure don't.
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