Here's a tease, or maybe a tiny bit more than a tease, of a sort-of-post that should be coming up soon

Here's a catchy old tune:

by Ken

The blog horror I reported last week, the imposition of a radical and near-catastrophic new interface by Google's Blogger bloghost, has taken an enormous toll, requiring limitless reserves of energy and determination to accomplish basic things that used to be fairly routine, making it that much more difficult to try to conceive a workable blogpost. I've got something that's not much of a blogpost but does advance us a little in some of our current inquiries, which have taken us from Mozart's Don Giovanni to Beethoven's Fidelio and onward to the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, but I still haven't been able to get even that stopgap thing posted. Monday, I hope?

Meanwhile, let me make good at least a little on the tease above.

To put it another way:

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Berlin Philharmonic, Ferenc Fricsay, cond. DG, recorded Dec. 1957-Apr. 1958

Franz Crass, bass; Vienna Singverein der Gesellschaft der Freunde, Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Live performance from the Vienna Festival, June 6, 1960

Watch for further developments.

#

Do I hear a waltz? (Tchaikovsky edition)

Ferenc Fricsay (1914-1963)

by Ken

Nothing fancy going on here this week. As I explained in Friday night's preview, we're just listening to four waltzes that happen to be included on an-all Tchaikovsky DG CD reissue conducted by Ferenc Fricsay. Okay, maybe not quite "just." It's possible that there are one or two diversions or digressions along the way.

Right now, for example, we're going to kick off, not with a waltz, but with a polonaise. Friday we listened to the waltz from Act II of the opera Yevgeny Onegin -- in both its "concert" form and as it's heard in the opera, as the music around which the opening scene of Act II, a ball given on the country estate of Madame Larina, unfolds. We're going to hear that again, in some different performances (plus the Fricsay, of course), but first we're going to hear the polonaise that opens Act III, introducing a considerably more cosmopolitan ball, in Moscow, at the home of Madame Larina's daughter Tatiana, now married to a genuine prince (and a prince of a fellow is our Prince Gremin).

TCHAIKOVSKY: Yevgeny Onegin, Op. 24:
Act III, Polonaise

Staatskapelle Dresden, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded June 1987

Orchestre de Paris, Semyon Bychkov, cond. Philips, recorded October 1992

USSR State Radio and Television Large Symphony Orchestra, Vladimir Fedoseyev, cond. Audiophile Classics, recorded 1986

Sofia Festival Orchestra, Emil Tchakarov, cond. Sony, recorded Jan. 15-21, 1988

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Sir Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded December 1977

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Jan. 12, 1971


NOW LET'S GET TO OUR WALTZES --

Preview: Do I hear a waltz? (Tchaikovsky edition)

TCHAIKOVSKY: Waltz from Act II of Yevgeny Onegin, Op. 24
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ferenc Fricsay, cond. DG, recorded Sept. 10-12, 1957

by Ken

So I was looking at this DG CD reissue of the 1952 recording of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony by the dynamic Hungarian conductor Ferenc Fricsay (1914-1963), filled out with material from a 1957 Fricsay Tchaikovsky LP. It's that filler material that I fixed on, and in particular the profusion of waltzes -- three of them standing by themselves (from the ballets Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker and the opera Yevgeny Onegin), plus yet a fourth contained in a little suite from the ballet Swan Lake.

In a way this isn't all that remarkable, since Tchaikovsky wrote a lot of waltzes, and not just the ones in the three ballets, and among them are some of the world's most celebrated, like the four included on this CD. Still, I thought it was interesting that the planners of that 1957 Fricsay Tchaikovsky LP were so waltz-happy.

If we wanted to go really waltz-crazy there is, goodness knows, plenty of material among Tchaikovsky's output. But I thought it might be fun just to focus on the four included on this CD, even though we've surely heard the three ballet-derived waltzes in our frequent incursions into the Tchaikovsky ballets. For our preview, we're starting with the other waltz, which in fact is played by Fricsay (and others) in not-quite-its-original form. In the click-through we'll hear that original form.

[In case there's any confusion, the above image is indeed of the CD, whose cover is a miniaturized reproduction of the original LP jacket of the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony recording, which of course made no mention of the other Tchaikovsky material Fricsay recorded exactly five years later. (The recording dates are September 9-10 for the 1952 symphony sessions, and September 10-12 for the 1957 dance-music sessions.)]


TO HEAR THE ORIGINAL FORM OF THE
YEVGENY ONEGIN WALTZ, CLICK HERE

#