What are you listening to now?

[Michael]

Malcolm Arnold's wonderful version of Beethoven's "Leonore No. 4"

Warning: It may haunt you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWYm9syfFP0

[Chris]

Malcolm Arnold's wonderful version of Beethoven's "Leonore No. 4"

Warning: It may haunt you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWYm9syfFP0

Very amusing!

[Peter]

Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstasy / Salonen · The Philharmonia Orchestra.

[hal9000]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQGm0H9l9I4[/youtube]

Is there a better coda than that of the last movement?

[Chris]

Bach's Italian Concerto played by Kenneth Gilbert on the way to work this morning. A good way to start the day!

[Peter]

Bach's Italian Concerto played by Kenneth Gilbert on the way to work this morning. A good way to start the day!

The 2nd movt is wonderful.

[Megan]

In the kitchen making bread on a lovely afternoon, listening to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony - BBC Symphony Orchestra. Really relaxing and therapeutic.

[Michael]

Beethoven's string quartet Opus 18 No. 3 played by the Italianos.

[Megan]

Elegy for Brahms.

Born: 7 May 1833, Hamburg, Germany
Died: 3 April 1897, Vienna, Austria



[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujr-VZgRf0o[/YOUTUBE]

[Quijote]

I really couldn't care less about the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan, I assure you. I am an anti-monarchist, to the guillotine with all of 'em, I say.
That said, I offer this great little piece by Purcell (Sound the Trumpet) to mark the occasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yV2FqpjUO4

[Fidelio]

Beethoven: String Quartets, Op. 18 Nos 1-3

Eybler Quartet

[Enrique]

Mendelssohn: A midsummer's night dream.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE0Vo7wutNQ[/youtube]

I think this music is one of the wonders of the world. Did he write it to accompany Shakespeare's play on actual performance? Specially noteworthy is, I think, [8.30, 9.10].

[Enrique]

I really couldn't care less about the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan, I assure you. I am an anti-monarchist, to the guillotine with all of 'em, I say.
That said, I offer this great little piece by Purcell (Sound the Trumpet) to mark the occasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yV2FqpjUO4

You Englishmen had some musicians, eh? I hope yours is just a joke. They are a symbol of all that Britain has always been admired for: the permanency of her institutions. Just quite the contrary of what the Frenchmen did with their guillotine.

[Peter]

Mendelssohn: A midsummer's night dream.


I think this music is one of the wonders of the world. Did he write it to accompany Shakespeare's play on actual performance? Specially noteworthy is, I think, [8.30, 9.10].

Yes and just think the overture was written when he was only 17!

This from wikipedia:

Mendelssohn wrote the incidental music, Op. 61, for A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1842, 16 years after he wrote the Overture. It was written to a commission from King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Mendelssohn was by then the music director of the King's Academy of the Arts and of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.[6] A successful presentation of Sophocles' Antigone on 28 October 1841 at the New Palace in Potsdam, with music by Mendelssohn (Op. 55) led to the King asking him for more such music, to plays he especially enjoyed. A Midsummer Night's Dream was produced on 14 October 1843, also at Potsdam. The producer was Ludwig Tieck. This was followed by incidental music for Sophocles' Oedipus (Potsdam, 1 November 1845; published posthumously as Op. 93) and Jean Racine's Athalie (Berlin, 1 December 1845; Op. 74).[1]

The A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, Op. 21, originally written as an independent piece 16 years earlier, was incorporated into the Op. 61 incidental music as its overture, and the first of its 14 numbers. There are also vocal sections and other purely instrumental movements, including the Scherzo, Nocturne and Wedding March. The vocal numbers include the song "Ye spotted snakes" and the melodramas "Over hill, over dale", "The Spells", "What hempen homespuns", and "The Removal of the Spells". The melodramas served to enhance Shakespeare's text.

Act I was played without music. The Scherzo, with its sprightly scoring, dominated by chattering winds and dancing strings, acts as an intermezzo between Acts I and II. The Scherzo leads directly into the first melodrama, a passage of text spoken over music. Oberon's arrival is accompanied by a fairy march, scored with triangle and cymbals.

The vocal piece "Ye spotted snakes" („Bunte Schlangen, zweigezüngt“) opens Act II's second scene. The second Intermezzo comes at the end of the second act. Act III includes a quaint march for the entrance of the Mechanicals. We soon hear music quoted from the Overture to accompany the action. The Nocturne includes a solo horn doubled by bassoons, and accompanies the sleeping lovers between Acts III and IV. There is only one melodrama in Act IV. This closes with a reprise of the Nocturne to accompany the mortal lovers' sleep.

The intermezzo between Acts IV and V is the famous Wedding March, probably the most popular single piece of music composed by Mendelssohn, and one of the most ubiquitous pieces of music ever written.

Act V contains more music than any other, to accompany the wedding feast. There is a brief fanfare for trumpets and timpani, a parody of a funeral march, and a Bergomask dance. The dance uses Bottom's braying from the Overture as its main thematic material.

The play has three brief epilogues. The first is introduced with a reprise of the theme of the Wedding March and the fairy music of the Overture. After Puck's speech, the final musical number is heard – "Through this house give glimmering light" („Bei des Feuers mattem Flimmern“), scored for soprano, mezzo-soprano and chorus. Puck's famous valedictory speech "If we shadows have offended" is accompanied, as day breaks, by the four chords first heard at the very beginning of the Overture, bringing the work full circle and to a fitting close.

[Enrique]

Thanks for the information. On second thought it's no wonder that he who wrote the violin concerto in E minor, the most violinistic of the famous concerts for that instrument could make such a feat.