After the introduction, a cathedral is built. Its roof is missing, you can still see the blue skies. Very enjoyable piece of architecture.
Gardiner's account is grandiose, the sound is absorbent. Strict playing is combined with reckless joy. A peaceful movement that does not expect anything in reward. Enjoy.
Composer: Johannes Brahms Work: Symphony No 2, IV. Allegro con spirito Recording: Orchestre révolutionnaire et romantique, John Eliot Gardiner
Here we have a game, filmed in black and white. Licentious girl is exposing her calf and then she's running away, smiling, to a meadow. There's no lust. For us, it's a comical situation–the film is speeded up a little bit.
In the serious middle section, we expect fun again and we're not disappointed. The music goes fast forward, slows down; it tries to astonish us but it's never enough. We want our heroine back.
Composer: Gustav Mahler Work: Symphony No 1, II. Kräftig bewegt, doch nichz zu schnell Recording: London Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti
Vivid, intensive, and hasty dance. But the smell is of countdown–this will not last. Maybe it's because of its directness, especially in the middle part.
The outer theme behaves like a center piece. And the last chord in the final cyclone–the chord that should be the last one but is not–is from a different, better world.
Composer: Edvard Grieg Work: Symphonic Dances, I. Allegro moderato e marcato Recording: Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Paavo Järvi
The edge of hysteria. The edge of collapse. The edge of living. The smell of Le sacre du printemps but it's not spring at all. A wheel of misfortune, of regret. And at the end, pure fatalism.
I can't focus my emotions, I'm getting hyperactive. This violin concerto–only five years old!–is moving on all levels.
Composer: Magnus Lindberg Work: Violin concerto, 3rd movement Recording: Lisa Batiashvili, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo
First smell is the smell of Tom and Jerry. One goes after the other–pure fun, imitation, frivolity. But then... these are deep undertows. Ambition to be perfect. A younger sibling trying to match, to face up.
The performance is thrilling and intrusive. No wrong sounds, everything in place. It's delivering something complete. Nothing can or should be added.
Composer: Robert Schumann Work: Sonata No 1 for piano and violin, III. Lebhaft Recording: Andreas Staier, Daniel Sepec
Lay down and watch. The walls are fluttering. The lines are spreading across them: stems are everywhere, and they're sprouting. Leafs and blooms–all black. Incorporated into the walls.
The voice is forcing the flowers to appear; breathe with Goerne. The piano is holding them back; listen how Schmalcz sways between strophes.
Composer: Franz Schubert Work: Nacht und Träume Recording: Matthias Goerne, Alexander Schmalcz
They're jumping and jumping again... Two cats, playing a game we cannot understand. Slow down, quick start, fast, then slow again, turn around–and pretend nothing really happened.
Valrie Kantorski and Ann Almond Pope deliver amazing experience here, especially when you're used to the version for orchestra. Their dynamics and tempo are perfect, and the sound is anything but skinny.
Composer: Johannes Brahms Work: Hungarian Dance No 6 Recording: Kantorski-Pope Duo
Crumb's music is overmuch literal. Forget about war. Open the windows so you don't smell napalm. Here you have primary, elemental fears.
The electric insects can lacerate your ears but that's only the visible crust. Deep below, there's something worse. Something you don't want to talk about, think about, hear about. Silence. Like if the movement is never really over.
Composer: George Crumb Work: Black Angels, I. Departure Recording: Kronos Quartet
For me, the finale of Swan Lake was never beautiful. It's a nervous, fragile, unstable piece of music. The main theme goes too fast, the pauses in harmonies are scary, the harp rhythm is perverse.
After watching the film Black Swan, the demons are even worse and darker. The dreadful, lethal music cries for help but the rising sun is black.
Composer: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Work: Swan Lake Suite, IV. Finale Recording: Wiener Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan
It's a city that is building itself. In strings, and then in oboes, bassoons, and horns, clean lines are designed. The building rush starts at 0'45'' and the city is built in three minutes. After that, piano makes its entrée, and we see two different layers. It's a new architect who's explaining, showing new ways, and moderating. In the seventh minute, the two layers gets synchronized and new developments are coming.
The first movement tells everything, the whole story. This recording is superbly exhibited; it's a clever, clean, architectural approach. The layers of material and spiritual are fighting, and piano is losing again and again. In fortissimo of the last tutti, it has no chance. It goes down and then up in sixteenths but orchestra is just confirming its position by two chords per bar. Yes, at the very end, piano repeats the C notes, as orchestra does. But it's not a happy reunion–we know it was swallowed by the merciless city.
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven Work: Piano concerto No 3, I. Allegro con brio Recording: Richard Goode, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer
Glowing, sensual recording of Beethoven's string quartets. The minuet of Quartet No 4 is especially welcoming. Here we don't play silly games–it says. You're right here where you belong, feel like home.
Do it. Enjoy the sun and the half shades. The end of the movement flies high. Turn your head up to the sky.
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven Work: String Quartet No 4, III. Menuetto: Allegretto Recording: Pavel Haas Quartet
Paavo Järvi with The Kammerphilharmonie Bremen has done for Beethoven's symphonies what John Eliot Gardiner did in 1994 with his Orchestre révolutionnaire et romantique. All the pigsty is gone, only music stays.
Bremen's Beethoven Project is a wonderful achievement and the Ninth symphony is its highlight. Clean lines, pure message. A gemstone.
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven Work: Symphony No. 9, IV. Presto Recording: Christine Oetze, Petra Lang, Klaus Florian Vogt, Matthias Goerne, Deutsche Kammerchor, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Paavo Järvi
This is a very special recording of Coriolan. Smell the force of bows in the first chord, it defines the landscape. Here I am, here I stand, live or dead.
Depending on your mood, you can sense Coriolan music as either fragmentary or concentrated. It's nervous, pushing forward. And then (after 6 minutes), the heroic theme breaks in the middle. The finale brings nothing but emptiness with no salvation.
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven Work: Coriolan Overture Recording: Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, John Eliot Gardiner
It's dancing but not moving: Two steps forward, two steps back, still on the same spot. It's not about the rondo form, you can hear it even in the main theme. It does not really want to move forwards–it makes the first two steps only to make room for coming back.
The recording is 58 years old and I bet you can find better today, more enlightening and swift. But there's something about good old Schneiderhan. Maybe it's the urgency of his playing. Maybe he's not afraid to recede if music asks for it.
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven Work: Violin Concerto in D Major, III. Rondo: Allegro Recording:Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Berliner Philharmoniker, Paul van Kempen
These small phrases are always so vivid and true for the first time–but then, they are repeated by other instrument, and then once more, and that's pure mockery.
It's all funny: alla polka, the false ending in the middle, pauses, last thirty seconds, all the affectation and pretending. Great piece of music.
At first (0:30), it's just a common, friendly rain, setting your melancholy mood. Then, the wind changes its direction and the raindrops are hitting window panes (3:51). Stop it–it's a film frame. Zoom it out–somebody's at the window, waiting.
Janina Fialkowska is back, with poetry instead of cancer in her arms.
Composer: Frédéric Chopin Work: Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, II. Larghetto Recording: Janina Fialkowska, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Bramwell Tovey
Four different still lifes. On the grass, on the beach, underground, and the last one–just hummed–everywhere. Beautiful stillstand, a cure for a hurried day. A poem by Octavio Paz.
Choir Polyphony needs just four minutes to slow down your heart beat and breath. Cool down. There's just una muchacha y un muchacho. Nothing more.
Composer: Eric Whitacre Work: A Boy and a Girl Recording: Polyphony, Stephen Layton
After twenty-four years being together and another eleven years being separated, my parent are getting divorced today. Romeo and Juliet sounds appropriate for such a day. The introduction is unstable, like off the beat, waiting for something to happen. When the Prince arrives, it's only pretending it's calm. The end in strings is restless, and although the contrabass exhales for the last six bars, the rest of the strings is getting nervous again.
Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set
on the fair daughter of rich Capulet.
Composer: Hector Berlioz Work: Roméo et Juliette Recording: London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis
Fascinating composition and fascinating recording. Recorded for the first time–25 years after Horowitz's American debut–at Carnegie hall. Soon, Mr. Horowitz announces his withdraw from public performances (he'll be back in 12 years; his final recital will take place when he's 84 years old).
Playful, yes; dancing, dignified, grandiose. Well calculated, very focused. It's not a strict piece of music. But the smell is there.
Composer: Franz Liszt, arr. Horowitz Work: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 Recording: Vladimir Horowitz, RCA Victor, 1953
The tone! Ehnes is creating something very magical here. The concerto is well known yet I wonder how different it can suddenly sound. The violin is really singing, pattering, always round, always pleasant, airy and jubilant.
This recording is touching the inner worlds. At first, it may not sound so different from other ones (say, Kavakos has the same tempo through the last movement, never off by more than 1 second). But the tone of Ehnes's violin is reaching eternity of perfection.
Composer: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Work: Violin Concerto in E minor, III. Allegretto non troppo – Allegro molto vivace Recording: James Ehnes, Philharmonia Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy
It's really a subtle smell. The main phrase is sad and blaming. We have no idea what happened, it's like post mortem lamentation in sarabande rhythm.
Listen to its very end: Do you hear the echo of the wail? These bloodless high tones? That's the only answer the wail gets, its own broken echo. After that–there's nothing. Two last bars, played pizzicato and piano, are just closing the door forever. The smell is in the air.
Composer: Eugène Ysaÿe Work: Sonata for solo violin No. 4, II. Sarabande Recording: Maxim Vengerov
Today it's literal–Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. I haven't heard better six horns unisono and more joyful and rich playing than from LSO. It's a moving, blithe piece. It's forcing you to stand up and dance.
Do you feel how the tempo is uprising, how the theme is exalting? It's like if you should be proud of something, of yourself. When I feel blue, I listen to Jupiter. And I smell it's helping me getting better.
Composer: Gustav Holst Work: The Planets, IV. Jupiter Recording: London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis
Why unexpected? One, this dixieland ballet was written in 1927; two, the orchestra is actually only a sextet (piano, violin, cello, trumpet, basoon, and clarinet); three, tango, really?
Yes, tango. After the beginning, sounding like an ending, the rhythm is there, in piano. It's a dance kept unexpectedly low, with soothing trumpet solo. The second part is even darker, ending in void. It's the smell you don't expect from Martinů. I was not prepared to hear something like it at all.
Composer: Bohuslav Martinů Work: La revue de cuisine, II. Tango Recording: The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Christopher Hogwood
It does not matter if it's an anti-sentimental parody (and it is, of course). For me, this will always be a sentimental piece of Disney and Hans Christian Andersen. It's a love story about standing on a single leg. I smell fairy tales.
The music was used in Disney's Fantasia 2000. It starts with military march (excellent strings) and its heart beat is peeping even in quiet tirades. The piano is organic and very hardline.
Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich Work: Piano Concerto No. 2 in F, Op. 102, I. Allegro Recording: Dmitri Shostakovich, Orchestre national de la Radiodiffusion française, André
It's a weird situation: Vanessa is expecting her lover Anatol but she doesn't want him to see her face. She has waited for him for twenty years and now she's afraid she's old, not pretty anymore. So she's asking him to declare his love to her shadow (remember, after twenty years of abandonment!) or leave at instant.
Now here's the thing. Vanessa does not know she's not talking to her Anatol but to his son. She knows nothing about the tragedy to come. However, the music knows. It gives you a hint: Something's very wrong. The mirrors will be covered again.
Composer: Samuel Barber Work: Vanessa, "Do not utter a word" Recording: Kate Royal, Orchestra of English National Opera, Edward Gardner
Listen to the violin. How forceful it is. Mayhem of soul. Misdoings of the world. Smell the pain that will never fade. This is not a dancing, playful recording but it's beautiful. It's a fight that cannot be won. Mr. Oistrakh, what have you done?
Composer: Maurice Ravel Work: Tzigane Recording: Igor Oistrakh, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Boris Khaikin
It's a quiet, very intimate setting. It's magic of the night. Smell the affection between alto voice and male choir when they repeat leise, leise. In that moment, music is not around you, it's inside you, spreading through your body. Sip hot tea–that's the feeling.
Schlaf du nicht, schlaf du nicht–do not sleep. Not now.
Composer: Franz Schubert Work: Ständchen, D. 920 Recording: Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner
