Urgent: Urspruch PC on German radio!

[Mark Thomas]

If the quality is the same as that broadcast over the internet, then Total Recorder would also do the job, with the added advantage that it works for any internet radio broadcasts, not just those from WDR. That means, Jim, that you could record German radio broadcasts even in the US! Of course, general speaking, internet radio is hardly CD quality, but it's usually good enough.

[JimL]

Great!  Now all I need are about three of me to do all this stuff while maintaining all the stuff I got going on in my life!  BTW, what is the site I need to go to to get the streaming audio?

[Amphissa]

For those who are interested, I have now a copy of this concerto, captured from broadcast by a friend of mine in Germany. Excellent audio. If you would like a copy, please contact me.

[Ilja]

For those of us on a Mac, WireTap Studio (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/wiretap/) does the same thing. Great tool.

[JimL]

Anybody else have any feedback on this concerto?  I've been busy assimilating it since Monday the 24th.  Nice, sumptuous cadenza in the first movement, and an exquisite trick ending to boot.  Both the PC and the Symphony have a sort of pastoral quality about them, which would make them rather bland were it not for the superb sense of harmonic motion and the variety of the musical ideas.  The virtuosity of the piano part isn't of the Liszt-Rubinstein variety, but more of the Schumann-Brahms school.  No barn-stormer, that Urspruch.  If you're going to have a rather long symphony program of nothing but unsungs, it would make a nice first half for the Rufinatscha 6th.  All in all a satisfying piece.  I'd rank it alongside, say, the Kiel concerto in terms of quality.

[Mark Thomas]

It's a well crafted and satisfying piece, and that's especially true of the last two movements. The finale is a delight and the slow movement has just that sort of delicate seriousness which seems to have been so hard to achieve successfully.

For me, though, as with the Symphony, the first movement is way too long. I'll repeat what I wrote to Alan about it in a recent email: "The material and its treatment are fine, but he could have said it in 12 minutes. Whilst I'm quite happy with the whole "heavenly length" thing, it does take a very special composer to pull it off (Schubert, Rachmaninov) and, as you very well know, I do admire concision. That's not to say that I delight in six minute movements, but I do admire a man who has enough material for 20 minutes and still manages to say what he wants to say in 10 or 12. Dvorak, for instance, or Raff in one of his better movements. Then there's the likes of Draeseke or Rufinatscha who take material which a lesser composer would exhaust after five minutes and build a 10-12 minute symphonic movement which still gives you the impression that they have only just begun to explore its possibilities."

That said, it's a  rewarding piece and we've been the poorer for not having heard it all these years.

[Alan Howe]

I'm very happy with Urspruch's expansiveness in both his PC and his Symphony. I am actually often frustrated that a composer doesn't somehow have the guts to do what Urpruch attempts in these pieces. I think this may have something to do with having spent much of my younger life listening to Bruckner and Mahler, so it's probably a very personal thing with me. It actually took me a long time (coming from tending to prefer the expansive rather than the concise) to appreciate fully what Raff was doing in his symphonies. I immediately liked 3 & 5, for example, but thought that, say, 4 was rather puny. How wrong I was: how much Raff packs into approx. 30 minutes; and what brilliance there is in the writing. But it took me time to uncover this. For the same reason I still prefer Beethoven 3 to his 8th; but I know that this is actually a problem I have to work out for myself.

One of my absolute favourite chamber music pieces is Wilhelm Berger's Piano Quintet. Why? Because it's great music - and, at 50 minutes - I never feel short-changed!

[Mark Thomas]

And, perversely for all my appreciation of concision, I'm always pleased when first encountering a new work and before I've heard it, to see that it is in four movements rather than three and is 40 minutes long rather than 30! It's something to do with feeling that I'm getting value for money!

[JimL]

I've done quite a bit of analysis on that first movement, and I can say that the cadenza adds about 3-4 minutes to its length.  Cut that down a bit, and trim some repetition in the closing sections of exposition and recap, and you'd get about a 15-16 minute first movement.  Nonetheless, I wouldn't change a note, since the repeated material is effectively re-orchestrated from its initial appearances.  I particularly like way Urspruch transforms his primary material from exposition to reprise, tossing in subtle alterations to the melodic line that have been previously hinted at or explicitly stated in a different context earlier in the movement.