Friends: I have been informed that Urspruch's Piano Concerto will be broadcast on WDR3 (Germany) between 13.00 and 15.00 this Sunday, 16th August. The pianist will be Oliver Triendl, with the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie.
Is anyone in a position to record this broadcast (I imagine it will be the same performance that will eventually come out on cpo, probably coupled with Urspruch's Symphony)?
Hi Alan,
I'll do my best to 'tape' (wow! that IS a long time ago!) it.
Is there a device that will burn it directly to a CD from a radio broadcast? Tape is so fragile. You might accidentally drop it in a bucket of vitriol or something. ;)
There's a guy on Dimeadozen who posts radio broadcasts from Germany all the time and his recordings are very good. I'll check with him and see if he is in a position to capture it and post it on the torrents.
Kevin
Thanks, Kevin. Let's hope he can help.
Jim, you might get some vitriol* from the German radio station if they find out what you're up to! ;D
*schwefelsaure Alan?
Actually, Jim, John, it's not that hard - provided that you can receive the broadcast in the first place. I can receive some radio stations through my satellite TV sytem and so can record them onto my hard-disc recorder. From there I can transfer onto a memory stick and, provided I can work out how to convert the file-type to an mp3 file or such like, it can then be burned to CD via my computer.
Whew! I cant wait to pop ye olde cassette in and press
the record button!!!
Actually, I agree! Taping is so easy - and you can still get excellent results, given a good signal.
Hello,
I am new on this forum. I am rather amazed that nobody seems to be familiar with the WDR Radiorecorder. It is just a piece of cake to make a recording of a broadcast of WDR programs. Just get a look on de WDR website
http://www.wdr.de/radio/home/radiorecorder/start/index.phtml
Good luck
Actually, John, I'm not "up to" anything. I'm in the States, and don't have any way of picking up the broadcast. Damn the ionosphere!
Thanks, Black! I've downloaded the WDR Radio Recorder and selected the programme with Urspruch's PC, so we'll see whether it works!
Well, thanks to the WDR Radio Recorder I have just finished recording and downloading the Urspruch PC.
The first movement has much the same quality as the composer's Symphony, also in E flat, i.e. a fairly leisurely pace and a rich orchestral palate. The piano-writing is attractive and demanding, but the feeling is of a concerto of symphonic scope along the lines of Beethoven's Emperor or Brahms, rather than of a virtuoso display-piece. There is certainly some really beautiful writing for woodwinds and some exciting tutti passages: very impressive - and memorable too. This movement is approx. 22 minutes long - an expansive opening indeed.
The second movement starts in a quite different mood - one of sadness and melancholy, rather than the expansive good humour of the opening movement. There is a most beautiful rise and fall to the melodies here - long lines and deep feeling. Eventually, a more hope-filled melody emerges, developed by both orchestra and piano: this is music of exceptional breadth and beauty - and drama too as the main, now tragic-sounding theme is thundered out by the full orchestra, thus ending the movement on a note of heightened sadness.
The finale begins in high spirits; then a more peaceful, typically long-breadthed melody is introduced, before we are back to more vigorous music, this time in less certain mood. Then we are back to a development of the opening high jinks, gloriously reiterated in tutti before the piano takes up the writing. There is tremendous variety in the writing here. Then a fugato...the tension finally builds, the writing becoming broader, then calmer, more akin to the mood of the first movement. The pace picks up, but breadth remains the predominant mood until a build-up of tension, a brief solo piano interlude preceding the final rush for the line, punctuated by horns - a humorous scurry and the work ends in glory.
This is a PC nearly 42 minutes in length. Too long? Maybe. But the delights are many. And, if cpo are to issue it coupled with the composer's Symphony (which lasts 50 minutes), it's going to have to be a 2-CD set!
Well, I'm glad you were able to get it Alan! I'm not sure how the radio recorder thing works. Does it just capture an internet stream at the time of the broadcast? If so what is the audio quality like? The user on DIME that I mentioned wrote me today and said he was able to record it and will be putting it up on the torrents after he gets more information from the radio station. Probably tomorrow.
Kevin
The audio quality is truly excellent!
As for how the recorder works: it captures the internet stream at the time of broadcast and then you can simply download the file. Windows Media Player was able to play the broadcast.
If the quality is the same as that broadcast over the internet, then Total Recorder (http://www.highcriteria.com/) 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.
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?
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.
For those of us on a Mac, WireTap Studio (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/wiretap/ (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/wiretap/)) does the same thing. Great tool.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.