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Messages - X. Trapnel

#1
I haven't seen the entire thread, but I'm sure someone has suggested Ina Boyle and I'd like to add Mary Dickenson-Auner whose romantic-impressionist style seems locatable between Hamilton Harty and Cyril Scott
#2
I've long been curious about Dynam-Victor Fumet from the description of his life and work in Laurence Davies' Cesar Franck and His Circle. I have a CD of music by Raphael F. which also has a work for string orchestra entitled La Nuit, same conductor as on the Koch-Schwann disc and more or less the same length. A little internet research turns up both being compared to Verklarte Nacht. Odd, but I'm wondering if the misspelling of "Dynam" points to a worse error of attribution.
#3
Composers & Music / Re: Le Flem Piano Quintet...
Sunday 26 January 2014, 22:50
The Jean Hure piano quintet is very close in character to the Le Flem as is the chamber music of Max d'Ollone, which remained romantic-impressionist into the 1920s and beyond.
#4
Composers & Music / Re: Why Unsung?
Monday 13 January 2014, 02:04
Fluctuations in reputation have as much to do with extra-musical issues, social, cultural, and political, as they do with the intrinsic quality of a composer's work. Likewise critical opinion is heavily influenced by the economics of performance such that one composer's victory becomes another's defeat, particularly as classical music becomes more culturally marginalized.
#5
Leo Weiner surely qualifies as a late romantic
#6
Composers & Music / Re: Great Unsung Tone Poems
Wednesday 04 December 2013, 23:16
Ludomir Rozycki's Anhelli, based on a poem Juliusz Slowacki (poem and program unknown to me) is a beautiful, rather Sibelian tone poem equal to any of those by Karlowicz
#7
Composers & Music / Re: Great Unsung Tone Poems
Sunday 01 December 2013, 19:56
I think of Loeffler's La Mort de Tintagiles and A Pagan Poem as the strongest musical examples of the Symbolist aesthetic in America, to my taste more dramatic and melodically inspired than the decorative and rather pallid music of Griffes, which has gotten far more attention, perhaps because he's American born and his piano sonata places him on the cusp of modernism, an aural transition from art nouveau to art deco.
#8
There really is no other composer like Rachmaninoff when it comes to the symphonies, though I think the sound world of the 3rd has some echoes in later Bax. I'm very fond of Miaskovsky, but even at his most symphonically expansive he just didn't have the melodic invention of Rachmaninoff (who did?); I think the 17th is the closest he comes, and it's certainly one of Miaskovsky's best. The Kalinnikov symphonies occupy a middle ground between Borodin and Rachmaninoff, are of unflagging melodic inspiration and have a sparkle and translucency that complement the darker and more dramatic qualities of the Rachmaninoff 2nd.
#9
Composers & Music / Re: Most Memorable Unsung Tune.
Tuesday 09 July 2013, 04:30
How could I have omitted Atterberg? Second Symphony, second movement, adagio theme heard after Kalinnikov-like introduction. Breathtakingly, jaw-droppingly beautiful.
#10
Composers & Music / Re: Most Memorable Unsung Tune.
Tuesday 09 July 2013, 04:10
1. Dukas, Symphony in C, second movement, second subject.
2. Hadley, The Trees So High, 3rd movement, trio.
3. Lajtha, Symphony no. 4, 2nd movement, central section (though the whole movement, in fact the whole symphony is gorgeous).
4. Chadwick, Symphonic Sketches, Jubilee, second subject (the most beautiful melody ever written by an American composer? Could be.)
5. If Suk is unsung then the main theme of the Fantastic Scherzo.
#11
Actually, Foerster's cello sonatas have been recorded by the Duo Moravia (Tudor 7071). Also on the disc are the Three Nocturnes for cello, viola, piano and the Melodie for cello and piano.
#12
I'd certainly include the Karlowicz and Vierne among the arguably great, both, to my ears, works of high and consistent inspiration. I'd say Bernard Herrmann's lone symphony is both a masterpiece and fits comfortably within the UC definition of romanticism.
#13
Does anybody know of a complete Gieseking work list? His Quintet for Piano and Winds is gorgeous, part Delius, part Ravel.
#14
Composers & Music / Re: To buy or not to buy?
Tuesday 23 April 2013, 18:38
"some piece that could have been Kalinnikov's 3rd, had he written such a piece."

Quite (cf. H. von Bulow on the "Beethoven 10"). For me the Catoire is indeed the leading candidate. Others (Bortiewicz, Kopylov, Arensky) don't wear their Tchaikovskyisms lightly enough for my taste.
#15
One of my favorite musical reference works is the gloriously mistitled Portraits of the World's Best-Known Musicians. Yes, Beethoven et al. are in it but also pictures of Charleses Grobe and Dupee Blake, some evidence they were carbon-based life forms. No such evidence there for Thirion, Johnson, or Heilman unfortunately.