The basic premise of All the Cool Parts is to introduce recent classical music recordings through some light commentary (with my own feelings and opinions thrown in) with excerpts from the CDs. It's my hope that you'll take what I present as a springboard for your own further discovery of this music.
Today: Eric Whitacre's beautiful and haunting Water Night for choir. Here performed by the fantastic Minneapolis based Vocal Essence. It's worth trying to follow the text, as Eric does some masterful text painting:
Water Night
Night with the eyes of a horse that trembles in the night,
night with eyes of water in the field asleep
is in your eyes, a horse that trembles,
is it your eyes of secret water.
Eyes of shadow-water,
eyes of well-water,
eyes of dream-water.
Silence and solitude,
two little animals moon-led,
drink in your eyes,
drink in those waters.
If you open your eyes,
night opens, doors of musk,
the secret kingdom of the water opens
flowing from the center of night.
And if you close your eyes,
a river fills you from within,
flows forward, darkens you:
night brings its wetness to beaches in your soul.
So, I know this is a guitar concerto... Actually, I think it's one of the finest examples of a solo for a wind instrument anywhere. The English Horn (a larger cousin of the oboe) takes this beautiful and haunting solo. The piece also features many smaller solos for flute, oboe and bassoon - and the setting where they filmed this in Spain is unbelievable. It's good to be John Williams :)
Today, pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim performing Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 2 No. 1. Amazing he performed all 32 sonatas in a series of concerts given in Berlin.
BTW - just some inside information about this piece. One of the performers (in this very video) told me that the piece was originally written for Radiohead, but that they were unable to get it together, so it was passed onto Bang on a Can to do. You might wonder why Radiohead had such trouble with it, but the challenge of performing rhythmically complex notated music can be daunting if you don't have much experience doing that.
I'm going to post a little Romantic music today, but done in a new, one could say "revolutionary" way. This video features Frederick Chopin's awesome "Revolutionary Etude in C minor Opus 10 No. 12" for piano - featuring California Guitar Trio member Bert Lams playing the left hand part on acoustic steel-string guitar, and Tom Griesgraber playing the right-hand part on Chapman Stick - a new instrument invented in California in the 1980's. The performance comes from the Shoal Creek House Concert in Austin, Texas on August 19, 2009.
This week on All the Cool Parts, I have a great conversation with California Guitar Trio members Bert Lams and Paul Richards. Specifically, we talk about the classical music that they've recorded over the past 20 years.
Also on this week's All the Cool Parts Idol, I decided to present my own recording of my Etude #3 for classical guitar.
