And a fun song by Percy Grainger, based on English folk songs he recorded across the countryside. He used incredibly weird time signatures and patterns to precisely recreate the song the way it was sung to him, including an obviously drunken man in mvt 5, where there is literally no time signature for most of the song, every beat is dictated by the conductor individually.
Everyone knows and loves the Pines of Rome, but my favorite Respighi piece is a relatively unknown one, called Huntingtower, that he wrote for John Phillip Sousa when the man died.
But this is what I'm listening to right now. It has one of the spookiest openings I've ever heard. I love this whole symphony so much, it captures the whole mood of revolutionary Petrograd: the brooding conflict between the People and the Provisional Government, the sweet countryside at Lenin's Finland hideout in Razliv, as he finishes State and Revolution. The sailors on the Avrora, conducting some battleship diplomacy during the bridge battles... you can almost imagine how it felt to be there in the basement of the Tauride Palace during the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, as delegates from all the workers' soviets of Russia argue about what to do, the cannon fire of the Palace siege echoing periodically in the background. Trotsky calls for all the soviets to veto the Provisional Government and support the measures against them, but Martov counters that what the Bolsheviks are doing is illegal, and refuses to go along with it! What will be done, who will the delegates follow? Its so tense, so epic, so real! I love it. So much of it is captured by that simple cello and bass soli at the beginning and its echoes in the following bars, they say everything.
If you don't have anything else to do for 1h45', here's a full live recording of Mahler 3 by the royal concertgebouw orchestra, with introduction in Dutch: http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=11188652
When you click on "meer afleveringen", you will find links to Mahler 1, 2, 4 and 5 as well
Link to video.
the version with organ is even sadder than the one for strings alone...
(btw, the piece was composed by Remo Giazotto in 1958, not by Tomaso Albinoni...)
After watching the French movie Tous les matins du monde I found this, played by my fellow countryman Wieland Kuyken:
Link to video.
The movie is a ficticious story about the lifes of both Monsieur de Sainte Colombe and Marin Marais, two of the greatest French viola da gamba players from the baroque era. Clips from the movie can be found on youtube as well.
More Penderecki, this time his Dies Irae. It's quite possibly some of the most horrible, terrifying music I've ever heard, but there's something remarkably beautiful about it.
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