Hubner,G. / Sirius Quartet / Culo,Michael - Six Songs Of Innocence - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

When, in 1922, Charles Ives published a volume entitled 114 Songs, he was indirectly drawing attention to the fact that the genre had played a central part in his output. 85 years on and, for all that his wider reputation may now rest on his orchestral, chamber and piano music, songs represent the heart of his creative thinking. Nor was that initial volume comprehensive; Ives having written almost 200 songs, of which this present edition includes all those he completed. The expressive variety encountered is accordingly vast indeed, the gradual evolution of Ives's songwriting, from those drawing overtly on the Austro-German Lieder and English parlor-song traditions to ones that evince anarchic humor as keenly as others do a profound vision, is analogous to the evolution of American music over the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries. Although it would be possible to collate Ives's songs according to type, the alphabetic approach adopted by this edition ensures each volume (of which this is the sixth and last) contains a representative cross section of his achievement. A wide range of poets is set (Ives could be highly interventionist when it suited his purpose), including (mainly early) German settings as well as forays into French and Italian writers. Moreover, the temporal distance (1887-1926) traversed by the songs is as little compared to their stylistic diversity or their emotional range. The extent to which Ives reworked songs throughout his career is considerable, whether substituting a text or reworking the actual music. To this end, songs with a musical or textual connection are cross linked accordingly (i.e. in brackets at the end of the relevant paragraph). The setting of Rudyard Kipling's Tarrant Moss (1902) uses just two verses, treated in a peremptory fashion as if to suggest that the text was merely the nearest

Michael Haydn did not achieve the same exorbitant quantity of instrumental music as his older brother, since he had to compose a large amount of sacred music because of his position; but the surviving symphonies and chamber music in particular are not lacking in novel and InchoriginalInch character traits. This becomes clear, for example, in the six string quartets recorded here, which he wrote sometime in the 1770s or 1780s. Here, personable elegance and subtle humour are combined with a quiet touch of tragic drama to create a very unique candour that reveals a world view that is as moving as it is entertaining, somewhere between the masterpieces of his brother Joseph and Amadeus, who was around twenty years younger.

Modern Baseball - Holy Ghost [CASSETTES] date 05/13/2016