John Weinzweig - Portrait - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Lackthereof - A Retrospective 1998-2008 Or I Was A Christian Emo Twenty-Something [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/13/2009

From the Russian fairy-tale enchantment of The Firebird to the austere ritual at the end of his Requiem Canticles composed over half a century later, Stravinsky's extraordinary creativity embraces a range of styles and tributes to composers of the past. He started under the guidance of Rimsky-Korsakov in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg and ended his life in America having made a very special kind of peace with the rigorous (serial) techniques of Schoenberg and Webern. Yet his homage's are always heartfelt, and he always remains himself truly the most comprehensive and wide-ranging musical genius of the twentieth century.

At the turn of the 20th century, Paris was a hotbed of musical change. Rather than fostering the emergence of a distinctly French sound, however, the city's most creative spirits sought to purge the influence of Germanic artistic ideals. Following an embarrassing defeat in the Franco-German War, the French vowed to distance themselves from Germany's lofty Wagnerian shadow and to promote homegrown talents with unprecedented fervor. And so the colorful wash of naïveté associated with early-twentieth-century French music was more the result of dismantling a German stronghold than building a French one. In musicologist Richard Taruskin's words, Inch[the French] aimed at the deflation of rhetoric-an especially pointed gesture in the face of German expressive maximalism-and placed a renewed premium on immediate physical sensation.Inch The official doctrine-ars gallica-was given through the Société Nationale de Musique, which was founded by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1871 and kept afloat by such luminaries as Gabriel Fauré, César Franck, and Jules Massenet. Each of these men played a central role in nurturing those who would shape France's musical future. The focus on exporting a national art was so strong, in fact, that traditions thought to hinder this goal were sometimes overlooked. It was under this spell of national pride that Franck opened the Conservatoire's doors to an exceptionally gifted female composer Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937). Despite a promising start, conventional gender roles forced Bonis to the sidelines of Parisian musical life. And though she continued to compose regularly, producing over 300 works under the masculine pseudonym InchMel Bonis,Inch her music eventually fell into obscurity. The Suite en Trio, Op. 59, dates from 1903 and is scored for flute, violin, and piano. In keeping with the doctrine of ars gallica, which sought an identifiably French music,