|
 |
ATTENTION! For those who want to avoid MP3. com's new imposition of surcharges on DAM CDs, you can order the very same recordings of the live concert performances featured on this site at IMCA RESOURCE CENTER.
There the price will remain at $6.99 plus $2.00 for shipping and handling. For my commercial CDs, please visit the labels' sites, listed on this page.
Attention those with phone modems!
Tired of waiting? For super-fast streaming and downloading of many of the recordings on this site, please visit the following stations:
CHOPIN
LISZT
SCRIABIN
SCHUMANN
DEBUSSY
NIETZSCHE
JBY ESSENTIALS
The Piano Music of Friedrich Nietzsche available from Berkshire Record
Outlet
 Prisms
 Nietzsche
NEW! VIDEOS! View videos of John Bell Young in concert, including Chopin's Barcarolle; Debussy's L'isle Joyeuse; Wagner-Liszt's Liebestod; Scriabin's Poeme Op. 32 No. 2; Liszt's Rigoletto Paraphrase and other works. Several of these videos, including Chopin's Barcarolle and Debussy's L'isle Joyeuse, are the same performances featured on the audio files here on MP3. com. Also, see an excerpt from the picaresque 1977 Dutch television documentary John Bell Young: Sweet Summer Concert, Amsterdam. Here JBY performs aboard an open tour boat afloat in Amsterdam's canals.
Internet Explorer browser recommended for viewing and downloading. Real Player required.
STREAMING VIDEOS:
Scriabin: Poeme Op. 32 No.2
To purchase Prisms, CDs, videos of Mr. Young playing the works featured
here, his Mahler transcriptions and other recordings in the Americus
Records
and Eroica Records catalogs, please pay a visit to the Identity Marketing
for Concert Artists Resource Center at www.johnbellyoung.org.
|
 |
|
|
|
| SOLOISTS: GALINA KALININA, soprano and OLEG KLENOV, baritone. GENADY PROVATOROV, conductor. While still a student at the Moscow Conservtory in the early 1890s, Scriabin embarked on an ambitious new project: an opera. To this end he sketched out motivic material and a harmonic foundation. Decades later, the Russian composer Alexander Nemtin fleshed out the work after Scriabin's death, fashioning it into an exotic oratorio of sorts for orchestra, soprano and tenor. Here we have a musical depiction of the first meeting of Keistut and Birute. Keistut was an actual 14th century historical figure (b. 1382?), the son of the great Lithuanian Prince Gedimin. In 1345 he assumed power, along with his older brother Olgerd, ascending to the throne and ruling Lithuania. Birute, a high priestess at the Temple of Perkun in Palangena, later became the wife of Keistut, and the mother of Vitov, another remarkable Lithuanian prince. | |
|
| |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
| Vladimir Sofronitsky, piano | |
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
| This famous evervgreen etude is often played as if it had no rhyhtmic spine. Indeed, the kind of spastic, syrupy plasticity that pianists so frequently see fit to impose upon it, without discipline or aforethought, has not only created a huge misunderstanding about the work, but amounts to a kind of interpretive rape. On the contrary, its turbulent character and oceanic rhythm demand the support of the most rigorous and steady pulse, within the context of both its micro (motivic) and its macro (formal) organization. in fact, that pulse proceeds in large, consistent waves of two, not four beats per bar, as Scriabin himself indicates with particular clarity in the text itself. What's mroe, the crucial dotted motive that opens the work and infects it throughout, is one that assumes extraordinary symbolic significance in all of Scriabin's music. This early incarnation of the "zov" motive ("the call" of Divine Wisdom -- the Pistas Sofia -- to man from the Pleroma; the divine spark of Prometheus) here is an emblem of the will. That idea, inspired by Nietzsche's philosphy and its emphasis on the Overman and the re-evaluation of values, exerted a profound influence on the young Scriabin, who was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory when he penned this masterpiece. Those pianists who throw all care to the wind, ignore its rhythmic contours and the affective precision that lend character and shape to its motivic systoles do the work a great injustice, all in the name of some ersatz "color" or "flexibility". But, as we all know, there is no real freedom without discipline, and where music is really made -- between the notes, not on them -- is where a composition reveals its essential meaning. For example, unlike the so-called Scottish snap that one finds so often in Beethoven, the dotted motive in Scraibin works rather differently. Indeed, it is the shorter of the two values in the short-long relation (in this case, a sixteenth follwoed by a dotted eighth) that must be given particular emphasis. This work is nothing if not an expression of will, defiance and determination at a time when the revolutionary fervor of an entire society had already saturated its youth, including Scriabin, and was to lead only a few years later, in 1905 and again in 1917, to massive social upheaval. I advise young pianists, learning this work for the first time, to avoid parroting the superficial readings of those who toss it off as if it were mere "piano music" and instead examine the text with the greatest care in an effort to fathom the internecine relations that form it. This marvelous etude, by the way, is one of two versions he composed. He had a hard time making up his mind which to submit for publication, but his publisher and mycenas, Mitrofan Belyaieff, wisely advised him to use this now famous version. It is the darker and less optimistc of the two, but also the more succinct and powerful. | |
Credits: Producer: John Bell Young |
| |
Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).
|
|
need help playing tracks?
lo fi play
hi fi play
download
email track to a friend
view track info