Sorry for the lack of new content in the past week. The thing is, there's so much great out-of-print and commercially-unobtainable music online that I don't want to run one of those music blogs that bombards you with new stuff to download day after day, to the point that you never have time to listen to any of it. So, although I have been digitizing a bunch of tapes, I haven't posted any of them up yet because I feel it's polite to give the potential downloader a little breathing space.
I have a number of tapes from my collection ready to post. One is a concert by the Esprit Orchestra, and amazingly, even though it was the very next tape I picked out from the pile, it is disconcertingly similar to my first post, to the extent that it has another Chris Paul Harman orchestral piece, and even includes a different performance of *the same Rose Bolton piece*. Imagine that. Another is a marathon performance of the R. Murray Schafer string quartets, played by the Molinari Quartet - including the premiere of the 7th Quartet (he was only up to 7 at the time of broadcast. I have the premiere of the 8th Quartet lurking around somewhere too). There's also Owen Underhill's opera "The Star Catalogues", which is a real rarity. There is no commercial recording, and as far as I can tell it was only performed 5 times in October 1994. This is sadly the fate of most new Canadian operas. It's my oldest tape from this collection - must have recorded it in the late fall of 1994 or early 1995 - and amazingly it still sounds acceptable. I also have a chamber concert from the Montreal New Music Festival in 2003, with works by Linda C. Smith, Sofia Gubaidulina, Serge Provost, Wolfgang Rihm and Jean Lesage. Plus - and this is one of my favourites - selections from the 2000 International Rostrum of Composers, which not only includes a great entry from Canada by Pierre Klanac, but also a fantastic Violin Concerto by Georg Friedrich Haas, who in the years since then has become an international Big Deal, championed by the likes of Alex Ross. I find his more recent work comparatively tepid, but that's another story. I listened to this tape about a hundred times back in the days when I first started smoking a lot of marijuana, so you can imagine the "mind-blowing" experiences I underwent.
Those are all ready to post whenever I get around to uploading them, and there are dozens and dozens of tapes left. I don't know how many I have, but it could easily be a hundred. So, if you are one of the 5 or 6 people who checks this blog once in a while to see if anything new has been posted, don't fret. I could keep this thing going for years.
Any requests? When I posted the NMCE show on Dimeadozen, surprisingly enough, a few people asked for specific Canadian composers. There are some real rep hounds out there. I love it. Not all of the Two New Hours stuff I have is Canadian - and I reserve the right to violate that mandate whenever I feel like it - but if there's a Canadian composer you want to hear, let me know, because there's a pretty good chance that I have something of theirs.
First of all, I'd like to commend you on your efforts. There simply isn't enough exposure for Canadian composers! This is all much appreciated. That said, I'd really like to see more of Denys Bouliane and, even though he's more well documented on record than many other Canadian composers, some Claude Vivier (but perhaps harder to find items). Thanks for anything that you may post in advance!
ReplyDeleteI think I have some Denys Bouliane in the collection, so I'll try to dig those tapes out for you. As far as Vivier is concerned, I don't have many live performances on tape (I never understood why the amazing production of "Kopernikus" from 2001 wasn't broadcast on the CBC - but since it was toured all over Europe, I'll bet somebody out there has an off-air recording of it). However, I have the 4-disc CBC Vivier collection, so I'll check around to see how much of it is still in print - if not, it should be fair game.
ReplyDeleteI believe the recording of Kopernicus is already on the Canadian Music Centre website. Not sure if it is the exact performance you are referring to, though.
ReplyDeleteThat's almost certainly not the performance I'm thinking of - it's probably the old CBC Records version, although since the CMC hasn't included any information whatsoever about the performers (I guess no one's getting paid for any of that streaming music), I can't be sure.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I just discovered that the 4-disc Anthology of Canadian Music: Claude Vivier Edition that I mentioned above can be downloaded here:
http://avaxhome.ws/music/avant_garde/Claude_Vivier_Anthology_of_Canadian_Music.html