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A Guy's Moleskine Notebook

Thoughts and reflections on works of fiction and literature. Pondering of life through pictures and words. Babbling about gay rights. Travelogues and anecdotes.

  • [1] Annie Proulx: Brokeback Mountain
  • [2] Arthur Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha
  • [3] Yu Hua: To Live
  • [4] Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty
  • [5] Colm Toibin: The Master
  • [6] Carlos Ruiz Zafon: The Shadow of the Wind
  • [7] William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience
  • [8] Charles Higham: The Civilization of Angkor
  • [9] Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case
  • [10] Dai Sijie: Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
  • [11] Alan Hollinghurst: The Swimming-Pool Library
  • [12] Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
  • [13] Colm Toibin: The Blackwater Lightship
  • [14] Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star
  • [15] Ross King: Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
  • [16] Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
  • [17] Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections
  • [18] Colm Toibin: The Story of the Night
  • [19] John Banville: Shroud
  • [20] Leo Tolstoy: Resurrection
  • [21] Peter Hessler: River Town, Two Years on the Yangtze
  • [22] Ian McEwan: The Atonement
  • [24] Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  • [25] Ignacio Padilla: Shadow without a Name
  • [26] Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
  • [27] Richard Russo: Straight Man
  • [28] Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
  • [29] Alan Hollinghurst: The Spell
  • [30] Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil
  • [31] James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room
  • [32] Ken Kesey: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • [33] Xingjian Gao: One Man's Bible
  • [34] C. Jay Cox: Latter Days
  • [35] Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird
  • [36] William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew
  • [37] Daniel A. Helminiak: What The Bible Really Says about Homosexuality
  • [38] James Baldwin: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
  • [39] Kenji Yoshino: Covering - The Hidden Assault of Civil Rights
  • [40] Italo Calvino: If, On a Winter's Night A Traveler
  • [41] Arthur Phillips: The Egyptologist
  • [42] George Orwell: 1984
  • [43] Michael Warner: The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and Ethics of Queer Life
  • [44] Andrew Sullivan: Virtually Normal
  • [45] Henry James: The Wings of the Dove
  • [46] Jose Saramago: Blindness
  • [47] Umberto Eco: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
  • [48] Dan Brown: Da Vinci Code
  • [49] Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
  • [50] Ken Follett: The Pillars of Earth
  • [51] Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
  • [52] Michael Thomas Ford: Alec Baldwin Doesn't Like Me
  • [53] Jonathan Franzen: How To Be Alone
  • [54] Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude
  • [55] Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club
  • [56] Zadie Smith: White Teeth
  • [57] Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Double
  • [58] Jose Saramago: The Double
  • [59] Andrew Holleran: Dancer from the Dance
  • [60] Heinrich von Kleist: The Marquise of O & Other Stories
  • [61] Andrew Holleran: In September, the Light Changes
  • [62] Tom Perrotta: Little Children
  • April 16, 2006

     

    Telemann Flute Concertos

    My iPod playlist of the latest Billboard Adult Contemporary 40, with James Blunt's You're So Beautiful, Michael Buble's I Wanna Go Home, The Fray's Over My Head (Cable Car), and Daniel Powter's Bad Day has become cloy to me. For a change of music I rummage through my CD shelf and find my favorite "thinking" music.

    Telemann: Flute Concertos is a rarely beautifully compilation. The five concertos for flute chosen for this recording illustrates exactly what suits the instrument best and accentuates the instrument's beauty. Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) not only wrote concertos for one flute or two, but also variously combined the flute with other concertante instruments, showing the virtuoso flute in a wide range of different roles.
    The five pieces heard in this compilation were composed over a period of more than 20 years and fully demonstrate Telemann's engagement with the concerto genre. In each of the five works almost every member in the orchestras at Telemann's disposal was capable of taking solo parts. The beauty of sound springs forth from the combination with softer tone of instruments such as oboe d'amore, viola d'amore or violone, which enhance the flute's brilliance and crispness, while an often astonishing playfulness could develop in the high registers when Telemann introduced a second flute or a violin, as manifested obviously in the Concerto for Flute, Violin, Cello, Strings and Continuo in A from "Musique de Table I" (5-8).

    Concerto for Flute, Strings and Continuo in G (1-4) is a first recording because the only manuscript copy of the parts was in an extremely poor condition that the piece was sadly considered unplayable (until 2000). The concerto was composed for oboe as well as for the transverse flute of the time. The andante movement is the most beautiful movement, so elegantly and stately executed. Pahud makes such a strong case for the first recording of this concerto.

    Concerto for Flute, Violin, Cello, Strings and Continuo in A from "Musique de Table I" (5-8) is probably the most beautiful concerto in Musique de Table. The agility and swiftness of notes best suited the festive occasions for which Telemann composed in 1733. This might be the most well-known and most played piece out of this compilation. Even Handel himself performed some of the pieces and some of his own compositions (flute sonata and oboe sonata) show the inspiration of Telemann.

    Concerto for Two Flutes, Violone, Strings and Continuo (9-12) is also a debut recording for the piece, with a deep, velvety tone of the violone that creates an impressive contrariety to the agility of the flutes, notably when the flutes and the violone play together in parallel for long stretches.

    Concerto for Flute, Oboe d'amore, Viola d'amore, Strings and Continuo in E (13-16). The Largo in D minor forms a sharp contrast to the vivacious movements to Part 1 of Music de Table. In the Siciliano, the repeated theme and expression is achieved by repetition of three concertante instruments without the continuo.

    Listen for the only concertos with a combination of flute and two other different solo instruments in the final piece of the compilation, Concerto for Flute, Strings and Continuo in D (17-20).

    Overall high marks for the agility, flow, and swiftness of all the performances in this compilation. The music whiles away a rainy afternoon of papers grading and writing.

    3 Comments:

    Blogger Jef said...

    I don't listen to much classical, and what I do have is a compilation. I couldn't even begin to tell you what each track is.

    You reminded me of a song by the Aluminum Group, which consists of two gay brothers. They wrote and recorded a song called "Chocolate," which is one of the most beautiful analogies I have ever heard.

    4/16/2006 10:50 PM  
    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Hope you had a nice Easter too!!

    4/17/2006 8:13 AM  
    Anonymous www.albacete-3d.com said...

    Little doubt, the dude is totally just.

    11/16/2011 9:04 AM  

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