The album brings together two artists with enormous followings: Valentina Lisitsa, with her dazzling artistry and hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube; and Philip Glass, with his hugely popular minimalist piano music.
Here is Glass at his best – using the building blocks of minimalism to achieve a huge, inventive soundscape of musical richness and contrasts. Richly harmonic, this is a deeply evocative listening experience with revelatory performances from Lisitsa; a wonderful artist with exceptional musicality and a stunning technique.
Saint-Saens: The Swan ( Le Cygne ) — Carnival of the Animals
Дата загрузки: 5 окт. 2008 г.Title: Saint-Saens: The Swan
From Wikipedia:
Le Cygne, or The Swan, is the thirteenth movement of The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns. This piece features a solo cello in tenor clef and two accompaniment pianos.The piece is in 6/4 time, with a key signature of G major. It makes use of legato and slurring, the music should flow like a swan gliding through the water. This piece is often played using much vibrato.
This is the only movement from the Carnival of the Animals that the composer would allow to be played in public during his lifetime as he thought the remaining movements were too frivolous and would damage his reputation as a serious composer.
The piece was written in tenor clef, although there are some arrangements in bass clef.
Because the high range of the cello is displayed in this piece, the voice is often misnamed as the violin. The cello, however, has an extremely large range and can play in this register, and its tones are rounder and more mellow…
Опубликовано: 11 февр. 2014 г.Following Glass's early operas, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies had been urging the composer to write more orchestral pieces, and the concerto marks Glass's first full-scale venture into non-theatrical orchestral composing.Glass's original concept was for a five-movement work, and Zukofsky requested a slow, high finale. As the composition process developed, however, Glass decided that five movements were too many and settled for a more conventional three-movement format. According to Glass, this traditional structure was not a concession to formality but simply a result of the work finding «a voice of its own» as the first and second movements developed into longer pieces than he had originally conceived. The work was composed with Glass's father, Ben, in mind, despite the latter's death some sixteen years earlier: «I wrote the piece in 1987 thinking, let me write a piece that my father would have liked. A very smart nice man who had no education in music whatsoever, but the kind of person who fills up concert halls. It's popular, it's supposed to be — it's for my Dad.»
The Hours is the story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Based on Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize--winning novel, the film interweaves the stories of three women—a book editor in New York (Meryl Streep), a young mother in California (Julianne Moore), and the author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman). Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.
Philip Glass's ravishing, Oscar- and Grammy-nominated score was a key element in this acclaimed triptych of dramatic tales. «The inter-cutting of personal stories over a wide span of time, » says NPR, «is held together by a single music approach.»
Опубликовано: 15 нояб. 2014 г.In memory of our friend, Josef Trávníček (23.5.1970 — 9.11.2014)
— great teacher, follower of Comenius way (educating while playing), who was easily able to get attention and interest of his students at any time, showing them history of their own district, city, region, country and the whole world in the way they would love to see — in context… with accent on culture, folklore and true traditions.
This is my condolence to his family — my very good friends.
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Philip Glass — «The Hours» (soundtrack from the movie «The Hours»)
Dušan Holý — piano
Grandpiano: Feurig — produced +- 1920 (truly beautiful instrument)
Опубликовано: 21 нояб. 2013 г.Philip Glass — The Hours, 2002. Michael Riesman transcription.
Branka Parlić, piano. Synagogue, Novi Sad. 5.VII.2005
«The Hours», Music from the Motion Picture for piano.
There are movies where you notice the soundtrack, and others where you don't. The latter is usually considered ideal, and yet it's impossible to ignore Philip Glass' pervasive, all-encompassing soundtrack while watching Stephen Daldy's celebrated follow-up to Billy Elliot (the same could just as easily be said of Elmer Bernstein's majestic music for Far From Heaven). This isn't such a bad thing — far from it. The piano-dominated score, incorporating motifs from Glass' Satyagraha, Glassworks, and Solo Piano is, by turns, lush, sumptuous, and stirring.
Philip Glass' score for the film The Hours is very typical of Glass, with its nearly constant repetition and slowly evolving variations on a theme. It suits the moods of the film perfectly, reflecting mesmerically the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters, but remaining subservient to the film itself. Michael Riesman, a long-time associate of Glass, has transcribed the score of The Hours for piano. It wasn't hard for him to do this: the score prominently features the piano alongside the orchestra, and Riesman performed the piano part in the soundtrack recording. His solo piano version covers exactly the same music as on the soundtrack album, but to call it a «reduction» of an orchestral work would be unfair. Yes, it is one instrument instead of many, but just by the facts that it's a single performer being responsible for realizing the music and it's no longer an accompaniment to screen images, Riesman is able to add to it more expression and more life. Even though his tempos and the track times match the soundtrack almost exactly, he is able to take tiny liberties with the phrasing of themes so that the quiet desperation of the music isn't quite as desperate. It doesn't matter if he uses a larger array of dynamics and is not quite as strict with time. Whereas listening to the soundtrack without the film can be almost unbearably boring or depressing, depending on your state of mind, listening to Riesman's version is less so. Although the track titles make no sense without film, in this version, the music is able to stand on its own as a distinct creative work, with more vitality and wider-ranging sentiment than the soundtrack.
The complicated storyline, based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (which was, in turn, inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway) is inherently dramatic and emotionally compelling enough that it doesn't really «need» music to get its message across. And the actors, including Nicole Kidman (Virginia Woolf), Julianne Moore (Laura Brown), and Meryl Streep (Clarissa Vaughn), breathe such life into these three distinct characters, living in three different time periods, that they don't need really need the music either. But it's always there, like a ghostly presence in each woman's life, helping to tie their divergent storylines together as much as the themes that are common to each. In the end, the score is as much a unifying force as Peter Boyle's deft editing and, most importantly, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which was originally to be called The Hours.
Pianist Branka Parlić is one of the most prominent interpreters of contemporary classical music in Eastern Europe. She graduated from the Belgrade University of Musical Arts in the late 1970s and studies under Professor Olga Mihailović. She later honed her craft at the Summer Music Academy in Nice under Professor Pierre Sancan of the Paris Conservatory. While studying, she also co founded the well-known Ensemble for Different New Music.
Taking on the task of presenting the cycle of the legendary Phillip Glass' «Metamorphosis,» is probably the most challenging task in the sphere of contemporary minimalism since Parlic's classical undertaking of Erik Satie's ''Gnossiennes'' in the 1980s. The album which she released back then, called «Initiés,» was the first album that contained one of Satie's compositions ever recorded here.
Branka Parlić premiered the Glass' pieces in Novi Sad in 2004 and the performance of «Metamorphosis No.2» recorded at this show was broadcasted regularly on prestigious British TV channel Classics FM. Recently, another British TV channel C Music TV http://www.cmusic.tv/cmusic/ started to broadcast two videos in Parlic' rendering: «Opening» by Philip Glass and «Spiegel im Spiegel» by Arvo Pärt. She also act as Artistic Director of the Concert Series «New Ears for New Music» in Novi Sad.
Philip Glass — Music from «The Hours» (arr. for piano solo)
Опубликовано: 20 янв. 2016 г.Philip Glass — Music from «The Hours» | Live & Complete | Arranged for piano solo by Michael Riesman and Nico Muhly.
1. The Poet Acts
2. Morning Passages
3. Something She Has to Do
4. I'm Going to Make a Cake
5. An Unwelcome Friend
6. Dead Things
7. Why Does Someone Have to Die?
8. Tearing Herself Away
9. Escape!
10. Choosing Life
11. The Hours
The Hours is the original soundtrack album, on the Elektra/Nonesuch label, of the 2002 film The Hours, starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. The original score was composed by Philip Glass.