Eric S notapenguin's blog: "musicstuffs version 2.0"

Since I'm feeling enthusiastic and even though I've recommended this piece of music before, still, if you like Rachmaninoff's music (and especially his more serious vein - the Corelli variations, his first piano sonata, the Symphonic Dances, the tone poem The Isle of the Dead too) - you may want to give a listen to the music of composer Nikolai Medtner and especially his sonata for piano in E minor, headed with lines from a poem (by Tyutchev) - and given the nickname - "The Night Wind" (Medtner's work was written around 1911, and a score is available here that's public domain in Canada and the US though not in the EU.) Was listening to a performance of this, recorded by Adam Fellegi back in 1989 for Marco Polo (while exercising actually, Wednesday...- listening to a good half-hour-_straight_ of almost unbroken piano music that only gets more exciting towards the end is a great way to ignore the fact that one's getting more sore and more tired, though it's only a half-hour... anyway, "serious Rachmaninoff fans" may have heard of the composer anyway since they were best friends more or less, but along with Medtner's songs and violin sonatas this might be the one work, just about, that I'd really recommend- despite the length. Definitely more than worth it. (There's a 1996 recording by Marc-André Hamelin that's part of his set of all 14 solo sonatas, and is better :) Not sure if it's available separately. Unfortunately I only see a few recordings in all listed http://www.medtner.org.uk/op25_2.html here, but I have a BBC broadcast one by John Ogdon too, good but apparently with some cuts... Budget label Naxos has released a recording of his late third violin sonata (nicknamed "Epica") - have two recordings of it in my collection but haven't heard this one yet. (I have three of his cheerful - contagiously cheerful, I tend to say - second sonata, I think! :) ) Their price is typically less than 8 US dollars a disc and performances are generally good, so might be worth a go (same company as Marco Polo, just their budget wing. They also have his piano concertos and quintet- I have, again, other recordings of those and think the quintet's especially good music; it quotes a song the composer liked enough to quote in yet a second - or third :) - piece. Enjoy, I hope!)

a friend gave me some bronzed CDs some years back - he'd be getting replacements for them, the CDs were decaying, I knew how to make backups before they did so. (They've since decayed - this was awhile ago. Yes, there is even a Wikipedia article on what this means- CD bronzing.) The backups themselves are falling victim to entropy and what-have after four or so years, so I'm glad enough to have other discs and an iPod, and to know how to find information I lacked (track/performer details/...) at the time I got the discs. (Also, the website of one of the recording companies from which most of these CDs were bought has much of that information easily available now, a good service for their consumers- and I've bought many of their discs myself, since they record so much music "up my alley".) That may well occupy my next who-knows length of time, or part of it, but at least it could be fun- as I've said when I've done this before, there's several worse ways to spend time than listening to a lot of music I haven't heard in awhile.

Ricordi - Italian music publisher; Augener - British, the same. Fairly sure that Augener has been subsumed by now by another "concern", but it would have been common for a piece (like the book of pieces by Hungarian composer Istvan/Stephen Heller's The Art of Phrasing, op. 16, written in 1844 or so) to be republished by both those companies. I have, purchased from a local "Friends of the Library" booksale to which people bring music, books, CDs, records, ... they no longer want so that the proceeds can benefit our local library- scores of the op. 45 and 46 sets of etudes of Heller, published sometime early in the 20th century - not first publications, I'm sure, but when those pieces still had some popularity among piano students (or teachers :) ). (Maybe they still do.) (Opus 45, as published by G. Schirmer, definitely _still_ a going concern now, http://www.schirmer.com ... and some of the op. 45 and 46 studies are still available from Schirmer directly for sale. (I got a CD, also from the booksale, of all the op. 47 studies- and one of Heller's sonatas- which I'd seen mentioned in a book "The Sonata Since Beethoven" at the library years back, excellent book by William Newman - but a very poorly-documented CD, no mention of the 25 individual op. 47 etudes by name- if any- or tempo, just all in one block, for instance.) My copy of op. 46 was published by the Boston publisher B.F. Wood Music Co. They were still around in the 1950s, but I'm not quite sure if they disappeared or were purchased.

Decided to attempt to upgrade LilyPond music notation software again (this had been giving me trouble I had no idea how to solve; I hoped the people on the FINK project were working on that part themselves). Worked. Now have LilyPond 2.10.25 installed; when I get back from shopping will test it. Still need to learn how to use it- I'm only used to version 2.0.1, from years ago (but my 2003 Mac upgraded to OS 10.2.8 couldn't install anything more recent than that!) See www.lilypond.org about the program and my image gallery and stash for some examples of what it does (and www.imslp.org has some too, e.g. this IMSLP page for Felix Mendelssohn's precocious (written by a 16-year-old- not so much precocious piece, as by a precocious person :) ) string octet: http://imslp.org/wiki/String_Octet%2C_Op.20_%28Mendelssohn%2C_Felix%29 - the second PDF listed on the page was typeset using lilypond.org (the first PDF was scanned in from score, as is more usual on IMSLP; Dover Publications reprint, in fact.) (Another example, Beethoven's 4th string quartet, can be found here.)

Have been doing thisthat with my iPod. Remembered that some tracks were missing information and remembered where some performer data I was missing (for now unavailable LPs) was... (in this case, for a brief quintet for oboe and strings by Danish composer Vagn Holmboe written when I was a very few years old and recorded just a couple of years after. Oboist on the LP was Mogens Steen Andreassen (also known for his Bach performances). Since I have the number of the LP, I have that it was recorded in 1973 (http://www.mikrokosmos.com/list508.txt) though probably premiered in 1970 (http://snyk.kroyer.kulturhotel.dk/vdb/resultat2.php?PARAMET_vaerkID[]=3887) (that latter website seems to give a timing of 27 minutes - and yet: the recording does not sound "cut" but is 13 minutes long. ... odd.) The oboist, Mogens Steen Andreassen, seems to have been known for his solos in Bach cantatas. (Speaking of Bach cantatas, if you don't know that side of his output but like the composer a lot, let me put in my recommendation. Very strongly.)

Lilypond (www.lilypond.org) is the program I've been using to create the music score images in the background and in my gallery here, among other things. I have some long-term projects that involve it, that I mentioned in earlier posts in this blog (and in Musicstuffs.) The version I was using, and getting used to, was LilyPond 2.0.1 - very far from being up to date, but with the computer I had, the most recent one I could install. With my new machine I installed 2.6.3, but hadn't yet gotten around to successfully doing anything at all with it (except having it crash on me a few times, and seeing why :) ). I found out that I could attempt to install a much more recent version, though, so I'm trying to do so now. (One thing about the FINK project is that it takes care of almost all of the installation on a Mac for you- don't need to know a ton about configuration of environment variables, or to compile programs on which this and that is dependent - it works out the details, asks you to make some choices that aren't obvious and that you may want to make differently if it fails... - and goes ahead (filling the terminal screen with line after line of compiler invocations.) Hoping it'll be successful- I'm looking forward to continuing a few of those projects again soon.

I have a lot of CDs, some audio, some mp3 discs, etc., of varying ages. (The oldest are holding up fairly well but I have made backups... of most of them in fact...) Still, backups of discs I made a few years ago are, as some have predicted, becoming less and less readable- I've started to have to make backups of them. It may be too late for some of them, as I find this evening. So it goes! (Edit: though at the moment I'm not backing them up, I'm putting them on my iPod *g*)

than just to credit the pianist in a concerto recording (a> one, which I just stashed) - the conductor was Howard Griffiths, the orchestra the English Chamber Orchestra. Lovely piece, hear it some way or another. (The "Köchel" catalog number is 488 - opus numbers were used near Mozart's lifetime but were conflicting and even more confusing...) Best wishes!

Earworms- those fragments of melody you can't ... get... out of ... your... head. (Or so I understand the term to mean :) ) Well, I had one going for awhile. I finally decided that it had to be the opening of Tchaikovsky's Symphony inspired by Byron's "Manfred", and was looking forward to hearing that work again. (I did, and it wasn't.) Which left one of a few other works probably inspired in turn by that Tchaikovsky piece (among others by that composer... and others!...) - and I just turned one of them on on iTunes, as it happens... - Feliks Blumenfeld's symphony, "To the Dear Beloved". (Recorded during the Soviet era and released on CD a few years back, probably no longer available. Like most everything like it... though it might be reissued. Inspired even more by the Pathetique (impassioned, that means, by the way... not "pathetic"...) 6th of Tchaikovsky's numbered symphonies, slow finale and all...) The part I remember best is the slow, scale opening of the Blumenfeld... (in C minor - something like... after a brief phrase in the basses, (this begins the first movement slowly before a fast main movement; second movement, slower- larghetto movement; third "scherzo" movement; then the slow finale) Eflat F G Aflat Bflat C F G Aflat Bflat C Eflat D------ C B(natural!) C (and so on- but the first ten or so notes, and their rhythm and orchestration, convince me that that's what I'd been looking for...and it is atmospheric and memorable.)

Nikolai Myaskovsky (pedagogue, friend of Prokofiev, composer) (1881-1950) (www.myaskovsky.ru) wrote thirteen string quartets between 1911(?) and 1949, changing in style and difficulty. A complete cycle was available on Soviet Melodiya LPs, was mastered on Russian Disc CDs that were available a few years ago but aren't now, and the first release of another outing of that cycle (played by the Leningrad Taneyev Quartet) is soon to be available on the Northern Flowers label. (A page written by me is linked to on the Myaskovsky.ru page and I'm certainly a fan of the composer's music, the first and last of the quartets, both in the key of A minor, from 1930 and 1949, are among my favorites of his works in fact... the first three quartets are on this first disc.) (Quartets 3, 4 and 10 are revisions of works from 1911 or so- and sound like it...- hence "from 1911 to 1949" even though his "first" quartet is from 1930 :) )