Customer Reviews

Babbitt: Concerto For Piano And Orchestra/The Head Of The Bed

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This CD features one of Babbitt's more 'accessible' pieces-- the Head of the Bed, with a fascinating dream-like text by John Hollander and a wonderful mood-- and one of his most difficult, the Piano Concerto, which is a tough go for even his most ardent admirers. But if you listen to the latter around fifty times, there comes a moment when it all starts making sense, and you think wow-- this is some of the most beautiful music ever written! Happy the soul that makes this most unique of musical discoveries.

The concerto was not recorded under the most ideal of situations (union rules insisted the orchestra took a 20 minute rest for every hour of recording)and the strings in particular sound a bit hard pressed.However,in part it all adds a sense of frisson to the proceedings and Feinberg traverses his way through the thickets of notes with incredible heroism.
The concerto is one of my favourite Babbitt pieces...i hate the elitist way some of his fans talk about his music as if you require an advanced degree in ear training/mathematics to derive any pleasure from it.Even on a first hearing,there's something quite wild and zany which captures ones attention.Further listenings reveal unexpected relationships...what at first seems inexplicable, seamlessley blends into the whirlwind of impetuous activity.
by contrast,i've never been so taken with 'the head of the bed'...more straightforward and cool.Like pierrot lunaire with the edge taken out.

I know I'm not gonna change anyones minds by this. I just think it's a little sad that some people can be so judgemental about music they don't understand. This music is not "sick". It's just difficult. And why would anyone think Reich is "disqusting" just because he's not an "avant garde" comnposer? I listen to everything from Bach and Bartok, to Monk and Jimi Hendrix, To Tool and Pantera, Not because I think it's "cool" that I listen to this stuff, but because I enjoy it. Music is music. And it can only expand your mind if your mind it not closed to begin with.

Soem of the wilest music I have ever heard. Not sure I "get" the Concerto, but it is endlessly fascinating. (Pay no attention to the poster of 3 April. He's written the same thing next to each Babbitt CD I see at Amazon.)

The lousy review below is actually damn funny, but in a black humor way I'm sure the author never intended. Please check out his other reviews--they're all of Milton Babbitt recordings and he actually mentions Spengler, of all people. I notice it's getting hip among the kids again to mention Spengler. Instead he should bring up Gibbon; it's the failure to stay with and appreciate developments in meaningful artistic complexity and expression (as opposed to pseudo-complex Hippie-art, clutter, for example) that, to a degree, lead to civilizations eroding away. Seventy years ago Schoenberg sounded crazy, now far less so and frankly (dear ghost of Arnold) I do whistle his tunes now and then, especially that great one from the Opus 43b Theme and Variations. If we move along in any sense (and I've my doubts these days), in seventy years Babbitt and Carter will be as easy as R. Strauss (well, at least as understandable--Strauss ain't easy!). I'm kidding of course, but it should be at least entertaining to a lot of folks. Should, but won't. Seventy years from now we'll be lucky if we're banging on logs and playing polo with goat entrails and congratulating ourselves on our genius.

The "good" review above is even funnier, damn hysterical even, and also in a way the author certainly never intended. Music like this is tough enough but a musical person will find their way through it...eventually. Have faith. Byzantine chatter like that above ("excoriated'? "ex cathedra"?! Even Mencken--80 years ago!-- had sense to only use an expression like that with considerable irony as any educated individual in these dopey modern times should!) is one of the several things that drove progressive art music right out range of our cultural radars and straight into the remaindered bins. Look how well, say, Artforum magazine managed to destroy the art world by burying it beneath an avalanche of post-modern and social-critical hooey. Anyone who would read through the precious and arcane appraisal dangling there over our heads, and who would agree with it, is already in Babbitt's camp! Anyone else will just moan and click through to a less pontificated-about work of musical art, or write stupid negative reviews mentioning Spengler. With that in mind, has anyone noticed how there's less and less appealing art (including literature) these days and more and more verbal blather about it all? It's as if no one knows how to be creative and all that's left is this ghost-like, bloodless, self-conscious critical stance. I'll take banging on logs any day to this, and we have.

The Head of the Bed?--it's fine--but I love this Piano Concerto. It's hard to convey why, it's actually kind of fun, like the Wourinen Piano Concerto, another modern fave. I could write for days about Babbitt's entertaining music without ever using the word dodecaphonic. Sorry, reviewer... and sorry, Milton. It's never really been a cool thing to claim that you don't care about your audience, especially when you know that can never be true.

[PS time has passed and I just reread the review above that I excoriated a bit and I've decided I was far too kind. I know it was written five years ago and so soon after 9/11 that maybe the reviewer just lost his grip on syntax and basic communication skills and such, yet still...]

The previous review by scarecrow surely seeks to discredit twelve tone music with his/her nonsensical quasi-intellectual ramblings. First of all, there is no such word as epigoni, so don't feel small when you the reader don't understand what a "fatuous market Glassite epigoni" is (a foolish scottish freemason imposter for hire?). But, one is most certainly an intellectual epigone(correct spelling) who seeks to purchase music for the mere joy of analysing it's mathmatical forms. Composers of this ilk are trying to speak to your soul and more often to your gut, not your brain! For a better introduction, listen to Schoenberg's A Survivor From Warsaw. This is disturbing music meant to convey the fear, confusion, and existential dread that is lurking within the shadows of pop culture. War is the father of this form of music and you must only react naturally and forget about tone rows unless you seek to perform or compose them. Yes, this is not music with an incredibly high replay value, but in the most noble tradition of human art, it documents our times.

Two beautiful pieces by America's best composer in all times. American music is not only the big orchestra business (Gershwin), Broadway musicals in symphonic dress (Bernstein), brainwashing disgusting minimalistic pop music (Reich, Glass), or chance & noise (nothing wrong just with this, unless it is all one can do...). Note that a lot of people do not like his music. Do not care about them. After all, who cares if they listen?

This 'Piano Concerto' is,ex cathedra a real achievement for the Americana erudite dodecaphonic language. And as well its esteemed,a eudaemonia place within Babbitt's oeuvre. Only the equal orchestral structural largesse of his "Relata"(I and II) for Orchestra mounts similar vainglorious habitations. Andrew Mead's excellent excursions in his erudite book into Babbitt's works makes the fascinating complexity come to life here, the various tone structures,trichordal,hexachordal combinatorials, the divisions of the orchestral registers into four places. The soloist piano also enters this labyrith formidably with weighted arrays,(tone configurations) as solo arenas, and superimposed materials with the orchestral forces mirabile mimetic in gesture..
If you know the lapidarian sinuous beauty of Babbitt's various piano solos, as "Canonical Form", or the first high unbounded energy revealed in "Three Compositions" from 1947, or the gentle miniaturist moments found in these works as 'Duet' for his daughter, this 'Concerto' scours the lifeworld of high mastodonic intensity, and is not breeze easy listening,the kind for various fatuous market Glassite epigoni.This piece requires a committment, an espousal of the highest moments of this genre,with pretensions(leave them at the doorstep) of hauteur so frequently levelled at Babbitt. His music has an intense direct immediacy,powerfully wrought,hortatory,with veiled histrionics. One is required to think of timbre,parametrical density, weight, array and lyne shapes, rhythmic projections, penetrability of orchestral timbre.
The work functions well as excoriated full blown within the context of the modernist orchestral concerti.I can only think of Elliott Carter's deeply penumbral 'Piano Concerto', one he wrote in Berlin, as a work which equals the weight of this. Although Babbitt's by comparison seems a bit more loosely focused and playfull with forever shifting densities.Repeated hearings are required.

In contrast however the chamber setting of the 'Head of the Bed' is not as successful, the voice has presented a set of creative problematics for the dodecaphonic language. The complex rhythmic projections and the deep tone concentrations to my mind robs the voice of its most profound primordial canto like dimensions.

...who lacks the slightest fragment of a musical bone in his body. this cd contains music for the eye and head by all-star theorist milton babbitt. recommended listening for the intellectual and mathematically talented deaf person with score in hand.