Customer Reviews

Notturno: Music by Donald Martino

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I agree with the above up to a point. I bought this as a 33rpm vinyl record in the 80s when I was trying to understand what attracted me to Webern. I don't know enough about music to appreciate the logic of the sounds, as I would if I was listening to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or even Stravinsky, but I keep on listening to it again and again. The Triple Concerto keeps me going on my NordicTrack listening to just the winds or the strings or the percussion. Whatever the compositional technique is I'm listening to it now day after day for weeks. The attarction of it sent me over to the Notturno, which at first I couldn't listen to at all, and now I find beautiful. I hear his String Quartet is beautiful too. I've just got to find out what's going on here!

I am not a fan of contemporary atonal music. It sounds random and arbitrary to me, at least by itself. It can make awesome background music.

This CD is more or less standard contemporary atonal music, and is okay at what it does. The written commentary accompanying the CD illustrates how little I understand contemporary music. I could not get how Notturno was "a drama played out by the personas of the self," or how, in Pianississimo, the "bravura of 19th Century Romanticism is wedded to the more intricate and evanescent sounds of our own time."

Something about the Triple Concerto made me want to come back and listen to it over and over again. It was interesting to hear the contrasts of the three different clarinet soloists (soprano clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet). I had never heard a contrabass clarinet before; its seismic rumble dominated the low tones, while the soprano clarinet dominated the high tones. The bass clarinet, for some reason, seemed reticent by comparison.

I think that all three pieces work best when the listener is busy doing something, such as schoolwork or housework, with the music hovering in the background, only semi-consciously heard. If one tried to focus one's attention on the music itself, I think he would be bored out of his mind.