Mahler Symphony No. 8

John | 13 November, 2011 - 11:11 pm

My last post, about the new Fleet Foxes album Helplessness Blues, featured the title soundtrack.  But the post also featured a video promotion extract from the new Blu-ray recording of Mahler’s Symphony No.8.  Ralph made a comment that he enjoyed the Fleet Foxes recording, and (not his words) politely implied that the Mahler was taking time to grow on him.  Well Ralph has nothing to be concerned about.   The video, which runs for 4 min 21 secs, only gives a very brief and scant view of the symphony which can run for 90 minutes, depending on the tempo of the conductor.  The video is too short to give newcomers to the work a reasonable opportunity to appreciate the symphony.

Besides that, my first and only acquaintance with Mahler was when I bought his Symphony No 1 with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Solti on cassette tape in the 1970′s.  It’s a 1964 recording.  I’d never bought a Mahler recording since, on either cassette tape, LP or CD.

But my enjoyment of the work must have stuck in my mind, because this year, after buying the Olive O4HD and then discovering Presto Classical as a great new source of buying classical CDs, I went Mahler mad, and soon bought two collections of his complete works, and have since bought several individual symphonies for the particular performance.

To be honest, in my short acquaintance this year with the complete works of Mahler, the 8th Symphony has seemed confusing to me, as it seemed to comprise two totally disparate movements.  The awesome 1st movement and the non-event 2nd movement.  I’m only now beginning to realise that there are musical links between the two movements.  When you listen to the whole work, the quieter second movement gradually develops and proceeds towards the stunning finale.  If one is able to concentrate on listening in suitable surroundings. the symphony can become an emotional experience.

The following is a short overview of the symphony, for the purposes of this post.  I’ve taken the material from Wikipedia, but have edited it and rewritten parts of it to suit this post.  Thanks to Wikipedia for the information.   Check the full article here.

The Symphony No. 8 in E-flat major by Gustav Mahler is one of the largest-scale choral works in the classical concert repertoire. Because it requires huge instrumental and vocal forces it is frequently called the “Symphony of a Thousand“, although the work is often performed with fewer than a thousand, and Mahler himself did not sanction the name.

The work was composed in the summer of 1906.  Mahler conducted its first performance in Munich on 12 September 1910.

The structure of the work is unconventional; instead of the normal framework of several movements, the piece is in two parts.

Part I is based on the Latin text of a 9th-century Christian hymn for Pentecost, Veni creator spiritus (“Come, Creator Spirit”), and Part II is a setting of the secular text from the closing passages from Goethe’s 19th-century dramatic poem Faust.  The two parts are unified by a common idea, that of redemption through the power of love, a unity conveyed through shared musical themes.

This leads me  into presenting a series of YouTube videos of the Mahler 8th, recorded by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain with Sir Simon Rattle conducting.

This is a very interesting series of videos.  As best as I can make out, it’s a recording of a live performance at the Albert Hall, and is not available elsewhere, either as a CD or as a DVD.  If you look carefully at the Hall you will signs for the BBC Proms.  These videos could be from the 2002 Proms, at which Simon Rattle conducted Mahler’s ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.

The videos are cut into segments under 10 minutes as required by YouTube at the time the videos were posted.  Unfortunately, this results in abrupt endings to some videos before you pick up the continuing action in the next video.  The videos have Japanese subtitles, which is not helpful to English speakers, and it looks a little odd.  At first I thought it must be a recording of a concert in Japan, but then I began to notice the unmistakable interior of the Albert Hall.   I’m grateful to The Chrome Dragon that the videos are there at all, and in such good video and audio quality.

So here goes.  By the way, feel free to dive all over the place in the videos to become familiar with what to expect.  And perhaps even watch the last video (Second Movement part 6) first, to hear what the whole work leads up to at its tumultuous finale.

If you can’t appreciate the beauty of this symphony, I’m sorry to say that I suspect you have no soul.

And note that it is a Youth Orchestra.  The players are all so young – and talented.  The singers and choir are mature performers.

INTERMISSION

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Our Queen visited Melbourne today

John | 26 October, 2011 - 11:56 pm

 

This morning the royal party left Canberra and flew to Melbourne.  After a one day visit (4-5 hours), the party then flew to Perth where Her Majesty will officially open the bi-annual Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) which starts on Friday.   For a short summary of the Queen’s visit to Melbourne today, I can do no better than look ahead and quote from the Court Circular in The Times of Thursday. 27 October 2011, about the Royal Visit to Melbourne today.

Government House, Perth, Western Australia

26th October, 2011   The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh today visited Melbourne and were received by the Governor of Victoria (the Hon. Alex Chernov) and the Premier of Victoria (the Hon. Ted Baillieu MLA).

Her Majesty and His Royal Highness this morning visited the Royal Children’s Hospital, 50 Flemington Road, Parkville, and were received by the Chairman (Mr. Tony Beddison) and Professor Christine Kilpatrick (Chief Executive Officer).

The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh toured the facilities including Emergency Department, Cardiac In-patient Ward, Intra-operative Magnetic Resonance Imaging suite and the meerkat enclosure.

Her Majesty unveiled a plaque to open the Royal Children’s Hospital.

The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh this afternoon visited the Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria Australia, Federation Square, and were received by the Chairman of National Gallery of Victoria Council of Trustees (Mr. Allan Myers) and Lady Potter.

Her Majesty and His Royal Highness toured the indigenous art galleries and met artists and students.

The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh afterwards walked through Federation Square and boarded a tram and proceeded towards Government House.

Her Majesty and His Royal Highness later attended a Reception given by the Governor of Victoria at Government House.

The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh were subsequently entertained to Luncheon by the Governor at Government House.

Her Majesty and His Royal Highness later arrived at Perth International Airport and were received by the Governor of Western Australia (Mr. Malcolm McCusker) and the Premier of Western Australia (the Hon. Colin Barnett MLA).

I’ve been a devoted subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II since I began reading about the plans for her coronation since she ascended to the throne in February 1952.  Back then, I was 15 years old, and I used to subscribe to The Illustrated London News and this weekly magazine published beautiful special issues about the Coronation.  It was exciting for me, as a young teenager in a small country town in South Australia, to read about all this grandeur and history, and see the beautiful gravure photographs.  And so it was that I felt compelled to make an effort to see the Queen and Prince Philip, and catch a  train to the city (Flinders Street Station) to arrive opposite Federation Square before the royal party did.  I took the train because I knew there would be road closures and parking problems.  I had made up my mind that even if I didn’t get a glimpse of the Queen, I’d be glad that I’d made the effort, and that I’d enjoy soaking up and being part of the exciting atmosphere.

Once I got to Flinders Street Station, I was amazed by the huge crowds and the police presence and barriers.  I could see that it would be hopeless to cross St Kilda Road at the only two crossing points nearby and try to get a good position in Federation Square.  Later in the day when I watched my TiVo recordings of the visit, I discovered that people had taken up positions in Federation Square as early as 5.30am.  And they were young people in their early 20s.

Because of the crowds I could see across the road in Federation square, I decided to stay under the verandah of the Flinders Street Station.  Here’s my view of Federation Square across St Kilda Road.

As you can see, it’s a very wide boulevard, and much of the view of the other side of the road is blocked by the long tram shelter with its advertising boards.  Take note of the position of the policewoman face the Station crowds.  Just nest to her cap, on the left as we see it, there is a little bit of bright red.  That’s the red carpet.  You can see it better in the following photo I took with the camera at 10x zoom.

At one stage of waiting for the Queen to arrive, the Royal Tram moved into position further north of my viewpoint, but then it made a short trip down to opposite me.  Perhaps it was just testing – or perhaps it was changing tracks.  I was intrigued to see that to my right, a tram recovery vehicle was standing by.  I took a photo of the tram when it was opposite me.

The thing that most impressed me during my wait to see the Queen was the huge and patient crowd that waited to catch even a brief glimpse of Her Majesty.  To be honest I’d come to fear, from reading articles in the Australian media, that the Queen could no longer draw a crowd.   Well, she did that in spades.  And I was delighted to see that most of the people around me were not only young (in their 20s), but many were of Asian and Middle Eastern origin.  Here is a further view of the crowds to my left.

 

Here’s a video from The Telegraph online, a London newspaper.

The following is a video taken by someone in Federation Square. I was on the other side of St Kilda Road under the verandah of Flinders Street Railway Station, so I didn’t see the Queen this closeup.

Here’s another video taken by someone on the same side of St Kilda Road as I was, but further up, at the corner of Flinders Street. The pan shows the Railway Station frontage, the Cathedral opposite, and the huge crowds trying to catch a glimpse of the Queen. But even if you didn’t see her, it was was worth being there just for the excitement and the atmosphere, which you can’t pick up so well on commercial TV.

This post is a work in progress. I have yet to add the video that I took today. My coverage from the distance is not remotely as good as the videos above, so it will take me a little while, perhaps a week or two, to edit the video to try to make it worth watching.

Please check this post now and again (maybe once a week) to see my video when I’ve added it.

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Learning Italian 6

John | 22 March, 2010 - 1:01 am

It’s only last Thursday that I drove to Chadstone shopping centre – the biggest in the Southern hemisphere – to buy the Italian for Dummies Audio Set. It’s an audio course with 3 CDs and a small 96 page book that you can follow along with the CDs to see in print the words you are hearing, and repeating.  I’ve used the CD case as the thumbnail for this post.

I’ve seen this audio set at Borders for the past two months but have resisted buying it.  I finally decided that it would be helpful.  I half expected that the CD set I’ve seen at Borders for two months, would’ve been sold since my last visit.  But instead, the set was almost everywhere I looked.  Borders had a Dummies promotion going on.

What surprised me was that Italian for Dummies (a normal size Dummies book) was in stock for the first time this year.  I pounced on it.  It comes with one audio CD.

I’ve only been studying the book for three days, and only in small doses, but I’m very impressed with it’s totally different way of explaining pronunciation.

This has led me to a better and more confident way of pronouncing Italian words.

To follow up on my last post, a typical problem I’ve had is how to pronounce the word “giorno.”

The Complete Idiot’s book says that all vowels in Italian are pronounced, but are slid together in the case of dipthongs (two vowels slid together to form one sound. So technically, giorno is pronounced jee-ohr-noh.  But the jee-ohr part should slide together quickly to form johr.  Hence,  johr-noh with a rolled r.

The Dummies book explains this in a totally different way.  It states that an e or i after a g indicates the g should be pronounced the same as j in jam, instead of  the usual g as in get.  Where the Dummies book differs is that it says that to obtain the “j” sound before a,o or u you have to insert an i.  But it then goes on to say, and this is the big difference, that the i serves only to indicate the proper sound of the g, and you do not pronounce it.  Hence giorno is pronounceed johr-noh (and not jee-ohr-noh).

So in words with “ge” or “gi” the g is pronounced with the “j” sound.  To get the “g” sound (as in get) when the g is before an e or i, you insert an h.  And of course h is not pronounced in Italian.  And so we have “spaghetti.”

It’s interesting, but this totally different way of explaining the pronunciation has made it a lot clearer for me.  Instead of trying to remember lots of rules, I’ve now got a different way of looking at it and understanding it.

However, I’m still having trouble with the pronunciation of o.  The Dummies book says it’s o as in piano (which they write as oh as a guide) and leaves it at that.  An example – espresso.   But I know from listening to Italian there are two ways of pronouncing the vowel, often in the same word.  An example – giorno!

You might by now be thinking that I’ve been learning Italian for almost three months and still haven’t got past buon giorno.  That’s quite true.  But it’s just an example of the some of the confusion in my mind from the different books and sources I’ve been using.  I’d like to get it sorted out in my mind.  At this stage I’m interested to learn whether the books are either wrong in places, or different people have different ways of hearing sounds,or whether the books are dumbing it down for beginners, or even just to make it easier for the authors.

The reality is that I can say buon giorno (as no doubt can you) well enough to be understood by any Italian.  But I’ve noticed the differences between books and travel guides, and I’ve perhaps become more interested in the linguistics side of it than in actually learning Italian itself.

As an example, how would you set out how to pronounce the word “question.”

In fact, ask yourself how you pronounce it.  kwes-tee-on?  kwest-chee-on?  kwest-chon?  kwest-shun? or some other way.

I’ve looked it up in the OED and it says kwestjun.  Well sort of. The u is shown in the OED as an upside and back to front e.  That symbol sounds like a in another.

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Learning Italian 3

John | 16 March, 2010 - 12:49 am

Once I had my iPhone dictionaries, I then began to realise that I needed a more structured approach to learning Italian, and I brought out The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian (1st Edition) which I bought from Amazon in 1998. This book almost got tossed out during my big purge and cleanup two years ago, but there was something about it that told me to keep it.

From there I moved to some iPhone apps with spoken Italian words and phrases, a book on Italian grammar, and a book on English grammar for students of Italian, and eventually the Concise Oxford Paravia about which I wrote in an earlier post. If you want to read that post, which is more about prices of books at Borders, search for Paravia in the Search box in the navigation bar above.

Ralph was right on the ball when he suggested that I watch the Italian news on SBS TV, to see what I can learn. This is one of the suggestions in the Complete Idiot’s book. But at this stage, I can’t distinguish any of the words when Italian is spoken at conversational speed. It’s just a string of sounds.

Last night I watched part of an Italian movie on SBS, with subtitles, and once again it sounded foreign to me (that was a joke). The only Italian word I could distinguish was signora. However, I already know enough about the Italian language to recognise that the SBS subtitles were not literal translations of the Italian words spoken.  I suspect the sense of the sentences are translated and paraphrased as they might be said by English speaking characters.  That’s not much help to me and only confirms that I don’t ever expect to be be able to converse in Italian.  But that’s not my aim anyway.  All I’m doing is seeing how much Italian I can pick up over the course of 2010.

Some readers might question that I’m using the 1998 version of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian on Your Own as the basis of my study course. They could be right. I am  not, after all, un perfetto idiota  o un completo imbecille. I’m more of a lavori in corso (work in progress).

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Learning Italian 2

John | 14 March, 2010 - 12:00 am

Colin was spot on in his comment to my last post when he wrote that learning a language from a desk calendar was novel. What I didn’t mention in my post was that the desk calendar not only gives a new Italian word every day (with a guide to pronouncing it), but it then uses the word in a short sentence in Italian, with English translation.

I soon found that I needed an English Italian dictionary to look up the words used in the example sentences. The English translations were not always all that helpful. The quickest solution was to check out the apps on the iPhone to find a good dictionary, and my first choice was the MSDict Italian Dictionary. From what I could see of it on iTunes it looked the most promising, so I bought it. I had no idea that I had bought the prestigious Oxford Paravia English Italian dictionary 2nd edition which is some 2,800 pages in print. It’s a large book costing up to $150.

However, I found that the Oxford Paravia didn’t have a lot of the Italian words used in the sentences on the desk calendar. And it didn’t have “dorma” from the aria “Nessun Dorma”. So I decided to buy the Collins English Italian dictionary (the big one) for the iPhone. This also didn’t seem to have any of the words missing from the Oxford Paravia, but it rather oddly always came up with a positive result to searches for these words, but with a different word.

Eventually, I learned that most dictionaries only list the infinitive form of verbs as headwords, and not any of the conjugated forms. The words that I couldn’t find in the Oxford Paravia were verbs, but they were not in the infinitive form – so the Oxford search couldn’t help me find “dorma.”

What I didn’t understand when I bought the Collins is that it has a feature which lists all the conjugated tenses and forms of verbs, indexed, so when I search for “dorma” it brings up the verb headword. Dormire.

Once I figured this out, it was a major breakthrough, and the big Collins on the iPhone remains a very useful dictionary to find the infinitive form of a verb when I only have a conjugated form to work with.

The verb conjugation issue led me to buying “501 Italian verbs” so that I’d be able to easily check out all the forms of the main verbs, together with examples of them in use.

That’s enough for now.   There’s more to come

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Learning the Italian Language

John | 12 March, 2010 - 1:24 am

For many years, perhaps the last ten, near the end of each year I’ve bought “The Joy of Cooking” desk calendar for the following year.  A cooking or food  tip every day; and the back of the calendar pages, when torn off, were handy for shopping lists, reminders and various notes.  I’ve even used the back of pages in lieu of  With Compliments slips when returning documents and so on.

But last year “The Joy of Cooking Tips” were finally wearing thin after all those years and I was getting no Joy when I tore off the previous day’s message every morning to read the message for the current day.  Besides, I checked out all the usual shops that have stocked it in the past, and none of them had it in stock.

So I decided it was time for a calendar change.  I considered many options over the final weeks of 2009, including the New Yorker Cartoons.  But in the end, on the last day of 2009, I bought the calendar below, that had a strong appeal to me.

I half-heartedly tried to learn Italian many years ago, before I retired, with such little success that I didn’t learn one new word (we all know some Italian words).

So I thought it would be very interesting to get a desk calendar that would present me with a new Italian word every day, and I would see how much Italian I could pick up by the end of 2010.

I want to make it very clear that despite the title of this post, and that I’ve told some friends that I’m trying to learn Italian this year, that is very definitely not the case.

My sole aim, on 31 December 2009, was to see how much Italian I could pick up in 2010 from the desk calendar, and perhaps from other sources.

I had and still have no intention of trying to learn Italian. I do not expect that I will ever be able to have a conversation in Italian or with an Italian.

I just enjoy the learning process, and am taking it very seriously. But the problem is that a lot of what I’ve read doesn’t add up. I’ve found it very confusing and at times I’ve felt like giving up. But in the past two days I’ve begun to realise that some of the guides are aimed at teaching or explaining enough for a tourist to get by, and are not aimed for students of Italian.

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