Symphony No. 2 by Sergei Prokofiev

Everybody hates this piece because it's atonal, unpleasant, and aggressive, but then Chris Brown gets to be on the Grammys so it seems like this is right up America's alley (topical humor). This is pretty good despite the fact that Prokofiev never really went expressionist again for the rest of his career. I guess we all have our phases, and for some of us those phases are maybe brought on by constant threat of execution by the 2nd most murderous tyrant of the 20th Century (write nicer music for workers lol or else ;) - JS).

RATING: 71%

SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century

This album in Sonic Youth's experimental series has the Youth covering the work of avant garde composers. In short - you probably don't want to buy this album. I think it's great, but there's nothing on here you can listen to for "fun" - it's all very serious stuff. I mean, John Cage and Yoko Ono serious. Come visit sometime and I'll play it when I want you to leave.

RATING: 70%

He Got Game: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

I don't remember too much about the movie He Got Game other than liking it when I was 18, but the soundtrack was amazing. Spike Lee paired music by Public Enemy with what is essentially a "greatest hits" collection of music by composer Aaron Copland. I never bought the Public Enemy disc, but the Copland disc is essentially what got me into 20th century classical music. Everybody knows "Fanfare For The Common Man," which is on this album, but there are a lot of other wonderful mid 20th century capsules of one of America's greatest composers here, from Copland's nostalgic reinterpretations of traditional folk melodies to his dissonant reconstruction of the icon Billy the Kid. So you can be miserly your whole life and blame the economy or you can try to at least enrich your sophisticated half by buying the classical part of a soundtrack to a failed movie indicting college sports if I remember it correctly (and probably racism).

RATING: 84%

Music For Strings, Percussion And Celesta by Bartok

A Month Of Halloweenie Reviews #25

Yikes! Sounds like ghost music, but like the kind of ghost who would lift up your dishes and candelabra and spin them around while your eyes bug out and the maid goes "g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-ghost!" but then it turns out the ghost just wanted a friend or justice (murderer) and everybody ends up happy. That or Hungarian expressionist music.

RATING: 73%

Faust Symphony by Liszt

A Month Of Halloweenie Reviews #24

I'm not a huge fan of Liszt, but his symphony after Goethe's Faust (really, three long musical character sketches) is a decent mid-Romantic composition. It's not especially scary or dark, even the Mephistopheles movement, but it's bombastic without being cloying, and its chord clusters shift seamlessly without losing the leitmotifs. I don't really know what I'm talking about with classical music, so I made up most of that last bit, but on the other hand there's no Devil in real life who can grant me the knowledge I need to be a genius in every (any) arena.

RATING: 72%

(Alternate Faust[us] ending here)

Piano Concerto No. 4 by Prokofiev

Prokofiev's 4th piano concerto is written mainly for the left hand, which means there are a lot of low notes. Some may say that sucks where's all the high notes, and others may say high notes are for scary movies and children's songs, or scary movies featuring children's songs, which is basically all of them. Reminiscing about the early part of this review, I can't help but regret not making a masturbation joke or an R3 joke, but at least I didn't live my whole life artistically oppressed by Stalin only to die on the same day as him, am I right?

RATING: 89%

Piano Concerto No. 3 by Prokofiev

Sleeping is a thing that most of us tend to do at night unless you are a vampire or witch in which case the gig's up, buddy. Sometimes you can accidentally sleep for a couple minutes during the day if something super boring is happening, like work or chess or Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major. A famous philosopher once said "I never sleep because sleep is the cousin of death," but that's bull puckey because if you never slept you'd probably be irritable and wouldn't be able to operate heavy machinery, and who can go through life like that, because I sure can't.

RATING: 57%

Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations

I'm not much of a "serious" music buff, but there's something wonderful about Gould's performance of Bach's piece(s). The piano is so named for its dynamic possibilities, and Gould demonstrates precisely why. Never noisy, never busy, just a marvelous musical texture from beginning to end. If unbridled praise is the mark of the dilettante, then I'm guilty as charged, but no one should go to their grave without listening to these at least once. I like to watch Gould's mouth move and try to imagine the electrochemical fireworks that must have been going off in his brain as he played.

RATING: Off the chart%

(Image from drewhewitt.co.uk.)

Piano Concerto No. 2 by Prokofiev

You think you're sooooo good at piano, hotshot? Well, why not try giving Prokofiev's 2nd Piano Concerto a try and just learn how wrong you are, hoss. In contrast to his 1st Piano Concerto, Prokofiev's 2nd demonstrates a substantial shift, both into tonal expressionism (a VERY brief period for the Soviet composers, due to Stalin's relentless assertion that "modern" musical trends were anti-worker), and into a different instrumental structure-- here, it is the piano that leads the symphony along, rather than filling in gaps for the symphony, and indeed there are 5 or 6 minute stretches of a full, lush piano exploring a variety of conflicting, complex modal twists, dancing from playfulness to dread, from excitation to tragedy and back. Hey, here's a video of an 11 year old girl playing what is considered one of the hardest pieces of piano music ever composed almost flawlessly. Enjoy a delicious humility sandwich why don't you?

RATING: 93%

Piano Concerto No. 1 by Prokofiev

There used to be a time when I was young that I was all like "Prokofiev is the fuckin PIMP." Then I got older and it turned into a bunch of garbage or some fucking shit, with all of his recurring motherfucking leitmotifs of Georgian themes and shit, and the same predictable chord progressions. Basically what had happened was I took Prokofibitch by the throat and said "Your ass is to the curb," and then I threw his ass to the curb (metaphor). But then the other day I bought all his concertos on sale for 10 FUCKING DOLLARS (true story) and after listening to his first piano concerto in D-flat major I have to admit that, yes, my bust, Prokofiev actually is one bad ass motherfucker, and while the first concerto is in and out quick like me with your moms last night, he still manages to build a furious emotional stake with some deft tonal shifts and sudden key changes, so fuck all you haters like I used to be, just get your ass to Border's and buy this shit.

RATING: 80%

Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Scheherazade is, of course, the name of the princess who tells the tales in Arabian Nights, and it is also unrelatedly the title of this symphonic suite by late 19th century Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov. Nah, just kidding, he based it around the classic tale. It's not by definition a tone poem, since it doesn't follow a specific narrative, although he does give the dastardly sultan of the tale a theme that competes with the lilting theme for the princess. It's bombastic and exciting, but NRK moves it beyond mere showmanship by implementing key changes that pull a lot of emotion out of the affair. If you're a philistine, you can just tell yourself it's the newest score to National Treasure or something and you'll enjoy it, I swear.

RATING: 79%

Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz

Written in 1830, this symphony by Berlioz might be the first time great music could be blamed on being totally fucked up on some wild shit, man. Basically it is a symphony that follows the loose "fictional" plot of an artist who wants this babe but totally can't get with her so he does a lot of opium and hallucinates that she is at this witch orgy. It's a pretty great piece, filled with a lot of bombastic moments of great pounding drums and brass, but the most famous element is the final movement, which takes place at the aforementioned orgy, go figure. Anyway, Berlioz is definitely cemented in the Romantic era of classical music, and in my opinion is the only French composer of note from that period, ie, that I like so deal with it.

RATING: 81%

Symphony No. 8 by Gustav Mahler

I'm not that familiar with the works of Mahler, but his 8th symphony is pretty great. It's very pre-Schoenberg early 20th century, with not so much of a melody as a repeating cycle of chord motifs played for emotional impact. I suppose you could call it the classical music equivalent to the impressionist painters - Debussy's work also fits into this category. The popular nickname for this symphony is the "Symphony of a Thousand," because in its original instrumentation it takes 850 choral singers and around 200 symphony members to perform. Damn, Gina! Talk about excess. It's pretty great like I mentioned so if you've got an hour and a half to spare why don't you get some culture in you said the post colonial westerner.

RATING: 78%

Rhapsody In Blue by George Gershwin

George Gershwin is an interesting character. On the one hand, his classical compositions did a lot to legitimize jazz music (that means make stuffy white people like it), but on the other hand he wrote Porgy And Bess which was chock full o' racism. Well, regardless of the 80 year old social implications of his work, we can all agree that Rhapsody in Blue is a pretty awesome piece. It was some plane company's theme song for a while, but I am too lazy to look it up. Anyways, that doesn't matter, just listen to it and get a little culture in you that isn't called Bud Light.

RATING: 81%

Swan Lake by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake is a ballet by Tchaikovsky that I guarantee you've heard some of before. It's also the most beautiful piece of music ever written in history. It's got a lot of short upbeat dance numbers, but then the leitmotif of the swan comes back and it's sombre and depressingly beautiful. Whenever somebody asks who my favorite composer is, I always try to say somebody more obscure like Khachaturian or Corigliano, but I'll tell you guys a secret - the true answer is Tchaikovsky.

RATING: 100%

Othello Suite by Elliot Goldenthal

You guys probably know Elliot Goldenthal for his composing of the hit scores to such movies as Titus, Frida, Interview With The Vampire, and Batman And Robin. I've always liked Elliot Goldenthal's film music, because it's loud and raucous and he uses a lot of brass, but the problem is that every movie score he does sounds pretty much the same. Well, a lot of composers are like that (cough James Horner cough), but then I was in the store one day in my youth and saw this ballet that he had composed and decided to pick it up for shits and pretentiousness. While it is definitely Elliot Goldenthal, it is everything good about his film scores without the confines and brevity of film tracks. It's epic in scope, but still maintains the loud circus quality of his work that I love so much, so hooray for this.

RATING: 79%

Khachaturian: Suites And Dances

Of the "big three" Soviet composers of the 20th century, Aram Khachaturian is usually the most underplayed and underrecorded. Certainly, Shostakovich is the superior composer, but Prokofiev is definitely not the same caliber composer as Khachaturian, although he did write Peter And The Wolf which everybody loves because there is a story. I try to pick up new Khachaturian music whenever I see it (I mean new as in ones I have never heard since he died 30 years ago), and I hadn't heard three of the four pieces on this disc. The Valencian Widow is excitingly bombastic, and A.K.'s use of strange, Armenian folk tunes and chords is in full force. The Battle of Stalingrad is also a pretty great piece, even if it was written for propaganda, but big deal most Soviet music was at the time, and it is great if you love horns and drums which I do so let's fight.

RATING: 78%

Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question, Holidays, Central Park In The Dark

(I wasn't too sure how to do this review, so I sort of am doing it based on the recording from this Bernstein album, rather than taking each piece on its own. Also this stuff in parentheses doesn't count as sentences). I have never really given Charles Ives a thought. I heard a violin piece he wrote and found it unbearable. But these orchestral works conducted by Bernstein are pretty terrific. They're sort of ambient, kind of like Hindemith or something, but there are a lot of moments of excitement, and the balance between ambiance and pressure creates some excellent emotional crescendos. Definitely check out this dude, particularly the Holidays Symphony.

RATING: 76%

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7

For years I've alternated between Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky as my favorite composers, but strangely I've never bought any of Tchaikovsky's symphonies, and while I've enjoyed Shostakovich's symphonies, I've never bought or heard a recording of his most famous one, the 7th. Anyway, it's great of course. It was written early in World War II, commissioned by the Soviet government as a propaganda/motivator piece for the citizens and soldiers. So it's pretty upbeat. I have to say I like his 8th a lot better, but this one is pretty great.

RATING: 82%