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From "Birds of Fire", Mahavishnu Orchestra, CBS 32280 CB 211, 53.
1973; Copyright &Copy; 1972, Sri Chinmoy Lighthouse.
This can be found (entitled Guardian Angel) on the LP "Friday Night In San Francisco",
played together with Al DiMeola and Paco de Lucia.
CBS, Philips, Phonogram, 1980.
Also (very short, and entitled Guardian Angels) on John McLaughlin with the
One Truth Band / Electric Dreams, recorded 1978, remastered for CD 1992.
King Crimson: Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford.
From "Three of a perfect pair" (1984) (third of the trilogy of which also
Discipline (1981) and Beat (1982) were part.
EG Records Ltd. / Polydor.
From Latin Byrd, recorded 1962, Remastered 1973, Copyright © Milestone Records, 1973.
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
The highlight of this Ballade for me is near the end: a chord containing a minor third (B flat on the tonic G) tending to go up, and a much higher major sixth (E below tonic G) tending to go down.
On the cd I have it is played by François-René Duchable. He takes the time
to play this chord (a fermate; is it also in the score?), then gradually accelerates.
This gives the listener the chance to hear and appreciate this wonderful musical moment.
However, on June 26, 2006, I heard a version of the same piece
(on Portugal's classical station
Antena 2), played by the famous Vladimir Horowitz. To my amazement, he played the
whole episode much too fast, and he didn't play a fermate on that important chord,
thereby ruining the whole effect!
This shows how important timing is in music,
not just jazz music, but also classical music.
Strange that a famous pianist like Horowitz can do this so horribly wrong.
Wrong in my opinion, that is, but maybe opinions vary as does taste.
A helpful fellow Chopin fan sent me a copy of the relevant page of the score. The point I mean is in the last line of the last page, bar 258. There is no fermate, but it says "poco ritenuto". Apparently, Horowitz takes this "poco" literally, and plays only a little slower there, whereas Duchable makes it "molto ritenuto", which to me sounds so much better, although it's not what the score says. Perhaps it's also not what Chopin intended? We'll probably never know.
The other five String Quartets are fascinating too! But the third
is ugly and beautiful to the extreme, especially the "gathering of
forces" (that's what it sounds like to me) just before the part called
"Coda: Allegro molto".
By the way, you may wonder why I write Bartók Béla, not
Béla Bartók: that's because Hungarians write last names first,
and first names last. Also, the acute accents are not stress
marks; all words in Hungarian, including names, have initial stress. The
accents are length marks, and also influence vowel quality. An approximation
of the pronunciation, for speakers of American English, is Bartoak Baylaw
(but keep the aw short), of for speakers of Dutch, Bartook Beelah (ah as the
a in Rotterdam or The Hague "dak"; ee and oo as in Twente).
And remember, don't stress the second syllable.
This concerto contains a nice example of why an A flat is not the same as a G sharp, and audibly so. More on this in this separate article.
From Portishead CD "Dummy". © 1994 Go! Discs Limited.
From Prodigy CD "The Fat of the Land". © 1997 XL Recordings Limited.
The same CD also has the track "Smack my bitch up" on it.
Again, great music, but the title and the video clip are disgusting.
From Yes the LP Fragile, 1973, © Atlantic Recording Corporation.
Written by Bill Bruford.
From Yes the LP Fragile, 1973, © Atlantic Recording Corporation.
Written by Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Bill Bruford.
From the Hommages LP, CBS, 1967.
I believe his real name is Ricardo Baillardo; the artist's name
Manitas de Plata is Spanish for "Little Hands of Silver".
This compilation Copyright © 1997 by R.Harmsen. Updated in 2007.
Technically improved (though still rather primitive) on 7 February 2012. The (misused) <H3> tags were unclosed, which caused the text to become larger all the time. Also changed the <H4> tags to simple <p>’s.