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21 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
#WinterSolstice #JupiterSaturnConjunction #ClassicalPoll

1/2 The spirit of Gustav Holst demands to know your favourite planet, and so do I.

Two groups of 4 (Colin Matthews also cares). Vote in either or both. Top two go head-to-head tomorrow.

Listening links to follow.
#WinterSolstice #JupiterSaturnConjunction #classicalpoll

2/2
A reminder of their powers:

Mars, the Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Uranus, the Magician
Neptune, the Mystic
And of what astronomers have discovered since Holst created this astonishing work.

Pluto, The Renewer

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More from @deeplyclassical

The Symphonist Profile picture
22 Dec
1808 State: A Thread

1/ Why not recreate the legendary Akademie concert held #OnThisDay in 1808, by turning off your heating and listening to 4 hours of badly-played Beethoven in the freezing cold?

Here's (nearly) all the music heard that night.
⬇️⬇️⬇️ ImageImage
2/ The evening began with the premiere of the symphony that we now know as No. 6.
3/ Then came this concert aria. Apparently the performance was a stinker even by the low standards of the rest of the night.
Read 13 tweets
The Symphonist Profile picture
21 Dec
#TheCompleteBeethoven #711

String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 127 (1824-5)

1/ "They seem to me to stand ... on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination." - Robert Schumann on the quartets Opp. 127 & 130
2/ Beethoven's late quartets are now revered as five (or six) of the supreme masterpieces in all music. Some of the praise is heaped on them in purple prose that I'm too tactful to quote, but which I often find as hard to digest as early audiences found the music to hear.
3/ Many of #BeethovensContemporaries were puzzled or actively hostile. Louis Spohr called them "indecipherable, uncorrected horrors". Yet the quartets, and particularly Op. 127, sprang from the same musical soil that nurtured his greatest public triumph.
Read 18 tweets
The Symphonist Profile picture
13 Oct
#TheCompleteBeethoven #447

Sonata for Piano & Violin in G major, Op. 96 (1812)

1/ The last of Beethoven's 10 violin sonatas is usually considered to be the last work of his middle period.
2/ His last two sonatas, composed almost a decade apart, bookend Beethoven's Heroic Style. You can almost hear that style germinating in the Kreutzer's virtuosic display. The G major dissolves it away in a cloud of serene, ethereal lyricism.
3/ It took Beethoven several years to find his way fully onto the "New Path" that became his late style, but there are signposts towards it in the almost impressionistic inwardness of the earlier movements, and the spacious yet spirited variations that form the finale.
Read 5 tweets
The Symphonist Profile picture
11 Oct
#TheCompleteBeethoven #443

Symphony No. 8 in F major, Op. 93 (1812)

1/ The first surprise about a symphony full of surprises is that it wasn't supposed to be a symphony at all.
2/ Beethoven at first intended it to be a piano concerto. The first draft contains the opening theme and music that's clearly related to later themes too, but it ends in a cadenza for solo piano, and passages in the sketches that follow are marked "solo" and "tutti". Image
3/ He started the piece straight after No. 7. Following a new symphony with a new piano concerto would once have been no surprise at all. He played Concerto No. 4 between the premieres of Symphonies 6 & 5, and No. 3 was composed to go with a symphony too.
Read 20 tweets
The Symphonist Profile picture
21 Aug
#TheCompleteBeethoven #344

Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 "Pastoral" (1807-8)

1/ "No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks give back the echo which man desires to hear." - Ludwig van Beethoven, 1810
2/ As a boy Ludwig and his father Johann van Beethoven went for hikes along the River Rhine. "Everlastingly dear to me", these journeys sometimes lasted several days. They stand out like a beacon among many more unhappy memories of his strict, abusive, alcoholic father. Image
3/ The adult Beethoven continued to took regular walks among the woods and fields around Vienna, and nature was a constant source of inspiration:

"You will ask me whence I take my ideas? I cannot say with any certainty: they come to me uninvited, directly or indirectly..." Julius Schmid (1854–1935): ...
Read 44 tweets
The Symphonist Profile picture
13 Jul
#TheCompleteBeethoven #331

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60 (1806)

1/ With the first great Romantic symphony under his belt, and the next two on the drawing board, Beethoven takes a break to compose the first neo-classical symphony.
2/ Beethoven began sketches for a new symphony as he was finishing the Eroica. However, it wasn't the fourth that he was planning. The ideas written in his sketchbook in 1804 eventually blossomed into the first movement and scherzo of No. 5.
3/ Another entry marked "lustige Sinfonia" also isn't No. 4. An idea for "Murmurs of the Brooks" prefigures the slow movement of the Pastoral. Beethoven had planted two symphonic seeds two years before No. 4, but they wouldn't be fully grown until two years after it flowered.
Read 42 tweets

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