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The Symphonist Profile picture
The Symphonist
@deeplyclassical
Passionate symphony lover. Other music is good too. #Holst150 #TheCompleteBeethoven #RVWSymphonyOdyssey Also at @deeplyclassical.bsky.social
Sep 1 • 24 tweets • 11 min read
#Holst150 #87: The Planets, H. 125 Op. 32 (1914-17)

I'm listening to every Holst piece I can find in the order he composed them. Gus's greatest triumph emerged from the ashes of disaster. He learned to treat those two impostors just the same. /1
That disaster was the 1913 premiere of The Cloud Messenger, after which he wrote to friend and fellow musician Frank Duckworth: "The 'Cloud' did not go well and the whole thing has been a blow to me. I'm 'fed up' with music, especially my own." /2
Oct 9, 2022 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
Nine symphonies, nine composers, one orchestra: @kennethwoods & @EnglishSymphony's wonderful #21stCenturySymphony project passes the halfway mark in style. Hear some of its richest and most moving musical bounty so far on my spellbinding #RecordOfTheWeek. spoti.fi/3yvEo5F Adrian Williams dedicated his symphony to Kenneth Woods "for giving me hope". With five premieres and four recordings to its name already this project gives me hope that it will banish the baffling (to me anyway) idea that no one wants to write, play or hear new symphonies today.
Dec 27, 2021 • 14 tweets • 14 min read
#SymphonistsChoice2021

For almost two years orchestras round the world have found ways to carry on making outstanding music despite the formidable ongoing challenges of #COVID19. This countdown of my twelve favourite symphony and orchestral records of the year salutes them all. Follow my playlist for fresh takes on old favourites and a wealth of wonderful music I'd never heard before 2021. My survey continues until #NewYearsDay 2022 when I reveal my Record of the Year.

Ready to play? Then it's time for my first choice.
open.spotify.com/playlist/0GTNp…
Aug 1, 2021 • 17 tweets • 9 min read
🧵

1/ On Wednesday I went to a wonderful concert by @EnglishSymphony and @kennethwoods. What a thrill to hear real symphonies played live in a real hall with a real audience for the first time since March 2020. I spent the whole afternoon grinning from ear to ear behind my mask! ImageImage 2/ We began with music by @emily_doolittle, a composer new to me. Woodwings is based on birdsong from Canada, the country of her birth. Cool, fresh and well-ordered in the first of its five short movements, it evolved into wild and free twilit fantasy by the last. Most effective. ImageImage
Jul 25, 2021 • 27 tweets • 13 min read
#SymphonistOfTheWeek 🧵

1/ Today's #RobertSimpson100 #SimpsonSunday listening: Symphony No. 9 (1985-7)

First things first: If you care about symphonies AT ALL and don't know Simpson 9 then stop what you're doing and buy this record RIGHT NOW. It will repay you many times over. Image 2/ "BUY?" I hear you cry, "But Symphs, can't you just post a Youtube link or something?"

No. The single 10-minute extract available online is in poor sound and doesn't begin to convey the cumulative experience this symphony's unbroken 50-minute span can deliver. Don't go there.
Dec 22, 2020 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
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.
⬇️⬇️⬇️ 2/ The evening began with the premiere of the symphony that we now know as No. 6.
Dec 21, 2020 • 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
Dec 21, 2020 • 18 tweets • 8 min read
#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.
Oct 13, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
#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.
Oct 11, 2020 • 20 tweets • 9 min read
#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
Aug 21, 2020 • 44 tweets • 18 min read
#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
Jul 13, 2020 • 42 tweets • 15 min read
#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.
May 23, 2020 • 52 tweets • 33 min read
The #BeethovenOdyssey #Symphony2 #Top20 Chart

1/ The deeply classical countdown of my 20 favourite recordings. Which version will be my #Beethoven2020 #1 choice for #Beethoven Symphony No. 2? Image 2/ I'll give 5 special awards along the way:

* A mono-era #HistoricChoice
* A #ClassicChoice from the age of stereo LP
* An #80s/#90s #CDChoice
* A shiny new #21stCenturyChoice
* An original-instrument #PeriodChoice

All leading to my #TopChoice.
May 1, 2020 • 41 tweets • 14 min read
#TheCompleteBeethoven #290

Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36 (1800-02)

1/ Beethoven's response to the despair caused by his incurable deafness? The longest, most audicious, most joyful (*) symphony the world had ever heard.

Not all heroes wear capes.
2/ "You shall receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands." - Count Waldstein

Mozart, Beethoven's musical hero since childhood, is at the heart of his second symphony just as surely as Haydn, his teacher, was the wellspring for Symphony No. 1.
Apr 21, 2019 • 59 tweets • 31 min read
1/ A new set of #Schumann symphonies features Christian Thielemann conducting @StaatskapelleDD. As I'd not heard these works for ages, I decided to catch up with a classic set by the same orchestra.

Then things started to get a little crazy.
#SymphonistOfTheWeek #SchumannSunday 2/ I must confess that I'd never listened to Wolfgang Sawallisch's classic cycle before. I'd always found Schumann's symphonies stodgy and unappealing, until Sir John Eliot Gardiner's revelatory acounts stripped the scales from my ears and opened my heart to him 20 years ago.