I get it!

[kip_w]

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I'm looking at my CD of Hindemith's "Ludus Tonalis," which I converted to mp3 the other day for easier listening. There's some sort of stock number after the title on the spine that makes it read "Hindemith Ludus Tonalis SUCS" followed by some digits.

I guess the digits indicate just how much...?
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Comments

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

Hm...I know that "Mathis der Maler" does not SUC, at least on my CD. How does "Ludus Tonalis" compare to "Mathis", since that's the only Hindemith I've heard?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I don't know Mathis der Maler at all, except as a title. In fact, that's still pretty much where I am on Ludus Tonalis, except that it's in my Lyra and I can presumably correct that a little. It's a bunch of fugues connected by interludes, and some of it sounded fairly entertaining the last time I gave it a listen.

Hindemith also wrote a bunch of sonatas for different instruments with piano, beefing up the repertoire of some otherwise neglected ones. I haven't heard those, but it's a nice thought.

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

"Mathis" is a big fat symphony, and opens with a glorious unison chord symbolizing the guy's ascension to heaven. It's hard for it to move on from there and gets a little twiddly, but it's still one of my favorite symphonies.

I have a couple disks worth of those sonatas-for-piano-and-something on the iPod, but haven't been in the mood for them. As soon as I'm tired of Ricky Lee Jones, I'll try them out, but moving from a boozy '70's beatnik girl crooner to piano-and-flugelhorn might cause whiplash, so I'll take it slow.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

A good opener is important. Like I say, Hindemith is just this guy I've known about, and I picked up his big piano epic because I'd been hearing about it for a long time. It's more mainstream than Nancarrow's music for player pianos, or Sorabji's "Opus Clavicembalisticum" (all four hours of it are on my player). I keep looking for those great 20th century piano epics. Rzewski's variations on "The People United" is pretty good, taking in a lot of ground both old and new. The more trad stuff makes it easier to accept the modern bits when they come along, and the structure is interesting as well.

Just now I'm listening to Mozart (and Suessmayr's) Requiem. Soon I shall take a nap. When I left the company luncheon, the radio was playing a "hooked on classics" version of the Hallelujah Chorus. Moving from that to anything is perilous, but I did it.

I'll self-snip the last thing I was going to say. Mmmmmf.

[ssprince.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with much of his work, but somewhere I stumbled on his viola sonata, and learned to like it a lot. It's on the list of works I'd like to own a recording of....