The NACA Music, Art & General Creativity Thread

[briantrumpet]

Wonder why he decided to go by Bud instead of his given name?

Weird, eh, in 1948...?

 

[briantrumpet]

Back to Ella. I'm not sure how she'd come out on that tuning analysis thing, but every single one of these notes is perfect. The note she sings near the start, on the second syllable of "winter", makes my knees go all a-wobble. If you know anything about music theory, she hits the augmented 4th absolutely perfectly to make it do something special.

 

[Pross]

I don't generally like operatic sopranos either (don't tell all my operatic soprano friends), and Kiri te Kanawa was a truly awful Maria on Bernstein's recording of West Side Story, but you do need a good voice for many of the musicals, and her voice seems to suit this very well. And she doesn't try to over-project since she's got a microphone to help.



(I expect that this Youtube link will get taken down as the person uploading it is very much breaching copyright, having grabbed it from iPlayer)

I guess ‘legit’ style musicals (as my daughter calls them and I guess she knows after graduating a few weeks ago in Musical Theatre) tended to lend themselves more to trained operatic singers.

Loved the voice of the guy who sung on Bohemian Rhapsody too. I think he’s playing Javert in Les Mis at present.

I actually didn’t enjoy Alison Balsom much. I certainly appreciated the skill but the piece she played just wasn’t my thing.

 

[midlandsgrimpeur]

Back to Ella. I'm not sure how she'd come out on that tuning analysis thing, but every single one of these notes is perfect. The note she sings near the start, on the second syllable of "winter", makes my knees go all a-wobble. If you know anything about music theory, she hits the augmented 4th absolutely perfectly to make it do something special.

I know she had a huge repertoire but I always come back to watching Youtube clips of live performances of 'Mack the Knife' and 'The Man I love'. Ella singing Gershwin and Cole Porter is some of the greatest music of the last century.

 

[briantrumpet]

I know she had a huge repertoire but I always come back to watching Youtube clips of live performances of 'Mack the Knife' and 'The Man I love'. Ella singing Gershwin and Cole Porter is some of the greatest music of the last century.

Yeah, I happen to rate Cole Porter as a greater songwriter than the Gershwins, at least as the words are so often sooo clever. And I'd played in 'Anything Goes' many times before I realised that the chorus of 'All Through The Night' is basically just a harmonised chromatic scale. I reckon he did it as a bet, but his genius was in doing it so well, you don't realise what he's done.

 

[briantrumpet]

I actually didn’t enjoy Alison Balsom much. I certainly appreciated the skill but the piece she played just wasn’t my thing.

And that's the thing - the Hummel Trumpet Concerto is one of the mainstays of solo trumpet repertoire (despite it being just Grade 8 and playable by college students the world over), and it's fairly clever, but also fairly trite/shallow. And I suspect it's one of the things she got asked to play the most often. Even if you're getting paid a few £1000s to do it, it's a bit like being a high-class prostitute : you're not doing it for the pleasure, just the good money.

Perhaps, if that's the reason, she'd have carried on longer had she been like Haken Hardenberger and commissioned mew music for herself, to challenge herself technically and artistically. But then you have to persuade concert promoters and orchestras to take the risk, compared with *yet another* Haydn or Hummel concerto.