The ninety-fifth classical recording: #275 Vincenzo Bellini - I Puritani
My day today is dominated, as far as listening is concerned, by a three hour opera, in Italian of course, about the English Civil War. Of course, with my focus on the music rather than the visuals, a lot of this does tend to escape me, but often musically a lot comes through.
While other operas can be fairly jubilant in places, with a tendency to 'go big', it feels like here there's more of a focus on the solos and the smaller, personal sounds, often dropping music to let the vocalists stand, with a violin punctuating it instead. The lack of the chorus in those places really makes them feel more personal, even more when the soloists get the focus over the more complex interplay, and it feels more of a case of the music supporting the text than you would see in other operas. It's a great piece from that perspective - feeling unique without really losing your interest during the three hours.
The two hundred and fourty-third album: Big Star - #1 Record
With the rock world at this point dominated by glam rock and the start of metal, with big instruments and hard guitars, the simpler rock of Big Star stands out, foreshadowing later bands doing the same. These are the gentler ballads like Thirteen, which have a slight folk influence but mostly come out as a lovelier explanation. Then there's Don't Lie To Me, which feels like a throwback at this point but sticks through a simpler garage rock style.
While I've never heard of the band before, it feels like this is setting up a lot of what will follow - not exactly back to basics, but something that goes back to a focus on the music and lyrics. I'm obviously only seeing that from a snapshot - others would have done the same, but it feels like a good album for it nevertheless.
The two hundred and fourty-second album: #242 Deep Purple - Machine Head
We saw the previous Deep Purple album as a starting point of heavy metal and there's no doubt that this album really puts us there. There are prog rock elements in here, with what feels like a showy performance, but it also has the driving riffs, the loud bass and aggressive guitar. The lyrics are what you'd expect from that - some time has gone into them, but none of them feel like they'll change the world either, with few deep meanings to discover. They are, in that sense, more accessible.
Between the extended solos and other jams, the album long tracks tend to lose their identity sometimes. When you get the core riffs and moments, they're at their strongest, but unfortunately they do meander sometimes to the point where they get lost when they do so. I can see that being fine for a casual listen, but it doesn't work as much for me when I want to focus on an album.
The ninety-fourth classical recording: #453 Reynaldo Hahn - Melodies
As a sign that we're listening to a prodigy, the collection of melodies we listened to contained some written when he was fourteen. These songs set existing poems to music, an exercise that means only a piano accompanies work with the flourishes being in the vocals. One of the things that happens is that we get almost a modern album, with a baritone singing several songs that otherwise feel like classical works.
It's a varied set of pieces, as you can expect from a number of works put together, but what shines through is how they build on a simple melody, letting the words shine through and emphasizing their emotion. It's simple, but very effective.
The two hundred and fourty-first album: #241 Randy Newman - Sail Away
It's hard to ignore how much of a throwback this album feels to be in places, with Lonely at the Top feeling like a track that could have been in Sinatra's repertoire and others throwing back to older gospel music influences. The short length of most sense feels like they contribute as well, so there are more jumps between stylings - there's an electric guitar in Last Night I Had A Dream, which is followed by Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear, which plays purely on the piano and which I can imagine a performer singing sat at the piano in a 1920s music hall performance.
Even so, these were all composed and written by Randy Newman himself, here recording new material and songs he'd written for others in the past. When he's able to get out there with his own material, a sarcastic hint in some of the best (to me) like Political Science, that really works in making a point while really inhabiting a character. While the music can feel older, the lyrics are more often of a contemporary nature. They're worth listening to and paying attention to, as that's what really enhances and makes the album.
The two hundred and fourtieth album: #240 David Bowie - Hunky Dory
And with David Bowie entering the room, we see another piece of the seventies music fall into place. We're due to see a lot of different sides of his work, but the first on the list (his fourth studio album) both has a fairly singular identity - they feel like they sound as a single album - but show a variety of emotions, with the upbeat 'Kooks' followed by a slower, more depressing Quicksand. There's still a lot of production in it and it ends with the upswing that feels typical of the album's sound to help with that. Add to that the references to folk rock, with Song for Bob Dylan being the closest, towards artier rock, playing with glam influences, and it's it's a mix that not only sounds good, but has a lot of content in the lyrics as well to make these a lot more meaningful.
It's a delightful album, with something new hiding in each album in a burst of creativity that I feel we see in few artists - similar to the period of the Beatles working together and trying what they can do in their albums without having to worry about what others will say. Add to that the silliness showing through a bit in the start of a track like Andy Warhol - both a dedication to perfection and a moment of levity (at least to the listener) that punctures the mythical legend a bit to show the humanity underneath it.
The ninety-third classical recording: #397 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto no. 1
While the name of this piece may not be as descriptive, the opening few bars are familiar with a horn theme and various motifs that seem to have been used in a lot of other places. Oddly enough, it also feels like it stands apart from the more delicate rest of the work, the proper first movement relying more on just piano and strings and making for a gentler journey.
The piano work in this piece is obviously the focus and the performance of that is as amazing. There's a great focus on it in the first movement, but it's a constant presence that sounds complicated in a lot of places and clearly requires skill to pull off as well. This is strongest in the march of the third movement, which drives relentlessly forward. On the whole, this is a classic piece, but with more layers than you'd hear if you only listened to that famous introduction.
The eighty-fifth comic: #184 Uncle Scrooge: The Second-Richest Duck
Thanks to my grandparents' giant collection of Donald Duck magazines when I was growing up, I've read a lot of Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck stories. Coming back to it today then makes for a nice and comfortable restart on the comics list.
While I'm not sure I've read this story before, there are certainly a lot of familiar elements that these stories end up having, with this one being the first appearance of Scrooge's rival Flintheart Glomgold. The amount of ground it manages to cover in twenty pages is quite amazing - not just the two rivals meeting, but also their lengthy competition to determine who wins on the last bit of the test, the fowl with the longest piece of string (as their wealth is equal everywhere else). It's fun, following cartoon conventions, wiht a bit of tension built in even if you know who'll win it at the end by comic logic. For me, it really is a return to a familiar world and familiar art and this is a good entry in that series.
The two hundred and thirty-ninth album: #239 T. Rex - Electric Warrior
I see this album cited as kicking off the glam rock movement, the band's appearance on Top of the Pops setting up that idea more than anything. While I'm sure this played on trends that had started, there's something different about the rock played here. It's subdued, without the big flourishes from before, but still more produced than those early rock albums were. It differs somewhat between tracks, of course, but the well known Get It On is a good example of this - a fairly simple rhythm, relying on some harmonies but creating a sound that's clearly intentionally produced to create crescendos. Plenty of the other tracks beyond that don't necessarily stick with you, but they're fine to listen to, a decent album but I know glam rock will go further than this.
The one hundred and fifty-second TV show: #94 Top of the Pops
While originally a British show, Top of the Pops transcended borders and for some time some decades ago I watched the Dutch edition. It gave away the trick of the show quite quickly, as the show has an identical studio in each country it records in so they can share performances. For a Dutch boy, Wyclef Jean singing about '999' when the version played on Dutch radio used the American '911' was a dead giveaway.
This doesn't appear to have been as widespread as I thought, based on the lack of international editions in general, but it always stuck in my head as a bit of TV magic - the same sets everywhere with some editing magic did a lot of the heavy lifting there.
As to the show itself, while we are going to cover more of its genre in the future, this does feel like the ur-example of a show like it: several performers record a performance, a presenter links them and you get access to see these artists perform without having to get to a concert. It makes complete sense, especially in the time before music videos as a way to see these performances. At the same time, with the way technology has changed we don't need them when you can go on Youtube and see all of these performance, recorded legally or not.
We saw some random editions for this, thanks to BBC 4 repeats, but looking at that is just as much commenting on the music of the day as it is the show. The stages, after all, are what you'd expect from the day, abstract so it doesn't distract too much, while the show gives you the music I've discussed on plenty of other posts. The lack of adornment does it a big favour in that sense - not having to deal with other distractions means you just get a show that's as good as the music that contains it. The episodes we watched did still have the dance troupe performances, with Legs & Co in the episodes we saw. They make sense in the context of the show early on, since when a band can't or won't perform you still need to show something on TV, but these days the hastily created routines seem cheesy and unnecessary. As a show, though, this sets a template and I wonder how other shows like Soul Train will do following it.