YouTube videos with score

[teamsaint]

A place to post your favourites.

Sibelius 7 BPO Karajan.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I adore this facility - particularly for access to scores of New Music not otherwise easily or cheaply available. Where to start? Well, of course ... who else?! :

[Flay]

That's four instruments. But how many fingers/people are needed to play each, ferney?

[EdgeleyRob]

Almost as good to look at as it is to hear (applies to anything by this composer)

Alkan - Symphony for solo piano

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

That's four instruments. But how many fingers/people are needed to play each, ferney?

- something that the Berne String Quartet (for whom the work was intended - and who had recorded BF's Sonatas for String Quartet, which isn't exactly a doddle!) might have said when they saw the work for the first time. They politely declined the honour of the first performance, leaving the field clear for the Ardittis (all thirty-two fingers and eight thumbs of 'em) to take over, beginning a 37-year association with the Composer. (The Ardittis have recorded the work three times: for RCA, Auvidis Montaigne, and Aeon - and I have also heard the Quatuor Diotima perform it Live, too. I wish both that RCA/BMG/Whoever would reissue the Berne Sonatas coupled with the Ardittis' first recording of the Second S4tet on a single CD, and that the Diotimas would record at least some of the Ferneyhough quartets.



(Ferneyhough has also written works for large orchestras, by the way. Rather good they are, too!)

[ahinton]

That's four instruments. But how many fingers/people are needed to play each, ferney?

Only the usual sixteen (+ the cellist's thumb + the digits required to hold the four bows); the real question is how many brains? (and this could be asked of almost any of Brian Ferneyhough's string quartet works after the early first quartet and the sonatas of which, as fhg rightly points out, is not a doddle!)...

[ahinton]

- something that the Berne String Quartet (for whom the work was intended - and who had recorded BF's Sonatas for String Quartet, which isn't exactly a doddle!) might have said when they saw the work for the first time. They politely declined the honour of the first performance, leaving the field clear for the Ardittis (all thirty-two fingers and eight thumbs of 'em) to take over, beginning a 37-year association with the Composer. (The Ardittis have recorded the work three times: for RCA, Auvidis Montaigne, and Aeon - and I have also heard the Quatuor Diotima perform it Live, too. I wish both that RCA/BMG/Whoever would reissue the Berne Sonatas coupled with the Ardittis' first recording of the Second S4tet on a single CD, and that the Diotimas would record at least some of the Ferneyhough quartets.

I thought that I'd read somewhere some time ago that Diotima were working on some more of them but I might have mistaken them for Danel in this; I'm not sure now. Each of those ensembles is truly astonishing in repertoire from a far wider repertoire range than the Ardittis ever present (and that's not meant to be read as a criticism of the Ardittis) - Diotima especially (whose 5-CD survey of all the completed quartet works of Schönberg, Berg and Webern has to be heard to be disbelieved).

[teamsaint]

Not perhaps the cleanest sound of all time, but well worth a watch and listen anyway.

[teamsaint]

[Bryn]

dp53 Plante's comment re. the recording conditions and the reason for the missing attack on the piano's last note is fascinating.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

One of the best features of scores featuring in videos is that it enables works with more than one piece being played simultaneously can be shown on screen in ways impossible in a printed "book" score. Those of us who try following the recording of Richard Barrett's Opening of the Mouth will know the fun of having to zip backwards and forwards to find the relevant pages that match what's happening in the performance. With video score, the various pages can be superimposed on screen as they occur in performance.

This (or something similar) is what I suspect is presented in this youTube video of Politeia, from the (as yet) not commercially recorded Construction. And it's pretty magnificent:

[ahinton]

(Ferneyhough has also written works for large orchestras, by the way. Rather good they are, too!)

Hmmm...but the prospect of, for example, La Terre est un Homme presented on YouTube with its score would make me wonder what size screen (and a portrait orientated one at that) one would need in order to be able to see it all just as much as I could not help but wonder what "size" ears one would need in order to hear it all!...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Hmmm...but the prospect of, for example, La Terre est un Homme presented on YouTube with its score would make me wonder what size screen (and a portrait orientated one at that) one would need in order to be able to see it all just as much as I could not help but wonder what "size" ears one would need in order to hear it all!...

They might have to rotate the score by 90 degrees and we'd have to watch with laptops resting on their ends! The size of ears - there's an essay by Derek Puffett on the Berg Drei Orchesterstücke in which he claims that it's impossible to hear everything that's going on. I think he meant it as criticism - but for me one of the (many, many) attractions of works at these levels of textural complexity is that I hear some new features with every hearing. Of course, that's also true of, for example, a Mozart String Quintet - but with Berg, Ferneyhough, Ives and others who so successfully make this a forefronted parameter of the Music, it is particularly joyful - and defiant. ("Defiant" because the chances that a work so complex that it needs several performances will actually receive those multiple performances in the current economic and aesthetic conditions is an act of defiant optimism that this conditions will get better.)

And having the score would be a help to getting to hear more of it (if not "all"), too.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Stravinsky Concertino for String Quartet:

[teamsaint]

Thanks for the links to the Stravinsky and Richard's piece, Ferney. Both wonderful experiences.
I'm afraid a little of the subtlety and detail of Richard's work got a little lost between the score and my headphones here on the 10.00 Liverpool St to Norwich. I particularly liked the idea ( if I read it correctly) of average duration quavers, but so much to enjoy and learn. And what a fantastic presentation of the score.

And the Stravinsky was rather tasty too.