Tuesday, April 28, 2009

boston 2005 emendations

time is tight at the moment, but - with the help of a correspondent, who kindly provided an mp3 version of the original flacs (see comments) - i have just today downloaded this concert and wanted to clarify some details which are incorrect in the accompanying post. let me say first that these corrections are NOT intended to make the original poster look stupid, nor offered by way of a "slapped wrist": rather, i am concerned that accurate information should be given out wherever possible, hence i try and correct such mistakes when i can. there is nothing personal in this whatsoever.

firstly, this is not the "diamond curtain wall sextet", since the music itself is not dcw, but rather gtm. the opening themes of both pieces make this abundantly clear. [in saying this i am also belatedly answering a challenge which one user of that website threw down last year, when he asked whether any listeners could tell the difference between the two; i didn't bother to give a detailed answer at the time, as i did not recognise it as a genuine question..!] to be more specific, both pieces are third species, accelerator class gtm. (fwiw, i have never personally come across any dcw recordings by groups larger than a quartet; often they are trios. also, as we know, dcw pieces always make much use of digital electronics.)

the first set may indeed be comp. 345, since it certainly does resemble the victoriaville recording from earlier in the same year; the opening themes are not identical, but small differences in the performance may easily account for this. the second set is not, however, comp. 39 (which is, according to restructures, an unrecorded creative orch. piece dating from 1974 - in any case, the opus number predates gtm by a good couple of decades) - and it cannot be comp. 399 (as the file itself is titled) either: that one has yet to be recorded, and may not even have been written yet! perhaps it is comp. 349? who knows...

finally, the personnel/instrumentation: bynum will presumably have been playing trumpbone rather than trombone (this is why i myself prefer the general designation "brass" for thb), and pavone usually plays both violin and viola; more importantly - as b's announcements at the end of each set confirm - the bassist on this date was carl testa, not chris dahlgren. (the paras regarding the 2005 philadelphia and victoriaville concerts are a little confusing, as is the partial list of performances: in talking of the "first" date, or the "only one officially documented", the poster presumably is referring to this specific sextet line-up, but of course the personnel often varies a little from concert to concert.)

that's it for the corrections... hope everyone enjoyed the music!

3 comments:

centrifuge said...

for those who will accept a lossy format in exchange for a shorter download, here is 1009's version: http://tinyurl.com/dao4zm

- thanks to him, and to the original poster for making these recordings available in the first place.

as for the disclaimer in my first para, which really "shouldn't" be necessary: i thought i'd better say that, since several previous attempts at correcting details (especially on that site) have met with heated responses...

lee said...

This has been on a long list of to-be-downloaded, so thanks for the clarifications and new link (I don't sweat fidelity on live recordings like this one).

Hope all is well. Looking forward to hearing this one.

centrifuge said...

lee, "no sweat"... well, this is the point i'm always trying to make myself :)

hope you enjoyed the music... all is going ok at least, hope things are good with you guys. cheers for the comment, talk to you soon perhaps!