Parkening Plays Bach

There were not too many Bach albums in our local record stores, however I did find one that changed my life. Hearing Christopher Parkening plays Bach on the classical guitar made me want to play classical guitar as well. 

My Dad bought us a nylon string guitar and a book of old time songs. He said that who ever learned to play it would have it as their own. I enjoyed working at it and learned from that book to play such folk songs as Sixteen Tons and House of the Rising Sun. I got the guitar but it was not in great shape by then and my Dad and Mum bought me another, better nylon string guitar and I went to the music store in Oshawa and got the excellent Folksinger's Guide to Classical Guitar. 

I was finally able to see Christopher Parkening in concert in Waterloo. My big sister Lynda Webster gifted me two tickets and I went to the concert with Eric Dennis after a brief and unexpected tour of beautiful downtown Breslau, Ontario. 

 Here is an excellent book for beginning to play classical guitar. It has the benefit of presenting the music in both tablature and standard music notation. Tablature is a very old and time honoured method of notating music by using each line of the staff to represent a different string of the guitar. It is a much more direct and visual display of the correct fretting and picking positions and is great for beginners:

Bach:  Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring

played by Christopher Parkening

Christopher Parkening plays 

J. S. Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze"

Beethoven - Ninth Symphony

Fortunately I turned 18 in 1971, just in time to see the movie A Clockwork Orange when it came out. Of course, I immediately ran out and got the soundtrack album. Kubrick always chose great music for his movies (I also had the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack). 

 

Not that Alex the Droog was a very good inspiration for loving the Great Ludwig Van. I had already been listening to some Beethoven: at home we had excellent recordings of both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies as well as the Moonlight Sonata and other pieces he composed, but now I really wanted a good recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and got one!

 

 

 

Nothing in music more rousing than that choral finale:

 

Leopold Stokowski - Beethoven : Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 

("Choral") 4th movement - part 2

 

 

You can hear all of this excellent recording on YouTube:

First Movement

 

 

 Second Movement

 

Third Movement

 

 

Fourth Movement Part 1

 

Fourth Movement Part 2

 

 

Concert Favourites in the Light Classical Tradition

Meanwhile, I searched through our home record collection for more Bach. I found some, but I also found a treasure trove that led me into many different areas of classical music. Deutsche Grammophon's "Concert Favourites in the Light Classical Tradition" is a ten record box set. 

Record Seven was called "Festival of the Strings" which included Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto, which quickly became a favorite Bach composition, but it also included Springtime by Vivaldi, another baroque composer who preceded Bach and greatly influenced him. It wasn't long before I was off in search of a complete recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and so it went, through many of compositions in this wonderful collection that proved to be an ideal introduction to many areas of classical music...

I eventually got all six of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and began reading about his tumultuous life. The Brandenburgs were said to be composed when he was court musician at Cothen, under Prince Leopold, probably the happiest and most productive six years of his career. Prince Leopold was an avid music lover and also a very talented musician.

Unfortunately, to get to Cothen, Bach first had to extract himself from the court of Weimar when he was concert master. A horn player there had asked for a dismissal so that he could pursue opportunities elsewhere and was promptly sentenced to one hundred lashes and prison. He escaped before this sentence could go into effect, but was hanged in effigy anyway as an example for other servants with wandering inclinations. 

Bach ended up spending a month in prison for the crime of "stubbornness" in his desire to leave Weimar. Prince Leopold of Cothen used his influence to free Bach from prison and they became close friends, blurring the line between master and servant. Prince Leopold even stood as godfather to Bach's son who was born in Cothen. 

I was thrilled to find a concert video featuring performances of all six of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos played at Cothen Castle by the wonderful Freiburger Baroque Orchestra:

Freiburger Barockorchestra - Johann Sebastian Bach:

Brandenburg Concertos No. 1-6 (BWV 1046-1051)

Hair: The Musical

An exciting event in 1970 was going to see Hair at the Royal Alex Theater in Toronto. It was great to finally see a hit musical on stage rather than at the movies or in amateur productions. Hair was the first rock musical to reach the big time on Broadway. The music was written by Canadian composer Galt MacDermot, who was an avid student of African Bantu rhythms and made powerful use of them in Hair, as well as adding variety by incorporating as many different rock styles as he could. We enjoyed this variety, played the album a lot and loved to sing many of the songs:

It is interesting to dig down into the McLeans Magazine Archive for 1970 and read some of the articles on Hair, such as this one about the Canadian cast and the show's writers Ragni and Rado coming to oversee the Toronto production while staying with the cast in suites at the Royal York Hotel:

What Hair is Doing to a Bunch of Otherwise Ordinary Canadian Kids 

Dr Wonderful was more than happy to provide a...

Sing Along With Hair: The Musical 

Galt MacDermot died in 2018, one day short of the age of ninety, but his website is still lovingly maintained and has a great page on Hair featuring a cavalcade of Hair posters:

Galt McDermot: Hair 

Ravi Shankar - The Genius of Ravi Shankar

Sitar music was much in the air in my later years of high school, showing up increasingly in pop music, but I really wanted to try to appreciate it as it was played by Ravi Shankar and other Indian musicians in their own music. Difficult to listen to at first, since we are inclined to try to apply all our notions of what music is supposed to be, rather than just relaxing and letting the music reveal itself in its own way.

Some great Ravi Shankar albums to listen to on YouTube:

Ravi Shankar - The Spirit of India

 

Ravi Shankar has two very musical daughters representing the best of East and West: Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones. I like this early video of Ravi Shankar performing with a very young Anoushka, sixteen years old I figure:

Ravi Shankar and Anoushka Shankar 

Live Raag Khamaj (1997)

 The famous warm up for the Concert for Bangladesh:

 

 
Recording of Ravi Shakar playing at the Concert for Bangladesh (could swear he was riffing on the Ode to Joy from Beethoven`s Ninth Symphony):

West Side Story - The Musical

The soundtrack of my high school days is filled with musicals. I acted in as many high school musicals as I could: Oliver, My Fair Lady, Wizard of Oz, The Fantasticks... and loved every minute of it! Our parents were big fans of Broadway musicals, so I grew up hearing and absorbing them all: Oklahoma, South Pacific, Sound of Music... But the musical that had the most impact on me as a teenager was undoubtedly West Side Story. After seeing the movie I just had to get the album and listen to it interminably...

 Dr Wonderful has put together a great page to...

Sing Along with West Side Story

Johann Sebastian Bach - His Greatest Hits

When I was a teen my Dad brought this album back from one of his lunch time forays to the record store, and so began a lifelong fascination with the music of Bach:

 You can listen to this album on YouTube: 

 Of course, when I found out there was indeed a volume 2, I had to get that too!