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76.126.5.126
Well, not really howler level, but sometimes, you wonder how booklet note writers wormed their way into their positions. I was just looking over a booklet of an album I've had for years: Smetana's Ma Vlast and works by Dvorak and Grieg with Paavo Berglund and the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Bournemouth SO on an EMI 2-CD set (a used copy of which is now available, as I write this, through an Amazon reseller for 32 cents plus shipping - of course the shipping is $3.99!). I read the following in the booklet notes:The four pieces of Grieg's Symphonic Dances, Op. 64 are all arrangements of Norwegian folk tunes collected by L. M. Lindeman; they were composed in 1896. Originally for piano duet (the Norwegian Dances, Op. 35), it took Grieg some years before he felt sufficiently confident to orchestrate them.This is either monumentally bad writing or else it's a manifestation of a writer who doesn't know what he's talking about. Where to begin? The first thing to note is that Grieg's Symphonic Dances and his Norwegian Dances are two completely independent works - they do not have anything to do with each other. I suspect that what the writer meant was that both works (the Symphonic Dances and the Norwegian Dances) first appeared in piano duet form. So perhaps there's a missing word, so that the parenthetical comment, "the Norwegian Dances, Op. 35", should have read: "like the Norwegian Dances, Op. 35". But even with this improvement, the wording still gives a misleading impression, because, although Grieg did orchestrate the Symphonic Dances, he did not orchestrate the Norwegian Dances - the Norwegian Dances were orchestrated by Hans Sitt. C'mon, folks, get it right!Good performances though!
Edits: 03/16/15Follow Ups:
"Fortunately, it is made more and more powerfully contemporary operas listenable, after decades of efflanquées cows and avant-garde. Among the distinguished composers big news, Rodion Shchedrin which, although carrying an unpronounceable name for the normal French, clearly belongs in the pantheon of the greatest living composers. Born in 1932, he spent his life writing unclassifiable but still brilliant works, which have ripped the most prestigious performers in the world, not just the wrong side of the Iron Curtain: Bernstein, Svetlanov, Rostropovich, Maazel, Rozhdestvensky and a thousand others. Here is his latest opera, The Left (2013), directed by its creator and Valery Gergiev dedicatee. Shchedrin phenomenal orchestrator shows it in a language that refuses either tone or atonal, but seeks above all to deploy emotion and strength. And a strong dose of black humor, by the way, since the subject mocks fiercely through the Russian - and across Western, by the way: a Russian inventor has to prove that the Russians are capable of copying, or even surpasses, an English invention, ie a mechanical chip as small as a real chip. With lies, misunderstandings and swagger that we can imagine. Awesome! SM / Qobuz"
Japanese-issue CD.
My all time favorite.
jm
AA
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" -Michael McClure
That's One Way to go!
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Geez, what's the world coming to?
-RW-
Good on ya, mate! Aberrations like this make me wonder how much care was spent on the music, production, etc. It is to be hoped that they rise above the quality shown in the notes...
-RW-
The Ma Vlast is a particularly beautiful recording, preserving an orchestral sound that is probably extinct by now.
. . . with the decline of CD's and the rise of downloads and streaming, booklet notes themselves are starting to become a thing of the past. So maybe I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth with my OP! ;-)
from popular music, but, my all-time favorite liner notes for a good laugh come from the very long essay on the back cover of Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" The opening paragraph, of the essay, penned by Pete Hamill, reads as follows:
"In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus. No. It turned up again in America, breeding in-a-compost of greed and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering death. The infected young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled metal death through the mighty clouds, up above God's green earth, released it in silent streams, and moved on, while the hospitals exploded and green fields were churned to mud."
What a pompous douche bag!!
-RW-
...he's pretty far out there though some of it might be due to the translations. Talk about obtuse and prolix writing...
From a Musicweb review of Weingartner's Sym 7 on CPO by Paul Godfrey:
"One of the drawbacks of CPO's releases in the past has been their tendency to commission long and often not very enlightening booklet notes from European academics. These have been rendered even more impenetrable by over-literal translations. Unfortunately here we have another example of this kind. The lengthy essay (over ten pages of quite small type) by Eckhardt van den Hoogen, translated with accuracy if not a totally felicitously English style by Susan Marie Praeder, tells us a great deal about the views of the author and not a lot about the music. One example from the first page of this essay is typical: "A fine materiality imperceptibly increasing with fineness, capable of being sympathetically roused by precisely synchronized musical waves and thus suggesting to us the idea that there must be 'something more' to art in general and music in particular? Limitations of space mean that such speculation cannot be continued here." However these limitations do not prevent the author from continuing his speculations for a further nine pages of this sort of writing, in which the name of Weingartner is only mentioned once in the whole of the first page. It takes him some seven pages to get round to any discussion of the symphony which is the subject of this recording. A couple of pages before the end the author rounds on an unnamed critic: "The coda of the main part, as Weingartner waggishly communicates, 'is designed after a sketch by Beethoven,' which in praxi [sic] not even a donkey can hear with his donkey's ears. One must have read this note in advance and then not as yet know as much as the critic for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung who in February 2012 reviewed the performance heard here as a live recording and in these five or six measures believed that she immediately recognized the 'strongest' effect of the whole symphony. That the same lady encountered Schubert, Mahler and (of all people!) Bruckner at every step was final proof of a gift that the likes of us have labored in vain to acquire to the present day!" Well, I suppose I may have donkey's ears, but I can certainly hear reminiscences of Schubert, Mahler and indeed Bruckner - just listen to the very opening, with its echoes of the Te Deum - in this music. Never mind; I am sure once the author has had a good lie down in a darkened room for a while he will feel better.
Then again, maybe not. But he sure enough is a horse's arse...
-RW-
rather than streaming on line with QOBUZ and TIDAL where I am missing the liner notes.
Once in a while I get comments from QOBUZ on s release that they sell as well as stream, and it's in French so I cut and paste to Google Translate.
From the album above courtesy of Google Translate:
"At the end of his life, Gustav Leonhardt returns to disk friendship for Marc de Mauny and Russian musicians with this sublime Forquerays - his latest album - released in 2005 under Russian label (EMR). This disc had a confidential distribution in Europe despite a Diapason d'Or. So here it is, this ghostly album, which can be considered almost like new. Leonhardt had never registered Hemsch of 1751 Flawinne castle in Belgium, he considers "ideal for collecting Forquerays." "These pieces were originally for viola were transcribed with superior knowledge of harpsichord, exceptional. Everything sounds easy, and the music has a lot of strength and delicacy at the same time. "He adds. Perfect in every way recital emanating from a great servant of the music: "We do not play the harpsichord or violin, one must play music, keep in mind its a lot bigger than the one we have between fingers, keep in mind at every moment the pieces for viola Forquerays father, be nourished by the study of the partition and all the culture that surrounds it, treaties, poetry, ensemble music. Please do not "think harpsichord. '" (Accuracy: the transcription of pieces for viola d'Antoine Forquerays is due to son John the Baptist)."
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Aside from basic facts or just simple clarity in one's writing, the whole issue of self indulgence on the part of the booklet-note writer could be an entire chapter unto itself in a "Sins of the Booklet Notes Writer" treatise. I have to admit that I've indulged myself along these lines in the past - I wrote the program notes for the San Jose Symphony's performance of Handel's "Messiah" one year, and I used the opportunity to inveigh against HIP performances of the work! (I do have to say that Eckhardt van den Hoogen has me soundly beaten in the self-indulgence area however - LOL!) Anyway, thanks for the amusing example!
I could come up with even sillier ones, but I'm not willing to put even a fraction of the effort you put in to that post. I am impressed.
Proofreading is a dying profession, and maybe a dying art too, much less fact checking. With computers, spell check and the internet, the author is supposed to get it right the first time, and if he or she doesn't, it doesn't seem to matter to the publisher.
I've seen some significant errors and incorrect statements that I could dig out, but nothing as funny as some of the quotes already posted in this thread. I know when I've been beaten. ;)
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