The 2021 ALDAs (Avoid Like Death Awards) Are Here!
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- čas přidán 10. 07. 2024
- These are, without doubt, the lowest of the low, the sour cream of the crop of 2021 releases. Get out your ratchets, and let's celebrate:
The White Scarf of Irredeemable Chutzpah Recipients:
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 (Currentzis/Sony)
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 “Eroica”) (Ensemble Cristofori/Schoonderwoerd/AVI)
The Scarlet Scarf of Shame Recipients:
Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 “Romantic” (Thielemann/Sony)
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” (Roth/Harmonia Mundi)
The Taupe Scarf of Turpitude Recipients:
DG Beethoven New Essential Complete Edition
Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 “Romantic” (Hruša/Accentus)
The Black Scarf of Lingering Stench Recipient:
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 (Petrenko/Lawo)
Congratulations to all the winners--or losers--or whatever. - Hudba
4 AM… “musical rectal exam”… best critical line ever! Will laugh all day!
Where does he get it....? 😂
This is easily one of the best CZcams videos I’ve seen in 2021. Fabulous video on not-so fabulous recordings
I used to be pretty into audio equipment and as such read several audio magazines; one of the most maddening things was every speaker they reviewed was at least above average according to them(not sure how mathematically possible that is), so a critic like David is a breath of fresh air!!
I couldn't help but giggling through the whole video. What a nice award!
Dave , I think your rechid rachid ending fanfare is the best thing you can give these recordings.
Keep up the good work.
"A musical rectal exam" Gotta luvit!!!!!!
BRAVISSIMO, Mr. Hurwitz! I heartily concur with all your choices here. I recently heard the Roth 'Eroica' and could not believe how such a great work, laden with gravitas and passion, could be made to sound like an unimportant piece of mincing fluff! The first chord is not even together, sounding like two different notes!
Some scarf collection you have! 😄
Oh boy! That was fun! Almost want to go and listen to bits. Kind of "plaisirs coupables".
I'm thinking that maybe one day you could do the Haydn Symphonies Awards or the most beautiful melodies Olympics in bronze, silver and gold. It could be interesting as a compilation of your videos about those topics.
"It's a musical rectal exam" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
David you are a legend! 😃🙏
Moral rectitude describing a rectal exam. Love it!!
One can only hope this morning’s content is sponsored by Alan Alda Productions, LLC. An enterprising grad student somewhere needs to write a thesis on the conductorial psychohistory of poor Prokofiev 5ths.
DGG packaging.... ah, yes. Years ago, when people still sold cassettes, I bought a cassette of Schubert's Winter Journey song cycle, the most desperate and nihilistic piece of music ever composed. The cover illustration showed a pretty decorated sled with bells.
I thought Thielemann's 8th with the VPO was worse. But the 4th was bad. The 3rd, however, I really like. This was a great video, David!
I love David, he is laugh aloud funny. I learn so much from him. I love how he says what he feels. I can’t wait for the next video.
That was performance art. 🥰
I hadn’t seen the review of Petrenko/Prokofiev, so that’s a surprise. Yes, I’m morbidly curious. Fortunately I imagine it’s on Spotify to I can try without buying.
"Someone's gonna love it. Please don't let it be you!" :-)
I had been waiting for these awards and it was well worth it👍
All of these recordings were such a terrible waste of money that could have (and should have) been spent on musically satisfying endeavors...
Arthur Fiddler Box
Slatkin St. Louis Box
Metropolis Box
Maybe next year
Why DG falls down from time to time? It's called MONEY!!!
On June 2022 petrenko is due to come to Israel to participate in the celebrations of the IPO 85th anniversary by conducting shostakovich 7. This is going to be the first concert I'll ever attend. And I'm excited as hell. I love the piece, my favorite shostakovich symphony, I love petrenko's interpretation of of it on naxos, and although I understand it's not one the IPO bread and butter pieces I hope they rise to the occasion. I so look forward to it. And I agree with you on the prokofiev disk.
Have fun, and do please let us know how it goes.
Much deserved awards!
I’d reserve an ALDA for the Cascioli/Resonanz Beethoven Piano Concertos. Oh boy, that thing is truly evil.
Was this the Harmonia Mundi disc of PC4 and the Violin Concerto arranged for piano? Cascioli is one of the very finest pianists for 20th century music. I've never heard him in classical era music aside from one short piece of Beethoven in an older DG CD of his.
@@r.handerlie9607 Exactly! And the Resonanz is a very fine group specialized in contemporary music. They opted for using an “alternative score” of Beethoven’s PC4 “restored” by “advanced technology” and backed by “musicological studies”. It’s horrific.
And all this time I thought it was a noun version of “torpid”, which you have to admit also suits many of the awardees.
Yes, I use it both ways, incorrectly but I like it. The real noun is "torpor."
Me too. I thought the scarf was awarded for "TORPOR" (and it's archaic version "Torpitude"), ie: lazy, sluggish, flaccid,..."sloth-like torpor", as my boss used to say. I had no idea the term "Turpitude" (vile, depraved) existed; sounds more like paint remover.
@@HassoBenSoba "Moral turpitude" is frequently used in the sphere of law.
@@HassoBenSoba "Moral turpentine" even works :)
Well - David - You have said it. And I believe it ! - "Music Criticism IS Entertainment ! " :)
Someone's got to love them!! Not surprisingly Osborne chose the Thieleman/VPO Bruckner 4 as his recording of the year in Gramophone hahahaha.
Osborne is still alive?
@@DavesClassicalGuide Physically but not musically, I don't think he ever was.
@@richardwiley3676 😄
@@richardwiley3676 LOL!! Musically dead though.
To be fair, there have been a number of positive reviews of the performance.
I saw the filmed concert of Thielemann's Bruckner 4 with the Wiener Phil in the Basílica de la Sagrada Família. And my goodness, that man has the audacity to turn the 5 horns, 4 trumpets and 4 trombones of the VPO into a Mozartian brass section. To me, it is a rare talent to get the absolutely wonderful Vienna string and brass, then make them produce a chamber music volume
I'm not making any excuses for Thielemann, but I do think the failure to 'capture' the brass vividly had something to do with it having been recorded live at Salzburg. I've not been happy with recordings I've heard from that venue, even on good days.
Beethoven's symphonies have been performed by small ensembles that cut down the work for such an ensemble (piano duo or violin-cello-piano trio) for small locations to accommodate the lack of local talent and the size of some dining room. But one string player to a part with full complement of brass and winds? It must fail.
Nice. You might have sort of liked a performance of Prokofiev 5 I did with the U.C.S.F. Orchestra, outdoors in Foster City. We didn't have great strings, but we had a fairly solid group of enthusiastic percussionists. I brought my own 100cm Wuhan tam-tam - which looks just like yours! - and placed it near the front edge of the stage. For some reason, there wasn't enough space in back, but plenty of space up front. I think it had to do with the way the sound guy had set up his equipment, or something. We wanted to give the audience a visual treat too. Anyway, I had my big 'bomber' mallet, and gave it some pretty good 'wham's. The conductor took the end of the finale pretty fast, and we did a great job on it in the percussion. I covered the triangle in the coda. Your 'Black Scarf' award made me thing back on that performance. It was good fun.
UCSF has an orchestra? I thought it was a medical school!
@@jimcarlile7238 It was combination of UCSF and community people. It has since morphed into the Parnusses Symphony (Parnusses St. goes through the U.C.S.F. campus).
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Worth watching for the show.
LOL. Truly laugh-out-loud funny. Dave, you could absolutely be a stand-up comic if you wanted. I thoroughly enjoyed this. And I will definitely avoid these ... although ... I must admit I'm intrigued by the one-part-per-string-instrument Eroica... It sounds so absolutely dreadful.
I would think that after 200 years of Beethoven in the musical mainstream and 175 years for the 'newest' (really, latest) Beethoven works, the only imaginable new insight onto Beethoven would be period performance except perhaps for translating the Ode to Joy into some other language for those who do not want to hear it in German. Beethoven has been the musical mainstream from the time of premieres, so what worked in 1920 is still valid. Period performances must still be convincing on musical value, which means that bad playing or lifeless direction have no excuse in authenticity. The same would have to be said of a performance on electronic synthesizer or steel-drum orchestra.
What would Robert have said and Alan say about such EPONYMOUS awards?
I was hoping to see Petrenko's Mahler 7th... The good news (probably not) is that the awarded recordings are part of non-completed cycles, so there is more of this coming. By the way, why the horses? I've missed some of your Bruckner videos.
Ever seen Young Frankenstein?
Ho-ho! With popcorn and soda ... this is better than Christmas.
Siskel and Ebert used to have "Dogs of the WeeK" with an actual dog on hand. But since you have cats I guess it wouldn't work.
May I add one more item to the list? "Beethoven The AI Project" Another how not to do Beethoven recording.
Possibly when it's finished. Right now it's just a partly complete theoretical stupidity!
What do you think of the AI Beethoven 10th symphony?
Check out the video.
This reminds me of John Kennedy Toole’s “A confederacy of dunces”
I knew there would be a Thielemann recording in the ALDA group and you didn't let me down. I was hoping for your Large Ratchet at the end. Maybe next year?
Ha! I actually enjoyed BBC Music magazine's review of Schoonderwoerd's Eroica: "only refreshing if you like your masterpieces in X-ray form: the bone structure clear, flesh and personality missing. Nothing done buy these doughty musicians runs contrary to the scores' markings, but even when they muster a staccato attack the effect has all the frightening power of a chihuahua barking." And "Beethoven may have had to suffer modest forces at the symphony's premiere at Prince Lobkowitz's private concert hall. But did he really want it squeezed into something like chamber music? Listeners will, I'm sure, have their own answer to this question, one which Schoonderwoerd, plodding and myopic, never seems to have asked."
I found the liner notes for this abomination online, and Schoonderwoerd said that he had every part Beethoven wrote and whether you have 12 first violins or 17 first violins, you're not hearing Beethoven, you're hearing an interpretation. Implying of course that with him you're hearing Beethoven.
@@Don-md6wn , he hasn't convinced me.
What do you think of Currentzis‘ Mozart Requiem? Woul love to know!
Sorry, that's a topic for another day.
Funny thing is, albeit not your intention, you really make me very curious about the recordings you review here. There is some fascination in people allegedly doing stuff horribly the wrong way. I will forever disagree with you on F.X. Roth, whom I admire, but I love your outspokenness.
I see the notoriously hyped "AI Beethoven 10th" did not make the grade... was it late for the awards? On the other hand, can this be because AI smartphone lounge music with a taste of Beethoven just ought not to be considered among Classical music recordings? If that is the thinking, I can probably subscribe to it.
Asked and answered. Check the comments!
@@DavesClassicalGuide Fair, I did not read far enough. :) I did watch your original review of it, by the way. A strange thing (that "symphony", not the review).
All Prokofiev is difficult. Prokofiev, unlike Shostakovich, was quite indifferent to idiomatic instrumental writing. He has a knack for writing against the grain of instruments and for creating sonorities where you have to balance blaring sounds with notes given to instruments in their weakest range. I think there are so many poorly interpreted performances in part because all of the orchestra's and conductor's efforts are spent in just getting things to be in tune and blended.
That's certainly true, but there's still no excuse for mucking up the first movement coda.
Prokofiev 5 isn't technically difficult at all. Playing in tune is pretty basic stuff and no issue whatsoever for pro orchestras. The Oslo phil certainly wouldn't have had a problem. This CD is is just a badly thought out interpretation by a conductor who just didn't get it on the day. Maybe the orchestra didn't take to him. That can happen.
@@john1951w That's true too, but what Mark says about Prokofiev's instrumental writing is accurate, and reflects my own experience of it in several orchestras. It's basically piano music for everyone, and it can be very awkward.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Yes I agree. I have the same experiences of his music too. It is awkwardly written rather than difficult. Your piano music comment is spot on. Ditto Rachmaninov. Some passages (e.g. in the Symphonic Dances) are a piece of cake on the 2 piano original but a complete pig for the violins. String crossings are often a nightmare.
This was fabulous! When you "echted" profusely in your spot on description of Thielemann, I reflexively ducked from the screen; I was sure that actual spittle was about to burst forth from your epiglottal pyrotechnics.
Sheer unadulterated brilliance!
I would love to knit you a "Sweater of Swaggering Criticism" but it wouldn't be finished until a year from next Shavuot. Have a Happy New Year, Dave, and keep on keepin' us informed. 💗🎶
I had the same reaction to the ECHTs! So funny.
Thank God Beethoven didn't live to see/hear these recordings.
Although I'd be interested in Beethoven's opinion of Prokofiev 5 in general.
@@vdtv What a thought!
Very funny, but I think he should prove his death-sentences by playing some bars of the incriminated works.
Oh, how bad could the Cristofori Eroica be, I thought? REALLY REALLY BAD. Painful and embarrassing, a musical rectal exam indeed! Unbelievable. 😂
I don't suppose Petrenko's Myaskovsky was any good?
It was OK, but then I find it a pretty dull thing anyway.
Too bad i dont stream. I would like to hear some of these brutal recordings. That cristofori 3rd is just a bad idea.
I streamed 90 seconds before I turned it off
I would like to hear all these CD's just to see how bad they all.
The Thielemann Bruckner 4th always sincerely confused me from the very beginning. I believe it's a live recording of when Vienna went on tour with it to the Sangrada Familia, and Bruckner in cathedrals is almost always dodgy (save for Gunter Wand's recording of the 8th). On top of that, the most baffling about it is that they were on tour with Herbert Blomstedt who was going around giving great performances of it (see the one in the Concertgebouw here on CZcams). All of the sudden, he's gone and here comes Thielemann. I was personally very disappointed to see the conductor swap, especially because I'm a big Blomstedt fan.
It was actually recorded at the Salzburg Festival.
Thank you for an entertaining video. If one follows the Brucknerati argument that because Bruckner consented to the edited version of no 4, then presumably one could justify splitting Berlioz's 'Les Troyens' into two operas and performing them as separate operas. Berlioz agreed to it as it was the only chance he had of hearing any of the music, but it was with the utmost reluctance and something that helped embitter his final years.
The colored scarfs replace the jar of fluff/can of spam as my favorite Hurwitz props!
😄🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🎖️
You should have used the Notre Dame organ chamades from the Karajan Saint-Saens recording in lieu of the ratchet (in fact, the ratchet sounds almost identical!)
"Echtitude." That I must remember!
You have your conductors, and then you have your... insulators? The opposite of a conductor, doesn't transmit anything. The performances certainly are NOT electric! There has to be a good term for the OPPOSITE of a good musician.
Of course it's hard to disagree wih your assessments - some of these guys aren't even worth your time. "The triumph of musicolgy over music" - great line. Hut ab, Herr Hurwitz! (Beecham's definition: "A musicologist is someone who can read music, but can’t hear it".) As C. Kleiber might have said, these people may be conductors but they're not musicians. Nevertheless you're sailing a bit close to the wind there with that new T-shirt - scarf of irredeemable critical chutzpah, anyone? ;-) Anyway, looking forward to your next _positive_ video!
99% of them are positive.
There are lots of good or at least adequate editions of symphonic works edited for small ensembles, but they play with the elements of the work, like reimagining the orchestration for how it could work in small ensemble practice, which entails more than just demanding one instrument per part of the composer's score, which is just plain idiotic!
I was listening one of this versions from this video and it was very terrible i agree with alda for that.
Realy funny was joke about he think he is smarter than Bethoven 😆.
DGs "New Complete BEETHOVEN Essential (absolutely Essential!) Edition... is a "CONCATENATION of idocy!!!" 😂Words to live by, my friends; NEVER before has a more irrelevant, pretentious and "Dollar-Store-Esque" collection of atrocious performances been thrust upon an unexpecting public than THIS! I kid you not: My very first thought when I saw this gratuitous and superflous monstrocity (in person) was, "I didn't know DG made box-sets specifically for inciniration???... but that's ALL it's good for!" Mike D.
Ironically this video has me listening to all these recordings! That Beethoven Eroica is really fucking dreadful. I love a good musicological argument, but not when they forgot that music is also supposed to sound good. Did they not listen to it and realize it just sounds plain wrong?
Ah, but that does not matter. It sounds DIFFERENT. And different is good. It is good because it sells. Who cares about the actual music if the sales figures show a positive below the line? I can only hope reviews like David's will do their bit to fight this idiocy, but with the lunatics running the CM asylum I'm not holding my breath.
Thielemann is one of the most overyhyped and superbly marketed conductors of our era. Once you actually buy one of his cd's you are inevitably disappointed. He's not horrible--just terribly mediocre. To manage to make Bruckner boring is quite a feat since by their nature those symphonies are dramatic. The fact that 4 of the of the worst recordings of the year are beethovens and bruckners tell me that far too many conductors are way too eager to tackle the big guys of the canon just for the sake of saying that they recorded it. But what's the point if it's just another to put on the bargain bin of oblivion? The symphonies of Beethoven,Bruckner, Mahler shouldnt really be attempted until you actually have something to say and have accumulated a substantial amount of experience. Start off by mastering Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Brahms. Mastering the works of those composers will help you to sharpen your musicality and only then will you be ready for somehting more. In fact an entire lifetime can be dedicated to the study of Bach and Haydn.
"Bargain Bin of Oblivion" - I think that needs to be the title for another Hurwitz award of excoriation.
I think Thielemann has the same 'problem' as most conductors. He is very good at some stuff, and disappoints at other. He is magnificent in Wagner and Strauss. I don't know his Bruckners well enough to form an opinion on that. But I like his command of colors. He is allegedly a d***head to his orchestras, but hey, that's just the old-fashioned way, I guess.