Rudolf Mauersberger composed his funeral motet Wie liegt die Stadt so wst (How lonely sits the city) to a text from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in Dresden after the terrible bombing of the city (photo above) on February 13-14th, 1945. The photo below shows the first performance of the motet. This was given in the ruins of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden, where Mauersberger was cantor, on August 4th, 1945 .  read more »

Listening: Ren Pape: Gods, Kings, and Demons (DG, out Nov. 11) Brahms, Symphony No. 1 and Schicksalslied; John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Rvolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir (SDG) Corigliano, Dylan Thomas Trilogy, with Thomas...

A.C. Douglas writes : " Every piece of stand-alone music traces out, from beginning to end, it's own perceptible, coherent musical narrative absent which what's written is gibberish, not music." I like telling stories; late at night, especially, I can hardly be held back. I even like the idea that music can tell stories, or at least, may have a compelling thread holding a whole work together in the musical read moral equivalent of a narrative. Some of these stories are explicitly composed into works and then either explained or kept private, others are imagined by players and listeners, often composers, players, and listeners imagine completely different narratives for the same work. But don't confuse narrative with coherence!  read more »

I love thinking about how music and poetry fit together in a piece of music, which is one of the things that attracted me to the early modern and baroque periodstheyre full of composers who were interested in figuring out how to interpret text through musical settings. Bach and Handel are probably the best known, of course; a few others that come immediately to mind are Claudio Monteverdi (his madrigals are exhilaratingtry Si, chio vorrei morire from Book IV; Heinrich Schutz, especially the Geistliche Chormusik , Op. 11; and Henry Purcells semi-operas.  read more »

It was a night spent in the basement of a burnt out building. People injured by the atomic bomb took shelter in this room, filling it. They passed the night in darkness, not even a single candle among them. The raw smell of blood, the stench of death. Body heat and the reek of sweat. Moaning. Miraculously, out of the darkness, a voice sounded: "The baby's coming!" In that basement room, in those lower reaches of hell, A young woman was now going into labor. What were they to do, Without even a single match to light the darkness?  read more »

Here's the complete list of Gramophone Award winners for 2008. There are several I'm pleased to see, but most of all Tasmin, whose Naked Violin project of course involved no record company, therefore has by nature to be independent of any industry pressure. The list I was sent does not include the labels of each disc, but these will no doubt be available on the Gramophone site as soon as they have all recovered from their hangovers. Baroque Instrumental Bach Brandenburg Concertos EBS/Trevor Pinnock Baroque Vocal Monteverdi l'Orfeo La Venexiana Chamber Brahms. Schumann Piano Quintets Artemis Quartet, Andsnes Concerto Elgar Violin Concertos etc. James Ehnes; Philharmonia/Sir Andrew Davis Contemporary Harvey Body Mandala BBC Scottish SO DVD Mozart Le Nozze di Figaro Pappano/dir.  read more »