Of course, you know and love Beethoven’s Ninth (who doesn’t?) You may want to listen to it as performed by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal when they inaugurated the Maison symphonique de Montréal in September or could try something a little different, for example the project 9 Beet Stretch, the brainchild of artistLeif Inge. Here, a recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth doesn’t last a little over an hour but 24 hours, without pitch distortion. It gives the work a somewhat eerie quality at first but then a profond sensation of calmness emerges.

Click on Ludwig’s face to start your podcast of this new reading of the work.

The line is thin but impossible to cross between classical music and pop, right? Crossover is bad for you, will scream the purists, while some performers don’t hesitate to use it as a way to put butter on their toast day in and day out. Composer Giovanni Dettori – who shares quite a few interesting pointers on counterpoint on Youtube – has decided that he didn’t care about such categorisations and wrioe a fugue, academic perhaps but far from boring, on the Lady Gaga hit Bad Romance.

You can even download the score here,  for those eager to try their hand at it this weekend. I might be able to trick a couple of my advanced students to reconnect with Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier after that one…

I admit to a somewhat guilty pleasure: I just love reading bad reviews… or rather very non clairvoyant ones, when the critic who is listening to the premiere of a work just misses the fact that, maybe, this could become part of the standard repertoire in, say, a few decades or so.

Several of those were printed after various journalists heard Scriabin’s Prometheus, a somewhat exalted piece, I grant you, but very intriguing, overwhelming and quite beautiful, especially since Scriabin transformed it in something between a symphony with piano or a concerto more prone to dialogue than combat. Alain Lefèvre will give a rare performance with the OSM on Sunday. Here are a few “gems”.

“If cacophonous discordance and noise which irritates the ear reflects the music of the antediluvian days, then Scriabin’s Prometheus describes most succesfully the chaos of those days… It may be true that the Russian composer is too far advanced for the presenet generation and that his doctrine and music will be accepted in years to come, but as the writer is not a reader of the future, the work is condemned for the present.” (Musical Courier, New York, March 10, 1915)

“Scriabin’s Prometheus is the product of a once fine composer suffering from mental derangement, and Schoenberg’s lucubrations are simply nothing at all. You cannot expect either a journalist or his public to see any difference between a lunatic and an idiot.” (Frederick Corder, “On the Cult of Wrong Notes”, in Musical Quaterly, July 1915)

“As a kind of drug, no doubt Scriabin’s music has a certain significance, but it is wholly superfluous. We already have cocaine, morphine, hashish, heroin, anhalonium, and innumerable similar productions, to say nothing of alcohol. Surely that is enough. On the other hand, we have only one music. Why must we degrade an art into a spiritual narcotic? Why is it more artistic tu use eight horns and five trimpets than to use eight brandies and five double whiskies?” (Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music, London, 1924)

October 31, Halloween night. What will you listen to today to get into the spirit of this ghoulish day? Several composers have written works inspired by horror, including Mussorgsky and his Night on Bald Mountain (1867), Charles Ives and Hallowe’en (1906), Iannis Xenakis and Nuits (1967) or John Corigliano who wrote Hallucinations in 1981. Krzystov Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1959) remains a particularly dense work. “Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost,” said the composer. George Crumb’s Dark Angels, written in the midst of the Vietnam War aims to be a musical representation of the struggle between good and evil, while Musica Ricercata (II) by Gyôrgy Ligeti, used a few years back in the movie Eyes Wide Shut, successfully instill anguish through the use of a minor second.

In a register more atmospheric than terrifying, you can also listen to Sympathy for a Devil Painted in Black, in a version for string orchestra, as performed by Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà.