Blog from Kanada

One of my hobbies is to listen music (derived from European classical music), especially modern and contemporary music. This category and this category in the Japanese version of my blog contains topics on CDs and videos of such music. The upper category is Art, Event and Entertainment.

BTW, as shown on the top of the category page, the submission date of this page is intentionally set 0001-01-01 00:00:00. However, the actual submission date is 2009-01-18 12:50:37.

To keep the page light, I exclude photos in individual pages from the archive page. Instead, I inserted some of them here.

The Schönberg Center in Austria uploaded tens of performance videos of Arnold Schönberg's music and documentary videos to YouTube. Most of the music performances are fragments, but some short pieces are completely included in the videos. "A Survivor from Warsaw" conducted by Holst Stein and "talked" by Herman Prei (by sprech-gesang) is a valuable video to be listened. Not only the performance but also the recording and the images are good.

The Schönberg Center in Austria uploaded fragments of Arnold Schönberg's piano concerto performed by Mitsuko Uchida and a mixture of her talk and performance of the concerto to YouTube. I did not know Uchida had played Schönberg's concerto, but now I know there is a CD (Universal, UCCP1016). The talk is in English and I have not yet understood whole, but I could know how Uchida grasped Schönberg's music, and I was very interested.

I happened to look at a page in YouTube, and wrote a comment. The video is on Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto played by Sayaka Shoji.

This video shows the facial expressions of the violinist very well. She shows both her emotion and technical issues. She seems to synchronize her performance with the orchestra by looking at the conductor (and probably by communicating with him). It is difficult to see such expressions in concerts.