Bach's St. Matthew Passion by the Dresdner Kreuzchor

Sometimes, things are puzzling indeed. The Kreuzchor of Dresden, Saxony, Germany is one of Germany's most renowned boy choirs with a long tradition, especially in performing J. S. Bach's choral works. Given this background, this video of the first choir of the St. Matthew passion is really puzzling.

Bach's conception of two separate choirs, each with its own orchestra, is simply ignored by placing these two sound forces just next to eachother.

Furthermore, the character of this first movement, a mourning music, is unfortunately ruined by playing a healthy forte instead of a dark, somber piano.

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Franz Welser-Möst, a very special kind of a conductor

Recently, I came across a very impressive documentary film on Youtube about the Austrian star conductor Franz Welser-Möst. who became chief conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra in 2002, and who is now also appointed chief music director (Generalmusikdirektor) of the Vienna Opera. The main reason why this documentation is very impressive, is because Welser-Möst is a really special kind of character that is extremely rare among top-level conductors. His very unpretentious and natural working approach which definitely comes from his very humble and natural personality, is extremely exceptional in the top-level conducting league where there are usually more egoful and more or less eccentric maestros. Welser-Möst is totally different in this aspect, yet still his musical work is on a very high musical and professional level. The documentation itself is in English, Franz Welser-Möst talks in German though with subtitles.

But, see yourself:

Technorati Tags: conductor, documentation, Franz Welser-Moest, Franz Welser-Most, Franz Welser-Möst, video

Free orchestration courses online!

Just today, I found two very good interactive, free online courses on orchestration. The first one is basically an online version of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's famous book "Principles of Orchestration", enhanced with many valuable comments by the Canadian composer Prof. Alan Belkin, who is a renowned teacher at the Music faculty of the University of Montreal. Unfortunately, Rimsky-Korsakov only uses examples from his own scores, which leads to a somewhat narrow stylistic variety.

The second course by Prof. Belkin himself is called "Common problems in Orchestration", and consists mainly of excercises that address some common problems, that one often is confronted with, when dealing with orchestration.

Both courses contain interactive scores in Flash format that one can look at and listen to, and they are integrated into a forum where one can discuss issues about orchestration with other users, including Prof. Belkin himself. As a slight drawback, it is to mention, that all music examples are synthetic, recorded with the Garritan Personal Orchestra sound library. However, taking into account the high quality of this sound library, the sound examples are still acceptable and useful.