Sha-La-La-La-Lee, etc.

What we have here is a three-track "Maxi-Single" issued in 1977 including the third, first and fifth of the Small Faces' A-sides: 'Sha-La-La-La-Lee', 'What'cha Gonna Do About It' and 'All Or Nothing'. I'm far from the biggest Faces fan, but knew and liked the songs and thought it worth the outlay of a pound to give them another hearing.

The label bears a few words that might strike fear into a purist's heart: "Electronically Re-processed Stereo" (though this only applies to 'What'cha Gonna Do About It'). To this casual listener's ears, however, it all sounds excellent: no-one involved in the recording, mastering or pressing can have put a foot wrong, and these songs practically jump off the disc, very much alive.

'All Or Nothing', in particular, here relegated to the B-side, sounds outstandingly good. Wikipedia tells me: "according to Kay Marriott, Steve's mother, Steve wrote this song about his split with ex-fiancée Sue Oliver, though first wife Jenny Rylance states that Marriott told her he wrote the song for her as a result of her split with Rod Stewart. Both statements are said to be correct."

A note to the imaginary reader: up to this point, all entries on this blog have been "randomly" selected, as per the strapline, courtesy of the Discogs "Random Item" link. I have done some steering, inasmuch as rejecting choices that would duplicate mention of artists/composers already discussed, with a little subsequent sorting of the choices to maximize variety. The random items are now turning up duplicates annoyingly too often, so for the remainder of this blog's short life I'll be providing the "randomness" myself.

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Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

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