Why should a piece be 'envelope-pushing'? And in which way? This is modernist ideology, music as a common project by an 'avantgarde' who pushes the art 'forward', like science which developes progressively from discovery to discovery. But in art there is no 'progress', only accumulation of means. Has Mozart progressed beyond Bach? And Beethoven beyond Mozart? And has Mahler made all composers before him irrelevant? What is 'new' in music history is merely the personal character of individual music. The only standard is musical quality. Jeu de Cartes is a masterpiece, a brilliant kaleidoscope of reworked bits of traditional music, and in brilliant scoring. Abbado takes some tempi too fast, by the way - not necessary to make it sound THAT neurotic. The music is in itself already neurotic enough. The ending, for instance, sounds like a desperate scream - under the surface of joyful brilliance there is an abyss of existential angst.
All the paradox of the neoclassical period of Stravinski is here. Can we say we do not enjoy? But can we say also that we do not feel that we are walking in a deadlock?
The worst piece by a major composer of all time or just the century? As my teacher once said, "The same person who wrote _Les Noces_ and _Le Sacre_ wrote _Jeu de cartes_ -- the human being is unfathomable."
I agree with Andrew Petersen. With a conductor like Abbado, Jeu de Cartes comes alive and reminds me how much I enjoy this music. I have heard it many times and I still find it one of the most refreshing of scores!
@@Renee2004lr Certainly is a piece that makes me happy. So does Pucinella;) The feeling I get when I listen to Jeux is the same I have when I listen to Bernstein's Facsimile.. another infrequently performed gem.
@@Renee2004lr I adore Abbado. I think he's supremely underrated, I really do. _The New Yorker_ didn't even mention his passing; I'll never forgive Alex Ross for that. It took enormous courage to follow Karajan in Berlin, and if versatility alone is the paramount criterion for musicianship -- and I sometimes believe it is -- then he was the greatest conductor of his generation. Indeed, maybe it's his Olivier-like expertise that explains why critics seem to have classed him with that _deuxieme rang_ of conductors with ample professional skill but essentially no personality. That, he was not: the Lucerne Mahler performances should stand as exhibit A. But maybe his ability to take interpretation so far means that for a lot of the public he appears to disappear. One thing I'll never forget is a concert he did in Paris with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. It was all contemporary composers: with the exception of Nono and Schoenberg, they were all living: Sciarrino, Ligeti (still alive at the time), Donatoni, and a plenty interesting work by a young female composer that required headphones and clicktrack. The whole thing was completely absorbing, and the audience loved it -- that's saying a lot, because peeps often resist "challenging" repertoire. But the thing that I savor was the encore: they did a movement from a Haydn symphony, a minuet-trio, without a score; it really seemed impromptu, I have a feeling it was. That was one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. In fact, it was the first time I truly "got" Haydn. If someone can do that, _and_ conduct _Wozzeck_ *without a score* AND do what he did with Nono's _Canto Sospeso_ for DG -- AND sustain multiple full seasons and fulfill the wishes of Polygram (no Kleiber, he) -- I mean I don't get why more people don't praise him more. And I won't even try to describe his Beethoven V and VI at Carnegie a couple weeks after 9/11 (his last tour with Berlin) other than saying it was for me personally the most important event I've ever attended in my entire life. My teacher was not a dolt. He was a genius, and everybody who encountered the guy, including Abbado and Boulez, said so. He was a composer who completely eschewed fame (although Solti did devote an entire CSO program to a massive work he wrote, back in the 80s). He was very shy, and he was also modest. He basically lived the life of a monk; he did _nothing_ but read and listen to music. No family; no companion. He didn't even drive a car. He barely taught! He'd often cancel classes, etc. But everybody loved the guy. He once told me he'd never met anybody who knew more about music than he did. It wasn't a boast; it was just an observation. Then one day he did! He somehow found out about a Hungarian musicologist in Budapest (he was fluent in eleven languages, including Hungarian, which is next to impossible) who somebody said knew more about music than anybody alive, and he called the guy up, and somehow they decided that, yes, the Hungarian guy knew far more about music than my teacher, who was astounded and completely elated. "I was blown away," he told me. I'm writing this just to say that I didn't and don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by reporting what my teacher said about this piece. But I used to love neoclassical Stravinsky, too, and this teacher I'm describing challenged my perspective. He had devoted his entire life to this one pursuit, and his thoughts are worth consideration and respect. Music is serious. Maybe there's no "right" and "wrong" in the arts the way there is in science, but at the same time the humanities are more than a dumping ground for bogus sentimentality; the arts aren't the recycle bin for emotional experience -- the entirety of which, of course, we're supposed to simply deny in all other domains, i.e. science and commerce and politics (i.e. our society), and throw temper tantrums in the "arts and leisure" aisle, after which they give you a self-help manual. I came to appreciate the early Stravinsky even more after wondering about certain decisions Stravinsky made later on in his life -- decisions that people like Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, incidentally, did definitely _not_ make, and I started looking at their music in a different way, too. In other words, the incident reported in the most recent Stravinsky bio, where he breaks down in tears at the loss of his talent? Maybe it wasn't as simple as the "loss of talent."
![[Full Score] Stravinsky - Jeu de cartes (Card Game: A Ballet in Three Deals), K059](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/imtKYDpJkh8/mqdefault.jpg)
Everything the late Abbado touched turned to gold.
+Cantor Daniel Pincus No. It didn't. The orchestras are what turned the masterpieces into realized gold. Not the conductors.
It has to be either/or?
Nonsense. It takes one conductor + an orchestra to tango.
@@organboi That is arguable. Reiner produced amazing things with Chicago. Solti didn't come close.
This is actually early Abbado, recorded in 1975, but a wonderful performance nonetheless.
J’aime beaucoup . La musique de Stravinsky visait à dépasser ironiquement les contradictions de son époque dans laquelle il fut tant décrié.
London symphony orchestra 's a excellent recoring
It's perhaps not Stravinsky's most envelope-pushing piece but it is one of the most sublime examples of Laugh Out Loud Fun Music.
Why should a piece be 'envelope-pushing'? And in which way? This is modernist ideology, music as a common project by an 'avantgarde' who pushes the art 'forward', like science which developes progressively from discovery to discovery. But in art there is no 'progress', only accumulation of means. Has Mozart progressed beyond Bach? And Beethoven beyond Mozart? And has Mahler made all composers before him irrelevant? What is 'new' in music history is merely the personal character of individual music. The only standard is musical quality.
Jeu de Cartes is a masterpiece, a brilliant kaleidoscope of reworked bits of traditional music, and in brilliant scoring. Abbado takes some tempi too fast, by the way - not necessary to make it sound THAT neurotic. The music is in itself already neurotic enough. The ending, for instance, sounds like a desperate scream - under the surface of joyful brilliance there is an abyss of existential angst.
My Stravinsky favourit"...!!!
5:24 2nd mov
14:47 3rd mov
Thank you very much!!
very interesting that the recurring theme is essentially the fugue subject from verdi's falstaff.
You a can find also touches of the Barbiere di Seviglia.
Jeu de Cartes.. how can anything be so delicious and still not fattening?
Great comment.
All the paradox of the neoclassical period of Stravinski is here. Can we say we do not enjoy? But can we say also that we do not feel that we are walking in a deadlock?
I just hear a shitload of intense fun
Of course the fun is there. But I hear the "locked" part, too.
Maybe I'm lost in the eyes of others, I don't really mind! I just hear intense pleasure in this piece from the beginning to the end!
I don't think so. Neoclassical it's a very reductive word: there was no "classical" music written in such a style before Stravinsky.
@Steven Moore XX century music travelled different and parallel roads.
17:40 ORF Universum altes Intro
UNIVERSUM
aber welche Stelle? ich hör grad durch, im 2ten, oder?ah, 17:38 ~
Rossini e Mahler
The worst piece by a major composer of all time or just the century? As my teacher once said, "The same person who wrote _Les Noces_ and _Le Sacre_ wrote _Jeu de cartes_ -- the human being is unfathomable."
Your teacher was a dolt.
I agree with Andrew Petersen. With a conductor like Abbado, Jeu de Cartes comes alive and reminds me how much I enjoy this music. I have heard it many times and I still find it one of the most refreshing of scores!
@@Renee2004lr Certainly is a piece that makes me happy. So does Pucinella;) The feeling I get when I listen to Jeux is the same I have when I listen to Bernstein's Facsimile.. another infrequently performed gem.
Thanx for the ignorance...
@@Renee2004lr I adore Abbado. I think he's supremely underrated, I really do. _The New Yorker_ didn't even mention his passing; I'll never forgive Alex Ross for that. It took enormous courage to follow Karajan in Berlin, and if versatility alone is the paramount criterion for musicianship -- and I sometimes believe it is -- then he was the greatest conductor of his generation. Indeed, maybe it's his Olivier-like expertise that explains why critics seem to have classed him with that _deuxieme rang_ of conductors with ample professional skill but essentially no personality. That, he was not: the Lucerne Mahler performances should stand as exhibit A. But maybe his ability to take interpretation so far means that for a lot of the public he appears to disappear.
One thing I'll never forget is a concert he did in Paris with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. It was all contemporary composers: with the exception of Nono and Schoenberg, they were all living: Sciarrino, Ligeti (still alive at the time), Donatoni, and a plenty interesting work by a young female composer that required headphones and clicktrack. The whole thing was completely absorbing, and the audience loved it -- that's saying a lot, because peeps often resist "challenging" repertoire.
But the thing that I savor was the encore: they did a movement from a Haydn symphony, a minuet-trio, without a score; it really seemed impromptu, I have a feeling it was. That was one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. In fact, it was the first time I truly "got" Haydn.
If someone can do that, _and_ conduct _Wozzeck_ *without a score* AND do what he did with Nono's _Canto Sospeso_ for DG -- AND sustain multiple full seasons and fulfill the wishes of Polygram (no Kleiber, he) -- I mean I don't get why more people don't praise him more. And I won't even try to describe his Beethoven V and VI at Carnegie a couple weeks after 9/11 (his last tour with Berlin) other than saying it was for me personally the most important event I've ever attended in my entire life.
My teacher was not a dolt. He was a genius, and everybody who encountered the guy, including Abbado and Boulez, said so. He was a composer who completely eschewed fame (although Solti did devote an entire CSO program to a massive work he wrote, back in the 80s). He was very shy, and he was also modest. He basically lived the life of a monk; he did _nothing_ but read and listen to music. No family; no companion. He didn't even drive a car. He barely taught! He'd often cancel classes, etc. But everybody loved the guy.
He once told me he'd never met anybody who knew more about music than he did. It wasn't a boast; it was just an observation. Then one day he did! He somehow found out about a Hungarian musicologist in Budapest (he was fluent in eleven languages, including Hungarian, which is next to impossible) who somebody said knew more about music than anybody alive, and he called the guy up, and somehow they decided that, yes, the Hungarian guy knew far more about music than my teacher, who was astounded and completely elated. "I was blown away," he told me.
I'm writing this just to say that I didn't and don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by reporting what my teacher said about this piece. But I used to love neoclassical Stravinsky, too, and this teacher I'm describing challenged my perspective. He had devoted his entire life to this one pursuit, and his thoughts are worth consideration and respect. Music is serious. Maybe there's no "right" and "wrong" in the arts the way there is in science, but at the same time the humanities are more than a dumping ground for bogus sentimentality; the arts aren't the recycle bin for emotional experience -- the entirety of which, of course, we're supposed to simply deny in all other domains, i.e. science and commerce and politics (i.e. our society), and throw temper tantrums in the "arts and leisure" aisle, after which they give you a self-help manual. I came to appreciate the early Stravinsky even more after wondering about certain decisions Stravinsky made later on in his life -- decisions that people like Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, incidentally, did definitely _not_ make, and I started looking at their music in a different way, too. In other words, the incident reported in the most recent Stravinsky bio, where he breaks down in tears at the loss of his talent? Maybe it wasn't as simple as the "loss of talent."