Brahms Through Schiff & Solti

Brahms Through Schiff & Solti

Now it's Schiff with Solti playing the Brahms D minor via Rdio. Georg really slowing down the 2nd theme. Gould was right that his infamous "slow" version committed no particular tempo sin except essentially keeping it intact. Of course it would be easy to make this observation (aural equivalent) every time I hear this concerto, but I can't think of anyone off the top if my head who really subverts it; who takes, for example, the opening theme at a breakneck and then really slows it down, or completely genuflects at the piano's entrance. I'll have to do some listening.

Back in 1963 a wonderful book of music was published: New Music for the Piano, and it covered a tremendous variety of mid-century composers. I first came across, not the book, the recording of all the pieces in the book by the indefatigable champion of living composers: Robert Helps. I found it in my local public library at some point in the 1960s when I was a boy. I checked it out, took it home, played it over and over. I was especially taken by Leo Kraft’s Allegro Giocoso and Ernst Bacon’s The Pig-Town Fling. I’ve since come to love not only those but many other pieces in the book. I ordered the score through a local music store way back then (it took weeks and weeks to arrive) and tried to learn the pieces, though they were a bit too much for my tiny technique of the time. I've since found many, many other wonderful miniatures in this book. I lost my original copy, I do not know how, and the book seems to be out of print. However, of all places, B+N stocked it and at the original price! So here it is back in my paws. Wonderful.

Fred Hersch is a beautiful player. This is an interesting and well-written expo of his recent tribulations, which I very much wish he hadn't had to go through.

Thanks to @concertmarvel for bringing this to my attention.

In Short: Splash

In short, I think the division of music into good and bad, even perhaps more shockingly into what one likes and what one doesn't like, is a bit of an ass puddle. This isn't to say you cannot or should not have an opinion if you like. Have any opinion you will. But opinions too are a bit of an ass puddle. Wouldn't it be a classic to find something a little more substantial to set one's foot to? These puddles, after all, dry up and blow away so soon, so soon. You didn't like that yesterday, today you might. It changed your life, now you could as like to flush it. I'm not even sure there is a proper way around these matters. Music is a special case. We'll have to speak more about why.

In piano playing, I do not want to hear (or rather, I do not need to hear) an "ideal" performance however I might define it for myself. What I need is to hear the mind and the making of another, someone of wonder and intelligence and beauty telling me something delightful, painful, astonishing, banal, etc, but not trivial, or trite, or pretentious (except in certain circumstances I cannot quite define), or easy. In this performance by my long-loved Alexis Weissenberg of Schumann, I hear an Arabesque I have not heard before. Is it how I would play it? Is it how I should like to play it? Those are not the right questions.

I like the player Balazs Szokolay very much. He gives quite the spirited reading of Bartok's Mikrokosmos. Of course what else are you going to do with it? Here is Vol. 6, No. 146, Ostinato: Vivacissimo.