Musical memories

What a piece! A real handful for the pianist and an earful for the listener. I took a cheap cassette featuring the pianist Homero Frankesch to Münster, Germany, with me for my year abroad and must have listened to it 200 times in those nine months. When he actually came to that city to play that piece, I went both nights. The first night I bought a student ticket. The second night I went in after the intermission and heard it again. During the first movement he got flustered and blundered through several measures before landing on his feet again. That show of humanness impressed upon me how hard the piece must be. The second night he played it beautifully. As with any piece of classical music, there is a huge difference in the listening experience, depending on the acoustics - can you compare listening to a bad recording on a Walkman to the thrill of a live performance in a concert hall? The notes are all there, but I learned that I had a hard time hearing and feeling them all unless

Right now I'm listening to Jessye Norman singing " Beim Schlafengehen " and still cannot believe there is such a beautiful thing on this earth! It is so wondrous that everything and everyone else must be made a bit better by it. I first listened to this recording 25 years ago and didn't understand it, much less appreciate it. In 1987 I ran across the sheet music in an antique store in Mittenwald, where I could easily imagine Strauss himself had left it before going to dinner before performing his music for the guests in that town. But I'm digressing, something I find quite easy to do here on this blog. I first came to appreciate "Beim Schlafengehen" while listening to the cycle with Elisabeth, a quite mystically gifted person I got to know while teaching at the Goethe Institut. She was telling me about a former boyfriend on the Canary Islands who had passed away but whose presence was still with her and which entered the room as we listened to the Swiss

If there is one piece of music that can calm my nerves, it is this symphony by the Polish composer who died in November 2010. I first heard the piece on a drive from Freiburg out to Umkirch to teach an adult education English class. The disc jockey of the classical radio station said the symphony had become a hit on the British pop charts recently. This was 1992 and the techno scene was in bad need of chill music. When the new recording of this work landed in the studios of the BBC and the DJ played the shortest of the three movements (26 - 9 - 17 minutes), the phones started ringing. By the end of 1993, the record had sold 600,000 copies. When I first heard this second movement, I thought it was very nice, but the story was for me even more interesting. A classical piece becoming popular? Bring it on! Three slow movements make up this Symphony. The first one starts off so softly that you always want to check to see if the disc is spinning, or you turn it up, only to feel the double-ba

OK, let's get a bit rougher here. Shostakovich's piano music takes a back seat to his work for orchestra and even for string quartet, though he himself was a tremendous pianist and wrote quite a lot of music for his instrument. He felt he could say more by using a larger variety of instruments. I'll have to agree with Dmitri there. The year was 1984. I had just graduated from college with a German degree and wanted to get back to the old continent to enjoy long breakfasts with friends, have coffee and cake in the afternoons and go to concerts at night, all the while officially looking for a job in "international business". - whatever that might have meant. So I spent eight months back and forth between my old friends in Münster and my sister and new friends in Vienna. While in Münster I went back to the foreign students' office and visited the animated secretary, Frau Droste zu Senden, who let me sign up for a week-long DAAD bus trip to Berlin, which was the