Musical memories

Had I penned this post Friday afternoon, as I had planned, it would have smacked of anxiety, tension, reticence, insecurity and disappointment. I would have used the words "harter Brocken" to refer to Brahms' German Requiem . Until last night's rehearsal I had perceived it as a Sisyphean boulder, a monumental work that I just wasn't able to get my head around - much less my voice - and so I feared my ineptitude would perhaps endanger our performance on Sunday afternoon. It is indeed a monumental work, being the longest opus Brahms ever composed and, as far as popular choral works are concerned, I would guess it is one of the most demanding for the choir. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but for a chorister to stand and sing for 80 minutes without a break takes more fortitude than I attributed to myself. I can't speak for the others, but simply sitting and concentrating on a piece of music for 80 minutes (without any breaks to look at your phone, take a dr

The stars aligned, the universe decided to play along and I ended up hitting a double a few weeks ago. At the Untertürkheimer Kulturtreff , a charming little venue for intimate performances, a local piano teacher was going to present music and musings from 40 years of piano lessons. That sounded like just what I wanted to hear. I figured everyone else in the hall probably knew him, so when I sat down, I asked the woman next to me if she was a pianist. "I'm the tuner of the piano," she replied. Even better, I thought! We chatted for quite a while, and I finally had the opportunity to ask a tuner the questions I had always wanted to ask about my instrument and about the way former tuners had worked on it. When someone is tuning my Blüthner grand piano, I feel they want to tune and not talk, so I let them go about their work. She admitted that she was no expert on the Blüthner mechanics, but she knew someone who is. He is retired; he did his master exam with her father!

Two years ago while I was attending the choir and symphony rehearsals for Christoph Eschenbach 's performance of Mahler's Second Symphony with the SWR Symphony Orchestra, I thought to myself: If I could ever sing in the choir for this piece, a dream will have come true.  At the time, however, I was not singing in any choir. Now that I've been singing in the Untertürkheimer Kantorei for half a year, I realize that the experience would potentially be even richer than I had imagined. Back then I was thinking I would enjoy all the rehearsal time listening to the great music. Although I get a lot of joy from playing the piano, most of my musical enjoyment comes from listening to others make music. Little did I know how much joy singing in a group could make me. My father was the chaplain where I went to high school. At the end of each weekly service (for five of my most formative years) we sang " Oh God our help in ages past ". But he was up at the front of the ch

Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues,  Op. 87 I'm going to start writing about some of my favorite music and what it means to me, so watch out! Right now I'm listening to a copy of the 24 Preludes and Fugues by Dimitri Shots-of-kovich as played by the Russian pianist for whom he wrote them in 1950 after her Bach interpretation stunned the composer as he sat in the jury of the Leipzig Bach Piano Competition. He composed these marvelous pieces within four months, becoming more and more enthralled with the idea and the genre as he went. My history with the pieces: A girlfriend in college played piano really well, stunning me again and again with the cadenza from Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto whenever we'd go over to the music building together. Her sister played some of the Preludes and Fugues, which was about as much of a recommendation as I needed to pick up the sheet music a few years later. You see, I approach music through people. And so these blog post

The joy I experienced while singing Schubert this morning was a long time coming. My memories of Schubert stretch from Stuttgart to my college days in Williamsburg and back again. Schubert's G-Major Mass with the Untertürkheimer Kantorei at the Wallmerkirche My first introduction to Franz Schubert's vocal music was through the recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I had probably first read about him in the Guinness Book of World Records, he being the recording artist (in 1980) with the most LPs on the market. In addition, our music library at William & Mary had a good number of his recordings and I found them very interesting. After failing my audition for the college choir the first week at college - and rightly so because I couldn't sing in tune - I began taking voice lessons. My elder sister sang in the renowned choir there and thought I would also enjoy singing. Our father sang Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, so she probably thought it was in our g

There are more recordings (at least 15) of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in my CD collection than of any other single work (even his Second Symphony !). I've often asked myself why that is. I'm going to try to figure it out now. The first recording of it that I heard was an LP with Richard Lewis and  Maureen Forrester . I remember not understanding the liner notes: How did Mahler take a German translation of Chinese poems and then change them to fit his purposes? Why did he do that? The pieces don't have much in the way of Chinese tonalities, and the texts fit into the dark Romantic German landscape as well as Caspar David Friedrich's paintings .  The lines that stuck with me after the first few hearings were "Dunkel ist das Leben, dunkel ist der Tod" and "...ein Aff' ist's" and, of course, the final "...ewig, ewig...". I was into Nietzsche and Hesse at that point in my life - as is the wont of many 20 year-olds - a

Last night ( Jan. 19, 2019 ) Arcadi Volodos did not play Scriabin’s Fifth Piano Sonata as he had announced and as I had so desperately hoped. Instead, he finished the regular program with Vers la flamme , which is also a piece filled with passion and quite an orgasmic ending, but still…it doesn't have this poem accompanying it: ''I call you to life, O mysterious forces! Drowned in the obscure depths Of the creative spirit, timid Shadows of life, to you I bring daring.'' I first heard the Fifth in the summer of 1989. Scriabin was unknown to me until I attended the William Kapell Piano Competition in Maryland and heard several of the contestants play it. The eventual winner, Haesun Paik , played it in each of the three rounds. It is not every day that I fall in love with a piece of music after hearing it a half-dozen times, but this was an exception. I even drove up to New York to hear her play it in Avery Fisher Hall and then took a road trip to Chattanoog