Musical memories

The first pieces of classical music that I heard as a college freshman have really stuck with me. Be it Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy or, in this case, Brahms, I must have been super receptive to the music that was offered at the recitals at William & Mary.  In this case it was, again, Kathy Geralds playing a late Brahms Intermezzo. Recently I read an essay about Brahms that suggested he wrote best for short formats such as the piano pieces from Op. 10 as a young man through Op. 119, which he composed in 1893, just a few years before his death. I am the last one to say anything derogatory about his longer works , some of which are on my all-time-favorite list. However, the short pieces have a certain poetic intensity to them - each in its own way - that draw you in and have you singing or moving with them after a minute. And yet they are not simple. I've performed a few of them and heard most of the others played live.  The Op. 117, No. 2, is one which is particularly tricky...

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...

After two years of piano lessons with a nice old lady, I could read music and play pretty well, apparently, though I never practiced and eventually gave up at 10 because I enjoyed baseball, football and basketball better. Then in 1978 for Christmas I was given three books of Genesis sheet music and couldn't wait to get home every day and play the songs I loved so well. " Squonk " became my favorite piece and even my nickname among some friends. While I was at it, though, I would look through the piano bench for other music. I discovered Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata and played the first movement of that before I went off to college. At William and Mary I began lessons for a year with a man who started me over, so to speak, with the Bach Inventions and bits of Haydn sonatas (because I had books of those pieces already). He set me onto the Invention #8 in E Major "because it was jazzy". I guess I had played him some of my Genesis and he thought...

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...

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...