Musical memories

The autograph of the first page of Op. 109 I'll never forget hearing Kathy Geralds, then a senior at William & Mary, play the first movement of this sonata at a noon recital at the beginning of my freshman year. Immediately afterwards, I was telling an upperclassman about how thrilling I found the sonata and when he asked which one she had played, I said, "Beethoven's 109th Sonata." He quickly clarified the difference for me between opus number and sonata number. It's a shame, though, that Ludwig didn't write 109 of them - this 250th jubilee year would have to last two years to fit them all in, but I think we've already had enough of 2020.  There's the playful first movement that refuses to allow the casual listener to comprehend it, contrasted by the short in-your-face second movement that only the greatest masters can perform transparently, and the ethereal, heavenly last movement of variations - something for everyone! Luckily, this piece is per...

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! ...

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...

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...