Musical memories

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...