Musical memories

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...