Musical memories

What's a musician to do in times such as these? We aren't allowed to meet as a choir and sing. Even if we could, half the elderly choir members would not attend the rehearsals because they are at-risk. To be honest, nor do I relish the idea of sitting in a room with 60 others for two hours. And yet the cinemas are back in operation in Germany. Concert halls are opening their doors again, spacing out the listeners, rationing the tickets and making the live concert sensation no longer quite as sensational. You can no longer sense the excitement from those around you. You might as well sit at home and listen to a CD. But I have been getting together with small groups of musicians, playing the violin and singing. And I've been practicing, of course, and making occasional videos of my progress over the past six months. However, the highlight for me was playing the violin in Mahler's woods near his composing hut in Maiernegg, Austria, on the Wörthersee. During my two weeks th...

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...

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...

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...

There are few other pieces of music which move me as much as Mahler's Second Symphony does. I imagine I first heard it at the end of 1983 after Tom Field introduced me to Mahler in preparation for a recital given by Maureen Forrester at our college. But I don't remember really falling in love with the piece until the following year when I was in Europe. I had bought a tape of Bruno Walter's recording with the N.Y. Philharmonic and listened to it hundreds of times throughout 1984-85. The first time I heard it live was in summer 1986. My Austrian girlfriend was visiting me that summer, while I was living at a friend's apartment near DC and working with my college roommate in his record stores in Northern Virginia. I somehow found out that Maureen Forrester would be singing the alto solo part with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at the Riverbend Music Center on the Ohio River, a good 10 hours from DC. My old VW Rabbit was on its last legs, so if I was going to make it o...