Musical memories

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...