So unsurprisingly I was too late to get tickets for the Barenboim Beethoven Series at the RFH. But in trying I found the website, which has some really nice clips on it. If you wait until it crawls from under the strain of what must be a million people doing what I just did and traipsing through the booking system to no avail (it's super slow right now, but worth a visit later). That is.
And here are those tiny hands in action in this little gem of a clip. Daniel Barenboim playing Chopin's Waltz in E Op Posthumous. (I'm realising good classical Youtube clips are all about searching for the artist rather than the composer, btw.)
Nice
article in the Independent Arts & Books Review last Friday about Daniel
Barenboim. I wanted to make note of
couple of things there.
That its 'a
matter of lifelong regret that he can't produce the stretch to play Bartok's
second piano concerto', one of his favourite works. I don't think I know it. I always thought it a prerequisite to have
big hands to play the piano, but apparently his are tiny.
That he's
coming to London's RFH later this month (which I probably won't be lucky to get
tickets for but am going to look into - I realised I'd never been to a proper,
big classical concert since I've been in London).
The notion
that the decision not to play Wagner had artistically harmed the Israeli
Philarmonic. That an ignorance of one
composer - if she's significant enough presumably) - is diagnosis enough for an
ignorance of the rest. This is the first
time I'd really thought of a very freedom-of-speech style tenet applied to music.
Talking
about Beethoven, his 'struggle to change, to simplify. If you look at his sketchbooks you see how he
struggled to simplify his ideas, which usually came to him in a form which was
too complex for his own taste and judgement. All his work moves from being complicated to being simple, to being more
concise.'
And about
the way classical music has been divorced from the other arts; the idea of
'professionalised listeners'. 'Fewer
people had access to [classical music] in the 19th century, but those who did
connected it instinctively with all the other arts. Now you get people who know every note of
Schumann but haven't read a word of Heine, and literary people who have read
every word of Heine and know nothing of Schumann. Music has been taken out of its place in the
totality of culture.' All of which makes
me feel bad because I haven't read a word of Heine and neither is my Schumann
brilliant, but hey. That's what this
here blog's for.
My blogs don't usually cross over, but this is one good reason for them to. Nike's perfect choice of Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem in their new Nike Air Jordan spot. You can watch it here.
Via Alex Ross.
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