old stuff
Claude Debussy, Children’s Corner, 1908
Alfred Cortot (piano), Marcel L’Herbier (director), 1936
*****
Children’s Corner was written for Debussy’s three-year-old daughter, Claude-Emma (nicknamed ‘Chou-Chou’ [AKA Chouchou]) and bears the following dedication: ‘to my dear Chou-Chou, with the tender apologies of her father for what is to follow.’
—All Music Guide to Classical Music (2005)
*****
Claude & Chouchou
picnicking in a pine forest near Archachon, 1915
Imagine what it would’ve been like to sit in the late afternoon with a cup of tea, listening to him, in the next room, practicing.
Dinu Lipatti (1917-1950), piano
Mozart, Sonata No. 8 in A Minor, K. 310,
Recorded live in Besancon, France, 9/16/1950
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lagniappe
As the date of his appearance in Besançon approached, Lipatti was becoming more and more ill [Hodgkin’s lymphoma]; nevertheless, in the days before the recital he wrote to his teacher Florica Musicescu and also to Paul Sacher that his health was fine. The morning of his performance, he practiced on the Gaveau piano in the Salle du Parliament without any problems. That afternoon, however, he developed a strong fever, and his doctor begged him to cancel; Lipatti did not want to consider this but admitted that he didn’t think he could perform. The organizer of the recital was contacted by telephone, and when he stated that the hall was already full, Lipatti made the decision to play. After some injections, he walked robot-like to the car that transported him to the hall. He took each step deliberately, with such difficulty that he decided that he would not leave the stage between pieces. The Radiodiffusion Française cancelled the live transmission of the recital, fearing the worst, but recorded the performance for future broadcast.
The hall was packed, with additional seating behind the piano . . . The concentration of both the artist and the audience members is palpable in both the photographs and the recording of the recital, with enthusiastic applause greeting each work.
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Despite other planned concerts later in September and in October, Lipatti did not give another public performance.
If I knew I had a week to live (as someday I will, whether I know it or not), this is one of the things I’d want to hear.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Chaconne in D minor for solo violin (Partita for Violin No. 2 [BWV 1004]); Isaac Stern (violin), live
Another take?
Here (Nathan Milstein).
And here (Gidon Kremer).
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.
—Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann (translated from German)
Not even with all the fingers on all the hands of all the people in the city of Chicago could you count the possibilities offered by just three instruments.
Gyorgy Ligeti, Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982); Tomas Major (violin), Zora Sloka (horn), Denes Varjon (piano), 2009
Part 1
***
Part 2
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lagniappe
art beat: Sunday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit, 1955
This guy’s a rare bird. Long a respected concert pianist, he’s also become a notable writer, appearing recently in the New Yorker and the New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Jeremy Denk, piano
Charles Ives, Concord Sonata (excerpt [“The Alcotts”])
Live, New York, 2012
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lagniappe
reading table
My Ives addiction started one summer at music camp, at Mount Holyoke College. I was twenty and learning his Piano Trio. There’s an astounding moment in the Trio where the pianist goes off into a blur of sweet and sour notes around a B-flat-major chord. I knew the moment was important, but I wondered, was my sound too vague or too clear? (A recurring interpretative problem in Ives is discovering the ideal amount of muddle.) I was also puzzled about where this phrase was going. I’d been taught that phrases were supposed to go somewhere, yet this musical moment seemed serenely determined to wander nowhere.
—Jeremy Denk, “Flight of the Concord,” New Yorker, 2/6/12
*****
yesterday
After posting the Peter Brötzmann clip and the AOL headlines, I drove a hundred miles to see a client serving a life sentence at the Pontiac Correctional Center, then stopped at a nearby restaurant for a mid-afternoon lunch, where I overheard the cook ask a patron: “Did you see where that guy was killed by a swan?”
The keyboard is the stage on which the fingers dance.
Sviatoslav Richter, piano
TV performance (CBC, Toronto),* 1964
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lagniappe
reading table
even grass and vines
don’t part willingly . . .
lantern for the dead—Kobayashi Issa, 1822 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
*****
*Johannes Brahms, Intermezzo in E Minor, Op. 116, No. 5
Sergei Prokofiev, Sonata No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 14
Maurice Ravel, Jeux d’eau, Alborada del gracioso
He plays Bach as if, at that moment, nothing in the world is more crucial.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Glenn Gould, piano*
TV performance, 1981
*****
*Here, courtesy of YouTube, is the program:
00:21 Die Kunst der Fuge BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I
Partita n.4 in D-dur BWV 828
05:11 I Ouverture
10:06 II Allemande
15:45 III Courante
18:52 IV Aria
20:07 V Sarabande
25:21 VI Menuett
26:41 VII Gigue
From “Wohltemperierten Klavier”:
28:10 Fuge in E-dur (II)
33:17 Fuge in Es-moll (II)
36:16 Praeludium & Fuge in A-dur (II)
38:52 Die Kunst der Fuge BVW 1080: Contrapunctus IV
(Some of this has been posted before, but not all of it and not in one continuous clip.)
What better experience for playing with the Velvet Underground, whose mentor, Andy Warhol, once observed “the channels switch, but it’s all television,” than to appear on I’ve Got a Secret?
I’ve Got a Secret (Garry Moore, host; John Cale, guest), 1963
The piece he plays at the end, Vexations, was composed in the early 1890s by Erik Satie.
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lagniappe
MCOTD’s granddog, and muse, Roscoe
Music doesn’t care who you are, where you come from, what you know. It asks only that you pay attention.
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), Piece in Three Parts for Piano and Sixteen Instruments (1961), Peter Serkin (piano), Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Oliver Knussen, cond.)
More? Here.
John Cage, Two (1987)
Live, Netherlands (Amsterdam), 2009
Dante Boon (piano), Rutger van Otterloo (soprano saxophone)
*****
Recording, 1991 (hat Art)
Marianne Schroeder (piano), Eberhard Blum (flute)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Every something is an echo of nothing.
—John Cage, Silence (1961)
music clip of the day 