With the greatest artists, even the most familiar pieces sound as if you were hearing them for the first time.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 14 in C# minor, Op. 27, No. 2 (“Moonlight”), 1801/Artur Schnabel, piano, 1933
1st & 2nd Movements
*****
3rd Movement
**********
lagniappe
The magnitude of his [Schnabel’s] creative accomplishments left technical considerations far behind. His Beethoven had incomparable style, intellectual strength, and phrasing of aristocratic purity. The important thing was that even when his fingers failed him, his mind never did. Schnabel was always able to make his playing interesting. A mind came through—a logical, stimulating, sensitive mind. And when Schnabel had his fingers under control, which was more often than not in his literature of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, he took his listeners to an exalted level. . . . There were no tricks, no excesses; just brain, heart and fingers working together with supreme knowledge.—Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Pianists (1963)
At the risk of repeating myself, the Matisse exhibit at Chicago’s Art Institute closes Sunday (then opens next month at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). How many other opportunities will you have to see this stuff?
Henri Matisse:
Seek the strongest color effect possible . . . the content is of no importance.
***
After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.
If you want to stay right where you are, don’t even bother with this clip. But if, instead, you’d like to go somewhere you may never have been before, well, this might be just the ticket.
Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006), Three Etudes, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
**********
lagniappe
I listen to all kinds of music—new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
—Gyorgy Ligeti (whose influences included not only the usual suspects [Chopin, Debussy, et al.] but also Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans and the Rainforest Pygmies and fractal geometry)
Suppose you could listen to only one for the rest of your life.
Which would you choose?
Tristan Murail (1947-), “L’Espirit de Dunes” (1993-94)/Bent Frequency, Robert Ambrose conducting; live, Georgia (Morrow), 2006
Part 1
*****
Part 2
**********
lagniappe
Our conception of music is held prisoner by our education. All has been cut into slices, put into categories, classified, limited. There is a conceptual error from the very beginning: the composer does not work with 12 notes, x rhythmic figures, x dynamic markings, all infinitely permutable–he works with sound and timbre. Sound has been confused with its representations . . .
I’ve posted other clips that were subsequently removed by YouTube. But this is the first time where I’ve posted something that was removed the very same day.
Oh, well—more tomorrow.
**********
When the tempo is perfect, the music unfolds in what seems to be the only way it could. “Fast” and “slow” lose their meaning. Time disappears.
Frederic Chopin, 24 Preludes for Solo Piano, Op. 28/Friedrich Gulda, piano
I was about 16 when I had an experience that I recollect in nearly Proustian detail, listening for the first time to the String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131. I was sitting in a friend’s living room when her father put a recording of it on the hi-fi. I remember everything about those three-quarters of an hour back in 1961 or ’62: the room in which I was sitting and the direction in which I was facing; the single, exposed Bozak speaker vibrating like an exotic organism in the unfinished wooden box that Mr. L. had built to contain it; the quickly dawning realization that the first movement was the most overwhelming piece of music I had ever heard—a feeling that comes back to me whenever I listen to it, in real sound or mentally, as at this moment; and I remember (but this memory comes also from countless later listenings) the mysterious, throbbing sound of the first violin’s statement of the opening subject in that recording, made by the Budapest Quartet in the early 1950s.
***
I am now several years older than Beethoven lived to be. I still think of him as my alpha and omega, but in a different sense: as the author of music that transformed my existence at the onset of adulthood and that continues to enrich it more than any other music as I approach what are often referred to as life’s declining years. His music still gives me as much sensual and emotional pleasure as it gave me 50 years ago, and far more intellectual stimulation than it did then. It adds to the fullness when life feels good, and it lengthens and deepens the perspective when life seems barely tolerable. It is with me and in me. A thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 years from now, Beethoven and our civilization’s other outstanding mouthpieces may still have much to communicate to human beings—if any of our descendants are still around—or they may seem remote, cold, obscure. But what matters most in Beethoven’s case is his belief that we are all part of an endless continuum, whatever our individual level of awareness may be. In the Ninth Symphony, he used Schiller’s words to tell us explicitly what many of his other works, especially his late works, tell us implicitly: that the “divine spark” of joy and the “kiss for the whole world,” which originate “above the canopy of stars,” must touch and unite us all. The spark is there, he said, and so is the kiss; we need only feel and accept their presence.—Harvey Sachs
*****
Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, op. 131/1st Movement
When it comes to saying a lot with a little, Chopin’s 24 Preludes for solo piano—most of which last no more than a minute or two—have few equals. This one was played at his funeral.
I used to write these gigantic pieces that were very complex and took a long time to compose, if not to play. I am now much more impatient and couldn’t stand working for so long on the same thing. But also those pieces were me working out certain ideas about music. Those ideas are now part of my life, so I don’t have to think about them in quite the same way. But some things never change, in that you are still glad to finish a piece and still wonder whether it is as good as you hoped it might be when you started out.
***
The Two Diversions were an idea of Ursula Oppens. Oppens decided that Carnegie Hall should commission composers to write what they considered easy pieces, and to make an album for piano students, and so I wrote two pieces for this album. I don’t think they’re as easy as they’d hoped, but there are some people with even harder ones.
—Elliott Carter (first quote’s from here, second here)
music clip of the day 
