The sky’s all thunder and lightning, and it’s almost midnight, and I’m sitting in a Walgreens parking lot near Midway Airport, waiting for my son Alex’s long-delayed flight to arrive, and if it weren’t for Rubinstein’s recordings of Chopin’s nocturnes, which I keep playing over and over amidst the rain and the neon, I’d be going absolutely bonkers.
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 1; Arthur [Artur] Rubinstein (1887-1982), piano
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lagniappe
random thoughts
Listening to Chopin, reading Chekhov: if I ever retire, maybe I’ll relocate to the 19th century.
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor
Rafal Blechacz (1985-), piano, live
1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement
4th Movement
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can’t wait
Tomorrow Blechacz (pronounced, I just learned, BLEH-hatch), who recently won the 2014 Gilmore Artist Award,* will be at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall, playing Bach and Beethoven and Chopin.
[O]ne of the great windfalls of the music world . . . the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award . . . is given every four years to an unsuspecting pianist deemed worthy of a great career by a panel of anonymous judges who conduct their worldwide talent search in secret.
Charles Rosen, pianist, teacher, writer (1972 National Book Award for Nonfiction: The Classical Style), May 5, 1927-December 9, 2012
Frederic Chopin, Nocturne in B major (Op. 62, No. 1)
Live, Atlanta, 1985
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Johann Sebastian Bach, The Art of the Fugue, excerpts
Recording, 1967
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today (although there are many other aspects of his music to enjoy). We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.
In Carter’s music, things happen for different instruments at different tempos—none of them dominates the others, and an idiosyncratic character is often given to the different instruments that preserves their individuality. Carter is never dogmatic, and the different measures of time may occasionally combine briefly for a moment of synthesis. The individuality of tempo and rhythm can make his music difficult to perform as each player unconsciously responds physically to the different rhythms he or she hears and yet tries to preserve his or her own system intact. Carter is, for this reason, best interpreted by those musicians who have often played his scores. Just as, in a polyphonic work of Bach or any other competent and genial contrapuntist, one takes pleasure in the independent line and interest of the separate voices and rejoices in the way they illuminate each other, so in Carter we can often delight in a quick foreground movement heard against a mysteriously shifting background that gives the foreground a new sense.
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[T]he sense of his music is dependent as much upon tone color and dynamics as it is on pitch; the more salient aspects of the individual instrumental lines have always to be brought out.
In the right hands there are no notes—only mysteries.
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reading table
Then I considered the spiritual bread that a newspaper constitutes, still warm and moist as it emerges from the press and the morning mist in which it has been delivered at crack of dawn to the housemaids who take it to their masters with a bowl of milk, this miraculous loaf, multiplied ten-thousandfold and yet unique, which stays unchanged for everyone while proliferating across every threshold.
—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (translated from French by Peter Collier)
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