№ 835. Scriabin

 

№ 831. Bruce Liu – Ravel: No. 3, Une barque sur l'océan, Miroirs, M. 43

Ocean's Embrace

№ 804. Arthur Rubinstein

 

 

If there was an award for the pianist who came closest to the artistic ideal in the widest repertoire, it would almost certainly go to Rubinstein. Whether playing Fauré or Brahms, Albéniz or Beethoven, Ravel or Schubert, the results were sublime. Yet he is most celebrated for his Chopin. That composer's aristocratic poise and elegance found a perfect match in Rubinstein’s own interpretative genius. 

His golden tone, exquisite sense of timing and sensitivity to phrase and structure were tailor-made for Chopin's nocturnes, waltzes and mazurkas. Yet remarkably he sustained that same level of musical intuitiveness and profound eloquence throughout the more heated virtuosity of the concertos, scherzos, ballades, preludes, sonatas and polonaises. 

There was seemingly nothing that Rubinstein could not play at the highest levels of distinction. This ranged from concertos and solo recitals to forming two ‘million dollar’ piano trios, first with Jascha Heifetz and Emanuel Feuermann and then with Henryk Szeryng and Pierre Fournier, with whom he made outstanding recordings of Brahms, Schubert and Schumann.

Incredibly, as witness sublime video recordings of concertos by Grieg, Saint-Saëns, Chopin, Beethoven and Brahms, he was still playing like an angel in his eighties. Rubinstein was one of the most widely recorded of pianists. That said, his love affair with the gramophone got off to a shaky start. He refused to record for the early acoustic process as he felt it made the piano ‘sound like a banjo’.

№ 795. Rediscovering Bach’s Prelude in C

 

№ 734. Beethoven's 9th Symphony

Robert Loves Pi

№ 698. Music Lessons

 

№ 688. Miroirs / Mirrors

Gibet Gaspard-Nuit

 

For some, that sense of containment makes Ravel easier to appreciate than to love. Yet he inspires adoration as well as admiration. Why? I think the containment is key. From the outside, Ravel appears small, self-contained, even buttoned-up. But anyone who has a heart can see that he is bigger on the inside. There is anguish within the Passacaille of the Piano Trio, mystery in the Miroirs, endless tenderness in the adagio of the second Piano Concerto, with its “mile upon silver mile” of melody. There is vivacity in the Violin Sonata, innocent wonder in Mother Goose. Nature is writ large in Daphnis and Chloe; in Histoires naturelles, human nature is writ small. These are intimations of the ineffable, not expressions of it. You don’t need to look behind the mask to feel them; look at it.

 

№ 637. Rachmaninoff

My English Club

 

№ 556. Myth, Meaning & Mahler

 

If the past 11 months have seemed illogical and unstoppable, consider these questions. What if the hummingbird darting from flower to flower is actually a nobleman eternally searching for his beloved maiden? Or the sun and the moon are an angry married couple destined to chase each other across the sky? These age-old myths unsettle everyday logic to reveal larger truths. Unpredictability is but a literary device that helps explain an increasingly bizarre world.

Mythology is not only the relic of ancient civilizations, but also the engine of contemporary cultures. Its stories provide comfort by bringing people together to make sense of strangeness through shared foresight.

Mythology (from the Greek mythos for story-of-the-people, and logos for word or speech, so the spoken story of a people) is the study and interpretation of often sacred tales or fables of a culture known as myths or the collection of such stories which deal with various aspects of the human condition: good and evil; the meaning of suffering; human origins; the origin of place-names, animals, cultural values, and traditions; the meaning of life and death; the afterlife; and the gods or a god. Myths express the beliefs and values about these subjects held by a certain culture.

Mythology has played an integral part in every civilization throughout the world. Pre-historic cave paintings, etchings in stone, tombs, and monuments all suggest that, long before human beings set down their myths in words, they had already developed a belief structure corresponding to the definition of `myth' provided by Leach and Fried. 

According to psychiatrist Carl Jung, myth is a necessary aspect of the human psyche which needs to find meaning and order in a world which often presents itself as chaotic and meaningless:"

"The psyche, as a reflection of the world and man, is a thing of such infinite complexity that it can be observed and studied from a great many sides. It faces us with the same problem that the world does: because a systematic study of the world is beyond our powers, we have to content ourselves with mere rules of thumb and with aspects that particularly interest us. Everyone makes for himself his own segment of world and constructs his own private system, often with air-tight compartments, so that after a time it seems to him that he has grasped the meaning and structure of the whole. But the finite will never be able to grasp the infinite."

№ 547. "Life is more important than a concert"

№ 524. Lullaby on a Saturday

 

№ 491. Maurice Ravel's La Valse

“We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. ” ― Ben Okri, The Famished Road


 

№ 489. Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake

Here's a modern reinterpretation of a beloved classic.

№ 466. New York City on My Mind

№ 447. World Piano Day

№ 429. Make Your Own Kind of Music

№ 367. Synesthesia

Today, Grimaud considers some of her early playing too slow and too attentive to detail at the expense of “the big arc,” but at the time she felt febrile with ideas that she had to share. Though she believes that Romantic composers like Brahms and Chopin hold special wisdom, she is not wedded to that style. “If you talk to me, you can call a lot of things Romantic,” she says. “You can call Bach’s Sixth Partita as Romantic as any Wagner opera. Romanticism is, for me, much more than a period in culture.”

№ 362. Poetry Seeking Understanding

Villanelle

By George Higgins

(Steven Spielberg visited an inner city school in response to a class of black students who had laughed inappropriately at a showing his movie about the holocaust Schindler's List.)

When Steven Spielberg spoke at Oakland High 

A custodian swept up the shattered glass, 

replaced the broken clocks to satisfy 

the Governor, who was preoccupied 

with becoming President, with covering his ass. 

When Steven Spielberg spoke at Oakland High 

the District found diminishing supplies 

of disinfectant and toilet paper stashed 

away, so they replaced the clocks instead to satisfy 

the cameras and the press that they had rectified 

the deficiencies among the underclass. 

When Steven Spielberg spoke at Oakland High 

the students didn't seem dissatisfied 

about the cover up, just happy to be out of class. 

The custodian replaced the broken clocks to satisfy 

this need we have to falsify 

the truth in subservience to cash. 

When Steven Spielberg came to Oakland High 

the custodian replaced the broken clocks.

 

№ 356. Daniil Trifonov

Even if 26-year-old Russian virtuoso Daniil Trifonov is too humble to extol his own virtues, a myriad of musicians and critics have done so for him. “What he does with his hands is technically incredible,” said the legendary pianist Martha Argerich in 2011. “It’s also his touch -- he has tenderness and also the demonic element. I never heard anything like that.”

№ 295. Yuja Wang

When Gershwin is infused with fire, what you have is Rhapsody in Blue played by Yuja Wang. Or Manhattan painted in the keyboard.