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The chronicles of Ruin, continued. Call me Ishmael said....intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Anonymous said... When I don't know what to do,I come here. 10 September 2009 22:59
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13 comments:
Wonderful, thanks.
A most prodigious talent.
I was, as you know, thinking about the prominence of Jews in the arts and reflecting that for all the sublimity of Brendel and Ashkenazy, Barenboim and Horowitz, without the catholic/agnostic/gentile Beethoven there would be no divine connection to be made. Just a thought.
I love this, hardly matters, within reason, who's playing if.
Beethoven comes before us all I think. Though I suspect you're one of those who would argue for Bach. As you say, at that level any argument about degrees of genius looks ridiculous. It's the Late Quartets that do it for me.
Of course there's also the anti-Semite genius Wagner whose liebestod from Tristan and Isolde always leaves me helpless. Perhaps the only worthwhile thing Stephen "I'm so clever and sensitive I can hardly get my words out" Fry ever did was his exposition of the Tristan chord which you can easily find on youtube.
I agree with Bill about the late quartets.
Bach is my main man though. I carry the Goldberg Variations and the Well Tempered Clavier note for note in my head (with Gould's backing vocals); though I prefer Wilhelm Kempff's softness.
Thanks for the Brendel Mr. Ishmael, he too is an artist I have always admired.
So much beautiful music, such a short lifetime of clashing global cacophony.
No, I only know such Bach as has come to me via inversions - Segovia, Swingle Singers, Jacques Loussier Trio, stuff like that, although I enjoy such Glenn Gould Bach interpretation as I have found time for, mind you, I'd probably enjoy him playing ragtime, mad as a fucking hatter, like all decent people.
It is the Late Quartets for me, too, mr bungalow bill, although the Overture to Tannhauser, all too brief, does bow the strings of my life.
Have just listened to Glenn Gould doing the Goldberg Variations again in 1981 before he willed himself to death, the mad bastard. Fucking hell, that's a slab of glory however much the cognoscenti purse their lips about pedalling and so on.
Brendal was a master of Schubert, as well. Well worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnZlBq5RY7U
Superb choice Mike......
Interesting Mr RR and Mr Mike that Brendel so disliked Gould, though not perhaps surprising. Room for both in my view.
It is an odd, atomising development, which has overtaken reproduced music this past while. In my time it has been the jukebox for popular music and those big, bassy Deutsche Gramafon LPs for Beethoven and such, then there came radiograms, Dansettes, transistor radios, hi-fi, Walkpersons, CD players and now all sorts of devices-of-individual-discernment.
I have nonesuch, can't operate my iPad, would never get to iTunes in a century. What I did do, though, was rip hundreds and hundreds of hours of music to Windows Media and stash all the CDs under the stairs, where they have been, now, for some years. I can hear and more importantly find what I want in seconds. But, like many, I do it, now, on my own. On their own is how the young people traverse their bafflingly barren, digitised musical landscapes. Except when they are at festivals, which now resemble Community Sing-Ins; the paid entertainers - I think this started with Oasis - chorus-mastering the crowds of adoring yoof; they all know all the words to all the songs and seem to wish nothing more than to sing them back to their idols. When I went to Knebworth to see Pink Floyd, among others, I had no plans to entertain myself or singalong with anyone, I was paying them to entertain me; the community aspect, then, before-before, to popular music and to an extent to classical, was that people would go to other people's homes and listen to their sounds, man, perhaps subsequently purchasing them. And most of the music, from the early 'sixties up until the iTune revolution, came as part of a collection called an album, now it has no ownable solidity and has been fragmented into the smallest possible economic union, single iTunes selling for cents, to individuals to enjoy, on their devices, alone.
And that's not to mention youtube, which, contrarily, is absolutely amazing, containing - amongst much other informative and instructional material - an inestimable amount of reproduced music, much of it captured in live performance by the original and subsequent, covering artists, nearly all of it posted freely by amateurs, simply sharing their own enjoyment with the rest of us, those of us wandering the information super-highway, at any rate; it is science fiction made real, instant access to everything which can be digitised; quite how it is maintained or maintains itself.
And the closest I now come to having people round to listen or going round to theirs is in these little posts, here; and the best of YouTube is that one thing leads to another, I have learned all I know of early music from YouTube, sad, in a way, but better late than never. It may be a sorry admission to make but I haen't actually purchased any recorded music for years, too busy gobbling up the wonders of YouTube; as I will mr mike's recommendation. It is a sharing of sorts.
Youtube is a sharing indeed. I had never heard of Nic Jones I am sorry to say before yours yesterday and as you say it is a truly democratic joy to be able to find such new things at the prompting of others or just by simple exploration. A public library of sorts. Hope Inverness is balmy.
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