Category Archive: Classical Music
Listen to This
We’ve recently ploughed (and sloshed) through a very sub-par biography of the great Ludwig van Beethoven – rather than trouble with that, listen to this instead:
Continue Reading →Meeting the Mastersingers
8 July, 2018 A very pleasant Sunday salon at the Hackett-Jones residence for the SA Wagner Society’s afternoon with some of the featured players from the forthcoming State Opera’s dramatic concert production of Act III of Meistersinger. ASO french horn players Emma Gregan and Alex Miller gave us some nice pieces written for horn (by Brahms, of all people!) These pieces were very easy on the ear, whilst apparently rather difficult to play. Hearing them, one started to daydream of a tense afternoon tea with Wagner, Brahms, Cosima and Clara Schumann debating the role of music, perhaps with Eduard Hanslick…
Continue Reading →In Search of Wagner
The sentimental Marat
(By Theodor Adorno) (written 1937-38) (Rodney Livingstone translation) (2005) Whilst Adorno (1903 – 1969) was a thinker of wide learning and deep perception, here he is defeated by Wagner, as well as by his own Frankfurter-Marxist dogma and drab obsession with the dialectical. He’d love to dismiss RW as repulsive, dangerous, tin-eared, a Jew-baiter and Jew-hater, formless and, worst of all, bourgeois; yet a kind of intellectual honesty keeps creeping-back in to Adorno’s highly profound skull that undermines all of his grumbling. Wagner is not only sui generis; he is unimpeachable; Adorno’s brilliant attacks, often highly personal, fail utterly, proving…
Continue Reading →Remembering Toscanini
Toscanini by Giacomo Grosso
Arthur Toscanini (March 25, 1867 – January 16, 1957) Naturally, they hissed at him at La Scala. But Arturo had the last laugh, recognised in his lifetime as the greatest conductor in the world, selector’s choice for launching the best operas on offer. After spurning Mussolini and Hitler, he concentrated on playing for people who were primarily interested in art rather than power: “Liberty, in my opinion, is the only orthodoxy within the limits of which art may express itself and flourish freely-liberty that is the best of all things in the life of man, if it is all one…
Continue Reading →The Brandenburg Concertos
24 March 1721 – J. S. Bach presented six concerti grossi, his Concertos, styled after Vivaldi, which he had adapted to several instruments, to Christian Ludwig, the Margave of Brandenburg-Schwedt, along with a rather grovelling dedication: “…begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigor of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him.” Precise in form, mathematical in logical structure, they are a revelation to anyone with an ear encountering…
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