Sticking with the Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini (see last week), people often wonder how what is undoubtedly the most famous bit of the piece, the 18th variation, is derived from Paganini’s theme. How, in other words, do we get: w from w The technical name for what happens is ‘inversion’ and it’s to do […]
w This is the piano part of variation 7 of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. As you can hear, the music has little to do with Paganini’s famous melody; in fact it’s a entirely new element in the work, but one that Rachmaninoff had used previously and was to use again in the […]
Hacking at scores has, I think, become less popular at the end of the twentieth/beginning of the twenty-first century. There was a time when anything that was perceived as overly long and/or liable to try the limited patience (or was it concentration?) of the audience had bits surgically removed to make it, seemingly, more acceptable. […]
In the 1890s Yalta – Russia’s southernmost (Black) seaside resort – was home to two famous convalescents. Both were suffering from tuberculosis and both had come to the warm south in the hope of easing their symptoms. The more famous of the two was Anton Chekhov; in Yalta he was to write the plays The […]
It should have been an icon, but – though it may seem something of a cultural mismatch (and a measure of my irretrievably muddled intellect(??)) – the stained glass of Chartres (it’s the South Transept you see above) and Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vigil (aka Vespers) seem to have an active stillness and a numinous quality […]
Beethoven started it. Followed (sort of) by Berlioz; then came Mendelssohn, Liszt and Mahler. Vaughan Williams was brave (or cheeky) enough to make his first essay one and also added the human voice to his third. The Russians? Of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies, 4 include singers (his 2nd, 3rd and 13th and 14th) and among other […]
Compared to their more populous cousins for piano or violin, cello concertos are relatively thin on the ground. There are, for example, no cello concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bartók, Brahms or Tchaikovsky. But what the cello repertoire lack in quantity it certainly make up for in quality: think of the Haydn (two of them […]
