On the idle hill of summer,Sleepy with the flow of streams… Concert: A. E. Housman’s dark rural world in A Shropshire Lad, with its contrasts of pastoral beauty and human tragedy, finds its musical equivalent in the work of George Butterworth; firstly, in Butterworth’s settings of Housman’s verse for voice and piano and then in […]
Category Archives: Piano music
Listen to this… w and then listen to this…
The German Tondichtung has several names in English. There’s the literal translation of ‘tone-poem’; there’s the slightly more musical ‘symphonic poem’ and finally there’s ‘programme music’. It’s music that tells a story; and, while composers have from time immemorial been attracted to ventures into the mundane by imitating the sounds of the natural world (birds, […]
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. […]
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 […]
No-one can resist the ravages of time and, as you can tell, the difference between ages 22 and 65 was, in the case of Alexander Glazunov, of some significance. (The pose is interesting: is it an habitual stance or is the older man consciously imitating the famous Ilya Repin portrait of him that you see […]
There are people who, through some flaw or other in their personality, acquire a bad reputation, a reputation which then proceeds to dog them throughout history to the detriment of several other sterling qualities: one such is poor Anatoly Lyadov. He wasn’t poor, not in the pecuniary sense, anyway. A scion of a well-to-do St.Petersburg […]
No, it’s not procrastination I’m thinking of, it’s Rachmaninoff. Tempo rubato translates as ‘robbed or stolen time’ and is the performance practice of slowing down or speeding up a phrase in music, mostly without any indication from the composer that such tempo alterations are required. For the classically minded it’s known (pejoratively) as ‘pulling the […]
