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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
