Friday, June 30, 2023

My Favorite Piano Recordings


I love jazz and rock piano but none here as my personal middle finger to all my music loving friends who ignore classical music.
Ahem: My favorite piano recordings (chronological order, not preference, containing two harpsichord exceptions):
Igor Kipnis plays Bach Goldberg Variations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhxjqGsyFR4
Leon Fleisher plays Bach Chaconne arr. Brahms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CbAmyCca0c
Gustav Leonhardt plays BWV 1004 (same piece Bach arranged himself for harpsichord) https://youtu.be/B8XFLDlhZQg?t=588
Lili Kraus plays Mozart's Complete Piano Concertos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvRhkZLM__E
Menahem Presler plays Mozart Piano Concerto no. 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0Tk3sliZ0U
Ivan Moravec plays Mozart C-Minor Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6hCoWG0KUc
Wilhelm Kempff plays Beethoven Piano Sonata no. 1
Wilhelm Kempff plays Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjIfzu82HU0
Friedrich Gulda plays Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf9eZdeS8es
Sviatoslav Richter plays Beethoven Sonata no. 32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjE1yst49rU
Sviatoslav Richter plays Schubert Sonata D. 784 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAxuFcFSw_g
Radu Lupu plays Schubert Sonata D. 894 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUXcEYaLvw0
Alfred Brendel plays Schubert Sonata D. 959
Clifford Curzon plays Schubert Sonata D. 960
Sviatoslav Richter plays Schumann Toccata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waS2A8en7ps
Radu Lupu plays Schumann Fantasie https://youtu.be/0j41RKL4DmU?t=2496
Josef Hofmann plays his Casimir Hall Recital https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgsLAQLc6Nk
Mieczyslaw Horoszowski plays Chopin Preludes https://youtu.be/XS0Yzbo99ws?t=819
Alkan Etudes (whoever can play them) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNcgAJLHf7A
Rosalyn Tureck plays Brahms Handel Variations
Friedrich Gulda and Joe Zawinul play Brahms Haydn Variations
Arthur Rubinstein plays Brahms Piano Concerto no. 2
Germaine Thuyssens-Valentine plays Complete Faure Piano Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eSbHWHel9Y
Rudolf Firkusny plays Pictures at an Exhibition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIizIOyisHc
Alicia de Larrocha plays complete Piano Music of Isaac Albeniz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_0u7AzMItM
Pietro Scarpini plays Busoni's Piano Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1AgOvleAmY
Marguerite Long plays Ravel's Piano Concerto in G https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUWsBjt8xJI
Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Winds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyRX_bq3Tds
George Antheil Airplane Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4on2sedCNg
Steffen Schleiermacher plays Henry Cowell Piano Music
Andras Schiff plays Bartok Piano Concerto no. 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7J7L53b8U0
Ivan Wyschnegradsky's 24 Quarter Tone Piano Etudes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiZ5EwSqAd8
Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays Messiaen's Exotic Birds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmjETPAkF70
Pierre Laurent Aimard plays Ligeti Complete Etudes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AyRrIkzrM8
The First Complete Recording of Kurtag's Jatekok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4oaXUdU6kE...
Rodion Shchedrin 24 Preludes and Fugues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0KH-wDfTlc
Nikolai Kapustin 24 Preludes in Jazz Styles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbxKRE7nxWk
Nikolai Kapustin Eight Concert Etudes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=116QHk9jNGI
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Tuesday, June 13, 2023

Beach Writing

 Summer 2011.

I was fat, drunk and stupid. It was the best of times it was the wo... you know.
Liquor would flow in the DC happy hours. We would start at Madam's Organ, a 'burlesque' bar in Washington's Adams-Morgan neighborhood (get it?). At noon, beers were a mere quarter (the bad ones...), the price going up by 25 cents every hour.
After what was inevitably a huge dinner we'd hop on over to our real hangout: Angles, a bar a few doors down whose owner, Phil, was until recently a war photographer - his pictures elegantly adorning every inch of symmetrical wall space. We'd stay there from 8:30ish till closing time at 3, and as Adams Morgan popped outside for the inevitable street brawl, we'd stay indoors afterhours, smoking cigarettes in the bar and drinking until a good 5:30 or 6 in the morning. Phil's violin would come out with the expectation that it would be me to play it and not him. Phil was a socialist of the Tony Judt sort, and we talk politics, we'd talk music, history, books, when he heard I worked cursorily in real estate he even tried to impress me with his knowledge of that. Phil eventually married is ectomorphically thin maitresse for the restaurant downstairs and later found out that Norm, the bartender, killed himself because the news made DC's City Paper.
Phil was all very fitting with the image of 'interesting' people we all hoped we were. The basic three staples of those years were Josh: tall, mysteriously brooding, surly, refreshingly free of all social graces. Rory: a little younger, medium height, full of optimism, handsome enough that practically all of DC would go home with him but he turned half of DC's women down because he found them boring. And me: basically the opposite of them both. I referred to us as Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Obviously I wasn't Kirk...
Early that summer my heart was broken twice. Once by a woman I'd known for years, once by a woman I'd met three weeks earlier. Being me, I'm sure I made the experiences as difficult as possible, but both experiences were, in their differing ways, brutal. Josh and Rory had no idea what experiences like mine were like, and I was basically there to fill the silences between them. Very soon, both of them would be gone, absconded together to some part of East Asia, I honestly forget if it was Vietnam or Thailand, and shortly after they arrived neither of them spoke to each other again.
What did we ultimately talk about? Well, what do all young people talk about. Our futures! What else is there? And I remember particularly as we smoked once (or was it as we drank?), I managed finally to articulate what I wanted and why I wouldn't be going with them on their open invitation big East Asian adventure they planned. It wasn't just because I thought I'd be a colossal failure in organizing life in a foreign country, it was because I wasn't suited for it. What I ultimately wanted wasn't travel, it wasn't 'experience' or 'adventure' it was... art. Big deal, I know... the most Tucker realization an Evan Tucker could possibly Evan... but when you're 29, you don't necessarily realize it. Against all evidence, you still think to yourself that all things are possible, that you are not who you are, and that all kinds of global adventures might give you the same joy you'd get from a lifetime pass to every show in New York.
Somehow, between binge drinking I managed not to get kicked out of my parents' house - living in an uncanny valley between my final years in DC and my first years in Baltimore; but the living room of my parents house began to cave in (heavy-handed metaphor alert) and we all ended up in my parents recently acquired beach house in Oceanview, Delaware, right off of Bethany Beach.
In retrospect, it was the most consequential two months of my life. In this vacationland of the Mid-Atlantic I found myself bikeriding 20 miles at a time, living on a diet of fish and veggies, hiking trails, and generally well and satisfied for the first time in... was I ever satisfied before then?
The key? Writing. The plan? Writing. The future? Writing. Not marketing or promoting, just writing. Not worrying about a career. Just writing.
I had a blog I'd started for the chorus I founded which I meant for promotional musings that would market myself as a brand for my business (and we wonder why it failed...), and I decided simply to do whatever I wanted with it.
This place, the place where it all began, is more holy to me than anywhere in Jerusalem. It's the place I know I became a writer: however bad the writing, however trivial the subject, I know I've given my last to this project.
From the beginning of my life, I've wanted one thing and one thing only: regardless of the form or the genre, regardless of the hardship, all I ever wanted out of life was to be a great artist. Be it a writer, be it a musician, be it a visual artist who can't even draw a straight line, it was what I would move the earth to make happen. Whether or not anybody knew who I was, I would know who I was, and even if only a few appreciate what I do, they too would know. The arts were all I ever knew, all I ever cared about. If I had the ability to be an accountant or an office clerk or even a janitor, I'd have long since left this wasteland of a life behind for something that makes life work a lot easier; but I am made of art, and life has nothing else for which I have any capacity at all. I have lived by this goal, and whether death comes for me now or in my nineties it is in art's pursuit that I shall cross over.
Even if it's just from this house infused with the sounds of Delaware herons rather than the front lines of our life histories, I plan on crossing this life for as long as life is good enough to grant me, and even if it's just in these stupid essays, I will give all of myself to the word and the note, and if that is my life, there can be no life better spent in all the world.
Amen
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Friday, June 9, 2023

A Brief Digression on Musical Brilliance

 We fundamentally misunderstand brilliance in the arts in four ways:

  1. There is brilliant talent everywhere. Talent is as common as artificial intelligence can reproduce it, but without deep life experience, talent can only produce insipid things that only make sense during the moments when life itself feels insipid.
  2. Genius is both less and more common than we think. No generation has more than a very few geniuses in every field, and you can't expect that every talent of the hundreds hailed as a genius is a genius. Nevertheless, there are geniuses in every field worthy of note. Duke Ellington was no less a genius than Dmitri Shostakovich, and both of them were quite a bit more a musical genius than Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez.
  3. Genius makes its own rules, so it does not need to be properly trained. If you can't understand the genius inherent in the work of rock groups like The Beatles or The Beach Boys - the burden of proof is now on you, not the people who hear it. But what makes us know that genius is genius is the mutability of the product - does the universality transcend cultures? Not just cultures of place, or even cultures of time. but cultures of mentality. Can the work speak to the same people in bad moments as well as good ones? Can the work of this talent not only make one feel joy but also put suffering in context?
  4. It would be wonderful if every talent is equally worthy of merit, but if that is true, then why are the rewards of some talents put on such a pedestal that it's at the expense of the thousands over whose work they climb to get those rewards? The answer is that there is an inborn capacity in the human built for worship that will not go ignored. So if we're going to irrationally worship certain objects and people, we might as well rationalize which objects are worth our worship. It is better to worship artists who put us in touch with the deeper phenomena of the world than it is to worship whatever is the latest pop sensation, whose entire cultural purpose is to turn us off to things in the world that actually happen.
The 20th century was a time of musical atomization. It was full of musicians, classical as well as popular, who pandered to good moods for money's sake and made people feel anxious in those moments when their mood was not how this easygoing music was supposed to make them feel. It was also full of musicians, popular ones as well as classical, who viewed themselves as a provider for a chosen elite whom they forced to 'stand up and take your dissonant suffering like a man.'

But there is so much great music from unknown sources, and so much of that that will repay the ears who open themselves. They come from all walks of life, but what they share is the willingness to not seal themselves off from life's many walks. 
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