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Mozart
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rmannstaedt 08-Feb-13, 10:08 |
 MozartI was in my teens then, and it was important for me to be special and definitely non-mainstream. Heh! Fun to think back on, considering I was a kid in the 70'ies who didn't like pop music much (Abba was OK, as was Beatles) and far preferred listening to classics whenever he could. But Mozart; he was too popular. Everybody knew him, and even my pop-culture-infected peers recognized the name. Oh, shame! So, nope - didn't like him! Listened to Rachmaninov instead... Bit of a shame, really. My parents had a rather good LP with some of his violin concertos, the 3 last, I think, if memory servers. Beautiful music. This is a piece I remember well from that time. Though a rather more modern recording... www.youtube.com I was about 6, in bed with the flu and feeling miserable. But then mother came home from work and gave me a gift, just to make me feel better: Beethoven's 'Eroica' symphony. The great 3rd! My very first classical LP. Our sound system was nothing special; just an old, electrical radio, in mono, that father had hooked up with the player. But the music! That was a revelation! Such beauty! I was enthralled. It's difficult to find a better version than Herbert van Karajan's: www.youtube.com But... a couple of years back I actually succeeded! Otto Klemperer! www.youtube.com A couple of years later I was ill again, and mom came home with Rachmaninov's 3rd. That was initially less of a success. I sat down in the chair, listened to, gave up. Too ... bizarre! The melodies were all chopped up and mixed together... But a couple of days later I put it on again, sat down in the chair, and closed my eyes. Listening... After a couple of minutes I got up, started it over again, sat down, tried to follow what was happening. And gradually, like a flower opening in the sun, it started making sense. Where Beethoven was dramatic, exciting, and had these wonderful evolutionary conversations in his music, Rachmaninov was ... sublime! I am not sure the wonder of his music can really be described in words, but it was like an intricate tapestry of melodies and harmonies, all interwoven and moving towards a horizon you could only occasionally glimpse, like a golden sunset through the clouds. Ashkenazy - one of the best: www.youtube.com Wonder. Since then my taste has changed and grown a bit. More Beethoven (www.youtube.com), along with Tchaikovsky (www.youtube.com), Prokofiev (www.youtube.com), Taneyev (www.youtube.com), Rimsky-Korsakov (www.youtube.com), Glazunov (www.youtube.com), Mussourgsky (www.youtube.com). And then back to the European masters, Grieg (www.youtube.com), Schumann (www.youtube.com), Beethoven again (www.youtube.com), Schubert (www.youtube.com), and then the Italians: Vivaldi (www.youtube.com), Corelli (www.youtube.com), Marcello (www.youtube.com), Galuppi (www.youtube.com), Tartini (www.youtube.com)... Never Mozart. Well, almost never. I got, more or less by accident, some LPs with the Haffner, Linz, and Jupiter symphonies. And they did make an impression on me. But then I started switching to CDs, my LPs got lost or given away, and I never really got back to him. Until a year past or so. My wife teaches the piano and I regularly buy new piano music for her. And last year, needing something new, I thought of Mozart's piano concertos and thought, "why not, actually?" My favourite vendor for music is Amazon. Not only because it is fast and easy and they have a huge collection of classical music, but also because people write reviews - often rather good and interesting/insightful ones - and sometimes they have samples where you can actually listen to a bit of the music too. So, after looking about for a bit and reading what people said, I settled for a box set with Murray Perahia and the English Chamber Orchestra. Almost everybody on Amazon were raving about it, and when I looked at the competitors people often commented like, "it is a good set, almost comparable with Perahia's wonderful rendering..." So I got it, listened to the concertos over a couple weeks, and went "Meh. It's OK. I guess... Yes, ok..." I guess you get the idea: I really wasn't that impressed. It was nice music, but a bit uninspiring. Kinda like what I expected, in a way, but rather less than I had hoped. The sound was a bit muffled, and the playing ... well, technically rather fine, but the music had an interminable sense of loss or autumn, except not in the interesting way that Chopin can evoke when played by a master like Moravec. More like a glimpse of something beautiful seen in your rear view mirror as you drive away from it. But a month ago or so I tried something new. I remembered that I had been kind of fond of some of Mozart's symphonies, so I went and bought a box with them. It happened to Trevor Pinnock's "The Complete Mozart Symphonies" with The English Concert, and changed forever my view of Mozart. I am still working through the box, but ... it is beautiful music. The structure, the melodies, the way it smiles and dances at you. Here there was real beauty! If you don't have it - and if you think Mozart should be a little more joyful and - yes - great than the version you do have - I can do nothing but recommend that you give it a try. It is very, very good. Here is the 1st and 4th movement of one of his early, unnumbered symphonies, conducted by Pinnock:www.youtube.com A habit of mine: I also read the sleeve notes. And I noticed that it said there, that at Mozart's time symphonies were "less serious" music. The kind of thing that you played at the start and at the end of the concerts. Warming-up kind of music. And I went "Huh?!". It made little sense for me that his symphonies could be so heart-warming, so alive, so alight with joy and wonder at the world ... and then the "real" music, the "piece de resistance" - the concerts - so dull? Back to Amazon then, to take a hard look at the competition for Perahia. And this time, rather than just taking for granted that the far majority of the reviewers were right, I sat down and listened to the other recordings, compared them together, and listened to those same little pieces of music on the Perahia recordings I had. Perahia is easy to find of Youtube. Like, here: www.amazon.co.uk Pianists like Karl Engel are far more difficult to find. But Amazon allows you to hear the first 30 seconds or so. Try comparing the start of the Perahia piece (above) with the same one by Engel: www.amazon.com Last week I got ten discs Karl Engel on the piano in front of the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg. I cannot listen to that music without getting tears in my eyes. Literally. It is almost the most beautiful thing I have heard in my life. There are other composers too, of course. But Mozart has, at last, found a place in my heart. |
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