A great ghostly song

Here is a wonderful song for October.

Mahler's "When the Fair Trumpets Sound" is a ghost story. If you are lucky enough to be hearing it for the first time I will not give away what it is about. I have found a video with a translation.

The singer here is Brigitte Fassbinder. She is kind of unpredictable in my experience and I have had my issues with her but she does pretty well here.

Normally all other things being equal I like Lieder better simply with piano. But in this case the orchestra is evocative of the trumpets and other sounds.

When I first heard this song I cried. There was something about the dreamy melody of the ghost. I love Gustav Mahler's "Knaben Wunderhorn" songs and this one is at the top of my list.

Take it, Ms. Fassbinder.

After you know what the song is about you can always try Jessye Norman's version. She sings the song beautifully.

Hear the tolling of the bell

I have been wanting to get this website up and running again and October is a perfect time to start.

It is a great time of year for challenges. I am doing Inktober for one thing. And you know what, as long as I am drawing an ink picture every day I am kind of in the mood for music too.

I think what I will do is link Inktober and music and explore some music that is, shall we say, inky.

One such dusky gem that comes to mind is Schubert's "Der Zuegengloecklein." I am sorry for all the vowels! I am too lazy to figure out how to type umlauts. The title, anyway, means "the little funeral bell." The accompaniment is beautiful, how you hear the soft chime of the bell, repeatedly. And the melody takes a cool twist at the end.

I loved this as a teenager and listened to it a lot, always with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. So here is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau again.




Hyperion Records always had excellent notes to Schubert songs, by pianist Graham Johnson. My friend Peter and I used to listen to the Hyperion CDs and we would always laugh at the cover because you would see Graham Johnson at the piano, and his keys were sitting there on the piano right next to the keyboard.

Ha, ha! No one ever said, "Hey, Graham, as long as they're taking pictures, you might want to move your keys." No! Album after album, disc after disc, there they were.

Well, he had higher things on his mind. It seems Hyperion is posting his notes online so here are the notes to this one. "This hypnotic song," it begins. Hypnotic is right.

The notes say that the little bell was rung in churches when someone was dying, and it meant you were supposed to pray for that person. We should bring back that tradition. That is a Zugenglocklein at the top of this post! I did a search on the word and that came up.

The notes also reveal that the poet who wrote the words to this song was just 22, hence the poem was kind of immature. That is the advantage to being an English speaker. Bad poem, who cares? But here is the translation anyway.

Enjoy this October song!

Color and light

For some reason I like doing art.

I use the term loosely. I do not have any pretentions as an artist. But late at night, or of an afternoon when I have been busy with work most of the day, it is fun to sit down with watercolors and relax. What is it about watercolors? They are just so cheap and easy.

Especially cheap. I have this $5 watercolor set I have been working off of forever. That is it in the picture above! I also have a sneaking affection for oil pastels because they, too, are cheap. That masterpiece in the sketchbook visible in thePain back on the right was done with oil pastels.

Not only that but they were oil pastels I purchased in Tupperware at a garage sale! I think I paid a quarter. The brand is Loew-Cornell, which despite the patrician name is made in China, let's not kid ourselves.

I remember my mom telling me at that garage sale that buying the pastels was worth it just to get the Tupperware! LOL! Anyway, those are the pastels that painted that picture in the picture.

HOWEVER. Once at another garage sale I bought a little wooden box of oil pastels of the Van Gogh brand. Van Gogh is not an exalted brand. Looking it up, I see it is a "student brand." However. sets of 10 or something (mine has 15) go for a cool $30 or something. So when I get better at oil pastel I will let myself use the Van Gogh pastels instead of the Loew-Cornells.

I will be the Leonard Pennario of pastels!

Jeoffry also enjoys art.

Good boy! Good boy!!

We are artists!

Mozart's mysterious last year

I have been wanting to get my, ahem, Music Critic Web log going again. It has been what, a year?

This seems like a great time to do it.

There is a recent story in Britain's The Telegraph about Mozart and his last year. I saw it yesterday morning and put it aside to enjoy later that day, appropriately with tea. So I could take it slow and digest it.

I love reading about Mozart, anything Mozart. Just so you understand, being a Mozart nerd I awoke this morning and my first thought upon hearing it was August 4 was, this is Mozart's wedding anniversary. It is! He got married August 4, 1782.

About Mozart's last year, 1791, there is so much that will never be figured out. However this story is not going to put us any closer to figuring anything out, I will tell you that right now.

One thing right off the top, there is this portrait they say is of Mozart. I pasted it up above.

I know, Mozart was painted by a lot of incompetent artists, but even allowing for the artists' incompetence, that is not Mozart. I think it might be Beethoven. It does not look like Mozart at all. Mozart had blue eyes, for starters. And the fashions are all wrong too for Mozart's time. I think it is Beethoven. I am just saying.

That stupid play "Amadeus," we are going to spend the rest of our lives pointing out how so much of it is B.S., and the author does a good job of debunking it, even if he does not point out that the idea did not start with Peter Shaffer. However, there is this.

Mozart returned to Vienna after the premiere at the end of September. During the two months of his life, he was furiously productive, polishing off Die Zauberflöte, which proved an enormous hit – perhaps the biggest of his career – with a non-aristocratic audience in a large suburban theatre in Vienna. He also wrote the enchanting clarinet concerto and started work on a requiem, commissioned anonymously by a nobleman grieving for his wife.

Then it just goes on, la la la la la, as if all this is normal.

I am sorry, that business about the anonymous Requiem commission, that is not normal! It is not normal now, nor was it in 1791, for a stranger to appear at your door dressed all in gray, like someone out of a masquerade, and wordlessly hand you a commission for a Requiem Mass. Once again ...

Not. Normal.

Ever!!

Another thing, I am getting a little tired of people explaining to me patiently how under Joseph II, it was customary for people to be buried in unmarked mass graves. I have never read one other biography that ends with the person being buried that way. What other subject of Joseph II who was famous was buried that way? Name me one other person and maybe I will take this explanation more seriously. Maybe not. It depends who the person is.

Anyway, I have issues.

It feels good too be venting again!

'Jupiter' ascending

I had too much fun the other night watching this new video on the finale of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony.

This is a symphony I have listened to my entire life but I have never looked at the score. As a rule I do not like looking at scores. I am afraid I am going to picture the score whenever I hear the music and for some reason I do not like that.

However. Comes a time, you know? I reasoned with myself that I had studied scores of Beethoven quartets and they did not ruin the quartets for me.

So, the "Jupiter." I know every note of it. I can hear it in my head, I mean, I can just mentally press "Play" and there it is. But watching this video I saw there were things that were going on that I had not noticed. It is a thrill just to see the logic of the thing.

And it's fun, how this guy's robotic voice just informs you what to listen for. He does not call attention to himself. He doesn't try to be charming or steal the spotlight at all from this magnificent work of art we are contemplating.

Richard Atkinson, is his name. I keep wanting to say Rowan Atkinson. That is Mr. Bean! That is someone else entirely.

Imagine Mr. Bean narrating Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony. No. Do not go there.

Anyway, Mozart's "Jupiter" finale, annotated. Find time in your day for it.

Enjoy!

A haunting performance

At Kleinhans Music Hall yesterday we had the violinist Mayuko Kamio playing Mozart's "Turkish" Violin Concerto. As an encore she did this unbelievable piece, Schubert's "Erlkoenig" arranged for violin.

The concert went late and I didn't have time to Google around to find out whose arrangement it was. I wrote my whole review in 25 minutes, yikes! But now I am looking it up and it appears to be by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst.

That was my grandmother's last name, Ernst!

But anyway. Here is Hilary Hahn playing it.

The description says it is one of the most difficult pieces for solo violin because of all the voices. I did touch on that in the review. I did kind of sense how challenging it was. How could you not?

Listening to this piece last night I found myself regretting it was not 150 years ago because then more people would know the song. I doubt that a lot of people in the hall knew the song because, even though it is one of Schubert's most famous songs -- probably the most famous -- people just don't know Schubert songs.

And even if you had heard the song before and recognized it, you would have to know the lyrics from verse to verse to follow what is going on. When Kamio got to the line where the little demon Erl King tells the child, "I love you," it was really cool and creepy.

My sister Katie who teaches German sent me this cool video. Now seems like a good time to share it.

The book of Liszt

Yikes, I should just let this Web log go. I never write in it any more. I have been so busy and then often when I try to write the computer messes up on me and I end up walking away.

Maybe I should make a last stand. So often through the week I walk around with something on my mind I want to write about.

Today it is Schubert songs arranged by Liszt.

I have been working on a few of them in my spare time. I am doing "Das Wandern" and "Der Muller und der Bach" from "Die Schoene Mullerin." I also have "Wohin" lying around and that will be next.

The challenge with these pieces of course is that you have to keep them flowing smoothly at the same time that Liszt is bending and stretching your hand in all these different directions.

Listen to how Rachmaninoff pulls it off.



What a romantic he must have been, you know? The way he plays the Serenade. His hands are not always together which ordinarily would bug me but in this case you have to forgive it,.

And I like how he does "Das Wandern." A few other pianists I listened to were too clinical with it. Too staccato, too, with the introduction. I have listened to that song cycle millions of times and that intro does not have to be choppy.

Anyway we are back to the idea of David Dubal, play the piano daily and stay sane. I get my little half hour with these pieces as long as I have gotten in my other work. It is a kind of reward. It is funny because you walk over to the piano with a glass of wine and an hour later the wine is still sitting there. That does not happen too often!

You heard the man.

Play the piano daily and stay sane!