On Sunday, I heard a great performance of the Mendelssohn F minor string quartet in a concert in Palm Beach by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and besides the musical excellence of what I heard, I also thought about the two other 200th-birthday boys: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.
Mendelssohn’s last string quartet was written in the summer of [...]
You get to the point in your reading and thinking about things that the oddest stray lines leap out at you from the page, or seem miraculously to have something exactly to do with what you’re thinking, or even more spookily, to somehow suggest the way out of a predicament.
Yesterday was a pretty down day [...]
Concert at Washington. The President of the United States and his lady are to be there. I have reserved seats for them in the first row. The Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, accompanies them. Mrs. Lincoln has a very ordinary countenance. Lincoln is remarkably ugly, but has an intelligent air, and his eyes have a [...]
I managed the other day to wheedle off the shelf of a friend of mine the two-volume Artur Schnabel edition of the Beethoven sonatas, originally published in 1935. My friend has the 1953 reprint, which was sort of an hommage to the pianist, who had died two years earlier.
Because I have the ancient so-called Urtext [...]
If I had to say which composer is played more often in encores than any other, and I had to base my judgment on the past two or three years of concertgoing, the answer is clear: Astor Piazzolla.
The Argentine composer who did something new with the tango form has been the encore choice of at [...]
