Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through

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This Ethiopian nun (b.1923), once a singer to Haile Selassie, imprisoned when her country was under Italian rule, has acquired cult status; once on the margins of classical music but now moving into mainstream consciousness. The Song of the Sea merges gentle arpeggios with a wash of rising chords and a plaintive song waving and weaving through all. 18 January Giustino: Act 1: Vedrò con mio diletto Antonio Vivaldi February 2021). "No Simon Rattle, and no new concert hall for London ... but we will survive". The Guardian. Three piano concertos, two symphonies, 83 songs, The Isle of the Dead(1909), The Bells(1913), All-Night Vigil(1915). I had some non-fantasy dinner issues of my own to sort out. Tom thought a good night out was John Cage followed by more John Cage. After once going with me to hear Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2, he adopted the Harry stance. “I don’t need to hear that symphony again as long as I live.” It happens to be a favourite of mine. Would I be able to convince him that the composer, and the music itself, were more interesting than he thought? I valued Tom’s incisive editorial input but had no time to waste proving the validity of my subject.

Music for Life: 100 Classical Works to Carry You Through

Brahms suffered many blows to his lonely heart, never finding redemption through love. His lifelong devotion to Clara Schumann, several years his senior and married to the composer Robert Schumann, never came to fruition even after she was widowed. For a time, Brahms turned his attentions instead to Robert and Clara’s daughter Julie, though not so that anyone would notice. News, in the summer of 1869, that Julie was to be married appears to have surprised him. Clara noted, “Johannes is quite altered, he seldom comes to the house and speaks only in monosyllables when he does come… Did he really love her? But he has never thought of marrying, and Julie has never had any inclination towards him.” Typically, Brahms spoke his feelings in the only way he could: through music. He called the Alto Rhapsody, for alto, male chorus and orchestra, his “bridal song”. Who but Brahms could have made a wedding gift in such autumnal hues? The melancholy text, from Goethe’s Harzreise im Winter (Winter Journey in the Harz Mountains), tells of a young man out of love with life. Its three parts conclude with a heavenly male chorus seeking consolation as a thirsty man yearns for water in the desert. “It is long since I remember being so moved by a depth of pain in words and music,” Clara wrote, as if full realisation had just dawned. “If only he would for once speak so tenderly.” He does, and now for ever, through the emotion of this Rhapsody. Pause

Kate Molleson marks the 150 anniversary of Sergei Rachmaninov's birth. She visits his home in Switzerland - after years of renovation, the beautiful Villa Senar, on the banks of Lake Lucerne, is reopening to the public. This is the peaceful summer residence where Rachmaninov lived in in the 1930s and where he composed the Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini and the Third symphony. Fortunately, I had no intention of becoming a professional violinist, for reasons of aptitude, application and self-consciousness at performing. I can’t entirely blame that teacher, but the experience closed off options. I learned less than I might have done. Yet those Saturdays were part of my identity and, in a combative way, the passport to wider horizons I so wanted. Though my playing had stalled, I loved the other lessons: the theory and orchestra and music history. Without realising, I was equipping myself for the job I would eventually have: writing about music.

music diet for January Feed your soul: the 31-day classical music diet for January

With one joyous explosion after another, each dazzling and bright as a sequence of detonating fireworks, this double-choir motet launches as it means to go on: “Sing to the Lord a new song,” the psalmist demands, and “sing, sing, sing” rings out from different voices in effervescent, uplifting harmony and darting, virtuosic counterpoint. The texts are from Psalms 149 and 150, and invoke praise through dance, through timbrel, through harp. Bach wrote the motet as part of the Lutheran liturgy for New Year’s Day 1724, his first at the Thomaskirche, Leipzig. Years later, in 1789, it left an indelible impression on Mozart. He heard it in Bach’s church and was overwhelmed. According to a witness: “Hardly had the choir sung a few bars when Mozart sat up startled; a few measures more and he called out: ‘What is this?’… As it finished he cried out, full of joy, ‘Now there is something one can learn from!’” The conductor John Eliot Gardiner has described the final section, Lobet den Herrn in seinen Taten, as sounding as though, with voices alone, Bach had “dragooned all the Temple instruments of the Old Testament – the harps, psalteries and cymbals – into the service of praising the Lord, like some latter-day cuadro flamenco or big-band leader”. Bring it on. A diet implies restriction as well as consumption, nourishment, reward. Omissions first: opera and big symphonic and choral works (with a few breakout moments) are excluded. They are worlds of their own: other diets for other times. They also tend to be long. All the choices here are under 10 minutes, and often under five. I could have selected only works by Bach or Beethoven – and where are Haydn or Brahms or Janáček, among my own favourite composers? – but we are learning to widen the fold, to scan the horizon for new or forgotten names, pushed aside by prejudice or fashion. Don’t assume you are alone in not knowing all the composers that follow. Some of these pieces are new to me too. After the disastrous premiere of his Symphony No 1 in 1897, Rachmaninov suffered depression and a breakdown. He attributed his recovery to the hypnotherapy treatments of Dr Nikolai Dahl, to whom he dedicated his Piano Concerto No 2 (1901). Choices have been shaped, in part, by the cold, dank days and long nights of January. A summer regime would have been altogether more airy. Away from live encounters in the concert hall, my preference tends to be contemplative and often quiet: a measure of what level of noise I want coming in through my headphones and invading rather than enhancing my day’s activities. You may have a different appetite for musical jolts and thumps and pulsating rhythms. All the composers here can provide that option too, easy to find with a bit of YouTube-ing or Googling. The boundaries of classical music are ever more porous and open, spilling into other forms and all to the good. Give up prejudice or fear or indifference. Open your ears. Get listening. Happy new year! 1 January SleepilyAfter I’d stopped lessons and the drudge of exams, everything changed – too late, yet just in time. I went on exciting music courses and spent every spare moment playing in student ensembles. No one shouted at me. There was, even, laughter. Music came alive, it became life. I began to play in string quartets (that is, usually, two violins, viola and cello) with friends and sometimes strangers. There’s an unrivalled pleasure in playing chamber music: a joint venture in which merely getting through can be harder, and more rewarding, than you’d ever think. New worlds opened. To forge the link between myself and the violin – by now in my first job as a journalist – I commissioned a new instrument, not a common procedure, for amateurs or professionals. I was introduced to a violin-maker, Juliet Barker, who was just establishing an important English violin-making school in Cambridge. I saved my meagre earnings each month to pay for it, and watched as, over two or more years, seasoned white wood turned to varnished gold and became an instrument. No one else has ever played that violin. It’s far superior to any I could otherwise have afforded, old Italian instruments being preeminent. It remains my prized possession. I began to play in string quartets with friends. There’s an unrivalled pleasure in playing chamber music. Pictures of Rachmaninov from this period show a tall, handsome man, suavely dressed, usually unsmiling, often with a cigarette between the beautiful long fingers of his famously large hands. This film-star image was only the outer garb of another existence entirely: of tireless, dogged hard work, rigorous hours of practice with associated painful hands, anxiety and chronic health issues. Despite his success and celebrity, he felt divorced from the act of composition that had for so long been his core activity. Left Russia with his wife, Natalya, and two daughters in the 1917 revolution, losing all his possessions and his Ivanovka estate. In the US he began a new career as a virtuoso pianist, with celebrity status. He built a house in Switzerland and travelled the world but wrote few new compositions.

Fiona Maddocks | Faber Fiona Maddocks | Faber

Playground Equipment for Ala Moana Park, Hawaii by Isamu Noguchi, 1939. Photograph: Isamu Noguchi Foundation A separate, quiet tune’… a vintage postcard featuring ‘anonymous figures from the past, their stories songs without words’. Photograph: courtesy Tom Phillips He was in demand as a conductor and pianist, as well as a composer. While still in Russia he wrote the bulk of his music (see below). Mozart, with Bach, Beethoven, Schubert (and more – don’t write in) is at the centre of western classical music. Mozart loved riddles, wordplay, card games, billiards. The two players, on two pianos, share the opening, bold statement then joyfully interweave and alternate, as if playing chasing games with each other. After this exhilarating opening, move on to the heavenly slow movement. Then the concertos, symphonies, operas, songs… 25 January What power art thou (Cold Song) Henry Purcell Byrd, who perilously kept his Catholic faith hidden in Protestant England, was a contemporary of Shakespeare. 2023 is the 400th anniversary of his death. Serene, soaring, unworldly, there will be plenty of Byrd around this year. As well as sacred music he wrote keyboard works and madrigals, leading the way in a golden age for composers of the first Elizabethan era. 16 January Candide Overture Leonard Bernstein

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-20 07:07:22 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40332405 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier The coat would never be removed from its bag. In the short time I was away, Tom had suffered a catastrophic haemorrhage. Ambulance, hospital, blood transfusions and other interventions followed. It was the dramatic start to a serious decline in his health. I attended the constant round of medical appointments with a sense of watching time and life disappear through a sieve. Somehow I forced myself to finish a draft of the book. Somehow, he read it, making detailed comments, sometimes too detailed for the frazzled author. (“I think here you mean ‘this’, not ‘that’.” “Yes, but what about the whole thing? Does any of it make any sense?”) Shrove Tuesday is on the horizon. Stravinsky’s ballet about the loves and losses of three puppets was written for large, spectacular orchestra but the recommendation here is the two-piano version. Imagine a carnival bustle of sideshows, ferris wheel, food stalls and a carousel. The festive energy is irrepressible. This is your warm-up for the greatest work of the 20th century: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. 31 January Vespers for a New Dark Age: VIII, Postlude Missy Mazzoli

Fiona Maddocks: music to carry you through - The Guardian

Marais was a viol player at the court of Versailles who wrote music of descriptive strangeness. We’ll keep his The Bladder-Stone Operation for a different dietary occasion. His name came to the fore after he featured in the film Tous les matins du monde (1991), when he was played by Gérard Depardieu. Marais’s music – intimate, deep, pensive – goes round in your head for days. 15 January Ave verum corpus William ByrdIf you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. In 1940 Sergei Rachmaninoff, living in exile in America, broke his creative silence and composed a swan song to his Russian homeland. What happened in those final haunted years and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece, the Symphonic Dances? Strozzi moved in intellectual circles in baroque Venice, a celebrated virtuoso musician, but womanhood, her own illegitimacy and that of her children, plus her reputation as a courtesan, all conspired against her. This lament, with rapturous lute accompaniment, asks what can be done, what said, in the face of disaster. The question tugs, over and over, at the heart. 24 January Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K448: Allegro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Rachmaninov proofing his Third Piano Concerto at his beloved Ivanovka estate in Russia, 1910. Alamy You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.