Archive for July, 2009
Rededication, For Love
Spent the week with my wife who was at a writer’s workshop in the Catskills, a lot of time alone to compose, to read, to listen to Lenny Bernstein (his music and his Haydn) and re-dedicate myself to music. Nothing weird—I think every artist (or thinker or lover) has to go through this from [...]
It seems like an odd match, Bernstein and Haydn. After all, it’s easier to imagine the gushingest conductor cottoning more deeply to the gushingest music—Mahler, Brahms, Rachmaninov, etc. But when I was a student, I bought a Sony disc of Bernstein conducting Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, which I thought would be a passable, [...]
Points West (Side)
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Lately Sony has been inundating me with a whole burning mass of excellent nostalgia in the form of records [...]
Scratches? Pops? Who Cares?
Sometimes I realize how spoiled I am, to live in this day and age where sound quality and recording technology are so specific, so awesomely brilliant, that an old recording like, say, Vladimir Horowtiz playing both Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the Liszt B-minor Sonata at Carnegie Hall in the late 1940s can at [...]