The advent of storing music digitally allowed consumers to carry a significant library of music on a player little larger than a CD. For the classical listener, with an ear to fidelity and musical quality rather than portability, new developments in delivering high-quality content are going to be of more interested. Two subscription access developments are the Naxos Music Library (recently updated with the EMI catalogue) and the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall. The NML is a great resource for discovering music with over 57,000 CDs available. However, it really only provides another means of accessing material already available. The Digital Concert differs from this in that it takes advantage of the latest technological developments to bring a new experience to listeners. The Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert is an excellent example of how classical music production has seized upon ways to use digital media to enhance and expand listener’s experience of the orchestra.
more…

The main concert hall in Sao Paulo is housed in a converted train station. The station still works – it serves line 8, which crosses the city. As you approach it, in the decadent downtown area, Julio Prestes Station appears as a neo-classical dream among the faded facades of the surrounding buildings. It was built between 1926 and 1938 and operated mainly as a station until the mid-1990s, when the main building was converted into a musical centre and the grand hall into a concert hall, the Sala Sao Paulo. It is home of the fantastic Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra (OSESP). The story of its construction, as well as that of its renovation, offers a wonderful story of how music can make us travel.

more…

Eric Satie
Parade (1917)

Gymnopédies (1893)

Paul Cézanne - The Black Clock

In their respective fields, Paul Cézanne and Claude Debussy influenced the artists of the early 20th century, which found their counterparts in intellectual circles formed around writers and poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Proust and André Breton. Jean Cocteau, in particular, with his interests in the Ballets Russes, Stravinsky and the compositions of Eric Satie, brought many of these artists and their ideas together.

In painting, Cézanne, in his still-life ‘The Black Clock’ and ‘Still-life with a Peppermint Bottle’, pointed the way. Contrary to what we have seen in Baroque era still-lives, which always would refer to the fleeting nature of objects and the viewer to consider his salvation in eternity, in Cézanne’s paintings, objects are present only to be painted. There is no story, no interpretation possible: the ‘Black Clock’ does not tell time; the relationship between it, the cup and the conch shell is distorted and the table cloth rises up to underline the flatness of the canvas, creating pyramid, cube and circles which are at the basis of Cézanne’s concept of painting.

more…

“I am the most unhappy and miserable person in this world… my health will never improve, and in such despair, things will only become worse instead of better…” ~ Franz Schubert

Austrian Composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is enshrined as the pillar of Romantic Western Classical Music who follows after Beethoven*. He had completed a tremendous collection of hundreds of lieder, symphonies, operas, and a large body of chamber and piano music that adds up to over 1000 works during his career. This was prolific for a man who only lived for 31 years. Franz Liszt described him as “the most poetic musician who ever lived.” On his deathbed, Beethoven is said to have looked into some of the younger man’s works and exclaimed, “Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert!”

Yet, a number of Schubert’s musical works such as ‘Winter Journey’, ‘the Unfinished Symphony’ and ‘Death and the Maiden’ are said to be filled with elements of death. Indeed, Schubert’s despair during his life is reflected in his own writing, “the brightest hopes have come to naught, to whom the joy of love and friendship can offer nothing but pain at most… Every night as I retire to my bed, I always hope that I would not wake up. Yet every day, the morning breaks into the pains of yesterday’s wounds.”

more…

Recently, in Sao Paulo, I lived through a perfect example of the surreal music scene in Brazil. It was a wintry Sunday afternoon. We went to Sala Sao Paulo, the concert hall home to the Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra (of which more to come in these pages) and tried to get tickets for a concert the following week. Disappointingly, there was none left. We briefly thought about buying instead tickets for a piano recital by Arnaldo Cohen, one of Brazil’s finest pianists, for that evening, but the only seats left were prohibitively expensive. The lady in the tickets office, noting our frustration, dropped a few tones in her voice, leaned over the counter and, with a conspiring look, said “go to the lady in the blue dress over there – she can give you some free tickets for tonight”. Before I could ask her to elaborate, she sat back in her chair and looked stern. I thought it wise to ask no more and went over to the lady in blue who, as it turns out, did have a huge pile of tickets for that evening’s recital and gladly gave us some. Soon she was encircled by other people and I was left in the dark about how that had happened.

more…

It is Proms season again. But I am not going to describe any of those splendid concerts staged at the Royal Albert Hall. I just want to talk about a free live concert held on June 21 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at Westfield London Shopping Centre, one of the biggest in the UK.

As part of promotions for the new season of Proms Out & About, the BBC Symphony Orchestra offered a wonderful dose of classical music at Westfield London. The orchestra was joined by operatic stars and local schoolchildren, who together presented this hour-and-a-half concert showcasing world-class music.

more…

Beethoven

Symphony no.9 in D minor Op 125 “Choral” (1824)
IV Finale: Presto – Allegro assai

Smetana

String Quartet no. 1 “From my live” (1876)

Má vlast (1879)

“… For two years I have avoided almost all social gatherings because it is impossible for me to say to people “I am deaf”. If I belonged to any other profession it would be easier, but in my profession it is a frightful state…” ~ Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is known as one of the most pivotal classical composers of the 18th century, and is still considered today one of the greatest composers of all time. Für Elise, Moonlight Sonata, and the rich and penetrating Fifth Symphony are amongst some of his famous works.
more…

If Joao Carlos Martins’s life has been pretty eventful, as I mentioned in my last article, the same can be said of his music, and the hallmark of his piano playing as well as of his conducting work is his genius originality. From the beginning of his career, Martins has imprinted his personal style on music of the compositions (often played ad nauseam) by great masters such as Bach, Schumann or Mozart. Despite having been sometimes criticised by his inventive approach to these well-known composers, Martins has remained true to his vision that great pianists are those that let their real selves come to the surface in music. In another excellent documentary about his life, Reverie (Johan Kennive and Tim Heirman: 2006), he says that “surely the point of interpretation is playing like yourself (….) somebody who played the notes exactly as they are written would be a computer!”. Furthermore, he mentions that even composers like Benjamin Britten, who obsessively annotated their scores leave a lot out, that must be intuited by the player. This feeling for the music is the mark of a great player.
more…

Debussy
La Mer (1905)
Estampes (1903)
Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune (1894)

Claude Monet - Impression, Sunrise

In 1874 a group of painters, including Monet, Pissarro, and Degas, displayed their works in the photography studio of Nadar, and entitled the exhibit as the “Salon of the Refused Painters”. At the time, paintings and sculpture were shown in the ‘official’ salon, so they could be judged, prizes awarded and, of course, sold. When seeing Claude Monet’s painting “Impression, Sunrise”, one of the critics coined the term “Impressionism”, which was then uniformly applied to the works of these painters, many of whom disapproved of the label.
more…