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Showing posts from March, 2021

swallow

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Dear friends of piano music, "A swallow doesn't make a summer". Actually, I wanted to write something completely different - how thoughts are as free as a swallow that soars into the air and looks at the world from a distance. How beautiful, I thought, the world looks from above, like in those movies "Germany from Above", in which you can see the large lines, the colored fields, the lush green of the forests, the blue of the seas. From a swallow's perspective, you are spared all the ugly little details, the dying forests, the poisoning of nature, even a motorway junction looks beautiful from a distance due to its precise geometric structures - you don't feel how the earth suffers from this sealing, the stench Cars, the aggressiveness of internal combustion engines and unfortunately also some of the contemporaries who drive these cars. The world is beautiful from the swallow's perspective, although this is already a romantic transfiguration on my pa

Burgmüller - "L´hirondelle" (Die Schwalbe, The swallow), Op. 100 No. 24

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Gade and Mussorsky

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  Dear friends of piano music, "From behind through the chest into the eye", this was one of the favorite sayings of my first piano teacher, a very clever but unfortunately very unhappy woman, and - in spite of "de mortuis nihil nisi bene", on the whole this expression unfortunately also describes their teaching methods. This principle has evidently become so much in my flesh and blood that I start my Sunday text on an elegy by Niels Gade with whom? Of course, with Modest Mussorgsky. I'm always terrified when I see pictures of him - a human wreck destroyed by self-doubt and alcohol. What wonderful ideas he had, but often, when I try to play his piano pieces prima vista, I have the impression that he must have clearly been convinced that he has three hands. Mozart is said to have pulled his nose in such situations, but unfortunately this is not a viable option for people who wear glasses like me. Mussorsky suffered all his life from not being a studied academic

Niels Gade, Elegie, Op. 19 #1

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blue ribbon

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Dear friends of piano music, Why does this music sound so sad, I thought the other day when I was recording Tchaikovsky's “Song of the Lark”, March from the Seasons of the Year. It's a piece of spring after all, and in spring, when it starts to get lighter and warmer, when the first soft green, the first buds and flowers appear, at least I always get slightly euphoric. I still remember how last year I walked through the city and photographed every shrub, every flower pot and every front yard and came home full of colors, light and the scent of flowers - spring! Finally! Spring has its blue ribbon Fluttering through the airs again; Sweet, well-known scents Touch lightly and forbodingly the country. The violets are already dreaming Willing to come soon. - Listen, the faint sound of a harp from afar! Spring, yes it's you! It's you I heard! https://lyricstranslate.com/de/er-ists-its-him.html (It's Him) (Mörike, one of the few poems that I know b

Franz Liszt: Spring / Wiosna / Frühling (Six Chants polonais, Chopin)

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for the cat

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  Dear friends of piano music,   “It was all for the cat”, which means something like “it was all in vain”. A German saying that sounds cute, although it means something very bitter and resigned. Yes, this proverbial cat is getting a lot of thought from all sides right now. Starting with the piece I had planned for today, which I had really practiced with devotion, and then I took thirteen recordings of it yesterday and then almost cried with anger. Then winter has returned, at the beginning of March, after it had already started to bud and bloom outside, there is now bitterly cold night frost again, so that one has to worry about the tender plants - hopefully it wasn't all for the cat. What was right for the cat, however, is our currently ongoing lockdown, which did not lead to the expected relaxation and thus to the opening, to the resumption of public life as an expected reward for the privations and restrictions, but directly into the third wave. Only the mutants party here,

Frédéric Chopin: Valse. Version autographe

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