Mc

Dear friends of piano music,

anti-cyclical behavior is supposedly intelligent. So we went on our honeymoon to Italy a few years ago - in August. Italy is always incredibly beautiful, even if you almost perish from the heat. In Milan we would almost have starved to death, because all restaurants and almost all supermarkets were closed. Why should they have opened, except for us nobody was there ...... We were saved by a well-known fast-food chain, where we consequently had to eat our meals every day - an interesting experience. It is well known that taste can be argued, and that is exactly what I have to do now. It starts out harmlessly, and then it may get really nasty, but unfortunately I can't help it. At first I was surprised by the consistency of the whole thing - it looked like a kind of sandwich, but had a "mouthfeeling" like a pudding. The taste was unobtrusive, indefinable, not unpleasant, somehow a bit sweet. But then came the shock: the so-called burger had suddenly disappeared, it was as if I had accidentally inhaled it, you didn't need to chew it, it offered no resistance. a kind of passive ingestion of food, enough sugar and fat that a school child could live on for a day, swallowed with an incidence that was really terrifying. And it seems addicting - a bit like being in the animal kingdom. Undirected appetite behavior - you go to a bar, directed appetite - you buy the burger, and then there is the instinctive dump that nothing can stop - some no longer have time to get a plate, burgers and fries are taken straight from the tray devoured. I'm exaggerating - you can eat there every now and then if you don't already have obesity or diabetes. What really bothers me is the infantilization of taste. It always tastes the same, sweet and unobtrusive, these characterless mud rolls are now loved and devoured all over the world - why? The world has so much more to offer from a culinary point of view, countless flavors and nuances of flavors that the different cultures have produced. Food that makes sense, that tells its story and tradition. That's incredibly exciting, isn't it? What there is to discover there!

Chopin's Nocturnes are recognized as character pieces. If he really had intended the same character all the time, it would have been incredibly stupid of him to write so many of them at once - one would have been perfectly sufficient. Chopin is also not a late romantic, his role models include Mozart - there were no such extremely slow tempi in classical music - and bel canto, and the human breath is also a limiting factor. At some point it's just too slow to sing. We have enough metronome numbers in the Urtext editions, mostly in the Fonatana editions, which are at least contemporary, if not partly from Chopin himself, who also gave a lot of piano lessons. So why do you have to stretch each piece like chewing gum and then pour the same feeling sauce over it? Because then everyone likes it, because it sounds sooooo romantic and soooo soulful? Chopin complained about this sentimentality during his lifetime. And as for the tempo: If Rubinstein played like that in the last years of his life, then that's authentic. The serenity of old age, he was wise, gentle, removed from things, closer to heaven than earth. but all others are epigones, and if they pass this type of interpretation copy on to their students, they are the epigones of the epigones. I am sure that Liszt had no fixed interpretations. He always found and reinvented everything practically. Anyone who can play the entire Schumann Concerto without the second finger of the right hand (which he had injured once) has an intellectual flexibility that constantly opens up new spaces for imagination, which is a never-ending cornucopia of tonal ideas and variants. Ah, this is music. Eternal vitality. I ask you - read a little, think, and then play as your heart desires. And never like anyone else. If necessary also counter-cyclically. Everything else is nonsense.

Kerstin