Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

Do you recognize these quotes by famous pianists? Who said these:

1. "My great sadness is the realization that the first ten minutes of every concert are lost to me, while I get accustomed all over again to being there. In these ten or fifteen minutes, I suffer agony, because even it if is a heavenly piece of music, I can't feel deeply about it, as I am still in the process of getting over my embarrassment and discomfort. When this short but of so long time has run its miserable course, I am all right, but until then, I must submit meekly to slips of the fingers, and to a heart that beats, but not enough to obliterate me, which is what I want . . . . I am nervous and apprehensive because I may not 'have it' that particular night. Because I feel the piece is bigger than me, so big I may never be able to even touch it, let alone be the master."

2. "Bad music disturbs me, but wonderful music disturbs me even more."

3. "I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare."

4. "When I am playing, I am in ecstasy; that is what I live for."

5. "Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents."

6. "Their's [the Beatles'] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. (Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.)"

7. "I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!"

8. "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes- ahh, that is where the art besides."

9. "Today's audiences go to the concert hall to hear Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms and so on. But back in Godowsky and Hofmann's day, we went to hear what the pianists had to say about the composer; we went to hear the pianists, and the same thing went for every other great pianist. When you went to hear Cortot play an all-Chopin recital, you went to hear what Cortot had to say about Chopin."

10. "Play Mozart in memory of me."

Alfred Brendel, the pianist who during his six decades of performances has mastered the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, will retire from the concert stage next year.

The Austrian native, who turns 77 in January, will give his last concert on Dec. 18, 2008, in Vienna. . . .

Brendel's final North American engagements will be in February and March, with performances in New York, Boston, Montreal, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Chicago and Pittsburgh. . . .

His final concert will be with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, a few weeks before he turns 78. He will perform Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9, known as the "Jeunehomme" ("Young Man").

My career is atypical. I have not been a child prodigy. . . . I have a good memory but not a phenomenal one. I am not a good sight-reader. I am completely at a loss to explain why I made it . . .

They say a prophetess is seldom honored in her own country.

Anne Manson has been making the papers recently — not in Kansas City but in the Big Apple, where on Nov. 4 she made a highly auspicious New York City Opera debut conducting Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa.”

The New York press was generous with superlatives about the 46-year-old conductor, who had a mercurial tenure as music director of the Kansas City Symphony from 1999 to 2003

Opera News review
Newsday review
NY Times listing
Playbill (with photos)

This demonstration provides an opportunity to evaluate the pleasantness of different tone combinations. . . . When you are finished, press the "Done" button to see how your ranking compares to the median preference order derived from studies in the literature.

In this segment you will be able to vary the number of harmonics in a complex tone. The point is to demonstrate the surprising fact that the pitch one hears always corresponds to the fundamental frequency of the harmonic series even when there is no energy at that frequency. This phenomenon is referred to as "hearing the missing fundamental", the fundamental being mathematically defined as the common divisor of a harmonics series.

Once again, pianist Ruth Slenczynska is having a bout with limelight - this time at age 82, as opposed to age 5, when she entered the Curtis Institute of Music the year before making her Berlin debut.

"A musician is always a musician. We pop up somehow or another," she said the other day in her West End Avenue apartment. What she doesn't acknowledge is the odds she has overcome in doing so: Slenczynska has achieved several reincarnations within a single lifetime.

Currently, she's on a new VAI-label DVD titled Tribute to Rachmaninoff, half of it a Camera Three CBS-TV program she made in 1963, the other half a series of recent interviews. In them, she reminisces about her years of study with "Mr. Rachmaninoff," as she calls him, as well as her time at Curtis, when a fellow student nicknamed "the pen pusher" was writing something titled Adagio for Strings. And that was Samuel Barber.

These days, she's often in Japan, where since 2003 she has developed a late-life cult concert following. Along with that comes hobnobbing with Empress Michiko, recording new CDs, and, as a symbol of lively seniorhood, being photographed beneath a 1,200-year-old cherry tree for ads in the Japanese version of TV Guide.

None of that was forseeable as recently as 2000, when she was devastated by the death of her husband of 34 years, or in the decades previous, when she planned to retire at 40, and before that, renounced performing after a child-prodigy period in which she studied with now-legendary artists but suffered some of the worst backstage abuse on record.