Music
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Our local chamber players, the Takacs, performed the Schubert Quintet (D.956). It's a glorious work — one of the finest in the entire chamber repertoire — and was brilliantly performed. It's a turbulent, nervous, tense piece of music. With the last notes, the entire audience rose simultaneously to cheer. There were fist-pumpings, whistles, "bravos," "yesses,"…
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Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" condenses centuries of tangled racial strife into a brief lyric. The song begins in rural, impoverished, perhaps southern, America: "I was born by the river, in a little tent." Then, with a glance at the old man river who just keeps rolling, it alludes to African-Americans as on-the-lam…
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I'm enchanted that our new president chose to cite — or "sample" as they say in the world of pop music — one of my favorite, and one of the most important of the songs of the 1960s. Here's the borrowed sentiment, delivered in Chicago on November 4, just after Obama cleared the electoral hurdle:…
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At Grusin Music Hall last night to hear the Takacs play Beethoven and Schumann, always a delight, and also a quartet by Bartok, which is, I’m sorry to say, even after many exposures is still screechingly hard on my tender ears (except for the very amusing pizzicato 4th movement). Perhaps some day I’ll "get" Bartok,…
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I’m just back from Lebanon (that would be Lebanon, New Hampshire) where I heard a performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. If you pay no mind to the ridiculous racist orientalist anti-American story, it’s a pretty good opera. The orchestra, though small, was excellent and the singers top-notch. The music is a little on the overwrought…
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Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old? Seems like just yesterday. This be the verse in its full splendor. Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke,…
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A few nights ago, I attended a performance by our local treasure, the ever-glorious Takacs Quartet. Without asking my leave, they chose to play works by Aarvo Part and Philip Glass. I suppose that there must be virtues to "minimalist" music, but a single motif played over and over again in the same tempo, with…
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On September 6, 1664, Sam Pepys purchased for his young wife a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon. At 20 shillings, he knew that he overpaid but he was not at all sorry, because Doll, the 'Change woman from whom he made the purchase was "so pretty, that, God forgive me! I could not think…