Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through

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Shrove Tuesday is on the horizon. Stravinsky’s ballet about the loves and losses of three puppets was written for large, spectacular orchestra but the recommendation here is the two-piano version. Imagine a carnival bustle of sideshows, ferris wheel, food stalls and a carousel. The festive energy is irrepressible. This is your warm-up for the greatest work of the 20th century: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. 31 January Vespers for a New Dark Age: VIII, Postlude Missy Mazzoli He was in demand as a conductor and pianist, as well as a composer. While still in Russia he wrote the bulk of his music (see below). Mozart, with Bach, Beethoven, Schubert (and more – don’t write in) is at the centre of western classical music. Mozart loved riddles, wordplay, card games, billiards. The two players, on two pianos, share the opening, bold statement then joyfully interweave and alternate, as if playing chasing games with each other. After this exhilarating opening, move on to the heavenly slow movement. Then the concertos, symphonies, operas, songs… 25 January What power art thou (Cold Song) Henry Purcell urn:lcp:musicforlife100w0000madd:epub:57bc5507-e1ec-4d9c-92da-0a09da66ba81 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier musicforlife100w0000madd Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2ng73bqghv Invoice 1652 Isbn 0571329381

Music for Life: 100 Classical Works to Carry You Through

So like most people whose work did not oblige them to be present, I stayed home. Days were spent in a small garden office (what crimes might I have committed without that hut). The sense of expulsion from a known existence hit everyone. To call it exile would be an affront to those millions experiencing enforced ejection from their country. The alienation, however, was real. When the days of ever more absurd exercise classes online and infuriating Duolingo language courses became too bizarre, I realised I needed to retrieve my writing self. I proposed a book to my publisher, Faber. Some friends winced when I mentioned what I was writing about. (‘Really? Is he your sort of thing?’) A diet implies restriction as well as consumption, nourishment, reward. Omissions first: opera and big symphonic and choral works (with a few breakout moments) are excluded. They are worlds of their own: other diets for other times. They also tend to be long. All the choices here are under 10 minutes, and often under five. I could have selected only works by Bach or Beethoven – and where are Haydn or Brahms or Janáček, among my own favourite composers? – but we are learning to widen the fold, to scan the horizon for new or forgotten names, pushed aside by prejudice or fashion. Don’t assume you are alone in not knowing all the composers that follow. Some of these pieces are new to me too. In 1940 Sergei Rachmaninoff, living in exile in America, broke his creative silence and composed a swan song to his Russian homeland. What happened in those final haunted years and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece, the Symphonic Dances? Assuming “normality” day two will be harder than day one, today’s choice is Schubert. If this speaks to you, try the piano sonatas, especially the late ones, the symphonies, or any – yes, any – of the 600 songs. The song cycle Winterreise captures every aspect of hope and wintry sorrow. A universe of tenderness awaits. 5 January Nagoya Marimbas To help narrow the field, I laid down a few guidelines: no operas, as they have their own narrative already (though one or two overtures have crept in). No song cycles for the same reason, though they too slipped in surreptitiously. Naturally the more rules I made, the more I broke, even concerning the title itself (why stop at 100? There are more if you count. The short round-ups discussing, or confessing, what I left out add a few hundred more).The popularity of Vivaldi – usually topping the “most played” classical lists thanks to The Four Seasons – risks obscuring the glory of his expansive genius. The Venetian priest-violinist wrote church music, more than 500 concertos and 50 operas. He died in poverty. Try the exuberant Gloria or the haunting Stabat Mater . But start with this ravishing love aria from his opera Giustino. 19 January Bagatelle Op 33, No 5 Ludwig van Beethoven After I’d stopped lessons and the drudge of exams, everything changed – too late, yet just in time. I went on exciting music courses and spent every spare moment playing in student ensembles. No one shouted at me. There was, even, laughter. Music came alive, it became life. I began to play in string quartets (that is, usually, two violins, viola and cello) with friends and sometimes strangers. There’s an unrivalled pleasure in playing chamber music: a joint venture in which merely getting through can be harder, and more rewarding, than you’d ever think. New worlds opened. To forge the link between myself and the violin – by now in my first job as a journalist – I commissioned a new instrument, not a common procedure, for amateurs or professionals. I was introduced to a violin-maker, Juliet Barker, who was just establishing an important English violin-making school in Cambridge. I saved my meagre earnings each month to pay for it, and watched as, over two or more years, seasoned white wood turned to varnished gold and became an instrument. No one else has ever played that violin. It’s far superior to any I could otherwise have afforded, old Italian instruments being preeminent. It remains my prized possession. I began to play in string quartets with friends. There’s an unrivalled pleasure in playing chamber music.

Fiona Maddocks - Classical Music Fiona Maddocks - Classical Music

Born Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov in 1873 into a musical-military family, the fourth of six children, in Novgorod, Russia. Escaped an anticipated army career when his dissolute father lost his fortune, sold the family estate and abandoned his wife, who took the children to live in a small flat in St Petersburg. Musically gifted from an early age, Rachmaninov went to the Moscow Conservatory to study with the great guru, Nikolai Zverev and caught the attention of Tchaikovsky. Robert Nathaniel Dett. Alamy Photograph: Alamy 29 January In the Bottoms: IV. Barcarolle (Morning) Robert Nathaniel Dett Marais was a viol player at the court of Versailles who wrote music of descriptive strangeness. We’ll keep his The Bladder-Stone Operation for a different dietary occasion. His name came to the fore after he featured in the film Tous les matins du monde (1991), when he was played by Gérard Depardieu. Marais’s music – intimate, deep, pensive – goes round in your head for days. 15 January Ave verum corpus William Byrd The coat would never be removed from its bag. In the short time I was away, Tom had suffered a catastrophic haemorrhage. Ambulance, hospital, blood transfusions and other interventions followed. It was the dramatic start to a serious decline in his health. I attended the constant round of medical appointments with a sense of watching time and life disappear through a sieve. Somehow I forced myself to finish a draft of the book. Somehow, he read it, making detailed comments, sometimes too detailed for the frazzled author. (“I think here you mean ‘this’, not ‘that’.” “Yes, but what about the whole thing? Does any of it make any sense?”)Playground Equipment for Ala Moana Park, Hawaii by Isamu Noguchi, 1939. Photograph: Isamu Noguchi Foundation Brahms suffered many blows to his lonely heart, never finding redemption through love. His lifelong devotion to Clara Schumann, several years his senior and married to the composer Robert Schumann, never came to fruition even after she was widowed. For a time, Brahms turned his attentions instead to Robert and Clara’s daughter Julie, though not so that anyone would notice. News, in the summer of 1869, that Julie was to be married appears to have surprised him. Clara noted, “Johannes is quite altered, he seldom comes to the house and speaks only in monosyllables when he does come… Did he really love her? But he has never thought of marrying, and Julie has never had any inclination towards him.” Typically, Brahms spoke his feelings in the only way he could: through music. He called the Alto Rhapsody, for alto, male chorus and orchestra, his “bridal song”. Who but Brahms could have made a wedding gift in such autumnal hues? The melancholy text, from Goethe’s Harzreise im Winter (Winter Journey in the Harz Mountains), tells of a young man out of love with life. Its three parts conclude with a heavenly male chorus seeking consolation as a thirsty man yearns for water in the desert. “It is long since I remember being so moved by a depth of pain in words and music,” Clara wrote, as if full realisation had just dawned. “If only he would for once speak so tenderly.” He does, and now for ever, through the emotion of this Rhapsody. Pause After the disastrous premiere of his Symphony No 1 in 1897, Rachmaninov suffered depression and a breakdown. He attributed his recovery to the hypnotherapy treatments of Dr Nikolai Dahl, to whom he dedicated his Piano Concerto No 2 (1901). With one joyous explosion after another, each dazzling and bright as a sequence of detonating fireworks, this double-choir motet launches as it means to go on: “Sing to the Lord a new song,” the psalmist demands, and “sing, sing, sing” rings out from different voices in effervescent, uplifting harmony and darting, virtuosic counterpoint. The texts are from Psalms 149 and 150, and invoke praise through dance, through timbrel, through harp. Bach wrote the motet as part of the Lutheran liturgy for New Year’s Day 1724, his first at the Thomaskirche, Leipzig. Years later, in 1789, it left an indelible impression on Mozart. He heard it in Bach’s church and was overwhelmed. According to a witness: “Hardly had the choir sung a few bars when Mozart sat up startled; a few measures more and he called out: ‘What is this?’… As it finished he cried out, full of joy, ‘Now there is something one can learn from!’” The conductor John Eliot Gardiner has described the final section, Lobet den Herrn in seinen Taten, as sounding as though, with voices alone, Bach had “dragooned all the Temple instruments of the Old Testament – the harps, psalteries and cymbals – into the service of praising the Lord, like some latter-day cuadro flamenco or big-band leader”. Bring it on.

Fiona Maddocks | Faber Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile by Fiona Maddocks | Faber

Strozzi moved in intellectual circles in baroque Venice, a celebrated virtuoso musician, but womanhood, her own illegitimacy and that of her children, plus her reputation as a courtesan, all conspired against her. This lament, with rapturous lute accompaniment, asks what can be done, what said, in the face of disaster. The question tugs, over and over, at the heart. 24 January Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K448: Allegro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Lccn 2018379471 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.8827 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000516 Openlibrary_edition For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Fortunately, I had no intention of becoming a professional violinist, for reasons of aptitude, application and self-consciousness at performing. I can’t entirely blame that teacher, but the experience closed off options. I learned less than I might have done. Yet those Saturdays were part of my identity and, in a combative way, the passport to wider horizons I so wanted. Though my playing had stalled, I loved the other lessons: the theory and orchestra and music history. Without realising, I was equipping myself for the job I would eventually have: writing about music. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? This Ethiopian nun (b.1923), once a singer to Haile Selassie, imprisoned when her country was under Italian rule, has acquired cult status; once on the margins of classical music but now moving into mainstream consciousness. The Song of the Sea merges gentle arpeggios with a wash of rising chords and a plaintive song waving and weaving through all. 18 January Giustino: Act 1: Vedrò con mio diletto Antonio Vivaldi

music diet for January Feed your soul: the 31-day classical music diet for January

Then, not long ago, I smashed my left arm, the one that creates the notes. Surgery and metal worked miracles but left it stiff. A Schubert string quartet can last 40 minutes. Straightening the arm afterwards takes a bit of teeth gritting. For a professional player, that everyday accident would have ended their career. Cling on to this last day of holiday before the general return to work. Time to act on those resolutions. Running maybe? Or maybe just rolling off the sofa. This blithe, galloping piece from a dance suite by Norwegian composer Grieg conjures open landscapes and a spirit of adventure. Too feelgood? The next choice is for you… 3 January NautilusPictures of Rachmaninov from this period show a tall, handsome man, suavely dressed, usually unsmiling, often with a cigarette between the beautiful long fingers of his famously large hands. This film-star image was only the outer garb of another existence entirely: of tireless, dogged hard work, rigorous hours of practice with associated painful hands, anxiety and chronic health issues. Despite his success and celebrity, he felt divorced from the act of composition that had for so long been his core activity. Byrd, who perilously kept his Catholic faith hidden in Protestant England, was a contemporary of Shakespeare. 2023 is the 400th anniversary of his death. Serene, soaring, unworldly, there will be plenty of Byrd around this year. As well as sacred music he wrote keyboard works and madrigals, leading the way in a golden age for composers of the first Elizabethan era. 16 January Candide Overture Leonard Bernstein