A little more arty stuff

It's an arts day today. A friend sent me a link to an article that was published in the Telegraph by Michael Henderson on Schubert. It's a bit gushy, but Henderson is obviously a Schubert devotee. I'm not, though I must say I love some of his music. Some of it, as I've said previously, 'rabbits' on a bit - to me. Nevertheless, as I said to my friends, any composer who can write The Trout Quintet, can be forgiven any less than perfect music that he might have written.

You can listen to some samples from the Quintet by clicking on this link at Amazon.com

More Musos

A friend commented that she 'Missed Mozart and Schubert, and Faure in the earlier blog. Well, it wasn't an intentional miss.

I enjoy all three of these composers (though sometimes find Schubert has a bit of a tendency to rabbit on in his piano works). I've struggled to be able to play one particular piece by Faure for many years. It not only has three against two - it was the first piece, I think, in which I encountered this difficulty, and the pencil notes from my teacher are still on the page - but it also has a stinker of a chromatic run at speed, and I'm blowed if I can figure out the sequence of it.

And Faure's Requiem is a favourite of mine, too (in complete contrast to another favourite Requiem, by Verdi, which is one of the all time great Requiems). I got to know it before I went overseas, and then heard that a local choral group was presenting it, in London. (I think my uncle may have encouraged me to go.) It was a dismal performance - but then, it seemed to me that the amateur strata in England was considerably below the skill level of the amateur strata in NZ.