Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through

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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.

Fiona Maddocks - Wikipedia Fiona Maddocks - Wikipedia

Three piano concertos, two symphonies, 83 songs, The Isle of the Dead(1909), The Bells(1913), All-Night Vigil(1915). In the US, the composer reinvented himself as a star virtuoso pianist, one of the most highly paid performers in the land. He was featured in fashionable magazines, moved in the same gilded society as Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin (though neither was an intimate; Rachmaninov didn’t fall easily into friendships). Soon after his arrival in New York, in November 1918, amid armistice celebrations, he was mobbed, as one critic noted, by the flapper girls of Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. They wanted to hear his famous C sharp minor Prelude, a youthful work that became ubiquitous in rag and jazz versions as well as his own solemn, solo piano original, the bells of holy Russia written into its chiming chords. 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?’)

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Left Russia with his wife, Natalya, and two daughters in the 1917 revolution, losing all his possessions and his Ivanovka estate. In the US he began a new career as a virtuoso pianist, with celebrity status. He built a house in Switzerland and travelled the world but wrote few new compositions. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Fiona Maddocks | The Guardian

I had some non-fantasy dinner issues of my own to sort out. Tom thought a good night out was John Cage followed by more John Cage. After once going with me to hear Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2, he adopted the Harry stance. “I don’t need to hear that symphony again as long as I live.” It happens to be a favourite of mine. Would I be able to convince him that the composer, and the music itself, were more interesting than he thought? I valued Tom’s incisive editorial input but had no time to waste proving the validity of my subject. Pictures 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.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 Twentieth-Century Classical Music: A Ladybird Expert Book. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-1-4059-3241-7. 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.

Music for Life : 100 Works to Carry You Through - Google Books

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 Nautilus

Knock on wood – six stunning wooden concert halls around the world

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 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 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. 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