More classical music than you can shake a baton at.

Right.

So the day after Don Giovanni we had purchased tickets to see apparently ridiculously famous pianist/conductor Andras Schiff. I am so lucky Mirva was around to tell me to go to this! I wonder how annoyed proper classical music afficionados would be if they heard me being all 'oh I saw some bloke called Andras Schiff the other day' so casually, but what can I say, I am uneducated to the extreme. It is very fun to learn though.

The Musikverein is predictably a stupidly impressive building, and it is I think a mark of the length of time I have now spent here that I was able to walk in without actually gasping...


Puzzlingly, for what was basically a simple cuboid, the acoustics were such that you could everything going on at the front perfectly, even though we were even further back than this picture was taken, up in the gallery.

In the extremely brief time I have been listening to live classical music on any kind of regular basis, I have noticed the difficulty in evaluating it. Basically, a lot of rock (and/or roll!) music is enjoyable if you are in the same room as it, you don't have to be paying attention, and if the music is crap you can easily blame the band for writing a bad song in your opinion. But now suddenly with classical music you have other things to consider, like did these guys play it well, is it a good piece of music in the first place, does it mean something to you, did you actually listen or were you thinking about your holidays? (this last usually is connected to the first three). I can't just tap my foot while standing eerily still like a london indie kid now...

I mention that first because of how that definitely did NOT apply to this particular performance.When Mr Schiff stepped out and started conducting, standing behind his grand piano, I could tell that the music was being played very well, and I was quite enjoying it. But then when he actually sat down behind the piano and began playing (while still conducting I might add), well... Once he started to play, there was no hard thinking; not about whether this was a good/bad interpretation of a piece, not about whether I just did/didn't like it, and not about whether or not I could guess what the music was written about.

Instead, it was just obviously, fantastically, emotionally GOOD. I didn't feel like some sort of uneducated outsider, missing the entire point of the piece because I didn't recognise the poignant, sad significance of that last minor third echoing the previous main theme (or whatever...). I just sat there, spellbound, marvelling at how amazing it was. Every person in the room was completely focussed on the music, it seemed like they waited for the gaps between sections to even move.

There where two sections, the first a group of pieces by Beethoven, the second by Mozart. While Mozart was very pretty, he did seem pretty to the extent that he didn't have much to say. Listening to lovely, happy, Constable-countryside-pretty music is great, but it isn't going to be the best. The best piece was Beethoven's Piano Concert No. 3. I can't really say why other than 'you had to be there man'. It was just undisputably good, really.

Here is a recording of Mr Schiff playing but not conducting the Concerto. If you are strapped for time and just want a quick example of some quite impressive piano playing, head to about the 3 minute mark onwards. Mirva said after the concert that it was among the best piano playing she had ever heard. This is of course good, although it is difficult to start at such a high level without going downhill from there!



Also during last week we went to 2 piano recital evenings at the University for Music and the performing arts. These are free, and they are a cool way to expose me to as many different composers as possible. Icouldn't possibly go into detail about everything we saw... I am making an effort to download versions of the pieces I thought were any good, as this is I think the only way to build up a collection of classical music without choosing stuff totally at random, and things always sound better (and I listen to them more closely) live anyway.

These concerts were notable in that it was my first exposure to 'modern' piano music, which is not really music for the piano at all, but another instrument absolutely identical in appearance and mechanical workings, but played completely differently. Despite my well known affection for weird discordant noise on the live stage, I have only really been impressed by a single modern piece so far. I believe I likened it to hearing music by aliens, and I believe that is a pretty fair description.

Der Tom