Jan
16
Schubert & Debussy, a New Baby
Filed Under Announcements, Classical Music |
My wife is delivering our second child this week (a daughter). So please excuse me as I can’t post as much as I’d like to. It’ll get more hectic with family flying in from California. And school’s starting again in a week! I will cardiac arrest right after all this is over. For some reason, I’m very nervous, although I’ve been through this process before. I’m freaking out, also, because I chose not to go to a refresher Lamaze class at the hospital, because I fell asleep my first time there. But I think I forgot most of the techniques, and we’ll have to resort to impromptu breathing patterns during labor. It is very likely that at my wife’s side, I’ll look like a third-base coach sending complex and frantic signals to a confused base runner. My wife, on the other hand, exudes a Siddhartan calm. Just an amazing woman.
Two nights ago, I took her out on a date. A last-chance respite, you know, before our incarceration. We went to the Radu Lupu recital at the Carnegie Hall. One of my favorite discs is Radu Lupu’s Late Brahms; when I die, I want to lose my final consciousness listening to his Opus 118 A-major intermezzo. Or Weird Al Yankovic, maybe, who knows.
Anyway, the first half of Lupu’s recital was devoted to Schubert’s D. 850 Sonata, and the second half, to the first book of Debussy’s Preludes. The hall was packed. Amazing, considering that there was no war-horse virtuoso piece nor an especially intriguing program. But I suspect all of them were there, just like me, to hear the sheer beauty of sound that Lupu can produce out of the piano. I don’t know of any other pianist who is capable of producing that kind of tone from the instrument. Maybe Krystian Zimerman or Murray Perahia.
Schubert’s D. 850 Sonata is called “Gasteiner” because it was composed in 1825, during Schubert’s visit to the spa town of Gastein. He would die in three years. His last symphony, the “Great” symphony in C-major, is also based on the sketches he made in Gastein in 1825. So the sonata, too, has a Beethovenian grandeur. I don’t know if Lupu was over-pedaling or if the Carnegie Hall’s acoustics were suspect, but the first movement came off a bit hazy. But the Con moto slow movement was perhaps the finest I’ve heard, either live or on record. And it was beyond my understanding how Lupu could make the mysterious hush of the ppp which ends the sonata linger in the hall’s air.
The Preludes were even finer. Became a suite of damn-near miraculous luminous sound in Lupu’s hands. As an encore, he played something from the second book of Debussy’s Preludes (I can’t remember the title, because Lupu didn’t announce his encores). Then for the second encore, he played the C sharp-minor from Schubert’s Moments Musicaux. In virtually all the renditions I’ve heard, the pianists invariably try to accentuate and over-emphasize the piece’s connection to Bach. But Lupu downplayed such a connection, and just… played. It sang as I’ve never heard it sing.
It should be obvious to you by now that this post isn’t much of an objective music review, because it was impossible for me not to love the moment. During the slow movement of the Schubert, I was holding my wife’s hand, my forearm nudged against her side. The entire hall was silent, straining to listen to the quiet music of Schubert, then I felt my baby squirm and move, grazing against my arm. I looked at my wife in wonder. I was so happy. She’s listening to this, I thought, the way the notes hang in the air before their decay.
(Image: by Shaun Tan)
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