Living Life Harmoniously
This playlist features music from various periods of my life, compositions in a range of musical forms and styles – not just for the piano, which has become my main personal and professional musical focus. It includes some of the earliest classical music that I remember my parents playing, theme music from various CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio programmes that we listened to as a family, and specific performances that I came to love as I began exploring the world of historical piano recordings.
Read more…As a child I used to run down the hallway whenever Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' or Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony began playing, and several other musical selections were family favourites, among them Sibelius's Violin Concerto, suites and concertos by Bach, and Beethoven's Symphonies. This music is so deeply enmeshed with my childhood years that specific settings and atmospheres come flooding back as I revisit these pieces. I will forever smell roast beef when I hear the opening strains of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.4 (our usual Saturday night dinner and music), Handel's Arrival of the Queen of Sheba was my British father's tongue-in-cheek theme song for my elegant Hungarian mother, and Smetana's Moldau remains for me one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed.
We listened to a variety of music on the radio, and the theme songs for 'Gilmour's Albums' (Sowande and Fauré), 'Off the Record' (Respighi), and 'Disc Drive' (Rameau) were leitmotifs in our household. The CBC theme music puts me right back in my childhood living room in Montreal, where we listened on a vintage wood-panelled Bang & Olufsen Beomaster 1000 receiver, with matching wood-framed speakers whose panels were covered with blue fabric. I can see the Canadian countryside that we drove through on summer trips – the summer of 1985 stands out in particular, when we drove across the country serenaded by cassettes featuring piano concertos by Rachmaninoff and Gershwin.
Once my interest in historical recordings began developing in my mid-teens, I became almost exclusively focused on the great pianists of the first half of the 20th century, although I still listened to a variety of classical music. Sergei Rachmaninoff was my 'gateway pianist' because I was so fascinated by the concept of a composer playing his own music; I then became interested in early recordings of Horowitz (who was still alive and performing at the time) and other pianists from his generation, most of whom I had never heard of prior to reading Harold C Schonberg's book The Great Pianists. This tome became my bible and I scoured second-hand stores for recordings of the pianists therein: Alfred Cortot, Ignaz Friedman, Mischa Levitzki, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Artur Schnabel all became favourites and still are some three decades later. Cortot's almost fragrant sonority and inimitable phrasing are a marvel, Friedman's creative voicing and timing are so seductive (his bold accents in mazurkas, while idiomatic, might raise an eyebrow), Levitzki's burnished lines and golden tone glisten, and Moiseiwitsch maintains elegance even in virtuosic works, while Schnabel fuses the cerebral and celestial in his reverential readings.
The life story of Dinu Lipatti captured my attention so profoundly – as did his playing (that Ravel 'Alborada'!) – that in the hope of hearing more I began what turned into a lifelong quest to uncover 'bootleg' recordings; among those published due to my research are Bartok's Third Concerto and a hifi tape of two Chopin Etudes. Marcelle Meyer would also hypnotize me with her crystalline tone and supple phrasing, introducing me to the piano music of Chabrier and delivering the most perfect Ravel I had heard.
Each of these recordings has a time stamp on the story of my life, and I am delighted to constantly be discovering new performances by artists previously unknown to me. What indescribable colour and richness music has brought to my life – a gift for which I am always grateful.