My latest musical discoveries

   There are so many reasons why I love Christmas break. One of the top reasons is that I have leisure time to indulge in my personal Music fests, utilizing YouTube for all its worth as I listen to old favorites and discover new ones.

   My latest musical find is the pianist Freddy Kempf. 

    His rendition of Beethoven's "Pathetique" touched me the most. And I'm now a fan!! :)

    Here are excerpts from an interesting interview of his that I came across.

   Interviewer: You seemed to feel entirely “at home” on stage during your concert in The Hague – is performing live the best thing about being a musician for you? 

Freddy: For me music is the stage. I find it so wonderful and so exciting. I know that there are many different types of great musicians. I would never neccessarily claim to be one of them! My aim is simply to touch someone in the audience and give them as intense as an emotional experience as I can. I feel that it is now only through music, because of the constraints and pressures of normal life, where we can experience these “fantastic” emotions – the feeling of love that Robert (Schumann) had for Clara: the feeling of desperation that Schubert must have felt towards the end of his life... These composers documented their feelings in their writing and for me it is a dream to try to communicate this emotion on the stage to the audience.

What’s your view on the classical music scene at present? Is there a crisis?

I think that in some countries the government, because of their own personal education, may not realize how important the Arts are. In that case they may not be putting enough stress in promoting the Arts. However in other countries the government has seen how important it is and are doing a big effort to make sure as many people as possible can enjoy it. I think classical music in many places is doing far better than it has done before. 

Do you feel that Crossover Projects are “part of the solution or part of the problem”? Or to put it differently: Should the worlds of Classical and Experimental Music remain seperated from each other or open up?

Again I think that there are too many sides to this to give a clear decisive answer. I feel that if someone is playing a classical instrument like the ‘cello or the flute they are only doing “crossover” stuff if they’re not playing the normal classical repertoire. I think one of the great helps to classical music is where people do play the core repertoire but manage to reach people that don’t normally listen to it. 

True or false: People need to be educated about classical music, before they can really appreciate it.

Can’t answer! Some people may be able to appreciate Mahler 5 on first listening, others won’t understand it at all. I think that like anything – wine, food, football, partners – we learn by experience. We can love something straight away but usually we appreciate more the more we learn.

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   For the entire interview, go to this page.

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   I was browsing in FULLY BOOKED the other day and came across two great "musical books:"

   Temperament by Stuart Isacoff: How Music Became A Battleground For the Great Minds of Western Civilization ---> 

   Clara by Janice Galloway --> It is a novel about Clara and Robert Schumann. I've scanned it and I love how she starts each chapter with a line from "Frauenliebe und Leben," the subject of a previous blog post. She also sprinkles it with musical excerpts, in some parts it reads like a Forms and Analysis paper! :) I'm very excited to read it!

   Reviews to follow! :)