Posts Tagged ‘Keith Horner’
Only 88 hammers on the piano, you say? Pity!
January 12, 2013
When Marc-André Hamelin brings his latest delicious, over-the-top, home-baked treat to MusicTORONTO, the confection will be iced with enough piano-insider jokes to give a pianist’s fingers cavities. Hamelin will venture where few living pianists dare to venture and none can quite bring off with the Montreal-born pianist’s deadpan nonchalance – and chops! Hamelin’s 10-minute take [...]
2013 | Piano Series | Tags: Hamelin, Keith Horner, Marc-André Hamelin, Paganini 24th caprice, pianist-composers, Variations on a theme by Paganini (2011)Comments (0)
Mendelssohn in Love
September 13, 2012
There’s a back story – a love story – to the remarkable quartet by Mendelssohn that the Attacca Quartet brings to MT later this month. A love story that lies in the shadow of the powerful, intellectually compelling A minor quartet, Op. 13, the first quartet that Mendelssohn wrote for a public audience. In it, [...]
2012 | Quartets Series | Tags: attacca quartet, Keith Horner, mendelssohn, mendelssohn in love, Op. 13Comments (0)
Dancing on the graves
August 15, 2012
Brahms left slim pickings for the musical grave-robber. He composed in his head, not in a notebook – directly to his C:\\, as it were. Brahms also burned his sketches – reducing PhD candidates to tears. He also admitted to destroying dozens of completed works that fell short of his own exacting standards. Sibelius, too, [...]
2012 | Quartets Series | Tags: adolphe, brentano quartet, fragments, gubaidulina, harbison, hartke, iyer, Keith Horner, wuorinenComments (0)
Uncovering the roots of Bartók’s string quartets
March 8, 2012
“The right type of peasant music is most varied and perfect in its forms. Its expressive power is amazing, and at the same time it is void of all sentimentality and superfluous ornaments. It is simple, sometimes primitive . . . and a composer in search of new ways cannot be led by a [...]
2012 | Quartets Series | Tags: bartok string quartets, folk music, Keith Horner, tokyo string quartetComments (0)
Rufus Wainwright’s All days are nights: Songs for Lulu
February 11, 2012
“Depressing, lugubrious and down” is how Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright speaks of All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu. The 48-minute song-cycle, written during the long and painful death of his mother Kate McGarrigle, divided fans. When the pop star toured the piece, alone at his piano, dressed in a 17-foot-long, black feathered cape, [...]
2012 | Discovery Series | Tags: all days are nights, Keith Horner, rufus wainwright, songs for lulu, wallis giuntaComments (0)
Who’s afraid of Hugo Wolf?
January 5, 2012
The late 19th century Austrian composer Hugo Wolf was born into a great musical tradition. By temperament, though, he remained an outsider. Song – German art song – was the weapon of choice with which he confronted the Viennese Establishment. With it, Wolf brought the tradition of Schubert and Schumann to a level of intensity [...]
2012 | Quartets Series | Tags: hugo wolf, italian serenade, Keith Horner, lafayette quartetComments (0)
Golijov’s Quartet-in-progress
November 13, 2011
Osvaldo Golijov. “The idea of a string quartet gives him nightmares, I think! But most composers go through that with string quartets.” (Geoff Nuttall) “They came on stage like hungry cannibals and I felt a strange sense of tranquility,” said Argentina-born composer Osvaldo Golijov when the SLSQ gave the première of his quartet Yiddishbbuk at [...]
2011 | Quartets Series | Tags: Geoff Nuttall, Golijov, Keith Horner, Kohelet, quartet, SLSQ, St. Lawrence String QuartetComments (0)
“He will soon be forgotten.”
November 6, 2011
“According to all testimony, his life had run a dissipated course between wine and card-playing. . . He will be soon forgotten.” (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov – My Musical Life) Never have your teacher write your obituary. Particularly when he gets it wrong . . . Rimsky didn’t mention that Anton Arensky, his Russian student, wrote [...]
2011 | Quartets Series | Tags: Arensky, gryphon, Keith Horner, piano trioComments (0)
Third pressing string quartets?
September 26, 2011
“If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth,” a determined 30 year-old Shostakovich told a close friend in 1936. Stalin and his cronies had just walked out of a performance of Shostakovich’s hugely popular opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Pravda, the official voice of the [...]
2011 | Quartets Series | Tags: Keith Horner, pierre boulez, shostakovich, string quartets, third-pressing musicComments (0)
I am not suited to give concerts
August 15, 2011
“I am not suited to give concerts. The crowd intimidates me. I feel asphyxiated by its eager breath, paralyzed by its inquisitive stare, silenced by its alien faces.” No, that’s not Glenn Herbert Gould speaking after he quit the concert platform in 1964. It’s a 25 year-old Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, speaking to Franz [...]