Jaap's Mahler 3 (梵志登的馬勒第三)

Mahler is right when he said his Symphony 3 was one the likes of which the world had never seen: it's a most unusual symphony. It's got 6 movements instead of the usual 4, plus parts for a soprano and children's choir. It's got one of the longest first movements of any symphony ever written: lasting some half an hour. Written in a small log cabin in front of the lake of Steinbach in 1895, it's suffused with the spirit and the power Nature, as inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who wrote the Overman (Ubermensch)("Superman" according to some translation, a name abused by Hitler who supplied specially printed copies of extracts of Nietzsche philosophy taken out of context to ordinary German solders as part of their training) and The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), was to be entitled in like the latter work and was supposed to have 7 programmatic movements as follows:
I : Pan awakens. Summer marches in.
II   What the flowers in the meadow tell me.
III  What the beasts of the forest tell me.
IV  What the night tells me. (Alto solo.)
V   What the morning bells tell me. (Women's chorus with alto solo.)
VI  What love tells me.
Motto: 'Father, behold these wounds of mine! Let no creature be unredeemed!'
(from Des Knaben Wunderhorn)
VII  Heavenly life [ Das himmlische Leben]. (Soprano solo, humorous)
Later, the original 7th movement became the final movement of his next symphony, the 4th and the third symphony became a 6-movement symphony.
In its present form, with the programmatic title "Sommermorgentraum" (A Summer Morning Dream", which is the only original programmatic indications, Mahler retains when the piece was first performed in 1902,  its 6 movements are as follows:
I  Kräftig. Entschieden (Strong and decisive) [D minor to F major]
II Tempo di Menuetto (In the tempo of a minuet) [A major]
III Comodo (Scherzando) (Comfortably, like a scherzo) [C minor to C major]
IV Sehr langsam—Misterioso (Very slowly, mysteriously) [D Major]
V Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck (Cheerful in tempo and cheeky in expression) [F major]
VI Langsam—Ruhevoll—Empfunden (Slowly, tranquil, deeply felt) [D major]
I leave it to the experts to argue out whether music can be progammatic, as if musical notes, phrases, motifs, movements could be treated as words, phrases, sentences, themes, paragraphs and essays or poems.  To me, any relevant indications of what the music is "about" is of assistance in firing our own imagination and thus help us appreciate different features and aspects in the composer's music, provided one bears in mind that these are no more than hints, clues, suggestions and can never be taken literally because music is always music. It can never be replaced by words, no matter how skilfully done. Otherwise, music will have lost its raison d'ête.

Dvorak and Tchaikovsky in Hong Kong (在香港的德伏扎克與柴可夫斯基)

I have a predilection for Russian conductors which the country's authorities allow to leave it. I don't know why. Maybe there's something in the Slavic soul which makes them feel very deeply about the music they play  and which enables them to express it in the way they handle the music. Whatever the reason may be, that intuition proved right again last night and made it one of the best concerts I have had for some time. Last night, we had Vasily Sinaisky as the guest conductor of the HKPO. He played for us two pieces Dvorak's Cellos Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 and Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony, Op 58. As solo cellist, we had Alban Gerhadrt.

The Maisky Duo in HK (麥斯基家人在香港的二重奏)

I have attended numberless classical concerts. I have yet to attend one like last night's. It's not just that beautiful pieces were played by the performers one after the other. Nor that the composers came from different countries. What made last night's concert stand out was the number of encores we had. Not just the usual one or two, not even three or four, not five but six. It happened at the Cultural Centre. The artists were both of the same family: Misha Maisky, cellist, Lily Maisky, pianist.

The Regal Concierto de Aranjuez--Xuefei Yang 楊雪霏皇后式的阿蘭惠斯協奏曲

Xuefei Yang (楊雪霏) is a collector. She collects all kinds of firsts: she started learning to play the classical guitar at 7, appeared at the First China International Guitar Festival at 10, played to a Tokyo audience at 12 and made a guitar debut in Madrid at 14 and was lent two of John Williams’ Greg Smallman guitars at 15 and became the first guitarist ever to receive an international scholarship from the Royal Schools of Music for her studies at the Royal Academy of Music from which she graduated in 2002 at 25 with distinction, after first having studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. She is the winner of countless guitar awards and has appeared in concert halls of England, Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Finland, America, Japan and Australia. I got several of her excellent CD's. So it was with great expectations that I attended her concert with the HKPO last Saturday under the baton of our guest conductor Alexander Shelley.

Three Glorious Romantics (邂逅浪漫)

Richard Wagner was a composer in a class of his own. He was a man with an overweening ego and ambition but fortunately with ability to match. He wanted to combine music, drama, poetry into a composite art form. There is a certain grandeur in his music which is difficult to miss. And in Parsival, his 14th "opera", he had ample room to fulfill this ambition. It's about how the spear with which Christ was said to be wounded on the Cross on First Friday was stolen by the magician Klingsor from Amfortas, the leader of the Knights of the Holy Grail (the Chalice used by Christ at the last supper) guarding it in a Spanish castle and how he used it to wound the latter and how a young man raised in the forest Parsifal decided to retrieve it and return it to Amfortas so that he might be healed. In both cases, it involved a temptress Kundry: whilst Amfortas succumbed, Parsifal was able to resist and in the end, Klingsor was annihilated. There are thus themes of temptation, sin and redemption which are all prefigured by in the Prelude to Act 1 of the opera. And in the third Act, Parfisal finally found the Knights after a number of years on Good Friday, was baptized and then made head of the congregation there after he healed their leader. Thus there are themes of glory and joy in that act, called Good Friday Music. We heard a version of this last Saturday by the HKPO under the guest baton of the German conductor Constantin Trinks, who had conducted the entire series of Wagner's opera. The opening bars by the strings are supposed to portray the dawn in the forest where Parsifal lives. This constantly repeated Parsival motif is followed by the brass theme announcing the solemnity of the Holy Communion and the sanctity of the Holy Grail, evident in the very slow and steady rhythm of the music which ends very softly as the scene ends in some high notes which seems to trail into the infinity of the distant heavens.

Julia Fischer's Brahms (尤莉亞. 費莎妁的布拉姆斯)

It's rare to be an accomplished violinist. It's rarer to be both an accomplished violinist and pianist. We know that most academically trained musicians nowadays are required to learn more than one instrument. But to be good in both is a completely different matter. Yet that's what we found last night at the City Hall.  We had the inimitable double-talented Julia Fischer, master musician from Munchen, Germany, who not only performs, records but teaches music at the Munich Music Academy. She came from a very musical German-Slovak family: her mother and brothers are all pianists.. She started with the piano at age 4 but was already in the Munich Music Academy at 9! She has never left music since. When she was young, she admired the performance of Gould  and Kissin as pianist and Vengerov as violinist. She has appeared with numerous world class conductors and played concertos of all the major composers. I don't know how she did with the baroque composers but from what I heard last night, she's really good at the music of Brahms, which I am sure she simply adores. It's impossible to do well with the music of a composer one doesn't love. 

Her first offering of the evening was a piece by a Dvorak (1841-1904) composed in 1893, The Sonatina for Violin in G, Op 100, whilst he was in America as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. As all Latin-based words, "ito/a" means a diminutive version of something of normal size. So "sonatina" actually means a little Sonata. This sonatina was written for Dvorak's 6 children. It was intended a fun piece, a bit rough in the first movement in Allegro risoluto, with some pretty strong rhythm and a bit uncouth but playing around with some light lilting passages and a bit nostalgic for his native Bohemia in the slow and heavy second movement in larghetto. This was followed by a much brighter, faster and much and  a bit cheeky third movement, a Scherzo in molto vivace and a very energetic finale which recalls some of the earlier nostalgic motives. I don't why. Fischer seems to emphasize the lower notes much more than those in the higher registers, giving the piece a heaviness which I think ought not to be there in some of lighter and brighter passages. The piano accompaniment Martin Helmchen does little to brighten up the piece. To me, there's far too much use of the pedal. It felt as if it's all brume and fog and hardly any sunlight. 

Every Grain of Sand (每一粒沙)and Not Dark Yet (還未黑齊)

In the days of old, there's hardly any poetry recital without music. Poetry is often recited in front of a small circle of friends gathered around a fire, to the rhythm and the soothing melodies of the gentle lyre. Times have changed. The lyre has been replaced first by the classical guitar and now by the electric guitar. But the different paragraphs of a ballad are still arranged like the stanzas of a poem. But of course, the strict rules for meters and end rhyme have been much relaxed, giving rise to much freer meters and rhythms favored by the much larger mass audience, as high culture is replaced by pop culture. No matter how much the form and contents of poetry have changed, something of its origin may still be detected in the so-called urban ballad, if one looks for it hard enough. The words sung by the singers to the sound of the music are still called "lyrics",even today. Could that be the reason why our idol of the 1960's, the man who started a quiet revolution in the way urban ballads are written and sung to convey the joys, the sorrow, the hopes and fears, the ups and down of the petty non-descript and nameless and almost characterless individual of the contemporary urban masses, has just been declared the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature?. He is of course the inimitable  singer-performer-composer of urban bluesy ballad, Bob Dylan. I don't think that there's anyone out there who hasn't heard of his "Blowing in the Winds", a favourite of the anti-Vietnam War era.

Murray Perahia in Hong Kong (梅理. 柏拉雅在香港)

Music is not just an experience, it is the life of man in sound, in rhythm, in melody, in harmony and sometimes in cacophony. Just as it is impossible not to continue to live, it is impossible not to continue to live without music. So last night I found myself again at the Cultural Centre. There in the hall was Murray Perahia, the very accomplished and almost 70 year-old New York American pianist, educator and recording artist of numerous CDs.

The program started off with a piece by the so-called father of modern classical symphony, Joseph Haydn.(1732-1809).  It was a piece written by Haydn in 1793 for a Mozart pupil. It's got two variations, the first in F minor with some syncopation and the second in F major, with some trills, with soft passages and louder passages. Perahia however gave him a make-over, in the Romantic style, emphasizing the contrasts and the dynamism of the piece. It's can't be called a purist's Haydn-Haydn version. It's become a Perahia-Haydn version. It may not be to every one's taste. Perhaps there is some wisdom in the claim that we must make music come alive for us. One way of doing that is to play it according to our preferences, our tastes, to give the old a new look and in short, to make it relevant to our times. I believe that Perahia did that.. Whether every one likes that is very much a matter of personality and taste.

秋 (Autumn)

今天是中秋,朋友傳來一首詩,饒有趣味,信手拈來, 借祝部落格友人中秋快樂

秋    

似酒   

味醇厚

     歲月悠悠   

  轉身又回首
  再無喜樂哀愁 

往事如煙花依舊
唯友誼綿長如水流 

緣牽一路有你陪著走
晨曦襯彩霞雨中漫遊 

待到紅葉濃時再聚首
品茶論酒賞石敘舊
落英滿地雲舒袖
 歡聲笑語不休
     夕陽掛枝頭
      紅塵看透

      別無求     

靜候

秋


此詩可由上而下讀； 亦可由下向上讀，
 感受大大不同！

Honesty --Billy Joel (真誠--比利·喬)

There are many songs by Billy Joel I like. One of those I like best is "Honesty". There he sings what's secretly in every man's and perhaps every woman's heart. So much is involved in love, so many different kinds of things are at stake that it must be one of the rarest blessings on this crowded planet so full of tricks and so sparsely filled with treats if one can find a soul mate who is truly honest with one, in everything. Or do we really want him or her to be so heart searingly and soul tearingly "honest" ? Are there dark secrets hidden inside every heart which it would be better or wiser to never seek to be brought out into the open? How much conventional marital bliss hangs upon that Pandora's box otherwise known as the human heart? Perhaps, is that why love is so fatally attractive?

Whatever the truth may be, "Honesty" is a beautiful song which gives expression to our heart's aching search for that quasi-impossible ideal.

Billy Joel (比利·喬)

Billy Joel (b. 1949) is a legend. He may not be every man's favourite, he's certainly one of mine. I could never forget how I was immediately won over once I heard his Downeaster Alexa. He's got the right voice, rough, a little hoarse and so full of passion.  And the pounding rhythm of the song was mimics so closely that the sound of a fishing boat plouhging and plunging through the waves as he recounts the story of a hardworking fisherman from a small fishing town on the Atlantic coast who's got to brave its treacherous storms and dangerous waters farther and farther out into deep ocean and risk his life just so that he may pay for those monthly bills of his wife and children. He's got little or no choice in the matter because: it's just the way life goes, the way it had been for his father and perhaps his father's father. But it's getting tougher and tougher by the day. He had to sell his house to buy his boat. The times, they are a- changing! 

He never finished high school because he had to play in piano bars from a young age to support his divorced mother, sister and brother. But he's got music in his blood. His father was a classical pianist and his brother a classical conductor. He composed and sang many songs about the problems and the life of ordinary folks which became hits, like "Honesty", "Just the Way you are", "Moving Out", "Only the Good Die Young." "Big Shot", "She's Always a Woman to Me" and many many others too numerous to mention and he collected 23 Grammies and got his name emblazoned in many halls of fame. According to Wikipedia, he sold more than 150 million records! I think I know why from the moment I first heard his  song.

Killing Me Softly with His Song & Empty Chairs (Lori Lieberman & Don McLean)他凴歌使我死在溫柔鄉 與 空椅子 ( 洛瑞·李伯曼--唐·麥克林)

Music is a mystery. Often, we listen to a song, perhaps by a stranger, perhaps by a friend or even some one long dead and gone. A little something stirs inside. We don't know where exactly, nor why nor how. But it feels as real as if we were right in front of the songwriter, the composer, the performer, confiding to us his most intimate secrets, his longings, his disappointments, his darkest pains and sometimes, his joys, his contentments. And we're touched.

Sometimes, we'll be moved to write something or other there and then. We just feel we had to do so. There seems to be a demon inside us about which we feel we've somehow got to do something, something which we must exorcise, something which cries out for expression, something which would give us no peace until we've done so. That's probably how Lori Lieberman felt after she heard Don McLean's song "Empty Chairs" in a small club in Los Angeles back in 1973. The result is a classic: Killing me Softly with his Song, made famous by another singer Roberta Flack.

Chopin's "Raindrop Prelude" No, 15, Opus 28. (蕭邦之雨點序曲)

Fellow blogger and concert goer Eric Tang recommended that I click into Chopin's "Raindrop Prelude" No.15, Opus 28 in Db major by the contemporary French pianist Hélène Grimaud. So here it is.

The piece is given the name "raindrop" by Van Bülow. It is believed that the piece was written by Chopin in 1838 whilst he was staying at a monastery in Majorca with his then lover, the woman romantic novelist, who was then forced by the customs of the age to write under a male pen name "George Sand". It's one of 24 preludes written by that poet of the piano.

True Colors--Eva Cassidy (原色--伊娃·凱希蒂)

I don't know how many CD's I've bought in my life. I love music. But sometimes, I can be greedy, like those women who window shopped, couldn't resist the temptation because that dress looked "just so beautiful" that she simply "must have it", tried it out, looking at herself in the mirror this way and that and then without a second thought, rummaged through her handbag, removed her credit card from one of the flaps of her small purse inside, signed, picked up her new conquest, tried it out again at home in front of the mirror, imagined how proud she'd look before her beloved and then carefully hung it inside her closet.

The next time when she thought about it, lying so inconspicuously amidst all her own past conquests, that initial passion that prompted her to take it home in the first place had somehow dissipated, vanished into a realm she really didn't know where.

Something rather similar may happen to some of my CD's too. But not Eva Cassidy's CDs though I haven't touched them for a while now. Quite by accident today, one of them caught my eyes whilst I was looking for something else. I put it on. It was as good as when I first decided to take it home.  

Crimes of the Heart --Amanda McBroom (心之罪--愛曼蒂.麥布本)

I love the songs of Amanda McBroom.
 There's a certain street-smartness, 
a certain worldly wisdom, 
a certain studied casualness,
a certain abandon,
 She has got a voice wonderfully suited to express the feelings experienced by those during the ups and downs of life of those her songs are about.
 Above all, she sings not just with her voice,
She sings with her heart.

"Crimes of the heart" tells the story of a middle aged woman falling madly in love with a man young enough to be her son.

I read in the news recently that a 50 year-old lady clerk in a legal firm whose proprietor I know had been sentenced for embezzzling more than $2 million to support her lover, a young barrister.

"Crimes Of The Heart"

We were drinking whiskey, we were talking men
She'd never see the sunny side of forty-two again
She was in love with a boy of twenty-nine
This was something new, what could she do
What should she do?

She made her burn like fire, made her drunk like wine
No one else had loved her oh, for such a long, long time
She was afraid it was moving way too fast, the die was cast
How could this last?

It was a crime of the heart
We all know that love's insane from the start
Where there's passion, there is pain
What do we gain, committing crimes of the heart

He was crazy jealous of everyone she met
Suspicious of the little things that hadn't happened yet
He devoured every minute of her time, she didn't mind
After all, young love's always blind

It was a crime of the heart
We all know that love's insane form the start
Where there's passion, there is pain
What do we gain, committing crimes of the heart

Funny how tomorrows turn into yesterdays
Funny how a mirror never lies
Somehow the hands of time turn back the other way
Every time I look into his eyes

The night was half-past over, time for going home
She said she'd rather walk, she needed time to be alone
When you're living your love from day to day
Somtimes tomorrow
Is the price you have to pay

For these crimes of the heart
We all know that love's insane from the start
Where there's passion, there is pain
And love is what we gain, committing crimes of the heart

A Delightful Combination (一愉快的組合)

Claude Debussy is a very French composer. He's influenced very much by the idea that music can sometimes imitate visual images and through the flow of the notes on the piano key board vivid images of the play of light upon the ever changing surfaces of a lake or a sea or the subtle rhythmic changes in the patterns in the intricate.arabesques of the Muslim religious architecture.

Simon Trpceski, a young pianist from Macedonia who learned to play the piano from a Russian master who plays with thought, imagination and sensitivity, seems a perfect partner for the music of the French impressionist composer. We get a taste of such a delightful combination in Debussy's piece, "Arabesque No. 1. 

Ne Me Quitte pas (Don't Leave me)(不要離開我)

"Ne Me Quitte pas" (Don't Leave me)(不要離開我) is one of the best songs composed by the Belgian singer-composer Jacques Brel together with his pianist  Gérard Jouannest. It was a song written in 1959, shortly after Brel's girl friend Suzanne Gabriello had his child aborted after he refused to admit to being its father and left him.  Later Brel admitted that it's a "hymn to the men's cowardice" and that it describes how far a man can go in humiliating himself in such situations but he also anticipated that it would probably be taken as a love song by many women who would take comfort in the thought. Édith Piaf , who gave one of the best renditions of this song, said : « Un homme ne devrait pas chanter des trucs comme ça ! » ("A man oughtn't sing of stuffs like it" ) But here it is, with my translations.  Marc Robine, Brel's biographer, suggested two writers might have influenced Brel in using the image of the dog: Dostoïevski  (A Gentle Creature 1876 ) and Garcia Lorca (Soneto de la Dulce Queja) and that in that song, Brel and Jousannest took a theme from Franz Liszt's 6th Hungarian Rhapsody.

George Brassens (喬治·巴頌) :Chanson pour l’Auvergnat (Song for the Auvergnese)( 奧媛之歌)

George Brassens always had his heart set on little people, those neglected, overlooked, ignored, marginalised by the bourgeois and seen by them with apprehension, contempt or disgust. So he uses his songs to expose their hypocrisy. His Chanson pour l'Auvergnat (Song for the Auvergnese)  is one of such songs. Auvergne is a hilly part of central France specializing in agriculture and dairy products. including such well known cheeses as Bleu d'Auvergne, Cantal, Fourme d'Ambert and Saint-Nectaire.

George Brassens (喬治·巴頌) : Les copains d'abord (Buddies first)(老友第一)

Les Copains D'abord is one of the most popular of George Brassens' songs. It expresses the feelings of the sailors for one another, their joys, their fears, their comraderie, their liberated views on life. Needless to say, it's the sailors' favorite. Like so many of his songs, it has a bouncy rhythm which is perfectly suited to the carefree attitude of those who make their living by the seas, who knows full well that huge billows of several tens of feet high in the vast expanses of the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean during a storm is not to be taken likely. Death threatens and may strike any time. Can we blame them if they'd lose no time in having some biological fun once they're ashore.

George Brassens ( 喬治·巴頌): Mourir pour des idées (Dying for Ideas)(為信念而死)

Georges Brassens (1921 –1981) was a very colorful French character from a small town Sète in southern France, near to Montpellier. He was a very poor student. He didn’t do at all well in his studies until he met his 9^th grade teacher, Alphonse Bonnafé, who noted his gift for creative writing and encouraged him to develop his talents and read more poetry

His family is the scene of constant conflict, with a very liberal and indulgent father and a very fervent and strict Catholic mother who loved to sing with his half sister. So from an early age, he learned a great deal about the joys of music and the little ironies of life. He later learned to play the guitar and the piano by himself and made a living by singing in cafés in one of which he met by accident a famous singer at the time, Patachou, who saw the quality of his songs, in which he set to music the poetry some famous and not so famous poets and transformed his life. He wrote, set to guitar music and sang more than 200 sons, based on his own poems as well as those from some from other poets like Louis Aragon’s Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux, Victor Hugo’s La Légende de la Nonne, Gastibelza), François Villon’s La Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis and Antoine Pol’s Les Passantes. . The most popular of his songs are Les copains d'abord, Chanson pour l'Auvergnat, La mauvaise réputation, and Mourir pour des idées. His songs are a complex mix of music and poetry. His poetic songs are set out in 14 song albums he produced between 1952-1976. When he started writing songs, he took as his model the songs of Charles Trenet, Tino Rossi and Ray Ventura. His songs usually have very strong and bouncy rhythms and evident sense of the joys of a simple life, tinged with occasional black humor.