\nYesterday we went to a concert for the first time in at least 7 months – to hear Murray Perahia at the Barbican. This was a birthday gift to Eric’s father who is very fond of classical music, so Eric bought tickets well over a year in advance. Hearing a great pianist live would be a wonderful experience in any case, but our excellent seats made it even better.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe programme consisted of Bach (a partita), Beethoven (a sonata), Schumann (Fantasiestücke<\/i>) and Chopin (a ballade). The Bach piece was my favourite – no surprise there. Bach is the one classical composer whose music I could put on a continuous loop for days without tiring of it. Beethoven has “too many notes” – I find his music a bit difficult to follow. Schumann’s Fantasiestücke<\/i> were, as the title implies, a mixed bag: very varied. Chopin’s was technically impressive but again not as gripping as Bach.\n<\/p>\n
\nDespite this I thought that Perahia’s style was better suited for the lighter, more romantic composers. He played very emotionally, gently, almost tenderly. I like my Bach performed firmly, with gusto and confidence – Glenn Gould’s version of the Goldberg Variations is more to my taste than Perahia’s. Not that I didn’t enjoy this, though!\n<\/p>\n
\nI was also intrigued to simply see Murray Perahia as a person. He appeared very quiet and introverted, almost bothered by the huge crowd. His bows were polite but small, his introductions of the encores<\/i> quick and clipped – I got the impression that he would have preferred to walk out as soon as he finished playing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday we went to a concert for the first time in at least 7 months – to hear Murray Perahia at the Barbican. This was a birthday gift to Eric’s father who is very fond of classical music, so Eric bought tickets well over a year in advance. Hearing a great pianist live would be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art_entertainment","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19714,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions\/19714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}