the great composer charles-valentin alkan

"Bob Dylan" is the new style we shd be aspiring to

will listen. very enjoyable thread.

Alkan retains a paradoxical posthumous relationship to fame, as he did during his lifetime. In an 1860s image, one of the few photographic portraits which survives, Alkan turns his back to the camera in a reflex action akin to a Hasid responding to camera-wielding tourists in Mea Shearim. In a 2007 article in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, musicologist Jacqueline Waeber interpreted this photo as showing that “Alkan turns his back on the world and its mundane glory. This is evidenced in his progressive abandonment of a career as a virtuoso.” Waeber added that in Alkan’s works, “virtuosity has to be taken in its purest literary sense, as an ideal search for virtu, from the Latin virtus, the quality of human excellence as expressed in any kind of exercise — artistic, intellectual and, of course, spiritual. Alkan’s reluctance to embrace the public career of the virtuoso also finds its roots here… Alkan practised virtuosity as a form of asceticism: a paradoxical conception of virtuosity, then, not aimed at performance and public recognition, but rather viewed as a form of solitary spiritual exercise. It may even be wondered whether the technical requirements of his piano writing might not have been motivated by his practice of Judaism.”

http://forward.com/articles/187754/celebrating--years-of-french-jewish-composer-ch/

that is a good article, also clarifies the death-myth about the talmud

thanks for that, man. Benjamin Ivry is good, I read his book on Ravel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mfke8M6be4

today's featured article on wikipedia

that is vastly complex

http://i.imgur.com/jMbDF4m.jpg

very good

this is excellent for a rainy sunday afternoon, goulash slowly ruminating on the stove.

in fact the feeling is like this muriel spark line:

The lawn lay beautiful as eternity. A servant was calling in Eddy's two children from an upper window; presently their high voices came quarrelling from the shrubbery and faded round the back of the house. There was a stir in the beech leaves like papers being gently shuffled into order. The drawing-in of an English afternoon took place, with its fugitive sorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Z5P1gAjyE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m52MJ6hJx3I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VW2ms-jpCY

the entire cycle played in one recital :)