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In Reply to: RE: I got very ill for an entire year posted by jedrider on November 02, 2020 at 08:28:44
I almost drifted into Medieval music then! Whew!
Follow Ups:
in medieval social customs and attitudes. Ha...
And, actually, I STILL find solace in Medieval music - from time to time! ;-)
My illness was a recurrent "grumbling appendix" at the age of 14. I was prone in bed in agony listening to my little transistor radio when the announcer proclaimed they were going to play Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. I was just too listless to roll over and turn this rubbish off (I came from a family with barbaric musical tastes) so I left it to roll over me.
And I loved and understood it, even though I didn't know then what a concerto was. It was played by an English pianist with just one name - Solomon - and I've worn out 2 LPs of his recording so far. I still listen to it.
So in the next 7 years I listened to every classical piece of music I could find on the radio and the few I could afford on record. By then I was in the big city as a student and was attending live concerts. I girl I fancied persuaded me to accompany her to a concert by a French singer called Gerard Souzay, who was going to sing some songs about children dying, by someone called Mahler. I'd never heard singing of that quality before, either. And I can't say that I've heard much better since then. And that started me on the second step on my Road to Damascus.
At the end of that year my appendix grumbled too much and I was hospitalized for its removal. To cheer me up my friends presented me with a recording of Mahler's DLvdE (Fischer Dieskau/Dickie/Kletzski). I was lost forever.
On the operatic side, Mario Lanza movies showed me that not all tenors were elderly, fat, bald and bawling monsrtosities. Such a pity that this marvellous voice was never properly trained. A dreadful Sophia LOren movie wherein she mimed Aida to Renata Tebaldi's singing removed any preconceptions about the soprano voice.
But it all started with Beethoven and the Emperor.
I attended a Gerard Souzay recital with two high-school friends - all three of us loved it. (And as I've mentioned before, Souzay had Dalton Baldwin play three Debussy Preludes as a solo interlude - I appreciated the accompanist getting some unexpected solo time!) I got Souzay's Philips recordings of Schubert's Schone Mullerin and Winterreise, Schumann's Dichterliebe, Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, and later (when he was a bit too old) the complete Faure songs with Elly Ameling on EMI/Pathe (five LP's IIRC).
As for the Emperor Concerto, I did not get it when I first heard it, if you can believe that! It wasn't until years later, when I guess I heard some better performances, that I grew to like the work.
And finally, as for Sophia Loren, I have to confess: I had the hots for her when I was in high school!
I didn't connect with the Emperor Concerto until just a few years ago, when I played the Perahia/Haitink version on a system that really activated my listening room and seemed to bring the full weight of the orchestra to the walls, even at a relatively normal volume.
Ms. CfL had it for awhile. I'm sometimes a bit ambivalent about Perahia, but that Beethoven set with Haitink was excellent.
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