yoyo ma

The amazing pianist I did not know: Vladimir Ashkenazy – With free giveaway!

/ antonioyrocinante / Leave a comment
Ashkenazy 46 cd (plus book and 2 dvds) boxed set

Although classical music might be showing signs of an increase in popularity, the overall trend seems to be decreasing. This brings me to today’s paradox: Due to social media, “rock star” classical musicians are more popular than their counterparts of decades ago (with obvious exceptions: Callas, Pavarotti, Segovia, et al.). Nowadays, Joshua Bell, Gustavo Dudamel (dude had a TV series, Mozart in the Jungle, based on him!), Lang Lang, Yo-Yo Ma, etc. (they each have around a million followers on Instagram!)

So the question would be: in equal circumstances (ceteris paribus) and access to YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, etc., how would a ranking of classical musicians look? And how would modern musicians stack up against pre-social media ones?

All this, because maybe (probably) I am an ignoramus and did not know Russian turned Icelandic pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy until recently. A dear colleague who just retired is a classical music connoisseur. He is also terribly generous and constantly regaled me with CDs that he was cleaning out.

One such gift was the boxed set (with book and DVDs) of Ashkenazy’s collected piano recordings. Obviously, it is not all the works ever written for piano, but it is 46 CDs including:

Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Schumann, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Scriabin, Previn, Chopin, Bartók, Glazunov, Franck

A couple of the works are repeated, albeit at different stages of Ashkenazy’s life, so if you have a fine ear, you can evaluate his evolution.

Listening to this whole body of work has taken me about 2 years, since I only have a CD player in my (old) car (see about minimalism here). And I replayed every CD multiple times!

This was a beautiful journey for me, learning about the magic of the piano, how different composers worked with the piano, etc. My favorite? The usual suspects: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms… My least favorite: Previn.

So now that I have enjoyed listening to this phenomenal collection, it is time for me to give it away. If you live in South Florida and you want to pick it up, we can arrange it. If you pay the shipping costs, I will be happy to ship it wherever you want me to. First-come first-served. This is very rare and is not available easily.

Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach

/ antonioyrocinante / 4 Comments

Memorial Hall will stay in my memory
Pierre Laurent Aimard
Concert night
Nice truck

My only music post on this blog was published in 2014 about Van Morrison. Well, it is time to add to that. Basically the only thing I listen to nowadays is Bach, as in Johann Sebastian Bach.

Of course we are all familiar more or less with his oeuvre, but I must confess that my first conscious contact with Bach was quite late. After college I got a job in Boston’s Financial District. I moved into an tiny attic apartment on Commonwealth Ave.  in the Back Bay. Walking around I found out that Emmanuel Church on Newbury st. performed the Bach Cantatas on Sundays’ mass, so I started going religiously (sorry, bad pun). I missed the Catholic ritual, but the music more than made up for it!

Fast forward to 2013 in North Carolina when I saw András Schiff  perform the Goldberg Variations and it all came flooding back, and I was hooked. As soon as I could I went to the used record store and got Glenn Gould’s original 1955 recording -yes, the one where you can hear Gould humming the tune in the background! I stuck it in my car’s CD player and it stayed there until the car was sold in 2018. That’s five years of listening to the record over and over. Call me obsessive if you want.

The next step for me was the Cello suites. The progression was simple, although it involved a step back. A step back because I had been surrounded by these pieces when I worked at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, eventually observing and participating in Über-conductor Benjamin Zander’s Master Classes at the school. Now I have Yo-Yo Ma’s 2015 Royal Albert Hall performance of the complete Cello Suites on a loop (see video below).

Occasionally, if I want to mix it up a bit I might listen to some of his organ music or, the Passions, or some of his other orchestral and chamber pieces (sonatas and partitas). There are many of these because back in the day (1685 – 1750) the only serious musicians worked for the king or the church. Bach falls in the latter, so he had to produce music basically for every Sunday! In case you had not noticed, I am not a musician -much to my regret- but this music has everything I need musically and spiritually speaking.

You are welcome.