Sitting nearby with a book, listening to his piano lessons, I can feel the best, most human things in his character finding lively and fluent expression; and when I hear the works he has produced performed by Mrs. Tamura and other musicians who have been generous in their support, I feel in awe of the richness of his inner life. Yet this is a life that, were it not for music, would have remained hidden, would have been utterly unknown to me, to my wife, and Hikari’s younger brother and sister. I am not someone who believes in any faith, but I find it hard to deny that there is something… something akin perhaps to “grace” in this music; indeed, listening to Hikari’s music, being exposed to the world beyond our everyday experience in which it seems to participate, makes me appreciate in it the full meaning of the word; not only “gracefulness” and “virtue” but “a prayer of thanks.”

I have not faced any of the challenges that Hikari has, and yet much of what Oe is describing feels very familiar to me. I’ve often felt that my own “inner life” is expressed with greater precision and dimension when I am making music than it ever could be through words, physical gestures, or any other form of communication of which I am aware. And I too find that music brings me closest to that concept of “grace,” which Oe describes so beautifully.

Oe hears in his son’s music a “prayer of thanks.” I sense this quality in much of the music I play, and as I play it, one of the things I find myself giving thanks to is music itself, for the inexpressible role it has played in my life.

The concert was in beautiful Schwetzingen, and the circumstances were close to ideal: the venue was aesthetically beautiful and acoustically even better, the piano was excellent, and the audience was as good as one could ask for — attentive, appreciative, obviously musical. As I finished the concert, I thought to myself that it was the best possible way to cap the month. And then the trouble started.

I was flying home through London, and Schwetzingen is more than an hour from the Frankfurt airport by car. I didn’t have much extra time to get to Frankfurt, my connection in London was fairly tight, and there was no later flight as a back-up -  in short, plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong.

Which is precisely what happened — immediately. I went to the appointed place to meet the driver who would be taking me to the airport, and he was not there. (Probably no one’s fault - just a wires-crossed moment…) Schwetzingen on a Sunday afternoon is not the sort of place where one calls a taxi on the spur of the moment, and I didn’t have any phone numbers in Germany that were of much use at that moment, and so I saw the whole house of cards that was the day’s trip falling down.

A few minutes and a few phone calls later, I had run completely out of ideas. It was at this point that a man approached me.

“You need to go to the airport, yes?”

Affirmative.

“And you’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

Again, affirmative.

“OK, I have a car, I’ll take you.”

When I recovered my power of speech, I happily accepted. It turned out that he had been at the concert with a friend. They had planned to have lunch in town following the concert, but when they overheard me, they decided to offer, as they were going to Frankfurt later in the afternoon anyway. So what looked to be turning into a nightmare say ended up being a pleasure - an afternoon drive with two extremely friendly, interesting people. And to top it all off, an on-time arrival at JFK hours later.

I’ve written before about the frustrations of travel, due to weather, human error, mechanical problems - the works. But in my experience, travel today is frequently unpleasant because of the behavior of people - needlessly unfriendly, unhelpful, inflexible.  At the end of a month which had been exhausting in every possible way, this small and completely unselfish act of kindness made me feel just slightly better about not only the traveling lifestyle, but about the world we live in.

I was excited at the prospect of making this recording, but it’s fair to say there was some trepidation as well. In addition to being my first ever live recording, it was my first orchestra recording. And since Orpheus plays without a conductor, that was another element of unfamiliarity inserted into the process. (I had played conductorless before, but not with anything approaching the frequency with which I’ve played concerti with conductors.)

There were also logistical differences between this and my previous recordings: until now, I’d always recorded in London, which meant sticking - obsessively, some might say - to a routine. I stayed in the same hotel, ate the same things for breakfast, ran in the same park, left at the same time every morning. This time I was in New York, which meant that I was at home: nice, but psychologically different. (In my life, being at home usually means not working - or at least not performing.)

All of which is to say that the element of the unknown was very, very present. The details of the recording had been more-or-less in place since the summer, so I had a long time to think about the implications of all this. I’ve written in the past that a recording, to me, simply represents a snapshot of my thoughts about the piece on the day, but the truth is somewhat more complicated: however impossible it might be, the permanence of recording has always caused to me to fantasize about an idealized performance of a piece. And because I always record a piece after I’ve played a series of performances of it, there’s an urge to see the recording as a kind of summation of the process - a chance to meld all of the prior performances, and hope for a “the-whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts” kind of result.

There’s a big downside to this attitude: not only does it discourage spontaneity, it is anti-spontaneity, as it carries the implication that everything that will happen in the recording studio has been experienced already. It also, I believe, leads to the making of a recording whose value is more theoretical than real - a recording that can be admired, but not loved. The snapshot analogy still holds, but the question becomes: is a photograph a document of a moment, or a highly posed creation?

Needless to say, I’ve given this issue a lot of thought, and in previous sessions I’ve felt that these two concepts of recording were doing battle with one another. I would have liked to have let go entirely of any expectation of perfection, or idealization, but the foreverness of the CD was often in the back of my mind. (Schnabel used to talk about the process of “verplattung” - which in German means both “disc-making” and “flattening out.”)

One of the advantages - or challenges, depending on your point of view - of recording live was that the decision as to which attitude I would take towards the recording was made for me. While the dress rehearsal was also recorded, and we had a brief patch session after the concert, the number of hours devoted to recording this album was a tiny fraction of what I spent making the Schumann and Beethoven CDs. The opportunity to play things over and over until I had found - or at least approached - what I had in my ear at the beginning of the day was simply not there. In its place was a very different opportunity: the chance to make a recording in which spontaneity was not only not shied away from, but actually the primary element involved. It’s not that my preparation for this recording was any less thorough: if anything, the mental and physical preparation for this disc was more intense than ever. It’s that the goal of the preparation was not to eliminate the element of uncertainty, of chance, but to free me to take chances. As cliched as it may be, my goal for this recording was to meet the moment.

As luck would have it, several elements combined to ensure that the odds were stacked in my favor. First of all, the music itself asked for this approach. Whereas in a Beethoven movement, creating a sense of the architecture of the whole is perhaps the biggest key to making the performance work, with Mozart, a sense of the mercurial - the sensation that the character of a phrase is being determined as it is played, as a reaction to the provocation that was the previous phrase - is of utmost importance. And that cannot be faked - you can only give the impression of being in the moment by actually being in the moment.

Second, I had the huge fortune of playing with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. In addition to their fantastic playing, their energy and enthusiasm were incredibly contagious, and the level of involvement each of them had in the music-making is something I will not soon forget. And any fear I may have had about playing without a conductor in a recording session proved unjustified: the lack of conductor - and the security one brings - forced everyone to listen that much more intently, which changed everything. It made the ensemble tighter, facilitated greater flexibility, and most importantly, it meant that whenever I tried something on the spur of the moment - a different dynamic shape, a slight leaning on a note - the orchestra not only accommodated it, but responded in kind. Never, playing this repertoire, have I had such a strong sense of a conversation being written on the spot.

Suffice it to say, the experience on the whole was memorable, and the concert itself had a joyousness - a pleasure in music-making - which I wouldn’t have imagined possible beforehand, given the pressure created by the circumstances. I’ve yet to listen to the tapes, but the making of the recording was so gratifying, the end result somehow doesn’t seem so important. (Another sharp contrast with my previous recordings, when the arrival of the first edit was a momentious - and nerve-wracking - moment.) What is important is the way the week confirmed my deepest-held feelings about music-making, so often compromised, and occasionally even obscured, by the pressure of recording and performing to the standard that great music demands: that it is all about communication. That if you strive to play in the most open, egoless way possible, you can reach people in a way that only music can. That it is, at its best, a more wonderful means of communication than speech.

I am very, very lucky to do what I do. Making this recording, I felt that as strongly as I ever have in my life.

Well, I’m about to find out. This weekend, I’ll be recording two Mozart Concerti live, with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, at Queens College. The process of preparing for the recording has been extremely fascinating - it has challenged, and in some cases altered, my beliefs on what recordings are for, and how they differ from live performances.  It has also forced me to examine, to a greater extent than I ever had before, how I listen to music, and what qualities I consider essential to great music-making.

Big questions, those. I’m going into recording hibernation now - I’ll be back with a full report on the experience next week.

I should probably pay more attention to my friends, as the other day no less august a source than the CBC quoted me, eliciting this nettled but polite response. (I would take exception to the description of the Schumann and Grieg concerti as BORING, but I’m not really operating from a strong position here.)

So, the time has come to set the record straight: not only do I have nothing against accountants, I’m very grateful that they exist, doing work that is in fact both necessary and creative, and which, given the avalanche of papers I refer to rather optimistically as my “files,” clearly I have no aptitude for. (I might add that my grandfather was an accountant, but I fear that might have a certain “some of my best friends are jewish”/”not that there’s anything wrong with that” flavor.) And when I contemplate what I put my accountant through annually at tax time, I really have to wonder what I was thinking picking this fight…

So, for the profession-based bigotry, a sincere apology. And suggestions for how I might replace the sentence in question will be welcomed.

I try to keep the self-aggrandizement to a minimum on this site,  but the performance is at any rate worth hearing for the improbably beautiful playing of the Cleveland Orchestra.

1) I had been visiting my brother and his wife in Chicago for a few days; it was probably the only entirely non-music-related trip I took all year. (In retrospect, this seems like already asking for trouble. I mean, do I really need to spend more time on planes than is absolutely necessary? This last year, I was twice - twice! - recognized by a check-in agent at LaGuardia, so frequent have my visits there been. Perhaps I should be paying rent…)

I arrived at the airport, went with my bag to the check-in counter, and told the woman there what my destination was (LaGuardia, naturally), to which she replied, “what are you doing here?” Perhaps this goes without saying, but I did not regard this as a good sign. By my rough estimate, there is approximately one reason to be at an airport, so her remark, while a bit vague, didn’t leave much to the imagination. The weather was bad in New York, it turned out. Why had the airline not notified me? They had the wrong number. This is fairly remarkable, as I have had the same telephone number for years, and I could have flown to the moon and back a few times with all the miles I’ve accumulated on the airline in question. (The airline wishes to remain anonymous, but is named after my country of residence and origin, begins with an A, and has its hub in Dallas, Texas.) Had I known, I could have made the earlier flight, which arrived on time in New York…

As the weather was quickly deteriorating, my options were limited. I was just considering a flight to Philadelphia when the agent noticed that there was a flight leaving for White Plains, in Westchester, in 30 minutes. I began to ask a question, and she interrupted me, saying “No time to think about it!” Fearless (=foolish) man that I am, I decided to take it. The bag was tagged and sent down the conveyor belt, at which point she said, “by the way, you’re standby, as the flight is full.” Again, not the news I was hoping for, nor the time I would have expected to receive it. I regarded her with displeasure, and she returned my stare with a look that was 50% “I did the best I could,” and 50% “I am profoundly disinterested in you and your petty little problems.”

So I trudged off to the gate, where the agent was announcing that he needed volunteers to not take the flight, as it was full, and there was some sort of problem to do with fuel and the weight of the plane - reassuring. I went and explained my situation to him, and he gave me a look that was 20% “it’s not my fault you made a stupid decision,” 20% “there’s no chance in hell you will get on this flight,” and 60% “Go away.” After that flight left - my luggage in tow - I was given a boarding pass for the next White Plains flight, two hours later.

The flight was delayed an hour, but it did leave. All progressed smoothly until about a half hour before what should have been our arrival, when the pilot announced that the weather made it currently impossible to land, leaving us in a holding pattern. (He did not announce that the plane’s sole lavatory was not working, but then again, he did not really need to…)

The good news was that we only held for one hour. The bad news was that when we stopped holding, we prepared to land not in White Plains, New York, but in Richmond, Virginia. The decision to divert the flight to an airport that was hundreds of miles to the south could probably only be explained properly by someone who works in aviation, or perhaps the Federal Bureau of Absurdity. Before proceeding with the narrative, however, I’d like to offer a brief scorecard:

* Point of departure: Chicago, O’Hare Airport.
* Intended destination: New York, LaGuardia Airport
*Scheduled flight time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
* Time elapsed since scheduled flight time: 8 hours, 20 minutes.
* Present position (passenger): Richmond, Virginia
* Present position (luggage): White Plains, New York

After about an hour at the Richmond airport - which, if I may offer a public service announcement, is not exactly a vacation spot - we were informed that flying to White Plains was still impossible, that it was unclear when it might become possible, and that therefore we were going back to Chicago.

Now, I realize, Dear Reader, that the “therefore” in the previous sentence seems a bit presumptious: why would it possibly make sense to fly us in the nearly exact opposite direction of our destination? Here, it becomes necessary to state the Suspension of Disbelief and Desire for Reason for the Sake of Sanity in the Frequent Traveler principle (SoDaDfRfrSoSinFT). This has prevented numerous ulcers, and perhaps even coronaries, over the years. How is it possible that our plane is delayed due to the lack of a crew, when the incoming flight just arrived, crew in tow? Invoke SoDaDfRftSoSinFT. How can the airline have lost your reservation when you are showing them an actual, paper ticket that they issued? SoDaDfRftSoSinFT to the rescue. And so on.

Back in Chicago, after a 30 minute wait for a gate agent to appear and give us instructions/assistance, and a short but ugly interlude where the airline (anonymous, you’ll remember) tried to avoid providing hotel rooms, which led to a sort of hyper-effective mob rule, I was booked on a flight to LaGuardia for the next morning. At this point, I went to deal with my luggage, and was told that I couldn’t file a claim for a missing bag until I reached my final destination. This led to the following exchange, reproduced here verbatim:

JB: Which final destination, LaGuardia or White Plains?
Agent: …
JB: Because as you can see, my flight tomorrow is to LaGuardia.
A: Then LaGuardia.
JB: But my bag is tagged to White Plains.
A: Then White Plains.
JB: …
A: Sir, I can’t help you.
JB: I don’t understand. Either the bag is still here, in which case you should give it to me, or it’s in White Plains, where I will not be going, in which case it’s just as easy for you to file the claim now as it would be tomorrow.
A: Sir, I can’t help you.
JB: Can you explain why not?
A: No.

And SoDaDfRftSoSinFT was invoked, for the second time that day. Perhaps we are ready for another scorecard:

* Point of departure: Chicago, O’Hare Airport.
* Intended destination: New York, Laguardia Airport
* Scheduled flight time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
* Time elapsed since scheduled flight time: 13 hours, 0 minutes
* Present position (passenger): Chicago, O’Hare Airport
* Present position (luggage): White Plains, New York.

Early the next morning, I flew to LaGuardia, and after a brief exchange with an understandably confused baggage representative, filed the claim for the missing luggage. A few hours later, I called: no news.

Later that afternoon: no news.

A third time that day: no news.

The next morning, I called again, and asked for all of the notes that had been entered into my file. After all of the customary information, was a curious remark: “Luggage handle broken, not liability of A_____ Airlines.”

After taking a deep breath, I asked, “Leaving aside, just for the moment, the fact that my luggage handle was not broken when I left it, can you tell me when and where that note was made?”

Dear Reader, it had been made the previous morning - after I had returned home. The person making the note, however, had not condescended to mention where the bag was.

Summoning my last vestiges of calm, I asked the woman on the other end of the line, “So, someone from the airline broke my luggage, noted their un-liability in your computer system, and then declined to provide the one piece of information that would be useful to me?” To her credit, she did not disagree with this view of events, though that did little to improve my mood…

A few hours later, I made Call Number 5: no news. In a fit of pique (understandable, I might suggest?) I announced that I was not getting off the phone until I heard something more interesting. First of all, I demanded, she should call the White Plains Airport.

I was put on hold for approximately one minute, at which point she came back on the line, and said, “What do you know, your bag is in White Plains. It was probably there the whole time!”

Oh, the things it must have seen…

2) Towards the end of the month, I flew with my brother to Israel. Or rather, I flew from New York to London, he from Chicago to London, and we were to proceed from there to Israel. In a brief, highly uncharacteristic, and as it turns out, ill-advised moment of generosity, I had bought him a mileage ticket. This story, as you might imagine, is shortly to take on a decided “no good deed goes unpunished” flavor.

At Heathrow, we met at the gate, and when boarding was announced, handed the gate agent our passports/boarding passes, then proceeded down the jet bridge. No sooner had I remarked to him how unusual it was for me to be traveling with someone, than the agent came barreling down the ramp, and asked to take another look at his passport. We were then told to head back to the gate and wait, which we did, trepidatiously.

Five minutes later, a supervisor came back, informed us that to enter Israel, one’s passport needs to be valid for six months, and that since his was due to expire in May, he was not going to be able to take the flight. At this point, intrafamilial differences began to reveal themselves: my brother calmly expressed his surprise at various aspects of this story, and I became hysterical.

(In my defense, I was looking for any way to make this situation go away. But nothing I did seemed to have much positive influence on the agent for the airline, which, again, wishes to remain anonymous, but is the flagship carrier of a European island nation which is not Ireland, nor Cyprus nor Malta, and whose capital is London.)

Given that someone else’s welfare, rather than my own, was at stake here, SoDaDfRftSoSinFT did not, and does not apply, and so I will compress the conversation, to keep that ulcer at bay. Suffice it to say that I suggested that given that the airline was being paid to facilitate the trip, it didn’t seem too much to ask that it inform its passengers of the documents needed at the destination. (Or, failing that, raise the issue at the point of departure, not 4500 miles later.) His response was that the airline’s only responsibility was to get us from point A to point B. This, it seemed to me, begged just the response I gave: “In that case, you don’t seem to be doing a very good job of it.”

It is difficult to remember if that is the precise moment that he declared the conversation over and walked away. What is very easy to remember is that given that it was Christmas, and that the embassy was closed, my brother had no choice but to board a plane straight back to Chicago. Leaving Chicago, it seems, is hard to do. Or else we are brothers: my suitcase, after all, left the city with no difficulty whatsoever.

Last week, amid this sea of Beethoven, was an island of Mozart: the Concerto K. 467, which I played in France. I’ve always felt that despite their status as Classical Era Icons, the distance between these two composers, in argument, in effect, and in affect, is immense. This time, playing the Mozart concerto while Beethoven was oozing from my every pore, the feeling was stronger than ever - it struck me as amazing that works which are unquestionably masterpieces could be so profoundly unalike.

I remember a remark Richard Goode made in an interview, to the effect that playing the 32 Beethoven sonatas in one year - presumably to the exclusion of much else - was a kind of sensory deprivation. (I am taking this statement grossly out of context - the larger message was that the immersion in Beethoven was one of the most extraordinary experiences of his life.) It’s a feeling that I’ve come to understand; it’s not that Beethoven’s music is lacking in sigh-making beauty or innovation, that it fails to give tactile pleasure to the performer, or that it is in any way grim, dour, or lacking in color. Rather, it is that in spite of his music’s beauty, its warmth, and its endless storehouse of ideas, it is above all the indomitable will of the composer - the will to say what must be said - that makes Beethoven’s music moving, that makes it Beethoven.

One of the works that I recorded and have been playing a lot of is the Sonata Opus 28 - the “Pastoral” sonata (not a name I’m fond of). Midway through the development of the first movement, we find ourselves in F# Major - a highly unlikely, not to say inappropriate, place to find oneself in the middle of a movement which is in D Major.

(*Brief musicological aside, which can be ignored by anyone not interested, without any serious deleterious effect on his/her understanding/appreciation of the rest of this essay: in fairness, this chord is actually approached as V of b minor [vi], making it somewhat less surprising, but through repetition, its function becomes increasingly unclear.*)

Now, composers before and after Beethoven wrote music with surprising harmonic twists and turns, so this chord, while immediately exotic, is not all that shocking. What Beethoven does next, however, decidedly is: he repeats the chord, over and over again, for twenty eight measures. For the first few measures, while the harmony remains unchanged, we at least still have a motive from earlier in the movement. Gradually, though, all other elements dissipate, and by the end, there is nothing else: no melody, not even a rhythm, just this chord, this harmonic visitor from a foreign country, desperate in its quiet insistence. By bar twenty eight of this, when Beethoven asks the performer to hold the chord - very quiet by now - indefinitely, we no longer have any sense of home whatsoever. The sheer repetition has forced our ears to rethink - even if only subconsciously - everything they had assumed about what they had been listening to. And all this done with one chord, stubbornly repeated, over and over, until Beethoven decides he’s finished with it, and in three short phrases, modulates us back home, as if it were nothing, the F# Major merely a mirage: this is Beethoven’s force of will.

The effect that this force of will has on the listener is so profound, it becomes difficult to imagine that music could ever be powerful or moving for any other reason. And that is why there have been times in the past where I’ve found it very strange to move from Beethoven to Mozart - the latter’s lack of a will of steel, heard in that context, can seem like a defect. This time, however, playing K. 467 was a joy and a delight, in equal measure, and it occurred to me that Mozart’s lack of will - his emotional malleability - may be not only not a defect, but in fact a defining feature, the quality that makes his music remarkable, much as the opposite is true with Beethoven.

Busoni referred to music as “sonorous air,” in which case one could call Beethoven’s music sonorous idealism. We sense in his music not only what he feels, but what he wishes he felt - not just his world (and ours), but the world he wished he lived in. Mozart, to put it mildly, is not like this. The greatest ever composer of opera, Mozart’s music is dramatic simply because life is dramatic. His music changes character and mood with such astonishing speed and frequency because that is how people behave. Nothing in Mozart’s brief biography suggests a particularly happy life, but the subject of his music is very definitely things as they are - not as they might be.

For the first seven bars of this concerto’s slow movement - an aria for the piano which could have just as easily been for the Countess instead - the emotional soundscape of the music is clear: wistful and poignant, but simultaneously noble, and very, very proud. In bar eight, however, comes a question which is asked with some urgency. When it is reiterated, two bars later, the question is asked in a voice far more stricken. By now, the defining characteristics of the opening of themovement - which occurred just seconds earlier - have vanished. The music has gone from major to minor, and more important, the nostalgia has been replaced with a sadness which is unmistakably raw.

And then, five bars later, after a harmonic sequence astonishing enough to give the lie to those who say that Mozart was not inventive, we are back in F Major, and the pain - which briefly seemed to be all-encompassing - morphs again, this time into something far closer to resignation. Not acceptance, perhaps, but the understanding that life must go on. And so it does: everything just described takes approximately one minute to play, and occurs prior to the first entrance of the piano! This is, thus, stage-setting, in a sense, and yet a whole emotional universe has already been revealed. In the same amount of time, Beethoven might have restricted us to one chord…

It was a very happy hiatus from Beethoven for me. While it might have been a rude shock, it instead was very wonderful to be reminded just how diverse is the music that I love. Now it’s back to Beethoven; despite his immense and immensely powerful personality, this time I’m reserving a corner of the room for myself. And for Mozart.

Inspired by an extremely thoughtful and inquisitive comment on a previous post, I thought I would try to explain the thought process that went into the planning of this particular program. It’s difficult, because “thought process” is an inexact term in this case - sometimes planning programs is more about an instinct for the alchemy through which certain pieces mesh well together than it is about any sort of formula which dictates how successful the program will be.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but my first selection criterion for any piece of music I play is that I must love it. I feel absolutely sure that if a performer lacks conviction in what he is doing, the audience will know it. And frankly, since I already see that life won’t be long enough to play all the pieces I do love, why on earth would I spend time playing those that I don’t?

This is the second time this fall that I play a program devoted to two composers: in September it was Brahms and Bartok, and now it’s Beethoven and Janacek. I love these kinds of programs: single-composer evenings can be wonderful - I’ve done all-Mozart, all-Beethoven, and will do all-Schubert later this year - but there is always the danger of a stylistic sameness, or rather a lack of confrontation between the pieces. Concerts of works of two composers are great because they still offer enough music of each to create a sense of immersion in the composers’ sonic worlds, and yet the concert becomes a dialogue between the two, which often moves in surprising directions.

The question of which composers work well together (and which don’t) is particularly alchemical, and I think it is one of both similarity and difference. The success of Beethoven and Janacek as a pairing relies in part on the terrific intensity that characterizes both, which is why Ravel, for example, is a much less natural partner for Beethoven. But what I think makes the combination really interesting is that the intensity may be similar, but the language is utterly different. One facet of this, as an example: Beethoven’s sonatas are incredibly tightly - one might say relentlessly - argued, giving the listener the feeling that from the first note, he is being inexorably led towards the last. Janacek, by contrast, is perhaps the greatest master of the musical non-sequitur. (These seeming non-sequiturs are, of course, actually connected to the material they surround on a deep level; on the surface however, they seem to come out of the blue.) This is just one example of many - really, the building blocks in Beethoven and Janacek could not be more different, which makes the similarities in temperament between the two all the more fascinating.

The great composer Leon Kirchner once wrote, “Poetry responds to poetry, no matter its time or chronology,” and much the same could be said of music: what is wonderful in juxtaposing Beethoven and Janacek is that Beethoven becomes not just the foundation - as he nearly always is, when juxtaposed with a composer who came after him - but the respondent. The deep nostalgia in Janacek’s In the Mists is, I feel sure, a longing for a lost musical world — the very world that Beethoven inhabited. (And, interestingly, played a large role in dismantling - but that is a subject for another essay…) But equally, when I play Beethoven’s Opus 109 after the Janacek Sonata - a gut-wrenching lament for a murdered Czech worker - it carries the feeling of consolation to a far greater extent than it might otherwise. This is one of the most wonderful things about great music: while its affects are in a sense unchanging, it is never impervious to its surroundings. Beethoven could not have predicted the events which inspired Janacek to compose his Sonata - and given his own political predilections, he may not have been interested anyway - but his music addresses every aspect of the human experience, and therefore is moving - differently moving - in any context.

So in a sense, I feel that in playing this program, I become the conduit through which a conversation between two great masters takes place: a very exciting notion.

I think this explains, far better than I ever could, why playing Beethoven - doing him justice, or at least coming as close as one can - feels like a matter of life-or-death.

Or perhaps even his words are unecessary: the force of his personality, the intensity of his need to say what must be said — these are made plain in his music.

My Beethoven CD was released earlier this month. Just my most recent attempt, in a series which I hope will last a lifetime, to come to terms with the most life-affirming, yet unfathomable music I know to exist.

(A further attempt to explain what this music means to me can be found here.)