The Hammock Papers: Bernstein

Showing posts with label Bernstein. Show all posts

16 December 2024

Happy Birthday, Beethoven

Stieler, Beethoven with the Manuscript for Missa Solemnis (detail), 1820

To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.

Ludwig von Beethoven, born on this day in 1770.

Kristian Zimerman performs the Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73, "Emperor" with Lenny and the Vienna Philharmonic ...

18 June 2024

Philosophers have said that music is most divine, that music, like God, is invisible. You can't see it. It's intangible. And yet it has this most penetrating of effects. And so it is a direct emanation of the transcendent beauty of the beloved. Music speaks concordantly to a troubled world, dispelling loneliness and discontent, its voice discovering in it those deep recesses of thought and feeling where truth implants itself. Music offers no quarter for compromise, no excuses, no subterfuge, no shoddy workmanship. And we sense in music an extension of ourselves, a reminder of our own potential for perfection. Life has conflicts and pleasures, harmony and dissonance. That's how life is. Can't escape it. By the way, the same thing occurs in music. There are dissonances in harmony, and resolutions. I believe that you won't enjoy the resolution unless you have that dissonance. What would it be if we didn't have the dissonance? We wouldn't know the meaning of the resolution.

Seymour Bernstein

On espressivo ...

Upbeater or downbeater?

13 September 2020

Excellent.

An excellent documentary ...

Don't miss this discussion that Ethan Hawke and Seymour Bernstein have about the documentary Seymour: An Introduction ...

All serious artists begin by devoting their lives to a passion because they love it. Music isn’t a way of life for me, it is my life. So when I practice, I’m integrating my emotional, intellectual and physical worlds. Now if artists were conscious of doing that, they would direct that integration into their social world. Musicians train themselves to listen to what is coming out of their instrument, so that it matches what their inner world is experiencing. That teaches them to listen to people speaking in a very intense and involved fashion. There’s a correlation there. I think artists get into trouble or become neurotic when they don’t carry the hard-earned discipline from their art into the social world. Many try to do just the opposite by bringing the social world into their art. I don’t think that works because the social world is very unpredictable, but our art is very predictable.

Seymour Bernstein

12 April 2020

Mahler, Symphony No. 2 in C minor, "Resurrection"

Throughout the movement offstage horns and trumpets periodically call out, as if announcing that there is a way out of the existential dilemma if only people would listen. Finally, when the last trumpet sounds again from beyond, the noise and confusion fade away, and in the silence “we think we hear a nightingale in the farthest distance, like the last quivering echo of earthly life!” The chorus begins softly and simply: “Aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n” (Arise, yes, arise) to the march theme. But after the chorus and soprano soloist sings the words "unsterblich Leben/ Wird, der dich rief, dir geben " (He who called you will give you eternal life) the solo trumpet plays the resurrection motive from the first movement. After a final impassioned plea to believe by the alto soloist, "Oh glaube, mein herz," the movement comes to an extended close, with tolling of bells and culminating in the resurrection motive.

CONNECT

Leonard Bernstein, without a score, at the helm of the London Symphony ...

09 April 2020

Mahler, Symphony No. 1 in D major, "Titan"

Great music to accompany the early morning birdsong.

Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra ...

09 May 2019

Beethoven, Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92

The Allegretto is performed by the Vienna Philharmonic, under the direction of Leonard Bernstein ...

20 June 2018

Mahler, Symphony No. 5

Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic performing the Adagietto ...

16 April 2018

Beethoven, Leonore Overture No. 3 in C Major, Op. 72b

Leonard Bernstein directs the Bavarian Broadcast Symphony Orchestra ...

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL