Music
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Love is…
when, on June 13 of 2018, Martha Argerich enters the stage of the Esplanade Concert Hall to perform with Darío Alejandro Ntaca and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at the Singapore International Piano Festival, and the audience applauds incessantly.
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Two hundred and twenty-four years ago, Schubert
Today I continue to celebrate life in details but also in the joy that adds two men to the spirit of celebratory thankfulness — music. Besides the birthday of Philip Glass, there is plenty of reason for celebrating two hundred and twenty-four years today. Franz Peter Schubert, the young man who composed the “Winterreise” (Winter…
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Celebration Day — twenty-six
Many lives stay with us in spirit, memory, lessons, inspiration. Some stay with us even as measuring kingdoms. Jacqueline Mary du Pré was born in Oxford, Oxfordshire, on the twenty-sixth of January of 1945. She could have never known that she, and her year would never be forgotten, and both would become significant in the…
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Celebration Day — seven
This is pure celebration, in part because the opera world has been an important source of joy in my life for the last four decades. Magnificent as realm of music composition and theater since the sixteenth century in Italy, it is a school on human condition, with its comedies, tragedies, and transcendental exercises, a school…
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Imprisoned with tails and top hat — words from the opera on mindset
(On the Viennese New Year’s Eve of 1899, Gabriel von Eisenstein is preparing to serve an eight-day sentence, for striking a police officer.) Gabriel von Eisenstein: My friend Falke is right. I’ll go to prison in tails and a top hat, in protest. They may lock me up but they will never humiliate me! Die…
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Existential Exercise I
Part one: In my teens I sat at the piano on a path of poplar trees, and felt confident in the assertion that no human, no swimming nor crawling nor flying creature dislikes music. As of that moment it was evident that whenever I compose sounds and words, it needs to be under the premise…
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Coffee in the Opera
MIMÌLet me look around.How wonderful it is here.I’ll recover… I will…I feel life here again.You won’t leave me ever… RODOLFOBeloved lips,you speak to me again. MUSETTAWhat is there in the house? MARCELLONothing. MUSETTANo coffee? No wine? MARCELLONothing. Poverty! SCHAUNARDShe’ll be dead within half an hour! “La bohème” (1896)by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)Libretto by Luigi Illica, Giuseppe…
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I’m back in Vienna!
Storytelling à la Norway, in the words of Henrik Ibsen. “Peer Gynt” his five-act play, set to the music of the incomparable Edward Grieg, interpreted as an expressive evening of ballet and movement, is loosely based on the Norwegian fairy tale. Beautiful music and sounds Poetic pictures Surrealism … It pleasantly points out that, while…
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Today I am in Vienna!
Today I will be in the most magnificent city on this planet. The Metropolitan Opera in New York is playing operas I am not interested in, so I will not be here. Today, mind and ears will be in Vienna. To my wonderful friends in Vienna, do not try to meet me, for I will…
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Words from the Opera — When horror breaks one heart, all hearts are broken
Balstrode:We’ll find him, maybe give a hand. Ellen:We have no power to help him now. Balstrode:We have the power. We have the power.In the black momentWhen your friend suffersUnearthly tormentWe cannot turn our backs.When horror breaks one heartAll hearts are broken. From the opera “Peter Grimes“ op. 33Composer: Benjamin BrittenFrom the poem by George Crabbe
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A Requiem on Arrival
What happens to a newborn when touched, impressed, moved by the depth of music but without the release of tears? Where does the intensity land?
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“It is cruel that music should be so beautiful.”
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony. Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) English Composer
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Truth cannot be known to mortals*
If truth cannot be known to mortals, why is the word in our vocabulary? *The words of Klytämnestra, in “Electra”.Opera in one act, by Richard Strauss (1864–1949).Clytemnestra, in Greek mythology, is a goddess, wife of Agamemnon, and mother of Electra, Chrysothemis, and Orestes
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Anna Bolena — tragically interrupted
Anna Bolena wrapped her long hair in one hand, lifted it above her shoulder, arm stretched, and walked decisively a few steps before an abrupt stop, swinging her black tail frontwards in an arch over her head where it hung before her forehead, as she took a drastic bow that exposed her neck to the…
Sila Blume 