Bargain-priced, first-class Handel overview

This is a great CD for newcomers to Handel, but also for those who already have a few Handel CDs. So often samplers have all the favourites which you already have on other CDs. But this set has a few well-known tracks, such as Zadok the Priest, See the Conqu'ring Hero Comes and La Rejouissance from The Fireworks, but mostly wonderful music, superbly played which is not extremely well known.

Highly recommended.

Delightful Mozart, sensitively performed

I love this CD of the Mozart Flute and Harp Concerto and the Clarinet Concerto, and am pleased that it is still available, though now under another label. The 2 works combine to make a great program.

In Australia, the clarinet concerto was voted the one piece of classical music people could not live without. However, I did for a while, because about 15 years ago, when I arrived home in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, from a trip to Sydney, I discovered that the shop assistant had not put the CD in the jewel case!

The flute and harp concerto is equally delightful.

Highly recommended.

All that old music that's falling apart

Just got a great gift for Father's Day from my wife. It is a comb-binding machine. It doesn't bind combs, but punches holes in sheets of paper and assembles them with plastic combs down the side of the sheets.

So now I am separating pages of books I've had for 30 years or more, cutting off the glue strip on the side with my paper trimmer, punching holes in the sheets and then binding them back together again.

It is a bit laborious, but it works and I now have several books usable again.

A friend rips apart brand new books that won't stay open on the piano and runs them trough a binding machine, but I think I would wait a while before I pulled any new books apart!

Keeping my hand in, part 2.

My wife's project for my musical development is continuing: I play, she listens and sometimes comments. Joan is a terrific piano teacher and I greatly value her encouragement.

We have now worked through:

Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas
Mozart's 18 piano sonatas
Tchaikovsky's Seasons [all 12 of them ...]
Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition
Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias
Bach's English and French Suites
and
Chopin's Waltzes.

And I am now playing through Haydn's Sonatas and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier volume 1. The early Haydn Sonatas are not as well-known and are much easier than Mozart and Beethoven's: more like their sonatinas, but maybe easier still for the first few in volume 1 of the Henle edition. Bach's WTC vol 1 is still a challenge, though I have played through them before.

This is a sight-reading exercise, by the way: not at all polished performing!

Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier

Tim Smith has done a ton of work in creating this superb site, which features oodles of information on this wonderful body of Bach keyboard music. One of the best features is Tim's Macromedia Flash movies which scroll through Bach's WTC fugues in real-time to David Korevaar's sensitive perormances, while presenting a real-time analysis. It has to be seen and heard to be appreciated. [You will need a fast-speed broadband setup to be able to make use of the Macromedia movies.]

from newsgroup alt:quotations

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
W B Yeats (1865-1939)

I like it.

A little nonsense now and then

Playing Bach fugues is hard work. Anything to introduce a bit of humour into the situation should be welcome, I reckon. This web page gives Ebenezer Prout's lyrics for all of the Bach fugue subjects, including words for the countersubjects.

I have created a pdf file of the fugues from the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier, which shows how the words fit with the music of the subjects. I hope you enjoy it.

The lyrics Prout wrote are light-hearted but do serve a serious purpose, because they show exactly where the subjects begin and end, and were written as amusing musical memory aids.