Mahlerman is away this week, but this terrific post from his archive shows that losing an arm need not mean the end of a pianist's career... When Paul Wittgenstein woke up in a Russian field hospital in 1914 he was missing his right arm and was effectively a prisoner of war. ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Mahlerman
This week Mahlerman celebrates the great Gallic songwriters... Words; whatever happened to them in popular music? And why was I shocked a few moments ago, hearing the 'song' that is currently topping the charts? Talk Dirty by Jason Derulo has sold 160,000 copies in the last seven days. The second verse ... Read More...
As well as being a remarkably innovative composer, Ferruccio Busoni was a writer, arranger, editor, painter, linguist and intellectual. Was he, in fact, the last Renaissance Man?... When the itinerant clarinettist Ferdinando Busoni's wife Anna Weiss became pregnant in 1865, it was a measure of the instability and recklessness of ... Read More...
The Dies Irae is one of the most-used themes in western music. Mahlerman selects some fine examples... Scholars are split, but to put the four note descending motive (and the bars that follow) into some sort of context, I will give the palm to the 13th Century Franciscan Thomas of Celano for conjuring-up ... Read More...
Unearthed from the archives and now restored with new videos, a post in which Mahlerman treats us to some outstanding Americana... The tradition of playing music at home, all but dead in broken Britain, flourishes still in atomized America and produces, along with the reality-wannabies, a never ending stream of talent ... Read More...
There is much more to contemporary serious music than Alan Titchmarsh's choices on Classic FM. Mahlerman selects some 'post-minimalist' composers who should stand the test of time... Look, let's get one thing straight, I have got nothing against Dr Karl Jenkins, the most performed living composer in the world. Before the doctorate and ... Read More...
With two thirds of the planet covered by water, is it any surprise that the churning mightiness of the seas and oceans has influenced artists, writers and musicians so profoundly?... Homer acknowledged that there was '...nothing so dire as the sea' and, more recently, the great Philip Roth intoned on the ... Read More...
Hitler's assault on 'degenerate art' - that deemed to be decadent or harmful to the Nazi project - affected not only visual artists but also some very talented musicians. Mahlerman picks out some of the best examples of the Entartete Musik... Almost exactly eighty years ago Adolf Hitler, exercising his recently ... Read More...
What can we learn from a composer's very first work? Mahlerman investigates... Not the first work composed, but the first work published, the Opus 1 has held a peculiar fascination for musicians down the years. Sometimes the work (opus), even if penned by one of the great masters, is perfectly serviceable ... Read More...
In this week's music post, Mahlerman is contemplating star-cross'd lovers... No need for officers from Operation Yewtree to plan a dawn raid, but the archetypal love story of the Renaissance enshrined in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet does throw up a few parallels. It did take place a long time ... Read More...
