Half-listening to Chris de Burgh's Lady in Red the other day I remembered his entry in the Irish Rich List as north of £30 Million a few years ago. From there my mind drifted across the landscape of once-only hits from Eddy Grant's Electric Avenue to, a personal soft-spot, Who ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Mahlerman
Can music describe anything more than music? This week we explore music that seeks to paint pictures. In his 1936 Autobiography, Igor Stravinsky famously intoned that music was "powerless to express anything at all" and throughout his long life he did not retreat far from this very personal view: "music expresses ... Read More...
In his meanderings through the internet's musical parts, Mahlerman has unearthed many obscure gems that, while perhaps not fitting into a theme, nonetheless deserve their moment in the sun. Here are four... When I began this fortnightly blog column a couple of years ago I had no real idea of what it ... Read More...
Mahlerman marvels at the remarkable, racy and musically-significant shenanigans of Mrs Mahler... Reading, as I have been, the surviving letters of Gustav Mahler to his frisky (to put it mildly) wife Alma, I'm not sure I can answer my own question. Her apparent need to be economical with the truth dated ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman brings us four great, and perhaps surprising, Bohemian composers... If you believe that music can express a national identity, then perhaps the greatest concentration of it in the 19th and 20th Century was in Bohemia and Moravia - today the Czech Republic. Save in his passionate cycle of ... Read More...
Three of the great British composers all died within a few months of each other. Mahlerman looks at what we lost in 1934... Last week we celebrated the ongoing second Elizabethan age, sixty years and counting. The first, ending with the death of Gloriana in 1603, was marked by an extraordinary ... Read More...
After last night's Europop shenanigans, Mahler presents The Dabbler's Alternative Eurovision Song Contest, as it might have looked 100 years ago... With live animals banned from the Eurodreck last night it was unlikely that Pudsey, the adorable lovechild of a bichon-frise and a border collie's one-night stand, would rock-up to entrance ... Read More...
Quintessential Mahlerman this week: four exemplary unions of music and film... A few weeks ago I took a sideways look at plagiarism in movie scores, going on to name the guilty men and sit them on the naughty-step. But a much easier route has always been available to film producers when ... Read More...
Mahlerman continues his fortnightly guide to serious music by looking at three great second symphonies... In the summer of 1802 Ludwig van Beethoven, as was his pleasure, left Vienna for the peace of the countryside, settling in the small hamlet of Heiligenstadt a few miles away. Just 32 years old, with ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman does some musical forensic work, and uncovers a shocking tale of plagiarism. It turns out that no less than three supposedly 'great' composers - all now dead - borrowed directly from a living American one... When does artistic franchise tip over into plagiarism in the musical landscape? If ... Read More...
