Willie Walton may have been slothful, diffident and a womaniser - but, as Mahlerman reveals, 'melody poured out of him'... Regular readers of Lazy Sunday (I probably have at least three) may remember that in a recent survey of the life of Sergei Prokofiev, an unavoidable conclusion was established: that he ... Read More...
Lazy Sunday Afternoon
Dabbler music
This week Mahlerman turns his attention to the Late Quartets of Beethoven - music so great that even T S Eliot would struggle to put it into words... "I should like to get something of that into verse before I die." This is how TS Eliot, in a letter to his friend ... Read More...
A real treat this week as Mahlerman hails the 'aural magic' of Claude Debussy, the leading exponent of musical impressionism... When Beethoven introduced his Third Symphony (Eroica) at the birth of the 19th Century, nothing like it had been heard before. The density of his ideas, the challenging way he develops ... Read More...
Not all of the great composers were child geniuses or teenage whizzkids. This week, Mahlerman looks at some who found their true voice later in life... I have always felt that the Octet in E flat major by Felix Mendelssohn is as close to a musical miracle as we are ever likely ... Read More...
Returning to the new-look Dabbler, Mahlerman turns his attention to Benjamin Britten and shares his personal attachment to the greatest English composer since Purcell... Had he not lived in Restoration England, where fully-composed opera was not yet accepted, there is little doubt that Henry Purcell would have developed into the great ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman selects works by four composers who were direcly influenced by the greatest of them all, J S Bach... Without the famous horsehair wig, and looking more like a Soho bouncer than perhaps the greatest composer who ever lived, we can better appreciate the personality of J S Bach, ... Read More...
Mahlerman turns his attention to Joseph Haydn, the 'father of the symphony and the string quartet'... To my shame, when finishing my post on Leonard Bernstein a few months ago with a blissful performance of the last movement of the Symphony No 88 by Joseph Haydn, I realised that in the ... Read More...
Mahlerman combines sublime music with the work of great female photographers... Around the middle of the 19th Century, Robert Schumann's wife Clara, a brilliant pianist and sometime composer, gave up writing music because 'no woman has been able to do it', which, broadly speaking was true, and has remained so to ... Read More...
Mahlerman selects three fine works by composers who died 'in service'... Emerging, as I did the other day, from the subterranean depths of the tube into the bright sunlight of Tooting Broadway I was greeted by the familiar beauty of Franz Schubert's imperishable masterpiece, Deutsch number 759, the Symphony No 8 ... Read More...
Mahlerman returns with a post celebrating the exceptional soundtrack to the film Shutter Island, one of many successful collaborations between Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson... The time was Thanksgiving, 1976. The place was the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and the last performance of the Canadian-American rock group The Band. It ... Read More...
