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...
Lazy Sunday Afternoon
Dabbler music
Toby Ash serves up a mezze of Middle Eastern musical delights... There is only one starting point to any post on Arab music and that’s Egypt and the ‘Star of the East’ Umm Kulthum, who is widely lauded as the greatest Arab singer of the twentieth century. Born the daughter of an ... 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...
There was more to Henry VIII than head-chopping and monastery-bashing... Bloody Tudors everywhere at the moment. I've been reading Hilary Mantel, watching BBC Two’s Tudor season, and now I can’t get this song out of my head. ‘I’m 'Enery the Eighth I am’, Joe Brown claims in a tale about a ... Read More...
Mahlerman guides you through the development of serious music in Spain... After a turbulent history of invasion and occupation by Romans, Visigoths and Moors (British pensioners don't count - yet) it is perhaps not surprising that by the time the nineteenth century rolled around, Spain was one of the most backward ... Read More...
What might Dave and Sam have been listening to as they chilled in the Balearics?... Whilst people have been listening to calming music forever, it's only in the last 20 years that 'chilling' has become an officially sanctioned activity. Many people don't even realise that the inoffensive 'chillout' music that has ... Read More...
Some of the most memorable films live on in our affections not just because they're beautifully shot or well acted or superbly scripted. Sometimes what really makes them stick in our memory is a song... The right sort of song - presented in the right way, in the right place, and ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman leads us into the spooky world of Bela Bartok... A glance at the photograph of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok gives a clue perhaps to the tensions, at times almost unbearable, that we find in much of his music. Reading his touching letters, as I have been, it ... Read More...
From the Dabbler archives, some rather odd pianists... The evidence would suggest that piano virtuosity and wild eccentricity go hand-in-hand. Here are three of the most troubled Greats (and this is not even to mention David Helfgott, made famous by the movie Shine, or Grigory Sokolov, who takes each piano apart ... Read More...
As we approach the anniversary of the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Mahlerman pays tribute to the great lyric baritone, who provided 'the soundtrack to my life'... In so many ways the aristocratic lyric baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died in Berg, Bavaria almost a year ago, was the quintessential Berliner, a genuine ... Read More...
