The great jazz composer, bandleader and notorious procrastinator, Duke Ellington once said “I don’t need time, I need a deadline”.
Author: berggasse
Death in Venice
In the third volume of his memoirs, An Orderly Man (1983), the actor Dirk Bogarde tells the story of the first screening for Warner Bros. studio executives of the film Death in Venice, directed by Luchino Visconti. Naturally they were curious to see how their money had been spent.
Lisztomania – a film review
This year sees the fortieth anniversary of the film Lisztomania, an outrageous fantasy biopic on the life of Franz Liszt, written and directed by the unashamed bad boy of British cinema, Ken Russell (1927-2011).
Transfigured Night
During his years of permanent exile in America, Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) once remarked “There is nothing I long for more intensely than to be taken for a better sort of Tchaikovsky. People should know my tunes and whistle them”.
Liszt in Weimar
“Do I care how fast you can play your octaves?”, Liszt remarked to a pupil in a master class, clearly unimpressed with the playing “what I wish to hear is the canter of the horses of the Polish cavalry before they gather force and destroy the enemy!”
Philip Glass and La Boulangerie
In his recently published memoirs, Words Without Music (2015), the American minimalist composer Philip Glass tells the story of a lesson in musical counterpoint he had one afternoon with the formidable Nadia Boulanger.
A Bohemian in New York
Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904) was a genial, unassuming man for whom life was “a very wonderful, uncomplicated thing”. Arriving in New York in 1892, his patron handed him over to the music critic James Huneker for the day’s excursion. This started innocently enough with Mass at a Bohemian church, but it soon degenerated into…
Béla Bartók, Out of Doors
Budapest – a fine city. Formerly a provincial backwater made up of three small towns (Buda, Pest and Obuda), at the turn of the 20th century it was Europe’s fastest growing metropolis and a symbol of Hungarian national pride, the population ballooning from around 300,000 in 1870 to over a million in 1910.
The Four Temperaments
The Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865 – 1931) once noticed a panel of four amateurishly coloured pictures hanging on the wall of a village inn. “I laughed out loud and belittled these pictures”, he later recalled “but my mind constantly returned to them … these crude pictures contained some type of seed or idea”. His…
Sabre Dance
Together with Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian (1903 – 1978) is considered one of the three giants of Soviet music, albeit the most conservative for he wrote colourful, evocative and unashamedly tuneful music with a broad popular appeal.