Tuesday, January 09, 2007

More Musos

A friend commented that she 'Missed Mozart and Schubert, and Faure in the earlier blog. Well, it wasn't an intentional miss.

I enjoy all three of these composers (though sometimes find Schubert has a bit of a tendency to rabbit on in his piano works). I've struggled to be able to play one particular piece by Faure for many years. It not only has three against two - it was the first piece, I think, in which I encountered this difficulty, and the pencil notes from my teacher are still on the page - but it also has a stinker of a chromatic run at speed, and I'm blowed if I can figure out the sequence of it.

And Faure's Requiem is a favourite of mine, too (in complete contrast to another favourite Requiem, by Verdi, which is one of the all time great Requiems). I got to know it before I went overseas, and then heard that a local choral group was presenting it, in London. (I think my uncle may have encouraged me to go.) It was a dismal performance - but then, it seemed to me that the amateur strata in England was considerably below the skill level of the amateur strata in NZ.

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