Tag: classical

Why you’ve never really heard the “Moonlight” Sonata. – By Jan Swafford – Slate Magazine

~ Mark

The audio examples are really fascinating. (via).

When composers wrote for these instruments they sometimes loved them and sometimes chafed at their limitations, but in any case they wrote for those sounds, that touch, those bells and whistles. From old instruments, performers on modern pianos can get important insights into the sound image that Mozart, Schubert, et al., were aiming for. But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn’t just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can’t even be played as written on modern pianos.

Why you’ve never really heard the “Moonlight” Sonata. – By Jan Swafford – Slate Magazine

~ Mark

Oscar Levant daydreams a total performance of Gershwin’s Concerto in F. From the film “An American in Paris”.

~ Mark

Beethoven’s laptop. That’s a clever little desk, no?

In the last weeks of Beethoven’s life this travel desk was placed right next to his bed. Three days before he died, he wrote a codicil to his will at the desk, in which he named his nephew Karl as his sole heir. Beethoven probably kept his letter to the Immortal Beloved in the open compartment shown here.