"...playing Schubert's piano sonatas well is one of the hardest things in the world. Especially this, the Sonata in D Major. It's a tough piece to master. Some pianists can play one or maybe two of the movements perfectly, but if you listen to all four movements as a unified whole, no one has ever nailed it....that's why I like to listen to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of---that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging...."

from Haruki Murakami's novel, "Kafka on the Shore," translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

Tributes to the late Gyorgy Ligeti continue to flood the blogosphere. From the American Music Center's essential website, NewMusicBox, three composers (Martin Bresnick, Roberto Sierra, and Anne LeBaron) offer their recollections of time spent in the presence of this most important of late twentieth-century composers. Wonderful, evocative stories from all three of them...what struck me the most in what they wrote? Sierra says of Ligeti, "Here was a man...longing for that music that nobody has written before." That's a beautifully pure way of portraying a mindset that I could only express clumsily in other posts.

LeBaron remembers a seminar four years ago at which Ligeti was asked what subjects should be taught in music conservatories...she quotes him answering that among other essentials "it's very important to have a high level of knowledge of non-European music: Asian, Javanese, Thai, Australian, the whole African complex south of the Sahara, Arabian, Iranian, and North African. I’m extremely interested in polyphonic music so I gravitate toward the African musics. For me, popular culture is very important, such as the blues..."  That's an intellectually and aesthetically omnivorous outlook that I would venture to say is not terribly prevalent in American music schools and conservatories in general.

...before you think to yourself, "Gee, this must be a person really worthy of attention in the classical music scene, somebody's whose body of work merits an interview in this respected publication..." you might want to check out this post on Orange County Register music critic Tim Mangan's excellent blog.

Pay particular attention to the section that includes the phrase, "...if you place either a full-page color ad or two consecutive half-page color ads, I'll arrange to have you interviewed."

There's a stack (well, a digital stack since it's in my computer's hard drive) of backlogged bookmarks about things that I have wanted to share with readers in the past few months, so I'll try to periodically pass those along in the approaching dog days of summer. Here's one example:

The marvelous English pianist Susan Tomes has added radio broadcasting and writing to her many credits. Like me, her career has been largely involved with collaborative work, specifically chamber music. There's no question that a lot of the single-instrument-with-piano repertoire should rightly be considered chamber music in just the same manner as are piano trios, quartets, or quintets. But in the classical marketplace, the pianist often gets short shrift in concerts of this format, both in terms of publicity and remuneration. This is so even though piano parts are just as difficult or more so than the "solo" instrument's part in works such as the Beethoven violin or cello sonatas, the Brahms sonatas for the same instruments, and so on. Last April in the "Guardian," Ms. Tomes wrote a fine article about the plight of the "accompanist" (as she says they are still called in Britain) or "collaborative pianist" (what she says is a more American term).

I'm usually pretty laid-back about these sorts of things myself. But I confess, I got a small knot in my stomach a couple of years ago when, while I was still sweaty backstage after a performance of the rather draining Tchaikovsky Piano Trio, a woman came up to me and very sweetly told me, "You know, you were a really fine accompan-i-est in that piece."

Anyway, check out the article. I knew Ms. Tomes as a fellow student at the Banff Centre in Canada back in the early 1980's, and it's great to see what a fine career she has had (and is having) in the years since. Check out her fine recordings with the Florestan Trio also. Incidentally, I see that she is part of a team-blogging effort over at the Guardian, so check that out as well.

The Herodes Atticus Odeon theater, Athens, Greece, July 4, 2006. This is about six hours before showtime for the Philip Glass Ensemble, and you can see a few mike stands, all the monitors, and a couple of synth stands set up, as well as the scaffolding for the lights that stays up for the entire Athens Festival.

The Herodes Atticus theater seen from the top of the Acropolis...I was standing a couple of hundred yards or so from the southwest corner of the Parthenon. Barely visible in the distance, through Athens' haze and 95-degree heat: Piraeus and the Saronic Gulf.