Nimble Tread

Wowsa!

I've just spent a happy couple of hours listening to Hilary Hahn's 1997 recording of Bach's Partitas, and I'd like to make two very brief observations: 1. despite the occasionally choppy character of her phrasing (it can be very distracting), some of her lines are absolutely incredible, and 2. is there anyone in the world who produces more resonant, shimmering, and otherwise miraculous double-stops than Hilary Hahn?  (This is of course a rhetorical question, but in case you were wondering, the answer is no.) 
She's often criticized for being a technical creature whose playing is perfect but cold, which is naturally unfair, but isn't entirely unjust in that the opinion is based upon her early recordings (like the aforementioned Bach, which she made at 17 or so -- way too early for such emotionally stratified music), which were unfortunately charged with slightly robotic undertones.  That said, anyone who's listened to her playing, especially live, over the past few years would have a very hard time leveling the R2D2 accusation, and I have to say that her most recent recording of the Schoenberg and Sibelius concertos is really terrific, particularly in the case of Schoenberg.  She's currently working on a collection of Bach arias with Matthias Goerner and Christine Schäfer, which, if they all let their hair down, could be terrific.  Wait and see, kiddies, wait and see.

God Jul from Norway!

Tired of Christmas Shopping?

Well, if you are, or if you'd like to invest in something more useful than a Kelly bag, why not lay some oof on Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy.  The group, to use their own words, "provides and promotes the skilled use of music with individuals, groups and communities who are challenged by disability, illness or injustice" and usually offers around 30,000 therapy sessions in the UK each year.  They don't have any statutory funding, which means they need to raise their £3 million operating budge from scratch every annum, and could certainly use your help to meet their mark.  If you'd like to learn more about N-R, you can visit their F.A.Q. page by clicking here, or if you'd like to make a donation, you can do so by clicking here. 

Winter Views

I had a fine start to the day this past Sunday.  the Wigmore Hall was offering its weekly Coffee Concert -- is there a more misleading series title in all of music?  With three-hundred glasses of sherry glimmering in the morning light, who cares about coffee? -- and I figured I'd attend, for how better to restore oneself to life than by listening to Haydn string quartets for an hour or so?  The group providing these gems was the Chilingirian Quartet (motto: we play mostly in tune), which is currently in the midst of wandering through all of Haydn's efforts in the oeuvre and had decided to favour us with the quartets in G, Op.64 No.4, F minor, Op.55 No.2 a.k.a. The Razor, and in C, Op.54 No.2.  The music itself was performed in a perfectly adequate manner, and despite a few technical glitches, the Chilingirian folks managed to convey much of Haydn's limitless humour to the audience, who seemed grateful for the tunes but appeared, to a careful observer (in this case, me) a bit distracted.  There was, for example, the pair of lovebirds seated directly in front of me.  I never found Haydn's music to be much of an aphrodisiac, but then again I'm a man of unrefined tastes.  The husband was playing it cool, but his wife kept leaning over and planting juicy ones on the side of his jaw.  These little bisous were enhanced by a look of absolute adoration, and I have to say that the whole spectacle was very touching.  What made it especially, almost distractingly, unique, however, were the canoodlers' ages, which I'd put somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty-five.
Seated directly in front of the couple was a man of enormous proportions, who was so much at his leisure while awash in Haydn that he'd planted an elbow on the armrest and was listing well to port.  His shadow loomed menacingly over the aisle, and his head would have eclipsed the husband's view of the stage if he (the husband) had been able to focus on anything other than his face being ravaged by Vampira. 
This scene was oddly enhanced by the tang of menthol that emanated from the myriad cough drops pressed into service on this morning.  While the smell, which seemed to hang in a cloud overhead, would indicate a dearth of coughing, the reality of the situation was quite different: hacks and wheezes pierced the air, and what should have been silent moments between the movements were in fact periods of absolute mayhem.  There was a terrifying variety of bodily sounds emitted and, I imagine, an even more frightening array of germs disseminated, making for a lovely little microbes' rodeo at the Wigmore this Sunday morning.  Well, 'tis the season.