slow movements

The end of the month is near, and that means it's less than half a month to my next pay day. As far as my life as a lowly slave goes, that's the only thing worth looking forward to. The pace has picked up slightly, but work is still generally unexciting. I still have no idea what I'll be doing over the next four months or so. This guessing game is b0th bothersome and tiring, not that my nonchalance about work is providing any reprieve. Uncertainty can be worse than shit.

The concert last night featured Jean-Philippe Collard performing Rachmaninov's 1st Piano Concerto. I had previously heard him at a recital in London QE Hall. His sensitive treatment of the piece was ably backed up by Okko Kamu's direction. Overshadowed in popularity by its composer's 2nd and 3rd piano concertos, I've not heard many interpretations of the concerto in my casual listening. Now I'd really like to hear the slow movement again.

Tribute must be accorded to the guest conductor Okko Kamu for the other two items. The orchestra began the evening with the expunged movement, nicknamed Blumine, of Mahler's Symphony No. 1, and ended with Beethoven's Symphony No. 1. This is the second time in recent history I've heard Okko Kamu conduct, and I'm drawn to his clean and polished interpretations, in contrast to the more brash and showy approach of the orchestra's Music Director. It's a pity that he conducts only a few concerts here each year.

A sommelier at a wine tasting talk I attend remarked that diehard wine tasters go through a cycle of preferences. They may start off liking sweet wines, then they move on to champagnes, the reds, etc.., only to return to where they have started out, and this can take over 10 years. I wonder if this can be extended to one's preferences in classical music. At 13, I started off tuning into the local classical music station because I didn't like the music selection on the other stations --- I didn't have an affinity for any music with human voice (it's less true today). I got acquainted with music in the standard repertoire. They make up, after all, most of the station's playlist. I enjoyed flashy passages, so virtuosic showpieces of Paganini easily became my favorite. Then there were some composers who "never disappointed" --- J.S. Bach, Rachmaninov and Schubert were amongst those. I identified pieces by the more melodic tunes in the outer movements of symphonies and concertos. Slow movements tended to be torturously long. My musical diet was a mix from all three classical music periods. Then I went to college... and that diet oscillated between extremes. The public library downtown had a classical music CD section and it really helped that I could borrow a maximum of 20 items. Work schedule permitting, I would visit the library every three weeks. The CDs I borrowed were reflective of my mental state. There were days when I would not think much about my CD selection, not even when some of them were of unfamiliar and esoteric music, and sometimes I went exclusively for those. Then there were days when I went back into the comfort zone of the more popular standard repertoire. I stopped listening to most Baroque music except for J.S. Bach's. I lost my ability to enjoy most of Mozart's music, except for a few of his late works. Then there was once when I got interested in 20th century composers and a few others who tried to compose atonally. School work piled up, and I found myself listening to too much Scriabin at 3am while at work on physics problem sets. At about the same time, my housemate was listening to too much Chopin, and we never really understood each other. I became interested in Ravel and got smittened by the slow second movement of his Piano Concerto in G Major. Slow movements started to make sense, and I paid them more attention since then. So that was the history of my musical preference over time, but I don't see it returning to the start yet. I wonder if the wine taster's cycle holds true for some of us.