Archived Music Blog
In last week’s post we listened in astonishment as Beethoven forklifts a passage out of his 5th Symphony’s third movement and drops its into the alien environs of its fourth and final one. As we saw, this remarkable move is motivated by an unassailable (if...
Archived Music Blog
I once heard a lecture by the late great critic and pianist (or, as he would have said, pianist and critic) Charles Rosen on two strands of Romanticism: a backward-looking “classicizing” one (exemplified by Mendelssohn and Brahms) and a forward-looking...
Archived Music Blog
Last week we caught Mozart peeking at the future in composing a passage that could have been written by Schubert (if on a more inspired day, perhaps, than even the latter ever had). In bringing off this miracle, Mozart’s futurescope was focused about forty years...
Archived Music Blog
Last week we saw Beethoven happening into jazz (and moving on to other things with nary a backward–or should that be forward?–glance). After writing that post, it occurred to me that Mozart can be caught in the same act, though in Mozart’s case...
Archived Music Blog
When I signed off last week I was wracking my brains trying to think of the name of the jazzy tune prefigured in the finale of Mozart’s K. 590 string quartet. My thanks to reader Doreen Spungin for passing along her son Andrew Lubman’s guess as to the...
Archived Music Blog
There are two common impressions of Mozart’s music. The principal one is of what could be called “Musicbox Mozart,” the graceful, elegant sort of piece epitomized by “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” In recent years a second impression has...
