Skip to main content

Impromptus

This is a 1962 performance by Alfred Brendel of Franz Schubert's Impromptus, Op. 90 & Op. 142 on a 1969 UK re-issue. Of Brendel, who would have been 31 at the time of the recording, the sleeve-notes say "he shows a particular preference for Mozart, and has been instrumental in bringing before the public unjustly neglected Schubert Sonatas" whereas nowadays he's probably best-known for his esteemed interpretations of the Beethoven Sonatas.  

After a paragraph about Brendel, the notes, by an un-named author, discuss the Impromptus in some detail. Despite the unalike opus numbers assigned to the two groupings of four pieces, they were apparently all written in the same year: 1827. "These eight pieces", the sleeve-noter adds, "were the outcome of publishers' urgings and requests for 'short pieces, not too difficult, and in easy keys'". The term Impromptu is misleading here, we're told. with the pieces being "anything but improvisations".

I've a definite preference for the Op. 90 pieces on Side A: all four are beautiful, and complement each other beautifully. Not that the Op. 142 pieces are bad by any means, just somewhat less to my taste. Brendel sounds very much at home in these works and I very much enjoy how he plays them.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more