On the Piano

I’ve posted here before about a music service I subscribe to, namely eMusic. The service used to be a huge bargain with thousands of classical music albums on sale at very affordable prices. However, the attractive pricing plans were changed late last year, and while it’s still cheaper than equivalent purchases at Amazon or in brick-mortar CD shops like HMV, it’s no longer the bargain it once was.

The net effect of the price changes is that these several months now I’ve become a lot more careful about what music tracks I purchase, since albums now cost typically about USD4.80 in their MP3 versions. That means I should leaning towards acquiring new classical compositions I haven’t heard before. But ironically a good amount of my most recent purchases are still old compositions!

There’s a couple of works I’ve fallen in love of late with revisits, and in the last 2 years have picked up several performances, two of which I’ll mention here. There’s Bach’s six French Suites that he wrote for the clavier but commonly recorded today on the piano. I first heard the work on an old Decca CD recording performed by András Schiff. Most of the several dozen short pieces in the suites were unknown to me (my only exposure to Bach as a piano learner 25 years ago was his Preludes and Fugues), but the Gavotte from the French Suite No. 5 in G has a wonderfully sprightly and melody that I remember from the very old but popular Hooked on Classics albums with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from the early 80s. A Youtube recording of the Gavotte is below.

My most recent acquisition of this composition was just over the weekend was a performance by German-American pianist Wolfgang Rübsam. By far though my favorite performance of the work comes off a recording before a live audience by Simone Dinnerstein, an American-born pianist I’ve blogged about a year ago here.

The other work that I’ve spent a lot of time listening to are Mendelssohn’s two Concertos for Two Pianos. These are far less frequently recorded than the Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or other late romantic equivalents, but they’re some of the most amazing works demonstrating collaborative keyboard artistry. There are perhaps six performances of these two concertos available for online purchase anywhere; I’ve got four of them already and I still haven’t tire of listening to them! This is music I could set to Repeat on my music player and not get tired of listening to them for hours. My favorite performance of the four sees Swedish pianist Roland Pöntinen and Love Derwinger supported by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta conducted by Lez Makiz, an ensemble who also recorded another one of my favorite performances of Mendelssohn’s twelve string symphonies.