Bach-et-alia
Friday night saw the last of this season's New York Collegium Concerts, at the Church of St Vincent Ferrer. We had the first two Brandenburg Concertos and two of Bach's "Lutheran" Masses. In other words, music familiar and obscure. The prevailing note all evening long was good humor, or perhaps jollity.
Continue reading about the New York Collegium at Portico.
On Saturday, Orpheus followed with the last of its Carnegie Hall concerts for the season. The big noise on the program was Leon Fleisher, whose recordings of the Schumann and Grieg piano concertos, made with the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, were the ones I grew up to. By the time I was listening, however, Mr Fleisher had developed dystonia in his right hand, and was down to playing the left-hand repertoire. According to an entry at Wikipedia, Botox came to Mr Fleisher's rescue. I remember his initial comeback; he played Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12 at Tanglewood. That's hardly a work of comparable difficulty to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat, Op. 73, the "Emperor."
Continue reading about Orpheus at Portico.
