I can't get to sleep—too much accumulated tension—so instead I'm rereading John Canarina's excellent 2003 biography of Pierre Monteux, one of my favorite conductors. (I've no idea why, but I've always found it relaxing to read detail-crammed biographies of classical performers.)
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Replying to @TerryTeachout1
This, by the way, was my introduction to Monteux: http://bit.ly/2Wj0KTR It's something close to fifty years ago now, but I still remember vividly listening to this, in the dark, with my mother (a student of a student of Bartok.) Wish I could do that now.
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Replying to @TerryTeachout1
An extraordinary pianist named István Balogh, then on the faculty of the Cornish School of Music and Art, in Seattle. A severe and demanding taskmaster, but also ultimately an admirer of my mother's passionate devotion to music, and to the struggle to master her instrument.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @TerryTeachout1
Balogh insisted, as a part of her musical education, that my mother attend recitals of all the great pianists of her time, and this she did, taking careful notes of details of interpretation in each case. Schnabel, Horowitz, Rubinstein, Rachmaninov -- she heard them all, live.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @TerryTeachout1
She retained her concert programs from each of these recitals, and these are among my most precious possessions. I marvel at the thought of my mother as a girl, sitting in the seventh row, while Rachmaninov performed the "Appassionata." Of course she never forgot the experience.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @TerryTeachout1
Perhaps the most remarkable of all her concert-going experiences, though, was a certain Schnabel recital. It fell on a day when Seattle lay entombed beneath a mass of snow so thick that only by slogging through it for miles was my mother able, eventually, to reach the hall.
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She found upon arriving that only ten or twelve of her fellow ticket-holders had proven equally indefatigable. And to her great surprise, she and her dauntless colleagues were admitted to the nearly-empty hall, and greeted there personally by Schnabel, who played for them alone.
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