Mstislav Rostropovich has died.  We were supposed to see him at the NSO this year, but he was ill and different music was subbbed in with the intention, as I recall, of rescheduling.  I remember seeing him in an interview once, when he said that he used to practice so much that he would forget to eat, and his wife would make pancakes on strings that she hung up so he could snack without stopping.  I never knew if he was just pulling the leg of the interviewer, but I have always loved the story.  What a great loss, but what a great life.

And only semirelated, rhymephile  posted this link

Worth thinking about.

I am curious--what would you stop for in your busy day?

I did not mention in my previous post one of the finer perks of the Thursday performance at the orchestra.  Both the conductor, Andrey Boreyko, and the piano soloist, Piotr Anderszewski, were very easy on the eyes.  Hotties even, in the world of the classics.  Not quite as pretty as the heyday of the orchestra, when a youngish Ricardo Muti set all our hearts beating a little faster when he took the podium.  But very nice to look at.  It was also interesting to watch him conduct.  It seemed almost as if he was sculpting clay with his left hand, describing curves and cupping his palm as if shaping clay, not notes, while his right hand pointed and waved and did the usual things with the baton.

Pianist, also pretty.

Moving this to a slightly higher plane, I am thinking about my last post, and interpreting Stravinsky's piece differently than his intentions when he wrote it, and something my friend Tom Purdom wrote about Shostakovitch for the Broad Street Review:

Shostakovich occupied a prominent, highly visible position in a society dominated by the tragedies of war and the whims of a capricious tyrant. You can’t play his music if you can’t work your way into the tensions that harry a creative artist trapped in that situation. The Beaux Arts made a good try, but their natural habitat is Schubert’s world, not Stalin’s.

This would seem to contradict my own disregard for Stravinsky's intentions in the Symphony in Three Movements, but in fact, I agree with Tom completely.  I think that the muscians, the conductor, have to play the pieces with a full awareness of what the composer's intentions brought to the sound of the music.  I think that an interpretation that inflects that to carry the point of view of the performance can also be interesting and worthwhile, but only with an awareness of the sound value the composer intended for the piece.  To use a text-based analogy, revising War and Piece as if it were Mary Poppins might be interesting, but it wouldn't be War and Piece.  Or, back to a different kind of music, Ronald Reagan using Bruce Springsteen's own recording of Born in the USA for a conservative rallying cry.  Did he even listen to the words? Did no one look up "irony" in the dictionary to see what it meant?  Did they not realize it was an indictment of government policies? 

I admit to being less certain about the responsibility of the audience to respect the composer's intentions,.  That doesn't mean one should go out of the way to be ignorant of them.  But I think that different times will evoke different responses, and as long as the music evokes a response, it is still relevant.  But then, I think of Bruce and Ronald Reagan, and I sorta wanna take that back.