Promoting the unknown

(at this moment, all of the above have less than 3000 views. Also, #2 is a bit slow to load – give it a few secs to buffer or it will cough a bit in the beginning, which is something you really don’t wan’t it to do)

I wasn’t all too happy about the previous video I posted of the third piece, which is part of the reason why I chose to – well, sort of – double post it. I haven’t played much the last couple of months, but I am getting to the point where I can almost play it correct and in tempo. Of course it would take at least another month to have it ready for a public performance, but I feel no time pressure or need to get it perfected that fast – I guess that’s one of the many good things about only playing for yourself and never playing in public if you can avoid it (I have given only a handful of, more or less, public piano recitals during the last half decade, and only one of them included playing in front of some people I didn’t know. If anything that’s a good thing for classical music as a whole: If people wan’t to listen to classical music, by *** they really shouldn’t be listening to people like me, when recordings of people like Lipatti, Horowitz, Kempff and Gilels are readily available. This point I have had quite a bit of difficulty explaining to my parents).

An interlude

How to deal with problems that you cannot solve, but which never the less troubles you? I usually answer questions like these with the word Beethoven. But of course if I had to give a more detailed answer, I’d have to include several of his friends and colleagues.

Here are a few pieces played by one of those colleagues, Dinu Lipatti, a wonderfully gifted Romanian pianist whose Chopin-interpretations were some of the first classical pieces I ever heard, and who died much too young, at the age of only 33. The second piece was recorded before either of my parents were even born – I’m pretty sure it’s no good trying to talk to the dead, but the dead can sometimes talk to you: