Sunday Classics: Not a review, but some thoughts prompted by Anne-Marie McDermott's recent New York piano recital

Even in this brief clip, I think you can hear that a (the?) distinguishing quality of Anne-Marie McDemott's piano-playing is the bracing physicality.

by Ken

Last week I laid the groundwork for some thoughts prompted by a recital that pianist Anne-Marie McDermott gave recently at New York's Rubin Museum of Art. (Of course it was a week more recently last week.) I focused last week on Liszt's solo-piano expansion of Schumann's brief but grandly expressive song "Widmung" ("Dedication"), which stands at the head of the list of songs he wrote for his new bride Clara, not to mention the vast number that were merely inspired by his passion for her, in his historic "Year of Song" (1840).

We never did get around to the recital itself. As I explained last week, that part was already written, but I just thought it would be too much for a single post. After the click-through we'll be picking up more or less where we left off last week, including hearing music by Prokofiev and Chopin which preceded the Schumann-Liszt (which we'll hear again, this time in some sort of context).

One thing we're not going to hear is the opening work, the Busoni rendering of the Bach solo-violin Chaconne, which I dislike a lot, though there'll be links to a couple of performances. To get us going, here's a performance of the violin original -- announced, you'll note, as "take one" -- by Jascha Heifetz. You might compare this with the Stokowski performance of his own orchestral version which we heard in Friday night's preview.



FOR THE THOUGHTS PROMPTED BY THE RECITAL,
AND A FAIR AMOUNT OF MUSIC, CLICK HERE

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