I know it’s the day after the day after Christmas, but I’m still going to give you a gift. A gift of Schiff.

I heard Andras Schiff on the radio a couple of days ago and it reminded me how much I’ve enjoyed his discussions of Beethoven’s piano sonatas before he’s performed them. He plays with passion but has an analytic understanding of the compositions. And, no, I’m not sure why I used “but” as the conjunction in that sentence.

Anyway, you can download the lectures here, thanks to The Guardian. (Thank you, The Guardian!)

Schiff said on the radio the other day that as he gets older, his understanding increases but his technical ability decreases. It makes me hope that we get some software that lets a master like him manipulate musical notation to produce a digital version of the performance that he would have liked to be able to give. Or will it turn out that there are so many variables for how you strike a note and string them together that such software is like wishing that Meryl Streep could instruct a digitizal avatar to act as well as she does?

Categories: culture dw