Concert Concat 2025

Published by peter on 2024-12-30 in Concats, Concert Concats, Concerts, Jazz and Music. Closed

This post is one in a sequence which lists (mostly) live music I have heard, as best as memory allows. I write to have a record of my musical experiences and so these entries are intended as postcards from me to my future self. All opinions are personal.

Other posts in this collection can be found here. The most recent prior post in this sequence is here.

  • Vadym Kholodenko in a recital at the Bechstein Hall, London, on Thursday 10 April 2025. This was a superb performance to about 40 people under the artificial stars of the new Bechstein Hall on Wigmore Street. The acoustics of the hall are very good, even with the hall being only about 2/3 full. The programme was:

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Musical performance

Published by peter on 2025-03-17 in Music and Uncategorized. Closed

Nat King Cole:

I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform, it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.”

Two nations under God

Published by peter on 2025-02-23 in Religion. Closed

To people familiar with the organized, formal factions of the Australian Labor Party, the divisions within the Roman Catholic Church may look quite unprofessional. To an outside observer, there appear to be two main factions in the modern Church, although neither is organized or formal (as far as I know). Their names are my own invention.

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Thinking aloud

Published by peter on 2025-02-14 in Music and Rhetoric. Closed

For some years, I have been arguing that music is a form of thinking. (See prior posts here, published in 2011, and here, 2010.) I realize that this statement would likely be obvious to most musicians, but I still receive push-back to it from those people (especially many philosophers) who believe that thinking requires words. In this belief, they are mistaken. Even with other forms of thinking (geometric, visual, musical, kinetic, etc), though, we may still need words to explain our thinking to others.

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Celebrity page turners

Published by peter on 2025-02-01 in Concerts and Music. Closed

Pianist Roger Woodward in his memoir, Beyond Black and White, (2014, Kindle Edition, location 5265):

Violin virtuoso George Enescu and acclaimed pianist Arthur Rubinstein were once lunching together at Enescu’s Paris apartment when there was a knock on his door. It was one of Enescu’s violin students, who was beside himself. Enescu tried to calm him down as the student explained that his piano accompanist had telephoned half an hour earlier to say he had fallen ill and was not able to replace him for his debut that evening. Since Enescu was as fine a pianist as violinist, he reassured his student he would accompany him. Rubinstein volunteered to turn pages. Next day, one of the Paris critics described the concert in the following way: “Except for the fact that the pianist should have played the violin, the page-turner the piano, and violinist the pages, the concert was memorable.” “

Woodward tells this story when recounting a rehearsal of Iannis Xenakis’ Eonta in UCLA in March 1972 under Zubin Mehta at which Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod turned up unexpectedly, having braved rioters and police on the UCLA campus to get there. Eventually Messiaen turned Woodward’s pages for him. However, Messiaen, who had been Xenakis’ composition teacher and knew his music (and who was always supportive of his student), first helped the brass players (from the LASO) deal with the many challenges and mis-prints in their parts for Eonta.

Four pianists enter a bar (in Paris, in 1832)

Published by peter on 2025-01-01 in Mendelssohn and Music. Closed

Felix Mendelssohn stayed in Paris between December 1831 and April 1832. His stay overlapped with those of fellow-pianists and friends Frederick Chopin, Franz Liszt and Ferdinand Hiller. Hiller later wrote an account of his long friendship with Mendelssohn, telling the following story.

At the time (early 1832), all four men were were aged between 20 and 23. Mendelssohn had earlier met and heard Chopin play in Munich and was greatly impressed with his abilities. The story concerns a meeting the four had with Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849), a German pianist, teacher and composer, who was influential in Parisian music circles. Mendelssohn had known Kalkbrenner from Berlin, and suspected him of faking improvisations (ie, playing a written piece from memory while telling people it was improvised). Kalkbrenner had further angered Mendelssohn by insisting, upon meeting Chopin in Paris, that Chopin take his group piano classes to “improve” his technique. Chopin, too polite to refuse, did so for a time.

I remember that one day, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, and I [Hiller], had established ourselves in front of a cafe on Boulevard des Italians, at a season and an hour when our presence there was very exceptional. Suddenly, we saw Kalkbrenner coming along. It was his great ambition always to represent the perfect gentleman, and knowing how extremely disagreeable it would be to him to meet such a noisy company, we surrounded him in the friendliest manner, and assailed him with such a volley of talk that he was nearly driven to despair, which of course delighted us. Youth has no mercy.”

Ferdinand Hiller [1874]: Mendelssohn: Letters and Recollections. (Translated by M. E. von Glehn). Macmillan. Page 26.

The Year 2025

Published by peter on 2024-12-30 in Mathematics. Closed

The year 2025 is a square number, since 2025 = 45 * 45. The adjacent years which are also squares are 1936 = 44 * 44 and 2116 = 46 * 46. There will be people who are alive for two of these three years, but nobody for all three (unless human lifespans increase dramatically for people born before 1937).

A Harshad number (aka a Niven number) is a number which is evenly divisible by the sum of its digits, eg, the number 24 is evenly divisible by 6, the sum of 2 + 4. The number 2025 is evenly divisible by 9 (the sum of 2 + 0 + 2 + 5), so it is a Harshad number. Likewise, the past three years are all evenly divisible by the sum of their respective digits: 2022, 2023 and 2024.

A sequence of four Harshad years in a row like this (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) is quite rare. The last time this happened was a millenium ago, in the year 1014, and the next time it will happen will be in the year 3030, a millenium ahead of us.

I feel privileged to be alive at this particular time to witness this sequence!

The sequence of numbers which begin four Harshad numbers in a row are shown at the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences here.

Recent Reading 21

Published by peter on 2024-12-11 in Books, Concats and Recent Reading. Closed

The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.

  • Kate Conger [2024]: Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Penguin.
  • Sarah Wynn-Williams [2025]: Careless People: A story of where I used to work. Power. Greed. Madness. Macmillan. This is a mostly riveting account of the author’s time working in a public policy role for Facebook/Meta. The company has denounced the many accusations of atrocious behaviours as out-of-date, which they don’t seem to have realized is not a rebuttal. Having myself worked with senior executives of major American companies, the allegations of US-centredness and gross ignorance of other countries and cultures, are all, sadly, very familiar.

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Characters in films

Published by peter on 2024-11-29 in Art and Film. Closed

Luca Guadagnino, director of the movie “Queer” (quoted in The New York Times, 20 November 2024):

Every movie is a documentary about the actor playing the character.”