Things Start To Level Out... But In Which Language?

"There are now 20 million blogs being tracked by the website Technorati - it is doubling about every five months: 70,000 a day are being set up, with the Chinese currently piling into this activity just as the US/Europe appetite for blogging plateaus." - BBC

The big question is: 如果我會翻譯這成漢語?

P.S. - I know it's over 2 weeks since I last posted to the blog, but I cannot emphasise enough how significant Ben Zander's words are (see my last post). I've been thinking about this on and off since my last post. I think it sums up really - in some respects - much of what Tommy and I are trying to achieve with Court Lane Music. And to think he wrote that five years ago. Prescient.

Free Tickets for 25 October

As promised:

http://www.violinmp3.com/freetickets

Grab them while you can!

Painting On The Canvas Of Time

Two wonderful thoughts I picked up in the course of my travels today...

"Music is a painting on the canvas of time" - Eric Gruenberg

"Historically, artists have been employed by leading institutions to bring emotional truth to established principles. Yet in our new global society, no institution has the wide acceptance to create values and direction for the majority of people. Markets in free societies are rapidly replacing governments and religious institutions as regulators of the highest authority, and markets perform without values; they do not converse in a human tongue. The arts can break new ground here, bringing human consciousness to bear on these flows of product and capital, energizing our interpersonal connections, and opening new doors for invention and practice." - Benjamin Zander

Really Weird Shostakovich

I downloaded Shostakovich's own recording of the Piano Quintet, with the Beethoven Quartet (with whom he originally premiered the work). It's really weird. To describe it as a perfunctory reading would be very rude, so I won't. But the word did cross my mind. The thing is, Shostakovich doesn't take into account any of his own metronome marks. He and the Beethoven rush through the work, with a limited use of rubato, in turn restricting the emotional depth that can be found in some of the more intense parts of the works. Is this deliberate? Boris Berman/Petersburg Soloists give a much more epic interpretation on Naxos, and even the snatches of the classic Richter/Borodin recording that I have had the pleasure to hear (though I've not yet had the opportunity to listen to that recording in depth) were far more accommodating to the potential extremes of contrast that can be eked out of the work.

Historical evidence points to this as an idiosyncrasy that doesn't necessarily merit modelling, but knowing that doesn't make the listening experience any less peculiar.