Hrm! Going to Wikipedia in order to put "Malcolm Sargent" on my "watchlist" there, I notice a few changes there just in the last few days.
Going to write this, then head out; was thinking about this at some length yesterday, enjoying it, then forgot :) ... I will get to work on time and to my (earlier) exercise appointment on time also, am not worried.
I purchased an issue of BBC Music about two weeks back, on the recommendation of a British friend- it appears on our shelves a month after it does there; in part, because its cover CD was a never-before- (commercially) released recording of Elgar's 2nd symphony conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. (Apparently, too, he never recorded the piece, which I did not know.)
In the large CD reviews section, taking up the middle of the magazine, there are some reviews by Calum MacDonald, the journalist pen-name of Malcolm MacDonald (not the novelist, but a writer on music whose books on Brahms, Schoenberg and Havergal Brian among others I've read with interest and pleasure, which have given me very much to think about.) One review by Mr. MacDonald, of a set by the Emerson Quartet and Leon Fleisher of works by Brahms, drew my attention more and more. Now MacDonald's descriptions of individual pieces can be evocative; that is one quality that kept me reading throughout his three-volume "The Symphonies of Havergal Brian", even though at the time I had not yet heard most of them (I now have heard all of them, only once in some cases; the label Marco Polo may be recording all of them, graduallllly, but I've heard tapes of performances of the rest. Yet- with music examples and rather dramatic descriptions of what went on in the music, and relation to biography, ...he held attention in ways other authors did not always...)
So I come to my point, bit, by bit!!
There is, in this review... some prose that could easily be dismissed as merely "purple", overdone, underhelpful- like much of my own!
(of Johannes Brahms' quintet for piano and strings in F minor, and the performance of it on this set by Leon Fleisher and the Emerson Quartet ...)
"I was especially impressed by the handling of the finale. Here, the yearning, crepuscular tension of the introduction..."
However... that description of the introduction - I think (hrm. Actually, I may have to look up crepuscular ;^) ) - and later, "hunted, harried" for the very last pages of the work... very definitely, very well described indeed!!... - it works. Those are odd pages in Brahms, moody, the opening pages of the finale tense, harmonically and tonally distant, uncertain and ... hrm. Best if I "stash" an example if I haven't already; for one can talk- and ... one can hear, and that is preferable. And I think that that may prove my point. (And for those who read music, one can follow along, too, so I will seek a score for those interested...)
My father, whose fault ;^) it is that I am such a fanatic here, loves Beethoven's chamber music and Brahms' orchestral music, but finds much of Brahms' chamber music tough to get into- I accidentally (no, really accidentally) left a tape of Fleisher and the Juilliard Quartet performing this same quintet from back when (old CBS recording I bought some while back) and I recall he really took to it. That was made before Fleisher had an injury restricting him to the use of his left hand only, after which I heard him in concert at Tanglewood, playing the Prokofiev B♭ concerto (written for Paul Wittgenstein, who commissioned so many concertos for piano left-hand but would not, I think, play Prokofiev's). (It's been a decade or so since Fleisher's been making two-handed recordings again, but there was that period in which he could not, I know...)
