For the last few weeks I have been putting together the programme notes that you can find by clicking on the button on each event. I was charged with finding a few short sentences to say a little about each composer and piece.
Like many people, I enjoy music in all its forms and recognise the names of well known composers, but know very little about them as people. In searching for my few lines I discovered that the lives of the composers reflected all of the human condition—love and loss, friendship and rivalry, success and tragedy. One or two led the sort of life that would provide endless tabloid material today!
You’ll find more about composer’s lives in these blogs but two particularly stuck in my mind. George Gershwin, who despite having written such wonderful music as Rhapsody in Blue, American in Paris and Porgy and Bess, died tragically young of a brain tumour. What might have been. Also Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s greatest composer of contemporary classical music forced to flee to Germany last year in the face of the Russian invasion. Another composer forced to live and write in exile.
So now I have a third dimension to listening; as well as the genius of the composition and the skill of the performance, now the life from which the music came.