Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Concerto for Turntable, Laptop and Moustache

Last night Chicky was strutting his smooth and less smooth bits of lounge lizard punk, up in the cavernous music room of the Third Ear. His act was followed by an acoustic Russian reggae band called "Los Caparos". Tomorrow Flashky will be the Eid al-Fitr DJ at the RiffRaff (Gruzenberg on Nahlat Binyamin, starting at 23:00), expect rock at its most juicy.

In between, I'm sitting here listening to Haydn's trumpet concerto as if the Hammond organ was never invented. What I love about concertos is that they are people. They recreate a human voice so vividly. the solo instrument is a living entity that comes in touch with an environment or a society of sorts (the orchestral backdrop) and communicates with it. I can identify my friends in concertos. in fact, I can even find many of them in Mozart's Concertos alone: Flashky would be the piano in Mozart's 9th piano concerto, butting in just as the exposition has begun, wonderfully self confident and creative. Itka is Mozart's clarinet. David Rapp is the harp in the flute and harp concerto. Efros, though she may protest, being such an Arabic music enthusiast, is the freewheeling piano of the 17th.

As for me, I'd love to identify with the piano in the 23rd concerto, but that would be vanity. It's the one pre-Requiem piece in which Wolfgang really lets loose emotionally. I'll leave it to even greater romantics and share instead this litle old bit of Groucho Marx. Trust me, watch it. It's a piece of television that's as good as Mozart.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And what am I, Chopped liver?
Gilli

יובל בן-עמי Yuval Ben-Ami said...

Exactly. Rachmaninov's concerto for chopped liver is one of the finest pieces ever composed for food, rivaled only by Bach's double concerto for regel krusha and beitza kasha.

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