![]() ![]() Sign on to the blogfeed: Visit the website: www.normanlebrecht. I’ve had her Ludus in the background all week and, while I can’t pretend to love the work, I can’t help but admire Hindemith’s morning exercises, his oh-so-German devotion to the precise placement of nuts and bolts and Laretei’s unflinching turn of the family screwdriver. Laretei treats Hindemith with appropriate austerity, no flirty smiles, no lapses of concentration (dinner at the Bergmans must have been fun). ![]() She has technique to spare and a feel for mood that few piano players can replicate. Why she is not better known I cannot figure. The pianist in this rare recording, reissued from 1965, is the Estonian refugee Käbi Laretei who, in Sweden, became the first wife of the film drector Ingmar Bergman. Like a rattler, you know it’s there but you don’t dare look. Ludus Tonalis is that great work of intellectual gymnastics which has been called a 20th-century composers reappraisal of Bachs Well-Tempered Clavier, but its twelve fugues and their interludes are notable equally for their emotion as for their (indisputable) logic. ![]() The 1943 Ludus Tonalis set for solo piano, premiered by Artur Schnabel in Chicago that year, is Hindemith’s attempt at a Goldberg Variations, contrapuntal as a dyspeptic snake, turning this way and that, striking without warning. ![]()
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