Hauser for Sale
Hauser for Sale – Christie’s New York announces sale of over 150 fine musical instruments on October 14.
Jaya Bhagavan – Laura Fraticelli and Johannes Moller
Traditional Indian song. Arranged by Johannes Moller.
Concierto de Aranjuez – Kuang Jun Hong
Kuang Jun Hong, 11 years old, rocks the Aranjuez. He studies with Professor Xu Bao at Sichuan Conservatory of Music in China.
Listen closely at the start of the second video.
Manuel de Falla: Ritual Fire Dance – Kupinski Guitar Duo
The Polish couple Ewa Jablczynska and Dariusz Kupinski are the Kupinski Guitar Duo. I found them on YouTube just a few minutes ago and couldn’t wait to post them here. It’s always great finding new talent on YouTube!
The Crucible
There’s a book that says mastery in any field comes after 10,000 hours of practice. The question arises: practice of what?
When it comes to technique, some of that time has to be spent in the “crucible” — which is to say, performance at your highest level. (Not noodling around playing background music for a tea party, or drilling Segovia scales while watching House.) In the crucible your body will produce an adaptive response. You can try to simulate the crucible by practicing with all your might, but it doesn’t work as well as the real thing.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but one of the things Rey de la Torre told me was that Segovia used to go straight back to his hotel after a concert to work out technical matters while the iron was still hot, while Rey would grab some friends and go out on the town after a concert.
I know from my own experience that an hour giving a solo concert in front of a large and attentive audience was worth 10 hours of playing in a noisy restaurant, and worth 20 hours of practice. Maybe more. And that if I would go home and work on my guitar playing right after a good performance, while I was still hot, my results were always much better for it.
Intensity, not extensity, leads to the adaptive response. I’d fill that 10,000 hours with plenty of intensity
America the Beautiful – Stuart Weber
One more time.
Robert de Visée: Prélude et Allemande – Jonas Nordberg, theorbo
This is what I like for the blog: beautiful music, beautifully played, and beautifully captured on video.
Sometimes people ask me to post their videos, but usually one of the main ingredients is missing. Often, the playing is excellent, but the videography is terrible. Or the visuals are good and the playing is good, but the audio quality is bad.
This video has it all.
Renata Tarragó
I think it was 1968 in the Santa Monica Public Library when I first heard Renata Tarragó play. I was all of 14, sitting at a table with earphones on, listening intently. It was something I did often in those days. I’d hitchhike to the library from Venice on an early evening and pore over their treasure chest of classical guitar recordings. I’d select two or three and bring them to the desk and ask the librarian to put one on the turntable. Then I’d take a seat at the table along with a few other listeners, put on the headphones and put my head down and listen. Sometimes I’d ask the librarian to repeat the playing, sometimes I’d move on to the next recording. After a few hours the library would close and I’d hitch back home with a head full of music.
This is where I discovered Narciso Yepes, Alirio Diaz, Pepe Romero, Julian Bream, and the player who was to be my idol all through my youth, Christopher Parkening.
But back to Renata Tarragó. I remember listening several times to her playing the Aranjuez. I would imagine myself playing it someday (which, alas, never happened and never will). I remember thinking how much I would like to see her play. All these years I never saw her play.
Well, thanks to the wonder of YouTube, here she is. Plus you get to see Michael Caine pulling off a heist. How good is that.