“Classical Music-Minded Pieces” from The New Yorker

Via NPR’s “Deceptive Cadence” blog, a veritable treasure trove of “delicious classical music-minded” long-form writing from The New Yorker:

Last month, The New Yorker announced that it was teasing a new “freemium” version of its website (which launches this fall) with an alluring proposition. All of its most recent pieces, plus the full archives back to 2007 and some even older selections, are free for the rest of the summer.

So we took this opportunity to dig up some delicious classical music-minded pieces from the magazine’s archives. They’re perfect long reads for a lazy August afternoon.

Lazy August afternoons are the sort of things my kids have, not me. But evenings, I can do. And will, because these sound really wonderful. (“…sound.” Sorry.)

While most of the pieces highlighted by “DC’s” Anastasia Tsioulcas are constructed around famous performers — Lang Lang, Christian Tetzlaff, Joyce DiDonato, and Helène Grimaud — it’s the last one that really caught my attention. Probably because it’s the only one to which I can truly relate: Jeremy Denk’s “Every Good Boy Does Fine: A life in piano lessons.”

One of the recurring story lines of my first years with [early teacher William] Leland was learning how to cross my thumb smoothly under the rest of my hand in scales and arpeggios. He devised a symmetrical, synchronous, soul-destroying exercise for this, in which the right and left thumbs reached under the other fingers, crablike, for ever more distant notes. Exercises like this are crucial and yet seem intended to quell any natural enthusiasm for music, or possibly even for life. As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven’s last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

Need something to listen to while you’re reading?  What about the aforementioned Miss Grimaud playing the middle movement from Mozart’s 23rd Piano Concerto? Gorgeous. (But at the same time, probably too short for a “long-form” piece, right? So here’s a link to Vladimir Ashkenazy playing the whole thing. Enjoy!)

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