Life and Fate

I'm just about to start reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. It's 855 pages long, with a battle map to start, and an 8-page list of the 'chief characters' at the end. On the backcover, Tolstoy's War and Peace is recommended as further reading. I could be a while.

Knowing it all

The Encyclopedia Britannica is to breathe its last in print form. From henceforth, the many-volumed reference bible will only be available online. Will it survive the effects of the omnipotent Wikipedia? Or did it gain something from its very physicality? Its unignorable presence on the shelves of schools and libraries? I had a wonderful Russian flatmate when I lived in France who always said that, when she had her first home, her first child, she'd make sure that she had an Encyclopedia Britannica. It'd be a symbol of aspiration, of hunger for knowledge and learning, a demonstration of the breadth of human understanding. From A to Z, it'd give her child the skeleton of what a grown-up should know, an appetite for exploring elsewhere. I wonder if you can get that sense of knowing what you should know from an online version? Or will its two-dimensionality hide it from us, leaving only a vague sense of what it is that we don't know?

Fraught memories

Time for some homework for this month's BBC Music Magazine podcast. Top of the list is a fabulous new recording of Beethoven and Berg Violin Concertos from violinist Isabelle Faust, the Orchestra Mozart and conductor Claudio Abbado. Berg's luscious, hyper-Romantic piece was written in 'The Memory of an Angel'. Commissioned by the violinist Louis Krasner, its emotional world has a tragic inspiration, the death of an 18-year-old friend of Berg's, Manon Gropius. Berg himself died just eight months after finishing it; he wasn't alive for the premiere, in Barcelona with Krasner. Here's an old recording of Krasner with Anton Webern conducting:

My other blog...

Sometimes, when I'm not blogging here, I'm bundling up my thoughts for a blog with a different purpose - work. Writing about music is of course a pleasure, although it can be pretty hard work too. Here are links to a few of the posts I've written for BBC Music Magazine.

Violinist Alina Ibragimova made a wonderful impression with her Js Bach/Vivaldi/Biber concert in Bath; The Plight of the Page Turner: one of the most nerve-racking tasks in music?; My top nine symphonies; a review of Mozart's Don Giovanni from the Met; the glorious Gould Piano Trio at St George's Bristol; Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito from Aix-en-Provence; Natalie Dessay stars as Violetta in Verdi's La traviata; the First Night of the Proms; Stephen Hough's strange sonatas recital; Beethoven from the Budapest Festival Orchestra; Cellophony: what do you call a group of eight cellists?

That's all for now folks!