Sunday, February 22, 2009

An outspoken critic

Reiterating an idea mentioned before that sometimes it’s OK to just disagree — from Wikipedia entry about the famous pianist Glenn Gould:
Gould also recorded works by many other prominent piano composers, though he was outspoken in his criticism of some of them, apparently not caring for Frédéric Chopin, for example. In a radio interview, when asked if he didn't find himself wanting to play Chopin, he replied: “No, I don’t. I play it in a weak moment — maybe once a year or twice a year for myself. But it doesn’t convince me.”

Although Gould recorded all of Mozart’s sonatas and admitted enjoying the “actual playing” of them, he was a harsh critic of Mozart’s music to the extent of arguing (perhaps a little puckishly) that Mozart died too late rather than too early.
This is a man in love with his work (some would call him a fundamentalist):


By the way, from what I remember, Einstein too seemed to think that after Bach there was very little good music written.

Meanwhile, coming back to the frum society, a very interesting discussion on the topic of contemporary Jewish music — or lack of thereof (scroll down to read what Der Shygetz had to say).

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