Splendid! Not too long to wait. Although in line with other Chandos release dates I guess 'April' actually means the very last day of April. Drat!
Almost perhaps deserving of a thread in itself, but I've now spent a week wrestling with the previous observation by JimL, viz "like all the truly great composers, his music sounds like it had already been in my head and only needed hearing it to let it out."
Seems to me that this comment is actually profoundly true, and if you dwell on it then it is puzzling.
Why is it that great music is always music that, the first time you hear it, you know (without much analysing it) that the music is spot on right, couldn't be any other way, that the progression of musical ideas is somehow both 'obvious', and yet, quite miraculously, is unpredictable given that no other than a great composer could have written it?
Maybe I'm creating puzzles where none are to be found. The puzzle came to me again last night when revisiting Brahms 1 (surely one of the greatest symphonies ever written?) Let me put the puzzle this way. Suppose a rather mediocre composer happened, rather like the proverbial monkey tapping away at a keyboard and by chance arriving at the first two acts of Hamlet, to have composed the first three movements of the symphony (OK, rather improbable, but stay with it).
Question: what are the chances of him going on to produce the final movement of Brahms 1? Absolutely zero, I'd say. And just as unpredictable as the monkey producing Hamlet Act III. And yet, puzzlingly, all the hints, all the ingredients of that glorious, heart-lifting, majestic 'big tune' that starts with the shift to C major after the extended introduction are already there or implicit in the first three movements. So in that sense the final movement is perfectly 'obvious' - and yet no-one other than Brahms and his genius could have done it. Once you've heard it you grasp that the movement and progression of ideas in it have an inevitability and just couldn't be any other way. And despite its 'obviousness' you're still enthralled many years later when you hear it for the 67th time. By that time you 'know' perfectly well what's going to happen in the crowning coda to the work, but it still knocks the socks off.
Isn't it something like this (hopelessly and clumsily expressed) that accounts for that feeling of the music already being in the head, already being familiar, and just needing the experience of hearing it to trigger off one's response to it?
It is surely that 'already being in the head' that also accounts for the 'indestructibility' of great music. Great music always survives a performance. Hear Brahms 1 performed by the Great Yarmouth Symphony Orchestra, or even in a piano reduction, and it still strikes you as great music.
What do others think of this idea that's struggling to get out here? Are there, for example, great pieces of music that are not likewise 'already in the head', not likewise with that 'obviousness' coupled with an unpredictability that only a great composer could think up? If so, I am refuted!
Apologies for rather wittering on!
Peter
