Housekeeping note

 

Leg hurting too much 5 hours before next tylenol, too distracting to work at anything, scrolling all boring, nobody around, finally occurred to me I could do half a gummie and some music (Brahms 2nd piano concerto for starters, old András Schiff and Berlin Philharmoniker under K. Petrenko—don't just listen, get a video and watch the solo cello in third movement—tape below feature the incredible Yuja on piano). Very pleased to report you don't have to wait an hour for CBD to kick in, I may not be high yet but my leg doesn't hurt. See you on the other side. Shocked how fast the first 18 minutes of the concerto are done.

Can't believe how disconnected my youthful drug life was from this central German Romantic repertoire, or really any "classical" music at all, 18th to 20th century, big as the music has been in my life. Always took that music straight or with a little beer. Cannabis music was "progressive", usually with electric guitars. But it's lovely for listening to this in ways I feel I should have known, listening to the general shapeliness without necessarily needing to pay very close architectural-style attention, and appreciating very slow cantilena passages with the solo instruments, which the performers love so much more than it's natural for a listener to do. It's over so soon! If you do listen, note in the fourth movement Brahms's affection for the pop music of his own time, sweetfake Hungarian dance music.

Interlude

Oh, Brahms. In 1890, at 57, having grown his famous beard, he thought he'd retire from composing, not in any despairing way, but just feeling he'd said what he needed and wanted more time doing nothing—he was dating, in fact, for the first time since his broken engagement of 1859, a 28-year-old mezzo-soprano, Alice Barbi, whatever that may have meant in Vienna in 1890, and hanging out with the most famous pop musician in Vienna at the time, Johann Strauss II, who was eight years older than he was. But when he went to a music festival in Meiningen in January 1891 and heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld playing the Weber concerto and the Mozart clarinet quintet, the dark intimacy of the instrument's sound with a genius player gave him a longing to do that thing, and he unretired himself, writing a trio, a quintet like Mozart's which is the one I love best, and two extraordinary sonatas, of which this is the second. Among a bunch of great pieces that are not for clarinet.

OK here's the trio too.

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