Film, TV, and Theatre

Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as Wayne and Garth in Wayne’s World (1992)

2 Comments

Writing my last blog about Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock put me in mind of the hilarious scene from the movie Wayne’s World, wherein the character Garth, prone as he is to day-dreaming, envisions himself inveigling a beautiful woman to the soundtrack of Hendrix’s Foxy Lady. I chuckled so much solely from its recollection that I just had to find it and feature it (along with several other scenes from the movie) this week!

Back in 1987, on a Canadian variety show called It’s Only Rock & Roll, an aspiring comic called Mike Myers was trying out a new character in a brief segment called Wayne’s Power Minute. The character of teenage heavy metal fan Wayne Campbell with his puppy-like exuberance and loveable-airhead philosophy was pretty much fully formed even back then.

It was a couple of years later that Myers joined the Saturday Night Live cast and introduced Wayne to a wider audience, in the form of the Wayne’s World sketches, now with sidekick Garth Algar (Dana Carvey). The premise of Wayne’s World was that it was a public-access television show broadcast from Wayne’s basement, and characterised by its chaotic production style, the anarchic schoolboy humour of its hosts, and their obsession with “babes” and rock music.

Myers and Carvey recorded 27 episodes during its 1989-1992 heyday and in 1992 filmed the first Wayne’s World movie, the perfect vehicle for Wayne and Garth to get involved in antics and exploits in the wider world. The movie was an instant critical and commercial success. Catchphrases abound, and many of them have become colloquialisms: “Party on!”, “Good call!”, “I am not worthy”, “Excellent!” (when intoned in the correct way), “No way…way!”, and of course “…not” (as in “Sure, it’s a great movie…not!”).

Let’s view a montage of some of their hilariously juvenile movements, followed by that mesmerising Foxy Lady mating dance of Garth’s. Excellent!

 

Wayne’s World basement
Music

Jimi Hendrix performs the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock (1969)

Leave a comment

In August of next year we will reach the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock Festival, that three-day concert (which rolled into a fourth day) involving lots of sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and mud, and which became an icon of the 1960s hippie counterculture. Held at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York State, the Woodstock Festival, billed as “three days of peace and music”, featured a roll-call of big acts of the day: Joan Baez, Santana, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Jimi Hendrix (it’s interesting to read the roll-call of cancelled acts and declined invitations too, but that’s another story).

When Hendrix stepped onto the stage, it was 9 o’clock on the morning of the fourth day – technical and weather delays had caused the festival to stretch into Monday morning. The organisers had given Hendrix the opportunity to go on at midnight, but he opted to be the closing act (by 1969 he had earned the traditional headliner’s position). The morning light made for excellent filming conditions, which may be part of the reason this particular Hendrix performance is so well known. In any event, Hendrix embarked upon an uninterrupted set lasting nearly two hours, one of the longest performances of his career. It concluded with a long medley that included the solo performance of The Star-Spangled Banner that would become emblematic not only of Woodstock, but of the 1960s themselves.

When most people think of Hendrix and Woodstock, it is this performance of the national anthem that comes to mind. It was not the first time Hendrix had performed it (in fact, there are nearly 50 live recordings of Hendrix playing it, 28 made before Woodstock) but no other version is so iconic. The idea of incorporating the sounds of bombs and jets and cries of human anguish into his country’s national anthem was brilliant. As a protest against the Vietnam War it was unambiguous and powerful: raw, jarring, soaring, and discomforting in equal measure (though in fact performed in front of a relatively small crowd since so many people had left Woodstock to return to work or college that Monday morning!). So 49 years on, and from the comfort of your mud-free armchair, here is Hendrix’s guitar-torturing rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. It’s not comfortable to listen to, frankly, but its cultural impact is clearly understandable. It’s followed by an interesting snippet of Hendrix discussing the performance on the Dick Cavett chat show a year later.

Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock
Music

Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1845)

Leave a comment

As musical geniuses go, you don’t get much more genius than Felix Mendelssohn. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg in 1809, Felix was deeply involved in music from an early age; by the time he was fourteen, he had written twelve string symphonies. In 1821 his piano teacher, Carl Zelter, introduced the eleven year old Felix to the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was then in his seventies. Goethe was greatly impressed by him, leading to a memorable conversation between Goethe and Zelter comparing Felix with the young Mozart, whom Goethe had also witnessed, many years before:

“Musical prodigies…are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporising and playing at sight, borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.”

“And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?” said Zelter.

“Yes“, answered Goethe, “…but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.”

The grown-up Mendelssohn had a good friend and collaborator in violin virtuoso and composer, Ferdinand David. The two had met as late teenagers in the late 1820s in Berlin where Felix was already an accomplished composer and Ferdinand was a violinist in the orchestra at the Königsstädtisches Theatre. In a remarkable coincidence, it was discovered that the two had been born in the exact same house in Hamburg, a year apart!

A few years later, in the summer of 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend: “I should like to write a violin concerto for you next winter. One in E minor runs through my head, the beginning of which gives me no peace.” In the end, it took him another six years to complete it, regularly consulting David about violin technique. Ever the perfectionist, Mendelssohn continually made minor adjustments to the concerto, right up to its premiere in Leipzig on March 13, 1845. The concerto became an instant classic and remains one of the cornerstones of the repertoire, being the most frequently performed violin concertos in history.

So I give you Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, performed by Ray Chen and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and if you can free up the twenty nine minutes required to wallow in its total glory, you will find it a worthwhile experience, believe me.

 

Felix Mendelssohn
Art

Tamara de Lempicka’s Young Lady with Gloves (1930)

Leave a comment

Art Deco was one of the first truly international styles, influencing the design of just about everything from buildings to furniture, jewellery to fashion, and art to everyday objects like radios and vacuum cleaners. It took its name (short for Arts Décoratifs) from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes Arts which was held in Paris in 1925, and which serves as a fair starting point to credit for the birth of a movement. We are slap-bang in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, the era of the Jazz Age and of flappers, of motion pictures and the Charleston, of The Great Gatsby and Radio City Music Hall, and whilst this representative list smacks of the United States, the cultural vibe was no less felt in Berlin, Paris, London and Sydney. It was an era of economic prosperity and cultural dynamism and as such, don’t be surprised to see this blog return to this period in the future.

Art Deco drew its inspiration from such art movements as Cubism, Futurism, and the influence of the Bauhaus. It played with geometric motifs and bright, bold colours, and of all the artists pursuing this style, one of the most memorable and interesting was Tamara de Lempicka.

Born in Poland in 1898, she lived, after her parents divorced, with her wealthy grandmother, who spoiled her with clothes and travel. By age 14 she was attending school in Lausanne, and holidaying in St Petersburg. All this high living gave the young girl an idea of how she wanted to live and what her future should be. Thus, when she found she had a talent for art, she took herself to Paris to live among the bourgeois and bohemian of the Left Bank (where else?). Between the wars, she painted portraits of the great and the good, and many of Eastern Europe’s exiled nobility, bringing her critical acclaim, social celebrity and considerable wealth. She was also well-known for her highly stylised nudes.

Her iconic work exuded a confidence that epitomised the era (see her Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, for instance). But let’s look at her Young Lady with Gloves (AKA Girl in the Green Dress), typical of her style. It has streamlined, geometric shapes and clean, metallic surfaces depicting a beautiful, sophisticated woman. She exudes a detached aura of superiority, and there is a visually striking interplay of compositional effects, angular lines, and shading. The unabashed sensualism of those nipples and that navel visible through the fabric is pure de Lempicka. Small wonder that one of her high-profile collectors is international superstar, Madonna, who has featured some of de Lempicka’s works in her own videos, notably Vogue. Pushing the boundaries as a fearless female artist, she was perhaps the Madonna of her day.

 

 

Tamara de Lempicka
Literature

Cecil Day-Lewis’s The Otterbury Incident (1948)

Leave a comment

When my wife and I first met and struck out on that long process of getting to know one another, one of the questions that came up at some point was: what was your favourite children’s book? Amazingly, we chose the same one – The Otterbury Incident by C Day Lewis – and this coincidence was compounded by the fact that neither of us knew anyone else who had even heard of this book, never mind read it or cherished it as their favourite.

In my case, the book, I believe, was on a bookshelf at primary school and I guess I must have borrowed it, or perhaps it was read by the whole class (the great span of time that has elapsed since then has, alas, greyed out the specifics…though looking it up, I see that it was in fact on the UK Department of Education reading list for 1972!). In any event, I came to own it, as did  my wife, and to this day both copies sit alongside each other on one of our daughters’ own bookshelf. So what was it that captured our imaginations?

Written in 1948, it is a story set in the fictional small provincial town of Otterbury, shortly after the Second World War. Although the town had been largely untouched by the war, it had sustained an accidental hit from a German bomb leaving a bomb-site (known as the “Incident”) which is used for war-games by two rival gangs of boys (Ted’s Company and Toppy’s Company) from the local school. A plot involving some stolen money draws the boys into conflict with local spiv Johnny Sharp and his sleazy accomplice “the Wart”, and a series of events lead the boys on a mission to uncover illegal goings-on in the town. An exciting denouement involves a raid on dodgy local businessman Skinner’s yard (with the rival gangs now collaborating against the common enemy) and his illegal activities are busted wide open, with everything pretty much wrapped up just as the police arrive.

Cecil Day-Lewis (father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis) was primarily a poet (and indeed was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972) but he also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. He only ever wrote two books for children (the other is 1933’s Dick Willoughby), but The Otterbury Incident is pitched perfectly for young minds, and its characterisation is engaging.

Then there are the illustrations by Edward Ardizzone: simple, charming, evocative. My wife says her first conception of what a “spiv” looked like (even before Private Walker from Dad’s Army, presumably!) came from the illustration of Johnny Sharp. We recently visited the Hepworth in Wakefield and saw an exhibition of lithographs from the School Prints scheme in the forties (an interesting story in its own right). One of the prints featured some sketched figures whose style jumped out as strangely familiar…looking up Ardizzone’s name we saw that indeed it was one and the same artist responsible for those images from our youth. So, to both writer and illustrator, we salute you!

The introduction is a masterclass in summarisation: in two paragraphs the whole story and its characters are set up perfectly.

Begin at the beginning, go to the end, and there stop – that’s what Rickie, our English master, told me when it was settled I should write the story. It sounds simple enough. But what was the beginning? Haven’t you wondered about where things start? I mean, take my story. Suppose I say it all began when Nick broke the classroom window with his football. Well, OK, but he wouldn’t have kicked the ball through the window if we hadn’t just got super-heated by winning the battle against Toppy’s company. And that wouldn’t have happened if Toppy and Ted hadn’t invented their war game, a month before. And I suppose they’d not have invented their war game, with tanks and tommy guns and ambushes, if there hadn’t been a real war and a stray bomb hadn’t fallen in the middle of Otterbury and made just the right sort of place – a mass of rubble, pipes, rafters, old junk etc – for playing this particular game. The place is called ‘The Incident’ by the way. But then you could go back further still and say there wouldn’t have been a real war if Hitler hadn’t come to power. And so on and so on, back into the mists of time. So where does any story begin?

I asked Rickie about this, and he said, ‘Jump right into the deep end of the story, don’t hang about on the edge’ – which incidentally was contradicting what he’d said first. ‘Start with the morning you kids had the battle and Nick broke the window’ he said. When Mr Richards calls us ‘kids’, nobody objects: he’s a decent chap, as schoolmasters go; and it’s quite true we’re young – even Ted and Toppy aren’t fourteen yet. But when Johnny Sharp and the Wart strolled past our ambush on the Incident that morning, and Johnny Sharp said in his sneering way, ‘You kids up to your games again? Flipping heroes, ain’t we all?’ our blood fairly boiled, as you can imagine. We may be kids. But it was us kids who raised more than £5 for the broken window, and us kids who tracked down a gang of crooks and incidentally were thanked in public by Inspector Brook. So there’s the start of my novel. You’ve got to have a title before you can start, I mean, and personally I think The Otterbury Incident is a smashing title.

C Day-Lewis
Music

Nina Simone sings I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl (1967)

Leave a comment

Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, and was recognised early on as a child prodigy at the piano. Supporters in her home town started a fund to help her become the first female black concert pianist in the US, but when she applied for a scholarship at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, she was rejected, which she suspected was due to racial discrimination (and considering this was Fifties America, it’s no great stretch to go along with that).

Eunice had to get a job, and she used her skills at the piano keyboard to get a residency at the Midtown Bar & Grill, Atlantic City. To ensure her Methodist minister mother wouldn’t find out she was playing “the devil’s music”, she adopted a stage name: Nina Simone. The bar owner said she had to sing as well as play if she wanted to keep her job and thus Simone’s deliciously dolorous voice was bestowed upon the world. And what a voice! She quickly built up a repertoire and a steady following, and was snapped up by Bethlehem Records, with whom she released her first album, Little Girl Blue.

There is much that could be written about Nina Simone: her disinclination towards the recording industry and refusal to be pigeonholed; her involvement in the civil rights movement (listen to the impassioned and provocative social commentary in her song Mississippi Goddam); her itinerant life, living in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France; her fiery temperament and regrettable legacy of abuse towards her daughter, Lisa.

However, it’s the fusion of that silky voice with her virtuoso piano playing that we’re interested in here. I have selected this clip from French TV show Tilt Magazine in 1967, in which Simone performs I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl. She is beguiling to watch as well as to listen to. Incidentally, in 2003, just days before her death, the Curtis Institute of Music bestowed on her a belated honorary degree.

 

Nina Simone
Literature

Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903)

Leave a comment

Erskine Childers’ novel, The Riddle of the Sands, has a reasonable claim to have been the first true spy novel. Published in 1903, it enjoyed huge popularity in Britain in the years leading up to the First World War. Taking its cue from the adventure tales of Rider Haggard and R M Ballantyne, Childers’ novel contains less of the derring-do of those writers but lots more realistic detail and intrigue and thus more authenticity. This formula would be used later to great effect by such espionage writers as John Buchan and Ian Fleming.

When Charles Carruthers (it had to be “Carruthers”, right?) accepts an invitation from old Oxford chum Arthur Davies, to take a yachting and duck-shooting trip to the Frisian Islands (the archipelago at the eastern edge of the North Sea), he has no idea their holiday will become a daredevil investigation into a German plot to invade Britain.
The action is centred around the large area of coastal waterway that is the Schleswig fiords, characterised by hundreds of channels and inlets and ever-shifting sandbanks that lend themselves to skilled navigators only. They lend themselves to secretive plots too, as it turns out, and when Carruthers and Davies stumble upon mysterious goings-on, we are drawn into a classic spy adventure in which the German plot to invade Britain is revealed…and of course eventually foiled. The ability to use boats in this environment is a secret weapon, and Davies, despite his eccentricity, is a gifted sailor. The minutiae of sailing and navigation throughout the book is engrossing.

The novel predicted the threat of war with Germany and was so prescient in its identification of the British coast’s defensive weaknesses that it came to influence the siting of new naval bases. As an aside, the story of its author is quite remarkable. Rather than following up the novel with a host of sequels as might have been expected (a sort of nautical equivalent of Biggles perhaps?), Childers instead entered politics. Quite bizarrely, since the novel is all about patriotic struggles for king and country, its writer eventually became a fervent Irish nationalist and was considered a traitor by the British government at the time of his death. He was executed by a firing squad in 1922, by order of the Irish Free State.

However, it is the novel that Childers will be chiefly remembered for, and I have selected as an excerpt the initial letter from Davies to Carruthers inviting him out to the Frisian Islands. It gives us an intriguing flavour of the adventure to come, plus an amusing insight into Davies’ scattergun psychology. It makes me want to grab an oilskin and a pipe and a pouch of “Raven mixture” and join the machinations!

 

Withers demurely handed me a letter bearing a German postmark and marked ‘Urgent’. I had just finished dressing, and was collecting my money and gloves. A momentary thrill of curiosity broke in upon my depression as I sat down to open it. A corner on the reverse of the envelope bore the blotted legend: ‘Very sorry, but there’s one other thing—a pair of rigging screws from Carey and Neilson’s, size 1-3/8, galvanized.’ Here it is:

Yacht Dulcibella,

Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Sept. 21.

Dear Carruthers,—

I daresay you’ll be surprised at hearing from me, as it’s ages since we met. It is more than likely, too, that what I’m going to suggest won’t suit you, for I know nothing of your plans, and if you’re in town at all you’re probably just getting into harness again and can’t get away. So I merely write on the off chance to ask if you would care to come out here and join me in a little yachting, and, I hope, duck-shooting. I know you’re keen on shooting, and I sort of remember that you have done some yachting too, though I rather forget about that. This part of the Baltic —the Schleswig fiords — is a splendid cruising-ground — A1 scenery — and there ought to be plenty of duck about soon, if it gets cold enough. I came out here via Holland and the Frisian Islands, starting early in August. My pals have had to leave me, and I’m badly in want of another, as I don’t want to lay up yet for a bit. I needn’t say how glad I should be if you could come. If you can, send me a wire to the P.O. here. Flushing and on by Hamburg will be your best route, I think. I’m having a few repairs done here, and will have them ready sharp by the time your train arrives. Bring your gun and a good lot of No. 4’s; and would you mind calling at Lancaster’s and asking for mine, and bringing it too? Bring some oilskins. Better get the eleven-shilling sort, jacket and trousers — not the ‘yachting’ brand; and if you paint bring your gear. I know you speak German like a native, and that will be a great help. Forgive this hail of directions, but I’ve a sort of feeling that I’m in luck and that you’ll come. Anyway, I hope you and the F.O. both flourish. Good-bye.

Yours ever,
Arthur H. Davies.

Would you mind bringing me out a prismatic compass, and a pound of Raven mixture?

I pulled out the letter again, and ran down its impulsive staccato sentences, affecting to ignore what a gust of fresh air, high spirits, and good fellowship this flimsy bit of paper wafted into the jaded club-room. On re-perusal, it was full of evil presage — ‘A1 scenery’ — but what of equinoctial storms and October fogs? Every sane yachtsman was paying off his crew now. ‘There ought to be duck’ — vague, very vague. ‘If it gets cold enough’ — cold and yachting seemed to be a gratuitously monstrous union. His pals had left him; why? ‘Not the “yachting” brand’; and why not? As to the size, comfort, and crew of the yacht — all cheerfully ignored; so many maddening blanks. And, by the way, why in Heaven’s name ‘a prismatic compass’?

 

Art

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881)

Leave a comment

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Le déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party) wowed the critics at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882 and remains one of the greats of Impressionism. It depicts a convivial bunch of diners enjoying a summertime meal alfresco at the Maison Fournaise, overlooking the Seine on the Île de Chatou, just west of Paris. This is the heart of Impressionist leisure land, and to this day the restaurant exists, on what is now dubbed L’île des Impressionnistes.

The diners are all friends or colleagues of Renoir. In the foreground, seated lower-right, is his fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte, who is gazing at Renoir’s future wife, seamstress Aline Charigot, sitting opposite and cooing at her dog. Next to Caillebotte is actress Angèle Legault and, standing above her, Italian journalist Adrien Maggiolo. At the back, wearing a top hat, art historian and collector Charles Ephrussi speaks with poet and critic, Jules Laforgue.

Leaning against the railing are Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise, the daughter of the restaurant’s proprietor, and her brother, Alphonse Fournaise Jr, who handled the boat rentals. Rowing was the main attraction at Chatou, and Renoir’s diners wear the straw hats and blue dresses that were the fashionable boating attire of middle-class Parisian daytrippers.

Renoir spent months making numerous changes to his canvas, painting the individual figures when his models were available (there is correspondence from Renoir moaning about models failing to turn up). Nonetheless, Renoir captures the freshness of his vision splendidly, and we can allow ourselves to be fooled that he has spontaneously captured a moment in time. It is a vibrant work of art celebrating good company and good dining, and it certainly gives us the impression of a very pleasant and carefree afternoon.

Details of the party-goers

 

Film, TV, and Theatre

Fry and Laurie’s “John and Peter” sketch (1990)

Leave a comment

Many a comedy double act or group cut its teeth as members of the Cambridge Footlights, the amateur theatrical club run by students of Cambridge University (and which has been going since 1883) – Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, the Goodies, and a surprising number of media personalities active on our television screens today. One pair of former Footlighters pursue their careers individually these days but for a long time throughout the 1980s and 90s their obvious comedic chemistry was exploited to great effect as a double act. I’m talking about Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who collaborated in such programmes as the Black Adder series, Jeeves and Wooster, and four series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

A Bit of Fry and Laurie was a sketch show cast for a post-Alternative comedy audience, in which elaborate wordplay and innuendo were staples of its material. Both performers brought great characterisation to the sketches, and were equally funny, though Fry’s well-known intellectual heft was clearly present throughout the series.

My favourites of the series’ characters were John (Fry) and Peter (Laurie), who are high-powered, hard-drinking business execs, engaged in backs-to-the-wall, boardroom hard talk, the joke being that their location, unlike London or New York, is completely nondescript (Uttoxeter) and their business distinctly underwhelming (a health club). The characters are of course a parody of hard-driving businessmen of the time, drawing inspiration from such boardroom soap operas as Man at the Top and Howards’ Way, in which characters’ bombast is delivered with such complete seriousness, and as if the fate of the free world depended on it, about matters that the viewers know are of no real consequence.

John and Peter’s loud catchphrase was “Damn!” and several increasingly ridiculous variations on this theme (“Three pints of Damn and a chaser of Hell-blast!”), as they uncover some new business-critical twist or plot engineered by arch-rival Marjorie, John’s ex-wife. This marvellous premise is summed up thus:

“Dammit John, I’m talking about the big idea. The dream that you and I shared. The dream of a health club that would put Uttoxeter on the goddamned map once and for all”

Incidentally, Uttoxeter is in Staffordshire…

Music

Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in E-Flat Major (1830)

Leave a comment

A nocturne is a musical composition intended to be evocative of the night and thus quite wistful and dreamy in nature. Although the term goes back a long way in musical history, its genesis as a distinct musical genre didn’t come about until the 19th century when Irish composer John Field wrote several pieces under this specific title of “nocturne”. He in turn heavily influenced one Frédéric Chopin who wrote a perfect set of 21 nocturnes that became the romantic period’s best-known exemplar of the form (to the detriment of Field’s legacy, since Field’s piano work is practically unheard these days when compared to Chopin’s piano repertoire).

Arguably Chopin’s most famous piece is the subject of today’s blog, his Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, written around 1830 when Chopin was in his early twenties and his creative juices were in full flow. It has been a permanent fixture of the Classic FM Hall of Fame ever since it started in 1996. Its beguiling melody haunts from start to finish. As the song progresses, the main melody is repeated three times, and each time includes more and more ornamentation, a classic Chopin technique. It’s played in andante and espress dolce, meaning moderately slow and expressively sweet.

Pianists live and die today by their ability to tackle Chopin’s repertoire of hardy perennials, and the Nocturnes are no exception – the list of great pianists that have committed their interpretations to record is extensive and includes Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Alfred Cortot, and Maurizio Pollini. I have chosen a recording by Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein, regarded by many as the greatest Chopin interpreter of his time. He played in public for eight decades so you can be sure we’re in safe hands. Listen to this masterpiece; it’s pure tenderness.

Frédéric Chopin

Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature