Oh, this playlist seemed so well planned originally.
Then, at quarter past five, I see an email from Pete, the manager of the Light Lounge, asking whether I have sent today’s playlist yet.
Well, I had not, so this one was partly well planned, partly improvised, and also is much shorter than the usual 6.5 hours.
Also, it starts with the finale of Nutcracker, which is a slap in the face for the evening’s theme – classical music hardly gets any more sugary 🙂 But at that time, I was in the bar already, and my friend Anna Harris requested Nutcracker, so who am I to ignore her.
However, the list swiftly follows with “proper” hardcore violin music with ASM first rendering Vivaldi’s four seasons in a recording that got a lot of flak at the time due to its rather big, almost romantically sized orchestra, but then Karajan did whatever he felt like at that stage.
A much younger Anne-Sophie Mutter follows with Karajan’s majesgtically slow interpretation of Beethoven’s violin concerto.
Then, Hilary Hahn does some Bach, and I have to admit that I commited the ultimate classical music sin and sacrificed the quiet movements. The bar gets too loud to hear anything subtle between about 7pm and 8.30pm.
Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto brings more contemporary passion and tempo into the evening with a wonderful and light-hearted recording by Gidon Kremer.
Julia Fischer then does all the very same work that I played with Hilary Hahn, because why not, it is nice to see how very different the same pieces can sound even here in the bar.
And because I am weird, obsessed and consistently inconsistent, I finish with Verdi’s Dies Irae, and Wagner’s ride of the Valkyries.