Category: notes about the music

This playlist is the last time we have a classical music evening at the Light Lounge near Leicester Square tube.

I am very grateful to Gary and his team for the opportunity and their support.

While I will now be looking for a new home for this project, this last playlist was able to divest itself of any populist considerations, so it is a bit, dare I say, “hardcore”…

If Knussen, Schönberg, Salonen, and Schnittke are a bit too much for you, come a bit later, at around 8.30pm to enjoy the less intense modernity in the form of Bernstein and Stravinsky.

On the other hand, the Light Lounge has a happy hour from 5pm-7pm, so this might be the perfect opportunity to sweeten this 20th/21st Century attack on your musical sensibilities with a Pisco Pear Sour, or a White Lady.

Link to the playlist

This certainly is one of the most upbeat playlist I have done.

Many thanks to Paîvi and Michael Smith who contributed a significant number of the titles here.

It is a very colourful collection of energetic happiness with such diverse composers as Beethoven, Handel, Strauss, Walton, Sibelius, Mozart, Bach, and many others.

Enjoy.

For Halloween, I decided to alternate dark themes with the almost unbearable cheerfulness of Johann Strauss, so almost every piece gets juxtaposed with a loud and light waltz.

That is real life for you: No light without shadow…

The sequence of the Strauss pieces is mainly based on the original Neujahrskonzert in Vienna of 1939. Once that is done, later pieces follow.

Interspersed, however, you will find much more sombre pieces by Liszt, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Mahler, Berlioz, Stravinsky, Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi.

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.

The whole Classical Cocktails series is an experiment, but the first night is the most unsettling first step into new grounds.

We will start the playlist at 5.10pm on the dot with Präludium und Fuge from the first book of the Wohltemperierte Klavier.

Back in 1985, when I was a student at Munich University, I went to one of the very first concerts at the newly built Philharmonie am Gasteig. Friedrich Gulda was on the programme with a solo evening, but without announcing any detail of what he was going to play.

There were teething problems with the ticketing system and I was one of probably no more than 100 lucky people who managed to get in. Looking back, I cannot help but think that English managers would have found a more flexible solution, but in Munich, at least at that time, if you did not have a ticket you would not be “zugelassen”. End of story. I had queued early, so I was one of the chosen few.

He opened with what most of us instantly would recognise, the Präludium und Fuge that starts this playlist. “Wir müssen uns erst einmal einhören”, he said. We need to first get used to the new acoustics, not a pluralis maiestatis, but including us into his invitation to acclimatise to the new space.

So, let us “einhören” in the new space, in the Light Lounge with the Friedrich Gulda recording.

I then continue with a wild mix of piano music until 7.00pm, when I switch to powerful symphonic music, starting with the almost clichéd first movement of Beethoven’s fifth.

More Beethoven follows, but also Mahler, Mozart, and Bruckner. Yes, Bruckner, despite my disdain, it’s for my friend Simon, he thinks Bruckner has “gravitas”. Not.

The evening then goes crazy (if you are of a sensitive nature or drunk or both) with choral dramatics in the form of Verdi opera, then Mozart’s Requiem and then finally Verdi’s Requiem. If you are still there at closing time, maybe Libera Me or Dies Irae will encourage you to retire to the safety of your home.