George Wu Teng

  1. blog
  2. 17 October 2022
    19:36


    I'm about a month-and-a-half deep into this excursion of Brahms' Second Piano Concerto, which is providing to be both more, and less challenging than I anticipated. Even just two months ago I considered the piece personally unplayable, harder still than his first concerto, which to me was the most difficult concerto in standard repertoire that I've ever worked on, even after Rach III and Prok II.

    None of this to pat myself on the back, of course, it's more even of a brushing-my-teeth-in-public sort of thing, which, granted, may be no better; regardless, there were more than a few discoveries I've made since starting to chip away at this behemoth which surprised me:

    -It fits quite well under the hand, surprisingly enough--even those passages that, on first glance, appear risky-at-best to play without a bit of trickery, make physical sense (I understand this is very much something which changes on a person-to-person basis)
    -Stamina doesn't yet seem to be an issue, though this may be a result of a constant drip of adrenaline, ie., unsustainable
    -The metronome marking for the first movement is nigh unplayable, I mean, I know tempi for Brahms have slowed considerably in recent times but holy hell is quarter note = 92 unforgiving
    -Please stop writing treacherous runs that come out of silence

    There's other things to talk about in the realms of Formula 1, chess, tennis, Gaddis (yo, rereading J R has been life-changing) but I'm feeling quite fatigued at the moment and so will wait to comment on those when I'm not mildly annoyed at my exhaustion-due-to-nothing.

    A friend recently sent me a weeknight recipe they concocted of artichoke pasta. Gonna go make that now. Did you know that once artichoke buds bloom, the thing is rendered barely edible?

    return home