My wife and I were fortunate this past month to hear a program of Spanish and Latin American piano music, with commentary, offered as part of Jeffrey Siegel’s Keyboard Conversations series. The music of Isaac Albéniz has been a particular favorite of mine for decades. It’s rhythmic and lyrical, and smooths the rough psychic terrain in which I tread. As much as I love it, and as much as I treasure recordings by Alicia de Larrocha and others, I do not often have the opportunity to hear Albéniz and Granados played live in concert. The tickets represented no small expense, especially if one lives on a frayed shoestring in West Utica, New York, but we went.
Siegel is more of an ambassador of concert music than a virtuoso, and as such he is engaging and companionable. His commentary, geared to a lay audience, is more than half the presentation. Nonetheless, it was thrilling to hear music in performance that I’d listened to only through loudspeakers, and most often half-attentively, at that. The late Albéniz piece Navarra finally registered as a coherent, joyous whole in my musical comprehension. It is too easy not to pay attention to recorded music, more so when it is used as background for conversation or other activities. The concert experience forces one to focus in direct communion with the performer.
I wonder: how many of us swim in a sea of music from rising until going
