The first day of this coming December will mark the 80th birthday of pianist Rudolf Buchbinder. I must confess that I have probably not given this pianist due attention. It has been almost two years since I Iast wrote about one of his Deutsche Grammophon albums. That was when the Song Transcriptions CD was released, on which he performed solo piano transcriptions of 28 songs by Johannes Brahms.
Cover of the album being discussed
Tomorrow will see the release of his latest album. The title is Schubert Treasures, consisting of 160 tracks of Schubert’s compositions of a diversity of different styles of dances (with a distinctive preference for waltzes). If the number of tracks seems daunting, readers should be informed that a significant majority of these tracks are less than one minute in duration!
Clearly, this album was not conceived for the purpose of listening to all of those tracks from beginning to end in a single sitting. Indeed, even the D. 145 set of 38 waltzes was probably not intended for sitting still for the entire collection. Fortunately, in our “digital age,” it is easy to visit these tracks, sampling different collections at different times. Schubert was certainly prodigious in composing all of this dance music, but the listener should be free to explore his own strategies for getting to know this music. I have been doing this over the last month, and I have to say that encountering any of the collections leaves me in a good mood!
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