Pope: An Epistle from Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot
Marianne Faithfull, RIP

Beethoven: Piano Concerto #2 in Bb Major

Well, maybe this concerto plan of mine--getting to know the five Beethoven piano concertos--just wasn't a good idea. Or maybe this just isn't the right time for it. It's not you, I say to the second concerto, it's me.

I listened to it once inattentively, then three times attentively, or as attentively as I could. And it just never touched me. There's nothing wrong with it, nothing I dislike; I just fail to respond with anything more than a mild and somewhat detached interest. I heard it in a way similar to the way I have sometimes heard certain progressive rock bands or tracks: it's interesting, it doesn't bore me, but it doesn't really engage me, either. (Sorry, I can't think of an example, but I know it has happened.)

I mentioned when I wrote about the first concerto a  weeks ago that I had heard a little of it on the radio and thought it was Mozart, but with something a bit different about it, and discovered when I checked the radio station's log that it was Beethoven. Now I wonder if I was mistaken about which Beethoven it was, because this one, which was actually composed before #1, seems even more like Mozart than the other. There are a couple of bits in the last movement--I can't tell you exactly where or what they are--that may have been the things that seemed un-Mozartean to me. 

Well. Be that as it may, I am saying farewell to this concerto for the time being. Perhaps I'll run across it sometime in the future and find that I really like it. In some of the progressive rock instances I've mentioned, I later came to like the music quite a lot. So that may happen. But now I'll move on to the third and see what happens.

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