--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "John" <jr_esq@...> wrote: > > WillyTex, > > Nice post! It just goes to show people are busy to get to > work to make a living. There's a time and place to > appreciate a good musician. The metro station is not one of > them.
I agree. Nor was it the best choice of music. I'm a huge Bach fan, and it took me at least a half-dozen hearings of this piece, putting all my attention on it, to begin to appreciate it. It's a transcendently great work, both highly cerebral and agonizingly emotional, but it's far from easy listening, not something one would be likely to instantly identify as "beautiful" if one weren't familiar with it and heard just a brief snatch while hurrying through a subway station. Much less would most folks have any way of recognizing that the violinist was a virtuoso (and NO way of knowing he was playing an expensive violin, for pete's sake!). It's almost as if they deliberately chose a piece that would be sure to prove their elitist point. They stacked the deck big-time. And the video is *awful*. They chopped the piece up to fit their fancy editing, leaving out big hunks of it, even repeating one section (the fast part) that's only played once. Not to mention that the acoustics and extraneous noise don't exactly enhance the sound of the violin. The whole stunt annoys me no end. I really think it's pretty much of a fraud. Here's audio of a complete performance of the Chaconne (from the Partita #2 in D minor), fragments of which are on the video; it's about 13 minutes long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Johann_Sebastian_Bach_-_Chaconne_for_violin_alone.ogg http://tinyurl.com/72zgj2
