Drip, drip, drop... - Monday Music Break No. 9

Chopin was my 'gateway drug' into classical music. The majority of my parents' extensive music collection - the stuff I first started listening to on vinyl when I was about four or five years old - was very middle-of-the-road pop singles from the '50s and early '60s (the early days of their marriage, before I came along to spoil things); and most of the LP records they owned were the soundtracks of the big musicals (I am more deeply familiar with the Rogers & Hammerstein songbook than I care to admit...). But my mum had a sneaking soft spot for classical music too, and the first example of this among her records that I discovered and fell in love with was an anthology of some of Chopin's most popular short piano pieces - The Chopin I Love - played by the incomparable Artur Rubinstein. Dear Artur had such a light touch with the Polish maestro, and he naturally became my favourite exponent of his work. And yet I somehow never came across a performance by him of the Preludes - not until many years later, anyway. The first record of that piece I owned and came to love was a wonderful Deutsche Grammophon recording by Maurizio Pollini.

But then, relatively late in life (18!!) I discovered Vladimir Horowitz - one of those rare performers who've actually given me the shivers. The only other one in the classical field who hit me this hard was the violinist Jascha Heifetz (I find it difficult to listen to anyone else playing the Tchaikovsky concerto - his rendition is definitive for me). With most performances I find myself admiring many different aspects, but still perhaps being aware of one or two things that don't quite chime with me; these guys.... they somehow seem to play it exactly like I think it should sound. That happens very, very rarely; but it is a scary-wonderful feeling when it does.

As so often in my musical history, I remember the serendipitous moment of first discovery quite clearly. My first week or so at college, a secondhand record sale at the student union, turning up a Horowitz album in one of the bins and immediately feeling an eerie, compelling must-have fascination with it. I'd heard the name, obviously, had probably heard some performances of his on Radio 3 (the BBC's classical music station, which had been a mainstay of my teenage years; I definitely leaned more towards the classics than to pop and rock in those days), but he still felt like a stranger to me. Not for long. Schumann's Kreisleriana - mesmerising. When the second side ended, I just sat there dumbstruck for quite a long while, thinking, "Jeez - what was that?" Then I flipped the record back on to Side 1 and played the whole thing again.

Over the next few years, of course, I picked up quite a lot more of his recordings and started to read up on his life story. So, when in 1986 Gorbachev's 'thaw' in the Soviet Union finally allowed him to revisit the country of his birth - for the first time since he'd fled the post-Revolution strife in Russia as a young man just over 60 years earlier - it was a major international event, and one of the most moving memories of my student days. His triumphant return concert in the Moscow Conservatory was televised live on the BBC; of course, I watched it, in rapture. For me, that was a more transcendent, a more indelible moment in my young life than Nelson Mandela's release from prison a few years later. [Luckily, the complete concert is now available on Youtube. I've only just discovered this. I'm not sure I'll be able to watch it one sitting; I'm sure it will make me cry buckets.]

It only just occurred to me that this, Chopin's 'Raindrop' Prelude (Op. 25, No. 15) played by Vladimir Horowitz, might be an apposite selection for this week's 'Music Break' - because we've been having a particularly heavy and protracted finale to the rainy season here in South-East Asia this year, and I've spent far more time than I would have liked over the last several weeks stuck indoors, listening to the rain....

[I first thought of making this addition my musical series a few weeks ago, when the rains were at their height. But I already had a post sorted for the coming Monday, and on the following week I wanted to do something linked to my imminent birthday; so, this piece devoted to Horowitz and the 'Raindrop' Prelude is slightly delayed. 

And it is starting to feel as though 'the season' may just have ended. In Cambodia, at least, the pattern of the summer months is that, after a gentle and intermittent build-up from late March or early April through mostly still dry-and-hot April/May, June and July are the peak months of the soggy onslaught. There's usually a little bit of a lull from around the last week of July: sometimes just a week or so, sometimes maybe a few weeks of much lighter rains, perhaps little or no rain at all. And then we get a second phase of rains through August/September, generally rather lighter than the early blast, and often threatening to peter out altogether through September. But then.... there is a last volcanic spasm starting towards the end of September, and reaching its drenching peak in the first week or two of October - a deluge so intense that, although the worst of the rains usually last barely half the month, October generally ranks as one of the rainiest months in the entire year. 

But when that last spasm of the rainy season finishes, it often does so very abruptly: there might have been a week or two of lighter rain, gradually diminishing in frequency, duration, and intensity; or there might have been one last big shower, and then.... suddenly nothing. Either way,.... well, there may be an element of romanticization, of imaginative exaggeration going on in this, but... many people say that there's a feeling you recognise on the first days after the rains have stopped: it's impossible to point to any definitive indicator in that day's weather, or in the pattern of weather in the preceding week, but there's suddenly this blissful sense that this one perfect sunny day is not just an isolated blip in an ongoing pattern of heavy rains but a harbinger of many more such days to come - a long, almost uninterrupted stream of them stretching all across the winter months (and with very slightly cooler temperatures in December/January - it's all relative; it's still generally warmer overnight on a typical January night in Cambodia than it is at noon on a summer's day in the south of England, but it can feel quite 'refreshing' after months and months of 35C daily peaks). 

That is a lovely feeling; and I was feeling it yesterday. Although the day had started quite overcast, and there had evidently been a brief but heavy shower at some point in the early hours of the morning, as soon as things had started clearing up by 9am or so, it was feeling like one of those perfect days that heralds the end of the rains. 

Alas, I'm not in Cambodia just at the moment. I'm about 150 miles to the north-east, having had to skip across the border into southern Lao for a while on a 'visa run'. There are some local variations in the patterns of the rainy season; but I think, on the whole, Lao, Cambodia, and Thailand tend to be very, very similar. I'm hoping I'm in for a sunny-and-mild (and dry) week while I'm in Don Det; and more of the same when I head back to Siem Reap.]