Month: July 2018

The one certainty of life is death, said a wit.

Moreover, the life death process is operative thousands of times a minute within all livings things –animal as well as vegetable.  Understanding what humans have in common with a blade of grass is not without its charm, once you’ve got over the shock.  But until the relatively recent advent of microbiology, Western medicine blithely operated in ignorance of this fundamental.  Microbiology is, however, the very cornerstone of Eastern medical practice, and has been since before written records were kept, which is long before the year the presumed Noah went into the presumed ark.

And Schubert, unobserved by most of us, spent a lifetime exploring this phenomenon in music. The OED’s phenomenal says perceptible through the senses or through immediate experience.  Schubert invokes both.

And perhaps nowhere quite so impressively as the Fantasies in F for piano duet.

Two young Dutch brothers have with surgical precision, taken this music to pieces, but unlike other King’s Men, they have also put Schubert together again. Also with surgical precision.  The Jussen brothers and others mentioned in comparison are all available on YouTube (click here), so readers can conveniently hear these differences for themselves. 

Read more