The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor

Alma Deutscher’s Rx for the coronavirus blues

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Alma Deutscher is a composer in the mode of Beethoven and Mozart, a pianist in the mode Arthur Rubinstein and a violinist in the mode of Itzhak Perlman.

Well not quite, but at 15 years old, she is a most remarkable girl who will put a smile on your face when the coronavirus pandemic gets to be too much to endure.

It’s not just melodiousness of her music–both composed and played–but also the beguiling way she puts herself into the music. As beautiful as her music is the joy and heart that show through her face is extra special. Here is something who not only enjoys what she does, but she, relishes it, lives it. It washes over her as it will you. As someone commented, “This is music straight from the Heavens.”

A great introduction to this prodigy is Barton Swaim’s piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Irony or Ugliness: This youthful composer likes to speak ‘directly to the heart.’ Critics won’t like it, but audiences do.”

Something terrible happened to classical music during the 20th century, and especially after 1945. You may be called a reactionary or a nostalgist if you acknowledge this fact aloud, but every concertgoer knows it. Many individual composers continued writing works of enduring value, but the great preponderance of classical music written over the past 75 years is deliberately opaque and aggressively ugly…

Some recent composers have resisted the tendency to equate serious with dissonant or difficult—Arvo Pärt in Estonia, the late Dominick Argento in America. But none have done so in quite the guileless manner of English composer Alma Deutscher. She writes music that people want to hear r: orchestral and chamber works that ordinary listeners—those who aren’t invested in the “serious” music industry—actually like.

Her oeuvre is small, but it includes chamber and orchestral works of inventiveness, technical sophistication, wit and, above all, melodic richness. She has performed her piano concerto and violin concerto with orchestras in Europe and the U.S.; her opera, “Cinderella, ” was performed by California’s Opera San José in 2018 and released on DVD by Sony Classical. In November, Sony released “From My Book of Melodies,” a collection of solo piano works.

In her, I see my beautiful grandchildren, loving and striving as only a child can. In these dark times, we thank God for them all.

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www.dennisbyrne.net

My historical novel: Madness: The War of 1812

Filed under:
Health, Music

Tags:
Alma Deutscher, classical music