Archives for September 24, 2014

Martha Argerich plays two Chopin mazurkas, Op. 24/2 and Op. 41/2, on German TV in 1966:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Sixty is not a bad age—unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but—so to speak—naked, stripped for a run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing, under the gathering shadows.”

Joseph Conrad, “The Inn of the Two Witches” (courtesy of Lance Mannion)