Strings in the Mountains

Tonight we attended a performance of Steamboat's summer music festival, Strings in the Mountains. The program, "A Romantic Evening", consisted of works by two well known romantic composers, Liszt and Brahms, and a new composer to me, Taneyev, who at least according to the commentator is known as "the Russian Brahms".

I am not particularly knowledgeable about music - in fact my knowledge does not extend much beyond knowing what I like and what evokes an emotional response in me - but for what it's worth I especially enjoyed the performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 for Piano.

The challenge now is to see if I can purchase a downloadable version, or whether I'll have to do it the old fashioned way and buy a CD. Well not entirely the old fashioned way, because the first thing I'll do is rip the CD and then throw it in a box somewhere, plus I'll order it online from Amazon or something, but all in all still a lot less efficient that simply buying and downloading an MP3 file.

Update: I was way too pessimistic. It took less than 30 seconds via Google. Here's the free MP3 recording I found. Ten years ago you would have driven to the store, and in all but the largest cities with big record stores, waited one or two months for it to be ordered.

In the process I discovered a wonderful new site called Classic Cat, which in its own words "is a directory with links to over 2500 free to download classical performances on the internet..." Talk about serendipity (what a wonderful word).

I do information technology for a living and I'm still constantly amazed at what is possible.