At the New Year’s Eve party my family has been attending for the last … oh, at least 20 years, we have a tradition of doing waltzes. By “doing,” I don’t much mean dancing — sadly, only a few brave souls do that — but playing them, since it’s a musical crowd and it’s easy to form a pickup group. (It’s another instance of the sort of informal playing together, not playing for, that I wrote about in Comparing Notes.) Waltzes for the new year are a tradition our hosts imported from Austria, and one I’m now importing from their party to my weblog.
OK, you caught me, I already posted one recording for the new year. So now I’ve posted two!
This isn’t quite as polished and unique as the previous Brahms recording I posted, I’m afraid, but I hope you’ll overlook that and enjoy the piece. It’s a wonderful little masterpiece of sophisticated simplicity.