Like our President, I too look back on a past that's had more than its share of "youthful indiscretions". While both tempting and expedient to simply write it all off to the exuberance and experimentation of a curious youth, there remains a pattern of tastes and predilictions which one can ignore only at their own peril.
While for George W. Bush such things may include cocaine, date rape and torturing small animals, I myself must plead guilty to what I now consider to be a decided overfondness for the works of Beethoven in C-minor: The Fifth Symphony, the "Pathetique" and this piano concerto, played by Arthur Rubenstein, a distant cousin of mine. (If you'd like to know how distant, listen to me play piano sometime.)
If perhaps the sum of this concerto has not withstood the test of time for me, I urge you to listen to the cadenza (5:20) and most of all the transition from the cadenza into the recapitulation (8:36 to end).
Rhapsodize though ye may about its shameless bombast and wanton triumphalism, sometimes passages like that are all that keep me going, and I'm pretty sure the President himself will back me up on this.
FB - 1493
USA - 1306
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