MUSIC IN MY MIND (conclusion: the very best cd)

10. Schubert For Two (Gil Shaham/Göran Söllscher)

The power of music, not unlike that of the short story, resides in its inherent ability to transport us to a space and time previously ours (through memory) or to one that was never ours (through imagination). The intangible endowment of music to ourselves carries the same weight as gold (the reward lies in the purity of substance) and the same efficacy as dream (the better part depends on our response to it), and if I were to describe Schubert For Two, it is nothing short of a 24-karat dream.

Schubert For Two is a powerful production. It's effect on me was so great that without even listening to it, it kept me company in what could have been a moment of fear. Last year during that fateful morning of Hurricane Wilma, while we were being tormented by gusts of wind and eerie sounds and flashes of blue light (exploding transmitters and snapping power cables, it turned out), I sought refuge inside my walk-in-closet with a flashlight on hand, a John Cheever book, and the music of Schubert playing in my head. The night before, I was listening to this newly-bought compilation of Franz Schubert's best music with Shaham on violin and Söllscher on guitar - and the tracks were so beautiful they stayed with me all throughout the following morning when ficus trees were being uprooted and roofs of neighboring buildings and houses were being torn apart. I was there in my little square paradise remembering Schubert's portaits of intimacy and loneliness, innocence and experience, armed with the knowledge that the opportunity to listen to that cd again will give me the courage - if not the pleasure - to suffer, among others, the atrocity of power failure.

I share the view of some music critics: If melody alone is what a music make, nobody in history can hold a candle to Schubert's music other than Verdi and Mozart. Not Beethoven. Not Chopin. Not Simon and Springsteen, and certainly not Lennon and McCartney. In the world of music, Schubert was King Midas and everything he touched turned into a song, and the quality of his melodies contains the eloquence of fresh feeling that through the years, to this very day, had not been surpassed. Schubert's music is The music, and Schubert For Two cd, to me, is The Schubert cd (even if the transcriptions for guitar were originally for piano, resulting in the tapering off of certain notes).

Music is my great love and this love is as far-reaching as a mountain range: from Frederick Delius to Delirious, from Rock to Rachmaninoff. My daily nutritional intake inludes a helping of Blues and Kundiman, Marvin Gaye and Howie Day, and I learned to like Country through Lucinda Williams; Appalachian through Mark O'Connor; Colombian through Marta Gomez; and Cuban through Ibrahim Ferrer and Ry Cooder and their incomparable Buena Vista Social Club. I have an extensive library of Classical - Handel, Debussy, Brahms, Liszt, Butterworth, Vivaldi, Saint Saens, and a complete collection of Yoyo Ma's, plus many more. But I take no more pride in having this one cd of Franz Schubert.

This continuing (and finishing) series, then, is my irony. While lyrics are the common denominator in my first nine selections, lyrics are missing in this number 1 choice. But the truth is I did not miss them, really, because despite the absence, what remain are something so profound, so beautiful, so pure, and so true that in the shortest track (Dance #12, no more than 41 seconds) for example, I was able to salvage feelings of what Gil Shaman says in the liner notes as "a whole universe of emotions".

Classical music, to some of us, conjures images of symphony orchestration - lush and sweeping. On this cd, however, Schubert's music was arranged for a single violin and a single guitar which, while evoking the charm of Vienna and the romantic essence of landler (or waltz, the German dance), the cd is basically a music for introspection, or for something that simply reminds us how lucky we are who possess the power to hear and carry the discretion to listen.

Listen, then, if you have the chance as mine, to Schubert For Two which, for all intents and purposes, contains the music I will share to the first alien I meet; will dominate the air during my wedding; will welcome the arrival of my firstborn; and will accompany me, as on that fateful morning, on my waning hours (specifically with the last track, Ave Maria, which presents Shaham's profound phrasing similar to a dying man's breath). For this cd carries what could be, collectively, one of the greatest sounds on earth.