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Category: in search of beauty

September 4, 2011

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto no 3, in D minor, opus 30

fully 150 years after Mozart the concerto was still a thriving
musical form though it had undergone some modifications,
you’ll hear a more passionate account in Rachmaninoff than
the more lyrical, less emotionally overt compositions of
Mozart, the variations in volume, tempo, tonality, the play
of harmonization and discords, all incidentally within a single
movement, show the passage of time, of Beethoven, of Chopin,
of Debussy between Mozart and the more Romantic, Impressionistic
Rachmaninoff, note the sweeping ritardandos, where the beat is
drawn out, stretched for pathos, a Chopinesque insinuation into
music not found in earlier stuff, one imagines torrid expressions
of fervent sentiment, note the evanescent flurry of notes passing
by like the fleeting glitter of stars, the ephemerality of an
incorporeal idea that Debussy originated and brought to music,
and of course note the irrepressibility, the authority, the masculinity
of a volcanic Beethoven underpinning the lot, you can hear them all

the Vladimir Horowitz Piano Concerto no 3 of Rachmaninoff at
Carnegie Hall, January 8, 1978, with Eugene Ormandy leading the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra is, after Van Cliburn’s historic
1950s account, May 19, 1958, again at Carnegie Hall but under Kiril
Kondrashin this time, and the now defunct Symphony of the Air,
don’t ask, the one I then grew up with, it was riveting even without
the pictures

with pictures here he is again a few months later at Avery Fisher
Hall in New York, September 24, 1978, under Zubin Mehta with
again the New York Philharmonic, so good you’ll even forgive
Mehta his usual sentimental excesses

incidentally Horowitz was 74 at this concert, he is astounding

Vladimir Horowitz, colossus and legend, 1903 -1989

enjoy, be transported, be transfixed, you have been warned

Richard

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September 4, 2011

piano concerto no 25, K.503, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

 
Mozart in our Western musical tradition is arguably the first
composer to write piano concertos, for two reasons, first
cause earlier there were no pianos, there were only
harpsichords, Bach wrote five wonderful concertos but for
the harpsichord 
 
secondly cause music was coming out of the shadow of the
Church in order to also cater to a more secular audience,
the monied aristocracy, who were looking for status through
art, personal portraits, music to make more illustrious their
already storied houses
 
Mozart is sprightly, unaffiliated, unopinionated, and
supremely talented, it was going to take a Beethoven to
make music more profound
 
meanwhile we have Mozart’s effervescent baubles, his
glistening, incandescent gems  
 
three movements
 
     1. allegro maestoso     
 
     2. andante    
 
     3. allegretto    
 
 
K is for Köchel, Ludwig von Köchel, the man who catalogued
Mozart’s works chronologically, of which there have been
accumulated after several revisions 626, none of which had
originally been given titles, though later sometimes
posthumously, for instance the “Jupiter” Symphony, his last,
no 41, K551  
 
no one plays Mozart like Mitsuko Uchida  
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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September 4, 2011

Beethoven, Triple Concerto in C major, op. 56

recently trying to familiarize a friend of mine with the idea
of the concerto, something I’d been working at with him for
quite some time, along with the related concepts of the
sonata, the trio, the quartet, quintet, sextet, and, following
those numerical indices, the symphony, when to count the
multiplicity of instruments involved would be asinine, I
asked, what do you think you’d hear if I said a triple concerto

after some polite leeway I answered for him, you’d need
a symphony of course, another word for an orchestra but
perhaps with some pedantry, showcasing in this case not
one, not two, but three soloists in conversation with
the band, another word again for orchestra, this time
connoting perhaps less pedantry, calibrating prestige
as it moves from the bar to the nightclub, to the more
rarefied air of the concert hall

most often a concerto will spotlight one only performer, one
must consider temperaments, finances, compositional ability,
three musical variables instead of the usual, and less demanding
but still impressive, hypothetically virtuosic, one

and indeed I knew of only one triple concerto then, Beethoven’s,
though I’ve since learned of another by Mozart, but that’s another
story

not only was this a triple concerto, I exhilarated, but one by
Beethoven, Nietzsche’s very superman, an entity of supreme
musical authority

and in my collection I had it performed by Yo-Yo Ma, the superstar
cellist, who needs no other introduction, Emanuel Ax at the piano,
whom I’ve admired for many years, dominating some of the most
difficult piano pieces in the catalogue with elegance and majesty,
often accompanying Ma, and Gil Shaham, an internationally famous
violin virtuoso of the very highest order

I trembled at the very thought, and hoped my friend would also thrill
at the opportunity

we watched

Ma, Ax, and Shaham did their usual unforgettable stuff

Alan Gilbert conducts the New York Philharmonic, another word for
symphony, that one, with perhaps a nod to a congruence of many
harmonies instead of merely an assemblage of sounds, both here
striving equally however for the undifferentiated sublime

my friend later found me the corresponding online video

watch

Richard

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May 21, 2011

On Being Eighty

if being eighty is a condition for writing so beautiful a poem,
how can that age be anything but precious, being eighty
must be a blessing only someone not eighty then can know,
never a “shadow”, never ever a “cobweb” 
 
a friend responded to my own poem with something of hers,
to which I could not but cede before its greater, its more
poignant, its more probing, its more pressing, beauty 
 
 
with applause
 
Richard  
 
                  _____________________
 
 
On Being Eighty
 

There’s been a subtle change, a feeling of absence,
I am an echo in the empty space 
Where once I stood among the crowd.
I am a shadow of the past
That haunts the edges of the world

I am the shadow that haunts my children
I am the shadow that clings like cobweb 
Entangling them with guilt. 
 
 
                                   a friend

 

 
 
          _______________________
 
 
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February 10, 2011

the sixth and seventh circles of Purgatory

after having managed with Dante first the seven circles of lurid Hell,
then five in the much more tolerable Purgatory, I’ve reached the sixth
and seventh circles there of Lust and Gluttony, sins I have been more
particularly prone to
  
the egregious crimes of murder, fraud, treason, blasphemy, the stuff 
of very Hell, were never a concern for me, while the venial imperfections 
of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, Purgatory’s more tempered lot, would never,
surely, transcendentally confound me, I thought, should there be indeed
a Hell, a Heaven, or a Purgatory, notions incidentally that were first made
explicit by Dante himself in his “Divine Comedy“, no earlier topographical
description of the place had ever been written, later Bosch would paint his
“Garden of Earthly Delights”  
 
we owe our notions of the Christian afterlife even still to Dante 
  
  
but where of course does all this fit in a universe we know to be infinite,
an idea itself, that last, that is no less awesome
 
somewhere above Olympus, the home of the Greek Gods, is where it sits,
I think, but beneath the canopy of the stars, which enclosed the earth then, 
but which dispersed, it would seem, of its own incorporeality when we’d
reached beyond  
 
  
at the terrace of Gluttony, a level that winds around the mountain,
Dante meets among emaciated shades – “shades”, he says, “that
seemed things dead twice over”, who hunger for instead of victuals
eternal life – Forese Donati, an old flame 
  
“how did you come so far so fast?”, he asks his bosom friend who’d died
only a short four years earlier  
  
“It is my Nella”, he replies, his wife
  
        “whose flooding tears so quickly brought me 
         to drink sweet wormwood in the torments. 
  
         With her devoted prayers and with her sighs,
         she plucked me from the slope where one must wait  
         and freed me from the other circles.” * 
   
but I think it was Dante himself who could never have consigned such a
privy buddy to anything short of Purgatory   
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    and that was the terrace of Gluttony
 
tomorrow I do Lust   
 
 
upon moving towards that terrace, the last before reaching the
circles of Paradise, an angel blinds Dante with its radiance so that
he must turn away his eyes  
 
        “And as, announcing dawn, the breeze of May
          stirs and exudes a fragrance
          filled with the scent of grass and flowers,
 
          just such a wind I felt stroking my brow  
          and I could feel the moving of his feathers,
          my senses steeped in odor of ambrosia.” **

 

I wish you angels, and Heaven 
 
Richard 
 
 
*    “Purgatorio“, XXIII, 85-90 
**  “Purgatorio“, XXIV, 145-150 
 
                           translations by Robert and Jean Hollander

 

 

 

 

 

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June 28, 2010

about poems

a while ago, around a piece I’d sent purporting to be a poem,
a friend asked, can a poem have only two lines 
 
what do you think, I answered, can it, was it 
 
which is to say a poem is in the eye of the beholder 
 
 
what would you call the following strophe, it is worth considering, the more you define what you mean by a poem, the more, like angels, like miracles, you find them, the more, soon, you find your own, the more suddenly they’re everywhere 
 
 
Richard 
 
                         ___________________
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    A Hand

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     A hand is not four fingers and a thumb. Nor is it palm and knuckles, not ligaments or the fat’s yellow pillow, not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins. A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines with their infinite dramas, nor what it has written, not on the page, not on the ecstatic body. Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping— not sponge of rising yeast-bread, not rotor pin’s smoothness, not ink. The maple’s green hands do not cup the proliferant rain. What empties itself falls into the place that is open. A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question. Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.  
 
 
                                    Jane Hirshfield

 

 

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May 31, 2010

“Once and Upon” – Madeline Gleason

having got up on the wrong side of my Monday morning, I wasn’t to be moved by even poetry, but like a morning prayer I began to read this one, as I do one, even two, even many, every morning
 
I was enchanted, I hope you are too 
 
 
Richard 
 
psst: compare e.e. cummings for childlike innocence and fancy, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” for instance
           
  
                          ___________________

                                                                                                                                                                                  

Once and Upon

                                                                                                                                                                             Cross at the morning
and at waking,
with a mourning for summer,
she crossed the bridge Now
over the river Gone
toward the place called New
to begin her Once Upon.

Once and Upon
my daddy long legs
walked in a web of work
for my sisters and me,
as Mother spun round
with silver knives and forks
in a shining of pans,
a wash of Mondays
and plans
for our lives ten thousand weeks.

To cross the bridge Now
over the river Gone
toward the place called New
to begin her Once Upon,
in a mourning for summer, she moved
to write her right becoming
and find her true beloved.

Snippets and tags of Gone,
criss-crossed as retold,
beggared the strumming
of fresh rhythms
that should have stirred her becoming.

Once and Upon
she ate the plum
and from a full mouth
disgorged the pit
into her hand
while Mother spun as she canned
peach and plum in season –
the land, holy Mother to
the plentiful fruit.

To cross.
But where should her steps lead
away from the river?

Through a desert she hurried,
thirsting she ran
to reach becoming,
passed three water holes
but never saw them,
so eager was she to reach
outward evidence
of her inward drawing.

Sisters of grace,
comely, sea-washed,
with blond shell hair and skin,
whirling with intermittent passion
amidst daddy long legs
and Mother awash
among the underthings,
boys shouting and running,
swaggering and dying
for the sisters’ charms.
AMEN!

Tops a-spin in a dying dance.
Yoo Hoo, Fatty! Buck!
Hi, Pete! Hello, old Gene!

Cross at the morning,
summer crossed with the beginning
of gold,
a sea of brown leaves swirling.

And no trees bent down
to whisper their wisdom
for her becoming.
Ah! Now! Ah! Gone! Ah! New
Ah! Once Upon!  

                     

                         Madeline Gleason 

              

                     

                  

             ___________________________

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May 28, 2010

true happiness

 
in the movie “Never on Sunday” Homer Thrace, an American moralist and armchair philosopher, objects to the libertine ways of the modern Greeks, Ilya especially, a whore, disconcerts him, she likes her job, so do the dockworkers, and the other women who ply her trade at the port of Piraeus, near Athens 
  
Homer Thrace accuses them all righteously of pursuing the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies that came out of the fall of Greece, instead of the true and noble ideals of the more upstanding Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who believed that the greatest happiness comes from the joy of understanding  
  
when he tells Taki, who plays the bouzouki, that he can never be a true musician because he can’t read music, Taki, who is too old now to learn, hides in the bathroom forlornly, and says he will never play again 
  
Ilya, Melina Mercouri, in a star turn, tells him composers need his music to be able to write his notes down, what would composers do without him, if birds can’t read music, she asks, should they stop singing  
  
Taki comes out of the bathroom
  
so had I   

  
Richard

 

 

 

                   

                       ______________________________

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May 13, 2010

John Ruskin, on truth in art

that we have dismissed, often indeed forgotten, the great voices of our culture,
the great oracles, the dead, they’ve dared to call them, painters, composers,
poets, doesn’t make their pronouncements less true, less inspiring, proof that
they are still very much alive, and relevant 
  
that they are still relevant ties us to the great notion that we are from very
Homer to the present day one family, one illustrious family, which to disregard, 
or any of its great giants, would be our inestimable loss 
 
where would we be without their wisdom, leaves without a trunk
 
 
John Ruskin was a great influence on Marcel Proust, my own supreme poet and prophet, I needed to plumb his literary pockets for, I did not doubt, nuggets of priceless gold
 
 
Richard 
 
 
                       _____________________

 

Chapter 7
 
8 – That then which I would have the reader inquire respecting
       every work of art of undetermined merit submitted to his
       judgment, is not whether it be a work of especial grandeur,
       importance, or power; but whether it have any virtue or
       substance as a link in this chain of truth; whether it have 
       recorded or interpreted anything before unknown; whether
       it have added one single stone to our heaven pointing pyramid,
       cut away one dark bough, or levelled one rugged hillock in our
       path. This, if it be an honest work of art, it must have done, for
       no man ever yet worked honestly without giving some such help
       to his race. God appoints to every one of his creatures a separate
       mission, and if they discharge it honourably, if they acquit themselves
       like men and faithfully follow that light which is in them, withdrawing
       from it all cold and quenching influence, there will assuredly come of
       it such burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine
       before men, and be of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite
       of lustre there must always be, but the weakest among us has a
       gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which
       worthily used will be a gift also to his race for  ever: 
                ‘Fool not’, says George Herbert,
                                                                     ‘For all may have,
                             If they dare choose, a glorious life or grave’ 
      
 
                                            John Ruskin (from “Modern Painters“) 
 
 

                     ______________________________________________

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April 29, 2010

“Trouble” – Matthew Dickman‏

                                                                                                                                                                              after the great hiatus of the Middle Ages Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am“, and set the modern world in motion, the Age of Reason, the Era of Human Rights 
 
but even Shakespeare some seventy years earlier had given voice already to the consequent existential dilemma, by way of Hamlet in his “To be, or not to be“, the moral dilemma of the individual before existence – “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – and the abyss of eternity, a question up to that point forbidden on dire pain of heresy  
  
                                                                                                                                                                         Emily Dickinson touches on the subject famously, others also of equal authority, but here is something I thought true, touching, beautiful, and ultimately inspiring for anyone who’s delved that deep  
 
                                                                                                                                                                   Richard 
  
  
                       ______________________
  
 
Trouble   
 
                                                                                                                                                                        Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.
 

                                                     Matthew Dickman 

             

                        ____________________________________

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