Richibi's Weblog

November 24, 2017

me, in C# major – in the beginning

“Prieteni“

_______

for my sister

my sister, who is presently recovering,
learning to walk again, up and down,
apparently, the stairs, after a second,
especially virulent, sarcoma, the first,
a year ago, insignificant compared to
this one, which has left her, this time,
with but two of seven muscles in her
upper right hind leg, her thigh, was
surely my first experience of someone
who could understand my existence,
she was born a year and a very few
days later than I was

two buds on a branch learning to
weather the weather from the same
degree, essentially, of inference

she had dark eyes, round, brown,
beautiful, would eventually win
beauty pageants, her hair was also
brown, beautiful, though all this
was to her ever irrelevant, until later
perhaps when she learned to always,
however humbly, as one should treat
a gift from heaven, use it, to protect
her child, to ensure her own ever
noble existence, through which she
never, however, stopped being
beautiful, even radiant

however beautiful might she have
been, I only ever saw her heart,
something I’ve done since with
beautiful people, beyond even
their vaunted allure

my sister was not only my sister,
thus, she was also the other part
of my heart

still is

my parents worked, were gone all
day, ensuring our physical comfort,
food, clothing, a roof over our
heads, and they were little by little
becoming eventually extravagantly
successful, for little people

but it was the ’50s, folks were
coming out of a culture of log
cabins and perseverance, aunts
had survived fires that had burnt
the town down, and who’d saved
their children, all cowering in the
nearby river, cloaked in tarpaulins,
while the menfolk had been toiling
in some other nearby township
to keep their families going,
nearly as heroically as the women

but my sister and I had just been
born in this particular corner of
infinity, where each child, in its
own, needs to make its own way

we, blessed as we were, could
confront this abashing new world
together

and we did

she had been a bud, she became
my anchor, as I, I think, ever for
her since have also been

if you’ll pardon my inordinate, and
perhaps too gushing, ardour

R ! chard

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November 23, 2017

me, in C# major – program notes

“The Journey of the Stone Unicorn“ (2005)

Stefan Caltia

______

for my Uncle Al, who put
me up to this challenge

an uncle of mine recently, who’d only
undertaken, just as recently, his own
“memoir”, he called it, urged me to
write my own autobiography on the
strength of what he perceived to be
my writing ability, I knew that would
be a daunting venture, one that he’d
shown me already in several internet
correspondences how daunting it
had been for his own eventually
abandoned effort, it had been
chronological, a death blow since at
least Proust, Joyce, and the advent
of stream of consciousness, time is
no longer considered linear, watch
any program on television

indeed I tried at one point, a few
months back to start from the
beginning, it was a disaster, where
I was born, when, in a manger, for
your information, for there was no
room at the inn, but from there it
was perfunctory, like watching the
hands on a clock turn

in the meantime, I thought I’d try
something else, a recent inspiration,
just sit by the fire and tell your story,
my story, which is not at all, I think,
as I would, of course, uninteresting,
but you’ll be the gauge of that,
should you keep on reading

and I think I can do that

R ! chard

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November 21, 2017

Dmitri Shostakovich – “Symphony No 5” in D minor, opus 47

“Hi, XVII Congress of the CPSU (B)“ (1934)

Ilya Mashkov

__________

if I thought the Fourth would knock
your socks of, stockings, the Fifth
ought to leave you with, dare I say,
nothing on but your awe, it is
extraordinary, so settle in, pour
yourself a glass of wine, or vodka
if you want to be ethnic, for a
mesmerizing three-quarter hour

days only before the first performance
of Shostakovich’s new symphony, an
article showed up in a leading Moscow
paper suggesting that it would be “a
Soviet artist’s creative response to
justified criticism” in reference, of
course, to Stalin’s displeasure with
Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of
Mtsensk“, which had led to the
cancellation of his Fourth Symphony,
read all about it here

disregard for Stalin’s opinion would
have meant certain execution in an
environment where the leader could
not be contradicted, the ruler wanted
uplifting tunes, the rule was Socialist
Realism, art to celebrate the Party

a similar thing was happening at the
same time in Germany, incidentally,
with Hitler objecting to “entartete
Kunst“, the degenerate art that
moderns were producing, Kirchner,
Klee, Dix, for example, who were
only painting, as Shostakovich was
only composing, what they heard,
saw, for which they were all
persecuted

a few necessary words about the
Fifth Symphony itself, if
Shostakovich had been moving
toward dissonance, you’ll find the
Fifth particularly notable for its
tonal melodies, however sometimes
astringent, more larger intervals,
sevenths, octaves, than strident
atonal conjunctions

and since Shostakovich had been
strictly adhering to the two other
Classical conditions, of tempo and
repetition, this symphony might as
well be a Romantic composition

listen to Beethoven’s Fifth and
compare, they sound nearly
identical but for a 130 years
distance, the peremptory opening,
loud, brash, bracing, followed
quickly by a lull in intensity, four
movements each, horns blare in
either military salvos, a propensity
toward dance rhythms, short, sweet
solo moments for several assorted
instruments, usually contemplative,
piercingly personal – after a
comparison, you’ll never see
Beethoven’s Fifth in the same light
again

Beethoven, however, though
forceful, indeed thunderous, is
more centred on the actual music,
which is jubilant, celebratory, an
exultation, while Shostakovich by
contrast, however equally martial,
sounds the implacability, the
ruthlessness of the fanfare, the
parade, you can feel the iron step
of the guard, their advance
inexorable, this is unquestionably
a political statement, then again
Beethoven didn’t live in France

it’s to be noted that both works
are products of a recent revolution,
the French, the Russian, and the
imminence of a Terror, as well of
the return of an autocratic leader,
the Emperor Napoleon in the first
instance, in the second, of course
Stalin

it’s helpful to view the bombastic
portions in Shostakovich, as the
unassailable positions of the Party,
the more melting moments and
single voices as those of the
oppressed proletariat, a people up
against the stringent requirements
of an unforgiving state growing up
all around them

a return to strict Classical
conditions, by the way, which is
to say “tunes”, might’ve been
Shostakovich’s way of placating,
however risky still, a dictator’s
fearful edicts regarding
permissible taste, that’s what
you can do when you can speak
the language

incidentally, the symphonies are
either composer’s Fifth, perhaps
not incidentally

R ! chard

psst: the applause at the first
performance, November 21,
1937, lasted over half an hour,
people were crying, they’d
found a prophet

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November 17, 2017

Dmitri Shostakovich – “Symphony No 4” in C minor, opus 43

“Portrait of Joseph Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili)“ (1936)

Pavel Filonov

_________

if you’ve been waiting for a Shostakovich
to write home about among his early
symphonies, here’s the one, his
Symphony no 4 in C minor, opus 43 will
knock your socks off from its very
opening gambit, have a seat, settle in,
and get ready for an explosive hour

the Fourth was written in 1936, some
years after the death of Lenin, and the
instalment of Stalin as the supreme,
and ruthless, authority, after several
years throughout the Twenties of
maneuvering himself, cold-bloodedly,
into that position

from Stalin, “Death is the solution to
all problems. No man – no problem.“

fearing retribution after Stalin had
criticized his recent opera, “Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk“, Shostakovich
cancelled the first performance of
this new work, due to take place in
December, ’36, others had already
suffered internal exile or execution
who had displeased the tyrant, a
prelude to the infamous Great Terror

the Symphony was eventually played
in 1961, 25 years later, conducted by
no less than Kirill Kondrashin, who’d
partnered Van Cliburn a few years
earlier in Cliburn’s conquest of Russia,
but along with this time however the
long-lived Leningrad Philharmonic
Orchestra

to a friend, I said, this is the biggest
thing since verily Beethoven, no one
has so blown me away symphonically
since then

he looked forward, he replied, to
hearing it

the Fourth Symphony has three distinct
movements, to fit thus appropriately the
definition of symphony, though the first
and third have more than one section,
something Shostakovich would have
learned from already Beethoven, it gives
the opportunity of experiencing a variety
of emotions within one uninterrupted
context, add several movements and
you have a poignant, peripatetic musical
journey, more intricate, psychologically
complex, than many other even eminent
composers, Schubert, Chopin,
Mendelssohn, even Brahms, for instance

it’s helpful to think of film scores, and
their multiple narrative incidents,
brimming with impassioned moments,
however disparate, Shostakovich had
already written several of them

let me point out that Shostakovich’s
rhythms are entirely Classical, even
folkloric in their essential aspects,
everywhere sounds like a march,
proud and bombastic, if not a
veritable dance, peasants carousing,
courtiers waltzing, and repetition is
sufficiently present to not not
recognize the essential music
according to our most elementary
preconceptions

but the dissonances clash, as though
somewhere the tune, despite its rigid
rhythms, falls apart in execution, as
though the participants had, I think,
broken limbs, despite the indomitable
Russian spirit

this is what Shostakovich is all about,
you’ll hear him as we move along
objecting, however surreptitiously,
cautiously, to the Soviet system, like
Pasternak, like Solzhenitsyn, without
ever, like them, leaving his country
despite its manifest oppression, and
despite the lure of Western accolades,
Nobel prizes, for instance, it was their
home

and there is so much more to tell, but
first of all, listen

R ! chard

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November 10, 2017

Symphony No 3 in Eb major, op. 20, “The First of May”

“The 1st May Demonstration on The Red Square, 1929“ (1930)

Konstantin Yuon

__________

let me correct something I wrote in my
last comment, inadvertently, misleading
you somewhat with my inappropriate
use of the word “movement”, that the
Symphony no 2 had only one, I stated,
by which I meant that there were no
pauses throughout, there are, however,
indeed four movements in the Second,
four distinct sections that have been
joined together, such an uninterrupted
piece would usually have been given
an appropriate title, or an opus number,
to identify it, but would not have been
called a symphony, a symphony is by
very definition a clearly segmented
composition, like chapters in a book,
they might follow a theme, though not
necessarily, see Mozart, but the breaks
are integral, where you get a chance to
cough, or to get up and replenish your
glass of wine

the Second could have been, should
have been, called simply, “October“,
and, ergo, left at that

but it wasn’t

the very same must be said about the
Third Symphony, “The First of May”,
you can already probably hear the
jubilation and fanfare in just the title,
another milestone of the Revolution,
the anniversary of Lenin’s death, the
final chorus sings a lyric of a poet of
the Revolution, Semyon Kirsanov, a
sure nod to the symphony‘s political,
however peripheral, intent

what you’ll note, however, is the
sensuality of the music, above
whatever weight of a, perhaps
more fitting, dirge, or the bombast
even of a commemorative, an exalting
tribute – though these are determinedly
there – going back to the orchestral
triumphs of the Romantic Era, with
its lush rallentandos and its voluptuous
ritardandos, the better to seduce

Shostakovich is getting ready for the
real thing, a piece with any partisan
message, he must sense, can never
work

by the way, should you disagree
with any of my evaluations, this
would not at all be offensive, but
even wonderful, I have been
wrong, I can prove it, I have the
dates, they are listed somewhere
in my papers, but it would mean
you’re paying attention, listening,
which is the entire purpose, more
than anything else, of this
exploratory exercise, should you
wish to participate

R ! chard

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November 6, 2017

Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony no. 2 in B major, opus 14 – “to October”

“Carpenter“ (1929) – note the industrialization
of the subject, however
Cubist, for better or for
worse

Kazimir Malevich

_________

Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 2 doesn’t
sound like a symphony – one movement
only, a chorus – but was never meant to,
it had been conceived as a piece in
commemoration of the October
Revolution, a significant event in the
Communist cosmology, and
commissioned by that very polity,
hence the name, “to October“

but later, the symphonic poem was
included chronologically, thus no 2,
in the Shostakovichian oeuvre – if
you’ll excuse that pedantry, “oeuvre”
being too sweet a word for me not to
resist its austere territoriality – the
Symphony no 2 in B major being
first performed in 1927

it starts a shade above inaudibly, which
I often find irritating – unless, of course,
it’s Wagner, or Richard Strauss, who
knew what they were doing – suggesting
something significant is rumbling,
brewing on the musical horizon, after
which we enter in a lively fashion upon
a dance, full of folkloric flavour

but the harmonies are atonal, discordant,
a society, however traditional, is in disorder,
tonality, one of the stalwarts of Classicism,
along with tempo and repetition, has been
upended, distorted, the commune, the
community, can, no longer unburdened,
with only discordant harmonies, dance,
though you can feel them trying

Ravel does something similar in his
“La valse“, where, with a distortion
of tempo, the world is spinning

with only a change in volume, intensity,
in Shostakovich, the music becomes
martial, autocratic, peremptory, nearly
even frightening

I found at this point that the subtlety of
the move from the conviviality of dance
to the aggression delivered by a more
forceful music, marches and so forth,
lay in a mere alteration of the musical
pulse, from seduction to, indeed, rape,
in a simple change of rhythm – thus is it
written in our very sensibilities

a violin obbligato then intervenes,
strangely, but welcome, in a piece of
brash, by this point, agitprop, but
soon becomes as vociferous as
earlier the crowd who wanted to,
however awkwardly, dance

the obbligato, incidentally, instead of
an out and out solo part, as also with
the piano in Shostakovich’s First
Symphony, suggests the work of a
a community, a Soviet ideal, rather
than that of an individual asserting
hir particular predominance, if you
listen between the lines

a particularly impressive chorus
eventually delivers a tribute, a
hagiographic poem, to Lenin, which
Shostakovich abjured, but delivered
nevertheless for the money, and for
the influence, reportedly, however
ignominiously, for he was young,
not fully formed, innocent yet

it resembles, of course, a cantata, a
religious chant – see Bach, one of the
evident muses of Shostakovich – but
which addresses here a political
system, a cute trick of contemporary
secular regimes, the several –isms
within our post-religious ideological
societies

watch for it

note the spoken, or rather, prosaically
proclaimed last verses of the oration,
hortatory, don’t you think, or what

R ! chard

psst: incidentally, few composers are as
political, though few have been
under such ideological pressure,
as Shostakovich

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November 1, 2017

Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony no. 1, opus 10, continued

Shostakovich in 1925

__________

for Barbara, who died recently,
she would’ve loved this

Shostakovich was just nineteen when
his Symphony No.1, opus 10 was
first performed – it had been his
graduation piece the previous year
from the Petrograd Conservatory –
by, then, which is to say 1926, the
Leningrad Philharmonic, renamed the
Saint Petersburg after the fall of the
U.S.S.R., the name it had held before
the Bolshevik Revolution, the oldest
philharmonic orchestra, therefore,
incidentally, in our Russia, going
back to 1882

the work was a complete success, not
surprisingly, if you’ll consider its scope,
its power, and its novel musical
interpolations, I mean a piano as an
integral orchestral instrument rather
than as a distinct, however interrelated,
component, a pas de 40 instead of a
pas de deux, something I can’t remember
anywhere else having seen for piano

not to mention the drum roll between
the last two movements, drums making
a splash in an orchestral setting, who’d
‘a’ thunk it, though Richard Strauss had
done just that in his extraordinary
“Burleske” several decades earlier,
another youthful work, Strauss only 21

but meanwhile back in Russia, before
I too seriously digress, Shostakovich
was immediately compared to another
earlier young prodigy there, Alexander
Glazunov, who’d himself put out his
own First Symphony, the “Slavonic“,
at age 16, introducing, incidentally, his
own instrumental novelty then, an oboe
obbligato, which by very definition is
lovely

Glazunov also mentored, by the way,
Shostakovich at the Petrograd, proved
to be instrumental indeed in his
progress

it’s interesting to put these last two
together, to compare, the Glazunov, 1881,
follows the traditional Romantic
imperatives, tempo, tonality and
repetition, but with more bombast, to my
mind, than its European counterparts,
its fields are the Russian steppes with
troikas, horse-drawn carriages, flying
across vast unhampered vistas of the
Russian snow-covered, therefore
pristine, tundra, to whet the unbridled
Russian spirit, the Europeans, Brahms,
Mendelssohn, Mahler, conversely,
are confined to the hunt, however ever
glorious, but with shrubs, copses,
thickets, if not veritable forests, to blur
the sonic arena, inspire dreams,
consequently, less far-reaching than
those of Johnny Appleseed even, of
the North American Prairies poets,
their own far-flung, boundless
imaginations, inspiration, you can
hear it all, blatantly, in the resonance
of the horns

you’ll note the movements follow
essentially the same rhythmic order
in either symphony, the first two fast
enough, then a third that’s somewhat
slower, a variation from the strictly
Classical order of fast, slow, fast, then
a last, eclectic, movement

but Shostakovich is more atonal,
melodically divergent, an eccentricity
he’ll later polish to a degree of
politically subversive brilliance

for not submitting, however, to the rule
of repetition, which is manifest, though,
in Glazunov, Shostakovich, I find, leaves
us trying to find our bearings as his music
rolls along, kind of like in biographical
movies, when you start looking at your
watch to determine how many life
incidents remain in this particular,
however significant, existential drama

as spectacle – and it must be noted that
symphonic displays were at the time
indeed spectacles – there was no
phonographic, photographic
equipment to transmit such
experiences, the symphony itself was
the show, it had, right there, itself, to
wow the audience

in all of these cases, all of them did

Shostakovich, however, of all of them
remained eventually potently
pertinent, powerfully paramount,
watch

R ! chard

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October 30, 2017

Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony no. 1, opus 10

“Portrait of Dmitri Shostakovich“ (1963)

Martiros Sarian

______

after being transfixed, rendered aquiver, by
this mesmerizing conductor in a performance
I can only remember for his magnetism,
expressive fingers performing arabesques of
such exquisite sensitivity, eyes that melt,
light up, gleam, glitter, at every ebb and flow
of the turbulent, towering, music, eyebrows
that, blonde, cherubic, angelic, display with
manifest intention, the spiritual implications
of every musical turn, a youth only, in my
senescent estimation, taking on the conquest
of the 21st-Century world, lately installed as
conductor, most illustriously, of both the
Royal Liverpool, in 2005, and the Oslo, in
2011, Philharmonics

Vasily Petrenko led me back to Shostakovich,
after his monumental Tchaikovsky 5th,
whereupon I’ve undertaken a chronological
review of all Shostakovich’s symphonies,
something I did long ago with Beethoven’s
sonatas, to my great cultural advantage, it
was a journey that informed me not only
intellectually but, even more significantly,
spiritually, taught me about patience, tumult,
and the wisdom, even glory, one acquires in
resignation, so long as you hold onto your
principles, your core

you look back, I told a man once, and you
see what you’ve come through, and you
are proud, you recognize the hero that
you are, or weren’t

we have only our poise and grace to lend
to the world, or our venom and invective

but I digress

here’s Shostakovich, his First, in a line
of Shostakovichian explorations

if you’ll join me

R ! chard

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October 3, 2017

the “wall”

“A Sunday on La Grande Jatte“ (1884)

Georges Seurat

________

should you know Vancouver, you’ll
recognize, nearly immediately, the
Seawall on this video, before even
a minute has elapsed you spot the
Westin Bayshore coming at you,
nearly perilously, before the speeding
bullet that takes you on the journey
turns the crucial corner on the paved
path that wends its way afterwards
around the peninsula

on foot, this takes about three hours,
but here, inspired by the music of Pink
Floyd, on a deft reinterpretation of the
title and music from “The Wall“, their
oracular masterpiece, an inspired
cyclist brings this local trajectory to
psychedelic life, if you can stand the
unsettling disjunction between his
dizzying speed and the grandeur
of the transcendent, immutable,
coastlines

you’ll need, I suggest, a seatbelt,
but the ride is wild

the journey ends abruptly, both
geographically and musically,
just down the street from my place,
across the road from a recently
favourite restaurant, with a view,
just as transcendent, however not
at all disappointingly mutable, of
the Pacific sunset, whenever we,
family and friends, eat there

R ! chard

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September 29, 2017

the milonga

“For a Better Life III“

Fabian Perez

________

a milonga, a song with a syncopated
beat, is the musical form that gave
birth to the tango, I wondered what
one could be after my mom brought
my attention to one in a program for
an upcoming event in our city, I had
to look it up

my only clue was that it was by
Astor Piazzolla, the Argentinian who
in the 20th Century reinvigorated the
tango nearly all by himself, but in
translation from Spanish to English,
milonga still came up milonga, what
could a milonga be, I asked

here then, by Astor Piazzolla, is
what we’d be hearing

you’ll want to pay attention too to
the paintings of Fabian Perez, also
an Argentinian, which visually
accompany the music, they are
equally as seductive as the
irresistible Piazzollan rhythms

on the program as well, for a
completely different musical
experience, is Mozart’s Clarinet
Quintet, a piece I wrote about
several years ago here, but must
revisit, there is no more beautiful
clarinet quintet, in my estimation,
and not many musical pieces are
either as beautiful

I won’t say a word about the other
piece on this eclectic upcoming
program, but to say that I’d arrive
after the intermission

R ! chard

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