Over this past week, I've planned to write about Hemingway and Babel, about Walter Benjamin and Derrida, and about some performances I admire of classical music. I'll try in these next weeks to offer comments on each (though they'll be curtailed due to added commitments which have arisen).
I'm hoping to comment on the issue of how Hemingway and Babel differently portray ways of surviving in a hostile universe - and, with regard to the former, I'm struck by the bearing of two quotations on his work. One is Lawrence's remark the Hemingway fearlessly reveals what it feels like to lose all hope. The other remark is more obliquely relevant; it's W. C. Williams' idea in introducing the little magazine he edited in the early 1920s: "Contact" is a man without abstract analysis, parody, abstract ethics - with nothing but immediate contact with his world.
And I'm interested in how the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has made use of Walter Benjamin's thinking about repairing the broken world, attending to what disappears into its cracks and fissures, and defining the role of hope in human life. The link I'll try to explore is between Derrida's Spectres of Marx and Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations.
Finally, I intend to comment on some of the musical performances which I've found most moving and illuminating - there are performances of Beethoven I'm tempted again to cite, but I'll let a single example about Schuber suffice for now: Sviatoslav Richter's performance of Schubert's last piano sonata (D. 960 in B-flat), playing the first movement at an unusually slow tempo which allows him to convey with great force the beauty in every phrase. [Here's a link to the cd: Schubert: Piano Sonatas D.958, D.960 ~ Richter .]
Showing posts with label Sviatoslav Richter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sviatoslav Richter. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Notes on the modern period - 24 - Modern Music ii
One of the stories in my new collection, Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable
, imagines the fate of an emigre virtuoso pianist in L.A., Alexander Petrov, who is a friend of Stravinsky and Schoenberg; he is at the center also of an earlier work of mine, Hungry Generations: a novel, which partly tries to convey my pleasure in the history of classical music and especially modern music from Wagner forward. About Wagner, as my previous post tried to show, the evident gigantism in Wagner’s extraordinary operas participates in the modernist impulse to create art which surveys and encompasses the entire span of civilization, reaching back to its mythic origins and moving forward to the present world which is judged to be disintegrating from the mid-nineteenth century onward – and increasingly so, as the two World Wars were fought. This ambitious and audacious vision of human experience announces the current disintegration of traditional thought and received conventions. Such is the vision in Wagner and so too, for example, in Joyce’s Ulysses, with the qualification that Joyce’s creation of Leopold Bloom – as much a mockery of Odysseus as he is – celebrates the character’s struggling humanity. As a result, Joyce’s exposure of the vast, disintegrating edifice of civilization yet leaves some room for the ordinary human being. Such a paradox is not central in Wagner’s work (despite some superficial elements of it in Meistersinger).
However, in Mahler, a composer deeply influenced by Wagner (as every German-speaking classical composer was), we do encounter that paradoxical face-off between the individual versus the massive forces which can crush the human. The individual’s features are reduced to often primitive and, therefore, bitterly ironic markers of expressiveness, yet they survive. I am thinking of the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, in which a naive children’s tune is transformed into a deeply sad minor-key funeral march, and so its sweetness is converted into a beautiful but bitter gesture of yearning. Soon in the movement, we hear klezmer-style carnival tunes, and their primitive contours are made to convey a similar yearning for expressiveness, despite their grotesque transformations. (Here is a Bernstein performance of the movement on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEPERXpOqiU&feature=related.) What we hear here is travesty: the children’s folksong and the carnival dance music are mutilated and mocked, and yet they are clung to as embodying the last possibilities of expressiveness and meaning: deformed as they are, they become a lyrical hallowing of the mundane and the clichéd as all that humankind has left of meaning.
The transition from the utter silence at the end of this funeral march to the last movement’s apocalyptic thunderclap is a primal gesture of disruption, and it yields another sort of tragically inflected and travestied march. (Here is a Dudamel performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY_g69mzv2E.) Mahler’s grotesque version of a victory march is, in Adorno’s image, a march as heard and witnessed from the point of view of the vanquished, the victims, who yearn for an alternative to brutality. Mahler’s music becomes an act of mourning for the passing of a "human" world. His symphonies employ huge orchestras, which can dwarf any semblance of the individual, and yet he makes us hear the individual instruments with chamber-music-like clarity. A most eloquent version of this meeting between gigantic resources in sound and the bared individual voices of instruments is to be found in his Symphony No. 3, the fourth movement, in which the mezzo-soprano sings Mahler’s setting of the “Midnight Song” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “The world is deep, / Deeper than day had been aware. / Deep is its woe;” yet joy is “deeper even than agony. / Woe implores: Go! / But all joy wants eternity - / Wants deep, wants deep eternity.” (Here is Abbado’s great performance with Anna Larsson, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCEr2mWhYs8&feature=related.) An estranged minimalism (which is ironically a bit at odds with Nietzsche's yearning for the fertile, unbounded spirit) is at work in this movement after the gigantic structures, in terms of both time and sound, heard in the previous three movements, estranged because its “wisdom” is so dwarfed, so close to silence, though all the more moving to the modern ear for that. (There are many great interpretations on cd of the first and third symphonies; here are links to Abbado's [recently] conducting Mahler: Symphony No. 3
and Bernstein conducting Mahler: Symphony No. 1- Titan / Symphony No. 10 (Adagio)
.)
Travesty and the tension between gigantism and minimalism are important also in an alternative classical music tradition to that in Germany, Austria, etc. In France, Debussy and Ravel employ features of modernist art with a quite different aesthetic, one based in a sort of floating aleatory associativeness, a graceful, sinuous welcoming dance of fragmentation. We can hear a powerful example of this alternative approach to travesty in Ravel’s “La Valse,” which presents the demonic destruction yet celebration of the mundane clichéd form of the waltz. Ravel disintegrates the form even as he simultaneously adheres to it as a last grotesque source of expressiveness. (Here is the second half of Dror Biron’s brilliant performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdaU-_vFH3g&feature=related# . There is also a wonderful performance available on cd of Argerich playing Ravel’s La Valse with Freire: Rachmaninov: Suite No. 2, Op. 17 / Ravel: La Valse / Lutoslawski: Paganini Variations ~ Argerich / Freire
.)
Debussy, the greatest modern French composer, can employ a large orchestra (as he does, for example, in La Mer, or even in his setting of Mallarmé's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
), but he always maintains a clear, supple, associative flow of musical gestures, a sort of stream of consciousness emphasizing unexpected individual "voices." His music continually opens itself to the possibility of an alternative pentatonic harmony independent of classical music’s customary harmonic vocabulary and to the potential logic of synesthetic sensations joining the senses and separate from the ordered development of musical themes, which are always on the verge of fragmenting. (Here is a fine orchestral cd of Debussy: La Mer / Nocturnes / Jeux / Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre - The Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez.)
Above all, Debussy’s minimalism becomes a means of maintaining individual expressiveness in the face of the experience of fragmentation, of sustaining the pared-down search for “meaning” in the face of chaos. His minimalism is very far from the rather gently beautiful impressionism with which he is sometimes identified. It veers abruptly from the delicate to the violent and back, for example, in Debussy’s Prelude for piano, the 12th in Book 2 - Feux d'artifice, or fireworks. (Here is a fine Maurizio Pollini performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m1_IPErT-U. There is also a very great performance on cd of Sviatoslav Richter playing this prelude along with all of Debussy's Book 2: Richter in Spoleto
.)
In my next post, I’ll attempt briefly to discuss Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
, imagines the fate of an emigre virtuoso pianist in L.A., Alexander Petrov, who is a friend of Stravinsky and Schoenberg; he is at the center also of an earlier work of mine, Hungry Generations: a novel, which partly tries to convey my pleasure in the history of classical music and especially modern music from Wagner forward. About Wagner, as my previous post tried to show, the evident gigantism in Wagner’s extraordinary operas participates in the modernist impulse to create art which surveys and encompasses the entire span of civilization, reaching back to its mythic origins and moving forward to the present world which is judged to be disintegrating from the mid-nineteenth century onward – and increasingly so, as the two World Wars were fought. This ambitious and audacious vision of human experience announces the current disintegration of traditional thought and received conventions. Such is the vision in Wagner and so too, for example, in Joyce’s Ulysses, with the qualification that Joyce’s creation of Leopold Bloom – as much a mockery of Odysseus as he is – celebrates the character’s struggling humanity. As a result, Joyce’s exposure of the vast, disintegrating edifice of civilization yet leaves some room for the ordinary human being. Such a paradox is not central in Wagner’s work (despite some superficial elements of it in Meistersinger).However, in Mahler, a composer deeply influenced by Wagner (as every German-speaking classical composer was), we do encounter that paradoxical face-off between the individual versus the massive forces which can crush the human. The individual’s features are reduced to often primitive and, therefore, bitterly ironic markers of expressiveness, yet they survive. I am thinking of the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, in which a naive children’s tune is transformed into a deeply sad minor-key funeral march, and so its sweetness is converted into a beautiful but bitter gesture of yearning. Soon in the movement, we hear klezmer-style carnival tunes, and their primitive contours are made to convey a similar yearning for expressiveness, despite their grotesque transformations. (Here is a Bernstein performance of the movement on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEPERXpOqiU&feature=related.) What we hear here is travesty: the children’s folksong and the carnival dance music are mutilated and mocked, and yet they are clung to as embodying the last possibilities of expressiveness and meaning: deformed as they are, they become a lyrical hallowing of the mundane and the clichéd as all that humankind has left of meaning.
The transition from the utter silence at the end of this funeral march to the last movement’s apocalyptic thunderclap is a primal gesture of disruption, and it yields another sort of tragically inflected and travestied march. (Here is a Dudamel performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY_g69mzv2E.) Mahler’s grotesque version of a victory march is, in Adorno’s image, a march as heard and witnessed from the point of view of the vanquished, the victims, who yearn for an alternative to brutality. Mahler’s music becomes an act of mourning for the passing of a "human" world. His symphonies employ huge orchestras, which can dwarf any semblance of the individual, and yet he makes us hear the individual instruments with chamber-music-like clarity. A most eloquent version of this meeting between gigantic resources in sound and the bared individual voices of instruments is to be found in his Symphony No. 3, the fourth movement, in which the mezzo-soprano sings Mahler’s setting of the “Midnight Song” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “The world is deep, / Deeper than day had been aware. / Deep is its woe;” yet joy is “deeper even than agony. / Woe implores: Go! / But all joy wants eternity - / Wants deep, wants deep eternity.” (Here is Abbado’s great performance with Anna Larsson, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCEr2mWhYs8&feature=related.) An estranged minimalism (which is ironically a bit at odds with Nietzsche's yearning for the fertile, unbounded spirit) is at work in this movement after the gigantic structures, in terms of both time and sound, heard in the previous three movements, estranged because its “wisdom” is so dwarfed, so close to silence, though all the more moving to the modern ear for that. (There are many great interpretations on cd of the first and third symphonies; here are links to Abbado's [recently] conducting Mahler: Symphony No. 3
and Bernstein conducting Mahler: Symphony No. 1- Titan / Symphony No. 10 (Adagio).)Travesty and the tension between gigantism and minimalism are important also in an alternative classical music tradition to that in Germany, Austria, etc. In France, Debussy and Ravel employ features of modernist art with a quite different aesthetic, one based in a sort of floating aleatory associativeness, a graceful, sinuous welcoming dance of fragmentation. We can hear a powerful example of this alternative approach to travesty in Ravel’s “La Valse,” which presents the demonic destruction yet celebration of the mundane clichéd form of the waltz. Ravel disintegrates the form even as he simultaneously adheres to it as a last grotesque source of expressiveness. (Here is the second half of Dror Biron’s brilliant performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdaU-_vFH3g&feature=related# . There is also a wonderful performance available on cd of Argerich playing Ravel’s La Valse with Freire: Rachmaninov: Suite No. 2, Op. 17 / Ravel: La Valse / Lutoslawski: Paganini Variations ~ Argerich / Freire
.)Debussy, the greatest modern French composer, can employ a large orchestra (as he does, for example, in La Mer, or even in his setting of Mallarmé's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
), but he always maintains a clear, supple, associative flow of musical gestures, a sort of stream of consciousness emphasizing unexpected individual "voices." His music continually opens itself to the possibility of an alternative pentatonic harmony independent of classical music’s customary harmonic vocabulary and to the potential logic of synesthetic sensations joining the senses and separate from the ordered development of musical themes, which are always on the verge of fragmenting. (Here is a fine orchestral cd of Debussy: La Mer / Nocturnes / Jeux / Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre - The Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez.)Above all, Debussy’s minimalism becomes a means of maintaining individual expressiveness in the face of the experience of fragmentation, of sustaining the pared-down search for “meaning” in the face of chaos. His minimalism is very far from the rather gently beautiful impressionism with which he is sometimes identified. It veers abruptly from the delicate to the violent and back, for example, in Debussy’s Prelude for piano, the 12th in Book 2 - Feux d'artifice, or fireworks. (Here is a fine Maurizio Pollini performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m1_IPErT-U. There is also a very great performance on cd of Sviatoslav Richter playing this prelude along with all of Debussy's Book 2: Richter in Spoleto
.)In my next post, I’ll attempt briefly to discuss Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Some great performances of Beethoven's last piano sonatas and other music in HUNGRY GENERATIONS
Please see my latest posts on Beethoven and four June 2011 posts about modern music and recommended performances. Also, Beethoven appears as a character in my novel "Hungry Generations" (about the friendship between a young composer in L.A. and a great emigre virtuoso pianist in the early 70s) - an excerpt is in one of my early blog posts.
Piano Sonata No. 29 in B Flat Major
(Rudolf Serkin playing the Hammerklavier Sonata);
Beethoven: Piano Works, Vol. 3
(Arthur Schnabel playing the Hammerklavier sonata); also there is Sviatoslav Richter's performance of the Hammerklavier on Praga (not the inferior alternative recordings).
For additional recommendations, look at my recent "modern music" posts 23-25. The following recordings of more modern music, along with the Beethoven below, are important to my novel Hungry Generations.
Murray Perahia Performs Béla Bartók (Piano Sonata; Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs; Suite; Out of Doors; Sonata for 2 pianos & 2 percussion) (Murray Perahia playing Bartok's Sonata)
Stravinsky: Serenade In A, Sonata / Lieberson: Bagatelles / Wolpe: Pastorale, Form IV ("Broken Sequences"), Four Studies on Basic Rows, IV: Passacaglia
(Peter Serkin playing Stravinsky's Sonata)
Glenn Gould Plays Schoenberg, Berg, Webern
(Gould playing Schoenberg's Suite, op. 25, etc.)
Also: Beethoven: The Last 3 Piano Sonatas, Nos. 30-32 (Rudolf Serkin playing the late sonatas)
Richter the Master, Vol. 1: Beethoven - Piano Sonatas
(Sviatoslav Richter playing the late sonatas)
Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor Op. 111
(Arthur Schnabel playing the last piano sonata)
Let me add a few more recordings of music important for my novel "Hungry Generations." There is Penderewski's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima: http://www.amazon.com/Penderecki-Anaklasis-Threnody-etc-Krzysztof/dp/B000002S5H/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1296338836&sr=1-1. Also, Zimmermann's piano works: http://www.amazon.com/Zimmermann-Piano-Works-Tony-Wirtz/dp/B000CCS9B8/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339063&sr=1-4.
My novel's main character the aging pianist Alexander Petrov achieves some incredible effects in his performances, particularly of Schoenberg, who is one of 'the three bald geniuses' haunting the other main (and younger) character Jack Weinstein's imagination (along with Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok). The significant effects achieved by the playing of the novel's pianist Petrov are suggested by, among others, Vladimir Horowitz's incredible performances (for example, he recorded the Scriabin Sonata #3, which the son Joseph Petrov performs in the novel: http://www.amazon.com/Horowitz-Plays-Scriabin-Alexander/dp/B0000CF325/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296340283&sr=1-2 or http://www.amazon.com/Horowitz-Plays-Scriabin-Alexander/dp/B000003EOZ/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296340283&sr=1-1, which contains the third sonata). Similarly, there is Sviatoslav Richter's powerful performance, for example, of Scriabin, Debussy, and Prokofiev (with a range of sound from immensely forceful to terrifically gentle, a range akin to that imagined for Sasha Petrov): http://www.amazon.com/Scriabin-Debussy-Prokofiev-Sviatoslav-Richter/dp/B00000E3ZX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1296340158&sr=1-5
Finally, the first recording I heard of Beethoven's late sonatas was by Egon Petri: http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Sonatas-Egon-Petri-Recital/dp/B00005Q636/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339508&sr=1-1
Piano Sonata No. 29 in B Flat Major
(Rudolf Serkin playing the Hammerklavier Sonata);Beethoven: Piano Works, Vol. 3
(Arthur Schnabel playing the Hammerklavier sonata); also there is Sviatoslav Richter's performance of the Hammerklavier on Praga (not the inferior alternative recordings).For additional recommendations, look at my recent "modern music" posts 23-25. The following recordings of more modern music, along with the Beethoven below, are important to my novel Hungry Generations.
Murray Perahia Performs Béla Bartók (Piano Sonata; Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs; Suite; Out of Doors; Sonata for 2 pianos & 2 percussion) (Murray Perahia playing Bartok's Sonata)
Stravinsky: Serenade In A, Sonata / Lieberson: Bagatelles / Wolpe: Pastorale, Form IV ("Broken Sequences"), Four Studies on Basic Rows, IV: Passacaglia (Peter Serkin playing Stravinsky's Sonata)Glenn Gould Plays Schoenberg, Berg, Webern
(Gould playing Schoenberg's Suite, op. 25, etc.)Also: Beethoven: The Last 3 Piano Sonatas, Nos. 30-32 (Rudolf Serkin playing the late sonatas)
Richter the Master, Vol. 1: Beethoven - Piano Sonatas
(Sviatoslav Richter playing the late sonatas)Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor Op. 111
(Arthur Schnabel playing the last piano sonata)Let me add a few more recordings of music important for my novel "Hungry Generations." There is Penderewski's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima: http://www.amazon.com/Penderecki-Anaklasis-Threnody-etc-Krzysztof/dp/B000002S5H/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1296338836&sr=1-1. Also, Zimmermann's piano works: http://www.amazon.com/Zimmermann-Piano-Works-Tony-Wirtz/dp/B000CCS9B8/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339063&sr=1-4.
My novel's main character the aging pianist Alexander Petrov achieves some incredible effects in his performances, particularly of Schoenberg, who is one of 'the three bald geniuses' haunting the other main (and younger) character Jack Weinstein's imagination (along with Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok). The significant effects achieved by the playing of the novel's pianist Petrov are suggested by, among others, Vladimir Horowitz's incredible performances (for example, he recorded the Scriabin Sonata #3, which the son Joseph Petrov performs in the novel: http://www.amazon.com/Horowitz-Plays-Scriabin-Alexander/dp/B0000CF325/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296340283&sr=1-2 or http://www.amazon.com/Horowitz-Plays-Scriabin-Alexander/dp/B000003EOZ/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296340283&sr=1-1, which contains the third sonata). Similarly, there is Sviatoslav Richter's powerful performance, for example, of Scriabin, Debussy, and Prokofiev (with a range of sound from immensely forceful to terrifically gentle, a range akin to that imagined for Sasha Petrov): http://www.amazon.com/Scriabin-Debussy-Prokofiev-Sviatoslav-Richter/dp/B00000E3ZX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1296340158&sr=1-5
Finally, the first recording I heard of Beethoven's late sonatas was by Egon Petri: http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Sonatas-Egon-Petri-Recital/dp/B00005Q636/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339508&sr=1-1
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