Nostalgia

Noone comes close to Furtwaengler's Schubert 9th. I wish we were more often allowed nowdays to make raw music, rather than/as well as cultivated music. There is much talk about the demise of classical music, and how it needs to be made hip and relevant again. How about allowing classical musicians who are alive and creative and dangerous to again participate in the "industry" machine, rather than focus almost entirely on safety, cleanliness and inoffensive correctness, despite lip service to otherwise. THAT is the death of art. Good marketing doesn't address the fundamental need of people and audiences to be moved and to be excited. Especially young people who still can dream. Education (at a young age but not only) is certainly an issue as well, but the ossifying of musical performance is almost entirely ignored in internal classical music discussions, replaced often by self congratulatory "amazing" "renowned" "ground-breaking" "riveting" epithets. Yet I'm starting to see the backlash against all that and a desire to be set free within students and working classical musicians, even if they feel that could jeopardize their employment in the great cog machine. But hopefully the numbers and courage will swell, and classical music will no longer be a haven largely for conservatives, but include more revolutionaries in middle rangs, not just the occasional super-star soloist artist who can break ranks without fear.

A dab of piss, blood and fur on my snowy white country forest walk romance. And winter apples.

Operaplot

Check out my friend's competition, participate, win prizes. Jonas Kaufmann is this year's judge! All ends this Friday. http://theomniscientmussel.com/2010/04/operaplot-2010-rules-and-faq/

Proust

"Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind. Sorrow kills in the end. And it is in this way that are gradually formed those terrible, ravaged faces of the old Rembrandt, and the old Beethoven, whom everybody used to laugh at. Let us accept the physical damage it does to us in return for the spiritual knowledge it brings us; let us leave our body to disintegrate, since each new particle that breaks away from it comes back, now luminous and legible, to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more gifted have no need, to increase its solidity as our emotions are eroding our life. Ideas are substitutes for sorrows; the moment they change into ideas they lose a part of their power to hurt our hearts and, for a brief moment, the transformation even releases some joy. As for happiness, almost its only useful quality is to make unhappiness possible."

György Sebök

The video www.youtube.com/watch?v=h427L7297xM of György Sebök prompted a friend of mine, who was his student, to reminiscence thus:

"I was told he lost his mother and sister in the Holocaust. He never spoke of that though. But I remember one lesson where I played the Prokofieff "War" sonata #7. Afterwards, he just sat there. Then he said, "never play that for me again" and it was the end of the lesson. Sometimes when I tell people that they laugh, like "wow you played badly". But I understood exactly why he said it. For me it was one of the best lessons ever. I learnt that in art, there is a human limit. And it is sometimes necessary to step observe that limit in art, that even in art, one cannot become inhuman. I feel that Sebok's survival to an old age was an act of will to live as a human. He saw things inhuman, and he was the most sensitive person I've ever met. And somehow, he found his humanity and taught us to see ours. He was a great, great teacher. When he died, Janos Starker called him "the greatest pianist of the 20th century". He wasn't perfect but he was excellent and took care of us and I loved him."

"He never ever judged a competition or entered one. Once I decided to go to one. He said, "well, enjoy the circus". Though he won the Grande Prix du Disque for one of his 50-odd records. He could sit down and play anything in the classical repertoire. His Bartok was a revelation but so was his Schumann. He didn't believe in repetition in practising. He believed in understanding what you did. Re promotion, he told us once that he had never solicited an engagement. He had only played when others asked. He had no agent. Some people thought he was a poor model for university students that way, he wasn't in the "real world" because he didn't teach PR and competition winning. The odd thing though is that of all my teachers, he is the one who taught me the most about the real world. Because his way of focusing the mind showed me how to cope with life situations and professional situations. I think of his words all the time and they give perspective."

"I owe so much to him."


FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Sebök looked back on his concert at age 14, and drew a connection between that event and his teaching philosophy. "During the third movement I made some mistakes," he recalled, "but I didn't feel guilty about it because I felt I had done my best." Similarly, Sebök helped his students overcome fear of mistakes in order to give their best performances: "One has to accept that to be human is to be fallible, and then do the best one can and be captured by the music."

Palin's Second Book and Chopin's 200th

When I told my rather simple, born in a small Ukranian village grandmother the story of Proust who in mid-life shut himself away in a room to write a book for the rest of his life and rarely emerged from its confines, she - while not being truly aware of the magnitude of the achievement but nonetheless impressed and full of reverance mingled with awe not due to snobbery, but from a deep-rooted human instinct for admiration of great deeds (in the same way she admired Chopin) - said something to the effect: "Imagine sacrificing oneself like that and WRITING A BOOK...". And then I think of the present day where anyone who does anything notorious, be it stupid, trivial or even criminal, writes (or rather has it written for them) a best-seller. And I reflect on how the intrinsic value of a book must have fallen greatly over time in the subconscious of the mainstream society due to the overexploitation of this last bastion of the written word's prestige.

"Why I hate ****" rant, or The Death of Art.

Death of art. Textbook correctness. Utter lack of creativity-personality-subjectivity, in other words Artistry as I define it. She is a good example of the dullest, most uninteresting playing that a human being is capable of producing; she takes music and erases from it all colour and inflection except for one: a confident, smoothly unobtrusive inoffensiveness – that most offensive quality in art making. There is no reflection of the human condition/range of expressiveness/weakness (flaw being an archetypal human personality trait) in her playing, which is the fundamental role of art. If I had to choose one characteristic that is most essential for performing European classical music well but too often absent today, it would be vulnerability. Music and art often are not about the rock solid unambivalent success of humanity; they explore our dilemmas and neuroses more readily, and without this vulnerability being brought out, the most human, enlightening, moving and profound dimension is missing. (Granted, it is difficult to have a modern career if one is acquainted with the concept of self-doubt; it seems that more often a supreme, almost arrogant and thoughtless confidence is encouraged and successful. But in such cases artistry too often becomes a casualty of single mindedness/limited life experience, since I believe that the artist can easily and correctly be intuited through their art). And finally the number one reason perhaps for my justified hatred? People idolize her without reservation. Due to the sheer number of accolades and fans she has become for me the poster child for a certain type of performer in the modern day classical music scene: the pure athlete, where the athletic feat is an end unto itself rather than a tool to be used in the creation of something greater. Her greatest attribute is in fact that her technique is absolutely “perfect”, machine-like. But rather than being put to a good use, it exists for its own sake. (I would go as far as to claim that this aseptic technical cleanliness by its very nature actually precludes individuality of interpretation/performance). In any case, I find it depressing that that’s all some people look for in classical music performances! I suppose it is easier to judge simplistic empirical criteria such as correct intonation (something we mistakenly believe is a set thing), unrelenting uniform vibrato and sustained monotonous phrasing and to label them as desirable or GOOD, than it is to see if these things actually MEAN anything (beyond the simple act of someone being able to produce them, thus proving themselves to be “good” artists), or if they are a smoke screen for vapidness. Technical "imperfection" is also not always categorically undesirable or BAD: an extremely high note that is not sharp and is without a wildly flailing about, uncontrolled vibrato is simply not particularly expressive. Though to be fair, I think she is simply a classic example, by no means an isolated one, of the mainstream academic American violin school of playing, as well as being reminiscent of the beloved nice simple girl/boy “next door” (perhaps the key to understanding why her “interpretations” have such MASS appeal), and not the devil incarnate. However the damage to people’s perception of what art is capable of amounts nonetheless to evil.