Esa Pekka strikes again

Another glorious evening (with one dry spell: badly rehearsed Haydn with a very dull first violin) at Avery Fisher tonight as Esa Pekka drew a stunning performance of Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle out of the enormous orchestra, along with a radiant Michelle de Young and a brooding Gabor Bretz.  Yes, these are cliches when applied to a soprano and a bass, but in this case, they were realized on stage with real power.  De Young was seductive, playful, frightened, repulsed, intrigued, hopeful, and loving in turns -- not only in her expressions, but in her voice; and Bretz was tragically woeful, anxious, and sexy, violent bass version of Tony Leung.  (I'm a fan of Wong Kar Wai, and I'm reading "Three Kingdoms," so I have wuxia films on the brain.)

Though I'm exceptionally busy teaching, writing a proposal for the American Philological Association, and preparing two lectures to give in Canada this Thursday/Friday, the few hours of listening at Lincoln Center were exemplary of the kind of otium Cicero finds most refreshing:

Quaeres a nobis, Grati, cur tanto opere hoc homine delectemur. Quia suppeditat nobis ubi et animus ex hoc forensi strepitu reficiatur, et aures convicio defessae conquiescant. An tu existimas aut suppetere nobis posse quod cotidie dicamus in tanta varietate rerum, nisi animos nostros doctrina excolamus; aut ferre animos tantam posse contentionem, nisi eos doctrina eadem relaxemus?

You're asking me, Gratius, why I take so much delight in this man (the poet Archias, whose Roman citizenship Cicero is defending).  Because he provides me with a place where my spirit may be refreshed from the noise in the lawcourt, and my ears, worn out from arguments, can relax.  Do you think that speaking daily on such a wide variety of topics can come easily to us if we fail to cultivate our souls with learning?  Or do you think that our souls can bear such heavy strain, if we do not relax them with this same learning?    

Perhaps Haydn, Ligeti, and Bartok aren't doctrina, exactly--Cicero is speaking of literary pleasures--but I persist in thinking that his point applies.   

Hungarian Echoes and contemporary music

Last Thursday I got on the subway very ready to listen to some music.  It had been a busy, appointment-filled day -- largely administrative meetings rather than wrestling with conceptual problems -- and while those days leave me tired out, my brain isn't "full" in the way it can feel after a long afternoon reading Arendt or Horace.  Also, we had bumped into Esa-Pekka Salonen on the plane from Chicago last Sunday (though I didn't approach him to say how happy I was that he was conducting in New York, since he had that harried, Sunday-evening-flight look on his face that I know intimately from the mirror), so there was a small touch of close-brush-with-celebrity excitement in play as well.   I've liked Esa-Pekka for years, mainly because he has always struck me as the real thing, not only a strong conductor with an ambitious vision and good taste who, as I understand it, helped make the LA Philharmonic a great hall but an accomplished composer and (always important for me, I confess) an attractive, charismatic presence on stage.

While I was anticipating a satisfying evening, my expectations were overturned -- not the moment the concert began, with Haydn's sixth Symphony (Le Matin), which the orchestra played perfectly well -- but with the opening chords and bangs of Ligeti's Piano Concerto.  I didn't know a thing about modern music when I was young, but now I can't imagine life without it, and the gloriously well-constructed yet explosive hotch-potch of ideas and sounds in the Ligeti reminded me how much I have come to rely on musical experiences to reveal something important about the modern world.
The concert ended with Bartok's Concert for Orchestra, more familiar than Ligeti, rousingly played, the waves of passionate sound produced by the massive string sections at some points just grazing a resemblance to the best possible film music.  (That's a compliment, in this case.  I'm not talking about Howard Shore!)

Busy month of recovery

In mid-February I took a nasty fall on the slopes of Squaw Valley, California, and suffered a severe concussion that's made keeping up with the blog (let alone the daily work-pile) very challenging.  I'm now more or less back on track and have plenty to say, starting with my reading over the past few weeks -- more de Beauvoir, Christopher Isherwood, and Robert Pippin on movies, as well as Esa-Pekka Salonen's marvelous concert series "Hungarian Echoes."  Now, dinner followed by a concert of new music in Brooklyn.  Until soon!