Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The Budapest Festival Orchestra was stupendous yesterday afternoon. Under the baton of its founder-conductor Iván Fischer, it rollicked through Shostakovich's "Selections from Suite for variety orchestra in eight parts" (1950), finessed Bernstein's "Serenade" (with replacement Dutch violinist Liza Ferschtman) and rendered Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 its fulsome due. I thought the first movement of the Rachmaninov was a little sluggish, but the rest of the symphony was played with such  emotional conviction that I fell in love with the music all over again. I had to rush off, abandoning AH, to meet EN for dinner before the NYC launch of the journal Asymptote. We had a good soto ayam at the Noodle Bar on Orchard Street, and then walked over to the Living Theater for the launch. It was lovely to meet Yew Leong's friends, poet and translator Yu Yan Chen and contributing editor Dylan Suher. Of all the readers, I particularly enjoyed hearing Cole Sw...

After hearing Stephen Dillane read "The Four Quartets" at the Clark Studio Theater last Friday, my longstanding love affair with the poem may be over. The still small voice of the poem that I had always heard in my head was suddenly and merely expressive in the mouth of the actor, expressive of a conservative religion, a contempt for other people and an authoritarian disposition that I knew were there, but had ignored as in the flush of love. I still admire the questing spirit in the poem--"Old men should be explorers"--and still respect the scrupulous scrutiny with which Eliot examines his life. Like Wagner's return to Christian symbolism in Parsifal , which caused Nietzsche to break with him, Eliot enters in "The Four Quartets" a dead end that no one else can follow, except his co-religionists. The contrast with Beethoven's late String Quartet in A minor, which supposedly inspired Eliot, could not have been vaster. Played feelingly by the Miro ...

It has been too long since I attended a concert, and last night's outing to hear the NY Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall was pleasure regained.  According to the playbill, Yefim Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, in 1958, and immigrated to Israel with his family when he was 15. He made his international debut two years later, at the age of 17, with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Since then he has been appearing regularly with North American orchestras.  Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 has a special connection with the NYP. The composer unveiled the work in 1909, playing the solo part himself, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony, which merged with the NYP. The playbill claims that Rachmaninoff only got round to practicing his part during the Atlantic crossing, when he rigged up a mute piano keyboard for that purpose.  I came to Rachmaninoff through Scott Hicks's 1996 film "Shine," a biopic about the Australi...