Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I don’t know why but I thought Joshua Bell was English, and so was surprised to discover last week, just before his concert on Friday, that he is in fact from Bloomington, Indiana. Owning such boyish good looks, he is astonishingly the ripe old age of 42. He has already had a long career, having debuted with Riccardo Muti and The Philadelphia Orchestra when he was only 14. 28 years in the business, and still looking as fresh as a daisy. I was really looking forward to hear him, not just because I have heard of him, but also because he was playing a composer I like. I know Saint-Saëns by his symphonies, and to listen to a violin concerto would be a revelation. The concerto is wonderful, especially the second movement when the violin rises into stratospheric heights. Bell made the ethereal eerily lyrical. The gypsy-influenced music in the third movement was played with verve and sensitivity, I thought. And yet, and yet. I could not put my finger on it until TCH used the word “aloof.” The...

I finally bought a CD player, from Circuit City, and now can play the music gathering dust in my desk drawer. From my meager collection, I found a CD I love: Pavel Sporcl playing Dvorak's Concerto in A minor for Violin and Orchestra, and Tchaikovsky's Concerto in D major. The playing is unabashedly Romantic, without becoming sentimental or melodramatic. I thought about how ephemeral music is, how it lives and dies in time. What I was hearing was a recording, which, by definition, is a copy. A performance cannot be possessed in the same way as a painting can be collected. A poem is both performance and object. It is performance when it is read (by the poet in his head or in public, or by the reader). As performance, it is painfully transient; a recording of Auden reading "In Praise of Limestone" is just that, a recording, a copy of a performance. On another day, he might have read it differently. A poem, however, is also an object: a text is a poem in a more literal se...