Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Heard Orpheus Chamber Orchestra again last night, at Carnegie Hall. Did not care very much for the score or the playing of Tippett's Divertimento on "Sellinger's Round" with its English musical allusions.  Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the French pianist, came on next to play, with Louis Hanzlik on trumpet, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor. First time I heard the piano concerto, and I loved it for its youthful brio. It brimmed with ideas and moved with zip. Thibaudet was poetic where the music was poetic and brash where it was brash. A tad too civilized, perhaps, but that might be my prejudice against the French. After the intermission, we heard Honegger's languorous evocation of a summer morning. Pastorale d’été was quite lovely, if not exactly ground-breaking. Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings concluded the program. Lush and sentimental. I hated it. I thought the musicians were on auto-pilot. Here was where an original interpreter--a conductor, ...

TLS July 9 2010 from J.P.E. Harper-Scott's review of Roland John Wiley's Tchaikovsky , and Adam Zamoyski's Chopin: Prince of the Romantics : Very touching are Tchaikovsky's letters to his brother Modest in 1876, which show him racked by his urge to perform sexual acts that he admits are contrary to his Christian belief. "Buggermania," he writes. "forms an impassable gulf between me and most people." Admitting to thoughts of joining a monastery, Piotr implores his brother, whose sexual interests were similar, to exercise control over himself. Some of the letters are more explicit than others. of Josef Kotek, fifteen years his junior, he writes,  When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it . . . passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength . . . . Yet I am far from the desire for a physical bond. I feel that if this happened, I would cool towar...

I think I may fall in love with Leonard Bernstein. His Symphony No. 2, inspired by W. H. Auden's poem "The Age of Anxiety," is melancholic yet optimistic, colorful yet witty, and, in its hospitality to different musical genres like jazz and big band, so generous. It captures what I like to think of as the best of New York. Bernstein is supposed to have said that he did not prefer any particular cuisine, musical genre or form of sex. A discriminating omnivorousness. Jean-Yves Thibaudet was poetic and funny on the piano. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Dudamel, attacked the music with discipline and gusto. (Glyn Maxwell wrote an interesting piece comparing the poem unfavorably to the symphony.) It made Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 "Pathetique" sound very old hat to me after the intermission. LW had the opposite reaction. The music was sculpted with emotional precision by Dudamel and his musicians. I could almost see the swirl of cream in the air above t...

March 27, Friday: I watched the Columbia-Barnard Classical Drama Group's performance of Euripides' Medea in the Minor Latham Playhouse, at Barnard. The actors spoke in Ancient Greek, which was glossed with English super-titles. Medea was played by two women roped to each other, in order to reflect her dual nature and internal conflict. My friend, who played the Nurse, spoke of her mistress' grief with genuine pathos. The other actors seemed too young to feel their parts. April 2, Thursday: Heard the NY Phil with TCH last night. Stravinsky's Concerto in E-flat for Chamber Orchestra, Dumbarton Oaks (1937-38) opened the concert. Lisa Batiashvili was the soloist in Prokofiev's modernist Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op, 63 (1935), a work he wrote before repatriating to the Soviet Union. Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888), after the intermission, was not subtle but rousing nevertheless. The horn in the second movement was lovely. The "fa...

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...