Beethoven’s Symphony no 6 in F major, opus 68, “Pastoral” Saturday, Feb 25 2012

here is the Beethoven that made me believe if not indeed

in God at least in something more transcendental than our

mere incarnate existence 

 

it was specifically in the second movement that I found

myself dancing in an altogether other dimension with

my very own beloved, my angel, who’d flown for much

too short a season too close, it appeared, to the ground,

the ground had become much too insubstantial to sustain

so ethereal an organism   

 

may my beloved angel rest in infinite peace

 

 

Beethoven’s Symphony no 6 in F major, opus 68, “Pastoral”  (1808)

 

     1.   Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande

           (Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arrival in the Country):

                  Allegro non troppo (sprighly but not overly so)

     2.   Szene am Bach (Scene by the Brook):

                  Andante molto mosso (at a brisk walking pace)

     3.   Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute (Happy Gathering of Country Folk):

                  Allegro (sprightly)

     4.   Gewitter – Sturm (Thunderstorm – Storm): 

                  Allegro (sprightly)

     5.   Hirtengesang. Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm

           (Shepherd’s Song. Cheerful and Thankful Feelings after the Storm):

                  Allegretto (not quite sprightly) 

 

the instructions for the movements actually indicate a descriptive,

which is to say a literal, account, wherein musical notes are to

become words that evoke a setting, music assumes the properties

of language, you’ll hear the birds, you’ll hear the brooks, you’ll hear

the thunder, you’ll even imagine on your very own alone the rainbows

 

 

Herbert von Karajan (1908 – 1989) conducts from the hereafter - 

this is 1967 – a version that is just about definitive, certainly

mystical, magical, wonderful 

 

 

with abstract camera work to make watching worth your while,

the close-ups of the maestros thumbs alone are worth the price

of admission

 

 

Richard

 

 

 

 

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Anton Bruckner’s Symphony no 7‏ Tuesday, Feb 21 2012

this is what it’ll sound like, I believe, when you enter
the gates of heaven, should you actually watch this

video you’ll be forthwith, I’m sure, even transported 

there, I always am 
 
Anton Bruckner‘s Symphony no 7 is the high mass of
all concertos, this is where Bruckner, patriarch and
prophet, gives us his, our, musical description of

grace 

Celibidache makes the occasion august, and utterly

transcendental 

 

no need to genuflect, of course, only to partake and

enjoy

 

 

Richard 

 

psst: I believe it was Herbert Blomstedt among conductors  

         who said that Bruckner for him was proof of God

 

         though I wouldn’t completely agree I think he is a

         very strong incentive, but I’d needed something 

         much more intimate and personalized, for me it

         took Beethoven 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565‏ Friday, Feb 17 2012

Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565  
 
         for feet          

         for mostly fingers 

                                                                                                                                               Richard

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Beethoven’s Sonata no 14 in C-sharp minor, “Quasi una Fantasia”, opus 27, no 2 (the “Moonlight Sonata”) Friday, Feb 17 2012

Beethoven’s Sonata no 14 in C-sharp minor, “Quasi una Fantasia”,

opus 27, no 2 - better known as the “Moonlight Sonata” after a

music critic several years after Beethoven had died likened its

famous first movement to impressions of moonlight, and the

name stuck - is probably along with his no 8, the “Sonate

Pathétique“, the most famous piano sonata in the history of

music, its name alone is hard to forget, and its murmuring

chords, like passing clouds before the quiet and uncluttered

simplicity of its central melody, like the longings of the very

moon, is etched in our Western cultural subconscious

 

“Quasi una Fantasia” means “in the manner of an improvisation”,

an idea already which would’ve been considered impudent earlier

at court, where decorum and form had held rigorous sway  

 

but Beethoven begins as well with a slow movement, an “adagio

sostenuto“, a sustained adagio, suggesting the inexorable passage

of time, interrupted only midst its unending undulations by the 

mournful cry of a melody, silken, yet solitary, as a moon    

 

so plaintive a display of pathos would not have played well

before an aristocracy which, ruled by codes of honour, would

have found common, base, such flagrant self-indulgence

 

but times had changed, discontent was having its say, and

Beethoven was fervently speaking it, for his era, and for very

history   

 

 

that a sonata would start with a slow movement also put into

question the very tradition, ineluctable until then, of having

to keep its place in the middle, by changing the order of play

the order of emotional commitment necessarily followed,

suggesting that these could be manipulated as in a play, a

novel, a poem, a narrative, wherein notes would speak like

words, Beethoven was devising to make music thus into a

veritable language 

 

just listen 

 

 

after a short middle movement, the allegretto, faster than

the first, the presto, the last and fastest movement of all,

usually the shortest movement of a sonata on account of

its technically difficult speed, is longer here than both other

movements put together, to concert pianists a very Everest,

a test of their mettle and skill, an irresistible challenge to

any ambitious virtuoso, another, more pragmatic, reason,

incidentally, for the success, and survival, of a piece, which

is championed, kept in view, by an artist for its ability to

make him or her technically impress, thereby creating the

canon, another word for the repertoire 

 

 

despite a few fluffed, here and there even discordant, notes,

Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991), a titan among pianists, manages 

a completely convincing interpretation, not easily bested 

 

enjoy

 

 

Richard 

 

 

 

 

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“Man at the Window” – Gustave Caillebotte‏ Saturday, Feb 11 2012

             

                                  “Man at the Window“  (1875)
 
                                            Gustave Caillebotte  

                                                                  __________ 

 

 

it’s hard not to think of Caspar David Friedrich (1818) or

Norman Rockwell (1962) upon viewing now this painting,

which came up today in a lecture I was viewing on the

Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, 1848-1894, halfway

between both 

 

they are, all three of course, all about contemplation,

but all explore a different aspect of that phenomenon

 

let me suggest that Friedrich‘s concerns are patently

metaphysical, he casts his eyes, which we do not see,

incidentally, upon a horizon that looks like destiny,

ours by extension, murky yet imbued with possibility,

even the improbable

  

or maybe this is just what I see

 

 

Rockwell‘s perspective is instead aesthetic, a view

of the world as expressed by others, the capacity to

understand and relate to other voices, opinions, within 

our social construct, allegorized here by the exhibition

room

 

it is a closed speculation, circumscribed by the limited

dimensions, physical or conceptual, of any other

counterpart, contained therefore metaphorically, and

concisely, within a frame  

 

that frame represents the physical limits imposed on

a painter, but also the conceptual limitations of the

viewer him- or herself, it works both ways, for some

this will be a man merely looking out a window, for

others an opening on an epoch

  

 

Caillebotte, 1848-1894, looks inward to his isolation,

alienation, from his luxurious interior, black as a cave,

upon a confined avenue where nothing but an impossible

communication, with the lone woman crossing the

street, surely a furtive eye, gives way necessarily to

resignation, and a kind of existential yield to ineluctable

fate, a sensibility beginning to burgeon at the time, see

Nietzsche, 1844-1900, and nihilism  

 

then again this is only my impression, this is what I got

 

and a picture is worth, we say, a thousand words

 

 

Richard  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Brahms piano concerto no 1 in D minor, opus 15‏ Friday, Feb 10 2012

this morning as I washed the dishes - nary a butler had 

managed to show, nary a merciful maid – I thought I’d,

as often I do, put on some Classical music, Romantic,

Impressionist, something, to tide me through the tedium  

 

there was a Brahms Piano Concerto no 1 to look into I’d

set aside, his opus 15, in D minor, Emanuel Ax with

Bernard Haitink

 

Emanuel Ax - a man I’ve come to admire above all other

musical giants for his humble roots, Winnipeg trained, and

for the dizzying heights he’s reached in the musical 

firmament, humbly, not so austere, not so patrician as his

European counterparts, and obviously, maybe consequently,

finding joy in, not empire over, the music - does the pianistic

honours

 

Bernard Haitink conducts in perfect synchronicity, leading

the impeccable Chamber Orchestra of Europe, at London’s

Royal Albert Hall, August 18, 2011 

 

 

by the third movement my hands were out of the water,

dry, my undivided attention was riveted, ready to all out 

applaud a thrilling concert, which indeed I did, long, loud, 

and with all my heart

 

you too likely will 

 

 

Richard 

 

 

 

 

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“The Connoiseur” – Norman Rockwell‏ Thursday, Feb 9 2012

       

                                        ”The Connoiseur“ (1962)
 
                                               Norman Rockwell
 
                                                       ____   

serendipitously trolling Rockwells after sensing his spirit in a

poem I’d just been reading I happened upon this marvelous

piece, an homage of course to Jackson Pollock, perhaps the

most successful of the Abstract Expressionists

 

but lurking behind the obvious surface of this painting it was

easy to recognize also another glaring, though not as explicit

maybe, tribute, misted perhaps by the transformational

permutations of context and time, wherein a seed becomes

a tree, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, to no less an iconic 

masterpiece than Caspar David Friedrich‘s “Wanderer Above  

a Sea of Fog“, the work we just, a blog or so ago, explored

 

both look upon their own idea of a new horizon

 

and a Pop Art stab at an Abstract Expressionist through a

High Romantic is a cute trick, witty, wonderful, wise

 

 

it’s an easy step to a literary counterpart from there, Keats’ 

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” nearly automatically

comes to mind, another iconic Romantic new dawn

 

               Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

                   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

                   Round many western islands have I been

               Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

               Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

                   That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

                   Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

               Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

               Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

                   When a new planet swims into his ken;

                Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

                   He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

               Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

                   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 

 

Beethoven, were I to go to music, is always, especially in his

later works, contemplating new dimensions, new worlds, he

more than any other composer is a metaphysical explorer

 

maybe also Pink Floyd

 

who’ve taken me to their own also exalted musical galaxies, 

awesome commanding perspectives, transcendental heights,

to my own “wild” indeed “surmise / Silent, upon a peak in”

my version of “Darien” 

 

 

Richard 

 

psst:  Chapman’s Homer   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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