Salonen's Last Stand, Mahler's Resurrection

Last night I was back at Davies Hall for the first in departing Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen's final run of performances, a three-concert run of Mahler's Second Symphony, the Resurrection. I was there once again courtesy of Lisa Hirsch, & I am particularly grateful as the Symphony's Uber-style surge pricing means single tickets for these concerts are going for astronomical sums, which is not surprising given this might be our last chance to hear what one of the great conductors of our time can do with our orchestra..

The Resurrection, a massive work, an emotional landmark for many symphony-goers, is always a special occasion, though of course as Salonen's last stand, these performances are particularly fraught. I assume the repertory was set before Symphony management made the unexplained & inexplicable decision to let their prize music director go, but the circumstances made the choice both ironic & hopeful.

The hall was packed & the audience vociferous in its applause & cheers for Salonen & Co every chance they got (not that there wasn't some of the usual bad behavior – very loud coughs, items dropped, & one man down front who had to be cautioned about his cell phone use during the performance by an usher with a sign; people are going to people, no matter how special the occasion). And this was a special occasion. The applause for the conductor's entry were in support; the applause & cheers for his final bows were in tribute. This was a stupendous performance on everyone's part: the orchestra, the chorus & their director (Jenny Wong), the soloists (soprano Heidi Stober & mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke), as well as Salonen. Given what I'll keep calling the circumstances, & despite or perhaps really because of the magnificent artistic achievement of all the musicians concerned, it was difficult not to feel that the performance was at some level the musical equivalent of the fuck-you dress.

As you can probably tell from my attempts to marshal praise-words into some sort of coherent form, this performance – strong, supple, soaring in its clarity & emotion – was a glowing one. I've been to other powerful Mahler performances that, while memorable, also left me feeling bludgeoned, not lifted up as this one did. This symphony is a tricky ship to sail! To switch metaphors, it was like seeing a familiar Old Master painting after a scrupulous cleaning, revealing shades of color & swathes of details that had been hidden under wax & varnish, waiting to be revealed. Particular instruments (the harps, the organ, the timpani) spoke with an invigorating clarity & force, but also with a tenderness, I hadn't recalled. The slow still entry of the chorus was like the first rays of sunlight after a stormy (picturesque, but stormy) night. Cooke, whom I believe I once described as "reliably radiant", came through as usual, with a voice like the warmth of a tender embrace. Stober soared along with the sinuous musical lines. The chorus ascended as one, & brought us with them. Requiems often try to duplicate the trumpets of the Last Judgment, but this was the thunderous opening of the final ascension. And this transitory & electric cathedral, with its vast perspective of arching architecture, its colors & pillars, &, this being Mahler, its gargoyles, had been summoned from the score as by a magician's wand by the conductor's baton, floating over us, suspended, giving us the usual dilemma: what do you do after hearing such a revelation?

I've read through what I've written a couple of times, wondering if I should tone it down, tamp down the extravagance, prune a few adjectives. But why? Ultimately, we go to live performances to have an evening like this, one that will live in memory as a justification for the time & money we spend on this strange hobby of going to sit in the dark, listening to sounds that will pass away just as we (often barely) comprehend them. So let my babbling stand as a monument to the why & wherefore of a concert-going life.

Enough of my raving. Re-entry has, as usual, been difficult. This was a great evening, & as for what happens to the Symphony after this, well, resurrection is always the hope.

for Mary Oliver

The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
Thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

************

Just As The Calendar Began To Say Summer

I went out of the schoolhouse fast
and through the gardens and to the woods
and spent all summer forgetting what I'd been taught –

two times two, and diligence, and so forth,
how to be modest and useful, and how to succeed and so forth,
machines and oil and plastic and money and so forth.

By fall I had healed somewhat, but was summoned back
to the chalky rooms and the desks, to sit and remember

the way the river kept rolling its pebbles,
the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn't a penny in the bank,
the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.

– Mary Oliver

Both of these poems are from Oliver's collection Devotions.

The poet Mary Oliver died last week, on Thursday 17 January 2019, aged 83.

I've been a little surprised by the somewhat grudging tone of several obituaries I've seen, which note that she is extraordinarily popular and perhaps overly quotable (I guess they mean popular for a poet, and I don't know what's wrong with being cherished by many readers, or saying memorable things in a memorable way), that the New York Times didn't think highly of her (that's fine with me; I don't think highly of the New York Times), and that her poetry is "simple" (by which I guess they mean she strives for clarity, which, again, does not strike me as a fault in a writer trying to communicate a message). Simple? She is the Wordsworth of our time, and he too was often criticized or mocked for his deeply subversive "simplicity". Like him, she is very much a poet of the healing power of Nature, and of oneself alone in Nature, and of the power of memories conjured up in trying circumstances. Look at the two poems I've posted above: in the first, the odd line endings keep you off-balance as she walks you through the worlds around us. Significantly, she starts off not by describing these separate kingdoms of trees and snow as they are on their own, but by describing the names we have given them – this not only puts us in direct relation to these kingdoms, it emphasizes that it is our perception of them that has the greatest effect on us, so that at the end of the poem she can remind us that we too, in our inmost selves, are inextricably part of this natural world. The modifier sweetly added to the earlier wild (Thus the world / grows rich, grows wild, and you too / grow rich, grow sweetly wild) brings us to an elemental joy in our union with the natural world around us. In the second poem, it is not so much learning that she runs from and tries to forget, but the social shackles forced on children as they are trained to be members of our wasteful, money-obsessed society – diligence, and modesty and plastics and money and "success" that isn't defined because it's clear what it means in this world she is supposed to enter. The repetition of and so forth indicates the wearying sameness of these lessons, and that we also know all too well what they're comprised of. Her true education, and this ironically also happens to her in the classroom, comes in the precise memories of the world outside her, the world from which school is trying to separate her. Oliver's insistence on the importance of noticing not what we are supposed to see but what is actually there, on finding for ourselves that which will bring us meaning, and on the crucial importance of, and our dependence on and co-existence with, the natural world that we mostly exploit and ignore, makes her one of our leading political poets.

Derek Walcott, 1930 - 2017

Derek Walcott died last week at the age of 87. Here is one of his poems:

Sea Canes

Half my friends are dead.
I will make you new ones, said earth.
No, give me them back, as they were, instead,
with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talk
from the faint surf's drone
through the canes, but I cannot walk

on the moonlit leaves of ocean
down that white road alone,
or float with the dreaming motion

of owls leaving earth's load.
O earth, the number of friends you keep
exceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver;
they were the seraph lances of my faith,
but out of what is lost grows something stronger

that has the rational radiance of stone,
enduring moonlight, further than despair,
strong as the wind, that through dividing canes
brings those we love before us, as they were,
with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

Derek Walcott

from Collected Poems 1948 - 1984

for Tomas Transtromer

Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer died today. Here is a poem from his Selected Poems, edited by Robert Hass.

The Half-Finished Heaven

Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton

Poem of the Week 2014/23

Family Affairs

You let down, from arched
Windows,
Over hand-cut stones of your
Cathedrals, seas of golden hair.

While I, pulled by dusty braids,
Left furrows in the
Sands of African beaches.

Princes and commoners
Climbed over waves to reach
Your vaulted boudoirs,

As the sun, capriciously,
Struck silver fire from waiting
Chains, where I was bound.

My screams never reached
The rare tower where you
Lay, birthing masters for
My sons, and for my
Daughters, a swarm of
Unclean badgers, to consume
Their history.

Tired now of pedestal existence
For fear of flying
And vertigo, you descend
And step lightly over
My centuries of horror
And take my hand.

Smiling call me
       Sister.

Sister, accept
That I must wait a
While. Allow an age
Of dust to fill
Ruts left on my
Beach in Africa.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou died last Wednesday, 28 May, at age 86. I think there has been a tendency to see her as a purveyor of Facebook-appropriate uplift, so I thought I'd undercut the kumbaya with this caustic poem in which she politely but firmly disassociates herself from white women who feel that they are her sisters in oppression. She describes these women using fairy-tale imagery, and an abundance of it (arched windows, hand-cut cathedral stones, seas of golden hair, princes (as well as commoners) climbing over waves, the rare tower, even the surreal and striking touch of the woman giving birth to badgers). In contrast, only a few stark details are given about the speaker's life: "pulled by dusty braids," she leaves furrows in African beaches; she is in chains and screams unheard. What goes unspoken, as they often were in American culture, are the reasons for these things: the abduction of Africans (dragged to the ships waiting just off those beaches) to be sold as slaves in America, and the history of sexual exploitation of slave women (referenced indirectly in the "swarm of / Unclean badgers" – burrowing, tenacious, dirt-dwelling animals – consuming the daughters). But when we seek explanations of the speaker's oblique references to her life (why is the woman being dragged forcibly down African beaches? why is she in chains? why is she screaming, and why is she unheard?), we are forced by the poem to remember these things, and to notice that they are officially unspoken, though the woman herself cannot forget them.

The woman in the tower, Rapunzel-like, lets down her own hair; the speaker, by contrast, is prevented from acting on her own, and is pulled by her hair away from her native land (this use of hair reminds me of a similar device in Celan's famous Holocaust poem, Todesfuge (Death Fugue), in which the "golden hair" of the typically German Margarete – note that the name is also that of the innocent young woman in Goethe's Faust – is contrasted with the "ashen hair" of the Jewish woman Shulamith). The woman in the tower also is allowed to change her own status: "tired now of pedestal existence" she descends her tower on her own, stepping lightly, easily. The speaker is not unsympathetic to this woman; a fairy-tale life is not quite a real human life, and neither is life in a tower. Indeed she does not reject the woman's addressing her as "sister"; she returns the title, perhaps with some irony, as she points out that she cannot overlook the woman's complicity in her own tragic story. And the title of the poem, Family Affairs, while suggesting that both women are members of the overall human family, also carries in this context an unavoidable underlying remembrance of the sexual exploitation of slaves. The capricious sun shines on both of them. But their troubles are not the same, and the speaker rejects easy, self-serving identification.

The "fear of flying" line is clearly a reference to Erica Jong's 1973 novel of that name, which became a cultural touchstone for 1970s feminists. The date of this poem also suggests that it was written in response to the women's movement of that period (it was published in the 1983 collection Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?; I took it from The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersand). But I think it is too limiting to read the poem solely in light of internecine battles during what is now called second-wave feminism (at the time we called it simply "feminism"); rather it is also a reminder, despite all we have in common as human beings, that there are some irreducible, historical differences, and the broader your category, the more likely it is to be useless. (This is as good a place as any to suggest that if you haven't already done so, it's worth spending the time to read Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent article The Case for Reparations.)

I heard Angelou speak once, at the Boston Public Library, shortly after I had moved there in 1981. It was one of the most astonishing, indelible performances I have ever seen, and I still remember it vividly over thirty years later. She captivated a packed auditorium with stories from her life – clearly, many of those in attendance had already read her famous memoirs and knew these stories, but wanted to hear them from her. She obliged, and spoke, moved, and even sang for us like the expert performer she was. (And as she signed books afterwards, she had something warm and gracious to say to each person.) I think it's important to remember that as a writer, she started as a performer: she represents the poet as public witness, as prophetic speaker. For most of us, poetry is written and interior; she represents what remains of the great oral tradition of poetry, the bardic tradition in which you serve as the public's memory. I was completely captivated by her powerful presence and her story-telling skill. The evening had special resonance for me, since a few weeks earlier I had been the victim of racial violence. There was some culture shock involved in moving from post-Flower Power Berkeley to post-busing crisis Boston, and I had noted that when I had to tell people (mostly co-workers, who were mostly white) what had happened, they fixated on the fact that it was black guys who had (out of the blue; I was in what I didn't realize was the wrong neighborhood, and some genius had scheduled a football game between an all-black school and an all-white school which had ended in a semi-riot, and I met some of the audience going home) attacked me, but they rarely seemed to pick up (though I was always careful to emphasize it) that it was another group of black guys who, at some personal risk, helped me out. At the time I didn't even have a working phone, or a TV (of course this was long before personal computers), and everyone I knew was back home in California. I had a radio, so when I got back from the hospital emergency room to my tiny, shabby apartment, I turned on the MIT station, which for some reason was playing nothing that weekend but gospel music. That seemed like one perspective on what had happened to me, and so was hearing Angelou speak several weeks later. History is complicated, and so are people, and life is very difficult, and though these things seem incredibly obvious, people seem to keep forgetting that these things apply to all of us, in different ways. When Angelou told the Boston crowd about her first trip to Africa, she mentioned stepping off the plane and realizing that for the first time in her life she was surrounded by people who looked like her – that, for once, she was not a "minority." She paused and said to the crowd in her molasses voice, in an ironic, slightly amazed, seductive tone: "Heady, isn't it?" She was a remarkable American.

Poem of the Week 2013/38

by Walt Whitman, from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, the song of the hermit thrush:

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv'd me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv'd us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love – but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

From me to thee glad serenade,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil'd death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

This is for AMV, 8 February 1926 - 12 September 2013: "rest, rest, perturbed spirit!"

for Seamus Heaney

The poet Seamus Heaney died today in Dublin, Ireland. My books are in even greater disarray than usual so the only thing by him I could find this evening was his famous translation of Beowulf, the earliest surviving great work of English-language poetry. In the excerpt below, for king, prince, lord, read artist, poet, man.

Then the Geat people began to construct
a mound on a headland, high and imposing,
a marker that sailors could see from far away,
and in ten days they had done the work.
It was their hero's memorial; what remained from the fire
they housed inside it, behind a wall
as worthy of him as their workmanship could make it.
And they buried torques in the barrow, and jewels
and a trove of such things as trespassing men
had once dared to drag from the hoard.
They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure,
gold under gravel, gone to earth,
as useless to men now as it ever was.
Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
chieftain's sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing,
for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear
and cherish his memory when that moment comes
when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.
So the Geat people, his hearth companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

translated by Seamus Heaney
13 April 1939 - 30 August 2013

for John Hollander

The poet John Hollander died last Saturday. In memoriam Knopf Doubleday sent out to its Poetry Month e-mail list the following poem, from Hollander's most recent collection, A Draft of Light, published in 2008. It feels like a poem written with a lifetime's experience, dealing lightly with deep things.

Some Playthings

A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown

oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it "just" the wind

playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with

an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?

These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their

frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic

substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?

Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly

dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath

of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.

John Hollander
28 October 1929 - 17 August 2013

Szymborska

I just heard that the great poet Wislawa Szymborska died last Wednesday, 1 February 2012. She was born in Poland on 2 July 1923 (a sentence which should convey some of the difficulties of her life). She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Here are two of her poems, from Poems New and Collected 1957-1997.

The translations are by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Still Life with a Balloon

Returning memories?
No, at the time of death
I'd like to see lost objects
return instead.

Avalanches of gloves,
coats, suitcases, umbrellas –
come, and I'll say at last:
What good's all this?

Safety pins, two odd combs,
a paper rose, a knife,
some string – come, and I'll say
at last: I haven't missed you.

Please turn up, key, come out,
wherever you've been hiding,
in time for me to say:
You've gotten rusty, friend!

Downpours of affidavits,
permits and questionnaires,
rain down and I will say:
I see the sun behind you.

My watch, dropped in a river,
bob up and let me seize you –
then, face to face, I'll say:
Your so-called time is up.

And lastly, toy balloon
once kidnapped by the wind –
come home, and I will say:
There are no children here.

Fly out the open window
and into the wide world;
let someone else shout "Look!"
and I will cry.


View with a Grain of Sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

beauty and sadness

I hadn’t heard Dubravka Tomsic in several years, possibly not since I left Boston, so I was glad to attend her San Francisco Performances recital last Saturday at Herbst Theater. They present her fairly often, according to the program, so I guess I just wasn’t paying attention. The first half of the program was all Beethoven (piano sonata in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, “Tempest” and piano sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 81a, “Les Adieux”) and the second half was the Four Chopin Ballades. There were three encores, two by Liszt (Valse Oubliée, S215/No. 1 and Concert Étude S145/No. 2, Dance of the Gnomes) with Chopin’s Minute Waltz in between.

Tomsic seemed to have a cold or allergies, since she coughed a bit and wiped her nose between numbers, as did the audience, but it made no difference in her attitude or her performance. She is a stolid player, one of the most unhistrionic pianists I’ve ever seen, but when she sits down and plays, pure glorious streams of precise and poetic sound flow into the hall. The evening needs no impertinent commentary from me. Sometimes the concerts you enjoy the most are the ones that leave you with the least to say.

Like many opera lovers yesterday, I was shocked and saddened by the sudden death of Daniel Catán. I discovered his music at the old Tower records on Bay and Columbus, when I saw a cut-out of his opera Rappaccini’s Daughter, which interested me because I assumed (correctly) it was based on Hawthorne’s short story. The music was so rich and immediately attractive. Later I went up to Seattle and enjoyed Florencia en el Amazonas very much. The older I get, the younger seem the ages at which people die. He was only 62. He should have had many more years of composition.

final Merce

The taqueria where I usually eat before events in Berkeley has taken rather charmingly taken to handing out fortunes with their burritos. Thursday before last mine said “An interesting musical opportunity is in your near future.” That’s always good to know. Then I headed to Moe’s, my favorite bookstore, to kill some time. Of course I ended up buying more books, which is something I really don’t need to do. But I had intended to buy some plays by Wallace Shawn after hearing him read several weeks ago, and I found some, and since you never know what you’ll find at a used book store I also picked up an attractive hardbound edition of The Golden Bowl, which I’ve been meaning to re-read since I haven’t read it since I was thirteen, which was so long ago it’s as if I haven’t read it at all. So I was feeling elegiac and subject to chance when I finally was in my seat for the opening stand of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour.

MCDC had a long association with Cal Performances and I know I’ve seen them before, though I couldn’t tell you offhand how many times. I don’t recognize the dancers from year to year, the way I do with Mark Morris. This is MCDC’s final tour before they disband (Cunningham died in 2009, aged 90). I thought this meant that Cunningham, in a final and full embrace of the concepts of chance and impermanence, was simply dissolving his life’s work, which I found very moving – many of us talk a lot about the transitory nature of existence and the mutability of life and so forth, but secretly we all hope that future generations will pore over any scrap we leave behind, the way classics scholars pore over any little fragment left by centuries-dead poets celebrating their brief moment on earth. It was almost unsettling to me that Cunningham would renounce that common human wish to retain power over the future, as if he were the Cincinnatus of dance.

It turns out that I hadn’t quite understood correctly: although the MCDC is being disbanded (which is perhaps the final lesson Cunningham learned from Martha Graham), there is a legacy plan in place to continue his work (you may read about it and support it here). And presumably some of this final generation of dancers trained by Cunningham will continue the apostolic succession in their own creative life.

The first piece was Pond Way from 1998, set to Brian Eno’s New Ikebukuro (for three CD players – I wonder if the CD player as musical instrument is on its way to becoming like the ondes martenot), with a backdrop of Lichtenstein’s Landscape with Boat (so large it looked almost abstract, with the tiny boat in the lower left-hand corner, which gave it a very Japanese woodblock-print sort of look). My memory of this is of a very quiet, flowing dance, that was almost hypnotic – I was very surprised when it ended to find that half an hour had gone by; I would have guessed we’d only been watching for ten or, max, fifteen minutes.

During the intermission the woman on my right and I ran down the list of collaborators (Eno, Lichtenstein, Cage, Rauschenberg, Cunningham himself) and tried to remember which were still living. She said, “I have the feeling tonight that I’m communing with the dead,” and I think that spirit of appreciation and farewell was common in the audience. It does seem as if a major chapter in the history of American avant-garde creativity is now closed, though of course these things just metamorphose and never really end. Incidentally New World Records has issued a fascinating ten-disc set of music composed for Cunningham’s dances. I’ve just started listening to it, but the sounds really evoke a certain era – I put a disc on and am in a darkened, quiet theater, watching people in leotards move in a way that is unexpected and yet completely right. I haven’t even looked at all the contents yet; but there’s of course lots of Cage, and Feldman, and some Christian Wolff (who was there Thursday night, performing Cage).

After the first intermission came Antic Meet from 1958, set to Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, with décor by Robert Rauschenberg. The décor must be the props used: a chair strapped to a dancer’s back, a sweater with four arms and no neckhole. There were lots of witty references to traditional dance steps. The epigraph to the work, quoted in the program, was Ivan Karamazov’s “let me tell you that the absurd is only too necessary on earth.” Indeed the dance did evoke a spirit-lifting attitude of absurdity.

After the second intermission we had the third and final piece of the evening, Sounddance from 1975. The title is from Finnegans Wake, so there was the feeling that the program had been designed to reference many of Cunningham’s touchstones: Joyce, Cage, Rauschenberg. . . . This was a more vigorous piece than the other two. But after about half an hour (all the dances were about half an hour) it too ended. The audience gave the performers an enthusiastic and affectionate ovation. And then the lights came back up and it was all over, so we all had to go home.

Haiku 208

(for Merce Cunningham, 1919-2009)

A leap into chance,
A long life constellation
Of bright lived moments

perche un di nella reggia, m'hai sorriso

With the recent death of Pavarotti following a year in which so many other great singers have died it is starting to seem as if an entire generation is passing into history, the generation that had just retired or was edging off stage around the time I started my concert-going. As a result some of these people I knew only by recordings or a rare live performance. Pavarotti I heard live only once. He gave a recital in Boston in the late 1980s and it was already considered something of an event for him to do so. The Globe always had thorough and high-quality arts coverage, so in addition to the usual review there were some articles before and after, most of them commenting on the bond he had with the audience. There was an older black woman who survived cancer and felt that his recordings helped her to do so; she met with him after the recital and from the Globe report it sounded like a warm and, if the expression makes sense, very human meeting. The recital itself was not the singer at his best; even by then there was some bloom off the voice, and he had his music in front of him, which I have never seen at any other vocal recital. But I was still glad for a chance to hear his remarkable voice live and feel his charismatic presence. It’s too bad that in later years he became more clownish; I wonder if the magnitude of his natural gift was more than he could really bear. I remember Ms. S and I back in Boston joking that there was something morbid about our annual ticket purchases; some of them were definitely “see them while you can” shows. I heard Anna Russell once, in what was apparently her farewell tour, though of course if Anna Russell had announced a farewell tour everyone would have assumed it was a diva joke. She went through just about every one of her classic routines and gave us three hours. I was with someone who said, “Wow! She’s like the Bruce Springsteen of whatever it is she does!” And when Horowitz came to town I knew there was just not going to be another chance, so I didn't care how pricey the tickets were. He was a tiny, frail-looking man; I can still hear the thundering octaves at the end of the first half and then a very long intermission so he could lie down backstage. At some point the last person to hear Horowitz live will also pass into history. I doubt I will be that person, but I’m glad I had at least a glimpse of these remarkable performers; it’s like seeing a sketch or fragment and knowing that it gains significance from its connection with an artist’s whole body of work.

There's rosemary; that's for remembrance. . . .

Clearly I haven’t felt much like blogging away, so this entry will be in the nature of an entr’acte. I refer you to The Standing Room, which has collected a garland of web tributes to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. I've been moved by the number of people who only saw her once yet were moved indelibly by her. The world is even poorer without her. I can’t say much more about her loss. (http://www.thestandingroom.com/blog/2006/07/lorraine_hunt_l.html#comments)

I’ve been working a lot in my garden, which is therapeutic. Not so much in a “restorative power of Nature” way; it only takes a few allergy attacks (which have been intense this year) to disillusion me there; maybe the views around Grasmere were more sublime or soothing, but I can’t really do the Wordsworth thing. Cutting stuff back is therapeutic, and there’s a lot of that to be done. For someone with problems dealing with death, I seem to have few qualms about causing it in other realms. But Nature returns the favor: the laurel and the rose have no more value for the universe than the tumor and the virus; to make the point explicit, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson can die at an age when she had so much more to give and in the same week Ken Lay, who ruined the lives of thousands, can die and escape whatever semblance of earthly justice was coming his way, and the universe goes on.

I have a beautiful (I’d say this is an anthropomorphizing statement, but Nature has to appeal to us as much as to the bees for propagation) passion flower vine, but it was growing in the wrong direction and starting to choke my lemon tree. (Yes, I get to choose which direction is the right one. When I bought my house I had some trees cut down, among them a redwood, having learned from my childhood home that a redwood is just not the right tree for a small backyard. When my co-workers found out, it was as if I’d announced I’d gone into church and spat in the holy water font. There’s something about redwoods. No one cared that I planted a fig tree in its place, and no one cared at all that a pine tree was cut down at the same time. One guy said that I was just “imposing my aesthetic” on the place; I didn’t bother to point out that that’s the definition of a garden. There’s a reason Candide ends by “cultivating his garden” as opposed to “reclaiming the wilderness” or “lying down moaning.”) If Bernini designed a flower, it would look like the passionflower: an amazing, energetic mass of twists and curls and tendrils, with flowers exploding into purple aureoles and the various pistils or stamens or whatnot jutting out in an aggressive way. I had to disillusion a friend of mine about the type of passion referred to: the purple is the crown of thorns, and there are other parts that represent the three nails and the five wounds. Of course the common denominator is the word “passion” the root of which is “suffering.” It’s an interesting interpretation to put on this flower, as if it needed some spiritual link to explain it. (There’s also a charming legend about the flower of the rosemary, which is said to be light blue because on the flight into Egypt Mary laid her cloak on it.) Perhaps these tales are just part of the human need to find a story of redemption from the loss that surrounds us.

I have a rosemary plant as well, but I haven’t yet faced cutting it back, since I feel I should be doing something useful with it instead of just tossing it into the compost bin. But I’ve had to pull up a lot of grass and weeds (which are, as the definition goes, just plants we think are in the wrong place) and as I do so I’ve inevitably torn up some of the nearby sage and rosemary leaves as well. I’ve enjoyed their scent on my hands. Requiescat in pace.

As with rosy steps the morn. . . .

Yesterday I was getting set to review the SF Opera’s last three productions of the season when my little plans were derailed by the news of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s death. I saw an announcement on a music-related website and had to go to several others to make sure – to make sure of what I don’t know, since the recent performance cancellations and stories or rumors of serious illness should have prepared the way, but I just am having such a hard time with this loss. When I started attending concerts in the 1980s in Boston I soon read of a really extraordinary viola-player turned singer named Lorraine Hunt. So I developed as a listener as her career developed; she wasn’t that much older than I am, so there is a certain “golden grove unleaving” quality to my sorrow. But more than a reminder that no matter how bright and beautiful we might be, the inevitable waits is just the lost of a rare artist. I will never hear her live again and recordings can’t quite capture the intense glowing quality she brought to everything she sang. Over the years I heard many of her performances, with Emmanuel Music and other groups, both in Boston and then the Bay Area after I moved back home, and even a non-musician (like me) could tell immediately that there was a special quality to her. Even more than the beauty of her voice and the radiance of her person there was – I guess I should just call it an artistic integrity that sublimed to the spiritual. I went to all the performances I could and should be grateful for each of them but I can’t help regretting that I didn’t hear more. Why didn’t I go to Santa Fe for Ashoka’s Dream? Why didn’t I go to NYC for Les Troyens?
Oddly enough, the night before I heard of her death I happened to be listening to a recording I had just bought of Monteverdi’s Return of Ulysses; I bought it because she sang Minerva in the piece, and the role of the wise warrior goddess sums up much of what I felt about this stranger who gave me so much. The last time I heard her live was in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony here in San Francisco.
Several years ago she gave a recital in Berkeley. When she came out the audience gave her a prolonged and heartfelt round of applause. The stranger next to me muttered, “She hasn’t done anything yet.” In his pompous rush to play the skeptical connoisseur, I think he missed a key moment in the strange magic, the developing, enveloping love, that can happen between performer and audience. I sometimes wonder why I go to hear performance after performance, so many of them forgettable if not regrettable, and then I come across a reminder of the generous gift that a great performance is and I know why I keep going night after night. I never met Ms. Hunt Lieberson off-stage, even to exclaim “You’re Lorraine Hunt Lieberson!” or gush about how much I love her work, but this morning in my tatty cubicle at work I put on her Handel arias and had to take my headphones off when I started to cry too much for a woman I never met. Her passing brings to mind lots of clichés about treasuring what you have and the uncertainty of life and daring to take an untrod path but these things are clichés because they are so true that all their edges have been worn off and they are as undistinguishable to the casual eye as pebbles worn down by the sea. But if Lorraine Hunt Lieberson were here to sing them to you, you would know that they are true.

Ligeti split

Gyorgy Sandor Ligeti, twentieth century man, May 28 1923 to June 12, 2006.
I'm listening to his vocal works now. I've only heard his music live a couple of times -- two performances of the American premiere of Le Grand Macabre and the complete piano etudes at Cal last fall -- and both times left me with an elation I rarely feel.
I can't even remember how or where I first heard of, or read about Ligeti, but I started collecting all the CDs in the series put out by Sony (then picked up by Teldec). The first one I bought had the Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes, which was too zany an idea to be resisted. I expected it to sound sharp and angular but instead it was like a buzzing, humming cloud that gently died away. Can you ask more from a composer than sounds you didn't expect and had never heard before?
I hestitated about the title for this entry, fearing it would seem flip or disrespectful. But the program book for Le Grand Macabre (which I can't find at the moment) quoted him saying that after the Holocaust, it was only possible to write comically for the stage. This is as good an answer as any to the question about how one can write poetry after Auschwitz. One thing I really loved about Le Grand Macabre is that he avoids the separation into life = good; death = bad that a lesser artist would have chosen. The life we're shown is often filled with squabbles, vulgarity, and cruelty. Death is a strange visitor who may or may not be who we think he is. So I meant to salute his antic spirit.
I read that Ligeti had hoped to compose an opera based on the Alice books but poor health prevented him. What a loss. Somewhere in the spirit world there should be a ghostly opera house performing such great lost works as Ligeti's Alice or Gershwin's Dybbuk. Perhaps we'll all end up in the audience.

I can't go on I'll go on

SAMUEL BECKETT, Patron Saint of the Twentieth Century
April 13, 1906 (Good Friday)
December 22, 1989

"Nothing is funnier than other people's pain"

the divine Sarah

It's no longer just the dishes in the kitchen sink crying koyaanisqatsi on my life -- I'm way behind on the blogging, too; but first I was felled by the flu and then I was out of town (cherry blossom time in DC; thanks as always to SW for her magnificent hospitality and a report on the Zambello American Rheingold is coming up). But before I move on to Events I Have Seen I have to mark the recent passing of Sarah Caldwell. Years ago, mostly in the 1980s, I lived in Boston. I saw about half a dozen rarities and oddball operas (Rameau's Zoroastre, anyone?) before I saw a standard one. In other words, I edged slowly into the opera zone but many of my early experiences were from Ms. Caldwell's company. As you can tell by the dates, her glory years were a bit past, but she still managed to put on some shows that thrill me in memory years later (along with a frustrating number of cancellations, including once an entire season -- though it probably wasn't her fault Stratas cancelled out of that Boheme, before I decided I had had enough of that opera -- but already Caldwell's legend, which seems to be the only word for it, included massive disorganization and chaos theory as well as knock-out productions). I remember seeing my first two Toscas in the same month -- first the Met tour (it was that long ago -- there were no surtitles, either) with Grace Bumbry, who gave a sweet performance, and then Opera Company of Boston with Shirley Verrett, who knocked me flat. (The production was a substitute for the scheduled Medea (done later with Barstow -- I can't remember why it fell through this time, but I felt the choice of Tosca was a deliberate gauntlet thrown at the Met). There was a dazzling Turandot, with a millefleur chorus in Chinese silks; a wonderful Makropoulos Case with I believe Silja (I cannot understand why Janacek is not one of the most popular opera composers around); and the famous Russian festival, with a surprisingly somber Dead Souls from Schedrin. It's odd that someone who accomplished so much more than many people ever manage should be seen as having such a mixed legacy, but I guess that comes from the feeling that her need for control and her disorganization held her back from a steadier career. But some people are drawn to the roller coaster.
And here's a story I overheard years ago while waiting for a Red Line T in a Cambridge station: a tall, goodlooking young guy was telling the woman he was with about his experience as a spear-carrier (literally) in a Caldwell production of Otello. He and his fellow spear carrier had missed their cue and instead of exiting the stage were trapped on it for the final scene and had to stand there slack-jawed and stunned while the murder took place. This huge mistake was singled out by some of the reviewers as a directorial masterstroke, showing the helplessness of the social organization and outside world in the face of the seething private passions that led to the murder. The train arrived before I could hear if they kept that part in for later performances.
I guess finding significance and order and art in the mistaken and the arbitrary and the chance is a huge part of theater. Vaya con Dios, Sarah.