The Joy of Comments
Alex Ross has an article in the New Yorker this week on the history of the classical music concert, and in particular its recent/decent descent/ascent into stoic sitting in silence. My favorite comment from the reddit thread on the article:
Reading this, I just realized the main difference between a classical concert and other types of concerts…. pianissimo, and the ability of the audience to hear it.
Nice.
In unrelated news, today I unevenly jammed a pair of contact lenses into my poor, silently screaming eyes for the first time. It took half an hour of poking to get the lenses in, and then another ten minutes to get them out again. The “whites” of my eyes currently do not deserve that title. This better bloody get easier soon…
Thoughts From Last Nights Concert
Last night, total lunar eclipse night 2008, at a concert by the Alban Berg quartet:
Pre-concert: Are these chairs made from wood or cunningly crafted plastic? They’re too precisely curved to be wood I think but.. OW. The lamps under the soffit of the armrest are a) hot and b) grounded, and all the dry air has shoved far too much static on me for that not to hurt in two different ways at once. Oh, here we go…
During Haydn Op. 77 No. 1: Sonata form, you cheeky devil, you sonofagun – I can hear you the first time through now! You’re marchy today, too. I just saw you repeat the exposition, and now look at you all developing. 2nd movement: your start brings to mind in me Shostakovich SQ 13, and the rest of you is exceptionally lovely, I like your rising ripples. Huh, rising ripples sounds surprisingly filthy. The rest of you is sturdy and wonderful to watch as everything gets thrown back and forth but, sorry Haydn, you just didn’t quite do it for me this time.
Berg Op. 3: Uh-oh, 2nd Viennese school, my classical music mostly nemesis, but… oooo… this stuff sounds rather different when it’s being performed live, it’s suddenly far more appealing, why is that? I wonder if it’s because it’s more shocking to see that these are actual people, playing actual music, on instruments of all things! It’s not some kind of electronic device whirring and chirping away and generating all those odd sounds. It’s wood and guts. You lose that through a CD, don’t you? You almost forget that once upon a time, someone actually played the stuff you are listening to. The live effect is particularly overpowering during the really dramatic sections. Watching those players batter their instruments has an intensity that recordings just cannot match.
Beethoven Op. 132: I know you. You’re the string quartet that starts out like the Grosse Fugue. Then you have that bit in your first movement which sounds like Schubert’s Trout. The third movement is the really good one, this is spiritual stuff, and deliberately so. It’s amazing during a movement like this to watch the faces of those watching the performers. Us, the audience. So many heads turned upward and sideways and all heavy with contemplation and concentration. Eyes lightly lidded but clearly alive, active below. The fifth movement is almost a song, lyrical but certainly not saccharine. Stubborn. Resilient. And the ending kicks about ten kinds of arse.
Coda: Huh. the moon’s all red.