The phrase “Coen Oddball” may seem redundant or non-specific, when that bizarre heading matches so many of the Coen Brothers’ films.
Raising Arizona? oddball comedy
Fargo? oddball thriller with pregnant cop stalking killer on frozen lake
Oh Brother Where art Thou? Homer’s epic in a daring adapation transplanted to the American South, complete with a fabulous soundtrack
Indeed, if they’re all oddballs, coming to the umpteenth in a series, one might well think they’re becoming banal and predictable.
But maybe not with the Coens, the oddball’s oddball. If they’re reading this I hope they’re smiling, even if their mom (wherever she might be: is she still alive?) might shake her head in disapproval.
I sometimes think about this in the abstract. I went to lunch yesterday with a friend, discussing his current music-theatre project, which he very generously opened up to me over lunch.
Artists are expected to show originality. Newness is one of the yardsticks by which we recognize importance.
But as always there’s a problem. We only really know what we have seen before. Creators employ genres that invoke patterns for the audience so that there’s at least something familiar, to fall back on.
We’re all different, and one way to understand that difference is the amount of novelty we crave. There are people who want the same breakfast every day, and rely upon the arts for a similar sense of order in their lives.
By a serendipitous coincidence, I watched A Serious Man last night. This is another Coen Brothers film, but one that for me brings up that whole question of newness, originality and intelligibility. As far as I know it did not do well at the box office: which may not be significant, but likely matters to those people who cough up the $ for the next Coen brothers film.
The first five minutes are in Yiddish. Then we’re in modern times, albeit not quite the present. Perhaps the 1960s? In that first half-hour –when I was admittedly sleepy and still feeling the effects of wine from dinner—I was trying to get a handle on this mysterious flick, and yes, nodding off a couple of times. I suppose I may have missed 5 minutes.
Gradually it started to make sense precisely because A Serious Man so studiously avoided being intelligible in any of the usual ways.
At times it resembles a comedy.
It’s full of judaica.
The film is pre-occupied with questions that can’t be answered. Sometimes they are deep questions with spiritual import. Sometimes they’re trivial matters. But the film is all about questions and questioning. A gambler seeks to find a system to win. A boy prepares for his bar mitzvah. All kinds of things go wrong in the protagonist’s life, from his struggles with a TV antenna that won’t allow his son to watch F-Troop, to the flagrantly bizarre arrangement his wife wants to foist on him.
In the process the questions being asked of us are often unintelligible.
I think the Coens were concerned they were becoming predictably oddball, that the phrase “Coen oddball” was now something you can google and even define. “Oh my God”, I hear Joel saying to Ethan, “we are no longer unpredictable!”
Or so they may have said, before they went back to the well, back to their roots, for A Serious Man.
For those who require complete intelligibility without ambiguity, stay away from this film. It will upset and anger you. And while you’re at it, vote for Mitt Romney. If you’re rich he’ll take care of you. If you’re poor and you vote for him? You’ll get the world you think you deserve: when Obama wins and you get another four years moaning.
I recommend this film without reservation to those wanting that magical experience of being lost in something new. No it’s not at the theatres any longer. I found it on DVD (click the picture for Amazon).
Last weekend John Terauds used the occasion of the Simcoe Day holiday to celebrate the quintessential Torontonian composer, Godfrey Ridout.
It reminds me of a time long ago, when I took a course taught by two giants at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, namely Harvey Olnick & that very same Godfrey Ridout. The current dean of the Faculty Don Mclean was also in the class, although I am certain he wouldn’t remember me. I remember Don as the brightest student in the class.
I recall something Ridout said about Wagner that struck me as one of the most insightful things I’d ever encountered in a class, as if the professor understood the psychology of composition & performance. Or so i felt at the time.
Ridout described how an orchestra might have played the “Ride of the Valkyries” in the 19th century. Those quick runs would be ragged, discordant because of the mistakes the violinists would likely make in attempting to play those quick notes. And I remember, almost as a footnote, his acknowledgment that nowadays violinists in any decent orchestra could play the piece without the raggedness Wagner must have heard, and indeed, expected when he wrote it. Here’s an older performance that might give a bit of an example of what Ridout meant.
Would he have expected musicians to master the piece a century later? Perhaps. Ridout was indeed suggesting a few things:
that the way Wagner heard the composition in his head was not with perfect playing
that making a mess of a difficult passage could conceivably serve a purpose
that (as I have alluded in other posts on this board) maybe musicians are more capable now than they were in Wagner’s time
That all comes back to me now, courtesy of Stewart Goodyear. I have been playing and listening to Beethoven piano sonatas all summer. I am reminded of Ridout’s commentary on Wagner, when I think of Artur Schnabel, whose approach to several sonatas has a ragged wildness comparable to what Wagner might have experienced in his century, hearing the Ride of the Valkyries. What indeed did Beethoven expect when he wrote these works?
It’s possible to play perfectly, especially if one doesn’t go as fast. Playing with the unbridled passion of a Schnabel, however, leaves you open to the occasional fudged note. I remember discussing certain pianists whose performance was fraught with this kind of thing. Rudolph Serkin’s Emperor Concerto many years ago at the Toronto Symphony was the occasion for a kind of psychological test. Those of us up in the balcony, seduced by Serkin’s mugging and posturing weren’t troubled by the notes he missed; whereas our friends on the orchestra floor –unable to see the histrionics—were fully aware of all the errors he was making. I think the mystique of the romantic virtuoso included a modicum of errors that one forgave if the aura was sufficiently heady.
But I’ve seen Beethoven in a new light, since hearing Goodyear. For example, let’s talk about the CD with the last three sonatas, op 109, 110, and 111.
In each sonata Goodyear has the capacity to surprise even a jaded veteran like myself, someone who thinks he knows how the pieces should usually sound, and was sure he has heard it all before.
Wrong.
I think I can now say that the whole set –all 32 sonatas—is for all intents and purposes perfect. But I’m not sure that playing a mistake-free cycle is the great achievement one might think. To do so is tantamount to reciting the complete plays of Shakespeare correctly: a technically impressive feat, but not really art. It’s what one does with the expression that matters, surely.
Each of those last sonatas illustrates the depths of Goodyear’s grasp of Beethoven. I am waiting for the world to discover this set, even if there isn’t likely going to be the same paradigm-shifting excitement as the one that greeted Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations.
I’ve found each pianist seems to have an approach that in the best cases is more like vision or even a special genius. Barenboim, whose playing is often slow and deliberate, is a man I have always admired since I first encountered his old TV series Barenboim on Beethoven on TVO when I was too young to have yet played those sonatas. When I first tried out the “Waldstein”, it was with Barenboim’s analysis in my head, his demonstration of how the first subject –the repeated chords—rises while the second lyrical subject descends. Barenboim had been my ideal.
I bought most of Schnabel’s old mono set, jumped at the chance to get Kuerti’s thrilling new set (or at least I bought it when it was still new), and listened to individual sonatas by many more players. Recordings offer solutions to the problems we sometimes can’t solve when we sit down with a score. And yet each of these pianists seems to characterize Beethoven with their own individual sound, their particular genius. This is as true for Glenn Gould (whose odd reading of the Op 14 #1 left me a bit mystified) as for Gavrilov (who seemed more genuinely at peace in the tortured first movement of Op 111 than in the calm second) or Ashkenazy (whose steady and un-mannered playing gave Beethoven much the same gravitas I found in Barenboim’s readings).
Underlying each of those readings is a drama enacted between the player and the work. In the faster movements that means, making choices:
playing slower but accurately, as Barenboim or Ashkenazy or Brendel did (although of course this is a generalization… sometimes any of them can play quickly)
playing faster, and in order to avoid errors, to sacrifice expression, becoming somewhat mechanical. Gavrilov is he one who comes to mind but he’s not the only culprit. I hate being unkind, but if the fast and precise playing loses contact with emotion, what else can I call it but mechanical? Like a machine in other words.
playing faster with passion and therefore making errors, as in the manner of a Serkin, a Horowitz, or a Schnabel
There might be another option. Stewart Goodyear plays the fast passages with astonishing clarity, without being mechanical, and with every bit as much passion & expression as a Schnabel. I get a rush several places from the exquisite clarity, the thoughtful management of the voices & the drama underlying every moment. It’s as though the passionate Schnabel has been reincarnated as a muscular young Canadian, putting that passion into a physique executing note-perfect readings, the best of both worlds. Instead of a struggle (recalling the analogy i made in the spring, describing the Beethoven Marathon, as climbing Everest), it’s as though we’re nearing the summit, and now blissfully above the clouds, in the clear air where the angels dwell.
The slow passages are soulful & subtle, crisply understated in a black comic vein that reminds me frankly of the detached touch of Gould playing Bach. Goodyear never lingers over anything, never outstays his welcome in a passage with sentiment. And his scherzi are riotously joyful, with all the boisterousness of Olympic track athletes out for a drink after winning a medal.
I looked for some sign that Goodyear was seeking to explore historically informed performance (HIP), in the spirit of Norrington or Gardner, but saw no mention of such issues in the liner notes. Wait, let’s have a bit of a digression and talk about those notes, which are an additional achievement from Goodyear, full of poetic descriptions of the sonatas (as you can see for yourself).
For example:
“I always saw the fourth movement as a dance of raindrops, a ballet depicting a windy shower. The constant triplet eighths notes representing the rain, the contrasts in dynamics representing the sudden shifts of the wind. The prestissimo is a medley of what we have experienced in this sonata. We had the dramatic first movement, the operatic second movement, the spook-fest third movement, and now the fourth movement gracefully melding everything. It is almost as if Beethoven is telling the listener: “Deal with it..I’m here. Now dance to my beat.”
So, to return to my HIP thought, I feel the same kind of loyalty to Goodyear’s readings as I do to those symphonic readings that burst free from the older conventions (whether we’re talking Norrington & Gardner, or even Mackerras & Bruggen), even though i don’t believe Goodyear was seeking any sort of authenticity in his readings. I have been trying to reconcile myself to old favourites –Klemperer especially—who no longer move me as they once did. Now this summer, Goodyear has changed the way I hear Beethoven’s sonatas, likely for years to come.
My Canadian Opera Company ticket subscription arrived in the mail today. I was never in doubt about renewing the tickets, still starry eyed by the new building and the overall quality of what we’ve been getting.
Even so—I tell myself—it’s worth remembering that a subscription is like a contract with the open-ended possibility of renewal. I pay the COC. This buys seats for each show on a particular night, and also preserve those seats for my renewal in the years to come. If I’m feeling particularly positive at renewal time I can also throw in an extra contribution to the COC.
Richard Bradshaw (Michael Cooper/COC)
In exchange? The minimum is that I get a series of operas. On those nights I will get to watch the company that I’ve come to know, including members of the orchestra, ensemble and soloists.
But speaking of contracts, the COC have another contract to add to the list. Yes, they have the contract with each of us, that unspoken promise to be better every year. We renew our tickets, and we wait, not just because we read the brochure starry-eyed and eager. I think of Richard Bradshaw’s wonderful ambition that he once expressed –sorry I don’t know where—to make the COC the best theatre in Toronto. It’s compelling because it’s such a simple idea, and particularly marvellous coming from a conductor.
One reason so many of us are devoted to the COC is because we’ve watched the company aim for that target –being not just a good opera company but the best theatrical experience in the city—and sometimes succeed.
And so the footnote announced a few weeks ago, is just another in the series of contracts, promises that have been made and hopefully shall be kept.
In the wake of Richard Bradshaw’s untimely death in 2007, Alexander Neef became general director the next year. August 15th is a little over a week from now, the fifth anniversary of Bradshaw’s passing. I am amazed at how fast the time has flown. I remember chatting briefly with him in the lobby a couple of times, memories I treasure.
COC general director Alexander Neef (Michael Cooper/Canadian Opera Company)
Neef? While Bradshaw died five years ago, Neef was only able to show his true colours in the last few years, given that the COC stayed on Bradshaw’s creative trajectory for at least two years (for example, the COC’s splendid production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace in 2008 was still really a product of Bradshaw’s company, not Neef’s). We’ve seen better casting, fascinating productions from famous directors, and yes, controversy.
I say bring it on.
The announcement I am speaking of is the extension of Neef’s contract through the 2020-21 season. It’s far enough in the future that I can sleep a little better.
There are, broadly speaking, two separate pathways to appreciate opera, and since I am suggesting there are only two paths of course this will oversimplify even more outrageously than, say, Boito adapting Shakespeare. But here goes.
One is based on individual virtuosity, and the awareness of those heroic individuals. Opera to them is an assemblage of talent ascending to high notes, to say nothing of the many skills in several disciplines, so many shining moments. On this side you might find the folks who brava, bravo and bravi, and I believe this is where fans come for specific arias, a favourite singer, and a tune they will even hum in the washroom.
The other road is more dramaturgical, bookish and scholarly, a series of stories set by great composers, adaptations, seasons to commemorate the Wagner & Verdi bicentennials, perhaps more a matter for those who woot for what they like. Once upon a time I felt that if it wasn’t a bravo it was disrespectful, but I’ve come to believe that all enthusiasm is sacred.
So in other words I probably sound like a conservative twit no matter which side of the fence I might sit on. But that’s just it. Opera is a form constructed of two things:
our devotion to stardom and our love of a story
our favourite aria and the scene it appears in
a series of moments, that may or may not cohere into a wonderful evening
I feel Neef is taking care of both groups, speaking as someone who is appropriately schizophrenic, unable to decide whether I prefer to say I love stars or star vehicles. How about both? Neef has been getting us better and better singers, showcased in a fascinating array of operas.
And I feel happy that Neef’s contract was extended, as the evidence of my own extended contract arrived in the mail, namely my tickets. It’s not sacred like a marriage, but even so, this is another contract based on love. I don’t see the romance cooling anytime soon.
Sam Stedman is a part-time university professor, with a PhD in ethics and theatre from the University of Toronto, and a mission to make his family more eco-friendly, step by step, piece by piece. After 10 years of post-secondary teaching, Sam is branching out in the hopes of reaching a much wider audience, informing and inspiring more people to make positive, engaged, intelligent choices in the world.
“Branching out” is an appropriately organic image for the founding publisher of EcoParent, a magazine that seeks to give you what you need to make responsible, sustainable and, most importantly, attainable lifestyle choices for your family. With an informative and non-judgmental approach, a fun and inspirational tone, EcoParent promotes engaged parenting and lifestyle choices relevant and do-able for the contemporary Canadian family.
I asked Stedman 10 questions: five about him and five more about EcoParent
1) Which of your parents do you resemble (what s your nationality / ethnic background)?
Sam Stedman
Not really sure. I’ve always had trouble with picking out resemblances. I think it’s because, in my life, I’ve always focussed a little more on difference than similarity. This certainly fed into my doctoral work in poststructural ethics. But simple answer: I’m told I resemble both. Nationality: total mutt.
2) what is the BEST thing / worst thing about being a magazine publisher?
Best thing is that I’m not beholden to a crappy bureaucracy (like those found in EVERY university at which I’ve taught), full of inefficiencies, redundancies, prohibitions, other sundry deadening forces…need I go on? Worst thing is that I have yet to get paid.
3) who do you listen to or watch?
Mad Men has got to be at the top of the list. But maybe that’s because I’m sort of becoming an Ad Man. Hmmm…musically, I’ve been obsessed (for years now) with 20th century classical. Especially Gavin Bryars and Arvo Part.
4) what ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?
Web development.
5) When you re just relaxing (and not working) what is your favorite thing to do?
I don’t relax. Such is the nature of a new business. That, of course, on top of having a toddler at home. We do try and get out for nature walks as often as possible.
1) As an educator and father, how does publishing EcoParent challenge you?
What’s in/out there?
It’s humbling to start over in life. There is nothing but daily challenge in this early, infrastructure-building, phase of getting the magazine on the map. It’s particularly challenging as an educator in the sense that my classroom just got exponentially larger, and the stakes ultimately that much higher. While I still believe that theatre is an important culturo-political force, there’s nothing more culturally and politically forceful than child-rearing. As a father, it’s scary to find out, on a daily basis, how many toxic sacrifices have been made in the name of profit – and how little we can trust our government to regulate the products that pass through into the marketplace. Most of the things on the shelves these days that go on our babies’ and children’s skin, for instance, is full of small doses of all sorts of toxic crap to which their little bodies should not be subjected.
2) what do you love about publishing, especially publishing that has such an important political message?
I love the creativity. Yeah, for real. I used to be a theatre director, and I find a very similar creative satisfaction in my day to day creative problem solving in the business world. I also love meeting passionate people that have devoted themselves to making salient improvement to the world, and expect very little in return.
3) What’s your favourite piece that you’ve published so far?
I love our current education special, made up of parent narratives about their experience with different forms of alternative schooling. I think it’s very honest, and will provide parents who haven’t researched much beyond the public school system with some excellent – and very balanced – perspective.
4) How do you relate to the challenges of being a parent, as an ecologically aware human?
I’ve sort of addressed this already, in part. I’d only add that it’s terrifying. My only comfort is that I was a baby in the 70s, and I’m still a (mostly) functioning human being.
5) Is there anyone out there who you particularly admire, and who has influenced you?
The love of my life, Alexis Butler. She’s shown incredible fortitude through our journey together, and inspires in me qualities that would otherwise have remained sadly dormant.
EcoParent is available electronically (paperless) or in a print version.
In August filmgoers’ thoughts turn to TIFF: the Toronto International Film Festival. Founded in 1976, TIFF isn’t just a local event anymore, having become one of the most important festivals in the world, if not the single biggest showcase for cinema anywhere.
TIFF has a big relationship with the industry, with the outside world, but first and foremost, TIFF belongs to Toronto and the audience. How did this happen?
Elwy Yost
While it’s a long complex story—how Toronto became such an important centre for film— and one that owes a great deal to the vision of those running TIFF, I want to acknowledge the godfather of film in the GTA. No I don’t mean a guy with cotton in his cheeks putting horsehead to pillow. Long before there was anything like TCM or Inside the Actors Studio—comparatively recent television programming dignifying the entertainment business and thereby ennobling the constituent arts of cinema and stage— Toronto had Elwy, as he was popularly known, Elwy Yost. Although he died recently, having left Saturday Night at the Movies (SNAM) in 1999, I believe he’s one of the keys to the Toronto film audience.
I watched SNAM last night on TVOntario: a local educational TV network. The program included
Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of The Age of Innocence
Oliver Parker’s 1999 version of An Ideal Husband
A series of interviews in between, including Jackie Maxwell, Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, encouraging us to notice issues pertaining to manners and morays, and in the process comparing the two films.
The program is no longer Yost’s (it’s now hosted by Thom Ernst) but still bears his stamp, as educational as it is appreciative. Yost had come to TVOntario in the 1970s, having earlier hosted another educational film series on CBC in the 60s called Passport to Adventure. Over the years Yost programmed literally thousands of films, while gently teaching us and influencing our taste.
Standing in line with TIFF patrons, one encounters enthusiasm side by side with genuine knowledge. While it’s undoubtedly true that Blue Jays fans are ignoramuses compared to the denizens of Fenway or Yankee Stadium, this is one of the most knowledgeable and appreciative film audiences anywhere. That’s why the industry comes here.
I’d like to think Elwy had something to do with it.
Once every decade Sight and Sound magazine polls experts on film to determine which films are understood to be the best. In 1962 they chose Citizen Kane best film, and every ten years since that time, they have returned Kane to its place of honour.
Until now, that is. On the Sight and Soundwebpage they announce
“846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors have voted – and the 50-year reign of Kane is over. Our critics’ poll has a new number one.”
The new number one? Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock.
If you understand film as a director’s medium Vertigo may seem to be a very different film from Kane.
One film is a pseudo-biography, complete with a bogus documentary near the beginning. The other is a suspenseful film
One is black and white. The other is colour
One is the first feature film from a director who would never
Genius at work: conductor & composer Bernard Herrmann in his youth
be so successful again. The other is one in a series of great films from a director at the height of his powers.
But the two films have something very important in common. Both films have an original orchestral score composed by Bernard Herrmann. Music plays a prominent role in both films:
In Citizen Kane there is a segment of opera within the film, a series of tantalizing fragments from a fictional setting of Salaambo. But whereas Kane’s mistress is not a great singer, here’s a chance to hear the aria sung by a genuine star, Kiri Te Kanawa.
In Vertigo there are several places where Hitchcock lets Herrmann play a special role, such as the opening chase scene
…and the wordless dream sequence
Both films are wonderful, but if I prefer one over the other –and it would have to be Vertigo rather than Kane–it’s because of Herrmann and the role he plays in the film. I believe Hitchcock entrusted some of his most important scenes to Herrmann, as he would again in films such as Psycho and North by Northwest.
Herrmann may have died back in the 1970s (just as he finished Taxi Driver: another great film) but his music continues to live on. For example just this past year his music figured in The Artist, a film that won Oscars for best picture and best orchestral score.
I have to wonder. Did the voters of The Academy realize they were giving Ludovic Bource the award even though the climactic moment in the film is underscored by Herrmann’s music from Vertigo?
Toronto is belatedly getting to know one of its own. Opera Director Robert Carsen, who’s made a name for himself worldwide has only recently directed productions in Toronto.
And how romantic is it that—as if to make up for lost time—we’re seeing his work every year?
In 2010-2011 (in the spring of 2011) the Canadian Opera Company’s Orfeo ed Euridice was one of the highlights at the end of a stellar season.
In 2011-2012 (autumn of 2011) COC followed with Iphigenia in Tauris to inaugurate the following season.
In 2012-2013, the third in the series is Dialogues des Carmelites coming next season.
click on image for more info on obtaining the DVD from Amazon
How could I then resist picking up a DVD of Tosca directed by our favourite son?
Carsen’s style is wonderfully distinctive even while working from the text.
The two Gluck operas were at times astonishing, even as they hewed closely to the text. Orfeo ed Euridice gave us a world as if perpetually mourning, ashes and precious fire, making the spare enactment of the story stunningly powerful. In Iphigenia Carsen showed us the nasty implications of a story that’s too often glossed over in the emphasis some directors place on a friendship between two men with homoerotic undertones; like it or not (and I am not sure I did like it), he told the story that’s in the text.
That’s more or less the reality of his Tosca, originally produced for the Opernhaus Zürich, in a sparkling television production with excellent sound & precise camerawork.
This time the organizing principle is found in Tosca’s life in the theatre. Without giving anything away –and I believe very strongly in spoiler-free reviews—this story is told in a meta-theatrical way, emphasizing the idea that for Tosca, life is one big performance.
If Tosca is going to work on you it requires some kind of chemistry among its principals. Emily Magee? I’d never encountered before, but find her singing more than adequate. Her take on the complex artist that is Tosca is at least sufficiently deep to stay afloat in some heady company. I believe the two male leads are –in addition to the fascinating mise en scène— the chief reasons to obtain this DVD.
Count me among those who has been holding his breath throughout Jonas Kaufmann’s career, a bit amazed that the voice works so well. He sounds too dark for this Fach although this sound is right for roles such as Siegmund (in which he starred at the Met in their High Definition broadcast, although he had to bow out of last season’s Ring Cycle) or Parsifal (to which I look forward eagerly in the coming Met High Def season). Kaufmann was absent from the stage for much of 2012, although he’s eased back in recently in a concert where he was reportedly in good voice. I hope he’s okay.
Kaufmann brings an interesting combination of skills, combining an uncommon voice, good looks, and genuine acting ability. He never seems to be out of character; he never lets the audience down when the camera is upon him. Carsen brings out the artist in Cavaradossi as no director I’ve ever seen. It helps that Kaufmann can pull this off.
His rival for Tosca and the audience’s admiration is Thomas Hampson, cast against type as Scarpia. This is a subtler Scarpia than many I’ve seen, commanding without needing to overwhelm, vocally gorgeous throughout. Need I add, he problematizes the triangle by making Scarpia something of an attractive option for Tosca. Only in his last scene do we see his true colours, which emerge in their full fury.
Some dates are more important than others in the timeline of a war. In the War of 1812, July 30th, 1812 is a relatively trivial date: 200 years ago today.
The war had been declared on June 18th.
The first casualty was recorded almost a month later. It’s the death of British Private James Hancock in the Skirmish at River Canard.
In an ambush at Turkey Creek on July 25th six Americans died.
And so, while we’re accustomed to reading of battles with immense body counts, that’s not what the War of 1812 is like. From beginning to end it consists of tiny skirmishes. A big battle would entail a few hundred on each side. Does that make it insignificant? Not at all. Are the deaths somehow less important? I’d argue that in a war where the entire body count for encounters could be measured in a single digit (as in the 1 at River Canard & the 6 at Turkey Creek skirmishes), the lives committed to the struggle were never more precious.
Stamp bearing the image of Sir Isaac Brock and the monument built in his name at Queenston Heights, where he died in battle.
What happened on July 30th? That’s the day that the British found out that they were at war. War had been declared on June 18th. The speed of information transmission at this time is almost incomprehensible to us today. Forty-two days elapsed between the declaration and the news getting to London. The skirmishes and deaths I spoke of that happened after June 18th, each have their own variable passage to London. Some were faster, some slower, depending on the timing of vessels carrying correspondence homeward across the ocean.
I wonder if we can really understand war at this time, when decision making on the ground (or lake) was also slower than what we experience today. Battles were determined by flukes of communication –or miscommunication—determining the fortunes of battle.
And again, although the war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in December 2014, the biggest battle of the war was still to be fought, namely the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815.
I wonder, now that the transmission of various sorts of messages is now virtually instantaneous, whether we can say that we have progressed. Nowadays one can take one’s mobile phone right into the middle of an atrocity such as a shooting inside a theatre. Our weaponry and our communication appear to be superior.
At one time I hoped that the increasingly interconnected web of media in the world might hasten a kind of utopian world because war would not be tolerated. I hoped that watching atrocities on television made war unthinkable.
But I was naïve. War was always undesirable. I wonder: is life more or less precious in 2012….?
After spending so much of the past few weeks thinking about virtuosity –both in my academic research and in the music I have been listening to—I was more than ready to see a documentary studying the quintessential Canadian musician, Glenn Gould.
click image for info on obtaining the DVD
Genius Within: the Inner Life of Glenn Gould is a series of reminiscences, memoirs, anecdotes, assembled into the story of Gould’s life, told mostly in the third person. Directed by Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont, it’s a fairly recent doc (2009) that I missed when it first came around during TIFF.
The film is in some respects horribly indelicate, invading the privacy of a defenceless icon. We’re given several hints as to why certain horrible things happen, without any clear indication. But after all, how could we really know the inner life of such a secretive person?
And so we watch wonderful images and clips of his great successes in the musical world, of his great tour of the Soviet Union, and later his battles with Leonard Bernstein in New York. And gradually we can’t be surprised when he retreats ever further into solitude. We hear of medications for depression, symptoms of OCD, and even see journal entries that made me cringe. You will know more about Glenn Gould than you probably wanted to know.
We’re told of the three most important women in his life, the first being his mom, so essential to his development.
Then we actually meet Cornelia Foss, both as she appeared when she met Gould in the 1960s, and in the present day when the film was made, looking back on her great relationship with the pianist. Gould and composer Lukas Foss had met, expressing their mutual admiration (Gould said Foss was the pianist he admired most). Foss’s wife Cornelia would move in with Gould along with her two children from 1968 to 1972, but Cornelia would eventually return to Lukas. The pain this caused can be surmised by the tears in the eyes of the children recalling their experiences in our time. Later he’d have another great affair with singer Roxolana Roslak, with whom he’d happily collaborated in the studio and on disc.
At one point we hear a quote from Gould, that “music insulates you from the world”. It’s hardly surprising that we’ll hear that Gould suffered from depression, and was likely only really happy while playing. As the pianist ends his career on the concert stage, moving permanently into studios as a pianist, composer and media artist, we begin to see the Mcluhanesque visionary who’d be remembered for his daring experiments as much as for his pianism.
This is an excellent doc, troubling because it explores its subject so faithfully, leaving us with might-have-been questions. Gould died at 50, too young.
Both Richard Wagner & Claude Debussy used the metaphor of the circus acrobat to describe the virtuoso dynamic with an appreciative audience. Whether we’re speaking of singers or instrumentalists, there is an implicit element of competition.
How fast can the pianists play a particularly fiendish passage? How long can the tenor hold the high C? how audible is the voice over a full orchestra in a huge opera house?
But for each of those three questions, there’s a word that could come straight out of the Olympic motto. “Citius, Altius, Fortius” translates as faster, higher, stronger, even though we may not be speaking of faster fingers, higher notes or stronger singing audible over a big orchestra.
If that’s all there is to their playing –fastest, highest, furthest—you might think they belong at the Olympics rather than a concert hall.
At one time such competitions were entirely a matter for anecdote and reputation. Nowadays? I am embarrassed to admit that I just used youtube to compare the tempi taken by a series of famous pianists on the same passage, to determine who is fastest.
Virtuosity interests me.
Some operas or sonatas or concerti are written at least partly as vehicles to show off the capabilities of performers. More recently one will encounter works that seem to mock our earlier infatuation with pure skill. Melati Suryodarmo is famous for having danced on butter, a curious critique of terpsichorean skill, an awesome display of bravery every time she slips and falls.
Soprano Maria Callas
This is perhaps the most extreme version I know, where we embrace the dance even as we are confronted by its impossibility. I am also reminded of singers such as Maria Callas or Amy Winehouse, whose skills are wrapped in pain and the imminent danger of failure. We also saw this with Judy Garland, a singer and actress who died in slow motion before our eyes, imploding over a half-century even as she loudly proclaimed her determination to go on singing. Virtuosity is sometimes about transcendent skill, sometimes about skill that cannot surmount its challenges.
For what it’s worth, when I compared them, Barenboim and Pollini and even Lisitsa were slower than Goodyear.
I was comparing performances of the last movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, aka sonata 23 op 57. Barenboim’s is delicious slow, passionate but restrained and elegant. Pollini brings a great deal more pace to his interpretation. Lisitsa is roughly the same tempo as Pollini, perhaps a bit slower at the beginning, but building quite impressively in the coda, and wonderfully fluid. In fact when we get to the coda, Barenboim of all people is the one showing blinding speed on the last pages, especially astonishing after the restraint he’d showed earlier.
And then there’s Stewart Goodyear.
Goodyear’s performance is note-perfect, the cleanest and most precise reading out there, and substantially quicker than anyone. When playing soft notes we get faint ghostly tinkling, but perfectly clear. When it’s time to crash chords, Goodyear is the most athletic player, making massive volume without any sense of banging or percussive tone. Where Barenboim sounds a bit ragged at the end, flying up and down the keyboard, Goodyear takes us beyond the issue of the performer’s athleticism, to a place of pure feeling, and as a result I am hearing an entirely new Beethoven.
Pollini and Barenboim remind me of the Schnabel Beethoven, the realm of middle-aged men with ruffled hair who shake their fists at the sky: like Beethoven himself. Their music is in an anguished search for dignity and meaning in the presence of a harsh world. Their Beethoven is closer to Callas & Garland & Winehouse I suppose.
Goodyear’s technique is so transcendent, so astonishingly secure, that he plays at an entirely other level than anyone performing these works. The pieces do not struggle. There is playfulness and fun in places where other musicians seem to be in a life and death battle. There is the ease of magnificent technique, fluid fingers and music that has a Wagnerian ability to find true feeling without encumbering us in the pianist’s battle with the keys. For Goodyear the battle has been won, likely during his practice sessions. He is at ease, the way a good orchestra should be when they play Beethoven, showing a majestic calmness rather than stress and anxiety. We are atop Olympus looking down, no longer worrying about climbing.
Goodyear’s Waldstein sonata –op 53—is every bit as accomplished. The first movement, employing repeated chords that can sound percussive in the wrong hands, is dramatic but with elegant flow. In the soft passages, though, Goodyear seems to channel a visionary link with the composer, a self-assured lyricism letting every phrase sing. The last movement is a bit of an epic, going from soft whispers of the divine to bold proclamations, that must be reconciled into the same tuneful edifice. Goodyear’s approach seems to favour playing Beethoven as written, easily articulating nuances and shaping the whole with a vivid sense of the unfolding drama. Again, the key ingredient seems to be that Goodyear is so adept at playing the notes that he can turn such a massive composition into something delightfully simple in the end.
Stewart Goodyear’s Beethoven is available either in the complete set of all 32 sonatas on the Marquis label, or you can obtain the smaller set containing these middle sonatas.
By a serendipitous coincidence, I watched A Serious Man last night. This is another Coen Brothers film, but one that for me brings up that whole question of newness, originality and intelligibility. As far as I know it did not do well at the box office: which may not be significant, but likely matters to those people who cough up the $ for the next Coen brothers film.
