  J.Brahms (B.Bartók), Violin Concerto, 4 Hungarian Dances (Rhapsodies for Violin and Piano) Leonidas Kavakos (Péter Nagy) R.Chailly / Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra Decca     |
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It's back to Balzac's La Comédie Humaine after a pause to read the third volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. Few writers are so gifted at the evocation of the physical: sights, colors, lines, smells, sounds. This is one of the most vivid portraits of the beautiful city of Paris, as one would have taken it in from the Place de l'Italie in the 13th arrondissement in the early 19th century, one that combines the mundane details with the spiritual heights of the place: "the murmur of the world of men and the idyllic quiet of solitude." It is also a skyline of Paris without either of the two most visible structures that now dominate it: the Tour Eiffel and the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, neither of which would be built for a half-century.Between the Barrière d'Italie and the Barrière de la Santé, along the boulevard which leads to the Jardin des Plantes, you have a view of Paris fit to send an artist or the tourist, the most blasé in matters of landscape, into ecstasies. Reach the slightly higher ground where the line of boulevard, shaded by tall, thick-spreading trees, curves with the grace of some green and silent forest avenue, and you see spread out at your feet a deep valley populous with factories looking almost countrified among green trees and the brown streams of the Bièvre or the Gobelins.
On the opposite slope, beneath some thousands of roofs packed close together like heads in a crowd, lurks the squalor of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. The imposing cupola of the Pantheon, and the grim melancholy dome of the Val-de-Grâce, tower proudly up above a whole town in itself, built amphitheater-wise; every tier being grotesquely represented by a crooked line of street, so that the two public monuments look like a huge pair of giants dwarfing into insignificance the poor little houses and the tallest poplars in the valley. To your left behold the observatory, the daylight, pouring athwart its windows and galleries, producing such fantastical strange effects that the building looks like a black spectral skeleton. Further yet in the distance rises the elegant lantern tower of the Invalides, soaring up between the bluish pile of the Luxembourg and the gray spires of Saint-Sulpice. From this standpoint the lines of the architecture are blended with green leaves and gray shadows, and change every moment with every aspect of the heavens, every alteration of light or color in the sky. Afar, the skyey spaces themselves seem to be full of buildings; near, wind the serpentine curves of waving trees and green footpaths.
Away to your right, through a great gap in this singular landscape, you see the canal Saint-Martin, a long pale stripe with its edging of reddish stone quays and fringes of lime avenue. The long rows of buildings beside it, in genuine Roman style, are the public granaries.
Beyond, again, on the very last plane of all, see the smoke-dimmed slopes of Belleville covered with houses and windmills, which blend their freaks of outline with the chance effects of cloud. And still, between that horizon, vague as some childish recollection, and the serried range of roofs in the valley, a whole city lies out of sight: a huge city, engulfed, as it were, in a vast hollow between the pinnacles of the Hôpital de la Pitié and the ridge line of the Cimetière de l'Est, between suffering on the one hand and death on the other; a city sending up a smothered roar like Ocean grumbling at the foot of a cliff, as if to let you know that "I am here!"
When the sunlight pours like a flood over this strip of Paris, purifying and etherealizing the outlines, kindling answering lights here and there in the window panes, brightening the red tiles, flaming about the golden crosses, whitening walls and transforming the atmosphere into a gauzy veil, calling up rich contrasts of light and fantastic shadow; when the sky is blue and earth quivers in the heat, and the bells are pealing, then you shall see one of the eloquent fairy scenes which stamp themselves for ever on the imagination, a scene that shall find as fanatical worshipers as the wondrous views of Naples and Byzantium or the isles of Florida. Nothing is wanting to complete the harmony, the murmur of the world of men and the idyllic quiet of solitude, the voices of a million human creatures and the voice of God. There lies a whole capital beneath the peaceful cypresses of Père-Lachaise.
-- Honoré de Balzac, The Woman of Thirty Years (translation by Ellen Marriage)
 Vivaldi, Four Seasons, A.-S. Mutter, Trondheim Soloists (DG, 1999) |
Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who made her mark as a teenage prodigy, is giving back through the foundation that bears her name. For the last couple years she has toured with the Mutter Virtuosi, a group of young musicians under her tutelage, and their North American tour included a stop at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Sunday night, presented by Washington Performing Arts.Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin
The program concluded with a guns-blazing performance of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” and in the hunting-themed finale of the “Autumn” concerto, the students played the part of the pack of dogs chasing down Mutter... [Continue reading]
 A.Bruckner, Symphony No.1 (1891 “Vienna” version) C.Abbado / Lucerne FO Accentus |
 Diplomacy, directed by Volker Schlöndorff |
New York Times | Washington Post | Los Angeles Times | The Guardian New Yorker | Christian Science Monitor | Variety | Hollywood Reporter |
 F. Busoni, Piano Concerto, G. Ohlsson, Cleveland Orchestra, C. von Dohnányi (Telarc, re-released in 2002) |
Anne Midgette, Pianist Ohlsson brings elegance to a whiz-bang performance of massive Busoni (Washington Post, November 21) ---, Pianist Garrick Ohlsson on Busoni’s 70-minute concerto: ‘A noble, beautiful work’ (Washington Post, November 20) |
 Smetana, Má vlast, Czech Philharmonic, K. Ančerl (Supraphon, re-released in 2009) |
 Mozart / Haydn, A. Tharaud, J. DiDonato, Les Violons du Roy, B. Labadie (Erato, 2014) |
 Mozart / Haydn, A. Tharaud, J. DiDonato, Les Violons du Roy, B. Labadie (Erato, 2014) |
 Dvořák, Complete Symphonies and Concertos, Czech Philharmonic, J. Bělohlávek (Decca, 2014) |
James R. Oestreich, Regardless of Offstage Worries, Onstage It’s All Artistry (New York Times, November 17) Eric C. Simpson, Home dishes prove ideal menu for Czech Philharmonic (New York Classical Review, November 17) Tom Huizenga, Played by Czech Philharmonic, 1890s Dvorak sounds fresh as ever (Washington Post, November 17) Zachary Woolfe, A Maestro Returns, First There, Now Here (New York Times, November 14) |
 John Adams, Doctor Atomic Symphony, Harmonielehre, Short Ride in a Fast Machine P.Oundjian / Royal Scottish NO Chandos SACD  |
 Piano Duets, Christina and Michelle Naughton (Orfeo, 2012) |
College friends of mine who were identical twin sisters and both music majors used to claim they could communicate secretly with each other when they performed together. By this they were poking fun at other people’s often rude curiosity about what it was like to be an identical twin. Other twins embrace this phenomenon, like Christina and Michelle Naughton, one of several piano duos formed by identical twins. They gave a recital on the Fortas Chamber Music series at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Thursday night.Christina and Michelle Naughton, piano duo
There were hints of the circus act in their performance of music for two pianos... [Continue reading]
 The Better Angels, directed by A. J. Edwards |
New York Times | Washington Post | Los Angeles Times | Variety Village Voice | Hollywood Reporter |
 Debussy, Complete Works for Solo Piano, A. Planès (Harmonia Mundi, 2009) |
Sometimes child’s play can be serious business. The Salzburg Marionette Theater, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, returned to the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Tuesday night. By contrast with their last visit, for a charming and traditional “Magic Flute” in 2005, this was a double-bill of Robert Schumann and Claude Debussy, with live music performed by pianist Orion Weiss, in an unusual concert presented by Washington Performing Arts.Orion Weiss, piano
Schumann’s “Papillons” tells a story from the end of Jean Paul’s novel “Flegeljahre,” slightly modified by the Salzburg puppeteers. Schumann’s two musical personalities, Eusebius and Florestan... [Continue reading]
I have taken a break from Balzac's La Comédie Humaine to read the third volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, published in Italian last year (see Part 1 and Part 2). Toward the end of the second novel, the protagonist, Elena Greco, describes how she came to write her first novel, about the disturbing way that she lost her virginity. In all aspects except the date of publication, this corresponds to Ferrante's first novel L'amore molesto, just in 1992 instead of the 1960s. The protagonist is on the verge of marrying into one of the leading intellectual families of Italy, the Airotas, who have helped her to publish that first novel, which becomes an emblem of the opening of Italian society in that turbulent decade. Men start to speak openly to her about their sexual exploits, all of her friends and acquaintances in the old neighborhood in Naples read the book, focusing on its "risqué pages," and reviews appear, alternately condemning and exalting her as the model of the liberated woman. Worst of all, her mother becomes furious with her when she learns that the wedding will happen at city hall instead of in a church. The Italian author known as Elena Ferrante has just published a fourth volume this year, called Storia della bambina perduta, so we have that to look forward to as well.I came out of the bookshop, I stopped in Piazza Cavour. The day was fine, Via Foria seemed unnaturally clean and solid in spite of the scaffolding that shored up the Galleria. I imposed on myself the usual discipline. I took out a notebook that I had bought recently, I wished to start acting like a real writer, putting down thoughts, observations, useful information. I read l'Unità from beginning to end, I took notes on the things I didn't know. I found the article by Pietro's father in Il Ponte and skimmed it with curiosity, but it didn't seem as important as Nino had claimed. Rather, it put me off for two reasons: first, Guido Airota used the same professorial language as the man with the thick eyeglasses but even more rigorously; second, in a passage in which he spoke about women students ("It's a new crowd," he wrote, "and by all the evidence they are not from well-off families, young ladies in modest dresses and of modest upbringing who justly expect from the immense labor of their studies a future not of domestic rituals alone"), it seemed to me that I saw an allusion to myself, whether deliberate or completely unconscious. I made a note of that in my notebook as well (What am I to the Airotas, a jewel in the crown of their broad-mindedness?) and, not exactly in a good mood, in fact with some irritation, I began to leaf through the Corriere della Sera.
I remember that the air was warm, and I've preserved an olfactory memory -- invented or real -- a mixture of printed paper and fried pizza. Page after page I looked at the headlines, until one took my breath away. There was a photograph of me, set amid four dense columns of type. In the background was a view of the neighborhood, with the tunnel. The headline said: Salacious Memoirs of an Ambitious Girl: Elena Greco's Début Novel. The byline was that of the man with the thick eyeglasses.
I was covered in a cold sweat while I read; I had the impression that I was close to fainting. My book was treated as an occasion to assert that in the past decade, in all areas of productive, social, and cultural life, from factories to offices, to the university, publishing, and cinema, an entire world had collapsed under the pressure of a spoiled youth, without values. Occasionally he cited some phrase of mine, in quotation marks, to demonstrate that I was a fitting exponent of my badly brought-up generation. In conclusion he called me "a girl concerned with hiding her lack of talent behind titillating pages of mediocre triviality."
I burst into tears. It was the harshest thing I had read since the book came out, and not in a daily with a small circulation but in the most widely read newspaper in Italy. Most of all, the image of my smiling face seemed to me intolerable in the middle of a text so offensive. I walked home, not before getting rid of the Corriere. I was afraid my mother might read the review and use it against me. I imagined that she would have liked to put it, too, in her album, to throw in my face whenever I upset her.
-- Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (translation by Ann Goldstein), pp. 53-55
 J. S. Bach, Orchestral Suites, Academy of Ancient Music, R. Egarr (released on November 18, 2014) AAM003 | 93'49" |
Patrick Rucker, Academy of Ancient Music gives Bach's Orchestral Suites the royal treatment (Washington Post, November 10) |
