Archives for 2004

I just got back from Lincoln Center, where I heard Hilary Hahn play the Elgar Violin Concerto with Sir Colin Davis and the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. I rarely go to orchestral concerts nowadays–it’s been months since I last heard the Philharmonic live, and I only went this time at the urging of a friend–and I was struck anew by how alienated I am from the increasingly tedious experience of traditional classical concertgoing, at least as it’s practiced in Manhattan. The ugly hall, the gray acoustics, the snidely knowing intermission chat, the coughing and ill-timed applause and near-complete lack of young faces in the audience: all these depress me so much that I find it hard to push them aside and attend to the music. The first half of the program, Janacek’s Taras Bulba and Sibelius’ En Saga, was well played, but I simply wasn’t there: I pulled my head into my shell and sat it out.

Not so the second half. For one thing, Hilary Hahn is an extraordinary artist, far more so than is generally understood, her fast-rising fame notwithstanding. I wrote about her four years ago in Time, whose editors had just dubbed her “America’s best young classical musician,” a fatuous mass-media plaudit that I did my best to put into some kind of sane perspective:

Yes, classical-music whiz kids are as common as laid-off dot.com executives, but Hilary Hahn is no robotic virtuoso. Her tone is lean and sweet, her interpretations smart and unshowy; even the hardest-boiled prodigy-hating critics in the business go all mushy when she plays Bach, Beethoven, Barber and Bernstein….

Hahn began studying violin at the age of four, entered Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music at 10 and signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical at 16. But she doesn’t think of herself as a prodigy. “A prodigy, in my mind, is someone who practices eight hours a day and has a big concert career at 13,” she once told a reporter. “That’s not my style. I practice maybe half that much, and I’ve had a pretty normal life.”

“Normal” may not be a totally accurate way to describe the life of someone who made her debut with a major orchestra when she was 12 years old. Still, Hahn has a point. The hot glare of big-media publicity can affect prodigies like a sun lamp: first you blossom, then you blister. But this wunderkind has paced her career sensibly, steering clear of the pitfalls that await unformed artists who push themselves (or are pushed) too hard. Now, at 21, she is a fully mature musician with a style all her own….

Listening to Hahn’s glowing recording
of Samuel Barber’s gently poetic Violin Concerto, one has the same feeling of intimacy as if the two of you were having dinner together. Only a very real person–a whole self–can make music that way. Far too many prodigies crash, burn and vanish, but this remarkable young woman seems here to stay.

All this was true enough when I wrote it, but it doesn’t come anywhere near describing what I heard a couple of hours ago. Hahn is now a profoundly gifted woman who has somehow retained much of the child prodigy’s mystery. Her playing is simple and wholly unaffected, though in no way na

It rained all day, so I didn’t take a walk, and I dined on sushi (a block closer to here) instead of going to Good Enough to Eat (and thus getting even wetter). Otherwise, I stuck pretty closely to the published plan for My Day Off. I spent rather too much time at the computer, but at least I didn’t post anything. In fact, I did no work of any kind, save for taking out the garbage. I spent big chunks of the afternoon and evening curled up on the couch with a couple of books, listening to music, alternately gazing at a candle and the art on the walls, and letting my mind wander wherever it pleased.

Yes, I checked my e-mail from time to time–too often, I’m sure, though I’m happy to have opened a message from the Phillips Collection in Washington. As I think I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ll be going to Washington, D.C., on March 9 to deliver a Duncan Phillips Lecture, and I’ve decided to talk about how my taste in modern art was shaped by that of Duncan Phillips, and the corollary effect that looking at the Phillips Collection over the years has had on the formation of the Teachout Museum. Well, somebody at the Phillips wrote today to suggest that I might want to bring along a half-dozen of the pieces in my collection and hang them in the room where I’ll be speaking. Now I’ve got to figure out which ones! Naturally, I’m inclined to pack my most recent acquisition, Fairfield Porter’s “Apple Blossoms II” (to see it, go here and scroll down), but I’ve got three months to make up my mind, so I expect to do plenty of dithering between now and then. At any rate, I spent much of the evening looking at the art on the walls, mulling over the possibilities….

I doubt you’ll be entirely surprised to hear that my day off left me feeling both happy and a bit blue (saudade, as my Brazilian friends say). It didn’t help that one of the pieces of music to which I listened, Constant Lambert’s Tiresias, is intensely melancholy, nor did the weather brighten my spirits. Nevertheless, I know full well that the main reason for my cafard (as Lambert liked to call it) was that I allowed a whole day to go by without distracting myself with work or companionship, as we workaholics are inclined to do. Instead, I let myself be alone with my thoughts, not all of which were comforting. Fortunately, I had the good sense to lift up my heart at day’s end with Dvorak’s String Sextet, which is in A major, that most divinely innocent of keys, and went to bed with its open strings ringing joyously in my inner ear.

Life is good, whether it feels that way or not.

Surprise! I’m in today’s Wall Street Journal with a special bonus piece, a review of a museum exhibition that will be of particular interest to dance buffs:

George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the 20th century, famously compared ballets to butterflies: “A breath, a memory, then gone.” Thanks to the timely invention of the video recorder, Balanchine saw most of his own masterpieces preserved for posterity, but things were different when he was getting his start. Of the dozen-odd major dances he made for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes between 1925 and 1929, only two, “Apollo” and “Prodigal Son,” have survived. In fact, no more than a half-dozen works from the entire repertory of the Ballets Russes, perhaps the single most influential company in the history of ballet, continue to be danced in anything remotely resembling their original state. The others died with the men and women who staged and performed them, and though some of those birds of paradise were amazingly hardy–the ballerina Alicia Markova, for example, died only last week, having just attained the great age of 94–few systematic efforts were made to tap their memories and reconstruct the lost ballets they recalled.

Once a ballet is lost, though, there are often more than imperfect memories by which to envision it. Costumes and set designs, still photographs, even printed programs: All these can help tell us why we had to be there. Alas, well-curated museum shows of such material are usually few and far between, but the centenary of Balanchine’s birth has brought some indisputable doozies, the most recent of which is “Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum,” on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford through Jan. 2.

As well as being a museum of the highest quality, the Atheneum has two unique ties to the world of ballet. In 1933, A. Everett “Chick” Austin, the flamboyantly imaginative director who dragged his recalcitrant trustees into the modern era by their heels, bought the collection of Ballets Russes designs amassed by Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s last premier danseur. In a single stroke the museum acquired a priceless cache of works by the likes of Matisse, Picasso, Derain, de Chirico and Rouault for the knocked-down Depression-era sum of $10,000 (a mere $130,000 in today’s dollars). Earlier that same year, Austin offered to let Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein use the Atheneum as the home of the ballet company they longed to start. Though its small stage would prove inadequate to Balanchine’s needs, it was Austin and his wealthy friends who put up the money to bring the choreographer from Europe to America, where he and Kirstein later launched New York City Ballet, successor to the Ballets Russes as the focal point of creativity in 20th-century ballet.

These twin achievements are documented and celebrated in “Ballets Russes to Balanchine.” Organized by Eric M. Zafran, Carol Dean Krute and Susan Hood, it’s crammed full of so many treasures that merely to mention a half-dozen of them is to indicate its splendor. You can see L

Would someone out there be so kind as to translate this link for us, please? It’s been bringing in a lot of traffic:

Bela cita

You’re browsing through a second-hand bookstore

And you see her in non-fiction, V through Y.

She looks up from World War II

And then you catch her catching you catching her eye,

And you quickly turn away your wishful stare

And take a sudden interest in your shoes.

If you only had the courage–but you don’t.

She turns and leaves, and you both lose.

What do you get for the ‘tween who has everything? How about Hello Kitty exposed? It’s scientific and artistic.

Email is owed. Oh, is it owed. I’m getting right on this. I do worry that my chronic tardiness in responding may give people the wrong, wrong, wrong impression that I feel anything less than delirious when you email me. Seriously, it makes my day. More, please.

Sansho dayu (Sansho the Bailiff) is Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film about a family torn brutally asunder by politics in medieval Japan. Not having seen very much classic Japanese cinema at all before, I’m unequipped to say anything very informed about it. The movie is about a strange and distant past; it was made in an era that’s obviously less distant but, in terms of film history at least, something of a middle age. Furthermore, it takes place in what is for me a faraway, unknown country. So my sense of distance from what I was seeing was doubled or tripled, and it was sometimes hard to sort through the several varieties of foreignness at work. Like reading one of Walter Scott’s historical novels, watching the movie sometimes felt like looking through two pairs of glasses. Aesthetically speaking, this amounted to something of a gift: watching most historical films, I find it hard to let go of my awareness of the filmmakers’ efforts at verisimilitude, but with Sansho the Bailiff I had to remind myself periodically that what I was seeing was not recorded six hundred years ago.