posted by James Reel
With the vernal equinox upon us, we're going all out with spring music Saturday morning (and right after the Metropolitan Opera, too). You'll hear the pieces you expect--between 7 and 8, it'll be an excerpt from Copland's Appalachian Spring, Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata for violin and piano, and Schumann's "Spring" Symphony--but we'll also have some comparative rarities, including Respighi's virtually unknown big cantata Spring. For various reasons, however, we will not be playing that hit from Mel Brooks' The Producers, "Springtime for Hitler."
Classical Music,
March 19th 2010 at 11:35 —
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posted by James Reel
Considering, first, the swarms of American and European journalists across earthquake-ruined Haiti and Chile, and the current controversy over what constitutes a literary “mash-up” and what remains out-and-out plagiarism, this seems like a good time to revive an essay I wrote a decade ago about a more benign form of “borrowing.” Remember that all references to things “recent” date back to around 1999.
Plagiarists of Experience
Proponents call it literature of witness. I think of it as social voyeurism. A First World writer dons an L.L. Bean pith helmet, jets off to some jungle hell, is horrified by reports of exploitation and slaughter, and catches the next flight back to the home computer to document it all in a slim volume of outrage and elegy. The book moves its American and European readers to momentary despair.
Back in the jungle, the atrocities continue.
I do not question the sincerity, integrity, or physical courage of such a writer. Nor do I claim that the nature of witness literature requires any artistic compromise. I merely question the relevance of witnesses now that the actual participants may testify on their own behalf.
Consider the work of Carolyn Forché, a distinguished, still youngish American poet who balances the elusive allusions so dear to academics with passion and conscience. Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), develops the themes of kinship and ritual. In many of these poems, she assumes the persona of her Slovak grandmother. In a few others, though, she insinuates herself into Native American culture, and seems something of a poseur when taking on a heritage other than her own.
The Country Between Us followed in 1981, shortly after Forché served a two-year stint as a human rights activist in El Salvador. Compared to Gathering the Tribes, her style is now even more direct and less self -conscious, but the subject matter is suddenly more artificial: political oppression and torture of mind and body on a scale alien to any U.S. citizen at this end of the 20th century. Whatever Forché may have experienced in El Salvador, these poems make her seem little more than a second-hand witness to atrocity. The people in her poems have already been mutilated, or killed, by the time they enter her text; this is by no means an account of direct experience. Forché has mounted an aesthetic colonization of others' anguish.
Fortunately, Forché remains aware of her status as an outsider, with outstanding results in the poem “Return.” The poet, back in the U.S.A. and snug in a supermarket—the chain, not coincidentally, is Safeway—frets over what she has observed in El Salvador, and how she is unable to change anything there. A friend admonishes her:
Your problem is not your life as it is in America, not that your hands, as you tell me, are tied to do something. It is that you were born to an island of greed and grace where you have this sense of yourself as apart from others. It is not your right to feel powerless. Better people than you were powerless. You have not returned to your country, but to a life you never left.
Clearly, Forché's need for kinship in an alienating world has remained constant since Gathering the Tribes, and her work in Central America has made this need even more intense despite its apparent futility. Even when the poems in this second collection resist the gravitational pull of politics, they orbit a sense of oneself as isolated from others, a sense of how individuals grow apart and are separated by huge differences in interests, commitments, and intentions—the "country between us." She is, more often than not, writing about universal concerns that resonate through her personal cares.
This rarely happens in her most recent volume, The Angel of History (1995). Forché overcame several years of writer's block by writing about silence in a larger sense: how the perpetrators of this vicious century's most heinous acts refuse to admit their crimes, and how victims remain reluctant to discuss their experiences. Naturally, Holocaust ash blackens many of these pages.
Forché is even farther removed in time and place from these events than she was from Salvadoran sadism, and although she now steps outside her Carolyn Forché persona more often than in earlier poems, she seems less a witness than a tourist logging her snapshots. Here we are visiting my aunt in Brno. This is us on our daytrip to the concentration camp. Here's a photo we took on our layover in Hiroshima.
I'm being unfair to what is, in truth, a moving lament. But Forché does not persuade me that the lament is her own. She is a noble plagiarist of experience.
Which puts her in good company. As Edward Said posited in Culture and Imperialism, and as many a post-colonial lit-crit twit has parroted since, the great figures of Western literary culture have long conspired with grasping politicians to justify not only the colonization of foreign lands but the domination of foreign cultures and collective imaginations. I need remind you only of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which an Englishman's confrontation with Darkest Africa (not to mention the blacker aspects of the British Empire) culminates in the scrawled journal entry, "The horror, the horror!" And perhaps I should bring to your attention Rudyard Kipling's Kim, in which an English boy raised "wild" in India prefers to go native and live like the subcontinent's denizens, who are shown to be by turns comic and sinister, although the boy's innate English intelligence eventually allows him to become a cunning undercover agent for the Crown.
The post-colonialism whip is too often employed to flog long-dead writers produced by a society far different from our own, except in its smugness. But post-colonial theory does sound a useful warning to contemporary writers endeavoring to speak for other cultures. Those cultures are perfectly able to produce voices of their own, thank you.
Consider as a single example Taslima Nasrin, a feminist poet with an aggressive social conscience, who emerged from (and found it necessary to flee) Bangladesh. In an online essay, Harry Russo III situates her succinctly: "She uses the repressive, male-dominated culture of her homeland as a vehicle for her indictment of men, governments and zealots who dismantle human spirit and dignity through isolation and oppression." All I need add is mention of Taslima Nasrin's one collection in English, translated by Carolyne Wright: The Game in Reverse (1995).
Does the development of literary expertise within oppressed developing nations mean that Western writers should now ban other cultures from their word processors? Not at all. The dictum "Write what you know," when taken literally, would clutter the closeout catalogs with even more novels about self-absorbed professors of creative writing. It is our nature, as creative writers and readers, to explore new realms, at least in our imaginations. But we cannot afford to lose ourselves in those exotic realms, as do, to their peril, the protagonists of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky.
(Interestingly, Bowles is one of the few American writers to penetrate a foreign consciousness with complete success. Hie thee to Bowles' third and finest novel, The Spider's House, and meet the complex, conflicted Muslim youth Amar; he makes Kipling's confounded Kim look like a Saturday morning cartoon.)
Carolyn Forché's admonishment from a friend plots our safest course, with its reminder to each writer and reader that "you were born to an island of greed and grace where you have this sense of yourself as apart from others." If we stand detached, yet not aloof, we may observe with greater clarity—and report with the compelling sadness and longing of the stranger within the gates.
quodlibet,
March 2nd 2010 at 8:53 —
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posted by James Reel
I have managed, Sgt. Bilko-like, to work out a scheme that will enable me to target specific CDs for addition to the KUAT-FM library, despite the statewide Legislature-induced budgetary disaster. We have 6248 active items in the classical library already, so you’d think all the standard repertory would be well represented by now, but not so. Recently, I’ve been filling a lot of Haydn gaps.
Somehow, we’ve limped along for 20 years with only one set of Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies, which are among his most popular works. Appallingly, that single set was not Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic series, the best place for anybody to start exploring Haydn’s symphonies. So one of the first things I did was acquire Sony’s boxed collection of all of Bernstein’s New York Haydn recordings: the “Paris” symphonies, the “London” symphonies, a few major Masses and “The Creation.” Most of these stand among the finest recordings by anyone of anything by Haydn, and now you’ll be able to hear them on the air from time to time.
The biggest gap in our Haydn collection for many years has been the piano trios. Until a couple of years ago, we didn’t even have a single version of the popular “Gypsy Rondo” trio. Right now, I’m taking care of that by cataloguing the splendid 1970s nine-CD traversal of all Haydn’s trios by the Beaux Arts Trio. By no means are these all significant works, but they are all at the very least pleasant, and about half a dozen of them are essential listening for anybody who wants to learn the basics of chamber music and be highly entertained at the same time. These will start slipping into the schedule next month.
I’ve also acquired the Angeles Quartet’s survey of all Haydn’s string quartets—which are already fairly well represented in our library, but not completely—and Antal Dorati’s classic traversal of all 104-plus Haydn symphonies. But I won’t have time to get those into the database in time for March scheduling.
But it isn’t all Haydn all the time; I’m also trying to establish better representation of significant artists who for some reason are largely absent from our library, starting with two colorful and controversial conductors: Constantin Silvestri and Leopold Stokowski. Brace yourselves.
radio-life,
February 11th 2010 at 8:01 —
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posted by James Reel
Here are two reviews I contributed to Fanfare last year of items from a new series of high-resolution recordings from James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
BRAHMS Ein deutsches Requiem * James Levine, cond; Christine Schäffer (sop); Michael Volle (bar); Boston SO; Tanglewood Festival Cho * BSO CLASSICS 0901 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 70:23) Live: 09/26-27/08
With the collapse of the major labels, more and more orchestras are launching their own audio series, on disc and online. So far, they seem to have learned little from the fates of the majors; for the most part, they’re churning out standard repertory conducted by conductors who have recorded the music before, and have little new to say about it. (The Mahler series from Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony has been the major exception to this trend.) Now the Boston Symphony Orchestra has launched its own vanity label, and sure enough, its first two releases are standard fare that the orchestra’s music director, James Levine, has already recorded. Yet in terms of interpretive insight and audio quality, these discs deserve to enter the troubled marketplace with great fanfare.
I review Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé elsewhere in this issue; the subject here is Brahms’s German Requiem, which Levine recorded for RCA with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in 1983. In the quarter century between that version and Levine’s new in-concert recording with the BSO, the conductor’s timings have hardly changed. The new version is, overall, a mere 20 seconds shorter, and the greatest difference, such as it is, comes in “Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt,” the penultimate movement, which has now bulked up with all of 28 seconds—not a significant amount over the course of an 11- or 12-minute piece. Yet Levine’s conception of the music has changed greatly over the years; indeed, it has deepened and matured.
As only one example, consider the aforementioned penultimate movement. In the Chicago recording, the beginning is as light and airy as if it had been lifted from one of Brahms’s early orchestral serenades, and the first climax is dominated by the typically bright, prominent Chicago brass section (exacerbated by RCA’s tinny, early-digital sonics). In Boston, the opening passage is more processional and subdued (but not undercharacterized)—more like a Requiem than a serenade—and more ominous in the baritone’s early interactions with the chorus and orchestra. At the first climax, the Boston brass are well blended with the rest of the ensemble.
In other words, Levine has fundamentally rethought his approach to the score; he no longer leads it like a serenade, or as if it were Fauré’s gentle welcome to Paradise, yet he doesn’t impose more drama than Brahms placed in the score, as if it were Verdi or Berlioz (two composers with whom Levine has long experience in the opera house). This is a reading of greater gravity, in which each movement gradually unfolds, revealing more and more layers along the way. This is by no means Wagnerian music, but Levine as an experienced Wagnerian has clearly mastered the art of pacing.
The Tanglewood Festival chorus sings this challenging music beautifully—from memory, as is its usual practice—and the two vocal soloists, Christine Schäffer and Michael Volle, are fully satisfactory, although they can’t beat Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau in the classic Klemperer recording, still on EMI; Fischer-Dieskau, especially, has the finest sense of line and color I’ve ever heard in this music.
The surround recording was produced by Elizabeth Ostrow with the technical services of the staff of sound/mirror, the excellent Boston firm that transformed many of the BSO’s old Living Stereo recordings into SACDs. They’ve done a superb job here, taking advantage of Boston Symphony Hall’s warm acoustics to create a spacious yet well blended soundstage.
So in almost every respect, this new release marks a great advance over Levine’s earlier recording of the Requiem (almost every respect; the Chicago Symphony Chorus was certainly wonderful in the RCA version). It’s also more insightful than the Robert Spano SACD from Telarc. This and the Ravel disc I review many pages hence augur very well indeed for BSO Classics. James Reel
RAVEL Daphnis et Chloé * James Levine, cond; Boston SO; Tanglewood Festival Cho * BSO CLASSICS 0801 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 54:55) Live: 10/05-06/07
James Levine recorded Daphnis with the Vienna Philharmonic for DG in the mid 1980s. I’ve never heard that version; Gramophone liked it, which is not necessarily a good sign (critics there generally favor discretion over passion), but I imagine that Levine’s ear for color and fine technical control coaxed an effective performance from an orchestra not usually associated with Ravel’s idiom. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, of course, made one of the greatest Daphnis recordings half a century ago under Charles Munch (and acceptable ones in the 1970s and ’80s under technicians Seiji Ozawa and Bernard Haitink). Now, with James Levine, the BSO has made yet another of the score’s finest recordings.
People think of Daphnis as a sonic spectacular, but it’s much more than that; just listen to the delicacy Levine and his musicians, including the chorus, bring to the hushed opening pages. Thanks to the performers and the recording team, the overall sound is plush, not overtly analytical, yet all the various instrumental and choral lines are expertly balanced throughout. That said, it’s possible to differentiate one trumpet from its neighbor at the back of the soundstage. Still, the emphasis is on sensuality, even through very precise attacks and ensemble work. The excellent solos are flexible and dreamy, but the pirates’ orgy has tremendous punch and precision, and the final scene is stunning. The concert audience is silent until its outburst at the very end.
As far as I can tell, there are only two complete recordings of Daphnis on SACD: this one, in 5.1 surround, and the mid-50s Munch, in two channels. Both are equally superb performances; Levine’s has the sonic edge. James Reel
Classical Music,
February 8th 2010 at 7:53 —
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