MEMETERIA by Thomas May

September 20, 2014 • 4:51 pm Comments Off on Seattle Symphony’s Dvořák-Fest Begins

Seattle Symphony’s Dvořák-Fest Begins

Daniil Trifonov: (c) Dario Acosta

My review of the Seattle Season’s opening concert of the season — including pianist Daniil Trifonov’s spectacular SSO debut — is now live on Bachtrack:

Music by Antonín Dvořák was included on Ludovoc Morlot’s first-ever programme leading the Seattle Symphony, which took place in October 2009. At the time – two years before coming on board as music director – Morlot was a visiting conductor, and he offered the barest sampling of his thoughts on Dvořák (three of the Legends).

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Filed under: conductors, piano, review, Seattle Symphony

September 20, 2014 • 9:12 am Comments Off on Absolute Literary Materialism

Absolute Literary Materialism

In his recent New Yorker profile of the Scottish writer James Kelman, James Wood contends that the no-frills, “absolute materialism” of Kelman’s prose — which he likens to Karl Ove Knausgård’s obsessive detail over daily rituals — “is rarely boring”

… partly because, like Knausgård, he simply proceeds AS IF the subject matter were interesting; and partly because, in writing as in most areas, limitation increases focus, and tends to irradiate necessity as if it were a luxury. This is the principle of prison writing, both in the literal sense (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”) and in the figurative sense (Kafka’s allegories of imprisonment.

Filed under: aesthetics, literary criticism

September 19, 2014 • 4:26 pm Comments Off on Pollock and Cage

Pollock and Cage

Animator Léo Verrier’s new Jackson Pollock-themed short (above) leads Colin Marshall to compare this film fantasy of the birth of Pollock’s famous technique with the real thing: “Chance may have led him to discover this practice, but it hardly means he gave up control.”

Marshall quotes another filmmaker, the maverick Stan Brakhage, on Pollock, who recalls a trip to visit the painter:

But they [some New York painters] were like commenting and the used they words ‘chance operations’ which was no bother to me because I was hearing it regularly from John Cage. And the power and the wonder of it and so forth . . . but this really angered Pollock very deeply and he said ‘Don’t give me any of your “chance operations”.’ He said, ‘You see that doorknob’ and there was a doorknob that was about fifty feet from where he was sitting that was in fact the door that everyone was going to have to exit be. and drunk as he was, he just with one swirl of his brush picked up a glob of paint, hurled it and hit that doorknob smack-on with very little paint over the edges. And then he said, ‘And that’s the way out.’

Meanwhile, in If Jackson Pollock Wrote Music, Kyle Gann explores the connections between Pollock and composers John Cage and Morton Feldman:

In the middle of the 20th century, the arts exploded into a new and unsettling realm of abstraction. Paintings were no longer paintings of something; they were simply paint. Music, too, was no longer about melody; it had abandoned the grounding in tonality that had been its mainstay for centuries. For some composers, notably John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown, music was now about sound the way paintings were about paint.

Filed under: aesthetics, art, art history, film, modernist composers

September 17, 2014 • 8:50 am 1

George Walker as Pianist

The remarkable American composer George Walker started out his career with the intention of becoming a concert pianist, but the racism of the era hampered those plans.

And more’s the pity, given the evidence captured on Albany Records’ ongoing series of releases of Walker as composer and performer.

Here are some more YouTube uploads where you can sample Walker’s artistry at the keyboard:

Chopin: Polonaise in A-Flat Major, Op. 53:

Robert Schumann: Fantasia in C, Op. 17- First Movement:

Filed under: composers, piano

September 16, 2014 • 9:10 am 1

Above the Abyss

Filed under: photography

September 15, 2014 • 11:01 am Comments Off on Titian’s Dog

Titian’s Dog

In a recent article in The American Scholar — “Carnival of the Animals” — Jan Morris joins Ruskin in admiring the menagerie of non-human creatures in Vittore Carpaccio’s paintings.

“I have counted in his pictures 20 species of animals and at least 11 sorts of birds,” writes Morris, “plus a winged lion, a basilisk, cherubs, peculiarly multi-antlered stags, and sundry angels.”

This reminded me of another Venetian painter and his love of nature: the great Tiziano Vecellio. I spent an ecstatic afternoon last month at the exhibition Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Art at the Scottish National Gallery, which brought together Titian’s two Diana paintings as well as The Death of Actaeon — all part of his monumental mythological cycle of poesie canvases based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a vast commission by Philip II of Spain.

The detail above is from Diana and Actaeon (1556-59) and shows the goddess’s lap dog (a spaniel?) yelping at the male intruder who has unwittingly (so Ovid’s account goes) chanced upon the nude Diana and her nymphs as they are bathing in a spring.

Titian, Diana and Actaeon

Titian’s sequel painting narrates the denouement in which Diana curses the hapless Actaeon, causing him to be transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hunting dogs. Given this context, the nearly comic effect of Diana’s little toy dog shown in a frenzy is all the more startling.

Titian, Death of Actaeon

Filed under: aesthetics, art, art history, Titian

September 13, 2014 • 8:39 am Comments Off on Putti in America

Putti in America

Filed under: photography

September 11, 2014 • 11:27 am Comments Off on Czech Mates: Seattle Symphony’s Dvořák Fest

Czech Mates: Seattle Symphony’s Dvořák Fest

Antonín Dvořák

The Seattle Symphony’s new season is about to begin, and I’m especially looking forward to the upcoming Dvořák Festival. Here’s my recent preview for City Arts:

Antonín Dvorák wrote his two most popular pieces during his early 1890s stay in the United States—the “New World” Symphony and the Cello Concerto. Their heart-melting melodies, infectious and thrilling rhythmic ideas, and emotionally complex use of the orchestra make both works among the most beloved in the orchestral repertory.

Their mega-success made the Czech composer into a “two-hit” wonder. But they’re just the tip of the Dvorák iceberg.

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Filed under: Seattle Symphony

September 9, 2014 • 7:16 am Comments Off on Lucerne’s Lion Monument – with Pig

Lucerne’s Lion Monument – with Pig

No reference I’ve ever seen to the popular tourist attraction known as the Löwendenkmal (Lion Monument) in Lucerne fails to trot out the quote by Mark Twain claiming this is “the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world.” He also wrote this, in the same book (A Tramp Abroad):

The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff — for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France. Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored, among the water lilies.

Around about are green trees and grass. The place is a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion — and all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings. The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is.

This massively proportioned monument is indeed an impressively stylized expression of a mode of tragic grief. It was designed by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and executed by Lucas Ahorn in sandstone in a spot to the east of the Altstadt, with a pond situated below. The inscription reads HELVETIORUM FIDEI AC VIRTUTI (“[Commemorating] the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss”).

As for what it commemorates, the event wasn’t exactly politically correct among European liberals when it was unveiled in 1821, since the lion is a tribute to Swiss mercenary troops in the service of Louis XVI who were massacred by revolutionaries while trying to defend the Tuileries Palace in the insurrection in August 1792.

One intriguing detail about the sculpture is usually glossed over: why does the outline surrounding the lion figure seem to trace the shape of a pig, complete with pointy ears and snout? Do you see it here?

I’ve heard several possible explanations, but the most popular one is that it represents payback by the sculptor for being cheated by the town council out of the agreed-on payment for the commission. He’s memorializing a parody of them as pigs on top of the noble monument. Or perhaps, goes another theory, it’s a middle finger aimed at the French for this massacre. Or — certainly the least-fun theory — could it just be coincidence?

Filed under: Uncategorized

September 6, 2014 • 10:09 am Comments Off on Setting Norma

Setting Norma

San Francisco Opera’s season just opened last night with a production of Bellini’s Norma starring Sondra Radvanovsky and Jamie Barton and directed by Kevin Newbury.

Here’s my feature essay for the opening program:

Setting Norma: Bellini and His Librettist

Many valid comparisons can be -— and have been — made between the film industry and opera as it was practiced in the golden era of bel canto in nineteenth-century Italy: the popular appeal of these media, their value as art versus “mere” entertainment, the clout of star performers, or the grueling, nervous-breakdown-inducing production schedules to get a new work “in the can.”

Another comparison that is especially intriguing is the parallel between screenwriters and librettists. To create a commercially viable film or opera that aspires to be something more than the run-of-the-mill competition, the practitioners of these respective crafts must walk a fine line. The indispensable qualification for that goal: being able to negotiate a tricky balance between artistic ambition and originality on the one hand, and generally understood conventions that define audience expectations on the other.

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Filed under: bel canto, essay, librettists, San Francisco Opera

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