December 16, 2013

Martha Argerich


I've been on a classical concert binge for a few weeks but I can't help blogging about this one.

I must have been the first person to order second category tickets for the Concert de gala of the international Concours de Genève on December 5th. Front row left.
Fine musicians (winners of the competition)  and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in fine fettle, with the young Argentine conductor Alejo Perez. A water theme for the first half, with Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes of Benjamine Britten, three percussionists performing a Water Concerto for Water Percussion by Tan Dun. Advised by ushers to move out of the front row for this piece, we watched water splashed theatrically into the seats as Aiyun Huang and two other percussionists plunged various vessels into shimmering blue tubs of water and used newly invented instruments making sounds we'd never heard before. Rather '60s -- doing weird things to instruments or doing things to weird instruments or both.
In the second half, Polina Pasztirczak sang a haunting Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss.

And we were back in the front row for the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra of Francis Poulenc, composed in 1932. Two concert grands emerged from the basement on platforms for Martha Argerich and Nelson Goerner and then wow....!  (I'm not known for hero worship).

I have a deep appreciation for Argerich, whom I've followed for decades. She combines profound musicianship with impeccable technique. Stunning. For me she's the greatest pianist of her generation.

Argerich concertizes rarely, and when she does, it's mostly with fellow musicians.
Here she is, live in Geneva, performing in our garish, over-the-top, beloved Victoria Hall with Nelson Goerner. There are my unauthorized, flashless shots. I was sorely tempted to photograph her strong, fine, compact hands as she played, but didn't, out of respect for her performance.

She moves swiftly, turns, bows, turns again to acknowledge the conductor and Goerner and other musicians, spins around again and is very hard to catch. Brilliant smile and a huge mane of silver hair.
Sigh. Yes, hero(ine)-worship.






In a 2001 article about Martha Argerich for The New Yorker, critic Alex Ross wrote: 

"Argerich brings to bear qualities that are seldom contained in one person: she is a pianist of brain-teasing technical agility; she is a charismatic woman with an enigmatic reputation; she is an unaffected interpreter whose native language is music. This last may be the quality that sets her apart. A lot of pianists play huge double octaves; a lot of pianists photograph well. But few have the unerring naturalness of phrasing that allows them to embody the music rather than interpret it."



Live in Berlin in 1967


and recently with Lang Lang




July 14, 2013

Rockport bis

OK, two years later I’m back in Rockport, and this time my son, who’s done his google-work, comes up with a half-day excursion to a place called Halibut Point, which has nothing to do with the fish and everything to do with the words ‘haul about’ in your boat, warning of what you’d better do fast to get around the ‘point’.



The park was gorgeous and flooded with songbirds, and we came to an old New England granite mine which was abandoned in 1929, and has since become a natural lake. The veins of granite are visibly layered. There’s a resident cormorant with other bird buddies and the most perfect serenity – inspiring both of us to meditate then and there, on birds, bushes and granite. Animal, vegetable, mineral.
Beauty, nature, love, the full monty.
And of course the only non-rainy moment for several days.

The park had the requisite crumbling trees and rampant vegetation as well as the myriad birds, who seemed to be the very soul of the place.

Down by the point were long, narrow slabs of granite, immortalized by Emerson*

"'Tis a noble, friendly power and seems to me 'Why so slow and late come to me? Am I not here always thy proper summer home? Is not thy voice my needful music, my breath thy healthful climate in the heats; my touch thy cure?...........Lie down on my warm ledges, and learn that a very little hut is all you need.  I have made thy architecture superfluous and it is paltry beside mine.  Here are twenty Romes and Ninevehs and Karnacs in ruins together, obelisk and pyramid and giant's causeway---here they are all prostrate or half piled.'"

All this, Bearskin Neck, Emerson Inn, lunching with dear ones and the Jupiter Quartet playing at sundown in the Shalin Liu Performance Center ---  le paradis, quoi.



see also one of my early blogs http://lexieintrator.blogspot.fr/2011/08/blogport-little-piece-of-heaven_11.html 

STUDS


So I wondered: am I too old to do studs? I mean the metal kind.

Needed some shoes to walk me around London and not look like a LOLIT (Little Old Lady In Tennis Shoes). The original LOL phrase dates from the early mesozoic era and meant ‘frumpy and without style’ before sneakers became a definitive fashion statement.

Found a perfect pair, and wow were they comfortable! And sort of chic.
I began to notice that London was full of studs, both human and vestimentary. Studs are in, sprinkled on shirts, dresses, wallets, bags and epaulettes and flaunt it:  I am urban, shiny and tough and I don’t take (sh)it from nobody.

Well of course my new shoes ended up taking (sh)it, and it’s not an urban legend. But they also took me up and down Southbank, through museums and London markets and off to the countryside.


Walkin’ tall in my studs.



PATTI


She was 96 and tiny and wise and beautiful and the undisputed (but not self-appointed) matriarch of the Indian community in Geneva.

Her parents had her married by age 13. She bore three sons. She visited Geneva with her husband in 1949, and in 1956 they moved to Geneva for good when her husband was recruited by the ILO. Not end of story.

Her middle son died in his twenties in a tragic car accident, her eldest son died in the US at age 47 leaving a wife and two young daughters. Patti outlived her husband by decades. She lived with her youngest son and daughter-in-law, who died in her fifties of cancer; her youngest son (my good friend) went totally blindPatti was there for her family and there for friends. The household was warm and open to friends from all over.  

Patti loved to dance. And to teach. She taught dance, she taught a bit of Tamil. Patti loved to read, all kinds of books and the international press. Patti loved the Indian soaps. Patti loved to cook, her vegetarian cuisine was legendary. Patti loved to knit and did so any time her hands weren’t busy working at something else. Patti loved to hang out with people, and listened with interest and compassion and responded with frankness and intelligence. Her grandchildren adored her. Her great-grandchildren adored her. We all did.

She was one cool lady.

Ekphrasis


Don't be shy if you need dictionary.com. I had to look it up a few years ago.  
Ekphrasis is Greek, and is the (usually verbal) praise of a work of art (usually visual), often in poetry (my definition). 
See also http://lexieintrator.blogspot.fr/2012/07/daphne-transformed-poem.html


Went with my sister-in-law and niece to the Courtauld Gallery on the final day of Becoming Picasso. And as we drifted toward the Impressionists,  appreciated the grand lines and proportions of Somerset house, the present home of the collection. A sumptuous building, Victorian and neoclassical.

Works by Cézanne hang in a fancy room at the old/new/old home of the Courtauld Gallery. And there is a disconnect. Inappropriate and distracting, this beautiful, ornate room makes this Cezanne look a country cousin attending a posh tea in old trousers. 
To place him here disrespects Cézanne. I suppose curators wish to give him a prominent spot, so they chose this room. But why? Why here?
Cézanne’s simple portrait of a man in a hat hangs way above a fancy mantelpiece, well above anyone’s eye-line: painterly, eloquent, plain-spoken and out of place.

But then there is another painting hanging closer to the window, and my eyes focus in on the lake with a castle, perhaps the Château de Chillon?
Turns out it's the Lac d’Annecy, but no matter.
It is the Léman of my mind. Cold weather blue on blue with blue, the kind of blue that moves through thick waves, deep and understated.
The kind of blue you feel watching an ancient glacier lake feeling the unexpected roil and flow of your life. The water holds me as it moved on the oil canvas, carrying whole epochs in its liquid mass.


Didn’t matter where the painting was, I was elsewhere.

May 10, 2013

FREEGLOT -- intelligence and wit with delicious bite.

freeglot.wordpress.com 

Catch this blog and you'll go for a trip around history, geography, 
mid-twentieth century Europe and Freeglot's wonderful mind.  

Born and bred in the age of print, an incorrigibly gifted polyglot and reader, 
he needed encouragement (aka a push) to create this blog.
Gently but firmly we pushed. 
Now he's free to blog to his heart's content and the text is rolling off his mental press. 

Try Freeglot's riff on the Euro -- whoa! Stuff you really didn't know and it's funny!
And with a new and original take on the euro's struggle!

http://freeglot.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/evro-evra-ewro-euras-eira-eoro-ευρώ-евро-avro/

Or how the Dutch react to his beard.....

Travel with him and travel far.


or google 'freeglot'

March 30, 2013

WORD is just another name for Nothing Left to Lose

WORD is an app. An app on my iphone and other peoples' phones and pods and pads. And an amuse-gueule* for people with an itch for word games and a nano-rush of adrenaline. Old scrabble heads who are looking for something to supplement scrabulous or lexulous love it. All you need is the app (free), a friend or 'friend' and a network. 
It's a crossword game like scrabble with a different board layout and somewhat different letter values. And it's fun. Especially if you win. I have three regular opponents: my son, a friend, and another friend with whom I play Word using a paid-for app where there are no pop-ups, worth the $ 2.50 or whatever it was, so you can home/hone in for the, um, kill without distractions.

On the free-app version you receive uninvited ads for finding new partners, disguising your voice with a death-rattle, playing new, transmogrified word games, tricking your girlfriend/boyfriend into responding to sexy siren stalkers, you name it. Ideal for some ADHD candidates, not so ideal for those pretending not to have ADHD. In any event, I have the habit. I do not invite unknowns for a match, but have played the odd game when invited. I know my opponents and have the occasional brief dialogue-SMSs incorporated into the body of the game. You can know if it's snowing in South Salem in an instant.

How u s e l e s s can this be? (I'm not referring to learning about snow in South Salem).
Well......quite. 
And that's the fun of it.  
It's useless, and it's naughty and fun to do something you know is useless, no money won or lost, gaming when you have nothing to lose but a few minutes (hours?) and your verbal-acrobatic pride.
- - - - -

*amuse-gueule: pre-appetizer tidbit usually offered up in fancier restaurants. Known more politely as amuse-bouche, as gueule is a coarse word for mouth. (Are the French the only ones to make a dirty word out of mouth? In the UK it's gob, but it doesn't have the impact of gueule).

March 18, 2013

Post-Photography Photography II

Choice. Sheer number in numeric, the capacity for teasing the image painlessly (and chemical-free)  from the most modest iphoto adjustment to trimming with iphone app to Adobe Pro photoshopping: transformative.
The darkroom is transformed: from chemical reactivity to virtual proactivity.

The long voyage from Brownie 616 through Kodak Starflash, Starmite,  Kodak Instamatic, a couple of simple 35 mm cameras, a couple of 35mm Nikkormat and Nikon reflex cameras with incorporated light meters.........and then the digital revolution in image-making. One of the technological trips of a lifetime.

We no longer fork over good money to a lab for Kodacolor lab prints; we can gear up our trusty HP with color cartridges. D.I.Y. printing lab. Or simply keep them on websites, memory chips, backup drives to be accessed at will.

So how do we take photographs now? With a different eye? in huge numbers, since cost is not an issue?  Greater ease behind the viewfinder? I think all of these.

Here's one of the thousands of azulejos in the Alhambra, taken with an iphone 4, (6 megapixels), a bit of adjustment of the glare on the right and slight increase in the virtual exposure:



This was dark in the wrong places and with far too little contrast. I was able to highlight the warm colors and add contrast without compromising foreground visibility.


In this photo of a keyhole door, a darkroom would probably have been better, but it's acceptable. I see I have to workshop it a bit more to eliminate the glare on both sides.


And below the simple joys of playing around with color and intensity, though they're not the best photos of Granada.




Rank amateur, but loving all of it!




March 3, 2013

Post-photography photography I


From many delicious extractable quotes in the politico- intellectual 1969 work by Susan Sontag On Photography, this one clarifies one of the reasons taking photographs can be reassuring:

 “The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery (from http://www.scribd.com). 

I don't agree with Sontag that it denies interconnectedness, but it does atomize our reality, and we love photography for this fragmentation, for the disassembling of what we can experience as the chaotic and relentless whoosh of time. And the fixing of an instant.


We slow down, we stand still in the moment. The shutter-eye blinks in the scene before us.

We have observed what there was in that moment and we have incorporated it into the memory of our tiny disk. In our unique way we possess the scene, we can pretend we own the vision.






Thoughts with photos

 Last year I wrote about turning 65, but this January I slinked past 66 without incident. No bells whistles or tantrums. This may explain the extended silence after the boisterous Swiss Miss blog (http://lexieintrator.blogspot.fr/2012/12/alpine-airhead.html).
Looking inward, meditating? Je recule pour mieux sauter. 
Well not really; I've been otherwise engaged (life happens).
I've missed the blogger's high, and want it back again.

Born to blog. My little mark in the sands....
Also born to procrastinate.

Born to do a lot of things, including nothing in particular, which I believe is a very human thing to be doing.


Here I am sitting in a café at high altitude finishing coffee, a snow bunny with sunglasses for cover. I pretend I'm in my thirties and on a break from the off-piste powder. My son has opportunistically taken iphone in hand and 5-megapixelled me. My face is mercifully in shadow, outglared by snow.
It is not typical of me to pose as I'm more comfortable on the other side of the lens, but here I pose.

Below, me as a dalmatian, and the whole menagerie from the running club for visually impaired---about to run in the Escalade Marmite Race in December.



 Since the last blog I've been fortunate enough to visit friends and take photos with the trusty iphone in Barcelona. Photos from the Barcelona museum where huge mummers' masks used in processionals are on display:









Big Bird
Pury with outsized characters








Window-shopping in the old town:  colors and shapes.

                


She was warning me not to take pix....





Hams are prepared, decorated and displayed with lights and pride








..............
And then it's back to cats and snow....winter's long vigil.