In Italo Calvino's famous work Invisible Cities, Marco Polo, a native Venetian, describes to the Chinese emperor the various cities he has travelled through, in one of my favourite passages in Italian literature:
'Dawn had broken when he said: "Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know." "There is still one of which you never speak."
Marco Polo bowed his head.
"Venice," the Khan said.
Marco smiled. "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?"
The emperor did not tum a hair. "And yet I have never heard you mention that name."
And Polo said: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."' '
(tr. William Weaver)
I found myself thinking of this extract when listening, with a broad grin on my face, to Gould's recording of Brahms's Op 118 no 2. The entire performance is just a response to "Tell me you're a Bach specialist without telling me you're a Bach specialist." I've never heard an interpretation which gives so much weight to inner voices.
My recording of the week, however, is Shura Cherkassky's recording of Chopin's Op 27 no 2. I've highlighted Cherkassky before on this blog, but that was for sheer ferocity of attack in a performance of Schumann's Symphonic Etudes. However, as I discovered this week, Cherkassky has an incredibly velvety tone and sense of dynamic shading which shines in softer repertoire, as demonstrated in this recording.
I'd also like to give a shoutout to Josef Hofmann's spectacular 1937 Golden Jubilee Concert, which came up in my podcast with Mark Ainley last year, and happily resurfaced in my memory this week. Maybe it's the photo in the thumbnail as well as the music-making, but it's a really comforting throwback to the wonderful aristocratic school of pianism. I have nothing against modern pianism, which is also great, but having been intoxicated for so long by its dizzying detail, it's sometimes exhilarating to return to a delivery like Hofmann's- no-nonsense, unvarnished, brisk tempi yet just regal. "It shouldn't work," you keep thinking, "it should sound like a machine, and yet it doesn't."
I was rewatching Gerwig's Little Women this week, to see if I liked it better this time round. [Spoiler alert] It still tears me in two. On one hand I do sometimes want to rip some more rawness into the sugar-coated aesthetic of the film, which only lets go of the saccharine tone for the event of Beth's death. The meta "This is all in her novel!" twist is tiresome. Why is Friedrich Bhaer- name unchanged from the book- played by a French actor who keeps his native accent? Why the hell does everyone fall for Laurie? What's the deal with his CHARACTER? Explain, Gerwig!
SAYING ALL THAT- it's a decent exploration of women's ambitions, with some fine acting from Saoirse Ronan in particular, and the aesthetic, if sometimes overdone, makes it a cosy rewatch after a long day. My favourite scene starts at 1:22 in the below video, in which Jo and Beth read together, on the beach, a terrific line from George Eliot:
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
-George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Whoever chose the location for this scene did a damn good job- there's something ethereal about the beauty of that beach, and the shot of two siblings reading, there, such a fine line of de facto poetry.... I feel it's a particularly poignant scene for those who know Beth dies, who knows that for Jo the sweetly familiar and comfortable will become a memory of such beautiful moments.
Picture credit: Sony Credits Entertainment (from video linked above)
Hardy's Return of a Native opens with one of the finest descriptions of a natural landscape I've ever read- even by Hardy's standards- and this particular passage always makes me think of this sublime part of Chopin Ballade 4 (played with typically raw intensity here by Richter):
For comparison, in my own poem inspired by this ballade (scroll to the bottom of this page to read the whole thing) I wrote this verse:
'For his soul first shifted seismically deep one night,
when in a restless sleep he heard clarion-like colours, of swelling, sea-like beauty, heaving hues hallooing like huntsmen across a vast plain, and sweating he leapt into the light'
The fleeting flames of late Turner are sublime, but I discovered this week a fine painting (below) from earlier in his career (1826, to be precise), with a stiller kind of luminosity, Note the pleasing contrast between the aching white of the left of the canvas and the subdued tones of the right, the earthy richness of the colours shot through with that soft gold, and just the right level of fine detail to balance atmospheric and immersive.
J. M. W. Turner, “Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning” (1826), at the Frick Collection. Credit.: The Frick Collection, New York
Source: New York Times
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