OK. I think that's quite enough about Wagner for a bit. My brain's getting twisted.
I'm off to Switzerland for a flying visit to the Verbier Festival tomorrow - back rather too soon. A couple of thoughts to leave you with in the meantime, including the promised Desert Island Discs in case anyone's interested!
First, though, for the literary-minded: in the wake of the bombings in London and Egypt and the continual suicide bombing insurgency in Iraq, how are we creatives to respond? I've often been annoyed by the way that much contemporary fiction seems to be an extended version of what's happened to be in the news - the result is a lot of books that date very quickly - and even my favourite books, which on the whole don't do that, can contain elements that become dated through their 'relevance to contemporary issues'. On the other hand, there's a lot of escapism too: historical novels that bury their concerns in the distant past (though I hasten to add that I love many of those!!). Is it possible for writers and, indeed, composers to handle the impact of our changing world in a creative way that doesn't become obsessed with relevance to these issues? I'm wondering how to make my new novel feel contemporary without getting too involved in such things. It's difficult.
Enough of that - here are 8 Desert Island Discs to enjoy. I've a nasty feeling I've done this before, but can't remember when - and the list has probably changed...
1. Krystian Zimerman plays the Ravel piano concertos - with LSO/Boulez (DG). Perfection.
2. Marc-Andre Hamelin's album 'Kaleidoscope'. All his recordings are brilliant, but this is the one I play most.
3. Mozart: The Magic Flute, conducted by Klemperer with fab cast including Nikolai Gedda, Gundula Janowitz and Lucia Popp. I grew up with this & may be where I am today partly because of it.
4. Tchaikovsky. Mravinsky conducts his own selection from The Nutcracker's most meaningful moments. Another world.
5. Peter Schreier and Andras Schiff in the Schubert song cycles. I was going to choose just 'Die schone Mullerin' but have now discovered that all three are available together!
6. The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto, played by Philippe Graffin in South Africa. This is meaningful to me for long, complex reasons that I've written about before.
7. Andras Schiff plays the Goldberg Variations. Definitely can't do without this.
8. Faure. It has to be Faure. I'd like to take my own compilation of Favourite Faure, but in the absence of that, This will do nicely: historical Faure, including Thibaut & Cortot in the Violin Sonata No.1 and the Calvet Quartet with Robert Casadesus in the Piano Quartet No.1. Having said that, my ultimate Faure choice has yet to appear on CD. I'm hoping that it will do so within the next couple of years.
5 comments:
Before you leave Wagner by the side of the road, you might be pleased to note the Berkeley Opera's "reduced Wagner" project. This weekend they did their foreshortened and updated Die Meistersinger. And it was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle.
I'm not sure about fiction, but what struck me reading Norman Davies history of Europe was that although it was a romp through a few thousand years of history of an entire (sub-)continent, it seemed, to me, to dwell very much on the turbulent ethnic conflicts in the area we currently refer to as Former Yugoslavia.
I would have thought - without the knowing the main subject of your novel - that a sense of foreboding is fairly timeless. Back in the Eighties we were obsessed by the nuclear threat. Additionally in Britain, from the 60s to the 90s there was the ever-present if low-level apprehension about the IRA.
I would argue that current fears are merely the reverse side of the same coin.
Hey, I too am in verbier and writing a blog about it:
http://www.verbierfestival.panopticon.fr
I always enjoy reading or seeing a movie about the unlikely hero or heroine.
Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm are orphans living with unwilling relatives under the shadow of childhood tragedy.
Neo (The Matrix) and even Jesus and Buddah are young adults who strike out on their own, away from good and easy lives, traveling far everything and everyone they've ever known, to find a Truth only they seem to know exists.
All are forced to find friends, family even, among strangers. They must live, for a time, isolated and misunderstood lives, lives their parents could not imagine and would not wish for them, in order to find their own greatest talents, their truest friends and their own place in the World.
Technology, Government and Corporate power cast long shadows over our modern heroes and heroines ...
I found Norman Dvaies's book to right wing. It goes on and on about stalin's killings demonising him,. But ignores Hitler's in many ways. And when Hitler's are mentioned tlike teh Nurembrug trials, at the end of it he goes on about katyn which was earlier. andsayd nothing of franco's massa executions. He also lists waffen ss divisiopns,. If that, why not list the red army divisons, he id it to pretend the waffen ss were more populatr thna the international brigfade which fought in spain for the republic, The interntional brigade was composed of 40,000 volunteers from neutral states, states that opposed them goinjg, while waffen ss was made up entirely of people from puppet states, and had less recruits thna the indian army had from briutain, thw affen ss had less than 100 members recruited from lands niot under nazi rule, the i b had 40,000
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