RLPF.ar

I'm posting this update actually a couple of days after coming back to GZ. After the -- remarkably! -- uneventful flight, with none of the drama that we faced on the way from Hong Kong to Washington, we passed a few days in Zhuhai, struggling with jetlag and -- yes -- swimming. In the spring, we had found a smaller swimming pool right next to the new apartment's building, but it wasn't open at that time. Well, it's open now and we made full use of it. It's "smaller" but long and narrow; I believe its length reaches the Olympic distance of 50 m. Some excitement here: In the spring, Jimmy was just starting to learn to swim and struggling with coordinating the strokes. Then, he would have to stop after about 15 m, jerking his head out of the water to grab a breath. But this time, during a night swim, he went the full length of the pool, no problem! The shout of "I did it!" was a sweet sound indeed.

Had to hit the ground running in Guangzhou. We rode the bus in on Wednesday, and I had my pre-semester faculty meeting on Thursday. Wednesday was a mad rush of cleaning, though not nearly as bad as it might have been, considering just over a month of 80% or higher humidity with no human intervention.

Classes next week. I'll have some new material to prepare for small group lessons, but my lecture class can reuse most of what I did last year. I hope that will make for a less hectic pace.

Recently-heard music:

Mahler, Symphony no. 2 ("Resurrection"), London Philharmonic under Vladimir Jurowski. I bought this recording on the strength of the review in Gramophone, which called it the new reference recording -- to paraphrase, "Finally, a 'Resurrection' worthy of superlatives." I can't say I have absolutely no qualms about the interpretation, but on the whole, it's good. Damn good. Crazy good. Even the interpretive surprises, like the just-slower-than-comfortable tempo in the second movement, make sense in context. (The second movement is a graceful minuet, but following on the heels of the searing drama of the first movement, it shouldn't be graceful. In Jurowski's hands, it's tentative and a little shaky, just as anyone would be after witnessing a horror.) The fifth-movement climax doesn't disappoint.

Perfect recording? No... but in fairness, no performance of Mahler could be perfect. There's too much going on, and too much room for interpretation, for it ever to be fully "correct." Effective? Startling? Rewarding? Yes, absolutely. Mahler-philes should check this one out.

Arvo Pärt: Credo, Hélène Grimaud, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen. Pärt became especially famous for the "tintinnabuli" technique, developed after an artistic crisis, during which he published no pieces for several years. This piece, from 1968, is one of those leading up to the crisis, and it shows. The collision of dissonant trumpet blasts against fragments of the famous C major prelude from Book I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier never works. It might have been clever as an undergraduate student piece, but this is a composer who had been around the avant-garde block more than a few times.

Despite the title of Credo, the piece demonstrates a profound lack of faith, a loss of confidence. It would be another three years before Pärt would retreat into a self-imposed silence, and another seven before he could spellbind an audience with scarcely more than ascending and descending major scales (Spiegel im Spiegel for violin and piano). But here, his aesthetic is already coming apart at the seams. I couldn't help feeling throughout that Pärt had to write something, just to get the piece done, but he was writing it not because it came from his heart, but rather because he couldn't think of anything else.

It's an uncomfortable piece to hear, but I'm glad I listened. It explains so much of Pärt's history. To go silent as Pärt did is a nearly incomprehensible step for any composer, but it's inevitable after a piece like this -- only a matter of time. It would be impossible -- that's no exaggeration -- to continue in that direction. I can't say it's enjoyable, but it's an essential document for lovers of Pärt's music to understand where he came from.