Gorbachev

Not much to say except this is for anyone who hasn't seen this, and with not very sincere apologies to Leninists and feminists everywhere.

I Would Not Eat This Pizza

Billie Jean: by Steve Martin

Last week we had Stephen Fry's version, this week Steve Martin. Next week it'll be Stephen Baldwin's.

The Wrath of Khan: The Opera

Wow. I've been really wrong about Robot Chicken. Even if they don't realize that Khan was stranded on Ceti Alpha Six.

The Dude Abides (sorry, not that one)

(The concert that changed everything. Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in August 2007 at the BBC Proms at London's Royal Albert Hall.)

What's being covered as the most important partnership in classical music began yesterday. 28 year old Gustavo Dudamel is now the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And with it, we are asking him to take on the great musical challenge of our generation. Arturo Toscanini brought fidelity to the composer's intention to performances, Herbert von Karajan brought classical music back into the home with recordings; Simon Rattle is showing the world that new music is just as compelling as old, and the challange now falls to Gustavo Dudamel to bring classical music back to the masses. We can only hope that one day soon conductors can stop being the dominant voices in classical music life, but until then, the task will fall to Dudi. We don't yet know how he's gonna do it, but so far, decidedly not disappointing. John Adams is now the LAPhil composer in residence, and the season begins with the world premiere of Adams's new piece: City Noir. Music by him, Thomas Ades, Osvaldo Golijov and Dudamel's predecessor Esa Pekka Salonen, are on the schedule.

Bad Jokes

I can't escape the feeling that posting this awesome scene from Robert Altman's last movie is a terrible idea. It's an awesome scene from an awesome movie based on an awesome show...and that statement alone piles still more evidence that the WC director is forty years older than he claims.

Nigel Kennedy

In all his glory.

(A piece about Nigel Kennedy I wrote two years ago)

After swearing for what seems like the 500th time that he was done with classical music forever, after swearing for what seems like the 1000th time that he will never perform on a London concert stage ever again, Kennedy, the greatest English violinist since Albert Sammons, the designated heir to both Yehudi Menuhin and Stephane Grappelli, is returning to England's pre-eminent classical venue for the first time in 21 years.

Every newspaper that does a profile on him seems aghast at the thought that he's now on the other side of 50. The idea that old-timers can pretend they're still twenty-five is still something new to the classical world. But even for me it does seem like yesterday that I was eleven years old going backstage after an electrifying performance of the Bruch Violin Concerto (that I tried ten years later to pathetically imitate as best I could) to announce to Nigel Kennedy that one day I wanted to be a violinist as good as he is. Kennedy heard my words with what seemed like something between amusement and alarm and immediately grabbed me by the forehead and shook my head back and forth until my brain was ready to fall out. And then he said the advice that I have kept with me to this day 'Just don't let'em turn you into a wankah!'

I'd like to think that I'm the only young musician to have had such a 'life-changing' encounter with Nigel Kennedy, but I would imagine that there are hundreds more stories just like it. Kennedy is the type of guy for whom the very act of meeting him becomes an event in itself. Between the punk haircut, the salvation army wardrobe, the 'mockney' accent straight out of Spinal Tap, the obsession with Aston Villa (he wears the team scarf onstage at concerts), he is a one-man anecdote machine.

Even to twenty-six year old me, Nigel Kennedy was supposed to be Peter Pan. I remember being thirteen and hearing his version of the Four Seasons (apparently I was one of 2 million people to have that experience) for the first time. It was the most exciting thing I had ever heard. I must have played the third movement of Summer five-hundred times. Vivaldi was no longer this boring composer of music that people listened to when they didn't want to listen. Vivaldi was as intense, as emotional, as 'hard-core' as Beethoven or Stravinsky.

No doubt his eccentricities have drawn serious flak on occasion. One time he appeared to play Berg's magnificently eerie violin concertowearing a black cape and Dracula makeup. In turn this prompted Radio 3's then comptroller John Drummond to blast Kennedy as a "Liberace for the 90's." No doubt there will always be people who feel that way.

And perhaps they're right. Kennedy has done his part to cheapen and coursen our musical life. After experiences with all those conductors who have bent over backwards to give him precisely what he wants, to castigate the entire profession as 'greedy egoists' is just plain embarrassing. Nobody needs to be told that conducting is a profession packed to the brim with bloodsuckers who milk orchestras for the highest buck and lowest performance standard. But for every Ozawa/Muti/Maazel of the jet-set whose aim is to piggyback off other's achievements, there is a Handley/Tennstedt/Tatewho has gone as many extra miles for Kennedy as are necessary to give the best possible performance. Indeed, in the Kennedy/Simon Rattle feudthat everybody already seems to have forgotten about, it was Kennedy who flaked out by not learning Sofia Gubaidulina's Violin Concerto, not Rattle. Rattle is now a living legend, while Kennedy is still a singularly impressive novelty act.

But who can say that music a is more boring, less meaningful activity for Kennedy's being around? No doubt about it, Kennedy can be a pill. But for everything he does that is unbelievably annoying, there are five acts of musical revelation that are so inspiring that they shake the very foundations of what we thought classical music was.

Classical music was supposed to be a civilizing force that our parents instilled in us as a way of teaching us discipline. If we could concentrate enough to practice our instruments every day, doing our homework and eating our vegetables should have been that much easier. But at least a few of us found something in classical music infinitely more valuable: it was subversive, it was dangerous, it was rebellion personified. It was rebellion against every whiny brat we knew in high school who insisted that his favorite band was comprised of artistic geniuses. It was rebellion against every bully who thought it was a joke that somebody would prefer to listen to Mozart over DMX. It was rebellion against our parents' generation, most of whom tried to tell us that no music was written before 1964. But more than anything else, listening to it was a way of taking it back. It was rebellion against the stuffed shirts who force fed it to us as kids and tried to use it as a way to make us into obedient citizens. Some of us fought back by staying with it and playing classical music with the emotion that it's no longer supposed to have.

So here's to you Kennedy. Here's to your hemming and hawing about the snobbery of our ghetto. Here's to your constant breaks from the classical world to play jazz - even if by now they're nearly as snobbish as we are. Here's to your prolonging your adolescence for another thirty years. Here's to you making passes at every pretty girl in the front row of your concerts. Here's to the all the constant provocations and tantrums and pointless feuds. We love you for every damn one of those things and we would never have you any other way.

Barn in the USA

A cute but not as memorable sequel.

Polanski... (hopefully part 1 of 4)

It's difficult to explain what it's like to grow up in a place where 90% of the people are Jewish for five kilometers in any direction to people who have never lived in Israel. It's hard for most people to imagine the entirety of a sold-out movie audience booing a Mel Gibson trailer. It's impossible for most people to imagine an American place where there isn't a single Christmas light for miles at a stretch. But that is exactly what happens in Pikesville, Maryland and on January 3rd 2003 the entire population seemed to pack itself into the Charles Theater's biggest screen for the Baltimore premiere of The Pianist.

I was with some old friends of mine who had been my classmates since we were five, and we entered the 500 seat theater to find that we had to go to the far right side of the third row to find any seats. Fifteen seconds later the lights dimmed. Within that time we seemed to get waves not only from half the people we went to school with but from half our parents' friends as well. The movie began, and for 150 minutes a theater full of Jews sat in rapt silence. A full half of the movie is without dialogue, and yet the audience was so quiet as to make me feel that I was the only person in the room.

No movie can possibly convey what being in the middle of the Holocaust was like, but more than Sophie's Choice, or Europa Europa, or even Schindler's List, The Pianist gives us an approximation. It is a survivor's story, and a lot of critics said that it was a testament to Wladislaw Spillman's perseverence that he survived an event that killed so many millions. But no other Holocaust movie contains The Pianist's ultimate insight: that no amount of willpower could save a single victim slated for death. All that allowed for Spillman's survival was luck, and luck of the most pure variety.

Spillman had help from gentiles, but so did millions of other Jews, many of whose lives were not saved. Two of those who were were my grandparents, Morris and Eva Tucker (formerly Maishel and Chava Ticoczki), but two who didn't survive was their daughter, Tzipporah and my great aunt Rachel Slodke. The chances are infantessimally small, but it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that Roman Polanski was hidden in the same Polish convent as my father's sister, or that one of the many people he probably saw shot was my father's aunt Rachel.

So maybe I have too much sympathy for a bad man. Holocaust survivors can be bad people too and I've had occasion to meet a few. But bad people are deserving of sympathy too and even if Polanski might deserve to go to jail for the rest of his life, I don't feel ashamed for having sympathy for him.

Born to Add

Greatest Sesame Street Parody Ever?

Who Does A Better Joe Cocker?

Joe Cocker?



or John Belushi?

Roman Polanski survived the Holocaust to be raised by his father. His father was also a Survivor, but to become so had to endure Matthausen, a camp deadly enough that no reliable figures exist for the casualties. The Nazis destroyed most of the statistics before liberation, but it's believed that somewhere between 170,000 and 320,000 people were killed (though some historians have put the figure at 2 million). After a childhood under Stalin and Hitler, Polanski was rewarded with a young adulthood in Gomulka's Poland. As a budding Polish director, his first film had enormous success but came under official criticism at a time when official criticism often meant imprisonment and sometimes worse.

He received asylum in France in an era when defection from a Communist country was anything but easy. His first period in France was unsuccessful because the arts in France were dominated by fellow travelers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Paul Sartre who were hostile to anyone who might contradict their view of the Soviet Union as the anti-imperialist savior of the world. One bad word from a famous cultural figure was enough to scare producers into refusing Polanski more than a few francs at a time. So Polanski had to move to London, where he found success and began his western career in earnest.

But Polanski's early movies had very little to do with politics. He was much more interested in human beings, and particularly in their humiliation. The streak of cruelty that marks his movies (and his personal life) was manifest from the very beginning. Whereas filmmakers today like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez use violence as an omnipresent force whose shock barely registers on the screen, the violence in Polanski's films slices to the cruelest possible angle. Perhaps a man who saw so much of life's terrors would see brutality as a part of the commonplace, or maybe Polanski was just a born sadist. But even with the Hitchcockian manner by which he makes his characters suffer (particularly his female characters), he seems to identify with their suffering in a way the Hitchcocks of the world never do. In a perverse, almost psychopathic way, there lurks a feminist streak to Polanski. It is hardly a streak that absolves him, but certainly one that that should make people question the standard writeoff of him as a born mysogenist.

His most famous early movie, Repulsion, is a case study of the madness that creeps in from isolation. The icily beautiful Carol (played by the icily beautiful Catherine Deneuve) comes to stay with her sister and gets into an argument with her sister's omnipresent yet married boyfriend. After the argument, Carol's sister goes on vacation with him to Italy and Carol finds herself trapped in her sister's apartment with the effects of an insanity that becomes more apparent every passing day. Unable to connect with people in either her personal life or her work, she comes completely undone over the course of a week. We helplessly watch as her hair gets messy, her clothes become tattered, and the food she refuses to eat rots on the table. Having previously confided that she is a virgin and perpetually afraid of men, she attempts to connect with a man only to end up blugeoning him with a candlestick and then cuts the throat of her sister's groping landlord with a straight razor. The sister comes home at the end of the week to find the dead bodies and Carol hiding under the bed. In the final shot, the camera pans to a family portrait in which Carol isolates herself from the rest of the family's domestic contentment.

Habanera

(Oh dear, the hours I've spent imitating this with Andrew Gordon...)

Hugh Laurie Interviews Michael Jackson

Alicia De Larrocha (1923-2009): An Appreciation

It was heady times for pianophiles in the 1980's. The grand age of Romantic Piano was coming to its end with a Lisztian bang. And the bang was dominated by three pianists still near the top of their respective games in their mid-eighties, each representing the last vestige of a different dying tradition.



In the late 1980's, Vladimir Horowitz was arguably in better pianistic shape than he was at any time since the early 50's. When Horowitz died in late 1989, the age of Anton Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Scriabin died with him. He was the last vestige of Russian pianism before the Revolution with its particular combination of elegance and volatility. The Soviet pianists after Horowitz could match him in temperament, but none of them could wed Horowitz's passion to his natural elegance.



One year older than Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin was nearly every bit the pianist at eighty that he was at thirty. The son-in-law of the great violinist Adolf Busch, the younger contemporary of Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Backhaus and a favored colleague of Arnold Schonberg, Serkin represented the last active link with the middle-class German traditions of chamber music, wide reading and bildung (though Wilhelm Kempff survived him in retirement). Serkin was the last pianistic link to an era in which German families would play Beethoven and Brahms for each other in drawing rooms. As a teacher Serkin mentored three generations of pianists and to this day generations of pianists he taught honor his legacy by playing the German classics with the same rigor and intensity he brought.



Serkin's exact contemporary in birth and death, Claudio Arrau, was Chilean by origin. But Arrau came from a tradition just as German as Serkin's and every bit as extinct. If Serkin was reared in the middle-class traditions of Brahms and Busch, Arrau came from the upper-class traditions of Liszt and Furtwangler. Arrau's music-making had a self-concious probity no other pianist would dare. No other pianist of the recorded era would chance to play the classics with Arrau's flexibility of tempo or disregard for written dynamics (not even his disciple, Daniel Barenboim). Arrau aimed not for Serkin's rigor but to endow music with all the weight of German philosophy. Every moment of Arrau's playing seemed to be an attempt to bend the listener's sense of time and space. Music-making has rarely been as 'heavy' an experience as it was in his hands.

While all three pianists still played around the world in their mid-eighties, their technique seemed fundamentally indestructable until the end (though Horowitz and Arrau had many off-nights). As they played on, a slew of slightly younger pianists seemed to find it excruciating to cope with the octogenarian onslaught. Among the Eastern Europeans: Emil Gilels, Gina Bachauer and Geza Anda all died early. Mieczyslaw Horoszowski and Shura Cherkassky seemed content to stay out of Horowitz's limelight, and Sviatoslav Richter confined his appearances to festivals. The entirety of th German-speaking lands did not produce an heir to Serkin until Alfred Brendel reached maturity and Arrau fans had to wait even longer for the maturation of Daniel Barenboim. Great American pianists seemed to appear at the speed of light: William Kapell, Julius Katchen, Leon Fleischer, Gary Graffman, Byron Janis, Van Cliburn - and yet every one of them seemed to die or burn out as quickly as they appeared. And that's not even mentioning Glenn Gould to the North... Maurizio Pollini was at his peak as he was twenty years before and still is twenty years later - playing the piano to an unassailable technical standard with barely any hint of a beating heart behind it.

With all these pianistic casualties, only two pianists the world over seemed to be able to compete with the old men on their own terms. Both were Spanish-speaking women, but there similarities end.



The Argentinian Martha Argerich was still only in her forties. Critics never seemed to tire of using words like 'volcanic' and 'smoldering' to describe her playing of the great Romantic works. Physically beautiful and forever rumored to be as tempestuous in her private affairs as she was in her pianism, her performances electrified crowds in every city. Like Horowitz, she seemed to carry an aura of instability and danger that magnetized audiences. Like Arrau and Horowitz, she overwhelmed her public with the enormity of her conceptions more than she did with the rightness of them. To this day her playing can be as wrong-headed as any great pianist in history, but her pianism was as unmistakable within a few notes as it is now.



But the Spaniard Alicia De Larrocha was Argerich's antipode in every way. Physically diminutive, Laroccha looked like a diminutive grandmother who couldn't possibly manage the piano's physical demands, and in a way she played exactly how she looked. Hers was the playing of a master who never tried to inundate the audience with pyrotechnics. Never especially intense or fiery, never prone to exaggerated phrasing or distended tempos, Laroccha's playing was elegance personified. She seemed to traipse onto the stage, blithely unaware of audience's expectations and played in a manner that seemed unaware there was an audience to play for.



In Larrocha's playing, proportion was the key: Every note articulated perfectly in proportion to the phrase in which it came, every phrase exactly right in proportion to the phrases around it and through it whole movements built with the efficacy of a master builder. Every tempo was perfectly chosen, and every tempo modification applied so judiciously to be unnoticeable. And all of that coupled with a touch to the piano that endowed Steinways worldwide with the most beautiful sound since Artur Rubinstein.



In the words of her manager, Herbert Breslin, "Alicia has two kinds of repertoire. The stuff she plays extremely well, and the stuff she plays better than anyone else." So it should come as no surprise that a pianist of such supernal elegance would be the undisputed Mozart pianist of her generation. But in the span of a concert she could go from making Mozart sound more pellucid than ever to making the music of her countrymen resound with swagger and abandon. Rubinstein and Barenboim have played Spanish music with more fire, but not even they could make it sound as natural, as "Spanish," and however she did that was her secret.

Pianists like Alicia De Larrocha are not supposed to be superstars. The kind, polite pianist who plays music like an eloquent conversation is not supposed to fill Carnagie Hall half a dozen times over. And yet in her era of giants, Alicia De Larrocha found an enormous place in music for intimacy and refinement. She was the most beloved pianist of an era and (with all due respect to the fine Maria Joao Pires) no heir has yet arrived to conjure up her particular breed of pianism for another generation.