Showing posts with label Mendelssohn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mendelssohn. Show all posts

Monday 16 July 2012

Performance anxiety

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


17 July

These words are sometimes thought of in another connection.

In the context of
Richard Sennett's lecture at The Aldeburgh Festival, although he did not ever seem to suggest (in addressing his topic) how a well-designed place for the performance of music or theatre could lessen it, it meant the fear on the part of either some of the performers or members of the audience that something would go wrong with the performance, a necessarily inhibiting feeling.

When listening to The Menuhin School Orchestra play Mendelssohn's Sinfonia No. 1, the fears were lesser than when they started to play the more rhythmically and dynamically varied Apollon musagète by Igor Stravinsky, but they need not have been present in either case: the pupils' musicianship, as conducted by Malcolm Singer, never appeared to be in doubt, and they brought off this second work to great acclaim.


Friday 27 April 2012

What did the bluebells tell Jesus?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


29 April

Dmitri Shostakovich concurred that Pushkin was right in stating that bluebells are very WYSIWYG*, pretty Zen.

DS demonstrated as much by transliterating the utterance - as only he knew how - to give the theme of the second movement of his Strinq Guartet [sic] No. 10 (sometimes seen as a printer's error, but actually a subtle slight on Stalin).

That apart, bluebells resemble snowdrops (and Märzenbecher) in being close to the ground, largely odourless, and, although not invariant, quite subtle in their varieties**.


As to whether they blabbed about the true nature of the Messiah and that he would suffer, opinions differ:

* Some say that the manna left in the desert areas was responsible

* Others blame Zionist / Marxist mechanisms of Tidal Flux

* It is, in any case, clear that Mendelssohn only accidentally gave the true name of God in one of the modulations of The Hebrides Overture, and paid a levy to the authorities governing Staffa for his mistake (but it was disguised, in the books, as late settlement of unpaid bills left by Boswell and Johnson)

* Botanists, who get shut out of many such a debate, say that bluebells were not in season at the relevant time - but what do they know about the conditions that prevailed two millennia ago?

* Sceptics suggest that, if the bluebells had been in a position to speak, they would not have been audible for the noise of the thyme and lemongrass


From which we can conclude that maybe the teaching of the bluebells, perhaps not as showy, resembled that of the lilies of the field, in being more like a PowerPoint® presentation in technicolor than a dry, formal lecture, given in a crumbling, drafty hall...


End-notes

* Which, actually, stands for What You Saved Is With Yuri Gagarian, the official motto of Moscow State Bank (we could not publish the unofficial one, for tax reasons).

** They are not well known in Galilee, it has to be said, but maybe the success that has built on their debut album might lead to a World Tour that takes in the region...