Gotham Diary:
Gypsies
16 April 2013
This has been a bad year for the ticket drawer. Too many tickets have gone straight from the drawer to the trash. Although Kathleen and I have decided not to renew our theatre and concert subscriptions for next season, I’ve tried to strike a compromise by taking advantage of the programs at the Museum, which is more or less in the neighborhood. Even that has been difficult, though, what with late-winter low spirits.
Last Friday, however, we did actually show up for something, and were delighted to have done so. A new outfit calling itself the Salomé Chamber Orchestra backed up violinist Philippe Quint and violist David Aaron Carpenter (one of the Salomé’s founding siblings) in a performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K 364. I’ll say right away that I’ve never heard the work played nearly so well. Live performances have, in fact, tended to disappoint me. Friday night’s was just the opposite: a surprise.
It has long been my conviction that K 364 is Mozart’s angriest work. There is a lot of mockery in Mozart’s catalogue, but anger is rare, and perhaps K 364 is the only instance. The anger, tucked in between every well-mannered note, is directed at the Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart’s employer, who refused to let the young musician travel. (And at Mozart’s father, whose idea of a career didn’t suit his son at all.) The violin and viola cry out in competition: “I hate this town more than you do!” The slow movement, which Maynard Solomon likens to a tragic opera seria duet, mourns the opportunities in Vienna, Paris, Milan, and elsewhere that Mozart is missing because he is stuck in a hick town by a contract. A hick town that would become a major destination on the music circuit simply because he couldn’t wait to get out of it.
You don’t have to know any of this background to grasp the passion; you need only read the music — which, when dutifully played for the archbishop, I’m sure went right over his head (or perhaps gave him a slight headache). Friday’s musicians did not play dutifully. They played the music by its edge. That’s how I describe what gypsies used to do — the faux gypsy musicians of old Vienna. They played as if entranced as dervishes, but every note would be where it belonged. Like such gypsies, Messrs Quint and Carpenter and the Salomé players flaunted the tension between precision and abandon, with all the playful ostentation of a sword-swallower. I couldn’t have liked it more. The performance was enthusiastically received, with booming applause after each movement. The musicians’ intensity fairly demanded it.
We stayed on for Lera Auerbach’s Sogno di Stabat Mater for violin, viola, vibraphone and orchestra. Aside from a few wild patches, mostly at the beginning, this is a neo-baroque work such as Arvo Pärt might inspire. I’d like to hear it again, and I look forward to a recording. (The program materials neglect to identify the gifted vibraphonist.)
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In the old days, which is to say the first six years of blogging (this site will be nine years old in November), I used to buy a lot of things on the basis of other bloggers’ enthusiasm. I got the mugs and T shirts out of my system fairly early, but it took a while to stop buying books that, months later, I could no longer recall a reason for ordering. Lately, I have been getting rid of a lot of such books, even though I haven’t read them. Because I haven’t read them. I shall, of course, name no names.
One book that I didn’t discard was Bill Morris’s All Souls’ Day. I can’t think why I bought it, but I do know that I had it long before my interest in the American War in Vietnam flared up late last year. Set in 1963, All Souls’ Day is a crisply-written romance. The hero is a burned-out Navy vet who is running a Bangkok hotel with a Thai buddy from the war. The heroine is the daughter of a prominent California family. Working in Saigon for the USIS, she is shocked to discover the discrepancy between reports from the field and the twaddle dispatched to Washington — where, it is clear, leaders from Kennedy on down have decided to punish those who tell them what they don’t want to hear. The hero is, naturally, unshockable. The heroine puts her foot down: she can have no respect for a man who knows what the hero knows but refuses to act. So the hero thinks up something to do. Action!
There is just enough well-written, intelligent discussion of the war to keep the book afloat in its sentimental sea of hyper-handsome lovers, thrilling sex scenes, and lovingly described meals. In the course of the novel, both the hero and the heroine read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and they’re amazed by how little has changed in the ten intervening years. It is clear that the author loves The Quiet American, but he is really too upbeat and — I can think of no other word — automotive to stretch for Greene’s dark-hearted gravity. The lovers are appalled by the American conduct of the war, and resolve upon an expatriate existence that seems to suit them well. There is none of Greene’s ambivalence.
As an accompaniment to reading serious histories of the American War, All Souls’ Day is a treat, evoking without pedantry a world gone by. Oh, the fall of ’63! It was my first term at boarding school, and everything that happened, from the explosion of the Beatles to the assassination in Dallas, is bound up in the delight of being away from home at last. Beyond the antics of Madame Nhu and the downfall of her husband and brother-in-law, I don’t remember giving a thought to Vietnam. Youth!