Rudolf Serkin, Leonid Kogan, Lorraine Hunt: mein Herze schwimmt im Blut.

What would you find in common between these three artists from different times, different origins, different backgrounds?

Well, let us find the answer in the cantata BWV 199 of Johann Sebastian Bach for solo soprano. The last one the Cantor wrote for a solo soprano and for me the most beautiful, most sensual, most risky of the entire corpus.

This is the cantata where the notion of faith is expressed in the most earthy, carnal, human, erotic way:

Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut,
Weil mich der Sünden Brut
In Gottes heilgen Augen
Zum Ungeheuer macht.
Und mein Gewissen fühlet Pein,
Weil mir die Sünden nichts
Als Höllenhenker sein.
Verhaßte Lasternacht!
Du, du allein
Hast mich in solche Not gebracht;
Und du, du böser Adamssamen,
Raubst meiner Seele alle Ruh
Und schließest ihr den Himm
Ach! unerhörter Schmerz!
Mein ausgedorrtes Herz
Will ferner mehr kein Trost befeuchten,
Und ich muß mich vor dem verstecken,
Vor dem die Engel selbst ihr Angesicht verdecken.


My heart swims in blood
because the brood of my sins
in God's holy eyes
makes me into a monster.
And my conscience feels pain
because my sins are nothing
but Hell's hangmen.
Detested night of vice!
You, you alone
have brought me into such distress;
and you, you evil seed of Adam,
rob my soul of all inner peace
and shut it off from heaven!
Ah! unheard of pain!
My withered heart
will in future be moistened by no comfort
and I must conceal myself from himbefore whom the angels themseves conceal their faces.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNF1zMzBEm4


The illustration through the YouTube video, with Magdalena Kožená singing, is a proof that music is the most powerful - and therefore the most dangerous of all Arts - and it also tells you that the pious Bach should and would have been killed by the inquisition, would the musician have been catholic and would the religious squad have been smart enough to identify and recognize the power and the danger of this music.
Fortunately, Bach was not catholic and the religious censors weren't smart enough.

But, back to Rudolf Serkin, the mid eastern Europe Jew from the early XX Century emigrating to the USA when the barbarians started to destroy Humanity and Mankind in Europe, Leonid Kogan, the "little Abraham Lincoln" from Odessa, who behaved and lived knowing and showing that being a Russian musician was the most important thing on earth and Lorraine Hunt, the girl from California who was able to " to dig as deeply as possible into the character — to find all the grain in the wood".

These three are the epitome of  the Power and the Danger of Music as supreme Art.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsLojxzbuFM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XuiYO95aBI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2bmIkljjqY

That is why their loss is so burning after respectively 19, 28 and 5 years.

That is also why the Life and the Art expressed by their musicianship is also forever burning, like the Burning Bush

Eat, pray, love.

I have to admit, I am usually a good sport and an easy public: it is rather easy to make me happy with Art or....what an awful word....entertainment.

But, I have to admit I did enjoy a lot this delicious movie. Is it a sign of a "bad" mid-life crisis? or, after all, maybe Elisabeth Gilbert was spot on with her book.

What is the meaning of an individual life?

Balance, stupid....as Bill Clinton would have perfectly responded like he did during the 1992 US presidential election!

Yes, balance: a very nice word, provided you are able to put some content behind it, and Elisabeth Gilbert is just able to do that.

The movie is rather faithful to the book and Javier Bardem has been offered one of his best roles. He is dignified, strong, moving and...yes very lovable, and  Julia Roberts would have made the biggest mistake of her life not regaining her balance with him.

This movie, like the Italian wine is a ....therapist and...an excellent one!

Literature in South Africa in the late XX century

Why is it that one of the most beautiful country on earth in my opinion, but also one of the most remote, has been producing so many great novelists during the second half of the XX century and at the turn of the XXI?

It is always difficult to oversimplify a series of complex reasons and circumstances, but the genius of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach and J.M.Coetzee has certainly been fueled by their will to use their artistic powers to depict stories shaped by an historical moment that was just a human dead end.

What makes their works masterpieces though is that they have been able to compose novels that will speak to their fellow human beings long after this historical moment would have vanished.

The historians are starting to do their job regarding the apartheid era and we have to let them work. Only time will let us have a more clinical and "objective" view about this period.

However, the art of Nadine Gordimer - the very first one - André Brink, and the other ones is telling us that this political and social construction was a dead end by design.

This is the power of great literature and great artists to be able to feel their time and to express it long before it can be understood.

One of these days, I will talk about the opera of Morton Feldman "Neither" and about why it is to me such an important milestone in the history of the genre.

Stay tuned !

August 20, 1980.

30 years ago in Tahiti today Joe Dassin passed away.

He was only 42. American-French, son of movie director Jules Dassin and Hungarian virtuoso violinist Béatrice Launer, Joe Dassin is an alumni of University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he got a Master Degree in Ethnology. Then he moved to France and soon started a career as a singer.

When I was a teenager, Joe Dassin was considered the epitome of sophistication and he was indeed.
His love songs are the reflect of his life: losing a child at birth five days after delivery in 1969 and having his couple being destroyed after that tragic event.

I still love Joe Dassin and his music and when I drive in the gorgeous Shenandoah Valley or when I return from a business trip and I have to drive a rental car from Dulles airport to Lynchburg, the journey is always much more enjoyable with "Salut les amoureux", "A toi", "Mon village du bout du monde", " Ca va pas changer le monde" or "les plus belles années de ma vie".

Joe, you will never be forgotten !

So long and R.I.P.

Heiliger Dankgesang

Beethoven and the notion of Deity ?!....As General Charles de Gaulle could have said in original language " Vaste Programme!".

The Missa Solemnis is already an interesting animal, showing Beethoven talking to ....God, not as a subject, but as an equal, even grounding him at time: you just have to listen to the music going with " Give us Peace ", it is an order and an expression of anger.

It remains me of a joke by Woody Allen that I always enjoyed : "If God really exists, he'd better have a good excuse !".

Anyways, in a nutshell, the notion of Deity is complex in Beethoven's life.

I always thought the late string quartets of Beethoven are the greatest music ever written and probably the greatest piece of Art ever written.

Among this Himalaya, the third movement of opus 132 has a special place. Here is a movement, which is the longest ever written for a string quartet at the time Beethoven composed it and is still one of the longest ever written for this medium today.

This piece is absolutely fascinating and I would like to share one of the most interesting lecture I ever listened too regarding this movement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c-R544gF8s

On October 30, 2007 Robert Kapilow, a composer himself, gave a lecture for the Stanford School of Medicine Medcast Lecture Series.

He is backed by the St Lawrence String Quartet, who was Stanford's University Ensemble in Residence at this time and he explores the notion of illness as a potent source of creativity through Beethoven's " Heiliger Dankgesang".

Beethoven wrote this movement after recovering from a life-threatening illness and he headed this movement with the words " Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart "; which you can translate in English as " A convalescent's Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity, in Lydian Mode ".

What interests me is the relation with the Divinity in this composition and I truly understand it as a pure appreciation of existence and a Thanks to Life.

I truely advise not to be afraid by the lenght of this Robert Kapilow's lecture, as it is one of the most nurturing, most refreshing, most interesting lecture and analysis I ever heard of this fascinating piece, which will always be larger and richer than any human being who will try to grasp an understanding of it.

Enjoy !

9000 days

This is the title of a song part of the soundtrack of the movie "Invictus".  It relates to the 27 years of Nelson Mandela's political imprisonement.

Like François Pienaar and the 1995 Springboks team, I paid a visit to the Robben Island Prison complex and to the cell occupied by Nelson Mandela.

All that does not kill us makes us stronger, but what really makes us stronger is the power of our mind.
Invictus is this poem by William Ernest Henley, whose words have been helping Mandela during the 27 years in jail.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
 
 
The song "9000 days" by South African band Overtone is very movinghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J1Xov0dB5Q
 
9000 days were set aside....9000 days of destiny.
 
And it leads me to talk about one of the greatest novelists of our time.
Although Nadine Gardimer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, she is not as well known as Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach and J.M.Coetzee.
 
It is very unfair, in my mind. Brink, Breytenbach and Coetzee are all three in their seventies and Nadine Gordimer is now well advanced in her eighties.
 
She was the first, starrting with her first novel in 1953 " The Lying Days" to use the power of her writing to depict the twisted evil of a system condemned to a dead end by design.
 
As it is today very difficult to find "The lying Days" - This absolute masterpiece by a young genius must be reprinted and should never have been out of print. It should also be translated - my intelligence tells me that it is one of the Gordimer's novels never translated in French....a shame! - I advise to read first "Burger's Daughter " to have a flavor of what has been apartheid.
 
I will always been happy about the decision I made during my time living in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 1983 to flight and visit South Africa and see first hand the apartheid, Soweto, the Kruger National Park and also the city of Bulawayo in Matabeleland and part of Zimbabwe.
 
It has shaped the way I live my life and the way I build relations with my fellow human beings for the rest of my life.

What does it mean to be a music interpreter in 2010?

Based on what I have been following over the last ten years, the overal technical potential of the average music interpreter is higher today than say sixty years ago.

But Rabelais was right "Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme".

And it is particularly true in Art in general and music rendering in particular.

Among other treasures that a trip to the gorgeous city of Marseille brought to my life, meeting René and Suzanne Gambini was priceless.

René and Suzanne created their own recording label Lyrinx some 35 years ago and, since then, they just remained true to themselves and to their philosphy and values.

During our meeting, René made me aware of the first recording of a young French pianist: Paloma Kouider.

The discovery of the art of Paloma Kouider has been one of the great joys this month of August 2010 brought to me, confirming my own motto "The best is yet to come!" even when you go through hard times.

Since then, I did start an exchange with this incredibly interesting, mature, consciencious young artist and I have to confess I enjoy it a lot.

Paloma has a web site, very well done: http://www.palomakouider.com/

You can listen to some extracts of some pieces, including the hungarian rhapsody No 12 of Franz Liszt.

I agree with René: Paloma is not like the average stainless steel pianist of today, but reminds me of the fantasy of the musicians of my childhood who were expressing their emotions through their piano: Yves Nat and Catherine Collard being two of these coming right to my mind.

It is always very emotional to witness the blossoming of a young artist: so many possibilities, so much hope, but also so much fragility.

I just can wish Paloma to enjoy the journey because this is what is really important after all.