Well-Behaved Preferences

NSO plays Matthews, Mackey, Sibelius

2012-01-14T10:42:00.000-08:00

Saw the NSO with violinist Leila Josefowicz and the Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu last night, in the DC-premiere of a captivating violin concerto by the composer Steve Mackey composed, Sibelius' 5th, and orchestrations of selected Debussy Preludes by Colin Matthews.

The Mackey piece, "Beautiful Passing," was composed with Josefowicz in mind in 2008. Josefowicz played some of the key themes before the performance and explained their provenance in Mackey's experience of his mother's death. I can appreciate this as a way to get an audience to identify with a new work--its hard to expect even the most open-minded concert-goers to develop much rapport with a complex piece the first time out. Premieres end up being "that new thing" between the overture and symphony. Some framing and a story, live from the musicians or composer, helps ensure listeners walk away with a lasting association, even if they can't hum the tune.

Yet, as Robert Reilly notes here, a work like this should really stand on its own as a piece of abstract music and learning about the "program" in this way can be a bit distracting. For instance, the work opens with a violent contest between wild percussive gnashing in the orchestra and the exuberant, almost desperate violin solo--it ends softly, the violin exhausted, the orchestra at a quiet drone. We are told this is Mackey's mother resigning herself to die, but such information seems so terribly reductive when applied to this rich, evocative music. Words and stories fail, as they should, to describe the experience. While inspired by a specific experience for the composer, the music becomes more universal, in the hearing, transcending its subject matter. Which is all to say, my hope for this worthwhile piece is that it is still played in 10 years but that the majority of audience members without the initiative to check out its history are none the wiser about its context.

Josefowicz was quite stunning in the solo part, embracing the raucous dance figures that reappear throughout with diabolical gusto and imbuing the closing section with a devastating sense of collapse.

After the half was a bravura performance of Sibelius' 5th symphony. Lintu goaded along the rollicking rhythms of the first movement with swift, intense precision, culminating in an ecstatic climax that was hard not to applaud. The winning final movement (I swear to God that theme is ripped off in a tearful Don Bluth-animated animal reunion somewhere) was urgent but suitably majestic. Lintu clearly has that great intangible conducting skill of maintaining momentum while allowing the audience to appreciate the "vertical" harmony and texture in a work. The NSO sounded agile and rich throughout, though some shrillness in the winds and scattered coordination problems in the strings were popped up.

The concert opened with a series of five Debussy preludes, as orchestrated by the composer Colin Matthews, apparently best known for his role in Deryk Cooke's performance version of Mahler's 10th. This may be a personal bias, but I have difficulty seeing the point of these sorts of projects. The Preludes are quintessential creatures of the piano, and, not having particularly memorable tunes, much of their appeal is bound up in the way Debussy's colors play on that instrument. Why one would want to hear an orchestra try its hand is unclear. Moreover, it is exceedingly grating to hear Debussy's music orchestrated in a way that is far removed from how Debussy's orchestral music actually sounds. Not that I would find it particularly worthwhile to hear someone fake Debussy's style, but there is some deep cognitive dissonance in listening to the composer's music via a sensibility far more obvious and schmaltzy than anything we would expect from Debussy himself. Not saying all orchestrations are bad ideas, but it doesn't work for all material.

(And dere's Downey's original take at Ionarts.)

Santorum on Citizenship

2012-01-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

Santorum, at a NH townhall Saturday:

The job of a citizen is one that was essential--our founders believed was essential. They limited, as you know, initially, the rights of citizenship from the standpoint of voting to a small group of people because they were concerned that all Americans wouldn't take the responsibility seriously, wouldn't be educated enough to make an informed decision. Over time, though laws passed and amendments passe to the constitution, that opened up and more and more people. But with that freedom to be a participant in the electoral process comes responsibility.

That's right. The exclusion from the franchise of women, minorities, and poor dudes didn't have anything to do with a preponderance of influential 1700s politicians people believing they were classes of human being that didn't belong in public life, or in some cases, subhuman. Those infalliable Founders just didn't think they were "ready" yet, but boy would they have been pleased to learn that with a century or two of hard work they'd show they were worthy of getting a vote.

Why has a fetishization of the "founders" so characterized the current right-wing resurgence? What necessitates such an extreme whitewashing of history when surely there would be no face lost in claiming that these extraordinary men were nonetheless products of their time in some respects, or even, that their impeccable morality exists outside of space-time but they lived in a democracy after all and their co-generationalists forced these positions on them?

But of course, neither of these questions would get at the real objective here: rationalizing conservatives' deep discomfort with the principles of egalitarianism that liberals, and the modern society they have shaped, hold dear. That discomfort, a result of deep aesthetic and sentimental attachments to authority (be it the ancien regime or Christian white male privilege), can be suffocating to the emotionally and intellectually incurious who make up much of the conservative base. Santorum's bed-time stories at once absolve these folks of a responsibility they can't bring themselves to bear while reinforcing a truth they really do cherish deep down: that people "like them"--really know what's best for the country.

No More Fixing Social Security

2009-02-23T09:51:00.000-08:00

Atrios calls out this line in the NYT coverage of the summit business:

But any solution, budget analysts said, must include a mix of both approaches, though current beneficiaries would see no change.

Seriously though. Instead of budget analysts it should say "centrist fetishists who think everything is better split down the middle regardless of the actual policy tradeoffs involved". That's a purely political opinion, no budget analysis about it.

Tea Parties

2009-02-22T10:41:00.000-08:00

Nice sensible editorial about bank nationalization in the NYT today. It's hard to tell sometimes just how much the "fundamental abhorrence of nationalization" meme is actually felt or just generated by the press as the natural countervailing theme to the suggestion that the government is considering going down that road. In fact, this is where the whole "tea party" nonsense should really be directed. (Speaking of, 'tea party' sounds vaguely like it should be a euphemism for some kind of trendy sex party which only some people understand right? "Jamie is going to another tea party this weekend. He really needs to slow down." "Oh, yeah, sure, that's disturbing...I think")

But anyhow. While the outrage over the stimulus and the foreclosure stuff is pretty misguided, if a bit more for the former than the latter, the outrage over the bank bailouts is legitimate and should be felt by both conversatives and liberals alike. Conversatives claiming any sort of populist bearing SHOULD be pissed about sloppy turnovers of taxpayer money to megabanks which, if they weren't feeling the moral hazard before, almost CERTAINLY are in the brave new world of endless TARP. But we're not going to do nothing. Temporary nationalization should be held up as the way for taxpayers to punish the leadership of these institutions for their profligacy rather than feeding it.

Of course the cynical money might say that conservatives are using this as an opportunity to use the bank bailout to tarnish the stimulus bill, which clearly wasn't really succumbing to their critiques taken alone. Never you mind the past 8 years of stunning and unprecedented complicity between the Bush government and the country's elite financial interests, reject Obama's culture of bailout! Yeah, that sounds about right, actually. Crafty bastards, aren't they.

Strategizin'

2009-02-22T09:07:00.000-08:00

Nate Silver points out the thinking behind the Obama administration's willingness to go after agenda critics, e.g. Rush Limbaugh, the crazy CNBC guy, directly in press conferences. As Silver says, it does provide a nice foil for the administration, but it also does something more: it aligns the craziness of the commentators with the similar craziness of actual elected Republicans, without going after the minority directly.

Crazysauce

2009-02-22T07:49:00.000-08:00

If you thought Fox News was scary during the Bush years, you ain't seen nothing yet. I mean, if some guy started saying this shit to you on the subway, you would be freaked out, right? At least on Fox, Beck is clearly situated in the "hopeless bloody car crash that is sickly entertaining" section of the commentary landscape, as opposed to the "how are we ever going to fix dumb cable news" section, as before.

Pickin' Candidates

2009-02-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Jean Lopez says she's not REALLY serious about this but you know she kind of is. Because conservatives (of the Corner sort, at least) just can't seem to get it out of their heads that garnering 15 minutes of fame in the political press is synonymous with fitness for national office. It's the same mentality drives their glee over partisan hackery competing on the level with legitimate journalism, i.e., it gets the collective liberal goat.

Christmas 2010

2009-01-30T09:19:00.000-08:00

All I want is for Sarah Palin to announce her presidential candidacy within weeks of the midterms. Oh please do it Sarah Palin, you would make me ever so happy.

No doubt she'll have enough whatnot to get to Iowa at the least, right? And in the meantime, her participation in every. single. blessed. republican debate will help voters (who could theoretically be less enthused by that point) fall in love with Barack Obama all over again, as they are reminded that the only thing the Republican party has to sell America is a big jar of extra hot crazysauce.

Un-pushing the envelope

2009-01-28T20:59:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan:

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It's fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

Of all the things the Bush administration did that gave one that special oh-s**t-maybe-we're-not-coming-back-from-this feeling in the pit of one's stomach, the way their relentless boundary pushing seemed to call the bluff of our whole system of checks and balances was possibly the most disturbing. All those fancy constitutional safeguards appeared for a time to be exactly as effective as the goodwill of the executive willing to humor them. Eventually the Supreme Court did (if in a bit of a roundabout way) call bullshit on the administration, but it took a lot of time and political wind shifting to get there, and a lot of damage was done in between.

After all that, Obama's 'self restraint' in reasserting the executive's humility before the law looks indeed like a great gift to the nation.