A clue to successful concert going

FF.
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Yundi Li rocks.

No, that's not right.

Let me rephrase that.



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YUNDI LI ROCKS
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It was by far the best Pictures I have ever heard. I was sitting at the edge of my seat, holding my breath and gripping the arm-rest for dear life.

Whoa.

Now, until winning the Chopin competition, aged 18, Xiao Yun had never studied in the West, or even outside of China; so much for the old saw, then -- the vaguely Eco-Steinerian hogwash so beloved of pianists in western music schools -- that Asian pianists are dull because they don't understand the music (have not read the Greeks, don't personally know Jesus, whatever). In truth, many Asian pianists are dull (we shall not name any names); but so are most pianists world over; and I have personally known a few Asian pianists who weren't dull at all. (And even slept with one: she played a real mean Piano, Percussion and Celesta).

Now Xiao Yun stands proof for all to see the hogwashness of hogwash.

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By the usual vagaries of concert-going (whereby the front row seats get blocked out to sponsors who then do not bother to turn up), I spent the first half sitting in the third row -- the only seats available in the whole house at the time I made the booking. And it was naaas-tea: O Grande Auditorio proved to be, in fact, O Grande Ospedale -- bird flu or something (pooh-leaze, if you can't stop yourself from coughing, hacking and snorting stay at home and give your ticket to someone who can). Besides, it seems, the locals must keep cats (here, "a common parasite found in cats may be affecting human behavior on a mass scale", read it and have your cat put to sleep now): there was so much fidgeting, twitching, program dropping, notebook consulting, purse-innards inspecting, and just plain wheezing, I could not concentrate at all.

In the third row, damn it. What did the poor wretches in row 29 get out of the concert, I have no idea.

But then, for second half, I snuck (sp?) into one of those VIP-abandoned seats; and the experience was incredible; best second half for many years; heaven and hell. You do not just hear the music better -- the sound wave gushing out of the open box hits you right in the face; or see the artists better (the fingers, the beads of sweat, the color in the cheek, the painful concentration, sometimes fear, sometimes delight); you also do not hear or see the audience.

This is what business consultants like to call a win-win situation.

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(By the way: the best way to listen to the grand piano is to lie under it while it is being whacked. In college, I had a pianist girlfriend and used to lie under her piano when she played. In time I developed a trick: I went to the music school and simply barged in on one of the practice rooms, asking whoever was in there to let me lie under his or her piano. They almost always did. (Wouldn't you?) The ability to do so is the only thing I miss about my college town. Many years later, my heart skipped a beat when I read a letter of Georges Sand talking about her lying for hours under Frédéric's piano).

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Now, onto the (usual) points.

First, lesson one:
If you go to a live concert, get seats in the first row -- whatever they might cost: an arm and a leg, your grandma's hearing-aid, whatever; just do it; or else -- don't bother. Really. I mean it. Just don't.

Second, lesson two:
If you ever wonder why other people do not share your impressions of a concert, well, they must have sat in a different row from you.

Corollary:
The concert is thus a good model for understanding all opinions regarding culture: there are 29 rows in the Gulbenkian plateia (plus Allahu-Akbar only knows how many in the balcao); which means that no more than 1/29 of the audience had the first rate experience. (Less than that in fact: the guy sitting next to me must have been from the sponsors: he kept consulting his watch).
This fact makes it virtually certain that the opinion you are getting from random someone else about a concert -- or a piece of art -- is wholly and completely worthless. (They are just too likely to fall into the 28/29ths cohort).
If you must consult, consult with those who have the time, money and commitment to do it right. Or not at all.

The truth is that art is not just an elite experience; it is an extreme-elite experience, as Nancy Mitford's Love in cold climate shows (in the novel, the aristocrats who own the art works are almost to a man too stoopid to know what they own). It's not that "only 10% know anything about it". Proper art appreciation is measured in parts per billion.

(Like -- three).

*

Anyway, here is Xiao Yun beating the bejeezus out of Prokof's Number 2. Prokof's Number 2 is some of the most barbarous -- no -- deranged -- stuff ever written for the piano (Bartok's Allegro Barbaro is tame substance by comparison) and on this account it has been rarely played or recorded; ("Er", said Prokof to himself halfway through a movement. "I don't like this tempo. Let's speed up", and sped up but after 12 bars: "Nah, that's too fast! Let's slow down", etc.); but delicate Xiao Yun (note the permed hair-do a la Frédéric -- who else? -- ) serves it up right. (Too bad about the orchestra; Xiao Yun also recorded this work with BerPhilius but no one had thought to pirate that on you tube, so you must buy it online to the get the optimum bang.

Alright, enough talk. Here is Xiao Yun. Knock yourself out:



PS. Alright, so I can't stop. Googling a bit I find that Xiao Yun played the same program in NYC in October, and that the NYT reviewer thought (here) as I did: that the Mazurkas were alright, the Polonaise fine (it was fine, I just don't love Polonaises, they're too close to home or something), and the Pictures fantastic ("a gripping, boldly conceived account"). Clearly, all great minds do think alike -- provided they have the same input (i.e., sit in the same front row seats, etc.)

(It's nice to read a reviewer one agrees with; especially since most I violently do not).

PPS. The reviewer is right in pointing out technical imperfections in the Pictures. I too have spotted three places where things didin't go exactly right (in one instance even outright wrong). But it is possible -- as paradoxical as that sounds -- to fail technically and yet deliver fantastic music all the same. There is a live Gilels recording -- the Busoni here -- to prove the point; error ridden and absolutely superb.

Greatness isn't possible without superb technique, but it isn't identical with it.

I'd rather

I wake in the middle of the night. The moon is looking in, a soft cool breeze blows over my face, a feint scent of lemons wafts into the room. I lie thinking about banks, housing, residence, airline tickets, travel plans.

But I want to lie there thinking about Chinese snuff bottles instead. Like this darling (above), in carved glass.

(See some other wonderful examples of this art genre at the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society's website).

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Among the items on that website, there is something odd:


Snuff-bottle makers often worked in one medium to imitate another (e.g., carved porcelain to imitate ivory, etc.). So only one naturally asks -- what is this? It looks like... Dutch steamed rye bread?

The technique, we are told, is -- er? -- molded gourd.

What is molded gourd?, you might well ask. A modern-day practitioner of the art explains:

The small gourd fruit, after dropping its flower, is inserted through the mold opening. The gourd grows into the mold confines during the summer season. At frost time, the stem is cut leaving the mold with the gourd inside. The mold is then opened ad the gourd is set to dry.

Here are examples of his work. (It's really quite interesting).

How very, very weird.

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Many snuff boxes were made in enameled copper -- they represent a kind of sub-genre. A copper enamel piece typically look like this:


(This page allows you to see this piece, once part of Qianlong's collection, now at National Palace Museum in Taipei, in all of its gloriously astounding detail).

At the very same NPM, there is a curious pair -- of European-made enameled copper snuff-bottles. Here is one of them:


They are of the usual shape typical of Chinese enameled copper pieces. Or rather close to it. But they differ in three ways: the colors are European; the roundel is a European miniature natura morta; and in the bottle cap there is... a miniature watch (clocks and watches being the only thing the Chinese were interested in buying from European merchants until the latter hit upon the idea of selling them opium).

Sadly, there appears to be no record of how, why, by whom or for whom the pair was made. Yet, there must be a rich story: the item was almost certainly commissioned as a gift from one person to another; the two certainly knew each other well and probably transacted business together; one -- the recipient -- collected snuff boxes; and was clearly a man of both means and exquisite taste; the other -- the giver -- had European contacts as well as considerable wherewithal. Since the order took two years to transmit to Europe, a year to make, and a year or two to return, the gifts was intended for, one assumes, an important, long term relationship. One also assumes the recipient could not have been too old: one does not plan five years in advance gifts to be given to septuagenarians.

(The Sherlock method works well in this instance, does it not?)

Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I would rather be thinking about.

Wouldn't you?

Histoire de l'empereur de la Chine

This is Emperor Sailing, one of a series of tapestries made at the royal manufactory at Beauvais, after a designs by Guy Vernansal, Jean-Baptise Belin de Fontenay and Jean-Baptise Monnoyer.

Writes Christie's who sold this particular work in 2004 (to Chicago Art Institute, as it happens):

[The series is thought to represent] the Chinese emperors Shun Chih (reigned 1644 - 1661) and Kang Hsi (reigned from 1661 - 1721) and their Empresses. Many of the images are based on Johan Nieuhof's Legatio batavica ad magnum Tartatiae chamum sungteium, modernum sinae imperatorem of 1665, which derived from the visit of a delegation of the Dutch East India Company to China from 1655 - 1657. For the botanical details Athanasius Kircher's China Monumentis qua Sacris qua Profanis of 1667 seems to have served as inspiration. As its title 'Roi de Chine' implied, the series was meant to illustrate the Chinese Royal Court, but many influences from other Far Eastern countries are discernable. The artists were keen to incorporate as many 'documented' exotic objects as possible in these tapestries.

Further discussion here.

Go here to zoom in on the remarkable detail.

Other tapestries from the series survive: here is one at the Getty (The Empress Sailing). The connection of these tapestries with Joachim Bouvet's book Histoire de l'empereur de la Chine, presentée au roy, 1699, printed by Meyndert Uytwerf, Paris, 1699 (and reprinted in Tientsin in 1940) is not clear; but Bouvet's connection with Louis XIV is clear: he was originally dispatched by His Most Christian Majesty with books and scientific instruments to the court of Kang-hsi as an envoy; he then served there as the emperor's tutor; and eventually became Kang-hsi's emissary to France.

One could say that one great difference between Louis XIV and the fellows like Steiner and Eco was that His Majesty, being a greater man, was interested in places outside of Europe. And how could he not be: on the opposite end of the globe there was someone like him, his double, perhaps his mirror image, a king of wisdom, virtue, art and gloire.

On precisely the other side of the world there existed his equal. There was one. How extra-ordinary.

Ottoman calligraphy on leaf

1) Take a leaf
2) Inscribe in gold ink or overlay with gold leaf
3) Soak in alkaline solution until connective tissue dissolves
4) Gild

The inscription is a formulaic prayer: "O Lord, grant me a good entry and a beautiful exit and support me with Thy might". The leaf is the especially difficult to handle (because fragile) chestnut.

Agha Khan collection.

On the importance of good promotion

Many have puzzled why French classical tragedy (Corneille and Racine) has not traveled abroad as well as the English Shakespeare has. Various fanciful explanations have been proposed for this problem¹ – such as that French tragedy is cut off from archaic or vernacular roots (French poetry being “inward looking”), that it is too rhetorical (all talk and no action), too grandiloquent (pompous), too set in the political realities of the moment, and so forth.

These are classic historicist explanations (in the Karl Popper sense): they cannot be tested. Indeed, some can't even be understood. (From which it follows that the guys in literary studies do not read enough analytical philosophy).

But these theories have something else in common: they use the seed-and-soil model of culture – make a seed appropriate to the soil, then throw it and it will grow into a tree.

It's wrong. (And typical of an academic who has not sold a thing in the real world in his life).

The authors forget the parable of the seed -- the essential third element of agriculture -- agriculture itself: domesticated plants don’t grow unless someone tills, rakes and waters the ground. (The seed of wheat is not robust enough to break dry ground unaided). Similarly, culture does not succeed on its own: it requires cultivation. And it seems just possible that French drama has never had in England the sort of enthusiastic and influential promoters that Shakespeare has had in France.

The promotion, or its success, need not have much to do with the quality of the art itself.

Consider that perhaps the most enthusiastic and influential promoter of Shakespeare in France was Voltaire who was, he reported, just amazed by what he saw in London. But Voltaire hardly spoke any English, so it isn’t clear that he knew what he was talking about; and in any case in his Letters From England were chiefly written for the purpose of knocking things French. Voltaire needed things foreign to praise -- with which to club the French: for what he wanted to accomplish, he could as easily have written Letters From Peking. Indeed, practically every sentence he wrote about Shakespeare and his superiority over French drama is so abstract, vague and -- well, historicist -- that he might as well have written it about Kungqu.

Similarly, those who seek causes for the success of even mediocre American film in its qualities may also be mistaken: they simply do not realize the power of the distribution machinery or the mammoth size of the promotional budget with which American films go out into the world. Typically, a film's promotional budget is greater than its production budget, and usually is increased if the initial sales are promising.

Human beings being essentially mimicking machines, in order to make its mark, a work of art needs good promotion far more than it needs quality of design -- as the latterly success of ugly fixtures and uncomfortable furniture clearly shows.

(I'd say the analytical value of Steiner's Death of Tragedy has been about zero, so far).

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¹It is a pseudo problem anyway: English tragedy has not traveled; Shakespeare has.

A piece of Chinese embroidery

The Gulbenkian is an extraordinary collection: it is all, without exception, incredibly beautiful. M. Calouste was not merely very rich, and immensely knowledgeable about what he collected (and he collected an extraordinary range of stuff -- his range was certainly broader than George Steiner's), but he also had impeccable taste: he did not buy a single second-rate item.

This piece of embroidery is one of the most extraordinary items in the Gulbenkian. As far as I know it may be unique -- there may literally not be another item like this in the world. (Although the Kantha embroidery is similar in style and can on occasion come close in technical attainment).

This perhaps explains the difficulty the museum has with attribution; it used to be marked as "Canton, China (?), early 19th century", reflecting perhaps its similarity to the yueh techniques (not mentioned in the English wikipedia entry on Chinese embroidery); and the Chineseness of the phoenixes; but I notice it has now been re-attributed to "Japanese, 19th century", presumably on its mindboggling obsession with technical virtuosity, the extraordinary color scheme -- gorgeous without being gaudy, and perhaps also on the geometrical arrangement, balanced rather than symmetrical.

I will try to find out what occasioned this re-attribution, but personally doubt it. While the Chinese have had a history of making embroidered wall-hangings, a tradition of free-standing embroidery, and a history of Imperial embroidering workshops, the Japanese had none of these. Further, no piece of Japanese embroidery which I have ever seen I looks remotely similar in technique, using, as it does very thin thread to produce smooth, flat images easily mistaken for print.

But I am prepared to be surprised.

The cloth is about 6 feet x 4 feet; uses several different embroidering techniques in several different thicknesses of silk; and seems by and large missed by most visitors.

Here are some close-ups of the work. Note that it is embroidered all over, the background having been embroidered in a subtle, barely perceptible pattern of spirals.











PS. The high cultural status of embroidery in China is reflected by the fact that the great Ming Dynasty scholar-painters Wen Zhengming, Dong Qichang and Shen Zhou had all been famous in their lifetimes as great embroiderers.

Crap luxury

So I went to see a luxury apartment for sale today. The place was 65 sq m and the asking price was 350K. (Yes, that would be 5.4K a meter, you are not misreading this).

The visit depressed me for the rest of the afternoon.

It depressed me because what was on offer would cost 70K down plus 1100 a month in interest; and was about 4K per meter more (yes, 3.5 x more) than some of the used, non-luxury apartments just next door; yet there was nothing luxury about it at all. The flooring was man-made fiber carpet; and the cabinetry was flimsy, hollow-sounding faux wood -- there was neither teak nor marble anywhere in sight. And while the place was packed with useless gizmos -- central vacuum, central heating, electric operated shutters, built-in centrally operated sound system, frames for LCD displays everywhere; yet, the rooms were small, the ceilings low (and made even lower by hung ceiling installed to receive the must-have recessed lights that are all the rage), the terrace was too small to eat on, and the noise from the traffic outside made double pane windows necessary, which in turn necessitated climatization.

Climatization! In this city!

To make things worse, everything was in the square style: glass table tops and stainless steel furniture and harsh-lights -- whoever lives there will no doubt eat of square white (or black) plates using inconvenient but very sharp utensils. It was all cold, angular, sharp-edged and calculated for discomfort - knobs with which to stabs one's fingers, etc. The concept appears to be one of Emergency Room.

Yet, the building was nearly all sold out: I was looking at the last two units available. People are buying this stuff; and paying real, hard-earned money for it. And clearly believe that central vacuum is luxury. And then move in and start feeling funny; and can't figure out why: they seem to have everything yet something seems lacking in their lives.

Comfort.