Almost Done Moving . . .
Two items that I've been enjoying in odd minutes during the last couple of days, when I haven't been packing, or moving my things down the street, or (shortly) cleaning the apartment I'm about to vacate:
Jean-Philippe Toussaint's short novel Television (trans. Jordan Stump) is delightful, and a pleasantly quick read. I pulled it off a bookstore shelf last week on a whim, having never heard of Toussaint. Turns out to have been a felicitous impulse-buy.
Ostensibly the book's about a French academic in Berlin for a summer who decides to quit watching television entirely, but this is more of a jumping-off point and refrain than a plot framework. The story is a series of blithe anecdotes from the unnamed narrator, threaded together by the man's utter inability to get any work accomplished. (His monograph, concerning Titian and the relation of political power to the arts in 16th-century Italy, stands for most of the book at exactly two words long.)
It's all dryly amusing, and the characterization is a great blend of ironic detachment and standard-issue obliviousness. The understated pace and rhythm of the storytelling fits well into the state of drifty laziness. The actual comments about television, though they're few and far between, are well put. Toussaint's character watches TV by flicking aimlessly through channels, in a bit of an echo with how he thinks about the rest of his world just enough to get by.
I never would have heard of the Viennese composer Kurt Schwertsik if my former place of employment hadn't had something rather direct to do with him, since he doesn't seem to have much of a foothold in the US. (Franz Welser-Möst did conduct a short piece of Schwertsik's with the Cleveland Orchestra a couple years back at Carnegie Hall, but nothing has come up since then.) He seems best at orchestra music, and composes with an ear for rich sounds and deft details; often this adds up to a pretty satisfying whole. Certainly often enough that he should be performed more often here.
A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to ordering a copy of this Australian CD of Schwertsik's "Irdische Klänge" cycle of tone poems (in English = Earthly Sounds), which he composed through the 1980s and early 1990s. (The final work represented, "Baumgesänge," isn't part of the cycle, but shares the style and personality of the others.) These are entertaining and sympathetic works, written in an expressive and fairly romantic vein -- Schwertsik uses complex and often thick harmonies, but they're not combatively dissonant and they move and grow with expressive melodic gestures. In places he drops in minimalist textures (pages pretty obviously out of Steve Reich's or John Adams's book, but freshly done) or, more rarely, a cheesy light-jazz sort of melody or riff.
Schwertsik brings a quirky and bemused personality to the table that's pretty rare in current classical music. This brings the Irdische Klänge pieces off as humble human reactions to nature, rather than any great statement on natural beauty. This is most literally the case in the "Fünf Naturstücke," constituting the cycle's second part, which pay homage to old-fashioned stage sound effects (wind machine, thunder sheet, etc.) I like that he lines up wonderment and appreciation of prettiness next to your more poetic emotions; so much recent classical music seems to deny the "lighter" emotions wholesale. They're not fluff; they're part of living.
There's some amount of environmental statement involved, at least in that the nature connection to "Mit den Riesenstiefeln," the last installment of the cycle, seems only to be the idea that we're destroying things. It's a broadly sardonic march that sounds like something from the world's scariest circus, or possibly what would have happened if Gustav Mahler had tried to write the soundtrack to Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
"Baumgesänge" I've found fiendishly catchy since the first time I've heard it, especially its fiery, kinda-minimalist, maybe-apocalyptic conclusion.
Anyway, recommended. (I actually ordered this from Australia, though it looks like you can get it within the US too. Why I only noticed this now while searching for the cover image online, I can't say.)
Jean-Philippe Toussaint's short novel Television (trans. Jordan Stump) is delightful, and a pleasantly quick read. I pulled it off a bookstore shelf last week on a whim, having never heard of Toussaint. Turns out to have been a felicitous impulse-buy.Ostensibly the book's about a French academic in Berlin for a summer who decides to quit watching television entirely, but this is more of a jumping-off point and refrain than a plot framework. The story is a series of blithe anecdotes from the unnamed narrator, threaded together by the man's utter inability to get any work accomplished. (His monograph, concerning Titian and the relation of political power to the arts in 16th-century Italy, stands for most of the book at exactly two words long.)
It's all dryly amusing, and the characterization is a great blend of ironic detachment and standard-issue obliviousness. The understated pace and rhythm of the storytelling fits well into the state of drifty laziness. The actual comments about television, though they're few and far between, are well put. Toussaint's character watches TV by flicking aimlessly through channels, in a bit of an echo with how he thinks about the rest of his world just enough to get by.
I never would have heard of the Viennese composer Kurt Schwertsik if my former place of employment hadn't had something rather direct to do with him, since he doesn't seem to have much of a foothold in the US. (Franz Welser-Möst did conduct a short piece of Schwertsik's with the Cleveland Orchestra a couple years back at Carnegie Hall, but nothing has come up since then.) He seems best at orchestra music, and composes with an ear for rich sounds and deft details; often this adds up to a pretty satisfying whole. Certainly often enough that he should be performed more often here.A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to ordering a copy of this Australian CD of Schwertsik's "Irdische Klänge" cycle of tone poems (in English = Earthly Sounds), which he composed through the 1980s and early 1990s. (The final work represented, "Baumgesänge," isn't part of the cycle, but shares the style and personality of the others.) These are entertaining and sympathetic works, written in an expressive and fairly romantic vein -- Schwertsik uses complex and often thick harmonies, but they're not combatively dissonant and they move and grow with expressive melodic gestures. In places he drops in minimalist textures (pages pretty obviously out of Steve Reich's or John Adams's book, but freshly done) or, more rarely, a cheesy light-jazz sort of melody or riff.
Schwertsik brings a quirky and bemused personality to the table that's pretty rare in current classical music. This brings the Irdische Klänge pieces off as humble human reactions to nature, rather than any great statement on natural beauty. This is most literally the case in the "Fünf Naturstücke," constituting the cycle's second part, which pay homage to old-fashioned stage sound effects (wind machine, thunder sheet, etc.) I like that he lines up wonderment and appreciation of prettiness next to your more poetic emotions; so much recent classical music seems to deny the "lighter" emotions wholesale. They're not fluff; they're part of living.
There's some amount of environmental statement involved, at least in that the nature connection to "Mit den Riesenstiefeln," the last installment of the cycle, seems only to be the idea that we're destroying things. It's a broadly sardonic march that sounds like something from the world's scariest circus, or possibly what would have happened if Gustav Mahler had tried to write the soundtrack to Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
"Baumgesänge" I've found fiendishly catchy since the first time I've heard it, especially its fiery, kinda-minimalist, maybe-apocalyptic conclusion.
Anyway, recommended. (I actually ordered this from Australia, though it looks like you can get it within the US too. Why I only noticed this now while searching for the cover image online, I can't say.)
2 Comments:
In what is perhaps one of those weird twinnish coincidences, a couple weeks ago I finally got around to special-ordering a Kurt Schwertsik CD featuring "Baumgesänge", though in my case it's a Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra album. I bought mine from the ORF store in Vienna, too, which I note is a more obvious choice for a composer from Austria, not Australia.
Huh. Yeah, that does seem unlikely.
Post a Comment
<< Home