Grieg - Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16

The very first thing to be aware of in this concerto is the way the orchestra and piano alternate; rarely do the two forces lay together as equal partners. Rather, either the piano or the orchestra leads, and most often the orchestral sections are little more than melodic bridges linking the technically demanding piano solos. Another important element to note is the fluidity of the structure; frequently the pace speeds and slows, ebbing and flowing freely.

The beginning of the concerto is dramatic; a quiet timpani roll rapidly gets louder and erupts into one chord blasted by the entire orchestra and the piano. From within this explosion the piano emerges with its first solo, a thoughtful yet powerful introduction instantly establishing the romantic mood of the work. The piano’s final note is held as it fades away, leading to a momentary pause. The silence is filled as the strings provide a jerky accompaniment for the woodwinds, who quietly establish the melody; it is tentative and tinged with sorrow. The clarinet and bassoon continue the theme with a lyrical line becoming more intense and passionate when echoed by the flutes, oboe, and first violins.

The piano then takes the melody and plays it nobly and somewhat dreamily, qualities heightened when the strings add a lush background. Left alone, the piano speeds up, becoming animated with a series of uneven, flitting passages. Listen for the way the oboe joins the piano, adding its soulful tone echoing the piano’s melodic line. Then, after a gradual slowdown, the mood changes again, becoming ultraromantic as the cellos play a gorgeous solo conjuring up images of candlelit elegance. Following the pattern of alternation established early in the movement, the piano takes this new melody, turning it into a dreamy, thoughtful little phrase accompanied only by sustained, quiet notes in the strings; the dreaminess is heighten by the solo bassoon adding its plantitive tone.

Slowly the speed increases, leading to another piano solo ending as the orchestra takes over excitedly. This, the first extended orchestra solo, is punctuated by dramatic trumpet calls ringing through with militaristic fervor, tempered by a subdued horn solo and fading into the return of the solo piano. This rhapsodic solo is accompanied by tender solos from the flute and horn. But the mood is shattered by a determined outburst from the orchestra as the piano part turns even more rhapsodic and florid, gradually speeding up. The orchestra grows angrier with a series of blasts interrupted by the piano. Ultimately, as the strain eases, the orchestra fades, replaced by the solo piano reprising the movement’s original melody.

The next sections are basically repeats of what has already been heard. As before, the piano becomes animated, speeding up, flitting gracefully over the keys. The ultraromantic cello solo returns and re-creates the candlelit aura echoed by the dreamy piano solo then heightened by a beautiful duet for the horn and piano. When the piano takes over accompanied only by quiet bits in the orchestra, the intensity and passion increase, gradually leading to a determined outburst by the orchestra. Weighted down, the pace slows and leads to a dramatic timpani roll followed by an abrupt full stop. Quickly filling the silence, the piano plays its cadenza, an extended rhapsodic interlude evoking romantic images as it ebbs and flows, a passionate, dramatic, technical tour de force for the soloist.

As the cadenza ends, the horn, timpani, and strings take over, leisurely at first. But when the solo oboe and bassoon play the melody over an agitated string accompaniment, the speed picks up. The piano enters reprising the movement’s opening piano solo, then joining with the whole orchestra for a frantic race to the movement’s final explosive chord and dramatic timpani roll.

- Anthony Rudel

painting after photography

The invention of the camera changed the way in which people saw paintings. Originally paintings were an integral part of the building for which they were designed. Sometimes in an early Renaissance church or chapel one has the feeling that the images on the wall are records of the building’s interior life, that together they make up the building’s memory – so much are they part of the particularity of the building.

The uniqueness of the every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes the painting was transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.

This is vividly illustrated by what happens when a painting is shown on a television screen. The painting enters each viewer’s house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends it meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified.

One might argue that all reproductions more or less distort, and that therefore the original painting is still in a sense unique. Here is a reproduction of the Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo da Vinci -

Virgin of the Rocks (1486)

Having seen this reproduction, one can go to the National Gallery to look at the original and there discover what the reproduction lacks. Alternatively one can forget about the quality of the reproduction and simply be reminded, when one sees the original, that it is a famous painting of which somewhere one has already seen a reproduction. But in either the case the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction. It is no longer what its image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is.

This new status of the original work is the perfectly rational consequence of the new means of reproduction. But it is at this point that a process of mystification again enters. The meaning of the original work no longer lies in what it uniquely says but in what it uniquely is. How is its unique existence evaluated and defined in our present culture? It is defined as an object whose value depends upon its rarity. This value is affirmed and gauged by the price it fetches on the market. But because it is nevertheless ‘a work of art’ – and art is thought to be greater than commerce – its market price is said to be a reflection of its spiritual value. Yet the spiritual value of an object, as distinct from a message or an example, can only be explained in terms of magic or religion. And since in modern society neither of these is a living force, the art object, the ‘work of art,’ is enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity. Works of art are discussed and presented as though they were holy relics: relics which are first and foremost evidence of their own survival. The past in which they originated is studied in order to prove their survival genuine. They are declared art when their line of descent can be certified.

Before the Virgin of the Rocks the visitor to the National Gallery would be encouraged by nearly everything he might have heard and read about the painting to feel something like this: ‘I should somehow be able to feels its authenticity. The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci: it is authentic and therefore it is beautiful.’

The National Gallery sells more reproductions of Leonardo’s cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist than any other picture in their collection. A few years ago it was known only to scholars. It became famous because an American wanted to buy it for an obscene amount of money.

Leonardo da Vinci -

The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist (1500)

Now it hangs in a room by itself. The room is like a chapel. The drawing is behind bullet-proof perspex. It has acquired a new kind of impressiveness. Not because of what it shows – not because of the meaning of its image. It has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value.

The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If this image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.

- John Berger

abstract sculpture

It was in the first half of the twentieth century that sculptors began eliciting equal measures of awe and opprobrium for exhibiting pieces to which it seemed hard to put a name, works that both lacked an interest in the mimetic ambitions that had dominated Western sculpture since the Ancient Greeks and, despite a certain resemblance to domestic furnishings, had no practical capacities either.

Yet, notwithstanding these limitations, abstract artists argued that their sculptures were capable of articulating the greatest of themes. Many critics agreed. Hebert Read described Henry Moore’s work as a treatise on human kindness and cruelty in a world from which God had recently departed, while for Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures expressed the loneliness and desire of man alienated from his authentic self in industrial society.

Henry Moore - Two Forms (1934)

It may be easy to laugh at the grandiloquence of claims directed at objects which on occasion resemble giant earplugs or upturned lawnmowers. But, instead of accusing critics of reading too much into too little, we should allow abstract sculptures to demonstrate to us the range of thoughts and emotions that every kind of non-representational object can convey. The gift of the most talented sculptors has been to teach us that large ideas, for example, about intelligence or kindness, youth or serenity, can be communicated in chunks of wood and string, or in plaster and metal contraptions, as well as they can in words or in human or animal likenesses. The great abstract sculptures have succeeded in speaking to us, in their peculiar dissociated language, of the important themes of our lives.

Alberto Giacometti - Hour of the Traces (1930)

In turn, these sculptures afford us an opportunity to focus with unaccustomed intensity on the communicative powers of all objects, including our buildings and their furnishings. Inspired by a museum visit, we may scold ourselves for our previous prosaic belief that a salad bowl is only a salad bowl, rather than, in truth, an object over which there linger faint but meaningful associations of wholeness, the feminine and the infinite. We can look at a practical entity like a desk, a column or an entire apartment building and here, too, locate abstract articulations of some of the important themes of our lives.

- Alain de Botton

the lover

Vietnam War Memorial

The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., designed by an actual refugee from that war, Maya Lin, bears no resemblance to any previous war memorial. It is a long, relatively low, black marble wall that zigzags its way along one side of the park that links the U.S. Capitol building with the Lincoln Memorial. Inscribed on this stark wall are the names of Americans who died in Vietnam. Since its unveiling, this memorial has become the most profoundly emotional of all Washington places, eclipsing even the solemn cemetery at Arlington and the themed monuments to our greatest Americans. The Vietnam War Memorial is perhaps the first successful built environment that represents the unrepresentable. It exists between the grim reality of too many deaths on one side and the anguish of military survivors or relatives of the deceased on the other. No image, no picture, no video, no music—in short, no simulation—can present the agony of that war; the stark wall alone represents the unrepresentable.

John Cage - 4′33″ (1952)

Barber - Adagio for String Orchestra

With its quiet, sustained opening notes the mood of the Adagio is set within the first ten seconds. Initially the sad melody is played by the violins while the cellos and basses supply a heavy bottom of sustained notes. The phrases are long and drawn out, and there is no doubt that this is a melancholy, yet peaceful work.

This exposition continues for almost two minutes. Then the different sections of the orchestra start to change roles, and with this shift the intensity of the piece grows. It is as if one is striving against all odds to climb a mountain, and with every two steps up you slip back one. This slow climb continues as the music grows in intensity until it reaches a searing climax (7:09). The climax is followed by a brief silence; the struggle to reach the pinnacle is now replaced by the calm and quiet of an exhausted trip down the mountain. The music returns to its solemn, peaceful beginning theme. The Adagio ends with sustained chords that are held until they fade away into silence.

china

large number of young people have little other than materialism and consumerism to believe in — a general description of Chinese society today since socialist ideology lost its grip

be an overachiever or bust

Zhao Bo - Mother 2004 (2004)