Carlos Kleiber

Some conductors leave their personal imprint on whatever they touch. Karajan is always Karajan, whether playing Mozart, Beethoven or Stravinsky. There is always a certain sense of solemnity - of  depth and weight. The only time I saw him conduct - the Berlin Philarmonic - I was struck by the way the bows of the violin section rose and fell exactly in unison. The orchestra behaved like an army, moving inexorably in perfect sync. Another conductor with an inimitable style was Furtwangler. But he was just the opposite of Karajan. For him music was all poetry and lyricism, nuance and fantasy. Carlos Kleiber belongs to a different school. When he conducts he seems to get inside the score. The music sounds as if it was meant to sound exactly the way he plays it. In his hand, everything becomes  fresh and spontaneous. There never is an undue emphasis, all the parts are phrased exactly right, everything becomes clear, sparkling, sharply delineated.  

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Almost inadvertently, I plunged into another novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer - "The Manor and The Estate". Beware if you pick up one of his books. Singer has that rarest of gifts in a novelist - the ability to hook you from the very first sentence. "After the unsuccessful rebellion of 1863, many Polish noblemen were hanged; others - Count Wladislaw Jampolski among them - were banished to Siberia. The Czar's soldiers led the Count in chains through the streets of Jampol, the town which bore his name." This is how "The Manor and The Estate" begins. Immediately, we are in the thick of it. Singer wastes no words. His narrative is fast paced, but he is capable, in one or two simple brushstrokes, to describe action, character and atmosphere. The novel is set in the vanished world of the Hasidim in pre-WWII Europe. It deals with Singer's familiar concerns: jews and gentiles, orthodoxy and heresy, poverty and money and always men and women and their complicated love affairs. Narrow concerns, provincial settings? In Singer's hands, stories of universal interest, gripping, moving, tellling and wise.

Cildo Meireles

I saw a great show at Macba by Brasilian artist Cildo Meireles. Landscapes, open cages, small objects conjure a vastly evocative personal universe. Meireles gives installations a good name. Here is a photo of one his great pieces, a tower of Babel made of radios. But the picture does not by any means convey the majesty of the sculpture, its towering presence in a dark room, with blinking lights and dissonant symphony of sound.

Kraftwerk

There is a new DVD with a fascinating documentary about the birth of german electronic pop music, called "Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution". It shows how in different german cities, beginning in the late 60's, weird experiments conducted under the influence of Stockhausen and psychedelic drugs coalesced into a cluster of great bands, some of which well known, like Can or Tangerine Dream, others much less so, like Ash Ra Tempel. It then shows how Kraftwerk, working in Dusseldorf, fitted or did not fit into that scene and how they progressively hit upon their style, creating some of the most sumptuous pop music ever recorded. And finally it shows the tremendous influence they had, first of all on David Bowie who, in 1976, went to Berlin with Brian Eno to record their great masterpiece, "Low", and then on disco, british electronic pop and techno. "From station to station to Dusseldorf city, meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie" sings Ralf Florian in Trans Europe Express. The record came out in 1977, when punk rock was raging. In New York City, cool black kids in sneakers were the first to take it up. I remember hearing Trans Europe Express for the first time in Central Park throbbing out of a ghetto blaster. Check out here Showroom Dummies  from that famed masterpiece album.

Cool Milan

Milan feels cool and, at the same time, oddly menacing. The massive presence of the Sforza castle in the middle of the city hints at sinister scenes within walls. The typical Italian swagger - tight pants, shiny sneakers, the shirt hanging out of the mauve sweater, overdone sunglasses - makes one feel about to be swindled. When the lights go out at night, the city has dark corners suddenly illuminated by speeding sports cars. If you ask someone a question in the street you are likely to get a brusque answer, or no answer at all. You are reminded of the decadent charms of Visconti and the perverse brilliancy of Pasolini. 

Parma

Leafy boulevards with handsome villas, wide green parks, a few choice medieval monuments, XIXth century palaces, a statue here and there, the opera house, old bookshops, strolling families with ice cream cones... and lots of Parmegianno...Parma is a bourgeois dream, an oasis of "bien être", the rare urban exception to the sprawling megalopolis which defines the XXIst century.

Padua

Padua looks disjointed. It was heavily bombed both in the first and the second World War, when it had the bad luck of falling within the Republic of Salo. But it boasts the marvellous Cappelli delli Scrovegni, decorated with frescoes by Giotto, and the Basilica of St Anthony,the saint who happened to be born in Lisbon in 1195 (apparently he was a Leo) under the name Fernando Martins de Bulhões. In the photo, a view of the Basilica with the famous statue by Donatello in front, the first bronze equestrian statue to be cast after the Roman period.

Basilica of San Marcus - Venice

In Venice, I learned that the Basilica of San Marcus is one thousand years old. It is covered in golden mosaics. The original ones were looted from Constantinople during the IVth Crusade, in the first decade of the XIIIth century. This photo shows the only mosaic panel  from that period still extant on the Basilica's facade. In the Academia, I saw the famous painting by Gentile Bellini depicting a solemn procession in Saint Marks square in which all the original mosaic panels are shown. This one is clearly visible.

Verona

Verona placida romana est.

The end of history

The single most influential book written about the post Cold War era was "The End of History and the Last Man", by Francis Fukuyama, a former US diplomat turned scholar who became famous practically overnight on the strength of this provocative title. Countless books, articles and pamphlets were written mocking, denouncing and seeking to disprove Fukuyama's thesis, many of them by people who had never read him and thoroughly misunderstood him. The last such attempt, by noted pundit Robert Kagan -  who also reached a kind of fame with his "Paradise and Power", positing that Europeans are from Venus while Americans are from Mars -  is called, significantly, "The Return of History and the End of Dreams". Kagan argues that a new era of great power politics is upon us and that the organizing principle of this new era is not the "clash of civilizations" - another book title which gained great currency as an unfortunate slogan in the last 10 years  - but the struggle between liberal democracy and autocracy. History is back in a most traditional guise: just like in the good old days of the XIXth century but now played out in a global scenario. But, even if this were true, does it really disprove Fukuyama's thesis? Fukuyama never meant that history had ended in the sense that all conflict had or would end. He merely argued that, with the collapse of communism, we had reached the end of ideological evolution, in the Hegelian sense. Liberal democracy had triumphed. There was no ideological alternative to it and none would appear. Now, does anyone really believe that autocracy, as practiced today, mostly in Russia or in China, offers any kind of ideological alternative to democracy? Autocracy can be a very efficient and practical method of government, but I very much doubt that it offers any kind of serious ideological competition to liberal democracy, as communism did in its heyday. Fukuyama's totem still stands.

Homage to Stefan Zweig

The books by Stefan Zweig that were sleeping soundly in the shelves of our mothers and grandmother's libraries have now come back to life. And they truly are masterpieces, which fully justify the enormous fame and prestige that Zweig enjoyed in his lifetime. His memoir about Vienna, "World of Yesterday" is the single most evocative book about the fading days of the Habsburg empire that I have ever read. His historical biographies (Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen Scots, Erasmus, Magellan, Fouché) are models of concision and psychological insight, told with a keen sense of drama and cinematographic detail. Equally worthwhile are his studies of great literary masters (Balzac, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Nietzche, Holderlin, to cite but a few of those he applied himself to present).  Zweig was in some respects a summation of what was best about the European civilization that ended with the two World Wars: the devotion to high culture, the cosmopolitan spirit, the sense of decency and refinement. He committed suicide in Brasil, together with his second wife Lotte, in February 1942, when the carnival was roaring in the streets.