Matthew Barney

I am still haunted by Matthew Barney's films shown yesterday at the London Estoril Film Festival. Especially his film set in Detroit, which he later explained is part of a cycle of 7 based on Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings and featuring Chryzler cars as the mummy. Haunting is the word for his images of industrial decay and car worship. Barney later defined what he does as narrative sculpture, but having seen his films I now understand why he is considered one of the greatest artists alive.

The Marriage Plot

"The Marriage Plot", the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, moved me. It is a sweet, funny, coming of age novel, set in the early 80's, centered on the transition from college to adult life. Ostensibly a love triangle, it is deft, knowing, compassionate, cool and strange, full of the promise and disappointment of early love. Like Franzen, Eugenides has a wonderful eye and ear for the texture and feel of contemporary life. It is always a particular pleasure to read a novel fresh from the printing press. This one is immediately captivating. From the very first sentence, it promises to be a treat and it seldom, if ever disappoints.

António Lobo Antunes revisited

In a previous posting a few years ago, I criticised António Lobo Antunes. This now seems short sighted and wrong headed. Reluctantly, slowly, I have moved into the camp of his fans - and they are legion. Whatever faults his novels may have, he should definitely be counted as a great writer. Why? Because of his unique voice, of his distinct literary universe, of his incomparable style, dense, sticky, rich, funny, outrageous. Yes, it may hard going at times (I am still reading the same novel I had put away years ago when I first posted about him - Fado Alexandrino) but the reward is there. This novel, dealing with a ten year period - say between 1972 and 1982 - in the history of Portugal - colonial war, revolution aftermath - really sends you sometimes into a time warp. And it makes you laugh out loud. It can be so vivid - I wonder what germans and americans make of it in translation. Lobo Antunes says the really great writers make demands on the reader. It certainly is his case, but once you get into it, it is as if you acquired a new lens to look at the world anew (Proust dixit).

Schoenberg on Spotify

Only the most devoted fans of the Viennese school or the most avid record collectors would risk their limited financial assets on Schoenberg records. His dodecaphonic oeuvre is not for the faint hearted. So why buy records you would most likely hear only once or twice? But - as far as I am concerned - Spotify has now come to the rescue of the famous and famously unloved and misunderstood Viennese master. On Spotify, you can listen to an unilimited choice of Schoenberg records - Boulez, Pollini, etc - and sample all this obscure stuff that he produced after straying from the narrow downtrodden path. Well, and a what a nice surprise it is! All of a sudden, Schoenberg does not sound quite as forbidding as one thought. On the contrary, he begins to grow on you... After all the late romantic "debordements", his astringent style can be quite a relief. But the main surprise is that these pieces sound musical and good. Who can tell who might come next? Ligeti? Berio? Stockhausen? Thanks to Spotify, there you have them all, in all these recordings impossible to find even in the best record store in the world.

Is History still over?

In a previous post in this blog, on April 2009, I argued that Fukuyama's famous boutade about the end of history still held true. Recent events in Egypt and Tunisia will confirm - or infirm - whether or not this is so. Personally, I - together with the likes of Barack Obama - still put my faith on Fukuyama's dictum. I know how terribly old fashioned it is to believe in human progress, but who could repress a stirring of hope watching these crowds in Tunes and Cairo claiming their right to freedom? I know that liberal democracy will be hard to implement in the middle east (the "muddle east", as an inspired error put it) but it does seem that this was precisely what this Facebook generation had in mind when it decided that enough was enough. Can anyone really believe that the crazed rantings of religious fanatics hold a greater appeal to egyptian youth than the prospect of free speech, free travel, free voting? Revolutions tend to be messy and bloody affairs and their outcome can be horrible, so it is probably naive to expect that everything will go smoothly in Egypt and Tunisia. But, whatever the outcome will be, the aspiration for freedom and democracy that is being expressed in the streets of Cairo remains a universal one.

Claude Lanzmann's memoir

Claude Lanzmann, the author of Shoah - that monument - has published a memoir with the incongruous title "Le liévre de Patagonie" which I have been reading - nay, devouring - compulsively. The whole thing may be faintly anachronistic - Lanzmann is 85 years old, he was a great friend of Sartre and longtime husband of Simone de Beauvoir - he remains faithful to both of them - he is a somewhat old fashioned fellow still living in the masculine myth "par excellence" - the myth of the hero, himself of course, the intrepid youth who fought in the resistance, the globe-trotting journalist, who met Kim il Sung, Bouteflika, Sofia Loren and Silvana Mangano, the fearless intellectual who directed "Les Temps Modernes" for twenty years. But the real theme of the book is jewishness, his own to begin with, Israel, the Shoah, his masterwork. With what deep reserves of emotion, and incomparable "verve" does Lanzmann recount his adventures, his very own personal odissey! C'est poignant, parfois bouleversant, a ne pas perdre!

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

Not a word of praise was wasted on Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, which was widely hailed as a masterpiece. Though the plot - especially the ending - can sometimes verge on the soapoperish, the novel rises above it through the incredible vividness of its characters, dialogue and scenes, which unfold majestically, in a way that is funny, dramatic and moving. The tension never relaxes and you are drawn into the novel to the extent that its moods seem contagious. In America it was particularly celebrated for how it captured the "zeitgeist", but it seems to me that depression and family neurosis is the real theme of the novel. Politics are just background scenario. It is love not power which is really center stage and its pangs in this novel seem all too real.

The 10 greatest composers

The New York Times music critic, Anthony Tommasini, came up a with a list of the 10 greatest composers. This is not supposed to be just a list of his personal favorites, but a reasoned attempt to rank composers not only by their inspiration but also according to other criteria such as their influence on classical music. Though many people thought the exercise silly, many more felt compelled to participate in it, voting, commenting and submitting their preferences. I was one of them.
Here is the list that Tommasini came up with:
1. Bach
2. Beethoven
3. Mozart
4. Schubert
5. Debussy
6. Stravinsky
7. Brahms
8. Verdi
9. Wagner
10. Bartok
Surprisingly, it would seem most people who participated in this exercise are in broad agreement about most names. I certainly could subscribe at least to eight of them.
About the first three, the only argument would probably be the order in which they should appear. After giving much thought to the subject, I would probably place Mozart first, followed by Beethoven and then Bach.
Should Schubert come in fourth? There is no doubt he was a great composer but he died young, he had a narrow range and was at his best only in chamber music and song cycles. So I would probably relegate him to a lower rank.
One objection I have to this list is the presence of Debussy at number 5. Don't get me wrong, I love Debussy, but is not Stravinsky a much greater composer, with a much broader range? And what about the other 19th century titans? Debussy may have been very influential but he would probably not make my list.
Next comes Stravinsky. Here the only question is whether he should placed higher, since to my mind he is undoubtedly the greatest XXth century composer.
In my opinion, Brahms deserves to make it, though he is not to everybody's taste. But ahead of Verdi and Wagner? I am not sure...
Verdi and Wagner, no question they should be in.
As for Bela Bartok, I have strong reservations. Apart from personal tastes, his music does not seem to be aging well. It now sounds ponderous and overwrought. But I admit this opinion may be founded more on prejudice than on knowledge.
Who is left out? First and foremost, Chopin. He should definitely be in. I would also probably make cases could for Haendel, Haydn, Schumann, and Puccini. I also saw a lot of comments arguing in favor of Mahler and Tchaikovsky, but these two, great as they may be, would not make my list. Some also argued for Britten, a few for Alban Berg...All things considered, I think Chopin should certainly replace Bartok and probably Debussy should make way for Haendel, though it is heartbreaking to leave Haydn, Schumann or Puccini out (my personal favorite among the three being Schumann).
And finally, shouldn't one spare a thought also for Johan Strauss Jr?
This list raises a larger point: given the heavy presence of XIXth century composers and German ones to boot, would it be fair to conclude that so-called classical music is time and place specific? An art that reached its apogee in the germanic speaking lands of Central Europe between, say, 1780 and 1910? I would probably answer yes. "Classical music" is not dead and it is still too early to have a good perspective on the XXth century. But my bet is that, with historical perspective, the XXth will be seen as the century of popular music, an american or anglo-saxon century, in which jazz and rock will rank as high as classical music, and names such as Miles Davies and The Beatles will be as much part of the cannon as the great composers of the past.

Janacek

The Gulbenkian Foundation mounted a superb production of Janacek's last opera, "From the House of Dead", first performed in 1930, after the Czech composer's death. A staged concert performance, with video projection, a great cast and musical direction by the finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, this show revealed a great work, taut, relentless, dramatic, which certainly places Janacek in the canon of XXth century classical music. In Lisbon, January 6 and 7th 2011.

Azenhas do Mar