Discoveries: Arts and Culture

Garrick  Ohlsson played a beautiful Brahms Piano Concerto no 1  receiving 8 ovations...remarkable master, who I discover lives in San Francisco.   Yuri Temirkanov  conducted the most exceptional Shostakovich Symphony No. 5, which was a complex response to Soviet politics in the period.    For those who think it is about affirming joy, it is about affirming joy because one must affirm joy.  I have never heard such a brilliant rendition.  I was moved to tears and riveted to my seat through the First Movement, nearly laughed aloud in the scherzo, and then was riveted to my seat in the largo, and moved to tears in the final  Movement.   Only a Russian symphony and one conducted by this man could do this.(  The orchestra is top heavy, with men,  - I counted nearly 75 and 12 women....)   Every member of the audience was on their feet, with thundering unending applause! 

My season subscription ends, and so this weekend I did a double decker...First, Balanchine, "The Prodigal Son", a production which got good reviews in NYC.  Having never seen this Biblical story adapted to ballet, I was interested, and found it engaging.  The music was composed by Sergei Prokofiev and the choreography is by Balanchine.  The Scenic and Costume Design was by the artist Georges Rouault.  It had its world premiere on May 21, 1929 in Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, France.  Its NYC premiere was in February 1950 and in SF in March, 1984. The other Balanchine pieces were the Stravinsky violin concerto and" Diamonds", composed by Peter Tchaikovsky, and like the other two pieces, choreographed by Balanchine.  Its world premiere as "Jewels" was in NYC Ballet in 1967 at the NY State Theater, and in SF on January 30, 1987.  My birthday.  Due to my jet lag, I kept dozing off during this piece.   Sunday was ...

Starting on p 72, Claudia Roth Pierpont, the author of the Philip Roth biography, details the new information found in the biography just released about Elizabeth Bishop based on letters at Vassar  which have become recently available. Megan Marshall, the author of ELIZABETH BISHOP: A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)  had been a student of EB at Harvard. Claudia says, " The book is ultimately about how words ordered on a page may supply some order for one's life, may assuage and even redeem tragedy ." Yes. Amen.    More on this page, later.  

Apologies.  I have been away from this blog for anyone who cares, for some time. Returning after 30 days in India, I am catching up, with the New Yorker, and found two articles of immense interest which continue a previous posting.  Books.  "The Mania and the Muse"  Did Robert Lowell's illness shape his work? "  I did not know that RL was bipolar or that it was even something which was diagnosed at this time.  It makes sense about his relationship and sympathy for Elizabeth Bishop, accordingly...The piece is written by Dan Chiasson and in the New Yorker's March 20, 2017 edition, beginning on p. 94. Joyce Carol Oates is cited as terming  Lowell's condition, "his ironic dignity". Like Merwin,Lowell e wrote a letter to Ezra Pound and met him and credits him with charging his path in life in poetry. As a freshman at Harvard, he indicated he wanted Pound to be his mentor. All this is about Kay Redfield Jamison's "groundbreaking" book...