Backland

Chris Offutt's Country Dark

Country Dark, a 2018 novel by the Southern humorist Chris Offutt, suffers from a protagonist named Tucker whose only flaw is that he kills people. But the people he kills are all so much worse than he is, morally, that one tends to forgive this tendency. Offutt is a master at local color, and the setting—Eastern Kentucky, near the West Virginia border—gives him plenty to conjure, from what people wear and the cars they drive to the natural beauty of their surroundings. Every sentence in this spare book—especially the dialogue—has real character. Unfortunately, the people in it don’t. I never could believe that they were real.

Salonen's piano concerto

Although it has three movements, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s piano concerto (2007) is all of a piece in tempo and tonality: it’s all fast and mostly consonant. Yet the movements have different characters. I think of them as places: the first a dark wood, the second a sunlit clearing, the third a nighttime feast complete with bonfires and fireworks.

            How can I describe this music? Salonen’s approach is quite unlike that of any other composer. Like all the composers I really like, he’s a maximalist, crowding his compositions with motifs, events, and color; yet he does go for ostinati, whether arpeggios or tremolos, and his rhythms, while varied, are insistent. He favors thickness over thinness, but lightness over heaviness, which is a difficult needle to thread. His textures are liquid; his hues are bright; his lines are rarely murky, yet they shimmer rather than define. While brilliant and virtuosic, his pieces aren’t ostentatious. The piano concerto is structurally messy, but that’s one of the things I like about it—it can’t be wrapped up in a neat package without a lot spilling out. It’s like real life, in that sense, or like a good novel. And that’s what a piano concerto, in my opinion, should aspire to.

            Why am I writing about piano concerti? More than symphonies, more than sonatas, more than string quartets, concertos tend to be unruly, and piano concerti are more so than those for other instruments. (I admit that they’re not as unruly, as a whole, as chamber concerti, but there really aren’t that many of those.) Pianos are not louder than orchestras, but they can be pretty loud, and the battles between the two forces can be fierce. This gives concerti a different kind of drama than other forms of classical music, a kind of drama more like a novel than a play or poem. Salonen’s concerto is unruly too, though hardly as unruly as, say, Ligeti’s or Prokofiev’s—it’s far more polite. But it’s not gentle. Even if Salonen isn’t as out-of-control as Ligeti and Prokofiev, he likes his spices strong.

            The piece begins with a kind of tumbling percussion and massed strings engaged in a dissonant quarrel (this dissonance evaporates after a while). But then they fade, the piano comes in, and the mood changes. The piano part is at first reminiscent of Messiaen, but with fewer extremes; when the woodwinds and brass come in, light glimmers through the trees. I could go on and describe the rest of the piece in this way, but would that be a good thing? I take no joy in plot summaries.

            The recording I’ve been listening to over and over is that of Yefim Bronfman, accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Salonen’s direction.

            You can read Salonen’s fascinating program notes here.

Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto

I’m going to write an intermittent series of posts about my favorite piano concerti from the last hundred years. I’ve never written a thing about classical music; it’s a challenge to begin now. I’ve been playing and listening since I was seven, but putting words down is different. I’ll start with Prokofiev’s second, then move on to Bartók’s second, Ligeti’s, Salonen’s, and, I hope, several others.

 

Sergei Prokofiev was a young piano and composition wizard who used the instrument not just harmonically but percussively. From an early age, he was determined to leave his mark on the instrument’s history, and his early works are not only virtuosic but loud. Take his 1912 “Toccata,” for instance, which is almost machinelike in its relentlessness. (Listen to Martha Argerich’s version.) Viscous, barbaric, blinding, caffeinated, it’s like nothing else that preceded it, and maybe it heralded something new. His twenty Visions Fugitives (1915–1917) are tiny dreamlike gems, some sweet, some bitter, some spicy, none bland. His first piano concerto was rousing and catchy in all the right ways. Prokofiev was the punk of piano music—he made it more physical, more galvanic, than anyone before him.

Prokofiev composed his second piano concerto in 1913, but the manuscript got burned in a fire following the Revolution. In 1923, after he’d written his third piano concerto, he went back to his memory of the second and rewrote it, making it an entirely new piece (essentially his fourth and greatest). Terrifyingly difficult, it was rejected as being impossible to play. Decades later, even Martha Argerich wouldn’t touch it. But Alexander Toradze, among others, has done it justice—his recording, with Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra, is stupendous.

It begins with a rather sweet and wistful waltz; the first movement feels like the second movement of a typical piano concerto. The left-hand arpeggios are reminiscent of Chopin, and the orchestra barely comes into view. But about halfway through, the demons enter. The cadenza is so long, difficult, and chaotic that it threatens to utterly fall apart, and when the orchestra comes back near the end, it’s like the landing of the air force and cavalry all at once.

The second movement, a scherzo, is fast, funny, and sprightly, though I prefer to spell it spritely; in its relentlessness, it's reminiscent of the “Toccata.” It’s over in just a few moments, followed by a heavy, funereal, loud, and slow march (marked pesante). And it’s here, in the third movement, that the demons are completely unleashed. By the time the fourth movement arrives, they’ve taken over, shredding rhythm, tonality, and melody in their wild fury. But then the fury abates, and a soft, melancholy, uneasy truce is called. An almost glacial bell-like melody contrasts with the opening minutes, extends itself leisurely, develops, and when the orchestra comes back in and settles on a grand chord, it’s all over, puzzlingly soon. Except it’s not: it’s a false ending. The demons stir again, they battle with the slow motif, and they emerge triumphant in a recapitulation of the wild opening.

Prokofiev wrote two more piano concerti, but they’re not as brilliant as this one. His sixth, seventh, and eighth piano sonatas, the “War Sonatas” (1940–1944), on the other hand, are truly crowning achievements (Sviatoslav Richter’s performances are definitive).

Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire

Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters is a strange, profound, and disturbing book. It portrays a world ruled by contradiction, in which all warring religious impulses come to fruition and somehow coexist. Wiesel’s Hasidism is not Buber’s: it is darker, more chaotic, truer to life. Wiesel’s radical insights remind me of those of the Zen masters; I like the way he grapples with his subjects’ flaws and incoherencies. Here are a few quotations from the book that I think will remain with me for a while. Some of these are Wiesel’s own words, others are translations from the words of great Tzaddiks.

Rebbe Hersh, son of the Baal-Shem, . . . withdrew into himself, and in the end, spoke only to his dead father. In his dreams, he asked him, “How can I serve God?”
    The Baal Shem climbed a high mountain and threw himself into the abyss. “Like this,” he answered.
    Another time the Baal Shem appeared to him as a mountain on fire, erupting into a thousand flaming fragments: “And like this as well.”

Man is the language of God.

Why does [suffering] exist? I’ll tell you: man is too weak to accept or absorb divine charity, which is absolute. For that reason, and that reason alone, does God cover it with the veil that is pain.

[Israel of Rizhin] addressed God [thus:] “I am not a slave come to ask favors of the king. I come as a counselor to discuss matters of state.”

A day will come when man will stop hating others and hate himself; a day will come when all things will lose their coherence, when there will be no relation between man and his face, desire and its object, question and its answer.

I remember. Grandfather blessing me: “May you see the Messiah put an end to exile and the reign of evil.” A blessing that almost came true. It was night. I found myself transported into a strange and distant kingdom. In the shadow of the flames, the exiled were gathered. They came from everywhere, they spoke every language and all told the same story. Seeing them together under the fiery sky, the child in me had thought: This is it; this is the end of time, the end of everything. Any moment the Messiah will appear out of the night, the Messiah of fear, the Messiah of death. I thought of my grandfather and I trembled for him, for myself. And for his blessing.

Miracles, [Yaakov-Yitzhak of Pshiskhe] would say, are not difficult to perform; it is more difficult to be a Jew.

The Messiah will come and there will be nobody left to redeem.

In hell one prays better than in paradise.

If I am and You are because I am myself and You are Yourself, then I am I and You are You; but if I am because You are, then I am not I and You are not You.

. . . a road where silence enters the word and tears it apart the way the eye tears apart what it sees.

His last words were: “At last I shall see Him face to face.”
    We don’t know—nor will we ever know—whether these words expressed an ancient fear or a renewed defiance.

The Best Long Articles I’ve Read Lately

(I found the following articles through Longform.org.)

Andrew Brown, "The Ugly Scandal that Cancelled the Nobel Prize."

Doug Bock Clark, "The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage."

Michael Finkel, "While We Sleep, Our Mind Goes on an Amazing Journey."

Scott Johnson, "Hunting the Con Queen of Hollywood."

Jeff Maysh, "How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald's Monopoly Game and Stole Millions." I've read a good deal of Jeff Maysh's work, and it's always good.

Jacob Mikanowski, "Language at the End of the World."

Matt Taibbi, "How to Survive America's Kill List."

Judging from the number of excellent stories being written, American journalism seems to be thriving. On the other hand, I have no idea how much these writers are getting paid for their work. They seem to be more interested in telling their stories well than in crafting an individual voice. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it might be necessitated by competition and by the strict standards of long-form journalism.