Saturday, March 8, 2008
Friday, I was finally released from the shackles of Old Main, gasping my first breaths of Spring Break! After collapsing in bed, exhausted from having organized the school's new music ensemble's performance that morning, I deserted the warmth of my 500 thread count sheets for Orchestra Hall. Missing Emmanuelle Boisvert's Beethoven for a few broken hours of non-REM sleep was unthinkable. Also, I think I've seen Jerzy Semkow and his stout baton every time he's come to Detroit in the past few years.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I think I may have heard and felt music from its historiographic perspective. The past few weeks, I've been reading treatises of Rameau and Riemann and thinking a lot about aural logic from a listener's perspective, and experiencing the live performance of works by Mozart, Schumann, and Beethoven was exactly what I needed. (Maybe it was one of those 'Backwards Days', since I began with Andriessen, spent the mid-afternoon in the throes of Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and found myself ending with Beethoven)
Jerzy Semkow's interpretations of the Mozart and Schumann were so tasteful and effective. The entire concert demonstrated a vintage of musical refinement that I felt I hadn't heard in quite some time. Listening to Emmanuelle Boisvert was divine; her style, that empyrean tone, those sublime cadenzas! My friends and I have been joking about synaesthesia lately, and this is ridiculous to assert let alone confess, but it's been about a year since I've discovered Charles Baudelaire... I can't really visualize his concept of 'azure', but somewhere in the middle of her first cadenza, I think I felt it.
To be a little indulgent, here's a touch of Baudelaire, if only to complement the great Emmanuelle Boisvert.
Beauty
I am as lovely as a dream in stone,
And this my heart where each finds death in turn,
Inspires the poet with a love as lone
As clay eternal and as taciturn.
Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,
My throne is in the heaven's azure deep;
I hate all movements that disturb my pose,
I smile not ever, neither do I weep.
Before my monumental attitudes,
That breathe a soul into the plastic arts,
My poets pray in austere studious moods,
For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,
Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,
The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.
posted by Erin Fung at
9:38 PM
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