Documentaries about classical music are valuable in at least two ways — as routes into a musical world for newcomers, and as insights behind the scenes of the more formal concerts and recordings for old hands. Three documentaries, all interesting in their different ways, illustrate the phenomenon.
The Art of Chopin was produced for the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth last year and is a sort of potted biography illustrated by clips from high-profile modern performances. Thus you see in action Yvgeny Kissin, Krystian Zimerman, Martha Argerich, Maurizio Pollini, Yuja Wang, Bella Davidovich, Ivo Pogorelich, Murray Perahia, and more, all looking very young, plus Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz and Sviatoslav Richter. It’s a little bit of a supermarket trolley, you feel, but marvelous for all that.
Continuity is provided by the American pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who won the International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition in 1970. He explains how Chopin expanded the possibilities of the piano, and at the same time combined a deep-rooted classicism with the new Romantic sensibility. A bonus disc has Ohlsson playing the two Chopin piano concertos with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra.
More memorable, however, is a film by Bruno Monsaingeon about another famous Polish musical figure, the pianist Piotr Anderszewski. You see him crossing Poland by train in winter, with a piano on board. He talks and plays, and in the process you get some way into the mind of this most introspective of artists.
Mozart turns out to represent his pinnacle of sensibility, and in one instance resolves for him a philosophical paradox. How could anyone express such profound feeling with such lightness of touch, he asks. And to hear him singing passages from The Magic Flute while playing a piano version of the orchestral accompaniment, exploding into ecstasies of wonder as he does so, is thrilling indeed.
But Anderszewski is anyway big on paradoxes. Poland is the Slavic soul in an impeccably cut French suit. The more you master something, the freer you are. And a barcarolle by Chopin is like a drunken gondolier, yet so beautiful (though elsewhere he proclaims he can only play Chopin in small doses).
This DVD, titled Piotr Anderszewski: Unquiet Traveler, is full of memorable phrases (plus phrases you sometimes think are meant to be memorable).
You see Anderszewski rehearsing a concerto by Brahms — once his favorite composer, and maybe he’ll come back to him one day — with Gustavo Dudamel. But Mozart! Ah, Mozart is life itself.
Thirdly there’s a very interesting DVD from Medici Arts about the Wagnerian tenor Max Lorenz. It’s called Wagner’s Mastersinger, Hitler’s Siegfried and centers on the 1930s in Bayreuth, the theater Wagner had built specifically for the performance of his operas. The artists who worked there were a mixed lot and included a fair share of gays and men and women of Jewish descent. They didn’t display much interest in politics, but the problem was that Hitler, unlike almost all his fellow Nazis, was a major fan, and attended performances rather frequently.
The leading Wagnerian tenor there was Max Lorenz, but his wife was Jewish and he was, in addition, something of a closet gay. Both these things could have spelled disaster under the Nazis, and indeed Lorenz was put on trial on one occasion for homosexual activity. On another, the SS arrived at their home to question his wife. But such was Lorenz’s celebrity, and Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagnerian opera, that Hitler ordered the gay-related trail to be stopped, and Goering told the SS by phone from Berlin to leave Lorenz’s wife alone.
This DVD contains some wonderful clips. You see Lorenz being interviewed late in life (he died in 1975), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau saying that all modern tenors were “hot air” by comparison, and, best of all, you see Lorenz and Frida Leider singing part of the love duet from the second scene of Gotterdammerung. This is intensely exciting, and you appreciate immediately why Fischer-Dieskau and Rene Kollo today value him so highly, referring to his voice as “a clarion,” his habit of attacking notes “like a lion,” and so on.
You also learn that Lorenz’s relationship with his wife was genuinely loving, that he protected many Jewish colleagues from the Nazis, and that on some occasions he actually stood up to Hitler, and won, and that in later life he was the tutor of the American tenor James King.
The cycle of Shostakovich symphonies currently being issued on CD by Naxos is attracting widespread attention. They’re from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under the young Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, and their version of the Eighth Symphony has just won the symphonic category of this year’s International Classical Music Awards. At US$7.50, this item should be snapped up immediately.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located