Reviews and News:
Ice-age squirrels and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
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Revenge of the copy editors: “Backed by the cherry fiddle and guitar of Tom Moss’s ‘Gypsy Night Dance,’ the bespectacled white-haired gentleman in a blue blazer, striped bow tie, and pocket square is holding forth on the language issue of the day. ‘I’m sometimes asked,’ he tells the camera, speaking patiently but gesturing intensely, ‘Is “data” singular or plural?’ The answer is yes.'”
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Andrew T. Walker reviews Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option: “American Christianity may worry over its declining cultural influence, but Dreher sees the potential for joy in the mourning of a lost cultural hegemony. In exile, finding one’s identity means stripping off the fancy gloss and strengthening one’s resolve.”
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The quiet accomplishment of Clement Attlee, Britain’s Labor leader during and after WWII: “Attlee the man is easy to like; his legacy is more complicated, to say the very least. But Bew’s main point is that a man variously described by critics as a ‘little mouse,’ a ‘poor little rabbit,’ and a ‘sheep in sheep’s clothing,’ was not only a highly proximate onlooker for one of the most radical transformations of a western democracy, but essential to the whole affair.”
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The upcoming French presidential election “could revitalize the European Union, or wreck it.”
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Henry James in Florence: “It was in Florence, in an endearingly dingy little hotel on the Via della Scala, close by the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, that I read the first chapters of The Portrait of a Lady, the great masterpiece, as I discovered, of the Master’s middle period. What I did not realise at the time was that, by happy coincidence, in my lodgings on the Via della Scala I was not far from the site of the hotel on the Arno where James embarked on the composition of the novel in the spring of 1880.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Richard Taruskin remembers Texan pianist Van Cliburn’s upset victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 and his subsequent decline:
“Immediately co-opted into the rhetoric and diplomacy of the Cold War, he was feted like no other classical musician in America, before or since. He shook hands with Nikita Khrushchev one week, with Dwight D. Eisenhower the next. He was given a Broadway ticker-tape parade. He had fan clubs (one defecting to him from Elvis Presley). His recordings of his war-horses, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Third, were huge sellers, and the Tchaikovsky disc is still the bestselling classical record of all time. It is impossible to think of him in any other context than the one that made him suddenly and sensationally famous. He is seen more as a counterpart to Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, than to other pianists, whether of his generation, such as John Browning or Byron Janis, or slightly older and better known, like Gary Graffman or Leon Fleisher – let alone to Emil Gilels or Sviatoslav Richter, the celebrity Soviet pianists who, as members of the jury that awarded him his prize, proclaimed him their peer.
“This is a pity and an injustice – Cliburn was their peer. He could have been one of the great twentieth-century pianists rather than a fabled flash in the pan. His recordings prove that, as do, even more convincingly, a set of five Video Artists International DVDs, that preserve his Soviet performances in recital and with orchestra over a period of fourteen years. (A few can be found even more easily on YouTube.) Watching as well as hearing him, one immediately sees what his peers and preceptors saw: an absolutely colossal aptitude for piano performance, beginning with ideal pianist’s hands: huge, like those of Rachmaninoff (he and Cliburn having been of comparable height), but with even longer, slimmer fingers. And how well they were trained, at first by his mother, his only teacher before he went to Juilliard at the age of seventeen, where he became the star pupil of Rosina Lhévinne, Juilliard’s star teacher, who had graduated with a gold medal from the Moscow Conservatory in 1898 (sixty years before Cliburn’s triumph in that very building), and who rated him ‘the most promising student I have had’.
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“But his playing coarsened with time. You can hear it happening if you compare his many performances of Liszt’s famous transcription of Schumann’s song ‘Widmung’ (Dedication), op. 25, no. 1. It was his favourite encore, and he recorded it during every phase of his short career…”
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Photo: Futuna Chapel
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Poem: J. D. Smith, “Grade Appeal”
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