The philosophy of this blog is that it will be a good time when humanity no longer has to deal centrally with economics or politics and can concentrate on life and culture - understood in the widest sense and including art.
Unfortunately, however, we have not yet arrived at that point. Too many people in the world are still too poor, and too many things still too threatening, to have such a luxury.
The pleasure and learning experience of listening to music has therefore been disrupted in the last few weeks by the need to follow world financial markets - hence the delay in posts on this blog. There has been no financial crisis on this scale since 1929 and events which occur only once or twice in a lifetime need study. This has meant time following London Interbank Offer Rates, movements in US Treasury Bond yields, relative rates of investment in the US and China and similar matters.
I find such issues deeply intellectually interesting, in addition to important, but it has left little time to listen to music properly. I normally listen even while working, but in this case the importance of concentrating on what is taking place elsewhere made it impossible to take in even in outline either music or performance.
Hence the pleasure of a natural break this weekend while the US Congress and president Bush are spending their time negotiating the Paulson bank bail out package - which makes it possible to listen to some serious music and performances with the attention they deserve (not as background I hasten to add).
As one of the several purposes of this blog is to promote outstanding performances which have not received the attention they deserve, this post puts in a big plug for a Melodiya CD of Kynill Kondrashin conducting Tchaikovsky - available on Amazon.
The longest item is a fine performance of Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony - although Mravinsky still has an edge as regards Russian interpretations. But what makes the CD truly outstanding is the finest performance of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet overture I have heard. In order to understand its character it may be worth making a small digression through Russian music's encounter with the world's most famous love story.
One of the most delightful ironies of English culture is that its greatest writer, and also its greatest contributer to world culture, has nothing in common with the 'stiff upper lip', 'lie back, close your eyes and think of England,' ethos which characterised Victorian Britain, and which pervades aspects of England to this day.
Romeo and Juliet is a perfect illustration of just how alien Shakespeare is to such English 'understatement'. Of all its strokes of genius perhaps structurally its most outstanding, as has been pointed out, is its compression of time. The lovers go from first meeting to suicide in a maximum of six days. There is nothing in the sources dictating such time compression, which was therefore deliberately introduced by Shakespeare. It is decisive in giving the play its characteristic of extremes - the time compression embodies its supercharged and driven character in a shattering emotional outburst. From an 'objective' psychological viewpoint both Romeo and Juliet were deeply disturbed and unbalanced. But love being one of the most out of control of all emotions this shattering character undoubtedly helps give Romeo and Juliet its dominant position as the love story in world literature.
Perhaps for this reason also Russian musical culture understands Romeo and Juliet very well. I frequently describe Russia to West Europeans, who do not know it, as somehow 'Spain in a cold climate' - intense passion amid violent, because overwhelming, nature. Romeo and Juliet, with its deliberately extreme and out of balance passion, which encompasses not only love but the violence of the family feud, resonates with that perfectly. Freud held that sex and violence were the two most powerful human drives and certainly the grip exercised on the world's cultural imagination by Romeo and Juliet does nothing to refute that view.
Prokofiev caught both elements in his own Romeo and Juliet - not only in the great love music but in the 'Knights Dance' becoming the classic music accompaniment to lectures on war. If you wish to see one of the greatest performances of anything get the Bolshoi DVD of Lavrovsky and Bessmertnova performing Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (finer, in my opinion, even than the film made with Galina Ulanova in 1954 - although that is itself superb, while the excerpts of Maya Plisetskaya performing Juliet, which are available most readily on Maya Plisetskaya: Diva of Dance, are even more remarkable but only small fragments).
Kondrashin brings out both aspects of the story/music quite superbly in this interpretation of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. Although Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev are, of course, very different in style - more than seventy years separate their musical reactions to Shakespeare's play - both understand both the love and the violence.
The CD's booklet interestingly quotes a letter of Tchaikovsky in which he writes 'after long reflections I come to a conclusion, that the old but always new story of "Romeo and Juliet" matches my temperament best of all.'
In Kondrashin;s performance the love music is beautifully fluid, melting and sensual - technically achieved by a really subtle flexibility in tempo around his central pulse, which gives a human and subjective character to the music, and by nuanced and exquisite phrasing. The music of the feud/duel achieves its impact of extreme violence by its extremely rapid tempo combined with heavy rhythmic stress - wonderful virtuosity by the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra making this combination possible.
This is a superlative interpretation not only of a musical masterpiece but of its relations to one of the most influential plays in world culture. Given that Melodiya CDs are only spasmodically available, readers of this blog who are interested should snap it up now.
