10. Free Solos: Movie and Concert Reviews by Pippa Hammet
I don’t know how insights arrive in your life, but I have three basic styles of knowledge accession: (1) formal research projects, like my current one on Dreams and The Movies (very Gérard de Nerval, very Parker Tyler); (2) making a fresh mental connection between two seemingly disparate areas of experience (vide this essay); and (3) sudden experiential surprises that arrive unbidden (see my final paragraphs below). As a perfect example of style 2, I realized today that there was a shared theme between a documentary movie I saw recently and a solo piano concert I caught at Carnegie Hall two weeks ago thanks to a ticket from my dear friend Florian. So I squeezed this report into my heavy schedule.
It is crowded because in addition to my secretarial assistance to Louise Ebersdorf, my dear employer, I am now asked to read great literary works to her at night. And our handyman Master Raro has brought one of Louise’s favorite, prize-winning tomcats, Murr (fixed), up from the lab to purr her to sleep. Master R. has rigged a microphone over Murr’s diaphragm, amplified the sound, and allowed nocturnal purring to penetrate most of our floor, the living quarters, but especially the master-mistress bedroom, with its immense sleigh-bed in which Louise reclines, lofted into dreamland now by Murr’s purrs. Louise claims that the steady hum is having lasting effects on her mature psyche and aged body. All of this is the result of lab technicians on the 35th floor (known as the Feline Farm) doing research on the effects of Cat Language on human beings. Master Raro says that A&P (that would be Louise’s researchers Albertine and Paco) claim to have made a scientific breakthrough and our employer is its immediate beneficiary, lying there in seeming catatonia while Murr serenades her. The tomcat sits upright on a dressing table, green agate eyes fixed on me throughout his vibratory ministrations! Louise is covered up to her chin in silk beddings. Murr is a large, sleek specimen, with a stare that never wavers. (I can testify.)
And he targets me possibly because I now read to him and Louise every evening in her bedroom for hours on end as our mistress prepares for sleep immersed in an aural synthesis of my words and Murr’s music. The tomcat seems especially inspired in his song if my literary texts are by Henry James or Ivy Compton-Burnett. (Think Mozart’s music and certain growing plants.) I read “The Lesson of the Master” two nights ago, and the animal and Louise seemed to achieve a state of shared nirvana. (I tried a bit of Hart Crane last night, but no go. So I began Men and Wives – as the Russians say, Big Success!) I practice my most dulcet female vocal skills while reading aloud – see James’ booklet On the Speech and Manners of American Women, one of my post-transition Bibles. When awake, dear Mrs. Ebersdorf insists she loves James’ multiple ironies, and she has a thing for the dark humor of Compton-Burnett. I certainly can’t object to the quality of the reading material. Sometimes I do feel in competition with Murr. But that’s undoubtedly just me. Another story.
For my own rest and recreation, I caught a new film documentary that I can highly recommend – Free Solo, which follows the extreme mountain climber Alex Honnold in his scaling of the sheer face of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan, without ropes or support team – that is why it is called a Free Solo ascent. The directors of the documentary, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, have just won a Bafta Award and an Academy Award for their film. They are to be congratulated on making Honnold’s skills understandable to an audience which may not only be unfamiliar with this sport but also terrified by its challenges. You learn a great deal about what is required to climb a sheer vertical wall featuring glassy granite, narrow cracks half a mile long straight up, and wall faces at every inconvenient angle for the climber. Who was it who wrote that you only self-define by overcoming obstacles? Hannold’s musculature is not only defined, he is eerily fast in his movement. He employs only a little chalk powder for manual traction and his Sportiva climbing shoes for secure toe-holds. The camera work and sound are extraordinarily intimate throughout the movie, while keeping at a distance so as not to disturb Hannold’s concentration. Interestingly, you don’t sit there terrified. You know he will make it to the top somehow. And the camerawork doesn’t emphasize the immense depths below. Toward the end of the climb there are some floating, lateral camera moves (from a drone?), and then you might become a little disoriented because you suddenly see the immense scale of the mountain against the pendant responses of the human artist-athlete.
I write “artist” because the moves Hannold uses are very like dance movements (one battement is referred to as a karate kick). Hannold shares shoptalk with a veteran climber, and they mention “footwork”. Also, those climbing shoes have a humility about them, even as they contribute so much toward the ascent. Shucked, they reminded me of pictures of Taglioni’s primitive pointe shoes. Hannold uses a simple notebook to plan his climb, and the notes we see look like the choreographic plans that dance-makers use for memory aids. When you watch the plastic figural transformations that Hammond invents to fuse himself with the mountain’s wall and then somehow propel himself upward against time and fatigue, you will be reminded of virtuoso dance performers on stage.
In the way that Philippe Petit is a tightrope poet, Alex Hannold is a poet-ascensionist. You’ll be interested in how self-aware, articulate, and philosophical Hannold remains throughout the interviews in this movie. He refers to his climbing role as resembling the life of a “warrior”, and one can see that there is something of the martial about his projects. For him, staying ready for a climb is a constant fight against physical and mental lethargy, like a soldier or a dancer on duty. As a friend mentioned after the screening, Alex is a fetching young man in addition to being a visionary of action.
You’ve probably seen those Nazi mountain movies with Leni Riefenstahl. (Or Guy Maddin’s 1992 film parody of them, Careful.) You may have always wondered about that original ending of the Stravinsky/Nijinska (later Balanchine) Le Baiser de La Fée. What Free Solo made me recall is the discussion Charles Rosen begins in his book The Romantic Generation of the effect of the mountainous sublime on the writers, composers, and aestheticians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Rosen suggests that for Romantic artists, landscape became inscape – a subjective emphasis that reconstituted the range, detail, heights and depths of a new sensitivity to the physical world (whether to mountain, sea, desert, or local countryside) in formal aesthetic terms. Rosen claims that one result was the song cycles of Schubert and Schumann, as well as the musical cycles without words of Schumann such as Carnaval and Kreisleriana. Watching Alex Hannold pass by the geological deposits of aeons of earthly time in the walls of El Capitan is a perfect illustration of what Rosen was referring to, a spectacle of duple time scales. Hannold’s traversal through temporal shards, crevasses, strata, beds, ledges, and heights constitutes a kind of individual re-mapping of our place on the planet, a temporal phenomenology in stone. No wonder a certain type of artist remains to this day drawn to the Romantic impulse.
I was given a ticket for the recent Carnegie Hall solo piano concert of Danill Trifonov, which included the music of Beethoven, Prokofiev, and Schumann. It was the Schumann which was the astonishment for me. Trifonov performed the composer’s collection of short pieces entitled Bunte Blätter (Colored Leaves), music that was new to most of the Hall audience, including me, and he also gave us Schumann’s Presto Passionato just before intermission. Colored Leaves contains fourteen numbers, including gentle meditations, stern invocations, a brilliant galop, and one march that seems an echo of Chopin’s famous Marche funèbre. Then the pianist went straight into the stunning Presto, no pause. Trifonov’s technical skill and stylistic insight allow him to penetrate areas of these works that are musically dense and filled with unresolvable tensions. I think the result of such artistry is related to the kinds of music-making that we are told Lizst and Paganini were able to achieve.
Indeed, the great pianist Martha Argerich has identified a musical range in Trifonov that she has referred to as “demonic” – and I must concur. There are moments here where the listener is stirred so as not to know whether to thrill, scream, or faint from the musical saturation. I am alluding, of course, to famously feminine listeners of past ages who are reported to have swooned before the artistries of Lizst and Paganini. It is easy to dismiss such anecdotal evidence. But listen to the critical prose of Schumann himself inspired by one of Lizst’s solo concerts that he attended: “The demon began to flex his muscles.” Also: “In a manner of minutes we have been exposed to tenderness, daring, fragrance and madness.” There was something magical going on in that period’s music-making, and it is Trifonov’s current achievement to remind us of these rare possibilities. I can report that I did not pass out at Carnegie Hall, but I could understand listeners succumbing under that evening’s musical provocations. And not just women.
Schumann’s music is so sensitive in its poetic implications that it becomes a kind of fraught crucible of musical thought, its transformations, its explorations, its metaphysical ambitions. Trifonov is able uniquely at this moment to re-substantiate these aspects of the composer’s insight. The pianist’s intent reminds me of Nerval’s account of awakening in his dream chronicle Aurélia, reaching for “the syllables of some unknown word I was about to pronounce” only to find that it has “expired on my lips.” Or Nerval again on the enquiring spirit’s garbled alphabets and mysterious hieroglyphs: “. . . let us recover the lost letter or the effaced sign, let us recompose the dissonant scale; and we shall acquire power in the spirit world.” Schumann’s music under Trifonov’s hands suggests a reaching for such powers. You can see how such an art may summon a spell unique to music, charms even of the darkest variety. Luckily, Schumann and Trifonov have the ability not to abandon us in those regions but to provide safety lines back to sanity. But some might indeed allow themselves to indulge along the way.
The pianist is able to locate these qualities in this composer because of two supreme talents. First, he is a master of the plasticity of the musical phrase, composed and recomposed in the immediate, exploratory performance itself. This achievement is related to an improvisatory quality in some of Schumann’s music. (And the skill is undoubtedly connected to Trifonov’s own ambitions as a composer.) Secondly, Trifonov is a true genius of musical rhythm, both large and small, local and architectonic. There is a sense in which no recording of Trifonov’s music-making can replace the electricity and revelation of his live performances, their sense of immediate choice-making, of achieved patterning, of discovery sought and won. These two talents allow the young Russian to approach the multiple challenges of Schumann: the composer’s gravid motifs, his poetic fragments, his mixture of the common and the refined, his caught obsessions and shifting allusions. Such a modern, or so Trifonov reveals him, as a prefiguration of much that was to come in music. My friend Florian reminds me that there were at least two great ballets derived from Schumann in the twentieth century: Fokine’s Carnaval and Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänz. And it continues: I myself recently enjoyed a highly poetic ballet newly drawn from the Kinderszenen at Columbia University’s Miller Theater and danced by performers from the Barnard Dance Department.
Since hidebound males around the arts are proud to keep their heads in the presence of musical incitements of the type described herein, I take pride in my choice to transition in gender if only to be able to swoon before the art of Trifonov and Schumann with impunity, past any guilt. If only for this, I feel justified in my decision.
The well-known Medici site on the internet is currently making Trifonov’s concert available for free viewing (three months): type medici.tv and fill out a form. You can also currently hear Trifonov’s version of the Schumann Kreisleriana from 2016 on Vimeo. Neither of course captures the mercurial, found qualities of a live performance. The Medici recording has excellent sound reproduction, but I would have preferred more opportunity to observe Trifonov’s pedaling, especially in the Colored Leaves. You will also be able to hear the pianist play the Schumann piano concerto live with the Met Orchestra led by Valery Gergiev at Carnegie Hall on May 18 upcoming. Florian and I will be there.
Update. It seems that Master Raro has been given a message today from Paco at the Cat Lab. Murr has delivered a reaction to his ongoing sessions with Louise and yours truly. (M.R. says he might one day be as famous as the late Karl Lagerfeld’s Choupette.) In one of their projects Paco and Albertine claim to have deciphered cat language, and it seems Murr is the most articulate of their felines. Paco asked Master R. to deliver the message, and not to Louise but to me. The message from Murr: “I am in love with Pippa.”
Surprise! Master Raro is intrigued, but I am skeptical. The Demonic!
P.H.
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