49. Exile: Music Video and Book reviews by Pippa Hammet
I’ve been in telephone contact with Florian, who is weathering the pandemic with his usual calm and expected dignity. He was happy to hear about Louise’s plans to revive (what is now called) The Ballet, which will be her second attempt at a New York company. Florian says that he feels that the art form has been exiled from our lives not only by the current viral threat but by the preponderate absence of serious new roles for ballerinas and new works from a younger generation of choreographers whose “latitudinous” concept of balletic style and form breaks the line of the art’s most recent serious tradition. Florian claims American dance critics are partly to blame, having offered responses to George Balanchine’s work (for example) that ran from the kitschy, to the genteel, to the exquisite, without ever defining what made that choreographer unique in his achievement. Our wise old balletomane quoted a religious text (he does that a lot these days): “He who joins not in the dance mistakes the event, Amen.” Our ambitious young ballet choreographers would cast aside the Petipa-Ashton-Balanchine achievement in the dubious name of innovation. Florian also quoted Lucretius: “proper vitam vivendi perdere causus” (“for the sake of living to lose the reasons for life”). Of course, he has not yet seen the choreographic work of young Cheryl and Sandy.
Speaking of exile, I have been reading a new book passed on to me by Louise: The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts (Grove Press). Louise engages passionately with travel writing these days (when really no one can travel), and Roberts’ description of Siberian landscapes and inhabitants reminded the boss of her Southwest oil-country childhood (endless horizons, few settlers). The new book uses the spread of pianos and sophisticated music across the Siberian vastness as a metaphor for the persistence of culture, education, and human dignity in the midst of calamitous historical upheavals, untold suffering under Romanov and Communist rule, as well as one of the most rugged environments and antagonistic climates on Earth. For the author, there is something poignant about discovering a lone, surviving piano in a wilderness, exploring its provenance and fate, and eventually noting how current circumstances surrounding the instrument reflect upon conditions under Putin. The scope of the book’s historical information is so inclusive it treats the infamous Gulag as merely one example of a permanently organized penal system that has characterized legendary “Siberia” for the West. And the irony, of course, is that many of those political figures exiled to its environs were highly educated, including many who were trained musicians capable for a time of making music under less than ideal conditions.
Unfortunately, we Americans today cannot feel culturally superior to the surviving Siberian population in terms of musical knowledge across our land since there has been a notorious failure to include such education widely in public schooling for a number of decades. In our culture, music is basically important as an accompaniment to football games. It is allowed a half-life during half-times. Beyond band practice, the U.S. has largely dropped the musical ball for its educable young. When you listen to the Muzak playing in bank lobbies during visits to their cash machines, you hear the sad result.
Inspired by a Russian friend, the pianist Odgerel Sampilnorov, Sophy Roberts proves an indefatigable traveler in her search for surviving Siberian instruments. (Roberts herself has had no musical training, but she comes to love the classical repertory of the piano. See what travel can do for you.) The unique perspective here is, indeed and inevitably, from the surviving exiles’ points of view or those of their descendants. Early on, Roberts locates an instrument in Tobolsk, inevitably in what was once the home of one of the managers of the Russian penal system. Further along in her itinerary, Roberts finds that the descendants of a large Polish population in Tomsk -- the result of the partitioning of Poland under Czar Alexander I – allowed Chopin to become a force for musical culture amid the Siberian wastes. In the Altai Mountains, Roberts encounters evidence of the ethnographic surveys of Nicholas and Helena Roerich, who in 1926 visited Siberia in search of an earthly paradise. (There is a Roerich Museum here in our sometime earthly paradise, New York City, although it may not be open at the moment because of the pandemic. Yes, the Roerich of Le Sacre.) The reader of Roberts’ book discovers that Siberian civilization has its documented ethnographic history, ancient and modern. Of course, a great deal of activity there of a somewhat less civilized nature doubtless went unrecorded.
We discover that certain of Siberia’s cities are compared by their residents to centers of world renown. Irkutsk is the “Paris” of Siberia. It has a public library, a symphony orchestra, and a tower from which bell tones ring forth. Roberts uncovers a surviving “pyramid piano” there in the local museum which was once the home of Prince Sergei Volkonsky, one of the Decembrists banished for life from Russia and a principal conduit for piano culture once he was in residence. The city of Kiakhta, near Mongolia, is known as the “Venice” of Siberia, although sand substitutes for water in its streets. A rare Bechstein piano is located in a far corner of its museum. Roberts visits Harbin, which is referred to as “the Moscow of the East”. Its history has included theaters, a symphony orchestra, and a Paris-educated pianist, Semion Kaspe, who was kidnapped and murdered at a young age when his wealthy father hesitated at paying a demanded ransom.
Louise and I were interested to find that the author records no evidence of ballet schools or resident ballet companies east of the Urals. After all, such schools and ensembles would have pianos of various vintages on site. The art of ballet is often said to be primarily a pursuit of Northern cultures. But perhaps there are limits. We must talk to Madame Beach about musical life in today’s chilly Yakutsk.
As indicated, there are inspiring Siberian discoveries – both in musical treasures and in cultural and historical information – made by Roberts. But the produced “folklorico” of her researches fades to black as we go deeper into the results of mass incarcerations in a physical and spiritual void. Best not to dwell on the Urals, where the last of the Romanoffs were executed, family and retainers, and then secretly buried (and later only partially disinterred). The family members briefly had a piano in their brief captivity. (It subsequently disappeared.) Roberts does not spend too much time on the Yamal Peninsula, which featured Gulag prisoners forced to sing and play for their local captors, who doubtless were improved thereby. (No piano survives in the Peninsula.) The infamous Kolyma Archipelago offered equivalent performing groups in its Gulag camps where three million prisoners were eventually reduced to five hundred thousand survivors. Yes, we have no pianos.
Our author also reminds us of the travels of Anton Chekhov across Siberia in 1891. He wound up at the penal colony of Sakhalin Island, which he characterized as “dismal”. Roberts follows in his path, finding no piano so far from Moscow. Roberts is very good when describing the desolate landscapes and seascapes that she encountered on her many forays into the vast. Here she is recounting her visit to the Kuril Islands:
“We sailed south. The islands’ conical peaks appeared and disappeared. Sometimes their rocky spires were ribbed with snow, and sometimes they were bruised from lava. Then the mist closed in again and I could barely see more than a few metres in front. There was the smell of sea kelp, and malodorous gases from hidden volcanic vents. Tsunamis are common in the Kurils, when the Pacific sucks in its breath and swallows up whatever gets in the way of its killer waves. New islands are constantly being formed. Others are toppling, sagging and shifting their stance as the seabed groans thousands of metres beneath.”
Siberian nature has its own way of making music. Louise and I recommend this book, both despite and because of its red herring: certain missing musical instruments.
The young Russian pianist Danill Trifonov has said that one of the reasons he was eager to perform in the West was to enjoy the fine pianos here. Finding instruments of equivalent caliber in contemporary Russia appears to be difficult. Trifonov now has a home here in New York City. He advises on the Board of the New York Philharmonic. And he appears regularly at Carnegie Hall in solo and shared concerts, along with various symphony orchestras as their guest soloist for the concerti repertory. Currently, he can be heard playing works by Scriabin on the Hall’s free streaming service on the Internet (see Live with Carnegie Hall, dated June 30). He is interviewed there by Emmanuel Ax and his friend and mentor, Sergei Babayan. There is a brief excerpt from a piano transcription of the Danse Russe from Petrushka, performed live by Trifonov on the Carnegie stage. (Ax also opens this program with a performance from his apartment of Brahms’ Intermezzo 118, no. 2.)
Trifonov essays the Scriabin pieces from his own studio in Battery Park, I believe. There is a camera crew to record his performance, and as a result the pianist wears a safety mask throughout the performance. This creates a dissociated, somewhat surreal visual effect, as though Trifonov is commenting on the world’s imperiled viral state through his chosen set of Scriabin works. (We are all experiencing some form of “exile” in our lockdowns. Trifonov would otherwise be on the international touring circuit at this time.) For the record, the pianist’s set includes the Etude in C-Sharp Minor, opus 2, no. 1; the Deux Poemes, opus 32; the Eight Etudes, opus 42; the Poem Tragique, opus 34; and the Etude in D-Sharp Minor, opus 8, no. 12.
I found myself once again interested in the mist-like effect of Scriabin’s tonal combinations, rendered especially eloquent by Trifonov’s distinctive stroking of the piano keys and without an overmuch use of pedaling, at least to my ears. Scriabin’s persistent sostenuto merging of keys and melodic lines is something that has been commented on by various writers, including poet Boris Pasternak, who discerned “the pitch of an unheard-of blending” in the music. Trifonov not only paints these unmoored, drifting colors and atmospheres but also manages to keep the interior musical lines clear.
As his admirers have come to expect, Trifonov is propulsive in the material that demands rhythmic drive and variation. He can shift quickly from one tempo to another so that the change is both substantive and impalpable. Instantly, the floor drops magically from beneath our feet – to be replaced by yet another level of aural support. This type of control would be described as a form of rubato in performing another composer’s work, but Scriabin builds such effects into the very fabric of his compositions (rather like Stravinsky), so you hear the miracles of achieved texture as products of both the composer’s insight and the pianist’s ready response. (That it also demands highly advanced technical skills from the pianist goes without saying.)
I am also interested in the way that Trifonov embraces both the salon-music, kitsch aspect of Scriabin and those near-metaphysical aural vistas that appear to require the launching pad of the conventional (check out the Fourth Etude and the Poem Tragique) to attain their eerie heights. (The other Russian composer who can take one to such astral planes is Prokofiev.) There is a component of the stock and the camp in Soviet and contemporary Russian ballet that refers to what must be a Mazdean tradition (as opposed to a Manichean) in the culture’s art. (I’m thinking of those “big themes” in Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos that make so many Westerners cringe amid his organic rhythms and brilliant cross-rhythms.) Trifonov embraces the full mix of a composer’s project. He is especially eloquent in the “jazzy” textures of the second of the Deux Poemes, where the built tension is allowed to lose itself perceptibly in compressed time. And the questioning tonalities of the Third Etude are held in true suspense by the delicate “trill-like” figurations throughout. Trifonov is a master of such musical paradoxes.
As is often the case with this pianist, we immediately want to go back and reconsider the featured composer in extenso as soon as we hear performances on this level. Clearly, Trifonov invests himself completely in his repertory choices. Since the pianist is also a composer, we are able to consider what such insights into the past may help form Trifonov’s future compositions. He may be providing us with an X-ray vision of a conceptual process.
The pianist appeared informally in the locked-down concert with uncut hair and a general appearance of a Silver Age decadent (or the funky neo-romantic style of a New York jobbing jazzman). A Trifonov collapses categories and times.
I must have put Florian on the alert. He just sent me a quote from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pointing out its application to the choreographic search for the New that seems to occupy so many of today’s young. Burke: “…they [read “Most Young Choreographers Today”] have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear in regard to the duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is of no object for those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery. They conceive, very systematically, that all things that give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at inexplicable war with all establishments.”
A voice from once and present barricades. All one can say is that the inherited past is a challenge for many, but there will usually be a few young artists who bear up and welcome its available persistence.
P.H.
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