40:
The number of days the Israelites spied out the promised land
The number of years they spent in the wilderness
The number of days Jesus was tempted in the desert
And, less significant but important to me,
the age I'm about to turn.
Night before last, Kathy and Wesly took me to a beautiful concert at Bok Tower Gardens to commemorate my 40th birthday. This made me think of the power of hearing musical performances and encountering specific works at the time of important events in one's life. In this regard, I often think of hearing Beethoven F Major Quartet, Op. 135 at the Garth Newel Festival near Warm Springs, VA, not long after my mother died.
As many of you know, my mom spent three months in intensive care before she passed on. She was in a hospital near the school where I was working, so I was able to spend a lot of time with her during those months. Following the funeral and the burial in Durham, NC, Kathy arranged for us to spend a few days in Warm Springs before returning to Richmond. So for me, the quartet and the music making I experienced then became a profound part of my grief, acceptance, and whatever healing has come or will come. Interestingly, I have not continued to listen to the quartet a whole lot in the years since, but it persists somehow as a very present part of the experience in my psyche.
And now I turn to another right of passage - moving from 39 to 40! I think I've been preparing for it for a year. After all, 39 is strikingly closer to 40 than any other age I've been.
Two posts about 39:
http://hulinmusic.blogspot.com/2011/03/539-am.html
http://hulinmusic.blogspot.com/2011/03/birthday.html
The concert at Bok Tower, "Curtis on Tour 2012," was very beautiful. The performers were the school's president, violist Roberto Diaz; a guitar faculty member, Jason Vieaux; and two students, Nadir Kashimov and Eric Han, violin and cello, respectively.
The smallish audience filled the intimate venue, and most of us sat around little tables. I enjoyed having a table to lean on. I'm aging fast.
I had been in the space before, but had not given the beams and rafters much thought. On this occasion, I noticed them, and they gave me a sense of being in a performance shed on a summer night in Norfolk or at Brevard. A lovely backdrop behind the small stage added to the mood. It was a brooding nocturnal image of the hills and the tower lit by an enormous moon on a bank of clouds.
Incidentally, this concert was an extremely good value. Tickets were $25 apiece and the level of playing was extremely high.
First on the concert was a transcription of Piazzolla's "Oblivion." Here we learned that Mr. Vieaux has really practiced his scales and can employ his technique with great expression and intensity.
Next was Kodaly's duo for violin and cello. The young musicians were incredibly in-sync and generated a huge amount of good sound with apparent ease. The Duo is a rich masterpiece, a "written-out improvisation," as the cellist put it. He went on to say it sounds out of control, but it's actually quite in control. I liked that statement. It let us know not to be anxious, sort of like letting the folks on the amusement park ride know it is safe, even though it's designed to feel dangerous. For me, though, the richness of this work comes from the moments of distilled folkiness that Kodaly sets with such beauty and with such a memorable quality.
After intermission, during which I was please to bump into one of my SEU students, we heard a wonderful new work by a Curtis graduate, composer Tian Zhou. It was an original and convincing amalgam of Asian and western elements. For example, the work unfolds what feel like rows that are actually Chinese-sounding collections: one of many examples of the rhetoric of the concert hall enacted with sounds of the East. The guitar also performed a sparkling role with sudden cascades and small fountains of notes giving depth and detail to the musical scene.
Up to this point, the playing had been very good, and it would have been a terrific and worthwhile experience even if the concert had not gone any further. But the crowning music-making of the evening was still to come.
Mr. Diaz came returned to the stage to perform the more soloistic viola part for Paganini's last quartet. Really, in terms of virtuosic impact, it's a pretty souped-up quartet all around. But Mr. Diaz's performance was stellar. Obviously, all four men have mastered their instruments, but Mr. Diaz brought a moving musicality and maturity that made the night even more of an event. His phrasing was heart-felt and profound, also varied but always grounded in the music's architecture. He was deeply expressive without striving to impress us with his expressiveness. The way he played everything he played was so masterful that I feel like I know the work much better than I would have if I heard some other performance of it. Indeed, I can remember much of his phrasing, and I believce I will continue to, to some extent. This a great example of a musician rising to the level of artist - that's the goal.
Thank you all for making my fortieth just right.
