Chris King of Confluence City with primary violoncellist, Danny Lee
Every time I think blogging about poetry can't get any more tiresome and ridiculous, something like this happens and it totally redeems itself. The SLSO contacted me through my blog (thank you, again Eddie Silva!) and in return for blogging about the experience, I was offered two tickets to Friday night's performance, two drink tickets, a chance to meet with a symphony musician before the show, and a meet-up with other bloggers at a gastropub across the street after. I said heck yes, of course.
So last night, Laine and I met up in the second floor Met bar at Powell Hall with Eddie, who runs the SLSO blog, among other things, and four other local bloggers, one from Euclid Records, one from the Pulitzer Foundation, one from St. Louis Magazine, and one from the eclectic St. Louis blog Confluence City. And we awkwardly drank wine and cocktails with the thoroughly awesomesauce principal violoncellist Daniel Lee.
And that wasn't even the cool part.
I was wary of blogging about a symphony performance. My introduction to classical music came at an early age, but it was similar to being introduced to Chaucer before you learn how to read, by a teacher who doesn't know how to read either, but thought you should probably know the stuff, just in case. My younger sister was, let's call it "spirited," as a child, and to keep her out of trouble, my grandma would let her hold onto the little transistor radio she kept in the kitchen, which was always tuned to the classical music station. Grandma would tell my sister to listen to the music really closely and try to pick out all the individual instruments. It was one of my favorite early memories, and I've always avoided intellectualizing classical music because any hint of polysyllabic educated talk caused my sister to scream, "Nobody cares about your stupid brain! Speak English!" at me, and would leave in a huff, and our love of music was one of the few things we had in common. Could I even write intelligently about classical music with zero experience in it?
Turns out, it isn't a problem at all. While my apprehension grew stronger during Wagner's Good Friday Music from Parsifal, a very corporate sounding, simultaneously polished and dull piece, I was totally relieved when I realized it was just a neutral backdrop for the killer second piece, the German composer Zimmermann's Canto di speranza (Song of Hope), for cello and orchestra. It was the best Modern art/Jazz cartoon soundtrack ever. I was practically hopping up and down in my seat because I'd found an in! I've been watching the comments on this argument on the New York Times blog all week. It's essentially a throw back to the blog-fighting of yore over the value of "avant garde" poetry (replace with post avant, flarf, experimental, "difficult" whatever).
The SLSO's performance of the Zimmermann piece was a perfect musical representation of an avant garde poem, and while it seemed at times that a mistake had been made and each member of the orchestra was playing from the wrong sheet of music, it totally worked together when watched from above.
And *that still* was a prim and proper backdrop to the even wilder craziness of the contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose 2007 piece "Mirage," as we knew from Eddie Silva, was inspired by a chant written by Mazatec medicine woman, Maria Sabina Garcia, who was tripping on psilocybin mushrooms when she wrote it. You're interested now, aren't ya?
The soprano soloist, Karita Mattila, came out in a yellow, gauzy confection of a drapey nightdress, backlit with no slip. For those who might go see this performance at Carnegie Hall next week, I hope she doesn't change up the wardrobe. I've never heard a soprano soloist in person before, so what a treat that was. She was riveting, and I thought any minute she was going to beat the cello soloist, Anssi Karttunen, in a tripped out fit of woman-powered rage.
The two Sebelius pieces, Luonnotar, op. 70 and Symphony No. 5 in E-Flat major, op. 82, rather suffered by comparison, in my opinion.
Which segues into my original erm, segue: The appreciation for experimental art, be it visual, musical, poetry or prose, is vital for art as a whole. Tangential work like Matthew Henriksen's chapbook Is Holy and Jen Tyne's book Heron/Girlfriend are monumental in their un-self conscious connection to the human imagination, unhindered by the dampening filter of linear thought. And no one could listen to the SLSO's performance of Mirage and say that the composer was lazy or undisciplined or intentionally obscure. She's merely working for her audience, and if you're not getting it, then that doesn't include you, sister.
