4/9. Finished Yevgenia Belorusets, “Lucky breaks” (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Brief portraits of women from Ukraine’s east. The tone varies from unsparingly acute reportage to droll absurdity. But no whimsey. Hurt, injustice and unease are never the topic, never in the foreground, but never out of sight in the background:
What is this story I am telling really about? Does it make any sense to continue? In fact, the story doesn’t exist, the narrative doesn’t continue, it breaks off. The florist disappeared. The house where she lived was destroyed. Her store was refitted into a warehouse of propaganda materials. Her regular customers left Donetsk long ago. Recently and purely by accident I bumped into one of the people who had often bought flowers from her, and he confessed to having heard something about the florist. He said that she went off into the fields and joined the partisans. That’s exactly what he said: “Went off into the fields.” But on what side her partisan unit was fighting and where those fields were, he had no idea. The florist, he reminded me, never had a nose for politics. She was a flowerworm of sorts; she even classified people into different kinds of flowers. She had never occupied herself with anything in life other than flowers, he lamented. “She must be fighting on the side of the hyacinths,” he suddenly declared, and broke into laughter. We fell silent as he stared at me and waited for me to give his sense of humor its due. “Time is passing, I’m growing smarter; I am beginning to understand which way the wind is blowing and where we’re heading,” he added. “I am not the person I was. You can’t fool me at one try! Kyiv has taught me a thing or two. This isn’t our naive Donetsk. But I still have my sense of humor; I don’t have to sift through my pockets for it.” And again he broke into laughter and then walked off with a triumphant gait, following his own business.
4/29. Heard Thomas Adès’ “Dante symphony” at Disney Hall.
Three summers ago I heard “Inferno” on the radio and then saw it performed with the Royal Ballet. Intensely disliked it. But this was different. I liked the “Inferno” more as an orchestral piece, without dancing. I liked watching the seven percussionists handling their beautiful instruments and making odd sounds – clappers, a giant freestanding drum skin in a frame. Also the bizarre sounds everybody else – double basses, contrabass clarinet, strings, tubas – was making. It was fun trying to figure out where a sound was coming from.
As an orchestral piece, it was possible to forget about the “Divine comedy” aspect entirely, and take it as a series of 13 colorful, varied tableaux.
I did not detect the voice of a prophet confronting us with the emptiness of our lives and our reprehensible sinfulness.
The mood was satirically grotesque rather than prophetic. Themes would start in an affirmative mode – jubilant, merry, serene, grand, tender – but would warp as they went on. Straightforward themes would merge and decay into polyphonic noise (Ligeti, Foss). The default mode was wrong-note neoclassicism (Prokofiev, Shostakovich), but also episodes of wrenching conflict (Ives, polyrhythm, conflicting tempi). Plus Adès integrates his basically tuneful, comprehensible material with free use of all the noisy, disruptive techniques of 20th century modernism (shrieking glissandi à la Xenakis, a bit more Ligeti).
Episode 12, “The Thieves – devoured by reptiles” is the high point. A boisterous romp by Offenbach distorted into a nightmare. Tremendous applause. But there’s one more section – “Satan – in a lake of ice” – that’s quiet and eerie.
The U.S. premieres were of the two other sections, “Purgatorio” and “Paradisio” (premiered in London, October 2021).
I immediately loved “Puragatorio” without any qualifications. The eerie, gripping recorded voice of a Khazan (cantor) singing a Baqashot prayer. The slightly tinny recording contrasting with the hyper-vivid droning of the double-basses and the bassoon.
“Paradiso” ended spectacularly – the ear-shattering kettle drum crescendo! – but the slow and steady revolving cycles went on past the stage of being mesmerizing to sleep-inducing.
Huge enthusiastic ovation for Adès, Dudamel and the orchestra.
Image: Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos, 1640
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