My requiem

Music touched me again, defined me--two nights ago-- ...broke me, but that has been since...Prokofiev's 2nd violin concerto, followed by Shostakovich's 8th Symphony; Mariinsky Orchestra (The Orchestra Formerly Known As the Kirov); conducted by Valery Gergiev; violinist Vadim Repin. The Prokofiev was beautiful...more of that Russian fire which has left me scarred...But it was the Shostakovich which has kept me thinking.

In what is turning out to be a typical move/response for me, two things arose - more accurately, more than two things have arisen in the day-and-a-half since being violently musicked.

The first thing that struck me at the concert itself was the sense of threat, especially in the Shostakovich. This, I'm sure, is not a new response, but since I had been giving thought to my previous posts on ones and twos, I was intrigued by the ways in which the threats were achieved. There were intensely menacing moments, those in which I was not on the edge of my seat--as it had been suggested that I might be, before the concert--but pinned down in it, unable to wriggle free of the music enveloping me, drawing round like a thick smoke and denying me breath. At those moments, the orchestra moved as one...from the very start, with the cellos and double basses creeping and lurking over a minor scale, leaving their dark stringy slime behind them. It was the unity of the orchestra that most threatened, contained most power.

There was danger in the solos too, something like an egotistical virtuosity, breaking away from the group which had offered some safety in its mass. These moments of disunity might--on the surface--seem to be the more threatening: they are embodiments of disruption. But it was the collective whole--a fragmented whole--of the orchestra as one, guided skillfully by the single, simple figure of the unadorned Gergiev, that built up the tension, represented the mass, collected conscious. The solo parts broke that tension--the tension demanded to be broken--gave moments of relief, lest I be crushed being pinned to my seat.

The intense physicality of the experience has also stayed with me, and this is the second thing I wanted to start pondering, especially because it seems to tie in with a whole set of feelings. I had a conversation with IQ at a concert once about the in/tangibility of live music. I said I found it more intangible than the recording--she argued the opposite, suggesting that it had an overwhelming presence and tangibility that was part of the musical magic we were both experiencing. At the Shostakovich, the musical text and the acoustics of the space combined to allow the percussion to pulse right through me, resonating in counterpoint with the natural rhythms of my body, such that I felt the terrifying power of the gong, the cymbals, the side drum, and--worst--the timpani. This was an unbearable tangibility, one that made my skin freeze and all of my internal organs shake.

But then it was gone, as quickly as it had come...quicker, even, since the composer had led me into it in some way--tricked me into accepting its inevitability. It was gone in a flash: like quicksilver...Mercury. But Mercury is the communicator, lord of language, giver of the gift of the gab...What was communicated here? Something intangible. Unbearably physical, visceral, tangible, and yet gone in an instant without having communicated anything on the surface level. In fact, very Mercurial in its shiftiness and shadowiness. Live performance--especially at moments like this--seems to be always entirely tangible and intangible. Not wanting to sound pathetically diplomatic, but it seems IQ and I could both be right.

This experience has broken me since, as I suggested above, and I am waiting to rebuild myself. After the concert, I felt in my mind's eye like a Charming Man...another delusion, another moment of dislocation between fantasy and reality, a dislocation brought into view by those moments where the two collide. In my fantasy, I can woo IQ, charm her, persuade her of things which she has not yet imagined. I can do to her what Shostakovich did to me. But in my desperation to recall all those moments I felt in the concert hall--those flashes when my fantasy and my reality both ceased momentarily to exist, when I had the power to do anything--I have been clutching at straws. I cannot place exactly the turns of phrase, the shifts in musical texture, the building and breaking of musical tensions...I am unable to specify those points. In no small part, this has to do with my unfamiliarity with the symphony, as I had not heard it before that night. But in my desperation to recall them, I have realised that this dance between the tangible and the intangible is precisely the dance I am engaged in with my fantasy. There are brief flashes of recall, moments that are gone as quickly as they come when fantasy and reality coincide.