Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Margotlog: SPCO's Innuendos

Margotlog: SPCO's Innuendos

Dear Music Lovers, the Twin Cities now has two dueling orchestras back on stage. Well, not exactly dueling, but at least playing at each other across the river. I could not be happier, though I rarely cross the great divide to sit in Minneapolis's Orchestra Hall--too abstract with its "cubes" staring down from the high, high ceiling. Plus I have to pay big bucks to park. Am I a philistine or not?

Last weekend's SPCO concerts led by German pianist and now conductor Christian Zacharias both charmed and puzzled me. He, we've heard many happy times before. His fluid, long-armed piano technique is a marvel. You can almost tell he'll be at ease as he walks on stage, loose-limbed like a Slinky, and almost smiling. He and three string players gave a fine rendition of a Mozart Piano quartet. The star was, no surprise, Zacharias. What fluidity, what measured dynamics, what precision and dew-drop clarity, what melt-in-your-mouth piano! Yet, the ensemble music itself came off rather dry. Maybe because three strings simply don't have enough heft to balance the piano, or maybe because they are given little to do but support--both problems with the composition, not the rendition. Mozart, on his way to learning what makes truly exciting Mozart sound--which for me almost always includes the bell-tones and rasps of oboes, flutes, and woodwinds against the whoosh of strings. Think woodland sent skyward into celestial spheres.

What Zacharias did with Charles Ives "Unanswered Question" was not so happy. Yes, the trumpet asks the question offstage. Yes, the woodwinds and flutes/oboes become increasingly discordant in trying to answer. But what happened to the obbligato of camp-ground hymns which Ives gave the strings? They are supposed to play offstage too--all rather cloak and dagger--but Zacharias kept them visible, they just played so softly as to be no more than a whisper, or less kindly, mouse-scratch. No, no, no. The piece lacked tension--the questions must go against something sweet and soothing; otherwise, no innuendo, just bleats of uncertainty.

Finally the old SPCO panache asserted itself with a Haydn London symphony. The old master was making a big splash in a city crazed for music. Renown and beloved, he was feted and courted, kept almost too busy to compose. But clearly he did, at the peak of his prime. What wonderful soaring strings and sashaying flirtation from flutes/oboe/woodwinds. What I had expected of the Mozart was produced by his much older contemporary. Yes, Zacharias may have overdone the extreme dynamics. Yes, we could have used a bit more modulation and innuendo, but the music pulses with so much energy, the invention falls so in love with the orchestra's capabilities, that no one can do wrong. I loved it for rollicking, for tootling, for crashing and deep diving. Congratulations to talented, hometown frolic led by imported but welcome to return, Christian Zacharias..

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Margotlog: Plot

Margotlog: Plot

Here in fly-over winterland, we are anticipating a winter storm. Our weather radio--cranked with a whirr, whirr every two minutes--has voices that sound like Yukon Yukes, drawling, then clamping their jaws.

I go out early to the postal box, intent on mailing letters before the "blowing and drifting." It's warmish, near 40 above zero. To you in Florida, this means a chuckle. To you in Mexico, it means almost nothing. To us after weeks of below zero, not just below freezing, but way below zero--20, 30 below, it means an increase of 50 degrees. A heat wave.

With heat comes melting. I wear my usual "waffle stompers" laced up tight against twisted ankles, but still, I pick my way very carefully, noticing a strange shift in the "plot" of Summit Avenue's wealthy (Fitzgerald's avenue of American architectural "monstrosities). For weeks as I've strolled through intermittent snows, I've been cursing these well-to-do for doing nothing with their sidewalks. Snow built up and was trod upon, leaving depressions where heels sank, and small peaks where snow refroze. When it was colder and snow kept replenishing itself, these slogs coated feet with snow, making every step heavier and heavier. I cursed nastier and meaner. Would I call the ombudsman? Would I call the city council, the police, the mayor's office?

Now with the peaks and valleys frozen, these former slogs offer at least some traction, as opposed to slanting, snow-free walks which are slick with slippery melt.

The plot thickens. Recently I've been tutored on plot. My fiction is too character-ridden. It stalls. Readers (at least some of them) don't seem to feel a forward motion. "You need to think plot," instructs my guide, a well-published fiction writer herself.

Eyes on the changeable sidewalks, careful not to slip, fall, break, I peruse plot and how the shift of even one element can change how others act and react. A mother goes berserk and kills a comatose child, unleashing a maelstrom of accusations, incarcerations, the threat of the electric chair. While in the background, her husband, also the damaged child's father, is struck dumb by his placid wife's act. He is stricken almost to the point of immobility. The other children wander aimlessly through their small lives, surviving on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, being helped to the school bus and taken in on weekends by worried neighbors. And the mother who's also a lawyer as she discloses in prison--hers is perhaps the most interesting transformation. She feeds fellow prisoners ideas to challenge their sentences. She, a well-educated, wealthy white woman, takes up with the poor, with drug addicts, African-American and other races. She almost forgets her husband and other children, she almost forgets the child she killed "out of mercy."

Maybe you see what I mean. Change one element and chart the consequences. Now I have to decide that that element will be. That is, unless I'm too in love with what I've already written, with the words I struggled so hard to craft, to let them go!

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Margotlog: Halloween Kimonos

Margotlog: Halloween Kimonos

We have two sensibilities in this house--my husband's deep-rooted radicalism. He went to prison during Vietnam not just as a draft dodger, but as a draft refuser. I didn't know him them. Now he reads The Nation.

During Vietnam I was going to graduate school, raising a toddler, and inching my way into an imagination which belonged only to me. Denise Levertov's poem from 1964 with these lines

a spring night entered
my mind through the tight-closed
   window,
wearing
a loose Russian shirt of
light silk

lifted me on a dream of sensuality and carried me across the tops of the elms. It carried me out of the big upstairs window and into a sense of possibilities. Meanwhile the kid was playing at being "Laura" from the Laura and Mary books. Sometimes I was dog Jack, barking down from the bed onto "Laura and Mary" on the shag carpeting.

Catching the touch of imagination's wing drew me out of bed after the husband beside me was fast asleep. I crept across the hall and crouching on a studio couch, wrote in semi-dark the lines that had been forming themselves in my mind:

Here we stand, the professor's girls
in wallpaper kimonos,
knitting needles quiver in my
black yarn hair, my sister's
flop like rabbit ears. Once more
she's charmed more candy into her paper sack,
once more the neighborhood cutie
has chocolate on her chin.

I think I know she won't blow me
any Mars bars, jelly beans, Hersey's kisses
from her chipmunk mouth. I think her teeth
should rot. I think next Halloween
her scalp should itch from red bugs
in her witch wig of Spanish moss.

I think my mother should see me pout.
But she says the picture shows
how she makes do on a professor's salary.

Now when I look at us, I wonder
at how we fought. Did my sister
save sweets against the winter cold?
Could I taste love or chocolate
on my spiteful tongue:

Capturing that quintessential conflict with my sister was a defining moment. It had none of Levertov's dreamy sensuality. It was not particularly imaginative in the sense of being transported from the everyday into a land of possibility. But it was a spitting clear rendition of sibling rivalry which I had often felt but never before quite pinned down.

Now when I read a review of Levertov's Collected Poems in The Nation (2/3/14), I'm startled by the reviewer Adam Plunkett's preference for a much later Levertov reference to silk. This was in the service of spirituality:

I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.

Call me a confirmed pagan. I want my silk worn by a spring night, come to charm me into creativity.