By the time you get to “None of Dem” on Robyn’s album Body Talk Pt. 1, a bass-loaded, dubstep-lite (which is an affixation with roughly the same metaphysical heft as a “small tank”) kind of pissed-off, drug-addled hyphenation-inducing song for that time that’s too early to be morning but too late to be night, you are sublimely ready for the not-quite blissed-out extrospection (aka dancing) it provides for. A video for the track has Robyn in a sweatshirt and knit hat in a darkened room, alone and dancing and seriously feeling the music, man. That it is her music she’s feeling seems to make no difference; she’s just as in thrall to it as you are, or will be, if you have not yet had the chance to listen to this sensationally well-constructed album.
Body Talk Pt. 1 is full of songs you like, then love, then really love, and then normally would get tired of and move on, but I’ve been rocking out to “Dancing on My Own,” that exuberant paean to being alone (if not quite to loneliness) at a very high rate for weeks now, and I want to keep doing it. That song is unquestionably the album’s high peak, for its sheer catchiness and singability (“I’m not the giiiiiiiiiirl you’re taaaking home, oooo oooooo”) and the way it revels in something a little stronger than melancholy, makes it desirable and unstoppable and an expression of whatever it is that substitutes for primal joy nowadays. There aren’t too many songs that give explicit license to back away from others that also offer this exuberant validation, to retreat to the corner (which is what you really wanted to do anyway) and be satisfyingly, gloriously emotional in time with the beat. In a word, it’s great.
It’s almost for the best that nothing else on the album reaches the same peak, because then Robyn gets to have that song. But nearly every track on the album is solidly written and even better produced, so that there’s a sense of balance maintained consistently, even rigorously, both both overall and within each song. “Fembot” has her trying on the character of, well, a fembot, to deliciously clever effect (as in, “automatic booty applications / got a CPU maxed-out sensation.” Sweet.). This song does well to show why she stands out from the crowd particularly now, as material that could have easily been pushed to extremes of ridiculousness by her contemporaries here instead remains very grounded. It’s safe to say although her music rises very high indeed, it is built firmly on the ground.
The video that sets her as a fan to her own music has the right of it, actually; this is relatable music for once, tracks that push up from our level rather than sound from on high. Robyn’s syllables are anything but nonsense, and her music makes sense, always. The overwhelmingly positive critical reception to both the album and her as a star is no doubt built on this aspect of her music and performance, its intelligence and honesty; and if she initially comes across as maybe just the tiniest bit blank, as a little less than a truly great singer, the minor quips are quickly discarded as overly hasty judgments about someone who is now a good friend. Flash and fire and fierceness are great from afar, but up close and personal with music wrapping around you in the corner, you’d rather have honesty, and feeling too. Her music is sustainable in a way that elides most pop.
The coda of the album — the straight-up ballad and now soon-to-be dancefloor hit “Hang With Me” and the classic Sinatra tune “Jag Vet En Dejlig Rosa” — is understandable, a respectable way to bow out and set the stage for Body Talk, Pt. 2. If “Hang With Me” is just a touch saccharine, with songwriting just a shade weaker than its minimalist arrangement allows for, it is notable only to appreciate that her songs work so well because of the greatly effective context they are in. And though it would be nice to be able to point to “Jag Vet Swedish” as lovely, it doesn’t really matter, and if anybody makes it through more than a third of that song without listening to “Dancing on My Own” again instead (“giiiiiiiirl”) I would be surprised.
The music is better to listen to than to think about, which is really just a way of saying that this is music that is meant to be music. Her music doesn’t make you feel morally compromised when you listen to it, which is all too often the case with pop. If it’s not quite deep either, that’s probably for the best, so that you can stay giddy and sweaty while still feeling, hard, if you want to. But only if you want to. It’s not going to force you there.
She’s somebody that you like if you give her a breath of a chance. She is somebody relatable. She is catchy and durable. Normally, this would be the point where one would work in a stinger, a shot of critical pithiness to dilute the compliments and strengthen the critique. But that would be cheap, and furthermore, unnecessary. She doesn’t pretend to be what she is not, which is saying something more than it seems. It would also be tempting to do a blow-by-blow comparison with other pop stars of the past few moments (and I will now mention a few in order to get more search engine hits: Beyonce, GaGa, Kesha, Katy Perry, Rihanna. Inception, Twilight, Edward, Jacob), but it is more tempting to let her stand — or dance, perhaps — on her own.
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Friday, July 23, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Being here
When I took a CD out from the library for the first time today, it turned out that Acts I & II of La Bohème had been replaced with Lenny Kravitz’s Greatest Hits. It was probably inadvertent, but I like to think that some rabid Lenny Kravitz fan was nefariously replacing CDs in the back of the library just to shock and appall all the harmless classical music listeners out there. All over Brooklyn, night after night, some unsuspecting music nerd goes to listen to Puccini or Bartok and gets a dose of reasonably catchy if less than spectacular pop-rock. Bewildering conspiracies are the best.
And now, although it’s not much of a segue, the ways in which living in a city differs from not:
1) There’s a lot more stuff. Buildings, activities, people, forms of transportation: these are all available in excess, which is both part of the fun and a little disorienting to someone not used to it.
2) On that topic: public transportation, namely, subways. Both wonderful and utterly frustrating, they encapsulate my encounter with the city as a whole on a daily basis. The fundamental idea of a subway appeals to me for some reason: I go underground in Brooklyn and poof! suddenly I’m in Manhattan, a form of magic accessible to everyone. I feel pride and mastery when I do something right, and feel equally disheartened when I don’t, or when service is changed and the F turns out to only go where I need it to if the number of letters in the name of the stop is a multiple of 4, which, it turns out, is not often.
3) Your home has its own personality. Other places do too, but less aggressively, and learning the rhythm of life here seems more like an act of assimilation than imposition.
4) Grocery-shopping and errand-running are much, much easier.
5) The sheer number of people has two primary effects, which are not necessarily incompatible: isolation and connection. Oddly, I find knowing that there are so many people here to be isolating, while I find seeing them to be kind of comforting. There is no obvious connection between me and the strangers I pass on the sidewalk, but I feel a camaraderie with them lacking when I contemplate the city from my apartment.
6) Relaxing is harder. For me, at least.
All of this adds up to something and at the same time it doesn’t, because for me part of the experience of living here is a variety and breadth that are too wide-ranging and heterogeneous to be summed and placed into neat conclusions. It’s an experience and a process that takes place on multiple levels, and reinforces the notion that location matters a great deal. It’s a place brimming with possibilities and pitfalls, which is just as it should be. It feels like a place to be young in, to make mistakes and successes and discoveries in. I have a hard time imagining growing old here without having started here. But that’s probably because I’m still young.
And now, for your listening pleasure, some Lenny Kravitz and some La Boheme.
And now, although it’s not much of a segue, the ways in which living in a city differs from not:
1) There’s a lot more stuff. Buildings, activities, people, forms of transportation: these are all available in excess, which is both part of the fun and a little disorienting to someone not used to it.
2) On that topic: public transportation, namely, subways. Both wonderful and utterly frustrating, they encapsulate my encounter with the city as a whole on a daily basis. The fundamental idea of a subway appeals to me for some reason: I go underground in Brooklyn and poof! suddenly I’m in Manhattan, a form of magic accessible to everyone. I feel pride and mastery when I do something right, and feel equally disheartened when I don’t, or when service is changed and the F turns out to only go where I need it to if the number of letters in the name of the stop is a multiple of 4, which, it turns out, is not often.
3) Your home has its own personality. Other places do too, but less aggressively, and learning the rhythm of life here seems more like an act of assimilation than imposition.
4) Grocery-shopping and errand-running are much, much easier.
5) The sheer number of people has two primary effects, which are not necessarily incompatible: isolation and connection. Oddly, I find knowing that there are so many people here to be isolating, while I find seeing them to be kind of comforting. There is no obvious connection between me and the strangers I pass on the sidewalk, but I feel a camaraderie with them lacking when I contemplate the city from my apartment.
6) Relaxing is harder. For me, at least.
All of this adds up to something and at the same time it doesn’t, because for me part of the experience of living here is a variety and breadth that are too wide-ranging and heterogeneous to be summed and placed into neat conclusions. It’s an experience and a process that takes place on multiple levels, and reinforces the notion that location matters a great deal. It’s a place brimming with possibilities and pitfalls, which is just as it should be. It feels like a place to be young in, to make mistakes and successes and discoveries in. I have a hard time imagining growing old here without having started here. But that’s probably because I’m still young.
And now, for your listening pleasure, some Lenny Kravitz and some La Boheme.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Of the Blue Colour of the Sky (OK Go)
I’ve been waiting for months—waiting for years—waiting for you to change; but there ain’t much that’s dumber, there ain’t much that’s dumber than pinning your hopes on the change of another. And I still need you, but what good’s that gonna do? Because needing is one thing, but getting, getting’s another.
—from OK Go’s latest album, the pleasingly titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the fourth track and my initial favorite, “Needing/Getting.” Like a lot of their lyrics, they’re clever, and unlike a lot of them, more than a little heartfelt. That seems to be where their latest is aimed, bringing the self-conscious, guiltlessly indulgent brashness of their particular brand of pop towards a place a little more enigmatic. It’s a worthwhile effort, one that even succeeds occasionally, but the problem is that the album equates restraint with sophistication, ambiguity with adulthood. The band distorts their lyrics nearly beyond recognition, a veneer of production—and it does sound very fine more often than not, crackling and crunching in all sorts of shades of white—usurping the feeling the words were meant to betray. The end result isn’t bad, just a little gray, and less saturated than you had hoped. It’s all surface, textured and nuanced but surface nonetheless. And that’s too bad, because what’s there is good enough to make you wish the band had decided to grow up in their own way instead of somebody else’s, forging their own paradigm instead of their idols’.
The album traffics in nostalgia, which is not a surprising move, for them or for us these days. It’s the flipside of that knowing sway, of that determined air that lends a direction to progress, the new adult who’s just a little too old to be young. It’s not a little expected, and because of that, disappointing in equal measure. When things seem as though they’re not working out, the wise choice, the right choice, is acceptance: acceptance without compromise. It’s an admission of fallibility but a wholehearted determination to invention, to moving forward even if it’s a little stupid to do so; because every once in a while a little stupidity is demanded, and never more so than when at the beginning of something. Nostalgia, while lovely and acceptable, is the easy route in a bad way when it constitutes the greater part of your reasoning.
And essentially, that feeling is: being lost. Whether citizens or rock stars, the one thing we can agree on is being stuck in that funk and wanting something to happen. The difficulty results from a plurality of options rather than their dearth, an experience that seems like growing up all over again and is confusing because it’s not. We understand that impulse to action and needing something to happen, and the call to hearken back is understandable but not excusable; there should be leaders, not shepherds, because when you’ve discovered something that feels disconcertingly like youth you’re not ready to be gently guided; you’re ready to be told what to do so that you can joyfully and ecstatically rebel. Moderation only means something in between extremes.
The first side of that equation is securely in hand. We have the brashness of youth underneath our belt, the boom years when everything was a discovery. But now we’re on the verge of finding everything a recapitulation, of letting that luxurious distortion of stored-up knowledge and sound obscure inherent originality. It’s easy to forget that things started in chaos, that seeming atrophy can be at least as much of a spur to newness as can order. You have to reject the false duality of escapism versus realism; there are escapes in this world that involve no compromise. It’s time to move forward.
Before the earth was round, there was no end to things; no one tried to measure what they knew. Everything was warm, and everyone would love, and every contradiction was true. The sun worked twice as hard, and the moon was twice as far, and the sky was still honestly blue. But when the time came, everything spiraled in, and everyone forgot what they knew.
—from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, track nine, “Before the Earth was Round”
- WTF?
- This Too Shall Pass
- This Too Shall Pass v2
—from OK Go’s latest album, the pleasingly titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the fourth track and my initial favorite, “Needing/Getting.” Like a lot of their lyrics, they’re clever, and unlike a lot of them, more than a little heartfelt. That seems to be where their latest is aimed, bringing the self-conscious, guiltlessly indulgent brashness of their particular brand of pop towards a place a little more enigmatic. It’s a worthwhile effort, one that even succeeds occasionally, but the problem is that the album equates restraint with sophistication, ambiguity with adulthood. The band distorts their lyrics nearly beyond recognition, a veneer of production—and it does sound very fine more often than not, crackling and crunching in all sorts of shades of white—usurping the feeling the words were meant to betray. The end result isn’t bad, just a little gray, and less saturated than you had hoped. It’s all surface, textured and nuanced but surface nonetheless. And that’s too bad, because what’s there is good enough to make you wish the band had decided to grow up in their own way instead of somebody else’s, forging their own paradigm instead of their idols’.
The album traffics in nostalgia, which is not a surprising move, for them or for us these days. It’s the flipside of that knowing sway, of that determined air that lends a direction to progress, the new adult who’s just a little too old to be young. It’s not a little expected, and because of that, disappointing in equal measure. When things seem as though they’re not working out, the wise choice, the right choice, is acceptance: acceptance without compromise. It’s an admission of fallibility but a wholehearted determination to invention, to moving forward even if it’s a little stupid to do so; because every once in a while a little stupidity is demanded, and never more so than when at the beginning of something. Nostalgia, while lovely and acceptable, is the easy route in a bad way when it constitutes the greater part of your reasoning.
And essentially, that feeling is: being lost. Whether citizens or rock stars, the one thing we can agree on is being stuck in that funk and wanting something to happen. The difficulty results from a plurality of options rather than their dearth, an experience that seems like growing up all over again and is confusing because it’s not. We understand that impulse to action and needing something to happen, and the call to hearken back is understandable but not excusable; there should be leaders, not shepherds, because when you’ve discovered something that feels disconcertingly like youth you’re not ready to be gently guided; you’re ready to be told what to do so that you can joyfully and ecstatically rebel. Moderation only means something in between extremes.
The first side of that equation is securely in hand. We have the brashness of youth underneath our belt, the boom years when everything was a discovery. But now we’re on the verge of finding everything a recapitulation, of letting that luxurious distortion of stored-up knowledge and sound obscure inherent originality. It’s easy to forget that things started in chaos, that seeming atrophy can be at least as much of a spur to newness as can order. You have to reject the false duality of escapism versus realism; there are escapes in this world that involve no compromise. It’s time to move forward.
Before the earth was round, there was no end to things; no one tried to measure what they knew. Everything was warm, and everyone would love, and every contradiction was true. The sun worked twice as hard, and the moon was twice as far, and the sky was still honestly blue. But when the time came, everything spiraled in, and everyone forgot what they knew.
—from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, track nine, “Before the Earth was Round”
- WTF?
- This Too Shall Pass
- This Too Shall Pass v2
Friday, November 13, 2009
Disliking Things
Since I’ve been here, the scope of my leisure activities has been reduced significantly. There are some very notable new ones, to be sure (scooter-driving, beach-going), but generally, I read, write, listen to music, and watch the occasional movie when the appropriate channels decide to work at the appropriate time. Consequently, my consumption of all those things has gone way up, and one of the nice perks of being here is that it has offered me the time to really delve into worthwhile projects and reconsider things that had become so familiar as to probably need that reconsideration.
One of these projects has been educational: I’m trying to introduce Silvia to classical music. This has the potential to be a more difficult project than it sounds: the term “classical music” encompasses such an incredible variety of styles, sounds, moods, and ideas that it seems self-defeating to just put my iTunes on random and click “play.” Not every incarnation of classical music might be to everyone’s taste, and there is a definite tendency towards extreme generalization when encountering classical music initially, a tendency to dislike or like a single piece by a single composer and then apply that judgment to the rest of the repertory. This almost inevitably results in disappointment.
Part of the problem here is the tendency for classical music to be viewed as something distinct from the rest of the arts. While few people would dislike a particular painting and infer that they then must dislike all painting, that attitude ends up turning a lot of people off to classical music. I completely (well, mostly) understand that impulse: classical music is intrinsically a lot more nebulous and harder to get a handle on than many other things, and the way that you absorb it is drastically different from the way we generally absorb popular music (two key differences being classical music’s length and kind of narrative as compared to pop). Furthermore, there tends to be a pretty big culture of elitism and pretentiousness (or at least a perception of one) surrounding classical music, and that air of “Unless you play three instruments and know the key of Chopin’s fifteenth nocturne from memory, you’ll never really be one of us.” (It’s f minor, incidentally, and thank you iTunes.)
But all that is a totally valid way to encounter classical music for the first, or even fourth or fifth time. It’s true: it’s hard, it’s abstract, it’s opaque and it can be pretentious as all hell. If that’s your reaction, then don’t try and ignore it, and don’t try to tell yourself that you just don’t “get it” and that you’re just not a classical music person. Use that reaction as a starting point: if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. That’s okay. Visceral, emotional responses—informed or uninformed, biased or unbiased, strong or mild—provide the starting point from which to move forward, and the one point of secure leverage around which you can pivot the whole world.
Figure out why you don’t like it, and know that for now, that particular stimulus generates that response in you. Try listening to something else; the breadth of the art is so large that there is probably something you will react to well. (If you really just don’t like anything at all, nothing whatsoever, then I got nothing. You just don’t like it. It happens.) When you discover something you do like, figure out why it appeals to you and leads you to feel that way. Encountering something new is a process, like anything else, and progress doesn’t come overnight, or even over several. But as long as you’re starting from a place of honest reaction, that journey can be undertaken with as much confidence and surety as any self-proclaimed connoisseur .
And to a certain extent, I think that same process can inform one’s encounter with other things as well. When it comes to traveling, it can be immensely counterproductive to force yourself to acknowledge the beauty or history or richness of a place. For sure, all of those things should be acknowledged, but forcing that judgment renders it hollow, all form but no content. In a way, you have to be unafraid to find things uninteresting, to let yourself be bored, so that the moments of genuine meaning are free to be truly genuine. Not everything comes in earth-shattering revelations or even revelations at all; some things are exactly what they seem and no more. Some things are more than that too, and as always, it’s a tricky process of negotiation. Sinking into complacency and apathy is at least as bad as seeing only what you want to see, so this is definitely a case of “everything in moderation, especially moderation.”
So while I will probably continue to find Kitty Wharf beautiful (see below for supporting evidence) until the time I leave, I have to remind myself that sometimes, negative reactions can be a valid way of encountering the world as well as positive ones. And though you’d have to ask her, Silvia can probably testify to this as well with classical music. Not everything I’ve played for her has been a well-received by a long shot, but openly acknowledging the lack of appeal or understanding in reaction to particular pieces has allowed for some overwhelming successes: she is currently in the midst of a love affair with Tchaikovsky that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. (And if you’re looking for a place to jump-start listening to classical music, or just for something to do when you’re procrastinating at work, check out the first 3-4 minutes of his piano concerto. It’s the kind of thing that storms out of the speakers, that demonstrates the full, bombastic potential of music in all its overwrought emotional glory. Even if you don’t intend to listen to another classical piece ever (and you should! it's good), it’s worth checking out. I’m sure it’s on youtube somewhere.)
And in the interest of full disclosure (and to belie all of this), I should confess that I've been listening to energetic pop music like nonstop lately.
One of these projects has been educational: I’m trying to introduce Silvia to classical music. This has the potential to be a more difficult project than it sounds: the term “classical music” encompasses such an incredible variety of styles, sounds, moods, and ideas that it seems self-defeating to just put my iTunes on random and click “play.” Not every incarnation of classical music might be to everyone’s taste, and there is a definite tendency towards extreme generalization when encountering classical music initially, a tendency to dislike or like a single piece by a single composer and then apply that judgment to the rest of the repertory. This almost inevitably results in disappointment.
Part of the problem here is the tendency for classical music to be viewed as something distinct from the rest of the arts. While few people would dislike a particular painting and infer that they then must dislike all painting, that attitude ends up turning a lot of people off to classical music. I completely (well, mostly) understand that impulse: classical music is intrinsically a lot more nebulous and harder to get a handle on than many other things, and the way that you absorb it is drastically different from the way we generally absorb popular music (two key differences being classical music’s length and kind of narrative as compared to pop). Furthermore, there tends to be a pretty big culture of elitism and pretentiousness (or at least a perception of one) surrounding classical music, and that air of “Unless you play three instruments and know the key of Chopin’s fifteenth nocturne from memory, you’ll never really be one of us.” (It’s f minor, incidentally, and thank you iTunes.)
But all that is a totally valid way to encounter classical music for the first, or even fourth or fifth time. It’s true: it’s hard, it’s abstract, it’s opaque and it can be pretentious as all hell. If that’s your reaction, then don’t try and ignore it, and don’t try to tell yourself that you just don’t “get it” and that you’re just not a classical music person. Use that reaction as a starting point: if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. That’s okay. Visceral, emotional responses—informed or uninformed, biased or unbiased, strong or mild—provide the starting point from which to move forward, and the one point of secure leverage around which you can pivot the whole world.
Figure out why you don’t like it, and know that for now, that particular stimulus generates that response in you. Try listening to something else; the breadth of the art is so large that there is probably something you will react to well. (If you really just don’t like anything at all, nothing whatsoever, then I got nothing. You just don’t like it. It happens.) When you discover something you do like, figure out why it appeals to you and leads you to feel that way. Encountering something new is a process, like anything else, and progress doesn’t come overnight, or even over several. But as long as you’re starting from a place of honest reaction, that journey can be undertaken with as much confidence and surety as any self-proclaimed connoisseur .
And to a certain extent, I think that same process can inform one’s encounter with other things as well. When it comes to traveling, it can be immensely counterproductive to force yourself to acknowledge the beauty or history or richness of a place. For sure, all of those things should be acknowledged, but forcing that judgment renders it hollow, all form but no content. In a way, you have to be unafraid to find things uninteresting, to let yourself be bored, so that the moments of genuine meaning are free to be truly genuine. Not everything comes in earth-shattering revelations or even revelations at all; some things are exactly what they seem and no more. Some things are more than that too, and as always, it’s a tricky process of negotiation. Sinking into complacency and apathy is at least as bad as seeing only what you want to see, so this is definitely a case of “everything in moderation, especially moderation.”
So while I will probably continue to find Kitty Wharf beautiful (see below for supporting evidence) until the time I leave, I have to remind myself that sometimes, negative reactions can be a valid way of encountering the world as well as positive ones. And though you’d have to ask her, Silvia can probably testify to this as well with classical music. Not everything I’ve played for her has been a well-received by a long shot, but openly acknowledging the lack of appeal or understanding in reaction to particular pieces has allowed for some overwhelming successes: she is currently in the midst of a love affair with Tchaikovsky that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. (And if you’re looking for a place to jump-start listening to classical music, or just for something to do when you’re procrastinating at work, check out the first 3-4 minutes of his piano concerto. It’s the kind of thing that storms out of the speakers, that demonstrates the full, bombastic potential of music in all its overwrought emotional glory. Even if you don’t intend to listen to another classical piece ever (and you should! it's good), it’s worth checking out. I’m sure it’s on youtube somewhere.)
And in the interest of full disclosure (and to belie all of this), I should confess that I've been listening to energetic pop music like nonstop lately.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
Dvorak
I remember when I listened to the Dvorak Cello Concerto for the first time. I was driving back from school, and a good friend of mine (a cellist) had just given me a CD of some of her favorite cello pieces. I listened to the whole thing (other personal favorites included Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras and excerpts from sonatas by Brahms and Shostakovitch (I forget which ones at the moment)), and the Dvorak took up the last three tracks the CD. I remember I got about 3/4 of the way through the first movement (probably to just after that awesome double-stop gliss climax) and I remember thinking something along the lines of "holy crap." There's a way that music can make me feel sometimes that's unlike almost anything else, where it's just incredible and I'm so utterly caught up in it that I don't know anything except the music right then. Like I'm just on the edge of something huge and vast and utterly, potently unknown, and I didn't know that music could do that or sound like that or even that that kind of feeling was possible. When it kind of expands the range of feeling I could have, the scope of experiences that I knew existed and makes we want to go do something, anything, to create anything that could match that level of pure experience.
I restarted the track and really listened this time, the whole thing straight through. When it got to the climax of the third movement, and there are those three descending notes on the cello, and on that last note the entire horn section just rises up out of nothing to build this vast architecture of rising chords, I was so taken in and utterly floored. Right after that, the piece seems like it should close, but just as it sounds like it could maybe resolve and fade, the cello holds that seeming last note and suddenly the chords shift beneath it and you know the piece isn't done. When a lot of pieces do that I think to myself "just finish already" and wish the composer was a little less committed to following the classical structure of composition and would just satisfyingly end the damn piece, but when that chord shifted in the Dvorak I was like I just don't care, I'll follow this piece wherever it's going to lead me. It seemed utterly inevitable that it wouldn't be over yet, that there was still more to come because the whole piece was such a heroic/triumphant/nostalgic struggle and had such a sense of personality that it was like a person and couldn't end yet because that's not how people end, with resolution and when it sounds like it should.
That's such an overblown romantic notion, but I think that it's really a testament to the success of this piece that I never doubted its romance. How that the cello holds, before the horns rise up, the way that that note is held through the first swell of chords by the brass so that when they release and prepare for the second chord, the cello is still defiantly holding out on that one vibrating refuge of a note. This is where the Rostropovich and du Pre recordings are different for me- du Pre holds, but Rostropvich climaxes. Hers feels like the work of a spectacular artist who's trying as hard as she can, and it's incredible because it's so human, but his strains towards the inevitable in a way that speaks of human achievement rather than being human. The way he bites off the end of that last note, expending all of its last energy defiantly, and then gives way. He has to succumb eventually, but those extra seconds were worth everything.
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