HEIL DIR, SONNE

For over a month now I've been struggling to find time to make note of one of my simplest pleasures - the southern / autumn equinox. How strange it seems as I read about the prolonged northern winter and its stuttering spring that down here the season I enjoy most is that of the transition away from the high sun.

Summers here are bimodal. For all the fun of hot days and warm languid evenings, of swimming and the smell of salt and the sea, of on-shore breezes and wild thunderstorms, these are the holiday summers of the city. In the bush, the focus is elsewhere. The sun sits high, its heat is harsh and burning. The dry sclerophyllic forest continually drops leaves, crisp and dry and almost smelling of ignition. Bush fires are on everyone's mind. Water is precious and you wait, and wait, for rain.

And there's snakes about. They're more frightened of me than I used to suspect and will be off in a flash unless cornered. But I do worry about the dog although she's a sensible bush girl, alert and cautious. Nonetheless, there is some unspoken relief in not having to watch every footstep as the weather cools and they slow down and slumber.

So, come the lowering sun, a calmness settles on the country. The overlong glaringly bright days shift into a lovely balance of light and dark; the rhythms of life are gentler. Tensions ease. Day by day I watch the shifting of the sunrise from south south-east to due east. The first rays soften, playing horizontal light across the grass till they find the house. The sun now becomes a blessing.

THE WAVES ARE BREAKING

We in Australia are governed by such small minds I sometimes all but despair. Thank all that is good that this in so close, if still so far. Those lovely Kiwis show the way.

Pokarekare Ana.

A THOUSAND WORDS

From the The Guardian a few days ago. While I saved the photograph for its sheer brilliance in capturing the arch disdain of the woman rising above the all but invisible grey populace and the SOCIETY whose very existence she chose to deny, I didn't save the direct link as there was no original intent to post it. But I'm still stewing on this.

ON HUMAN DAMAGE

I abhored Thatcher for her lack of humanity, her moral bankruptcy, and for sinking the Belgrano. While  we might think we survived our miserable little Thatcher in drag, I don't believe we are not damaged.

This came late to me from an unlikely source :

KULLERVO AT LAST

It's important to me to make note of how very good was the Sydney Symphony's Kullervo, with Vladimir Ashkenazy seemingly at one with the work. Three weeks have rushed by since we went, yet I think about it a lot.

It will be broadcast on Thursday 14 March 1300 (Australian Eastern summer time)  a time slot which seems rather obtuse, and certainly not that accessible for the working man. It's a recording I can just hope makes it to the CD stage.

The first half of the programme was the Ravel's Left Hand Concerto with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet which was rather as epxected - not exactly Ashkanzy's natural home and played with considerable physicalness, which included leaving the stool and clutching the Steinway with the right hand to run the keyboard with his body as much as five fingers, by M. Bacouzet.

Kullervo is Opus 7. Sibelius was 26 when it premiered in 1892 with a scratch orchestra in a Finland now annexed to Russia having been sectioned off from the Swedish Kingdom earlier in the 19th Century. Reactions were mixed. There was sneering, there was uncertainty, there were reservations, there were cries of treachery for the use of the Finnish language (for a very Finnish legend mind you) as Sibelius gave first notice of the nationalism which would be his hallmark, and then there was the laurel wreath presented to Sibelius by his friend, the conductor Robert Kajanus, and on which were inscribed the final lines of the Kalevala on which Kullervo is based:

"This way therefore leads the pathway,
Here the path lies newly opened ..."

It is a huge work, an 80 minute oratorio / tone poem of substantial incubation.

It was, to cut to the chase, a simply maginficent performance for little ol' me, hearing it live for the first time (the previous outing in Sydney was in the 70s) and pretty worked up about it too I was. Everything was right. Ashkenazy is so well connected with this composer, the orchestra responded wonderfully to his every insight, and the all male choir was in fantastic form (in Finnish what's more) under acting music director Elizabeth Scott - take a big bow boys and girl. And then there was the supreme gift, thank you Mr Ashkenzy (for not much longer can we call you 'Our Vlad', as we tend to informalise those we love most) - two Finnish soloists in the absolutely splendid form of Helena Juntunen and Ville Rusanen.

Helena Juntunen and Ville Rusanen. You can hear them on March 14 if you're not down the mines like I will be.

Ashkenazy played it very darkly, which is what it is for sure. After the hauntingly restrained first two movements - a mysterious flight of ideas of youth (composer and hero/anti-hero) from which would emerge the shocking story of lost childhoods, lust and incest, guilt, self-condemnation and suicide - came the tragedy. And Ashkenazy played it very darkly.

The chorus, a Greek chorus of dark knowing tragedy, from entry to the final "and so he perished", was relentlessly good, these men in black getting around the language as if their own, with a beautiful sombre tone replete with doom. The steady swaying funeral beat was hypnotic. You could only yield to it and go with it, swept into the darkness, as did they.

Ville Rusanen's Kullervo ran the gamut. From his almost naive heady insistent "Come, girl, into my sledge" of young libido uncontained, he morphed into a darker voiced fallen human, angry, judging and brutally condemning of self.

Now, Helena Juntunen simply stunned me. Her confident presence told all. She had its measure. In a equally astonishing display of vocal development, rather the reverse of her brother's, she devolved from a fiesty object of seduction, initially wildly rejecting with spitting conviction the sleigh man in those woods, into a soft hued girl, with lilting beauty of such sweetness as to break your heart, and a soft grained tremolo like a maiden's curls, as the winds rippled behind her, as she recalled her childhood and the realisation of the horror of the self alone, such that she wished herself dead.

If only I get to hear this again; then again, revisiting such specialness doesn't always work.

(To the stage right of the podium, a beaming Mr Ashkenazy and Elizabeth Scott; to the left, soloists Ville Rusanen and Helena Juntunen)

For the record, your blogger visiting Ainola (2009)

BACK TO BACON

I went back to the Francis Bacon Five Decades in its last week. Noticeably, my emotional response was muted now the startle reflex had faded, and I found the early work the more interesting.

The first painting you see, on its own in a small entry room, is the 1933 Crucifixion. It quite overwhelmed me on first viewing, and I actually got a bit teary. The guide (we were on a early entry tour and were the only two) noticed, I think, and I was half embarrassed to be so unsophisticated yet half proud that at least I had some feelings left.

I had been overcome by the transparency, the evanescence of existence, the fading of animus, and the horribleness of the exaggerated suspension, but it was when I fixed on the three ribs that I became so visibly affected. Ribs invariably define the carcass. Perhaps it is just that they are so recognisable or more likely they outline a precious cavity and it is they themselves, the ribs, which are the machinary of the most elemental of the life forces - inhalation of exhalation. Little wonder the breath is the focus of much meditative technique.

Then there's the religious connotation of course, to crucifixion I mean. But Bacon's focus was on the incredible cruelty of man to man rather than sacrificial lamb.

On the other side of the entry wall the Odessa Steps Massacre - Battleship Potemkin - was screening high on one wall so we could all see again, and again, the nurse's scream that so affected Bacon (Head series), and later Whiteley.





The young Whitely spent time with Bacon as Wendy Whiteley recalls below (25 minutes admittedly, although quite interesting ones I think, covering much of what Bacon was about, technically and personally)




"Bacon didn't change what he did all that much ... "



Head I (1947-1948) shows a head with both human and animal features, the boundaries blurring.

From the catalogue: "For the philosopher Gilles Deleuze this slippage between animal and human in Bacon's work cannot be resolved: "This is not an arrangement of man and beast, nor a resemblance; it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility ... the man who suffers is a beast, the beast who suffers is a man."" This was the one painting which stirred me most this visit.

And then there was the dog - Study for a running dog, 1954.

The blurred head and feet, suggest more than movement (and maybe he wasn't very good at heads, and feet, and hands, and genitals, never seen). What initially felt like menace, a slinking dog in the gutter, became, the longer I looked, a sad and lonely outcast creature in the sewers and drains of the gutters of life. Self Portrait I ?

Blurring movement interests me, along with changing the (extremely limited) time frame in which we operate (as say in Koyaanisqatsi) in its capacity to change perception and perspective, unmasking the unseen, changing emphasis, and refocusing interest.

I've tried catching my dog at different speeds. Here are two. The first photo was shot using a slow shutter speed with the camera above and following the dog walking. The effect is of a dog walking along its own time tunnel in space, the past behind and its future beyond.

The second is because I like it.

SO GOOD IT'S SICKENING

Vladimir Ashkenazy kicked off his final year as MD and Chief Conductor with the SSO with an interesting if not particularly gala-ish programme of:

Sibelius - Lemminkäinen Suite

Fauré - Pelléas et Mélisande
Debussy - La Mer

It was played in that order although the programme notes made mention that the order of the halves had been originally the reverse. The very raising of the matter suggests some residual uncertainty about the decision. Whatever Mr Ashkenazy's reasoning, I think plan A the better. The Fauré would have made a fine opener, the Debussy, which was the most accomplished playing of the night, would have sent everyone out for drinkies on a big swell, and the Sibelius would have been the main focus for a programme called 'Legends by the Sea - Ashkenazy conducts Sibelius'. Or Legends by the Lake. Or Stay in your Cabins.

While we're talking about reversing the order, episode two of Ashkenazy conducts Sibelius - A Finnish Epic - follows on this week and it seems to me it would have been a fine season opener with the much more gala-ry Kallervo (monumental, imported soloists, male choir, and me busting to hear it live, especially after reading Alex Ross go bananas about it with Vänzkä) and a big rumble with Ravel's left hand concerto.

Anyway, back at the actual gala opening night, playing in reverse. We were well into the second should-have-been first half.  The Debussy was working well. The strings had reached that certain frission they didn't quite manage in the Sibelius (and Sibelius is all about the strings), bowing and swaying through the penultimate bars when, can you believe it,  someone two rows behind got sea sick and started to throw up. Now throwing can be quite off-putting - not only for the victim of the irreversible urge (there's only a few physiological processes that can't be aborted past a certain juncture - vomiting, sneezing, and one other does come to mind) but also for those close by, and trapped close by, whose proximity to the whole unpleasantry risks them joining in. The man directly behind me kept repeating, loudly, like some gormless adolescent - 'ooh it's going all over her dress'.

That music should so emote is the envy of many a conductor. It even made Norman's newsroom.