Always Something

Bruckner rehearsal this morning, then a board meeting and luncheon, and a little party this evening celebrating the meeting of the Annual Fund goal last August. And a Family Concert on Sunday afternoon, and SLSO trumpeter Josh MacCluer and company playing a Musicale at the Lucas School House on Sunday evening, and I was working on a program for the next concert at the Pulitzer, on Wednesday, October 29; Molly Morkoski will play Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, a series of jazzy piano miniatures. I was trying to find some words to say about it, and found these by Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise: "The jazzy tinge [in Messiaen's music] is felt even in the immense sacred landscape of the piano cycle Twenty Aspects of the Infant Jesus, written in 1944; one four-note motif in the tenth piece, depicting the 'spirit of joy,' sounds suspiciously like the jaunty four-note refrain of Gershwin's 'I Got Rhythm,' while the fifteenth, 'The Kiss of the Infant Jesus,' vaguely recalls the same composer's 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' Wagner, in Tristan and Parsifal, saw a fatal contradiction between body and spirit; Tristan and Isolde could complete their passion only in self-destruction, the Knights of the Grail could preserve themselves only by renouncing sex. Messiaen perceived no contradiction, indeed no difference, between the love of man and the love of God."

Meanwhile, I've had Peter and the Wolf in my head all day.