le frisson

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After being disrupted from a sound yet dream-infested sleep by two unsolicited phone calls, I finally decided to give early rising a try. What followed can aptly be described as a variation of my morning routine: 3 homemade Americanos (1 cup more than my daily ration, plus I ground the beans myself) & 2 croissants followed by a brief internet session.

The two unsolicited phone calls. I was about to press the 'reject' button for the first, as it was an unknown caller ID. But my curiosity got the better of me. It turned out to be R, a Slovak girl I had met earlier in an Evgeny Kissin concert at the Barbican. It only took an overjoyed gasp from me to draw her attention: I had just realised the great Pianistess Mitsuko Uchida was among the audience that night. R was new to London and found the place totally unappetising, which was unfortunate enough. She was about to return to the US with her partner, who was a few rows behind us. I did my best to debrief her on London life. Therefore....

Now she's back from Boston & looking to settle down here for the foreseeable future. It was typical of her to start the conversation like this: 'Hey, this is R, you know, from the Kissin concert, btw, do you have a spare ticket for the Vengerov concert?'

'Thank God, no!' was my reply. A. I don't like his playing that much. B. which is more important, I think paying £10 or more to hear two piano trios by Tchaikovsky & Shostakovich would be poor value for money. But still we agreed to meet up later at another concert.

And the second call was definitely about money, although only marginally so. My colleague & boss Y asked me if I was available for a consecutive interpreting session next month. Of course I was. Interpreting is one of my biggest hobbies and the most lucrative one at that. But it's also a risky one: I have been cancelled for a couple of assignments just 1 day before the conferences took place. And another time I was so confused I mistook the lack of correspondence from my contact person a sign of dismissal, only to be dragged out of bed & sent on a train to the south coast, kicking and panting (no screaming allowed on any train in this country).

Thus my boring day started auspiciously. Rilke wrote about the thinning of air that those tireless birds in flight must have felt when 'they fly deeper into themselves'. When I was on the top floor of a bus on the bridge last night, I felt similar sensations. As the bus was slowly but deliberately plunged into the thick of city life, I had to make sure that I was still alive and thinking and functioning properly. For everything was at stake here. To lift a line from an earlier version of myself, 'you are what you desire'. Somehow I felt I wasn't what I desired or what I desired certainly didn't include the newly developed spot just underneath my lower lip.

But this, too, shall pass...as old wisdom goes. Sometimes, if one's desires entail the giving up of one's true self, something must be wrong with that person's diet. Desires result from an unconscious evasion of consciousness. The English craving for junk food is a case in point here. But if we believe in Vico's historicising effort, fish 'n chips is a symbol of the unique marriage between a sea-faring, exploitative nation and a certain kind of domestic national character, with some occasional white sauce casually thrown in!

Back to my ramblings here: the point is that I have recently re-discovered that the mundane life I am living, is not exactly devoid of any meaning. And hence on my bus to town last night I had this most enlightening thought: if you desire what you are, life is going to be full of pleasant surprises. Live up to yourself, and don't be blinded by your reasoning (sometimes a.k.a. rationalising). If a flight of fancy doesn't strike you as being something of greater significance, then you must be terminally pathetic. Because as I see it, these sudden occurrances are, more often than not, an attempt by our conscious to explain things yet to unfold but immanent in our existence. By giving them serious thought one is more likely to extract the true meaning out of the disconnected trivialities that are often equated to an ordinary life. However much I believe in this I must warn myself against adopting a preaching tone.  

Sunday I went to the Barbican to hear the great Alfred Brendel play Mozart's swaggering Concerto No.25. Almost everybody else thought it was a fabulous performance, though I begged to differ. That piece certainly deserved a less restrained & intellectually austere treatment than Brendel's. I hold Sviatoslav Richter in the highest honour in this piece. Even from listening to his recording only, one could tell he had the unique ability of combining the majestic grandeur with a lightness of touch. I was more impressed when I heard Brendel earlier this year in an all-Viennese programme consisting of solo pieces by Haydn, Mozart & Schubert respectively. In the two Haydn sonatas Brendel was able to capture the whimsical, witty humour. In the Mozart (Fantasia K 475) a probing intelligence & beguiling spontaneity was called for & Brendel more than rose to the occasion. In the Schubert (D 894) his playing was radiating with a calm splendour. I still prefer Uchida & Schiff in this piece but Brendel's slightly detached, rigorously intellectual approach came as a pleasant surprise.

Gladly I wasn't in alone in my less than enthusiastic critique of him. The music critics of several local papers certainly agreed, although the English usually profess an inexplicable predilection for the mediocre and less than engaging kind of pianists.

The Mahler 9th that followed the Mozart concerto was a bit tedious, so I won't even go into details here. Still I'm looking forward to the same orchestra playing the same composer's 2nd symphony under MTT next year.