Ensemble of Violoncellists of St Petersburg

Somewhere between the trips on vodka-vapoury buses that move at a rate of inches-per-hour and the trips on sleek express trains, where electronic cigarettes guarantee the cleanliness of the air as the kilometers between Moscow and St Petersburg are swallowed up, I have found my way to hear some cellos, and more besides.

First off, right at the bottom of the classical music listings, there was the Ensemble of Violoncellists of St Petersburg. I turned up at the venue, a recently restored Estonian church, with no idea of what to expect. I was vaguely recalling the night, some ten years ago, when I went to a jazz club in Samara: I had been thinking intimate smoky basement -- and I joined orderly rows of audience in a vast hall to listen to a four hour long concert of hopping big band music on a stage hung with a banner proclaiming, Soviet-style, glory to geologists.

(Lest I was overstating the dissolution of all difference between Russian and Western ways in my previous post, let me just say that on the way to the concert I had an amusing experience of Russia's all-too-often flagging (but evolving) culture of customer service: I went into a shop and asked for a bottle of mineral water. The sales assistant pressed some buttons on the till, then--ever so slowly--turned away from me, took up a comb, looked into a small mirror that was hanging on the partition that divided the drinks counter from the dairy products counter, and carefully combed her fringe a few times. She turned slowly back to me, and asked, moodily, "Is that all?")

On entering this cleanly painted, plain wooden Lutheran church just round the corner from the Mariinsky Theatre, we were handed a programme and a pen, with the instructions to rate each piece with points on a scale of one to ten. For an instant, I thought I'd come to see some kind of strange talent contest, and not convinced I'd understood correctly, I asked my neighbour what this was all about. "Just so they know what people like best," she told me. No contest, then -- just a bit of audience engagement.

There were 17 short numbers on the programme -- ranging from Rachmaninov to Chuck Berry, from Ukrainian folk dance to the Pink Panther. The arrangements were pretty great, and the eight cellists were joined by a soprano from the Mariinsky for a few numbers -- including, to my delight, Villa-Lobos' Aria from Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5, which I had stumbled through, piecemeal, in the string orchestra workshop in San Francisco last summer. My other favourite was probably the arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie's Night in Tunis...translated into marvellous jazzy cello riffing... Biased toward the cello I may be, but with that versatility, who needs any other instrument...

I'm not sure I was fully committed to the point allocation aspect of the evening -- but I nonetheless recorded my scores for each number (minimal distinctions between generally superlative responses--an opinion largely shared, my sneaks revealed, with my neighbour, and judging by the hall's response, with most of the audience, too) and dutifully handed in my sheet at the end.

I'd never heard a cello choir concert before, nor a concert with such a varied programme -- and as well as great musicianship, there was also what seemed like a good dose of adventurousness in exploiting the cello's potential. A couple of pieces were a little heavy on the romantic-sentimental side for me, but overall there was something quite refreshing about the whole concert (and which made me think of the conversation some fellow cello-bloggers had had a while back about concert programmes and the profiles of dwindling audiences): moving easily between such a range of genres, these Petersburg cellists quite openly and enthusiastically combined some serious artistry with music's emotional transports and an unabashed experience of entertainment. And as a result, while the music wasn't at all amateur, the feeling of community among the public (of around 80 people, probably) was somehow more akin to my memories of (English) village hall events than to the solemnity and urbanity of a concert hall.

On the Streets of St Petersburg

This post comes to you courtesy of wi-fi on board the Sapsan [Peregrin Falcon] express train from Moscow to St Petersburg...amongst whose other high-tech amenities number "electronic cigarettes"-- on sale in the buffet car for those who can't make the four hours...I wonder if these may have been introduced as a precautionary measure after desperate passengers, used to the lengthy stops of regular Russian trains, nipped out for a quick smoke at Tver', only to be stranded on the platform as the speedy Sapsan took silent flight....

Умом Россию не понятъ - You can't understand Russia with your mind, as Tiutchev's words come out rather less pithily in English. But sometimes with your body, perhaps: I walk a lot in my usual life, but why does walking the streets of Petersburg make my foot strangely swell up and my limbs ache with a deep fatigue? The air is filled with traffic fumes, cigarette smoke, and, at close quarters on pavements and in shops, the tragic smell of stale vodka. Yesterday afternoon I bought a slim volume about Shostakovich in an antikvariat bookshop from a man who gave off that familiar odour of toxic vodka tears. Last week, I sat on a bus for almost an hour, stuck in one of Petersburg's many probki (traffic jams) crawling along a few hundred meters of Sadovaya Street to join Nevsky Prospect. This was the very place that, on board a tram in 1918, a chance encounter took place between the poets Zinaida Gippius and Aleksandr Blok. Unable to reconcile herself to Blok's recently published long poem, The Twelve, and its depiction of the revolution, Gippius declared that in public, at least, all relations between them must be severed. The tram stops and Blok gets off. It was the last time Gippius was to see him before his death in 1921. Stuck in today’s city's traffic jams, they would have had time to thrash out the matter further; the probki grant no such fleetingness to encounters aboard public transport.

A man breathing sour vodka vapours sits down next to me. "You have beautiful hands," he says, through the slight thickness of drink. "Veins--that's good--they carry life, you know you are alive." (After the exertion of a walk in the heat, the veinon the backs of my hands were prominently standing out.) He compares his own hand to s mine: almost unnaturally smooth skin covered the puffy reddish hand; I recalled the more extreme bloatedness in the hands and faces of the drunken men and woman--the sight of the women was always more shocking--I used to see hanging around on Ligovsky Prospect near the Moscow Railway Station before a smart new shopping centre was built there. "No veins, you see." He took a call on his mobile phone. When it ended, he complained about a nagging woman, and then, with a hint of ruefulness, added "My daughter -- she took away my car because I drink." The traffic lights at the corner with Nevsky changed several times; we moved nowhere.

The St Petersburg traffic is somewhat calmer and less anarchic than it was six years ago--and not just because it spends most of its time ground to a halt in perpetual traffic jams. Many streets in the centre are now one-way (to make room for parking the rapidly growing number of vehicles at the curb), there are light-controlled pedestrian crossings with reassuringly large green-man walk signs, and, I am told, a new law stipulating that vehicles must give way to pedestrians. Crossing Ulitsa Marata each morning, though, is still something of a gauntlet to run: woe betide the pedestrian who thinks it is for him that the speeding car slows, and not to swerve a gnarly patch of potholes and raised tram-tracks...

I can’t help but wonder, though, how the changes in the traffic rules happened—I mean, in a way, it must have been a change that happened overnight--did they just put up sign and the next morning everyone drove the right way? Did people get it right straight away? Were there chaotic encounters as cars erroneously came nose-to-nose in newly designated one-way streets, or confusions and frustrations as drivers were sent looping round the block one more time…? And does this most banal change—the establishment, one day, of a one-way street, work as something of a metaphor for other processes of change in Russian society…? Now the traffic situation is more or less entirely normalized – as are the other changes most visible to me.

For the young Russian friends (5 years my junior) that I live with, the new normality is seamlessly assimilated: they tell me that clothes from [the English high street store] Marks and Spencer are simple, that bread from the French bakery is good, that a smart phone was really the only upgrade to go for. The five years that separates us in age is not a lot, but it does mean that their adult life began in the mid-to-late 2000s, when the “middle class” had grown, wealth was becoming more evenly distributed after the grotesque extremes of the unstable 90s, and the gap between Russia and western Europe, at least on the most readily observable plane of material existence, had shrunk. Their adult lives had largely been formed in the six years that I had not visited Russia, so the imperceptible assimilation of these new ways was somehow even more striking to me.

"Modernization or Death"

I had first come to Russia in 1998, and in forming my relationship to the place and to people here, the “difference” of the place that I came from had to be dealt with one way or another. Perception of the differences stood behind the interest, openness, good humour, and sometimes exasperation, that came along with experiences of everyday life in Russia. People would often ask about where you lived and what your life was like or how certain things worked—and I remember a feeling sometimes of the sheer impossibility of conveying some of these things—not because any one individual aspect of life was so wildly different, but because the whole picture of life that they formed was an altogether different kind of composition. Now, though, that difference has diminished dramatically, and in my relation to Russia and Russians, I no longer feel so much of that suppressed or under-expressed sense of the gap.

***

The other day I was stopped on the street and asked the way to the Dostoevsky house-museum, and the next day, the way to Pushkin’s apartment on the Moika. I was, of course, able to help these seekers of literary addresses –this layer of St Petersburg remains unchanged in the six years since I was last here--but when I speak and they realize I am not Russian, they laugh good-naturedly at the unlikely foreigner who knows where Pushkin lived…

St Isaac's Cathedral on a White Night, from Canal Griboedova

Travelogue ~ Prologue ~ Prelude

My cello has been left upstairs in the attic room at the top of M.’s house that looks one way onto the San Francisco Bay and the other way onto a wooded hillside that is home to new-born, long-legged prancing deer, sweet-songed orioles, a slinky red fox, nine menacing turkeys, and, occasionally, to the delight of M. the improvising cellist, a partner in nighttime duets, the ever-inventive mocking bird. The hard white case in which M.’s own cello has travelled to Russia, Palestine, Israel, Hungary and elsewhere lives up in this room as well -- and the room itself, with its odd-shaped ceilings and many angles is not unlike a giant cello case of its own. I think my cello will be happy there while I am off on this summer of restless travels. Perhaps, now and then, first thing in the morning, instead of picking up his own 300 year-old cello of dark, wise wood, M. will take downstairs my three-year-old anonymous cello, bought from the man in the subway station, and play Bach on it.

***

Returning to England for the first time in eighteen months, I made the hour’s drive from Heathrow to my parents’ house in Hampshire. After the expansiveness and scale of the American landscape, England always seems cosy and rounded, its features—both natural and built—huddling on an island, not stretching across a continent.

In the past few years of living in the Bay Area, I have found myself, now and then, perceiving the landscape in a more primal way--with some awareness the land and climate that exists separately from all that is built, natural contours and dynamics that exist apart from and prior to the modern life that goes on there. With the bay, the headlands of Marin and San Francisco, the Berkeley hills and the certainty of westerliness that comes with the sun descending into the Pacific, one comes to always be sure of one’s orientation in this place. With so many vantage points from which to admire the view of the bay, one is so often struck by how thoroughly humanly settled the area is and, at the same time, how dynamic and boldly defined its landscape is. (Knowledge of the possibility of earthquakes heightens this sense still more.) And as for the weather, one usually has the feeling that although it is so rapidly variable, it moves in large, wide fronts off the ocean or down the coast and across the land. Sometimes, especially when it rains in huge sheets for hours on end, as it did so much this spring, there’s almost some of feeling of processes that are not just local but that belong to the planet, or a relationship between earth and sky that adheres to geological time, not human time.

As I near my parents’ house in the village of Headley, and in the next few days as I drive to nearby towns, I feel that that habit formed in California to perceive both raw landscape and its relation to human settledness now apprehends something anew about this familiar place. What strikes me is how we really do live in woodland. There are woods all around the houses and villages that are joined by narrow, often deep sunk roads. The dense leafiness that is all around creates a sense of protective proximities, and the possibility of ever being able to see as far into the distance as one might from a window or hillside in Berkeley now seems strange and almost audacious. This sense of proximities has an audible manifestation too: issuing from the woodland is a true chorus of birdsong—not the single voice of an oriole or mockingbird, but a constant and variegated song, a tuneful babble of chirps and whistles and low and clear coos, all woven together and close around, through the kitchen window, like sticks and grasses making a nest of song.

***

Now St Petersburg: the first time here for six years. The same familiar smell of the tap water. My body remembers the odd feeling of encountering the one differently spaced flight of stairs on climbing to the fourth floor apartment on Svechnoi pereulok (Candle Lane). And though the trams are all new, the same rattle that’s felt right through the apartment when they pass along the street below. There have been some cellos in Russia, too (heard not played) but more on those another time.

***

I did fulfil the ambition of playing some Bach by the time I had finished the PhD -- the Prelude of Suite No. 1 --and so I made this recording the week after I had submitted the dissertation. It’s certainly quite crude and patchy, and despite a couple of more overtly botched moments (including, annoyingly, the end), it’s just about palpably whole enough. At the very least, a yardstick by which to measure future and hopefully ever- improving efforts…

[just wow]

Every so often the musical experience comes along that blows your mind, alters your state of being...tear-inducing and skin-gasm-giving (learned that one from Eddie!). Tonight it was the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yuri Temirkanov and Alisa Weilerstein playing the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1. Preceded by Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture (and followed by Brahms Symphony No. 4 and an encore --hurrah-- from the Enigma Variations, which did something beautiful and delicate at the very end, giving the final pronounced dying note to a violin somewhere at the back). But they had me from the first notes of the Rimsky-Korsakov. The sound of the orchestra was just beautiful -- a completely different experience from the SF Symphony (feel a little bad there resorting to such comparisons). So live -- in the sense that no recording could ever approximate this sound -- a performance that pulls you right there into the present with it, that doesn't just let you listen from the outside, as if through glass or through speakers, but pulls you right there into the music with it.

Lacking much proficient vocab for describing these things, I want to say somehow that their "pronunciation" of the music was different, and that its "posture" was somehow exceptional. Perhaps the pronunciation was the deep and many-sided emotion -- as well as something that I struggle to describe in how the transitions between different kinds of passages seemed to more meaningfully articulated than anything I've heard before. And perhaps the posture is the sense of an unshakable conviction that this was profoundly serious, that the efforts to use all this art form's abundant and varied means for communication and expression and to convey all that these pieces contained -- that these efforts were made with the utmost earnestness and with abandon. In short, I suppose what there was here (or what I was ready to feel) was art, unabashed, unapologetic art.

And, by the time we got to Shostakovich in particular -- art as a matter of life and death, in all its urgency. Weilerstein was tremendous. The Shostakovich concerto is terrifying and ferocious. And so devastatingly subversive. Appropriating music to fit a desired meaning is notoriously fraught (especially in the case of Shostakovich), and although the Soviet authorities found a perfectly acceptable narrative of their own in the concerto, it's impossible not to hear the cello as a biographical subject of the past decades of Stalinist Terror and war that preceded its writing. And that the cello could say what it does with the full support of the ranks, of an orchestra around it -- is somehow visually also deeply subversive. At one point, in one maniacally repeating dance right up high in thumb position, I swear you could actually hear the cello issue a caustic mocking laugh. Even the breaking of a string during the final movement and Weilerstein's departure from the stage to fix it did nothing to diminish the taught, terrible power of the whole. Maybe, like the enigmatic, ambiguous, disturbingly strained "sound of a snapped string" in Chekhov's famously obscure stage direction to The Cherry Orchard, it only enhanced it.

heaven, earth, sea

The concert-goers, with ample yards, between them, of the kind of good quality raincoat cloth that bespeaks wealth and decency, hurried out of the rainstorm into the sanctuary of Bach's Mass in B Minor in Davies Hall on Saturday.

I've never heard the whole of one of Bach's big choral works performed live before, and it was indeed a soaring, glorious edifice. I realized, though, how my sense of this music is so bound up with some experience of church interiors and architecture -- columns and interlacing of arches, traced by the voices that rise upwards, dancing and weaving in their polyphony, sent back to us the listeners by the acoustics of stone and the tall length of the nave. As I listened at the Symphony, every now and then, I would have some vague feeling of disconnect between the sound and the space--the rounded, evenly lit, open space of the concert hall--that I found myself in.

Interior of the Thomaskirche, Leipzig, where Bach was cantor for 27 years.
-- photo by profstewartrk @ flickr

At the end of one movement which closed on a powerful choral note, the sound of the voices hung and resonated and dispersed in the air -- like the puff of rosin dust issuing up from a bow, or maybe a puff of chalk from the wooden boards in the Lutheran church where the numbers of the week's psalms were written up.

The cellos and basses play almost continually throughout the Mass -- providing the bass line, the continuo part. In one gentle and beautiful movement (of the Sanctus) the cello is quite prominent, playing with only the flute to accompany the tenor. Yet at the end, as the conducted invited the different sections and soloists of the orchestra to take their bows, the humble cellos won little in the way of extra cheer or applause. Their part is too unremarkable, rarely attaining prominence, yet their the grounded earthliness of their bass line sends the harmonies soaring and keeps rhythm's surety of creation.

In other Bach news, I have started playing the Prelude of the 1st Suite in my lesson and have been practicing the first half of it, one note to a bow, in the kitchen this week. Maybe it's because the music is so familiar, or because of some more readily intuitable logic in the progression of the chords as they go a-venturing outwards, but I can feel, in a way that is new (there was maybe an inkling of it with the last Vivaldi sonata), some closer connection between the sound and my fingers of my left hand -- I mean I can feel it, hear it even, in my fingers -- especially when I go to sleep at night not so long after practising...in the same way you might feel like you're still on a ship when you lie down to sleep again on land after a journey by sea.

sympathetic vibrations

I wasn't going to practice yesterday, but as I was driving back from a quick errand in the evening, contemplating dinner and Dostoevsky (not to be confused with Dining with Dostoevsky), out of the car radio came some cello notes -- slightly electronic, musacky ones at that, barely real music, but just some filler between programs on NPR, but unmistakably cello -- and that was it -- irresistible seduction; I just had to take out the cello when I got in.

To say something was "pulling at the heartstrings" is obviously a total cliche, but the idea of the soul as something like a stringed instrument goes way, way back...in Plato's Phaedo the attunement of a stringed instrument is a metaphor for man's responsiveness to the divine. And, at the eighteenth century's gentlemanly invitation, "Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find," David Hume tells us, "that with regard to the passions, 'tis not of the nature of a wind-instrument of music, which in running over all the notes loses sound after the breath ceases; but resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays."

One of my early and most thrilling cello breakthroughs (a good many months in) was my discovery of sympathetic vibrations. I may have noted down something about this phenomenon from my Scottish physics teacher's endless dictation in high school, but it doubtless got lost somewhere between the formulae for calculating the elastic extension of springs and the speed of toy trucks rolling down ramps. If it did get a look in in those physics lessons, though, I'm also pretty sure it had more to do with preparing us as engineers of the future who made non-wobbly bridges, rather than as late-blooming cellists.

In short, though, when you play, say, a D on the cello's A string, it will cause the neighbouring open D string to resonate--due to sympathetic vibrations. The sound has an extra, glorious, quality of ringing resonance. As well as endearing the cello and its voice to me still further, this discovery went a long way at that time in helping me hear and understand how to play in tune. The sympathetic vibrations reach outwards, ringing with the potential to attract other kindred strings and spirits, and drawing the listener-player into their song.

The physics of the matter turns into both a beautiful sound and a powerful image for connection and communion, through music or otherwise.

In Virginia Woolf's long elegiac novel, The Waves, a work intensely concerned with the aural imagination and the aural landscape, Bernard muses as he walks the city streets: “Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which, unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed flocks?”

Already moved by musical experiences and literary images of sympathetic vibrations--and having sneaked them into my dissertation chapter on the elegy--it was with delight that I came across Elizabeth Le Guin's book: Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Le Guin provides a brief sketch of the history of the soul-as-stringed-instrument metaphor (the examples above from Plato and Hume come from her), and concludes that by the eighteenth century what was new in the use of the metaphor was "its emphasis on the idea of bodies resonating, not only with God or with the organization of the universe, but in sympathy with one another."

My delight in Le Guin's book was manifold (but this element will make it into the dissertation footnotes; the cello deserves to be in there somewhere, even if covertly.) Now, I actually sat down meaning to tell you about Boccherini's Body (as I have been meaning to for ages), but this will have to serve as a preview of coming attractions....

springtime stock-take

The (sporadic) bloggeur is going to have to relinquish her original ambition of playing a Bach suite by the time she finishes her dissertation. This is not done with any sadness, though, as it certainly does not mean the cello itself is being relinquished; I still foresee it as an invaluable companion in what is hopefully the final couple of months of the dissertation-writing life.

And not does it mean there is any disappointment about what has been attained. In a way, that ambition was always a bit abstract, tinged with a gently jesting idealism. And besides, all this amateuring is premised on what is almost the sheer impossibility of the goal; the delight comes in the process, in having added to life the active experience of music, in hearing the most vaguely musical shapes emerge from the cello, in exerting the patience and perseverance that gradually bring the next elusive element of technique into reach, in the experiences of the genuinely new, of the not-yet-conceived-of perceptual and expressive possibilities.

And, in the end, maybe the ambition need not be entirely dismissed as unfulfilled: I have, at least, played, in my kitchen, in uneven and rudimentary form, the Prelude of the first suite, and, in a lesson, its first Minuet. The notes are deceptively simple, but how to give them shape and expression seems another matter altogether.

In some other more concrete sense--the sense that is constantly modifying and fluctuating week by week and lesson by lesson--the measure of things is good: I'm still playing, still enthusiastic, still improving, still thrilled by minor and modest accomplishments, still energized by practicing in my kitchen, and still convinced I'll play the suite one day. And of course, the part of me that still disbelieves that any of this music-making business was ever at all possible has had its expectations well and truly exceeded.

I think all three personas--the high-aspiring idealist, the persevering realist, the easily delighted naive novice--are key to the motivation and reward-reaping of the adult amateur (or this one at least).

In the meantime, though, I had a delightful experience last night of playing together with two patient and generous friends at one of our department's annual social events in the warmly welcoming house of two of its professors. In the company of my musically gifted friends, The Swan, as a cello-violin-piano trio sounded--to me at least--quite transformed. Playing with others, especially carried along by my friends' stronger skills, the music feels, well, more musical, more of an embodied whole. It's suddenly not just a line moving along in time, but a many-dimensioned shape moving and turning, with texture that's almost available to many senses all at once.

Last week at my lesson, I had one of those experiences of the new, too: my teacher modelled (with singing and gesture; he rarely plays to demonstrate) how to play one particular phrase in the Vivaldi final allegro movement, and told me to do what I might feel like was exaggerating the bow movement. The result of imitating his model made me gasp -- it both sounded and felt so different! But more than that, I felt it had taken me beyond some long-held reluctance or self-consciousness in the face of fullness of performative or extraverted expression. His particular choice of words to encourage me was even reminiscent of something an invaluable adviser had once said in helping me enhance my own presence as a teacher in the language-learning classroom: don't be afraid to exaggerate, she had told me, because, your sense of what exaggeration is probably takes you nowhere near what others, and your students, would actually perceive as exaggeration. The perceptiveness of that advice I now appreciate anew and all the more.