A concert can transport you to some other world, a different consciousness or new, disorienting perspective. I don't go to many concerts or live music events now. So, when I do venture out, things seem strange to me; I slip into a reverie and hallucinate.
The Austin Symphony Orchestra performed at the Knowlton Auditorium at the Public High School on March 30, 2025. A soloist, Rachel Barton Pine, was featured in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D (Opus 35). The second part of the concert was comprised of a performance of three relatively short pieces by Ravel. I'll dispose of my criticism at the outset -- the orchestra botched the Ravel pieces, played them with a disconcerting stutter, herky-jerky as opposed to the limpid legato required by this music. The strings sounded out of tune and the brass fumbled their notes, spattering them all over the stage. I thought that the rest of concert was effective and well-played -- indeed, on the Tchaikovsky piece, the orchestra seemed to be punching considerably above their weight. Impressionism in music is tricky. Apparent formlessness can degenerate into actual chaos and I think this happened with respect to the Ravel numbers.
The day before the concert, it was warm and humid. The temperature in mid-afternoon was 79 degrees, unseasonably warm in this climate for the end of March. But, then, wind and rain intervened and, on the day of the performance, it was bitterly cold with icy water drizzling out of dark, congested skies. As I walked from the side of the gymnasium parking lot, along the long dour facade of the High School, I realized that I was not dressed for the weather and my forehead was damp as if ice were freezing above my eyebrows and the cold made me shiver and ached in my joints. The hike to the concert hall on the sidewalk outside the concert hall knocked me into another realm.
Rachel Barton Pine has red hair and extremely pale skin. She may be in her mid-forties although she looks younger, like a child prodigy of some sort. She entered the concert stage on a scooter, driving up to a low platform on which a chair had been set for her. Something was wrong with the lower half of her body and she had difficulty transferring from the little, black three-wheeled scooter onto the platform. A young man followed her obediently to her position on the stage and, then, reached forward to hand her violin to her. The violin was as red as her hair. (In January 1995, when she was twenty, the violinist was riding a METRA train into Chicago where she was teaching music lessons. As she exited the train, the strap on her violin case, or, perhaps, some other bag, was caught in the closing door. The train started away from the platform dragging her along the tracks. After being pulled over one-hundred feet by the accelerating train, the violinist yanked herself loose but slid under the wheels. The metal wheel sliced off one of her legs and mangled the other lower extremity and she almost bled to death on the tracks. In the ensuing lawsuit, METRA rather heartlessly defended by claiming that the musician was responsible for her own injuries because she was carrying an old and famous violin and wasn't willing to relinquish her grip on it. The defense didn't work -- doors on the car closed without warning and there was no alert to the driver -- and one presumes that she was paid millions of dollars by METRA. Her injuries were horrible, requiring over 50 surgeries but she persisted in performing on what remained of her legs while standing until 2018, when a joint infection caused her permanent damage requiring that she now remain seated while playing.) According to the brochure, Pine plays an "ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat" Joseph Guarnerius del Gesu violin, an instrument made in Cremona, Italy in 1742. I'm not sure if this was the violin involved in the METRA accident. The concert program notes that she has the violin "on lifetime loan from an anonymous patron", a detail that haunts my imagination -- I think there is a novel implicit in this arrangement, or a film or play of some sort.
Barton Pine introduced the Tchaikovsky concerto with verve and enthusiasm. She spoke of Tchaikovsky's suffering, how he was implored to marry one of his students, something that he obligingly did, although, of course, he was shy, closeted homosexual. She described how he overcame his depression arising from this disastrous marriage, fled Russia with his boyfriend, and, later, regained his spirits to write the rollicking Finale: Allegro Vivacissimo, a melody that she described as a drinking song, "vodka music". She observed that she couldn't relate to his depression since she is a "straight woman" -- but, of course, given the horrific accident and ghastly treatment following that calamity, I suspect that she is more than qualified when it comes to grief and sorrow. She played with flair, executing spectacular cadenzas and, then, flinging her right arm with the fiddle's bow up in the air in a triumphant gesture. As an encore, she performed a very slithery, eerie blues piece by the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor. I was impressed by her curriculum vitae, she regularly performs avant-garde music, commissions works by contemporary composers, admires Death Metal and, in fact, plays that kind of music in a bar band called "Earthen Grave." There is nothing not to admire about this woman -- her courage and industry seem to be exemplary.
Just before the intermission, the director, Maestro Stephen Ramsey showed a twenty-foot tall slide photograph of Diego Velasquez' Las Meninas (1656) and asked the audience if they could identify the King and Queen shown in the large, and intricate, painting. (The King and Queen of Spain, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria are visible as shadowy figures in a small mirror in the background of the picture.) The work is visionary, sometimes called "the theology of painting" (Luca Giordano) with Velazquez looking out at the viewer from a position on the left, half-concealed by the big canvas that presumably will become las Meninas ("the ladies in waiting"). The Infante, Margaret Theresa, probably about six when her portrait was painted also stares out of the image, tiny in a white bell-shaped dress, and every inch a future queen. A female dwarf with a prognathous jaw glares at us as well and there is another little person, a young man, at her side prodding a big mastiff. The dog is dignified but sleepy; it seems to be dreaming. Of course, I have known this image all my life and admired it and, so, it was wonderful to see the picture projected above the orchestra all luminous with brass instruments shining in the stage light and the rich, deep hues of the strings, the shapely cellos and the fiddles and covenant ark of the harp. The concert began to seem like a waking dream. I have no idea why Maestro Ramsey had the picture projected above the orchestra -- it was a gratuitous gift, I suppose. Ramsey said something about Ravel and his Pavane for a dead Princess but I never figured out the connection with the Velazquez painting --perhaps, Ramsey was implying that the little girl with her regal bearing was a "dead princess" somehow -- in fact Infante Margarita Theresa died at 21 after seven years of marriage to a Habsberg King and six pregnancies (with four live births); maybe, the painting had something to do with the mutilated princess playing the violin for us. I don't know. It was the sort of association that seems obvious in a dream but can't be deciphered when you are awake.
Pavane for a Dead Princess composed in 1899 for solo piano was orchestrated by Ravel in 1910 as a concert version of the piece. The name of the work in French is Pavane pour une Infante Defunte. I suppose the word "Infante" triggered the association with the Velazquez painting. Ravel remarked that the pavane, which is a species of courtly dance music, was paradoxically a sort of elegy for a dead renaissance princess as well. This is also incomprehensible to me, dream logic of some sort.
After the concert, the air filled with snow, blown almost horizontally by the cold wind and wet grass turned white in the storm.
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