One-Year War and Peace E1.12 – The Household

Reading for Friday, June 12

In a very Tolstoy-like chapter, we get a snapshot inside the heads of all the main characters in the Rostov/Bezuhov household. The most interesting (and moving) of these is Andrei’s son, Nikolai. It’s a strange character, because Andrei (and Tolstoy for that matter) showed no interest in Nikolai for quite a long while, so all of a sudden, to find out that he’s 15 and worships the father he’s never known is quite interesting.

Was anybody else unsurprised that he much prefers Uncle Pierre over Uncle Nikolai? I certainly would . . .

Finally, a description of the ailing Countess Rostova. This could be milked for all its worth and made to be quite sentimental (for some reason, I’m thinking of Sally Field as the dying Mrs Gump . . .) but instead it’s portrayed as the cycle of life. I think we get a bit sheltered from the onset of old age and dementia, because people of that age get shunted off to nursing homes and we don’t have to think about them. So in some ways, it’s quite helpful that Tolstoy shows us that the same youth and beauty which we’ve seen in many different facets in this great novel is just one of our lives – the other end is ailing bodies and ailing minds.

CD Review: The Hyperion Schubert Edition Complete Songs – Vol. 2

In this age of digital music, I’m still a fan of CDs. I’m not opposed to MP3s, and the like. Certainly, iTunes is a great way of getting hold of a song from an album where you really only like one or two songs.

But, when it comes to buying classical music, I still love the CD. And this CD series would be a classic example of why. I’ve done an earlier review of Volume 1 in the series, but as a brief recap:

In the early 80s, the pianist Graham Johnson persuaded the Hyperion record label to let him release a complete collection of all the songs ever written by the composer, Franz Schubert. Considering that Schubert wrote over 600 songs in his short life (he died in his 30s), it was an immense recording project and took 37 CDs. I’m slowly collecting and listening to them.

Graham is the constant link in all of these CDs, and he accompanies all the songs, but he picks a different singer for each album. In this case, he picked the baritone, Stephen Varcoe.

Varcoe is not particularly famous outside of England (and even there, he may not be completely well-known), but he has a very pleasant baritone voice, which makes these songs very easy to listen to. (No unpleasant operatic belting here.)

Graham tends to group songs by theme, and in this second volume, he has picked a group of songs all themed around the idea of water. (Not, however, “The Trout” which would probably be the most famous Schubert song of all – or would that be “The Erl-King”? Hard to pick . . .)

As with all these volumes, because it is a complete set, you get some well-known songs and some really obscure ones, all side by side. What makes them interesting is the liner notes. Graham goes to town, writing several paragraphs for each song in the booklet, explaining what he’s doing in the piano, what the singer is doing with his voice, what Schubert is doing in the music, the background to the song, who the lyricist was, what’s going on in the music, etc. His level of knowlege is immense and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Also, there are interesting experiments. For instance, the first two tracks contain the same song lyrics set to different melodies. Schubert came back later in life and tried his hand at the same song. So by having them on the same CD, you get to hear how varying the accompaniment can change the whole tone of a song.

But probably the real main piece on this CD is a song that runs for half an hour that tells the legend off a young man that dives off a cliff into a swirling maelstrom to rescue a cup so that he can win the hand of the king’s daughter. It’s quite dramatic, with the piano all the time providing the dramatic accompaniment (like a soundtrack) to the whole thing.

All in all, a good album of lieder and it certainly made me happy to buy future albums in this series. Which I will hopefully get to review in due course.

4 out of 5.

One-Year War and Peace E1.11 – A Husband’s Return

Reading for Thursday, June 11

Here we have another bizarre chapter, where Natasha is waiting for Pierre to return from business and gets all upset when he doesn’t come back. Is this because him being away reminds her of the time that Andrei went away for a year and she betrayed him? I don’t know, it’s not mentioned, but it could be . . .

I must admit, it was hard to concentrate too hard on the subtleties of this chapter, because I was too busy noticing the interesting cultural understanding of breastfeeding that we get from this chapter (and the previous one). In the previous chapter, Natasha is portrayed as being quite radical for breastfeeding her own children instead of having a wet nurse.

And in this chapter, she “overfeeds” her baby and makes it ill. Certainly, if you give a baby too much breastmilk, you can give them a stomach-ache and they might start throwing up a bit more . . . but you can’t give an illness to a baby by giving them too much breastmilk.

How do I know all this? My wife is training to be a counsellor for the Australian Breastfeeding Association, so I’ve heard a fair bit of info about breastfeeding over the last few years . . . in fact, I’m hearing a fair bit as I write this.

Anyway, that’s a bit of a digression, but it goes to show the shifting and changing attitudes towards breastfeeding in society. (It went completely out in the 50s, when formula came in and now it’s starting to come back in again.)

Meanwhile, Pierre arrives back home and proves that he is good with the kids – which you’d kind of expect. Nikolai can’t see the value in babies, which slightly irks me – but hey, this is Nikolai . . . would he really act any differently?

One-Year War and Peace E1.10 – Under Petticoat Government

Reading for Wednesday, June 10

Now, I must confess, this is the first chapter that has had me scratching my head a bit. I’m not sure whether it would have infuriated the 19th-century equivalent of feminists back in the day, but here we have Natasha who has devoted all her time and energy to her children as a mother.

Now, I don’t have a problem with this – what I find a bit sad is that it sounds like she gave up the sparkly life-loving part of her personality to do so. Surely, Natasha would be a Mum who was full of energy and excitement and would convey that to her children and those around her?

Maybe she is like that . . . but it does sound a bit like Tolstly is saying she gave up the fun-loving part of her nature to become completely family-focused. It’s just sad, because it makes being family-focused sound so boring . . .

Sigh . . . oh well. Maybe this is why they never filmed the epilogue for the Bondarchuk film.

One-Year War and Peace E1.9 – A Rostov Domestic

Reading for Tuesday, June 9

Now we’ve actually jumped quite a few years forward here, because Nikolai and Marya now have two kids. Who are named, bizarrely enough, Natasha and Andrei. (Though the translation refers to little Andrei as Andryusha, which is a bit like a Russian nickname for Andrei, so you may not have realised straight away what his proper name was.)

This is on top of Andrei’s surviving son, who was also called Nikolai. Maybe it’s just Tolstoy’s way of showing how history repeats itself?

I don’t know.

I tell you what I do know, and that is that Nikolai is quite a sook, and I really was feeling sorry for Marya in this chapter.

But then again – hasn’t he always been? Do we expect him to change? Not really . . .

DVD Review: Les Vampires

This brings me up to having watched number 4 from the 1001 Films to Watch Before You Die book. This is one I think I could have given a miss.

Les Vampires dates from 1915, and is a French serial, so all up, it’s something like 6 or 7 hours long. It consists of 10 episodes, ranging in length from 15 to 55 minutes in length.

They all revolve around a legendary gang of Parisian criminals known as The Vampires, and the dedicated duo of crime-fighters trying to take them down.

It’s not a continued story with cliffhangers as such, more just a series of episodes (much like a TV series) with a new predicament in each one.

I think the reason this one is on the list is because Louis Feuillade was one of the first filmmakers to use a lot of the cliches that went on to become, well, cliches of the crime thriller drama. There are role reversals, where someone good turns out to be bad. There’s people hiding behind secret doors. There’s chases across rooftops, and ropes down buildings. There’s even a few slightly more off-the-wall things like a portable cannon that gets assembled in a hotel room, then fired across the street to blow up a cafe.

On paper, this series has some clever ideas. But to watch it is painful. Don’t get me wrong, I love silent film. In fact, that’s partly the problem. The last one I watched was The Birth of a Nation which, despite its racism, is still pretty solidly entertaining. It has pace, it has drama, and it sucks you in.

But Les Vampires just becomes tedious. Partly this is due to the fact that most shots consist of a static camera in a room shooting the characters with no editing. This makes for fairly slow, clunky moments. (And I can’t even lipread it all, because it’s in French!) I kept hoping that the last episode would tie it all together and make it all worth while. Certainly, the stakes are raised in the last episode, but nothing to get too excited about.

Finally, the music on the DVD is atrocious. Silent films do often suffer because they get some dude with a synthesiser in to make the soundtrack, and this film is no exception. Hear me now – SYNTHESISERS KILL SILENT FILMS. I ended up playing spooky soundtracks over some of the episodes just to try and raise the tension levels. (It didn’t help much.)

So, yeah, film students only for this one. (And if you’re a film student, I’m putting it up on eBay soon, so keep an eye out.) For the rest of you, don’t watch it – it’ll put you off silent film. Which would be a shame, because the next film up on the list is the astonishing everyone-should-watch-it Intolerance.

1.5 out of 5.

Benjamin Zander Explains Music

A while back, I was posting about how to explain classical music, and I said that if we really want to help people understand the music, our explanations of music need to:

1. Be emotionally engaging.

2. Provide a complete end-to-end listening guide through the music.

3. Not use terms that people don’t understand (unless you explain them).

Have a look at this video by famous conductor Benjamin Zander, as he (among other things) explains a prelude by Chopin. he doesn’t do it in any academic way, and you may not even realise he’s educating you, but in the space of 20 minutes, he applies all three of the above principles to the music he’s talking about.

I thought it was really well done. See what you think.

One-Year War and Peace E1.8 – Fisticuffs and a Barren Flower

Reading for Monday, June 8

And here we see more of the domestic side of the Rostov home – but this time Nikolai’s fiery temper and his habit of getting into punch-ups with unruly peasants. Marya is horrified, but from memory – it’s been a while since we read that chapter – the way they first met was Nikolai punching up some peasants who didn’t want to help Marya escape from the attacking French.

So the very habit that sewed the seed of romance is now the seed of marital discord. But rather amusing marital discord (well, at least I found it funny).

What’s far sadder is what’s happened to poor old Sonya. She just seems to have accepted her place and lumped it. Despite what I (or any other readers) thought she might have deserved, she’s really turning into an old maid at the Rostov’s place . . . and that’s pretty much where this chapter leaves us.

There’s a certain worry about getting near the end of a book like this, because if you don’t like the state that a character is in, you know there’s only a few more chapters to fix the problem, and if they don’t get fixed – that’s it. Forever and ever, that character is going to be stuck in that situation. (A facet of fiction that is played with in a rather light-hearted and amusing fashion by author Jasper Fforde in his zany fiction The Eyre Affair.)

So if this is the last we hear of Sonya, that’s it for her . . . sigh . . .

One-Year War and Peace E1.7 – Nikolai as Tolstoy?

Reading for Sunday, June 7

I can’t remember where I read it, but I’m pretty sure that I heard that Tolstoy, in his later years, freed all his serfs on his family estate. Whether I imagined it or not, it feels very much like this chapter, where we read about Nikolai and how he manages his peasants, is very much Tolstoy’s view of how they should be treated.

Treat them like humans, put their welfare first, and lo and behold, you have well-managed estates.

Oddly enough, this is starting to be the mantra in the world of employment as well. Treat your employees well, and they just might make your business profitable.

But only Nikolai would pretend that he’s not doing this for any humanitarian reasons at all. Anyway, I must run, it’s time for church.

One-Year War and Peace E1.6 – Love Blooming

Reading for Saturday, June 6

We kind of all knew this chapter was coming – Marya and Nikolai finally get together. (I think that’s definitely the nail in Sonya’s coffin lid . . .)

It’s, of course, completely like Nikolai to be too proud to marry her for her money and also completely like Marya not to push him after he showed an interest in her.

I think the nice thing about how this panned out was that at least we’re pretty sure that they are getting together because they like one another – it’s not another Pierre and Helene we’re setting up here.

But still, I reckon she’ll have her work cut out for her . . . don’t tell Marya I said that, though.

And now for another installment of the Busoni. Despite the majestic main theme that the orchestra set up, you might have noticed (if you watched the video yesterday), that the pianist actually didn’t play around with that too much. Which is what a piano concerto is about, really. The orchestra plays a theme, the pianist elaborates on it.

But, from what I’ve been able to work out, there’s not a lot of that – at least in this movement. In this second video, the movement continues and we realise that yesterday the pianist was only warming up. In this video, Busoni flogs him within an inch of his life. There’s nothing quite like a pianist having to keep up with a monstrously complex piece of music – enjoy!