Deux

Patricia Kopatchinskaya, Polina Leschenko, Deux (Alpha)

This didn't quite get ordered a couple of years ago but came in useful now when making up an order. To save oneself £2.50 p&p, one spends another £11. Violin Sonatas by Poulenc and Bartok are augmented with Dohnanyi and Ravel.
Poulenc never fails for me and is in a bracket of great C20th composers in behind Shostakovich, who I'm increasingly convinced is the greatest. There is something of his tonalities in the Violin Sonata but Poulenc's structure is less formal, the changing tempi offering serenity amid the agitation. The second movement, tres lent et calme, is welcome respite with the piano following happily rather than challenging the violin. Kopatchinskaya- and Leschenko for that matter- is flash, zippy and passionate and doesn't let herself or the listener rest for long.
By way of light relief, the piano has Dohnanyi's arrangement of the Waltz from Delibes' Coppelia, which might have been placed after the Bartok because we don't quite need it just yet. An exuberant arrangement, almost syncopated, Leschenko is flighty, as in 'in flight', and flamboyant.
The Bartok Violin Sonata no. 2, Sz.76 is a darker thing altogether. Poulenc, Bartok and Ravel all now have their own designated cataloguers and it's not just Mozart's Kochel numbers, Schubert's D's and Bach's BWV's. Being from 1922, one can't help but be aware this is contemporary with The Waste Land and it's tempting to hear it as a soundtrack to that post-WW1 zeitgeist. Distraught, fractured pizzicato is not the least of the singnifiers of bleak grief and an inability to come to terms, if that is what Bartok was thinking. The piano part is as disturbed as the wide-ranging neurosis of the violin. before the piece disappears higher and more remote than Vaughan-Williams's ascended lark but this is no good as background music or easy listening, it demands concentration.
Ravel and his French contempoaries shouldn't be conveniently pigeon-holed with Impressionist painters as simplistic sorts like me sometimes try to do. Tzigane is based on gypsy and folk music but seen through a Modernist prism and more Cubist than Impressionist, sharper and less easy. It's always been there but not previously been a favourite of mine. This recording might make it more familiar and help to asssimilate it.
I was expecting something 'wild' and invigorating and wasn't disappointed in that. But in places, especially the Bartok, it was more harrowing than the bohemian image that the ladies project led me to believe. I'm not at all surprised it had such glowing reviews at the time of its release.

Art Saves Us

Art Saves Us
Very good value at £1, donated to the NHS.
Motion and Harsent so far and O'Brien soon, I understand, in the poetry section.

Situation

Not really a plague/lockdown poem but it might not have been written unless locked down.

Situation

rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress

                      Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

The tidy town through which the river flows

does business steadily to feed itself

and gives no thought to where the river goes

across countryside to the coastal shelf.

Settled in its unsettled way, the boat

is locked in the doldrums of its own wake

and calls it success to stay afloat,

being a boat for being a boat’s sake.

The water ripples still around the prow.

The under-powered motor, melancholy

with efforts to sustain it here and now,

accepts that it is going nowhere slowly.

Odette on Poets

With apologies to those who take a more high-minded attitude to poetry, this is one of the numerous passages I made a note of in Proust as Swann's young lady, Odette, is less impressed with art and artists.

As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked whether he

had been made to suffer by a woman, if it was

a woman who had inspired him, and once Swann

had told her that no one knew, she had lost

all interest in that painter. She would often

say: "Poetry, you know— well, of course, there'd

be nothing like it if it was all true, if the poets

believed everything they say. But as often as not

you'll find there's no one so calculating as those

fellows. I know something about it: I had

a friend, once, who was in love with a poet of sorts.

In his verses he never spoke of anything but love

and the sky and the stars. 0h! she was properly

taken in! He did her out of more than three

hundred thousand francs.

Proust

It isn't really a lockdown/pestilence project, only by proxy.
I haven't got anything new to read. The new Sean O'Brien is delayed, I see, so it will be an autumn of my favourite living poets with August Kleinzahler due then, too. In the meantime, continuing the French theme from Montaigne and Camus, Proust was to be a retirement project but with partial retirement due soon, I thought I'd have a look.
I abandoned about 300 pages into Vol 2 of 3 in this Penguin edition in the early 1980's. Since then I've eyed it with some foreboding when looking through the library shelves, wary of its long sentences and extensive list of characters. From the Monty Python 'Summarize Proust' sketch to its awesome highbrow reputation, I've tended to prefer short novels.
I need not have worried. It is a complete and utter wonder. As long as the last 2800 pages are anything like the first 200. It will only take a few months at the rate I was reading it over the weekend, and it will be the paragon of reading enjoyment.
I'm already wondering if another go at Ulysses might be next. The point being that once one stops being afraid of these sacred colossi, they are, more than anything else, comic. Like Ulysses and Don Quixote, literature is best when it's ironic and funny. Proust is as funny as Diary of a Nobody but with far more rapture at the very fact of existence, and incandescent with life. It is that sort of writing that captures feelings and experience so accurately that it recreates in the reader very much the same flood of memory as the cake dipped in tea does for Marcel. It flows so gorgeously that it hardly matters that two facing pages have no paragraph indentations at all. I'd get a copy in French to see what it's like in the original except that Terence Kilmartin is tremendous in English and I don't want to put the post lady to that much trouble.
The first 200 pages have generated nearly one side of an envelope's worth of page references, at which rate it will be 15 envelopes but maybe I'll slow down as it becomes less about the wonder of childhood, although I remember from 35 years ago that Swann in Love is dense with ardent prose, too.
I've never had a favourite novel. My George Eliot year was a great succes; it's always been the accessible Joyce; one has one's Salinger fixation; Hardy has to be on any shortlist; Julian Barnes, Camus. But by the summer, it could be À la recherche du temps perdu. At this rate, I'd be surprised if it wasn't. But it is, thus, likely to be quiet here.

Today's Times Crossword Solution

Finished at 10.46.
Too easy.