On Becoming a Socialist

Back when Bernie and Biden were running neck and neck for the nomination of the Democratic Party, I found myself in Bernie's camp. I'm still there. I only switched to Biden because I believed he could get more American voters behind him. The primary goal was to get rid of Trump, and everything, I believed, had to be subordinated to that goal, the environment, equity, everything.  I believe time has proven me correct in assuming Trump was that destructive to the American pursuit of democracy. The fact that Biden has made room for Bernie in his cabinet pleases me no end.

To be a Bernie-backer is to have to listen to the right slam socialism. And that led my friend Sharmon and me to want to get a clearer idea of what we were backing when we backed Bernie. We both signed up with others advocating Social Democracy. The problem is I had much too vague an understanding of what exactly that was. I liked Bernie's goals; I didn't necessarily want to slap a label on his followers. Socialism is one of those portmanteau words that means many different things to people.

I have since come upon a wonderful site I want to recommend to you which tackles the kinds of distinctions I've been struggling over, and has enabled me to feel a bit less tentative in embracing the label "Social Democrat" for myself. God bless the nerdy academic types who do their homework in this area.

Here's the site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlXZZhcWfyg

From now on, when asked to locate myself on the political spectrum, I will say I am a Social Democrat, and intend that to mean a capitalist who advocates the Marxist goal of a more equal distribution of wealth than the system we are currently working with by means of governmental intervention in the economy. I am not (yet) a Socialist, which is a person who believes in centralized government control of all means of production and distribution of wealth, but a capitalist who has been steadily moving in the direction of socialism, and hope to be a full-fledged socialist one day (although the time is getting short for that development to transpire).

The main problem with the way the U.S. goes about furthering its very noble project of achieving democracy one day, as I see it, is that it lacks a sufficiently enlightened populace. Because a raw form of capitalism is our most widely shared ideology, we are much better at producing wealth than we are at distributing it fairly and equitably.  Until the advent of Trump, who has now effectively turned the Republican Party into a Trumpism-over-democracy Party, we had the more unabashedly capitalist Republicans on the right and the less abashedly capitalist - but still capitalist - Democrats on the left. Bernie and his sympathizers - both Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists - were pretty much outliers.

But thanks to the two mainstream parties, we have now returned to the days of robber-baron inequity and many are beginning to look for alternatives. Some, deceived into thinking of Trump as their Savior, sought a solution in authoritarianism. Others, like myself, began looking more closely at socialism.

The only reason I am not yet a full-fledged socialist is that I think to line oneself up with socialists is to squander the little political influence any of us have. I think we calculated wisely in choosing Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders to run for president because he would get more Americans behind him than the Socialist Bernie Sanders, who has far more of my personal affection than Biden does. Biden is a decent enough man to make that decision palatable, so I have no regrets. But as long as Americans find socialism unpalatable, I feel I should continue to identify as a social democrat (i.e., capitalist) rather than pure socialist.

Socialism and Capitalism are opposing means for achieving democracy, the ultimate goal, democracy being understood as a social system in which distinctions of race, sex, ethnicity, and other accidents of birth are not impediments to a fair share of the pie. Capitalism's chief drawback is it operates on the assumption that human beings are inherently greedy; it uses the profit motive as a prime mover and is lousy at preventing the less powerful from falling through the cracks. Socialism's chief drawback has been that in all cases where it has been chosen over capitalism around the world, it has not been able to prevent a self-serving minority from seizing control and manipulating the uninformed to their own ends. And it has failed to achieve the economic goals achieved by capitalist nations. It is still, in my view, the better way to go; it's just that it has not had a good record thus far. The more successful democracies, those functioning in places like Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand and a few other places, are all making the same choice I have, to go the capitalist route for now. I believe (and this is speculation on my part - I don't have sufficient evidence for this) these countries have two factions, conservatives who are happy with the half-loaf of social democracy and want to maintain it, and progressives, who hope to make the jump away from capitalism to socialism some day.

Incidentally, I am inclined to listen carefully to voices on the far left who make the case that the main reason the socialist experiments (in the former Soviet Union, Vietnam, China, the countries of the Warsaw Pact, Cuba) have not worked is that the countries of the capitalist world have sabotaged their efforts. Whether this is largely true or simply somewhat true, or whether the problems lie inherent in the socialist systems themselves, I am sadly not sufficiently educated or informed to believe I can speak on this subject with any certainty. I continue to listen and hope to learn.

For a proper defense of socialism, I recommend this site: https://www.socialism101.com/basic

Photo credit 

Going Dutch

I have a curious relationship with the Dutch.

I identify closely with my mother's North German background. She comes from an area of Germany where they still spoke Plattdeutsch (Low German) when she was a kid. Low German is on the same close continuum as Dutch, Frisian and English to varying degrees and I realized I could read Dutch at an early age with far less effort than I could other foreign languages. The Netherlands struck me, the first time I went to Amsterdam, as familiar somehow. Not quite, but kind of. The spoken language has more guttural sounds than decent people ought to be allowed to utter, but other than that, it felt like I was visiting distant relatives for the first time. People whom I didn't know, but could understand and connect with.

When I went to live in Saudi Arabia, I thought it would be a great opportunity to see the Middle East - I would go to Lebanon, to Egypt, maybe to Yemen and other Arab countries. But I found living in Jeddah so oppressive that as soon as I got some time off, I headed for Amsterdam instead. It was like dying and going to heaven. I opened a savings account and wired money into it from time to time, having decided I'd find a way to settle there at some future point. That never came to be, and in later visits, I got bored with Amsterdam and put off by its open brothels and marijuana smoke everywhere, ironically - all too free, too libertarian somehow - and decided I had to admit I prefer places with some exotic features to keep me going.  Probably why I took to Japan so readily. I have a masochistic streak a mile wild. I need something to push against.

So it's as if the Netherlands and I dated for a while but could never get past the feeling of being like brother and sister with no sexual attraction. The Dutch and I parted ways.

That is until this wonderful time of isolation and solitude when I found myself listening to hour after hour of music, perhaps especially the excitement of discovering the Jussen Brothers, these two extremely talented and cute-as-hell youngsters (they are now 25 and 28, but I'm 80 - so "youngsters") who are now at the top of my list of favorites to listen to over and over again.

Most of the Dutch are not Christian anymore. Polls show over half the population has left the church behind, and now only 23.6% still identify as Catholic and 14.9% as Protestant.  5% are Muslims, 1% are Hindus. The Nazis succeeded in wiping out most of the Jews - there are only about 45,000 left today, less than half the number that existed before the German invasion. 

That said, I have a biased image of the Netherlands as a Protestant country. It's their secularism, not their Calvinism, that makes them somewhat stark and no-nonsense, I think - remember I'm talking impressions here, not facts grounded in evidence - but that's how I continue to see them.

And I see the Royal Concertgebouw as a Calvinist church, rather than a concert hall. It's got organ pipes up front, as many of the sternly rationalistic Protestant churches often do, rather than an altar, the way the more ritual-centered Catholics and Lutherans and Anglicans construct their churches. Kind of ugly. Clunky. Boxy. The focus is on its excellent acoustics, the practical side of things, rather than on elegance. People have to enter the stage via a long long flight of stairs, where I can imagine somebody could easily trip and fall. Nobody seems to be too concerned about that possibility, but when the Jussen boys comes running down the stairs to perform I freeze up. "Careful! Careful!" I hear myself saying.

All terribly irrational. But that's the way it is.

Let me move on to the music I want to share here.

Two wonderful pieces, one by the romantic composer Robert Schumann. Just a gorgeous piece of music. Wonder how much his talent was tied to his manic depressive disorder - he died insane, diagnosed with "psychotic melancholia" (if you've got to be insane, might as well have a diagnosis as romantic sounding as that one...) Schumann wasn't Catholic - more pagan than anything else - but he's on the catholic/schwarmy/romantic side of the spectrum compared to Bach, Mr. Lutheranism himself. (I'm blending the Lutherans and the Calvinists together, another inexcusable liberty, I know, but...)

So Concertgebouw - pronounced in that wonderful Dutch way - con - tsert - kkkkkkkkhhhhhhe - bow (as in bow wow), when combined with Bach, leaves me feeling all hot for the Protestant Church. Except that when I begin sitting back and listening to it, it sounds so light, so happy, so much fun, that I find myself retreating from thinking of Bach as a stern cold-blooded Protestant. What have I been thinking all these years?

I had an experience sometime earlier of rethinking Beethoven as far more "musical" than I have in years. Now I'm getting turned on to Bach in a new way.

All thanks to these marvelous, beautiful 25- and 28-year-old Dutch boys.

What a strange and wonderful time this lockdown is turning out to be.

Here are the two pieces:

Schumann's  Abendlied (Evening song):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGodaPuxTMI , an encore piece they played to a concert last July; and

Bach's Concerto for Two Keyboards in C-major, BWV 1061, Movement 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy2PAfqpPWU

Photo credit 

Japan - love it and leave it

When people ask me about my twenty-three years in Japan, and what I learned from it, the first thing that comes to mind is that it made me a firm believer in scientific truth. And by that I mean that when one speaks of truth, one is revealing little more than what the world knows at any given point in time. Absolute truth is pure illusion, and the best metaphor for knowledge is the story of the blind men and the elephant. One man grabs hold of the tail and describes the elephant as being "like a whip." Another touches its side and sees it "as a wall." A third puts his hands on the trunk and thinks it is a hose.  And that's only half the story. The truth is not that we should stand back and wait till we can get a view of the whole elephant, i.e., the actual truth. The truth is that even then all we have is a better picture. But not the whole picture. The whole picture remains eternally beyond our grasp.

Let me explain why I say I learned to think like that from my time in Japan.

I learned to accept, gradually, that I was always going to be changing my take on the place.

All life is about change, and hopefully, if one is lucky, I think one comes to see personal change as growth, as something positive.

I had a conversation some years ago with John Bester, the English language translator of a book which was, for many years, central to my understanding of Japanese culture. It's called 甘えの構造, Amae no Kōzō, in Japanese. In English, it's The Anatomy of Dependence. I took issue with the author's, Doi's, contention that Japan is not merely "unique" but "uniquely unique," i.e., that it is more of an outlier culture, at least compared to all other modern cultures, than the rest. John Bester, whose knowledge of Japan greatly exceeds mine, agreed with Doi: Japan is "uniquely unique." 

I just refused to buy it. All cultures are unique, I insisted, and when one tries to describe something so complex as a national culture, all one is really doing is revealing one's experience of it, and perhaps more significantly, one's inexperience.

I have left Japan - I left it in 2006 - and so the question no longer hounds me. But I continue to live with a Japanese husband, and the once endless sifting through the question of the ways Japan might be said to be unique has been replaced by endless speculation about how to separate the ways my husband seems to reflect traits that I want to mark as "Japanese" and the ways in which he is merely a distinctive human being. In the end, this question has gone from being an interesting academic pursuit to being of no consequence. Boring, even. What does it matter. We are in a committed relationship and what matters is that commitment, not the correctness of any analysis of his behavior.

For those still engaged in such pursuits, however - and I assume that means most foreigners who are long-term sojourners in Japan - I assume it continues to be relevant, and inevitable.

Another insightful Japan observer once told me that he could pretty much put his finger on how long a foreigner had been in Japan by their choices of what to say about Japan and how to describe it. One goes, he said - and I agree very much with this view - back and forth from the conviction that one has "figured it out" to the conviction that one really doesn't have a very accurate picture of the culture as a whole. The more one knows, in other words, the more one has to accept that one doesn't know all that much. Which, I suppose, is one way of defining wisdom, the admission of one's own limitations.

Many people come to Japan and instantly decide they have to write a book. "This is such an interesting country," you hear foreigners say all the time. "I need to get it all down while it is still fresh." But that's the point. What you're "getting down" isn't insight so much as it is truth as defined by "everything we know so far." Truth is the sum total of all knowledge but only to date, and anybody with a good background in science knows that truth gets redefined with each new bit of data. Only fools make absolute truth claims. Everybody else realizes it's like grabbing a handful of mercury. If you're smart, you'll avoid statements that begin with "the truth is..." and say something like, "As far as I know..." instead.

Most books written for the general public on Japan, if I'm not mistaken, are written by people who have lived there for no more than a couple, three, four years. And that means, if my other observations are correct, that they are inadequate takes on a complex civilization. I taught language and culture, i.e., the stuff of the fields of linguistics and anthropology, at a Japanese university for eighteen years. That means I was frequently more familiar with Japan than my younger students were. Because I am not racially Japanese and because my knowledge of the language is limited, many of my students took it upon themselves to explain Japan to me, thinking they were doing me a favor. They, most of them, had no way of knowing that when they began a sentence with "Wareware Nihon-jin..." - "We Japanese..." they were not so much informing me of something I might not know as they were inviting a response like, "Shame on you. Why are you reducing such a wonderful broad civilization to a mere listing of a few ways in which Japan strikes the world as distinctive?" They were, in other words, no more sophisticated about the land of their birth than most foreign sojourners. And they were easy prey to those who would sum up complexity in a few sentences.

I maintain that view. Japan will always be a major part of who I am. It will always be home. Both alien and strikingly familiar. Rich and wonderful and maddening.

I came to these reflections this morning after watching a video of a young American who was about to leave Japan after six years there. He is a wonderful illustration of what I mean. He has a love-hate relationship (and perhaps that's too strong: like-dislike will probably do) with Japan that reflects the experience of somebody with six years of intimate connection. Not necessarily a more accurate description than by somebody with two years or a less accurate description than by somebody with fifteen years, but a different experience. In a different place of an evolution which is not necessarily linear.

I can relate to this guy. He's playing the game all of us gaikokujin - non-Japanese - have played and will probably always play. Developing our knowledge base and simultaneously playing with the idea of truth. And getting only a partial picture.

Here's the video in question, if you're still reading and are still interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yauSILFvC5U

The Jussen Brothers

Where to start with the Jussen brothers?

How about Schubert's Fantasie in F Minor: 

The duo - I want to call them boys because I've seen them perform as child prodigies and once you've been wowed by a kid at the keyboard, it's hard to shake the image even though they are now fully grown - the two look enough alike in this video to make you think they might be twins, but they aren't, and normally you see the clear differences. Lucas is three years older than Arthur, and Arthur is the taller of the two. Lucas will be 28 in February, and Arthur will be 25 in September, so they are more than three and a half years apart. But they make such a beautiful team whether they are playing one piano, four hands, or two-piano duets, that it's easy to think of them as a single unit. They also play solo but they have said in interviews that they prefer playing together.

It says something wonderful about the Dutch that their culture has brought forward the likes of these guys and their parents.  Disciplined and dedicated to their profession as musicians, they are obviously healthy, handsome young men who have a normal social life and a variety of interests beyond music. Lucas loves soccer and likes to razz the Germans about the superiority of the Dutch national soccer team. They fit the image of talented youth fortunate in being born to two parents who knew how to mentor them when it counted. The boys gave their first major concert at the ages of 10 and 13 and signed a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon in March of 2010. The "Russian Album" just out is their seventh album with Deutsche Grammophon.  Lucas has studied in the U.S. and Spain and is Artist in Residence of the Dutch Chamber Orchestra (See the Chopin Concerto No. 1 listed below). Arthur has studied at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.

The brothers have played with nearly all the Dutch orchestras, as well as with the symphony orchestras of Boston, Philadelphia, Montreal, Sydney, Singapore, and Shanghai. They inspire effusive praise; Michael Schønwandt compared directing them to "driving two BMWs at the same time.". One reviewer described them as "Zauberbrüder" - magical brothers, who leave you with the feeling you have just heard a piano played by a single person with four hands.  Their friend, the pianist Fazil Say composed a wild modernistic piece for them three years ago called "Night." 

Because they are by nature social beings, they're finding it particularly difficult during the Covid crisis not to be able to play in front of an audience. Lucas has said that he feels their audience is always rooting for them, giving them encouragement, and that's something he really misses. Some artists are happy to play from their living rooms, but Lucas insists it's not the same thing. When they meet the public after a concert, it's not the signing that they enjoy, he says, it's the interaction with people. They are the very antithesis of reclusive artists living in gloom and wanting to bury themselves in their work. They thrive on human contact and interaction.

Mendelssohn: Andante & Allegro Brillante

There's a great video of the two of them in an English-language interview where they are playing "which would you rather, x or y." You can see their love of life. You can also see how remarkably they seem to be on the same wave length most of the time. I can't imagine having a sibling and not wanting to have this kind of relationship with them. They could be putting on a show for PR purposes - I seriously doubt they could be faking it - but I seriously doubt it. Watching them for even five minutes makes you wonder how people this young could have this kind of self-confidence, wisdom, charm and congeniality all rolled into one.

Mozart: Double Piano Concerto in E-flat Major (K365)

and don't miss the wonderful encore piece, "Sinfonia 40" following this concert, which starts at about minute 25:15. It is a piece by the Italian pianist Igor Roma, a jazz variation on Mozart's 40th Symphony (K550). Can't verify this, but one commenter says it was written for the Jussen Brothers. It's also available directly, on a separate YouTube video. What a perfect encore gift to an audience that comes to hear a Mozart Concert. A takeoff on Mozart's familiar "Great G-minor Symphony." Pure joy!

Germany created a Society for the Advance of Classical Music (Verein zur Förderung der Klassischen Musik) in 2018. The award went to the Jussen Brothers, who followed up with a performance of

Bizet's "Jeux d'Enfants" (Games for Children) - The brothers are clearly having a ball.

Fauré: Dolly Suite for piano four hands

One of my favorite pieces of music for four hands is the Poulenc Concerto for two pianos and orchestra, played by Alexander Malofeev and Sandro Nebieridze. Up till now I've only heard it played by these two guys. Turns out the Jussen Brothers do a magnificent version of it, as well.

Stravinsky: Sacre du Printemps - I'm not a fan of Stravinsky, but it shows the range Lucas and Arthur are capable of.

Debussy: Six Épigraphes Antiques 

Lucas, with a three-year lead on his brother, has several solo performances which I think are worth noting.  Here's just a sample:

Saint-Saëns' 5th piano concerto - recorded when he was only 22 - an exquisite performance - just look at the smiles on the faces of the conductor and the first violinist

Beethoven: Waldstein Sonata

Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1 - with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra

I'll stop here. There are more; I've only listed the pieces I've been listening to the past few days. But I trust these will suffice to show you, if you are not already familiar with the talent of these marvelous musician brothers.

Poelwijk, Wang and Cateen, Fou and Levit

Following up on my effort to share with you my joy-in-confinement exercise yesterday, I had a day of browsing today that was a whole lot of fun. Just wandering from one thing to the next without any direct purpose after yesterday's attempt to discipline myself by making lists.

I started out this morning with Nick Poelwijk, a young guy from Portland I'm now going to add to my "up-and-coming" list - another of those artists whose talent showed up when he was young and who had the advantage of good parental mentoring.

I found him when I came across a Guardian article this morning about the pianist, Angela Hewitt and her "best friend," her piano,  the one she had done all her recordings on since way back. Moving from one place to another, piano movers dropped her piano and smashed it to pieces. Heartbreak. The piano manufacturer, Faziola, got wind of the disaster and created five pianos for her to choose from. And the insurance company picked up the tab for the new piano, so this is a story that ends well.

In the Guardian article is a mention of Gershwin's "Love Walked in," which sent me in search of a recording, which led me to young Nick.  Here he is, playing "Love Walked In." 

That led me to an interview with him, in which he totally charmed me, partly because it turns out he's from Portland, and I like to think of the West Coast cities of Seattle, Portland and San Francisco as  oases (oasises???) in an increasingly uncivilized place one of my friends like to refer to as "South Central North America." Also because he's a cutie and because he lists Brahms as his favorite composer, as do I.

When asked his favorite composition, he said Brahms' First Piano Concerto, "especially the second movement". That sent me running to YouTube. Of the many offerings available, all by piano greats, I chose the one by Yuja Wang. To my utter delight it turned out to be a concert played in the open air in Munich in the summer of 2017. And that brought back a flood of serious nostalgia for my first experience with a big city. I was twenty years old when I went to Munich to study. It opened my life to the pleasures of Europe's great cities. I lived a twenty-minute walk from this place and got to combine this powerful music with the images of the Theatinerkirche and Feldherrenhalle, where the orchestra was set up, got to watch Yuja perform between the hindquarters of two magnificent lions, with the Frauenkirche and the spire of the Peterskirche all in the background when the cameras moved back. What a way to spend an hour after breakfast! If you can't find the time to listen to the whole piece, listen to the second movement, the Adagio, at least. It begins at minute 23:05. But the whole thing is only an hour and it's much more effective if it flows out as part of the whole.

The connections go on and on. The lions, turns out, were created by a sculptor named Rümann, from Hannover. My grandmother's maiden name was Rühmann (OK, there's an h added - the pronunciation is the same ) and she too was from Hannover (OK, not Hannover itself, but from Celle, but that's all close enough for my imagination).

This is life in the lockdown, the freedom to let the spirit wander wherever the internet will take me.

Other excursions in the past couple of days include feeling sadness over the death of Fou Ts'ong, the brilliant Chinese interpreter of Chopin. He was on my list of greats, along with Yuja Wang. He died a few days ago of Covid.

Fascinating story there. He went as a young man to Warsaw to study, no doubt because of his love of Chopin and the fact that he was selected to compete in a musical competition in Warsaw in 1953. Once he had tasted the freedom of being out of China, he escaped to England and eventually made it his home. For this the Chinese came down hard on his family, and his mother and father eventually committed suicide from the harassment. His younger brother attempted suicide as well, but failed three times. Imagine the guilt Fou Ts'ong had to contend with. And consider how many other Chinese lives were destroyed by Mao's Cultural Revolution.

And how about this piece about Igor Levit playing that idiotic Vexations piece by Satie - support for the notion that pianists have to cultivate their masochistic sides to get good at what they do?

Or skip the masochism for now and tune in to something completely different, this crazy Tom and Jerry number by Cateen, known for having fun with the piano and his performances. (remember his "Happy Birthday" number in twelve keys, one for each month of the year? Or his brilliant "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?" This one is pure joy when he gets to his cadenza. Hope Liszt has a sense of humor and is not rolling in his grave. I, for one, want to stand up and holler over this one:

Not bad, for a Monday in January, I'd say...

Music in the time of plague

 I love these videos now available of musical scores you can follow along as you listen to the music.

Here's one of Brahms' Variations on a theme by Paganini.

What they do for me is remind me of the magic that takes place when an artist takes the written medium and transforms it into the actual sound it is intended to capture or generate. The two mediums are in sharp contrast and you feel the gap, as you do between the written word and the spoken word. We take it for granted that the connection is there, but we forget that somebody had to create the system in the first place. What a contribution to civilization the systems are for writing things down.

Secondly, following a musical score reminds me of my own limitations, how little I actually ever accomplished with piano lessons. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would spend less time patting myself on the back for what things I did accomplish and more time contemplating the work necessary to make this magic happen. I don't blame my mother and father for not tying me to the piano bench, but I do appreciate parents and teachers who know how to motivate kids to persevere when they get tired or distracted.

I couldn't disagree more with people who say too much analysis ruins a good thing, that one should simply sit back and enjoy art and not pick it to pieces. For me, the picking to pieces only enhances my respect for the effort necessary to produce the visual or auditory art we tend to enjoy holistically. Child prodigies are wonders to behold and they raise questions you might otherwise not ask on how it is that some of us are born with a natural talent for music (or other form of art) and others of us, no matter how much time and effort we give to trying, never achieve the results that come to these kids naturally. 

When you read the histories of great pianists, it's almost always the case that the talent shows up early on, and if the kid is lucky, and is born to parents who recognize their talents, and have the means to foster it, the world benefits. I can think of no better argument for music and art in the schools. Cutting these programs out as "extras" removes from kids, especially those born into poverty or otherwise unlucky circumstances, the possibility of escaping these conditions. It's something a compassionate society should come to automatically, if we define the role of government as the fostering of the well-being of us all.

Because of the lockdown, I spend far more time than I ever did before listening to music, and because I had a good musical grounding as a kid in the piano, I am naturally drawn to music written for the piano. I've recently started taking notes on the composers and the artists I gravitate toward naturally. I love the discovery, at my advanced age, of things that have been sitting there on the shelf all along, that I never paid much attention to before. Or new discoveries, like the Russian-born German pianist, Igor Levit, who turned me on to Beethoven, many people's idea of one of the best composers of all time, but one I had decided for some reason, was not my cup of tea. Levit accomplished this with his lockdown concerts in Hamburg.  

He's an example of what I'm talking about, a child prodigy with a talented musician for a mother. And what luck. He's long been among my favorites, but now he's doing a job way above and beyond that of an ordinary concert pianist: he's showing the power of music to lift us up in hard times. He represents much better than I what I've discovered in the last year, that I can survive the tragedy of watching the results of America's surrender of its democracy to the least admirable among us, those who are inclined to follow an egomaniac into one folly after another and those enabler politicians who give him the lemming support he needs to keep it going. And I can survive the pandemic and the economic destruction the lockdown has brought about. Music saves. Or at least keeps us going until something else can save us.

For some time now I've followed the career of a young Russian boy, Alexander Malofeev, who came to the piano at age 5 and was already concert-ready three years later and at 11 was already turning heads.  He has gone from the kind of adorable towheaded cutie you just want to wrap your arms around and protect to a teenager fighting the trials of puberty to an accomplished young man - he's now 19 - you know you'd be proud to be associated with - or maybe move to Moscow so you could attend all his concert performances. 

One of my favorite performances of his is the one in which he shares the stage with another young prodigy, Sandro Nebieridze, in a performance of Poulenc's Concerto for two pianos and orchestra. Another is one in which he is clearly ill and sweating profusely, sweat dripping onto his hands as he plays. I wanted to rush in and grab him off the stage and scold his mentors for not keeping him in bed. But he represents the extraordinary efforts by these very special people who will spare no effort to put on a musical performance, who make you appreciate it that some people rise way above the crowd to reveal the best that is in us. Watching this performance goes a long way to counter the nefarious political shenanigans of our so-called leaders and the tragedy of our dumbing-down in recent years as a society. There are reasons why people tear up and sometimes even start sobbing in the presence of beauty. I do. Death and sadness rarely bring me to tears. But beauty does.

I don't want to make comparisons, don't want to talk about my favorite composers or musicians - singular. Instead I want to make sure I know who's out there in the world making music. I recently sat down and made a list of people who have written and performed piano concertos I've been lucky enough to become familiar with. I limited the list to piano because it would be too much to handle if I included the violin and the cello, my other favorite musical instruments, or if I just listed the best singers of opera and Lieder, two of my other favorite forms of classical music. I spend a lot of time with these, as well, and recently I've been listening to a lot of music sung by countertenors. But it's the piano I always come back to for grounding when I need to remind myself of reasons for not seeing the glass as half empty. 

I came up with five categories, starting with my favorite composers of all time who were also good at the keyboard: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff (listen to Yuja Wang playing Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto in C-minor) and Mozart.  I make no argument for one over another, and no claim to having an exhaustive list of greats - these are simply my favorite seven. There are so many more - like Tchaikovsky and Robert Schumann, but I'm listing my heroes of the moment, not my heroes of all time. I also love reading their personal histories for insights into their lives as real people. Consider, for example, the speculation about how Schumann's bipolar disorder and madness brought on allegedly by mercury poisoning from the treatment of the syphilis he contracted - again allegedly - from his father's maid, as a youngster. I'm not into speculation, as some are, over whether the bipolar disorder affected his later compositions - I lack the aptitude for that kind of analysis, and don't know if I would go there even if I could. But I do sit up and take notice of the fact that something drove him to excel against severe handicaps.

Secondly, I have a category for the two greatest pianists who performed during my lifetime, Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubenstein, both of whom died in the 1980s, after setting the bar almost impossibly high.

Third, there are another twenty or so greats who are also no longer alive, but who left us with some magnificent performances. Won't list them all. They include Van Cliburn and Glenn Gould. Then, I've got a list of thirty or so greats who are still alive and performing, whom I rush to listen to as soon as I hear they've given another concert. These include Martha Argerich and Yuja Wang, Evgeny Kissin, Fazil Say and Mitsuko Uchida, and again I mention only those whose names come first to mind, and not people I lift above other greats, necessarily. 

There are an unusually large number of greats living and performing today, in my opinion. They are the reason I think we should be cautious about any indiscriminate limitations on what the social media giant corporations put out. I'm thinking of YouTube in particular. YouTube is the mechanism for bringing these people into my life at the cost of paying only for ad-free access. Much as I enjoy live concerts, I also enjoy watching the fingers fly over the keyboard in close shots, and the sweat on the brow and the nervous tension resolving into smiles as the performers get caught up in their own skill for bringing notes on a page into a vivid reality.

Finally, there are the up-and-coming - and arguably already great, like Alexander Malofeev and my most recent discovery, the wonderfully creative Hayato Sumino, who goes by the curious name of "Cateen." To get a flavor of this guy and his talent, listen to these two pieces of his: "7 Levels of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"  and his "Happy Birthday to you" in all twelve major keys and tell me you don't think he should be included in any encyclopedia entry on "musicianship."

Don't give up.

It's a new year.

Young people are coming into their own.

The world can get better.