jwilzewske: Just returned to U.S. from several weeks in China, inspired by the possibilities

S oft power is derived from both state and society. Savvy states are able to harness the creativity and vibrancy of their societies for soft power purposes while understanding that it is civil society’s independence from the state that contains the real persuasive power. When authoritarian states deny the global public the ability to directly access their domestic civil society, they are potentially depriving themselves of a key soft power asset in the information age.”
— Shanthi Kalathil, ISD Working Papers in New Diplomacy, MAY-2011.

I ’ve just returned from several weeks in China—a wonderful, profoundly stimulating experience. I attended chamber music performances in Beijing, including a delightful concert at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (“The Egg”) by pianist Igor Levit and three of his colleagues (Evgenia Rubinova, Michail Lifits, Herbert Schuch).

U nfortunately, due to Chinese government policy Google Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook are all blocked in the PRC, which is why I have posted no blogs or tweets in recent weeks. (Did not try to use a proxy-server. Hotel ISPs were dodgy enough as it was...)

T here were interesting ‘audience compliance enforcement’ practices in China that we would never see in the West. For example, the concert hall staff aim red ‘marksman’/gun-sight-type lasers on the heads and backs of audience members who make noise or who move or try to take a forbidden photo during a performance. Everyone in the audience sees the bright red dot ‘painted’ on the body part of the offender. We don’t see that kind of enforcement of etiquette in the U.S. or Europe, that’s for sure. But the effectiveness of the social censure by the other audience members who are seated near the ‘offender’ is total and nearly instantaneous. From a performer’s perspective, this is kind of cool—especially when the behavior is disruptive and selfish on the part of the person doing the picture-taking or recording or moving-around.

I gor Levit gave a fantastic left-hand-only rendering of BWV 971 (among other things). I asked him and he says the transcription was Brahms’s, published by Breitkopf & Hartel, but I look in Breitkopf catalog and do not see it... I will have to buy a copy of their EB-6018 to look... maybe it is in there and only the Breitkopf pdf file online is in error. There are lots of LH transcriptions of BWV 1004 Chaconne, BWV 1006, BWV 1002, BWV 1031, and so on. I so far do not find the LH tr. of 971...

T he unlikely LH as proponent of subject, object, everything: this reveals new dimensions in, and sheds new light on, a piece I thought I understood. The RH stands by like a watchful parent, saying nothing.

L eon Fleisher and others have had dystonia or other reasons to pursue such literature, but here in China I hear Igor Levit and learn new things. Some might consider one such piece in an otherwise normal program to be a ‘novelty’ or ‘gimmick’, but it was not. Absolutely masterful.

I visited hospitals—crowded but fastidiously clean and well-run—so many things different from the West, but so many things the same. Visited the Central Conservatory where Chen Yi and Zhou Long and others trained. Oh, the food! The friendly, gracious Chinese people!

S o China blazes this prodigious, distinctive, iconoclastic path—many paths, actually, reflecting mixtures of Han Chinese plus 55 minority groups: regional, metropolitan and rural—always diverging from the West, because why? Because what is distinctly Chinese embodies the belovèd “national circumstances” and reinforces the honorable “Chinese characteristics”, or guoqing (国情). That is why... that is why this Chinese ‘autopoietic’ tendency is self-sustaining. It is a little like Richard Dawkins’s ‘Selfish Gene’ on a large social scale. Based on my 3-week exposure, I think it’s not a deliberated process and not a politically-coerced one. Instead, it feels organic, inevitable. So many people, who mostly seem so happy, so long as the ‘boom’ lasts! I can hardly wait for the chance to return...

Brahms transcription of the Bach Chaconne of Violin partita BWV 1004 for the left-hand (Peters)
Brahms transcription of Italian Concerto (Clavier-Ubung II) for the left-hand (Breitkopf)
Joseffy Violin partita BWV 1006 transcription for the left-hand
Kistler-Liebendorfer Choralvorspiel BWV 711, violin sonata BWV 1001, violin partita BWV 1006, orchestra suite No. 1 BWV 1066, orch suite No. 3 BWV 1068, musical offering canon BWV 1079... transcription for the left-hand
Philipp violin partita BWV 1002, violin partita BWV 1004 transcription for the left-hand
Raff Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Sitsky Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Sosa Chromatische Fantasie und Fuge BWV 903 transcription for the left-hand
Sosa Invention B-Dur BWV 785 transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Schule für die linke Hand III/2: Präludium c-Moll transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Siciliano aus der Flötensonate Es-Dur BWV 1031 transcription for the left-hand

jwilzewske

Friday, June 3, 2011

Just returned to U.S. from several weeks in China, inspired by the possibilities

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