The Beatles and I
Imagine a cold, overcast day. Now imagine a quaint pub at the corner of a street by a canal. Entering it on a day like this is like entering a new world. You are sitting, chatting with colleagues with a glass of iced tea in your hand. Music plays in the background but faintly - for it doesn’t want to intrude on your conversation. In fact it is so faint that it sounds like a whisper from a world beyond ours. The music changes and your ears catch a vaguely familiar strain. But they can’t quite place it. Besides this is a pub - most of whatever little reached your ears is drowned in conversations around you. That nagging sense of familiarity persists - and the inability to clearly hear the music strengthens it. Then suddenly, by some stroke of good fortune, the conversations at your table and at the table beyond and at the bar stools pause for a fraction of a second - as if everyone was reading from the same page and encountered a full stop. And you hear with unmistakable clarity a voice that you know can only be Paul McCartney softly crooning:
Michelle, my belle.
Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble,
Très bien ensemble.
A Beatles binge ensued for 2 days - one that has left me happy and sad in equal measures. Happy because it’s such delightful music. Sad because of how short-lived it all was.
While listening to this bit in John and Yoko’s Ballad today:
Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton,
Talking in our beds for a week.
The newspaper said, “Say what you doing in bed?”
I said, “We’re only trying to get us some peace”.
I realized that while roaming around Amsterdam during our visit in January, we had come across a shop selling prints of black-and-white pictures of John and Yoko taken during their aforementioned stay. There is something mesmerizing about these pictures, and I stood there staring at this one in particular for a long time:
The Beatles and I
I didn’t have my camera then, but while I was interviewing (the reason why we were here in January), my wife hunted the shop down and got a picture of the picture for me (we hadn’t taken a note of the street name - what magical powers she used to find this place again will remain a mystery to me).
P.S. I am impressed at how thoroughly documented their music is on Wikipedia. Practically every song has a page of its own with all sorts of quotes, notes and anecdotes - anything that doesn’t have a copyright attached.
Mahler’s death centenary
The musicians at Centraal Station were playing at the North (IJ-facing) exit today. Here is what they sound like:
Download: mp3 (476 kb) | ogg (380 kb)
The overcast weather of the last three days and the cold river-front breeze makes the music sound more melancholy than it should.
It was Mahler’s 100th death centenary today. I was expecting google to do their customary doodle but it wasn’t on their .com homepage and it seems like their .de and .at homepages gave it a miss as well. As a teeny private tribute, I played Mahler on my headphones all day.
Slightly spooky coincidence of the day: while checking the tram routes to office, I discovered that tram 16 terminates at Gustav Mahlerlaan:
MahlerLaan
If music be the…
[The events in this post took place on the 13th but I finished writing it today just as Azerbaijan were crowned the Eurovision song contest winners.]
In the elevator ran into someone who looked like a cross between Alfred Brendel and Woody Allen and had their combined age. I wondered if I’ll ever hear Brendel perform live (the concert page on his site is empty and the copyright date on the footer is 3 years old).
Decided to go home to drop my laptop backpack. Was missing those street musicians at Centraal just yesterday. Theres always the usual hubbub of people in a hurry at a busy station and theres trams ringing their “ding-ding-ding” bells, yet it had still felt eerily quiet without them. Seeing them today was life affirming. Smiled at the clarinetist and left them some pocket change. Must do it more often. On a vaguely related note, the tram bell always reminds me of The Beatles’ Penny Lane (seek to about 1:06 to figure why, or, listen to the extract below).
It was a mad dash to Concertgebouw. Presented my ticket outside the Great Hall where they were performing Mahler (lots of Mahler these days - his 100th death anniversary is on the 18th) and was politely pointed to the Kleine Zaal (Small Hall) where the String Quartet recital was.
Gratuitous ticket scan
D’Amici started with Haydn’s Op. 77. I have a beautiful recording of this work by L’Archibudelli playing on period instruments. It sounds a lot different live.
They followed it up with the work that I was really here for - Beethoven’s last (well almost) String Quartet - Op. 135 and I wasn’t let down. I am no musician, but the 2nd movement of this quartet must be one of the most difficult thing to play in the entire String Quartet repertoire. During the 1st movement, tears were rolling down my eyes, but during the 2nd, I wanted to get up and dance.
During the break I tried to memorize the names of all the composers on the plaques above each door (to my left Bach, then Haydn, followed by Beethoven (that’s where the musicians sat), Mozart, the two Schus- Schuman and Schubert spelt in the classical form Schvbert, Schvmann). A brilliant performance of Debussy’s String Quartet in G-minor ended with a long, rapturous applause. D’Amici returned it with an encore. The first violinist whispered ‘some more Haydn’ to the crowd and the quartet played the last moment of Haydn’s ‘The Joke’ quartet.
There’s a technically detailed explanation on Wikipedia to let you in on the joke but in brief (hear hear):
The movement begins with a lively theme. As it nears completion theres a short pause and then it resumes again. This goes on till the pauses become so long that the audience begins to wonder if the piece has finished already. But no it hasn’t and the quartet begins playing again. This happens a few times till everyone is chuckling.
I found the choice of works by D’Amici for this recital interesting. Each work here is the last completed String Quartet by the respective composer and each one is considered a bridge on to the next one. I wonder what it must feel like to have roughly 100 years of music (Haydn’s Op. 77: 1799, Beethoven’s Op. 135: 1826, Debussy’s Op. 10: 1893) placed before your eyes. I sure feel lucky to be able to listen to hundreds of years of musical evolution in one sitting.
Came out sporting a cheek-to-cheek smile to my wife waiting patiently outside and we went for an Italian dinner. I told her on the way about how badly I had wanted to hire a String Quartet for our wedding. Better sense prevailed, but I did manage to sneak in the first movement from The Joke on the CD that played at our wedding.
I also kept gushing about how beautiful it is to see a String Quartet perform. There is this anecdote about Cleveland Quartet (disbanded in 1995 so theres no way I am getting to see them live), where they were once presented with a “cuddly velvet Octopus” named Mr. Cleveland by a little girl. Her reasoning was immaculate - a String Quartet is like an Octopus - “one head, one heart and eight hands that work together perfectly”. The wife, I am sure now, refuses to believe that a String Quartet is a beautiful thing to see. That we spotted the following on our table mat while battling our thin-crust pizza at the Italian restaurant won’t help my cause:
[Updated 22 May with a scan of my Concertgebouw ticket and an extract from Penny Lane]
Rough Draft: On Letting Go
One of the hardest things I did before moving to Amsterdam was to give away my collection of 500 odd audio CDs - painstakingly curated over a period of more than 8 years. Sure, I have a digital copy on my hard-disk now but having been through 3 audio formats (Microsoft’s WMA, Sony’s NetMD and finally MP3), it was vaguely reassuring to always have the ‘master copies’ at hand. But it was not for the reasons of acoustic fidelity (hearing is not a faculty known to improve with age) that I felt bad about parting with them; rather the qualms were about abandoning the physical aesthetic of the packaging that had made collecting CDs worthwhile.
Most western classical CDs come with carefully written notes about the work, musician biographies; and depending on the label, beautiful artwork. For example, I still remember the recordings of Bach’s Double Violin Concertos on Harmonia Mundi not only for the divine music, but also because the linear notes included this playful photoshoot of the vilonists Andrew Manze and Rachel Podger:
From the linear notes of Bach's Double Concerto recording issues by Harmonia Mundi
Often, the musicians add some unique insights into the work or the place where the work was recorded. Heres what Quatuor Ysaÿe had to say about their recordings of some of the rare works of Beethoven:
“We were familiar with the Abbey of L’Epau, having played their prior to choosing it as a recording location. L’Epau, so close to the city [Le Mans] and yet so far from man… The first time we assessed its full force was when we visited it alone, for recording trials. In the space of an instant, the place belonged to us: confidence was established, and we were on friendly ground. The beauty of the stone, the haromy of the volumes, the play of light, which alone gives rhythm to the hours - all contributed to the triumph of the spirit and called forth the music. . . The dormitory, where we recorded, boasts exceptional acoustics, coloured by a natural reverberation that is ideal for the sonority of strings. The volume is large without ever being overwhelming, and in it, the quartet resonates without dryness or hardness, but with the brightness and clearness that we hoped for.”
It might colour your opinion of the recording before you hear it, but chances are that you’ll appreciate what you hear more.
Then there is the matter of listening to works that are ‘CD buddies’, together. By some strange trick of fate, certain western classical works acquire affinity for each other and are always issued together on a CD (and on LPs before them). Often it is the obvious stylistic similarties that bring two works together (Debussy and Ravel’s string quartets), but sometimes it could be the doing of an obscure historical quirk (Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is paired with Schumann’s Piano Concerto because these are the only works by these composers in their respective genres). In an era where you buy ‘tracks’, the notion of a complete classical work itself is fast disappearing to say nothing of two complete works being paired together.
There is a brighter side to this whole episode. I am now in the same city (Amsterdam) as one of my favourite concert venues (Concertgebouw). This Friday I’ll finally be listening to a live performance of two of my most cherished chamber works:
The links above point to 7 year old posts on my previous blog. Life has been kind.
Maastricht
My wife is a bigger travel junkie than I can ever hope to be. When I come to a new place I like to - “wear it off”. Going to the same haunts over and over again doesn’t bore me. I was thus quite content walking about in Amstelveen with my camera, clicking flowers. Then there is this matter of mind being a place of its own and some of us like to explore its warren of alleys. Sitting about at home is therefore a perfectly legitimate way to travel for some of us.
That said, all this inertia fizzles away in the face of cheap train fares - which the wife has become quite adept at ferreting out from the Nederlandse Spoorwagen (the national rail here) website. Three weeks ago when she got hold of the spring pass that allowed us to travel for a first-class return fare of 20 €/person I decided to follow her along to Maastricht with the eagerness of a dog being taken out for its morning walk.
If you have time to visit just one place in Maastricht, make sure it’s the Selexyz bookshop. Situated inside a centuries old Dominican church with vaulted, painted ceilings, it’s one of the most beautiful bookshops that you’ll ever visit. Although most books here were in Dutch, they had a respectable collection of English books too. We picked David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. We realized later, that the book has a strong Dutch connection [Zoet gave it away, Wikipedia did the rest].
With that bit of shopping behind us, we spent a lot of time walking about in the quiet, quaint, cobbled streets wondering if all places of worship were to turn into bookshops one fine morning, wouldn’t this world become a much more livable place?
The thing about old architecture is that it can bring an air of respectability even to such instituions as McDonalds.
We walked along the Meuse river and along the mooring spot right in the middle where (we presume) the rich and the famous park their expensive toys.
Suddenly the sky turned grey and acquired a texture I had only seen in video games before. The time for lazily lingering about was up.
We finished our trip with a visit to the 17th century town hall and the statue of Minckelers that holds the ‘eternal burning flame’. The man invented illuminating gas and therefore deserves to have it wasted eternally in his honour.
On our way back, I noticed that the train stopped at Eindhoven.
The name rang a bell. Now I am not into football at all, but wasn’t it PSV Eindhoven that visited India several years ago and beat Mohan Bagan (or was it East Bengal?) 7-0 (or something equally one-sided)?
Garbage
Spotted one morning during the brisk 40-minute walk to office:
Near a pile of elm seeds
rests a rickety chair.
From a plastic trash bag
peeks a tattered teddy bear.