Witnessing Bartok's 3rd Piano Concerto today, I fell into an expansive series of moments at the outset of the second movement, which is not-coincidentally tempo-marked adagio religioso. In the clip below it starts around the eighth minute. The part I'm talking about starts there and lasts two minutes or so. It seemed like much more during the concert.
No matter where you are in music, if you're truly in it, as a player or listener, you are nowhere other than that moment. In hymns like this, the moment is allowed to persist long enough to be explored. And there's no concern about the dissonance or consonance of the next moment. That's the oddest part. Yes, slow movements have melodies that are built like song melodies. But at times, like in the Bartok selection, I have the experience of total surprise with each change. I've settled in, explored, maybe discovered something, maybe joined with something, and then it changes and the feeling starts all over again, only different.
Slow can approximate timelessness, I guess, in a way that fast doesn't. I can be transported by fast, and I can be swallowed by it, and I can feel joy and divinity. With slow, in addition I have no purpose or direction.
The performance was by the San Francisco Symphony under guest director Vasily Petrenko. The first piece, also deeply spiritual, didn't work so well, and I think that's because Petrenko is too human and driven to grok Arvo Part. He conducted Fratres, a famously simple composition, with a lot of fierce emotion, as if its subtle tensions were a personal manifesto. I just don't think that's what's going on in the piece. It's about an orchestra holding moments and moods, and that was what I didn't hear. I heard it in the Bartok in spades, so much so that the virtuosity of the fast, technically demanding last movement was completely lost on me. I was still stuck in the slow moments of the second movement.
Boy I love live music. The second half of the show was Respighi's Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. Not the deepest stuff, but exuberant and beautifully delivered by Petrenko and the symphony. Petrenko's a young guy, and that means he can be in full command of breathless, fast, brassy, complex charts. All he has to do is project himself! And then, in the midst of this Disney stuff, principal clarinet Carey Bell delivered repeated egoless, sensitive, textured and exquisite solos, one after another. It was like I had never heard a clarinet before.
I can't find any video of Carey Bell, so here's a nice recording of Fratres:
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