Balanchine | The Casual Blog

October 28, 2012

A piano tuning and a ballet board meeting

My Steinway grand piano (an A) is a gorgeous musical instrument, but it is subject to entropy. It needs a regular tuning, and lately a few notes in the lower-middle range sounded overly bright to me.

On Saturday, Phil Romano, a master Steinway technician, tuned it and did some voicing by needling the hammers. Phil was about to take off on another tour with Paul McCartney, and shared some interesting stories of Sir Paul’s performing in the Queen’s Jubilee, the Olympics, and South America.

With the benefit of Phil’s good tuning and voicing, I had a gratifying session with my instrument on Saturday. Recently I’ve felt a bit stuck on the same musical plateau. Although this has happened from time to time over the years, each time it’s uncomfortable, as I wonder whether I’ve gone as far as I can go. An essential part of the joy and challenge of the classical tradition, for me, is forward movement. It’s true that I’m now playing better than I ever imagined I would, but still, I would see no point to practicing if I didn’t expect to achieve greater technical and artistic mastery. This is one of the reasons it is so important to have a teacher — to get you unstuck when you’re stuck.

Anyhow, today felt as if I was getting unstuck. For a devoted student of the piano, there are few things more pleasurable than a freshly tuned Steinway. I played some of my favorite Chopin, Debussy, and Liszt works, and made some headway on my assignments from Olga — Rachmaninoff’s Elegy and Chopin’s etude op. 25 no. 12. Also, for a special treat, I read through some of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. The Waltz of the Flowers really works as a piano piece! I’d like to polish it up for the holidays if I can find the time.

Speaking of the Nutcracker, this week I had my first meeting as a new member of the board of directors of the Carolina Ballet. I’m really pleased to be able to help support this wonderful company. It’s also good to meet other people who really love ballet. As Ricky Weiss pointed out at the meeting, not everyone likes it, and some actively dislike it, but those who care about it care a lot.

In his report, he noted that we have a particularly strong group of dancers now. In the all Balanchine program, he had four different Apollo’s. It is, he said, an extraordinary thing, particularly in a company of this size, to have four males who are all capable of fully expressing this difficult role. (In an interesting coincidence, this morning the dance critic of the New York Times discussed Balanchine’s Stravinsky ballets and led off the discussion with Apollo.)

There are lots of things to be happy about, including the company’s large number of performances, the large number of new works, and the consistently high standard of performance. Weiss noted that the current group of dancers have achieved a high level of individuality, by which I think he meant they are artists who express not only the classical tradition but also themselves.

At the same time, there is a real concern about company finances. This is no great surprise. Since the recession of 2008, times have been hard for lots of people, including lots of arts organizations. But realizing this does not lessen the difficulty for this particular organization. I continue to think that there are more people around here who would enjoy ballet who haven’t yet discovered it, including some who would find it rewarding to help support the company. I hope so.

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May 22, 2010

Daunting derivatives and Sleeping Beauty

Tuesday evening I boarded the flight from RDU to Dallas, and was confused at first as I looked in the coach section for my seat. 5E wasn’t there. It slowly dawned on me that I had a first class ticket, either as a result of a computer glitch or some unexpectedly generous rewards system. After I wedged my way forward through the human tide and found my seat, I tried not to look too ecstatic. Ah, such a comfy, roomy seat. And so sweet to have a flight attendant who’s attentive, and little luxuries like warm peanuts and hot towels. My neighbor was a precocious nine-year-old boy with a stuffed toy traveling to see his mom. He’d flown this route many times. He wanted to be an inventor when he grew up.

On the trip, I finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis. I picked up the book on the strength of his earlier book, Liar’s Poker, and out of concern that I probably didn’t fully understand the drama in the U.S. and world economy in the last two years. After reading the book, I’m quite sure I didn’t. I now know a little more, but my larger takeaway is that part of the cause is that the mechanisms involved are so complex that they defy conscious human understanding or control. I don’t think this is Lewis’s intended message. He tries to create some heros and villains, or at least intelligent actors and dupes. The intelligent actors had rational thoughts, and realized that subprime-mortgage-based derivative investments were much riskier than advertised. He casts some blame on clueless regulators and unscrupulous investment bankers.

Lewis implicitly suggests the slightly cheering possibility that if people were more reasonable and diligent, they might set up regulatory and other systems to avoid financial catastrophe. I found this encouraging message not very persuasive. There were surely some monsters and frauds involved in the recent debacle, and plenty of examples of unsavory pure greed and indifference to human welfare. But right now it looks to me like the big driver was the financial engineering of investment vehicles that were practically impossible to understand, even for professional investors and regulators, never mind individuals. Creating them was far from unnatural. In nature, technology, and other human systems, greater and greater levels of complexity over time is generally the rule. At some point, there’s simply too much for the human mind to deal with. Our rational systems are overwhelmed, and our fallback emotional systems have no guideposts from experience. Disaster is not necessarily inevitable, but we are less and less in control. Yes, it’s scary.

But life, amazingly, goes on. Sally and I went to the last program of the season for the Carolina Ballet last night, which was Robert Weiss’s version of Sleeping Beauty. The music is by Tchaikovsky, and as Weiss explained at the beginning, the choreography comes in significant part directly from Marius Petipa’s nineteenth-century work. For the most part, this was a very traditional, classical form of ballet. I generally prefer the more abstract athleticism of Balanchine and his school (including Weiss) with modern dance inflections. No matter. Sleeping Beauty was wonderful. Even the junior members of the corps de ballet showed considerable authority with classical technique, and the soloists were masters who communicate emotional depth within that framework. Margaret Severin-Hansen as Aurora was etherial. The costumes were also classically inspired (gowns and embroidered waistcoats and many tutus), and gorgeous.

We got a backstage tour courtesy of our friend Ginny at intermission. It turned out, the action hadn’t really stopped. On the stage behind the curtain, some of the dancers were practicing difficult passages or doing deep stretches. It was disconcerting at first to shift from observer of a carefully planned spectacle to quasi-participant in the assembling of the spectacle, but fascinating. We met Lilly Vigo, a great favorite of ours who was off for the night, and talked about her new baby, who was six months old that day. We examined up close the intricate costumes and saw the swan boat and the huge dragon puppet in the wings. A friend once told me that I was the kind of person who likes to look behind curtains and see what’s really going on, and it’s true. One of my fantasy careers is to be a stagehand.

After the show, we decided to have a drink at the Foundation, a tiny bar on Fayetteville Street that features a huge menu of American-made designer spirits. The downstairs space was crowded, so we settled on stools at street level and did some people watching. Two of our favorite soloists from the company, Lara O’Brien and Eugene Barnes, arrived shortly afterwards, and sat down next to us. They seemed pleased that we were big fans, and we really enjoyed talking with them about favorite ballets, goings on in the company, and the travails of the professional dancer’s life. This is the end of an arduous season for them, and both are looking forward to recovering from injuries over the summer. We’re looking forward to seeing them again.

February 20, 2010

We won the lottery, ate, and were transformed by the ballet

I was terribly embarrassed to forget about lunch on Wednesday with my good friend Jay B. After dealing with a series of absorbing if not gut wrenching legal puzzles through that morning, I paused around 12:15 to check the headlines in the NYT. At that moment Jay called to ask where I was. I remembered instantly that I was supposed to be with him at noon at the Remedy Diner. I also remembered I had put the meeting on my electronic calendar when we scheduled it, but somehow it was not on the calendar now. After fifteen minutes of rushing and apologizing profusely, I was in my seat at the Remedy and catching up with Jay.

It’s always fun to hear about Jay’s doings, but he had a particularly fascinating story this time: he had arrived in Haiti on January 12 five hours before it was hit by the mother of all earthquakes. He and daughter Kate were there to do some charitable work in a village some distance from Port au Prince, and got close up view of the incredible devastation heaped on a country already unimaginably poor and broken. The contrast between the Haitian experience and ours is indescribable. As I said to Jay, everyone in this country has won a huge lottery prize just by being born here.

But we can’t either celebrate or feel guilty all the time, and we get on with the challenges of our daily lives. My work Friday was a series of intense meetings with lawyers from all over the country interested in doing business with Red Hat, punctuated by numerous phone calls, emails, and pop-in office questions. It was almost nonstop activity, but I did manage to take a call from sweet Jocelyn. She was thrilled with her first powder skiing experience at Telluride, and feeling excited about her increasing skill as a skier. She also told me about hanging out in a Telluride bar with Ed Helms, a successful actor in The Office. As I told her, I’d knew from the Oberlin magazine he went to Oberlin, and she confirmed that fact. Indeed, she told him I went there, too! It sounded like he was very friendly and quite taken with her but did not attempt anything ungentlemanly.

That night Sally and I ate at Bu.ku, a new restaurant that replaced Fins. We had liked the food at Fins, but found the place a bit formal and cold. Bu.ku is warm and interesting, based on the theme of street food from around the world. The service was very good (thanks, Turner!), and so was the masaman curry. We’ll go back.

We saw the Carolina Ballet do a Weiss’s Cinderella and several short Balanchine works. I didn’t love everything equally, but forget the nits. I still found the experience transporting. After many hours of computer interactions, talking, and thinking about business and legal problems, the dancers and the dance opened doors to another world — a human world. They use a vocabulary of movement refined for a couple of centuries to get at a particular kind of truth — emotional truth. There’s a remarkable purity about it. The form involves beautiful young dancers, but somehow it isn’t particularly sexy. Cinderella, in particular, movingly expressed the old chivalric vision of romantic love, and it seemed completely real. For me, the ultimate test is teary eyes and goosebumps, and it passed.