Art before Breakfast...just don't do it in public!

Art Before Breakfast: A Zillion Ways to be More Creative No Matter How Busy You Are by Danny Gregory

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Cheerful little book, impossible to dislike. However, I have the impression the artist had all these sketches sitting around and didn't know what to do with them, so he put them together in this book, with the title and intent as afterthoughts. I enjoyed listening to his interview on NPR and hope to sketch more as a result.

There is still a stigma, though, of people drawing in public. Our culture, regardless of what our leaders say, is hostile to the arts and views them as a waste of time and money, showing off, even a threat. Adults who take music or art lessons are viewed as self-centered and selfish, although children are still encouraged to take lessons as long as it doesn't interfere with sports and passing exams.

I think a subversive, revolutionary approach to drawing would be more effective.



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Stamitz's Viola Concerto, treasures by Mozart and Beethoven

Although titled “Beethoven and Mozart,” three composers from the Classical Era, who knew each other in a sense, headlined an exciting Philadelphia Orchestra concert April 10, 2015, under the masterful direction of Paul Goodwin.

The Third Man in this trilogy of music masters is Carl Stamitz (1745 to 1801), whose lilting Viola Concerto in D received a rare performance by the Philadelphians, with Choong-Jin Chang, principal violist, playing spectacularly and sfrom the heart.

While in his late 30s, Stamitz, a virtuoso violist celebrated throughout Europe, shared billing with a scruffy 12-year-old piano prodigy during a concert in the Hague at the end of 1783. To further the sting of performing on the same bill as a Wunderkind, the boy was paid four times Stamitz’s fee.

Yet, possibly inspired by Stamitz, the child went on to become a professional violist in two Bonn orchestras before leaving for Vienna at age 21. There, he composed a number of symphonies, including the Fourth featured in Friday’s program. Yes, the child prodigy turned violist turned master composer was none other than Beethoven.

Mozart, on the other hand, may not have met the elder violist, though he shared a few choice words in a letter to his father in 1778 about the Stamitz brothers Carl and Anton: “…(they) are indeed two wretched scribblers, gamblers, swillers and adulterers—not the kind of people for me.” Historians think Mozart was simply having a bad day in Paris when he wrote those words, but it was assuredly a great day in Salzburg when he composed the tuneful Symphony in D major (the “Posthorn”) K. 320.

The Symphony is, in fact, essentially the same work (with fewer movements) as the beloved Serenade Number 9, the “Posthorn,” dating from 1779. Goodwin is the man to conduct this refined but spirited work, hitting exactly the right tone in terms of speed, lightness, control, melodic emphasis, and dynamics. Director of the Carmel Bach Festival and associate conductor with the Academy of Ancient Music, Goodwin brought poise and energy to the podium, an attractive music conjurer, and not surprisingly, his experience with earlier music gives him a profound but appealing insight into classical forms.

The orchestra shed its brass and percussion for the intimate Stamitz Viola Concerto, a work some dismiss as pedantic, but in the hands of Goodwin, the Orchestra, and Chang, a delightful work. How seldom we hear the viola cast as a solo instrument. I’ve often thought the only problem with a viola is that listeners want it to sound like a violin. That was not the case in this concert, where Chang played warmly, from the heart, with deep feeling. A brilliant cadenza, and some noteworthy solo work in the second movement, made this a memorable performance. Very moving, and a cautionary tale for those who expect music from the late 1700s to sound cool and detached.

Intermission separated these two masterworks of classical refinement from Big Bad Beethoven, an overture and a symphony from the man who took music to a new level of power, energy, and insight. Goodwin chose the seldom-performed Overture to the Consecration of the House (the house being a rebuilt theater in Vienna). Beethoven had a knack for weaving military band effects into some of his most noteworthy creations, and this work is no exception, with a choir of four French horns, three trombones, two trumpets, timpani, and strings and woodwinds. Animated, alternating between crouches and leaps, his three-quarter frock coat flapping, Goodwin drew out a bombastic sound just right for a work of public celebration. There is a fugue toward the end which is truly soul-satisfying to hear, Beethoven having mastered fugal writing around this time (1822) as witness the spectacular fugue of the Missa Solemnis, also from this period.

The concert concluded with the Fourth Symphony in B-flat, another of those complex, evolving works that Beethoven was able to spin from the bones of a few rhythmic patterns. The Fourth tends to get lost between the two giants: the Eroica which revolutionized the symphony and the Fifth which every grade school child can identify. Too bad, for it’s a treasure trove of musical ideas, driven by a pulsing energy and sense of urgency that’s rare even for Beethoven. Again, Goodwin is spot-on throughout, capturing every twitch and tingle in a relentless torrent of sound.

This concert was exhilarating and enlightening throughout. Let’s see and hear more of Paul Goodwin in Philadelphia, and come to think of it, more violas, please!

Film "Woman in Gold": How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Cast adrift in a sea of gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer gazes at the viewer with doe-like eyes, her sensuous red lips on the verge of speech, her right hand unnaturally bent at the wrist (you can almost hear it crack). Mosaic golden tissue flutters across the surface, a wedge of green carpet below its only anchor. Created by Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862–1918), son of a gold engraver and a leader of the Viennese Secessionist movement, the painting, “Woman in Gold,” continues to mesmerize admirers since its creation in 1907.

To Maria Altmann, however, the 54 x 54-inch canvas was simply a portrait of beloved Aunt Adele, who died at age 44 long before the Nazis ripped it from the wall of the family home. Maria and her husband made a harrowing flight from Vienna not long after, shown in flashbacks in Simon Curtis’s Woman in Gold. The film itself is a glittering mosaic, flashes of the life that Maria, by this time a widow residing in Pasadena, lived until her death in 2006, snatches of the past, memories steeped in Viennese culture, beauty, and family, the devastation wrought by German anti-Semitism, and an unlikely intersection with the path of a young lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, who just happened to be the grandson of the composer who developed the 12-tone row. (The actual E. Randol Schoenberg co-wrote the script.)

Complicated, right? Yet much of the film is a delicately choreographed pas de deux between Maria (Helen Mirren) and Randol (Ryan Reynolds) as they alternately pursue and withdraw from a chase for legal documents and justice that takes them to archives and courtrooms over a 10-year period.

Can Maria claim rightful ownership of the Klimt portrait, which after the war was mounted at Vienna’s Belvidere Museum? What are the rights of families whose art treasures were plundered 50 years before? How long and at what expense should those families persist in their quest for restitution, and is there a point when the struggle should be given up? Is “Austria’s Mona Lisa,” as the Klimt has been called, part of the Austrian people’s heritage?
The issue of art restitution is a thorny one. Woman in Gold takes the position that art taken from families should be restored to families. Others argue that great art belongs to humanity, and efforts to wrest it from safekeeping in museums and public collections represent elitism and, at worst, could result in damage or loss during the transportation and restitution process.

Curtis’s film addresses these issues deftly, though not definitively, through his actors, who are impeccable, with standout performances by Mirren and Reynolds, to cameos by Elizabeth McGovern (Curtis’s wife) as a judge and the incomparable Charles Dance, who can play a cold-hearted attorney like no other actor, as Schoenberg’s inflexible employer.

And what more can be said about Dame Helen? Her uncanny ability to channel her characters illuminates Maria, a frail but indomitable survivor, charming, but not someone you’d want to work for. There is a wistful tenderness to her performance, as though she were adept at juggling eggs on the tip of a pen. There are no false moves or inflection in an accent which is subtle and always right, never bordering on parody as with some well-known performers. Similarly, Reynolds merges with the far less complicated character of the naïve young lawyer who increasingly finds himself pulled into a maelstrom of international proportions. The characters evolve throughout the film, slipping into new understandings, new memories, little epiphanies that flicker like fireworks across faces genuinely surprised by a sense of shared purpose. It is this subtle interplay between the lead actors that most captivates the viewer.

There is a cliché frequently voiced about accounts of World War II: “We must never forget.” But we do, no matter how eloquent the statements of Spielberg, Polanski, and others. Films like Woman in Gold remind us that at the center of history are individual people with stories of breathtaking power, courage, and insight, and relationships of delicate complexity. The stories must be told over and over, an unending source of great art and the deepest sort of collective self-awareness. --Linda Holt



Photo courtesy of www.Klimt.com