The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

We are not concerned here with death so much as the farthest reaches of the creative process, be it in music, movement or film…

Smoke

The Swede Mats Ek created this provocative exploration of the human condition in the mid-90’s. This small section from a later film version features Ek’s brother Niklas, and the mesmerizing Parisian Sylvie Guillem. Now in her mid-40’s and living in London, she was discovered and mentored by Nureyev, and was already a legend in her teens. A gymnast before she turned to dance, her now famous ability to mimic six o’clock is hinted at around 3.38. In the flesh, and there’s not much of it, she is frighteningly intense and out there, on the edge. ‘Music’ by the Estonian, Arvo Part.

Mirror

Used literally dozens of times by advertising Tristrams, film producers, ring-tone Johnnies – even by RTE in Ireland to ram home car accident statistics – you might imagine this haunting few minutes by Arvo Part would have had all the life squeezed out of it – but no. Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror), in the bell-imitation style of tintinnabuli, for the spare forces of violin and piano, still has the power to move and disturb. Oddly, it appears to work with any visuals that it is married to but here, linked to scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s majestic film Mirror, it almost seems made for it, fitting like a hand to a glove…

Live With Me

Trip Hop is the phrase that first attached to the dense sound of the amoebic Bristolians Massive Attack, but it does scant justice to their ambition or to the pulsating orchestral soundscape they create, always serious and dark and often, as here, augmented by a really grown-up vid – this one, if I’m not mistaken, shot on the mean streets of South London, and switching effortlessly from grim reality to bizarre surreality. Popular music as art? To this six minute masterpiece I would say an unqualified yes.

Sibelius

Mozart once wrote to his father “I couldn’t get the ideas down quickly enough”, but his transcendent gifts, along with perhaps Schubert’s, were on a plane above even the very greatest, and ideas just tumbled out for most of their short lives. Consider the noble head and the penetrating gaze of the great Finn, Jean Sibelius and, before you hear a note of his music you may be able to postulate that, along with the inspiration came perspiration aplenty, as if the music were being hewn out of the landscape. The absence of human qualities – unless you count rough heroes and pure maidens – is replaced in his powerful imagination by a poetic apprehension of non-human forces. He arrived at his own ‘farthest reaches’ in late middle age. The muse left him; he struggled for a decade with another symphony, burning it in torment. He lived for another 30 years producing next to nothing. This from a man who conceived and notated whole symphonies in his head, only inscribing them when he was completely satisfied with what he ‘heard’. Here, the lightweight but delightful Andante Festivo, re-scored for string orchestra in 1939 from the string quartet original.