The first month of learning new pieces is like cutting through a jungle with a dull machete. In this case, the jungle is the formidable array of unfamiliar notes staring at me from the page. The dull machete is, of course, my brain. Going from a pianist that can actually play a full program reasonably well to a stumbling and bumbling beginner is always a humbling experience. Since I limit myself to two hours a day of practice, time is always in critical shortage at the beginning. Take my first hour: 7 short pieces that have only 50 minutes total time (5 minutes of each hour is used for technical warmup). Divided evenly that is 7 minutes per piece. Not bad, you say. Try it some time. With 14 pages to learn, that's now down to 31/2 minutes per page.
Surprisingly, after one month, things begin to slowly fall together. It will be another 6-8 weeks before I can really play any of them well and then begin to memorize them (another entire basket of troubles). My program will open with two Scarlatti sonatas, one of which I have learned a very long time ago. Neither piece is difficult, but they are oh so fine! I love Scarlatti and have been ignoring his music of late. Next come five pieces by Couperin, all new to me.
My second half is still not fully settled. Currently I am working on three preludes Op 11 by Scriabin, all new to me. Then I am reviving a favourite set by Bartok, his 6 Roumanian Folk Dances. The last two are difficult and must be played at a furious tempo, but having learned them many years ago will help with the muscle memory motions. Currently those 9 pieces take up my entire second hour of practice. I'm hoping there will soon be room to add in another Philip Glass Etude, as well as a previously learned Debussy Prelude (to be determined). We will see where I am in another month.
In further piano news, Deb has been painstakingly attempting to rescue all my previous recordings. From 1994 to about 1999 I routinely recorded all my programs, and had them copied to cassettes at Aldon Studio in Windsor. Those tapes are seriously degrading, and Deb is using software to try and save at least some of the pieces. If she is able to do that I will try and post them somewhere on line, perhaps here on a separate music blog.
In film watching news we managed to last through ten episodes of a 2019 Japanese TV show called The Real Thing. Due to the weakness and uncertainty of the two main characters the show can be very frustrating to watch most of the time. A young man saves a young woman's life at a train crossing, and from then on their lives keep crossing and causing interference. Though things more or less work out okay in the end, so many bad decisions by the characters are being made throughout the series that one wonders just how the writers figured that a happy ending could actually work. It's difficult for Westerners to deal with Japanese ways of thinking, and this series highlights this fact. If you enjoy watching a series that frustrates you, I can recommend this one.
Mifune is a Danish/Swedish film from 1999. Here is the capsule from Criterion:
Directed by Søren Kragh-Jacobsen • 1999 • Denmark, Sweden
Starring Iben Hjejle, Anders W. Berthelsen, Jesper Asholt
The third film made in accordance with the Dogme 95 movement’s so-called “vows of chastity” is an offbeat, darkly comic romance in which Kresten (Anders W. Berthelsen), a successful, newly married businessman in Copenhagen, finds his life turned upside down after his father dies and he must return to his rural hometown to help care for his childlike, UFO-obsessed brother (Jesper Asholt). As he struggles to adjust to the not-so-simple-life in the country, a budding relationship with his new housekeeper (Iben Hjejle), who is actually a call girl on the run, forces Kresten to reexamine everything.
The film is a brilliant look at a city boy returning home to the farm where he grew up. When he was young he found his mother hanging from a tree. Since then, and as his father aged and cared for his simple-minded brother, the farm and house gradually fell apart. He wants to keep his family a secret from his wife. The scene of their wedding night together is one of the funniest sex episodes I have ever seen on film. From there on the marriage quickly runs downhill. When the wife pays a surprise visit to the farm, she stays about 30 seconds before deciding to get a divorce. The highlight of the film is the simple-minded brother, brilliantly acted by Jesper Asholt. He steals virtually every scene he is in. A lot of screwball material is inserted at times, but the picture is best in its quieter moments. It won a Silver Bear in Berlin.
Lastly comes Witches, a 2024 documentary by Elizabeth Sankey. Using interviews with women who had suffered from post-partum mental health issues, as well as relating her own harrowing experiences after giving birth to her son, the film offers a new take on the burning and hanging of witches over the past 5 centuries. With its generous use of clips from Hollywood and other films showing women with mental health issues, a strong case is made for exploring an issue which most women never talk about, to their detriment. Broken into five chapters, the film has hair raising moments when the women reveal their actual feelings at the time. They tell their stories through tears, some of them expressing feelings on camera that they have never shared before with anyone. This is a film that should be required viewing for all family and ER doctors, not to mention pregnant women. Harrowing and fascinating, and at times almost unbelievable, the film should create a lot of discussion and hopefully some healing. Required viewing.
May reading summary coming this weekend!
Mapman Mike
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