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+--- Thread: Schubert Everlasting + Panorama of the Gilded Age, Seen Through Sargent’s Art (/thread-4137.html)
Schubert Everlasting + Panorama of the Gilded Age, Seen Through Sargent’s Art - C C - Sep 3, 2017
Schubert Everlasting
https://theamericanscholar.org/schubert-everlasting/
EXCERPT: [...] Nobody played Schubert like Sviatoslav Richter. I could bring up any number of felicities—his sense of narrative and structure, his exquisite touch, the attention he paid to the most innocuous detail, the way his interpretations of the standard repertoire seemed at once controlled and improvisatory—but when I think of Richter’s Schubert, one thing comes to mind first: tempo. Slow tempos, glacial tempos, tempos that make no sense on paper, but that, when heard, transport the interpretations into visionary terrain. The most famous example perhaps is Schubert’s Piano Sonata D. 960, the last he ever wrote. The first time I heard this piece, a little more than two decades ago, it was on a recording of Richter’s, made at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival, on England’s Suffolk coast. The playing of the first movement was unlike anything I’d listened to before....
Panorama of the Gilded Age, Seen Through Sargent’s Art
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/books/review/john-singer-sargents-women-donna-lucey.html
EXCERPT: “Sargent’s Women” presents biographies of four American ladies whose lives intersected with John Singer Sargent’s. The detail is deep, sometimes unnecessarily so, and the theme, that Sargent’s portraits “hinted at the mysteries, passions and tragedies that unfolded in his subjects’ lives,” is pursued in every chapter. [...] Sargent and Henry James are often paired as comrades, as closeted gay men, as great portraitists and as each other’s subjects. In 1893, in “Picture and Text,” James introduced Sargent to an American audience, arguing that the ideal artist “sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, elevates and humanizes the technical.” James makes it clear that Sargent is as close to this ideal as he can imagine in real life....
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