The concert I attended over the weekend is covered in much greater detail by Inquirer music critic David Patrick Stearns — who noticed a somewhat disturbing political perspective:
…the sort of special attention the [Curtis Symphony] orchestra brings to whatever it plays allowed it to deliver Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto from semi-obscurity Sunday at the Kimmel Center.
This early work from the British composer’s wartime years in the United States is championed by major violinists, but doesn’t emerge much on U.S. concert programs. In one of her first outings with the piece, the 26-year-old violinist Hilary Hahn (one of Curtis’ star graduates) was the catalyst in a meticulously prepared performance that had to attract new friends for a piece whose political convictions are both its strength and its problem.
Concern over an impending World War II and the Spanish Civil War conspired to make the 1939 concerto an instance of expression over form. The music documents an inner landscape that seemingly begins with nostalgia for peacetime and progresses into a turning point that many thinking people have in their 20s, when a securely constructed worldview is blown to smithereens by outside events, leaving questions likely to remain unanswered for the remaining lifetime.
When I was in my 20s I don’t think I had a securely constructed worldview, as I grew up during the height of the Cold War and its much hotter Vietnam proxy war. While I was eventually blown to smithereens by certain events (namely the AIDS virus) I don’t know whether to call that outside or inside.
However, I am deeply concerned about the lessons of the Spanish Civil War, and I worry that this painting (Dali’s “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonitions of Civil War“) might accurately depict a recurrent historical pattern:
When democracy degenerates into one class being forced to feed another, the result is a cannibalistic orgy of horror. A war (brought on by cycles of violent political indigestion) between malignant “isms,” one of which will “win.”
It’s also interesting the way political food fights tend to be sexually packaged.
(If I’m lucky I won’t live to see America repeat the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. I’d hate to have to become a “real” traitor.)