SOUNDTRACK: BORROMEO STRING QUARTET-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #127 (December 15, 2020).
This is the second of three Tiny Desk Home Concerts to honor Beethoven’s 250th birth anniversary.
The Borromeo String Quartet consists of Nicholas Kitchen: (first) violin, Kristopher Tong: violin, Mai Motobuchi: viola and Yeesun Kim: cello (who is Kitchen’s wife).
Beethoven doesn’t score high when it comes to positive personality traits. Paranoid, litigious and a micromanager, Beethoven didn’t suffer fools and often fought with friends. Still, he possessed a well-developed funny bone, which Nicholas Kitchen and company put on display here, along with their own whimsical tiny “desks.” Because of the virus, and the confined space, the players wear masks.
The humorous side of Beethoven’s personality seeps into his music, such as the false stops and musical giggles that fuel his two-minute-long Presto from the Quartet Op. 130, which opens this performance.
“String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130, II. Presto” has many fast moments and interesting parts where the first violin pays fast melodies but the rest of the quartet plays slow triplets over and over. This is one of Beethoven’s shortest movements and is full of variety and energy.
For contrast, the Borromeos follow with a serious movement from later on in the same piece, the prayerful Cavatina, which Beethoven said even got him choked up.
This movement is full of serenity and tranquil beauty. This is called the beklemmt section meaning trouble breathing.
Kitchen can barely contain himself about the humor in the next piece, “String Quartet in F, Op. 135, II. Presto.” He says this has a playful melody and “berserk” middle with instruments going all over the place.
More hijinks ensue in the Vivace from the Quartet in F, Op. 135, where Kitchen says the music becomes “completely berserk.”
And finally, in the last movement of the same quartet, Beethoven inserts a musical inside joke, the brunt of which falls on a wealthy music lover who displeased the great composer by not showing up at an important concert.
Kitchen says that Beethoven never met an occasion when he did not have a pun. And he enjoyed injection his own brand of humor into his pieces. In “String Quartet in F, Op. 135, IV. Der schwer gefasste Entschluss” there is an inscription: question must it be? answer: It must be it must be! Kitchen explains there was a patron who did not attend the premiere of opus 130. The next day the patron asked Beethoven to send him the music so his court musicians could play it. Beethoven said he’d send it but “you not only have to pay the price of admission for the concert you missed but for everyone in your family.” The man looked at him and said “Must It be?” Beethoven wrote a canon for four men to sing “it must be it must be.” Then he made that joke the basis of the last movement of Op. 135.
[READ: January 3, 2021] Dinner
The Linden Tree was an interesting trip down memory lane for Aira.
Dinner, by contrast is a wild violent fantasy (translated by Nick Caistor). But its starts in the mundane–with a man and his mother going to dinner.
The two of them went to his friend’s house. The friend was a terrible storyteller. But he and the narrator’s mother had one thing in common–they were great at remembering the names of everyone in Pringles. They knew the genealogies and configurations of nearly all the families.
But the narrator was terrible at remembering names–he had no facility for it at all. He had plenty of memories from the town, but could never put a name to an event.
Evernatully the friend brought out a precious toy that he had. It wa an old and rather sophisticated wind-up toy. Two separate gears would go at the same time. As it began to run, the door to a bedroom opened an a fat man came out and started to sing (as well as an old 19th century toy could sing). An old woman was in bed and she began to move back and forth “as a blind person does.” Then the second mechanism kicked in an the bedspread began to move and it looks like flocks of birds were flying out from underneath it.
The toy was precious to the friend. But the narrator’s mother found the whole event reprehensible. She was hostile from the very moment they arrived.
The friend showed them a whole room foul of old toys including one of a Humpty Dumpty type of character, called Pepín Cascarón. There was an old Rhyme in Argentina that went:
Pepín Cascarón sat on a wall.
Pepín Cascarón had a great fall.
All the kings horses, and all the king’s men,
couldn’t put Pepín Cascarón together again.
Along came an Argentine with special skill,
and fixed up that egg out of simple goodwill.
Pepín again whole, gives girls and boys
this wonderful magazine for all to enjoy.
In this toy, the egg would fall and “break” and then rise again. In addition to the tiny figurines he also had oversized toys, including one that was so big the narrator couldn’t imagine how it got into the room it was in.
But his mother was incensed by the whole thing. How could he spend so much money on all this junk? He was totally broke!
The narrator didn’t believe her about his friend being broke because she was often bitter about things like this and said nasty things about people. But the details she gave seemed very believable.
In Chapter 2, he returns home and decides to watch T,. He never watched TV when he lived on his own, but now that he moved home (he is unemployed) he watches is mother’s TV all the time. It is a complete waste of time. He just flips through the channels hoping for something but never finding it.
He was especially enamored of the local programs that were badly filmed with terrible audio. Tonight there was a new program filmed live on Saturday nights to capture the nightlife in Pringles. But it was weird because anyone who was on it couldn’t see themselves because the show was live. Tonight, however,
It had already started when I turned to it, and I amused myself for a while analyzing all its defects. Now I was watching the main part, which was the live broadcast itself: there was endless dead air between one event and another, no matter how fast María Rosa drove her scooter. They hadn’t thought of that, either. Since they didn’t have any advertisers, there were no breaks; the cameraman rode as best he could on the scooter behind María Rosa, and with wildly jerky movements the camera kept showing whatever it happened to catch—the starry sky, the streetlights, houses, trees, paving stones, all in a convulsed waltz. He had to hold onto the driver with one hand, and hold the heavy camera on his shoulder with the other, and this went on and on. María Rosa would try to fill the interlude with commentary, but in addition to not having anything to say and having to pay attention to the road, her poor diction and the sound of the engine made it impossible to understand anything
They were actually going to the cemetery because they heard the dead were rising from their graves. And the next almost fifty pages of this book turns into a violently graphic zombie nightmare. The entire town is swarmed by the dead who suck on people’s brains to get their endorphins. No matter what people do they can’t stop the attacks. Until finally someone recognizes one of them and says their name.
It all comes down to remembering people’s names.
The last part (which is only 15 pages) continues as if the middle nightmare happened, but that it wasn’t a big deal.
The narrator’s mother wakes up and complains about the dinner from last night–the food was terrible and she didn’t sleep at all.
She talks about a nightmare she’d had about a brother and sister who were both were known as crazy Alliveio. The sister was “crazy” because she named her dog Rin Tin Tin and then called it Riti. His mother said everyone was crazy. If she talked about meeting someone at the grocery store, she’d say that X was crazy: “she’s crazy and through the rest of her story she’d call her “Crazy X.”
But brother Alleivo was actually crazy: he drove from their farm house into town (about twenty five mies) in reverse. He did it because the car was parked out front facing the opposite direction, so why not just drive in reverse?
He was very anxious to get outside to see what the general reaction was to the zombie nightmare, but he had to wait for his mother to leave so he call his friend and thank him for the dinner (he could never call while she was there).
He wanted to hit up his friend for money for a business proposal. But then the story kind of drifts off–ending with a profound thought but with nothing solved. Very Aira.
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