Actually 77 but I have included an interview with the pianist Helene Gimbaud who has the most "rubato" rendering of Ravel.
There is another brief interview with her as well.
So in the interview she states how she also has a Wolf conservation center in New York State - working with the governmental agencies to raise and release wolves as species restoration. She noticed how the wolves howl in harmony to make it sound like there are more wolves than just two - a kind of resonance of harmonics effect.
She said then how a pianist needs to find out the secret to music as the medium of the composer but in the tradition of the German romanticists - Nature is the ultimate Muse and nothing new is discovered, since we are always part of Nature already.
So in the interview she then spontaneously played the Adagio music and said how she has always loved it.
Another pianist that plays the Ravel Adagio with strong rubato is Alicia de la Rocha.
There are a couple other pianists who "specialize" in this Ravel concerto featuring the adagio - and so their performances are considered the best, in contrast to the more rubato style.
And so I even discovered the first premiere recording of the concerto from 1932 - with Ravel conducting the live performance and then supervising the recording of the piece.
But in wiki it says he really suffered over the melody and Helene Gimbaud says it is in the style of Chopin etudes - which she then played in the interview.
So the other thing is Helene Gimbaud says she has synesthesia and so she sees colors for notes and she says this helps her memorize music. So clearly she has some third eye energy happening as a real music mystic!!
Pianist Hélène Grimaud sees flashes of colour when she plays music.
“An F sharp is red, C minor [E flat] is blue, G major is green and B flat is yellow,” explains Grimaud, who has a condition called synesthesia.
The fusing of two senses isn’t uncommon, says Grimaud, 45, adding that the visual effects are “more of an idea of a colour than the colour itself. It’s abstract. I see it in my mind’s eye.”
The other thing is she is about the same age as me. well she's a couple years older. But I had a girlfriend her age. haha.
The Wolf Center harmonics
http://helenegrimaud.com/wolf-conservation-center
helene playing piano and hanging with wolves
And she just performed Ravel's Concerto in G this January.
Yet, remarkably, Hélène Grimaud has also found time to pursue writing, publishing three books that have appeared in various languages. Her first, Variations Sauvages, appeared in 2003. It was followed in 2005 by Leçons particulières, and in 2013 by Retour à Salem, both semi-autobiographical novels.
Duo, the album she recorded with cellist Sol Gabetta just prior to the Brahms concertos, won the 2013 ECHO Award for “chamber recording of the year”.Reviews of her book Wild Harmonies 2007
she slid her head and then her shoulders under my palm. I felt a shooting spark, a shock, which ran through my entire body. The single point of contact radiated throughout my arm and chest, and filled me with gentleness, ... a most compelling gentleness, which awakened in me a mysterious singing, the call of an unknown, primeval force.”She got a Shakti energy transmission from this part-wolf-dog!
“I had fallen in love with this she-wolf,” she writes later.
On 29 acres, the center currently is home to 17 wolves. Four socialized “ambassador wolves” are on view to the public; the other 13 are shielded from human contact, so that they can ultimately be returned to the wild, as a couple and their pups were in July.
“We started building the facility in ’97,” she said, “opened in ’99, and the place is doing really well. We started with 500 visitors in the first two years, and now we’re at 20,000 a year.”
“Only in the last three years was I able to start really focusing on my music completely,” she said, “because before that, the wolf center took so much time and energy.”https://nywolf.org/category/helene-grimaud/
Her woodland concert
Yeah I actually thought maybe DemocracyNow would mention the Abrupt Methane Eruptions!! Nope. Just the fact that the Arctic is a sauna. We got sauna in Minnesota now. Strange discovery of Helen Gimbaud tonight. I did a playlight of Ravel's adagio of his Concerto in G and this lady kept performing the music very slow with lots of emotion. So then in an interview she says how wolves howl in harmonics and she set up a center to save the endangered gray and red wolves in the U.S. Imagine how a pianist has to do the conversation work since the U.S. is destroying everything and so puts no money into conservation! Talk about the irony of it all. https://nywolf.org/secret-life-of-mountain-lions/
Dear Helen Grimaud: I was making a playlist of Ravel and discovered
your interview about wolves. I performed Ravel's Adagio, the piece you
love, when I was in high school. I also memorized Bach's Italian
concerto in F and so I can relate to your synesthesia. So I just
discovered your work an hour ago but we are close in age - I am 1971
birth. So I studied conservation biology and sustainable development for
my undergraduate degree and also was in music composition on "global
blues." I got kicked out for being called a Communist due to my
environmental activism at UW-Madison. haha. I worked for Greenpeace,
Clean Water Action and half a dozen environmental nonprofits. I studied
music theory intensely and finished my master's degree doing nonwestern
meditation based on music theory. My blog is http://ecoechoinvasives.
take care,
No comments:
Post a Comment