Thursday, March 10, 2005

Lang Lang Plays Rach 2 and the Rach Paganini Variations

I'm currently listening to the new Lang Lang CD. It's good, but nothing remarkable. It is mostly conventional, and it has some of Lang Lang's negative qualities as well as some of his arrestingly great one.

This may well be the most technically exact rendering on disc. The notes are so clear, the repeated notes and runs so sharp in this live performance, that one can only marvel at this supreme technician in a time of supreme technicians. But this razor-sharp execution sometimes works against Lang Lang, as it does in his rendition of Balakirev's Islamey, where a great showpiece came out sounding mechanical. Some passages in Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto sound lifeless, the antithesis of the awesome vitality which is Lang Lang's trademark in his best moments.

There are also some eccentricities; Lang Lang plays the opening chords of the Concerto at an extraordinarily deliberate pace, in an attempt to ratchet up the drama. But the effect fails because it is too calculated.

It is possible that Lang Lang, who at his worst can display a maudlin sentimentality, paid close attention to Rachmaninoff's own recording of the Second Concerto, which is quite simply the most unsentimental rendition of the work on record. But the genius of Rachmaninoff's own playing was Rachmaninoff was able to play with great vitality and drama without resorting to mannerisms and without the wide fluctuations in tempo that characterize Lang Lang's playing in this and the Tchaikovsky concerto. Lang Lang's Rach 2 avoids some of the excesses of his Tchaikovsky, but does not join the higher echelon of Rach 2 recordings with this effort. (The upper echelon is not that big. It includes, for me, Rachmaninoff himself, Artur Rubinstein, Jorge Bolet, and more recently, Evgeny Kissin and Helene Grimaud. Incidentally, Lang Lang need not fret; his Rach 3 is in the upper echelon of Rach 3 recordings, along with Horowitz, Van Cliburn, Lazar Berman, maybe Alexis Weissenberg, Arcadi Volodos, and a few others. Lang Lang's recording of Rach 3 was gorgeous, Berman's golden tone with Horowitz excitement.)

The Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini was better. Here, Lang Lang invested the music with much more drama, and Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra provided especially vivid accompaniment. Lang Lang is bumming around New York playing the Rhapsody this week with the China Philharmonic. Here, the Twenty-Second Variation, an alla breve was especially memorable, a great example of Lang Lang's ability to exite and electrify the listener.

It is not on the level of the Rachmaninoff recording, but no recording I've heard is.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Columbia Unseemly

It amazes me that Lee Bollinger, a lawyer, was stupid enough to believe that he was going to get away with putting together a committee to investigate intimidation of pro-Israel students by Columbia's Middle East professors with so many conflicts of interest. Nat Hentoff has written about it, and spoke about over the weekend at a conference held at Columbia. I cannot understand it. Bollinger simply cannot be that dumb.

It is, on another note, naive to think that anything the New York City Council does is going to make any difference. Resolutions like the one passed by the Council calling for an independent investigation into the Columbia Unbecoming allegations are toothless documents produced to curry favor with interest groups in the city. Columbia is not about to change the committee on the Council's urging, which it probably views as tiresome meddling in its affairs. It will change only if there is a larger public outcry, particularly from Columbia students, combined with pressure from donors and trustees.

I see two paths. One is for interested organizations like the Anti-Defamation League to continue to work behind the scenes on the problem. The low-key approach has two benefits. The first is that it allows Columbia administrators the space to act without every decision being written up in the press. It does NOT help pro-Israel students that the only paper out in front of the matter is the ultra-conservative New York Sun, which is almost certainly perceived as a hostile newspaper on Columbia's campus. Students are not going to rally around it. So far, the New York Times' entry into the matter has been a typically condescending effort, illuminating the bickering going on between both sides rather than the muckraking quality of the New York Sun's reporting. The other, more important, benefit is that the low-key approach will avoid further polarizing the Jewish and Arab communities on campus. These two communities, from what I understand, got along fine before this scandal broke, and now relations are quite strained.

It serves no one's interest, not the Jews, not the Arabs, and not Columbia's, to import the Middle East conflict to Columbia's campus.

The more public option would marshall meaningful public support for the students. Meaningful means concentrating on the people who matter, namely Columbia students and press organs who are not so politically polarized as is the New York Sun. City Council resolutions are not going to cut it. The students need to coordinate with other students who have faced similar problems on campuses around the country and even around the world that it has become acceptable in far too many places to tolerate what was thought a generation ago to constitute antisemitism and assorted hatred.

Part of the problem with the whole Columbia issue is that it pales in comparison to some of what goes on elsewhere in the world. The student government of the School of Oriental Studies, which is part of the University of London, is openly antisemitic, and has attempted to ban all Jewish speakers who are not avowly anti-Zionist while permitting a full range of Muslim speakers, including Holocaust deniers and open advocates of terrorism.

This issue with the professors is familiar to most students who have encountered what might be called the Arabist element that is so prominent in Middle East Studies today. The head of the Middle East Studies Association is Juan Cole, a guy who refers to everyone on the issue he disagrees with as "far-right" and appears to believe in frankly ludicrous theories of Jewish influence in Washington and elsewhere. I think he is more the norm than the exception. A public approach would highlight these people without doing the McCarthyite thing and adding additional accusations to their dossiers a la Daniel Pipes made to make them look anti-American and generally evil people. Our argument is stronger than theirs. Our principles are stronger than theirs. This is what has made us effective in the past, not the nasty, self-defeating bullying tactics that guys like Pipes tend to favor.

In the end, I think a little bit of both strategies would serve us well, along with a commitment to promote Jewish-Arab dialogue on campus to ensure that college campuses do not become full-blown extensions of the conflicts as they have in Europe and elsewhere.