Italics are mine

Piano Great: SMU's Joaquin Achucarro

SMU really is fortunate to have had the great Joaquin Achucarro on its piano faculty for the past 25 years. (Everyone who knows me knows how appealing it was for me to join a university with very strong performing arts programs.) I thought of Achucarro, who just turned 84, in early November when I attended a performance of the Schumann piano concerto by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra with Ingrid Fliter as guest artist and Pinchas Steinberg guest-conducting. The piece had last been performed by the DSO in September 2012 with, yes, Achucarro himself playing the piano under the baton of Jaap van Zweden. In the performance I attended, Fliter kept jumping up and down on her bench like a puppet jerked in all directions, her flowing hair falling into her face. I had seen Fliter at the 92nd Y back in 2011 in a program of Beethoven sonatas and I don't remember her as being so over-the-top. In Dallas she was so ridiculously overdramatic (people laughed in the audience) that I found myself yearning for an artist who doesn't try to steal the show away from the composer and lets his playing speak for itself - a consummate professional like Achucarro. Anyway, I felt sorry I missed Achucarro playing this great concerto by only four years. 

By coincidence, the students in his master class presented an event connecting music - piano recital - and literature - poetry reading - at SMU Meadows the other day, with music by Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Debussy and Ravel, and texts by Petrarch, Goethe, Shakespeare, Verlaine and Bertrand. I wish more of Achucarro music was available on Amazon.com but I still recommend the few recordings on sale (Schumann: Fantasy and Kreisleriana, Schubert and Schumann: Masters of Art, Brahms Piano Concerto No 2, Musica Espaola Por Un Poeta Del Piano) - as a side note, I find it fascinating that Achucarro didn't go the route of his contemporary Alicia de Larrocha in making a primary reputation for himself as advocate for Spanish composers such as Albeniz and Granados, although he did play them to some extent and you can find his Granados recording on YouTube. He was just as well-known for his playing of Rachmaninoff, Ravel and Brahms. Performances available on YouTube include the Grieg Piano Concerto in A minor and the Mozart Piano Concerto K.467, although I hope you will consider buying the music so that he can receive royalties.

Below is a video posted on the YouTube channel of SMU Meadows, to honor Achucarro's 25 years of teaching at SMU, with a few musical excerpts by himself and his students and plenty of good words from people who know him, including SMU President Gerald Turner himself. The concert given in his honor is described here. Dallas is fortunate to count Achucarro among its residents.

Quotes

Wise words to help us through trying times.

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. (Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke).

The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow-men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair. (Winston Churchill's "Never Despair" speech to the House of Commons, March 1, 1955.)

 

Movie Review: "A Place in the Sun" (1951)

Why doesn't Hollywood do movies like that anymore? (Warning: this post contains spoilers.) A Place in the Sun (1951), with the tagline "A poor boy gets a job working for his rich uncle and ends up falling in love with two women", stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters, and is simply a masterpiece in the story line, structure and tight editing. For instance, the major turning point where factory worker Alice, who is unmarried but pregnant with George's child, learns that he postponed their wedding to go out cavorting with beautiful socialite Angela on the lake instead of visiting his uncle, as was his excuse, happens exactly at the half point of the movie. The use of lighting and framing of shots remind me of the best Joan Crawford movies and Laurence Olivier's Richard III movie. Even the music is great, complementing the plot at just the right moments, especially when George and Alice are on the lake. Hopefully it won't come as a surprise that the love triangle doesn't end well, not well at all.   

When the movie came out, Elizabeth Taylor was only 19 and she seemed much more like a real human being, multifaceted, multidimensional, than in the roles that she remains famous for, such as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Cleopatra in Cleopatra and of course the much older Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Later in her career her image trapped her and she had a stormy personal life, being married eight times including twice to Richard Burton (an enormously talented actor in his own right, but who had issues with alcohol) and marrying a man twenty years younger as her last husband, a construction worker. It seems that she searched for happiness her whole life. I remember that she was relentlessly the subject of jokes in the early 1990s when I was in high school - this was the time of her last husband, the much younger construction worker - her beauty gone, the ravages of age and alcohol so plain on her face she was much uglier than many women who hadn't come close to being beautiful in her youth. In hindsight I find her heartbreaking, but of course when you are a teen you don't have the life experience to realize that. Now that I'm more involved in acting I can appreciate her talent more. Or perhaps it is simply that the irrelevant facts of her personal life have receded into oblivion, now that she's been dead for five years, and we can all go back to admiring her work on the screen without thinking of the person.

And 31-year-old Montgomery Clift also cuts a tragic figure in the movie, only five years away from the terrible car accident in 1956 that left him with permanent changes in his facial appearance, especially the left side that was nearly immobile. He then relied more and more on alcohol and pills, leading to a stark deterioration in his physical appearance. Clift would die in 1966 at age 45, after what Vanity Fair would call A Long Suicide. According to Vanity Fair, he insisted on maintaining his residence in New York instead of California, read Chekhov, Aristotle, and classic works of history and economics, and infamously owned only one suit, which helped establish him as the embodiment of the 1950s youth culture along with Marlon Brando and James Dean.

In the 1970s, and so after his death, it emerged that Clift, who had confounded the gossip press by his lack of romantic attachments, had been gay - something that doesn't seem like a big deal now but was a very big deal in the 1950s. And perhaps that's what was eating at him, even before his accident. The VF article explains that, by August 1955, "he was 'drinking himself out of a career'; on the set of Raintree, the crew had designated words to communicate how drunk Clift was: bad was Georgia, very bad was Florida, and worst of all was Zanzibar."

Clift had crashed his car after leaving a party at Taylor's house (rumors about whether they were an item or not swirled around them for years) and it is to Taylor's credit that she prevented photographers from taking pictures of Clift's face after the accident and imposed him in Suddenly, Last Summer, long after Clift's good looks had disappeared from his excessive alcohol consumption, although it is perhaps ironic that she was going to have her own troubles with liquor later on. Clift also appeared in The Misfits, with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. Monroe apparently reported that Clift was "the only person I know who is in even worse shape than I am," perhaps a testimony of the toll it takes to be in the public eye.

Particularly noteworthy in the VF article is the discussion why Clift drank himself to death. It argues that the reason involves more than Clift's homosexuality. Clift once asked in his journal: "How to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable and still alive?" - a question the best actors continue to ask themselves today.