The Trouble Clef – Findings | 6 January 2010

Lera Auerbach

Originally published on January 6, 2010 on the now-defunct Best American Poetry blog. Republished in The Trouble Clef.

This New Year, I am starting a notebook in which I will write my daily findings. These could be a phrase from a conversation or a line from a poem or various Internet findings sent to me by friends or unearthed by accident while browsing the web during my daily procrastination sessions. This notebook is different from a writer’s notebook, since the findings are not observations that I plan to use in my work, but simply a collection of impressions.

Here are some of the treasures from this week, which are too good not to pass along:

Zhenya (Evgeny) Kissin sent me a link to an extremely rare video of the great conductor Herbert von Karajan…playing piano!

Here is the same Andante from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467 (one of my all-time favorites!) but in a completely different interpretation by Jiří Kylián and the Nederlands Dans Theater – “Finale” of the ballet “Petite Mort”.

(The recording you will hear is by the English Chamber Orchestra and Mitsuko Uchida). The result is stunning and timeless – you will not be able to forget this any time soon.

Back to Kissin and Karajan – here is the video of a very young Kissin and a very late Karajan in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. I thought to include this in today's blog as well:

Back to the findings. Here is the poem, which resonated most with me this week. It comes from “The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons”.

• • •

Success Story

I never got on good
relations with the world

first I had nothing
the world wanted

then the world had
nothing I wanted

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