The Art and Music List

People are fond of posting lists on facebook of books or music, but I started thinking the other day of art I have seen that touched me or moved me in some way. So here's that list sort of in order of impact.

Van Gogh — Starry Night — MOMA — 1981

The first thing that struck me was how small it was. In a corner a couple of rooms away from the Waterlilies in the pre-redesign of the MOMA, it was surrounded by other works of other artists and seemed almost postage stamp-like. I have gone back specifically to see it more than once.

Botticelli — La Primavera — the Uffizi — 2007

The room was crowded and filled with a babel of language but there it was on the far wall. I cried. I literally cried. The Venus was to its immediate left but I had eyes (and heart) for nothing but Primavera. No amount of having seen reproductions in books prepared me for it.

Renoir — Bal a Bougival — Boston Museum of Fine Arts — 1962

This is the most beautiful of Renoir's paintings. It's in the museum's permanent collection. It is part of a trio of related paintings and is clearly the best of the three. The movement of the couple, the swirl of her dress, the insistent push of the man, and her coy turning way — the painting seethes with romantic tension and you can almost hear the music play.

Monet — Waterlilies — MOMA, L'Orangerie — 1981, 2012

The first time I saw some of these at the MOMA I just sat for probably 20 or 25 minutes as people drifted by. It was soothing to see them, to be in their presence. The ones at L'Orangerie are much bigger and almost implode inside you. We saw those the same day we had returned from the gardens where they had been created and I can no longer separate the images.

Degas — Dancers — Cincinnati Art Museum — 1958

Off of Eden Park, a majestic swath of green at the edge of downtown, I could walk from where I lived, the museum collection wasn't huge, but they had two or three of these Degas. I was instantly drawn to them and came back quite a bit in that one year.

Michelangelo — David — the Academy in Florence — 2007

It seems lonely in its place in the great hallway. Michelangelo's paean to the young male body is erotic and serene at the same time, with a sense of intention you don't quite expect.

Picasso — Guernica — La Reina Sofia, Madrid — 2012

I was exhausted the first time we saw it. I couldn't quite let it in. The traveling exhibit of other Picasso works I had seen back home had included a series of photographs of the mural in progress. After a second visit to the painting a few days later, I could see it and not the photos. There is something cold and almost clinical about the black and white piece, as if you look at it from a far distance. It was the 75th anniversary of the bombing the week we were there.

Rodin — The Gates of Hell — National Museum in DC and again in Paris at the Rodin Museum — 1980, 2006

Many of the well-known individual sculptures (e.g. The Thinker) are in these monumental doors. I think you could examine them for hours. It is a study in la Vie Humain. A close second for me was outside in the garden — The Burghers of Calais.

Velasquez — Las Meninas — the Prado — 2012

Until I saw it in the flesh, so to speak, I could never quite understand why my wife liked this one so much. Now I do. It's an amazing painting, full of nuance and meaning. It was fun to see several of Picasso's cubist variations on it later on in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

unknown — Winged Victory of Samothrace — the Louvre — 2006

For me, the highlight of the Louvre. Yes I know those great ladies Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa are there, but this one just leaps at you with great power and great grace and is superbly located on a staircase that lets you see it from all angles including from below looking up as if it is a figurehead on a ship. Magnificent.

Tiffany — the wisteria blossom window — Metropolitan Museum of Art — 1982

Louis Comfort... what else to say. This is just simply beautiful.

El Greco — Christ Bearing the Cross — a visiting collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum — 1958

It was part of the Lehman Collection traveling through the country and a school class made a special trip. I remember the exhibit for a number of things, among them a wall of Renoirs, and a tiny copy of a Vermeer by Dali, but the El Greco struck me hard. It was hung so that you faced it straight on as you entered the room full of the Greek's paintings, and for a moment it was all you could see. It was the first painting I had ever experienced almost solely as an emotional reaction.

Classical Music

I am not a musician or an artist, but often experiencing great art or great music I have this overwhelming feeling of gratitude that somehow the piece or that work was created just for me, and just for the moment of my first encounter. It is a kind of love at first sight or first hearing. Something changes and I am different in that moment and after. It isn't about taste, but about what the music evokes.

Richard Strauss' Til Eulenspiegel — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958

I had never been to a live concert and had little access to recordings of classical music. My exposure was very limited. Given bus fare and the price of second balcony seats ($0.20 + $1.50!!!) this was the first piece of live symphonic music I had ever heard. I was blown away. At intermission I begged the head usher to let me join the Conservatory students who ushered the balconies (I was a junior in high school) and I ended up seeing a whole season.

Beethoven's 7th Symphony — the Esplenade Pops Concerts — 1959 or 60

The Pastorale is, I think the most moving of the Beethoven symphonies. I love the 9th and the 3rd, but I always come back to this. Hearing it outdoors by the Charles River seems somehow most appropriate. A recent performance in Benaroya was lovely.

Bizet's L"Arlesienne Suites — I don't know where I first heard them, probably a recording

Now having been to Arles and Provence the music has a place in my mind. I can feel in it the Mediterranean ethos, full of life with all its underlying tensions.

Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958-59

This is such a delicious piece of music, so evocative; even the original piano version, and the Emerson, Lake and Palmer rock version fully in the spirit of the Ravel orchestration. The promenade may be one of the most memorable themes in music.

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue — probably a recording but since, at least one live performance with orchestra

The opening clarinet puts me right in the center of it. But I didn't miss that in the remarkable four hands two pianos version (how it was written before scoring for orchestra) by Katia and Marielle Labeque. Gershwin seems to me underappreciated.

Liszt's Les Preludes — probably as the theme for an early TV sci-fi show in the 50s

It still evokes rockets taking off. It's kind of schlocky and I have never heard it performed live but it is one of those things I like to play with the volume turned up all the way.

Mendelssohn's Incidental Music for a Midsummer Night's Dream — recordings, film

I think my first experience of this was as the music in the schlocky 1935 film with Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and others. The most interesting version I have heard is a Tanglewood performce with chorus by Seiji Ozawa and the BSO.

Ives' The Unanswered Question — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958-59

I didn't quite know what to make of it, and this is one of Ives’ slightly more approachable pieces. I've come to look forward to hearing Ives done live.

Bach Cello Suites — many times but most recently live at Town Hall Seattle by Joshua Roman — 2012

Joshua did all six in a single concert with a dinner break in the middle. (Easier than the Ring cycle.) He's an immensely talented young man who clearly loves what he does.

Handel's Water Music — BSO in the 1960's

One of these, the second one in the second set, is embedded in my brain as the theme music for "Afternoon Symphony" on WHRB. I think they still use it. I wonder if they still program five pieces from five periods alternating chamber and large orchestra pieces, all to time out to exactly 3 hours. Programming to those constraints was an art form all of itself.

Verdi Requiem — not sure where I first heard it, probably records in the 60s, live in Seattle around 2000

There is something electrifying when the Kyrie rises out of the chorus and orchestra. There's a lot of Verdi that is moving and emotional, the slave's chorus from Nabucco, which I have heard from the wings wearing a Babylonian archer's costume, the quartet from Rigoletto, but the Requiem is first to mind for me.