Showing posts with label Sokurov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sokurov. Show all posts

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E major

Symphonies 1-9Listening to Bruckner's 7th, which I haven't heard in over a dozen years, not since my ex left and took Bruckner with him. It's the Jochum recording with the Dresden orchestra. Magnifique!

While I once heard Bruckner on huge speakers with booming bass, I now listen on a Tivoli hi-fi, with its inbuilt sub-woofer, and seriously, the sound is decent.

Bruckner to me is spiritual strength. We boldly reach for what we desire, and we dance with it. No light New Age-y airy stuff here. Dense, an impenetrable storm of instruments at times, like an orchestra of mountain ranges with dangerous sloping rock and deep bottomless crevices that plunge into the depths of the earth, beyond human range. And towering storms that move in a musical mass over the peaks. And the clear endless sky that opens out to the universe. At the centre, the heart that sings, with such passion!

Bruckner doesn't uplift me so much as buttress me against the oncoming tides of difficulties in their manifest forms. I find Bruckner in my bones.

Alexander Sokurov: Moscow Elegy - Andrei TarkovskyTarkovsky, in Sokurov's 'Moscow Elegy,' which I watched last night, says, of film, but it could be any art, that it is "a serious, difficult art, with great sacrifices."

Tarkovsky says, "It's you who must belong to the art, not vice versa."

Bruckner reminds me that we belong to life.

Woman with Flowers 7.1

(7th sketch in series, first iteration of this one) Woman with Flowers  Flowers, props  upholding the woman. The flowers, fragrant, imaginar...