Mahler and Måneskin (and Boléro, somehow)
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
I don’t love Mahler. I have tried, multiple times, to fall in love with Mahler the way so many people do so easily, but it is very hard for me to love a man who stuffs approximately three full-length concert programs’ worth of material into a single symphony as if a symphony were a vacuum-sealed space saver bag. I realize this is very rich coming from a person whose writing tendencies fall squarely in the category of “whatever the opposite of ‘concise’ is,” but I must speak my truth!
I don’t loathe Mahler the way I loathe Wagner (both the man and the music). I don’t even dislike Mahler the way I dislike Bruckner, nor do I care to make fun of Mahler the way I will endlessly dunk on Berlioz.
That being said, Mahler symphonies are simply not my jam. The amount of Mahler (approximately the first 30 seconds of the 5th Symphony) in Tár was the perfect amount of Mahler for me. If the human manifestation of a Mahler symphony were to approach me at a party, I would make no eye contact with him and scramble out of there like a spooked fawn before he could launch into conversation.
So when I got tickets to hear MTT (Michael Tilson Thomas) conducting Mahler’s 9th with the LA Phil, I was 1000% going for MTT. Both because of the long-standing parasocial relationship I have nursed with MTT—who is, after all, the foremost living Mahler interpreter—and because I am painfully aware that there are not many more opportunities to hear him. At this point, I would buy tickets to hear MTT conduct anything: Wagner, Berlioz, a handbell choir of toddlers.
Saturday’s concert had me totally enthralled; it was absolutely the most I have ever enjoyed Mahler. My seat was in the very front row of the section right below the stage, meaning that 1) I felt very at home as someone who used to play in orchestras and 2) I got to look directly at MTT and see every gesture and expression he made.
(If you are new to symphony-going or prone to boredom, I absolutely recommend sitting in the side or back-of-stage sections, because orchestral pieces are infinitely more exciting when you can see the mechanics of what is going on in the ensemble.)
Much has been made in concert reviews about the bittersweet poeticness of a conductor hyper-conscious about his mortality performing a symphony about the very subject, but the overwhelming sense I got from the performance was one of bliss. MTT just looked so joyful basking in the sound, conversing with soloists and sections with a flutter of his fingers. I’m so used to seeing conductors muscle through big symphonies with thrilling displays of tight control and determination, and it was so, so striking how MTT didn’t seem to fight anything (the music, the ensemble) so much as he was just…gracefully directing the flow. It was masterful.
I also appreciated very much how structurally MTT conducted; a lot of the time when I hear Mahler there are so many moments where I go “Oh that was a nice movement, here’s the end…oh, nope, it’s still going, oh god, how much more of this is there??” multiple times within a single movement. In this performance, he made the larger arc more clear, so there was no question when a section was (or wasn’t) ending, and he used tempo changes to give a jolt of energy to the proceedings without making it jarring. (It’s also something Yo-Yo Ma does really well; when I heard him play all the Bach cello suites at the Hollywood Bowl in 2021, he was so good at making audience aware of the structure and at making endpoints extremely clear. It’s an underrated but extremely critical element of performance.)
I hate slow songs but I love 6/8 time
Help, I am obsessed with the new Måneskin album, Rush! Last night I went to bed late because I couldn’t bear to hit pause. I am on that ecstatic new album high where I cannot get my fill of all the songs and just want to stuff them all into my mouth like cake.
Broadly speaking, it’s a no-skip album for me, and the songs (a very generous 17!) shake out into three distinct categories: bangers, ballads, and weird ones.
The bangers: It is ridiculous how many of them there are here—just one after the other. My favorite bangers at the moment: “GOSSIP,” “BABY SAID,” “GASOLINE” (that chunk-chunk-chunk of the bass is electrifying), “READ YOUR DIARY,” “MARK CHAPMAN,” and “LA FINE.”
The ballads: Where I’m shocked is that there are three ballads/slow jams—“TIMEZONE,” “IF NOT FOR YOU,” and “THE LONELIEST”—four if you count “IL DONO DELLA VITA,” and I don’t hate any of them!
I am, regrettably, a slow song hater. This is a prejudice that spans genres. Many slow movements of classical works do nothing for me. I have learned to tolerate the slow love songs in Disney movies. The slow tearful heartbroken ballads about love and loneliness that permeate pop music leave me feeling cold-hearted and bored. Many an album in my iTunes library has the slow tracks deleted. If I like a slow movement, piece, or song, that means it must be truly extraordinary…or just be in 6/8 time.
Because yes, of the three (or four) slow jams on this album, two of them are in 6/8! Both “TIMEZONE” and “IF NOT FOR YOU” utilize this meter to great effect—they’re like sexy lullabies.
I love 6/8 time—putting slow music in 6/8 is an instant hack to giving it a lilting propulsion that makes it 3000% more listenable to me. It’s the killer combo of the swinging one-two big beat, but with the inner movements of one-two-three, which usually manifest in a very compelling up-down or forward motion. (Other notable pop songs in 6/8: “King of the Clouds” by Panic! at the Disco, “Jerome” by Lizzo—I’m sure there are more but I don’t feel like going on a 6/8 hunting expedition right now.) I’m glad someone’s reading my tweets.
The weird ones: Ah, the best category. There are two absolutely weird songs on this album, and I am living for them.
The first time “BLA BLA BLA” started my face was like this:
Then I was like “…I like this??”
“BLA BLA BLA” is barely a song. There are no traditional verses or choruses; it’s basically Damiano David just talking in a repetitive monotone over a repetitive motif. What makes it compelling (other than the band sounding like they are just having so much fun) is that the band’s treatment of the motif changes every time it repeats. Then it hit me.
“BLA BLA BLA” is just the rock version of Ravel’s Boléro.
In a similar vein, “KOOL KIDS” is another “wtf” track (and imho isn’t nearly as compelling as “BLA BLA BLA”) that reminds me of two things: the megaphone monologue in Green Day’s “Holiday,” and John Mulaney’s Mick Jagger impression.
This song is clearly Måneskin taking the piss out of the UK and British rockers, right? Right??
Please stop me if I start to do things like this
I thoroughly enjoyed Hugh Morris’ quietly savage review of Igor Levit and Florian Zinnecker’s new book, House Concert, in VAN Magazine. How could you not, with passages like this:
[S]uch banalities have been cut up into little chunks and sprinkled through the book, aided by a journalist with a taste for punchy declarations. The sheer number of these moments (like “you can’t play music indecisively, and Igor can’t speak indecisively” or “his stylistic device: determination”) leaves Levit in an odd position, like if Mike Tyson awoke to find his hands had been replaced by two jellies and decided to carry on boxing regardless, every jab more farcical, squishy and futile than the last.
Or this:
“I hate talking about my career,” he announces, 234 pages into a book about his career.
There were points, though, where I realized that I need to read this review for the cautionary tale it is.
It’s hubristic for me to compare myself to Igor Levit, a pianist with what I can only wistfully call “a real career.” No one is offering to write a book about me, nor am I drawing breathless reactions from press or selling out concert halls. But in a field where I have to fight the pull to be as bland as possible, I do find myself identifying somewhat with people like Levit, who is otherwise thoughtfully well-rounded. This piece is a sobering reminder that there are wrong ways to put your narrative out there, and that is one of them.
So if I ever start doing pointless, self-aggrandizing stuff like House Concerts (the book title, not actual house concerts, which I do indeed do), please stop me before the fine people at VAN Magazine skewer me to pieces.
Kids accomplish the darndest things
Without meaning to, I recently got into two different shows about Kids Doing Stuff.
The first is Junior Bake-Off, one season of which is available in the US via Netflix. It’s the kiddie offshoot of GBBO, and it is great for getting your GBBO fix, mercifully without Paul Hollywood. It also has many qualities that are sadly not present on adult GBBO:
I sound like a horrible person for saying this, but it is so fun to watch kids failing. There are multiple struggle bunnies who do things like mix up salt and sugar and drop everything they bake. (At one point, the editors just cut together a montage of kids trying to get their cupcakes into too-tall freezers and dropping them all over their own heads.)
The kids are weirdly relatable but have astoundingly great self-talk?? I definitely get down on myself whenever I encounter obstacles—which is frequently—and could actually learn something from these children, who say things like “I can’t change the past so there’s no point dwelling on it, all I can do is try my best going forward.” I just…??? Sorry, I dwell on the unchangeable mistakes of my past ALL THE TIME.
While the game-faced adults on GBBO have to put up with the hosts occasionally being annoying, the kids on JBO simply will not. I cried with laughter every time the host attempted to joke or prod a reaction out of a contestant who would tell him, with the directness that only children can pull off, that he wasn’t funny and that he should go away please. Solid television. I would watch a show just of unimpressed children telling professional comedians to suck it.
The second show I have been thoroughly enjoying is Season 2 of Old Enough!, also on Netflix. YES THERE IS A SECOND SEASON. DROP WHATEVER ADULT NONSENSE YOU ARE WATCHING AND GO ENJOY THIS SUPERIOR SHOW.
If you missed last year’s Old Enough! craze, this is the gist: camerapeople follow Japanese toddlers being sent on errands. That’s the show, and it’s amazing. SNL also did an incredible parody of it:
The first several episodes of Netflix’s Season 2 have the producers following up with the original errand-goers years later; in one episode, you watch a pair of siblings going on an errand, and then two decades later they go back to send the older sibling’s child on an errand of their own!! It’s FANTASTIC. I am so mad there are only ten episodes. (Also, ngl, I now pretend I am a little toddler when I run errands myself now. I’m just missing the disguised camera crew running around me holding toolboxes.)
Anyway, I am now off to listen to more Måneskin while I try not to think about the multiple project deadlines looming around me. See you next week! 🎹