An interviewer for the London Sunday Times once praised the acclaimed Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau for breathing some much-needed life into his instrument. The piano, the interviewer said, was “the most machinelike of instruments—all those rods, levers, little felt pads, wires, no intimate subtle human connection with it by breath, tonguing, or the string player’s direct engagement with speaking vibrations.” Arrau’s playing transmitted the sensation of touch, each note like a finger pressing down on the spine, relieving the tension of the day. Admirers of the musician often described his talent in bodily terms, reaching for physical metaphors to explain his interpretive gifts. The Argentinean-born conductor Daniel Barenboim said of Arrau, “The music really goes into his bones and his blood.”
In “The Pole,” the new novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, Arrau has another fan in the character of Beatriz, a fortysomething socialite. But what does she know? The wife of a wealthy Spanish banker, Beatriz volunteers with the Concert Circle, a cultural foundation that hosts monthly recitals in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. She has been let in because of her ample free time and her impressive Rolodex, not her ear. As the book opens, the “rather staid” board has flown a Polish pianist in his seventies from Berlin to perform works by Frédéric Chopin, another Polish musician adrift outside his homeland. The man’s name, Witold Walczykiewicz, “has so many w’s and z’s in it,” the narrator explains, that “no one on the board even tries to pronounce it. They refer to him simply as ‘the Pole.’”
Denne historien er fra October 02, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra October 02, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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QUARTET ISLAND
Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.
FIX YOU
The self-help positivity of Coldplay.
ILLUMINATIONS
Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.
RAT PACK
The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future.
ROYAL TREATMENT
The unrivalled omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth IL.
WELL, WELL, WELL
Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.
NEWARK STATE OF MIND
Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.
DOOM SCROLLING
Social media and the teen-suicide crisis.
THE WORKER REVOLT
Harris and Walz try to stop blue-collar Americans from drifting to Trump.
THE CHIT-CHATBOT
Is talking with a machine a conversation?