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| 2016/07/30 06:23:48瀏覽157｜回應0｜推薦0 | |
Sowash: Last movement of Impressionist Suite #2 for reed trio is entitled “Sisley & Bazille: Joyful Skies & a Lament for the Fallen.” for oboe, clarinet and bassoon.
In the Impressionists Gallery of the Cincinnati Art Museum, where I was as a museum guard for eight years, there are two paintings by Alfred Sisley and one by Frédéric Bazille. The Sisleys are tranquil landscapes, a river in the foreground, a village half-way back, a joyful sky rendered in shades of pale green, pink, lavender, dusty blue and cream. Sisley must have loved “inventing” the sky. Consider. As he painted, outdoors, the river and village just sat there before him, unchanging, in no hurry to be captured in paint. But the skies were always changing, leaving him at liberty to devise whatever sky he wanted to fashion above his quiet river and his sleeping village. He indulged his fancy and concocted some of the most joyful skies ever seen on canvas, at least by me. The Bazille is mysterious and unfinished, like Bazille himself. A woman sits on a bench at the edge of a garden; a beckoning path recedes into a distance of surprising depth, suggesting undeveloped potential, an unknowable future, a journey only just contemplated, never begun. The woman and the bench are transparent; mere outlines; you can see right through them to the garden behind. Is the painting unfinished or did Bazille intend to indicate only the outline of the woman? Is she a ghost? Bazille’s story doesn’t answer these questions; it certainly enriches them. A painter of great talent, close friends with Monet, Renoir, Sisley, he was killed at the age of 28, heroically leading a charge in the Franco-Prussian War. When he painted that strange garden scene he couldn’t have known that his life would soon be cut short. When we look at it today, we cannot help imagining that the beckoning path is emblematic of the future he might have pursued, the potential he might have realized; the ghostly figure is perhaps the partner with whom he might have found a lasting, loving fulfillment. For me, despite the garden's rich greens and robustly colorful flowers, it’s a sad painting, a lament for young talents taken away too soon by War and for the veterans who returned but who had lost their way and were never the same. My father, for one. It is right that we are enjoined to ponder the true costs of War on Memorial Day. The last movement of my Impressionist Suite #2 for reed trio is entitled “Sisley & Bazille: Joyful Skies & a Lament for the Fallen.” You’ll hear Sisley’s joyful skies right off, the closest I could get, musically, to what Sisley expressed so cheerfully in paint. Exactly two minutes in, the mood shifts from joyful to sad as I try, beginning at 2:30, to put into notes the sense of loss we feel, standing before a soldier's grave. At 4:15, we lift our eyes from the grave and there, again, is the sky. Sisley’s sky. So happy after all, smiling down on us. And, through our tears, we smile back, in spite of everything. To hear this movement played — perfectly! beautifully! -- by oboist Mark Ostoich, clarinetist Ron Aufmann and bassoonist Mark Ortwein, click here: http://www.sowash.com/ To see the score, click here: http://www.sowash.com/ |
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