#11 (6.12.25)
Tomasz, John, Isabel
SEE
Solidarność, High Noon, 4 June 1989, by Tomasz Sarnecki.
Europe House, London SW1 (& elsewhere)
In a hallway at Europe House — home once of the Conservative Party, now of the EU’s mission to the UK — there hangs a replica of this great 1989 poster. On the way into an event, I stopped to look: it caught my eye because, coincidentally, I’ve written about it in a forthcoming piece for the LRB. By 1989, the CIA had spent years flooding Poland with samizdat printing equipment, & as the first free elections came, placards bristled in Warsaw’s streets. Tomasz Sarnecki, a young designer, took the poster for High Noon, splashed over it “Solidarność” (Solidarity) and the date of the vote; his peers ran off 10,000 copies, & pasted them on the side of the city’s buses. The result was never in doubt.
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LISTEN
Piano Music, by John Tavener (pianist Ralph van Raat).
Naxos
Tavener’s pieces for solo piano receive less attention, much less, than his choral works. This record, I think, shows why, being uneven & riddling, though at its best, in ‘Ypakoë’ & ‘Pratirūpa’, the writing almost reaches — almost — the otherworldly beauty of Messaien or Pärt. The effects in Tavener can be frustrating: they burst, then vanish fast. He can seem to compose in many minds. But then, in religion, he was a syncretist. His final opera, Krishna, will premiere at Grange Park next year, 13 years after his death. In the meantime, these piano pieces have some appeal, being made of glassy repetitions, returns, dwellings, all done with delicacy: they’re hardly overwhelming, but they’re devoted, & far from bad.
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READ
As If, by Isabel Waidner.
Hamish Hamilton
One of the literary highlights of next spring. Two men who seem strangely similar – more than counterparts, less than doppelgängers – meet, orbit each other, then slowly trade places & lives. As If carries an epigraph from Beckett, and you might think it easy for a novelist to cast themselves as his prism, to refract his comic pairings, his elliptical style, his deadpan jokes. But it isn’t easy: his influence closes in, the temperature changes, the light, the whole situation. I don’t write fiction, but I bet it takes strength, under those conditions, just to be yourself. Waidner manages, & then some.