I’m a late bloomer in eclectic art appreciation. Maybe this is what retirement is supposed to be about – catching up with soul delights previously lost in the shuffle of earning daily bread.
It’s not that I now spend my non-productive hours basking in unread classics or building a CD library of new sounds or touring galleries touting post-modern canvases. Nothing that intentional. Rather, my new discoveries unobtrusively have insinuated themselves into days already brimming over with fascinations and the maintenance-demands of latter-day singlehood. Just today I paused to take stock. What’s different? I asked myself.
I have been listening to some wonderful jazz on the radio. While that musical genre has always been of some passing interest (the take-it-or-leave it type), suddenly I seemed mesmerized by the nuances of Wynton Marsalis’ elegant interpretation of “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears out to Dry” and a whole series of bouncing, buttery and blues-ballads dressed up in syncopated jazz. Knowing that some of the top classical artists like Marsalis, Yo Yo Ma, and even conductors like Andre Previn could be equally brilliant when playing jazz helped me to elevate in my own scale of values this creative category to the high art status it deserves.
I have occasionally roamed in art galleries off and on all my life, here and abroad, but only recently have I really studied some of the spectacular art hanging in New York galleries and museums. It is exciting finally to apprehend Jackson Pollack and to realize his art is more than random splashes of paint.
Where have I been all my life and not read the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz whom I discovered only when I read he had died? And hearing the current Poet Laureate Ted Kooser from Nebraska being interviewed on the Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS recently, I was stimulated by his talking about reading and writing poetry and his words got me going and I think I have now been captured by a new passion.
A news item drew me to the Brooklyn Academy of Music where I was enthralled by a new musical setting of the biblical passion story for soloists, chorus, orchestra and even dancers. It was the premiere in this area of Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov’s highly dramatic “Passion of St. Mark.” Hearing this contemporary work, commissioned by the Stuttgart Bach maestro Helmut Rilling, with its wild Latin rhythms and emotional valleys and dramatic peaks, was to me an inspiring revelation. Only after the work was over and the composer was called on stage by the long applauding listeners did I realize that all during the concert he was sitting right in front of me.
I have seen hundreds of exquisite and profound photographs over the course of many years but only recently have I come to prize this art medium as very “fine art” indeed. Black-and-white film seems more classic somehow, especially on gallery walls or in folio collections or coffee table books. But two of my daughters, who have been exhibiting startling color images with their digital cameras, have gifted me with many chromatic moments of awe, now unfolding daily on my computer as screen-saver art.
While there was a time when I saw most new movies to come along, now I miss so many good ones. But when a film buff friend of mine eagerly relates the story of the latest picture he just saw and insists to me that it is a “must see”, I try to go. And that’s why I discovered one of the finest productions to brighten the screen in years – an offbeat British movie, “Vera Drake”, that wrapped me in its emotional realism and left me weak from wrestling with vicarious human drama. Yes, you “must see” it – but I fear that, like so many fine films, it may not survive without blockbuster hype to promote it.
Even modern dance has dazzled me in a new way. Watching the stunning choreography of Paul Taylor or Mark Harris being danced at Lincoln Center has made me wish I had been a subscriber years ago.
Even opera, which it seems I have just tolerated before, has suddenly opened for me a new musical-theatrical experience: discovering a world in which the incredible accomplishments of lyricists and composers are magically and sensitively synthesized with powerfully dramatic and love-lifting vocalists, and with the top talents of orchestral musicians and conductors, choruses, stage directors, costumers and set designers. Why had I sometimes discounted opera as “screaming sopranos”?
Please don’t think that I am just a neophyte aficionado of music, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, dance, poetry, photography or even cinema. Cultural appreciation has always been a top priority of mine, and especially of my life partner and our children. But when the pace and hectic quality of a busy life shoves so much of artistic value to the side in favor of producing work results, culture could not be front and center except when it appeared on my job description – as it did when I reviewed at least one movie each week for several years in the 1970s and 1980s. How refreshing and stimulating then during these years, when the daily commuting grind is behind me, to find gifts of new art waiting to surprise me down the street and just around the next corner.
I plan to continue to make the most of it.
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| Page last modified by Richard Lee on 8 July 2006 |