nature and intimacy

Chopin, the mountains and the search for interconnectedness

I am listening to …

the Chopin Project . This is a collaboration between Ólafur Arnalds and pianist Alice Sara Ott, combining works by Chopin with music from Arnalds, which draws on themes from Chopin’s work. It was recorded on various types of piano, using vintage recording equipment to create an intimate texture of sound, an approach Nils Frahm, who was involved with the mastering of the album, is very much known for as he is for his unconventional approach to the piano (in all its forms) in general.

I have always loved the piano music of Frédéric Chopin, but had grown weary of the uniform and standardized perfection of recordings available and I was longing for someone to come along and try something different. And one day, on a long flight to London, I thought: why don't I do it myself? (Arnalds)

Listen to the Nocturne in C Minor - it seems to have been recorded on a rainy autumn afternoon, maybe in a bar, with people chatting in the background and kids playing. A very private setting, maybe much more in line with how it was played most often many, many decades ago. Here Ott and Arnalds have re-imagined Chopin for the 21st century, but with a distinct approach towards regaining some of the intimacy of the private performance.

I recently listened to the ZAREK trio playing Renaissance and early Baroque music in a beer lab in Brixton, London. The gig took place upstairs on an open balcony, while other visitors below kept chatting. At first, I thought the hum would disturb the performance, but somehow the laughter and general hubbub from below added to the relaxed enjoyment of some really good music upstairs.

We are so used to listening to pristine recordings or sitting quietly and very still during concerts; often forgetting that classical music is and should be part of the real world. I am really glad that these kinds of gigs are now happening more and more.

I am reading …

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. Mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) describes her ventures into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland, so breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly severe and cruel at others. The book reads like a meditation on the magnificence of mountains, the interconnectedness of nature and her (and our?) imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. It is in equal measure a very intense and at times scientific prose and poetic exploration.

And I have to admit that I did not read but listened to it, at night, in bed, in the dark (instead of doomscrolling). You can call it escapism, but I feel that this kind of writing (and there have been many more fantastic new nature writings in recent years) is essential for us to reconnect, re-anchor ourselves within our natural habitat in order, to put it plainly, save the world and ourselves. Shepherd’s descriptions in all their poetic directness hold hope.

Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.

Viewing nature as either disenchanted and close to catastrophe or as this beautiful but strange sphere we are not really able to engage with, is not the answer. Books like The Living Mountain challenge us to rethink our perception of the natural world and our place within it.

…. and with this I will now go for a walk and leave my headphones behind for once.

Till next time

Kirsten