Waiting For Inspiration Poem by gershon hepner

Waiting For Inspiration

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Those who do not wait for inspiration
depend on craftsmanship. The art
of waiting may inspire liberation
of spirit that requires a jump-start
to fire the creative process. Craft
makes up for lack of inspiration till
the spirit rises in a thermal draft
to heights that never can be reached by skill.

Bernard Holland writes about a an Emerson Quartet recital of three Brahms pieces in the minor key, the quartets in C Minor and A Minor and the piano quintet in F Minor with Gilbert Kalish (“In Different Minor Keys, Three Formidable Pieces, ” NYT, January 22,2008:
You greet a cold, hard, wintry Sunday afternoon with either avoidance or embrace. Stay home and dream about the beach at Waikiki, or go hear the Emerson String Quartet play Brahms chamber music in three different minor keys. For all their sophistication and invention, Brahms’s string quartets are tough love, and hearing consecutively both ends of his Opus 51 — one piece in C minor, the other in A minor — is an awful lot of genial determination at one sitting. To ensure that a large audience at the Rose Theater kept any hint of a smile off its collective face, there was the F minor Quintet for Piano and Strings after intermission, with the pianist Gilbert Kalish.The quintet may be the most welcoming of the three items, but it is also classical music’s prototype for stubbornness. First Brahms wrote it for five string players and didn’t like it. Then he wrote it for two pianists and didn’t like that either. Clara Schumann told him that the final version sounded like orchestra music, and indeed the piece is an awful lot of energy crammed into one relatively small space. Brahms evidently did not wait for inspiration to compose, the result often being intense rectitude born of enormous craftsmanship. In this quintet some light is allowed to enter. Measures of lyrical beauty and even jauntiness help mitigate — both for players and listeners — the virtuoso fierceness that makes the first and last movements sound so warlike. It is easy to understand why Schoenberg so attached himself to the music of Brahms; he would go on to raise the idea of high density to another level. If any group of players is suitable for sorting out these formidable pieces, it is Emerson. No Romantic soupiness here, only playing of individual incision and mutuality of gesture. New Yorkers have been listening to Mr. Kalish with deep respect for more than a generation, and judging from his strong yet unassuming musicianship on Sunday, we have reason to hope he will go on forever.


1/22/08

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