Grineva performed from a well of feeling that was as nuanced as it was powerful, giving stunningly beautiful dynamic shape to songs, such as Debussy’s “Clair du lune,” that had long ago been shorn of surprise by the debilitating injustice of familiarity. But what she provided was more than surprise. It was musical revelation, an initiation into expressive riches that I would never have supposed they bore. There is something in Grineva’s playing—her pauses, her note shaping, her sound dynamics, her phrasing, her almost unique sensitivity to the intentions of the several composers who fill her repertoire—that made me certain that each one of them would have gladly stood over her piano nodding enraptured approval.
When Grineva concluded the evening with a performance of Erik Satie’s brief, beloved, but undeniably overexposed “Gymnopedie #1” that nonetheless left me certain it too could never be done better, I realized I had been granted a rare, exquisite lesson in listening. For the first time and for sure, I knew the Romantics drew from depths that are uncontaminated by the sentimentality of which they are all-too-often accused. At their best, they recombine our very human soul with the Eternal Water that is its sustenance and renewal. This is the necessary alchemy of all art. How lovely that Katya Grineva is one of those relatively few master artists who knows how to get that particular “job” done.
Katya, who performs annually at New York’s Carnegie Hall, will be offering a rare San Francisco performance this Sunday evening at the Davies Symphony Hall. Yes, it’s Sunday and with a hard week ahead you need more time for deep refreshment. That’s precisely why you should go hear her perform. Take your kids too. This might just make them want to become pianists.
Here are the details:
Katya Grineva
“Love and Water”
Enchanting Evening of Romantic Piano: Works by Schubert, Debussy, Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Liszt.
Sunday August 28, 2011
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness
San Francisco, CA 94102
Tickets: $25-$55
10% discount with code: KATYA247
Buy tickets online Tickets or call (415)392 4400
contact: katyagrineva@aol.com
About Katya Grineva:
When teenage Russian pianist Katya Grineva came to New York in 1989, she had two goals: to study in America, and one day, to play in Carnegie Hall. She made her Carnegie Hall debut on May 13, 1998 and has performed there every year since. May 22, 2011 will mark her twelfth solo appearance at this world famous hall.
Having lived most of her adult life in New York, she has acquired a reputation as a pianist of exceptional romantic and poetic expression. Commentators agree that her subtle performances are deeply impactful and demonstrate her value of the beauty of tone.
The New York Times describes her as “liquid…dreamlike.” WNYC Radio states “she’s a noted exponent of the Romantic repertoire…”
Her interpretation and mastery of the piano can be summed up by one of her fans: “With Katya you sink into the sweet abyss of the music.”
Since April 1998 Steinway and Sons has awarded Katya the honorable title of Steinway Artist.
In 2005 Katya performed Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20 as a guest artist with the Guayaquil Symphony Orchestra under Conductor David Harutyunyan, in Ecuador and Avery Fisher Hall in New York City.
Her other awards include a special award from the New York State Shields in 2005, an award for special achievements from the government of Guam, and in 2006 received the Guzi peace Prize from the President of the Philippines.
In 2006 she was chosen to perform and record the world premieres of piano sonatas by romantic Viennese composer Marcel Tyberg, with the support of The Foundation for Jewish Philanthropies, which established the Tyberg Musical Legacy Fund.
She continued her worldwide travels returning to the Philippines for a benefit concert attended by the former President Fidel Ramos.
For Katya 2010 marked a significant year with the completion of her most recent world tour. Noteworthy performances took place in top concert halls in Quito, Ecuador; Nairobi, Kenya; Singapore; Hong Kong, China; Melbourne and Sydney, Australia; and Ravello, Italy. H performance in Singapore was captured on her newly released DVD, Katya Grineva… Live in Singapore.
Katya recently returned from Fiji where she recorded her new CD, “Liquid Dream” of piano works inspired by water. The CD will be available the night of the concert.
For more information visit: Katy Grineva’s website
Roberta on the Arts Review Arts Review of her recent Carnegie Hall performance
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My last such outing was about a week ago, when I found myself in a room with two very decent gentlemen primed to tell a group of not so very young white people how to go about doing a business that is doing the world some good. Or at least that’s what I thought I was going to learn. I’d had come there at the invitation of my buddy Eliot, with whom I am starting a new policy institute. Eliot had met one of the seminar leaders at another event. With a forthcoming book on the subject of entrepreneurial do-gooderism to burnish his own impressive business and marketing credentials, the fellow certainly appeared well-qualified for his task, and so why not? His partner also a strong background in human resource development and was a relaxed, credible presence. My five hour roundtrip to the benignly sybaritic fields of suburban Marin county would be worth the trouble if I truly did learn something of great practical use about how to do benign business in the world .
The event was held at an amazingly well-maintained community park building surrounded by lightly misted, morning sunned athletic fields. Already at this early hour those fields were home to flocks of eight year old boys proudly warming up in their professional baseball uniforms. I noticed that were nearly as many adult coaches for the boys as there were players on the field, a demonstration of fatherly commitment that I suspect few parks in the red states were likely equaling that morning. Man, wouldn’t a game of baseball be fun right now! Anyway, it was upstairs to the room and the beginning of the seminar.
Twenty or so of us sat in a large semi-circle of chairs facing a butcher papered blackboard. The event began with a warbly projection of the opening crawl sequence from the original Star Wars movie, “Long, long ago in a galaxy far away . . . ,“ that famous Saturday morning matinee call to arms that that no 16 year old boy or girl will ever be able to resist. Having spent the better part of a lifetime learning the requirements and costs of authentic self-transcendence, however, I was more embarrassed that they should show this than I was moved to visions of personal glory. “I didn’t know we were going to watch a documentary,” I quipped to the seminar leader.
What came next moved me on from my slight embarrassment to a real annoyance that I had no choice but to conceal. The seminar leaders advised us we were all on a journey traversing the sequence that Joseph Campbell outlined in his famous Hero With a Thousand Faces, filtered through his interview with Bill Moyers on that very subject. The hero, we were informed, passes through four phases: (1) the call to destiny; (2) renunciation; (3) the struggle with obstacles; and, (3) a great Awakening. The only problem I had with all this is that the exemplar of this sacrifice that they presented to us was Gautama Buddha, a man who actually is one of my revered heroes and who literally did make his life all about Awakening. Did they seriously intend to compare the small levies upon our life and energy required to perform our worldly do-gooderism with the utter self-relinquishment demonstrated by the Buddha?
The answer was, yup, they sure did. They even told the foundational story of what occasioned Buddha’s renunciation, the one event that his parents had done everything in their power to prevent—his apparently chance observation of a sick and dying man. Buddha, of course, immediately realized the triviality of the princely destiny held before him. In the face of the death and disappearance of all that you love, what’s the point of pursuing any destiny whatsoever? Hence Buddhism in all its multiple glories, including the Advaitayana Buddhism that claimed my heart, as well as all the other serious spiritual teachings and paths in other traditions that likewise see through the beguilements of our worldly commitments.
The Buddha himself was well aware that his message could never be a popular one. He was at first disinclined to teach. It was only when he came across several serious ascetics who were obviously both available to and in great need of his instruction that he began the compassionate teachings that we treasure today. And it is so that to this day no aspiring Buddhist can be spared the very same crisis faced by Gautama. We either yield all to the Divine or we continue to design—these days we say “script”—our lives of ego-selfhood. The truth is that when we actually hear the Dharma, we realize that our lives are no longer our own because we were holding on to something unreal to begin with. Gautama himself likened it to be seized by the jaws of a lion:
‘Monks, the lion, king of beasts, at eventide comes forth from his lair. Having come forth from his lair he stretches himself. Having done so he surveys the four quarters in all directions. Having done that he utters thrice his lion’s roar. Thrice having uttered his lion’s roar he sallies forth in search of prey.
Now, monks, whatever animals hear the sound of the roaring of the lion, king of beasts, for the most part they are afraid: they fall to quaking and trembling. Those that dwell in holes seek them: water-dwellers make for the water: forest-dwellers enter the forest: birds mount into the air.
Then whatsoever ruler’s elephants in village, town or palace are tethered with stout leather bonds, they burst and rend those bonds asunder, void their excrements and in panic run to and fro. Thus potent, monks, is the lion, king of beasts, over animals; of such mighty power and majesty is he.
Just so, monks, when a Tathagata arises in the world, an Arahat, a Perfectly Enlightened One, perfect in wisdom and in conduct, wellfarer, knower of the worlds, the unsurpassed trainer of those who can be trained, teacher of Gods and of men, a Buddha, an Exalted One; he teaches dhamma: “Such is the Self: such is the origin of the Self: such is the ending of the Self: such is the way leading to the ending of the Self.”
Then, monks, whatsoever gods there be, long-lived, lovely, and become happy, for a long time established in heavenly mansions; they too, on hearing the Dhamma-teaching of the Tathagata, for the most part are afraid: they fall to quaking and trembling, saying: “It seems, sirs, that we who thought ourselves permanent are after all impermanent: that we who thought ourselves stable are after all unstable: not to last, sirs, it seems are we, though lasting we thought ourselves. So it seems, sirs, that we are impermanent, unstable, not to last, compassed about with a Self.”
Thus potent, monks is a Tathagata over the world of gods and men.’(Anguttara-Nikaya [Book of the Fours], trans, David Maurice, from The Lion’s Roar: An Anthology of the Buddha’s Teachings Selected from the Pali Canon)
This is not a message built to please beings who are busy congratulating themselves for being alive. Even some practicing Buddhists seem surprised to learn that they need the Buddha not only for the kind of fierce, clear admonitions we read above, but for his own Blessing Grace—an attitude that has come down to us all courtesy of some very mistaken nineteenth century European historiography. The truth of the matter is unequivocally stated right on the jacket of noted Pali scholar Peter Masefield’s landmark Revelation in Pali Buddhism:
[S]alvation in early Buddhism depended upon the saving intervention of the Buddha’s grace and . . ., contrary to the now commonly accepted view of Buddhism as a rationalistic philosophy of self-endeavor, the picture that emerges from a careful examination of the canonical texts is one of Buddhism as a revealed religion in every sense of the term with the Buddha as every bit the divine guru.”
The pop Buddhism my seminar leaders were inflicting on their audience certainly was no worse than what is being replayed thousands of times every day across America. I’m sure that some of the people in the room felt served by the occasion. Who cares that Joseph Campbell died a famously miserable death, the painful fruit of a life spent overfilling the mind and dining on roast beef and scotch? In any case, I was sufficiently engaged by the people around me that when they had us close our eyes and select three small stones from a basket, thereafter to do some kind of imaginative, invocatory prayer, I had no trouble playing along. Even so, I could not help but think, “Ah, if they only knew the Siva Lingam!,” which is the truest, deepest meaning of stone. But that’s another story.
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Yet in yesterday’s opening ceremony to the Olympics we saw something that that just might possibly be the key to China’s – and thus the world’s – eventual salvation from what otherwise will likely be the emergence of an aggressively imperial modern China. That new influence is actually ancient, and it is something that until recently China has appeared to cause the Chinese leadership more embarrassment than pride: the country’s brilliant heritage of Confucian morality and Taoist and Buddhist spirituality.
Several years ago my friend Daniel Sheehan, the great constitutional lawyer who has done more than just about anybody to secure our 1st amendment rights, especially regarding religious practice, told me an amazing story. The Chinese Academy of Social Science got this idea that China should not only reclaim its Taoist heritage but actually use it to take the lead in what could (and should) be one of the great scientific enterprises of the 21st century, the exploration of qi (chi) – the pervasive energy that your acupuncturist awakens in your body with needles, that you feel flowing down your legs and through your hands when you practice tai chi, that indeed animates everything that lives and moves and breathes. The plan was nothing if not ambitious,. The director of Academy’s Science and Technology Division wanted the government to pony up $2 billion to fund the most comprehensive research on qi ever done. In this way, China would take the lead in the subtle sciences of the future. It was a brilliant, far-seeing proposal.
As every salesman knows, when you want to land a big deal you need a great demo. That’s where the Sheehan family came in. In December 1999 Daniel brought his 17 year old son Daegan with him to China and loaned him for an hour to the Academy for an amazing demonstration. The movie star handsome young American quickly found himself standing blindfolded on a stage in a lecture hall filled with Chinese political dignitaries and hundreds of social scientists. He had never in his life been instructed in or performed any kind of Taoist energy practice. He was told only to relax and to allow his body to move as it willed.
A man came out on the stage and stood behind Daegan, composed himself for a moment, and then began to do a spontaneous and unusual tai chi routine. His movements wasn’t anything like the standard long or short form taught now throughout the world. And here’s where a remarkable thing happened. Every movement made by what was obviously a powerhouse of a chi kung master was spontaneously duplicated by the blindfolded boy. Unless the man and the boy on stage were perpetrating a most remarkable fraud, there would only be one conclusion: the chi kung master had the ability to use his own energy to animate the body of another person. And not just a a fellow chi kung master. This was a hormone activated teenage boy, here at least temporarily made subtle by an esoteric gift courtesy one of the world’s most ancient – and most valuable – traditions.
The Academy didn’t get their money. The Chinese government doesn’t officially recognize recognize the reality of chi because that would undermine its longstanding contention that religion is an addictive opiate from which it is here to liberate us. After all, if there is actually is something valid in religions like Buddhism and Taoism, then how to justify its suppression of the Tibetan people . . . and Falun Gong?
Well, in yesterday’s opening ceremonies at Beijing’s amazing new stadium called “the Bird’s Nest” the Chinese officially laid claim to their venerable traditions. China openly celebrated itself as the home and nurturer of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. So now the contradictions that pull at the secular rationale of the state – which, after all, is founded on a communist critique of capitalism but today is pell-mell promoting capitalism to its people – have been widened by the government itself. The officially atheist government of China has given great praise to its sacred inheritance, an inheritance that challenges he very foundations of the state. That is a contradiction that we can all pray eventually does a whole lot of good.
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