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Stories   >   A Washington Post' critic's suggestions for 'art with meaning' during the 'stay-at-home pandemic' includes; Carnegie Hall's Live streaming series

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A Washington Post' critic's suggestions for 'art with meaning' during the 'stay-at-home pandemic' includes; Carnegie Hall's Live streaming series

Posted: July 22, 2020 12:00 AM | By: Admin
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As the pandemic grinds on, I find myself trying to be more disciplined about wasting time, especially online. I want to go there only with a purpose, not just to while away a few hours clicking idling from distraction to distraction.

Some artists, and institutions, seem to be equally purposeful, making and doing things for their online audiences with the same sense of intention and meaning. The best of them even offer a sense of what life will be like after the pandemic creates a new normal, when we all live in a hybrid world of "real life" and virtual aesthetic consumption. Here are a few things that meet this new standard.

The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin lived through some of the most riotously creative years of music history in his home country. He was a masterful pianist, deeply influenced by Chopin, but evolved an idiosyncratic style that eventually encompassed his own mix of mysticism and atonality. In his earlier years, he composed in a hyperromantic style and forms, including volatile preludes, dreamy études, ebullient mazurkas and searching sonatas.

Few pianists are better equipped to play this repertoire than Daniil Trifonov, who features Scriabin's music as his selections for Carnegie Hall's streaming Live with Carnegie Hall series. Trifonov knows every nuance of this kinetic and mercurial music. He performs with a face mask on, at a piano in a domestic space; the sound is remarkably good. The stream also includes a conversation between Trifonov and pianist Emanuel Ax.

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