I took down my last post, on violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, because I ended up using some of it for my review on the Strings Magazine website:
http://smtemp.mugo.ca/Reviews/Performances/The-Crazy-Genius-of-Violinist-Patricia-Kopatchinskaja
(The title is my editor's, not mine!)
I wanted to pick up though on another strand of thought that emerged from my reviewing this performance, which was, after all, only part of an entire musical evening devoted to celebrating the incredible talent of Fazil Say.
A Turkish musician. In Berlin. An audience dominated by the bourgeois crème of the Berlin Turkish population. Not your usual Philharmonie crowd, nor the folks you see ambling down Kottbusser Damm.
So my thoughts are already turning idly to what it must mean for a musician like Say to be playing in Berlin for this audience (before PatKop comes out and, like, alters my violin-reality).
It’s not until Say, Kopatchinskaja, and percussionist Burhan Öçal play Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca -- in a wacky, jazzy arrangement (by Say) -- that it hits me: they are reappropriating Hapsburg “Turca” as modern-day “Turkei” for the hip Berliner.
Say, speaking in heavily accented German, poked gentle fun at Öçal, an actor from Turkey famous for playing gangsters in mafia movies (that figures, with his dark looks) as introductory banter before they went on to play a funked up improvisation on Turkish folk music in 10/8 meter that would probably have let those Silk Road Project guys drooling.
Now, I’m no identity-politics-musicologist, and even if were, I’d probably still struggle to form a coherent sentence out of the following keywords: postmodern Mozart -- Turkey – Globalization – Musical Identity – Islam -- Post-Race-World.
I mean, here’s a guy who has reclaimed Scheherazade with his “1,001 Nights in the Harem” Violin Concerto: turning the exoticization element of Orientalism on its head.
This point will probably be lost on Americans who may not know that “Orientalisch” in Berlin can describe anything from chow mein to bellydance.
What’s most admirable about Say though is that he is only unwittingly contributing to the “music & politics” debate. His relaxed demeanor and humor said it all: after a program of seriously wacky music, he introduced the encore as “ein ganz normales stück … von Beethoven” [“a totally normal piece… by Beethoven”], then proceeded to play Für Elise. For a few measures, that is, before Kopatchinskaja, and Öçal joined in and all hell broke loose.
