A Light from the Baltic in Tbilisi 28 September 2014

When you see Jrat Landsbergyt in person, or listen to her play the
organ, it is clear that she is an angel from the North, who has come to
bring light.
However, my pleasure at latest recital at Saint Peter and Pauls Catholic
Church, Tbilisi, was not unmingled with regret that shes much
preoccupied, these days, with worries about Ukraine and the intentions
of Russia: this came out very clearly in the conversations she and her
friends were having after the concert.
We were tasting some excellent khachapuri and salad not far away from
the church, at Marjanishvili; and later, recalling what I could make of
the conversation (much of which was in Russian amid the London smog
of cigarette smoke at our table) some lines of Conrad seemed to come
back to me:
It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my
experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything
about meand into my thoughts. It was sombre enough, tooand pitiful
not extraordinary in any waynot very clear either. No, not very clear.
And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.
Why I should have felt that I am not sure; but I have been much
influenced by these other words of Conrad:
Its extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull
ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps its just as well; and it may be that it
is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so
supportable and so welcome.
[my italics]
This feeling might arise from the fact that Jrat, as a daughter of
President Landsbergis of Lithuania, has ipso facto an eirenic mission
when she plays music, always to soothe and enlighten. Shes quite
consciously an ambassador of Lithuanian cultural values wherever she
goes (sometimes to Germany and the wonderful instrument at Riga)
although the Lithuanian part of the program was more exciting in last
years recital, when she played the rare but wonderful Fantasy and
Fugue on the Kyrie from the Missa de Angelis by eslovas Sasnauskas,
a nineteenth century Lithuanian composer. The theme is perhaps the
most charteristic clarion-call and the most heartwarming watermark
of Catholic Christianity in the west:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4T4BkXvSPw
This is music which can bring peace to troubled souls and lead us to the
necessary healing act of asking for mercy after witnessing or being party
to traumatic and violent, and even murderous, events. Jrat, currently
looking at some trends in her national music in the light of Jung so she
tells me would understand this, I think
And it seems to me that there will always be this dialectic, this crazy
swing, between the highest enlightenment clearly not of this world (with
a centuries-old tradition behind it; and all the human input which that
implies) and the thoughtless, arrogant, retributive and evil things
human beings are capable of doing, in thought, word, and deed, when
the mind and spirit are not fully, and naturally, engaged; when the
common charity and respect for the stranger and the other which
marks us out as a divinely-created species are in abeyance
These constants this dichotomy will always be operative, beyond the
contingent reach of intentions and politics.
I conclude with some links to the most glorious of the pieces which
Jrat played on this occasion. Vierne gave us one of his lovely stealthy
endings in Lamento

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qozu9nMmJF4
from the Vingt-Quatre Pieces de Fantaisie ; and his Hymne au Soleil
from the same collection was marked by his confident full flight in the
remotest of keys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maoegdZH280
As I pointed out to Jrat, Vierne (who was to die at the console of
Notre-Dame after playing his 1500th recital there, on 2 June 1937) had
written American dedications on these two pieces and several others: at
this period of his life (the mid 1920s) he was touring America to raise
funds for the restoration of Cavaill-Colls masterpiece in Frances great
iconic cathedral, the state of which at the time, according to Vierne, was
perilous:
The organ is filled with dust and dead bats and swallows and is perishing
from mildew and dry rot A few days ago one of the biggest of the
organs 5,264 pipes only just missed crashing down on a crowd of
worshippers. This is all due to a lack of money. Notre-Dame parish is the
poorest in Paris.
*
Jrat boldly gave us some Tournemire (Charles Tournemire was a
reclusive, mystical French organist who composed many quite
specialized pieces on texts for the liturgical year). At their best they have
a strange exaltedness; but much depends on having a fantastic French
cathedral instrument, full of unlimited tone colours, at the organists
disposal. Like Messiaen and Mahler, in my opinion Tournemire feels
that he can sometimes break the rules of good taste in an overriding
search to implement his vision: thus some of his music, as recorded here
on one of the grandest organs of all, that of Saint-Ouen, Rouen
http://picosong.com/9acA
sounds not unlike the wonderful sounds which might emanate from a
shipyard! So this must be most charitably considered a kind of
Teilhardian music, wherein all living and even inanimate things shout
out the Glory of God. Otherwise, it risks being rather subjective and
arbitrary; and not really conforming to Conrads imperative -

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry
its justification in every line the artist descends within himself, and in
that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he
finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious
capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike
conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more
resisting and hard qualities--like the vulnerable body within a steel armor.
His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring--and
sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of
successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories.
But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on
wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition--and, therefore,
more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and
wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of
pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all
creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits
together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams,
in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds
men to each other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the
living and the living to the unborn.
Bach, however, most certainly does all of this; and in every bar and
magistrally so in BWV 546, the Great C Minor Prelude and Fugue, the
piece with which Jrat commenced her mission to enlighten and delight
the congregation in Saint Peter and Pauls Church yesterday.
I link to it here in a very smooth performance by the late Gustav
Leonhardt a little bit slow in the Fugue, where there is, alas, a single
wrong note; and rather fast in the Prelude, which I prefer at about half
the speed at which Leonhardt and Jrat took it: for to me it seems to
speak of realities at least as distant as the planet of Mars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ALzS5oTvU
But with Bach, the same reality can always be viewed in countless
different ways

(Image of Martian craters taken by Indian Mangalyaan space probe last week)
*
In conclusion, the manner in which my thoughts gathered this morning,
when I set out to encapsulate the kind of light which yesterdays
recital, in Conradian terms, ...threw has itself a reassuring pattern: and
a moral which might console those lamenting an apparent shift in
political logic in eastern Europe over the last year or so, and the
perceived vulnerability , at times, of our present existence And
reassure, too, anyone thinking that things will not work out for the best,
provided they bring their zeal and best energies to the task. I think this
minusucule incident shows that everything is ordained; and that a
sparrow will indeed not fall from Heaven without Gods consent.
(Although I cannot but help think that something as wonderful as a
paradigm-changing political revolution driven by a nations moral will
and courage alone and headed by a musicologist (!) which happened
in Lithuania in 1990 is by its very nature not something which is likely
to delaminate from the pages of history! It is just too odd and too
unexpectedit carries with it what was said of Helen Wadell the
mark of the Maker.)
*

My young neighbor Nikoloz, pictured above, regularly comes from
Block 9 across the way to our Block 7 to be minded by my next-door-
neighbour, Irina. But today, when I went out to buy the bread, he was
inconsolable: he wanted his mother. I tried to calm him, as we are good
pals, but his grief this time was intense and unstoppable.
While I was out getting the bread I considered making another purchase
at the shop, but as I would have had to wait, I decided to postpone it I
did not want to be distracted from my thoughts.
But to my consternation I could still hear Nikolozs sobbing on my
return, which had followed me down the path, until I was out of earshot,
as I set out
Then I was aware of a smarly-dressed lady, Nikolozs mother, obviously
called back from setting out for work, who was approaching our block at
some speed. I let her pass ahead of me, as I clutched my loaf of bread.
I had already decided to offer some bread to Nikoloz he usually asks
for a bit if he sees that I am carrying some but before I reached my
door I could see that he had been transferred from Irina to his mothers
arms, and his sobbing was turned off as suddenly as if someone had
clicked a switch. This was seconds before I made it to my flat, but so
rapid was the transformation in his mood that he even asked for some
bread before I had a chance to tear a chunk off for him from the end of
the loaf.
His mother thanked me, and that was it.
But what was amazing was the general effect of the moment when he stopped
weeping. It was exactly like the conclusion of those stories in the New Testament
when a person is healed or a situation put right: there was a sudden, unaccountable
absence of the previously prevailing problem: which did not merely cancel out the
problem, but mathematically, seemed to leave some small change over There
was not just a healed, calmed situation, but a palpable blossoming It was as if the
situation which now prevailed was a lot better than it might have been had Nikoloz
earlier simply stopped crying. It was as if something had been added and as if
something had been improved it was a blessing, in short.
You need to view this with the eyes of faith to understand what I mean; but the
very fact that my arrival (brought forward in time by my having not dallied in the
shop, yet delayed a little by having allowed Nikolozs mother to pass) coincided
perfectly with the moment at which Nikoloz just calmed was now was happy
enough to ask for bread, speaks for itself. It was a kind of divine intervention.
Indeed Nikoloz even ventured the comment that this was my house, after happily
taking from me his little chunk of the bread.
It was a communion to add to all the others, I suppose: which at different
levels and in different ways, are I hypothize happening all around us,
all the time. This one was even symbolic. He wanted his mother, and he
wanted bread. What could be more natural or permissible than that?
The essential goodness of the human being and the divine innocence of children will
carry all before it.

Here is a picture of the Church of Saint Paul from the outside. It was built in 1808, in an
Italianate style, and restored in 1999 in time for a visit from Pope John Paul II the pope
who spoke about the need for Europe to breathe with two lungs meaning that the
Orthodox and Catholic, Eastern and Western, halves of Europe needed to be united and in
balance; which obviously would depend on healing between all neighbouring countries
and Russa. In this spirit, Pope John Paul restored the itinerant icon of Kazan to the
Russian Church in 2004.
The interior of the church is equally attractive

and here it is in Lent:

The organ is from Lvov, Ukraine, and dates from 1886. Here is Lila, the regular
Organist, and one or two singers, at Eastertide 2013

That Jrat could play on such an inadequate instrument, conceived entirely for
hymn singing, anything of merit at all, is quite surprising.
That she could play music of the quality we have heard is wonderful and
astonishing.