{"id":669,"date":"2010-02-17T23:50:38","date_gmt":"2010-02-18T03:50:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/?p=669"},"modified":"2011-11-27T00:09:47","modified_gmt":"2011-11-27T04:09:47","slug":"ice-and-oceans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/2010\/02\/17\/ice-and-oceans\/","title":{"rendered":"Ice, Oceans, Earth, Mahler"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/files\/2010\/05\/icyflight.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Belatedly catching up on the Winter Olympics, especially the figure-skating pair upon which China has been pinning its dreams.  After near-misses at three prior Olympics, Shen Xue (31) and Zhao Hongbo (36) finally took the gold Monday\u2014with a new world record. In the flawless clinching of each most critical moment one sensed the poignant history of their determination.<\/p>\n<p>Is there anything in the world more beautifying of the dyad than pairs figure-skating?  Dance can express a greater range of truths, but skating dreams all the friction out of dance, out of relation, even as it exquisitely refines a sense of danger and vulnerability.  There\u2019s no scampering, no chase; one merely glides, until one crashes, either for having attempted something more or for having been unable to stop.  For the dyad on ice dramas of apartness remain but never inevitably: even when the very rhyme of their routines keeps them separate, the two figures stay always linked\u2014the diagonal corners of a flexile, collapsible parallelogram.  &#8220;Earth&#8217;s the right place for love&#8221;\u2014yes\u2014because it&#8217;s a place of frictive pleasures, because there&#8217;s something honest and effortful in the discrete biped tread.  But one could imagine others who find the peculiar beauty and brinksmanship of love on ice more irresistible.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.carnegiehall.org\/article\/box_office\/events\/evt_9990.html\">Royal Concertgebouw\u2019s Mahler Third<\/a> tonight at Carnegie Hall: this was oceanic feeling.  This was earth as drummed immensity, whose concussions only this music, and in our time maybe only this orchestra\u2014its sound both muscular and of measureless depth\u2014could fully body forth.  In the opening movement one could feel the very tendrils of summer shivering into life, the season&#8217;s sunny resplendence still tenuous at the edges, before full fulmination.  The second-movement minuet had a gorgeous, lilting airiness, and the third movement was all expansive breath.  Mezzo Jill Grove&#8217;s voice melted gracefully into the orchestral scoring during the <em>O Mensch!<\/em> and <em>Es sungen drei Engel<\/em> songs. Infinite steadfast patience: what the final movement instilled and sublimely rewarded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Belatedly catching up on the Winter Olympics, especially the figure-skating pair upon which China has been pinning its dreams. After near-misses at three prior Olympics, Shen Xue (31) and Zhao Hongbo (36) finally took the gold Monday\u2014with a new world record. In the flawless clinching of each most critical moment one sensed the poignant history [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5752,13879,4537,39,2328],"tags":[15943,13869,15939,19806,5838,15942,15941,15940],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-dance","category-love","category-music","category-nyc","tag-carnegie","tag-dyad","tag-figure-skating","tag-love","tag-mahler","tag-mariss-janssons","tag-rco","tag-royal-concertgebouw"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":921,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions\/921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}