The Fredösphere

It's been a fine birthday week, with the Sea Symphony performance, and a gift of this CD of Sofia Gubaidulina's Johannes-Passion.  The latter begins with massive chords for the organ that may have sounded good on Gubaidulina's home piano, but are not completely satisfying on the instrument they were written for.  Then the bass cantor begins intoning his recitative, and things start getting spooky in an appealing way.  The ghostly feet of one thousand years of Old Russia seem to have trod on Genady Bezzubenkov's voice, producing a vintage with hints of sorrow, vitality, and peace.  [Now that you ask:  why, yes, I am aware that metaphor is the most ridiculous thing you've read all day.  As metaphors go, it's overripe.  It's a hedonistic fruit bomb.  It's not just larger than life, but realer than reality.]

Anyway, I'm going to spend more time with this huge piece before I attempt a more coherent description.  Purely by accident, I now own three of the four passions commissioned by the International Bachakademie Stuttgart to observe the 250th anniversary of the death of J. S. Bach -- I've got Gubaidulina's, Tan Dun's, and Osvaldo Golijov's.  Should I be a completist and get the one by Wolfgang Rihm?

But enough of this boring classical music crappe.  You came here for the VW unpimp my ride link, and to see this unusually lame attention-getting headline.