Ravished By Rubato Poem by gershon hepner

She begged her boyfriend: “Please go slower, ”
for he’d been playing agitato,
and said: “You talking like a Roer! ”
and ravished her with his rubato.
It took a long time till she came,
but once she did she didn’t hinder
repeats da capo, with the aim
of pleasing both. Her name was Linda,
which still, I do believe, remains
unchanged, though she has changed a lot.
Of speed she never now complains,
in the fast lane, cool and hot,
as to the finish line she drives
not quite prestissimo, but faster
than females who become, when wives,
too desperate to please their master.

Inspired by Michael Kimmelman’s review of a concert at the Lucerne Festival (“Racing Chopin All the Way to the Finishing Line, ” NYT, September 10,2009) :
The other night Lang Lang twittered his way through Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto. How better to describe it? He played with the Dresden Staatskapelle under Fabio Luisi at the KKL concert hall here. I can’t recall a more galling soloist. Lang Lang, the 27-year-old Chinese virtuoso, is by various measures the most popular pianist around, a kinetic superstar thanks to his outsize charm and gymnastic technique that earns him the nickname Bang Bang. He can play with grace too. He didn’t here.He splits opinion. Contemporary culture in general is polarized, but the poles keep shifting in ways that can help tell us where we are. By way of illustration, the night before Mr. Lang made mincemeat of the Chopin concerto, a sizeable, rapt crowd listened in the same hall to Pierre Boulez conducting works by Janacek, Varèse and Berg…. The way he took apart Chopin’s score made it into a jumble of hyped-up anecdotes. Here he played super quietly, there super slowly, there like Wile E. Coyote in his Acme rocket shoes. Occasionally he came to a near standstill, forcing the orchestra to crawl with him, so he could ravish a rubato. He swooned and swayed as if possessed by the music (feeling the music “at you, ” to borrow the New Yorker magazine critic Alex Ross’s phrase) , as if the audience needed little parcels of exaggerated emotion and virtuosity to stay interested. It brought to mind what Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about interpreting history these days. Writing for The New Republic, she reviewed a book by Nicholson Baker, “Human Smoke, ” about the lead-up to World War II, which stitched together, without comment, hundreds of nuggets culled from newspapers, memoirs and other (often secondary) sources to suggest a case for pacifism. “A series of pretentious, Gawker-like vignettes, ” Ms. Applebaum called these orchestrated tidbits. “Ripped from their respective contexts each item has the same weight as the next. There is no hierarchy, no sense that one enigmatic anecdote might be more important than the next equally enigmatic anecdote.”


9/10/09