emember when Vanessa Redgrave sang “The
Lusty Month of May” in the movie version of
Camelot? She was heartbreakingly young then, and
surprisingly callow, oblivious to the vast promise
inside her, preparing soon to reveal itself. This song has
everything to do with SOLUNA, the fantastic festival of
music and arts coming to a city near you for 21 days this
May, courtesy of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. That city,
of course, is Dallas, which finds its essential distillation in
the Dallas Arts District, where video artists, performing
artists, photographers, musicians, painters, and sculptors
will hold forth in a grand cacophony of social commentary,
celebrating spring as if it were indeed in Camelot, but not
ignoring the shadow within and without that threatens
always the sunshine of our lives. Guinevere, after all, wound
up in a nunnery for the love of Lancelot. King Arthur, her
husband, was not amused by any of it.
Anna-Sophia van Zweden is the impresario of all this
edgy reverie that recalls more than once the glory days of
Hollywood in that golden age of the 1940’s and ‘ 50’s when
movies relied, often but not always, on writing done with “a
pen of brass,” as Virginia Woolf once said, unkindly, about
Vita Sackville-West. But video-and-still photographer Alex
Prager and composer-pianist Conrad Tao (both featured
in SOLUNA) regard the classic California of mid-century
motion pictures with reverence and respect, with yearning,
even, for a world they never really knew. Neither did Anna-Sophia van Zweden, but she views with urgent empathy
the quest for “identity, memory, nationality, and religion”
implicit in so much of the work now slated for SOLUNA,
especially Inferno, a film by Yael Bartana that will be screened
as a prelude to Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish, conducted by
Jaap van Zweden, father of Anna-Sophia.
BY LEE CULLUM
RJaap van Zweden, miraculous music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, started out in Amsterdam as a prodigy of the violin, Anna-Sophia’s instrument insofar as she has had an instrument of her own. She played it when she was
three or four but was “not very successful,” she remembers.
Besides, her father was “too good,” so it was pointless to
compete with him. She decided to “stay away from playing
music” and instead chose the path of her mother, an art
historian who introduced her daughter to museums and
talked her into coming to Dallas to intern with Charles
Wylie when he was curator of the contemporary section at
the Dallas Museum of Art. The three boys in the family
stayed home in Amsterdam, one working in insurance,
another “obsessed with music,” as his sister said, especially
the electronic sound of the keyboard.
Anna, the oldest, does listen to music, mainly Bach when
she’s working. His odes to the orderly mind saw her through
the writing of her thesis at the University of Amsterdam
on Dutch and American museums, their differences and
cultural dilemmas. She also likes Mozart, another apostle of
Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, and Wagner, who
certainly isn’t. Wagner was the 19th Century precursor to
Freud and the discontents he summoned to the surface of
conscious recognition. As for Anna-Sophia, her musical
choice at any moment “depends on my mood,” she said. One
could say she’s somewhat like Einstein, who worked on the
edge of the universe but turned for solace to Vivaldi. Few
can navigate the unimaginable in every aspect of life.
If music for her looks back to earlier inspiration, art is
planted firmly in today, in ground that shifts with the seasons
but never loses its connection to the earth. When she talks
about Destination (America), the theme of SOLUNA, Anna-Sophia turns immediately to Alex Prager, who understands
Alex Prager, Face in the Crowd, 2013, Film HD shot on a RED Epic Camera (color, sound), 11 min., 28 sec., Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York
and Hong Kong
