Memorial Concert for Sergei Vladimiroff, pianist, woodsman, grandpa

This post was updated on April 7, and April 12, 2011.

A musical tribute and celebration of the life of Sergei Vladimiroff of Brooklyn NY took place at the Valley Presbyterian Church in Brookfield CT on Saturday, March 26.

Players included  Natalya Shamis (violin), Bonnie Aher (violin), Zarchary Paranyuk (cello), Maragrita Nuller (piano), soprano Patricia Hulber, and Sergei's son Maxim (piano). The program, which was played with great skill and deep feeling, included Tchaikovsky's prelude "Autumn Song" Opus 37, "If we live in the spirit" by Clement W Barker, the Largo from the Sonata in C Minor (BWV 1017) by J.S. Bach, two Rachmaninoff works "Moment Musical" Op 16 #1 and "Daisies" Op 38 #3 and finally Sonata for violin and piano in F minor by Eugene Ysaye.

In addition Sergei's two grandsons dedicated performances to their gandpa - Damian on guitar and Luca on piano - both displaying the musicality and feeling of fine beginning musicians. During the Remembrances many spoke of their fond memories of Sergei including Tatyana his wife, with Max translating from the Russian.  Sergei  "would have clapped very loudly," one of his grandsons said of the performances.

Concert pianist, woodsman, showman, grandfather - Sergei died in the midst of living - of  a sudden heart attack while riding the city subway on his way to the beach on March 15, 2011. He was well known in this area as a concert pianist, having performed at the Danbury Music Center on quite a few occassions. For the past ten years he served as organist at First Church of Christ Scientist Katonah.

The official bio:

A native of Klintzi (Ukraine) Sergei Vladimiroff spent his childhood in Saratov, a major port on the Volga river. He began studying piano with his mother, and later became a pupil of Dmitri Serov. While a student at the Saratov Conservatory of Music, he met Tatyana, who at that time was attending Saratov State University. The two of them married in 1962, and a few years later moved to Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea coast. Sergei worked as a pianist in the local Philharmonic Society, and Tatyana became a TV commentator and producer. They had two sons, Maxim and Frol. During the last decade of his life, Sergei worked as a ballet accompanist at the Steffi Nossen School of Dance in White Plains, NY, and served as an organist at the First Church of Christ Scientist in Katonah, NY. He gave a number of solo piano recitals at different venues, including the Danbury Music Centre and the Valley Presbyterian Church.

He is survived by his wife  Tatyana, two sons, composer Maxim Vladimiroff (and his wife Leisa), of Brookfield, CT and Frol Vladimiroff of Sochi, Russia, and two grand sons Damian and Luca.

Besides his musical endeavors, Sergei was an avid woodsman who loved life, loved to keep moving. He enjoyed leading his grandsons on hikes though the woods, and also taking extended hunting expeditions to wilderness areas. "His hunting trips could fill up a whole chapter," his son Maxim said this week. "Everything he did, he did with great enthusiasm. He will be greatly missed."

The  70 minutes from memory recital Sergei gave on his 70th birthday with photos.

A News Times  review of Sergei's All-Russian-Composers program from Oct 2008

Read about a joint concert with Sergei and Maxim

A Review of an All Chopin program Sergei played in 2007

Painting: Anyone

This is my 501th post on this blog. Woohoo!

Humans hold many kinds of commonality - via inheritance as well as history. We are connected over centuries by the tranmission of handed down culture as well as hand me down genes. We have a common animal nature and energy that expresses itself in countless individual ways. We are many and one. Any one.

The materials here are watercolor pencil and gesso on paper.

Books: A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway

Seared carp with butter and brandy

If Earnest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is about surface, then the surface in question would surely be a well-appointed dinner table. While obsessing in detail over the delights of Parisian food and liquor, Hemingway casually carves up both friends and acquaintances. They are just another course, really, in this buffet view of life in Paris.  However, like the smooth surface of soup in a tureen, this work's pleasant reflectivity conceals a few lumps. Hemingway uses careful manipulation to make readers think well of Hemingway even while he is poking at other writers. He skillfully brags about his own character in the manner of a good novelist, by showing rather than telling. He shows us, by his own example that what writers say is not to be trusted, nor taken at face value, that surface does not equal truth.

Hemingway spends some 16 pages openly skewering Gertrude Stein. He says her companion was frightening, that Stein was badly dressed, that she craved public recognition for her work but couldn't be bothered revising it, that she was repetitious and lazy, that she prattled endlessly, that she badmouthed any writer who had not already spoken well of her work, that she was so competitive she should couldn't bear to hear about acclaimed writers, that she was an egoist, that she resorted to “dirty easy labels” for others.  After thus dispatching “Miss Stein” handily, Hemingway tries to leave the reader with a good impression of himself. The chapter ends as he spends a part of a very long sentence recalling a speech she had made defending one of the painters. After trashing her for 16 pages, he vows to “serve her and see she gets justice for the good work she has done." Then Hemingway quotes himself in a conversation with his wife: “You know, Gertude is nice, anyway,” he says.  Gee, what a magnanimous, forgiving, always-fair kinda guy.

In the chapter “Shakespeare and Company” Hemingway presents himself as someone who craves books, yet who has enough integrity that he would worry about getting right back that afternoon to pay. In the chapter “Hunger was Good Discipline” he shows us Hemingway, a  man who never complains and who would rather learn the benefits of hunger than borrow money, even to eat. Of course  later on, we see  that in truth he is a betting man, one who would take money he'd collected for charity purposes to help a fellow writer, and lose it betting on crooked races.

He uses the same strategy with regard to marital fidelity. He presents himself as Hemingway the loving husband in several stories. In one, the painter Pacin offers him one of his beautiful models. “Do you want to bang her?” he asks, “She needs it” but dear good Hemingway goes home to his “legitime." Yet, towards the end of the book he offhandedly talks for a page about how complicated it is to have a mistress and a wife.

He implies that he is a trusting man and a gentleman in the chapter on “Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple.”  Hemingway shows himself inwardly irritated and disgusted with Ford, yet outwardly polite through Ford's “cutting” of Hilaire Belloc, and the long discussion of who is a gentleman. Though Ford insists Hemingway would only possibly be considered a gentleman in Italy, in the end we see he is a propagator of falsities, and has passed off the devil's disciple as a poet.  Hemingway humbly apologizes for passing on this misinformation to someone else. Maybe he is a gentleman after, all a reader might conclude.

Hemingway's Paris memoir was his lush answer to Stein's oddly stark and chatty book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which tells everything and shows little.  While his work is ostensibly a memoir, it is interesting to note that the following disclaimer appears on the copyright page of the Touchstone edition of A Moveable Feast “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.”  Both works skip across the surface of life in Paris like stones across the Seine.  Both feature multiple episodes of dining, of leaving and returning to Paris, of things not said.

However, any writer almost always has a reason for including a vignette about the main character. Hemingway is a clever man and a skilled storyteller who is essentially telling his story his way. He knows very well that things stated plainly are not nearly as memorable things deduced from stories and dialog. This is the pattern in A Moveable Feast. He openly makes unfriendly judgments about other writers, but stays the likable protagonist by imbuing himself with noble qualities implied through action and dialog. When joining Hemingway's moveable feast, - let “Tatie” pick the restaurant; you can trust him to order something delicious, but be sure - with Tatie and every writer - to examine the subtext with a skeptical eye.

- Mar Walker

written 12 October 2003

Poem: Unmask (from Inverse Origami)

Unmask

the fall of your soft eyes,
so suddenly slumped and weary.

This weight,
a whisper,
a formless something
hinted at.

I have stepped
unthinking around it,
my words,
waxed brick
brittle and waterproof.

Unmask,
gather your chaos
and conjure the thing itself by alchemy:

sweetness
from the tin-acid taste of emptiness.

------------------------

I just realized I still have a lot of work left to do as I have only half of my chapbook, Inverse Origami online. This this is the 13th poem in the book and it appears on page 19. After this one, I have 17 more to put online.

from Inverse Origami -  the art of unfolding
by Mar  (Mistryel) Walker
Puzzled Dragon Press, 1998

the drawing was not a part of my book. 

Painting: North Country Scene

This scene was inspired by my years in Maine and New Hampshire. I started painting this when I lived over a junk store in Cornish. I think now, finally, it's done. It's oil on an 8 x 10 canvas board. Wrong it's actually on 9 x 12 canvas board. I was close.

Photo: The Shattering

Another everyday item has deteriorated into an odd state due to a lack of house-keeping will.  The fractal pattern is formed by cracks in dried cocoa on the bottom of a white mug. A few days after I drank the cocoa, I came across the mug, carried it to the sink and looked down inside it, thought wow, gotta take a picture of that. I obscured the cup rim and edge with the vignette effect in iPhoto.

Rifkin: Human nature, the fate of civilization

There are ideas here that will challenge you, challenge us all. If you are a thinking person, and have a little time, watch this video.

Painting: Spacious No. 3: The Dry Lands

These mountains, rising in the distance under an expanse of sky, began their existence looking like scenery on the planet MARS. The underpainting I used for this oil-on-canvas-board scene was cadmium red.  You can see it clearly in the stage on the right. The main shapes of the mountains and the road line were immediately laid in with a soft cloth. I learned this technique when I went to a SCANart.org demonstration where a painter used it to build  a flower painting.  The red was hard to give up though, so this painting ended up as a Southwestern sort of scene.  I thought the colors were off, but a friend who'd lived out west told me this is how the mountains look at a certain time of year.  I'm not positive that I'm through with it.  I have terrible urges to add items to the foreground such as a rusty pickup, a gates, an oil derek, a wagon wheel, an OKeefe-eske skull, or an antique gas pump, or aburro, etc. etc - all the usual Western sterio-typical items. I am trying to resist this urge.

One thing I like about this painting is a funny effect the sky has in different light. Sometimes the clouds almost seem to have a depth, I think from the layering of blue and white that I used. Sometimes it looks like it must be raining over the mountains. Sometimes it looks like dusk, and there is a city on the other side of the mountains - giving off a glow.  It's quite odd. And I am not sure if I could reproduce it.

It occurs to me that I have not posted Spacious No 2, nor Spacious No 1 - so I guess I am ahead of myself somehow.

Painting: The Riptide Within aka Brain Chemistry

UPDATED WITH NEWER VERSION OF THE PAINTING in Feb 2011

A human being, torn in multiple directions,  struggles but is unable to break free!  To me this is a visual representation of how I felt the greater portion of my early adult life: caught in a subtext of hormonal machenations, fighting overwhelming emotions. It's inspired by the mood swings of my youth... So much of what we are is about brain chemistry and DNA.  Studies of identical twins separated at birth are quite bewildering. Some marry women with the same first name and buy the same style of eyeglasses. Yet nurture and experience alter the brain as well, alter our paths. The brain, once thought immutable rewires itself, its chemistry can change.  So much is still unknown...  This is an oil painting on canvas board. It was begun around 1990 and finished late last year.

Walking away from religious belief - my story

I grew up as a quasi- Episcopalian, sang in the junior choir. When I was 14, I was invited by a classmate to a baptist vacation bible school where I got “SAVED” i.e. born again as they say. I was an over-imaginative and socially alienated teen, happy to hear somebody loved me.... And when I say over imaginative, I was the sort, who as a child of three or four years old, had conversations with an imaginary species of “pookiebell,” a sort of small fairy creature that tended the ferns. It wasn't so much delusion as a strong creative streak that needed guidance.

In my teenage loneliness I conjured a deep emotional connection to Jesus and to god as I imagined their love for me. And this was the attraction.  I started going to a baptist church, and felt accepted there, and began writing christian folk songs. This belief conveniently kept me from having to make the usual teenage decisions about sex and drugs, gave me a ready-made group of people who were supposed to care about me and another far more  authoritative imaginary presence to talk to. After high school, I went to Philadelphia College of Bible as a music student. (Subsequent name changes include Philadelphia Biblical University. and now Cairn University)

The first chink in the old armor came one day when I was out passing out "Jesus Saves" booklets in Rittenhouse Square. I met a Hindu man and we spent some three and a half hours trying to convert each other.. My mind churned. We couldn't both be right, one of us had to be wrong, I thought. But he was every bit as sincere and devout as I was, knew his own holy books just as well...

The summer I got a job as a camp counselor at a religious “ranch” I was brought up short again when a fellow counselor told all the children that their mommies and daddies would burn in hell unless they came to believe. The terrible anguish of these children, who assumed the words of that counselor to be literal, immediate truth - starkly framed the barbarism inherent in the concept of hell.  It was the beginning of the end of fundamental evangelical Christianity for me. I no longer could believe in this version of god. Despite this, I returned to college in the fall - I needed to figure out what to do instead, how to change direction.

After one more year (three total) at bible collage, going through the motions, trying to understand - I dropped out and became an avid non-christian, interested in whatever I could read about religion(s). For many years I told the census takers I was a pantheist, a pagan, a  heathen. For a short while I I was into a sort of new age mumbo-jumboism & reincarnation,  and then dabbled in home-styled American buddhism & insight meditation. My religious opinions were further fleshed out by six years working for churches as a mezzo-soprano, including four years working for a Roman catholic church. I was a non-christian, quasi-atheist at the time, and my immediate musical bosses knew it.

Over the years I have done a lot of thinking about religion and it's creator - the human mind. At the core of each religion, there is always a set of people called mystics. When you read about their experiences they are remarkably similar even in religions that call each other heretics and infidels. I think the similarity is because a “mystical experience” is a brain-state that can happen to anyone who's brain chemistry gets bent in a particular way. It is a state accessible through mediation practice BUT it is a physical phenomenon, not a revelation of a god or gods and not a product of any supernatural process. Religious states of communion, thankfulness or “oneness” that often accompany prayer or meditation are also brain-based and beautiful even apart the common religious labels applied to them. They are natural states of the human brain.

Apparently, I have a atheistic and naturalistic view which excludes divinities as well as the supernatural.. Naturalists see no evidence for the supernatural, and no need for it either as all things, both interior and exterior, arise from the natural physical world. I am also a secular humanist. Secular humanists think that human beings should, without a god or a religion, try to live the best life they can using the power of reason to realize their unique abilities and thereby contribute to the good of society, mankind in general and to the life and history of the planet.

- Mar Walker