corollary

Listening to:

Mahler, symphony no. 9. Mahler was apparently a little affected by a superstitious worry to the effect that nine symphonies is as many as a great composer is allowed. Bruckner didn’t even manage to comlete his ninth, and Beethoven’s ninth was his last. As it turned out, Mahler’s ninth was indeed his last completed symphony. (There is a “performing version” of his drafts for a tenth symphony.)

Thirty-five years later, it seems quite likely that Shostakovich deliberately thumbed his nose at this tradition of great ninth symphonies (and thereby thumbed his nose at the Soviet government, who expected something great of him), by producing a ninth symphony that was short, not overtly dramatic, and which seemed very slight.

Anyway, Mahler’s ninth is quite a mysterious work. Its opening and closing movements are both slow movements (an Andante and an Adagio), while its two internal movements are quite raucous and full of strange eruptions of sound. However, it’s definitely coherent and melodic at the same time.

A recent movie:

Mission Impossible 2. We got this out on DVD. It’s slickly done, but it suffers from a number of faults. It has a serious case of Bond-envy; its plot is ridiculous; Tom Cruise smirks far too much; the other good guys are far too marginalised (the best part of the first MI movie was the initial segment when you saw a team of operatives working together; Cruise as lone operative dominating the plot destroys that interesting, and distinctive, flavour), and those bloody masks are used far too much.

Plot holes range from the typical ridiculous science (why didn’t the operatives that stole the magic medicine pick up the disease from the scientist carrying both the medicine and the disease on the plane?) to the implausible assumptions. Why, for example, on knowing where the bad guys were (great location, Sydney Harbour), did the good guys not get in several truck loads of police to arrest them? The Australian authorities would be more than willing to arrest people that special US agencies fingered as terrorists.