Category: Culture/Art

Cellist Efe Baltacigil, pianist Amy Yang perform as part of Embassy Series

By Cecelia Porter, Published: December 19

(Balazs Borocz) – Amy Yang

Istanbul-born cellist Efe Baltacigil and pianist Amy Yang played at the Turkish ambassador’s residence Friday. The concert, co-sponsored by the Embassy Series, highlighted two iconic sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven: Op. 5, No. 1, in F and Op. 102, No. 2, in D. The musicians’ informed yet personal approach to this music beautifully underlined the composer’s groundbreaking liberation of the cello from its traditional supportive role — as in the Op. 5 — to its emerging reciprocal partnership with the piano — as in the Op. 102.

Baltacigil, the newly appointed principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, combines an intense, gorgeous tone with a broad palette of timbres. In Op. 5, these qualities were carefully subdued to a quiet intimacy in accordance with the piano’s prominence. (Beethoven was a celebrated pianist himself.) Yang underscore dher command of the keyboard in music demanding the titanic power of the composer’s “Hammerklavier” sonata while exhibiting Op. 5’s full range of technical pizzazz and fluid scale passages. This was all the more remarkable because the pianist had to deal with a small, out-of-tune Steinway that lacked resonance. Particularly in the Op. 5 finale, the cellist met Beethoven’s playful presto temperament with a boldly impulsive bow matched by Yang’s incisive phrasing.

In Op. 102, the cello comes into its own against the piano. This was especially evident in the adagio, where Baltacigil missed no chance for sonorous passion to match Yang’s depth of expression.

Programmed between the Beethoven pieces, Maurice Ravel’s “Habanera” resonated with a tangy Iberian rhythmic pulse, and Antonin Dvorak’s “Silent Woods” was nicely done, with both players maintaining a marvelous legato from start to finish.

Porter is a freelance writer.

via Cellist Efe Baltacigil, pianist Amy Yang perform as part of Embassy Series – The Washington Post.

December 22, 2011
Armenian Revolt

A balanced view of the struggle between the Ottoman Empire and the Armenians in the Eastern Anatolia during the late 19th century what is considered by some today, a genocide. This in-depth documentary is based on two years of research in the United States, Russia, Germany, Romania, England, and Bulgaria with historical footage and images from the national archives of the United States, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia and Germany with participation of an international team of experts.

User Reviews

Finallly…historical context for a highly politicized subject

14 October 2007 | by telstar7 (United States) – See all my reviews

Most of us know nothing about the Armenian Revolt, which is why it is so easy for the Armenian Diaspora to convince people that their ancestors were the victims of genocide. While they are very effective in their advocacy, their approach is also unethical because they use “selective truth” to “prove” their point. They also know that most of us will jump on the bandwagon and sympathize with their claims. As for others who beg to differ, the Armenian Diaspora in the US, Australia and Europe denounce them as “genocide deniers.”

How sad that such organizations such as the Armenian National Committee and other radicals must unjustly accuse an entire nation in order to preserve their fragile cultural identity. After all, what does it mean to be an Armenian, other than descended from victims of “genocide”? In the meantime, Armenians steer clear of the Armenian Revolt; many of them are ignorant on the subject and do not realize that the revolutionary Dashnak and Hinchak parties began to attack and kill innocent Muslims many years before Armenians were deported in 1915.

Our Congressmen have better things to do than pass resolutions about emotional, politicized claims that have never been substantiated by the historical record. But they don’t have enough spine to stand up to their Armenian constituents and say, “Enough is enough. We sympathize with you, but this is a matter between Turkey and Armenia. Let them settle it.”

This program on the Armenian Revolt is apparently the only one of its kind. Small wonder! It seriously undermines the genocide claim, and should be required viewing for any politician, teacher or journalist who has been co-opted by the Armenian Diaspora’s arguments.

Yes, Armenians were tortured and massacred. But so were Muslims. If we are willing to call what happened to the Armenians a genocide, then what do we call what happened to the Muslims?

I often wonder how some members of the Armenian Diaspora sleep at night, knowing that their political game is based on deceit.

December 22, 2011
Stand up for Christian values, says Cameron

Joe Murphy, Political Editor

Faith: Mr Cameron hailed Christianity

David Cameron today attacked a “slow-motion moral collapse” in Britain and called for a revival of traditional Christian values.

In a keynote speech, he condemned a growing “do as you please” culture in which people, including political leaders, increasingly feared criticising the bad choices of others.

“Whether you look at the riots last summer, the financial crash and the expenses scandal or the on-going terrorist threat from Islamist extremists around the world, one thing is clear,” said the Prime Minister. “Moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn’t going to cut it any more.”

Addressing Church of England members at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, he went on: “Put simply, for too long we have been unwilling to distinguish right from wrong. ‘Live and let live’ has too often become ‘do what you please’.”

Mr Cameron, whose speech marked the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, said people should openly proclaim the explicit values of Christianity.

He criticised the notions that by “standing up for Christian values we somehow do down other faiths”, or that it was offensive to pass judgment on other people’s behaviour.

“I think these arguments are profoundly wrong,” he said. “And being clear on this is absolutely fundamental to who we are as a people, what we stand for and the kind of society we want to build. We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so.” The Prime Minister admitted that his own faith was racked by doubts. “I claim no religious authority whatsoever,” he said.

“I am a committed – but I have to say vaguely practising – Church of England Christian who’ll stand up for the values and principles of my faith but who is full of doubts and, like many, constantly grappling with difficult questions.”

He listed Christian values in British society as “responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-
sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities”.

He went on “These are the values we treasure. Yes, they are Christian values and we should not be afraid to acknowledge that. But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every faith and none. I believe we should all stand up and defend them.”

The Prime Minister said the summer riots were partly caused by people “shying away from speaking the truth about behaviour, about morality”. He added: “One of the biggest lessons of the riots is that we’ve got stand up for our values if we are to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations.”

He said faith was no guarantee that people would lead moral lives and stressed that many atheists and agnostics lived by strong moral codes.

But religious faith could inspire people to more ethical decisions. “The absence of any real accountability, or moral code, allowed some bankers and politicians to behave with scant regard for the rest of society,” he said.

An “almost fearful, passive tolerance of religious extremism” had let Islamic extremism grow unchallenged.

During his speech, Mr Cameron also hailed the King James Bible as one of the greatest and most important works of literature.

www.thisislondon.co.uk, 16 Dec 2011

December 17, 2011
The Lost Word by Oya Baydar

A welcome spotlight shone on Turkey’s Kurdish war

Maya Jaggi

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 December 2011 22.55 GMT

Kurdistan Workers Party members silhouetted on a hillside in southeast Turkey

Kurdish insurgents belonging to the PKK. Photograph: Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images

Snow, the 2002 novel by Turkey’s Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, was set in north-eastern Anatolia in the 1990s, as war with secessionist Kurds raged in the wings. Oya Baydar’s fine novel – her seventh, and the first to appear in English – brings that conflict to the fore. Published in Turkish in 2007, it is set in the recent past, as a war fought with Kurdish separatists since 1984 intensifies in the mountains and spills across borders, while tourists are targeted by seaside bombings.

The protagonists are an Istanbul couple in their 50s: Ömer Eren, a celebrity writer who drinks as his inspiration dries up, and his wife Elif, a genetics professor whose ambition has stilled her unease at experimenting on small mammals. When Ömer, waiting for a bus home from Ankara, sees a pregnant Kurdish woman wounded by a stray bullet, he decides to visit her and her husband’s relatives in the south-east. His own wife’s journey west, to a conference in Copenhagen, heightens their sense of estrangement.

A source of grief is their “lost” son Deniz, born while his father was in jail for writing in a leftwing magazine during the 1980 military coup. Ömer and Elif met as teenagers building a bridge (with obvious symbolism) in the Kurdish region. But their son failed to match up to their ideals. After his Norwegian wife was killed in a terrorist bombing near the Blue Mosque – not by separatists, but a far-left group – Deniz retired with his young son to a tiny Norwegian island. As Ömer revisits the Kurdish east, his wife visits the son she scorns for living the “happiness of swine” among “Nordic peasants”.

After a bus journey punctuated by road blocks, Ömer enters a scorched landscape, where a banner proclaims, “one country, one flag, one language”, but a bust of Ataturk, founder of the republic, is swathed in barbed wire. A boy tells him that this is “my land and your colony”, while a hotelier warns of the special team in black snow masks: “If they take you in, they will question you like there’s no law or constitution – or even God.”

Children who have Turkish beaten into them grow ashamed of their mothers’ tongue, then of their shame. Many join the mountain rebels, finding that “the sword is more powerful than the pen”. As the widowed Jiyan, with whom Ömer has an affair, tells him, “One cannot become an artist here … one becomes a guerrilla, a terrorist, a traitor, a separatist, a collaborator, a martyr or an informer. Or you are captured dead.” Kurds are caught between army and guerrillas, often conscripted to kill brethren. Her husband’s resolute non-violence made him a target for all sides.

In a compelling, polyphonic structure, the alternating journeys of Ömer and Elif are interspersed with the story of the Kurdish couple, Zelal and Mahmut. Zelal’s pregnancy followed rape – whether by soldiers or rebels – and she is fleeing the logic of “honour” that would see her killed by her brother. Mahmut is a deserting guerrilla whose wounds she nursed, in a novel filled with fugitives seeking sanctuary from violence. He is pressured to take one last job for terrorists who threaten Zelal, since, for the rebels: “Entrance is free, but the exit costs.”

Baydar (who spent 12 years in exile after the 1980 coup, and is an advocate of Kurdish rights and peace) has little time for intellectuals’ complacency. Ömer has spoken out for Kurds on TV, but lapses into peevish “white Turkish” condescension: “All that trouble he faced to protect their rights, being denounced as a traitor, tried under this or that article … none of it is appreciated. They neither trust nor thank you.” Turkey’s east of “harsh accents”, spicy food and bootleg raki is, the novel suggests, as exotic to most Turks as any orient. For Elif, Turks are “Aegean, Mediterranean people”, who “feel closer to Europe”. Yet Turkish prejudices against Kurds are shown up by Scandinavian skinheads’ feelings about Turks. There are other shifts, as Elif comes to see the expectations imposed on her son as a form of violence, and Mahmut’s father rebukes Ömer: “Our children are not our mirrors that they should reflect our values … You haven’t lost your son unless he is actually dead.”

Although Baydar’s compulsion to flag her characters’ shortcomings signals their development too early, the changes of heart are subtly drawn. The translation improves after an unfortunate opening that makes heavy going of Ömer’s writer’s block. That this welcome arrival in English of an important Turkish novelist coincides with a major resurgence in the Kurdish war makes it even more timely.

via The Lost Word by Oya Baydar – review | Books | The Guardian.

December 17, 2011
Video: Suleiman the Magnificent

In the 16th Century an Ottoman Sultan known as the second Solomon ruled half the civilized world. He was known as Süleyman the Magnificent. During his 46-year reign, the Ottoman Empire flourished and witnessed a golden age.

To purchase a DVD of the film, please visit:

https://www.musefilm.org/store/suleyman-the-magnificent

SÜLEYMAN THE MAGNIFICENT

In the 16th Century, an Ottoman Sultan known as the second Solomon ruled half the civilized world. The Turks called him Kanuni, the Lawgiver. To the Europeans, he was known as Süleyman the Magnificent. During his 46-year reign, the Ottoman Empire flourished and witnessed a golden age.

A contemporary of Francis I of France, Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and Henry VIII of England, Süleyman was an audacious military leader, celebrated poet, and enthusiastic patron of art and architecture.

Shot on location in Turkey, and narrated by Ian McKellan, this program explores the breathtaking palaces and mosques of the Ottoman Empire and focuses on the dramatic life and personality of Sultan Süleyman.

1987 / 57 min. / DVD / Color

© 1987 The National Gallery of Art / The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Producers: The Metropolitan Museum of Art / The National Gallery of Art / Suzanne Bauman
Director: Suzanne Bauman
Studios: The Metropolitan Museum of Art / The National Gallery of Art
Executive Producers: The Metropolitan Museum of Art / The National Gallery of Art
Producer: Suzanne Bauman
Director: Suzanne Bauman
Narrator: Ian McKellen

December 17, 2011
Modern Women Artists in Turkey Meet Their Trailblazing Counterparts

Modern Women Artists in Turkey Meet Their Trailblazing Counterparts

By SUSANNE FOWLER

ISTANBUL — “Dream and Reality,” a show at the Istanbul Modern art museum, pairs “nearly forgotten” painters from the Ottoman era with some of the most intriguing artists in Turkey today.

Courtesy of Aydan Murtezaoglu

Perceptions of reality are questioned in ‘‘Untitled, 1999’’ a digital photograph of the Galata area of Istanbul by Aydan Murtezaoglu.

The common thread? All are women.

Levent Calikoglu, chief curator for the Modern, said by e-mail last week that female artists “have a very important, critical and pioneering position in the Turkish art world. One of the objectives of the show was to render this visible.”

Another goal, he said, was to illustrate the social and cultural transformation in Turkey over the past century by reintroducing the older painters’ accomplishments alongside the work of contemporary artists who tackle more modern challenges through newer mediums like video.

In 1913, for example, the Newspaper of the Ottoman Painters’ Association wrote that the profession of painting and womanhood had never “agreed with each other.” It argued further that a deep love of art and the “inextinguishable” desire to paint were inherently male attributes.

But toward the end of the Ottoman Empire, daughters of the wealthy or upper-middle class intellectuals, particularly in Istanbul and especially in non-Muslim families, were encouraged to learn to paint, to speak French and to play the piano, Mr. Calikoglu noted, all in an effort to appear more Westernized.

Even so, being an artist was not encouraged as a career track, since society’s main objective for women was to fill roles as wives and mothers.

“Art for women was considered a mere hobby, a pastime,” he said. “Professionally speaking, men monopolized art, just as they did the word ‘genius.”’

This was not the case only in Turkey, of course. “I don’t think the Ottoman society presented a more constraining environment than that experienced by French Impressionist women artists,” Mr. Calikoglu said. “If we consider the examples of Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot we can realize how Ottoman and French women artists stood up to similar difficulties” inherent in the social roles assigned to them.

In the 1920s, the Turkish Republic continued to send artists to Europe for study and training, as ambassadors of a sort for the new Turkey. According to the “Dreams” exhibit catalog, when the figurative painter Mihri Musfik, who was born in 1886, traveled to the United States, a Turkish newspaper referred to her 1928 visit as “powerful and effective propaganda in America on behalf of Turkey and the Turks.”

Yet life was hardly easy for such trailblazers. Ms. Musfik had run away from her home in Istanbul in her 20s to go to Rome, and later lived in the Montparnasse area of Paris, selling portraits to earn a living. Her niece Hale Asaf became a painter, and worked in Berlin, Munich and Paris, also finding more of an audience abroad than at home. Ms. Musfik died in the 1950s, impoverished, her portraits already fading from the art world’s collective memory.

“Very little information about the individual life stories of this generation of female artists exists,” Mr. Calikoglu wrote in the exhibit catalog, “and there is no clear and accurate information about the number of their works.”

Even for the most accomplished ones like Ms. Musfik, “female artists are mentioned in the texts of male authors of history in one or two sentences at most,” he wrote.

Fatmagul Berktay, another curator of the “Dream” exhibit, wrote that “Patriarchal ideology assigned men the attributes of rationality, civilization and culture, while the female identity was one of irrationality and sentimentality,” right down to a Turkish proverb that says women are “long of hair, short of sense.”

In Turkey as elsewhere, female artists of the era were mainly confined to becoming teachers of painting, if they had careers at all. And a dearth of documentation — like the paper trails built by the catalogs or biographies common for male artists — led to a number of what Mr. Calikoglu termed “dead ends” for the team of curators mounting this anthology of works by 74 women.

More »

A version of this article appeared in print on December 15, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: Modern Women Artists in Turkey Meet Their Trailblazing Counterparts.

via Modern Women Artists in Turkey Meet Their Trailblazing Counterparts – NYTimes.com.

December 15, 2011