News

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NCMF cycling jerseys are for sale in-store at Riverside Cycle with all proceeds going to the festival. Thank you, Riverside owner Tom Reinke!You can follow David live along the route and watch his avatar ambling along.

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”

Ernest Hemingway

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We  got a late start and left late around 10 am. No rain, hooray! We rode up to Newark and took the PATH train to the World Trade Center (I’m mortally afraid of cycling over high bridges) which sounds simple but was far from it. We’re staying with two very old, very dear friends, Misha Amory and Hsin-Yun Huang, both violists. Mona is outnumbered 3 to 1, the poor thing.

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Getting out of Hopewell was lovely and on roads I know like the back of my hand. It was pretty calm but past Metropark things started to get spicy with traffic and cars. Lots of cars. Lots of very aggressive cars.

At one point. we got screamed by a woman in an enormous SUV furious that we delayed her a few seconds as she tried to exit a Shop ‘n Save. The exquisite subtlety with which she demonstrated nuanced inflections of the F-word was deeply moving. Who knew one word could be used in so many creative ways?

I think we’ll try to avoid Elizabeth, NJ altogether on the next trip.  
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Once we got to New York, things settled a bit. We flew up the west side on the Hudson River path.

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For a day of contrasts – quiet, twisty rural roads with birds singing on the one hand,  dystopian industrial parks surrounding the nation’s most built up urban center on the other – what could be more fitting than a look back at Beethoven’s late masterpiece, his Opus 130 string quartet, which ends with a fugue so massive, so titanic (in German Grosse Fuge), that it was later deemed to require its own publishing number, Opus 133.

 Performed at NCMF 2018 with Miho Saegusa and Yonah Zur (violins), me on viola, and Gabriel Cabezas (cello), Opus 130 asks as much of the audience as its performers - the piece lasts nearly an hour. Beethoven is uniquely qualified to serve as our guide, walking the listener through entire ecosystems of emotion. The Grosse Fuge feels like some great geological event - a continent being subducted, or a comet leading to a mass extinction - as angular and shocking today as it was in 1826.  

But it isn’t the fugue that is the heart of Opus 130 but the deeply personal and introspective slow movement, the Cavatina. As ferocious as the Grosse Fuge is, the Cavatina is poignant and intimate, like overhearing a man’s most personal and private feelings. How Beethoven was able to reconcile such extremes within one great work is one of the wonders of Western music.  

‍David Yang, Artistic Director
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