winter souls

I spent a number of winters in Scandinavia and the USSR back when my bones didn't ache.  For whatever the reason, the nationalist composers of that latitude wrote music that sounds like winter to me if winter can sound like anything.  I don't, for instance, think of Prokofiev (of Peter and the Wolf fame) as a warm weather guy. I more imagine him huddled in some Moscow apartment with inadequate heat, the snow beating on the windows, scarf around the neck and writing the music down with gloves on using near frozen ink.  La Boehme in Moscow.

It seems so odd to find this performance by a teenage kid from the absolute poverty and slums of Venezuela playing this Russian winter music, bedecked in a green spring dress..well it just seems odd. 

It isn't though, if you listen to this remarkable performance.  All the kids there are growing up in the desolation of a country thoroughly out of control and that does very little for their citizens except for the magnificent youth music movement that sees nearly half of a million impoverished kids striving to do this 45 hours a week in addition to school and home and jobs.  

I think, romantically I suspect, of Russian composers in apartments with Lenin and Stalin and cold; societal hardships if you will, and simply not enough that they were writing masterpieces of creativity and kids, decades later and in a simililarly "harsh" setting finding the music both to their liking and to their souls ...