Russian Garden Gazette

The sunlit grace of late summer, the festivals, the street concerts — all of it makes for a city that feels alive and easy to be in.

As it happens, for the second year running, September 12 at Severance Hall has brought one of the great pianists of our time. This year the gift was Lang Lang.

Subtle, ironic, intelligent and utterly virtuosic, he brought Cleveland a program built with filigree precision — luminous and crystal-clear.

He opened with Mozart: the Rondo in D major on a theme by Johann Christian Bach. In it Mozart joined two generations of the Bach family — the worldly outward grace of the youngest son, and the formidable inner technique of developing an idea that he had learned from the father.

Then Beethoven. Lang Lang played the “Pathétique” as though it had been written yesterday, and after the close of the first movement even our well-mannered audience could barely hold back its applause. The great Thirty-First Sonata, with its formidable closing fugue, brought us back to Bach again.

In the second half he carried us into the transparent, passionate clarity of Spanish music, and finished with Liszt: a wildly contrasted, delicate “Consolation” turning into a Tarantella that spun and enchanted with its mischievous dancing character and impossible virtuosity.

A world artist. A full house. A great celebration.

Polina Osetinskaya played on this same stage.

A year has passed and the memory of that concert is still alive — you find yourself measuring every pianist against Polina, against the extraordinary deliberation of how she built a program. That night the first half belonged to Bach. Fifty minutes of unbroken, unprecedented Bach that stay with you still.

Polina Osetinskaya has a particular relationship with Bach. She is justly regarded as one of the most interesting interpreters of his music on the world stage.

She also has a program of her own — “Baroque Music in Auteur Cinema”: Bach, Handel, Purcell, Rameau, and the films their music appears in. Bergman, Greenaway, Coppola, Tarkovsky. The program was also released as an album on the Melodiya label.

And in that program, the chorale prelude “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,” BWV 639, is the piece tied to Tarkovsky's Solaris.

In Solaris the Bach theme returns again and again — and each time it is tied to a return to what is human, earthly, remembered. Set against the cold scientific study of an alien world.

The film was made from Stanisław Lem's novel, and Lem's birthday falls in September. On the twelfth.

Cleveland audiences are spoiled by great names, and musicians count it an honor to play for Clevelanders — an audience with a reputation for being educated, well-mannered, attentive and very hard to please. And a year after Polina Osetinskaya's concert, a question arises: are we ready, once again, as a community, not only to enjoy the cultural life of a large city, but to make it ourselves?

The Gazette does more than carry cultural and educational news; it also takes up uncomfortable questions. Which is very much in the spirit of Cleveland's oldest debating forum, the City Club of Cleveland, where since 1912 speakers have been handed uncomfortable questions and expected to answer them on the spot, with no preparation at all.

On September 10, at the Mimi Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square, the City Club held its “State of Cuyahoga County” forum. Chris Ronayne, the Cuyahoga County Executive, spoke about the state of the county today and about its immediate future.

The Mimi Ohio Theatre holds a thousand people. The house was full. Mayors, politicians, attorneys, business people and, of course, the press.

And at one point in Chris Ronayne's remarks came a frightening number: there are roughly twice as many homeless children in Cuyahoga County as there were people in that room.

It is worth working out what that means.

When we speak of the homeless, we picture a child on the street or in a shelter. But by the county's own figures, more than 97% of students identified as homeless in Cuyahoga are living “doubled up” — with relatives, with acquaintances, in someone else's apartment. Fewer than two percent are in shelters.

Which means the child walks to school every morning from a grandmother's apartment, or an aunt's. He is washed, dressed and fed. And nobody looking at him would call him homeless.

He has a roof over his head. What he does not have is a permanent home of his own.

Children and their families can drift from one household to another, without stability and without safety.

The most memorable part of the speech was not about numbers.

Ronayne recounted that on his very first day in office, he and his team found a fourteen-year-old girl who had nowhere to go — she had made her way into the county administration building to spend the night somewhere warm.

This year she graduated from high school.

The dignity of these children was one of the central themes of his remarks. And that, it seems, is why he spoke about one person rather than about a system.

Such nights were not isolated. For several years running, the Jane Edna Hunter building on Euclid Avenue — the administrative office of the county's child protection service — served as the last place children taken into county custody were brought when no foster family could be found for them. On one night in June 2023, there were thirteen children there.

Now, on Lorain Avenue, on the site of the former Cleveland Christian Home, Cuyahoga County is completing the HOPE Campus together with The Centers for Families and Children. Some fourteen million dollars invested. Not a shelter, but a place where a child receives medical and psychological care, education and the help of specialists.

All of this is happening in a difficult year: the county is closing its budget at a deficit, departments are being asked to cut spending, and the funding of social services remains contested. But this is not a question for the county administration alone.

On September 12 a full house at Severance Hall applauded Lang Lang.

Two days earlier, in a room holding a thousand people, we were told that there are twice as many children without a home in this county as there were people in that room.

Both of those numbers are about the same city. And about the same week.

Uncomfortable facts? Oh yes. Can we ignore them? By no means.

This is a hard problem, one that calls for a systemic answer and for the attention of business, of community organizations and, of course, of the administration. What is good is that it is not being kept quiet, and that the answer is aimed at bringing dignity into the lives of children who lack the most necessary thing of all — a permanent home.

One invented the future. H. G. Wells — September 21.

Another warned that the future will not necessarily turn out to be the one we picture. Stanisław Lem — September 12.

A third proved mathematically that the road to the stars was possible. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — September 17.

A fourth went there. Gherman Titov — September 11.

At twenty-five he became the second human being in space, and he remains the youngest cosmonaut in history. His flight was not a single orbit but the first full life lived beyond Earth: sleeping, eating, working in weightlessness. Titov proved that a person can live and work out there.

But the most interesting thing is the tension between Tsiolkovsky and Lem.

Tsiolkovsky — movement away from Earth.

Lem — a return to the human being.

And here it is worth saying something honest about the most famous line from Solaris.

“A person needs a person” became famous through Tarkovsky's film, where the words are spoken by Snaut. They are in the screenplay Tarkovsky wrote together with Fridrikh Gorenstein — a writer who was barely published in the Soviet Union.

The thought is in Lem's novel, but in different words: we do not need other worlds, we need a mirror.

The thought belongs to Lem. The words we know by heart belong to the film.

And here one detail is worth adding: Lem himself disliked the film intensely.

He held that Tarkovsky had not filmed Solaris at all. That the novel's whole epistemological side — the reason the book was written — had been stripped out. That the great question of humanity's place in the cosmos had turned into a psychological drama. What angered him most was the ending: in the novel Kelvin stays on the planet with no hope whatever, while the director invented an island, and on the island a little house. Lem could not speak calmly about that house.

About Tarkovsky himself he spoke with exasperated affection: the director reminded him of “a lieutenant out of Turgenev” — charming, impossible to pin down, and incapable of doing anything other than his own way.

So the line the whole Russian-speaking world remembers as Lem's belongs to a film Lem rejected.

Which perhaps only makes it more interesting.

Rasul Gamzatov was born on September 8, 1923. Another September birthday.

In 1965 Gamzatov came to Hiroshima. There he saw the monument to Sadako Sasaki — the girl who folded paper cranes after the atomic bombing, believing that a thousand of them would give her back her life. She did not finish in time.

While he was in Hiroshima, news reached him that his mother had died.

That is how the image was born: everyone who did not come back turns into a white crane. Later it joined with the memory of the war dead, and the song became an aching symbol of remembrance for everyone who has gone.

This September — on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the tragedy of September 11, 2001 — it sounds altogether different.

Here “Cranes” is sung by Yan Frenkel himself, the composer who wrote the music.

We began this issue with a concert.

Then we talked about the city — and about the children in it who have no home of their own.

Then we went past the horizon, after the people who knew how to look beyond the world as it is.

And we came back to a September sky and white cranes.