Love helps

By David Blake

Musical memory will have no trouble retaining this concert. It was right, quite perfectly right in every essential. These players came, visited the Small Hall without much ado, little pre-performance assistance and a smallish audience, but the pay-off was remarkable. A performance showing great faith and loving assistance between the players of a work by Chausson new to Cairo, a clear, quite pure revelation of a unique and capriciously difficult work.

By 1899 Chausson was dead. His brief life slotted into a strange, disturbing, unsettled period -- rather like now for a 1998 audience -- fast making for the rubble heaps of war time. When he wrote Concerto in D major Op 21 for violin, piano and string quartet everything was on the slips, with music, as now, way out ahead of the other arts. The fissures and black holes would soon be opening to swallow Europe, but the establishment held fast. When Chausson wrote this work the surface was still proud and the ancien regime still glowed, even if it did not quite glitter. Peace, money, fashion: great salons operated as in the 18th century. Sargent and Boldini painted it.

Out of all of this came Chausson. No cinema, nothing electronic except electric fans for hot Parisian summer nights. The music is like the elegiac poetry of late Rome before it too fell down.

How to play this fugitive thing? These musicians, with tact, imagination and some sort of added piquancy of their own, almost a comment on the period itself, succeeded beyond any hope one might have had.

The newly formed quartet of the Opera House comprises Shamil Rashidov, violin, Walid El-Hamamsy, violin, Alaa Khalil, viola, and Eugene Vysotsky, cello. They formed an ever-moving and flowing, ever-active magic carpet for the two soloists, Pascale Rozier, piano, and Osman El-Mahdy, violin. The soloists enjoyed themselves as contrasting agents in the sound web. He, romantic, eloquent, full of attention and care, she dashing, setting a pace of powerful speed, a turbine driving the softness of the work with a firm hand. Chausson always has his eye on the piano and Rozier never let him down.

This work opens with three large powerful chords from the piano alone, metamorphosing into a form taken up by the rest of the players. As it swoops on its way the structure of the work is clearly seen. It is a strong, powerful, almost symphonic design, but decorated in the softer materials beloved of French composers. Essential to get this accent correct. They did. Paris, France it was on the eve of something momentous, and it trembled with excitement and anticipation. As the concerto approaches the end there is a strong, upward gush of arches of music, glissandi-like. Chopin had six ears for this powerful work. Nothing is neglected. The perversions of tempo, rhythm, line and colour ignore proper evaluation. The players began to put on further speed, seeming to improvise the music out of a lesson Chausson had given them before the performance. Go out and give the audience a mirage of civilisation.

Late things are always breathtaking. Will they make it before the edifice crumbles? Hereabouts it is Proustian, a slip-over into the 20th century. Civilisation is not that soft. Paris survived. Music continues to make marvels and the mansion in the Paris Faubourg where the first performance probably took place still stands.

What came before this unique manifestation of Chausson was Haydn's Quartet Op 77 in G major -- strange choreography of classical music, the ability to change partners during the dance. The Haydn tunes were 20th century ones which the Cairo Opera House sang as if it was Cole Porter.

The Cairo Choral Society with the Akhnaten Chamber Opera and Orchestra; Mozart's Requiem and Vesperae Solennes de Confessore; Marilyn Coriege McCarthy, soprano, Gihan El-Nasser, contralto, Mohamed Abu El-Kheir, tenor, Raouf Zaidan, bass and Ashraf Swailam, bass; Larry P. Catlin, conductor and director; Ewart Hall, American University in Cairo; 29 April

The leap across Wolf's Glen -- from the salon party of Chausson's concertos to the high classic formalism of Mozart's death rites on the other side is some leap across time and idiom. You need some sort of love to sustain you to get to the other side.

The Hapsburg emperor Leopold once warned Mozart that there would be no one to save him from his friends if he, the emperor, died. Mozart, small of form, had huge stature musically, a hard sharp tongue and a mocking manner. Icarus was born and his talent permitted him to be close to the sun, but when the sun set, leaving Mozart alone to the mercy of the great world, he soon died away.

The Requiem had taken him a long time to finish, but finished it was and just in time. Mozart was not quite sure about God. This Requiem begins simply enough, does all the right and expected things, an obeisance here or there to convention and fine funereal manners, and then, no longer able to keep the face that society demanded, Mozart lets fall the mask, and proceeds to die honestly and truthfully.

The majestic edifice he erected is terrifying, blood curdling. He was alone and vulnerable and the work becomes Promethean.

And it is here that Larry Catlin comes in, strangest of maestros. He gives away little in charisma and personality -- nothing in personal contact except bland good manners. He is an untouchable, friendly wall. And then -- he has visions. The opening solemn Vesperae were played as thoroughly ordained and horribly classical prayers, an impenetrable curtain of silver formality.

And then the Requiem. Catlin is good at requiems. Not long ago in this same hall he did a grand and touchingly intimate performance of the Verdi Requiem, which broke all rules of size and style of performance. Warm, candle-lit, loving and tender, it brought tears as well as refuge from the huge forces Verdi unleashes. But it was a requiem for a man, a loved friend of Verdi, and this Catlin revealed. Everything was in the notes.

For Mozart, Catlin took it halfway and, then, quietly, with assiduous faithful steps, he began his vision of the path upwards. It was astounding. Amadeus in his rather worn 18th century brocades disappeared. We have had enough of him in that guise anyway. Instead, he appeared as a Leonardoesque angel of the annunciation.

The ultimate, everyday mystery of death is forbidden to mortals. This Requiem, anyway, is not for a man, not even Mozart. It is a glimpse, devastatingly accurate, of an empire -- the Hapsburg, Europe itself -- a Rococo glimpse shrouded in something without meaning in words.

Verboten -- road closed -- but Leopold's little man and Catlin's art open the gates.