24 - 30 May 2001
Issue No.535
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 May 2001 Issue No.535 |
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Battling with the Ewart
David Blake watched favourite pieces rattling through the mincer
Come, Ye sons of Art and The Funeral Sentences, Henry Purcell; Requiem, Gabriel Fauré; Cairo Choral Society, with orchestra and soloists, dir. Larry Catlin; guest artists, Harrison-Wolzien Duo
Quick, let's play it now, the Requiem, before it fades away and all we can do -- as with so much music -- is play yesterday's tunes tomorrow.
Fauré, like some other composers, Kurt Weill for one, is poised over a time crack. The music of Fauré and Weill, its special tonal atmosphere, makes very much present something that has long since gone. The moment itself may have passed but they capture its shadow with a disturbing intensity.
All music has to cope with time passing, with les temps perdues, and it does, though not all music does so in as personal and intimate a manner as Fauré's. For the likes of Fauré music is a form of interior decoration, an embellishment for whispered secrets.
Kurt Weill, Berlin in the 1920s; Fauré, Paris during the long splendid twilight between the wars: the mood is difficult -- when the crack in the golden bowl is visibly an apparent defect how does the artist create a thing lovely beyond despair? Fauré and Weill found a way.
At this concert we concluded with the Fauré Requiem and had Purcell as, of all things, a fill-in, though a fill-in as opener. Between the two came the Harrison-Wolziem duo, with baroque pieces by Corbetta and Moulinié.
The Offering of the Heart, early 15th century tapestry
Fauré was a bright social figure in a resplendent musical Paris that also included Debussy. Their methods of dealing with time differed: Debussy, impassioned and fierce, a Wagner-hater who inadvertently wrote a perfect Wagnerian opera, Pelleas et Melisande. Fauré, less adventurous, made his own truce with the passing of time. It was peaceful, never taking him as far out as Debussy.
Fauré's misty arc of sound and colour was of course swamped by the greater music of Debussy. Fauré's audience, nevertheless, cherished and defended his music against all comers. When he uses the long blond line Fauré's music is elegiac in a Horatian way, though big houses are no longer filled by elegy and reminiscence alone. A tempo, a sound, something a bit vulgar that bequeaths another life is needed.
Fauré in the stately Ewart hall is a particular event, for the hall is stately, and it is not generous to Fauré. But Larry Catlin, tonight's maestro, and the composer, are about to give it a go. As things turned out, the value of this performance lay in its touch and go, come what may handling.
The surface was flaccid and unruffled: Fauré's, after all, is no hurdy-gurdy, sun and flame requiem. The composer carefully avoids the deep and awesome aspirations of the conventional funeral mass. It was not, really, intended for any individual's departure, deals, rather, with our feelings of death without death actually present, and is consequently full of light and quite resplendent at the end with leafy natural wonders of landscape and forest.
The voices used in the production never hurl themselves at destiny's harsh means of removing us from the world. It is not sad to go: I'm glad I came but am not sorry to depart: Fauré must have loved the Roman poet Horace, it shows in all his music, songs and chamber, and especially here, in the final section of the Requiem, In Paradisum.
The voices of Raouf Zaidan and Kristin Gustavson shone brightly enough. Zaidan's sound was fresh, dark, and as usual done with feeling for words and music. Gustavson has the right voice for such music, but what capricious thing made her contribution so pale. The feeling was too restrained: perhaps she did not understand that there are treacherous, shady spaces in Ewart Hall, and they will get you if you do not sing clear.
The Cantique de Jean Racine that opened the Fauré section of the programme was tuneful, rippling and harp-like, showing the beauty the 20 year old composer could extract from a religious background. Fauré's music spans height and distance. It also has grandeur, a French purity of spirit, something that was lacking in this performance.
By the end of the concert the beginning had come to seem an age ago. The concert, perhaps, had offered rather too much, beginning with the last of Purcell's Music to Queen Mary's Birthday Odes and then his Funeral Sentences for the same monarch.
This latter is striking, and seems quite unperturbed by the awful presence of the grim reaper. It is 1694, and every known pestilence, including the plague, has carried off millions of souls. Mary has died from small pox, and agonisingly so. If this piece of music does nothing else with its bright brass, its stately gait and its stern, impersonal warnings of our brief existence on earth, it can make us justly grateful for the advance of modern medicine.
Between Purcell and Fauré came the Harrison-Wolziem Duo. The two dance pieces by Francesco Corbetta were played on a replica baroque guitar by Wolzeim, joined by Harrison, tenor, for Moulinié's "air du cour" for voice and baroque guitar.
Both artists are distinguished, though perhaps slightly underweight for the Ewart Hall spaces. They needed a smaller, more intimate space, preferably hung with tapestries.
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