5 - 11 July 2001
Issue No.541
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 5 - 11 July 2001 Issue No.541 |
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Lovely Verdi gets it right
David Blake wonders how this concert came about at all. It was very wonderful
How did this concert come about? Love, probably.
Florin Totan, tonight's conductor, has love and it certainly showed, plenty of it, in this performance. Loving and hating maestros is quite reasonable. Dualism is part of their character. Troublesome, uncomfortable but it all works out in the musical payoff. And Totan is generous. At times in the music he asks for and gets high splashes of colour. But he's a wide-scope conductor and the small, tiny, softly murmuring sounds that are often called upon he made as well as the splashes. He's happy as a conductor and it is catching.
It was a Romanian night. Two of the pieces played and the conductor himself, Florin Totan, are Romanian. Being an ancient Latin race they have a never-ending variety of space and movement to offer. All this is bound together by subtle tempo and dance rhythms. Totan at times almost dances on the podium. And he certainly swings an expressive hip on occasion. Everything about this performance had distinction and concentration. George Enescu, composer of the first piece, Romanian Rhapsody was an international phenomenon. He became an icon for a revival of the national, colourful style of Romanian music, a Romanian equivalent of Bartok. For a conductor of such energy and grandeur he revels in fine-spun effects. This music grew finer and finer as it went along and by the end was strictly for the birds -- hops, skips and jumps, light, amusing and aerial, music for Shakespeare's Tempest.
Then came Mendelssohn's concerto for two pianos, the second of two such. The pianists were the sisters Ghada and Iman Shaker. At the premiere the composer played it with his sister Fanny. She was a shiner, bright as him, though she seems to have kept to the background of his brief life.
The Shaker sisters have their own ways and are both handsome and brilliant players. Their impression of the work was to take it easy, straight. The music was allowed to speak for itself, which is a pleasant change. But it had more than enough brilliance.
There were no fancy fireworks for the Shakers and it sounded very beautiful. They were secure, humorous and relaxed. The effect of the piece was enhanced by a slight aloofness, increasing its elegance. Their playing was informative. The architecture of the young Mendelssohn was lit by a feeling of letting the notes talk, and they certainly did. There was a touch of hindsight in their work. Here it is, this incredible exotic thing, a bird, perhaps, from an undiscovered country. The bird flies aloft over the top of the music, leaving the lush green jungle far beneath.
There is menace to this brilliant thing. The three movements constantly reminded of the threatening shadows beneath. All the delicious melodies were played in a ghostly format the Shaker sisters brought out repeatedly. They were questioning about the piece and the composer. Mendelssohn had everything: genius, love, richesse and all the answers -- a Mozartian domination of the classical musical format. He had an embarrassment de richesse and the music, well, he died puzzled himself by the resentment it caused. We will never know what would have emerged had he digested the golden spoon.
There is nothing dreamlike about the next offering, Mihaela Sturza, the Getica Symphony, which is about life in Transylvania. This part of Romania has a very ancient patriarchal system of rule which is clear in the three movements -- Roman Legions, The Birth Fairy's Blessing and Rain Invocations, and the primitive repetition of the same barbarous movements. There seems not a tone of love. Totan, the conductor, did a great job throughout, balancing the primitive with something gentler. Even though this music is written by one of Romania's great women composers there was no show of what it may have been like to be a female in all this.
And then, as the final offering of this grandly descriptive and musically probing concert there were Verdi's last post-Falstaff compositions, the Quattro Pezzi Sacri. These four pieces are a musical setting of a final section of his life voyage. Purged, or at least held at bay, is Verdi's pessimism.
Some aspects of Verdi's life as composer, including Falstaff, show his strength in creating smouldering phrases held until the exact moment when they will strike their maximum force and the effect will be one of musical eruption. We know the moment is coming because it is Verdi. It is the life force of Verdi himself, the one that made these four pieces possible at his great age. He aroused Italy and all of Europe with his ideals and miraculous life force. No one ever surpassed him in the theatre for storming confrontations. He lived this particular life in the blaze of love, pride and glory. These remarkable remnants show his great cantilevers of sound. Conductor Totan's vision and the chorus of the a cappella choir showed the great courage needed in facing this heroic music. From high to low the chorus was never found wanting. They sang like larks on the wing and the audience went away knowing that never did the Opera House serve its purpose better. Fortunate we who were present. Like Liszt's piece "Après une lecture de Dante," only Italy's greatest poet was worthy of comparison with the music. And then came the cries of affirmation from the audience ringing through the Opera as the Te Deum, the last holy piece, came to its end.
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