BRITTEN, JARMAN, JAROUSSKY, HANDEL, VIVALDI ANDMANY OTHERS

Jacques COULARDEAU

MY MUSICAL WORLDAS A CONSUMER

My world is multifarious and God bless the child and bless me at the same time. Check these 38reviews and other productions.

It is said that multifariousness is nothing but eclecticism. You can’t imagine what some people maysay. They always grumble they cannot do what they want and at the same time they consider one has to doone thing at a time and a life is just one time so they imagine themselves having the same job in the samebusiness or corporation from birth to death, and yet at times they would like to be able to go to school up to45 and to retire as soon as they get out of school. God bless them then.

You will see that in these musics I am not necessarily always on one line. I added at the end what Iam doing in the musical field as an artist this time and here too I can say I must be multifarious too thoughsince I am only an author I am aiming high and hard. Then the difficulty is for musicians around me, andauthors in general, to accept that multifariousness and that idea that nothing is high enough for me to stopclimbing, or digging actually since high and low is nothing, but a metaphor as Lakoff would say.

Enjoy.

Jacques COULARDEAU

Check:  MY MUSICS (FIRST PART), https://www.academia.edu/1479604/MY_MUSICS_FIRST_PART_MY MUSICS (SECOND PART), https://www.academia.edu/1501444/MY_MUSICS_SECOND_PART_

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TABLE DES MATIÈRESBENJAMIN BRITTEN’S WAR REQUIEM

1. DEREK JARMAN – WAR REQUIEM – 19892. SIMON RATTLE – CITY OF BIRMINGHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA – BENJAMIN BRITTEN –

WAR REQUIEM - 19833. ANDRIS NELSONS – CITY OF BIRMINGHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA – CBSO CHORUS AND

YOUTH CHORUS – BENJAMIN BRITTEN – WAR REQUIEM - 20124. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – CURLEW RIVER5. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – BILLY BUDD6. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER GRIMES

MORE RECENT JAROUSSKY1. Check: DR JACQUES COULARDEAU PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY THE VOICE OF OUR SOUL IN

FULL COMMERCE WITH THE WORLD SUFFERING AND BEAUTY PLEASURE AND DEATH,https://www.academia.edu/1869097/DR_JACQUES_COULARDEAU_PHILIPPE_JAROUSSKY_THE_VOICE_OF_OUR_SOUL_IN_FULL_COMMERCE_WITH_THE_WORLD_SUFFERING_AND_BEAUTY_PLEASURE_AND_DEATH

2. PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY - MAX EMMANUEL CENCIC – DUETTI3. HANDEL – FARAMONDO – MAX EMMANUEL CENCIC (FARAMONDO) – PHILIPPE

JAROUSSKY (ADOLFO) – XAVIER SABATA (GERNANDO) – TERRY WEY (CHILDERICO) –LUGANO RADIO SVIZZERA 2008

4. PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY – THE VOICE – LA VOIX DES RÊVES5. LEONARDO VINCI – ARTASERSE – PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY – MAX EMMANUEL CENCIC –

DANIEL BEHLE (tenor) – FRANCO FAGIOLI – VALER BARNS-SABADUS – YURIY MYNENKO –CONCERTO KÖLN – DIEGO FASOLIS – 2012

6. PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY – FARINELLI – PORPORA – ARIAS – 2013OLDER MUSIC

1. PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA – LA PIRPIRA DE LA ROSA2. VIVALDI – CONCERTI PER FLAUTINO E ARCHI3. JOSEPH HAYDN – DIE SCHÖPFUNG – THE CREATION – RENÉ JACOBS4. ERNST KRENEK – LAMENTATIO JEREMIAE PROPHETAE – 7 9488185392 25. JAN WILLEM DE VRIEND – EVA BUCHMANN – HANDEL – AGRIPPINA6. HANDEL – NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT – JEPHTHA7. JOURNEES MUSICALES D’AUTOMNE DE SOUVIGNY – BIBER – ZEAMI – RESURRECTION -

AUSONIANEWER MUSIC

1. PAAVO JÄRVI – GABRIEL FAYRÉ – REQUIEM & AL2. GEORGE GERSCHWINN – IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-19593. SHORTER VERSION4. LEONARD BERNSTEIN – WEST SIDE STORY5. FARINELLI IL CASTRATO – 19946. TERRY RILEY – KRONOS QUARTET – REQUIEM FOR ADAM – THE PHILOSOPHER’S HAND –

20017. HANZEL AND GRETYL – SCHEISSMESSIAH – 20048. CELESTIAL YOO – GEMS : ALONE, BIG BIG WORLD, GOOD BYE, MARIA, NELLA FANTASIA9. WOLFGANG MITTERER – COLOURED NOISE – BRACHIAL SYMPHONIE FÛR 23 MUSIKER

UND ELECTRONICS – 9-12001028113610. ATA EBTEKAR &THE IRANIAN ORCHESTRA FOR NEW MUSIC – PERFORMING WORKS OF

ALIZERA MASHAYEKHI11. BREL BARBARA – MAURICE BÉJART – EDITIONS JACQUES BREL – www.jacquesbrel.be12. SUB ROSA – AN ANTHOLOGY OF NOISE AND ELECXTRONIC MUSIC – SIXTH A-

CHRONOLOGY – 1957-201013. FANFARAI – RAI CUIVRÉ

PERSONAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE MUSIC WORLD1. Jacques COULARDEAU, Docteur en Cosmologie Générative (Generative Cosmology,

University of Jupiter on Europa), LA CHAISE DIEU – 3015, Les aventures de Loukardill enmusique sucrée (Sweet Music, University of Jupiter on Europa), Illustration Kévin Thorez,Imageur luciférico-obscur, Editions La Dondaine, Juillet 2014

2. Jacques COULARDEAU, ILYA & VANYA (Love Drama, Full and Uncut), Illustrations AnnunzioCOULARDEAU, Editions La Dondaine

3. SYNCHROSOME two, Kévin THOREZ , NADXKA & Jacques COULARDEAU, Paintings onsleeves Caroline GUILLE

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4. SYNCHROSOME II : Ilya and Vanya, Jacques COULARDEAU, NADXKA & Kévin THOREZ,Paintings on sleeves by Caroline GUILLE

5. L’APOCALYPSE SELON SAINT JEAN, Adaptée du Nouveau Testament, JacquesCOULARDEAU, Mise en musique, Kévin THOREZ, Illustrations Annunzio COULARDEAU,Editions La Dondaine

6. L’APOCALYPSE SELON SAINT JEAN, Adaptée du Nouveau Testament, JacquesCOULARDEAU, Mise en musique Kévin THOREZ, Paintings and cover by Caroline GUILLE

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BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S WAR REQUIEMThis musical work is a masterpiece in many ways but it is first of all a universal celebration of the

vanity of all wars and the beauty of all those who die in wars, a beauty that accuses the war mongers of pureabsurdity. It has been often performed since 1962 when Benjamin Britten composed it and conducted for thefirst time for te consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. This requiem has been immortalized by the filmDerek Jarman made of it and I will start with it, though it was performed more than thirty years later, becauseDerek Jarman used the recording of the music conducted by Benjamin Britten himself with his friend as thesoloist tenor, Peter Pears.

DEREK JARMAN – WAR REQUIEM – 1989

This film is of course the meeting of three artists. The poet Wilfred Owen, the composer BenjaminBritten and the film maker Derek Jarman.

Let’s speak of Jarman here. He is perfectly at ease with this project because of many reasons butfirst of all because he is a visual painter and as such he is probably at his best in this film because he has tofollow the music and the words, half of the latter being in Latin and the rest in English. He is not the author ofthis text that is sung to the music of Benjamin Britten. So Jarman must paint the music, paint the words,show us in striking live images the meaning of this oratorio or requiem and the strong trauma this war wasand still is, even today when we are going to “celebrate” the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning ofthe most absurd human butchery, the most meaningless barbaric slaughter that leaves us senseless whenwe look at it.

He shows first of all the tremendous suffering this war was for the men, for each man and for theclusters of men that had to live the war through together, a fighting unit and within that fighting unit somesmaller groups or couples that more or less got bonded by the absurdity of this suffering. The officer that wasliving with the men in the trenches was necessarily the empathetic and supportive “father” of his men, thoughhe was hardly older than them and even at times younger. This bond between men in uncontrollablesuffering, pain and inevitable death becomes superhuman and even divine. The real god for such men is thesmall gestures of help and compassion they find in the men they are sitting next to, they are fighting with noteven against a common enemy, but for the sake of invisible industrialists and politicians.

Derek Jarman is a genius when he deals with suffering.

You can imagine the extremely high level of pictorial power the trenches, the mud, the snow, the ice,the blood, every soiled element of the soldiers’ life can have under the brush of Derek Jarman’s eyes.

But he is also a great color painter and he skillfully alternates total mud in nearly black and white, infact in grayish brown on grayish brown, dark olive green on feldgrau kaki with other scenes out of thetrenches. That muddy gray universe is the universe of the soldiers. Then you have the universe of the nurseswhich is brilliantly red, blood red for sure but also the red of fire, of molten metal, of the famous red poppiesthat have become the memorial of this war every year. That red is of course contrasting with the white andlight blue of the nurses’ uniforms. You can suffer and die in their arms, because they are your mothers at thatmoment, your lovers too, those in whose arms you can abandon yourself to go to eternal sleep.

But then there are two other moments in this war picture that Derek Jarman stresses out. First thereligious sanctification of the war with church altars that are also used to deposit bodies waiting for theirburial, or that even can become the top part of some anonymous and collective tomb for the dead that willnever go back home. The church is the culprit here, or the accomplice, the accessory to a crime, and onepriest puts on his butcher’s apron to terminate one soldier who has been too traumatized by the death of his“friend” in front of his own eyes to be able to go on living. So the priest in his reddish “uniform” of sorts cancut his throat with a razor and then hold and let seep his blood through his fingers, retaining his life for just afew minutes more. Of what? Suffering? Or life? How can such suffering be in any way seen as life? Thepriest is retaining the man alive for him to suffer more, for the audience to understand the suffering such awar can be, but that is our easy interpretation. In the film the priest has an audience: the rich, theindustrialists, the politicians, etc, standing or sitting in elevated alcoves overlooking the altar on which theslaughtering of the soldier is being performed by the priest.

The next element Derek Jarman is great at is painting the rich, the industrialists, the nobles, thepoliticians, the powerful and the vain when looking at the show of this man being killed with a razor by apriest we can imagine Anglican. Jarman is here again a genius at showing the hypocrisy and the barbarity of

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these men who are made up like whores and behaving in their fatness like hogs. He also has some cameosof the “king” that are worth the best images of the Sex Pistols about “God save the Queen it’s a FascistRegime,” which came out as a song – and as a film that I cannot trace anymore – in the late 1970s. And Isaw the film twice, and once with students I had taken to London, some Easter 1978 or 1979.

And yet there is one more phenomenal pictorial and picturesque artistic achievement. When at theend he widens the description of war to what it is today, what it was in his days, what it may always be, hefinds the proper pictures to show the racism of war, and at the same time the racelessness of such events.Wars are probably waged to protect the interests of some and to destroy those who could menace theseinterests, be they religious, political, geographical, economic or whatever, but wars drag in mud and slimeeveryone without any distinction. The black man, half nude, pulled by the legs and dragged in some indistinctgrubby soil is there to remind us that war has no color, war has no soul, war has no god, war only has greedand the extreme love of man for violence and suffering, torture and slow death. In this last sequence of thefilm the images are so strong that we cannot even listen to the music, what’s more to the words. Thewounded soldier in civilian clothing carrying a wreath of red poppies towards us, the audience, between twofiles of soldiers in full uniform carrying bland anonymous crosses like those in a military cemetery is the mostshocking image we retain from the film and that man without any expression n on his face is looking up atwhat or who we cannot know, maybe god, the king or the president of any type that dominate us and orderus to go fight in a war they are waging from the comfort of their shelters.

I could of course speak of the words and the music. But I am speaking here of the film. Let’s say thewords are the absolute denunciation of war, the music is the absolute dirge and tenebrae we can imagineagainst war and yet with the fatality of knowing there will always be some leaders foolish enough to start anew war tomorrow. The big mushroom on Hiroshima is in no way a deterrent for these leaders, if they can doit without being rejected by their electors. Harry Truman did it after all.

SIMON RATTLE – CITY OF BIRMINGHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA – BENJAMINBRITTEN – WAR REQUIEM - 1983

In spite of what some may say, this requiem is a profoundly religious work of music and the fact thatthe traditional Latin text is vastly interspersed with poems by Wilfred Owen does not take the religious natureof the requiem away. In fact it even widens it by making the requiem less liturgical and more reflective,spiritual and universal.

The first element is that these poems bring into the requiem a deep reflection on the nature of theFirst World War, its deeply inhuman nature that made it treat men as “cattle” worthy of a human sacrificemultiplied into millions for the sake of nothing at all except maybe some private ambitions. And yet thesepoems are looking at the horror of this war from the inner point of view of the soldier who fought and diedthere, from his post mortem point of view as if the poem was bringing back to life the men it evokes. Thisgives to the requiem a dimension it generally does not have. It is not the audience who is begging god forpeace and quiet for the dead but it is the dead themselves who are demanding this peace and quiet in deaththat means respect and recollection from the people who are entering this evocation of the dead soldiers, farmore than begging for it.

The music is sort of divided into two registers. The Latin sections are sung by the chorus and theboys accompanied by the big symphonic orchestra and the organ. It is within this big rendering that thesoprano intervenes contrasting with the full orchestra and the two choruses. She has to sing out because themain chorus is more or less merged into the music. The boy chorus is different because for Benjamin Brittenthere is an obvious symbolism in the boys themselves because their male voices are the voices of thechildren that were sent to fight in this WW1. These boys are also symbolical in the whole work of BenjaminBritten who often had boys in his stories and operas. The second register is the poems themselves sung bythe tenor and the baritone with a smaller orchestra that could be considered as a chamber orchestra. Thetenor and the baritone can easily sing over the music and even at one time a capella.

From the very start you have a tremendous beauty created by the sounds of “bells” in the music,bells that are tolling of course but their sound is light, high-pitched and in a way not tolling for death buttolling for life. They are like the call from ahigh, from heaven, from god to the dead men to hurry and comewhere they deserve to be. On the other hand the main instrumental music is somber and dark, deep and attimes lugubrious.

But the music emphasizes the beauty of the poems based on strange metaphors and very resonantalliterations or rhymes. To make “bells” and “shells” rhyme is very powerful since the bells as I have said are

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the call of god and the shells are the call of death. And that is such a merging of the positive and negativesides of things that is the dominant trait of this poetry. When he speaks of the falling night in the trenchesand says “each slow dusk [is] a drawing-down of blinds” we have that soft image that evokes going to sleep,resting in the comfort and warmth of a bed and a bedroom on one hand and the death that eventually andinescapably will come in these trenches sooner or later. In the same way the dead “boys . . . by the river-side” are “mothered by sleep” and this sleep is the sleep of death. Death becomes the mother that takes careof the dead after death, as opposed to the male Death that is reaping the battle fields, harvesting his crop ofbodies and souls.

And that relation with “Death” is also ambiguous and the music amplifies that ambiguity by using therepetition of some words and the wavy advance of the notes that wax and wane in and out. We could thinkthese soldiers, the preys of the war, could and even should hate “Death” and yet they don’t. They play withhim, they entertain with him. He is their master and clown. “Death was never enemy of ours.” And yet at thesame time, in the same poem the text says “when each proud fighter brags He wars on Death – for Life; notmen – for flags.” This text assumes a contradiction since Death is here the opponent at least, the challengerfor sure, if not the enemy, and Life can only be won by defeating Death in a way or another. But this strangecontradiction supports and sustains the idea that the “proud fighter” did not war against “men” and “for flags.”The stake for these “proud fighters” is not the war itself but some kind of living principle that will provide themwith survival if they do not die, or with eternal sleep and rest if they do die.

That’s the meaning of the reference to Abraham, the last character in the Old Testament whoconsidered human sacrifice, worse the sacrifice of his own and only Jewish son, as natural if God asked forit. The son himself might be astonished by the absence of a sacrificial animal but he does not protest whenhe is tied down and strapped to the sacrificial pyre. For him too dying as a “burnt-offering” is natural,acceptable, an honor. But we are not afraid since we know a ram is going to be provided by God, and theintervention of an angel is leading to some extremely soft and aerial, heaven-like even music that is crownedby a perfect line of iambic verse and “iambic music”: “Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.” And yet thisangelic beauty is blown up into pieces by the reality of the old men who govern these countries into a warthat is eternal in the fact it never comes to an end. And this human sacrifice that negates the promise ofAbraham that the world was to be more humane is performed “one by one” and the mass excuse, the excuseof mass murder is not even possible since it is performed one at a time, one after the other, one on one andone by one: the death of one, for one and by one. Death is totally individualized in the very fact that it ismade anonymous by the shells and the Big Berthas of both sides.

This war is thus a sacrilege that goes against any hope and human promise or target. That leads toa totally beast-haunted vision, that of the tigress that inhabits the soldiers who run and do not “break ranks,though nations trek from progress. . . [in] this retreating world into vain citadels that are not walled.” There isno future in this totally open world that leads to no improvement. And that’s when the text becomes divine bygoing a capella:

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I know you in this dark: [short music intervention] forso you frowned yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. [short music intervention] Iparried; but my hands were loath and cold. [short music intervention]”

But this “friendly” meeting of the men from both sides, the killed and his killer is only possible afterthis very killing when the killer joins the killed in death. The final musical burden can come till the end of therequiem, “Let us sleep now.” This conclusion is extremely ambiguous. It may be a call to the audience to letthem sleep now and thus not to disturb them with more rites, rituals, symbolical sacrifices and musicalexecutions. Let bygones be bygones. But it might be the call of these dead men to god to let them rest inpeace in their death, by even forgetting them and not disturbing their sleep with vainglorious references.

This extremely ambiguous feeling I get out of the music is of course personal but also sustained bythe music itself. The music does not require me to take part in this human sacrifice, nor in this human ritualrecollection, nor in the haunting memory of the brutality, bestiality and backward imbecility of the humanspecies. The music takes me beyond this in a heaven-like resting field after the battle field where all thevictims can be brothers, friends and comrades in no arms at last and forever. The music that is so powerfulwhen depicting the fighting becomes so inspiring and enlightening when depicting what comes after the war,unluckily only for the dead.

ANDRIS NELSONS – CITY OF BIRMINGHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA – CBSOCHORUS AND YOUTH CHORUS – BENJAMIN BRITTEN – WAR REQUIEM - 2012

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This recording with the same orchestra as Simon Rattle’s recording in 1983 can be compared to thelatter and it is easy to say the same thing and just add a few remarks on the originality or originalities of thisrecording. But let’s start with these originalities.

The first one is the place and the medium. The place is the Coventry Cathedral and with the videomedium we have a full sight of the old ruins beyond the new cathedral since the choir is ending on a glasswall through which we can see these ruins. This is impressive especially since dusk is coming down little bylittle. It is also very important since this cathedral was also the locale of the first performance of the requiemunder the conducting of Benjamin Britten himself.

The second originality is that the boy chorus has been replaced by a “youth” chorus which isessentially, as far as we can see girls. In the name of politically correct actions this performing and recordingtakes away from the original work an essential element: the symbolical value of the boys for this requiemsince the soldiers of WW1 are called boys by the poet, and for the composer who had a special attachmentto boys in many of his musical works. Does it bring anything? From my point of view no. It does not changethe pitch of the singing, but it gets away from the music two elements: the child-like immaturity of a boychorus and the male harmonics of these boys. A boy chorus does not have the same sound as a girl chorus,maybe the same pitch but not the same color.

In this rendering the soprano seems to be slightly too “powerful” and I mean her voice soundsslightly forced to dominate the chorus and the orchestra. In the previous recording the soprano was a lotlighter and yet quite able to sing over the chorus and the orchestra, which gave her more flexibility.

Do these elements change the value of the musical and poetical discourse? Certainly not at least notbasically. When the grapes are too green we can always find some compensation in a couple of plums evenif you could make cats bark.

In spite of what some may say, this requiem is a profoundly religious work of music and the fact thatthe traditional Latin text is vastly interspersed with poems by Wilfred Owen does not take the religious natureof the requiem away. In fact it even widens it by making the requiem less liturgical and more reflective,spiritual and universal.

The first element is that these poems bring into the requiem a deep reflection on the nature of theFirst World War, its deeply inhuman nature that made it treat men as “cattle” worthy of a human sacrificemultiplied into millions for the sake of nothing at all except maybe some private ambitions. And yet thesepoems are looking at the horror of this war from the inner point of view of the soldier who fought and diedthere, from his post mortem point of view as if the poem was bringing back to life the men it evokes. Thisgives to the requiem a dimension it generally does not have. It is not the audience who is begging god forpeace and quiet for the dead but it is the dead themselves who are demanding this peace and quiet in deaththat means respect and recollection from the people who are entering this evocation of the dead soldiers, farmore than begging for it.

The music is sort of divided into two registers. The Latin sections are sung by the chorus and theboys accompanied by the big symphonic orchestra and the organ. It is within this big rendering that thesoprano intervenes contrasting with the full orchestra and the two choruses. She has to sing out because themain chorus is more or less merged into the music. The boy chorus is different because for Benjamin Brittenthere is an obvious symbolism in the boys themselves because their male voices are the voices of thechildren that were sent to fight in this WW1. These boys are also symbolical in the whole work of BenjaminBritten who often had boys in his stories and operas. The second register is the poems themselves sung bythe tenor and the baritone with a smaller orchestra that could be considered as a chamber orchestra. Thetenor and the baritone can easily sing over the music and even at one time a capella.

From the very start you have a tremendous beauty created by the sounds of “bells” in the music,bells that are tolling of course but their sound is light, high-pitched and in a way not tolling for death buttolling for life. They are like the call from ahigh, from heaven, from god to the dead men to hurry and comewhere they deserve to be. On the other hand the main instrumental music is somber and dark, deep and attimes lugubrious.

But the music emphasizes the beauty of the poems based on strange metaphors and very resonantalliterations or rhymes. To make “bells” and “shells” rhyme is very powerful since the bells as I have said arethe call of god and the shells are the call of death. And that is such a merging of the positive and negativesides of things that is the dominant trait of this poetry. When he speaks of the falling night in the trenches

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and says “each slow dusk [is] a drawing-down of blinds” we have that soft image that evokes going to sleep,resting in the comfort and warmth of a bed and a bedroom on one hand and the death that eventually andinescapably will come in these trenches sooner or later. In the same way the dead “boys . . . by the river-side” are “mothered by sleep” and this sleep is the sleep of death. Death becomes the mother that takes careof the dead after death, as opposed to the male Death that is reaping the battle fields, harvesting his crop ofbodies and souls.

And that relation with “Death” is also ambiguous and the music amplifies that ambiguity by using therepetition of some words and the wavy advance of the notes that wax and wane in and out. We could thinkthese soldiers, the preys of the war, could and even should hate “Death” and yet they don’t. They play withhim, they entertain with him. He is their master and clown. “Death was never enemy of ours.” And yet at thesame time, in the same poem the text says “when each proud fighter brags He wars on Death – for Life; notmen – for flags.” This text assumes a contradiction since Death is here the opponent at least, the challengerfor sure, if not the enemy, and Life can only be won by defeating Death in a way or another. But this strangecontradiction supports and sustains the idea that the “proud fighter” did not war against “men” and “for flags.”The stake for these “proud fighters” is not the war itself but some kind of living principle that will provide themwith survival if they do not die, or with eternal sleep and rest if they do die.

That’s the meaning of the reference to Abraham, the last character in the Old Testament whoconsidered human sacrifice, worse the sacrifice of his own and only Jewish son, as natural if God asked forit. The son himself might be astonished by the absence of a sacrificial animal but he does not protest whenhe is tied down and strapped to the sacrificial pyre. For him too dying as a “burnt-offering” is natural,acceptable, an honor. But we are not afraid since we know a ram is going to be provided by God, and theintervention of an angel is leading to some extremely soft and aerial, heaven-like even music that is crownedby a perfect line of iambic verse and “iambic music”: “Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.” And yet thisangelic beauty is blown up into pieces by the reality of the old men who govern these countries into a warthat is eternal in the fact it never comes to an end. And this human sacrifice that negates the promise ofAbraham that the world was to be more humane is performed “one by one” and the mass excuse, the excuseof mass murder is not even possible since it is performed one at a time, one after the other, one on one andone by one: the death of one, for one and by one. Death is totally individualized in the very fact that it ismade anonymous by the shells and the Big Berthas of both sides.

This war is thus a sacrilege that goes against any hope and human promise or target. That leads toa totally beast-haunted vision, that of the tigress that inhabits the soldiers who run and do not “break ranks,though nations trek from progress. . . [in] this retreating world into vain citadels that are not walled.” There isno future in this totally open world that leads to no improvement. And that’s when the text becomes divine bygoing a capella:

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I know you in this dark: [short music intervention] forso you frowned yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. [short music intervention] Iparried; but my hands were loath and cold. [short music intervention]”

But this “friendly” meeting of the men from both sides, the killed and his killer is only possible afterthis very killing when the killer joins the killed in death. The final musical burden can come till the end of therequiem, “Let us sleep now.” This conclusion is extremely ambiguous. It may be a call to the audience to letthem sleep now and thus not to disturb them with more rites, rituals, symbolical sacrifices and musicalexecutions. Let bygones be bygones. But it might be the call of these dead men to god to let them rest inpeace in their death, by even forgetting them and not disturbing their sleep with vainglorious references.

This extremely ambiguous feeling I get out of the music is of course personal but also sustained bythe music itself. The music does not require me to take part in this human sacrifice, nor in this human ritualrecollection, nor in the haunting memory of the brutality, bestiality and backward imbecility of the humanspecies. The music takes me beyond this in a heaven-like resting field after the battle field where all thevictims can be brothers, friends and comrades in no arms at last and forever. The music that is so powerfulwhen depicting the fighting becomes so inspiring and enlightening when depicting what comes after the war,unluckily only for the dead.

You will be probably surprised with the end since the conductor manages to keep the wholecathedral silent in complete contemplation of the beauty that has been performed and of the dense sufferingthat had been evoked. This is a rather rare moment of epiphany in the musical world where too often theaudience tries to clap in the middle of a piece.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN – CURLEW RIVER

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Brilliant Gregorian beginning in the sonority of a medieval church we can imagine Romanesque. Andwe are transported to an eternal time that has to be out of time.

We are introduced to the abandoned and the weak on the side of the road and God lifting them up,giving them some life back. God is with the dejected and rejected. The Curlew River becomes the dividebetween this world and another more humane world and the Ferryman is the Go-Between that takes you tothe other side of your soul.

A rite is to be performed for the first anniversary of a burial on the other side of the river, a grave thatis a curing place for the sick. The ferryman is going to bring the people to that shrine. The trumpet of theferryman is like the trumpet of Jericho: crossing the river is like bringing down the wall that hides theunknown.

The harp brings the traveler evoking some mermaid, some voyage, from far behind to far ahead,from the remembered to the unknown, then a change occurs and is announced by the music.

The mad woman is introduced as crazy and having made people laugh with her raving. Herdiscourse is incoherent, she asks for passage as well as for passage to be refused to her. The reedy soundat that time shows that uncertainty, more than craziness. She is distracted by the loss of her child she islooking for and she sees and loses at the same time. Her discourse is incongruent and the music plays onthese notes going up and then down as if hesitating to follow one way and only one.

She explains her son was stolen from her by a stranger and taken east. This dramatic event hasmade her mind unclear and fuzzy, which is expressed by the last syllable of the first lines going up and thensystematically turning down. Is there still some hope? It sounds very bleak, a favorite theme with BenjaminBritten: the child enslaved by some adult that is no relative. He approaches the motif through the derangedmother.

Then the ferryman refuses to take her across the Curlew River and demands her to sing in order toentertain people. This rejection of the one who seems warped is surprising and yet common with BenjaminBritten who constantly tries to explore this divide between acceptance and refusal, normal and abnormal.

The madwoman starts speaking in a language that is too sophisticated and she starts more or lessasking birds a question about the one she loves and if he is still alive. At this moment we feel all theexpectancy in her mind, she is both suffering and hoping. The situation then becomes tense becauseeveryone asks the ferryman to take the mad woman till he finally yields since she knows where she wants togo. The superposition and even contrast between voices though they are all men’s voices create a deepdramatic tension.

Strangely enough the dividing river is turned into a connection bringing people closer to one anotherand on the other bank they discover people around a yew. The ferry has brought the west bank people to theeast bank people. The music seems to be alternating between a forward movement and a retreat.

The explanation given by the ferryman about a boy that came along with a foreigner as his master,and that boy being sick while crossing and then unable to go on, was struck, abandoned by his master,taken care of by locals but he died after telling he was the only son of a dead nobleman and had beenkidnapped. He dies and is buried along the way and a yew is planted. People say he is a saint, come, prayand take some earth to cure their sicknesses.

They all start praying a Kyrie Eleison of thankful hope for a sad but miraculous event. The music isthen very light with some sad beauty, the beauty of the miracle and the sadness of the dead boy. The madwoman is weeping. They come to the shore, punctuated by the drums. The traveler and other people offerprayers to the boy, but the ferryman is pushing them, along with the drums and kettles, to make haste.

Then the madwoman realizes the boy must be her son. The music takes the shape of a dirge withlong silences between sad sentences and the singing voices are superimposed without being unified, eachone pulling in a different direction. The woman starts mourning and wants to see her son again. The musicbecomes a complex assemblage of whirls and whorls as if taken in a maelstrom of emotions. But the abbottells her weeping does not help the child whereas a prayer may bring him peace. She yields and gets readyto deliver a prayer, while the toll is ringing on the percussions, persistent and sad.

Then the prayer becomes powerful with the superposition of the Traveler and madwoman’s English

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on the monks’ Latin very Gregorian chant. The alliance of modern music and medieval singing creates a verypowerful atmosphere. The flute supports the madwoman with some rather sharp notes. And a very highpitched voice starts singing as if it were the voice of the child praying in his tomb. Then this spiritual voiceintroduces the spirit himself that comes to the madwoman and transforms her.

The spirit brings the good news that the dead will rise again and the singing becomes very pure on asingle note like a continuo to gives depth to the sky high and spiritual singing. The conclusion can then goback to the Gregorian chant and Latin. The prediction is finished. The sign from God has been registeredand accepted. The progressive building up of the unified medieval chorus really brings the piece to itsfulfillment.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – BILLYBUDD

The re-mastering of the original BBC production of this opera by Benjamin Britten is a real treat withPeter Pears. The story, adapted from Melville by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier is a fascinating tale about theevilness of human justice on a ship under the Acts of War and other regulations having to do with court-martialing anyone for any misdemeanor in war time on a man-of-war. Falsely accused by his superior officer,the foundling and volunteer in the royal service against the French in 1797 Billy Budd is unable to defendhimself with words because he is silenced by a fit of stuttering.

So he hits the accuser and kills him. But that accuser is his superior officer, hence he deservesdeath for hitting his superior officer and committing murder. He has to be hanged twice but they will reduce itto once. The point is not that miscarriage of justice, but the all-male environment that creates tensions andstress. The said superior officer is “down on” Billy Budd, in other words attracted by him sexually, which hecannot accept and hence he decides to have him pay for that unmanly attraction of his.

But Billy Budd is liked by everyone and the captain is himself attracted to that young and handsomefoundling. This time we cannot say the attraction is sexual but the attraction is a deep emotion that makesthe captain like Billy Budd and vice versa Billy Budd like the captain. In an all-male environment all kinds ofdistortions can occur in the relationships among the men in this closed environment that the ship is. Butthat’s not what Benjamin Britten tries to show. He tries to show the dilemma in which the captain was whenthe events took place. He had to stick to what he had seen and avoid what he may have sensed or felt at thetime. He then stuck to his testimony that meant two death penalties.

But in his old age, that captain acknowledges the idea that he could have saved Billy Budd becausehe had the power to pardon the convicted man, and even before he could have testified about the loyalty ofBilly Budd, hence the accidental and provoked assault on Billy Budd’s superior officer. But he didn’t and thushe is to be tried by another court, a divine court in which he believes. But the following episode is the mainmoment of that story. Just before being hanged and released to the deep sea, Billy Budd actually forgivesthe captain and that saves the captain’s soul, but then he could have pardoned on the spot and he did not doit, and that does not save his soul.

That’s the story of a sea episode in which a captain endorses a miscarriage of justice just to keep hisliking for the accused secret in an all-male environment. It is very similar to Peter Grimes, except that inPeter Grimes the young apprentices die due to accidents, and yet a retired captain tells Peter Grimes to goat sea and sink himself in his boat and he does it. Miscarriage of justice again. But it is an opera, so what isso musical in this story. The music and the singing are systematically dramatic and somber like hell.Instruments often run one against the others, creating conflictual points even at times hiatuses and that givesto the words and the images since it is a visual show a tremendous depth.

But there are some moments when this depth becomes a tremendous elevation. Before hisexecution Billy Budd is visited by an older sailor who brings him a final drink and a biscuit. That scene is fullof emotion and Billy Budd concludes his making his peace with the whole world and the injustice he is goingto suffer with a final sentence that reads like that when sung: “That’s all, all, all, and that’s enough, that’senough, that’s enough. This is a marvelous direct allusion to Solomon’s trial or wisdom (due to the tworepetitive triplets in the sentence) but it shows that the captain was the one who was confronted to a decisionthat could be compared to Solomon’s decision: Billy Budd is guilty twice and he is going to die, but this timethe captain did not react like the real mother did, accepting to lose her child for it to live, the captain did notaccept to make public his liking for Billy Budd in order to enable him to live.

And that’s what is wrong with human justice: it is blind, deaf and mute: it does not see, does not hearand does not say the truth. The music that accompanies the gathering of all the men and the arrival of BillyBudd for his execution is a real gem and diamond in the whole opera with rolling drums from time to time,

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with whining horns and mocking flutes that create a fake environment to introduce a fake sham of justice thatis a real execution nevertheless. And the forgiving declaration of Billy Budd after the reading of the sentence“Captain Vere, God Bless you” shines like a dawning sun in that visual scene of an execution you never seeexcept through the eyes and movements of those who look at it.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER GRIMES

An opera like this one is surprising in many ways but this is a special BBC production of 1969 and Iwould like to insist first on the tremendous qualities of this production.

The first element is the setting. It is a complete village square surrounded by wooden houses allraised over the ground with outside staircases to go up to the main doors. These raised houses insist on thedanger the sea represents when a tidal wave or a storm comes up to the coast. All made of wood. That’s abrilliant idea and yet it is entirely unrealistic. It wants to be out of time and set in a past that could make thestory plausible. That village looks like a pioneering settlement in New England in the 18th century, a puritansettlement in a way where everyone is meddling with the business of others because they are locked awayfrom the world, and their only entertainment is to gossip and accuse the one they don’t like of all abominablecrimes.

The second is the house of Peter Grimes, or hut if you prefer. It looks like an upturned ship hull, adream for many seamen who want to live on the earth as if they were on their boats. It is not without recallingsome other uses of that concept, and in a way it reminds me of Moby Dick and of the whale which swallowedJonas. Here the boat is swallowing the seaman even on the earth.

The third positive point is the use of crowds. The chorus is not in anyway set aside or gathered inone place. The chorus singers are moving as they were a real crowd and that gives a good illusion of themass movements of a crowd when they are more or less chasing Peter Grimes.

The fourth point is the very clear distinction between the officials of the village and that crowd. Theymove alone and not along with a mass of people and they are dressed in a slightly different way. The lawyerand mayor for example with his red coat, or Ellen, the widowed school-teacher, with a knitted sweater and abig brooch. There is thus a clear distinction between the important people and the common people, on top ofthe fact that the former are the soloists.

The story is of course what is essential in that opera that is telling us a story. It is a very bleak story.Peter Grimes, a solitary sailor, needs an apprentice and he takes orphans from the workhouse in the nextbut rather distant city. The profession of fisherman is a very difficult profession with many hazards and wecould say it is not a profession for children of let’s say 10. What’s more Peter Grimes seems to be ratherrough and careless. In other words his apprentices seem to die by accident in a rather repetitive way. Helpedby Ellen at first, he is abandoned by her when she discovers that the new apprentice is being brutalized. Oneday when trying to run away from the hostile crowd climbing up to his hut, the new apprentice slips and fallsoff the cliff to his death. Peter Grimes hides away for a couple of days but he has to come back and there aretired captain gives him the only piece of advice that would pacify the village: take tour boat, go out at seaand sink the boat and yourself. And he does it.

The story is depicting a brutal world that is not so much so physically, but I would say socially. Thepeople are meddling with their neighbors’ business all the time, creating tension and stress and pushingpeople to the brink of sanity and causing over-reactions more than anything else. This is perfectly renderedin this production.

But there is of course the music and that is also a great element in the opera. The music neverceases and is always dramatic in its movements up and down in the most logical and yet surprising ways.We cannot really know what is coming and the notes are thus separated one from the others as if the stringsof notes were in fact successions of unlinked notes. This creates in the solos a strange feeling of distance, ofsomething lurking in-between the notes, something menacing us constantly. That tone and atmosphere findsits acme with the choruses. The various chorus-singers sing together but most of the times along lines andpatterns that are crisscrossing one another to give that impression of a hostile crowd no one can stop ordominate. There is one exception to that disorder. It is the early duet of Ellen Orford and Peter Grimes whenthey plan some kind of common future with the new child to come. The sentences are perfectlysuperimposed one onto the other with only the pronouns changing. The contrast between this messy andmeddling crowd as long as Peter Grimes is alive and the sudden total ignorance and forgetfulness once he isgone, meaning dead, is of course striking thanks to that use of the music to build a dangerous and menacingenvironment.

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MORE RECENT JAROUSSKYCheckDR JACQUES COULARDEAU PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY THE VOICE OF OUR SOUL INFULL COMMERCE WITH THE WORLD SUFFERING AND BEAUTY PLEASURE ANDDEATHhttps://www.academia.edu/1869097/DR_JACQUES_COULARDEAU_PHILIPPE_JAROUSSKY_THE_VOICE_OF_OUR_SOUL_IN_FULL_COMMERCE_WITH_THE_WORLD_SUFFERING_AND_BEAUTY_PLEASURE_AND_DEATH

PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY - MAX EMMANUEL CENCIC – DUETTI

In the language of wine, Cencic is “charnu” and Jaroussky is “boisé”. Wine is “boisé” when the newwood of the barrel in which it has aged gives its taste to the wine and I would say the wood used forJaroussky’s vocal barrel was redwood or even maybe sequoia because it erupts into the sky like a spear oflife out of some dark underground lair in the earth. Light, very slender and agile it climbs to heavens in oneleap. On the other side wine is “charnu” when its body has some density and some fleshy elasticity. Thedense vocal flesh of Cencic is like the embodiment of the light slim bones of Jaroussky. They are the twoinseparable parts of the same being, the body and the skeleton without which there is no soul and the soul isthe music. The best wines are those that are “charnu” with a good “boisé” taste behind and throughout.

If we listen to them like that, and no one can ever mix them up even when they sing together, we cansee the music they sing live under our own eyes. One illuminates the other though Cencic is dark and yetbrilliant with the light of the sun reflected into him by Jaroussky who is the selenian moon in the sky thatreflects the light of the sun into Cencic and who takes its splendor from this darkness that you feel in Cencicand surrounds Jaroussky. Cencic is the roots of the tree of life and Jaroussky the fronds of that very sametree of life. And the tree of life is their music.

We can only approach those two countertenors via metaphors because the simple music lovers whodo not like technical words have not yet found the plain words and language with which we may be allowedto speak of these two admirable and adorable singers who are just enjoying their mystery and who don’twant us to mix and meddle with their shared feelings and emotions. So we, the simple music lovers, aresupposed to provide the dress and attire of this evanescent form we can hardly perceive through the imagesit brings to our minds and the empathy that Jaroussky and Cencic are sharing something that go miles andaeons beyond whatever we can imagine.

Jaroussky is the victorious warrior Achilles who is able to hold the whole world mesmerized in front ofhis decision to suspend his support and let us die bloodless just because we do not deserve the privilege ofwinning the war against ugliness and inhumanity. Too bad for us but luckily there is Patroclus. Achilles getshis strength and will find his right mind in the love that unites him to Patroclus. Achilles is the whimsicalinspiration of the moment who follows his guts and emotions whereas Patroclus has a sound sense ofresponsibility that comes from the unfathomable depth of history. And Patroclus sends Achilles back to thebattle field, back to the music. And Achilles wins but launches Patroclus with him to the victory line. TheTrojan Hors of these two is the music they share that invades our ears and ours souls. We are defeated likepuppies in the claws of two eagles.

Jaroussky is the batter on his home plate and Cencic is all the others, and first of all the pitcher,around this god, this king, this mysterious priest of an enigmatic religion, that of baseball. But the batter isnothing without his home plate on which he stands, and all the others are nothing without this home platethey have to reach and touch, and the batter in return is nothing since the value of the homes plate on whichhe stands comes from the need for the other, all the Cencics of the game to reach out and touch that homeplate. How can you cut Jaroussky from Cencic without sterilizing the whole world of each one of them and ofboth, the whole world of us all. Music is a collective game and the batter is little without the pitcher whothrows the ball and the players who have plenty of things to do to score and the audience who is suspendedto the outcome.

Jaroussky is the nibbana the illuminated spirituality worshipper is trying to reach so than when hedies he will finally be able to escape the curse of being reborn again, but Cencic is the eightfold path theilluminated spirituality worshipper has to follow to reach that nibbana. There is no escape from the curse oflife if we don’t have that path of enlightenment and illumination. There is no beauty if Jaroussky and Cencic

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do not sing together and bring us the nibbana of perfect passion and passionate perfection.

But more than anything else Jaroussky is David and Cenci is Jonathan, the son of King Saul whohates David and wants Jonathan his son to kill him. But it all goes wrong because David without Jonathan’slove is dead to the future he carries in himself, and Jonathan without David’s love is dead for God andsalvation since he would become a plain and ordinary murderer executing his father’s orders and everyonewould hate? He prefers obeying Saul’s folly who sends him to fight some Philistines, though he Jonathanknows he will die in that battle, but then he would not have to kill David and be rejected by God and Davidwill eternally love him beyond his own death. That love between Jonathan and Davis is so well rendered byHandel in his opera Saul. And the story comes from far away:

“17:57 And as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, Abner took him, andbrought him before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand.58 And Saul said to him, Whose son art thou, thou young man? And David answered, I amthe son of thy servant Jesse the Bethlehemite.18:1  And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soulof Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.2 And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father's house.3 Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.4 And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, andhis apparel, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.” (1 Samuel 17:57-18:4,Bible, American Standard Version)

To finish with that CD, I have to speak of tracks 22 and 23. In both Jaroussky and Cencic are twoyoung men who are in love with the same woman. Instead of fighting to the death or one treacherously killingthe other, or the other committing suicide out of despair, they come together and cannot find any way out oftheir curse. Since they love the same woman the same way they are forever linked and bound together in alove that is beyond the way they love the woman they love, the love of two souls tied up together in somekind of a fix.

“That noble light / leads my soul / enthralled and bound.Following those footsteps / my loyalty could never / live more contented / or more happily.”(track 22)

Their contentment is in the common love they share and in the common resolution to walk togetheraway from this woman since they are bound together and cannot cut themselves from each other but neitherone nor the other will ever forget that woman and the love they feel for her.

And again:

“Say, god of hearts / if there is any pain equal to mine.” (track 23)

Imagine these two excerpts sung by the two men together in absolute love for that same woman andyou may understand the blending of the two voices, both obviously male in their harmonics, and one alwayson top of the other and yet we never know which one is on top and the other under, and yet you will nevermix them. They are so different in their sameness and so identical in their specificity.

That’s when you understand that it is a crime against artistic humanity to have female sopranosreplace castratos… or countertenors and male sopranos in today’s world. It is true some of the bestconductors do it. Well at least one does not and it is William Christie.

HANDEL – FARAMONDO – MAX EMMANUEL CENCIC (FARAMONDO) – PHILIPPEJAROUSSKY (ADOLFO) – XAVIER SABATA (GERNANDO) – TERRY WEY(CHILDERICO) – LUGANO RADIO SVIZZERA 2008

The first thing to be said on this opera is that it requires four “castrati” normally replaced today by“countertenors” who can be of different pitches and have different ranges. This recording goes back to theoriginal score and thus has four countertenors. This is essential as we are going to see.

There exists only one other recording of this opera by the Brewer Chamber Orchestra directed byRudolph Palmer and actually recorded in 1996. This older recording has only one countertenor, what’s morefor Gernando? the traitor, which is providing this countertenor with a very black outlook and at the same time

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is restricting this countertenor pitch to this very dark role. In other words it replaces the three other “castrati”with three female mezzo-sopranos and sopranos, Faramondo, Adolfo and Childerico, the first two of thesethree being leading parts in the opera. As the opera says so well this has to come from the mind of a“barbaro traditor”, a barbaric traitor, and that barbaric traitor is Rudolph Palmer who more or less kept thetradition and I am sure in the 19th century even Gernando was replaced by a female mezzo-soprano, thoughthere probably was an alternative score, like for Agrippina, with tenors and baritones instead of “castrati”.

The four countertenors are essential for the vocal beauty and balance of the opera. As we are goingto see Faramondo sung by Max Emmanuel Cencic is opposed to Rosimonda who is a mezzo-soprano. Thetwo have very close pitches and their ranges are nearly similar. The closing duet of the second act is ofcourse superbly amplified by this choice. Note the two names Raramondo and Rosimonda use the same“mondo/a” root.

Then Adolfo sung by Philippe Jaroussky is opposed to Clotilde who is a soprano which is perfectsince Jaroussky has the pitch of a soprano and his range is very similar to that of the soprano he isassociated to. The second duet of the opera (and there are only two) that brings together these twocharacters is of course transmuted by the choice.

The third pair is Gernando sung by Xavier Sabata who is associated to Teobaldo, a baritone, andFaramondo, a countertenor as well as Gustavo a bass. Gernando is the traitor in the opera and he isopposed to Faramondo (a slightly lighter and higher countertenor) who is his ally who he betrays with thehelp of Teobaldo (a baritone) who does not seem to understand what he is doing though he knows and hasprivate interest in the bleak situation created by the initial death of Sveno, officially Gustavo’s son, in factTeobaldo’s son. Note Gustavo is a bass. But the killing on the battle field of Sveno by Faramondo is the keyto the opera since it motivates the vengeance, “vendetta,” Gustavo wants and his desire to have Faramondokilled.

The last countertenor is a lot less important since he is impersonating Childerico. He is Terry Wey alight and rather high pitched countertenor. He is the confidant of Rosimonda at first as the son of Teobaldothough he will be revealed to be Gustavo’s son at the end, hence Rosimonda’s brother. There too the twovoices are close.

Why do I insist on these elements? Because the pairs set up by Handel in three cases, two of whichwere replaced by mezzo-sopranos or sopranos by Rudolph Palmer, are essential to the musical and vocalbalance of the opera, and these two are the only two duets of the opera, hence bringing together two singerswho have practically only their body harmonics to differentiate them. That is an extremely important elementand that goes back to Handel’s time when these two “castrati” would have been opposed to two “sopranos”or “divas”. And we are back to the turning point in Handel’s music modern rendition: the two exhibitionsproduced by the Handel House Museum in London in 2006: “Handel and castrati” and in 2008 “Handel andDivas” that have revealed the essential part played by these two types of “prima donnas” in Handel’s timesand the consequences on Handel’s style and operas.

In that perspective, and for the Handel House Museum Ita Marquet writes in 2009: “The exhibitionsHandel and the Castrati (2006) and Handel and the Divas (2008) showcased artists giving interestinginsights into male and female singers with whom he worked. Through portraits, scores, objects and themusic they sang, the exhibitions explored the careers, rivalries, successes, failures and stories of scandalousbehind the scenes behaviour which made castrati and divas the talk of the earlier centuries in London.”(Website: www.handelhouse.org)

This being solved we can consider the opera itself.

The plot is very complicated and at the same time very simple. It’s a war situation with TheCambrians on one side led by their king Gustavo and his general Teobaldo. His elder son Sveno was killedin battle by Faramondo. Gustavo has a daughter Rosimonda and another son Adolfo. Rosimonda has aconfidant Childerico. Gustavo is a bass and Teobaldo a baritone. Adolfo is a countertenor and Rosimonda amezzo-soprano.

On the other side Faramondo, the king of the Franks, is allied to Gernando, the king of theSwabians. Faramondo who is a lot younger than Gustavo, has a sister Clotilde. Faramondo and Gernandoare countertenors and Clotilde is a soprano.

The hazards of war makes Rosimonda the prisoner of Faramondo and Clotilde the prisoner ofGustavo. The two women are desired by two men on the side on which they are held prisoners. Clotilde is

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desired by Adolfo and Gustavo. The choice is simple and what’s more Adolfo is not at all keen on avengingSveno. Rosimonda is loved by Faramondo and Gernando. She is strongly inclined to set her vengeful projector request first and thus will lean towards Gernando when he betrays and he will betray his ally to winRosimonda. But Rosimonda really loves Faramondo. All that happens in the opera then is the story of abetrayal and the final revelation, which reveals another betrayal, that solves the vengeance: Sveno wasTeobaldo’s son and not Gustavo’s, whereas Childerico was not Teobaldo’s son but Gustavo’s. Then sinceone of Gustavo’s sons was not killed by Faramondo, all is well that ends well. Adolfo can have Clotilde andFaramondo can have Rosimonda. The final revelation happens when Gustavo in the execution ring is goingto behead Faramondo who accepted to be beheaded because of the satisfaction that would give toRosimonda who he loves.

Four essential male characters are depicted. Gustavo is an old vengeful fool, even ready to have hisown son Adolfo executed because he freed Clotilde. Adolfo is a charming young man who is so deeply inlove that he is ready to do anything to satisfy the woman he loves, hence to free her from custody, whichmeans betraying his own father. Gernando is shown as a vicious ambitious social climber. He wantsRosimonda at any cost and he betrays his ally Faramondo, gets into a pact with Teobaldo to further thatbetrayal and force Faramondo to surrender to Gustavo, endangering his own life. Strangely enough Gustavowill be forgiven in his shame by Faramondo. And Gernando will be forgiven too by Faramondo but rejectedby everyone. Note Teobaldo dies in battle far away and it is on his death bed that he writes the letter thatreveals his treachery.

The main character is Faramondo. He killed Sveno in battle, hence not personally. There should beno vendetta, no vengeance since it was a regular battle. But Faramondo who loves Rosimonda does notonly want to win her physically, which after all he has done since she is his prisoner, but he wants to win hersentimentally which she refuses because of the vengeance Gustavo has decreed. Faramondo thenjeopardizes his own victory by accepting to submit himself to Gustavo and by accepting Gustavo’s vengefuldecision to behead him because that’s what Rosimonda wants too. That’s foolish, but that’s typical of ayoung sentimental king. His sentiments are stronger than his reason and he is ready to accept anything thatcomes from the woman he loves, including his own death.

That reveals the fact that Rosimonda is just the same type of a fool her own father is. She does notsee her future interest but only her father’s will. She is in other words father-dominated and suffers of father-fixation. On the other hand Clotilde is a lot more reasonable, sensible: she wants Adolfo, Adolfo wants her,so she does not care what happens, not one iota more than Adolfo. That is foolish too since Gustavodecides to have them executed. But on one side the foolishness of vengeance and on the other side thefoolishness of love. The two are not the same at all. Reason is in the motivation not in the end, though wecould say that in both cases the protagonists lose their heads, for vengeance or for love.

But the main point here has to do with the vocal performance. Due to the presence of fourcountertenors the pairs are perfect. Faramondo and Rosimonda are very close in pitch and range. Samething at a slightly higher pitch with Adolfo and Clotilde. Same thing with Childerico and Rosimonda, thoughthis pair is hardly used. The third “pair” is in fact a set of three pairs. Gernando is not contrasted to womenwho have the same range as him, but essentially to three men: Gustavo a bass, Teobaldo a baritone andFaramondo a countertenor who is slightly lighter than him. The three essential countertenors are positionedas follows: Jaroussky at the top with the highest pitch. Cencic in the middle with a slightly deeper pitch andSabata at the bottom with the deepest pitch, though of course the three are countertenors but the scoredifferentiates them with the music. Then their pairing with respectively a soprano, a mezzo-soprano and abass, a baritone and a countertenor is just perfect and it is a crime against Handel and artistic humanity tochange these balancing pairs.

As I said before there are only two duets in the opera, the first one closes the second act: withFaramondo and Rosimonda. The second one is in the second scene of the third act with Adolfo and Clotilde.Both duets are perfect since they express love, and the unity it implies even if it is warped by vengeance inone case, and are extremely close in pitch. Unity in pitch and difference in body harmonics. We have to notethe three acts end with Faramondo. An aria for the first act, a duet for the second act and an aria with chorusfor the third act. That shows how treacherous the replacing of “castrati” by “sopranos is.

As a conclusion, so far it is Jean Claude Malgoire with Agrippina in 2004 and this recording by DiegoFasolis in 2008 that finally restored Handel in his real and original beauty. The ball is in the field of allconductors and opera houses in the world: they have to dare go back to Handel’s original scores, even ifcountertenors are more expensive than sopranos or mezzo-sopranos. At least Rudolph Palmer avoidedusing a 19th century score in which the main castrati would have been replaced by tenors or baritones, like inthe Agrippina of Arnold Östman. We can see that the first exhibition of the Handel House Museum in 2006 is

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central in the dynamic of this revival.

PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY – THE VOICE – LA VOIX DES RÊVES

By principle I do not like collections of independent pieces because they have no real dramatic line,they carry no plot, no suspense, no progression. But how wrong I would be if I kept that principle in this case.

First of all and above all this voice is so beautiful, so clear, so aerial and so amazingly steep in itscrystalline sharpness that each piece is one more moment of enjoyment never distracted or interrupted byany dramatic disturbance. We are so high in our enjoyment we do not need any labyrinthine suspense. Wejust curl ourselves onto this purity, close our eyes and let our senses go along with the flow of this voice.

The question is no longer about what this voice may mean, whether it is the voice of god, heaven orangels because it is none of these. Jaroussky is not god. His world is not heaven. His partners are notangels.

Jaroussky is just a trailblazer who needs no god to brandish his fiery voice, and he takes us into aworld as dense as a forest that would walk on its own roots, like the forest of Macbeth, and be animated withall the elves, gnomes and other doppelgangers of the genie of Aladdin’s lamp. We just have to ask for morebeauty and we get it at once.

But what is that beauty?

It is the beauty of a male voice, so masculine that we are shivering all over with such a real manmade into a real voice and that male voice is so far, so different from any other male voice that we think aftera while we are lost in another level of existence, that we have finally succeeded in our meditation and wehave reached nibbana (nirvana they say in Sanskrit) and we can let ourselves blend into the cosmic energyof the universe and be part of this phenomenal force that gives life to every piece of rock in the whole naturalarchitecture of all the galaxies.

And we follow the Milky Way of this voice that can be joyful like a May dance around a Maypole onMay day in the village green. It can also become as sad and suffering as the dirge of a funeral that wouldbring our very soul down into the grave and would make that soul feel the sand and earth being thrown onour last mental breath, because this voice then becomes breathtaking.

But this voice can also take us down into the deepest chasms full of beasts and violence and we canfeel the heat of the dragon’s flames on our left or the ice-cold electric caress of a medusa in the vast oceanat the foot of the cliff we have just fallen from and that stinging monster like freezes our heart to a stop.

And then the voice suddenly takes off like some albatross searching the vast seas for some oldmariner who could tell us the triumphant arrival of his ship in a harbour that would bring life back to all theother sailors and officers on the vessel, all those who had died during the endless calm it had gone through.

And the albatross would sing the trumpeting announcement of the end of some enchantment and theprobable rebirth to a world of wild growth and succulent enjoyment of eternal bliss.

But then the voice can take us off this satiety into a new state of want, lack, and we will start beggingand running behind it. Please, please let us rest a while. But the voice is deaf to any complaint and whips usback onto the road to the other side of here and even of beyond there, to a world that we did not suspectexisted.

And there new chimes, new chants, new chords will make our feet become impatient to dance butwe have to find the one we want to dance with, otherwise, though there is no way to escape that curse, wewill dance with the devil, with ourselves in some onanistic gavotte or is it a requiem that buries standardhumdrum everyday life under a cataclysm of apocalyptic exquisite suffering.

That’s the voice you have here in your ears. Just listen to it. Let it sway and swing you to and fro inthe cradle of its music.

If you can survive the experience you will just be a new man, a new woman. You will haveexperienced the hydromel of the messianic Jerusalem that we all carry in our brain and ears because it is asong from the blazing heart of the sun. A heart that is beating its tempo in a tongue or language we cannotunderstand any more. But we sure can feel it.

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Halleluiah!

VERSION FRANÇAISE / FRENCH VERSION

Par principe je n’aime pas les morceaux choisis, mais j’aurais tout à fait tort de m’en tenir à ceprincipe dans ce cas-ci car alors je manquerais quelques purs moments de jouissance que rien ne pourraitme donner, si ce n’est cette voix.

Laissez-vous aller à ce voyage, les yeux fermés et l’esprit et l’âme ouvertes à tout ce que cette voixva faire naître dans vos oreilles et sous votre crâne qui sera pris bientôt d’une tempête d’émotionsirrépressibles et incommensurables.

Pas besoin de la distraction d’une intrigue, ni du divertissement de je ne sais quel suspense. Cettevoix est un monde en soi, fait de la soie à la fois fine et grège que vous vous devez simplement de suivredans sa quête sans fin de perfection jamais atteinte.

Cette voix vous entraîne dans un sillon de feu qui marque de ses flammes les arbres de la forêt quidoivent céder la place à la route d’un pèlerinage à la recherche d’une épiphanie existentielle dans unmonde où l’existence n’est même plus une dimension quotidienne.

Et elle sait vous charmer d’un brin de douceur et vous envoûter d’une réverbération de lumière dansl’ombre de quelque recoin rupestre et elle vous transporte soudain dans une clairière éblouissante qui vousaveugle les yeux d’une douleur exquise comme si vous posiez vos rétines sur quelque éruption originelle dequelque univers encore inconnu.

Et cette voix décide que le ciel n’est pas une limite et elle vous soulève, enlève jusqu’au plus hautdes nuages de douce laine et vous vous endormez entre deux étoiles bercé à jamais dans le cocon blancd’un cumulus stratifié en un mille-feuilles de mille surprises.

Mais ne croyez pas que vous allez rester là-haut à jamais. La voix vous fait dévaler les hauteurs etvous précipite dans un gouffre sans fond jusqu’à vous sentir battu des embruns d’un océan qui s’esclaffe ets’éclate de fureur au pied de la falaise d’où vous avez plongé.

Et là l’ombre de ces vagues vous saisit le cœur d’une tristesse que vous ne saviez même pasexister, raison de plus capable de vous remuer les passions vitales avec une telle force. Vous voyezdescendre dans une tombe profonde tous ceux que vous avez jamais aimés comme si le monde était arrivéà sa propre fin. Et vous descendez dans la tombe à votre tour et vous sentez tomber le sable et la terre vousensevelissant au son des accents et des trilles si légères que vous vous en étonnez d’y perdre votre souffle.

Et pourtant au fond de cette tombe l’œil de Caïn brille et la voix retentit qui vous dit combien il estmal de se laisser aller au crime de l’habitude et de la lassitude. Cet œil est là pour vous tirer de votremalaise et vous emmener au-delà des plus distantes galaxies dans une joie si forte que le cœur manquevous en exploser en plein ciel.

L’hydromel de cette messianique Jérusalem apocalyptique est trop intense pour simplementassouvir votre soif. Plus vous dégustez cette voix, plus vous voulez la dévorer. Mais le plus beau dans cesvoyages qu’elle vous fait faire, c’est qu’elle est une voix que vous n’avez aucun mal à identifier. Ni la voix dedieu – qui d’ailleurs est sans voix – ni la voix du paradis – qui est nécessairement artificiel – ni la voix desanges – qui volètent entre les flèches des églises et autour des cloches qui s’en reviennent le jour dePâques d’un long silence lointain.

Rien de tout cela. La voix mâle à en mourir d’extase d’une profondeur si masculine que seuls lessourds peuvent y voir autre chose que l’homme qui ose dire au ciel qu’il n’a pas peur de ses orages, ou dedéclarer à la tempête qu’il n’a pas peur de ses élans dévastateurs. Il est l’homme qui crie au calme morteldes mariniers d’autrefois ou qui défie l’albatros aux longues ailes de le suivre d’un pôle à l’aitre sans jamaisfaire une pose.

C’est une voix de conquête, une voix de la méditation la plus profonde qui mène son homme ou safemme à cet état de nibbana ( certains disent nirvana en sanskrit) qui le ou la fait bondir dans le cosmospour s’unir à son énergie vitale universelle en un appariement capable de faire naître de nouvelles étoiles àla Voie Lactée, une voie qui en reste sans voix de cette pénétration impromptue.

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Alléluia !

LEONARDO VINCI – ARTASERSE – PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY – MAX EMMANUELCENCIC – DANIEL BEHLE – FRANCO FAGIOLI – VALER BARNS-SABADUS – YURIYMYNENKO – CONCERTO KÖLN – DIEGO FASOLIS – 2012

This rare “Dramma per musica”, in other words opera, is admirable in many ways, and it shoulddeserve a long commentary if not a study in depth. I am only going to make a few remarks. I will keep thefact that this recording is an all-male recording for the end.

Note the action takes place in Persia, hence everything is possible since they have very cruel godsover there. We must be surprised by nothing. Let’s first look at the plot. The king of Persia, Serse, isassassinated by Artabano, the commanding officer of the royal guard. This Artabano is plotting the end ofthis dynasty, along with the main general of the army, Megabise. Artabano then tells Serse’s son, Artaserse,that the culprit is his brother Dario. Artaserse orders him to capture Dario and put him to death, which is donevery diligently. Artabano’s plot is in fact to kill Artaserse too but within a military putsch that will bring his ownson, Arbace, to the throne as the liberator of the people and the country. Thus after killing Serse, he hadgiven the bloody sword to his son and told him what he had just done, which deeply perturbed the son.Artabano thinks that his son is going to play the game because he was banned from the palace by Sersebecause he had dared ask for Mandane’s hands, Artaserse’s sister, Serse’s own daughter. To understandthe situation we need to add at this moment that Arbace has a sister, Semira, who is deeply in love withArtaserse and Artaserse is in love with Semira too. But Artabano has negotiated Semira’s marriage withMegabise to get the general’s support in his plot. Finally Artaserse and Arbace are friends and theirfriendship is probably more love than just simple friendship, if there is a difference between the two.

At this point then, the opera is setting one against the other two love relations between four men.Artabano and his son Arbace, filial and fatherly love on one hand. This love implies that the son will neverspeak against his father and that the father will do anything he can to serve his son, even if the son does notagree or approve. On the other hand the love between the two friends Artaserse and Arbace and that lovewill lead Artaserse to trying all he can to save his accused friend Arbace who was found in the palace gardenwith the bloody sword that killed Serse and in a state of total derangement. Artaserse appears here as achildlike character who makes all types of mistakes because he reacts like a child, without thinking. He isreactive and in no way mental. He orders the death of his brother without wondering why his brother wouldhave killed their father. He then orders Artabano to be the judge of his own son, thinking the father wouldshow some clemency or leniency in, judging and sentencing his own son. Later on he will order the death ofArbace on one piece of information, Arbace’s leading the rebellion, just before it is revealed to him thatArbace has just brought the mutinous army down and killed Megabise. Finally he will order the death ofArtabano when Artabano confesses the plot and his guilt, and it will take a lot of energy on Arbace’s side toconvince him to be clement. It is useless to insist on the fact that the childlike clear voice of PhilippeJaroussky fits perfectly in that childish personality.

But the love between Artaserse and Arbace is so deep that we wonder at times if it is not more thanlove or friendship and we feel at times the relation that should exist between the prince, and then king, andthe son of the commander of his royal guard is not inverted. It clearly seems so when we consider the twovoices. Franco Fagioli has a deeper voice than Philippe Jaroussky and the music emphasizes this contrastso that at the end, when Arbace convinces Artaserse to be clement Arbace sounds like the man who issound and able to make sound decisions whereas Artaserse sounds like the child, teenager or young manwho is just able to understand and accept what Arbace tells him. The dominant character is Arbace. So thatis more than love or friendship. That is a relation of political and mental dominance, developed and acceptedby both men. Arbace becomes Artaserse’s counsellor but founded on a deep loving relation between the twomen which enables the King to follow his friend’s advice, or rather decisions. This is all the more true when atthe beginning of the third act Artaserse helps, and in fact orders, Arbace to escape before he be executed,what’s more by his own father. It is this act that will enable the end and the defeat of the rebellion.

Then we can wonder at this point why Artabano is the only tenor among the men, all the others beingcountertenors. The question is particularly important since the opera was created in 1730 in Rome. The tenorhere is two things: first a father who is suffering tremendously when his own plot sets his own son in atremendous danger and when he sees that the failure of the plot might get his son in even greater danger.He has the deeper voice of a tenor and that fits with his being a father, and what’s more a commandingfather, if we can say so, that commands his son around and commands such a level of filial love in his sonthat Arbace will accept to play the game and remain silent when he finally knows the plot and his father’scrime, even when he is accused of this very crime. He commands such a level of authority with his daughter

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Semira that she accepts to marry Megabise though she clearly says she will never love him and Megabiseclearly says that what is important for him is to possess the body named Semira and in no way her love. Thisvision of love as a pure sexual commodity is nearly shocking for a modern audience, though the worse sideis Semira’s submission to her father’s decision that turns her into a sexual sellable valuable and nothing else.And he commands such authority over Megabise that this latter one accepts to support the plot just withSemira as the prize of the venture. Yet in the last act Megabise becomes quite pressing as for the plotbecause Artabano is wavering because of the situation of his own son who has escaped his jail and isannounced as being dead, which determines in him a new motivation that is limited since it is to killArtaserse, the king, before he can kill himself in expiation of his son’s death. That love between a father anda son is explored in such detail and poignancy that we can consider this element as one of the two majorthemes of the opera.

The second is the love between Artaserse and Arbace as we have seen. We could wonder whichone is first and which one is second. But the question is flawed. The two loving relations and the conflictbetween these two loving relations are the heart and core of the opera. And there again the contrastbetween Artabano, a tenor, and his son Arbace, a slightly deep countertenor, is perfect both to set the fatherin his dominant position of authority and to set the son in a challenging position that is as submissive asnecessary and possible, and yet represents the man who is going to fail the plot and kill the main associateof his father. That voice needs to be a countertenor with enough depth to convey this challenging role. Andat the end when Arbace pleads for clemency in the name of his father with Artaserse the contrast of thisslightly deeper voice is perfect with the rather childlike voice of Artaserse. Note that all along the opera whenArbace was expressing his despair of being entangled and imprisoned in a plot he disagreed with andrejected though he had to accept it and support it since it was coming from his father Franco Fagioli had avibrating voice that fitting perfectly that dilemma.

We should add one more situation having to do with this tenor voice. Artabano is the one who isgoing to assist Artaserse in his oath as a king that ends with drinking a cup of wine. He has poisoned thatcup. Artaserse is saved by the announcement of the rebellion outside. Later when Arbace arrives he is goingto swear his innocence to the Gods with the same cup of wine as the sealing ritual, hence drinking the winepoisoned by his own father. That’s the element that will trigger Artabano’s confession to save his son. Youcan see the strategic position of this tenor voice in the first oath ritual, the dark voice of the plotting killer, andthen the same strategic position of the tenor voice interrupting the two countertenors and his own son in thatsecond oath ritual to save his son and confess his crime. That’s dark indeed and this confession does notbring any light into the picture of this damned soul. When all that is understood we can understand the placeof the tenor in such a very dark and yet central position by the fact that we are a long time beforeBeethoven’s redefinition of the tenor as the heroic voice of the opera with Fidelio, a new definition that willtriumph in Italy and Germany with Italian operas by Rossini, Verdi and a few others and with Wagner andlater Richard Strauss.

But then we can wonder about the presence of the two women. They are indispensible to make theopera acceptable in the 18th century. Semira is only some exchangeable goods for her father and his co-plotter. But she is also the one Artaserse loves. Mandane is the one Arbace loves. Are these two lovesnegligible? That would be a mistake to believe so.

These two loves are present at the very beginning of the opera but as soon as Serse’s death isannounced things change very fast and Arbace disappears to be brought back on the stage as the accusedkiller. Then Mandane becomes a fury asking for immediate vengeance without a trial if possible, and whenArbace is sentenced to death by his own father Semira becomes a second fury demanding the recognition ofher brother’s innocence without any proof, just on the basis of logic and respect, on the basis of her owncertainty. The confrontation of the two in the third act is such a show of total sectarianism that we wonder ifthese women were ever in love. They declare their mutual hatred. Mandane sings, in tears for her lost love:

“Ungrateful Semira,I cannot bearSuch hatred, such fury,From your enraged heart.”

And Semira sings in her turn, probably in tears herself though maybe with some diatance:

“Madwoman, what have you done? I thoughtBy expressing my fears I mightLessen them, but I have only increased them.I thought I could soothe my heart

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By offending MandaneBut I have pierced her heart without healing mine.It is not true that our own troublesAre lightened when we seeAnother weeping.For the sight of sorrowOnly prompts usTo further sighing.”

And yet the only duet of the whole opera will be just one scene later the conclusion of theconfrontation of Mandane and Arbace before Arbace leaves the palace as Artaserse has ordered him to do.But the structure is complex since we have first Arbace (3 lines), then Mandane (three lines), six shortexchanges between them and finally the real duet in two parts (two lines + three lines), and then a coda ofthe whole section all over again. It is interesting to see the despair of Arbace and the inflexibility of Mandaneat this crucial moment before Arbace’s departure that will enable him to defeat the rebellion and killMegabise.

“ARBACEYou want me to live, my beloved,But if you deny me your loveYou will cause my death.MANDANEOh God, what bitter sorrow!My blushes should be enough for you;I cannot say more.ARBACEListen to me …MANDANENoARBACEYou are …MANDANEOut of my sight …ARBACEMy love …MANDANELeave me, for pity’s sake.BOTHOh gods,When will your cruelty end?If through such great sorrowI do not die of grief,What is the anguish that can kill?”

I don’t think I have to explain the extreme ambiguity of the final duet since they both sing the samething and for each one of them it has a completely different meaning.

The two women do not close the opera. The end is the final and long exchange between Artaserseand Arbace about the necessity and beauty of clemency that exiles Artabano and this exile saves his life.The love for the women is not even, alluded to, the possible marriages are not an issue then. Then we canconclude the two women were there only to prop up, emphasize and amplify the two loving relations betweenArtaserse and Arbace on one hand and Arbace and Artabano on the other hand, the former by settingMandane on Artaserse’s side and Semira on Arbace’s side, and the latter by setting Semira on Arbace’s sideas Artabano’s daughter..

Then we can easily see that the choice of having two countertenors instead of two sopranos is quitejustified since it gets the sexual element out of the picture since after all this sexual aspect is absolutelyminor and secondary. Even in the voices the feminine presence is eliminated. Then the various one-on-oneof these two women with male characters are not sexual but purely abstract, mental, political, or ethical. Nolove is wasted in that opera at all, no love whatsoever, meaning of course love between a man and a womanand a possible marriage and sexual encounter. The only marriage that is envisaged ends up with Arbacekilling Megabise, and even so that marriage of Meagbise and Semira was certainly not a love affair.

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Some may say that gives a gay dimension to this opera and they will be wrong since at no time isthere any mention of such a gay sexual encounter between Artaserse and Arbace. We will of courseconsider the relation between Arbace and Artabano has nothing incestuous in it. In fact we are dealing with asociety in which men have the upper hand in all matters and women are nothing but an everyday commoditythat has to be in conformity and agreement with everyday demands and requirements. So if they are acommodity in society they cannot be in anyway put forward. They maybe should be sent back to the haremor the gynaecium.

And what about the music?

Rich recitatives and very powerful arias and one admirable duet. These arias express a tremendouspalette of emotions, feelings, passions, mental states, etc. It is in line with the best music of the 18th centurythough I would say it does not have the brilliance of Handel nor the virtuosity of Vivaldi but it is quite pleasantand engaging for a drama that is absolutely bleak though it ends in the best Mozartian way though withoutthe love that Mozart was so keen on singing and expressing everywhere and all the time, I mean the sexuallove between men and women. The main asset of this opera is definitely the phenomenal use ofcountertenors who must have been countertenors and castrati at the time of creation.

PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY – FARINELLI – PORPORA – ARIAS – 2013

Read the booklet and you will know a lot about Porpora and Farinelli, and especially the end of bothat the same time, Farinelli as a castrato when he stopped singing, and Porpora as a composer when he losthis castrato. There is no explanation about that breach of professional collaboration, a real breakdown forPorpora who ended in misery and the full disappearance from the public eye for Farinelli.

But one thing is sure: the famous film Farinelli has to be remade, at least for its music sound tracksince there is a voice now that can sing like Farinelli without voice processing or whatever they used at thetime.

Now a recording of separate arias is frustrating because you only have thin slices of the variousoperas but you do not get the dramatic dimension, the real charm of the opera and all that is happening onthe stage. So you are reduced to listening to the voice and trying to enjoy it in its beauty scattered all overthe recording studio. For Philippe Jaroussky it is a challenge to follow Farinelli and Porpora in their tracks butwhen are we going to get their operas?

And the voice is so charming that we forget all that dubitative blah-blah, and along with it the blacksheep of criticism, critique and critics, and we dive into the beauty of this voice that has no limit in theconquest of our mental virtual sky, and that conquest is so real we are mesmerized, hypnotized, charmedand we are ready to lie down like Cleopatra and let the snake do its work. In two arias we are beyondreason, beyond control, beyond the real world that has just vanished like a dark cloud dissolved in the brightsunshine of this mystery, and mystery it is in its old Renaissance meaning. You have to be initiated toappreciate it. But don’t be afraid, the initiation is simple: once again, lie down and open the breast of yourmind to the snake that comes up from this treasure chest of this voice and let the snake get warm in yourbrain and try to enjoy the slow comfort that comes from its cool warmth.

I absolutely love all the tracks but I have to choose one or two, maybe more, that are more strikingthan the others and that sent me in such an acme of pleasure that I nearly fainted, they would have saidswooned in older times, pass me the salts, please.

The third track is one of that kind, with that power. The wild conqueror is just running after us, up ourfortified slopes and over our crenellated defenses and there he is jumping out of his wild box into the sereneyard of our private garden and he just stamps and tramples with full force our roses and we just stand, kneel,lie there and ask for more of this astounding vocal power. You beg for pity and you pray it may go on forever. Beauty is at times the most brutal thing that we can hardly bear and yet we want to let it penetrate usso deep that we lose our mind, loosen all our canons and we become popish sinners and with no astutenesslike Pope Francis. Just plain vocal and auditory sinners who like being dragged into that forceful sin that isenjoying a voice that beats us about in its tournament and we are no equal to refuse or resist that chasingknight who will, it’s sure, transpierce us with his spear and then put us on the grill for more exquisiteenjoyment of the beauty of his voice.

The fourth track is a duet with Cecilia Bartoli and we wonder who is the soprano and who is thecountertenor though we know who is the man and who is the woman, the woman and its trembling voice as ifshe was awed and frightened by the man in front of her. And they come to a perfect moment when the two

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voices are merging and merged together and yet it is a miracle because you can make the differencebetween the two, especially since at that moment they are singing a cappella.

The fifth track is long and of a completely different style. We are amazed by and at the double tonewe have in this aria. Aci is thanking Jove for the goddess he gave him. We expect awe and joy, happinessand humility, and we get all that probably but yet this spirit is completely over-drowned in some tone that thesinging alone, and the music then, carries through with such a force that we are wondering if this is not alamentation, a dirge. At least in the first part of the aria. To be grateful to Jove the human’s subservience hasto be expressed with some sorrowful tone that maybe regrets the conquest of the goddess was not exactlyromantic, just divine, by divine decision; There is then in Aci something like an attempt to recapture himself.And move away from the lamentation, but that is short lived when the lamentation comes back, when itbecomes a contemplation that has to make that poor human who receives a goddess as his love partnerabsolutely impotent and unable to perform what Jove authorizes him to perform. No shiny knight in a goldentournament, just a plain teenager meeting his first sexual partner, like begging for the divine inspiration thatcould make him up to the task. The humility this singing contains is more than just humble love. It is a dirge,as if it regretted and repented the fact he is going to lose, maybe waste, his human virginity on a goddess hedesires, he wants, he longs for, he fantasizes and yet who will leave him emasculated on the bed. And yetthe last note is a total submission to the pleasure of this encounter, joy in the instant no matter what maycome afterwards: just take this instant of orgasm as what it is supposed to be a gift from the gods that willonly last an instant but will leave your mind and body so fully satisfied that then the future, life or death,torture or the stake does not matter any more. That’s what love is and it may last forever though the instantof pleasure will only last a minute.

The seventh track is just another aria in which ambiguous and contradictory motivations areexpressed by the music and the voice. Though Phoebus is requiring the sacrifice of a virgin on the altar toblow the Greek fleet to Troy, how can he, or rather Achilles, accept the sacrifice of this beautiful Iphigenia hemust be in love with? And both the composer and the singer excel in that ambiguous dual allegiance: theduty to go on that punitive war against Troy and at the same time the gallant dedication to protect and lovethe beautiful Iphigenia who will nevertheless be sacrificed for the first duty to be fulfilled. That’s wherePhilippe Jaroussky is best because he can use his voice with such subtle nuances in his expressive feelingsthat we just wonder at times if that singer is not the devil himself capable of fascinating and capturing all ourattention and mental energy into total submission to the sad sorrow of this chant, the beautiful exquisitesuffering of this hymn to life in and beyond death.

The eleventh and last track starts as a dirge and it is dedicated to love. Orpheus is in love, is singinghis love and yet he is in mourning, mourning his love and that last piece is a prodigy of vocal expertise andgenial inspiration. Philippe Jaroussky is for me one of the rare singers, if not the only singer who is able touse his voice to express joy and sadness together, pleasure and suffering as the two sides of one singlecoin. And that duplicity, duality of his singing makes him the doppelganger of my most intimate desires andimpulses. How can a man be so divided in his unity, unified in his division, so much able to merge togetherthe antagonistic dimension of life and death?

To compose such ambiguous arias for Farinelli, Porpora must have been in love with this voice, andprobably man, that and who could bring together in the same notes, in the same sequences, in the samemeasures both the accents and the tempos of sorrow and joy, of sadness and happiness. This is so rare, soamazing that we remain totally frozen in front of such depth and multiple facets of life and death so wellcrisscrossed together that we just wonder if love is not hate, if hate is not desire, if desire is not destructive ofthe love we started with and that remains discarded in a way into impotence and sterility, fantasy andvirtuality. And yet every musical sentence, every vocal cadenza is full of the belief and even faith that love isthe most human value, I would like to say the human-est value.

Philippe Jaroussky makes the voice that some see as the voice of angels, or of God, or of the HolyVirgin, or even of the Devil and Satan, Philippe Jaroussky makes this voice, his voice so human that we areready to die for it, I mean die with pleasure, die from enjoyment, die for the promise of an orgasmiccommunion with supernatural beauty. I only felt that emotion with the first soprano I ever listened to: TeresaStich-Randall singing some cantata by Johan Sebastian Bach.

OLDER MUSIC

PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA – LA PURPURA DE LA ROSA

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Passons sur l’ouverture à la gloire du roi Philippe V d’Espagne. Cela se faisait chez les Bourbons, deFrance ou d’Espagne ou d’ailleurs, mais ensuite cet opéra n’est pas un opéra mais une vaste lamentationavec quelques petits accents musicaux guerriers ou dansants mais rien de bien remarquable dans le rendudes voix.

D’abord oser faire chanter Adonis et Mars par des soprano et mezzo-soprano est une provocationdans notre monde d’aujourd’hui. Adonis le symbole même de l’amour masculin tué, émasculé par Vénusl’égoïste amante prête à tout pour prendre ce pauvre garçon. En fille il est pitoyable. Et Mars, le guerrier, leguerroyeur, le martial par définition en mezzo-soprano est comme un général en jupe. Cela n’a pas encoreété vu sur cette planète et si une générale apparaissait elle ne serait pas en jupe, du moins pas pour lecombat, sauf l’avant combat d’alcôve.

Mais le pire reste la musique. Des phrases musicales qui se répètent inlassablement etinterminablement, d’ailleurs on pourrait enlever le inter- de ce dernier adverbe et on aurait l’impression delassitude et d’ennui que je ressens après vingt minutes de cette musique minimaliste répétitive. Et on y vad’un tour de plus de dominante et de tonique, avec un dièse ou un bémol ici et là comme une larme de soleilet un pleur de lune dans un tout plus que lassant, on pourrait même se mêler les pédales et parler dedominique (le patron fondateur de l’inquisition et de sa torture) et de tonnante (bien que cela ne tonne passouvent).

Comme pièce d’archive c’est peut-être quelque chose que l’on doit garder, Mais comme une œuvrebaroque, elle ne l’est que par sa période. Le premier CD se termine donc sur l’ennui absolu devantl’hypocrite Vénus qui a bien sûr le dernier mot. Shakespeare avait bien mieux rendu l’horreur de cette femmeéternelle, donc vieille comme le monde et qui saute sur tous les petits jeunes garçons qu’elle voit, lesdépucelle et ensuite prend la fuite en laissant les cadavres derrière elle.

Heureusement qu’il y a un intermède au début du deuxième CD qui a la facture rotative généralemais sur des accents sud-américains plus crédibles. Cela dure 2 minutes 33.

Et puis on repart sur la sinistre histoire d’amour de la Vénus qui est bien plus une violeuse de grandschemins et de petits garçons. C’était un temps où la Vénus était vue comme une mégère, une diablesse,une grande méchante louve qui attend les petits chaperons rouges qui sont des garçons au fond des boisquand ils vont porter du tabac et une pipe à leur grand papa grabataire. Mais ici on chante cela comme del’amour.

Mais le dragon en mezzo-soprano est un miracle de transformation de l’horreur en gentille petite fille.On y perd toute la profondeur du dragon de Médée, du dragon de Siegfried, et de tous les autres dragons denos légendes millénaires. On a un dragon d’opérette en tutu qui fait des pointes vocales. Et le Mars enmezzo-soprano se prend de trembler devant ce terrifiant dragon en mezzo-soprano. C’est alors qu’onintroduit les grandes catégories de la conscience humaine, crainte, soupçon, envie, colère. Le pauvre Marspassé à la moulinette du précieux Tendre de nos Précieuses Ridicules.

Il ne reste plus qu’à attendre la désillusion qui vient quand on réalise la profondeur du dilemme dudésir : « Malheur à celui qui, sous l’empire de la jalousie, veut fuir l’Amour en l’empêchant de fuir. » On doitdire que c’est cornélien, du genre Tartuffe, « Cachez ce sein que je ne saurais voir » ou quelque chosed’approchant. Vraiment « plus l’effet se recule plus le plaisir augmente » et je dois dire que l’effet se reculepas mal dans ce dilemme de dragueur/dragueuse de grand boulevard. Je ne peux m’empêcher de penser àdes tableaux moralistes de Greuze ou des pièces de théâtre éthiquement mélodramatiques de Rousseau.

Et en plus on finit sur une Vénus conquérante et un Adonis vaincu qui montent au ciel sous la formed’étoiles, du moins pour Adonis (en fait un astéroïde (no 2101, diamètre 2 km) de type Apollo (familled’astéroïdes dont l’orbite coupe celle de la Terre). Adonis a été découvert par E Delporte en 1936. En 1937,cet astéroïde s’est approché à 2 millions de km de la Terre. On a ensuite perdu sa trace. En 1977, après quel’on ait recalculé son orbite, il a été à nouveau repéré.), car Vénus est une planète comme Mars. Et dire quecette mégère de grand chemin pédophile qui plus est va régner pour toujours au-dessus de nos têtes. Il estvrai qu’en ce temps là on se mariait à douze ans, et qu’au 18ème siècle l’Angleterre améliora un peu lasituation en remontant la barre inférieure à 13 ans. Quel progrès.

Ici on a oublié Shakespeare qui condamne Vénus comme étant une voleuse et violeuse d’enfants.J’en pleure encore. La jalousie de Mars c’est du mélodrame, à part que mars aurait voulu faire d’Adonis sonPatrocle personnel.

VIVALDI – CONCERTI PER FLAUTINO E ARCHI

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Les concertos pour flûte et autres compositions pour flûte et instruments de la même famille ontsouvent été produits pour les jeunes filles que Vivaldi éduquait musicalement dans les couvents fémininspour lesquels il travaillait en tant que prêtre, le célèbre prêtre roux. Sa musique n’a plus de secret pourpersonne car elle est plus connue que les premiers titres du hit parade pop. Mais comme celle de Mozartque tout le monde chantonne, elle est ignorée dans la genèse de sa beauté.

La flûte, et autres instruments du genre, est un instrument solo qui ne peut que surprendre dans unconcerto avec orchestre. C’est une voix légère, aigue et dansant souvent très haut dans les nuages alorsque l’orchestre, même les cordes parfois, est resté au sol, pris par la glèbe. Cela donne à ces flutes etflutiaux une force et une vigueur inouïes alors même cependant qu’elles ne peuvent pas faire preuve del’amplitude et de la virtuosité d’un violon par exemple et plus tard d’un piano.

Vivaldi utilise cela pour en faire un avantage sans égal. La flûte peut ainsi égrainer à l’envie deslignes mélodiques douces ou brusques mais toujours claires et bien définies, note à note, montante oudescendante. Tout alors est dans la clarté de ces sons et dans la rythmique de l’attaque plus encore quedes sons eux-mêmes et là Vivaldi va utiliser l’espièglerie de ses élèves religieuses pour affiner encore lapâte de cette musique et la rendre aussi légère que des cheveux d’ange ou du pain azyme.

Ne nous y trompons pas Vivaldi utilise toujours ses solistes de cette façon. Le violon permet desmitraillages de notes qui peuvent sauter d’un ou deux octaves s’il le faut. La voix d’un alto est une voix sanscommune mesure ni chez les hommes, trop haute, ni chez les femmes, trop mâle (sauf à qui n’entend rien àces choses-là), et c’est de cela qu’il joue. Et l’orchestre n’est pas là pour briller, l’orchestre est là pour fairebriller avec son propre éclat. Plus l’orchestre est éclatant de beauté et de retenue plus l’instrument ou la voixsolo sont brillants de beauté et d’exubérance vitale.

Enfin la dernière chose qu’il faut dire c’est que Vivaldi était un contemplatif du monde, de la nature,des hommes et des animaux et qu’il savait à merveille captiver leurs rythmes, leurs tonalités, leurscadences, leurs essences et chaque être a plusieurs essences cachées, en plus de son essence publique,mise en exergue. L’instrument solo donne généralement cette essence visuellement visible et l’orchestredonne toutes les harmoniques cachées de cette essence et ainsi reconstruit la myriade inépuisable dechaque être et chaque moment de la vie.

C’est donc un merveilleux moment de musique et il va s’en dire que les interprètes de ce CD sont àla hauteur, vraiment à la hauteur de cette musique et qu’ils sont capables de la hausser aux plus hautsdegrés de la voûte céleste. Je ne regrette qu’une chose, que cet ensemble Matheus ne soit pas enregistrésous la voûte de l’Abbatiale de La chaise Dieu où je les ai si souvent entendus. La sonorité certes d’uneéglise, mais d’une simple église, ne donne pas la profondeur aérienne que La Chaise Dieu donne aux angesqui viennent jouer dans son chœur. Ici nous avons davantage le chœur des anges descendus sur terre pourcélébrer la naissance de l’enfant Jésus dans une étable. Combien j’aurais préféré les anges chantantl’Ascension en paradis. Mais ce n’est qu’un regret qui me donne un sanglot ? Disons que Jean-ChristopheSpinosi me console avec la chaleur d’un cœur de musicen, c’est tout dire.

JOSEPH HAYDN – DIE SCHÖPFUNG – THE CREATION – RENÉ JACOBS

Before speaking of the CDs I would like to say a few words on the DVD.

The DVD is interesting to see the real conditions in which this recording was actually rehearsed andrecorded. We lose the dresses and the suits and we can see the music in itself without a tuxedo. We canalso see how the conductor works with the whole artistic and recording team and that is beneficial to ourunderstanding of the music. But I would like first to consider some ideas defended by René Jacobs in thisDVD. Then I will come back to the music.

Some assertions are slightly easy, like the fact that the emperor Joseph II was a free mason, likeHaydn and Mozart. It gives too much value to this element and it draws a conclusion that is totally false, thatthey did not believe in God though some did believe in a superior order. The idea that Haydn was not acreationist because of that is anachronistic. In the 18th century not to believe in God, or a Superior Being ofany nature, would have been absolutely absurd. Voltaire was not an atheist. The resentment was not againstGod or even religion but against the church, any church that spread superstition. All the heroes of the leastclerical or even religion-inspired French philosophers of the 18th century believe and are in awe in front of alarger dimension that is supposed to humble man.

Voltaire’s Candide and his garden does not forget the wider picture of the world. Diderot’s Jacques

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the Fatalist believes everything is written up there on a big scroll. And even Emile is forced to learn byspending a freezing night in a room whose window panes he has broken to learn the respect of materialthings in their finality and to learn about the vast rules of nature. And Rousseau’s mythical “social contract” isjust one of these superior dimensions you cannot negate but it is in no way a contract negotiated withinsociety by social partners. It is a superior order without which there would be no humanity. It is in other wordscarried by the species called man, not in its genes but in its weaker (weakest?) position in the cosmic order.To survive and expand you need a “social contract”.

If you state that freemasons did not believe in God, then the American freemasons behind theDeclaration of Independence or the US Constitution are pretty hypocrites since they state God created theworld in the very first sentence. It is René Jacobs’ opinion for sure that Haydn and freemasons did notbelieve in God. But that is far from being proved. And as for clerical orders and organizations the freemasonorganization is quite clerical in many ways, hierarchical, secret, even secretive and underground, with all itmay mean eventually as for negating democracy and free information.

But we are not really interested in that aspect of the composers of the 18th century. This recording isthe recording of The Creation, directly inspired from the first book of Genesis, in fact it stops when Adam andEve are released from the hands of God into the Garden of Eden to enjoy life, and enjoy they do. The onlything I may say on the rewriting of this Genesis story is that it is stopped before any damage is done to thiscreation by the snake and his fruit (a fig by the way not an apple). This is not explained by any religiousaffiliation to Protestantism nor Catholicism. It is the story of the creation not the story of its destruction. So ithas to stop before the “apple”. How could Haydn have stopped it after the “apple”? That would havecompletely destroyed the dramatic dimension of the work. René Jacobs is wrongly inspired about thatelement.

And now what about the music?

1- Haydn cannot be compared to Handel (in spite once again of what rené Jacobs says) in spite ofthe fact that he brought the English libretto of this oratorio from London when he visited it. The choice ofvoices is not in Handel’s line but in Bach’s line: three voices, a bass for two parts, a tenor for one part, asoprano for two parts. Handel would have differentiated the angels from Adam and Eve and would probablyhave kept the soprano for Eve and would have used a countertenor (a castrato) for Adam, bringing the twovoices close to each other in pitch and range but different in body harmonics, what some call timbre. Thethree angels would have been better rendered as bass, baritone and tenor, even if baritone did not exist atthe time. He could have used a deeper bass, a lighter bass and a tenor.

2- This oratorio is not intended to be produced as a stage show with any setting and operaticdressing. It is a pure concert piece to be only produced as such. Handel composed a lot of Biblical operasthat some call oratorios and his pure oratorios are designed at least in Handel’s mind, as operas, as visualcreations. That’s what is missing most in this oratorio: the visual elements. It is only words and it cannot beset on stage, even today with all our special effects.

3- The music is not Handel’s. It is Haydn’s, and I will say “Thanks God.” Haydn’s music is not simpleror even comparable to Handel’s. It is different. The voices are not contrasted: they are associated and theyare not contrasted to the instruments. The object of the voices is to lead to unifying choruses and theinstruments when they play solo try to illustrate the words, the images of the text. They try to enable us tohear what the text is speaking of, like the flutes for the nightingales in CD1 track16. Someone said on theDVD this music is cartoon music. This is right if you take the instruments as illustrating the words, but it is toolimited. The music in itself, the instruments in themselves are a language and Haydn is a symphonistprobably first of all and his music is telling a story. Here he just makes the music tell the same story as thetext. It is typical when he opens the oratorio with a vision of chaos in C minor and when God decreed there tobe light and light appears the C minor becomes C major. The music is telling the story. So at times we wouldlike more melody and harmony, more development of a melodious line in the arias that are not always verydifferent from the recitatives that are at times slightly too flourished for recitatives though the arias have littlefioritura. That’s probably why the music has not become popular, because of the absence of such ear-capturing melodies like the Alleluia of Handel’s Messiah or Mozart’s Kleine Nacht Musik.

4- The end of the second part is surprising. God is declared to be faceless and this is tragic for allliving creatures just after the creation is finished:

“But as to them thy face is hid,With sudden terror they are struck.Thou tak’st their breath away;

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They vanish into dust.”

And that God is capricious:

“Thou lett’st thy breath go forth again,And life with vigour fresh returns.Revived earth unfoldsNew force and new delights.”

The creation is under the constant decision – or caprice – of God to hold his breath. That vision isdangerous in many ways since the creation is thus enslaved and under constant blackmail or menace.“Behave or I hold my breath.” If the original sin is not included in the tale since the “apple” is not, it is a lotworse in fact since any respiratory problem on God’s side would mean the end of the world. I hope that godhas a good doctor.

5- Finally it is the third part that is also very surprising. Adam is the master, the leader and Eve isnothing but the one who is supposed to give him pleasure and be obedient. But Eve introduces somethingelse and that is surprising. God created Eve for her to provide Adam with three things: “Liebe, Glück undWonne” (CD1, track 24, “love, joy and bliss”) It becomes in Eve’s mouth on CD2 track 3:

“Und dir gehorchen bringtMir Freude, Glück und Ruhm.”

I translate it in my own words because the translation in the booklet is erroneous: “and to obey youbrings me joy, happiness and glory” [reputation, maybe]. The interesting element is that ternary structure thatEve is supposed to bring Adam in the first quotation and then what Adam brings her, an other trinity. Only thecentral element is identical, love is no longer present and “Glück und Wonne” are echoed in “”Freude,” but“Ruhm” introduces a completely different dimension: something that is no longer an inner satisfaction but anouter satisfaction: the way people look at her, hence a reputation. The disappearance of “love” on the side ofwhat Adam provides Eve with is in a way counterbalanced by the request, demand, rule that Eve issupposed to obey Adam. If that is love, I don’t want to have anything to do with this love. The vision of Eve isabsolutely reduced to a second position, a submissive position in the 18th century (a puritan protestantapproach) and it would be considered at least sexist today.

In other words if she eats the “apple” later on it will be because she disobeyed her man. RenéJacobs was saying the original sin was absent because it was not catholic-inspired and that the Catholics inVienna did not like the oratorio because of that. I am afraid that the vision of the woman in this oratorio istypical of the puritan protestant vision of sexes. Eve is a pleasure toy who finds her satisfaction in the loveand pleasure she provides Adam with and finds her place in the obedience to Adam she sticks to all the time.Well so far. Luckily she will disobey and that will set some action in this particularly calm world.

ERNST KRENEK – LAMENTATIO JEREMIAE PROPHETAE – 7 9488185392 2

These Lamentations were very popular in baroque times but they go back to the Middle Ages. Theywere eclipsed slightly in France by the Tenebrae under Louis XIV, the Sun King. But they came back andthen disappeared completely in the 19th century to reappear in modern times. The general idea is a longlamentation for the three days of the passion of Christ, Holy Thursday, Holy Friday and Holy Saturday,without including Holy Sunday, Easter Sunday. It is a lamentation on the death of Christ first of all, on hiscruel death from the arrest to the entombment.

But the object of these lamentations is Jerusalem that is denying itself in that passion, Jerusalem thecity of God that becomes the city of evil. By centring the lamentation on the city the direct accusation of theJews is avoided. By also showing how God was generous and did not destroy the city for this crime isemphasizing one essential quality of the new God, his forgiveness, his power to forgive, as opposed to thepunishing God of the Old Testament. But these Lamentations that carried a heavy dose of anti-Semitism inthe Middle Ages, at the time of banning Jews from most cities and countries, though they were also directedat the individual Christians who were considered as responsible for these events and as having tocompensate with their faith and penitence.

But these Lamentations were less directly popular when the anti-Jewish stance regressed, at least inFrance and in England, and even less because of the spread of Protestantism. They were replaced by directevocation of the suffering of Christ as being the concrete side of our suffering and as being the model of thesuffering we have to assume to be saved in a way or another in Catholic France. The baroque approach in

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France was centred on the darkness of death and in Germany it developed into fully constructed evocationsof the passion directly from the Gospels. Only Johann Sebastian Bach apparently composed four passionson the basis of the four Gospels, though one seems to be difficult to find in its recorded form and is veryrarely performed if ever (Luke’s) and another is not performed very often (Mark).

John and Matthew seem to be the most popular today. In modern times the meaning is completelydifferent. Jerusalem is no longer what it used to be. First the Romans performed the punishment it deserved,but later on it fell in the hands of the Moslems and now it is divided. It surely no longer is the sacred and onlyJewish place it used to be and the Temple has not been rebuilt and in its place a mosque was erected. TheLamentation Wall (or Wall of Lamentations) is also a reality for most Jews and even Christians as thesurviving piece of the original wall of the city, the wall over which James, the elder brother of Jesus wasthrown before being stoned to death by the high priests of the Temple. This gives a new value to theseLamentations: they represent the deep sorrow and sadness that is ours, if not grief, after the Shoah and aftersixty odd years of strife and struggle if not war in Palestine.

Yes Jerusalem is still the seat of an enormous guilt of the western world and God has not spared it inhistory: destruction, invasions, colonisations, and still no solution in view in the near future. Now what aboutthis rendering? It starts with some old Gregorian sound and then moves little by little to a mostly moderntreatment. It is of course basically vocal, as it should be. Polyphonic in nature it finds in this rendition acompletely new dimension because the modern architecture of the music gives a very introspective andpain-centred musical discourse. We feel the pain of our age in this music, the pain of the killing, murderingand incinerating of millions of people among more tens of millions who died to impose the end of thatgenocide and the road to freedom.

I can’t help hearing the four freedom speech behind and Roosevelt’s very peaceful, balanced and yetpowerful tone in the same crucial period that is far from being finished: the emergence of a humanity able tosolve its problems with no violence. It is this general tone I feel at every moment of the score and thepolyphony systematically uses contrasts between and among the voices and builds some unifying momentsthat contrast in their turn with the discordance of other moments. The future is necessarily the attempt tobalance oxymoronic trends and forces. There is no future for humanity if that balance is not sought andfound and guaranteed; We still have a long way to go and these Lamentations are and will be pertinent, andfor a very long period of time, maybe forever if strife is a fundamental dimension of mankind.

Check: OPERAS (ONE) MORE WILL COME LATER,https://www.academia.edu/1481770/OPERAS_ONE_MORE_WILL_COME_LATER

JAN WILLEM DE VRIEND – EVA BUCHMANN – HANDEL – AGRIPPINA

This production of Agrippina is brilliant though it must be discussed on some details, which are nodetails actually, as we are going to see.

The music is definitely at its best. It is Handel in its flexibility, mobility, vivacity and diversity. Eachinstrument has its own soul and the souls can join, they don’t get drowned in some mushy soup ofhomogenizing unity. What’s more the conductor is very careful to make the instruments play with the voicesin such a creative way that at times we have real duets and even echoing duets from one voice to oneinstrument. That game is even brought to the absolute acme when Narciso in his last aria goes down into thepit, sits at the harpsichord and accompany himself on it. That’s brilliant, especially since the alto voice of thesinger is a perfect echo of the pinched slightly bitter notes of the harpsichord.

If the music captured the perfection of Handel’s baroque spirit and mind, the acting is also very good.The singers are never abandoned to their own singing. They are always doing something and that somethinghas a meaning. Lesbo is the one who moves the furniture around in a set that is a big scaffoldingconstruction in front of what could be the entrance of a palace. The scaffolding has several levels and ateach level there are platforms with beds or sofas. This set is a very good idea since that gives verticality toan opera that otherwise might have been too flat, too horizontal. That also gives the possibility to have someactors at all levels and the lights then designate the one who is concerned by the scene, and the others canmove in the shade of the rest of the stage

As for action, dressing and undressing is quite common all along, with Nerone at the beginning andthen Claudio several times with Poppea, and Ottone with Poppea in this turn in an explicit scene that will justget rid of the direct benediction by Claudio at the end. They also have some kind of banquet when Claudioaccuses Ottone of treachery and the banquet starts with a toast from Claudio to turn sour right afterwards

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with the accusation and the rejection of Ottone by everyone. The final scene, when Claudio finally yields toAgrippina after teasing her a last time with Ottone on the throne, he is playing dice or some game withPallante and Narciso and sharing the money of the innings.

But though they have given Narciso’s part back to a male alto, they did not go as far as going back tothe original score. Nerone as a tenor appears as an older young man who is infatuated with his mother to thepoint of some incestuous attachment if not relation amounting to intercourse. He sounds and looks like apervert and not what he is supposed to be a voracious, covetous, gluttonous, rapacious teenager just afterpuberty. Then the going back to his mummy to complain about Poppea who pushed him away is absurd andAgrippina’s thrashing and chastising is impossible since the man is a man and not a child. At this moment hedeserves a good spanking but he does not have the age and the voice any longer that would justify it. Thenhis conversion to power and his rejection of Poppea and love is artificial and superficial. That conversionshould make him vicious for future times and it does not because of that voice and age.

In the same way Ottone should be a male alto, in Handel’s tradition, because he is the military hero,but also in Handel’s artistic vision, because he is also a younger man who is awkward and shy with womenand who is timid with the emperor. Then his suffering after being rejected as a traitor makes him with hisbaritone voice and his young physique look like some kind of romantic Werther whereas he should look like abaroque hero suffering and enjoying his suffering, lamenting and enjoying even relishing in his lamenting.From baroque exquisite suffering to romantic wailing and whining, there is some kind of a treacherousdeviation. And the last scene of undressing and love with Poppea then looks artificial. In many ways Ottoneis one of these young courtiers who are trying to capture the beautiful young lady over there and who has tosuffer to deserve her, though at times that young courtier might yield to the flattery of the king or duke orwhoever who suggests power for him, in exchange of the beautiful eyes of the girl he has seduced. That isdefinitely baroque and not romantic.

But then the show itself is so beautiful that we let that treacherous twist go and enjoy the rest,including the romantic rewriting and its contradictions.

On the other hand the DVD is of course filmed. It remains an opera and the mental reflectivedistance necessary for proper reception is always present and we will regret a lot the fact that there are noItalian subtitles, which forces us either to follow on a printed libretto or to know or guess the text. This isawkward and definitely a shortcoming, and a very long shortcoming.

The shooting is quite volatile and flexible and that is good. The images are not inert and immobile,far from it. The angles are varied and the cameras are multiple. Fine. There are many close-ups and evenvery close close-ups and that is good to capture the expression of the faces and the feelings of thecharacters. Details are essential, though in the real theatre they evade you except if you have binoculars.Full stage pictures are quite systematically used to give a large picture of what is happening, especially sincethe stage is used vertically as well as horizontally and there are some extensions in or over the pit. In thefamous scene between Poppea and Claudio with Ottone and Nerone hidden away, this production putsOttone under the bed, which is very Hollywoodian, and Nerone in the pit, which is very expressive of thenuisance he is being to Poppea at this moment: in the pit with snakes of course.

The camera at the end gives a frontal image of Agrippina up at the top of the scaffolding and Neronedown on the stage sitting on the throne. This is symbolical and it needs to be given as a full picture and thenthe image moves from the top to the bottom and back to the top and then the full picture. This means a lotabout the relation between Agrippina and Nerone. Unluckily it cannot reinforce the fact that when Neronewas thrashed by his mother he should have become a vicious angry young man who was probably alreadyconcocting in his mind the assassination of this domineering mother, since the scene leads us tocontemplating a perverse rather young man who is infatuated with his mother to some kid of incestuousattachment. In the ending of this production he appears too much infatuated with his mother and drowning inhis enjoyment of the throne. He is a satiated young man not the vicious per vers mind we know he is going tobecome, and one can only become what one is already potentially.

The last thing I would like to say is that this production uses cutting shifts from one angle to another,from one camera to another and from one distance to another too much. This production does not usezooming in and out enough and when it uses a zooming in movement it is maybe too slow, and there is nozooming out afterwards. What’s more travelling does not seem to be an action the camera or cameras knowhow to do on this stage. And that’s somewhat displeasing at times. The constant jumping from one shortsequence from a particular angle, distance or camera to another short sequence from a different angle,distance and camera, and by short I mean at times very, very short, is not the best for an opera like this one.It is a typical TV or cinema technique, but here we are filming an opera for a DVD. The reception is neither

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that of a film in a movie theatre nor that of a TV show or series on a small screen in a drawing room. Thatuse of cameras, angles and distances gives dynamism to the image and the film, but it slices the opera uptoo much. An opera needs some continuity in the filming of a scene or an aria, at least some stability ofvision, and zooming in and out and traveling is a lot better provided it is neither too fast nor too slow.

A very good production that might have been difficult to watch in the opera house itself but it isrendered very well on the DVD in spite of some artistic choices at the level of voices and filming that maybeare drawbacks.

HANDEL – NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT – JEPHTHA

This is a Biblical oratorio that refers to a very sorry episode of the Old Testament. In just a fewwords, Jephtha goes to war in the name of Israel to liberate some area. He vows before leaving that he willput to death the first person who salutes him if he comes back triumphant. He so vows to put to death amember of his own community to thank his god for his victory, not an enemy like in Titus Andronicus. Amember of his own community. Barbaric. And triumphant he is and his own daughter salutes him first. Theplot sickens. But God in his great omnipotence saves the life of the daughter provided she dedicates herwhole life and virginity to God himself, killing all possible love, particularly with her promised husband Hamor.He is a god of justice, maybe, of authority for sure, of obedience definitely, but of love certainly not.

But Handel transforms this hateful story into a marvellous opera thanks to his music and the singing.I defy you to find any distance between n him and the plot that he takes the way it comes without hintinganything negative about that god. So let’s speak of the music.

The voices first. The mother Storgé is a mezzo-soprano and that’s the perfect choice for her role.She is a permanent lamenter. She laments when the war is announced. She laments when the daughter ispromised to a sacrifice. She event laments when the daughter is saved from death though not from virginity.She is a lamenting and weeping mother and a mezzo-soprano is just the perfect range for a woman to singthat role.

The alto is Hamor and not Jephtha and we understand why very fast. He is a perfect lover going tothe war, wailing slightly and rejoicing with the promised fame, especially since his promised wife Iphis isexhilarated by the war and the excitement. He is also the perfect messenger who brings the news of thevictory, ignorant he is of the danger that message conveys. Mercury could not have been better. He is alsothe perfect second grade scapegoat to pay for the dumbness of his father-in-law-to-be and who will never be.He can even rejoice in the survival of his paramour and the fact that he will become the son of her father.That’s a good payment for his life of celibacy. And he can even sound joyful when he greets his for evervirginal ex-promised wife.

The fact that the father is a tenor takes him completely out of the hero position and he is not a hero,far from it. He is not even able to win a battle within the help of god.

Iphis on CD 3 track 15 reaches a tip top summit in singing: she sings her joy at being saved and atbeing able to offer her life, instead of sacrificing it, to her god. Her song of praise and joy little by little turnsinto a tenebrae and she ends up singing her own requiem, the requiem she deserves since she is going tobe buried alive in the temple.

We could analyze every moment of each one of these voices to show how perfect they are for theplot and events. But let’s shift to the music itself.

There is no surprise to have Handel’s style all along. But his style is so creative that the wholeoratorio is starred and spangled with myriads of small pleasurable gems from beginning to end. Let me giveyou a few.

Storgé on CD 1 track 5 is the perfect bird of bad omen, announcing the worst catastrophe though thewar is not even started. She is able to express a level of dread and fright unimaginable and yet an absolutesubmissive attitude in front of that hellish situation, and she only knows about the war.

Hamor on CD 2 track 1 is reporting the victorious battle as if it were some innocent game in theplayground of his school. It is so naïve, so childish in tone and in terms with angels fluttering over the battlefield so that we can only admire the innocence of this poor man who is going to be deprived of his promisedwife by the silliest vow possible from a grown man, his father-in-law-to-be. He is some kind of Mercury withthe voice of Cupid, or is it Adonis before he starts being chased into dying under the tusks of a boar?

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The symphony on CD 2 track 8 is the perfect shift from the battle field to the city where Iphis iswaiting for her father with a choir of virgins. It is just dramatic enough, maybe ironical in a way, since weknow about the vow. The next symphony on CD 3 track 4 bringing the angel on the stage to commute Iphisdeath penalty into virginal life imprisonment is also sublimely beautiful in that situation that should makepeople laugh but that is dramatic in a way because god is not better than Jephtha: a man can make amistake but he will not be punished, his daughter and her paramour will. That’s divine justice. The symphonyis of course a beautiful piece to make this shift from drama one to drama two.

The instruments are systematically used as if they were voices and vice versa. But I would like tonote the use of the flute on CD 2 track 4 when Iphis is rejoicing after the news of the victory of her father. Iwould also note the harpsichord on CD 2 track 10 when Jephtha realizes the big mistake he has committed,a mistake that amounts to a crime since an innocent human being is going to be sacrificed to pay for hispromise. The harpsichord is the best cuckoo bird for the furious self-satisfied and submissive anger at noone in particular except maybe a little bit himself: even old monkeys can learn new tricks after all.

We have to say a few words on the language. Handel is one of the best English composers as forusing the stressed nature of the language to support his music and to play the music. He is able to cut up aword just after the stressed syllable, have vocalizes on this stressed vowel and then go back a couple ofwords and go through. What’s more his text is extremely well written. On CD 2 tracck 7 the chorus has first adirect parallel symmetrical line and then a chiastic inverted antagonistic symmetrical line: “In glory high, inmight serene, / He sees, moves all, unmov’d, unseen.” And on CD 2 again, track 12 he uses a ternary iambicparallel construction: “so fair, so chaste, so good”. When you add the music these linguistic structuresbecome diamonds in your ears.

An absolute must and we regret all the operas and oratorios by Handel are not … yet? … available.

JOURNEES MUSICALES D’AUTOMNE DE SOUVIGNY – BIBER – ZEAMI –RESURRECTION - AUSONIA

Ce festival est un festival de petite taille dans un site exceptionnel, l’abbatiale de Souvigny dansl’Allier. Cette abbatiale est très belle avec un orgue Clicquot. Ce concert est cependant particulièrementintéressant car il permet d’entendre la suite de sonates du Rosaire de Biber avec deux performances« Hagotomo » de Zeami par des acteurs du théâtre Nô. La rencontre est fort instructive.

L’ouverture avec le « Lamento sopra la dolorosa perdita » de J.J. Froberger introduit un clavecin sitotalement retenu, suspendu, distendu dans le temps de l’église qu’il en glisse beaucoup plus triste encorequ’on ne pourrait l’espérer, comme désespérant les accords moins sombres qui résonnent parfois.

La Sonate XI « Résurrection » de H.I.F. Biber poursuit sur une basse continue très longue, profonde,sombre et même sinistre parfois et le violon tente de s’élever par salves successives. Quand le violonerejoint la basse et ajoute ses sanglots tristes et même amers le violon essaie de s’envoler de cette gangue,de cette tombe. Entre alors un acteur Nô aux mouvements lents et tournants dans un kimono blanc, lemasque visiblement posé sur le visage sans le dissimuler totalement, dans un faisceau de lumière.

La première lamentation « Hagoromo » de Zeami est à dents forcées, gutturale même si elle ouvreune porte à une remontée vers un ciel encore bien lointain.

J.J. Froberger et sa « Lamentation sur ce que j’ay été volé » nous offre un clavecin qui égrène sespleurs de façon plus grinçante et comme se perdant à mi-chemin vers le ciel, à mi-chemin au-dessus du sol.

Avec la Sonate XII « Ascension » de H.I.F. Biber le violon se fait léger, mélodieux même, presquejoyeux d’être sur la route ascendante, soutenu et porté par la basse continue. Envoûtant dans le deuxièmemouvement, charmeur, il nous invite à la route que nous prenons d’un bon pas mesuré mais sûr. Plus vive lamusique introduit le danseur Nô à qui une servante apporte un plateau rituel.

La « Fantasia » de J.S. Bach est une légère et entraînante montée à un chemin escarpé à lamontagne sacrée du pèlerin fervent et recueilli pendant que l’acteur Nô est revêtu du vaste kimono rouge.

Dans la Sonate XIII « Pentecôte » de H. I. F. Biber le violon devient, je dirai enfin, plus bohémien,plus larmoyant, plus insistant et l’acteur Nô monte progressivement vers les musiciens en vastesmouvements lents et déroulés. On entend le potentiel quasi tzigane du violon qui hésite ou résiste à cette

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coloration qui serait pourtant la bienvenue pour accompagner l’acteur Nô qui se met à tourner à petits pas etvastes mouvements amples de son kimono et de son éventail.

La deuxième lamentation « Hagoromo » de Zeami, plutôt un chant à la gloire du souverain, estcependant distante, génératrice de distance, comme hors d’atteinte de ses sonorités qui résonnent pournous d’un autre monde rêche et dur et sort se perdre dans les bas-côtés et à la voûte de l’église.

H.I.F. Biber et sa sonate XIV « Assomption » nous engage dans un chant plus que de bonheur et dejoie. On a une sorte de satisfaction repue à la tâche enfin remplie, au message enfin complet et entendu. LaVierge ainsi peut monter au ciel quand le cycle de la vie de son fils est complet. Sa joie est aussi la nôtre carelle est notre ambassadrice dans notre vie de pêcheur et se fera notre défenseur. La joie s’intensifie peu àpeu. Le clavecin est la jubilation et l’orgue la profondeur de la certitude d’être sur le chemin du salutconvoité.

La « Fantasia » de J.J. Froberger égrène ses notes l’une après l’autre comme aux doigts d’unapprenti qui se découvre en marchant savoir aller d’un bon pas. Il en devient un divertissement.

H.I.F. Biber conclut avec sa sonate XV « Couronnement de la Vierge » qui est le triomphe du ritecatholique dans sa joie, sa beauté et sa bonté. La Vierge est la clé de voûte de la foi catholique, celle enlaquelle la sérénité seule existe et en qui seule on peut la chercher.

Le jeu ininterrompu de la musique en une sorte de mosaïque architecturale qui ne trouve sa beautéque dans l’ensemble achevé et qui exige de nous le recueillement est ici probablement le trait le plusmarquant soutenu par l’acteur Nô et sa participation qui donne à l’ensemble un habillage comme cousu mainet donc parfait dans son artisanat artistique.

NEWER MUSIC

PAAVO JÄRVI – GABRIEL FAYRÉ – REQUIEM & AL

Ce Requiem commence comme un Tenebrae classique et ensuite de délie légèrement en unemusique plus coulante, plus souple, plus même virevoltante, puis après un instant puissant le Kyrie s’élèvedu plus haut du chœur comme une voix céleste reprise par un cœur presqu’imposant. Mais tout n’est quevariation, mouvement, passage d’un voile à un autre d’une nuance à la suivante. La musique a même àcertains moments la douceur et la légèreté d’une berceuse comme si la mort était un sommeil d’enfant.

L’Offertorium en canon fugué est si calme et si lent qu’on se prend de l’envie de se laisser emporterpar cette mélopée, emporter vers cet inéluctable que les violons montent en force peu à peu, comme uneplainte et une supplique d’une promesse qui reste à tenir et la voix du baryton sur ce fond langoureux estcomme le chant d’un vent d’espérance, d’un souffle d’espoir que sous-tend l’orgue, et cette prière a besoinde ce soutien et des cordes enveloppantes pour monter à son destinataire

Le Sanctus est féérique et se déplie comme des jets d’eau dans un jardin de rêve. On voit vraimentles saints et les élus dans cet univers sans substance et tout en âme et esprit, tout en tons pastels et lumièretamisée qui s’enflent pour devenir l’entrée triomphante du seigneur et de l’agneau.

Et c’est à ce moment que la voix de Jésus, ce héros de nos légendes sacrées, sonne à nos oreillesdans les aigus légers et rieurs d’un contre-alto qui n’a pas d’égal en ce monde et qui donne à ce jour dedeuil la dignité et le rêve qu’il faut à tout homme pour partir dans la joie, à toute femme pour s’élever dans leplaisir et à tout enfant la force de se dire que l’avenir sera encore plus grand que le petit passé de sonenfance. O divine idée de faire chanter cette pièce par un contre-alto plutôt qu’une soprano. La voix deJésus mérite bien un tel détour absolument sacré, surtout quand ce contre-alto est Philippe Jaroussky.

L’agnus Dei ensuite enchaîné sur le Lux Aeterna devient menaçant comme si l’agneau était le rappelde sa mort et la lumière éternelle le fait que celle-ci n’est possible et à portée de la main que dans l’acte dela résurrection. Le mort se doit de tendre les bras vers ce sein qui l’attend mais vers lequel il doit s’efforcerde monter à en perdre haleine s’il le faut, mais de monter contre vents et marées, contre les pires affres del’enfer. Cet affrontement, ce passage dramatique de mort pourrissante à renaissance spirituelle, GabrielFauré en fait une sorte de forêt dense et sombre dans lequel un violon nous appelle à la survie, au voyaged’un pèlerin vers la lumière qui se doit de résonner de la voix divine de l’au-delà et c’est la force d’un barytonqui révèle les anges d’un chœur distant et plutôt contenu qui s’enfle un peu jusqu’à ce que la trompette

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divine fasse tomber les murs du jugement et ouvre grandes les portes de ce paradis, de cette Jérusalemmessianique dont nous rêvons tous, tôt ou tard. Le dernier Libera me peut alors retentir quand la promessedevient chose reçue.

In Paradisium se veut un chant d’anges et une musique céleste. Difficile aventure dans notre mondesi lourd et attaché à la glèbe. Fauré réussit parfaitement à nous donner cette illusion de céleste paix etbonheur, comme s’il ne s’agissait en définitive que d’oublier le monde réel.

Le Cantique de Jean Racine avec ses alexandrins et ses décasyllabes alternant tour à tour commeen un moulin à prières qui est un joli cantique pour cathédrale le jour de Noël ou d’une autre Ascension carc’est gentil, gracieux, mais ça n’a plus le charme de ce que l’on pourrait attendre d’un cantique chrétien.Jean Racine aurait peut-être du se contenter d’écrire des tragédies, ou bien son cantique aurait peut-être durester dans un tiroir. C’est comme si on réduisait les Passions de Jean Sébastien Bach aux seuls chorals,sans la poésie que Bach sait souvent ajouter à la voix d’une congrégation assemblée.

La Pavane pour violoncelle et orchestre a par contre une puissance dramatique certaine. Levioloncelle est comme un grand seigneur de la musique qui affronte l’orchestre d’un seul pas, d’un seulmouvement. Rien ne fait reculer le violoncelle qui sait devenir sombre et pathétique quand le hautbois ledéfie d’une note d’ironique sarcasme. Mais le violoncelle répond et enfonce ce sarcasme dans le brillant etpuissant orchestre qui englobe la voix du violoncelle dans un mouvement enveloppant fort où la brasséeforte du violoncelle lui permet de surnager à la tempête jusqu’à s’endormir dans le calme revenu.

La Pavane est un thème hyper connu qui marche pratiquement tout seul comme une sarabande demarionnettes qui n’osent même pas faire un écart. Et les paroles sur quelques amours qui ne mènent à riensoulèvent une vague de révolte mais qui ne sera suivie d’aucune fin surprenante et en tout cas imprévisible.Toute la musique nous mène à cette fin de conformisme et de soumission. On est loin de l’amourromantique, mais on est en plein dans l’amour des salons, dans l’amour d’opérette même, même si lamusique est un tout petit peu plus tragique que cela. Mais de caquets en coquets et de minois en laquais onse survit dans la soumission des dernières notes étales.

Le Super Flamina Babylonis est un psaume de l’exil d’Israël à Babylone. C’est très fort, trèspuissant, très poignant. On entend les chants langoureux et douloureux des exilés mis en esclavage dansdes chantiers étrangers, des chantiers où mourir est le pain quotidien et survivre le miracle accidentel etimprévu. Et dans ce peuple d’esclaves une force ronfle et enfle comme la promesse, la certitude qu’un jourviendra où le joug étranger disparaîtra et où la liberté sera retrouvée. On peut regretter le ton de vengeancequ’il y a dans la fin. La vengeance n’est pas un sentiment digne de David, même quand c’est la certitude quele Dieu d’Israël vengera la souffrance de son peuple. La musique se fait presque pathétique sur la fin danscette certitude. Quand une voix de femme s’élève comme une plaie d’Egypte. La musique devient alors plusbouleversante et tourmentée. La certitude n’est peut-être pas aussi entière que l’on voudrait le croire mais lapuissance est vite retrouvée, la puissance de cette justice divine qui punit ceux qui font souffrir les élus deDieu, comme si Dieu pouvait avoir des élus. C’est cette certitude d’être élus parmi les élus qui est parfois unpeu irritante dans les psaumes. Gabriel Fauré a amplifié ce sentiment de puissance vengeresse avec unemusique qui se termine de façon si écrasante qu’on pourrait douter de l’humanité de ce dieu. Gabriel Fauréa du ressentir cela car il liquéfie et apaise les dernières trente secondes de la sa partition.

Un très beau CD mais peut-être un tout petit peu trop traditionnel dans la lecture de Gabriel Fauré.

GEORGE GERSCHWINN – IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959

The story is entirely enclosed in a black community that lives on the coast of South Carolina next to afishing harbour. They are fishermen and they till some land for cotton. They live in some kind of a fort that isclosed by a metal and monumental gate and that is entirely turned inward onto its own courtyard. The onlyoutside people are the police that comes when a crime is discovered and that is only to make a token arrestsince they never get any testimony about who committed the crime. There will be two murders in the “fort”.The other visitors are peddlers. The strawberry lady, the honey man or the crab man do not represent adanger in any way. But the drug peddler known as Sportin’ Life is another can of worms. He is dangerousand his role will be dramatic in the story.

The story is simple. A woman who is more or less an easy woman is the unmarried woman of aviolent man. They are Bess and Crown. She provides her man with the money he needs to buy alcohol anddrugs and to gamble. She is entirely mesmerized and dominated by the drug, Happy Dust, and her man. Thedrama starts with Crown killing another man, Robbins. He runs. The cops want to arrest some bystander,Peter, but he will be eventually released after some time in prison. The main witness that testifies no one has

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seen anything is a cripple and beggar, Porgy. He appears as being the one who defends the waterproofcharacter of the community. Do not deal with the white police. He is also the one who is going to take care ofBess, left behind by Crown who is on the run.

The rest is the story of the fight of this woman between two men, Porgy and Crown, a battle that islost from the very start but not by the fault of anyone in the community but because of the outside “invaders”the police and the drug peddler are.

The drug peddler has it right when he says that two men for one woman always end up with oneman dead and the other in prison, and the woman having no one at all. Porgy kills Crown, is arrested with notestimony against him but under the pretext that he is supposed to identify Crown’s dead body, which herefuses to do, even when in front of the body. He is sent to prison for contempt of court. Hence Bess ends upalone, an easy prey to Sportin’ Life who manages her so that she goes back to drugs and then goes awaywith him to New York. When Porgy comes back with presents for everyone, since he played dice in prisonand made a little fortune, the community is friendly with him but does not want to tell him where Bess is. Hefinally gets it out of them and he decides to drop his two crutches and go to New York after Bess.

That kind of rivalry between the protector of an easy woman and someone who falls in love with heris not so uncommon, even in the opera world. The new element is the fact that the man ho falls in love withthe woman is a cripple and the protector turns criminal. The rivalry between two men for one woman is notuncommon in all spheres of literature and music and the fact that one kills the other is banal, except thathere it is the cripple who kills the super strong and powerful protector. The end is purely opportunistic. Thewoman is totally unable to live without the authority of a man: she is helpless without a man and she findsherself alone. She cannot choose the community as a substitute or at least she cannot resist the suggestionfrom a third man, the drug peddler who proposes her to go back to easy life in the big city up north.

But this opera is a lot more interesting than this dramatic love affair and this surprisingly effectivelove quartet, one woman and three men. As long as the black community lives closed up on itself it cansurvive more or less decently though poor but proud of what they can make on the very edge of the whitesociety outside, the society of the buckras. When you get out of this cocoon, you run all kinds of dangers:fishermen are killed by hurricanes when they go fishing. Women are exploited into selling themselves toanyone, into drug addiction and even slavery of some kind when they get out and follow a man out of theircommunity. And it is from outside that the drug peddler comes to bring into the community what may destroythat community. And yet this community is totally pervaded by gambling with dice, alcoholism with whiskyand moonshine alcohol, and even common brutality among the members. What saves them is their solidarityin front of the outside white society. They even have a fringe of black exploiters like the undertaker, thedivorce dealer, the drug peddler and some others that ransom their own black community for any mostlyillegal reason.

Solidarity cannot do anything against that kind of easy exploitation.

The opera was composed in 1935 and represented a revolution in itself. The action concerned ablack community that was depicted as containing normal human feelings and passions and that was underthe perversion imposed onto them by the white society outside that both victimized the community withsystematic suspicion and made that community close up onto itself into some autarchic functioning thatmade them accept to be exploited by some black crooks and accept the violence of some of their memberseven when it became criminal. In other words their minds are totally colonized, under the domination from anoutside, surrounding and seen and felt as superior group that dominates them. In 1935 there was yet no wayout of this colonized situation except hard work to make a better living in that system but that did not changeit, no matter whether they were fishing or growing cotton. Their lot was to be fishermen or sharecroppers. Wewere at the time still a long way from the education and then civil rights transformation, the main two ways forthese communities to open up on the world, for the individuals in these communities to find their way up insociety by conquering an equal, or at least as equal as possible position in the surrounding white society. Butthis opera showed that the situation was becoming highly explosive inside and in the relations with theoutside world. It could not last very long indeed because presents, beautiful dresses, new hats were wantedand there would come a time when these people would say: we want them and they will finally do what theycan to get them without selling their bodies, drugs or fake divorces, not to speak of coffins and funerals.

And yet the composer is not black which means the Blacks are not in 1935, though they are some ofthe greatest musicians in America already at the time, accepted on Broadway yet. It will take a long timebefore the Blacks are accepted as equal in showbiz as composers, authors and artists. But this quasi-all-black opera is a very important precursor of “Guess who’s coming to dinner” that was only to come out in1967, thirty two years and one World War later.

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But the music is surprisingly modern and avant-garde for its time and even today. It is bothmelodious with some sentences coming back both with words and notes, but also disruptive of standardharmony and melody, working on slight variations from major to minor tones, and working tremendously onhalf tones and other intervals that are often taken downward when we expect upward movements or viceversa. It is not jazz but it integrates some of the innovations of jazz in the music and particularly thepolyrhythmic aspect of African and African-American music by playing on the chorus as opposed to theleading voice, or on some more distant rhythm that has its autonomy behind the voice, on on gospeltechnique of a chorus calling for attention every so often in the rhetoric of some songs and introducing adifferent tempo articulated on the main tempo. Hallelujah! We are like entering a musical forest in which eachtree is revealing the whole forest and all the other trees of it.

SHORTER VERSION

The story is entirely enclosed in a black community that lives on the coast of South Carolina next to afishing harbour. They are fishermen and they till some land for cotton. They live in some kind of a fort that isclosed by a metal and monumental gate and that is entirely turned inward onto its own courtyard. The onlyoutside people are the police that comes when a crime is discovered and that is only to make a token arrestsince they never get any testimony about who committed the crime. There will be two murders in the “fort”.The other visitors are peddlers. The strawberry lady, the honey man or the crab man do not represent adanger in any way. But the drug peddler known as Sportin’ Life is another can of worms. He is dangerousand his role will be dramatic in the story.

The drug peddler has it right when he says that two men for one woman always end up with oneman dead and the other in prison, and the woman having no one at all. Porgy kills Crown, is arrested with notestimony against him but under the pretext that he is supposed to identify Crown’s dead body, which herefuses to do, even when in front of the body. He is sent to prison for contempt of court. Hence Bess ends upalone, an easy prey to Sportin’ Life who manages her so that she goes back to drugs and then goes awaywith him to New York. When Porgy comes back with presents for everyone, since he played dice in prisonand made a little fortune, the community is friendly with him but does not want to tell him where Bess is. Hefinally gets it out of them and he decides to drop his two crutches and go to New York after Bess.

But this opera is a lot more interesting than this dramatic love affair and this surprisingly effectivelove quartet, one woman and three men. As long as the black community lives closed up on itself it cansurvive more or less decently though poor but proud of what they can make on the very edge of the whitesociety outside, the society of the buckras. When you get out of this cocoon, you run all kinds of dangers:fishermen are killed by hurricanes when they go fishing. Women are exploited into selling themselves toanyone, into drug addiction and even slavery of some kind when they get out and follow a man out of theircommunity. And it is from outside that the drug peddler comes to bring into the community what may destroythat community. And yet this community is totally pervaded by gambling with dice, alcoholism with whiskyand moonshine alcohol, and even common brutality among the members. What saves them is their solidarityin front of the outside white society. They even have a fringe of black exploiters like the undertaker, thedivorce dealer, the drug peddler and some others that ransom their own black community for any mostlyillegal reason.

Solidarity cannot do anything against that kind of easy exploitation.

The opera was composed in 1935 and represented a revolution in itself. The action concerned ablack community that was depicted as containing normal human feelings and passions and that was underthe perversion imposed onto them by the white society outside that both victimized the community withsystematic suspicion and made that community close up onto itself into some autarchic functioning thatmade them accept to be exploited by some black crooks and accept the violence of some of their memberseven when it became criminal. In other words their minds are totally colonized, under the domination from anoutside, surrounding and seen and felt as superior group that dominates them. In 1935 there was yet no wayout of this colonized situation except hard work to make a better living in that system but that did not changeit, no matter whether they were fishing or growing cotton. Their lot was to be fishermen or sharecroppers. Wewere at the time still a long way from the education and then civil rights transformation, the main two ways forthese communities to open up on the world, for the individuals in these communities to find their way up insociety by conquering an equal, or at least as equal as possible position in the surrounding white society. Butthis opera showed that the situation was becoming highly explosive inside and in the relations with theoutside world. It could not last very long indeed because presents, beautiful dresses, new hats were wantedand there would come a time when these people would say: we want them and they will finally do what they

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can to get them without selling their bodies, drugs or fake divorces, not to speak of coffins and funerals.

And yet the composer is not black which means the Blacks are not in 1935, though they are some ofthe greatest musicians in America already at the time, accepted on Broadway yet. It will take a long timebefore the Blacks are accepted as equal in showbiz as composers, authors and artists. But this quasi-all-black opera is a very important precursor of “Guess who’s coming to dinner” that was only to come out in1967, thirty two years and one World War later.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN – WEST SIDE STORY

This film is a myth, like the musical it comes from. It has been alive and a success as a musical formore than 50 years and about the same for the film when it became a VHS tape and now a DVD. It isdoomed to be a lasting success and hence a classic in its genre and in its field.

Of course it is a rewriting of Romeo and Juliet but with some kind of a twist. The twist is that the twoyoung people are simple young people and not members of the aristocratic families of an ancient city. Theyare second or third generation immigrants in New York of European origins, the jets, versus the firstgeneration immigrants from Porto Rico, the Sharks. The girl is a Porto Rican and the boy is a New Yorker. Infact the first fight is very similar in a way to what happened in Shakespeare’s play. Riff is killed by Bernardo,Bernardo is killed by Anton and there is the twist. Chino picks up the vengeance of Bernardo and runs afterTony and he will shoot Tony in the arms of Maria who will survive. Tony’s body will be taken away bymembers of both gangs.

Of course the context is completely different and the New Yorkers are very good at mocking otherpeople, cops, judges, head shrinks and social workers and at depicting their fate as the most dramatic andtragic alienation, exploitation and dereliction. They all are born Mercutios. They are the victims of the smokeof tobacco and other stuffs, the fumes of alcohol and other wines, the beatings of their fathers and otherparents, etc. They are just discrete on the sexual part because of the time (1961 for the film) and thetargeted audience that has to be a family audience even if it is Parental Guidance on my DVD.

There is not much to add to this since the twist does not really change Shakespeare’s lesson.Bigotry, racism, hate and a few other of these subhuman passions are dominant with simple people in anysociety and they guide their passions, feelings, actions and reactions. These simple people can kill in a moband even individually when such emotions take hold of them. And after that there is nothing left for thesurvivors to do except to cry and suffer in silence if possible.

But this film, then VHS tape and now DVD brings up a completely different discussion. The musicalwas for an elite audience, that of the Broadway theatres. The film was for a wider public though the cinemasneeded to be equipped in wide screens, color projectors and sound systems of quality. It anyway reached awider audience than the play. The film amplified the success of the musical. The VHS tape came later and infact was the cause and amplification of the first revival twenty years later. The DVD was in the same way thecause and the amplification of the second revival of the musical some twenty more years later. Each revivalwent along with a vast tour in the USA and Canada but also all over the world, especially the second sincemany cities are now equipped in special large halls for such super productions.

But the live musical and the DVD are not the same.

The live musical takes you into the magic of a show on a stage with lights and sets that aresupposed to fascinate you, with actors, singers and dancers that are supposed to mesmerize you and amusic that is supposed to charm you. But you are sitting in one place and cannot move and you can at bestuse special binoculars to zoom on some actors or singers but then you lose the wide picture. A show like thisone is of course entirely nourished with conventions in the acting, the singing, the performing, and so on, ofevery single artist on the stage or in front of the stage or anywhere else in the house. Conventions and trade-unions that can at times dictate the rhythm of the show. The spectator is supposed to let him/herself slideinto that magic and enjoy both visually and auditorily but the heavy machinery that produces the lights, theamplification and the various physical elements of the show take you for a real dance and you may fly intothe show. The very strong sentimental scenes and situations may carry your emotions away too. But that willremain moderate due to the distance between you and the characters.

The film, VHS and then DVD are free of such constraints, at least for you. This film uses a reallocation, New York itself from the very start wince we come from the sky to land in the street of the West sideof Manhattan after a slowly zooming overview down into the streets from the sky. This real location is ofcourse an enormous change because of the liberation it provides the actors, singers and dancers. They have

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space, they can move, climb, run, and do many other things without any limits, or nearly none. They can playbasketball in real conditions. They even have cars in the street and the cops come into the various streetsituations with their cars blinking blue end red like some bleeding heart.

The second change you perceive from the very start is of course the great mobility of the camera.You can shift from one angle to another instantly and that creates movement in the picture and on the screensince you are constantly capturing the situation from a myriad points of view. This acceleration of thecamera’s movements and multiplication of shooting angles really project you into the action or suck you upinto it if your prefer and you are a lot more involved in the action, in the film. You are no longer a simplevoyeur. You are part of the action itself.

This is multiplied by the fact that the camera is constantly zooming onto faces and bombarding youwith close-ups that enable you to see the facial expressions of the actors, their tears and their suffering, theirjoy and their pain. You are deeply moved in your own sentimental emotions by this closeness to the actorsand you may not identify with one particularly actor or actress, but you definitely feel part of the situationsthat are constructed on the screen. The production becomes deeply multi-sensorial, though not all-sensorial,which makes you keep a mental reflective distance, especially since you constantly keep in mindShakespeare and so many other love dramas you know, from the Titanic to Love Story. Note this empathyyou feel in front of this film comes from your famous mirror neurons that make you project yourself into theemotions of other people.

The film knows how to maintain this distance which is basic with a wide screen film. A film is notsupposed to swallow you up and make you be an enjoying machine that has no mind.

Here the film very precisely uses some means to remind you how you must keep that mentalreflective distance. The opening sequence with its changing colors on a simple sketch of New York, then theslow descent into New York. It is artificial enough to tell you that you are supposed to keep your mind alert.The dancing itself is a distance building device, just as much as the singing, since as far as I know peopledon’t sing in everyday situation, and you probably cannot really identify yourself with that dancing or singingsince you are not a member of these professions.

The film also uses lights to create such a distance by building luminous situations that are notrealistic like red lights under the highway. The night scenes are particularly eerie and your mind reacts in away or another to identify the nature of the atmosphere, the premonition contained in the scene.

Finally the credits at the end leave a fully realistic set behind and write most names as graffiti onbrick walls, stone walls, concrete surface, palisades of all types and particularly a palisade only made up ofold doors, to finish with road signs that are orders to turn left or not turn right, of stop, or not walk on thegrass. There you know that you are in a film, that you have to keep a distance, that your mind is supposed tostay alert and fresh, and that you are supposed to come back on earth.

The film is thus a perfect example of what can be done with a musical. It becomes a real film thatassociates a multi-sensorial experience and yet a mental reflective distance, and at the same time someacting conventions, the dancing and the singing, the music even, are there to both charm you and keep youalert. And you sure have quite a plateful of thinking to do all along the film and you are nourished and fedwith the necessary energy to chew your food properly. Have a good digestion.

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1 of 4 people found the following review helpfulThe "fun" of gang life, August 11, 2003

By Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say"

This review is from: West Side Story [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This is a classic, a cult film, an eternal plot that has roamed around in our imagination for centuries. Itis of course a rewriting of Romeo and Juliet, but so well done and performed, acted and rendered that it is atleast as beautiful and emotional as its model. It is also one of the very first absolutely perfect tragic musical,a musical for sure with a good chorus line but no comedy, no comic strain, nothing but a tragic story thatends badly and in pure blood.

The film is faithful in most details to Shakespeare's play, except one: Maria survives since her name

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makes her a survivor and at the end she is in the quasi typical posture of a "pieta", of a Holy Virgin holdingher son Jesus in her lap after him having been brought down from the cross, and if she is dressed in red it isbecause we are dealing with a plot of gratuitous violence between street gangs ending in three murders,absolutely gratuitous like the violence that causes them. What makes this film poignant is the choice of twogroups of white young people in two poor white communities in New York City, the "Americans" who are infact mostly from Europe, less recent immigrants, and the Porto Ricans who are more recent immigrants.

It is not even racist. There is not one ounce of blackness in this film. It is just absurd competitionturned war between these two communities, or at least their youngsters. But the film is a severe socialcriticism in many scenes, though the social commitment here is generally best expressed and demonstratedin some songs and the dancing or acting that goes along with them. The social sickness is sad though funnyand the social worker looks like what he is, a social jail warden not to say a social fascist. The JuvenileDelinquent is beautiful in his resignation to being what he is supposed to be, i.e. an asocial and violentmarginal.

The male chauvinism of these young people is strikingly realistic, and mind you still perfectly trueand right today. The film is also full of humor, particularly about the American dream that fascinates allimmigrants and about the absurdity of it like earning a lot more but having bills that higher in direct proportionwith this wealth, which ends up in not being very wealthy really. But I must admit the best part of this musicalis the music that is never any kind of easy-sounding and soothing melody, but always some elaborate line,rhythm or even harmony.

At the same time the dancing is perfect because it is never a gratuitous decoration but alwaysdramatic in so far as it emphasizes and amplifies the dramatic content of the scenes it supports or magnifies.Note too the two cops who are on the beat in that neighborhood are not very swift, nor very clear. In fact theyprobably are on the "American" side rather than on the Porto Rican side. This film still has a lot to show, tobring, to give, to teach exclusively through its deep poignancy.

FARINELLI IL CASTRATO – 1994

Farinelli est une légende dans le monde de la musique et bien sûr des castrats. Le film est lui aussiune légende. Cependant il n’atteint pas le niveau qu’Anne Rice avait atteint en 1982 dans « Cry to heaven »,« La voix des Anges » en français, une bien mauvaise traduction du titre.

Le film efface complètement ou presque la jeunesse de Farinelli, la douleur immense de sacastration compensée par l’amour de son frère mais en plus rend plutôt sauvage le drame de ce frère quisacrifie son propre talent musical pour servir ce frère blessé dans son humanité. On ne saisit alors pas lalogique de ce Farinelli qui accepte ainsi de survivre dans cette compensation alors qu’il a tout pour se laissermourir. L’amour fraternel le sauve de la déchéance.

Mais le pire dans le portrait de ce Farinelli c’est la façon dont les castrats sont montrés comme unerace de parias alors qu’ils étaient une race de dieux vedettes avant même l’existence du showbiz et ce dansl’Europe entière. L’Allemagne est effacée, l’Italie même est effacée, ne parlons pas de la France, et cepauvre Farinelli est une attraction de foire d’abord, une bête de cirque qu’on montre sur les scènes desthéâtres populaires ensuite, et il refuse Haendel comme si celui-ci était une peste inguérissable. Il acceptede faire carrière à Londres, mais chez le concurrent de Haendel, donc dans des opéras bouffe ou presque,Saliéri et pas Mozart. Quel dommage ! Et ce n’est pas la Flûte Enchantée.

Le chant est sublime bien sûr, mais au temps de ce film il n’y avait pas un chanteur qui pouvait tenirun tel registre, alors on fit dans la synthèse. Depuis ce malheureux temps Jaroussky est apparu qui peutchanter une telle musique comme dans « Caldara In Vienna : Forgotten Castrato Arias » et dans « Carestini(The Story of a Castrato) ». Cette utilisation de la synthèse rend la musique justement un peu artificielle etles articulations pas toujours parfaitement justes.

Mais le film restera un film phare car en 1994 on était encore très loi n d’une victoire de la musique àun alto, ce qui est le plus près d’un castrat sans la castration. Il faudra attendre 2008 et les 15èmes victoiresde la musique pour que Jaroussky soit couronné, pour qu’un alto monte sur le podium. Depuis la routeparcourue est immense et comme Jaroussky le disait si bien en 2008, la voix d’un alto est devenue une voixnormale dans l’opéra. C’était pas trop tôt car quelle lassitude d’avoir des voix de sopranos femmes pourchanter les grands héros de l’opéra baroque. Le Roi David en femme est plus qu’un travesti, c’est unegrande folle (bien mauvaise traduction de drag queen en anglais).

C’est ce film qui a ouvert grand les portes qui ont mené au triomphe actuel, mais non pas parce que

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c’est la voix des anges, mais bien plus comme Anne Rice l’avait senti, parce que c’est le cri et les pleurs del’âme humaine, donc la plus pure beauté drapée de souffrance, d’autant ,plus belle que douloureuse.

TERRY RILEY – KRONOS QUARTET – REQUIEM FOR ADAM – THEPHILOSOPHER’S HAND – 2001

In the first movement of the Requiem you have to ascend to heaven, and an ascension of that type isdefinitely difficult, even for the soul of a dead man. It is rather easy to propel the image of that ascendingstaircase with string instruments. They just play single notes of a certain predetermined length atpredetermined intervals and there you have that ladder and you can even speed it up because no one wouldgo up that Jacob’s ladder always at the same speed. Those notes can even disappear for a short while andthe climber is like lost in his thoughts or his whirling vertigo.

And that ascension can even become brilliant and joyful. After all we are ascending to Heaven andthat should be a great pleasurable moment of bliss for us, even if and even though we have to die first. Butwell there is always a rub somewhere and in everything. You cannot peal onions without crying and youcannot take a shower without undressing first. That’s the down turning side of things. So let’s die to climb,hopping and skipping to the highest heaven we can find. The sky is our limit after all.

And when you think it is Adam who is finally ascending to the sky after so many millennia spent inthe Limbos of hell or of nowhere because he was not a proper Christian. How dumb of him to have forgottento go to Sunday school regularly. It may be useless but in his case it would have avoided him all thesethousands of years in these dark and sad limbos. It does not matter at all that the Adam evoked here isAdam Harrington. All Adams are just one and single Adam, the one we all know from birth to death and evenbeyond and before.

The second movement is a complete change since we are still in the sky but only at the top of amountain and the movement is not to go up any more but to go down. Your soul has gone up and now yourbody goes down into decay and decomposition. That’s exactly what happened to the first Adam of them allwhen Jesus on that Easter Sunday, or maybe just before, when he went down into the Limbos to get Adamout and bring him to heaven. Adam left his corporal decaying body in that decaying decomposing place. Themusic all evokes that descent into annihilation and yet it is not the descent of the soul but only of the body soit is not really sad. Just down oriented. The decaying is also evoked by the numerous musical movements ofvarious notes and clusters of notes, instruments and lines of composition. But the final violin is like a smallnote of peace and balance in an environment of brittle movement and multifarious intertwining.

The third movement of this Requiem is the Real Requiem and this time the music is irritatinglyrepetitive and like sawing and slashing at our ears to let us know there is no life possible without the troubleof living and the most important problem of living is dying. Living would be OK if there were no dying at theend of the road, if the road had no end. But it has and we know it. So every thing is berserk and twisted anderratic and crazy in many ways since we are only on probation and every moment of our too long life, or tooshort if you prefer, will be a contradiction, a hair pin turn and bend in the chaotic road of this life that has nopavement, no sidewalk, so paving or simple road surface of any kind, not even smooth, just a surface andnot a chasm.

Life is a chasm and luckily we have to evade it, to go beyond even before we imagine what it maylead to. The violins are making themselves unbearable, and yet some dirge emerges from that unbearability.A dirge that surges like a religious chant to take that poor Adam to the Tenebrae of death. And that dirgeturns into a procession, a long file of people slowly advancing in front of the open tomb and throwing somekeepsakes to the deceased in his box. And then the damned descent starts again pulls in the two direction,up and down and that poor Adam has to try to climb the escaping ascending steps and to descend theaggressive descending stairs. It is really some kind of divine choice to take the low road to hell or the highroad to heaven. Maybe the less frequented would be better but there is always a pushing crowd after deathas if everyone was in a hurry.

After the crowd comes the vast immensity of the sky that has to be flown through and over to reachthe heaven-like Jerusalem of paradise. Silence and an absolute lack of movement, peace and an absoluteabsence of noise. Only some angelic music, long notes in the distance of here and everywhere and a vagueechoing tempo on some kettle drum. And that’s the exit that is an entrance.

The last track, on the piano is quite different. That philosopher’s Hand is the retention of soundsresounding beyond the notes themselves, notes that are like standing in midair as if they did not dare come

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down and just sit on the piano top and start talking to us. The piano is like murmuring a message it does notunderstand in a language it does not practice, the language of notes and lines that go not beyond their pointof birth and yet spread and scatter all over the place. That’s the hand of the philosopher which cannot doanything since the philosopher is a brain and the brain does not think with its hands since it does not evenhave hands. The hand reveals only the whirls and whorls of a brain that tries to think beyond the appearanceof things. What a task, indeed!

HANZEL AND GRETYL – SCHEISSMESSIAH – 2004

One thing is sure it is not baroque Venetian music, but it is stronger and more powerful than anythingthe underlings from Seattle have ever produced in the line of hard metal grunge Scheisse. This is Käse andthat kind of cheese fest you cannot find anywhere else or hardly. That’s the first impression after a firsthearing.

What about a second hearing with a little bit more attention to the details, sir!

With great pleasure, Herr Kaiser, mein Herr. With great pleasure.

It all starts with church bells and a sermon about the beast that is inside us and is eating us up, thatbeast has a name, a human name, but you need finesse and intelligence to read that name, and that nameis 666, the beast, in other words Lust, a threesome fallatio in other words. Lust is the Beast within you, thebeast that wants to consume you. Prosit, my friends. It is said the beast will just leave behind and beyond itsrepast two meat balls in the shape of bollocks, or is it buttocks, for you to suck on in your free time.

Then you can stand up and get up on the stool and reach out the arms of the cross and just startenjoying your own crucifixion and all the torturing you will have to go through in the hands of God and underthe fingers of Lust, hanging from the arms of a Saint Andrew’s cross in the middle of the village square withdogs and kids authorized to do anything nasty they want and first of all rip off your clothes to be able to crushtheir cigarettes on your flesh, to use their lighters to burn you skin and you hairs, in one word to enjoythemselves at your yelling shouting howling expense.

“Fikk Dich Mit Fire” is a sublime frenetic beating up of your meat with fire up your dark door and firein your hand on the front handle. What happens is exactly what is written in the title. You are fucked front andback with fire. And for you to hear the hammers driving the nails into your hands and feet into the cross thetext is repetitive and groups of four of any repeated phrases are essential to give you the taste of that crossand the hammer can of course slip from the head of the nail to some of your bones, but who cares since youwill never come back when you are finally gone. You will never need your bones any more. You will havebeen saved into becoming a pure spirit, and you can even think you are a soul if your god is a soul-makinggod.

“The “Kaiser Von Shizer” has little to say. He does not speak with words but with the big bertha of hisfarting mouth and this time he rejects salvoes of fire for you to enjoy how he is abusing you sexually in allholes and conduits, into the ears, the eyes, and so many other apertures. And no resistance is possibleagainst this Emperor. You can always get your countertenor voice of a castrato, or maybe your sopranovoice of a doppelganger, floating and flying around in the background. That will not stop the Kaiser who hasdecided to turn you into a motherfucker grilled hamburger.

But liberation comes with “Disko Fire Scheiss Messiah”. The Lord liberates you from your bondage.You can finally get free and enjoy the freedom of divine grace. But before that salvation you have to gothrough the epiphany of sulphur and fire, of complete elimination, or is it satisfaction, of all your instincts andimpulses, and the body along with them since the body is the carrier of the orgasmic message, andeverything material in that body made of dust (dust to dust), earth (man from clay, Adam from Adamah) andof course Scheisse (the perfect fertilizer of all times). But here we reach the total contradiction that thisScheisse is also the messiah himself. Is the Messiah made of Scheisse, or is he the one who bringsScheisse to our Last Supper, or is he the one who destroys all that Scheisse with archangelic fire? Whocares! We are floating in an ocean of Scheisse and we are back to the first verse of Genesis: total darknessand nothing but an immense expanse of Scheisse in that darkness with God and his spirit more or less flyingor roaming over it.

The next track, “Blut! Zex! Fire!” should bring you to the final truth that nothing exists, that everythingis delusional and everyone is delirious. In fact I just wonder if this piece is not advertising for Zex, that Zexthat brings fire into your nerves and tripes and flesh, the fire of exhilaration and derangement and pureblissful pleasure. This music in a way is so onanistic and so masturbational. You have to let your own wild

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desires flow and fly and give them a hand if you can or even ten fingers of Schnapps to even amplify thedelirium tremens of the passion, of the eruption that makes you ejaculate the name of the lord in vain, notreally by the way, since your ejaculating the name of the lord enables you to get to the topmost bliss onearth: cumming over and over again and with no blue pill of any kind, just that music that drowns you in asea of fiery cum.

“Burning Bush” comes after this sexual high. Then God can speak to you via a burning bush and youcan hear the whimpering pleasure of the fornicating mother copulators in the back, and that will never beenough. So an extra track will lead you even deeper into that tsunami of hormonal fluids.

Welcome to the “Scheissway To Hell” and there you can at last just try to recuperate after yourmultiple orgasms waiting for and expecting the next stage. Along that way to hell you will hear a few churchbells again to remind you of the simple fact that after orgasm comes communion, after enjoying the body ofyour Christ or you Mary Magdalena, or both, you have to receive the body of the Lord to prepare you forpurification. Don’t be afraid of the monstrous monstrosities that howl around you. They are the minions ofGod and the real face of guardian angels. You are in good hands and in good bleeding teeth and you will belike all new in a minute to be purified into serving again for the glory of your Lord and God, Herr Kaiser,Maestro Penis, Doctor Phallus and all their plugs and sockets.

“And we shall Purify” has come and with it the great change and the seventh generation, theapocalypse of your sorry life into the purity of the next life. You have to be sanctified, via crucifixion and thenwith the help of a demonizer that will purify you. That’s the great mystery of this Gospel: the saviour is theone who can demonize you. There is no purification but beyond demonization and crucifixion; And beyondyou will reach obsessive destruction into resurrection, and a few church bells of course. You will be sadisticwith your personal masochism and masochistic with your own sadism and you will never know how far youcan go because there will always be one more step on the way, one more stage on the road one morestation on the track.

Now it is time for the revelation of the “10th Circle” which is the sermon of the beginning but this time,you have understood the beast inside each one of us, lust. We have to let it come out onto ourselves andonto everyone else around us for the orgasmic epiphany to redeem our souls and our bodies intoinflammatory sermons that will burn us down into a pile of ashes, sanctified by your end and transmuted intoeternal death on earth and in a virtual body of no consistence at all. Can you hear the singing whiners in theback?

And Handel is waiting for you with his “Hallelujah” but it is not longer a welcoming song to heavenbut to Hell and it is more Hellalujah than a nothing else though the musicians of German tradition haveavoided the an easy Heili Heilo Heillalujah that everyone was expecting but you can’t have the devil and Godtogether, so they kept the devil and got rid of all the saints who like final solutions too much. And obviouslythe closing word is “The power of God has freed us.”

So we can get onto the last instrumental piece, “Purity”, that sounds in a way like some cosmicinterstellar galactic mission beyond the material reality of our small tellurianesque universe. We are reachingbeyond the Space Odyssey of old and we are fully engaged in the Viagratic blue pill and amphetaminic redpill saga. We can go back onto the Argo of our senses, the Titanic of our impulses, the Queen Elizabeth ofour passions and meet with a new iceberg to get down into the erotic hole of the ocean and directly into theunderground hell of fire.

CELESTIAL YOO – GEMS : ALONE, BIG BIG WORLD, GOOD BYE, MARIA, NELLAFANTASIA

A natural and endocrinal castrato is of course rare and we don’t have to ask why at age 12 hispuberty did not come for some hormonal reasons.

His voice is high pitched for sure but his harmonics are very round and dense, maybe slightly toodense. His voice then is not as aerial as one may want or like, but it is as close as can be to the voice of asurgically castrated castrato, but that’s what we can imagine since circumstances have changed, thesuffering of the surgical castration is not the same as a hormonal castration and the psyche of the personmust be different. What’s more the castrati were separated from other boys their age and more or less had alife in reclusion except from their masters (all meanings allowed according to Anne Rice).

The pieces we have here are working more on surprise as if they were some exotic production than

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on the art of such a voice. In other words it is pop music. Would this voice find its place in more seriousmusic productions like musicals first, then operettas, and then operas? But the higher you go the more workyou need. Work of and on the voice more than just a voice. As Handel says to Farinelli in the eponymous film“you can be an attraction in a funfair, but you have the potential of the opera house.” (from memory: themeaning is there, maybe not the words.) And later he will criticize in the same film the over-decorated musiche is singing to instead of looking for perfection in beauty which is also in some way purified of uselessdecoration. Work and work all the time.

If the voice of a castrato, if what they say is right, is the voice of an angel – since angels are sexless– this angel is a very intense busy-bee busy-beaver of a vocal worker.

The future will say if Celestial Yoo will find his way beyond Youtube.

WOLFGANG MITTERER – COLOURED NOISE – BRACHIAL SYMPHONIE FÛR 23MUSIKER UND ELECTRONICS – 9-120010281136

Don’t expect the presentation of this symphony in the booklet of the CD to enlighten you about whata standard listener could get out of it. The point of view is “how did the composer do it?” which is for theaudience of no avail. But get into it and just listen. The composition that associates the instruments andmusicians of the orchestra and the samples and sampled tit bits produced by the computers are built in avery complex architecture. That it rejects all the facades of standard music is not a characteristic of thismusic. It creates a depth in space, hence in time, and if architecture there is, façade there is too.

The point is that you cannot just let yourself expect being transported into a traditional universe withan effortless because already learned listening. You have to let yourself slip into the music and you have tolearn how to devise a way to listen to that music in order to get into its architecture, deep architecture and notsuperficial façade. Every single sound, no matter what it is, is in a way or another an isolated island to whichall the other sounds of that very moment are the surrounding environment.

The point is that the focus changes all the time from one sound to another and the environment isrecomposed every single time. Instead of entering a linear composition that leads you from one note to thenext in some kind of audio logic, here you jump from one island to another, from one environment to anotherwith no apparent logic but only the idea, the feeling, the impression that each island has a color and that thecolor of each island is like the sequence, the sequel not of the previous one, but of the following one. Howcan an impression be the result of something coming afterwards?

That’s the impression I have, the emotion I feel of a sound retrospective architecture. That means wehave in a way to reconstruct that retrospectivity and to expect something that is not a sequel but a sourceafter what we have just heard. It is not so much an attempt to question and surprise and even shock yourlistening habits as a complete reversal of them. You have to listen to what comes as if you were lookingbackward at what has come from the point of view of what is to come. I have rarely felt that emotion.

Yet it is an extremely classic emotion with some great composers of the past. I even think the greatbaroque composers were dedicated to that kind of retrospective vision. I have always felt that when listeningto J.S. Bach’s Passions. Every single piece in those passions transforms what precedes them. Youconstantly have to go back to enrich what you thought was the meaning of any piece with the meaning of thenext piece or pieces. But the retrospective sensation was working in your memory. Mitterer who is Bachian inthat way, is requiring from you that you envisage what is coming when you are listening to what is beingplayed at this very moment. How can you?

That’s just the point. Your enjoyment is constantly suspended and your enjoyment is in this verysuspension. Your enjoyment is at its highest point when you have been able to foresee what is coming. Howcan you do that? With a lot of practice and a lot of imagination. And at the same time, every single momentwhen you have not been able to do it, you are surprised and you kind of feel “Of course, dummy, that Ishould have seen”. In other words Mitterer is turning you into the composer. Either you can or you can’t butyour pleasure will be all the more important if you can, at least from time to time.

You have to learn to imagine how what is coming and has not come yet is going to surprise you, todisturb your expectation, to destroy your standard visions. You constantly have to play with that idea: “Howcan we disrupt this sound, this piece of music, the impression and sensation and emotion I am feeling rightnow.” We have to live that music dangerously and that is a beautiful experience. What are the clues Mittererprovides you with?

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Little or few. But rhythm seems to be one clue because it is easier to imagine how one piece ofrhythm can be disrupted. But you also have the textures of the sounds because here too there is some kindof disruptive logic. In the past they used the different textures of the different instruments, that they calledtimbres, in order to create some harmonious, or disharmonious, whole. Mitterer uses this dimension in orderto build a constantly jerking progress in the world of sonority. But there is a great pleasure when you havebeen able to foresee the textural change Mitterer is going to introduce to disrupt your listening façade.

I must say my pleasure is maximum with this piece, a lot more than with “The Saint BartholomewMassacre” I have had the opportunity to watch live recently, probably because the music is not overloadedhere with a not so meaningful visual wrapping. Its architecture is purer, pure sound and not composite.

ATA EBTEKAR &THE IRANIAN ORCHESTRA FOR NEW MUSIC – PERFORMINGWORKS OF ALIZERA MASHAYEKHI

This orchestral performance of this music is astounding. It takes a power and a depth it could not findin simpler performances. The evocation of vast numbers in limited spaces, of vast forces over weak people,of vast movements over our heads, around our heads, inside our heads. Sombreness most of the time, butalso danger, unforeseeable danger that can come anytime from anywhere and crush us like feathers. heavynoises to evoke some violently closing doors, some vague and distant, indistinct women’s voices liketransported by this train of music and noise. Can there be an end to that maelstrom that takes us along,under and under. Is anything clear in that world?

That’s just how “Little Tales 4pointS” (1993) starts but at once some darker and heavy sounds cometo crush the clear notes of the beginning into the soil, the ground, the earth. We do feel as if a steam rollerwas going over some more clear sound, nearly watery and river-like. But not for long “Ornamental” (1995)comes and pushes aside this little clarity and sand is piled along with gravel over our heads and we can hearthe hinnying and braying and neighing of the horses of Satan and we are rolled up in the mud scattered bythese rolling herds of apocalyptic animals and noises.

If that is ornamental then the house it ornaments is an antediluvian cave inhabited by people comingfrom one hundred centuries in the future after the mutation that deprived them of articulated languages andcondemned them to forever live in noise and plough the universe with their noise makers that work like theploughs drawn by oxen a long time ago. Up and down the soil roils and at the same time all kind of notesand fragments of sentences are buried in our ears like some fertilizer in the ground. That music is themanure that will make our musical vision multiply three or four times in a life time to produce the psychenecessary to confront the monsters of history, the ghosts of the past and the fears, frights, angst, panics ofthe present and the future.

And voices in that boiling cauldron as if men were there to be turned into pieces of rotten turnips inthe gulag of the monsters that have conquered earth according to the Gospel of Saint Hubbard. What are afew piano notes like in “Little Tales 3” (1993)? Nothing but the accompaniment of the end of humanity as anautonomous entity. Maybe it will be better to be the slaves of that superior species. But the” Broken SilenceCmpd” (2002) comes and we understand that the best policy is to submit, to keep silent about the true natureof the invaders.

One day someone will understand, and though it would be too late, some truth my come out of thattotal unpenetrable night. And that night, en-nightening night is filled with some “Turquoise Gas in Ice” (2005-2008) that amplifies the feeling to an unbearable weight. And life is turned into an infinite chase and race,always in front of that roaring beast, at least we hope so, or it is under the silence in our ears forever, the endof the music, the shift from the flight seen by one individual that does not survive after another that does notsurvive any more than the first one, or the previous one, since there will be one after this one. The tonebecomes more dramatic with “Meta XY” (2001) because there is like a lamenting surging that survive or justfloat adrift on top of the sea of tempestuous black ink. This flotsam is like the little particle of dirt that finds itdifficult to sink. But will it sink anyway and after all?

Or will some shark jaws come and terminate that dream of living alone and independent from therest of the universe. In this piece he is flirting with polyrhythm now and then and the rhythms are in the sameway as before any other element fighting against all the others. As musician the composer is enriching thatdimension but the meaning appears to be chaotic, anarchy, the lack of any unity, organization, collectivesense and good will. Humanity is lost in an unavoidable falling in the deep chasm of history. Polyrhythm evenreinforced by west versus east themes is seen as a weakness.

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The only vision then is that of power, the power, the only person or committee that is assumingpower since it is also assumed that no one wanted it, even if no one asked no one if they wanted it. Beautifulmusic of a soul that is presently being tortured by all the minions of Satan in his special Satan’s chapel.

BREL BARBARA – MAURICE BÉJART – EDITIONS JACQUES BREL –www.jacquesbrel.be

Aux chansons que nous allons voir, la danse ajoute la magie, les films noir et blanc la nostalgie, lesfilms couleurs l’envie et les danseurs la survie heureuse de pouvoir être à jamais.

Rosa ! Couples en étoile à six branches qui entrelacent les pas de deux de tous les mystères denotre civilisation latine et classique de Salomon à Jésus en passant par tous les dominus qui nous ontrythmés nos dimanches.

La Solitude, simple pas de deux un peu découplé, comme désuni, où l’un comme l’autre sont seulsavec l’autre ou l’un, sans jamais vraiment se rencontrer, se retrouver, l’un n’étant que l’ombre de l’autre, unmanteau que l’on se partage à tour de rôle, tout le temps, qu’à un seul chaque fois.

Litanies pour un retour, le retour d’un couple blanc reflet d’un couple noir dans un cadre dont ils nepeuvent s’enfuir que pour un tour de scène mental, désir d’un retour, envie d’une retrouvaille qui n’a de forceque d’être un espoir.

Chapeau bas ! Admiration devant ce qui est sublime, que cela vienne de la main de dieu ou de lamain du diable, peu importe. Le couple noir et le couple blanc forme comme un pentacle avec une roserouge qui se glisse entre eux et entre eux deux comme une rouge tempête d’une possible suite sans fin,d’une éventuelle fin sans suite.

Ne me quitte pas ! Un tel classique donné tout entier à une femme noire seule devant un fauteuil àbascule, une femme noire qui danse comme une marionnette entre les mains d’un apprenti marionnettistequi mélange les fils et la tringle. Danse saccadée et désarticulée d’une crainte que l’on sait déjà perpétrée.

Dis, quand reviendras-tu ? La promesse d’un retour est un spectacle rêvé par la femme au fauteuil àbascule. Spectacle vision de désir dénudé, de plaisir promis mais distendu, par trop attendu. Elle ne peutque s’abandonner à ce spectre et abandonner ce mirage souhaitée mais sans avenir.

Une première valse à mille temps avec cinq couples de petits adolescents qui apprennent l’ivressedu champagne à mille bulles tout le temps, de vingt ans à cent ans, et même à mille temps, si à cet âge làon a encore le temps de compter jusqu’à trois. Multiplication des temps, comme des pains et de dixdanseurs, binaire pentagone, on passe à quinze, ternaire pentaèdre. Cinq hommes de plus pour ternariser lebinaire et faire valser nos pupilles.

Avec élégance, seul, isolé, abandonné, esseulé, désespéré, déserté, liquidé, brûlé de sa jeunesse,oublié dans son âge, comment rester avec les jeunes, que l’on porte en son âme, quand on n’est plus dubon côté de la haie de l’âge. Il n’est enfin plus que seul dans une foule avec pour seule consolation soncœur qui danse en cette fin d’un temps tonitruant.

L’aigle Noir alors surgit de la tempête. Un couple tout en plumes dans le ciel de la scène. L’oiseauroi, roi de la nuit, roi du jour, roi de tous les désirs sans limites autre que le ciel sur terre. Et deux voilesnoires se dressent comme un doublement des ailes de l’oiseau, de cet aigle noir que l’on ne peut peut-êtreplus vraiment avoir autrement que dans le sommeil ensongé du plaisir mental, le souvenir ennuité desplaisirs d’antan.

Mijn Vlakke Land ! Ô rare plaisir du Flamand de l’au-delà de toutes les montagnes, là où l’Europe sefait si plate qu’on en a plein son assiette, du vent, de la pluie, des brumes et des brouillards. Et l’on sentcette odeur des fritures de ce plat pays. Et l’on sent le sucre cassonade fondre sur la gaufre à la langue denotre gosier gourmand d’une bière sombre comme l’œil de toutes les tempêtes de la mer de ce vlakke land.

Le bon dieu nous emporte alors loin de tout dans un pas de deux de la rencontre des cœurs, desâmes, des mains, des pas, qui se multiplient en fond de scène et tout autour qui en deviennent alorscomme…

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… Une deuxième valse à mille temps, danse dense et lente dans des tuniques enroulantes jaunes etoranges quand aux cinq couples du début cinq supplétifs s’adjugent, et cinq encore et cinq de plus, et l’onn’en finit ainsi pas de tripler les antichambres Pentapyles du destin car la valse est le quinquennalpentagramme de l’avenir quand on le rêve. Et l’ombre de Brel revient pour rendre ternaire le couple divin.

Quand on n’a que l’amour nous emporte dans un tourbillon quand la ronde de la valse s’assoit aupourtour de la scène pour laisser un simple couple de noir vêtu ou à demi-dévêtu danser l’amour qui n’ad’égal que ce qui est beau dans un monde où la beauté nous fait souvent défaut. L’amour est le but, la fin, lafinalité la destination, le destin en un mot de chaque croisement de l’inconnu aux carrefours de la vie où laguerre parfois se déchaîne sans que rien si ce n’est l’amour puisse l’arrêter.

Une rencontre inouïe, imprévue mais inévitable entre trois artistes si différents qu’ils en sont lesfacettes multiples d’une révélation polyédrique. Un voyage à l’autre bout des passions à ne surtout pasmanquer à quelque prix que ce puisse être.

SUB ROSA – AN ANTHOLOGY OF NOISE AND ELECXTRONIC MUSIC – SIXTH A-CHRONOLOGY – 1957-2010

This volume (2 CDs) has qualities that are striking and emotionally powerful. I will just give someimpressions.

It starts with a drowning car sinking in a road mess of noise and hullabaloo. The sounds are so real,so material, so physical, that we feel at home in each one. We are in a world of noises and sounds we knowby experience, our everyday sonorous world. The only new element is the rearranging of these sounds intosomething that is not what we could hear in a simple and single street.

The mixing of these sounds, their succession and their superposition, their crossing and theirintertwining are at times frightening as if these sounds and noises were alive and could overtake us,overwhelm our mind and being. And we let ourselves go in that universe and we are carried away into aworld of surreal existence.

Rarely distorted the sounds are only associated in such a way that we can be seized by fear if notfright. The fear of being mentally transported to a country we do not really know and we’ll have to discover, ifwe can open our ears and eyes long enough. The fright of someone who suddenly thinks that he might notbe able to come back, he might be swallowed for good and digested by this sonorous world. The panic infront of this simple idea that maybe there is a matrix behind all that noise.

But that noise is there to charm us. It is made musical, rhythmic even melodious and the sounds thatcould be of musical origin or musical nature get the texture of noise, street noise or factory noise with aharmonious tinge. It is this divide that disappears and without that divide we wonder where we are, on whichside of it that are no longer different, opposed, divided, separated. We have managed to bring togethermusic and noise.

When it becomes rhythmic it takes the power of some Vodun or Voodoo incantation, ritual trance,magical divination, pure sorcery in the hands of the three weird sisters, Harmony, Melody and Rhythm. Wehave to let our most intimate fibers go into that rhythmic pulse that impulses and repulses at the same timeour conscious mind into some experience of overwhelming seriation of pounding sounds or sounding poundsthat prances onto us, that bounces us over the gate and the fence and the wall into pure beat, tempo,duration sliced into recoiling and leaping sounds that ricochet in our ears as if these ears were some soundstage or rhythm generator. We are generating and becoming that rhythm and we can’t evade it any more.

At times some voices come up but they speak a primitive language that has no words just syllablesthat scream around and away, crossing the horizon of this sound stage as if the wings were in theforeground and the background on top of it all. The backdrop of these rare vocal elements is a multifariousand ever-changing soundtrack that never ends wrapping these few vocal elements up with swathes ofabsorbing cotton that retains the deep and light sounds and makes it a shrine for these vocal elements andwe pray these divine apparitions to work some miracle and humanize this universe.

The last element that fascinated me was the sound of water. It is rare but when it comes it creates apeaceful moment when the mechanical and noisy sound world suspends its own existence and we suspendour own disbelief to envisage a regeneration, a rejuvenation, a rebirth of the colorful and pristine naturalhuman world from the swarming crowd of biting banshees or stinging nettles or wasps. An instant of inner

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peace in an instant of outer aquatic rocking and rolling of the mental cradle of our souls mesmerizes andhypnotizes our spiritual energy.

FANFARAI – RAI CUIVRÉ

Si vous ne connaissez pas ce groupe de Raï, mais est-ce du Raï, précipitez vous dans les bacs etpataugez si nécessaire pour les trouver et en jouir jusqu’à plus soif. Il vous restera toujours encore un peude soif pour en prendre encore plus. C’est comme le thé à la menthe : on sait quand on commence à l’aimermais on ne sait pas quand on arrêtera, si jamais.

Il y a d’abord les instruments pour beaucoup inattendus dans leur composition. Ces cuivres sont siclairs, si sonnants que l’on se croirait transporté dans ce que la musique la plus classique a produit de plusdynamique et fort avec ces cuivres. On est au meilleur de Bach, Purcell and bien d’autres.

Il y a ensuite les langues. Elles sont bien sûr loin de nous si nous ne les parlons pas, moins loin sinous les avons fréquentées, et comment pourrions nous aujourd’hui en France dire que l’on n’a pasfréquenté les langues sémites ou les langues bantoues ? A part de censurer son audition dans la rue et lemétro, on les entend tous les jours que le Seigneur ou le Cosmos nous offre prêt-à-porter. Elles ont unemusique qui accroche à l’oreille ? probablement car elles sont primales car issues des premiers pas del’humanité qui osait vouloir parler et communiquer il y a quelques deux cent mille ans. La musique ne faitque renforcer ces tours virevoltants proches du tournis et dont le vocalisme est une dentelle sonore ajoutéeà la trame des consonnes, un des sept voiles de la danse de Salomé.

Mais il y a ensuite l’immense saladier, dirait Bill Clinton, où ces artistes composent piste après pisteun cocktail multiformes et multi-genres que l’on ne peut cependant pas vraiment isoler comme une imitation,mais chaque phrase musicale est bien plus une allusion à une palette aussitôt tressée, entrecroisée,hybridée et torsadée en un tout multiple qui n’a plus de nom dans aucune de nos langues car cela devientune musique de l’âme que personne ne peut plus rejeter, dans laquelle on se laisse aller comme à ladouceur tendre d’un duvet. Les Australiens ont un mot pour cela que nous n’avons pas, un mot qu’ils ontlargement emprunté à une tradition anglo-saxonne reprise et amplifiée par les Noirs d’Amérique dans leurémergence post-esclavagiste. Ils comparent cette fécondation par entre-mélange à un couvre-pieds fait demille morceaux et piqués comme un tout chamarré.

Mettez ce CD en boucle sur votre lecteur et laissez vous aller à ces climats, tous chauds, certains unpeu torrides, et définitivement qui sentent bon la vie. J’entends déjà certains dire que ce n’est que du mash-up d’emprunts sauvages à la meilleure musique européenne pour en faire un sous-produit touristiqueméditerranéen. Ils ne voient pas que c’est comme cela que grandit la musique. Bach puis Mozart ont inventéla valse en simplement copiant et plagiant les bourrées populaires et paysannes. On est si à l’aise danscette musique que l’on devrait en faire un festival dans une cathédrale, à La Chaise Dieu par exemple quin’a encore jamais reconnu la musique sacrée des pays autres qu’Européens, et même Chrétiens. Sémitess’abstenir et Bantous restez invisibles.

Il y a aussi dans cet art musical fugué une polyrythmie typique de la musique qui nous vient du nidmême de l’humanité, des polyrythmies sur lesquelles ont peu imaginer Lucy dansant il y a quelques millionsd’années, ou plus prêt de nous ces Homo Sapiens Africains qui ont inventé le langage dans les hautesvallées des divers Nils d’où sont parties et descendues toutes nos société humaines. Ne nous laissons pasfrustrer de ces racines profondes qui sont les nôtres.

PERSONAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE MUSIC WORLD

Jacques COULARDEAUDocteur en Cosmologie Générative

(Generative Cosmology, University of Jupiter on Europa)

LA CHAISE DIEU – 3015Les aventures de Loukardill en musique sucrée(Sweet Music, University of Jupiter on Europa)

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Illustration Kévin ThorezImageur luciférico-obscur

Editions La DondaineJuillet 2014

UNE VISITE INTERSIDÉRANTE

Loukardill débarque du satellite Europa de Jupiter dans son Vaisseau Spatial Individuel(VSI) à La Chaise Dieu en 3015 pour l'ouverture du Festival. Il découvre l'Abbatiale et ses secretsou ses charmes parfois cachés, et surtout une musique "sucrée" comme on dit sur Jupiter (en fait"sweet" car on parle anglais partout dans le cosmos sauf en France), qui serait en languefrançaise standard de la musique sacrée.

Et il prend un sacré pied - de nez bien sûr - à utiliser ses pouvoirs cosmiques pour ajouterun peu de piment et de piquant dans le concert. Il en invente alors le concept de MaladieSpirituellement Transmissible appelé à avoir une longue carrière universelle dans l'univers desmillénaires à venir. Il est sûr que l'introduction de Rap dans l'Abbatiale entre deux morceauxbaroques a pu semblé un peu rococo aux esthètes patentés de la presse bien en vue - mais bienmal en vie - de Paris. Inutile de dire que Loukardill est reparti ce soit là plein de souvenirsfantasques.

Il nous a laissé à rêver de ce que ce Festival pourrait être s'il était interrompu de façonintermittente par des artistes alternatifs intermittents pour des divertissements anachronistiques(en anglais dans le texte) intermittents. Certains diraient bien des choses, mais Loukardill n'enpense pas moins.

Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.fr; and all other Amazon stores. KDP Edition37 pagesSimultaneous Device Usage: UnlimitedPublisher: Editions La Dondaine; 1 edition (July 4, 2014)Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.Language: FrenchASIN: B00LJXWIL6Lending: Not EnabledPrice: US $8.24, EUR 6,04

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Jacques COULARDEAU

ILYA& VANYA(Love Drama, Full and Uncut)

Illustrations Annunzio COULARDEAU

Editions La Dondaine

TWO LOVE BIRDS . . . OF A FEATHER

This story has to be dedicated to time and life. It is the result of meeting many people in theavenues of big Paris, gay as is well-known, and gay it is, indeed.

The songs were written to the music Kévin Thorez had previously composed. All the songsare from 2011-2012.

The dramatic story of Ilya and Vanya was written in 2013, integrating the lyrics of the songsas part of the story. It is a full homage to a young man who does not like his name to be quoted oruttered. Anonymous he will stay, just the way he likes it, and he likes many things.

The two characters carry endearing shortenings of Russian names. The names aremasculine and the two shortenings are built on a feminine ending. I was attracted by this ambiguityfor our birds of a feather.

Just as I was attracted by the morbid merging love of Dracula and Mina. Love is, in a way,losing yourself in the other while the other loses himself or herself in you. Losing and looseningthemselves into each other.

That’s the miracle of love and it has little to do with orientation, though we always have toconsider the end from the very beginning and just as much as love is suffering, the end of love isexquisitely painful. Dukkha!

The story in a shortened version to hold within 80 minutes will come out soon at Zimbalamand most platforms under the title Synchrosome II Ilya and Vanya., with the voices of KévinThorez, Nad.X.Ka and Jacques Coulardeau.

Olliergues, Auvergne, France, March 8, 2014

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Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.fr; and all other Amazon stores. KDP Edition74 pagesPublisher: Editions La Dondaine (March 7, 2014)Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.Language: EnglishASIN: B00IVIUAOEText-to-Speech: Enabled Price: US$8.17,EUR5.96, IndianRupees320.00,￥813,etc

SYNCHROSOME two

Kévin THOREZ , NADXKA& Jacques COULARDEAU

Paintings on sleevesCaroline GUILLE

www.kevinthorez.com

Synchrosome Two [Digital Edition] 4.4.2014Kévin Thorez (Composer, performer, singer), NadXka (Singer),

Jacques COULARDEAU (Author),Caroline Guille (Visual artist)

2014 - All right reserved: Jacques Coulardeau & Kévin Thorez

This Pop Folk Rock adventure is targeting sonorous outlandishness through a vast quest forinstruments, language and voices that bring together a surprising - if not even mind stirring - atmosphere, Weare trying to capture and reproduce various emotions via music and the sounds of the English language thatmay be raucous and rough.

We touch themes that are1- The depth of the heart when it suffers ;

48

2- The beauty of love when it breaks;3- The power of the heart when it is in love;4- The unfathomable pleasure of the heart when love is born, lives and finally dies, to perhaps be

reborn.

As for the music we are trying to bring together various styles from pop-rock music to soft folk music. Weassociate piano and guitar to many other instruments to build sets if not bands that can have different andvaried wings

Product Details :► Total Length: 58:54 ► ASIN: B00J09FVBA► Language: English ► Format: Explicit Lyrics► ASIN: B00J09FVBA ► Copyright: (p) Kevinkxproductions► Digital Distribution: Zimbalam – Believe Direct Limited► Sold by: I-Tunes, Amazon, Google music, Virgin mega, Deezer …

SYNCHROSOME II : Ilya and Vanya

Jacques COULARDEAU,NADXKA & Kévin THOREZ

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Paintings on sleevesby Caroline GUILLE

www.kevinthorez.com

Synchrosome II : Ilya and Vanya [Digital Edition] 4.4.2014Jacques COULARDEAU (Author, Lead speaker),

Kévin Thorez (Composer, performer, singer), NadXka (Singer),Caroline Guille (Visual artist)

2014 - All right reserved: Jacques Coulardeau & Kévin Thorez

This Love Pop Folk drama is targeting sonorous outlandishness through a vast quest forinstruments, language and voices that bring together a surprising - if not even mind stirring - atmosphere, Weare trying to capture and reproduce various emotions via music and the sounds of the English language thatmay be raucous and rough. The voice of the story teller is taking the audience in the most far-reaching painsof a soul, a mind and a heart at once.

We touch themes that are5- The depth of a gay heart when it suffers ;6- The beauty of gay love when it breaks;7- The power of the gay heart when it is in love;8- The incredible exquisite pleasure of the gay heart when love is born, lives and finally dies, to

perhaps be reborn.

As for the music we are trying to bring together various styles from pop-rock music to soft folk music . Weassociate piano and guitar to many other instruments to build sets if not bands that can have different andvaried wings

50

Product Details :► Total Length: 1:19:14 ► ASIN: B00J09IYFA► Language: English ► Format: Explicit Lyrics► Copyright: (p) Association La Dondaine – Mtkx► Digital Distribution: Zimbalam – Believe Direct Limited► Sold by: I-Tunes, Amazon, Google music, Virgin mega, Deezer …

L’APOCALYPSESELON SAINT JEAN

Adaptée du Nouveau TestamentJacques COULARDEAU

Mise en musiqueKévin THOREZ

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Illustrations Annunzio COULARDEAU

Editions La Dondaine

UNE VASTE HISTOIRE PERSONNELLE

Il y a des années que je lis cette Apocalypse en anglais, en français, en vieil anglais même, et dansquelques autres langues. C’est pour moi le texte le plus mystérieux qui soit car il raconte une histoire trèsancienne en l’habillant des couleurs de la prédiction.

Je vis dans le dragon autant que dans la bête. Je frémis avec les quatre chevaux et leurs cavaliers.Je tremble avec Babylone, cette pute céleste et divine, peut-être pas du dieu des Juifs ou des Chrétiens,mais d’un dieu quelque part dans une quelconque galaxie. Je halète au sort de la femme enceinte qui porteson destin, et le texte dit le nôtre aussi, entre ses mains, façon de parler.

J’ai demandé à bien des compositeurs de mettre cet oratorio en musique, mais ce fut toujours uneœuvre trop importante. J’ai essayé avec Annunzio Coulardeau une production en direct, en live et en plainair à Olliergues, lui, assurant la sonorisation et une composition de musique concrète et électronique plus oumoins improvisée. La première moitié seulement a été produite dans ces conditions.

Certains tremblent à la religion, d’autre à la longueur, d’autres encore tremblent devant la palette devoix à réunir, produite, construire, gérer. Et que dire de la musique !

Kévin Thorez s’y est mis lentement et il aura fallu trois ans pour réussir l’enregistrement, lacomposition et le montage. Vous me direz si le texte en vaut la peine, et vous rechercherez l’enregistrementpour me dire ensuite si la musique emporte bien l’aventure vers une fin qui, loin d’être salvatrice, est en faitdes plus dramatique, tragique, car on vous raconte ici la fin de l’humanité matérielle et sa simple survievirtuelle. 

Mais est-ce aussi simple ? Rien n’est jamais aussi simple qu’on le voudrait…

Amazon KindleEditions La Dondaine (2 juin 2013)Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com; etc.Langue : FrançaisASIN : B00D5YL2W8Prix sur Amazon.fr : 6.34 TTC

L’APOCALYPSE SELON SAINT JEAN

Adaptée du Nouveau TestamentJacques COULARDEAU

Mise en musiqueKévin THOREZ

52

Paintings and cover by Caroline GUILLE

www.l-apocalypse-selon-saint-jean.com

[Digital Edition] 3.6.2013

2013 / 2014 - All right reserved: Jacques Coulardeau & Kévin Thorez

UNE VASTE HISTOIRE PERSONNELLE

Il y a des années que je lis cette Apocalypse en anglais, en français, en vieil anglais même, et dansquelques autres langues. C’est pour moi le texte le plus mystérieux qui soit car il raconte une histoire trèsancienne en l’habillant des couleurs de la prédiction.

Je vis dans le dragon autant que dans la bête. Je frémis avec les quatre chevaux et leurs cavaliers.Je tremble avec Babylone, cette pute céleste et divine, peut-être pas du dieu des Juifs ou des Chrétiens,mais d’un dieu quelque part dans une quelconque galaxie. Je halète au sort de la femme enceinte qui porteson destin, et le texte dit le nôtre aussi, entre ses mains, façon de parler.

J’ai demandé à bien des compositeurs de mettre cet oratorio en musique, mais ce fut toujours uneœuvre trop importante :certains tremblent à la religion, d’autre à la longueur, d’autres encore tremblentdevant la palette de voix à réunir, produite, construire, gérer. Et que dire de la musique !

Il aura fallu trois ans pour réussir l’enregistrement, la composition et le montage. Vous me direz si letexte en vaut la peine, et vous rechercherez l’enregistrement pour me dire ensuite si la musique emportebien l’aventure vers une fin qui, loin d’être salvatrice, est en fait des plus dramatique, tragique, car on vousraconte ici la fin de l’humanité matérielle et sa simple survie virtuelle. 

Mais est-ce aussi simple ? Rien n’est jamais aussi simple qu’on le voudrait…

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Product Details :► Durée totale: 1:54:54► Copyright: (p) Association La Dondaine - Mtkx► Digital Distribution: Zimbalam – Believe Direct Limited► Sold by: I-Tunes, Amazon, Deezer… ► ASIN: B00CY4R1W0

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