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jeudi 15 juillet 2004
 

"In the sacristy of the church where we recorded (...), there was a small, very well-equipped kitchen, with a large bay window looking out on to the surrounding trees. Light, calm, silence. We met there from time to time between takes, a glass of wine, bread, fresh fruit, coffee... It was a moment of great tranquillity, few words, many glances exchanged. Open windows, cigarette smoke vanishing into the cool air of those summer afternoons. After the music, those few minutes allowed us to get our energy back between one piece and the next; we exchanged our impressions, comments, smiles. We spoke different languages, we didn't all know one another, but as can mysteriously happen sometimes, there was a subtle musical esteem that enabled us to play and sing together as if we had always done so. And it is true that music brings people together, cuts across the frontiers of our feelings. From Finland to Naples, from Japan to Austria via Holland, France and Belgium, from one side of the Po to another in search of who knows what blackbird, a little songbird flying high up there (...)."
Marco Beasley, tenor, thus added a personal view, dated Genoa, 25.09.2001, to round off the programme notes provided with a wonderful recording of works by a singer, harpist, guitarist and organist previously unknown to me, Stefano Landi, who first turned up in Rome as a choirboy in 1595.
Landi went on to become a teacher, part-time member of the papal choir, and rich patron's composer. However, the title of the CD most strongly recommended to me by Barry J is 'Homo fugit velut umbra...' (Man flees like a shadow), an anonymous song-dance of death which precedes the varied collection of songs and poems set to music by Landi and recorded by L'Arpeggiata.
When I told Barry of the Bach I wrote about yesterday, he asked whether I'd heard of Christina Pluhar and L'Arpeggiata ensemble.
Now I have. As Barry and the fellow who reviews 'Homo fugit...' at that Amazon.fr link said, this achievement is a marvel. It ranges from the mystical to the amorous. Others have more to say of it on a page in the BBCi Classical Reviews.
Thanks for that one!

Last night, a film and music left me haunted throughout today.
When 'The Pianist' came out in the cinemas after taking the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2002, I avoided it, being too much of a coward to face any more Holocaust at the time.
Unlike many of the professional critics who managed to gather their thoughts and impressions of Polanski's literally stunning film within a few hours of seeing Adrien Brody's performance in 'The Pianist' (Rotten Tomatoes), I scarcely know yet what to say since it has left my mind reeling and revisiting many scenes and images over and over again.
All I'm sure of is that it's one of the greatest and most terrifying movies I have ever experienced, devoid of melodrama and cliché. I have also decided, I think, that this largely true account of survival in and beyond the Warsaw Ghetto under German occupation is one of the very few films that I still consider the Kid, for all her considerable but hard-won maturity at 15, may still be too young to see.
There may be a dark side, which worries me not at all, to her 'belcatja2' blog -- currently winning her more than 500 "hits" a month -- and her iTunes may be full of the direst heavy metal among a much brighter musical collection, but Marianne remains ultra-sensitive to real violence and inhumanity. I'll discuss it with her, but this DVD may be a film to give her nightmares for weeks.
If hell is the absence of God and the absence of god is no more and no less than the absence of love, Polanski's Warsaw is it. Of course there are scenes of horrifying bravery and courage in such a hell. There is resistance. Some of the characters retain humanistic values and care for one another. The film is full of the ironies and the paradoxes that constitute life, but what kind of life?
Drawn utterly into 'The Pianist', I felt like a voyeur, much as I did in 1994 when we were reporting on the genocide in Rwanda. Organised extermination is the rule and still in this film each individual murder comes as an almost physical blow. Like the audience in the concert hall at the end of the movie, we are outsiders, mere survivors perhaps, looking in on the edge of a place where hell strangely meets heaven.
The music is genuinely miraculous, somehow. It "cuts across the frontiers of our feelings", as Beasley wrote of Landi's pieces from a different age. Some reviewers suggest that Polanski has shown us his most intimate understanding of the nature and power of art itself. I don't know. Perhaps that is one way to comprehend the scene where the pianist plays for the SS captain who returns to give him bread, a greatcoat and life.
Like the pianist himself, disintegrating throughout a superb performance among nothing but other outstanding pieces of acting, you could feel detached, disengaged from the horror of which you are at once part and witness. Or you could see him as contemptible, emotionally frozen, unable to take sides in a total war where almost everybody else finds they have no choice but to do so.

By the end of this film, what the hell is it that we, as part of the audience, as both voyeurs and people sharing in the completely personal experience of music, are applauding? A performance? Survival? Art? Transcendence?
Again, I don't know. I think I prefer not to know. To write that we all have hell and heaven in ourselves is a cliché and perhaps became one because it's true.
There is also, inevitably, the "what on earth would you have done and become?" question that tales like this leave behind.
Seeing 'The Pianist' is, I think, one of those experiences that render judgement virtually impossible, yet verdicts have to be reached if we're to retain any humanity at all. It's an insight into what the Nazis called a "final solution" which raises enormous and perhaps unanswerable questions.
It reaches beyond reason.
It's a film I certainly want to see again, several times. But none of them too soon.
Until I read those liner notes for the Stefano Landi album, I didn't know where the musical term passacaglia began.
Referring to the subtitle of that anonymous first piece, Christina Pluhar tells us that

"'Passacaglia della Vita' suggests a dance of death, a danse macabre, which conjures up before our eyes the mediaeval vision of a skeleton dancing through the streets of the town (passa=calle, the original meaning of the dance in Spain)."
In one of the most powerful long shots in 'The Pianist', a skeletal musician hobbles through the ruins of a city.
I can't help but leave this on that unfinished note.


9:58:02 PM  link   your views? []


nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit
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