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Sunday, June 11, 2006
EcstaticusPeople everywhere are absorbed in conversation. Seated under trees, under striped canopies in the squares, they bend together over food and drink, their voices darkly raveled in Oriental laments that flow from radios in basements and back kitchens. Conversation is life, language is the deepest being. We see the patterns repeat, the gestures drive the words. It is the sound and picture of humans communicating. It is talk as a definition of itself. Talk. Voices out of doorways and open windows, voices on the stuccoed-brick balconies, a driver taking both hands off the wheel to gesture as he speaks. Every conversation is a shared narrative, a thing that surges forward, too dense to allow space for the unspoken, the sterile. The talk is unconditional, the participants drawn in completely. This is Don DeLillo’s American narrator in The Names, walking among the cafes of Athens and taking it all in. Music, especially choral music, is like this too -- what’s moving to me in choral performance is the depth of that same gesture, which is also a communal gesture as large numbers of people delight in the sound they all make. Mahler’s Eighth is lightly, not darkly, raveled, and it is no lament. To the corporate bliss of choral voices it adds content about the power of the creative spirit and the salvation of souls. The piece is in fact “a thing that surges forward, too dense to allow space for the unspoken.” It’s too populous, too harmonic, too fortissimo, for night thoughts. To the hundreds of singers onstage were added, last night, two lines of singers on either side of the concert hall. From our orchestra seats, we looked up at them as they stood along the second tier, their sound from either side a sonic embrace. Again and again Mahler marshaled his forces -- impossibly high sopranos, dual harps, hard percussions, soft pizzicatos -- all for the ardor of existence. |