Music in Historic Settings

 One of the benefits of living in Paris is the regular opportunity to see (and perform) concerts in famous, striking venues. Recently I have seen a few of these. The concert quality and interest varied, but the setting was uniformly wonderful. Going from oldest to most recent:

La Sainte-Chapelle is a famous church on the Île de la Cité in the center of Paris. It was built for the deposition of holy relics (eg Jesus' crown) in 1248 and is famed for its pure Gothic style, with walls that are nearly entirely made of stained glass.

I saw an early music concert in this extraordinary chapel by its resident early music ensemble, about 12 professional singers who seemed well trained in medieval voice techniques. The hourlong concert was varied, with a mix of monophony (a single vocal line, eg Gregorian chant), as well as more advanced compositions from the 13th century, eg the Notre Dame polyphonic style, in which 2-3 lines are sung together, forming primitive and effective harmonies, usually cadencing on a pure open fifth or octave. The singers sang from different parts of the church, using differing numbers of singers and alternation of men's and women's voices, keeping things interesting. Intonation and vocal quality was pleasingly uniform. It was a lovely atmospheric experience.

We now skip forward 600 years or so in our architectural tour. The Châtelet Theater was built in 1862 as part of the  same Haussmann renovation of the Paris cityscape that gave us the superb Palais Garnier opera house, which I described in my last post. The Châtelet is an ornate red and gold classic with lots of boxes designed to accommodate the upper classes who liked to attend the theater with their colleagues in privacy from the surrounding riffraff. 

The concert I saw there was an interesting one--Point Nemo, a dramatized version set to Steve Reich minimalist classic Drumming (1971), with music by Paris' Ensemble Intercontermporain and the acting/movements by the Belgian collective FC Bergman. The music was bewitching. The piece lasted over an hour, and migrated in instrumentation from drums to xylophones/voice, then ending with a combination. What I love about the best minimalist pieces such as this one is that they have real structure and direction, with recurrence of recognizable motives. They have fascinating timbre shifts, but the music is not just timbre like so many pieces of our time. Reich's extended rhythmic repetitions play with your mind, and when the pattern shifts, even a little, you undergo a sort of neural shock. It reminds me a bit of being in a pitch black cave; without visual input your hearing becomes more acute and sensitive to small changes. 

The "dramatization" of this wordless, script-less piece was curious, and not entirely convincing. Two people wandered around a human-designed faux Garden of Eden.

At times they discovered odd mechanical devices and weapons (humans violating the garden?).  The couple also tended to a automaton-like child, guiding it around a circular railroad track. But in the end, the child was coldly disassembled (remarkably sad), as were the plants and rocks of the garden. The title Point Nemo comes from the name of a real locale in the Atlantic where obsolescent satellites are programmed to fall and sink to the bottom of the ocean--sort of an underwater junkyard. I am not sure of the complete meaning, but ecologic commentary was, I think, the point. 

Moving later in the 19th century, the American Cathedral in Paris is an Episcopalian neo-Gothic church dedicated in 1886. It's on the right bank, near the Seine and the Arc de Triomph. I sing there each weekend as part of the Cathedral Choir. It is the first time that I have sung in a proper set of Gothic choir stalls, which is very cool. The architecture is spectacular, as are the decorations (stained glass, organ, tapestries). 

My eye was particularly struck by the altar painting by American muralist Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911), whose art was influenced by the French Pre-Raphaelite Brothers movement.

Skipping forward into the 20th century, we have the Church of Saint Christophe-de-Javel, which was completed in 1933. It's rather dark (much of the building is formed of preformed cast concrete, a new technique in its era) but with a titanic rounded nave ceiling that provided resonant acoustics for a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony by the Note et Bien orchestra and chorus. 

I loved the mural over the choir by Henri-Marcel Magne, featuring saints with modern modes of transportation (ie sailing and motorized ships).

While there are Romanesque and Gothic influences, the church feels intriguingly 20th century industrial, appropriate for Mahler's music, which anticipates the advances and traumas of the century. The performance by the non-professional performers was generally quite fine, but I thought the conductor's choices in tempi and lack of effective tempo and mood transitions were not ideal. An innovative touch was to place the choral singers (incognito, dressed as audience members) for the final movement scattered within the audience, the first time I have experienced that. This was most effective at their entrance halfway into the finale, where the hushed "Auferstehen" (rise again) emerged from a mysterious somewhere, until we figured out that the choir was actually among us. This was wonderful. It was less effective when the music got louder, and you could hear little pockets of singers, rather than a unified ensemble. But I applaud the creativity of the Note et Bien ensemble, and would enjoy seeing them (or maybe playing viola with them) again.