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Sábado 16 de julio de 2011 | Buenos Aires Herald
An evening of superlatives
Por Jaime Botana
Carlos López Puccio & Co. are mesmerizing, as usual
Argentina is surely due to be hailed eventually as one of the foremost choral centres of the world.
Monday evening’s concert, organized by the enterprising and resilient Festivales Musicales, would be enough to prove my assertion.
I don’t think I need to sing the praises of the Estudio Coral de Buenos Aires, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in the best possible way: singing for a mesmerized audience.
While there are literally hundreds of choirs in Argentina, this group stands out for many reasons: their members are professional musicians, voice teachers, conductors. Professional here does not mean they are paid for their labour more than a nominal salary: it is meant to construe their life is entirely devoted to music.
They can even sight-read complex scores, many have absolute pitch, a not-always-welcome blesssing which can (and is) complemented by the use of a tuning fork, an indispensable tool to check (especially if they are singing atonal music) if their tuning is perfect. They shouldn’t worry.
Their conductor, Maestro Carlos López Puccio, most preferently selects their repertoire among contemporary music (and Baroque works frequently following the new findings of musicology), and they have presented premières of works hitherto thought impossible, setting new trends of interpretation and programming and gently inviting other groups to follow suit.
Alas, this is not always possible, but striving to attain a superior level is the good side of competition.
And now, to the concert.
Beginning with a delicate, ultrarefined rendering of Debussy’s Trois Chansons, generally chosen to close a concert because of their beauty and complexity, the concert offered a magnificent tour of the evolution of choral music.
They were followed by seldom — if ever — performed works, by underrated Liszt: two beautiful Ave Marias, sung with devotion: sung prayers of magical appeal.
At this early moment of the evening, some of us thought they would have benefited from the acoustic box , essential to help the blend by impeding the sound to disperse unaided by the friendly, almost church-like resonance the box provides.
Yes, the Colón, built for Opera, Ballet, Theatre and Recitals, has lately deprived their artists of the box, and recitals and concerts are performed in front of the curtain.
Great harm has been done to them and to us.
The famous, wondrous acoustics has lost an irrepleaceable ally. The obvious reason is surely the amount of work and money the removal of Ballet and Opera scenographies would entail. Unfair, but true.
I thought maybe this had been a decision taken by Maestro, not renowned either for his addiction to blurred sound or sentimentality, but this was not the case.
The Colón, having advanced to new heights of magnificence and on its way to recover its former international standing, should not allow these mistakes. We hope the end of refurbishment and construction will modify this bee-hive on the ointment. It would make both the artists and the audiences happy.
This was not a dramatic instance of quality loss, because the ECBA is made up of specialists: singing in quartets (which requires an absolute command of the score) as apposed to performing in self-contained groups of Sopranos, Mezzos, Tenors and Basses makes all the difference in the world.
And now, a paragraph about physics, which you may skip.
Now that we got rid of them, let me remind you of something we learnt at school and may forgot. Any sound produced naturally (sorry, electronics) produces a main sound, which we can all hear.
But this sound is accompanied by a host of others: its octave, the octave’s fifth, its fourth, its major third and many more.
I shan’t get into that.
I only want to call your attention to the fact that a sound is never alone, but is escorted by its many ghosts, which are called harmonics.
They are not easy to discern for the untrained ear, but very close attention (especially when the acoustics are good) will allow you to hear at least the octave and the fifth. Conductors such as Robert Shaw and Charles Dutoit tune their groups by asking them to sing or play a given note — only one — in unison, until they reach the perfect agreement: then, when the harmonics appear, the concert may begin.
These ghosts also appear, of course, during performances, in those instances where the group plays a major chord in faultless tuning.
Untrained ears construe this addition to the beauty of the voices or instruments, while the truth is it is a consequence discovered by the ancient Greeks and applies to any natural sound.
Electronic music often produces a natural sound by adding these emanations following specific rules of volume and timbre.
You may come back now, ye indifferent to science.
The Estudio Coral de Buenos Aires, led by an obsessive conductor, produced these harmonics in many instances, and fleetingly added yet more beauty and magic to their sound.
The acoustic box would have helped to help them produce even more, but they are so perfect that the absence of an harmonic spectrum was not missed by many. Even when it is hard to believe, this choir is even better than it sounds.
I have been led astray by my technicalities. To return to the concert, they sang an emblematic work: Schönberg’s Friede auf Erde, composed in 1907 and beginning the end of 1500 years of tonal music. Their version was, of course, admirable.
The first part ended with a virtuoso rendering of Jannequin’s Le chant des oiseaux.
I believe their reading, and also of Debussy’s second chanson, suffered from the breakneck speed the conductor chose in his refusal to court Romanticism, thus depriving us of the many details and nuances a slower performance would have allowed.
But he, of course, has his reasons.
The second part was tough.
György Ligeti is undoubtedly one of the most important composers of the XXth / XXIst centuries, and his work is yet to be digested and assimilated. Vásár (1983), is one of his Magyar Studies: a depiction of the cries of street vendors.
An incredible experiment for five small choirs with a conductor each, placed in different spaces and singing their hair-raisingly difficult parts a capella.
They were helped — so to speak — by a supervisor connected by earphones to the conductors. He marked given points in the score, since there is no coincidence of rhythm or accents between the groups.
Their only meeting point is their last chord, brief and followed by silence.
It may have been its world première live: recordings must help simplify its unsurmountable difficulties, but a live rendering is no less than heroic.
Given the status of the performers, I can only say their version must have been excellent.
Two other Ligetis followed: Hortobágy (1951) and Kállai kettös (1950). Composed thirty years before, these arrangements of folk songs bond Ligeti with Kodaly and Bartók and, as the “missing link,” they are essential to the study of the evolution of music.
With Randall Thompson’s The Peaceable Kingdom (1936) we were taken back to times when a dissonance was a mere accident which obediently led to its peaceful resolution. The work is moving and was delivered beautifully.
A question that has been racking my mind for quite a while: is it reasonable to group all these works (rather, all works) under the common denomination of music? Isn’t it misleading and equivocal to put Schubert and Ligeti under the same label?
It is not a matter of taste: it would be sensible and reasonable.
I am not alone in my doubts. Juan Carlos Paz, not a minor member of my club, perhaps plagued by the same thoughts, suggested “Music of our time.”
Anyway, the concert was superb, and should have been recorded and imported to show the planet and surroundings one of Argentina’s claims to world recognition.