In 1707, George Frideric Handel, a 22 -year -old radical composer working in Rome, surprised the Vatican and the public with “Il Trionfo del tempo e del Disinganno” (The triumph of time and disillusionment). An opera disguised as an oratorio to bypass the prohibition of the church on the profane opera, the impolitic work on the past and the present is formed as the conflict between extravagance and holiness. Humanizing our obsession with beauty and the obligation for the Council, Handel's first masterpiece appears as appropriate as it is titillating.
Exactly 240 years later, another radical, 22, Pierre Boulez, started his second piano sonata. This wild and impolitic work surprised civilized Parisian salons with what looked like pure ugliness. However, this complex and aggressive sonata took a sonata to sow the European avant-garde of the post-second world war and provide a music base that led in new directions.
Boulez, who deceased Nine years ago, would have been 100 last Wednesday. Among the universal celebrations of his work this season, an appropriate young wild pianist with a taste for Death Metal, Thomas Mellan, has captured the assault of the second sonata of Boulez the composer as part of the composer's birthday as part of Piano spheres Series at Colburn school. The following night, on the other side of the rue du Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic presented “Il Trionfo” to conclude a Handel project inaugurated by a week, the first episode of the French conductor and the orchestra clandes, the closing of the orchestra.
What are the chances that these rare works appear back to back? Very well in most places but less surprising here. Boulez had close links with the founder of Piano Spheres, Leonard Stein (who gave the first performance in Los Angeles of the second sonata in 1963) and with the Phil (which will celebrate Boulez next month).
In its own right, Haïm broke the baroque barriers. She made an arrest the phil beginning in 2011, bringing a Luttoi inhibited to Handel and with Each successive appearance She made the baroque more and more modern, almost as unpredictable and modifiable as the Boulez. His appointment of an artist collaborator follows that of the director of the opera Yuval Sharonwhich was better known as a artistic disruptorA designation just as well suited to Haïm.
Nine years ago, Haïm was the conductor in a very provocative staging of “Il Trionfo” at the Summer Aix-en-Provence Festival which included a filmed clip of the French theorist Jacques Derrida, who was sometimes accused of doing literary studies what Boulez had done to music, and vice versa. Haïm also recorded “Il Trionfo” in 2004 in Ircam, the Bouleval Institute of Computer Music created in Paris.
Haïm supervised “Il Trionfo” at Disney Hall with a singular shine. His Handel project included three programs. For the regular subscription concerts of the Phil the weekend from March 21 to 23, she directed Bach Magnificat and “Dixit Dominus” of Handel. This was followed by two programs with the own together of Haïm, the Astrée concert. These consisted of a Rameau / Handel program, studies on lush sounds. “He trionfo” arrived last. The La Phil, sparing little expenses, also flew over the Astrée choir of 25 members of Haïm of Paris as well as eight extraordinary vocal soloists.
“Dixit Dominus” by Handel, which was composed the same year as “Il Trionfo” and began the Haïm Phil program, prepared the field. It is also daring, especially for a sacred work. It avoids the scandal, however, by being an attractive joy to hear and not engaging in the more risky human desires of “il trionfo”. In Disney Hall, he offered an unrealized joy. Virtuoso of Astrée de Haïm dazzled. The La Phil gave the best approximation of the period instruments of the game that I met. With the Magnificat of Bach and a reminder of “happy, happy that we will be” of “Semele” of Haendel, “Dixit Dominus” made sure that happiness prevailed. Wonderful smiles all around, on stage and out.
During the next concert on March 25, “Ode for St. Cecilia's Day” by Haendel, “a poetry framework by John Dryden, took even less risk, at least for anyone with a love for music. The “ode” famous in an exalted song and an irresistibly alive instrumental invention, the wonder of music in all its processes and measures. Handel is delighted with the howling trumpet, the flute of speech, the miracle of harmony, the capacity of music to tame the wild beast and to offer revelations of absence. Haïm seemed to have an instruction for his overall refrain and his soloists, the soprano Elsa Benoit and the tenor Eric Ferring: find, in each statement, more and more happiness.
This emotionally optimistic preparation revealed “Il Trionfo” all the more revolutionary with his allowances to disturb musical formulas as well as psychological formulas. To face the truth and the disillusionment brought Handel back again and again to the work over half a century, rewriting her twice (the last time at the end of her life) as the blackberry and majestic “the triumph of time and truth”. Even thus, it is the freshness of the allegorical audacity as a young genius who looks towards the future that has the most relevance.
The characters are beauty, pleasure, time and disillusionment. Beauty is young and vain. The pleasure assures her that she can stay like this, so she could live as long as she can. The time does not say so quickly. Disillusionment warns him that the Route du Salvation is to face the facts. It takes 2 ½ hours tenacious to finally follow the disillusionment.
But the pleasure cannot be defeated. She is ready for the next victim. She lives for the moment and will not let him go. Time and disillusionment remain abstractions to the point where we no longer dare to be mistaken.
The singers inspired by Haïm – Benoit (beauty), Julia Lezhneva (pleasure), Iestyn Davies (disillusion) and Petr Nekoranec (time) – Everyone gave convincing arguments. Pleasure is often presented as a shady male operator. Lezhneva's exciting pleasure acted as a kind of ghost, a haunted vagabond seeking his own validation rather than victims.
Handel wrote for pleasure one of his most famous and moving arias, “Lascia la Spina”. Leave the thorn, the pleasure of imitations in lamentation, take the rose. Handel later reused him in his opera “Renaldo”. Haïm moved Thursday's performance as well as an intensity that allowed no room to applaud the arias. The amazing impact of Lezhneva's “Lascia” was the sound of a large audience that holds fear of fear.
There is little equal in music to 22 -year -old disruptors in Handel and Boulez. We are at a time of joyful disruption, especially since we are witnessing the strategies of Silicon Valley and the demolition of the federal government. Handel and Boulez revealed a different strategy. The two may have been aggressive in their requirements that the world is ready for a new direction. But they demolished the conventional worn structures in which they were deeply educated, already knowing what worked and what needed replacement. They crossed the next stage providing where the new freedom would lead them. The two passed the following half-century to develop ideas that they initiated in these first two works, which reflects them, as they still do.
