Les Delices

Les Délices: "Mirages and Monstrosities" at the William Busta Gallery (October 30)  

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by Nicholas Jones  NB: This appeared in ClevelandClassical.com
Opera dominated the world of the French baroque, delighting court and capital with its strange combination of the fantastic, the noble, the grotesque, the beautiful, and the expressive. The theatricality of opera permeated this weekend's Halloween-themed presentation of "Mirages and Monstrosities," the opening concert of the fifth season of concerts by Debra Nagy's group "Les Délices," which specializes in music of the French Baroque. With its mastery of baroque style, the group delivered a program of instrumental music that needed no sets, no singing, no costumes to transport us to the strange world of the French 18th-century imagination.

The opener was a suite from Rameau's noted opera Platée, which tells of a love that was a mirage (Jupiter, it seems, for some devious marital scam, pretends to make love to a water nymph named Platée; the poor girl, not very beautiful, is fated to be left at the altar). Nagy and her group gave us a dramatically emphatic rendition of Rameau's lithe and startling music, filled with the sounds of the frogs and insects of the water nymph's boggy home and the slippery deceits of Jupiter (I assume the latter was represented in the overture's lush and sliding suspensions).

Supporting Nagy here and in the other concerted pieces was a small band comprised of the fine violinists Julie Andrijeski and Karina Fox, and a continuo section (Josh Lee, viola da gamba, and Michael Sponseller, harpsichord). The ensemble was strong, the three treble instruments working with and against each other and the continuo like the best jazz musicians. The group plays at French low pitch (A = 392), considerably lower than even standard Baroque pitch; the resultant sound is rich and mellow, without any loss of sparkle, perfect for an intimate space.

Saturday's performance was hosted by the William Busta Gallery, inaugurating brand-new gallery space next to Busta's former galleries on Prospect. The new space holds a good-sized audience — a little more than a hundred, I think — and is an excellent venue. It was a joy to hear such intelligent and scintillating chamber music surrounded by the kind of serious and compelling visual art that Busta consistently hangs — the colorful, dripping abstracts of Matthew Kolodziej, fascinating acrylic night and city-scapes by Timothy Callaghan, and the haunting fiber-paintings of Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson.

As Nagy explained, the group likes the joy of discovering something new: in this case, an almost unknown "symphony" – more like a quartet – by François-André Philidor, a member of a musical dynasty in the baroque and (according to the program notes) the finest chess player in Europe at the time. In a more classical mode than the Rameau, this piece was also more graceful, and should not remain neglected. Its gorgeous opening phrases, led by the oboe, reminded me of Ennio Morricone's haunting pseudo-Baroque music from the film The Mission.

In the breaks between ensemble pieces, the continuo players became soloists. Harpsichordist Sponseller gave us a whirling world of fantasy in the unaccompanied harpsichord piece, Le Vertigo, by Pancrace Royer. His playing is at once forceful, witty, and intelligent. Gambist Josh Lee took center stage for one of Marin Marais' masterpieces, Le Labyrinthe. This long, virtuosic solo (with unobtrusive harpsichord accompaniment) seems to represent the journey of a single protagonist, whose simple "walking" motif, a little ascending and descending scale figure, appears again and again. Is he in the labyrinth of the Minotaur, or — as Lee suggested — the courtly gardens of Versailles? We can't know, but the music makes it abundantly clear that in his journey he encounters some pretty strange and creepy sights. I couldn't decide whether I was most reminded of Pictures at an Exhibition, Disney's Fantasia, or Harry Potter. Lee played with great expressiveness, sometimes spooky, sometimes easy and unconcerned, sometimes almost heartbreakingly sad and lyrical.

Les Délices gave us one piece that could never have been put on the 18th century operatic stage – Marais' bizarre depiction of a gall-stone operation, played by Lee and Sponseller and narrated in spine-chilling French by Nagy herself (without oboe). The viola da gamba follows the operation step-by-step with brief representations of what must have been a harrowing experience in the absence of anesthetic — the patient's shudder of fear at seeing the operation table; his determination to go through with the operation; the tying down of his legs and arms; the incision and removal of the stone; the flow of blood; the exhaustion at the end. The piece can be performed as a mere quirk, a kind of ghastly joke. But the intensity of Lee's playing here made it something more than that, a reflection on medicine and mortality.

"Mirages and Monstrosities" ended with a little piece by Michel Corrette, a Concerto Comique, that appropriately dissolved all these serious and grotesque concerns with a bit of courtly baroque fluff, exquisitely tossed our way by this stellar group.

We have reason to be thankful for the concerted and complementary work of training and encouraging such performers and entrepreneurs, at the Oberlin Conservatory, at Oberlin's Baroque Performance Institute, and at CWRU. Who would have thought, twenty years ago, that today greater Cleveland would have such a wealth of early music ensembles? 

Early music and silent film

Today -- just a link to my latest music review featuring the divine Sarah...  Ohioans, don't forget to subscribe to Cleveland Classical!

After long silence

The beginning of fall, the beginning of September, the beginning of the school year. My school-teacher dreams of being in the wrong place, in the wrong subject-matter (always math), at the wrong time. The leaves drying on the ground, the day turning cool despite the sunshine. The wind blowing fresh from the north west across Lake Erie, the waves scudding towards the shore.

The memories of so many times looking at water, at times of enormous change. This near shore of Lake Erie after a death, the far expanse of San Francisco Bay absent of airplanes in the days after Sept. 11. The sense that everything changes, and that water is one of the great metaphors for that change.

And to find that sense of change to be at the center of the book I choose to read just now. Allegra Goodman's beautiful and moving novel about time, change, philosophy, and (ah!) cooking: The Cookbook Collector. A book to read in the fall, when those perfectly ripe peaches are ready for the eating.

What can I do in this time but turn back to Keats? There he was, almost 200 years ago, in the sun outside the old town of Winchester, thinking about his brother's death and his own tenuous hold on life. And watching the fruit ripen, perhaps he dared to eat a peach, and above all putting process, change, transience, into words. Just the first stanza for now. You can find the rest here. What about those bees, finding more and more flowers, lulled into thinking that it all will last, and yet knowing better?

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Elizabeth Hoover Norman

When I started this blog about a year ago, I called it "the world's museum." I meant to evoke in that phrase the curious and thoughtful looking that I associate with museums, the way we pause, admire, critique, ask questions, try to remember objects that the museum presents us. What if the world were a museum, then? What if we, walking across fields, reading a book, looking at a garden, visiting a new place, thought of what we were seeing as cared for by curators, as "framed" to invite us to contemplate, the time we spend there precious and significant?

I came this way of thinking from many others who seem also to know this, from my father, my friend George Allen, my wife, my brothers and sisters-in-law, cousins, teachers, students. This week I lost one of my dearest museum companions, my cousin Elizabeth Hoover Norman, who died Tuesday.

Elizabeth was the daughter of my father's youngest sister, who followed him from southern Georgia to Cambridge, Mass. There they roomed together and she studied Shakespeare with the G. L. Kittredge, who was my father's dissertation advisor. And he introduced her to Herb Hoover, not the president, but a young architect from Idaho. He built a collection of stunning modernist homes in Lincoln, Mass., including his own home. No wonder that Elizabeth, and her twin Lucretia, and brother Harry, grew up wanting to talk about art -- and music, and books, and mountains -- as if these were part of a vast museum.

Elizabeth, like her sister, studied art history at Oberlin, using the same wonderful art museum that I now teach in and write about. Later she took an MA at Harvard -- while I was an undergraduate there, and I would visit her at the Fogg. When she married John Norman, she moved to England with him and taught art history at several places, most recently at Hallam University in Sheffield. She finished her PhD at Leeds just a few years ago, in her late 60s!

What she most loved was public art, art that doesn't hang on the walls of a real museum, but occupies public space in cities or in fields. She took us a couple of years ago to the Yorkshire Sculpture Garden on a blustery November day, full of energy despite her cancer, bounding across fields and paths to find the next Goldsworthy.




I loved visiting England's historic homes with Elizabeth. Last fall we went to Haddon Hall, an Elizabethan house that I had never seen. We lingered -- despite the freezing cold -- in the courtyard, the great hall, the chambers, the galleries, talking all the time about the architecture, the furnishings, the people who had lived here, above all just trying to evoke for each other the sense of the wonderful patina of the place, its layered historicity. John gave up after not too long and went ahead to watch a video about the re-creating of a sixteenth century banquet in the hall.

Just weeks before she died, Elizabeth went to London to give a talk about public art at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was about a project she was passionate for, the "Fourth Plinth" project in Trafalgar Square. There are three big plinths occupied by statues; the fourth has been empty for most or all of its time. The artist Andrew Gormley devised a plan to fill that plinth not with images of famous people, but with actual ordinary people, all day and night, all summer. Elizabeth signed up to be one, and was delighted to be chosen in the random drawing process. Late one night, at one am, she was put on this plinth by cherry-picker and proceeded to spend an hour doing her Indian Club exercises. We and others watched by streaming video as she deliberately paced off the area, swung the clubs in wonderful great arcs, and her amplified shadow followed her, projected by the arc lights onto -- where else? -- the front of the National Gallery. The indoor museum as a screen for the outdoor museum! Here the link to her part of this event -- you can actually watch her swing the clubs! 

Elizabeth was an exceptional curator of that world's museum that she and I shared.