Uncle Ludwig
The Plaza Mayor was even more crowded than its usual Friday night, transformed for one evening into an open-air theatre. The stage was big enough for both the symphonic orchestra, in full penguin dress, and the big chorus called for by the 4th Movement of that particular score. The night was tremendously warm, pity those musicians! Apart from the "suits", the local beautiful & famous, in by-invitation-only blue plastic chairs, aparthei-ed from the rest of the seated crowd, the masses out here, outside the barriers, were the ones having the real fun. Standing, with the full no-breeze-whatsoever famous summer Madrid nights, coping with the high temperatures by the usual means. The non-ladywindermeered fans, manipulated with tremendous skill by Wimbledon-standard quick strokes, generated a kind of environment-friendly air conditioning, and with a more poetical bass sound than the usual air-con humming. Around the third Movement the pervasive smell of "Paella", also a traditional feature of the Plaza Mayor, had mercifully subsided. But it was part of the fun too. How many times you have glorious high-culture classical music being processed by your brain in conjunction with fried "gambas" and saffron rice olfactory stimulation? The conditions of silence in the Imperial Austrias' architectural auditorium might not be perfect, but who really cares if a cellos moving part is at some point somewhat mixed with the high-pitched barks of a poor canine spectator being bullied by a bigger dog? Was it a serious distraction when a full tray of lager glasses impacted the stone pavement of the Plaza? Not really, when we are under rock festival rules rather than concert hall's. And this blogger of yours witnessed a real frisson swarming the masses when it became obvious, even to the more remote to XIX century erudite music, that the "Ode to Joy" was imminent.
So, Daniel Barenboim was last Friday in Madrid directing the Berlin Staatskapelle (orchestra and chorus) who played Uncle Ludwig's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125. I know Barenboim is a great conductor, and I managed to attend his concerts a couple of times (sounds terribly pedantic but it's true, what can one do?), in Paris and in London, and of course he's right there at the top, among the rare cases of an excellent solo performer (as pianist) who turns into an excellent Maestro too - but it was not because of him that I confronted the unforgiving heat . (I'll never forget his comment that to get a second exact same note on the keyboard, that sounds exactly as the first one, requires an added quantum of energy and power in the piano strike. A kind of paradox in physics but then again perceptions are tricky stuff). It would be ridiculous for me to engage in musical reviewing, I'm not qualified for that, but allow me to point out that if you are serious about hearing the "9th" you either go for a prime concert hall with first rate orchestra, singers and director or you have access to a very good (and very expensive) hi-fi platform. So, being in the Plaza Mayor was not about a new interpretation of a familiar opus magnum but about something else..…
The "9th", and the ode "An die Freude" in particular, has not only been trivialized by the EU bureaucratic decision (how strange it does sound when played after National anthems are heard, like in the most recent "Quatorze Juillet" in the French Embassy grounds). It has become a pop-art iconic "cult thing", like the Rock Horror Movie Show, or "Blade Runner", or the Mona Lisa, or the England-Germany World Cup final. We want to build up a collection out of those bits of our auto-biographical journey, when that familiar imagery or soundtrack keep popping up, with a reassuring recurrence. (No "Ninth", for me, will ever surpass the pre-revolutionary concert at the Coliseu dos Recreios, Lisbon, 1974, when I got goose pimples everywhere. A close second was the open-air version in the Gulbenkian gardens, also in Lisbon, near a small lake bursting with full-moon excited frogs.)
In Spanish (or rather Castillian, to be politico-linguistically correct), "Ninth" is "Novena". Like in ecclesiastical jargon, where a "novena" means performing nine times a particular devotion, one should aim at attending , at least, nine "Ninths" in one's lifetime. On that spirit, last Friday at the Plaza Mayor was another successful devotion..…
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