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Concert at l'Église de la Madeleine | |
| It should have been a disaster: two violins, viola, cello, soprano—a mere five musicians performing chamber music classics—Pachelbel, Vivaldi, Schubert—"pour les touristes"... | ||
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It should have been in an intimate Renaissance salon, not in the echoing Napoleonic vastness of Paris’s Église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, the gigantic classical temple conceived as a monument to the Emperor’s victorious armies, but in the end surrendered to the Benedictines. Fauré composed his famous Requiem for La Madeleine, and an enormous orchestra, chorus and soloists numbering 250 might even have filled the place with sound. But…only five musicians? And unamplified at that? The strings began, the echoes spread, the notes blurred and resounded, and the familiar compositions were transformed. We all knew what the notes were, so the echoing indistinctness in the 93,000-square-meters of enormity didn’t matter. In fact, it was the point: the brilliant strings, beneath the looming apse which amplified their vibrations, spread to the soaring roof 20 meters above and to the shadowy vastness of the temple’s far wall 100 meters away. The single cello made the massive Corinthian columns hum, and the soprano, in full voice, produced the clarion thrill you may hear and feel when you arrive in heaven.
That was it. If you’ve ever dreamed of the Celestial Harmonies, of the Music of the Spheres, it was like that. You should have been there. More...
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The vastness of l'Église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Paris.
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