MCME: Hymns and Lamentations

One can hardly imagine now that Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion – this cornerstone of all European music of the 18th–21st centuries – had to be rediscovered by twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn in 1829. In his native Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, the oratorio was performed not only during Bach’s lifetime, but also for another half century after (until 1800). However, this masterpiece gained European and later world fame thanks to romanticists – at the time when the principles of music organization and the instruments of the Baroque era themselves fell, as it seemed then, into oblivion. The St Matthew Passion (followed by the Mass in B Minor and other works by Bach) proved to have overcome the stylistic, technological, and ideological gap and speak to the people of the new age in their language. Since then, each epoch has comprehended and interpreted this spiritual oratorio in its own way.

Night-time enigma concerts are one of the traditions of the Diaghilev Festival that define its atmosphere. This is a rare opportunity to spend the shortest nights of the year listening to music of different eras.

It is only after the end of the concert that the music works the musicians have performed are revealed. Such a procedure helps to focus attention — the motion of the senses in response to the course of musical events are the subject of careful observation for all participants in the event. Guessing the composer and the style of a particular composition may also be fascinating: the answers to an enigma will be found in the programme that everyone will receive after the concert.

This year, enigma concerts are taking place in the historic reception room of the House of Diaghilev — the concert hall of the mansion where the great impresario spent his childhood years.

A brass ensemble has been added to the musicAeterna family: the artists from the brass section of the orchestra united under the leadership of trumpeter Pavel Kurdakov. The first big concert of musicAeterna Brass will take place at the Diaghilev Festival.
Its first part will feature music from famous operas arranged for brass ensemble.
The second part of the concert will remind the audience about the origins of brass ensembles.
As a rule, the broad repertoire of brass ensembles is based on popular, recognizable, and typically dance music. The second part of the musicAeterna Brass presentation concert will be in line with this tradition.

‘Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would only be another form of madness’. That is what Blaise Pascal said, one of the most observant thinkers of the 17th century. Madness, la folie, permeated his turbulent era. Devastating religious wars and inheritance battles were followed by brief periods of peace. Adventurers roamed the roads of Europe in an attempt to beat fate. Beginning with the story of Don Quixote’s madness, the art of the new century with every passing year looked more and more intently into the dark depths of human passions — Orlando and Hercules succumbed to the power of madness, Henry Purcell brought the mentally ill to the stage in his songs, and William Hogarth ended the story of the Rake with debt prison and lunacy.

La folie concert by the Miludus ensemble is centred on the cantata Lucretia by George Frideric Handel. It was composed during the composer's stay in Italy and written to a text by Roman Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili who was also the author of The Triumph of Time and Disillusion, the premiere of last year's Diaghilev Festival. Lucretia is actually an opera scene, in condensed form telling the story of a virtuous Roman woman who was raped by the emperor’s son. Unable to endure the shame, she told her husband about the incident and stabbed herself in front of his eyes. The music, at first, traditionally alternates recitatives with da capo arias, but in the second half of the cantata comes out of its banks — unexpected changes of tempo and short ragged phrases express the fatal frenzy of the heroine.

The cantata is surrounded by violin sonatas by two Italians, Francesco Veracini and Francesco Geminiani. They both were outstanding violinists who travelled extensively in Europe and met in London. Both wrote music for the violin at the limit of the technical capacities of their time; it was inventive, extravagant and not always understandable to contemporaries. In the sonatas, both look like heirs of Arcangelo Corelli, whose concert style works mark the beginning of the high Baroque. Their music does not imitate singing and enjoys all the advantages of a solo instrument. It is dynamic, richly ornamented and blends virtuoso passages, dance rhythms, contrapuntal exercises and subtly varied harmonic formulas into a single whole.

The evening opens and closes with arias by two French Baroque classics — Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau. The operas containing these arias are united by the desire of the characters to overcome the established social order. Jourdain, the protagonist of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, a co-authored work by Lully and Moliere, is a bourgeois who received a title of nobility and dreams of the status of a hereditary aristocrat which is unattainable for him. The nymph Plataea from Rameau's opera is convinced that Jupiter in love can elevate her to a higher place in the divine hierarchy than that she is destined to. The era of the Ancien Régime saw such delusions as a dangerous departure from reason, bordering on madness and worthy of punishment. Lully includes a divertissement of Nations in the comedy and composes an aria, the text of which is made up of Italian opera clichés about the ‘sweet torments of love’ (more than two centuries later, Richard Strauss in The Cavalier of the Rose will write a parody of Puccini's aria on the same text). In Rameau's opera, Madness appears on stage as a character and tells the story of Daphne, a nymph who rejected Apollo's courtship and was turned into a tree — Cupid always takes revenge, and love is cruel when he is furious.

Elizaveta Moroz, Director:
‘A chamber music evening infers a theatrical experience, as the audience follows the heroine's attempts to hark to her own consciousness and find reconciliation with the contradictions that torment her. There is not just a single voice hidden inside the heroine, but a whole swarm of voices. At times one can't make them out. At other times they contradict each other. The process of deciphering the inner voices and the opportunity to hear oneself is the central theme of the performance.’