Unexpected comedy and vulgarity at the Recital

Fac me vere tecum flere--unknown poet.

On Sunday evening, my wife took me to Concertgebouw to attend a recital performance of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater with Jaroussky and Julia Lezhneva (Юлия Михайловна Лежнева) as part of an extended birthday celebration. Jaroussky (a counter-tenor) is the star, but Lezhneva's singing stole the show.  Below the picture, two musings on what happens when comedy and vulgarity creep into high art.
as the hall was filling up.

There were two funny moments during the concert. Dutch audiences are well-trained not to clap during pauses within a piece; but if given the opportunity, they will happily cough. Given the fabled acoustics at Concertgebouw, this often means a deafening, extended noise. This often annoys me, and I also tend to feel a kind of embarrassment on behalf of my home town; most professional performers tune it out, of course, but I do wonder if it doesn't ruin part of their experience. They are, after all, playing one of the great classical halls. At one point before intermission, during a break in Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus, the coughing got so bad, that Jaroussky decided to take advantage of the situation and, too, coughed with a big grin. This managed to quiet the audience at once (despite a few giggles). Oddly enough, hereafter the coughing was less, and Jaroussky's singing more impressive. The Grote Zaal is not very forgiving for Baroque recitals (happily wikipedia agrees with my non-expert opinion).

 

As the Stabat Mater (here's a promotional video with Jaroussky and Lezhneva) got underway, I was transported by their singing. Now, I am one of those people, that barely hears text when he likes a melody. Even when I do hear the words, I don't really process them. It's not just words; I miss the beat, too, as others have pointed out to me frequently. (Writing this makes me wonder if I have some kind of syndrome.) For example, it took me over a decade to realize what The Eagles "Hotel California" was about. I like opera houses that have superscript machines because without them I would barely enjoy the story, too.

Given that I rarely set foot in a church, it's only because I am a scholar that I have a vague sense about the content of the meditative poem. The lack of sense doesn't bother me and may, in fact, sometimes please me because I can enjoy the music regardless of the content of text (which may well be pretty awful when you start thinking about it). I am not a good phenomenologist, but I would describe the joy as a kind of pleasing, empty mind; perhaps, it's because of the way I enjoy such music that there is simply no room for text to be processed.

Anyway, I suddenly and quite distinctly heard, the singers sing, "fuck me," repeatedly. (See the epigraph at the top of the post; here's the full text.) I carefully looked around the bourgeois audience in the auditorium, but nobody seemed unsettled. Given that the phrase was repeated, I started to look forward to it. Rather than destroying the atmosphere for me, it just added a comic  note to the elevated joy I was experiencing at the performance.  It clearly wasn't intended by poet, but I did briefly wonder before my mind went back to empty, if the performers had laughed about it in rehearsal, ever.

Here's a picture of the applause after the performance:

On the bike-ride home, my wife and I were animatedly discussing the performance, especially Lezhneva's singing. As with a good meal, the enjoyment of the original experience is extended and transformed by the conversation after. (The experience is also stabilized, as it were.) Anyway, near the Marnixstraat, I finally asked her, "so you think anybody else heard it?" "Oh," she said with a smile, "you're so juvenile." "But, did everybody notice it?" "Of course, everybody did!"

So, there you have it: a couple of thousand people heard the most divinely sung 'fuck me' at Concertgebouw; what a great town, Amsterdam!

Comments

[Bence]

You got good seats (in my third favourite concert hall in the world).
And I don't think this separation of meaning and music is that unusual - in fact, it's a really interesting aesthetics/phil perception question how one's attention is exercised in these cases...

[Eric Schliesser]

My wife got us great seats!
Anyway, is there good aesthetics work on musical, non textual attention?

[Julie Klein]

How the mind wanders in the presence of beauty!