JOHANNES BRAHMS –
JONAS VITAUD – RHAPSODIES INTERMEZZI KLAVIERSTÜCKE – 2011
The piano is for me the most
musical instrument and yet of course not the only one, but the only that can
talk many and even more than many languages. I have always been intimidated and
fascinated by that instrument standing upright in the music classroom and on
which this classmate of mine was playing some jazz every day during lunch
recess. It will take me many years before I could be in a concert with a grand
piano and his pianist. I seem to remember it was in the “Grand Théâtre” in Bordeaux.
It took me some time to get used
to it and to understand its many languages, idioms, dialects and to realize
that the pianist was also essential to make the piano’s discourse expressive of
anything.
Beethoven, and his avant-garde
piano forte, was always sad for me with fateful destiny badly sublimated into
some hymn to Freude, Joy: too banal and commonplace in the music class with his
themes and basic sentences repeated ad nauseam on the piano of the classroom.
Is it sol sol sol mi (flat mind you) or some other combination of four notes
that made me both become passive and submissive to that whipping of a music
that tetanized me.
Then Chopin has always been and
will always be for me the gay music of a playful philanderer in Paris with his
dog running after his – sorry its – tail as if he were a snake biting his own
tail. I have never been able to forget him courting with George Sand dressed
like a gentleman and smoking a cigar. What was Chopin in the alcove of this Paris apartment rue
Taitbout? Probably a plaything who played music to entertain the lady of the
house, apartment or withdrawing room, dressed in pants with a tie under the collar
of her starched shirt, before withdrawing to the back room opening on the yard rather
than on the street for some more private keyboard games.
Then there was Liszt tender and
mysterious but so melancholy, so romantic à la Lamartine, so tear-drawing at
times that I could not listen to it very long without being taken by sobs and
sighs and tears, precisely. That music is so heart-breaking and soul-rending.
But beyond them all there was,
and apparently still is; Johannes Brahms. He was the one I feared and desired
in the most intimate way because he sounded frightening, terroristic, dramatic
and above all German in the wild meaning of some wilderness I could only find
in Werther, Heine or Götz von Berlichingen. There is always behind the surface
something like a monster, a tiger William Blake would call it, lurking under
the giant ferns and tropical underbrush of some jungle. Brahms called in me the
vision of death and the fascination of death I could only find in Thomas Mann, Wedekind
or Musil, and I read them all in their original language. I was Törless in the
hands of this pianist known as Johannes Brahms. Each note was a torture, and an
exquisite pleasure.
I could not understand when the
music teacher and later professor said he was the acme of romanticism. For me
he was the acme of an untellable inner life that he could not express in any
other way than through his fingers on the keys and his feet on the pedals. And
I still feel like that when I get across Johannes Brahms.
So you can imagine when I had the
privilege of going to a concert less than twenty kilometers away from my home
in the mountains in an old Romanesque church and that I discovered Johannes
Brahms played by Jonas Vitaud. A treat, an overdose of feeling, emotion,
empathy and sudden engulfing fall in the oldest passions and frustrations,
sensations and evasions of the old oldest days of mine. Brahms was there in
front of me in the choir of this Romanesque church, flying and swinging in his
awe and forbidding power from vault to vault, from column to column; from sculpted
capital to carved capital, and they are all telling us without any words multiple
stories, with monkeys, atlases supporting the heavens and the loft over the church
entrance, mermaids, Sheila na gigs and many other forms and representations of
elevation, skyward and up into spirituality.
Brahms was at home. He is for me
a lot more Romanesque than romantic. He is the music that reverberated for me in
the Romanesque church in Bordeaux,
Sainte Croix, every time I visited it, and that just wraps up and molds the naves
and the transepts of all these churches around me in my mountains, from
Courpière to Beurrière, from Saint Germain l’Herm to Pignols
What makes this recording
special, It is the way I felt it in the concert and I find it on this
recording, Jonas Vitaud seems to go beyond the score and penetrate the soul of the
composer and he is able to slightly impersonate the composer himself in his
suffering, in his hope, in his insanity and in his spirituality, nothing well
tempered, but variable, changing, in multiple ways that make every note a giant
step towards the other side of the universe, the other self of the mortal man
who reaches out for eternity and actually grasps it for the instantaneous
duration of a few notes and one silence, for a variation on a sharp or a flat
that run natural in spite of all, and yet remain flat or sharp. It is such
wavering impressions that I find in Jonas Vitaud that is absent from so many
other performers who read the score and forget the soul, the tortured soul of the
composer, of the man who can only howl with a piano, till death them parts.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:45 PM