Walking home from the opera

A Christmas tree

Jerome and Silke and grandpa Ted and grandma Eva on the way home with a tree!

One more photo of l'académie de musique concert at la madeleine

Silke's grin

This didn't make it into the edit done by l'académie de musique:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjW2jUkI_EE

Laudamus te deum

Someone made a recording of Sunday's concert.  Here is Laudamus te deum by Bizet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTAxnm_RnD8

I swear it is a just a coincidence that Silke is so prominent!  It's not my recording.  I wasn't even at the Sunday performance.

One detail that might be interesting: the 300 singers and instrumentalists represent 30 different nationalities.

Silke's new shoes

Long time readers of this blog will recall that Silke's footwear has already made an appearance.  In fact that was the blog posting that I received the most email about: Silke discovers that she is Canadian .  Maybe you remember the photo of her old scruffy and decidedly non-Parisian runners.  Well, prepared to be shocked.  The dress code for l'Académie de musique specifies high heels for women for concerts.  Despite some protestations of mock horror, Silke seems not at all uncomfortable in them.

And those scruffy old runners?  Long gone now.  For daily use she has new runners (which she insisted on), and a pair of attractive casual shoes (which I insisted on).

General rehearsal at la Madeleine

I obviously can't take pictures at the concerts, so I took a few at the rehearsal last night at la Madeleine.

Silke is not hard to spot, at least in a close-up.  Her stand partner, the concert master and one of the professional musicians in the mix, is Nguyen Nguyen.  The French expression is to say that it is an orchestra of students "framed" (encadré) by professionals.  Here is his biography: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.academie-de-musique.com%2FJean-Pierre-Lacour .

Besides me, there were only a handful of people sitting in on the rehearsal.  (Because Silke is so young, I have a pass that allows me attend rehearsals with her.  But mostly I don't, unless they rehearse somewhere new where she hasn't been before, as last week, or it's something special, like a rehearsal in la Madeleine.)  Those listening last night were outnumbered by the statues of saints around the walls.  Perhaps they were listening as well.  Here, Jean d'Arc:

La Madeleine is extremely reverberant.  It is a much more lively sound than Notre Dame.  Actually Notre Dame is kind of dead acoustically I find.  The interior of Notre Dame is cross-shaped, with many deep alcoves and galleries on all sides and at several levels - lots of spaces for sound to get trapped and lost.  La Madeleine, in contrast is simply a huge shoebox - Silke says "ginormous", with only a few shallow alcoves.  Ginormous being a roof at a height of 43 metres, and a hall 108 metres long.  That is longer than a football field.  I think those are the exterior dimensions, but the interior is not much smaller, being one huge open space.  Stone walls, stone ceiling, stone floor, and no interior pillars, except right along the walls.  When then orchestra cuts off suddenly on a loud note, you can still hear it reverberate for the longest time.  It goes on . . . and on . . . and on . . . and if you listen closely, you can still hear it.  When they play with an audience, there will be more sound absorption in the hall, and it won't ring quite that long.  It is actually a hard setting to play, according to the professional musicians.  They prefer la Trinité, where the other two concerts will be held.  Now I know why at the rehearsal last week, Jean-Phillipe Sarcos, when working on a fugue passage, had the chorus sing almost entirely the just attack of each note, and then back right off.  In a smaller hall, that had a somewhat coarse, overly rhythmic effect.  But in la Madeleine, it gives it some clarity.  Actually in walking around la Madeleine during the rehearsal, I found the sound best, and clearest, about 2/3 of the way back in the church.  Close up, the contrast between the direct sound and the delayed reflections was unbalanced.

I recognize that poster

Spotted walking around Paris.

One week to go!

The first of three December concerts by l’académie de musique takes place a week today.  I attended a rehearsal last night, the first in some time that I have attended.  I went with Silke because it was at an unfamiliar location that she was unsure of finding on her own.  And then I stayed.  It was also, as it turned out, the first general rehearsal, with brass and percussion instruments (up to now the strings and woodwinds have rehearsed together), and with the chorus, two hundred strong, and with the soloists, Isabelle Cals, soprano, and Sebastien Obrecht, tenor, and with a number of professional instrumentalists filling out the orchestra where it needed a bit of reinforcement, for example in the violas, of whom there are never enough.

All I can say is, wow!  It’s going to be some concert.  The last time I heard a rehearsal, back in September or October, I wondered whether they would be able to fill the huge space of la Madeleine.  Now I think they are going to blow the roof off - figuratively!  I heard some violinists chatting afterwards, and one remarked that at previous rehearsals, those being strings alone or strings and woodwinds, she hadn’t been really enthusiastic about the music, but in the complete ensemble, it was awesome.  Silke said she had missed an entrance because she was listening so raptly to the soprano soloist, and the others laughed and admitted they had done the same at least once during the evening.

A word about the venues: La Madeleine is one of the most recognizable landmarks in Paris.  It forms one end of one “sight-line” in Paris - grand boulevards of straight alignment running between symmetrically opposing buildings or landmarks at either end, and featuring a large square or crossroads at the midpoint.  La Madeleine terminates rue Royale, facing along the length of rue Royale towards l’Assemblé Nationale, whose Corinthian columns it mirrors.  In the centre, equidistant between l’Assemblé Nationale and la Madeleine - place de la Concorde, with its “giant Egyptian pencil” as Jerome calls it, more commonly referred to as the Obelisk.  On the spot Marie Antoinette lost her head to the guillotine.  She was sadly unable to admire la Madeleine as we know it today while waiting for her head to be swiftly and efficiently separated from her shoulders, because its construction was ordered later by Napoleon, who had the pre-existing église de la Madeleine demolished - he generally being unfavorably disposed to churches - and replaced with a monument to his grand army.  In a typical twist of history, a later French monarchist government re-dedicated it as a church.  [ed. The long version of the history is, well, longer, as it was continually redesigned, constantly repurposed and repeatedly demolished in part over a period of 85 years before finally being completed as a church.]  It is however, to my eye, the most un-churchy of churches, being in conception a sort of neoclassical temple, like the Pantheon.  Silke still can't quite believe that she is actually going to be playing there.

photo by Shahee Ilyas, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 2.0

For the two concerts the following week, they are playing at église de la Sainte-Trinité.  Notably, the funerals of both Berlioz and Bizet, who figure prominently on the concert program, were at la Trinité.    (Some famous composers had funerals at la Madeleine, for example Chopin.  But his music is not on the program of Musique Français en Fête.  Not because the French wouldn't happily appropriate him - he did after all live nearly half his life in Paris - but in consequence of the fact that he wasn't in the line of writing works for 300 singers and instrumentalists, being rather one to prefer 88 keys.)

photo credit user Mbzt wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

If you are wondering what kind of preparation to takes to play a concert like this, Silke figures that in the last 13 days alone, she has attended in total 25 hours of orchestra rehearsals.  (5 of which admittedly, were with another orchestra, as she plays in two.)  Some days she doesn't get home from an orchestra rehearsal until midnight, and then she has to be at school again the next morning at 9 or 9:30.