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.