Deeply saddened to learn of the death of Anne Rice last night. Her work held an immense place in my life for many years growing up, and continues to influence the cadence of my prose style. She taught me to look for the poetry in a scene; to invest in each character the humanity (or inhumanity) which makes individuals truly complex. She wrote romantic, mellifluous lines which unfurled like a beautiful secret. Her writing, for me, was a bulwark against the rampant postmodern nihilism of the 20th and early 21st century, and was vital in my development both as a writer and as a person. I will always be grateful to Anne (and to Mike Russell for introducing me to her work) for making me unafraid to disclose the beauty of the world, even when it is terrible. A cup of blood raised in loving memory.
Recently I discovered the French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau. Only twenty-nine, his articulation and expression are stunning for his age.
I have always preferred the harpsichord to the piano; there is something regal and sublime in plucked notes – a sort of shimmering, scintillating shower, like a melodic shattering crystal. Typically on recordings – particularly of the chamber varietal – the delicate, cascading framework can seem merely a frilly window dressing for the dominant thrust and weave of viols. The harpsichord (or clavecin en française) becomes mere tinkling in the composition. Background.
In Rondeau’s interpretations, the harpsichord emerges as an expressive rival to the piano – more brittle and vulnerable and yet, paradoxically, powerful. The box containing those rows of strings and inverted black and white keys and slender covers – often painted extravagantly with dramatic scenes of passion or tragedy – becomes a kind of enunciator of the past, not merely a flat, filigreed fence. With no dampening pedal or pianissimo available to the player, it is up to him alone to communicate the feeling of the piece. Rondeau attains this with stunning mix of subtlety and fortitude.
Jean Rondeau performs Royer’s “La Marche des Scythes”
Rondeau’s intuition for the Baroque is haunting. As he plays, he seems to be searching for the narrative behind the quilled notes. It is this seeking and coupling of the composer’s humanity with his technical excellence that gives Rondeau’s performances an emotive verity, uncannily communicating the long-dead sentiments of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) and Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer (1705-1755), as well as the inimitable Johan Sebastian Bach. In life, Rameau and Royer were rivals, battling for prominence in the French Opéra. Yet in his album Vertigo – Rondeau’s pairing of a selection of the two composer’s works – the pieces flow from one to the next with the crystalline brilliance of an 18th-century chandelier. But thanks to a sensitive performer, they also tell the tales of the people once reflected in those manifold bevels.
JOSHUA REX 