Souvenirs and a nice review from our Torroella concert. Many thanks to Monse Faura and her wonderful production and technical team!
https://www.classics.cat/critiques/detall?Id=4514
Graindelavoix Lamentations of David for Jonathan and Absalom
Church of Sant Genís, in Torroella de Montgrí
The capacity of art, beyond the aesthetic enjoyment it can give, is very powerful. Since the beginning of humanity, there has been a need, in certain situations, to go beyond mere communication to express ourselves. Music, singing, were among the first. To celebrate a good hunt, to soothe a child's cry, also to express love or pain.
The excellent concert by the Flemish group Graindelavoix, with a set of motets from Laments of David for Jonathan and Absalom, was a very good example of the salvific capacity of music, a suitable space in which to find rest from pain.
Based on biblical texts, David's lamentations for the death of his son Absalom served as an inspiration to numerous composers to express the pain of the death of a child or, by extension, of a loved one. The careful selection of motets by composers from the end of the 15th century (Desprez or de la Rue) to the middle of the 17th from different countries in Western Europe served Graindelavoix, led by its creator and director Björn Schmelzer, to create, with a great efficiency of resources, sublime sound structures that filled the church of Sant Genís de Torroella with memories. The eight magnificent performers were directed with passion and intensity by Schmelzer demonstrating how the richness of polyphony is able to create an evocative intensity, how the surrounding conjugation of voices achieves with the effects of depth, of volumes and hierarchical planes, a three-dimensional effect, which can almost be touched. A polyphony and a counterpoint that become the ideal means to articulate proposed answers to the ontological and spiritual question. Polyphony, as Ramón Andrés describes it: this writing that shows the multiplicity that we are.
Carefully placed in a circle looking inwards, gathering together, the different combinations of the eight voices created a kind of auditory trompe l'oeil, articulating very effective acoustic illusions. Illusions, true, but enough to gently touch the soul of all of us who were transpiring from the heat on an evening in mid August in the middle of the Empordà.
Ignasi Albors
(English based on google translate)
