Russia (bbabo.net), - Teodor Currentzis and his musicAeterna ensembles performed the program of European music compositions created at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries in a finely thought-out dramaturgy. As an introduction, the traditional Spanish Pavane by Gabriel Fauré (1887), Jean Sibelius's suite to Maeterlinck's iconic drama of that time "Pelléas et Mélisande" (1905), in the finale - Fauré's Requiem (1887-1900).

All this music belongs to the fin de sicle cultural paradigm with its melancholy, the feeling of "decline" and the heightened experience of beauty (panaestheticism), receding before the changes that are approaching in that era with unclear prospects. And this state of melancholy, longing for irrevocably elusive beauty is reflected both in the music of Sibelius and in the works of Fauré, and not only in Pavan, where, like a mirage, the image of the old culture emerges, but also in the Requiem - with its Gregorian chants and gentle, " subtle harmonies. But it was also a time of total influence on the culture of the ideas of the art of the future - Wagnerian synthetism, merging other types of art with music. And Teodor Currentzis in Requiem decided to present a video art created specifically for this project by the British artist and art photographer Matt Collishaw. The program also included the boys' choir of the Choir School named after A.V. Sveshnikova and soloists - soprano Fani Antonelou (Greece) and British baritone Thomas Mole.

The first part featured Pavane, one of Fauré's most popular scores - a charming homage to the star of the Parisian fin de sicle salons, Countess Elisabeth de Grefful, introduced by Proust in the novel In Search of Lost Time (Duchess de Guermantes). The literary text for the score was written by the countess's cousin Count Robert de Montesquiou (the hero of the novels of Proust and Huysmans) - a dialogue of male and female voices with a courtly "double game": They love each other! They hate each other! Currentzis' pavane sounded piercingly melancholic, gentle, with expressive fluid reliefs of strings and choir, the dynamics of which seemed to reflect the approaching and receding movement of invisible pavane performers, participating in the distant and eternal "play of love and chance" to the bewitching melody of the flute.

In Sibelius' suite "Pelléas et Mélisande" the orchestra sounded laconically and sternly, with that gloomy expression of a tragedy in which mystical fate leads the heroes to inevitable death. The slow, heavy, lead-filled movement of the orchestra spun like a spring on a crescendo, rolled in stormy waves with timpani, and the melancholy solo of the English horn foreshadowed tragedy. The corrosive tremolo of Mélisande's "spinning wheel" and the ominous, in the spirit of the "dance of death" energy of the Musical Intermission sounded in Currentzis with dark infernal paint. And Melisande's death, with its melancholy and beautiful melody over the mourning sound of the orchestra, unfolded into a painful and emotional picture, which ended in a piercingly quiet, ethereal sonority.

Fauré's Requiem was performed in the second part. And in this project, Currentzis seemed to go against the composer, who, as you know, deliberately evaded the depiction of painful otherworldly pictures that open to the soul of the deceased. His Requiem is permeated with mystical intuition, faith in the peace of eternity, in the harmony of the other world. The inspiration for him was the mysticism of Wagner's Parsifal.

But to Currentzis this energy of the "enlightened" Requiem, where there is no Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), seemed not enough, and he connected Matt Collishaw to the project. The artist complemented the lyrical and gentle sound environment of the score, in which children's voices and the prayer Pie Jesu (Merciful Jesus) performed by Fani Antonelou, the mournful Libera Me (Deliver me) with the quiveringly excited voice of Thomas Mole and the sweet Gregorian singing of the choir sound like "angels", solemn peace in the strict, balanced sound of the orchestra - a psychologically ruthless thriller depicting clinically naturalistic scenes of the dying of the elderly.

The works of Fauré and Sibelius reflect a state of melancholy and longing for an irretrievably elusive ideal

And the chain of these physiological deaths of old people, lying in their beds surrounded by their loved ones in the rooms of a mystical house that goes into the clouds, did not look here either as a parable or as a reflection of the philosophy of death. And although each plot of death was accompanied by a majestic silent landscape with rivers and mountains, and after the symbolic scene where the vultures tormented the corpses collected on the roof of the house (freed the souls from the flesh), the beauty of living matter was revealed - the Earth, the ocean, space, this gloomy and straightforward the spectacle did not for a moment enter into a living dialogue with the Requiem.

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