Even as I had a non-religious or rather religiously non-committed upbringing, my mother being a socialist with spiritual leanings but not much respect for any church establishment, still I grew up with the - today absolutely unfashionable - idea that Easter is a holiday and not a prolonged shopping-weekend. When I was a kid, Stockholm was a closed city on Good Friday - which we call "Long Friday" in Swedish - no restaurants, no going out, no theatre, no cinema except two Christian (!) movies - Barabbas and another one about a little handicapped boy who saw the virgin - strange fare for Lutheran Sweden. And absolutely no shops open. Now, all this has changed a great deal and not just for the better. It's a comfort to know that you can find food if you forgot to buy any yesterday and that lonely persons can go and have some fun somewhere. But I really prefer to stay at home and be quiet, even though I am no believer and no church-goer. So what is my Easter music? Bach? Not really though I remember being invited at about the age of ten or eleven to the traditional and very prestigious performance of the Passion according to St. Matthew's at the nearby Engelbrektskyrkan, where my school-teacher Gustaf Hellblom sang in the chorus and sometimes gave us the privilege of his free tickets. Once I was invited to the choir loft for the second part, to sit beside my teacher among the tenors. In the interval I was introduced to soprano Eva Prytz, whom I already had admired and cried for as Liù in Turandot at the Opera. But she almost scared the wits out of me by asking - in her Norwegian accent that to Swedish ears always mixes the funny and the holy - if I really knew who had written the work we were listening to and in which she sang the soprano solos with such splendour and conviction. The angelic and slightly frightening lady answered herself with great enthusiasm that this work was written by God himself.
We all ought to have our private rituals for restauring peace of mind and inner strength. For many years my Good Friday music was Krzysztof Penderecki's Utrenja, having bought the Lp's and half the score (yes, the rest was not yet published) at one of Teater 9's many Polish tours when we always earned too much unchangeable money which we could only use for buying records, art books, music, leather bags... Penderecki's enormous fresco of sounds, human and ex-terranean, filled first my small apartment at Kungsholmen once a year for a decade and later followed me where I live now, the version from 1973, with Warsaw forces conducted by Markowski, lately on CD. A huge work - even the printed score a half meter high and with extra folds at the top of the pages to accomodate up to 75 systems - mixing the archaic with the ultramodern, the angelic and the chaotic, profoundly gripping, whatever your nomination. And so full of wonders - the duet between two ultra-deep basses like Orthodox archdeacons gone mad or the spooky apparition of a congregation from Mickiewiecz' Forefathers' Eve...
In later years I have exchanged Penderecki for slimmer diet. Soeur Marie Keyrouz sings - in Greek and Arabic - excerpts of the Eastern Byzantine liturgical chants for Passion and Resurrection on a disc from Harmonia Mundi. The exarche of Antiochia (does he still exist?) explains the contents for us in the booklet. The culmination for me is the Ya rabbi, the Apostikhon or Prayer of Maria from Magdala. A sinner, a woman talks to Jesus in the superrefined melismatic chant of the ancient Eastern civilisation, a tradition with deep roots in the cultures of the Middle East, such an unruly part of the world and the cradle for so much of our culture. Soeur Marie is a nun, a researcher and a virtuoso performer, her somewhat forbidding half-profile looking away from us on the cover. Her voice is one of the most beautiful I have heard or will ever hear, light but strong, straight but immensily flexible, with a grasp of the all-important (micro)intervals and the very florid and complicated ornamentation flowing out of the singing line as a natural expression. There are absolutely no theatricals, no false psychologising of Maria Magdalena's plight, but Soeur Marie makes even the unbeliever see her, humble but also proud below the cross, looking up at her saviour and speaking for all - Ya rabbi! For years to come this will be something I want to listen to at this time every year. And the woman has recorded much more, the proud and beautiful chants of the dwindling communities of the churches of the East - Maronite, Assyrian, Chaldean, Greco-Arabic Orthodox - listen and ... yes, Soeur Marie - in a way she reminds me of my childhood's Eva Prytz - is a singer, a great artist, not necessarily a missioner. She sings for us with the respect she commands for her great and rare music. If this is religion... perhaps it still has something to give to us. But I will never agree with the soprano of my first Matthew Passion - no God nut human beings have written this music, Bach and the long line of anonymous creators of the chants, and it's no worse for that.
Good afternoon. It?s like your batteries get low, and you need to charge them on someone else?s story.
I am from Ukraine and learning to write in English, give true I wrote the following sentence: "When you out in the public, do little things that put her in the mindset for what will happen later."
With respect 8), Howard.
Posted by: Howard | January 15, 2009 at 08:41 AM