A blend of sumptuous music to unfold today
Harmonious teamwork: The Chamber Music Society rehearsing for this evening’s concert
The main hall of the Goethe Institute with a black stage, a whiteboard and classroom chairs with writing pads attached looked like it might be the setting for a management seminar. On Sunday, it was witness instead to a riveting rehearsal by the Chamber Music Society of Colombo of Renaissance and Baroque music for a concert scheduled for today, Sunday June 2.
The programme brings together once famous composers such as Anthony Holborne, who had been a favourite at Queen Elizabeth’s court, with crowd pleasers such as excerpts from French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Les Indes Galantes as well as Telemann’s humorous take on that always tragicomic hero, Don Quixote.
The practice session offered sumptuous music — and a lesson in collegial teamwork and light-touch leadership. Concert-master Lakshman Joseph-de Saram frequently deferred to Shinichi Murata, playing the violoncello. Murata, a Japanese embassy official on his second posting to Colombo who played with the Chamber Music Society more than a decade ago, comes from a family steeped in early music. During the rehearsal, Murata intervened a couple of times asking, for instance, for the Holborne Suite for Five Voices to be played at a slower tempo and for the emphasis of specific beats. Joseph-de Saram suggested Murata lead by giving more air to the first note of each bar, humorously likening it later to an engine being cut off and the music gliding to the next phrase.
Later, after the completion of the Telemann Trio Sonata for two violins, violoncello and cembalo, where one of the violins was standing in for a high-sounding recorder, Joseph-de Saram seemed relieved at the end, exclaiming that it was “a high-wire act”. Telemann was a pragmatic, even populist, composer who wanted his music played as widely as possible and so these substitutions, then and now, are routine. For a small chamber music ensemble, playing the music of Holborne or the operatic work of Rameau requires similar flexibility and multi-tasking. Happily, one of its members, Johann Peiris, who usually plays the piano, plays the flute as well. For the Holborne, Peiris played a blockflote, an early version of the recorder which Murata owns that is a hundred years old and wraps in soft blue cotton cloth as if it were valuable jewellery. Peiris played the cembalo/harpsichord on a keyboard through much of the concert rehearsal.
Joseph-de Saram’s programming is always energetically, inventively eclectic. For a concert two months ago, the programme included both Anton Bruckner, whose 200th birth anniversary is this year, and Philip Glass’ Mishima, written first as a score for a movie. For Sunday’s concert, the second half includes Rameau’s utterly addictive La Marais and Tendre Amour & Entrée les Sauvages from his opera Les Indes Galantes, which was spectacularly reworked five years ago by the similarly effortlessly cosmopolitan Paris Opera under the baton of a hip hop choreographer and a film director.
Stillness and silence are usually required of classical music audiences. At the Chamber Music Society’s concert today, however, foot stomping afterwards and maybe even the occasional hip hop dance move ought to be permissible. The music on offer really is that irresistible.
(Rahul Jacob worked as a foreign correspondent and a travel editor for the Financial Times, London)
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