Moussorgski : Tableaux d'une exposition, Une nuit sur le mont Chauve

Description

Markevitch or the evidence of energy and clarity. It would certainly be a rather incomplete portrait if one did not remember how much these characteristics distinguishing one of the most brilliant conductors resonated in perfect harmony with the sharp sense of the expressive role of dynamic nuances and the ability to completely reconstruct an imaginary world where color, the supreme value of Russian music inherited by the Western musical world, triumphs, is magnified, and exalted. The art of inhabiting silences, of bringing in the sections with perfectly defined layers through the clarity of attacks and the homogeneity of groups restructures our perception of orchestral space with the brilliance and luminosity of Cézanne's canvases, that other exact revolutionary contemporary of Mussorgsky who equally gives the impression of having wiped the slate clean, an impression that inevitably eclipses a more complex reality. However, it is a miracle that such an analytical and rigorous mind manages not to diminish but rather to magnify what underlies the compelling call of this music: the Dionysian and the Apollonian ready to merge into the swirling dance of the enchanting and festive popular. Let us not seek here to find in the version with the Berlin Philharmonic (1953) the concentrated ardor of the decisive gesture and the aesthetic minimalism of the phrase aimed at the dramatic power that could lead to the sweet shiver of fear. Instead, let us sharpen our senses to entirely different stimuli. Frequently evoking the desire to slow it down to contemplate its stereophonic panoramas softening the mourning of Berlin's sonorities, the Leipzig promenade of 1973 is imbued with a very "Children's Corner" fragrance in the tenderness of its renewed daydreams. In this reading where the tone of wonder frees itself from the savory dissonances of the radicality of the synthetic spirit characterizing avant-garde ambition, the silences maturing the bursts have gained in thickness and expressive depth, resonating like a pedal point of the "world of yesterday" before which the dazzling functionality of a production mechanism from the constructivist era would constantly delay its appearance, a mechanism that the Berlin version ignited. The great door of dreams then opens as if by enchantment. (Pascal Edeline)