N.B.: despite the title, ignore (let it not become a habit...) Hændel and put on Puccini's Manon Lescaut's CD, at the beginning of act III, the interlude, to be more precise.
Concert at Florence Canoe Society's pier, september, estival but tolerable heath, night.
While the sun was setting and we were having a rehearsal a mighty wind was blowing (as it often happens at sunset - hot and cold air masses etc.), and mighty means force 4 in musician's graduation: four clothes pegs for each stand to keep the sheet music from flying...
Now wind has subsided.
Ponte Vecchio stands out in front of us familiar and sympathetic, as always, extraordinarily patient even if it befell in an extremely oleographic picture.
Fireworks near San Miniato, in a cloudless evening, the river Arno - when the sun sets you can forget it's not more than a polluted sewer and you only see the city lights reflecting in it, orchestra lined up on the pier and three or four boats (one is an authentic Venetian gondola - in Florence - the power of twinnings...) lighten by the candles that noisessly slip off over the water, and above our heads the Uffizi, with their earnest man appearence, benevolently snickering under their moustache.
Parenthesis opened: you need a florentine to understand certain things, but you first need a tourist to explain him those things, or, at least, that makes him notice them.
Maybe it's beauty addiction.
It's enough to see a tourist with his eyes glued to the Arno or to the Ponte Vecchio and refrain from considering him a poor fool - you don't have those things..., but thinking he's right, thinking that we, when we were children, we did the same, with our little hands on Lungarni's stone banisters, with the first-glance curiosity... parenthesis closed.
Giuseppe Verdi, Symphony from "Nabucco"
Ok, apart from "va' pensiero"'s shake at about a quarter of the piece I must admit that this overture disconcerts me.
Apart from the great use of brasses - in every single symphony, as in "Rigoletto"'s - and here he's superlative, there is a whole section, repeated several times, that should fit perfectly an american action movie, like hey ours are coming!, know what I'm saying?
The very first I heard it I asked myself if he wasn't playing us a prank ("Tutto nel mondo è burla" - "Everythings in the world is a joke" - his own words).
Did he really believed in what he wrote? music seems, at first glance, really rugged, and also quite trivial.
Did he do that only to please the audience (Nabucco was the first of all the operas where he took advantage of Italians' wish for independence), or instead he put in it also a bit of his idea about what music should be?
We can imagine, hearing this piece, as a lot of his, that Verdi isn't an opera composer, but only the idea a peasant has about a what a composer should be (and that's the burden one born in a place called Le Roncole - an agrarian tool - and had his first contacts with music hearing the village band has to bear)...
Still, it works...
And if you play it it's even more rewarding!
The question remains unanswered...
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Giacomo Puccini, Interlude from act III of "Manon Lescaut"
I've listened to this piece at a couple of concerts.
After each, I didn't remember a single note.
I read at first sight at an orchestra rehearsal, and it was perfect, like I've never played anything else in my whole life.
After that, I still couldn't remember anything!
That's Puccini greatest invention - and not only in Manon: new music at every listening.
It's not like I don't remember it beacuse it's illogical, or because it's poorly written... on the contrary! every single change of tempo - in Puccini they are essential, they make the music flow softly roll, and also difficult, because you ever have to keep an eye on the director - comes naturally, as natural comes all the sudden diminuendos, the wild and libering crescendos, and everything - plying this piece is a continuous catharsis.
We made it again as an encore.
Obviously, in a relaxed, post-concert atmosphere, the mind cleared, we played it even better.
There is a particular moment that sticks in my head (but only after the tenth listening...).
After the introduction with soloists (two cellos, the first viola, the first violin) and after winds' theme accompanied by strings' pizzicatos, there is a sort of sound drop, not a diminuendo, but a preparation atmosphere.
Then, all of a sudden, the whole orchestra plays forte, with violins' unison starting a roller coaster course made of crescendos, diminuendos, improvise accelerations and languid contemplative pauses, liberation roars and intimate confessions.
Uffizi kindly stare from above while a gang of madmen tire out on wooden and/or metal tools to make out the very mistery of existence from a written philosophical sheet (and someone's sneering, not only the Uffizi).
In the meantime Ponte Vecchio benevolently snicker from his stone arches.