Night of music at the Louvre

That night, I wanted have myself a real good time... so I bought for 5.5 Eur a ticket for the concert in the Auditorium of the Louvre Museum, in the framework of the so-called Vendredi du Louvre.

The Hungarian Quatuor Takash was playing, in a minimalistic, wrapped auditorium.

  The deconcerting point of this concert was that this people, when they play, they really bacome a sole animal with four legs, and they have an extraordinary coordination. They began with a contemporary music piece, by Rihm, something too uniform and uninventive to be as long as 40 minutes.

But the very amazing part of it was seeing this quartet not missing a beat, and staying all glued-up together. They were puppets in the hand of a sole big player, they were as together as the seaweed under the water, independent but all moved by the very same and invisible exterior force, uniformly, at the same moment and in the same way. This force acting in the material void, which seemed to animate them, was the starking point of the whole piece.

Someone was snoring near me - I could not feel I was too warm for forgetting to take my jacket off, I did not feel the great hunger I had after 11 hours of work, I forgot to be tired.

And this, especially when they went on with a quartet by Beethoven The fourteenth quartet by Beethoven is a very interesting thing, because there Beethoven informally experimented whatever he could. It is like, when you cook and try to invent a totally new dish. A lot of things are there, in this kind of "musical atelier": dynamics are all stretched (Adagios are in fact Allegros, and vice-versa), poliphonic construction, of course encouraged by the fact of having four musical lines to bring forward at any time, gives place to manierism, and then again, after a minutes, the lines are broken and decorticated anew. And it begins with a new theme built on one or two voices in dialogue with other two lines, and so on.

There are like six or seven movements in this quartet, all linked together seamlessly, and at some point an artificial echo of pizzicatos takes place shared by the four musicians, which require an extreme sense of rythm and coordination amongst them.

This music sounds so scadalistic and modern, almost like Rihm, but without losing the depth that Beethoven is capable of (especially at the very beginning, where the dynamic is a Very espressivo).

I noticed that in Takash Quartet, the cello wants always to dominate the scene, which creates at the end a certain umbalance and boredom in the quartet. It is true, that having well-marked bass is a plus, but having a drama queen at the cello is a bit different, indeed. I also noticed that the second violin would never never come out, and I thought what a weird life is it, to be a second violin alone, destined to anonimity and gregariousness for the rest of your life, with no line ever that you (or your fellows at least if you are in an orchestra) could never bring out.

What this quartet leaves you is a sense of clarity, efficiency, transparency and awareness. I got out at 9:20 (they ended 5 minutes ahead of schedule, like a Swiss train) feeling extremely awake, warm, vigilant, proactive and sure.

This is what good music, good rythm and perfect coordination may profond in a compassionate listener.