Two Traditions

The winter blahs are threatening very early this year, and they must be kept at bay! Fires in the fireplace, hearty stews, long walks through the barren winter woods. And music. Getting out of the house after dark takes an extra effort, but it's almost invariably worth it.

Hilary and I drove over to St. Thomas University Saturday night to hear an organ and voice recital in honor of Francois Couperin's 350th birthday. We walked across the icy campus to the chapel, listening to the laughter of passing co-eds while admiring the pedestrian space illuminated by brilliant streetlights on crusty snow.

As for the concert itself, I would say it had too much organ and not enough voice. Speaking as a rank amateur, Couperin's style strikes me as lilting yet halting, like a courtly dance. It lacks the flow, majesty, and drama of Bach's keyboard work, and the tone tends to be light. In the course of introducing the program, Pipe Dreams impresario Michael Barone drew our attention to the various stops and voices that the young Couperin made use of—everything from the Aéoline and the Clairon to the Nazard and the Vox humana. Nevertheless, during the recital that followed I eventually got a little bored and began to examine the huge tapestries hanging on either side of the alter, wondering if they were mirror images, and if not, how the patterns, very similar to each other, had been generated.

I also began to wonder if these organ pieces might sound better on the piano. But that would have been a different concert altogether, and a huge disappointment to many in the audience, who were, no doubt, organ enthusiasts. The organists themselves never appeared; they were off somewhere behind the rood screen.

 After four or five such pieces, the singers of Consortium Carissimi emerged from the chancel and stood in a row in front of the audience, looking like they'd just been wakened from a long nap. And the singing was dreamlike—but in a good way. I especially enjoyed the second "set," sung by two tenors and a baritone, but by this time more than an hour had gone by, and we'd heard nine or ten organ pieces along with the fine spots of singing.

The old colors

Well satisfied, we took our leave at intermission and drove home through the night, admiring the silent river as we crossed the Lake Street Bridge and the various lights along West River Road, including the Guthrie spire and the flashing neon Grain Belt Brewery bottle cap, which seemed to be emitting a sequence of blues and whites rather than the greens and oranges I'm familiar with.

When we got home, Hilary said, "That was fun. What shall we do tomorrow night?" Digging out the weekend Variety section of the paper, she soon hit upon a concert scheduled to take place at the Cedar Cultural Center featuring a lyra player from Crete named Stelios Petrakis. Neither of us had heard of him but I hunted up a few YouTube videos. He sounded good. The important thing here is to make sure there will be a healthy measure of authentic music, rather than an electrified facsimile with the volume turned up and the rhythms watered down. There's no way to know for sure, but it looked promising.

And so, in a fit of late-night enthusiasm, we took the plunge. I bought two tickets online—and this is an important step. If you don't buy the tickets, it becomes easy to talk yourself out of going the next day when it's dark and cold outside and you've already had a glass of wine.

Stepping into the lobby of the Cedar Cultural Center can take ten years off your life. It's not that you suddenly feel young in the midst of a bunch of old fogies, but that the crowd is casual, diverse, sharp, and buzzing with enthusiasm. We grabbed a couple of chairs on the center aisle, nine rows back, leaving an empty row in front of us for no particular reason. It was soon filled by a tall man who seemed to know everyone in the room. Petrakis himself dedicated a song to him. He was having a fine old time, speaking Greek with various friends seated nearby, though he resisted the impulse to hum along with the tunes—with only a few exceptions.

Petrakis was playing a small stringed instrument called a lyra, no more than two feet long, that he cradled in his lap and bowed like a cello, accompanied only by a toubeleki-like drum and a Cretan lute. The lyra isn't loud, but, like its distant cousin the cello, it's capable of producing slow, haunting tones and also frenzied patterns. Petrakis covered the range, and he also sang several numbers. He opened the show with a few pleasant numbers accompanied by piano, during which the music teetered on the edge of a Yanni-like schmaltz. Once the band came onstage the vibe improved, and on several numbers the drummer got up from his seat and did some dancing.

During his soft-spoken patter Petrakis conveyed his deep love of the musical traditions he was extending, and also his appreciation for the crowd's enthusiastic response. "In Chicago, a chilly audience," he said in his shaky English. "Cedar Rapids, warmer. Here, most warm of all!"

On one number he played a goatskin bagpipe, and inquired as to the proper way to pronounce "shepherd." He tried it several times, but the second syllable wasn't coming out well. "That's very hard to pronounce," he said with a laugh.

Including an opening set by a local band called Uskudar Eclectic, we were treated to two and a half hours of music and conversation, absorbing the warmth and sincerity of the eastern Mediterranean just fifteen minutes from home. The walk back to the parking ramp was bitter—but somehow it didn't feel that bad.