Victoria Arts Festival - Waking the dead

It was a very hot and humid night as we made our way through the twisted narrow streets leading to the Basilica of St George for the final concert of this year's Victoria Arts Festival. A week before the feast and the interior of the basilica, already elaborate when not en fête, looked resplendent in red damask and shimmering gold. The National Philharmonic under the baton of Mro Joseph Vella performed Dvorak's exuberant Cello Concerto, Joe Vella's own Domine Jesu Christe Opus 38 and that most sublime of choral works, Faure's Requiem. A rather strange choice, one might say, as the only thing that the Faure and the Dvorak have in common is their popularity in the classical charts. They are there, forever in the upper echelons, for diametrically opposed reasons.

The basilica was a little too small and possibly too acoustically prone to echo to cope with the large choral and orchestral forces. This was especially evident during the Faure. The dynamics were at times drowned in echo and massiveness of sound. One felt that the forces at Mro Vella's disposal could have been cut down to half. This is in fact a very inward-looking work of art hallmarked by chromatic subtlety and inimitable melodies that is on a tonally different plane to any other requiem written at the time. Devoid of the type of earth-shattering passages that abound in Verdi's and Berlioz's work, Faure's sad and poignant message of quiet despair that is only redeemed by the final In Paradisum inevitably touches the heart and ravishes the soul of whoever listens to it. Having sung it many years ago, when a member of the Malta Choral Society with Joe Vella himself, brought back many fond memories. Maria Frendo herself, whose treble type soprano is ideally suited to the spirit of the Pie Jesu, had taken part along with Cecilia and Paul Xuereb too who were sitting a couple of rows away. I wonder what they were thinking. I missed the text of the requiem along with the translation. The way Faure framed phrases like in profundo lacu, in the deepest pit of hell, or the repetition of et timeo, et timeo, I fear, I fear, reflect the meaning so poignantly that one needed to follow. I was one of the lucky ones. I happen to know the text upside down and inside out. Not being able to follow and translate the meaning was not a plus point. Still, I did enjoy the performance despite the obvious drawbacks which I am quite happy to gloss over.

Still in mortibus mode, Joseph Vella's Domine Jesu Christe was an interesting mixture of the past and the present; rather like our own lives, in fact! The long traditional sweeping legato passages were punctuated by percussion that made me think of rattling bones. Not an easy first hearing, but one that I would like to listen to again in acoustically kinder settings. I certainly was thrilled by the climactic fugato of quam olim Abrahae promisisti, which led to the return to the introspective and calm theme we had started off with.

Dvorak's famous B Minor Cello Concerto abounds in melody and is the sister-work to his famous New World Symphony. They are undoubtedly the composer's most popular and best-known works. Czech cellist Daniel Veis must be no stranger to this vibrant work of art by his conational. Mr Veis performed in the VAF last year and his son the year before that. His technical prowess and interpretative abilities were more than equal to bringing the utterly splendid score, full of scintillations and quirkiness, alive. His performance was outstanding. Again here it was a question of the acoustics being unable to cope with the sheer volume of sound, at least from where I was sitting. This made it very difficult to appreciate the orchestral colours and nuances that hallmark this work as the sound tended to enmesh itself with the most disconcerting of echoes. It was like playing the piano with the left pedal pressed firmly down throughout!

A most enjoyable concert, by all accounts.