This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 30, 2013 - In an upcoming installment of Downton Abbey, Maggie Smith’s dowager countess intimates that no loss equals that of love: “I do not speak much of the heart, since it is seldom helpful to do so. But I know well enough the pain when it is broken.”
Truly, there is no time more poignant to speak of love than when it is lost, as the current exhibit at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts illustrates.
The Progress of Love, which examines the end of love and its aftermath through the eyes of artists, opened in November and will be on display until April 20.
Curated by Pulitzer Foundation Director Kristina Van Dyke, the exhibit features the multimedia installations and photography of British-Nigerian artists Zina Saro-Wiwa and Yinka Shonibare, MBE, French artist Sophie Calle and American-Jamaican-Nigerian artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi.
On Wednesday, Feb. 6, the exhibit will serve as a fitting setting to mezzo-soprano Debby Lennon and members of the St. Louis Symphony as they perform an intimate concert that explores relationships through unique and unexpected perspectives, and navigates the oft rough and all-too-familiar seas of expectation and reality through human connection. [Note: that is also the date for a curatorial tour led by Tamara H. Schenkenberg, assistant curator for special Projects (1:30-2:30 p.m.)]
The latest in the Pulitzer series showcases the power and fury that comes when Maurice Ravel and Albert Schoenberg independently set verse to music.
Ravel’s “Chansons madécasses” consists of three songs in which the composer excavates in Evariste Désiré de Forgé Parny’s poem that reveals the perils of love, its anticipation and its unexpected turns. The counter-intuitive quality of the work intrigued Lennon.
“There is a total role reversal in this piece,” Lennon said. Usually, it is the woman who waits for her lover. Not in this piece. In this, the woman is the more aggressive, and the male is forced to wait impatiently for his lover’s return.”
“Chansons madécasses” -- written in 1925 and 1926 as the modernists were redefining literature and painting as well as the other arts -- offers a spare music assortment, specifically, a cello, a flute and a piano in addition to the soprano.
The genius of the piece lies in Ravel’s ability to play with his audience’s expectations, something he came to understand when he encountered Schoenberg’s piece, “Pierrot lunaire,” which is the second piece in the concert. Schoenberg uses juxtaposition as well as complexity to build his work, said Eric Gaston, the symphony’s artistic programs manager.
“There is a tempestuous quality in the textures and the layering of sound — it is a very beautiful piece,” he said. “The variations in the tone in each of the poems, the love sickness and home sickness in the third part, the trouble and misadventure in the second — it all adds to the drama.”
Schoenberg’s work, a melodrama composed in 1912, is “much darker than Ravel’s,” Gaston explained. “To some, it was downright blasphemous, but it is the treatment that interested Ravel.”
And that is what both pieces share: the use of the instrumentation to turns the expectations of the audience on its ear, quite literally.
It is this counter-intuitive use, this sort of reversal of the recognizable in the choice of instrument and the part it plays in the pieces that makes it such a fitting amplification of the Pulitzer exhibition, both Gaston and Lennon acknowledge.
And that is the sort of interplay that has become the moniker of the symphony’s Music Director David Robertson, and speaks to the intimacy of the Pulitzer as a backdrop and visual commentary that harmonizes with the music.
Both of the pieces center on human connection, collaboration, Lennon said. In fact, it is as much about interaction as it is about interpretation.
“David (Robertson) is constantly listening he gives people room, freedom to interpret,” she said. “No two performances are exactly the same. That is the beauty of live music. David senses what is coming and listens.”
Please note that the concert is already sold out, but you can check with the symphony (314-534-1700) to see if tickets are turned in. The next in the series is Messiaen’s “Harawi” on March 6.
Elizabeth Harris Krasnoff is a freelance writer.