Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Last Thursday GH and I heard a concert of French sacred music in the beautiful gothic church of St. Ignatius of Antioch at West End Avenue and 87th Street. Under the music direction of Phillip Cheah, the Central City Chorus presented à la glorie de Dieu . The program connected medieval French composers with their modern counterparts. According to the program notes,  La Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) is often cited as the earliest complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer. Cheah writes, to my great interest: The text of the Ordinary falls into roughly two categories: one short, with the conciseness of poetry (i.e. Kyrie , Sanctus , and Agnus Dei ), and the other extended and prosaic (i.e. Gloria and Credo ). Machaut sets the texts of the former group as self-contained abstract formations that seem almost more instrumental than choral in the drawn out syllables, while the latter are set in accordance with the t...

Heard with EN last night the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, led by a young vivacious conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The strings were especially silky and bright. Jean-Yves Thibaudet played Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major (1859) with great panache, but the work strove too hard for effects and seemed to lack a coherent shape. I did not enjoy much either Richard Strauss's programmatic Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) (1898), though the orchestra played it with gusto, and received calls for an encore after it. Three trumpets left the stage at one point, and played off stage to sound like faraway horns. Neat effect. The piece I liked best of the evening was the program opener, Messiaen's Les offrandes oubli ées, méditation symphonique (1930). In contemplating the Cross, the Sin and the Eucharist, it renewed convincingly an old devotion.