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Rating: Anything, as long as it's about music. So it happens that a colleague tells me about one of his personal passions and I, being naturally curious, find myself shortly after exploring musical territories unfamiliar to me and enjoying a beautiful evening like this, appreciating a choir of 100 elements instead of the usual indiepop recommended by such and such magazine or weblog.
The choir director, the Brazilian Martinho Lutero Galati de Oliveira, opens with a brief informative moment explaining the project of the namesake association Cantosospeso. At later moments, he reappears to explain the choice of the pieces proposed, which is absolutely essential for someone like me who is largely unfamiliar with cultural references on the subject. The main objective is immediately emphasized: the search for a vocality that represents the meeting between the classicism of European baroque music, represented by J. S. Bach, and the modernity and freshness of African music, an ideal continuation of what Albert Schweitzer proposed at the beginning of the century.
The overall vision of the choir is very well crafted: there are 100 members, 50 of whom are in the center in black but with colorful vests, almost evoking the ethnic soul, 15 women on each side in black dresses and red scarves, then a string section of 5 violins and a cello, followed by woodwinds, percussionists, and soloists. The only off-key note of the performance will be non-musical: in the background, a sort of screensaver alternating African masks and moving images of Bach is projected, with a montage worthy at most of a TV signature.
The beginning of the concert is focused on the classical; the sweetness and elegance of the treble voice stand out, intoning the Zulu part of the South African anthem Nkosi Sikelele Africa, followed by the Cantata BVW4 performed by the choir, then a solemn and resigned Agnus Dei sung in falsetto, leading to some excursions almost into contemporary music, such as a moment where the choir seems to reproduce a chaos from a crowd in a square, with a sort of dialogue between men and women. The tune changes with the piece Csu War Da Nye, a traditional from Burkina Faso that marks the entry of percussion: the performance was brought as a gift on the occasion of a choir visit to the country. Here, the almost shrill female voices from the right side of the stage counter the percussion on the left, while the central part's harmonization completes the execution. The wind instruments enter, and the choir reconfigures into a new formation. The following work is a Cuban requiem from the 1700s, recently restored, composed by Esteban Salas, a mixed-race priest who in his time was already experimenting with the fusion between the baroque and African tradition, a true testimony of how ancient the idea of experimentation in contaminating genres is and a further "historical" endorsement to the project carried forward by the choir. The last piece presented represents the best synthesis of the project: if so far the pieces have simply alternated between baroque and African music, now we are witnessing a real fusion. One of Bach's most well-known pieces, the chorale from cantata BWV 147, is performed with a more regular and sustained tempo than I am used to recognizing, up until the transition of the first hits on the bongos which transform it into the splendid choral epilogue on M'Ganga, a piece offered by the choir as a gift during another trip, this time to Kenya.
The concert was re-performed and recorded on CD the following day and will be on sale in the coming days: for those interested or simply curious like me, it is available from the official website of the namesake cultural association. All proceeds will be donated to a humanitarian project aimed at building a hospital in Kenya.
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