FundamentallySound Blog

Last night I went to church. Well, a church, anyway. My roommate, a cellist, had a performance of Gabriel Fauré's Requiem in the Oude Kerk, Voorburg, near the house where we live. I didn't know the piece, and was reluctant to go out into the nasty rainy and cold weather, but finally decided that it would do me some good to hear real acoustically produced music for a change, enough of this synthetic electronic business! It was a wise decision, they had an absolutely lovely performance of music by a composer that Proust is said to have admired while they both lived in Paris. And this was definitely music of a Proustian kind: gentle, dreamy, and very human. Apparently, at the time the piece was written, it was even described as a "lullaby of death." Wow! (Is that a bad review?)
I'm always excited when I learn about a good work that isn't the product of an artist's ego-trip. This was one of them, and it was so much better than other hyperbolically grandiose requiems that have gotten headlines for the last couple hundred years.