<<  -- 5 --  David Wilkins    A WEEK TO REMEMBER

Ahmet Erenli, Director of the Music Festival, says that he would have liked to have found enough funding for some kind of staging. The money wasn't there -- Maria would have empathised with that! In the event, the performances in the Hagia Eirene were just a concert presentation of the Teldec recording with, oh-lucky-festival-goers, the identical cast. Julia Zenko, in the eponymous role, could have done with the chance to shift her body according to the instinctive demands of her spirit. Nonetheless, her capacity to characterise overcame any inhibitions that might have flowed from the religious austerity of the setting. In the work's paired 'hits': Yo Soy Maria and the Milonga de la Anunciacion, you could sense her desire to let-rip with body as much as voice but the voice still managed plenty. The tenor, who prefers to be known as 'Jairo', had some amplification problems on the first night that seemed to have been sorted on the second. Those of the audience, overheard during the interval, drawing an easy comparison with Julio Iglesias and his ilk, were quite wrong. Those 'in the know' recognised his contribution as entirely authentic. In voice, as in stance, he is the inheritor of the tradition of the great Carlos Gardel far more than that of any Hispanic crooner.

Just to prove that this music is not an easy ride for the instrumentalists, even the Kremerata Musica had a moment or two of loose ensemble in the fiendishly difficult fugal writing on the first night. They were, however, all ashine with their obvious dedication to the score. Kremer's contribution -- primus inter pares, though he's probably too humble to accept even that -- was specifically designed to draw you into the piece. His violin was never boastful but flirted, explored, commiserated, laughed and wept with Maria. The bandoneon playing of Norwegian, Per Arne Glorvigen, revealed that a hemisphere of distance means nothing when it comes to identifying with a musical language. Horacio Ferrer's surrealistic (sometimes quite unfathomable) libretto can be studied endlessly and still not reveal its many secrets to a soul not breast-fed on the language and metaphors of Buenos Aires. How can that matter, though, when the man himself -- affectionate, stern, vulnerable and compromised or jealously bewildered -- delivers his text as musically as any other instrument? The birds in the hidden reaches were silent and ponderous. I imagined that they had fallen under Maria's spell as inescapably as so many of us shadows below.

So -- for me, a three hankie job! If you don't know this piece, I urge you to explore the preferable Kremer recording on Teldec (numbers above) or, as a less hothouse alternative, that on Dynamic (CDS 185/1-2). You will either join me in the haunted-region or wish to laugh at my gullibility -- but I can live with that!

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