I once read, I think from a Scandinavian poet, that there are dimensions of time in which feelings are eternal. Life has taught me that this is true. And the verifications for it are as multiple as details can present each day of each existence. I thought about it in a chat with friends a few days ago and in correlation to the news that NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected the most distant star ever seen. A friend explained how two ways of measuring such distances are usually used: by the angles of the light and by its color. The fact seemed fascinating to me. It is incredible the passage of time and how memorable a few moments are. And there was something memorable at the Pablo de Villavicencio Theater last Thursday, memorable like that verse I quote above, because Culiacán received a visit from the Catalan orchestra director Marc Moncusí. And let me tell you, it was something special.
The concert of the Sinaloa Symphony Orchestra of the Arts (Ossla), was the fourth program of the 2022 Season, had the Mexican pianist Fernando Saint-Martin as soloist in its first two pieces. But of the three plays that the maestro directed, it was the one that followed the intermission that convinced me that that night was going to be remembered; the work was “Symphony No. 1 in G minor”, by Vasily Kalinnikov Russia, 1866 – 1901), especially its second movement, which seemed to me like putting music to a dream. This symphonic work takes up Russian popular music and was composed between 1894 and 1895, and premiered in kyiv, when it was still part of Russia.
For reasons without clear cause, after the intermission I was sitting right at the height of the director, surrounded by the tranquility of a couple of empty seats, although there was a good audience that day. As there was no longer a pianist in the symphony, the instrument was closed and from the angle I was at, I could see the double direction of Maestro Moncusí: the real one, on the Ossla and the reflected one, on the piano cover, as if the piano it was a lake. With the perfect addition of a work that I did not know, that dimension of time reminded me of a story by HP Lovecraft, The Music of Erich Zann, which is about a violinist who, from the top of his room, uses his music to contain beings of another type. . Maestro Moncusí, it seemed to me, was as if in that reflection of his on the piano he opened a portal, but of something good, of dimensions in which the feeling of time is eternal. And that was precious to share with those who went to the Theater that night. The maestro manages to connect well with both the orchestra and the audience. He has been a guest conductor in our state several times, the last one in 2017, if memory serves me right, it was in mid-September, around the time that Miguel Salmón del Real received the baton of the Ossla; that time a ‘concert with a cause’ was held for those affected by the earthquake and cyclones of that sick year. I would like to hear you conduct the Overture to Wagner’s opera Rienzi; and Symphony No. 3, by Brahms.
As I checked, the teacher began his musical studies at the age of six, having his own mother as a teacher, since, like his maternal grandmother, she is a piano teacher.
One day, when Master Moncusí was 16 or 17 years old, his father, who was a pastry chef, proposed that he enter his pastry shop to work and thus begin to learn the trade and one day in the future, take command. Faced with an offer that was tempting, he fortunately decided to follow that path as wonderful as it is complicated that music is. To train, he made use of institutions in his native Spain and the United States, as well as at the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin, invited by Daniel Barenboim (2001-2004). And although he was very attracted to composition, conducting was always more his thing, there he saw more possibilities in the orchestral field than in any other instrument. Even so, he studied composition and composed many things, but more with the aim of having more musical knowledge and thus having more tools for the director’s job. Or, in his own words, “the great orchestra has an intensity and an indefinable capacity for sounds, colors and possibilities that make it wonderful that you can influence that field”, expressed a few years ago this director who directs as Joaquín Sorolla portrays the color white.
I will have to look forward to hearing him conduct again, be it the Ossla or another orchestra. Moncusí is “exact without losing the complete realization of the composers’ intentions”, as Herbert Graf explains that Richard Strauss felt that an orchestra should be conducted in his book Opera for the people.
This Thursday the 7th there will be a concert in favor of the Sinaloa DIF Autism Center, with tickets of 200 pesos on the ground floor and 100 on the upper floor, at the Pablo de Villavicencio Theater. And on Sunday the 10th the concert will be repeated at 12:30, with free admission.
#music #Marc #Moncusí