Jean Rondeau presented Wednesday evening at Bourgie Hall, on a sumptuous pianoforte, his program “Gradus ad Parnassum”, taken from a CD released last March. A disturbing evening at the end of a day like no other.
Has the slightly shaggy, bearded young man in a short-sleeved shirt from Paris who sits calmly at his pianoforte and waits for a long time before beginning his recital ever heard of Karl Tremblay?
Does he know the emptiness that inhabits us, this desire not to be there? This desire to be nowhere, in fact. Harpeggio in G major by Johann Joseph Fux, this piece recorded on the harpsichord on the disc acquires on the pianoforte and subjected to the ritual of the concert, in the circumstances, an unexpected dimension of contemplation.
The Muses to heal the wounds
“Gradus ad Parnassum” is the aspiration to Parnassus, the mythological mountain where the Muses live. It is also the title of the treatise on counterpoint by Johann Joseph Fux, the great theorist on the subject at the turn of the 18th century, who draws on the example of Palestrina and whose teaching will influence Johan Christian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus. Mozart.
Jean Rondeau organizes this aspiration for aesthetic elevation in one breath (without intermission) on this unique instrument. He seeks to connect the works and composers as much as possible: the Clementi-Beethoven transition is striking. It is definitely through music that we best fill a void, even one that cannot be filled.
The artist’s few words tell us the joy he has in playing on the instrument in the Bourgie Room. In Haydn as in the famous Sonata in C major K. 545 of Mozart his lightness of touch is combined with a great softness of sound. Jean Rondeau plays with the resonance of the instrument and is patient in the silences of Haydn’s 1st movement.
But the whole concert seems to lead so much to the final Mozart diptych that we almost forget the rest and we will be forgiven for not having taken the risk of attending the slightest encore. The large arch with Fux is established. The tones are serious and tense: A minor And D minor in the Rondo K. 511, and the Fantasy K. 397. Alone in the world, Jean Rondeau faces his keyboard in an embracing silence, the abyss could not be blacker. It sounds like a call, a cry.
At the peak of pain Rondo K.511follows the beginning of this Fantasyso bloodless that one thinks of the devastation of the song Nothing : “There are only a few minutes left in my life […] My brother died yesterday in the middle of the desert.” But here we are with Mozart: if the Andante turns into Adagio, suddenly a final Presto-Allegretto emerges. Life goes on, not like before. Jean Rondeau will have softened the lack and the pain that affected a nation last night in a wonderful program played with magical tact.