My friend is wiser than me. That goes without saying. When we heard the Brodskys playing Golijov's Tenebrae last Friday we both hurried home but I'm fairly sure I'd ordered a recording of it before he had. And yet then I wondered if he hadn't bought the better CD.
I still can't find the disc he's ordered with the piece on it by the Brodksys but I'd ordered this already anyway and I'm a fretful, disappointed sort of person who is always accusing himself of doing the wrong thing. And that happens quite a lot if you like horse racing.
So, despite its beautifuilly forlorn cover picture, I embarked upon this disc with some trepidation. Oh, Jesus, what have I done this time. I don't like slagging things off for the sake of it but this Oceana piece isn't anything I'm going to try to find excuses for. I got nowhere near the end of it and don't even wanna talk about it. But I can't throw it away because it has the Couperin-based Tenebrae in it which is so wonderful. Exactly what Golijov did apart from deconstruct the Couperin third Lecon and then rebuild it is hard for me to say but at least he did it. In some post-modern way, this is absolutely wonderful. It isn't at all better than Francois Couperin but it has done something with it and got its map references right.
So, then, the last three tracks on the CD are listed as Three Songs. You might not be expecting much but you'd be entirely the more wrong if you weren't. Here is Dawn Upshaw, previously perhaps most famous for singing on the best selling CD of Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,and here, equally movingly.
This is music by an Argentinian composer and I wonder if I should be made to think of the doomed passion of the Portugese fado songs that I never did quite find the time to fall in love with, or an echo of Jewish kletzmer music. Whatever it is, it is also of its own and I played these three songs three times over rather than the cod baroque I'd bought the disc for. Very deep and very dark if you like that sort of thing. I'll be going back to this many more times. My friend is wiser than me and his adventures have no doubt taken him further than I have ever been. But not on this occasion.