Satyajit Ray was once almost eaten alive for having the gumption of having Kishore Kumar sing a Rabindrasangeet song in his 1964 film Charulata. Kishore was not an ‘exponent,’ so it was reckoned he would not only destroy the song, and by being a ‘pop’ singer, would also detune the whole Tagore songbook. The irony that Rob T himself in his time, much like Mozart in his, was seen as an upstart crow trivialising traditional high music was lost on this vishuddh ghee bunch. The calling out of Bob Dylan as ‘Judas’ when he switched from ‘acoustic folk’ to ‘electric rock’ is better chronicled.
Dead in the centre of this don’t-walk-on-grass zealotry lies the pedantry of classical music purists. This snobbery applies to both Western and Eastern classical ‘cognoscente’ (pronounced ‘kanya-shen-tee’ if you’re a true ‘cog-na-sentee’). But once in a while, something wickedly fresh comes this way, giving the very classical music a dose of the much-needed, old in-out, in-out.
Last week, I was forwarded a short video clip (bit.ly/3q3HCwa) from the 2012 documentary film, Salut Salon: The Movie. It has four women in Philharmonic black – two violinists, one cellist and one pianist – putting on a startlingly wonderful exposition that starts with the violent crackle of the 3rd movement of Antonio Vivaldi‘s ‘Summer’, the second of the 17th-18th century Italian Baroque master’s The Four Seasons suite of violin concertos.
It is a highly-stylised, faux testosterone-fuelled Mexican stand-off being ‘fought’ by the four musicians from Hamburg going under the collective name of Salut Salon, a ‘chamber music acrobatic ensemble’ since 2002. The four Good, Bad and Beauties perform, in symphonic regalia, both music associated with high gravitas as well as slapstick theatre of Commedia dell’arte heritage.
The four stomp onto the stage with their stilettos amplified to set the battle to follow. Cellist Sonja Lena Schmid draws first blood with the opening notes of Summer’s presto movement. Done, she looks at the audience with a triumphant, crooked smile as if she has just successfully robbed a bank, or rubbed the noses of her fellow Furies in musical mud. It’s then violinist Iris Siegfried’s turn to string ’em up, which she does after tossing her hair back and placing violin on chin as if putting a royal to a guillotine. A hyper-controlled musical melee follows with a cello riposte, the music then suddenly snatched like a Vespa-riding thief in Rome by pianist Anne-Monika von Twardowski… Angelika Bachmann then pours out her violence in violin, and The Four Seasons turns into a veritable Macbethian ‘Three Witches Plus One’ fabulist comic drama. But here’s the thing – all the while with Vivaldi’s scalding music raging on impeccably, even as it now sounds like something that Quentin Tarantino just has to put in his next Kill Bill film. The cello and violins are literally lifted to be pointed towards the audience and fired, but with glorious strings released instead of semiautomatic ack-ack.
At 1:34 of this 3:24 min clip, the piano suddenly cracks a ‘Mission: Impossible’ joke, breaking into the familiar theme tune composed by the Argentine Lalo Schifrin in 1967. Anne-Monika then turns back, with an apologetic smile, to mutter out the familiar notes from the first movement of Mozart’s ‘Piano Sonata No. 16’. The pianist plays ‘backhanded’ and then lies back on her back like a drunk Tina Fey at a louche bar in a Saturday Night Live sketch.
A mean player and show-off himself, Amadeus would have been delighted, as the piano segues into the finale with Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht’s great Weimar romp, ‘Mac the Knife’, from their 1928 ‘play with music,’ The Threepenny Opera.
What the Vivaldi Sisters – Vival-dis? – of Salut Salon do is bring the raw energy of rap and dance battles into the grown-stodgy chambers of chamber music. Wunderbar!