Music to watch the wonderful world pass by

Music / Wonderful World, Christian-Pierre La Marca & Itamar Golan. At Snow Concert Hall, July 20. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD

Christian-Pierre La Marca is a highly respected French cellist and for this tour he collaborated with the excellent Israeli pianist Itamar Golan.

This was not so much a concert, but a combination of short pieces of music, projected video and text, all around the theme ‘the world is threatened by climate change’.

The music was a combination of some mainstream classical works – Beethoven, Dvorak, Saint-Saens – in whole or in part, along with some more modern pieces. In addition, the program included several arrangements of pop standards such as Moon River and Over the Rainbow (oddly enough credited to H Harlen!).

Most of the pieces were quite short, two to three minutes, but with a few longer pieces. The most impressive was Four Cities, a sonata for cello and piano by Turkish composer Fazil Say, the first movement of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4, and a fiery performance of Astor Piazzolla’s Grand Tango to close the concert.

Each piece of music was thematically linked to a video compilation by filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand, so Dvorak’s Silent Woods was performed over moving images of forests and trees, all beautifully shot from drones or helicopters. Other video segments focused on endangered species, human activity, the oceans and similar themes, all filmed from above and cleverly edited to fit the length of each piece of music.

Over the years I have been to several concerts where projected images were featured, usually to expand the idea of ​​an immersive ‘multimedia’ experience, but rarely have they worked as hoped. When the images are good (and they certainly were), I can’t hear the music, and when I concentrate on the music, the images fade into the background.

This is certainly an interesting way to present live music from two excellent musicians, adding the underlying political/environmental message in the video and lyrics.

There was perhaps a little too much pop music among the 17 pieces performed, and the modern trend of performing fragments or single movements of longer classical music can perhaps be seen as a way to attract new audiences. This was not a concert for classical music purists, but enjoyable nonetheless.