 |
| Marc Destrubé's violin on Bach's score of Partita No.1 in b minor for violin without bass, BWV 1002 |
The Strawberry Shortcake Concert
This last Saturday I was a St. Anselm’s Anglican Church (has terrific acoustics) one of the best intimate concert venues in our city
I was there with three friends. One of them graphic designer Graham Walker (born in Scotland) was happy to pay a $30 admission that included tea, coffee and various servings of strawberry shortcake where the choice was either whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.
Our real reason for our venture to the church across from the UBC Golf Club was that we were there to listen to Marc Destrubé play his violin for solo works by Johann Joseph Vilsmayr, Heinrich Ignaz Frans van Biber and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Listening to the music on the front row often makes me associate the music being played with events in my own life. There was this one which hit me like a flash.
When I was 8 and living in Buenos Aires, my mother took me to the Lincoln Library run by the United States Information Service, which in actual fact, was then a spy agency. The library was in the same building as the US Embassy and the Filipino Embassy. It was the latter to where my mother went so she left me at the library.
It was there where I picked up a magazine (or book?) called American Heritage. In it were photographs of dead US Civil War Confederate soldiers taken by Timothy O’Sullivan. I looked at the pictures and had two thoughts. One was that the dead men on the battlefield had been alive before they had been killed. And my second thought was that they looked exactly like the men walking outside on Calle Florida. I was not to know until many years later, when I became a photographer, how important those photographs were in perhaps inspiring me to be one.
They were really the first photographs I had ever seen and it provided me with an inkling of something called death.
When I go through my extensive files of people and family I have photographed, knowing that many are dead, when I look at them, I think, “They were alive when I photographed them. That eye contact gives me a glimpse of their soul when they were alive and now that they are dead a memory of who they were.
This thought I then associated with Destrubé playing Bach’s Partita No.1in b minor for violin without bass, BWV 1002. I had a Lincoln Library moment, “Alex, the music you are listening to is music composed by a man who was alive when he jotted down the score on paper.”
It seems that looking at a photograph of my now departed wife Rosemary (she died on 9 December 2020), is really no different from Destrubé playing that Partita No. 1.
I did not tell my friends of my finding as they would have thought I was loony. I also did not tell them of one of the most unusual experiences I ever had. Some years ago I went to a rehearsal of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra led my Destrubé at the The St. James Community Hall on 10th Ave in Kitsilano. Before the concert began I asked Destrubeé if I could listen the music while on my back under the harpsichord. With a smile he said I could.
On a not completely positive note in 2024 and 2023 I went to three concerts at St. Anselms where Destrubé played all six (two per concert) of Bach’s Partitas for unaccompanied violin.
This sort of music is so difficult to play that rarely is it performed in Vancouver. I thought when I left after hearing Partita 5 & 6, “Alex, statistically because you are 82 you will certainly not ever hear them again played live in Vancouver."
I was sort of wrong as that Partita was on the program on Saturday. As an Argentine I am a fan of Jorge Luís Borges. He wrote many poems where he questioned, becausehe was an old and blind man if he would ever read that one book in his library that he had not read or if the mirror in his room had reflected his face for the last time. My plain Borgesian version of that is that I know that my 7-year-old Chevrolet Cruze is the last car I will ever buy.
