Soupir. Encore lundi...
Tant pis - aujourd'hui c'est la fête nationale française!
Ok, that's quite enough pretence that I actually speak French - on this Tacky Music Monday, let us instead hand over to the late, great Mlle Annie Cordy to provide the (very odd) wake-up call today, shall we?!
Have a good week, dear reader.
Madam Arcati and I concluded our "choral triptych" - we saw Faure's Requiem in March, and Verdi's Requiem in June - at the Cadogan Hall last night, with the biggest and most OTT of the lot, William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast.
Famously, the piece requires a huge vocal ensemble (last night's production had two choirs - Epsom Choral Society and the Barnes Choir), and just about every instrument in the orchestral canon. Indeed, the renowned wit and esteemed conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (who was very sniffy about the work as it was about to receive its premiere) said to the young William Walton: "As you'll never hear the thing again, my boy, why not throw in a couple of brass bands?" So he did.
It's impressive, that's for certain, if not exactly my "cup of tea" either. It's based upon one of those dramatic Old Testament stories full of smiting: the Jews are in exile as slaves in Babylon and the tyrant Belshazzar commits sacrilege by taking their sacred vessels for his guests and concubines to use at a lavish feast, bringing damnation upon his head. It includes the original source of the phrase "the writing's on the wall" - "You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting." Belshazzar's subsequent death and the fall of his empire become the cause of great celebration for the Jews. Noisily.
It is, of course, another phrase from that original story [later repeated in one of the Psalms] that has become even more famous in popular culture - not least in this eternal classic. I couldn't possibly imagine two more polar opposite pieces of music - but hey, that's the way my mind works!
PS
It's France's greatest day of celebration, Le Quatorze Juillet (or Bastille Day)...
...so here's some coq gaulois, for your delectation:
Ooh, la, la!
Across the channel, our leetle Froggy chums are having a party - for today is their biggest day of celebration, Le Quatorze Juillet (or, as it is better known here, Bastille Day!
To mark the occasion, shall we dance..?
It’s a fad that many of us would be hard-pressed to term, but many of us recognize: The baby doll dresses. The twee voices. The false eyelashes, oversized eyewear, excess lipstick. The two-and-a-half minute jingles. Though it was dominated primarily by French, Quebecois, and Spanish popstrels who were easily interchangeable, yé-yé performers’ hallmarks seeped through the ages. Everyone from Baby Spice to Ke$ha have co-opted some element - affected naïveté, hemlines, bubbly hooks - from the yé-yé girls. During the height of its success, Susan Sontag wrote of the movement in her essay Notes On Camp:Without further ado, here is Mademoiselle Gall herself (read my previous tribute to her), not with the "Lollipops" song [check the link above for that], but with another, groovier hit Cet air-là:
"In the last two years, popular music (post rock-’n'-roll, what the French call yé-yé) has been annexed into the camp sensibility."
The movement takes its name from the yells of “Yeah! Yeah!” that peppered the movement’s hits. Yé-yé songs, though explicit by nature, still opted for more subtlety. It was an era when mankind on the whole wasn’t so desensitized to sex that we needed a musician to hammer us over the head with sex and booze. Fans made do with France Gall’s Les sucettes, or “Lollipops” which at once managed to be subtle and profane - clearly an allusion to oral sex.
