The poisonous spiders really got something started. They gave rise to a musical form– although Wikipedia tells me that it actually existed among the early Greeks. Nevertheless, the form is more usually associated with spider bite curative music and dance in Southern Italy, whence the spider’s and the form’s names – tarantula and tarantella.
The tarantella is still to this day a very popular folk style, but there is a wealth of compositions from the 16th and 17th centuries, and composers of the stature of Schubert and Liszt have made liberal use of the form and introduced tarantella movements in their music.
I am definitely not a tarantella conoscente, so I will not venture any further into the subject, the history of which is easy to find online. The reason I am writing about it today is that last evening I attended a concert of the ensemble L’Arpeggiata, lead by theorbist Christina Pluhar. I got tickets essentially to please Oboe, whom I remembered to have really liked a recording by the group, including a lively song called Antidotum Tarantulae which was quite entertaining.
We decided to attend the pre-concert interview, a very laudable New York tradition, but as it turns out there were very few people there and the ones who chose not to attend didn’t miss anything. It was a tame little talk about the origins of the tarantella, about early 17th century music and about the group itself. The interviewer was not very inspired and neither was the interviewee who completely failed to infuse her explanations with any enthusiasm. I’m sure she is full of it, but it just stopped short at the first row of the auditorium, as did her voice. But then, she plays the lute and the theorbo, she does not sing.
The concert started punctually, to a sold-out house. True, the group has been getting rave reviews all over the world, and I’m probably the only idiot not to share the general tarantella hysteria. This audience was just as excited as any, and the concert ended with a standing ovation, many curtain calls and three encores.
And I just sat there wondering what all the fuss was about. I will tell you what I saw, and maybe someone will tell me what I failed to.
First of all, the setting and costumes are messy. Instruments scattered on the stage, musicians dressed rather ordinarily or frankly in poor taste. I like a bit of glamour and drama in a live performance. OK, purists will say it is all about the music, but the whole point of going to a live concert is to witness music being made afresh, and it is such a festive occasion that the performers should be in proper attire. So this group could make an effort on the visual aspects of their performance.
Next, the music is tremendously repetitive and the instruments mainly fall into that category which has me wonder why anyone should want to invest a lifetime in playing one of them. I know I would get massacred by any early music lover who read this, but luckily, very few people do and I’m sure no serious music lover will be caught dead reading this gibberish. So, as I was saying, the instruments are not very thrilling. Yes, there is a baroque violin, but give me the Freiburg Chamber Orchestra or the Orchestre Romantique et Révolutionnaire any time! The guitar and lute and theorbo and cornetto and psaltery are just very thin sounded and rather boring. There was a bass too, but played in such a subdued manner that it did not shake up the act either. I know that it sounds terribly arrogant and stupid to put down all these virtuosi, but their only fault is actually to have chosen the wrong instrument. This said, they were all excellent musicians and I beg to be forgiven for being so flippant.
But this was not only about music. There was a dancer as well, doing, yes… the tarantella. But this looked nothing like the folksy tarantella one is used to seeing, with the women in costumes with dainty aprons , espadrilles and bows in their hair, and men, well, the men don’t usually look all that great in their cropped tights and pompommed bonnets. Oboe likes to point out that the origins of most folk dancing is related to the fact that in the countryside, there are usually quite a lot of rampant insects, mainly cockroaches, and that people go around stomping on them, which gave rise to the normal stomping and tapping inevitable in folk dances.
So back to the Arpeggiata tarantella. This was performed by a lithe, springy and ultra flexible lady, also very poorly dressed down to her bare feet, who went through all sorts of intricate acrobatic steps, along with the inescapable thump-thump-thump… again, I apologize for my stupidity, but I found it ridiculous and unbearably boring.
Why baroque and contemporary? Because, believe it or not, there are people who still compose for the genre, including the singer (yes, there was one too), who gave us samples of her modern (?) output .
You are quite right, I should have stayed home. And, by the way, Oboe didn’t enjoy it either – he needed an antidote for the Antidotum Tarantulae.