The opening motive in the piano tentatively weaves, and then, her voice -- enticing as any dream-drenched siren call -- to tell how
There is nothing
more desirable
In the world than the dream.
Sung in the soft consonants and lilting rhythms of French, the song intoxicates me with "the magic stillness" sleep promises. I sit here, listening, and I marvel at how Rachmaninov can cultivate a feeling of endlessness when, all the while, the piano drifts in currents of 32nd notes. It's the lack of traditional harmonic progression, I guess. The pianist plays around a few notes, accompanied by simple chords in the LH; the soprano sings a kind of texted vocalise, describing sleep's "bottomless eyes." She searches for a harmonic footing, but doesn't quite reach that place of rest. The piano, in muted octaves, begins to add triple to its duples, then 16ths and a crescendo of arppegiations and turns -- almost like some graceful bird rising, wings taking flight.
She finally finds a melody, dark and reverent and powerful. Rising up for six notes, and then descending, yet to rise and fall again. She reaches, sings the scale up to its soft, sky-filled xenith. Yearning, yearning for being "as light as the shadow of midnight," the piano echoing in countermelodies beneath. I know that yearning (my love affair with the music of Rachmaninov).
It's unfathomable
how it carries them,
and where and on what;
She finally settles into a transcendent musical line, ends the last measures of her phrase just short of the tonic note. The final 30 seconds of the song close with a lovely piano solo, diaphanous as angels' wings.
It's an amazingly fulfilling song. Desire, stillness, dreaminess, longing, homesickness and finding a place of rest -- such a symphonic living out of emotion with just one pianist and one soprano.
God is worshipped with music of this sort.
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