When Paris’s monumental cathedral – which had sat like a celestial wonder in the centre of Île de la Cité for over 800 years – caught fire in 2019, the world fell into a shocked and reverential silence. At the time, some people criticised this global mourning as crass and misplaced: why were we grieving the loss of a building, they asked, when so much human suffering goes unnoticed? The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra (ABO) doesn’t answer that question directly, but this new work goes a long way to explaining the source and perhaps even the purpose of that grief.
The orchestra has teamed up with playwright and librettist Alana Valentine to create a work that traverses a number of different disciplines, from baroque concert to dramatic monologue via video projection – all orbiting the history and destruction of Notre Dame. The music is largely drawn from centuries of French composition, written for or performed in the cathedral itself; Jean-Philippe Rameau is most represented, although there is a composition from the legendary Hildegard von Bingen, and even a contemporary piece by Hugh Ronzani.
