J’aime les nuages
Those who know LA are familiar with the schizophrenia of clouds. They come in the morning and disappear midday into the most brilliant sun, especially now that it’s warmer. It’s as if the clouds, like the people who live here, wander in forgetting that it’s a desert.
So how does it tie in with The Tristan Project? Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Debussy’s Nocturnes before the second act of the opera, and the first movement was Nuages (French for clouds). It was immediately clear that Debussy’s clouds were not LA’s clouds. His linger and generate mystery and romance. In fact, I’m told that Paris is under cloud cover for most of the year.
Strangely, this haunting piece was the most effective of the Debussy interludes used to frame the Wagner. It was as graceful and otherworldly as Claire de Lune, except the shimmering pentatonic arpeggios are replaced by shimmering slivers of strings breaking through like blessings of light. Somehow the other Debussy pieces (many of them including choir) seemed so much more earthbound. A friend even remembered Nuages as the piece that sounded sci-fi.
Anything to mitigate the meteorlogical monotony of LA denizenhood.
