Marcel Mihaloviči (1898-198… )
Meditation
A very expressive piece for solo violin, probably one of his last works.
Don't let be abused by the terme "contemporary", The prejudices damage the mental health !
This being said, one can love it or not, it's like Indian cooking, some in France can't support the hot piments, and the simple fact of shaking the closed bottle over the stew puts their throat on fire…
It's after all only a question of habit since the Indians don't mind it at all… I must admit that I do feel the same, and I don't mind at all those red piments in vinegar sold in supermarkets, just like this, out of the jar, as appetizers to wake up the papillaes (exept if after this, would come some classical "grande cuisine" menu, in which case one needs all the papillaes to be in a state of meditation.)…
So, since we are now talking about meditation, lets come back to this one, which is great violin writing, directly inherited from Ysaÿe…
Some by the way, may in the opposite reproach to him its lack of "avant-gardism" (forgetting that he was born in 1898 and was a pupil of d'Indy, been thus just a year younger than Poulenc, and quite older than Britten or Chostakovitch)… the sort of criticism that I don't take easily since it is only a question of fashion.
Should someone today write a symphony in the style of Brahms or Mozart, well fine, provided that he would do it with the same genius as the one or the other, what matters after all if it had been written in 1880 or 2000 or in the Middle-Ages ; What's important is the content.
As it had been very poetically said by Marie-Claude Cauchy in one of the poems included in this big musical tale for little kids of which she wrote the text and I wrote the music:
Similar or not similar,
With or without ears,
Very small or very big,
Black, yellow, green, or white,
What's important,
It's to be beautiful inside.
And so, here it's beautiful inside.