Between the Lightning Bolts

Last Night was both weird and also wonderful. We were supposed to have been (well if I had been a bit quicker and on the ball we would have been) in the Auditorium of the Gulbenkian Museum for Bach’s St John Passion played by the Amsterdam Baroque orchestra and choir. But by the time I had noticed it was on, the tickets were already sold out. So instead we were at home, observing he impending storm from our ninth floor window. Rolling up the River Tejo from the direction of Palmela and the Arrabida, occasional flashes lit the night sky, along with rumbles of thunder, and then the rain came, hammering down on the balcony.

We slept with the window open, and smelt the freshness of the night air. It had been dry for several weeks, and the farmland of the Alentejo was beginning to show its thirst for water. Great drops of rain fell from the heavens and flashes of lightning illuminated the room. Trawling randomly through youtube, I discovered a version of the Passion according to St John not by J S Bach, and that I had not heard before. It’s by Arvo Pärt, a 20th Century Estonian composer (he’s still alive, so I suppose he’s also 21st Century) whose minimalist approach to sound and music I have grown to appreciate through his works “Spiegel im Spiegel” and “Tabula Rasa” in particular (the latter piece making me feel like I’m swinging on a garden gate with a rusty hinge on a hot day in high summer).

The whole “St John” piece lasts 70 minutes (amazingly available for free to listen to in it's entirety in 8 youtube videos) and is based solely on the Latin text of the Gospel of John Chapters 18 and 19, ending with a resounding “Consumado est!” “It is finished”. I felt drained listening to it through the early hours of the morning, and thus entering into Easter Week, with a strong sense of the wonder of this moment of ultimate sacrifice and eventual salvation for us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YhFmIZi978&feature=related

PS I stood for several minutes on our balcony in an effort to get a proper photo of the lightning strikes, but to no avail, so the image is unashamedly someone else's!