Music / Wonderful World, Christian-Pierre La Marca & Itamar Golan. At Snow Concert Hall, July 20. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD

Christian-Pierre La Marca is a highly regarded French cellist, and for this tour working with the very fine Israeli pianist Itamar Golan. 

This was not so much a concert, but a combination of short pieces of music, projected video and text all put together around the theme of the world under threat of climate change.

The music was a combination of some mainstream classical works – Beethoven, Dvorak, Saint-Saens – in whole or in part, along with some more modern pieces. In addition, the program included several arrangements of pop standards such as Moon River and Over the Rainbow (curiously credited to H Harlen!). 

Most of the musical works were quite short, two to three minutes, but with a couple of longer works. Most impressive was Four Cities, a sonata for cello and piano by Turkish composer Fazil Say, the first movement from Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4 and a fiery performance of Astor Piazzolla’s Grand Tango to finish the concert.

Each piece of music was thematically matched to a video compilation by filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand, so Dvorak’s Silent Woods was performed to shifting footage of forests and trees, all gorgeously shot from drones or helicopters. Other video segments focused on endangered species, human activity, the oceans and similar themes, all filmed from above and cleverly edited to fit the length of each piece of music.

Over the years I have been to several concerts that have included projected images, usually seeking to expand the idea of an immersive “multimedia” experience, but they rarely work as hoped. If the images are good (and these certainly were), I am not hearing the music and when concentrating on the music the images fade into the background. 

This is certainly an interesting way to present live music, by two very fine musicians, with the addition of the underlying political/ecological message in the video and text. 

There was perhaps a bit too much pop music amongst the 17 pieces performed and the modern trend to performing excerpts or single movements of longer classical can, maybe, be looked at as a way to draw in new audiences. This was not a concert for classical music purists, but enjoyable nevertheless.