Musical fun with the Versailles Saxophone Quartet

By Gus Kairupan [10 pts ML]

JAKARTA (JP): Four reggae pop stars, dreadlocks hanging down from under caps of screaming colors, high on reefers (i.e. cigarettes laced with marijuana), reeling all over the stage ...

Four Russians shivering with cold, heads wrapped in thick earmuffs, warm gloves pulled over hands, one takes out a bottle of vodka and passes it around, which also sets them reeling all over the stage ... Put these together and you come up with four Frenchmen who are known as the Quatuor de Saxophones de Versailles, the Versailles Saxophone Quartet.

The group began playing together in 1983 and has already stunned audiences in their own country and abroad, not to mention the many appearances on radio and television broadcasts.

Versailles, of course, evokes visions of towering powdered wigs, mesdames Maintenon and Pompadour who were very sweet to a couple of kings named Louis, lavish soirees in the Hall of Mirrors with everyone dancing cheek to cheek to the gentle strains of a minuet or gyrating uncontrollably to the rhythm of a wild gavotte.

Not to fear. That's not what Guy Rebreyend (alto sax), Jean- Marc Pongy (soprano sax), Michel Oberli (tenor idem) and Dany Aubert (baritone ditto), who performed here on Wednesday, are all about.

There were no Maintenons or Pompadours, no kings called Louis, and the venue wasn't the Hall of Mirrors but the Hotel Le Meridien.

However, the music of that time was very much present but in a way the Versailles court circles would not have thought possible and would never have heard anyway.

After all, the saxophone, born about 150 years ago, is a mere babe when compared to the violin, say, or the harpsichord.

But if the Versailles folks had never heard the swinging ways of the quartet named after that magnificent palace, neither had the Wednesday audience in Jakarta.

It's probably music you could sing to or even dance to, but most of all, it was music that made everyone present shriek with laughter during the entire performance that combined music, comedy sketches, mime, slapstick and choreography.

Fleas

Of course there was a very serious, even tragic, number, i.e. the death of circus performers.

Not that it had anything to do with clowns, trapeze artists or lion tamers, because it was a flea circus and the musical number for it was called Blues, a composition by the quartet itself with a little help from Chopin.

The program listed such deadly serious composers as Nino Rota, Handel, Ravel and five others. Unlisted were -- as far as I was able to recognize -- Tchaikovsky, Johann Strauss, Borodin, Bizet, Mozart, Richard Strauss, Monti and Scott Joplin, all woven into a crazy quilt of a musical parody which, I'm sure, would have amused the composers just as much as it did the audience.

Take Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, an educational composition that introduces the various instruments in an orchestra.

The quartet's version was called Peter, the Wolf... and Others, the "others" including Snow White.

Madcap fun it was. But don't think that the music suffered from the antics. The range of colors they produced was incredible, to say nothing of the technique.

But then, all four are seasoned musicians who have been through rigorous educational disciplines which concluded with them receiving the Superior Diploma of Concert Artists from the Ecole Normale de la Musique in Paris, and an award called Presence de la Musique from no less than the august Yehudi Menuhin Foundation.

They leapt about, lied down, pushed each other from the stage, but through it all they kept on playing and did not miss a single note, even when Jean-Marc Pongy blew his saxophone while Guy Rebreyend did the fingering.

All this was done for more than two hours without interruption or an intermission, except for an occasional stage exit to put on reggae caps or ear muffs or set up the paraphernalia for the flea circus.

Of course the message of the quartet was that you needn't be serious about music all the time, even if it's serious music. The Versailles Quartet's speciality may be poking fun at the works of well-known composers, but that shouldn't be taken as belittling the art of music.

Anyway, there are enough composers (Mozart springs to mind) who readily parodied their own works or wrote music strictly for laughs like Rossini's duet for two cats, the text of which contains only one word: meow.

Whether it is 17th century baroque, 18th century classical, 19th century romantic, or 20th century jazz, the Quatuor de Saxophones de Versailles handles it all with aplomb and finesse, and mixes the lot in a way that makes everyone leave with a broad grin on the face.

Music in caricature ... that's what it is.

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