Search - Esther Lamandier :: Music of the Bible Revealed 1

A personal interpretation of a seminal decipherment

John Wheeler | King David's Harp, Inc., Houston, TX. USA | 08/21/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This recording (produced in 1992) is the first of Esther Lamandier's two recordings of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura's work (compare "The Music of the Bible Revealed", book and recording, also sold on Amazon.com), and the second in her series of recordings of early sacred chants. (The first, produced in 1989, was "Chants chrétiens araméens", Alienor CD AL 1034: a recording of early Aramaic Christian chants.) Mme. Lamandier, a Jewish woman of striking features and ethereal voice, is well-known in France as a performer of early music.My review of Haïk-Vantoura's book especially summarizes her thesis. In effect, she used the Hebrew verbal syntax as the "Rosetta Stone" necessary to decipher the original musical meaning of the accents (=te`amim=) of the Hebrew Masoretic Text, deriving the first and only complete explanation of all their features and functions. What is the more striking is that the melodies that result appear to be so wedded to the words they support that they had to have been created by the same authors and transmitted together. Thus Haïk-Vantoura (now deceased) believed that she had rediscovered the long-lost music of the Temple and of the biblical authors.This recording is the second longest among the eight recordings in Haik-Vantoura's oevure, with no less than 26 tracks -- 25 in the cassette version, which lacks Psalm 138. (Contrary to what the title might indicate, not all the Psalms featured are "of David"; some Psalms of Moses, Asaph, and the Sons of Korah, as well as a number of anonymous Psalms, are featured as well.) Mme. Lamandier accompanies herself with her Gothic harp in performance. The quality of the recording itself is rather mixed; one senses at times that the artist imposes her own sensibilities in tempo, rhythm and accompaniment on the music. On the other hand, many performances are touching (such as that of Psalm 104) or even brilliant (such as that of Psalm 97). The intervals and triads that return from the walls of the Abbey of Mont St. Michel are beautiful and even awe-inspiring as well.If you're looking for music that has the exotic flavor of traditional Arabo-Persian =maqamat= or the Oriental Jewish chants that have borrowed from them, you won't find it here. What you'll find is evidence that long before the Christian era, people understood and used functional tonality based on diatonic-chromatic scales and modes, and that in a way not recovered in the West until the time of Monteverdi and his peers."