Traipsing off to Gozo for a cultural treat is nothing new for us music lovers who grab any opportunity we can get to enrich our minds in what Mary Poppins calls "the most delightful way".
Whether it is opera, put up at great expense but, even more, at great personal sacrifice, or the extensive and varied Victoria Arts Festival, a crossing is well worth it.
It was a pity that a number of Gozo events clashed with the Malta ones, while we had doubles like the Schwarzenberg Trio playing at the Manoel Theatre's Isouard Hall also playing in the festival.
Above all, it's a question of logistics. Unlike St Teresa of Avila who could, they say, bilocate most conveniently, I am unable to pull something like that off too often and I missed many performances I am sure I would have thoroughly enjoyed.
The grand finale of the Victoria Arts Festival takes place a week before the titular feast in the utterly sumptuous Basilica of St George, where not an inch of wall space is to be seen in a superb example of almost Byzantine Horror vacui (literally translated - a fear of empty spaces).
Cherubs waving golden garlands of foliage flit between stern archangels before the bemused eyes of prophets, patriarchs, martyrs, doctors of the Church, popes and cardinals and even a few kings and queens.
To add to the general fantasy, the streets leading to St George's Basilica are all decked out with the most elaborate pavaljuni lights, with even more angels and prophets, martyrs, emperors and empresses and all those members of the heavenly host somehow connected to the ancient cult of St George; the slayer of dragons, the paladin on the white horse rescuing a beleaguered princess in a Christianised version of Perseus and Andromeda.
Of course, Andromeda personifies the Church, so then it all makes theological sense. I just love it, as I love Solomon'sSongof Songs, which Joseph Vella set in an utterly lovely cantata which simply must be recorded and soon.
I have known Vella forever. I know his forte beyond compare is composing for the voice. No other Maltese composer before has ever produced such heavenly vocal music.
He understands its capabilities and has created the loveliest masses and cantatas, not to mention those exquisite madrigals wherein the voices sinuously rise and fall in beautifully intricate lyrical melodic lines.
I just loved soprano Sophie Bevan's interpretation. It was splendiferous, dramatic and yet tender; and the voice itself, magnificent.
The music enhanced the highly charged poetry of this curiously erotic work which has somehow survived purges, pogroms, reformations and counter-reformations, to fascinate even our own sexually jaded palate .
Because of the sexual media bombardment it would, in this day and age, be rather difficult to get too worked up about: "I arose to open for my beloved; and my hands dripped with myrrh; the liquid myrrh from my finger ran over the knobs of the bolt. With my own hands I opened to my love."
Well we all know that besides being all wise, Solomon had great taste in women so he definitely knew what he was on about; ask the Queen of Sheba.
Which, of course, makes it one of the most beautiful passages of the Old Testament dealing with mutual earthly love but, sadly, one that is not often read at weddings. I cannot imagine why.
Like the Songof Songs, Joe Vella's Cantataop42 will survive long after we are dead and gone, for he has reset a jewel that is over 2,000 years old and which is as scintillating and bright as the day it was cut into a new setting which enhances its brilliance.
There is a rumour, or let us call it common knowledge, that the exArchbishop had decreed that nothing but sacred music could be performed in our churches.
I believe it was because of some incident where someone went too far.
I am so relieved that there seems to be no such problem in Gozo, where cello concertos and symphonies are played to highly appreciative audiences in the basilica.
I feel that for the sake of art, the Church and the Ministry of Culture should meet to discuss new clear guidelines as to what should and shouldn't be performed in our churches.
If one cannot perform a Handel organ concerto, a Bach orchestral suite or a Vivaldi concerto because it is not strictly religious, I think it would be taking things to extremes, don't you?
This is why I was delighted to listen to an old favourite so rarely performed in Malta. Mozart's celestial SinfoniaConcertante, with its magical thematic material intertwining as sensually as the Song ofSongs in a love duet between the violin and the viola.
Violinist Dejan Bogdanovich and violist Pierre-Henri Xuereb played it beautifully; however, I felt I was placed too near the orchestra and that there was an echo that somewhat blurred the crispness and crystalline clarity that Mozart requires to be pulled off with aplomb, especially in the tuttipassages.
Vella'sLamentop103was written very soon after the world was plunged into shock after 9/11 changed our lives forever.
The eerie shrillness of the upper register strings wailing out long and baleful notes cut like razorblades and the bitterness and anger was seething beneath a deceptively tranquil adagio that meandered like the proverbial lost soul oblivious to us, the audience, the saints and seraphim on the walls, or even the paladin saint himself.
It was a human version of "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" etched in music.