The comparativist

M ost artists are performers. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some of the best artists perform their craft. A few artists, though, are interpreters . Interpreters give a normative twist to the performative and, by kicking the foundations of their craft, give it a revitalising jolt. João Luís is an interpreter. If you read his programme of today, you’d see he signs his interventions as ‘arrangements’, which is formally truthful, but doesn’t do justice to his role: he has intervened with the composition. He has taken it from a place where it was a Debussy, a Ravel, a Saint-Saëns, and re interpreted them into a limbo where they are neither wholly theirs nor entirely his ; they belong, if one is concerned with authorship, to genius, to the exceptional insight that surpasses last names, as it belongs to the ether. To such genius about one hundred musical enthusiasts were privy earlier today in Christ Church, where Mr. Luís played the saxophone alongside a superbly talented Ms. Madel...