After a slow start, the classical music year is back to top speed. Daniel Barenboim has arrived with the Berlin Staatskapelle; the New York Phil, armed with their secret weapon, is hot on their tales. Not the best moment, perhaps, for a local period instrument orchestra - whose name only the most devoted of its devotees bother to pronounce in full - to begin yet another Beethoven symphony cycle. But on the strength of the opening concert under Vladimir Jurowski, I can safely say that far from being “just another” Beethoven cycle, this series will prove to be unmissable.
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment often gives the impression of not really needing their conductor. Most of their repertoire, in fact, predates the existence of virtuoso professional conductors. But Jurowski’s (therefore highly inauthentic) style of micro-conducting – shaping every phrase, jumping on every lead – evidently suits them very nicely indeed. Beginning with the 4th symphony, stretching the slow introduction to near-breaking point, they pounced on the Allegro vivace with the kind of brazen diversity of tone that non-period bands can only dream of. From the long melodies of the second movement, perfectly shaped by the strings despite the absence of vibrato, to the fleet cross rhythms and stabbing motions of the third – which had Jurowksi looking like something out of The Matrix, dodging maelstroms of bullets from all directions – the audience had trouble holding on to their seats.
The seventh symphony, which followed, was no different. A triumphant character is of course built in to this piece, with its mishmash of military and peasant styles. But even here the orchestra found shapes and sounds which, together with the immaculate ensemble and a sense of dynamism not far short of inflammatory, restored to this well-loved work the raw effervescence which protracted bouts of Karajanitis led
many to assume had died long ago. But no: it is very much alive, and kicking.
Monday, 1 February 2010
Thursday, 28 January 2010
We're not out of the woods, yet
Review of Hans Werner Henze's Phaedra and the Henze 'Total Immersion' Day at the Barbican, 16-17 January. From the TLS.
The myths of ancient Greece still command our artistic attention. Part of the attraction comes from their archetypal status; they offer us proximity to the sacred sphere, yet are free of the kitsch that clings to modern religious art. That at least seems to be the view of the eighty-three-year-old composer Hans Werne Henze, who shares his long-standing interest in Greek myth with everyone else who has tried composing and writing opera. The genre was, after all, born in an attempt to restore what was believed to be the lost power of Athenian tragedy. One senses in Henze, however, a concern less with the perfected union of music and poetry than with the fluidity of borders between the mortal and immortal realms. Greek myths represent man as buffeted by the desires of shallow and self-serving deities, but they also show mortals partaking in divinity, with the capacity to change the world and to recalibrate its relationship with the heavens.
This interest is particularly evident in Henze’s latest opera. Phaedra, the tormented and venal wife of Theseus, has been the subject of surprisingly few operatic treatments, although Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie of 1733 (adapted from Racine rather than from Euripides) is one notable forebear. But Henze’s version, which concerns itself with the story’s philosophical implications, is quite unlike anyone else’s. Its strange events and transformations are about the nature of human identity itself: specifically, the spark of spirit that turns flesh into person, matter into mind.
The first act is orthodox enough, though sparing as far as the action is concerned: Hippolytus spurns Phaedra’s advances in disgust, and Phaedra then lies to Theseus (supposedly resident in Hades), telling him that his son has tried to rape her; the result is the son’s death and the mother’s suicide, a kind of inverted liebestod to which Aphrodite provides a Freudian preface: “Nicht allein die Liebe führt Fleisch und Fleisch zusammmen: Habt Geduld mit dem Tod (Not only love may unite flesh with flesh: have patience with death)”. In the second act, set on the shores of Lake Nemi (where Henze has lived since 1966), it emerges that Hippolytus’ body has been rescued by Artemis, stitched back together and placed in a cage. Phaedra, now a shade in the form of a bird, mocks him as she might a pet but still tries to lure him into underworldly communion: “Dein Körper und mein Schatten suchen sich (Your body and my shade seek each other)”. Finally, after an earthquake, Hippolytus is resurrected a second time, this time in bliss as the King of the Forest. Henze’s enquiry into the mutable nature of identity concentrates on Hippolytus – but Phaedra’s is still the title role, because she is the psychological catalyst for her stepson’s metamorphoses.
Henze fell ill while working on the opera in 2005, falling into a coma that lasted nearly two months. Friends and colleagues assumed he would die, but one day he got up and, almost without delay, went back to work, completing the opera in time for its premiere in Berlin in 2007. Was this, in some way, Henze’s own field-trip to the underworld? Certainly the circumstances of the composer’s illness and the various stages of reincarcation and apotheosis undergone by the opera’s main character appear to be entwined. Musically, though, Henze is his usual mercurial self, sweeping through various twentieth-century musical idioms as if contemporary musical history were a kind of theatrical clothes rack or effects box. The opening is a representation of the labyrinth from the point of view of Hippolytus, Phaedra, Aphrodite and Artemis (the huntress’s role here given to the countertenor Axel Köhler); together they sing of the mystery that binds them together. A nagging rhythm from the timpani and subtly devised electro-acoustic track rise gradually to form a snaking melody, charming the rest of the orchestra. Phaedra, sung by the Swiss mezzo Maria Riccarda Wesseling, who created the role in Berlin, has the stature of a Straussian heroine, her taut lyricism at once a sign of her psychological power over others and her deep self-loathing. It’s a vocal style that rather swamps the Stravinskian profile of the other major characters, but creates a truly tantalising tension with Hippolytus, sung with measured intensity by John Mark Ainsley (also in Berlin). The orchestral score, distributed among a mere twenty-three players from Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, guided clearly and unfussily by Michael Boder, is busy, colourful, always precise in its intended musical and dramatic effect. Driven by clear but fluid rhythmic structures, every so often erupting in an Expressionist frenzy, the music has moments of great tenderness, and moments of orchestral ecstasy, such as the Mahlerian whirl that launches Hippolytus on the sylvan chapter of his career. The prerecorded track, put together by Henze’s assistant Francesco Antonioni, adds an extra dimension to the transition scenes. The earthquake is no simple metallic rumbling, but a complex, dynamic episode which envelops the listener with seductive force.
The communicative fluency that has won Henze many friends in opera houses around the world has often been viewed with suspicion in other circles. Although one of the first composers in Germany to embrace serialism after the war, Henze soon found himself out of step with the militant Modernism of the Darmstadt summer schools, which he attended from 1946. Schoenberg, it should be remembered, saw his twelve-tone method not as a purge, but as a means of preserving some kind of authentic continuity with musical history; likewise, Henze never shared Stockhausen’s, or Boulez’s, view of “total” serialism as a clean and necessary break with a contaminated past. Henze’s position may have had something to do with his intense dislike of being told what to think (a souvenir, perhaps, of his father’s Nazi proselytizing); it is at any rate striking that his first successful twelve-tone piece – Apollo et Hyazinthus, for harpsichord and eight instruments – followed an entirely extra-musical schema. Darmstadt never forgave him. Even today, there are many who view Henze as a kind of traitor, someone who turned down the chance to effect a deep cultural cleansing in music in favour of more immediate political and allegorical gains. But one of the advantages to listening in the twenty-first, as opposed to the twentieth, century is that these old antagonisms have largely dispersed. Our ears are less self-consciously attuned to the exaggerated demands of history; we are free simply to listen to music that rewards attention.
Themes of revolution and renewal in fact run through most of Henze’s works, from The Raft of the Medusa (1968), dedicated to the memory of Che Guevara, to Phaedra, in which the harmony between mind and body is restablished by violence. His most overtly political piece, Voices (1973), was given a superbly committed performance by the Guildhall New Music Ensemble (conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth) as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s “Total Immersion” day of concerts. It’s a ninety-minute setting of poems chosen by the composer to reflect the spirit of post-Vietnam dissent, in which popular genres co-exist with a restrained classicism, and Heine’s teenage soldier shares the stage with Brecht’s showgirl, offloading her mundane inner thoughts (“It’s nearly 12. I’m going to miss my bus”) to a rather caustic cabaret. The overt sarcasm of Voices has little in common with the more generalized irony of leftist sensibilities today, which may be why the Barbican audience found it somewhat difficult to take seriously.
Henze’s recent essays in musical politics are more digestible. Fraternité, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Kurt Masur as one of their “messages for the millenium”, and subtitled “aria per orchestra”, is less a song than an attempt to forge the musical conditions in which a song of hope might be sung. From the glittering harp oscillations of the opening, the piece unfolds as a kind of breathless relay of melodic fragments which appear to point collectively towards some blissful cadence without ever quite reaching it. A blistering performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra was one of the highlights of the evening concert superbly conducted by Oliver Knussen. We heard, too, an interesting selection of solo piano works – including the humorous Mozartian fantasy Cherubino (1980–81), played by Huw Watkins – as well as the fourth symphony, an interesting choice for the way it foreshadows, though with vastly different orchestral forces, the music of Phaedra. The concert was also the occasion for the UK premiere of Elogium musicum, Henze’s requiem for his lover of forty years, Fausto Moroni, who died unexpectedly in 2007.The text is a quartet of newly commissioned poems in Latin by Franco Serpa. The result, for choir and orchestra but without soloists, is a restrained work in which extremes of emotion are avoided. The choral setting is reminiscent of the sacred cantata style, allowing the audience – which included the composer – to conjure their own private images of loss. In the final Adagio, the ritual of mourning is absorbed with unforced grace by the benevolent movements of the earth.
The myths of ancient Greece still command our artistic attention. Part of the attraction comes from their archetypal status; they offer us proximity to the sacred sphere, yet are free of the kitsch that clings to modern religious art. That at least seems to be the view of the eighty-three-year-old composer Hans Werne Henze, who shares his long-standing interest in Greek myth with everyone else who has tried composing and writing opera. The genre was, after all, born in an attempt to restore what was believed to be the lost power of Athenian tragedy. One senses in Henze, however, a concern less with the perfected union of music and poetry than with the fluidity of borders between the mortal and immortal realms. Greek myths represent man as buffeted by the desires of shallow and self-serving deities, but they also show mortals partaking in divinity, with the capacity to change the world and to recalibrate its relationship with the heavens.
This interest is particularly evident in Henze’s latest opera. Phaedra, the tormented and venal wife of Theseus, has been the subject of surprisingly few operatic treatments, although Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie of 1733 (adapted from Racine rather than from Euripides) is one notable forebear. But Henze’s version, which concerns itself with the story’s philosophical implications, is quite unlike anyone else’s. Its strange events and transformations are about the nature of human identity itself: specifically, the spark of spirit that turns flesh into person, matter into mind.
The first act is orthodox enough, though sparing as far as the action is concerned: Hippolytus spurns Phaedra’s advances in disgust, and Phaedra then lies to Theseus (supposedly resident in Hades), telling him that his son has tried to rape her; the result is the son’s death and the mother’s suicide, a kind of inverted liebestod to which Aphrodite provides a Freudian preface: “Nicht allein die Liebe führt Fleisch und Fleisch zusammmen: Habt Geduld mit dem Tod (Not only love may unite flesh with flesh: have patience with death)”. In the second act, set on the shores of Lake Nemi (where Henze has lived since 1966), it emerges that Hippolytus’ body has been rescued by Artemis, stitched back together and placed in a cage. Phaedra, now a shade in the form of a bird, mocks him as she might a pet but still tries to lure him into underworldly communion: “Dein Körper und mein Schatten suchen sich (Your body and my shade seek each other)”. Finally, after an earthquake, Hippolytus is resurrected a second time, this time in bliss as the King of the Forest. Henze’s enquiry into the mutable nature of identity concentrates on Hippolytus – but Phaedra’s is still the title role, because she is the psychological catalyst for her stepson’s metamorphoses.
Henze fell ill while working on the opera in 2005, falling into a coma that lasted nearly two months. Friends and colleagues assumed he would die, but one day he got up and, almost without delay, went back to work, completing the opera in time for its premiere in Berlin in 2007. Was this, in some way, Henze’s own field-trip to the underworld? Certainly the circumstances of the composer’s illness and the various stages of reincarcation and apotheosis undergone by the opera’s main character appear to be entwined. Musically, though, Henze is his usual mercurial self, sweeping through various twentieth-century musical idioms as if contemporary musical history were a kind of theatrical clothes rack or effects box. The opening is a representation of the labyrinth from the point of view of Hippolytus, Phaedra, Aphrodite and Artemis (the huntress’s role here given to the countertenor Axel Köhler); together they sing of the mystery that binds them together. A nagging rhythm from the timpani and subtly devised electro-acoustic track rise gradually to form a snaking melody, charming the rest of the orchestra. Phaedra, sung by the Swiss mezzo Maria Riccarda Wesseling, who created the role in Berlin, has the stature of a Straussian heroine, her taut lyricism at once a sign of her psychological power over others and her deep self-loathing. It’s a vocal style that rather swamps the Stravinskian profile of the other major characters, but creates a truly tantalising tension with Hippolytus, sung with measured intensity by John Mark Ainsley (also in Berlin). The orchestral score, distributed among a mere twenty-three players from Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, guided clearly and unfussily by Michael Boder, is busy, colourful, always precise in its intended musical and dramatic effect. Driven by clear but fluid rhythmic structures, every so often erupting in an Expressionist frenzy, the music has moments of great tenderness, and moments of orchestral ecstasy, such as the Mahlerian whirl that launches Hippolytus on the sylvan chapter of his career. The prerecorded track, put together by Henze’s assistant Francesco Antonioni, adds an extra dimension to the transition scenes. The earthquake is no simple metallic rumbling, but a complex, dynamic episode which envelops the listener with seductive force.
The communicative fluency that has won Henze many friends in opera houses around the world has often been viewed with suspicion in other circles. Although one of the first composers in Germany to embrace serialism after the war, Henze soon found himself out of step with the militant Modernism of the Darmstadt summer schools, which he attended from 1946. Schoenberg, it should be remembered, saw his twelve-tone method not as a purge, but as a means of preserving some kind of authentic continuity with musical history; likewise, Henze never shared Stockhausen’s, or Boulez’s, view of “total” serialism as a clean and necessary break with a contaminated past. Henze’s position may have had something to do with his intense dislike of being told what to think (a souvenir, perhaps, of his father’s Nazi proselytizing); it is at any rate striking that his first successful twelve-tone piece – Apollo et Hyazinthus, for harpsichord and eight instruments – followed an entirely extra-musical schema. Darmstadt never forgave him. Even today, there are many who view Henze as a kind of traitor, someone who turned down the chance to effect a deep cultural cleansing in music in favour of more immediate political and allegorical gains. But one of the advantages to listening in the twenty-first, as opposed to the twentieth, century is that these old antagonisms have largely dispersed. Our ears are less self-consciously attuned to the exaggerated demands of history; we are free simply to listen to music that rewards attention.
Themes of revolution and renewal in fact run through most of Henze’s works, from The Raft of the Medusa (1968), dedicated to the memory of Che Guevara, to Phaedra, in which the harmony between mind and body is restablished by violence. His most overtly political piece, Voices (1973), was given a superbly committed performance by the Guildhall New Music Ensemble (conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth) as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s “Total Immersion” day of concerts. It’s a ninety-minute setting of poems chosen by the composer to reflect the spirit of post-Vietnam dissent, in which popular genres co-exist with a restrained classicism, and Heine’s teenage soldier shares the stage with Brecht’s showgirl, offloading her mundane inner thoughts (“It’s nearly 12. I’m going to miss my bus”) to a rather caustic cabaret. The overt sarcasm of Voices has little in common with the more generalized irony of leftist sensibilities today, which may be why the Barbican audience found it somewhat difficult to take seriously.
Henze’s recent essays in musical politics are more digestible. Fraternité, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Kurt Masur as one of their “messages for the millenium”, and subtitled “aria per orchestra”, is less a song than an attempt to forge the musical conditions in which a song of hope might be sung. From the glittering harp oscillations of the opening, the piece unfolds as a kind of breathless relay of melodic fragments which appear to point collectively towards some blissful cadence without ever quite reaching it. A blistering performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra was one of the highlights of the evening concert superbly conducted by Oliver Knussen. We heard, too, an interesting selection of solo piano works – including the humorous Mozartian fantasy Cherubino (1980–81), played by Huw Watkins – as well as the fourth symphony, an interesting choice for the way it foreshadows, though with vastly different orchestral forces, the music of Phaedra. The concert was also the occasion for the UK premiere of Elogium musicum, Henze’s requiem for his lover of forty years, Fausto Moroni, who died unexpectedly in 2007.The text is a quartet of newly commissioned poems in Latin by Franco Serpa. The result, for choir and orchestra but without soloists, is a restrained work in which extremes of emotion are avoided. The choral setting is reminiscent of the sacred cantata style, allowing the audience – which included the composer – to conjure their own private images of loss. In the final Adagio, the ritual of mourning is absorbed with unforced grace by the benevolent movements of the earth.
Labels:
classical music,
opera
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Faust/Stirling/Hewitt
I've never met anyone who has heard Brahms' Horn Trio and not loved it. In many ways it is a quirky piece: the first movement follows a rather archaic scheme associated with baroque church music, and the seldom-revisited combination of instruments is fraught with problems. But Brahms managed to get everything just right, balancing the mixture of fluid melancholy and bucolic delight with exquisite skill. A good performance leaves one with the kind of all-encompassing satisfaction more readily associated with a long, excellent lunch.
The nicely judged performance provided by this mouthwatering lineup of Angela Hewitt, Isabelle Faust and Stephen Stirling was appetising enough, but my satisfaction was undermined by the music-making that preceded it. The combination of Faust and Hewitt suggested something really special would emerge from Schumann's first and Brahms' third violin sonatas, but in both cases the result was, if not underwhelming, some way short of whelming.
This was at least understandable in the Schumann, a late work that looks forward to Fauré and Franck and backward to Haydn and Mozart, but which demands exceptional lightness of touch. But for the much less evasive Brahms piece, one would have expected Hewitt and Faust to be in their element. But in both cases, an over-studied approach led to a diffusion of energy and a confusing shapelessness of line. There were great moments in the Brahms, but they remained isolated.
Stirling's arrival for Schumann's Adagio and Allegro for horn and piano brightened the mood, but he, too, didn't really get himself fully together until the Brahms. This, all told, received a magnificent outing, wonderful partnerships emerging between the players as Brahms's lilting melodies wafted in and out of Hewitt's gleaming Fazioli.
The nicely judged performance provided by this mouthwatering lineup of Angela Hewitt, Isabelle Faust and Stephen Stirling was appetising enough, but my satisfaction was undermined by the music-making that preceded it. The combination of Faust and Hewitt suggested something really special would emerge from Schumann's first and Brahms' third violin sonatas, but in both cases the result was, if not underwhelming, some way short of whelming.
This was at least understandable in the Schumann, a late work that looks forward to Fauré and Franck and backward to Haydn and Mozart, but which demands exceptional lightness of touch. But for the much less evasive Brahms piece, one would have expected Hewitt and Faust to be in their element. But in both cases, an over-studied approach led to a diffusion of energy and a confusing shapelessness of line. There were great moments in the Brahms, but they remained isolated.
Stirling's arrival for Schumann's Adagio and Allegro for horn and piano brightened the mood, but he, too, didn't really get himself fully together until the Brahms. This, all told, received a magnificent outing, wonderful partnerships emerging between the players as Brahms's lilting melodies wafted in and out of Hewitt's gleaming Fazioli.
Labels:
classical music
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Daniel Hope and Friends
Billed as a "ba-rock" concert, this spin-off concert from Daniel Hope's latest Deutsche Grammophon album brought the trappings of an informal gig – standing only in the Royal Albert Hall's Elgar Room, chatting, and texting allowed, if not encouraged – to a period performance exploring the history of baroque virtuoso violin technique. Like the marketing department's pun, it could have been gut-wrenchingly awful. But it wasn't.
There are, in fact, numerous similarities between the baroque style and rock music: regular rhythms, repetitive harmonies and block dynamics with the burden of expression placed on melody. It's good to stand up when hearing and playing it – although Hope's cellist Stephan Schultz, who managed to play his instrument while he and the rest of the band paraded through the audience to Diego Ortiz's rambunctious Recercada Segunda, looked glad of his seat when he reached it.
"You may know it from the Levi's jeans advert" was Hope's introduction to an arrangement of Handel's Sarabande. I didn't, but knowing it instead from the composer's D minor keyboard suite didn't prevent my appreciating artistry of breathtaking vitality, the violins of Hope and Daniel Deuter not so much passing the melody between them, as taking turns to savour something circling above them. The performers' faces crumpling under the accumulation of Handel's expertly intertwined sighs, a tenderness of extraordinary richness took hold of the room.
This was a memorable evening's music-making, though it could have done with a little more genuine improvisation from players more than capable of it.
There are, in fact, numerous similarities between the baroque style and rock music: regular rhythms, repetitive harmonies and block dynamics with the burden of expression placed on melody. It's good to stand up when hearing and playing it – although Hope's cellist Stephan Schultz, who managed to play his instrument while he and the rest of the band paraded through the audience to Diego Ortiz's rambunctious Recercada Segunda, looked glad of his seat when he reached it.
"You may know it from the Levi's jeans advert" was Hope's introduction to an arrangement of Handel's Sarabande. I didn't, but knowing it instead from the composer's D minor keyboard suite didn't prevent my appreciating artistry of breathtaking vitality, the violins of Hope and Daniel Deuter not so much passing the melody between them, as taking turns to savour something circling above them. The performers' faces crumpling under the accumulation of Handel's expertly intertwined sighs, a tenderness of extraordinary richness took hold of the room.
This was a memorable evening's music-making, though it could have done with a little more genuine improvisation from players more than capable of it.
Labels:
classical music
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Song of innocence and experience
Seventeen-year-old conductor Alexander Prior is a prodigy – so Britons are naturally suspicious of him
Never put off until tomorrow what you can reasonably put off until next week. For as long as I can remember that has been my motto, and it suits me well on the whole: life proceeds in a peaceful, sofa-rich manner, punctuated by happy-slaps from the real world, with its telephone-wielding deadline junkies. It keeps me on my toes too, my bumpy life's journey more funfair dodgems than congested motorway.
This approach has not, however, been the one adopted by Alexander Prior, who at 17 finds himself appointed to a junior conducting role at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. For Prior has been in classical music's fastest lane all his life: playing the piano while still in nappies and composing and conducting while still in short trousers, he was shipped off to the St Petersburg Conservatoire at 13.
Child prodigy stories are two-a-penny in the classical music world. Yo-Yo Ma and Mozart both started performing in public at the age of five. Yehudi Menuhin and Daniel Barenboim began their careers at seven, as in former ages did Chopin and Paganini. The majority, of course, are long since forgotten, childhood sparks whose flames spluttered with the advance of adulthood. So you'd think we'd be used to stories such as this. But many in the industry have greeted news of Prior's appointment with something less than warmth.
To be fair, his personal manner is rather offputting, although this is no uncommon trait among conductors, particularly from previous generations. In a recent and somewhat snotty-nosed outburst, Prior complained that English orchestras lacked sufficient imagination to hire him: "England always has so much of a bitterness about young musicians," he added.
This last remark will endear him to no one: England, or rather Britain, is neither bitter about young musicians in general, nor about young conductors in particular. In fact, with Robin Ticciati (26) now at the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Edward Gardner (35) at ENO,
Vladimir Jurowski (37) at the LPO, and Vassily Petrenko (33) at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Britain's senior conductors probably have the lowest average age among their international peers.
Nor is youth a particular disadvantage to a conducting career, for which a good level of general fitness, an excellent ear and keen sense of showmanship have always been the chief prerequisites.
But could Prior be right about Britain and youthful talent more generally? We certainly tend be rather po-faced by comparison with Americans, for whom talent contests and pageants have always been popular among parents. In Britain, however, the word "precocious" has long since been employed as a term of abuse. We despair at the sinking average age of the world's tennis players, and marvel at the advancement of George Osborne to shadow chancellor at the age of 34. But William Pitt the Younger was appointed prime minister in 1783 at the age of 24 (he was also appointed chancellor, simultaneously). And while we today in Europe are accustomed to extending our studies and exercising our right to mess about "finding ourselves" well into our 20s and 30s, back in Pitt's day the realities of adulthood hit rather earlier.
The fact is that most of things we greybeards do could be done just as well by kids, and probably much faster and with greater enthusiasm. We hang on to our positions by clinging to the myth of career development, and of the acquisition of wisdom from experience. But if experience usually teaches us anything, it's that we have to do as
we're told and wait our turn. In our frustration and bitterness, we nurture illusions about talent getting younger and younger all the time, when in fact it is simply that we take longer and longer to mature than we used to. And all this in a culture seemingly obsessed with delaying the process of ageing, in both appearance and behaviour.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can defer till middle age. As I say, this principle works fine for some. But as a motto for a whole country? It could well be ours, but it certainly can't be right.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can reasonably put off until next week. For as long as I can remember that has been my motto, and it suits me well on the whole: life proceeds in a peaceful, sofa-rich manner, punctuated by happy-slaps from the real world, with its telephone-wielding deadline junkies. It keeps me on my toes too, my bumpy life's journey more funfair dodgems than congested motorway.
This approach has not, however, been the one adopted by Alexander Prior, who at 17 finds himself appointed to a junior conducting role at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. For Prior has been in classical music's fastest lane all his life: playing the piano while still in nappies and composing and conducting while still in short trousers, he was shipped off to the St Petersburg Conservatoire at 13.
Child prodigy stories are two-a-penny in the classical music world. Yo-Yo Ma and Mozart both started performing in public at the age of five. Yehudi Menuhin and Daniel Barenboim began their careers at seven, as in former ages did Chopin and Paganini. The majority, of course, are long since forgotten, childhood sparks whose flames spluttered with the advance of adulthood. So you'd think we'd be used to stories such as this. But many in the industry have greeted news of Prior's appointment with something less than warmth.
To be fair, his personal manner is rather offputting, although this is no uncommon trait among conductors, particularly from previous generations. In a recent and somewhat snotty-nosed outburst, Prior complained that English orchestras lacked sufficient imagination to hire him: "England always has so much of a bitterness about young musicians," he added.
This last remark will endear him to no one: England, or rather Britain, is neither bitter about young musicians in general, nor about young conductors in particular. In fact, with Robin Ticciati (26) now at the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Edward Gardner (35) at ENO,
Vladimir Jurowski (37) at the LPO, and Vassily Petrenko (33) at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Britain's senior conductors probably have the lowest average age among their international peers.
Nor is youth a particular disadvantage to a conducting career, for which a good level of general fitness, an excellent ear and keen sense of showmanship have always been the chief prerequisites.
But could Prior be right about Britain and youthful talent more generally? We certainly tend be rather po-faced by comparison with Americans, for whom talent contests and pageants have always been popular among parents. In Britain, however, the word "precocious" has long since been employed as a term of abuse. We despair at the sinking average age of the world's tennis players, and marvel at the advancement of George Osborne to shadow chancellor at the age of 34. But William Pitt the Younger was appointed prime minister in 1783 at the age of 24 (he was also appointed chancellor, simultaneously). And while we today in Europe are accustomed to extending our studies and exercising our right to mess about "finding ourselves" well into our 20s and 30s, back in Pitt's day the realities of adulthood hit rather earlier.
The fact is that most of things we greybeards do could be done just as well by kids, and probably much faster and with greater enthusiasm. We hang on to our positions by clinging to the myth of career development, and of the acquisition of wisdom from experience. But if experience usually teaches us anything, it's that we have to do as
we're told and wait our turn. In our frustration and bitterness, we nurture illusions about talent getting younger and younger all the time, when in fact it is simply that we take longer and longer to mature than we used to. And all this in a culture seemingly obsessed with delaying the process of ageing, in both appearance and behaviour.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can defer till middle age. As I say, this principle works fine for some. But as a motto for a whole country? It could well be ours, but it certainly can't be right.
Labels:
classical music,
society
Friday, 15 January 2010
PLG Young Artists (2)
The second evening of the Park Lane Group's five-part new year concert series had none of the programming confusions of the first. Yet the event is confusing enough anyway, with a stream of young talent passing through a stage so adorned with greenery that it looks like a cheap hotel lobby. The repertoire, too, can be bewildering, with impassable stylistic gulfs bridged as if all recent music matches simply because it is recent. Still, there are occasions when artist and programme really gel. One was Clare Hammond's recital, which married Giles Swayne's 2008 Three Bagatelles for solo piano with two of Julian Anderson's Piano Etudes, and also featured a little-known study by Stephen Oliver.
Hammond, who studies at the Guildhall, played from memory with crisp precision and unflashy intelligence. The second of the Swayne pieces requires the softest, most even touch for its delicately balanced tonality to stabilise, just as the brittle humour of the third could easily snap under less clever fingers. Similarly, Anderson's studies require minute command, not just over each note's attack, but also of each release. Most impressive, though, was her natural sense of pacing, allowing the hollowed-out climax of Pour les Arpèges Composées to gather like a wisp of smoke in sunlight before dissipating in a passing breeze.
The second concert was less memorable. The Wu String Quartet, despite the very evident talents of the cellist and first violinist, never quite reached communion in works by Nicholas Maw and David Matthews, although they made a good case for Morgan Hayes's witty Dances on a Ground.
Similarly, the pairing of John McMunn's tenor and Christina Lawrie's piano was rather monochrome, although we were treated to the UK premiere of Huw Watkins's exquisite setting of three Auden poems.
Hammond, who studies at the Guildhall, played from memory with crisp precision and unflashy intelligence. The second of the Swayne pieces requires the softest, most even touch for its delicately balanced tonality to stabilise, just as the brittle humour of the third could easily snap under less clever fingers. Similarly, Anderson's studies require minute command, not just over each note's attack, but also of each release. Most impressive, though, was her natural sense of pacing, allowing the hollowed-out climax of Pour les Arpèges Composées to gather like a wisp of smoke in sunlight before dissipating in a passing breeze.
The second concert was less memorable. The Wu String Quartet, despite the very evident talents of the cellist and first violinist, never quite reached communion in works by Nicholas Maw and David Matthews, although they made a good case for Morgan Hayes's witty Dances on a Ground.
Similarly, the pairing of John McMunn's tenor and Christina Lawrie's piano was rather monochrome, although we were treated to the UK premiere of Huw Watkins's exquisite setting of three Auden poems.
Labels:
classical music
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Music is the loser in this V&A gallery shake-up
Classical music in the capital is riding high just now. Musical standards among London orchestras and ensembles are arguably higher than ever. And with ticket sales largely bucking recession trends, widespread fears that concert culture would collapse together with an ailing record industry have proved misplaced.
Meanwhile, best-selling books by psychologists such as Oliver Sacks and neuroscientists such as Daniel Levitin seek to ask why our brains and bodies have always found music's abstract play of pitch and rhythm so deeply expressive of our common humanity.
Yet when it comes to the instruments that have allowed musical culture to flourish down the centuries, the outlook is less rosy: the gallery of musical instruments at the V&A Museum looks certain to close next month in order to make way for an expanded display of the museum's fashion and costume holdings.
While a number of the instruments will remain exhibited as part of other sections — such as the Venetian virginals owned by Elizabeth I which now stand in the Medieval and Renaissance galleries — most of them will be placed in storage, available on request, or distributed among other museums and collections.
Unlike Brussels, Paris and New York, where national instrument collections are displayed centrally, London's rich store of instruments is distributed among several smaller collections. The V&A's collection, of international significance purely by itself, gains in importance in this respect because it is the only collection of historical musical instruments to be housed in a major national museum, thereby attracting general as well as specialist visitors.
Besides the virgin queen's sole surviving keyboard instrument — Elizabeth I was a keen amateur musician as well as an active patron of the art — the jewels in the collection include an ivory oboe and tortoiseshell recorder that belonged to the composer Gioachino Rossini and two pianos owned by the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, both lovingly decorated by the artist himself.
One of the collection's greatest assets is its visual attractiveness. The V&A was founded as and remains primarily a museum of decorative arts and its musical instrument collection developed around pieces striking for aesthetic as well as historical reasons. As most people visit museums seeking instruction and entertainment for the eye, the collection has for years played a unique role, by appealing first to the eye and then opening an imaginative window on past musical worlds.
There is some good news in the discovery that a proportion of the collection will go to south London's Horniman museum, whose already excellent musical instrument collection will be enriched by the loan. But despite its national status and its considerable charms, the Horniman remains somewhat off the beaten track of London's major visitor attractions.
Music is our common heritage, the oldest and perhaps most deeply engrained form of human culture. The prime physical embodiment of this culture remains the musical instruments which come down to us.
While I understand the V&A's need to keep its focus on its core collections, the decision to close the musical instrument gallery is a mistake. It will deprive many an accidental tourist of past music's rich rewards. Surely our musical heritage deserves better than this.
Meanwhile, best-selling books by psychologists such as Oliver Sacks and neuroscientists such as Daniel Levitin seek to ask why our brains and bodies have always found music's abstract play of pitch and rhythm so deeply expressive of our common humanity.
Yet when it comes to the instruments that have allowed musical culture to flourish down the centuries, the outlook is less rosy: the gallery of musical instruments at the V&A Museum looks certain to close next month in order to make way for an expanded display of the museum's fashion and costume holdings.
While a number of the instruments will remain exhibited as part of other sections — such as the Venetian virginals owned by Elizabeth I which now stand in the Medieval and Renaissance galleries — most of them will be placed in storage, available on request, or distributed among other museums and collections.
Unlike Brussels, Paris and New York, where national instrument collections are displayed centrally, London's rich store of instruments is distributed among several smaller collections. The V&A's collection, of international significance purely by itself, gains in importance in this respect because it is the only collection of historical musical instruments to be housed in a major national museum, thereby attracting general as well as specialist visitors.
Besides the virgin queen's sole surviving keyboard instrument — Elizabeth I was a keen amateur musician as well as an active patron of the art — the jewels in the collection include an ivory oboe and tortoiseshell recorder that belonged to the composer Gioachino Rossini and two pianos owned by the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, both lovingly decorated by the artist himself.
One of the collection's greatest assets is its visual attractiveness. The V&A was founded as and remains primarily a museum of decorative arts and its musical instrument collection developed around pieces striking for aesthetic as well as historical reasons. As most people visit museums seeking instruction and entertainment for the eye, the collection has for years played a unique role, by appealing first to the eye and then opening an imaginative window on past musical worlds.
There is some good news in the discovery that a proportion of the collection will go to south London's Horniman museum, whose already excellent musical instrument collection will be enriched by the loan. But despite its national status and its considerable charms, the Horniman remains somewhat off the beaten track of London's major visitor attractions.
Music is our common heritage, the oldest and perhaps most deeply engrained form of human culture. The prime physical embodiment of this culture remains the musical instruments which come down to us.
While I understand the V&A's need to keep its focus on its core collections, the decision to close the musical instrument gallery is a mistake. It will deprive many an accidental tourist of past music's rich rewards. Surely our musical heritage deserves better than this.
Labels:
classical music,
visual arts
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Elektra
TLS review of Elektra, Royal Opera, Sweden
Feminism has a difficult time with opera. The majority of operas are by men, of course, as well as being mostly conducted and directed by them. Operatic heroines also have a tendency to get killed off before the curtain. Still, a good case has been made, notably by the American musicologist Carolyn Abbate, that the way female voices preside over the musical texture in opera ensures that, at the level of performance, female experience is often centrestage.
There are few operas which the female voice dominates as much as Elektra. The title role is one of the most demanding in existence, and requires the singer to be on stage for well over ninety minutes. The three main women also encompass the range of dramatic perspective in the opera, while the gaggle of maidservants – who approximate to Sophocles’ original chorus, discarded by Hofmannsthal from his play – amplify the psychological spectrum and our sense of its instability. Moreover, the dramatic presence of both male leads is generated by their physical absence for most of the opera. For much of the time, Orestes might simply be a figment of the three women's conflicting imaginations.
And yet the opera’s protagonist is not Elektra but Orestes. The opera is about Elektra, but the female characters all lack the capacity to act. They are trapped, Elektra in her solipsistic bloodlust, Chrystothemis in her maidenly dreams of escape, and Klytaemnestra, in fears she cannot even name. What the women control is representation: how actions should be interpreted, what rituals should be observed in order for their meaning to be absorbed. And in the psychotic context of the drama, it is this domain of representation that matters. The problem is that when it comes to performing the one rite left to the citizens of Mycaenae – revenge – the women by themselves are powerless.
The great strength of Staffan Valdemar Holm’s new production for the Stockholm Royal Opera is its emphasis on the claustrophobia of a world in which action and thought are so effectively divorced. The stage, designed by Bente Lykke Møller, is reduced to a narrow strip at the front, the characters spending most of their time pressed up tight against the blood-red wall that reaches high above the proscenium arch. The only depth is a dark, airless corridor in the wall’s middle. This is not a production for those in search of visual extravagance, but the staging has the advantage of concentrating our attention on Strauss’s hyperactive music.
The house orchestra were alive to the delicacy of Strauss’s score, guided through its twists, turns and changes of colour by Pier Giorgio Morandi. While the stylized acting was also mostly successful – particularly the awkward, dizzy movement of the women, a clumsiness that culminates in Elektra’s final dance – the singing was quite wonderful, and clearly extremely carefully prepared (all the soloists were singing their roles for the first time). Marianne Eklöf, who sang Fricka in Holm and Møller’s Stockholm Ring in 2006, was especially notable for her sympathetic interpretation of Klytaemestra (and for her youth – the part is often reserved for Elektras past their prime).
But however good the staging and the playing, Elektra stands or falls on the credibility of its heroine. Katarina Dalayman was evidently born to sing the part, and is arguably even better suited to it than Susan Bullock, currently singing the role at the Met and more often cited as the heir to Varnay and Nilsson. Dalayman’s merit lies not in the power and stamina of her voice but in the fact that it combines these qualities with a strange ability to retreat into a fragile, girlish tone from which both power and stamina are estranged. This allows us to see the damaged teenager behind the fulminating princess, and Dalayman to do justice to the shades of colour and emotion the role really requires.
Elektra expires once her rites have been observed, but the music continues baying for blood through the reiterations of the Agamemnon theme, crashing like waves against the palace walls. The attention now fixes on her sister Chrysothemis, at last beyond the reach of her family’s psychoses, but stranded by terror and loneliness. It is a portrait of the fragility of human freedom which demands that the character remain isolated. Holm has nevertheless decided she should be “rescued” by her brother. Has he a reason, or is the sense-destroying detail just an aberration?
Feminism has a difficult time with opera. The majority of operas are by men, of course, as well as being mostly conducted and directed by them. Operatic heroines also have a tendency to get killed off before the curtain. Still, a good case has been made, notably by the American musicologist Carolyn Abbate, that the way female voices preside over the musical texture in opera ensures that, at the level of performance, female experience is often centrestage.
There are few operas which the female voice dominates as much as Elektra. The title role is one of the most demanding in existence, and requires the singer to be on stage for well over ninety minutes. The three main women also encompass the range of dramatic perspective in the opera, while the gaggle of maidservants – who approximate to Sophocles’ original chorus, discarded by Hofmannsthal from his play – amplify the psychological spectrum and our sense of its instability. Moreover, the dramatic presence of both male leads is generated by their physical absence for most of the opera. For much of the time, Orestes might simply be a figment of the three women's conflicting imaginations.
And yet the opera’s protagonist is not Elektra but Orestes. The opera is about Elektra, but the female characters all lack the capacity to act. They are trapped, Elektra in her solipsistic bloodlust, Chrystothemis in her maidenly dreams of escape, and Klytaemnestra, in fears she cannot even name. What the women control is representation: how actions should be interpreted, what rituals should be observed in order for their meaning to be absorbed. And in the psychotic context of the drama, it is this domain of representation that matters. The problem is that when it comes to performing the one rite left to the citizens of Mycaenae – revenge – the women by themselves are powerless.
The great strength of Staffan Valdemar Holm’s new production for the Stockholm Royal Opera is its emphasis on the claustrophobia of a world in which action and thought are so effectively divorced. The stage, designed by Bente Lykke Møller, is reduced to a narrow strip at the front, the characters spending most of their time pressed up tight against the blood-red wall that reaches high above the proscenium arch. The only depth is a dark, airless corridor in the wall’s middle. This is not a production for those in search of visual extravagance, but the staging has the advantage of concentrating our attention on Strauss’s hyperactive music.
The house orchestra were alive to the delicacy of Strauss’s score, guided through its twists, turns and changes of colour by Pier Giorgio Morandi. While the stylized acting was also mostly successful – particularly the awkward, dizzy movement of the women, a clumsiness that culminates in Elektra’s final dance – the singing was quite wonderful, and clearly extremely carefully prepared (all the soloists were singing their roles for the first time). Marianne Eklöf, who sang Fricka in Holm and Møller’s Stockholm Ring in 2006, was especially notable for her sympathetic interpretation of Klytaemestra (and for her youth – the part is often reserved for Elektras past their prime).
But however good the staging and the playing, Elektra stands or falls on the credibility of its heroine. Katarina Dalayman was evidently born to sing the part, and is arguably even better suited to it than Susan Bullock, currently singing the role at the Met and more often cited as the heir to Varnay and Nilsson. Dalayman’s merit lies not in the power and stamina of her voice but in the fact that it combines these qualities with a strange ability to retreat into a fragile, girlish tone from which both power and stamina are estranged. This allows us to see the damaged teenager behind the fulminating princess, and Dalayman to do justice to the shades of colour and emotion the role really requires.
Elektra expires once her rites have been observed, but the music continues baying for blood through the reiterations of the Agamemnon theme, crashing like waves against the palace walls. The attention now fixes on her sister Chrysothemis, at last beyond the reach of her family’s psychoses, but stranded by terror and loneliness. It is a portrait of the fragility of human freedom which demands that the character remain isolated. Holm has nevertheless decided she should be “rescued” by her brother. Has he a reason, or is the sense-destroying detail just an aberration?
Labels:
classical music,
opera
Borodin Quartet
Wigmore Hall Concert, London, January 9th
Guardian review
Shostakovich's first quartet has often been misunderstood as a timid, almost glib response to his humiliating dressing down by the regime in 1936. Subtitled Springtime, and composed of four brief movements in an insouciant idiom, one can see why. Yet, when performed properly, this restraint is understood as part of the subject matter. Opening in medias res, reminiscent of a Tolstoy or Chekhov short story, one seems transported to a country drawing room. Tea has been served and polite conversation is in full flow.But amid the chatter and anecdotes of rural life, fragments of a lovers' discourse emerge.
The first quartet is one of the few that the Borodin Quartet, in previous formations, didn't work on with the composer. Although none of the original members remain (it was founded in 1945), Valentin Berlinsky was a guiding figure until his death in 2008, and his former student, Vladimir Balshin, is now the group's cellist. Balshin's relative youth shows only in his tendency to smile after a successful performance. But in playing he is at one with group's trademark mix of confidence and self-effacement.
This approach captures the quartets in the perfect light. Hovering between public and forbidden private worlds, these works are the heirs less of Borodin and Tchaikovsky than of Beethoven's troubled final essays in the genre. Saturday night's concert confirmed this with exemplary performances of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and the third quartet of Shostakovich's pupil and most obvious stylistic heir, Alfred Schnittke.
Yet, as may have been predicted, it was a performance of Shostakovich's masterful eighth quartet that dominated. The group have performed this work, which in its incessant self-quotation amounts to a kind of potted autobiography, countless times. Teetering on the edges of expression, the performance remains the same; it is the work itself that deepens.
Guardian review
Shostakovich's first quartet has often been misunderstood as a timid, almost glib response to his humiliating dressing down by the regime in 1936. Subtitled Springtime, and composed of four brief movements in an insouciant idiom, one can see why. Yet, when performed properly, this restraint is understood as part of the subject matter. Opening in medias res, reminiscent of a Tolstoy or Chekhov short story, one seems transported to a country drawing room. Tea has been served and polite conversation is in full flow.But amid the chatter and anecdotes of rural life, fragments of a lovers' discourse emerge.
The first quartet is one of the few that the Borodin Quartet, in previous formations, didn't work on with the composer. Although none of the original members remain (it was founded in 1945), Valentin Berlinsky was a guiding figure until his death in 2008, and his former student, Vladimir Balshin, is now the group's cellist. Balshin's relative youth shows only in his tendency to smile after a successful performance. But in playing he is at one with group's trademark mix of confidence and self-effacement.
This approach captures the quartets in the perfect light. Hovering between public and forbidden private worlds, these works are the heirs less of Borodin and Tchaikovsky than of Beethoven's troubled final essays in the genre. Saturday night's concert confirmed this with exemplary performances of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and the third quartet of Shostakovich's pupil and most obvious stylistic heir, Alfred Schnittke.
Yet, as may have been predicted, it was a performance of Shostakovich's masterful eighth quartet that dominated. The group have performed this work, which in its incessant self-quotation amounts to a kind of potted autobiography, countless times. Teetering on the edges of expression, the performance remains the same; it is the work itself that deepens.
Labels:
classical music
Monday, 11 January 2010
The wolves at my door
We don't like newcomers much in our village. Truth be told, we're relative newcomers ourselves. But that no longer seems important now a new family has moved in. Unkempt, smelly and downright antisocial, everybody seems to want them gone – everybody, that is, except a nice tree-hugging friend, who thinks they are romantic. The newcomers are wolves, you see.
The wolves I grew up with were romantic in a literal sense: they existed only in fairy tales and the odd song by Duran Duran. But since I've been coming to rural Sweden, wolves have been encroaching on reality. Three of them, it turns out, seem to have made their den a stone's through away from the churchyard.
Swedes hate uncertainty but love to hunt. For both these reasons the native wolf population died out completely in the late 1960s. But in 1974 the government placed wolves under strict protection. Killing them without direct and almost impossible to procure evidence of an immediate threat to the life of human and other domesticated animals became punishable by prison sentences not incomparable to those for manslaughter. It was an excellent piece of legislation, for the wolves. By the end of last year there were thought to be over 240 wolves in Sweden, most of them to be found in the vast swathes of woodland sweeping through the middle of the country.
Last year the environment ministry decided to organise the first cull in nearly half a century. A total of 27 wolves were to be shot between 2 January and 15 February and some 12,000 permits were issued to hunters wishing to participate.
Usually slow to the point of hazy sublimity, for a brief two days the pace of Swedish country life quickened inordinately. In many places the quota was reached in a few hours. Nationally, 28 wolves were recorded shot by 5 January, the extra being attributed to a communications error (cough cough). The hunters could keep the skins, the bodies were to be gathered and transported to Stockholm for postmortem.
The rural enthusiasm for the hunt is easy to understand. While it is no longer the case that the majority of Swedes living in the countryside are farmers, it is only a matter of a generation or two at most. And for farmers, or indeed anyone else with domestic animals or small children, wolves are a natural enemy. With recorded wolf killings of sheep and dogs having risen sharply in recent years, frustration at what many see as exaggerated levels of protection has waxed similarly. Furthermore, given that the present generation of wolves has never known man as a predator, contemporary Swedish wolves are attracted to rather than repelled by signs of human habitation.
Not wanting to risk accusations of anthropocentrism (God forbid), the government presented the cull in purely lycocentric terms: restricting the national wolf population to a manageable total of around 210 would limit the frustration of the biped neighbours, thus ensuring the animals' safety. Furthermore, given that the current population is descended from what is thought to be a mere three individuals brought over from Finland, the gene pool is not what it might be.
Heart and kidney disease is increasingly common and a cull would increase the effectiveness of the government's plans to introduce 20 new wolves over the next four years.
It's a nice argument, but the socialist press are not buying it, suggesting the government is simply pandering to the rising bloodlust of the hunting and farming community (the Center party , traditionally popular with farmers, is currently a key part of the governing centre-right coalition). Their own bloodlust rising in turn, calls are being made for the head of the environment minister and Center party MP Anders Carlgren.
So who is right? In ways reminiscent of Britain's fox-hunting debates, opinion is divided sharply along urban and rural lines, but shouldn't we be able to appeal to a higher moral code when it comes to such cases?
According to the Rev Andrew Linzey, whose book, Why Animal Suffering Matters, was published last summer, it is absolutely wrong to inflict suffering on an animal unless it is for its own good. This precept is a simple extension of that trusty cornerstone of all moral thought, do as you would be done by. That is to say, when considering the implications of our actions for others in the light of how we ourselves would desire to be treated, we should include animals among these others.
In this sense, the question of the conflicting perspective of rural v urban dwellers is irrelevant. The imperative to preserve the wolf species is, after all, bound up with the more general recognition that certain predators or vermin once understood as being in simple competition with us are in fact partners within a more complex ecology. The cull therefore offends a universal moral precept and the immediate perspective of the human agents is irrelevant.
But perspective is the lifeblood of moral awareness. The grounding principle to which Linzey refers derives from an effort to balance perspectives, not to do away with them altogether: incorporate into your own point of view what you understand to be the point of view of others with whom you identify. The moral sphere exists in the lived and felt relation between sentient, self-conscious beings, and in that sense it is local before global, particular before universal.
So while we may be right to identify with wolves in the abstract, identifying with them in the flesh is a rather different matter. The people in our village are currently more intrigued and alarmed than frightened by their new neighbour. But without culls of this nature, the fear of wolves preserved in fairy tales will once again become quite real.
There's a rumour that our new neighbours is now a family of two. I, for one, am glad.
The wolves I grew up with were romantic in a literal sense: they existed only in fairy tales and the odd song by Duran Duran. But since I've been coming to rural Sweden, wolves have been encroaching on reality. Three of them, it turns out, seem to have made their den a stone's through away from the churchyard.
Swedes hate uncertainty but love to hunt. For both these reasons the native wolf population died out completely in the late 1960s. But in 1974 the government placed wolves under strict protection. Killing them without direct and almost impossible to procure evidence of an immediate threat to the life of human and other domesticated animals became punishable by prison sentences not incomparable to those for manslaughter. It was an excellent piece of legislation, for the wolves. By the end of last year there were thought to be over 240 wolves in Sweden, most of them to be found in the vast swathes of woodland sweeping through the middle of the country.
Last year the environment ministry decided to organise the first cull in nearly half a century. A total of 27 wolves were to be shot between 2 January and 15 February and some 12,000 permits were issued to hunters wishing to participate.
Usually slow to the point of hazy sublimity, for a brief two days the pace of Swedish country life quickened inordinately. In many places the quota was reached in a few hours. Nationally, 28 wolves were recorded shot by 5 January, the extra being attributed to a communications error (cough cough). The hunters could keep the skins, the bodies were to be gathered and transported to Stockholm for postmortem.
The rural enthusiasm for the hunt is easy to understand. While it is no longer the case that the majority of Swedes living in the countryside are farmers, it is only a matter of a generation or two at most. And for farmers, or indeed anyone else with domestic animals or small children, wolves are a natural enemy. With recorded wolf killings of sheep and dogs having risen sharply in recent years, frustration at what many see as exaggerated levels of protection has waxed similarly. Furthermore, given that the present generation of wolves has never known man as a predator, contemporary Swedish wolves are attracted to rather than repelled by signs of human habitation.
Not wanting to risk accusations of anthropocentrism (God forbid), the government presented the cull in purely lycocentric terms: restricting the national wolf population to a manageable total of around 210 would limit the frustration of the biped neighbours, thus ensuring the animals' safety. Furthermore, given that the current population is descended from what is thought to be a mere three individuals brought over from Finland, the gene pool is not what it might be.
Heart and kidney disease is increasingly common and a cull would increase the effectiveness of the government's plans to introduce 20 new wolves over the next four years.
It's a nice argument, but the socialist press are not buying it, suggesting the government is simply pandering to the rising bloodlust of the hunting and farming community (the Center party , traditionally popular with farmers, is currently a key part of the governing centre-right coalition). Their own bloodlust rising in turn, calls are being made for the head of the environment minister and Center party MP Anders Carlgren.
So who is right? In ways reminiscent of Britain's fox-hunting debates, opinion is divided sharply along urban and rural lines, but shouldn't we be able to appeal to a higher moral code when it comes to such cases?
According to the Rev Andrew Linzey, whose book, Why Animal Suffering Matters, was published last summer, it is absolutely wrong to inflict suffering on an animal unless it is for its own good. This precept is a simple extension of that trusty cornerstone of all moral thought, do as you would be done by. That is to say, when considering the implications of our actions for others in the light of how we ourselves would desire to be treated, we should include animals among these others.
In this sense, the question of the conflicting perspective of rural v urban dwellers is irrelevant. The imperative to preserve the wolf species is, after all, bound up with the more general recognition that certain predators or vermin once understood as being in simple competition with us are in fact partners within a more complex ecology. The cull therefore offends a universal moral precept and the immediate perspective of the human agents is irrelevant.
But perspective is the lifeblood of moral awareness. The grounding principle to which Linzey refers derives from an effort to balance perspectives, not to do away with them altogether: incorporate into your own point of view what you understand to be the point of view of others with whom you identify. The moral sphere exists in the lived and felt relation between sentient, self-conscious beings, and in that sense it is local before global, particular before universal.
So while we may be right to identify with wolves in the abstract, identifying with them in the flesh is a rather different matter. The people in our village are currently more intrigued and alarmed than frightened by their new neighbour. But without culls of this nature, the fear of wolves preserved in fairy tales will once again become quite real.
There's a rumour that our new neighbours is now a family of two. I, for one, am glad.
Labels:
society
Friday, 18 December 2009
Abbühl/LSO/Gergiev
Among this year's various Ballets Russes centenary commemorations came a nicely conceived programme of music by some of the composers who ensured their immortality. There's nothing like hearing this music without the distraction of men cavorting in tights to remember what wonderfully crafted orchestral work so much of it is.
Debussy's Jeux, for instance, was conceived by Diaghilev and Njinsky as a homoerotic shocker. But the choreography, and the absurd plot about the fumblings of three tennis players, proved instantly forgettable. Not so Debussy's music, which is pure grace. Magical harmonic and timbral shifts hang off a gently unfolding arabesque, leaving the listener weightless. Such effects, of course, require quite an orchestra. The LSO is just such an orchestra.
This was demonstrated time and again during the concert: in Stravinsky's lithe dictionary of neoclassical techniques, Jeux de Cartes; in Boléro, where the largely motionless Gergiev simply wound up his players and let Ravel's magnificent clockwork masterpiece get on with unravelling itself. The depth of talent was also revealed in Richard Strauss's oboe concerto, in which the orchestra's principal Emanuel Abbühl delivered the solo part's serpentine writhings with a perfectly judged mixture of passion and poise.
The greatest touch of all, however, came in the opening work. Ravel's Pavane pour une Infante Défunte received a performance which carried the listener breathlessly into a dance of entirely spiritual dimensions. Both demanding and obtaining a control over his orchestra which only pianists should reasonably expect from their instruments, Gergiev has always aimed high with the LSO. With this concert, they hit the bullseye.
Debussy's Jeux, for instance, was conceived by Diaghilev and Njinsky as a homoerotic shocker. But the choreography, and the absurd plot about the fumblings of three tennis players, proved instantly forgettable. Not so Debussy's music, which is pure grace. Magical harmonic and timbral shifts hang off a gently unfolding arabesque, leaving the listener weightless. Such effects, of course, require quite an orchestra. The LSO is just such an orchestra.
This was demonstrated time and again during the concert: in Stravinsky's lithe dictionary of neoclassical techniques, Jeux de Cartes; in Boléro, where the largely motionless Gergiev simply wound up his players and let Ravel's magnificent clockwork masterpiece get on with unravelling itself. The depth of talent was also revealed in Richard Strauss's oboe concerto, in which the orchestra's principal Emanuel Abbühl delivered the solo part's serpentine writhings with a perfectly judged mixture of passion and poise.
The greatest touch of all, however, came in the opening work. Ravel's Pavane pour une Infante Défunte received a performance which carried the listener breathlessly into a dance of entirely spiritual dimensions. Both demanding and obtaining a control over his orchestra which only pianists should reasonably expect from their instruments, Gergiev has always aimed high with the LSO. With this concert, they hit the bullseye.
Labels:
classical music
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Invitation to a real-time ritual
TLS Review of Huddersfield Festival
Our experience of music, more than any other art form, except perhaps dance, draws on our awareness of the living moment, of the here and the now. This is perhaps why music seems so often to retain its links to the performance of ritual, to the sacredness of places and why, in a world where technological change – not least in the music recording industry – gnaws away at the force and meaning of physical presence, live contemporary music remains important.
Opening of the Mouth, Richard Barrett’s setting for soprano, mezzo, ten instruments and electronics of poems by Paul Celan, is named after an Ancient Egyptian ritual in which the mouth of a statue or mummified corpse is touched with sacred objects in an attempt to bring the body back to life. Barrett’s piece, in seven overlapping movements, is concerned with animating the dead in the rather different sense of reviving the meaning and force of an association. Specifically, his intention is to create a time and space in which the “unsayable” of the Holocaust can be said, and heard. The idea is a good one. Our awareness of the Holocaust should not be consigned to uneasy history lessons and conventional pieties but should, in some sense, still resemble an open wound which the impossibility of full description keeps from healing over. So it is appropriate that Barrett’s music should be “impossible” to listen to. The words – or, more often, individual syllables – stick into the musical texture like shards of meaning that can’t be pieced back together. There’s no hope of following a text, and the music wriggles free as soon as you think you’ve identified a recurring rhythm or motif. Much of the excitement is visual as the momentum passes between members of the ensemble, often stretching performer and instrument to breaking point. A large part of the focus, inevitably, is on the two voices, particularly that of the mezzosoprano Ute Wassermann, whose ability to manipulate register and timbre are crucial to the composition. But all the performers – from the Australian ensemble Elision, who gave the world premiere in Perth in 1997 – were committed to the point of entrancement. Opening of the Mouth is seldom performed. This was its British premiere.
Despite moments of great and genuine power there was a clear sense in Huddersfield that Barrett’s music is apt to stimulate performers rather than listeners, though a musical ritual requires both parties to attend. And then there is the moral discomfort: the value of works such as these consists in their extension of an invitation to consider something – an invitation which may, or may not, be taken up. The problem is that Barrett’s work strong-arms the listener into confronting the subject matter, just as the nature of the subject matter forces us to suspend our critical engagement with the musical experience. “This is about the reality of the Holocaust”, the music seems to jeer, “how can you dare to doubt me?”. The spectacle left me open-mouthed, certainly, but I also felt like stopping my ears on one or two occasions. Barrett is often numbered with Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Christopher Fox (Barrett’s colleague at Brunel University) and James Dillon as an exponent of the New Complexity, and its mission to keep alight in Britain the torch of astringent musical modernism. Dillon is the exceptional figure: he claims to have little interest in the British music scene, professing it to be parochial and nepotistic – despite the fact that it was during the early years of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival that his talent was first brought to wider public notice, just as it is a British record label (NMC) and publisher (Peters) that allow this wider notice to sustain itself. The scope and depth of his musical achievement require that such churlishness be overlooked. Two new pieces presented at the festival this year confirmed that there is nothing cranky about his music.
The Leuven Triptych, which commemorates the Renaissance master Rogier Van der Weyden, was commissioned by the Leuvenbased ensemble Ictus, who premiered the work in Belgium before bringing it to Huddersfield. The links to painting are apparent in the movement titles (“signum crucis”, “deposition”, “omnia vanitas” – suggesting the inspiration of Van der Weyden’s “Descent from the Cross”), but there is not much else here to please those seeking a musical gallery tour along Mussorgskian lines. Instead, the relation of image to score is more symbolic, the shifting and interweaving musical textures recall the foldedness of a triptych, while a quotation from Dufay, as well as incorporated chanting from sacred Latin and French fifteenth-century texts in the long, central tableau, anchor the generalized mysticism in a specific historical context. The detail is difficult, as in the Barrett, and yet the Triptych comes across as a profoundly peaceful and balanced work, its poised and esoteric beauties reminiscent of medieval craftsmanship or illumination. While the shorter outer movements are more decorative – as if completely absorbed in the task of exploring figurations and textures – the middle movement is unusually lyrical, and structured as the musical equivalent of a cruciform plan. The ear hears an expressionistic palette of extreme dynamic contrasts in constant succession and nagging, rhythmically mutating motifs. Had this been offered as a literal depiction of Christ’s deposition, it would have been hard to erase the impression of a body still convulsed, with agony and ecstasy outflowing.
The other new piece by Dillon is his fifth string quartet, intended as a gift to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Arditti Quartet, and begun six years ago. With the fourth string quartet completed in the mean time, the fifth was finally ready for the Canadian group’s thirty-fifth birthday instead. The music is a writhing blend of dances, consciously reminiscent of Bartók and Haydn. Like Barrett’s larger piece, it plays with different partnerships among the four players, who evidently delighted in repaying the composer’s craftsmanslike compliment with a typically engaged performance. The Dillon quartet shared the stage with Jonathan Harvey’s fourth String Quartet, written in 2003. The Fourth is the only one of Harvey’s quartets to make use of the realtime electronic sound manipulation for which the composer is so well known. It is also the best of his quartets, in part because the electro- acoustic manipulations are so effective in exploding the idea of four-part counterpoint in spatial and textural terms. But the electronics are tricky to pull off and the work is not performed as often as it might be. This was the first time I had heard it live, and it was not an experience I shall soon forget. With the festival centred on Harvey – it included a memorable performance of six of his solo piano pieces by the young Dutch pianist Ralph van Raat – the mood at Huddersfield this year was always going to be suffused with a certain spiritual glow. Yet if the opening of new spaces, and times, in which our need for the sacred can be met is one of contemporary classical music’s most important tasks, its other traditional function – that of entertaining us – shouldn’t be overlooked. Huddersfield is generally rich in arcane rituals of one kind or another, but more traditionally conceived musical entertainments are something of a rarity, so the arrival of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, with David Sawer and Richard Jones’s new musical mime, Rumpelstiltskin, was doubly welcome.
Their production is pitched as a “grotesque fable for our times”, the obvious moral of the tale being the one about greed, to go with the less obvious one about money flowing to power and staying there. And there is a third: a warning that the world may be stripped of its mysteries as a result of failing to heed morals one and two. Despite the repulsiveness of the dwarf, the boneheadness of the father, the shallowness of his daughter, and the callowness of the king, there are no real villains in Rumpelstiltskin; like all fables, there is something immutable about the sequence of events, which moves beyond the world of cause and effect into the realm of presence. The beauty of Sawer’s and Jones’s dramatization is its careful preservation of balance between story and mystery.
Much of the success is Sawer’s. In its idioms and its constant, fleet-footed movement, his music is distinctly Stravinskian (not that this narrows it down: both Petrushka and The Rake’s Progress are audible antecedents), with vibrant dance rhythms and ostinato effects mirroring the comic ballet. To reinforce the circular aspect of the fable, Sawer’s players – who are also in costume (1940s, rural Central Europe) – make their way around the stage or pass in circular motion between the main group on the left and a variously constituted quartet on the right. The choreography and staging are both, in their matter-of-fact simplicity and coarse humour, well suited to retelling a familiar story. For anyone under the impression that contemporary music is necessarily an obscure abstraction, here was delightful evidence to the contrary.
Our experience of music, more than any other art form, except perhaps dance, draws on our awareness of the living moment, of the here and the now. This is perhaps why music seems so often to retain its links to the performance of ritual, to the sacredness of places and why, in a world where technological change – not least in the music recording industry – gnaws away at the force and meaning of physical presence, live contemporary music remains important.
Opening of the Mouth, Richard Barrett’s setting for soprano, mezzo, ten instruments and electronics of poems by Paul Celan, is named after an Ancient Egyptian ritual in which the mouth of a statue or mummified corpse is touched with sacred objects in an attempt to bring the body back to life. Barrett’s piece, in seven overlapping movements, is concerned with animating the dead in the rather different sense of reviving the meaning and force of an association. Specifically, his intention is to create a time and space in which the “unsayable” of the Holocaust can be said, and heard. The idea is a good one. Our awareness of the Holocaust should not be consigned to uneasy history lessons and conventional pieties but should, in some sense, still resemble an open wound which the impossibility of full description keeps from healing over. So it is appropriate that Barrett’s music should be “impossible” to listen to. The words – or, more often, individual syllables – stick into the musical texture like shards of meaning that can’t be pieced back together. There’s no hope of following a text, and the music wriggles free as soon as you think you’ve identified a recurring rhythm or motif. Much of the excitement is visual as the momentum passes between members of the ensemble, often stretching performer and instrument to breaking point. A large part of the focus, inevitably, is on the two voices, particularly that of the mezzosoprano Ute Wassermann, whose ability to manipulate register and timbre are crucial to the composition. But all the performers – from the Australian ensemble Elision, who gave the world premiere in Perth in 1997 – were committed to the point of entrancement. Opening of the Mouth is seldom performed. This was its British premiere.
Despite moments of great and genuine power there was a clear sense in Huddersfield that Barrett’s music is apt to stimulate performers rather than listeners, though a musical ritual requires both parties to attend. And then there is the moral discomfort: the value of works such as these consists in their extension of an invitation to consider something – an invitation which may, or may not, be taken up. The problem is that Barrett’s work strong-arms the listener into confronting the subject matter, just as the nature of the subject matter forces us to suspend our critical engagement with the musical experience. “This is about the reality of the Holocaust”, the music seems to jeer, “how can you dare to doubt me?”. The spectacle left me open-mouthed, certainly, but I also felt like stopping my ears on one or two occasions. Barrett is often numbered with Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Christopher Fox (Barrett’s colleague at Brunel University) and James Dillon as an exponent of the New Complexity, and its mission to keep alight in Britain the torch of astringent musical modernism. Dillon is the exceptional figure: he claims to have little interest in the British music scene, professing it to be parochial and nepotistic – despite the fact that it was during the early years of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival that his talent was first brought to wider public notice, just as it is a British record label (NMC) and publisher (Peters) that allow this wider notice to sustain itself. The scope and depth of his musical achievement require that such churlishness be overlooked. Two new pieces presented at the festival this year confirmed that there is nothing cranky about his music.
The Leuven Triptych, which commemorates the Renaissance master Rogier Van der Weyden, was commissioned by the Leuvenbased ensemble Ictus, who premiered the work in Belgium before bringing it to Huddersfield. The links to painting are apparent in the movement titles (“signum crucis”, “deposition”, “omnia vanitas” – suggesting the inspiration of Van der Weyden’s “Descent from the Cross”), but there is not much else here to please those seeking a musical gallery tour along Mussorgskian lines. Instead, the relation of image to score is more symbolic, the shifting and interweaving musical textures recall the foldedness of a triptych, while a quotation from Dufay, as well as incorporated chanting from sacred Latin and French fifteenth-century texts in the long, central tableau, anchor the generalized mysticism in a specific historical context. The detail is difficult, as in the Barrett, and yet the Triptych comes across as a profoundly peaceful and balanced work, its poised and esoteric beauties reminiscent of medieval craftsmanship or illumination. While the shorter outer movements are more decorative – as if completely absorbed in the task of exploring figurations and textures – the middle movement is unusually lyrical, and structured as the musical equivalent of a cruciform plan. The ear hears an expressionistic palette of extreme dynamic contrasts in constant succession and nagging, rhythmically mutating motifs. Had this been offered as a literal depiction of Christ’s deposition, it would have been hard to erase the impression of a body still convulsed, with agony and ecstasy outflowing.
The other new piece by Dillon is his fifth string quartet, intended as a gift to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Arditti Quartet, and begun six years ago. With the fourth string quartet completed in the mean time, the fifth was finally ready for the Canadian group’s thirty-fifth birthday instead. The music is a writhing blend of dances, consciously reminiscent of Bartók and Haydn. Like Barrett’s larger piece, it plays with different partnerships among the four players, who evidently delighted in repaying the composer’s craftsmanslike compliment with a typically engaged performance. The Dillon quartet shared the stage with Jonathan Harvey’s fourth String Quartet, written in 2003. The Fourth is the only one of Harvey’s quartets to make use of the realtime electronic sound manipulation for which the composer is so well known. It is also the best of his quartets, in part because the electro- acoustic manipulations are so effective in exploding the idea of four-part counterpoint in spatial and textural terms. But the electronics are tricky to pull off and the work is not performed as often as it might be. This was the first time I had heard it live, and it was not an experience I shall soon forget. With the festival centred on Harvey – it included a memorable performance of six of his solo piano pieces by the young Dutch pianist Ralph van Raat – the mood at Huddersfield this year was always going to be suffused with a certain spiritual glow. Yet if the opening of new spaces, and times, in which our need for the sacred can be met is one of contemporary classical music’s most important tasks, its other traditional function – that of entertaining us – shouldn’t be overlooked. Huddersfield is generally rich in arcane rituals of one kind or another, but more traditionally conceived musical entertainments are something of a rarity, so the arrival of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, with David Sawer and Richard Jones’s new musical mime, Rumpelstiltskin, was doubly welcome.
Their production is pitched as a “grotesque fable for our times”, the obvious moral of the tale being the one about greed, to go with the less obvious one about money flowing to power and staying there. And there is a third: a warning that the world may be stripped of its mysteries as a result of failing to heed morals one and two. Despite the repulsiveness of the dwarf, the boneheadness of the father, the shallowness of his daughter, and the callowness of the king, there are no real villains in Rumpelstiltskin; like all fables, there is something immutable about the sequence of events, which moves beyond the world of cause and effect into the realm of presence. The beauty of Sawer’s and Jones’s dramatization is its careful preservation of balance between story and mystery.
Much of the success is Sawer’s. In its idioms and its constant, fleet-footed movement, his music is distinctly Stravinskian (not that this narrows it down: both Petrushka and The Rake’s Progress are audible antecedents), with vibrant dance rhythms and ostinato effects mirroring the comic ballet. To reinforce the circular aspect of the fable, Sawer’s players – who are also in costume (1940s, rural Central Europe) – make their way around the stage or pass in circular motion between the main group on the left and a variously constituted quartet on the right. The choreography and staging are both, in their matter-of-fact simplicity and coarse humour, well suited to retelling a familiar story. For anyone under the impression that contemporary music is necessarily an obscure abstraction, here was delightful evidence to the contrary.
Labels:
classical music
Monday, 14 December 2009
Transition Projects, Kings Place
Music critics can be a grumpy lot, rarely more so than when producers recruit video projection to "liven up" the otherwise dull experience of sitting through a concert. It was a mark of the intelligence and beauty of Netia Jones's video accompaniments to a series of mostly early and late music concerts that scarcely a frown could be registered. That the concerts were semi-staged, allowing clever live film to contribute to the projection, also helped.
For Couperin's Leçons de Ténèbres, the sopranos Claire Booth and Elizabeth Atherton were cast as Jewish widows wailing by the ruins of the temple (economically rendered by a jagged silhouette of fallen music stands), while Stephen Wallace explored Dowland's luxuriant Elizabethan melancholy, in the guise of a love-sick accountant drowning in a vale of stationary-cupboard detritus.
Of the three concerts I attended, the most successful audiovisually was the Couperin. One of the finest and most versatile vocalists of her generation, Claire Booth was at one with the French composer's archaic grieving, her tones flecked with subtle emotional shifts. At times when her head was bowed, the notes fell from her mouth, their dying sounds oddly sustained by Jones's Garamond-inspired projections overhead.
The Dowland was to my mind less successful, partly because Wallace's forthright, wondrously powerful countertenor was at odds both with the more tentative aspect of the songs and with Andrew Maginley's rather timid lute accompaniment. That Wallace resembles a lean and sartorially savvy David Brent didn't help the video either, though the idea of an office crush for the theme was a good one.
Booth returned for a dazzling rendition of Berio's Sequenza No III for solo voice, joined by Clio Gould's solo violin for No VIII and Oliver Coates's solo cello for No XIV. The auditorium was scarcely a third full, the playing world-class.
For Couperin's Leçons de Ténèbres, the sopranos Claire Booth and Elizabeth Atherton were cast as Jewish widows wailing by the ruins of the temple (economically rendered by a jagged silhouette of fallen music stands), while Stephen Wallace explored Dowland's luxuriant Elizabethan melancholy, in the guise of a love-sick accountant drowning in a vale of stationary-cupboard detritus.
Of the three concerts I attended, the most successful audiovisually was the Couperin. One of the finest and most versatile vocalists of her generation, Claire Booth was at one with the French composer's archaic grieving, her tones flecked with subtle emotional shifts. At times when her head was bowed, the notes fell from her mouth, their dying sounds oddly sustained by Jones's Garamond-inspired projections overhead.
The Dowland was to my mind less successful, partly because Wallace's forthright, wondrously powerful countertenor was at odds both with the more tentative aspect of the songs and with Andrew Maginley's rather timid lute accompaniment. That Wallace resembles a lean and sartorially savvy David Brent didn't help the video either, though the idea of an office crush for the theme was a good one.
Booth returned for a dazzling rendition of Berio's Sequenza No III for solo voice, joined by Clio Gould's solo violin for No VIII and Oliver Coates's solo cello for No XIV. The auditorium was scarcely a third full, the playing world-class.
Labels:
classical music
Friday, 11 December 2009
An ingenious take on national service
It's funny how, whenever anyone mentions "broken Britain", we think immediately of teenagers. Or perhaps we think of David Cameron, and then of teenagers. The second route has the advantage of making us look favourably on teenagers for a time, but soon they present themselves to us in their natural element: hooded tops, leering, sideways glances, random foul-mouthed abuse, the smell of two-stroke engines and fear.
I know quite a few non-imaginary teenagers, and nearly all of them are much brighter and motivated than I remember myself or my contemporaries being. Where I was content with either listening to Wagner or examining my looks, thoughts and actions from the perspectives of imaginary females whom I never met because I was at an all-boys' school, the teenagers I know now all seem to want to do things, whether that be making music and films or merely trying to change the world.
That said, I can't go to my nearest newsagent any more for fear of a gang of teenagers to whom I once refused to give a cigarette. One of them has me pegged as having stolen his scooter. These are the teenagers I think of when people say "broken Britain".
But the teenagers didn't break Britain. They're far too young to be anything but victims. If anyone broke it, we did; especially those of us who are older than me.
What is worse, though, is that we broke it in a manner calculated to be as hard to fix as possible by adopting bad-loser psychology and applying it on the biggest scale possible: when someone loses, it's society's fault (or nature's, when it comes to reality TV); when someone wins it's because – to adopt a familiar phrase – they've got talent. The chapter on the thing that actually separates winning from losing – hard work – doesn't really get a look-in.
Genuine proposals for a fix don't come very often. So when a new report from Demos comes with strong recommendations for implementing a social national service programme for the young, designed to restore a link between community service ethos and the motivation for personal gain, we should take it seriously.
Nobody would expect a 21st-century proposal for national service to comprise a simple recommendation for two years on minimum pay in the military (which is not to say that most of the people who did military service before it finished in 1960 thought their time there was well spent), and readers will be glad to learn that Service Nation, published yesterday by Demos and written by Sonia Sodha and Dan Leighton, proposes nothing of the kind.
Also unsurprising is that the model proposed by Sodha and Leighton is clearly much more attractive than the one currently being peddled by the Conservatives. The latter, the brainchild of Cameron's director of strategy, Steve Hilton, suggests a three-week programme for 16-year-olds. That would be far too limited to make a difference, probably because someone did a cost-benefit analysis and found the results rather terrifying. According to Sodha and Leighton, however, the Demos scheme can actually run at a net profit to society.
While this would remain to be seen, the element of continuity central to the Demos proposal is ingenious. Starting with the introduction of "service learning" in primary and secondary school curricula, the idea is to incorporate various schemes that combine active work in the community throughout the early careers of those in sixth form and higher education, incorporating initiatives for jobseekers and even encouraging employers to fund community service leave.
The last point sounds may sound strange. Why after all, should employers pay for their workers to go and work for someone else? But if you think about it, employers – and Whitehall not the least of them – spend millions of pounds each year on training and team-building workshops. While the acquisition of specific skills and working relationships is usually the nominal aim of these, most would admit that the general purpose is one of regenerating motivation in the workplace – mostly, if we're honest, by sustaining an illusion of personal development.
If anything is genuinely surprising about the report it is that the model for the policy-led generation of public service ethos comes not from state-centric countries like Sweden but from the US where, all too often, allegiance to the flag has been mistaken for entitlement to do just what the hell one wants. But the AmeriCorps programme – introduced early on in the Clinton administration and pushed, among others, by the late Edward Kennedy – has proven to a marked success and Sodha and Leighton are clearly right to see its potential for use in the UK. The other surprise is the pamphlet's inscription – "We are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims for itself one part of our birth, and our friends another" – from Cicero's discourse De Officiis. Surely this must be the first publication from the Athens-inspired Demos to adopt a motto straight from the heart of republican Rome?
We think of community service as resulting from the fact that our prisons our full. Maybe it's time to remember that it's actually the other way around? Our prisons are full, and our newsagents off-limits, because we somehow forgot that communities need servicing.
I know quite a few non-imaginary teenagers, and nearly all of them are much brighter and motivated than I remember myself or my contemporaries being. Where I was content with either listening to Wagner or examining my looks, thoughts and actions from the perspectives of imaginary females whom I never met because I was at an all-boys' school, the teenagers I know now all seem to want to do things, whether that be making music and films or merely trying to change the world.
That said, I can't go to my nearest newsagent any more for fear of a gang of teenagers to whom I once refused to give a cigarette. One of them has me pegged as having stolen his scooter. These are the teenagers I think of when people say "broken Britain".
But the teenagers didn't break Britain. They're far too young to be anything but victims. If anyone broke it, we did; especially those of us who are older than me.
What is worse, though, is that we broke it in a manner calculated to be as hard to fix as possible by adopting bad-loser psychology and applying it on the biggest scale possible: when someone loses, it's society's fault (or nature's, when it comes to reality TV); when someone wins it's because – to adopt a familiar phrase – they've got talent. The chapter on the thing that actually separates winning from losing – hard work – doesn't really get a look-in.
Genuine proposals for a fix don't come very often. So when a new report from Demos comes with strong recommendations for implementing a social national service programme for the young, designed to restore a link between community service ethos and the motivation for personal gain, we should take it seriously.
Nobody would expect a 21st-century proposal for national service to comprise a simple recommendation for two years on minimum pay in the military (which is not to say that most of the people who did military service before it finished in 1960 thought their time there was well spent), and readers will be glad to learn that Service Nation, published yesterday by Demos and written by Sonia Sodha and Dan Leighton, proposes nothing of the kind.
Also unsurprising is that the model proposed by Sodha and Leighton is clearly much more attractive than the one currently being peddled by the Conservatives. The latter, the brainchild of Cameron's director of strategy, Steve Hilton, suggests a three-week programme for 16-year-olds. That would be far too limited to make a difference, probably because someone did a cost-benefit analysis and found the results rather terrifying. According to Sodha and Leighton, however, the Demos scheme can actually run at a net profit to society.
While this would remain to be seen, the element of continuity central to the Demos proposal is ingenious. Starting with the introduction of "service learning" in primary and secondary school curricula, the idea is to incorporate various schemes that combine active work in the community throughout the early careers of those in sixth form and higher education, incorporating initiatives for jobseekers and even encouraging employers to fund community service leave.
The last point sounds may sound strange. Why after all, should employers pay for their workers to go and work for someone else? But if you think about it, employers – and Whitehall not the least of them – spend millions of pounds each year on training and team-building workshops. While the acquisition of specific skills and working relationships is usually the nominal aim of these, most would admit that the general purpose is one of regenerating motivation in the workplace – mostly, if we're honest, by sustaining an illusion of personal development.
If anything is genuinely surprising about the report it is that the model for the policy-led generation of public service ethos comes not from state-centric countries like Sweden but from the US where, all too often, allegiance to the flag has been mistaken for entitlement to do just what the hell one wants. But the AmeriCorps programme – introduced early on in the Clinton administration and pushed, among others, by the late Edward Kennedy – has proven to a marked success and Sodha and Leighton are clearly right to see its potential for use in the UK. The other surprise is the pamphlet's inscription – "We are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims for itself one part of our birth, and our friends another" – from Cicero's discourse De Officiis. Surely this must be the first publication from the Athens-inspired Demos to adopt a motto straight from the heart of republican Rome?
We think of community service as resulting from the fact that our prisons our full. Maybe it's time to remember that it's actually the other way around? Our prisons are full, and our newsagents off-limits, because we somehow forgot that communities need servicing.
Labels:
society
Monday, 30 November 2009
BBC SO / Robertson
The American conductor David Robertson is less widely known than he ought to be, perhaps because his name is so unexotic. For eight years he was director of Pierre Boulez's Ensemble Intercontemporain, and now directs the St Louis Symphony. His regular appearances with the BBC Symphony as their principal guest conductor are a boon both to the orchestra and its audiences.
Friday night was typical of his wide-awake programming, using Josquin des Prez's meditation on the death of his friend and teacher Johannes Ockeghem, Nymphes des Bois, and Boulez's esoteric Rituel for his colleague Bruno Maderna to draw out something fresh from Mozart's Requiem. The Josquin lacked shape; the Boulez was magnificently done. Scored for eight groups of similar instruments, each led by a percussionist, Rituel is at once an arcane meditation on death and a fabulously primordial act of mourning. Shrill choirs of oboes and muted brass, shimmering tamtams and eerie thuds conjure images of antiquity so powerful that they might come directly from Sophocles' Thebes. This relies partly on spontaneous asynchronies arising between the various groups. Thus, directing it requires great control but also the ability to delegate – less common among conductors.
Mozart's funereal work emerged duly enlivened – if that's not the wrong image – its rhythms less fluent and more mournful, its reedy timbres echoing the Boulez. The soloists were given admirably free expressive rein, to the credit particularly of Elizabeth Watts, Ed Lyons and, of course, Robertson himself.
Friday night was typical of his wide-awake programming, using Josquin des Prez's meditation on the death of his friend and teacher Johannes Ockeghem, Nymphes des Bois, and Boulez's esoteric Rituel for his colleague Bruno Maderna to draw out something fresh from Mozart's Requiem. The Josquin lacked shape; the Boulez was magnificently done. Scored for eight groups of similar instruments, each led by a percussionist, Rituel is at once an arcane meditation on death and a fabulously primordial act of mourning. Shrill choirs of oboes and muted brass, shimmering tamtams and eerie thuds conjure images of antiquity so powerful that they might come directly from Sophocles' Thebes. This relies partly on spontaneous asynchronies arising between the various groups. Thus, directing it requires great control but also the ability to delegate – less common among conductors.
Mozart's funereal work emerged duly enlivened – if that's not the wrong image – its rhythms less fluent and more mournful, its reedy timbres echoing the Boulez. The soloists were given admirably free expressive rein, to the credit particularly of Elizabeth Watts, Ed Lyons and, of course, Robertson himself.
Labels:
classical music
Saturday, 28 November 2009
Florestan Trio
A good sense of humour would not be the first quality listed on Beethoven's personal ad. But, in addition to his fondness for terrible puns, the lighter side of Beethoven's personality does emerge in a handful of pieces. The Op 1 piano trios, for example, are full of rhythmic jousting and Haydnesque witticisms, even though the composer's characteristic grandness of vision sits awkwardly with them.
The Florestan Trio's unapologetically full-blooded approach is undoubtedly the right one, a judgment confirmed by this blistering performance of the G major trio. As in their excellent Hyperion recording, they made no attempt to smooth over the bumps but simply revelled in the work's rambunctious temperament. The Rossinian finale was a blast, the awkward piano part like a boxer in ballet shoes bravely keeping step with fleeter-footed companions.
This was a good beginning to a concert that ended with an exquisitely raw performance of the much more famous "Ghost" trio, in which every interpretative judgment betrayed class and unegotistical musicianship. The tension between the ethereal and fuller-bodied tones in the slow movement was perfectly tuned, while the first movement, for all its cracking pace, sounded edgy, spotted with dimly suspected sorrows. Such playing makes you remember just how modern Beethoven still is.
In between came a new trio by Huw Watkins. For all the angularity of its writing, Watkins's piece is much more traditional in conception than either of the two Beethoven works, with three movements in fast-slow-fast arrangement and a harmonic and melodic conception that never seems to develop. There are some striking moments – Fauré's great trio often comes to mind – but its monothematic single-mindedness is most reminiscent of Beethoven's bashing-at-the-door, you-will-let-me-in style. Which is all very well but for the fact that when you do open the door, it helps when it's Beethoven doing the knocking.
The Florestan Trio's unapologetically full-blooded approach is undoubtedly the right one, a judgment confirmed by this blistering performance of the G major trio. As in their excellent Hyperion recording, they made no attempt to smooth over the bumps but simply revelled in the work's rambunctious temperament. The Rossinian finale was a blast, the awkward piano part like a boxer in ballet shoes bravely keeping step with fleeter-footed companions.
This was a good beginning to a concert that ended with an exquisitely raw performance of the much more famous "Ghost" trio, in which every interpretative judgment betrayed class and unegotistical musicianship. The tension between the ethereal and fuller-bodied tones in the slow movement was perfectly tuned, while the first movement, for all its cracking pace, sounded edgy, spotted with dimly suspected sorrows. Such playing makes you remember just how modern Beethoven still is.
In between came a new trio by Huw Watkins. For all the angularity of its writing, Watkins's piece is much more traditional in conception than either of the two Beethoven works, with three movements in fast-slow-fast arrangement and a harmonic and melodic conception that never seems to develop. There are some striking moments – Fauré's great trio often comes to mind – but its monothematic single-mindedness is most reminiscent of Beethoven's bashing-at-the-door, you-will-let-me-in style. Which is all very well but for the fact that when you do open the door, it helps when it's Beethoven doing the knocking.
Labels:
classical music
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Blind update
I was staring at a computer screen, as usual. But instead of a mess of half-read and half-written articles the screen was displaying graphic representations of my wife's labour pains and our soon-to-be born baby's heartbeat. And not just to me: this being a Swedish hospital, the computer was hooked up to a network where these vital signs could be monitored by a whole team of midwives and obstetricians.
Exhilarating, diverting and occasionally useful. I love computer technology.
The feeling's hardly mutual, though. For according to the computer itself, its business of reporting my small family's vital signs was a merely incidental affair. It soon transpired that Microsoft Windows had actually been getting on with the much more pressing business of installing some "very important" security updates. These now successfully installed, the computer would soon be restarting. In 30 seconds. OK? Help!
As luck would have it our midwife came back at that moment and unplugged the monitors because everything was in any case, according to Swedish idiom, "giant well". But where does Windows get off thinking a software update – which probably only consisted of a patch to verify the licences on the computer – is more important than reporting on my health of my family?
I have long suspected that computers are primarily designed for the amusement of those who programme them rather than for the convenience of we who use them. I've lost count of the times my machine's desire to keep up with the latest fashions in software patches has prevented me doing what I want do with it, either by slowing everything down to the speed of glue, or by simply switching itself off for whatever is the silicon equivalent of a Kit Kat. I don't even know why I call it "my" computer anymore.
For some reason we simply accept this situation, doormat-like, as if we didn't have anything better to do with our time. But what if computer programmers designed cars? The road system would be grid-locked with vehicles that have simply stopped because they want to adjust the rear windscreen-wiper or recalibrate the climate control. Instead of telling you where to go, road signs would be crammed full of the same meaningless advice, all ending with "Ctrl-Alt-Delete".
Worst of all, when Ctrl-Alt-Delete failed to work, you'd have to call for roadside assistance. They might fix the car for you but they'd certainly have no qualms about deleting your passengers. "What, you didn't have them backed up?" I've never met an IT support engineer who didn't view the contents of my computer as an unsightly inconvenience, to be erased at all costs in the interests of the proper functioning of the machine.
All this might not matter but for the fact that it has become usual to use computers as metaphors for the human brain. It is axiomatic to cognitive scientists that the brain be thought of in terms of "hardware", "software", "applications", "multi-tasking"; the phrase "hard-wired" has become so embedded in everyday usage that apparently we must be hard-wired to parrot it all day long.
I don't know how many of you have been to see a shrink, but one of the most comforting things about them is that they tend to be so ineffectual. Imagine, though, when the self-fulfilling brain computer prophecy is complete. They'll have no trouble fixing us, of course – but what, you mean to say you didn't have it backed up?
Anyway, we had a baby girl. She's the most beautiful thing in the world. But then I suppose I'd have faulty wiring if I didn't think that.
Exhilarating, diverting and occasionally useful. I love computer technology.
The feeling's hardly mutual, though. For according to the computer itself, its business of reporting my small family's vital signs was a merely incidental affair. It soon transpired that Microsoft Windows had actually been getting on with the much more pressing business of installing some "very important" security updates. These now successfully installed, the computer would soon be restarting. In 30 seconds. OK? Help!
As luck would have it our midwife came back at that moment and unplugged the monitors because everything was in any case, according to Swedish idiom, "giant well". But where does Windows get off thinking a software update – which probably only consisted of a patch to verify the licences on the computer – is more important than reporting on my health of my family?
I have long suspected that computers are primarily designed for the amusement of those who programme them rather than for the convenience of we who use them. I've lost count of the times my machine's desire to keep up with the latest fashions in software patches has prevented me doing what I want do with it, either by slowing everything down to the speed of glue, or by simply switching itself off for whatever is the silicon equivalent of a Kit Kat. I don't even know why I call it "my" computer anymore.
For some reason we simply accept this situation, doormat-like, as if we didn't have anything better to do with our time. But what if computer programmers designed cars? The road system would be grid-locked with vehicles that have simply stopped because they want to adjust the rear windscreen-wiper or recalibrate the climate control. Instead of telling you where to go, road signs would be crammed full of the same meaningless advice, all ending with "Ctrl-Alt-Delete".
Worst of all, when Ctrl-Alt-Delete failed to work, you'd have to call for roadside assistance. They might fix the car for you but they'd certainly have no qualms about deleting your passengers. "What, you didn't have them backed up?" I've never met an IT support engineer who didn't view the contents of my computer as an unsightly inconvenience, to be erased at all costs in the interests of the proper functioning of the machine.
All this might not matter but for the fact that it has become usual to use computers as metaphors for the human brain. It is axiomatic to cognitive scientists that the brain be thought of in terms of "hardware", "software", "applications", "multi-tasking"; the phrase "hard-wired" has become so embedded in everyday usage that apparently we must be hard-wired to parrot it all day long.
I don't know how many of you have been to see a shrink, but one of the most comforting things about them is that they tend to be so ineffectual. Imagine, though, when the self-fulfilling brain computer prophecy is complete. They'll have no trouble fixing us, of course – but what, you mean to say you didn't have it backed up?
Anyway, we had a baby girl. She's the most beautiful thing in the world. But then I suppose I'd have faulty wiring if I didn't think that.
Labels:
society
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Symphonies for life
Review of Roger Scruton's Understanding Music, TLS
Although music has always stood comparison with the other arts, its oddness is something we rediscover each time we try to describe it. When we speak of interpreting works of art, for example, we refer to the practice of deciphering their single or several meanings. But to interpret music, in the classical tradition at least, has come to refer simply to playing it; that is to executing a set of more or less clear instructions left by the composer. Similarly, in eighteenth-century France, when the concept of mimesis harboured the images of excellence in all the arts, and no one troubled to discuss the arts without discussing their success in imitating “la belle nature”, the sole entry on musical imitation listed in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie discussed only the purely technical matter of one part imitating another in polyphonic music. None among the numerous such pitfalls is more hazardous than the idea of musical understanding. Ordinarily, when understanding something, such as a sentence, we are grasping its meaning. But while most people are clear that the phrase “to understand music” is not itself without meaning, agreement on what is understood in the musical case is less forthcoming. We might not hesitate to criticize an otherwise note-perfect performance for “lacking understanding”, but it might take us longer to specify what it was the player had failed to understand.
The elusive question of musical understanding lies both at the centre and in the margins of Roger Scruton’s latest book. It is central in the sense that a key chapter addresses the subject directly, and that much of the rest of the book reflects on various normative issues that follow from the concept of musical understanding (such as which kinds of music lend themselves best to being listened to in this way). It remains marginal, on the other hand, in that no substantial theory of musical understanding is in fact advanced, though this is largely on account of the volume being a collection of somewhat disparate philosophical and critical essays. None the less, there is a tantalizing sketch of such a theory, and in this respect, the present volume constitutes a genuine advance on the earlier, and very influential, Aesthetics of Music (1997). In addition, it permits the reader to grasp the relation between Scruton’s thoughtful aesthetic conservatism and the more general social and political conservatism which many of his critics idly suppose derives from a reactionary and unashamedly bucolic nostalgia.
In approaching the question of musical understanding, Scruton takes his cue from Wittgenstein. This might seem an odd place to begin, given that Wittgenstein is more famous for emptying things of meaning than for filling them with it, and a large proportion of his sadly fleeting references to music are concerned with showing how our use of language is often more meaningless – or perhaps “musical” – than we would suppose. The demonstration is never reversed, however: music, for Wittgenstein, should never be thought of as a vehicle for something else. This is not to say that we do not find music meaningful as a practice – and it is this more embodied sense of meaning that Scruton pursues.
It is Wittgenstein’s analogy between musical and facial expression that Scruton eventually uses to sketch an account of the way music demands imaginative engagement. Just as facial expressions do not communicate something that can be understood so much as enjoin us to imagine what it feels like when we ourselves make such an expression, so too, according to Scruton, does some elemental aspect of musical experience enjoin us to engage our imagining in similar fashion. In this way, and because the experience of music is not, at least not typically, heard as a single expression, the imagination is forced to grapple with the musical shapes and forms as they unfold over time, following its movement as it echoes in, or is anticipated by, the movements of our body and rational imagination.
It is in this aspect of “enjoinment” – of the way we join with the music – that is the key to Scruton’s conception not only of musical understanding but also of its wider cultural and social value. Just as a grimace demands that we imagine the complex of unpleasant feelings and thoughts behind that particular belligerent facial expression, and so too music may require us to identify with a world of sensibilities which happens to sit ill with us. We may refuse to acquiesce, but, as Scruton puts it, in connection with the hit song “Angel of Music” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, we may also be “seduced”. In which case, “we become the music, while the music lasts. Into our own first-person perspective there creeps a phoney state of mind that sits uncomfortably with our sense of who we are. It is surely one of the roles of taste or aesthetic judgment to discriminate between the expression with which we might identify, and the expression that invites us to sympathize with a state of mind that in our better moments we seek to shun”.
This is why the cultural aspect of music is so important for Scruton. For while sentimental, phoney music does not communicate shallowness and falsehoods in a conceptual sense, it does communicate such things in the more literal sense of shaping a community of listeners who share the phoney sensibilities of which it is an expression. The point is a blunt one: without good music, culture and society simply degrade.
But what is good music, according to Scruton? As with the concept of musical understanding, this is something that must be teased out of the volume as a whole. A clue may be found in the essay on Janácek and Schoenberg, however, where Scruton refers to the common sensation in art that something “could not have been otherwise”; to a sense of necessity central to the experience of all art according to which we judge the rightness of a gesture, an expression or an entire work down from its overall shape to its tiniest detail. In terms of the argument of the chapter itself, it is held that this sense is much greater with the relatively free music of Janácek than it is with the strict and methodical serial compositions of Schoenberg. This is because, Scruton argues, the sense of necessity that attaches to our perception of the rightness of Janácek’s music comes solely through what we can hear, whereas with Schoenberg it comes by understanding things that cannot, in actual fact, really be heard.
As a representation of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, one might argue, this is as wilfully misleading as it gets – notwithstanding its being spot-on as a condemnation of some of the uses to which Schoenberg’s method has been put. But as a general principle, Scruton’s idea that good music must be both worthy and capable of being listened to with understanding is hard to fault. That is to say, music can be held to be good not only if we can join with it in the sense outlined above, but if we can also judge it to be worth joining with, a rational aesthetic judgment that draws in considerations of everything – from character, sincerity, to clarity of line and subtlety of argument – that may reasonably be heard in the music.
In philosophical terms, Understanding Music represents as profound and thoughtful a musical picture as one is likely to find in the newly abundant literature on the subject. In some cases, such as the chapter on “Movement”, one feels that much more could have been said had the publisher asked for some new material rather than simply hoovering up articles and essays from publications ranging from the scholarly British Journal of Aesthetics to Prospect magazine. The most rewarding chapters in fact are the critical essays, in which the philosophical dimension ties itself to elucidating, for example, the meaning of the use of “colour” in Szymanowski, or the sacred utterance at the heart of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Here – even for those of us with more apparently progressive musical tastes than those professed by Scruton – there is so much to agree with that one’s nascent frustrations at the absence of a more complete book grow exponentially. But extended philosophical exposition has its dangers, too, and in enjoining his reader to piece together for themselves such a humane and insightful conception of musical understanding, perhaps this lack of systematic presentation should be considered a virtue.
Roger Scruton
UNDERSTANDING MUSIC
Philosophy and interpretation
244pp. Continuum. £18.99 (US $29.95).
978 14 84706 506 3
Although music has always stood comparison with the other arts, its oddness is something we rediscover each time we try to describe it. When we speak of interpreting works of art, for example, we refer to the practice of deciphering their single or several meanings. But to interpret music, in the classical tradition at least, has come to refer simply to playing it; that is to executing a set of more or less clear instructions left by the composer. Similarly, in eighteenth-century France, when the concept of mimesis harboured the images of excellence in all the arts, and no one troubled to discuss the arts without discussing their success in imitating “la belle nature”, the sole entry on musical imitation listed in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie discussed only the purely technical matter of one part imitating another in polyphonic music. None among the numerous such pitfalls is more hazardous than the idea of musical understanding. Ordinarily, when understanding something, such as a sentence, we are grasping its meaning. But while most people are clear that the phrase “to understand music” is not itself without meaning, agreement on what is understood in the musical case is less forthcoming. We might not hesitate to criticize an otherwise note-perfect performance for “lacking understanding”, but it might take us longer to specify what it was the player had failed to understand.
The elusive question of musical understanding lies both at the centre and in the margins of Roger Scruton’s latest book. It is central in the sense that a key chapter addresses the subject directly, and that much of the rest of the book reflects on various normative issues that follow from the concept of musical understanding (such as which kinds of music lend themselves best to being listened to in this way). It remains marginal, on the other hand, in that no substantial theory of musical understanding is in fact advanced, though this is largely on account of the volume being a collection of somewhat disparate philosophical and critical essays. None the less, there is a tantalizing sketch of such a theory, and in this respect, the present volume constitutes a genuine advance on the earlier, and very influential, Aesthetics of Music (1997). In addition, it permits the reader to grasp the relation between Scruton’s thoughtful aesthetic conservatism and the more general social and political conservatism which many of his critics idly suppose derives from a reactionary and unashamedly bucolic nostalgia.
In approaching the question of musical understanding, Scruton takes his cue from Wittgenstein. This might seem an odd place to begin, given that Wittgenstein is more famous for emptying things of meaning than for filling them with it, and a large proportion of his sadly fleeting references to music are concerned with showing how our use of language is often more meaningless – or perhaps “musical” – than we would suppose. The demonstration is never reversed, however: music, for Wittgenstein, should never be thought of as a vehicle for something else. This is not to say that we do not find music meaningful as a practice – and it is this more embodied sense of meaning that Scruton pursues.
It is Wittgenstein’s analogy between musical and facial expression that Scruton eventually uses to sketch an account of the way music demands imaginative engagement. Just as facial expressions do not communicate something that can be understood so much as enjoin us to imagine what it feels like when we ourselves make such an expression, so too, according to Scruton, does some elemental aspect of musical experience enjoin us to engage our imagining in similar fashion. In this way, and because the experience of music is not, at least not typically, heard as a single expression, the imagination is forced to grapple with the musical shapes and forms as they unfold over time, following its movement as it echoes in, or is anticipated by, the movements of our body and rational imagination.
It is in this aspect of “enjoinment” – of the way we join with the music – that is the key to Scruton’s conception not only of musical understanding but also of its wider cultural and social value. Just as a grimace demands that we imagine the complex of unpleasant feelings and thoughts behind that particular belligerent facial expression, and so too music may require us to identify with a world of sensibilities which happens to sit ill with us. We may refuse to acquiesce, but, as Scruton puts it, in connection with the hit song “Angel of Music” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, we may also be “seduced”. In which case, “we become the music, while the music lasts. Into our own first-person perspective there creeps a phoney state of mind that sits uncomfortably with our sense of who we are. It is surely one of the roles of taste or aesthetic judgment to discriminate between the expression with which we might identify, and the expression that invites us to sympathize with a state of mind that in our better moments we seek to shun”.
This is why the cultural aspect of music is so important for Scruton. For while sentimental, phoney music does not communicate shallowness and falsehoods in a conceptual sense, it does communicate such things in the more literal sense of shaping a community of listeners who share the phoney sensibilities of which it is an expression. The point is a blunt one: without good music, culture and society simply degrade.
But what is good music, according to Scruton? As with the concept of musical understanding, this is something that must be teased out of the volume as a whole. A clue may be found in the essay on Janácek and Schoenberg, however, where Scruton refers to the common sensation in art that something “could not have been otherwise”; to a sense of necessity central to the experience of all art according to which we judge the rightness of a gesture, an expression or an entire work down from its overall shape to its tiniest detail. In terms of the argument of the chapter itself, it is held that this sense is much greater with the relatively free music of Janácek than it is with the strict and methodical serial compositions of Schoenberg. This is because, Scruton argues, the sense of necessity that attaches to our perception of the rightness of Janácek’s music comes solely through what we can hear, whereas with Schoenberg it comes by understanding things that cannot, in actual fact, really be heard.
As a representation of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, one might argue, this is as wilfully misleading as it gets – notwithstanding its being spot-on as a condemnation of some of the uses to which Schoenberg’s method has been put. But as a general principle, Scruton’s idea that good music must be both worthy and capable of being listened to with understanding is hard to fault. That is to say, music can be held to be good not only if we can join with it in the sense outlined above, but if we can also judge it to be worth joining with, a rational aesthetic judgment that draws in considerations of everything – from character, sincerity, to clarity of line and subtlety of argument – that may reasonably be heard in the music.
In philosophical terms, Understanding Music represents as profound and thoughtful a musical picture as one is likely to find in the newly abundant literature on the subject. In some cases, such as the chapter on “Movement”, one feels that much more could have been said had the publisher asked for some new material rather than simply hoovering up articles and essays from publications ranging from the scholarly British Journal of Aesthetics to Prospect magazine. The most rewarding chapters in fact are the critical essays, in which the philosophical dimension ties itself to elucidating, for example, the meaning of the use of “colour” in Szymanowski, or the sacred utterance at the heart of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Here – even for those of us with more apparently progressive musical tastes than those professed by Scruton – there is so much to agree with that one’s nascent frustrations at the absence of a more complete book grow exponentially. But extended philosophical exposition has its dangers, too, and in enjoining his reader to piece together for themselves such a humane and insightful conception of musical understanding, perhaps this lack of systematic presentation should be considered a virtue.
Roger Scruton
UNDERSTANDING MUSIC
Philosophy and interpretation
244pp. Continuum. £18.99 (US $29.95).
978 14 84706 506 3
Labels:
classical music,
philosophy
Monday, 16 November 2009
Britten Song Cycles
Benjamin Britten was less of a presence than usual at this year's Aldeburgh festival, but lovers of his music could find consolation in a series of Britten song cycles in Blythburgh church, masterminded by the accompanist Malcolm Martineau. Six were included in Aldeburgh's London showcase at Kings Place, intended to display the festival's usual fine fare and the fruits of its artist development programmes.
One of the problems with this repertoire is that while the composer is always unmistakably himself, the songs also have the chameleon-like property of completely immersing themselves in the character of the poems being set. The singer has to convey the character of the poems without drowning the rest. Of the six singers, only Nicky Spence erred, his taste for the spry Scots dialect of Who Are These Children? causing him to miscue when handling the searing anger at the heart of these songs.
Praise should go to the soprano Katherine Broderick and tenor James Geer, who gave nuanced and mature renditions of Britten's Pushkin and Hölderlin settings. But it was Benedict Nelson's superbly rich baritone that stole the show. Songs and Proverbs of William Blake is marked by a darkness of mood and bleak mixture of yearning lyricism and uncanny incantation. Controlled and committed, Nelson produced a tour de force.
Martineau's command of this repertoire is second to none and his unfussy playing throughout this long and gruelling programme was perfectly placed. But to judge from his young singers, his qualities as a teacher may yet equal his more celebrated gifts as an accompanist.
One of the problems with this repertoire is that while the composer is always unmistakably himself, the songs also have the chameleon-like property of completely immersing themselves in the character of the poems being set. The singer has to convey the character of the poems without drowning the rest. Of the six singers, only Nicky Spence erred, his taste for the spry Scots dialect of Who Are These Children? causing him to miscue when handling the searing anger at the heart of these songs.
Praise should go to the soprano Katherine Broderick and tenor James Geer, who gave nuanced and mature renditions of Britten's Pushkin and Hölderlin settings. But it was Benedict Nelson's superbly rich baritone that stole the show. Songs and Proverbs of William Blake is marked by a darkness of mood and bleak mixture of yearning lyricism and uncanny incantation. Controlled and committed, Nelson produced a tour de force.
Martineau's command of this repertoire is second to none and his unfussy playing throughout this long and gruelling programme was perfectly placed. But to judge from his young singers, his qualities as a teacher may yet equal his more celebrated gifts as an accompanist.
Labels:
classical music
Friday, 6 November 2009
How you write an opera? Aldeburgh has the answer
A pioneering project is helping young – and not-so-young – composers get to grips with the challenges of writing an opera. Rule number one: collaborate, collaborate, collaborate
David Toop has a spring in his step. "What a day," he says, looking out over a sea of billowing reeds sweeping out to the Suffolk horizon. "I feel I've achieved more in these past three days than in the last three months. Today is perhaps the most productive day I've ever had."
It's only lunchtime, too. Toop, a pioneering figure in the field of sound art and the author of two critical surveys of hip-hop and experimental music, is working on an opera. "Well," he says, "a kind of opera – but if you'd asked me a few years ago whether I thought I would ever be writing an opera, I would have said no. More than no, in fact."
The kind-of-opera in question is provisionally entitled Star-shaped Biscuit, a work for three singers, a handful of instrumentalists and computer loosely based on the story of Dora Maar. Maar, a painter and photographer as well as Picasso's lover for much of the 1930s, possessed a star-shaped biscuit box that – together with a fragment of the original contents – became something of a fetish object in surrealist circles. The opera relates her efforts to reconcile her sense of identity with the manipulation of it by others, the star shape symbolising the web of relations and Maar's efforts to draw them to a coherent centre.
Toop's enthusiasm for the project is partly thanks to his participation in the Jerwood Opera Writing programme, which is hosted by Aldeburgh Music. The organisation works year-round to promote music-making, education and performance in this area of coastal Suffolk – best known for the Aldeburgh festival, which for three weeks each June attracts the great and the good of the international classical music world. The festival was founded by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in 1948; their intention was partly to foster a renaissance in English opera.
Now, their dream seems finally to be coming true. "The programme is unique," says Jonathan Reekie, Aldeburgh Music's director and the controlling mind behind the buzzing "creative campus" at Aldeburgh, a cluster of rehearsal spaces and performance venues that now run through the former Victorian maltings at Snape. "There are other places where you can go and workshop classical music, but with opera it's exceedingly rare. What's unique about our programme is the opportunity it affords for the fellows to workshop intensively as well as sample the experiences of others. They are really being provoked into thinking about what opera is, why it's needed."
Getting the shows on the road
Reekie developed the Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowships in response to the difficulty most young – and not-so-young – composers face in trying to write for the form, and the consequent dearth of new works in the UK. Only a handful of new operas make it to the stage each year, and even then new work is usually consigned to the smaller auditoriums, such as the Royal Opera's Linbury Studio or Glyndebourne's Jerwood Studio. It doesn't take long to figure out why. It's hard enough for playwrights to come up with a text and get it on stage, even in a homemade production, and infinitely harder if your project involves live music and trained singers.
"The economics of opera production are really not geared towards the financial risks involved in commissioning new work, training the cast, setting up the production, staging what could well be only a handful of shows," says Reekie. Even well-established composers find that commissions are extremely scarce.
Which is where the Aldeburgh scheme comes in. It offers composers the opportunity to see and hear their pieces while they are still in development. Composers, librettists and others selected for the fellowship receive year-round support in developing their projects, and are invited to Snape for a number of week-long residencies during which they receive both formal and informal guidance. They're able to try out sections of the work with a team of players, singers and technical staff assembled for the purpose.
Elspeth Brooke, a young composer, says she has been wanting to write an opera for years, but couldn't have done it without something like this. "The idea of working on something for a whole year without really knowing whether it fits together, and what it's really going to look like, is a terrifying leap of faith," she says.
In Brooke's case, the question of what the finished work is going to look like is particularly crucial: her project is a collaboration with video artist Ellie Rees and poet Jack Underwood. Underwood's libretto, based on a poem by Michael Donaghy called The Commission, is about a Florentine Renaissance artist who decides he must cut off the head of the man who murdered his brother.
"I wasn't really au fait with the world of opera when we started to discuss the project," says Underwood, "but I wanted to shock Elspeth with a big, stomping murder thriller. The first-person narrative also gives it a very film noir-ish, Robert Mitchum flavour, which is a bit of a dream for a video artist."
Video projection has increasingly become standard for many opera directors, but The Commission is different: the video is completely integral. Much of the action will take place on screen, or behind it, using shadow projections. The visual and musical styles are strongly reminiscent of film noir. And, strikingly, the entire set will be portable – meaning the show can be staged practically anywhere.
Reekie sees it as one of his many missions to free opera from the constraints of the traditional opera house. He has invited the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli to lead the Jerwood programme. A former student of Stockhausen and Kagel, Battistelli has written nearly 20 operas on subjects ranging from Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopaedia to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. His latest project, based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, is due to open at La Scala in 2013.
Besides offering practical advice, Battistelli's role is to make sure everyone involved is certain that what they really want to write is an opera – which, in his understanding means sowing doubt, teasing out problems in the work. "Opera is the enemy of certainty. It should be all about impurity," Battistelli says. "It's one thing to know how you might go about setting a drama to music, but quite another to know why the drama you want to set should be an opera."
The importance of impurity
Impurity – or at least compromise – has always been essential to opera. Its history has been marked by power struggles between composers, librettists, directors, singers and impresarios – who, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were very much in charge. Mozart's famous complaint to his father in 1781 that "music should reign supreme" in opera was born of frustration with the status quo. Only in the 19th century would composers begin to assert themselves as being in charge of the whole process.
Certainly, Brooke, Rees and Underwood all see themselves as equal partners, whose separate spheres of knowledge and experience intersect in a collaborative project. "It's absurd when composers insist on writing their own libretti," says Brooke. "I mean, I wouldn't expect Jack Underwood to write the music." Underwood, who admits he scraped a pass at Grade One trumpet, seems relieved. "I do worry that at any given moment my ignorance will expose me," he says. "But I feel I perhaps have a more objective view of the piece – of what the musical setting can do for our story as a whole."
Rees, too, has been involved right from the start, even to the extent that one of the characters will have an exclusively pre-recorded video presence. Does that mean it's still an opera? "It is an opera," says Rees, "but one that we hope will bridge some of the gaps between opera, traditional theatre and film."
Battistelli, for one, seems impressed. I ask him if he doesn't think the idea is artistically compromised. "Not at all," he says. A grin spreads as he rises slowly to his feet. "This is a very strong piece. Full … of impurities."
David Toop has a spring in his step. "What a day," he says, looking out over a sea of billowing reeds sweeping out to the Suffolk horizon. "I feel I've achieved more in these past three days than in the last three months. Today is perhaps the most productive day I've ever had."
It's only lunchtime, too. Toop, a pioneering figure in the field of sound art and the author of two critical surveys of hip-hop and experimental music, is working on an opera. "Well," he says, "a kind of opera – but if you'd asked me a few years ago whether I thought I would ever be writing an opera, I would have said no. More than no, in fact."
The kind-of-opera in question is provisionally entitled Star-shaped Biscuit, a work for three singers, a handful of instrumentalists and computer loosely based on the story of Dora Maar. Maar, a painter and photographer as well as Picasso's lover for much of the 1930s, possessed a star-shaped biscuit box that – together with a fragment of the original contents – became something of a fetish object in surrealist circles. The opera relates her efforts to reconcile her sense of identity with the manipulation of it by others, the star shape symbolising the web of relations and Maar's efforts to draw them to a coherent centre.
Toop's enthusiasm for the project is partly thanks to his participation in the Jerwood Opera Writing programme, which is hosted by Aldeburgh Music. The organisation works year-round to promote music-making, education and performance in this area of coastal Suffolk – best known for the Aldeburgh festival, which for three weeks each June attracts the great and the good of the international classical music world. The festival was founded by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in 1948; their intention was partly to foster a renaissance in English opera.
Now, their dream seems finally to be coming true. "The programme is unique," says Jonathan Reekie, Aldeburgh Music's director and the controlling mind behind the buzzing "creative campus" at Aldeburgh, a cluster of rehearsal spaces and performance venues that now run through the former Victorian maltings at Snape. "There are other places where you can go and workshop classical music, but with opera it's exceedingly rare. What's unique about our programme is the opportunity it affords for the fellows to workshop intensively as well as sample the experiences of others. They are really being provoked into thinking about what opera is, why it's needed."
Getting the shows on the road
Reekie developed the Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowships in response to the difficulty most young – and not-so-young – composers face in trying to write for the form, and the consequent dearth of new works in the UK. Only a handful of new operas make it to the stage each year, and even then new work is usually consigned to the smaller auditoriums, such as the Royal Opera's Linbury Studio or Glyndebourne's Jerwood Studio. It doesn't take long to figure out why. It's hard enough for playwrights to come up with a text and get it on stage, even in a homemade production, and infinitely harder if your project involves live music and trained singers.
"The economics of opera production are really not geared towards the financial risks involved in commissioning new work, training the cast, setting up the production, staging what could well be only a handful of shows," says Reekie. Even well-established composers find that commissions are extremely scarce.
Which is where the Aldeburgh scheme comes in. It offers composers the opportunity to see and hear their pieces while they are still in development. Composers, librettists and others selected for the fellowship receive year-round support in developing their projects, and are invited to Snape for a number of week-long residencies during which they receive both formal and informal guidance. They're able to try out sections of the work with a team of players, singers and technical staff assembled for the purpose.
Elspeth Brooke, a young composer, says she has been wanting to write an opera for years, but couldn't have done it without something like this. "The idea of working on something for a whole year without really knowing whether it fits together, and what it's really going to look like, is a terrifying leap of faith," she says.
In Brooke's case, the question of what the finished work is going to look like is particularly crucial: her project is a collaboration with video artist Ellie Rees and poet Jack Underwood. Underwood's libretto, based on a poem by Michael Donaghy called The Commission, is about a Florentine Renaissance artist who decides he must cut off the head of the man who murdered his brother.
"I wasn't really au fait with the world of opera when we started to discuss the project," says Underwood, "but I wanted to shock Elspeth with a big, stomping murder thriller. The first-person narrative also gives it a very film noir-ish, Robert Mitchum flavour, which is a bit of a dream for a video artist."
Video projection has increasingly become standard for many opera directors, but The Commission is different: the video is completely integral. Much of the action will take place on screen, or behind it, using shadow projections. The visual and musical styles are strongly reminiscent of film noir. And, strikingly, the entire set will be portable – meaning the show can be staged practically anywhere.
Reekie sees it as one of his many missions to free opera from the constraints of the traditional opera house. He has invited the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli to lead the Jerwood programme. A former student of Stockhausen and Kagel, Battistelli has written nearly 20 operas on subjects ranging from Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopaedia to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. His latest project, based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, is due to open at La Scala in 2013.
Besides offering practical advice, Battistelli's role is to make sure everyone involved is certain that what they really want to write is an opera – which, in his understanding means sowing doubt, teasing out problems in the work. "Opera is the enemy of certainty. It should be all about impurity," Battistelli says. "It's one thing to know how you might go about setting a drama to music, but quite another to know why the drama you want to set should be an opera."
The importance of impurity
Impurity – or at least compromise – has always been essential to opera. Its history has been marked by power struggles between composers, librettists, directors, singers and impresarios – who, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were very much in charge. Mozart's famous complaint to his father in 1781 that "music should reign supreme" in opera was born of frustration with the status quo. Only in the 19th century would composers begin to assert themselves as being in charge of the whole process.
Certainly, Brooke, Rees and Underwood all see themselves as equal partners, whose separate spheres of knowledge and experience intersect in a collaborative project. "It's absurd when composers insist on writing their own libretti," says Brooke. "I mean, I wouldn't expect Jack Underwood to write the music." Underwood, who admits he scraped a pass at Grade One trumpet, seems relieved. "I do worry that at any given moment my ignorance will expose me," he says. "But I feel I perhaps have a more objective view of the piece – of what the musical setting can do for our story as a whole."
Rees, too, has been involved right from the start, even to the extent that one of the characters will have an exclusively pre-recorded video presence. Does that mean it's still an opera? "It is an opera," says Rees, "but one that we hope will bridge some of the gaps between opera, traditional theatre and film."
Battistelli, for one, seems impressed. I ask him if he doesn't think the idea is artistically compromised. "Not at all," he says. A grin spreads as he rises slowly to his feet. "This is a very strong piece. Full … of impurities."
Labels:
opera
Monday, 2 November 2009
English Touring Opera: 'Handel would have done the same thing'
They are masters of multi-tasking. But can English Touring Opera pull off a five-night Handel marathon?It seemed like a good idea at the time," says James Conway. "Now I realise I must have been bloody crazy." Conway is the director of English Touring Opera, which is celebrating the 250th anniversary of Handel's death by doing what no opera company has ever done before: staging five different Handel operas over five consecutive nights.
"We have had some of our biggest successes with Handel," says Conway by way of explanation, but the company's very existence is perhaps its most stunning achievement. ETO was set up by the Arts Council in 1979, as a quick way to bolster it commitment to regional opera. "I don't think anybody expected it to last," says Randall Shannon, who, in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's infamous arts budget cuts, was charged with putting together and managing the orchestra.
But the company – called Opera 80 until a name change in 1992 – has indeed lasted. It now stages up to 90 opera performances a year, in as many as 25 regional and small-town venues around the country, at an annual cost to Arts Council England of just under £1.5m. That would be good value in any theatrical or musical context. But by operatic standards, it's extraordinary.
No less extraordinary is Handelfest, the extravagant project Conway cooked up to celebrate ETO's 30th birthday. The company is taking two well-known Handel operas (Alcina, Ariodante) and three less-well known ones (Flavio, Teseo, Tolomeo) to venues across southern England, together with a series of seminars and masterclasses. Most of the cast have at least two roles, with the counter-tenor Jonathan Peter Kenny, who sings Polinesso in Ariodante, even being recruited to conduct for the production of Flavio.
"People have asked whether we haven't had enough of Handel by now," says Conway. "But the man who presided over the greatest period in English operatic history deserves more than the smattering of attention he has received from the other opera companies. You might argue we're stretching the point, but I like to think that, given my position, Handel would have done the same thing."
The composer might also have been impressed by – and envious of – the unique rapport ETO has between cast and orchestra (the composer had a notoriously tempestuous relationship with his soloists). Shannon believes this rapport was the key to the company's early success. "The upstairs-downstairs division tends to be rather extreme in opera," he says, "but the informal atmosphere of touring lent our productions an extraordinary level of musical intimacy."
David Parry, artistic director from 1983 to 1987, agrees: "Because everybody knew each other so well, we could turn to our advantage the fact that we had neither the budget nor the space to mount imitation Zeffirelli productions. Our early productions of Mozart and Rossini were sleek, pared-down affairs, with an emphasis on acting and dramatic immediacy that put us in stark contrast with much of what was going on in Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells."
An early success was Steven Pimlott's controversial 1982 production of Don Giovanni, much raunchier and darker than audiences were used to at the time. Sexual tensions between all of the characters were made explicit, including the chemistry between Giovanni and his servant Leporello, who was forced to wear a dress in Act II. "It went down a storm with all but the most opinonated members of the audience," says Parry, who remembers one reviewer bemoaning the lack of "propriety and sunny Spanish scenes" – an odd complaint to make about a work set almost entirely in the hours of darkness. "The production certainly put us on the map, giving us a sense of identity and confidence that allowed us to experiment."
Since 2002, ETO has been run by Canadian-born Conway, who has revived its ailing finances by returning to experimentation. "People often assume that regional audiences are somehow deficient," says Conway. "That when it comes to opera, you almost need to apologise for waking them from their provincial slumbers. These ideas are complete bollocks."
Conway cut his directorial teeth working with the West Bengal jatra, music-theatre companies that toured India's tea plantations and coal mines with "shows about everything from Krishna to Che Guevara. I travelled with jatra parties by coach and boat, sleeping on classroom floors in the humid afternoons before the long evening shows in big-top tents, with several thousand paid-up enthusiasts crammed inside, and hundreds more peeking through holes in the tarpaulin."
The experience gave Conway a taste not only for the sometimes uncomfortable lifestyle of touring, but also for the unpretentious performance aesthetic that continues to define ETO's work. "It certainly instilled in me a conviction that opera, on a good night, speaks persuasively to the heart and mind."
Labels:
opera
Friday, 16 October 2009
The future's taped
Review of Sonic Explorations festival for Times Literary Supplement
Perhaps all art should be strange. The historical and cultural continuity we seek to find in art imparts a veneer of usualness to it, but it is precisely the usualness of the world we require works of art to disrupt. Certainly the quality of strangeness has been at a particular premium in the art of the last hundred years or so, and in few contexts is this more evident than in the field of electroacoustic music. In many ways similar in conception to a host of now much more mainstream artistic practices – such music shares, for example, with abstract expressionism a focus on the perception of the material rather than representation – there has always been something otherworldly about electroacoustic music, a future-orientedness more authentic and deeply entrenched than the casual sci-fi futurisms to which our saturated sensibilities have become inured.
The Swedish composer Åke Pamerud is a good example. His Crystal Counterpoint is one of many works that received their British premieres during Sonic Explorations, the London Sinfonietta’s recent three-day exploration of the past and present of electroacoustic music. It begins with a vivid aural snapshot of the everyday: cocktails, contented chatter, Frank Sinatra crooning away in the background. But Pamerud soon draws the ear closer to the chinking glass until, suddenly, we seem to enter its very fabric, the soundworld dominated by bulbous shapes and brittle textures swirling, presumably, in response to being filled and emptied by now inaudible merrymakers. To begin with, the atmosphere is calm and luxuriant, but the tension mounts, building to a rather angry climax and the breaking of a wine-glass stem. On one level the proceedings are solidly humorous: who would have thought the secret life of glasses to be so fraught with emotion? On another, the work is every bit as fine-grained as more traditional musical forms. In opening our ears to a world of apparently endless possibility, too, the sense of the future is palpable.
The transformation of the commonplace – to borrow Arthur Danto’s phrase – may itself be commonplace within electroacoustic music, but when handled with skill it can be very rewarding. Often the commonplace in question is simply the sound of a traditional instrument. In Luigi Nono’s À Pierre, for example, composed in 1985 for the sixtieth birthday of Pierre Boulez, a duet for the already unusual combination of bass flute and bass clarinet decomposes as shifting electronic filters draw the ear in and out of various parts of each instrument, exploring their contrasting wooden and metallic textures and teasing out an elaborate counterpoint between the wheezing of the clarinet’s reed, the whoosh of the flute’s mouthpiece, and the dull tap of the fingers working the felted keys. Similarly, in György Ligeti’s Artikulation, from 1958, one of the earliest examples of music of this kind, the notes of a solitary harp disappear into a vortex of fully sustained tones, the instrument itself remaining like a ghost on stage while its reverberations take on a life of their own.
Three consecutive evenings of experimentation could have proved rather heavy going. That they didn’t is a credit to Jonathan Harvey, who organised the festival and put together programmes which managed to sharpen particular angles on the repertoire without going over the top. Though a central figure in European electroacoustic music, Harvey’s electronic compositions are unusual in the field by being much closer in form and design to what most people would think of as conventional music. Ricercare una Melodia (1989), for instance, really is a ricercare in the renaissance manner of Andrea Gabrieli, though in an advanced harmonic idiom and using electronic processing to build imitative parts from a single acoustic line. And again, in a recent work called Other Presences composed for Stockhausen’s son Markus, digital sampling captures motifs played by a solo trumpet and distributes them as sustained broken chords to specific speaker locations around the auditorium, leading to an effect not dissimilar to the great spatial choral works composed by Adrian Willaert for St Mark’s. As the work progresses, the rough-hewn melody and thick timbre distil and clarify themselves, and a prolonged middle section engenders an atmosphere of vastness and peace.
Such works are leagues away from the abstract whirrs and crackles of Edgard Varèse or Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose Pole for 2 received a spirited “live electronic” performance by Ian Dearden and David Sheppard of Sound Intermedia (the Sinfonietta’s electroacoustic wing), a tireless if not always visible presence throughout the festival. A little closer to Harvey’s aesthetic are Luciano Berio’s essays, particularly the wonderful Naturale from 1985, in which a recording of a wistful strain of a Sicilian shepherd’s song is “accompanied” by live viola, marimba and tamtam.
It was a pleasure to hear these important, older works, but the real excitement of the festival came from the new compositions. David Fennessy’s The Room is the Resonator was atypical in using consonant harmonies throughout. Based on recordings made in Bockenhiem underground station in Frankfurt, the piece features a live cello playing around and against taped harmonium chords, which are electronically manipulated and sustained. The sense of place fades in and out, coming to a head with the eventual arrival of a train (though this is abruptly cut off), but the feeling of space and elemental calm endures. Equally arresting, if very different, was Claudia Molitor’s it’s not quite how I remember it, which combines pre-recorded and live music with 3D film to prise open our sense of linear time. The film is tied to the music, but both are constructed as collages so that listeners are forced to piece the whole together for themselves, helped along by a visual conclusion in which a page of the score is folded up to form a cube.
The festival closed with Trevor Wishart’s Globalalia. Wishart is an important figure in the world of electroacoustic music; he turned his attention to the human voice (“the most versatile instrument there is”) in the early 1980s and hasn’t looked back since. Globalalia uses 8,000 different syllable sounds drawn from 26 different languages. It is composed with minute attention to the details of rhythm and consonance, in clearly organised musical sequences that help the ear divorce the sound from any residual trace of semantic meaning. As a technical achievement – and as a remarkably pleasant way to witness the whole of linguistic creation hurtling past – Globalalia is magnificent, leaving one, quite naturally, lost for words.
Perhaps all art should be strange. The historical and cultural continuity we seek to find in art imparts a veneer of usualness to it, but it is precisely the usualness of the world we require works of art to disrupt. Certainly the quality of strangeness has been at a particular premium in the art of the last hundred years or so, and in few contexts is this more evident than in the field of electroacoustic music. In many ways similar in conception to a host of now much more mainstream artistic practices – such music shares, for example, with abstract expressionism a focus on the perception of the material rather than representation – there has always been something otherworldly about electroacoustic music, a future-orientedness more authentic and deeply entrenched than the casual sci-fi futurisms to which our saturated sensibilities have become inured.
The Swedish composer Åke Pamerud is a good example. His Crystal Counterpoint is one of many works that received their British premieres during Sonic Explorations, the London Sinfonietta’s recent three-day exploration of the past and present of electroacoustic music. It begins with a vivid aural snapshot of the everyday: cocktails, contented chatter, Frank Sinatra crooning away in the background. But Pamerud soon draws the ear closer to the chinking glass until, suddenly, we seem to enter its very fabric, the soundworld dominated by bulbous shapes and brittle textures swirling, presumably, in response to being filled and emptied by now inaudible merrymakers. To begin with, the atmosphere is calm and luxuriant, but the tension mounts, building to a rather angry climax and the breaking of a wine-glass stem. On one level the proceedings are solidly humorous: who would have thought the secret life of glasses to be so fraught with emotion? On another, the work is every bit as fine-grained as more traditional musical forms. In opening our ears to a world of apparently endless possibility, too, the sense of the future is palpable.
The transformation of the commonplace – to borrow Arthur Danto’s phrase – may itself be commonplace within electroacoustic music, but when handled with skill it can be very rewarding. Often the commonplace in question is simply the sound of a traditional instrument. In Luigi Nono’s À Pierre, for example, composed in 1985 for the sixtieth birthday of Pierre Boulez, a duet for the already unusual combination of bass flute and bass clarinet decomposes as shifting electronic filters draw the ear in and out of various parts of each instrument, exploring their contrasting wooden and metallic textures and teasing out an elaborate counterpoint between the wheezing of the clarinet’s reed, the whoosh of the flute’s mouthpiece, and the dull tap of the fingers working the felted keys. Similarly, in György Ligeti’s Artikulation, from 1958, one of the earliest examples of music of this kind, the notes of a solitary harp disappear into a vortex of fully sustained tones, the instrument itself remaining like a ghost on stage while its reverberations take on a life of their own.
Three consecutive evenings of experimentation could have proved rather heavy going. That they didn’t is a credit to Jonathan Harvey, who organised the festival and put together programmes which managed to sharpen particular angles on the repertoire without going over the top. Though a central figure in European electroacoustic music, Harvey’s electronic compositions are unusual in the field by being much closer in form and design to what most people would think of as conventional music. Ricercare una Melodia (1989), for instance, really is a ricercare in the renaissance manner of Andrea Gabrieli, though in an advanced harmonic idiom and using electronic processing to build imitative parts from a single acoustic line. And again, in a recent work called Other Presences composed for Stockhausen’s son Markus, digital sampling captures motifs played by a solo trumpet and distributes them as sustained broken chords to specific speaker locations around the auditorium, leading to an effect not dissimilar to the great spatial choral works composed by Adrian Willaert for St Mark’s. As the work progresses, the rough-hewn melody and thick timbre distil and clarify themselves, and a prolonged middle section engenders an atmosphere of vastness and peace.
Such works are leagues away from the abstract whirrs and crackles of Edgard Varèse or Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose Pole for 2 received a spirited “live electronic” performance by Ian Dearden and David Sheppard of Sound Intermedia (the Sinfonietta’s electroacoustic wing), a tireless if not always visible presence throughout the festival. A little closer to Harvey’s aesthetic are Luciano Berio’s essays, particularly the wonderful Naturale from 1985, in which a recording of a wistful strain of a Sicilian shepherd’s song is “accompanied” by live viola, marimba and tamtam.
It was a pleasure to hear these important, older works, but the real excitement of the festival came from the new compositions. David Fennessy’s The Room is the Resonator was atypical in using consonant harmonies throughout. Based on recordings made in Bockenhiem underground station in Frankfurt, the piece features a live cello playing around and against taped harmonium chords, which are electronically manipulated and sustained. The sense of place fades in and out, coming to a head with the eventual arrival of a train (though this is abruptly cut off), but the feeling of space and elemental calm endures. Equally arresting, if very different, was Claudia Molitor’s it’s not quite how I remember it, which combines pre-recorded and live music with 3D film to prise open our sense of linear time. The film is tied to the music, but both are constructed as collages so that listeners are forced to piece the whole together for themselves, helped along by a visual conclusion in which a page of the score is folded up to form a cube.
The festival closed with Trevor Wishart’s Globalalia. Wishart is an important figure in the world of electroacoustic music; he turned his attention to the human voice (“the most versatile instrument there is”) in the early 1980s and hasn’t looked back since. Globalalia uses 8,000 different syllable sounds drawn from 26 different languages. It is composed with minute attention to the details of rhythm and consonance, in clearly organised musical sequences that help the ear divorce the sound from any residual trace of semantic meaning. As a technical achievement – and as a remarkably pleasant way to witness the whole of linguistic creation hurtling past – Globalalia is magnificent, leaving one, quite naturally, lost for words.
Labels:
classical music
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Wozzeck
Keenlyside, Dalayman, Philharmonia, Esa Pekka-Salonen
Royal Festival Hall
It is a mark of any successful performance of Wozzeck – Alban Berg's masterpiece of dramatic and musical expressionism – that it leaves you completely lost for words. So thorough and far-reaching is the hatchet job it carries out on everything we assume to be the source of human dignity, and so forceful is the way Berg dramatises this moral and existential vortex in visceral, uncannily immediate music, that the only authentic response is silence.
Sadly, my job makes wordless responses rather awkward, but Esa-Pekka Salonen's semi-staged performance with the Philharmonia was certainly a success. Berg calls for a large orchestra and works every instrument hard right from the start, with tightly constructed symphonic sections demanding frequent changes of colour and style. Players and conductor must somehow keep cool heads while immersing themselves in the emotional upheavals of the music.
Though confined to a narrow strip at the front of the stage, the soloists brought fine acting and finer singing to the mix. Simon Keenlyside and Katarina Dalayman managed to convey the troubled essences of Wozzeck and Marie respectively, while Peter Hoare's tenor captured the skin-deep self-assurance of the Captain.
There is no reason why a semi-staged Wozzeck shouldn't have the same dramatic presence as a fully staged one. Unfortunately, this version tried to bridge the gap by projecting woozy fragments of live footage mingled with enormous kaleidoscopic visualisations, "colour-matched" for mood. A performance this good is impossible to ruin, but someone gave it a damn good try.
Royal Festival Hall
It is a mark of any successful performance of Wozzeck – Alban Berg's masterpiece of dramatic and musical expressionism – that it leaves you completely lost for words. So thorough and far-reaching is the hatchet job it carries out on everything we assume to be the source of human dignity, and so forceful is the way Berg dramatises this moral and existential vortex in visceral, uncannily immediate music, that the only authentic response is silence.
Sadly, my job makes wordless responses rather awkward, but Esa-Pekka Salonen's semi-staged performance with the Philharmonia was certainly a success. Berg calls for a large orchestra and works every instrument hard right from the start, with tightly constructed symphonic sections demanding frequent changes of colour and style. Players and conductor must somehow keep cool heads while immersing themselves in the emotional upheavals of the music.
Though confined to a narrow strip at the front of the stage, the soloists brought fine acting and finer singing to the mix. Simon Keenlyside and Katarina Dalayman managed to convey the troubled essences of Wozzeck and Marie respectively, while Peter Hoare's tenor captured the skin-deep self-assurance of the Captain.
There is no reason why a semi-staged Wozzeck shouldn't have the same dramatic presence as a fully staged one. Unfortunately, this version tried to bridge the gap by projecting woozy fragments of live footage mingled with enormous kaleidoscopic visualisations, "colour-matched" for mood. A performance this good is impossible to ruin, but someone gave it a damn good try.
Labels:
opera
Monday, 5 October 2009
Sonic Explorations
Sinfonietta, Kings Place, London
Most music heard today could be called electro-acoustic, but concerts devoted specifically to exploring the implications of electronic sound are exceedingly rare. Excellent, then, that the London Sinfonietta organised a three-day festival of the stuff – and where better than in the underground wood caverns of London's Kings Place, with acoustics so present and immediate that, with closed eyes, you can imagine yourself to be right inside the instruments on stage.
This kind of sensation is central to much electro-acoustic music. Take James Tenney's For Percussion Perhaps, Or … (night), the last work performed at the series' opening concert. In contrast to the precise scores of his European contemporaries, Tenney asks an unspecified instrument to create "nocturnal music – very soft, very long, very white". The performer – here David Powell, peering over the well-worked brass of his tuba, a wall of silent percussion rising up behind him – played a duet with his amplified and variously reprocessed echo. The result was magical, like being borne aloft on a comfortable cushion of sound to the cry of a distant muezzin.
The sense of flight is also central to Francis Dhomont's Vol d'Arondes, which, with its constantly changing shapes, symphonic textures and fleeting impressions of a village fete far below, feels something like hearing Debussy on acid. Other pieces, particularly from the first concert of canonical works in the genre - such as Ligeti's Artikulation and Nono's ¿Pierre [Boulez] – focus more on giving significant form to purely electronic sounds.
The once-mesmerising strangeness of this repertoire of burbles, plops and clicks seems rather quaint now that anyone can download a library of digital effects. But the music remains as fresh and vibrant as ever.
Most music heard today could be called electro-acoustic, but concerts devoted specifically to exploring the implications of electronic sound are exceedingly rare. Excellent, then, that the London Sinfonietta organised a three-day festival of the stuff – and where better than in the underground wood caverns of London's Kings Place, with acoustics so present and immediate that, with closed eyes, you can imagine yourself to be right inside the instruments on stage.
This kind of sensation is central to much electro-acoustic music. Take James Tenney's For Percussion Perhaps, Or … (night), the last work performed at the series' opening concert. In contrast to the precise scores of his European contemporaries, Tenney asks an unspecified instrument to create "nocturnal music – very soft, very long, very white". The performer – here David Powell, peering over the well-worked brass of his tuba, a wall of silent percussion rising up behind him – played a duet with his amplified and variously reprocessed echo. The result was magical, like being borne aloft on a comfortable cushion of sound to the cry of a distant muezzin.
The sense of flight is also central to Francis Dhomont's Vol d'Arondes, which, with its constantly changing shapes, symphonic textures and fleeting impressions of a village fete far below, feels something like hearing Debussy on acid. Other pieces, particularly from the first concert of canonical works in the genre - such as Ligeti's Artikulation and Nono's ¿Pierre [Boulez] – focus more on giving significant form to purely electronic sounds.
The once-mesmerising strangeness of this repertoire of burbles, plops and clicks seems rather quaint now that anyone can download a library of digital effects. But the music remains as fresh and vibrant as ever.
Labels:
classical music
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Anne-Sofie von Otter
Theresienstadt concert, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Music's emotional power is often dependent on its context. A programme of music composed primarily by inmates of the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt was always going to be moving, but the profundity of the encounter still took me by surprise.
Theresienstadt was a holding camp where prisoners stayed before being carted off to the death camps. But there were many longer-term inmates drawn from the Czech and German Jewish elite, who developed a kind of last-resort entertainment culture to keep themselves alive and to afford a glimpse of hope to the shorter-term residents who knew they had none. Eventually, the Nazis co-opted the unlikely renaissance for propaganda purposes by staging operettas and concerts to fool visitors from the Red Cross.
Stylistically, this programme was extremely varied, ranging from Debussyan song settings by Viktor Ullmann and the art-folk songs of Pavel Haas to the cabaret-esque ballads of Adolf Strauss and the skin-deep jollity of the camp's unofficial anthem – "In Terezin we take life as it comes" – adapted from the operetta Countess Maritza by Kalman. The commitment of the performers was unmistakable, Daniel Hope's throaty violin tones in particular echoing perfectly the ambiguous lyricism so often at play.
Like her legendary compatriot Jussi Björling, Von Otter's facility with folk genres is amplified by an ability to inhabit them completely in performance, and it was in many ways the least artful of the song settings that proved the most affecting. The lullaby by the children's author Ilse Weber, who looked after the camp children and voluntarily accompanied them to Auschwitz in 1944, has the simplest rocking melody imaginable. There may have been a dry eye in the house after Von Otter's serenely compassionate rendition, but I couldn't tell. Even my neighbours' faces had reduced to a dim blur.
Music's emotional power is often dependent on its context. A programme of music composed primarily by inmates of the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt was always going to be moving, but the profundity of the encounter still took me by surprise.
Theresienstadt was a holding camp where prisoners stayed before being carted off to the death camps. But there were many longer-term inmates drawn from the Czech and German Jewish elite, who developed a kind of last-resort entertainment culture to keep themselves alive and to afford a glimpse of hope to the shorter-term residents who knew they had none. Eventually, the Nazis co-opted the unlikely renaissance for propaganda purposes by staging operettas and concerts to fool visitors from the Red Cross.
Stylistically, this programme was extremely varied, ranging from Debussyan song settings by Viktor Ullmann and the art-folk songs of Pavel Haas to the cabaret-esque ballads of Adolf Strauss and the skin-deep jollity of the camp's unofficial anthem – "In Terezin we take life as it comes" – adapted from the operetta Countess Maritza by Kalman. The commitment of the performers was unmistakable, Daniel Hope's throaty violin tones in particular echoing perfectly the ambiguous lyricism so often at play.
Like her legendary compatriot Jussi Björling, Von Otter's facility with folk genres is amplified by an ability to inhabit them completely in performance, and it was in many ways the least artful of the song settings that proved the most affecting. The lullaby by the children's author Ilse Weber, who looked after the camp children and voluntarily accompanied them to Auschwitz in 1944, has the simplest rocking melody imaginable. There may have been a dry eye in the house after Von Otter's serenely compassionate rendition, but I couldn't tell. Even my neighbours' faces had reduced to a dim blur.
Labels:
classical music
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