'Fallen Women': Welsh National Opera Orchestra opens the Spring 2014 Season

The following review was first published in Wales Arts Review, Vol 3, Issue 2: http://www.walesartsreview.org/fallen-women-wno-orchestra-introduces-the-season/



St David’s Hall, Cardiff, 17 January 2014
Alban Berg: Lyric Suite (Three Movements, arranged for string orchestra by the composer)
Richard Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder
Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
Welsh National Opera Orchestra
Soprano: Emma Bell
Conductor: Lothar Koenigs


The status of women in opera is fraught with social and artistic contention. No masculine term carries the equivalent power of ‘prima donna’ or ‘first lady’ which, in opera, denotes the soprano heroine around whom both narrative and music often pivots.* But the accolade is an ambivalent one for, as Roger Parker has noted of nineteenth century opera – in a comment which carries far wider resonance – there are largely two types of women to be found: ‘the docile ones who usually suffer and die; and the scary ones who almost always suffer and die.’ Murder, banishment, abandonment, fatal illness, torture, suicide, despair: these are the fates which await the heroines of tragic opera, regardless of where that heroine might sit on the sliding scale from passive to strong spirited.

‘Fallen Women’ are so common in opera as to be cliché. This season, Welsh National Opera is putting the term under the microscope with dramatically linked new productions of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and Henze’s 1950s’ take on Manon’s story, Solitude Boulevard, together with a reprise of David McVicar’s classic production of Verdi’s literal ‘fallen woman’, La traviata. Of course, these operas were composed by men, depicting stories by men from a male-dominated world. Still today, in our less polarised yet unequal society, operas are more often than not written, conducted, and even directed by men, as these will be this season (here’s an interview with director Mariusz Treliński). So the opportunity to consider issues affecting contemporary young women from a woman’s perspective will be welcome indeed with a staging, by WNO Youth Opera in March, of Errollyn Wallen’s new work for young people, ANON. How ‘Anon’ might be related to ‘Manon’ will be intriguing to discover.

This concert by the WNO Orchestra was intended to introduce the ‘fallen women’ theme, with three works inspired by a composer’s impossible love for a particular woman; Berg’s yearning string orchestra arrangement of three inner movements from his Lyric Suite, encoded with references to Hanna Fuchs; Wagner’s uniquely intimate Wesendonck Lieder, setting poems of love by Mathilde Wesendonck, and Berlioz’s revolutionary Symphonie fantastique, an outpouring of frustrated passion for the actress Harriet Smithson. But, whilst this programme made for a satisfying – not to mention superbly performed – concert, ‘impossible love’ by no means equals ‘fallen woman’, which was confused here with quite different themes of the ‘muse’ and the ‘forbidden woman’.

For it is sexual trangression which causes a woman to ‘fall’, thereby unleashing the retribution of her society. As far as we know, however, none of these women transgressed through seducing, betraying nor, indeed, submitting to their wooer. Rather, they were unattainable – and that, in the case of Smithson only temporarily, as she eventually consented to marry the man who had made her his psychological-cum-musical idée fixe (unsurprisingly, the marriage did not last long). Wesendonck and Fuchs were already married – as were their would-be lovers, Wagner and Berg. These women were not fictional operatic characters. The fact that their respective composers turned them into highly romanticised fantasies encoded into music (whether for public or private consumption) says more about the composers and the prevailing aesthetic than it does about the women themselves or women in general. Indeed, the potent fascination with the female ‘muse’ still common today, and the complex, paradoxical relationship of this idea to modern-day notions of ‘fallen women’,** tells us more about our society’s continued enthrallment to the cultural and aesthetic norms of the nineteenth century than it tells us about actual women.

Happily, the confused theme did not detract from an evening of outstanding music-making, with the WNO Orchestra under conductor Lothar Koenigs, joined for the Wagner by soprano Emma Bell, together on excellent form. A wonderful array of colours, energy and dramatic contrast greeted the St David’s Hall audience. Especially striking were the evident commitment of the musicians and the detailed fineness of phrasing and articulation, which Koenigs deftly shaped into a dramatic whole in each piece, culminating in a Symphonie fantastique which was both riotous and grotesque without tipping overboard or becoming sloppy.

Berg’s Lyric Suite arrangement set a delicately serious tone, with the composer’s original forces of string quartet expanded into an ensemble of lush, ethereal orchestral textures. It was only in the 1970s of course, that George Perle discovered the entwined numerological and poetic symbolism embedded at the secret, structural heart of this exquisite work. Tonight, searing yet often pianissimo lines combined with wonderfully tight pizzicato and col legno in a luminous, almost impressionist performance evocative of tortured love. High praise is due to section leaders Stephen Bingham, Philip Heyman and, in particular, William Schofield and orchestra leader David Adams.

That this orchestra instinctively knows how to accompany is undoubted, but the sensitivity of ensemble with Emma Bell in the Wagner was acute. I had remembered Bell as a fine, intelligent Elsa in WNO’s Lohengrin last year but was taken aback by the sheer mellifluousness of her voice on this occasion. Initial tiny hints of a vocal catch in the upper register were soon dismissed to produce a beautifully rounded tone in tender service of music saturated with pre-Tristan und Isolde passion and pathos. The fourth and fifth songs, Schmerzen and Träume, were especially beguiling, with the brass and woodwind shining in support (though the lack of reproduction of the text in the programme was an oversight).

Berlioz is famous for his radical orchestration as well as his dramatic symphonic narratives, and Koenig’s players entered into the spirit of the fantastique with gusto. Not tonight the ‘post-classical’ Berlioz with smooth, rounded edges – nor the patchwork dilettante of misguided lore – but a truer, edgier portrait of a composer always highly charged, but here completely gripped by a narcotically-aided monomania. For it is he – not Smithson – who we see in this dreamscape, by turns alluring and alarming. Berlioz effectively wrote his own pathology into the score as he stalked the actress, determined to win his Ophelia.

Indeed, Francesca Brittan has pointed out that, as a one-time medical student, Berlioz would have had particular insight into the fashion in Paris at the time for the new scientific theories of romantic obsession as nervous disorder, developed by Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol and others. Berlioz himself wrote of his fixation in 1830 that ‘sometimes I can scarcely endure this mental or physical pain (I can’t separate the two), especially on fine summer days when I’m in an open space … alone … I suffer so much … that if I did not take a grip of myself I should shout and roll on the ground.’ Fallen? I should say so – but into what? And, of course, this is the composer, not the object of his desire.


* ‘primo uovo’ (usually a tenor) denotes the ‘first man’ of an opera company or production but it lacks the iconicity of ‘prima donna’.
** for instance, on the one hand, famous women who embody highly sexualised ideals of feminine glamour and beauty continue to inspire outpourings of artistic and other forms of devotion but, on the other, ordinary women who dress in ways reflecting those ideals are often seen as ‘asking’ to be raped.

Thomas Søndergård in Conversation

The following conversation was first published in the Wales Arts Review, Volume 3, Issue 1, Jan 2014: http://www.walesartsreview.org/thomas-sondergard-in-conversation/

 

BBC National Orchestra of Wales
at Venue Cymru,
Llandudno
Photo: Betina Skovbro

Thomas Søndergård enjoyed an exceptional first full year as Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 2013, forging a creative partnership with the orchestra which was acclaimed by audiences and critics alike. This spring season 2014, he has chosen for his first concert back in Cardiff to conduct a programme of two leading contemporary Danish composers, Poul Ruders (b. 1949) and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (b. 1932). The programme will include two arresting and contrasting pieces: Ruders’ Kafkappricio from the 2005 opera Kafka’s Trial and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Symphony, Antiphony, which won the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1980. You can hear them both at the Millennium Centre’s BBC Hoddinott Hall on 28 January.
Just over a week following the Danish concert, on February 7, Thomas and the orchestra will appear at St David’s Hall for an eagerly anticipated performance of Gustav Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 9; the composer’s final complete work and one of the greatest, most intense and complex symphonies ever written. It is a work which exerted a profound influence on music throughout the 20th century – and it also has poignant meaning and association for the conductor, as Steph Power discovered when she spoke with Thomas about the two concert programmes in a wide-ranging conversation.


Steph Power: Early this season you will be conducting two concerts with BBC NOW which, on the face of it, involve very different kinds of music – the first will present recent Danish music and the second, Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 from the early 20th century. Would you agree with Luciano Berio that ‘spiritually and emotionally modern music started with Mahler’?

Thomas Søndergård: Yes that’s not far off. I often think how similar the 1st Chamber Symphony of Arnold Schoenberg is to the expression that you find in the 9th Symphony of Mahler. And actually, because I enjoyed Mahler so much when I played him many years ago as a percussionist, I arranged to conduct the 1st Chamber Symphony with my colleagues at the Royal Danish Opera so I could learn more about the whole period, the Second Viennese School and so on. And I loved it. This is the piece which was composed I think one or two years before Mahler’s 9th?

Yes, in 1906 [Mahler 9 was written in 1908-9].

There are many similarities in the counterpoint, especially in the third movement of the symphony. They are masterpieces, both of them – although funnily enough, most people that I speak to about this – even musicians – don’t really like the Chamber Symphony! But there are also many similarities between Mahler and the painter Gustav Klimt. The last time this struck me was in a museum in Venice when I stood in front of a Klimt painting. He was a Viennese contemporary of Mahler of course – and maybe you see similarities because you’re looking for them, I don’t know. But the way that Klimt uses gold and colours, Mahler also does in his score I think. He uses something that’s easy for the listener to absorb, which is Ländler or dances that we are familiar with, and then he just squeezes in these experiments with counterpoint around the colours and the gold, which makes you think deeper thoughts. That combination for the audience at that time must have been a bit over the top – too emotional – he was criticised for that. Which I can see even now, even if we are at a distance. I can still see the afterwaves of that.

It’s quite extraordinary isn’t it? That parallel – and the new approaches to colour and line which Mahler also inspired in other composers. There is an important link there with the idea of Klangfarbenmelodie [or ‘sound-colour-melody’] that Schoenberg in particular was exploring, which would come out in his Five Orchestral Pieces, composed around the same time as Mahler 9. But that intense emotional expression of Mahler’s really does reach an apotheosis in the 9th Symphony doesn’t it?

Oh yes. And it actually had a real live effect on me. I’ve experienced some devastating things in my life – when I was 10 my father died. It was terrible for years following that. I moved to Copenhagen and one of my biggest experiences was to perform in Mahler 9 in my final tour after two and a half years with the European Community Youth Orchestra as it was then called. And what struck me about Mahler’s music – and this is why I’d love to conduct it with youth orchestras if I work more with them – is that it contains all these incredible hopes, full of energy. You know Mahler’s world is right there in front of you, not just a little bit – and not held back. And for me, that just fitted incredibly well with the experience of being young.

As a young person, you’re ready for anything – from the first sexual experience to the happiest hours with your friends, to testing how much you can drink, or how you can treat your friends or how love can bring you to the edge – things like that. But also the sorrow. Which of course I had in huge amounts when I was playing this piece. It was the last tour, and the last movement of Mahler 9 is of course a farewell in many ways. It just hit me like no piece of art had ever done in my life. Half the orchestra was crying on stage because we knew that it was maybe the one and only time that we would experience something like it – we all spoke about it together. We were going on from there to enter the profession, which is so much better in many ways – I wouldn’t change it! But the experience and the fun we had playing in the ECYO with the great conductors, the tours and the wonderful halls we played in. We knew it was the end of that.

Thomas Sondergard and BBC National Orchestra of Wales,
in Venue Cymru, Llandudno
Photo: Betina Skovbro

Mahler famously spoke – to Sibelius as it happens – about a symphony needing to contain the whole world. If ever one did, surely it would be his 9th!

Definitely yes. All the experience that a human can come across – that is what it really contains to me.

Many people have noted how this symphony seems both to look backwards to an intense romanticism, but also forwards to the new modernism of Schoenberg and others in response to the crisis in artistic expression at that time. It’s as if, on many levels, Mahler holds contrasts and dualities opposed without necessarily resolving them. How do you find the 9th yourself, preparing the score? Because it’s so volatile.

Well, I’ve noticed this too. But I don’t find it so much in the 9th as in, for example the 8th and 7th symphonies which also have those things. For some reason, the 9th falls more into place for me – and I find there is a real sense of finality. Except the [Rondo-] Burlesque, the third movement, which I think contains so much of a struggle, even if you really try to ‘force’ it into place, to make the structure very clear. And I’m not sure that’s the best way of actually performing it! Of course I will do my best with the BBC NOW and hopefully it will stand as it’s written! They are excellent players. But that’s not to say that the architecture of the movement is possible to hear very clearly.

I also think that Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony is similar in a way – certainly having slow movements at either end, which is a strange way of thinking about a symphony. So I don’t know. To me, maybe Mahler came to a point in life where none of that mattered so much. The 9th really is a piece of epic history, where he wants to tell us his view of life. And my God he must have felt so terrible also, as his daughter had died just the year before!

Yes indeed! And then he’d been diagnosed with a heart problem – and had to leave his beloved Vienna Opera for political reasons to work in New York! That parallel with Tchaikovsky 6 is interesting. Both works are often held up as examples of composers coming to terms with mortality and death. On the other hand, the letters Mahler sent to his close friend Bruno Walter from New York are actually quite cheerful and positively looking forward! As you say, both elements are there in that symphony, of sorrow and of embracing life – and yet, at the same time, of farewell.

I think when you read music like the 9th symphony – the score of it has followed me for many months now and whenever I feel like it, every day I go through some of the movements – it just makes me think about fate. Maybe I’ve done that all my life in a way, given what happened to me when I was young. But I realise now that I’m no longer young! Hopefully I’ll live a long time still, but if it’s going to feel like that when you know that death is not far away, as Tchaikovsky and Mahler both did, for me it’s so fantastic that there are artists out there that can actually describe how it feels. It actually calms me down and I’m very grateful for being able to take that in; what other artists can express of how it must feel when you’re close, to say goodbye. Because to me the 9th feels very at peace with things, ultimately. Even if you are desperate and afraid that death is going to happen now – or, like Stravinsky, afraid that you are ill all the time – what do you call it in English?

Hypocondriac.

Exactly, yes. We all have that kind of stress, whether we compose or if we are workmen on the street, we know we’re going to die some day. But artists like Mahler and Tchaikovsky could express something that makes me rest more in life about getting to that edge. Of course, being composers, their response gets very brainy at times! It gets a little crowded shall we say, with so much information, and for the listener it’s probably not that easy. But for the analysts and a nerd like me – whatever – a conductor! – it’s just excitement! Because it’s amazing how he just makes it all fit.

It seems to me that one of the great excitements about the 9th is precisely that question of ‘where is the subject’? Can you hear it? Is it a colour, is it a theme? Is it a rhythm? What happens to that motif that seems to dive underneath and then pop up again somewhere else? It’s full of that kind of activity. Even in those outer movements, the slow movements,  they’re full of lines and colours treated in that way.

And when you study these lines – this is really interesting, really well pointed out – because I don’t know how many times that middle voices have interested me! For example, with second wind players, even if they’re often told ‘don’t cover the first wind player’ – I remember in my bringing up with Paavo Berglund, he often talked about how he wanted second wind players to support the principals – but they often have the most interesting lines you know! And these lines as you say, that dive down and come up again. By studying scores so intensely as we do, you actually hear them also when colleagues perform them in concert, even if they’re really covered up way inside the texture. When I first turned to conducting from being a player, this made me afraid that I would be too focused and too much at work when I should just enjoy listening to a concert sometimes! And that was very much the case at the beginning, but now that I have so much experience, I can actually sit in a concert and just enjoy it.

Oh that’s a delight – may you never lose that!

Exactly – because that’s what it’s about – you should also enjoy it! But of course there are different layers of enjoying. I do sometimes listen to the quality of what I’m hearing in concert, but try not to judge – and if I’m in the perfect mood I will just let it stream.

Backtracking a little to your Danish concert in January, there is a book on Carl Nielsen with an essay [by Colin Roth] entitled: ‘Stasis and Energy: Danish Paradox or European Issue?’ [Carl Nielsen Studies I: Ashgate 2003]. Certainly, a kind of simultaneous stasis and energy seems a feature of Nielsen’s music and that of some later Danish composers perhaps. But what struck me as so interesting, is that you could argue that stasis and energy are also big structural features of Mahler’s 9th Symphony – in completely different ways, in a different musical universe!

Well it’s funny you should say this. If we just go to Nielsen first, this is interesting because I’ve long had trouble – and still have trouble – with Nielsen’s music, which is of course in a way the summit of the Danish way of composing as he was number one. Rued Langgaard [1893-1952, who only began to be recognised several years after his death] of course had a long fight to get acknowledged as well as Mr Nielsen, who he really didn’t like – partly of course because of his success, whilst Langgard couldn’t get through! But what Nielsen is known, loved and hated for is his way of stumbling over his own legs in terms of harmony changes. There are people that have written about how amazing it is that Nielsen really double-surprises us by not only going to this tonality but changing into that and so on. But, to my ears, sometimes it’s not surprise, but really an empty disappointment. Though at other times – and also the older I get – it’s not quite that any more because he does it with a real twinkle in the eye actually.

But Mahler does the same! And especially in the bass lines I find, where the foundation is. I don’t know if it’s because I came as a timpanist from the percussion section, playing so much together with the basses, which made me very aware of the bass line. But there’s so much of what’s on the top of the bass line that I think we’re partly not aware of and I believe that composers are very conscious about how they build their sound. So if it’s not quite settled in the bass, it won’t work. I’m sure you also know of music where you have just one note and the harmony changes around that? Well, Mahler’s bass lines are full of these – and there’s a lot of sforzandi which feel somehow like a damaging experience of your soul. So there are real similarities with Nielsen in terms of strange harmony changes where you think: What?! Where is he? – Is he anywhere now?! Mahler actually eliminates the tonality and just forces us to listen to the elements on top of the bass line – the counterpoint that goes mad like a little firework that has no colour really. Or, at least, he asks us not to think about the colours or anything – he just forces us to listen to the elements.

Of course Pelle Gudmunsen-Holmgreen and Poul Ruders are not Nielsen copiers or anything like that.

No, not at all.

Pelle’s piece I came across on a recording a long time ago. I never heard it live. But I was so taken by it that I knew I would love to programme it at some point. We actually programmed it in Copenhagen at the beginning of December last year but had to cancel the concert because of a storm. We’d got so far with it and Pelle had been in the hall and loved it, so I’m really glad to be doing it with the BBC NOW – I hope there won’t be any more storms!

No, I hope not!

It’s an excellent piece and I understand why he won the Nordic Council Music Prize for it.

That was in 1980 wasn’t it?

That’s right. It contains all sorts of funny layers – I don’t know if you’ve heard it?

I have, yes. It has an extraordinary structure where he squashes the ‘symphony’ into two and a half minutes at the beginning of the piece, followed by a series of six ‘antiphonies’ or responses to that. Do you think that’s his way of critiquing the hallowed view we have of the symphony as a form or genre?

I think so yes – there must be a twinkle there!

Pelle’s said all sorts of wonderful things like: ‘I have the definite impression that at times I succeed in curling the toes of the lay and the professional, which is an exquisite honour.’ He also has a refreshing attitude to music as embracing all sorts of sounds. How might you describe the soundworld of the piece? Because I don’t think many people in Wales will have come across Pelle’s music.

Well it’s very tricky to pin down. I’m thinking of the beginning, which is like a piano-percussion fanfare, and then you have three notes, boom boom boom, and it goes mad with chords on top of that. If I was to mention another composer, I don’t know, it would be Per Nørgård actually – but I’m sure Pelle would not like me saying that, even though I think they are very good friends. But that doesn’t really help your question in terms of audiences because they probably wouldn’t know Per Nørgård either! But Per studied Balinese gamelan music a lot and there are also many of those ideas from the ‘70s and ‘80s in this piece of Pelle’s. But actually, in Denmark around that time everything was Uendelighedsrækken… I wonder how you would say that in English? [Very broadly speaking, this word refers to an ‘infinity series’ or type of serialism whereby melody, harmony and rhythm are generated by use of mathematical mirroring]. It’s a structure with no end based on rows. If I take a line of notes left to right then mirror those backwards right to left, then mirror those four lines, and then mirror the result of that and so on. Those ideas became really important, especially in Per’s music. But it’s a hard question really, because I don’t think it’s easy to say what Pelle’s music reminds me of in terms of other composers.

No, I believe both he and Per Nørgård are very much individuals – like many Danish composers? At any rate, they didn’t form themselves into ‘schools’ as happened in Central Europe around figures like Boulez and Stockhausen for example. It strikes me that in Denmark composers absolutely went their own way at the start of the 20th century in response to that crisis of artistic expression we spoke of – which continued post-World War II. That individuality is terribly exciting I think.

I think so too. And, in a way, it’s very positive that we can’t really say who Pelle sounds like! There’s something in the tutti maybe where you can find similarities to other composers but in general, for example, just to have the courage to have the solo violin play entirely without the bow [makes a pizzicato sound]! He or she would play like that as you know for two minutes or more. And then you have the whole string section playing the same thing with these ‘stars’ sounding on top [makes bigger, popping sounds]. And then this honky-tonk piano that plays in its own time. You know, who else does that? It’s very much ‘70s, ‘80s, it’s true. But actually, you find composers that write very much like this now, today! So I really look forward to seeing how the BBC NOW reacts to it, because I hope that they like the piece too. Pelle is surely very proud of it. I gave him a lot of credit for it when I saw him and he was, ‘yes – I know, I know!’

And of course Poul Ruder’s music I know very well. As I’m sure you’re aware, I conducted the premiere of his opera Kafka’s Trial in 2005, from where his piece Kafkappricio comes. So therefore I know the material of the piece very well and it makes sense that I would do this too in the BBC NOW concert. Wow, 2005 is already nearly ten years ago!

Indeed it is! I suspect that people might be more familiar with Ruders’ music – it’s better known in the UK for sure than that of many Danish composers. Of course, you recorded the opera itself on CD too. But they’re very different composers aren’t they, Ruders and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen?

Yes. Actually the way Poul sometimes talks – or even the way he emails me – reminds me a lot of his music because, in the middle of a sentence you can have just a little flute you know – I mean, like a drawing – what do you call it in English – a little series of drawings that you get in newspapers. What do you call Donald Duck?

A cartoon?

A cartoon, exactly, cartoon music. And then on the other hand, one of the first experiences I had of Poul’s music was the opera he made of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. That is the most amazing piece of staging that I’ve seen, one of the strongest impressions I’ve ever had in an opera house. Now that music is something completely different from Kafka’s Trial. So that also shows that Poul really has a feeling for music-drama – and that was the bigger success I must say. Kafka’s Trial was also a success but the introduction was a little too long. It was 20 minutes, with the letter exchanges between Franz Kafka and his two lovers. But when it started, the actual process of the opera, then it really became alive, the whole drama – that was great.

In terms of his concert music, Ruders once described himself as being like ‘a film composer with no film’ – so perhaps he’s referring to that sense of drama; the cinematic quality of his music?

I’m fascinated he said that actually. Because I can imagine that many composers would not like to be described like that!

No, but it’s actually a great positive I think.

Yes – because it’s not easy to write music for film!

No indeed. I think it will be fascinating to present his music alongside Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s to a Cardiff audience.

I think so too – these two gentlemen mean a lot to me.

And clearly, Mahler also means a lot to you, for very personal reasons. So thank you for talking with me so frankly. I am very much looking forward to these two, very different concerts.

Yes, so am I, very much!

Rehearsals at BBC Hoddinott Hall
Photo: Betina Skovbro

Smyth, Suffragettes and Women in Music Today: Odaline de la Martinez in Conversation

1st published in Wales Arts Review Suffragette Special 2013, Vol 2, Issue 27, guest-edited by the wonderful Ben Glover : http://www.walesartsreview.org/smyth-suffragettes-and-women-in-music-today-odaline-de-la-martinez-in-conversation/


‘Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheep-dogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted in them; because I was a militant suffragette and seized a chance of beating time to The March of the Women from the window of my cell in Holloway Prison with a tooth-brush; because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don’t always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known.’
Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)




From blatant sexual exploitation in videos and marketing, to a lack of women in top and/or creative positions, there are many contentious issues surrounding women in music today. High profile figures from Charlotte Church to Kaija Saariaho have given voice to serious concerns about the music industry at all levels and across genres, as many hard-won gains for women have either plateaued or, more worrying still, eroded in recent years. It was only in 1984 that Odaline de la Martinez made history as the first woman ever to conduct at the BBC Proms.¹ Since then, progress in representation for women conductors and composers at the Proms and elsewhere has been extremely slow, and it was not until this year – nearly 30 years later – that Marin Alsop finally made the landmark step of conducting the iconic last night of the festival. So it seemed doubly shocking that Alsop’s historic concert should happen to coincide with a storm of controversy which somehow – almost unthinkably in 2013 – re-erupted around questions of whether women can and should conduct at all, thanks to some unguarded remarks by Vasily Petrenko and others, such as Bruno Mantovani, Director of the Paris Conservatoire.

Beneath the subsequent bickering in the media regarding who said exactly what, how, why and in what context, the basic issue remains: in classical music as elsewhere in music and in society at large, women have yet to achieve equal access, representation and status with men – or anywhere near that goal in many areas. It is just the tip of the iceberg that there are far fewer female than there are male conductors,² composers, arrangers, producers, broadcasters, critics and academics (and you can read my essay about finance and economics elsewhere in this issue of Wales Arts Review to get a picture of the lack of parity in pay and the dangers of dualistic thinking) – a situation about which one can argue back and forth forever, but which will, ultimately, only improve with a transformation in cultural attitudes and behaviour towards women amongst men and women alike.

In the meanwhile, I wonder what the composer and militant suffragette Ethel Smyth would make of the progress thus far in equal rights and status for women were she alive today. For the most recent controversies in the world(s) of music have lent a certain irony to the commemoration in 2013 of a number of important centenaries around the women’s suffrage movement, including the trampling to death of Emily Wilding by King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby, and the passing of the so-called ‘Cat and Mouse’ or Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act in 1913.³

De la Martinez is an expert on the music of Ethel Smyth, and has performed and recorded her extensively. In 1994, she conducted the BBC Proms premiere of Smyth’s acknowledged greatest work, the opera The Wreckers, written between 1902-04 (and premiered in Leipzig, 1906), several years before Smyth eventually joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1910. I spoke with de la Martinez about Smyth and about the current situation for women in classical music. But first, a brief look at Smyth herself and her background provides food for thought in terms of how deeply the iniquities are ingrained from not-so-distant social history.

*

In the Victorian England into which Smyth was born, it was unheard of for a woman to want to be taken seriously as a composer – let alone expect to be given equal consideration alongside prospective male colleagues. Women were just about acceptable as performer-teachers, and might perhaps compose parlour music for domestic use. But, for women of the aristocracy, music was generally seen as no more than a genteel, ladylike pastime; a situation which was replicated for women who, like Smyth, were born into the military upper classes – except that, here, there was usually a complete absence of understanding or sympathy for artistic pursuits beyond childhood fancy.

Imagine the reaction, then, of Major-General J.H. Smyth C.B. when, having encountered the music of Beethoven, one of his six daughters (he also had two sons) informed him that she wanted to become a composer – and to study composing at the Leipzig Conservatory, no less, where her governess had learned to play the piano sonatas that she found so inspiring.

When her father predictably forbade the idea and insisted that she rather marry, Smyth embarked on a prolonged campaign of wilful rebellion which seems to have prefigured her entire life; adopting ‘direct action’ tactics which included refusing to eat, refusing to go to church and locking herself in her room for hours. Eventually, in 1877, at the age of 19, she won through and was able to enrol at the Leipzig Conservatory as a pupil of Carl Reinecke. It was the beginning of a long and colourful musical career during which Smyth composed many substantial and accomplished works, including six operas, several large-scale orchestral pieces and a Mass in D alongside considerable other vocal and chamber music; a career during which she met Brahms, Grieg, Clara Schumann and Dvořák,⁴ was encouraged by Tchaikovsky, supported by some prominent artistic patrons and championed in England by the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham – but which nonetheless saw her continually having to battle for professional recognition.

Today, despite a number of highly successful performances during her lifetime and since her death – not to mention her 1922 elevation to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her services to music – Smyth remains shamefully neglected and undervalued. In de la Martinez’ words,

‘I don’t know what it is – people don’t give her her due credit. But some of her works still have not been heard in London! There’s a lot of brilliant music by Ethel Smyth and I thought we were opening the door with The Wreckers. But it opened and then shut, and people don’t remember Smyth so much. It’s a very sad case, it’s heart-breaking really.’

Indeed, with Smyth, as with her later, fellow (so-called) ‘woman composer’ Elizabeth Lutyens, it is her boisterous, ‘eccentric’ behaviour rather than her music which continues to attract most attention.⁵ In Lutyens’ case, it is her alcoholism and notoriously acid tongue which seem to give added frisson, but with Smyth, it is her upper-crust country-bumpkinisms, ‘mannish’ appearance and many lesbian attachments – if only for the latter to be skated over with embarrassment or passing voyeuristic relish. Tellingly, Smyth’s very commitment to women’s suffrage is often painted as a direct result of her having fallen in love with Emmeline Pankhurst – which she may well have done, but which should not trivialise what became a commitment to the campaign so fervent that Smyth gave up composing for two years upon joining the WSPU (and fought for other issues of women’s equality later in life – such as equal pay for women orchestral musicians). Moreover, she was willing to go to jail for women’s suffrage, spending two months in Holloway Prison in 1912 after smashing the window of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lewis Harcourt.

Smyth’s major contribution to the WSPU was nonetheless a musical one. In 1911 she wrote The March of the Women to words by Cicely Hamilton, which became the organisation’s iconic anthem.

Beecham famously described visiting Smyth in Holloway in his autobiography and, here, in an article for the Musical Times in 1958:

on this particular occasion when I arrived, the warden of the prison, who was a very amiable fellow, was bubbling with laughter. He said, ‘Come into the quadrangle.’ There were the ladies, a dozen ladies, marching up and down, singing hard. He pointed up to a window where Ethel appeared; she was leaning out, conducting with a tooth- brush, also with immense vigour, and joining in the chorus of her own song.

It is not hard to see how this tale – and it is often true of its re-telling, however affectionately meant – manages to ridicule both Smyth and the other suffragette prisoners, and to entirely gloss over the harsh, often brutal reality of life in jail for those determined to win votes for women. In de la Martinez’ opinion,

‘I don’t have any problem with the story of Smyth conducting with a toothbrush. I think that’s all wonderful – they were singing her song, her choir piece. But I have a problem with the way that, during her lifetime, she was characterised as a really strange and unusual person, which with a man seems to be ok because it leads to the idea that they are geniuses – look at history and see how Beethoven has been talked about! But with women it’s something to laugh at, it’s something to ridicule with humour.’

For those contemporaries who did give Smyth and her music serious consideration, there often emerged another problem; one captured perfectly by a critic’s response to her Violin Sonata Op. 7 (1887), which was found to be ‘deficient in the feminine charm that might have been expected of a woman composer.’ In effect, Smyth was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, to paraphrase Eugene Gates (from the title of a paper on Smyth for the Journal of Aesthetic Education, 1997); if she wrote light, delicate music it was criticised for being ‘weak’ and ‘feminine’, but, on the other hand, her trade-mark assertive, muscular music was often held to be too ‘masculine’ and therefore ‘unnatural’ – which last was how the violinist Joseph Joachim described her sonata.

Quite what the exact supposed difference is between music written by men and music written by women remains a mystery. But the idea that there is a difference became one of the most damaging and pernicious beliefs of 20th century music in gender terms, as the music of women composers from Smyth onwards was evaluated against some perceived masculine ideal. Such ‘gendered aesthetics’ can be found at the root of idiotic and offensive statements like ‘women can’t compose’; said by many, alas, but here, a direct quote from the then Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta, Michael Vyner, in a late ‘80s radio interview which I myself heard, broadcast live.⁶

I quizzed de la Martinez about gendered aesthetics, and she admitted to having been initially swayed by those ideas herself, as many people were – including some feminists from the ‘80s on who argued that a more ‘democratic’, less ‘hierarchical’ ethos that women supposedly brought to the profession of composing extended to their actual music. I personally – as a composer and erstwhile performer – have always considered gendered aesthetics to be not just bizarre but objectionable; not least because the ideas ultimately appear to rely on stereotypes or over-simplified definitions of gender, often ignoring issues of transgender and, indeed, sexuality. For de la Martinez:

‘It’s ridiculous, I agree – I thought I could hear the difference and I can’t. I’ve now been on too many competition juries where I don’t know the names of the composers and I’m sure “that person is a woman” and then, after the people have been chosen, when you see who the names are, those people who I thought were women were not, they were men. So, from my point of view, you can’t tell if a composer is a man or a woman. [Regarding Vyner’s comment], it’s terrible. But he was revered – so it’s hard to believe with people. It also happened with Louise Badger – do you remember the  woman who once ran the BBC Symphony Orchestra as general manager? – who said on the radio that women were not good conductors.’ ⁷

Obviously, de la Martinez is a composer as well as a conductor and she is currently working on an opera trilogy about the beginnings of slavery, based on Aphra Behn’s famous story Oroonoco: or the Royal Slave – but which, unlike the original (published in 1688), will be told from a woman’s point of view.⁸ I asked de la Martinez whether she agreed with Saariaho and others, that the awareness and status of women in music has plateaued or dropped off in recent years, or whether she felt improvements were still being made. Her response makes for sobering reading:



‘Oh I don’t think there’s many improvements being made – I think it all has to do with novelty. When gay people started coming out, women conductors were coming out conducting – it’s the same story. Did you ever see that fabled film Antonio: Portrait of a Woman about the Dutch conductor? [Antonia Brico 1902 – 1989] It’s the same old story still. When women conductors are something of a novelty, they get hired, and no matter they’re as good as men. The people hiring don’t think about the women conductors, they think about the men. It’s something that’s been happening all along – I don’t think it’s gotten any better. 

‘I think we fought some strong fights in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, we fought some strong fights in the ‘80s and so on. There’s been some profit from it, but I think very little. In general the situation with the majority of women has not improved – no matter what you see in the media – and they’re still earning a lot less than men. As far as women conductors are concerned, yes you can get on, but you don’t get the same chances as men because the people hiring don’t think of you. And a lot of women conductors won’t say that because they’re afraid.’

Returning to Ethel Smyth, de la Martinez has long been determined to stage her later, suffragette-inspired opera, The Boatswain’s Mate (1913-14). I put it to her that the success of The Wreckers in the ‘90s – both in concert and subsequently on CD – would surely indicate that such a project would generate a great deal of audience interest, particularly at a time when greater attention is being given to lesser-known or otherwise neglected composers of the early 20th century:

‘I agree. I’ve been trying to find somebody to help me put on The Boatswain’s Mate and I’d love to offer it to the Proms. There’s one problem but it’s easily remedied, and it’s not in the music. The words are really 1914 – that period just after Smyth’s years as a suffragette – so it just sounds old-fashioned nowadays. But it’s really easy to take the spirit of what it means – it’s just dialogue – and to rewrite it in modern language, the same way people translate Mozart’s The Magic Flute because the old-fashioned German doesn’t necessarily stand! 

‘Then The Boatswain’s Mate would be a fabulous opera. It has a real feminist flavour but it’s done with a smile. It isn’t hitting you in the head but it gives you this flavour of a strong woman – very different from the strong woman of The Wreckers. And instead of the chromatic lines she used sometimes in The Wreckers, it’s almost folky. It’s very tonal, very approachable and is very beautiful music. Lilian Baylis put it on at Sadlers Wells [in 1922] and it ran – it was popular. So it would be a hit now, I know it would.’

Next year, 1914, will see the 70th anniversary of the death of Ethel Smyth and the centenary of her completion of The Boatswain’s Mate. Of course, 1914 will also be the centenary of the outbreak of World War I – at which point many suffragettes put their agitation on hold so as to to join the war effort and concentrate on the immediate crisis gripping the nation. There would seem to me no better occasion than to mount Smyth’s opera – in which overture she uses the melody of The March of the Women – in honour of the many suffragettes who sacrificed so much to ensure that women eventually won the right to vote, paving the way to gender equality in law, if not yet in practice in society at large. Today, the fight for equality for women across the board goes on, in music as in other aspects of life. For de la Martinez, that fight involves both pragmatism and a continued chipping away:

‘I don’t know how much change there will be in my lifetime and that’s why I think I decided a long time ago I would concentrate on the things I think I can do and try and make a difference and I think that’s the only way. I don’t think you can change the world but you might be able to change a tiny little bit of the world, and if you fight at it long enough you might actually be able to do it.’

No doubt Ethel Smyth would have lent her wholehearted support.



¹   Odaline de la Martinez was born in Cuba in 1949 and raised in the USA. She settled in the UK after winning a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music and the University of Surrey founding the ensemble Lontano in 1976. She has conducted, and her music been performed, by many ensembles and orchestras all over the world, and she has won many prestigious awards and accolades. A full biography and discography can be found here.

²  Jessica Duchen has compiled an exhaustive list of women conductors, with links to biographies and websites on her blog.

³  This was a law which allowed for the discharge of suffragette hunger-strikers from prison when they became ill, only to re-imprison them as soon as they were sufficiently recovered, leading to further savage ill-treatment at the hands of the authorities through force-feeding.

⁴  You can hear choral music by Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn alongside Dvořák’s own Mass in D in a concert with the BBC National Chorus of Wales on Dec 6th at BBC Hoddinott Hall.

⁵  Rhiannon Mathias has noted that ‘Smyth’s musical accomplishments and involvement in the most acrimonious years of the campaign for women’s suffrage did not, however, prepare the ground for the young women who reached student age in the first decades of the twentieth century’ (Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music, Ashgate, 2012).

⁶  Indeed, that comment, together with various sexist encounters I myself had and observed as a then student composer, performer and chair of York University’s ANeMonE (‘A New Music Ensemble’) led me to accept the job when the pressure group Women in Music asked me to briefly run the organisation after I graduated. The committee then included composers Nicola LeFanu and Errollyn Wallen, Enid Williams of the rock band Girlschool, Gemini’s Ian Mitchell and Gillian Moore (now South Bank Centre Head of Classical Music) together with support from de la Martinez, broadcaster Natalie Wheen, soprano Jane Manning and Icebreaker’s James Poke among many others.

⁷  ‘Women can’t conduct Brahms, and Mahler is men’s music.’ So said Helen Thompson in the 1970s, then manager of the New York Philharmonic.

⁸  Part 2 was first performed in the USA in April this year and will premiere in the UK at Martinez’ biennial American Festival in London, October 2014.

Here are some links to further websites offering statistics and opinions regarding the status of women in (mainly classical) music today:
Some statistics released by Female Pressure for International Women’s Day 2013

Ellen McSweeney’s post for the New Music Box.

Some American Statistics (posted August 2013) by the Musicians for Equal Opportunities for Women.

Some Austrailian statistics (posted October 2013) from Women’s Agenda.

The UK Performing Right Society’s ‘Women Make Music’ initiative 2011.

Concert pianist and Bangor University academic, Dr Xenia Pestova’s ‘Quick and Dirty Survey of Man/Woman Ratios in UK Academic Music Departments’ August 2013.

A June 2013 blog for The Huffington Post by Lara Baker, organiser of the AIM Independent Music Awards.

Helienne Lindvall’s blog for The Guardian 2010.

Some Words on John Tavener

The immense popularity of the music of John Tavener, who died on Tuesday, 12 November, belies our age of supposed hipster irony. For here was a composer who spoke simply and directly from an inner, spiritual world in ways which communicated with millions of people, regardless of whether they shared his Orthodox faith – or any belief in God.

Born in 1944, Tavener first emerged as an avant-garde composer – himself a hip, child of the sixties – with experimental works such as The Whale (1966) and the Celtic Requiem (1969). It was The Whale which first brought Tavener fame through an unexpected source. Premiered by the London Sinfonietta at their inaugural concert in 1968, the oratorio made a huge impact, and its surreal, dissonant combination of encyclopaedic narrative and electronics, with children’s voices, chorus and ensemble, so delighted the Beatles that they arranged to have it recorded on their Apple label.

But Tavener’s subsequent celebrity status engendered cynicism from the classical music establishment; a cynicism which hardly abated as the maverick composer turned away from complex modernism and began composing more overtly religious music in an increasingly transparent, tonal style based on chant, melodic repetition and a kind of meditative stillness that drew on Eastern as well as ancient Western musics and religious texts. Alongside such composers as the Estonian Arvo Pärt, this supposedly more ‘accessible’ spiritual turn led to Tavener being branded, sometimes with disdain, as a ‘holy minimalist’ – but it won him new audiences of people hungry for a music which seemed to address the mysteries of existence in ways which spoke to them directly.

The irony is that, far from ‘dumbing down’ (in modern-day parlance), Tavener himself often decried our society’s ‘huge loss of esoteric knowledge’ – at least, in religious terms – and he hoped that his music would contribute to ‘a recovery of the sacred in a new form’ in the coming together of world religions. Brought up as a Presbyterian, he converted first to Catholicism and thence to Orthodox Christianity in the late seventies at a time when a series of major health scares revealed that he had Marfan Syndrome, the condition which would eventually lead to his death.

Indeed, regardless of his more worldly persona as a young man, the mystical contemplation of death and inner life overflowed in Tavener’s music from the start; eventually touching a chord with so many across the world when his ‘Song for Athene’ was performed to cathartic effect at the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. Prior to this, his piece for cello and strings on the Orthodox Feast of The Protecting Veil of the Mother of God stunned the audience at its BBC Proms premiere in 1989 with its piercing, luminous sound which seemed to rise and go on rising in what Tavener described as ‘an attempt to make a lyrical ikon in sound’.

Growing ever frailer, and all but dying on several occasions, in recent years Tavener found he could no longer undertake such enormous tasks as his seven-hour dusk-to-dawn vigil The Veil of the Temple (2003), but he continued to compose until his death (when he felt physically and spiritually well enough), exploring his beloved Hindu metaphysics and latterly turning back to composers such as Beethoven, Stockhausen and Mozart, who inspired him in his youth before a subsequent rejection of later Western forms. He was knighted in 2000 and remained very much in the public eye right up to his eventually sudden end, recently giving what turned out to be a final interview to the Telegraph, and joining Andrew Marr to discuss the poetry of George Herbert for BBC Radio 4′s Start the Week (recorded on 31 October).

My own first encounter with Tavener’s music was a recording of his Requiem for Father Malachy; what for me as an atheist adolescent seemed a hair-raisingly austere but compelling liturgical piece, combining an arresting dissonance with plainchant, and written in 1973 for a priest he knew and loved. It strikes me that some touching words Tavener wrote by way of programme note might well stand as his own epitaph:

As someone has said, we know and we do not know, yet know all we need, that here is a man we and the world are better for having.

He will be sorely missed by many.



The Protecting Veil and the Celtic Requiem will be performed as the culmination of next year’s Vale of Glamorgan Festival by the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales under David Atherton on Saturday 17 May 2014.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales: Berg, Holt and Schmidt

BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff, 29 October 2013

Alban Berg – Violin Concerto
Simon Holt – The Yellow Wallpaper
Franz Schmidt – Symphony No 4

Conductor: Thierry Fischer
Soprano: Elizabeth Atherton
Violin: Baiba Skride
Members of the BBC Singers


According to his biographer, Norbert Tschulik, the composer Franz Schmidt was colour blind; only able to see in different shades of grey. So the irony seems cruel, then, that his music is often said to be stylistically grey, backwards-looking and – worse – derivative; so different from the progressive modernism emanating from the Vienna of his day. Indeed, Schmidt has not so much been unfashionable post-war as untouchable; a situation not helped by his monumentally ill-judged – and mercifully unfinished – cantata, Grossdeutschland of 1939; a piece which set an unequivocally National Socialist text – albeit whether by choice or coercion remains unclear. Nonetheless, Schmidt  himself and his music have had some prominent champions over the years, not least the redoubtable Hans Keller, who knew a thing or two about Nazism from bitter personal experience, and who remembered Schmidt with fondness and respect from his youth in Vienna.

Politics aside, Schmidt could certainly be found guilty as charged as a musical reactionary, for he persisted in adherence to an ‘outmoded’ style which, for many listeners still today, is all-too redolent of Brahms and, especially, of Bruckner. Schmidt was born, in fact, the same year as Arnold Schoenberg, in Pressburg in 1874, and the two men grew acquainted in Vienna, where Schmidt was well known as an excellent cellist and pianist; leading a much-praised performance of Pierrot lunaire no less, from the keyboard in 1929. Schoenberg is on record as remarking merely that Schmidt had ‘too much talent’, purportedly baffling his target, but implying that Schmidt might have done better had he been forced to struggle for his art – presumably, like Schoenberg himself did on many levels.

This programme from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales featured Schmidt’s best known and most respected work, his Symphony No. 4 of 1932-3, in a programme that was either cunningly devised or heavy-handed depending on your point of view. Personally, I plump for the former despite the preponderance of shared, weighty themes of requiems and suffering women that I will come to. For it placed Schmidt’s work in Viennese context with Berg’s Violin Concerto; by far the most popular and ‘approachable’ work of the mature so-called ‘Second Viennese School’, together with a world premiere by BBC NOW’s outgoing Associate Composer Simon Holt, thereby giving the programme an interesting slant from a ‘new music’ perspective. ‘New music’, after all, can be a relative term, as contemporaries of Schmidt were very well aware.

A pity then, that the enduringly iconic Berg Violin Concerto which opened the concert did not galvanise from the start. Indeed, the performance only really took off from the second movement; notably from the Adagio onwards, whence the soloist, Baiba Skride, took charge. Skride was in command of her own, virtuosic part throughout, applying her rich, full tone with spirit and energy. And there were some lovely, poignant touches too from the orchestra. But conductor Thierry Fischer seemed to proceed by section rather than finding the lines and phrasing which are so necessary to this concerto’s through-momentum and coherence. He made little distinction at times, for instance, between Hauptstimme, Nebenstimme (main and secondary voices – some of which are rhythmic motifs) and minor colouristic parts, so that tiny details of Berg’s orchestration seemed to take on undue importance – a distraction not helped by some occasionally awry ensemble, particularly in ritardando passages. But Skride effectively took the reins after the initial rendition of Bach’s quoted chorale Es ist genug (It is enough), physically turning towards the upper strings to lead them in an extended passage of jointly electrifying intensity which reached its climax at the chorale’s second variation. Only then was it made apparent what might have been for the entire performance.

Berg’s Violin Concerto has become known as his personal requiem. He was ill whilst composing it (in 1935) but died unexpectedly without hearing the work performed. It was written in quick, heartfelt response to the tragic death of Manon Gropius (daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius) aged just eighteen; lending the piece coincidental kinship with Schmidt’s 4th Symphony, which was dedicated to the memory of his daughter Emma after she died unexpectedly following the birth of her first child. In Schmidt’s case, however, the piece signaled a return to health for its composer, who was lifted through its composition from a precarious state of mental near collapse.

If only the protagonist of Simon Holt’s piece, The Yellow Wallpaper, and countless women of her time and predicament, had had similar access to creative work – at all, never mind during periods of mental anguish. The work is a setting of an extraordinarily courageous short story by the early American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1890, extrapolated by David Harsent, further adapted by Holt), who dared to write about her personal experiences of post-natal depression. The story makes for enraging and painful reading, as the woman is shut inside a foul-smelling bedroom with barred windows and wallpaper which ‘color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow.’ Holt responds with music which deftly and sensitively illuminates the woman’s descent into madness with a highly colouristic use of instrumentation, including the literal tearing of rolls of wallpaper and the placing of six sopranos and altos at random within the orchestra; all conveying symptoms of the woman’s fragmentation as she attempts to liberate herself, and the other women she hallucinates, from their entrapment behind the wallpaper.

Soprano soloist Elizabeth Atherton sang a challenging part with clarity, poise and feeling – and she was in very fine voice tonight. But her rendition was a little too Britten-esque for my liking; too safely dependent on the melodic arc for expression. Whereas a more pointed vocal delivery of consonants both hard and soft, for instance, could have produced a more intense musical characterisation without danger of over-dramatising. Indeed, Holt is scrupulous in giving virtually every syllable of his dynamic vocal part particular and often maximal articulation in the score. Moreover, a dramatic intent of sorts – if only to stress the Woman’s exhausted isolation – is signaled by his score indication for her to ‘walk slowly on to the stage’ whilst percussionists tear wallpaper at the start of the piece, and to walk slowly offstage at the end still singing; directions which were foregone tonight. It seemed unclear from this performance why the piece was broken into nine distinct ‘miniatures’ heralded by pauses rather than being through-composed. But I suspect a more idiomatic vocal approach from both soloist and ensemble singers (who were miked up but whose words were fairly inaudible) might throw an entirely different light on Holt’s structural design.

Talk of things idiomatic returns us to the tricky figure of Schmidt and his Bruckner-esque 4th Symphony – of which Fischer and the BBC NOW gave a passionate and pretty well convincing performance on its own terms. For, whilst it is valuable and thought-provoking to hear his music alongside more ‘progressive’ work of the time, it seems ultimately beside the point to compare Schmidt’s work with that of his contemporaries – or even with those elders he emulates – in terms of  relative ‘originality’; indeed it is a moot point how far originality is a reliable touchstone for musical integrity in any case. For a great many excellent composers might fall down if such a criterion were too rigorously applied – Holt included, as the sounds and techniques used in The Yellow Wallpaper are familiar from fifty-odd years of ‘new music’, and yet the piece is surely none the worse for that.

Even so, there is much to admire in Schmidt’s music, which ultimately stems from a Schubertian (rather than Beethovenian) classicism in that it ‘constantly takes pause, recapitulates, reformulates’ as Rudolf Scholz put it, with repetitions that appear straightforward on first hearing, but which are often gradually revealed as subtle re-workings of surprisingly strong themes. Similarly, Schmidt’s ear is finer than his decriers sometimes acknowledge, as he utilises some deft melodic and harmonic turns in the 4th Symphony, for example, to shape an ambitious four movement structure played without a break, but lasting nearly fifty minutes. The idiom might be stylistically anachronistic, but the influences are varied and Schmidt nonetheless manages to evoke a world of feeling without dipping into the sentimental – and without sounding faux in my opinion but, rather, simply elegiac and unforced. Tonight, Guest Principal Victoria Simonson gave eloquent voice to the singing cello solo of the second movement that would have been very close to Schmidt’s heart. Indeed, the whole orchestra felt committed and alive to the music under Fischer’s admirably clear shaping of the work (quite different from his Berg) between its opening and closing trumpet solos.

In recent years, various aspects of the modernism that arose in the first half of the twentieth century have begun to be re-examined – not least the foundational assumption that the contrasting, revolutionary figures of Schoenberg and Stravinsky swept all before them. In any case, whatever one’s opinion of Schmidt’s actual music, I think Keller and other commentators are right to conclude that this seemingly ‘extra-historical’ composer (Bayan Northcott’s term) deserves much greater recognition. For clearly, at the very least – and notwithstanding Schmidt’s once acerbic description of Mahler’s symphonies as ‘cheap novels’ – the Central European romantic symphony did not die with Mahler, however much prevailing music history tries to teach us otherwise.

Chlöe Hanslip in Interview: Bruch Violin Concerto No.1

Given her extensive and distinguished career, it seems astonishing that the violinist Chloë Hanslip is only 26 years old. But, by the time she reached the age of ten, Chloë had already appeared on some of the world’s major concert platforms, including London’s Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall in New York, having embarked on studies at the Yehudi Menuhin School aged just five at the iconic violinist’s invitation. She went on to study with the Russian pedagogue Zakhar Bron for ten years in Germany and, amongst other film appearances, was featured in the BBC 1 documentary Can You Make A Genius?, which screened in 2001. Of her many mentors, she has named the great Ida Haendel as perhaps the most inspirational.

Aged 15, Chloë’s second CD, a recording of Bruch’s 1st and 3rd Violin Concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra under conductor Martyn Brabbins, won international acclaim for her musical maturity and depth of tonal command. The disc led to Chloë winning the ‘Young British Classical Performer’ award at the 2003 Classical BRITS among other awards and accolades – the same year that she made her American and Japanese concerto debuts following her first appearance at the BBC Proms in 2002.

Chloë is now established throughout the world as a concerto soloist and chamber musician. She is continually adding to her repertoire of well- and lesser-known romantic virtuouso works and has also won praise for her championing of contemporary composers. In recent years, CDs of romantic concertos by Benjamin Godard and John Adams’ Violin Concerto have won particular acclaim and she has worked with many of the world’s leading conductors from Mariss Jansons and Sir Andrew Davis to Leonard Slatkin and Michail Jurowski, with a core repertoire that stretches from Sibelius and Shostakovich to Korngold and Britten. As a dedicated chamber musician, she has worked with Stephen Isserlis, Gerhard Schulz and Angela Hewitt among others at events such as the Open Chamber Music at Prussia Cove and Italy’s Trasimeno Festival.

On Monday 18 November, Chloë will be performing that same Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 Op. 26 which signaled her arrival as a major talent, when she joins the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Libor Pešek for a concert at St David’s Hall in Cardiff. The programme will also include Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 (‘Unfinished’), the Overture to Johann Strauss’s opera Die Fledermaus and Dvořák’s dramatic Symphony No. 7. Chloë spoke with Steph Power about the Bruch ahead of the concert – and about touring the work alongside it’s direct forbear, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto Op. 64.


Steph Power: You’re bringing to St David’s Hall one of the best-known and best-loved romantic concertos in the repertoire, Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 – a piece which you yourself know incredibly well; you recorded it at the very young age of 15 and have played it many times since.

Chloë Hanslip: Yes I was very young when I first recorded the Bruch! It’s such a phenomenal concerto actually – as I get older and the more I practise it, the more I find in it. And I always look forward to coming to play in Cardiff.

How has your understanding of the Bruch changed or grown over the years?

Just on a very basic level I really have got to know Bruch’s orchestration – how he combines the instruments, but also to know the individual orchestral parts. I think that’s so important when you’re playing a concerto; to know exactly what’s going on behind you. Because it’s just a very large form of chamber music really, so you have to be aware if you have a duet, say, or if you’re accompanying. For example, there’s a wonderful moment in the second movement where I have a sort of conversation accompanying the cellos and it’s just so fabulous to do that; to connect with the orchestral sections and really work with what they’re playing.

So the work you do as a chamber musician really informs your concerto playing?

Yes it does – and I love playing chamber music. It’s almost a re-set button in a way; you really listen and understand what’s going on when you’re blending a sound – which you can’t always quite do when you’re playing a concerto – but having that mentality I think is very beneficial. But also, every time I play the Bruch, I try to find something different in it. Working with different orchestras and different conductors gives you that opportunity as well, so it’s always exciting.

You’ve worked with Libor Pešek and the CNSO before I believe, but this will be the first time you’ve played the Bruch together? It’s the orchestra’s 20th anniversary this year so a celebratory time to be touring with them.

Yes it is absolutely! I first worked with Libor and the orchestra about five or six years ago. We toured some Prokofiev then, and also played Samuel Barber and Philip Glass. I loved working with them – the orchestra has a wonderful, deep sound – so I’m looking forward to working with them all again, and on the Bruch. Each conductor interprets the orchestration slightly differently if you like, and that always gives me something new to think about and work with.

At other venues on your tour together you’ll be playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto Op. 64. What’s it like playing the Bruch and Mendelssohn back-to-back as it were in that intensive way on tour?

I enjoy it. It’s lovely sometimes to play the same concerto but I do enjoy having a varied repertoire at any one time. It keeps things fresh and I suppose you delve that little bit further if you’re constantly changing pieces because you’re so focused on that. At the same time if I was asked to play the Bruch or the Mendelssohn ten times in a row I wouldn’t complain!

When he was composing this first violin concerto, Bruch sought the advice of the violinist Joseph Joachim. But he also went to Ferdinand David, I gather; the violinist who had helped Mendelssohn twenty years or so previously?

Yes, that’s right – but I think the concertos are quite different in a way. The Bruch has a slightly richer sound if you like in terms of orchestration – although the Mendelssohn is also absolutely glorious to play; I would hesitate to say it’s more vivacious but it is lighter I think. The Bruch is a little bit more introverted. The first movement is a Vorspiel; a prelude, which is quite an unusual marking for the beginning of a concerto. The way the timpani roll starts and the violin just appears out of nowhere, it’s really atmospheric. Also the last movement of the Bruch has an incredible lyricism that’s quite unusual for a last movement.

The Bruch’s considered very much a romantic showpiece I think?

Yes it is – and the last movement is great fun to play. It’s also really dance-like and you can really get your teeth into it!

As well as your extensive romantic virtuoso repertoire, you also work with contemporary composers. In fact, the last time I heard you in Cardiff you were performing Huw Watkins’ Concertino.

I think it’s so important to have a very broad repertoire. As you say, I’ve played Huw Watkins in Cardiff – also Simon Holt, plus there’s the Glass Violin Concerto we mentioned earlier, and Brett Dean, Michael Nyman… I just find it incredibly exciting to be able to talk with a composer – you know you can’t do that with Bruch or Mendelssohn! You can read everything you like about them but you can’t actually ask them ‘what were you thinking about here?’ and ‘what’s your intention there?’

So, when you work with living composers on a new piece, in a way it’s not unlike the work Joseph Joachim did with Bruch and Brahms and other composers in his day in terms of reflecting back to them your ideas as a violinist?

I’d never thought of it like that! Yes, I suppose so! I just find it terribly exciting to get new music, to re-live that and to delve further! I’m playing the John Adams again next year and also John Corigliano’s Red Violin concerto again in New Zealand.

If Bruch were alive today and asked you about his first concerto what would you say to him about his writing for violin?

Oh gosh! Honestly, I love the way he’s written the 1st Violin Concerto! It really gives you an opportunity to sing; to create some incredibly special moments with dynamics and with the accompaniment, with the support that you have from the orchestra behind. Technically I wouldn’t say it’s comfortable to play – but it lies very well under the fingers. I don’t think I would change anything in it I have to confess!

He would probably be relieved to hear that as he was apparently very nervous about composing that first violin concerto! It took him a long time to write.

Yes I think that’s true – and he revised it several times as well. But I think it’s just a great concerto and it’s very easy to see why it’s so popular. It sounds very spontaneous and Bruch gives you the flexibility to play around within the piece a little bit if you want – to do something slightly different in each concert. I think that is just one of the many reasons why it’s such a special concerto.

The Lumen Prize: Digitally Created Fine Art from Around the World

‘The fact that the screen is illuminated makes you choose luminous subjects.’

So David Hockney has commented about making art on his iPad; an emerging digital arts tool which he is not alone in finding exciting. Indeed, he is just one of a growing number of artists across the world who are exploring the creative potential of fine art made on digital platforms – not just on tablets, but across an increasing range of ever more accessible digital devices from computers to notebooks, cameras to smartphones. Notwithstanding the problematic and ultimately false distinctions between ‘fine’ art and any other kind, digital art is not new; as any designer, animator, installation artist or film-maker will tell you, it’s been around for as long as digital technology has existed. What’s new is the increasing availability and sophistication of the technology, together with greater access for ever-increasing numbers of people to a truly world-wide web for the dissemination of art works online. And the proliferation of new, tactile surfaces and interactive software is encouraging new generations of artists – of all ages – to take up what might, in traditional terms, be called ‘fine’ art on digital platforms.

Carla Rapoport is an art-loving former business journalist who has spotted the rapid increase in fine art being made digitally across the globe, and who is passionate about the need to encourage and support the very best work that is emerging. In 2011, based in Wales, she founded the international Lumen Prize to that end, and it has quickly come to be recognised by many as ‘the world’s pre-eminent digital art prize’ as the Guardian culture blogger, Adam Price put it. This second year of the Prize’s running, no doubt assisted by the draw of a distinguished panel of judges (including Tessa Jackson OBE, founding Artistic Director of Artes Mundi and Ivor Davies, President of the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art), over 700 entries were received from 45 different countries – a sharp increase on the already impressive 500-plus artists who submitted work to the inaugural prize in 2012. Accessibility is key for Rapoport, who is keen to point out that any artist, no matter how well- or little-known, ‘so long as they can get online, if they’re creating [digitally], then they can communicate their work and get it judged by an internationally renowned jury panel.’

Talking to Rapoport ahead of the announcement of this year’s winner on October 8, I quizzed her about the relationship of new digital technologies to more traditional ways of making art. We started by discussing the word ‘lumen’ and she explained that,

‘Artists have been seeking light all the way back to Rubens and beyond. The use of light is key to creating almost anything you want to do in the visual arts, so I think a lot of artists are being drawn to new technology because it allows you to work with light in a new way. I think light is the key to these new technologies.’

Asked about the continued – albeit happily shrinking – resistance to digital art in some areas of the art world, Rapoport explained that digital technology is simply a new tool. In her words:

‘If you think about the creation of oil paints, they were considered quite radical at first – the idea that you could use oil paints and not grind your own colours was considered very new-fangled and wrong! Again, with the creation of printing technology, the Royal Academy refused to recognise print makers so they had to set up their own royal society – and, of course, photography “wasn’t really art”. So each innovation of new tools has been controversial.

‘Another reason the art community has found it hard to embrace digitally created art is because a lot of the people who are good at it are also geeks! We can be threatened by the technology of a computer if we don’t understand it, but we are somehow not threatened by oil paints even if we don’t understand how they’re made.

‘There is [art-making] software that you don’t need to understand in terms of how it works, but there is also art work that requires computer coding. It will be up to curators and art historians of future generations to decide which is more “worthy”. Maybe it’s the result that’s more deserving of praise! But I think people have got used to the idea that art can stretch across a whole panoply – from performance art, architecture to installations and so on.’

This year’s winner of the Lumen Prize is by an artist who has chosen to completely immerse herself in aspects of new technology. It is an emotionally moving, CG animated film by Katerina Athanasopoulou, a Greek animation artist based in London, who utilises a soundtrack by Jon Opstad that is extremely evocative, if perhaps a little too reminiscent of Arvo Pärt. That aside – and Apodemy is a film with a commissioned score, rather than a overtly ‘multimedia’ work – the pathos of its subject is beautifully understated. Athanasopoulou describes it as a ‘portrait of Athens’ conceived ‘in a time when Europe seems to be imploding’:

‘Plato likens the human soul with a cage, where knowledge is birds flying. We’re born with the cage empty and, as we grow, we collect birds and they go in the cage for future use. When we need to access knowledge we put our hand in the cage, hunt for a bird – and sometimes catch the wrong one. Ornithology uses the term Zugunruhe to describe the turbulent behavior of birds before they migrate, whether free or caged. These two images, birds inhabiting the human soul and the distress of the migrating bird became the starting points for this film, commissioned on the theme of Emigration.’

The runner-up piece also happened to involve moving images, this time in an installation realised for the Carrousel du Louvre. Here, technology itself forms the subject of the work, as the Paris-based Bonjour Lab makes fascinating interactive play with the idea of ‘data we leave in spite of ourselves, at each of our visits on the web’. Passage is the creators’ name for a ‘sensitive setup which decrypts the visual and sound imprint of those who step near it’ inside a specially reactive room:


A third prize was awarded to a Swiss photographer based in London, Nicholas Feldmeyer, for his striking 2D piece After All; a monochromatic print which, for me, stood out among the short-listed entries for its clean, strong lines and quietly monumental scope. I was not surprised to hear that Feldmeyer cites archaic monuments, Taoism and the ‘sublime’ among his inspirations:




The Lumen Prize is run on a not-for-profit basis. Proceeds after costs are donated to the charity Peace Direct, which in turn subsidises entry fees in countries where it is active, such as Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Sudan. There is currently a charity auction running until November 6 and, building on the competition’s global reach online, fifty works (including all five prize winners) are touring to venues in New York City, Hong Kong and London in recognition of the continued importance of more traditional gallery viewing (last year the competition also visited Shanghai and Riga).

Returning to the subject of how the arts establishment and the public at large view the emerging digital field in general terms, I asked Rapoport whether reception of the exhibition differs from country to country. Perhaps predictably thus far, Asia seems most alive to art created through new technologies:

‘Hong Kong is particularly interesting because they just get it – there’s no barrier to digital art there. It’s a culture which is more accepting of technology so there’s even a kind of “oh this is a bit representational isn’t it? Where’s the edgier work?” – which is interesting – whereas in London they are more likely to go, “that’s strange” – no matter what it is! There is a big digital art community in the UK but I feel it’s been ghetto-ised and put off into a new media category, whereas in Asia, because it’s a newer art scene and younger, they’re much more open to this kind of work.’

Clearly, as well as in Asia, the field and understanding of digital art is rapidly increasing across the world. It is a medium which is already producing fine work – whether ‘fine’ art or otherwise – that speaks to a growing public at an international and local level. Moreover, closer to home, the Lumen Prize is yet another way in which Wales, and the city of Cardiff in particular, is emerging as a major player on the world arts and technology stages. It will be fascinating to see how the Prize, and the many artists it attracts from around the world, evolve in years to come.