BBC National Orchestra of Wales Conductor – Pascal Rophé Soprano – Elizabeth Atherton
Eric Tanguy – Affetuoso, ‘In memoriam Henri Dutilleux’ Julian Anderson – Shir Hashrim Thierry Pécou – Les liaisons magneétiques Kenneth Hesketh – Graven Image Henri Dutilleux – Le temps l’horloge
If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that
bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunk
without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what
you please. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Enivrez-vous’ (‘Be drunk’ from Petits Poèmes en Prose, 1869)
It is very poignant that the final song in Henri Dutilleux’s last published piece, Le temps l’horloge
(‘Time and the Clock’), should be his only setting of Baudelaire; the
poet who had been perhaps the profoundest influence on his own,
passionately meticulous art. The state of drunkenness that Baudelaire
advocates is bittersweet, and Dutilleux’s rendering of these words into
music of remarkable colour, wit and dignity at the end of his long life
seems especially apt as summation. The entire, five-section cycle, also
setting words by Jean Tardieu and Robert Desnos, is a celebration of the
mystery of life shot through with the composer’s characteristic
ambivalence towards an ungraspable present and an unknowable future. On
the one hand, time is mechanical; a ticking clock inexorably pressing
forwards. On the other hand, time is an illusion, and nowhere is it more
tyrannical than in contemplation of the past, as memory becomes a kind
of haunting – the burden to which Baudelaire alludes. To enter or induce
a state of ecstacy – or drunkenness – is to free oneself from that
burden so that a deeper mystery may be apprehended. For Dutilleux, this
notion was not to do with wantonness but rather an artistic striving in
which, as he once put it to Roger Nichols (pictured below), ‘asceticism
has a distinct role to play, the artist has to renounce so many things,
so many pleasures; and in any case he’s not happy unless he can find the
opportunity to realise his true self.’
Eric Tanguy and Thierry Pécou both featured in the first half. Tanguy’s Affetuoso, ‘In memoriam Henri Dutilleux’
was written upon news of Dutilleux’s death in 2013, but seeks to honour
him through thanksgiving rather than grief. Building from a
chorale-like opening to a strongly three-in-a-bar, ‘affectionate’
tumult, Rophé drove the piece to its third and final climax with a
riotous orchestral blaze. By contrast, Pécou’s two-part Les liaisons magneétiques
(‘The Magnetic Connections’), closed the half in an idiom of
wide-ranging influence that owed as much to Milhaud and the Stravinsky
of The Soldier’s Tale as it did to more lyrical French writing.
Here the instrumentation comprised a chamber ensemble of six wind, two
percussion and nine strings, with a variety of grunts and growls off-set
by glissandi, harmonics and a pounding, animalistic bass drum.
Dutilleux – Métaboles Dutilleux – Sur le même accord Debussy, compl. Orledge – Nocturne (UK premiere) Mozart, compl. Süssmayr – Requiem Mass in D minor K. 626
BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales Conductor – Thomas Søndergård Violin – Akiko Suwanai / Soprano – Rebecca Evans / Mezzo-soprano –
Jennifer Johnston / Tenor – Timothy Robinson / Bass – Alastair Miles
Henri Dutilleux so nearly lived to see his 100th birthday, which
would have fallen on the exact day of this concert, January 22nd 2016.
But he died three years ago, in May 2013, and so we are left to honour
his centenary without him – and without that other distinguished,
long-lived French composer: Dutilleux’s nemesis, Pierre Boulez, who died
earlier this month aged 90. Of the two, seemingly antithetical,
figures, it is of course the latter who is far better known, and as much
for his brilliance as a conductor as for his youthful polemics,
institutional reach and uncompromising modernism. Yet Dutilleux, too,
was a fastidious composer, subjecting pieces to lengthy processes of
revision to the despair of publishers and commissioners. He too – albeit
far more overtly heir to Debussy and Ravel – shared an obsession with
matters timbral and textural and, in his own way, has proved highly
influential: it is notable, for instance, that his pupils should have
included the renowned ‘spectralist’, Gérard Grisey,* for whom the
fundamental, acoustic properties of sound (as opposed to, say,
mathematics or other underlying principles) were all-important creative
drivers.
In Dutilleux’s music, mystery and illusion abound; not simply as
atmosphere or ‘impressionist’ effect, but embedded deep within the
structure. Timbre and harmony become inextricably linked, for example,
so that it becomes hard to know precisely where one stops and the other
begins, especially in dense textures. Each of his two pieces in this
imaginative, beautifully performed ‘concert of two halves’ from the BBC
National Orchestra of Wales showed how Dutilleux’s chords shimmer with
overtones particular to his carefully chosen instrumental groupings,
creating layers of contrapuntal mirage. The first, Métaboles,
dates from 1962-4 and Dutilleux has described it as ‘where I [first]
succeeded in fully realising myself in music.’ Almost a concerto for
orchestra, the array of colours is astonishing as Dutilleux
‘metabolises’ or evolves his material through five, continuous but
distinctively orchestrated sections. Principal Conductor Thomas
Søndergård and his fine players rose to the work’s many challenges,
bringing an architectural sweep as well as attention to detail to the
evocatively titled ‘Incantatoire’, ‘Linéaire’, ‘Obsessionnel’ (this
incorporating a perhaps ironic nod to certain serial techniques),
‘Torpide’ and the final ‘Flamboyant’. The opening section’s unisons
alone might have proved exposing of tuning vagaries were not these
musicians so adept at listening and responding to one another.
The completion of works by deceased composers always raises issues of
authorial control, and no example has proved more contentious than that
of Mozart’s Requiem, famously left unfinished on the great
man’s untimely death in 1791. That this centenary celebration should be
headlined by a requiem might look odd on paper, but it was not
inappropriate following what amounts to the passing of an entire era of
postwar composers in recent years. Here, a downsized orchestra was
joined by a reduced BBC National Chorus of Wales (superbly primed by
Artistic Director, Adrian Partington) and four excellent soloists to
perform the most longlived version of Mozart’s swansong: by Franz Xaver
Süssmayr. Since the 1950s onwards brought increased scrutiny of his
efforts, poor Süssmayr has been scorned and reviled by many, only to
enjoy a recent rehabilitation: Stephen Oliver once wrote that ‘a
glow-worm would be a better composer’ than Mozart’s hapless pupil, and
that the Requiem has ‘the feel of a massive ancient cathedral
held together with bits of plastic’. By contrast, the Dunedin Consort’s
2014 reconstruction of the work’s first ever performance in David
Black’s edition of Süssmayr’s version has attracted wide acclaim.
Still from Miloš Formon’s 1984 film ‘Amadeus’
However, few listeners care about the wrangling of experts – just as
internecine contemporary-composer warfare passes them by. Regarding the
Mozart, they’d prefer simply to be moved, terrified, comforted and
ultimately uplifted by what they hear – and, for those in the packed St
David’s Hall, the BBC NOW did not disappoint. Søndergård’s tempi felt
spot-on and his balancing of the various forces was well judged in the
space, for all that the soloists were positioned behind the orchestra
and in front of the onstage chorus. In any case, the last-minute
inclusion of Rebecca Evans’ clear and lustrous soprano could not but
help elevate the performance to another plane. Mezzo, Jennifer Johnston;
tenor, Timothy Robinson and bass, Alastair Miles rose admirably to
match her unfussy artistry – which reached its culmination in a
magnificent Lux aeterna – as did the chorus with a delivery by
turns threatening and mournfully beseeching, but always clear and
vigorously sung. Of the orchestra, with its lovely strings and darkened
woodwind and brass, trombonist Donal Bannister deserves special mention
for his sonorous Tuba mirum duet with Miles.
From the processional grandeur of the Introitus and the Handel-inspired double fugue of the Kyrie, to the angst-ridden fury of the Dies Irae (so reminiscent of Don Giovanni’s casting into hell); the poignant lament of the Lachrimosa and the surging hope of the Agnus Dei, Mozart’s Requiem
combines a neo-baroque sensibility with a forward-looking, urgently
emotional drama. Whatever the truth surrounding its commissioning,
uncompleted writing and many subsequent versions, it has become lodged
in the popular mind as signifying the mystery of death itself. As BBC
NOW and the Cardiff University School of Music continue to celebrate the life and achievements of Dutilleux this spring,
it’s worth recalling that, however different in temperament he may have
been, the Frenchman shared with Mozart a profound humanism that wasn’t
reliant upon religious faith, but was deeply rooted in the resilience
of, and restless search for authenticity within, the human spirit.
Published as part of a Wales Arts Review tribute just after the death of David Bowie.
Fifty years ago, following the death of Edgar Varèse, Pierre Boulez wrote in tribute to the great man:
‘You have the deliberate wildness of the animal that does not go with
the herd, the rarity of the diamond in a unique mount … Your legend is
deeply rooted in our era; we can scrub the chalk (and water) circle of
those magic or ambiguous words “experimental”, “precursor”, “pioneer”…’
These words might equally apply to Boulez himself and, especially, to
David Bowie; both are recently deceased titans of contemporary culture
about whom I’m currently finding it hard to think without turning my
mind to the other – however unlikely that may sound, given their
differences. Boulez’ death (5 January) had already prompted reflection
on my own musical life, since my first amazement at the sensuous,
distilled beauty of Le marteau sans maître as a teenaged
guitarist-composer. In those days I was blithely unaware of any musical
‘rules’, and didn’t understand that high modernism and other kinds of
high fuck-off-ism represented by, say, punk rock, were not supposed to
mix. So I’ve felt a contradictory sadness, too, at both the fact and
passing of Boulez’ controversial era: that angry, damaged but brilliant
generation of postwar avant-garde composers, who so exquisitely yet
tyrannically held ‘new music’ hostage, and of whom Boulez was just about
the last representative (happily, Betsy Jolas, for one, is still with
us).
But, at age 90, and with his ill-health well known if unpublicised,
Boulez’ death was hardly a shock. How different was Bowie’s, coming
completely out of the blue, and just two days after the release of Blackstar on
January 8, his 69th birthday. The album and accompanying videos seemed
to me a return to superbly enigmatic, melancholy form. Boulez may have
been a thrilling discovery as a young musician, but I grew up with
Bowie. Until the Berlin years, and especially “Heroes” – I was
twelve when it came out in ’77 – it wasn’t so much his music that
grabbed me as his sheer, unapologetic otherness. Bowie’s eyes reminded
me of my mother’s following surgery for a detached retina. Except that
his felt curiously less alien than hers, regardless of his
sci-fi personas, and seemed to suggest infinitely greater understanding
of my own burgeoning, ambivalent sexuality.
Listening to ‘Lazarus’ on Blackstar, I’m reminded of the ironic spirit of “Heroes”
– and especially the fractured soundscapes of that album’s non-vocal
trilogy: ‘Sense of Doubt’, ‘Moss Garden’ and ‘Neuköln’. These were
imbued with what I imagined to be the defiant but flat-feeling decadence
of West Berlin during the Cold War – and they seemed to articulate a
kind of hollow yearning within my psyche, just as Boulez would later,
for a while, offer a jewelled respite from anguish.
Bowie showed us that identity can be what you make it. That the
binary opposites we fall into so unthinkingly – of high-low,
popular-serious (culture), male-female (gender), left-right (politics),
young-old (age) – are really only products of existential terror denied.
As Boulez pushed uncompromising extremes of the senses and synapses,
Bowie danced through them as shape-shifter extraordinaire; always and
never at home in his unique, ‘unbearable lightness of being’. That he
could share that with so many so profoundly – through music, art,
theatre, film, fashion, and now his own death – makes him a phenomenon I
doubt we’ll ever see the likes of again.
As music editor of Wales Arts Review, it’s
always heartening to get a sense of the sheer spirit of musical
endeavour and achievement across the country, mustered yearly in the
face of shrinking budgets – and across an ever-broadening spectrum of
genres from mainstream indie pop to the classical canon; from sonic art
to the post-minimal avant-garde. I’d like to extend thanks to the
directors who have written about their personal 2015 highlights for the Wales Arts Review classical music feature.
To add to theirs and our critics’ words, here are just a few of my own
stand-out events and performances from Wales and beyond. This year, I’m
focusing on contemporary music and/or new productions:
Firstly, the wonderfully ambitious culmination of Mark Bowden’s
composer’s residency with the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales
in A Violence of Gifts;
a work which saw the composer successfully join forces with another,
major Welsh creative voice in poet Owen Sheers – and at a time when
large-scale orchestral commissions everywhere are becoming increasingly
rare.
On that point, the continued re-invigoration of Tŷ Cerdd, Music
Centre Wales, is proving greatly positive for the future health of Welsh
and Wales-based contemporary work: 2015 saw the announcement that the
International Society for Contemporary Music has admitted Wales as a
full national member for the first time. The ensuing range of benefits
to be afforded via the new ISCM Wales
will be unfolded over the coming months and years, and will include the
offer for Welsh composers to submit scores alongside other nations for
international performance through the ISCM platform. Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
In May, visiting Estonians showed how a relatively small nation can
find ways to safeguard and encourage their composers and musicians,
often against the odds. At the internationally renowned Vale of
Glamorgan Festival, the Talinn Chamber Orchestra and Estonian
Philharmonic Chamber Choir presented three generations of composers
from this proud Baltic State as featured composer, Arvo Pärt, was
celebrated in his 80th birthday year. Also featured in 2015 was the
British-Bulgarian composer, Dobrinka Tabakova, and we were lucky to have
her in residence for key days of the festival. It was a great
opportunity to hear a cross-section of her beautifully wrought music
which, like Pärt’s but in its own, unique way, bridges worlds of the
ancient and modern.
Back to BBC NOW, the annual Composition: Wales event is going from strength to strength each spring under conductor Jac van Steen – and this autumn saw Huw Watkins
become the orchestra’s new Composer in Residence. Watkins will no doubt
help the continued drive to encourage Welsh contemporary music, and it
will be intriguing to see what further performance and education
projects he is able to support alongside Composition: Wales as his own
music receives deserved, increased exposure. BBC NOW at the BBC Proms 2015, conducted by Xian Zhang
BBC NOW has recently made history as the first BBC orchestra ever to
appoint a woman in a titled position: the Chinese conductor, Xian Zhang,
will be a welcome, frequent visitor in Wales as the orchestra’s new
Principal Guest Conductor following her successful concert with BBC NOW
at the BBC Proms in July 2015. Welsh audiences will, of course, know
Zhang from her more recent appearances with the Welsh National Opera
orchestra, having made her pit debut with the company to great acclaim with Nabucco in 2014.
Yet again, Welsh National Opera proved a source of inspiration and
world-class achievement in 2015 (watch out for two new commissions to
come next year for their 70th anniversary: Figaro gets a Divorce by Elena Langer and In Parenthesis by Iain Bell, which will also commemorate World War I). WNO Pelléas and Mélisande, credit Clive Barda
Last spring, Artistic Director David Pountney’s new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande
was both searingly intelligent and ravishingly beautiful, aided by an
exceptional cast, and with stunning orchestral colour provided by the
WNO Orchestra under Lothar Koenigs’ baton. Director Annalise Miskimmon
went on to score a further, perhaps less likely, hit at WNO with her
courageous production of I puritani for WNO’s ‘madness’ season.
Here – in all too timely a fashion – it was not simply the heroine but
the fact of war that was held to be insane, as Miskimmon and her team
cast Bellini’s Roundheads and Cavaliers as warring Protestants and
Catholics in 1970s Belfast.
Staying with opera but moving further afield, I have to flag up the recent world premiere of Morgen und Abend by Georg Friedrich Haas at London’s Royal Opera House. RO Morgen und Abend, credit Clive Barda
It’s always encouraging to see new work commissioned for the main
stage at Covent Garden (the last was Mark-Anthony Turnage’s noisily
kitsch Anna Nicole, some four years ago), and Haas delivered in
anticipated beguiling fashion. His music is known for hovering on that
elusive, noumenal brink where sound becomes colour and vice versa. Here
it took on yet further dimensions in Graham Vick’s intriguing,
bleached-bare production, in an opera which explored life, death and the
continuum between the two as viewed from inside/outside, beyond the
grave (and, yes, the Beckett inference is deliberate).
As memorable as this was, however, my highlight beyond Wales was
another opera directed by Vick; this time at his own Birmingham Opera
Company, who win plaudits for bringing off in superb style an audacious,
seemingly impossible project combining professional soloists and
musicians with a chorus of local volunteers – who learned their
challenging parts by ear.
Thirty-eight years ago, Tippett’s complex fourth opera premiered to
the rolling of many critics’ eyes. Scorned as a sixties-fuelled,
over-earnest attempt to get down with the kids, the visceral integrity
and sheer social relevance of the work has largely been overlooked –
until this year. Finally, The Ice Break was given the
production it deserves, showing how a visionary staging at the right
time and in the right venue can – if only in some cases and for a
one-off event – prove redemptive of works once dismissed as failures. BOC The Ice Break, credit Adam Fradgley
In Vick’s cleverly choreographed, industrial warehouse setting, none
of us were innocent bystanders. Sited amongst the jostling, mob chorus,
we swayed with their mood: now adoring the doomed black champion,
Olympion (sung by Ta’u Pupu’a), now racist and hating as black and white
went berserk in post-Handsworth, post-Ferguson riot. Intimate pains of
love and inter-generational conflict were etched against a background of
political struggle as the once-exiled Lev (Andrew Slater) was reunited
with his dying wife, Nadia (Nadine Benjamin) and damaged son, Yuri (Ross
Ramgobin).
The cast sang and acted superbly, allied with conductor Andrew
Gourlay’s excellent City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which
revealed the hitherto clouded brilliance of Tippett’s uncompromising
score. While Stephanie Corley’s Gayle and Chrystal E. Williams’s Hannah
made sacrifices – one fatally, the other in renewal – ultimately,
breaking the ice was shown to mean breaking down barriers. As Tippett
intended, and as this production powerfully showed, the challenge
remains vital, exhilarating – and urgent.
Works by Alun Hoddinott / Grace Williams / Mervyn Burtch /
Geraint Lewis / Héctor MacDonald / Mark Bowden / Paul Mealor / William
Mathias
BBC National Chorus of Wales
Conductor: Adrian Partington Piano: Christopher William / Organ: Jonathan Hope / Percussion: Andrea Porter & Matt Hardy / Trumpet: Martin Rogers
Since Remembrance Sunday on November 8th, the people of Beirut and
Paris have once again been forced in appalling fashion to join the
myriads around the world who are mourning their dead and injured at the
hands of madmen in thrall to a death-cult. At a time when millions are
fleeing atrocities and the ravaging of their ancient civilisations,
questions about the preservation, celebration and sharing of culture
inevitably take on a more urgent significance – not least in the light
of attacks deliberately aimed at artists, writers and now
concert-goers.*
It is not so easy to separate music from world events or politics as
some would prefer. Of the eight pieces featured in this impressively
performed BBC National Chorus of Wales concert of Welsh and Patagonian
composers, three had a timely, outright connection with war. A fourth – We Have Found a Better Land
by Mark Bowden, here receiving its world premiere – marked a
contemporary response to the stories of those who left Wales 150 years
ago on board the tea-clipper Mimosa in an ironic, but
ultimately successful, attempt to preserve their cultural heritage and
identity. Crucially, following a research visit to Patagonia, Bowden
interwove these stories with tales of the indigenous Tehuelche people
who helped to ensure the survival of what, to them, would have been
strange, alien incomers from some unimaginable, distant land – before
themselves being subject to genocide by marauding Argentinian military
during the 1870s ‘Conquest of the Desert’. An early settler in Patagonia with people of the Tehuelche. Catrin Rogers.
Bowden’s a cappella, sixteen-minute piece, performed in the second half, contains strong resonances of the folk-creation themes featured in A Violence of Gifts,
and showed the further evolution of this thoughtful vocal composer in
its six sections, balancing narrative and description through an
imaginative use of solos, semi-chorus and divisi SATB. Bowden
compiled the text from various diaries, letters, stories and poems which
together paint a vivid picture of hope, disappointment and change
against a suitably ambivalent geopolitical backdrop. Most affecting were
his quietly unsettling dissonance – with the singers doing well to
negotiate unfamiliar chords – and the quasi-antiphonal passages which
detailed the uncertain progress of the voyage itself (Section 2),
followed by the discovery that ‘The region is nothing like we read or
heard. We have been told tremendous lies’ (Section 4).
As Bowden captures very well, one of the most deeply embedded human
instincts at times of shared disaster, joy or fear is to join together
in song, and Wales is justly famous for the robust choral tradition
which has sustained its industrial and rural communities for
generations. However, notwithstanding a frustrating general tendency to
ghettoise performances of ‘Welsh composers’ rather than simply integrate
them in everyday programming, none of those featured this evening were
or are nationalist in any narrow sense, nor restricted to clichéd ideas
of tradition; indeed, in various ways, each reflects an international as
well as more domestic outlook.
The work that proved most directly poignant post-Beirut and Paris was Geraint Lewis’s The Souls of the Righteous,
which was originally composed for the memorial service of William
Mathias at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1992. Here – so soon after July this
year, when the piece was performed at St Paul’s to mark the 10th
anniversary of the 7/7 bombings – it transcended any religious context
to convey a universal dignity in sorrow courtesy of some fine, heartfelt
singing from the assembled Chorus; and this despite the odd, too-brisk
tempo adopted by conductor and NCW artistic director, Adrian Partington.
Lewis’s piece came at the close of the first half, following a pair
of equally brief, but more celebratory 1980s psalm-settings by late
friends and colleagues, Alun Hoddinott and Mervyn Burtch, which framed
the most substantial work of the evening, Grace Williams’s 1973 Ave maris stella. Burtch’s Psalm 150
(1989) was the more extrovert in both character and performance; its
bouncing, quirkily rhythmic piano part contrasting with the organ’s
underlying portentousness in Hoddinott’s Sing a New Song (1985), which opened the concert. Between the pieces a semi-chorus stepped forward to perform the challenging Ave maris with such confidence as to make it easy to forget that the BBC NCW remains an amateur choir.
In a sense, Williams – like any Welsh composer who has struggled to
find a foothold in a London-based establishment – found herself dealing
with politics of a kind by default. As a woman in a male-dominated
world, though uncomplaining, she found it harder still to be taken
seriously and, whilst highly respected by her colleagues and by
musicians today, she remains relatively unknown and vastly underrated.
Though she eschewed the radicalism of serial composers, which she found
‘incredibly strange’ and counter to her essentially melodic impulses,
she heard other music whilst studying with Wellesz in 1930s Vienna which
undoubtedly left its mark. Like many of her works, the Ave maris
belies the apparent accessibility of its romantic surface, with
intense, sustained harmonic processes that need coaxing, as it were,
from the inner voices outwards. Here, the semi-chorus proved highly
capable despite Partington’s reluctance to allow Williams’s seascape to
roil and surge as passionately as it might have, given greater room to
breathe.
Of further works this evening, Héctor MacDonald’s Clyw ein Lief, O lôr
(‘Hear my Prayer, O Lord’: choir joined by organ and trumpet) was a
further chance for audiences to hear this fourth-generation Welsh
composer from Chubut province in Patagonia, whilst Paul Mealor’s In Flanders Fields
extended the remembrance theme to that earlier site of atrocities in
World War I, a centenary ago. War – and the hideous slaughter of
children and innocents that it always entails – also formed the subject
of the final work of the programme; at twenty minutes the longest, and
the toughest in musical idiom, charting a journey from anguish to
renewal. London during the Blitz.
This was William Mathias’s Ceremony After a Fire Raid, a
setting of Dylan Thomas’s famous poem from the London Blitz, written in
response to seeing a charred baby lying dead on a bombed-out street. Of
his setting, Mathias wrote, ‘Although inspired by the Second World War,
the poem’s meaning (for me) is reflected in events closer to our time.’
What these were he did not specify, but renewed bombing from the IRA
following Bloody Sunday (1972) can hardly have been far from his
thoughts – nor indeed the Vietnam War, with Nixon finally calling
ceasefire on that tragedy in 1973, the year he composed the piece. Cast
in three, continuous sections, it carries traces of the Stravinsky of Les Noces
in its spiky vocal lines and bold, additional parts for percussion and
piano – as well as (albeit mildly) reflecting the decade’s
music-theatrical experimentalism, encapsulated by Peter Maxwell Davies
and others.
It was in this work that Partington felt most at ease, leading the
choir in vigorous rendition of Mathias’s whispers, chants and
full-voiced quasi-expressionism. Some of the work’s gestures sound dated
today – the circling glock and xylophone motifs, for instance, and the
extended ‘drum solo’. But the integrity of the piece is undoubted in
response to the kind of entirely self-made horror which humanity even
now seems unable to avoid repeating.
* not to mention less well-publicised western acts of barbarism and
hypocrisy such as the American hospital bombing in Kunduz, and the
ignoring of the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied
territories.
The concert was recorded for a forthcoming Tŷ Cerdd CD, as well as future broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Brecon Cathedral, 23 October 2015 J.S. Bach – St John Passion (1724)
Brecon Baroque: leader Rachel Podger Choirs of Brecon Cathedral Conducted by Mark Duthie Evangelist – Nils Giebelhausen / Christus – Nicholas Gedge Alison Hill / Robin Blaze / Giles Underwood
Earlier this month, on October 7 2015, Rachel Podger became the tenth
recipient – and the first woman – to be awarded the highly prestigious
Bach Prize at the Royal Academy of Music, where she is Micaela Comberti
Chair of Baroque Violin. The annual award recognises an individual who
has made an outstanding contribution to J.S Bach performance and/or
scholarship. Needless to say, following a lifetime of dedication, Bach
remains the cornerstone of Podger’s exquisite artistry. In June, she led
a joint RAM/Juilliard School venture which included a concert of Bach’s
music in Leipzig as part of the city’s 2015 Bachfest. How fitting,
then, that her very own Brecon Baroque Festival should celebrate its
tenth anniversary this year with a focus on Bach, and on Leipzig in
particular, where the mature Bach wrote some of his greatest works.
Rachel Podger. Credit: Jonas Sacks
Bach was Cantor in Leipzig for 27, sometimes stormy, always
hard-pressed, years between 1723 and 1750. The first major event for
which he was tasked with producing music was Good Friday, 1724, when the
resulting St John Passion was performed in liturgical sequence
as part of a church service. In Brecon, nearly 300 years later, the
piece launched Podger’s festival at the town’s cathedral – which happens
to be dedicated to St John the Evangelist. Perhaps the chamber
instrumental ensemble and somewhat larger church choir gathered on this
occasion might reflect the scale of forces available to Bach in Leipzig –
although the great man would no doubt be stunned by the modern players’
virtuosity.* At any rate, Podger’s exceptional Brecon Baroque players
(here comprising double flutes and oboes, with bassoon, minimal strings
and organ continuo) were joined with admirable spirit by the 43-strong
Choirs of Brecon Cathedral, including local schoolchildren, and an array
of superb soloists of varying international experience and renown.
It is the Evangelist who bears the greatest burden in the St John
as narrator of Jesus’s harrowing journey to the cross, which Christians
seem to find so paradoxically liberating. The ambivalence lies at the
heart of Bach’s magnificent, oratorio-like drama which, through a
succession of recitatives and arias, choruses, chorales and quick-fire
exchanges, ultimately views the crucifixion through the lens of Christ’s
joyfully anticipated resurrection. The tenor, Nils Giebelhausen, proved
ardently capable in what is an extremely demanding, exposed role; only
occasionally showing signs of vocal pushing as he guided the
‘congregation’ from the pulpit through nearly two hours of highly
charged, descriptive story-telling – and sang the contrastingly
plaintive tenor arias from the floor to boot.
Giebelhausen was ably supported with brisk pace-setting from the
conductor, Mark Duthie, Brecon cathedral’s organist and choral director,
who steered the choral sections with unassuming skill and a clear sense
of direction. In places there were hints of inflexibility, where
greater looseness of tempo would have helped articulate Bach’s dense
polyphony and finely calibrated emotions; there was untidy haste, for
example, in ‘Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen’ and the final chorus, ‘Ruht
wohl’, intended as a balm. However, this is a minor quibble. Overall,
the performance had a stirring combination of devotional pathos and
earthy brio, and the choir sang with combined accuracy and fervour.
Indeed, it would have been wonderful to hear them in their true
substance, perhaps raised by some means above the height of the
ensemble, which they had no choice but to stand behind in the
cathedral’s slender nave.
The other soloists were well-matched in the acoustic and sang with
zeal. Nicholas Gedge – who grew up in Brecon, where Podger has lived for
some fifteen years – brought grave dignity to the role of Jesus,
balanced by the imperiousness of his fellow bass, Giles Underwood, who
emerged in Part II to sing a blood-freezing Pilate and contrasting,
soulful ariosos.
As good as these were, the high points came at places of especially
intense vocal and instrumental interaction, as countertenor, Robin
Blaze, and soprano, Alison Hill, took turns to deliver some ravishing
arias, each one accompanied by a different combination of woodwind and
strings. Throughout, the ensemble, led by Podger on baroque violin and
viola d’amore, played with pellucid feeling for Bach’s harmonic shifts
and suspensions. Blaze, currently impressing in Welsh National Opera’s Orlando,
interwove lovely ornamentation with the delicate oboes in ‘Von der
Stricken’ and, together with Alison McGillivray’s consummately mournful
cello, brought the work to its wrenching climax at ‘Es ist vollbracht!’.
Meanwhile, Hill and the two flutes made a sound to soften the very
stones of the building in her first aria, ‘Ich folge dir’; oboe was
added for Part II’s keening ‘Zerfliesse, mein Herze’ at the death of
Christ.
If only Bach had written more for these solo vocal parts in his
subsequent revisions of the work. But, for all the adverse comparison to
1727’s lengthier, more intellectually weighty St Matthew Passion – not to mention more recent controversies regarding supposed anti-Semitism in the libretto** – Bach’s St John Passion
remains one of the great pinnacles of the sacred canon. Surely fewer
openings anywhere can match the sustained hair-raising of ‘Herr, unser
Herrscher’ which, in its combined immediacy and layered, theological
tension, throws down the expressive gauntlet for the ensuing drama.
Brecon Baroque stayed true to both aspects – and presented the work in a
community context which made it all the more intimate and inclusive.
* In 1730, Bach ruefully observed of the professional musicians
supplied by Leipzig Town Council: ‘Modesty forbids me to speak at all
truthfully of their qualities and musical knowledge. Nevertheless it
must be remembered that they are partly emeriti and partly not at all in such exercitio as they should be.’
** Richard Taruskin, for example, has condemned the St John
for portraying the Jews alone as guilty of deicide, although Michael
Marissen has pointed to evidence that Bach did nothing to emphasise any
anti-Judaic sentiment in the original text, which is of unclear
authorship, but based on the Gospel According to St John, 18-19.
Stravinsky: Fireworks Watkins: London Concerto Borodin: Prince Igor – Polvtsian Dances Elgar: Overture ‘Cockaigne (In London Town)’ Rachmaninov: The Bells
BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales Conductor – Thomas Søndergård Chorus Musical Director – Adrian Partington Violin – Malin Broman / Bassoon – Rachel Gough / Harp – Hannah
Stone / Soprano – Anastasia Kalagina / Tenor – John Daszak / Bass –
Mikhail Petrenko
There are many fallacies wrapped up in our love affair with the idea
of a pantheon of ‘great composers’, and they are often contradictory.
For instance, we continue to rate the importance of composers from
history according to their success in forging influential new paths,
while snubbing those of our own time who are deemed experimental. And
yet few composers actively set out to blaze a trail, and some of the
most popular and enduring have shown little interest in innovation per se.
Of the five, diverse composers featured in this BBC National Orchestra
of Wales season-opener in Cardiff, three may be cited as cases in point:
Elgar, Rachmaninov and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s newly
appointed, brilliantly accomplished Composer in Association, Huw Watkins, for whom the evening was in part an official welcome and introduction.
The concert offered a generous, off-beat stylistic sweep, balancing
the overtly populist with an intense main event in Rachmaninov’s The Bells, and bringing together Russian and British composers from the late 19th century to the present day. Stravinsky’s Fireworks
(1908) opened proceedings with a short, celebratory flare of colour
under Principal Conductor, Thomas Søndergård. Composed as a wedding
present to the daughter of his beloved teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, the
Stravinsky is really a piece of slightly wonky juvenilia, chiefly
important as a sketch for his lush first ballet, The Firebird.*
Huw Watkins. Photo credit: www.operaomnia.co.uk
Watkins’ London Concerto which followed was equally, if more
quietly, dazzling in its orchestral palette – but proved far more
substantial in breadth and disciplined invention. Cast in five movements
as a kind of concerto grosso or sinfonia concertante, the work was
named for its 2005 centenary commissioners, the London Symphony
Orchestra, but has had to wait until now for its deserved second
performance. No doubt this is partly due to the unusualness of its
engaging solo trio of violin, bassoon and harp (persuasively played by
Malin Broman, Rachel Gough and Hannah Stone). Watkins’ handling of form
was particularly impressive, with a dynamic and, at times, welcomingly
astringent use of harmony coupled with strong contrapuntal writing. With
two movements devoted to orchestra alone, many fascinating partnerships
unfolded between the soloists and orchestral players to create a
tapestry which would reward repeated listenings without losing its
direct appeal.
The other London piece of the concert was Elgar’s characterful Cockaigne Overture
(1900-01), which opened the second half. Here, Søndergård conveyed a
sense of proportion and restrained lyricism, but skated thinly over the
score’s latent ambivalence and volcanic fire. Whilst Elgar is too often
wrongly pigeon-holed as stiff and heavy with the ‘nobilmente’
designation he used for the first time in this score (sketches for
the ‘Enigma’ Variations aside), here the performance also gave few hints of Elgar’s equal weight and wry sparkle. Ironically, following its premiere, Cockaigne
had been dismissed by the critic Charles Maclean as having ‘an excess
of fancy’ and paying ‘too little attention to form’. But perhaps we have
all the grounds we need to dismiss such remarks as callow regression
from one who also opined that women’s suffrage was a ‘truly nefarious
cause’.
Seated high up behind the orchestra, the BBC National Chorus of Wales
sat patiently awaiting their two daunting encounters with the Russian
language. The first – the ‘Polvtsian Dances’ from Borodin’s unfinished
opera, Prince Igor – drew cheers from the audience in closing
the first half. However, it was the second which drew greater Slavic
vocal character from the eager massed forces, in the form of
Rachmaninov’s magnificent choral symphony. The Bells was
written in 1912-13, on the cusp of World War I, and the 1917 October
Revolution which would sweep the Bolsheviks to power in Russia and
precipitate the bourgeois Rachmaninov’s flight from his motherland,
never to return.
The tolling of bells and the intoning of the Dies Irae
held enormous significance for Rachmaninov, and both come together in
this secular setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s intense, brooding poem in
Konstantin Balmont’s narrative translation. As the chorus and orchestra
dug deep, Søndergård deftly steered their journey from the light ‘Silver
Sleigh Bells’ of the 1st movement to the dark, ‘Mournful Iron Bells’ of
the final 4th with the aid of three superb soloists: soprano, Anastasia
Kalagina; tenor, John Daszak; and the wonderfully reverberant bass,
Mikhail Petrenko. Together – and with the exquisite lament of
Sarah-Jayne Porsmoguer’s cor anglais – they lent solemn authority to a
performance which proved, appropriately enough, the ringing highlight of
the evening.
* It will be interesting to see what, if any, resemblance Fireworks
passes to a piece Stravinsky wrote for an entirely more sombre purpose
in Rimsky’s funeral, 1909: long thought lost, the work has recently been
discovered in the form of a set of orchestral parts found in the
library of the St Petersburg Conservatoire.
This performance formed part of a Cardiff-wide celebration of
Rachmaninov spanning BBC NOW to the Welsh National Opera and
Philharmonia orchestras, St David’s Hall to the Royal Welsh College of
Music and Drama.
ORLANDO THIS AND ALL IMAGES BELOW CREDIT: BILL COOPER
Bellini – I puritani / Handel – Orlando
Welsh National Opera
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 11 and 27 September, 2015
"The most beautiful things are those that are whispered by
madness and written down by reason. We must steer a course between the
two, close to madness in our dreams, but close to reason in our writing." André Gide
Madness – like the affliction itself – continues to provoke extreme
or confused responses, despite today’s more enlightened attitudes. On
the one hand it remains largely taboo, and sufferers continue to be
laughed at, vilified or feared. On the other hand madness is viewed
romantically, through rose-tinted glasses, as a prerequisite of creative
genius. Clearly the former position stems from ignorance and cruelty.
But, notwithstanding Schumann, Wolf (or indeed Woolf), Robin Williams
and a host of others, surely the latter position could only seriously be
held by those fortunate enough never to have experienced severe mental
illness themselves, or in someone close to them. And yet statistics tell
us that one in four adults will experience some kind of mental health
problem at some point in their lives, and that suicide is the leading cause of death
for women and men between the ages of 20 and 34 in England and Wales.
Perhaps all those mad heroines and heroes of the operatic canon are
expressing something less extreme – or at least less unusual – than we
might suppose.
Of course it is the excesses of madness for which opera has proved so
eloquent a vehicle through the ages; the fiery volatility of psychosis
rather than the grinding flatness of depression. And, as Gide so
poetically implies above, it is a matter of context and degree: up to a
point, certain forms of madness can be a liberation from artistic or
social constraint; a way of breaking loose from pressures to conform to
what are often narrow, generic ideas about how we should live or think,
exhorting us to behave reasonably. Or, to put it another way, within the
bounds of ‘reason’. The fact that people in positions of power, and
entire agencies of social control – families, police, governments – can
themselves behave in very ‘unreasonable’ ways makes for an uneasy
relationship between the psyche of the individual and the norms of the
collective. Madness can be an act of protest, while the diagnosis of
madness can be used to repress anything deemed threatening to the social
order. And, as we can see in the operas explored below, the supposed
causes of madness (beyond the purely neurological) – and how mad people
are treated – tell us a great deal about social attitudes.
I puritani: Elvira – Rosa Feola.
It seems fitting that Welsh National Opera should embark on their
70th anniversary year with a season devoted to madness. In many ways,
the subject goes to the heart of opera itself; not just through
characters in extreme distress, or stories depicting social chaos or
collapse, but through the very nature of the art-form, which invites us
to step out of our everyday reality and into a fantastical world where
the usual ‘rules’ of time and space are suspended, and characters
communicate through song. In any production, the different elements of
opera – music, libretto and staging – are experienced as a continual
dialogue which may move in and out of internal congruence. Where that
process is deliberately and thoughtfully undertaken, the results can
illuminate or challenge our own psychological habits and assumptions.
I puritani: Elvira – Rosa Feola / actress Elena Thomas, Arturo – Barry Banks.
The operatic age most commonly associated with madness is that of 19th century Italian bel canto,
or ‘beautiful singing’ – which immediately suggests a contradiction.
How is it possible to find beauty in madness and suffering? And at what
point does audience sympathy for the inevitable mad soprano turn to
voyeurism as her affliction induces her to displays of searing emotion
and dazzling, virtuoso coloratura? On the surface, it appears
that, for composers such as Donizetti* and Bellini, losing her man is
sufficient cause for a woman to lose her mind; thereby equating security
and sanity with the masculine, and mental vulnerability with the
feminine. Beneath this lies the point (noted by WNO artistic director
David Pountney in his programme introduction) that such women are
trapped; powerless within a patriarchal system that denies them the
right to choose whom they may love. But herein too, lies a trap for
modern directors: that, whatever her lack of recourse to other forms of
protest, depicting a woman as ‘going mad’ rather than ‘getting mad’ at
her situation can end up lending weight to the cliché of the hysterical
female victim – or replaying the myth that madness is merely a form of
aggression, passive or otherwise. Thankfully, WNO’s ‘madness’ teams
skillfully avoid such perils.
I puritani: Elvira – Rosa Feola.
A key answer to the first question above is that beauty and madness
are not mutually exclusive, and that opera is surely one of the most
powerful means to explore their interaction – not least through the
power of sung melody. Bellini’s final masterpiece, I puritani
(1835) – the opera which unveiled WNO’s ‘madness’ season this autumn –
has the slightest of plots. But the sublime subtlety of the music
(wonderfully played by the WNO orchestra under conductor Carlo Rizzi)
ensures space for nuanced thematic exploration, and Bellini paints his
mad heroine, Elvira, with an especially fine brush: gorgeously sung here
by the outstanding Rosa Feola, with no, misplaced, histrionics but a
myriad, delicate inflections. Elvira wrongly believes that her lover,
Arturo – the soaring, tenor marvel that is Barry Banks – has deserted
her for another woman, and she duly succumbs to lunatic fantasies
brought on by inconsolable grief. Interestingly, Elvira’s rejected
suitor, Riccardo (a suitably gruff, menacing David Kempster), retains
his own sanity sufficient to plot revenge on Arturo – who has, in fact,
gone off to rescue the widow of the executed Charles I: for Riccardo and
Elvira are Roundheads (the Puritans of the title), but Arturo is a
Cavalier, and the lovers are attempting to cross the ideological divide
of the English Civil War.
Director Annalese Miskimmon’s response to Bellini is considered and
intelligent, and her courageous new production not only sets Elvira’s
madness within a timely modern frame, but goes some way to addressing
those questions of voyeurism and gender politics raised above – at least
regarding this particular piece – whilst re-working Bellini’s
unconvincingly happy ending to shocking effect (I won’t give away what
happens). Miskimmon and designer Leslie Travers draw compelling
parallels with modern-day sectarianism, setting the opera in 1970s
Belfast. Elvira and Arturo are respectively Protestant and Catholic, and
the entire action – not just Elvira’s ‘mad scene’ – pivots around her
cracking under the strain of the Troubles. As she descends into
insanity, she hallucinates proceedings via the symbols of Riccardo’s
Orange Order, back to the age of Cromwell. This is cleverly done, but,
crucially, vis-à-vis Elvira’s madness, Miskimmon undercuts the problematic male gaze by introducing a silent Elvira doppelgänger,
who looks on with horror from the equally mad ‘reality’ of Belfast.
Thus the most important observer becomes the split Elvira herself, and
the audience is drawn visually as well as musically into her inner
conflict and its wider – political – outward cause.
When Bellini composed I puritani, Shakespeare’s Hamlet
was enjoying great popularity in France and Italy, and Ophelia, fatally
caught between the expectations, cruelty and kindness of various men,
became an important model for staged female madness. Some hundred-plus
years after Shakespeare, bisecting his and Bellini’s works in time,
Handel composed his opera Orlando (based on Ariosto’s epic poem, Orlando furioso,
and premiered in 1733) in which it is the eponymous hero, rather than a
heroine, who goes mad. For this WNO season, the opera forms a kind of
opposite sex counterpart to the Bellini in a handsome production by
director, Harry Fehr, performed with conviction and panache by a strong
cast and a convincingly baroque, reduced WNO band under conductor,
Rinaldo Alessandrini.
Orlando: Dorinda – Flur Wyn (& other nurses), Orlando – Lawrence Zazzo, Zoroastro – Daniel Grice.
Whilst the two operas have certain tropes in common, they present very different takes on madness. In Orlando,
once again it is love – or the lack thereof – that triggers a descent
into insanity, but here the action revolves around the romantic
entanglements of four people: the traumatised Orlando and physically
wounded Medoro are soldiers (sung here by robust countertenors: Lawrence
Zazzo is especially rich-voiced as Orlando, whilst Robin Blaze makes a
spirited rival). They both love the same ‘high society’ woman, Angelica
(a superbly torn Rebecca Evans), who once loved Orlando but has now
fallen for Medoro; a situation observed with dismay by the unfortunate
nurse, Dorinda, who loves him to no avail (beautifully sung by Fflur
Wyn).
Like Elvira, Orlando is caught between love and duty. In Elvira’s
case, she allows her heart to overrule her tribal loyalties, but her
choice is effectively between one man or another, and her madness is an
expression of despair. With Orlando, however, the dilemma takes him into
Hamlet’s territory rather than Ophelia’s, for it concerns the correct
path of action: should he go back to war and rejoin the fight, thus
leaving behind his beloved Angelica – which he cannot bear to do – or
should he stay and devote himself to love?
Orlando: Orlando – Lawrence Zazzo & nurses.
This kind of proactive decision-making is naturally available to
Orlando in a way which would simply not arise for a woman of the opera’s
time, nor indeed the Bellini. But then Handel, the master psychologist,
through music of exquisite dramatic nuance, undercuts Orlando’s
apparent agency in two significant ways – effectively emasculating him
and, it is implied, thereby finally sending him mad. Firstly, Angelica
invalidates Orlando’s predicament by rejecting him, precipitating a
jealous, psychotic attack in which her would-be lover murders Fedoro
before threatening to kill her too. However, they are all then rescued
by a more powerful agent still in the form of Zoroastro (sung here with
passion if not authoritative presence by Daniel Grice), who restores
Angelica and Medoro to life and love, and Orlando to sanity and peace.
As dramaturg, Sophie Rashbrook’s excellent English surtitles inform
us, ‘The lesson of Orlando [is]: love can often lead to madness.’ But of
course there’s more to it than that. In Handel’s vision, Zoroastro is a
supernatural figure; a wizard, retrospectively inviting comparison with
the characters and moral dilemmas of Mozart’s later, The Magic Flute.
Fehr and his designer, Yannis Thavoris, depict him as a doctor – indeed
as the proverbial mad psychiatrist – up-dating the action to a World
War II hospital during the London Blitz. The setting enables some
pertinent modern questions to be addressed concerning the social roots
of madness which, in Handel’s day, was often attributed to demonic
possession. In the Handel as in the Bellini, war is shown to be a form
of madness. But here, Orlando is cared for on the one hand, and
subjected to medical experimentation á la Wozzeck on the other –
including bouts of electro-convulsive therapy. Moreover, he is
brainwashed (in a scene which might be strengthened by more overt
reference to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), as Zoroastro attempts to instil the highly dubious notion that war is preferable to love.
Orlando: Dorinda – Fflur Wyn, Angelica – Rebecca Evans.
Ultimately, Zoroastro is confirmed as the most powerful force; the
implication being that we challenge the gods – or authority – at risk of
madness. Through the psychiatrist’s intercession, deus ex machina,
Orlando returns to chastised sanity and will, it seems, obediently go
back to war like a good soldier. But it is noteworthy that, in Fehr’s
production, the role of wizard should be given to a sinister
representative of medical science; perhaps a portrayal of which figures
such as Lacan, Foucault and R.D. Laing, of the last few decades’
‘anti-psychiatry’ movement, would approve. It is also interesting that
Dorinda manages to suffer equal rejection and disappointment to the mad
hero without losing her mind – or her ability to empathise with others.
Which leads us to especially fraught, probably unanswerable,
questions about the nature and limits of behavioural responsibility.
Today, there remains no medical definition of the word ‘insanity’.
Rather, it is a legal term, pertaining to a person’s ability to
determine right from wrong following the commitment of an [act of]
crime. How far Orlando is responsible for murder, or may be excused on
the grounds of diminished responsibility, is a fascinating question
which goes right to the heart of WNO’s next installment of their
‘madness’ season: Sondheim’s brilliant ‘musical thriller’, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
* With tragic irony, Donizetti, composer of the most famous so-called
‘mad scene’ of all – ‘Il dolce suono… Ardon gl’incensi… Spargi d’amaro
pianto’ from Lucia di Lammermoor – died in a lunatic asylum in 1848, having suffered syphilis-induced derangement for several years.
Carlos López Burchardo – Escenas argentinas Juan José Castro – Sinfonía argentina: ‘El Arrabal’ Àstor Piazzolla – Concerto for Bandoneón, ‘Aconcagua’ Michael Berkeley – Tango! (world premiere) Alberto Ginastera – Estancia (ballet)
BBC National Orchestra of Wales Conductor – Edwin Outwater / Accordion – James Crabb / Baritone – Lucas Somoza Osterc
"This city that I believed was my past Is my future, my present; The years I have lived in Europe are illusory, I was always (and will be) in Buenos Aires."
Jorge Luis Borges
BBC Hoddinott Hall on a mild September afternoon is a far cry from
the sweaty bars and brothels of Buenos Aires which gave birth to the
modern tango – or at least distilled it into its most potent, erotic
form. So, too, are the windy plains of Patagonia, where the BBC National
Orchestra of Wales is heading later this autumn for a pioneering
residency (joined in concert by the National Youth Choir of Wales),
before a South American tour that takes in Argentina’s capital and its
counterparts in Uruguay and Chile. But, from the once-seafaring settlers
of Cardiff Bay to the Welsh descendants in distant Y Wladfa and the
Creole melting pot of the Porteños, nostalgia and national identity
often go hand in hand. The tango is not unique to Buenos Aires, and
exists in many forms, but everywhere it evokes a heady mix of imagined
romance and a supposedly better, more alive place and time. Àstor
Piazzolla is the most celebrated composer to have fallen under its
spell; one of a long list of Argentinian composers who, in various ways,
merged elements of the past and present with popular and ‘art’ musics,
seeking a national style and their own voice within it.
The BBC NOW will shuttle across the Atlantic in a jumbo jet; very
different from the patriots who set sail with no small trepidation in
the modified tea-clipper, Mimosa, in 1865, trading the
oppressive anglicisation of their language and way of life for an
unknown future. From Argentina, 20th-century musical traffic often
flowed in the opposite direction, with composers seeking inspiration
(and, during periods of domestic dictatorship, political refuge) in
Europe. Of the composers featured in this imaginative afternoon concert,
Carlos López Burchardo and Juan José Castro were of the earliest
generation to study in Paris – with Albert Roussel and Vincent d‘Indy
respectively – before returning to Buenos Aires in the mid 1920s. Two
decades later, Alberto Ginastera was drawn to the USA and to Aaron
Copland in particular, whilst Piazzolla, a pupil of Ginastera in the
early ‘50s, subsequently became one of many composers from all over the
world to find success following studies with that great Parisienne,
Nadia Boulanger.
Argentine Gaucho, 1868, Arts Library of Congress.
As if to underline the importance of Europe in Buenos Aires itself, Burchado’s Escenas argentinas
was premiered there by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, on tour in
1922. Cast in three movements, the work charts ‘Scenes from Argentina’
as a story of young love through changing moods: fiesta; a tranquil then
lively brook; and a type of folk song originating in the gauchesco,
or cowboy, culture Burchado encountered in his youth on the family
estate, replete with the rhythms of the milonga; a syncopated style
within which some trace the origins of the tango. The BBC NOW was
crisply persuasive under its Californian conductor, Edwin Outwater, with
a rippling homogeneous sound, and themes passed like colourful batons
acround the orchestra. This is richly melodic music which looks back to a
European 19th century nationalist model; characterised by expansive
gestures and romantic wistfulness with the odd, harmonic twist in its
folk-based material.
Castro’s ‘El Arrabal’ – the first movement of his Sinfonía argentina – was altogether more sinewy, and clearly influenced by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring,
which Castro performed many times in Argentina and elsewhere as a
conductor. ‘Arrabal’ refers to the impoverished districts of Buenos
Aires from which the tango emerged in the late 19th century, just as the
idealised rustic culture of the gaucho was disappearing. Both
traditions are inherently macho; full of a domineering virility
reflected in the strutting rhythms and sonorities of Castro’s
impressively vivid score, authoritatively dispatched (to use an equally
macho metaphor) by Outwater and the BBC NOW.
James Crabb. Photo credit Christoffer Askman.
Piazzolla’s Concerto for Bandoneón, composed in 1979, was
more subtle in balancing red-blooded passion with an almost sentimental,
café culture insouciance. James Crabb was the outstanding soloist who,
as much as Outwater, guided a responsive BBC NOW with relaxed expertise
through the composer’s improvisatory twists and turns. Piazzolla was
himself celebrated as a bandoneónista, and Crabb clearly knows his music
inside out – although it was disappointing to hear the accordion rather
than the brasher bandoneón on this occasion. However, there was some
wonderfully snappy interplay across the strings, and between the soloist
and pianist (Catherine Roe Williams) in particular.
Such is the ferocity of tango purists that Piazzolla endured death
threats for supposedly diluting its authenticity, daring to push its
harmonic and rhythmic possibilities on the concert platform. I trust the
same won’t happen to Michael Berkeley in the light of his five-minute Tango!,
here receiving its world premiere in homage to the great man. But then
Berkeley’s score, albeit deftly and colourfully written and
sympathetically performed, seemed to come more from the head than the
hips, rather calling to mind these words of Borges:
“[the tango] promises no difficulties, but the French or Spanish
composer who then follows it and correctly ‘crafts’ a tango is shocked
to discover he has constructed something that our ears do not recognise,
that our memory does not harbour, and that our bodies reject”
The final work was by Argentina’s most distinguished composer:
Castro’s younger friend and colleague, Alberto Ginastera, whose earlier
music was very much concerned with the gauchesco legacy. His popular ballet, Estancia,
tells a picturesque tale of love and life, filtered through a
Copland-esque, wide-angle lens, as a city boy woos a country girl on a
cattle ranch. Here we heard the full ballet score rather than the more
usual Suite, performed with verve by the orchestra and the
yearning, almost-tenor, baritone of Lucas Somoza Osterc. The lack of
programme text was an oversight by BBC NOW – but, regardless, the
orchestra were in their element, with big, open chords, fanfares,
galloping dances and tender entreaties off-set by muscular, driving
rhythms.
Ginastera was a second-generation Argentinian and a life-long
patriot who, despite going on to develop a more atonal idiom, and
spending his later years in Europe, still spoke of his belief that “the
artist should be a spokesman of a society, a spokesman of a people, and a
spokesman of a given culture.” He died in 1983 – the year which saw the
end of the last military dictatorship in Argentina – having put
Argentina firmly on the international musical map for reasons quite
aside from the brilliantly seductive tango.
St David’s Hall, Cardiff, July 21 2015 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Piano: John Lill Conductor: Owain Arwel Hughes
Wagner: Overture, Tannhäuser Mendelssohn: Scherzo, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Op 61 Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No 2 Elgar: ‘Enigma Variations’ (Variations on an Original Theme, Op 36)
At a time when festivals are becoming ever more ubiquitous across the
arts, any Proms organiser has to be prepared to think outside the box
to create distinctive, innovative programmes. In London the BBC Proms
has become not so much a festival as a season-long behemoth; certainly
it is the largest and most widely accessible, if not necessarily the
‘greatest’, classical music festival in the world, fuelled by the
corporate might of the broadcaster. 2015 sees its 120th anniversary
(121st season), but, as listeners of Radio 3 might attest, the
relatively staid programming this year is indicative of a holding period
between artistic directors.*
As the BBC Proms – and indeed the entire corporation – faces its own
challenges to stay sharp and relevant in an increasingly hostile
political and financial climate, the comparatively tiny, wholly
independent Welsh Proms has survived by a whisker to celebrate its 30th
birthday this July in Cardiff. The disastrous withdrawal of Cardiff City
Council funding has been well documented – and so too has the
generosity and spirit of founder and artistic director Owain Arwel
Hughes, who has been prepared once again, alongside help from other
sources, to dig deep into his own pockets to ensure the festival’s
survival for this year at least.
Perhaps inevitably, as Nigel Jarrett pointed out in his review of the Opening Night,
the ensuing programming has proved piecemeal, despite Hughes’
impressive achievement in bringing a variety of top orchestras,
ensembles and soloists to the capital for the week-long event.
Ironically, the very night of Hughes’ focal ‘Masterpieces’ programme, on
July 21, when he conducted the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at St
David’s Hall, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was performing for the
second time already this Proms season in London. Sinfonia Cymru are
poised to appear at the up and coming, three-year-old Bristol Proms on
July 29 following their successful debut there in 2014. Neither
orchestra will appear at the Welsh Proms this year.
Nonetheless, concert-goers turned out in droves in Cardiff to hear
Hughes, the BSO and the distinguished pianist John Lill in a concert of
popular classics as comforting as they were defiant in the face of bleak
economic realities. This was Hughes’ single scheduling of a concert
containing longer pieces performed in their entirety, in a week
otherwise frustratingly devoted to excerpts and shorter works. Even so,
albeit received with appreciation by the audience, the concert was in
some respects a patchwork quilt affair.
Two contrasting excerpts opened the evening, dating from the same, mid-19th century period: the Overture from Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1845), followed by a snippet of the composer’s nemesis, the 1843 Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The styles and contexts of these works could not be more different,
with Wagner continuing to lay the foundations of what would become, in
effect, a radical musical metaphysics, and Mendelssohn responding with
still-youthful, lyrical delight to Shakespeare’s beloved fantasy. Here,
the roiling inner layers of the Tannhäuser proved elusive to
Hughes, who favoured stepped dynamics over thematic shaping and balanced
textures. However, he and the orchestra felt more at ease with the
Scherzo, with its crisp, bubbly woodwind and lightly dancing motifs; the
first violins here as elsewhere proving the strongest section of the
strings.
Between pieces, Hughes thanked the audience for coming, stating with
typical mildness that this particular Proms ‘has been quite an adventure
for me, I must say.’ The ensuing Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No 2 gave
them the chance to cheer their support of both conductor and soloist,
John Lill. Appropriately enough, given the rollercoaster ride of the
Welsh Proms’ recent history, the piece happens to be one which heralded a
new dawn for its composer. Rachmaninoff had fallen into despair and
stopped composing altogether after the catastrophic premiere of his
Symphony No 1 in 1897. Luckily for us, three years later, and following
treatment for depression, he produced this tempestuous, dramatic work to
great acclaim, and it has remained enormously popular ever since.
Lill has always been refreshingly free of showy gestures, rather
embodying a deeper, more thoughtful romantic pianism. Depending on your
point of view, this either bodes well for a concerto more steeped in
subtle mood shifts than some care to acknowledge, or threatens a lack of
the extrovert impulses so central to its expression. Lill’s performance
had lovely moments in both regards, but he and the orchestra struggled
to attain the higher reaches of passion and raw commitment. Nonetheless,
the big tunes were all there, and a glittering, quicksilver virtuosity
belying the soloist’s 70-some years. And the orchestra responded with
spirit; well versed in Russian music under its Ukrainian chief conductor
since 2007, Kirill Karabits. Here, the second movement was the most
cohesive, with the pianist forming the central hub of an amply-coloured Adagio sostenuto.
Elgar’s popularly titled Enigma Variations is more natural
territory for Hughes, and he dived into the famous theme and its
fourteen variations with brisk enthusiasm (the central, ninth variation
and core of the work, ‘Nimrod’, having popped up at the Proms Opening
Night with the Philharmonia Orchestra). The conductor’s eschewing of
sentimentality was salient, and he proved alive to Elgar’s keenly
observed and often witty characterisations. The Variations are
full of contrasts and quirky touches, but it is Elgar’s brilliant
orchestral inventiveness which saw this piece finally launch his career
at the turn of the century – at the very time Rachmaninoff was
overcoming his own struggles to be taken seriously as a composer.
Not all the variations were played with technical distinction (from
fluffed passagework to dodgy intonation in the double basses, and with
the tripping rhythms of Variation X, ‘Dorabella’, hanging by a thread).
But they were played with hugely enjoyable gusto – which ultimately
matters more. Indeed, the most boisterous variations were the most
successful, and the brass were clearly delighted to be given their
fanfare heads in Variations VII and XI (which respectively portray a
Malvern architect attempting to play the piano, and a bulldog, belonging
to the then Hereford Cathedral organist, attempting to retrieve a stick
from the River Wye).
Elgar, of course, remains synonymous with the Last Night of the BBC
Proms – though he would undoubtedly squirm at the ghastly jingoism with
which his music is too often unfairly associated. His presence here, in
this Cardiff concert, prompted some interesting questions about the
Welsh Proms going forward – assuming that they do indeed have a future,
as many people wish. For surely it is time to embrace a new vision of
the Proms which doesn’t cast Wales in a parochial, ‘poorer cousin’
relation to the enormous festival in London, with which it can hardly
hope to compete, and which itself is looking to find new ways to evolve.
That would entail taking a good, hard look at the repertoire,
presentation and purpose of the series overall in light of 21st-century
trends, and finding some innovative way of departing from the current
London model; Bristol is doing just that in its own, totally different,
way (and it will be interesting to see how that still-new festival grows
over time, given its proximity to Cardiff).
Whether the process in Wales involves greater emphasis on Welsh
composers, say, or young soloists or conductors – or perhaps some
overarching theme for the season, embracing different kinds of
contemporary music-focused ensembles, for instance, or technology and
education to make the Proms a more truly national festival – it’s to be
hoped that Owain Arwel Hughes is given, and chooses to grasp, such
opportunity in future years. He has done incredibly well to keep the
festival going thus far under enormous pressure.
* The newly appointed (ex-Glyndebourne chief) David Pickard is
waiting in the wings to assume control from the long-standing Roger
Wright via Edward Blakeman, who took on the stewardship of this summer’s
event after Wright’s departure for Aldeburgh Festival in September
2014. Pickard will report to Alan Davey, controller of BBC Radio 3.
