‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.’
So said John Cage (1912-1992), the American composer and cultural icon, whose birth centenary was celebrated this year. Revered by many as one of the fathers of post-war experimentalism, Cage also managed to unite otherwise opposing traditionalists and avant-gardists who, together, scorned his music for its conceptual nature and lack of technical rigour; he was, said his one-time teacher Arnold Schoenberg, ‘not a composer, but an inventor - of genius’.
Perhaps, then, it says something intriguing about classical music in the UK today that Cage is often treated as a kind of honorary national treasure and that he, in his centenary year, has been subsumed into what has become a real industry of cultural nostalgia. For we are, it seems, completely in thrall to the past; not only through an obsession with anniversaries (not to mention jubilees) but - much more tendentiously in classical music culture - through a seemingly unshakeable focus on music from distant eras rather than that of our own time; hence, in this end-of-year piece, notwithstanding my focus on events around 20th Century and contemporary composers, I find myself in an ironic position that Cage would no doubt have smiled at - in effect, looking back at what we chose to look back at during 2012.
That said, as individuals and as a society, we need to be able to celebrate and to mourn; to pause and consider where we stand in relation to events. And anniversaries are also a way of gauging relative cultural value in terms of who we choose to remember and how; alas, for instance, the centenary of Cage’s brilliant but lesser-known compatriot, the experimentalist Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), seems to have been passed over entirely in Wales - along with celebrations of Schoenberg’s own seminal work of music theatre Pierrot lunaire - whilst the 150-year birth anniversaries of Claude Debussy and Frederick Delius that enthralled BBC Proms and other audiences elsewhere in the UK were also given less attention here (albeit thankfully in the latter case - notwithstanding the advocacy of Tasmin Little and Julian Lloyd-Webber with his Violin and Cello Concertos respectively at July’s Fishguard International Music Festival).
Regarding Cage, it was the Bangor New Music and Gregynog Festivals which, most notably in Wales, chose to mark his life and work with concerts in March and June respectively. In Bangor, a selection of his earlier pieces was combined with other works inspired by the Fluxus movement to which he was central. More imaginatively, at Gregynog’s National Museum of Wales concert, the experimental harpist Rhodri Davies revealed surprising links between Venice, Cage (his piece Sounds of Venice) and the Gregynog’s founders (one hundred years since they first started collecting paintings of Venice by Whistler, Monet and Sickert). Cage would, one suspects, have relished both occasions.
Closer to home, but on quite another aesthetic planet, lies the music of Pembrokeshire-born composer Daniel Jones (1912-93) who would also have turned one hundred this year. Jones may lack international stature - and his music is yet to truly touch a nerve at home, falling in the cracks between traditional and modernist - but his was an important and substantial Welsh voice, including thirteen symphonies and eight string quartets, the last unfinished at his death. Between them, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and July’s Gower Festival (for whom he was long-standing Festival President) sought to bring his music to wider attention in 2012; the former adding performances of his Cello Concerto and Five Pieces for Orchestra to that of his 12th Symphony in 2011, and the latter programming his Quartet No. 7 alongside choral music and a talk/documentary screening. Hopefully, 2014 will see further programming of his music as part of another, more promising centenary celebration; that of his close friend and collaborator Dylan Thomas.
Thankfully, there is a music festival in Wales that has a policy of celebrating the birthdays of composers while they are actually still with us: the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, founded in 1969 and, since 1992, run as a major international “festival of living composers” by Welsh composer John Metcalf. 2012 was significant for the festival, as it moved from its customary early autumn slot to the spring, this year featuring the music of Philip Glass, who turned 75, and - much more interestingly - Per Nørgård at 80.
Whilst Glass needs little introduction as one of the best-known living composers in the world (to mark his birthday, the original, 1976 Metropolitan Opera production of his seminal Einstein on the Beach was reconstructed at the London Barbican this May), Nørgård deserves a far wider audience than he has had hitherto as the most influential and important Danish composer since Carl Nielsen. Conductor Sergiu Celibidache has ventured that ‘only the mind of a new time in the new millennium will be able to understand the scope of Nørgård’s music’ and this may well turn out to be true; in any event, BBC NOW, the virtuosic Ars Nova Copenhagen and equally impressive young Ensemble Midtvest gave Vale Festival performances of both large and small-scale works to deserved acclaim ahead of the UK premiere of Nørgård’s 7th Symphony at the Proms (his 8th - already written this summer - will premiere, along with his 11th String Quartet, in the UK next March at the Barbican).
Metcalf should be congratulated; both for these successes and for another international coup this year with the first ever visit to the UK by Soloists of Traditional Chinese Instruments, with further focus on the music of contemporary Chinese composer Qigang Chen (who happens, like Glass and Nørgård, also to have lived and studied in Paris). In this respect - and made poignant by the large and supportive presence of Ensemble Midtvest’s ‘friends’ group, who travelled all the way from Denmark to attend their concerts - his Festival was especially thought-provoking this year as to the importance of not only bearing witness to new work, but of embracing and participating in the wider-level cultural shifts and changes that those works can signify.
Sadly though, 2012 saw the passing of another era with the recent deaths of two major 20th Century figures, both radicals in their own way and both mavericks latterly embraced by the establishment; the self-exiled German, Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) and remarkably long-lived New Yorker, Elliott Carter (1908-2012). Perhaps it is too soon to expect concert tributes by year end, but it was, at least, a fitting coincidence that a Welsh National Opera concert in Cardiff should happen to have featured sections of Henze’s Requiem alongside Mozart’s but three weeks after Henze’s death.
Certainly, it would be good to see further tributes to Carter and Henze in the coming year - and, more widely, both to increase our national engagement with contemporary musical events of international significance and, indeed, to generate such events from home soil by encouraging more of a focus on new works. Perhaps we should look to two new key appointments to deliver in that regard, with the dynamic, young Thomas Søndergård having embarked upon a four-year contract as new Principal Conductor of BBC NOW, whilst the internationally distinguished opera director David Pountney is about to launch his first new production as Artistic Director and CEO of Welsh National Opera.
Søndergård has won accolades for championing new work and the music of fellow Scandinavians from Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen to Magnus Lindberg - which three he did in 2012 or will in 2013 - perform in Wales. It would be fantastic if he were to follow Metcalf’s lead in programming Nørgård - but, as Principal of Wales’s national orchestra, it would certainly be fitting for him personally to contribute to BBC NOW’s various initiatives encouraging contemporary Welsh composers as other, less senior conductors already do; Grant Llewellyn, for instance, did sterling and inspiring work in November at the helm for BBC NOW’s Welsh Panorama at Hoddinott Hall, which featured a whopping seven lesser-known composers both from and living in Wales - including the current BBC NOW Resident Composer, Mark Bowden.
On the operatic front, it is ironic that Pountney’s year of coming into post at WNO should have seen yet another new staging of an old war-horse in the form of La Bohème, as he is on record around the millenium as stating,
‘the future of opera for me is not about how many performances of La Bohème there will be in the next century, nor about whether this Bohème is dressed up as something else. It is about which stories we would like to tell in our new century, and what music we will tell them with, and which audience we will find to listen to our stories ... I am talking about new work’.
Thankfully, Pountney’s first new production as director is promisingly ambitious and signals a commitment to more exciting, challenging fare than the Puccini: Alban Berg’s 1930s opera Lulu (to be staged next February), is not only a masterpiece of 20th Century theatre, but represents a milestone in operatic social and political critique - and has, shockingly, never been staged in Wales. Looking to the future, Pountney certainly has contemporary opera on the agenda, with a series of five starting with Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream next summer. [Sad news at time of writing - Harvey died on 5th December aged 77, having lost his battle with motor neurone disease]. But when - or if - WNO will venture to put new work by Welsh composers onto its main stage remains to be seen.
Wales is, after all, not short of talent; this year alone, Lynne Plowman scored great success with her third opera, The Face in the Mirror, for WNO’s educational arm, WNO Max, and has won a prestigious Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales award for 2012-13. Likewise, the enterprising Music Theatre Wales toured coming man Huw Watkins’s chamber opera In the Locked Room alongside Scot Stuart MacRae’s Ghost Patrol in a joint project with Scottish Opera to notable acclaim.
From where will the major new voices of the future appear if the opportunities for inspirational engagement at top level remain elusive? Of Welsh-born composers, Paul Mealor has undoubtedly achieved greatest international and popular success this year, with his Jubilate! Jubilee! for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee building on the success of his 2011 Royal Wedding piece Ubi Caritas - and serving as a reminder that, of all the art forms, it is music through which anniversaries and significant dates in general are most movingly celebrated. But none of the thirteen composers commissioned for the Flotilla on the Thames were Welsh. And Bryn Terfel’s Bryn Fest at London’s South Bank in July may have showcased the usual choral suspects, but he promoted precious little by way of new classical music beyond the ubiquitous (and musically conservative) Karl Jenkins.
So, as we look back on the Welsh classical music scene in 2012, there is much to celebrate and to ponder - but it is concern for the present and for the future which we must ultimately carry into the New Year; for it is, alas, the ongoing, swingeing cuts to arts budgets and the erosion of music education nation-wide that could turn out to have the most decisive and far-reaching effect of 2012. In instrumental tuition alone, it was reported in 2011 that £500k had been cut from budgets for school music lessons across Wales since a report called for a better service - and that Powys County Council has a shameful zero budget for instrumental tuition. When Newcastle City Council recently cut its arts budget by 100% there was great outcry within England, so where is the the outcry here in the ‘Land of Song’? Or are we so focused upon the past that we allow a drift backwards into musical mediocrity and parochialism? Cage would, one suspects, truly be frightened at such a prospect for, rather than a choice between new and old ideas in classical music, it seems we could choose, even more starkly, to be left with few ideas at all.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 14/12/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/look-back-in-apathy-anniversaries-icons-and-the-new-in-welsh-classical-music-2012/
About Me
- steph power
- Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
- composer, poet, critic, essayist
Sunday, 16 December 2012
Friday, 30 November 2012
Concert Review: Welsh National Opera Chorus and Orchestra: St David's Hall, Cardiff, 16th November 2012
Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music
Henze: Movements from the Requiem: Introitus / Agnus Dei / Sanctus
Mozart: Requiem
Conductor: Christoph Poppen
Soprano: Elizabeth Watts / Mezzo: Máire Flavin / Tenor: Andrew Tortise / Bass baritone: Gary Griffiths / Trumpet: Dean Wright / Piano: Simon Phillippo
When tonight’s concert programme was devised months ago, there could have been no inkling how prescient it would turn out to be with the death, on October 27th, of Hans Werner Henze at the age of 86. At once, an early appetizer to Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming Spring 2014 production of Henze’s opera Boulevard Solitude (1952) became a poignant memorial to a leading composer of the late Twentieth Century - and one of the most important to have emerged from the ashes of Hitler’s Germany.
In his 1998 autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, Henze described hearing Mozart on the radio as an adolescent, traumatised by Nazi brutality, in words that encapsulate what he himself went on to aspire to as a composer and a man:
‘It seemed to me as though here was a composer who, lovingly and knowingly, had evolved beyond the music that typified his time and country ... Against the cultural background of his age, Mozart opened up a whole new world of emotion in which ... feelings such as femininity and desire, tenderness and love ... are just as important as frivolousness and danger, risk-taking, death and despair in the form of aggression and masculinity ... It is music of and for humanity.’
Indeed, he wrote that:
‘My goal was Mozart, beauty, perfection, a new form of truth - a truth that pays no heed to the Zeitgeist and that triumphs over death itself’.
How far Henze achieved his loftier artistic ambitions remains open to question, but his life-long social and political commitment and sheer maverick endeavour are demonstrable; tonight’s moving rendition of three sections from his Requiem felt especially apposite alongside a refreshingly spirited Mozart’s, whose seminal final statement was, of course, left unfinished upon that composer’s untimely death in 1791 aged just 35 (not to mention unsatisfyingly - if quickly - completed by his pupil Franz Süssmayr).
Perhaps now, as we emerge from a period of de-politicised post-modernism - in which notions of truth seemed to get submerged to an unhealthy degree by relativist equivocation - Henze’s more polemically abrasive, overtly left-wing music might stand reappraisal. At any rate, the luminous performance here tonight demonstrated the emotional power of which he was capable in more lyrical mode, without forsaking the opportunity for direct social allusion. Choosing to omit the Latin text in favour of solo instrumentalists for a series of nine ‘sacred concertos’ (and reordering the liturgical sequence), the unreligious Henze nonetheless intended his Requiem to stand not only as a secular ‘act of brotherly love’ for Michael Vyner, erstwhile Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta, but ‘for all the many other people in the world who have died before their time’ and as a paene for human suffering. In its entirety, the work is overlong and texturally unrelenting without compensating clear direction, but the combination here of opening and closing Introitus and Sanctus with the sixth movement Agnus Dei opened an, at times, exquisite window on his intensely felt musical world. Special praise must go to conductor Poppen and the superbly evocative soloists Simon Phillipo and Dean Wright, as well as the echoing trumpeters placed in the auditorium.
If Henze was a latter-day romantic who took pains to deny his romanticism, the story of Mozart’s Requiem, his short life and tragic last days, have famously been subject to all sorts of romantic speculation of the fictional variety. Thankfully, tonight’s performance did not, as can so often happen, over-milk the pathos (nor did it - as Richard Taruskin has so eloquently noted of many a supposed “authentic” performance - ‘embalm [Mozart] in “historical” timbres’); instead, Poppen and his committed ensemble succeeded in demonstrating the work’s undoubted power through clear and thoughtfully-modulated enthusiasm rather than a straining towards the mythic or unduly mystical.
Having come to symbolise the painful quenching of young genius in popular imagination, the Requiem itself, retrospectively - and more prosaically - looks back to older, Baroque settings of the Latin mass, whilst opening the way to newer, more operatic approaches to liturgical form; that said, it is a largely choral work and, of tonight’s soloists, it was the soprano alone, Elizabeth Watts, who took true expressive flight. The chorus themselves were mostly magnificent and sang with gusto, albeit with lower voices veering towards harshness in some louder passages such as the opening of the Rex tremendae.
Both tonight’s composers were preoccupied by death at times - as are we all necessarily. More importantly, they both actively sought the artistic freedom without which life itself can fall into the metaphoric but by no means petty deaths of inertia and apathy. Mozart’s loosely freethinking Catholicism was supplemented by a (yet) more mysterious commitment to brotherhood in the form of Freemasonry; a connection which inspired the brief but intense Masonic Funeral Music in memory of two dead brethren, and which proved an excellent introduction tonight.
Henze swam perhaps more obviously against contemporary prevailing tides with his open homosexuality and Marxism; exiling himself not only from his German homeland in horror at war atrocities, but musically, post-war, against what he quickly construed as an authoritarian modernist orthodoxy, epitomised by hard-line peers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Despite later returning as a prodigal son to Germany to work, he never quite managed to reconcile himself on political grounds to being the natural successor of a German tradition stretching back to Mozart and beyond. Time will tell if upholders of that tradition will embrace him - that is, to the limited extent they embrace any post-war composer - by continuing to programme his vast body of works in familiar genres; from symphonies and ballets, to operas, string quartets, chamber and vocal music - and, indeed, his Requiem.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 30/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/welsh-national-opera-chorus-and-orchestra/
Henze: Movements from the Requiem: Introitus / Agnus Dei / Sanctus
Mozart: Requiem
Conductor: Christoph Poppen
Soprano: Elizabeth Watts / Mezzo: Máire Flavin / Tenor: Andrew Tortise / Bass baritone: Gary Griffiths / Trumpet: Dean Wright / Piano: Simon Phillippo
When tonight’s concert programme was devised months ago, there could have been no inkling how prescient it would turn out to be with the death, on October 27th, of Hans Werner Henze at the age of 86. At once, an early appetizer to Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming Spring 2014 production of Henze’s opera Boulevard Solitude (1952) became a poignant memorial to a leading composer of the late Twentieth Century - and one of the most important to have emerged from the ashes of Hitler’s Germany.
In his 1998 autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, Henze described hearing Mozart on the radio as an adolescent, traumatised by Nazi brutality, in words that encapsulate what he himself went on to aspire to as a composer and a man:
‘It seemed to me as though here was a composer who, lovingly and knowingly, had evolved beyond the music that typified his time and country ... Against the cultural background of his age, Mozart opened up a whole new world of emotion in which ... feelings such as femininity and desire, tenderness and love ... are just as important as frivolousness and danger, risk-taking, death and despair in the form of aggression and masculinity ... It is music of and for humanity.’
Indeed, he wrote that:
‘My goal was Mozart, beauty, perfection, a new form of truth - a truth that pays no heed to the Zeitgeist and that triumphs over death itself’.
How far Henze achieved his loftier artistic ambitions remains open to question, but his life-long social and political commitment and sheer maverick endeavour are demonstrable; tonight’s moving rendition of three sections from his Requiem felt especially apposite alongside a refreshingly spirited Mozart’s, whose seminal final statement was, of course, left unfinished upon that composer’s untimely death in 1791 aged just 35 (not to mention unsatisfyingly - if quickly - completed by his pupil Franz Süssmayr).
Perhaps now, as we emerge from a period of de-politicised post-modernism - in which notions of truth seemed to get submerged to an unhealthy degree by relativist equivocation - Henze’s more polemically abrasive, overtly left-wing music might stand reappraisal. At any rate, the luminous performance here tonight demonstrated the emotional power of which he was capable in more lyrical mode, without forsaking the opportunity for direct social allusion. Choosing to omit the Latin text in favour of solo instrumentalists for a series of nine ‘sacred concertos’ (and reordering the liturgical sequence), the unreligious Henze nonetheless intended his Requiem to stand not only as a secular ‘act of brotherly love’ for Michael Vyner, erstwhile Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta, but ‘for all the many other people in the world who have died before their time’ and as a paene for human suffering. In its entirety, the work is overlong and texturally unrelenting without compensating clear direction, but the combination here of opening and closing Introitus and Sanctus with the sixth movement Agnus Dei opened an, at times, exquisite window on his intensely felt musical world. Special praise must go to conductor Poppen and the superbly evocative soloists Simon Phillipo and Dean Wright, as well as the echoing trumpeters placed in the auditorium.
If Henze was a latter-day romantic who took pains to deny his romanticism, the story of Mozart’s Requiem, his short life and tragic last days, have famously been subject to all sorts of romantic speculation of the fictional variety. Thankfully, tonight’s performance did not, as can so often happen, over-milk the pathos (nor did it - as Richard Taruskin has so eloquently noted of many a supposed “authentic” performance - ‘embalm [Mozart] in “historical” timbres’); instead, Poppen and his committed ensemble succeeded in demonstrating the work’s undoubted power through clear and thoughtfully-modulated enthusiasm rather than a straining towards the mythic or unduly mystical.
Having come to symbolise the painful quenching of young genius in popular imagination, the Requiem itself, retrospectively - and more prosaically - looks back to older, Baroque settings of the Latin mass, whilst opening the way to newer, more operatic approaches to liturgical form; that said, it is a largely choral work and, of tonight’s soloists, it was the soprano alone, Elizabeth Watts, who took true expressive flight. The chorus themselves were mostly magnificent and sang with gusto, albeit with lower voices veering towards harshness in some louder passages such as the opening of the Rex tremendae.
Both tonight’s composers were preoccupied by death at times - as are we all necessarily. More importantly, they both actively sought the artistic freedom without which life itself can fall into the metaphoric but by no means petty deaths of inertia and apathy. Mozart’s loosely freethinking Catholicism was supplemented by a (yet) more mysterious commitment to brotherhood in the form of Freemasonry; a connection which inspired the brief but intense Masonic Funeral Music in memory of two dead brethren, and which proved an excellent introduction tonight.
Henze swam perhaps more obviously against contemporary prevailing tides with his open homosexuality and Marxism; exiling himself not only from his German homeland in horror at war atrocities, but musically, post-war, against what he quickly construed as an authoritarian modernist orthodoxy, epitomised by hard-line peers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Despite later returning as a prodigal son to Germany to work, he never quite managed to reconcile himself on political grounds to being the natural successor of a German tradition stretching back to Mozart and beyond. Time will tell if upholders of that tradition will embrace him - that is, to the limited extent they embrace any post-war composer - by continuing to programme his vast body of works in familiar genres; from symphonies and ballets, to operas, string quartets, chamber and vocal music - and, indeed, his Requiem.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 30/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/welsh-national-opera-chorus-and-orchestra/
Sunday, 18 November 2012
Opera Review: Music Theatre Wales double-bill: Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, 2nd November 2012
Huw Watkins composer / David Harsent librettist: In the Locked Room
Stuart MacRae composer / Louise Welsh librettist: Ghost Patrol
Conductor: Michael Rafferty
Directors: Michael McCarthy (In the Locked Room)
Matthew Richardson (Ghost Patrol)
Cast: Paul Currievici / Jane Harrington / Ruby Hayes / James McOran-Campbell /
Nicholas Sharratt / Håkan Vramso / Louise Winter
‘Grand’ opera seems to be enjoying somewhat of a renaissance as big-hitting companies like London’s Royal Opera House and the New York Metropolitan seek international audiences through televised transmission of live shows and work to refute charges of elitism with productions aimed squarely at the ‘common man and woman’. The star charisma of singers and conductors, the spectacle and sheer romance of it all, seem to be gaining them new audiences eager for live action, familiar stories and emotional catharsis. But what of the more ‘difficult’, less popular repertoire? And - more to the point - what of new, contemporary opera? How do today’s composers approach a genre so weighty with tradition?
Huw Watkins and Stuart MacRae have both been nurtured by companies sensitive to the challenges encountered by composers new to opera. Watkins has worked with Music Theatre Wales in various ways since 2004, whilst MacRae has come though Scottish Opera’s pioneering Five:15; a project first conceived in 2008 for five composers writing fifteen-minute works. It takes time and experience for any composer to find an authentic musical voice (if they do), but opera brings additional, unique demands and the many, subtle aspects of theatre production must, at times, seem a minefield. First and foremost, though, composers must decide what it is they want to say and how they want to say it.
Tonight’s programme was most thought-provoking in that regard. It presented Watkins’s In the Locked Room and MacRae’s Ghost Patrol as a touring double-bill of new, complementary works marking an innovative collaboration; that between two companies taking artistic control of an opera apiece within a joint production utilising two teams, with different composers, directors and casts working independently but alongside each other. Neither composer knew what the other was writing and the results give an intriguing comparative snap-shot of operatic thinking from two very different composers from the same generation.
From a performance perspective, the pairing was highly successful and the two companies should be congratulated. The operas sat well together and made for a meaty, tightly produced night of musical theatre. Praise is due to the impressive, well-matched casts who, together with the Music Theatre Wales Ensemble, performed with consistent excellence under conductor Michael Rafferty’s confident baton. The ensemble and instrumental writing was fluent overall; Watkins displaying his usual skilled craftsmanship and ear for beauty, with MacRae adding occasional electronics to an imaginative and distinctive, if sometimes overfussy, acoustic mix. Neither really soared vocally but the balance was good, with nothing unduly taxing for the singers, whilst the mises-en-scène offered effective vehicles for the largely plausible stage action (notwithstanding Watkins’s problematic ‘fantasy’ poet appearances). Whereas In the Locked Room could happily have been lengthened, giving the narrative room to breathe, Ghost Patrol was overlong, needing compression to tighten the drama, which sagged after an energetic start. A closer look at the drama in each case, however, leads to some less comfortable, wider questions.
The subjects of the two operas are very different despite aspects of plot in common; each revolving around a love triangle which ends tragically, with female leads left pregnant but bereft. In the Watkins, Ella’s fantasies darkly engulf her unhappy world after the object of her obsession - a typically tortured poet - apparently commits suicide, whilst a more external conflict leads to the mutual killing of haunted ex-army comrades Sam and Alisdair in the MacRae. So far, so operatic perhaps. But it is precisely the conventionality of plot and dramatic approach that was striking tonight as, in both works, a desire to explore universal themes - albeit in strongly contrasting ways - similarly lapsed into romantic and social clichè.
Whereas In the Locked Room had more literary, formal strength - perhaps benefiting from librettist David Harsent’s veteran experience (credits including Harrison Birtwistle’s internationally-acclaimed The Minotaur) - MacRae and librettist Louise Welsh showed greater theatrical vitality in Ghost Patrol. But they too were thwarted by the notorious difficulty of creating internally congruent operatic characters that nonetheless retain the essential flaws and contradictions that give them human cogency. This difficulty is partly due to the inherent absurdity of opera; dialogue that is sung rather than spoken invokes a level of surreality from the outset. Ultimately, deeper layers must either be carried, or thrown into relief, by the music - but neither score here contained the theatrical instinct or dramatic subtlety to flesh-out characters borne of stereotype; indeed, Watkins seemed trapped by his very idiom, which was Britten-esque to the point of saturation.
Both operas inhabited a simplistic, binary moral world in which oppositions framed in deeply conventional terms - good-bad, military-civilian, male-female and art-business - shaped the story. Again - so far, so operatic perhaps. But here there was little, if any, of the requisite underlying psychological depth or social critique. Positioning women as victims may be so time-honoured as to constitute operatic fetish, but the unquestioning narrative reliance on this in both works was disquieting. Watkins portrayed an insipid, entirely self-absorbed world in which Ella slips passively into solipsism and the only energy is displayed by her materialist, banker husband. MacRae’s Vicki pleads with her typically sensitive/macho ex-soldiers to ‘leave the war behind’, but this becomes just one of several empty homilies; repetition of which increase as the opera goes on, and which lends the conclusion a morose fatalism: ‘only the dead see the end of war’. Along the way, some obvious imagery (remembrance poppies for ‘blood on your hands’) fails to develop aspects of class, militarism or politics, which might have added dramatic depth.
Certainly, Watkins and MacRae more than fulfilled their remit for this admirable joint project, and the sheer professionalism of their work testifies to their success on many levels, not to mention the careful nurturing of Music Theatre Wales and Scottish Opera. If tonight’s two works beg reappraisal of what opera - and writing opera - means today, that too should rightly be deemed positive. In any case, mute observation or mere wringing of the hands at personal and social tragedy is surely disengenuous post, say, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw or Berg’s Wozzeck - which were, after all, written a long, or very long, time ago. There is no reason why an opera composer should write with direct psychological or social - let alone political - intent. But writing an opera - a genre culturally charged by its very nature and history - cannot help but be an act of social as well as dramatic engagement, whatever the narrative or setting. It will be intriguing to see where Watkins and MacRae go operatically from here; how - or whether - they develop their feel for theatre, and to what they next choose to give music-dramatic voice. Hopefully they will get the opportunity to do so.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 17/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music-theatre-wales-chamber-opera-double-bill/
Stuart MacRae composer / Louise Welsh librettist: Ghost Patrol
Conductor: Michael Rafferty
Directors: Michael McCarthy (In the Locked Room)
Matthew Richardson (Ghost Patrol)
Cast: Paul Currievici / Jane Harrington / Ruby Hayes / James McOran-Campbell /
Nicholas Sharratt / Håkan Vramso / Louise Winter
‘Grand’ opera seems to be enjoying somewhat of a renaissance as big-hitting companies like London’s Royal Opera House and the New York Metropolitan seek international audiences through televised transmission of live shows and work to refute charges of elitism with productions aimed squarely at the ‘common man and woman’. The star charisma of singers and conductors, the spectacle and sheer romance of it all, seem to be gaining them new audiences eager for live action, familiar stories and emotional catharsis. But what of the more ‘difficult’, less popular repertoire? And - more to the point - what of new, contemporary opera? How do today’s composers approach a genre so weighty with tradition?
Huw Watkins and Stuart MacRae have both been nurtured by companies sensitive to the challenges encountered by composers new to opera. Watkins has worked with Music Theatre Wales in various ways since 2004, whilst MacRae has come though Scottish Opera’s pioneering Five:15; a project first conceived in 2008 for five composers writing fifteen-minute works. It takes time and experience for any composer to find an authentic musical voice (if they do), but opera brings additional, unique demands and the many, subtle aspects of theatre production must, at times, seem a minefield. First and foremost, though, composers must decide what it is they want to say and how they want to say it.
Tonight’s programme was most thought-provoking in that regard. It presented Watkins’s In the Locked Room and MacRae’s Ghost Patrol as a touring double-bill of new, complementary works marking an innovative collaboration; that between two companies taking artistic control of an opera apiece within a joint production utilising two teams, with different composers, directors and casts working independently but alongside each other. Neither composer knew what the other was writing and the results give an intriguing comparative snap-shot of operatic thinking from two very different composers from the same generation.
From a performance perspective, the pairing was highly successful and the two companies should be congratulated. The operas sat well together and made for a meaty, tightly produced night of musical theatre. Praise is due to the impressive, well-matched casts who, together with the Music Theatre Wales Ensemble, performed with consistent excellence under conductor Michael Rafferty’s confident baton. The ensemble and instrumental writing was fluent overall; Watkins displaying his usual skilled craftsmanship and ear for beauty, with MacRae adding occasional electronics to an imaginative and distinctive, if sometimes overfussy, acoustic mix. Neither really soared vocally but the balance was good, with nothing unduly taxing for the singers, whilst the mises-en-scène offered effective vehicles for the largely plausible stage action (notwithstanding Watkins’s problematic ‘fantasy’ poet appearances). Whereas In the Locked Room could happily have been lengthened, giving the narrative room to breathe, Ghost Patrol was overlong, needing compression to tighten the drama, which sagged after an energetic start. A closer look at the drama in each case, however, leads to some less comfortable, wider questions.
The subjects of the two operas are very different despite aspects of plot in common; each revolving around a love triangle which ends tragically, with female leads left pregnant but bereft. In the Watkins, Ella’s fantasies darkly engulf her unhappy world after the object of her obsession - a typically tortured poet - apparently commits suicide, whilst a more external conflict leads to the mutual killing of haunted ex-army comrades Sam and Alisdair in the MacRae. So far, so operatic perhaps. But it is precisely the conventionality of plot and dramatic approach that was striking tonight as, in both works, a desire to explore universal themes - albeit in strongly contrasting ways - similarly lapsed into romantic and social clichè.
Whereas In the Locked Room had more literary, formal strength - perhaps benefiting from librettist David Harsent’s veteran experience (credits including Harrison Birtwistle’s internationally-acclaimed The Minotaur) - MacRae and librettist Louise Welsh showed greater theatrical vitality in Ghost Patrol. But they too were thwarted by the notorious difficulty of creating internally congruent operatic characters that nonetheless retain the essential flaws and contradictions that give them human cogency. This difficulty is partly due to the inherent absurdity of opera; dialogue that is sung rather than spoken invokes a level of surreality from the outset. Ultimately, deeper layers must either be carried, or thrown into relief, by the music - but neither score here contained the theatrical instinct or dramatic subtlety to flesh-out characters borne of stereotype; indeed, Watkins seemed trapped by his very idiom, which was Britten-esque to the point of saturation.
Both operas inhabited a simplistic, binary moral world in which oppositions framed in deeply conventional terms - good-bad, military-civilian, male-female and art-business - shaped the story. Again - so far, so operatic perhaps. But here there was little, if any, of the requisite underlying psychological depth or social critique. Positioning women as victims may be so time-honoured as to constitute operatic fetish, but the unquestioning narrative reliance on this in both works was disquieting. Watkins portrayed an insipid, entirely self-absorbed world in which Ella slips passively into solipsism and the only energy is displayed by her materialist, banker husband. MacRae’s Vicki pleads with her typically sensitive/macho ex-soldiers to ‘leave the war behind’, but this becomes just one of several empty homilies; repetition of which increase as the opera goes on, and which lends the conclusion a morose fatalism: ‘only the dead see the end of war’. Along the way, some obvious imagery (remembrance poppies for ‘blood on your hands’) fails to develop aspects of class, militarism or politics, which might have added dramatic depth.
Certainly, Watkins and MacRae more than fulfilled their remit for this admirable joint project, and the sheer professionalism of their work testifies to their success on many levels, not to mention the careful nurturing of Music Theatre Wales and Scottish Opera. If tonight’s two works beg reappraisal of what opera - and writing opera - means today, that too should rightly be deemed positive. In any case, mute observation or mere wringing of the hands at personal and social tragedy is surely disengenuous post, say, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw or Berg’s Wozzeck - which were, after all, written a long, or very long, time ago. There is no reason why an opera composer should write with direct psychological or social - let alone political - intent. But writing an opera - a genre culturally charged by its very nature and history - cannot help but be an act of social as well as dramatic engagement, whatever the narrative or setting. It will be intriguing to see where Watkins and MacRae go operatically from here; how - or whether - they develop their feel for theatre, and to what they next choose to give music-dramatic voice. Hopefully they will get the opportunity to do so.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 17/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music-theatre-wales-chamber-opera-double-bill/
Saturday, 3 November 2012
Concert Review: BBC National Orchestra of Wales St David’s Hall, Cardiff 12th October 2012
Magnus Lindberg - EXPO
Grieg - Four Songs: To Brune Øjne / Jeg Elsker Dig / En Svane / Våren
R. Strauss - Three Songs: Muttertänderlei / Meinem Kinder / Cäcilie
- Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche
Sibelius - Symphony No. 5
Conductor - Thomas Søndergård
Soprano - Inger Dam-Jensen
The appointment of a new Principal Conductor to a major orchestra is a big event with far-reaching ramifications for the musicians concerned and their audience; a fact hardly lost on Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård, to whom the baton was officially passed, as it were, on October 12th from Thierry Fischer, outgoing Principal at the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Søndergård’s choice of repertoire for this, inaugural concert revealed aspirations for his four-year tenure on both personal and orchestral levels. But it was the opening piece that threw down the gauntlet in more than one regard.
EXPO, a short, flamboyant showcase of orchestral virtuosity by Finn Magnus Lindberg, was commissioned in 2009 to celebrate the inauguration of another, similarly youthful conductor at another orchestra; Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic. It’s inclusion here drew bold comparison between that event and tonight’s concert in Cardiff - perhaps overly bold, given that a bright start gave way to workmanlike performances in key ensuing items. However, the piece also signaled Søndergård’s welcome intent to perform not only works by fellow Scandinavians, but contemporary music alongside older, more familiar repertoire. EXPO fulfilled both criteria and was used here to play a fun, if somewhat unsubtle, national card as a link with Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 in the second half; a piece nonetheless worlds away in tone and seriousness of intent, and the most ambitious item on tonight’s programme.
But before that came less challenging fare from Edvard Grieg and Richard Strauss; firstly, in a series of orchestral songs also designed to please followers (at least, those with long memories) of the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, won in 1993 by tonight’s Danish soloist, soprano Inger Dam-Jensen. Grieg was, of course, also a Scandinavian composer and the first to achieve wider fame outside his native Norway - although his music is still snubbed by some who persist in the condescending belief that only proven symphonists can earn the right to ‘major composer’ status. Where Grieg excelled was as a miniaturist and writer of deceptively simple songs (he, like Strauss, was married to a soprano), and the set of four on offer tonight were delivered with grace and sensitivity; the first, To Brune Øjne Op. 5 No.1, delicately orchestrated by Barry-based composer Christopher Painter. A more full-bloodied, dramatic approach from soloist and orchestra alike would have enlivened the three Strauss songs which followed; these were somewhat fey and underwhelming, but nicely wrought for all that, with Dam-Jensen and orchestra finding comfortable rapport.
Strauss, too, had musical detractors and initially had difficulty earning respect as a composer, but for wholly different reasons; in his case, an advanced and, to some, shocking chromaticism begot a reputation as an enfant terrible. With the tone poem Till Eulenspiegel - his fifth in a genre he developed with extravagant artistry - he stuck out his tongue at critics who could not, after all, ignore it’s dazzling feats of invention, wit and colour. How far Søndergård himself may or may not identify with the anti-hero prankster of the folk tale from which the piece springs is open to question (notwithstanding his cheeky-chappy exhortation to the audience’s ‘beautiful faces’ to stay for a post-concert interview). But tonight’s performance could certainly have been more rudely characterful. This is not a piece with which to tread carefully and, although the orchestra clearly enjoyed themselves once warmed up - the Strauss eventually picking up where Lindberg’s virtuosic energy left off - it needed a more insolent relish.
It was, in part, interpretation of another tone poem which brought Søndergård critical acclaim upon his BBCNOW debut in 2009; then with Sibelius’s En Saga. Tonight, he upped the ante considerably in tackling the Finn’s profound and problematic Symphony No. 5. It is not the harmonic or rhythmic language Sibelius employs that makes this and other of his key works so difficult to bring off, nor any specific aspect of instrumentation or technique; indeed, at the time Sibelius wrote and then revised the 5th Symphony during and after World War I, his tonal idiom appeared, on the surface, positively backward-sounding beside the atonal experiments of Central European contemporaries. However, this and other of his major scores have often baffled those who seek in vain therein for conformity to prevailing Austro-German symphonic models. Furthermore, Sibelius is not simply a proto-Romantic, inspired by national identity and lonely Northern wilderness (although this can also be true), but his organic formal and harmonic processes are so subtly radical as to constitute a unique, modernist development in themselves. It is nonsense, therefore, and not just simplistic to assume that a Scandinavian must be able to perform Sibelius convincingly just because he or she is Scandinavian, for this ignores the extent to which Sibelius’s unique sound springs from purely musical procedures rather than nationalist sentiment.
Søndergård’s interpretation on this occasion showed a great deal of promise but was far from polished or convincing overall; much of the formal expansion and contraction of the first movement, for instance, was marred by a feeling of its being bolted together - both in terms of the movement’s span and the instrumental sections, as woodwind, brass and strings sounded at times completely disparate rather than fragments of one voice, now emerging from, now dissolving into the disquieting orchestral texture. Such waves occur throughout the work, in which the three movements are themselves different stages within one, extraordinary whole. But, despite Søndergård’s often brisk pacing, there were long passages where momentum flagged, becoming ploddy and lacking the tension so needed to ensure the forwards propulsion that should paradoxically emerge from Sibelius’s continual collapsing inwards. Key climactic brass passages (notably the so-called ‘swan theme’ that emerges fully at last in the third movement) were strangely muted - although some passages and certain of the trickier transitions had verve and spirit, showing flashes of what could be accomplished given greater depth and broader, longer-range sculpting.
Søndergård will surely continue to hone his Sibelius 5, both with BBCNOW and elsewhere - and it is good news generally that Sibelius’s true stature continues increasingly to be recognised. On the other hand, Sibelius is performed and recorded a great deal nowadays, in stark contrast to an exact contemporary of his who also produced major symphonies - and who, by chance, was actually Danish. So, whilst it was inevitable that considerations of popularity would shape tonight’s inaugural programme, it is nonetheless a pity that we will have to wait until next April to hear Søndergård’s interpretation of his fellow countryman’s important but little known Symphony No. 5 - composer of which being the troubled but brilliant Carl Nielsen.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/bbc%20national%20orchestra%20of%20wales.html
Grieg - Four Songs: To Brune Øjne / Jeg Elsker Dig / En Svane / Våren
R. Strauss - Three Songs: Muttertänderlei / Meinem Kinder / Cäcilie
- Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche
Sibelius - Symphony No. 5
Conductor - Thomas Søndergård
Soprano - Inger Dam-Jensen
The appointment of a new Principal Conductor to a major orchestra is a big event with far-reaching ramifications for the musicians concerned and their audience; a fact hardly lost on Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård, to whom the baton was officially passed, as it were, on October 12th from Thierry Fischer, outgoing Principal at the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Søndergård’s choice of repertoire for this, inaugural concert revealed aspirations for his four-year tenure on both personal and orchestral levels. But it was the opening piece that threw down the gauntlet in more than one regard.
EXPO, a short, flamboyant showcase of orchestral virtuosity by Finn Magnus Lindberg, was commissioned in 2009 to celebrate the inauguration of another, similarly youthful conductor at another orchestra; Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic. It’s inclusion here drew bold comparison between that event and tonight’s concert in Cardiff - perhaps overly bold, given that a bright start gave way to workmanlike performances in key ensuing items. However, the piece also signaled Søndergård’s welcome intent to perform not only works by fellow Scandinavians, but contemporary music alongside older, more familiar repertoire. EXPO fulfilled both criteria and was used here to play a fun, if somewhat unsubtle, national card as a link with Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 in the second half; a piece nonetheless worlds away in tone and seriousness of intent, and the most ambitious item on tonight’s programme.
But before that came less challenging fare from Edvard Grieg and Richard Strauss; firstly, in a series of orchestral songs also designed to please followers (at least, those with long memories) of the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, won in 1993 by tonight’s Danish soloist, soprano Inger Dam-Jensen. Grieg was, of course, also a Scandinavian composer and the first to achieve wider fame outside his native Norway - although his music is still snubbed by some who persist in the condescending belief that only proven symphonists can earn the right to ‘major composer’ status. Where Grieg excelled was as a miniaturist and writer of deceptively simple songs (he, like Strauss, was married to a soprano), and the set of four on offer tonight were delivered with grace and sensitivity; the first, To Brune Øjne Op. 5 No.1, delicately orchestrated by Barry-based composer Christopher Painter. A more full-bloodied, dramatic approach from soloist and orchestra alike would have enlivened the three Strauss songs which followed; these were somewhat fey and underwhelming, but nicely wrought for all that, with Dam-Jensen and orchestra finding comfortable rapport.
Strauss, too, had musical detractors and initially had difficulty earning respect as a composer, but for wholly different reasons; in his case, an advanced and, to some, shocking chromaticism begot a reputation as an enfant terrible. With the tone poem Till Eulenspiegel - his fifth in a genre he developed with extravagant artistry - he stuck out his tongue at critics who could not, after all, ignore it’s dazzling feats of invention, wit and colour. How far Søndergård himself may or may not identify with the anti-hero prankster of the folk tale from which the piece springs is open to question (notwithstanding his cheeky-chappy exhortation to the audience’s ‘beautiful faces’ to stay for a post-concert interview). But tonight’s performance could certainly have been more rudely characterful. This is not a piece with which to tread carefully and, although the orchestra clearly enjoyed themselves once warmed up - the Strauss eventually picking up where Lindberg’s virtuosic energy left off - it needed a more insolent relish.
It was, in part, interpretation of another tone poem which brought Søndergård critical acclaim upon his BBCNOW debut in 2009; then with Sibelius’s En Saga. Tonight, he upped the ante considerably in tackling the Finn’s profound and problematic Symphony No. 5. It is not the harmonic or rhythmic language Sibelius employs that makes this and other of his key works so difficult to bring off, nor any specific aspect of instrumentation or technique; indeed, at the time Sibelius wrote and then revised the 5th Symphony during and after World War I, his tonal idiom appeared, on the surface, positively backward-sounding beside the atonal experiments of Central European contemporaries. However, this and other of his major scores have often baffled those who seek in vain therein for conformity to prevailing Austro-German symphonic models. Furthermore, Sibelius is not simply a proto-Romantic, inspired by national identity and lonely Northern wilderness (although this can also be true), but his organic formal and harmonic processes are so subtly radical as to constitute a unique, modernist development in themselves. It is nonsense, therefore, and not just simplistic to assume that a Scandinavian must be able to perform Sibelius convincingly just because he or she is Scandinavian, for this ignores the extent to which Sibelius’s unique sound springs from purely musical procedures rather than nationalist sentiment.
Søndergård’s interpretation on this occasion showed a great deal of promise but was far from polished or convincing overall; much of the formal expansion and contraction of the first movement, for instance, was marred by a feeling of its being bolted together - both in terms of the movement’s span and the instrumental sections, as woodwind, brass and strings sounded at times completely disparate rather than fragments of one voice, now emerging from, now dissolving into the disquieting orchestral texture. Such waves occur throughout the work, in which the three movements are themselves different stages within one, extraordinary whole. But, despite Søndergård’s often brisk pacing, there were long passages where momentum flagged, becoming ploddy and lacking the tension so needed to ensure the forwards propulsion that should paradoxically emerge from Sibelius’s continual collapsing inwards. Key climactic brass passages (notably the so-called ‘swan theme’ that emerges fully at last in the third movement) were strangely muted - although some passages and certain of the trickier transitions had verve and spirit, showing flashes of what could be accomplished given greater depth and broader, longer-range sculpting.
Søndergård will surely continue to hone his Sibelius 5, both with BBCNOW and elsewhere - and it is good news generally that Sibelius’s true stature continues increasingly to be recognised. On the other hand, Sibelius is performed and recorded a great deal nowadays, in stark contrast to an exact contemporary of his who also produced major symphonies - and who, by chance, was actually Danish. So, whilst it was inevitable that considerations of popularity would shape tonight’s inaugural programme, it is nonetheless a pity that we will have to wait until next April to hear Søndergård’s interpretation of his fellow countryman’s important but little known Symphony No. 5 - composer of which being the troubled but brilliant Carl Nielsen.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/bbc%20national%20orchestra%20of%20wales.html
Concert Review: Music Theatre Wales Ensemble, Dora Stoutzker Hall, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, 4th October 2012
Huw Watkins - Four Inventions (2009)
Mark David Boden - Between Waking and Dreams (2012)
Stuart MacRae - Equilibrium (2008)
Huw Watkins - Speak Seven Seas (2011)
Salvatore Sciarrino - Lo Spazio Inverso (1984)
Mark-Anthony Turnage - Grazioso! (2009)
Miranda Fulleylove (violin), Yuko Inoue (viola), Daisy Vatalaro (‘cello), Jo Shaw (flute/piccolo), Scott Lygate (clarinets), Julian Warburton (percussion), Huw Watkins (piano/celeste), Michael Rafferty (conductor).
Since the early days of opera, when Claudio Monteverdi and his Renaissance contemporaries first staged a type of secular music drama with characters that mostly sang rather than spoke, the question of what kind of an art-form opera is and what it seeks to do has elicited passionate and differing responses. But what constitutes the bedrock of the art-form has never been seriously doubted - and that is, music. Not theatre nor visual spectacle, not staged narrative nor even libretto, but musical sound; the dramatic combination of voice and instrumental ensemble expressing human emotion and telling human stories. The acting of roles and paraphernalia of staging have always been important, but secondary to the music itself which carries the drama - even in Richard Wagner’s supposedly totalised Gesamtkunstwerk, in which he aimed to elevate the visual, the poetic and the musical into a new kind of integrated art-form beyond any one of the three alone.
At the heart, then, of Music Theatre Wales, as with all opera companies, lies music and the composers who write it. What characterises MTW is that, not only is it one of the UK’s leading touring companies, but it is also one of the few demonstrating an ongoing commitment to the development of opera as a contemporary art-form through the commissioning of new works by living composers, rather than the re-staging of familiar, established repertoire from the past. This concert at the Dora Stoutzker Hall was an opportunity to meet two such composers, whose work MTW is currently touring as a double-bill across the UK in collaboration with Scottish Opera; Welsh-born Huw Watkins (In the Locked Room, librettist David Harsent) and Scot Stuart MacRae (Ghost Patrol, librettist Louise Welsh).
Stripping back, as it were, to bare, musical bones away from the operatic stage, this event featured members of MTW’s Ensemble, offering an introduction to the chamber, concert music of these two contrasting composers and three others with whom MTW have already or will in future enjoy operatic collaboration; Boden, Sciarrino and Turnage. It also marked the inauguration of a three-year partnership between MTW and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) which aims, in the words of MTW Joint-Artistic Director Michael McCarthy, “to expand the appetite and understanding of contemporary opera in Cardiff” and “build a platform of professional knowledge and experience for future performers, musicians, writers and composers”. So, an important event, which also sought, in part, to open a dialogue concerning the different but not necessarily unrelated disciplines of composing for theatre and composing for the concert platform; which latter - at least in terms of contemporary music - ironically appears so much harder for audiences to engage with in the absence of additional theatrical inducement.
Three of the composers (Watkins, Boden and MacRae) were present to talk about their work. Of these, perhaps inevitably given the current tour, it was MacRae and Watkins who made the more overt links to their operas. MacRae described how his mini viola concerto Equilibrium pitted soloist against quintet in a dramatic dialogue directly informed by his operatic writing; here, with a gradual paring down of contrast, play and imitation to find balance in repose. The work offered a proliferation of dynamic ideas and intriguing landscapes, ably navigated by conductor Rafferty and with some excellent playing. A greater sense of risk would have enhanced the drama which, nonetheless, had subtlety as well as punch.
Watkins opened both halves, given star billing for his deserved renown as a pianist. His Four Inventions for piano solo were a concise, brilliant display but it was his piano trio Speak Seven Seas which referenced his opera, for which it was a study. Both the opera and the trio have sea settings, the title here coming from Dylan Thomas’s Author’s Prologue; but this was no Four Sea Interludes-type extraction from the opera, despite clear stylistic parallels with Benjamin Britten. Rather, the trio takes the opera’s opening material in a different musical direction; employing an ebb and flow of changing moods - with some beautifully-crafted writing - to rise to the challenge of composing a piece of substantial duration (13-14 minutes) in just one movement.
The three remaining pieces were idiomatic showcases bearing no direct relation to their composer’s operatic writing. Boden’s Between Waking and Dreams was largely effective in its exploration of contrasting textures, inspired by a poem by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, which describes the tranquillity of air travel above the clouds and its antithesis in the mêlée enjoined upon landing, whilst the closing Grazioso! displayed Turnage’s trademark rude percussive health and sharp orchestration, with moments of surprising tenderness.
But before that came the clear highlight of the evening. The largely self-taught Sciarrino (b1947) is a prolific Italian composer whose importance has yet to be recognised in the UK. His Lo Spazio Inverso of 1984 was by far the oldest work on the programme but sounded the freshest and most striking, drawing the best from an ensemble that was everywhere superb. This was music of gossamer and depth; not at all fragile but appearing so in its hushed exploration of “sound at the edge of breath” as McCarthy put it - and with some astonishingly relaxed but controlled playing from clarinettist Scott Lygate. Deceptively simple yet profound, and inspiring eager anticipation of MTW’s 2013 UK premiere of Sciarrino’s 1998 opera Luci mie Traditrici (roughly, My Betraying Light). Yet another major forthcoming event, this will hopefully continue to prove MTW’s ability to draw large and enthusiastic audiences for superbly produced contemporary opera. Perhaps another challenge for the company’s ensemble might be to buck another cultural trend and discover how to do the same for some richly rewarding but relatively ignored contemporary music in the concert hall.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20theatre%20wales%20ensemble.html
Mark David Boden - Between Waking and Dreams (2012)
Stuart MacRae - Equilibrium (2008)
Huw Watkins - Speak Seven Seas (2011)
Salvatore Sciarrino - Lo Spazio Inverso (1984)
Mark-Anthony Turnage - Grazioso! (2009)
Miranda Fulleylove (violin), Yuko Inoue (viola), Daisy Vatalaro (‘cello), Jo Shaw (flute/piccolo), Scott Lygate (clarinets), Julian Warburton (percussion), Huw Watkins (piano/celeste), Michael Rafferty (conductor).
Since the early days of opera, when Claudio Monteverdi and his Renaissance contemporaries first staged a type of secular music drama with characters that mostly sang rather than spoke, the question of what kind of an art-form opera is and what it seeks to do has elicited passionate and differing responses. But what constitutes the bedrock of the art-form has never been seriously doubted - and that is, music. Not theatre nor visual spectacle, not staged narrative nor even libretto, but musical sound; the dramatic combination of voice and instrumental ensemble expressing human emotion and telling human stories. The acting of roles and paraphernalia of staging have always been important, but secondary to the music itself which carries the drama - even in Richard Wagner’s supposedly totalised Gesamtkunstwerk, in which he aimed to elevate the visual, the poetic and the musical into a new kind of integrated art-form beyond any one of the three alone.
At the heart, then, of Music Theatre Wales, as with all opera companies, lies music and the composers who write it. What characterises MTW is that, not only is it one of the UK’s leading touring companies, but it is also one of the few demonstrating an ongoing commitment to the development of opera as a contemporary art-form through the commissioning of new works by living composers, rather than the re-staging of familiar, established repertoire from the past. This concert at the Dora Stoutzker Hall was an opportunity to meet two such composers, whose work MTW is currently touring as a double-bill across the UK in collaboration with Scottish Opera; Welsh-born Huw Watkins (In the Locked Room, librettist David Harsent) and Scot Stuart MacRae (Ghost Patrol, librettist Louise Welsh).
Stripping back, as it were, to bare, musical bones away from the operatic stage, this event featured members of MTW’s Ensemble, offering an introduction to the chamber, concert music of these two contrasting composers and three others with whom MTW have already or will in future enjoy operatic collaboration; Boden, Sciarrino and Turnage. It also marked the inauguration of a three-year partnership between MTW and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) which aims, in the words of MTW Joint-Artistic Director Michael McCarthy, “to expand the appetite and understanding of contemporary opera in Cardiff” and “build a platform of professional knowledge and experience for future performers, musicians, writers and composers”. So, an important event, which also sought, in part, to open a dialogue concerning the different but not necessarily unrelated disciplines of composing for theatre and composing for the concert platform; which latter - at least in terms of contemporary music - ironically appears so much harder for audiences to engage with in the absence of additional theatrical inducement.
Three of the composers (Watkins, Boden and MacRae) were present to talk about their work. Of these, perhaps inevitably given the current tour, it was MacRae and Watkins who made the more overt links to their operas. MacRae described how his mini viola concerto Equilibrium pitted soloist against quintet in a dramatic dialogue directly informed by his operatic writing; here, with a gradual paring down of contrast, play and imitation to find balance in repose. The work offered a proliferation of dynamic ideas and intriguing landscapes, ably navigated by conductor Rafferty and with some excellent playing. A greater sense of risk would have enhanced the drama which, nonetheless, had subtlety as well as punch.
Watkins opened both halves, given star billing for his deserved renown as a pianist. His Four Inventions for piano solo were a concise, brilliant display but it was his piano trio Speak Seven Seas which referenced his opera, for which it was a study. Both the opera and the trio have sea settings, the title here coming from Dylan Thomas’s Author’s Prologue; but this was no Four Sea Interludes-type extraction from the opera, despite clear stylistic parallels with Benjamin Britten. Rather, the trio takes the opera’s opening material in a different musical direction; employing an ebb and flow of changing moods - with some beautifully-crafted writing - to rise to the challenge of composing a piece of substantial duration (13-14 minutes) in just one movement.
The three remaining pieces were idiomatic showcases bearing no direct relation to their composer’s operatic writing. Boden’s Between Waking and Dreams was largely effective in its exploration of contrasting textures, inspired by a poem by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, which describes the tranquillity of air travel above the clouds and its antithesis in the mêlée enjoined upon landing, whilst the closing Grazioso! displayed Turnage’s trademark rude percussive health and sharp orchestration, with moments of surprising tenderness.
But before that came the clear highlight of the evening. The largely self-taught Sciarrino (b1947) is a prolific Italian composer whose importance has yet to be recognised in the UK. His Lo Spazio Inverso of 1984 was by far the oldest work on the programme but sounded the freshest and most striking, drawing the best from an ensemble that was everywhere superb. This was music of gossamer and depth; not at all fragile but appearing so in its hushed exploration of “sound at the edge of breath” as McCarthy put it - and with some astonishingly relaxed but controlled playing from clarinettist Scott Lygate. Deceptively simple yet profound, and inspiring eager anticipation of MTW’s 2013 UK premiere of Sciarrino’s 1998 opera Luci mie Traditrici (roughly, My Betraying Light). Yet another major forthcoming event, this will hopefully continue to prove MTW’s ability to draw large and enthusiastic audiences for superbly produced contemporary opera. Perhaps another challenge for the company’s ensemble might be to buck another cultural trend and discover how to do the same for some richly rewarding but relatively ignored contemporary music in the concert hall.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20theatre%20wales%20ensemble.html
Book Review: Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras, Tom Service, Faber 2012
Music as Alchemy is writer and broadcaster Tom Service’s first book. In it, he describes a series of encounters with six conductors and their principal orchestras within the context of his beliefs about the transformational power of symphonic music. Chapter by chapter, he narrates his listening experiences of each conductor-orchestra combination over a period of rehearsals and performances in a chatty style aimed at the general reader and classical music listener. Informal interviews with the conductors and sundry orchestral players provide further access to this traditionally exclusive world whilst a smattering of information about the orchestras and repertoire in development paints a basic background picture.
The book’s purpose is to unpick the apparent ‘magic’ of these particular ‘great’ conductors; what they do and how they do it, described in poetic rather than technical terms. Perhaps it might more accurately have been sub-titled ‘My Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras’ as it revolves around Service personally; focusing on his subjective thoughts and feelings about his chosen conductor-orchestra pairings. His approach is to consider each in turn, observing part of a typical orchestral schedule as a fly-on-the-wall and marveling at the gulf between conventionally taught conducting technique (he himself once studied the ‘Canford Method’) and the arcane gestures which form part of the unique arsenal of every ‘great’ conductor. He discusses charisma and body language; how each conductor handles the orchestra musically and psychologically, how they view their leadership role and how the orchestra responds artistically and individually before assessing the musical results from the perspective of a largely enraptured, if not always entirely convinced, listener.
Disappointingly, Music as Alchemy glosses over issues of social and artistic relevance at a time when many orchestras world-wide are struggling to find funding in a climate of savage cuts to the arts. Rather, Service chooses to re-explore territory which is historically controversial in its own right - the relationship between a conductor and ‘his’ orchestra being notoriously tension-laden - but he does so in almost entirely positive terms; content to put "a happy family" spin on the ensembles concerned (to use Iván Fischer’s description of his Budapest Festival Orchestra), whilst adopting the rarefied, Romantic position that the ‘music itself’ and musical values are autonomous. Throughout, Service sticks to an idealised view of symphonic culture despite acknowledging that “conducting is about collaboration, politics and society”. Nowhere, for example, does he consider the controversial ‘museum’ aspect of a classical music culture in which a proliferation of orchestras depend on ritualistic performances of the same, familiar works from the past to ever-shrinking niche audiences of ever-increasing average age. The result is a text which props up the symphonic establishment with virtually PR zeal.
Moreover, the masculine emphasis on ‘his’ orchestra is a given in this survey, as Service’s roster of ‘great’ conductors are all men, even as he notes that increasingly well-known maestros such as Marin Alsop and Susanna Mälkki are no longer merely described as ‘women conductors’. Indeed, it is a very select, European few who gain inclusion here: from Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Jonathan Nott to Simon Rattle, Fischer and Claudio Abbado. Service justifies his choice on the less than convincing grounds that a) material is readily available on other candidates such as Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez (when Rattle, for example, has had huge exposure) and b) the sheer amount of space needed to do justice to more conductors. Clearly, lines had to be drawn regarding both the numbers and quality of conductors included - particularly in view of the personal nature of the book and focus on perceived ‘great’ (as opposed to ‘mediocre’?) conductors - but the loosely-written chapters could comfortably have been reduced in length for the sake of broader geo-cultural scope.
Service is careful to note that the days of the tyrannical, megastar maestros such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan are over; that, these days, a healthier, more democratic culture of mutual respect prevails. But his conductors are presented as superstars nonetheless; they, their musicians and even the music itself are lionised as culture heroes in terms that downright stretch credulity. For instance, he writes that Abbado
“needs his musicians to make music, to interpret his gestures, but more than that ... he needs their faith. Abbado’s body language is only translatable into sound because the musicians in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra believe that’s possible ... that Abbado’s gestures communicate everything they need to know about how to play Berlioz or Bruckner ... The fact that they know Abbado trusts them and has chosen them ... means they can safely go further into the music and their musicality than they could otherwise and Abbado himself is pushed to explore the extremes of what’s possible because he knows there are no limitations imposed by institutional politics or personal conflicts. That’s part of the secret of the musical miracle manufactured in Lucerne.”
Such heady stuff typifies Service’s idealisation of the orchestral environment and hints at his reification of the aesthetic experience. Throughout, he talks about music in universalised terms separate from society and ‘real life’, writing, for instance, of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony that:
“Having looked at the music’s terror and fear and premonitions of death squarely in the face, it was possible to return to the world drained but renewed.”
Yet, at the same time, he describes music in exalted emotional terms as, for instance, in a performance of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique:
“We all became Berlioz’s doomed protagonist that night, wracked by obsessive love, experiencing moments of sensual joy and pastoral calm and then going through the fires of hallucinogenic hell until the ultimate extinguishment of our collective ego in the final moments...”
Emotional transport is often central to the hearing of extraordinary music and the impetus to share the effects of it on oneself is matched only by the paradoxical impossibility of doing so through the medium of words; Service is brave indeed to try and is clearly a knowledgeable as well as passionate advocate. But the difficulty here is that his grandiose, quasi-spiritual descriptions infantilise both the experience and his readers; moreover, he skirts uncomfortably close to condoning a kind of artistic submission and escapism despite his intention to encourage the opposite and, indeed, to de-mythologise the orchestral world. Submission to the composer via the score, submission to the conductor, to the collective entity of the orchestra and to the performative moment and a kind of ‘great mystery’ are all ultimately lauded as a means of giving up the self in order to transcend the self through ‘great’ music. Such utopian ideals of social or individual harmony are all very well, but it is arguable to what extent music sets out to achieve that - even if such healing transformation is possible in purely musical terms; a question which continues to resound, alas, all too clearly as we see in the chapter on the Berlin Philharmonic, in which Service recounts that orchestra’s shameful allegiance to the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.
Ultimately, it is not enough to suggest, as Service does, that transported listening amounts to active participation in the artistic experience; for that, one also needs a good deal more critical engagement than is offered by Music as Alchemy, for all that Service is not always won over by some of the music-making he describes. His book may open the door a crack for those completely unfamiliar with the workings of such cultural monoliths - and it certainly offers a view into an unfortunately wide-spread, romanticised mode of thinking about classical music and its performance. Nonetheless, it is a missed opportunity to gain deeper insight into the contemporary symphonic world at a time of increased global musical reach, yet urgent social and artistic challenge.
This is a longer version of a book review posted on Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20as%20alchemy%20-%20journeys%20with%20great%20conductors%20and%20their%20orchestras%20%20by%20tom%20service.html
The book’s purpose is to unpick the apparent ‘magic’ of these particular ‘great’ conductors; what they do and how they do it, described in poetic rather than technical terms. Perhaps it might more accurately have been sub-titled ‘My Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras’ as it revolves around Service personally; focusing on his subjective thoughts and feelings about his chosen conductor-orchestra pairings. His approach is to consider each in turn, observing part of a typical orchestral schedule as a fly-on-the-wall and marveling at the gulf between conventionally taught conducting technique (he himself once studied the ‘Canford Method’) and the arcane gestures which form part of the unique arsenal of every ‘great’ conductor. He discusses charisma and body language; how each conductor handles the orchestra musically and psychologically, how they view their leadership role and how the orchestra responds artistically and individually before assessing the musical results from the perspective of a largely enraptured, if not always entirely convinced, listener.
Disappointingly, Music as Alchemy glosses over issues of social and artistic relevance at a time when many orchestras world-wide are struggling to find funding in a climate of savage cuts to the arts. Rather, Service chooses to re-explore territory which is historically controversial in its own right - the relationship between a conductor and ‘his’ orchestra being notoriously tension-laden - but he does so in almost entirely positive terms; content to put "a happy family" spin on the ensembles concerned (to use Iván Fischer’s description of his Budapest Festival Orchestra), whilst adopting the rarefied, Romantic position that the ‘music itself’ and musical values are autonomous. Throughout, Service sticks to an idealised view of symphonic culture despite acknowledging that “conducting is about collaboration, politics and society”. Nowhere, for example, does he consider the controversial ‘museum’ aspect of a classical music culture in which a proliferation of orchestras depend on ritualistic performances of the same, familiar works from the past to ever-shrinking niche audiences of ever-increasing average age. The result is a text which props up the symphonic establishment with virtually PR zeal.
Moreover, the masculine emphasis on ‘his’ orchestra is a given in this survey, as Service’s roster of ‘great’ conductors are all men, even as he notes that increasingly well-known maestros such as Marin Alsop and Susanna Mälkki are no longer merely described as ‘women conductors’. Indeed, it is a very select, European few who gain inclusion here: from Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Jonathan Nott to Simon Rattle, Fischer and Claudio Abbado. Service justifies his choice on the less than convincing grounds that a) material is readily available on other candidates such as Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez (when Rattle, for example, has had huge exposure) and b) the sheer amount of space needed to do justice to more conductors. Clearly, lines had to be drawn regarding both the numbers and quality of conductors included - particularly in view of the personal nature of the book and focus on perceived ‘great’ (as opposed to ‘mediocre’?) conductors - but the loosely-written chapters could comfortably have been reduced in length for the sake of broader geo-cultural scope.
Service is careful to note that the days of the tyrannical, megastar maestros such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan are over; that, these days, a healthier, more democratic culture of mutual respect prevails. But his conductors are presented as superstars nonetheless; they, their musicians and even the music itself are lionised as culture heroes in terms that downright stretch credulity. For instance, he writes that Abbado
“needs his musicians to make music, to interpret his gestures, but more than that ... he needs their faith. Abbado’s body language is only translatable into sound because the musicians in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra believe that’s possible ... that Abbado’s gestures communicate everything they need to know about how to play Berlioz or Bruckner ... The fact that they know Abbado trusts them and has chosen them ... means they can safely go further into the music and their musicality than they could otherwise and Abbado himself is pushed to explore the extremes of what’s possible because he knows there are no limitations imposed by institutional politics or personal conflicts. That’s part of the secret of the musical miracle manufactured in Lucerne.”
Such heady stuff typifies Service’s idealisation of the orchestral environment and hints at his reification of the aesthetic experience. Throughout, he talks about music in universalised terms separate from society and ‘real life’, writing, for instance, of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony that:
“Having looked at the music’s terror and fear and premonitions of death squarely in the face, it was possible to return to the world drained but renewed.”
Yet, at the same time, he describes music in exalted emotional terms as, for instance, in a performance of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique:
“We all became Berlioz’s doomed protagonist that night, wracked by obsessive love, experiencing moments of sensual joy and pastoral calm and then going through the fires of hallucinogenic hell until the ultimate extinguishment of our collective ego in the final moments...”
Emotional transport is often central to the hearing of extraordinary music and the impetus to share the effects of it on oneself is matched only by the paradoxical impossibility of doing so through the medium of words; Service is brave indeed to try and is clearly a knowledgeable as well as passionate advocate. But the difficulty here is that his grandiose, quasi-spiritual descriptions infantilise both the experience and his readers; moreover, he skirts uncomfortably close to condoning a kind of artistic submission and escapism despite his intention to encourage the opposite and, indeed, to de-mythologise the orchestral world. Submission to the composer via the score, submission to the conductor, to the collective entity of the orchestra and to the performative moment and a kind of ‘great mystery’ are all ultimately lauded as a means of giving up the self in order to transcend the self through ‘great’ music. Such utopian ideals of social or individual harmony are all very well, but it is arguable to what extent music sets out to achieve that - even if such healing transformation is possible in purely musical terms; a question which continues to resound, alas, all too clearly as we see in the chapter on the Berlin Philharmonic, in which Service recounts that orchestra’s shameful allegiance to the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.
Ultimately, it is not enough to suggest, as Service does, that transported listening amounts to active participation in the artistic experience; for that, one also needs a good deal more critical engagement than is offered by Music as Alchemy, for all that Service is not always won over by some of the music-making he describes. His book may open the door a crack for those completely unfamiliar with the workings of such cultural monoliths - and it certainly offers a view into an unfortunately wide-spread, romanticised mode of thinking about classical music and its performance. Nonetheless, it is a missed opportunity to gain deeper insight into the contemporary symphonic world at a time of increased global musical reach, yet urgent social and artistic challenge.
This is a longer version of a book review posted on Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20as%20alchemy%20-%20journeys%20with%20great%20conductors%20and%20their%20orchestras%20%20by%20tom%20service.html
Friday, 5 October 2012
Book Review: Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens - Rhiannon Mathias (Ashgate, 2012)
Rhiannon Mathias’s book aims to bring to wider attention three 20th Century composers who continue to suffer varying degrees of unjustifiable neglect. Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) have very little in common musically, but were contemporary, pioneering students at the Royal College of Music in the 1920s; each, however, going on to experience difficulties as a woman in gaining professional recognition despite their acknowledged talents. Mathias argues that, although ‘these women were rightly held in high esteem in the musical world’, they never quite got the opportunities or recognition they deserved, and her survey is intended to help end at last the continuing lack of public awareness of their music and their important contributions to British 20th Century musical life.
Clearly, their gender has been central to their neglect. Mathias points to crude and pervasive sexism from the ‘20s and later, typified by critic and composer Cecil Gray’s paraphrasing of Dr Johnson’s infamous dictum: ‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog walking on its hind legs; it is not done well but you are surprised to see it done at all’. Alas, such attitudes have been slow to change within the classical music establishment; as recently as the mid-1980s, I myself heard the then Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta Michael Vyner opining (not to mention whining) on national radio that ‘women can’t compose’. So - and despite her book striking a somewhat awkward balance between sociological study, biographical survey and musical analysis - Mathias is to be applauded for opening a wider debate by putting in plain terms gender issues that ultimately concern not just these three composers, but which go to the heart of musical culture well beyond the narrow enclaves of historical musicology.
Moreover, Mathias rightly contextualises the gender prejudices experienced by all three within a broader parochialism that largely prevailed throughout their lives (and, it could be argued, in many regards still exists today). She shows how attitudes within British musical institutions tended to reflect a cultural insecurity and snobbery, veering from a conservative horror of contemporary music on the one hand, to a self-conscious obedience to fashion on the other - and taking in a sentimentalised nationalism along the way. Williams, for instance, lamented that ‘when people see my...folk song arrangements and Fantasias...it is so easy for them to forget that I also write full scale serious works’. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Lutyens - an important pioneer of much-maligned and misunderstood serial techniques in Britain - was first perceived as too ‘advanced’, then too ‘behind’ vis-à-vis European compositional developments. Meanwhile, Maconchy simply suffered from a lack of ‘modishness - for saying the right things to the right person, or for being in the right place at the right time’ , as the composer (and, coincidentally, her daughter) Nicola LeFanu put it.
This raises all sorts of important, still wider issues about how we decide - and, indeed, about who gets to decide - questions of what constitutes cultural and artistic value in society, and thence to shape the practice, distribution and history of art itself. Mathias steers well away from deeper probing of this kind and is careful even to avoid comparative musical judgements, writing in a very neutral prose and giving the three composers distinctly equal consideration. What she does do is manage to discuss a large amount of music amidst a wealth of background information, interlacing monographs of each composer within three historical periods; Part I 1926-1935 narrating student experiences, whilst Part II 1935-1955 and Part III 1955-1994 consider each composer in turn, surveying key works within their respective biographical frameworks. This approach serves well for the introduction she intended - so it is a pity that Ashgate’s ungenerous Index hardly does justice to her painstaking research and is, moreover, unforgivable in a volume priced for institutional libraries.
But there is a difficulty lurking within Mathias’s book, which no amount of diplomatic treading and balanced musical and biographical attention can circumvent, and which remains an issue for anyone daring to broach considerations of gender bias in music; and that is the thorny problem of how one gets away from the tiresome pidgeon-holing of women composers as ‘women composers’ when one has chosen to write a book that groups three composers together on the basis that they are...women composers - however sympathetic and sensitive the angle.
Of the three, arguably, the one who detested such pidgeon-holing the most - or, at any rate, the one who protested the loudest and in the ripest language to anyone who did it to her - was Lutyens; she who happened at her best - arguably again - to have composed by far the most interesting and influential music. However, what Lutyens would no doubt have appreciated about this book, is Mathias’s determination to discuss her music rather than her famously acid persona, which has hitherto inevitably proved the greater talking point. Notwithstanding feminist quibbles, for that reason alone, Mathias’s survey deserves to be widely read. Not only that, but she succeeds in placing Williams in a wider, British - as well as a Welsh - context and mounts a serious challenge of the music-historical ‘backwater’ category to which Maconchy in particular, but all three to varying extent, have unjustifiably been consigned for too long.
Published by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12
http://www.walesartsreview.org/lutyens,%20maconchy,%20williams%20and%20twentieth-century%20british%20music%20-%20a%20blest%20trio%20of%20sirens%20by%20rhiannon%20mathias.html
Clearly, their gender has been central to their neglect. Mathias points to crude and pervasive sexism from the ‘20s and later, typified by critic and composer Cecil Gray’s paraphrasing of Dr Johnson’s infamous dictum: ‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog walking on its hind legs; it is not done well but you are surprised to see it done at all’. Alas, such attitudes have been slow to change within the classical music establishment; as recently as the mid-1980s, I myself heard the then Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta Michael Vyner opining (not to mention whining) on national radio that ‘women can’t compose’. So - and despite her book striking a somewhat awkward balance between sociological study, biographical survey and musical analysis - Mathias is to be applauded for opening a wider debate by putting in plain terms gender issues that ultimately concern not just these three composers, but which go to the heart of musical culture well beyond the narrow enclaves of historical musicology.
Moreover, Mathias rightly contextualises the gender prejudices experienced by all three within a broader parochialism that largely prevailed throughout their lives (and, it could be argued, in many regards still exists today). She shows how attitudes within British musical institutions tended to reflect a cultural insecurity and snobbery, veering from a conservative horror of contemporary music on the one hand, to a self-conscious obedience to fashion on the other - and taking in a sentimentalised nationalism along the way. Williams, for instance, lamented that ‘when people see my...folk song arrangements and Fantasias...it is so easy for them to forget that I also write full scale serious works’. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Lutyens - an important pioneer of much-maligned and misunderstood serial techniques in Britain - was first perceived as too ‘advanced’, then too ‘behind’ vis-à-vis European compositional developments. Meanwhile, Maconchy simply suffered from a lack of ‘modishness - for saying the right things to the right person, or for being in the right place at the right time’ , as the composer (and, coincidentally, her daughter) Nicola LeFanu put it.
This raises all sorts of important, still wider issues about how we decide - and, indeed, about who gets to decide - questions of what constitutes cultural and artistic value in society, and thence to shape the practice, distribution and history of art itself. Mathias steers well away from deeper probing of this kind and is careful even to avoid comparative musical judgements, writing in a very neutral prose and giving the three composers distinctly equal consideration. What she does do is manage to discuss a large amount of music amidst a wealth of background information, interlacing monographs of each composer within three historical periods; Part I 1926-1935 narrating student experiences, whilst Part II 1935-1955 and Part III 1955-1994 consider each composer in turn, surveying key works within their respective biographical frameworks. This approach serves well for the introduction she intended - so it is a pity that Ashgate’s ungenerous Index hardly does justice to her painstaking research and is, moreover, unforgivable in a volume priced for institutional libraries.
But there is a difficulty lurking within Mathias’s book, which no amount of diplomatic treading and balanced musical and biographical attention can circumvent, and which remains an issue for anyone daring to broach considerations of gender bias in music; and that is the thorny problem of how one gets away from the tiresome pidgeon-holing of women composers as ‘women composers’ when one has chosen to write a book that groups three composers together on the basis that they are...women composers - however sympathetic and sensitive the angle.
Of the three, arguably, the one who detested such pidgeon-holing the most - or, at any rate, the one who protested the loudest and in the ripest language to anyone who did it to her - was Lutyens; she who happened at her best - arguably again - to have composed by far the most interesting and influential music. However, what Lutyens would no doubt have appreciated about this book, is Mathias’s determination to discuss her music rather than her famously acid persona, which has hitherto inevitably proved the greater talking point. Notwithstanding feminist quibbles, for that reason alone, Mathias’s survey deserves to be widely read. Not only that, but she succeeds in placing Williams in a wider, British - as well as a Welsh - context and mounts a serious challenge of the music-historical ‘backwater’ category to which Maconchy in particular, but all three to varying extent, have unjustifiably been consigned for too long.
Published by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12
http://www.walesartsreview.org/lutyens,%20maconchy,%20williams%20and%20twentieth-century%20british%20music%20-%20a%20blest%20trio%20of%20sirens%20by%20rhiannon%20mathias.html
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