More John Adams

An comment on my review of Sunday's John Adams concert points out that that Proms performance by the work's original dedicatee, Tracy Silverman, was outstanding. So it looks as if I'm going to have to look out for further performances by Silverman.

Technorati tag:classical music

Its now official

My forthcoming disc is now official, contracts have been signed etc. and the disc is mentioned on their forthcoming discs page. We're not recording until April, so there will be all sorts of alarums and excursions before the disc goes live, but this is step 1.

LSO and John Adams at the Barbican

At the interval of Sunday's LSO concert at the Barbican D. and I had divergent opinions of the music. It was the first of 2 John Adams concerts that the LSO are doing as part of a mini-season. Adams had just conducted Slonimsky's Ear Box and Dharma at Big Sur, this latter with Leila Josefowicz playing the electric violin.

D. had found the works attractive and entertaining, whereas I had wanted something more. They had undeniable surface brilliance and attractiveness of construction and Josefowicz's playing had been nothing short of brilliant. But the solo part is designed to sound free and improvised whilst actually being highly notated, and I felt that Adams should have trusted his soloists more. This might have led to the missing ingredients, depth and passion. Though the music was played with passion I did not feel that it expressed it, though they were full of brilliant surfaces the very construction techniques that Adams uses means that he does not allow you underneath and the very tightness of the orchestration does not allow for much additional expression from the players.

I had been hoping that this depth might come from On the Transmigration of Souls, the work in the 2nd half. But having the faintly embarrassing texts projected on screens, having the audience 'surrounded' by a sound installation of which we could only hear half and the naive nature of the texts themselves, all these contributed to the rather ephemeral nature of the piece. It was slightly moving and undoubtedly well performed, but it was too highly manicured. The work commemorates a perfectly gut-wrenching event and Adams failed to produce a work which matches that, it was too well-behaved, to neatly manicured and failed to take risks. Give me Nixon or Klinghoffer any day.

On the subject of trusting performers, Adams made an interesting comment in the programme notes. The Big Sur piece was originally written using just intonation, but at the first rehearsals Adams discovered that it is impossible for 80+ musicians to agree on the exact intervals used in the just intonation. The results could perhaps have been creative chaos, but instead Adams reverted to standard mean-tone intonation for most of the parts.

Technorati tag:classical music

La Fille du Regiment - again

Saturday we went to see La Fille du Regiment at Covent Garden, for the 2nd time. We were quite surprised at how well the production held up, seeing it twice in just over a week. There was still much to enjoy and the jokes did not seem stale.

The main reason for going was to see/hear Colin Lee as Tonio. It must take a great deal of gumption to replace Juan-Diego Florez for one performance in a role like Tonio. Lee's presence was no last-minute emergency, but had been planned from the start. Though, judging by the comments around us, a significant no. of the audience had thought they were going to see Juan-Diego Florez.

As it turns out Lee was almost as impressive as Florez. There were one or two moments of slight uncertainty, but his performance was notable for its confidence. Tonio's shorts suit Lee, a rather bulkier figure, than Florez, and Lee's was a slightly less naive, more knowing presence than Florez. Perhaps because Lee cuts a far less boy-ish figure on stage.

As far as the singing went, Lee was superb and received a well deserved ovation for his performance of his Act 1 showpiece, complete with the high C'.s His voice is less suave than Florez's and will perhaps develop rather more dramatically. Lee also has a rather more pronounced, but attractive vibrato which he uses expressively. If this were a competition then I think that Florez would win, but it isn't. There is plenty of room for both of them and those in the audience who came to see Florez were not disappointed in Lee. Next time, the Royal Opera ought to give him more than a single, measly performance. With adequate rehearsal time, I'm sure he could do wonders.


Technorati tag:classical music, opera

Recent CD reviews

My review of Emmanuelle Haim's new recording of Monteverdi's Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda with Rolando Villazon is here.

You get to hear how one of the 21st century’s loveliest voices sounds in this music, providing you can get beyond the vexed issue of performance style. ...

And my review of Andrea Gullickson's oboe concerto disc is here.

Out of the way repertoire and musical performances, a highly recommendable disc. ...

Both reviews are on on Music Web International.

Recent CD Review

My review of the compilation, Sacred Treasures IV, is here on Music and Vision.

Plans

Well we're off to see La Fille du Regiment at the Royal Opera House tomorrow. Yes, I know we saw it last Saturday, but tomorrow has Colin Lee as Tonio instead of Juan Diego Florez. We saw Lee at Grange Park last summer and have seen him in the past at ENO, so look forward to hearing his take on this killer role.

Then on Sunday its all change as the LSO do an all John Adams concert, with Adams conducting. The programme includes his 9/11 piece, On the Transmigration of Souls, should be amazing.

Recent CD Review

My review of Windsor Castle Chapel Choir's disc of music by Sir Henry Harris is here on Music Web International.

They perform their old master's music with passion, commitment and a remarkable degree of accuracy. What more could you want? ...

CD Review

My review of Nigel North's 2nd volume of Dowland's lute music (Naxos) is here on MusicWeb International.

There is only one thing to say about this wonderful recital: buy it! ...

Soli Deo Gloria

A comment on one of my previous posts has brought the American organisation Soli Deo Gloria to my attention. They organise and promote performances and recordings of sacred music. Their activities include an admirable contemporary stream. Composer James MacMillan has just joined the Honorary Board of Directors and Paul Ayres has been commissioned by them to write a new piece.

Book review - A Concise History of Western Music

It is a brave person who attempts to summarise the history of Western classical music in just over 300 pages, but Paul Griffiths has done just that in his new book, A Concise History of Western Music, published by Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521842945 ) It is this conciseness which is the problem, of course, how to give shape and coherence to a tradition that is multifarious and varied. But condensing this sprawling narrative into one slim volume has great advantages as it enables the writer (and the reader) to keep control of themes and enable the entirety of Western Classical Music to be considered in one sweep. Larger volumes might have the advantage of comprehensiveness. But small volumes such should have shape and elegance.

Running through Griffiths’s narrative is the concept of how time was considered. To a certain extent this is a conceit which enables him to give his sections some elegant titles, but beyond this you can sense that he is straining to express the way the different periods of music had very different relationships to musical time and pulse.

Griffiths divides his book into 8 sections as follows:-
Part 1: Time whole (14 pages)
Part 2: Time measured 1100-1400 (24 pages)
Part 3: Time sensed 1400-1630 (52 pages)
Part 4: Time known 1630-1770 (40 pages)
Part 5: Time embraced 1770-1815 (28 pages)
Part 6: Time escaping 1815-1907 (64 pages)
Part 7: Time tangled 1908-1975 (72 pages)
Part 8: Time lost 1975- (18 pages)

I have included the page counts to give an idea as to how Griffiths divides his time. This is a book that gives due weight to early music and to contemporary music; Griffiths’s narrative is so structured that Beethoven occurs almost at the centre of the book.

At first I found his language a bit too flowery, e.g. "Music, so intimately engaged with percetion, lights up the mind. Music, being immaterial, touches on the immaterial – on the drift of thought and feeling, on divinity and death". But once we move from the speculation on music’s sources to concrete history then things settle down and Griffiths’s language is generally admirably direct and clear.

There are a number of themes running through the narrative, which help to lift it from being a simple list of names and places. Firstly, Griffiths includes elements of musical analysis so that we understand the musical forms about which he is talking. One of the strands in the piece is the way musical form (and its use of time) has metamorphosed and changed, it is only when the narrative is well under way that we even get the first glimpse of the major and minor keys. His analyses are always apposite and straightforward to understand, he never seems to talk down to the reader. In the early part of the book, this sense of analysis is expanded to include bits of science in easily absorbed forms.

This first section also parallels the development of music with the development of musical notation and Griffiths helps us to understand how rooted in notation our music really is. The various elements of this strand run throughout the book, giving a clear idea of how music works and why it works the way it does.

Another strand of the book is how the present views the music of the past. This is important in a culture such as ours which seems to record everything. Initially this view of the past simply has a bearing on how we perceive the music; Griffiths makes it clear that music is not an absolute but is affected by how it is perceived and how we perform it. He reinforces this with an illuminating discussion on a piece of plainchant which can be heard nowadays but is apparently very old; Griffiths elucidates how modern perceptions and performance issues constantly re-create the music of the past.

This re-creation is made all the more apparent when we come to the music of the 20th century when Stravinsky starts creating works which are affected by past musics but as Griffiths points out "neoclassicism … owed its cool and strict rhythm not so much to the eighteenth century as to how the eighteenth century was being presented to the modern age by such performers as Landowska".

But besides seeing threads of continuity running through music history, an overview such as this is able to elucidate comparisons between contemporaries to help illuminate their musical world. Handel and Bach lived separate yet parallel existences in the same musical world. They never met and their music is apparently distinct, but Griffiths points out some helpful parallels between works written around the same time. Bach’s St. John Passion and Handel’s operas Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda come from the same period and would normally be seen as vastly different, but Handel and Bach were breathing the same musical air and Griffiths is able to detect this and help us see the commonalities between the works.

This crops up repeatedly in the book, the way the different musics of particular time have bearing on each other. Griffiths is admirable in the way he finds a similarity of purpose in late Rameau and late Handel: "Like Rameau at the same time, and very much the same age, Handel produced a series of works in which characterful action cascades into creative enjoyment, his choruses corresponding to Rameau’s dances."

I had never really thought about the parallel developments of music in the Soviet Union and in the USA in the 1930’s but Griffiths points out that in both countries composers moved away from modernistic developments - the Soviet composers under instruction from the government, but the American composers doing so apparently spontaneously. As with many other parallels, Griffiths offers no theories but simply records and allows the reader to develop ideas for themselves.

Finally, the last major strand that runs through the book is the role of composer in society along with how we perform music. How music was performed when written, along with sociological influences, is an important way of perceiving musical history. Other artistic and historical developments are touched on so that the can see modernism in the context of abstraction in the arts or come to feel the major effect that the French revolution had on the music and the arts in general.

Griffiths displays admirable clarity when picking his way through the many developments in music during the 19th century. He seems to be able to write about the era without obvious axe-grinding. And these are virtues which he needs in spades when approaching music in the decades after the 2nd world war. If he quotes Adorno a little to much and a little to abstrusely, he manages to make sense of the developments in music that happened during these challenging decades.

His treatment of atonality, serialism and modernism is scrupulously fair and Griffiths seems to be able to pick his way through the maze. But there is one area that he does not quite address fully. Whereas his discussions of music in the past includes information about performance practice and audience, for modernism he does not really address the central problem with post-War music making, that of the alienation of the audience. This is an area of music history which, I think, needs to be fully addressed in any major work.

Griffiths does enliven his narrative with brief biographical sketches of some composers. He does not always do this, perhaps because biography is not relevant for all composers. But there are moments when we seem to have lists of composers flashing past our eyes as we traverse the page; a problem in any work of this sort, but one that Griffiths seems to have minimised.

You can always play spot the bits missed out in this type of work. Griffiths seems to omit 19th century British composers pre-Elgar neither Stanford nor Parry gets a mention, though Ethel Smyth does.

The main narrative is followed by a 12 page glossary detailing all the specialist terms that you might need to know. Even more helpfully, this is followed by a list of further reading and listening, Griffiths suggests books and recordings which can be explored at leisure.

We have a tendency to view musical history as one of constant development. This is something that seems to be quite valid until we come to recent musical history. But perhaps even when dealing with the past, we should be wary of this model. In his closing sections on the musics of today, Griffiths introduces another, helpful, analogy – that of the labyrinth. We are no longer on a path but finding our way through a constantly expanding labyrinth and books like this help is to put ourselves in proper context.

Technorati tag:classical music, book review

First Night nerves

Well, I've sent of the contracts (duly signed) so that the recording is almost signed and sealed - it won't be delivered, of course, until the recording sessions in April.

Usually I obsess about minor details rather than the big picture - in this case, the pitch of the organ (a bit higher than concert pitch), how much rehearsal the strings will need, logistics of getting the singers together.

But sending off the contract rather gave me some pangs. Primarily of course, whether anyone was going to buy the recording. I go through a similar crisis of confidence when writing longer works, I get part of the way through and start to feel that its all rubbish and why bother to continue. When dealing with writing music, the only way is forward and the solution is to press on and eventually I rediscover my bounce. If and when a piece is finished it gets put in the draw before being brought out again and I'm usually pleasantly surprised and rather like the piece.

Its going to have to be the same with the recording, onwards and upwards ignoring worries. Its not that I don't feel my music is worth recording, just that I tend to go through crises of confidence and am not the best promoter of my own work. Also, of course, its rather a long process from conception to delivery of the final recorded item. At the moment we are in the middle of the waiting period, looking forward to the actual sessions and hoping that arrangements work. More in due course!

Technorati tag:classical music

Reviewer's log

I've been a bit intermittent with it of late, but I try and write a reviewer's log for Music Web, giving thoughts on the discs I've been reviewing. The latest instalment is here.

Review of La Fille du Regiment

My review of La Fille du Regiment is here on Music and Vision.


Technorati tag:classical music, opera

La Fille du Regiment

To the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on Saturday for Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment with Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez. Quite Wonderful. A review will appear in due course.

The programme included various informative articles, including one about women appearing on stage in the guise of soldiers. But there is one aspect that neither the production nor the programme book addressed. As the opera opens, Marie has become a Vivandiere (translated as mess-girl). Now, these women were not noted for their morals and in the opera Marie has sworn to marry a member of the regiment, one of here 'Fathers'. This sexual aspect would, surely, have occurred to the French listeners, well the male ones as well, so that the entire performance would have had an underlying feel of the incest taboo, even if the stage events did not emphasise this. Thankfully Laurent Pelly chose to ignore this as well in his production.

Another area which he ignored was language. The troups, and Marie, are French, Tonio is Tyrolean and the Marquise is not French either, she's local. So there would have been a great deal of scope for mixing of accent and language in the dialogue. Something that was missed

Technorati tag:classical music, opera

Publicity

I've been drafting the posters for the London Concord Singers concert on March 29th (Rachmaninov Vespers) and the FifteenB Consort concert at All Saints Margaret Street on March 18th. The results for this latter concert can be seen here. The poster includes the full programme for the concert, a mixture of 17th century Verse Anthems and my pieces.

Technorati tag:classical music

Radio Silence

Sorry for the radio silence, its been one of those weeks requiring planning and organisation for two of the big projects that I have on the go.

First off, our concert on March 18th at All Saints, Margaret Street. Its tricky enough getting a rehearsal schedule together which allows all 6 of us to be present, but we've had to fix up rehearsal venues and an organist. This latter has been a bit challenging regarding schedules, but luckily we've managed to get Paul Ayres to play for us, so we'll be in safe hands. Mind you, we have had to be a bit creative with the rehearsal scheduling. All I have to do now is get the music in a fit state for Paul to play from!

Then things also started moving on the recording front. I've been finalising contracts with the record company, via email luckily. Also, rehearsal schedules had to be addressed here and venues, both fixed now for the string orchestra which is one less thing to worry about. Another item on the worry list is the pitch of the organ at the recording venue, its a bit above concert pitch (not as much as a semi-tone). I think we'll be able to work round this, but its one more thing on the list.

In a couple of weeks time I'm off to visit the recording venue and see the organ. Also on the cards is a meeting with the record company's PR person. It almost feels as if we might be doing a recording! I've finally sent the conductor all the scores we'll be doing and have to address myself to the vexed question of producing the string parts - always a tedious business.

We're rehearsing for the March 18th concert tonight, and then we are off to the Royal Opera House tomorrow for the new production of La Fille du Regiment, can't wait!

The same, only different

We recently were listening to The Scissor Sisters first album, it was on top of the display in my local library so I thought, what the hell! They are a group about which I've seen and heard a lot but never really sat down to listen to their music, except for the odd track.

What struck us, when listening was how much we'd heard it before. The sound world of the disc is very reminiscent of the original gay disco boom, which of course was when D. and I paid a lot of attention to popular music. It is fascinating the way pop culture constantly needs to re-invent itself, re-using elements of the past. Its not just music, but fashion does something similar.

Whereas Western art culture is heavily based on the unchanging artefact (a score or work of art), the idea being that things develop towards the perfect artefact, in pop culture there is no such development, the moment is all. It matters not that the artefact might have been used before, what matters is what you are doing with it at the moment.

This, of course, has had a big influence on some of the major names in modernism, where the move away from the fully notated score and the concept of an artefact, is quite important.

But there is another fascinating parallelism, the world of the baroque. Where composers were constantly pressured for something new, it was newness that mattered. Everyone recycled and re-used pre-existing material, whether it was your own or someone else's. If you read about the constant pressures on Handel, you can see parallels with our own pop culture. Not only the expectation from the audience to produce something new, but the constant striving to make each revival of a work new and different, no matter what the total effect on the work's artistic integrity.

What is fascinating is that nowadays we decry some of Handel's revivals of his works, where he cut and pasted all manner of music to create new versions which were weaker than the original. But to contemporaries do not seem to have worried about this in the same way, they were concerned for the ephemera of the moment, whether the singers were good and whether the songs were knew.

Reading biographies of baroque composers you often feel that their lives were closer to key figures in pop culture than contemporary composers. Handel as George Michael!!!

Technorati tag:classical music, Handel

News season Great Performers at the Barbican

The 2007/2008 Great Performers season has started booking at the Barbican. As usual, ridiculously early but how can one resist such a good selection of concerts. It seems to be a feature of concert life in London that the big institutions are opening booking earlier and earlier (at least it seems that way, I've not kept a proper record of it).

But the 2007/08 season at the Barbican includes Les Arts Florissants doing Landi's Il Sant Alessio (no, I hadn't heart of it either). Magdalena Kozena doing Handel arias, Emmanuelle Haim and Le Concert d'Astree doing Handel's Dixit Dominus and Bach's Magnificat, the Sixteen doing Messiah, Natalie Dessay doing Italian operatic arias, Vivaldi's opera Tito Manlio, Handel's Flavio, Ian Bostridge singing in Bach's St. John Passion, Mozart's Idomeneo and Britten's Billy Budd (this latter with the LSO), Thomas Quasthoff and Bernada Fink in Bach cantatas and Andreas Scholl doing Handel cantatas. Plus of course various more modern musics, including another Golijov premiere, Saariaho's Adriana Mater, recitals by Juan Diego Florez, Roberto Alagna, Cecilia Bartoli (no programme for this one, which is a bit naughty) and Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic much much more.


As a member you get 20% discount, which certainly makes a big difference to ticket prices. It means that we can just about afford to sit in half decent seats in the stalls instead of way back in the circle.

Technorati tag:classical music

30th London Handel Festival

The brochure for the 30th London Handel Festival has dropped through my letter box and we have sent off our application for tickets. As ever, the selection of works is mouthwatering.

The main oratorio performance is Solomon with a cast including Iestyn Davies. And the opera performances this year are of Poro in a production which is co-produced with the Benjamin Britten International Opera School and directed by Christopher Cowell.

There are an attractive selection of lunchtime concerts, the annual St. Matthew Passion performance on Good Fridy and of course the Handel Singing Competition. This year, at one of the lunchtime concerts Paul Ayres will be giving a programme of Handel's organ music together with news works for chamber organ inspired by Handel's music. The new works will chosen from those submitted to a Handel-inspired composition competition.

Most of the concerts take place at St. George's Church, Hanover Square, though Adrian Butterfield is giving a concert of English violin sonatas at the Foundling Museum. The advantage of St. George's Church is that it was Handel's parish church. This disadvantage is that sight lines are mixed and the comfort poor, the seats become very hard after 3 hours of Handel oratorio!

Full detail's at the Festival's website.

Technorati tag:classical music