At last - tax breaks for gifts of art works

I see from the Autumn edition of Art Quarterly (the Art Fund's magazine), that from some time this autumn, people who donate art works to museums will be entitle to 30% of the value off their tax bill. Something that already happens with gifts of money and shares, but not art works. Its high time that this anomaly was corrected, the UK lags rather behind other countries in encouraging people to donate.

Britten 100 launch

To the Britten Theatre at the Royal College of Music for the launch of Britten 100, the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. The centre of the events is the Britten Pears Foundation, but the celebrations are in fact a wide collaboration between a variety of organisations, tribute to the wide regard in which Britten's music is held. The events start from yesterday's launch and run all the way through to the centenary day itself, on 22 November 2013 and beyond. At the launch, Richard Jarman the director of the Britten Pears Foundation gave a summary of the events. There is a cornucopia and this summary post will be the first of a number covering the celebrations.

Birthday song placed in top 4 in EPSS Diamond Jubilee Competition

My song For David, on his Birthday has been placed fourth in the English Poetry and Song Society's Diamond Jubilee Competition. The competition, which requested composers set a poem written during the Queen's reign, was judged by Sarah Leonard, Stephen Varcoe and Raymond Warren. The top four songs are being performed on Friday 12 October at 8pm at a concert at the Colston Halls, Bristol. Sarah Leonard,  Stephen Varcoe and Nigel Foster will be performing songs by Elgar, Walford Davies, Bax, Bliss and Malcolm Williamson (all Masters of the Queens/Kings Musick), plus Purcell, Greene, Boyce, Coward, Novello and Madeleine Dring, alongside the winning songs, North Ship by Jolyon Lacock, Bee Dance by Janet Oates, The Fox by Brian Daubney and For David, on his Birthday by Robert Hugill.

In fact, For David, on his Birthday is the 7th in a cycle of songs, each written for my partner's birthday. The original versions of the songs, for tenor and piano, were privately recorded but are unpublished. The entry in the competition is the version for baritone and piano, which is available from the Spherical Editions website. And you can hear Simon Biazeck and Paul Webster performing the tenor version of the song on Sound Cloud.

Guildhall School autumn season

The Guildhall School of Music and Drama (GSMD) in their autumn season offer opportunities not only to catch young up and coming performers, but also to heard works you might not otherwise be able to.

British Youth Opera - The Bartered Bride

Matthew Stiff (Kecal), Luis Gomes (Jenik) and chorus

For their first production in their September season at the Peacock Theatre, British Youth Opera chose to present their first ever production of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, sung in Kit Hesketh Harvey’s English translation (originally made for the Royal Opera House production). We saw the first night, on Saturday 8 September.

For all its infectious music and apparently light-hearted popularity, The Bartered Bride remains a problematic piece. There is the depiction of Vasek, which though sympathetic, depends for its comic value on the character’s stutter. Plus the awkward fact that for a chunk of acts two and three, Jenik blithely assumes that Marenka will blindly trust him and quietly go along with his deception. Either he is horribly manipulative or simply egotistically selfish. But this is fundamentally a comedy, and if played straight the piece can be made to work well. This does, however, require the director to trust the piece.

A garden of delights - BBC Lunchtime concerts at Wigmore Hall

BBC Radio 3 have published their programme for the 2012-13 season of lunchtime concerts from the Wigmore Hall. Lasting from September 2012 to July 2013 there some 42 concerts mixing lots of young artists (including BBC Young Generation Artists) with more experienced ones. So that the talent ranges from Benjamin Grosvenor to Elisabeth Leonskaja.

Musical Depression (2)

Ripon Cathedral

Ripon Cathedral Choir School has closed. I suppose in the grand scheme of things, this counts as a relatively minor blip; unless of course you happen to be attending the school, working there or trying to sort out the provision for choral music in Ripon Cathedral. It is very sad when such traditional bastions of our choral heritage become unworkable. Attempts to merge the school with a local one have foundered.

It looks as if the cathedral has moved to another model entirely for the choral provision. A new choral foundation encompasses 24 boy choristers, 24 girl choristers from the local area rather than from a choir school and six lay clerks. The Ripon Cathedral website reads very upbeat and we wish them well in their new enterprise.

Musical depression (1)

It sounds as if cuts will almost certainly be expected to affect the BBC's contract performers as there are plans to cut the budge by £2.1 million by 2016-17; that's about 10% of total spending. The administration of the BBC Singers is being merged with that of the BBC Symphony Orchestra which, from an outsider's point of view, seems quite sane.  But reductions of 10% are going to be difficult to achieve whilst maintaining the current output. Isn't it about time that we reflected on the money, kudos and all sorts of other kinds of goodness that these organisations bring. But, of course, that sort of thing doesn't sit well with the government's bean counters. Still, we have to be thankful for small mercies; the Mysercough Report (which set all this off), didn't recommend that any of the ensembles be got rid of, at least this time.

Courtauld Late - Music from Drawings

Last night, 6 September, the Courtauld Gallery held one of their late openings. There was the exhibition, Mantegna to Matisse, plus talks from Niccola Shearman and music from Exaudi, conductor James Weeks. The exhibition was impressive in that it was taken entirely from the Courtauld's own holdings.

CD Review - Elijah

The intention of this new recording of Mendelssohn’s Elijah conducted by Paul McCreesh was to recreate the first performance of the work at Birmingham Town Hall in 1846. This was very large scale affair, 100 musicians and 400 singers, and is very well documented. The first London performance, in 1847 is far less well documented. However, for this performance Mendelssohn made the significant revisions to the work which create the Elijah that we know today. So McCreesh has taken the decision to record the 1847 version but using forces akin to those Mendelssohn conducted in Birmingham. The result is to convincingly give us a taste of the sort of ‘big band’ performances of which the Victorians were so very fond.

The recording has been issued on McCreesh’s Winged Lion record label and was recorded with the support of the Wroclaw Cantans Festival of which McCreesh is artistic director. McCreesh’s Gabrieli Consort and Players are joined by the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir and choirs from the Gabrieli Young Singers Scheme: Chetham’s Chamber Choir, North East Youth Chorale, Taplow Youth Choir and Ulster Youth Chamber Choir.

The recording was made in Watford Colosseum, but the organ of Birmingham Town Hall played by William Whitehead has been over dubbed onto it. Though the organ has undergone changes since the 1840’s, Whitehead explains in a CD article how he has attempted to come close to the sound of the organ at that period.

One area of problem for performances of Elijah remains the ensemble numbers intended for solo voices. Choral societies engaging just four soloists need to allocate these to a chamber choir, and performances with more than four soloists seem profligate. It is an issue which is often skirted over in reviews, but can have a small but significant effect on the overall sound of the piece. Wolfgang Sawallisch in his Leipzig recording of 1968 in German was one of the first major conductors to use eight singers and have the quartets, octet and trio all sung by soloists. Paul Daniel does this on his recording with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with Bryn Terfel in the title role.

On this disc, McCreesh opts for a slightly different alternative. He uses four well established soloists, and the quartets, octet and trio are sung by a separate group of eight young solo singers from the choir (Susan Gilmour Bailey, Emily Rowley Jones, Lucy Ballard, Ruth Gibbins, Samuel Boden, Richard Rowntree, Robert Davies, and William Gaunt). The result beautifully realises Mendelssohn’s intentions, and at the same time moves the work further from the operatic. If you listen to these movements on the Sawallisch recording, sung by mature operatic voices, the results are closer to an operatic ensemble. But Mendelssohn wasn’t writing an opera, even though the work is dramatic.

In the last few years I have developed an increasing knowledge of Mendelssohn’s choral music, particularly his unaccompanied pieces and the cantatas which sound like trial runs for Elijah. Using different blocks of singers, soli against chorus, was a technique that you find cropping up, so clearly the sound world which McCreesh evokes is one which would have been familiar to Mendelssohn.

The orchestra has its share of interest and oddities including slide trumpets (an English invention which allowed natural trumpets to play chromatic notes), a contrabass ophicleide (there is only one of these left in playable condition and Gabrieli were lucky enough to borrow it from Albany, NY) and the addition of serpents to the vocal line.

Regarding the text, McCreesh has made his own discreet emendations to the original translation to remove the odd infelicity in the traditional version.

Of the various performances of Elijah that I have heard, both live and on disc, the three singers who have impressed most in the title role have been Norman Bailey and Benjamin Luxon (both heard live) and Bryn Terfel (heard only on disc). Now two of these are bass baritones and Luxon had a very rich dark voice, with a very dramatic delivery. Simon Keenlyside is rather different in style, his voice is slimmer for a start. I have heard him perform the role live, though with different forces to those on this disc, but my memories of that performance reinforce my impression that Keenlyside makes from this disc. But a critic must be careful of castigating contemporary singers just because they do not sound like their predecessors; the soprano role in this piece is a similar problem as I always hear it in my mind sung by Isobel Baillie. You must attempt to review the performance on its own terms.

Keenlyside sings Elijah beautifully and intelligently with a very fine sense of line and lovely feeling for the words. His delivery of It is enough is one of the most moving that I have heard. And he does not eschew singing very quietly, his phrase to the Widow Give me thy son is stunning. But, at the big moments, he can’t disguise that his voice lacks the bigness, the amplitude that would be ideal in this role and, quite simply, there are one or two moments when it goes lower than his comfort zone. His singing of the arias Is not His word like a fire is wonderfully vivid and vigorous, but he doesn’t quite fill the vocal line the way I want. One small point, Keenlyside does not seem to be able to settle on one particular pronunciation of the word Israel.

But his interpretation is well aligned to McCreesh’s interpretation, though this performance is dramatic, it is not particularly operatic. Here McCreesh’s experience conducting earlier oratorios comes to the fore and we experience Mendelssohn as the heir of Handel, Haydn and Bach, rather than as opera composer manqué.

In the soprano solos, Rosemary Joshua is vibrant and rich voiced. Her vibrato is caught in a way which sometimes compromises the line, but she brings to each solo a well modulated intelligence. Perhaps the Widow could be a little more pointed at first. Her delivery of Hear year, Israel is not the most beautiful I have heard, but it is supremely characterful.

Sarah Connolly turns in a beautifully rendered and differentiated performance of the alto arias. As Jezebel she conjures up a wonderful vein of nastiness (well supported by the chorus), whereas as the angel she is poised, beautiful and controlled. Her performance of O rest in the Lord brought a lump to my throat.

Tenor Robert Murray is someone whose work in the opera house and concert hall I have admired. Like many of his distinguished predecessors, he does not quite managed to differentiate between Ahab and Obadiah. More problematically, the recording has picked up strongly on his vibrato, especially in the upper register so that when he applies pressure to the voice it starts to sound unstable. This might not bother everyone, but I am afraid that it is something which I always notice.

Singing the role of the boy is Jonty Ward, at the time of recording he had just finished his treble career as Head Chorister of New College Oxford and has appeared in a number of their recordings including his stunning contribution to their Couperin disc.

But the real star of the disc is the chorus; huge it may be, but McCreesh gets a stunning variety of tone and volume from it. There are moments when you feel that perhaps his speeds are moderated to cope with the chorus’s huge size. I was particularly disturbed by the slowing down at the chorus’s first entry after the overture, but this was so marked that I presume it to be definite choice. The chorus brings great commitment to the nasty passages and turns in luminous singing in the hushed sections.

To hear quite what effect such a big chorus can have, you need to hear Holy, holy, holy where a quartet of young singers is contrasted with the huge, huge impact of the chorus. Simply stunning.

The orchestra is a similar revelation, with Mendelssohn’s textures coming over far more vividly than with modern instruments. I sang in the chorus for Elijah under Raymond Leppard in the 1980’s. His interpretation was, at the time, rather controversial but he pointed out to us that Elijah was still young man’s music. Mendelssohn was only 35 when the work was first performed. In some performances you forget this, but not here.

The CDs come with the libretto (in English and Polish), plus articles by a variety of people on the work and the recording, helping you to understand what you are hearing and why.

Elijah is a work very dear to my heart and I don’t think that any recording can ever succeed on every count. But in his recreation of the style of Mendelssohn’s first performance Paul McCreesh and his forces have come up with something rather wonderful to which I will return again and again.

Felix Mendelssohn - Elijah

Rosemary Joshua - Soprano

Sarah Connolly - Mezzo-soprano

Robert Murray - Tenor

Simon Keenlyside - Baritone

Jonty Ward - Treble

Susan Gilmour Bailey, Emily Rowley Jones - Soprano

Lucy Ballard, Ruth Gibbins - Mezzo-Soprano

Samuel Boden, Richard Rowntree - Tenor

Robert Davies,  William Gaunt - Bass

Gabrieli Consort

Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir

Chetham's Chamber Choir

North East Youth Chorale

Taplow Youth Choir

Ulster Youth Chamber Choir

Gabriel Players

William Whitehead - Organ

Paul McCreesh - Conductor

Recorded Watford Colosseum 29 August to 1 September 2011

Birmingham Town Hall 26 February 2012

Total running time 135:58

SIGCD 300 2CD's

Rosenblatt Recitals to TV

Rosenblatt Recitals, the recital series devoted to established and emerging singers from the operatic stage, has signed a deal with Sky Arts to televise the first four recitals in the 2012-13 season. This season, for the first time, the recital series takes place at the Wigmore Hall rather than St Johns Smith Square. With the location move and now the televisation, it looks as if Rosenblatt Recitals is significantly raising its profile.

40 + 22 + gone

St Augustine's Kilburn

Possibly your last chance to hear I Fagiolini perform music from their best-selling Tallis and Striggio CD. On Saturday 22 September at St. Augustine's Church, Kilburn, London NW6 5XB, they will be joined by the English Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble, the City Musick and the Renaissance Singers to perform Striggio's Ecce beatam lucem and his Missa Ecco si beato giorno plus Tallis's Spem in alium. Stunning music in an amazing location. More details and tickets from the Renaissance Singers website.

Be prepared to travel - the Kings Consort new season

The brochure for the Kings Consort's new season popped into my mailbox. It looks an attractive season with some rather enticing events, but you will have to travel if you want to see them. They are making two appearances at the Wigmore Hall, but all the rest of their programme is performed out and about, with none of the bigger works are making it to the UK. Which is a shame, still the season is worth travelling for.

Stubete am See Ländler Orchestra

A friend of mine sent me this link about an orchestra of Swiss folk instruments (strings, clarinets, brass, accordeon, Schwyzeroergeli and hammered dulcimer) which was formed for the Stubete am See folk music festival in Zurich. The orchestra has music written for it, the Youtube link is to a piece by Dani Häusler called Waldstätter-Fantasy based ontraditional Swiss folk dances.
 http://www.stubeteamsee.ch/5-1-The-Laendler-Orchestra.html
http://youtu.be/0YKlYzb6UGk

Mark Simpson - Sparks!

Mark Simpson is a busy boy at the moment. The young (born 1986) composer and clarinettist has a new piece at the Proms, opening the Last Night of the Proms on Saturday 8 September. His piece, Sparks, will be played of course by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jiri Belohlavek. We are promised a 3 minute opener full of fireworks and virtuoso orchestra writing. Then on 24 September Simpson will be playing in the Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) showcase concert at the Purcell Room at 7.45pm

Coming to Colchester - Music of Place 2012

This weekend (8/9 September) is the annual Heritage Open Days in the UK weekend (unless you live in London when the dates are different). In Colchester you have the added advantage of The Music of Place 2012, where members of the Britten Sinfonia will be popping up in various places over the weekend to play music in historic and interesting venues. So two birds with one stone.

Choral at Cadogan

The Choral at Cadogan concert series started in 2008 and since then they have presented a wide range of artists in some fascinating programmes of generally unaccompanied choral music. The concert series has built up steady support from the Cadogan Hall audience and recent programmes have been very well supported. But sometimes I have felt that the series has seemed a little under-valued in the wider musical community. Cadogan Hall is an excellent medium sized venue with a nice, not too resonant acoustic which responds well to small choral groups. The programming in Choral at Cadogan has always been varied enough to provide something for everyone whilst not shying away from some good meaty early polyphony to attract nuts like myself. Last night, 4 September, there was the 2012/13 season launch with a short performance from the Tallis Scholars and an introduction to the season by Peter Phillips who is artistic director of Choral at Cadogan.

William Alwyn Festival 2012

William Alwyn

English composer William Alwyn (1905 - 1985) is perhaps still best known for his film scores, for such films as The History of Mr Polly. But besides his many film scores (60 feature film and 150 documentaries) there are five symphonies, operas, song cycles and many other works. His opera Miss Julie has had a degree of success, and he was able to record much of his output for disc. But there is still the feeling that, compared to his contemporaries Walton, Tippett, Britten, Alwyn's time has not yet come. This year's William Alwyn Festival is an opportunity to get to know more of his music, alongside that of some of his contemporaries..

Brighton Early Music Festival at 10 - interview with Clare Norburn

BREMF 2011 with Nick Boston and Deborah Roberts
Picture credit Robert Piwko

The Brighton Early Music Festival (BREMF) is ten years old this year and, not surprisingly, the theme of this year’s festival (26 October to 11 November) is Celebration and I caught up with co-founder Clare Norburn to talk about festival past and present. BREMF was founded in 2002 by Clare Norburn and Deborah Roberts over a cup of coffee. Both are singers, Clare grew up in Brighton and Deborah had just moved there and started directing the Brighton consort. Their paths kept crossing as they both organised and promoted concerts in the city and, almost as a joke; the suggestion came up that they might put on a festival. Over the fateful cup of coffee, they decided that it was possible.

Opera for a Change

Opera for a Change are a group of singers and performers who plan to take a production of Mozart's Magic Flute across Africa on a lorry, from Nairobi to Cape Town. From November to December 2012 there is a pilot project where four of the team will drive the route and meet local partners in order to build collaborations for the main project. Their vision is to take a travelling festival of stories and songs along a route that stretches more than 5000 miles though 9 countries.

Those involved in the project are Andy staples, Louis Watt, Poppy Savage and Sarah Harvey. During November and December they will be running workshops as as they travel, firmly of the belief of the power of music and story telling to bring people together and make lives better.  Each time they stop there will be a mini festival lasting around a week, tailored to the location and the people.

Its all a bit crazy, but really rather wonderful. You can find out more from the  Opera for a Change  website.