A sweet way to go gay

Make up your own risqué comments. This ad just begs for them. It comes off a great blog I follow called Musty Moments. "Scouring history for cheap laughs". Who said working in archives can't be fun !

Villazonistas unite - Don Carlo streamed

Three more days to watch the full performance of the original (2008) Don Carlo at the Royal Opera House. Villazon, Keenlyside. Poplavskaya. Pappano conducts, Hytner's director. Follow this link to watch online, on demand til Saturday night. All 3 and 1/2 hours incl extras! Fabulous, watch it loud and full screen.

It's wonderful that such things are possible on public TV. The BBC is funded by a licence fee paid by taxpayers. This of course drives hard line extremist capitalists crazy. Rupert Murdoch thinks the BBC is "competition" and wants it crushed. Ironic, huh, that someone who believes in free market forces needs politicians to help him control the market ?

Maybe he'll succeed as there are plenty of folks who think only in terms of greed, not good. And those are the very ones who can be bought. When such folks have power, that's all the more reason for ordinary folk to stand up for the ideals behind the BBC charter "to entertain, educate and inform". The BBC, despite its hangups, serves the public good and supports whole industries in music, news and creative arts. Much better that public money should go to such a project than on guns, dodgy politicians, dubious bail outs and so on. Oops ! sorry ! NOT guns, they don't arm or support the troops in Afghanistan.

Wolfgang Rihm - et lux et al

Wolfgang Rihm's Et Lux had its UK premiere last weekend at Huddersfield ( for more on the Huddersfield Festival which continues this week please see HERE) It's different because it brings together the Arditti Quartet, who do ultra modern, and the Hilliard Ensemble, who sing early music. Rihm has experimented with odd combinations before, like his refiguring of Bach, but this is quite new.

Ivan Hewett was there. Here's what he said "After a wispy single-line introduction from the quartet came a pure euphonious vocal chord. It was light but shadowy, a stunning moment of "darkness visible".......Often, the music tipped towards harsh dissonance, though always in a soft voice.....someimes, the quartet seemed to fight the voices with plucked and scrubbed sounds, sometimes it was like a second four-part choir." Read the full review HERE.

Looking ahead, there's a Wolfgang Rihm Total Immersion at the Barbican in London in March. See HERE for details. Wow ! Lots of previously unheard work and Rihm will be there himself to talk to.

The White Ribbon - Haneke

Michael Haneke's film The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) at the Barbican is worth rushing out for. I was going to wait for the DVD (also available on download) but I'm glad I didn't wait. It's won the Palme d'Or at Cannes but that alone means little: this a very compelling movie whatever the accolades.

It's set in 1913, but framed by the voice of an old man recalling events that happened long ago when he was the village teacher, and says "it might explain what happened later". Don't, however, fall into the trap of assuming it's some kind of pseudo-history. This film is about human nature and could apply anywhere.

The village preacher punishes his kids by making them wear a white ribbon to remind them to be pure in heart and mind. He loves them and genuinely believes he's guiding them well. By the standards of the time it wasn't so unusual to think masturbation caused death. So purity as ideal and symbol. But the story isn't nearly as simple as you'd think. Many dangerous things are happening in this placid little village. Someone causes the doctor to fall off his horse. Two children are brutally tortured. A barn is burned, cabbages in a field decapitated. Who is doing these things and why? Are the events even connected? As the old man says, perhaps the greater damage was that it created a climate of suspicion, everyone sniffing out evil, even where it wasn't. Then the real "white band", the villagers' innate purity, was lost forever.

This film doesn't do stereotypes. The Baron is the main employer but he's not a remote capitalist exploiter. With status come feudal obligations. He knows the locals personally. When a woman is killed in an accident in his barn, her son wrecks the cabbage patch. Then the Baron's son is beaten up - he hangs out with the local kids, too. Yet the Baron tells the village he knows it wasn't the woman's son. In any case, he tells the villagers, Felder (the woman's husband) is so straight and so upright, he'd die rather than be sneaky.

What's interesting, too, is that the narrative is oblique. It's a series of vignettes which hint rather than explain. The teacher sees the preacher's son walking dangerously on the edge of a bridge. "Now I know God doesn't want me to die", says the kid. His little brother looks after a wounded bird. The steward's son has pushed the baron's son into the brook (this time he's quickly saved by the steward's other son). When questioned by his father he denies it, but as the father leaves the boy plays the baron's son's flute - it's proof, without the need for words.

One day, the teacher encounters Frau Wagner, the midwife, who's rushing off to town because she "knows" who the perpetrators are. It turns out that the doctor, who'd been sleeping with her and his own daughter, has disappeared with the kids. But the midwife doesn't come back either. The local kids are at the doctor's house, trying to look in. Why has the midwife barricaded the windows, in a tiny Dorfchen where doors are left open to all?

The teacher remembers how the band of kids were present at all the strange incidents. He doesn't know (though we do) that the preacher's daughter killed her dad's pet canary by spiking it with nail scissors. The teacher questions the kids, but they're so used to clamming up, they act innocent. So he goes to the preacher, who goes berserk, as any parent would, although it's not just his kids. He threatens mayhem on the teacher if word gets out. But he doesn''t act. Nor does the midwife return. All is unresolved.

Much has been made of the sensational parts of the story, such as the doctor's son seeing his dad and sister in bed, but the film is about wider concepts like taking responsibility. Hence old peasant Felder, whom the baron had exonerated, is found having committed suicide right after the barn where his wife died is razed in a dramatic fire. The baron's wife says she's leaving him, not because there's another man but because she doesn't want her kids growing up in this unhealthy environment. And perhaps the teacher becomes a tailor because his girlfriend's father - a totally direct man who gets straight to the point and doesn't do chat - asks him why he didn't take over his dad's business in the first place.

Watch the trailers HERE

Because English language audiences don't know anything about Germany other than Hitler, they might see The White Ribbon as a simplistic allegory about the war. But Haneke connects the story to 1914 for much more complex reasons. Anglophiles assume the First World War was the Western Front, not realizing that the devastation on the Eastern Front was infinitely greater. Both world wars stemmed from events in central and eastern Europe, rather than from the western peripheries. But history is written to suit the winners, and English is so dominant a language that it pushes other accounts out of the picture.

Setting The White Ribbon is that specific time and place adds extra resonance if you think beyond Anglophone assumptions. We might deduce that the film is set in East Prussia because of the reference to Frederick the Great as flautist, and to general knowledge about north German society. German communities, were established as far as Russia around 1000 years ago, nominally under the control of various kingdoms, but effectively self-contained. Hence the Junkers, on whom so much is blamed. In practice, though, feudal throwbacks maintained different values. Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit bis an dein kühles Grab. Honest and honourable until the grave.

The German communities of Prussia and beyond no longer exist. They were subject to ethnic cleansing in 1918 and again in 1945. Of course that doesn't diminish what happened to Jews and Communists in Nazi times. But the point of the film is that evil comes from human nature, and innocents suffer. Everyone gets caught up in the madness, culpable or not. Which is why real purity comes from being direct, like the teacher's girlfriend's father, and the old peasant widower.

Like the period it depicts, Haneke's The White Ribbon ends in a kind of of limbo. The teacher never finds out what happened because he left the village soon after. Then the war came, overturning everything. By the time the teacher became an old man, the world he knew was obliterated. What happened to the people? Where did they end up, what did they do?

The photo is a real family, taken around this period from an archive collection. No one knows who they are or where they ended up, but in the picture, they look so happy.

Mahler 10 Harding Mendelssohn Tetzlaff

Because Mahler didn't complete the Tenth Symphony, performance needs to be open ended, recognizing that we'll never know what might have been. What a conductor hears in the material is just as informative as what we might assume we know.

That's why I found Riccardo Chailly's Mahler 10th with the Leipzig Gewandhaus at this year's Proms so fascinating. Chailly brought out aspects of the Eternal Feminine: a concept quite explicitly developed in the 8th Symphony. Connecting the 10th to the 8th is perfectly valid, for Mahler is on both sides of the divide in his life, before and after the crisis with Alma.

Daniel Harding and the London Symphony Orchestra's Mahler 10 at the Barbican on 20th November was altogether tougher and sterner, more cognizant of the horrors in the piece, so in that sense is a more conventional reading. In the alternating themes of the Adagio, Harding hears duality too, but develops it into a complex shifting between polarities. The themes circle each other, interweaving rather than firmly connecting. Mahler and Alma, perhaps, since the composer marked his manuscript with so many references to the woman he loved.

But Harding hears the Adagio as a prelude for what is to come. As sao often in Mahler, beginnings set the stage for ultimate resolution in a different form. The Adagio isn't an end in itself. Perhaps Alma wanted only the Adagio to be performed because she wanted to maintain a romantic image of her marriage. Obviously Mahler adored her. But the manuscript shows that he was going further. As Harding has said, the “famous “scream” chord in the first movement, a nine-note dissonance, is an astonishing cry of anguish …. "it’s pure Edvard Munch in music”.

Dissonance of the soul, teetering on an abyss of something terrifying and new. The duality, in Harding, is unsettling, uncomforting. Some performing editions try too hard to "complete" the 10th, smoothing out the angularity, but Cooke III lets them hang. Thus, in the second scherzo, Harding kept the LSO tightly reined in, so they don't cover the jagged edges Mahler left incomplete by "normal" orchestral colour. In his recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, Harding's careful control was even more shocking, because the VPO is an orchestra for whom stark chiaroscuro almost doesn't exist. But that's the whole point. We don't know where Mahler was heading, we can't paper over the aural gaps.

Hence the hollownesss, particularly well shaped in the second (and most incomplete) scherzo and in the Finale : the drumbeats here truly sounded strangled, cut off in mid flow, minimal resonance. The fireman's funeral GM and Alma watched in New York moved him deeply, exactly why we'll never know. But the fireman was cut down in his prime, so the drumbeats are both dirge and truncated heartbeats. Good as the LSO is, the Vienna Philharmonic recording shows just how chilling a performance can be (for a review see link above).

Alma was Mahler's muse, but she wasn't a benevolent deity. She scratched out the second part of its title "oder Inferno", and cut away the bottom half of the title page which may have contained a poem she didn't like. GM loved her but he was smart enough to know her love for him was utterly conditional. He may have won her back but that didn't mean she might not leave again. Alma loved playing angelic nurse to ailing husband, but when he was gone, she went back to Gropius. And, by praising Alma's rather banal songs, Mahler was making compromises with his artistic instinct, even if that was understandable in the circumstances. So Harding's tense, disturbing approach to the symphony is psychologically as well as musically astute.

Most of the audience at the Barbican on Friday night seemed to have come for Christian Tetzlaff's Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Tetzlaff's amazing and this is one of his showpieces. Divinely fluid playing, rewarded by unusually prolonged applause. Yet part of the magic was due to the orchestra, too, because Mendelssohn wasn't writing for a demented violinist-as-demon . Here the LSO got to demonstrate their delicacy, carefully micromanaged by Harding without losing the whimsical spontaneity in the piece. Pairing Mendelssohn with Mahler was a very good idea, for the poised balance in Mendelssohn contrasts with the wavering polarities in Mahler. Yet both pieces were executed with sensitive, musically informed intelligence.

Elisabeth Söderström passes away

Elisabeth Söderström passed away yesterday 20th Nov. Here is an obit written by Alan Blyth some years ago. So many memories ! Strangely enough, in the last few days, I've been thinking about her rendition of Sibelius's Se'n har jag ej frågat mera. (Since then, I have asked no more). It was odd, as I haven't thought about it in ages. But I pulled it out again, and it's marvellous, and a great way to remember Söderström.

It is a wonderful song, one of Sibelius's greatest and most intense. Yet so understated and dignified. In youth a woman used to ask why summer ended so soon. Then, when she learned of life, she questioned no longer. "Deep in her soul", she has "come to know that beauty is transient, and that happiness does not last".

On the DVD, she sings against a filmed landscape of mid winter, with heavily snow laden trees reflected in the waters of a lake, a symphony in grey and white, as abstract as a painting. It is incredibly poetic, a poignant way of expressing music in visual images - a five minute masterpiece of the art of filming music. When Söderström appears, she's filmed in soft focus, lit with luminous shimmering light. She's quite mature, about 55 but this adds to the depth and dignity of her performance. We are fortunate that Söderström lives forever on recordings.

Secret Chinese restaurant, London

London's best kept secret Chinese restaurant is open again! Loon Fung is the wholesaler who supplies most Chinese restaurants in the London area, huge floorspace where you can buy rice by the tonne, cooking oil in industrial cans, and saucepans a metre in diameter. Huge choice of vegetables, UK or China grown and air freighted. These taste different, much stronger, so they're worth the price and carbon footprint. Come here too for serious, ripe tomatoes that don't taste like cardboard. And Chinese supermarkets are the only source in UK for A&W root beer!

People travel for miles to stock up, so it's common sense to give them a meal before their long trek home (and to cook for others). The restaurant, above the Alperton store, is upstairs through a side entrance. Opening hours the same as the shop, so emphasis is on dim sum and Chinese fast food.

The last caterers were very good, these new ones less so, but it's convenient to have decent Chinese food without a big ceremony and fuss parking. This time I had an excellent congee (jook) flavoured with lots of chicken knuckles. Congee is basically rice soup, a sort of watery porridge – Chinese comfort food. When in doubt, eat congee! Cures all ills. During the Japanese occupation when there was famine, congee kept people alive. Much less impressed by the char siu which was truly horrible, weedy and stale. Other people were eating noodles and whole fish, which looked good. Choose things that have to be cooked not microwaved and you should be fine.

If you want banquet quality, there are other places, but Loon Fung is convenient for basics. It's also next to a Sainsbury's megastore. One day I might get lucky and get invited to Royal China Club in St John's Wood (Club in Hong Kong connotes very very upmarket) This week I'm going to Phoenix Palace in Glentworth Street (off Baker Street). There are two Royal China's in Baker Street, one a pretentious and expensive pseudo tea house with expensive (but decent) teas. Royal China in Queensway is where everyone goes, so much so now that most of the customers aren't Chinese anymore, but the food's so good that it's worth waiting in line for an hour. There is a restaurant upstairs at Hoo Hing megastore on the A406, and above Wing Yip in Croydon, South London but neither are good - I walked out of the Wing Yip thing in disgust.

Later today : review of Harding Mahler 10 and Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (Tetzlaff) at the Barbican last night

Henze launches Barbican new operas season

Hans Werner Henze's Phaedra at last comes to London in January, keynote of special immersion weekend in Henze's wonderful, far-ranging music. Devotees booked their tickets a year ago, but you can still get them now from the Barbican. Henze is the greatest living German composer, by miles. He's not given nearly enough recognition in the English-speaking world because in 1968 he put his principle before profit. He supported the revolutionary ideals of the time, went to Cuba and protested against the Vietnam war. End of lucrative deals: DG had just issued a mega retrospective of his symphonies, so they lost out badly. But they stood by him and are now reissuing the recordings to new audiences who now realize that maybe Henze had a point.

Henze is an institution. If anything in old age and infirmity he's even more creative. Phaedra is a crucial point in his life and music. It's a passionate statement about love, and the power of love to triumph over all obstacles, including death. Personally it had huge emotional resonance for Henze because his lover of 40 years died suddenly while it was being written. This lover had just nursed Henze himself through a traumatic near death illness which left him incapacitated for months. So there's no separating the personal from the musical in this powerful work. When the work premiered in Berlin in 2007 one writer sneered that it wasn't funny enough and that Henze shouldn't end his career like that. Another moaned it was in German! Well, Henze didn't end his career and has gone on to write yet another opera, to be premiered in Rome in May 2010.

Henze's previous opera L'Upupa was cheerful and whimsical but the composer has written so much else. Indeed, his work is notable for its extreme range. Phaedra is a very tightly crafted, intense chamber opera, austere and yet other-worldly. In London, we'll be getting Ensemble Modern, who've made it a key part of their repertoire, and John Mark Ainsley.

Read more about it HERE on What's on Stage. Simon Thomas has interviewed Angela Dixon about the Barbican's special season of new European operas. The special season will include Peter Eötvös's Angels in America and Michael van der Aa's After Life. Read about them in the link.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2009

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival starts Friday 20th November. This is Britain's biggest new music festival, and has been going for decades, though some years have been a lot better than others. This is where to go for the hip in new European music. Huddersfield is an industrial city up north, expensive to get to if you live in the south, but BBC Radio3 will be broadcasting some highlights. Lots of composers, few know outside specialist circles, plus some of the greats - this year features Louis Andriessen.

Read this year's programme HERE. The hot item on 20/11 will be Wolfgang Rihm's -ET LUX- UK premiere, performed by the Arditti Quartet, so closely associated with the composer, and the Hilliard Quartet.

Pity the BBC won't be doing this , but they're devoting 90 minutes on 28 November to the festival and to Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, which is being done as a full installation tomorrow. Normally Harvey is not my thing, but this piece is fabulous, and made Harvey's reputation way back. It's about different levels of time, expressed by mixing bells, a boy's voice and electronic sound: it' would be moving to hear as live installation in a church. Lots more Harvey during the festival as he's "featured composer". Piano works on 21/11, followed by the Ardittis playing string quartets, including works by James Dillon and James Clarke.

Another not miss if possible is David Sawer's Rumpelstiltskin with the BCMG. This received rave reviews when it was premiered in Birmingham recently. Conducted by Martyn Brabbins and directed by Richard Jones, it's evidently a major event, which won't be quite the same audio-only. Pity it's coming nowhere near London.

Bas Wiegers brings the Nieuw Ensemble from the Netherlands for several concerts : look at the one which has Luca Francesconi, Gérard Pesson and Stefano Bellon (24/11). But the big draw will be Louis Andriessen Day on Nov 25th at which the composer himself will be present. The afternoon concert brings smaller scale works (Cristina Zavalloni sings) and in the evening a two piano feast - including De Staat transcribed for pianos, and the Hague Hacking (which grew on me after repeat listening) and the companion pair, A very sharp trumpet sonata and A very sad trumpet sonata. These are whimsical miniatures but extremely inventive, full of witty ideas.

Emmanuel Nunes day on 25th. Nunes is well known in Europe, unknown in UK, He spent his working years teaching in Paris, but now he's retired and back in Lisbon, his own work should get higher profile. At Huddersfield Noriko Kawai (excellent) will be playing his masterpiece, Litanies de feu et de la mer 1 and 11. Read THIS description of his work from IRCAM. Listen HERE for sound clips of Litanies, and HERE for a description of the Guild CD. Quatuor Diotima premieres his Improvisation IV - l'électricité de la pensée humaine the next evening.

Everyone knows and loves Rolf Hind as a pianist, so there'll be interest in his own work, A jasmine petal, a single hair, seven mattresses, a pea I've only heard one of Hind's pieces, the title I can't remember but it was interesting enough that I'd like to hear this. He'll be playing the UK premiere of a work by Lisa Lim, whom I've also heard but less memorably. Frederic Rzewski is also a big name pianist, and here will be playing his own Nanosonatas Books III to VI. Also featured will be a Danish composer, Jexper Holmen, completely new to me and Rebecca Saunders' premiere Disclosure. Read more about her on this blog, her music intrigues me, its so tactile.

As always, the last Saturday night in any festival is the big night and this one has the London Sinfonietta, Jonathan Harvey and Richard Barrett. Barrett's Mesopotamia has its world premiere, and will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 on 28 November, available online worldwide and on demand for a week on the BBC website. "Inspired by artefacts found on ancient archeological sites, Richard Barrett's Mesopotamia has a "dense, multi-layered structure that imitates the successive destruction and re-building of communities throughout history. Scored for 17 instruments and electronics, the piece forms the fifth part of a series of compositions collectively entitled resistance & vision", says the blurb. Barrett and his partner Paul Obermayer will be doing the electro acoustics, and there'll be two vocalists. More electro-acoustics next night, too, with Enno Poppe and Wolfgang Heiniger, Tiere sitzen nicht. "Animals don't sit". Poppe's work is very conceptual, and with such a concept, anything's possible.
Read about Rihm's Et lux and the forthcoming Rihm immersion day at the Barb HERE

Ma Sicong - why Chinese composers matter

Ma Sicong (1912-1987) is important because he was a major Chinese composer who wrote western classical music, but influenced by Chinese traditional music - think Bartók, Ravel, Janáček creating their music from folk forms. Some of Ma's music is seriously good.

Ma is also important because his life reflects what happened in China during his lifetime. His parents were Guangdong intellectuals: this southern province, often the source of rebellions, produced Sun Yat Sen and other leaders of the movement that overturned 2000 years of imperial rule. (Later his father was asassinated in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.)

Ma was a child violin prodigy, who went to Paris to study when he was only 11. staying ten years. Many Chinese intellectuals trained in Paris and Berlin at that time - like Zhou Enlai the grand eminence behind the Communist Party and the composer Xian Xinghai. This was a fascinating generation - gifted, adventurous, idealistic, which should really be better documented. Like most of them, Ma returned to China after the Japanese invasion, to help the country. After 1949, Ma, like all intellectuals, had to serve the Revolution. His 2nd Symphony celebrates the big civic works that were needed to modernize the country. Yet, like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Ma retained his integrity and identity, perhaps best expressed in his chamber music. He was a virtuoso violinist and a charismatic, much loved teacher.


During the Cultural Revolution, he became a target of the Red Guards, but his sympathisers helped him make a dramatic escape, first to Hong Kong, then to the US. He died in exile. Now that trauma is over: Ma's ashes have been returned to Guangdong, and honoured. Please read the wiki entries in Chinese and English : they're well informed. But above all, listen to his music. Please read about Ku Hsiao-mei's recording of Ma's music for violin and piano. There are sound samples to listen to if you follow that link.
There is plenty of Chinese music elsewhere on this site - it needs to be better appreciated for what it is. It's sad that such a huge part of human experience isn't enough understood in the west.