My contribution to stopping COVID - Pappano, Britten, Vaughan Williams

As my contribution to not spreading COVID, knowingly or unknowingly, I refrained from going to what would otherwise have been a perfect programme for me, Antonio Pappano conducting Britten's Violin Concerto (soloist Vilde Frang, whom I've heard doing this piece before) and Ralph Vaughan Williams Symphony no 6. at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra. But in times like these that's when background counts.  No concert ever exists in limbo. Context matters, absolutely. Pappano's programme is particularly relevant in these times, too, because both pieces deal with almost apocalyptic situations, so bleak that even the power of music cannot articulate.

Britten, like so many others knew all too well what the rise of Hitler meant for Europe. Our Hunting Fathers, his op. 8, was a specific response to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which dehumanized Jews, gays, intellectuals and "modernists". Indeed there are very specific references embedded in the text.  As a protest against cruelty and madness, Our Hunting Fathers is so powerful that it perhaps says more about listeners still who don't get it.  Franco's victory in Spain, supported by Nazi aeroplanes and strategists intensified that sense of despair.  For many, it was traumatic, as if European civilization was doomed.  Britten's Violin Concerto is a product of that period of intense despair.  The Violin Concerto was never meant to be easy listening. It takes moral courage to write a deeply uncomforting statement like this, and know it might never be understood.  Perhaps this is why it has only relatively recently entered its status in the canon of major works by a composer who thought deeply about society and the human condition.

From a hushed string introduction, the violin rises, against an understated but ominous background of percussion and brass. Despite the lyricism of the violin line, the idea of war lurks, with menace.  Hollow pizzicato suggest agitation.  The second movement has the character of nightmare scherzo, a battery of strings, brass and percussion battling with the violin, which remains detached.The tumult is shaped carefully, bringing out the huge, angular blocks of sound, booming bassoons,  spikey details in the strings, rumbling drums, creating contrast with the violin. In the cadenza, Frang has in the past lit up the dizzying diminuendo : not a defeat so much as a “tactical withdrawal".  In the passacaglia, descending notes from the brass moved in careful procession. Now the violin line is haunted by other strings, mumuring as if heard from afar. Eventually an anthem builds up, the brass no longer against the soloist, but leading forwards.  Tense, brittle figures suggested gunfire, but the violin remains uncowed.  A particularly full-throated tutti section,  almost a chorale, violin and orchestra united in common cause.  From the strings, a suggestion of guitars : the ghosts of the dead in Spain, rising again, led by the violin, marching quietly onward.

Vaughan Williams would not be drawn on what his Symphony no 6 might be "about", but that in itself suggests how difficult it was to express the traumas he'd witnessed.  Of his third symphony, he  explicitly stated that it was "wartime music", inspired by his experiences as a stretcher bearer in France. "It’s not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted". Thus the sixth has no cosy title to throw the unwary off track. The onus is on the listener to listen sensitively, and understand the piece from within. To hear music as no more than sound is to deny emotion and humanity. Last year, Salonen conducted the introduction so the brass seemed to scream in a communal wail of anguish. The quieter "pastoral" themes on strings, woodwinds and harps felt haunted, swept away in the tumult.  In the second movement tension built up steadily, the three-note ostinato figure at first muffled, the cor anglais offering a moment of contrast before the relentless fusillade of brass and percussion. This  gives context to the saxophone solo in the scherzo, enhancing its strange, alien nature. Its jazziness is seductive, yet it suggests disorder, the breaking-up of safe structural certainties. The bass clarinet served as lament.  The final movement, with its ambiguous pianissimo, suggests not peace, but perhaps a numbness so great that even music cannot fully express. Unlike the third symphony, there's no room even for wordless voice. Muted flutes in unison, rather than the fanfare of brass with which the symphony began.

Barbican Britten Our Hunting Fathers Bostridge

The Barbican's Britten celebrations continued Friday with a concert by Ian Bostridge and the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Paul Daniel, featuring Britten's breakthrough masterpiece, Our Hunting Fathers. To this day the work remains strikingly advanced, with its strange stabbing rhythms, contradictory phrases and  quirky twists up and down the scale. Medieval dance becomes a  vehicle for modern inventiveness. At its premiere in Norwich in 1936 it must have seemed bizarre. To Britten's credit, it still is. Indeed, I'd say that Our Hunting Fathers is Britten in microcosm,  adapting ancient ideas to modern sensibilities. Even if the good burghers of Norfolk had appreciated the musical inventiveness, they might have been discomforted by the message.

"They are our past, and our future" the cycle begins. But what are "they", who we "cannot voluntarily move, but await the extraordinary compulsion of the deluge and the earthquake" ? We hear an incantation invoking the saints for the banishment of rats, who populate the earth in greater numbers than man.  Messalina weeps because her monkey lies dying. Then The Dance of Death (Hunting for Partridge) where the names of hunting falcons are recited. The text is early 17th century, but the effect is utterly modern. "Whurret ! Wanton, Sugar, Mistress, Sempster" each word clearly defined and separate. You can almost see the falcons take to the air, like a squadron of fighter planes, off on a mission to kill. The Spanish Civil War was the first major occasion when aeroplanes were used to bomb civilians, a point not lost on Britten and W H Auden. The Epilogue and Funeral March draws a connection between the killing of animals and cruelty to men. One class kills, another is condemned "to think no thought but ours, to hunger, to work illegally, and be anonymous".

For a far better insight into Britten's Our Hunting Fathers. please read Claire Seymour's detailed review in Opera Today. Although the work was originally written for soprano, I think it needs the stronger, more assertive voice of a tenor to bring out its darker,more dangerous nature. In 1936, Britten was only 23. Perhaps even he baulked at its disturbing implications. Bostridge's recording, with Daniel Harding and the Britten Sinfonia, dates from 1998. His voice has matured, and is much more impressive now, though he was under the weather on Friday. If  only he would record it again!

Britten's Young Apollo op 16 (1939) is almost as creative. The strings spring jauntily upbeat, with the suggestion of wild dance, with exotic undertones: Dervishes, perhaps? Then savage downward chords from the piano, establishing strange tensions. Apollo shines in the string harmonies. We are dazzled. For a while the orchestra and pianist Lara Melda frolic together playfully. Tiny repetitions on the piano suggest awe and wonder. Then the sun seems to hide behind clouds. The piano protests, but in a glorious final glow the music disappears. A miniature Death in Venice in less than 7 minutes.

More than most British composers, bar perhaps Ralph Vaughan Williams, Britten immersed himself in Elizabethan and Tudor music. yet he adapted this firm foundation in a unique way. At the Barbican, Paul Daniel (one of the best Britten conductors) led the Britten Sinfonia (somewhat misnamed as they don't do mainly Britten)  in Britten's arrangement of Henry Purcell's Chacony in G minor, and later Britten's Suite on English Folk Tunes (A Time There Was)  (1974). While looking backwards, Britten looks ahead.

Michael Tippett's Fantasia concertante on a theme of Corelli( (1953) was a timely reminder of what British music might have been without Britten. Britten's originality still discomforts some who would prefer him domesticated in the British mainstream, though he's often misunderstood by those who associate modern music with the European avant garde. Britten is interesting for me because he's too good to pigeonhole.  James Bowman once asked Britten if he'd like to be buried in Westminster Abbey. "No!" came the reply. "I don't want to spend Eternity next to Hubert Parry".

My review of Britten's War Requiem Royal Albert hall Bychkov is HERE.

More on Britten on my site here than anywhere else that's not solely Britten. Please explore and k3ep coming back