Charles Ives and Carl Nielsen, the Wild Men of Music Prom 72

Charles Ives and Carl Nielsen, two great outsiders,  together in Prom 72 with  Andrew Litton conducting the BBC SO.. the BBC Singers, the Tiffin Boys and Girls Choirs, The Crouch End Choir and a cast of good soloists

Lovely Carl Nielsen Springtime on Funen, so pretty that one might forget that Spring is brief, even on a paradise island. To make a living, Nielsen had to move to the city, though he never lost his love for his country roots. Henning Kraggerud was the soloist in Nielsen's Violin Concerto.

Charles Ives's music, like his personality, seems to defy convention. Many men write part time while pursuing other careers (like Mahler did) and many are justifiably forgotten but Ives stands out because he built on the sounds around him to create brilliant innovation.  There's nothing quite like Ives's Symphony no 4 until, perhaps, Stockhausen, yet it was written from around 1910.

To get a handle on what made Ives tick, read Stuart Feder's My Father's Song : a psychoanalytiuc biography (1992), still the most perceptive insight on what made Ives tick.  Ives's father was a rich kid, who dreamed (unsuccessfully) on breaking out.  He lived out his fantasies playing in bands commemorating the Civil War, the one time when he'd (sort of) made it big on his own. Thus Ives the son got a kind of revenge on the clan for dissing his Dad, by making more money than they ever did, and honoured his father by incorporating the hymns and brass band marches music he grew up with into music that operates like a kaleidoscope that's hard to pin down in conventional terms. Incidentally, one of the hymns Ives used has  a parody text that dates from way back, "We'll have pie in the sky when we die", an irony probably not lost on the composer.  That's why I've chosen this photo of Ives. He's crouching as if he's about to pounce like a tiger. The photographer was expecting a  normal portrait, but Ives's mischief gets the better of him.

In Ives's Fourth Symphony, different sound worlds operate, more or less independently. The music happens when the sounds are combined in the ear of the listener. Although Ives's roots were in semi-rural Danbury, Connecticut,  he commuted to New York City where  skyscrapers inhabited space in the air, and subways added dimensions underground. People came from all over, each with individual lives and agendas, their interaction - if any - creating what we might call modern city life. It's no accident that Elliott Carter admired Ives and was influenced by his ideas.

Because Ives's Fourth predicates on multiple levels and different pulses, performance predicates on precise attention to detail and accurate timing.  The BBCSO, under Andrew Litton, achieved the feat, creating the swirling textures and quirky ins and outs, weaving a whole fabric from the numerous contrary inner cells.  Nowadays we're perhaps used to multi-dimension music, but once it must have seemed hard to achieve.  All the more reason to honour the vision of Leopold Stokowski, who believed in the piece and was instrumental in bringing it to public attention.  When Stokowski first conducted it with the American Symphony Orchestra,in 1954, he needed dozens of hours of rehearsal.  Stokowski's assistant conductor was José Serebrier.  Two main conductors, together conducting an orchestra operating in two sections, with a third, smaller unit, conducted by a third conductor. Not an easy task! When Serebrier recorded Ives's Fourth  in London a few years later, he wasn't allowed the luxury of unlimited rehearsal, or the company of other conductors.  Luckily, he was conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra and could rely on players who learned fast and well. He divided the orchestra up into different sections, relying on the section leaders to lead their units.  The recording is still a testimony to creative problem-solving in performance practice. .

Below Stokowski and Serebrier conduct Ives Fourth for prime time TV in the early 1960's Imagine new music getting such mass coverage now, when the media has fooled audiences into thinking that anything difficult is wrong. Without pioneers, like Ives, Stokowski and Serebrier  where would be be? ?

Lawrence Zazzo's Adventure in American song

Lawrence Zazzo, the American countertenor, gave a recital last week at the Wigmore Hall with Simon Lepper. Amazing programme, which overturns the image countertenors have in this country. That in itself should have made the concert a big draw. Modern composers love the countertenor voice because it extends the palette and opens up new possibilities. This recital was "news" that should have attracted more attention. Regrettably, I couldn't get there but Claire Seymour has written about it in depth in Opera Today. Follow the link, it's detailed and analytical.
 
Zazzo's established his baroque credentials so well he has nothing to prove. Remember his Radamisto at ENO So this programme showed courage. Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs, for example, are so closely identified with Leontyne Price that they're not performed nearly as frequently as they should be. Her interpretation, though loved by Barber and the audiences of the time, is classic, but it doesn't necessarily explore all the levels in the cycle. Perhaps a male voice with wit and asperity might find new things in it? I wish I'd heard Zazzo!

Ned Rorem loves the countertenor voice and has written lots for it. There are whole CD collections of Rorem countertenor songs. Zazzo sang Rorem's War Scenes to poems about the US Civil War by Walt Whitman. Not quite Alfred Deller territory, though he could have done them had his audiences been more used to the genre. Charles Ives songs are more problematic, since they were conceived for more conventional performance. On the other hand, Ives himself was hardly conventional even if he seemed so on the surface. I hope Zazzo persists with this kind of repertoire because it's much too interesting to leave fallow.

Susan Graham French Songs Proms 2009

If Renee Fleming's voice is "creamy", Susan's Graham would be pure golden honey, scented with summer blossom. Graham sings with personality and wit, making her songs come alive with personal feeling. Like William Christie and others, she's American but France is her artistic home. She understands the clarity of French song, and adds robust warmth and spirit. Had Ravel, Debussy and Poulenc lived to hear this voice! Her recordings of Charles Ives and Ned Rorem show that her style works for American song, too. But she's almost without par in French chanson.

So this chamber Prom at Cadogan Hall had song fans drooling with delight. Most of the audience know her masterpieces, like the amazing Reynaldo Hahn songs, and Berlioz, Massenet and Bizet, so she chose a good mix of other French song composers for variety.

There were great favorites, like Le Paon, from Ravel's Histoires naturelles, animated by Graham's exuberant good humour. A peacock gets jilted by his bride, but he's really more interested in flashing his plumage. When he sings, it's a hideous squawk! Ravel sends up the pompous fool, Graham softens the satire with charm.

Less famous, but much loved, Emmanuel Chabrier's Les cigales. "Les cigales, les cigalons chantent mieux que des violins!" But do they? Malcolm Martineau played the jerky, jumpy piano part with such charm, you really could feel the buzz in the cicada chorus. It was great, too, to hear Caplet, Roussel and Honneger's miniatures.

Two Susan Graham specialities, which no one does quite like she can. Manuel Rosenthal's La souris de l'Angleterre comes from a set of 12, the Chansons de Monsieur Bleu. Some of them sit a little too low for soprano, but they're a wonderful group and should be programmed more often. I've heard Graham bring down the house at the Wigmore Hall with Poulenc's La dame de Monte-Carlo, swaying her hips and prancing with a feather boa. I laughed so much, I had tears in my eyes. Graham is a natural actress, which makes her formidable in opera.

But Graham in a pensive mood is even more beautiful. For an encore she sang Reynaldo Hahn's exquisite A Chloris. Graham brought Hahn into the mainstream. Her recording, with Roger Vignoles, is the benchmark. At this Prom, she was freer and lighter than on the CD. Listen to the clip below. It also links to a version by the dishy Phillippe Jaroussky who makes the song sound gloriously baroque but Hahn, who died in 1947, was only playing at being baroque.

Into the soul of Erich Korngold

Who really was Erich Korngold? We know the facts of his life and lists of his opus numbers, but who was the man, what made him tick? I’ve never swallowed the “more Korn than Gold” epithet. He was no fool, but genuinely talented, and smart enough to know what was going on around him.

As a young man he had everything going for him. Music flowed out of him as easily as from a young Mozart. Like Mozart, he had a powerful and pushy father whose contacts could have advanced anyone’s career. Vienna was thriving, culturally. It must have been exciting to be where so much was going on, in so many different circles.

This is certainly not to suggest that Korngold “should” have taken on new developments. He moved in much fancier circles than the Schoenberg set and probably wouldn’t have given them much time, even though he worked with Zemlinsky, who obviously knew all about them. But Schoenberg wasn’t the only modernity in town – even Zemlinsky moved ahead: His Lyric Symphony is strikingly “modern” in its own way. Nobody is going to do "new" the same: music doesn’t work in neat little boxes. The current fashion for dividing music into tonal and atonal is schoolboy shallowness.

So there’s young Korngold born with a silver spoon in his mouth and everything going for him. Listen to the first two String Quartets and dream of what might have been. Die tote Stadt, for all its high Romantic lushness, has a lot more going for it than the sometimes ultra suss treatments it gets. With Ingo Metzmacher, a specialist in the avant garde, we should hear a much more incisive approach. But if Die tote Stadt is such a masterpiece, where does it lead ? Korngold was only 22, 23 when he wrote it. It was an instant success, so the pressure to top it must have been intense. Hence, perhaps Das Wunder der Heliane, which received a drubbing last year even with a sympathetic audience and Jurowski conducting. So how did young Korngold respond to the pressure ? It can’t have been easy for a gifted young man used to having things go smoothly. 

Lots of child prodigies don’t go on to be Mozart. There’s nothing to be ashamed of about that. What is interesting, to me anyway, is to try to understand the way things happen and how people develop inside. Having a father like Julius might have been an advantage but it was also inhibiting. The old man wanted things his way and couldn’t deal with Erich marrying a woman who most parents would have been delighted with. 

Then there’s Erich’s personality, harmonious, accommodating, none of the obsession that seems to drive some composers. The reason I’ve been doing so much on Bruges-la-Morte is that it may reveal something about Erich and Julius by default. Obviously composers completely change their sources. An opera is a whole new work. But the differences are telling. In the novel, Hugues is totally dominated by the memory of his dead wife, who exerts a vampire-like paralysis on his life. Hugues is a creepy loner, living in an emotional desert unpopulated by anyone other than his servant, who leaves him. He doesn’t touch Jane but keeps her like a statue, like the piece of his wife’s hair, in a glass box never to be touched. In the opera, Paul is a reasonably sane fellow who has friends and real life relationships and isn’t nearly so screwed up by religion. In the novel, Hugues kills Jane and goes mad, repeating mechanically “Morte, Bruges la morte”. In the opera, it’s all just a dream. If most of us dreamed of killing a friend, we’d worry. Not Paul, who simply goes on to a new life.Also significant is that Erich and Julius concealed their joint authorship of the libretto for many years. A shrink might think, what's going on? 

A few years ago, the late Stuart Feder wrote an excellent analytical biography of Charles Ives, examining his relationship with his father and the effect on his creative work. Feder was a child psychologist as well as a musician, so his book is full of perceptive insights, much too detailed to go into here. Interestingly, when Charles retired, as a millionaire, having achieved what his father's family wanted of him, he stopped writing music. Like Sibelius, something held him back just when he seemed to find good conditions in which to work. It’s not enough to blame Ives’s late career on depression, or the Silence of Järvenpää on alcohol. Similarly. it's not enough to "explain" Korngold by simply saying that fashions in music had changed. 

Korngold’s facility came easily and he was no fool. Perhaps his real achievement isn’t so called “serious” music but in another genre. There still is far too much prejudice about film music. Not long ago a major newspaper ran an article which baldly stated that any composer who wrote for film should not be taken seriously. Evidently written by someone who’d never heard of Britten, Prokofiev, or many others. This attitude hinders a more enlightened appreciation of Korngold’s achievements.
 

Only a few years before Korngold went to America, all films were silent. Music for film was an entirely new genre, cutting-edge modernity in its own way. It was different because music could no longer be through-composed, but instead had to be written in conjunction with film. Sort of "extreme opera". Had Johann Strauss or, for that matter, Wagner, lived into the movie era, they'd have had a ball. Movie music was created to pull heartstrings, not for intellectual analysis, so judging it in the same terms as ordinary music doesn't work. Indeed, it's almost a reversion to the pre 19th century approach to music, that it should be either religious or entertainment, not "high art".

Moreover, Hollywood was a lot like the old image of Vienna, only much richer, much brasher, much more opulent. So Hollywood composers, most of whom had known the old world, felt quite at home despite the sunshine and strange customs. In many ways, Hollywood carried on the Vienna image when it died in war-torn Europe. Even Hanns Eisler, surly old communist that he was, wrote music that won Oscar nominations. So maybe Korngold found his voice in a medium other than what his father dominated. There’s a lot about Korngold and about modern music we haven’t yet thought about.

Ives's Unanswered Question, Aldeburgh

Saturday night I was at a concert with an interesting programme :

Haydn : Symphony no 22 "The Philosopher"
Schoenberg : Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra
Kurtág : Doodles for András Mihály´s Birthday, Ligatura - message to Frances-Marie (also known as The Answered Unanswered Question)
Webern : Fünf Sätze, (Five Movements for String Quartet)
Ives : The Unanswered Question
Mozart: Piano Concerto No 26 "The Coronation"

Haha ! Try this one at home and see why it is so interesting. It operates on many levels - celebration music, the idea of play, experiment, aphorism, questions, dialogue etc. Lots to get from it that might not catch the ear on a single hearing.

The "obvious" cliche there is that it's mixing Mozart and Haydn with Kurtag, Ives etc. But it's not nearly as simple as that. Note the Mozart and Haydn pieces, not big, famous blockbusters but pieces which are fairly open ended. The Mozart for example allows for extended improvisation and isn't "complete" in the formal sense. And the Haydn is a kind of exploration of the possibilites of symphonic form. So, "old" as they may be they are "new" in spirit, (and were new music in their time).

Then the Kurtag, Webern and Schoenberg miniatures, each concise explorations....played without a break, then Ives The Unanswered Question. It's was wonderful to hear Ives framed in this way, a kind of "coronation". This was a very high profile concert indeed, the first real music concert of the current Aldeburgh Festival.

Aldeburgh is unique. It was founded by Benjamin Britten but is definitely not a Britten exclusive. On the contrary. Look it up on google for an idea of what they do. All kinds of people come tho' it's way out in the country and hard to reach without a car. (In England lots of people don't drive). Lots of serious music folks from Europe and also lots of ordinary local people for whom it's the main event of the year. It's an excellent mix for exactly that reason. For me it was wonderful to hear what the locals thought of Ives. In this context they seemed to immediately "get" where Ives was coming from, it was a joy to hear how thrilled they were. These days, there's a lot of nonsense about atonality "having" to be difficult and impossible. People swallow the myth and switch off. Instead here they were just presented with Ives on his own terms, and no prejudices at all !

Before the concert someone asked Aimard who conducted, "Will Schoenberg ever be popular". If the guy was expecting Aimard to sneer at Schoenberg, he was wrong. Aimard said "Why should anyone HAVE to be popular?" It's more important that composers have integrity and ask the questions than pander to "popular" values. And this audience proved that ordinary people can respond, given a chance.