The Passion of Joan of Arc Dreyer - the movie

Full download of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) directed by Carl Th. Dreyer. Click here to run. This one is SILENT  and over 70 years old, out of copyright in Europe. It's being shown tonight at the Barbican, while Marin Alsop is conducting the LSO in a performance of Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light written in 1999 to accompany the film. If you buy the DVD release you get the movie plus Einhorn.  Personally, I'm inclined towards the silent version. Firstly, silent makes you concentrate on the intensity of the images, almost a spiritual experience, which is what Jeanne is going through in the movie. Secondly, from other Dreyer films, like Vampyr (full download HERE) and Vredens Dag (description HERE) it would seem that Dreyer conceived his movies with minimal sound. Although the Einhorn soundtrack is interesting, it's an add-on and isn't that overwhelming as music.

Joan is played by Renée Jeanne Falconetti, billed as "Mlle. Falconetti" for reasons unknown. She was a stage artiste, so making this film must have been a kind of ordeal, holding a pose for an eternity for the camera, then slowly changing expression so every muscle twitch is recorded. Look at the intense lighting too. At the end of a day's shoot, her eyes might have stopped working and  her brain given her migraines. So maybe Falconetti was a hero, like St Jeanne. For posterity she'll be remembered without makeup, stressed out and her head shorn.

Look at the rest of the cast list. One of the prosecutors is played by Antonin Artaud, theorist of the Theatre of Cruelty. That doesn't mean S&M but the idea that pushing boundaries makes us challenge assumptions. So the connection between Dreyer's intellectual austerity and Artaud's theories goes pretty deep, All the more reason for a silent Passion of Joan of Arc. Sound distracts. Brian Ferneyhough explains his music in terms of Artaud theories. Now, there's a thought - a Brian Ferneyhough soundtrack to The Passion of Joan of Arc. He's good with complex "medieval" polyphony too. You can bet his version wouldn't be anything like Einhorn. I'll be writing more soon on Ingrid Bergman's Joans of Arc, especially her version of the Arthur Honegger Jeanne d'Arc au bucher (Giovanna d'Arco al rogo) directed by her then husband Roberto Rossellini in 1954. When I wrote about the Barbican Jeanne d'Arc, (see HERE) I hadn't seen this film, which is much overshadowed by the famous Bergman Joan of Arc movie made in 1948 by Victor Fleming. The Fleming movie is staightforward Hollywood. The Rosselini film is art. Read about it HERE and come back for more!

Brian Ferneyhough Total Immersion Barbican BBC

It's taken me a week to write about the Barbican BBC Brian Fernyhough Total Immersion. Firstly, this is not music for instant reactions. Secondly I was upset at the poor presentation. Just as you can't learn a language in small doses, you can't learn Ferneyhough's language superficially. That's why, five years ago, I suggested Ferneyhough as a subject for Total Immersion. No one needs to know much, but at least they'd get the idiom. But frankly, this time the BBC might as well not have bothered.

The evening concert was worthwhile, however. The UK premiere of Ferneyhough's 2006 Plötzlichkeit would be a Big Event in any situation. It's scored for massive forces - a Proms piece par excellence - and is as visually spectacular as it is to listen to. Big as it is, Martyn Brabbins understands how it works, so the BBCSO make it move with great energy.

Plötzlichkeit is made up of over 100 segments in 23 minutes. Thus the idea of "suddenness", new ideas popping u up unexpectedly, flying past before you can quite take them in.  It's like a densely populated panorama, where everything's moving on different levels and directions. Fascinating because it can't be taken in all at once. The more you listen, the more you get. Ferneyhough described it to Julian Anderson in an impromptu talk, surrounded by the musicians. "No global strategy" in the structure, which evolves instead from the fragments themselves. It's this inventiveness that gives momentum to what might seem an unwieldy work in theory. There are elements left open and what Ferneyhough  calls "inserts",  passages not related  to the other sections, which help anchor the work as it flows onwards. Always surprises to add sparkle, like descant trombones, or instruments played out of kilter. Three voices are embedded in the orchestra so they pop out unexpectedly. At first I thought they were synthesized, so that was a surprise for me. It must be heaven to study this piece in depth, observing the mathematical relationships and signifiers, but it works fine on a basic emotional level. It seizes your imagination and perks you up.

"No liberty without restraint" said Ferneyhough of his work. Often there's a sense of crawling out of traps, breaking bounds, struggling against overwhelming forces. The picture is one of a series called Carceri d'invenzione. by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) showing unimaginably complex dungeons. Staircases lead to obstacles. Drawbridges are drawn up suddenly, blocking escape. Throughout, a sense of vertigo, where all that's gained could be lost in a sudden fall. Perhaps it's no accident that Ferneyhough was drawn to these engravings for his own series. Engraving is a painstakingly slow process which demands concentration on detail. Psychologically, it's forcible restraint. One mistake and the whole plate is wrecked.

Ferneyhough limits his palette this time to strings and winds but Carceri d'invenzione III (1986) still sounds like intense chamber music on a larger scale. A solo clarinet calls you into the piece, and soon you're caught up in swirling turns and counterturns. The music ends with limpid simplicity, but by now, you don't trust the apparent freedom. As I've said before, gamers (especially those who play Dungeons and Dragons) would talke to Ferneyhough instinctively. If only they knew! The market for Ferneyhough might be bigger than we realize.

Missa Brevis demonstrates Ferneyhough's interest in polyphony. The BBC Singers are among the best in the business, and are completely competent,. But the piece is a lot quirkier than this performance would suggest. A few years ago at Orford, I heard it as part of a programme with Ockeghem and others, sung by Exaudi, who specialize in this genre. How shockingly unique it sounded! Even when Missa Brevis was written  in 1969, Ferneyhough was distinctively different.

Hearing La terre est un homme (1976-9) after hearing Plötzlichkeit (2006) showed how far Ferneyhough has come. There are similarities, such as the huge ensemble and the sense of great portent. But it's a good show stopper because it's relatively easy to digest. Tuttis and crescendi soar like waves, but details like solo piccolo help you identify with the human scale of the work. Simple instruments like an uncommonly small trumpet, probably a specialist type, clapped sticks and tambourines. Magical long ending that dissipates into silence.

In the short 1pm concert, we'd heard Quatuor Diotima play Ferneyhough's very early Sonatas for String Quartet. "I was young then " Ferneyhough told Anderson. "I couldn't understand why Webern wanted to write miniatures, so I wanted to fill them out". Big mistake, since Webern was right. A bit cruel to give this piece of near juvenilia such prominence when so many important works were left out. One wouldn't expect the Diotima to venture too far into Arditti territory by essaying the Sixth String Quartet (featured at the Wigmore Hall and at the Symposium) but surely there could have been other choices?  The main reason for its inclusion might have been to highlight the sophistication of Plötzlichkeit but there's more to Ferneyhough than that.

Thank goodness Ferneyhough and Julian Anderson had a few moments together on the platform before the concert. Total Immersion Day had started with the comment, "The most amazing thing about Ferneyhough is that he was born in Coventry", which was met by a loud collective snort of derision from the audience. On the BBC Radio 3 broadcast this "amazing" concept was further developed, to explain Ferneyhough moving to Germany, which had also been bombed. But surely music comes into it, somehow? Then a long snip of Fürtwängler to illustrate that what is played isn't necessarily just the notes. Given that anyone who's heard of Fürtwängler can figure that out anyway, it's pretty pseud. Then the mock "interview" on the broadcast. Surely it would have been better to use Ferneyhough's own words from the 4pm interview instead of letting Tom Service repeat what he'd heard then? Surely they could have used a tape of Ferneyhough and Anderson speaking before the concert, since they were taping the concert itself ? Infinitely more enlightening.  Most people listen to learn, not unlearn. The BBC really must address the dumbing down of Total Immersion days.
Please read aboutt the Ferneyhough Symposium HERE
There is a review of the UK premiere of the Sixth String Quartet London premiuere HERE

Fun and Ferneyhough - Immersion Symposium London

"Let's not use the C-word" said someone at the IMR Ferrneyhough Symposium in the Senate House, London, part of a two part Ferneyhough Total Immersion.  Meaning, "Let's not talk about New Complexity in case it scares the punters". But why? Brian Ferneyhough is complex, which is precisely why he's fascinating. No-one needs to know every little detail to get pleasure (and pain) from Ferneyhough's music. Indeed, effort is part of the process. Res severa est verum gaudium,  "true pleasure is a serious business".

One of the papers at the conference was about time organization in Caceri d'Invenzione II.  The 'irregular metronome' occurs along mutually-interacting layers  of time organization... (and part) of a graduated tension field between large tempo relations and subtle metric nuances". But even someone like me can follow the gist of that. Like Ferneyhough's music, there are lots of different levels through which you can enter and progress. So what if it's complex? That's where the fun lies.

Fun and Ferneyhough? Yes! Gamers would love this music because it can function like a supremely devious puzzle, with so many possible angles that you can get something whatever level you operate on.  In his keynote address Ferneyhough himself spoke about jigsaws. When you're fitting the pieces together are you fitting physical shapes or "making" a picture ? Why do things fall in place the way that they do? Why do the pieces lock together even though the shapes seem random?  Is it the shapes we follow or the image? What if the picture is abstract or blank? For me the fascination of Ferneyhough's music is exactly this sense of multidimensional plasticity, like the staircases in this MC Escher etching, or the one where birds morph into fish in a stylized pattern. Obviously the more you can analyze, the more you get, but there's no reason why the process shouldn't be enjoyable because it's elusive. It's boring if you can get everything instantly.

Another good paper at the symposium was Matteo Cesari's Achievement of the Unachievable. Cesari's a flautist and worked with Ferneyhough to try to crack the code to his formidably arcane manuscripts. Millions of tiny markings, intricate instructions. Yet the secret is to interpret what goes into a performer's psyche and what makes it through to audible sound. Performance is more than mechanical note-processing,  it's a creative act of engagement with a composer's inner world. Sisyphus was cursed by the gods to keep rolling stones uphill, which would roll back each night. Enormous effort, and a goal that could never be achieved. Yet there's a kind of warped logic in the situation. Maybe no-one will find nirvana but if you don't even start to try, there's no chance at all. One thing these papers didn't go nowhere near is Ferneyhough's interest in the darker, almost S&M aspects of challenge - Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and the idea that sublimation can be achieved through extreme stress. Part of Ferneyhough's uncompromising  asperity is this journey past the boundaries of comfort.

Then there's the metaphysical side to Ferneyhough's music. It's not simply that he's interested in early music polyphony and the cosmic mindset that comes with it. Julian Anderson reading Lois Fitch's paper linked Ferneyhough to Blake for both approach the universe with a sense of mystery. Blake's God is unsettling, his relationship to man not quite as benevolent as it might be in the Bible. Yet the concepts are deeply embedded in the music itself. Fabrice Fitch's paper Polyphony : Ferneyhough and prima prattica drew the connection between Ferneyhough's arcane notation and early medieval practice.  Notations in early music aren't standardized, for music was passed on through oral tradition. Traditional forms within which there was improvisation and invention. Ferneyhough not only quotes from early polyphony but integrates the mentality.

Therre was a screening of Colin Still's latest documentary Climbing a Mountain- Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet (produced by Paul Archbold) made with the Arditti Quartet at Donaueschingen in 2010. Still's films are wonderfully informative, so I hope we get to see this one again. There was a short  evening concert, too, with Ensemble Exposé (cond Roger Redgate)  which featured O Lux, a UK premiere.

What is so frightening about complexity that it puts Ferneyhough's music somehow out of bounds? Frankly I don't care if he never makes it on Top of the Pops, because popularity is no arbiter of quality. There is a snobbishness in new music circles that would like to exclude mere mortals from the Chosen Few, but it's not necesarily best for the music, or indeed, for the masses. At the Saturday Barbican evening concert there were quite a few in the audience who had no idea who Ferneyhough was and came along because it was a Night Out. They seemed to be having a good time even though it might not quite have been what they expected. If you set yourself up for difficulty, difficulty is what you get. But there are many ways into Ferneyhough, one of which is simple instinct. Ferneyhough talks in convoluted sentences but inside there's an extraordinarily sharp mind that's surprisingly accessible. Because the venue for the post-symposium party was changed I misdirected Ferneyhough to the wrong building, so he went on a wild goose chase. When he came back, he scolded me with a twinkle in his eye, "They'll have finished all the drinks!"

Please reead about the Barbican BBC Ferneyhough Total Immersion HERE - great music, shameful presentation (though Fermeyhough and Julian Anderson were a balm).

Brian Ferneyhough Full Focus

Brian Ferneyhough is one of the most innovative of living British composers. But because he's spent most of his life in continental Europe and the US he doesn't get the recognition he deserves in the UK.  Coming  up are several different major events which could redress the balance.  Ferneyhough's been labelled "New Complexity" but labels like that shouldn't put anyone off.  In 2005 I took my son to Shadowtime. The kid could not believe his ears. Then I noticed my Fernyhough CDs had been "borrowed", which proves open minds, open ears.

First, Ferneyhough's String Quartet no 6 with the Arditti Quartet from Huddersfield on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 12th repeated online for a week. Read about the Wigmore Hall performance  last week.  This programme will also include Rebecca Saunders's Murmurs and Wounds 1, 2 and 3 from Richard Barrett. .

On 23 February, Brian Ferneyhough- a Symposium at the Institute of Musical Research. Click link for more details. Heavy duty but should be stimulating . Look at the speakers, who include Ferneyhough himself. A film of the Arditti Quartet playing String Quartet No 6 at Donaueschingen, and a concert in the evening.

Then Ferneyhough Total immersion  at the Barbican on 26th February, Saturday. It won't be as deep as the IMR symposium, but worth attending. It starts with Colin Still's film about Time and Motion Study !!, which is very well made and sensitive. Quatuor Diotoma do the lunchtime concert, but the evening concert is extremely important. Larger works for orchestra (conductor Martyn Brabbins) Book now if you haven't already - follow this link.

Up north, at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, there'll be a Brian Ferneyhough Day on 28th February. Two concerts, open forum and Ferneyhough in attendance.

Then another concert on 7th March at Kings Place - the Elison Ensemble do Time and Motion Study I and II.. Circle this, too! A few years ago someone asked me who should feature in a Total Immersion. "Ferneyhough" says me. "Too difficult" says they. But it's come around at last, and we'll all celebrate.

4 premieres - Arditti Quartet Wigmore Hall

Four premieres in one concert! The Arditti Quartet are pioneers. Over the last 30 years, they've led the resurgance of new works for string quartet. Because they're technically superlative, composers can write  knowing they're capable of almost anything. Performers spark off composers and vice versa. Every Arditti Quartet recital I've been to over the years has something challenging, and many include major new works in the canon.

Any new work by Brian Ferneyhough is a milestone. The Arditti Quartet, who have worked with the composer for nealy 30 years, introduced his String Quartet no 6 at Donaueschingen late last year, so this Wigmore Hall recital was much welcomed. Seventeen years elapsed between Ferneyhough's Fourth String Quartet and his Fifth, premiered by the Ardittis at Aldeburgh in 2006. Only four years later, Ferneyhough's again breaking new ground. The energetic sense of adventure is still there but textures are more transparent. A whirlpool of tiny fragments, scattering skittishly in multiple directions. Brief clearing, and brief moments when the four players are playing in confluence. There's a wonderful slow passage which Irvine Arditti plays so expressively that you hold your breath in wonder.

Ferneyhough (always worth quoting) says that the idea of this multiplicity was to "create an unpredictable tangle of conflicting materials and time frames....leading to a sort of mirrored or negative hierarchy of material". Listen for yourself,. It's hard to take in all at once, but it's so intriguing it pulls you in.


Dai Fujikura's Flame (2010) is a Wigmore Hall commission. It employs similar ideas of small fragments, flying, combining and separating. Big, percussive pizzicato beginning, dying down for a moment when the players strum  their instruments for resonance. Almost romantic and very visual. Fujikawa remembers watching a campfire as a child, seeing flames rise and embers fall. "The composition" he says "evolves into a slow motion arco rendering of the pizzicato and its reverse. The audience loved this - new music isn't frightening when approached with this sense of adventure.

Hilda Paredes' Canciones Lunáticas (2009) are based on three poems about the moon by Pedro Serrano. The piece begins with low, windlike emanations from the strings, for the first song depicts the moon suffering, unprotected in "the slaughterhouse of the heavens" as it crosses over "a landscape laid waste". The second song describes los lunáticas , "the moonstruck" who have to be locked away so they don't wander off beguiled. The last song is a tantalising miniature, where the moon, having "broken free", dances "sola en el prado".

Surreal and otherworldy : ideal for countertenor, though I think it might be transposed for soprano. The piece was written for Jake Arditti, so perhaps the family tradition will continue. Just as the string players use many techniques, so does the singer. At one stage he puts his finger in his mouth to make round, whirring sounds, immediately replicated by strings. The effect is quite amazing. A voice, after all, is a wind instrument! Many sibilants in the vocal line, stretched and sharpened so they cut. Voice as percussion?  Small tight vocal  outbursts like pizzicato, a big, arching "O" like the sound of a cello.

The recital began with James Clarke's String Quartet no 2 (2009). It was a good choice, as the piece introduces some of the ideas that appear in later works, but is readily accesssible. In most other programmes it would  have impressed but Ferneyhough is simply in another vstratosphere bfrom anyone else.

Please note, there's A Ferneyhough Total; I,m,mersion at the Barbican in March.  Also an important Kurtag Focus at the Wigmore Hall in February. I've been to the first part and will write more on Sunday.

Wigmore Hall Festive Sale

Some VERY important concerts are included in the Wigmore Hall 10% discount offer on some concerts during January and February 2011

The Arditti Quartet are giving the London premiere of Brian Ferneyhough's String Quartet No 6. This is  MAJOR news and you can get in for £10.80. Ferneyhough is I think the greatest of living British composers (and a darn sight better than some dead ones) and the Arditti Quartet are his finest interpreters. If the Ferneyhough were not enough to make headlines, there are also three other new works by well established composers: Hilda Paredes, Dai Fujikura and James Clarke.

The other big news in February is the Wigmore Hall Kurtág series. There's a full price 3 day study workshop at the beginning of the month which includes a ticket to Marino Fomenti's concert on 9/2 which "combines Kurtág’s pieces with works from Beethoven, Bach and Schumann to Messiaen and Bartók." If you can't make the daytime workshops, tickets to this concert are discounted, which is a good idea. To understand a composer, understand his context.

The highlight of the Kurtág series will be Juliane Banse singing Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente with violinist András Keller. If you hated Dawn Upshaw and Peter Sellars' version of this work at the Barbican a while back, think again and hear Banse and Keller. Keller is to Kurtág what Arditti is to Ferneyhough. There just isn't anyone who knows the composer's idiom so intimately. Although there are at least 4 recordings of this seminally-important work, the one by Banse and Keller (1996) is the benchmark. It was made with Kurtág himself, advising in rehearsals and in the studio. Hear Banse and Keller and realize just how powerful this piece really can be, shorn of Sellars' silliness. Anyone remotely interested in 20th century music needs to hear Banse and Keller do this live.

Other recommendations in the WH's Festive Offer : Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace on 16th January, playing Korngold, Prokofiev and Frank Auberbach Preludes op 48. Unusual programme - worth catching. Piers Lane plays Schubert, Beethoven and Chopin on 24th.

February is even better. Boris Giltburg - Chopin, Prokofiev on 8/2. the Borodin Quartet play Myaskovsky's String Quartet no 3 op 86 which is getting cult status in some circles. Stéphane Degout sings an ambitious French recital on 10/2 which I'll go to - may be worth keeping an ear on him. And Midori, for whom I have a soft spot even though she's playing Brett Dean, for whom I don't.
This snow is nothing by Siberian standards  but I feel "snowed in". So over the next vfew days, I'll write about DVDs , CDs and books. Wagner Rienzi for example, fantastic !

Dum Transissets Ferneyhough

A feast of Dum Transissets at Saturday's Prom Matinee, built around Brian Ferneyhough's Dum Transisset I-IV. A whole Prom built around a short string quartet? But Ferneyhough's one of the most interesting European composers around, anything he does is seriously significant. (Book now for the Ferneyhough Total Immersion.) It's been heard at Salzburg, Huddersfield and Berlin, but this was the London premiere.  Listen to the The Arditti Quartet on the repeat broadcast  (starts at 43.0 minutes).

The reference is Dum transisset Sabbatum, "When the Sabbath hath past", meaning the Sabbath after Jesus's Crucifixion. Jesus has died and been buried. But when his friends go to anoint his body, he appears, alive again. The key mystery in the whole New Testament. As is said in the commentary, the idea is that the Ardittis find their way "like Houdinis" through Ferneyhough's intricate maze. 

Four sections which move from statis to horror through rapture to wild freedom: Reliquary, Totentanz, Shadows and Contrafracta. Barely audible tappings, bowings that shape huge twisting contortions, exquisite pppp that makes you listen intently.  Maybe the excellent blog 5 against 4 will write about it?  He writes about new music in an  informed but communicative way, which is good.  Part of the reason new music doesn't get through to "ordinary" people is because some of the fraternity likes excluding outsiders. It's not technicality that intimidates (anyone can master that)  but the spirit of cliqueyness. That's not fair on the music, much of which is very good indeed. There's no reason mere mortals shouldn't enjoy new music, given encouragement to enjoy and feel.   

Perhaps that's why this Prom encased Ferneyhough with other works on the same Risen from the Dead theme. Those accustomed to contemplating the miracle in the New Testament have already acquired contemplative skills and should be able to adapt them to new means of expression.  That said, I'd rather have listened to the original Dum Transisset by Christopher Tye (1505?-1572?) which inspired Ferneyhough in the first place. It's much more unearthly and primeval than the latter-day versions included in this Prom.

Luckily, we did get Taverner (the original). I did hear the whole concert through, so maybe I did a Houdini too, since only Ferneyhough (and Taverner) were worth more than one listen. Sorry but I'm definitely no fan of Jonathan Harvey or Thea Musgrave. I could hear where Bayan Northcott was going with his Hymn to Cybele but it was a bit too Birtwistle for me.