GSMD Ned Rorem Our Town

Ned Rorem's Our Town received its European premiere at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, last night.  Rorem is a prolific composer of vocal music, but has rarely ventured into opera, so Our Town is quite a scoop for GSMD. Ironically, some of the leading Rorem specialists in this country were associated with the Royal College of Music.

Our Town is based on the play by Thornton Wilder (1938) which pits the artifice of theatre with the reality of live performance. A Stage Manager (Stuart Laing) stands on the GSMD Theatre platform, interacting with the stage hands. The opera has already started though we in the audience haven't realized yet, for The Stage Manager is an interface between us and the performers.. It's a good device for later, the dead Emily Webb (Sky Ingram) will  go back in time and relive a day in her childhood. She interacts with her parents, but also carries the knowledge of what will happen to them in the future. Parallel realities. It's so unsettling that she returns to take her place among the dead in the cemetery,who observe mourners come and go with dispassionate detachment.

But first, we see George Gibbs (Alexandros Tsilogiannis), playing with schoolmates and falling in love with the girl next door (Emily, aged 16). The Stage Manager tells us about this small town, with its churches, drug store and neat rows of houses, similar to the one in the photo, perhaps, which shows Thorton Wilder and his family in 1900.  It's "Normalcy", as Warren Harding described America of this period., though even then, it was an idealization. It's so bland that the dramatic pace of the first act drags, unless you're familiar with the cultural context.  In the second and third acts, the narrative takes leave of convention and becomes far more involving.  But this orderliness is just a foil for the metaphysical goings-on. Although nostalgia is integral to the plot, Wilder insisted on absolute non-realism. Thus the stage at the Guildhall is almost bare. Performers mime activities. Stage hands run in and out .They're performers too, part of the strange blend of theatrical illusion and reality.

Like most of Rorem's music, the vocal lines are almost conversational, the orchestra (conductor: Clive Timms) providing atmosphere. Nice keyboard, adding a "period", drawing room feel. Singers don't get to sing much, since it wouldn't be right in this conformist society where there is "No culture" as Mr Webb the newspaperman (Ashley Riches) tells a questioner planted in the audience.  All they do is sing hymns. Towards the very end, though, the Stage Manager gets to sing gloriously long lines, so protacted that you start counting the bars. The whole opera pivots around Emily and George, but the closest Sky Ingram gets to elaborate singing is when she realizes she can never go back among the living. While they were "alive", the performers had to act. When they're "dead" they can sing properly again.  Short but excellent moments from Mrs Soames (Anna Starushkevych), Mrs Gibbs (Kathryn McAdam), and the Choirmaster Simon Stimson (Jorge Navarro-Colorado). Barnaby Rea  was Dr Gibbs and Emily Blanch was Mrs Webb, who don't die and sing as much.

Rorem's Our Town is good for students as it teaches singers how to act without relying solely on vocal technique. Actors can learn how music changes the way theatre works. Since large numbers of students can participate, everyone has something to do. Even skills like moving as an individual in a group are useful. One good example is when the alcoholic Choirmaster throws up in the choirstalls. Obviously there's no real vomit, he doesn't really throw up, but the actor closest  to the mess reacts, screwing up his nose at the smell, wiping his hands on the bench, after the action has moved back to the front of the stage. Most of the audience wouldn't notice, but this was very good acting indeed, completely natural. The Guildhall School of Music and Drama teaches theatre and music skills, but these are just as useful in other professions. If an actor can be so dedicated that he keeps in character even when no-one is watching (except me), he can be dedicated in any kind of work he does. Not everyone who graduates from GSMD ends up like Bryn Terfel, but many learn things that will serve them well whatever careers they choose.

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Lots more on Rorem on this site. If the idea of Rorem's Our Town appeals, you might like Laci Boldemann's 4 Epitaphs, These  are based on Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915). Masters writes fictional epitaphs, each of which tells the story of the person supposedly buried beneath. Ollie McGee denounces her abusive husband. "In death, I am avenged". Sarah Brown tells her lover to tell her husband "There is no marriage in Heaven. But there is love".....Laci Boldemann (1921-69) gets straight to the point, expressing the "person" by inflections in phrasing and syntax, rather than through ornamentation. The songs feel like speech, just as you'd expect from gritty pioneer folk who don't mince words. Anne Sofie von Otter recorded them in 2009 - cult favourites!  Read more here.

Stephen Hough's new hat - Herbstlieder

Stephen Hough's famous as a pianist, but at the Oxford Lieder Festival he wore a new hat as composer. Previously all I'd heard of Hough's own music was a piece written for the Sacred Made Real exhibition at the National Gallery. Against those phenomenally powerful visual images, it had no chance. So I came expecting to be polite. Instead, I'm most sincerely impressed,.

A coup for the Oxford Lieder Festival! Hough's Herbstlieder is a good addition to the repertoire.  Set to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, it's a meditation on themes loosely connected with autumn, the passing of time, days drawing in, regret, the end of fruitfulness, and all that implies in life. Herbstlieder is impressionistic, creating an atmosphere as nebulous as autumnal mists.

It's quiet, too, like meditation. Herbstlieder starts with a simple cadence of separate chords fluttering downwards. "Like leaves falling" said Hough in the pre-concert talk. Diminuendi don't necessarily diminish. The chords that link the first two songs mark a subtle progression. Rilke writes of a star seit Jahrtausenden tot, whose light still reaches us from afar.A strange image : ein weisse Stadt an Ende des Strahls in den Himmeln steht. A white city seen in the heavens at the end of a ray of light. Hough sets these words so the crescendo rises right to the top, to the limits of the register. Whatever the image might mean, the connection is made between the lone individual on earth and distant galaxies beyond.

In Trănenkrūglein, images of jugs being filled and emptied. Circular, cascading piano part,  but at the conclusion, the vocal line pauses, like the last drops dripping from a jug. Machen ...mich....leer. (make me empty), Bestūrz mich, Musik is its companion piece. Big, bold phrasing, the piano part almost staccato. In the midst of the turmoil an unadorned line Mein Herz: Da!, emphasis on the da.The voice part swells passionately, evoking the Posaune des Engels, (the Final Judgement)  Filled to overflowing, the music subsides.

The final song, Herbst, reverts to hushed, autumnal contemplation. Indeed, much of it is parlando. A pianist composer writing his own instrument out of the picture? Yet in some ways, that's the spirit of Rilke's poem. Und in der Năchten făllt die schwere Erde.(and in the end Earth itself will fall) like the distant stars. Individual striving is no big deal in the eternal scheme of things. Und doch ist einer, welcher dieses Fallen, unendlich sanft in seinen Hănden fast. (And yet there is one who holds these fallen gently, eternally in his hands)  Eichendorff or Rūckert might have been specific about the "one", but with Rilke we can imagine a more abstract communion with the cosmos. 

Hough spoke about writing these songs three years ago while he was in a hotel in Seoul, Korea. Even in this maniacally busy world of 24/7 communication, we're often isolated. But it's not necessarily a bad thing if we can switch off the mental muzak around us and think beyond ourselves. Far from being noisy and dissonant a great deal of modern music is like this - pure, abstract, contemplative. There are no jolly jingles in Herbstlieder to worm their way into your mind and distract. Yet that's precisely why it's such a good piece. Wolfgang Rihm, darling of modern German music, said of his hero, Wilhelm Killmayer, "His scores are all white!"  Think of Webern's aphorisms, Kurtág's tiny fragments, antidotes to the frantic turmoil around us. Stephen Hough's nowhere near that league, but he's a lot closer to the real avant garde than he realizes.

Good performance by Alisdair Hogarth and Jacques Imbrailo, who seems to intuit the spirituality of these songs. We will get to hear them again, as there may be a recording in the offing. In the meantime, track down the publisher. See Stephen Hough's site for more.

This is the sort of adventurous music Oxford Lieder Festival is famous for. Also premiered in this recital was a new piece by Ned Rorem, a setting of Shakespeare Sonnet 147, (My love  is as a fever longing still) jointly commissioned by the Oxford Lieder Festival and Prince Consort. They're relatively impecunious but what they have, they invest in long-term benefits for art song. It's an excellent piece, wavy cadences, baritone and tenor artfully blended, the piano tolling like a bell at the culmination.

The Prince Consort also sang songs from Schumann Spanisches Liederspiel and Spanische Liebeslieder. Read about their concert of Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen at rthe Oxford Lieder Festival in 2009.

Please read my other posts on Oxford Lieder, Prince Consort and Jacques Imbrailo. (Use search facility or labels below)  Photo credit : Grant Hiroshima

Ned Rorem Evidence of Things Not Seen - Oxford Lieder

Ned Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen received its European premiere in Oxford. Rorem is a very important song composer, and this is a major cycle so it's a scoop for the Oxford Lieder Festival. Oxford Lieder spots what's good long before it reaches the mainstream. This is the way to keep your fingers on the pulse of what's happening in art song. Some of these concerts will be repeated later in London, but Oxford is where things start.

It's strange that a composer as famous as Ned Rorem should be considered "unknown" in Europe. He may not be performed here as frequently as he is in the US but everyone has access to recordings. Susan Grahams's Rorem Songs was a huge hit a few years ago, winning awards all over. Carole Farley's recorded him for Naxos and there's even a British recording of his Auden and Santa Fe songs (Black Box) And these are the tip of the iceberg.

The Prince Consort have recorded Rorem's On an Echoing Road for Linn. It's excellent - follow the link for extensive sound samples and hear why! Highly recommended for those who love RVW, Quilter, etc and want to hear how Rorem rejuvenates the form.

The Prince Consort is another Oxford Lieder discovery. This is a lively, flexible ensemble which brings together some of the most exciting young singers around. Many are already quite high profile - some have been heard at the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne and Salzburg. They're seriously good - grab tickets for their Wigmore Hall appearance in January 2010.

Evidence of Things Not Seen is a collection of 36 songs that flow together to form a whole greater than its parts. The first group of songs are optimistic, open ended. Rorem calls them "Beginnings". "From whence cometh song?" is the very first line. The same questioning reappears throughout the cycle, expressed in Rorem's characteristic rising and falling cadences.

"Middles" (the middle section) explores ideas more deeply, rather like development in symphonic form. There are some very strong songs here, such as ..I saw a mass, from John Woolman's Journal. Woolman was a Quaker, and Quaker values infuse the whole 80 minute sequence. Indeed, the the title Evidence of Things Not seen comes from William Penn. Rorem's cadences are light quiet breathing, the way Quakers think things through in silent contemplation. Two songs to poems by Stephen Crane, The Candid Man and A Learned Man, provide counterpoint. The candid man blusters, using violence to impose his will.

Rorem chooses his texts carefully. Middles ends with a song to an 18th century hymn text by Thomas Ken which leads into Julien Green's He thinks upon his Death. W H Auden jostles with Robert Frost, Colette with A E Housman. Mark Doty and Paul Monette write poems referring to AIDS. Jane Kenyon's The Sick Wife poignantly describes a woman lost , still young, to some illness that keep her alive but barely sensate. In its own simple, direct way it connects to the final song, in which Penn reflects on the Bible. "For Death is no more than the Turning of us over from Time to Eternity". Whatever the Evidence of Things Not Seen may be, following the journey in a performance as good as this is a moving experienece.

The Prince Consort was represented tonight by its founder, the pianist Alisdair Hogarth, and the singers Anna Leese, Jennifer Johnston, Nicholas Mulroy and Jacques Imbrailo (a former Jette Parker artist) Perhaps the sparse audience showed that people are scared off by the idea of an "unknown" modern American composer. Too bad, it's their loss. This was excellent music in excellent performance and really deserved better exposure. Public booking for the Wigmore Hall concert in January starts next week - don't miss the next chance to hear these songs again.