Gérard Grisey Les espaces acoustiques

Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques is a ground breaking work which defies assumptions about what music “ought” to be. Not for nothing did the composer describe it as “a great laboratory”, exploring the way we listen.

Written from 1974 to 1985, it’s actually six pieces which can be enjoyed separately. This was the first UK performance of the whole cycle. It starts with a single violist, expanding to ensembles for 7, 18, 33 and 84 musicians. Grisey uses chords that endlessly morph and oscillate, displaying the full spectrum of sound. Hence the term “spectralism” which Grisey later abandoned. This is very organic music, in harmony with the biorhythms of the human body, like breathing, steadily exhaling and inhaling. This isn’t music to “audit” passively as it’s complex, but it’s also strangely therapeutic. Afterwards, you feel refreshed, like you’ve had a workout. If you’ve been listening well, you probably have, since the more you put into this, the more you get back.

Yet Les espaces acoustiques grows outwards from extreme simplicity. A basic melodic cell repeats like in spiral, back and forth, each time with tiny gradations of pitch. It’s a tour de force. Paul Silverthorne demonstrated why he’s the foremost violist in Britain, and a long term stalwart of the London Sinfonietta : fifteen minutes of seamless bowing, energetic yet subtly refined. Grisey himself said such progressions were specially difficult on viola, so Silverthorne’s virtuosity deserves much praise. Even when the viola plays alone, though, there’s a “réponse fantomatique” with the other instruments. The viola is the heartbeat, they are the echo, unheard at first. In the second section, Périodes, Grisey adds to the breathing motif an extra level of “rest” as natural rhythmic as walking. It’s never mechanical but blurred, allowing variations of tempo, stillness and pitch. Most dramatic perhaps is the theme on double bass, played by Enno Senft, but there are many other intriguing variations. This is music that proliferates, building elaborations upon itself, like cell divisions, like fractals in mathematics.

Grisey was a student of Olivier Messiaen, and dedicated the 4th section, Modulations, to him. Since George Benjamin was also Messiaen’s student, this performance took on overtones reminiscent of Messiaen, particularly Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. The double bass theme reflects the “walls of solidity” and the extensive brass the “final trumpet” fanfares. Benjamin connects Les espaces acoustiques to the ideas of time, space and eternity in Messiaen, like borrowed vistas in landscape. Just as Grisey’s music expands from simple cells, it thus grows “beyond” itself, into a vast new conceptual universe. Benjamin was extremely perceptive, for this “value-added” approach enhances Grisey’s concept of infinite possibility. You can enjoy this music in a vacuum, but it’s so much more fulfilling in a wider context. In some circles, it’s fashionable to call Messiaen “history” but anyone with any knowledge of his influence on composers as diverse as Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, Grisey, Murail, Anderson and Benjamin himself, will know that’s nonsense.

Messiaen also influenced conducting style, since music of such subtle colour needs performance of great clarity. Benjamin is a lucid conductor, and gets brilliant results. The London Sinfonietta has long championed Grisey’s music. Balances were finely judged, even details like the varied mutings of brass deftly executed. When the viola resurfaced between the 5^th and 6^th sections, it shone clearly, proving its central role in the whole structure of the cycle. In the Epilogue, the four horns stood proud above the massed orchestra.

Please explore this blog for lots of other pieces on Grisey, Murail, Messiaen, Scelsi, Vivier, Sciarrino, Dufourt, Stockhausen, Xenakis and others ! This is one of the biggest blogs for new music, welcome back anytime.

Please see the whole with extra pix
http://www.musicomh.com/classical/grisey_1008.htm

Bohuslav Martinu - the operas

Coming up in 2009 is Bohuslav Martinu's anniversary. In London we're lucky as Martinu is a speciality of the BBC's top man Jiri Belohlávek, so we're in for some idiomatic performances. There's a very good article about Martinu's operas in MusicOMH , so follow the link below. It's worth it as Martinu isn't nearly as well known in this country as he should be.

"The best known of the dozen or so oratorios/cantatas are the quietly moving Field Mass and the strangely hypnotic Epic of Gilgamesh. In recent years, only one of the composer's 14 operas have been performed at a major London house – the last one, The Greek Passion, which was finally presented at Covent Garden in its original form in 2000, and again in 2004. It is 30 years since his early opera Julietta has been performed in the capital, although a concert performance is scheduled (the first of the anniversary tributes?) at the Barbican in March 2009"

"Most of Martinu's work flirts with the strange and off-kilter, delving into the subconscious in one way or another, and Les larmes is an extreme example of this exploration – a woman falls in love with a hanged man, Satan rides a bicycle and heads split apart, while legs and arms dance on their own."

Definitely read this link for more !
http://www.musicomh.com/classical/features/martinu_1008.htm

James Gilchrist Die Schöne Müllerin Oxford Lieder Festival

Twenty-five years ago I heard Die Schöne Müllerin in a country church beside the Thames in South Oxfordshire. “How lovely”, said the vicar, noting that the village is famous for its old mill. Had he known the cycle he might not have been so thrilled! Beneath the sunlit rippling of the brook in Schubert’s music lies menace indeed.

In an excellent pre performance talk, James Gilchrist made the point of contrasting the brightness of the music with the darkness of its content. All around the young miller, nature blossoms, but he’s totally indifferent. He lives in a vacuum, disconnected from reality. The world hums steadily along but he’s hyperactive, swinging from one extreme to another. He hears voices, becomes violent and finally throws himself into the millpond. It’s not pretty. Nowadays, he’d be heavily medicated and thrown into the community without support, harming others as well as himself.

The vernal landscape deceives, as it’s meant to. Hence exquisite performances like Fritz Wunderlich, where you’re taken in by the sheer beauty of the voice. That’s why Matthias Goerne’s version a few years back was so shocking. “There’s nothing cute about teenage suicide”, he said, producing a version so psychologically penetrating that it’s frightening to listen to, even though it’s groundbreaking and a superlative performance. Ian Bostridge, in his more recent work with Mitsuko Uchida, takes another path, connecting the spirit of the brook to the earth spirits and folk magic so dear to the Romantic imagination. James Gilchrist has found yet another distinctive approach, which is quite an achievement in a cycle as frequently performed as this.

I made a special effort to hear this concert as I thought it would be well suited to Gilchrist’s style and I was right. Firstly, his clear, lucid singing works extremely well for it’s direct and naturalistic : songs like this need an understated, almost conversational style for what we are hearing are highly personal “unspoken thoughts”. Secondly, Gilchrist doesn’t declaim, he convinces by genuinely communicating the inner world of his protagonist. Like a true method actor, his characterization comes from understanding how the young man thinks, alien as it may be to “normal” people, so the performance grows from this. Thirdly, he understands how the poetry and music work as external commentary, following the miller’s descent towards death. There’s a journey here, just as there is in Winterreise.

Gilchrist’s young miller is most certainly delusional, a very sick loner unable to form even the most basic of relationships. As he approaches the mill, he’s almost manic with expectation, the voice taking on a shrill excitement. Peter Schreier’s miller had a similar unnerving intensity. This is observant, for the miller’s mind is lit up with an unnaturally bright light : he sees things in extremes. Phrases repeat, like double takes, as if the miller is contemplating his own vision. The rhythms of the millwheel and brook are resolute, Anna Tilbrook’s playing captures the relentless flow. The miller’s fundamental weakness is thrown into contrast : he doesn’t think he’s as strong as the apprentices : Ungeduld is a list of the things he’d like to do, but can’t.

In some interpretations, Mein! is a moment of hope. But Gilchrist appreciates how it connects to the previous song, Tränenregen, where the miller at last gets to spend time with the girl. Instead of talking to her, he talks to the brook ! No wonder she makes her excuses and leaves. To anyone else, that would be rejection, but suddenly the miller thinks he’s won the girl. Gilchrist’s Mein! is heartbreaking, because the ecstasy is so clearly delusional. The miller “feels” intensely, therefore assumes everyone else feels as he does, without compromise. As Gilchrist shows, this joyous song is the beginning of the end. The miller’s jealousy and anger seem quite healthy in comparison. Just as the brook misleads deceptively, Schubert builds in deceptively happy music at the grimmest movements.

Gilchrist and Tilbrook use silence to create space the two final songs, for they are the threshold from which there is no return. When the miller stops being hyperactively manic, he becomes numb, unable to resist the brook’s lethal powers. This is also tn opportunity for Gilchrist to comment as an observer. All along, he’s acknowledged the miller’s mania accurately, but with sympathy rather than judgement : the poor lad is no grotesque. Gilchrist doesn’t look “at” him, but “with” him. In the end, though, he can’t go where the miller goes. These two songs are trickier than they seem, for the singer has to express sympathy yet detachment. Tenderness is important for the miller has suffered so much. Yet listen to what the brook is saying : It blames the huntsman, it blames the girl, the böses Mägdelein, who still has the power to wake the drowned boy ! Give into the brooks seductive lies and enter into the madness. Gilchrist sings gently, but he knows this is no lullaby, it’s dangerous.

This was one of the key concerts in this year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, and for good reason. Oxford Lieder is dedicated to extending the art of Lieder, making people think how and why it’s such a special art form. Gilchrist demonstrates exactly the sort of intelligence and sensitivity that makes good Lieder singing. This was a masterclass in itself.

See the review and the lovely pic :

http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2008/Jul-Dec08/olf1210.htm

Please note, James Gilchrist has recorded this on Orchid, to be issued late September 2009

Die Schöne Müllerin - Bostridge Goerne Uchida

Ian Bostridge astounded the song world with his seminal Die Schöne Müllerin with Graham Johnson in 1994. He's pulled off the feat a second time, in this outstanding performance with Mitsuko Uchida. Indeed, this is even more distinctive for it's shaped with much more depth of insight.

Schubert's song cycles are much more than the sum of their parts: performing them requires a breadth of vision to illuminate the cycle as a whole. It is not enough to sing well: understanding and interpretation are paramount. What is fascinating is how Bostridge has lived with, and grown with, this cycle. With Johnson, Bostridge emphasized the painful vulnerability of the miller's lad, a portrayal of youthful anguish. Now, Bostridge brings to it the insight of a more mature observer, more attuned to the psychological drama that is at the heart of the cycle. It is a tour de force, reflecting an infinitely deeper understanding of what the cycle means. There is nothing quite like it. The nearest comparison is Matthias Goerne, whose depiction of the psychosis haunting the miller's lad shocked many by its intensity. Bostridge manages a different, if equally perceptive understanding, without Goerne's unorthodox tempi. He's also a tenor. Schubert envisioned the cycle for higher voice and was a tenor himself. This matters a lot, for this version expresses much of what might have been Schubert's personal subtext.

This is, therefore, almost as innovative as Goerne's groundbreaking version, but perhaps more accessible. Bostridge and Uchida make more of the brook's demonic struggle to overpower the boy than his inner demons. This makes their version closer to the Romantic spirit where magic and menace lurk close beneath the surface, where nature spirits can be malevolent. It also fits in with the theory that Schubert himself may have felt cursed by his illness, the result of a natural act of love. Danger and the supernatural are Bostridge's natural territory: witness his brilliant Janáček and Henze recordings where he elucidates terrifying mysteries beyond the realm of consciousness. This new interpretation has, therefore, all the virtues of an intelligent, modern psychological reading while remaining within the mainstream of the Romantic tradition.

Significantly, Bostridge emphasizes that the poet Wilhelm Müller said it was a set "Im Winter zu lesen" - to be read in winter, in barrenness and cold. The text may speak of Spring and flowers but it is, frankly about suicide of a very young man. Schubert connected love with death only too well, for he had been diagnosed with venereal disease shortly before setting the poems. It is not a pretty cycle, by any means. Bostridge and Uchida focus on the uneven dialogue between the brook, representing death, and the young man, dreaming of love.

Uchida is almost too dominant a partner, yet her evocation of the powerful, unyielding movement of the mill wheel expresses the unrelenting power of the waters. This brook has a demonic life of its own, calling to the boy, drawing him towards its crushing embrace. Bostridge's voice has developed deeper colours over the years and his portrayal of the lad is exquisite – lyrical yet richly shaded, making the contrast between the boy and the brook all the more poignant. He whispers, both in awe and excitement “ist das denn meine Straβe ?". The brook has already shown who's boss. In the brief vignette of "reality", where the miller talks with his apprentices after work, Bostridge manages to portray the gathering vividly, yet the piano reminds us of the ferocity lurking outside, threatening to shatter the cosy scene. Der Neugierige (the questioner) is one of the critical turning points in the cycle. For Goerne it was as if we were inside the boy's troubled mind, a terrifying inner sanctum. For Bostridge, it is the curiosity of innocence, a moment when the demons in the brook for once are still, while the boy wonders about love. But not for long – Ungeduld starts almost immediately with its insistent, demented pressures. Bostridge sings the verse, when he thinks he's won love with heartfelt openness and triumph but Uchida has already told us that something's amiss. The contrast between lyricism and the violence of the piano part is striking.

In a Wigmore Hall recital in 2005, he sang the last verse of Morgengruβ with much more defiance than on the recording, which was much more effective, for it shows that there's still spirit and hope in the lad's mind. Soon after, though, follows Pause, which for Bostridge is the turning point of the cycle. The boy has hung his lute on the wall, and can sing no more. Bostridge's voice actually takes on a lute like quality from here on. It is as if the boy has already lost the power to be a proactive individual. The two "lute" songs, Pause and Mit dem grünen Lautenbande are balanced by two angry songs about the huntsman whom the miller's daughter clearly prefers. Bostridge and Uchida hardly stop to breathe between songs, allowing them to form a striking group that in turn connects to the "colour" songs, Der liebe Farbe and Die böse Farbe. As a unit of six, without a break, the drama is intensified. In the middle was a most ferocious Eifersucht und Stolz (Jealousy and Pride). It is somewhat restrained on this recording, compared to the fire with which Bostridge sings it in recital. His recent years in opera have certainly taught him expressive, passionate characterisation.

By the time Bostridge sings "Der Mai ist kommen, der Winter is aus!" we are left under no illusion that Spring really will come. The miller's lad and the brook have a final dialogue. Uchida starts Der Müller und die Bach as if she were playing a funeral march, for the brook is calling the boy to itself. Yet Bostridge infuses the last verses with revived lyricism. "Ach, Bächlein, liebes Bächlein ... aber weiβt du wie Liebe tut?" These are "his" last words in the cycle, and Bostridge has him depart with tenderness.

Just as Uchida started the cycle evoking the mechanical process of the mill wheel, she ends it with the same relentless turning over of the same small motif. In this context, I've often thought of the folktune "muss i' den" with a similar hurdy-gurdy type figure revolving over and over. Here, the coy, fake sentimentality of the folktune seems absolutely right - the brook's quaint song is ersatz. The brook has destroyed the lad and absorbed him into itself. Goerne managed a strange but brilliant synthesis, expressing sympathy for the boy while expressing anger at the waste of a destroyed life. For Bostridge the final Wiegenlied is no tender lullaby either, but the chilling voice of the brook and its lack of conscience. It possessively warns the flowers not to arouse the lad from his slumber, like the warped mother in the movie Psycho. It is all the more disturbing because Bostridge sings this with such understatement, letting the horror speak for itself.

Bostridge has emerged from a period of quiet in his career and become a more mature, deeper and sensitive performer than before. A true artist keeps creating, thinking things over and developing and to his credit, Bostridge seems to have endless reserves of musical intelligence. Creating one distinctive Schöne Müllerin enshrines him as one of the cycle's best performers. Creating a second, exceptional and far more original interpretation as this new version, earns him a place in the pantheon.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classRev/2005/Mar05/Schubert_Mullerin_5578272.htm

Finzi : Intimations of Immortality James Gilchrist

Super performance today by James Gilchrist of Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin. I rushed home to listen to another DSM but couldn't resist pulling up one of the best Gilchrist recordings, Gerald Finzi's Intimations of Immortality. There are many good recordings of Finzi’s masterpiece Dies Natalis op. 8 but relatively few of Intimations of Immortality op. 29. Only two recordings are readily available, one with Philip Langridge (Hickox, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, 1988) and another with John Mark Ainsley (Best, Corydon Orchestra and chorus, 1996). The surprise is that this new recording is so good it exceeds even the high standards of its predecessors. This is the one to get, on nearly every count.
Intimations is a blockbuster, a spectacular on a massive scale. As Finzi himself joked, it was a “hell of a noise, but rather a wonderful noise all told”. It certainly is ambitious, requiring a large orchestra, a well trained big chorus and a tenor with the fortitude to sustain 45 minutes of singing against a loud background. Finzi attempts to match the grand, stirring verse of Wordsworth with an equally expansive orchestral setting. For a composer whose strength was in smaller scale chamber and choral music and song, it is quite an achievement: in some ways it outdoes Vaughan Williams in dramatic effects. Nonetheless, its very sprawling ambitiousness, and the rush with which it was completed for first performance in 1950 poses problems. This means all the more that it needs to be performed with clear vision.

As with Dies Natalis, Intimations starts with an Andante setting out the main themes to come: the horn solo is particularly evocative, with its echoes of Arcadia. Then Gilchrist enters, pure and clear. Gilchrist’s voice is remarkably beautiful, pure and clear. Ainsley brings a highly refined, magical quality to his singing: this baroque sensibility brings out a deeply spiritual level to the text, which is utterly appropriate and will remain a favourite of mine. But Gilchrist has a more direct, almost conversational edge which expresses profound conviction. His phrasing is immaculate, his diction so clear that Wordsworth’s difficult long sentences come across with a natural ease and flow. Wisely, the recording keeps his voice in the foreground. Langridge’s more straightforward singing is more recessed into the whole, which doesn’t help, since the soloist’s role is so important.

David Hill has been conducting Finzi for years, and with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and chorus, he has fine musicians to work with. The results show in by far the most animated, vivacious playing of all three recordings. One of the critical points for me is the xylophone solo which dominates the fourth stanza. Stephen Banfield, one of the great Finzi commentators, calls it, charitably, “ragtime”, though what place ragtime has in Wordsworth, I don’t know. Of course it’s cheerful, but in the Best/Corydon recording in particular it reminds me far too much of “The Donkey Serenade”, a concept totally jarring to the ideas in Wordsworth and the general thrust of the music, and spoils the recording. Hickox may not mute its effect, but doesn’t overemphasize it, either. Hill thoughtfully tones it down and keeps it more integrated with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, so it does not jar quite so much. Indeed, he gets from his players a clarity and liveliness that complements Gilchrist’s expressive singing. This is one of the strengths of this recording, as balancing the constituent parts of the piece make it flow with more spirit and feeling. What Finzi may have been seeking, after all, was a profound emotional charge, so as to equal Wordsworth’s intense poetry. While the Langridge/Hickox recording has its merits, it’s far more conservative and unadventurous. It doesn’t capture the sense of wonder and excitement that Finzi’s spectacular setting seems to cry out for.

Indeed, what strikes me about his setting is its “technicolor” elements: great surges of volume, intense chromatics, lushly romantic voices and strings in particular. It’s not surprising that the Hollywood musician Bernard Herrmann was one of the first to appreciate the work for what it was. Hollywood may have bad connotations in conservative eyes, but in those dark days of post-war austerity, it meant something quite different. If Finzi sought the ebullient and the upbeat, it seems quite natural that he should have written music whose boundless optimism transcended parochial convention. It’s no defect. Indeed, Banfield calls the chirpy little melody that illustrates the words “this sweet May morning” as “one of most sly pieces of mickey-mousing outside Hollywood”. Finzi’s good humour meant he was no po-faced musical snob. Gilchrist, Hill and the Bournemouth musicians seem to understand Finzi’s quintessential approach, so their bright, vivacious performance is more in keeping with the composer’s vision than their rather staid predecessors. Finzi ends the work with a sparsely orchestrated, exquisitely elegant simplicity, all the more profound for its contrast with what went before. In this final stanza, Gilchrist’s singing is almost surreally beautiful. The way he sings “another race have been, and other palms are won” gives me goosebumps, for so clearly does he evoke "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”.“

ENO Partenope Handel

Melanie Eskenazi is one of the most perceptive writers on the baroque. This is what she's written on the new ENO production of Handel's Partenope :

"Partenope (Greek for ‘virgin’) was, according to one legend, cast ashore on the coast near Naples after throwing herself into the sea in her despair at not having been able to sing Ulysses to his death – it’s almost as good a name for an opera as “Orfeo” and this first staging of the work in London since 1983 is given an exciting production, further strengthening English National Opera’s pre-eminence as the leading house for Handel opera. “Partenope” could almost be called a chamber opera, and in purely visual terms one might have been looking at a production of Richard Strauss’s “Capriccio” – but more of that later. It’s singing that counts in this music – and this was an evening of exceptional Handelian style. Rosemary Joshua’s Partenope was a worthy successor to her Semele, ‘L’Amor ed il Destin’ typical of her confident delivery, silvery tone and mastery of phrasing. In Act Two, ‘Qual Farfalletta’ was perhaps a little subdued, but ‘Quel volto mi piace’ was incisively characterised. It helped that she was not only beautifully costumed but given graceful and appropriate things to do whilst singing, neither of which advantages were given to the Emilio of John Mark Ainsley, who must surely now win the award for ‘Singer Who Has Survived the Most Stupid Stage Business Whilst Singing Impossibly Florid Music’. Ainsley sang his first aria whilst placing bodies and photographing them, his third up a ladder wearing a skirt and a turban, but ‘Barbaro Fato sì’ topped them all, standing on a toilet, leaning halfway out of a transom window and smoking. All taken in his stride, of course, the rapid coloratura delivered with firm steady tone and immaculate diction..........."

"Alden and his co-director Peter Littlefield, together with the set designer Andrew Lieberman, took their inspiration from Surrealist writers and artists, setting Partenope’s court in a pared-down, blond-and white version of Man Ray’s studio: the character of Emilio is presented as the photographer, arranging images just as he arranges the lives of the other protagonists, and the heroine is an emotionally well balanced version of Zelda Fitzgerald – you could just see this lady using a belt to ensure that the lift stayed on their floor.Does it work? Yes, it does – the world of the early eighteenth-century is not that far distant from that of the early twentieth in terms of its surface gloss and its emergent questioning of the relationship between Reason and Emotion, between the urbane and the spontaneous, and the concept is wonderfully coherent despite the demands made upon some of the singer / actors within it. It’s also very funny in parts, and although I did not always warm to Amanda Holden’s chirpy translation (“Crikey!” “O shit!”), it certainly engaged most of the audience."

Here's the full text :
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=6349

Oxford Lieder Festival starts Oct 10

This year's Oxford Lieder Festival starts October 10th, kicking off with a "Schubert Weekend" , three days of the big cycles – Florian Boesch in Winterreise, James Gilchrist in Die Schöne Müllerin, and Joshua Ellicott in Schwanen
gesang. Then there's the "lost" cycle, Kosegarten. This is a compilation of existing songs which Prof. Morten Solvik believes may have been presented as a group in Schubert’s time. It’s rarely heard in this form and while it won’t challenge the existing canon, it should be interesting. It’s Schubert, after all!

Two of the greatest names in English singing will be featured. Ian Partridge will be giving his farewell recital. Solid technique and good husbandry have kept him singing to the age of 70. Sir Thomas Allen is a Patron of Oxford Lieder so he's singing a recital on Friday 17th, accompanied by Roger Vignoles. Seats are selling fast as Allen is so much loved. This concert is being held in the church of St Mary The Virgin where John later Cardinal Newman preached: it's the University Church in which the formal religious part of University life takes place – just across from the Sheldonian and the Old Bodleian.

Another reason for going to hear ThomasAllen is to follow him up with the extra late night concert at the Holywell Music Room. It's Gweneth-Ann Jeffers singing Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi , a stunning tour de force which is also rarely heard as it’s such a demanding piece to perform. There’s also Zigeunerlieder, an evening of gypsy-inspired songs by Brahms, Liszt, Janacek and Schumann performed by the Prince Consort, one of the more exciting vocal ensembles to emerge in the last few years, who specialise in relatively neglected repertoire. Along with some rarely heard songs by Liszt and Brahms they are doing Janàček's Diary of One Who Disappeared. The buzz is that this will be one of the highlights, so keep Oct 16th free if you can. The evening before is devoted to Czech song (Martinu, Dvorak, Smetana).

It's Michael Berkeley's 60th birthday this year and Julius Drake suggested he write a voice/piano arrangement of his Speaking Silence. So Drake will be playing this, with Susan Bickley singing – she's a specialist in new repertoire, and very good. More local colour comes later with another David Owen Norris special, "An Oxford Song Book": various 18th century songs by composers who worked in the university. There will also be an "Oxford Musical Walk" earlier in the day. This isn't any average guided tour but is designed around Oxford’s musical history. This is very rich indeed, as the Holywell Music Society was one of the first to encourage serious listening and music making in this country in the 18^th century. The Holywell Music Room, built in 1740, hosted performances by Mozart and Hadyn, no less. The final evening concert is more like conventional "gala" insofar as a festival as original and lively as Oxford Lieder does "conventional". and this year, the stars like Sir Thomas Allen are choosing young singers for "Fifteen minutes of fame" singing pre-concert extras before the main events. It is extremely important that young singers are given such exposure, because song as an artform needs live performances, rather than over-dependence on recordings. Sarah Walker will be conducting master classes. Again this is a typical Oxford droll understatement, for Walker is an amazing personality, who communicates her love and enthusiasm for voice so well that these master classes are worth attending even if you don't sing. They have become almost legendary. Richard Stokes, Eugene Asti and Julius Drake are also leading classes, so these are seriously useful, for anyone wanting to polish their Lieder skills. Participants get to put on a full concert of their own, too. Oxford Lieder is special, an important feature of musical life in Britain..Please read more from the festival web site and try to support it
www.oxfordlieder.co.uk

The photo is Sholto Kynoch who organises Oxford Lieder and plays in many programmes. This is a guy who could curate a week at Kings Place worth making the trek for !

Itzhak Perlman on TV Friday

On Friday October 10th BBC 4 TV will be screening a film about Itzhak Perlman. Perlman wanted to be a violinist from age 3 but then he got polio which was often fatal in the late 40's. He survived but was left severely limping, which in those days people couldn't deal with. They assumed he couldn't appear on stage, travel etc. Things were very different then before people became aware of disability. Yet he persisted and went to the Juilliard and then on the Ed Sullivan show, just like the Beatles ! This film shows how he's built up inner resources to sustain a successful career. Perlman is self-effacing, but his warmth and innate decency mark him out. If anything, his modesty restrains the film, for much could be made of his stellar career, his campaigns for the disabled, his numerous awards, his connections with royalty and the White House and so on. But you won’t find them in this film. Instead, we see him as a person first, then as a consummate artist. He has remained true to himself as to his music. That is the achievement of this lovely, intimate film, because it reveals how an ordinary human being can achieve great things through integrity and faith … and talent and hard work. As Perlman says, as a child he often had to play late in the evening, after dinner parties when people weren’t actually listening. It taught him to find ways of getting attention, but to his credit, he learned to do so on his own terms.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2008/Feb08/Perlman_a08cnd.htm

Grace Chang Bizet in Chinese video

Bizet in Chinese ! 50's Chinese movies

Grace Chang (Ge Lan) is an icon of 1950's Chinese movies. She's wonderful, a truly "modern" liberated girl, who dances the cha cha and calypso. The clip below is her take on Bizet's Carmen. It comes from a movie called Wild, Wild Rose where she plays a nightclub singer with brains. So she sings Bizet in Mandarin, dressed in Spanish cape and fedora. The nightclub patrons love it and even the fokis (staff). If ROH wants to know how to snare a hip crowd they should watch the video embedded in the link below (scroll down partway). Grace was a character, charismatic, totally original, but like nearly all the stars of 30's to 60's Chinese cinema, died tragically young. For a short while her movies were available on DVD other than Region 3. Now you have to pray for a retrospective season or watch clips like this :

Janacek - From The House of the Dead DVD

Last June I went to Amsterdam to the great, lively Holland Festival and heard Janacek's From the House of the Dead conducted by Pierre Boulez, directed by Patrice Chéreau. It was fantastic, brilliant, vibrant orchestrally, making Janacek vivid and intense. You can scroll down to see what I wrote then (under tabs for Janacek). Now, you can watch the DVD which has extras, which are just as good. Here's a review of the new DVD ! Recordings are few - Mackerras and Jilek (good) but none come even close to this.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classRev/2008/Apr08/Janacek_DG%20004400734426.htm

Matthias Goerne Shostakovich Michelangelo

Two approaches to Michelangelo (Wolf and Shostakovich) and Goerne's trademark Brahms's Vier Ernste Gesange. Definitely a programme for the dedicated ! He's performed all these before in London and this was a fairly short concert (just over an hour). Beautiful phrasing, such rich gorgeous colours in the singing. I particularly liked the Shostakovich - dignified, true Russian bass yet with the supple muscular agility Goerne's voice can achieve. One of the best known Shostakovich specialists was in the audience, looking very happy. It was nice to return to "core repertoire" again after the two earlier mega profile concerts (Hartmann and Larcher) ! But this was not a programme for the faint hearted. No candyfloss whatsoever !

Incidentally several baritones in this audience. And Goerne slipped into the audience after his set at the Larcher concert. Nice to see singers enjoying non vocal music !

Photo by Annette Boutellier

Feisty women musicians, composers

The autumn issue of The Maud Powell Signature, Women in Music is now available on line free at http://www.maudpowell.org/signature/

This issue features women who have been “Lost and Found” or who simply are not as well-known as they should be. David J. Brown recounts his experience of finding the music of English composer Lilian Elkington in a used bookshop in Worthing, England, shares what he was able to learn about her life and tells how his efforts led to a recording of her only surviving orchestral work. Ian Graham-Jones provides a rich portrait of composer Alice Mary Smith whose successful career was cut short by her early death and takes us on his journey of discovery that led him to a leaking garden shed.

In Europe, Annemarie Vogt introduces readers to Berta Geissmar, friend of Furtwangler and Beecham and administrator of that male bastion, the Berlin Philharmonic, while Susan Pickett, writing from Washington State, chronicles the career of Swedish composer and organist Elfrida Andree, a bold woman who dared to defy convention.

On the North American side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth Juliana Knighton recounts the pioneering career of American conductor Mary Davenport Engberg while Anya Lawrence introduces readers to the Canadian-born composer Gena Branscombe. The Children’s Corner features American violinist Rachel Barton Pine whose work in music includes bringing obscure composers back into public awareness and a strong commitment to education. Welsh composer Grace Williams, English conductor Gwynne Kimpton, pianist-composer Teresa Carreno and violinist Maud Powell also play roles in this issue. Columnist Diana Ambache reflects on attitudes towards women composers and her own response to their music while Pamela Blevins tours her own bookshelves for books about women in music.

Goerne - Larcher Die Nacht der Verlorenen

Thomas Larcher's Die Nacht der Velorenen really is an interesting work, which we'll probably hear more of. His publishers are Schott, though this piece isn't available yet. However, his 2002 song cycle for soprano, violin, cello and piano, My illness is the Medicine I need is available. In fact it's being performed at the Wigmore Hall on 24 November with Claire Booth, who's very good indeed – another must-go concert. Böse Zellen, also premiered by the London Sinfonietta this week, will be on at Zankel Hall in May (piano and orchestra).

The texts used are recently published fragments from Ingeborg Bachmann, the poet who fascinated Paul Celan and Hans Werner Henze. These aren't formal poems, but fragments, but it was this very brittleness that attracted the composer, "to transcend their rawness by compositional means". So, not conventional word painting but the opposite. It's as if the music expresses what's beyond the text. The singer listens a lot, the words singing like a commentary on the music. This was written for Matthias Goerne, and it sounds as if it was written "with" him, too, for there's a lot of "listening", dialogue between voice and orchestra, as if they are bouncing ideas off each other. Larcher uses an interesting sub group of piano, double bass and, of all things, an accordion, whose dark timbre reflects the baritone's voice.

The introduction is fairly long - fast, rustling figures shrill but clear, then gently deflating diminuendo that becomes softly pounding ostinato. I thought at the time of a clear stream, like a brook in Schubert churning along, entering a deep, still pool. The "pounding" of piano, accordion and double bass made me think of rocks on riverbeds. So what a surprise to read Larcher's note in the programme later: "Here I was encountering not polished surfaces but instead rough stones, on to which I could hold and claw my way forward." It's certainly not literal, descriptive music, so it's uncanny that such images jumped into my imagination.

The poems blend into the music, and sometimes elide into one another. "Ich habe die Wahrheit gesehen .......verschlungen von einer Riesenschlange die in ihren Bauch sie aufbläht..." the piano beats crazy staccato, the winds swirling, circular figures. The dark centre of the cycle is a simple 6 line poem "Im Lot" It's numb, beyond pain "Du sollst ja nicht weinen". Instead of crying, the sense of tight chested breathing, impassive yet unpeaceful, watching, listening, tense. Suddenly tubular bells from the percussion lifting out of the misery, yet distant, and the "riverbed" ostinato returns – this is literally "rock bottom ".

What';s also striking about this piece is the physicality, the sense of "breathing", up and down cadences like exhalation and inhalation. It gives an eerie sense of presence, like there's someone unseen hidden in the music. So all that listening has a very natural, organic feel, the idea of dialogue again. The final song "So stürben wir um getrennt zu sein" is tantalisingly inconclusive, opening outwards yet again. The clear Schubertian brook, but deceptively so. The poet is trying to sound confident but it's illusion, and she knows it.

An absolutely magnificent performance by Matthias Goerne. Of the three concerts he sang in six days, this was the finest, exceptional, perhaps closest to his heart. Audience ecstatic – a wonderful piece of music, so original and distinctive.

Kings Place opens with a bang !

Kings Place opened with a bang – literally – as the builders were still about hammering, while the first concert took place. Melinda Maxwell was playing Simon Holt's world premiere, Disparates, a work he'd written for her. It's beautiful, complex and contemplative. Definitely not oboe solo with "improvised percussion". Pity, but she deserves credit for perserverance.

Hall One at Kings Place is without doubt the most elegant concert hall in London, small but classically proportioned and blessed with an extremely clear acoustic. Ideal for chamber music and song. Hall Two is more spartan, but the concerts here turned out to be the biggest surprise of the whole opening day. Bharathiya Vidya Bhavan Centre is the biggest Indian culture centre outside India and is based in humble West Kensington ! Founded by Mahatma Gandhi himself, it's the Indian equivalent of RCM, RAM, Guildhall, Kings and the Juilliard put together –producing seriously dedicated performers. Indian culture stresses the unity of the arts – music, speech, dance, visual. So we saw dancers, heard musicians and took part in a workshop about tala, Indian rhythms, and how they can be infinitely varied and extended. There I was, beating time merrily, but it's OK, Indian music is interactive, audiences are part of the process. Since so much new western music uses ideas from Indian form, it was a surprise that there weren't many western musicians or composers present. They could have learned so much. Messiaen, for example uses tala and variations, Indian "form" created by tempo changes and directional plateaux rather than formal western symphonic structure. The musicians themselves are articulate, highly enthusiastic about sharing their art. They took over the workshop from the scheduled speaker and wow ! They could demonstrate, counting time as they played. Number sequences are part of Indian rhythm because basic sets are multiplied for melody : no wonder Messiaen heard in it the "music of mathematics". Fantastic ! See link below – they do regular concerts and courses all year round.

As for Kings Place, it's strikingly beautiful, all glass, chrome and marble. And surrounded by canals, so a good place for a drink. Whether it will make money, I'm not sure. It's too small for celebrity names, though excellent for small, intimate music. Innovative programming, too. Each week will be "curated" by different people so there's always an eclectic mix of ideas. Consistency probably doesn't matter so much as long as most of it's exciting. Two days are set side for regular things like talk and new music, but will these be enough to sustain a venue without regular paid-for outside concerts such as support the Wigmore Hall ? Maybe having offices upstairs will bring in steady, predictable income so it will work. It deserves to !
http://www.bhavan.net/
http://www.musicomh.com/classical/kp-day1_1008.htm