Posted on by Stuart Millson

Boisterous banshees, and ghosts of war

STUART MILLSON enjoys four Divertissements from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Way back in orchestral history, at the 1971 Proms, a modest-sized broadcasting orchestra appeared at the Royal Albert Hall for the first time. An ensemble of some 40 players, the (then) BBC Welsh Orchestra performed smaller-scale works by Haydn, Mozart, Stravinsky and Brahms under the baton of the American conductor, Irwin Hoffman — who, incidentally, as a US serviceman, had been stationed in Britain. In a radio interview, Hoffman talked about the sense of occasion felt by the orchestral players, transported from their Cardiff studio duties to the international stage of the Royal Albert Hall — sentiments which might come as a surprise to concertgoers, today, accustomed to the work, international scope and remit of the c. 80-strong BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

From their modern performance centre, BBC Hoddinott Hall at Cardiff Bay (the larger St. David’s Hall in the city, opened in 1982, remains — curiously — closed and crumbling) the Welsh national orchestra plays for a dazzling array of international conductors. The trend started with Mariss Jansons in 1992 (with Richard Strauss’s massive Alpine Symphony) to Tadaaki Otaka, the Japanese maestro who loved and performed Elgar and attained laureate status with the musicians.

At Aberystwyth Arts Centre on the night of the 13th March (touring is a major priority of the orchestra) Christoph König presided over a programme of four intriguing divertissements for orchestra – Ravel’s Great War homage to lost friends and artists, Le Tombeau de Couperin, Anna Clyne’s modern saxophone fantasy on a theme of the banshee, Grasslands, Louise Farrenc’s boisterous, if uninterestingly-named ‘Second Overture,’ and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 — the complete opposite in scale to his 7th, 1941’s ‘The Leningrad.’

A detailed delicacy of tone, especially in the woodwind section, made Ravel’s homage to an older France sound particularly tender and nostalgic. Yet the players switched effortlessly to a different scale of sound in the spikes and sparks of Anna Clyne’s banshee world, Grasslands, complete with an exciting pizzicato chase in the last movement — foreshadowing the Shostakovich 9th that ended the second half. The brilliant saxophonist, Jess Gillam, almost co-led the orchestra in this weird phantasmagoria — striding on with a complete stage-presence, notwithstanding her pink suit and blue spectacles. However, another player had a chance to shine in the concerto, the overlooked double-bassist, who had a mysterious little accompaniment to perform alongside Jess’s saxophonic highs – a moment of real atmosphere.

A sardonic march, a cheeky fizzing curtain-raiser to an odd sort of symphony, is what the first movement of Shostakovich 9 is all about — a far cry from the tense, tortured spans of the Stalin-shadowed 5th and 7th. Here, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and their (batonless) conductor found much to enjoy — and full marks, of course, to leader, Lesley Hatfield and the ice-cold violin tingle achieved in her sinister-sounding mini-solo of the march theme. Even with such a divertissement of a symphony, Shostakovich still managed to create that hypnotic feel (which you find in the ‘Leningrad’ or in the 11th) in his slow movement — before the unsettling, quixotic torrents of the work reach their exciting finale. 

At Aberystwyth, the orchestra fielded c. 60 players, just right for the dimensions of the Arts Centre, and an audience of some 300. In this era of cuts to arts funding (even within the BBC) it is vital to maintain visits and tours to places which are a little off the usual orchestral beaten track. Perhaps the orchestra might consider going even further afield – deploying a detachment of string players to the Theatr Mwldan, Cardigan, for example – or chamber groups drawn from the various sections, to visit churches or village halls, or best of all, schools, in which classical music is desperately needed but often utterly absent.

Such considerations aside, the Aberystwyth concert was a good night for orchestra and audience, alike. Concertgoers in Wales are truly fortunate to have these inheritors of Irwin Hoffman’s BBC Welsh Orchestra.

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Pilgrimage to the peninsula

Image: Stuart Millson
STUART MILLSON reflects on his relocation to Wales

Born in London sixty years ago and although, as far as I know, possessing not a drop of Welsh blood, I now live in the country to the west of the River Severn, popularly known for its chapels, presided over by Kenneth Griffith-like ministers, its famous rugby players and opera-singers born in obscure green valleys (obscure, at least, to the English), its rousing songs, hymns and tunes: Men of Harlech, David of the White Rock, Cwm Rhondda – music and people, you might say, bred of heaven.

Throughout my life, my homes have been in England – in London, suburban, increasingly Greater-Londonish Kent, rural Kent, besieged by the planners; marshy Essex and hilly Gloucestershire – and I developed interests in English music, English pints and pubs, pilgrimages to Canterbury and Romney Marsh churches and bird sanctuaries (all some 300 miles away from Wales). Yet today, living in Cambria, it feels as though a Welsh moss, or ivy has entwined itself around my legs, rooting me to the spot – with late-night fog and early-morning mist blotting out any sight of the tips of the Severn suspension bridge, obscuring the entrance to the Severn Tunnel, and making me forget about my previous haunts, routines, and once-loved favourite places. What caused all this? What brought me here?

Thinking back, long-ago family holidays to Tenby or Aberdovey might have sown the seeds for the Welsh enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was the evocative section on Wales from our family’s 1970s’ AA Illustrated Guide to Britain (“the land of Merlin the Wizard and Dylan the Poet”). Or maybe it was the drive, undertaken with the girlfriend I would later marry, on a spring weekend in 1988 to Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire? The trip, even in those younger days when you are meant to have a surfeit of energy, felt like an act of escape from work and everyday life – the return journey spent, inevitably, on those ‘grass is greener’ thoughts, so common to travellers, deep down, ill at ease with some aspect of life. So maybe that explains it all: the vague, formless urge to escape – with only the ‘Celtic fringe’ of the British Isles, less congested by the knotty, breathless way of life everywhere else, now capable of offering retreat?

Part of the pilgrimage path. Image: Stuart Millson

All of these thoughts and memories – why and how have I landed here? – and isn’t it a miracle – jangled together, as I set off at the very end of February from home in Carmarthenshire to the City of St. David’s (the smallest city in Britain) for the 1st March St David’s Day pilgrimage to the cathedral, in its wide valley hollow, at the tip of a Pembrokeshire peninsula. According to Welsh hagiography, the sixth-century future Patron Saint of Wales, Dewi Sant was born in a thunderstorm by the clifftop – his mother, St. Non, giving birth on an apocalyptic night, where, miraculously, a well appeared, which continues flowing to this day, to bring forth legendarily life-giving, health-giving waters, considered particularly efficacious for sore eyes, or more serious ocular conditions. Several of the pilgrims gathering for this year’s St. David’s Day ceremony did, in fact, dab their eyelids with well-water – just prior to the Bishop of St. David’s, Dorrien Davies, almost re-baptising the throng (including a Catholic delegation from Kent and pilgrims from Ireland) using a bunch of watercress soaked in a full jug drawn from the well.

It was a simultaneously serious and light-hearted ceremony. Watercress was the thin, subsistence food used by St. David and his followers during periods of fasting. Today, as well as proving effective in the dousing of pilgrims, it also plays a part in a nightly ceremony (reinforced with port and Davidstow cheese!) initiated by the Order of St. David and St. Non. For more than a decade now, the Order (founded by the late Simon Evans and now presided over by one, Steve Turner, from Kent – but with, he tells me, a Welsh grandmother to his genetic credit) has participated in the annual ceremony. This year the Order brought to the altar not just its devotees, but an offering for the cathedral – a substantial cheque to help with urgent repair works to the ceiling of the Quire. It was noticeable that the cathedral bells were not chiming on St. David’s Day morning, no doubt a precaution at this time of crumbling roof masonry. Prayers were said for a swift restoration to the problem; and in a purely spoken service, held at 4pm on the eve of St. David’s Day, other more personal prayers – for family, loved ones, peace in our troubled world etc., – written on small sheets of paper, each imprinted with the emblem of St. James’s pilgrimage shell and left on a silver plate, were unfolded and read aloud.

A glow of early springtime sunshine filled the cathedral – wide, broad, crystal-clear light, all of a sudden, no longer the mean, cramped, cold rays of winter. It really did feel, especially with the daffodils in the cathedral grounds as golden as the cross of St. David, as if the seasons had changed before our eyes. And the sea, viewed from the clifftop at St. Non’s well, sparkled in the westering sun, but had all the stillness of well-water. Earlier, en route to the cathedral, not far from Fishguard, a bank of white cloud, far out at sea, resembled the gigantic cliffs of a lost landmass. I imagined the probable reaction of mediaeval pilgrims to such a sight – a miracle on the horizon, people pausing, fingers pointing at a sign of God’s grandeur.

The Bishop and Dean of St David’s, and the Mayor of the city, addressing the pilgrims. Image@ Stuart Millson

The 1st March is a great moment in the life of the small city – a place probably not a great deal larger than my old town of West Malling in Kent – but ennobled and important, far beyond its physical size, by its heritage of Celtic Christianity; by the cathedral cradled in its valley, and overlooked by what appears to be the strange, craggy tip of an extinct volcano. No city should ever be allowed to be larger than St. Davids. The streets, filled with pilgrims, or visitors who just happened to be on holiday on the day of the devotions – folk dressed in historic costume – children parading with dragons and (later in the day) a band evoking a Mardi Gras procession in Louisiana – the Bishop, Dean and Mayor at the Market Cross addressing the citizens, as the breeze caught the large Red Dragon flag of Wales – everything felt right, in its place.

It is important to come away from a pilgrimage with that ‘God’s-in-His-heaven’ feeling.

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Contemporary classics

Harvesting on the Sussex Downs, by John Charles Dollman.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
STUART MILLSON assesses some horizon-broadening CDs

Part of the pleasure (or occasionally, the necessary discomfort) of reviewing music, is to find unfamiliar works and composers – in genres, perhaps, not entirely to your taste – and embarking upon a process of self-training – dismissing your prejudices, trying to clear your mind and hearing the music as if it is the first music you have ever heard. Of course, the exercise is nearly impossible, but there are occasions when you genuinely begin to find an attraction to something that, hitherto, you might never have listened to.

The first such CD in this month’s review pile fits into the latter category: the chamber music of Justin Connolly (1933-2020) – an overlooked figure even in the realm of contemporary music, who, in the late-1950s came under the wing of Roberto Gerhard (composer of the choral-orchestral The Plague) and symphonist, Peter Racine Fricker.

Connolly, who became a teacher in his own right, developed what could be described as an astringent, even hard style, something which can be found and felt in a three-movement String Trio (Op. 43) – a work which might complement a Britten String Quartet, or the quartet by Stephen Matthews (a tonality-challenging work given some years ago at the English Music Festival).

Yet there is much light and shade in the score, and it would be fair to say that Connolly, like Britten, in his quest for a pure form of music, did not turn his back entirely on folklore. In Ceilidh, Op. 29, written with younger musicians in mind and performed in the US during the country’s bicentennial celebrations, the composer retains his customary ‘gimlet focus’ on technicality, but hints at an old-world atmosphere with movement titles such as, Gathering, Dordfiansa (spear-clashing dance), Night, and Four-hand reel. Recorded in venues as various as the Royal Academy of Music and the studios of the Australian Broadcasting Company, Melbourne, the passionate devotee of contemporary music and audio perfection will find the Justin Connolly collection essential listening.

Another contemporary-music CD – Distant Voices, New Worlds, Songs, Landscape and Histories – brings together the Sky Rhythms of Ed Hughes, Shirley J. Thompson’s Hymn to the Evening, Evelyn Ficarra’s What Larks, and Rowland Sutherland’s Modes from the Downs (the latter two pieces, both written three years ago).  In Sky Rhythms, Ed Hughes adapts words taken from the Mass Observation Archive Day Survey, from 1937 – an interesting and involving weaving together of everyday thoughts, worries concerning the world situation, and an evocation of Sussex – of England. Here are some extracts (the words of one, Mary Robinson):

I live in a seaside bungalow town, in a furnished bungalow,

Very small and draughty,

but fortunately,

looking out across open fields and country

to the South Downs…

… To the news’ agents

Daily Herald Placard

Stalin might do something to make our bread dearer

Further depressed by news in paper

which hopes that England will not let France down…

… The air is splendid,

we get whatever sunshine is going,

and witness superb skyscapes,

Felpham, where Blake lived, is near…’

A modern ‘Lark Ascending,’ a contemporary ‘Land of Lost Content,’ a ‘Paradise Postponed,’ or the paintings of John or Paul Nash, Evelyn Mary Dunbar, John Piper, Eric Ravilious – all of these thoughts and associations came into my mind in this strongly modern setting, which includes electric guitar, as well as flute and clarinet. Expertly performed, this production by Sussex musicians (ensembles, The New Music Players, The Orchestra of Sound and Light) shows that the landscape inspiration in our artistic DNA is unbroken.

A mellow tonality of summer warmth and wandering can be enjoyed in Shirley J. Thompson’s An Hymn to the Evening (a setting of Phillis Wheatley, from the eighteenth century) and in Matthew Sheeran’s Languet Anima, in which echoes of fourteenth-century music gently appear and drift for an all-too-brief three minutes — a piece reminiscent of modern orchestral settings of Byrd or Dowland.

Finally, to the music of Arthur Butterworth (1923-2014), a one-time player in the Hallé Orchestra (incidentally, his signature appeared, alongside that of his orchestral colleagues on the score of Vaughan Williams’s Eighth Symphony – premiered by Manchester’s great orchestra) – but he went on, not in the orchestral ranks, but to forge a career as a composer.

Windy Hill, on the Pennine Way. Image: Jooniur, Wikimedia Commons

Not for Butterworth, though, the challenges of atonality, the abandonment of convention by the brave, new ‘Manchester School’ of Maxwell Davies, Goehr and Birtwistle. In Butterworth, we are taken by the hand, rucksacks on our backs – as if by a musical Wainwright – to the peaks and tarns of the North, in a rhapsodic, but never sweet or self-consciously nostalgic survey of sky, rock, scrubby path, rainfall, tufts of moorland grass vibrating in the wind, and eerie, supernatural forest shadows. The Fifth Symphony from 2001-2; Three Nocturnes, Northern Summer Nights; The Quiet Tarn; The Green Wind – the listener will revel in the Sibelius-like passage of clouds, the full use of the late-romantic orchestra (with some gorgeous harp moments) and a sense of escapism, dreamy altitudes, and communing with Nature. As Butterworth proves, not all contemporary music has to conform to one standard. And as the South Downs composers also reveal, modernism need not be removed from a wider audience.

CD details: Justin Connolly, Music for Strings (plus…), metier label, mex 77209; Distant Voices, New Worlds, metier, mex 77131; Arthur Butterworth, Symphony No. 5 etc, Dutton Epoch, CDLX 7253. Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by the composer

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“The dawn’s early light” – American classical for today

October in the Catskills, Sanford Robinson Gifford, 1880
STUART MILLSON gets lambent glimpses of light

Kenneth Fuchs is Professor of Music Composition at the University of Connecticut. Born in 1956, Fuchs belongs to a generation of modern composers who, whilst creating a sound-world clearly of our time, have partially turned their backs on earlier avant-garde trends, in favour of symphonic music that is optimistic, open, communicative, cohesive and completely accessible to a wide audience — an important consideration in these times of dwindling arts funding and an audience that is not getting any younger. 

Inspired by a painting by his compatriot, Morris Louis — and entitled Point of Tranquility — Fuchs’s work of the same name is a mind-clearing, subtly dazzling eleven-minute tone-poem of sudden, shimmering sunlight. There is a sense of a sea dancing beneath silvery horizons, of new pages turning in life — or even a return to old haunts, refreshed and renewed after a long period of absence. A masterly deployment of orchestral colour, the Buffalo Philharmonic and their conductor, JoAnn Falletta, set us on course for an album that gives us a further three revelatory scores.

Next comes Russell Platt’s Symphony in Three Movements, inspired again by an artist — this time, Clyfford Still (1904-80), creator of what has been described as “dramatically jagged colour fields” and “abstract expressionism.” This work is the most modern item on the CD, with an outdoor, breath-of-fresh-air tonality sharing the orchestral platform with more dissonant forms, and showing in that exciting brew the tremendous virtuosity and flexibility of the Buffalo orchestra, which emerges here as a top-flight US ensemble. (Why haven’t they been invited to the Proms? Why do we never hear them on BBC Radio 3?)

However — for me — the most intoxicating work on the recording is the Oboe Concerto by Randall Svane (born 1955, although the CD notes list his birth-date as 1972). As a lover of Vaughan Williams’s 1944 Oboe Concerto, I was anxious to hear Randall’s piece — a classic example of new Americana. A composer of church music and late-Romantic symphonic works, with distant echoes of Roy Harris, Samuel Barber or the melodious Howard Hanson, the new concerto begins in a pastoral dream: a long, languid span — a haze — of bittersweet reflection; similar in pace to the opening of Walton’s Viola Concerto. The oboe soloist (in this case the Buffalo Philharmonic’s principal, Henry Ward) clearly believes in the work with all his heart, and hearing this gently-questing, passionate piece makes you believe that a new Vaughan Williams is at work in the world. The three movements are entitled: ‘Flowing,’ ‘Very slow,’ and ‘Quick and light.’ Notice the simple titles, no arcane or technical musical notation, just names that provide an easy guide for listeners, particularly newcomers to classical music.

The album concludes with Chinese-American composer, Wang Jie’s orchestral tour de force, The Winter that United Us — a brilliant Stravinsky-like orchestral showpiece, culminating in a broad, noble, hopeful finale; showing the listener that music can help us to overcome the shadows that pass over our world — in this instance, the Covid pandemic and the suffering and anxiety that forced all of humanity to face up to a common crisis.

Recorded at the Kleinhans Music Hall and superbly recorded by sound-engineer, Bernd Gottinger, I have no hesitation in recommending this collection.

CD details: Contemporary Landscapes, Beau Fleuve Records, 605996-998593. bpo.org

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Sounds of sovereigns

Coronation Banquet of George IV

Royal Throne of Kings

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Albion Records, ALBCD062 

 STUART MILLSON finds royalist strains in the complex composer

Since the days of Purcell and Handel, English composers have often excelled at royal music, or more accurately, marches and anthems for great regal occasions. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) did not quite fit into this tradition, with Elgar, Bliss and Walton largely assuming that role during his lifetime. He used to say he would never write such music. He nevertheless famously composed for Elizabeth ll’s coronation (‘O Taste and See,’ a setting of Psalm 34, and ‘All People That On Earth Do Dwell,’ based on Psalm 100) although in a way that stressed the link between monarch and people – which is characteristic of his complex character and work, bridging ancient and modern, mystical and democratic.

Vaughan Williams also wrote for monarchs less directly, in his many incidental orchestral and vocal pieces for (or inspired by) Shakespeare’s history plays – dramas laying bare the trials and tribulations of the kings of old, the dark moments of their reigns as well as the moments of jubilation. Ironically enough, on the strength of this latest CD release from Albion Records, it could be argued that Vaughan Williams was in fact the most prolific servant of the Royal remit of any English composer, commemorating England’s battles, bloodshed, dynastic struggles, civil wars and crownings of Kings across the entire span of the country’s life as a monarchy.

Shakespeare being the inspiration, the disc offers us such gems as the 1913 Stratford Suite, in which ‘Greensleeves’ and several other famous tunes from Tudor antiquity make an appearance. Throughout the 72 minutes of music carefully curated and conducted by Vaughan Williams expert, Dr. James Ross, the listener will recognise folk-tunes which appear in other guises, such as Henry lV’s ‘Princess Royal’ — also heard in the quick-march opening to the composer’s jaunty ‘Sea Songs,’ ‘Halfe Hannikin’ (found in Sir John in Love and Fat Knight), Dowland’s ‘Pavane Lachrymae’ which was used by Sir Granville Bantock in Old English Dances, and finally, the noble plainsong melody which makes an appearance in the semi-final movement of Tippett’s Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles, and in the Allan Gray film score for the classic Powell and Pressburger film, A Canterbury Tale — the uplifting ‘Angelus ad Virginem.’

However, what makes this recording such an exciting find, the production such a success — so atmospheric and authentic, throughout — is the use of a smaller orchestra, in this instance the poised, elegant, silvery strings (listen out for the latter quality in Track 18) of the often-overlooked Kent Sinfonia. Recorded in Kent churches (Wye and Hythe) James Ross’s players bring an atmosphere of the theatre to the proceedings, but sacrifice nothing in the expansive and spine-tingling moments in Richard ll, or in Henry V’s appointment with destiny in the “vasty fields of France” (the seven-minute long ‘Henry V Overture’).

The recording has plenty of ‘air’ around it, so the dry acoustic of studios and modern concert-halls is, mercifully, avoided. A Tudorish brass sound, spot-on woodwind and martial side-drums ring out from the spaces of the mediaeval churches (so often the best recording venues), whilst the choral contribution of the Albion Singers in Henry lV – especially the rich baritones – suggests a larger number of singers than were actually present at the making of the record. Guildhall-trained soprano, Eloise Irving, also brings her magic to solo songs, such as in the famous melancholy setting from Othello, ‘Sing willow, willow willow.’ 

With informative programme notes, excellent photography and artwork from the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society’s John Francis, the CD is complete joy from start to finish: my ‘album of the year.’

CD details: Vaughan Williams, Royal Throne of Kings, Albion Records, ALBCD062 

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All eyes on Opera Rara…

STUART MILLSON enjoys hearing Donizetti’s bel canto legacy honoured

At this year’s prestigious OPUS KLASSIK Awards, the Opera Rara recording label took centre-stage. Its success in winning the plaudits of the judges with a handsome CD set of a little-known opera by Offenbach, La Princesse de Trebizonde, has very much put the spotlight on a discerning recording initiative. Their latest release, Donizetti’s equally rare (1828) L’esule di Roma – ‘the exile from Rome’ – brings the work of opera conductor, Carlo Rizzi, to the fore, once again, as well as reminding us that 225 years have passed since Donizetti’s birth.

Rizzi, for many years associated with Welsh National Opera, has a rich and varied repertoire and endeared himself very much to audiences at the New Theatre, Cardiff, home of WNO, during the heyday of his tenure. The maestro’s Italianate ‘light touch’ – as opposed to the Teutonic heft of mid- to late-19th century opera – is put to great use in the bel canto genre of Donizetti. Yet this particular piece has many of the hallmarks of ‘heroic opera’, set as it is in the reign of Tiberius – whose opponents have been vanquished by General Publius, an outcome hailed by all it seems, except the Senator Murena, father of the beautiful Argelia, who has mysteriously disappeared… The reason: the ardent Septimus (the son of a man exiled by Murena) has returned to win Argelia’s heart – freely given – a situation which leads to his imprisonment. There is the unnerving unravelling of a political conspiracy, and the mental breakdown of Murena, who has condemned Septimus to death – but then, the eventual pardon and reuniting with Argelia – a typically joyful end for an opera of this era. 

Bass-baritone Nicola Alaimo, bel canto soprano Albina Shagimuratova, and tenor Sergey Romanovsky in the title role, lead the cast – supported by that orchestral precision-instrument, Britten Sinfonia, whose ensemble size as a chamber orchestra make it perfect for those intense moments for the romantic duo at the heart of this Roman epic – and yet also capable of the grand moment (a prelude, perhaps, to the age of Verdi). And what a combination the leading stars make: each scene and aria outshining the previous, giving the opera a sense of unrelenting drama, with no feeling of drift or dullness, just an immersion into the fate of the exile, and the pain of internal exile, in the stifling atmosphere of Tiberius’s citadel.

With an excellent CD booklet (synopsis, artist profiles etc.) the new discs are a firm recommendation for those who relish front-rank operatic performance, the intrigue and passion of Ancient Rome, and recordings capable of evoking the radiant, searing sounds of the opera house.

CD details: Donizetti, L’esule di Roma, Opera Rara, (ORC64)

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Looming Labour pains

Image: Wikimedia Commons
STUART MILLSON says the almost guaranteed Starmer government will need to be realistic

Staring into the political abyss, in this, the last fortnight of the General Election campaign, the British Conservative Party is probably asking itself: how has it come to this? The impressive majority won by Boris Johnson in the 2019 Brexit election across large areas of the midlands and northern England where Labour once reigned unchallenged, has dissolved into nothingness. The allegiance of those former Labour voters (the result of Labour abandoning the real workers in favour of a ‘smarter’ internationalism forged in the salons of central London) has boomeranged back to the party of prices-and-incomes policies and trades unionism. 

Reinventing Labour as an electable, reassuringly mainstream force for common-sense, whose delegates sing God Save The King at their conference and vote for increased defence spending, Sir Keir Starmer’s determination to pull his members away from the Corbyn years of grievance-Socialism (and from the Blairite legacy of free migration and easy credit) has pulled the rug from under his Tory opponents.

Combined with the catastrophic mistakes made by the Conservatives – shindigs in Downing Street during lockdown, a Liz Truss economic gamble that succeeded in doubling everybody’s mortgage payments, the present scandal about election-date gambling by senior Conservatives – Starmer has emerged to raise again the tattered and tarnished banner of trust – in politicians, and in the reliability of government. Curiously enough for an Opposition leader who mocked Truss’s ideology of growth-at-all-costs, Starmer has placed at the top of his agenda the very idea of those denounced free-marketeers – that the only possibility of clambering out of the United Kingdom’s slurry pit of debt and billion-of-pounds social spending is to shore up the real, productive economy. 

Yet can he ever achieve his growth-to-fuel-the-welfare-state objective? With the industries that Labour so relied upon from 1945 to 1979 now either pruned to their thinnest-possible capacity, or completely non-existent, can a Starmer Government ever hope to re-seed industry? After the 5th July, will the new ministers subsidise, nationalise Port Talbot steelworks, protect British jobs, rescue us from privatised price-rises in the (Tory-created) deregulated energy market by establishing a new Great British energy company? Economic experts such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies fear that no new government will have much chance to address Britain’s ever-growing state borrowing. 

There seems little doubt that Starmer will partially ramp up Britain’s defences, say the right things that will appeal to Middle England and the old Red Wall/Brexit seats of the North, and within the precincts of government will pay little attention to ‘woke’ – one of our few remaining growth industries. He will see planning regulations as being against growth – a curious similarity with Truss – yet will make the mistake of viewing housing development and wind farms as generators of wealth. He will pay little attention to countryside matters or rural voters’ concerns: he is, after all (like Jeremy Corbyn) a London politician, through and through.

Sir Keir also promises a new Border Command, to tackle the mass-migrant arrivals on the Kent coast – but just what does that mean? Just a renaming of the existing messy, ineffectual Border Force? His undoubted successes in Scotland will relegate the SNP, and that alone is a good thing for the Union of the Kingdom – so his victory will be a mixed bag. It will usher in, however, a long period of further detachment from politics: he and his team look technocratic and too-serious, even when they remove their ties at those irritating ‘let-me-level-with-you’ moments. And a year from now, everyone who voted for the Labour landslide is likely to be complaining about electricity prices, too-high mortgages, ‘Labour dictatorship’….

Starmer is in the real world – a world away from Corbyn and the recent Labour past – and he and his inner circle know that they will have to deal with Meloni and Le Pen, Russia and China. So his government – tested by world events – may reflect a new managerialism, not an old ideology. We drift into new waters, new times…

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A Hispanic and Germanic journey

STUART MILLSON travels from Moorish Spain to Beethoven’s more-ish Mass

Newly minted by the imaginative Meridian CD label comes a recording which is best played, late in the evening – on a warm night – with a glass of Rioja to hand and candlelight flickering in the corner of your room. In the absence of real Iberian surroundings, the disc – From Al Andalus to the Americas – takes the listener from the times of the Moorish domination of Spain from the eighth century, to the fall of Granada in 1492 to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and eventually the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the era of composers Granados, Turina and the Argentinian, Ginastera. 

The motivating force for and on the recording is the acclaimed American soprano, Christine Moore Vassallo, whose mother, of Arab-Levantine ancestry, inspired the singer to delve into the richly-textured, heady, overlapping mix of Muslim, Spanish, folk, religious, pastoral music and lamentations – fanned, like seeds in the air, to the New World, but rooted in the hills and gardens of Al-Andalus (the name for Spain during Umayyad rule). For this Meridian recording, Christine’s collaborators are Philip Arditti – an expert in Sephardi culture and an exponent of Darbuka, Riqq and Frame drums, Rachel Beckles Wilson, a writer and composer who is one of the West’s foremost authorities on the music of the oud, the guitar virtuoso, Pablo Gimenez, flautist Anthony Robb, and the Spanish pianist, Jorge Robaina. Each musician contributes to this fascinating hour-long time-travel through the history of the Iberian peninsula.

An anonymous pre-15th century piece begins the journey – Lamma bada yatathanna – from a poetic genre of the Arab language which appeared in the tenth century. The song, though, is ageless, describing a gentleman’s interest in the ‘swaying hips’ of a woman, and bemoaning his malady of love. Sephardic songs then follow (arranged in 1975 by Manuel Valls), leading on to three anonymous 15th to 17th century items, collected by the poet, Lorca (1898-1936) Canciones antiguas espanoles; the first ballad, Las morillas de Jaen, telling the tale of three Moorish girls, converts to Christianity, gathering olives and apples on dusty terraces, but earning, too, admiring glances from a nearby farmer. The Iberian climate clearly inspires ‘youth, mirth and warm desire’…

In Canciones del Jardin Secreto, a composer of modern times, Anton Garcia Abril (1933-2021) sets old Arab texts, including the lament of Boabdil (or Abdullah, the last Moorish king) for his lost fortress of Alhambra:

‘Longed-for Alhambra, your castles are weeping

About what happened to me, Lord Abu-Abdullah

Give me my stallion and white blade

And let us go and take back the Alhambra…’

The collection ends with the colours and magic of Ginastera’s Five popular Argentinian songs; taking us to the New World; to the frontiers of the Latin civilisation founded by trade, exploration, conquest, yet tinged and underpinned by the cadences of a culture – that of Islam and the Moors – which itself formed one of the world’s mighty empires.

Gustav Blaeser’s 1840 model for a never-made monument to Beethoven

Finally, by way of complete contrast, we travel to a mediaeval church in the ancient kingdom of Kent (the land now criss-crossed by motorways, the pilgrims in shorter supply) to a performance of Beethoven’s Mass in C major, given by the powerful forces of the 70-strong East Malling Singers – Kent’s large-in-scale, large-in-ambition ‘amateur’ choral society. Able to attract exceptionally fine instrumental accompanists and accomplished soloists, the Singers (conducted by Ciara Considine, with organist, Nick Bland) patiently rehearse their repertoire for many gruelling weeks – a repertoire that typically includes Masses by Haydn, the occasional Handel oratorio, uplifting anthems and hymns by Parry and Vaughan Williams. 

At first, the regular concertgoer and buyer of CDs might pause before considering a non-professional performance of a Beethoven Mass. But such reticence would be a mistake, because here – like an amateur orchestra tackling Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony – we enjoy the pleasure of hearing the rush of adrenaline of aspiring artists, our fellow human beings, activating every sinew in the cause of doing their very best. And in the wide acoustic of the Church of St. James the Great, the rising swell of sound in Beethoven’s opening Kyrie is just as satisfying for any true music-lover, as if you had just ventured into a Deutsche Grammophon recording studio. With a reverential Bruckner motet as an extra item on the CD, how could you resist?

CD details: From Al-Andalus to the Americas, Meridian, CDE 84647

Beethoven, Mass in C Major. A private recording, but for further details contact Mrs. Elaine Gordon of East Malling Singers,www.eastmallingsingers.co.uk

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Masters of the English musical renascence

Image: Stuart Millson

STUART MILLSON reports from the 17th English Music Festival

Ever since 2006, except for the shortest of absences due to the Covid crisis, the Oxfordshire village of Dorchester-on-Thames has been hosting the English Music Festival, the EMF – the artistic creation of one dedicated Englishwoman, Mrs. Em Marshall-Luck. The first-ever concert was held on an October evening, given by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by (the late) David Lloyd Jones – a conductor noted for his love of opera and Russian music, but also for the music of the English musical renascence: the era often seen as dominated by Elgar, but actually the time when Holst, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Bliss, Ireland and many others shaped a national musical style (or styles) with their expansive symphonies and folk-infused song-cycles.

For an initially small Festival with great ambitions, but – inevitably – with limited funds, the participation of the BBC’s most versatile orchestra was a masterstroke of strategy by the Festival founder – ensuring a prestigious beginning to her concert series and an all-important broadcast on BBC Radio 3. At once the Festival was put on the map and thanks to many others being inspired by Em’s great enthusiasm, has grown in scale and scope through the years, with the BBC’s orchestra still the mainstay of the opening concert.

Today, the Festival takes place over the May Bank Holiday, a time when the countryside surrounding Dorchester comes into its own: willow cotton drifting on the air; the footpaths to the Thames laced with white cow parsley; meadows of buttercups leading to Iron Age embankments; and nearby, under the full canopy of churchyard trees, the welcome shade and cool recesses of places such as St. Peter, Little Wittenham. 

Here, among the tomb chests and brasses, the Oxfordshire of quiet parsons and fussy parochial church councils can be found – but also the dreamy, immemorial Thames-scape of William Morris and Kenneth Grahame, the immemorial England of T.S. Eliot, Sir John Betjeman, or Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. High above the hamlet, like a sentinel in the downland, stand the trees of the Wittenham Clumps: inspiration for Paul Nash – and welcome shade for grazing cows and OS-guided walkers who find themselves a little too warm after wandering to the ridge on a hot day. As was the case with Richard Adams’s rabbits of Berkshire-set Watership Down, the view here seems to take in ‘the whole world!’ – or at least, the Chilterns to the east, Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford to the north, and beyond, an outline of the beginnings of the English Midlands.

Dorchester Abbey is the largest building visible in the landscape (save for a lurking, distant 1930s-looking factory-type structure to the northwest). The Abbey has been a seat of Christianity since the seventh century and a survivor of the reign of Henry Vlll – its great window and towering arches a worthy rival to more famous landmarks, such as Gloucester Cathedral. As the Wittenham Clumps were to Paul Nash, so the Abbey became an inspiration to fellow artist, John Piper – and in our own time, for the orchestral musicians of the EMF, the great church offering a near-perfect acoustic and a truly inspiring setting for their concerts. 

And for the musical offering of Friday 24th May, Doreen Carwithen’s Suffolk Suite opened the BBC Concert Orchestra’s programme, the work based upon romantic and folk-reminiscent melodies originally penned for a short 1950s transport film, entitled East Anglian Holiday. A superior piece of public information-film scoring, the suite begins with a stirring ‘spirit of England’ theme, which gives the impression that you are back on the Wittenham Clumps, surveying the majesty of ‘this other Eden.’ However, East Anglia has no downland, so listeners find themselves rubbing shoulders with morris-dancers at a Suffolk festivity, or being lulled into an afternoon slumber by the waters of Orford Ness. A stirring, martial portrait of Framlingham Castle ends the sequence, but not before a brief reappearance of the moving opening tune – a pleasing farewell to the East of England on Carwithen’s bus or rail trip to the county.

Holst’s imposing and early (1899-1900) Symphony in F major, subtitled The Cotswolds, was the main work in the concert – its last movement, like the Carwithen, conjuring scenes of bucolic, open-air celebration and the atmosphere of a countryside where people still whistled folk-tunes. Yet the work’s other movements sometimes seemed to bypass the village green, with an altogether less scene-painting feel – although it has to be said that the brooding and dark slow movement is a memorial in music to the Arts and Crafts luminary, William Morris. Conductor Martin Yates and the BBC Concert Orchestra played with deeply-felt intensity, with brass and the darker hues of the orchestra summoning the spirits of the Cotswold hills and combes.

Brass instruments were very much in evidence in the world premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Richard II – A Concert Fantasy, woven together from fragments of music and ‘cues’ written by the composer for a planned wartime radio play. The arranger and bringer-to-life of this Shakespeare scenario is Nathaniel Lew, Professor of Music at St. Michael’s College, Colchester, Vermont, who – like conductor, Martin Yates (the arranger of RVW’s Falstaff suite, ‘Fat Knight’, also once premiered at this Festival) – has a fascination with the rescuing and revival of works once thought to be lost, or not to have existed at all. The performance fully honoured the EMF’s guiding philosophy of what can almost be seen as musical archaeology, or restoration.

Saturday morning’s chamber recital featured Rupert Marshall-Luck, violin, and Peter Cartwright, piano, doing their brilliant bit in bringing obscure works into the limelight, including Ernest Farrar’s Celtic Suite, Bliss’s Theme and Cadenza, and sonatas by Herbert Howells and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (whose Clarinet Concerto, played by Michael Collins, featured in the first-night concert). Known for his authoritative performances of Elgar’s famous Violin Sonata, Rupert Marshall-Luck, brought gravitas to the Howells and Stanford, aided by the concerto-like strength of Peter Cartwright’s piano playing. Both artists channelled huge energy and concentration into what was a lengthy, often heavyweight chamber programme, which allowed us to see the overlooked greatness of England’s heritage of smaller-scale works.

Hilary Davan Wetton, with the Godwine Choir. Image: Stuart Millson

My journey to Dorchester ended this year with the Saturday evening concert by the Godwine Choir conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton, an effervescent, ever-youthful 80-year-old veteran of the concert podium. Addressing the audience on the desperate need for arts funding in Britain, and contrasting how Parisian politicians would authorise the pouring of money into any festival of French music, the Maestro went on to conduct choral masterpieces such as Vaughan Williams, O Clap Your Hands; Elgar’s 1914 Give Unto The Lord, but with time, too, for the enchanting Blake-inspired part-song by Havergal Brian, The Dream – with a folkish, fairy atmosphere of glades and glow worms. Dreamscapes were also created by the wonderful Godwine voices in the form of Holst’s Sanskrit-inspired Hymns from the Rig Veda, pieces that had the Abbey audience spellbound, especially one of my concert companions, a youngish (still under-40) relative newcomer to music. Proof indeed, should the Arts Council require it, that you stimulate an interest in classical music by playing to people… classical music.

With its Suffolk and Sanskrit music, its Cotswolds and choral contributions, the 2024 EMF may well go down as a vintage ‘season’ – but we say that every year.

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Is this a dagger they see before them?

STUART MILLSON is appalled to find Mid Wales Opera facing closure

Founded 35 years ago to bring the finest music and drama to rural towns and communities, Mid Wales Opera is a company specialising in bringing pared-down versions of the greatest music-dramas to far-flung parts of the country. 

On Saturday 23rd March, their run of Verdi’s Macbeth came to an end at the c. 500-seat Brecon Theatre (Theatr Brycheiniog), with a capacity audience enjoying Jeremy Sams’s English version of the score. Directed by Richard Studer – and full marks here for the stage lighting and ‘recycling’ of roles among the chorus – Mid Wales’s own glorious opera company succeeded in generating a dramatic effect, just as overwhelming as anything you might hear at Welsh or English National Opera.

How was it possible for an orchestra-pit ensemble, just 15-strong, to conjure much of Verdi’s lush orchestration? Under conductor Jonathan Lyness the resident chamber orchestra, Ensemble Cymru, achieved this miracle – the timpanist also playing the side-drum, and their splendid cellist generating a rich, resonant sound in those dark moments of the drama. 

On stage, meanwhile, Macbeth’s court, began its disintegration: soldiers with a Fascistic air, reminiscent of Richard Loncraine’s film of Richard lll, marched up and down, Lady Macbeth – the brilliant stage presence of Mari Wyn Williams unleashing her amoral powers, and Macbeth himself, sung by Jean-Kristof Bouton, descending into his ‘feverish visions’ as the apparition of the murdered Banquo appears at a castle feast.

The witches, dressed as 1950s’ office secretaries, but with demonic eye make-up reminiscent of Kathleen Byron’s unsettling appearance in the 1947 film, Black Narcissus, deserve great praise for their unsettling performance. Finally, the end comes for Macbeth as a forest supernaturally advances upon his fortress – actually, the English army in camouflage, although on stage at Mid Wales Opera only the Scottish saltire was raised. (Surely a major omission that the Cross of St. George did not appear?!)

What next for Mid Wales Opera? A real-life dramatic crisis, no less: the shocking removal of one hundred per cent of their grant from the Arts Council of Wales, casting doubt over whether productions of this kind could ever be staged again. Is this a dagger they see before them? It would seem so. But the story is the same, everywhere. Last year, the BBC tried to disband its own elite choir, the famous BBC Singers, and cut its symphonic strength across three ensembles. Meanwhile, the length and breadth of these islands, from Birmingham to Bournemouth, our orchestras and theatres struggle to convince those in power of the vital need for the arts. 

Quite simply, Britain now has a choice: do we just become a TV/consumer society, turning our backs on the splendour and enrichment of music and the arts? Or do we challenge the Arts Council and those in political office for a change in direction? As the wise Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger put it: “Neglect the civilised arts at your peril…”

To support the appeal for Mid Wales Opera, write to Bryn Wgan, Caersws, Powys, Wales, SY17 5QU