Posted on by Stuart Millson

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

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

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.

Posted on by Richard Dove

A charm of Ffinches

Alexander Ffinch, by Harriet Lloyd-Smith (2011)

Parallels

Alexander Ffinch, the organ of Cheltenham College Chapel, Divine Art Recordings. DDX 21112

RICHARD DOVE is transported by a new album of organ music

My father adored church organ music. At the weekend, I would often wake to the grand noise of Nôtre Dame, Rouen, or the three manual, 44 stop organ at Freiburg Cathedral (a particular favourite). I was constantly reminded of him as I listened to Parallels, a new CD by Alexander Ffinch.

Ffinch is the organist at Cheltenham College and oversaw a complete rebuild of the organ in 2017. There is an intimacy between player and instrument which is both rare and wonderful. There is also a refreshing boldness in the selection of compositions. Where else could one find Gustav Holst alongside Coldplay’s Chris Martin? As Ffinch explains in the sleevenotes:

Today, one of my daily duties is to play to 700 students at the start of their working day. I am facing a generation with the power to instantly access the music they want at any time and trust me, it’s not likely to be original organ music. So to capture their attention, I have enjoyed turning to classical some pop/rock arrangements to present music they hear elsewhere.

The Coldplay song ‘Paradise’ soars around the college chapel, stirring even the most indolent student.

There are other surprises on the recording – a Suite by Florence Price, an African-American composer who combines her classical training with Southern black American culture. Her ‘Symphony No 1 in E Minor’ was premiered at the Chicago World’s Fair by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. The concert was the first performance of a composition by a black woman by a major orchestra in the US. The ‘Suite’ is jaunty, mellifluous and immediately engaging, with jazz phrasing and gospel singing inspiration.

There is a wonderfully atmospheric, gently-paced interpretation of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod,’ benefiting from the resonance of the chapel’s ancient stones.

Dan Locklair’s ‘Rubrics’ is another surprise, and requires Ffinch’s masterful dexterity. After a tumultuous first movement, we move to a gentle second movement using silence as a sort of leitmotif. As the composer explains in the excellent accompanying booklet: “To be sure, it is impossible to have true silence when music is sounded. But the illusion of silence can be suggested.”

The recording closes with Leon Boellman’s ‘Suite Gothique.’ It was early morning when I listened to the Suite and its third movement ‘Prière a Nôtre-Dame.’ My father was almost with me in the room as the melody floated and swirled. Nôtre Dame was his first port of call on any visit to Paris. From this embracing reverie we launch into the thunderous final movement, the Toccata. It awakened the household as Dad was prone to do. Time to put the kettle on.

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 4 Comments

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

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Keys to the past – Restoration in Rochester

Wenceslaus Hollar, Coronation Procession of Charles II Through London, 1662
STUART MILLSON visits one of Kent’s great houses – and savours a perfect choice of music

On the eve of his royal return and progress from Dover to London in 1660, the heir to the throne, the second Charles Stuart, paused for rest at the City of Rochester on the River Medway. He stayed in an Elizabethan mansion built in 1587, on a gradient just above Rochester’s main thoroughfare – a stately town abode that took the name, Restoration House, in honour of the great event that would soon be formally confirmed by the English state

Today, some 360 years since that first visit, Restoration House continues to project and transmit an aura of history to its many visitors, thanks to the care, custodianship and ownership of patrons of the arts, Jonathan Wilmot and Robert Tucker. On Saturday 7th October, these renaissance and restoration gentlemen hosted a recital by the emerging eminence that is harpsichordist, Nathaniel Mander – a young musician already distinguished by a recording of J.S. Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations, and performances with the celebrated Les Musicians du Louvre and Marc Minkowski. 

In a grand, yet intimate candlelit room, accessed by an ascent of a wooden staircase (upon which a ghost must surely walk past midnight), Mr. Mander performed a recital of harpsichord pieces, from Frescobaldi and Froberger in the middle of the 17th century, to Bach and Handel, a century later. But at the centre of the concert, echoes of Tudor and Elizabethan England abounded, in the form of Grounds, Almans and Fantasias by the masters of that first English musical renascence, Byrd and Gibbons.

The audience was particularly delighted by the soloist’s engaging introductory mini-talk before each work, a sometimes humorous, neat lacing-up of the historical context of the music – none so remarkable as Johan Jakob Froberger’s travels to England, during which he was not only robbed on a European highway, but intercepted by pirates at sea, thus arriving at the royal court in little more than rags donated by sailors. Froberger had to play some music before his Royal hosts believed who he was.

Historical authenticity was very much the lodestar of the evening – Nathaniel performing on Restoration House’s Zenti Harpsichord of 1658, an instrument once in the possession of and adapted to the needs of Queen Christina of Sweden (r.1632-1654). The craftsmanship which created the instrument remains a thing of wonder – a work of art itself, a piece of furniture so delicate, it seemed almost dangerous to walk near it. Yet Nathaniel Mander drew from the elegantly-turned casket on its delicate, spindly legs sounds of such antique quality, that audience members – judging from their closed eyes and expressions of sheer peace – seemed transported to the candlelit past.

For me, two of the highlights were the Ground by Thomas Tomkins and Nathaniel’s first encore to the evening’s proceedings, the Aria to Bach’s Goldberg Variations ~ the five-minute meditation that forms the beginning and end to the piece. For Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656) church music was a lifelong calling. From his early days at St. Davids, Pembrokeshire, to his life in the service of Worcester Cathedral (during which time he endured the ravages of the Civil War), Tomkins came to signify all that we understand by the English ecclesiastical choral tradition – anthems, pieces for services, which rely so much on great spans of sound (the imprint of Tallis and Byrd) and which, centuries later, would continue through Parry, Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Howells. Yet we discovered from Nathaniel that following the destruction of the Tomkins home in a Civil War bombardment, the composer – taken in by kind friends – sought solace in the writing of dozens of pieces for harpsichord. An English melancholy was certainly conjured by our soloist in the Tomkins Ground.

However, happier thoughts were prompted by the inclusion of Byrd’s folk-based airs, The Woods So Wilde and Selingers Round; music which, along with a spirited Allegro by a gourmandising Handel, provided an uplifting, animating spirit to a memorable oak-brown October evening.

Nathaniel Mander is artist-in-residence at Restoration House. His recording of Bach’s Goldberg Vatiations is available on the ICSM label

Posted on by Richard Dove

Transporting music

Image: On the South Downs Way. Malcolm Oakley. Wikimedia Commons
RICHARD DOVE savours the sounds of Ed Hughes and Airat Ichmouratov

On a couple of occasions, I have cycled across the South Downs, and even managed (once) the slow climb up Ditchling Beacon. I should have had Ed Hughes’ music to accompany me. It would have made a wonderful bike ride even more special. 

His Music for the South Downs is a recent release on the Metier label and part funded, in a most enlightened way, by the South Downs National Park Authority. The music embraces the rolling landscape and its endless natural variety.  We can be in open fields and wooded valleys, beside fresh bright streams and rolling waves. The music is both evocative and grounded in this verdant environment. Listening to Flint Movement 2 on a dull and rainy afternoon, I was transported to a forest watching the sunbeams dance through the leaves – and then in the next movement I am on the bank of a fast-flowing stream. Such is the magical power of Ed Hughes’ music. 

It was composed for Sam Moore’s film, South Downs: A Celebration, to mark the National Park’s tenth anniversary, and is played by the New Music Players, founded by Hughes and the Primrose Piano Quartet. Ed is professor of composition at the University of Sussex and is very obviously steeped in the South Downs landscape. He has walked the paths that he now portrays in this music. I will ensure that Hughes’ music is with me when I next tackle the South Downs trails.  He might even encourage me to ascend effortlessly up Ditchling Beacon. And that takes some doing.

On a first listen to Airat Ichmouratov’s Piano Concerto (a recent release on Chandos) I could not get Tchaikovsky out of my mind. He is clearly an influence on Ichmouratov. The notes to the CD underline my first impression in a description of piano, woodwinds and glockenspiel engaging in a Tchaikovskian exchange of scurrying semiquavers. Indeed, the use of percussion throughout the work to punctuate, embellish and encourage is consistently surprising.

In the Viola Concerto, also on the CD, Ichmouratov brings in tubular bells to build the rousing climax before closing with the melancholic tones of a clarinet. Both works are masterfully played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer. Ichmouratov is guided by tonality and romantic traditions in his exuberant music coupled with a very original sense of drama. The soloist in the Viola concerto No 1 is Elvira Misbakhova who wanted something new and challenging for her doctoral performance at the University of Montreal.  She certainly got it. 

For the Piano concerto, Jean-Philippe Sylvestre is the soloist and it needs all the energy of this “poet of the piano” (as described by conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin) to take on this demanding Concerto where the piano is rarely silent for more than a few bars. In the words of Airat Ichmouratov: “When I compose I hear a certain tonality and simply follow what I hear.  Sometimes I end up with surprising key relations.” Quite true and well worth an absorbing listen.   

Posted on by Richard Dove

Prom perfection

Image: Wikimedia Commons
RICHARD DOVE relives a wonderful Last Night

For some it is all about vexillology.  For some the study of the flags being waved defined the evening. For the Daily Mail, the plentiful EU flags were a clear and obvious betrayal of Brexit. But they chose not to notice the quite resplendent union jack blazer on display in a plush box or the St George flag shirt (mine) on display in the stalls.

I had to look up another dominant flag being waved in the hot, sweltering arena. It was the flag of Norway to honour the statuesque mezzo soprano Lise Davidsen. Her voice soared around the Royal Albert Hall as she embraced arias by Wagner, Mascagni and Verdi. She stands tall – indeed, the same height as conductor Marin Alsop even as she is perched on the conductor’s podium. Lise’s dresses (three changes) were wonderfully theatrical and created for her for the evening by Norwegian designer Carejanni.

The programme was diverse, adventurous and traditional. The perfect mix. Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei was played with great sensitivity by star cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who for one piece took up a solo location in the centre of the arena, giving the ardent Promenaders, many of whom had queued since early that morning, a privileged view.

Marin Alsop in action in 2017. Image: Mastrangelo Reino /A2img. Wikimedia Commons

We had three world premieres with the composers present and spotlighted after the performances – James Wilson’s 1922, Roxanna Panufnik’s Coronation Sanctus and Laura Karpman’s Higher Further Faster Together. You felt the strong guiding hand of Alsop in these choices. She is a pioneer of new music and, as she said in her closing speech, gender equality in classical music. She was even brave enough to mention Aberystwyth as a location of a Proms concert next year. She admitted she had been practicing the pronunciation all day. I imagined the maestro stalking the back rooms of the RAH not with a Verdi score but a guide to Welsh place names. Let’s hope Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiligogogoch puts a bid to host one year. Marin will certainly earn her fee.

It was a party atmosphere but tempered by reverence for the performers. The BBC Symphony Orchestra played their hearts out, and the loudest sustained cheers were for the BBC Singers, once threatened with extinction but now sort of reprieved (we must remain vigilant to keep them a going concern). The BBC Chorus was full of gusto for Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory and the concluding Auld Lang Syne when our collective voices drowned out the orchestra. Marin turned to conduct us all as balloons were sent soaring and crackers were set off almost in time to the music. This was a profound, passionate celebration of classical music with the barriers of elitism and traditions dissolved into pure joy.  In one evening we had the soaring wonders of William Walton’s Coronation Te Deum for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the festive and glittering Coronation Sanctus of Roxanna Panufnik composed for King Charles III’s coronation service and the theme from the upcoming film The Marvels by flamboyant US composer Laura Karpman with Marvel Comics celebrating super heroines; very appropriate given Marin Alsop’s absolute control over the proceedings. Super Marin, perhaps.   

Posted on by Martin Godleman

Last Night of a distinguished Prommer

MARTIN GODLEMAN witnesses Sir Simon Rattle’s LSO swansong

Sir Simon Rattle. Image: Monika Rittershaus. Wikimedia Commons

I should have had a more pronounced focus on advanced ticket sales of Prom 56 when I casually noticed that Simon Rattle would not only be present at the eight week festival of music, but there to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No.9 [27 August, but available until 9 October on BBC Sounds].

Rattle, himself British-German, was born in Liverpool in 1955, the same year that the International Gustav Mahler Society was established. Needless to say, the concert had sold out almost immediately by the time I had become aware of it. Fortunately, thanks to a generous and industrious benefactor, I managed miraculously to procure a seat for myself just a week before the event.

Mahler, an Austro-Bohemian, actually earned his living at the turn of the 20th century as a conductor of opera, interpreting the stage works of, amongst others, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. His was a career that led to his post as director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. On his days off, most of which he must have spent travelling across the world from concert to concert, he managed to somehow find time to attend to his other passion as a composer, one that brought him little financial success in his own lifetime, but one which, thankfully for us, he never abandoned.

Perfect then that Rattle, whose lifespan covers the years over which Mahler’s reputation as a composer has been established, should conduct him. Equally sublime that Rattle, for whom this is a final UK outing as Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra, should choose to conduct Mahler’s farewell symphony, the ninth. Rattle himself was knighted in 1994, eight years before becoming principal conductor and artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic, then taking on the challenge of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 at his opening performance in September 2002, almost exactly 21 years ago.

Gustav Mahler

I had been fortunate enough to attend Mahler’s ninth at the Proms before in July 2011, when Sir Roger Norrington conducted the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in his final concert with them. The appeal of this piece of music to orchestrate a professional farewell from one’s role as principal conductor of a world-renowned orchestra was therefore not lost on me, or indeed Rattle. Few conductors are recognisable from outer space, but I’d wager that any alien with a penchant for classical music would immediately recognise the white, crimped locks of Rattle, monochromous tonight against his smart black livery.

Rattle takes initially to the podium to conduct the BBC Singers performing Poulenc’s Figure Humaine, a cantata, a hymn to freedom, dedicated to Picasso and composed in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of France. The BBC Singers were also behind its premiere in London, in English, on Palm Sunday, 25th March 1945 – the score having been smuggled over to the UK five months before the war ended. A beautiful and intense choral work, chosen specially by Rattle who has described it as ‘profoundly moving; one of the greatest masterpieces that people don’t know.’

It was tonight the perfect appetiser for the evening’s main course, radiant in energy and harmonic, a choral masterpiece against tyranny. Rattle makes a point of leading out Sofi Jeannin, the Swedish chief conductor of the BBC Singers, to share the applause she has paid a central part in promoting. Then, after a short rehydration break, the conductor faces his ‘farewell’ challenge with the LSO, a group of people he has on more than one occasion described as his ‘family’. There is something religious about the falling silent of audience, orchestra and conductor before the onset of a final performance, whether it be of the night, a concert series, or of a career in post.

The ninth is, I would argue, the most self-consciously reflective of all of Mahler’s works, its tone set by the ponderous and lugubrious opening to the symphony, so alien to any of Mahler’s other, bolder dramatic initiations. I am gripped in anticipation by that silence. What a man is Rattle that he can let the whole of this majestic, mysterious and magnificent piece of music inhabit him as he hangs over that silence, ready to conduct.

Through Rattle, Mahler’s work tonight occupies a landscape of sound, narrating a man’s pain as cuckolded husband, unrecognised composer, dying… a man who was intimately aware of his own fate. James Joyce once said that for anyone to be serious about the study of his writing, they would have to be prepared to dedicate a lifetime to the task. For me, this single piece of music cries out for the same attention.

I find myself drawn to the horn section, and tonight the emotion of the opening movement is cradled by the subtlety of their handling of its many hanging moments. With his back to me, I cannot see Rattle’s cheek puffing, his teasing out of the connect between the players and the piece, but I can see them looking up at him, their eyes smiling. His family. The tiny mallets skilfully tap out the ringing of the tubular bells at the edge of that first movement; the climbing and scaling of the players across the terrain that Mahler has challenged them to cove. From the roof of the piccolo to the floor of the contrabassoon, Rattle weaves them in and out of the musical foliage.

It is a wondrous performance, and like the knowledge of death that Mahler hints at across the piece, the experience tonight is ultimately mortal. At the end of the first movement, Rattle nods knowingly in judgement of what we have all experienced, players and audience alike. I wonder at how effective my ears are tonight. Like reading a book at 18 and again at 65, the words, the notes, are static on the page, only ever brought to life by the human experience. As the orchestra move gently, urgently, left and right, I contemplate the cold fact that Mahler never heard or directed this piece himself. It only ever moved in his head, as he wrote it. What would he think about all of this? This performance 114 years on from the writing of it, conducted by someone whose love of the work has given us all this sublime evening. The thought is worthy of something with which to underpin tonight’s unforgettable experience.

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

Italian light, and Nordic darkness

Image: Stuart Millson
STUART MILLSON (celebrating his 43rd season) reports from the 2023 Proms

‘Where are the Proms of my youth?’ asked Barrie Hall’s now almost forgotten book, The Proms and the Men Who Made Them – a title that would be unlikely to pass the sensitivity readers of today’s London publishers. When I first attended the Proms, one joined a queue (along with all the other sixth-formers and undergrads) for the Gallery or Arena. You paid your few pounds at a little booking-office-type hole on the south side of the Royal Albert Hall and in you went. For the Last Night, people camped outside on the pavement near the Hall’s South Steps for two weeks, just to ensure a place on the front rail of the Arena, or close to it. Today, Promenaders no longer queue up: you book your Arena or Gallery ticket online. And the Last Night camp was abolished years ago, on health and safety grounds.

There have been changes in the repertoire and in presentation: this season, the BBC Concert Orchestra collaborated in a Northern Soul Prom – something that would have been virtually unheard of in the days of past Controllers of Music and Directors of the Proms (although Soft Machine did manage to creep in under Sir William Glock’s radar in 1971). Have such initiatives opened up the Proms to a younger audience? I am not sure. In 1983, the Arena was composed of 75% youth, 25% oldies. The ratio seems to have reversed. So more work needs to be done – perhaps more classical music, less Northern Soul, or at least another type of soul from the North.

Sir William Walton. Image: NPG (Wikimedia Commons)

For the 3rd August Prom, given by the BBC Philharmonic (formerly, BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra), Oldham-born William Walton (1902-83) provided the centrepiece of the concert, in the form of his Violin Concerto of 1939 – a work inspired by the composer’s abiding love for Italy and its riviera. Tinged with Mediterranean sunsets and shadows, and containing many moments of deep lyrical introspection and unbridled romanticism, the Concerto nevertheless provides some ferociously exciting and incisive sections for both soloist and orchestra. Playing the solo part that night was Manitoba-born James Ehnes – a musician renowned for his interpretation of Walton – and one who finds the true measure of a composer too often seen as something of a steely recluse, but who, in his heyday, was a determined, passionate and often avant-garde figure.

The Violin Concerto (like the stormy First Symphony written some four years earlier) has a surprise up its sleeve for the listener – a break from all the heavy preceding passion via a ‘presto’ movement, laced with a dash of jabbing, smirking, sardonic humour; softened by a waltzy, Neopolitan dance rhythm – the effect, like a generous glug of wine tipped into a glass during a fiesta. The movement, though, also broadens out into a serious nocturne: dreamy, intense; the dissatisfied Englishman abroad sinking into his local surroundings, yet thinking (perhaps) of glimpses of home. But for Walton after the Second World War, ‘home’ ceased to be England; with his new Argentinian wife, the composer turned his back on queues and nationalisation, settling on the little isle of Ischia out in the Bay of Naples. Continuing to compose, he produced such fine pieces as his Cello Concerto and a grand opera, but never quite recapturing the ardour and brilliantly-written soundscape of the Violin Concerto. As author Laurie Lee once observed: “All the great hymns to the sun are written in cold garrets.” When you are in the sun, you just… sit in the sunshine.

Image: Daniel Nyblin (Wikimedia Commons)

Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1 ended the concert. In a lifespan similar to that of Vaughan Williams, Sibelius lived from the era of empires and Grand Duchies, to the atomic age and world order of the United Nations. Yet throughout the changes remained rooted to a vision – and a physical reality – of an unchanging landscape and heritage. In his music, Nordic deities make brief, spectral appearances through endless pine woods; swans in flight sweep like angels across frozen lakes, on corridors of cold air – and at night, bards tell tales of heroes and worlds gone by. The First Symphony comes from 1900 – or rather, it was revised in that year, because it is essentially a late-19th-century piece, influenced by the dense harmonies of Tchaikovsky, but still (in the opening movement) showing signs of the fleeting, sparkling, supernatural Northern Lights that characterise the fully-individual works that would come – the kind of delicate, subliminal Nordic Impressionism of, say, the Sixth Symphony. Conducted by the Finnish maestro, John Storgards, both Walton and Sibelius found a worthy interpreter.

Just a word about the opening piece, Kafka’s Earplugs (a BBC commission for Irish contemporary composer, Gerald Barry, born 1952). Not even the Kafka title and the composer’s self-described “sense of humour, which I obey” could rescue this ten-minute monotony – and mediocrity. As the piece ended, one member of the audience shouted: “Total rubbish!” Who are we to disagree? 

Posted on by Richard Dove

Splendid Sun King

Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children. Image: Wikimedia Commons
RICHARD DOVE revels in Akhnaten at the ENO

“The thing about Philip Glass is that there’s so much repetition.” A friend pronounces his verdict. Well, yes, but what repetition. The ENO revival in association with LA Opera with the third of Glass’s so-called ‘portrait’ operas, Akhnaten, is entrancing. The set is a multi-level tableau of slow-moving interpretation and quite a bit of juggling. The jugglers are there to symbolise, I think, an imposition of order on the chaotic religious miasma that was ancient Egypt. King Amenhotep IV succeeds his father and declares a monotheistic religion with him, unsurprisingly, at its pinnacle.

The music swoops, swirls and glides across the narrative with the singers seeming to provide accompaniment for the orchestra and vice versa.

Glass had to do shifts as a New York taxi driver alongside regular plumbing jobs to help fund (and subsequently pay for production losses) his first portrait opera, Einstein on the Beach, which he developed with the grandiloquent imagination of Robert Wilson. He began by performing in sparsely attended recitals in New York lofts. Slowly, opera houses around the world caught up with Philip Glass. His second portrait opera on Mahatma Gandhi, Satyagraha, was a resounding and enduring success.

Akhnaten is now almost 40 years old and Glass has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. He is now chauffeur-driven.

American counter tenor Anthony Roth Constanzo has made the role of Akhenaten his own, appearing in productions in 2016, 2019 and now in this revival. He shows no signs of weariness with the role, commanding the huge stage with his soaring voice and subtle, precise gestures. His wife, Nefertiti, is an equally commanding presence, with mezzo soprano Chrystal E Williams delivering power and gravitas.

Phelim McDermott’s production is bold and sometimes a little baffling when images override meaning – a sort of Zoolander moment or two amidst the creative visual excellence.

The Coliseum was packed for the performance – ENO at its very best. The attempt by the Arts Council to shift it out of London is gesture politics at its most egregious. Let’s have more ENOs in Lincoln, Newcastle, Plymouth as well as London. We all need doses of cultural excellence, as bills mount and services decline.

The audience is wonderfully diverse and soundly engaged despite the singing in Egyptian, Hebrew, Akkadian and English. You do not need surtitles to get the gist. We are now well attuned to small dictators marooned in gilded palaces. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the remains were discovered of the city Amarna built by Akhenaten. In 1907 a mummy was unearthed that is most probably Akhenaten. The body was effeminate with womanly hips, elongated skull and fleshy lips, giving rise to speculation that he suffered from rare diseases. His androgynous appearance is cleverly portrayed in the opera. Akhenaten, the Sun King, is variously described as enigmatic, mysterious and revolutionary as well as mad and possibly insane. This production captures all those contradictory passions in a magisterial sweep. It is certainly repetitive but gloriously so. I will let my friend know.