The Prom concert on August 20, by The Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen, began with The Foundry (1927) by Alexander Mosolov. This is a four minute bit of Russian avant-garde constructivism, portraying in the most realistic way possible with an orchestra…well, a foundry. It was first performed in Lenningrad in 1927 at a concert celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. The Foundry was originally intended to be the first of four movements or music for a ballet, which was never produced, to be called Steel. The other movements, which have been lost, were called ‘In Prison,’ ‘At the Ball,’ and ‘In the Street.’ It became celebrated and much performed in the US and Europe in its day. Henry Wood performed it on Proms concerts seven times between 1931 and 1940. It makes a hell of a jolly industrial racket; the best moments were the two times when the eight horn players stood and blared out a unison ‘tune’ over the general din, the second time to the accompaniment of one of the percussionists whacking away at a metal sheet.

The concert of August 17, which began with the Pärt Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, included the first performance of Huw Watkins’ Violin Concerto, a BBC Proms commission, played by Alina Ibragimova, with the BBC Symphony, conducted by Edward Gardner. Watkins, who is a professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, is at least as well known as a pianist (and he is a formidable one) as he is a composer. In the composer portrait concert which preceded the Prom, he played his Four Inventions for piano, joined one group of students from the RCM in performing his Sad Steps for piano and string sextet, and conducted another group in a performance of Gig, a seven minute work for the same combination as the Ravel Introduction and Allegro.

The Concerto starts with a sort of bang which generates a lot of energy. The soloist alternates playing agitated arpeggiated music which helps to contribute to the maintenance of this energy and longer lyrical lines which float on top of it. The first movement of the piece is the composing out of the gradual unwinding of the activity generated by its beginning, and finally unfolds itself into the second (the three movements are clearly meant to proceed without a break; it was unfortunate for its effect that the performers chose to make fairly long breaks between them), which is a gently rocking song-like piece. The third movement, not completely successfully, it seemed to me, was intended to regain the energy of the first and carry it further before ending once again with a quiet coda representing its final conclusive dissipation, making all three movements one span. The Concerto, like all of the pieces on the composer portrait, was tonal, with lucid harmony and transparent textures and was thoughtfully made and appealing. As an encore, Ms. Ibragimova, who is a champion of Watkins’s music, played the last movement of his Partita for solo violin, which is an attractive, energetic, and snappy piece.

(more…)

Among the events being commemorated in this year’s Proms season, is the 75th birthday of Arvo Pärt. This celebration kicked off on August 17 with a concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edward Gardner, which began with Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, and which followed Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. The intention was that the Britten would follow without a break; the program actually said that. But as it turned out, the body language of both the conductor and the orchestra told the audience at the end of the Pärt that something had stopped, and the audience responded with applause, so that particular idea didn’t exactly work.

The Cantus was one of the first works written in Pärt’s tintinabulum style, in which a stepwise melody entwines with and is surrounded by the notes of a triad. It is said that Pärt developed this system (whatever it is) out of his disillusionment with the twelve-tone system (whatever that is). This narrative conforms to the current historiography of post-World War II music which can be summed up, paraphrasing Animal Farm, as “twelve-tone bad–-anything other than twelve-tone good,” which wants to represent “twelve tone music” as a sort of cruel and unnatural Stalinist dictatorship that was out for the complete and crushing domination of the musical world, and oppressed composers and audiences alike with an iron fist, until it was overthrown by a few brave souls, but in this particular case, if not any other, the story is more complicated than that.

Pärt and a number of his contemporaries in the Soviet Union enthusiastically embraced “serialism” as a political statement, so they saw it not as being a means of their intellectual and musical oppression, but in fact just the opposite. “Twelve-tone music” and “serialism” are terms that are hardly ever defined, and they have varieties of meanings even if they are, so it’s always a little hard to know exactly what anybody who says or said they are or were writing twelve-tone or serial music might actually be or have been up to, although it would seem likely that whatever it is or was, it would involve a music which would be heavily chromatic–or chromatic, anyway. In any case, when Pärt turned away from whatever it he was doing that he thought of as serial, he was not signaling some kind of return to or affirmation of a former status quo, but among, other things, moving to an equally, possibly more, subversive political statement, since it involved a language and techniques which evoked religious practices. He was developing a style which was much more pared down and diatonic and whose rhetoric and grammar was, if anything, probably more “modern” by means of its simplicity.

(more…)

On Thursday night The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins, performed La navette by James Dillon, giving the work its first UK performance.   Born in 1950, Dillon could be described as a ‘New Complexity” composer, along with Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Richard Barrett, among others.   He has written lots of music, a lot of which has been played on the Proms concerts and other places, and he is celebrated in the UK, where is definitely considered to be an important composer.    Although his music is not so well known in the US, he has done a fair amount of teaching there, including at Oberlin and The University of Minnesota, where he is currently on the faculty.

The title of La navette is translated as shuttle, in this case a shuttle used for weaving. This piece, which dates from 2001,was written at the same time as Dillion’s music theater piece Philomela, finished in 2004, and it refers, at least obliquely, to the Greek myth which is the story of the opera. In Ovid’s version of the myth, Philomela is raped by Tereus, the husband of her sister Procne and king of Thrace. To keep Philomela from telling about his crime, Tereus cuts out her tongue. Philomela nonetheless reveals her story by weaving it into a cloth that she sends to Tereus. When Procne discovers what has happened, she kills Tereus’s–and her–son and feeds him to Tereus in revenge. The gods eventual intervene and turn all three of them into birds; Philomela, who becomes the nightingale, has her voice restored in the bird’s song. As Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes in his program note, the reference to the loom’s shuttle evokes dark and violent mythology, but “it also speaks of hope, ingenuity, and resilience: all qualities possessed by Philomela as she passed the shuttle back and forth” to weave the cloth that will tell her story. ” La navette” can also be translated as ‘the commute,’ however, and Dillon also intended to imply a continuous movement from one state of being to another.

La navette is a twenty minute piece for a very large orchestra. It begins with very slow music which is presented in several simultaneous strands. These strands are eventually separated, but together they give at the beginning the impression of luminous, motionless music quietly throbbing. After developing more activity, this music transforms itself into a steady movement (suggesting the back and forth of the loom?), and then into a sort of quietly heavy inexorable thumping (imagine the Sacrificial Dance done quietly and in very slow motion). Although the beat of this section is quite a bit faster, the staticness of the pitches and particularly of the harmony, militates against the perception of increased speed. As in the two other sections, this one builds in volume and density, and finally ends, neither with a bang nor a whimper, but rather in sort of last quiet gasp. Given the amount of stuff going on most of the time, one wouldn’t necessarily expect the texture of La navette to be as transparent or to sound as luminously as it does, or that so many of the details would be so clearly audible. This has not been the case is other of Dillon’s pieces that I’ve heard. The sound of it is always seductively attractive and appealing. In terms of its continuity, I could imagine one thinking that it was hypnotic and I could imagine one thinking that it was slightly tedious after a while; I’m inclined more toward the former view.

This very difficult piece was on a quite long program with other pieces, which, though standard repertory (Sheherazade, the Tschaikovsky Second Symphony, the Lizst First Piano Concerto, and the Mozart Overture to The Impresario–not in that order), were not at all easy; it must have been very tiring for the orchestra. Martyn Brabbins in all the pieces, but especially in the Dillon, where it was especially welcomed, presented lucid, no nonsense, beautiful performances.

Prior to the Albert Hall concert, the Royal Scottish Academy MusicLab, presented a composer portrait of Dillon’s Music across the street at the RCM.  Zone (..de azul), for a fairly large ensemble, a relatively recent piece is a mellifluous, shimmering, and (as Adrew McGregor described it during the event) iridescent piece. ….Once Upon a Time, which Dillon described as his Opus One (everything earlier having been withdrawn, and therefore is being remembered as in a story) is for the same instrumental combination as Varese’s Octandre, and, in fact, demonstrates, in its textures and the shaping of its instrumental lines, Dillon’s great admiration for Varese. Between those two pieces, both of which got slam bang performances, conducted by Jessica Cottis, were two gently contemplative piano pieces, Dragonfly and Charm played by the excellent pianist Ed Cohen.

Both these concerts are available for listening on the BBC iplayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007v097/episodes/player) for a week after the concert.