On the August 21 Prom concert The City of London Sinfonia, with Ian Bostridge, tenor, and Roderick Williams, baritone, conducted by Stephen Layton, presented he first performance of Colin Matthews’s No Man’s Land, which had been commissioned by the Boltini (Family) Trust to commemorate the group’s fortieth anniversary. The commission was offered to Matthews by the founder of the Sinfonia, Richard Hickock, three days before his sudden death in November, 2008, and the work is dedicated to his memory. In planning what to write Matthews’s thoughts turned toward the First World War. He has been obsessed with the war for a long while. His interest is not just that of a history buff, however; one of his grandfathers died on the Somme. The text, written at Matthew’s request by Christopher Reid, whose children’s verses he had set in his work Alphabicycle Order in 2007, is a sequence of poems representing the conversation of the ghosts of two soldiers of the First World War.

The First World War has an evocative power for the British that it does not have for Americans, who tend to find much more inspiration from either the American Civil War, which seems to be still connected in a powerful way to American thinking about government and every day life, or The Second World War, in which Americans can find a representation of themselves in the world that conforms to their preferred self-image. Aside from the closeness that all the British, and their parents and grandparents, had and have to both of the world wars, there is a great fund of British artistic models concerned with “The Great War,” most prominently the poets of the war, such as Rupert Brooke, Seigfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, and Wilfred Owen; the influence of the Britten War Requiem, with its connection to Owen, especially on composers of Matthews’s generation, is also considerable.

No Man’s Land is a dialog between Captain Gifford and Sargeant Slack, the tenor and baritone soloists, respectively, whose bodies have been left hanging on barbed wire in the no man’s land between the two front lines. The first part of their conversation is concerned with the details of life (and death) in the trenches; in the second, after telling of a bar where wine and women were available, Gifford relates a dream about the official attitude of the expendability of soldiers, Slack sings a lullaby, and the two particular soldiers recede into the mass of soldiers. The text for their conversation is full of songs, which Matthews has set in many cases with parodies of music of the period, including marches, hymns, and pub and music hall songs, both comic and sentimental. He has also included ‘documentary’ music, recordings from the time: some scraps of marches, and Edna Thorton singing a song entitled ‘Your King and Country Need You.” No Man’s Land’s orchestra consists of double woodwinds, pairs of horns and trumpets, percussion, keyboard (playing celesta and an out of tune upright piano), and strings, divided into three violin parts, and two parts of each of the other instruments.

It may be that there is supposed to be a class element depicted in the setting as a means or characterization. It is Sargeant Slack who sings the songs which are most clearly parodies of music hall songs. Roderick Williams sang those songs with a sort of working class accent, although since he didn’t apply this otherwise it’s a little unclear what the intention was. Slack’s songs are accompanied by the out of tune piano. Gifford’s songs are in a much more modern music style, and are accompanied by music which is rather like the music that accompanies the Owen poems in the War Requiem. Even the song of Gifford’s that in this context would seem to cry out for a parodistic setting, the one about the bar where soldiers could find wine and women, in which Slack joins in, is given a less vernacular treatment, and, rather than being accompanied by the piano, are accompanied by fancy violin music. The use of vernacular elements, which has it effect, certainly, seems not to be particularly strongly connected to the other music thematically. It is also not so clear what, other than the immediate effect, is gained by playing the recordings of music of the period in the two short stretches where they appear, rather than incorporating the music into the texture in some other way. At one point where reference is made to a mouth organ, there is a striking a masterly invocation of that sound of the harmonica by strings. It might be that some similar treatment of the rest of the vernacular elements might have been more rather than less effective. Nonetheless, No Man’s Land is an ambitious, masterly, effective and affecting work, whose seriousness and sincerity is beyond questioning, and the mastery of its composer is also clear and unquestionable.

The rest of the concert consisted of Britten’s Variations of a Theme of Frank Bridge, for strings, and the Mozart Requiem. All the Proms concerts can be heard on the Proms website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms) for a week after the performance.

For the students in Aspen’s Composition Individual Studies Program, the last week of the festival culminated the final student composers’ concert last Friday, August 19^th. This evening of music not only featured large works by the six students of George Tsontakis, but also featured the Aspen-first: an Exquisite Corpse composition created by all 12 of this half-session’s composition students. My review of the August 12^th composers’ concert presaged the strength of Friday’s program and – despite offering an unconventional lineup of ensembles – the featured works did not disappoint my auguring.

Patrick O’Malley’s Five Scales for Brass Quintet – the first of two works for that ensemble – opened the evening like a fanfare. The work is brightly scored and drawn from a simple idea of cleverly harmonizing a basic scale, such that the linear movement of the music is colored distinctly with varying levels of dissonance and consonance depending on the section of the work. The brass writing is solid and attractive, particularly the bass trombone part, which explodes at various times, adding breadth to Mr. O’Malley’s inventive harmonic progressions. A calming postlude in A-flat major cleanses the audience’s aural palettes after the work’s chaotic, polyrhythmic climax featuring clashing quarter-note triplets and sixteenth notes. As if the dissonances, jarring dynamics and wide orchestration of this moment aren’t attention-grabbing enough, this section offers a stunning contrast to the predominant chorale-like flow of the work. The necessity of this brief, violent burst is made apparent at the onset of the aforementioned and subdued postlude, whose sweetly and tightly voiced polyphony puts an appealing cap on the extremity of the preceding musical journey.

Five Scales’s reserved closing phrases acted as an effective set-up for the concert’s next work, Wen-Hui Xie’s …After… for clarinet, violin, percussion and prepared piano. The piece, written in response to the devastating earthquake that struck China in 2008, is not booming or violent as one might expect. Rather, the piece is a captivating series of widely-spaced (temporally) and subtle gestures that builds from extreme quietness to slight loudness over its 7-8 minute duration. The suspenseful delicacy of the work’s gestures draw the audience toward the stage, and put me – at least – on the edge of my seat as my attention was captured by Ms. Xie’s faint and translucent musical landscape. Supporting – perhaps even predicating – the music’s plaintive character is Ms. Xie’s exotic and elaborate sense of color. The prepared piano part includes multiple bowed passages along with fingered pizzicato, and similar extended techniques permeated the rest of the score: the percussionist rubs his fingers on a snare drum and bows a cymbal on top of a timpani while the clarinetist and violinist both speak in addition to producing ivarious unpitched instrumental noises. However intricate these sounds seem in writing, they carried essential and highly effective roles in the communication of Ms. Xie’s artistic message.

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On Four Saturdays in August and September, the BBC Proms has been presenting Saturday matinee concerts in Cadogan Hall in Sloane Square. On August 20, The London Sinfonietta, the BBC Singers, soloists Andrew Watts, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, and Nicolas Hodges, conducted by David Atherton, performed works of Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, along with the first performance of a work commissioned by the BBC from Georges Aperghis. Davies’s Il rozzo martello (The Crude Hammer), written for the BBC Singers in 1997sets a sonnet by Michaelangelo, preceded by a stanza from Dante’s Paradiso (II-127-132) and followed by an prose annotation of it by its author. All three of the texts focus on the image of the hammer of the smith and of the sculptor as a metaphor for artistic creation and further for the divine shaping of the universe. (Whether it was intentional that the title is more or less the same as that of Le Marteau San Maître, whose text also deals with artistic creation, is an open question). After an introduction in which each of the voice sections enters in turn with long phrases accumulating into chords, Davies sets both of the first two quatrains of the sonnet in turn with homophonic music which is then repeated with a elaborate and floridly melismatic descant sung by soloists. The sestet returns to the initial homophonic texture enriched with more voices. The concluding annotation is given an almost patter setting, with a concluding broad phrase repeating the opening line of the Dante. In certain respects the work represents a fusion of the style and tonal language of Davies’s more recent, Naxos quartet, music with that of some of his earliest choral music written for students at the Cirencester Grammar School.

Georges Aperghis, a Greek composer who now lives in France, is known for his involvement in experimental theater, being the founder of the theater company ATEM (Atelier Théâtre et Musique) in Paris. The title of Aperghis’s concerto for piano and chamber orchestra, Champ-Contrechamp, means Shot-Reverse Shot, which is a technical term from film editing dealing with editing film of two people, shot at different times and in different places, so that they appear to be having a conversation. The piece is a handsome sounding whirling and shimmering dialog of great surface activity between the piano and the orchestra which builds to a climax and then rather quickly unwinds to a sparse slow coda for the soloist.

Birtwistle’s Angel Fighter, written for the 2010 Leipzig Bachfest, sets a text by Stephen Plaice which dramatizes the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. The work begins with accusations of Jacob by his conscience (represented by the chorus) as he is dividing his livestock and tribe in anticipation of a confrontation with his brother Essau, whose birthright he stole. In answer to Jacob’s call for a sign from Yahweh, an angel appears, singing in Enochian, the universal language of men, lost in the Great Flood. The angel descends and speaks to Jacob in his own language. In order to prove to the doubting Jacob that he is real, the angel insists that they fight, and Jacob, against all odds, prevails against him. As the night is ending the angel threatens to kill Jacob if he does not let him go, which Jacob refuses to do unless the angel blesses him. Having received the angel’s blessing, Jacob, now Israel, asks his name, which the Angel refuses to give. As the angel disappears, the work ends with blessings in Hebrew.

Angel Fighter is constantly at a very high level of dramatic intensity, which is relaxed only briefly close to the end when the angel sings an aria about his refusal to give his name. This is accompanied only by harp and English horn, and it is also the only instance of any lessening of the work’s textural density, which is otherwise remarkably full and intricately detailed and constant. Despite its density the instrumental writing is calculated so that it does not in any way obscure the vocal writing, which is highly florid and effective, and in turn set so that its delivery of all the words is always completely clear (well the English–I can’t speak to the setting of the Enochian).

A week earlier, the Sinfonietta, conducted by Nicholas Collon, presented a program featuring music by Richard Rodney Bennett, whose 75th birthday the Proms is commemorating. The concert opened with Dream Dancing, which is scored for the collective instrumentation of the late Debussy Sonatas. Debussy projected six sonatas, but had only finished three of them before he died. The three finished have relatively straightforward instrumentation (‘cello and piano; violin and piano,; flute, viola, and harp); the fourth was intended to be for oboe, horn, and harpsichord, and the fifth for clarinet, trumpet, bassoon, and piano. I had never heard of an instrumentation for the sixth before, but the commentary at this concert seemed to say that the sixth was supposed to be for the entire complement, as this piece is. Dream Dancing is in two movements, lasting about 16 minutes. The music is fluent and elegant and expressive in a sort of general way, as film music would need to be.

Henri Dutilleux was represented by his Les citations, a short piece for oboe with harpsichord, double bass, and percussion. It is also in two movements, the first features a long oboe solo line with its spaces at first filled in and amplified by unpitched percussion, but is gradually joined by the other instruments, which offer a quietly accelerating background In the second movement, which is based on material from a piece by Jean Alain, and from music from Janequin which Alain quoted in a work of his, the activity is more equally distributed among the players. The performance of this work was extremely polished; the playing of oboist Gareth Hulse and double bassist Enno Senft was particularly beautiful. The Romanza by Elizabeth Maconchy for viola and chamber orchestra feature Paul Silverthorne. It is a clearly and convincingly shaped work whose texture is a little murky and clumsy.

The concert concluded with Bennett’s Jazz Calendar which was commissioned by the BBC in 1963 as a concert piece, but which became best known through a ballet which Kenneth MacMillan made to it. Bennett characterized Jazz Calendar, whose seven movements depict the characteristics claimed by the famous nursery rhyme for children born on the different days of the week (“Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, etc.), as being completely a jazz piece, rather than some kind of third stream classical piece. It’s scoring is for a small jazz band, and it is something of a tribute to Gil Evans. The piece is a complete charmer and it got a fabulous performance.

All these concerts can be heard on the Proms website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms) for a week after the performance.

I have been a hack for nearly 50 years now. Because most of those years were during the age of newsprint, large swathes of Brazilian rain forest now lay barren as a consequence of my commercial  renderings.  Most of the stuff was crap that I didn’t bother to  read the first time, much less a second time.  I occasionally stumble across something on the Internet that I wrote years ago and don’t recognize it as my own.  I was reminded of this last week after I got an e-mail from a German broadcaster named Rainer Schlenz:

I’m journalist working with the nationwide airing radio station
Deutschlandfunk. I’m gathering music pieces in the context of 9/11 at the
moment and read your article in sequenza 21 about Michael Gordon’s
composition “The Sad Park”.

I just would like to say that compared with other articles from all over
the world your text appears to me the most profound comment on this great
music.

By the way the other pieces I will use for my feature are:

Steve Reich: WTC 9/11
Julia Wolfe: my beautiful scream
David Lang: Men
Terry Riley: One Earth, One Love, One People

It will be broadcast  on 10th September, 10:05 pm CET, that means 04:05 pm
New York time.  (Available live on the web at www.dradio.de.)

I searched S21 for “The Sad Park” and started reading the review he mentioned and was well into it before I realized that I had written it.  I’m pretty sure it’s not “profound” but it’s not terrible.   I could send you to the link but since it’s on one of our ugly old pages I thought I would reprint the whole thing here…right after the break.

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The logic according to which the Copland Fanfare for the Common Man and the Barber Adagio for Strings make good companion pieces on a concert for Arnold Bax’s Second Symphony and the Bartok Second Piano Concerto eludes me. When you add that that’s just the first two thirds of a concert which also includes the Prokofiev Fourth Symphony, it gets even more curious. That was, however, the content of the Proms concert presented on August 16 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Litton. Fanfare for the Common Man is the sort of piece that could be described as Virgil Thomson said about another piece: it’s the perfect hors d’oeuvre: nobody’s appetite was ever hurt by it and nobody ever missed much by missing it; he might have added, in this case, that nobody’s budget was ever broken by rehearsing it. Whatever the merits of the music, and they’re considerable, its title is its big selling point; Copland had good reason to be grateful to Henry Wallace, who coined the phrase, or least brought it to political prominence.

The Barber Adagio has developed a reputation as the saddest music ever and an official mourning piece and just about anything other than a really good and well made piece of music. Andrew Litton, fortunately, didn’t treat it like funeral music; his performance was not overly lush and it moved and had shape. The Bartok, whose soloist was Yuja Wang, had lots of vigor and pep.

The big piece on the concert was the Bax Symphony. One (this one, anyway) hears Bax’s name a lot more often than one hears his music. The Second Symphony is generally in the same sound world as Vaughan Williams, but with a more motoric, driving, maybe even harsh, quality. The agitated quality of this particular work is apparently part of its being a product of his relationship with Harriet Cohen, a pianist who is nowadays known mainly as the dedicatee of the Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythms of Bartok, but was considerable player and a champion of modern British music, and, apparently, a handful personally. (Glenda Jackson’s last work as an actress, incidentally, was playing Cohen in a short movie by Ken Russell about Bax; this comes to mind as a result of reading in the program that Russell had sponsored the recording of Bax’s symphonies.) The symphony itself is continually interesting and compelling, and well worth hearing.

The Prokofiev Fourth Symphony was commissioned by Serge Koussevtizky for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony (along with a bunch of other pieces, including Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms); it’s first version was rather short and consisted of big chunks (directly, apparently) of his ballet The Prodigal Son: either because he was under the gun to get it finished or because he was unhappy with the size of the commissioning fee. In 1947 he revised the work, making it longer, and, presumably, attempting to increase its quotient of socialist realism (which didn’t help him much in the terror the Soviet government unleashed on composers in 1948). The revised version of the piece is about forty minutes long. Its orchestration is brilliant and effective. The first movement, after a lyric introduction, has some manic, almost comic, and appealing music which keeps coming back. I think the Bax is a better piece. (more…)

This is my first year at the Aspen Music Festival, and the way the second session composition program has been run is a little different than it usually is. Namely, the two composition recitals have necessarily been divided evenly among Syd Hodkinson and George Tsontakis’ studios, six on each night with Syd’s kids – or the “Hodkie’s” as some of us call our group – going first, on last Friday, August 12^th (yes, that was our poster).

The reason for this is a scheduling conflict George Tsontakis had thanks to an appearance at the Cabrillo Festival he had committed to months before the festival began. Despite the knowledge that George would be out of town, the powers here at Aspen went ahead and booked the recital during his absence. The best reconciliation the festival could reach was agreeing that George shouldn’t miss his own students’ performances.

I mention this back-story to mitigate the sentiment that I am being partisan with the following praise-filled assessment of the recital. I have heard music by every composer here and we all write good stuff. As much as I intend to luxuriate in the overall excellence of last Friday’s premiere performances, I am unequivocally confident next Friday’s composition recital will be equally as strong, we just haven’t gotten there yet.

The evening’s opening piece was Dan Schlosberg’s I Was All Right for a While (2011), which takes its title – and the foundation for its material – from a Roy Orbison song. This reference’s transparency develops over the course of the piece, culminating in a full-blown quote of the song occurring at a decisive point in the work’s structure

Like the rest of us, Mr. Schlosberg gave a brief oral program note before his piece was played, in which he described the influence of the Orbison track on the work’s other musical content. I did not hear as ubiquitous a connection between the non-quoted sections and the quote as Mr. Schlosberg described, but I did detect other, more general, elements that beautifully melded these opposing sections of the piece. Namely, the restless character of the music preceding the quote conveys a clear sense of yearning I feel connects strongly with the emotional message of the referenced song. Moreover – and more importantly – the unique orchestration of the quote – vibraphone and viola harmonics carry the melody as the pianist strums chords inside the piano – elegantly transports the reference into the sound world of the rest of the piece, bridging the music’s stylistic gaps with the ensemble’s color.

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