On August 22, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Barry Douglas, conducted by Thomas Dausgaard, presented the first performance of Kevin Volans’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which was a BBC Commission. Volans is quite proud of his method of composition, which he refers to as ‘anti-conceptual.’ What he means by this is that he does not think about what a piece will do until he starts it, and every day he starts at the point he stopped the day before, without reordering anything; he doesn’t say whether or not he revises. One assumes not. This is a little like a practice of Virgil Thomson’s, which he referred to as ‘the discipline of spontaneity;’ Thomson, I think, mainly did it in his portraits, which were two- or three-minute-long pieces done in one sitting (and sometime revised later). In Volans case it’s probably more like an extreme reaction against what is often called ‘pre-composition,’ and therefore, a lot of modernists practices (and probably a lot of stuff done by minimalists who do process music as well), and, for me, anyway, it doesn’t work so well in a piece that’s twenty minutes long. In the case of this piece, one is left with a feeling of a sort of flat and haphazard continuity which could be described in the words of one of the characters in The History Boys by Alan Bennet, who says that history is ‘just one fucking thing after another.’ In fact the sound of the piece is polished and attractive and arresting, full of nice, and, mostly, interesting music; it just goes on a little too long some of the time, and, no surprise, its progress seems sort of random and unconsidered. The performance was also polished, colorful, attractive, and arresting.

A few days earlier, August 18, Viktoria Mullova and Matthew Barley, joined by Christof Dienz, Luka Jukart, Martin Brandlmayr, Thomas Larcher, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov gave the first performance of Larcher’s Concerto for Violin, ‘Cello, and Orchestra. The orchestra for the piece includes a concertino group of electric zither, accordion, percussion, and prepared piano which provides a good deal of instrumental color in the work, and the function of the orchestra seemed to be that of a sort of amplifier for the smaller group, taking up the music and expanding on it both in terms of material and of decibels. On top of this, the violin and ‘cello often spun longer singing lines and sometimes shorter more agitated ‘riffs’ which were largely arpeggios. These were repeatedly the same in term both of the shape and the range of the lines, and the sameness of the solo parts left a sense of frustrating lack of motion and progress and formal staticness which I think was not intended. There are two movements, the first more expansive and varied, tempo wise, at least, and the second shorter and more restrained, with the solo parts some what chorale like, and suggesting a more traditionally tonal language. The work was both intriguing and appealing, and at the same time, due to the sameness of the shape of the main lines, somewhat frustrating. The performance was lively, concentrated, and serious and had a heartfelt quality.

On August 23 Leonidas Kavkos and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev, performed L’arbe des songes by Henri Dutilleux, a violin concerto which was written in 1980 for Isaac Stern. The work is in four movements, but there are also three interludes after the first three movements, all of them played without a break. The beginnings of the interludes are marked by a sort of gamelan-like music which Dutilleux referred to as ‘tinkling’ bells, played by tubular bells, vibraphone, piano/celesta, harp, and crotales. Perhaps the most striking parts are the first movement which features long singing lines in the violin, the third movement, in which the violin is joined in a lyric duet by the oboe d’amore, and the third interlude which is a free sort of tuning up episode in the orchestra. The whole work is very singing, atmospheric, and full of beautiful instrumental textures and colors. It seemed to me to be the best of the Dutilleux pieces that I’ve heard.

On the next night the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, conducted by Colin Davis, performed the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements. Probably the most important work of his early American years, the Symphony is one work which its composer, who otherwise was insistent that music was powerless to express anything at all, was eager to present as a depiction of war time tensions. He said that there were sections related to sequences in documentary films about scorched-earth tactics in the Sino-Japanese War and to newsreels and documentaries of goose-stepping soldiers, etc. It is certainly a muscular piece full of lots of rhythmic energy, harmonic propulsion, and a sort of cinematographic sweep. Little of this was realized in this performance, which was rhythmically slack and, in terms of its formal shaping, apparently completely clueless. Elliott Carter wrote of hearing Stravinsky play at gatherings of Boulanger’s students in Paris; he said that Stravinsky seemed to play every note with an intense rhythmic energy and intention, making each one a special ‘Stravinsky’ note. That was exactly the quality that was completely lacking here.

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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