Sequenza21

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.

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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.

The slice of the Proms which I’m getting this summer seems less of full of twentieth and twenty-first century music than usual. Works of Gunther Schuller, Simon Holt, Harrison Birtwistle, Stockhausen, Colin Matthews, Luke Bedford, Brett Dean, Oliver Knussen, (late) Stravinsky, George Benjamin, Stephen Montague, Takamitsu, and Julian Anderson were done before I got here and music by Judith Weir, Bayan Northcott, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, James MacMillan, Tansy Davies, and Jonathan Dove will be on after I leave. But there’s still plenty happening while I’m around.

On Friday night, August 13, the BBC Philharmonic and Gianandrea Noseda, on a program with otherwise pretty standard pieces (Verdi Forza de Destino overture, Bruch Concerto, Schumann Fourth Symphony), performed Partita by Dallapiccola. Written in 1930 to 1933, before Dallapiccola started writing 12-tone music, it is larger, both in terms of it’s length (twenty seven minutes) and it’s orchestration (triple winds, alto and tenor saxophone, lots of brass, two harps, piano, organ, lots of percussion, and strings) than one usually thinks about Dallapiccola’s works being. There are four movements, the last being a setting with soprano of a Latin poem, ‘The Lullaby of the Blessed Virgin Mary.’ Although the music certainly gets big and loud at places, particularly in the third movement, much of it has the delicacy, mellifluousness, and transparency
that characterize his better known pieces. In fact, it’s elegant and sonorously seductive music, especially the last movement, in which Sarah Tynan was the rapt soloist.

Two days earlier the concert by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Thomas Dausgaard began each half with choral pieces by Ligeti, sung by the Danish National Concert Choir and the Danish National Vocal Ensemble. The first featured Night and Morning, early pieces setting epigrammatic poems by the Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres describing, in fact, night and morning. These pieces were among the last that Ligeti wrote before he left Hungary for the west in 1956, which means that stylistically they would have been at least marginally acceptable under the constraints of the communist government of the time. The liveliness and skillfulness of the choral writing demonstrated how completely Ligeti had mastered traditional compositional techniques. Lux Aeterna, possibly Ligeti’s most famous work, which was written in 1966 and balanced those pieces on the second half of the concert, demonstrated the lengths to which his imagination and mastery were able to take those same techniques when he got the chance.

The concert concluded with Music of the Spheres by Rued Langgaard, which can possibly best be described as being the damdest piece. Langgaard is, apparently, one of the most important Danish composers of the first part of the twentieth century. Written in 1918, when Langgaard was 25 years old, it consists of about 35 minutes of texture of various density, register, and orchestration without any traditional elements such as harmony, melody, or bass, in one continuous span comprising many shorter sections. It is, in the words of Malcolm MacDonald in the program note “an apocalyptic religious meditation which simultaneously evokes the vastness of space, the wonder of nature and the destructive power of the sun and all its kindred stars,” scored for a soprano soloist (who is hardly noticed in all the traffic), a larger double chorus, and a large orchestra including a ‘glissando piano’, organ, and much percussion. Music of the Spheres could be considered either as being extraordinarily prescient and visionary in predicting certain musical styles of the future (both Ligeti micropolyphony and certain kinds of minimalsim) or as being extraordinarily incompetent, and is probably some combination of both. Still is had some kind of compelling continuity and certain moments were very striking, most memorably so a stretch for a solo wind and four sets of timpiani, which were eventually going full blast and the two times when an second smaller orchestra, hidden in the gallery of the Albert Hall, started playing very different music (or at least very different notes) (that kind of thing works really well in the Albert Hall). It sure was peculiar, and I’m not sure how “good” I think it is, but I didn’t mind hearing it as it was going on, and I wouldn’t be terribly unhappy at the prospect hearing it again sometime in the future if it were to ever cross my path again, although I don’t think I’d ever seek it (or any of Langgaard’s other music, of which, apparently, there are great quantities). The performers played with absolutely blinding conviction and dedication. It was clear that one was never going to hear a stronger or more eloquent advocacy of the piece.

On the first half of Tuesday evening’s concert by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin and Ingo Metmacher Nachstück from Der ferne Klang (1903-1910) by Franz Shrecker and the Violin Concerto of 1937 by Korngold (with Leonidas Kavkos as the soloist) were shown to be pieces of enormous refinement, skill, and beauty, made with great mastery; then on the second half the Mahler Seventh Symphony, that wonderful and thrilling piece of chamber music for 150 players, showed itself to be the primary image and the real thing, an exhilarating and overwhelming masterpiece.

All of these performances are available for listening at the BBC iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007v097/episodes/player) for seven days after the performance. (Since they get rebroadcast, and those are also available for seven days, they’re actually available for a rather longer time.)

Fanfare, please.  From the creators of Sequenza21 comes a new web community–Chamber Musician Today.  Something like that anyway.  Go over and register and you’ll find there are lots of neat things you can do there.  You can blog directly on the site whenever you feel like it, you can post concerts and announcements to the Calendar page, you can review a CD, comment, add a profile, even add your existing blog feed to the Autopost and the software will automatically pull in your last 10 posts and all new ones.  The ones that are on target (i.e., have something to do with chamber music) will mysteriously appear at Chamber Musician Today, as well as your own blog, multiplying your readership into the dozens.

The site is pretty easy to use.  Once you register and log in, the green dashboard on the right contains all the links you’ll need.   Remember that whatever user name you choose is what will appear on your posts and comments.

Some of you may recall that I previewed the site several weeks ago under the name Chamber Music Now but our friends at chambermusicnow.org were concerned that it might encroach on them a bit so–because I am an incredibly nice human being–I decided to go with Chamber Musician Today instead although it’s really not as good and cost me another $350 for a new software license but who’s counting?

Consider this a beta opening (which is what web people say when they aren’t sure if all the buttons work right yet).   If you see something that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, please let me know.