Sequenza21

On August 16, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Martin Brabbins, presented a late-night concert in honor of Sir John Drummond, former director of the Proms, who died last year. The program consisted of three works which he had commissioned for the Proms: Veni, veni, Emmanuel by James MacMillan, Chantefluers et Chantefables by Witold Lutoslawski, and Panic by Harrison Birtwistle. (I was unfortunately late for the concert and missed the MacMillan.) The Lutoslawski work is a set of nine songs for soprano and a small orchestra, setting poems for children by the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos, whose poems he had used earlier in the cycle Les espace du sommeil, which he had written in 1975 for Fischer-Dieskau. In these songs, the setting of the texts is very straightforward and the imagery of each poem is realized in a equally direct, but strong, way in the sparse orchestration. Solveig Kringelborn, for whom the songs were written, and who gave the first performance at the Proms in 1991, was the soloist. For me this piece, although clearly beyond any kind of criticism, was not as striking as the other vocal works of Lutoslawki’s that I know, particularly Paroles tissees.

Panic by Birtwistle was famously commissioned by Drummond for the Last Night of the Proms in 1995. A hoary tradition, Last Night is essentially a pops concert which traditionally ends with a melange of patriotic British music, in conjunction with a good deal of flag waving and other jingoistic whoopla. The Birtwistle does not fit into that mold, and it caused something of a stir at its first performance. Birtwistle describes the piece, which is for alto saxophone and drums with orchestra, as a dithyramb, which in Classical Greece was a hymn celebrating Dionysus. In this case that means that it goes brawling along at high speed and with wild energy for its entire seventeen minutes’ duration, in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of Coltrane, maybe. The performance, by Martin Robertson and Peter Erskine, was full of suitable momentum and intensity.

The concert on August 20, by the Philharmonia and Christoph von Doknanyi, ended with a fabulous performance of Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartok and began with an equally wonderful performance of Webern’s orchestration of the Ricercar from the Musical Offering by Bach. In between was a performance of Overture, Waltz, and Finale from Powder Her Face by Thomas Ades. Powder Her Face, Ades first opera, which is about the scandals associated with the Duchess of Argyll in the 1950’s, is scored for a chamber orchestra of three clarinets, brass trio, piano, harp, accordion, percussion, and string quintet. Earlier this year, Ades arranged this suite for full orchestra, which the Philhamonia performed, with him conducting, at the Aldeburgh Festival. The excerpts that Ades chose for the suite are all concerned with dance music: waltzes, foxtrots, and tangos; and all the music has a certain kind of high style, chicness, and glamor combined with deliberate glitz and tawdriness, all appropriate to its rather sleezy story. This version, with the full panoply of orchestral resources in play, has glamorous sound and a very high class glossy sheen, while maintaining an appropriate touch of the slick and the tawdry . The performance was at the same level as the other two pieces on the concert. Earlier on, there was a ‘composer portrait’ concert which featured Ades in conversation with Andrew McGregor, and excellent performances by members of the Contemporary Consort New Generation Ensemble of the Royal College of Music, directed by Huw Watkins, of arrangements by Ades of Les baricades misterieuses by Francois Couperin and Cardiac Arrest by Madness, along with Court Studies from The Tempest, another arrangement, for clarinet, violin, ‘cello, and piano, this time of music by Ades himself, his second opera.

These concerts can be heard online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/.

IRIS

By evidence (stephan moore + scott smallwood)

Deep Listening (DL 35-2007)

This two-disc collection offers an audio CD with works by evidence, and a DVD that uses this audio in collaboration with videos from “video artists, VJs, vusicians, live video performers, and time-based visualists…”

Successful electronic/computer music is multi-dimensional. Chamber &Host (track 4, audio; track 1, DVD) offers a sonic depth and intricacy that allows detail and line to be felt and heard. The companion video by David Lublin & Jack Turner is simple and mesmerizing, hooking me as though it had a plot with a twist.

IRIS moves from the static and motionless to puzzling rhythmic patterns, offering sound worlds and moving, dancing lines. Most of the videos are captivating, and would do well on large screens.

3 Solos

R. Murray Schafer

Annie Tremblay, soprano

Tim Brady, guitar

Brigitte Poulin, piano

Canadian Music Centre (CMCCD/DVD 12006)

Our friends from up north at the Canadian Music Centre offer another look at their composers, with R. Murray Schafer and 3 Solos.

Music for the Morning of the World sets the text of Rumi (translated into English) for soprano and 4-channel tape. The original analog tape was restored into digital by Tim Brady. The tape is spacious and meditative, with deliberate motions that conjure up images related to the text. Soprano Annie Tremblay navigates a demanding vocal line, not always convincingly. This isn’t her fault, but rather the result of some awkward leaps that are not idiomatic.

Tim Brady returns as guitarist for Le Cri de Merlin, a work composed for Norbert Kraft. This is the first recording/performance on electric guitar. Schafer’s score asks the performer to supply a recording of birds from their native country at the end of the piece.

Concluding this album of electronic music, is a work for solo piano composed for Janina Fialkowska and commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Deluxe Suite, and all of Schafer’s works on this disc, moves from idea to idea in an improvisatory fashion, morphing between ideas with little preparation. Brigitte Poulin performs with remarkable skill.

Peter Scott Lewis

river shining through

Timothy Day, Marc Shapiro, Ciompi String Quartet, and Dorian Wind Quintet

Lapis Island Records 003

Peter Scott Lewis’s most recent release of his music on his own label Lapis Island Records is unassuming. All three performances are professional, the package is self-less and not a hint of inflated hyperbole inhabits the composer’s biography. This is all a relief from the barrage of over-dramatic, yet poorly produced homemade albums that sometimes inhabit my mailbox.

River Shining Through is well-crafted and engaging. Exploring ideal textures for string quartet, Lewis shows a knack for the medium. He gives the players some fun counterpoint through out, and spicy rhythmic ideas in the final two movements.

Lewis shows equal skill and intuition when writing for winds. Serenade for Winds is delightful and bouncy; with tender moments juxtaposed with driving chordal textures (“Serendipity”). Lewis’ works are full of contrast, alternating between complex harmonic motions and simple melodies.

In England the last Monday in August is a Bank Holiday, and is more or less equivalent to Labor Day in the U.S. in being the last holiday of the summer. The Proms for August Bank Holiday Monday usually has a matinee, and the whole day usually has a more populist, is not popular- music, slant (the evening concert this year was devoted to the singer Michael Ball and was a concert of Broadway-type songs). The afternoon concert, billed as a family concert and presumably intended to be especially appealing to children, was the occasion of the first performance of The Water Diviners Tale, a sort of opera, (sorry, “a dramatic musical piece for people of all ages”), by Rachel Portman, with a libretto by poet Owen Sheers. Portman is a successful composer for movies who has provided music for, among others, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Emma, The Cider House Rules, Beloved, The Joy Luck Club, Miss Pottter, The Manchurian Candidate, Marvin’s Room, Benny & Joon, and Chocolat; her opera on Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera and has been taken up by a number of other companies, including the New York City Opera.

The Water Diviner’s Tale came about as the result of Portman’s work with BBC television producer Fiona Morris on a broadcast of The Little Prince. Wanting to do another large work which would involve a lot of children and have “some relevance to their lives;” they decided to focus it on the environment, specifically on climate change. The work became the focus for an American Idol-like process (undocumented or, at least, broadcast, at least as yet), called BBC New Talent Search which led to the selection of the group of 40 children, ages 11-16, from all over the UK, who constituted the ensemble of “lost children,” performing with professional adult singers, six youth choirs, and the BBC Concert Orchestra., conducted by David Charles Abell. This is one of several educational outreach programs associated with the Proms, one of the others being a series of BBC Proms Composer Labs and “Inspire”, a BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composers Competition, that led to a concert featuring ten high school composers on August 17 at Cadogan Hall.

In The Water Diviner’s Tale, a large number of children, lost as a result of a cataclysmic storm which has separated them from their homes and parents, encounter a man wearing a sort of bathrobe and turban and carrying a staff (in this case the sonorous actor Nonso Anozie), who tells them that their individual cries for help will never be heard (the fact that they are already en masse and singing as a chorus seems not to matter) and encourages them to join together as a group so that their parents can find them. They begin to ask the Water Diviner how this catastrophe has occurred, and he, surprisingly, assumes personal responsibility for it. This has something to do with his inability to alter the world’s habits of energy consumption, which he has tried to effect by following and telling stories of water. The children tell the Diviner that they will listen to his stories, at which point he puts them in a deep sleep and summons up a Weather Forecaster, who cheerfully, in her chipper “Elegy for All that Shall be Lost,” predicts the worst for the world and tells the Diviner that he is too late to change any thing about it by telling his stories; she also adds that if nothing changes (something that she’s already said is impossible), the children with him will also be lost (presumably in some larger sense than that they are already separated from their homes and parents). The Water Diviner, newly aware of the importance of his task, brings the children out of their trance and tells his story, which is about a young boy who was seduced by the siren song of oil, coal, and gas (represented by the adult singers) concerning their amazing benefits. The boy’s ability to hear this song attracts unsavory scientists and businessmen who sing their own siren songs about how they can put these fuels to use. These songs overpower the “Song of Natural Harmony,” with which the section began. Eventually the boy begins to hear reports of the ill effects of his cooperation with coal, oil, and gas, and he travels the globe to hear the stories of drought, flood, and disaster. It turns out that the Water Diviner is that boy. The children ask him if he thinks it is too late to change the future, and he says it isn’t (even though he’s already be assured by the Weather Forecaster that it is). He then summons up the Weather Forecaster again, but she is unable to detail all that will be lost this time, somehow as a result of the promises of the children to do better than the Diviner has done. They all promise to change things and everybody leaves, happy and unlifted. The fact that they still are separated from their homes and families has somehow ceased to be a problem; it certainly isn’t mentioned any more. (To quote Anna Russell: “I’m not just making this up, you know.”)

The music for The Water Diviner’s Tale is efficient and skillful and, in a way, effective, but it is the sort of generalized effectiveness of movie music, it’s all background. There is never any musical portrayal of any character (despite the fact that there’s a sort of chirpy xylophone figure associated with the Weather Forecaster and a sort of menacing, dinosaur-like, low sort of awkward galumphing motive associated with the siren song of oil, coal, and gas), never any sort of specific or individualized emotion, and never any particularly clear way in which the action, such as it is, could be thought to be either effected or realized by its relationship to the music.

Writing music aimed at children is a tricky undertaking. I found myself comparing The Water Diviner’s Tale to other works intended to have a special interest to children and involving young performers: works such as The Little Sweep, the 150th Psalm, and Noye’s Fludde by Britten (Noye’s Fludde is one of my favorite pieces of Britten’s, and seems to me to be his most successful stage work), or Cinderella, The Two Fiddlers, Kirkwall Shopping Songs, and a whole raft of other small stage pieces (the only one of that group I’ve seen is Dinosaur At Large) by Peter Maxwell Davies, or, even Amahl and the Night Visitors. All of those pieces have a much stronger and clearer dramatic effect, which is manifested IN THE MUSIC. The part of the “message” of The Water Diviner’s Tale that has something to do with collective responsibility and the importance of individuals working together is, in a way, closer to that of The Second Hurricane by Copland, which has nicer music, but is also impeded by the less than completely sure stage sense of its librettist and composer. The piece which Portman’s is closest to, maybe, is the Ballad of Americans by Earl Robinson and John LaTouche, although that piece isn’t staged and even it isn’t quite as hamfisted with making it’s point. The performers in the Portman, especially the lost children and the youth choirs, were absolutely first rate and sounded great. The end of the piece seemed to have been extremely uplifting. The audience when it was over went wild. Like all Proms concerts, this can be heard online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/.

The Arcola Theatre in Hackney has become a major fringe venue in London; this summer they have been presenting a series of operatic performances, curated by Andrew Steggall and Mehmet Ergen and produced by Michael Harris, called Arcola Opera: Grimeborn. On August 22 they staged the first act of Pierre, a work in progress based on Melville, by Richard Beaudoin, The production was directed by Steggal and the “orchestra,” in this case the very excellent pianist Constantine Finehouse, was conducted by Christopher Ward. Although this might be said to be a workshopping of the piece, the simple, effective, and completely polished production did not seem in any way unfinished or tentative, and the singing, by Joseph Kaiser, Annete Dasch, Rachael Nicholls, and Abby Fischer, was uniformly fantastically wonderful. The music for Pierre is carefully considered and masterly in its composition. The vocal writing was effective, and the word setting just about perfect; one could always understand just about all of the words. The weaknesses are that it takes a while into the act before one can quite figure out what might be going on and that there is a certain sameness of quality and tempo. Since voices can’t be that much different in speed and quality if the composer seriously wants them to present the words clearly, differences in tempo and character need to be very clearly articulated in the accompaniment. Still, it would be hard to imagine a more sympathetic or polished realization of Beaudoin’s work on the project up to now; it made me eager to see and hear the whole opera when it’s finished.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only S21 reader pleased when Ennio Morricone received a lifetime achievement Oscar earlier this year.  Recently he chatted with CNN.  At one point he advises young composers to focus on writing absolute music:  if you’re a film composer without a film, you’re not really a composer at all. 

Which begs the question:  any film-less film composers peddling their misconceived craft these days?  Play nice, now.

Rodney has been doing such a great job with the Proms that it’s given me time to finish one of my new projects–the Cleantech Collective, a social community for people who believe there is serious money to be made in cleaning up the planet which, of course, is the most persuasive argument for doing so.  (See Tragedy of the Commons for details).  Also, having this thing with the lower back.  When I sit down, it takes me about three minutes to get vertical again.  Who wants to be Rodney next week while I consult my physical therapist? 

The Prom concert on Tuesday night was given by the BBC Symphony and John Adams, with pianist Olli Mustonen. The big event of the evening was the first performance of Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony, a big instrumental piece based on scenes from his opera of the same name. In this project he was consciously following the example of Hindemith with Mathis der Mahler in not merely assembling a sort of suite from the opera, but recomposing the material into a related but nonetheless independent symphonic composition. In a pre-concert talk Adams said that the task had been much more difficult and time consuming than he had at first envisioned: what he had assumed he could do in a month actually took seven. His main problem was with the reworking of the original music, containing vocal lines, as a completely instrumental texture including those lines as instrumental parts in a completely convincing way.

The symphony is in four movements, The first, The Laboratory, from the beginning of the opera is set in Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory, and includes what in the opera was a choral setting of text from a book about the military uses of atomic weapons; the second, The Bedroom, is based primarily on music setting a poem by Baudelaire which is a set piece in a scene in the opera for Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty; Panic, the third movement, the most extended, uses music from the second act having to do anxiety about whether or not the bomb will actually work (and other kinds of panic, Adams said); the concluding movement, Trinity, is an intensely sorrowful song based on the opera’s climactic music, sung by Oppenheim, setting the Donne sonnet, Batter My Heart Three Personed God. The symphony is a wonderful piece, serious in its intent and imposing in its execution, and always compelling and engaging. It is gorgeously orchestrated, full of beautiful lines, beautifully written for the instruments and completely sure in its dramatic trajectory and timing. (Adams should write a tuba concerto immediately; the writing for tuba was especially imaginative and effective.) It was exciting to hear it, and it makes me want to hear the whole opera as soon as possible. If there’s any quibble about it, it might be that so many of the tunes are in the horn, the trombone, and the bassoons. Adams spoke about this in his talk. Most of the music he used in the symphony involves men’s singing parts, and he put them in instruments which have the same range. The exception to this is the last movement, based on the Donne setting, which he moved up in register and turned into a wonderful trumpet megasolo. One might wish that he had spread the other voice parts over the entire register and timbre of the orchestra as well.

Adams the opera composer has a pretty near perfect sense of how long things should go on and when something different should happen. Century Rolls, a big piano concerto, suggests that Adams the instrumental composer doesn’t. It seemed to me that each of the three movements went on too long, the first movement most egregiously, being, to my mind, about twice too long.
(I presume there was some kind of process going on which caused this to happen.) The instrumental writing, although engaging and interesting, also lacked anything like the specificity of the beautifully shaped former vocal lines in the Doctor Atomic Symphony, and although the piano part seemed plenty hard, it also most of the time was just part of the general texture, rather than standing out in any way. The exception to this was the second movement, which was very beautiful. It’s title is Manny’s Gym, Manny being Emmanuel Ax, for whom it was written, and the Gym in this case being a Gymnopedie; the quality of the piece as a Gymnopedie is not immediately apparent, but is gradually revealed, presumably also systematically somehow. The third movement, Hail Bop, was intended, apparently, as a sort of tribute both to bebop lines and to Nancarrow, but didn’t actually seem much different in character or method from the first movement. The performances of both the Adams pieces seemed to be near perfect.

The concert began with an excellent performance of the suite from Billy the Kid by Copland. For my money, this is the best of the Copland ballets; it’s always interesting and inventive and always, however pompous it may be to put it like this, music of substance, which, it seems to me, can’t be said for the other two. In his pre-concert talk, Adams said that he thought that the ‘populist’ Copland pieces were better than his other pieces. With all due respects to Mr. Adams, this seems to me to be quite foolish. Not that I want to make the opposite case, but rather I’d like to do away with the distinction. The manner of Billy the Kid, the way it’s put together and the way it works, is really not different from the manner of the Sextet/Short Symphony, for instance, and, for that matter, even with the cowboy tunes, it doesn’t sound all that different; nor does Music for the Theater, say, sound all that different, really, from even the Lincoln Portrait. Arthur Berger, when he wrote a review of the Piano Sonata in the 1940’s (hailing it as evidence of Copland’s return to his ‘asbsract’ style) got a rebuke from Copland for making the distinction between his ‘popular’ and ‘abstract’ (I think those were Berger’s terms) works; to Copland it all just seemed to be just his music. (Nowadays, I think people would probably list the Piano Sonata among the populist pieces, anyway, which says something about the validity of the distinction.) Generally, when somebody tries to make a lot of the difference, as Mr. Adams did, they’re not really trying to say anything much about the music so much as they’re just trying to take an opportunity to bash modernism, as Mr. Adams went on to do, and I’m not sure how much anybody gains from that.

The concert (and possibly the pre-concert talk) can be heard online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/.

What will music sound like in 50 years?

What will your music sound like in 5 years?

Back in 1994, these composers weighed in on what music would be like in 150 years: Milton Babbitt Pierre Boulez Harrison Birtwistle Brian Ferneyhough Steve Reich Franco Donatoni Louis Andriessen