Sequenza21

Dave Smith is an excellent composer and a formidable pianist. In his early days he played in the Scratch Orchestra, and over the course of his career he has worked with the likes of Cardew, White, Skempton, Nyman, Bryars, and Parsons, and was an early champion and performer in the UK of Glass, Reich, and Riley. For the concert of his music celebrating his 70th birthday at Cafe Oto the place was packed. The largest and most recent (2018-2019) work on the program, Hunter of Stories, lasting 70 minutes, was described by Smith in his program notes as being a posthumous collaboration between the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), John Tillbury, and himself. Tilbury’s part of the collaboration was the selection of excerpts from Galeano’s final book whose name was given to this project, which are separated by short musical interludes by Smith. The spoken texts, which Smith described as, “intentionally varied, dealing with universal issues as well as the realities of Latin America, indigenous and modern,” were originally in Spanish, and are here presented in translations by Mark Fried. The thirty-two vignettes are divided into two groups, separated by a longer interlude; the entire set is framed by two longer pieces serving as prologue and epilogue. Some of the interludes draw on tunes from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, as well as from the Western Sahara. The work is dedicated to Tilbury. In this performance Tilbury was the speaker and Smith was the pianist.

Tilbury, joined by speaker Ella Marsh, was the pianist is These Special Colours (2002), a short, at least by the terms of this concert, work whose musical material is a Palestinian song called ‘For the Flag,’ and includes a poem published in the Palestinian Chronicle of March 26, 2002, by the thirteen year old Nura Salameh, describing the Palestinian flag. The concluding work, Kaivopuisto (1995-96), an approximately half hour long work in four continuous sections, was originally for ‘cello and piano. Smith was joined by Ian Mitchell in the first performance of a more recent version for bass clarinet and piano. Smith’s notes explained that Kaivopuisto is a large park in Helsinki which he visited in August of 1995 and that ”the piece is in no way descriptive although the (correct) impression may be that the park was spacious and the weather unusually hot.”

All of the performances on the concert were, apparently, flawless; they were certainly definitive.

Another theme of this year’s Proms is the 150th Anniversary of the birth of Henry Wood, the founder of the Proms. This celebration includes a survey of works which he introduced to Britain, and their number is legion, ranging from works of British composers, to composers such as Ravel and Sibelius, through works of Schoenberg and Webern. This anniversary was also the occasion for a concert at Holy Sepulchre London (Otherwise known as St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate}. Henry Wood’s father was a tenor in the choir of the church, and Wood himself studied organ at the church and later became assistant organist. He is also buried there, and there is a memorial window to Wood (along with windows to John Ireland, Nellie Melba, and Walter Carroll) which was dedicated in 1946, in the side chapel of the church, which has, since 1955, been designated as The Musician’s Chapel. There is a book of remembrance, maintained by Friends of the Musician’s Chapel memorializing many musicians, including John Cage. This concert, on August 17, was presented by the BBC Singers, conducted by Sofie Jeannin, was. in fact. a showcase of 20th and 21st century British choral music. The concert opened with Where Does the Uttered Music Go? by William Walton, setting a poem by John Masefield, who was at the time Poet Laureate of The UK, which had been written for the dedication of the Henry Wood memorial window, and it ended with a short new piece by Joanna Lee, At This Man’s Hand, a BBC Commision, setting a short poem by Masefield which is in fact in the window. In between those two works the concert included shorter pieces by John Ireland, Vaughan Williams, Helena Paish (a winner of the INSPIRE competition for young composers), and Eizabeth Maconchy. There were also three large works, Sacred and Profane by Benjamin Britten, Rorate Coeli by Thea Musgrave, and Missa del Cid by Judith Weir.

Sacred and Profane, written in the last year of Britten’s life, is a set of eight relatively short pieces setting texts in Middle English. One might cynically think that Britten was trying to recapture the success of the Ceremony of Carols, whose texts are also in Middle English, but Sacred and Profane is much more astringent both in sound and in manner, and comes off as being downright forbidding. The Musgrave, setting texts of the Scottish poet William Dunbar, is intense and loud and exciting, and somewhat unvaried. It leave an impression of being a big impressive block of continuous sound, without all the much detail–certainly not in clarity of its text.. Judith Weir’s Missa el Cid, combines parts of a translation of a Spanish medieval poem celebrating El Cid’s reconquest of Spain from the Moors and some of the text of the mass, presenting and shaping the story of El Cid in the form of the mass The use of a speaking narration at the beginning of each section is reminiscent of the manner of Weir’s earlier work King Harald’s Saga, and the effect here, as in the earlier piece, is clever, oddly dramatic, and effective.

Music by Walton, which began the concert on August 17, ended the Prom presented on August 20 by The London Symphony Orchestra, along with the London Symphony Chorus, and Orfeó Català and the Orfeó Català Youth Choir, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. The choruses consisted of many singers, and they and the orchestra, assisted by two brass groups, made a big sound in Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast one of the archetypal big British works for chorus and orchestra, which more than filled the enormous space of the Albert Hall. Gerald Finley was the baritone soloist. Their performance was vivid and full of detail and exciting.

The concert began with Les Bandar-log by Charles Koechlin, and Edgar Varèse’s Amériques in its original version of 1921. The Koechlin, evoking Kipling’s The Jungle Book, where the band of monkeys are called by a Hindi term, ‘bandar-log’, to satirize musical trends and contemporary composers of the 1930s, using 12 note tunes and neo-classical fugual textures to portray the composers as gleeful followers of any newfangled trend that comes along. Koechlin was an extremely subtle and skillful composer, and a fabulous orchestrator, and his satire is achieved through the most polished and suave means, producing a very engaging narrative. Varèse started Amériques, his biggest single work, in New York right after he had immigrated to the United States and it is full of what could be described as big city music, portraying the sounds of New York as, he wrote, “all, discoveries, all adventures….the Unknown, new worlds on this planet, in outer space, and in the minds of man.” That big conception is realized with extravagant abandon, with lots of notes and lots of sound produced by an enormous orchestra, including 13 percussionists who seem to play continuously. For all its excessive motion and hyperactive surface, the work is essentially static, and, for this listener, anyway, wears out its welcome before it stops, but it’s exciting and bracing all the while it’s going on. It was striking how well matched the three enormous, noisy and not immediately apparently compatible pieces fit together to make an interesting and satisfying program featuring both their differences and their similarities in languages and manners and spirit..

The Prom on August 18 was billed as ‘Youthful Beginnings”, consisted of firsts: the first Symphonies of Beethoven and Shostakovich, as well as Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, written when the composer was sixteen, and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Fairytale Poem of 1971, her earliest completely orchestra work. The work is a piece of program music telling the story of a piece of chalk, who, although dreaming of drawing wonderful castles, gardens, and the sea, finds itself used for writing boring words, numbers and geometric figures. Just as the chalk has become worn down (literally) from all of this dreary work, it finds itself in total darkness and assumes it is dead. However the darkness is the pocket of a boy who has taken the chalk, and put it in his pocket. He uses the chalk for drawing pictures of wonderful castles, gardens, and the sea on sidewalks, so in the end the chalk finds happiness even though it also finds its extinction. The clarity of the story telling in Fairytale Story is not all that clear, but it is, nonetheless, continually and completely interesting and compelling as music.

The conductor Martyn Brabbins has been and continues to be a champion of new music and of British composers in particular. In celebration of his 60th birthday, the BBC commissioned fourteen composers with whom he has been associated to join in producing a collaborative work, entitled Pictured Within, which is related to the Elgar Enigma Variations, and this project was presented by Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on their Prom on August 13. The participating composers were Dai Fujikura, David Sawyer, Sally Beamish, Colin Matthews, Iris ter Schiphorst, Brett Dean, Wim Henderickx, Richard Blackford, Harrision Birtwistle, Judith Weir, Gavin Bryars, Kalevi Aho, Anthony Payne, and John Pickard. This new project was supplied with its own enigma: the theme, somewhat related to the Elgar original, was written by an anonymous composer. Each of the composers was asked to model his or her variation on one specific Elgar variation, and each of those variations was supposed to be roughly the same relative length as its model. The sense that each of the variations is a commentary on aspects of specific variations and on the Elgar as a whole in the voice of that particular composer gives the whole project a coherence and, frankly, interest that one might not have expected from first hearing about it. Not only did one get a range of various personalities and personal styles in the new work, but one retained some memory of those commentaries during the wonderful performance of the Elgar which ended the concert. The fact that the older work was providing the structure for the newer one, while the newer one was offering fresh perspectives on aspects of the older, made for a sort of two way conversation which was very satisfying. Between the two Enigma works, and flanking the intermission, there were performances of Vaughan Williams’s ethereal Serenade to Music (unfortunately not in the original version with sixteen soloists) and Brahms’s Song of Destiny in which the orchestra was joined by the BBC Singers and ENO Chorus. All of the playing and singing on the concert was exceptionally beautiful.

Since 1998, the BBC has run concurrently with the Proms a competition for pre-college composers called INSPIRE. The competition itself is the culmination of a whole series of localized events over the year. Each year there is a concert at which the winning works are presented. Over the years there has been some tinkering with exact format, but for some time now the concert, which is performed by the Aurora Orchestra, this year conducted not by its principal conductor, Nicholas Collon, but by Duncan Ward, who is himself a composer and a past winner of the Inspire competition, has contained only the winning works, not the highly commended ones as well. For the last few years, the concert has also included newly commissioned works from the previous year’s winning composers. In this year’s concert, which was given at the BBC Maida Vale Studios on August 13, the winning works were Alien Attack: Opening Sequence by Jacy de Sousa (born 2004), Melodie by Daniel Liu (born 2003), Cycle of the Sun by Madeleine Chassar-Hesketh (born2005), and Humans May Not Apply by Sasha Scott (born 2002). The newly commissioned pieces were Mare Tranquillitatis by Tom Hughes (born 2004), and Ambience by Isabel Wood (born 2000). Another winning work for chorus, Twilight by Helena Paish (born 2002), was performed on the BBC Singers concert on August 17. All of the compositions were on a level of quite impressive skill and maturity, and the playing was on a level that many, as it were, grown-up composers would just about kill to get.

The Late Night Prom on August 13, was billed as a “Late-Night Mixtape”, a “digital detox” whose contents “spanning repertoire from the 16th century to the present day” and dealing with the “the expansive themes of space, life, and death”, “with the rich, sinewy sound of the Northern Indian sarod running through it,” would “calm the mind and nourish the soul.” (In the words of Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know.”). The selection of works included works by Arvo Pärt (Fratres–what else?), Max Richter (Vladimir’s Blues and On the Nature of Daylight), Ëriks Ešenvalds (Stars), Pëteris Vasks (The Fruits of Silence), Ola Gjeilo (The Spheres), Iain Farrington (Morning Song), Soumik Datta (Clouds), and John Taverner (The Lamb), along with works by Chopin, Bach, Lobo, Schubert, and some improvisation, apparently, by Soumik Datta (the sarod player) and Cormac Byrne (percussionist), bridging some of the gaps. The other players were pianist Martin James Bartlett, 12 Ensemble (a string orchestra whose artistic directors are Eloisa-Fleur Thoms and Max Ruisi), joined by the vocal ensemble Tenebrae. All of the new-agie, too cool for school, language was a little off-putting, but in fact most of the pieces (none of which was longer than three or four minutes) were quite good and good to hear, the sequence of them was interesting, the playing and singing was all fabulously beautiful, and, it was…sort of ..soothing….so….

The proms concerts are all available for a month on the BBC Sounds website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007v097.  The INSPIRE concert was recorded for later, date unspecified, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.