Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance posits the existence (in some metaphysical or conceptual sense) of morphic forms which arise when living beings act in the world. In this theory, these forms are strengthened with each repetition of the action, and create a force field (a morphic field) which can be drawn upon by subsequent beings repeating the same act. The theory predicts that doing the same thing should become easier over time, even when the entities doing the acting are different, in different locations or not not even alive at the same time. Morphic resonance, if it exists (whatever that may mean) is a form of action at a distance and action through time. I have been fascinated by this theory since first reading Sheldrake’s book about it 36 years ago.
Archive for the ‘Jazz’ Category
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Concert Concat 2024
This post is one in a sequence which lists (mostly) live music I have heard, as best as memory allows. I write to have a record of my musical experiences and these entries are intended as postcards from me to my future self. All opinions are personal, although music historians from the 25th Century may find some of them of interest.
Other posts in this collection can be found here. The most recent prior post in this sequence is here.
- Harp Chamber Music, by students from the Royal Academy of Music, at Regent Hall, London, Friday 15 November 2024. The programme was:
- 1. Debussy (arranged Henk de Vlieger): Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune
- 2. Christopher Gunning (1944-2023): Lament
- 3. Britten: Folk Songs for High Voice
- 4. Andre Jolivet (1905-1974): Chant de Linos
The performers were:
- 1: Ethan Osman (conductor), Jamie McClenaghan (flute), Benjamin Atkinson (clarinet), Katie Sherratt (harp), Sara Maxman (v), Polina Sharafyan (v), Charlie Howells (va), Jayden Lamcellari (c).
- 2: Jayden Lamcellari (c) and Megan Humphries (harp).
- 3: Isobel Cleverly (soprano), Sofiia Nikolaiets (soprano), Huw Boucher (harp), Katie Lo (harp).
- 4: Efrem Workman (flute), Sara Maxman (v), Charlie Howells (va), Jayden Lamcellari (c), Huw Boucher (harp).
This was an exquisite and delicate programme, with all the works played expertly, to a near-full hall. Christopher Gunning’s very moving Lament was written in response to the horrors of the war in Syria. Among the Britten songs was David of the White Rock, which I once set myself (for tenor) when at school.
Jolivet’s very challenging Chant de Linos was apparently a 1944 commission for a flute competition that was won by Jean-Pierre Rampal. With such a provenance, it would be a brave flautist who even attempted it, and so hats off to Mr Efrem Workman. He played it superbly, with a strong coherence of line, and without apparent effort. I was reminded of a short poem by Piet Hein:
There is but one art,
No more, no less:
To do all things
With artlessness.” - Vikungur Ólafsson with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on Wednesday 6 November 2024, playing Brahms’ First Piano Concerto.
This was superb performance to an almost full hall, and I had a very good seat in the rear stalls with a direct line of sight to the keyboard. It was amazing to hear how softly Mr Ólafsson played, especially in the second movement, with 2000 or so people sitting immensely quietly to hear him. This Concerto is growing on me, although I still consider Brahms’ music to be long-winded (he is the musical equivalent of Henry James), and the second movement in particular I find to be too long. I could not stay for the second half, which included a new piece by Freya Waley-Cohen and Bartok’s The Miraculous Mandarin Suite.
- Jan Liebermann on the organ of the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, London on Saturday 26 October 2024. The programme was (in a slight change from the printed list):
- JS Bach: Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564
- Jean Langlais (1907-1991): III Chant de paix from Neuf Pieces
- Alfred Hollins (1865-1942): Concert Overture No. 2 in C minor
- Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-18760: Larghetto in F sharp minor
- Zsolt Gardonyi (born 1946): Hommage a Marcel Dupre
- Marcel Dupre (1886-1971): Trois Preludes et Fugues Op. 7 (No 1 in B major, No 2 in F minor and No. 3 in G minor)
This was an outstanding afternoon recital by a young German organist to an audience of about 60 people. I appreciated the three brief introductions to the works played given by Mr Liebermann. Most of the audience were seated downstairs, so it was very good that his performance was relayed live from cameras in the organ loft to three large video screens at the front of the church. It is a wonder of our particular era – still working with imperfect technology – that even across a distance of only a few metres, the sound of the organ reached us before the video images did, with a delay of about half a second. Thus, for instance, it took some getting used to hearing a sudden loud chord and then seeing Mr Liebermann’s hands play it. For this reason, I stopped watching the video screens after a while.
All the works were played superbly, with great technical facility and musicality, and with a large variety of organ sounds and effects. Mr Liebermann appeared to know this particular organ well. I especially liked the Concert Overture by Alfred Hollins. The most exciting work he performed was in fact the encore, Bach’s Badinerie from Orchestral Suite No 2 in B minor, BWV 1067, in an arrangement for organ, I think by Jean Guillot (1930-2019). The concert was worth attending for this one joyful and virtuosic work alone. Congratulations to Mr Liebermann for bringing it so well to life.
Mr Liebermann has posted a clip of himself playing the Badinerie (on the Father Willis organ of Salisbury Cathedral) on IG, here. His cross-over footwork is a marvel to behold.
This recital reminded me of hearing another superb young organist, Cameron Carpenter, once in Cottonopolis.
- Leonard Bernstein’s two operas, Trouble in Tahiti (1952) and A Quiet Place (1983), performed by the Royal Ballet and Opera Company at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera, Covent Garden London, on 22 October 2024.
The RBO’s website says these performances are sold out (and has said so for months), but I had no trouble getting a ticket last week, and there were dozens of empty seats on the evening I attended. This was an outstanding performance of these two operas, with very good singing and acting. The orchestra performance was also superb, and it was nice to able to see four of the percussionists who were at stalls level (not in the orchestra pit). The music was recognizably Bernstein’s and, particularly for the second opera, it sounded repeatedly as if it was about to break into a number from West Side Story. Despite being recognizably Bernstein’s, the music isn’t very good.
Before the start, an American patron in the foyer told me that these two operas were very dark. I did not think them dark, so much as overly melodramatic and anguished. So much angst, so little plot. And so much time – the second opera could have been cut in half with no loss of anything – not message, nor meaning, nor musical pleasure. How could the composer of the taut West Side Story also write such never-ending meanderings? I am pleased that I heard these two operas, but I would not choose to hear them again.
And, forty years on from its composition, I wonder what Bernstein was trying to say with his quotation of Henry Mancini’s Baby Elephant Walk, played by layered strings? What will anyone think in 100 years, when even we, today, don’t get it?
- Professor Dmitri Alexeev, in a late afternoon recital for the Chopin Society, at Westminster Cathedral Hall, London on 20 October 2024. The program:
- Rachmaninoff: Sonata No 1 in D minor, Op. 28
- Chopin: Three Nocturnes (Op 48#2 in F-sharp minor, Op 62#2 in E, Op 27#1 in C-sharp minor)
- Chopin: Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat minor, Op. 51
- Chopin: Three Nouvelle Etudes (#1 in F minor, #2 in A-flat, #3 in D-flat)
- Chopin: Five Polish Songs (arranged by Liszt)
INTERVAL
Mr Alexeev’s performance was superb, and I was indeed fortunate to hear it. A portrait of Chopin was placed behind the piano, as befits a concert for the Chopin Society. The Rachmaninoff Sonata was new to me, and apparently the composer had initially begun the work inspired by the legend of Faust. This idea was still evident in the final work, which had a very strong intellectual energy, with musical ideas from one movement returning and being developed in later movements. Who could have imagined that ordinary scales could sound demonic, as they did here? This Sonata is an intellectual tour de force and Mr Alexeev’s playing made the ideas and their development clear.
Transcendent music
Some years ago, I compiled a list of purposes that may motivate composers, performers or listeners of music, under the heading What is music for?
An objective that may motivate many performers is that of reaching a transcendent state, as the Russian-Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg, describes here. His blog post was written after he had performed all five Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Brussels Philharmonic (under Thierry Fischer) across three evenings, in February 2020 (blog entry of 18 February 2020):
The high point for me was No. 4, during which I experienced something which until now I’ve only felt while playing Russian music: a kind of floating, when your brain disengages or splits in two. One (small) part is alert and following the performance, and perhaps directs the musical flow a little bit, the other (much larger) part is completely sunk into the music, experiencing it in a kind of visceral, instinctive way which precludes logical thinking and seems wired directly to your deepest feelings, without any buffers or defenses. After that concerto I was drained, bewildered, exhilarated – a complete mess. But what an unforgettable night.”
Transitions 2015
People who have passed on during 2015, whose life or works have influenced me:
- Yogi Berra (1925-2015), American baseball player
- Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), American jazz musician
- Robert Conquest (1917-2015), British kremlinologist
- Malcolm Fraser (1930-2015), Australian politician
- Jaako Hintikka (1929-2015), Finnish philosopher and logician
- Lisa Jardine (1944-2015), British historian
- Joan Kirner (1938-2015), Australian politician, aka “Mother Russia”
- Kurt Masur (1927-2015), East German conductor
- John Forbes Nash (1928-2015), American mathematician
- Boris Nemtsov (1959-2015), Russian politician
- Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), British-American neurologist and writer
- Gunter Schabowski (1929-2015), East German politician
- Alex Schalck-Golodkowski (1932-2015), East German politician
- Gunther Schuller (1925-2015), American composer and musician (and French horn player on Miles Davis’ 1959 album, Porgy and Bess).
- Brian Stewart (1922-2015), British intelligence agent.
- Ward Swingle (1927-2015), American singer and jazz musician.
Last year’s post is here.
Paris life – brunch
Cafe Les Frangines, 46 Rue Raymond Losserand, Montparnasse 75014 Paris, France. Soundtrack: Dixieland and klezmer – trumpet, clarinet, trombone, piano, accordian, double bass.
A great Norwegian Messiah
Until this month, the best performance of the Messiah I ever heard was in 2011, an event I recorded here. I have now heard its equal.
This latest Messiah was performed on 19 December 2014 by The BBC Singers and the Norwegian Wind Ensemble, in an arrangement by Stian Aareskjold, under David Hill (conductor), with Fflur Wyn (soprano), Robin Blaze (counter-tenor), Samuel Boden (tenor) and Mark Stone (bass), in Temple Church, as part of Temple Winter Festival.
My heart sank when I first saw that the music had been arranged for wind-band, since groups of woodwinds, so often shrill and ineffectual, are not my favourite ensembles. But in fact this version turned out to be a wonderful arrangement and was realized in a thrilling performance. The secret, I think, was that the ensemble included a double bass and cello, some marvelous natural horns and three sackbuts, and, most spectacularly, saxophones. The solo for soprano sax in “O Thou That Tellest” played by Kristin Haagensen was just superb. That solo soared, as so did the saxes on “Surely He Hath Borne our Griefs and with His Stripes we are Healed”. A modern Briton, of course, cannot easily hear baroque music played by saxophones without thinking of Michael Nyman, and, just as with his great music, this was a truly sublime experience. The trombones in “He Trusted in God” were also inspired. Mr Aareskjold should be congratulated on this arrangement, and I hope it is soon recorded.
In addition, the performance rocked, and often literally. I was sitting as close to the orchestra as I could possibly get, and even had the two baroque trumpeters between me and the orchestra for the second half – Stian Aareskjold and Torgeir Haara, who had played angelically from the organ loft in the first half. (They played from iPads controlled by foot pedals.) So I could see the movement of choir and players as they performed, and there was a distinct bounce in some of the numbers, particularly in “His Yoke is Easy”. Perhaps the presence of saxes played by jazz musicians, who (unlike most classical musicians) move in time to their playing, led to this. Mr Aareskjold is the son of a trumpeter and the grandson of a trombone player (the reverse of my own ancestry), and brass players are often crossover musicians. The Church acoustics were, as usual here, superb.
For the “Hallelujah” Chorus, only part of the audience stood. Until this performance, I had never heard of the action of standing being construed as showing support for monarchical systems of government, and, frankly, such an interpretation is ridiculous. One stands for the “Hallelujah” because it is a tradition to do so, even if a tradition started by a Hanoverian monarch. Like Karl Marx, I believe traditions are the collected errors of past generations. But, like Morton Feldman, I’ve realized in adulthood that errors are not necessarily always to be avoided.
The concert is available to listen until mid January 2015, via BBC Radio 3. The Ensemble hails from Halden, a town of just 30,000 people. It was nice that the people sitting near me also came from there, and had brought with them tourist brochures to entice us to visit the town. I took one, of course, as it gave to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
And on the way out of the Middle Temple, in the offices of law-firm Gibson, Dunne & Crutcher in Temple Avenue, a late-working Friday evening team could be seen around a white board, making at least one observer envious of their camaraderie and collective efforts. How much fun it looked!
Juju
Wayne Shorter’s album Juju was recorded at the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on 3 August 1964, 50 years ago today. The ensemble comprised Shorter on tenor sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Reginald Workman on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. The album has six original compositions, all by Shorter; the modern remastered version has two alternative takes. The music is sublime.
Postscript (added 2024-08-03): 60 years ago today. Still sublime.
The Lamberts
From sometime before 1933 right down to the present day, members of my family have had on their walls reproductions of George Lambert’s 1899 Wynne-Prize-winning painting Across the Black Soil Plains, and so this image is part of my cultural heritage. (Image due to AGNSW.)
George Washington Thomas Lambert (1873-1930) was an Australian artist born, after his father had died, in St Petersburg of an American father and English mother. The family emigrated to New South Wales in 1887. In Australia, he is most famous for his painting, Across the Black Soil Plains, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which was based on his time living at Warren, NSW. During WWI, he was an official Australian war artist.
George’s son, Leonard Constant Lambert (1905-1951) was a jazz-age British composer and conductor, and co-founder of Sadler’s Wells dance company. Constant’s son, Christopher (“Kit”) Sebastian Lambert (1935-1981) was a record producer and manager, and part-creator of rock band, The Who.
Sad that son and grandson both died in their 46th year.
Piano on the Bay
Another colourful outdoor piano, this one by Yunior Marino, spotted at 595 Bay Street at Dundas Street, Toronto. This afternoon some great stride piano was being played on it by an elderly gentleman.
Vale: Graeme Bell
Farewell, Graeme Bell (1914-2012), legendary Australian trad jazz man. His band’s tour of Czechoslovakia in 1947 was still fondly remembered almost four decades later by patrons of JazzKlub Parnas when I first visited Prague in 1984.