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Moscow Soloists in London

Published by peter on 2011-12-17 in Concerts, Music, Reviews and Violin. 0 Comments

This past week I attended a concert in the Cadogan Hall by the Moscow Soloists String Chamber Ensemble, led by violist Yuri Bashmet.  The concert seems to have attracted many in London’s large Russian-speaking community, and there were idling limousines outside the Hall.

Although technically the playing was very proficient, the concert and the performance left me disappointed.  First, everyone on stage was dressed entirely in black, even the soloists.   Was this a convention of undertakers, I wondered? Second, almost nobody smiled, again not even many of the soloists. Why so glum? Third, a grand Steinway was used for the first concerto, and then remained stuck there on stage, like some silent, brooding animal.   All the movements of furniture between pieces was done by several of the ensemble members, rather than by the Hall staff, and it is true that the piano was moved a few inches.  But not out of the way, nor offstage.   It therefore blocked the sound (and the view) of the ensemble, and meant that the sound we in the audience heard was not projected uniformly to us.   Where I was sitting on the right-hand side of the hall I heard the two cellos and the lone double bass well, but not the violins, who were hidden by the piano.    I regard this failure to move the piano out of the way as unprofessional, although who was to blame for it is not clear.  Surely, the Hall staff should have moved it aside.

And the glumness!  The first item played was Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052) with soloist Ksenia Bashmet.  Her playing was technically excellent, although not from memory.   But the music was played with such po-faced seriousness, and without any apparent emotion.   This concerto is one of the great humorous compositions of all time, perhaps the greatest before Shostakovich’s Piano and Trumpet Concerto.  A few minutes with the score would tell you the composer was having fun as he wrote it, since it is filled with adornments and flourishes, completely unnecessary and joyful in the extreme, which feel exactly right under the fingers.   This is music written by someone who really liked playing a keyboard.   Moreover, the first movement has a rondo form, with the first theme returning and returning and returning, as if without end.   There is even a solo cadenza, which would traditionally be placed near the end of the movement, which here comes in the middle;  so even after we hear the cadenza, the movement still does not end.   This is Bach having fun.   But where was the fun or the joy from these performers?   Perhaps the fact that Ms Bashmet was not playing the music from memory meant she had had not yet internalized the score sufficiently to allow herself to have free reign with its interpretation.  This performance was not a patch on the last time I heard this concerto played – by Joanna MacGregor in Cottonopolis, a few years ago, whose physical joy at the music was evident from from the get-go.

Similarly, for Mendelssohn’s D Minor Violin Concerto, played by Alena Baeva.   Again the playing here was technically excellent, although also not from memory.   However, only in the third movement did we hear some emotion – at last, some passion and joy from the soloist in what is a very joyful movement.   The earlier movements were played, in contrast, without great passion, although very well.

The two middle soloists in the first half, Dinara Alieva (soprano) and Alexander Buzlov (cello), did smile at us after their performances, but their chosen music was less intellectually enriching.  Buzlov played a theme and variations by Rossini, something the audience seemed to like more than anything else they heard, but which I found superficial in comparison with the Bach or Mendelssohn.  I did  not stay for the second half, the concert already running too long.

Overall, I believe these performers were technically very proficient as musical performers, but not superb as communicators of musical ideas;  sadly, they did not achieve their potential on this occasion, and seemed to lack any group spark or chemistry.  Perhaps this was due to the presence of the brooding piano, obstructing complete interaction with the audience, or perhaps there were other reasons.  Oddly, the ensemble did not tune up on stage at the start of the concert:  I wonder if this explained the lack of social chemistry evident.

References:
Here is a review of the concert by Hugo Shirley of The Telegraph, who likewise noticed an absence of passion.

Ein Deutsche Hamlet

Published by peter on 2011-12-17 in Poetry, Reviews and Shakespeare. 0 Comments

Earlier this month, I caught Schaubuhne Berlin’s Hamlet at the Barbican London.  What an amazing ride!  This was Hamlet as a comedy – contemporary, knowing, witty, and alive.   I imagine the experience is the closest we could come to a modern version of the experience that Shakespeare’s own audience would have had.  The play was presented in German (mostly), with English surtitles.

The performance began with the words from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, ending with “and perchance to dream”.  Was all that followed, then, a dream?   We were confronted with grainy, silent black and white images of people in dark formal dress, like newsreels of pre-war Eastern Europeans.  Again, was this a deliberate allusion, perhaps a reminder of the last time we all were happy innocents prior to a great crime.   Only after some time did we realize that the film we were seeing was not some collection of past newsreels, but live shots of the actors at the back of the stage, taken by young Hamlet wielding a hand-held video camera.

The first scene of the play then was the burial of old Hamlet, with lots of theatrical dirt and hose-pipe rain.    The dirt and often the rain were present throughout the performance, like some muck that stuck to everyone regardless of how often they cleaned it off.  The funeral degenerated into farce, and then the real fun began: the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude was presented as a typical Balkan wedding, with kitschy music, belly dancing, drunken announcers, and even  –  a very funny touch of realism here – someone firing off a machine gun. We learn this was Laertes!

Much of the humour, in the German theatrical tradition perhaps, was slapstick and not to my taste.  Why did Hamlet have to wear a fatsuit, for example?   Some of the humour, however, was witty and clever.  Three times the actors turned to the audience, the house lights going up, and we then became part of the action.  The best of these times was during the late soliloquy of Claudius (Act 3, scene 3) – when he seems to confess:  “O my offence is rank, it smells to Heaven.”  Claudius played this scene as an episode of a Jerry Springer show, coming down as the compere into the audience to ask our opinions of the offence.

Several times, too, the actors pretended to lose their place or forget their words (in German), so looked up to the English surtitles to see what they should be saying next.  Similarly, great fun was had when the court was informed that Hamlet intended to stage a play.  Well, Claudius was informed, not so much a play as a theatre-piece (“theaterstuck”); Claudius repeated this word with all the disdain one can imagine a man of his age and class having for avant-garde theatre.  This was very funny.   Even the final death scene, although mostly serious, was played for laughs, with all us knowing that it was an act and not for real.

Because the cast was small (six actors), there was much doubling.   A different coloured wig transformed Gertrude to Ophelia, and the transformation of the actress, Judith Rosmair, from a middle-aged, Jacqueline Kennedy-lookalike  to teenage girl was immensely convincing.  Her voice, her words, her stance, her mannerisms, her movements – all changed, and instantly.  And how clever to allude to Mrs Kennedy-Onassis when portraying Gertrude!  Hamlet was played by Lars Eidinger.

This was “Hamlet” done brilliantly, original and thought-provoking.   And immensely funny.   Superb!
Any earlier review of the Berlin production is here.  And a Liverpudlian blog devoted to Hamlet is here.

(HT: Benjamin Leitch.)

Balmain boys don't cry

Published by peter on 2011-12-11 in Concerts, Music and Reviews. 0 Comments

One of my great-great-great-grandfathers, William Graham Peverley (1811 – 1893), established a ship-building business in East Balmain, Sydney, in 1853 or 1854.    The location was east of St Mary’s Street and south of Pearsons Wharf,  an area which is nowadays a harbourside park, Illoura Reserve.  The suburb of Balmain had been named for Dr William Balmain (1762-1803), a surgeon with the First Fleet, and later Principal Surgeon in the colony of New South Wales, who was first to be granted land on the peninsula.   They have always bred them tough there – the saying is: Balmain boys don’t cry.  Among the residents have been two Premiers of NSW, Sir Henry Parkes and Neville Wran, neither someone to mess with.  And the State MLA for Balmain in recent times was the very tough Dawn Fraser, Olympic swimmer and publican, elected as an Independent.

It therefore felt like a chance meeting of a long-disappeared friend to enter the Church of St Giles-in-the-Fields in London’s West End this week, and discover it had been Dr Balmain’s home church upon his return to Britain in 1802.   At the back of the church is a plaque erected by The Balmain Association.   The church was the venue for a performance of Handel’s Messiah, by Solistes de Musique Ancienne and Siglo de Oro, under the direction of  the latter’s founder, Patrick Allies.   This was the second time I have  seen SMA perform, having heard their superb Sloane Square concert earlier in the year.   This time they had an audience of about 50 people, perhaps one quarter of the church’s capacity.

Despite the empty seats, the acoustics of this church were much better than that of Holy Trinity Sloane Square, and the performance was just superb.    St. Giles has two long parallel first-floor balconies, each about 1/4 of the width of the building, running the length of the church, and these two overhangs, together with their supporting columns and multiply-surfaced stone decorations, created strong reverberation, with a medium-duration delay.  The result was to make the choir and orchestra sound at least 5 times their size, filling the space with sound.   Even sitting at the back of the church, the sound was both warm and clear, something rare in churches, whose acoustics usually make concert performances sound either fuzzy or cold.   As with their previous concert, SMA made use of the space, having two of the trumpeters in Part I play from the left balcony.

This was one of the greatest Messiahs I have ever heard.  All the vocal soloists were excellent, and projected well.  Similarly, we could hear well the instrumental soloists (which was not the case in the earlier SMA concert).   Unfortunately, the program notes did not list the names of the soloists specifically; I was only able to infer the name of one vocal soloist, William Morrison, who’s aria in Part I was extremely clear and very moving.  Joel Newsome’s trumpet solo, on an instrument with cylindrical valves, on “The trumpet shall sound” in Part III, was also very powerful.    I left the church uplifted and inspired.

I had not known before reading the program notes that Handel’s librettist for The Messiah, Charles Jennens (1700-1773), was a supporter of the Stuarts, and that his words for the oratorio – people in darkness awaiting a redeemer who returns in triumph and glory, etc – could be taken as political commentary on the Hanoverians, even as late as this (1741).

A very different experience last night, in another London church, St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate.  This was a performance of (excerpts from) Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and his Mass in B Minor, by the Medici Choir and the Brandenburg Baroque Soloists.  The church this time was overflowing, with perhaps 250 people seated and more standing at the back.    The acoustics of this church with its much higher ceiling and absence of balconies was very different to that of St. Giles.  The performers were not raised above the audience, and their sound disappeared upwards; it seemed not to come back to us.

Sitting behind a column meant I head some sounds with clarity — those of the choristers I could see — while  other singers and the orchestra were fuzzy.   For the most part, the soloists sang without projecting their voices.  At first, I thought this was due to the acoustics, but on occasion the soloists did project, and the difference was noticeable.   Why would a professional opera singer, as these soloists were, not project, I wonder?  Why not seek to fill the space one is performing in?  The lady who sang “Schlafe, mein Liebster” in the Oratorio, was particularly disappointing, filling powerfully the ears of the lucky people in the first row, it seemed, and no one else.   Those of us at the back of the church could barely hear her.   Was this due to some silly authentic-performance notion or a Lutheran disdain for aural spectacle, perhaps?

I suspect some silly notion at play.   Bach’s music in the Mass was “improved” by the addition of a new section composed by director John Baird for this concert.  One has to admire the self-confidence of someone willing to try to complete what Bach did not himself finish.  However, the real absurdity for me, and evidence of a lack of musical seriousness, was to end the concert with the congregational singing of Christmas carols:  rather than leaving with the sound of Bach in one’s ears, instead it would be, “We wish you a merry Christmas”.  It was important for me that my ears and mind be not so corrupted, so I left before the end.   What a contrast in integrity of musical purpose between these two concerts!  And how great again were the Solistes de Musique Ancienne and Siglo de Oro.

Mendelssohn in Wigmore Street

Published by peter on 2011-10-31 in Concerts, Music and Reviews. 0 Comments

At Wigmore Hall last night was a thrilling performance by the Scottish Ensemble, a string orchestra, together with Scottish pianist Alasdair Beatson. The program comprised works by Stravinsky and by Mendelssohn.  Both the Stravinsky pieces were  rhythmically complex, but hard to parse otherwise – melodic invention, as so often with this composer, was absent and large-scale musical form, if indeed any was present, was not discernible from a single hearing.

I have remarked before that music instantiates or executes a thought process, and some music involves thinking processes that are alien to me.  Most of Stravinsky’s late music is in this category, while that in his middle phase (in the so-called NeoClassical style), while not alien, is quite often banal.  Yet his early music speaks to me profoundly. Last night’s two pieces were clearly challenging to perform well, with the subtle rhythmic interactions and off-piste counting, despite their unpleasant listening.

What I lost there, however, was more than compensated by the Mendelssohn.  The first half saw the Ensemble play two of his Four Pieces for String Quartet, which really should be called “four pieces for String Quartet”, since the composer never grouped them together in this way.  The fugue of the first piece, furiously intense, gives the lie to the claim one still sometimes hears that Mendelssohn’s music lacks profundity or intensity. The playing and cohesion here was superb, and as always with this fugue, spine-chilling. It would be nice to hear this group play some of Mendelssohn’s 12 string symphonies, particularly the fugal movements of the later symphonies.

The real excitement last night came with Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Piano, Violin and Strings, in which Alasdair Beatson played piano and Jonathan Morton, solo violin.   Morton also joined in the ensemble parts when not soloing.  I know this piece very well, although I can recall only once hearing it in performance.  The placement of the performers was somewhat strange, with the high and middle strings behind the piano (and hence behind the upraised lid), dulling their sound.

In any case, the performance was thrilling in the extreme. Beatson captured the many, varied moods of the piano part – from church-like chorale harmonies, through rolling, lieder-style accompaniments for a cantabile violin, to a tempestuousness that made the instrument sound like an angry, rampaging animal.     You can tell how good Mendelssohn was as a pianist himself just by listening to this part, and also how much he enjoyed playing.   The first movement, particularly, has flourishes of pleasure and delight throughout.

Strange, then, was the positioning on stage of the two soloists, with the violinist standing behind the pianist. The first movement has such witty interplay between the two performers – calls-and-responses, mimicry, quoting, and transforming, etc – that for each player not to be able to see the eyes of the other seems untenable.   I cannot imagine young Felix on piano and Eduard Rietz, his friend and violin teacher, for whom this music was written, not facing each other and smiling with each returned flourish.

Like the Australia Chamber Orchestra, most members of the Scottish Ensemble stand while performing.  As with the ACO,  this strikes me as an insidious type of ageism, and is entirely unnecessary.  Only young or very fit people can do this, and one wonders at what average age of ensemble members will the group regain their commonsense. Also, for the historical record, Beatson’s pages were turned by one of the hall staff: even the stage-hands at the Wigmore can read music, apparently.

Program:

Stravinsky:  Concerto in D
Mendelssohn:  Capriccio and Fugue from opus 81 (arranged Morton)
Stravinsky:  Concertino (arranged Morton)
Mendelssohn:  Concerto for Piano, Violin and Strings in D minor.

A review of another concert in the same tour, in Dundee, is here.

This concert is listed in my concatenation of live music events.

Concert Concat 1

Published by peter on 2011-06-04 in Concats, Concert Concats, Concerts, Music, Reviews and Violin. 0 Comments

As part of the diverse mental attic that this blog is, this post simply lists live music I have heard, as best my memory serves, up until the pandemic. In some cases, I am also motivated to write about what I heard.

Other posts in this series are listed here.

  • Gulce Sevgen, piano, in a concert at the Gesellschaft fur Musiktheatre, Turkenstrasse 19, Vienna 1090, Austria, 15 November 2018.   This venue turned out to be a small room holding 48 seats in a converted apartment.  There were 20 people present to hear Ms Sevgen play JS Bach’s Chromatic Fantasie & Fugue in d-minor BWV903, Beethoven’s Pastorale Sonata, excerpts from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”, Mendelssohn’s Variations Serieuses, Op. 54, and Liszt’s Concert Etude E/M A218 and Zweite Ballade, E/M A181.  Ms Sevgen’s performance throughout was from memory, a quite remarkable feat.  Her playing was perhaps too loud for the size of the room, even with the piano lid half-down. The Bach, Beethoven and Mendelssohn were all excellent.  I have remarked before that I do not “get” the music of Prokofiev.  His music for Romeo and Juliet is a prime example:  the famous dance with its large-footed stomping bassline conjures up, for me, Norwegian trolls not feuding Italian merchant families, as if the composer had read a different play altogether. (Mendelssohn’s and Shostakovich’s incidental music to Shakespeare, by contrast, both make perfect sense.)  The playing of the Liszt works was fluent and articulate, but devoid of any meaning; it is perhaps unfair to ask performers to add meaning where there was none, since these are simply show-off pieces, all style and no substance.  But it is not unfair to ask performers not to play such vapid, meaningless music in public.

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Cocktails with Rhythmica

Published by peter on 2011-02-11 in Concerts, Jazz, Music and Reviews. 0 Comments

Another superb gig from Rhythmica, this time in the Cafe of Foyle’s Bookshop in London.   After last weekend’s wake-up call in Southport, tonight’s gig was at a more civilized hour.   But the pace and the musical skill and the serious intent were just the same – anyone expecting easy-listening, cocktail-bar music was in for a shock!
With about 75 people present, it was standing room only.    Standing at the back, I found Peter Edwards’ piano hard to hear – maybe it was not amplified, or not sufficiently.   I enjoyed again bass Peter Randall’s solo in Parallel, a solo which seemed to have more coherence tonight, or perhaps I understood the motifs and their development better this time round.   Andy Chapman on drums provided solid support for the odd time signatures, and I noticed again the frequent rhythmic coupling and tripling he did with Randall’s bass and Edwards’ piano.
I was also impressed by Mark Crown’s superfast bop trumpet solo on Herbie Hancock’s The Sorcerer. But the man of the match tonight was undoubtedly stand-in tenor sax player, Binker Golding, whose blistering, vein-popping solo on the same number had the audience up in a standing ovation when he ended.    Even the two Dutch women near me who talked through the entire set were quiet for this, although they still didn’t look at the stage.
As best I recall, the order of songs was:

  • Time Machine (Audu)
  • Anthem (Edwards)
  • Parallel (Joe Harriott)
  • Turner’s Dream (Crown)
  • Triple Threat (Edwards)
  • The Sorcerer (Hancock)
  • Blind Man’s Stomp (Golding).

Can’t wait to hear these guys again!
UPDATE (2011-02-18): A video of Binker’s blistering solo is here, and photos of the gig here.

Breakfast with Rhythmica

Published by peter on 2011-02-05 in Concerts, Jazz, Music and Reviews. 0 Comments

Earlier today I caught a rainy, late morning gig by Rhythmica as part of the Southport Jazz on a Winter’s Weekend Festival.  The quintet comprises Mark Crown on trumpet, Peter Edwards piano, Peter Randall double bass, Andy Chapman drums, and Zem Audu on sax.  Audu was absent today, his place taken by Binker Golding on tenor sax.   There were perhaps 150 people in the audience, with only a handful looking younger than 50.   Maybe everyone younger was still asleep.
What a way to wake up!  From the first three bars of the first number – Time Machine – you knew these guys were serious – they were people to be reckoned with.  The piece was in 11/4 (or perhaps one bar in 3 beats to every two bars in 4), and they were extremely together!  Piano and bass were in close unison for an ostinato bass line, trumpet and tenor sax together in similar unison for the melody.    And everyone – all 5 – in very tight formation.    The close co-ordination was evident throughout the morning, with the players grouping mostly as for Time Machine.
The use of trumpet and sax together, sometimes in unison, sometimes playing seconds and thirds (especially at the ends of unison phrases), with the piano riffing between phrases,  as if commenting from the sidelines on the melody, is a feature of Wynton Marsalis’ compositions, and before him, of Wayne Shorter and others in the early 60s.   This produces what I find is a very attractive sound, and Rhythmica did it very well.  Anthem was in this vein.   Sometimes also the bass and drums would double (as in Mr JJ), and just once we also heard trumpet, sax and piano play unison/thirds choruses together, in the aptly named Triple Threat.   And for the final chorus of Solace, Crown’s trumpet played long-held falling fifths underneath everyone else’s bop gyrations; these were just sublime.
In a lineup of excellent performers, the standout for me was bass player Peter Randall – he was fast, agile, and with lots of interesting walking lines – and using all five fingers to stop strings in the high registers.   But we only heard him solo once (in Parallel) –  it would be good to hear more of him.

As best I recall, the order of songs was as follows:
Set 1:

  • Time Machine (written by Audu)
  • Anthem (Edwards)
  • Delfeayo’s Dilemma (Wynton Marsalis)
  • Turner’s Dream (Crown)
  • Mr JJ (Jeff “Tain” Watts)

Set 2:

  • Triple Threat – The Bridge (Edwards)
  • Parallel (Joe Harriott)
  • Solace (Edwards)
  • The Sorcerer (Herbie Hancock)
  • Blind Man Stomp (Golding).

The last number was a great New Orleans stomp written by Binker Golding, which the crowd loved – perhaps showing their real preference would have been for something more traditional.   Myself, I was happier with what came before.  Counting 11 to the bar certainly woke me up PDQ!

UPDATE (2011-02-06): I have now listened to their debut CD.  Confirms my view that these guys are not people you’d want to mess with.  They have some serious intent and the strong musical skills to achieve it.  This is great music.
UPDATE #2 (2011-02-08): The band’s next outing is in a bookshop!   First, pre-dawn Saturday morning gigs, then playing  in libraries!  What next?  An appearance on The Archers?  Or music to accompany a TV cooking program?

Last Tango in Braidwood

Published by peter on 2011-01-29 in Concerts, Music and Reviews. 0 Comments

Here is a review of a concert of student compositions, held at the then Canberra School of Music, on 31 October 1978, which I wrote at the time.

It is interesting that the student composer of one of the least impressive works played at that concert should end up as a professional composer  (Knehans), while that of the most impressive, it seems, did not (McGuiness). But the style of McGuiness’ piece was closer to what we now call downtown, and I have never been much impressed with uptown contemporary music, despite its hold on the academy and the new music establishment.  My sympathies for downtown and antipathy to uptown music has as much to do with the various aspirations of these styles as with how the resulting music sounds.

Ian Davies:  Last Tango in Braidwood or I Might be Wrong. Very good – at times impressionistic, at other times expressionistic.    Owes a lot to Sculthorpe (before his turn to late romanticism).  Good stereo effects. Held together well, except for the ending.  The last 15% of the piece would be better deleted and replaced by something much shorter, and more unified with the first 85%.

Alexandra Campbell: Harmonic Music. More harmonic than Davies’ piece, but not at all traditional. The piece seemed to lack any unifying idea, and just seemed a series of random statements, the phrases disconnected and unrelated.  A pity, because some of the individual phrases were nice-sounding.  Showed clear understanding of instrumental possibilities, especially the winds – perhaps fittingly for a composer who plays the oboe.

Richard Webb: Cube. If the previous piece was incoherent, this was completely incomprehensible.   Like listening to someone speaking in an unknown foreign language, not even the individual phrases made sense.  The piece was just a cacophony of effects, overloud and overlong.

Richard Webb: Maya. A tape realization, this was also overloud and overlong. Not gebrauchsmusik, but boretheaudiencemusik.   Listening to electronic special effects in 1978 brings to mind only Star Wars and science fiction novels, so perhaps these effects can’t be used any longer.  The audience began to talk about 3/4 of the way through, so my boredom was not unique.

Andrew McGuiness:  Simple Music (for Simple People). This was superb!  Fantastic!   The ensemble stood in darkness and played according to graphic instructions written on paper affixed to the wall, each page of instructions illuminated by a lady (Alex Campbell) holding a torch, as it was being played.  Sitting  in the dark with just the torch light, it felt like we were watching a sunrise.  And the music mirrored this feeling perfectly, though it was not programmatic or symbolic at all.  The music was impressionistic and at times pseudo-Balinese (again, a la Sculthorpe).  One discord was sustained throughout, I think on an electric piano or on a synth set to “harpsichord”, perhaps.  Simply marvellous.

Peter Butler: Champagne will be Served at Interval. Butler played chimes and electronic piano at front. The e-piano was too loud, especially in comparison with the acoustic piano at rear.  Apart from this the piece was very good.  The “form” was a call-and-response structure, with the call issued by one of the five sections (strings; e-piano; piano; guitar and flute;  and guitar and flute) to another, with the chimes intervening every so often to signal a climax, or perhaps an anti-climax.  The calls – were these questions? – occasionally became fierce, with loud crescendos and sustained ranting, usually ending abruptly or halted by a clang of the chimes. Certainly, as the notes said, a snakes-and-ladders piece.  Apparently, only the outline was sketched by the composer, with details added by the performers.  It would be interesting to see the score.   This was the most expressionistic piece of the evening (ignoring the tape realization).

Peter Butler: One Dollar per Glass. A piece for solo guitar, performed by Brian Lewis, this was a collage of special effects:  tapping of the base of the guitar; playing it with a cello bow, a beer glass and a spoon; and re-tuning the instrument while it was being played.  The second half of the piece was more overboard with effects than the first, which at least required some guitar-playing skills from the performer.

Douglas Knehans:  Survey in Regions (A Tragedy in 4 Parts). Structured on Eliot’s poem, Portrait of a Lady, the piece was supported by rude tape noises.   Some of these tape recordings were verses of the poem, although others sounded like Ronnie Barker speaking.  I was unable not to laugh each time Barker’s voice was heard.  The piece seemed sentimental and insincere, because so many cues in  the poem were missed or ignored:  “attenuated tones of violins, Mingled with remote cornets”, “a dull tom-tom begins”, etc.  The only excitement was visual, since the performers each played many instruments (although only ever one at a time), so that everyone was running around: organist to xylophone, and then back; guitarist to bass drum and back, only to be followed to the drum immediately by the lady percussionist.  Musically, the piece made no sense to me, although the organ had some nice phrases now and again.

Art: Katie Allen at Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno

Published by peter on 2010-07-28 in Art and Reviews. 0 Comments

At the fine Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno, Wales, there is currently an exhibition of various contemporary artists, We Have the Mirrors, We Have the Plans/Gennym Ni Mae’r Drychau, Gennym Ni Mae’r Cynlluniau.  By far the most interesting works there, and the reason for my visit, are some paintings by Katie Allen.
Allen paints intricate landscapes with acrylics, making use of the key features of these paints:  that they are water-resistant when dry, and dry quickly, so can be over-painted on one another.  Her paintings involve intricate borders and highlights, each flower and leaf bordered, with little dots of colour inside every one, an effect which must take hours of tedious, careful, mind-numbing (although also possibly spiritually-uplifting) work to produce.   A reproduction of her Autumnal Arboretum (2009, Acrylic on Board, 153 x 122 cm) is shown here (courtesy of the artist’s website), although no reproduction can do justice to the intricacy of the actual painted work:

I find Allen’s work reminiscent of that of Peter Doig in its intricate representation of a landscape; I am reminded of paintings such as Doig’s White Canoe (1991), with its detailed lake-surface reflections of scrub and trees.   Both are modern-day descendants of the carefully-observed landscapes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  As with Doig’s work, I feel Allen’s efforts and skill are wasted on representational art.   With such facility, intelligent imagination, and obvious energy, she could produce very fine abstractions.

Of course, all art is abstract, even fully representational art, since art is a manifestation of what is in the artist’s mind, of what the artist sees, not what exists in the world outside his or her mind.   Clearly what is in Allen’s mind is a distortion – to me, a very attractive and compelling distortion – of the real landscapes that the paintings point to.  Despite being representational, her work is much closer to the abstract end of the spectrum than to the realistic, pictorial end.  By being very nearly, but not actually, abstract, her work unsettles me.  In other words, her methods and  technique are highly abstract yet still the paintings point to some real-world landscapes, and these two – the methods and the semantic signified – are in conflict.
How much stronger and more compelling Allen’s work would be if her paintings did not point to anything ostensibly real and external, but were pure abstractions.  As with all purely abstract art (for example, music, islamic tilings), the paintings could well still point somewhere, but precisely where would only emerge with the act of painting and the act of viewing.   Allowing the meaning of the work to emerge rather than pre-defining it, however, is so contrary to what most of us moderns think artists are doing (that they are communicating a message to us, and that message is pre-existing in themselves) that doing this requires some courage.  The strength of Allen’s existing work shows that she has this quality.

POSTSCRIPT (2010-08-23):  More on the abstract nature of all art, and the relationship between object, eye, mind, and hand,  here.
Reference:
Anon [2010]: We Have the Mirrors, We Have the Plans/Gennym Ni Mae’r Drychau, Gennym Ni Mae’r Cynlluniau.  Exhibition Catalog, Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales. 2010-05-22 to 2010-09-04.

Carpenter in Cottonopolis

Published by peter on 2010-05-22 in Concerts, Minimalism, Music, Recent Listening and Reviews. 0 Comments

Being a traveling organ recitalist has its own challenges. All pipe and most electric organs are unique. A recitalist needs to practice beforehand on the organ he or she will perform on, to get a feel for the instrument’s capabilities, to know its sounds and colours, to choose the stops (the sounds) for the works to be played, and to become familiar with its physical layout. Thus, deciding what music best fits a particular organ and how best to voice that music on that organ requires the organist to spend some time alone with the organ. Organs are one of the last remaining examples in modern Western life of the primacy of the local, the particular, the here-and-now, over the universal and general and eternal (in the analysis of Stephen Toulmin). It is not surprising that the art of improvisation remains alive in organ recitals, alone among current classical music performance practices.

For this reason, American organist Cameron Carpenter tries his best not to decide recital programs in advance of seeing the organ. Last night in Manchester, playing on a large cinema-style organ in the Bridgewater Hall (not the Hall Organ), he gave an outstanding performance of the following works (as best I can recall):

  • Bach’s Toccata in F minor (though played in F#)
  • One of his own Three Intermezzi for Cinema Organ
  • Bach’s Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, in C minor, C# minor and D major
  • Schubert’s Erl-King, in Carpenter’s transcription for organ
  • Two Chopin Etudes for piano, in Carpenter’s transcription for organ.
  • Bach’s Prelude and Fugue for Organ in G major (with an inserted cadenza improvisation, cinema-organ style)
  • He ended the concert with two improvisations.
  • The audience then recalled him three times for encores, which including a cinema-organ version of Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turk (famous as the usual music for the chase scenes in silent films) and (I think) a Prelude and Fugue by Mendelssohn.

What a wonderful, thought-provoking performance this was! Before the concert even began, Carpenter spent 20 minutes in the lobby, greeting members of the audience as they arrived, something unknown in classical music (at least since Franz Liszt, who, in addition, chatted to the audience between pieces and even while playing).

Carpenter’s performances then likewise played masterful havoc with the fusty organ recital tradition! But not arbitrarily – the guy had thought intelligently about the music and knew what he was doing. For instance, in Bach’s proto-minimalist Prelude in C minor (WTC, Book I), the left-hand part was taken by the feet, and the subtle melody which emerges from the leading notes of the right-hand part was played on a different keyboard (and thus with different tone colours) to the notes from which it emerges.  Pianists often foreground the leading melody notes while pushing the other right-hand notes into the background; Carpenter did not do this, which I think better matches the minimalist tenor of the music – ie, it is the background here that is really the foreground. His was an intelligent and reflective treatment, and showed an understanding of the ideas in this music. (In case the mention of Bach and minimalism in the same breath surprises you, I think there is a close connection between Minimalism and Pietism, a relationship which deserves its own post.)

Would old JS have liked this treatment of his music? Of course, he would have! The man who imported colorful Italian and French musical styles into the moribund North German church music tradition and wrote a cantata in praise of coffee would surely have loved it. And one only has to listen to Bach’s Piano Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052), with its humorous flourishes and its repeated notes (more minimalism!), to know that this was a man who liked to play the keyboard.

And Carpenter’s delight and enthusiasm at playing the organ was evident throughout. Hands stretched across two, three and even four keyboards, or jumping back and forth between them, along with feet playing 4-note chords or impossible contrapuntal parts (such as the opening voice of the D Major Fugue) or imitating the wild horses in the Erl-King, all showed a man enjoying himself immensely. Even when a technical problem caused one keyboard not to sound, he remained enthusiastic. The hall was only about half full, and all of us who heard him were lucky to have experienced this superb combination of enthusiasm, black-belt technical mastery, and intelligent musicianship. Life has been better ever since!

POSTSCRIPT (2010-08-10): Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Carpenter’s organ-playing.  I note that the writer and reviewers quoted in that review are themselves organists (or the children of), and wonder if Carpenter’s messing with tradition is what really upsets these folk. For some reason I think of Karl Marx’s dictum that tradition comprises the collected errors of past generations.

References:

Cameron Carpenter web-site.  Edition Peters page.

Guardian preview here. Pre-concert interview with BBC In Tune here (limited time only).