Bath Music Fest 2009

May into June : time again for the Bath Music Fest which opened this weekend with a brilliant firework display. We are going to several concerts and on Monday I was part of an enthusiastic audience at the Assembly Rooms hearing a popular programme played by Freddy Kemp, a virtuoso of the key board, but a person of quiet and modest manner. Before the concert there was an interview with Kemp by the Festival’s charismatic Director, the multi-talented Joanna MacGregor.

Kemp’s father is German and his mother Japanese (and he is married to a Russian wife!), but although England is his home, his work confirms him as an international citizen, now much in demand around the world. During the interview, he reeled off the engagements he has had in the last two weeks. And claimed not to be very good at practicing! After a concert the previous evening in Perth, Scotland, he had driven through the night to be available for Monday’s concert, but there were no signs of any tiredness in his performance of two Beethoven sonatas, two Chopin ballads, Liszt’s’ monumental Mephisto Waltz No.1 bringing the recital to a sensational close. It was wonderful to be there.

The Bath Festival is an eclectic mix of music and a long way from the more traditional days of its origin in 1948. Well before Bath became the fashionable destination of the wealthy, Bath was known for its music. Queen Elizabeth visited the city in 1668 to hear the choristers from nearby Wells Cathedral perform in Bath and in the early 1700’s when Beau Nash was the Master of Ceremonies, indulging his love of gambling, and drawing society away from London to bathe in the spa waters, Nash introduced an orchestra as another of the delights the city could offer the indulgent rich. 2008 celebrated Bath International Music Festival's 60th Anniversary with a stunning Bruckner performance by the L.S.O. under Colin Davis.

Joanne MacGregor not only performs in several concerts, but regularly pops up to greet audiences throughout the seventeen days of music making. Yesterday I went to one of her Master (Mistress’?) Classes for young pianists, one of whom, a ten year old girl, brought the house down by the maturity and concentration of her playing. We are looking forward to hearing the amazing South African mezzo Sibongile Khumalo in Bath Abbey this evening.

B.R.

Another Prom Season

The prospectus for the 2009 Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in London is now on sale and you can check on the programmes by looking them up on bbc.co.uk/proms. Each year the style of music is expanded to embrace many genres and performed in a variety of venues, more this year than before. But the classical repertoire is the mainstay of the concerts, and most of them – 76 in total - will be held in the spacious Royal Albert Hall. All will be broadcast and several televised either on the night or at some time later. I have decided to be an armchair concert-goer this year, although I shall miss the unrepeatable atmosphere that can only be experienced in the hall itself.

The programme planners bend over backwards to be different from previous years, the theory being that for a tradition to survive it mustn’t get stale. One novelty this year are concerts that employ the piano or is some cases more than one. All of Tchaikovsky’s works for piano and orchestra are being performed with Stephen Hough as soloist.

But for many the most unusual experience of the Proms will be when Malcolm Arnold’s A Grand, Grand Overture begins the second half of the last night on September 12th I have a recording of this on a compilation disc of his music on Conifer Classics, probably no longer available. It’s a crazy work employing a huge orchestra, organ, three vacuum cleaners, a floor polisher and rifle shots with surely one of the most delayed climaxes in all music to finish the work. The piece if full of spoof references to other composers, including Mahler and Saint Saens. It will be worth waiting for and the Promenaders will love it. My bet is that they will demand an encore.

Originally – and I think its only previous performance – the piece was composed for one of the three Festivals in London organised by the humorist, cartoonist and tuba player Gerard Hoffnung’; a highlight of the 1950’s. The two were friends, both mischievous but Hoffnung’s humour less dark than Arnold’s. I wrote a blog on Arnold in October 2006. I still feel that although he is an uneven composer, he is seriously neglected. So it’s a bit sad that when he is featured in a concert programme its only as a joker, not a serious composer.

But do listen on September 12th if you can. It will be enormous fun.

B.R.

Symphonic Overdrive?

Haydn wrote a hundred and four symphonies, but Beethoven, Bruckner, Vaughan Williams and Mahler only managed nine (though the latter was on his way to a tenth when he died). The British composer, Derek Bourgeois however has written forty four symphonies, more than any other contemporary composer.* With a sound musical training and positions of responsibility in the world of young people’s orchestras, he has composed many works for brass band, several of which have been employed as competition pieces. The symphonies, however, have hardly ever been performed, though you can get a flavour of them in synthesised form on the internet.

Living in Majorca for some years, Bourgeois now lives in New York and is shortly moving back to England. He was educated at Cambridge University, obtaining an honours degree and doctorate, and for two years studied composition with Herbert Howells and conducting under Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal College of Music. He lectured in music at Bristol University between 1970 and 1984. His compositions include fourteen concertos and two operas.

Alan Rushbridger, editor of The Guardian, and himself a keen music lover has written an article about the composer this week. Bourgeois’s problem, he says, is that he writes tunes. Whilst brass bands warm to the ‘rich melodic inventions and romping humour of his compositions’ the critics are more ‘sniffy’. He enjoys inserting jokes into the usually very serious symphonic form, though Haydn and Mozart and even Beethoven could have fun with it, and certainly Malcolm Aarnold did. ‘One camp thought I was too old fashioned, the other camp thought I was far to avant garde… so eventually I decided I would be myself.’

Most of his symphonies have been composed in the last ten years during the illness and death of his first wife. Explaining his method to Rushbridger, he says he begins writing a symphony with an exact length of time in his mind, knowing how he intends to finish; all the way through aiming for that point. He starts the next symphony on the day he finishes the previous one. Analysing his style, Rushbridger is reminded of Walton, Britten, Bernard Herrmann. Eric Coates, Stravinsky, Ives and Bartok.

I wonder if the enterprising Naxos label might record him, so that we can hear his music for ourselves, and could test his assertion that if we heard the symphonies they 'would bring the house down’.

B.R.
* Thanks to Kari for putting me right on this. I have only known Leif Segerstam as a larger than life conductor not as a mammoth composer. 215 symphonies!

Judgement and Inspiration

Dies Irae - Day of Wrath - is the name of the greatest of all medieval Latin hymns, the Gregorian Chant of the Dead, part of the Requiem Mass. It is a powerful description of Judgment Day at the end of the world – a day of divine wrath and a day of mourning - and a prayer to Jesus for mercy. It was probably written by Friar Thomas of Celano (who died circa 1256), a Franciscan who knew St. Francis.

It’s terribly gloomy and perhaps reflects not only a harsh theology of God as avenger and judge but may also echo the severity and hardship of the times in which it was written. But it has been an extraordinary inspiration for several composers of classical as well as religious music. Requiems by Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Verdi include the forbidding words, but Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Tchaikovsky’s Third Suite and Saint Saens’ Organ Symphony No.3 also use the menacing tune of the chant. It appears in many of Rachmaninoff’s works, notably The Isle of the Dead and The Symphonic Dances, which I referred to in my most recent blog, and was almost his last composition. Did it have a special significance for him, I wonder? Unfairly, he is often portrayed as a grave and pessimistic man.

I have just been listening to Liszt’s ‘Totentanz’ ( Dance of Death) in a new recording by Eldar Nebolsin who, although born in Uzbekistan, studied in Madrid and had his first triumph in Spain, in the international piano competition in Santander. He is a brilliant pianist and in this recording on the Naxos label, is partnered by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under its permanent conductor, Vasily Petrenko. In the notes to the recording Keith Anderson suggests Liszt was inspired to write the work by a fresco rather than by the words of the Requiem. (Thinking about his unusual marital arrangements, he would have been wise not to worry too much about the after life!). But in thunderous tones he employs again the familiar tune. I bought the CD because it received a rave review – which is justified. The main works are Liszt’s two piano concertos in wonderful performances. They are by definition ‘performance’ pieces with opportunity for the soloist to display his or her technique, although musically I find all three works disappointing.

I am indebted to an American website simply called DIES IRAE for these background notes. The writer points out that the Polish classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki named his famed "Auschwitz Oratorio" Dies Irae. " And so, composers continue to find inspiration in what otherwise might seem unpromising material . Is it the theme or is it the tune? Or both?

B.R.

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

I am an unashamed devotee of Rachmaninoff’s music and have just been playing a 1990 CD, recently re-released, of his Third Symphony, stunningly performed by the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra under Pavel Kagan (on the bargain alto label). It’s a favourite work of mine and hearing it on this re-mastered disc has been a revelation. On the same disc is another superb performance of his Symphonic Dances, both works belonging to the end of his career, both poorly received by the public on their first performances and given to much revision afterwards as was often his practice, even making changes just before a performance. His recording of the third piano concerto which I have and which he made in 1940, has several cuts in the score, to the disappointment of musical purists. And me!

Responding to an invitation for him to perform in Stockholm, he and his wife and two daughters, as their part of Moscow was taken over by the revolutionaries, virtually escaped from Russia in 1917. They caught a train to Finland, completing their journey by travelling from Finland to Sweden by sledge at night. The family arrived in Stockholm with hand luggage, two thousand roubles and nothing else. Moving eventually to America, he made his home in many places and travelled widely as both composer, conductor and pianist. But international citizen though he became, he saw himself always as Russian. Interviewed in 1941 he said ‘in my compositions no conscious effort has been made to be original, or Romantic or Nationalistic, or anything else. I write down on paper the music I hear within me, as naturally as possible. I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. ‘

The third symphony was received with some enthusiasm in Britain but less so in the U.S.A. People were reluctant to accept him on his own terms and critics and the public found him either too traditional or too radical. His great long-breathed tunes and brilliant orchestration remind one of Tchaikovsky (whom he knew of course; as a student he made a piano transcription of the Manfred Symphony, and played it to the composer), but point to influences by Stravinsky and even, for me - in the Symphonic Dances -to Mahler and Bartok. But he was himself, and whatever his influences, the popularity that marked the last years of his life as he continued to perform on both sides of the Atlantic, has endured, and if his second piano concerto continues to be his signature work for many people, there is much, much more to know about him than that one enormously popular work.

He died just before his seventieth birthday, and the day before a cable arrived form many Soviet composers, congratulating him on his birthday. His music will live for ever.

B.R.

Orchestral Excellence

I was at the Colston Hall, Bristol yesterday for the third of three orchestral concerts, each of which featured a violin concerto. I wrote about the first on November 14th : an intense performance of the Sibelius by Henning Kraggerud, with the Halle Orchestra, which in the days of John Barbirolli, was an early champion of that composer. On the second occasion it was the Brahms concerto, again performed by a woman soloist, Arabella Steinbacher, playing with great strength and golden tone. The orchestra was The Philharmonia, and Charles Dutoit, for many years associated with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, was the conductor. In the programme notes I see the orchestra describes itself has ‘having the greatest claim to be the U.K.’s National Orchestra’.

I was thinking of that audacious suggestion last night when we heard the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto played with appropriate passion but an unusually restrained delicacy for this popular warhorse, by Ilya Gringolts who also presented a sensational pyrotechnic display on the violin as an encore. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra – making no claim to be anything other than a first class ensemble – played with precise attack and opulent sound under its newly appointed conductor, the Ukranian, Kirill Karabits. A slight figure with a no-nonsense attitude on the rostrum, Karabits seems to be in worthy succession to such predecessors as Marin Alsop and Andrew Litton, though perhaps as yet lacking their charisma. Talking with two of the players who I happened to meet later, I gathered that he has already a good rapport with the orchestra.

But back to this claim of the Philharmonia. Of course it is a fine body of musicians. From 1945 when Walter Legge founded it, mainly as a recording orchestra, to the days of Otto Klemperor, and then its rebirth as a self-governing orchestra in 1964 it has been one of our finest and, it seems, most proud orchestras. But there are at least a dozen fine orchestras in the U.K. I was listening to one on TV the other evening, The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by their newly appointed Director, Valery Gergiev in a powerful and deeply moving performance of Mahler’s 2nd ‘Resurrection Symphony. The orchestra describes itself as ‘widely regarded as one of the world’s leading orchestras’. And so it is.

I suppose I have a bias against the suggestion that the London orchestras are peers of the realm. Although much of my early love for music was nurtured in London’s Barbican, Royal Albert and Festival Halls, wonderful evenings listening to the City of Birmingham Orchestra, many recordings of the Halle and now listening to the Bournemouth Orchestra, have taught me otherwise.

So, no U.K. ‘national’ orchestra; just a cornucopia of excellent ones!

B.R.

The Boyan Ensemble of Kiev

We were in Bristol yesterday afternoon to hear this remarkable Ukrainian men’s choir as they come to the end of an intensive month’s tour in this country. They have been making annual visits to Britain since 1992 and although once financed by the U.S.S.R. they are now completely reliant on ticket sales and overnight hospitality from their growing number of supporters. They travel by coach and boat rather than by air, to defray costs. This was their 21st concert and with four more to go they finish their punishing tour on Thursday in Hereford. Heard yesterday in the echoing acoustics of Clifton Catholic Cathedral, the dedicated professionalism of their performance was overwhelming, and richly deserved the huge applause when the concert ended.

The first half consisted of unaccompanied liturgical chants, the twenty four members of the choir dressed in black cassocks, some of the items graced by stunning solos from the counter-tenor V.Mitryayev, the soprano B. Ivanenko and the bass V. Pudchenko amongst others, their voices emerging out of and rising above the harmonic background of sound. That distinctive sound was spine-tingling, evoking the worship of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and conjuring up the purity and austerity of that branch of the Christian Church, which for so many years has existed without reference to any other part of Christiandom.

In the second half, the choir, now dressed in informal white and embroidered clothes, sang a series of folk songs, some poignant and sad, others funny and endearing. Again the choir, now supported by musical instruments, sang with the utmost precision, clearly enjoying the music as much as we were. The solemn and moving first half now balanced by choir’s delight in showing another facet of their art.

I learn from their website that the Ensemble’s members are drawn from Ukraine’s top professional male choir: the Revutsky State Male Choir based in Kyiv (Kiev). The ensemble has toured the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, Israel and Poland, as well as countries of the former Soviet Union. A tour of Canada and the United States is in their future plans.

They should come to Spain! They would be well received amongst people of very different but equally ancient musical traditions. If the choir was able to enthuse the polite English on a cold Sunday afternoon, they would certainly set alight the more extrovert audience that the Spanish would provide.

Meanwhile here in this country we look forward to their next tour in the hope that we shall be able to hear them again.

B.R.