More than Pictures at an Exhibition - Volkov Julian Anderson Liszt

Ilan Volkov photo: Alastair Miles, courtesy Maestro Arts

The Imaginary Museum - Julian Anderson's Piano Concerto at Ilan Volkov's Prom 16 with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the most innovative Prom programme so far, and possibly the best performance, too.  Music doesn't exist in a vacuum, but in a continuum. Volkov's eclectic programme showed how visual images and music connect: a cross-fertilization that reflects the panorama of human experience.  Though the Prom was billed "Pictures at an Exhibition" because Mussorgsky sells, the heart of the programme was Franz Liszt';s tone poem From the Cradle to the Grave (Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe).  In April 1881,  Liszt received a drawing from the Hungarian artist Mihály Zichy. Zichy was preparing a book of illustrations tracing the role of music in life, from birth to death and the afterlife, and wished to portray Liszt as the Muse of Music on its title page.  Liszt was delighted. "Celebrated Artist!", he wrote "Your drawing about the Genius of Music is a miraculous symphony! I am trying to set it to music and shall offer it to you".

Though composed as a symphonic poem in one movement, Liszt's From the Cradle to the Grave unfolds in a series of vignettes, like the illustrations in Zichy's volume. The gentle first phase suggests, perhaps, innocence, though there's no obvious lullaby melody.  Gradually  textures develop, the tessitura growing higher until, ornamented by rich, shimmering strings and a trumpet, one might imagine the fullness of time. Then, silence and rarified calm. Although this piece isn't nearly as flamboyant as Liszt's Hamlet S104 from  1858, it's interesting because it's more inward, almost impressionistc in its abstraction. Hamlet, though, is a jolly showpiece full of colour and drama. An excellent opening piece, setting the stage, so to speak, and a counterbalance to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, (orchestrated by Ravel), where each "picture" tells a story.  An ebullient performance, though, nicely detailed. The BBC SSO are an excellent band, and have worked so long with Volkov that orchestra and conductor understand each other well.   

Julian Anderson is a composer whose visual imagination has stimulated and inspired his music for the last 25 years. Think Poetry Nearing Silence,  Imagin'd Corners, The Book of Hours, the Alhambra Fantasy, Eden (sparked off by Brancusi's The Kiss) and even Symphony, which, despite its non-committal title, is vividly graphic, like a fast-flowing mountain stream such as in paintings by Sibelius's friend Axel Gallen-Kallela.  Or, more recently, Incantesimi (at the Proms last year, with its multi-level layers in perpetual orbit, reflecting early machines used to explain the universe.  Indeed, I think Anderson's best work springs from ideas sparked by visual stimuli, as opposed to literary sources. Thebans, for example, though I liked it (review here) isn't at all typical of his work.

The Imagined Museum isn't typical Anderson, either, but it's a successful new departure for a composer who writes more for orchestra than for single instrument, and this is very much a piece where the soloist (Steven Osborne) is alone, in the foreground.

On the Radio 3 broadcast, Anderson explained how moved he was by a B flat which Steven Osborne played at the end of his encore at the Proms last year, the note echoing into the vastness of the Royal Albert Hall.   That note is thus the "found object" that starts this imaginary voyage.  Thus the title of the first of the six sections is "The World is a Window"  tiny single notes, stretch outwards in space, awakening the flute, then other instruments.  Suddenly, the piano strikes off in a new direction, Osborne playing long fast-moving lines, darker sounds in the orchestra suggesting vertiginous depth. Anderson says the idea came from Janáček's study of wells in Hukvaldy.  Thus time the "echo" is the sound of an object hurtling down a well, into inner space. Another transformation and we are once again in the open, the orchestra surguing as if on the high seas, the piano flying over the waves.  The strings introduce a sea change, and the piano once more defines single note patterns against a backdrop of silence. Where are we? Although there's a programme - of sorts - you listen with your mind. In the fluttering figures in the piano line do we hear a bird, or clear water, or winds in an empty desert?   Poetry is often more evocative than prose.  You could listen to Anderson in purely functional ways,  but I think it's rewarding to listen with an inner ear and wonder how the sounds act in relation to each other, processed through the effect that they have on your imagination. 

Harmonics is me - Salvatore Sciarrino

The identity of the violin soloist for this performance of Salvatore Sciarrino's Caprices was a secret until the very last moment when she walked in. Carolin Widmann! This was a bonus as she knows Sciarrino and had polished her interpretations with the man himself. "Why do you only do harmonics?" she asked him once. "Because I am harmonics," was the whimsical reply. Enigma, and gentle humour, that's Sciarrino all over. "The man", says Widmann, "seems to walk just above the ground,"

That should be no surprise to those who love his music, (see the earleir post below or via label) which seems to hover in a rarified atmosphere, pitched so high it's almost beyond human hearing. Nowadays we have so much aural overload that it's easy to forget how to listen to simple purity. It's a bit like watching ants : we don't notice them but they communicate and have busy lives. Sciarrino's high registers are there because the music is always on the threshold of floating away, elusively, if we don't listen carefully enough. This sensibility involves the listener rewarding him or her with a different perspective. It's the complete opposite of the new fashion for music as consumer product, imbibed mass rally style. To think that Dudamel was on this same platform last week.

Sciarrino's music isn't difficult though. It's intuitive and life affirming, so you can just chill. In any case Sciarrino's music springs from tradition, so even those who know nothing of new music can find points of entry. Widmann demonstrated. She played a passage from Paganini's Caprices and then the same from Sciarrino's: a direct quote but reinvigorated in a different way – sheer, pure light, as if from another plane of existence. "This music is like learning a new language", she added, with its unusual aesthetics and quirky technical challenges. At one stage, Widmann's fingers were poised at the extreme upper end of the neck of her instrument, while sweeping her bow in dizzying diagonals. The notes refers to the "brushing" of strings with the bow rapidly alternating between tasto and ponticello. This is music to be watched for maximum impact, because the sounds are so elusive you can't grasp them on recording alone.

Of the six Sei Capricci (1976) tonight we heard only I, II, III and the all important VI, the biggest section, which pulls together what's goe before and ends with a short pause and joyful flourish. Like a smile ! Then ten members of the Philharmonia materialised for ...da un divertimento. This is an early piece, from 1970. more "concrete" in the sense that the forms are easier to grasp. The larger ensemble also means more space to let ideas grow, so can hear subjects and reiterations etc. What's already there is Sciarrino's way of making things sound quite unlike what you'd expect. The bassoon, for example, sounds remarkably lithe for an instrument normally so resonant. Then the bassoonist, clarinettist and oboist pull out the reeds from their instruments and blow them through their cupped hands. This may sound silly on the written page, but in performance it's very effective. It's the essence of a mouth blown instrument, pared down to basics, the sound so quiet you could miss it if you weren't paying attention.

This was the second to last in the "Music of Today" series, created by Julian Anderson at the South Bank. It's been wonderful, hearing good new music presented intelligently and by someone who knows what he's talking about. Let's hope the series repeats next season. Or gets picked up by the BBC, whose "Hear and Now" slot could use major refurbishment.

Aldeburgh Festival 2009- big on the European circuit

The Aldeburgh Festival is very much a fixture on the European music circuit. Far more than any other British composer, Britten saw himself as European at heart, so the Aldeburgh Festival has always had an international, progressive outlook, with strong connections abroad. Londoners don't know what treasures they have "in their own backyard".

Britten's ideals come to fruit in this year's Festival, titled "Glitter of Waves". It's Pierre-Laurent Aimard's first full year as artistic director, and he brings sharp new focus. Even the buildings have been extended to provide new theatres and workshops, at last fulfilling Britten's vision for Snape.

Harrison Birtwistle's two new chamber opera set the tone. Dowland's Semper Dowland, semper dolens, is "theatre of melancholy, in which Birtwistle adapts Dowland's Seven Teares figured in Seven Pavanes and interweaves them with Dowland's songs. Early English music reinvigorated with modern British music.

The big premiere is The Corridor, a scena for soprano, tenor and six instruments. As Orpheus and Eurydice escape the Underworld, he looks back on her despite being warned not to do so, and he loses her forever. "I see the Corridor as a single moment from the Orpheus story magnified, like a photographic blow-up", says Birtwistle. Given his long standing fascination with primeval myth this should be interesting. Libretto is by David Harsent, who wrote The Minotaur and other important Birtwistle milestones, so expect limpid, lucid poetry in direct modern speech - extremely moving on its own terms. Mark Padmore and Elizabeth Atherton sing the lead roles. The London Sinfonietta, Britain's best modern music ensemble, will perform. VERY high profile indeed. Even if it's repeated in London, seeing it first at Aldeburgh is part of the experience, for it was here 41 years ago that Britten and Birtwistle met. Britten apparently wasn't impressed. But Birtwistle's come a long way since Punch and Judy. Perhaps Britten would now be pleased, for Birtwistle has developed and is now an Elder Statesman himself, undisputedly this country's foremost opera composer.

Next morning there's another Sinfonietta concert featuring bits of The Io Passion, and the 3 Settings of Celan - Claire Booth whom we hear everywhere and for good reason! Then Harrison's Clocks where Hideki Nagano plays the brilliant Birtwistle piece as part of an installation around the new buildings at Snape - very unusual. That same evening, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, with ensembles, will produce a "free thinking musical fantasy". Moto perpetuo movements from Beethoven and Bartok are interlaced with serene moments from Brahms and Messiaen. The finale is Ligeti. Aimard excels in imaginative juxtapositions like this - see the links on right for what he did last year at Aldeburgh with Bach and Kurtag. That's just the first weekend, 12th and 13th June.

The following week starts with a Britten song symposium, more performances of the Birtwistle operas, and some very interesting recitals including Christiane Oelze, (highly recommended!), Zimmermann, and Exaudi. Vladimir Jurowski conducts a chamber orchestra on Wednesday 15th - Gabrieli, Stravinsky and Birtwistle. The big concert on Friday night, 19th June, has George Benjamin conduct the BBCSO, in two premieres, Julian Anderson's Fantasias and Benjamin's Duet for Piano and Orchestra - with Aimard as soloist. Of course this will be broadcast, but the atmosphere at Snape is part of the fun, you want to "be" there.

Elliott Carter is the focus of the second week. In fact, he's planning to be there in person, scheduled to talk with Aimard, with whom he goes back decades. Carter's presence alone should make attendance compulsory, for he is an icon. He's closely connected to so many involved with this Festival, including Oliver Knussen who will be conducting the keynote Saturday night concert on Saturday 20th. This features yet another Carter premiere, On Conversing with Paradise, a song cycle to poems by Ezra Pound, for baritone and orchestra. This is rumoured to be powerful stuff. In recent years, Carter's style has distilled into intense zen-like depths, perhaps well suited to Pound's verse, which Carter has long loved.

This second week is the week to come for more Elliot Carter, Birtwistle and Thomas Adès chamber music. Ian Bostridge, Louis Lortie, Mark Padmore and Nicholas Daniel will appear in recital, too. The blockbuster concerts, though, will be the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, one of the hottest bands in Europe. This was founded by Claudio Abbado. Daniel Harding's been seminally involved since 1998. He's now principal conductor, but their first concert on 25th (Hadyn, Ligeti, Birtwistle) will be conducted by Susanna Mälkki, the charismatic conductor of Ensemble Intercontemporain. Aimard plays Birtwistle's Slow Frieze. Aimard conducts the second concert on 27th, another eclectic mix, Haydn, Stockhausen and Beethoven. Since the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is exceptionally good, and rarely heard in the UK, these are concerts that shouldn't be missed.

Then, on Sunday 28th, Masaaki Suzuki returns to conduct Bach's St Matthew's Passion. Suzuki's Bach is legendary. He's working with the Britten-Pears Orchestra. Its members are young, but enthusiastic. Britten and Pears would be thrilled.

Seats sell fast and accommodation gets hard to book, so check Aldeburgh Music sooner not later.

Tristan Murail Total Immersion

This is why I pay taxes. Each year the BBC sponsors a series at the Barbican in London for “total immersion” in a particular composer. It’s intense: whole days of music, talks, extra activities. In fact so intense that this year they’ve divided it into three separate days. Stockhausen Day was described earlier (follow the subject link on the right). Next month it’s Xenakis, and on Feb 7^th it was my favourite, Tristan Murail. Anyone who still thinks that Messiaen had no influence (and there are some) is totally deluded.

Messiaen taught people to find themselves, said Murail to Julian Anderson. In the evening, Pascal Rophé conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two early Murail works.

Gondwana was the land mass formed when the continents we know were once joined together. Very loosely, this describes Murail’s Gondwana (1980) when densely textured blocks of sound gradually evolve. The concept is Messianique, recalling Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, even The Quartet for the End of Time. Murail also references Sibelius’s Leminkäinnen in Tuonela, from the Kalevala saga, grounding the piece in tradition even though the harmonies were derived from frequency modulation (FM).

Time and Again (1985) was commissioned by Simon Rattle, with whom Murail played ondes Martenot on the famous CBSO recording of Turangalíla. Themes from Turangalíla pop up joyously, but the real tribute is in the way Murail unites Messiaen’s wayward exuberance with electronic techniques made possible by Murail’s use of FM and synthesized sound. If Turangalíla bothers some with its “cinematic” wildness, Murail makes it a virtue. Time and Again moves back and forth, as Murail says “replete with flashback, premonitions, loops…as if the listener were inside some sort of time machine”.

Murail’s more recent work is even more inventive. So much so, that I’ll write about ...amaris et dulcibus aquis….(1994/5 rev 2004) and Terre d’ombre (2003/4) in much greater depth later. Come back to this blog for more.

Murail’s “greatest hits”, Winter Fragments (2000) and Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (1978), were played by students of the Guildhall School of Music in the afternoon, joined by Rolf Hind in Territoires de l’oubli (1977), a thundering turbulence for piano. Plus the Hugues Dufourt Hommage á Charles Négre which is described below. But there’s only so much I can write at one go. So “watch this space”, as they say.

Hugues Dufourt Hommage à Charles Nègre

In the mid 19^th century photography was such a new medium that there weren’t any conventions to assume: Nègre and other early pioneers created the medium from scratch. Charles Nègre was a painter, who saw how photography could be art, not merely reproduction.

This picture shows doctors examining a patient in the asylum at Vincennes. The doctors stand in neat, formal poses, but notice how Nègre includes the vast expanses of emptiness that are floor and ceiling. This is part of the composition, for what this depicts is an inmate in the asylum at Vincennes. Psychiatry in those days was barbaric. Note, the patient is blindfolded, and he's rendered immobile in a straitjacket. What are these men in suits and stovepipe hats going to do to him ? Nègre’s photograph screams mute horror.

Hugues Dufourt's flute concerto Antiphysis is fairly well known, as it was commissioned for Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the recording with Boulez has been issued several times. Dufourt coined the term "spectralism" now associated so strongly with Grisey, Murail and Vivier. (See list of subjects at right for more on these composers). So it was good to hear Dufourt's Hommage à Charles Nègre included as part of the Barbican's Tristan Murail retrospective on Feb 7th.

Hommage à Charles Nègre was indeed written in connection with an exhibition of Nègre's photographs. Dufourt captures in his music the "empty spaces" and surreal angles so characteristic of Nègre's work. A photograph represents time, suspended. Dufourt's uneasy silences hang in limbo, chords held longer than expected, or suddenly curtailed. He uses low register instruments like contrabassoon to play at the top of their range, and high pitched instruments like piccolo to play at their lowest. Chords extend into space, particularly evident in the writing for electric guitar (fairly alien to classical convention), whose sounds, extended still further by electronic projection, oscillate into empty space.

That's why I chose the photo above. Like Nègre, Dufourt is deliberately distancing the observer/listener from the subject, forcing them to think past smooth surfaces. Just as photographs present a "perfect"image, this music might be heard as serene. Indeed, the elegiac pace stretches colours, so they seem as mellow and nostalgic as the faded, sepia tints in the pictures. But like Nègre's photographs, surface calm belies reality.

George Benjamin on Messiaen

"Fais le chien" said Mme Loriod, and George Benjamin would do dog imitations, making Olivier Messiaen burst into smiles. That's the sort of thing that happens in truly close families, complete naturalness and no "front". That is why I love Messiaen. More than just the music, Messiaen the man is inspirational. He was one of those rare genuinely good souls who make a difference to others simply by being themselves.

"Faith is simple", Messiaen used to say. Yet simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve. It just "is". A million times deeper than mindlessness. Whatever faith you may follow - and it doesn't matter - this inner stillness, purity of spirit - is a truly rare thing. That's why Messiaen chose St Francis of Assisi for his only "mortal" subject. St Francis abjured worldy values. "Listen to the birds" he said. Utterly simple and yet profound. Some folks go violently ballistic at the very thought of "listening" to things they don't already know. Please read what George Benjamin has to say :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/05/olivier-messiaen-centenary

Gerard Grisey et Claude Vivier Spooky Tale

What could have inspired Grisey's extraordinary song cycle Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil ? The title comes from a line in Claude Vivier's Glaubst du, an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele ? The piece refers to being stabbed and crossing over into the unknown. Soon after it was completed, Vivier (ironic name) was murdered by a casual stranger. After Grisey completed Quatre Chants, he too died suddenly in the prime of his life. No wonder the spooky connotations that attach to these works. They had nothing to do with the compositional process, though they do colour the way we listen.

Yet they are such powerful pieces it hardly makes a difference. Just listen ! Vivier's work is distinctive, even though he was killed aged only 34, when most composers haven't yet found their musical personality. There is a DVD out which is a must-have, which includes Glaubst du and other key Vivier works. Many recordings buut you have to track them down. I'm writing in much more detail aboout the Opus Arte DVD whiuch is perhaps the most comp[rehensive collection of Viviers music, including the operas, directed by Pierre Audi for the Hollan Festival retrospective - see blog list at right

Vivier was a character ! Born in Montreal, he came to Europe to study with Stockhausen, who could not figure him out (apparently, he had BO !) The quotation Grisey used for the title of Quatre Chants comes towards the end of Glaubst du. Listen out, but don't worry if you miss it. It hardly matters as this is distinctive work on its own terms.

http://www.psappha.com/webcast.asp

Julian Anderson Book of Hours

All this ornate, richly coloured music we've been listening to lately reminded me of Julian Anderson's Book of Hours. It’s inspired by the Trés riches heures du Duc de Berry, illuminated painstakingly by hand and gilded with real gold. That rather describes Anderson’s technique, too. Not one slipped note, everything intensely coloured, and enhanced by electronic effects applied at first like fine gold leaf over rich painting. The first part is an intricate tracery built around four basic notes. Its exotic textures are interrupted two-thirds of the way through by a strange electronic interlude. It’s not pre recorded but live. Then a Luftpause to create distance from what has gone before, the second part opens with deliberate distortion – people who listen to "surface sound" will get a shock! It’s based on a scratched LP, a reminder perhaps that recorded music is artificial and ephemeral. Then the distortion clears and the music reveals itself again, reborn. Towards the end there’s an apocalyptic electronic cadenza, which fits in with basic ideas in medieval cosmology, such as "the world overturn’d". In other words, fate, sudden upheaval, etc, ideas which are strikingly modern. Of course you don’t need to know any of this to enjoy the music, but Anderson is far too literate a composer not to be aware of this extra dimension. It adds a deeper resonance, linking the Book of Hours to, say, Adès’ America. That's why i've added the pic of the Tower of Babel, which as we know collapsed. For all the beauty of medieval manuscripts, the world of the Middle Ages was a savage place, ripped apart by war and pestilence. Mayhem was never far from the surface and death lurked in every corner. Not pretty. Anderson's music has this sharp, ironic edge which gives it power.

Here's  the big review which like a medieval box, opens up yet another link to another Julian Anderson recording, Alhambra Fantasy inspired by Islamic mosaics. Tiny jewel-like fragments, glowing together.Amazon has them HERE and HERE.