Pubs and the British choral tradition - The Gluepot Connection

"That bloody Gluepot" railed Sir Henry Wood, annoyed by musicians who were late for work because they tarried too long at The George, on the corner of Great Portland Street, adjacent to the old Queen's Hall and near the BBC in Langham Place. The George attracted a close-knit crowd of composers, musicians, poets, artists and writers. It's still around, and thriving, though the clientele has changed, so it's fitting that its past should be remembered in this new recording The Gluepot Connection from SOMM Recordings.  The CD features music from John Ireland, Alan Rawsthorne, Peter Warlock, Arnold Bax, Alan Bush, Elizabeth Lutyens, William Walton and E J Moeran, a few of the many who once thronged therein.  Andrew Griffiths conducts the a capella Londinium Chamber Choir.

The Full Heart is Peter Warlock's earliest choral work, dedicated to the memory of Carlo Gesualdo, an interesting choice of role model for the young Peter Heseltine who was but 21 when he sketched the piece.  The Gesualdo connection probably relates more to musical form, for the piece  employs finely parted chromatics, creating a rapturous work that seems to span centuries.  "O, my companions, Wind, Waters, Stars and Night". The text is by Robert Nicholls, invalided from the Somme, and later a socialite whose friends included Aldous Huxley.  Heseltine heard Frederick Delius's On Craig Ddu (1907) while still a student at Eton, and went on to champion the older composer.  The two pieces complement each other, though Warlock is more stylish.  Beautifully balanced singing from the Londinium Chamber Choir keeps texture clear and clean.  Warlock's The Full Heart is a stand out, on its own worth the price of the CD.

Warlock and Moeran were born in the same year, but had different backgrounds, Heseltine's influences more esoteric and international. He didn't like the John Ireland focus at the Royal College of Music and encouraged Moeran to develop further.  On this recording we hear Moeran's six Songs of Springtime (c. 1931) to poems by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  Warlock amd Moeran were close, and in this set Warlock's influence is clear : more polyphonic inventiveness built on Renaissance models, yet distinctively of its own time.  These Warlock and Moeran settings shine out out in comparison with the more conventional John Ireland songs, The Hills and Twilight Night. The Hills, written to mark the Coronation in 1953, to a poem by James Kirkup, is chastely hymnal, while Twilight Night,

to a poem by Christina Rossetti, while Victorian, is rather more potent. Two people meet clapsed "as close as oak and ivy stand". They may never again meet "in the accustomed way" but that secret encounter is not erased.  Ireland's setting is straightforward, but the meaning of the text could hardly have been lost on the younger moderns, like Warlock and Moeran, in the more liberated 1920's.
Andrew Griffiths' erudite booklet notes give extensive detail on other habitués of the "gluepot", with so many cross-references that one could probably draw up a flowchart.  He quotes Michael Tippett on the "anti-Britten" clique at the George, ".... a cabal of composers who were trying to debunk Ben (Britten) or undermine his reputation.....they all had great chips on their shoulders and enetrtained absurd fantasies about a homosexual conspiracy in music led by Britten and Pears".  Bigots will always find excuses, hence the homophobia, but the real threat Britten posed was not his sexuality but the fact that his music didn't conform to the assumptions of what "British music" should be.  Frank Bridge opened his horizons to Europe, and WH Auden and Colin MacPhee to the world.  Britten was original, and successful, which created resentment.  Britten won the commission for the Coronation of 1953 with Gloriana, in which Queen Elizabeth I sees through sycophancy and status games. This didn't go down well with some, and for some Britten is still too "modern", though his influence has nurtured whole new generations of British composers and musicians.  Britten didn't do the Gluepot, but he is relevant in context.  He, too, drew inspiration from polyphony and Early Music, as any study of Gloriana will demonstrate.

The Gluepot "cabal" Tippett mentioned centred around Constance Lambert, his wife Isabel Nicholas, who later married Alan Rawsthorne, William Walton, and Elizabeth Lutyens and Alan Bush   Most of these are represented in this collection, apart from Lambert who didn't write a capella choral work.   Rawsthorne's Four Seasonal Songs (1956). The title is slightly misleading, since three of the songs refer to Spring. More multipart harmonics applied to 16th century texts !  In Lutyens' Verses of Love (1970) to a text by Ben Jonson, long lines elide, sounds shimmering.  Walton's Where does the Uttered Music Go ? (1946) was written for the dedication of the memorial window of Sir Henry Wood in the Musicians Chapel in St Sepulchre's where Wood, as a boy, learned to play the organ.  This disc also includes the premiere recordings of Alan Bush's Like Rivers Flowing (1957) with sinuous lines, and Lidice (1947) commemorating the massacre in Lidice by the Nazis.  The mood is hushed, the lines swirling : a secular Requiem. 

Another Gluepot regular was Arnold Bax. His I sing of a maiden (1923)  has charm, but is eclipsed by his Mater ora filium (1921) a substantial (11 minute) masterpiece based on William Byrd's five-part Mass, beefed up for as many as 16 parts, embellished by what Griffiths calls "prodigious extremes of range" (cloaked in) "luscious, late Romantic harmony in myriad different textures". The voices of the Londinium Chamber Choir rise to the task, their voices glowing "Amen, Amen". It's as if a stained glass window were bursting into song !

For London, courage

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear." - Mark Twain

Why the City of London backs World Class Music Centre

The City of London Corporation has announced that it will fund the completion of the study into a business case for a new, world class centre for music in London.  This is the feasibility study that was in progress until last November when it was abruptly cut short by the government. The Corporation has pledged £2.5 million  towards the £5.5 million cost of the study, of which £1.25 million has already been spent.  A shortfall, but still a tiny proportion of the £80 million the Corporation spends each year on the arts in London. Why does the Corporation value this project?  Because the arts are a major part of the economy.  In a global market,  Britain needs to stay competitive or fall backward.

Opposition to the world class centre for music reflects long-term British resentment against London.  That reductionist philosophy is embedded so deeply into the Arts Council England's DNA that the organization isn't structurally capable of adapting to change, or of reflecting the realities of the business. Fact is, Britain is a  centralized country and always has been.  For a brief time in the Industrial Revolution, northern regions competed with London but the modern economy is now international.  A report released last year (read more here)  showed that in 2014/15 London generated almost as much tax as the next 37 cities, and contributes 30% of the entire tax income in the nation.  The imbalance can be changed by a political agenda that wrecks London, while hoping that the slack can mysteriously be taken up elsewhere.  Alternatively, policy makers could recognize that London generates income for the entire country, and in an international. technological world this isn't going to disappear overnight.

It's nonsense to suggest that a world class centre for London will only benefit London and tourists. Everyone wins when there is a centre for excellence that generates talent, earns income and raises the nation's profile. The arts are "foreign policy", more effective, in the long term, than guns and bombs.  The Victorians were making political statements when they built the Royal Albert Hall and the museums around it.  At the British Museum, one marvels at the Empire that ripped artefacts from Greece, Egypt and Assyria, and gets the implicit message. London's heritage is everyone's heritage, whether or not they go there themselves. And they can, if they care.

Technology is also changing the way the arts reach potential audiences.  Through its Digital Concert Hall, the Berliner Philharmoniker reaches anyone, anywhere in the world with internet access. Increasingly, other orchestras and opera houses are wising up to the potential of digital marketing. Even the Met is streaming its archives online. The day when record companies controlled things is over.  Now orchestras and opera houses can themselves decide artistic content and feasibility. Smaller organizations can co-operate to spread costs. Profits stay closer to source. When listeners can access the world,  geographic boundaries count for less, while opening up the market for diversity.  Orchestras won't all have to sound the same, to fit the old-style mass market, and repertoire can be less narrow.

Yet it's also imperative to recognize that excellence in the arts is generated when there is a large enough critical mass of talent concentrated together so creative people can stimulate each other. Poets can live as hermits, if they wish, but orchestral musicians, almost by definition, operate communally. Even more so with opera houses, where the creative community is even greater, and costs are contained by keeping people together. It's all very well to prioritize micro-mini ventures in out-of-the-way places, but reality is critical mass. All the technology in the world does not compensate for bringing people together in direct, personal contact. The bigger the group, the wider the creative horizons.  Excellence "is" education. I'ts all very well to suggest Birmingham or Glasgow or whatever, but fact is, London is where it's at.  Shakespeare needed to leave Stratford for London to do what he did.

This week, the Elbphilharmonie opened in Hamburg (read my analysis, not just a review,  here).  The NDR Elphilharmonie Orchester is good, though it's not mega-league.  But with the new hall, it's challenged to excel itself, and every orchestra that can will want to perform there, which will again raise the stakes. The city-state of Hamburg, a state of the German federation in its own right, had vision enough to realize that the arts are an important part  of the economy and of the wider community: an investment for the future on many different levels.  London's orchestras are very good indeed, but they're trapped in inadequate facilities. The acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican are only the tip of the iceberg. Berlin, Paris, St Petersburg and now Hamburg: what about London?  Someone seriously suggested that the British economy would survive Brexit by selling more tea, scones and jam, though such things can be made well elsewhere. Not rocket science!   But unfortunately that small-mindedness reflects the reductionist, self-destructive lack of vision that could suffocate the arts and the economy as a whole. 

Read this too Can post Brexit London survive as Europe's cultural and financial capital ?

Prophetic London Belongs to Me

A petty criminal, peruses the comics. "Easy Pickings", he thinks. But "easy pickings" and easy answers don't mean taking control.   London Belongs to Me now seems terrifyingly prophetic. The film begins in the London of 1938 : social change is already underway.   Once grand terraces are now multiple occupancy rooming houses, with lodgers who can't meet their rents, or feed their gas meters.  The landlady, Mrs Vizzard, lives in grand delusion, still dressed in Edwardian garb, her home cluttered as if in Victorian time warp.  A new lodger (Mr Squales) turns up. He's so unnatural that she thinks he's an actor. He is, but not quite in the way she thinks.  Mrs Vizzard  hosts seances for dodgy mediums who claim to commune with the dead and foretell the future. Think on that.

It's Christmas, and Mr and Mrs Josser, daughter Doris and Uncle Henry are having Christmas dinner.  Fellow tenant Connie fakes a faint to con a free feed.  The family discuss the Munich Agreement.  As he cracks a walnut, Uncle Henry says "If we don't wake up, Hitler will have us like this!"  "For goodness sake", says Mrs Josser, "Put on your paper hat and enter into the spirit".  Percy the flashy young spiv takes Doris to a dodgy night club, which gets raided. Percy escapes but Doris gets caught. But the policeman, Sgt  Bill Wilson, who takes her details, doesn't note them in the right place, because he fancies her.   Hoping to make enough money to start a business, Percy steals a car.  Spotting the police, he panics. The  ex-girlfriend who forced him to take her for a ride is killed, though it's not exactly clear how and by whom.  Even Mr Squales worries that he might have been involved, without "being himself".  . 

Mrs Vizzard learns that Mr Squales has been faking photographs of ghosts at seances, and kicks him out.  "I've no use for frauds and common adventurers".  Squales overhears Sgt Wilson order Percy's arrest and uses this to have a  trance "revelation" . When Percy is picked up, Mrs Vizzard is fooled all over again.  In prison, Percy has graphic nightmares. "I never did it!" he cries.   Mr Josser uses the money he's saved for a cottage in the country to hire a defence lawyer for Percy, even though he doesn't like the lad, because it's the moral thing to do.  Mr Squales turns up for the prosecution. It seems the girlfriend was killed by a "blow to the head" though she was hit by a passing car after falling out of  Percy's car.  Percy is condemned.  Won over by Mr Josser's generosity, Uncle Henry organizes a mission to save Percy, and raises a petition that gets so many names that it has to be carried to the Home Office pushed in a pram. Wonderful shots of the procession of protestors crossing Westminster Bridge in pouring rain !  Big Ben booms. It's 5 pm. Are they too late ? But the newspapers announce that Percy's been reprieved.  It's August the 31st, 1939...; what happens next ?  Air raid sirens. Mr Squales, now married to Mrs Vizzard, says the spirits tell him the war will soon be over. Mr and Mrs Josser are staying in London, despite the war.  They wouldn't leave Doris.  The film ends with a shot of Dulcimer Street. "They certainly are fine houses" says the narrator.  So are some of the people within.

London Belongs to Me was made by Sidney Gilliat in 1948. It stars Richard Attenborough, then aged 25 though he looks even younger.  It's long been one of the great classics of British cinema, but after the Brexit debacle, perhaps it means even more, now.

London's new concert hall - the wider perspective

Plans for a new, world-class concert hall for London reach a further stage, with the approval of funds for a more detailed business plan.  Even before the initial feasibility study was made,  there were strong indications that the new hall would be connected to the Barbican, on the present Museum of London site. So the news isn't really "news" .  However, now that more details are emerging, it's time for more analysis.

Since the new hall will cost £278 million (at least), the public and media will be up in arms protesting.  Serious music isn't taken seriously enough in this country, so already there's opposition from many quarters. More worrying, though, is the opposition from within the industry itself, riddled as it is with balkanization and special interests. What we really need is a coherent national arts policy that deals with things from an international perspective.

London doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a key part of the global arts ecology. Mess London up and it impacts on the world. Should we care? Yes, because the arts are also part of the economy and play a huge part in maintaining Britain's political credibility.  Britain is still perceived as a civilized nation thanks to its  progressive, generous cultural heritage

 For decades France had no real national arts policy, but the new Philharmonie has dramatically changed things. The Philharmonie is a stunning building with superb acoustics, and back-up facilities. It's so good that it could well revitalize the French arts industry all over, not shifting the balance so much as opening up new possibilities all round.  Paris was once the heart of  European culture.   Berlin has always been way ahead, part of the German-speaking musical ecosystem, to the extent that the Austro-German tradition eclipses the French contribution to music in many minds. This is what London is really up against. Stop swimming and you sink.

London's new concert hall won't, one hopes, be just another concert hall, but a genuinely innovative facility designed for the next 100 years. Sure, London has lots of venues but small venues like the Wigmore Hall, Milton Court, etc, serve niche audiences.  The South Bank was a flagship sixty-five years ago, but it's now overcrowded, its artistic purpose drowning under under other priorities.  A Philharmonie-type venture would be altogether in a different league.  It would be world class, attracting musicians and visitors from all over the world.  The arts market is now global. Listeners are as likely to be in Ulan Bator as in Pontypridd. One  huge international community linked by the internet and telecommunications, which render obsolete the boundaries of space and time. If you stop swimming, you sink. Britain's got to keep pace.

So the new centre will cost  £278 million?  Compare that with Boris Johnson's Olympicopolis, partly funded by the Smithsonian but also requiring £141 million in government funds, in theory offset against a supposed £2.8 billon income.  It's basically just another college site with museum attached.  At least the new concert hall would be something genuinely different, as opposed to another way of milking the Olympics' so-called legacy.  Keeping Boris happy is one thing, but what about the overall impact ?  Governments have a way of discovering money, as we've seen in the sudden decision to fight another, possibly unwinnable, war in Syria.  As Churchill supposedly said, what would be fighting for if we didn't have the arts? Bombs make enemies, culture wins friends.

Capital projects always attract funding, for various reasons, but it's also false logic to assume that the money could be better spent on  existing facilities. A sudden injection of funds like that that would be reckless, without a great deal of careful planning. You don't just divvy up goodies willy nilly.  As for austerity, the reasons behind that are ideological, not financial.

 Could the money be used towards music education?  But music education isn't just schools and music colleges.  Excellence in performance is in itself an important form of education. It raises standards and expectations, which, long term, also expand opportunities.  Music education was eroded long ago, by successive governments and a public that thinks of education as vocational training.  Besides, everyone is, or should be, learning all the time, but listening and experiencing the best on offer. You can't separate education from performance.

So the next stage in the process will cost £5 million?  Better that money be spent on good planning, like working out the acoustics, a business model, transport infrastructure and so on, rather than making mistakes that would cost more to fix in the long run. From what I've read so far, some ideas seem OK and others much less so, like the idea of listening pods (why not stay home?) and the lack of front  and back-of-house facilities, which could prove fatal.  Abandoning the Barbican is all very well, but is it actually suited to jazz and world music ?  The South Bank does that, diluting its committment to classical music.  What happens to the BBC SO and the BBC source of revenue ? What about the LPO, the Philharmonia, the London Sinfonietta and the OAE ?   The Paris Philharmonie builds upon existing arts ventures, eg IRCAM, and provides a home for many orchestras. Like all big projects, it was controversial, but it's worked. A good new centre needs to be flexible enough to allow for the future. Short-sighted savings are foolish. Remember the decision to keep the M25 narrow.

The new concert hall for London is big and will take years to come to fruit. Instead, the level of debate is so low that some think it could have been dashed off to bring Simon Rattle back to London (where I suspect he'd like to be anyway). The project is so big that it needs sophisticated evaluation, pro and con.  But while we have arts thinking that predicates on piecemeal and special interests, I don't know how that will come about.

Photo : By Acabashi (Own work)

Turn the Key Softly - love poem for London

Not many films start with credits like: "We acknowledge with gratitude the help of the Home Office, The Prison Commissioners and the Governor of HM Prison, Holloway".  Turn the Key Softly begins with a shot of Holloway Prison,  as it was in 1953. It's oddly nostalgic. Veiled in heavy London fog, the prison looks mysterious, almost romantic.,Within minutes though, we're up against reality. Three women prisoners are being released. The scene's filmed inside. The guards are dehumanized - you can almost smell the repression. In prison, the women are anonymous. They collect their belongings to return outside. "Until you see people in their own clothes, you don't realize what you've been mixing with in this place" Who's that familiar face - Joan Collins  aged 19, dolled up in a deliciously bizarre peplum, which sums up the personality of her part, Stella Jarvis, flibbertigibbet good-time girl.

London itself stars in this film. The camera lingers, lovingly, on scenes shot on location. Monica Marsden ( Yvonne Mitchell) goes home to a flat in a terrace near St Mary's, Bryanston Square - nothing has changed in 60 years !  We also see another part of London which has disappeared, though - rooming houses in run down Victorian mansions, seedily keeping up pretensions. The landlady lets Mrs Quilliam (Kathleen Harrison) have her old room back. It's unchanged. The landlady's even looked after Johnny, the dog. Imagine landlords that laidback now.  Onc scene seems to have been filmed in a real pub, not a set.  Few pubs look like that now.  We see the Underground, pristine and spotless, and Trafalgar Square minus tourists. We see the West End, and something of London's future. Mrs Quilliam's daughter is "aspirational". She's escaped the East End for an identikit house in  some outer suburb and shudders at the thought of "lower class". The cinematography is so poetic that this film is a kind of love story for London.

Turn the Key Softly was written, produced and directed by Maurice Cowan and Jack Lee, at Pinewood Studios, when the British film industry was at its artistic peak. Based on a novel by John Brophy, it's a tightly paced drama, with deftly written dialogue, and strong characterizations, even in the minor parts - all of them London "types", lovingly drawn. Stella brags to her prostitute friends that her boyfriend's "in transport". Since the action all takes place within 24 hours, the narrative moves swiftly. Stella loses the £3 her boyfriend gives her to live on for a week, (!!!!) but gets it back by fleecing the stranger who thought he'd arranged a date with Monica. Unlike Stella and Mrs |Quilliam, who are feckless kleptos, Monica has never been in trouble with the law before. She was arrested because her boyfriend David (Terence Morgan) let her take the rap for one of his burglaries. Clearly, she loves him, but sees through his games. Thinking they're going to the theatre, she wears an evening gown. Now, you don't wear yards of tulle, even at Glyndebourne. David, however, has set up another crime. This time, Monica doesn't help. David is trapped on a roof, fighting off the police.  Wonderful cinematography again, worthy of much better known films noir. The camera shows the West End theatre in awkward angular shots. It's a wet night in theatreland : the camera contrasts textures: stone walls, cramped stairwells, metal fire escapes, the machinery with which the police winch themselves onto the roof. each frame adds to the sense of tension and danger.

The tightness of the script is further enhanced  by the clear-sighted anti-sentimentality of the plot. Monica is a strong person, determined not to be dragged down, like poor, dotty Mrs Quilliam, who gets killed by a car as she squeals in delight and relief, having found her lost dog. Stella's getting married, but how long will it be before she goes back to her old ways  Young as she is, she may squander her future and end up like Mrs Quilliam. 

Mischa Spoliansky wrote the soundtrack and conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, when orchestras did movie work on a regular basis. Spoliansky was a star in German theatre and cabaret, before being forced into exile. In London, he built a successful  new career, writing scores for Norman Wisdom movies, and many others, including Sanders of the River and King Solomon's Mines. In Turn the Key Softly, Spoliansky's wit shines through. Stella sings trashy pop, but Monica's more sophisticated taste is underlined by quotations from Poulenc Les chemins d'amour. 

Save the ENO : British culture and phoney class war

The Arts Council England has announced that it's placing the ENO in a "special funding arrangement" and removing it from the portfolio of national organizations given a place at the funding table. Within that two-year period, the ENO will have to present accounts on a monthly baisis and meet milestones set by the ACE, in return for a short-term £I million grant to repair the rumoured shortfall in this year's budget. That there is a shortfall is hardly surprising as the ENO's new business model has yet to kick in.  On the surface, this looks simple enough that some observers think the ENO is "saved".  It's an irony that the ENO is housed in a building called the Coliseum. Photo above shows the sacking of Rome, by the Visigoths.

The ENO has never been a money cow. The primary purpose of any arts organization is to produce good art. Even the ACE acknowledges the role the ENO has played with groundbreaking work. But good art means taking risks: no arts organization is foolproof. For every Satyagraha, Peter Grimes or Mastersingers  there are bound to be some flops, just as everywhere else. That's the nature of the business. I don't hold much hope for aspects of the new business plan which predicate on duplicating what the West End already provides, ie smart cafés. One thing the ENO's critics miss entirely is that all opera companies these days operate in connection with each other, nationally and internationally. Scrapping the ENO would have a drastic knock-on effect on the rest of the industry. The loss of the ENO would create such a huge hole in the business that it would take more than a few million to fix.  The ACE, and the government, needs to think long term, and on a wider scale. Read more about what I've written on the interconnectedness of the industry HERE.

Far too much emphasis has been placed on the recent resignations. Henriette Gõtz was a lovely person but not experienced enough to deal with the scale of the problems the company faces, which go back way before she was even born. Strangely,  part of the ACE measures is to look for a "qualified" Executive Director, which is a bit rich,  given that the ACE is itself headed from Classic FM whose claim to wider arts policy nous lies in suggesting the formation of education "hubs". Or a Head of BBC Radio 3 with no broadcasting experience. Obviously education is part of arts policy, but only as an adjunct: it can't replace the wider context of arts education in schools and adult education. Yet the interim ENO Executive  Director is a man probably better placed than anyone else to solve problems  Anthony Whitworth-Jones (more HERE) oversaw the new building at Glyndebourne and came to the rescue of Garsington Opera when Leonard Ingram died. Look at Garsington Opera now.  Whitworth-Jones also wasn't part of the turbulence that hit the ENO three years ago, so he carries no baggage. If the ACE sincerely wants to set the ENO on a good footing, they'd be wise to back someone who just might, against all odds, be able to do the job.

There are some who'd like to replace tha arts altogether with, for example, performance theatre. That kind of writing is to journalism what busking is to grand opera.  Fact is, the arts are an important  part of this nation's economy.  London is a critical player in the world arts network, bringing in unquantifiable cultural and foreign policy influence. It's not clever to scrap the nation's patrimony simply because Harriet Harman's constituents don't go the the ROH (read more HERE). Everyone in this country has a stake in the continued health of the arts, whether they're directly involved or not.  The ENO has a unique place because it connects to English theatre tradition, from Purcell and Handel to Philip Glass and more. It's also championed British opera, which strictly speaking didn't exist before Benjamin Britten. It's also a springboard for nurturing English-speaking singers, some of whom, like Stuart Skelton and Iain Paterson, have developed international careers. Scrap that and it would cost a whole lot more to fix the mess the industry would then be in.  So what if only a minority enjoy the arts? Only a minority work in the banking system, so should we stop propping it up? If we were to support things with mass appeal,  maybe the state should be funding pornography. Some have been known to claim that on expenses.
 
But does the ACE, and whatever government that supports it, really want to save the ENO. The current ACE policy was set up under the last administration, but the present government has endorsed it without demur. It doesn't matter that much whether a Minister of Culture  like Sajid Javid, should be a luvvie. What really matters is whether he has a sensible business head (in which case being a luvvie is a disadvantage). The fundamental problem is that the arts do attract votes. Thus it's tempting for politicians like Harriet Harman to use the arts as a weapon of class war.

Unfortunately whipping up class hatred against the perceived "elitism" of the arts grabs headlines, and feeds resentment. There will always be thousands more who think that the arts don't matter because they don't participate. There's infinitely more mileage in stirring up class resentment than in explaining the wider role of the arts in the economy. The ACE's anti-London bias is part of this Phoney Class War. London dominates the UK because it's big, demographically and economically.  Downgrading London arts funding won't do anything to redress that balance. But "regionalism" buys votes, especially if it comes in the form of big capital projects where everyone benefits, except artists. Never forget the Sheffield National Centre for Popular Culture which looked PC but fell flat. No-one advocates London because the constituency for the arts is spread too thinly. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is far too busy with his pet Olympics project, which the government has funded to the tune of £141 million, which only marginally impacts on the realities of performance. For that kind of money, one could do a lot for the rest of London arts.

 The arts have become a pawn in the dismantling of this nation's heritage. Once, schools had decent music and arts programmes.  Arts organizations are expected to do the work schools used to do. Obviously, some form of "education" is essential but we need to rethink the whole concept of arts education. Instead, we have an arts policy that stakes so much on the need to replace that shortfall in basic arts education by forcing arts organizations to take up the slack, to the detriment of their primary purpose, which is to create art.  Instead of creation, we now have  a navel-gazing tick-box mentality, based on meeting targets instead of creativity.  There's also a lot more to arts education than teaching people what to think, like the ludicrous "Ten Pieces" programme. Some of these projects work counter-productively, reinforcing the notion that the arts are unapproachable. We can't expect the arts to carry the burden of changing a society when what causes inequality stems from something much more fundamental.

 But do politicians really care?  Or is chasing the short-term vote more fruitful?   Britain is now infinitely more diverse than in the old cloth-cap tribalism of class war. People of all classes and ethnic backgrounds are relatively upwardly mobile and aspirational. That's where the future really lies. A potential renaissance of the arts, if intelligently addressed, and not in the patronizing way it's done at present, where the emphasis is on dumbing down, not smarting up. Heed the prescient warnings of Hans Sachs! A society without culture falls apart. (Read more here.)

London's South Bank - cutting thru the coterie

Priority case for Sajid Javid.  The South Bank should be the nation's cultural flagship, if only because it's gobbled millions. Since the South Bank management, The Arts Council England and the Guardian, formerly a newspaper, are far too cosy together, it will take a strong-minded Culture Minister to cut through the coterie.

From Douglas Cooksey :

"Dr Johnson is famously remembered for his quote that when a man is tired of London he is tired of Life. Having now lived in London for almost 50 years, I can say with some confidence that I am emphatically not yet tired of Life. However, in common with - one suspects - a great many genuine music lovers, there is a sense of total frustration at what has been happening at what we must now apparently call 'London’s Southbank Centre'.

"Of course all things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.  It would be completely unreasonable and stultifying to expect them to remain the same. However, despite a renovation costing in the region of £100 million, the Royal Festival Hall has declined from its original status as one of the World’s great concert halls, spoken of in the same breath as Vienna’s Musikverein, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall or Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and has sunk into a sort of pervasive self-inflicted squalor.

"What other major concert hall in the World permits unfettered access to all levels to members of the public, even during concerts? Previously at RFH one had to show a ticket for an event before proceeding to an upper level. Now, however these uppe- level areas are used as free Central London meeting space for all sorts of unrelated groups, even amazingly on occasion for groups of people dossing down to sleep.

"During one of Lorin Maazel’s recent Philharmonia concerts there was actually a children’s party in progress with children screaming and running riot at every level. Prior to this concert my partner and I were amazed to find couples with buggies picnicking on the upper levels, even directly outside the main entrance to the Stalls. A new low came when the public address system announced the start of the concert in 3 minutes time and the voraciously picnicking couple next to us swore loudly because the announcement had woken their child in his buggy.

"The opening up of the Royal Festival Hall to all-comers has also had discriminatory and Health & Safety consequences. In the first place, totally free access at all times has meant that older concertgoers now have little or no chance of a seat before, during the interval or after a performance because every seat in the public areas tends to be already occupied by people working on their laptops or by ad hoc group seminars, frequently being addressed by a speaker. When an older person may have made a long journey from, say, Bristol to attend a particular concert, only to be denied a seat by freeloaders, it clearly discriminates against the elderly and infirm, and is a strong disincentive for them to attend.

"More fundamentally, with several times as many people as originally planned now using the building at all times of day, there are genuine Health and Safety concerns; for instance, earlier this week I took two Czech and German friends to a concert, one of them a former member of a professional all-girl punk band (and therefore probably well used to touring insalubrious venues), and they were appalled to be confronted with three out of five toilets completely blocked. (Incidentally Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, which holds around 60,000 people, is an object lesson in the matter of hygiene and I was going to say that RFH would do well to take a leaf out of its book!) With the hall now in constant use throughout the day, mountains of garbage regularly accumulate in its waste bins and - leaving aside the stench - this should surely be investigated by Health & Safety as a matter of urgency.

"What is so depressing is that this is no slide into genteel poverty caused by lack of investment or by an ageing infrastructure – after all we’ve just spent more than £100 million renovating the hall - but largely the result of a series of conscious decisions by a perverse and unpleasant management operating to its own agenda which appears to seek to turn the hall into a “People’s Palace”, available to all people all the time. Regular concertgoers clearly now come a poor second. One has only to look at the Southbank’s monthly programme, where classical music is now relegated to the last 4 pages of a 28 page A4 booklet, to realise where the present regime (for that is what it is) sees its priorities. When just before Christmas the Philharmonia Orchestra wanted to announce its forthcoming season at roughly the same time as the LSO’s at the Barbican, I am given to understand that the orchestra was ‘instructed’ by the Southbank’s Management that it could not do this until some 5 weeks later, thus putting the Philharmonia at an unfair competitive disadvantage with their main rivals.

"Serious music lovers are now forgoing the Royal Festival Hall in increasing numbers, put off by the unpleasant surroundings. Who wants to emerge from a concert as that sublime final paragraph of Mahler’s 4^th symphony 'Kein Musik is ja nicht auf Erden' ('No music like this is heard on Earth') fades into complete silence only to be confronted with pounding rock music from a party on the ground floor or by the raucous din of drink-fuelled hordes of revellers on the terrace.

"The Royal Festival Hall was erected as a temporary structure and has never been a wholly satisfactory venue for orchestral music but despite its faults we grew to love it, not least for the memories of all those great performances and great performers we heard there  – Klemperer, Karajan, Stokowski, Barbirolli, Boult, Celibidache, Giulini, Carlos Kleiber and even those two legendary Toscanini concerts – but perhaps it should now be turned over to GLC Parks & Leisure and a new ‘fit for purpose’ acoustically satisfactory concert hall like Birmingham’s built at a location with good transport connections such as Kings Cross. Above all it should be managed by a team in sympathy with its primary purpose as a place for music, not as a public space. In the wake of various Parliamentary scandals and an upcoming General Election we are almost certainly on the point of ridding ourselves of a swathe of career politicians who have existed wholly within the Westminster bubble, impervious, even contemptuous of public opinion. Perhaps now is also the moment to see the back of career arts administrators and to appoint some new blood."

See also :

Ellis Woodman in the Telegraph

Richard Morrison in the Times

Tour London in music

Tour London through music. The city is gridlocked by the paranoid Olympics, so you can't do it any other way. Even the government is saying "Don't go into town!".  Which defeats the purpose of the whole exercise. I'd be at the Wigmore Hall tonight for Prégardien/Drake but can't face traffic mayhem. Go if you can, it will be good.

So enjoy In London Town : A musical tour of the historic sights of London, a new release from independent label SOMM records. Visit the Tower, Rotten Row, the Royal Thames and take in the Blitz, too.  Visualize!
1. Concert Overture: Me And My Girl (The Lambeth Walk) Noel Gay, arr.Iain
Sutherland
2 Knightsbridge March (The Household Brigade & Harrods) Eric Coates
3 Westminster Waltz (Big Ben & Westminster Bridge) Robert Farnon
4 Rotten Row (Hyde Park) Wally Stott
5 Covent Garden (The Historic Flower Market) Eric Coates
6 Overture: Yeomen of The Guard (The Tower of London) Sir Arthur Sullivan
7 London Fantasia (The London Blitz) Clive Richardson
8 Get Me To The Church On Time (My Fair Lady - Theatre Royal, Drury Lane)
Lerner & Loewe
9 Greensleeves (Hampton Court Palace) Arr. Ralph Vaughan Williams
10 Four Dances: Merrie England (At the Court of Queen Elizabeth I) Sir
Edward German
11 London Bridge is Falling Down (Tower Bridge) Alan Abbott
12 Elizabethan Serenade (Buckingham Palace) Ronald Binge
13 Prelude: Water Music (Diamond Jubilee Pageant on The River Thames) G.F.
Handel
14 Three English Dances (The Historic Mayfair) Roger Quilter
15 The Sea Hawk (Main Title) (Greenwich: Cutty Sark & The Maritime Museum)
Erich Korngold

I was there at the Coronation!

Since Windsor and central London are no-go areas for common citizens, we might celebrate the Queen's Jubilee in other ways. I love the Queen because she comes over as a genuinely decent person, who works extremely hard and cares about the country (and Commonwealth). Which is more than we can say about politicians, or other members of her family. One of the reasons we admire the Queen is because she came to the throne at the right time.The war was over, but there were still bombed areas and memories of rationing, death etc. And  out of this a pretty, conscientious young woman taking on the mantle of Empire. Highly symbolic. Monarchy is image, not logic, and if it remains, the monarch must fill a need. Which is a contradiction in terms when it's hereditary. Long Live the Queen, Long May She Reign (even if it's only to keep the seat warm for William).

Anyway, here is a Calypso from 1953, and the singer, nice tenor, is Young Tiger (George E Browne) who was young then but was nearly 87 when he died in 2007. Listen to the inventive words, and the way they twist round the line.  "Her Majesty looked really divine, in her crimson robe furred with ermine", "the night wind was blowing freezing and cold, but I held my ground like a young Creole"  Royalty sure throws a grand party, though we pay and pay and pay and pay.....I'l be doing quite a lot more on the Queen in music over the next few weeks, but very "alternative". Which somehow I think she'd apppreciate more than right-wing Little Englanders.

Friday in SMitF

There is an ad around that says "Remember the soldiers who won't come back". Which is true. But remember those who do come back, traumatized, unable to get jobs, wounded emotionally if not physically. Heroes, who end up homeless and on the streets. Yet still the Big Powers are finding excuses for more wars.

So on Friday a well chosen concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields with the New London Singers (conducted by Ivor Setterfield, William Whitehead, organist).  Choral gems : Fauré Requiem, Finzi  Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice, John Ireland Greater Love Hath No Man and John Tavener Song for Athene.

St Martin-in-the-Fields often gets overlooked because it's not as glitzy as other places we go to. But that's exactly why this concert is worth attending. St Martin-in-the-Fields has endured. Once, it really was "in the fields" before London grew in the 18th and 19th centuries. Now every tourist stops by but locals take it for granted.  Yet it's a lovely performance place, a haven from the mad rush outside. And on Remembrance Day, it's a spiritual centre. Trafalgar Square was built to commemorate the defeat of Napolean and invasion of  France and Spain. Nelson sits on his column and a smaller statue of Edith Cavell stands in front of Pret a Manger. In 1990, a peaceful protest against the Poll Tax was crushed by police on horseback, riding all the way up the steps of St Martin's, beating elderly demonstrators with truncheons. The film footage "disappeared" apparently under a D notice, but it happened.  In 2002, the biggest ever demonstration against the invasion of Iraq took place in Trafalgar Square. Never in our worst fears did we imagine how that war would escalate and still be with us. No doubt Tony BLiar will wear his red poppy and smirk. Wha happened to the money he pledged the British Legion from his book sales? Not that it would go far enough to mend the damage.


photo : montage of a monument in Amiens, credit : Weglinde Gordon Lawson

Bangkok Butterfly - NOT a review but

Everyone's been reviewing the new Madam Butterfly set in Bangkok where Cio-Cio San is a ladyboy. I won't, because reviews are irrelevant. Much more interesting is the very phenomenom of small  scale pub opera. OperaUpClose is part of the completely alternative scene where conventional opera values don't count. So instead of churning out yet another "review", I'll ponder what this means.

Pub theatre has been happening forever - even before Brecht (who himself was reviving an old Munich genre). Like pub music, it's direct and unadorned. Usually it's pretty awful, but there's nothing like a bored, drunk audience for a reality check. Cliques exist, but not crowds of fawning luvvies massaging each other's egos and eyeing an MBE.

What pub opera means is that people who love opera - and the making of opera - have a chance to get out there and do what they love. Performers need to perform like fish need water and birds need air. It's not so much how "good" they are but how their enthusiasm communicates. The very act of performance helps performers grow and learn. Most of the people involved in OperaUpClose  have to juggle their lives round so they can take part. But they do it because they care. That kind of committment I respect.

What OperaUpClose offers is a much grittier, experimental experience. Puccini's been adapted with a new, minimal orchestration (Danyal Dhondy) for piano, viola and oboe.  No room for luscious wallowing, but what's left counts. The viola screams tension as Butterfly begins to realize she's been dumped. One player (Dhondy himself) but he has to be effective, and is. The melodies are less prominent, but this is hardly a drama about feelgood harmony.

The back room at The King's Head, Islington, sits less than 100, and the new text is in English. Diction wasn't a problem, but there were many in the audience following the libretto in the programme. Another thing about small scale opera. It reaches audiences who know nothing about opera at all. Personally I'd prefer a synopsis rather than libretto, so people listen and engage to the basic drama. The rest will follow.

Because pub opera is so low budget, the mind is concentrated on essentials. Instead, think things through from scratch. What's the opera about? How does it work, dramatically and musically? How can we use what resources we have in the best way?

Puccini's idea that geisha were bought like furnishings was more fantasy than reality. The Bangkok sex trade is only too real and destructive. Adam Spreadbury-Maher and his team of designers and producers have thought about the dynamics of exploitation. The transvestite angle is good. Making Butterfly a man emphasizes the delusional aspects of her personality. Even Puccini acknowledged that Butterfly was an obsessive who though the world should go her way. Ladyboys don't get that way by accident. This one (Laura Casey, Margaret Cooper, Mariya Krywaniuk) has a "history". Pinkerton's just the last straw. The idea fails, though, to make much sense of the rationale for the adoption, on which the denouement pivots. OTOH, Puccini wasn't realistic either - no way would an American  couple bring back a non-white child in 1904. Not fair on the kid, either. A male Butterfly also makes Pinkerton (Stephen Anthony Brown, Mario Sofronio, Randy Nichol) even creepier. What does he really want the child for? Making him a pilot's a mistake - pilots don't stay away long and would get fired if their employers found out. Is London ready for Gary Glitter as Pinkerton? That would really be shocking, but apt.

Even if you pay £300 at the Royal Opera House, you might not get perfection. In any case, what you get connects to what you put in yourself. Notice how many people are involved. Three sets of primaries, lots of understudies as cover. Everyone chips in, multitasking. It's a co-operative learning process.  Some of the singers had to learn a new skill - puppetry! This puppet's much simpler than Complicite's dog in A Dog's Heart but his hands are real hands. The singers aren't singing, but they're acting with their hands. It's moving, in every sense. That's why I enjoyed OperaUpClose. It's a continuing process of learning and developing. And that involves the audience too.

The production runs until 23 January.

January brings London back to life

New brooms sweep clean so chimney sweeps bring good luck. To switch metaphors, what an oasis January will be after the desert of December.

András Schiff will be bringing good cheer to the Wigmore Hall with his new series, where he'll be blending songs for voice with songs for piano. He does real "intelligent programming" so look at his selections and drool even if you can't get there. First off on 6th January, he's playing Mendelssohn, Schumann and early Mahler with Juliane Banse.

On Sunday 10th, Peter Schreier will be conducting Bach at the Royal Academy of Music. Modern instruments but Schreier's brilliant. He's been conducting RAM students for years, and he's well loved. Needless to say, it's sold out but lucky me, I've got a ticket. Many tickets still available for Brecht songs on the 12th - not Schreier singing though. He retired gracefully a few years ago, while still relatively in his prime. OTOH Brecht isn't difficult so he probably "could" sing at a pinch, though he evidently has more sense.

On 12th and 14th, though, the big draw will be Strauss's Elektra in a concert performance at the Barbican. Gergiev conducts and a good line-up - Jeanne-Michele Charbonnet, Felicity Palmer, Angela Denoke, Matthias Goerne, Ian Storey. Also on at the same time, Melvyn Tan and the Škampa at the Wigmore Hall, and also Sholto Kynoch there, too.

The biggest feature for me though will be the Hans Werner Henze Total Immersion at the Barbican on 16th-17th. This is the first big retrospective since the South Bank Henze series 10 years ago. Oliver Knussen will be conducting Symphony no 4 and the UK premiere of Elogium musicum, after an afternoon that includes Voices and two films. The Barbican doesn't name the speaker for the talk, which is ominous as if they'd got anyone good he'd be advertised. These days pre-concert talks are becoming a bad joke, a platform for those who know nothing about the subject to show off about themselves, antagonizing genuine listeners. Sit strategically near the door.

Absolutely unmissable though will be opera, Phaedra, for which I booked as soon as tickets were available last year so as not to miss it. Almost the same cast as the Berlin premiere which I attended, which I'll write about closer to the time. Ensemble Modern hardly ever come to UK anymore, so that in itself is a draw. It's an amazingly powerful work, quite hard to take it's so intense, but Henze always confounds.

More clashes, as on the 16th the South Bank kicks back in action with Jurowski conducting Shostakovich. At the Wigmore Hall, the Nash Ensemble has an interesting French programme followed by Raphael Wallfisch next day. AND two concerts of opera and early music (Mingardo and Borsi) Luckily no clash with Netrebko and Hvorotovsky in recital at RFH on the 18th. The rest of the month is just as busy, so I'll write about that later.

London is The Place For Me Calypso

Enid Blyton's towns full of gollies represent one response to West Indian immigration. So hearing about things from a West Indian point of view is an antidote. When the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in 1948, TV cameras were waiting for an immigrant from Trinidad called Lord Kitchener. A reporter with the plummy BBC accent of the time asks him "I am told you are the King of Calypso". And Kitch promptly bursts into song ! Here's the full song complete with trumpet backing and the chimes of Big Ben.

One of the regular readers here, the guy with masses of West African LPs, suggested the 4 CD set from Honest Jon's Records in 2003, "London is the Place for Me". (can also be downloaded on amazon). Lord Kitchener is there, Lord Beginner and King Timothy, The West African Rhythm Brothers, Ambrose Adeloya Campbell. Such lively, inventive creative music, so vivacious and so irrepressible - what a heady mix it was. There are songs like "I was there at the Coronation", and Cricket Victory, with its amazing chorus "those little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine" (cricketers, 1950), and funnies like the song about a guy cheating on his wife whose girlfriend steals the wife's nightie! Songs about jazz subcultures like "Gerrard Street" (100 club not Chinatown). These guys are sharp, too and deal straight out with issues like race prejudice, poverty, tough landladies, mixed marriage. Here is Lord Beginner on the General Election (1950)


One song is a kind of social document. After a long grey winter, Carnival would be a good thing, but there's no carnival in Britain in those days. The story goes that some guys were playing for themselves and for some reason started walking along playing in the streets. Crowds followed. Notting Hill was born!

There were already colonies of Africans in London, and there was cross-fusion that way, too. On the later CDs in the set many songs aren't in English but apparently just as witty if you understand Yoruba or Asante. Great music ! Click HERE for more music, including Kitch's tribute to Ghana Freedom song. "Ghana is the name, we wish to proclaim ! We will be jolly, merry and gay, the 6th of March, Independence Day". It sounds more hi-life than calypso but that's fine!

Secret Chinese restaurant, London

London's best kept secret Chinese restaurant is open again! Loon Fung is the wholesaler who supplies most Chinese restaurants in the London area, huge floorspace where you can buy rice by the tonne, cooking oil in industrial cans, and saucepans a metre in diameter. Huge choice of vegetables, UK or China grown and air freighted. These taste different, much stronger, so they're worth the price and carbon footprint. Come here too for serious, ripe tomatoes that don't taste like cardboard. And Chinese supermarkets are the only source in UK for A&W root beer!

People travel for miles to stock up, so it's common sense to give them a meal before their long trek home (and to cook for others). The restaurant, above the Alperton store, is upstairs through a side entrance. Opening hours the same as the shop, so emphasis is on dim sum and Chinese fast food.

The last caterers were very good, these new ones less so, but it's convenient to have decent Chinese food without a big ceremony and fuss parking. This time I had an excellent congee (jook) flavoured with lots of chicken knuckles. Congee is basically rice soup, a sort of watery porridge – Chinese comfort food. When in doubt, eat congee! Cures all ills. During the Japanese occupation when there was famine, congee kept people alive. Much less impressed by the char siu which was truly horrible, weedy and stale. Other people were eating noodles and whole fish, which looked good. Choose things that have to be cooked not microwaved and you should be fine.

If you want banquet quality, there are other places, but Loon Fung is convenient for basics. It's also next to a Sainsbury's megastore. One day I might get lucky and get invited to Royal China Club in St John's Wood (Club in Hong Kong connotes very very upmarket) This week I'm going to Phoenix Palace in Glentworth Street (off Baker Street). There are two Royal China's in Baker Street, one a pretentious and expensive pseudo tea house with expensive (but decent) teas. Royal China in Queensway is where everyone goes, so much so now that most of the customers aren't Chinese anymore, but the food's so good that it's worth waiting in line for an hour. There is a restaurant upstairs at Hoo Hing megastore on the A406, and above Wing Yip in Croydon, South London but neither are good - I walked out of the Wing Yip thing in disgust.

Later today : review of Harding Mahler 10 and Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (Tetzlaff) at the Barbican last night

Where Handel gigged with Britton

Here's the Jerusalem Tavern in London in its present building (1720), although it's been in existence since 1100. It's in Britton Street, Clerkenwell.

Thomas Britton (1644-1714) gigged with Handel and many others near here. Britton, a self-educated man of great learning, built a music room on top of his house near the site of the present tavern to create a salon – the Wigmore Hall of 1678.

In this salon, up a steep staircase, next to the charcoal store, Britton installed a harpsichord and 5-stop organ and hosted weekly subscription concerts. Handel was known to have played here when he arrived in London. Britton drew together everyone hip in musical and literary London. Besides Handel, many other musicians came to play – Britton himself sang and played the viola de gamba. Matthew Dubourg made his violin debut as a small boy at Britton's; he went on to conduct the premiere of Handel's Messiah in Dublin in 1742, with Handel on the harpischord.

Samuel Pepys considered Britton an authority on Tudor music because he also amassed a huge collection of Tudor manuscript scores, later bought by Hans Sloane, after whom Sloane Square and Hans Crescent (near Harrods) are named. Sloane's library and artifacts became the basis of the British Museum. Jonathan Swift and Thomas Hearne knew Britton well, and described him in their work.

Britton was a humble "small-coal" (charcoal) merchant and his premises were fairly basic, but even dukes and duchesses attended the "Small coal man's music club" because it provided good music and discourse. The English Civil War was still in living memory, and Victorian ideas of rigid social station hadn't solidified. Read more about the world of music clubs like Britton's, and their significance in music and social history in Arno Loeffler's excellent paper on Britton. It quotes great poems too.

There are quite a lot of places like the Jerusalem Tavern tucked about in Clerkenwell, a place redolent with history if you know where to look. The Jerusalem is still run by a small brewer, St Peter's Brewery, so visiting it is an act against multinational conglomerates.

photo credit

Mr Beethoven lives upstairs

"There's a madman upstairs!" says a young lad writing to his uncle about a nutcase neighbour who makes a lot of noise."Send Mr Beethoven away, I beg you !" cries the boy. It's a little Freudian considering that Beethoven's own nephew felt exactly the same way.

Long before the advent of DVD, or even CDs, there was a series of cassettes and LP's for kids by Ann Rachlin, called "Fun with Music". Highly recommended as the series was not in the least dumbed down. Each piece is well written, and has something intelligent to say, even if you aren't six anymore. Better than many programme notes these days ! Or the awful Naxos "composer books" series. Rachlin did a "Happy Birthday Mr Beethoven" which was pretty much on the same lines as the DVD - Beethoven seen thru a kid's perspective. "Did you know that Beethoven's favourite food was macaroni cheese? Or that he took a shower standing in a bowl, throwing water all over himself - and the floor?" It's documented too, though you might not read that in Grove. Rachlin's series are still available, so check out the website if you know any kids. Bookmark it for birthdays and Xmas !

My favourite in the series was the one about Mozart's childhood, Mozart the Miracle Maestro, very well researched, but presented in such a way that kids become fascinated with the 18th century. "A small boy who hated sloppy kisses!...A miracle in a cathedral in Rome!...The mystery of the Dark Stranger...Wolfgang's journey through Europe with his sister". In fact, and this is a TRUE STORY, one five year old, visiting Mozart's birthplace in Salzburg, piped up, "that's Mozart's sister!" looking at her portrait. She'd recognized the picture from a children's book and knew the story from Ann Rachlin.

And there are excellent ones on Handel and Haydn, indeed, two on Handel, which should be required listening for people who don't get the baroque. Rachlin's Handel's Firework Party resonates with kids who know London. It is a godsend if you get stuck with kids in the car in Central London traffic. "Fireworks that backfire...Traffic jams in 1749...Sword fights on London Bridge...Road rage in horse-drawn carriages." One minute the kid is having a tantrum, the next it's transfixed by proper music, not pap. The performances are pretty good, LSO, Mackerras etc. Again, Naxos pabulum it ain't.

Google Ann Rachlin for details. The series also includes ballets and orchestras and "stories" like Lt. Kije. Extremely good introduction to music even if you're not a kid.

Handel Festival, London

Get a handle on Handel this year in London! Below is a link to Melanie Eskenazi's article on the celebrations. This will be Handel Total Immersion, as there will be so many concerts, talks etc, even walking tours, as the composer spent so much time in England. The London Handel Festival, which starts 23 Feb, features some of the greatest oratorios, Theodora, Alessandro and Jephtha.

"The highlight of the Festival is surely Jephtha. Laurence Cumming, the conductor and Festival director, has been “saving up for this as it’s such a dark piece, with such complex issues being grappled with. It’s a work in which everything is inherent in the drama, with nothing more needed to bring it out than the right singers.” John Mark Ainsley considers the title role one of the greatest and most challenging: “I’ve recorded it once and would love to have another go at it now that I’ve got so much more life-experience under my belt – I’ve always liked the piece for its top-class Handelian lyricism, and its combination of superlative music with an involving text.” The clearly-defined narrative is “as much about moods of the protagonists as it is about actions”, and he loves the almost Shakespearean nature of the text, which he says you can speak “without cringeing”. After a relatively long absence from the role, Ainsley is looking forward to finding out “what new colours I’ve got in the paintbox.” Ainsley has a special closeness to the Festival, since he sang his very first Handel oratorio in St George’s and learned a great deal from performances there by an earlier generation of singers. He credits Laurence Cummings with the new energy that is evident in the Festival, owing not only to his musical invention but also to his enabling, “yea-saying” approach. He feels that we don’t really celebrate Handel enough as a Londoner, but this Festival gives the chance to do just that in the composer’s anniversary year."

Read the whole article here
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_features.php?id=6809

Architecture as music Kowloon Walled City

In 1965, my friend went to a talk by Xenakis. Yesterday we went together to the big Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican. First weekend - queues for tickets, packed with earnest looking students and a few familiar faces, not that architects are as high profile as rock stars.

The Poème Électronique room is particularly good because you can see the whole film in its original black and white starkness - clips of Godzilla, ancient art, Belsen, Madonnas. Profound and found objects, thrown together. Sit where you can see both the film and the colour overlay on the other side of the room. At the Philips Pavilion both were shown together : at the Barbican, use your imagination to put them together and in the context of the undulating, walls not made of solid concrete but shards attached to a metal frame, hanging in the air, defying gravity rather than solidly ignoring it.

So, a few random and non-technical thoughts. Mandelbrot patterns are supposed to show how all creation evolves in a systematic sequence even though it may look infinitely chaotic. One striking thing about the patterns in Le Corbusier's work is the way simple grids multiply themselves, becoming ever more complex. It's really not so different from so much new music. Which is why for me new music is as organic as nature, cells dividing and expanding in sequence. And why I don't buy rigid tonality versus atonality doctrines which inflict labels on what is beyond classification. Time to reverse dogma and simply listen.

Architecture is a way of "enclosing space" even when they integrate light, air and landscape. Xenakis described the three planes of the Philips Pavilion as a "cow's stomach", an inner space where ideas are digested. Music too is a way of enclosing sound in structure, creating sculptures with sound. More on this soon after Xenakis Immersion Day on March 7.



Architecture isn't just buildings. The exhibition featured a lot on Le Corbusier's thing for urban space. Cities don't usually grow by planning. except when there's a disaster like the Lisbon Earthquake, or the upheavals in Paris in the 19th century. In the third world there are/were lots of urban environments which defy any principle of urban order - people just build where and how they can. The "traditional" Third World city is a maze-like warren of random structures. Electricity is "borrowed", sewers connect to water supply. There used to be a place in Hong Kong called the Kowloon Walled City which was a vertical burrow of conjoined structures where you never had to reach street level, if you knew how to navigate corridors, illegal bridges etc.

Note in the photo above, extensive gardens were created by the government - not the city inhabitants - to counteract the claustrophobia of the Walled City. (the photo enlarges if you click on it). The gardens acted as a kind of cordon sanitaire around the conurbation. Previously, it had been surrounded by multi storey building, only separated by a narrow city street. Had fires broken out or plague or cholera, it would have easily spread to the rest of the area. Moreover, since the Hong Kong government had no legal jurisdiction, triads ruled : the Walled City was a crime hotspot. Surrounding it with public gardens meant that police surveillance was possible. When the Triads ventured out, they could be stopped. In theory, anyway. The gardens weren't about aesthetic design, but served a grim, practical purpose. Town planners with their drawing boards sometimes don't understand.

Eventually the Chinese and Hong Kong governments made a deal to end the historic anomaly that allowed the Walled City to exist, and the whole place was razed.

So back to my beef with the Barbican. Originally the idea was that the mini-Metropolis should reflect the warren that was medieval London. The ancestors of my friend who heard Xenakis in 1965 lived under what is now the Barbican Hall. The difference is that, in a medieval village people knew their way around because they didn't travel far, and adapted to the higgeldy-piggledy maze by habit, not optimum convenience. People don't build warrens for fun, they just come about piecemeal. Ordinary people don't have big budgets they just improvise. "Traditional" cities aren't a "model" for anything.

The Barbican's systems are utterly counter intuitive to logic and rational movement. Even the lifts (elevators) when they condescend to appear, don't all go to the same floors. And when you get in them they decide for themselves where they are going to go, complete with sado-mechanist voice machinery. The Barbican was not designed for the disabled, elderly, children, or anyone who wants to get from point A to B without going round the block ten times. here's no natural flow of movement. And the feng shui is hopelessly stagnant. The Barbican complex is a structure that actively hates people.

Renzo Piano's Shard of Glass

Renzo Piano's new building is named "Shard of Glass" because it's a clear glass spike due to shoot out of the Southwark skyline at London Bridge in 2012. In fact, two of them big momma and baby. Architects and modern art fans, drool. But also fans of Luigi Nono. Prometeo was premiered as a performance installation in a structure designed by Renzo.

Prometeo is all about clawing onto the shards of civilization in a collapsing world. Things can shatter at any time, everything's fragmenting, dissolving. So Piano designs a boat like structure, hanging suspended from the roof of a derelict baroque church. The musicians were seated on planks, little more than boards across space. Scary ! The performance must have captured that edge of danger which the sedate concert at RFH this year missed. So, concept and music combined.

Read about Prometeo by following the links on the list of subjects on the right of this page. It's an experience, its message even more prescient now than in Nono's time. Read about Piano's Shard of Glass in the Times, or by googling Renzo Piano Top of His Game. Photo by Keturn. There is a lot about architecture on this blog considering it's a music blog. Please look on the labels list at right, lots on architecture and its interface with music, incl Xenakis and Le Corbusier, and composers whon think music as architecture, so PLEASE keep coming back. Also pieces on non western architecture, and visual art.