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'I think there is a great deal in The Kingdom that is more than a match for Gerontius, and I feel that it is a much more balanced work and throughout maintains a stream of glorious music whereas Gerontius has its ups and downs.'
That is from Sir Adrian Boult's introductory note to his 1969 recording of The Kingdom and after writing yesterday's post about mystical devotion I listened once again to Elgar's oratorio. Sir Adrian's high regard for The Kingdom is reflected in his interpretation - his recording is probably the finest achievement of the EMI dream team of Boult, Bishop and Parker, although their Pilgrim's Progress runs it a close second. Forget about Elgar the flag waving patriot, he was a Catholic and it was only twenty-eight years before he was born that Catholic emancipation became law in England. Instead follow these links to Elgar the mystic and Elgar the occultist.
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'As an Anchoress Julian was allowed to keep a cat for pest control, particularly to keep down the mice. Julian is often portrayed with her cat nearby, no doubt it was a great source of comfort to her.'
That notice is displayed in the Anchoress' cell in St Julian's Church in Norwich and I photographed the Marseille street cat seen below when I was on the road with a Sufi saint recently. On my iPod in Marseille was Aïcha Redouane singing her own settings of the Sufi poems of Rabi`a Al-`Adawiyya. Those two remarkable women, Julian of Norwich and Rabi`a Al-`Adawiyya, are linked by their fervour for mystical devotion. Julian and her cat are portrayed by Brother Robert Lentz OFM, a gay American Franciscan friar who controversially incorporates contemporary social themes into his icons. The link between Christian and Islamic mysticism fascinated another American monk Thomas Merton, who venerated both Julian of Norwich and the Algerian Sufi saint Shaykh Ahmad ibn 'Ajiba. The importance of mystical devotion was also recognised by the Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin who said "humankind is being brought to a moment where it will have to decide between suicide and adoration". Suicide has powerful advocates but those fighting the corner of adoration include Edmund Rubbra with a homage to Teilhard de Chardin in the form of his revelatory Eighth Symphony together with the feline linked Jonathan Harvey whose How could the soul not take flight sets the verse of Sufi poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi. Also on the side of adoration is Hildegard authority June Boyce-Tillman who captures Julian's mystical devotions in Enfolded in Love, a musical pageant for young musicians. With maritime tragedies in the news June Boyce-Tillman has a topical performance in Southampton on Feb 4: her new work for choir and orchestra The Myth of the Titanic retells the story of the sinking of the Titanic as a myth about human hubris and arrogance - classical music cannot be more relevant than that. The Myth of the Titanic, which in an echo of Tippett's A Child of Our Time uses a song from the black community in the US to protest against colonialism and racial subjugation, is confirmation that engagement is alive and well if you look beyond the Mahler symphonies. Isabelle Eberhardt, who campaigned against colonialism and was a frequent maritime traveller, had drawn me to Marseille and Missy Mazzoli's refreshingly engaged opera Song from the Uproar: the Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt premieres at The Kitchen, NYC on Feb 24. Funds are being raised for a recording of the opera on Kickstarter, which was how Ochion Jewell funded the CD of his First Suite for Jazz Quartet - is a new anti-business model emerging for music recording? Alas no recording of June Boyce-Tillman's mystical musical celebration of Julian of Norwich, but read about it in Meetings with remarkable women.
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Liturgy comes from a word meaning "public work"; by its performance more is expressed than can be conveyed in verbal formulae. Like music, liturgy holds more than can be explained in a commentary. The meaning is implicit and conveyed by performance. It is not a theatrical performance but more like the performance of a string quartet, not in its aesthetics, but in the thing behind the music.
Classical music's anti-silly conventions lobby has been getting quite a bit of airtime here recently, so I offer the thoughts above to add some balance. They come from Christopher Howse's book Sacred Mysteries and help explain why concert hall conventions have survived and also clarify the intentions, if not the actions, of traditionalist Catholics.
Illustration shows Julien's Orchestra at a Promenade Concert in Covent Garden. Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) was born in Sisteron in France and after leaving France to escape his creditors established promenade concerts in London; which means that great British tradition the last night of the Proms is in fact of pure French descent. Jullien's first concerts were popular mixed programmes but later introduced symphonies, a trend which which contemporary Promenade Concerts have reversed. There is a topical link to audience interruptions at Promenade Concerts here, and more on music as ritual here.
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Nielsen's Fifth Symphony has been well served by the record industry. I grew to love it through a long-deleted 1975 LP. Producer David Mottley and engineer Stuart Eltham captured the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paavo Berglund in that wonderfully rich yet realistic sound that was the hallmark of EMI's recordings of the period. Simon Rattle said of Berglund "He is one of the great conductors still among us", an opinion I will happily concur with. I remember a blistering Shostakovich Seventh Symphony in the acoustically magnificent Caird Hall in a freezing Dundee in the 1980s, with Berglund conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Paavo Berglund's 80th birthday passed unnoticed on April 14, 2009. The reason is not difficult to find. The Finnish maestro has never been part of classical music's PR circus. One lasting memory of Berglund [seen above] is his Shostakovich in an arctic Dundee. Another is an appearance by him on BBC Radio 3's In Tune programme a couple of years back. Presenter Sean Rafferty was in the studio in London, Berglund was being interviewed over a line from Scotland where he was conducting. Sean Rafferty asked his usual fawning and vacuous questions. Berglund refused to answer in anything but monosyllables. As Berglund became more taciturn Rafferty became more voluble (if that is possible) until the interview ground to a halt. If it was available on CD it would be a best seller.
From The Uncertainty Principle - May 2009. Paavo Berglund died on Jan 25, 2012. Thanks for the music and for the wisdom Paavo.
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Cut to the Britten Studio at Snape on Saturday evening (Jan 21) where the 'Returns Only' sign was posted at the box office. So what sold out this remote venue in the middle of January - a pop-up concert by Gustavo Dudamel and his Simón Bolívar band perhaps? Well actually no, the event was an exploration of symmetry presented as part of Aldeburgh Music's Faster Than Sound experimental series. A major factor in the box office appeal was that Marcus du Sautoy was animating the event - author of several best selling books and a frequent TV presenter, his day jobs are Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of New College.
Marcus du Sautoy was leading an exploration of symmetry in mathematics, design and music supported by a graphic designer, a multi-disciplinary artist and a multi-sensory artists collective. This Oxford professor of mathematics is also no slouch when it comes to music - he plays the trumpet and his unscripted deconstruction of the Goldberg Variations put many professional musicians to shame. His symmetrical soundtrack included Iannis Xenakis' Nomos Alpha and Olivier Messiaen's Quatre études de rythme Île de feu 2 in quadraphonic diffusions and a sequenced version of Bach's Goldberg Variations performed on MIDI Piano and Mac mini. All the photos were taken at Symmetry and the central figure in several of them is Marcus du Sautoy.
Symmetry sold out against the odds and Marcus du Sautoy kept his audience captivated for two hours. So someone, somewhere was doing something right. This was not a conventional live music performance and there is no suggestion that Symmetry can provide a template for the future of classical music. But it can provide some pointers to innovative ways of connecting with that elusive new audience, and where better to start than challenging conventions? Jonathan Harvey famously proposed that classical music should drop its silly conventions and Symmetry confirmed that we should be far more willing to experiment - and sometimes fail - with new concert formats.
Allowing the audience to move around during the performance was one of Jonathan Harvey's suggestions. Symmetry was not a live music performance, but I was impressed by how well the no seats Top Gear-style format (hate the programme but let's learn from it) worked in the Britten Studio - see accompanying photos. In the 1970s the seats in Philharmonic Hall in New York were replaced by red rugs and foam cushions, with Pierre Boulez explaining in a pre-echo of Jonathan Harvey "There is so much formality involved in the performance of music that we make it hard for audiences to get emotionally involved." More recently experiments such as Gabriel Prokofiev's classical club nights have dispensed with that formality - we need others to follow their lead.
Overturning established intermediaries was the second pointer from Symmetry. Even in these financially troubled times a not inconsiderable number of middle feeders - agents, impressarios, PR consultants, media companies etc - are making a very comfortable living from classical music. Any change threatens that comfortable living, which is why established intermediaries pay lip service to change while actually resisting it. Credits for Symmetry include graphic designer Richard Rhys, multidisciplinary artist Russell Haswell, visuals and electronics facilitator Farmersmanual, which describes itself as 'a pan-European, multi-sensory artists' collective that presents a stream of events from concerts to interdisciplinary cultural, aesthetic and political experiments', and co-producer Lumin, which creates 'sound led experiments across art forms'. Those are not names you find in the average concert programme - which is a pity.
The third pointer from Symmetry was the power of the visual. This is a familiar theme On An Overgrown Path and Saturday evening reinforced the point that a spoonful of images helps difficult music go down. Big screen organ recitals are popular with audiences, so why not big screen symphony concerts? And that could just be the starting point - at Snape Russell Haswell's oscilloscope images created by real time sound spectrum analysis gave a taster of the further possibilities.
Another pointer from the event was how a really good presenter never talks down to his audience. Marcus du Sautoy stretched his audience - which had one of the widest age ranges I have seen at Snape - and took them with him all the way to Xenakis' Nomos Alpha without once talking down. If you need any more convincing watch this video. In comments about the decline of classical radio a number of readers complained about how the current generation of radio presenters talks down to their audience. Marcus du Sautoy handed out work sheets for the audience to complete in the intermission with the explanation that "mathematics is not a spectator sport". We could well adopt "Classical music is not a spectator sport" as a new battle cry because many of the genres current problems are caused by futile attempts to repackage it as a passive entertainment rather than an active experience.
The key role of the animateur - the final pointer from Symmetry - is also a familiar theme here. Seeing Marcus du Sautoy in action brought home just how lamentable BBC Radio 3's current crop of imported Classic FM presenters really are. Marcus du Sautoy may not come cheap, but ex-Classic FM 'face of the BBC Proms' Katie Derham comes at a reported annual cost of £250,000 - and still the ratings go down. Symmetry was all about seeing things from a different perspective. So, in conclusion, here is a suggestion for an experiment that might just engage with a new audience. Send Katie Derham back to reading the news, recruit Marcus du Sautoy to present the Proms on BBC Radio and TV, and hire Farmersmanual, Lumin et al to give the Proms concerts a much needed makeover. I have a feeling the result would not be spectator sport.
* More on the Britten Studio in Playing in new music's sandbox.
Photos are by Jana Chiellino and come via Aldeburgh Music, whose indefatigable Marc Ernesti receives my thanks for finding me a complimentary ticket for the sold out event. All views expressed here are, of course, my own. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter.
