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'The Orlandos hadn't met the Tuvans when I spoke to them, but were confident they'd find common ground, since this is the strategy they employ as a way of drawing in audiences to the forbidding medieval music they specialise in. Forbidding is my word, not theirs: as tenor Angus Smith points out, composers such as Steve Reich, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell-Davies are now ploughing the same melodic furrow of the monks of Notre-Dame, 800 years ago. "We don't like to programme early music in isolation – we like to find ways of giving it a resonance today," says Smith. "And the music of medieval Notre-Dame is, in many ways, similar to the music being written today"' - from Michael Church's Independent preview of the East Neuk Festival in Scotland.
The festival includes a premiere by Tarik O'Regan whose Scattered Rhymes, inspired by Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame, featured in my recent 'Mixing it' post and the CD of which provides my header graphic. And mixing it certainly does draw audiences, a very healthy number of the East Neuk Festival concerts are sold out.
More from the Notre Dame composers here.
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Spirit of space as well as spirit of place is being celebrated at this year's Aldeburgh Festival. The magic of perspective was present even before the music started with sculptor East Anglian sculptor Laurence Edwards' three nine feet high Creek Men (photo above) menacingly standing guard over the distant marshes.
Space and visual images were also at the heart of last night's double-header new music programme which included the UK premiere of Harrison Birtwistle's string quartet Tree of Strings. This totally convincing study in creative fragmentation started with the superb Arditti Quartet inhabiting a single musical and physical space at the centre of the stage. Then, as the thirty minute work unfolded they moved to separate and distanced spaces around the perimeter of the large Snape platform where they spoke with separate musical voices before individually, and silently, making their exits from the famous performing space. In the magical final moments, as the last member of the quartet, cellist Lucas Fels, stopped playing and left with his instrument, we were left wondering whether the Arditti were on their way across the wind-blown marshes to join the Creek Men.
I have for long thought that Stimmung is a superb piece of music but a miraculous piece of music theatre, and London Voices' exemplary performance, which concluded the evening, confirmed that. Space and visual images were again central, with the six white-clad singers individually moving from the audience to the stage at the beginning of the performance and tossing vocal lines across space during it. A great performance of Stimmung is the ultimate in teamwork, big companies should stop wasting money on expensive team-building consultants and simply send their executives to observe Stimmung being sung as it was last night - at just £10 a ticket think of the budget savings.
But despite affordable tickets neither the Arditti concert, which also included Birtwistle's Bach transcriptions, Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet and John Cage's String Quartet in Four Parts (which made the new Birtwistle quartet sound positively familiar) or Stimmung were anywhere like full even after energetic marketing which included a late half-price ticket offer. However, what the audience lacked in quantity it made up with quality, Joanna McGregor, Sir Harrison Birtwistle and former Covent Garden and Channel 4 boss Jeremy Isaacs were just some of the celebrities in the rows behind us. As someone remarked to me, if Aldeburgh can't sell out a concert like this who can?
One smallish moan. Mains hum through the PA was excusable in 1968 when Stockhausen was composing Stimmung for six amplified voices and flaky valve (tube) PA systems were the norm. But things have moved on and the obtrusive 50hz buzz from the left speakers throughout Stimmung last night was inexcusable. But, carping aside, a quite magical evening, and it didn't rain on our between-concert picnic although the wind did blow the candles out.
They don't always get it right. But the magic of Aldeburgh is that, unlike so many of today's prestigous festivals, it is so much more than just a music factory. One of many heroes last night was local sculptor Laurence Edwards who created the Creek Men, and the evening made me think of American sculptor Richard Serra's words about his own work, "It's not going to change the world, but it can be a catalyst for thought."
* Barbara Hepworth's Family of Man sculture occupies the foreground between Snape Maltings and the Creek Men on the marshes, and also comprises three figures. Family of Man is on permanent loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in memory of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. But despite the title of the work Hepworth had a distinctly feminine point of view.
Creek Men photo credit EADT24. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
The Detroit Symphony's publicity stunt with Asimo the robot conductor reminded me of this review from the non-too happy period when their new music director was in charge of a leading London orchestra - 'The BBC Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin gave a vigorous, perhaps slightly mechanical performance of ... Alexander Goehrs' second musical offering (GFH 2001)'.
Alexander Goehr was a member of the Manchester School in the 1950s together with Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon, read the story here.
Photo of Leonard Slatkin from Thomsonian. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
'As a by-product, this development will put an end to today's star system. The indispensable quality of "stardom" is its rarity. But, on the one hand, the difference between a star and a non-star performance will not be tolerated much longer by a growingly knowledgeable public. On the other, the stars themselves will fade. Even now, their strength is being progressively dissipated by the incredible fatigue of their enforced nomadic life, and in the end they will be unable to deliver what is expected of them.
The true future of opera lies in the ensemble principle, by which I mean well-matched ensembles of fine singers working together and staying together. This mode of organisation has never completely disappeared. A few, very few, theatres have always maintained it, and elsewhere, now and then at the insistence of a maestro, a performance reflecting it turns up. So the ensemble principle will not need to be re-discovered. Even the public knows about it. And once the public starts asking for it, sooner or later it will get it' - Antal Dorati writes in his 1979 autobiography Notes of Seven Decades (Hodder ISBN 0340159227).
The exigencies of the star sytem mean that Punch and Judy receives a tiny mention in this new Royal Opera House national press campaign, but its composer doesn't. Never mind, read about him here, and continue playing spot the composer's name here, before reading more about Maestro Dorati here.
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On An Overgrown Path July 27 Pliable writes - "August 4, 3.00pm, a fine programme of excellent 20th century music at a silly time in a silly place. Elizabeth Maconchy's Music for Strings and Gerald Finzi's Clarinet Concerto (plus Elgar and Grieg) are marginalised to an afternoon concert in the Cadogan Hall, to make way for what in the Albert Hall in the evening? - yet another Shostakovich symphony."
Guardian July 28 Andrew Clements writes - "It's Nicholas Kenyon's last year as controller of the Proms, so the end of ghettoising contemporary music at London's summer music festival may finally be in sight. Over the last 10 years Kenyon has coralled more demanding new works into the hapless late-night slot, ensuring that he can serve populism in the main concerts. This week's late-night offering illustrates the problem perfectly: the programme by Susanna Malkki with the BBC Singers and the London Sinfonietta consists of a UK premiere and a London premiere; that those works are by Pierre Boulez and Sir Harrison Birtwistle, two of today's leading composers, is apparently irrelevant. As a result only a fraction of the potential audience will hear the latest version of Boulez's work-in-progress, Dérive 2, and Birtwistle's luminous choral setting of Pablo Neruda's ode: another opportunity to champion the finest music of today has been ducked."
But will the ghettoising of contemporary music really end under under Nicholas Kenyon's successor Roger Wright? Pigs may fly.
Before anyone writes, it was Andrew Clements who turned 'ghetto' into a verb, not me. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
"A lively era comes to an end this summer, when Nicholas Kenyon presides over his tenth and last BBC Proms season before going off to become the managing director of the Barbican. It’s spooky that his tenure has more or less coincided with Tony Blair’s as Prime Minister, because their regimes have been quite similar. Like Blair’s New Labour, Kenyon has promoted a “big tent” policy at the Proms: strong on diversity, inclusiveness and impact. And, like Blair, he has sometimes been accused of caring more about style and presentation than intellectual substance.
"It’s undeniable that Kenyon’s decade hasn’t been as notable for avant-garde shocks or bold commissions as, say, William Glock’s Prom seasons in the 1960s were. When, as an impressionable youth, I attended the bloodcurdling Proms premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Worldes Blisin 1969, I watched with astonishment as hundreds of outraged punters stampeded for the exits. Similarly, when John Drummond, Kenyon’s predecessor, provocatively programmed Harrison Birtwistle’s Panic on the Last Night in 1995 – knowing full well that it would be televised on BBC One at peak time on a Saturday evening – the BBC switchboard was jammed with calls from appalled viewers.
"Nothing in Kenyon’s era has caused such a furore – not even his faux pas of concocting an entire season last year without including a single woman composer or conductor. He is too silky-smooth an operator, and perhaps too emollient a personality; he doesn’t get a buzz from ruffling feathers.
Richard Morrison tells it like it is in this extract from The Times, although hasn't Nicholas Kenyon been director of the BBC Proms for twelve seasons, not ten? For more on those William Glock Proms, and also on a composer you won't find in the 2007 season, take this path.
Photo On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
