Weak at the knees over this gig

28 January - a legend - concert room 7.30 - a legend
Paolo Pandolfo viola da gamba
A legend. I've had members of the public weak at the knees over this gig. You won't have heard of him as you are music students but don't let that or good natured sarcasm stop you from coming. FREE FREE FREE for MUS students

That's what the University of East Anglia School of Music internal flyer said, and for once the hyperbole was justified. Like his viol da gamba teacher Jordi Savall, Paolo Pandolfo is a legend. Pandolfo's concert last night, with its seamless transitions between the 17th and 21st centuries, confirmed his status. The evening was crowned by one of the pinnacles of classical musiuc, Bach's Fifth Cello Suite in a transcription for viol, after revelatory interpretations of music by Tobias Hume, Le Sieur de St. Colombe, Marin Marais and Pandolfo himself. The music students may not have heard of Pandolfo, but there was standing room only with the widest range of ages that I have seen at a concert since last summer's Faster Than Sound.

My photo above captures some of the magic of the evening, and there is more magic in the brutalist 1960s architecture of the UEA music room in which it was taken. Paul Hillier's first recording of Stockhausen's Stimmung, made for Hyperion with Singcircle, was recorded there in 1983. Which may explain the interesting similarities between my header photo and Richard Friedman's 1971 shot used in my recent Stimmung post, and no comments, please, that we were both struggling with available light.

Paolo Pandolfo is one of a a disappearing breed - a musician with views on more than his next recording contract and music directorship. Read about them in Baghdad's Spring.
Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Naughty but nice

What are your musical equivalents of chocolate cake? - the performances you know you really shouldn't be enjoying, but do. Here is my menu of 'naughty but nice' music dishes:

Uri Caine's Wagner E Venezia - yes, I know it is a serious taste crime to admit to enjoying the Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg played in the Piazza San Marco by an ensemble that includes accordion, piano and acoustic bass. But I do. Quite appropriately the recording was made live at the Gran Caffé Quadri, Piazza San Marco, Venice, and is complete with authentic background café sounds which provide a splendid counterpoint to the Tristan Liebestod. If you've never sampled this lovingly crafted, and packaged, chocolate torte from Uri Caine (photo above) I warmly recommend ordering a portion.

Karl Münchinger's Art of Fugue and Musical Offering with the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester reminds us of how Bach used to be performed before musical scholarship moved on. As one reviewer said: "This lush performance of Bach's complex Art of Fugue is as emotional as Barber's Adagio for Strings." But these 1976 recordings still blow me away. Stunning playing recorded in classic Decca sound in the Liederhalle, Stuttgart by the legendary team of producers Ray Minshull and James Mallinson, and recording engineers James Lock and Martin Fouqué.

Wagner makes his second appearance on my ultimate 'naughty but nice' disc. This is Glenn Gould playing his own transcriptions of Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey and the Prelude to Die Meistersinger. This reissue is worth the price for these two transcriptions alone. The disc also includes Gould conducting members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in a painfully slow Siegfried Idyll, which at almost twenty-five minutes outstays even Knappertsbusch's interpretation by several minutes. This conducting debut was the last thing Gould recorded before he went on tour with Bach, and it leaves us thankful that he didn't give up the day job. (Photo above shows a young Gould with one of his first teachers).

Bach sung in English may well be considered 'naughty.' But not only is my next nomination 'nice', but it is high up in my list of the greatest recordings ever made. Benjamin Britten set down his account of Bach's St John Passion in April 1971. With performers including Peter Pears, Gwynne Howell, John Shirley-Quirk, HeatherHarper, Alfreda Hodgson, Robert Tear, and the Wandsworth School Boys' Choir you know this is going to be something special. The English Chamber Orchestra reads like a Who's Who of instrumentalists. Kenneth Sillitoe is leader, Richard Adeney (flute), Cecil Aronowitz (viola) and Adrian Beers (double bass). Philip Ledger plays the harpsichord continuo originally prepared by Britten and Imogen Holst. And the 'naughty' English translation is made by none other than Peter Pears and Imogen Holst.

This recording of the St John Passion was made by Decca in Snape Maltings. It has to be said that if there is a weakness it is the engineering which falls somewhat short of Decca's signature Snape sound. Also watch out for the intrusive low frequency 'thumps' in the opening chorus which producer David Harvey really should have covered from alternative takes. But one factor places this performance in that stellar group of the greatest ever made - Britten's interpretation. Some of the tempi are surprisingly brisk, but this is one of those rare performances where musicality and humanity meet as equal partners. Naughty, but simply sublime.

Purists will consider any Bach transcription 'naughty but nice.' But my third Bach nomination comes just about as close to the spirit of the original as it is possible to get with a transcription. Paolo Pandolfo (right) was a founder member of early music group La Stravaganza, and is recognised as one of the leading exponents of the viola de gamba. His transcription of Bach's six Cello Suites (BWV 1007-12) on the enterprising Spanish Glossa label is really more of a re-interpretaion that a transcription. Four of the six keys are transposed, the well known G major Suite No. 1 is played in C major, the C minor Suite No. 5 is played in D minor, and so on. But this is done simply to make the most of the range of the viola de gamba, and it works beautifully allowing the warm tone of the gamba to really ring out. These are personal interpretations, and Pandolfo's reshaping of some of the lines will not be to everyone's taste, but this is wonderful music making.

To conclude with a 'naughty but nice' piece that I always find inexplicably moving - the finale to Bernstein's Candide, 'Make Our Garden Grow'. This is classic Lenny, over the top, superbly written, and absolutely heart on sleeve. One reviewer wrote of "its soaring sentimentality". I find it absolutely irresistible - just like chocolate cake. And if you want the recipe for the example seen in my header photo here it is.

Now read about my first classical record
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Simple gifts – Baghdad’s Spring

Travel Notes – new music for the viola da gamba was one of the most thought provoking CDs of contemporary music that I heard in 2006. One of the tracks is Baghdad’s Spring, and here are composer and viol player Paolo Pandolfo’s own words:

Baghdad’s Spring was born while I was on tour in Japan, in March 2003. The TV was like a window opening onto what was happening in Iraq. CNN accompanied me every moment I spent in the hotel room: satellite transmissions of an Iraq reduced to a videogame session, the camera gradually zooming in on the images of bombed targets, strategic sites, bridges, streets, cities … Reality was quite different from those images, the violence of the explosions, the terror of the people … The was seemed to boil down to a question of skill and precision, a game in which someone surgically dosed out horror and death with the click of a mouse button, undoubtedly in the interest of all the world’s TV viewers.

I remember the moment in which I decided to keep watching CNN, but with sound turned off. The images were quite sufficient and the booming quality of the news commentators seemed superfluous, impeding a better understanding of what was really going on. Those images began soaking in silence, like a fine rain, in the small hotel in Hiroshima where I found myself. I’d already visited the museum of horror, the loose strands of memory, the deafening silence of the shoes carbonised by radiation.

My viola was there, resting against the table, mute. I started playing: the instrument produced anguished, subterranean sounds. Now it was there, on the streets of Baghdad, it was next to the fearful families transfixed by a TV screen, like I was, listening in amazement to the same news commentators who explained the characteristics of the tempest of fire which was descending on their city as if they were describing a real atmospheric disturbance, directly connected with the eye of the hurricane ….

Travel Notes comes from the innovative Spanish label Glossa. Violist Paolo Pandolfo (photo above) is better known for his interpretations of baroque and early music. All the compositions on this CD, with one exception, are by him, and this unashamedly contemporary album for viola da gamba, trumpet, percussion and human voice is remarkable proof that today’s new music knows no boundaries.

Paolo Pandolfo wrote the notes for Baghdad’s Spring in the summer of 2003. How tragic that his words, and music, are more relevant today than they were three years ago. There is no simple gift that will bring peace to Baghdad this Christmas, even as I write BBC News reports that a suicide bomber has killed at least 10 in the Iraqi capital - horror and death are still being surgically dosed out.

* Less 'left-field' is Paolo Pandolfo's new CD of improvisations on 16th and 17th century musical forms. Improvisando is another superb Glossa release, and is certainly on my shortlist of best CDs of 2006.

For more seasonal reflections take An Overgrown Path to For unto us a child is born
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "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