Call it good or bad, I love to experiment


It is troubling when I find myself agreeing strongly with a view expressed in the all too often reactionary Spectator. But Damian Thompson's totally justified castigation of the Southbank Centre's forthcoming Belief and Beyond Belief festival - "This is a missed opportunity on an epic scale" - echoes my view. The fashionably themed concerts, which are billed as "a festival of music inspired by spiritual belief", are presented in collaboration with the London Philharmonic and run from January to June 2017. They include two Mahler symphonies, two Bruckner symphonies and that ubiquitous expression of joyful fuzzy spirituality Beethoven's Ninth. As Damian Thompson observes: "As for the concerts, they look suspiciously like the programmes the LPO was planning to perform anyway, before they had the three-Bs label slapped on them.."

As is the vogue, the warhorses gallop alongside contemporary music including commissions and premieres from Aaron Jay Kernis and Magnus Lindberg. In Damian Thompson's view "Belief and Beyond Belief reeks of Scriabinesque condescension." That condescension is very evidence in the programming which applies the all too familiar formula of juxtaposing new and very familiar music in the same concert. Yes, these 'front half hyena, back half koala' concerts may attract sizeable short term audiences that are prepared to sit through a Magnus Lindberg premiere for the reward of Beethoven's Ninth. But is there any hard evidence that this hyena/koala format, which inevitably fails to satisfy either neophyte or nerd, builds the much more important long term audiences? The Southbank Centre argue there is, but I question their argument.

Belief and Beyond Belief is the brainchild of Southbank Centre director, Jude Kelly. She received justified praise for masterminding the Southbank Centre's acclaimed Rest is Noise festival in 2013. Few dare criticise Jude Kelly because she is one of the elite group of power brokers that controls classical music in Britain. But that will not stop me from proffering the view that Belief and Beyond Belief is no more than a muddle-headed attempt to repeat the success of The Rest is Noise.

Let me give an example of that muddle-headedness. On the Belief and Beyond Belief website there is a seminar on Jan 28 titled 'What you need to know: Shostakovich Symphony No.5 In Depth'. We will overlook that the tension between Shostakovich and Stalin must be one of the most overexposed backstories in classical music, and also overlook that this seminar sounds suspiciously like The Rest is Noise reheated. My point is that in the Beyond Belief festival there is not a performance of performance of Shostakovich's Fifth. But it gets even worse, because the day after the seminar there is a performance of the symphony at the Southbank Centre. But it is not part of the festival; presumably because the orchestra is the St Petersburg Philharmonic, and as Beyond Belief is an LPO party they don't want another orchestra gatecrashing it.

All this muddle-headness is exacerbated by a Southbank Centre website which is generously larded with platitudes but is painfully hard to navigate. Which means a a website visitor seeing details of the Shostakovich 5 event is very likely to leave without ever finding out that the next day there is a performance of the symphony; because there is no link from the talk to the symphony. However the same confused visitor may stumble across another Shostakovich symphony that is part of Beyond Belief; because the composer's Fifteenth Symphony does make the cut into the festival, presumably because it is played by the LPO.

But let's stop playing hunt the Shostakovich; because there is the far more important question of how inclusive should a a festival of music inspired by spiritual belief be? A recent post here commented on how the classical industry refuses to even contemplate any sacred music from beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition, and, as Belief and Beyond confirms, that proscription extends effectively to all music outside the mainstream Western tradition. The photo above shows Ravi Shankar performing with Yehudi Menuhin, and the sitar master's recorded legacy for EMI also includes collaborations with percussionist Terence Emery (who worked with Pierre Boulez), flautist Jean Pierre-Rampal (who had works composed for him by Boulez* and André Jolivet), and conductors Lorin Maazel and André Previn. Pandit Shankar also collaborated with Philip Glass on a project released by Atlantic (in the photo below Philip Glass is nearest the camera with Shankar next to him), and Shankar's valedictory Symphony was premiered in 2010 by, ironically, the London Philharmonic Orchestra with daughter Anoushkar playing the sitar obbligato.

If Belief and Beyond Belief really is a festival of music inspired by spiritual belief, why is music from beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition not included? Yes, the Southbank Centre does have notable separate mini-festivals of non-Western music. But by forcing music - and therefore audiences - into hermetically sealed genre boxes, musical boundaries are being built not demolished. Classical music needs wider as well as younger audiences, and another music festival has shown very successfully how the definition of spiritual belief can be - in fact should be - widened in our multi-faith age. In 2012 the Salzburg Summer Festival launched its Ouverture Spirituelle; each year this trans-cultural sub-festival brings together sacred music from Christianity and one of the other great perennial traditions, notably Islam in 2014 and Hinduism in 2015.

Ravi Shankar once explained "I have always had an instinct for doing new things. Call it good or bad, I love to experiment", and his experiments attracted new audiences in the 1960s and 70s. Today, acclaimed interpreters of Mahler and Shostakovich abound, but classical music struggles. Do any of today's celebrity musicians love to do new things and experiment? Are classical music's problems really due to changing demographics, reduced funding and the other alleged culprits? Is it not a case of musician heal thyself?


* Boulez's 1946 Sonatine was dedicated to Rampal; but he never performed it as he found it too avant-garde. Header photo is via France Musique. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Comments

Opus Alba said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
4:17 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

Does it have integrity and relevance?

Image
Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc
Read more

Why new audiences are deaf to classical music

Image
One important reason why classical music is failing to attract a new young audience is being ignored - today's much sought-after digital natives are fast becoming tomorrow's hearing loss natives. As the Clínic de Barcelona explains , until recently, hearing loss had always been related to age: the older you are, the worse your hearing is. This situation, however, has changed in recent years, as increasingly younger people are suffering from hearing loss. There are many reasons for this widespread hearing loss. There are now high levels of ambient noise - for instance the average daytime ambient noise  without PA announcements inside a US airport terminal is 66 decibels which approaches that of a a washing machine. Then there is the noise from the headphones, earbuds, etc used for long periods with digital devices. In addition the overlooked widespread  use of ototoxic drugs , including macrolide drugs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), contributes to hearin
Read more

I am not from east or west

Image
The ranking of the Muslim Rumi as America's best-selling poet is, like the embrace of vinyl by a hard-core digital culture, one of the paradoxes of recent times. Rumi's inclusive message of joy and love explains his universal but still surprising appeal , and in populist interpretations by Coleman Barks and others this message resounds in verses such as "I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Zoroastrian nor Muslim, I am not from east or west" and "I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars". Rumi's life-affirming poetry has been set to music by notable figures including Philip Glass , John Tavener , Jonathan Harvey , R. Murray Schafer and Karol Szymanowski , while takes on Rumi by rock musicians have included the 1996 album Three Fish by the eponymous band led by Pearl Jam 's Jeff Ament. All of these settings of Sufi poetry use translations of varying accuracy of Rumi's original vers
Read more

The paradox of the Dalai Lama

Image
The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the regional capital of Leh, where I had travelled overland from Delhi in July to observe the Kalachakra teachings given by the Dalai Lama. My accompanying photos capture that intensely moving spiritual event; but they also capture a great spiritual tra
Read more

Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

Image
With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
Read more

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

Image
It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
Read more

In the shadow of Chopin

Image
The music police are already telling us how we will be celebrating the Chopin bicentennial this year. So, never one for musical correctness , my header photo honours another giant of the piano, in status if not in stature, who is buried literally in the shadow of Frédéric Chopin. Michel Petrucciani, compositeur - pianiste de jazz , died in 1999 aged just 36. He is buried alongside birthday boy Chopin in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and his pianistic genius has featured several times On An Overgrown Path . Père Lachaise has more musicians per acre than any other burial ground, and they include Georges Bizet whose headstone is seen below. Bizet's grave is surprisingly understated for France's most famous musician and the dates on it are a sobering reminder that he was the same age as Michel Petrucciani when he died. Adjacent to Bizet is the more contemporary resting place of Georges Enescu who died in 1955. Enescu (Enesco in France) taught Yehudi Menuhin , Arthur Grumiau
Read more

Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

Image
In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
Read more