But I don't want comfort

Legendary wilderness survival expert and author Tom Brown, Jr wrote that "Safety, security, and comfort are euphemisms for death". It is only too evident that the priceless artform of classical music is struggling to survive fundamental changes in culture and technology, yet it remains puzzlingly wedded to the fatal dogmas of safety, security, and comfort. Just one example is the reactionary brouhaha that greeted the City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's experimental challenges to classical comfort zones. Yes, some of those experiments were obviously misguided and doomed. But the classical nimbies would do well to remember Søren Kierkegaard's assertion that "Everyone wants progress, no one wants change". 

Change in the classical lexicon all too frequently means experiments with lighting, visuals, and social media targeted at young audiences. Or it means emphasising the zones of safety, security, and comfort by programming "classical light" repertoire aimed at the older Classic FM audience. Or bland virtue signalling programmes to satisfy institutionalised political correctness. Yet repurposing great classical music to acknowledge the cultural zeitgeist while still respecting the composer's intentions, is too often ignored. Yes, too often but not always ignored. Thankfully there are a few brave musicians who are prepared to challenge classical comfort zones, and this post is a celebration of one notable example. 

Bach did not specify the instrumentation of his incomplete The Art of Fugue BWV 1080, and the classical thought police have accepted wide-ranging instrumental interpretations from string groups, through piano solo, to organ and even brass ensembles. So this precedent gives tacit approval to a remarkable repurposing for the cultural zeitgeist of another Bach masterwork, the Goldberg Variations, by the Trio d'Iroise and Syriab Trio.

The Syriab Trio was originally an orchestra of 40 members founded by kanun player Ibrahim Bajo playing in Syria. But the dreadful Syrian civil war which started in 2011 dispersed the musicians, and three of them - Ibrahim Bajo with Abdalhade Deb Oud/vocals and Ahjad Sukar percussion -  regrouped in Germany to form the Syriab Trio. Their collaborators the French/German Trio d'Iroise were founded in 2017 and have built an enviable reputation for exploring both within and beyond the comfort zone of the classical string trio literature. After the Syrian musicians crossed paths with the Trio d'Iroise's cellist Johann Caspar Wedell work started on the Bach collaboration in 2018, resulting in the 2023 CD release Goldberg - see accompanying photos. 


This Goldberg is emphatically not 'jazz Bach' or 'Bach-light'. This is JS Bach the master composer seen through a different cultural filter. It is not until the fifth variation that the orchestration diverges from violin, viola, and cello. And then the process of transculturation starts in a nuanced way with the introduction of just the oud. Progressively the variations then move further from safe and secure classical dogma, but never beyond respect for the composer. For this is serious Bach moving beyond accepted comfort zones, just like the Swingle Singers Bach - which influenced among others Luciano Berio.  As the sleeve note by the Trio d-Iroise explains:

Bach's music is timeless and the Goldberg Variations are of an unfathomable depth. This makes it a perfect foil for two different musical languages. We layered Arabic chants on top of this foil like weaving an oriental rug. The two ensembles would take turns in one moment, then merge into a single organism in the next. It created a wonderful dramaturgy. 

A big shout-out goes to legendary recording engineer Dirk Fischer's Solaire label for making this recording available. The sound - as on other Solaire releases - is of demonstration quality. (Coincidentally the recording was mixed with B & W 803 Nautilus speakers, the same as I use in my listening room.)  Solaire is one of the few labels that have not capitulated to the safe and lazy minimalism of music streaming and downloads: instead their CD releases are lovingly-crafted objects of tactile, literary, aesthetic, and sonic beauty.   

For those still not convinced, remember that one of the best selling classical records of all time - Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations - was not recorded for a harpsichord with two manuals as stipulated on the title page of its 1741 publication. Instead Gould and CBS acknowledged cultural preferences by using a piano, and the rest is history. In these conflicted times Bach with Arabic chats may be dangerous, for some it may even be sin. But the Syriab Trio and Trio d'Iroise are simply following in Glenn Gould's footsteps and celebrating the viewpoint expressed in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World:
  
 But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
Read more

Classical music's march to the scaffold

Image
News that revamped BBC Radio 3  attracted a record audience in Q1 2025 and programme presenter Norman Lebrecht's euphoric support for the network's new regime should be seen in the context of the following extract. This comes from a paper entitled The guillotine: Shadow, spectacle and the terror in volume 20 of the academic publication Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal:   'Executions were the most frequent and popular of revolutionary festivals, and the guillotine was at the centre of entertainment celebrating the Republic. A sense of the fairground spectacle and amusing novelty is conveyed in the following passage:  "Around the scaffold people sold mementos and lists of the scheduled executions. There were restaurants and cabarets de la Guillotine, where the latest victims were lists as “catch of the day” and satirical songs and poems were performed. The crowds were especially dense near the Jardin des Tuileries where, it was commonly known, one had...
Read more

The Accidental Pilgrim

Image
There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
Read more

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

Classical music should exploit its healing power

Image
Classical music cannot stand still; so that means it must find new audiences. Western classical music has evolved into a highly dualist art form with clearly demarcated boundaries around its core offering of the orchestral and operatic repertoire. There is little debate that this repertoire must - and will - remain central to the art form. But it can be argued that to open up new markets the current watertight boundaries around that core offering must become porous. An example of a blurring of these boundaries would be an entry into the mind, body and spirit market; a market which a post here in 2011 pointed out was then worth around $11 billion annually in the US, compared with $200 million for classical album sales. It is tempting to dismiss the mind, body and spirit market opportunity as no more than 'Mozart for meditation' and 'Gregorian Chant for the soul', but that would be a mistake. As my earlier post noted , the spiritual dimension is found in many of cl...
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

Are top musicians sharing the financial pain?

Image
Everyone in classical music is talking about funding cuts. But no one is talking about how dwindling budgets continue to be top-sliced by the fees charged by high profile musicians. In my recent post I used an estimate of Gustavo Dudamel's fee for a BBC Prom taken from an identified and reliable source . But it remains an estimate because the musicians, agents and concert promoters involved keep such information a closely guarded secret; even when , as is the case with the BBC Proms , they are paid from public funds. But now a concert promoter who has suffered savage funding cuts and considers some of the current fees "outrageous", has supplied details of what top musicians charge. And, more importantly, has agreed I can publish them anonymously. So here are the fees and associated on-costs. They are as requested by the artist's management for a single concert appearance unless otherwise stated. It should be emphasised this is simply available information and ...
Read more