Prom 64: Yin, Yang, and Chaos Theory

I am a newcomer to Messaien but if I had to pick an exponent of the Turangalila Symphony, I couldn’t have chosen a worthier or better champion than Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil.

It is a large abstract piece but with a concrete core and an earth-bound effect. It is also an amazing exercise in juxtaposition: yin vs. yen; man vs. woman; thrust vs. pull; tenderness vs. passion.

This is a symphony of duelling duos intertwining then de-coupling with an energy worthy of a Picasso, though unlike Picasso, the 'Joie' (which recurs often in the notes)
is personified in the union between man and woman, something you don’t often see in his pictures.

The fifth section is in the form of a ballet worthy of a Gene Kelly musical as inflated and daring but equally fun and tongue-in-cheek until something very disruptive mischievously breaks it up creating a happy chaotic scampering, bobbing and clamouring effect.

Is sexual desire the mischievous child/clown and the dance the deeper layer of love? Christmas is here at the end as an eruption of utter joy pushes the orchestra louder than I ever heard an orchestra play at the RAH (NY Phil, eat your heart out).

Then follows the garden where lovers sleep yawning on a lazy post-coital afternoon, finishing with the chimes of times passing.

This is a very pictorial music once you’ve grasped the main theme (thanks to the programme notes). For chaos returns more destructive, random and cruel, but not entirely evil, just majestic and serendipitous.

The duality and battle of extremes fill the second half of the symphony as it surges ever louder into melody chopped and suppressed by chaotic strings (piano excellently played by Pierre-Laurent Aimard) and reaches a level of almost pagan awe which is remarkable considering Messaien was such a committed Catholic to the last. As if his love of woman and his Gallic rejoicing in the beauty of sex were not in conflict with his more religious beliefs. Rather refreshing!

This is a remarkably orchestrated giant of a symphony with a huge message of the wonder of human love in its heart, but it was also made accessible by lucid and clear interpretation for which a novice such as I am cheerfully grateful.

(Zeina Trewin)

RAH Live

Prom 64: Messaien: Turangalila Symphony; Berlin Philharmonic; Pierre-Laurent Aimard (pno); Tristan Murial (ondes martinot).

Messaien/Manchicourt: Club Mix (Prom 32)

I wish, sometimes, the BBC wouldn't try to educate us quite so obviously. Like by interspersing Messaien's "Messe de la Pentecote" with Manchicourt's Missa Veni Creator Spiritus, which I'm listening to now. Fascinating it is, too, in some startling harmonic correspondences. And beautiful singing by BBC Singers and sensitive playing by James O'Donnell.

The trouble is, that to review each properly, I'm going to have to spend time editing my recording on my Mac separating the two—hello, BBC, we Prommers do  have a long enough concentration span to have got the idea if you'd done it that way!—and as you'll have noticed by now, I'm getting a bit behind with some of the other stuff, so it'll have to wait, probably, until after the seven days allowed for listening to it on line are up.

But, if you didn't  hear  the live relay, get your mouse over to the Proms iPlayer when it's up and listen. You'll be well rewarded. Honest. Sneaky way as it may be to force people to listen to both Messaien and Manchicourt in one concert . . .Still, it's one way of doing it, and since I don't choose my concerts by century, or style, or (musical!) prejudice, but I know many do, I oughtn't to complain that the Beeb has to resort to this sort of trick.

(The presenter, delightfully, said "Messien is casting a long shadow over this Proms Season . . ." A bit too long, I think, but I don't think she quite meant it the way I took it.)

Prom 27: Bananas, Belle Epoque, and Waterlilies

I think I can predict most reviewers' reactions* to this Prom's Bolero, that is, if any bother to do any more than dismiss it in a couple of lines. So I shall try to get my retaliation in first. Tonight's performance had much more substance than a mere ice lollipop handed out to the audience on a hot stifling evening to thank them for sitting (or standing) through the serious stuff.

It actually made, as these programmes sometimes (and sometimes very mischievously) do, connections (musical, I mean, not ideological) with what had gone before that you don’t expect: most obviously in a kind of temporal or epochal consanginuity with the Stravinsky, but also with Benjamin’s own piece which I'll write about later. His decision to follow the Pavane pour une infante defunte directly without a pause, which might have appeared whimsical, actually did make contextual sense.

Benjamin set that neatly in a pre-war decade, before the world lost both its innocence and its money for the first time, or so people once said, as it has again all too many times even in George Benjamin’s lifetime.

It was clear that he and the BBCSO were mentally and emotionally in France, and not even within sight of the Spanish border. There was nothing of Velasquez here; there was the delicate colouring of a Monet watercolour in the strings and the harp, backlit with flashes of the richer colouring and fleshiness of a Renoir nude in sometimes very darkly coloured strings.

This, you had the feeling, was une infante who had an inkling she was destined to become defunte later in that equally drug-riddled, psychologcally edgy era of the kind we think we’ve invented that was also the belle epoque—and was dancing away her last years of adolescence. It was a very stylish, beguiling, knowing, cleverly constructed performance.

And now forget (please, it’s about time we, or at least we the Brits did) that ice skating Bolero that’s blighted the poor orphaned thing again for the last umpteen years. Benjamin’s was well into the post war belle epoque this time, but with the crash impending any moment: no flossy evocation of prancing wasp-waisted, slim-hipped matadors, this was cigarette factory sex, bosoms, Josephine Baker and sultry dancing in skirts made of bananas.

At times it was so sensuous, thanks to the swaying smoky jazz cafe woodwinds with their clever touch of syncopation, you could have rolled cigars on its thighs. It was the jazz era hitting Paris—as interpreted by Gertrude Stein.

Robert Maycock of the Independent wrote in the notes “all that happens in Boléro, apart from the big harmonic surprise close to the end, is that a pulse continues unchanged, and alternating melodic lines return in changing orchestral colours. On another, Ravel lavished all his sophisticated skill on making a substantial, perfectly timed form out of these few dimensions. You just try making a crescendo build for 10 minutes.” Benjamin had no diffculty at all with that; he made it sound simple.

And it was tense, a tension that increased relentlessly almost bar by bar until its climax. And, probably, had they heard this performance, also that of both Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein.

But it was the jazz-influenced orchestral colours of both the woodwind and the brass that made it sound as though there was a lot more happening than usual; some of those melodic lines suddenly and unexpectedly growling threateningly and anguished out of the brass section like a very big Parisian Apache with a knife looming out of the back door of a subterannean club in a dark Parisian alleyway . . . There was a strong hint of that dark underbelly of the period that Cocteau lived in in that.

Someone, whose name I missed because I had my head in the fridge looking for some ice for my whisky, commented in the interval that George Benjamin has an impeccable sense of pace, and doesn’t he just. It must be the envy of a good many far more experienced conductors.

And that, if you want to get back to the way Ravel probably thought of it at the beginning before he practically obliged himself to disown it, is just what the Bolero must have as a base to lift it from the banal rigmarole it so often has become. No way would Ravel have made the complaint he did to Toscanini that it was too fast. The acceleration was perfection.

You can tell me I’m just a kid still, if you want, I don’t damn well care, but I found tears of sheer joy running down my cheeks listening to this Bolero, and I'm not at all surprised that both the audience and the conductor were wearing grins as broad as Josephine Baker's hips when the applause and cheers erupted.

It was one of those prom endings that sends you away happier, or at least reassured, with life; even when, as with tonight’s other pieces either side of the interval, you have also felt the fingers of its traumas counting down your vertebrae and pausing ominously one handspan to the left, and wonder what it’s all really for. Even the weather gods must have felt something of all that; in the minutes after the concert ended the darkening violet London sky over Kensington was lit up with vivid flashes of lightning.

There is some Messaien, like some Boulez, I just cannot manage, try as I might, and believe me, I really have tried over the years. The orchestral L’Ascension is one I’ve had to give up on. It struck me that Benjamin was conducting it more as a pupil of Alexander Goehr than as a Messaien accolyte, but other than that I will leave it to Evan at PromsAmerica, Classical Iconoclast or Boulezian to give you a better insight than I can into how it went.

The Prommers (and the BBCSO through the season) have a few conductors they fall in love with and hug to their hearts. When you’re in the hall, the feeling is tangible even before the concert starts; and if you listen to the broadcast recording, you’ll sense it even in that, because George Benjamin is one of them. John Adams, any American readers might be surprised to hear, is another.

(I do hope I don’t get into Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner with my cigar-rolling metaphor or Gertrude Stein. . . If you don’t believe me about this, and I can tell already you probably don't, you still have six days to catch this Prom on the iPlayer. Listen to it all the way through, but ignore the couple of accidental squeaks from the horns in the Bolero—it was a hot, humid, muggy night and the stage lights would have been very hot on them by then, none of that good for horns—in one bar, they don’t matter.)

* My predictions don't always come true.  At least Andrew Clements in The Guardian didn't write it off, and nor did Neil Fisher in the Times, so  there's hope yet. . . My  crystal ball must have gone out of tune. I did use an A=440 tuning fork last time, didn't  I?

(R3 relay)

Prom 27: Ravel: Pavane pur une infante defunte, Bolero

Prom 1: Festivity and a Feisty Organ

Just a few passing comments, on this one, since I wasn’t particularly keen on the performers. Or the conductor, to be honest. He might be a welcome relief after Slatkin (for whom I invented my own nickname involving the substitution of a vowel but which I daren’t write here for fear of being sued; a truly dreadful spell, that) but for me, he lacks sympathy with a lot of the BBC SO’s repertoire. But I like Richard Stauss.

The Festliches Praeludium was grand. Large. But, for once, not bulky or sounding overstuffed like an old feather mattress. And the organ was even grander. Since it was refurbished, it sounds even prouder and more imperious than the Albert Memorial on the other side of the road to the Albert Hall looks since its refurbishment, and that’s saying something. Jiri Belohlavek was apparently worried it might sound too big: he was right, but its glorious bigness didn’t exactly do the piece any harm, just made it grandiosely celebratory, as it ought to be.

Belohlavek, perhaps, was too in thrall to the idea of the sheer size of the Strauss orchestra; when it came to the smaller scale of the Mozart Oboe Concerto. The first movement was decidedly perfunctory, too fast and casual with no subtlety at all, yet under other conductors the BBC SO is perfectly capable of sounding like a highly skilled and delicate chamber ensemble. Just not this first night. Somebody was out of sympathy, and to be honest, Nicholas Daniel’s cadenza was pretty but really rather trivial, and, to my mind though beautifully played, not very appropriate, for all Petroc Trelawny’s boosting of its natural origins and birdsong in his introduction. I’ve always thought of Mozart as a Townie, anyway, rather than a country boy. The last movement., as you might have expected, was rushed to a close.

And the Four Last Songs? Thanks to the original soloist being unable to appear, the performance had all the signs of having been perfunctorily re-rehearsed some time in the morning (one of the curses of the BBC SO’s schedule when it appears at the Proms, and one that too often leads to somewhat clumsy performances except under a small handful of supremely talented conductors—Gerghiev for one. This was a long programme, too, which always makes me suspicious: I suspect a hurried briefing, a few bars played over and pencilled notes on the players’ scores.) The orchestral conducting was simply out of sympathy with Christine Brewer’s voice. And, really, not subtle enough or shaded well enough. It plucked more at my Achilles tendons than my heartstrings. We’ll draw a veil (or maybe even seven) over that.

What I really wanted to hear was the Messaien, and that superb organ again. This birth, the way it sounded, virgin or not was not an easy birth. It is full of screaming, sweating and agonising heaves, or, if you don’t like my similes here, an incredible rending of temple curtains but with a glorious blazing blinding extended daybreak of glaring Meditteranean sunshine instead of a storm, ending with, not exhaustion, but sheer unbelievable drawn-out ecstasy of a new infant birth. I’ve never really heard the organ at Notre Dame, but this is what the Albert Hall organ was created for. Glorious.

Me, I’m not terribly sympathetic to Elliott Carter. Catenaire was not for me. Or anyone who isn’t amused by an out of control pianola with the handle wound round fast by a maniac. Strangely, a very strong smell of embrocation suffused my flat through its open windows as soon as it ended. The mad handle-winder must have sprained his wrist, and a whiff of the soothing ointment wafted over all the way from the Albert Hall . . .

I’ve noticed over the last few years that the Prom audience, or at least a sizeable part of it, seems to have reverted to an older practice of applauding a cadenza, an individual movement or each song of a cycle . .I wish they wouldn’t. It’s something that should only be done when you are really transported, and that ought to mean rarely. It’s terribly distracting when you are trying to keep the whole piece in mind during the performance whether you’re at home or actually in the Albert Hall. And I just don’t know how it came to be.


(R3 Repeat) Strauss, Festliches Praludium; Mozart Oboe Concerto; Messaien, La Nativite du Seigneur-Dieu parmi nous; Elliot Carter, Catenaires for Solo Piano