Charged with Assault with a Deadly Toothbrush

Or Dame Ethel Smyth would have been, if she were still alive, very likely. This is what the London Times critic wrote about her Concerto for Horn and Violin (see my rather longer review below):

"Its grand gesturing and bandstand jocularity made one wish that Smyth had for once confined her championing of the female muse to the political arena."

And the same critic could write of those burgher-bellied, horse-hair padded Henry Wood orchestrations that "the Albert Hall thrilled yet again to his glorious magnification of the master" (Bach, of course) and "Rachmaninov's Prelude in C sharp minor . . .sounded, in the hands of the BBCSSO, like a soundtrack for the Kraken rising from the deep." True enough, I suppose: the Kraken was a monster that terrified seamen, much as that 'version' should have chased the denizens of the Albert Hall to seek refuge in the bars in horror.

News International paid for that summary of a rare concerto performance that probably took the soloists weeks to learn and rehearse . . .and which, apart from being superbly performed, was an original composition, whatever your view of its rank, not a re-rendering of another's.

Why, I wonder, do I and just a few others on the internet bother? Why concentrate hard and sweat over a bloody review for two hours, and go to bed at two in the morning, for nothing? And this is from a major music critic of the British national press. I think you can grasp why I lost any respect for its music criticism years ago.

What angers me even more, is that the same critics who make perfunctory, simplistic, and even mean-spirited judgements often seemingly for the sake of a cheap laugh, are the same people who deafeningly bewail the fact that fewer and fewer people show an interest in classical music, and classical record sales are declining.

Well, if they cannot engender some interest or enthusiasm themselves in a performance (and of something that has been recorded too, a CD that no-one who read that review would ever buy, reducing classical sales by yet another few dozen tenners) and constantly opine that most of what they hear is worthless anyway, how can that be a surprise?

(So I needn't hang around waiting for your call, then, Mr Times Music Editor? Sir?)

Prom 24: There is nothing like a Dame . . .

I am sure Ethel Smyth would not be turning in her grave so much as hurling lid, nails and shovelfuls of earth about in her eagerness to get at the mysogenist ‘music critic’ who wrote this —which I found on the internet: “She composed a rather anaemic Concerto for Horn, Violin and Orchestra in 1927 trying to imitate the lyrical Brahms . . .”

Tasmin Little, I’m sure too, would have something vocal to say about that nonsense. From the performance perspective rather than the feminist one, at least so I imagine, since last time I had a pint in the pub with her and her husband neither Mrs Pankhurst nor Germaine Greer happened to crop up in the conversation. (I can’t drop many names, so you’ll let me off, won’t you, this time?) Metaphorically, in Prom 24, she chained herself to the musical railings in full wholehearted support of Dame Ethel.

As far as ‘modern’ English composers go, especially female ones, Dame Ethel is perhaps a little too early for me; I haven’t really ventured further back than Elizabeth McConchy, and I can’t say I made much at all of listening to bits of The Wreckers years ago, but I regret, hearing this performance, not having paid more attention to her before the 150th anniversary of her birth.

I have always admired Tasmin Little’s ability to burrow into the essential heart of a piece and then to stretch its sinews and muscles until it snaps into resolute perfection, let alone her seemingly easy way of learning, and then championing in her playing, relatively obscure or underplayed compositions, though heaven knows, there’s a very tough self-discipline gained at the Menuhin school that underlies that. I only wish she appeared much more often at the Proms instead of all those teenybopper technically perfect, but emotionally absent, Suzuki school violinists we so often end up with.

Smyth, in her Concerto, Little is quoted as saying, after an initial hint at Brahms, "goes off into her own sound world” (to me, for tantalising moments, tangentially closer to Les Six and Honnegger rather than early twentieth century Austria or Germany). “The music is meaty and expansive, with attempts to do something radical.” Exactly what that radicalism is, is not so easy to describe, but Little and Richard Watkins played in such close companionship and created such tension, it was unmistakeably there. It is by no means just the pretty piece that Andrew Achenbach might like us to believe from his Prom notes.

The first movement, the Allegro moderato, introduces all the strands that then wind themselves as strongly as an anchor chain through the two following movements. Underneath snatches of haunting lyricism and dance-like passages from the violin, there is a brooding presence emphasised turn and turn about by violin and horn. Little created the initial tension in this movement with a harder tone than I expected from her, but one that set the scene perfectly for the Adagio.

This second movement is termed “Elegy (in memoriam)”, but for whom or for what, I have to admit I do not know. But in terms of Little's and Watkins’ performance, any biographical detail was rendered irrelevant. For all the springing dancelike melody in the middle, this again had a looming, almost threatening tone, before a return to an earlier theme from the first movement, a presence that inescapably reminded you of the Somme and the horrors of WW1, achieved with surprising complexity, and technical difficulty, in the passages between horn and violin. There was some inkling here of Vaughan Williams but with the iciness of the Sinfonia Antartica, not the pastoral mode.

And then the amazing allegro. Rolls of worrying timpani and hunting calls from the horn , not the cheery View Halloa of English huntsmen in pink coats, but transformed into miltary calls. Or the horn calls of men who hunt, if not other men, at the very least wolves or bears. Followed by a reiteration of the dance liketheme from earlier, in a saoring duet between horn and violin that was both almost vocal and dramatic, theatrical and operatic, tender and harsh, moderated by gentle, barely audible chords from the harp, until you can no longer be sure whether the horn or the violin is the real protagonist, and the last strains of dance and the final orchestral chords end the movement.

This concerto, as it was performed on Monday night, did indeed possess an unexpected radicalism, emphasised by the tautness of the soloists’ phrasing and above all by the sheer tension they created between them. It spoke of a depth of concentration and commitment, of thoughtfulness and imagination that made this a thoroughly fascinating and absorbing, and even unexpectedly challenging piece. It is all too easy to imagine how in less committed hands it could end up as a rather flimsy sub-Brahmsian ‘English’ piece of fluff. (And how Dame Ethel the Suffragette would have growled at me for the implications of that phrase!) But after this, it cannot ever now be played so it sounds even palely "anaemic" (I hope) without arousing sheer derision.

The applause was enthusiastic, and deservedly so. My last note as I tried to absorb this superb performance was just “Wow!” I’m afraid Dame Ethel might not quite approve of that as a final judgement, but if she’s reading this somewhere, I hope she’ll forgive me. I’m likely to have enough problems in the afterlife without her going after me with the sharp end of a broken baton as well . . .

(R3 relay) Prom 24: Dame Ethel Smyth, Concerto for Horn and Violin

I'm probably angrier about this than either Tasmin Little or Richard Watkins will be; I know very well they get used to it and shrug it off, but it is just yet another clever-clogs piece of fatuity. And it's the kind of writing that used to mean I —as a reviewer well out of the mainstream—meant I had to constantly almost re-audition myself every time I met a  performer in case I turned out to be someone who would do that kind of thing. I'm amazed now I think about it that so many have treated me so well when they are up against this kind of thing.

Photo of Dame Ethel in, shall we say, "challenging" mood and fetching tam o'shanter, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph website.

A bum note . . .

Can I be the only one who is finding the Prom Notes on the Proms website all too often either too uninformative or just unhelpful? Or even sometimes simply casual and poorly researched? That trend was terribly obvious last year, but I had hoped it wouldn’t continue.

I had also hoped that casual proofreading might have been cured, too. I didn’t know that the famous altercation in Adrian Boult’s dressing room in 1930 was between him and a ghostly Ethel Smyth. She died in 1924, according to the BBC’s header, which also means she somehow transmitted her manuscript of the Horn and Violin Concerto posthumously, which would be really noteworthy.

And I do understand the pressures of writing to meet a midnight deadline, and of only having 300 or so words available, but I’m giving up on the English national newspaper Prom reviewers, who seem too often to be equally uninformative, or worse, uninformed. Or cannot actually write a succinct review in that many words instead of simply offering a broad-brush opinion.

A sign of the times, I suppose, that editors cannot spare even a full column for a Prom, or even classical music, review any more.

I reneged on my promise to myself, because I got curious, and checked out this. See what I mean? If I were Ms Smyth I know where I'd put that toothbrush . . .

Nil nisi bonum . . .

I know, I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but why did we have to listen to two of Henry Wood’s own pieces in Prom 24? He is dead and buried, and I thought his ‘re-arrangement’ of the Bach Toccato and Fugue in D minor had been too. Certainly, the BBC Scottish did a commendable job of pretending to be the Albert Hall organ, but I would have far rather heard it on that.

And the orchestration of Rachmaninov’s Prelude certainly belonged somewhere amongst the gloomier overgrown and forgotten mausoleums of Kensal Green Cemetery. It is a very heavy, ‘muggy’ arrangement. Unless, of course, Stefan Solyom and the BBCSSO had been affected by the muggy weather we’ve had here in London the last few days, and were oppressed by the threatening grey clouds that appeared by the interval.

I don’t want to sound too ungrateful, but we are grateful for HW’s institution, and we have celebrated its, and his, hundredths, before now, so I can only assume the Proms planners were relying on a rather tenuous linkage between him and Ethel Smyth as an excuse for some rather sloppy and questionable programming. We had far too much of that last year. Perhaps it was a leftover?

Mercifully, it was the Smyth Horn and Violin Concerto that made the programme memorable, with brilliant playing from Tasmin Little that I’ll be writing much more about shortly, I hope. I would have loved more, instead of the also rather heavy and muggy Rachmaninov 2.

The BBCSSO textures were too heavily Wood-influenced in the first movement, and it was obvious throughout the first and fourth movements that they, or Solyom, cannot do ‘lush’ and ‘rich’ which is what I assume they were aiming for. The second was lighter and tauter, and there were pleasant lighter lyrical touches in the third, let down by some leisurely patches that were too near somnambulance for my liking. Despite a suddenly vigorous conclusion, it was one of those Rachmaninov performances where the listener mentally reaches the end a good ten minutes before the orchestra does.

Note to planners: Proms audiences don't really need 'sweeties' to sugar the hour and a half around an unknown, or scarcely known piece. Or are you thinking a little too much of the international audience on the internet now?

Before anyone says anything, I can see I have poppy petals all over my jeans, and I won't forget to shake the seeds out of my trainers . . .But if you prefer indiscriminate gushing enthusiasm in all your reviews, you could desert me and go here . . .

(R3 Relay) Prom 24 Bach, orch. Henry Wood: Toccata and Fugue in D minor; Rachmaninov, orch. Henry Wood: Prelude in C sharp minor; Rachmaninov (orch. Rachmaninov): Symphony No 2 in E minor

Prom 18: A Blood-spattered Coronation

Il Coronazione di Poppeia

When Glyndebourne go to the Proms, it’s always a lively occasion. I’m sure half the celebratory anticipation is due to the simple fact over a thousand of us can get in for about a fiver, which wouldn’t even pay for the cheapest public transport to the opera house, let alone even a sandwich when you're there.

It means the audience will forgive a lot. Particularly that Glyndebourne singers are never first rank, or, to be honest, even second, for example. But they always make up in infectious enthusiasm and commitment, and, what is still a rare sight in some places, they act. (They act with their voices, too . . .) That is presumably why the Glyndebourne Proms, for all they are described as “semi-staged” are now as near as dammit fully staged, just with fewer props and no stage sets or prosc arch.

I remember the first time they came to the Proms, when they were supposed to be doing a ‘concert performance’, but quite simply forgot not to move; so well before half-way through the first act they’d all lapsed into acting as though they were on the Glyndebourne stage, and some of them nearly fell off the platform onto the Arena audience.

So I would probably have been a little more enthusuastic if I’d watched rather than just listened, for all that latterly the Glyndebourne productions have come unnervingly close to a send up. I suspect this time there may well have been some fancy near-slapstick antics going on around the bathtub, judging from the occasional laughter. But then, live, it usually works.

But listening, I’m a little less forgiving, and I found there is quite a lot in both the Times and Guardian’s critics’ reviews of Poppeia at Glyndebourne I agree with; but there was rather more than just ‘ditzy bottom-waggling’ to Danielle de Niese’s Cleopatra in Julius Caesar in 2005. (A friend and I can still do our version of the wonderfully funny but also threatening ‘confrontational gavotte’ between her as Cleopatra and Sarah Connolly as Caesar.) I can’t help thinking someone here is trying to avoid mentioning that at least a little of the frisson she engendered might not have been just through her voice, but have been helped along by her being sexy enough to get away with being both braless and (I think) knickerless under a translucent gown. At least at the Albert Hall.

The singing this time was simply glorious, and, as I’ve come to expect from the Glyndebourne, intensely dramatic. There was the smell of menace, casual evil, threat, corruption and blood from the very beginning. None of which could have ben unfamiliar to Monteverdi in Venice. It was, after all, the Venetians who lived with the constant threat of anonymous denunciations slipped into the mouth of the lions, who invented the art of ‘disappearing’ people who later turned up strangled in the street with no explanation. And all the Italian city states had their own histories of devious, vicious, cruel, bloodthirsty, murderous and every now and then downright mad rulers who might occasionally have surprised Nero. All the Glyndebourne cast captured this sanguine emotionally charged atmosphere superbly. There were duets that were simply scary.

Contrary to one critic, I thought Danielle de Niese’s Poppeia was superbly coloured and rich, full of character, whether her register might be entirely historically accurate for a Montevedi opera or not. What can’t be was her somewhat melodramatic vibrato, something which cropped up elsewhere incongruously, vocal slippage which I can only think must be down to the musical director.

I am not so sure about Alice Coote’s Nero; another critic noted a certain shrillness, which I thought distractingly prevalent, and occasionally bitter, even strained at times, in this performance. There are other, and better, ways of implying neuroticism. Not that the Neumann mics the BBC uses help, it must be said. And among the ‘major’ characters, Tamara Mumford (Octavia) turned in a star performance, excellently nuanced, characterful again, with a splendid emotional range that almost had me in tears at times. Both she and Alice Coote must have had the Albert Hall audience gasping for breath at times, I’m sure.

What I cannot be forgiving about is the musical direction of Emmannuelle Haim. For all I would applaud using a minimal chamber-sized ensemble, for the life of me I could barely recognise any authentic Monteverdi, even allowing that the score has been ‘recreated’ anyway. Musically, the tempi were plodding and invariable, many passages merely repetitious with little attempt at variation. Much struck me as being played more as though it belonged to the early Cinquecento not the Seicento, while one dance tune was played more like a stately18th century gavotte than anything of its real era and a little jig cropped up more than once that was more Susato than anything from the near mid-1600’s Italy.

I am just not keen on French styles of ‘early music’ performance; they have practically stifled Handel’s oratorios and operas in France, to the extent very few there grasp our current enthusiasm for their revivals on this side of the Channel. We in Britain have been taught forms of playing much more various, daring, and, dare I say it, lively, even sometimes challenging, over the forty years or so since David Munrow and Alfred Deller. To be blunt, William Christie’s own Les Arts Florissants (with whom I discovered later, Haim spent a decade) seldom enthuses me with anything more than mildly academic appreciation, for all the success of the Handel in 2005 with the OAE, and Marc Minkowski’s egotistical revisionism of Rameau at last year’s Proms was one of the worst examples of pretentiousnous.

Haim, in this oeuvre, it seems to me, failed to come to terms with its possibilities and left it a fossil, as though she was unwilling to deviate any distance at all from the surviving bass line in terms of scoring, and certainly not in imagination. Her own harpsichord continuo was percussive, merely twiddly and barely more than decorative; a series of Grinling Gibbons carvings, with little to do with Venice.

I have heard the OAE play with vastly more engagement and panache, particularly with a Prom audience before them, than they showed for more than a very few sparse bars under her direction in Poppeia. It was the soloists who were left to carry the performance by default, and that, in Monteverdi, is just not enough to be entirely plausible. I don’t think I’ve ever been so unenthused by Monteverdi’s music. Perhaps, as she was hinting in an interview, she would do better with ‘authentic’ Mozart, though I doubt I shall want to listen to it.

(R3 Relay) Prom 18: Monteverdi, l'incoronazione di Poppeia, Glyndebourne Opera

(This is on the iPlayer list, in two parts, rather widely separated for some odd reason. Sadly, there won't be an afternoon repeat, nor any video, which is really regrettable, presumably becasue of complications with royalties, residulas and contracts that would simply make it too expensive. Catch the audio while you can, if you didn't hear it the first time.)

Storms, teacups, vodka and moments of enlightenment

Didn’t Roger Norrington start a storm? And all because he took the traditionalists’ vibrato away, hid it under the underwear in the bottom drawer and said maybe they oughtn’t to play with it anymore . . .

What some people seem to have forgotten, or would like to ignore, is that he, John Eliot Gardiner, and latterly Valery Gerghiev and Simon Rattle, have been coming along to the Proms for years now to challenge old fossilised ways of thinking about Classical music. And, because Proms audiences have proved extraordinarily receptive and even adventurous (albeit sometimes with a little prodding and pushing and now and then they can be a bit slow on the uptake) they often challenge their orchestras and the critics more than the prommers.

I remember going to ‘Early Music’ proms where the Albert Hall was barely a quarter full, if that, and we were all asked to huddle together in the posh seats so we looked like an audience instead of a random scattering of lost souls. Now they can put on early masses that are utterly esoteric, and Josquin, Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Handel are staples: and it’s packed out. And conversely, Boulez can now be just a little boring and dated and unchallenging . . .

I vividly remember the first ‘authentic’ Norrington Beethoven I heard there, in a hall that was only just half full. The concentration after the first few bars was intense, because we knew we were hearing something with almost as fresh untutored an ear as those who heard the first performance must have done. And we heard instrumental textures and interplay of themes we had never grasped quite so clearly before.

It dissipated any scepticism anyone except the most entrenched classical neanderthals had about ‘authentic’ Beethoven; and I admit that I had been one, until then, who had felt that the authentic revival really should stop around 17-something . . .

Gerghiev has done that to us with Prokofiev; even though his own Rotterdam orchestra admitted it was at a loss to grasp what he was up to, and were bemused by the prommers’ intensely silent concentration followed by an outburst of raucous applause and stamping. Just as, after that first Beethoven, any radio listener would have believed the Albert Hall was as packed tight as the black hole of Calcutta.

And in 2004, Simon Rattle stretched the Berlin there into the most extraordinary Beethoven 9, with a first movement played—and how sensible and obvious it seemed in context afterwards—as though it was by Haydn. And continued it into an orchestral battle between Sturm und Drang and Pure Romanticism that almost belonged a century later. In that one performance we grasped wholly, stunningly, and incontrovertibly the great arch Beethoven forms over the development of the symphony.

So, treasure that Norrington Elgar and forget the controversy, because that was one of those epiphanies that means I will forever think of a composer differently. As though, like Hans Richter, I had come across it for the first, unplayed, time.

And I don’t know that you will regularly get that experience, and know it is shared and understood by so many people, anywhere else but in a Proms season when it used to be something you might only be able to experience a few times in a lifetime. And a great deal more expensively.

Tall Poppy syndrome . . .

I've been warned by a friend to beware what she calls the 'smug Londoner' syndrome. It's that rather tiresome "heard it, bought the T-shirt and it was all crap anyway" style of reviewing almost anything that's become prevalent here in the last few years. So I'm sorry if I do seem as though I'm part of that sometimes.

Still, I must admit this Proms season has a slightly discomfiting feel about it so far. We have been getting some rather 'traditional' programmes, and, alas, they have been not much to write home about, with some not very deeply considered conducting, and some rather average playing. And one particular oddity I simply cannot come to terms with, or grasp yet why I was so unaffected by it: Prom 8, the Obrecht and Josquin. I could not shake off the feeling that that was almost a fake. Or was it that it was performed in such an unusually cool almost off-hand Brechtian-alienated way that made me so uncomfortable with it? It wasn't like the Tallis Scholars and Peter Preston I thought I knew.

All the same, I know very well that the first half of the Proms season has often had makeweights in it over the last few seasons and it picks up in August, but there have been some spectacular and unexpected performances: the Haydn Cello Concerto, the Elgar 1 and the Stockhausen night to name my current three fave raves.