Olympic Fireworks and Damp Squibs

I hadn’t intended to listen to Prom 29, for reasons that will shortly become obvious, but I cottoned on just in time that it would give me an opportunity both to let fly about a couple of other things, and, perhaps, keep this blog visible on Google searches amidst all the Olympics stuff. And this time I don’t care if I send enough tall poppies flying to set me up with a new career in the drugs trade.

I suppose commissioning a piece called “Olympic Fire” (there’s another one called “Javelin”, heaven help us, tonight—at least I presume that refers to the pointy thing people chuck about, rather than being an encomium to the Jowett) is the BBC’s attempt to create some kind of ‘relevance’ for the sportier types who might be tempted thereby to ditch the telly coverage of the four-yearly athletes’ drugstest in favour of a Prom or two. Sorry, I mean ‘sportsfest’. I think.

Which leads me to my first moan. Our ‘Unculture’ (whose name bears an uncanny resemblance to both the sharp implement and the vehicle) Minister, just before the Proms programming was made public, accused classical music (and the Proms, by implication, though later she denied it) of being “excluding” of various age groups and races. This, despite the wonderful Soweto Strings at last year’s Proms.

Classical music does not, any more than any other pursuit, “exclude” people. People exclude themselves. It’s something either you gain an interest in, hopefully with passion, or you don’t. I have never had any interest whatsoever in sport, although I was a passable sprinter in my early teens when I couldn’t avoid teachers bullying me onto the sports field. (I was never even that bothered about winning, even though I did sometimes, which, despite Baron de Coubertin, I gather is the main aim.) But I don’t feel ‘excluded’ from it. ‘Uninterested’ is the proper word. It’s just the amount of coverage it gets now on TV and radio and in the press makes me angry. And, come to think of it, ‘excluded’ but only in the sense I feel they feel I ought to be one of them.

I might as well complain to FIFA I am ‘excluded’ from football because they don’t play classical music at the interval, or whatever they call the space between the two halves. (Discounting Nessun Dorma, of course.) All this politician was doing, despite the hurt she caused, was trying to drum up a bit of coverage for a department that has, under her, collapsed even more into desuetude. And might have disappeared without trace, except that sport, god help us, is also under its umbrella. Catch the French (pre-Sarkozy, anyway, I wouldn’t be too sure now) doing that. But the side-effects are probably going to last for years.

The other reason for not intending to listen was Slatkin reappearing. I thoroughly disliked his tenancy (for in all honesty, that is all it amounted to) with the BBCSO, for reasons I won’t bore you with. A friend who was at his last concert with them told me she had never ever heard an audience apparently sound so relieved that the conductor of a major orchestra was departing. Privately, at home, I cheered. I would even have thrown 50p into his retirement fund collecting bucket, had there been one, to help pay the fare home. Preferably on a slow, uninsured-at-Lloyds, cargo boat.

(As Maggie Thatcher—who I also loathe, I might say, and not just for her ignorance of the arts, either— memorably said at her last appearance in the House of Commons, “I’m enjoying this!” I’d never have dared submit this for print; at least not in quite such unveiled terms.)

So, would Chen Yi's “Olympic Fire” have attracted any of the excluded sporty types, or was it just there as some kind of sop to its being Olympics year again, a futile PR attempt to get just one Prom concert a two-liner in the sport-obsessed media?

I doubt the first. Not unless they’d like a Pekin Opera version of Bernstein (or vice-versa) conducted as though it was a 100m sprint. I’m not sure who won, but I think it was a dead heat between the conductor and the RPO, with the composer falling out of the race very early on through injury. I hope. So I suspect PR. Which is why my review, too, is a two-liner. Despite the Proms audience who were obviously caught up in the mad rush. Of first-performance adrenalin only, I trust. I'd fail a drugs test at Door 8 of the Albert Hall if they ever bring them in; I have to take a morphia-derivative these days . . .

Olga Kern wore a red dress to the Albert Hall. To hide the blood? Slatkin came as "Flash Lenny." That's all, folks. Packed house (and you can take that which way you like) or not, the 'Rach & Pag' Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini was a comic strip performance.

(R3 Relay)

I did listen to the Vaughan Williams, but it's the interval piece on Dives and Lazarus, especially the woman folk singer in her 60's from forty years back, I'd choose to listen to again, and if it's on the BBC  listings anywhere, I suggest you do too.

How long does ephemera last?

Paul Daniel (late of ENO, that is; a magician in his way, of quite a different kind) wrote to a Proms blogger colleague recently. The substance is not relevant here, but he made one remark that has been niggling at me ever since:

“As performers we create the immediate, the temporary, and leave others the pleasure of picking over the results.”

Do you know, for all that’s been said to me before, I’m not sure it is entirely true? Admittedly, once upon a time I was rather shocked to find members of the orchestra, after what I thought was a stunning performance, heading for their hotel discussing anything but what they’d just amazed 6,000 people doing. It seemed more like factory workers going home from the car production line at Dagenham. A disappointingly industrial kind of outlook. But then, they do this every day. I would hear that concert just the once.

But that doesn’t mean that the performance, for all it might be a singularity, is going to be ephemeral in the way Paul Daniel’s remark seems to imply. Some concerts, some productions, are, of course.

I doubt very much whether many of the audience now remembers anything (or did even then for very long) about the stage productions I was once a humble ASM for. Goodness knows, I only have a hazy recollection of two of them, and that is probably only because I was a teenager with a crush on one of the actresses who was in one, and because the other was the first time I’d ever seen Godot live. I was given an afternoon off to see it from the front for a change . . .I was innocent then; it wasn't entirely generosity, or concern for my dramatic education. I was a bit more 'papering' for an undersold matinee, of course. And we didn't talk about it then in the pub either where we had our (after-hours, usually) break before striking the sets.

But some, for all that, do last in the memory; I’ve spoken to people who have been able to tell me in detail about Callas's performances at Covent Garden. I still have a vivid recollection of Tennstedt’s Prom Ninth: I wept over that, was convinced it was his swansong, the culmination of a life of unkind fragility, and sure enough, not long after, he did die. Whether there will be any of that calibre this season, it’s too early to say, but I am sure there will be one or two. And of course, there are some I've already almost forgotten.

While I agree that the performance on the night is temporary, is immediate, in that it will never be repeated—or at least we expect and hope not, though there are always ‘industrial production-line’ ones that are, played with all the individuality of interpretation of a West End musical score that has to sound the same every night, regardless of who’s playing the instruments—I can’t agree with the implication that it’s necessarily ephemeral. At least not in its effect.

(And of course, I wince rather at the implication I too am a vulture, even if a small one, though I’d agree that many music critics inhabit the same sort of locus. Can I be a carrion crow? At least they are handsomer.)

Photo by Kathy Chin

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

A matter of presentation

I'd meant to comment on  this before, but forgot. Just to show I am capable of giving praise where it's due, I am very grateful to the R3 presenters this year for allowing us to appreciate a sensible amount of the audience applause before they interrupt after a piece has finished.

There have been innumerable episodes in the last couple of seasons where they have started talking almost before the conductor had lowered his arm, which is as infuriating listening at home as it is to hear some members of the audience's premature applause in the hall.

And, just as important, they are again paying attention to the conductor's and R3 producer's cue lights, so so far this year I haven't heard some idiot still finishing a (usually unimportant) sentence as the performance begins. Someone has finally realised there is enough ambient sound from the auditorium for us to recognise that the broadcast hasn't broken down. If we listeners can cope with four minutes of John Cage's silence, we can manage 10 or 20 seconds of Albert Hall's.

But I still have a gripe. Why should we be told, for instance, Caroline Widmann's 'emerald green dress' complemented 'her red hair'? The Albert Hall doesn't have a catwalk during the Proms season, at least not so far; and even though radio has no colours, do we need to know that? Since I have worked for a fashion magazine in my time (though not, obviously, as a concert reviewer) would you —or maybe the BBC would— like me to do a few fashion/couturier pieces in this blog while I'm at it?

Le Cirque du Son

The Stockhausen night, regrettably, was the other concert apart from the Glyndebourne that I couldn’t go to last week. Unfortunately, pain rather took over, too much for me to really be able to cope with two long concerts, even lying flat on my back in the Gallery, especially as I would have wanted to stay on for the Stimmung.

That meant, of course, that I couldn’t hear Cosmic Pulses in the ‘surround sound’ it obviouly required. Apparently at home we heard the “CD” version, whatever that was. I am entirely uncertain as to whether that was some previous recording or a different stereo mix-down. Or even whether it was recorded on the same day. Very annoying, as anything I write about it might not correspond at all with what I might have heard in the hall.

The presenter apologised for the BBC not being able to broadcast Surround Sound, although I know some years ago the BBC was certainly experimenting with recording it. Whether the experiment was abandoned (Dolby Labs licence fees have often proved a stumbling block) I don’t know, but maybe a surround sound version may just one day turn up on the cover of the BBC Music magazine? Yes, I do realise that it has the same commercial value, and probably even less popular appeal, as producing cloned Dodos for battery farming their eggs, but you never know.

There were two other minor irritations; I tend not to listen to the presentation pieces, but apart from that, I believe I heard the reason for playing Gruppen twice. I should say ‘half heard’. It sounded a little disingenuous, rather as though the idea might be “Since you didn’t like it the first time, we’ll play it again so you can not like it all over again.”* Rather like the EU Commission’s reaction to a “No” vote on a constitution, I thought. I might be doing the Albert Hall audience an injustice; though I thought the applause at first was tentative and uncertain, it did seem to become gradually more enthusiastic. I also know, however, from being there on these sort of occasions, enthusiasts like me can clap louder and harder if the others are jibbing a bit . . .

The other remark I found a little odd was an expression of surprise that Stockhausen included an electric guitar in an ensemble 50 years ago. If he’d been Carl Dolmetsch I might have accepted that, but for someone who was interested in sound manipulation, and was in his (late) twenties, I’d have been much more surprised if he hadn’t discovered the instrument by then. What different and isolated worlds some classical people live in—still—compared to the rest of us who were brought up with rock and roll and punk or even house, garage and rap as well as classical music. . .

And there, of course, is the great gulf fixed. Not being there, I couldn’t know how many fans of Brian Eno, Frank Zappa (post the Mothers, I mean) even Gary Numann, or that much more recent German group (whose name escapes me, yet again, but means something like ‘turning it all inside out and putting it together again’ **) might have turned up to either Stockhausen concert, but much as I would say they ought to be a natural constituency, somehow I bet they didn’t.

Anyway, I am a part of his natural constituency ever since I discovered Zenakis and branched out from him years and years ago; and I don’t think—going back to the pre-concert chatter, again—vague New Age bleatings about cosmic whirlings and spinnings are anything other than patronising about a composer (and why on earth still "challenging"?) who’s been around for more than half a century.

That was a long (only in hours, not in any other way!) and glorious Prom night. One of my favourites so far this Season.

And, since I am getting a bit behind with the reviews, in the meantime I recommend you to two other enthusiasts, Classical Iconoclast and Boulezian.

*I remember Charles Groves conducting the BBCSO in Maxwell Davies’ cheeky ‘Foxtrot for Orchestra’ on a tour of Germany years ago. It was booed and hissed with a vehemence I thought only the La Scala audience was capable of. Wonderfully, Groves turned to the audience and said: “Since you liked it so much, we’ll play it again.” And did.

** I got there eventually, after being mentally bogged down with ‘Bauhaus’ and 'Einsatsgruppen’, and stuff, so I’m not quite brain dead yet: Einsturzende Neubauten is what I was after . . .

The foggy, foggy dew

There is nothing, nothing, like one of the Proms' late-night vocal concerts to send you out into the night close on to midnight cheerful enough to withstand a half-hour wait (after you've just missed the night bus in Kensington Gore and ought to feel bloody about it)  pouring rain, getting home in the early hours, and leave you still capable of believing you'll enjoy getting up at seven in the morning.

I daresay some will whinge about the "Uncle Tom Cobley and all" aspect, or folkiness, of the programme for Prom 26, judging from some of the reactions to the 'Folk Day'. But if you are incapable of laughing helplessly at the Kings Singers' (or more properly Gordon Langford's) dramatisation of Widdecombe Fair, and wouldn't want to do a pretend Morris Dance, or get together with another five people on their way home to try your hand at it,  afterwards, all I can say is  you have no soul.

OK, yes, I was a folky once; complete with beard  (but not the sweater and I have never ever worn sandals and socks together) so you can say I'm biased. Or susceptible. But there was, as this Prom showed, an essence of a folk tradition that ran through Lassus. Poulenc, right through to the Victorians, sung without a single trace of nacreous sentimentality. And the purity of the McCabe piece was somehow perfectly appropriate after the early renaissance French songs. 

And at nearly midnight, how else could you end a long concert of fun, seriousness, solemnity and the rollicking humour of ordinary people's lives, spread over half a millennium except by a touching but still unsentimental 'The Long Day Closes' as an encore?

I have always loved these late night vocal programmes, so often with what turns out to be an unexpectedly appropriate and thought-inducing mix of what at first sight seems bizarre and mistaken, right from when they started. In those days, while the audience was large enough to have been respectable in a small hall, but was barely visible in a space meant for 6,000, we were all called down from our scattered places around the Albert Hall to be upgraded to the very comfy swivelling Business Class seats around the Arena. It's a bit different now . . .

If you missed it, or thought it was just another vainglorious programme not worth taking seriously, try it via the BBC's iPlayer, I urge you. And it's on BBC4 on the 1oth. I'll write it up fully shortly, when I've had chance to digest the America deserta properly.

And good lord—the Kings Singers have been doing this now for forty years? I hadn't realised they'd become an institution . . . Funny; they never sound like one . . .

(R3 Relay)

Prom 26, Kings Singers

Prom 25: Dutch Courage

I hadn’t intended to listen at all seriously to Prom 25, but put down my book within a few bars of the opening of the Brahms Violin Concerto. I am not keen on violinists who rise to prize-winning stardom and vociferous publicity before they reach puberty, but Julia Fischer must be in her mid-twenties now, and played the Brahms with elegant stylishness, and a superb sweet and rounded tone. I thought her phrasing was perfectly judged and the cadenza delightful.

And that was after a Dvorak 6 from the Netherlands Philharmonic under Yakov Kreizberg that was well-paced, technically very well-played, but not stong on interpretation, and one, while probably enjoyable in the hall, as these performances often are, was never going to count as one of my great long-lived Prom concert memories.

In a way, it was just that, by juxtaposition, that made Fischer’s performance particularly striking. Competent and obviously enthusiastic, a very well-drilled ensemble as the NPO obviously is in these pieces, nonetheless, Kreizberg produces a somewhat gruff impression, which threw Fischer’s violin strongly into the limelight against a rather industrial sounding accompaniment, so in lieu of hearing her with a world-class orchestra, I’ll reserve judgement on her interpretational abilities.

(The first piece was one of those things I always like at the Proms; something I'd never hear of otherwise and that does take a bit of courage to propose for a programme. Patriotic fun for the Dutch orchestra, but a sub-Straussian curiosity really is all the Wagenaar ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ Overture is. An overture to all the snortings, sneezings and trumpetings that probably emanated from M de Bergerac’s famous nose on occasion. Still, if anyone ever asks, I can at least say “Ah, yes. The Wagenaar Overture. I’ve heard that . . .” and now I can even pronounce the name properly. Do you think anyone will? I’m getting older; I can’t wait forever.)

There does seem to be an awful lot of young prize-winning violinists about these days, enough to form an entire orchestra section. If not two or three. Can we really support that many soloists? Shouldn't more youngsters be encouraged to take up other instruments? Who was the last 13 year old tuba player to get a dozen prizes?

(R3 Relay)

Among others, Fischer won an award from Gramophone.

Prom 25: Wagenaar; Dvorak Symphony No 6; Brahms Violin Concerto.