Showing posts with label Aldeburgh Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aldeburgh Festival. Show all posts

Sunday 16 June 2019

A report by Tweet on Vox Luminis II at #AldeburghFestival2019

A report, by Tweet, on Vox Luminis II at Aldeburgh Festival 2019

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


17 June

A report, by Tweet, on Vox Luminis II at Aldeburgh Festival 2019
(a concert of Handel and Britten, both setting Dryden, given at Snape Maltings on Sunday 16 June 2019 at 7.30 p.m.)


Prelude :




Image by David-Samyn







Concluding comments :

As one has learnt to expect, sensitive and sincere performance from Vox Luminis, under the direction of the affable Lionel Meunier - one senses, even from the encore, that this ensemble does not perform repertoire in which it does not believe.


Postlude :






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sunday 19 June 2016

From Sheffield to Southwold* : Planning one's time... (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


19 June onwards




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Tippett & Britten II ~ Saturday 18 June at 3.00 p.m. ~ St Bartholomew's, Orford










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End-notes

* For, respectively, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Aldeburgh Festival** : in 2016, their respective 23rd and 69th incarnations (they bear a relation : for example, one is one-third the age of the other, one may note).

** No doubt (?), Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1) would wish to insist that Aldeburgh is, properly, Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts ?




Judging, at any rate, by his word-wasting pedantry (please see below) in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass review – large as life and twice as phoney’, his a skatingly thin review of Alice Through The Looking Glass (2016)...



Bradshaw takes, that is, many a word (a sentence of thirty-four, in fact) to make yet another highly catty observation about this work (even if the film may not bear examination, as, for some, its Burton-directed predecessor did not...) : Using only the title and some characters from Lewis Carroll’s own 1871 sequel – in fact called Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There [The Agent’s emphasis] – this new movie is just machine-tooled CGI fantasy fare’.






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Monday 22 June 2015

Boulez at 90 : Aldeburgh Festival at its niche best

This is an account of Boulez Exploration at Aldeburgh Festival’s Boulez at 90

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


22 June

This is an account of the Boulez Exploration day, on Thursday 18 June at 3.00 p.m. (and 11.30 a.m.), at Aldeburgh Festival’s celebrations of Boulez at 90


On the face of it, Boulez Exploration sounds like a strange activity, but, with a strong communicator and respectful guide in the composer Julian Anderson (and the apt collaboration of Florent Boffard to give and bring out examples from the score (in the morning, it had been Quatuor Diotima : see below)), it was a chance to realize, during Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic), just how much there was to explore in the realm of the compositions of Pierre Boulez.



Regarding Piano Sonata No. 3, one might have thought that one had heard a recording, but it became clear that the notion of incompleteness in itself meant that we did not have all the material, and Boffard even had a piece, in manuscript and courtesy of Boulez himself, that might not have been played in public before : at the end of Anderson’s exposition of the work to be heard, and before Boffard gave his performance, one questioner, envisaging that Boulez might not live forever, seemed quite perturbed that we might be left with no definitive version of the sonata...



Meanwhile, we had heard how Boulez had debated, and corresponded with, Stockhausen and Cage about the use of aleatory techniques (which Cage, we learnt, preferred to call ‘chance’), and had, after blasting them both (but without naming them) in an article in 1957 called Alea, had maybe shown them how it should be done in this piece. He had started with criticism, of other things, of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, and its apparent scope for random performance of its elements : for Anderson and Boffard were agreed that the scope for playing such works from sight, and with decisions made on the spot, is limited, because one actually ends up needs to prepare one’s approach to the piece in advance (defeating what Stockhausen seemed to have aimed at, with elements that could be played in any order ?).

By contrast, and objecting to anything so arbitrary (if it were possible to play it that way), Boulez had provided choices, and, between them, Boffard and Anderson talked us through the instructions that he had given to the performer, and which were at their simplest in those for the middle movement (Formant 2), called Trope (a word, we heard, denoting a section inserted into a plainsong text) : start with any one of its four sections and play all four, from that point until one got back to where one began. (The titles of those sections (Texte, Parenthèse, Glose, Commentaire) are all evocative of the layers of interpretation of mediaeval religious texts (of all kinds).)



Before, Constellation-Miroir (Formant 3) was an assemblage from sections that were, essentially, individual notes (Points 1 to 3) and groups of notes (Blocs I and II), and, afterwards, Formant 1 (extracts from Antiphonie) had simple-form and elaborated versions of each verset and RÉPONS (the lower- and upper-case descriptions, respectively, denoting them - only one version was to be chosen to be played) : Boffard gave us the simple and elaborated versions, but none of this really served as a guide to listening in the performance (as the effect was too overwhelming to want to keep track of whether one was hearing VERSET II, or already onto verset 3), but an understanding of Boulez’ care as composer, and of his integrity in doing what he believes in.



Pictured a few nights later, Florent Boffard is the last figure on the right


What one saw was how Boulez had given freedom to prepare a version of the sonata for performance (arguing against what he saw as the extreme liberty of his contemporaries in letting their work become too random), and could then listen to Boffard’s pianism and precise articulation against that theoretical and musical background.

A superb event – but what else would one expect of Boulez at 90 at Aldeburgh Festival ?




In the morning, and in a different approach (not least as one ticket-price admitted one to both sessions), Julian Anderson had played us, as DJ, extracts from a constellation of other works by Boulez that surrounded his Livre pour quatuor, and we had heard from members of the quartet how they had gained his trust (by suggesting a pairing to bring its sound into relief). From that point, they had worked with him to ease certain difficulties in a score that is itself, we gathered, virtually unobtainable, such as how to interpret a tempo-marking Vif consistently with sustained playing (Anderson liked the short extract that they played at that original speed, but had to agree that it was punishing on them), or the lack of dynamic-markings or a means of making a reasonably playable transition from one note to another that was quite separate on the strings and finger-board for the next.

An earlier, and more linear, score than that of the sonata, and brought to us with great sincerity and interpretative skill by Quatuor Diotima : one immersed oneself in the sound of their playing, and, rare for a live performance, avoided watching the performers in order better to do so.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Thursday 18 June 2015

Gerard McBurney's A Pierre Dream at The Maltings, Snape

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


18 June

This is a review of A Pierre Dream : A Portrait of Pierre Boulez at Aldeburgh Festival on Wednesday 17 June at 7.30 p.m.




Actors with placards, at times a little too noisy on their castors, protested not student issues from the late 1960s, but with the face, image and message of Boulez, in this unbroken evening, dedicated to his music and his (often literary*) influences.




At times, he was heard translated, possibly when he spoke in French more (or his English had not been so strong**, or he resisted talking in it ?), but very often not. And his face, whether in stills or footage, spilled onto or was caught on assemblages or groupings, or discrete arrays, of placards***, along with pages from his scores, or shots of places, or even images that were redolent of natural growth or of the rain. (One can taste the production a little here.)

Soprano Anna Sideris adeptly gave us Improvisations sur Mallarmé I and II (from Pli selon pli : Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui… (Improvisation I) and Une dentelle s’abolit… (Improvisation II)), and Charlotte Betts-Dean Le marteau. Elly Condron, credited as a speaking actor (and all in white as a Muse ?), was clear, definite, and, deliberately, a little cool and detached in rendering English translations of French texts for his Mallarmé and René Clair settings (in Le marteau).




From excerpts of the intimate sound of piano**** (or doubled piano) to pieces for eleven players or more, such as Dérive 2 or Le marteau sans maître, writer and composer Gerard McBurney’s staging ranged over Boulez’ work, thought and utterance in this intense show. Hearing, and re-hearing, his texts and instrumental and vocal settings, his voice changed, but was always Boulez, just as he changed from his arrival in Paris to contemporary footage.


Do not take one's word for it : this review in The Times now Tweeted :




End-notes

* Proust, Mallarmé, and René Clair.

** Striking up a conversation with him at Aldeburgh Festival’s Boulez at 85, with a friend who wanted to know his thoughts about Keith Jarrett (after enquiring about, which he denied, the influence of Messiaen’s teaching, thought to have been heard in works that he conducted the night before), one can testify to his English.

*** The fact that they were non-speaking actors, or that there were screens on the stage that acted as verbal prompts, was not sufficient to explain how they knew where exactly to be : no doubt there must have been tape-marks, of positions, on the floor.

**** Incises, Structures, Notations, and, with flute (which, it seems, Jean-Pierre Rampal rejected), Sonatine.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 2 July 2014

At Aldeburgh Festival 2014 : The Humphrey and Andy Show

This is a review of the t.v. documentary Benjamin Britten on Camera

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


2 July

This is a review of the t.v. documentary Benjamin Britten on Camera shown at - and as shown at - Aldeburgh Festival on Monday 23 June 2014


Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity


Humphrey Burton, of course, needed no introduction. When, having nonetheless been introduced (as, with his intense tan, we might otherwise have struggled to recognize him), Burton – in all seriousness – said something like I’m Humphrey, and this is Andy, it felt as though it was going to be Round the Horne, rather than the gentle parries of Sir Humphrey Appleby and Sir Jim Hacker (in the late but immortal Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington)…

The Humphrey and Andy Show proved to be one feeding the other prompts for what they had decided to say earlier, with the just slightly better hidden impression of news front-people, supposedly chatting casually to each other on a couch. Except that they were standing, had no notes / prompt-cards, and it had more class than with those typical presenters. Yet there was no challenge to Andy from Humphrey to say anything unprepared, but a united front to present this – well, what was it ?

We were in a nice cinema, with good sight-lines, but this was not Aldeburgh Documentary Festival, and Benjamin Britten on Camera was not a film (in the way that Rafea and The Great Hip Hop Hoax are, even though both were commissioned for BBC’s Storyville). And we had not, Humphrey, imagined for one moment that making this piece was just a matter of ‘splicing together’ material ‘in an edit-suite’ (even if we could easily credit that some do rarely see their finished piece on a screen such as this one) !

Even so, what was being screened did not have, much of the time, the aesthetics and approach of the powerful documentaries on the cinema circuit : they may then transfer very well to home-viewing, but those that are made for it will not always stand the test of this sort of public screening (as Poor Kids, for one, does). For the best of cinema demands greater rigour, and even greater attention to detail, than when such material is seen via its intended medium : the scrutiny that is given is necessarily more concentrated than at home, with its distractions, or even the scope for pausing a live programme to take a phone-call (or of recording it, and then introducing pauses when watching).

One critiques these two down at the front simply because Andy King-Dabbs, the documentary’s producer / director, might just as well have presented it himself. Needless to say, he did not (and never would), because he is not the draw at an event of this kind, and also because he has given a lot of screen-time in his programme to Burton, who is the draw – partly since he played (along with David Attenborough) an important part in the story of Benjamin Britten, BBC Television, and how they came to work together.

However, as Burton was quick to point out (by way, one supposes, of managing our expectations) – and as King-Dabbs cheerily and readily agreed – the story of Britten on ITV was not being told. Indeed, King-Dabbs additionally apologized that clips of musical performances cut away, when some might have wanted to stay longer with them, because the emphasis of the piece was on making these productions, rather than individual performance : this observation, perhaps unnecessarily even in the context of the title Benjamin Britten on Camera, served as a further elaboration of what this screened work was, and what it was not.

Simply put, introducing the screening without Burton would have been less interesting as an event, even to those of the same age-group as composer / conductor Oliver Knussen (born in 1952), let alone that of Britten and Burton themselves (born, respectively, in 1913 and 1931, respectively) – Knussen, because he had been allowed the most important contribution, that of talking in detail about how Britten’s compositions worked, which he did with concrete, thought-out examples (please see the foot of this posting, in the form of a question put to King-Dabbs).

And, naturally, we had Burton and David Attenborough, as movers and facilitators of the time, encouraging Britten to engage with t.v. as a way of sharing his music with Britons – for, not having a television-set of his own (but having acquired one to see the televised Owen Wingrave (or Billy Budd ?), he had not even been a (regular) viewer, and (as we saw, and were told) had to learn ways of working and engaging with what it is. As much as anything, this work considered how he came to grips with it, and it with him.

Therefore, it is a tribute to the BBC and to Attenborough and Burton that they helped Britten see the worth of this collaboration (even if, because of what we were told the cost of video-tape had been then, some recorded programmes ended up overwritten, and so lost to us) : when King-Dabbs was asked about the quality of the footage from Britten’s War Requiem, he candidly told us how what we saw, horizontal lines and all, had been produced simply by pointing a camera at a t.v. screen on which it was being received.

In complete contrast, technically, it was a ravishing Billy Budd for which we have, in part, to thank David Attenborough, crisply filmed, and full of tension and passion. Even so, it felt as though that achievement were gratuitously being undermined, by someone telling tales out of school concerning the recording : we heard how Peter Glossop, the singer playing Budd, when being led up to face his fate, and in take after take, kept missing the note, and so ended up having it hummed in his ear :

For, although this anecdote relates to preparing Britten’s work for broadcast, it effectively had nothing to do with Britten, and just diminished Glossop as a singer / performer, since it was not as if we were not told that this was done at his instigation. Whereas the story regarding the singer in Owen Wingrave, needing prompting about the lyrics (pistols and other weapons of war – and by way of signals, not with the note), at least seemed to show that BB had been in his own world as conductor, for he had apparently been unaware of these tricks of t.v.

That said, too much time was spent with footage and accompanying narration* on just the latter point, which surely could have been put to better use : here, t.v. showed its current leaning in the direction of entertainment, rather than educational purposes, as it also did by making a curiosity, an eccentric, of the already eccentric percussionist James Blades, with his drums, beaters, and thimbles. The effect of using this clip was, by association, to seem to trivialize the serious point about the interaction, between performer and composer, concerning the sound-world that the latter had envisaged when writing his score : in exploiting the person[ality] of Blades, the programme seemed too frothy, just to laugh about, Britten’s concerns for the use of drums in his ‘church parable’ The Burning Fiery Furnace.


The quick opening montage of scenes and shots from Britten in public had been on a different timescale and using another dimension, including much in a moment, and gave the impression that the programme was going to be a build-up to the recording of Peter Grimes at The Maltings, Snape, where Britten had founded his Festival, and which seemed presented as a unique requirement for agreeing to the project (which, since – as we had been told - Naughtie had written his own narration*, must have been down to him). Instead, Wingrave had equally been captured at Snape, and we had bypassed Grimes, whether we knew that it came first or second to Wingrave (presumably second, since the former had not been a BBC commission), and on to Britten’s burial, and to how that moment had been shared with the nation.

In between, for our modern audience, Britten and Pears were stated to have lived almost openly as a couple (probably defying society as Grimes defies The Borough’s mean conventions and morals, and Wingrave his family’s notion of military honour). Yet we had reserved to when Britten’s War Requiem was fleetingly featured any mention of his pacifism, with none of its consequences for him**.

In terms, then, only of its story-telling, this was no documentary worthy of a cinema, and, as to interpreting material to its viewer, did one have more than a scant sense of real curatorship ? One almost felt that someone had only just held back the question of whether PP & BB would, if living now, have done as Sir Elton John and David Furnish, and have a civil partnership and attempted to adopt a child, rather than addressing what it really meant to be gay at their time, prior to the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1956. Britten’s sexual orientation was included (as the extent of his pacifism was not**), but it might just as well not have been – it was not even obvious that it had any bearing on the BBC and Britten at all.

It was good to have the merest appearance of Sir Michael Tippett, a composer at least as much in need of our attention (along with Ralph Vaughan Williams, to name but one other), but it was just two or three sentences from a compilation concert, under Sir Henry Wood, to honour Britten. We had an even more meagre inclusion of some others, one of whom (Tom Service) had, much more recently than when Britten had been fêted ten years ago (and from when footage of a younger-looking Service had been taken), presented a long Radio 3 broadcast about the War Requiem :

So, a question was asked (one of only two, as Burton quickly decided, following the query about the quality of some of the footage – and on no immediate show of hands – to adjourn to the sunshine (or, rather, to being lionized in the foyer), this on the assumption that everyone had been satisfied…

Q : I am sure that people will agree that many of the contributions in the film were excellent, particularly those from Oliver Knussen, but blink and you missed Tom Service, and only a little less so for Charles Hazlewood, although these are the people on Radio 3, broadcasting about and interpreting Britten now – why was it worth including them, but giving them so little time ?

A : Burton opined that ‘Tom Service says a lot in a little while’ (and made no comment on Hazlewood’s appearance), whereas King-Dabbs elucidated that the footage of Service (and Hazlewood) had been from Celebrating Britten (around ten years ago). Moving swiftly on from why there had actually been so little from
Service (and nothing contemporary***), he told us that there had been good reason to include an academic from King’s College, London, as a cultural commentator who talked about Britten’s place in English life, but not what that reason was.



Reading between the lines, King-Dabbs appeared to be admitting that the programme had had to have popular appeal, and so featured Attenborough and Burton in priority over those now regularly broadcasting on the BBC’s own classical radio channel, and, perhaps for his authoritativeness and stature, giving over so much of the musical interpretation to Knussen, as a fellow composer.


Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity


End-notes

* James Naughtie was supposed to be the documentary’s narrator, but, for want of an overarching role, he might as well not have been.

** Going to the States with Pears, for three years from April 1939, and then, on their return, not immediately (and only on appeal) gaining exemption from military service (as a non-combatant). (By contrast, Tippett rejected even being allocated non-combatant duties, and served two months out of a term of imprisonment of three.)

*** At one point, it was mentioned in a caption that Knussen had been ‘Speaking in 2010’, but not flagging up, in that way, that Hazlewood and Service had been recorded earlier still.



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 24 June 2014

Ever-ambitious¹ Aimard wows with authenticity

This is a review of Pierre-Laurent Aimard's solo piano recital in June 2014

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


24 June (updated, with link, 6 July)

This is a review of a solo piano recital given on Monday 23 June 2014 at The Maltings, Snape, by Pierre-Laurent Aimard during the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic), as also relayed live on Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3)

Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)



The best £13 ever spent !


Why are all concert / recital programmes not like this, mixing memory and desire, as Eliot once wrote ?

That was written at the end of the first half, but it could have been inspired by later seeing the Aldeburgh music booklet ‘Leaving a legacy in your will’, which has Eliot on the back cover (You are the music while the music lasts (which seems sure to be from Four Quartets)), and the words Make Your Mark¹ on the front :

If Pierre-Laurent Aimard (PLA – just as Kristin Scott Thomas is always KST in these postings) has not made his mark on people’s consciousness to-night, that of the bewitched audience at The Maltings, Snape, and in those listening to Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3), he never will !


PLA at The Friends' Reception


(One almost hesitates, having perfectly seen those fingers and hands crossing, separating, interlocking, even one above the other, to go to the Radio 3 web-site and Listen Again (for seven days only), but, as one of my fellow occupants of the front row suggested, one wants to hear again the juxtapositions that PLA has made here.)



He has built on the wonderful curation in past Aldeburgh Festivals, both in partnership with the amazing Tamara Stefanovich (on both one and two pianos), and his solo piano non-stop miscellanies, which had seemed, until last night, to be ground-breaking music marathons. Not that they were not, but PLA has now shattered the unhelpful image of separateness in and between composers and their compositions, and, with the sheer dynamism with which he interpreted these two, differing halves, thrown down a sort of gauntlet to the question of what we listen to – and why : with the first sounding as though it contained some Scriabin (although it actually did not, because studies of his, exquisitely rendered, had only been scheduled, according to the running order, after the interval), the second with a complete short set of pieces by Bartók, whose score alone (and not exclusively) was remarkable for resembling pyramids, upwards triangles of notation.


Afterwards, when a couple was heard comparing this Festival very positively with previous ones², they appeared (unless they were talking about another performer) to be saying that PLA’s response is an intellectual response, not an emotional one, whereas one could not agree less. Yes, he is clearly a shy man (on the level of being unassuming, but proud of what he has the conviction to attempt, and succeed with), but he clearly accepts that a public face is part of performance (as, maybe, Glenn Gloud could not), and he entered into this recital as another John Ogden (who, one is glad, is being recalled just now on Radio 3) :

No one who saw Ogden, for all that he had these feats of memory and technique at his fingertips (pun intended), could doubt how brilliantly he felt the music in his soul. (Quite apart from whether having the experience of worlds known to Alexander Scriabin [the programme prefers the spelling 'Skryabin'] allowed Ogden to enter into the landscape of his harmony, and make so many remarkable recordings that we can go to³.) With PLA, one could see the pleasure, joy, surprise, anguish and discomfort with what all this music, at its height, had to say to him from the page.

He has little physical resonance with the look of Ogden on stage, but there was a resemblance in that he had clearly fixed the order of works in his head not only so that he could transition into the next one as the page-turner moved the concertina, booklet or collection of pages that was (as the case might be) the score, but be fully present to the music in each case :

And this was not ‘compartmentalization’ at all, in no sense a glib characterization of the next composer, but internalizing the essence not only of the moment, but also of the connection that he had, in scheduling the works, made with what went before : the quotation from Eliot is so relevant here, that, whilst the music – in each case – lasted, he was not only with it, but was it.




A butterfly on the lavender in the lovely garden at By The Crossways
(where The Friends' Reception was held)


Performers as different as Stile Antico (@stileantico), Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia), and (to name but one other pianist) Vladimir Horowitz⁴ all have had their notion of a sequence, but the programme of PLA’s two halves was curated in such a way that we only (especially if one had a clear view of PLA’s hands, and where he was on each score) incidentally noticed the practice-elements in these various Études, such as octaves, chimes, dissonances, or even what, at the beginning of the very first piece, presented just as a simple scale (and how it developed from there !).

He had not, of course, not just jumbled these pieces all together, and the programming alone deserves enormous acclaim (though could another have brought off delivering it ?), alongside the precision and pianism with which PLA played. (Some might have wanted to follow the listing, to see what he was playing, where ‘we had go to’, but that seemed unnecessary (although one was partly still playing The Radio 3 Guessing Game, when, having switched on during a piece, one tries to guess what it is, before it is announced).)

More so than through enviable technique and stamina, it was in the integrity, the conviction that this should – and would – work. Rarely, then, in a second half will we have heard the top note struck and stroked to such effect, but entirely integrally and organically, as much as finding pentatonic scales, or bell-notes, and chimes. PLA did seem to be saying two things very clearly :

Why do we need opus numbers, keys, and sets of pieces so often brought to us as sets⁵, etc. ?


More importantly :

Why, in all these things, do we seek what divides music from music ?


Do not just take @THEAGENTAPSLEY's word for it that this recital excelled - read The Guardian's review, which gave it five stars, and with the following extract from which one cannot at all disagree !


Yet he will surely never make a more heartfelt tribute to Ligeti than this recital, where he placed the Hungarian composer squarely in the context of the piano greats. This was an exquisitely constructed programme, interlacing 12 Ligeti studies with 12 by Debussy, Chopin, Bartók and Scriabin, first paired and then heard in blocks of three. It made for spellbinding listening.

Rian Evans

Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)


End-notes

¹ In the good way, that of extending an ambit, here that of musicality and the true life that is, and is of, music.

² Not, though, that they seemed in any way let down with them, but highly impressed this time, whereas, at The Friends’ Reception on Sunday, someone had sounded a note that there had been uncertainty about how successful of this year, but that it – and PLA – had proved him or her wrong.

³ An excellent choice, made available by gullivior, is his interpretation of Beethoven's Opus 111...

⁴ Who could seem almost impatient to move on to the next piece in a recital, and not to be ruffled by applause…

⁵ In a recent piano recital (15 February) in King’s College Chapel (@ConcertsatKings), Leon McCawley (@leonmccawley) had brought us Rachmaninov’s whole Opus 32 (from 1910) in his second half, Thirteen Preludes, and, stunningly nice though it was to hear them through (the familiar and the less familiar), they made no connection of this kind :

Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms were still the other side of the interval, in another place. And, with the Songs Without Words, there had seemed little feeling for the three pieces played : how often (and what does it tell us ?) might we have been to a recital where we could take or leave staying after the interval ? (Yet, to give an example, Sodi Braide’s all-Liszt second half redeemed a performance at Cambridge Summer Music Festival where one had initially felt exactly that.)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Monday 23 June 2014

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

This is a review of Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès in Schubert’s Winterreise

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


This is a review of a performance at The Maltings, Snape, of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Op. 89, D. 911) by Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès on the evening of Sunday 22 June 2014 in the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic)

One might have imagined that the theatrical nature of to-night’s Winterreise at The Maltings, Snape, was Nicht für alle – but when Adès had sounded the final moment of calm, beyond bereftness, and had maintained long his final position on the keys (holding the reaction off), the vivid acclaim proved otherwise.

And seventy or more minutes had passed without seeming so, taking us to Der Leiermann quite, it might almost have felt, by surprise – could we really be at journey’s end already (wherever we actually were in time, that is)… ? Had we not been immersed, and begun to lose track of the number of song-settings by around the seventh – and why, anyway, was the figure of thirty-two floating around in the mind (or was that from The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 ?) ?

In ‘Gute Nacht’ (1*), right at the start of Wilhelm Müller’s sequence (though there were originally only twelve poems), there might have been some wonder at Bostridge’s extreme enunciation of clusters of letters at the ends of words such as gemacht / Nacht, and then, in reverse order, Nacht / gedacht**.

The initial impression was that maybe Bostridge had reacted to some criticism of his German by over-accentuation – but no, with further listening, diction in other places was more interior by far, not simply quieter, and, although (with the hall’s fine acoustic) it must have, seemed in danger of not reaching halfway up the side-stalls, let alone carrying to the back of the raked seating :

Something more complicated was going on with the voicing of this piece, which not only looked back to Bostridge’s recording with Julius Drake of ‘Erlkönig’ (D. 328) (on the EMI album Schubert Lieder*** in 1998), but also to his acclaimed appearances in so much Mozart, so much Britten, even as Caliban in Adès’ own much-lauded opera. (And, as Bostridge was in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, fitting to be reminded of a Director of Studies at Cambridge, who once expressed the belief that the separate characters in The Rape of Lucrece are different parts of one person – and the concomitantly repellent implication that Shakespeare had composed a fantasy of rape.)


Bostridge was bringing what amounted to a semi-staging to this late work of Schubert (hardly anything later than the year of death, and correcting the proofs of Part 2 of the song-cycle), but almost within the conventions of the concert-hall : done-up dark suit, single buttoned and almost a less-showy dinner-jacket, white shirt, but no tie for Adès or him.

Sometimes leaning on the curve of the Steinway grand as if this were cabaret (and sounding not a little Kurt Weillish), sometimes feeling like about to dive into it, under its lid (yet not as at a word-prompt, but as if his lost love and heart might be there), other times advancing upstage, at yet others writhing, contorted, and seeming to start disintegrating. Which, of course, is at the heart of Winterreise (after – and painfully leading on from – [Schubert’s setting of] Müller’s optimistic and enthusiastic Die schöne Müllerin (no sly self-reference there).

Or, more than two centuries later, at that of Beckettt in Molloy**** (and the other two novels of that trilogy, or even in the earlier work Mercier and Camier), though one was reminded most of that writer’s more famous and actually once cultured ‘men of the road’ in Vladimir and Estragon (affectionately, Didi and Gogo) : Could Bostridge possibly be seeing himself as a Vladimir, first of all seeing that special tree (‘Den Lindenbaum’ (5)), but with difficult feelings because of the mismatch with what is rooted in memory ?

That was the first really lyrical voicing, with Lieder-type gestures and tone, but it led, for example, to :

* ‘Wasserflut’ (6), with a massive, expressionistic stress on Haus (the ultimate word of the lyrics)

* Looking back on the town, as the departing man leaves it behind (‘Rückblick’ (8))

* The heart’s unfettered reaching out, in rapturous hope, when ein Posthorn klingt (in ‘Die Post’ (12)) – more clamorous lyricism

* The fixéd resignation / resolution (in ‘Der Wegweiser’ (20)) of :

eine Straße muß ich gehen,
die noch keiner ging zurück



Maybe at this point a different note set in – or perhaps as early as ‘Der greise Kopf’ (14)*****, contemplating the poet’s happy illusion of being old (because of frost on the hair). From then, diese Resie not seem to be demanding of Bostridge in the same way, and the slightly reeling and slurred Tom Waits down tone, contrasting with the defiant up voice that clearly and angrily states how the traveller has been treated, had evaporated – the feeling of ill-treatment had been early, starting with ‘Die Wetterfahne’ (2), and seeing Cressida-like inconstancy in the weather-vane signalling a change of direction (indicated by what is described as ‘[ein] Schild’, a crest or shield), and in the cynicism of the wind-changed beloved’s parents :

Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen ?
Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut.



Yet this living so deeply with the role (no less than that, say, of Lear, where there is some respite) must have been at, and continued to be at, a price : at the end of Winterreise, when Adès and he went off, Bostridge seemed physically reduced from being already slim – though perhaps it was just the back view – and looked depleted, almost lamed.


Just one minor hesitation…

Yes, we can be plunged into this winter-world, but (especially if we do not know it, and struggle to follow the unremitting text in the concert-hall’s relative gloom) do we best find our emotional direction with Schubert’s work here ? Coming to the performance with our maybe hurried occupation of seats, our life outside the hall, brought into our seat ? – until, though, we relax into the offered music. No, we definitely would not have demanded more of Bostridge before Winterreise, but could we not have had a momentary taste of the composer just for piano, just to get us in his sound-world ?

As it was, it transpired that Adès, as accompanist, had read back into the early sections the spiky strangeness of the close, with his brought-out bass-figures and what seemed quirkily anachronistic stress, but could we have followed him better, and alone first, with a suitable Impromptu or two, to remind ourselves of the Schubert who after all strove, not least in Rosamunde (however fragmentarily his efforts usually survive, outside Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Schubert marathon, as ‘incidental music’), to be part of theatre ?

Or even Liszt transcriptions of some songs, to take us away from the text-based, score-based literalism with which we might have approached what, it turned out, was anything but a hide-bound Winterreise, but a dangerous encounter with the part-like nature of the self…


A review of the following night's marathon solo piano recital by Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard is now available here



End-notes

* The numbering denotes the positioning of the poems of the song-cycle (as against Müller’s sequence of poems).

** Not here, but later, is where sounds were almost launched at the front rows of the stalls, right below Bostridge : ab in ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ (3), and, probably next, überdeckt andausgestreckt in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (7).


*** The initial recording, to which a Volume II was added (in the release in 2001).

**** ‘Rast’ (10) talks of sheltering in a charcoal-burner’s house, and there is such a person in Beckettt’s Molloy

***** In the closing two lines, we have confirmation that this is a definite departure, eine Reise :

Wer glaubt’s ? under meiner ward es nicht
auf dieser ganzen Reise !



Also on Aldeburgh...

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 23 June 2012

Authenticity and the actual

Quitting Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI for Tamara Stefanovich

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


8 July

Quitting Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI for Tamara Stefanovich

It was my big chance - hearing Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI - and, I had thought, a fitting end to a great few days of talks, concerts and even a film at Aldeburgh.

Only he and his three fellow musicians weren't a string quartet, but we were sitting in the same artificial hush as if they were, and we were hearing them play what was clearly, often enough, music for dancing, yet in a concert.

But, since we were in a concert, there was a mismatch that just didn't work for me any more than it does when people in a jazz-gig do not have a natural impulse to applaud - or even urge on - a striking solo.

The ancientness of one instrument that Savall was playing was patent in that it looked like a tree-stump, but I didn't know which of it was which and which the other, and the way in which the music was coming to us in this place seemed at odds with however accurate the performance-style and elaboration of each piece may have been : in more ways than one, I just could not believe that it was intended to be listened to or presented in this way.


Yes, maybe, if there had been dancers, it would have been different. I don't know what would have helped me feel that I was not in a sterile environment, trying to listen to the life in what was being played, but I just know that, however appropriately relaxed the musicians were, the resultant event felt stiff and unnatural.


I took the chance to write about Tamara Stefanovich's recital, and didn't go back for the second half :


For me, that helped to preserve (and not just in the form of a blog-posting) what I had related to in those few days, so that I could drive home happy.