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19 May
At full strength, Basel Symphony Orchestra has fifty string-players. Cambridge Corn Exchange has had many a huge orchestra occupy its stage, but it has probably never before entertained a programme comprising works such as those by Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass and John Adams in its regular concert series, as it did on Sunday 27 April – and rarely under a conductor as distinguished in his field as Dennis Russell Davies.
Whatever the three composers featured may have in common (Pärt, at least, rejects the popular description of minimalism), there is assuredly more that makes each one distinctive, as this review hopes to show.
Arvo Pärt – These Words…
This short piece was composed at the end of the last decade, and apparently (according to the publishers) uses material from a Slavonic Prayer, as well as alluding to Hamlet. The reference is not made explicit, but, just before the scene with the play performed by the theatrical troupe, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius says to him I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. (Act 3, Scene 2).
With the connivance of the leader of the players, Hamlet had interpolated the text with material designed to bring out guilty behaviour in Claudius. Yet afterwards, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude, she says O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet. (Act 3, Scene 4).
All of these works employ percussion in a persuasive way. In These Words…, it is triangle, xylophone (marimba ?), cymbals, drums, and bell-sounds (not obviously tubular-bells), and, with them, strings. After a beginning filled with suspense, Pärt sets out his thematic material in the percussion instruments, and then introduces the bell-notes, with a descending interval between them.
With, at times, an oriental feel to the writing, he moves between plucked and bowed strings, evoking a sense of eeriness in the ensemble, and returning to the contrasting bell-notes, letting the second one sing – and then a pause / silence in which it lingers as part of the music. So is a fade to almost nothing, after which, in the spirit of Pierre Boulez, he puts the xylophone / marimba into the texture, not as an interjection, but an inner statement.
We seem to be tracing a very slow, but clear, life-sign, with the music conforming to its own measure. The strings swell, then diminish – momentarily (no more than a bar or two), the material has a different rhythm, then it ends, again with the sound of the bell. An excellent choice to open the concert !
Here, it is essential that the gesture of sounding a bell is germane and has poise : Davies so works with orchestras that the atmosphere that Pärt is seeking is wholly present. Likewise, a large group of strings bows together, yet playing piano, with the density of the texture, but not the immediacy of the sound.
Philip Glass – Cello Concerto No. 2 (‘Naqoyqatsi’)
Four times, Philip Glass has worked with director Godfrey Reggio on a film (the latest being Visitors (2013)), and turned the score for the previous film, Naqoyqatsi (2002) into his seven-movement Cello Concerto No. 2, thus subtitled.
Davies has recorded the work with the same soloist, Matt Haimovitz, but conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Its movements all have titles, which may be those of cues from the film’s score, but they are not always self explanatory.
The concert performance had a moment of additional drama in that, at around the end of the sixth movement, one of Haimovitz’s strings – under a lot of pressure – broke. With aplomb and a string from a fellow cellist to hand, he effected the repair there and then in front of us, whilst Davies stood guard over the mood of the piece…
As mentioned, percussion is important in these pieces, but Glass also writes for tam-tam, struck cymbals, wood-blocks, and snare-drum : as the percussionists were at the back, and largely standing, one had a perfect view of what they were adding to the sound, and how carefully. In addition, the concerto is scored for harp, bassoon, horns, and other brass.
1. Naqoyqatsi
Strings and ‘parping’ horns open the work, before the soloist enters with intense drums and cymbals, and weighty cellos / double-basses. Straightaway, Haimovitz demonstrated a lovely sound with the ensemble, his part encompassing a variety of moods, including yearning.
A feature is the shifting tonality, and a tutti section features tubular-bell, and thrilling modulations. Later, cellos alone, then with basses, bring what is almost a trademark of Glass’ music : with, for want of a better term, circle-sounds, he does not literally inscribe a circle with complementary pairs of descending triplets, but it feels like it. He ends the movement with low-register cellos, joined by basses, brass, and percussion.
2. Massman
The second movement had Haimovitz playing sharpened notes, a tremolo effect, and even, later, quarter-tones. The orchestra interjects tutti, but overall that it feels a little like a trudge. Glass then writes high for the cello, and, with percussion giving an oom-pah effect, he momentarily seems to parody Shokstakovich’s own ‘ironic’ parodies. High-energy tutti, rich in brass, herald ‘circle-sounds’ again – now with a slightly sickening feel to the solo part. Before Haimovitz ended, at the bottom of his register, we had a fleeting evocation of Viennese style.
3 – 5. New World / Intensive Times / Old World
Taking these movements together, as they feel linked, we find (3) that tam-tam beats lead to suggestive solo-writing, resembling a gypsy fiddler. Now resembling a solo cello with an orchestra behind him, Haimowitz evoked not only tuning the instrument and the Bach solo cello Suites, but also harmonics, slide-notes, and ghostly tremolos by the cello’s bridge. Next (4), prominent tutti passages, featuring wood-blocks and snare-drum, which leads to haunting brass-writing in its ‘peachy’ register, accompanied by struck cymbals.
The movement develops to vary between driving inevitability and harmonic uncertainty, but bedding down before the end. Finally, (5), as with New World, another opening with the soloist - high, aetherial lines, followed by harp chiming in with an emerging phrase by sounding a descending interval. Generally, the movement feels similar to New World, but instead exploiting a rising interval.
6. Point Blank
A bouncy, but sinister, theme opens the movement, coarsened by a rasp from the brass. Yet it develops by seeming to pitch a descending minor third against a rising major third (?) from the soloist, with lurking snare-drum rhythms. After tutti sections, Haimowitz had writing that demanded intense slurring and sawing. Adamsian ‘Circle-sounds’ follow, but are undercut by descending, sneering brass and strings. Though the cello reaches out, it simultaneously feels constrained by brass and percussion, and ends meditating on one note.
7. The Vivid Unknown (when the broken string was being replaced, described by Davies as ‘the epilogue’)
The movement opens with a very expansive theme for solo cello, which, whilst it generally strives upwards, moves downwards. Cellos and basses contribute ‘circle-sounds’ as the cello has a vivid outpouring, only brought back to earth by the violins’ purity. The bassoon, there in the general texture, makes a weighty contribution, which gives way to more solo material. The bassoons then contributed, with a rising interval (a third ?), and, on beats from the tam-tam – in conjunction, with the other percussion ¬– the concerto came to an end.
The concerto’s origins may mean that the movements are necessarily more delineated than, say, in the work by John Adams after the interval : several began with the soloist introducing thematic material, or of a different character. Haimowitch gave a highly engaged performance. He had hesitated about premiering the work, but Glass had assured him that repeated matter could be varied according to context and his judgement.
All in all, with Pärt and Glass, a good first half, and one that introduced a post-modern approach to compositions that explore the dimensions of a small chosen realm in depth, but without much of the vividly atonal or even twelve-tone approaches that many composers of the last forty or fifty years have embraced.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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1 May
Whatever the three composers whose works were on the bill on the evening of Sunday 27 April at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx) may have in common (Arvo Pärt, at least, rejects the description of ‘minimalism’ (let alone ‘holy minimalism’, which he considers nonsense)), there is probably more about the music that each one writes that makes him distinctive :
Below, is a review, which follows on from the introductory posting Minimalists - or Rhythmicists ?, and there is also an edited-down version of the first half of the review here...
When large orchestras, such as from Russia, have visited The Corn Exchange in the past, the stage has seemed crammed, and this time was no different, with what seemed a massive orchestra (at full strength, there are fifty string-players alone). A little of a pity that more had not turned out to witness this spectacle and hear their impressive ensemble, but still a creditable attendance of around six hundred heard two major works by Philip Glass and John Adams, and something more modest from Pärt – as maybe the man himself may be, although works such as Passio are on a larger scale.
Arvo Pärt – These Words…
According to Universal Edition, this piece for string orchestra and percussion was composed between 2007 and 2008, and it was a commission by the Léonie Sonnings Musikfond in Denmark. (The same source says that Pärt has been awarded the Léonie Sonning Prize, the most important musical distinction in that country.)
About the piece itself, the person who wrote that entry (Eric Marinitsch) goes on to say :
As its textual basis Pärt uses the human foibles mentioned in the old Church Slavonic prayer from the Canon to the Guardian Angel, while the title derives from associations between this material and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Whatever that may mean, it is to be noted that, just before the scene with the play performed by the theatrical troupe, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius says to him I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. (Act 3, Scene 2). With the connivance of the leader of the players, Hamlet had interpolated the text with material designed to bring out guilty behaviour in Claudius, and then afterwards, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude, she says O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet. (Act 3, Scene 4).
As for the work, it began with a chord full of suspense, and, after the sound of a triangle and a bass-note, the strings sometimes played piano, as a sequence was given first by what sounded like a xylophone* and then a different one by a bass-drum, before the opening material returned. Still with a feeling of suspense, a swaying sweep of the xylophone and another note from the triangle led to a statement of the same sequences, seemingly both hesitantly and thoughtfully, after the string writing had moved up and down in chords.
Yet although a triangle had been seen struck earlier, the bell-sound that next entered could have been a tubular-bell (it had more of the lasting, resonant note that characterizes a desk-bell), and preceded a progression that had an oriental feel to it, if not how it grew in intensity. Then a moment’s pause, cymbals and the bell and then a bell sounding a tone lower marked a new section, in which the interval given by the two bells recurred before a pizzicato motif with a rumbling drum-noise – a moment of haunting eeriness, which gave way to a bowed sound, and then the two bells again, the noise of the second of which held in the air.
After another pause, beats on the bass-drum led to further powerful writing for the strings, which again drifted away to a pianissimo. In what followed, heralded by triangle and xylophone, the latter did not so much interject, as juxtapose the feeling of its presence (in the spirit of Pierre Boulez) : the writing was moving as if we were tracing a very slow, but clear, life-sign, and the music conformed to its own measure. The string-sound swelled again to something fuller, and then diminished. Momentarily, for no more than a bar or two, the material took on a different rhythmic stress, and then ended, with the sound of the bell.
What is so important with a piece such as this is that a gesture of a bell or something like it should feel germane and organically have its own poise, otherwise one is just going through the motions of playing it. Davies fully knows that, and has worked with orchestras, this one included, in such a way that the atmosphere that Pärt appears to be seeking is wholly present, such that a large group of strings can bow together, and yet play piano, so that one has the density of the string-texture, but not the immediacy of the string-sound.
Those new to these composers may not have experienced this kind of sound-world before, but it was a good choice to open the concert, rather than, say, Pärt’s better-known Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which would have been too intense to fill this role.
Philip Glass – Cello Concerto No. 2 (‘Naqoyqatsi’)
The fourth film on which Philip Glass worked with director Godfrey Reggio, Visitors (2013) has just been released in the UK.
Glass has also turned the score for the previous film, Naqoyqatsi (2002), in which cellist Yo-Yo Ma played prominently, into his seven-movement Cello Concerto No. 2, subtitled Naqoyqatsi. Dennis Russell Davies (the conductor in this concert) has recorded the work, conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and with the same soloist, Matt Haimovitz.
As with the Adams work in the second half, the movements have titles, but one wonders whether they may be more for the convenience of players, conductors, concert arrangers and the like to refer to the piece’s constituent parts, rather than just by bar-numbers, because, in both cases, there seems to be relatively little emphasis on elucidating the word(s) chosen. (In the case of Glass, of course, the cues for the film would have given rise to a need for titles, which may have (partly) survived : contrast this with how one refers to the works of artist Mira Schendel, when almost everything is sím titulo).)
1. Naqoyqatsi
The work opened with strings and ‘parping’ horns, before going down a level for the solo entry, which was marked by the intensity of drums and cymbals, and the weight of the cellos and double-basses. It was clear straightaway that the combination of instrument and cellist brought about a lovely sound, and the solo part developed to encompass a variety of moods, including, most obviously, yearning. The opening motif recurred, but now against material of shifting tonality, and, in a tutti section with contributions from tubular-bell, the modulations were thrilling. A short section for the cellos alone, before joined by the basses, led in what is almost a trademark of Glass’ music, where he does not literally inscribe a circle with complementary pairs of descending triplets, but feels as though he does (for want of a better term, circle-sounds). The movement came to an end as the cellos played at the bottom of their register, joined by basses and brass, and percussion.
2. Massman
In the opening of this movement, Glass used an alternating pattern, which modulated, before the cello gave us a short motif, and then a shorter motif, parallel to it, and the strings then played this material under the writing for cello, where Haimovitz had sharpened notes in his part, and with a tremolo effect. With the combination of interjective tutti and a climax in the percussion, the feeling that was conveyed was a little like a trudge, and, when Glass had quarter-tone writing high in the cello’s solo register, the percussion was given an oom-pah effect : we momentarily felt as if it were a further parody of one of Shokstakovich’s ‘ironic’ parodies. Another high-energy tutti section, rich in brass, brought in those ‘circle-sounds’ again, but with a slightly sickening feel to the sound of the soloist. Together with brass and strings, and a fleeting evocation of Viennese style, the movement ended, the cello at the bottom of its register.
3. New World
With some beats from the tam-tam, the soloist had a suggestive phrase that had the quality of a gypsy fiddler. For the first time seeming like a solo cello with an orchestra behind him, Haimowitz’s part ran the gamut of evoking tuning the instrument and the tradition of solo cello music of Bach, but also harmonics, slide-notes, and ghostly tremolos by the bridge of the instrument.
4. Intensive Times
Tutti passages, with a prominent place for wood-blocks and snare-drum, led to a haunting theme in the ‘peachy’ register of the brass being taken up, and to the accompaniment of struck cymbals. As the movement developed, there was a feeling of varying between driving inevitability and harmonic uncertainty, but which gave the impression of bedding down before the end.
5. Old World
Another movement that opened with solo cello in a high, aetherial stratum, a phrase then emerged with which the harp chimed with a descending interval, and the movement had a similar feeling to it to that marked New World, but exploiting a rising interval.
6. Point Blank
The opening theme had a bouncy, but sinister, aspect, with a slightly coarse rasp from the brass. Yet, as it developed, Glass seemed to pitch a descending minor third against the cello’s rising major third (?), and with a lurking snare-drum rhythm. Tutti sections followed, and, in turn, gave way to writing for Haimowitz that seemed to demand intense slurring and sawing. More ‘circle-sounds’ followed, but which appeared undercut by sneering descending writing for brass and strings. At a moment when the cello seemed to be reaching out, it felt constrained, as if required to limit itself to Semaphore against the brass and the percussion. The movement then ended, meditating on one note. [Around when, unfortunately, Haimowitz’s C-string (?) broke]
7. The Vivid Unknown (described by Davies as ‘the epilogue’ when the broken string was being replaced)
The movement, in its opening, had a very expansive theme for solo cello, which, whilst it generally strived upwards, had downwards motions. As cellos and basses contributed ‘circle-sounds’, the cello had a vivid outpouring, only brought back to earth by a pure sound from the violins. The bassoon, always there in the general texture, was given the special feature of a weighty contribution, which gave way to more solo material. The bassoons then contributed, with a rising interval (a third ?), and, on beats from the tam-tam – in conjunction, with the other percussion ¬– the concerto came to an end.
The filmic origins and nature of the concerto may have meant that the movements were necessarily of a more delineated kind than, say, in the work by John Adams (which followed after the interval), because several began with the soloist introducing thematic material, or in a different character from what preceded. In any case, it was clearly a score that Davies knew very well and was involved with, if possible, even more fully than with that of These words….
Haimowitch, whose hesitations about the idea of the work, when being invited to premiere it, could be read about in the programme, gave a highly engaged performance, and, as he says Glass had licensed, played the repeated matter in a manner as he saw fit, varying it according to context and his artistic judgement. (Haimowitch has recorded it under Davies, about which one can read here, and also listen to samples of tracks.)
All in all, with Pärt and Glass, a good first half, and one that introduced a post-modern approach to compositions that explore the dimensions of a small chosen realm in depth, but without much of the vividly atonal or even twelve-tone approaches that many composers of the last forty or fifty years have embraced :
This, if anything, sets these composers apart, but in a different way from that of other practitioners such as, from the world of choral music, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen or John Rutter, whose works are characterized by being much more highly tonal, and less rhythmically emphatic, than those of Adams, Glass, and Pärt.
Harmonielehre original version ?
John Adams – Harmonielehre
Not uniquely so, but the title of the work is that of a text by composer Arnold Schoenberg (from 1911), which roughly means Lessons in Harmonc Writing, whom Adams describes as representing ‘something twisted and contorted’ (this from the composer of Gnarly Buttons). Contrary to Adams’ claim that, as a pupil of a pupil of Schoenberg’s, he had respect for and even felt intimidated by Schoenberg, what he writes – at length – in the programme suggests something different :
That he built an image of Schoenberg of his own, as a god or ‘high priest’, and that then Rejecting Schoenberg was like siding with the Philistines. Adams has built a Schoneberg-shaped altar, according to his notion of Schoenberg, and then refused to bow down before it, citing the aural ugliness of so much of the new work being written. Yet the real Schoenberg wrote, for example, the incredibly beautiful and moving Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31…
Anyway, Harmonielehre is in three movements, but the first has no title (as to titles, please see the section on Glass’ concerto, above). It seems that the second movement has some connection with what Russell Hoban, making a Spoonerism, called Blighter’s Rock, because the programme reports that a dramatic dream broke a fallow period and gave rise to the piece – the link with The Fisher King (made famous, if not by T. S. Eliot’s notes to ‘The Waste Land’, then at least by Terry Gilliam’s film of that name in 1991) being that of woundedness, impotence even in some versions of the Arthurian story, and sometimes with a second wounded figure, the father.
As the programme tells us, Quackie is just what Adams and his wife were calling their daughter Emily at the time of composition (in the mid-1980s), and Adams had another dream, this time with her floating through space with Meister Eckhardt, a German mystic and philosopher, born in 1260. (As discussed, whether such titles and anecdotes add anything to a performance may be a matter of personal experience.)
1.
The work has an energetic, rhythmic opening statement, with tubular-bells. As in These Words…, one could hear xylophone, and brass and woodwind instrument playing high up, with plucked second violins, and also glockenspiel. The movement was one of contrasts, with bowed and plucked strings, and then with some string-players playing very long, slow notes against others with jabbed notes of much smaller duration – an exciting, bright mix of sound, which reminded of Adams’ A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, before it gave way to a moment of quiescence, against which we had the bubbling sounds of the xylophone and the luminous ones of the glockenspiel, before struck cymbals brought about a pause.
A full string-sound from cellos, double-basses and brass, with the material then passed to violas and violins : a questioning tone and a high string-sound gave a resemblance to a heavenly choir, before the direction moved down to a pulsing, with arpeggios from the strings, and solid bass-notes. In both texture and depth of sound, there was still an other-worldly sense, an almost Brucknerian sound-mood (with hints of Mahler) in the string-writing, and with the harp evident. Momentarily, Adams gave us raindrops, in the form of high notes, falling on this Alpine mood-meadow, and then the brass of tuba, trombone and horn came through. This rich and luscious feeling, changed, as the pitch descended, to sustained string-notes – the initial impression was given by some ‘snarky’ bass-notes, but overall it was one of rhythmic plasticity, with contributions from triangle and tubular-bells.
Then the tense opening motif returned, and gained in intensity, with huge rhythms from tam-tam, and the bass-drum a-booming. The moment dissolved, and re-formed, heralding anxious string and brass sounds, with high notes in the latter. Finally, fast-paced snare-drumming and tubular-bells (coupled with harp) broke through the sonority, followed by hammer-blows on the bells that brought about a close.
2. The Anfortas Wound
With grave notes on the basses and cellos, before the woodwind joined in, with the cellos playing in unison, we found ourselves in an andante in an uncertain place, where one of the five busy percussionists could be heard bowing a crotale and then seen wafting it, so that it resonated in the air.
Tonality was now quite unclear, and harmonies were straying, with brass-notes adrift amongst the bell-sounds, as a crescendo slowly built and then, as in Bartók’s mirrored ascent in the Music for Percussion, Strings and Celesta, fell away again from its zenith. The harps were given prominent rhythmic patterns as the harmonic centre, in the strings, began rising, tension being added by pizzicato playing, and by the percussion, whose bass-drum led another crescendo. With a momentary slap of the strings and a screech, the tuba-players fitted their huge mutes, and the bowed crotale was sounded again.
The tubas were just as quickly unmuted, and with anticipatory sounds from the strings, let off blasts, which signalled bell-sounds, and low notes from cellos and basses. Several times before the end, the orchestra seemed to die away, but revived – a sort of inversion of classical works that seem to have ended with a loud full close, but for a few more chords to declare insistently the approach of the real ending.
3. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie
Once again, we were in that alpine meadow for a while, with high notes from the harps, and with ambient percussion. Through it, though, came a soaring feel amongst the twittering of piccolos, and there was again a remembrance of Fast Machine, but this time inversely, a sensation of (harmonically) slowly dropping.
Mounting tension, fed by a tap-tap beat on a block, and high violin notes performed in a slicing motion (as if for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)), was intensified by agitated writing in very short note-values, evoking Fast Machine further with chords from the brass as if receding on a railway, and then that sinister type of horn-tone that The Matrix (1999) uses for the sentinels. With pulsing drum and glockenspiel, the energetic impulse in the ensemble rose, fell away again, and climbed back up – to end on a brief open sonority.
End-notes
* One says ‘xylophone’, because the sound did not appear to resonate, but it may have been a marimba…
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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22 April
The composers on the bill at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx) on Sunday 27 April are usually (nay, invariably) referred to as members of the school of Minimalism.
Dennis Russell Davies, interviewed on Tuesday afternoon’s edition of Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) ‘In Tune’ (@BBCInTune) (available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04153wl for seven days from transmission), pointed out that the composers in the series of three approaching concerts at London’s Cadogan Hall, from which the programme in Cambridge has been derived, all know each other – with Arvo Pärt having looked to Michael Nyman as an example before the disssolution of the Soviet Union led to The Baltic States becoming free (Pärt is Estonian).
Nevertheless, although Nyman took the term from art history*, and, it seems, first used the words ‘minimal music’ in a review in The Spectator in 1968**, it seems to have lost its connection both with other movements in the arts, and with evidently fitting the music to which it refers : does a work by Frank Stella, for example, bear any significant resemblance to the way in which a composition by John Adams works ?
If there is any common element in the work of composers that is described as minimalist, it is never as distinct as John Cage’s unavoidable 4’33” or unconventional in the way that his ‘prepared piano’ is. Instead, it tends to treat a theme as an ostinato or a ground bass might be used, for its rhythmic possibility, and the same is as true for Steve Reich, with the fringe effects caused by two or more players (who gradually become more and more out of synch and cause interference), as when a repeated motif in a work by Philip Glass modulates in relation to the parts of the other instrumentalists.
More here (the long version - easy-read one to follow soonish) as a review of Sunday’s concert…
End-notes
* Whereas it had initially been applied to Black Square (1915), a famous painting (of the infamous kind) by Kazimir Malevich.
** In relation to various compositions that had been performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA – @ICALondon).
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
