Articles
Proms 2000
The BBC Proms concerts is a festival lasting the entire summer, which offers a wealth of different kinds of music performed by most of the major performers of Britain with distinguished guests from other countries. I heard a number of Proms concert during August of 2000. A number of the most interesting new works offered during the season, including the U.K. premiere of Judith Weir's new work setting works of women writers for Jessie Norman, the first London performance of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's Seventh Symphony, and a number of works of other British composers, had already happened by then. Still, there were several performances which were worthy of comment, and the following is an account of them.
A number of performances in connection with Aaron Copland's centennial afforded a glimpse at some sort of official British view of American music. From the other side of the Atlantic American music consists primarily of Copland, Gershwin, Carter, and Bernstein along with a little Ives and Cage, and just about nothing else. At least the Copland that was presented was not only the narrow selection which nowadays is complacently considered his "true" and best work, the populist works of the late thirties and forties. A concert by Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta offered The Short Symphony, the Clarinet Concerto, and Music for the Theatre. The performance of Music for the Theatre, one of Copland's ultramodern jazz works, was splendid, demonstrating complete understanding of the idiom of the piece along with total technical mastery. Although the mastery remained in evidence in the performance of the Short Symphony (hardly an insubstantial matter), its language and logic were less convincingly realized. The piece itself is somewhat problematic. It's chamber music incarnation, the Sextet, is arguably Copland's finest work. In the orchestral version, I've never heard a performance which is as spare, bracing, or exhilarating--or convincing. It always seems too plush, too over-stuffed, too thick. This performance was no exception. To that failing was added a tendency, especially in the slow movement, to make the phrasing too continuously unarticulated, and the dotted rhythms too straightforwardly exact. The performance of the Clarinet Concerto, which is a much less compelling piece by comparison to the other Copland works on the concert, received a polished, sympathetic, and user-friendly performance. Time Cycle by Lucas Foss, which completed the concert, is a product of Foss's early fascination with sixties musical radicalism. It remains a genuine, brilliantly exciting piece, full of the thrill generated for its composer by his new discoveries concerning Œatonal and 12-tone devises.' The performance was dashing and lovely. The considerable pleasure to be had from Rosemary Hardy's otherwise wonderful singing was somewhat alloyed by a too plummy, overly British accent.
Copland's less often heard and very beautiful choral work, In the Beginning was one of the major works on a late night concert by the BBC Singers, conducted by Stephen Cleobury. Although the singing of the chorus and of soloist Sarah Connolly was exemplary, the grasp of the trajectory of the piece, its rhythmic character, and its connection with the words (and their pronunciation) was less satisfying. Mr. Cleobury seemed intent on trying to make In the Beginning, as well as the Ives Psalms and Schuman Carols of death, sound as much like C. V. Stanford as possible. Although I held high hopes for the performance of the Chichester Psalms of Bernstein which ended the concert, it also lacked the kind of sharp and lythe rhythmic quality which would have made it the kind of pleasure that I had hoped for. Maybe this was the result of the Albert Hall Organ (the accompaniment was Bernstein's reduced orchestration for organ, harp, and percussion). The singing of counter-tenor Robin Tyson in the second Psalm was nonetheless highly satisfying.
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Orchestra did their part in the Copland birthday party by playing the Symphonic Ode. The Ode is probably the least often play and least well known of Copland's major works. A product of Copland's abstract modernist style of the twenties, it has many of the same daunting rhythmic difficulties of the Short Symphony, which followed it three years later. These offered no problems to the performers, who delivered them with panache and realized the imposing span of the work's structure with eloquence and passion.
Joining the Copland on this concert was The Shostakovitch Eleventh Symphony, subtitled The Year 1905. Although the program notes made an interesting case for Shostakovitch's intentions and possible political commentary in his writing a work about the brutal suppression of a popular demonstration by Tsarist forces in the wake of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the music seemed to me to be in line with the good old-fashioned view of Shostakovitch as a yes man. Even though full of skillful and persuasive things, it seemed to me to be a long, torpid dose of propaganda, despite the very fine performance.
By contrast, Shostakovitch's Eighth Symphony, which was brilliantly performed by David Atherton and The BBC National Orchestra of Wales on a concert commemorating the 25th anniversary of Shostakovitch's death, is an astounding work, bountifully inventive and clearly, carefully, and fully argued over an enormous span of time and emotions. Having grown up in the time when, at least in what were considered by themselves the better academic circles, Shostakovitch could simply not be taken seriously, I am always surprised when I encounter the undeniable evidence in the music itself that he was an amazingly masterly composer and a truly brilliant orchestrator. The other work on the concert was the Suite of Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti from 1974. I always feel that much of the subtlety and expressive power of the vocal works of Shostakovitch are lost to people who don't understand Russian. This seemed to be the case here, anyway, except for the brilliant beginning of the last song, despite what seemed to be a very good performance by the aforementioned performers and baritone Sifar Leiferkus.
More recent European music was represented in several concerts. These included Boulez's Rituel and Berio's SOLO, the former performed by The London Philharmonic and Mark Wigglesworth. The Boulez, a piece dedicated to the memory of the Italian composer Bruno Maderna, is solemn and calculatedly repetitive, building its ritualistic character deliberately and with orchestral sureness. The Berio, a work for solo trombone and orchestra, is orchestrally inventive, somewhat madcap, and very enjoyable, as was the bravura performance, by Christian Lindberg and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste.
On September 1, The BBC Symphony, joined by The Berlin Radio Choir, and conducted by Ingo Matzmacher, presented the UK premiere of Hans Werner Henze's Ninth Symphony. Henze's relationship with his native Germany has not been simple or straightforward, and been mingled with a changing political consciousness over most of his lifetime. The Ninth Symphony is a product of that relationship and is dominated by Henze's experience with the German Fatherland during and before the Second World War and with his meditation concerning the Holocaust. It is an enormous span of seven movements, lasting around an hour. It's text, by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, based on Anna Segher's novel Das siebte Kreuz, is set entirely for a large double chorus, much divided. The lack of soloists is supposed to give the work a universality, although it is debatable whether it is that or a certain non-specific lack of dramatic power that is the result of this decision, since the text is often in first person and refers to highly personal interaction with the events of highly dramatic and personal story. For this listener, despite the fact that Henze is a composer of great power and accomplishment, his ninth symphony is something of a soft egg, although it is certainly possible that, much as with the Shostakovitch songs mentioned above, a native speaker might have find this particular combination of words and music to be more satisfying.
Gyorgy Kurtag is a composer with a highly powerful voice based on intense compression of material and time scale. His stature as a composer is considerable and seems to becomes more
evident with increasing acquaintance with his music. A late-night concert by the Keller Quartet on August 14, presented six works of Kurtag's, all of them very short, very intimate, and very concentrated, interspersed through a performance of Bach's The Art of Fugue. One of these works, the Twelve Microludes, is a sort of homage to Bach, as was another, entitled, in fact, Homage to J. S. Bach. Another, Officium breve, Op. 28 is a tribute to Webern, the last movement of whose Second Cantata provides the basic material for the work. Although one might question the implied placement of Kurtag into certain company and also derive some irritation from the extreme and aggressive solemnity of the event, there was no questioning the serious musical intent and content of his music, and no avoiding the great satisfaction of the encounter with the music or the performances, which were splendid.
Like Kurtag, Percy Grainger is a composer of great individuality whose music sounds like nobody else's. Also like Kurtag, Grainger work on a very small scale. Grainger has had a major influence on a number of British composers, ranging from the more conservative Benjamin Britten to the very unconservative Michael Finnissy and the British Avant Garde represented by such composers as Dave Smith and Gavin Byer, so he is not just the composers of novelty numbers. Another late-night concert by The Joyful Company of Singers and The City of London Sinfonia, conducted by Richard Hickox, presented fifteen of Grainger's works. These represented several of the musical preoccupations which lasted throughout Grainger's career: British folk music, Scandinavian folk music, the works of Kipling, and "free music." Perhaps most striking performances were the those of Danny Deaver, a Dollar and Half a Day, and The Widow's Party by the men of Joyful Company of Singers, but all of them had verve, sweetness, freshness, and great beauty.