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Stomp!

Posted in Jazz with tags , on October 24, 2009 by telescoper

I couldn’t resist a quick post about this old record, which was made in Chicago in 1928. The personnel line-up is very similar to that of the classic Hot Sevens, except that Louis Armstrong wasn’t there. Satchmo was, in fact, replaced for this number by two trumpeters, Natty Dominique and George Mitchell. John Thomas played trombone, Bud Scott was on banjo and Warren “Baby” Dodds played the drums.

The star of the show, however, is undoubtedly the great  Johnny Dodds (the older brother of the drummer). He was a clarinettist of exceptional power, a fact that enabled him to cut through the limitations of the relatively crude recording technology of the time. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Louis Armstrong doesn’t make it easy for a clarinettist to be heard!

This is still a favourite tune for jazz bands all around the world, but I’ve never heard a version as good as this one. There are lots of little things that contribute to its brilliance, such as the thumping 2/4 rhythm (which also gives away its origins in the New Orleans tradition of marching bands). It’s a bit fast to actually march to, though;  I suppose that’s what turns a march into a stomp. I like the little breaks too (such as Bud Scott’s banjo fill around 2:10 and, especially, the ensemble break at 2:45). But most of all it’s all about how they build up the momentum in such a  controlled way, using little key changes to shift gear but holding back until the time Johnny Dodds joins in again (around 2:20). At that point the whole thing totally catches fire and the remaining 40 seconds or so are some of the “hottest” in all of jazz history.

Some time ago I heard Robert Parker’s digitally remastered version of this track, which revealed that Baby Dodds was pounding away on the bass drum all the way through it. He’s barely audible on the original but it was clearly him that drove the performance along. Anyway, despite the relatively poor sound quality I do hope you enjoy it. It’s a little bit of musical history, but also an enormous bit of fun.

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Au Privave

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , on October 18, 2009 by telescoper

At the risk of becoming a complete bore on the subject of bebop I thought I’d follow up an earlier post on the joys of jazz with this brilliant performance of yet another Charlie Parker tune, not by the man himself, but by one of his disciples.

I was lucky enough to hear Sonny Stitt live a number of times and he was always brilliant; he died in 1982. He was criticised by some jazz buffs between  numbers during one gig I was at with the words “You’re just playing like Charlie Parker!”, to which he replied by handing his alto saxophone to the twit  in the audience and saying “Here then. YOU play like Charlie Parker.”

Anyway, in the late 1950s (after Charlie Parker had died) Sonny Stitt sat in as on alto saxophone with the Oscar Peterson trio of which Ray Brown (bass) and Ed Thigpen (drums) were the other two members. They made a classic album for the Verve label which features a number of Charlie Parker numbers. Oscar Peterson isn’t my absolute favourite jazz pianist but it has to be said that he and his sidemen build up a colossal head of steam on these records, especially the one I’ve picked which is called Au Privave.

I tried for ages to unravel this intricate little tune. It’s basically a twelve-bar blues, but it is built  on much more complicated chords than the usual blues cycle. In its simplest form, the blues involves only three chords, the same three that most rock-and-roll tunes are built on. The foundation is a  “tonic” chord (T) based on the root note of whatever key it’s played in, often a basic triad consisting of the first, third and five notes of a major scale starting on that note or including the dominant 7th. The next chord is the subdominant chord  (S), shifting things up by a perfect fourth relative to the tonic, and then finally we have the dominant (D) which brings us up by a fifth from the original root note.

The basic twelve-bar blues has one chord per bar. The first four bars are accompanied by the tonic, then the subdominant S takes over for two bars followed by a return to the tonic for another two. The last four bars introduce the dominant (but only for one bar), followed by S for one and then back down to the root for the final two.

In a standard blues in F the sequence would thus be

| F| F| F |F | B♭| B♭| F| F | C| B♭| F| F|,

or possibly with F7 etc. The slow and relatively simple progression of chords gives these  blues a rather statuesque form: the soloist has to be really good to keep the thing going without getting bogged down. When played by a master even the simplest blues can be immensely powerful, but they can also be very dull when played not so well. It may be simple, but it certainly isn’t easy.

Au Privave is in F but has considerably more complicated changes than the bog-standard F blues. Parker inserted several intermediate chords to keep the harmonies moving and dispensed with some of the conventional progressions.  There are also more chords, usually two per bar rather than just one. The sequence here looks more like

| F| Gm7C7| F |Cm7F7| B♭| B♭| F7Gm7| Am7D7 | Gm7| C| FD7| G7C7|,

although I’m not sure I got them right as it tends to be played very fast! It’s a lot more to remember, but it’s also a much more dynamic setting  to improvise in which is what people like Charlie Parker wanted to create. Instead of moving quasi-statically through perfect intervals each chorus, you run helter-skelter through a constantly shifting harmonic environment. Notice also that there’s no comfortable return to the tonic at measure 12, even. The appearance of a C7 chord here is called a turnaround. Complicated? Yes, I suppose it is. But whenever I hear it played by Sonny Stitt it’s always just four minutes of sheer exhilaration.

Oh, and there’s another thing. Listen to the chorus that starts about 2:58. Did he really play all twelve bars without breathing?

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Classic Collection

Posted in Biographical, Music with tags , , on October 16, 2009 by telescoper

I’ve been told on more than one occasion that some people find all the stuff about opera and poetry and the like is a bit too highbrow for them. In an effort to make myself more commercially relevant I’ve therefore decided to include something a bit different from my usual line of music posts.

Twenty years ago, while I was still living in Brighton, I didn’t go to the Opera or to classical music concerts at all, but instead went out most nights to various nightclubs (most of which have now closed down). This was all before I became too old and decrepid to be anything but an embarrassment in such a context. I also had a habit of buying singles of the records I heard night after night in the clubs which I would play before going out to get me into the mood for a boogie. I like dancing, in case you hadn’t guessed.

In recently sorted through my old vinyl record collection and hunted through Youtube to find the corresponding videos. So here are three examples from my own classic collection which will hopefully prevent any further accusations that this blog is too erudite. It won’t do much for my street cred with the younger generation, though, as these records are all older than most students.

First one up is from the cheesy end of the spectrum. It’s the sublime Bananarama, doing a very camp cover version of the Supremes’ hit Nathan Jones. I want you to pay particularly close attention to the video as I expect you all to learn the moves. There’ll be a test. Right hand on right hip. Left arm extended. Ready? Go!

Number two in my hit parade belongs to the commercial wing of the Acid House movement that swept through dance clubs during the late 1980s. S’Express released Hey Music Lover in 1989 and it immediately became one of my favourite things to dance to. It’s nowhere near as effective watching it on a small screen, away from the thumping sounds and whirling psychedelic environment of a nightclub, but this one always used to make the blood rush to my head and it also seemed to get the best out of the best dancers. Note the sly references to Federico Fellini in the video.

Lastly but definitely not leastly is easily the best dance record of the classical period under consideration. It deserves to be in the collection because it still packs the dance floors twenty years on. Fabulously funky, tantalising trippy and devilishly danceable, this was a huge hit in 1990 for the fantastic Dee-Lite – here is a medley of their hit Groove is in the Heart.

And that’s enough of that.

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Lux Aeterna

Posted in Music with tags , , on October 12, 2009 by telescoper

Since my recent trip to see György Ligeti‘s extraordinary Opera Le Grande Macabre, I’ve been trying to find out a bit more about the composer. I’ve stumbled across a few of his works, including some very strange and difficult piano pieces which I might put up here sometime. However, I thought it would be nice to acknowledge probably his most famous work particularly because it came up in a previous post.

Lux Aeterna is a choral work for sixteen unaccompanied voices which was written in 1966. Along with excerpts from his Requiem (from the Kyrie and Dies Irae) and the orchestral piece Atmospheres (1961), this composition formed part of the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. What I didn’t know until reading about Lux Aeterna was that Kubrick didn’t bother to ask for permission to use Ligeti’s work in his film and it was only after heated discussions that he agreed to pay the composer a fee. Ligeti doesn’t seem to have minded that much, however, as he subsequently went on record saying that he admired Kubrick’s work enormously.

Lux Aeterna (“Eternal Light”)  can be thought of as a kind of postscript to the Requiem and its text comes from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead (in Latin):

Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia pius es. Requiem aeternum dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis.

 Although the piece is officially dated later than Ligeti’s setting of the rest of the Requiem Mass, the compositional technique he used seems to be similar and its emotional feel seems also  to belong with that longer work. It’s an uncompromisingly avant-garde work, exploiting a dense atonal polyphony to create a strange atmosphere that seems to combine agonised apprehension with a kind of bewildered exhilaration.

Here it is combined with images from the film and various bits of interesting information about Ligeti’s life and music.

I can only speak directly for myself, of course, but I suspect many will agree with me that it’s a remarkably effective piece on its own that has even greater  impact in the context of the movie. However, I wonder how many would say that it is  beautiful? I know I would.

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Le Grand Macabre

Posted in Opera with tags , , , on October 4, 2009 by telescoper

According to the programme notes, Le Grand Macabre is an anti-anti-Opera in that it is to some extent a reaction against an artistic movement (“anti-Opera“) that sought to avoid and/or subvert the conventions of Opera. Thinking as a physicist, on the basis that C2=1, you would be forced to call this work an Opera, but György Ligeti‘s extraordinary apocalyptic surrealist farce is unlike any Opera I’ve ever seen. The production now running at English National Opera (which I went to see last night, Saturday 3rd October 2009) is a fabulously over-the-top realization of this wonderfully quirky piece of  musical theatre.

I’m not sure I can really describe the plot as there isn’t one as such. The Opera is split onto four scenes which are like comic sketches bearing only slight narrative relationship to each other. The result is a bit like Monty Python meets The Magic Flute. However, Mozart’s Opera managed to become an acknowledged masterpiece without its plot making any kind of sense, so in that respect this work is certainly in good company!

It probably suffices to explain that Le Grand Macabre is actually Death (in the Opera his real name is Nektrotzar and he’s played by Pavlo Hunka). He keeps appearing, complete with scythe, trumpet and egg-timer and warning of the forthcoming End of the World. Somehow, though, there’s always an excuse for it not arriving; just like the British railways. At one point, just as he seems to be getting it together to send everyone to their doom, two characters ply him with wine so he’s too sozzled to blow the Last Trump. The idea of getting Death too drunk to organize Armageddon is just one example of the  bizarre sense of humour that courses throughout this piece.

Other principals include the lovers Amando and Amanda who are dressed in costumes of flayed skin, like refugees from the Bodyworlds exhibition. These two are at it like rabbits all the time, but also have lovely music to sing while they’re on the job. Apparently their names were originally supposed to be Spermando and Clitoris, but it was decided that was a bit too rude…

We also have the court astrologer (Astradamors; Frode Olsen)) and his dominatrix wife (Mescalina; Susan Bickley), the latter with fake comedy boobs, a full wardrobe of SM gear and an excessively hairy “spider” (nudge nudge). Prince Go-Go is the effete ruler who wears a gold suit  and who blames the impending annihilation of his land on his ministers, a role brilliantly sung by counter-tenor Andrew Watts. I’ve never heard a male singer with such effortless control at the extreme end of his vocal range.  And while we’re on about stratospheric singing, I have to mention Susanna Andersson who doubles as the goddess Venus (in a diaphonous suit that looked like it was made of pink candy-floss) and Gepopo, the chief of the secret police (in full modern body armour).

Le Grand Macabre is set in the imaginary Bruegelland, inspired by the paintings of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymous Bosch and this production borrows a great deal of imagery from their paintings.  The critics have devoted a great deal of attention to the spectacular set, but reading about it doesn’t really prepare you for the real thing. After a short piece of film projected onto a giant screen, the curtain goes up to reveal a huge-scale torso of a naked woman that looms over the stage (see below). The head of this figure moves, clever projection effects give it facial expressions and change the appearance of its body into, e.g., a skeleton, its eyes sometimes glow red, and the whole thing also rotates so it can be viewed from different directions and used in different ways in different parts of the Opera. At various points characters emerge from the mouth, nipples, and other orifices. Yes, from there too!

All the action is carried out in front of, on top of, or inside this amazing structure. In one scene the figure has been cut in half exposing its insides, an image clearly originating in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights:

Soldiers first force their way on stage through huge wobbly intestines, then the empty body cavity becomes a nightclub in which amongst other things, the dancers do a hilarious skit on Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

Making this whole thing work to such stunning dramatic effect is an amazing achievement, and this production is worth seeing just for that. At least part of the joy of Opera is the sense of spectacle and this is indeed spectacular.

But I think it’s also important not to let the scenery and staging overshadow the rest of the work too. Although its critical reception has been very mixed, I thought Le Grand Macabre was absolutely superb. My companions thought it was a blast too.

For a start, it is hilariously funny (although quite rude and sexually explicit). Part of the humour is crudely lavatorial: there’s a sequence where two characters have a obscene name-calling contest which would have schoolboys chuckling with glee, and the whole show abounds with knob jokes and scatological remarks. However, there’s another level to the humour that derives from references to other composers and operas. My musical vocabulary isn’t that wide, but I definitely spotted irreverent quotes from Monteverdi, Beethoven, and Wagner. The final scene of the opera – a kind of epilogue for which all the principals return to the stage  and sing sanctimonious platitudes to the audience – just has to be a pisstake of the ending of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The designers of the Opera also took a cue from the nature of the music, to make lots of visual jokes on stage. I’ve already mentioned the Michael Jackson reference – which was great – but there’s also more than a nod in the direction of Ridley Scott.

Don’t get the impression that this is just a kind of pastiche. Ligeti does  borrow ideas from elsewhere but there’s also a lot of his own uniquely quirky musical material in it too. From the Dress Circle we could see the orchestra pit filled with peculiar bits and pieces: sledge hammers, whistles, air raid sirens and the like. But there are passages with a fairly conventional orchestration that are just as  innovative as those for which the funny instruments and special effects are needed. I didn’t know much about Ligeti’s music before this performance, but I’m definitely going to listen to more of his work in the future.

So there we are then. My second Opera in two days, and both of them were superb. Le Grande Macabre, played to a full house at the Coliseum, and Friday’s Wozzeck were greeted with enthusiastic applause. I’m heartened that it’s not only La Traviata that bring people to the Opera. However, that’s all the Opera I’ll be seeing and writing about until mid-November.  Until then no doubt I’ll be returning to the real Bruegelland of UK science funding…

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Wozzeck

Posted in Opera with tags , , on October 3, 2009 by telescoper

It was a late decision for me to go to see Welsh National Opera‘s production of Wozzeck last night (Friday 2nd October) at the Wales Milennium Centre. It has been a busy week and I’m travelling at the weekend too, so I wasn’t sure I could fit it in. In the end, I am really glad I did because it was by far the best of the three operas WNO are presenting in the current season; you can read about the other two here and here.

Stylistically, Wozzeck (composed by Alban Berg) is a far cry from Madam Butterfly and La Traviata but it is also a tragedy of some sort. The principal character – Wozzeck himself –  is one of life’s losers. The Opera opens with him establishing his servile nature by shaving a character called the Captain in order to supplement his salary. The original story has a military setting, but in this production it is moved to a factory producing tins of baked beans.

Wozzeck has fathered a child out of wedlock with Marie and is doing everything he can to earn money for her and their son. Later on we find out that he is also trying to earn cash by helping another character, the Doctor, in a medical experiment the main element of which seems to involve eating a large quantity of the baked beans produced in the factory.

Perhaps caused by his peculiar diet as well as the stress of his personal situation, Wozzeck is clearly losing his marbles. He suffers from hallucinations. Then Marie has an affair with another character, the Drum Major – we know he’s a bad guy because he likes golf and wears nasty white shoes. The Doctor and the Captain see the Drum Major and Marie in flagrante delicto and subsequently taunt Wozzeck with his lover’s infidelity. Wozzeck goes berserk, challenges the Drum Major to a fight and gets himself badly beaten up for his trouble. He takes  out his frustration on Marie, luring her outside and then killing her by cutting her throat with an opened baked bean tin. He doesn’t have the sense to wash the blood from his hands and when this is spotted he returns to the scene and tries to find the murder weapon. In the original story Wozzeck had thrown the weapon (a knife) into a lake: trying to get it back in order to hide it in a better place he falls in and drowns. In this production he had thrown the tin can into a huge hopper full of similar tins. He falls into this and dies among the rubbish. In the final scene, his young son is told of the death of his mother and father but it doesn’t really sink in. He sings a childish song and opens a tin of baked beans. Like father, like son.

The stark industrialised scenery and drably austere clothing  serve to reinforce the steady dehumanisation of Wozzeck and accentuate his descent into madness.  The subtext is about the exploitation of the poor and disadvantaged; the message is that those to whom evil is done, do evil in return. Wozzeck’s actions are not condoned, but we know from the start that he’s a man in trouble and if only someone had helped him rather than everyone tormenting him, things might have turned out for the better. Shades of Peter Grimes.

Peter Hoare was a creepily comical Captain and Cliver Bailey an appropriately ghoulish Doctor. Marie was sung beautifully by Wioletta Chodowicz. But even these were somewhat eclipsed by Christopher Purves’ wonderful and deeply moving performance as the tortured Wozzeck. His singing and acting raised the level of this to truly world-class. One of the best I’ve ever seen.

The real star of the show for me, though, was Berg’s amazing music, which managed to be both sumptious and edgy at the same time. This is an atonal piece, and I know some people are pretty much allergic to music that doesn’t rest on a tonal framework. But the orchestral colours Berg achieves have a remarkable effect in combination with the action on stage and some of the more lyrical passages are intensely beautiful.

Actually, it’s a remarkable opera altogether. For a start it’s exceptionally compact. Three Acts each of five Scenes but the overall running time is about 90 minutes (with no interval). The music for each act is constructed like a concert work. The three Acts are marked Five Character Pieces, Symphony in Five Movements and Six Inventions (five of the latter accompany the scenes, the sixth is an orchestral interlude before the final scene). There are leitmotifs, unusual vocal techniques such as Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme, innovative rhythmic explorations with strange uses of percussion, and so on. Berg packs so much into this work that it is definitely one to listen to over and over again.

I and the rest of the audience responded very enthusiastically both to the performers on stage and  to the Orchestra of WNO who did full justice to a 20th Century masterpiece. Bravo!

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Blue Horizon

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on September 30, 2009 by telescoper

I just noticed that somebody put this on Youtube and I couldn’t resist putting it on here. This slow blues features an extended clarinet solo by the great Sidney Bechet. I’ve loved Blue Horizon ever since I was a kid, and think it has a good claim to be the finest instrumental blues ever recorded.  I also heard it more recently at the funeral of one of my Dad’s old jazz friends. Listening to it then it struck me that it’s not just one of the greatest blues, but must also be one of the greatest laments that has ever been produced in music of any kind. It’s absolutely pure sadness – there’s no bitterness, anger or resentment about it – and it develops through the stately choruses into a sense of great pride and even, ultimately, of triumph.

A few posts ago I blogged about the thrill of high-speed jazz. This perfomance is at the other end of the scale in terms of tempo, but you can still feel pull of the harmonic progression underlying the tune. In this case it’s  the chords of a standard 12-bar blues with that irresistible  cadence of perfect fourths leading back to the root at the end of each chorus. Bechet builds quite simply on this structure, but makes frequent telling use of searing  blue notes of heart-rending emotional power. If you don’t know what a blue note is then listen, from about 2.08 onwards, to a chorus that always makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

I should also mention that the fine piano accompaniment on this all-time classic piece (recorded in December 1944) is provided by Art Hodes. Bechet’s raw power and very broad vibrato probably won’t suit scholars of the classical clarinet, but I think this is absolutely wonderful.

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Madam Butterfly

Posted in Opera with tags , on September 27, 2009 by telescoper

Apparently the production of Giacomo Puccini‘s Madam Butterfly I saw last night is now over thirty years old , but the current revival by Welsh National Opera still managed to fill the Wales Millennium Centre. The critics might carp that a season of three operas that includes both this one and La Traviata isn’t exactly radical scheduling, but WNO has to cope with economic realities and they need to put bums on seats in order to survive. Recycling old productions like this is one way of maximising revenue that they can spend on future productions. Fortunately, although I have seen Butterfly several times, I haven’t seen this particular staging so have no reason to complain that it’s doing the rounds yet again.

The story must be familiar enough. Cio-Cio-San – the Madam Butterfly of the title – a 15 year old Geisha, is betrothed to Lieutenant BF Pinkerton of the United States Navy who has come to Japan with his ship. Pinkerton is contemptuous of all things Japanese, and shows his true nature by explaining that he has paid just 100 Yen  for his new wife via a marriage broker. She, however, is devoted to her new husband; so much so that she renounces her religion in favour of that of her man (although I doubt Pinkerton ever goes to church). Act I culminates with their wedding and a gorgeous love duet with the kind of ravishing music that only Puccini can supply.

Act II is set three years later. Pinkerton has gone back to the States, but Butterfly waits patiently for his return, singing the beautiful aria Un bel di vedremo, or One Fine Day as it is usually translated. Her maid Suzuki thinks that he will never come back – she never liked Pinkerton anyway – and points out that they’re running out of money, but Butterfly refuses to contemplate giving up on him and marrying again. She  has had a son by Pinkerton and intends to remain faithful. At the end of Scene 1 we find that Pinkerton’s ship has arrived and Butterfly waits all night to greet him. The exquisitely poignant cora a bocca chiusa (humming chorus) accompanies her vigil.

After this intermezzo, Scene 2 finds  us at dawn the following day. Butterfly is asleep. Pinkerton shows up, but he has brought with him a new American wife who offers to rescue Butterfly from poverty by adopting her son and taking him to America. Butterfly awakes, finds out what has happened. Pinkerton has left money for her but she refuses to take it, having already decided to kill herself.  She says goodbye to her son with the heartbreaking aria  Tu, tu piccolo iddio, binds his eyes so he can’t see, then kills herself. Pinkerton and his wife arrive to see her bloody corpse.

In this production the principals were Amanda Roocroft, an excellent singer and a fine actress but a bit miscast as Butterfly. Tenor Russell Thomas on the other hand was exactly right as Pinkerton: brash burly and arrogant but with a superb tenor voice. Pinkerton is a complete bastard, of course, but he has to have enough charisma for you to imagine that it’s possible Butterfly to fall for him. Their singing together at the end of Act I was rapturous, dispelling any doubts about the reality of the mutual desire.

The staging is quite simple: a traditional Japanese house with sliding screens surrounded by stylised trees and gardens. The costumes were less colourful than I had expected, dominated by browns and beiges rather than brightly coloured pattern silks. Thankfully they resisted the temptation to plaster on the make-up to try make the characters look Japanese; all that ever achieves is to make all concerned look ridiculous.

The original production of Madam Butterfly was staged in 1904 (although it took several revisions before the two-act version we saw last night emerged). It therefore dates from a time when Europeans (including Puccini) were quite ignorant about Japanese culture. Modern audiences probably find some of the stereotypes rather uncomfortable. I would say, however, that the only two characters in the Opera to show any moral integrity and nobility of spirit are the maid Suzuki and Butterfly herself. The rest are unpleasant in some way or other, especially Pinkerton who is completely odious. So the Opera is not nasty about Japan, although its attitudes are a bit dated.

Madam Butterfly is worth it for the music alone – call me a softy but I love Puccini’s music. The score was handled beautifully in this performance by Carlo Rizzi. He’s a master storyteller too and it’s a beautifully crafted piece of musical theatre.

Overall I’d probably give this production about 7/10: enjoyable and professionally done, but perhaps with just a hint that it is nearing the end of its shelf-life. Although at times it was wonderfully impassioned, at other times I had the feeling that the cast were just going through the motions.

I have been dithering about mentioning one unfortunate thing about the production, which did have people around us sniggering. Butterfly’s son is blond with blue eyes –  she sings about this,  in case there is any doubt. Russell Thomas (Pinkerton)  is an African-American. The plot involves a scene in which questions are asked about whether Pinkerton really is the boy’s father. That is not supposed to be funny, but it was glaringly obvious that the son of  black man and a Japanese woman is not going to have blond hair and blue eyes…

You always have to suspend your disbelief a bit in the opera theatre, but this was going a bit far. There’s no reason at all not to cast a black singer as Pinkerton, especially when he has such a fine voice. He looked the part as a naval officer, but surely something could have been done to avoid this obvious absurdity?

Anyway, I don’t want to end on a blemish so here’s a short clip of the humming chorus taken from a production with staging not dissimilar to what we saw last night, complete with authentic coughing from the audience.

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La Traviata

Posted in Opera with tags , on September 19, 2009 by telescoper

Summer must be over: the students are returning to University next week;  the cricket season is just about to end; the football season is well under way; the Last Night of the Proms is all done and dusted. But at least it all means the Opera season has started again!

Last night I went to the Wales Millennium Centre to see Welsh National Opera’s production of La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi. Actually, to be precise, this was a co-production with Scottish Opera who supplied the sets scenery and costumes, it was directed by David McVicar and was first staged in Scotland before transferring to Wales for this run.

La Traviata is one of the most enduringly popular of all operas – and is one of the most frequently performed. It’s quite curious that its first performance in Venice was a complete disaster and it took several revisions before it became established as part of the operatic repertoire. A production like the one we saw last night, however, makes it abundantly clear why it is such an evergreen classic. Act I in particular is just one memorable tune after another.

The opera is based on the novel La Dame Aux Camélias which later became a play with the same name. It tells the story of Violetta, a glamorous courtesan and flamboyant darling of the Paris party scene. She meets a young chap called Alfredo at a spectacular do in her house in Act I and he tells her he’s completely in love with her. She laughs him off and he departs crestfallen. When the party’s over and  he’s gone, though, she finds herself thinking about him. The trouble with Violetta is that she is already seriously ill with consumption (tuberculosis) at the start. She knows that she is doomed to die and is torn between her desire to be free and her growing love for Alfredo.

Cut to Act II, Scene I, a few months later. Violetta and Alfredo are shacked up in a love nest away from Paris. While Alfredo is away paying off some of Violetta’s bills, Alfredo’s father Giorgio turns up and tries to convince Violetta to abandon her relationship with his son because its scandalous nature threatens their family’s prospects, particular his daughter’s (Alfredo’s sisters) plans to get married. Violetta eventually agrees to do a runner. Alfredo returns and meets his father who tries to convince him to return to his family in Provence. Alfredo is distraught to hear of Violetta’s departure, refuses to go with his father, and vows to find Violetta again.

Scene 2 is back in Paris, at the house of a lady called Flora. There’s a lot of singing and dancing and general riotousness.Alfredo turns up, slightly the worse for drink and proceeds to gamble (winning a huge amout of money). Violetta turns up and Alfredo insults her by throwing his winnings at her. He’s then overcome by remorse but the Baron Douphol, a wealthy friend of Violetta, is outraged and challenges Alfredo to a duel.

Act III is set a few months later in Violetta’s bedroom where she’s clearly dying. Alfredo has run off after wounding the Baron in a duel. The doctor gives Violetta just a few hours to live. Alfredo returns. The lovers forgive each other and embrace. Violetta dies.

In this performance Violetta was Greek soprano Myrtò Papatanasiu, a name that’s quite new to me. She’s tall, elegant and has a lovely voice. Violetta is quite a demanding role- there are several tricky coloratura passages to cope with – but her character is quite complicated too. Although we know she’s ill right from the start she’s not by any means a passive victim. She’s a courtesan who has clearly put it about a bit, but she’s also got a strong moral sense. She’s vulnerable, but also at times very strong. I thought Myrtò Papatanasiu was a wonderful Violetta who not only sang beautifully but had a mesmerising stage presence.

The other star of the show (for me) was Dario Solari as Alfredo’s father. His richly textured baritone voice was a revelation to me. He was quite limited as an actor but musically excellent.

Tenor Alfie Boe’s Alfredo was less convincing. His voice was not as powerful as the other principals and at times he sounded very strained. He’s quite small in stature as well as voice and I found it hard to imagine that this particular Violetta would fall so dramatically for him. However Alfredo is torn between the powerful personalities of Violetta and his father so in a strange way his relative weakness worked out pretty well in that mixture.

The  look of the opera – staging and costumes – was also stunning. The Paris parties were riots of colour and movement with just as much debauchery as desired.

All in all an excellent production which I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. It was so good, in fact, that even after seeing it many times, and knowing very well what was going to happen, the final scene of Violetta’s death was still deeply moving. My love of Italian opera makes me regret even more that the UK will be be leaving the European Union in 2020.

Finally, I should also mention that La Traviata has a wonderful overture. I’ll probably stop going to opera when I no longer get butterflies in my stomach during the overture. It’s childish but I still get excited like that sitting  in the theatre waiting for the performance to start. This overture certainly does that for me, and it also underlines the  underlying tragedy of the story. Opening with ghostly strings that presage Violetta’s inevitable death, it then bursts into one of the beautiful melodies that Verdi seemed to be able to produce at the drop of a hat. Genius.

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Making the Changes

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on September 15, 2009 by telescoper

I often find myself trying to explain to people why I love listening to Jazz. Most people either don’t know much about it or don’t like it at all, especially if it’s “modern”. The trouble is, explaining why it’s so hard to play jazz doesn’t usually make people want to go and listen to it.  “There’s no proper tune”  and  “It’s just noise” are just a couple of the comments I heard in a pub a few weeks ago when somebody put a Miles Davis track on the internet jukebox.

It’s partly a matter of language, of course. The most exquisite Japanese poetry probably sounds like noise to a Westerner who can’t understand the language. When it comes to jazz,  even if you do know a bit about the music you’re by no means guaranteed an easy listening experience. But, played at the highest level, with a driving rhythm section and a star soloist improvising through a constantly shifting pattern of harmonies, there’s no music to match it for sheer white-knuckle intensity.

Far from being “just noise”,   jazz is a tightly disciplined musical form. The freedom given to the soloist to create their own melody comes in fact at a very high price because the melodic line of a jazz solo must constantly recalibrate itself in relationship to the harmonic changes going on beneath it. The chord progression within which the original melody was embedded provides the soloist with the challenge of playing something that fits as well as being new and interesting to listen to.  Usually the actual tune is played only briefly at the start and thereafter becomes pretty much irrelevant until recapitulated at the end of the performance. What really matters to a jazz soloist is not the original melody but the chords.

Each chord establishes a tonal centre and a related scale that  furnishes a reference frame in the space of possible musical notes. When the rest of the band makes the chord changes the soloist must transform to a different coordinate system. The progression of chords as the tune unfolds thus has the effect of pushing and pulling the soloist in different tonal directions. A great jazz solo requires strict adherence to this framework and it imposes tremendous discipline on all the musicians involved.

In a slow 12-bar blues the gravitational effect of the relatively simple chord pattern is especially strong, which is no doubt why it has such a powerfully expressive effect when the soloist plays a “blue note” such as a flattened fifth on top of major scale chords.

In more complicated tunes keeping your place within the constantly shifting harmonic framework is a real challenge, especially if the chord progression is complicated and especially at fast tempi in which the chord changes go flying past at a rate of knots. Such numbers turn into a rollercoaster ride for both musicians and audience.

It’s not just the speed of fingers that makes great soloists so electrifying, but their astonishing mental agility. I remember seeing the great saxophonist Sonny Stitt at Ronnie Scott’s club in London playing the jazz standard How the Moon. Nothing unusual about that because it’s part of the jazz repertoire. The thing was, though, that he played 12 choruses, each one in a different key. How he managed to keep track of everything is completely beyond me. I wasn’t the only one in the audience shaking his head in disbelief.

Giant Steps by John Coltrane is an example I posted a while ago of a supreme piece of high-speed improvisation, and I thought I’d follow it up with this wonderful performance  in which the legendary Charlie Parker plays an extended solo, very fast.

The tune is in fact a variation of a 1930s hit  called Cherokee. Most popular tunes have a 32 bar basic format of the type AABA, with B representing the bridge or middle eight. Cherokee has a similar structure, but is 64 bars long. Its chord progression is both complicated and unusual, with lots of changes to remember especially in the (16-bar) bridge which is fiendishly difficult to play. This makes it fertile ground for improvising on and it quickly became a standard test vehicle for jazz soloists and a yardstick by which saxophonists in particular tended to measure each other’s skill.

During the bebop era it became fairly common practice for musicians to borrow chord sequences from other tunes. Many Charlie Parker pieces, such as Anthropology, are based on the chords from I Got Rhythm for example. There’s a famous story about a recording session involving Charlie Parker during which the band decided to do a version of Cherokee (i.e. using the chord sequence but with a different melody). During the take, however, they absent-mindedly played the actual melody rather than playing something else over the chords. There was a cry of anguish from producer in the control room who had hoped that if they stayed off the actual tune of Cherokee he wouldn’t have to pay composers royalties and the performance ground to a halt.  Shortly after, they did another take, called it Ko-ko and it quickly became a bop classic. This is a later version of Ko-ko, played live, during which Bird runs through the changes like a man possessed. What it must be like to be able to play like this!

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