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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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Also Sprach Zarathustra

Posted in Biographical, Music, Poetry with tags , , , , on September 8, 2009 by telescoper

Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of the great composer Richard Strauss in 1949. I’ve already used up the music which is probably the most appropriate for this occasion, so I thought I’d mark it instead with a clip from the work that is probably most familiar to my likely readership, Also Sprach Zarathustra, as used in the closing stages of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This little clip is from the final stages of the film, though the music itself is from the opening segment of the Strauss work, the part that represents the Sunrise.

For people of my age, this music is inextricably linked not only with the film, but also with the TV coverage of the moon landings that happened about the same time as its release, about 40 years ago, and for which it also provided the theme music. I don’t know which came first. I’d love to be able to say that these events are behind what made me become an astrophysicist but, as I’ve explained before, the truth is somewhat different.

Anyway, the theme of transfiguration and rebirth depicted in the movie  seems to me to be one more closely related to Strauss’ earlier work Tod und Verklärung,  and it always makes me think of the following lines from East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets by TS Eliot:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

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Happy Birthday Bird!

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , , on August 29, 2009 by telescoper

I was listening to Jazz Record Requests on BBC Radio 3 this afternoon, which reminded me that today is the 89th anniversary of the birth of the great Charlie Parker, who was known to his friends as “Bird”. Looking for something to celebrate with, I was delighted to find on Youtube this version of the classic bebop tune Anthropology, which appeared on another blog post of mine about Bud Powell (who also plays on this track). This clip (inevitably without video I’m afraid) is in fact taken from the first ever Charlie Parker LP I bought when I was about 15 and which I still have. Sadly, it has never been released on CD so I’m very glad I held onto the LP for so long.

No information is provided on Youtube, but referring to the sleeve note reveals that the track was recorded from a radio broadcast live from  Birdland in New York City on March 31st 1951 using a primitive disc recording machine by an amateur recording buff called Boris Rose. The sound quality isn’t great, but he deserves much greater recognition for capturing this and so many other classic performances and preserving them for posterity.

The personnels consist of Charlie Parker (alto saxophone), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Bud Powell (piano), Tommy Potter (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums).

Here’s what the sleevenote (written by Gary Giddens) says about this track:

“Anthropology is an “I Got Rhythm” variation which originally appeared, in a slightly different form, as “Thriving on a Riff” on Parker’s first session as leader. The tempo is insanely fast; the performance is stunning. Bird has plenty of ideas in his first chorus, but he builds the second and third around a succession of quotations: “Tenderly”, “High Society”, “Temptation.” Gillespie’s second chorus is especially fine – only Fats Navarro had comparable control among the trumpeters who worked with Bird. His blazing high notes tend to set his lyrical phrases in bold relief. Bud, the ultimate bop pianist (and much more), jumps in for two note-gobbling choruses: no quotes, though, it’s all Powell. The four bar exchanges that follow demonstrate Hayne’s precision.

Spot on, but words aren’t really enough to describe this scintillating music, so listen!

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The Heldentenor

Posted in Opera with tags , , , , , , on August 28, 2009 by telescoper

Last week I was listening one of this summer’s Promenade concerts on the radio. The one in question featured the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a group of young Arab and Israeli players conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Before the music actually started there was a lengthy discussion by the radio pundits and members of the orchestra about the decision to include in their programme a piece by Richard Wagner, the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. The orchestra had actually done this as an encore piece previously, but had never had in on their published programme. The problem was that Wagner was a notorious anti-semitic bastard and his music is considered by many to be emblematic of German Nazism. Many members of the orchestra – not only those who happened to be Jewish, in fact – did not feel at all comfortable playing music that carried such distressing overtones. After much discussion, however, they had decided to reclaim Wagner’s music from its awful past and treat it as their own. The performance they produced last week was really excellent, I should add.

For reasons which should become obvious fairly soon, this spurred me on to put something up here by the great Danish singer  Lauritz Melchior. Born in Copenhagen in 1890, Melchior was probably the greatest of all the Heldentenors. If you don’t know what a Heldentenor is, it’s a term used to describe the heroic lead in most of Wagner’s operas. In the words of Anna Russell, he

… is very big, very strong, very brave, very stupid. He carries a spear and wears a helmet. He talks to birds, laughs at dragons, and travels by swan.

Melchior had an immensely powerful voice, which is obligatory if you have to cut through a huge Wagnerian orchestra, but, unlike many other singers who can sing very loud, he was also extremely accurate and his voice had a very rich texture. Other dramatic tenors of his day had purer voices – but if Richard Tauber‘s was polished silver, Melchior’s was more like wrought iron. It’s a matter of taste of course, but I haven’t heard any modern singers anywhere near as good as him in Wagnerian roles. For me, Melchior is the Heldentenor.

The other thing I should mention about Melchior was that he was Jewish (NOTE: This appears to be incorrect – see comments). Although he performed frequently in German opera houses – including  Bayreuth – during the 1920s, he stopped doing so in 1931 when Hitler and his cronies started systematically persecuting Jewish musicians. He spent much of the rest of his life as a star performer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and eventually took up American citizenship. Despite his ancestry and his hatred for the Nazis, however, he never stopped performing Wagner’s music.

When he  died in 1973,  Melchior’s body was transported back to his native Denmark and he was buried in the famous Assistens Cemetery in his home town of Copenhagen. His grave, in fact, is not far from that of the jazz musician Ben Webster.

I don’t know the date of this particular clip, but it was made for American television, I guess sometime during the 1950s. Melchior was already an old man by then, but I love the way he sets himself for this performance and you don’t have to make any allowance for his years. His diction is superb, there’s a wonderful timbre to his voice and when he unleashes the fortissimo his power is almost shocking. This is the narration In Fernem Land, from Wagner’s Lohengrin that also provides the theme for the exquisite instrumental Prelude to Act I of the opera, which also provided Anna Russell with her reference to travelling by swan..

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Consummation

Posted in Music, Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on August 27, 2009 by telescoper

Not long ago I put up an item containing a  poem by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Since I’ve been reading a collection which contains poems by another of the metaphysical poets, Thomas Traherne, I thought I’d pick one of his to put up too.

I was also reminded of Traherne’s poetry when John Peacock commented on another recent post because it was he that introduced me to the truly wonderful musical settings of some of Traherne’s poetry made by Gerald Finzi in his cantata Dies Natalis, and pointed me in the direction of the stunning recording of that work made by Wilfred Brown with the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Finzi (son of Gerald). Why Finzi –  and especially that work – is not better known is something I’ll never understand. But that’s another story…

The story of Thomas Traherne’s poetry is strange and fascinating. The son of  a cobbler, he was a devoutly religious man who lived most of his short life (1637-1674) in relative obscurity as a clergyman and theologian. He was a prolific writer of both prose and poetry, but very little of his work was published during his lifetime. Vast number of handwritten manuscripts survived his death, however, and many of these remained in the safekeeping of a local family in his native Herefordshire. However, in 1888 the estate of this family was wound up, sold, and the manuscripts became dispersed. Eventually, in 1897, one set of papers was  accidentally discovered in a bookstall. Traherne’s first volume of verse was published in 1903 and a second collection followed in 1908.

When these poems finally found their way into the literary world they were greeted with astonishment as well as deep appreciation and they were widely  influential: TS Eliot was a great admirer of Traherne, as was Dorothy L Sayers. The timing of their publication probably explains why Finzi’s music teacher, Ernest Farrar, suggested them to his young student; Finzi was born in 1901 and Farrar taught him as a young boy before he was called up for service in the First World War and killed in action in 1918.

Over the years further manuscripts  have also come to light – literally, in one case, because in 1967 another lost Traherne manuscript was found, on fire, in a  rubbish dump and rescued in the nick of time.

Traherne is sometimes described as the last metaphysical poet and, indeed, the last poems in the collection I have been reading are by him. However, it seems to me he might equally be described as the first romantic poet. The themes he tackles – love of nature and loss of childhood innocence – and his visionary, rhapsodic style have as much in common with William Blake and, especially, William Wordsworth as they do with better known metaphysical poets such as John Donne.

Traherne’s most famous poem is probably Shadows in the Water, but I decided to pick a relatively obscure one, primarily because it deals with matters close to the concerns of a cosmologist! The central theme is the inadequacy of human thought processes in finding a true description of reality or, if you like, full intercourse with nature. For the poet, this can only be achieved through God. This is the consummation referred to in the title.

He’s particularly good at capturing  how we tend to gloss over difficulties with our conceptual framework and how we invent things to plug the gaps. I particularly like the lines from the fourth verse “Wherein because we no//Object distinctly find or know,//We sundry things invent,//That may our fancy give content.” Dark matter?

Consummation

The thoughts of men appear
Freely to move within a sphere
Of endless reach; and run
Though in the soul, beyond the sun.
The ground on which they acted be
Is unobserved infinity.

Extended through the sky,
Though here, beyond it far they fly:
Abiding in the mind
An endless liberty they find:
Throughout all spaces can extend,
Nor ever meet or know an end.

They, in their native sphere,
At boundless distances appear:
Eternity can measure;
Its no beginning see with pleasure.
Thus in the mind an endless space
Doth naturally display its face.

Wherein because we no
Object distinctly find or know,
We sundry things invent,
That may our fancy give content;
See points of space beyond the sky,
And in those points see creatures lie;

Spy fishes in the seas,
Conceit them swimming there with ease;
The dolphins and the whales,
Their very fins, their very scales,
As there within the briny deep
Their tails the flowing waters sweep.

Can see the very skies,
As if the same were in our eyes;
The sun, though in the night,
As if it moved within our sight;
One space beyond another still
Discovered; think while ye will.

Which though we don’t descry,
(Much like by night an idle eye,
Not shaded with a lid,
But in a darksome dungeon hid)
At last shall in a glorious day
Be made its objects to display,

And then shall ages be,
Within its wide eternity;
All kingdoms stand
Howe’er remote, yet nigh at hand;
The skies, and what beyond them lie,
Exposed unto every eye.

Nor shall we then invent
Not alter things; but with content
All in their places see,
As doth the glorious deity;
Within the scope of whose great mind,
We all in their true nature find.

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Giant Steps

Posted in Jazz with tags , on August 21, 2009 by telescoper

After all the griping about musical taste  in two of my earlier posts this week (here and here), it’s probably good to put something up which I think is a masterpiece. You may, of course, disagree….

I came across this on Youtube a while ago. It made me think of the hours I spent trying to transcribe a Johnny Dodds clarinet solo from an old record, and that came out as a single page of music!

Here’s what the incredible virtuosity of John Coltrane‘s tenor sax playing looks like when written down. Or not quite. For some reason, the transcription is done as if the instrument is in Concert Pitch (C) whereas the tenor saxophone is a transposing instrument (B-flat). This means when you play what is written as C on the stave what actually comes out as B-flat, etc. Music for such instruments has to be written taking this into account, but this transcription doesn’t do so. There used to be (and probably still are, here and there) C-melody saxophones but they’re not very popular, and John Coltrane certainly wasn’t playing one on this track!

Neverthless, the speed and inventiveness of his playing is just amazing to behold. The tune is a Coltrane original which involves an unusual (and difficult to play) chord progression based on three keys shifted by major thirds.

It’s  called Giant Steps…

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