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Una Grande Vociaccia

Posted in Music, Opera with tags , , , , , , , on December 7, 2008 by telescoper

I missed an important anniversary this week. Had she still been alive, December 2nd 2008 would have been the 85th birthday of the most renowned opera singer of her time, Maria Callas.

She was born in 1923 in New York city of Greek parents who had moved there the previous year, and christened Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulou. Disenchanted with her deteriorating marriage, her mother abandoned her husband and took Maria and her sister back to Athens in 1937. Maria enrolled at the National Conservatoire of Greece the same year after winning a scholarship with the quality of her voice, which

was warm, lyrical, intense; it swirled and flared like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations.

At this age, Maria was a rather plump young lady with a rather deep voice. Initially, she aspired to be a contralto but at the Conservatoire she was encouraged instead to become a dramatic soprano. Accordingly, she underwent special training to raise her natural pitch (or tessitura) and learned how to control her remarkable voice more accurately so she could sing in a sufficiently disciplined fashion that she could take on the dazzling coloratura passages that she would perform in later years with such success. She also worked on her chest tones to broaden the scope of her voice in the mezzo region. Although she became more technically refined as a singer during this period, there were some things that didn’t change. One was the sheer power of her voice, which is something that we tend to notice less in these days of microphones and studio recordings. People who heard her sing live confess to being shocked at the sheer scale of sound she could deliver without amplification. Perhaps more tellingly, she eschewed many of the devices sopranos tended to use to control the highest notes, usually involving some alteration of the throat to produce accuracy at the expense of a thinner and more constricted tone. When Callas went for a high note, she always did so in a full-throated manner. This often produced a piercing sound that could be intensely dramatic, even to the extent of almost knocking you out of your seat, but it was a very risky approach for a live performance. Audiences simply weren’t used to hearing a coloratura sing with such volume and in such a whole-hearted way. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was certainly remarkable and often very moving. It was this aspect of her voice that led her friend Tito Gobbi (who sang with her in Tosca) to call it una grande vociaccia, which I translate in my schoolboy Italian as meaning something like “a big ugly voice”. That isn’t meant to be as disparaging as it sounds (Gobbi was a great admirer of Callas’ singing).

Having listened to lots of recordings of Maria Callas I have to admit that they are certainly not all good. Sometimes the voice didn’t come off at all. Unkindly, one colleague said that she “sang with her ovaries”. When she talked about her own noice, Callas herself often referred to it as if it were some independent creature over which she had very little control. Anyway, whatever the reason, when she was bad she was definitely bad. But I adopt the philosophy that one should judge artists (and scientists, for that matter) by their best work rather than their worst, and when Callas was good she was simply phenomenal, like a sublime and irresistible force of nature. That’s why they called her La Divina.

Although her talent was very raw in the beginning there was no question that she always had a voice of exceptional power and dramatic intensity. When she started singing professionally she immediately attracted lavish praise from the critics not just for her voice but also for her acting. As a young soprano she sang in an astonishing variety of operas, including Wagner‘s Tristan und Isolde and Die Walküre, neither of which one would now associate with Callas.

It was in the late 194os that Callas began to take an interest in the type of opera that would really make her name. Bel canto opera was rather unfashionable at that time, probably because audiences preferred the grittier and more realistic verismo style. Virtually single-handed, Callas resurrected the bel canto canon by injecting a true sense of drama into works which had previously just been seen as vehicles for the singers to demonstrate their art. Callas brought an entirely new dimension to the great operas by Bellini (Norma, I Puritani, La Somnambula…) and Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor, Anna Bolena), although she was sufficiently versatile to also perform brilliantly in the verismo syle of Verdi and Puccini as well as lesser known composers such as Giordano (Andrea Chenier). Recordings of many of these performances are available, but it is sad that this glorious period of her singing career happened just a bit before high quality equipment was available so the true glory of her voice isn’t always evident.

In 1953, Callas decided that she wanted to change her appearance, perhaps so she would look more appropriate for the parts she was playing on stage. At the time she weighed almost 200lbs. In order to lose weight as quickly as possible, she followed the barbarous but highly effective expedient of swallowing a tapeworm. She lost 80lbs in a matter of months. The dramatic loss of weight changed her body and her face, emphasizing her high angular cheekbones and giving her a striking look very well suited to the opera stage. But it also affected her voice somewhat, especially at the upper end where she seems to have found it more difficult to avoid the dreaded “wobble” which was one of the alleged imperfections that critics tended to dwell upon.

Callas also had very poor eyesight which required her to wear very thick spectacles in order to see at all, a thing she refused to do onstage with the result that she was virtually blind during performances. In fact, during a performance of Tosca at Covent Garden she leant too far over a candle and her hair caught fire. Improvising magnificently, Tito Gobbi, as the loathsome Scarpia, extinguished the fire by throwing water at her before the audience had noticed. Although they weren’t much use for seeing with, her eyes were a great asset for her acting, in turns flashing like a demon then shining like an angel.

After her weight loss, Callas was suddenly no longer just a wonderful singer but also a strikingly beautiful woman. Her career took a back seat as she started to revel in the glamorous lifestyle that opened up in front of her. Her voice deteriorated and she performed rather less frequently. Eventually she embarked on a love affair with Aristotle Onassis, a notorious serial collector of trophy women. She hoped to marry him but he abandoned her to marry Jackie Kennedy, widow of John F. Kennedy.

She never really recovered from the failure of this affair, retired from singing and lived out the last years of her life as a virtual recluse in her apartment in Paris. She died in 1977.

I had heard a lot about Maria Callas when I was younger, but the recordings that I listened to (generally from the 1960s) were really not very good as her voice was undoubtedly much diminished by then. I just assumed that, as is the case with many artists, the legend of Callas was all mere hype. Then, about fifteen years ago, I was listening to BBC Radio 3 and they played the final scenes of the great 1954 recording of Norma with Callas in the title role, conducted by Tullio Serafin. I was completely overwhelmed by it and tears flowed freely from my eyes. I’ve always had a tendency to blub when I hear really beautiful music, but as I’ve got older I’ve learned not to be embarrassed by it. At least I don’t cry at football matches.

In England, Callas is probably best remembered for her performances in Tosca in Covent Garden. I have recordings of her in that role and they are really wonderful. But there are many fine recordings of Tosca by other singers, some of which are almost as good. In the case of Norma, though, there isn’t any other performance that comes within a mile of the Callas version. Or if there is, I’ve yet to hear it.

Now I know that there are some people, even opera lovers, who just don’t get Callas at all (just look at the comment boards on Youtube). I grant that she wasn’t always the most accurate singer, and I don’t think you could say her voice had a purely classical beauty. But even if you don’t like her voice you have to admit that she revitalized the opera stage and brought a new public into the theatres. I can’t imagine what the state of opera would be now, if there hadn’t been a Callas and you can’t argue that she is now an iconic figure. What I admire most about her is that, like it or loath it, her voice is instantly recognisable. In this sense, she always puts me in mind of a kind of operatic version of Billie Holliday. She’s a far cry from the many bland mediocrities that pass themselves off as opera singers nowadays.

I’m going to end with the obligatory clips from Youtube. There’s a lot of Callas on there, not all of it good. I’ve chosen a couple of items, although neither of them has a proper video. The first was performed live in 1955 in front of the notoriously difficult audience at La Scala in Milan and recorded from a radio broadcast so that the sound quality is quite poor. A studio recording of this aria, from Andrea Chenier, features most movingly in the film Philadelphia. This live version, however, is notable for a number of reasons. One is that you get some idea of the power of the Callas voice in the way she pushes aside the entire orchestra and is even able to cut through the distortions introduced by the rather primitive recording technology. The second thing is that she sings it so beautifully, with such feeling, lovely phrasing, and so much colour and vitality. Listen to the way the texture of her voice matches perfectly her changing emotions as she tells her story. The shattering, climactic high C that occurs near the end is a perfect example of what I was saying above. She stabs this note out like her life depended on it. It sends shivers down my spine and clearly had the same effect on the audience. The thunderous applause that follows the end of this aria is quite frightening in its intensity, but gives a good idea how much her public adored her. If you can put up with the lo-fi recording, this is certainly a better performance than the studio version.

The final piece has to be from Norma. I think Bellini is a wonderful composer of opera, but he doesn’t make life easy for the singers. There’s never any doubling of the vocal line by the orchestra so the singer is very exposed. This doesn’t bother Maria Callas. This is the famous aria Casta Diva, which has become a kind of signature tune for her and it’s one of the pieces that she always seemed to perform beautifully. It might be a bit hackneyed but I love it and, after all, it’s my blog. There’s also a nice compilation of pictures.

I’d be interested to hear what the general opinion of Callas is based on a sample of the two or three people who read my blog, so please feel free to add your comments!

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Beethoven and Borge

Posted in Music with tags , on November 25, 2008 by telescoper

I still don’t seem able to shake off this cursed cold that I’ve had for nearly a week. I resorted to finding some of my favourite clips on youtube to cheer myself up. Actually these are so funny I think I’m quite likely to have a relapse. If there’s anyone else out there in the blogosphere who’s feeling a bit under the weather, I thought I’d share a couple of uplifting cultural moments with you.

The first is by the brilliantly talented musician and comedian Dudley Moore, who performs this hysterically funny parody of a Beethoven Piano Sonata. Dudley Moore was best known as a comedian and actor but music was his first love, and he was a wonderful pianist who could play lovely jazz as well as classical pieces. His only fault was probably that he never really acquired a style of his own. Playing Jazz, he usually sounded like Errol Garner and on the classical side he was much disposed to affectionate piss-takes like this. I particularly love the drawn-out ending which seems to take up about half the track! I wonder what old Ludwig Von would have thought of this? I suspect he would have loved it. Don’t believe everything you hear about Germans having no sense of humour.

The second is by the Danish comedian (yes, there are such things), Victor Borge. Playing half of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. It says on Youtube that it’s No. 2 but I think it’s great.

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Fine and Mellow

Posted in Jazz, Music with tags , on November 23, 2008 by telescoper

I’ve been off sick for the last few days with a nasty bug, but at least it’s given me the chance to listen to quite a lot of music. Yesterday, I was playing some of the classic recordings made in the 1930s by singer Billie Holiday and saxophonist Lester Young. I’ve had these for ages but for some reason haven’t listened to them for a while. Coming back to them after a long break just strengthened my belief that they are amongst the greatest recordings ever made in music of any kind.

Billie Holiday was born in Baltimore in 1915. After a grim and traumatic childhood she dabbled with prostitution and then ended up as a night club singer where she was spotted by talent scout John Hammond who arranged for her to make recordings with Benny Goodman‘s Orchestra in 1933. Most people don’t realise this but, by 1935, this band was a pop sensation on exactly the same scale as, say, the Beatles were to achieve three decades later.

In her early recording career, Billie wasn’t so well known so she was given relatively unpromising songs to sing. With her unique sense of phrasing, and a willingness to take outrageous liberties with both melody and rhythm, she turned out to be brilliant at turning this base metal into gold; some he was undoubtedly the best singer of a bad song there has ever been. If you ever get the chance to hear her versions of When you’re smiling or Back in your own Backyard you can marvel at how she manages to say everything about life and death using only the slenderest of lyrics.

Also featuring on both of these classic tracks was the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Nicknamed “The President”, or “Prez” for short, he was one of the greatest of all Jazz musicians. He had a sublime gift for melodic improvisations, coupled to unrivalled sense of sheer swing as befits a mainstay of Count Basie‘s magnificently propulsive big band of the late 1930s. The sound of Lester Young at full throttle with the Basie Band riffing away behind him must have been truly magnificent to hear live and is thrilling enough on record.

Although he wasn’t at all averse to a bit of rabble rousing, and loved to see people dancing as he played, Lester Young’s solos on the Billie Holiday recordings mentioned above showed the delicate side of his nature. People often say is that the reason the two of them worked so well together musically was that they had similar sense of phrasing. I don’t agree with that at all. Billie Holiday’s vocal style sound to be more like a feminine version of Louis Armstrong’s, derived from a trumpeter’s mannerisms rather than those of a saxophonist.

Lester Young and Billie Holiday became very close friends during this period, although there is no sign that they had any form of sexual relationship. Rumours have circulated that Lester Young was gay, although I don’t think there’s any evidence to back them up. It is true that he had a rather eccentric and perhaps effeminate demeanour, but it seems that’s just the way he was. During the war, Lester Young was conscripted into the US Army and this had a dreadful effect on him personally and on his career, not least because he wasn’t allowed to play his saxophone at all. The strict discipline and macho posturing of the army affected this gentle and introverted man very badly and drove him to a nervous breakdown. He was eventually discharged from the army and, although he started playing again, his career never regained the heights it had reached in the 1930s. He had frequent bouts of ill health owing to alcoholism and drug abuse and his recordings from the late forties and fifties are of uneven quality.

Billie Holiday’s career was also in decline during the 1940s, after she became addicted to heroin, and she was imprisoned on drugs charges in 1947. Cigarettes, booze and hard drugs ravaged her voice and, although she made a number of classic records in the 1950s, her vocal style was sometimes mannered and self-conscious. I definitely prefer the earlier recordings which show her at her most original. That said, there was one song from George Gershwin‘s Porgy and Bess that invariably inspired her to an intensely moving performance, including this sensational recording made just five months before her death in 1959.

But the reason for putting this all on my blog was that playing through these old records I remembered when I used to listen to Humphrey Lyttelton‘s Jazz programme on the radio. He once admitted on the air that there was a TV recording involving Billie Holiday and Lester Young that he couldn’t watch without bursting into tears. The programme “Sounds of Jazz” was made by CBS Television in the United States in 1957 and features a vast array of great musicians, including Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. But this excerpt is the bit that always got Humph going, and I don’t wonder why.

Lester and Billie had at one time been very close indeed, but had become estranged for some reason, and hadn’t recorded together for the best part of twenty years before this. Time had exacted its toll on both of them. Prez, in fact, was very ill during this broadcase and he looks it. Barely able to stand or hold the horn, when he plays he still manages to deliver a moving and poignant solo. The camera cuts to Billie’s reaction, full of tenderness and empathy and the emotional effect is overwhelming. So intense is that moment that you tend to forget the other magnificent players on this track (including Coleman Hawkins, the other leading saxophonist of the 1930s whose style was very different, but whom Lester Young deeply admired). As Nat Hentoff later recalled

Lester got up, and he played the purest blues I have ever heard, and [he and Holiday] were looking at each other, their eyes were sort of interlocked, and she was sort of nodding and half–smiling. It was as if they were both remembering what had been — whatever that was. And in the control room we were all crying. When the show was over, they went their separate ways.

Lester Young died in March 1959, a little over a year after this performance. In a taxi returning home from his funeral, Billie told a friend that she thought she would be the next. She died in July the same year.

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Boris Godunov

Posted in Music, Opera with tags , , on November 16, 2008 by telescoper

The production of Boris Godunov now playing at the Coliseum has had mixed reviews, largely because of the performance of Peter Rose as the tormented Tsar. I usually don’t find myself agreeing very much with what music critics say and I had been looking forward to English National Opera’s take on Mussorgsky‘s opera for some time. My trip to London this weekend gave me an excuse to see it for myself and form my own opinion.

The opera is based on a play by Pushkin which tells a story based on the historical figure who ruled Russian from 1598 until 1605. In the play, Boris Godunov only becomes Tsar after murdering the son Dmitriy of the previous Tsar, Ivan IV (“the terrible”) and is plagued with ghostly visions of the dead boy. His guilt drives him into madness and eventually to death, although in this production of the opera the audience doesn’t see how he dies.

In Tim Albery’s staging, the action is shifted forwards in time to pre-revolutionary Russia, with the costumes and designed hinting a time round about 1900. The production uses Mussorgsky’s original version of the opera which is not divided into acts, but spread across seven scenes (lasting about two hours and fifteen minutes) which are performed without an interval. The limitations of the minimalistic set are more than made up for by wonderful use of lighting at one point bathes the stage in gold and at another turns it into a chill Moscow streetscape.

The update of the period allows Albery to give this production a dimension that is entirely new. The ENO chorus deliberately conjures up the idea that revolution might be imminent. At several points the chorus appear in huge numbers on stage to be held at bay by only a few soldiers with rifles. This is a very effective device, especially since the chorus is in such good voice. The passion and attack of the mob is unleashed only sparingly but when it is it is very effective in providing a vocal backdrop to the developing plot.

Mussorgky’s music for Boris Godunov is romantic, richly textured, even lush in places and full of wonderful melodies. As you can imagine from the storyline it’s also rather dark and sombre, much of it in the basso profundo region.  That also goes for the singers: there is no conventional tenor role, though basses and baritones proliferate among the cast.

The one thing the music doesn’t have is a great deal of dramatic contrast, which I think must be why it appears to be difficult for the principals to bring their characters fully to life. It’s almost as if the opulence of the score holds them back. The other difficulty is that there are so many characters with not much time for the audience to get to know their personalities. Although they all sang well, I still felt they were strangers at the end. The one really outstanding performance in there was Brindley Sherratt (as the “chronicler” an old hermit called Pimen) who gave his character real depth and pathos.

And as for Boris himself? Was Boris good enough? I think Peter Rose actually sang very well and the limitations of his acting have been overemphasized by the critics. There aren’t that many opera singers who can act well, and he is certainly far from the worst I’ve seen. His voice is relatively light for a bass and he didn’t have the bottomless range that is really needed to get across the angst of the remorseful murderer.  In the scenes with Pimen (another bass) he generally suffered by comparison with his opposite number’s much richer sounds at the  low end of the register.

So, not for the first time, I am glad I ignored the critics and went ahead and bought my tickets for this. As it turned out I was sitting quite close to John Nettles (who plays Tom Barnaby in Midsomer Murders) and Jane Wymark (who plays his wife, Joyce,  in the same series). I half-expected there to be a murder during the performance.

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For You

Posted in Music, Opera with tags , , , on November 12, 2008 by telescoper

I had divided loyalties this evening. Tonight was a special showing of Blast-The Movie, a documentary film about an experiment involving several Cardiff astronomers. The movie has had pretty good reviews, so I originally intended to join my colleagues this evening watching it in Cardiff University’s Julian Hodge Building.

However, only last weekend I found out that tonight was also going to be the night for the Welsh premier of For You, a brand new opera composed by Michael Berkeley and with a libretto by Ian McEwan. As an added bonus, both composer and writer were going to be around to talk about the piece beforehand, so I decided to break ranks and go off to the Sherman Theatre to watch this new production by Music Theatre Wales.

The pre-performance talk was very interesting in describing how the work came about and how the collaboration between Berkeley and McEwan worked out in practice (basically words first, music after). I’d read something about this already and the opera has also been premiered in London so I’d read some of the reviews. The Guardian liked the music but was less keen on the words; the Times was uniformly positive.

So how was it? I actually thought the libretto was very fine indeed: the plot is simple but ingenious and there are some nice comedic touches to counterpoint the darkness of the overall feel. The music was what didn’t really work for me. I felt Berkeley’s score was far too dense and fussy. There’s so much going on in some passages that it subtracts from rather than adds to the text. The vocal lines often have to battle through the rest of the music like shoppers on a busy saturday afternoon on Oxford Street. Sometimes less is more.

In the opening scene the composer Charles Frieth is taking a rehearsal, with him on stage conducting the orchestra in the pit. The tuning-up sounds are carefully scored – quite a challenge for a composer, I think – and it’s a very clever opening. This idea comes back whenever there’s a particularly manic episode (usually involving the deranged Polish maid Maria), the apparent cacophony from the orchestra mirroring psychological disorder on stage. That works well too, at least the first time. But this device is used so often that it begins to irritate. If you’ve read my piece about Charles Ives you’ll realise that I’m quite partial to a bit of dissonance here and there but even I find repeated extended doses rather indigestible.

But it’s not all like that. Although it is variable, the music does have some lovely moments, including a cheeky quotation from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

The cast was pretty good too, especially since none of the characters are particularly likeable. Baritone Alan Opie was really good as Frieth and Amanda Collins sang wonderfully well as Maria (although she did overact quite a lot). The rest of the cast was solid rather than remarkable.

Overall, I’d say it was interesting rather than wonderful, but I’m definitely glad I went.

At the interval I went to the loo for a quick pee and as I was standing there answering the call of nature I realised that the composer was using the urinal next to me. That’s something you never get with Puccini….

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Statistics

Posted in Music, Poetry with tags , , on November 11, 2008 by telescoper

Not many summers ago, in 2004, I spent an enjoyable day walking in the beautiful Peak District of Derbyshire followed by an evening at the opera in the pleasant spa town of Buxton, where there is an annual music festival. The opera I saw was A Turn of the Screw, by Benjamin Britten: a little incongruous for Buxton’s fine little Opera House which is decorated with chintzy Edwardiana and which was probably intended for performances of Gilbert & Sullivan comic operettas rather than stark tales of psychological terror. When Buxton’s theatre was built, in 1903, the town was a fashionable resort at which the well-to-do could take the waters and relax in the comfort of one of the many smart hotels.

Arriving over an hour before the opera started, I took a walk around the place and ended up on a small hill overlooking the town centre where I found the local war memorial. This is typical of the sort of thing one can see in small towns the length and breadth of Britain. It lists the names and dates of those killed during the “Great War” (1914-1918). Actually, it lists the names but mostly there is only one date, 1916.

The 1st Battalion of the Nottingham and Derbyshire Regiment (known as the Sherwood Foresters) took part in the Battle of the Somme that started on 1st July 1916. For many of them it ended that day too. Some of their names are listed on Buxton’s memorial. On the first day of this offensive, the British Army suffered 58,000 casualties as, all along the western front, troops walked slowly and defencelessly into heavy fire from machine guns that were supposed to have been knocked out by an artillery barrage that had been tragically ineffective. Rather than calling off the attack in the face of this slaughter, the powers that be carried on sending troops to their doom for months on end. By the end of the battle in November that year the British losses were a staggering 420,000, while those on the German side were estimated at half a million.

These numbers are beyond comprehension, but their impact on places like Buxton was measurably real. Buxton became a town of widows. The material loss of manpower made it impossible for many businesses to continue after 1918 and a steep economic decline followed. It never fully recovered from the devastation of 1916 and its pre-war posterity never returned.

And the carnage didn’t end on the Somme. As the “Great War” stumbled on, battle after battle degenerated into bloody fiasco. A year later the Third Battle of Ypres saw another 310,000 dead on the British side as another major assault on the German defences faltered in the mud of Passchendaele. By the end of the War on 11th November 1918, losses on both sides were counted in millions.

The First World War ended a long time ago, and there is now only one living survivor of the British trenches, but the tragedy that it was shouldn’t be forgotten and neither should the sacrifices made by those caught up in the slaughter. Every year, we have Remembrance Sunday (which passed yesterday) for which it is traditional to wear a poppy after John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

And tomorrow morning, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – when the guns fell silent 90 years ago – I will stand (as I always do) for the two minutes of silence observed across the country. Some people consider the wearing of a poppy and the observance of the two minutes’ silence to be celebrations of militarism. I don’t. I wear mine with respect for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice (on both sides, including non-combatants, and in all wars not just the “Great” one). As their deaths recede into the past, these rituals are needed to stop us seeing them as mere statistics. Each name on the war memorial at Buxton represents a human life extinguished and is evidence of the capacity for inhumanity which we all possess and from which we must not be allowed to hide.

For me the poppy also symbolises anger for those whose arrogance and mendacity has led us into wars that we should have avoided. I thank my lucky stars that I never had to live through conflict on the scale my grandparents’ generation had to face and curse those who have inflicted that fate on others. I quote another great First World War poet, Siegfried Sassoon (writing here in prose) whose words are as apt today as they were ninety years ago:

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. On behalf of all those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception that is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

That could just as easily have been written about Iraq (2003) as Flanders (1917).

Benjamin Britten was the reason I went to Buxton that day in 2004 so its only fitting I should mention the moving performance of his War Requiem I listened to yesterday on the radio. This is a powerful work that interleaves the latin mass for the dead with poetry from the greatest of all the war poets, Wilfred Owen. This is his Anthem for Doomed Youth , which is set right at the beginning of the War Requiem, the references in the poem to church services adding tragic irony to his already powerful verse.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
-Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen died in battle in 1918, aged 25, just a week before the armistice was signed. Another statistic.

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Amen

Posted in Jazz, Music with tags on November 8, 2008 by telescoper

A few days ago I put up a short clip of The Train and the River taken from the opening moments of the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day. This post contains the two last numbers to feature in the film, and the last one in particular is very very special.

At the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Mahalia Jackson (“The world’s greatest gospel singer”) played a lengthy set on the Sunday evening, and the whole concert is available on CD.  She wasn’t really a jazz singer, but she was born in New Orleans (in 1911) and her style developed in the shadow of both the jazz and blues traditions that had their origins in her home town.

Three tracks from her 1958 concert made it into the film. Two of them are the sort of exuberant up-tempo stompers typical of Southern gospel music; there’s something about that beat that sets your pulse racing and makes it almost impossible to resist clapping your hands on the off beat. A fine example is this highly locomotive rendition of Didn’t it Rain, a tune written by the world’s greatest composer  (“Trad”) which has the crowd of jazz fans leaping about in the aisles.

As you can hear, Mahalia Jackson’s voice is simply phenomenal.  She has so much power and emotional expressiveness that she is in a class on her own when it comes to this kind of music. In fact she gave singing lessons to the young Aretha Franklin, the one “soul “singer who came anywhere close to that quality of voice. But if you really want to hear music with from the soul, listen to Mahalia Jackson.

Although she had a number of hit records, Mahalia Jackson refused to sign for any major record label and performed throughout her life almost exclusively on gospel radio stations. I think she could easily have become a pop star if she had wanted to, but she saw her mission in life to communicate her faith to others through music. She also used a great deal of her earnings to help others by founding school bursaries and through other charitable works.

As in this concert, she usually performed with a backing band of piano, bass and organ but despite the lack of a drummer they build up a tremendous forward momentum.

Terrific though that track undoubtedly is, what comes next is truly sublime. The Lord’s Prayer is such a familiar piece of text to anyone brought up in the Christian tradition that it is difficult to imagine in advance of hearing this performance that it could be sung in such a way. The contrast between this and the previous track is immense, which makes it even more effective. This is no rumbustious rabble-rouser, just a simple and pure expression of her own deep religious faith. 

Almost as moving as her singing are the cuts to the audience reaction – the same people who were leaping about a few minutes earlier sit in deep and respectful contemplation. And who wouldn’t.. I’m not a religious man but there is certainly religious music that moves me very deeply, and this is a prime example.

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Parallel Lives

Posted in Music, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on November 6, 2008 by telescoper

I’ve just finished reading The Life of Charles Ives by Stuart Feder, which I bought some time ago with my Cambridge University Press author discount and I’ve had on my shelves without getting around to read it until this week. It’s a very interesting and informative biography of one of the strangest but most fascinating composers in the history of classical music.

Charles Ives was by any standards a daring musical innovator. Some of his compositions involve atonal structures and some involve different parts of the orchestra playing in different time signatures. He also wrote strange and wonderful piano pieces, including some which involved re-tuning the piano to obtain scales involving quarter-tones. Among this maelstrom of modern ideas he also liked to add quotations from folk songs and old hymns which gives his work a paradoxically nostalgic tinge.

His pieces are often extremely diffficult to play (so I’m told) and sometimes not that easy to listen to, but while he’s often perplexing he can also be exhilarating and very moving. Other composers might play off two musical ideas against each other, but Ives would smash them together and to hell with the dissonance. I think the wholeheartedness of his eccentricity is wonderful, but I know that some people think he was just a nut.. You’ll have to make your own mind up on that.

My favourite quote of his can be found scrawled on a hand-written score which he sent to his copyist:

“Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have – I want it that way.”

But the point of adding this post to my blog was that in the course of reading the biography, it struck me that there is a strange parallel between the life of this controversial and not-too-well known composer and that of Albert Einstein who is certainly better known, especially to people reading what purports to be a physics blog.

For one thing their lifespans coincide pretty closely. Charles Ives was born in 1874 and died in 1954; Albert Einstein lived from 1879 to 1955. Of course the one was born in America and the latter in Germany. One inhabited the world of music and the other science; Ives, in fact, made his living in the insurance business and only composed in his spare time while Einstein spent most of his career in academia, after a brief period working in a patent office. Not everything Ives wrote was published professionally and he also rewrote things extensively, so it is difficult to establish exact dates for things especially for a non-expert like me. In any case I don’t want to push things too far and try to argue that some spooky zeitgeist acted at a distance to summon the ideas from each of them in his own sphere. I just think it is curious to observe how similar their world lines were, at least in some respects.

We all know that Einstein’s “year of miracles” was 1905, during which he published classic papers on special relativity, brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. What was arguably Ives’ greatest composition, The Unanswered Question, was completed in 1906 (although it was revised later). This piece is subtitled “A Cosmic Landscape” and it’s a sort of meditation on the philosophical problem of existence: the muted strings (which are often positioned offstage in concert performances) symbolize silence while the solo trumpet evokes the individual struggling to find meaning within the void. Here’s a fine performance of this work recorded at La Scala in Milan, in which the strings are onstage while the trumpet is in the audience. I love the way that at the end nobody seems to know if they have finished!

The Unanswered Question is probably Ives’ greatest masterpiece, but it wasn’t the only work he composed in 1906. A companion piece called Central Park in the Dark also dates from that year and they are sometimes performed together as a kind of diptych which offers interesting contrasts. While the former is static and rather abstract, the latter is dynamic and programmatic (in that it includes realistic evocations of night-time sounds).

Einstein’s next great triumph was his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, an extension of the special theory to include gravity and accelerated motion, which which came only after years of hard work learning the required difficult mathematics. Ives too was hard at work for the next decade which resulted in other high points, although they didn’t make him a household name like Einstein. The Fourth Symphony is an extraordinary work which even the best orchestras find extremely difficult to perform. Even better in my view is Three Places in New England (completed in 1914) , which contains my own favourite bit of Ives. The last movement, The Housatonic at Stockbridge is very typical of his unique approach, with a beautifully paraphrased hymn tune floating over the top of complex meandering string figures until the piece ends in a tumultuous crescendo.

After this period, both Einstein and Ives carried on working in their respective domains, and even with similar preoccupations. Einstein was in search of a unified field theory that could unite gravity with the other forces of nature, although the approach led him away from the mainstream of conventional physics research and his later years he became an increasingly marginal figure.

By about 1920 Ives had written five full symphonies (four numbered ones and one called the Holidays Symphony) but his ambition beyond these was perhaps just as grandiose as Einstein’s: to create a so-called “Universe Symphony” which he described (in typically bewildering fashion) as

“A striving to present – to contemplate in tones rather than in music as such, that is – not exactly within the general term or meaning as it is so understood – to paint the creation, the mysterious beginnings of all things, known through God to man, to trace with tonal imprints the vastness, the spiritual eternities, from the great unknown to the great unknown.”

I guess such an ambitious project – to create an entirely new language of “tones” that could give expression to timeless eternity, a kind of musical theory of everything – was doomed to failure. Although Ives was an experienced symphonic composer he couldn’t find a way to realise his vision. Only fragments of the Universe Symphony remain (although various attempts have been made by others to complete it).

In fact, the end of Ives’ creative career was much more sudden and final than Einstein who, although he never again reached the heights he had scaled in 1915 – who could? – remained a productive and respected scientist until his death. Ives had a somewhat melancholic disposition and from time to time suffered from depression. By 1918 he already felt that his creative flame was faltering, but by 1926 the spark was extinguished completely. His wife, appropriately named Harmony, remembered the precise day when this happened at their townhouse in New York:

“He came downstairs one day with tears in his eyes, and said he couldn’t seem to compose anymore – nothing went well, nothing sounded right.”

Although Charles Ives lived almost another thirty years he never composed another piece of music after that day in 1926. I find that unbearably sad, but at least a lot of his work is available and now fairly widely played. Alongside the pieces I have mentioned, there are literally hundreds of songs, some of which are exceptionally beautiful, and dozens of smaller works including piano and violin sonatas.

Although they both lived in the same part of America for many years, I don’t think Charles Ives and Albert Einstein ever met. I wonder what they would have made of each other if they had?

If you believe in the multiverse, of course, then there is a part of it in which they do meet. Einstein was an enthusiastic violinist so there will even be a parallel world in which Einstein is playing the Ives’ Violin Sonata on Youtube.

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The Train and the River

Posted in Jazz, Music with tags on November 5, 2008 by telescoper

It’s not particularly relevant or topical, but I thought I’d put this up as it’s a great favourite of mine. This was the opening set from the classic film Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which is about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Beautifully directed by the fashion photographer Bert Stern, this was originally intended to be a drama set against the backdrop supplied by the various concerts, but Stern lost interest in the plot storyline and it was dropped. The final cut of the film released in 1960 is basically a straight documentary about the music festival, and it’s none the worse for that.

Stern’s photography didn’t just capture the diverse personalities of the artists, who range all over the spectrum of Jazz from Louis Armstrong to Thelonious Monk. He keenly observed the audience as the performances unfolded and sprinkled some wonderfully humorous glimpses into the film. In between the music there are also some wonderful impressionistic sequences of yachts racing off the coast of Rhode Island and reflections on the water. I think the film is pure joy from start to finish and I treasure my copy of it on DVD.

The opening track of the film is The Train and the River, by the Jimmy Giuffre three. Jimmy Giuffre was an immensely gifted saxophonist and clarinet player who was also an accomplished arranger and composer who worked for many big bands. His most famous piece as an arranger was Four Brothers which he wrote for Woody Herman’s fantastic saxophone section of Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff and Herb Steward. Giuffre was at one stage a very avant-garde musician playing quite challenging material, but in 1958 he had a more accessible style that blended jazz with folk elements, as you can hear from the video.

The other members of the band are the wonderful guitarist Jim Hall and the multi-instrumentalist Bob Brookmeyer who, on this number, plays valve trombone. Notice how they cleverly interchange the lead and rythmic support so you don’t really notice that it’s such a small band. There are studio recordings of the Train and the River, but none of them are anything like as good as this live version. Unfortunately the start of the tune is missing on the video because it was played over the opening titles, but if you want the whole thing just go and buy it!

Jimmy Giuffre died in April this year, before I started blogging, so let this be a belated tribute to him. I also think it’s a fitting way to celebrate the dawn of a new era in American politics with a reminder of the tremendous vitality, creativity and diversity of the nation that brought us jazz and a fervent hope that it will rediscover its true identity in the post-Bush era. Enjoy.

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Jenufa

Posted in Music, Opera with tags , on October 8, 2008 by telescoper

Another day, another opera. Today I had to duck out of the usual post-seminar drinks and food and get down to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay for one of only two performances in Cardiff by WNO this season of Jenufa by Leos Janacek.

You couldn’t wish for an opera more different in style and substance than Saturday’s Otello, although I suppose both operas would probably be classed as tragedies. Gone are the opulent sets and costumes and associated courtly intrigues of Otello. Instead we enter a world of drab and claustrophobic interiors within which a dark story of ordinary country folk unfolds in all its bleakness. Jenufa has a child by her lover, Steva, whom she hopes will marry her. When he refuses to do the honorable thing, Jenufa’s stepmother, Kostelnicka, drugs Jenufa and kills the baby, disposing of the body in a freezing lake. Jenufa is then persuaded to marry the dim but devoted Laca. In the final act, the baby’s body is found, Jenufa is accused and then Kostelnicka confesses her guilty act, claiming that she wanted to save Jenufa from disgrace. She goes off to be tried for the murder, while the steadfast Laca promises to stand by Jenufa come what may.

None of the characters is particularly sympathetic or even comprehensible. Laca (Peter Hoare) changes from a brutish oaf, who accidentally stabs Jenufa in the face in Act 1, to a doting husband in Act 3. Steva (Stephen Rooke) is superficially attractive but clearly a bit of a bounder. Kostelnicka (Susan Bickley) is severe, pompous and moralistic. Jenufa (Nuccia Focile) just seems a bit vacuous in Act 1 but progressively disintegrates under the stress of shame and rejection becomes increasingly morose and unpredictable as the opera goes on.

But these are not meant to be easy roles to understand. They are as inconsistent as real people, and as difficult to figure out.

On paper the plot and characterization seem very slight, but what holds it all together is Janacek’s wonderful music which seems to pull together all the rather ragged strands left dangling by the libretto. The score features lush romantic passages interspersed with snatches of folk tunes and jagged unresolved ideas that seem to mirror the fractured psychology engulfing Jenufa and Kostelnicka. Although the story is unrelentingly grim, there always seems to be something interesting going on in the music. Near the end, when Kostelnicka confesses the infanticide and accepts her punishment the music is particularly beautiful and even uplifting. However dark the deed, it seems to say, some form of redemption is always possible. How Janacek manages to conjure such a radiant burst of optimism at the end of such a dark tragedy is nothing short of miraculous.

I could listen to Janacek’s music for hours. As a matter of fact, now I think about it, that’s exactly what I did.

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