In celebration of Louis Andriessen’s seventieth birthday, the first UK performance of his The Hague Hacking was scheduled for the Prom concert on August 17.  The piece was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed with that orchestra by the pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who were the performers for the Proms, playing this time with the Philharmonia Orchestra.   There were several sources, or perhaps references embedded in The Hague Hacking: the piano parts make use at the beginning and subsequently in the piece of the notes of the beginning of the Lizst Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which Andriessen knew not so much from knowing the piece itself as from knowing its use in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, The Cat Concerto (Warner Brothers used the Lizst in a similar way in a fairly well known Bugs Bunny cartoon, Rhapsody Rabbitt); the work also uses a Dutch “sing-along ballad” about The Hague, O, O, The Hague (Andriessen suggested in an interview that the text of this song is vulgar), whose notes are presented first at lengths which render it unrecognizable, but on subsequent reappearances faster, finally, apparently, at the end of the work, at its original speed; in addition the work’s Dutch title, Haags Hakkûh, makes allusion to the slang name (the second word of the title) for what we are told in Robert Adlington’s program note is a “a distinctive kind of dance, characterized by quick ‘chopping’ foot movements, that emerged in Dutch nightclubs in the 1990’s.

All of these allusions are very subtle, however.  If one knows they’re there, the notes of the Lizst are recognizable, but if one wasn’t looking for them they could easily be missed.   The surface of the piece is full of fairly rapidly zig-zagging hocketing notes in rhythms that one could see coming from some kind of house music, but since the bass is fairly consistently in long notes, certainly not suggesting any kind of dance music, the sense that there’s some kind of clubby dance music going on is absent.  O, O, the Hague not being a particularly well known tune, outside of Holland anyway, a non-Dutch listener has to take its presence there on faith.   What one hears if one isn’t worrying about all these subtle allusions is an engaging,  mostly slow, rather monumental work with very active surface texture, although not as lively as all the preliminary information suggested.  The orchestration is forcefully sonorous and bell-like and the piece makes an impressive sound.

The concert also included three dances from El amor brujo by De Falla, and two works of Ravel, the Mother Goose ballet (the movements from the original four hand piece, which Ravel turned into a ballet, changing their order and adding music, mostly short interludes connecting the movements, and Bolero.   The performance of Mother Goose was astounding and unforgettable due to  beauty of the playing, particularly of the winds, and its great subtlety. (more…)

The BBC Proms is ongoing until the end of this week, the traditional Last Night at the Proms being on Saturday night.   For me it all ended about a week and a half ago, but there are a number of things still to report on.

The Proms on August 19, given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov, which was a collaboration between the BBC and IRCAM, featured the music of Jonathan Harvey, a long time associate of IRCAM.  It included the first performance of Speakings, a major work of Harvey’s which had been commissioned by the BBC, IRCAM, and Radio France and which was also the final product of a three-year association between Harvey and the orchestra.  The concert was in three parts, divided by two intermissions, each one of which consisted of a relatively brief piece for tape or electronics, followed by a larger scale instrumental work.   The first contained Harvey’s Tombeau de Messiaen for piano and digital audio tape, followed by Messiaen’s Concert á quatre, the second Harvey’s Mortuos plango, vivos voco for eight channel tape, followed by Speakings for orchestra and live electronics, and the third Varèse’s Poème électronique for magnetic tape and Déserts for fifteen wind instrument, percussion and magnetic tape.
(more…)

One of the threads of this year’s Proms is a survey of the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of his death.   On August 26, which was the actual date of his death, the survey climaxed with an all-Vaughan Williams concert by the BBC Symphony, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis.   The first work on the concert, the justly celebrated Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis; its performance, although maybe not exactly peremptory, was certainly restrained and cool, rather than as impassioned as one might have wished it to be.    It was followed by the ballet score Job, with whose performance one could not argue.   My own feeling about Job is that even though there is much very beautiful music in it, it is a little looser in construction and maybe a little more general in expression that the tightly constructed and closely argued symphonies, and that this is a, for lack of a better word, weakness in the piece.

The second half of the concert consisted of Serenade to Music, a short work setting an excerpt from The Merchant of Venice written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the conducting career of Henry Wood, the founder of the Proms, and the Ninth Symphony.   Serenade to Music was performed, as it was originally intended, by sixteen singers.   It seems to me to be a just about perfect piece, and the performance was beautiful.  The Ninth Symphony is a remarkable work.  It holds a place in Vaughan Williams output somewhat analogous to that of the Requiem Canticles in Stravinsky’s; procedures and material from all earlier periods of his career appear, but both refined and, due to their different contexts, transformed into something new but with enormous added depth and expressive resonance.  Each of the movements is the product of an extraordinarily original concept.   In the first sonata form movement, a tune played by the clarinet accompanied by the harp, followed by a short trio for the clarinets, introduces the second theme; at the beginning of the recapitulation the clarinet tune returns played by the violin, leading directly to the second theme with a descant added on the flugel horn. From that point the events of the recapitulation proceeds in reverse order to that of the exposition, ending with the music for three saxophones that began the movement.    In the second movement a solo line is alternated with a sort of court march which causes the line to fray and proliferate parts, leading to lyrical music for the full orchestra.    The third movement is almost a mini-concerto for the saxophones, starting with perky soloistic lines accompanied by the snare drum and other percussion; that music develops into a fugue which is followed by a chorale that accelerates into very lively cascading music in close harmony that could have come from Duke Ellington and then dissolves, leaving only the ghosts of the accompaniment on the snare drum.   The last movement is a complex two part form which begins quietly and contrapuntally and become a passacaglia somewhat like the last movement of the Fifth Symphony, but with more intensity.   The whole work has a quality of intense urgency. (more…)

Among the focuses of the Proms this summer are the centennials of Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen and the eightieth birthday of Karlheinz Stockhausen (due to his death in 2007, the celebration of his birthday was fused with a commemoration of his life’s work). Although the first night concert included the first performance of a Proms commission from Carter, the piano piece Caténaires, he is only represented by three other works, the Oboe Concerto, Night Fantasies, and Soundings, as opposed to eighteen works of Messiaen, several of them, including the opera St. Francis of Assisi, to be played on September 7, major works of considerable length. The Stockhausen celebration included a Stockhausen day on August 2, which included performances of Gruppen and Stimmung, among other pieces, as well as a performance of Punkte on August 22, which was his actual birthday.

Carter’s Soundings, which received its first UK performance on August 18 on a concert by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, was written in 2005 as a present for Daniel Barenboim when he left the post of music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Since Carter’s intention was to celebrate Barenboim as a musician who regularly directs performances of Mozart piano concertos in which he is also the soloist, he cast the work for piano and orchestra intending that the piano soloist would also be the conductor. It goes without saying that the rhythmic and ensemble difficulty of Carter’s music is greater that that of Mozart’s, making the realization of the idea of a conductor playing along with the orchestra a challenge. Although there are certainly ways that could have been devised to deal with this problem, Carter chose to side step it altogether by, basically, never having the piano and orchestra play together. The piece begins with a piano solo, there is a short interjection by the orchestra, the piano plays a little bit again, then there’s a long stretch of orchestra music; there is a very brief exchange of single notes on the piano (the notes, D and Bb, being, of course, Barenboim’s initials–in fact, D is also the first note of the piece, and Bb the last), and then the piece ends with a piano solo. In a performance where the soloist and the conductor were the same, the skimpiness of the interaction might not be so noticeable, but in this performance where the piano, moved off to the side of the orchestra, was played by Nicholas Hodges and the conductor was Illan Volkov, it was not only noticeable, but a little strange and unsatisfying. I have to admit that I found myself wondering if Carter charges by the minute for his commissions, and how much he got paid for this one.

Although Carter’s program notes didn’t explain the title, I assume that it probably refers to the practice of using sounds and echos to measure underwater distances. In this case bursts of fast notes, usually in the winds, are answered by sustained notes, usually in the strings, outlining the boundaries of the registers used. Carter is a master, and in Soundings, as in all his other music, both the instrumental lines, which are always wrought in a masterly fashion, and the unfolding of the music through time, are always skillful and elegant. There’s no question of it being anything other than first rate music. However, it is clear that the piece is, to say the least, not one of Carter’s most important or profound works. Virgil Thomson’s comment on the Beethoven Irish folk song arrangements seemed applicable here: it’s like getting a letter from somebody who can really write, about nothing in particular. (more…)

The BBC marked the beginning day of the Beijing Olympics by offering the first performance of Olympic Fire, commissioned for the occasion from Chen Yi. All of Chen’s music uses Western modernist practices to evoke her native culture, but Olympic Fire deals even more directly in Chinese materials, using folksongs both from the predominant Han Chinese and from minority Chinese ethnic groups as well (Chen keeps to the Chinese government party line by considering Tibetans among those Chinese ethnic minorities), and imitating the sounds of Chinese instruments, particularly the lusheng (described by Chen as a “mouth pipe-organ”).  Olympic Fire begins with enormous energy and unrelenting febrile motion and considerable instrumental brilliance featuring the brass and the xylophone.  The initial ebullient activity continues for quite a while, to be interrupted by a slightly slower high ostinato music with a less thick texture, evoking bird calls and still featuring the xylophone, which turns out to be an accompaniment to longer lyrical tunes in the lower registers.

The opening celebratory activity is eventually regained, with the layering of different musics over a repeated rhythmic figures. The music goes driving headlong into a furiously explosive timpani cadenza which leads to a roaring ending.  The performance, by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, matched the exuberance of the music. (more…)

George Benjamin, at age 48, is one of the grand old men of British music.  Considering a succession starting with Britten, and continuing with Oliver Knussen and Thomas Ades, and including Benjamin, one might consider that the tradition of rather young grand old men, all of them very fine performers as well as seriously talented and accomplished composers is a grand old British one.  Benjamin is a really good conductor, and the BBC Symphony orchestra clearly respected him and worked hard for and with him.  On Wednesday night the main event was one of his first big attention-getting pieces, and his first work for orchestra, written when he was 19, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, which was being played for the third time at the Proms.  (more…)

I have a vague recollection of an article in the Sunday Times sometime in July of one of the last ten or so years which compared the decline of twelve-tone music (or maybe atonality or maybe modernism in general, but I think it was twelve-tone music) to the fall of the Soviet Union. I wonder if anybody remembers it and can possible cite its date and author.

Thanks

The biggest shock of the day was reading in the NYTimes Book Review a review by Pankaj Mishra of Coltrane:  The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff, the following sentence:  “Jazz’s turn to the avant-garde and exoticisms of the 1960s now seems as inevitable as the rise of atonal music after the breakup of the stable societies of 19th century Europe.”  These days you’re likely to get stoned if you so much as hint that there was any kind of inevitability in the rise of atonal music (whatever that might be).  Fancy not knowing that “we” all now regard “atonal music” (whatever that might be) not only as not being inevitable, but as being a downright aberration or perversion (if they’re different things).  How did Pankaj Mishra fail to find that out?