Sequenza21

The Prom on August 26 was presented by The BBC Scottish Symphony conducted by Ilan Volkov. It included, along with Ah! Perfido (sung by Lucy Crowe) and the second Symphony of Beethoven, the first performance of Minds in Flux by George Lewis. This involved computer software design and realization by Damon Holzborn and Sound Intermedia. Like the piece by Shiva Feshareki a week earlier, Minds in Flux was written a designed to make use of the special acoustical properties of the Albert Hall, and it did that handsomely. The sounds of the work were compelling and alluring and engaging and listening to it was a pleasure. The shape and organization of it was for this listener a little more difficult to follow and much less satisfying, making it as a statement and a coherent whole a lot less convincing that one would hope for it to be, however continually enthralling and handsome the sound of it was. It was difficult to stay with it for its entire half hour length.

The next night’s Prom was presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo, included Where Icebergs Dance Away by Charlotte Bray. It is a short (4 minute long) highly icily evocatively impressionistic work, extremely skillfully orchestrated, that did absolutely everything one would expect from a piece with that title, and absolutely nothing that one would not expect. It opened the second half of the concert, which had begun with a (similarly short, and effective, work by John Foulds, Le cabaret (Overture to a French Comedy), preceding a performance of the Viola Concerto of William Walton, with Timothy Rideout as the highly impressive soloist (who also did a barn burning performance of the 4th movement of the Hindemith Sonata for Solo Viola, Op, 25, no. 1 as an encore). The Bray was followed by a performance of Malcolm Arnold’s Symphony No. 5. The symphony is a very interesting work. It’s language is that of sixties movie music, as one might expect from the composer of the music for The Bridge On the River Kwai, and its orchestration always sounds great and is always highly skillful, as one would expect from a successful composer of music for the movies. But it is always serious and engaging. It’s tightly constructed, built like a steel trap in fact, and full of interest and surprises, most especially, possibly, the devastating ending of the whole piece.

The Prom on August 30 was present by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Sir George Benjamin. It opened with The Way to Castle Yonder (1988-90) by Oliver Knussen, which is a compilation of the three orchestral interludes from his second operatic collaboration with Maurice Sendak , Higglety Piggety Pop!. As Virgil Thomson said, it was the classic hor d’oeuvres: nobody’s appetite was ruined by it and nobody missed much by missing it. It was followed by orchestrations by Benjamin of three instrumental pieces by Henry Purcell, billed as Three Consorts. Benjamin’s program note said that the pieces are expressions of his intense attachment to the works; the orchestrations don’t add to or benefit the Purcell pieces all that much. They pale besides similar orchestrations of older music by Stravinsky or Davies.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard joined Benjamin and the orchestra for a really wonderful performance of the Ravel G major Piano Concerto which had a combination of intense concentration, tenderness, and carefree jazziness that was perfect for that piece. As an encore, Aimard did a dazzling performance of Benjamin’s Relativity Rag. The concert concluded with Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra. Benjamin had a close relationship with Oliver Knussen, and the work is a memorial for him. It is intense and gripping piece. Beginning with long lines that eventually are engulfed in an agitated texture of repeating twitching rhythms and swirling lines, the music moves to a still quiet center and then progresses through a more fragmentary and shimmering fabric, including a striking duet involving the two violin sections, to a quiet resolution. The music throughout and for all the instruments is extremely virtuosic, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra not only negotiated the difficulties with aplomb, but played with a fierce commitment.

All three of these concert can be heard online: at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000z0x0 for the Lewis and Beethoven, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000z1lq for the BBC Symphony, and at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000z666 for the Benjamin and Mahler Chamber Orchestra concert.

The Proms concert on August 19, presented by the BBC Singers conducted by Sofi Jeannin, was a continuous complex sequence lasting about an hour and a half. In it, a number of renaissance choral works were paired with reflections on or reactions to those pieces by more recent composers, in three cases BBC commissions written for this concert. At the center of this was one of Stravinsky’s completion, by adding lost parts, of one of the Three Sacred Songs by Gesualdo, Illunina nos. There was also a work by Hildegard of Bingen, O viridissima virga which stood by itself. An instrumental ensemble consisting of Liam Byrne, playing viola da gambe, Stuart King, playing bass clarinet, Tom Rogerson playing synthesizers, and the strikingly charismatic Delia Stevens, percussionist bridged the space between the works, and sometimes also played during certain of them. This whole enterprise was bookended by Qui habitat in adiutorio altissimi, a large for work 24 voices, by Josquin de Prez at the beginning, and a mammoth reaction/reflection of it, Aetherworld: Josquin Mirrored by the featured artist, turntablist Shiva Feshareki, at the end.

Of the inner pairings, Ken Burton reflected Tallis’s Loquebantur variis linguis, whose text is about the apostles at Pentecost speaking in many tongues with texts from the psalms set with elements of gospel music. Bernard Hughes, in Birdchant, stayed close to the surface qualities of Janequin’s Le chant des oiseaux, and, in fact, made his work a continuation of it, but pushed everything further along, including adding more bird songs, in more realistic transcriptions, as well as mechanical imitations, and adding the instruments, making everything more manic and funny. The title of Roderick Williams’s Ave verum corpus Re-imagined tells the whole story: he made a different piece from Byrd’s Ave verum corpus using exactly the same material that Byrd used. Sweelinck’s Je sens en moy une flamme nouvell is embedded as a sort of memory/reference point in a larger piece setting a poem by Thomas Traherne in the very beautiful A New Flame by Nico Muhly.

Shiva Feshareki’s program note for Aetherword: Josquin Mirrored explains that “Aether was the fifth element in alchemical chemistry and early physics. It was the name given to material that was believed to fill the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere….This concept was used in several theories to explain various natural phenomena, such as the traveling of light and gravity.” Her work, taking the Josquin piece that begin the program as material and using technology including vinyl, turntables and CDJs, all processed through “vintage analogue tape echo and a cutting-edge immersive software designed by creative technologist Andy Sheen” makes what she describes as “an intricate duet between immersive electronic and natural acoustic sound, based on the fractal geometry of sound.” The work filled the hall, moving from place to place, and also interacting with a certain amount of live playing, including that of Kit Downes on the Albert Hall organ, in a sort of climactic show down between the organ and the technological forces.

The playing and singing throughout the whole concert was fabulous and the presentation was flawless–even considering an unnecessary sort of light show accompanying it—and the effect of it all enthralling. The recording of this concert can be heard at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ytpy for 43 days.

The Prom concert on August 24th was presented by Chineke!, the UK’s only black and ethnically diverse orchestra. The last Prom concert I heard them do, in 2017, focused on living black composers. This concert, conducted by the Panamanian-American Kalena Bovell, featured historical black composers, presenting music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Fela Sowande, and Florence Price. Fela Sowande, a Nigerian-British composer and organist, who lived a long life and had a long a successful career in London, was represented by his African Suite (1944) for string orchestra and harp. Based on West African material, including quotations from Ghanaian composer Ephraim Amu, it was in the vein of British string orchestra pieces such as the Holst St. Paul’s Suite, and was extremely appealing music. Florence Price’s Piano Concerto In One Movement (1934) featured pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason. Although played without a break, the piece really had three fairly clear and distinct sections, if not movements. In the first two the very grateful and impressively virtuosic writing for the piano was matched by very strikingly delicate and skillful scoring for the orchestra. In the third section, a juba, an African-American plantation dance with origins in the Kongo, although the music is snappy and engaging, the piano part tends to fade more into the texture and loses its prominence, which, however attractive it is as music, becomes less successful as a virtuoso vehicle, and causes the piece to end, despite its upbeat quality, with something closer to a whimper than the sort of bang one would like for a big concerto.

The concert also included two pieces by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. It’s hard to see any reason other than racism why Coleridge-Taylor should not have been a revered British musical icon before now. His music is as accomplished as anything that his countrymen of his age (and this includes Vaughan Williams and Holst) were writing during his lifetime. In fact Vaughan Williams and Holst had barely begun to produce any of the music of theirs which we know before Coleridge-Taylor died in 1912. The concert began with the Overture to The Song of Hiawatha (1899), one of the large choral works based on Longfellow’s poems that were the pieces their composer was best known for for many years, since they were for many years before the Second World War annually staged in the Albert Hall (although none of it has been performed in that hall for the last sixty years). As good as this piece was, it was somewhat overshadowed, at least for this listener, by Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphony No. 1 (1896-1901) which ended the program. It really is a very fine piece, but is an astonishingly accomplished and successful piece for a twenty-one year old composer, taking a place with pieces like the Mendelssohn, Octet, the Shostakovich First Symphony, and the Shapero Four Hand Sonata, as incredibly mature pieces–masterpieces, in fact– by very young composers. The last movement, which Stanford his teacher apparently kept telling him wasn’t quite right, is problematic and, despite, his reworking it several times, is still not quite right, but it was still immensely impressive and exciting and wonderful to hear. The performance, like those of the other pieces, couldn’t have been better. This concert can also be heard for a little over a month at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000yzr8.

The Proms concert on August 17 was presented by The Manchester Collective. The group apparently has different manifestations, but in this case it was an almost twenty-member string orchestra, led by its music director, violinist Rakhi Singh, performing a more usual sort of new music concert, featuring harpsichord soloist Mahan Esfahani. Adam Szabo, the organization’s Chief Executive, also participated as a sort of MC for the evening, introducing and commenting on the program. Like the concert highlighting Abel Selaocoe two days earlier, it had a piece featuring, or at least referencing Jean-Phillipe Rameau, this one being Suite in Old Style ‘The Court Jester Amareu’  by Dobrinka Tabakova. The suite evokes Rameau’s music to “present a series of glimpses of the life of an imagined 18th-century aristocratic household,” including a return from a hunt, a (anachronistic) waltz “through the opulent corridors of the imagined stately home,” a conversation between the solo violist and members of the orchestra in the slow movement, and a fugato fast movement which presents a ‘riddle,’ embodying Rameau’s name in the main melody. The whole suite is symmetrically framed by a fanfare appearing at the beginning and at the end. The solo violist (in this performance Ruth Gibson, playing with enormous bravura), appears from offstage after the fanfare as the returned hunter, who then dominates the action of the rest of the work. The performance was marked by a beauty of sound and a rhythmic verve, as well as a great enthusiasm for the music.

Maahan Esfahani, harpsichordist, who has a prominent part in the Tabakova work, was the soloist in the works that began and ended the concert, the Harpsichord Concerto, Op. 40 (1980) by Henryk Górecki  and the Jazz Harpsichord Concerto (1965) by Joseph Horowitz. The Górecki begins with the orchestra playing a slow unison melody over an continuous and unrelentingly frantic stream of notes with very little recognizable pitch in the harpsichord for the entire first movement. By contrast the second movement’s writing for the soloist makes the pitches and the harmonies of the harpsichord clear in a sort of folky dance-like exchange with the orchestra. The recognition that pitches on the harpsichord in modern(ish) music can be not at all clear, and the use of that fact in the realization of the work is one of the chief elements making the nine-minute long piece so funny and enjoyable. By contrast the Horowitz, which is about twice as long, is almost completely lacking in profile and shape, and left this listener with the impression of a more or less endless stream of vague and vaguely jazzish stuff in three movements. In the Horowitz Esfahani was joined by bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado and drummer Alan Taylor. Esfanni’s playing in both pieces was magisterial.

Following the Górecki, and before intermission (a concert with an intermission seems to be something of a rarity in this season’s concerts) were The Centre is Everywhere by Edmund Finnis and The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc by Julius Eastman. The Eastman was first performed, and is usually done, as a piece for 10 ‘cellos. This performance was by the whole of the group. Most of Eastman’s scores are general enough in their notation that it’s possible to perform them with different instrumentations than that of their iconic recorded performances. This performance certainly lacked nothing in terms of its concentration, its rhythmic precision and energy, or its forcefulness of character. The brash energy of the Eastman was a striking foil to the Finnis, which preceded it. Starting almost inaudibly, it consisted of shimmering, ever changing, overlapping lines which gradually coalesced into a glowing motionless aggregate. It would be hard to imagine a more lovely or persuasive performance of it.

In fact, every work on the concert including the encore, Orawa by Wojciech Kilar, was given a performance whose obvious understanding of and enthusiasm for the music and generosity of music making was matched by the meticulous preparation and flawless performance. The whole concert was enjoyable and memorable.

The Prom on August 22, presented by The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, consisted of three works of Stravinsky, each of them with title ‘Symphony’, which gave some insight on the development of the composer’s thinking about the term. The concert, which was done without an intermission, began with Symphonies of Wind Instruments in its original 1920 version. The work was not published until 1947, when Stravinsky revised it, mainly its orchestration; the original version was not published until 1991. The piece is not only one of Stravinsky’s most striking and original works, it was also the work with which he crystalized his personal formal constructive methods, which E. T. Cone called stratification, interlock, and synthesis. The work is dedicated to the memory of Debussy, and an earlier small memorial piece which Stravinsky had contributed to the periodical La revue musicale, a sort of chorale which in that version was a little piano piece, appears early on and gradually, for lack of a better term, takes it over, becoming the summation of the work. I think Rattle was trying to play to the plaintive quality of the chorale, but without the crispness and incisiveness , and, frankly, speed, of the other music, that quality doesn’t exactly read, so this performance had a slightly soggy quality about it, despite the fact that in practically all ways, the playing was beyond reproach.

That incisiveness and precision of rhythm and attack was also lacking in the performance of the Symphony in C. By the time he wrote that symphony Stravinsky was very intent on assuming the mantle of the great “classical” composers, and the piece aspires to that kind of structural scope, but without the tonal workings that underlie what those masters were up to. It’s very interesting to experience the first movement’s approximation of what a classical first movement does without those qualities. There is a further consideration of the work in that the first two movements were written in Europe at a time of great stress in Stravinsky’s life due to the deaths of his wife, his daughter, and his mother more or less at the same time. The final two movements were written after he was in the United States, initially to deliver the Norton lectures at Harvard, but eventually, due to, among other things, the second World War, for the rest of his life. He certainly spoke of that creating a divide between the qualities of the first and second pairs of movements. The final movement, which initially seems to evoke Tschaikovsky, is in itself problematic, at least it’s always seemed to me. This performance’s lack of rhythmic drive and attack, pretty much throughout, didn’t help anything. The Symphony in Three Movements, which dates from the very end of the second World War, seems to be a more successful match of Stravinsky’s intention with its character and musical materials, and the qualities of attack and incisiveness and rhythmic dive which the piece needed were there in abundance in the playing, so the performance realized, at least it seemed to this listener, the scope and breadth and particular specialness of the work. It should be added that the audience seemed to have no reservations at all about any of the performances, all of which were enthusiastically, if not ecstatically, received.