Sequenza21

On the 18th and 19th of August Dave Smith’s 75th birthday was celebrated at Café Oto with two concerts of his music, performed by Jan Steele, Janet Sherbourne, and himself. Each concert began with Smith, who is an extremely masterly pianist performing works of his, and concluded with Steele and Sherbourne performing his major work, Albanian Summer.

Albanian Summer was written in 1980 for Steele and Sherbourne, and performed widely by them for a while. These performances were the first in about 30 years. The work is a sort of travelog of a number of summers that Smith spent in Albania in the 1970s, and includes over its approximately 45 minute duration evocations of Albanian bagpipes (which is how the piece starts), Albanian Communist “anthems,” folksongs, and dances. On both evenings it was engaging and enjoyable and rousing. The performances were completely compelling.

The first concert began with Smith playing three quite substantial works. On the Virtues of Flowers, a half hour long piece, celebrates the therapeutic and restorative powers of flowers as part of a treatment of hospital patients, and was written for a concert by John Tilbury to mark the 30th anniversary of a hospital of the West Sussex Health Authority. The sort of jazzy meditative music which begins and ends the work frames what might be described as post minimalist fast and flashy material. The other two works on the concert were shorter and possibly more dynamic pieces, which were originally intended as parts of a set (Smith has written a number of evening long sequences of sorter pieces which he calls piano concerts), that he says “never materialized.” Nails is forceful and hard as. All This and Less came together as a reaction to a review of a concert of music by friends and associates of Smith’s by Nicholas Kenyon in the Financial Times in 1979: “Satie without the wit; Ravel without the grace; Cage without the silence; Rakhmaninov without the tunes: the recent music of Gavin Bryars and John White is all this, and less.”

The second evening’s concert began with Smith playing fourteen pieces from his First Piano Concert. The Concert was a reaction to the more than one hundred tangos that were written by many composers, including Smith, for the Tango Project of Yvar Mikhashoff. Hearing one of Mikhashoff’s “Tango Marathons” at the Almeida Festival in 1985, Smith thought that “it was apparent that many of the featured composers had not seriously engaged with any form of tango.” In reaction he wrote a set of 24 pieces for piano, each 3 to 4 minutes long, each one “relating to specific musical genres or piano playing styles, western or non-western, well-known or obscure, real or imagined.” The fourteen played on this concert included as well as a tango and a bossa nova, a Charleston, a Calypso, and Hokey Cokey, and some vaguer forms: Afterhours, Nocturne, and Avash Avash (which is an arrangement of a section of Albanian Summer.) Smith’s playing in both evenings was powerful and satisfying.

Both of the concerts were, to put it one way, well attended, or, to put it another way, mobbed; and both were full of the joviality that one would expect from a birthday party. So not only did they offer the opportunity to experience a sizable and satisfying sampling of a serious and impressive composer’s work, they also were a festive celebration of that composer’s accomplishments.

The Prom on August 10 was presented by The National Youth Orchestra, conducted by Alexandre Bloch and Tess Jackson. The 160 members of the orchestra, who completely filled the stage, were joined by the almost as large cohort of NYO Inspire, who were in various places in the hall, including the gallery, some boxes, the choir seating areas behind the stage, and, eventually, in the aisles of the stalls. The program began with the Overture to The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner, and concluded with the Symphony No. 1 of Gustav Mahler. In between those were two works, Orpheus Undone by Missy Mazzoli and Three, Four, AND… by Dani Howard , which was a BBC co-commission, receiving its first performance.

The Mazzoli, written in 2020, is, of course, concerned with the Orpheus story, which, as Mazzoli said in an interview for the Chicago Symphony, where she was composer-in-residence, “has been told a million times.” The present work was based on material from her earlier (2019) ballet about the Orpheus story, Orpheus Alive. Mazzoli said that Oprheus Undone “focuses on a very specific, small moment of the story, right when Eurydice has died and gone to the underworld, and has left Orpheus.” Steve Smith, in his program note for the Proms concert, speculates that there, in fact, might be more it: he thinks that the piece is concerned with “how, in times of trauma, time comes unstuck; sped up to a frenetic pace and slowed to near stasis seemingly at once.” The beginning of the first part of the piece, entitled ‘Behold the Machine, O Death,’ is marked by a regularly repeating wood block beats against which are strands of other music suggesting varying other tempos. The beats of the wood block disappear and periodically recur, but the pulse it marked seems constant in various ways, playing out against the opposing pulses, suggesting the variability of the perception of time. The second section, entitled ‘We of Violence, We Endure,’ suggest the pondering of an event in its aftermath, and is marked by piano figuration, wandering and eventually melting into the greater orchestral texture, which then fades away. All of this is very effective and moving and was performed with enormous understanding and commitment by the orchestra, conducted by Bloch.

Three, Four, AND… by Dani Howard, who was during the time of its composition the NYO’s resident artist, was written with a fair amount of input and interaction with the orchestra’s members, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of NYO Inspire. Howard wrote a tune called As One, which members were encourage to make their version of and record and upload. During the orchestra’s spring residency members made suggestions as to things they would like to see included in this piece, which was composed specifically for the Proms concert. The original tune and those requests were incorporated into the final work. Three, Four, AND… is an ebulliently optimistic work, offering a kaleidoscopic array of different very effective orchestral textures, some including unusual sound effects, expertly shaped to reveal the next cohort of musicians, leading to the concluding climax. The orchestra was conducted in this work by Jackson.

The concert concluded with a masterful performance of the Mahler First Symphony and a really staggeringly wonderful encore (which can be found at about 2:11:36 in the recording of the concert). It would be hard to oversell the many awesome qualities of the concert, which was brimming with playing that was as accurate and precise as one could ever hope for and at the same time so full of commitment and enthusiasm. The recording of this concert can be found for a limited time at ttps://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021r1f.

The late-night Prom on August 9, presented by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment, conducted by Chloe Rooke, was devoted to a single work, Songs of Wars I Have Seen by Heiner Goebbels. The work was written in 2007 for those same two groups, on commission from the Southbank Centre, for the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall after its two year-long renovation. Songs of Wars I Have Seen is based on Gertrude Stein’s book detailing her life in occupied France during World War II. The ins and outs of how Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, two openly Jewish lesbians, survived more or less unscathed in a country controlled by Germans, where Jews were steadily being deported to concentration camps (examined in great detail by Janet Malcolm in an article in The New Yorker— https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/06/02/gertrude-steins-war) is not dealt with in Goebble’s work directly, as it isn’t in Stein’s book. Here the subject matter is the concerns of day to day existence in a war-torn environment controlled by occupiers. The part of Stein’s narrative which is used in this work is also concerned with comparisons between the current war she is living through with earlier wars she has experienced, and even more with the presentation of wars and their effects in Shakespeare’s plays, which Stein and Toklas were reading aloud with friends during that time. These two time frames are presented in musical terms: the modern day concerns are presented with, as it were, “modern” music, while the discussion of the concern of wars in Shakespeare plays are represented with music of Matthew Locke’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, although that music may sometimes have a sort of overlay of mechanical noises, making the immediate situation inescapable. The text is always spoken by players, usually individually, but occasionally as a group. The players of modern instruments are not separated from the players of period instruments, but there is a separation of genders. In this performance the women were on the main part of the stage, surrounded by old style standing and table top lamps, as though at home. Around the top perimeter of the stage there was a line of male musicians, playing mostly brass and percussion instruments, who didn’t speak.

The quotidian nature of life in war is set off immediately by a discourse on honey and its replacement of sugar, which quickly becomes unobtainable in conditions of war. Later in the piece meetings with strangers and the fact of the full moon and the notion of going away or being taken away and the fact of pets and children in ones household and the differences of radio announcement in the broadcasters of different countries are also discussed, but all of these details of daily life are always considered against the usually unspoken consciousness of the potentially calamitous events that could be produced at any minute by the war in progress. The shape of the work is never articulated in a dramatic way, in keeping with the overarching concern with day to day life in wartime. But the progress of the work is sure and convincing and always engaging, and one is led eventually to considering that after a war, nobody wants to eat honey because it’s too sweet. The work ends with a statement that a war is over when everybody’s had enough of it, followed by a trumpet solo over the sound of prayer bowls, which is a combination of a lament and a sad fanfare.

Songs of Wars I have seen is a very intricate and demanding work, requiring not only very expert players playing very difficult and demanding music, but very very expert sound production as well. It’s hard to imagine a better performance that the one presented here. The recording of this performance can be heard on the BBC Sounds website (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021k0w) for a limited time.

The BBC Prom on August 7 was presented by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds. It featured Stefan Dohr as soloist in the Horn Concerto by Hans Abrahamsen, written between 2018 and 2019. The work is mostly a monologue by the soloist which is provided with a luminous and quite beautiful backdrop, sometimes reactive and interactive, and sometimes just a background, but always aurally compelling. Although the movements are designated by tempo, they are really differentiated more by the density of the, as it were, accompaniment than by the actually speed of the music. At the end of the work, the orchestra joins the soloist in the argument of the piece, before everything recedes into the glowing distance. The performance of the concerto was on the level that it deserved. It was all quite beautiful and effective.

The Abrahamsen was proceeded on the concert by Schumann’s Genoveva Overture and Pohjola’s Daughter by Sibelius, and was followed by an absolutely barn-burning and unforgettable performance of Tschaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

The Prom on August 9, which was presented by The BBC Symphony and their chief conductor Sakari Oramo, began with a performance of Mirage by Kaiji Saariaho, with Silja Aalto, soprano, and Anssi Karttunen, ‘cellist, as soloists. Mirage sets a poem by the Mexican shaman and poet Maria Sabina. (1894-1985). Sabina’s “poems” were actually trans-like utterances from her healing sacred mushroom ceremonies, called veladas. She is generally regarded as a masterful oral poet due to her presentation of traditional native Mexican themes in a uniquely person voice. For Saariaho, Sabina was an example of an exceptional female artist whose work was a powerful proclamation of her existence as a uniquely powerful creator. Mirage features the soprano voice singing Sabina’s text (in English, in a translation by Alvaro Estrada), but its way is prepared by the ‘cello part, which then intertwines with it, supported and amplified by the orchestra. In a way the work is a sort of recreation of the trance which produced the poem. The effect of the whole, with more forceful and less diaphanous and ethereal music than one usually expects from Saaariaho, emphasizes the concept, as articulated in the program notes by Pirkko Moisala, of “the identity of a mature woman and artist who has found her voice and accepted her calling.” It was completely compelling. The Saariaho was followed by performances of Mozart’s K. 271 Piano Concerto, with soloist Seong-Jin Cho, and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony.

The Prom on August 8, presented by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Anja Bilhmaler, was originally to have contained the first performance of beyond the beyond, by Sarah Gibson, which was a BBC Commission. At the time of her death from cancer in July of this year, the piece was incomplete. It is to be finished by her associate Thomas Kotcheff and will be performed at a later date. In its place, the program contained an earlier orchestral work of Gibson’s, warp and weft, of 2021. warp and weft is a tribute to the artist Miram Schapiro, whose work emphasizes what she called “femmage,” which is to say artistic work formerly practiced mainly by women, for instance decoupage and weaving, which were formerly considered “cafts” or “decorative art,” as opposed to the “high” arts, which were supposedly practiced mainly by men, and were, therefore, considered superior. In warp and weft, the weft, the horizontal axis of the loom, is associated with more melodic elements, and the warp, the vertical axis of the loom, deals with more harmonic aspects, and these two aspects basically alternate, finally, at the end of the piece, coalesce in a lively and appealing music. Gibson’s program note says that she imagined the piece as a sort of representation of Schapiro’s studio, “…a place full of color, with various materials and ideas, swirling around…” That is a fairly accurate description of the qualities of the work. In the concert the Gibson was preceded by the Beethoven Violin Concerto, with the admirable Tobias Feldman, as soloist, and followed by a compelling performance of the Brahms Fourth Symphony.

All of the proms are available for about sixty days after the date of the concert, on the BBC Sounds site, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b007v097.