Wednesday, 16 May 2012
News Story - Major Comissions for Britten Centenary - Classical Music Magazine
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Exploring Bach
Review of London Bach Society's 3rd BACHFEST, for the BACH CLUB page, in their journal BACH NOTES. Sept 2011
500 words
Exploring Bach
2012 is the year baroque virtuoso Rodolfo Richter sets out to complete one of his life ambitions: to record all of Bach's output written for the violin. The audience of the third Bach Club meeting were present for a preview of what is to come at the Foundling museum, where we gathered to listen to Sonata's No 1, 2 and 4 for violin and harpsichord.
Like myself, Richter is convinced that Bach should be for everyone, for the young and old; for those who have grown up with the tradition, and for those who have arrived at Bach from other pathways. I wanted to find why Bach fires Richter's ambition, and what his love of Bach can tell us about the ways in which we can experience the composer.
“What makes Bach's music so enjoyable for me is the fact that it is unbelievably rich at so many levels”, Richter comments. It's true; we admire Bach for his tight technique, his astute balance of melody and counterpoint. For performers the complex inner workings of the composition provide provide an endlessly rich source for interpretation. But, as Richter implores “he's never academic, because even when he's obsessed with the complexity and rigidity of his own technical challenges; he knows when to break free.” Indeed, each note is always present, but it is the art of choosing which colours, tones and shapes to accentuate; the way one might turn a diamond to let it glimmer in the light.
Richter's performance encapsulated the equilibrium of this ordered, yet entirely expressive art; especially in the allegro movement of the first sonata. The music was exquisite. His nimble bow soared over the strings, spinning silken melody lines, effortlessly interlocking with the accompanying harpsichord counterpoint. The relationship between the two was precise, alive; instinctual.
When I asked him why it is important to help young people engage with Bach today, Richter replied that it is important to help them open up a new path of discovery. A discovery of both Bach's music, and a self-discovery. It is specifically the emotional and technical richness of Bach's music that enables such a deep exploration. As Richter says, “These different levels contain so many other layers, that one feels no one can't get to the bottom of it all in a lifetime.”
This sense of exploration and growth created a depth throughout Richter's performance. The emotional shading was that of one who has taken a journey with Bach, returning to the same music to nourish the different stages of his life; finding new meanings there and refining his interpretation. Each movement achieved a subtle profundity through its nuanced colouring. The opening siciliano largo of the more well-known Sonata no. 4 was especially poignant with its slow, careful dignity and tender expression; giving melodic lines their full expressive potential whilst implying a hint of reservation; never rushing ahead into their familiarity.
In the concert I was struck by the memory of a phrase a play-write friend recently expressed to me: “There's one story; you get that for free, but look again, and there's another, and if you give the time then you get something far bigger than the price you paid for admission.” Ultimately by offering tickets at reduced prices, the 18-30 Bach club offers young people a way of coming to know Bach. Yet what they take away with them is their own decision.
It was wonderful to see the evening was brought to a close with wine, and an informal dispersal of people around the Foundling Museum, talking to one another about their experiences with Bach. A group of students set themselves up round the harpsichord to play and talk about certain passages and show off their keyboard skills. One of my friends listened with intrigue to one lady's description of a previous musical life she had led in Berlin. Others were admiring the extravagant architecture and curiously wandering to have a look at the paintings. For everyone involved, the evening acted as as a mirror for their own lives; different chords, melodies and interactions resonating in different ways for different people.
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Tête à Tête/Grimeborn Festival review (CONTEMPORARY OPERA)
Article reviewing the opera festivals Tête à Tête and Grimeborn for Classical Music Magazine
900 words
What direction is contemporary opera moving in? According to 2011's new-opera festivals: every direction possible.
This summer, East and West London went head-to-head, fighting to bring opera into a new array of styles and subjects. Hammersmith's Tête à Tête festival earned it's boast as the ‘most imaginative laboratory for new opera’, presenting a diverse patchwork of finished productions alongside works in progress. Meanwhile, the 5th Grimeborn Festival ran in East London's gritty Dalston; a series of innovative operas and musical theatre pieces staged in the squat-chic Arcola Theatre.
Both festivals blurred the boundaries of traditional styles, forming operatic hybrids from movement-theatre, street entertainment, live electronics and performance-art. Themes ranged from traditional subjects (Greek mythology and Austen novels) to today's politics (ecological and middle-eastern issues) to the macabre and downright bizarre (drunk artists, sexualised nursery rhymes and the story of Ziggy, a cabaret-singing aborted foetus). Here is an overview of the works likely to remain with us for longer than one season:
Grimeborn launched with the London premiere of Jonathan Dove's new take on the Austen classic, Mansfield Park. 'When I first read Mansfield Park, over twenty years ago, I heard music' Dove claims; the appeal being to give expression to the quiet sufferings of the heroine, Fanny Price. The libretto, by Alasdair Middleton, distills Austen's story, making the Cinderella aspect its kernel. Herritage Opera commissioned the work, to add to their repertoire of chamber operas they perform at stately homes around England, using only a piano for accompaniment – an appropriate medium to set a 19th Century classic. Musically, Dove wanted to write something which was not bound by the stylistic procedures of the period, but would be recognisable and appropriate to the era. The result is an attractive and engaging work, which is reserved yet not lifeless; which manages to capture the charm of the period without becoming too chocolate-boxy. Dove's melodies for his characters are memorable, although at times the work could have benefited from more changes of key and harmony to move the action forward and prevent a feeling of stasis.
The 'traditional with a twist' idea was echoed elsewhere in the festival; Barefoot Opera reinvented Handel's Alcina for the Grimeborn, presenting it as a stripped-down version which kept the original melodies of the arias but accompanied them with just a clarinet and a harpsichord, adding an english narrator, folk interludes and pieces of movement theatre.
Other librettists, meanwhile, ventured into uncharted areas. With subject matter influenced by the recent successes of quirky opera-biogs, such as Anna Nicole, Steven Crowe's The Francis Bacon Opera, presents a humorous yet intelligent look at the life of the 20th Century's most revered painter. Staged inside a irregularly-shaped yellow scaffold – a motif featured in many of Bacon's paintings – the work uses an exact transcription from the 1985 Melvyn Bragg interview, which won awards for it's brutal honesty and controversial subject matter. Musically, we can see the attraction of Bacon and Bragg to the composer; Bacon's philosophical spiels about art and beauty were stretched into long luxurious melody lines, whilst the intonation of Bragg's questioning grew ever more ridiculous and high-pitched as he steadily grew more drunk.
The decadent and the absurd provided a recurrent theme, particularly for Tête à Tête, where the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme protégés Luke Styles and Peter Cant premiered the first scene of their unfinished work A Fetus in America, which breaks stylistic boundaries, bringing together drag, musical satire and cabaret to critique pro-life issues and American politics.
However, the most innovative material of the festivals – two Tête à Tête works that are clearly holding the torch for the future of new opera – were SizeZero Opera's The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane and Frances M Lynch's collaboration with Alejandro Viñao: Baghdad Monologue.
The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane was a short but truly outstanding work by Singaporean composer Diana Soh, which told a story of Jack and Jill in sexual pursuit of one another through a cut-and-paste libretto made entirely from snippets of nursery rhymes (James Currie). Dressed in a baby-doll dress the lead soprano and founder of the company, Laura Bowler, hurled herself through a series of schizophrenic ramblings, lending a sexual element to the originally innocent text. The score's rhythms were neat and articulate, its pace was fast and its material was fresh. However, its real innovation lay in the way that it combined different tonalities – simple, childlike, melodies in a major key against dissonant chords and obscure timbres – to achieve the effect of distorted innocence.
Baghdad Monologue was a work for a solo performer and live electronics which commented on the middle-eastern intervention, inspired by Eliot Weinberger's book What I Heard About Iraq. It was constructed from small soundbites, some abstract noise, others obvious references to everyday life: the call to prayer, George Bush's voice; the innocent sound of children playing. These were blended into Lynch's voice, used to punctuate it; they faded in, out, were sometimes distorted or bled into one another to create an exquisite patchwork of politically-charged aural meanings.
What united both works in their success was music's central and irreplaceable role. Whereas with Dove's Mansfield Park, or Crowe's Francis Bacon the music adds to the libretto, these works are entirely reliant on their medium in order to even make sense. The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane depends on it's music for its sense of befouled innocence; Baghdad Monologue depends music to refer to different cultures. If we want to see contemporary opera continue to flourish, then undoubtedly, this 'gestalt' approach is its foremost champion.
900 words
What direction is contemporary opera moving in? According to 2011's new-opera festivals: every direction possible.
This summer, East and West London went head-to-head, fighting to bring opera into a new array of styles and subjects. Hammersmith's Tête à Tête festival earned it's boast as the ‘most imaginative laboratory for new opera’, presenting a diverse patchwork of finished productions alongside works in progress. Meanwhile, the 5th Grimeborn Festival ran in East London's gritty Dalston; a series of innovative operas and musical theatre pieces staged in the squat-chic Arcola Theatre.
Both festivals blurred the boundaries of traditional styles, forming operatic hybrids from movement-theatre, street entertainment, live electronics and performance-art. Themes ranged from traditional subjects (Greek mythology and Austen novels) to today's politics (ecological and middle-eastern issues) to the macabre and downright bizarre (drunk artists, sexualised nursery rhymes and the story of Ziggy, a cabaret-singing aborted foetus). Here is an overview of the works likely to remain with us for longer than one season:
Grimeborn launched with the London premiere of Jonathan Dove's new take on the Austen classic, Mansfield Park. 'When I first read Mansfield Park, over twenty years ago, I heard music' Dove claims; the appeal being to give expression to the quiet sufferings of the heroine, Fanny Price. The libretto, by Alasdair Middleton, distills Austen's story, making the Cinderella aspect its kernel. Herritage Opera commissioned the work, to add to their repertoire of chamber operas they perform at stately homes around England, using only a piano for accompaniment – an appropriate medium to set a 19th Century classic. Musically, Dove wanted to write something which was not bound by the stylistic procedures of the period, but would be recognisable and appropriate to the era. The result is an attractive and engaging work, which is reserved yet not lifeless; which manages to capture the charm of the period without becoming too chocolate-boxy. Dove's melodies for his characters are memorable, although at times the work could have benefited from more changes of key and harmony to move the action forward and prevent a feeling of stasis.
The 'traditional with a twist' idea was echoed elsewhere in the festival; Barefoot Opera reinvented Handel's Alcina for the Grimeborn, presenting it as a stripped-down version which kept the original melodies of the arias but accompanied them with just a clarinet and a harpsichord, adding an english narrator, folk interludes and pieces of movement theatre.
Other librettists, meanwhile, ventured into uncharted areas. With subject matter influenced by the recent successes of quirky opera-biogs, such as Anna Nicole, Steven Crowe's The Francis Bacon Opera, presents a humorous yet intelligent look at the life of the 20th Century's most revered painter. Staged inside a irregularly-shaped yellow scaffold – a motif featured in many of Bacon's paintings – the work uses an exact transcription from the 1985 Melvyn Bragg interview, which won awards for it's brutal honesty and controversial subject matter. Musically, we can see the attraction of Bacon and Bragg to the composer; Bacon's philosophical spiels about art and beauty were stretched into long luxurious melody lines, whilst the intonation of Bragg's questioning grew ever more ridiculous and high-pitched as he steadily grew more drunk.
The decadent and the absurd provided a recurrent theme, particularly for Tête à Tête, where the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme protégés Luke Styles and Peter Cant premiered the first scene of their unfinished work A Fetus in America, which breaks stylistic boundaries, bringing together drag, musical satire and cabaret to critique pro-life issues and American politics.
However, the most innovative material of the festivals – two Tête à Tête works that are clearly holding the torch for the future of new opera – were SizeZero Opera's The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane and Frances M Lynch's collaboration with Alejandro Viñao: Baghdad Monologue.
The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane was a short but truly outstanding work by Singaporean composer Diana Soh, which told a story of Jack and Jill in sexual pursuit of one another through a cut-and-paste libretto made entirely from snippets of nursery rhymes (James Currie). Dressed in a baby-doll dress the lead soprano and founder of the company, Laura Bowler, hurled herself through a series of schizophrenic ramblings, lending a sexual element to the originally innocent text. The score's rhythms were neat and articulate, its pace was fast and its material was fresh. However, its real innovation lay in the way that it combined different tonalities – simple, childlike, melodies in a major key against dissonant chords and obscure timbres – to achieve the effect of distorted innocence.
Baghdad Monologue was a work for a solo performer and live electronics which commented on the middle-eastern intervention, inspired by Eliot Weinberger's book What I Heard About Iraq. It was constructed from small soundbites, some abstract noise, others obvious references to everyday life: the call to prayer, George Bush's voice; the innocent sound of children playing. These were blended into Lynch's voice, used to punctuate it; they faded in, out, were sometimes distorted or bled into one another to create an exquisite patchwork of politically-charged aural meanings.
What united both works in their success was music's central and irreplaceable role. Whereas with Dove's Mansfield Park, or Crowe's Francis Bacon the music adds to the libretto, these works are entirely reliant on their medium in order to even make sense. The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane depends on it's music for its sense of befouled innocence; Baghdad Monologue depends music to refer to different cultures. If we want to see contemporary opera continue to flourish, then undoubtedly, this 'gestalt' approach is its foremost champion.
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Concert Review and Commentary: OPERA IS SICK, The Boy Who Lived Down The Lane, Size Zero Opera, 11/08/11 (Soh)
The Boy Who Lived Down The Lane as part of Tête à Tête Opera Festival, Thursday 11th August 2011, Size Zero Opera, Music: Dianna Soh, Libretto: James Currie.
700 words
OPERA IS SICK
Size Zero's Opera,'s short, 20 minute performance The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane, was not only the crowning gem of the Tete a Tete Opera Festival, but the most promising new work I have seen this year and the most hopeful patron for the continuation of contemporary opera.
Part of the larger set Innocence in the Asylum, the work is a Jack-and-Jill story where an intense narrative of sexual pursuit is relayed through a cut-and-paste libretto (James Currie), consisting of snippets from nursery rhymes. Dressed in a baby-doll dress, the lead soprano (Laura Bowler) hurls herself through a series of schizophrenic ramblings which bring the innocent words of the libretto into new, dirtier, arena, where restraint struggles to contain desire.
The work is exquisitely wrought. Figure by figure the singers constantly renew the material, bringing each line to life with a new set of expressive gestures; every passage holds an explicit communicative purpose. Orchestrally, the chamber ensemble use a wide variety of extended techniques, predominantly used to deepen each gestural facet with a different timbral frame. Soh's momentum never dulls, the score bounces from one section to the next; never tipping the delicate balance of varying material and still keeping a sense of continuum.
The performance left me safe in the knowledge that opera is in the hands of highly intelligent creative individuals, not only for the work's finesse, but for the particularly evocative choice of subject matter that appeared so appropriate to the medium.
Madness, the macabre and defiled innocence are nothing new to opera. On the contrary, we could call it a 20th century obsession – from the moment Salome kisses the decapitated head of John the Baptist, through Schoenberg's harlequin Pierrot Lunnaire, to when the black widow Lulu breaks down as she loses her balloon in Berg's erotic tale and Punch kills Judy for the fourth time in Birtwistle's neo-modernist masterpiece – a fascination with derangement has produced operatic masterpieces over and over again.
Why do madness and opera go so well together? The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane, provides us with the answers in its successes.
Madness is often represented as an inability to control 'the passions', hence, an exaggeration of the expression of passion through verbosity and gesticulation. The primary reason opera is such a fitting medium for these themes, is the exaggerated gestural potency that is afforded when action is coupled with music; through music, the expressive potential of each idiom of insanity can be maximalized.
The secondary reason is what music gives through the resource of tonality. The absolute genius which makes Birtwistle's Punch and Judy such a raw, evocative work, and which The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane shares, is the use of tonality to conjure a sense of innocence and unrest simultaneously. Through the deeply-embedded cultural associations humans attach to different musical scales and forms, it is possible to layer playful, childlike idioms formed out of simple scales and major triads and skipping rhythms against a dissonant, timbrally obscure backdrop with violent percussive punctuation. The effect of the narrative is produced separately to its representation; essentially, it twice magnified.
Thirdly, operas on madness appear to take the nature of their own medium into account when choosing a subject. Opera is a powerful art form; the vocal agility, height, and volume some performers achieve is an extremely intense experience for listeners. By taking the macabre as subject matter, the medium can appeal to opera lovers and haters alike; for those who find it compelling, the emotional intensity absorbs them in the medium. For those who find it ridiculous, a double entendre is formed when an extra dimension is transposed onto the performance through a sense of alienation; at least resulting in an intellectual, if not sensual, appreciation.
Size Zero Opera has not only demonstrated it is technically capable of producing works to an exceptionally high standard, it also demonstrates a particularly acute perception of what to do with itself and how to create works that will excite a new audience. I hope that Size Zero Opera will have the courage to preoccupy itself with the carnal, the arcane and the obscure, and will dance it's dark dance towards a potent operatic future.
700 words
OPERA IS SICK
Size Zero's Opera,'s short, 20 minute performance The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane, was not only the crowning gem of the Tete a Tete Opera Festival, but the most promising new work I have seen this year and the most hopeful patron for the continuation of contemporary opera.
Part of the larger set Innocence in the Asylum, the work is a Jack-and-Jill story where an intense narrative of sexual pursuit is relayed through a cut-and-paste libretto (James Currie), consisting of snippets from nursery rhymes. Dressed in a baby-doll dress, the lead soprano (Laura Bowler) hurls herself through a series of schizophrenic ramblings which bring the innocent words of the libretto into new, dirtier, arena, where restraint struggles to contain desire.
The work is exquisitely wrought. Figure by figure the singers constantly renew the material, bringing each line to life with a new set of expressive gestures; every passage holds an explicit communicative purpose. Orchestrally, the chamber ensemble use a wide variety of extended techniques, predominantly used to deepen each gestural facet with a different timbral frame. Soh's momentum never dulls, the score bounces from one section to the next; never tipping the delicate balance of varying material and still keeping a sense of continuum.
The performance left me safe in the knowledge that opera is in the hands of highly intelligent creative individuals, not only for the work's finesse, but for the particularly evocative choice of subject matter that appeared so appropriate to the medium.
Madness, the macabre and defiled innocence are nothing new to opera. On the contrary, we could call it a 20th century obsession – from the moment Salome kisses the decapitated head of John the Baptist, through Schoenberg's harlequin Pierrot Lunnaire, to when the black widow Lulu breaks down as she loses her balloon in Berg's erotic tale and Punch kills Judy for the fourth time in Birtwistle's neo-modernist masterpiece – a fascination with derangement has produced operatic masterpieces over and over again.
Why do madness and opera go so well together? The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane, provides us with the answers in its successes.
Madness is often represented as an inability to control 'the passions', hence, an exaggeration of the expression of passion through verbosity and gesticulation. The primary reason opera is such a fitting medium for these themes, is the exaggerated gestural potency that is afforded when action is coupled with music; through music, the expressive potential of each idiom of insanity can be maximalized.
The secondary reason is what music gives through the resource of tonality. The absolute genius which makes Birtwistle's Punch and Judy such a raw, evocative work, and which The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane shares, is the use of tonality to conjure a sense of innocence and unrest simultaneously. Through the deeply-embedded cultural associations humans attach to different musical scales and forms, it is possible to layer playful, childlike idioms formed out of simple scales and major triads and skipping rhythms against a dissonant, timbrally obscure backdrop with violent percussive punctuation. The effect of the narrative is produced separately to its representation; essentially, it twice magnified.
Thirdly, operas on madness appear to take the nature of their own medium into account when choosing a subject. Opera is a powerful art form; the vocal agility, height, and volume some performers achieve is an extremely intense experience for listeners. By taking the macabre as subject matter, the medium can appeal to opera lovers and haters alike; for those who find it compelling, the emotional intensity absorbs them in the medium. For those who find it ridiculous, a double entendre is formed when an extra dimension is transposed onto the performance through a sense of alienation; at least resulting in an intellectual, if not sensual, appreciation.
Size Zero Opera has not only demonstrated it is technically capable of producing works to an exceptionally high standard, it also demonstrates a particularly acute perception of what to do with itself and how to create works that will excite a new audience. I hope that Size Zero Opera will have the courage to preoccupy itself with the carnal, the arcane and the obscure, and will dance it's dark dance towards a potent operatic future.
Thursday, 18 August 2011
LONDON BACH SOCIETY: BACH CLUB, Bach Notes, Journal Entry, September 2011
Article for London Bach Society's BACH CLUB page, in their journal BACH NOTES. Sept 2011
500 words
How should we promote Bach to people ages 18-30? What should London Bach Society's BACH CLUB be, and do, to communicate Bach's music to this audience? How can we help those already persuaded by Bach's music to take their interest to new heights, whilst also providing an introduction to those unfamiliar with or undecided about his work?
Whilst electronic composition classical composers such as Glass, Reich, Eno, Xenakis and Feldman receive a natural social platform in current society, Bach is a figure more isolated to contemporary life. Many young people come to minimalism through an experience of film scores, which provide an emotionally evocative platform for music similar to what they are listening to already in its tonality, chord progressions and repeated idioms. Others turn to electronic composers and the neo-modernists in an extension of their interest in experimental popular forms and concept albums.
Bach possesses less of these observable 'lead-ins' to his music through contemporary culture. Often, he is spoken of as being a 'cerebral' composer. The intricate part writing in his fugues are said to play themselves out with almost mathematical precision, the passion of his cantatas is ignored, and instead they are praised for their architecture, structure and form.
Yet words such as form and structure are misleading, mathematical terms, they can give the impression that Bach is to be understood in the same manner you would understand the workings of an engine. They are, understandably, an unnattractive and pressurised way to promote music, whose allure lies in the emotional reaction to sound as much as the sound itself.
So, for newcomers to Bach, it is important to realise that, it is possible to appreciate him just by listening, not thinking: the same way you would appreciate any other music. By moving, mentally and emotionally with each arching melody, each expected and unexpected chord change, each vigorous upbeat and poignant cadence you can open yourself to, and experience Bach. You may find your emotions amplified at specific points in the composition or you may decide Bach has nothing for you BUT the only way for this realisation to occur, is through experiencing it directly.
Thus: in November 2009, London Bach Society launched BACH CLUB, for those aged 18-30. All BACH CLUB events are free for students and a modest cost for others. From November onwards BACH CLUB meetings will happen twice a year, but, as we see the BACH CLUB grow members and develop interest, we hope to increase this to more.
The meetings are modelled on the weekly events Bach himself headed, in the city of Leipzig. At the forefront of artistic life, Bach and his students would use the time to discuss and perform new music, new ideas and new meanings. Likewise, BACH CLUB wants to push music into new areas. The meetings will not just favour seasoned performers but will introduce new interpretations of Bach's work by new performers and première works by new composers influenced by Bach. Over drinks it will also give artists a chance to talk about their work, offer audience members opportunity to ask questions, share thoughts and make useful contacts for future performances, concerts and careers. Whilst this will provide a cultural 'lead-in' for those who have had little experience of Bach (and this is where YOU come in to invite as many curious friends as you have BACH CLUB events) the social space the meetings create will allow everyone to pursue Bach to their own level.
Please seek us out on Facebook, Twitter, and on the London Bach Society website, and we hope to see you in November
Monday, 1 August 2011
News Story- Boulez Festival, Women at the Vanguard - Classical Music Magazine
News Story - Boulez Festival, Women at the Vanguard - Classical Music Magazine - Second July Issue 2011
350 Words
SouthBank Centre Celebrates 'The Godfather' of new music with exquisite labyrinth: The music of Pierre Boulez culmonating in Boulez conducting his seminal modernist masterpiece.
Friday 30 September – Sunday 2 October 2011
Mr Boulez has been modern music's most active voice and participant over the last 60 years. His compositions utilize a range of compositional styles, from twelve-tone technique, controlled chance and aleatoric music, to the use of electronics.
The festival, running from 30th September - 2nd October, offers an opportunity to witness each of Boulez's experimental facets through exciting collaborations from the the leading figures of today's contemporary music scene, and will include performances of his major works. Experts are also to deliver their insights in an in an International Study Day, which will take place at the Royal Festival Hall on 1st October.
The programme also boasts a high level of female performers - who are becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary music - including finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki, pianist Tamara Stefanovich and Finnish soprano Barbara Hannigan, who will undertake a fiendishly difficult vocal role in the climax of the programme, the work Pli Selon Pli.
On Friday 20th September, the Royal Academy of Music's Manson Ensemble will kick off the celebration with a selection of Boulez's acoustic works. The concert will feature Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna, alongside two versions of his Domaines. The works explore the notion of musical space as a solo clarinetist transforms the work's soundscape by moving about the stage, interacting with different musical groups.
On Saturday 1st October, leading Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös will conduct London Sinfonietta,flautist Micheal Cox and violinist Clio Gould in a collaboration with a sound engineer and computer music designer from IRCAM to perform the electronic works Explosante-fixe and Anthèmes 2 for violin & live electronicsare.
The will weekend culminate on Sunday 2nd October, when all of Boulez's piano works are to be performed in three short recitals over one afternoon by his friends Piere-Laurent and Tamara Stefanovich. And, as a grand finale, Boulez himself will be conducting soprano Barbara Hannigan, Ensemble intercontemporain (which he founded in 1976) and the young musicians of the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble in his own seminal masterpiece, Pli selon pli (Fold by fold). The 70-minute work takes its inspiration and, more innovatively, its structure, from the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Gillian Moore, Head of Contemporary Culture at Southbank Centre, describes the weekend as 'the perfect opportunity for curious audiences to discover and enjoy the vertiginous thrill of modernist music, brilliantly performed.’
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
Concert Review: SEVEN ANGELS, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, The Opera Group, 14/07/11 (Bedford)
SEVEN ANGELS, Royal Opera House, Thursday 14th July 2011, The Opera Group, with Nicholas Collon conducting Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
500 Words
Seven Angels, with words by Glyn Maxwell and music by up-and-coming composer Luke Bedford, unveils the new concept of an 'eco-opera', exploring the relationship between human beings and the earth's finite resources. Taking inspiration from Milton's Paradise Lost, seven angels, overlooked in Milton's poem, fall to earth with no knowledge of how they arrived there. By becoming a King, Queen and their son and workers, the characters construct their new world piece by piece, imagining the creation of a legendary garden that once flourished there, and its destruction from greed and neglect.
The opera makes a bold appeal to today's environmental problems, and it's concluding moral is poignant: two of the angels choose to remain behind whilst others abandon the devastated world. Yet despite the opera's pertinence, it's strength lies in it's message alone; emotionally and imaginatively it fails to engage its audience.
The lack of spark rests on a disjunction between the serious, quasi-religious message, and the mediums through which it is portrayed. Although appealing to grandiose ideas which demand a great deal of rapture from the audience, the manner of presentation is surprisingly reserved. Characters appear as two-dimensional representations of their societal role (a chef, a gardener, an industrialist). Through their text, 'Oh I love to weed the earth, God knows it's all my time is worth' they are reduced almost to the point of naivety, becoming symbolic, rather than the expressive. Whilst this form of representation works in combination with the minimalist set design by Tadasu Takamine (consisting solely of kitsch paper 'pop out' trees which emerge from the books of various sizes) it is out of keeping with the serious tone the opera requires, and, above all, the score.
Despite the well-ordered progression of ideas throughout the libretto, its division into two acts, and therefore its obvious structural potential, the score was architecturally flat. The accompanying ensemble punctuated, supported, or drove the melody lines with a monotonous series of, short pizz chords and bow-slaps, tense drawn-out chords, and repeated motor rhythms. Tonally, the picture was a sea of drab greys, with no memorable motifs or interesting structural devices.
The vocal lines, although more lyrical and melodically interesting than their accompaniment, consistently delivered the same form of emotional arch: short phrases, rising in tension, then breaking out into plateaus of expressive legato; rendered ineffective due to their predictability.
This 'inexpressive' expressivity almost forms the effect of a parody, merely announcing the grandiosity of the ideas in the libretto or the pretence of the production, rather than invoking any emotional reaction to support its cause.
Largely, despite the commendable efforts of the performers, the production lacked the spark it needed for I, the audience, to take it seriously. But then, to give drama to the libretto's poetry was an ambitious project. To quote Wallace Stevens: 'A grandiose subject is not assurance of a grandiose effect, but, most likely, of the opposite'.
500 Words
Seven Angels, with words by Glyn Maxwell and music by up-and-coming composer Luke Bedford, unveils the new concept of an 'eco-opera', exploring the relationship between human beings and the earth's finite resources. Taking inspiration from Milton's Paradise Lost, seven angels, overlooked in Milton's poem, fall to earth with no knowledge of how they arrived there. By becoming a King, Queen and their son and workers, the characters construct their new world piece by piece, imagining the creation of a legendary garden that once flourished there, and its destruction from greed and neglect.
The opera makes a bold appeal to today's environmental problems, and it's concluding moral is poignant: two of the angels choose to remain behind whilst others abandon the devastated world. Yet despite the opera's pertinence, it's strength lies in it's message alone; emotionally and imaginatively it fails to engage its audience.
The lack of spark rests on a disjunction between the serious, quasi-religious message, and the mediums through which it is portrayed. Although appealing to grandiose ideas which demand a great deal of rapture from the audience, the manner of presentation is surprisingly reserved. Characters appear as two-dimensional representations of their societal role (a chef, a gardener, an industrialist). Through their text, 'Oh I love to weed the earth, God knows it's all my time is worth' they are reduced almost to the point of naivety, becoming symbolic, rather than the expressive. Whilst this form of representation works in combination with the minimalist set design by Tadasu Takamine (consisting solely of kitsch paper 'pop out' trees which emerge from the books of various sizes) it is out of keeping with the serious tone the opera requires, and, above all, the score.
Despite the well-ordered progression of ideas throughout the libretto, its division into two acts, and therefore its obvious structural potential, the score was architecturally flat. The accompanying ensemble punctuated, supported, or drove the melody lines with a monotonous series of, short pizz chords and bow-slaps, tense drawn-out chords, and repeated motor rhythms. Tonally, the picture was a sea of drab greys, with no memorable motifs or interesting structural devices.
The vocal lines, although more lyrical and melodically interesting than their accompaniment, consistently delivered the same form of emotional arch: short phrases, rising in tension, then breaking out into plateaus of expressive legato; rendered ineffective due to their predictability.
This 'inexpressive' expressivity almost forms the effect of a parody, merely announcing the grandiosity of the ideas in the libretto or the pretence of the production, rather than invoking any emotional reaction to support its cause.
Largely, despite the commendable efforts of the performers, the production lacked the spark it needed for I, the audience, to take it seriously. But then, to give drama to the libretto's poetry was an ambitious project. To quote Wallace Stevens: 'A grandiose subject is not assurance of a grandiose effect, but, most likely, of the opposite'.
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