Campogrande, Prokofiev and Dvorak in Alicante

The placing of the world premiere alongside establish repertoire is not itself unusual. What was unusual about ADDA Sinfonica’s latest concert was the fact that the contemporary piece that started the concert was arguably the most musically conventional item on the programme.

Nicola Campogrande’s music paints wholly recognizable shapes in never jarring colours. It seems to live in familiar landscapes, often vistas that are reminiscent of film on television music. This is in no way a criticism, but I do think it is an observation that informs an approach to his style. His second symphony “A New World”, follows a conventional four movement structure, but diverges by not pursuing formal development and also by having the finale presented as a song. The whole piece lasts just fifteen minutes, which was about the time devoted to a discussion between the composer and Josep Vicent, the orchestra’s artistic director, at the start of the evening.

Nicola Campogrande explained that he began the work because he felt that the world needed a change, a new direction, clearly toward a greater amount of tolerance and cooperation, rather than division and conflict. A friend offered to write a poem that became the symphony’s finale. The message, if such a work can be summarized, is that we can build a better world if we simply accept what we are, where we are, and share things like music and singing.

Nicola Campogrande’s “A New World” proved to be as gentle on the ear as in its message from within the text. Again, this is not a criticism. We respond to suffering and pressure in our own individual way. It was, after all, Vaughan Williams, a favourite composer of mine, who responded to the carnage of the First World War with the Pastoral Symphony, a work that presents precious little played forte and boasts three slow movements. Piero Bodrato’s text presented a positive vision that we were invited to share, at least for the length of the piece. Stephanie Iranyi’s soprano voice proved perfect for this text and music.

The First World War link is important, because of the work that followed. Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto was written in 1917 and its premiere had to be postponed because of Russia’s Revolution. Conceived in an era of conflict, this is another work that seems to commemorate via suggestion a vision of a different world. But Sergei Prokofiev’s imagination lived in a truly individual and ethereal universe, which only occasionally seems even to reference the terrestrial. Twenty-year-old Ellinor D’Melon’s playing as via a soloist captured every aspect of this masterpiece. She was delicate and brash, soothing and acerbic, loud and soft, always perfectly expressive. Alongside Josep Vicent’s perfect balance in the ADDA orchestra kept the piece overall a musical whole, while allowing the soloist to shine. It was indeed a memorable performance of arguably the greatest of all violin concertos. Ellinor D’Melon’s encore lightened the mood considerably. She offered Henri Vieuxtemp’s Variations on the Yankee Doodle, a piece that allowed her to show off in the conventional concerto style that the Prokofiev masterpiece largely denied.

There is perhaps nothing new to say about Dvorak’s New World. But at the end of the 19th century, this work referenced the still revolutionary Wagner, included folk tunes in serious music and used orchestral colours and power that many audiences might have found challenging. Above all, the New World of the title was itself in reference to the idea of freedom from Europe’s feudal shackles and staid empires. The performance, as ever with the ADDA orchestra, was full of expertise and enthusiasm, a perfect mix to make even the familiar memorable.

There was a little encore, of course. Bernstein’s Mambo from West Side Story is a roof raiser. Thankfully the roof stayed on. Just.

El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero

El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero is beautiful, if at times frustrating book. It could all be said much more simply, succinctly and perhaps with greater immediate power. But if it were written that way, it would lose what becomes its special and elegant appeal as a repeated motifs, by simple virtue of their repetition, actually take on the flavour of what the writer clearly intended to communicate.

Ostensibly an autobiography, El balcón en invierno often feels like a novel, a surreal experience couched in a style that approaches magical realism. Long before we reach the end of the book, its characters have attained for the reader the near mythical status they hold for the book’s narrator, ostensibly a child of the extended family described.

We are pitched into a world of memories. This remembered world is that of a college educated, Madrid resident, mature man, who still wants to be a professional jazz guitarist. Every element of that sought after and pursued identity would have been beyond not only the experience or even capability of the family that raised him, it would be beyond the limits of their encultured imagination. Guitarists certainly existed in this reality, but jazz was recorded music, internationally marketed and reliant upon participation in an economic system that was unknown to this community. It would have been unimaginable for the grandparents, so vividly recalled from the experience of times shared. It’s a measure of how much change can be foisted from outside on a mere generation of human existence that the grandson viewed as normal that which was beyond the imagination of the parents.

The principal character of El balcón en invierno was raised in a rural community in western Spain, near Badajoz in Extremadura, not far from the Portuguese border. The families in that area shared a common approach to life. They were all different, but they were all dependent on a local economy rooted in the soil, in agriculture, in small holdings, in the processing of the products of that soil and the servicing of the needs of the community. Ambition extended only as far as the next village. And it is this all embracing, all encompassing, almost closed, repeated and repetitive way of life that forms the backbone of nostalgia the stiffens the entire book.

But not for this writer the repeated daily responsibilities of chicken coop, the tending of goats, the drawing of water, the pruning of vines, the tethering of cattle, the leading of donkeys. Not for him the preparation of gazpacho, the making of bread, the stirring of an olla bubbling with cocido over a wood fire, the kneading of dough or the grinding of flour. Not for him the cutting or pressing of grapes, the picking of oranges, the drying of tomatoes or figs, nor the harvesting of nisperos. For him, the enduring ambition was to become a jazz guitarist. And that would require visiting a city. A city! A what? And for what would you need all that schooling, all those lessons and exams and prices of paper they call qualifications, when not one of them shows you how to milk a goat, make cheese or butter or press an olive?

And it is this access to schooling, to an education that certainly existed in his grandparents’ time, that truly offered the means of transforming a life and, by accessing it, the process that would end a lifestyle. Schooling was probably a commodity not accessed by grandparents and parents alike, because it could contribute nothing to the necessities of a life that was all demanding in its essential tasks. But, as the schooling also demonstrated, it was also something of a self-reproducing prison, which retained relevance only within its own, shrinking walls. There was a life elsewhere and it was beginning to invade.

In less able hands, the reliving of rural life via nostalgic images could have become a mere romanticized fantasy, a lost imagined ideal world which, in reality, was hard, unforgiving, often short-lived and, when truth be admitted, far from ideal. The reader is often walked through the recalled reality of this existence, but the lists of objects, of foods, of daily tasks might just have been culled from someone else’s nostalgia. But in the hands of Luis Landero, the processing of lists becomes a cultural experience, a filled-out landscape, rather than an ego-trip down memory lane.

El balcón en invierno’s beauty is not in its sensitivity, its compassion. Its message, however, is that the lives become what time and circumstance conspire to arrange and that, in the end, we may idealize only the life we have not lived. The one we have lived, on the other hand, becomes the mundane, the challenging struggle that life has always been, even that ideal, remembered, reimagined rural existence for those who lived it. Read it in Spanish, but ignore the fact that there are many old, archaic words. Just go with the flow and appreciate the contrast that the author draws between nostalgic imagination and brutal reality.

Europe Since Napoleon by David Thomson

 

Some time ago and in relation to a different book, I wrote a review that in essence began, “Occasionally, just occasionally, one comes across a book so impressive, so scholarly and so communicative that it leaves a reader both in awe of its achievement and completely rewarded by the experience of reading it.” I did not expect to encounter another book in the near future to which that description might also apply. I have done just that, and my life is immeasurably richer as a result.

The title, Europe Since Napoleon, communicates what the book addresses. This is not a history of the United States, Asia, China, South America or Africa. Europe is the focus, but the vision is in no sense myopic. During the period in question, history of course documents that some European powers were imperial powers, claiming ownership and rule of colonies across the globe, indeed on every continent. There was also the detail of two World Wars, which have been granted that title because the conflict was near global in scale. Hence Europe Since Napoleon addresses many aspects of history, politics and economics that relate to the global interests of the European nations and, as such, this book, at least in the opinion of this reader, becomes more of a Eurocentric view of world history, rather than a narrower discussion of a specific continent. And it must also be added that any Eurocentrism arises nearly out of the focus, and not from any form of bias or sense of superiority.

There is a problem with the book’s title, however. Europe Since Napoleon implies that it might begin at the end of the French Imperial era, but Europe Since Napoleon begins by analyzing the circumstances and events that allowed Napoleon to assume power. We start, therefore, with the discussion of pre-revolutionary France and the revolution, itself, because it was out of these events that the arose the opportunity for Napoleon to assume power.

The Napoleonic Wars, the peace, reform, revolution, socialism, labor, economy, Russian expansion, nationalism, the creation of Italy and Germany, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune all pass by and we have yet to complete half of the book’s two centuries of coverage. Of course, there follows the Berlin Conference, the partition of Africa, the lording it over the rest of the world to shape it into European advantage zones, the Great War, another revolution, boom, depression, strike, greater war, atomic bombs, the Iron Curtain, the suggestion of international cooperation, the rise of science, the nuclear age and the molecular age.

Of course, Europe Since Napoleon, like any summary work cannot even address the claim of being comprehensive. But in his book, David Thomson regularly illustrates how the big issues of the day re-drew the map, forged new alliances, created opportunity and transformed people’s lives. The author wrote over 400,000 words spanning almost 1000 pages and at the end provides a thorough bibliography of works he has no doubt read to provide greater depth across most of the issues covered in the book.

But the real strength of Europe Since Napoleon is not its coverage, nor its description of the events it lists, but its narrative. Throughout David Thompson resists the temptation merely to list facts, opting instead for a fluid, narrative style that does, it has to be said, assume a modicum of prior knowledge. But what if the reader gains from this apparently stylistic ploy is quite brilliant contextualization, synthesis and thereby understanding. This is a thousand-page history book that is simply a joy to read, from page one to page 946, to be precise, not counting the appendices.

And, if the foregoing were not enough praise, the author’s final observations, written in the 1960s are ostensibly predictions of where the human race may go over the following decades and it is nothing less than revelatory. Not only does David Thompson have a bigger view of history, but he also demonstrates a true intellectual vision that is both breathtaking in its scope and exciting in its optimism. Reading this vision sixty years on, one can only ask the question, how on Earth did this happen, how on earth did we end up here? And, after reading this book, the one thing that history has taught us repeatedly, is that we may catalogue, describe and understand, but also that we should not predict, and we should not take anything for granted. History is a guide, but never repeats itself, never returns us to the familiar. That is how it happened. What a superb book!

English Bread And Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David

 

At almost 500 pages, Elizabeth David‘s English Bread And Yeast Cookery is quite a read. It’s also quite mis-titled, but more of that later. But it is a cookbook, so why would one want to read it from cover to cover? Surely reference is its prime function? The answer simply is that this cookbook is written by Elizabeth David and the writing is exquisite, the erudition thoroughly impressive and the advice probably faultless. This last point has to be qualified with “probably”, since it is highly unlikely that anyone except Elizabeth David herself might put every one of these recipes to any sort of practical test. Even she did not do all of them, but when she has not already tried out a recipe, she actually tells the reader in her text and admits she is speculating.

This is a text littered with items grabbed from historical cookbooks where the writer has merely copied what went before, sometimes despite its advice being demonstrably nonsensical. It is also littered with gems of verbosity from the past, where writers might offer such advice as “agitate the receptacle aggressively” rather than “beat it”. And some of the older recipes seemed to have been designed for armies, so great are the quantities and might start with and instruction such as “take a bushel of flour”.

Written in the 1970s, this text was obviously already familiar with supermarkets, but not with fast food in quantities as it currently surrounds us. This allows a contemporary reader to reflect on just how much the average diet might have changed in the last fifty years. Elizabeth David is, for example, not fond of restaurant pizza, which she seems to judge as having the same qualities as hardboard panelling. Precisely what she would have made of O’Muffins or Macbuns or similar I have no idea, but I bet I could guess.

But pizza recipes in the book on English bread? Well, this is part of the problem with the book’s title because not only does it regularly visit Scotland, Wales or Ireland, it also gets on a ferry to France, Austria, Italy or even Russia or the United States and elsewhere. It seems that the 1970s was more willing than now to admit international influences and sharing, without ever once using vacuous and meaningless terms like “fusion” or “world food”. If it’s not from the world, where on earth is it from? And as for “fusion”, this particular reviewer regards much of it as a con, leading to confusion.

The author spends much time in space explaining the details, even the intricacies of flours, grains, milling, grinding and sifting. There is a superb historical section that dips into the techniques, technology and technicalities of breadmaking. And in doing so, Elizabeth David explodes many myths which have remained mythical until today. She points out that much of brown bread on sale is coloured with molasses, not whole wheat grain, and that many recipes that specify whole grains often extract the germ and pre-cook it before adding it back to the flour. She also describes how commercial bread was in her time often aerated or pumped with extra water or even chalk to add volume, bulk and profit. Here Elizabeth David looks in immense detail at conventional yeast risen bread, flat breads, sweet breads, (not one word!), muffins, pikelets, crumpets, fermented butter cakes, griddle breads, sourdough, soda bread and many other delectable concoctions of flour, water and rising agent.

In the process, she dispels many myths, such as the oft quoted need to throw away half of a sourdough starter, advice I have read many times, many times indeed. Personally, I have in the past tried to follow such recipes, but when it came to “divide it into two and throw half away”, I was always stumped into inaction, because I never knew which half should be discarded. If it’s the case that the sourdough starter’s volume would be too big otherwise, then “make less” ought to be the instruction. Isn’t it obvious?

But then there are a lot of myths, many of them sourced in religion about bread. Man may not live by bread alone, but maybe it is all right for women. Bread of heaven, but not from my oven… There are many more, some of which made it into these pages. But with breadmaking, there is room for myth, since the process is often wholly unpredictable, so quantity, so temperature, or so procedurally sensitive that it is impossible to predict the results which will be produced even by following exactly the same recipe, a point that Elizabeth David regularly makes throughout the text.

And, of course, that is precisely why the mass-produced loaf was baked on an industrial scale, in order to try to achieve the regularity and uniformity that the modern consumer sees to crave. But no two vegetables are exactly the same shape and the shape has nothing to with the taste. Elizabeth David’s English Bread And Yeast Cookery offers the perfect cure to this disease of expected uniformity. Mix it, wait, cook it and see. Do it again, and it will probably be different. Now isn’t that a recipe for an interesting life! It is most certainly an interesting book, but don’t try to eat it all at once.

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham

 

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham is a profoundly surprising book. Written in 1930, the novel begins its story in the Edwardian age prior to the First World War. It comes, therefore, with the inevitable expectation that it will depict English society as a rather stuffy, perhaps dusty entity, full of flock wallpaper and aspidistras, tired after so many years of Victoria, but not yet woken up to the new world that the war so painfully introduced. But this is precisely where expectations could be wrong. In fact Cakes And Ale takes a rather liberated view of British society’s values, pokes fun at stiff convention and generally offers no moral judgment where other writers would surely lay on the presumption.

Cakes And Ale carries the subtitle The Skeleton In The Cupboard, without being absolutely clear whose skeleton is described, while the book certainly does not list many cupboards. One must presume that what is being referred to is the relationship between the privileged character William Ashenden and Mrs. Rosie Driffield, the wife of a novelist. Their time together begins when Ashenden is a boy, at least in his own eyes, and concludes many years later by which time both characters have reinvented themselves several times. It is a relationship that starts in platonic fascination, graduates to physical adulthood and concludes in seeming admiration at distance.

But overall, this relationship is allowed to blossom without the judgment on might expect it to receive, so skeletons remain hard to justify or identify. Equally, it could be Mrs. Driffield‘s long-standing obsession with a certain Lord George, but eventually this turns out to be sincere and long lasting. Mrs. Driffield certainly liaised with enough men to create several skeletons, but they would not have been in cupboards.

We follow William Ashenden from a self-identified childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. He too wants to become a writer and at least initially it is Mr. Driffield the novelist who interests him. At one stage, Ashenden laments the burden of having to describe his own experience in the first person. All writers, one supposes, love to inhabit that special heaven which allows convenient detachment and can put words into anyone’s mouth and feelings into anyone’s experience. Being merely oneself can be utterly restricting.

We first encounter this life while he is visiting his uncle on the south coast, in Kent to be precise, where Driffield the writer and his wife Rosie have moved in and are in the process of causing quite a local stir. General opinion is that Mrs. Driffield is rather common, a bar maid or of that ilk, and the suggestions are that she does not need classes in anatomy.

The moral indignation of the chattering classes is apparently unanimous. Mrs. Driffield puts herself about, especially in the direction of Lord George who is no lord, and the judgment is that anything in trousers is deemed of interest to her. And the indignation is not related to class, since the servants of the household where Ashenden stays are as vehement in their opinions as the boss, until they meet the sad Rosie, that is, and then their tone changes, for some reason.

Maugham has such a lower-class people drop their aitches and modify their vowels to such an extent that one wonders how they manage to say so many apostrophes. But Rosie Driffield thoroughly captivates the young lad. He becomes infatuated with her though he doesn’t realize it at first. For him, it’s merely growing up.

But the relationship changes from one of curiosity and interest to one of physicality and sex, but never does Somerset Maugham have either Ashington or Rosie regret what they are doing. Guilt seems not to be a destination in the London where they meet. They are merely human beings being human. And this is what is so surprising about the book.

Rosie eventually runs off with Lord George to the United States, where he makes a fortune and she becomes as respectable as she can possibly be first in New York and then in Yonkers, atop a significant fortune, which all goes to show something at least.

Though it is not explicitly stated, the United States is portrayed in the book as a land where moralizing attitudes and gossip have no place. Both Lord George and Rosie have moved there and have lived their lives unaffected by social judgment. Back home in England, where one expects judgment to be available by the stone, physical life continues to be denied, but not in Cakes And Ale. The fact is that Rosie has risen above criticism, but one must assume that she can only continue in that life out of Albion. Perhaps it was her skeleton after all.

 

Orchestra La Scala Milan under Riccardo Chailly in Alicante's ADDA

 A program juxtaposing two first symphonies has to invite comparison. When those first symphonies are those of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, arguably at either end of the nineteenth century German Romantic tradition, then that comparison must include considerations of what happened to the style, if indeed it ever existed as an identifiable entity.

The orchestra, La Scala, Milan under its conductor Riccardo Chailly, has a tradition with Mahler symphonies, and this is very much the tradition of its conductor. Ricardo Chailly, the program noted, has over 150 recordings to his name and he also has recorded a complete Mahler symphony cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus. ADDA’s audience thus expected a lot from the evening. There was no disappointment.

Beethoven’s First Symphony was premiered in 1800. Stylistically, it is rooted in the tradition that Haydn and Mozart had created in the previous century, but from its opening, Beethoven’s first is different. While we now label the earlier era as classical, Beethoven’s first surely heralded the era of Romanticism, where the expression of individual emotions rather than structural integrity was to be the focus of artistic intentions.

The structure is there from the previous classical era. Sonata form is evident in the first movement and elsewhere. The fast, slow, minuet and finale format is preserved, but the principal keys, which still dominate the work, arrive more by suggestion than by statement and the minuet is barely danceable because its character is that of the modern scherzo. The very word implies a musical joke, perhaps a piece of trivia included to express personal feelings and reflections.

This is thus a work that represents a revolution of symphonic thinking, but this revolution was not a break with the past, more its extension and amplification into new territory. And though Beethoven’s orchestra was large for its era, it still comprised only double winds and no trombones or tuba. What characterizes the music, however, as so often in Beethoven, is the possibility that the inspiration came from the composer’s memory of dance tunes and popular music, reworked and remodelled into “serious” form.

And so to the link. At the end of that nineteenth century, Gustav Mahler announced another stylistic revolution with his first symphony, whose most noticeable difference from the Beethoven was immediately the size of the orchestra employed. There are four movements again. But now the movements pay only lip service to the formal structures of sonata form, which, like Beethoven’s introduction of the tonic, is via suggestion rather than statement. The placing of the slow movement third rather than second began with Beethoven, so this was nothing new.

But what Mahler did that was revolutionary was to incorporate folk-like melodies into the symphonic argument and render that argument largely textural. Here, the composer seems to want to explore the range of sonorities that these large forces could generate. But despite the composer’s reputation for deploying large forces, these sonorities are only rarely loud or brash. These contrasts are textural and coloristic, clearly intended to convey to the listener the quality of an experience, rather than its narrative.

A contemporary listener can only imagine what an audience in central Europe made of a slow movement that juxtaposed a funeral march based on a French children’s song with passages that derived from Jewish Klezmer dance music.

Perhaps the finale is a little too meandering and perhaps its triumphal end is overblown. But who cares? And this performance, under the watchful eye of Ricardo Chailly, was wonderfully detailed. Here we heard all the sonorities and all the dynamic changes in intricate and vivid detail. Everything seemed to make sense, even those passages where the composer seemed to delight in the tangential. The use of rubato was obvious, but never overdone. Everything made musical sense to the extent that during the first movement this listener heard the progress as a walk through scenic countryside! It is a work I have heard many times before but with Riccardo Chailly’s vision and supremely masterful reading, I now can’t wait for the next performance.

And what about the comparison, Beethoven to Mahler, mentioned at the start? Beethoven arguably invented the individual’s experiential centrality in the symphony. No longer was the form a rigid frame that had to contain certain elements. In his first symphony, Beethoven had not yet fully divested himself of the need to conform, but the innovations he introduced were well developed in Mahler’s time. By the end of that nineteenth century, the individual’s emotions and feelings had become the point of the exercise, not mere suggestion and in Mahler’s first, we meet the composer, not the structure. In fact, the whim of the composer’s intention was about to prompt others, following the current extension of harmonic complexity, to call again for the imposition of structure. There was a tradition, but perhaps by the century’s end, there was nowhere else for the style to go. And, if we were to accept popular tunes into the symphony, why not make folk culture central to the argument? A new era dawned.