Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Billy Budd is doubly famous. He is the eponymous principal character of Herman Melville’s novella and, by adoption via E M Forster’s hand, also the eponymous hero a Benjamin Britten’s opera. The contrasting if not contradictory words ‘character’ and ‘hero’ are important in the context of these two masterpieces.

Like all good stories, it cannot be spoiled, because it is in the way the story is told that the real experience lies. Billy Budd is a young man, rather handsome in a simple, lower status, ratings way. He is recruited from a merchant ship called The Rights of Man to HMS indomitable and so joins the King’s Navy as a foretopman. The previous ship’s owner with its explicitly political title is mentioned in the book as owned by someone who sympathises with Thomas Paine and presumably the American and therefore the French Revolutions. This point is merely referenced by Forster and Britten, probably because it might provide an alternative political motive for the antagonism that develops, an antagonism that, in the opera, focuses on sexuality.

The Indomitable embarks on its mission during the Napoleonic Wars under the direction of Captain Vere and is policed by a master-at-arms called Claggart, whom Vere only met on the return part of his last voyage, indicating that exists no personal friendship between them. Melville tells us that Claggart is around thirty-five, an age he generally exceeds by a considerable amount in most productions of Britten’s opera.

Billy Budd is a genial sort of giant. Everyone notices his good looks, his youth, his athletic stature and his obvious strength. But it is also noted that he is naïve, perhaps overly trusting. An old hand tries to warn him that Claggart has taken against him, but Billy insists that he himself has never spoken ill of anyone, so there can be no problem.

Claggart conspires to pin an accusation of recruitment for mutiny on Billy. The name of his previous ship and presumably the political associations of its owner play an important part, as does the impressed status, equals kidnapped, of some crew members. Already I fall into the trap of labelling the ‘bad’ guy with a surname and the foretopman with a forename. But that is the reality. For whatever reason, Claggart is out to get Billy.

Billy has one severe weakness. He stutters. He stutters more when stressed. And when, in the company of Captain Vere, Claggart publicly delivers his accusation against the young man, Billy becomes so incensed that he cannot defend himself verbally. The words will not come and in frustration he strikes Claggart and kills him. Billy is tried, found guilty of striking and killing an officer and is condemned to death. He hangs.

At the trial, Vere presents his version of events in a cold hearted, matter of fact manner that will admit no nuance. In effect, he merely recites the rulebook. In the opera, Vere’s ghost, still troubled by conscience, admits he could have saved Billy Budd, but chose not to. In Melville’s original, things are more complex. Vere must enact the demands of his office and so he behaves as he does. Stability, loyalty to King and country and the rightness of superior social class trump notions of justice, fairness or compassion. The obvious injustice almost creates sufficient reaction amongst the crew to itself provoke a mutiny, but the anger dissipates, defeated by continued enforced subservience.

And, by the way, all of this applies to the opera, as well as the novella. Forster and Britten make more of Vere, paradoxically, than Melville, despite the novella spending much more time on the actual trial than the opera. Vere is torn by conscience, but he is the apparently unwitting possessor of a responsibility that trumps personal judgment. In some ways, Vere is more of an order taker than those whom he orders. And at the end of the opera, Britain illustrates how the aspiring middle classes, those promoted and paid to populate a buffer zone between protest and power, eventually protect the status of their social betters, but cannot salve a collective conscience, a conscience that in any case does not care.

A theme which becomes central but not rarely explicit in the opera is the suggestion that Claggart is homosexually attracted to Billy Budd. The antagonism generated within him towards Billy is thus the result of an inner purging of guilt and self-loathing that the attraction itself generates. There is the mere hint of this in Melville’s words. For obvious reasons, it was a theme that interested Britten deeply.

But the opera’s amplification of the theme is justified. Melville distances himself from anything sexual. The topic clearly exists in the lives of the sailors. But Melville apparently refuses to enter the establishment, let alone the bedroom where implied acts take place. There is a clear reference to Claggart’s attraction, but the author also wrote of the highly ambiguous relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg at the start of Moby Dick. There is evidence enough of the author’s reluctance to enter the bedroom, even when he declares himself explicitly in attendance!

Perhaps the most moving experience in Billy Budd is to read the epilogue, which is a sailor’s poetic retelling of the story. Personally, I find it impossible to read these words without also singing Billy’s almost proud but frank lament from the opera. The story is, undoubtedly, a double masterpiece.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I did not begin the two hundred thousand words plus of Moby Dick expecting to be surprised. Herman Melville’s book has been on my reading list shelf for years, always an intended read but never opened. Its iconic status has always proved too much of a barrier to its starting. The motivation eventually came, however, from a particularly moving production of Benjamin Brittten’s opera Billy Budd, itself based on a Herman Melville story, that prompted a decision to start Moby Dick, the whale sized book about whaling, and I had a whale of a time. A copy of Billy Budd, incidentally, was not to hand at the time. This must be remedied.

The bare whalebones of Moby Dick are very simply arranged. The story is told by Ishmael, who is seeking work as a sailor. Paradoxically, perhaps, we learn very little about Ishmael. It seems he is cast almost like some detached observer, able to discern the motives of others, but usually unable to declare his own feelings. He is, however, undeniably a character, not a mere vehicle for a writer’s declamation.

In Nantucket, Ishmael befriends Queequeg, a fellow sailor, who is ethnically and religiously different from himself. They soon share a room and even a bed. How the cultural difference and the male camaraderie are described is one of the more memorable aspects of this thought-provoking book. Both men are recruited onto the Pequod, a whaler under the command of the initially anonymous and even mysterious captain Ahab. Ostensibly, they are joining a factory ship on a standard mission to harvest whales for the extraction of profit via oil. The source of the profit and the means of realising it may run counter to our current assumptions, but the capitalist nature of the activity remains central to our contemporary interactions.

Once on board, however, they, along with the rest of the crew, discover that their now revealed captain has been all but destroyed in an encounter with a vast animal called a white whale and that their ship, the Pequod, is embarking upon a mission to extract vengeance. Captain Ahab is intent, nay single-mindedly obsessed with hunting down his attacker and repaying its compliment. A simple irony about Ahab is that having lost his leg in his encounter with Moby Dick, he now supports himself on a false leg made of whalebone, tapered at the base so it locks in a deck socket for stability. Thus anchored, supported by the very material he seeks to destroy, he surveys the sea for evidence of his prey. He does find his goal and pursues it for three days. Ishmael lives to tell the tale. But those particular events are more than one hundred and thirty chapters in the reader’s future after first encountering Ishmael seeking work in Nantucket.

In Moby Dick Herman Melville places us firmly in the middle of the nineteenth century. Modern readers must bear in mind that assumptions will be challenged by what has changed in the intervening decades. This was an age before electricity, before mass travel, before immediate communication over distance. But it was also an age when the industrial exploitation of the earth’s resources, animal as well as mineral, was not just under way, but was seen as an essential and desired end that might provide employment, generate wealth and benefit human life. As readers today, we must therefore attempt, for that is all we can do, to relieve ourselves of our novel positions on the activity the book describes. This was an era when killing whales for extraction of profit was quite normal, if, for most people, still a distant, dangerous, even fabulous activity. Reading a whodunnit does not indicate acceptance of murder, so exposure to Moby Dick does not imply support of whaling. And making this required mental shift will unlock the tremendous power, immediacy and indeed wisdom of this masterpiece.

That whaling happened, that a large industry grew up and was sustained by the activity and that people lived the life that it demanded is indisputable. Like all history, we are never condemned to repeat it, but we are also reminded that, though we remain free to reinterpret it, we are powerless to change it. And this book, almost like no other, is replete with the whaling experience which is now so foreign to us. We do, via Herman Melville’s magnificent narrative, enter into that world, that pursuance of life and death, and the experience is not for the faint hearted.

But what is most surprising about Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is its form, or indeed its lack of it. The effect is strikingly modern, in that the novel is not presented as a linear narrative. Instead, Moby Dick presents facts about whales, descriptions of the whaling process, details of its contemporary setting and, above all, portraits of the characters who populate the Pequod and are pressed into partnering Ahab’s mission. In some ways, Moby Dick presents a total experience of a microcosm, often so focused it does its subject literally to death, but in other ways so lacking in focus that a reader can profitably dig in and out of the book almost at random.

And despite the location of the subject matter in a particular time, some of its themes are also relevant to our contemporary society. For example, through Ishmael’s narrative Herman Melville addresses the question of what kind of animal the whale might be. He is aware of Linnaeus and the modern concept of species. He is aware of the evidence that whales, unlike fish, give birth and suckle their young with mother’s milk. The Bible, however, describes Jonah’s encounter as being definitively with a fish, and so that is that, and thus the question is unarguably answered. The whale has to be a fish, since God may not be contradicted. What more perfect example of fact-ignoring fake news or conspiracy theory could one imagine?

Ahab, certainly, is a tyrant, but he is perhaps not the totalitarian dictator that some interpretations demand. He is driven by a personal mission and recruits others, perhaps by deceit, perhaps by stealth, to further his ends. Now a flawed human being, he uses the able bodies of his recruits to pursue his ends and rise above his own limitations. But though he does conduct his pursuit on his own terms in his own autocratic way, eventually he leads his own chase, his personal vendetta and tunnel vision relieving him of his better judgment, whereas a modern dictator would have the exit strategy ready before any risk might be considered. Essentially, Ahab is the ultimate politician who recruits unquestioning and loyal followers who become part owners of individual drive. And then, like any politician who needs to exert pressure, he calls upon his followers to amplify himself, albeit unsuccessfully. All political careers, we are told, end in failure.

Overall, once the paradigm shift in the reader’s assumption is made, Melville’s Moby Dick presents a thoroughly modern and therefore a thoroughly surprising experience. The subject matter may not be fashionable today, but then it reminds us that today’s preoccupations and assumed values might soon themselves appear both pointless and, indeed, repulsive.

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf is the author’s last novel. It is often described as a difficult read. And indeed, difficult it is, not because it is full of shocking scenes, tough language or improbable plot, but because it attempts to present what people think, as they think it, jumbled, processed only by passing experience, often random and disjointed.

The style might be called ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘internal narrative’, but no stock phrase can sum up or adequately describe the abrupt changes in point of view, the disjointed time, the juxtaposition of sometimes unrelated material, the real with the invented, all imagined and suffused within the feared. One thing that does become clear as the book progresses is that this process is much more akin to poetry than narrative. Its images often flash past in opposite directions, apparently unrelated but thought by the same person, often in contradiction to what we have come to assume is the professed intent of the character.

Ostensibly, this is just a group of people coming together to see a play. They assemble in the open air, in the bucolic landscape of the English shires, on a long light summer evening to witness the performance of a drama conceived by one of their number and acted by their acquaintances. We learn that the proceeds from ticket sales and donations will go towards the installation of electric light in the parish church, probably to replace the now extinguished Light of The World which has now proved to be defunct. Thus, at least on its surface, Between The Acts seems to be a rural English, middle class comedy, where society folk gossip about one another while view while they remain baffled by amateur dramatics. After all, what might one expect from artists?

But that surface is mere illusion. Written in 1939 to 1941, Between The Acts senses war close at hand. There is potential for destruction, for disquiet, for foreboding. In addition, the characters who almost anonymously populate the book, relate their own histories, fears, hopes, prejudices and confusion, any of which might change by the moment. They are all complex in an ordinary and perhaps predictable way and, like all of us, they often think and act tangentially, with one person‘s utterance provoking perhaps unrelated responses in others.

Between The Acts is not a long book. Neither, on its surface, is its language difficult. But its myriad of associations, random shifts and passing associations make it impossible to follow for any reader intend on finding a one-dimensional narrative. It was obviously never Virginia Woolf’s intention to facilitate such an experience.

But any conventional route is not an appropriate way to approach this book. It is a work to be absorbed word by word, phrase by phrase, and then again, with the reader’s own imagination stimulated by the images supplied. In these pages we are presented with the play itself, with all of its non sequiturs and all of its deliberate imitation of well-known drama. But overall, we are amongst people who are as confused about their own identity as anyone, and we live through that confusion apparently as they live at themselves.

A rewarding activity for anyone interested is to read the book and then to work through the free course on the book available via a The Open University’s Open Learn website. What the course admirably achieves is a promotion of reflection on the text, and insistence that writing as dense as this needs a reader’s reflection and an imagination’s participation.

It has to be noted also, however, that the author herself was not in the best of mental health when the book was written. This surely is reflected in the text and, as such, Between The Acts probably offers at least some insight into what it must be like to suffer mental illness. The dividing line between coping with experience and being overwhelmed by it is a fine one, it seems, so narrow that any of these characters and indeed any reader may cross that boundary without really knowing it.

The Ambassadors by Henry James

Soft words butter no parsnips is an English saying that is, let’s admit, not overused, especially these days. It probably means get on with it and shut up. In many decades of reading, I have probably only ever ones come across the expression used seriously, rather than in jest, and that was in the Ambassadors by Henry James, who has a certain facility with language and a particular style of sentence construction. Here’s an example. Well, there was an example, but the bookmark went missing and I can’t remember where the evidence was located.

So there it is. And there was The Ambassadors, some thousands of words of story relating to late nineteenth century Americans who found Paris society and culture seriously challenging.

There is a plot. X is the son of Y. He is in Paris and has taken up residence with a woman of all things who might even not speak English as the first language. It seems that at least one of the protagonists in The Ambassadors night at least have twigged that some people in France speak French. X is really wants to go back at home, to be embraced in the family fold, guided to occupy the role others want him to play. He seems oblivious to these desires and seems to like France.

Y talks to Z, who comes across the Atlantic us to England and then to France. He seems to have time on his hands when he sets about persuading eggs to come home. Z is not a little taken with Y and agrees, though his motives may not be of the first order.

Strether visits Paris and finds that it is not precisely what his preconceptions might have predicted. And that, I’m afraid, is about it. Plot is developed largely via dialogue, which is often expressed in the kind of language but probably no one ever spoke.

Do these soft words really butter parsnips? On that issue the jury is still determinedly out, one feels.

Musical perfection - the Bamberger Symphoniker, Jakub Hrusa, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Many years ago, when I was a student, I, along with many others, bought a new stereo system and we regularly listened to chosen LPs to assess the relative merit of the purchases. One of the disks was Istvan Kertesz’s Dvorak Symphony No.8 on Decca. The recording and playing were both crisp, sure, and sonorous. The entries were decisive, the interpretations subtle, and the dynamics generous. Until last night, I thought I had heard the definitive interpretation of this familiar, but never disappointing, work.

The last night in question was a performance by the Bamberger Symphoniker under Jakub Hrusa who, for me, arrived with a certain reputation to prove. What was it about this conductor that now seems to have the world of classical music at his feet? Well, the list proved to be long - and included precision, dedication, vision, cooperation, and, above all, a sheer delight in music. I began with a question and by the end of the evening it, along with many others had been definitively answered.

This performance of Dvorak’s eighth symphony was more than memorable. The pianos were piano, and the fortes were forte. These are platitudes, perhaps, but nonetheless often and crucially such elements can be smoothed out to a generalized shape which hides the music’s detail, especially in a piece so well-known and as often played as this. Jakub Hrusa, from the very first notes of Beethoven’s Leonora overture number three that started the concert, was clearly someone who wanted to shape the sound, to make sense of the musical argument. It is this vision of the work’s shape and construction that makes the listeners’ experience complete. I cannot remember a performance of this Beethoven overture where the transitions were quite so clear and contrasted, where the dynamic changes added to the musical experience rather than merely punctuated it. And equally, it was the same with the Dvorak Symphony. The attention to detail, the continual consideration of the question of what the composer was trying to say produced a performance that was utterly memorable.

And so to the central work in the program. I like to save the best to the last. Igor Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto uses no bombast at its surface and its employees little which is merely an opportunity for the soloist to show off. But at the heart of the piece is a dialogue. often humorous, between the soloist and selected bands from within the orchestra, which itself behaves differently from a conventional concerto accompaniment. Stravinsky always concentrates and contrasts sonorities, grouping instruments into surprising combinations of timbre and harmony. The work progresses as a dialogue between the storytelling solo part, amid interjections and comments from the orchestra.

To work as music that communicates, this piece needs a soloist who can overcome the technical challenges with ease, whilst at the same time, maintaining a conversation with the different orchestral elements. Patricia Kopatchinskaja was not only able to do this, but also to raise the performance to a perfected artwork. One was not conscious of ‘soloist and orchestra’, one felt only that one had entered a music world, understood it’s highly personal language and shared its vision and thus become a partner in the experience, not a mere onlooker.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s performance of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto was one of the most memorable musical events. I can recall in over fifty years of concert-going. The playing was perfect, but that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t the virtuosic performance that made the difference. Such adjectives simply don’t apply when an experience is so completely absorbing that all you hear is the communication and the message, not just the voice that tells the story. Music, after all, can say things in ways that words can’t. That is why we listen to it. And I will be listening to this performance in my memory for the rest of my life, and happily so.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja made the point that much of Stravinsky’s music in the concerto takes the form of chamber music. And, as an encore, she unusually presented more chamber music in the shape of part of the violin and cello duo of Ravel, the Bamberger’s principal cello playing the second part. Like the Stravinsky, this work was full of humour and contrast, but here, Ravel also delved into the surreal. Music is a language, and the Bamberger orchestra, Jakub Hrusa, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja were simply its voice.

Jenufa by Leos Janacek in Valencia – simple triumph for Corinne Winters

Of all operas, there are a couple by Leos Janacek that I would profess to ‘know’, in that I have seen multiple productions, read and studied the libretti, listened to the music literally hundreds of times and read around the creation and setting. Jenufa would be one of them, all the way from an early 1970s production at Covent Garden in London, where it was sung in a clumsy English translation, through to last night’s offering in Valencia, where the Dutch National Opera’s production took the story out of rural, nineteenth century Moravia, and gave it a contemporary setting, more like a movie than a staging.

To start with the staging is perhaps an injustice to the performances, but that is where we are. This production, in order, perhaps, to emphasize the cinematic concept, featured an elevated space that was set back from the front of the stage. It was a lit rectangle, just like a movie screen. It provided a space that could be subdivided to provide multi-roomed interiors, complete with ceilings. It was a production where everything happened ‘inside’, even in act one, a factor that concentrated attention on the internal conflicts of the characters. Visually, it also concentrated attention on the characters’ actions. Everyone had to enter the space via a door and the rooms’ walls and ceilings seemed to focus attention on the psychological drama that unfolded. A drawback with this design, however, was the enclosure it created, a closure that rather deadened any sound that did not come from the very front of the set. In act one of Jenufa, there are movements in an out, on and off stage, and this set meant that there were moments when the singers fought to make themselves heard from within the rather insulated space.

In acts two and three, of course, there is a much greater concentration on the psychological drama than the introduction of protagonists, and it was here that the set came in to its own. In act two, for instance, when Jenufa is given a sleeping draught by the Kostelnicka, she has to retire to her bed, and this is often offstage, out of view. Here, as part of her concealment from public gaze, the room she occupied was set below the stairs amid gas pipes, drainpipes, and electricity meters. But this staging allowed her to remain centre stage, and, although asleep, in full view of the audience. And thus, while ever she remained centre stage, she still seemed to figure in the dialogue the other characters shared. And far from diverting attention from the interactions between Kostelnicka, Steva and Laca, the continued presence of Jenufa kept her character of the centre of the argument. This single design element allowed Jenufa’s solo, after Kostelnicka had already taken her baby away, to flow with the same psychological force of what had gone before, rather than become a new episode.

Act one of Jenufa is written in a different musical language from acts two and three. Nine years intervened between act one and the opera’s completion. Changes in compositional style are mirrored in how folksong is treated. In act one, the folk song is exactly that, literal, rooted harmonically, and very much a partygoers’ sing-along. By the time he had written the folk song melody that forms the choral passage in act three, where the girls celebrate Jenufa’s wedding, the musical language has been transformed. Yes, it’s celebratory, but there are question marks everywhere, because the song doesn’t easily find a key. Yes, it’s modal, but now not sweetly so.

In this staging, the toilet plays a central role, at least, in act one. Placed centre stage, it was used at the start of the action by Jenufa, who has a bout of sickness, emphasizing from the start that her pregnancy is the main issue. In a beautiful moment, during Kostelnicka’s diatribe about Steva’s drunkenness, when she relates her own experience of an abusive husband, one of the previously partying women retires to the toilet and silently grieves at her own circumstances as the words outside describe domestic troubles. This stresses the ongoing issue, the past for Kostelnicka, perhaps the avoidable future for Jenufa, but also the present for the silent partygoer.

And toilets figure elsewhere. Steva, unable to stomach the criticism in act one, retires, like a spoiled child to the washroom at the side to avoid having to listen. When things get tense in act three, a character retires to the toilet on the edge of the set for a moment of privacy. All of this adds to the internal nature of the drama, the fact that we are always dealing with how individuals cope psychologically with pressure, with challenge, with opportunity, with options. They have to think things through, and even still might come to the wrong conclusion.

What perhaps none of us rationalizes are the emotions that give rise to physical attraction and sex. Here we are driven by feelings that often control us and take us over before we are even conscious of them. Jenufa is clearly besotted with Steva and continues to be so until, very late on, she is won over by Laca’s albeit flawed devotion. The irrational passion that is in all of us thus explains how the responsible, sensible, caring, competent Jenufa got pregnant in the first place. It also justifies how this particular staging ends, with Jenufa and Laca, rather than walking hopefully towards a better future, get down to having sex the minute the guests have left their tragic wedding. The sensuality, after all, is there in the music.

And, at last, I can turn to praising the Jenufa of Corinne Winters. A more convincing, complete portrayal of the role has perhaps never existed. Roberta Alexander was superb, if a little too suffering. Asmik Gregorian has recently claimed the role for herself with a unique blend of vulnerability and steadfastness. But this evening’s performance by Corinne Winters adds much to this role. Corinne Winters’ Jenufa is a complete and credible modern woman, professional, competent, caring, needing love and affection, passionate, responsible, vulnerable, realistic… the list could be endless. Let’s say human. This, after all, is a complete person, with all the contradictions and qualities that implies.

In act one, Jenufa is in her office, the young competent professional, though abused, perhaps as much by her own passion as by Steva’s insistence. In act two, she is in a jumpsuit for lounging around the house. The elegance has gone, the work-a-day requirements of being a mother having taken over. In act three, she is in white, hardly the ‘dressed like a window’ of the libretto, but the white becomes a statement in itself, a determination to look to the future, however, limited its boundaries may appear. Perhaps the most moving moment of the story happens when Kostelnicka, having just drowned the baby in act two, tells Jenufa that she has been in a fever, and that the baby has died. How easy would it be to revert to paroxysms of pain, histrionics of emotion? Here, Corinne Winters, merely sinks to her knees in her jumpsuit, and stays there, devastated, visibly emotionally destroyed.

Petra Lane, this production’s Kostelnicka, gave a moving and convincing performance of this truly demanding role. One was never in any doubt she was convinced that she was doing the right thing. The guilt of the third act was perhaps a little under-played, but this was probably as directed.

The two men in the principal roles often do not often figure significantly in reviews of Jenufa. They can all too easily become stereotypes. But here they too were rounded human beings, if that term can be applied to the selfish, self-interested, self-obsessed character of Steva. Norman Rheinhardt’s portrayal made the character’s flaws apparent, however, and though never excusable, they became understandable.

Brandon Jovanovich’s Laca, however, was nothing less than revelatory. Here we have a character complex enough to be in love with a woman he physically abuses. But he is ultimately trustworthy and dependable, and here, also, passionate. Brandon Jovanovich’s voice is a perfect match for the part. I never thought I would hear a more convincing Laca than Philip Langridge, but Brandon Jovanovic has indeed made this character his own.

And finally - finally? - the music. Janacek’s score, especially in the final two acts is a masterpiece. The music never dominates, but always contributes. It adds subtle pictures to illustrate and define the psychological drama, often creating that drama via the juxtaposition of small cubist planes and perspectives, so that emotions flutter around an idea that can be seen from multiple viewpoints. Janacek’s musical language is so subtle and so communicative that it cannot be described in words. And like all languages, it does take time to learn, but once familiar, it says so much that is different, and that is original, inexpressible in any other way, or perhaps by any other composer.

Gustavo Gimeno‘s reading of the score emphasized the subtlety and sheer physical beauty of the sound, rather than the composer’s characteristic spikiness. But this reading of the score did emphasize the normality of the people depicted and the universality of their dilemmas. The production proved to be an emotional roller coaster, but overall, it’s gentle contours stressed its everyday significance. It will live long in the mind, and, hopefully, long on the stage.

 

 

Folk song, dance and ritual - ADDA Simfonica with Ramon Tebar and Juan Perez Floristan

 

In another loosely themed concert, ADDA Simfonica played four works written in the forty years that spanned the dawn of the twentieth century. In different ways, these works address religious, folk and popular culture from central and eastern Europe, though the range of styles may have obscured whatever thematic links that may have cemented them. Under guest conductor Ramon Tebar, the ADDA orchestra opened the concert with the Russian Easter Festival Overture by Rimsky-Korsakov. The composer’s idea was to synthesize popular religiosity with the theatre to arouse feelings of nationalism. And so in an overture that lasts a quarter of an hour, the composer displays great technical prowess without really exploring many musical ideas. The playing was superb, the material less so.

The Hungarian composers Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodaly were both personal friends and musical collaborators. They set out at the start of the twentieth century to note down and thus preserve the nation’s folk music, specifically the rural peasant songs that were likely to disappear under the tide of modernization. Both composers used much of the material they collected in their own compositions, sometimes literally via quotation and sometimes, especially in Bartok’s case, by implication via the extraction of a musical language. Thus the harmonies, scales and sometimes the themes themselves appear in the music.

Bartok’s first piano concerto is not overtly folkloric. It’s a work of the 1920s, written to provide a vehicle for the composer’s own playing, but also to allow him to clarify the stylistic character of his compositional style, which was a rejection of romanticism, atonality and neoclassicism. Bartok wanted to unite the discipline of Bach with the structure of Beethoven and the harmony of Debussy. But he wanted to achieve this using some of the tools he had wrought from the folklore tradition.

The result was a rhythmic, percussive First Piano Concerto that makes massive demands on the soloist. Some approach the work as if it were a gymnastic challenge, where the goal is the completion of the exercise merely without fault. But this concerto needs a soloist who can not only rise to the challenge but also interpret the nuances, register the contrasts. Juan Perez Floristan did that very well. Overall, the reading of the work, however, seemed to this listener to duck the opportunities to vary the tempi and the loosen the rhythms, thus losing any sense of jazz, which I personally think enhances this music. I admit that this criticism is nit-picking, however. The Debussy Prelude, the Girl With The Flaxen Hair was as Juan Perez Floristan pointed out, in keeping with the evening’s theme.

Zoltan Kodaly dealt with the folklore influences more literally than Bartok. His oft-performed work, Dances of Galanta, was inspired by a gypsy band in his hometown. The work’s five sections are played without a break and the music speeds up towards a breathless and spectacular conclusion. On this occasion witnessed some beautiful orchestral playing.

And speaking of beauty, what can match Richard Strauss’s music to Der Rosenkavalier? The music is obviously thicker in texture than what had gone before and it differed in being based on popular dance than on folkloric influence. From the first notes, there was suddenly more space in the music. The effect, of course, was deliberately theatrical and lusciously so.

The ADDA orchestra played the work expertly and allowed the humanity of the music to shine through its obviously technical demands. The solo contributions were faultless but what shone the brightest were the beautiful string tones that this orchestra now achieves. Der Rosenkavalier is a work that takes the process of human relationships seriously, whilst apparently dismissing their overall importance. What is important now will not seem will not cause the blink of an eye by tomorrow, or maybe in an hour. Enjoy what life presents and enjoy it now. But for many in this audience, the sheer beauty of this music will be an enduring experience.

Vienna surprise – Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber orchestra play Mozart and Schoenberg in Alicante

 

After hearing Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall, I was sufficiently surprised by what I had heard to be prompted to download a score as soon as I got home. I don’t think I have ever heard this music played in this way. The impression this event made on me was one of surprise.

The program did not promise a surprise, or even suggest one. On offer was a peculiarly Viennese sandwich, the bread from the first school of the city’s composers and the filling from the second. The two outer layers were both Mozart piano concertos, numbers 25 and 27, whilst the filling was provided by Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1. All of these works are familiar, the Mozart concerti perhaps over-familiar, in that they are played, perhaps overplayed, by a multitude of soloists. The Schoenberg is less commonly included on concert programmes, especially in the style the Mahler Chamber Orchestra chose to present it, but it’s a piece that has been in the repertoire for over a century, so surely there’s nothing new here!

Let’s start with the Schoenberg. As the evening’s programme notes reminded us, the first chamber symphony caused a riot at its first performance in 1907. The music was clearly not what the audience was expecting and, always afraid of the new, they vented their disquiet. And yet this chamber symphony pre-dates Schoenberg’s adoption of the twelve tone system, let alone its later manifestation as serialism. This work is in late Romantic style, but now the key changes are more extreme, the harmonies more dissonant and, perhaps crucially, the ideas pass by faster, rather like a series of juxtaposed miniatures and fragments.

It sounds like a musical equivalent of Braque’s cubism, in that recognizable shapes are still there, but they are cut up, reassembled, overlapped in order to break up the lines and encourage listeners to savour the moment rather than anticipate the next. But there is surely also some of Schiele’s emotional aggression in this music. It remains a piece that challenges its audience to listen, though it does analytically conform to the ‘traditional’ symphonic structure.

Playing this work convincingly on stage needs expert musicians with the habits of the cooperative communication that makes chamber music such a joy. Only with all of these ingredients can performers make a success of this music. Some fifteen members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra stood to play this piece and their performance was almost beyond perfect. Musical ideas were passed around with nods and smiles and the work’s complexity simply became the medium via which these arresting sonorities were communicated. A century can make a massive difference. Suffice it to say that this performance was greeted with cheers, not jeers.

So the filling in the sandwich was very tasty indeed. But what about the Mozart bread and butter that confined it? Well, this was the real surprise. Mitsuko Uchida was soloist and director for both concerti. This in itself is not so rare. But what was utterly surprising, even arresting, was the way the pieces were played. Yes, it was perfect. Yes, all the notes were there and all in the correct order. Yes, these pieces are familiar. But the phrasing and dynamics were chosen to emphasize the music’s emotional meaning, which was beautifully and implicitly communicated. I rarely associate Mozart’s music with emotional involvement. Usually, the sheer decorative elegance gets in the way of human contact, like a hard glaze that hides the material beneath. But this was something quite different and utterly original.

The score I consulted afterwards was that of the Piano Concerto No. 27. Had I ever heard the opening played so quietly? Had I ever heard the pauses inserted to make the sentences and paragraphs of this music make such complete sense? Well, the score did in fact say ‘p’ at the start. Unlike Schoenberg over a century later, Mozart did not use many expression marks to indicate performance style. This is often interpreted as meaning that everything should be played in a mechanical rhythm, with phrasing and emphasis only minimally applied. But in the hands of Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, this Mozart was vivid, emotional and above all communicative rather than showy. And, with deference to Mitsuko Uchida, the dynamics are all there in the score. The real difference was achieved via touch and phrasing, and all of this was a result of Mitsuko Uchida’s playing and interpretation of the score. As was the case with Mozart, himself, and this evening with Mitsuko Uchida, the surprise could be attributed to the presence of genius.