Costa Blanca arts update - No superlatives - L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante with Jonathan Nott and Emmanuel Pahud play Ibert and Mahler

 

There are insufficient superlatives to describe the experience. L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante under Jonathan Nott played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Ibert’s Flute Concerto with Emmanuel Pahud a soloist so perfectly that ratings and comparisons simply do not apply. When music is this good, it is useless trying to say ‘how’ good it was. The playing transcended descriptions of technique, superseded mere sound and attained a perfection that can only be labelled ‘communication’.

Ibert’s syncretic mix of neo-classicism, humour, jazz and surrealism was so expertly played by Emmanuel Pahud that his virtuosity was almost immediately taken for granted by his audience. Once achieved, that level of experience progresses into a changed awareness where the music is absorbed and known, rather heard or learned. Emmanuel Pahud seemed to invite everyone to participate rather than merely receive. One doubts whether in the packed auditorium there was a single person who did not feel that this was anything other than a personal experience.

And so, when presented with what, it must be said, was probably an unknown work from an under-performed composer, that packed audience found absolutely no barrier of unfamiliarity between themselves and appreciation. Like all concertos, Ibert’s Flute Concerto offers a soloist an opportunity to show off, but here the virtuosic witticism engaged the crowd rather than simply impressed it.

Emmanuel Pahud communicated with the orchestral players, but he also seemed to engage the listeners directly. He was a soloist whose complete mastery of the music and his instrument created something that transcended performance and created genuinely shared experience.

An encore, introduced to the audience’s delight in Spanish, offered a statement of solidarity with the Ukrainian people in general, but especially the soloist’s performing friends and colleagues. This was one of the Jolivet’s Incantations for solo flute, a piece from just before World War II that is prefaced by the composer’s plea a world of serene communion. It was a heart-felt and wholly appropriate message on this dark day.

In his fifth symphony, Gustav Mahler seems eventually to have approached a state of optimism, certainly ecstasy. It is a work best known for its smallest part, the adagietto, a fourth movement that is often both played extracted and often murdered in performance. Its celebrity can too easily dominate, can become the focus, and thus conductors often take it too slowly, rendering its form disembodied, disjointed and meaningless. It becomes sweetness for sweetness’s sake, separate spoons of afters that ignore the identity or obscure the composition of the dish. Not here with Jonathan Nott, however. This adagio was paced towards the andante and so the lines joined into a whole that made sense. And that whole, as far as the symphony in its entirety was concerned, became the perfection that is communication.

This work in sound was read by the audience like a novel, whose complex plot found resonance, understanding and empathy. The biting contrasts of the second movement were expertly played and this movement, which can suffer from lack of direction made perfect sense. And the finale was simply unstoppable, apparently driven by its own internal momentum, the final flourish arising from its own logic, not merely tagged on as an afterthought, as can be the case. There’s simply aren’t the superlatives to do justice to the experience. Let’s just call it perfection.

As a footnote, there must be a mention for Jordi Verges Riart, whose organ recital the night before in Benidorm also delighted. Works by Pachelbel, Buxtehude, JS Bach, Vidor and Vierne were offered chronologically with the transformation and development of style both clear and powerful. It must be said, however, despite the finale of Vierne’s first organ symphony that concluded the recital, the major chord ending of Buxtehude’s G minor prelude provided the most powerful memory.

 

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

 

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag was first published in 1961. It is hard in 2020, to accept that this was almost 60 years ago, especially since many of the works reviewed in this volume of criticism, containing essays as late as 1966, would probably not make it into the mainstream today. If - and if must be repeated for emphasis - if the objects of her criticism in the 1960s were manifestations of the current mainstream in the arts, then 60 years ago, at least to this reader, then contemporary theatre, film and art of today seem much more conventional, even conservative. No-one now, it seems, takes risks.

There are names that remain familiar in Susan Sontag’s critiques. We have a Genet, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, Godard, Brooke, Arthur Miller, but there are many others who would now claim only anonymity. But what is truly interesting is how reluctant Susan Sontag is even to mention trends from popular culture, the term I personally regard as a misnomer.

Indeed, the essays are, by contemporary standards, elitist. Ironic, isn’t it, that they come from the decade which became notorious for challenging elite status? Perhaps we forget that an element of 1960s culture was to invade elite structures, to cram them with experience it would find both challenging and uncomfortable. Susan Sontag herself obliquely refers to this attempt at change by noting “…the American theater is ruled by an extraordinary, irrepressible zest for intellectual simplification. Every idea is reduced to cliché, and the function of cliché is to castrate an idea.” The implication is that much needed change via infiltration was already happening. One wonders what her opinion might be today.

As already stated, these essays on criticism unashamedly intellectual. There is not a hint that they also want to address popular themes in popular language or on its own terms. Susan Sontag does address popular culture, but sometimes, as in her analysis of science fiction movie scenarios, to record her belief that it relies on the formulaic. She was not alone in casting an apparently academic eye over mass market culture. At the same time in Britain, we had Kenneth Tynan and Bernard Levin, both young Mavericks in their way, but also both securely establishment figures, despite Tynan’s enduring celebrity drawn from his use of the f-word on a live television chat show. And Bernard Levin, for those who care to remember, offered a satirical and critical monologue late on Saturday nights on That Was The Week That Was, the satirical revue populated by largely upper-class intellectuals who would later become superstars and pillars of the establishment. This was a fate not to befall Susan Sontag and some of her ideas still sound contemporary.

How about this as a plea to writers that they should imagine a status other than Godly? “The immediate cozy recognition that the lifelike in most novels induces is, and should be, suspect… I wholeheartedly sympathize with what she objects to in the old fashion novel. Vanity Fair and Buddenbrooks, when I read them recently, however marvelous they still seemed, also made me wince. I could not stand the omnipotent author showing me that’s how life is, making me compassionate and tearful, with his obstreperous irony, his confidential air of perfectly knowing his characters and leading me, the reader, to feel that I knew them too. I no longer trust novels which fully satisfy my passion to understand.” How many subsequent writers took note of this advice? My suggestion is a few, but none of them popular.

At the heart of Susan Sontag’s ideas about art, theatre, literature and criticism is the need for audiences to be open to challenge. She writes “Hence, too, the peculiar dependence of a work of art, however expressive, upon the cooperation of the person having the experience, for one may see what is ‘said’ but remain unmoved, either through dullness or distraction. Art is seduction, not rape. A work of art possesses a type of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperiousness. But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject.” Perhaps the 60 years that intervened have conspired to reduce this willingness to tolerate the unexpected? Or perhaps nothing has changed. Audiences were never very good at it.

In the Modern Classics edition of her work, Susan Sontag had the opportunity, some 30 years after publication, to offer her own reflections on the significance of the writing. She reflects on how the artistic climate had already changed and on the characteristics of the decade in which her critical essays were written. These three short quotes from the final essay from the 1990s indicate why Against Interpretation is now an achievement in its own right, and not simply a response to the work of others.

“Perhaps the most interesting characteristics of the time now labeled the Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian movement.”

“Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people and when allowed - an arbitrary decision of temperament - probably unhealthy, too.”

“The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.”

Truly we live in a different age.

A Culture of Benidorm

Sunday morning choir at the harbour

Mention Benidorm and with it, by implication, the concepts of package tourism, hotel buffets, British bars with one euro a pint lager, northern English Working Men’s Club turns imitating something neither themselves nor their audience have ever been, lobster-impersonating spit-burnt sunbathers and fried English breakfasts with the bacon already coated in tomato sauce, and I would bet that very few punters would auto-associate the phrase “cultural experience”. More likely, perhaps, might be the image of over-revelled revellers spewing out from the industrial-sized, garish and scruffy discos along the strip at nine in the morning, seated wavering by the roadside amidst the split, cracked and squashed plastic waste which these no doubt environmentally aware individuals seem to generate by the ton.

Benidorm, certainly, is not Spain. Like many other popular mass tourism resorts around the world, it has an identity which is quite apart from its host country or hinterland. Benidorm is not Spain in the same way, perhaps, that Kuta is not Bali, Nice not France, nor Acapulco Mexico. On the same scale, Blackpool is Britain! In effect these places are melting pots of imported identity, usually with a strong flavour of the largest group of visitors. In the case of Benidorm, of course, it’s the Brits. A fortnight in Benidorm can offer about as much exposure to Spanish culture as the experience of September lights in Blackpool informed the visitor of the Lancashire cotton industry. (The past tense is highly relevant here.) Equally, Benidorm juxtaposed with the word “culture” might vie for a definition of “oxymoron”, alongside German with humour, Ireland with culinary and British with honest. (I may borrow here and there from our working Men’s Club humour tradition, but perhaps employing a consistently different skin colour!)

Benidorm is known for its seven kilometres of perfectly kept, clean beaches, its year round tourism, its millions of visitors. It has fine places to eat in its old town and environs. It has nightlife, theme parks and five star golf resorts. It is surrounded by mountains, has an island nature reserve. And in a European sense, the area as a whole is truly cosmopolitan and increasingly sophisticated.

So when my wife and I came here about five years ago to claim a November base while we examined the possibility of a life-changing shift from work-a-day pressures, our prime goal was to investigate whether, near this tourism megalith, there might be space for a small rental business, aimed at those who might crave proximity to the iniquitous den whilst also wanting to retain a suburban distance from the rasping motorbikes, the hen and stag parties, the beachfront Harley Davidson pubs, the plastic glass discos and even the line dancing. Well we found our place and took the plunge. What we had not bargained for was “the culture”.

In that first month, as late-booking package tourists ourselves, we were making our first visit to mainland Spain for 24 years and we were pleased to find an odd festivity or two. Having lived here for a few years we now know, of course, that it’s actually quite hard to avoid them! The Benidorm town band – symphonic bands are the Valencian tradition, we now know – did a free concert in the salubrious Benidorm Palace, a place whose usual show apes the Folies Bergeres. The local choral society did the Venusburg music from Tannhauser alongside original compositions for the band and some populist offerings. We sought and found a sub-set of the band doing a jazz and Latino evening at the CAM Bank auditorium where, another night, there was a chamber music recital. Just along the road at the Cultural Centre in Alfaz del Pi there was an American pianist who had studied in Barcelona playing Montsalvatge.
Similarly, we found a soprano giving opera arias in Calpe.

And so we bought the place and we were owners of a house with two apartments, a beautiful Mediterranean garden, proximity to the tourist hub, but still very much a part of its own town, a place with outstanding local services. Our aim was limited, pragmatic and clear. After some fifty-six years of unbroken professional employment between us, we decided that a change was potentially better than a rest. We had already lived and worked in five countries and had extended experience of several others, but we had also concluded that pounds of flesh weigh the same the world over. Though we had gained a few of these over the years, having them occasionally demanded and extracted ran the risk of their being ripped from critical areas. Over the years the pay had been good, the pressure significant and, overall, the rewards worth the pain. But times change, lives change, priorities change and people reach fifty.

This was the time to do something different, to trade income for quality. We bought a house in La Nucia, just five kilometres from Benidorm’s beaches, the town’s skyscraper hotels visible from our front balcony. Our aim was to establish our own niche business renting the two bedroom garden apartment while we lived a modest if sometimes indulgent life on the first floor. We have now been doing this for more than four years, have an established clientele and basically have achieved what we wanted to achieve. We will not get rich from the trade. That was never our goal. From the start we wanted to offer simple, clean, affordable accommodation at a reasonable price, modelling our pitch on the kind of place middle class backpackers like ourselves would find both satisfying and a little surprising at the price. And it has worked well. What we had not bargained for was the “culture”.

For some sixteen of our thirty or so post-graduation years we had lived in London. We were vultures of the cultural type whenever energy levels ran to it. We were friends of the English National Opera during its ‘power house’ years. I was a teacher and, during school holidays, used to walk from Balham to central London for the lunchtime concerts, St James’s in Piccadilly being my favourite venue. Then we moved to Brunei and then to the United Arab Emirates. In Brunei we were members of the Music Society and helped to organise concerts. In Abu Dhabi, cultural events were very much in the purview of the diplomatic and private sector people, and there was and remains a vibrant cultural life in the city which, after all, is the nation’s capital. So we were able to attend good quality cultural events, comprising mainly music, theatre and visual arts, in both places. And then we came to Spain.

Our initial visit had suggested that there was more going on in this sphere than a browse through the package tour brochures might suggest. But if I was to relate that in the last eight months we have been to four operas, four full orchestral concerts, ten chamber music recitals, five local festivities, an international film festival, uncountable art exhibitions and goodness knows what else – and furthermore if I were to qualify this by saying that not once did we have to travel more than ten kilometres from home, would you associate this with Benidorm and the Costa Blanca? And, if you are mildly surprised by what I have just claimed, it would probably further surprise you to learn that in addition to this, Benidorm itself is building a new cultural centre, that ten kilometres down the road the new Villajoyosa Cultural Centre is about to open and that this year La Nucia, our home town, itself opened a 600-seat concert hall and a 3000-seat outside auditorium.

Perhaps I need to re-state how local is my claim. About thirty kilometres down the road from Benidorm is Alicante, a regional centre with a nineteenth century theatre presenting a full programme of ballet, drama and opera. About a hundred and forty kilometres north is Valencia, where the programme of the spectacular new Reina Sofia opera house is coordinated with those of New York’s Met and London’s Covent Garden. What I have described excludes those venues and only includes what can be found within ten kilometres of where we live, within ten kilometres of Benidorm, a cultural paradise.

You may have guessed that we are very keen on music, my wife and I. But we are also keen on theatre, dance, painting and the arts in general. We don’t tend to go to pop festivals, but if we did we have those locally as well.

Why not check out the listings for La Nucia, Altea, Benidorm, Alfaz del Pi, Villajoyosa and Finestrat? Choose your time of year and you could attend a superb musical event every night of your stay and I guarantee that the performance standard will be as good as anywhere. And if you can also take in Joachim Palomares and his ensemble playing their arrangements of Piazzolla tangos, or Altea’s April opera week or La Nucia’s Les Nits festival, you are in for a real treat. And when Benidorm’s new cultural centre is open, imagine glossy package tour brochures offering deals inclusive of stalls seats for Puccini or a performance of Steve Reich’s Drumming! Followed, of course, by a one euro pint of lager, bacon and eggs and a northern comic, perhaps.

Saturday, 11 August 2007