Leaves From His Life, essays by Leoš Janáček, edited by V and M Tausky

About twenty years ago my wife and I were on a train that came to a halt. It was late afternoon in mid-August. We were on holiday. A weak sun was already casting long shadows from the power-line gantries across the heavy industrial landscape in view. It was a local train with low priority at the signals. The carriage was nearly empty on this service form Kutná Hora to Prague. As we awaited the passing of an express, the only sounds came from steam hissing from vents in the pipe-work of nearby factories.

A young man on a seat opposite started to doze. His head nodded forward. His dark checked shirt opened wider at the neck to reveal white skin which, unlike his head and neck, had remained untouched by the sun while he had worked his day on a construction site. His boots and trousers had streaks of earth and cement that confirmed his trade. The express passed by, slowly, without much noise and then, just seconds later, our train lurched into slow motion. The young man woke up with a start. “Pfui,” he said as he rubbed his palms against his face.

And, for the next few minutes, all I could hear in my head was music replayed from memory. There is a moment in an opera, a Czech opera, where a character awakens from sleep. He not only says this word, but he sings it with exactly the same intonation and stress as my fellow traveller did that August afternoon on a stalled suburban train. I ought to have realised immediately that this was no coincidence. 

In part I did, but I was not prepared for how perfectly the composer had set that strange little word. The music literally came to life. The opera in question is by Leoš Janáček. He spent much of his time listening to and notating the music of everyday sounds and speech. These he used to set the words of his own libretti, all of which are highly naturalistic rather than stereotypically operatic. He repeats very little. There are no set pieces. The people are never counts or kings, princesses or heroes. There is the occasional fox and frog, however, and many chickens. But for the most part, Janáček’s characters are like the slumbering builder on the train, ordinary people, working class, middle class, merchants or labourers, sometimes artists, sometimes prisoners. 

On first hearing his music can sound disjointed, lacking the flowing lines that lyric opera fans might expect. But Janáček’s music is both cubist and yet still wholly naturalistic. People really do speak like that. Of course he stretches the points. It is opera, after all. But it is not only speech that is naturalistic in Janáček, as anyone who reads this beautiful little book, Leaves From His Life by Vilem and Margaret Tausky, will soon realise. Janáček notated the sound of the sea, birdsong, the trickling of water in streams, the wind, coughs and sneezes, and about anything else that took his fancy. 

Above all he notated the sounds of speech, words married to their expression. In one respect, he was the complete impressionist, but in another the complete opposite because he then reassembled these snippets of collected reality to form something wholly original. Some of essays, reminiscences, musical analysis and occasional literary reflections that fill leaves From His Life were written for the composer’s own column in local newspaper in Brno. 

I first read the book over twenty years ago, just before my holiday in then Czechoslovakia, during which I visited Brno to stand in Janáček’s study. Re-reading it now is something of a revelation. If anything it seems fresher now than then, but there again perhaps it’s me that’s mellowed with age in a way that Leoš Janáček never did. If I had another life I would learn Czech to gain a fuller appreciation of the man’s music. It must be worth it! As an example, just imagine the sound of the opening of the Credo from the Glagolitic Mass. In Czech, the word is vĕruju, I believe. Janáček’s setting is three notes with a long stress in the middle. Try saying ‘I believe’ or even worse, ‘credo’ to the same sound. It only works in Czech. Anyone who is the least bit interested in opera and certainly anyone who as listened to Leoš Janáček’s music will love Leaves From His Life. 

The writing style alone is a wonderful insight into his music. The man really did think in those terse little aphorisms. But what shines through his music and his words is his love of and devotion to the experience of ordinary folk, and the occasional bird, furry creature or insect: life, in short. View the book on amazon Janacek: Leaves from His Life

Don Quixote de La Mancha

I’d like some advice from other writers. I’ve just finished a book. It’s my fourth time through it. It might be a bit over-written, perhaps over-read. The writer found the manuscript on a stroll through a street market in Toledo, Spain. It was written in Arabic, a language of which the author only know a little, but he could see from page one that there was something special about this text. He translated it into Spanish, and then others rendered it in English. 

The book is a little less than five hundred thousand words. It has no plot, and little obvious characterisation. The style varies, and there are several quite glaring inconsistencies, most of which I just laugh off as inconsequential. There are no intrigues. There may be a few murders, but none within the book’s pages. There are no spacecraft, aliens, plots that threaten the earth, spies, terrorists or dog lovers. There’s not much sex, and what exists is largely imagined from afar and is unconsummated, or is very close at hand and is perpetrated by a hag with excess kilos and few teeth. 

There’s a lot of largely unintelligible games and role-plays, some fantasy, most of which is at the level of fairy-tale, some satire and a lot of innuendo. The main protagonists are rather sexist, racist and, by modern standards, religious bigots. Could anyone suggest a publisher?

On the other hand, I have a novel that contains such familiar scenes that a good proportion of the world’s population would recognise them. It’s accessible, written in an easy prose that makes few demands on the reader, and whose protagonists are just ordinary people, not unlike those who might read it. It features a man who is so obsessed with celebrity and deluded by popular culture that he believes he too can become a star. No-one, of course, in modern society would ever think that. And, incidentally, it’s been a best seller in multiple editions and languages for over four hundred years. Could anyone suggest a publisher?

I have just finished a fourth reading of Cervantes’s classic Don Quixote. I have now read it in two quite different translations, one via Wordsworth Classics and the other Penguin. The book is more like several years of soap opera episodes, series such as the Archers, Coronation Street or Emmerdale and definitely not Dr Kildare, Ironside or Kojak, let alone Dallas. It comes to an end because its author wanted to kill it off, since even in its own time it had become something of a cliché. In some ways it’s a book that’s so ‘modern’ it’s ahead of contemporary fiction. At the same time, its scenarios need footnotes because they are unfamiliar to us. After all, soap opera installments from a month ago are out of date. The ones in this book are four hundred years old. In essence, however, the delusion presented by popular culture is precisely the same.

At its core, we have a middle-aged, in his day perhaps elderly man who is obsessed with popular culture and celebrity. He doesn’t want to be a film star, footballer or pop singer. He wants to be a knight, travelling the countryside, doing good deeds that the role demands. One day he decides that this is the life for him and, to the consternation of his household, he decides he must live this life of fantasy. Unlike his heroes, however, his sports car is a clapped out old banger, his designer clothes are rejected junk from charity shops, and his millionaire’s mansion is the local pub. His contemporaries merely laugh at him, but he remains utterly convinced of his call to stardom. But, and this is the crucial fact, he never loses his wisdom, however false its basis might have been. Neither does he lose his faith, though misplaced, in his own superiority.

No-one else shares these faiths, except perhaps his travelling companion, Sancho Panza. He is a peasant, with a down-to-earth view of life and a thoroughly bucolic interpretation of its challenges. He proves, however, to be as wise as his master, a lord he hardly ever questions. No-one else shares this faith in the master, but then that’s the point. Life is once through. If we dream, it’s as good as any reality. So, after four times through this great novel, I have no more idea what it’s about, or what it says than when I started it for the first time. It’s funny, and in places it’s incomprehensible. It’s absurd. It’s serious. It’s stupid, inane, both intellectually challenging and inconsequential at the same time. I am also a few thousand words from the end of a modern parody of Don Quixote, which I hope is as focussed as its inspiration. Can anyone suggest a publisher?

View the book on amazon Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) Don Quixote (Wordsworth Classics)

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Pianist Daniel del Pino plays in La Nucia

A few days ago I wrote a piece about a Russian pianist who successfully mixed so-called ‘classical’ music with jazz on the same programme. In her case, it was one half of each, half great Romantics and half jazz standards plus her own compositions. I could not have predicted that soon I would be reviewing a work by a Russian composer who does much the same thing, but at the same time! 

Daniel del Pino is a fine, even great pianist, known throughout Spain and in concert halls across the world. I have heard recitals by him at least once a year for the last six years or so. Certainly one thing he always delivers is hard work, his own, that is, because his performances are nothing less than a complete delight from beginning to end. 

But there’s no opening Haydn Sonata followed by Mozartian gentility for Daniel del Pino. His programmes are never less than demanding and his most recent recital in La Nucia’s Auditori de la Mediterrània, organised by Los Amigos de la Musica de la Marina Baixa, was no exception. On reading the list of works in prospect on this occasion, however, something immediately stood out. There was a composer I had never heard of – and that’s quite a rare occurrence these days! Daniel began with a finger loosener. In his case this meant six of Rachmaninov’s Opus 39 Etudes Tableaux! If he had played nothing else all night, I would have gone home in bliss. Opus 39 number 5 in E flat minor is a personal favourite and in Daniel del Pino’s hands the exquisite shape of the music, a complex interaction between three musical arguments, was close to sublime. In all, Opus 39 numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 9 might, for many pianists, have formed a grand finale. For Daniel del Pino, they were openers. 

He followed this with two pieces by Granados, both Goyescas, El Pelele and Quejas, o Maja y el Ruiseñor. In many ways I find the idioms of Rachmaninov and Granados similar, in that they were both late Romantics, celebrants of the luscious, the personal, the individual and the national. In Rachmaninov’s case, it’s usually the pathos that dominates. In Granados, it’s the sunshine, dance and display, but mingled with some absurdity. Daniel del Pino was able to switch his interpretive landscape effortlessly to bring out the more impressionistic subtleties of Granados. This is music for which he clearly has more than mere feeling. 

His final piece was a rousing finale in the form of Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody. Alongside memories of the Granados, this was musical tourism, but cultural tourism at worst! Showpiece it may be, but it is harmonically and structurally inventive, so it is musically satisfying as well as being a pyrotechnic display. As an encore he chose a simple – not so simple! – study by Mendelssohn. I have, of course, missed something out! 

Between the Granados and the Liszt, Daniel del Pino presented the eight Concert Studies Opus 40 of Nikolai Kapustin. Now I can hear the concert goers of western Europe saying, “Who?” in concert. In over forty years of listening to music, I have never encountered the name … I think … I have vague recollections of a piece for Jazz Big Band being played on the BBC Third Programme’s Music In Our Time in the mid-1960s. I missed the name of the composer, but now I think I know it. Daniel del Pino introduced the music to his audience before playing it. He told us that Kapustin was Russian, born in 1937, and composed in a pianistic tradition he inherited from Rachmaninov, but placed his thematic and rhythmic material firmly in the idiom of jazz. I have expressed my opinion of ‘crossover’ music before. Usually the result is puerile from the point of view of expression and often mundane in terms excitement and performance. Via the scored and highly pianistic music of Kapustin, we heard something that was definitely not crossover. The music was precisely scored and perhaps there was an arpeggio too far here and there. But while it was clearly rooted in the harmonic language of Rachmaninov and even Scriabin, the material and its treatment were pure bee-bop. Though it may have lacked an improvisatory edge – it seems that Kapustin himself does not claim that he scores improvisations – the music still had the feeling of jazz, but was presented in a structure that revealed itself and engaged. These eight pieces proved to be a major work and technically at least were perhaps the most demanding part of a thoroughly demanding programme. Daniel del Pino’s recital was the work of a complete artist. He can surprise as well as deliver amazing technique alongside superb interpretation and musical sensibility. Hear him play. You will not be disappointed.

Piano recital by Elena Lasco, classical artist meets jazz virtuoso

During a recital some years ago, a pianist introduced a Chopin Impromptu by describing its improvisatory essence, likening it to a snapshot of perhaps transient musical ideas, a significant but mere facet of genius. After the concert, a regular at our private gatherings took issue with the pianist. “How could we, the listeners, possibly know that such a piece was largely improvisatory unless you told us? Isn’t it all just written down, composed music?” The pianist politely declined to engage, since the customer is always right. “Just listen!” ought to have been her response. Contrary to much popular belief, improvisation has played a large part in the development of so-called “classical” music. 

Not only Chopin was noted for a brilliance of passing invention. Beethoven improvised. Listen to the Sonata Opus 111 – especially under the fingers of Rudolf Buchbinder – with an expectation of jazz. There’s a whole sequence somewhere between boogie-woogie and ragtime – from a hundred years before anyone else thought of either! Bach improvised. After all, there’s a whole raft of his compositions called “inventions”. 

An improvisatory quality introduces a sense of genuine surprise into the musical flow of a piece, a tangent to the argument that can conjure the unexpected. Many pianists also include improvisatory elements in performance. It’s nothing more than an element of what we generally refer to as interpretation. A hint of rubato for some might be a lack of accuracy, whereas for others it’s interpretive genius. Similarly, new improvisatory approaches to the Baroque ground bass are perhaps closer to how it would have been played originally than the mechanically ground-out pluck of more recent past decades. 

There are times, of course, when an improvisatory approach, however minimal, would be inappropriate. I cannot imagine Webern played in any other way than indicated in his micro-managed scoring. And for all its jazz-like elements, minimalism works because of its obsession with the detail of infinitesimal change, detail that would be lost if either over-worked or over-stated. Now despite these close bonds between so-called “classical” music and improvisation, I usually avoid anything that purports to link the approaches. The experience of “classical” celebrities “crossing over” generally generates muzak. When popular artists join “classical” friends, the artistic, if not financial, result is usually embarrassment for both. Carla Bley, Frank Zappa and Keith Jarrett might exemplify a counter-argument. But then where would you site such talents in the first place? Menuhin and Grappelli collaborated successfully, despite Menuhin describing the experience as vamping while an improvisatory genius played for ever without once repeating himself. No doubt the awe would have flowed in the opposite direction if the material had been Elgar. 

So it was with some trepidation that I approached Elena Lasco’s recital in May 2009 in L’Alfas del Pi. Forming part of the unique Spain-Norway Festival hosted by this little Norwegian town on Spain’s Costa Blanca, Elena Lasco’s concert advertised a classical and jazz programme, but thankfully no cross-over, which would only have made me over-cross. In the first half, Elena Lasco played a set of Schumann Variations, Grieg’s Norwegian Dances and Cordoba and Seguidillas by Albeniz. Make no mistake, however. Elena Lasco is no part-time classical pianist. She studied for ten years in Moscow’s Tchaikowsky Academy and was already something of a prodigy as well. Her pianistic and interpretive skills are from the top drawer. When one adds to that five years of master classes in the famous Jazz Academy of Moscow’s Gnesin Academy the mix is not just virtuosic and persuasive – it’s totally convincing. 

The rhythmic fluidity matched with complete control that she brings to pieces like the deceptively demanding Norwegian Dances of Edvard Grieg render them nothing less than a revelation. Albeniz always does benefit from rhythmic fluidity, in my opinion. It adds a commentary to the angularity and occasional abruptness of his style. And even in the Schumann the suggestion of an improvisatory edge merely added to both the drama and virtuosity. 

The second half of Elena Lasco’s Alfas recital was devoted to jazz standards and her own compositions. Appropriately we heard a homage to Errol Garner alongside some standards from the golden years of jazz. Elena Lasco’s improvisations are impressively inventive and always swing. We are transported to the world of Garner or Peterson, not Cecil Taylor or even McCoy Tyner. It’s a jazz Romanticism, infused with the personal, the memorable and occasionally the spectacular, but only for its melodic or rhythmic impact, never merely to impress. It’s a style that does not aim to confuse or obfuscate. This is musical story-telling at its most communicative. On 15 October 2009, Elena Lasco will make her London debut in the Conway Hall. She will present a jazz programme and entry to the concert will be free. Again she will feature jazz standards alongside her own compositions. Londoners will thus have the chance to experience what the privileged full house at the Spain-Norway Festival in L’Alfas del Pi lapped up in May, or indeed what Elena Lasco’s 200 million Russian television audience could not get enough of. Elena Lasco’s is a unique mix of talent and style.

The Fall Of Troy by Peter Ackroyd

In The Fall Of Troy, Peter Ackroyd explores some grand themes against a backdrop of a grander history, but always from the narrowed view of an obsession that denies experience.

The story is set in the early twentieth century, a period of great and fast discovery of ancient sites. It is also a time when archaeology is being transformed from a pastime of those with time on their hands to a science for professionals. Obermann has his mission, an overbearing, all-consuming obsession that drives him to uncover ancient Troy. He knows where to look. In defiance of received wisdom, he demonstrates the accuracy and veracity of his assertions. 

He feels things to be correct, admits no question and seeks to edit all dissent from any discussion. Enthusiasm feeds obsession, while obsession drives the man, excluding others. He has a track history of success, however, so when he pontificates about the whereabouts of the lost city, others tend to listen, despite his ideas appearing at best off-beat.

Obermann has taken a new wife, a young and attractive Greek woman called Sophia. She reads ancient Greek, so she can recite Homer to her new husband in the hours that cannot be devoted either to practical archaeology, of which we learn much, or marital duties, of which we learn nothing. She becomes a member of his team, entrusted if not actively enlightened, and soon learns how certain discoveries of her husband need to be sanitised to protect them from the gaze of their resident Turkish official, who is burdened with the task of inspecting all finds. She learns, also, how not to question the wisdom of her husband, a wisdom apparently founded in myth, expressed via whim and summing to obsession, but which is invariably correct. Until, that is, visitors appear.

There is a Harvard academic called Brand and an English vicar. Then there is Thornton from The British Museum. These visitors join Obermann and his wife, alongside a self-confessed Frenchman and a young man the boss calls Telemachus, who helps, but whose motivation remains suitably opaque. But Obermann always dominates. Sophia becomes a new Helen of Troy while her husband’s assumptions are elevated to a religion he must live or be punished by.

As the dig progresses, finds appear, are sometimes revealed, sometimes not, and are interpreted, discussed, even fought over. If the resulting ideas conform to Obermann’s assumptions, harmony is publicly maintained. But if contradicted, the archaeologist appears to have the power to conjure divine retribution upon his critics. He is a man of the gods. But eventually he is revealed as a man of the world. Sophia, the new wife, discovers a reality she never expected. She acts decisively when things come to a head but, as far as Obermann is concerned, it is the gods, perhaps, who play the last card.

View this book on amazon The Fall of Troy

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Miraculous Bartok from Valencia Youth

A full symphony orchestra in full flight is a thoroughly rousing experience. When that is combined with a programme that offers contrasting style and form, the result is usually a treat. When the whole is also delivered with the enthusiasm of a youth orchestra, then joy also enters the equation. I would not claim that the Valencian Youth Orchestra performed perfectly in Palau Altea last night, but their efforts were well beyond the creditable. 

Even the two conductors, Robert Ferrer for the first half and then Isaac González were rookies, the latter especially appearing to possess a talent that might mature to fame.

The band began with a concert hall regular, Weber’s Die Freischütz Overture. They played it well, not always accurately, but the relatively simple musical ideas were clear and the lines always joined up. The second work proved to be something of an enigma. I know nothing of the music of Manuel Palau, and unfortunately his Dramatic Concerto for Piano and Orchestra did little prompt further investigation. It was a confused piece, with the orchestra sounding all triadic and modal, like Vaughan Williams 80 years too late, while the soloist mingled styles reminiscent of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, interposed with highly chromatic clusters and even, in the third movement, introducing the opening descending chords of the Schumann concerto as a theme! The orchestra and soloist, Bartolomeu Jaume, played beautifully throughout, but the work let them down. 

The second half began with a recently commissioned work by Miguel Gálvez-Taroncher. His Concerto for Orchestra was quite slow to take off, but take off it did. There was the influence of Kancheli, and also Berg. Small germs of music emerged, sometimes in high dissonance, to be passed around the orchestra’s sections. The giant band sported a veritable battery of percussion for this piece and the forces were eventually well used. The work was effectively a giant single climax, from a confused, quiet, chromaticism to a violent, thrashing, atonal quake. It might not prove to be memorable but it was an engaging, interesting and visceral experience. The composer took a bow. 

Bela Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin is a piece I have known for a long time, but listened to only infrequently. Though originally a ballet, it has rarely been staged outside the concert hall. Anyone who has read the story would understand why. Its sexually explicit plot involving a Chinaman who lights up after he has been hung by the neck from an electricity cable illustrates the challenge. It was 1918 in Central Europe, after all, post-Freud, expressionist and post-World War One. But what an experience! I was genuinely apprehensive about whether the youthful orchestra would be able to play its complex rhythms and fiendishly difficult ensembles. I need not have worried. They were faultless and extremely well rehearsed. When Bartok’s pounding rhythms, all assembled as a fugue, brought the piece to its frantic and exciting conclusion, it sounded as if the music had been driven off the edge of a cliff. Exhilarating! Good luck to the young players of the Valencia Youth Orchestra.