Costa Blanca Arts Update - Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky in Alicante's ADDA

 

Two concerts on consecutive days might be considered by some as a live event to far, especially when the concerts feature big, autobiographical works, one of which at least is widely regarded as difficult. But these two events in Alicante delivered by the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev seemed to make light of the challenge and on both occasions an eager and adoring audience could easily have taken more.

A Friday night program was clearly constructed to show off this magnificent orchestra. We began with Wagner’s Prelude and Good Friday Music from Parsifal. Despite the composer’s reputation for excess, Parsifal, his last opera, is largely contemplative, slow, controlled and unspectacular. The forces are large, but the control is larger and allowed this superb orchestra to generate beautiful, luscious textures within the balance, sounds that give away the sensual aspects of this piece, all encased in an apparently single-minded religious devotion.

The program then offered Prokofiev’s classical symphony. Now this work is conceived as a neo-classical re-visitation of the world of Haydn and Mozart. But, despite its logistically small scale, musically it is sophisticated, often complex, a surreal view of the apparently literal. Throughout, this work’s beautiful interlinking string lines were completely clear, whist remaining integrated in the whole. The resulting surprising harmonies blended to a convincing transformation of world we once thought familiar and the always arresting rhythms were allowed to fight it out.

After the interval this audience was treated to a completely virtuosic performance of Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss. Now by definition and intention this music is autobiographical. This is the already successful Richard Strauss showing off. The piece is almost self-promotion, a brilliant succession of tableaux illustrating his claim to be able to do a multitude of things, including the deferral ad infinitum of an obvious cadence. It is also full of self-quotation from a career that had already flourished, despite the fact that there was a considerable amount yet to come from this composer who was only in his mid-forties. It is a poet’s statement, says its title, but the self-knowledge here is far from analytical. This is undoubtedly a work that demands complete mastery from the partnership that is conductor and orchestra, and this particular performance excelled. We were treated to an encore, a Strauss waltz, no relation.

Our second concert of this mini-series featured a single work, if the word single can be applied to the vast complexity of the fourth symphony of Shostakovich, which calls for more than a hundred performers. My personal take on this music is that it is also autobiographical, taking its listeners from birth to a question-marked death, eventually accompanied by the same faltering heartbeat in the basses that signs off Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique.

Autobiographical it may be, but here we are imagining a life yet to be lived by a composer in his thirties. Unlike the Strauss, here the process seems to be highly analytical and, crucially different from Strauss’s self-adulation, the internally reflective process of Shostakovich’s fourth symphony seems to lack confidence. To clarify, this lack of surety has nothing to do with compositional ability, nothing at all to do with an inability to express, and even less to do with the obvious technical mastery that the composer brought to his handling of the orchestra. But in this piece Shostakovich seemed to be conscious of pushing the limits. If only I might express myself, this is what I would like to say. If only I had the space…

Well, we know now that Shostakovich did not have the space and that he withdrew the work and waited twenty-five years before he heard it played, when times were marginally easier for artists. One is left reflecting what the composer might have written subsequently if the work had been allowed its original space. It is paradoxical that his best loved symphony in the West remains the fifth, a work in which he self-corrected the “excesses” that had preceded it. By a quirk of programming, perhaps by design, the next concert in ADDA will feature the fifth.

The forces required were obviously too great for a touring orchestra to muster and so the numbers were made up by incorporating several members of ADDA’s resident orchestra. The achievement of this ad hoc combination was nothing less than breath-taking. This is perhaps one of the most difficult of all works to interpret and yet, despite the scratch team, the performance was nothing less than faultless. Gergiev’s tempi were quite fast in movements two and three, which increases demands of cohesion amongst the strings, a challenge that these players met as if they had played together all their lives.

The fourth symphony takes its audience to some scary places. Even when we waltz, we feel we are looking over our shoulders, and even when we go to the circus, we are watching our back. The heartbeat is permanent, however, and we know we are alive throughout. When, late on, we look back on our achievements, the climax is vast, but the sensation is hollow. There are still things we have not said, and the apparent pride is unconvincing.

But the magnificence of the final questioned peace is undiminished. The heart may falter and the body decline, but eventually we are what we are, nothing more. And that is probably when we realise we control precisely nothing and that what went before may as well have been a dream. Sounds like Shakespeare.

I have written of the work elsewhere, but this live performance, only the second one I have had the privilege to attend, confirms in my own mind a personal view that this work, the Symphony Number Four of Dmitri Shostakovich, is nothing less than the greatest single work of art the human race has thus far produced. Okay, I will tone down the superlatives: it is the human race’s greatest artwork that I personally have encountered. And this performance did it more than justice.

Veronica Decides To Die by Paulo Coelho

 Veronica Decides To Die is a novel by Paulo Coelho. I write the review in English, though I read the book in Spanish, so it may be that many aspects of the book’s language may have disappeared in translation.

The novel deals with several significant issues impinging upon the lives of ostensibly ordinary people. But, perhaps because of social definition, perhaps via self-identification, perhaps as a result of the hand dealt by experience, these people are treated by the ordinary in extraordinary ways. Veronica and her associates are treated in very special ways indeed, receiving, amongst other things, doses of insulin high enough to incapacitate and electro-convulsive therapy designed to stimulate temporary amnesia. They are all, for the purposes of Veronica Decides To Die, inmates of an asylum.

And the location is important. The asylum, probably referred to by some as a madhouse, is in Ljubljana, Slovenia, just at the time when the former republic of Yugoslavia is in the process of breaking up. There is a strange and, certainly within these pages, little exploited parallel between the mental disintegration of these individuals and the break-up of a state that has previously sought advantage in unity and incorporation. Thus, the novel examines – though none too deeply - the relationship between sanity and madness, unity and separateness, individuality and society, personal and accepted response.

Elements of plot may be discovered by readers of the novel. But nothing is revealed by recording that interactions between four of the asylum’s inmates, Veronika, Eduard, Zedka and Mari that form the backbone of the book, along with their relationship to Doctor Igor, who is in charge of their care and also his own research project. We encounter the histories of these characters and find clues as to why they may have chosen less than conventional ways to express themselves.

And it is the developing relationship between the eponymous Veronica and Eduard, a schizophrenic young man, that forms the central thrust of the story. At the start of the book, Veronica wants to die. She is depressed. She jokes about how no one on the planet seems to have any idea where her country, Slovenia, might be, as it emerges from the conflict, pain and growing wreckage of Yugoslavia. But for Slovenia, nation status was being achieved for the first time in his modern history. It had always been part of somewhere else, perhaps like every individual was forever incorporated into some social group loosely labelled “society”. Isolated, alone, many individuals struggle to define or cope with their own individuality, a void which, unchecked or unfilled, may lead them along paths that grow unfamiliar.

In some ways, Veronika's despair at feeling alone in the world drives her to take an overdose. She survives. But she is changed, mentally and physically, and so is admitted to an asylum for treatment. It is there she meets Eduardo and others, whose individual histories have created their separation from what is perceived as normal by the rest of some vague notion called “society”. These principal characters relive some of their past experiences to illustrate what might have brought about the changes in their characters, transformations noted by others that led to their isolation.

Their stories are not unlike the unique concordance of events that were currently propelling a nation to an independence it had previously never known. It was the rest of the world that was creating the conditions, but it was Slovenia that changed. For these people something caused them to react or behave differently from the norm, hence their status, but it may have been the actions of others, or indeed circumstance that created the conditions that changed them.

A weakness of Veronika Decides To Die lies in its tendency to be both analytical and rational, without ever actually declaring itself to be rooted in either concept. Equally, by the end, this might be its strength, because there is always room for interpretation. Characters within its pages do analyse their relationship to the spiritual, the religious, and occasionally the chemically induced. They explore themselves, discover new or previously ignored aspects of themselves and are surprised in the process.

By the end, the characters have engaged. But they have apparently been fulfilling someone else’s purpose throughout, someone invested with society’s authority to observe and monitor. Whether that person is the doctor in charge of the asylum or the writer holding the pencil is an interesting question.

Saariaho's La Passion de Simone

It's a comment both on current availability and prevailing mentality that I choose to write a piece about a television experience, albeit via the internet. There are not many concerts around during this year of lock down.

The broadcast in question was courtesy of Operavision and, given rules on social mixing around Europe at the time of the recording - last October - it is no surprise it came from Sweden. It was a performance of the oratorio La Passion de Simone, based on the writings of Simone Weil composed by Kaija Saariaho on text by Amin Maalouf. This is a piece for orchestra, chorus and soprano that its composer describes both as an oratorio and an opera. The latter is stretching concepts, because there is only one character and no action. There are also electronics, which extend further than the taped quotations from Simone Weil's work that mark the movements, to include at various points augmentation to the orchestral sounds in order to change textures, add depth or surprise.

The structure is fifteen movements, each representing one station of the cross, the whole representing a passion play. The underpinning idea is that the life and work of mystic, political thinker and philosopher, Simone, Weil, was like that of a modern Christ, who gave her life to identify the shortcoming in the rest of humanity. This does not seem to come across in the music, perhaps because, in updating the idea, Saariaho and Maalouf have completely transformed the image into something both contemporary and unfamiliar.

Simone Weil was academically successful, a classmate of Simone de Beauvoir, and one time Marxist. She was born into a middle-class professional Jewish family and excelled from the start, but not in the realm of health. And her eyesight was none too good…

She took a job in a factory at one stage to fully understand what it was to be a worker. She took up arm on behalf of the anarchists in Spain, before her comrades took the rifle away from her on account of her eyesight’s inability to aim it. She had always had a “spiritual” streak, it seems, and later on went on to formulate a pantheistic version of Christianity, apparently rejecting her Judaism. She eventually, aged 34, finished up in hospital in Britain with tuberculosis. And died. The judgment was that she had in fact starved herself to death. The basis of Saariaho’s piece is that this was an act of personal sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity.  The case is made.

Saariaho's music is all about timbre and texture. It tends to sound one paced, though it rarely is. It deceptively seems to offer a wall of experience but close up that expanse of sound comprises many miniscule shards. The chorus acts like a commentator, not quite like an evangelist as in Bach, but always playing a secondary role compared to the presence of the soprano soloist. The principal character is not only the voice of Simone Weil, but also a commentary on her writing, an interpreter, sometimes even a third person critic, probably the voice of the author. And Sophie van Otter's performance is so good it is impossible to describe. One aspect of the text which I do not understand is the repeated references to Simone as if the narrator is a younger sister. Simone had no younger sister, so this is perhaps the personification of the rest of humanity who have adopted her as a sibling in gratitude to her gesture of solidarity.

But overall, as so often with Saariaho, we are left with a sense of something having passed us by, greeted us perhaps, held our attention for its duration, but without ever really revealing itself to us. It may be an enigmatic style, but it may also be something deeply personal, as the composer revealed in the barely comfortable interview that followed. It may be shyness, a desire to remain apart, removed from direct contact. It was also revealing to hear the composer say that this was only the work’s second production in 14 years.

The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan

Ostensibly, The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan is a book for children. It’s not really a novel, because the author himself conceived these pieces as separate stories to be told to his own children. Assembled in this way, however, in form they resemble many contemporary writers’ novels that portray apparently disparate and unrelated scenes featuring a main character who acts as a thread. It’s not a linear plot that is desired, but recognition that the character responds and develops as a result of what life presents and is changed by that experience. 

In his introduction to these “Peter stories”, Ian McEwan describes how he tried to forget about “our mighty tradition of children’s literature and to write a book for adults about a child in the language of the children could understand”. In so doing, and very succinctly, the author has achieved his aim and has thus created a world which is multi-layered in that there are events themselves and then there are the emotional worlds related to them.

Peter Fortune is eleven or thereabouts. Precision doesn’t matter. He has a younger sister called Kate who always seems to be able to get her own way, either by guile or by politics. Parents Thomas and Viola both work, it seems, but we never get to know them. From Peter`s point of view it is as parents that they exist and thus all possible questions about them are both answered and irrelevant.

What Peter experiences via imagination is at the core of this work, as so the review will not reveal any detail. Suffice it to say there is a cat, some toys, a burglar, a bully and even an adult in the mix. Peter address is these objects of interest directly and without analysis. He is rarely in control of his thoughts and regularly surprises himself. He addresses no great questions directly, but raises many for his co-travellers.

Costa Blanca Arts Update – Orquesta de Valencia under Trigueros and guitarists in Alicante

Two concerts in five days might sound quite a lot, but we achieved that by skipping the others on offer. But could one imagine two more different musical events? How many times across two concerts have you been presented with orchestral music and solo guitar comprising ten works, seven of which you have never hear before and featuring no less than four composers who are completely new to you? And this comment comes from someone who has a personal library of recordings that feature almost five thousand different composers… 

The Orquesta de Valencia under José Trigueros gave their concert in La Rambleta Arts Centre in Valencia. The acoustic of the hall might be a little too dry for music, but it must have served the orchestra’s purposes well for their recording session.

It began with the Serenata Española by Miguel Asins Arbó, who was known for writing music for film and television. This was an atmospheric piece that made its point by understatement, which is not a word that would apply to Keiko Abe’s Prism Rhapsody No2. This is a highly virtuoso concerto for two marimbas and orchestra. The solo parts were played by Josep Furió and Luis Osca with the kind of expertise that leaves an audience breathless both from exhaustion and admiration. There is a lot to do for the musicians in this piece, which is roller-coaster excitement from beginning to end. But it is also highly crafted music, skilfully constructed to do more than merely shimmer in the light. It was a piece of contemporary music that was rapturously received by the audience, prompting the players to offer an encore that allowed them to show off a more reflective side of their instruments.

After the interval, we were treated to a superb reading of the Symphony No10 by Shostakovich. Now this is a work that I have personally been listening to for more than fifty years. And still, it never fails to make its point. In live performance, it’s a work that comes alive beyond the pyrotechnics of its presence. It has a humanity and depicts a world that is a great deal more personal than many analyses might suggest. Particularly impressive was Trigueros’s reading of the scherzo, which he conducted from memory. Hearing such a work again is like meeting an old friend who always surprises.

The next trip was to Alicante to hear students from the Esplá conservatory. They were all on a master’s course in performance, so they ought to be nearing professional standard. The three of them were superb, but the last, Juan José Rodriguez, was outstanding. It was not what he played, it was how he played it. The pieces were shaped, communicative and faultless all at the same time.

Before him, Xuan Lien Liu gave a very clear and evenly paced account of the Sor Sonata. I feel that Sor was less at home with sonata form than with other ways of expressing himself, though I hesitate to belittle the towering achievement of this work. The form, however, appears to dominate the writing, but in this performance, there was a little hint of “going through the motions”. The playing was superb, if a little unspectacular, though this is no criticism because the music itself demands this kind of approach.

Miguel Verdu Andreu chose a much more ambitious programme. He started with the first movement of a sonata for guitar. The Amando Blanquer that followed was industrial in conception. The music was not composed using serial techniques, but it did employ atonality. The form was always clear, and it owed much to classical structures, but the material was like hardened steel. Again, the playing was completely convincing.

The last performer also started with an off-programme piece and continued with two works by a Valencian composer, Vicente Asenio. Who also had good connections with Alicante. The music was superb. The playing better.

This was completely modern guitar music, but there was more than a hint of the vernacular style about the compositional technique, hardly surprising when paying homage to Lorca. The Collectici Intim was a five-movement suite that had the clear structure of a five-movement single work. There was a musical sense to the overall shape, a sense that was admirably conveyed by the expert, Juan José Rodriguez

Cities of the Plain by Marcel Proust

 

Times change. Of that there is no doubt. Platitudes, however, remain platitudes whenever they are, like a dose of vaccine, rolled out. Their use, perhaps just once, but certainly on the second occasion, ought to inoculate and protect their user from ever again suffering their nauseating mundanity. But such immunity is rarely achieved, especially amongst those who find simple instructions, such as "don't gather", “stay at home” or “avoid clichés, at all costs” quite impossible to interpret or indeed remember.

I recall the time, not so long distanced, when even the mention of certain sexual habits might only be referred to in passing, accompanied by the bat of an eye, the nervous clearing of the throat or the deliberate and calculated inclusion of classical allusion, lest the speaker appear himself to be tainted by such professedly immoral practices. The inclusion of gender was important, here, for these unspoken, unnamed behaviours, alluded to habits that remained illegal and indictable amongst men, while the female equivalent bore a different name, lusciously classical, and, whilst not officially tolerated, it generally remained beyond the interest of the law.

But it was not only the classical, but also the biblical world that provided the means of referring to these despicable, but apparently common practices. The Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, suffered divine retribution - at least the experience is recorded as divine - because of the prevalence of these crimes against nature within their walls. In more modern times, we have passed beyond the age when the natural can be criminal, and also beyond the clichés of vilifying and ridiculing via censorious judgment or humour. For all its use of the theme, the filmed series never did include the title Carry on Sodomy, despite the near-repeated scripts’ regular use of both censure and ridicule to raise laughs from audiences who elsewhere might judge and scorn.

And so we arrive at Sodom and Gomorrah, volume four of A La Recherche De Temps Perdu, A Remembrance Of Things Past, or words to that effect. At its time of writing, an observation that significant numbers of French high society might just be able to trace their descent to these cities of the plain would have shocked. Eyebrows would have been raised, throats cleared, and private laughs would have hidden behind social condemnation, as gentlemen conversed on the way to the brothel, where the workers to be encountered did not really count, because it was clearly poverty that required them to behave thus. But times do change. Now it is not this discussion of homosexuality that might shock, but the destination of the conversants.

So now when we read of homosexual men and women, gays and lesbians, queers and dykes, we cannot suffer either the shock or the surprise of exposure to ideas we now ignore politely in public or condemn only in private. Neither can we, almost certainly, associate with the kind of society in which the revelations were being made. The lives, and more exactly the attitudes, of these people are now utterly foreign to our experience, though they may well still exist. The realization reminds us that we regularly admire images in the form of galleried art, which bear as little relation to our own lives as do the characters Marcel Proust creates, but because paintings have nothing audible to say in their own words, we fail to recognize the cultural gulf of our distance from what they depict.

Times may change, but our propensity to apply false logic persists. Marcel Proust’s observation of doctors is almost contemporary. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to outcome. “Wine in moderation, it can do no harm, it is always a tonic… Sexual enjoyment? After all it is a natural function. I allow you to use, but not to abuse it, you understand. Excess in anything is wrong.” At once, what a temptation to the patient, to renounce those two life givers, water and chastity. He also recognized that by a certain age, human beings cease to be individuals and become research projects. He had arrived at that stage of exhaustion in which a sick man’s body became a retort in which we study chemical reactions. In our own time, we codify this as aging.

But then we may, like the English public schoolboy, develop personal and internal resistance to propensities that could previously prosecute via physical activity. Various English Prime Ministers have thus profited from the Eton Wall Game in public whilst in private they probably remained on the other side of the wall. “Suppose we took a turn in the garden, Sir,” I said to Swann, while Comte Arnulphe, in a lisping voice which seem to indicate that mentally at least, his development was incomplete, replied to M. de Charlus with an artlessly obliging precision: “I, oh, golf chiefly, tennis, football, running, polo I’m really keen on.” So Minerva, being subdivided, ceased in certain deities to be goddess of wisdom, and incarnated part of herself in a purely sporting, horse loving deity, Athene Hippia. Thus we may find the limitations we impose on ourselves limiting.

At least the Old Etonian Prime Ministers would have coped admirably with the classical allusion, and probably still would. Times may change, but we only understand how they have changed when we trouble ourselves to experience remembrance of times past and engage with its characters, both larger and ultimately smaller than life.

According To Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

On the surface, According To Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge might appear to be firmly rooted in the genre of historical fiction. Its cover portrays two gentlewomen, perhaps a mother and daughter, of the eighteenth century. Their arms are intertwined hinting at an intimacy their expressions do not convey. The elder, perhaps of the mother, stares into a distance beyond the landscape, beyond the viewer, but her imaginings are surely internal. The younger looks rather quizzically towards the mother, but there is a formality close to an assertion of independence in her demeanour. Her arm, on which her mother’s rests, is offered stiffly, tolerating her other’s presence rather than engaging with it. Surely this is to be a family affair.

We are told not to judge a book by its cover. We should also not be influenced by presumptions of genre. According To Queeney might be an historical fiction, but there is little that is purely historical about this plot. Some of the salient detail is documented elsewhere. Samuel Johnson, after labouring on his dictionary, needed silence and rest to avoid breakdown, both physical and mental. The Thrale family, who resided in Streatham, then a country retreat far from the bustle of the city, lived comfortably by virtue of profits from the family brewery. They had space and the inclination to invite. Johnsen accepted. His sojourn with the family, perhaps the most settled years of his life, is not documented, even by Boswell, though the diarist occasionally walks in and out of this novel, that charts the transformation of Johnson in the household from mere lodger to something more than a companion.

According To Queenie has nothing to do with genre fiction. It fits no mould, occupies no stereotypical niche. The events that unfold while Johnson’s relationship with the Thrales develops, especially with Mrs. Thrale, are described by Hester, a daughter of the household, who is better known to all as Queeney. The same character, via letters from decades later, also reflects upon what happened in an illuminating light. According To Queeney is thus a series of probably recalled scenes during Samuel Johnson’s stay with the Thrales, recollections that shed considerable light on the eighteenth century family, social relations and cultures of the era and contemporary concerns, as well as the specifics of Samuel Johnson’s character. We meet other notable names along the way, such as Charles Burney and his scribbling daughter Fanny, Joshua Reynolds of the peeling paint and David (Davy) Garrick who seems to ham his way through life.

Genre fiction this is not. What happens is not important here, only how it happens. Johnson develops an apparently pragmatic relationship with Mrs. Thrale, who tolerates, encourages, enjoys and rejects all at the same time. We are left with the impression that marriage may be for life, but commitment within it is taken as variable. Her overeating husband munches away. Hester, the Queenie, seems determined to compete with her mother, perhaps merely to state her own claim on individuality. Her insights along the way and afterwards are often grounded more in judgment than insight.

But what is most startling about Beryl Bainbridge’s novel, communicated via simple, transparent yet vivid prose, is the proximity the reader is brought to eighteenth century life. By the end of the book, we feel we have been there, rather than have been told about it. Exactly where we have been, let alone let alone why, is as confusing as life itself was, and remains, for its protagonists. Things happen that have no explanation. People do things for complex, often contradictory reasons. Individuals put themselves first. They overeat. They over-indulge. They get ill. They get better. They die. They pee by the roadside. They pontificate. They hurt one another. They use their stools in public. That, it seems, is life, whatever the era and whoever the celebrity. Some, like Queenie, do survive, at least for a while.