The Dome, Brighton, 23 May

If the Shostakovich at lunchtime had been demanding, the whole of the evening concert at the Dome proved to be equally challenging. The soloist in Prokofiev’s 3^rd Piano Concerto was the blind pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii. Normally one would not want to highlight disability, but the phenomenal power and precision of his playing, to say nothing of his ability to respond with enormous sensitivity to orchestra and conductor, was mind-blowing. His approach was aggressive and forthright, bringing intense energy to the technical expertise at his command. It was no wonder that Ashkenazy, as much a pianist as a conductor, had chosen this young man as the soloist for the fireworks and the intellectual challenge of the concerto.

After the interval came Shostakovich’s Symphony No 13 Babi Yar. In the wrong hands the work can easily seem to dissolve into cynicism or despair, but here Ashkenazy was able to find some form of comfort and resolution, if not hope, in the final movement. After the almost unbearable emotional intensity of Yevtushenko’s opening poem, the work guides us through the stoicism of mankind in the face of evil to a resolution which, if not one which leads to an answer, does at least give hope that individuals can face up to evil on such a scale.

The Russian bass Sergei Aleksashkin knows the work well enough to sing it almost from memory, and brings not only authority and power to his performance but an emotional truth which helps us cope with the impact of the text. He was well supported by the men of the Brighton Festival Chorus dealing with transliterated Russian with some aplomb. The Philharmonia Orchestra showed off the strengths of their various departments, with particular plaudits going on this occasion to the woodwind.

A packed audience followed the evening with hard edged concentration and rewarded the performers with extended applause. BH

 Pavilion Theatre, Brighton, 23 May

A packed lunchtime audience gave a very warm welcome to a young quartet who are rapidly making a name for themselves. Formed only two years ago, they have won prizes both nationally and internationally. It is easy to see why. Their music making is not only technically accomplished but deeply felt and convincing.

They opened with Shostakovitch’s string quartet No 11 Op 122. This was not an easy choice for a lunchtime recital, with only occasional moments of calm to offset the tension and underlying melancholy of the work. The seven movements flow easily into each other with a relentlessness which does not allow for any real break either in concentration or emotional impact.

Mendelssohn’s quartet Op44 No2 came as something of a relief even if its fierce virtuosity was almost at the same level of intensity as the Shostakovich. The second movement lightened the tone and the third was positively relaxed, with some exquisite playing from cellist Rebecca Herman.

On one of the warmest days this so far this year, it was worth spending an hour in the dark for playing of this quality. BH

80th Anniversary Concert, The Warehouse, London  19 May 2012

Carey Blyton would have been 80 this year and this concert brought together not only family and friends but many of his former pupils and composers in a celebration of his own music and the influence he had over younger writers. It is strange that a man known only to the wider world as the writer of Bananas in Pyjamas was such an eclectic figure, with settings ranging from the most profound – a deeply felt Dirge for St Patrick’s night – to the flippant.

The concert included an impressively wide range of Carey’s own song settings, including one to a poem he had written as a student, and some of his instrumental scores. Soprano Alison Smart took a little while to settle into the close acoustic of The Warehouse but was on splendid form for Prayers from the Ark. She also found great sympathy for six Warlock songs and a selection from E J Moeran’s Six Poems of Seumas O’Sullivan.

The evening was introduced by John Mitchell and his own setting of The Half-moon Westers Low, together with Frank Bayford’s delightful Songs for Children’s Dreams, were rightly included as tributes to Carey’s continuing influence.

Pianist Katharine Durran brought two examples of Carey’s piano works; Three Impressions, with their keen atmospheric encapsulation of landscape, and the more familiar jazz pieces Park Lane Stroll and A Ghost from the Past.

Carey was essentially a miniaturist, but the range and beauty of his creations were very evident here. It was announced that a Carey Blyton Society is to be formed and details of this will be available through his website www.careyblyton.co.uk

Recordings and writings are available from www.fandmusic.com

BH

London Coliseum, 16 May 2012

As we are not to have any Wagner at the Coliseum during his anniversary season next year it is some comfort that we will have the memory of Edward Gardner’s exhilarating reading to The Flying Dutchman and the promise of greater things to come. His fierceness, forcing the narrative line forward with virtually no points of respite or let up in the tension, together with orchestral playing finer than it has been for some time, helped to smooth any passing problems which the production might throw up along the way. Jonathan Kent’s approach , placing a neurotic and damaged Senta at the heart of the work, is familiar from other productions, but on this occasion he goes far further in implicating her father, Daland, in her problems, and the viciousness of society towards those who are mentally unstable. The pirate party in act three is at once both hilarious and deeply disturbing, given the way binge drinking can so quickly get out of hand. That she commits suicide using a broken bottle is uncomfortably apt. Towards the end of the run, when I saw the production, I felt no concern about the quality of voices on stage. If James Creswell’s Dutchman was dramatically dull at times it seemed correct in terms of Senta’s very limited emotional development. Orla Boylan rose not only to the vocal challenges of Senta but convinced us that she was a solitary figure in a vile world. Few Erik’s have the stature of Stuart Skelton, which made one realise just how limited Senta’s view of the world had become. He may be only a security guard but he was real and emotionally far more complex than the Dutchman. Clive Bailey’s creepy Daland sees nothing unsavoury about selling off his daughter, and this is the only point at which the overlap between reality and dream becomes confused. Paul Brown’s design brings brutal container ship reality and factory work into a head-on clash with Senta’s romanticism which washes constantly across the stage from the effective video work. Wagner set out to challenge, and productions like are vital in their combination of the highest musical qualities combined with provocative staging. BH

 St Bartholomew’s, Brighton, 11 May

A world premiere, and the revival of a baroque work the audience are unlikely to have encountered elsewhere, would seem to be essential fare for a Festival. If the result was not quite as exciting as it looked on paper it was no fault of Ivan Moody whose new piece, Sub tuum praesidium, proved to be both challenging and aurally exciting.

The composer draws on three different versions of the hymn to the Virgin, setting them in Latin, Slavonic and Greek. Though the work is through composed and moves easily between the sections there are obvious differences, with the Latin text used to create vast sonorities where the Slavonic section alternates between massive block paragraphs and more ethereal dynamics. There are certainly some ravishing sounds here and it will be interesting to encounter the work in a different acoustic. Where St Bartholomew’s vast spaces allow sound to roll around and for echoes to enfold the listener, this is often to the detriment of the immediacy of the musical line and the clarity of diction.

While Ivan Moody’s work relished the challenge of the building, much of Antonio Teixeira’s Te Deum was lost within its space. The Portuguese composer was born in 1707 and the Te Deum was probably first performed in 1734. However, those used to the conventions of Northern European Baroque may have found the work perplexing in its mixture of styles within a rigid framework. The setting alternates verses of florid embellishment with plainsong, but while there is much individual writing that pleases, the structure is enforced throughout so that there is no sense of narrative line or of dramatic development. The listener quickly realises that each verse will be worked on as if it stood alone, rather than being a stepping stone within a whole. As such the scoring, while effectively performed, dulled as time went on.

This was a pity. There was much to enjoy in the singing of the English Chamber Choir under Guy Protheroe and the soloists of the English Players fought gamely with the acoustic. The two tromebe di caccia sounded splendid, though there was no specific reason textually for their involvement.

It is always good to hear new works, and to be reminded that some older works have been forgotten for good reasons.  BH

Barbican Concert Hall, 26 May

What exactly is Philip Glass’s first opera; is it a ballet with singing, an opera with dance, an art house play with both? Well, it’s all of these, yes, but really it’s in a category all of its own too; in the way that no-one who was there quite knew what to make of Waiting for Godot: a new existential art-form was born. Think also of the vitriol that accompanied Berlioz wherever he went, of the riot that accompanied The Rites of Spring; music almost against its will was being nudged in a new direction. At the Barbican for only nine nights, for the first time in Europe since 1976 and in this country ever, the production I saw on May 4^th was all-but the same show that premiered 36 years ago in Avignon (and lost all concerned a small fortune).

The opera itself is, how to say, unusual. Four and a half hours with no interval, with no discernable arias, simplistic plot and no clear narrative; but it is hypnotic, entrancing, enveloping, sucking you into a different world that repeats and almost repeats again and again. In structure it is four acts with five intermezzos or ‘knee plays’. The two central motifs throughout are time – passing or not, looking forward and back; and numbers in any sequence, random, Fibonacci, ascending and descending.

It’s clear that Glass’s 1960s associations with Ravi Shankar and his ragas, some of which can go on for a solid day, are strong inspirations. Themes come and go, come and go, are invented and reinvented, disappear and an hour later reappear again. It is as much an intellectual exercise as aesthetic.  

There are clear strong resonances, if not premonitions of Koyaanisquatsi with the low, slow sepulchral organ, of CIVIL warS with the voice over as though from the news.

The singing itself, this being an opera, was pretty much always ensemble with usually a half dozen voices the norm. Largo al factotem is often quoted as the by-word/guide against which to measure speed, technique and clarity. Frequently this, with six voice together (not just one), with many many words per minute in perfect syncronicity, was the match. The dancers too must have supreme stamina, dancing vigorously for up to 20 minutes to a choreography of Lucinda Childs

It’s fair to say that at four and a half hours its long, a good editor could have taken this down to three with ease. To quote Glass though, less is not more, more is more, that’s why its called ‘more’. Parts of the staging are certainly self indulgent, not least a single bar of light rotating, taking a full 20 minutes to do so with no other visual elements at all. The human brain likes linear stories and this one has almost none. Whilst the music was often fast some parts of the staging were snail like, perhaps to avoid repetition, perhaps just because that is what director Robert Wilson wanted. Michael Reisman conducted, as he has for every single performance, ever!

I found the absurdity of it all strange, entrancing and exhilarating; its fair to say some won’t have. CM

Hertfordshire Chorus at The Sage Gateshead

It is said the English romantic poet John Keats wrote his Ode to a Nightingale in a single day in 1819, inspired by one of the birds singing in a garden. Evidently it took the Durham-born composer Will Todd rather longer to set it to music, having been commissioned by Hertfordshire Chorus patron Rod Jones. In the programme, Todd reveals the humility he felt, having to work with a poem which has meant so much to so many people. He writes about his working method, the succession of drafts, the first “heartfelt and very bad”, and the intensifying pressure as the deadline approaches.

The resulting one-act choral symphony was premiered at London’s Barbican arts centre last May but got its first stunning North East performance recently, sandwiched between Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42 and the Mozart Requiem.

The Hertfordshire Chorus, under its Newcastle-born musical director David Temple, made an impressive sight, its ranks of black-clad singers – more than 100-strong – ranged across the stage. The choir makes a big sound, as you might expect, but most impressive of all, it is extremely well drilled and can turn on a sixpence.

Todd’s work puts great demands on the singers, its big, long notes and phrases seeming to invite hyper-ventilation, but all proved equal to it. Keats wrote of nature and the realisation of mortality (he would die a couple of years later of tuberculosis, aged just 25) in a poem full of light and shade. Todd’s piece, comprising great ebbing and flowing tides of sound, does justice to it, capturing the mood even if – inevitably – some of the words are lost.

Accompanied by the English Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Tristan Jurney, Todd’s work proved more than just a tasty starter before the main Mozart course was served.

But the Requiem was brilliant too, bringing out the best in soloists Katharine Watson, Kitty Whately (Kevin’s talented daughter), Joshua Ellicott and Michael Bundy.

Miss Watson, a bit of a nightingale herself, also shone in the earlier Mendelssohn piece, a work of delicate beauty.

The audience was disappointingly small but it departed happy. Hopefully the Hertfordshire Chorus will be back before too long. It has championed Will Todd whose mounting achievements should be celebrated here on his home soil.