Barlines at Dartington: Concert no 3

Somei Satoh: Kisetsu
Mozart: Sinfonia Concertante for winds and orchestra
Haydn: Symphony no 104

Melinda Maxwell, oboe; Janet Hilton, clarinet; Sue Dent, horn; Laurence Perkins, bassoon
Conductor: Diego Masson
Dartington Festival Orchestra

One of those concerts which gives the summer school students a chance to see and hear their masterclass tutors in action (in the Mozart). But also an opportunity to hear something a little different. Dartington has a long tradition of inviting resident composers, and this year it's the turn of the Japanese musical colourist Somei Satoh (there's a Japanese theme to the festival as a whole - it culminates in a couple of performances of Madama Butterfly, in which Festival Orchestra, student conductors and the opera class come together). Over the weeks of the school he has been holding composition classes, and various concerts have featured his work.

Working on a piece like Kisetsu poses particular challenges for an orchestra, particularly when the remainder of the programme is firmly classical and ends with as rumbustious a piece as Haydn 104. For a start, it is resolutely quiet, testing string harmonic technique and bow control under pressure, and relying on much ppp wind writing; and it's certainly no place for a percussionist with the DTs. It is also slow, very slow, with very few moving parts. As a result, any slight surge in volume or intensity is magnified. And there is a sense of anticipation, once each momentary bloom of timbre has subsided into silence, regarding what will come next.

But it's not just the performer's technical skill which is tested. Any ambient noise, a squeaky chair, a buzzing mute, is easily discernible. That's not to mention a violinist's stomach rumble (for that's what happened) causing the placid musical meniscus to tremble in a rather unexpected way.

Next: Haydn's Creation, with Aussie legend and the Bradman of the Baton, Sir Charles Mackerras (fingers crossed for the Ashes, eh, Sir C?)

GRAaaaaaaaah!

Can’t the Proms turn out some professionals to do the choral parts in the annual Beethoven 9? Trained singers are booked to do the early music, opera and new music bits, so why not the big choral repertoire? The cost is not prohibitive – the stage is filled with pros for many other Proms and during the Stockhausen day last year the stage and most of the arena was filled with highly-trained musicians who were being paid – so it must be a matter of priorities. How hard would it be to get in the BBC Singers, the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir and then a load of students from the Royal College next door? You wouldn’t even have to pay the students for goodness sake (give them course credits – the oldest trick in the book). Trained singers are going begging all over the UK for the measliest of gigs – I’m not suggesting that they should be exploited, I’m lamenting their underuse.

I had the opportunity to take a guest to the SSO/CBSO Chorus Beethoven 9 at the proms the other day. I wanted to take a friend who used to play trumpet for one of the German opera houses, but I suspected, since the BBC hadn’t engaged professionals to sing the choral part, that those bits would be over-mannered and under-powered, in the manner of amateur choruses the world over. The CBSO chorus is an admirable choir, but on the whole I wasn’t wrong, so it was a good job that I took someone else who wouldn’t hold me personally to account for the BBC’s apparent disdain for this masterwork.

It is impossible to find someone to blame, and it is difficult to know which came first – the embarrassingly low standards or the institutional contempt for choral singing.

Let’s go back to basics here. Singing and playing a violin are roughly analogous activities from a consumer point of view. The more talented you are, the better you sound. Practice also helps. Contrary to the consensus of the twentieth century, singing once a week in an amateur choral environment does not equip you to handle choral masterpieces to a professional standard. Doing this in large numbers does not bypass the problem.

Barlines is a huge enthusiast of amateur choirs. We have conducted dozens, of all different types. We love them. However it is clear to us that any properly trained male voice, for example, could drown out, with the sweetest of tones, the tenor and bass sections of any non-professional choir in the UK with his back turned and without breaking a sweat. We have seen it done, by various people in a number of prejudicial environments. He could then proceed to diminuendo, crescendo, exert emphasis and generally emote in ways simply unavailable to the others, due to having been trained a lot in those exact things. It is analogous, in fact, to the difference between a professional violinist and an amateur violinist. Can anyone imagine a scenario where a professional orchestra would replace its violin section with amateurs?

This is rather cruel, but it really has to be done. Here is last week’s prom performance (available on t’iPlayer till Saturday evening). Skip to 56 mins 44 seconds. Witness people singing. Then listen to this clip (from the beginning) of a Bernstein performance and witness singers singing:

On the evening what brought it home was the pivotal F natural/A dyad on ‘vor Gott’ – at this point the audience should be blown away by the raw harmony, the universe should stand still, the ethereal tendrils of eternal brotherhood should grasp you by the balls etc, but Volkov dispatched it with a crispness typical of the performance. It was consistent, and certainly provided a good springboard for his swift reading of the ensuing alla Marcia, but I am certain that the limitations of the chorus influenced his entire approach to the final movement.

Listen back a bit on the iPlayer and tell me that this is good enough for the UK’s flagship Beethoven 9 performance.

Barlines at Dartington: Concert no 2

Gounod: Messe Solennelle
Ravel: Daphnis & Chloe (suites 1 & 2)
Dartington Festival Chorus & Orchestra (plus guest vocals from Exaudi)
Conductors: Brian Kay and Diego Masson

Firstly, erk, a correction: yes it was the Cello Concerto no 2 by Shostakovich that we played in Wednesday's concert, not no 1 (a rather less searching piece).

But anyway, following that intense experience, the prospect of Gounod's unfamiliar mass promised to be something of an anticlimax - it's one of those pieces which gets labelled as 'unjustifiably neglected', as sure a sign as you can get of something being justifiably neglected. In this case, well, it's not long, so would be a useful concert-filler, next to other relatively short pieces like the Beethoven Mass in C, or the Schubert E flat mass (even if putting Gounod in the same programme as Schubert would cruelly show up the differences between the two in tune-smithery).

Here, though, the companion was Ravel's ballet, which, as well as being an orchestral showpiece of the ultimate kind, gives a chorus a run-out in something rather less chaste than standard choral fare. This is particularly so in the second suite, where their wordless singing adds a real Hollywood bloom to the most glorious depiction of sunrise in all music (I'd like to add my personal thanks to Ravel for giving the tune to the violas, while the violins busy themselves with their fiddly background noodlings). But it's in the final section where the chanting really pays off, delivering an erotic charge the piece misses a little bit in the purely orchestral version - you feel just a little bit dirty even playing along.

Other than the music, one reason for looking forward to the Friday concert is that summer school director Gavin Henderson gives a hint of what's to come the following year. I guess the big news this time is that next year will be his last festival (after nearly a thousand years in charge), so there's a vacancy for 2011. Evidently, nobody has been lined up yet, so now's the time to start getting your CVs in order.

Next: Haydn, Mozart and Satoh.

Barlines at Dartington: Concert no 1

Shostakovich: Cello Concerto no 1
Dvorak: Symphony no 8
Soloist: only Karine Georgian!
Conductor: Diego 'Dieu' Masson
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The Dartington Festival Orchestra, house band of the Dartington International Summer School, has a somewhat polyvalent existence. A ragamuffin collection of freelancers, teachers, students and musicians of varying degrees of spuriousness, it exists primarily to:

a Accompany various choral courses during the last 3 weeks of the school
b Work as the pit band for the opera course at the end of August
c Provide cannon fodder for the advanced conducting course classes (6 students chosen for their all-round musical skills rather than nascent dictatorial qualities)

All this involves 6 hours' rehearsal a day (6 days a week), covering a range of repertoire. But the high point of all this work is the opportunity to perform a couple of concerts each of the 3 weeks the orchestra is in residence. And the first of this season was a belter, featuring a powerfully committed performance of Shostakovich at his most bleak by one of the world's most powerfully committed cellists. The concerto is not so well known - apparently, Ms Georgian herself had only performed it once before (I remain to stand corrected) - but from its opening falling minor second figure, to its mechanical percussion conclusion, via a cadenza in which the soloist duels with (and beats off) a furious bass drum, and a scherzo where she dances with a trio of beserk bassoons, the piece never stops probing at the scary crevices of the musical imagination.

Next up: er, Gounod!
(And Daphnis and Chloe.)

Nixon on Bernstein: "Son of a bitch"

Hands in the air for New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, who has published US government documents relating to Leonard Bernstein on the magazine's blog, including FBI files, memos from the files of Richard Nixon’s infamous 'plumbers', and several lively excerpts from Nixon’s White House tapes.

Those who have read the transcripts of Aaron Copland's relentless MacCarthy hearing will know of the terrifying resources the US government was willing to put into the monitoring and interrogation of left-wing composers in the middle of the last century.
Initially, it seems, J Edgar Hoover's office dismissed 'ambiguous and sweeping' insinuations about the politics of our beloved Lenny. But as McCarthyism took hold an X appeared next to the 'communist' box on his file. Much later, in the late sixties some serious stationery was committed to documenting Bernstein's support of Black Panther associates who had been charged with criminal activity.
The most entertaining parts of the file include some personal correspondence in 1961 between Hoover, director of the FBI, and a New York Philharmonic-attending communist-hunting nun, who received free literature and a plug for Hoover's book Masters of Deceit.
Some splendidly paranoid correspondence from the Nixon administration surrounding the premiere of Bernstein's Mass makes interesting reading, while sound files of Nixon dismissing Bernstein's habit of kissing people on the mouth, including Alvin Ailey, as 'absolutely sickening', and dismissing the composer himself as a 'son of a bitch' are simply beyond parody.

Pissed on at Glynders

Young Pythagoras here had developed a reputation over the last few years of guaranteeing blue skies at Glyndebourne simply by turning up. Early in the season? Late in the season? No worries. A succession of (it turns out) ineligible young ladies were encouraged to pack sunscreen with the fizz. All the more so in August! If only I had gone as far as suggesting a parasol – anything to put between myself and the angry skies last week would have been appreciated.

A first interval in patchy cloud encouraged us to lay the picnic out, only to find – a mere fourteen-and-a-half hours of Tristan later – that the weather had turned inclement all over the damn salmon.

Not feeling quite so smug for nabbing the secret spot that always catches the last of the afternoon sun (but lies what, in rain, feels like three miles from the auditorium) the picnic was hastily adjourned to under a big tree. Which does not, it turns out, offer the same sort of weather-proof cover as, say, a restaurant. Who’d a thunk.

Come the Liebestod my moth-worried black suit was almost dry and (ah, the smell of wet wool in the evening) but that situation proved temporary, as the scramble to the car was effected in a violently wet cloud chunder.

My motto from now on? Don’t end up with a wet suit – just turn up in a wetsuit. Ok, it needs tweaking I suppose.

*Blub*

We can't take it. Admittedly Barlines cried at the Youtube Symphony Orchestra global mashup (it's beautiful, just beautiful, and there's a fit xylophone player and a bloke in a Star Wars helmet) but we may just implode in a glob of nostalgic tears and snot if what we hear is true. Kiri Te Kanawa has reportedly (and steady, it wouldn't be the first time some quarters of the press have jumped the gun on this one), announced that, after 40 years, her swansong on the operatic stage will be playing the Marschallin in Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, for Cologne Opera next April.

She brought grown men and women (and women dressed as men, and Barlines, who was but a boy) to their knees over 20 years ago in the role at the Met (see below); just think of the atmosphere in the house as she signs off her career with the act 3 trio - as the knowing, experienced Marschallin, her heart breaking, releases the strapping young Octavian to pursue the younger Sophie.

Kill for a ticket.

Backatcha Depp

Mere amateurs in the product stakes. I take your autoerotic chair cello thing and raise you the mighty NOLIGRAPH Staffwriter

WANT!!!

Normally I've no patience with musical merchandise. From the first "I've Passed My Grade 1" badge to the keyboard socks that just keep popping up in your Christmas stocking every year even when you're in your thirties, people will persist in thinking that you find these items amusing. The Chopin Bored is about as funny as getting your bottom caught in a bacon slicer, and frankly anyone who voluntarily wears treble clef cufflinks or earrings ought to be euthanised.

Having said that, I WANT one of these. Do any of my adoring fans fancy buying me one?

And they're off!

BBC Maestro mentors Peter Stark and Jason Lai are experts at doling out the advice to aspiring conductors, but now they are dealing with the big players, and they need to do their homework.

As commentators on the Proms 'maestro cam' (mad, mad props etc) they will be giving us the lowdown, cue by cue, on the Proms performances of conductors Daniel Barenboim and David Robertson respectively, through a dedicated camera which can be accessed through the red button.

A broadcasting first, claims the BBC (see the broadcasting feature in the next issue of Classical Music). Au contraire, ma tante, au contraire. Listen and learn from the master: