Museum Lunchtime concert: Theo Platt, Keval Shah, 11th April 2024

Firstly, one of the most famous poems in the English Language, Keats’ sonnet On first looking into Chapman’s Homer. It goes thus:

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet never did I breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific – and with all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise-

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Why the poem? Well, I know of nothing that distills better the moment, in reading, in listening to music, in looking at a picture, when the reader, the listener, the gazer feels that they have had the stunning experience that only art can communicate. Such an experience occurred to me in the opening moments of the last Thursday concert of the Winter season at the Museum given by the baritone Thomas Platt and his piano accompanist Keval Shah. I have delayed writing about it since I  knew that I was going to hear the English Touring Opera in Stravinsky’s A Rake’s Progress at Curve this week and I felt I needed to hear some other operatic voices to verify that I was not exaggerating when I thought that last Thursday I had come across a voice that had reminded me of some of the great singers of the last 60 years.Was I delusional to think that here and there I was reminded of Thomas Allen, of Fischer- Dieskau, even a whiff of Boris Christoff such was the range of the voice and the singer’s responsiveness to the word? Well, I think not. This was voice totally under control across a wide range, dramatic but also capable of great beauty.

        All of this became apparent from the very first item in the programme, a James Macmillan setting of a poem by the Scottish poet William Soutar called The Children, a poem describing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Its powerful simplicity was given music that was immensely moving in the straightforwardness that at times is so characteristic of the composer. It was made all the more powerful here by the singer declaiming the opening whilst slightly outside the hall and thus quite separate from the piano, so giving to the performance as he advanced towards the platform a sense of a processional with the piano picking up the horror of the scene. It reminded me of Britten who in works such as Curlew River used this device to great effect.

            After this the credentials of the pair as singer and pianist of German and French song were established in songs from Schumann’s Kerner Lieder followed by Poulenc’s Le Fraicheur et le feu.  Here there seemed to be an instant and completely confident response to the varied tone of the songs.

           Then we were in the last part of the concert presented with the often harrowing world of racial suffering in the American South in a series of American songs, Shawn E. Okpebholo’s Two Black Churches, Ballad of Birmingham and The Rain, Richard Farina’s Birmingham Sunday, Margaret Bond’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers and William Grant Stills’s  Grief . These were sung and played with great feeling. Particularly striking in the first was the expressive writing for piano. In the second the singing was wonderfully fluid at times and in the third I will remember for a long time the softness of the rendering of the line ‘I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong. There was much one could have written about a number of felicities in the last two of the songs listed though I was grateful to reach the vitality of the final piece in the concert, Florence Price’s energetic My Dream which effectively brought the concert to a moderately up beat ending and ensured that we did not go home sobbing our hearts out. It was a triumphant ending to a triumphant concert and I would dearly like to hear both artists again in the not too distant future, perhaps in a mainly English programme, with one of the Britten song cycles at its centre.

So that is the end of the Winter season in which there have been quite a number of outstanding concerts. Top of the heap to my mind were the concerts given by following . Firstly, there was the astonishing Pelleas Ensemble consisting of the seemingly unlikely combination of flute ,viola and harp which made of transcribed works utterly memorable music. Then our director partnered by the pianist Antoino Oyaizabal gave a delightful concert centred on  the music of Madeline Dring but culminating in beautiful, beautiful arrangements by Vaughan Williams of English folk songs.

That was followed several weeks later by Helene Clement and Alasdair Beatson Viola and Piano taking a mezmerising musical journey through the relationships that Frank Bridge and Imogen Holst had with Benjamin Britten that culminated in a performance of the latter’s deep and knotty masterpiece Lachrymae, reflections on a song of Dowland that was as revealing as any that I have heard. And lastly there was the concert reviewed above.

So, we were hardly lacking in music making to remember. However, in truth I finished thinking that this winter series was not really one of the most memorable and that the reason was not hard to gauge. It lay in the self evident fact that music for string trio, quartet and quintet, which surely harbours by far the greatest number of works of genius to be found in chamber music, was totally absent from the programme and I don’t think I can remember that happening any time in the past. When it was coupled with the exclusion of piano works not composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, there was thus a huge chunk of the most inspired chamber music rendered unavailable for the season and that that was a hole not to be filled by such things as music for massed brass,at least not for me.

Lastly, though, we should all be hugely grateful that we have people like Nicholas Daniel and Kevin Rush willing to put so much time into making sure that Leicester gets music of real quality year after year particularly in the present atmosphere of mild hostility to the arts by people who should know better.

De Montfort Hall : The Philharmonia Orchestra, Steven Osborne, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, April 6th 2024

A glance at this, the last concert of the present series, was enough to set the heart racing, featuring as it did two Scandinavian works conducted by the Philharmonia‘s Finnish chief conductor who is one of the best of the present day interpreters of the Nordic repertoire, with in addition the concerto slot having one of today’s very best pianists playing one of Beethoven’s greatest works , the Fifth Piano Concerto. What could possibly go wrong, one thought.

            However, I was aware that this concert was designated the Lord Mayor’s concert, at which as usual the incumbent for the year was expected to deliver a speech. Now, of course, being made Lord Mayor for twelve months is the reward for many years of worthy public service and not for the ability to speak in public. The two quite often do not go together, a fact which was brought home to me in my first year of teaching in Rochester in the early 1960s when with my future brother-in-law I was given the tricky task of controlling the fifth form during the speech day, that year held in Chatham Town Hall. We were soon more than apprehensive when the principal speaker, the then leader of the Kent County Council, meandered on and on recalling all the great orators he had heard, starting with Lloyd George and proving to an increasingly restive school boy audience that he had, alas, learnt very little from his experiences. However, everything comes to an end and the two of us were just congratulating ourselves on having kept a lid on things when he stood up again and, these are his exact words, asked the hall to stand up whilst ‘the stage party pass out’! Needless to say, we had no hope of containing the tsunami of laughter that swept through the hall.

Now, nothing like that has happened in my experience of speech making in the De Montfort Hall. Leicester folk are nothing like as revolutionary as a body of Kent adolescents of the 1960s but it has been quite common to feel a general wish that the speechifying would stop and the music begin. That this year that feeling was absent was a tribute to this year’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Susan Barton. She spoke of the debt that we owe the Philharmonia for the way they have embedded themselves in city life, how widely the orchestra has made itself felt not just in the concert hall but in schools and in universities as well in many worthwhile projects besides what is, of course , the basic reason for their presence in the city, an annual feast of music- making not to be surpassed in quality in my experience with anything else in the great wide world of music. To judge from the vigorous applause that followed, the audience, besides endorsing that, also registered their thanks in times of outrageous financial squeezing of local government by central government that our city continues to see the arts as central to the community and to hear someone say in this context how this great orchestra’s presence in the city is so mightily appreciated. The speaker deserved the hearty applause she received from both orchestra and audience.

            It was therefore apt the concert began with Nielsen’s glorious evocation in his Helios Overture of the glory of the Sun God as he traverses the sky from dawn to dusk. The orchestra thoroughly blazed at the great climaxes in the centre of this work displaying the light and heat of its zenith. The brass had a field day, if there is a woodwind section that surpasses the Philharmonia’s, well I haven’t heard it and as for the strings… well worldwide to judge from reviews read it would seem that what was in my youth the Achilles heel of many an orchestra is no longer so. The wonder is that the Philharmonia’s strings have maintained a distinctive quality, that clarity and virtuosity come also with warmth. They are simply wonderful in adapting to the sound world of the work they are playing.

            There followed a performance of Beethoven’s last piano concerto which decisively questioned the title by which it is commonly recognised. It was interesting that the programme asked whether The Emperor really did justice to the revolutionary quality of much of the music. The other idea that it referred to Napoleon is even more questionable since well before its composition the composer had written off Bonaparte when he gave himself royalty. Whatever, I found this a searching performance indeed. This was the first time that I have heard Steven Osborne live and, my goodness, what a virtuoso he can be but with the most delicate of touches at times as well. The individuality of the interpretation was perhaps compounded by his playing the Hall’s piano, the Fazioli. It took a little time for this listener once again to adapt to a sound so unlike the much more frequent choice of a Steinway for this concerto. However, very quickly the ear did adapt once again to the often beautiful and rather wonderful bell like clarity of the instrument even in the bass. With an orchestral accompaniment which was in the outer movements not afraid to be hugely exciting, in other words Romantic, and was beautifully delicate in the middle movement, by the finish I felt I had heard an interpretation which really made one re-think the essence of the work and that it was no bad thing for old and loved warhorses to undergo an occasional shake. I am not, though, advocating a bonfire of Steinways!

And so we came to the final work of the season, Sibelius’ great Symphony No.5 with an orchestra which has played the composer’s work under some of the best conductors of this repertoire, particularly so in recent years. The latest in that line is their present chief conductor Santttu-Matias Rouvali who on this evening convinced this listener that he had never heard a better interpretation. Time and again you sensed what is vital in this composer’s symphonic music, the sense of there being an overarching grand structure with at almost the same time a certain mystery as to where the journey is going. Proof of the wonderful control of this performance was illustrated to me in a surprising manner.  I was accompanied to this concert by some friends who had never heard this symphony before nor I think would two of them even suggest that they had much knowledge of classical music generally. Yet, after the concert one of them said how fascinating it was to hear music that gave a sense of something deep going on and yet was utterly mysterious as to where it was going, only then to suddenly reveal in several great dramatic moments what it had been journeying towards all along.

And what drama there was in this performance. The strings in particular in the great apotheosis of the last movement played with an intensity that almost suggested that flames were about to appear, but then every moment of the performance offered some breathtaking felicity and was a wonderful ending to the season. Hope to see you all in October and onwards in the new season.           

Lunchtime Concert : Helene Clement, Alistair Beatson, 14th March 2024

This was a memorable concert for several reasons. Firstly, we welcomed back to Leicester Helene Clement, Viola and Alasdair Beatson, Piano, fine artists both. However, that wasn’t the half of it. The programme they had put together looked and proved to be fascinating, centring as it was upon music by three people who in one way or another revolutionised the British music scene in the middle of the last century, Frank Bridge, Imogen Holst, and Benjamin Britten.

The first was, besides being a composer to be reckoned with, the person most responsible for nurturing the young Britten but more of that in a minute. The fact that Britten’s vision of a kind of Bayreuth on the East Coast of England in his native Aldeburgh came to such a successful fruition is very much down to Imogen Holst and is perhaps not always fully recognised, not least for the  effect it had on her own compositional life. Some people have felt that she did not always receive the gratitude which should have been hers. It is sadly often the way with genius that the more earthbound things are taken for granted.    

            Whatever, genius Britten most certainly was. Now it is commonplace to see him, with Shostakovich, spoken of as the most significant composer of the mid 20c century and certainly its greatest opera composer but it was not always thus. In the 1950’s into the 60’s I was in London and I heard Peter Grimes for the first time 15 or so years after its premiere in 1945 and barely could believe what I was hearing. I have since thought of it as my Hector Berlioz moment (!), said moment being when in the late 1820’s he saw Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the stage for the first time and, never a man to do things by half, had on the same night also became besotted with the Ophelia of Harriet Smithson, walked the streets of Paris for the whole night, no doubt plotting the Romantic revolution and later, and much more disastrously, finished up married to the said actress. I did not walk the streets of London and had yet to meet my wife, but otherwise was quite as disorientated.  An opera of all things in English and as powerfully dramatic as anything in the repertoire?  I must be imagining things, I thought, but then along came Billy Budd, Turn of the Screw, Midsummer Night’s Dream, the War Requiem etc.etc.  In 1963 I was at the composer’s 50^th Birthday concert in the Festival Hall in which he conducted a performance of his Spring Symphony. In the same era London fell in love with Mahler, who had been a major influence on the young Britten and one critic, I think Hans Keller, the Austrian /English musicologist, remarked in an article that living in Mozart’s Vienna must have felt not dissimilar to what it was to be in London in the 60’s. Of course, many of the learned, particularly those who belonged to Schools dedicated to the new music, laughed derisively and William Glock in charge of BBC music for the period introduced British listeners to the really ‘important’ things going on in Europe, much of which seems now, to judge by the rarity with which it is publicly performed, actually of very little importance.

            As it happens, the music chosen to shed light on this triumvirate was fascinating and it was difficult to think that any of it could have been played better. Frank Bridge’s Cello Sonata in an arrangement by Helene Clement for viola seemed to have preserved the heart of the music admirably. Even though a friend, a cellist, felt something had been lost, in all honesty to this listener who did not know original it at least conveyed very much of the vigour and at times beauty of the composer’s voice. The loveliness of the viola’s tone was such that one was beguiled time and again by the musical content so much so that one wondered why the composer’s output did not feature more in concert programmes. The programme perhaps gave the clue when it mentioned the turmoil the composer had been reduced to by the first World War. Perhaps that explains why in terms of structure, and despite the continuing interest of what one was hearing, this listener at least was uncertain at times where the music was going. It felt more a tone poem than a sonata.

Imogen Holst’s Suite for Solo Viola on the other hand was clarity itself and in its own terms also delightful to listen to. The last two movements Sarabande and Gigue seemed to seek to recall the pre Romantic world like a number of composers in the inter war years, Stravinsky and Ravel to name but two.

            That left the three pieces by Britten, two from his student days only discovered shortly after his death and a first hearing for me. I remember the excitement the discovery caused but had never come across either in a concert programme. In one, his teacher’s There is a Willow grows aslant a Brook  was wonderfully atmospheric in the student’s arrangement for viola and piano. The performance was beyond words beautiful. The other work Elegy for solo viola written on the day after he had left public school at the age of 16 was so much more than an adolescent’s pay back gesture. It created with extraordinary power and in a very short space a dark and mournful world. No wonder Frank Bridge was so eager to give all he could to the young prodigy.  

            That left one work of Britten’s maturity, Lachrymae, Reflections on a song of Dowland written for the famous violist William PrimroseThis is famous for having been possibly the first theme and variations in which the theme comes after the variations, only to be revealed in its entirety at the end. I have heard it several times and have usually struggled to see quite where the music is going at times. However, for some reason this time I actually felt there was light on the way due no doubt to the wonderful playing of the two artists and as a result I don’t think that I have ever been so moved by the way at the end out of the thicket the unadorned and simple rendition of the song emerges and creates a  wonderful few moments of beauty and contemplation.

            Lastly, throughout this concert in the background there was the knowledge that one was listening to Britten’s viola, an instrument given to him by his teacher as he left for America in 1939, perhaps as a thank you to the young man who had given him some sort of immortality by composing for the Salzburg Festival of 1937 Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge for string orchestra , which it is agreed was the work which put the young composer on the international map. That knowledge and the wonderous sound of that particular instrument, an 1843 Giussani, made this concert something very special.

Museum Lunchtime Series, Bone-afide ,29th. February 2024

The debut in Leicester of this quartet of trombones was a thoroughly enjoyable occasion. From the opening speech it was clear that this was a group which set out first and foremost to entertain. The introductions to the music and the playing that followed conveyed a winning pleasure. They clearly recognised that the classical repertoire for solo trombones was, to put it gently, somewhat limited and that therefore arrangements of music were going to have to feature largely in any programme. Also, the fact that the instrument was to be often found in jazz and dance music clearly opened up further opportunities for witty musical connections to be made.

Laughter, surprise and delight rarely seemed very far away in the concert. Arrangements for the instruments of well known music as in the first two works played, Dan Jenkins’ Dance with Dreams and Callum Au’s Kind of Blue Danube and Low Down quickly established that. In the latter the trombone became astonishingly beguiling and in William Foster’s adaptation of music from Swan Lake the playing achieved an astonishing lightness at times.

It was followed by an arrangement of the spiritual Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child which has a most beautiful ending and that was followed by Brian Lynn’s Trombone Quartet which on a first hearing seemed to have rather too much display and not a great deal of substance, despite what I thought to be its occasional sexiness at times.

 I have also to say, however, that by this time I was puzzled by the composer being described in the programme as infamous,as was the ballet Swan Lake earlier? If it was intended as a piece of humour, it failed with me, if it was meant to signify high praise, as a onetime teacher of English Language and Literature I do suggest a dictionary should be consulted! Also, I was intrigued by a mention of ‘a broken stick effect ‘in the music but, alas, remained not much  wiser about its meaning from reading the programme.

The last two offerings created no such problems as music, though by this time I was beginning to tire of the relentlessly over the top description in the programme of the wonders of the arrangers and artists. It didn’t really chime with the modesty of these players and is best left to those in our world for whom hype is their natural language. The 18^th century theatre invented a character for such people by the name of Mr.Puff .

Anyway, the last two pieces, the quite beautiful arrangement of a Welsh folk song by Patrick Rimes and Sam Every’s Cha Cha did very much deserve praise , the latter bringing to an end the concert with a great swing which sent me out into the miserable Winter much warmed.

The Philharmonia, Esther Yoo,Emilia Hoving, DMH February 24th,2024

The fourth concert of the season brought to DMH in terms of artists a familiar combination of the known and the new.  For the violin soloist Esther Yoo it was her third visit over a number of years and it was fascinating to look back and compare the present with the past. No such opportunity presented itself in regard the conductor Emelia Hoving, however, since this was her debut in Leicester. Yet one in a sense guessed that something was afoot as the programme placed her as a product of the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, from which has come some of the most exciting new conductors of this century. Add to that the fact that over the years it has been obvious that you don’t get to conduct the Philharmonia unless you have something rather special to offer and it was not surprising that expectations were high.

And those expectations were rapidly fulfilled in a powerful performance of the final movement of Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Legends, entitled Lemminkäinen’s Return. It appears that it was not surprisingly something of a triumphant return since his Mum had sown her lad’s dismembered body together again and had thus brought him back to life. What it most certainly did do was to fire the composer’s defiant nationalistic feelings to produce music that was as dramatic a 7 minutes of music as one could have wished for as an opening to a concert, particularly in its relevance to what is going in the Ukraine in our own day.

And so on to the concerto slot, this time filled by Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No1. It received a fine performance. In Esther Yoo’s last visit I warmed to aspects of her interpretation of the Tchaikovsky, particularly those passages which called for beauty of tone but felt that at times the virtuoso parts could have done with rather more heft. Here that rarely seemed wanting. She seems to be now the complete player. Of course, this concerto is very different, making virtuoso demands which more equate with quicksilver rather than demanding weight. It also has much that is characteristic of the composer’s wonderful lyrical gifts and these produced playing of great beauty from both soloist and orchestra. In the end, though, I felt that, though there was much in the concerto that looked forward to the mature composer, the sum of its parts was not always that convincing. It reminded me at times of that wonderful line from Monty Python, ‘And now for something different.’

Well, the audience certainly got that in the post interval performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Let me say at once that I have had a long standing thing about this composer when faced by the condescension which this music has drawn at times from some eminent musicologists and other superior beings. Sometimes it was worse than condescension. I remember a friend who for many years ran a record shop which drew me to browse every Saturday morning telling me of an encounter with a customer who had come into his shop. Said customer asked him to put together some music which would act as an introduction for his son to classical music. However, he stipulated that in the collection there was to be no Tchaikovsky nor Puccini. Apparently, he thought their music dangerously depraved! Some years later  The Leicester Music Society welcomed John Steane, the eminent contributor to the Gramophone on opera, to give a talk on the latter which he started thus, ‘ You may be interested to learn that not so many years ago a very eminent Cambridge Professor of Music declared Puccini’s music to be evil.’

Now, I would not have dredged up these memories had not the evening’s programme notes by David Nice drawn attention to the condescension which the composer faced in the period that saw the composing of this symphony, during which a Hamburg critic seemingly suggested that the composer should come to live in Germany where, wrote the composer, ‘’ classical traditions and conditions of the highest culture would certainly free me from my shortcomings’’.

What all this did achieve was give me the very greatest satisfaction to hear a great orchestra under a young conductor in as fervent a performance as I have heard of one of the greatest symphonies ever written. The playing of all sections of the orchestra I thought by turn stunning, by turn beautiful. Even the first horn managed his terrifyingly exposed part at the beginning of the Andante with hardly a stumble, the brass had enormous depth, the wind section was its aristocratic self with mouthwatering effect and the strings were incandescent in the great moments of the symphony.

And I have yet to mention the conductor! Well, of one thing I think I can be sure. None of what I heard in the last instance could surely have occurred without a direction and encouragement that comes from fine conducting and a clear grasp of the music. It is true that conducting is a mysterious art. I have heard conductors like Furtwangler and Klemperer who, despite having no sort of clear beat, produced magic whilst others, despite appearing to be clarity itself, created stubbornly earthbound results. What I would say here is that Emilia Hoving seemed utterly in control, that her left hand appeared often expressive instead of simply keeping time with the stick and that this performance had me looking forward very much to seeing her on the rostrum again.

Lunchtime Series: Iyad Sughayer, 15th.February,2024

This concert featured the swift return of the pianist to Leicester as he pursued his journey through Mozart’s Piano Sonatas. It is a journey which I think has created a number of varying responses from the Leicester audience. There have been some performances which have made this listener at least begin to revise his long held belief that, whilst this aspect of the composer’s output contained some jewels, generally if you wished to hear music that truly explained why for anyone with a shred of imaginative understanding Mozart is one of the greatest geniuses to be found in western art, one hardly goes first of all to the piano sonatas for proof. Furthermore, one has to ask whether it has it been wise to attempt some sort of blockbuster approach in a limited winter lunchtime series that as a result has apparently led to little other solo piano music being played.

            This question can perhaps be answered shortly by pointing to the size of the audience this last Thursday. It was true that there appeared to be quite a few who had travelled to support the artist but that can hardly be a bad thing. In the long term, though, the absence of a number of stalwarts from the audience, one or two because they felt ,horror of horrors , that they had had their fill of Mozart, might give cause for concern. I have to admit that the question as to whether this evangelism is resulting in a joyous voyage of discovery is much more difficult to answer and this concert, at least for me, resulted in the jury remaining out.

Readers of this blog may recall that I finished listening to the second concert in the series in a good frame of mind. I felt that I had heard an intriguing and various recital, perhaps the result I gathered of some changes made to the original programme. That mood carried on into the opening work of this recital, the unfinished Fantasia in D K397. It was new to me and I found it an intriguing short journey whose shifts of mood finally settled into a memorable main melody before it’s brought to a peremptory ending. The work as a whole was presented in playing of beguiling simplicity.

That suitable directness of playing made for an experience of a late sonata ‘for beginners’, Sonata 16 K545, which was utterly delightful. The only word for the performance was blithe. Here the programme made a connection to Schubert whose early compositions likewise appear very straightforward and simple but demand a very precise lightness of touch which eludes quite a few. That was certainly not the case here and at this stage I was almost purring!

It was thus rather disconcerting that in the performances of Sonatas K.333 and 576, works in spirit seemingly not a million miles away from what we had already heard, the lightness of touch , the caressing of a phrase, the transparency so frequently evident in those performances became increasingly absent in interpretations which seemed to want to make the last two works of the recital into dramatic and heavyweight compositions. Perhaps it was simply the mounting adrenalin that commonly occurs during public performance but I increasingly found a gap between the adjectives the programme notes used to describe the musical world of these works and the sounds I was hearing. Singing ,simple , playful, ebullient, galloping, frothy, perky rarely fitted. Thus, qualities that had given so much pleasure early on largely disappeared, seemingly in the pursuit of a dramatic end to the concert.

And I thought it something of a shame that it was thus. Paradoxically I later heard of a complaint that the concert was more of the same. In this instance, I would have been rather happier had it been so!  

Lunchtime Series: Nicholas Daniel, Oboe, Antonio Oyarzabal,piano. 7th December 2023

To judge by the last three concerts before the Christmas break, the Lunchtime Series is at the moment on something of a roll. All three in very different ways succeeded in producing an hour’s music full of delight. The last of the three, given by Nicholas Daniel, oboe, and Antonio Oyarzabal, piano, largely featured, on the centenary of her birth, the music of the 20c English composer Madeleine Dring, a name that had hitherto escaped me, though, as I will explain later, I must have heard some of her music in my youth.  The programme suggested that her musical voice was distinctive enough to warrant an attention which in her life-time and in particular afterwards it has not had, despite the efforts of her husband, the famed Roger Lord, principal oboist of the London Symphony for many years.

            Well, by the end of the concert I found myself very much in agreement with the suggestion that her music was at the very least worthy of attention. I warmed to it firstly because it was highly accomplished yet without any obvious pretension. There was no suggestion that it aimed at being groundbreaking. Instead of that bane of some contemporary music in which the pretentious and sometimes obscure title of the piece aims to convince the hearer of the music’s depth before a note has been heard and when heard fails all too often to connect the title to the music, the titles of these short pieces told one exactly what in musical form the ear was to hear and left the music to do its work. That the music which reached the ear was self-evidently a product of the title, was beautifully written yet conveying a quirky personality assured one that there was enough variety to make the hour slip by. It was hugely refreshing to hear music that did not pretend to be earthshaking but in recognizing its compass ironically provided a profound pleasure not to be found sometimes in the supposedly deep.

In character with the music, it is perhaps not really appropriate to solemnly attempt to assess each short piece in detail. I have a number of scribblings on the programme which I think will convey the pleasure given by many moments in the music and will communicate the blithe character of the concert as a whole. Of Three Piece Suite I noted its bounding start,its wit, I found the ending of the second movement Romance magical and the finale had me writing ‘jolly and playful’. In Danza Gaya, a Cuban dance, the response was particularly to the beguiling lilt of the playing and in an equally short piece that followed entitled Valse Francaise  I thought how expertly the composer captured the atmosphere of melancholy sometimes to be found in French Impressionist music. That ability to capture the atmosphere of various styles was also abundantly evident in Mazurka and in Three Pieces -Tango , Sarabande  WibWaltz +Italian Dance which brought the concert to a thoroughly rousing and virtuosic finish by two great artistes who played as if fully believing that this was music very much deserving of attention. And I am not about to disagree.

I have deliberately left to the last any comment about the two other works which made up the concert, Madelaine Dring’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s In the Still of the Night arranged further by Nicholas Daniel for oboe, and the one work on the programme not by her, Vaughan William’s Six Studies in English Folk Song. In regards the first, the programme notes awakened me to the fact that I must have heard some of Madelaine Dring’s music in my youth since she was active in the theatre. My parents loved musicals and revues and the family not infrequently found itself in a London theatre in the 1950s listening to same, such as Kiss Me Kate, Airs on a Shoestring and Flanders and Swann. The first needs no further comment but in the latter two there were songs of considerable quality, sometimes of penetrating satire, which should not be forgotten.

The Vaughan Williams, though, raised thoughts of a rather different compass, firstly because this caused me to ponder the nature of genius and the way even it can fail to be appreciated as it should be. I happened to read an article last week that, noting the absence of twelve-tone music in concert programmes these days, declared that we now live very much in a post Schoenberg era and that composers who were sneeringly denigrated in the middle of the last century for their interest in folk music, referred to on one occasion as cow pat composers, are right back in the limelight. Indeed, one shudders to think of what would have been lost had musicians and collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams, Holst , Bartok and others not saved for posterity this priceless music of the people. Perhaps, the greatest legacy, though, lies in the music of some of those very same collectors which opened up and continues to open up for composers sources of inspiration arguably much more fruitful than those of the supposed revolutionaries of the 20c. Nothing could have illustrated that more vividly than Vaughan Williams’ Six Studies in English Folk Song. In a performance of incandescent beauty Nicholas Daniel, this time on the cor anglais, and Antonio Oyarzabal gave the audience an unforgettable experience with which to ring down 2023.

Museum Midday Music: Iyad Sughayer, 23rd November 2023

This was the second recital of this fine pianist given over to a survey of Mozart’s piano sonatas which I was looking forward to with some anticipation but also not a little trepidation. The latter arose I have to admit from what seems to me still a valid grumpiness regarding the programming of the first recital as the opening concert of the annual Leicester Festival, in effect a midday music recital to be followed by just one other concert. This overall hardly seemed to me to constitute a satisfactory Festival offering, particularly since, such as I had heard, I had never been much of an enthusiast for this part of Mozart’s huge output.

            However, it did cause me, as I sat down to write this blog aware of said previous grumpiness, to think about the role of those who write reviews and what should be expected of them. Should they, for example, attempt to play the role of some mighty judge in the sky when they are just like the rest of us, mere mortals open to ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’? This question set me off to search out some facts concerning the mighty man who did more than anyone else in Britain to encourage that approach, Ernest Newman, who was still writing for The Sunday Times when I was a lad in the 1950s.

My investigation immediately led to one very uncomfortable fact, that when young himself he decided to change his name from William Roberts, so unsuitable a name did it appear to him in his chosen crusade. I nearly did not read on!  However, that he was clearly a mover and shaker of great intelligence was clear. I remember reading long, long ago his magnum opus, his biography of Wagner. He was also fabulously witty at times and quite often did not avoid cruelty. I remember reading that he had written probably the shortest review in history which I think went as follows: So and So.… sang at the Wigmore Hall last night. Why?

However, it was also obvious that he had thought about whether it was possible for the music critic to achieve some almost scientific detachment which would give the critical judgement complete validity for all readers but that in the end he seems to have realised that to be impossible. Critics would be wise to accept their humanity, and realise that even enthusiasms might reveal you as having got some things sometimes wrong.

Unfortunately, over my lifetime his legacy particularly in America has seemed to me to have spawned some very unpleasant critical egos. Towards the end of his life I became a friend of Edward Greenfield, for many years the music critic of The Guardian, and he told me of an ongoing  feud he was having  with a New York critic who accused him of lacking any real standards. He rather wistfully remarked to me he would much prefer to be called an appreciator but I equally wistfully said to him that I thought linguistically that that boat had well and truly sailed and critic was here to stay. However, I went on to say that I felt he was quite right to indicate that, without at least some attempt to see where artistic endeavour was coming from, there was very little pleasure or indeed validity to be had in the activity of being a critic.     

            After all the above, the reader will no doubt hope that I found something  to enjoy in this recital and I am glad to be able to say that I quickly lost any residual grumpiness and found myself frequently full of delight! I had heard on the grapevine that there had been some change of programme from the original published and in the event I have to say that what was heard presented a Mozart of much wider variety of mood than I had detected in the Festival recital. For instance, in the Piano Sonata No.9, after an ebullient opening movement played with brio, the music of the second movement at once suggested the part of the composer that relished the dramatic possibilities of the singing voice and was to create unsurpassable music in the operas. Add to that a third movement of ineffable high spirits played here with great virtuosity and I felt myself somehow to be in different territory than the music of the first recital.

            And that feeling of joy did not let up in the second offering, Piano Sonata No.10, composed in his first year of marriage to Constanze and six years after the work we had just heard. Once again it was the middle movement that went far beyond being a mere display piece. There seemed to be real drama at its heart in the midst of on either side movements of contrasting high spirits.          

            By this time, I felt that I was listening to a well thought out programme, a feeling that was amplified by the next work, a descriptive and contemporary piece entitled Levantina, composed by Helen Ottaway. Here the music was based on a folk song sung by women whose wish was in some sort of code to get messages to their men who were away at the wars. Composed with an impressionistic voice, very beautiful, which came and went as it were, this work in a way I cannot fully explain seemed a lovely contrast to the clarity which so wonderfully characterises most of Mozart’s music.

            And there was still one last surprise in the final work of the concert, Piano Sonata No.8, written at the dreadful time of Mozart’s 1778 sojourn in Paris, during which his mother died. Here in the two fast movements there was music of a fury and power not to be found so far in this musical journey, with the show off capacities of the composer here employed to a very different purpose and even to be found in the much quieter and deeply thoughtful Andante. That mood returned completely in the fierce final movement which may have been short but inhabited a world that for me looked forward to such works as Don Giovanni and made for a fine climax to a very well thought out programme, full of contrast and brilliantly played throughout. I shall look forward to the next instalment.

Museum Lunchtime concert – The Pelleas Ensemble,9th November 2023

When I read that I am about to hear an ensemble dependant for repertoire almost wholly upon transcriptions, I tend to yawn quietly and recall Dr.Johnson’s comment about a dog walking on its hind-legs, that ‘it is not done well but you are surprised it is done at all’. In the event I have often been pleasantly entertained but such concerts tend not to stick firmly in my mind.

            The hour spent in the company of the Pelleas Ensemble, however, will most certainly stay in the mind. It was sixty minutes of astonishing music making. To begin with, I would never have guessed that an ensemble of flute, viola and harp would meld so well and offer such variety and flexibility, the flute taking the tenor role, the viola lending a rich middle and the harp ranging from a beautiful tripping lightness to on occasions a percussive bottom. This enabled the players to offer a veritable richness of sound that could be harnessed to music ranging from the Renaissance to the present century and sounding in each offering what was felt to be a totally appropriate sonic world.

            That that was to be the effect of the concert was evident in the opening offering, excerpts from Rameau’s opera Les Boreades. I have written in my programme simply ‘Baroque balm to the ears’ and really nothing more needs to be said. The programme spoke of the delight the members of the ensemble take in making their arrangements to suit their instruments and here one was one hundred per cent taken back to France of the 18c.

            There followed arrangements by Luba Tunnicliffe, the viola player of the ensemble, of several songs by Rebecca Clarke with texts by major poets. Perhaps in song the words and the voice are necessary for a full response and to have had the texts in the programme would have helped. However, the texts were read out and the music made clear a composer of some power.

            There followed a work by John Woolrich ,Favola in Musica, an adaptation of a Monteverdi madrigal which the composer had transposed especially for the ensemble. I met him once or twice a number of years ago when his music was performed at the Leicester Festival and found his music full of originality whilst also wedded to the past. This rivetting work ticked both of those boxes with an amazing array of sounds.

            There followed a late work of Ethel Smyth, Variations on Bonny Sweet Robin (Ophelia’s Song) quite unlike anything that I have heard of hers, much more of her time than of the previous century and perhaps therefore of rather more interest than those works written when she was so active in the world of female militancy. The music of that period such as I have heard has usually seemed to me conservative in idiom and of limited interest.

            So, I reached the last work of the concert delighted with what had been offered. However, in truth I was very uncertain whether the delight would last through a transcription of pieces from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet score. I just could not imagine how such a rich orchestral score could possibly be transposed to the ensemble before me without severe loss. Well, Gilad Cohen, the transcriber, and the ensemble literally swept all that away. Here was one of the richest and most dramatic of ballet scores sounding as authentic as could be. There was a lovely lightness of touch in Juliet as a Young girl , throughout all the swagger with which Prokofiev  surrounds the young stags, this culminating in the terrifying music by which the composer portrays the fatal fight. Here the virtuosity, particularly of the harp, was demonic to a degree that I don’t think I have ever heard surpassed and of course absolutely in your face in a small hall. I was flattened!

 Congratulations to Henry Roberts, Flute, Luba Tunnicliffe, Viola and Oliver Wass, Harp and please do come again.

Philharmonia, Chloe van Soeterstede, Leia Zhu,DMH October 5th 2023

            When viewing the new season for the DMH concerts I felt that, despite my knowing neither conductor nor soloist, the opening concert of confirmed  favourites, Schubert, Vaughan Williams and Mendelssohn  was bound with this orchestra at least to bring pleasure to most. In the event it did a great deal more to this listener. Very soon I judged that I was listening to some very special performances of works which I thought I knew well, like for instance Schubert’s Symphony No.5.

            Now before I go any further, I have an admission to make. It is that perhaps I refer to a particular conductor of my youth rather too much when setting a standard by which to judge the present. However, in this instance I cannot refrain from referring again to Sir Thomas Beecham, an unforgettable conductor and whom I heard a number of times in the 50s at the end of his life. It was he who introduced me to the then novel idea that music was there to be enjoyed rather than worshipped as if in church and it was in a Prom concert of his that I heard this Schubert symphony for the very first time. I suspect a large number in the Albert Hall that night were also hearing it for the first time since then only the last two of the composer’s symphonies were thought weighty enough for regular performance. However, I was enchanted and as a performance have never quite heard its equal for releasing the lovely sense of young genius awakening. A little later Beecham recorded it and he was said to have demanded rehearsal time in excess of the norm to get the lightness of touch and phrasing in the music. The result was a recording which I play whenever I need cheering up and if you can’t shape a phrase lovingly so that it floats, forget about conducting it. Equally if you think it an early trial run for the composer’s 9th Symphony you are also advised to leave it alone. Just a few years ago a very fine conductor of our era tried to make that case with the result that the music’s youthful spontaneity simply disappeared.

            Which as the reader may well guess is leading up to saying that the other night I thought I was listening to Beecham such was Chloe van Soeterstede’s conducting and the playing of this marvellous orchestra. It had felicity after felicity. Throughout the concert I found myself watching the conductor’s expressive left hand encouraging the shaping of a phrase, the result of which was any number of moments in which the orchestra , and the woodwind in particular, had this listener positively drooling with pleasure.

            And much the same could have been said about the Italian Symphony after the interval. It was simply so full of life and elegance, with the final Saltarello having a brio that brought the concert to an exhilarating finish. Throughout it was to be particularly noticed the gain that is to be had in this repertory with high quality orchestras from sitting the second violins opposite to rather than with the first violin section. Since I have wandered down memory lane once, why not a second time! The very first time I heard Beethoven in the concert hall was with this orchestra in 1952 in the last concert Wilhelm Furtwangler conducted in London. The final work was the 4^th Symphony which has a particularly exciting passage in the last movement involving the two violin sections tossing between them a theme like a tennis

 ball. Years later I laid hands on a recording he had made earlier with the Vienna Philharmonic. Alas, it had no such effect and I assumed either my memory was flawed or it illustrated what many said , that the conductor was at his greatest in the concert hall rather than in the recording studio. I think now that there is a simpler reason. The recording was in mono, made before the world of stereo recording took over!

            By now readers will be wondering why there has been no mention of the work that separated the two symphonies. Had I been lulled to sleep by the pastoral beauties of The Lark Ascending ? Anything but! Indeed, I was lost for words, not least because of the superb programme notes of Richard Bratby which in a way say all that needs to be said about this wonderful work. I quote: ‘The Lark Ascending is something unique – a supremely difficult violin showpiece without a trace of superficial glitter. Poetry, purity and expressive beauty of tone are all.’

            Well said, indeed. At long last, the unique greatness of this composer is being recognised, and not just in this country either. Some years ago Andre Previn introduced The Tallis Fantasia to Vienna and some musicians were so impressed that one of them asked him if the composer had written anything else! Previn is reported as wryly replying, ‘ Yes, 9 Symphonies!’

            I had my own moment of truth the other night. My memory may be fallible but I suddenly wondered whether I had ever heard this work in a live performance. In addition, I was quite sure I had never heard of the violinist Leia Zhu. Well, I have now and suffice to say I thought her performance revelatory. On the evidence of this debut in Leicester she is already an artist who digs deep into the nature of the work she is playing. Here one was not listening first and foremost to a virtuoso but to a player for whom quality of sound was more important than anything else. For me in a way it was like listening to the inwardness of the work almost for the first time and I realised that perhaps in recording this work one runs the danger of fiddling balance to make it the violin concerto it is not. True on this occasion I found myself having occasionally to strain to hear the violin, so quiet was the occasional pianissimo but it felt absolutely right in the way it established the spiritual depth of the music. With the orchestra and conductor also at one with the wonders of this work, let my son who has not entirely followed his father’s taste in music have the last word. ‘Gosh that was beautiful!’