Thursday 30 May 2013

Beyond "The Rite of Spring"

Yesterday was the official 100th Birthday of Stravinsky's notorious ballet, The Rite of Spring.  It created controversy right from its first performance, both for its jagged rhythmic patterns and for its extremely dissonant harmonies.  And then there was the choreography....

If you're a lover of The Rite of Spring and want to hear more Stravinsky along the same lines -- it's not easy.  Stravinsky was something of a musical chameleon, continually evolving and reinventing himself and his composing style.  But there is one later ballet which may fill the bill, and is definitely worth checking out for its different but equally unique musical substance.

That is The Wedding, more often called by its French name, Les Noces.  This work, premiered in 1923, uses a similar rugged musical style to The Rite, but with folk-inflected melodies more to the fore.  It also adds singers to the ensemble -- four soloists and a small choir.  Stravinsky tried many different combinations of instruments for this piece, but finally settled on the undeniably unique sound of four pianos and a large number of percussionists.

It seems that the composer wanted to make more of an impersonal comment on the wedding rituals than a personally involving account -- and the monochromatic sounds of piano and percussion "...would fulfil all my conditions.  It would be at the same time perfectly homogeneous, perfectly impersonal, and perfectly mechanical."

The result is like no other piece of music I have ever heard -- glittering, hard-edged, brittle, and full of unique and intriguing sound combinations.  This may sound like a tough nut, but in performance it is much more captivating than you might suspect.  And that's how I first heard it, years ago at a Toronto Symphony concert.

The recording I have is a classic by Leonard Bernstein for DGG.  The playing time is not long for a CD (Les Noces lasts for 24 minutes, the accompanying Mass for 20) but it's reasonable value at a reissue price if you can find a copy.  Both works are given what I would describe as definitive performances.

The Mass, by the way, inhabits a completely different sound world.  Completed in 1948, designed for liturgical use, and based (remotely) on Gregorian chant, the music has an austere and dignified beauty all its own.  Again, the scoring is unusual -- choir and soloists accompanied by an ensemble of ten winds and brass.  Here you can experience for yourself two wildly contrasting facets of Stravinsky's musical personality.

Friday 24 May 2013

Unfairly Neglected Baroque Quality

Composers are constantly becoming the victims of changing fashions.  Usually, after a popular composer dies, his or her music has to go through a purgatory of being out of fashion for a generation or so, and then later musicians rediscover the quality that was there all along.

But then there are the ones who become a victim of mass group labelling.  Such a one is William Boyce, who was born in London in 1711, the year before Handel came to England, and died in 1779.  It's kind of a received truth that English music after Purcell descended into utter and irredeemable mediocrity until the fresh kick-start from composer/teachers such as Parry and Stanford in the late 1800s.  That would certainly cover Boyce, and may go a long way to explain the neglect of his music.  The rest is explained by the fact that he continued composing in the late Baroque style that had already become unfashionable by the time Handel died in 1759.

All this as background to a recording that had been gathering dust on my shelves for quite a while until I pulled it out and listened again yesterday.  It's a collection of 12 Overtures and 3 Concerti grossi by Boyce, and the music made me re-evaluate that received truth mentioned above.  These could almost be considered pastiche works, as they are pulled together from various secular and sacred odes and anthems which Boyce had already composed.  But, taken as a group like this, they are highly recommendable.

It's music of undoubtedly high quality.  Boyce depended mainly on the strings, but his more sparing use of winds is always appropriate in scale and often quite ear-catching.  His music leans a bit more towards the dance than some of Handel and Bach, and has a lift and a lightness to it that is refreshing, if not perhaps truly original.  But then, few Baroque composers could ever be considered to be utterly original, since all worked in variants of a highly-developed and widely-disseminated musical language.  But Boyce's take on that language is certainly original enough to merit wider hearing, and so thanks to Chandos Records and the chamber orchestra Cantilena, directed by Adrian Shepherd. 

This 1979 2-CD set is one of several recordings of little-known British composers from this team, and I now feel I have to go and look out the others too.  In the meantime, this one will certainly get another hearing, and soon, now that I have taken the time to re-evaluate it.

Friday 17 May 2013

Music for Practical Jokers

Stands to reason that I would enjoy any music written by a man who was an inveterate joker.  Actually, way back when I was a kid, my brother played on the piano a valse (French waltz) by this man that always struck me as odd because the wrong note that kept intruding at a certain point in the music was so pointless that I could never figure out why it was there.

I know now that it was the musical equivalent of a photobomb.

The man?  Francis Poulenc, a French composer who was very much a man of the 20th century -- born in 1899, and died in 1963.  If you're the sort of person who can never resist trying to turn everything into a joke, then Poulenc's probably your man.  I plead guilty to the charge at once!

Claude Rostand defined Poulenc as "a bit of monk and a bit of hooligan."  It's a good description.  The austere beauty of some of his sacred choral music is every bit as much a part of the picture as the little ironic and sarcastic touches are in his instrumental music.  And what can you say of a man who could write an opera-bouffe based on Apollinaire's surrealist play Les mamelles de Tiresias ("The Breasts of Tiresias") in which a married woman named Therese becomes a man after her breasts turn into balloons and float away?

Consider Poulenc's Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra, premiered in 1932.  From start to finish, this modestly-scaled piece is never able to sink into solemnity for more than 10 or 15 seconds.  The first movement, in particular, is interrupted frequently by a little 8-bar theme on the pianos that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a can-can in a smoky Parisian night club.  Each time it appears, this little riff gets twisted into stranger and stranger harmonic shapes.  Kind of like the guy who keeps pulling weirder and weirder faces each time he photobombs a picture where he doesn't belong.  The slow second movement sounds like a tribute to Mozart, but "tribute" is a loaded word in Poulenc's musical lexicon, where its closest synonym is probably "mockery".  At any rate, the Concerto goes through its three movements in a matter of 18 or 19 minutes, full of high spirits and good fun.

In the early stereo era, Georges Pretre directed a 1957 recording for EMI which featured the composer as one of the soloists.  He may not have been a pianist of the first rank, but who better to capture the delicious two-faced ironies found throughout the score?  Another good recording came in 1986 from the French Erato label, with a young James Conlon conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.  The two pianists were Francois-Rene Duchable and Jean-Philippe Collard.  These performers also are completely in tune with the inherent witty character of the piece.

Even when Poulenc tried to be serious, he could have trouble sustaining the mood.  His Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani of 1938 inhabits a more serious world than the 2-Piano Concerto, but some of the blaring discords from the organ give the impressions that a naughty choirboy is still peeking out from behind the choirmaster's more solemn mask.  Certainly the overall impact is more majestic, the music more overt in tribute (without much mockery) to the great age of Bach and Buxtehude.  The thunderous opening chords, which recur several more times in the lengthy single movement, show that this is only one of many works of music inspired by Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, one of the great monuments of the organ literature.  At the same time, the lighter, faster passages undeniably come closer to the sound-world of the 2-Piano Concerto.

No doubt this Poulenc concerto is unique in its instrumentation, but the showy (albeit not difficult) organ part makes it an irresistible work for any orchestra whose hall includes a good big organ.  A fine example was the lengthy Grand Opening concert of Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto (1982) where the new pipe organ made by Gabriel Kney got a splendid workout in this piece.  It's also been heard in more recordings than almost any other Poulenc work, as so many organists love its marriage of baroque structure and style with 20th-century harmonic touches.  I have the partner of the James Conlon CD listed above, where the Rotterdam Orchestra and Conlon are joined by the splendid French organist Marie-Claire Alain (whose recent death ended a long and honoured career).

Hope that gives you a good idea of the diversity of style underlying the music of Francis Poulenc.  These two concertos are old favourites of mine, and definitely worth pulling out and enjoying from time to time.

Sunday 5 May 2013

An Interesting Collection With Two Highlights

Way back when I was just starting this blog, I wrote a detailed post about some favourite music of George Dyson.  I unaccountably forgot to mention one more disc, and indeed hadn't listened to it for ages until I dug it out last week and put it on in the car.  It's a Hyperion CD featuring the St. Michael's Singers and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and conducted by Jonathan Rennert.

For much of his life, Dyson worked with school and amateur choirs.  The first sets of pieces on this disc, Three Songs of Praise and Three Choral Hymns both were written in the 1930s when he was teaching and conducting in Winchester.  These are well-written pieces within the competence of amateur and younger singers, perhaps a little simple, but very beautiful nonetheless.

These hymns are followed by a brief but effective setting of Psalm 150 for chorus and organ, which Dyson composed for the Coronation of King George VI in 1937. 

The real prizes, though, come at the end, in two larger works from the "Indian Summer" at the end of Dyson's career.  First we hear a Fantasia and Ground Bass for organ, composed in 1960.  Dyson started his musical career as an organist, but it was only at the latter end that he began composing for the organ.  It seems a pity, as this work begins with the sort of imposing opening that makes you sit up and pay attention right away!  The score lasts for over 16 minutes, but the symphonic character and length of the themes prevent the music from ever dragging or seeming too thin for its length.  This is the work of a master, and the composer plainly at home with larger forms of music.  You'd never suspect that from the assured simplicities of the earlier hymns and songs.

The last piece on the disc is entitled simply Hierusalem, and identified only as a "hymn".  This is just as disingenuous as Dyson's use of "cycle of poems" to describe his monumental oratorio, Quo Vadis.  Indeed, Hierusalem is a full-scale 20-minute cantata to a mediaeval poem about the Holy City, and involves a soprano soloist and choir, harp, organ, string quartet and string orchestra!

In my previous post about Dyson's music I commented briefly about his dramatic sense, and here again it works at full stretch.  The text presents a kind of "preview" of the joys of the heavenly life in the voice of one still firmly locked into the present life on earth.  Dyson captures this scenario perfectly, with the longing notes of the soprano representing the earthly voice of the human aspiring towards the divine.  The chorus is placed distantly, by the composer's intention, and the result is a clear sense that the "present" of humanity looks towards the distant "future" of heavenly joy.  Dyson uses the contrast of solo strings with string orchestra as felicitously as Vaughan Williams did in his masterly Tallis Fantasia, and the harp and organ are effectively used to touch in the colours of the picture at appropriate moments.  The whole result gives me a feeling that I am looking at a lovely impressionistic watercolour painting of Paradise through a veil.

Performances of all the works are first-rate, and the Hyperion digital sound is splendid as always.  You might enjoy the choral hymns or pass lightly over them, as I tend to do, but the Fantasia and Ground Bass and Hierusalem both captivate me from start to finish.