Friday 21 November 2014

Shorter Nielsen

Although Carl Nielsen's work is not nearly as well known in North America as in Denmark and Britain, there's a decent body of recordings, slowly growing, that offers multiple choices for almost all of his significant works. 


This post has two parts: first, about some of his shorter orchestral works, and then about some of his choral music.


Nielsen received many commissions for music for theatre stage plays, and he wrote a great deal for this purpose.  Typically, music for plays tends to come in short movements (except, perhaps, for overtures) and doesn't require nearly as intense a concentration on structure as symphonic writing.  Theatrical music also encourages writing that is highly colourful, yet still approachable and easily grasped at one hearing.


Nielsen's best-known theatre music is the extensive suite of pieces he composed for a production of Adam Oehlenschlager's play Aladdin.  The published suite consists of seven movements extracted from the much longer complete score.  All seven pieces contain scales and triads that suggest exotic environments, along with percussion parts to reinforce that impression.  Melodies are short, neatly turned, and frequently repeated.  The music stands well alone, too, for concert or home performance.


The recording of Aladdin that I own partners it with a number of shorter tone poems and overtures, not overtly theatrical but nonetheless pictorial.  Helios depicts a magnificent sunrise, high noon, and sunset over the Mediterranean.  An Imaginary Journey to the Faeroe Islands especially fascinated me after I had made the journey to the Faeroes myself (a Danish territory in the Atlantic Ocean between Scotland and Iceland).  It ends with a lively adaptation of a Faeroese folk dance, notable for its odd number of beats in each phrase.


Most fascinating to me is the tone poem Saga-Drøm ("Saga Dream"), inspired by an old mythical tale from the sagas of a wanderer having a nightmarish dream when he lies down to sleep during his journey.  The music is mostly quiet, with a recurring motif of mysterious block chords for horns in modal harmony that is obstinately memorable.  It also includes a revolutionary passage in which four instruments -- oboe, flute, clarinet and bassoon -- quietly play four quite separate and independent solo cadenzas in total freedom, until they slowly coalesce again on a single chord.  That moment of reunification then ushers in the final recurrence of the horn chorale.


Another favourite recording contains three significant cantatas for choir and orchestra from this composer.  The first, Hymnus amoris ("Hymn of Love") is set to a secular text, written in Latin, which praises Love as the divine essence of humanity.  Firmly tonal and diatonic in style, it passes through several connected sections, ending in a grand conclusion where the choir, instead of singing "Amen", sings "Amor".


Next came Søvnen ("The Sleep"), setting a poem about the different phases of sleep.  The central "Nightmare" section teems with startling discords which shocked the original audience.  Less shocking today, the music still effectively portrays the disquieting influence of nightmarish dreams.  These works date from 1897 and 1905 respectively.


The third cantata didn't appear till 1922, after World War One, but has become the most popular in Denmark because it is the most overtly Danish -- as well as being the sunniest and most entertaining of the three, by a wide margin.  Fynsk Foraar ("Springtime in Funen") is a loving and lovable tribute to the rural island communities in which Nielsen was raised.  The themes are broadly folklike in cut and harmonization, and the rhythms always seem to go with a swing in their step.  There's a lengthy section for children's choir depicting -- what else? -- the games of the children.  This is followed by a solemn but warm chorus of reminiscence and contentment for a group of old men.  I find it impossible to listen to this cheery cantata without getting a smile on my face.  The piece then ends with a rousing chorus of joy from all the singers.  It's an excellent piece for gloomy winter days!


The disc closes out with three unaccompanied choral motets, which use a much more rarified and indeed more acerbic harmonic language than the orchestral cantatas.  But the whole disc (on Chandos) is a sheer delight.  There have also been other recordings of the three major works for choir and orchestra.







Thursday 20 November 2014

A Symphony Like No Other

I'm even a little surprised at myself, that it has taken me this long to get around to blogging about the music of a remarkable composer from Denmark, Carl Nielsen.  He's a firm favourite of mine and I could easily write a dozen posts about his music.  Well, all in good time....


This month the Toronto Symphony is giving a series of concerts pairing the symphonies of Nielsen with the piano concertos of Beethoven.  As unlike each other as they are, these two composers fit together surprisingly well and anyone who likes Beethoven should certainly give Nielsen a bit of a try.  There was one similar concert last year (read about it here:  A Repertory Staple and a Canadian Rarity) which featured Nielsen's Third Symphony, one of his sunniest creations.


This time around, it's the Fifth Symphony, and this work -- which was my introduction to Nielsen's music -- really is unlike any other symphony I have ever heard.


It consists of just two movements, the second somewhat longer than the first.  Unlike several of the preceding symphonies, this one has no title.  Unmistakable, though, is the sense that Nielsen is engaging in his most titanic struggle yet with the forces that strive to subdue Life in all its essence.  In saying that, I am referring to what George Bernard Shaw called "the Life Force" -- a concept which plainly finds a home in Nielsen's music as much as in the Irish dramatist's plays. 


The principal strength of Nielsen's music -- and the element which brings it close to Beethoven -- is the emphasis on rhythm as the driving force of the musical argument.  Also, and much more unusually for his time, Nielsen makes extensive use of unadulterated tonic major and minor chords and modes.  What is most unique about Nielsen is his method of casually jumping from chord to chord to chord, until any sense of a "home key" is lost.


Part of the strangeness of this particular symphony lies in the way it seems to abandon the traditional force driving symphonic argument -- the cut and thrust of interaction between themes.  In the Fifth Symphony, and especially in the first movement, the themes are set out, and simply sit there in contrast with each other.  The work opens with a wavering figure in the violas, alternating rapidly between 2 notes a third apart.  Eventually a melodic figure rises and falls in scale form on the violins.  A kind of shrill, wild skirling figure in the woodwinds is also heard.  All three of these elements appear and reappear without ever actually combining.  Then a militant rhythm is heard, rattled out repeatedly on the snare drum.  A theme of aspiring nobility arises from horns and strings and pursues its way into the brasses, unaffected by all the other material.  This solemn theme leads the way to the movement's climax.  The skirling woodwinds are heard again, fortissimo, and the snare drum returns, louder and louder -- Nielsen specifies that the drummer must "improvise as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra."  This wild improvisation, when played properly, should make the hair stand on end.  Eventually the noble theme swells louder and louder, swamps the militant drum, and proclaims its triumph in the full orchestra by converting the woodwinds to the melody.  But as the music slowly dies away, reminiscences of the drum motif are still heard from offstage (think Beethoven right at the end of the Missa Solemnis) and the movement ends with a mournful, plaintive solo clarinet.  Plainly the war is not yet ended.


The second movement opens with fiery energy, but with off-beats that take several moments to resolve into a clear triple-time pattern.  The heart of this movement is a high-speed, demonic fugue subject working its way through the various sections of the orchestra, which creates a battle almost as intense as the one in the first movement.  This exhausts itself and is then followed by a quieter, more severe fugue in the strings.  Eventually, the opening music returns and the symphony ends affirmatively on a clear tonic major chord.  Robert Simpson, in his book on Nielsen, suggested that this lengthy movement should either be analyzed very deeply or else described in the fewest number of words possible.


I am very much looking forward to hearing this symphony played live for the first time tonight, and will of course be writing about it in my "Large Stage Live" blog.  By the way, the companion work is the last and largest of Beethoven's piano concertos, the Concerto # 5 with Jan Lisiecki as soloist.

A Great Unknown Part 2: Orchestral Power and Depth

The English composer Sir Hubert Parry is one of those figures mainly known today for some of his less-significant compositions.  His fame in Canada is mostly confined to Anglican church musicians, and mainly rests on a couple of hymn tunes and one anthem.  A little more of his music has received attention more recently in England, yet even there much is relatively unknown.

In this second of two blog posts about Parry's music, I will talk about three orchestral works.

Like many people, I came to know the music of Sir Hubert Parry through his hymn Jerusalem which was still in the hymn book of the Anglican Church of Canada when I was raised in that faith.  In my choir-singing days I learned his anthem I was glad.  I had heard that he wrote orchestral music but had never heard any of it.  Apparently, even in Britain it was rarely played.

Then, in 1978, Sir Adrian Boult (a noted English conductor) was planning his retirement.  His company, EMI, offered him the opportunity to record any work of his choice for his final record, and he chose to do 3 works by Parry.  I purchased that record a few years later, and immediately fell under the spell of some truly remarkable music.

As soon as I began listening, I realized that Brahms was a major influence on Parry's orchestral style, and that his orchestration in particular had a distinctly Brahmsian cast to it.

On Side 1 of that historic record Boult gave a splendidly energetic reading of Parry's Fifth Symphony (his last).  It's not a lengthy work, running only about 25 minutes, but it gives the impression of being much larger in scale than it really is.  The themes are broad in scope, the developments intriguing, and the work is kept tight by the use of unusual structural devices.  The four linked movements are given cryptic titles:  Stress, Love, Play and Now.  What any of these might mean (especially the last one) is hard to say.  The music flows continuously from start to finish, without interruption.  Each movement is marked by graceful melody, but it's the sturdy, upbeat theme of the finale and its strong but not overblown conclusion that always sticks in my mind and memory.

On Side 2 Boult gave us the Symphonic Variations.  With this work, Parry joined his name to Brahms and Dvorak (to name only two) as the composer of a significant set of variations for orchestra.  This one has a feature that sets it apart from all others of the genre that I know: the variations are actually grouped in such a way that the layout resembles a four-movement symphony, albeit on a compact scale.  The opening group of variations is played through at the same basic tempo of the original theme.  Next follows a group in faster time, with a lighter, more fantastic scoring -- plainly the "scherzo".  The last of these closes into a long shake or trill on clarinet under which the strings pluck the outline of the theme, and then -- as Sir Donald Tovey so aptly said -- "the slow movement group sails in with tragic pomp".  The tempo shifts to an unusual and majestic 9/8, while the orchestration is dominated by horns and trombones, rich and dark.  Each variation in this slow section adds another layer of intensity to the music.  I truly believe that Brahms would have been proud to sign his name to this work on the strength of this powerfully dramatic passage.  After the slow section dies down, the original key and tempo return and the final set of variations work up to a rousing finale.  All this passes in the space of less than 20 minutes, yet those tragic slow variations lift the whole composition to the scale and weight of a full-length symphony.

And after that, the disc closes with the Elegy for Brahms.  This memorial work, for whatever reason, was never published and indeed may never have been performed before this 1978 recording session.  It's a true masterpiece, nothing less, a reverent acknowledgement by one master of his debt to another.  It opens with a wistful wind phrase, then a string line rises and falls, repeating itself over and over again -- but two tones lower at each step.  This descends into the depths and then gives birth to a whole series of thematic developments.  The music, in full sonata form, unfolds as naturally and organically as the best works of the man who inspired it.  There are moments of smiling reminiscence, moments of mourning, moments of anger.  At last, at the end, all passion is spent.  The rising and falling string phrase from the beginning is recalled briefly, as the music climbs up out of the depths and finally comes quietly to rest under a clear sky.  The inspiration from the closing pages of Brahms' Third Symphony is unmistakable.  This piece, so heartachingly beautiful, completely captured me at the first hearing.  I replayed it so often that I eventually wore the record out! 

More recent recordings of all these works, all five symphonies, and much more rewarding orchestral music by Parry, have been made on the Chandos label, and are readily available for download.  I've got them all from that source -- and I still press the repeat button every time I play the Elegy for Brahms.  It never fails to move me very deeply.

Sunday 16 November 2014

A Great Unknown Part 1: Choral Majesty and Power

The English composer Sir Hubert Parry is one of those figures mainly known today for some of his less-significant compositions.  His fame in Canada is mostly confined to Anglican church musicians, and mainly rests on a couple of hymn tunes and one anthem.  A little more of his music has received attention more recently in England, yet even there much is relatively unknown.

In this first of two blog posts about Parry's music, I will talk about three choral works.

Anyone who has ever attended, or watched a telecast of, the famous "Last Night of the Proms" concert from London has heard Parry's famous hymn, Jerusalem.  Few outside of England, perhaps, are even aware of the composer's name.  He lived during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth century.  As a teacher and writer about music, he was enormously influential to the next generation of English composers.

His own music is of higher quality than is generally admitted.  He had a powerful sense of structure and an innate gift for setting words to music, an art which is harder than many people realize. 

Many church and cathedral choirs around the world have sung his magnificent anthem for the Coronation of King Edward VII, I was glad.  It's probably also been recorded more often than any other work by Parry, but most often in the reduced version for chorus and organ.  To get the full and true impact of I was glad, you need to go to one of the rare recordings which present the work complete and uncut, with full orchestra. 

That's because most versions omit the central 2 pages of the anthem, where Parry incorporated the traditional trumpet fanfares and the shouts of Vivat, vivat rex!/regina! which are contributed at a Coronation by the King's/Queen's Scholars of Westminster School.  The printed music neatly shows how this section can be eliminated for all other uses, and so it usually is.  But Richard Hickox on Chandos Records, as a fill-up to his recording of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, gives the piece whole, with the fanfares resounding and echoing splendidly in the church where the recording was made.  The choir re-enters with the lyrical line to "O pray for the peace of Jerusalem" and then the sound swells mightily to a glorious climax at "...and plenteousness within thy palaces."  The extra brass return at the end to crown the final orchestral bars with appropriate pomp.

The same recording also contains Parry's ode Blest pair of Sirens, a setting of a poem by Milton entitled At A Solemn Musick.  This work, vastly under-rated today outside of England, is (for my money) one of the most perfect settings of words to music from any composer of any period.  That is not least because the very clear structure of Parry's musical paragraphs exactly matches the structure of Milton's poem.  The poem as printed basically falls into two sentences: the first running through 24 lines of poetry, with one clear break in the meaning at the mid point, and the last encompassing the remaining 4 lines.  Parry's composition matches this poetic structure with a lengthy opening flow of music taking in the first half of the long first sentence, a distinct change of tone and style for the second half, and then a short interlude and a completely new melody for the final 4 lines.

Parry opens with an orchestral introduction, scored for strings and winds, which generates several melodies that will be intertwined throughout the first part of the piece.  The choir enters, singing in continuous 8-part harmony, which is also much more difficult to write than it seems.  The music flows along in the most natural and organic way, matching the sense of the lines beautifully.  At the mid-point break in the first section, the orchestral introduction resumes, with the choir re-entering almost at once and turning the music into darker regions as required by the text.  At the end of that long first sentence, there is another orchestral interlude, and then the last part begins with a brand-new tune from the sopranos.  This soon gives rise to a vigorous fugue built up on top of a continuous pedal point (as in the third movement of Brahms' German Requiem).  It's the use of this fugue that enables Parry to build a concluding portion equal in weight to the long opening section.  The pedal note is sustained while the fugue grows in power, strength, and velocity until the climactic moment when the bass note suddenly rises by a fifth, lifting the whole mass of choral and orchestral tone boldly towards the heavens -- a thrilling moment indeed.  The final cadence on the words "And sing with Him, in endless Morn of Light" is accompanied by the third and grandest appearance of the orchestral introduction.

Late in life, Parry composed a cycle of six motets for a cappella choir which he entitled Songs of Farewell.  That great gift of matching words to music was still working at full stretch, and with much more daring harmonic progressions than are found in the two earlier works -- proof positive that Parry was not simply trapped in the past, as many of his contemporaries mistakenly believed.  The cycle is noteworthy for the way that the number of parts expands from four voices in the first motet to seven in the fifth and to eight voices in the sixth and last.  The texts are a mixture of sacred and secular writings, characteristic indeed of a man who was a prominent agnostic or "freethinker" as the term was in his day.

There's a definite cumulative arc to the increasing complexity of the dissonances as the cycle proceeds, and also a building of emotional intensity which truly requires the motets to be performed as a group -- although separate performances of individual numbers do occur.  I've had the good fortune to hear the Songs of Farewell sung in concert, and it was very moving.  You can read about that concert here:  Choral Splendour 


Plainly, Sir Hubert Parry was a noteworthy composer for the human voice massed in chorus.  Not less noteworthy were his orchestral works, and I'll be discussing several of those next.

Sunday 9 November 2014

Dancing Your Way Through a Rough Life

England has never had a strong tradition of home-grown ballet music.  Several composers in the great English musical renaissance of the 20th century composed ballet scores, but these have remained largely unperformed as dance.  Where some of them have survived and triumphed is in the concert hall.


I've written before about a ballet score by Ralph Vaughan Williams (Christmas Delights 1) but never have I discussed his finest music for ballet, indeed one of the finest works he ever composed.


RVW was far from being the first composer to take a series of pictures as the inspiration for a work of music.  When he had the idea of writing a ballet that would revive old dance forms of the Tudor and Stuart eras, he turned to poet and artist William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job as his starting point, and created a ballet scenario that compressed Blake's twenty-some pictures into nine tableaux.  The result was Job: A Masque for Dancing.  As a ballet it was something of a flop.  As a concert work, on the other hand, it works beautifully.


Job runs about 45 minutes in playing time, and is scored for triple woodwinds and brass, 4 horns, percussion, 2 harps, organ and strings.  That's more orchestra than most theatre pits can easily accommodate, and for the premiere in 1931 a reduced version for smaller orchestra had to be arranged.  The original score, then, can quite appropriately be regarded as more of a symphonic poem than a ballet score. 




The score's dedicatee, Sir Adrian Boult, said of Vaughan Williams and Job: "His very broad mind is all there."  It's a comment worth noting.  Few of this composer's works span so many different styles of writing, or weave them so closely together. 


The three main contrasting elements are strongly presented in the first scene: the nobility and grandeur of the music for God and the angels of heaven, the simple yet positive music of Job, and the whirling, spiky, malicious material associated with Satan.  The first of the "set dances" is the Sarabande of the Sons of God, a stately chordal hymn-like theme.


In Scene II, Satan dances wildly before the throne of God (now vacant) and then runs to sit on the throne while the hosts of hell bow to him and the brass play a fanfare that sounds like a mockery of the angelic Gloria in excelsis.


The third scene depicts the sons of Job and their wives dancing and clashing their wine cups together in a gentle minuet.  Satan enters, summons a whirlwind, and the house collapses to a grinding discord, killing all those in it.


Scene IV depicts Job sleeping while Satan stands over him and summons visions of plague, famine, war and destruction.  This scene contains some of RVW's most violent and discordant "modern" idiom, very much akin to the contemporary Fourth Symphony.


In the fifth scene, the messengers arrive to tell Job of the death of his sons and their wives, yet Job still blesses God.  The Dance of the Messengers is a sombre, slow-moving theme.


The sixth scene is memorable for the slithery, unctuous tones of alto saxophone and bass clarinet as the voices of Job's hypocritical comforters.  At last Job loses patience and curses the day in which he was born -- this to an agonized minor-key version of the music for him in the first scene.  Heaven opens to reveal a vision of Satan and the hosts of hell enthroned in God's place and Job cowers down in terror.  This moment features one of the most remarkable and breathtaking inventions of the score: the vision is accompanied by a grinding, terrifying distortion of the Sarabande of the Sons of God played powerfully by the organ (conventionally considered a very religious musical instrument)!


In the shadow of that awe-inspiring climax the music dies away until a solo violin opens the seventh scene in a slow, rhapsodic, musing quasi-recitative accompanied by pizzicato strings and harp.  This favourite musical trademark of the composer leads into Elihu's Dance of Youth and Beauty, and it's a blessed relief (in the most literal sense) after the vehement emotional contrasts of the preceding scene.  This Dance in turn flows into the lyrical beauty of the Pavane of the Sons of the Morning, one of the most heartfelt and lovely musical ideas that Vaughan Williams ever composed.


In Scene VIII Satan enters to claim his victory and reward, but God rejects him and banishes him.  The Sons of the Morning dance a robust Galliard in joy and praise.  On earth, Job builds an altar and with his wife and daughters worships God in the Altar Dance.  As the Sons of the Morning resume their Pavane, the Altar Dance and Pavane intertwine beautifully together until the scene ends with three surging chords that then die away.  Scene IX resumes Job's pastoral music from the first scene, a perfect illustration of the text, "So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning." 


Sir Adrian Boult recorded this magnificent score for the first time in 1946, and made no less than three further commercial recordings, the last one in 1970.  I had that 1970 version on LP and it vividly characterized all the diverse aspects of then music.  Plainly the conductor knew the score like the back of his own hand, and loved every note of it.


The only other recording I've ever heard is one made by Vernon Handley for EMI.  Handley had worked extensively with Boult, and the reading comes across sounding very like Sir Adrian's, but with the advantage of more modern sound.  Where Handley's version triumphs is in Scene VI, where the organ entry at the vision of Satan is absolutely overwhelming (as it would have to be in a live performance) and yet firmly contained and clearly recorded with no distortion -- an impressive and hair-raising moment indeed.


I was set off on writing this particular post by having a dream of winning a gigantic lottery prize and using part of the money to pay the costs for a complete performance of Job at Roy Thomson Hall, in which I got to play the organ part!  Isn't it fun to dream?