In media res, the pleasure of finding Alice Coote and Julius Drake in Winterreise (uncorrected proof)

A full canvas and an unlimited palette : the pleasure of finding Alice Coote and Julius Drake in Winterreise

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28 January

A full canvas and an unlimited palette : the pleasure of finding Alice Coote and Julius Drake
in Winterreise, D. 911 (uncorrected proof)

In media res, the pleasure of finding @AliceCoote and @juliusdrake, on @BBCRadio3, in a December performance of Winterreise, D. 911, and - as rightly described, later, by @MannGeorgia as spell-binding - waiting in the car for the concluding 20 minutes ! :https://t.co/ZHHKI84JS4

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 29, 2020

Hearing barely the latter sixteen* numbers, one could :

(a) not only at first not place it - was it necessarily even Schubert, and not actually Dichterliebe, or Frauenlieben und Leben ? - but, as the libretto, once more, unfolded, that unease / dis-ease to be longer than one needed in those Straßen in den Städten [oder in den Dörfern ?] ; but also

(b) 'caught' how supremely sensitive to the text and its affective pulls and hesitations, doubts and despairs, these players were :

With freedom used both for vocalist to float or extend lines, and for Julius Drake, as pianist, also to sing, in many ways - fully resonantly ; sometimes as an almost metrically resigned hymnal, acting as a kind of 'foregrounded background' commentary ; in defiant / strident tones, usw.


From mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, free and sure use of collatura, slurred notes, selective vibrato, and - equally with the pianistic ones - variations in dynamic force, note-duration and stress.

At times, in the closing numbers, we had the sighs or deep breaths of weariness, lost hope and love, and of abandonment, all of which - ultimately, with the inevitability of as much the Dona nobis pacem of Bach's h-moll Messe, BWV 232, as Totentanz - preparing us for and taking us to dem Leiermann, so folkloric, haunting, öd und leer, and einfach da :

Beethoven's Muß es sein ?, answered by Es muß sei. It 'just is' so.


This disintegration in and of the hurdy-gurdy man is essentially one with the inexorable, slow transformation of the Singer-Poet into a degenerated form - witnessing no longer in a glass, darkly, but [...] face to face, and - having been thrust out of some Eden - der Welt abgekommen ?

Moving music**, movingly and beautfully brought to us from a Wigmore Hall that, clearly, hesitated to stir in the moments at the end !


End-notes :

* From memory, are there 32, 24 or maybe 26 texts in this Liederkreis ?

** Even without knowing what proofs / fair copies Schubert was checking in his final illness...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child

This is a review of The Gospel According to Matthew (Il vangelo secondo Matteo) (1964)

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31 May (updated, with Scorsese's comments, 1 June)

This is a review of The Gospel According to Matthew (Il vangelo secondo Matteo) (1964)

Faces (and what – whenever we look at a face¹ – we think / imagine about that person²) are central to this film, though we start, with nothing to tell us so beyond the narrative of Matthew’s gospel, with a medium shot of the pregnant Mary, a virgin whose husband then takes an angled path off into the distance, and at a pace from the humble dwelling where we see her. The contrast is with when we see faces of the disciples, and of Jesus and others, later on :

The casting has been said to have been, in many cases, from those whose families were rooted in Sicily, but the truth of that claim matters relatively little : the actors have been chosen with care, and Pasolini has the camera gaze on the variety of faces that we see. Yet not as if they were subjects for Renaissance portraits, but as the portraits themselves – in this film, which speaks in the language of bearing, attitude, and gesture, as well as with the intensity of the repeated challenge to ‘normality’ of Jesus’ words on the lips of Enrique Irazoqui (who plays him³), the striking feature is the vividness of human expression :

Indeed, we may have the impression that Jesus’ mother Mary must have spoken, but we probably only hear her crying at the foot of the cross, for that opening interaction with Joseph was wordless, as it is when Jesus is told that his mother and brothers have come, and it is in her presence and pose that she is fluent. (For the novice, a book such as Baxendall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy⁴ is an invaluable starting-point.)

By contrast with Mary, at times the film seems like a torrent of teaching from Jesus, with the familiarly gentle Sermon on the Mount (as it has come to be known) at a pace that challenges us to keep up with it, and thereby provokes us to see the innovation of this catalogue of assertions. Pasolini famously came at making this film not from the position of a believer, but supposedly having been struck by the story when he read Matthew’s gospel in a copy of the New Testament (i.e. the first gospel that he would have come to) , when waiting in his hotel for someone delayed by the attendant traffic of a Papal visit :

It is actually irrelevant how Pasolini came to the text, but crucial that he seeks to tell the gospel as it is written, and so effectively leaves us to determine – as we might with the credibility of many a film – what we believe, for, by showing it, he is really not slanting one way or the other whether this happened or who this Jesus was. (That said, IMDb makes this wayward suggestion to the contrary (as if Pasolini could / should have used the whole text) : Pasolini shows Christ as a marxist avant-la-lettre and therefore uses half of the text of Matthew.)

Saying that, his choice of music for the soundtrack is telling, because he builds on some cornerstones of Western tradition (as well as giving a spirit of otherness, in veneration, with the Gloria of the Congolese Missa Luba) with works such as Bach’s St Matthew Passion (BWV 244) and Mass in B Minor (BWV 232), in particular the Donna nobis pacem, as well as Mozart’s famous final Requiem in D Minor (K. 626) and – apparently when Jesus heals the two demon-possessed men (Matthew 8 : 28–34, but with no evil spirits entering into the pigs, perhaps for obvious practical reasons) in – Anton Webern’s Fuga (Ricercata) a 6 voci for orchestra (from Bach's Musikalisches Opfer (BWV 1079)).

Pasolini takes the grand sweep of the gospel, and gives it to us in a run-time of two hours and seventeen minutes. As observed above, when this film was clearly not attempting, ahead of its time, to be Powell in Jesus of Nazareth (from 1977), he inevitably omits things, but it is far harder than, for example, with some aspects of the relationship between Judas and Jesus in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), to say that there is a (potentially) revolutionary Jesus here – if so, the earthquake and darkening of the sun that Pasolini faithfully gives us are suddenly on a symbolic level, and represent the unstoppable force of history (as seen from the Marxist perspective)…

What, it is to be suggested, is that Pasolini makes a further gesture (to that mentioned above with The Sermon on the Mount) in the direction of challenging us with Jesus, and who he is and what he said, by making a remorseless montage : with tight editing, it has Irazoqui delivering saying hard on the heels of saying, not a few of them those that Jesus’ disciples might have called ‘a hard saying’ (John 6 : 60). Using different dress for Jesus, and immensely varying both the lighting (on Jesus and his background) and the scene, Pasolini might be hinting at the duration, over space and time, of Jesus’ ministry, as well as his claims that his kingdom is not of this world (reported in John 18 : 36), an evanescence of the world that we know in the monochrome juxtapositions of dark and light.


Sourced from Scorsese on Scorsese³ since writing the above :

[...] The biblical film that made the biggest impact on me, when I was at film school, was Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew, which in Italy was just called The Gospel According to Matthew.

[...]

Pasolini's use of faces was marvellous. It reminds me of Renaissance art even though it's in black and white, and I love the music - the Missa Luba and Bach. Just compare his Christ with Jeffrey Hunter[⁵]. He doesn't act walking, he is walking; it's not self-conscious and yet it's very determined.

[...]

This European style [of early Rossellini], in its simplicity, gave me the key to be able to make The Last Temptation of Christ. The images have to resonate and be very, very strong.

[...]

The strength of Matthew's language comes out very clearly, and it's purer because it doesn't try to make it a straight story from beginning to end. There are no transitions between scenes, characters come and disappear, then reappear in no dramatic way.

[...]

He's a very strong Christ, you're either for Him or against Him, and some of the sermons do give you the sense of being yelled at and beaten down. [...]

[p. 136]

Much of what Scorsese makes explicit in these quotations (last read in January, in the chapter on The Last Temptation of Christ) is alluded to in the response to viewing the film above (or in the notes below).


In conclusion, these are the principal way-marks from the silent opening (with Jesus yet in the womb), to the other side of death, tasking his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28 : 18–20, usually known as The Great Commission) :

* Joseph leaves the pregnant Mary and goes into town, where he encounters a group of boys, and, dreaming, sees the angel

* Later, after the unfussy visit of The Magi (alongside the spiritual Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child), the angel appears again, telling Joseph and Mary to go into Egypt

* Then, in a landscape like that of china clay mining, the angel returns, saying that the man who wanted Jesus killed is dead, and that it is safe to go back

* Roaming over the faces of the disciples

* Through to Jesus’ ministry – baptism

* Returning, again and again, to John the Baptist in prison

* The Sermon on the Mount

* The leprous man’s face is suddenly healed – the fig tree that Jesus curses is shown withering straightaway – a lead into the saying about the mustard-seed / mountain

* Crippled man also told not to tell anyone

* The demon-possessed men (Webern’s music)

* Montage of teaching

* Palm Sunday (Missa Luba)

* Before the Chief Priest in the courtyard – the mood is edgy at that hearing, and before Pilate, with the camera back and forth behind the heads

* More emotion on Judas’ sense of betrayal than that of Peter ?

* Focus on the (wordless) grief of the older Mary, falling over, being helped up - her face – leading the way to the tomb – the stone falls over and the grave-clothes are there, then the angel appears

* The angel – timeless – curls - vaguely masculine, though feminine ?

* During the blackout, our eyes and ears are on alert

* The Great Commission


End-notes

¹ As we do all the time, but seldom as unfleetingly as in the fourth Godfrey Reggio / Philip Glass collaboration, Visitors (2013).

² As Kit Downes says, Cats are persons…

³ According to Martin Scorsese, in Scorsese on Scorsese (one in Faber & Faber's excellent series, where directors have conversations that have been edited to be by film (or group of films)), Irazoqui was a Spanish law student (ed. Thompson, David and Christie, Ian, Faber & Faber, London, 1989, p. 136).

⁴ Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974.

⁵ In King of Kings (1961) (briefly discussed by Scorsese, loc. cit., p. 131).


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Did Hewitt succeed – or did The Art of Fatigue intervene ?

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29 April

This is a review of a concert performance, given at the Faculty of Music's concert hall in West Road in Cambridge (@WestRoadCH) and in conjunction with CRASSH (The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), of Bach's The Art of Fugue by pianist Angela Hewitt

It was clear from what Angela Hewitt said in what was billed as a Symposium yesterday* that she has approached Bach’s The Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080) as a problem, which therefore implied that it needed to be solved**.

The nature of the problem being that she thought that, without adjustment in playing (she did not name anyone’s recordings), it can sound (or does sound) boring, a word that she must have used at least half-a-dozen times to describe a straight way of playing a passage as written, as against what she preferred (and which she then demonstrated).

In fact, the problem described may only exist because of attempting a performance, from start to seemingly unintentional finish***, in one go : if one did not try such a thing (as it is no more self-evidently desirable than with Book I or II of The Well-Tempered Clavier (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, BWV 846–893)), would there be a problem ? A recording is one thing, and one accepts its limitations – unless the quality of the recording itself deteriorates, it is invariably the same. Yet there are not a few who like that feature of a recorded symphony or concerto – and, knowing one recording of a work, are disappointed when a concert sounds different.

That accepted, certain things had emerged from, or been confirmed by, the Symposium (and by clarifying a point with Butt that had arisen in an answer to a question at the end) :

1. We do not even know for sure (because programmes for, for example, the concerts of the Collegium Musicum, in Leipzig, do not survive) whether Bach ever gave wider performances of either Book of the Well-tempered than those reported to have taken place in a teaching context : as Butt agreed, he may have done, but we do not have documentary proof. What we do know is that, after his death, they were not published for another fifty years, around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

2. We do know, however, that the mighty achievement of writing the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232), another two hours or so of glorious music, did not lead to the opportunity for Bach to hear it realized – indeed, we do not seem to know for sure why he wrote it, although scholars have speculated about that question, as well as identifying earlier music that he adapted to the task and revised for the purpose.

3. There is accordingly a pattern of lengthy works, all of which were assembled over the years (as was the case with both Books of the Well-tempered), and part of the answer about why Bach wrote / revised them lies in this : he died at the age of 65 (in 1750), and must have been all too aware, throughout the preceding decade, of that principle of putting his house in order.

Coming back to performance, both knowledge of life-time performances (which we know definitely in some cases, such as the two Passions) and Bach’s expectations about how The Art of Fugue and the Mass in B Minor might be received in the future (and the debt that we seem to owe to Mendelssohn that we still have the latter), we probably know even less in the latter case than in the former, but the obstacles to mounting a concert rendition of one work (whether with a huge choir, or a voice to a part) are different.

With The Art of Fugue, if one sticks to one keyboard instrument, whether clavichord / harpsichord, organ, or piano (or even fortepiano, one supposes), the obstacles are different, and they came to the fore in seeking to proselytize about this work in events either side of the weekend – different from those if one arranges it, as, say, wind quintet Calefax’s saxophinist Raaf Hekkema did with his group, for an ensemble, and different from if one breaks the work with an interval.

In Cambridge, in this same venue, Richard Egarr (director of the Academy of Ancient Music) has certainly played a Book of the Well-tempered (on the harpsichord) in an evening’s performance, and also a selection of three of the six Partitas (BWV 825–830) in a lunchtime concert, but maybe not with much of a pause between the first and second sets of twelve Preludes and Fugues.

Can it be argued that inherently, if one wants, as here, to perform The Art of Fugue on a piano, there must be no break ? If, as Hewitt suggested, one is proselytizing, which one was not solely doing****, the needs of those new to this work – whatever the overview(s) have given to them – do not obviously require a very lengthy period of uninterrupted fugal and canonic writing.

For one is also preaching to the converted, who have come not to be persuaded so much, but to appreciate an interpretation, and not to wish to find fault, with global or specific matters. Having said which, Hewitt used (as she previously had) the word ‘swing’ to describe her approach to Contrapunctus 2, and, in full, the effect was more that of Jacques Loussier than of Johann Sebastian – with which one could cope as an aberrational belief that adding (accentuating ?) syncopation is the only way to play this part of the whole, although it seemed rather unlikely.

This performance at eight o’clock to-night ended at a quarter to ten (it had been preceded by a short version of the overview, for those who missed the Symposium) : by the time that Hewitt came to play the four Canons, which she had placed before the final Contrapunctus (and in her own order), she was, regrettably, very clearly flagging, because there were slips and stumbles in her playing.

That said, Hewitt did not let herself be put off, even by a significantly askew sequence of notes in the right hand that jolted one into full attention. Yet the test of endurance, of ninety minutes of playing, that she was making of herself must put the viability of the endeavour in doubt, for she really seemed to need the support of the front edge of the piano when she took applause :

That objection is not answered by Hewitt building up stamina yet further, but by stopping to question the purpose of playing through without a break. As the ancients said, but for a different reason, Cui bono ?

Here, it is the law of diminishing returns that tends to apply, because, if the audience can tell that the performer is tiring (and Hewitt, understandably not wanting the tensions of a page-turner, nonetheless seemed let down by her technological solution*****), he or she gets their sympathy for the feat attempted, if not their patience and toleration for the faults. Here, they were not just slips, but places where Hewitt sounded lost as she played what she read.

The opening of Contrapunctus 7 seemed wholly undigested (before its resemblance to fugues around 5 to 7 in Book I became apparent), whereas, in Contrapunctus 3 and 12, it felt as though the performance was suddenly on the hoof : in performance, Egarr has given notice, with his very expressive face, that something in Bach’s score has pulled him up, but not that it is any more than a pleasant surprise, rather than conveying musical uncertainty as to where it is going next.

At the end of the work, something seemed really awry. It eventually became clear, after the event, that the part had been reached where, in the MS, the music runs out without the Contrapunctus otherwise concluding. Before that, it had been clear enough when Hewitt started the first of the Canons, yet, in between, there somehow seemed to be too much material to account for four Canons and the closing Contrapunctus******.

As Bach’s end that is not an ending was awaited, one Canon or Contrapunctus finished in a way that other members of the audience could be heard saying had sounded like an attempt to improvise a conclusion in Bach’s style – whatever happened, it seemed out of place, and was perhaps the result of the technological aid.

Until we reached the Canons, and passing over the question of Contrapunctus 2, Hewitt seemed on course to manage what she had set herself. Necessarily, one did not always agree with her other choices. However, the whole concert could have been so much better but for the feeling that she was weary (and that two glasses of water had proved insufficient), and that the sense of the weariness (and the mistakes attributable to it) was passing itself over, to disrupt one’s own concentration.

A noble enterprise to perform The Art of Fugue straight through – but can one believe that even Bach required it ?


End-notes

* In fact, an introduction to the work and interview with Hewitt by Bach scholar John Butt, followed by Hewitt’s overview, with examples.

** And even revealed that she had initially been using a swear-word to refer to it, surely The Fart of Fugue, or The Art of Fuck (although she did not actually say what).

*** Then closing with the Chorale Prelude that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach added to his father’s work when it was published under his direction, Vor deinen Thron tret’ich hiermit (BWV 668).

**** Some of us have known recordings of this work for more than thirty years (even if, in the light of the Symposium, it can be understood that a recording such as that on Deutsche Grammophon's Archiv label, by Kenneth Gilbert, is of the work before Bach’s revision for the press).

***** In the Symposium, it was all too clear from what Hewitt said that she temperamentally could not have tolerated a person turning for her, and she said that the complete score, with her markings, was on her iPad®, with a pedal to change pages.

****** Unless, maybe, Hewitt had actually announced that, in departing from the order given in the programme, the Canons would come after Contrapunctus 12, and thus Contrapunctus 13 and 14 followed them (and with an arithmetical error in thinking that the part before the Canons had been Contrapunctus 13.


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Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Claire Martin

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9 May




I never tire of Claire Martin's (@CMartinJazz's) gigs : the quality is consistently very high, the energy and love of jazz evident (along with appreciation of her fellow musicians, applause for whose solos she always encourages), and Claire is a very worthy holder of an OBE for services to this music, not least as a regular broadcaster on Radio 3's (@BBCRadio3's) Jazz Line-Up.

I was going to say that Gareth Williams is her unfailing pianist, forgetting for a moment that she did some duo performances with the much-loved and recently departed Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, one of which I caught at Concerts at King's in Cambridge. Gareth was, however, in her quartet, along with another regular, Laurence Cottle (on electric bass), and Mark Skelton (until now, I hadn't managed to find his surname, or identify him via Google®).

A great set from @clairemartinjazz at #cheltjazzfest - a songful, joyful, heartfelt, playful show all with Messrs Williams, Cottle & Skelton
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 5, 2013

Perversely, when there is something that I love, I can be a bit D. H. Lawrence and find myself looking and hearing with an unconverted companion's eyes and ears, but there was absolutely nothing to disappoint, and, unlike what I felt about a jazz Clare whose gig I left after the first set, nothing stagey or false in Claire Martin. When she referred to Sir Richard, I could sense that she was welling up, and it was poignant to be reminded that he had died on Christmas Eve, and to learn how strange it felt that the CD of Irving Berlin that they had recorded was just about to come out.

It must be a good few years ago that I was joshing around with Claire and Gareth after they played at Anglia Ruskin University's Mumford Theatre (something about my being the only person with a pen when others, too, wanted a signed CD, and I also wanted to get Gareth to buy the CD of his that I had bought), and I know that how she is on stage is how she is - as some would say, no front.

So this was a lovely set from Claire, and no matter that I knew much of the content as the repertoire from her long list of CDs on the Linn label - not utterly in the same way that I can listen without tiring to Bach's great Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) or the great Handel arias, but it did not hurt to have heard Claire sing 'Love is a necessary evil' or 'Cheek to cheek' (her tribute to Sir Richard) before, or to learn that a song or two was by James Van Heusen*.

With someone who loves the songs that she sings in the way that one knows that Claire does (one feels it tangibly), and who can swing them this way or that as fits the occasion, a gig is a chance to meet old friends, be it the amazing finger-quickness of Gareth or of her other unfailing choices of collaborators, or the songs themselves, which, as she picks them as well, are full of goodness and freshness.

I see that Claire is doing a tour with a quartet of cellos, the Montpellier Quartet from Brighton, and I am just sad that I cannot be back in time to catch that particular date near me...


End-notes

* I recall now that, not for the first time, Claire mentioned the singing of Julie London - must have a look at the content of the link that I've just put there...


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Who gets diagnosed - and where are the psychiatrists when this is happening? (2)

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12 April

It's Mozart's Rondo in A Minor, K. 511. In a minor key and it sounds sad, so Mozart must have been depressed at the time.

No evidence of which I am aware except the internal temperament of the piece for this proposition: he must have been depressed, because - amongst what we have - it is unusual amongst his works to be in this key / a minor key.

Could someone not, as a patron, have commissioned Mozart to write such a piece? A Duke Orsino, from Twelfth Night, would have desired to hear such a thing, and, when David played to Saul to soothe him, whose mood was he fitting?

For we do not impute to Bach, in those other-wordly passages in the Crucifixus of the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) the state of mind / soul at the time of composition that the music portrays, before the sudden triumph of Et resurrexit, do we?


To be continued


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