An evening of their special kind of folk from Flook at Cambridge's The Junction (work in progress)

An evening of their special kind of folk from Flook at Cambridge's The Junction

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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11 May

An evening of their special kind of folk from Flook at Cambridge's The Junction at 8.00 p.m. (work in progress)

Although it's highly variable as to pitch and intensity¹, there's nothing quite like the deep, oceanic boom of the bodhran, or the soaring flute-and-pipe combination that is part of what audibly defines Flook and the appeal of the group, underpinned by a reedy rhythmicity of the guitar-line, on which bodhran and the woodwind instruments dance, swoop and glide.

Whether, as to open the first set, it's a march and a reel, or a set of gigs, this is music that enlivens, bringing to us a sound-world of otherness - of lively possibility and the possibility of maybe just being in some related, but other, universe, to reach which the facility and expressiveness of Brian Finnegan's playing, ever in close eye-contact with flautist Sarah Allen during significant passages, helps us and lets us find refuge.

Guitarist Ed Boyd likened us² to The King's Singers and – in a good way – an early Syd Barrett demo

Invigorated by the opportunities for live performance (Allen told us that Flook's latest album, Ancora, is three years old, but that few gigs to promote it had been possible that year), members of the band were expansive, in their introductions to sets of tunes, in referencing old Cambridge venues, including Cambridge Folk Festival, and around three decades of instrumental tuition in a summer school in Burwell (Burwell Bash, a connection that had caused pieces to be written in the past, and to some of whose present and past organizers dedications were made).

The craic - the story-telling, the anecdotes that put a set of tunes in context – is all part of the gig

It was clear how strongly the band had missed such places, being able to appear before an audience, and other performers and organizers to whom they also dedicated sets of tunes. Towards the end of the first set, we heard, in this connection, how they were used to being invited to play in Japan, arranged by someone called Yoko, and that one meaning of this name is Ocean Child, the title given to a piece that had echoes and the wider dimensions of folk rock, and of swirling, funky flights above the percussiveness of guitar and bodhran.


With our attention suitably drawn to the existence of merch such as long-sleeved T-shirts, tea-towels [sticking with the 'T' theme ?], beanies, and even CDs and an album on vinyl, Flook whirled us to the end of the first set and the interval...


The second set began with something of a tapping effect from John Joe Kelly and a more resonant guitar-tone (Boyd had two instruments available to him), around which the interlocking steps of flute and pipe could weave, in a number that built in both tempo and intensity and which, as they circled around it, made a generous impression, but with an occasional beat's rest per tutti that kept us – as well as the players – focused.

Next, a lovely initial tone on transverse flute from Finnegan, then joined by Allen and a gentle undertow from the rest of the band – as earlier in the gig, Finnegan could be seen, approaching and adjusting the distance from the microphone to alter the quality of the sound. Likewise, we saw and heard the ease with which Kelly strikes the sweet spot and also maintains, for the phlegmatic notes of pipe and flute alongside it, a steady pattern – especially in the more lively second and third tunes of the set, which, again, felt as though we were occupying some other space, where Joy and Jollity ever abound, and the percussion elements got louder and louder.

One tribute, to fiddler Andrew Dinan, was a lullaby from Austria – breathy, quiet and reflective

Kelly had evidently been working hard under the hot lights. Wanting to check on the football results³, he had 'sat out' that dedication, but rejoined the ensemble, as – with a bouncy style of attack from Allen – she started the band on another set of jigs :

This was a beautiful melding of flute and pipe, with a fairy-harp style of guitar accompaniment, and then, with a vigorous start from Kelly, the second tune was set up, which became a very pleasingly foot-stomping number !



More to come...
















End-notes :

¹ As John Joe Kelly was skilfully and amply to demonstrate in a solo slot (a drum solo with a big difference), before the last official number and the encore.

² In, collectively, parping the trombone theme that features on the first of a set of tunes on the album Rubai, we had been encouraged to better the audience in Newbury the night before. (Boyd had warned the newcomers to a Flook gig, in what was then the front row, that they might not have expected what would happen next...)

³ He is from Manchester, and a City fan. Quietly, but with clear satisfaction, he signalled digitally at an appropriate moment : 4 – 1.


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

How helpful is it that Cambridge student newspaper Varsity has published the anonymous article 'Cambridge was not the time of my life' as it stands, without historical context

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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14 June

How helpful is it that Cambridge student newspaper Varsity has published the anonymous article
'Cambridge was not the time of my life' as it stands, without historical context ?

From its personal perspective, the piece makes some very good points, e.g. that - whether taking up rowing becase it's 'supposed to be' beneficial, or treatments or therapies - not everything helps everyone.

Or pinning so much, week by week, on the response of one's supervisor. https://t.co/Uif7Brgn5a

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 14, 2020

'I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety in my second year. After presenting me with this information², the college nurse asked if I was okay, as I looked "a bit numb".'

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 14, 2020

'I asked for an intake appointment at the student counselling service. In the session, the therapist wasn’t able to understand what I was saying. I left feeling crushed and empty.'

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 14, 2020

¹ I.e. not even by decade, or in which period of 15-20yrs.

² The juxtaposed sentences read as if the college nurse *made* the diagnosis :

That may have seemed what happened, even if the nurse's intention was for the writer to see a GP to make a diagnosis and prescribe, etc. ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 14, 2020

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

Real, moving and effective power in these massed voices¹

This reviews Stephen Layton conducting the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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25 August

This is a review of a concert given, under the guest conductorship of Stephen Layton, by the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain (NYCGB) in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge,
on Friday 25 August 2017 at 7.30 p.m.

Thanks to Julian Forbes' kind offices, an excellent time at Trinity College in the accomplished aural company of @nycgb under Stephen Layton

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 25, 2017

First half :

1. Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) ~ ‘Exultate Deo’ (1941)

2. Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) ~ ‘O sacrum convivium’ (1937)

3. Frank Martin (1890-1974) ~ Messe pour double chœur à cappella (1922-1926) :
Kyrie - Gloria - Credo - Sanctus / Benedictus - Agnus Dei


Judge just by the title (1) ‘Exultate Deo’, and then by the text (as heard, e.g. ‘Exultate timpanum’), that this short piece by Poulenc (from 1941) is a setting of praise (taken from the Psalms). With its bright, dawn-like opening (this material recurs), this was where one first took in the clear, full and assured sound of nearly ninety voices – soon into passages of subtle light and shade, as well as Poulenc’s uncompromising use of dissonance :

Straightaway, in this initial choice of repertoire, and in Stephen Layton’s (@StephenDLayton's) home acoustic at Trinity, Cambridge, we were able to appreciate the clear diction and unmuddied sound² of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain (NYCGB), and the exciting effect, in this familiar space, of ‘falling away’ into silence at the close.


In (2) ‘O sacrum convivium’ (1937), a second piece – and a more difficult one (?) – sung from memory, appropriately reflective tone and affect were brought out in a very mature and measured response to this text, a setting that wonders at the sacrament of communion (the Eucharist).

Although Messiaen’s spiritual and theological message is abiding in his canon, it appears that this work is unusual in being liturgical. Particularly striking were the gradations of dynamics across the ensemble, and the employment of softness and hush, which may be known from works as diversely religious as Quatuor pour la fin de temps [Quartet for the End of Time (1941)] or, for solo organ, La Nativité du Seigneur (1935), his beautiful meditation(s) on the birth of Christ.

The Kyrie of this well-known (but simple and unfussy ?) (3) mass-setting by Martin (1922-1926) begins with a multi-entry section [the first entreaty of Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy)], which, through the rendering of its flowing melismatic lines, established warmth and the celebratory sense of participating together in the mass. The central Christe eleison rose at least to fortissimo [ff], but still with a good balance.


Characteristically rounded and pure vowel-sounds flooded the sound-world of the Gloria and, as Frank Martin again gives us a multi-entry setting of the text, we clearly heard, in a trio of statements prefaced by Domine Deus, Agnus Dei… [‘Lord God, Lamb of God’], the sincere and solemn heart of this section of the Messe :

Martin has some of the singers imitate a drone, thereby giving the quality of a suspensive underpinning to each affirmation (and, not for the only time this evening, the powerful sense of sounds that, because one could not immediately locate them, evoked aetherial disembodiment). At Quoniam tu solus sanctus (‘For you alone are the most high’), we bridged into a form of chanting, and with the vivid impression of composer, conductor and choir together heightening our perception of what is very active within the words of the standard text of the Latin mass.


Except when one such as that of Stravinsky (1944-1948) whisks through it, the Credo – which almost certainly contains more words than in the other four sections combined – inevitably forms a significant portion of a setting : this one makes generous and vibrant use of a double choir, and, again, of wordlessly hummed notes and of crescendi to the full sound of the ensemble.


Amongst various others, some features in particular were highly moving : the tenderness, in the singing and the writing, of the passage that sets Et incarnatus est ('And [He] became man') ; then, the dramatic present of Crucifixus etiam ('For us [He] was likewise crucified'), but with neither Layton nor Martin rushing anything in the specificity that is in the text that starts with sub Pontio Pilato… (‘in the reign of Pontius Pilate’) ; and in the simple joy of Et resurrexit ('And [he] was resurrected'), which re-deploys the theme of running notes from the Kyrie.

There is a real, moving and effective power in these massed voices, they and we alike enjoying Martin’s flowing melodic lines, but held back in Et unam, sanctam, catholicam… ('And a single, holy, catholic [church]') – before a declaration of faith in Et exspecto…, ('I await [resurrection and eternal life]') and the closing ‘blaze’ of Amen.


Maybe these are not the right words for it, but there was ‘luxuriant’ writing and singing in the repeated word ‘Sanctus’, which then gently ‘retired’, so giving a strong contrast with the dynamics of Pleni sunt coeli (‘The heavens are full…’). Afterwards, we were into the peals / waves of the first Hosanna - before the Benedictus commenced with almost sub voce 'utterances', developing and ‘rolling’ into repeating the acclamation Hosanna !


With its tri-partite form, the Agnus Dei had an otherworldly, ‘uncanny’ feel to it at the start [for the words are addressed directly to Christ], with voices supporting, and yet moving against, each other – and then an evocation as of a calm beat of a clock (or heart ?), in which one senses Martin’s conviction most, and also, just as significantly, these performers’ dedication to conveying the text.

After all that has gone before, both in this section and in Martin’s mass for double choir as a whole, the concluding chords - which set the supplication Dona nobis pacem (‘[Lamb of God,] give us Peace’) - are open. As Peace is open to us... ?


Certainly, the audience seemed very open to giving applause from its hearts for this accomplished and engaged performance under Stephen Layton, a celebrated interpreter of such sacred works – one had also had the privilege of seeing close to his encouragement of and approbation for the members of NYCGB, and of feeling pride as they took an orderly step down to walk along the aisle, and out, at the end of this impressive first half.

Second half :

4. Vytautas Miškinis (1954-) ~ 'Angelis suis Deus' (2006)

5. Eriks Ešenvalds (1977-) ~ 'Salutation' [world premiere]

6. Ugis Praulinš (1957-) ~ Missa Rigensis (2003)

7. Paweł Łukaszewski (1968-) ~ ‘Nunc Dimittis’ (2007)


Again from memory, two short pieces (maybe shorter again than the Poulenc and the Messiaen ?) began the second half, by which time one finds that, both as one settles into a programme, and into taking further pleasure from it (even as it advances into territory that is less familiar, but no less engaging), one tends - for good or ill - to have to keep prompting oneself to record impressions in one's review-notes, and so makes fewer… [Apologies for anything not noted at the time, and so unlikely to be here now.]

In any case, from a trio of twentieth-century composers in the French tradition (none still alive, though their music continues) to ones all still living and from Eastern Europe (Latvia [Ešenvalds], Lithuania (x2), and Poland [Łukaszewski]) – and, this time, not with works now seventy-five or more years old (yet sounding so fresh), but everything from the twenty-first century.

We even had a new commission from Eriks Ešenvalds, as well as a second of the composers (Ugis Praulinš) with us, in the chapel itself. Before it, though it had in common that it evoked the sound-world and affect of John Rutter (also said afterwards to have been present), (4) Vytautas Miškinis’ ‘Angelis suis Deus’ (2006) had a swaying motion to it, which was rooted in the bass and treble lines. [As for the text, that will need to be researched (for an end-note), but had apparently been set to celebrate Stephen Layton’s birthday, when he was forty…]

(5) ‘Salutation’, with a text in English, felt like a pæan, and we had been told that Ešenvalds, in common with large numbers around the world (via live-streaming), was intending to watch the world premiere of this work : the words Senses reach out, and touch thy word at my feet were noted, but this, too, needs research. The overall impression of the ensemble was of brightness, but, within it, Ešenvalds had placed little harmonic hesitations, or what seemed like remembrances of Morten Lauridsen, and then brought the piece to a close with a beautiful bass-note : repeated listening will be necessary, but the audience responded very well to his setting, as it had to that of Miškinis.

As with the Mass setting by Frank Martin, that by (6) Ugis Praulinš, Missa Rigensis (2003), had a strong opening, and the effect of echoic falling-away. To judge by the singing and how the choir looked, it must be thrilling to perform this composition, and this was an excellent space in which the sounds could die away.


In the Kyrie, one could pick out some lovely soprano voices, nicely blended. A bass took a solo in Christe eleison³, and Praulinš also gave us little lingering individual sounds, and an a capella voice to close.

The rhythms and style of the Gloria were exciting, but it was also a moving setting, and employed chant-style sections. One almost had the feeling here, as when soloists step down from the choir, of individual testimonies being given³, and with a vivid sense of expectation in the Domine Deus.


The clever impression (as of rain-drops) that is formed by the overlay of voices in the Credo also feels in line with worship, and the harmonic riches that Praulinš bestows (as Martin did) on this part of Missa Rigensis put one in mind of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms (other composers' works aplenty were discernibly quoted). Particular focii for attention were, again, the words Qui propter nos homines ('Who, for mankind and for our salvation, came down from Heaven'), and a remarkable setting of the Crucifixus, after which Stephen Layton brought us an impassioned believer's personal confession of faith³.

The Sanctus was full of life, especially the 'Hosannas', and was simply set until the repeat of Dona nobis pacem ('[Lamb of God], may you give us Peace'), when the Agnus Dei then had unexpected twists and turns. An accomplished bass recitation³, to a wordless hum, led to a simple close.


Ugis Praulinš, who was in the front row, keenly applauded the NYCGB and Stephen Layton, and was clearly affected by the performance. (It was also a pleasure to have him kindly receive some brief words of thanks afterwards.)

The programme closed with - as fitting both the purpose of the work and the reason for programming it - a ruminative setting by (7) Paweł Łukaszewski of the 'Nunc Dimittis' (2007), and with the uncomplicated beauty in which it ends : again, there was an element of voices 'coming off' and so our hearing a remaining voice exposed.


This was an extremely enjoyable concert, and one that gives great comfort at the depth and breadth of new choral singing, and also very real delight in individual performers within a tight and disciplined ensemble.

No doubt some very proud parents and other relatives would have shed a tear of pride as the NYCGB processed out !


End-notes

¹ A review-comment, as noted on the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain (@nycgb) in Frank Martin's Messe pour double chœur à cappella (1922-1926).

² The confidence of these young performers – and the worthwhile promise that they show for the future – was, too, inspiring in their appearance, in how they held and comported themselves : assuredly, one power that there is in justified self-belief.

³ As if, perhaps, the representative characters of The Apostles had been given, to show that we, through them, were in the midst of this act in remembrance of The Last Supper. (Some - if so, they could not have been many - might have found this work theatrical, but it served the liturgy and felt apt in doing so.)


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

Claire Martin and trio at Cambridge Arts Theatre

Claire Martin at The Arts Theatre, Cambridge,

with Dave Newton, Jeremy Brown, Steve Brown

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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17 January

This is a largely complete review of Claire Martin's gig at The Arts Theatre, Cambridge - with trio Dave Newton, Jeremy Brown, and Steve Brown

Linn (@linnproducts) recording artist and OBE-holder Claire Martin (@CMartinjazz) gave Cambridge, with its wintry feel outside The Arts Theatre (@camartstheatre), a breath of her infectiously enthusiastic and sympathetic approach to singing, which thawed out - even if partly with, and through, the blues - some affected by it (them ?) :

At @camartstheatre earlier, we did not so much welcome @linnproducts' @CMartinjazz to Cambridge as she did us to the world of her super trio
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 18, 2015

Listen to Claire* on Radio 3's (@BBCRadio3blog's) Jazz Line-Up, or see her on stage, and there is no doubting that she is The Real Thing, with a passion for jazz and what she does, whether presenting what speaks to her, or, at a gig, doing the same through the medium of her voice. Amongst, in other places, the mark of her quality is the instrumentalists that she brings with her :

With Dave Newton on tireless form, and Jeremy Brown / Steve Brown effortlessly on bass and drums, respectively, @CMartinjazz sang with style
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 18, 2015

Gareth Williams is a usual pianist for Claire, but his piano, though lovely, is somewhat introspective and even moodful, whereas Dave Newton, as he is at his best, was inspired, being both fantastically inventive and creatively exploratory. An excellent mix of trio, bass, drums and piano, and a real tribute to Claire that she knows the strength of these players and that the trio worked to a tee with her first time, a rich mix of four musicians who can swing it, cool it, give it soul or rhythm, and leave you joyful and carefree.

Speaking as one who loves Claire’s presentational work on Radio 3 (@BBCradio3blog), one cannot but wish that there had been the tiniest bit more of her warm personality to share with those knew to her and to her art : nothing much, as one can over-elaborate introductions and setting out the connections (it has been heard done in this very venue, but the second set was different), but maybe just a little phrase here or there, because, when Claire talks about music during broadcasts, there is no doubting that it is her own reactions and evaluations that one is hearing (even if, inevitably, filtered through the ears and views of her producer) :

If one thing was missing from @CMartinjazz at @camartstheatre, it was just nothing musical or interpretative, just a tad more chattiness ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 18, 2015

Unlike other jazz-singers one could name, @CMartinjazz's always approachable in her take on music, and on the stage : no slickness, no side.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 18, 2015

Detailed observations to come (via the set-list)…



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Gustav Metzger, Damien Hirst, and being a butcher

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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18 August

The cinematic reference is : White Heat – or White Star ?

BelstonNight Works booked @THEAGENTAPSLEY as a delegate to White Heat, the Symposium on Gustav Metzger. See you ? http://t.co/eOgB1wdfyn
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2014

At the end of it all, whatever the merits of Kettle’s Yard’s (@kettlesyard) Gustav Metzger retrospective Lift Off ! in Cambridge (which runs until 31 August 2014), is one just left with ideas of responsibility and redundancy, and with exhibits that could be reliably reproduced by anyone following the instructions / principles involved ?

Called in briefly at @kettlesyard for some of Gustav Metzger's traces of oscillating fibres, liquid crystal projections and a steam bubble !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2014

One wanted it to amount to more than The Science Museum in a gallery, but the overlap is really less than when, in his quest for understanding, Peter Diggs goes to look at Klein bottles in Amaryllis Night and Day (a novel by Russell Hoban*), and ends up meeting both the man who made them, and, much more, what they signify to him and his situation. Or, in another Hoban novel* (Angelica Lost and Found), an imaginary creature in the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto learns how, by travelling to a space of contradictory appearance, to become real and occupy human form – only to be haunted by art, and visit others with it, that unnervingly revisits that space.

Hoban (who died at 86 in December 2011) was full of life, and with an irrepressible interest in science and technology (as this writer touched upon in Russell Hoban at 80, a festschrift [http://hoban2005.co.uk/] from February 2005), so he could just as easily conceive of Jocasta as the organic computer Pythia, and invent interstellar voyaging by means of flickerdrive, which is based on the idea of what happens in all the spaces caused by the refresh-rate of the retinal image. This feels like a real meeting, a fusion of art and science.

The show at @kettlesyard is, as always free, and comprises : http://t.co/JOMKVXrcjx Plus, on site, one can usually enter Jim Ede's house
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2014

In comparison, Metzger – not always easy to understand when he speaks nowadays – may have been talking about meeting The Who, how they wanted to do a benefit gig for his colleagues and him (but their management refused), and ending up doing a liquid-crystal light-show for a gig of theirs at The Roundhouse. However, it was in some obscure context, never curatorially explained, of having to be at The Central Criminal Court (The Old Bailey), and there was never any suggestion here of cross-fertilization between art and science – he did his things, they did theirs (almost a transaction**)

Kettle's Yard in Cambridge pic.twitter.com/mlmyLqqhDh
— Ian Thompson (@ianthompson) August 24, 2014

A note on so-called auto-creative art :

Put a primed canvas on an easel, line up a prepared palette and a selection of graphite, pencils, rags, brushes, solvents, water-jars, lock the room, and wait to see what happens…

Or set a process off (it could be a computer, generating fractal- diagrams, or liquid crystals that are being heated on a slide in front of a projector), and see what happens.

Both outcomes are predictable within certain limits, i.e. that the canvas remains as it is, or another piece that looks like a fractal-diagram is generated and the heated crystals distort into patterns that are projected, but there is no auto-creation. If there were, the canvas would be painted on, and one would not know what to expect of the program or the set-up with the crystals :

The exact patterns generated are not known beforehand, but they have not caused the process that gave rise to them (even if they did, via a feedback loop, that loop’s effect would have been envisaged and pre-ordained).


The show Lift Off ! is stochastic processes and applied physics, and, although some of the exposures of fibres moved around on photographic paper may be striking, it is essentially an aleatory method that can be repeated over and over, and one could fill the room with the things, but they largely resist having an artistic content. Dancing Tubes could just as well belong in a Health and Safety Commission training video about the dangers of releasing compressed air without controls, and any lab could set it up.

The scientific method says that an experiment should be capable of being reproduced, and these works can be by just having the notion of what is to be achieved and setting it up, which may even produce refinements or improvements. The idea seems temptingly close to the approach of Damien Hirst (except that he was the one who did first cut – or have cut – in half a formaldehyde-treated cow (and a calf)) and exhibit it (them) as art), and yet so far away, with his being across the line in art.

Not indisputably so, though, with works displaying concepts such as What Goes Up Must Come Down (1994)*** and Loving in a World of Desire (1996) (using the same essential technology), or, perhaps, the less-skilled spin paintings) but in terms of a body of work that is recognized as artistic. The Plexiglass, table-tennis ball and hair-dryer of the former differ from similar museum displays of the principle of keeping a ball in the air by explicitly being – or appearing to be – ready-made items, such that the hair-dryer coincidentally has the right amount of upthrust to keep the ball in motion (though its current may, of course, have been safely adapated to achieve this effect, by trial and error with resistors or the like, behind the scenes).

Hirst’s huge ashtray Crematorium (1996) (not his only repository for cigarette-butts), Roni Horn’s huge glass pieces (opaque, red, black, and one at least resembling an ashtray ?), take the artist into the hands of a manufacturer who will produce what the artist seeks, but the vision makes it more than any old order from a glassworks. There is even more artistry in generating a fractal diagram and giving it a colour-scheme than in most of these exhibits of Metzger’s :

Though some would sniff at fractals as art, but not hesitate to embrace Duchamp’s Fountain [http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573] (Tate Modern (@Tate) exhibits a replica in 1964) – there, the mistake is as to the real work of the piece, which was Duchamp’s gall and iconoclasm in submitting it to an exhibition at The Society of Independent Artists, not the urinal itself. A Museum of Curiosities seems a better place for what Metzger gives us, alongside automata, counting-engines, and elaborate orreries.

He created, after all, a significant art show in and using materials found around a brand new laboratory in Swansea : if that influenced anybody, then we need to know how and why, and that should be at the heart of curation. Instead, the rather unhelpful assumption is of an unannounced starting-point, and hence of shutting off discussion, to the effect that any distinction between art and science is arbitrary : yet the fact is that anything that can be depicted as a continuum has no point where something ceases and another begins does not render it meaningless to ask the question*** and to set limits (e.g. abortion and the medico-legal test of how many weeks old a foetus is).

However, the one-day conference Art, science and social responsibility in 1960s’ Britain largely took tangents from Metzger, and shied off, much of the time, from stating clearly why we should care about him now, whatever his approach was 50+ years ago, and not just forget about it as a by-way : Metzger, sadly in a wheel-chair, was ‘in the room’ literally (the aptly Zen Lecture Theatre 0), but he was rarely the topic.


A brief summary report on the conference – to come…

The best part of @kettlesyard's Gustav Metzger conference White Heat ? Tangentially, it was getting to chat to Robert M. Young at lunch.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 5, 2014

As to auto-destructive art, the Conference seemed to have assumed that what Metzger did in 1960 with a large pane of glass, a larger piece of nylon stretched across it and applying hydrochloric acid that neither the set-up, not the outcome needed to be described : the Tate (@Tate) has has done it for us.

Again, it is to be noted that the description of auto-destruction is simply wrong : the nylon clearly did not destroy itself, Metzger destroyed it by painting acid on it, otherwise, if I kill someone with a gun, I could call it as meaningfully self-shooting syndrome.


End-notes

* Respectively, Bloomsbury, London, 2001 and 2010.

** The allusion is to the play Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill.

*** One of Zeno’s paradoxes starts with a grain of millet, and adds one, and then another : when does it become a pile ? Blurring boundaries because of the in-between ground is as much a fallacy as the law of the excluded middle (where anything that is not X must be Y, whereas it could be Z, in that middle ground), and it ignores the obvious fact that two grains are not a pile, 20,000 grains are. A chemistry experiment is not a piece of art, and a work by Watteau is not science.




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

Dennis Russell Davies conducts Pärt, Glass and Adams - Cambridge, Sunday 27 April 2014

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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1 May

Dennis Russell Davis was brought back to the rostrum at @CambridgeCornEx at least three times after his programme of Pärt, Glass and Adams.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 27, 2014

Whatever the three composers whose works were on the bill on the evening of Sunday 27 April at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx) may have in common (Arvo Pärt, at least, rejects the description of ‘minimalism’ (let alone ‘holy minimalism’, which he considers nonsense)), there is probably more about the music that each one writes that makes him distinctive :

Below, is a review, which follows on from the introductory posting Minimalists - or Rhythmicists ?, and there is also an edited-down version of the first half of the review here...





When large orchestras, such as from Russia, have visited The Corn Exchange in the past, the stage has seemed crammed, and this time was no different, with what seemed a massive orchestra (at full strength, there are fifty string-players alone). A little of a pity that more had not turned out to witness this spectacle and hear their impressive ensemble, but still a creditable attendance of around six hundred heard two major works by Philip Glass and John Adams, and something more modest from Pärt – as maybe the man himself may be, although works such as Passio are on a larger scale.



Arvo Pärt – These Words…

According to Universal Edition, this piece for string orchestra and percussion was composed between 2007 and 2008, and it was a commission by the Léonie Sonnings Musikfond in Denmark. (The same source says that Pärt has been awarded the Léonie Sonning Prize, the most important musical distinction in that country.)


About the piece itself, the person who wrote that entry (Eric Marinitsch) goes on to say :

As its textual basis Pärt uses the human foibles mentioned in the old Church Slavonic prayer from the Canon to the Guardian Angel, while the title derives from associations between this material and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.


Whatever that may mean, it is to be noted that, just before the scene with the play performed by the theatrical troupe, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius says to him I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. (Act 3, Scene 2). With the connivance of the leader of the players, Hamlet had interpolated the text with material designed to bring out guilty behaviour in Claudius, and then afterwards, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude, she says O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet. (Act 3, Scene 4).


As for the work, it began with a chord full of suspense, and, after the sound of a triangle and a bass-note, the strings sometimes played piano, as a sequence was given first by what sounded like a xylophone* and then a different one by a bass-drum, before the opening material returned. Still with a feeling of suspense, a swaying sweep of the xylophone and another note from the triangle led to a statement of the same sequences, seemingly both hesitantly and thoughtfully, after the string writing had moved up and down in chords.


Yet although a triangle had been seen struck earlier, the bell-sound that next entered could have been a tubular-bell (it had more of the lasting, resonant note that characterizes a desk-bell), and preceded a progression that had an oriental feel to it, if not how it grew in intensity. Then a moment’s pause, cymbals and the bell and then a bell sounding a tone lower marked a new section, in which the interval given by the two bells recurred before a pizzicato motif with a rumbling drum-noise – a moment of haunting eeriness, which gave way to a bowed sound, and then the two bells again, the noise of the second of which held in the air.

After another pause, beats on the bass-drum led to further powerful writing for the strings, which again drifted away to a pianissimo. In what followed, heralded by triangle and xylophone, the latter did not so much interject, as juxtapose the feeling of its presence (in the spirit of Pierre Boulez) : the writing was moving as if we were tracing a very slow, but clear, life-sign, and the music conformed to its own measure. The string-sound swelled again to something fuller, and then diminished. Momentarily, for no more than a bar or two, the material took on a different rhythmic stress, and then ended, with the sound of the bell.


What is so important with a piece such as this is that a gesture of a bell or something like it should feel germane and organically have its own poise, otherwise one is just going through the motions of playing it. Davies fully knows that, and has worked with orchestras, this one included, in such a way that the atmosphere that Pärt appears to be seeking is wholly present, such that a large group of strings can bow together, and yet play piano, so that one has the density of the string-texture, but not the immediacy of the string-sound.

Those new to these composers may not have experienced this kind of sound-world before, but it was a good choice to open the concert, rather than, say, Pärt’s better-known Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which would have been too intense to fill this role.



Philip Glass – Cello Concerto No. 2 (‘Naqoyqatsi’)

The fourth film on which Philip Glass worked with director Godfrey Reggio, Visitors (2013) has just been released in the UK.

Glass has also turned the score for the previous film, Naqoyqatsi (2002), in which cellist Yo-Yo Ma played prominently, into his seven-movement Cello Concerto No. 2, subtitled Naqoyqatsi. Dennis Russell Davies (the conductor in this concert) has recorded the work, conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and with the same soloist, Matt Haimovitz.

As with the Adams work in the second half, the movements have titles, but one wonders whether they may be more for the convenience of players, conductors, concert arrangers and the like to refer to the piece’s constituent parts, rather than just by bar-numbers, because, in both cases, there seems to be relatively little emphasis on elucidating the word(s) chosen. (In the case of Glass, of course, the cues for the film would have given rise to a need for titles, which may have (partly) survived : contrast this with how one refers to the works of artist Mira Schendel, when almost everything is sím titulo).)


1. Naqoyqatsi
The work opened with strings and ‘parping’ horns, before going down a level for the solo entry, which was marked by the intensity of drums and cymbals, and the weight of the cellos and double-basses. It was clear straightaway that the combination of instrument and cellist brought about a lovely sound, and the solo part developed to encompass a variety of moods, including, most obviously, yearning. The opening motif recurred, but now against material of shifting tonality, and, in a tutti section with contributions from tubular-bell, the modulations were thrilling. A short section for the cellos alone, before joined by the basses, led in what is almost a trademark of Glass’ music, where he does not literally inscribe a circle with complementary pairs of descending triplets, but feels as though he does (for want of a better term, circle-sounds). The movement came to an end as the cellos played at the bottom of their register, joined by basses and brass, and percussion.


2. Massman
In the opening of this movement, Glass used an alternating pattern, which modulated, before the cello gave us a short motif, and then a shorter motif, parallel to it, and the strings then played this material under the writing for cello, where Haimovitz had sharpened notes in his part, and with a tremolo effect. With the combination of interjective tutti and a climax in the percussion, the feeling that was conveyed was a little like a trudge, and, when Glass had quarter-tone writing high in the cello’s solo register, the percussion was given an oom-pah effect : we momentarily felt as if it were a further parody of one of Shokstakovich’s ‘ironic’ parodies. Another high-energy tutti section, rich in brass, brought in those ‘circle-sounds’ again, but with a slightly sickening feel to the sound of the soloist. Together with brass and strings, and a fleeting evocation of Viennese style, the movement ended, the cello at the bottom of its register.


3. New World
With some beats from the tam-tam, the soloist had a suggestive phrase that had the quality of a gypsy fiddler. For the first time seeming like a solo cello with an orchestra behind him, Haimowitz’s part ran the gamut of evoking tuning the instrument and the tradition of solo cello music of Bach, but also harmonics, slide-notes, and ghostly tremolos by the bridge of the instrument.


4. Intensive Times
Tutti passages, with a prominent place for wood-blocks and snare-drum, led to a haunting theme in the ‘peachy’ register of the brass being taken up, and to the accompaniment of struck cymbals. As the movement developed, there was a feeling of varying between driving inevitability and harmonic uncertainty, but which gave the impression of bedding down before the end.


5. Old World
Another movement that opened with solo cello in a high, aetherial stratum, a phrase then emerged with which the harp chimed with a descending interval, and the movement had a similar feeling to it to that marked New World, but exploiting a rising interval.


6. Point Blank
The opening theme had a bouncy, but sinister, aspect, with a slightly coarse rasp from the brass. Yet, as it developed, Glass seemed to pitch a descending minor third against the cello’s rising major third (?), and with a lurking snare-drum rhythm. Tutti sections followed, and, in turn, gave way to writing for Haimowitz that seemed to demand intense slurring and sawing. More ‘circle-sounds’ followed, but which appeared undercut by sneering descending writing for brass and strings. At a moment when the cello seemed to be reaching out, it felt constrained, as if required to limit itself to Semaphore against the brass and the percussion. The movement then ended, meditating on one note. [Around when, unfortunately, Haimowitz’s C-string (?) broke]


7. The Vivid Unknown (described by Davies as ‘the epilogue’ when the broken string was being replaced)
The movement, in its opening, had a very expansive theme for solo cello, which, whilst it generally strived upwards, had downwards motions. As cellos and basses contributed ‘circle-sounds’, the cello had a vivid outpouring, only brought back to earth by a pure sound from the violins. The bassoon, always there in the general texture, was given the special feature of a weighty contribution, which gave way to more solo material. The bassoons then contributed, with a rising interval (a third ?), and, on beats from the tam-tam – in conjunction, with the other percussion ¬– the concerto came to an end.


The filmic origins and nature of the concerto may have meant that the movements were necessarily of a more delineated kind than, say, in the work by John Adams (which followed after the interval), because several began with the soloist introducing thematic material, or in a different character from what preceded. In any case, it was clearly a score that Davies knew very well and was involved with, if possible, even more fully than with that of These words….

Haimowitch, whose hesitations about the idea of the work, when being invited to premiere it, could be read about in the programme, gave a highly engaged performance, and, as he says Glass had licensed, played the repeated matter in a manner as he saw fit, varying it according to context and his artistic judgement. (Haimowitch has recorded it under Davies, about which one can read here, and also listen to samples of tracks.)

All in all, with Pärt and Glass, a good first half, and one that introduced a post-modern approach to compositions that explore the dimensions of a small chosen realm in depth, but without much of the vividly atonal or even twelve-tone approaches that many composers of the last forty or fifty years have embraced :

This, if anything, sets these composers apart, but in a different way from that of other practitioners such as, from the world of choral music, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen or John Rutter, whose works are characterized by being much more highly tonal, and less rhythmically emphatic, than those of Adams, Glass, and Pärt.


Harmonielehre original version ?

John Adams – Harmonielehre

Not uniquely so, but the title of the work is that of a text by composer Arnold Schoenberg (from 1911), which roughly means Lessons in Harmonc Writing, whom Adams describes as representing ‘something twisted and contorted’ (this from the composer of Gnarly Buttons). Contrary to Adams’ claim that, as a pupil of a pupil of Schoenberg’s, he had respect for and even felt intimidated by Schoenberg, what he writes – at length – in the programme suggests something different :

That he built an image of Schoenberg of his own, as a god or ‘high priest’, and that then Rejecting Schoenberg was like siding with the Philistines. Adams has built a Schoneberg-shaped altar, according to his notion of Schoenberg, and then refused to bow down before it, citing the aural ugliness of so much of the new work being written. Yet the real Schoenberg wrote, for example, the incredibly beautiful and moving Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31…


Anyway, Harmonielehre is in three movements, but the first has no title (as to titles, please see the section on Glass’ concerto, above). It seems that the second movement has some connection with what Russell Hoban, making a Spoonerism, called Blighter’s Rock, because the programme reports that a dramatic dream broke a fallow period and gave rise to the piece – the link with The Fisher King (made famous, if not by T. S. Eliot’s notes to ‘The Waste Land’, then at least by Terry Gilliam’s film of that name in 1991) being that of woundedness, impotence even in some versions of the Arthurian story, and sometimes with a second wounded figure, the father.

As the programme tells us, Quackie is just what Adams and his wife were calling their daughter Emily at the time of composition (in the mid-1980s), and Adams had another dream, this time with her floating through space with Meister Eckhardt, a German mystic and philosopher, born in 1260. (As discussed, whether such titles and anecdotes add anything to a performance may be a matter of personal experience.)


1.
The work has an energetic, rhythmic opening statement, with tubular-bells. As in These Words…, one could hear xylophone, and brass and woodwind instrument playing high up, with plucked second violins, and also glockenspiel. The movement was one of contrasts, with bowed and plucked strings, and then with some string-players playing very long, slow notes against others with jabbed notes of much smaller duration – an exciting, bright mix of sound, which reminded of Adams’ A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, before it gave way to a moment of quiescence, against which we had the bubbling sounds of the xylophone and the luminous ones of the glockenspiel, before struck cymbals brought about a pause.

A full string-sound from cellos, double-basses and brass, with the material then passed to violas and violins : a questioning tone and a high string-sound gave a resemblance to a heavenly choir, before the direction moved down to a pulsing, with arpeggios from the strings, and solid bass-notes. In both texture and depth of sound, there was still an other-worldly sense, an almost Brucknerian sound-mood (with hints of Mahler) in the string-writing, and with the harp evident. Momentarily, Adams gave us raindrops, in the form of high notes, falling on this Alpine mood-meadow, and then the brass of tuba, trombone and horn came through. This rich and luscious feeling, changed, as the pitch descended, to sustained string-notes – the initial impression was given by some ‘snarky’ bass-notes, but overall it was one of rhythmic plasticity, with contributions from triangle and tubular-bells.

Then the tense opening motif returned, and gained in intensity, with huge rhythms from tam-tam, and the bass-drum a-booming. The moment dissolved, and re-formed, heralding anxious string and brass sounds, with high notes in the latter. Finally, fast-paced snare-drumming and tubular-bells (coupled with harp) broke through the sonority, followed by hammer-blows on the bells that brought about a close.


2. The Anfortas Wound
With grave notes on the basses and cellos, before the woodwind joined in, with the cellos playing in unison, we found ourselves in an andante in an uncertain place, where one of the five busy percussionists could be heard bowing a crotale and then seen wafting it, so that it resonated in the air.

Tonality was now quite unclear, and harmonies were straying, with brass-notes adrift amongst the bell-sounds, as a crescendo slowly built and then, as in Bartók’s mirrored ascent in the Music for Percussion, Strings and Celesta, fell away again from its zenith. The harps were given prominent rhythmic patterns as the harmonic centre, in the strings, began rising, tension being added by pizzicato playing, and by the percussion, whose bass-drum led another crescendo. With a momentary slap of the strings and a screech, the tuba-players fitted their huge mutes, and the bowed crotale was sounded again.

The tubas were just as quickly unmuted, and with anticipatory sounds from the strings, let off blasts, which signalled bell-sounds, and low notes from cellos and basses. Several times before the end, the orchestra seemed to die away, but revived – a sort of inversion of classical works that seem to have ended with a loud full close, but for a few more chords to declare insistently the approach of the real ending.


3. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie
Once again, we were in that alpine meadow for a while, with high notes from the harps, and with ambient percussion. Through it, though, came a soaring feel amongst the twittering of piccolos, and there was again a remembrance of Fast Machine, but this time inversely, a sensation of (harmonically) slowly dropping.

Mounting tension, fed by a tap-tap beat on a block, and high violin notes performed in a slicing motion (as if for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)), was intensified by agitated writing in very short note-values, evoking Fast Machine further with chords from the brass as if receding on a railway, and then that sinister type of horn-tone that The Matrix (1999) uses for the sentinels. With pulsing drum and glockenspiel, the energetic impulse in the ensemble rose, fell away again, and climbed back up – to end on a brief open sonority.


End-notes

* One says ‘xylophone’, because the sound did not appear to resonate, but it may have been a marimba…


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

@THEAGENTAPSLEY's Tweet review of a cinematic event (without actually watching it...)

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30 April

Much of a crowd, @tobytram @CamPicturehouse ? @THEAGENTAPSLEY was put off by the sound of it being Max Ernst rehashed (plus Glen Baxter)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 30, 2014

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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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