A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme Amuse-bouche at Cambridge Summer Music Festival

An overview of I Fagiolini with Amuse-bouche at Cambridge Summer Music Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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23 July

A quick overview, by Tweet (and free text), of I Fagiolini’s performance of their programme Amuse-bouche, under the directorship of Robert Hollingworth, for Cambridge Summer Music Festival at Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Cambridge, on Saturday 23 July at 7.30 p.m.

A still from I Fagiolini - Ode à la gastronomie

Directed by John La Bouchardière and made by Polyphonic Films

-> In addition to Poulenc's Hôtel and Sept Chansons, a side of Darius Milhaud to complement the usual La Création du monde - in Deux poèmes

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 23, 2016

In both halves, we also heard from Anna Markland (as well as her voice in the ensemble) on piano, with two of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes (Nos 4* and 6, respectively), and, to close the first half, with Roderick Williams’ arrangement for piano and choir of the central movement (marked Adagio assai) of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major

-> One of Verlaine (Clair de lune), one in his cast (Silvestre's Le secret), before @ifagiolini performed more Poulenc in Un soir de neige

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 23, 2016

Taking four poems from Poésie et verité (again by Éluard), once more the language of seasons, weather, times of day. https://t.co/QPNPbe9agK

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 23, 2016

Not only a world-premiere recording by @ifagiolini (and of the Milhaud, from 1919), but also a full film version :https://t.co/UPe7pRzwOI

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 23, 2016

All in all, whether one wants to relate to the majority of the texts that we heard before the Françaix as surréaliste, or in some other stylistic or genre terms, these composers brought out qualities in them, and likewise the members of I Fagiolini under Robert Hollingworth’s direction, that made them compelling, and highly inviting of our interest :

In his Lieder, Franz Schubert sometimes transformed poems to which one might otherwise not have devoted much attention : here, it was not that the poems of Éluard or Apollinaire were unattractive, but that interpreters such as Poulenc could, in and through their sound-world, cause their visions to open up – in a way that, beforehand, their words on the page, even in the French, did not easily allow one to experience…

And then tomorrow hopefully @ifagiolini at Emmanuel URC https://t.co/2ut25qiEoI for Amuse Bouche. A Weekend of Cultcha.

— Rachael Beale (@FlossieTeacake) July 22, 2016

Yes, off we go, crossing Continents to get to @cambridgemusic https://t.co/pRqYCjQORz

— Robert Hollingworth (@ifagiolini) July 23, 2016

To conclude by way of an encore, after the well-received strangeness of Jean Françaix’s text and its treatment, something more familiar still than the Satie pieces : ‘Baïlèro’ from Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne.



Very much a Post-script - Schumann, Surrealism, and Satie [in Satie’s Parade] :

In @BBCRadio3 from @cheltfestivals 2016, good to hear Pascal and Ami Rogé play Satie's Parade (for piano 4 hands) :https://t.co/2Ddgk4hhXs

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2016

Does one miss the seeming vividness of hearing orchestra, let alone the klaxon :

Now more like Davidsbündlertänze ? https://t.co/GSXjhlBiXI

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2016

Schumann's Opus 6, now being listened to, played by András Schiff - come and join me ! :https://t.co/mvsDLL46x7 https://t.co/c4h8U0LNhf

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2016

According to @Wikipedia, Guillaume Apollinaire described Parade as 'une sorte de surréalisme' (a kind of surrealism) in the programme-notes.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2016

One can read more about András Schiff here [from Kirshbaum Associates Inc., his representatives in North America], and Wikipedia® on Parade, Satie's Opus ??, here...



End-notes

* Regarding which the audience, wrongly, seemed almost more enthusiastic than the preceding Sept chansons (by Francis Poulenc)… ?


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

Here's to you, Dmitri S. !

Here's to you, Dmitri S. !

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25 July

Here's to you, Dmitri S. !

Not even knocking it back in one, but drinking it cold from the freezer with enthusiatic company (and on top of other drink), I know that there is a state of regretting having had so much vodka.

The existence of such enthusiastic company would offer support for the notion Any excuse for a drink ! being a current one, of course, which takes me back to this old old topic of anniversaries :

Is Myaskovsky - or are his works - suddenly more interesting because (as last year) it was 130 years since his birth ?


Or 200 years :

* Since his death

* Since he first vomited after too much vodka

* After he stubbed his toe on Poulenc in Montmartre (which he may have done), and so experienced an unexpected orgasm (which he may have done*) ?


End-notes

* But Twitter doesn't tell me...


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Britten and the concentration camps

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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14 February

[For which, of course, read extermination camps - or death camps.]

But can we really hear, in the writing of his String Quartet No. 2, that Britten had made a visit to these camps? Surely, if we could, we wouldn't need to be told the fact, because the music itself would tell us!

The essence of my point is the old, old one: does the detail of a biography (even an autobiography) inform how we listen to a composer's work*? If so, are we then not unbelievably alienated, according to that belief, from Bach's highly alive compositions, because we do not really know very much about his life?

After hearing a quartet, five or so years back, announce Shostakovich's inescapable String Quartet No. 8 in a different way from what predominates, I have been freed from crediting that old chestnut about the bombing of Dresden, even if the composer was, indeed, in Dresden to write music for a film about that very subject (Five Days, Five Nights), and wrote it there in the three days from 12 to 14 July 1960.

Rightly or wrongly, I feel that I can now hear that quartet without these supposed guides to an interpretative view of what is - purely - music: it is not, I believe, programme (or programmatic) music.

And we also ought not only to get a good chance for an airing of more than a dozen other string quartets except to mark the 52nd anniversary of his stubbing his toe in Dresden (a bit like Poulenc: 50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre).


End-notes

* Orrin Howard seems to inform us, regarding Britten, that 'In spite of his being a Britisher through and through, he didn't go the folk route of Vaughan Williams'. Well, yes...


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50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre

50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre

9 January

Do not misunderstand me - I have loved, even if I can never remember how to pronounce his surname, Poulenc's chamber works for a long time.

But to-day, a matter of weeks since it was played before on Radio 3, I have just heard again his Sextet for Piano and Wind, so some dubious anniversary must be afoot:

However, why not hear his glorious music more often just as a matter of course, as with that of Prokofiev (a proposition with which Susan Milan, who had just played his sonata for flute and piano at a recital, fully agreed and with the notion that he is underplayed in the repertoire)?

We really don't need these lame excuses such as its being 100 years since Groves pronounced somebody's music 'an abomination' to revisit them.


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