Category Archives: Talking heads

Talking Heads: Paul Agnew

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The conductor talks to Ben Hogwood about his forthcoming debut at Garsington Opera, where he will conduct Rameau‘s Platée – a work in which he has also sung the title role. Agnew talks about Rameau but also Handel, considering why now is a good time for British audiences to embrace the music of the French Baroque.

On a dark, dank winter’s day there is something incredibly heartening in having a discussion about the prospect of a summer opera season. Arcana has teamed up with conductor (and former tenor) Paul Agnew to do exactly that, and he is in optimistic mood. “It will arrive quickly, with the spring and the daffodils, and then we’ll find ourselves in Garsington!” he says. It will be his first visit to Wormsley Park, and to the festival. “I’m really looking forward to it. It’s one of those very original places, and it isn’t a dark theatre. It has windows, and so each production has to take into account that you’re going to have a part of that show in the light. I’ve never done that sort of thing, and the team is very nice. We had the model showing so we’ve seen the set, and the concepts, and it looks great. It will be a lot of fun, which it should be – but with that hint of tragedy, which is always lurking in Platée.”

He is talking about Rameau’s comic-tragic opera, which he will lead with a new team of soloists and The English Concert. It is the first excursion for Garsington into the world of French Baroque opera, but Agnew is returning to a piece he knows well. Indeed, he first encountered Platée as a singer. “I didn’t sing Platée – I sang Thespis in the Prologue. I was quite a young thing, and it was a production with the Opera de Paris. It’s a really hard role, extremely high – and obviously you go on at the top of the show. It’s a bit nervy. Then almost immediately I took on the role of Platée in that same production in Japan. That was released on DVD, which had a lot of success.”

He explains why. “Laurent Pelly did a genius job – and they found just the right balance in order that when we get to the end, where the audience have been cheerleading with the rest of the chorus and these horrible characters, and they find themselves in fact implicated in this terrible humiliation. I think he just found the right click. There was a gasp from the audience when they understood quite what a terrible thing this is. I wouldn’t want to exaggerate, but there is something political about it, and within the operas of Rameau – Les Indes galantes and certainly Les Boréades. They tend to have slightly monarchical reflections, and there’s a sense – if you know the film Ridicule – about how close you can get to the king but then you know you made a mistake, you didn’t use the right wig and so on, and you get sent straight back to the back of the queue. There’s a sense of that in Platée and the ridicule, as you would expect Jupiter – who essentially is Louis XIV – to be the hero. In fact, he’s the villain! It’s not exactly dangerous, but not politic either – Louis XV by then.”

Agnew has enjoyed a close affinity with Rameau throughout his career. “The very first thing I did in France, with William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, was record the Rameau Grands Motets. They’re relatively youthful pieces compared with the operas, which he didn’t start until he was about 50 years old. I love Les Grands Motets, partly because it’s surprising to find such incredibly sensual music for the church. They just seemed to suit my voice, and in fact it was one of the very first French Baroque things I did at all. You know you have those lucky things in in a long career where you ‘meet’ a music and you think, “Oh, my goodness, I’m really made for this!” I love the sentimentality of it, in the best sense of the term, I love the melody and I love the sensuality of the harmonies. That leads you through the line and tells you where you’re going constantly, so you can make the music into such a strong experience.”

Things moved quickly. “Almost immediately we started on the operas in the Opera de Paris, so we did Hippolyte et Aricie, then various roles in Les Indes galantes, and then we did Platée, which was with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre. Then we did Les Boréades, the last opera, which was never staged in his lifetime – he was 80 when he wrote it. It’s amazing to think he lived to 80, but happily he did! It’s an astonishing journey, very much like Platée but in a much more heroic way – he’s a real prince. So I did all those operas, and I’ve sung others – Castor et Pollux for instance – in concert. I’ve done a lot of the ballets, too. I’m a big fan, as you would expect! It’s the most extreme the Baroque gets, even more complicated in some ways than Bach. He was an amazing technician, and he’s stating things relatively clearly, whereas there’s a complexity of emotions in Rameau which really predate going into Gluck and then early Mozart. He didn’t die until 1764, so Mozart has already composed his first piece before Rameau dies. There is a big influence on Gluck, and everything that he says about the reform operas is what Rameau has been trying to do for years.”

Performing the operas as both a singer and a conductor has given Agnew a unique perspective. “It’s very helpful”, he agrees, “for the singers too. I’m naturally a singer’s conductor, as I want them to be able to breathe and recover and so on, because that’s the best for us. I’m not going to push them into a tempo which they can’t do, so we want to find the right tempo for the singer. If you’re a singer you understand that more clearly. It’s a good place to have been, whatever the music – I’ve sung a lot of Handel and Purcell, and now I conduct a lot of Handel and Purcell too. Having sung Platée itself, it makes me smile and I’m not in the least bit jealous about being on stage. I wouldn’t want to sing it again or go through that experience. It’s a long evening, and you’re on stage a lot. There’s a lot to sing, it’s quite hard, and it’s quite physical because it’s a comedy. There’s a lot of running around, and jumping – if you’re a frog! – and I’m happy to leave that to other people. I still absolutely love the piece, and to have that long association is very useful.”

Visitors to Platée’s page on the Garsington Opera website are presented with the image of a flamingo and a beachball (above), an immediately appealing prospect in the depths of winter. “I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I really like the way it’s being approached. We’re quite used to women playing men – that’s been around in Handel‘s Rinaldo, for instance, but the other way round is very much rarer. The only way in which the piece works is if she’s just a woman, you just get over it. I think Rameau’s idea was to define the strangeness to that person. It’s not about sexual politics, but not a woman as the gods would know – maybe asexual thing rather than being particularly transvestite or drag. I think we’re in the right direction in this production, where we just need to forget that the singer is a man, and just accept that this is a strange woman. She’s a nymph from the marshlands – we don’t know really what she is, a creature from the blue lagoon.”

It is the first time Agnew has encountered the work of director Louisa Miller and designer Christopher Oram. “I’m not sure they’ve done much Baroque before, so I wouldn’t have encountered them as that’s more or less my world. I like them very much. It’s not a very easy piece to approach dry – just to get your head around what Rameau could possibly be thinking about is quite hard. Right from the very first meetings we were clearly on the same page, and Louisa clearly knows the piece, which is very reassuring. As a singer you often get to the first rehearsal and find out the director doesn’t really know the piece very well, and you find yourself having to subtly guide the director through towards a good solution. That’s definitely not the case here! Chris’s designs are very good, it’s funny and relevant and they work throughout the piece. Sometimes at a first rehearsal you think, “This will work great in Act One, and Act Three, but Acts Two and Four will be a disaster because it just simply won’t work in this concept. This concept will work the whole way through, so I’m really encouraged. We’ve got a lovely cast, and also decided at the beginning we would take a cast where nobody had sung it before. Nobody arrives with preconceptions about how their role is, or how they would like to play it.”

There is a sense of great excitement that this is Garsington’s first foray into Rameau’s output. “Yes, and they’ve chosen well!” he says enthusiastically. “We’ve got a great band in the English Concert. I sang with them in my 20s, with Trevor Pinnock, and what an honour it is to direct them.” He expands on the repertoire at hand. “I’ve done French Baroque music with English bands before, and it is quite tricky. They’re technically such fantastic players, but it has a tricky accent, and you can’t get it just by reading the books. Again, it’s useful to be a singer in those situations because you can sing the sensuality of the line much more easily than you can describe it. I always end up singing quite a lot of rehearsals because it’s a visceral, physical reaction to what you hear, which makes it much easier. It will be a challenge for the band to get that accent right, but they’re eminently capable, and I’m massively looking forward to working with them.”

They are complemented by a strong team of soloists, who have equivalent challenges. “Equally, the singers are all English, so we need to get that right – and that’s not just question of pronunciation. There are all sorts of things about how the phrases are constructed, and how the ornamentation helps the grammar of the music. We will have time and we have a good cast, so that doesn’t worry me. You have to go quite deep into these pieces, especially doing this repertoire for the very first time in an opera house. It’s very rare to hear Rameau at all in the UK. I think Platée is the only piece that has been properly staged in the past, and that was a long time ago with the Royal Opera House. It’s very exciting, and there is a lot of interest from the public in French baroque music, so I look forward to that encounter! It is very complicated to put on, you need a ballet, an orchestra that knows their beans, and a cast willing to take risks with the ornamentation. It’s a courageous choice, but not an impossible one.”

Is the boundless supply of great music by Handel (below) in some ways to blame for the relative lack of French baroque music in the UK? Agnew smiles. “Handel’s an interesting one, because he would say, “You do get French Baroque – because if you look at the dances in Alcina, the overtures – you’re not missing out, I’ve written it myself!” In some ways, yes – but you could never say Handel’s at fault, because a house without Handel would be a disaster. You have to think as well that if Purcell had lived longer than the whole history of English music would have been very different. He died in 1695, and then they had a few abortive attempts to create English opera. Then there was an extraordinary moment where Handel arrives, and he creates this strange bastard form of Italian opera for English people, written by a German! You think it’s never going to work but he has this immense success, at least until the early 1740s.”

He goes into more detail behind Handel’s successful formula. “He is much more straightforward, he has the advantage – and I don’t mean to be disrespectful – that what you see on the page is what you get. Twenty to thirty years earlier, the ‘affect’ is everything. Once you start an aria you stay in that in that emotion until the end of the aria, and then a recitative will tell you what kind of emotion you’re going to go to in the next one. With Rameau it’s much, much more fluid than that, because things are changing very fast, and he goes towards complications where the likes of Pergolesi go towards simplicity. You get that break that comes around the time of French Revolution, a time of an immense social and cultural change. Handel is a chancer, isn’t he?! He’s in Italy, and then he knows that George of Hanover is going to be the next king of England, so he immediately goes up and gets a job in Hanover. The first thing the Hanoverians say is go to England, as a sort of spy-come-diplomat or equerry.”

The rest – as they say – is history, and Agnew relishes recounting the events. “And then, of course, George I turns up and it’s all set up for him to have this contact with the nobility, and the prestigious arrival of the king at his operas and so on. He’s bright, and gets it sorted right at the start! The other thing is he turns up in Italy, and produces these works that are effectively for the Catholic nobility and cardinals, and he is a straight, up and up Protestant Lutheran. And yet – business is business, you do what you want! He produces something for a public that don’t know anything about anything. Rameau can produce something much more technically difficult and also psychologically complex, because he’s simply joining the train. We’ve had Lully, Charpentier, Campra, and all the rest – and Handel arrives and takes all that on board, that melange between the original French style – which wasn’t French anyway, because Lully wasn’t French – and then he puts this new Italian virtuosity in. He’s joining this great movement, and dominates England completely!”

We move on from Agnew’s fascinating dissection of Handel and Rameau to talk about one of his mentors and accomplices, conductor William Christie (above). “He’s a theatre man, he wants to pick up the music and shake it and I love that. When you’re a singer, you absolutely want that because you don’t want someone saying, “Careful with the D sharp”, you want someone saying, “Come on, tell me the story!” I always much prefer those people  – and John Eliot Gardiner as well – who pick up the music and shake it, and have enough courage to say this music needs interpreters. The composer wants you to take it and make a show of it. That’s what Bill does, and absolutely what I try to do now as a conductor. You should take risks with it! These people were pragmatists, so if you’ve got someone who can sing this note but not that one, go with it. If you look at the history of Handel’s operas, or Messiah – there’s no definitive Messiah. He changed all the time, because he wanted to get the best out of who he had. It wasn’t saying, “This is my definitive work of art, have some respect and do it correctly”, it was, “Today it’s going to be like this, tomorrow it’s going to be different again, because I need to get the best that you have! I need to get great performance out of you. And that’s why it changes constantly. We don’t quite have that variance, but nonetheless you still have to have that attitude that you have to make a show. That goes straight through to Mozart – he is a show man. You want to start Cosi fan tutte with the overture thinking that you are making a show, not a homage. It’s an entertainment. You should laugh and cry and be frightened and happy, and all those things!”

Turning to Rameau again, he considers the composer’s standing. “He can be very funny, in the likes of Les indes galantes – and Platée is genuinely funny too. Rameau is always known as a surly bugger, when you read about him he is not at all a nice person – but he is really genuinely funny. To do comedy, as everyone knows, it’s much harder than just telling a joke – you have to have that special talent. He has that. It doesn’t mean that Boreades or Hippolyte aren’t amazing pieces, but when he wants to be funny he can be very funny.”

Rameau (above) is a colourful composer, too. “Everything is about colour”, agrees Agnew, “and he’s the first to really properly orchestrate, not just saying to the flutes to play the same as the violins. This is music just for flutes, just for the oboe, and then we’re just going to hear the strings coming in when when we need harmony. And then of course we’ll have a big string moment. It’s the beginning of colour in its best sense, not only harmonic colour but audible colour. The players suddenly find themselves pretty exposed in Rameau, particularly the bassoon parts. He’s a genius of the bassoon writing, and you get these incredible melodies, in Dardanus for example, with these sombre, reedy, mournful qualities. Some amazing colours.”

There is more, too. “And then he’s a great dancer! I think he has to be the best dance composer before Stravinsky. He has this incredible variety, within the ‘stock’ dances. Everyone knows straight away if it’s a Galliard or a Bourree, but they are so incredibly different. It’s a joy when the band understand it, too. I did Platée with the Dresden Staatskapelle, and a more serious orchestra you could not find – but once they got the idea that you could have fun and you could play out and take risks, they really went for it and it ended up great fun. There was a sort of trigger moment where we were doing a dance, and I kept on trying to get them to bow shorter, because they do hugely long bows, with fabulous, resonant instruments – nothing like the English Concert will play in Platée. I was trying to get them to play shorter and closer to the bridge, get a slightly sharper sound out of it. The shorter they got with the bow, the more they understood it and wanted to play out. It took off! Legato is a kind of aberration in this opera, everything else is short – so we charmed them out of certain – very good – habits.”

We bid farewell with one thing clear – Platée is in very good hands and a highly entertaining night is in prospect. “The main thing to say is that it’s a fun evening. You don’t need to worry if you don’t know much about French, or Baroque, or history. Just come and have a ball, it’s a fun evening, a fun piece with some very sharp twists!”

You can read more about the forthcoming production, and book tickets, at the Garsington Opera website

Talking Heads: Bruce Brubaker

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by Ben Hogwood

Pianist Bruce Brubaker is a man who likes a challenge. A prolific and highly respected performer of music by Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Meredith Monk – and recent collaborator with Max Cooper, Brubaker has in recent times turned his attention to the music of Brian Eno. In November he released an album of piano interpretations taken from the former Roxy Music keyboard player’s solo work – including a complete account of the seminal Music For Airports. The album, Eno Piano, has been released on the InFiné label, Arcana sat down with him to discuss the project, gleaning some fascinating insights into Brubaker’s world of contemporary and classical piano playing.

Given his impressive CV up until now, the music of Brian Eno appeared a logical step – albeit not an easy one. The genial pianist takes up the story. “No, because as you know, Music For Airports and almost all of Brian’s earlier work in this ambient area was studio music and he made it without really any kind of reference to live performing. There were no scores, no plan even! On Music For Airports he provides these little drawings showing you about the patterns involved, but the idea of playing it live was really very far away.

The prospect of recording Eno on the piano had great appeal. “I’m fascinated by the idea of using the wrong tools to make this music. In the original they are physical tape loops that have been used to make the sounds of Music For Airports, so when you hear a particular pattern of notes, and it’s repeated, you are literally hearing the same thing – the exact micro timings the exact balances are the same. In our version I’m playing those things by hand each time, so they’re not the same thing. It’s an interesting problem, and I kind of like it!”

It also resonates with Eno’s methods of composition. “You know Brian did that thing with Peter Schmidt called Oblique Strategies, with the deck of cards – one of my very favourite Oblique Strategies is “Repetition is a form of change”. That’s really a big part of this, so even when you use a tape loop, and play the same notes exactly in the same rhythm, exactly the same way, the effect to the listener / human is not exactly the same. We’re impinging on that, in a slightly different way, because now things are not identically the same. Perhaps the listener perceives this, perhaps they don’t. I think all that ambiguity is right in the neighbourhood of what he was doing in the first place.”

Certainly in music of this kind, the fifth instance – for example – of a melodic phrase is very different from the first, because of the listener being more ‘in the zone’. Brubaker agrees. “Absolutely. I think that as each person hears a piece of music, because of all the things you’ve heard before, the place you live, the sound environment you’re in, every single person – as they hear musical sounds – makes a new piece of music by listening. For everybody sitting in a room, at a concert or hearing a recording there’s a somewhat different piece of music being completed as they listen. That appeals very much to me and our sense of our own time, where people’s participation in the process of music is, I think, much greater. It’s not a passive thing. When you’re hearing something like Music For Airports, you really are invited or allowed to be inside and to make those connections yourself. It’s infinitely variable. Then when you come back and hear it again, it will also vary, so if you hear it for the tenth time, you probably don’t hear the same thing as you did in the beginning. I’m thinking of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, where he says something like, “I returned to the books that I read when I was a young man, and I find that they have changed”. Of course, he knows that they haven’t, the physical printed book is exactly the same – but different when he reads it. I think that that’s where we were trying to be with this.” The question also arises that if Brian Eno sat down to write Music For Airports today, we would end up with something very different. “Definitely”, he agrees.

In spite of its ambience, Music For Airports has a number of interpretative issues and is an intense experience for the performer. “One of the challenges was to figure out how much to allow these repetitions of the same material to vary, or how much to try to make them the same. As a human being, if repeat something over and over again, each one will be different. Do you intentionally push them to be different or not? It’s actually not that much different than playing other minimalist or repetitive music like Glass because I think it’s the same thing. I always found in Glass that if you intentionally varied something, it usually seemed like too much. The better way to do it was to be more like an observer and not really a participant. If you can get yourself into a state of being where you’re listening to the sound as it happens, but to be outside and hearing it happen, and then responding to whatever is unequal but not really making it happen. That is true here too, as it goes by, you monitor and notice the things that vary, but you’re not really making them happen. If you try to do that, then it almost always seems like a heavy hand too much.”

Brubaker’s detail is fascinating, as he moves on to consider his topic further. “I guess it’s true of a lot of kinds of art. One of the strange things about music that’s improvised versus music which is planned beforehand is that a lot of the music that we like, which is planned in advance, aspires to a quality of improvisation. Even if you’re listening to a Beethoven symphony, probably the best performance is the one that seems like it’s not written down, the one that seems like it just happened – even though we know that’s not true. If you map that on to the world of movies or theatre, that’s exactly the same, right? In a movie, for the most part, you understand the actors have learned their lines and rehearsed them many times, but if you’re lucky, you forget all about them. You have the sense that whatever the action is, in the scene you’re watching, it’s really happening. The same thing is true in music, you want to be engaged in what’s happening so that it seems like it’s just a spontaneous event.”

Although he cannot remember his first encounter with Eno’s music, Brubaker admits to a connection with the minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s. “I did get this idea of trying to play Music For Airports on the piano quite a while ago, but then there always seemed to be this big problem, which was how we can make very long sustained notes, because that’s such a feature of the piece – and some parts of the music actually have human singing. Then I heard this jazz pianist in America play a concert where he had modified one of these devices that electric guitar players use, the E-bow – and cut it down to put on one string inside a piano. He did an improvisation around this long droning note. I started to think maybe you could do that with the piano and use a bunch of E-bows to make long notes. Then almost by chance I was talking to one of the people at my record company who happen to know of an inventor in France, who had started working on a system like this, specifically for the piano. We met and started talking about it, and that is what we used for this album.”

He explains the methodology. “There are these electromagnets suspended over a piano string, and the string is allowed to vibrate either by putting down the pedal on the piano or in some other way where you can raise the damper. The electromagnet creates a signal that causes this vibration in the spring, which can be controlled very specifically with frequency. You can also produce overtones. Then we found with the lower strings, if you continually excite one of those strings, which are wrapped with another kind of metal, you actually get a pulse. This also fascinates me because we’ve never heard a piano string that was vibrating continuously! When you’re hearing piano sounds in a normal piece of music, you’re always just hearing the decay of that sound, you’re not really hearing the impulse and you’re the impulse for just a little tiny bit of time. What we’re doing now is we’re actually making the string vibrate for a long period of time, like you would on a violin. And so, you know, the nature of the tone, in some cases was really surprising because we’ve never heard it before.”

A new instrument, even! “I was joking about this, but I think it’s true. Eno Piano is not just the title of the album, it’s also an instrument. A long time ago Brian said that the studio is a musical instrument, so it is turning it around and showing that an instrument can also be a studio! The way we’re using it is something that really couldn’t have happened very, very long ago.” The emphasis falls on the string part of the piano rather than its percussive element. “There are other examples of course, in John Cage, and the American composer C. Curtis Smith, who wrote a whole bunch of music for pieces of string or fishing line were used inside the piano. I also played a Cage piece where you had to thread the strings through, and we were able to make a long tone that way.”

Brubaker had the pleasure of meeting Cage on several occasions. “I actually played with him a couple of times. I played Radio Music with him once, and a new chamber music piece he had written. I always found his effect was really very powerful and a spark towards something more. This chamber music piece, called Seven, he had notated using a heavy Japanese brush with ink, and so a lot of it was very difficult to read. The brush was irregular and some of the notes were very thick and some of them were very thin and scrappy and you couldn’t really tell what the notes were. I remember saying, “Mr Cage, can you tell me what the notes are in this chord?” He probably gave the ultimate advice that you could give to any musician in any situation. He said, “Just listen, and you’ll know what to do”, which I thought was pretty good. At the time I just wanted him to tell me what the notes were, but he wouldn’t do that!”

He also recalls a musical example. “I played a little solo piece called Dream, with a long meandering melody, a pretty piece like a lot of his music from the 1940s and early 1950s. I played a concert where he was giving a commentary and had played it from memory. One of the audience asked Cage, “What would happen in the performance if the pianist got lost?” Right away Cage said, “That would be wonderful!” That was good – and that touches this illusion of spontaneity, the illusion of something that isn’t planned. By getting lost, you might be found again. Even in the 19th century, it’s pretty well documented that pianists giving concerts from memory was a kind of substitution for people who didn’t improvise. When Liszt played his own music in public, he always held up the score so that people would know he was not improvising. That back and forth between what the music is and how it sounds is something very interesting, especially with the recent importance of sound artists. A lot of these people come from the visual art world, using sound not as music but as something that they can manipulate and sculpt. I think that actually connects back to Brian Eno. You could say he wasn’t really making music but more creating this sound environment, this space to be inside.  That boundary between written music and the world of sound has got much closer, and that will probably continue to be the case.”

One of Eno’s more recent compositions, the single-track album Reflection from 2017, comes to mind. “I think that’s the greatest achievement, being on the cusp of paying attention, or not paying attention”. Some of the pieces chosen on Brubaker’s album – By This River and The Chill Air – sound as written. In the live show we are using those two short pieces in the middle of Music For Airports which I was very sceptical about at first, but I think it does help and is good for the audience.”

Though Brubaker’s recent recorded output is more minimal, his background is steeped in classical music. “I trained as a classical pianist, and I taught at Juilliard for a long time. Even now the students I teach really are primarily interested in Beethoven and Liszt, not even going very far into the 20th century. Sometimes I feel like I almost have a double life! When I go out and do my own artistic work it tends to focus on much more recent things, but when I go back to teaching it’s Beethoven all the time. On the other side I still feel there’s a long connection, and that some of the things we’re talking about with non-directional music, which is to be completed by the listener, connect to what was happening in European music, maybe in the 10th and 11th century. If you go back long before the Classical period, before the composer identity was so formed, there were many other ways of making music, and in other musical cultures outside of European music. One of the things that happened, say with minimalism in the 1960s, is that some of that authority of the composer was lessened. It’s not so much a kind of top-down hierarchical format, and instead the listener, the performer are much more included in the complete art. I think that’s a good thing.

We always seem to blame Beethoven, but he really created a kind of art where the composer really was operating as a kind of God and, and making this musical experience where you weren’t really invited to be a participant. I’m probably overstating it a little bit because I think these different ways of using music exist in lots of kinds of music, so you can approach almost any piece with various ways of participating. But I think Glass actually is the one who said that he found that when you listen to a symphony by Beethoven, the climax generally happens at the same place every night and the organisation of the overall peace really remains the same. His contrast was going to see a play by Samuel Beckett, where the play seemed like a different experience each time he saw it. It was much more of a of a network of relationships rather than this narrative of beginning and development and progression to some kind of goal. It was less teleological if you want to go that way! A lot of European art of the 18th and 19th centuries was directed towards a goal, which could be very satisfying, and then there’s some kind of conclusion. On the other side, with a lot of minimalist music and repetitive music, you can argue that there is no ending – and no beginning either. You’re just in the middle. And of course, isn’t that the experience of life? You don’t remember being born and you haven’t died? So here we are, and I think that’s a very appealing art for our time.”

Finally we move on to discuss Brubaker’s work with Max Cooper, where the pair reinterpreted the music of Glass. “That was a really good project for me, I enjoyed it a lot. It was quite unpredictable, because there was this algorithm in use in the software that translated the signals from my piano playing. Every time we did the performance, those signals would vary slightly, depending on the precise touch, the dynamics, everything about the pedalling, and then those signals were controlling Max’s computers and his synthesizers. Every time we did the performance, that information that he received was really quite different, so what I would hear from him was really varying every day. So it was quite unpredictable, and sometimes it was a little confusing because it could be quite chaotic. What you hear on that album is actually a live show from Paris, and he did a little bit of changing because he didn’t like the quality of the sound. It was quite a voyage!”

Brubaker hasn’t spoken to Eno about his new project – yet – but the pair have conversed previously. “He’s working on the rehearsals for The Ship live show, which are using up all his time, as well as a bunch of other things. I started talking to him about this a long time ago, and I think he’s very open to the idea now of other people taking his music. I always wonder about that with very iconic pieces. I did some piano transcriptions of music by Meredith Monk, and that was a very interesting project where she was really very involved. It was complicated for her because she liked the idea that it was going to be her music heard in a different way, but at the same time she really wanted to be sure it was what she wanted. And I think Brian is not like that and has a very different attitude. In that sense, he is probably much open to other possibilities.”

Eno Piano rewards focussed listening – as well as giving the listener the option to draw back and observe from afar. Typically Brubaker, before he goes, is able to introduce another point of reference. “You probably know this piece that Erik Satie wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, called Furniture Music. My understanding is that he wrote it for some kind of art gallery, some kind of show that was being given. He had the musicians in the room, and he told the audience not to pay attention to them – but he got unhappy because when the musicians started to play the audience got quiet! They were listening intently, and Satie was unhappy because he wanted them to ignore it. I rather liked that.”

You can listen to Bruce Brubaker’s Eno Piano below – and explore digital purchase options. Click here for Bruce Brubaker’s website, and here for his InFiné artist page

Talking Heads: Katharine Dain & Sam Armstrong

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by Ben Hogwood

Soprano Katharine Dain and pianist Sam Armstrong are on the other side of a screen, talking to Arcana from the Netherlands – where Katharine lives, and where Sam stayed during lockdown. Their musical partnership blossomed in that time, yielding the intriguing collection Regards sur l’Infini, grouping songs by Messiaen, Delbos, Debussy, Dutilleux, and Saariaho. The sequel – and principal topic of conversation here – is their new recording Forget This Night, a carefully curated selection of songs by Lili Boulanger, Karol Szymanowski, and Grażyna Bacewicz on 7 Mountain Records. Headed by Boulanger’s special cycle Clairières dans le ciel (Clearings in the sky), its subject matter is very different.

“In some ways we were worried that the music was going to be too similar, very thoughtful and intense”, says Katharine, “which the first one also was. As we went along, we realised that no – thematically and musically, it’s very, very different. It is a continuation, we hope, but not anything directly related to the first. It’s all the kind of material that we gravitate to anyway, and of course it’s helpful to be validated in our choices the first time, to realise that people really do respond to them in the same way that we do if it’s presented thoughtfully and at the best level we’re able to give. For us we had already started to think about the next music we wanted to look at, before we knew the kind of reach our first album would have. Yeah. So this Lili Boulanger cycle was really the beginning of the second project, but it’s already something that you begin to think about when you’ve spent so long on one programme. Your brain immediately starts to wander, and both ours had started to do that!”

Given the intensity of the songs chosen, and their heady, emotional content, did the music take a toll on the performers? “The Boulanger cycle is particularly intense,” agrees Sam, “and it’s great to see Boulanger getting much more exposure in concerts and also recordings. With this cycle the emotional scope doesn’t fully reveal itself unless you hear all 13 songs together. The last song is devastating, and Katharine doesn’t always make it with dry eyes. It’s a really intense cycle.”

The fact we have any music at all from Lili Boulanger is remarkable, given her story of life and death from tuberculosis at the age of 24. “I think so too”, agrees Katherine. “Before we embarked on this project, I knew her name and a few pieces, but didn’t really know a lot of her music. I had been influenced, I realised in retrospect, by this idea of her as a fragile flower who died before she could really do anything significant. I couldn’t disagree more with that now that I do, but it took some real investigation of the music itself, of what turned out to be a major work. As Sam said, you don’t know it unless you go into it completely and find out what’s there. It was a real revelation, worth all the intensity and being drained after the performances!”

Throughout Clairières dans le ciel the singer needs an unusual amount of vocal control, with some long notes to master. Katharine laughs, modestly. “That’s very true! It took a long time until I felt I was typically integrated with what she asks. The original singer who premiered it was a tenor, and that gives it a different sound of course, but it’s not easy for a tenor as it’s for a high voice that could be a soprano or tenor. There is an amazing story that I find very touching, which is that when she wrote the piece it was the beginning of World War One. Normal performances weren’t really happening in France, and she was busy with the cycle, doing her best in her first year after winning the Prix de Rome composition prize. She wrote this major piece and had to do a private ‘try out’ of the premiere, where she sang all 13 songs herself and Nadia played the piano. That was the only time she ever heard or experienced her own song cycle live, when she sang it. I thought about that so much because the songs are so challenging to sing, they’re really tough and ask a lot of you. Yet somehow Lili, not a professional singer or even a performer, managed to do it in a home for a few friends as an unofficial premiere. Something about that inspires all of us – professional or not – to try to meet the challenges of these amazing songs!”

The challenges are by no means restricted to the singer, with the pianist battling some quasi-orchestral writing to evoke a whole range of colours. Armstrong smiles. “Towards the end of the cycle it really opens out in scale, and suddenly all these changes and fragments, and the breaking apart of everything to represent what’s happening emotionally give it a bigger scale than the standard song repertoire. It’s emotionally very intense, and a lot of the transitions in the music are directly related to the psychology of the text. They are difficult to navigate and you really have to think about you do that. The counterpoint is not simple, either!”

To complement the Boulanger’s cycle there are two more of her songs and two piano pieces, along with works by Szymanowski and Bacewicz. As Polish composers, their language is a marked but welcome contrast to the French songs. “I’m so glad, if that’s how it feels to you”, says Katharine warmly. “That’s certainly how it felt to me in preparing it. Polish is a really tough language in which to sing. I had done a bit of Szymanowski in the past but not a lot, so it was a big hill to climb, but it also created different chapters in terms of my ability to assimilate the music. It really directly affects how you think about the score, the way the vocal line unfolds. Once you learn about the way sounds travel in Polish through the mouth – vowels and consonants – it’s very different from other languages, but it has the same kind of specificity as French. They both have to be really precise, the position in the mouth, the position of each of the parts of the mouth – the tongue, how the lips are shaped, what the space inside is like – all of these things are super specific, and I had great help with that. Once I began to get a handle on the Polish, not that I am singing it like a native speaker would, I began to understand the music better too. That allowed me to understand the emotional temperature of the songs as a result, so it really was an important part of the preparation. If it feels like differentiated sections on the programme then I’m very glad because that was something we were aiming for.”

The songs are an area of Szymanowski’s output that feel ‘off limits’ in recent times. “I find it so strange”, says Katharine, “as his piano and violin pieces are a lot better known, and his opera King Roger has been done in London not that long ago. It’s a stunning piece, and I think that’s how you got to know it?”, she says, turning to Sam. “Yes”, he confirms. “I’ve done the Myths for violin and piano but that really reignited my imagination for his sound world. It’s really special. “The songs are quite hard to programme though”, says Katharine. “I’ve known songs of Szymanowski for a long time, and I’ve really loved them – but I’ve sung one complete cycle of his which is the Songs of The Infatuated Muezzin, a particularly beautiful piece. Apart from that, I have never done a complete song cycle of his. When we were thinking about what to put on this disc, we loved the music and knew it would be a great pair with Boulanger, but then which cycle or chunks of songs to choose? We figured out that’s probably why we don’t hear the songs more often. Every cycle has a big challenge, a big thematic difficulty, not all of the songs are of equally high quality, or dramatically it doesn’t create the kind of story we look for in song cycles. So we decided what we would love to do is think about the developing theme of the program, which is how do we cope with things that vanish or things that disappear, and pick and choose with that?

Their approach paid dividends. “The whole world of Szymanowski opened up to us in a beautiful way and suddenly many things became possible that are not possible when thinking of his own groupings of songs. I would hope more people can start to think outside the box of just the groupings, the cycles, the opus numbers, because it’s such a rich and beautiful repertoire and you don’t have to think of it that way to make a nice programme.”

It is an easy trap to fall into with songs, thinking they should only be sung in the groups in which they were published. Is it the case of some composers randomly putting songs together but all of them being published at the same time? “That’s exactly it”, confirms Katharine, “and this is the funny thing about the song cycle, this term that we’ve come to associate with anything from 3 to 24, any number of songs. It meant different things at different times, and to different composers. There are some famous 19th century examples of pieces that were conceived complete, but for the most part they were mostly songs published at the same time for a commercial reason, which is that someone could take home a book of songs and get to know them. With Szymanowski he was such a prolific song composer, and some of the groups have a real cohesion and a reason for them being together. We found the songs don’t necessarily suffer if you sample them out of context and are stronger as a result than if you just try to stick to an opus number. For us it was an eye=-opening approach.”

The songs of Bacewicz were an unexpected find. “That was a real discovery. I found out that Bacewicz is a figure known in orchestral circles and in chamber music circles, because she was a violinist and wrote beautiful music for strings. A lot of string players and pianists I know had played her or a few of her pieces. Singers know nothing about her, because she didn’t write very much vocal music at all. She only has 11 songs, I think – a very small number. They were only recorded for the first time as a collection of her complete songs for voice and piano in the year before our recording, so it was luck that I was able to actually hear them.”

There is an intriguing historical context, too, meaning her music fits the collection hand in glove. “I had come across her name, and liked her string music once I started to listen to it, and I found this interesting biographical continuity, because Lili Boulanger and Szymanowski lived at the same time. They didn’t meet each other but they were inspired by many of the same things, writing music that was fearless, imaginative, colourful and with no ceiling on the kind of emotional intensity. There was something really common between them, but then we were hoping to find some sort of cooler composer in terms of the emotional temperature of the music, to mop up all that intensity but still be in the same world. We thought for a while about Lutoslawski, and there are some beautiful ones by him that are more known, but eventually I just bumped into Bacewicz, I came across her almost by accident. A friend mentioned the name of this composer and I said, “Wait, who’s that? That sounds Polish?” “Well, yes, she was Polish.” “Wait, she?! Who is this?!” So that that was how it began.”

Her fascination with the composer deepened. “Once I started looking into it, and found out that the songs had just been recorded, I thought they were fantastic. It turns out she was a student of Nadia Boulanger in the 1930s, so there’s something a little bit different in her influence. She was the generation after Szymanowski, so would have known Szymanowski she was studying at Warsaw when he was the head of the Conservatory. There seemed to be a continuation of the family of music that was coming as a result of all Szymanowski’s innovations and from the Boulanger sisters, but by then she was really doing her own thing. I found it very interesting, very fresh, and the music very beautiful. Although it’s also intense, it does have a different way of interacting with the emotions of the texts, than Szymanowski or Boulanger.”

One poem, Parting by Rabindranath Tagore, appears on the album in contrasting settings by Szymanowski (in German) and Bacewicz (Polish). One wonders when they encountered it in their lives and how that affected them? “I find it so interesting”, says Katharine. “In that one poem that is on the album twice, although in different languages. Szymanowski’s approach is so melancholy and so hopeless, and Bacewicz has no fear in expressing anger. I’ve thought about the pressure on women, and women composers, and then women composers of songs, what kinds of pressure they have to create things that are just very beautiful. For a long time I think that’s what people expected women to produce – songs in a domestic form, rather than a big orchestral form met for the concert hall, things that were beautiful and pleasant to listen to. Bacewicz really broke all those moulds, writing music that is rhythmic and super spiky. That setting of that song I found it very cool that the setting was completely different than Szymanowski’s and was very angry. I really liked that about it.”

Armstrong’s approach to Bacewicz’s music was similarly fresh. “Her music was new to me. Interestingly I was teaching a class of students about the Piano Sonata no.2, which is quite beautiful, and has been played quite a lot in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately there is not much music for piano by Lili Boulanger, though two of her three pieces are on the album – and then with Szymanowski I did some of the chamber music actually. Szymanowski is more familiar to me by ear than stylistically, he is very specific but also quite accessible. With Boulanger the influences are obvious in a sense, certainly Wagner and Fauré I hear in there, but the voice is really her own, especially in the song cycle, where the forms are quite unconventional. It is a question of finding your way in and the prose, the essence of the language. As Katharine was saying, in Bacewicz it’s much more paired down and concentrated, in a way that I think is more expressionist than Szymanowski.”

Dain and Armstrong worked in each other’s company through lockdown, where their creative relationship was cemented – enough for them to have plans for further collaborations. “We always have far more ideas than we can ever implement or use!” laughs Katharine. “Coming up with interesting ideas and music that I love and want to explore further is never the challenge. With this project, because we’re not Covid-locked down anymore, we’ve spent as much time on this as we did on the previous disc, probably more. The question is that in the end it’s going to require a huge investment, so what is going to light such a fire under you that you’re willing to put in the amount of time that we want to? Not everybody approaches recording in the same way, but what’s been so rewarding for us has been giving ourselves as much time as we can until the answers arrive, and you can’t force them. The Boulanger cycle we started by performing live, and did one recital, and it blew our minds how amazing it was – but that only came by performing it. We realised in rehearsal that this is a major piece, more than we realised, but only in performance did it really hit us what an impact it can have. That was already more than two years ago, since when we’ve performed it as much as we could, and every time we do we have to go back and spend another few days or a week revisiting it, uncovering new things, and trying to set aside our old ways of coping with the score’s challenges in order to get to a truer version each time, a version that’s more honest. It’s really hard but it’s also the biggest pleasure of the work.”

Looking forward, “I have an idea – one at the top of my mind – and many others lining up behind that idea! We just have to see as we begin to try music together, and that’ll be the next step. We’re always doing that for fun, thinking about future recital programmes, whether they become recording products or not, and finding out what really makes us so passionate that we have to spend the time and we have to do all that discovery.”

Turning to live performance, Katharine has Finzi’s Dies natalis on her concert schedule in the Netherlands, where they both live. Is the piece a curiosity for Dutch audiences? “It’s my first time performing it, and it’s so amazing, but Finzi is really not very well represented here. I would say in general English language – American and British – is not performed so often. I really jumped at the chance when this opportunity came along. It was going to be a Christmas concert, and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra – a wonderful orchestra – had their programming already, but when they proposed this and I had to do it! I never get to do Finzi unless it’s on recital, and I choose it for fun with Vaughan Williams or English composers in the same period. Mostly it’s me having to advocate for them, so that was very exciting!”

Is their hope for the new album a similar aim, to bring in new listeners – as well as retaining those who enjoyed the first album? “Both of those are equally important to us”, she says, “and whether we’re thinking about people who are inside or outside of the experience of listening to art song albums already. There’s a very niche market for people who already know what they’re getting when they see this, even within people who like song. We’ve discovered that these are three composers that – although the combination might be intriguing – people really have no idea what they’re going to hear. There are several simultaneous goals. One is that for people who love song, but don’t know that there are good songs by these people, that they will listen and realise that the song repertoire is fantastic. The Boulanger is an overlooked masterpiece, and people don’t know that yet because it’s not heard very often. But then we felt equally passionately about Szymanowski and his songs. If you think you love hearing song recitals, but haven’t heard any of these composers represented on a song recital yet, you can listen on a recording at home and realise there’s really good stuff here. Let’s let’s try to get into performance!”

They have clearly considered their output, for Armstrong nods in agreement as Katharine talks. “In the end”, she says, “we also didn’t want to make something that only would be of cerebral specialist appeal. We hoped to make something that if you know nothing about any of this music at all, you could still listen from beginning to end if you chose, to feel an emotional shape and hear very beautiful songs in a very thoughtfully laid out sequence – the same way you would for anything else, like pop music. That’s why we spend all this time digging up music that people haven’t heard yet, because it turns out to be super emotionally powerful and direct and beautiful.”

She cites a recent event supporting their approach. “Last week we did a release concert for the album, and someone in the audience was a pop musician I know who had seen how passionate I was about this project, though this person had absolutely no experience listening to classical songs. They came to the show with an open mind, and they write pop albums, concept albums, single songs. At the end of the show, they loved it – and said “It’s the same as what I do, they’re songs! They each have a feeling, or series of feelings, and they go on a journey from start to end. There’s no difference in what we do except that the style is different!” To me that felt like such a happy validation, and the work that we do to build bridges. This is actually just music that you haven’t heard yet, but anyone can relate to. We feel equally strongly about these two goals for the album.”

The example adds fuel to the theory that Schubert was, in fact, one of the very first writers of the early pop song. “I completely agree!” says Katharine, “and I didn’t instantly like song when I heard it on recordings. When I was 19 years old and encountered Schubert I had no experience with it before. I liked pop songs and choir music, and that was how I got into singing, not through classical solo singing at all. When I first encountered it I found it strange and stylized, and a bit off putting, but when I heard it live and realised that it’s just about how someone is putting across a story in a different way, I found the music is really beautiful once you get a chance to experience that more easily.” How reassuring – to hear a singer’s own story behind an initial struggle to love song, for this is an area of classical music receiving less column inches than most. The next part of the process is for you, the reader, to get out there and start listening – for the same transformative experience can most definitely be yours.

Katharine Dain and Sam Armstrong present their new album Forget This Album on 7 Mountain Records. You can order the album at the 7 Mountain Records website, or listen below:

Talking Heads: Kenneth Woods – Ten Years After…

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Just a decade after he became conductor of the English Symphony Orchestra, Kenneth Woods looks back on his varied career in the US and UK, then considers what might be coming next.

interview by Richard Whitehouse

Autumn customarily sees the start of a new concert season for UK orchestras – except when, of course, the requisite financial support is not forthcoming. That could easily have been the case for the English Symphony Orchestra were it not for its ambitious schedule, as detailed in the document Music for Humans, which reflects the convictions and the vision of several persons who work for and as part of this ensemble – notably its chief executive officer Seb Lovell-Huckle and, above all, its principal conductor and artistic director Kenneth Woods.

With his extensive discography and frequent appearances online or on radio, Woods is not exactly a ‘best kept secret’ among British or – given he hails from the USA – British-based musicians, but his contribution to British musical life during the past two decades is a very substantial one and worth reflecting on for any consideration of music-making in the UK during that period. Speaking to him recently in Worcester, where the ESO has its HQ and gives many of its concerts, brought some of these achievements into closer perspective.

A native of Madison (capital of the state of Wisconsin and which, situated adjacent to five lakes with various historic landmarks including several buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, surely ranks among the most visually striking cities of America’s upper mid-west), Woods did his early academic training here and at Indiana University before doctoral studies at the University of Cincinnati. Here he studied conducting at the College-Conservatory of Music and assisted Jesús López Cobos, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

Subsequent mentors included Leonard Slatkin, David Zinman and Jorma Panula, but the most decisive influence was Gerhard Samuel (above) who, in 21 seasons with the Cincinnati Philharmonia, programmed a wide range of unfamiliar and contemporary works. Those who were present are unlikely to forget their London visit in 1989 featuring the UK premiere of the Symphony by Hans Rott, while his later recordings include Larry Austin’s realization of Ives’s Universe Symphony and the entertaining ‘Symphony of 1825’ allegedly by Schubert but now known   to be a publisher’s concoction – on both of which, Woods features in the cello section. Also   a composer, with a distinctly though never inflexibly contemporary idiom, Samuel remains    a totemic musical figure whose undoubted significance Woods continues to acknowledge.

‘‘Working with Gerhard was important not just in terms of honing my conducting technique, but also in helping me to understand that the responsibility of a conductor give audiences a chance to hear works from outside the canon, whether new works or lost works of the past. His long experience of bringing to life pieces such as Hans Rott’s Symphony and Mahler’s orchestration of Beethoven’s Ninth showed me the positive impact a conductor can make simply by giving an unknown work a chance to be heard rather than simply written about.”

The latter was a challenge Woods took on with directorships of the Grande Ronde Symphony and Oregon East Symphony orchestras at the end of the last century then into the new one. During the 2000’s he also maintained an active collaboration as Principal Guest Conductor with the Rose City Chamber Orchestra in Portland. Guest engagements included the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Northern Sinfonia and the State of Mexico Symphony (a 2004 account of the first movement from Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony can be heard on YouTube below). He continued (and continues) to appear as a cellist, notably as part of the string trio Ensemble Epomeo with whom he worked widely in the decade from 2008 and made several recordings.

‘‘Playing with Epomeo was a great opportunity to explore a repertoire which is much more extensive than often imagined, and to extend that repertoire through timely revivals and new commissions. It also enabled us to approach the issue of music education a slightly different way, the Auricolae album bringing new music to younger listeners via the retelling of often familiar stories and commissioning composers whose music they’ll more than likely enjoy when they’ve heard it. Any regret at disbanding was tempered by the knowledge of what we achieved over that decade, and what we all learned from that intensity of collaboration with one another. I’d hope we can be proud of what we’ve contributed to the string trio medium’’.

Having relocated to the UK in the mid-2000s and pursued a varied freelance career, Woods’s major break came when he was appointed principal guest conductor of the Orchestra of the Swan in 2009. The following four years brought several notable projects, most significantly a first recorded cycle of the symphonies by Hans Gál. Although he lived out his long life as a respected pedagogue in Edinburgh, Gál never regained the eminence he enjoyed in Germany and Austria prior to the Third Reich. Both as cellist and conductor, Woods has done as much as any musician to bring about fuller reassessment of a composer who not merely continued the Austro-German lineage but took this in often unexpected and intriguing directions. Even the cycle of symphonies had come about through an unlikely succession of circumstances.

‘‘Having conducted the first recordings of Gál’s orchestral music [Violin Concerto, Violin Concertino and Triptych for Orchestra] with the Northern Sinfonia, our producer Simon Fox-Gál [grandson of the composer] and I were excited to do the symphonies together. Thomas Zehetmair and the Northern Sinfonia had already recorded the first two for Avie, so Simon thought it would be diplomatic for me to start with the Third and Fourth to avoid any direct competition. It was my dear friend Melanne Mueller [Managing Director of Avie] and her husband Simon Foster [Avie’s co-founder] who suggested before we’d recorded a note that we announce this project as a complete cycle. It was a big risk as we didn’t have funding in place, but things don’t happen in this business unless you decide to make them happen. I was keen from the start to couple each of these symphonies with one by Schumann, as this gave a relevant context for listeners to approach Gál while allowing me to record interpretations of works that I’d often conducted and about which I felt I had something worthwhile to say’’.

The critical and popular reaction to these releases certainly justified the confidence placed in Woods by label and producer. The resulting cycle, part of the Avie label’s extensive coverage of Gál’s output, was later reissued as a standalone double-set but the originals remain of value for underlining the continuity of thinking across centuries between these composers and their aesthetic connections. Was Woods at all surprised that these recordings failed to translate into public performances of the Gál symphonies, or that other conductors failed to take them up?

‘‘More disappointed than surprised. Much unfamiliar music remains so, not through its lack of appeal for players or listeners but because orchestra managers and promoters simply won’t take any risk – preferring to schedule what they know will attract an audience, without any real thought as to expanding a repertoire that has become more restricted in terms of Baroque or Classical music through notions of authenticity, and in contemporary music because of the failure to commission more substantial pieces as might occupy the second half of a concert’’.

It was just such thinking that Woods was able to put into practice with the English Symphony Orchestra. Founded by William Boughton in 1978 as the English String Orchestra and based in Malvern, it enjoyed a successful spell in the concert hall and recording studio – promoting a wide range of music with an emphasis on British music of the early and mid-20th century. Having stood down in 2006, Boughton was replaced by a sadly ailing Vernon Handley – his death two years later leaving the orchestra in a period of uncertainty until 2013, when Woods became director of its Malvern concert series – becoming principal conductor the following year and its artistic director in 2016. From the outset, he was keen to make commissioning and recording of new pieces central to the ESO’s activities. Its first such undertaking was the 2014 violin concerto Wall of Water by Deborah Pritchard, which also saw the orchestra renew its long-term association with the Nimbus label, but Woods was already thinking in terms of a more ambitious strategy which duly resulted in the ESO’s 21st Century Symphony Project.

‘‘Three events led me to conceive of this project. First, early on in my conducting studies, my experience of learning Brahms’s First Symphony when I found myself imagining the amazing feeling those present at the premiere in 1876 must have had in witnessing a seminal addition to the repertoire. Why shouldn’t it be possible to enjoy a similar experience today? Second, performing Philip Sawyers’s Second Symphony with ’the Swan in 2013 when the musicians, listeners and I all experienced something akin to those at the premiere of the Brahms. Third, having commissioned Philip’s Third Symphony when I joined ESO, I realised that it needn’t be a one-off. My new post with the ESO was the catalyst so here we are over a decade later – the project having come through a pandemic and associated lockdowns, with six symphonies commissioned and premiered, and more to follow as we start on this project’s second phase’’.

Indeed, what started out as the commissioning, performing and recording of nine symphonies in as many years has evolved into a process featuring composers new to and already involved with the project. Following on from Sawyers’s Third, it has seen the premieres and recordings of David Matthews’s Ninth, Matthew Taylor’s Fifth, Steve Elcock’s Eighth, Adrian Williams’s First and Robert Saxton’s Scenes from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Six very different works from six very different composers, all confirming the validity of the symphony in the present day.

Alongside this project, Woods revived the ESO’s Composer-in-Association chair – beginning with John McCabe then, after his untimely death in 2015, the post was re-named in McCabe’s memory and has since been occupied by Philip Sawyers (now Composer Laureate), Adrian Williams, David Matthews and Steve Elcock. Again, the exact nature of this role depends on  the incumbent but Woods is keen these composers represent who the ESO is and what it does.

‘‘It’s not just a matter of commissioning then premiering their new works, but of having their active involvement at the time of composition and rehearsal; of reviving some of their earlier pieces, and maybe getting their input as to how we might schedule their music in the context of an overall concert. Hopefully it also gives audiences the chance to become more familiar with the composer as a ‘real person’ instead of merely a name in the programme. I feel sure that the quality of what these composers have been writing for us is its own justification’’.

In addition to overseeing the ESO’s educational and social activities (not least the ESO Youth Academy with its extensive schedule of courses at beginner, intermediate or advanced levels, performances by ESO musicians at residential care-homes and ‘relaxed’ concerts of a more informal nature), Woods has a longstanding blog A View from the Podium that tackles issues pertinent to the music-world from a wholly non-partisan angle; unafraid to stir controversy on topics of wider relevance than is often evident from their coverage in the mainstream media.

Since 2018 Woods has been in charge of the Elgar Festival – a two-day series of concerts and recitals with related events held on the weekend nearest to the composer’s birthday (June 2nd), while making full use of the various places and venues associated with Elgar’s home county.

‘‘Given the region in which most of our concerts take place, it made sense to revive the Elgar Festival and perform his music at venues associated with his life and work in the region. It’s also been a welcome opportunity to include music by recent and contemporary composers who come audibly within the Elgar lineage, and I’m aiming with next year’s festival to try a reordering of the conventional concert programme to feature familiar pieces by Elgar next to others that might spring a few surprises, but which I hope the audience will enjoy hearing’’.

It would be remiss not to mention the Colorado MaherFest which Woods took over from long -serving founder Robert Olson in 2016, and whose remit he has successfully expanded while remaining true to the spirit of an event endorsed by the International Gustav Mahler Society.

‘‘Taking on directorship of MahlerFest after Robert was a daunting prospect given how many years he had been at its helm and the performance tradition he’d established during that time. Of course, I have my own convictions as to Mahler interpretation, and our performances have been able to utilize recent developments in scholarship such as the new critical edition of the First Symphony [published by Breitkopf and Härtel] we gave in 2019. Here again, I was keen to expand the context in which this music was performed – both in terms of medium, Mahler having left little else apart from symphonies or songs, and in other composers heard here. We think of programming in terms of celebrating Mahler’s influences such as Beethoven, Wagner and Schumann. Also we explore his artistic and creative ties to contemporaries in a variety of media – whether artists like Klimt and Roller, writers, philosophers or, of course, composers. We’ve performed contemporaries like Robert Kahn and Zemlinsky, and last year there was Alfredo Casella [the First Cello Sonata], who was an active supporter of Mahler’s music in Italy when it was all but unknown there.”

The festival also aims to look forward. “Finally, we try hard to raise awareness of the music of composers who were influenced by Mahler. This includes modernists such as Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, together with more tonal composers such as Krenek, Schulhoff and Weill. This opens the door to the music of those composers who were either murdered or forced into exile by the Nazis such as Krása, Gál or Ullmann; not to mention such as Korngold, Waxman and Steiner, who founded the art of film scoring as we understand it today. This can only lead to a wider appreciation of Mahler’s legacy and hopefully encourage others to seek out music they would otherwise not have performed or heard, thereby enriching their own experience’’.

A more recent move has been making the final concerts of MahlerFest available on CD or for download, enhancing a discography that makes Woods among the most recorded of present-day conductors. Along with releases for the Avie, Nimbus, Signum, Somm and Toccata labels, plans are well advanced for the ESO’s own label – drawing on a wealth of material recorded at the Wyastone studios in Herefordshire during the pandemic and its aftermath, besides such as the complete symphonies of Sibelius. Nos. 5, 6 and Tapiola are planned as the first release.

There may be lots to be proud of in terms of achievement, but Woods is hardly one to rest on his laurels, not least because the future of those projects here outlined – indeed, even the very future of the ESO is not something that could, or should, be taken for granted. A full schedule of events is now in place until next spring, with much in the pipeline after that as long as the finances are there to make it happen. Given that his negotiating skills are no less adept than his conducting skills, Woods is quietly optimistic that things will come together as intended.

‘‘It’s not always been an easy process in securing funds to make possible what we’ve wanted to commission and perform, but then nobody working in this field in the UK expects to have it easy, so I’m just pleased that we’ve accomplished as much as we have so far. There’s much more that I want to achieve with the ESO, so we’ll have to keep finding ways to make things happen. What I do know is that there are composers who have much to give an audience, and that these listeners are more than willing to give this music a try given the right conditions’’.

Such things are vital, not least at a time when the value of what might reasonably be called the Western Cultural Tradition is being questioned as never before. This being the case, and while accepting that ‘the situation’ is likely to get worse before getting better, can one look forward to a further 10 years of the English Symphony Orchestra with Woods at the helm? ‘‘It might be best to ask me that in 10 years’ time, but I’d hope the answer would be ‘yes’’’.

Talking Heads: Anna Thorvaldsdottir

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by Ben Hogwood

Arcana is very fortunate to have time with one of the finest composers of this generation, Icelandic creator Anna Thorvaldsdottir. With two albums of her new music just released, she has also been enjoying elevated status as a featured composer of the Aldeburgh Festival. We began by talking about her formative experiences of East Anglia’s premier music event.

“I was at the Aldeburgh Festival last year”, she begins, “and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra performed my piece Catamorphosis then. Aldeburgh is such a lovely place, so beautiful, and it has a special aura. It is so focus but also beautifully relaxed. Everybody is there to enjoy music and art, and it’s so special.” The aura of Benjamin Britten, the festival’s founding father, is at every turn, but in a forward thinking way. “It’s beautiful how things grow. Of course he planted all the seeds, and that’s apparent everywhere, but it also feels so open as an event.”

Britten, of course, portrayed his home surroundings of Aldeburgh through incredibly vivid music, music that speaks of a time and place as powerfully as any British music. Is that something Anna is conscious of reflecting with her home country of Iceland? “I have never approached my music from describing nature, or natural phenomena. For me it’s more about the energy, and when I am inspired by nature it’s much more about the energy of nature and the construction – how you can sense details and perspective between them. Of course nature is all around us, and while I come from Iceland – my roots are there – I lived for a while in California, and now here. There are such different atmospheres in the different types of nature, and that’s very inspiring. For myself it has never been about describing that in music, but allowing for the inspiration to seep in when there are things I find musically interesting in the in the atmosphere and the energies.”

She is not aware of having changed her approach in California. “Not so that I know! I think these types of things are perhaps easier to analyse a bit later for oneself, but there are different energies. Also, when I was in California, I was thinking a lot about Iceland because I wasn’t there. I had never lived away from Iceland before, so it was a different kind of energy. I didn’t recognise that I wrote differently but then again you are always evolving and growing, and while wherever you are plays a big part in that growth, it’s hard to identify for yourself specifically.”

The reactions to Catamorphosis have been very strong. “It’s been really wonderful. The circumstances under which that piece was premiered were very unique, because the Berlin Philharmonic managed to have the world premiere at a time where everything was on lockdown, and they could do that over their digital concert hall, in front of an empty hall. That is a very apocalyptic aura that comes with that, and it suited the piece in very strange way. I would have never chosen this of course, but it was a very special aura, even though I was not able to be there! I had so many long talks with Kirill Petrenko, the conductor. I have been really pleased with the reception since then, and now it has now been performed in many concerts with an audience. It’s been a special ride with that piece, for sure!”

The orchestra in Catamorphosis feels like a very big engine, but the light can change according to Thorvaldsdottir’s scoring. “I really enjoy working with different types of energies in my music, and I really spend a lot of time on structuring a piece, getting to know internally how the piece is going to move from one material to the next, and from one atmosphere to the next. In Catamorphosis these polar shifts, that sometimes merge and sometimes separate, is what really drives the energy of the whole piece, and pulsates these different energies and atmospheres throughout the whole structure of the piece. I do this quite a lot in my music, but in this piece it becomes very dramatic in a way, these shifts.”

Talk turns to another new piece, Rituals, written for the Danish String Quartet – which required a different approach. “I do have a passion for writing for larger ensembles and orchestras, but I also have written quite a lot of chamber music. It’s a different approach, a different aura that you embrace, but then again with a string quartet, you can decide whether you’re going to treat it as a chamber ensemble or a bigger string ensemble. In Rituals, I’m really focusing on different kinds of materials. It is written in eleven short parts, but those parts together form one whole. The individual parts focus on their own materials and atmosphere. It’s good to have both, to write chamber music and orchestral music, and I really enjoy writing pieces at the same time in different sizes.”

Like Mahler, Thorvaldsdottir can combine the two forces, possessing the ability to write chamber music within a very large orchestral piece, drawing the ear to the centre of her compositions. “I’m very fascinated with perspective in music”, she says, “and to draw attention to different places at different times, so that you can zoom in and out to get the overall picture and then smaller details of that picture. That’s something I really enjoyed doing.”

Anna played cello as part of her musical education. “I studied a few instruments when I was growing up but I focused a lot on the cello. After I became a teenager I got to know more contemporary music, because when you are studying an instrument, you’re mostly playing older music. When I got to know more and more contemporary music, and I had been always making up songs, I really opened up to all the possibilities that you can work with in music. I started to write down music when I was around 19, and it took over my life – something I couldn’t be without doing. I wrote a lot of pieces before I started studying! Then I studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts where I had to wait until that department was starting. When I graduated with that degree I, while studying the cello, I went to California and did my masters and Phd there.”

Even then, Anna had a great conviction about her work. “I always knew the reason I was making music – that is I had this open curiosity thirst to create music. I had wonderful teachers who really knew the freedom that I needed, and we had wonderful conversations and discussions. At UCSD I used to see all of the teachers on regular basis because it’s so nice to have conversations with these wonderful composers. As an art student so I was very fortunate to have wonderful people around me, and also in Iceland. All my teachers recognised the space I needed to create my music, which was very special.”

Casting her gaze back a little further, Thorvaldsdottir considers the impact on Icelandic classical music of Jon Leifs, often seen as the founding father in the country. “The history of this sort of Icelandic music is very young”, she considers. Jón Leifs is one of the first Icelandic composers and he was such a big figure. He went to Germany to study and had a very big influence on the music life in Iceland, and the composers coming through at the same time. He’s had a monumental influence, but he had such huge ideas that it was impossible to perform some of his music in his lifetime. Those works have been later performed, but what a great figure to have had in Icelandic music. He did study Western music of course, but for Iceland he was one of the very first composers, and that’s big.”

Does Icelandic music reflect the country from which it comes – young, energetic, in touch with the elements? “It’s really hard when you do come from there. I haven’t lived in Iceland for a while now but my roots there are very strong, and I go back a lot. I understand what you mean, but it’s hard for me to really recognise it in the same way that people can who are not from there. You grow up and live away from Iceland, and you understand the space that is there in a different way than you do when you live there. There is so much space for the individual as well. As I said, we have a young music tradition, and we learn and study the history of music. Being from a place that’s younger, in that sense, has a different kind of freedom. There are great music schools that can play a big part in just how big the scene can actually be, because it’s not a big population but there are so many musicians! So I think it’s a combination of many, many different things.”

The surroundings are key, too. “The fact that untouched nature is so close, wherever you are, is big – it takes half an hour and you are in the middle of a lava field! I grew up surrounded by the ocean and mountains, and that was normal to me. People say they can hear certain things in the music coming from Iceland, but we have very different musical forms – pop music, too. That has the same freedom when you are working outside, in a way that you cannot in the middle of a big city. There is a certain sense of freedom and allowing the individual to be open.”

Talk moves on to Anna’s piece Metacosmos, due for performance at Aldeburgh by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Rumon Gamba soon after we speak. “It was written in 2017, and it’s a piece that orbits a similar aura I work with a lot in my orchestral music. It’s a 13-14 minute-long piece, shorter than Catamorphosis, It’s harder for me to describe, but again it lives in this border between darker energy and brighter energy and this pulling sense of time. The overall inspiration initially was this force that moves between textural material, clusters of harmonies, and very lyrical passages.” She pauses. “It’s hard to describe your own music!”

Writing music is a continuous process and passion for Anna. “Yes, always. I recently had the premiere with the Danish String Quartet, and I handed in another piece that will be premiered in May, for Yeah. Yeah. recently had the premiere with a text request that and I, I handed in another piece that will be premiered in May, which is for Claire Chase in Carnegie Hall. It’s called Density 2036: part x, and it’s a 50-minute long piece, for the whole concert. I am also working on an installation for an orchestra, I have a few pieces lined up.”

Perhaps inevitably, she is approached by TV and film companies for music. “I am, but I haven’t really gone into that medium. It’s a very different way of working for films, and it’s not that I’m closed – I’m open to discussing different projects, but my schedule is planned very far ahead. Yeah. I do get approached but haven’t gone into the medium yet.”

Whichever way she goes, we can be certain of one thing – Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s musical progression will be one to keep a very close eye on. Hers is a talent to nurture in the future, for sure!

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s album ARCHORA / AIŌN is available on Sono Luminus now – and you can listen below: