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What’s coming up on Arcana in 2016?

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Caricature du Maître d’Arcueil, Erik Satie

A question. What do Janet Jackson, Steve Hackett, Gary Numan and Cesar dog food have in common?

I’ll let you ponder the answer while setting out what Arcana has planned for some of 2016! We’ve already wished you a happy new year but having survived the first week back this is a great chance to let you know what we have planned for the year ahead.

We plan to make much more of the links between classical and pop music this year – so you can expect further episodes of The Borrowers (which already includes Manfred Mann, Plan B, Village People and Greg Lake), interviews with artists who like to work in both areas of music, and reviews of albums that appeal to both sides.

These will include the forthcoming James Holden and Luke Abbott album, a homage to Terry Riley – and we might even delve into the daunting prospect of Rick Wakeman and Alice Cooper celebrating the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, with large orchestra in tow! There is so much variety and depth in this area to explore. We also hope to hear from the artists themselves, whether electronic, prog, jazz or ‘other’.

shining

Arcana will also be training the spotlight on two composers who have been a big influence on pop music, albeit in very different ways. 2016 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Erik Satie, and we will explore his influence on pop music from several directions. A good contrast to Satie’s music can be found in the work of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók – famously used by Stanley Kubrick in part of The Shining (above). Arcana aims to show the breadth of his writing, as well as illustrating how rock music can be said to trace back through his work. Kicking off, Richard Whitehouse will be covering James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong playing Bartók in a concert from the Wigmore Hall tonight.

All that and the usual concert and new recording reviews…showing there is an awful lot to enjoy musically this year. Please do stick around for the ride! And the answer to the question? They’ve all used the music of Erik Satie! We’ll tell you how in due course…but for now we will leave you with his most popular piece:

Vilde Frang, Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Peter Oundjian – Viennese classics in Dundee

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Ben Hogwood visits Dundee’s magnificent Caird Hall for an trio of Viennese works given by violinist Vilde Frang, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and principal conductor Peter Oundjian
Caird Hall, Dundee, Thursday 12 November

Webern Langsamer Satz (1905), arr for string orchestra by Gerard Schwarz

Brahms Violin Concerto (1878)

Mozart Symphony no.41 in C, ‘Jupiter’ (1788)

What a magnificent setting for a concert. Dundee’s Caird Hall will be well known as an attraction by the locals but it bears repeating that the venue is an excellent acoustic for classical music, as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conductor Peter Oundjian observed in his brief talk to the audience before the concert.

The high ceiling was perfect for the burnished ardour of Webern’s Langsamer Satz, written while the composer was still in a tonal way of thinking and in thrall to his hero Mahler. Although normally heard through the intimate medium of the string quartet, this arrangement, made by the conductor Gerard Schwarz for string orchestra, worked extremely well, and the RSNO strings made a beautiful and clean sound that left us in no doubt as to the composer’s feelings towards his cousin – who was later to become his wife.

The Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang then joined the enhanced orchestra for another Viennese piece, Brahms’s Violin Concerto­ – and in the process she built on a relationship already established with the erte concerto last year. Frang is not a player prone to exaggerated gestures or one-upmanship on the orchestra and this was the ideal approach for the Brahms, where the two forces work together and where the orchestra often have the better tunes. Oboist Adrian Wilson, acknowledged by Frang at the end, was superb in his slow movement solo, and while this was perhaps a more ‘classical’ reading looking back towards Schubert, Frang took the difficult and extended solo passages, particularly the cadenzas, by the scruff of the neck and refused to let them go.

Completing the Viennese trio was Mozart’s Jupiter symphony, his last – with Oundjian sensibly reducing the forces in the name of clarity. This was an extremely fine performance where the rapport between the RSNO and their conductor was abundantly clear, and where he ensured that Mozart’s deceptively simple themes were beautifully communicated and developed. A graceful minuet was notable for the floated violin delivery, though in the trio the minor key harmonies sowed the seeds of disquiet.

These were emphatically blown away by the finale, one of Mozart’s greatest achievements as a composer in his successful dovetailing of all five themes in a brilliantly worked fugue. Oundjian took this at a daringly fast tempo but we never lost sight of the tunes, the orchestra working incredibly hard to keep their lines clear and crisp. The enjoyment of all – players and audience – was clear, for this was music to banish even the squalliest of November nights.

Edinburgh String Quartet – Intimate Voices

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Ben Hogwood visits the Edinburgh String Quartet on their home turf for an inventive program studying the intimacy of the string quartet
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Wednesday 11 November

Schubert String Quartet in E flat major, D87 (1813)

Shostakovich String Quartet no.7 (1960)

Sibelius String Quartet in D minor, Op.56, Voces Intimae (1909)

Intimate Voices was the subtitle of this triptych from the Edinburgh String Quartet, an intriguing look at how the combination of two violins, viola and cello has become one of the main expressive forms in classical music.

To show how composers have approached the medium in different ways they presented a quartet by the teenage Schubert, a mature and compact example by Shostakovich and the only fully published example by Sibelius.

Of the three pieces it was perhaps this one – subtitled Intimate Voices – that carried the most penetrating emotional impact, played with passion and purpose by the quartet, whose dynamic control was especially impressive. The quiet moments, helped by an attentive Queen’s Hall audience, were a real window into Sibelius’ mind, and his string writing, which as the perceptive booklet note pointed out was boosted by his knowledge of stringed instruments through playing the violin, was interpreted with real style.

This piece was equalled in emotional impact by the Shostakovich, arguably the most effective of his fifteen quartets at making its mark in a very short space of time. Just twelve minutes pass in the String Quartet no.7 but in it we get deep into the thoughts of the composer. Shostakovich vividly illustrates his humour in the face of adversity but also the adversity itself, and the Edinburgh Quartet could be found warily treading forward as though worried what might be around the corner. Here again they paid exquisite attention to the quiet writing, so that when the third movement exploded out of the box it did so angrily and with maximum impact.

By complete contrast the first item in the program served notice that the sixteen year old Schubert was capable of going places. While taking obvious leads from Haydn (the second movement) and Mozart (the third) the String Quartet in E flat, published as D87 in the composer’s catalogue, is a beautifully crafted work that is by no means a copy. Schubert writes with confidence and melodic interest, the roots of his work in song already sown and making their most poignant effect in the first and third (slow) movements. The second movement was a blink-and-you-miss-it affair, with first violinist Tristan Gurney and cellist Mark Bailey helping to bring out the humour. Overall the intimacy between the players was as Gurney said in an insightful chat with the audience, essentially being a conversation between friends.

Gurney’s introduction was a key part of the enjoyment of this concert, showing that the theme Intimate Voices need not be restricted to the four players, but that the audience were included as well.

The Edinburgh String Quartet website can be accessed here

James McVinnie with Bedroom Community – Royal Festival Hall, 24 September

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Arcana has just completed an extremely interesting interview with the organist James McVinnie, who is due to give a concert on the Royal Festival Hall organ along with several of his Bedroom Community colleagues on 24 September.

Bedroom Community is the family-sized Icelandic label that specialises in music where classical and pop intersect, founded as it was by Valgeir Sigurðsson, Nico Muhly and Ben Frost in 2006.

Music by all three artists can be heard in McVinnie’s concert at the RFH tomorrow night, which will be given with singers and instrumentalists from the label. It will include the premiere of Median Organs, a new piece by The National’s Bryce Dessner, written for McVinnie himself…but not the organ.

“The great thing about how Bryce and Nico write,” says McVinnie, “is that they have written pieces without indication. That means you can sit down at the organ with the notes and you are in a sense the orchestrator, which is an interesting and artistically fulfilling piece of work. Bryce has not specified the registrations he wants, but knowing his music I can relate my choices to all of that.”

You can hear and download James McVinnie playing Nico Muhly’s The Revd Mustard his Installation Prelude, which he will also play in the Festival Hall concert, below:

 

The full interview with McVinnie, in which he talks about Bedroom Community, removing organ music from its religious stigma and the overriding influence of Bach, can be read on Arcana soon.

Songs in the Key of Gambling – how music in Vegas helps you spend money!

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Ground floor panorama of New York New York hotel, Las Vegas

We all love a gamble. Don’t we?

Well a recent visit to Las Vegas revealed a few very cunning tricks that hotels, casinos and the makers of slot machines build into their venues. They have very subtle ways of making you part with your money.

This includes bright lighting, extra oxygen and free drinks and food if you’re sitting at a machine…but when it comes to the music their tactics are a little more devious.
moolah

The hotel in which we were staying, New York New York, has a massive wall of noise on its ground floor. And all of it is in a major key. Bright, treble rich colours are not just visual but they can be musical as well. Apart from the bass generated by the night DJ’s thumping trance tunes, there was almost nothing audible in the lower end of the scale.

Instead all the melodies and harmonies can be heard up top, with brightly voiced sounds that come across as electronically modified glockenspiels, clarinets, harps, flutes and organs.

I am fortunate enough to be blessed with perfect pitch, so it was almost an assault on the senses when walking out the lift to be blasted with a wall of pure C major. It seemed almost every machine was in this key, the notes all piling together to make a big, big sound of consonant and utterly positive harmony. The effect on the brain was striking, and this was even without reckoning on the songs played over the PA system or thumping out of the 9 bars and 12 restaurants in the hotel.

Again, these were almost all major key classics – Katy Perry’s Firework (in the key of A flat major), P!nk’s Try (E flat major), pretty much everything in the Avicii back catalogue (Wake Me Up is a classic in D major!) and, perhaps inevitably, a fair bit by Taylor Swift (Bad Blood being in G major).

When all these musical constituents were heard together this made a potent mix, the musical part of a carefully constructed environment for gambling. Thankfully we didn’t lose our shirts!