Alistair McGowan as Erik Satie, BBC Proms 2016 (c) Chris Christodoulou
A Satie Cabaret, Cadogan Hall, Monday 1 August 2016
Who wasErik Satie?
Or, come to think of it, who isAlistair McGowan?
Clues to the answers of both questions were on hand at this stimulating Proms Chamber Music concert, where the ‘bright, airy interior’ of Cadogan Hall, celebrated as such by Proms director David Pickard, became dark as night for an hour, the curtains drawn so we could enjoy A Satie Cabaret.
McGowan has already presented a concert in similar form this year, for Satie is one of his obsessions – and it is 150 years since the birth of the composer. Ever the arch impressionist (not in a French sense!) McGowan took on Satie’s character, dressed in a trademark suit and bowler hat, even managing to grow the composer’s facial hair – or at least don a very convincing disguise!
He chose a set of autobiographical readings that captured the French composer’s irreverence, his unique approach to making music and his oblique sense of humour, one that could often have you scratching your head in wonder after the laughs had died away.
Providing the musical entertainment – with some laughs, too – were pianist Alexandre Tharaud and tenor Jean Delescluse. Their mix of piano music and song was very well chosen. In the ambient balm of his piano writing we saw how Satie used simplicity in a very original way, and how he has gone on to influence generations of disciples, Ludovico Einaudi and Michael Nyman two obvious recent examples.
The songs were much less inhibited, with the riotous Allons-y Chochotte (Let’s do it, Chochotte) bringing the house down near the end. We also had brief illustrations of ‘furniture music’ from Tharaud – music for solicitors to listen to, for instance! – which found Satie a century ahead of his time, predicting the environment where we would be treated to music on hold or in a dentists’ waiting room.
McGowan was funny but also completely respectful, and was the first to appreciate Tharaud’s control and beauty of tone, as well as Delescluse’s brilliant send-ups of songs like La diva de l’Empire (The Diva of the Empire) and La grenouille américaine (The American Frog).
In all this was a highly entertaining hour, given in a spirit the composer would surely have enjoyed. Would that he knew his influence has been so far reaching – and even now is not fully appreciated.
Alban Gerhardt has not played his cello for 12 days…but on the evening Arcana calls for a chat he is about to pick it up, finally.
“It’s fantastic not having played for that length of time!” he enthuses. How will he get back into the saddle? “I start off with very basic exercise, just playing open strings and long notes – nothing else really. It’s all about getting to know it again, and I play so slow that I won’t get any notes wrong or play anything false. Then tomorrow I will restart the Dvořák, which I haven’t played in a long time!”
He is referring to the DvořákCello Concerto, which he will perform at the Proms this year – Prom 25, to be precise, on Wednesday 3rd August at the Royal Albert Hall, where his accomplices will be the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and their conductor Charles Dutoit. “I definitely haven’t played the piece this year”, he confirms, “but I think I am starting next year with it a couple of times. I’m very glad to have been playing other things, otherwise you start doing crazy stuff with a piece. If you do perform something more than 50 times without a proper break the danger is you start doing those things to entertain yourself.”
As is customary with all Arcana interviews, I move on to ask the cellist if he can recall his first encounters with classical music. “Mine were pre-natal! My mother was a singer, so I heard her singing and practising, and when I was born I was crawling between the music stands. I don’t actually have any memory without music, it has been the all-dominating thing for me. My mother would sing a lot, and then the cello was the next choice, as I found I could sing with that.”
His love of the cello developed as an extension of the voice. “In my second lesson I learned how to make the music vibrate, to use vibrato, and it made so much sense to me. My mother had a natural vibrato from between the ages of three and four and I picked it up. I had a minority complex about my voice, but when I got the cello it all happened and I ran screaming through the house, I was so happy!”
Gerhardt has performed the Dvořák concerto at the Proms before, stepping in for the indisposed Heinrich Schiff in 2001. “It was a huge thrill, to be playing such a big piece on the biggest stage of all.” How will this experience be different for him? “I think by now I am so old” (he’s only 47! – Ed) “but I am very much looking forward to working with Charles Dutoit again. The stage doesn’t matter so much anymore, I find, and I don’t get inhibited or frightened. I do respect the stage more though, wherever I am. Everybody deserves a good performance wherever I am, and it shouldn’t necessarily be better just because I am at the Proms. The last time I played it was exhausting because you have to produce more sound in the Royal Albert Hall. In the last six years I have been playing with earplugs, as I used to force my sound, and that has helped enormously.”
This year the BBC Proms is focusing intently on the cello, with ten concerto performances and four premieres. Does that reflect the instrument’s popularity? “I would love to say yes, but I don’t know”, he says candidly. “There are many seasons for each of the orchestras where the violin and the piano are far more in demand. It might reflect the number of wonderful cellists there are these days, though I do find I am missing a bit, a wonderful protagonist like Mstislav Rostropovich who created works and was such a natural force for the instrument. He was not created by any PR or fancy stories, but there was a huge hunger in this guy. Now we have specialists and PR people – they are wonderful players but none are of that stature so far. It could be a couple of people standing up for the instrument, but then maybe it’s Rostropovich’s fault, that nobody has stepped up like that since him! Maybe Casals did, but there has not been anyone quite of the same stature. It feels like we are still trying to catch up.
Gerhardt has yet to record the concerto, save for a disc given away with a past issue of the BBC Music Magazine, but from the sound of things is not in a hurry to do so. “I’d like to one day, but there is no rush. It should be in the perfect setting. I don’t want to do it for the sake of it. It is such an important piece, such a symphonic work. To make it special it would have to be recorded with genius people. I think ahead of the Dvořák I have pushed for the Bach suites, but that is maybe the next thing I would love to tackle.”
And what of the considerable honour of performing the piece at the Proms? “It will always be special, the excitement is so much bigger. I believe my father played at the Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1960s. I think it was when Herbert von Karajan came to the Proms for the first time (this appears to have been in January 1973 according to the Proms website) and it was a very political occasion. He told me that when the oboist Lothar Koch gave the ‘A’ the whole audience hummed it! The orchestra thought it was sabotage, but then they realised the orchestra was so excited. When I was asked to the Proms around 20 years later I played Shostakovich in the late 1990s. I got frightened, but now I am excited to play for this unbelievable audience.”
He goes on to discuss the advantages of planning for the festival. “At the Proms you can schedule almost anything and people come! For instance this year Steven Isserlis is playing a new orchestral version of Thomas Adès’s Lieux retrouvés, and it is one of my standout Proms, as I love Isserlis. I am sure it will be full.” There is a note of regret, too. “I wish this could be translated into other seasons, because I think it proves you don’t always need the big names like Beethoven and Brahms to fill a hall. Music is for all seasons, not just the summer!”
Staying with the Proms theme of the cello, does he think it true to say the instrument is popular for new works? “Not so much in the last 40 years”, he says. “Not since the Rostropovich commissions. We live in times where there is a much shorter life, things expire quickly, and so to get a piece into the repertoire is impossible. This has happened with the Dutilleux concerto perhaps (Tout un monde lointain) but not since then, especially if you compare those pieces to Shostakovich and Prokofiev.”
He muses on the reasons for this. “It is difficult for a player to learn without having a pianist accompany them, and for that you need a piano reduction. People love modern music, and there is lots being written, but it’s been written, played once and then never again. Maybe that’s how it was 300 years ago, after all Bach had to write a cantata every week! It is nice to go back to a piece and rediscover it though. I have been able to do that with some contemporary pieces which is great as you can do so much more with them. With the Dvořák I can tell a story with it, and I can channel my energies so that I am not dead by the end of the first page, and can carry through the whole piece!”
What of recommending a piece of cello music to Arcana readers? “The Wigmore Hall Director John Gilhooly did tell me that Lieux retrouvés is a fantastic piece”, says Gerhardt, “and he thinks it is one of the greatest pieces written in the last few years. I think that is my favourite last cello recording, the one made with Isserlis and Adès themselves. I do love to go to concerts rather than stay at home and listen though, I am not a big consumer of recordings. Having said that this one is also special for the Janáček and Fauré pieces they include, it has a beautiful combination of works. They are such fantastic musicians, and at times they remind me of Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten in partnership.”
It is nearly time for Gerhardt to head home and pick up his cello. “I will summon the energy over the next six days to completely fall in love with the piece again”, he declares. “I have a complete score and will go back to basics, to look at the part without any marks on the page and look at what the composer really had in mind. Otherwise I find that I do things in the moment and repeat them. A clean score, with no markings, fingerings or bowing instructions, brings you back to the composer.”
Andrew Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra
(c) Chris Christodolou
Prom 15; Royal Albert Hall, Tuesday 27 July 2016
TchaikovskyThe Tempest (1873)
Anthony PayneOf Land, Sea and Sky (2016) [BBC commission: World premiere]
Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor (1866) (Ray Chen, violin)
Vaughan Williams Toward the Unknown Region (1906)
The focal point of this evening’s Prom was a first hearing for Of Land, Sea and Sky, the latest work from Anthony Payne and a BBC commission to mark his 80th birthday in a week’s time.
Taking its departure from a description of white horses in the Rhône Valley as they seemed to merge into the surrounding water, this piece comprises eight continuous sections in which the relationship between image and illusion is considered from numerous perspectives.
Payne evidently looked at various texts before deciding to write his own: what resulted is functional in the best sense, each of the choral sections conveying its appropriate imagery without any superfluous literariness. Choral writing is less certain in that it often feels more of a textural gloss on, than integrated into orchestral writing whose clarity and resourcefulness continues from Payne’s previous large-scale works; indeed, the piece as a whole seems to unfold as a sequence of variations on the motifs set out in the opening pages, with an orchestral postlude effecting a final synthesis as the very notion of illusion is rendered in suitably elusive terms.
Of Land, Sea and Sky is typical of Payne in that its approachable (and recognizably English) while never derivative idiom is likely to yield any number of subtleties on repeated hearings. The present performance seemed an assured one, Andrew Davis securing a committed response from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in music whose intricacy benefited from the cushioning resonance of the Albert Hall acoustic. This also marked the fourth Proms collaboration between conductor, orchestra and composer, and will hopefully not be the last.
The programme had opened with a hearing for The Tempest, Tchaikovsky’s still relatively unfamiliar symphonic fantasy inspired by, yet by no means indebted to Shakespeare’s play. The framing seascape music, with its sombre horn writing, resonates long after the music has ended, and if what comes in-between – notably the eloquent but unmemorable ‘love’ theme – finds the composer at less than his best, this was perhaps reinforced by a reading that lacked nothing in cohesion without sustaining a cumulative momentum across the piece as a whole.
After the interval, Ray Chen made his much-heralded Proms debut with Bruch’s First Violin Concerto. A little histrionic, the preludial first movement was vividly and at times ardently projected, with a heightened transition into an Adagio whose fervency was purposefully held in check. Nor, other than a slightly hectoring edge in passagework, was there much to fault in the final Allegro; despatched with a flamboyance continued in the encore – Paganini’s 21st Caprice in A, which provided ample means for Chen to display his meaningful virtuosity.
The concert ended with a welcome revival for Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Region, the composer’s first major success and a piece whose impression is greater than its modest length. If the rapt inwardness of the first half feels more successful than the fervency of what follows, Davis ensured a cumulative tension such as made the final pages – the BBC Symphony Chorus giving its all and the Albert Hall’s organ enhancing the resplendence – a fitting testimony to Walt Whitman’s conviction as to the soul’s tangibility in death as in life.
The national flag of Argentina waves in response to Sol Gabetta‘s account of the Elgar Cello Concerto
(c) Ben Hogwood
The BBC Proms are go!
The 2016 season is underway, and in a packed Royal Albert Hall this evening we were treated to the first of 75 Proms. As is traditional Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave us a flavour of the season, but also a substantial second half in the form of Prokofiev‘s cantata and film score, Alexander Nevsky.
To begin, a sad reflection of the world’s troubles could be keenly felt in La Marseillaise, the Proms showing solidarity with France after the horrors in Nice. After such an event music can feel inconsequential but it can also bring people together and provide some sort of comfort – and in the big, swooning tunes of Tchaikovsky‘s Romeo and Juliet Oramo provided just that. The woodwind chorale on the approach to the end was particularly moving.
Sol Gabetta then stamped her own personality on Elgar‘s Cello Concerto, taking a few liberties with the tempo – but none of these were for personal gain, rather reflecting her own interpretation of the music. The pauses at the end of some of Elgar’s phrases were unexpected but profound, while the silvery accompaniment of the BBC SO spoke of Autumn rather than our supposed high summer. Gabetta’s encore, Dolcissimo by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, found her singing as well as playing cello, reducing the Royal Albert Hall to reverent silence.
Things got even colder for Prokofiev‘s film score Alexander Nevsky, though there were thrilling moments when the massed choir of the BBC National Chorus of Wales – just over 200 in all – let rip. The basses reached their lowest notes with commendable accuracy, while the Battle On The Ice, where Nevsky faces his German and Estonian foes, was thrilling and immediate.
Yet the show was stolen by Olga Borodina, the Russian mezzo-soprano ghosting onto the stage for a keenly felt account of The Field of the Dead near the end. Her emotion was first hand, and Oramo’s sensitive hand on the tiller encouraged a similarly heartfelt response from the orchestra.
It was a concert that bodes well for the season – and this year Arcana is planning two different approaches to its coverage of the BBC Proms. There will be a few straight ‘reviewed’ concerts, but the focus of our coverage will be on taking people to the Proms who have not been before. To that end our reviews of Proms will not be by experts, rather by first-time punters chosen from a pool of friends and contacts. Further to that, all reviews will be from the Arena, which is the ultimate Proms experience – and which to my knowledge is the best place for sound quality, let alone atmosphere.
No other source reviews from here as far as I am aware…so stick with Arcana in the weeks ahead, particularly through August. I can assure you we will be bringing classical music to new audiences on a weekly basis!
In an interview for Arcana, Tansy Davies detailed how Re-greening, written for all 164 players of the National Youth Orchestra without a conductor, is essentially an introduction to Mahler’s Symphony no.9, the piece they performed without a break afterwards.
In the interview, which can be read in full here , Davies explains how “the way the music is layered to me suggests a forest like quality; interweaving arpeggio-type figures bubbling or erupting up from the cold earth in winter, and scales or lines reaching up to the light”.
Did you know?
Before making her way as a composer, Davies sang and played guitar in a band. That was probably until she won the BBC Young Composers’ Competition in 1996!
Initial verdict
Re-greening begins with bright sounds like a forest coming to life – the opening percussion stroke, a bright, metallic sound, feels like the first sun of the day.
Then we hear the rustling of the orchestra, with harmonics from the stringed instruments and shrill woodwind that sound like the birds, sonorous brass. A song is sung by the orchestra, the popular and ancient song Sumer is icumen in, essentially a hymn that glorifies in the arrival of a new season or a new day. The chant continues, surrounded by a large orchestral sound that is used economically. The brass are prominent, Davies making great use of a big space with percussion and a huge string section.
Davies layers the sounds, so that it feels like several chords are piled up on top of each other in a full bodied texture. Then towards the end the orchestra sing again, this time a canon from English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, set like the earlier song in C major,. This proves an unusual and moving experience when set among the excited cacophony from the rest of the instruments.
Second hearing
tbc!
Where can I hear more?
There are a couple of excellent Tansy Davies discs in circulation, partly because her music seems to be very aware of its surroundings, i.e. it is aware of the culture – both popular and classical – in which it is written. So far she has tended towards chamber pieces that are of manageable length but considerable intensity. That much is very clear from her Troubairitz disc for Gabriel Prokofiev’s Nonclassical label, which includes the excellent Neon for chamber ensemble – and from the Spine disc for NMC, which includes the Saxophone Concerto with Simon Haram:
