‘Dance of Apollo and the Muses’, Baldassare Peruzzi
In this edition: Haydn from Kent: a fanfare from America, reviewed by Stuart Millson
The East Malling Singers, conductor, Ciara Considine, performed Haydn’s Nelson Mass to warm applause last month, in the fine acoustic of their village church, St. James the Great. Accompanied by a an exceptionally fine line-up of soloists – Gillian Ramm (soprano), Rachael Lloyd (mezzo-soprano), Tom Robson (tenor) and Luke Gasper (bass) – the Singers successfully scaled the heights of the work’s imposing opening, the great Kyrie, which rises in martial mood with timpani and brass to the fore.
Cohesion of voices and a ‘tightness’ in the delivery of many of the more ornate sections of the work carried this Nelson Mass along, as if sailing on a strong tide. The emphatic delivery of the opening section seemed to spur the choir to even greater things in Gloria in excelsis deo; a jubilant release from the brooding introduction. Like Mozart, Haydn possessed that seemingly inexhaustible capacity and inspiration to compose masses (and Masses) of music, in practically every form; from oratorio (the magnificent, The Creation, has also been performed here in East Malling) to chamber works, solo piano pieces and concertos.
Born in 1732, Joseph Haydn was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and for a great part of his musical life was engaged by the powerful Esterhazy family, for which he composed celebratory pieces, such as a mass for the name day of Princess Marie Hermenegild. The latter work was composed in 1798, not long after Haydn had completed The Creation. Yet he registered the work (completed, incidentally, in the record time of just over 50 days) as: Mass in Straitened Times. Let us not forget that the end of the 18th-century/beginning of the 19th, was a period of extreme political turbulence for Europe; the continent dominated by Napoleon, the sea-lanes by the resisting Royal Navy, hence Haydn’s choice of title.
The first performance took place in Eisenstadt, and it was on a visit to that town in 1800 that Admiral Nelson heard the work; his celebrity conferring a new title on the piece: Nelson Mass. At the time, people sought to find echoes of Nelson’s career and achievements in this forty-minute-long piece. Had not Nelson defeated the French at the Battle of Aboukir Bay in the very same year in which Haydn had composed the mass? That was indeed true, but there is no evidence to suggest that Haydn, in his Austro-Hungarian fastness, would have had any idea of the sea-battle taking place between Nelson and Napoleon’s Mediterranean fleet. Here we truly find a work named because of a happy accident: Nelson simply attending a Haydn concert.
For the East Malling Singers, the great tenderness, generosity and often just simple melodies – such as in the Agnus Dei, or even the gently-rolling, optimistic ending – Dona nobis pacem – provided some heart warming highlights to the evening, but it is surely in the opening of the Credo that Haydn gives us an arc of light: a movement of breathtaking baroque majesty, more than competently taken up by this ‘amateur’ band of voices.
Haydn lived to see the defeat of the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805, but not the final demise of that audacious son of Corsica who became Emperor of France. The composer died in 1809, but became forever enthroned as one of the great classical-era composers; establishing that famous canonical trinity which, after J.S. Bach, set the gold-standard for music: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven.
In the first half of the concert, the choir performed Bruckner’s motet, Locus iste, and Josef Rheinberger’s Abendlied – both works creating an immediate atmosphere of Middle-Europe: dimly-lit churches in Upper Austria, twilight forests in Bohemia; with the tenor, soprano, mezzo and bass soloists also contributing a medley of operatic arias and English song. Offenbach and Bizet sparkled (accompanied by pianists Nick Bland and John Hayden), but for this observer, the piece that truly stood out was Vaughan Williams’s Vagabond, from Songs of Travel. In bass, Luke Gasper’s hands (and in this, the Vaughan Williams 150th anniversary year), we truly found ourselves on the moonlit, open road through rural shires and candlelit villages.
Finally, in complete contrast, a discovery: the music of contemporary United States composer, Randall Svane – his majestic fanfare (a live recording sent to The QR on an mp3 file) also manages brief moments of introspection, as if we are floating above the Appalachian mountains, just pondering the grandeur of the scene. Spans of brass writing bring a Copland-like horizon into view, and at the end, with Randall Svane unleashing his full force, it as if we were leaving the orbit of the Earth altogether on a NASA mission!
We are looking forward to hearing more from this composer, and it looks as though the Three Choirs Festival here in England have recognised his talents: a new work for orchestra, Quantum Flight, is destined to dazzle them soon, at Gloucester Cathedral.
Stuart Millson is Classical Music Editor of QR
Jacques Bertaux, Prise du Palais des Tuileries, credit Wikipedia
Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion and Politics, Sylvana Tomaselli, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2021, 230pp, pb, reviewed by Leslie Jones
The first riposte to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was Vindications of the Rights of Men (1790), by one Mary Wollstonecraft. Sylvana Tomaselli, a Lecturer in History at St John’s College Cambridge, notes that Wollstonecraft’s thought was profoundly “shaped” by both Burke and Rousseau. [i] She reviewed several of Rousseau’s works and had studied Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and his Vindication of Natural Society (1757). Although hardly an original thinker, she was an eloquent writer and a powerful polemicist. Women in contemporary society, she averred, “learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, and nick-name God’s creatures”.
In his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité (1750), Rousseau maintained that the only inequality in the state of nature was the natural inequality between men, some being stronger and more adroit than others. But, with the establishment of private property and the development of agriculture and industry, the effects of natural inequality were magnified and compounded. Enter inequality of wealth, of social standing and power and all their attendant abuses – to wit, idleness, luxury, poverty, the mutual dependence of the rich and the poor and the selfish wish of the individual to benefit at the expense of others. The upshot was that “Man was born free but is everywhere in chains” (Rousseau, Du Contrat social, 1762). Continue reading
Vaishali, Pillar of Ashoka, credit wikipedia
Past centuries saw the creation of various literary treasures whose worth cannot be gauged by modern standards because what has been handed down possesses unique qualities. Forms of spelling, stylistic idiosyncrasies and provenance all contribute to a text’s general reception. Accordingly, titular divisions developed and became important to writers and readers. Those distinctions are still important for historians today. It is for this reason we encounter such contrived divisions like Golden Age Latin, Silver Age Latin etc. Prehistorians whose expertise concerns pre-written material have been unable to provide exact dates for any number of events because the resources available for determining their place in time can provide only unconfirmable dates that fall within the specific limits prescribed by them.
Literary sources offer some things that are concrete and supply literate persons with more realia than one’s imagination can supply. Ancient books are access points into antiquity, which are unique gateways established for learning about heroic men and women, exotic customs, and esoteric characters whose habits may have been either prudish, licentious, or somewhere in between. So the benefits of acquiring a rudimentary knowledge of historical texts and their translations are many. There is an undeniable truth: orally transmitted tales from times of yore were invaluable to collectors of legends in any age. Religious convictions pervaded ancient societies. They were absurd to some; obscure to others. The thesis that ‘Rome had no myths’ was itself a myth. But it was one popularized by the noted scholar, Kurt Latte (1891-1964), who in writing about a peculiarity of the Italian conception of God, stated ‘für diese unspekulativen phantasielosen menschen… keine mythilbildende phantasie schlingt ihre ranken um die götter’/for these unspeculative people lacking imagination no mythical fantasy coils its tendrils around the gods [Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 24 (1926), 244-58]. Studies in the histories of religion, and the unearthing of thousands of inscriptions, have proved him and several of his peers to have been in error. Therefore, scholars of classical texts, although sometimes misjudging the extant facts and data, find that philological reinterpretation of those same literary sources, in time, will bring readers nearer to the truth. Continue reading
Alma Mahler in 1909, credit Wikipedia
In this edition: Mahler’s Fifth Symphony from the Czech Philharmonic, Elgar, choral music from Severnside, reviewed by Stuart Millson
Sometimes described as a “journey from darkness to brilliant light”, the Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler (1901-02) is one of the composer’s most closely-argued works. A portentous, but nervous trumpet fanfare opens the first movement, leading the listener into an expansive orchestral landscape, yet along clear, direct lines throughout. No significant diversions, no meandering, just taut – sometimes perilous, sometimes radiant – spans of writing that carry you to a glorious, perhaps Brucknerian as much as Mahlerian, finale.
In this new CD from the Pentatone label, the Czech Philharmonic under Mahler expert Semyon Bychkov, provide a remarkable view of the “Middle-European” orchestral sound: a sharp, rasping edge to trumpets and brass, and a precise sound to strings, never the deep richness to be found in some orchestras, but nevertheless with a brightness and depth that is needed for the moods of Mahler. For those who know their Mahler recordings, the new CD puts one immediately in mind of a Deutsche Grammophon version of some considerable vintage; the reading by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the great Rafael Kubelik (which can still be obtained via the following catalogue number, 429 519-2). Kubelik’s Bavarians give, what to this reviewer, is the near-definitive interpretation of the Fifth – at least in terms of tempo and “outlook”, not to mention the thrilling playing of Munich’s and southern Germany’s outstanding radio orchestra. Now, we have a perfect match, in the form of Bychkov’s realisation of the score – where the Czech Philharmonic achieves a truly satisfying blend of forward-motion, but never sacrificing Mahler’s shattering ability to dwell on profound emotions.
The enormous funeral march that is the first movement keeps its dignity, but does not stall or wallow. The next movement is one of supreme agitation, and early violence, yet Bychkov brilliantly conjures at the end glimpses of radiance and heaven; keeping a thrilling tension to the orchestral sound. The Austrian country-dance atmosphere of the landler-dominated scherzo has a pleasing sense of sunshine gleaming through trees and over Alpine peaks (Mahler composed the Fifth during productive summer months); and the famous Adagietto (Editorial note: supposedly a portrait of Alma Mahler) floats and sighs through moonlit glades and dreams. The last movement – an affirmation of the composer’s ability to build musical power, through sequences that all seem to be climaxes of sound in their own right – take us to the overwhelming final minutes; the Czech Philharmonic sound captured in all its volume and detail. The “inner sounds” of the score – the sinews and strains, the details of woodwind, the hues of the immense string ensemble – this is Mahler’s Fifth at its finest.
In complete contrast, on the ever-questing Somm label, comes choral music from Elgar’s beloved world of Worcestershire and the Severn. Entitled ‘The Reeds by Severnside” (Elgar, as a boy, could often be found by the river, trying to translate into music the sound of the reeds), Somm has assembled a rare sequence of church music by a composer who always remembered his roots – as a local organist, a wanderer, walker and bicycle-rider through the lanes of his home county. Performed by the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, under William Vann (with Joshua Ryan, organ), the new CD offers such gems as the Angelus, O hearken Thou (Op. 64), the Queen Alexandra Memorial Ode. The better-known, Give unto the Lord, (Op. 74) – Elgar at his most typically Victorian, ‘Sunday best’ and earnest – also appears, but most eye- or ear-catching is a Credo on themes from Beethoven’s symphonies; choral variations on passages from the Eroica and the Fifth, in which the music of Bonn’s great master manages to sound completely English. A strange feeling, and a fine recording, William Vann keeping a sense of Elgar’s provincial church tradition: noble, yet intimate – a thought that after the recital, one could emerge from listening or worship into the fresh English air.
Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review
Recording details: Mahler, Symphony No. 5, Czech Philharmonic/Bychkov, Pentatone – PTC5187021.
The Reeds by Severnside, choral works by Elgar, Somm label, SOMMCD278.
Khedieval Opera House, Cairo, credit Wikipedia
Criss CrossLa Princesse de Trébizonde, Jacques Offenbach, libretto by Étienne Tréfeu & Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter, English narration adapted by Jeremy Sams, sung in French, London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Paul Daniel, Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Friday 16th September 2022, reviewed by Leslie Jones
In ‘Go North, Young Man’, (QR, June 29th 2022), we commented that a concert performance of Wagner’s Parsifal “hardly constituted ‘the total integration of music and drama’ (gesamtkunstwerk) proposed by the composer”. However, given the exorbitant cost of staging opera, with scenery, costumes and chorus etc this pared down type of production seems here to stay. Witness this concert performance of La Princesse de Trébizonde, at Southbank Centre.
Opera Rara is on a mission “to restore, record, perform and promote the lost operatic heritage of the 19th and early 20th centuries” (Concert Programme p14). But this begs the question – why do certain operas get lost in the first place? Wagner, for one, considered most contemporary opera as “childish”. He would doubtless have regarded this ‘lost’ work by Offenbach, with its convoluted plot and contrived happy ending, as an example. Continue reading
Old turnkey
Most of our larger cities still have what used to be called a local prison. Usually they date from the nineteenth century and are monuments to Victorian civic pride. Like other public buildings of that period they were meant to impress. Leeds Prison for example, is said to have taken its inspiration from Windsor Castle, though the soot blackened facade doesn’t quite match the original.
By 1877, all prisons were under the control of commissioners, whose governance was exercised by standing orders of immense detail, running to over 1000 paragraphs (plus appendices). The 1925 edition is a masterpiece of bureaucratic micromanagement, taking in every aspect of institutional life, both for prisoners and staff. Back then the prison officer was required to work a 96 hour fortnight, presumably calculated in this way to allow maximum flexibility when detailing for duty. Augmenting pay, a variety of allowances were available for various additional tasks. Perhaps the most peculiar being five shillings for assisting at an autopsy. Interestingly the usual age for retirement was 55 with no-one permitted to remain beyond the age of 60. Today’s prison staff may view this with some envy, since their union has been waging a so far unsuccessful ‘Sixty Eight Is Too Late’ campaign, against the raising of the retirement age.
Allowances followed a strict hierarchy based on rank. On transfer, for example, a governor was allowed a maximum weight of furniture of eight tons whereas at the bottom end of the scale an officer was permitted only two. Some strange additions and omissions are to be found. ‘The removal expenses of sons of officers will not be paid after they have attained the age of 18 unless such sons have become dependant on their parents by reason of mental or physical disability’. Daughters don’t seem to have been considered at all. Perhaps, because ‘in no case will the expenses of more than one domestic servant be allowed without the previous sanction of the commissioners’ and ‘The railway warrant or fare for a servant will be third class’. Surprisingly, there was no mention of which ranks might be bringing a servant with them on transfer. Married officers were required to live in quarters and even here regulations intruded. Permission to have guests ‘for a short period’ was allowed, after submitting a request in writing to the governor. Continue reading
On the 14th September, six days after the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ll, Stuart Millson, Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review, was present at The Mall
On Thursday 8th September, during the course of the afternoon’s broadcasting on news channels, presenters appeared in dark suits and black ties. Meanwhile, at the House of Commons, notes were passed across the despatch boxes – alarm and concern appearing on the faces of politicians of all parties. Reports had stated that HM The Queen, 96 years old and suffering from “mobility problems”, was now “under medical supervision” at Balmoral, the Royal residence in the heart of Scotland, to which all members of her family were now travelling, post-haste. By early evening, 6.30pm, BBC News showed the Union Flag of the United Kingdom being lowered at the Buckingham Palace flagpole – a scene transmitted with no commentary or explanation. Then, the programme’s presenter Huw Edwards, made the announcement that Elizabeth ll had died peacefully that afternoon (although this fact was only later released) – his words being followed by the playing of the National Anthem. Via television and radio, and news alerts to millions of mobile phones, the long, second Elizabethan Age came to its end: the Queen’s first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was born in 1874: the 15th and last Prime Minister of her reign, Liz Truss, in 1974.
Acres of newsprint and hours of broadcast time, online comment and expert constitutional discussion of Her Majesty’s 70-year-reign, have since followed. One common assessment is that “in an age of change, the Queen remained constant” – followed by another, that the late monarch “devoted her life to duty”, in endless Royal tours; the presiding-over and patronage of numerous charities; the hosting of countless foreign leaders and fellow-monarchs; and as the guiding light of the Established Church and the Armed Forces. Continue reading
Winston Churchill and Maria Callas, credit Wikipedia
Madama Butterfly, Japanese tragedy in three acts, Royal Opera 12th September 2022, music composed by Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, conductor Nicola Luisotti, reviewed by Leslie Jones
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels considers how sexual relationships might best be regulated “after the impending effacement of capitalist production”. He anticipates that women will no longer be obliged to “surrender” to any man “out of any other consideration than that of real love”. Cio-Cio-San (soprano Maria Agresta) is in no such privileged position. After her father killed himself by order of the Mikado, the women of her family had to become geishas to survive. Lieutenant Pinkerton (tenor Joshua Guerrero) is set to marry her “Japanese style for 999 years”. A house and servants are included in the marriage contract, which can be terminated at any time. Indeed, Pinkerton drinks a toast to the ‘real’ American wife he expects to one day have, after a ‘proper’ wedding. But although a cynic and misogynist, he is not without redeeming features.
Reportedly, this revival of Directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s twenty year old production was given the go ahead only on condition that it was made “more authentic in its representation of Japan” (see Oliver Mears, Director of Opera & Antonio Pappano, Music Director of Royal Opera, Official Programme, p 21). This apparently involved some input from Japanese practitioners and academics. As Michael Church remarked in the Independent, 15th June 2022, the revival director was required to find a slant “which doesn’t offend those who regard the opera as an expression of racist stereotyping”. Yet messrs Mears and Pappano, somewhat inconsistently, consider Madama Butterfly “ahead of its time” and “a savage indictment of the evils of imperialism”. Continue reading
