Left in the Lurch

Posted on October 25, 2013 by leslie

Left in the Lurch

LESLIE JONES reviews a resume of Weimar political culture

Weimar Thought: a Contested Legacy, eds. Peter E Gordon & John P McCormick, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2013

Provocative historian Jan T Gross points out in Neighbours that Polish workers only once downed tools in the critical period 1945 to 1948. But the cause of this wave of strikes in 1946 had nothing to do with pay or working conditions or even with the emasculation of the trade unions by the communists. Factory workers in several Polish cities stopped work to protest against the condemnation (in their name) of the perpetrators of the Kielce pogrom.

Such a paroxysm of working class anti-Semitism is somewhat difficult to explain from the perspective of Marxist theory.[i] But so is the crushing defeat of the German organized left in 1933. Hitler, as Martin Jay reminds us in his compelling contribution to Weimar Thought: a Contested Legacy, came to power “with only token resistance from the left”, a left moreover that had been bitterly divided throughout the years of the Weimar Republic.

Yet according to orthodox Marxist doctrine, the whole German working class should have been united “…in a single, coherent movement, both as a force to bring about socialism and as a bulwark against…barbarism…” (Jay, page 378). Class divisions in German society should have widened until a united working class was transformed from a class “in itself” to a revolutionary class “for itself”.

Jay’s objective is to challenge this dubious notion of the proletariat as “a singular collective agent”, predestined to redeem society. He identifies several factors that divided workers in the Weimar Republic, notably age, gender, religion and the growth of a white collar sector that defined itself more in terms of life-style and educational status than class. Certain contemporary commentators considered the masses particularly susceptible to manipulation, including political manipulation, by the new cinema.[ii]

Whereas employed workers tended to vote SPD (Social Democrat) their unemployed “brothers” were more open to the blandishments of the KPD (Communists) or even the Nazis. And some elements of the working class were persuaded that the real enemy was “Jewish capital” and the “Jewish Bolshevism” of the SPD, which allegedly had a disproportionate number of Jewish leaders.

Professor Jay also observes that although the SPD (Social Democratic Party) embraced “virtually all factions of the left” in the years before 1914, this ostensible unity masked some profound underlying divisions. Contra orthodox Marxist thinking, in Evolutionary Socialism (1899) Eduard Bernstein had rejected the notion of an imminent bouleversement of bourgeois society. Bernstein emphasised the continuous improvement in the living standards of the workers in the Kaiserreich, thanks partly to the endeavours of the trade unions and the socialist party. For Bernstein, democracy rather than revolution was the way forward. In Social Reform or Revolution (1900), in contrast, Rosa Luxemburg upheld the necessity of mass action, in particular the general strike. The outbreak of war and the approval of war credits on August 4th 1914 by the majority of SPD deputies brought these divisions to a head.

Although Bernstein, for one, opposed what he regarded as an imperialist war, his pre-war vision of a democratic and non-violent route to socialism clearly anticipated the praxis if not the ideology of the SPD during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Thus, in 1918, Carl Legien, the head of the SPD affiliated Free Trade Union, reached a quid pro quo with representatives of heavy industry (Stinnes-Legien Agreement). And in the following year, the government of the SPD leader, by then Chancellor, Friedrich Ebert gave the army and the Freikorps the green light to suppress the Spartacists in Berlin and the other leftist revolutions. In due course, elements of what the writer and critic Kurt Tucholsky called the “fossil class” (i.e. the Prussian Officer Corps) openly participated in the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and subsequently in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 but went largely unpunished.[iii] Little wonder that the radical pacifist Helene Stöcker considered Weimar a continuation of the militarist state.[iv]

Henceforth the German left was bitterly divided over the so-called “organisational question”. In practice, the SPD in conjunction with the unions sought piecemeal reform by parliamentary methods and became what Jay calls “the mainstay of the new Republic”. In contrast, the Communist Party (KPD) founded in December 1918 and controlled from 1925 by the Comintern, denounced Weimar as a “bourgeois democracy”. It espoused the Leninist concepts of the vanguard party, democratic centralism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, opposing not just reformism but also the doctrine of the spontaneous action of the working class, as championed earlier by Rosa Luxemburg. In his essay collection History and Class Consciousness (1923), Georg Lukács provided KPD thinking with a philosophical veneer. Left to it self, he maintained, the working class would never advance beyond economism and reformism.

Far from co-operating with the rest of the left, in 1923 the KPD joined forces with the far right to try and destabilise the Republic over the issue of French occupation of the Ruhr and the execution of Nazi “martyr” Albert Leo Schlageter. In due course, the Comintern fatefully rejected the idea of a united front of the KPD with the SPD (or “social fascists”) to counter the radical right. Indeed, in 1932, the KPD even co-operated with the Nazis in a strike over the Berlin public transport system. As Sidney Hook memorably remarked, the German left was destroyed “between the hammer and anvil of Fascism and Communism”.

In The Impending Danger of Fascism in Germany (1931), Trotsky warned the German Communists that Fascism would ride over their skulls “like a …tank”. Tragically, his prescient warning went unheeded.

©

Leslie Jones, October 2013

NOTES

[i] Although a survey of working class attitudes organised in 1929 by the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt emphasised the prevalence of authoritarianism and conformism. Likewise, in the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Wilhelm Reich identified a divergence between the economic position of the masses and their ideological structure

[ii] See Sabine Hake, ‘Weimar Film Theory’, in Weimar Thought, pp 273-290, at p 276

[iii] See Karin Gunnemann, ‘Writers and Politics in the Weimar Republic’, ibid, pp 220-239 at p 225

[iv] Vide Tracie Matysik, ‘Weimar Femininity’, ibid. pp 361-376, at p 363

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ENDNOTES – Prokofiev, Szymanowski, Vaughan Williams and Arnold

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Derek Turner

Endnotes – Prokofiev, Complete Works for Violin; Szymanowski in the High Tatras; Malcolm Arnold and Vaughan Williams in classic recordings

STUART MILLSON looks to Europe’s east

Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev (1891-1953) is, possibly, one of the most difficult composers to discuss. For me, he was – at first – very difficult to warm to: his ballet music to Romeo and Juliet seeming harsh, relentless, bare-boned and occasionally brash, and even the episodes which were supposed to convey tenderness seemed to be hard to touch – as if a small charge of static electricity was always present beneath the surface. There was a tremendous thrill to the Death of Tybalt sequence, but listening to it, I saw not just an Errol Flynn-style swordfight, but the menace of Soviet Russia and the life and times of the composer. I was determined to try to like Prokofiev, and so turned to the Fifth Symphony, a work of huge breadth, but somehow consumed by its complicated inner workings and ideas – although with radiant moments of genuine warmth in the first movement, and fast, rhythmic excitement in the second. Yet still, Sergey Sergeyevich was a difficult companion. Over recent weeks, though, I have found a way into Prokofiev, via a 1975 CBS vinyl record of a young Andrew Davis conducting the Cinderella ballet (an icily-enchanting vision of the fairytale), and a beautifully-recorded two-CD set of the composer’s complete music for violin – featuring the Violin Concerto No.1 in D Major, Op. 19 (first performed in 1923); the Concerto No. 2, a product of the 1930s; and the two Sonatas for Violin and Piano.

The Canadian violinist, James Ehnes, plays the two concertos, accompanied by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. The partnership (recorded by Chandos at the new performance venue of Media City, Salford) seems to be perfect for these absolutely, unmistakably 20th-century works – 20th-century in the sense of having within them all the quicksilver energy, emphatic self-belief, emotional neuroses, flashes and blasts of life, and (in contrast) pools of bittersweet reflection and delicacy which mark the new art of that hundred years of wars, revolutions and dictators. The Violin Concerto No. 1 is brilliantly despatched (and I wonder how much of a model it was for Walton’s emotional concerto of 1939) – with Ehnes and his accompanists drifting into the final passage of the work, as if in a nocturnal dream, under bright stars, and with a strange, ‘tick-tock’ sense of time being marked out, time slowing down, of thoughts revolving and fading. One of Prokofiev’s interests was astronomy, so perhaps something of this pursuit filtered into the work. The Second Violin Concerto is especially notable for its second movement, Andante assai – music that evokes for me a sense of being in a garden of roses, where there is a faint atmosphere of incipient decay: Prokofiev always having that soft, sinister touch.

Completed in 1946, the First Violin Sonata is a work of great virtuosity and depth. Set in four movements, the third movement – Andante – stands out for its perfect, part-lyrical and part-spectral atmosphere; its hypnotic and addictive quality. You will not want the movement to end, and I found myself playing it over and over again. The same is true of the Moderato first movement of the Second Sonata, with its confident, striding, arching theme that brings to mind the first movement of the Fifth Symphony.

Karol Symanowski

The Polish composer, Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937), can be placed very easily in a concert programme alongside Prokofiev – but Szymanowski, although ‘difficult’, with discordant moments, is altogether much more of a true late-romantic. His Third Symphony, for example, “Song of the Night” (a setting of poems by an Islamic mystic, for tenor soloist, large orchestra and chorus) is an act of homage to exoticism itself; the style of music, a fusion of Debussy, Mahler, Wagner, and the Russian recluse and Theosophist, Alexander Scriabin (composer of The Poem of Ecstasy). If you require music that takes you into a sometimes startling dreamworld, with lush, heavy orchestral textures giving way to tiny filaments of sound evaporating into a nigh sky, Szymanowski is an ideal choice. Smaller-scale than Wagner, and more contemplative than Scriabin, the Polish composer is perhaps more properly categorised as a more discordant Debussy. However, the ballet-pantomime, Harnasie, sees Szymanowski in a more down-to-earth setting, absorbed by the folk-music of the High Tatras, and a story of shepherds, rustic weddings and robbers (the Harnasie).

In this latest recording, again by Chandos Records, Edward Gardner conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, in an interpretation which shows the BBC SO fulfilling their role as one of Europe’s best ensembles for the music which straddles the end of romanticism and the beginning of modernism. It seems almost superfluous to comment upon the quality of sound which you find on Chandos productions, but on this new disc, the attention to detail and the ‘colours’ of the music have a pinpoint accuracy and reality which I find on very few CD labels.

Everest Records, an American company, was at the forefront of high-quality, high-fidelity analogue tape recordings in the 1950s and ‘60s. Here we find clarity of a different kind: music that appears in the full light of day, but in a sort of audio Technicolor (if one can describe sounds in this way). State-of-the-art microphones must have been placed very close to the orchestra in Everest’s stunning 1959 issue of Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony (the musicians embarking on the recording just hours after the announcement of the composer’s death). The gloomy flugelhorns of this austere, unusual and unsually-scored symphony sound as though they have arisen from a fog in a Wessex landscape – a later menacing march and sidedrum tattoo evoking a legend of a ghostly drummer who inhabited Salisbury Plain. So dry and clear is the recording, that one can almost see the glint of metal in the cymbal clashes, and feel the rasp of the London Philharmonic’s trumpets. Sir Adrian Boult is the conductor.

The ‘fill-up’ work, if indeed a 35-minute work can be called that, is Malcolm Arnold’s rarely-played Third Symphony; a panoply of ideas from one of British music’s most original and quirky voices. And yet, in the Third’s opening – with its sense of remote landscapes – there are echoes of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, in particular, the eerie, troubled ‘warning’ sounds of brass fanfares – a signature-tune, as it were, at which Britten excelled. There is something, Waltonian, too, here and there in the score – but above all, this is Malcolm Arnold painting and developing his tunes, phrases, and magnificent ideas, such as the great and emotional theme which rises up at the height of the middle movement. Symphonic writing at its best, and a reminder of Arnold’s skills as a composer of cinematic scores. And to make this recording even more of an authentic experience, the LPO plays under the baton of the composer.

STUART MILLSON is the QR‘s Classical Music Editor

CD details

Chandos – Prokofiev, complete works for violin. CHAN 10787(2)

Chandos – Szymanowski, Harnasie. CHSA 5123

Everest – Vaughan Williams and Arnold. EVC 9001

 

 

 

 

 

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Monday night

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Derek Turner

Monday night

 

The roundest moon was resting on our road,

Making of the lane a silver stream –

A chilly channel running from some Sea

To carry its Tranquillity to me.

 

I waded in those waters ‘til it rose,

Falling upwards, bringing its own blue.

It shook itself untangled from the trees –

Stone in space, only seeming to be free.

 

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Is it time for a new teleology?

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Derek Turner

Irregular Galaxy, Hubble

Is it time for a new teleology?

PATRICK KEENEY enjoys an ambitious assault on the materialist underpinnings of modern science

 

Mind and Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

Thomas Nagel.  Oxford:  OUP, 2012, pp. 130

Thomas Nagel, University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University, has written an ambitious book.  As he writes:

One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge (p.3)

Nagel sets out to challenge the standard assumptions of the dominant scientific consensus, and tentatively suggest a way out of what he perceives as the theoretical impasse which the current scientific orthodoxy has created.

Mind and Cosmos is Nagel’s attempt to examine the limitations of the current, orthodox governing assumptions about nature, what might be briefly characterized as the

…reductive form of materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension (p.128)

The starting point for his argument is

…the failure of psychophysical reductionism, a position in the philosophy of mind that is … motivated by the hope of showing how the physical sciences could in principle provide a theory of everything (p.4)

If that hope is unrealizable – if, that is to say, psychophysical reductionism is false as Nagel believes it to be – then the physical sciences are incapable of providing an explanation of everything, compelling us to speculate about possible alternatives to the dominant scientific world view.

What propels the book is Nagel’s insistence that failure of the dominant scientific consensus to account for mind is a singular and decisive omission, one which

…casts its shadow back over the entire [scientific] process and the constituents and principles on which it depends (p.8)

Nagel rejects the view that the mind-body problem inherited from Descartes can somehow be localized and kept apart from mainstream physical science. Rather, it

…invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history (p.3)

He finds naïve the notion that physics is philosophically unproblematic; rather, if we take the mind-body problem seriously and think through its implications,

…it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic wold picture (p.35).

The repercussions of the brute facts of consciousness demand nothing less than re-thinking the place of the physical sciences in describing the natural order. Ultimately, the enlightened, contemporary culture which accepts the dominant climate of a scientific naturalism, needs to wean itself of that reductive materialism and explore other possibilities.

The task is to come up with an alternative (p.37)

Nagel rejects the idea that we can arrive at a full account of the origins and evolution of life by relying exclusively on the laws of physics and chemistry. He finds both the mechanistic reductionism inherent in the physical sciences, along with the physico-chemical reductionism in biology both unconvincing and improbable as accounts of the world, as they have been developed for a “mindless universe.” While he readily concedes that

…the great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world (p.8)

such advances have been purchased at the price of comprehensiveness. Without some account of consciousness, our understanding of nature can only be a stunted and partial one. Obviously, the universe contains minds, and

No conception of the natural order that does not reveal [consciousness] as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness.

He thus rules out any sort of psychophysical reductionism. The dominant scientific convention cannot be right, for how can any comprehensive account of nature ignore the bald fact of such a salient feature of the world as consciousness? As he suggests,

…the exclusion of everything mental from the scope of modern physical science was bound to be challenged eventually (p.36)

For Nagel then, the modern scientific desideratum – that is, a  quantified understanding of the world, expressed in timeless, mathematical formula — can never be anything other than a very partial and incomplete understanding of nature, as any full and comprehensive account of nature must include an account of consciousness. Yet current models of physical science leave no conceptual place for cognition, desiring, valuing, and all those other subjective mental activities which define our lives, and which are such an evident part of the world. As he writes,

Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science (p.35)

In brief, science needs somehow to include the human mind in the natural order. For Nagel this is a commonsensical given, and he finds it incredible to think that any explanation of the natural world which left out an account of consciousness could provide anything more than a partial account of the universe. That vast numbers of people in advanced societies believe that a full understanding of nature is possible without an account of mind — that is, to buy into the prevailing forms of naturalism — represents a

…heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense (p.128)

Nagel is astute in telling the history of science. In particular, his account of the rise of evolutionary naturalism is one of the highlights of this book. Darwin’s legacy continues to dominate our understanding of nature, so that in some important sense, we are all Darwinians now. Yet from the first, Darwin’s theory has been abused and misused. Perhaps the first and still most influential distortion was Social Darwinism, where survival of the fittest was used to justify social hierarchy. More recently, sociobiology trades on neo-Darwinian ideas of natural selection to explain various social phenomena, including ethnic violence, poverty, gender differences, and so forth. And the emerging field of evolutionary psychology, which attempts to link social patterns to genetic evolution, proceeds by postulating a radical reductionism, one which oversimplifies both mind and natural selection. For example, various cognitivist theories of mind hold that the mind is little more than an information processing machine, analogous to a digital computer, and that evolution has bequeathed us a “cognitive architecture” with pre-programmed software for dealing with the world.

One of the more unfortunate consequences of the intemperate attacks on Darwin from religious fundamentalists is the suggestion that any challenge to Darwin can only arise from some combination of religious mania and scientific illiteracy. Yet to accept Darwin is also to accept a host of implicated Darwinian ideas. And many of these Nagel finds intellectually unconvincing. In taking issue with Darwin, Nagel is forthright about his lack of a religious motivation, affirming that he “doesn’t have a religious bone in his body.” Yet as he is quick to point out, one does not need to be a scriptural fundamentalist to find fault with Darwin; disinterested reason and intellectual rigour combined with independent empirical evidence, point to deep problems in evolution and natural selection. In particular,

Consciousness presents a problem for evolutionary reductionism because of its irreducibly subjective character (p.71)

In Nagel’s estimation, the problems for Darwin’s theory  which grow out of mental functions such as thought, reasoning and evaluation have not been taken seriously enough:

The problem has two aspects. The first concerns the likelihood that the process of natural selection should have generated creatures with the capacity to discover by reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the initial appearances …. Is it credible that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time? The second problem is the difficulty of understanding naturalistically the faculty of reason that is the essence of these activities (p.74)

In brief, Nagel  finds unconvincing the notion that rationality and consciousness could arise on a strictly reductive,  naturalistic account, one which relies solely on the mathematical probabilities of natural selection. Nagel, while an avowed atheist who by his own account “lacks any religious impulse”,  is nevertheless sympathetic to defenders of intelligent design, and the problems they pose for the orthodox scientific consensus.

…the prevailing doctrine – that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms had involved nothing but the operation of physical law – cannot be regarded as unassailable.  It is an  assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis (p.11)

As Nagel says of defenders of intelligent design,

They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met.  It is manifestly unfair (p.10)

Yet if an atheist rejects the idea of God, and further rejects the notion that a non-purposive nature, guided only by the laws of physics, chemistry and mathematical probability, can account for the origins of life, what explanation possibly remains? Nagel believes that

…in some way the likelihood [of life] must have been latent in the nature of things (p.86)

That is, there may be inherent in the natural order of things teleological principles. Teleology is, as Nagel notes, a

…throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature, banished from the scene at the birth of modern science (p.68)

He goes on to say,

I have been persuaded that the idea of teleological laws is coherent, and quite different from the idea of explanation by the intentions of a purposive being …In spite of the exclusion of teleology from contemporary science, it shouldn’t be ruled out a priori (p.66)

Nagel want to resurrect the idea of teleology as

…an explanation not only of the appearance of physical organisms but of the development of consciousness and ultimately reason in those organisms (p.92)

He readily concedes that

Teleological explanation may have serious problems, but in this case they are no more serious than those of the alternatives (p.88)

And he is clear that the teleology he seeks is quite independent from any theistic notion, or any idea of an intelligent designer.  It is rather a natural teleology, one which is perfectly consistent with atheism. He recognizes that the notion of a teleology which is part of the natural order

…flies in the teeth of the authoritative form of explanation that has defined science since the revolution of the seventeenth century (p.92)

Nevertheless, for Nagel, a naturalized teleology provides a credible alternative to the orthodox, reductive understandings of modern physical science.

The arguments in Mind and Cosmos are carried on at a high level of abstraction. Yet Nagel is a fine writer, and he manages to make these debates vivid, and show the reader what, exactly, is at stake in what might at first blush appear to be rather esoteric questions unrelated to the concerns of the everyday world.  Nagel points out at various junctures the intellectual muddle which has arisen by attempting to understand the mental in terms and processes taken from the physical – that is, by using the categories of a reductive physical science to understand the subjective. This error has had dire consequences for our understanding of the social world. The confusion has infested all of our institutions, from schools, to the law courts, to politics. All of these crucial institutions have come to rely on the guidance of the social sciences, which, like the natural sciences, are predicated upon a reductive materialism. Because of this intellectual corruption, much of contemporary social science has arrived at a theoretical dead end. In Nagel’s view, a productive social science can only come about by establishing a more accurate account of nature, namely one that can account for the fact of consciousness.

In sum, Nagel’s twofold task consists in demonstrating the shortcomings inherent in the “Neo-Darwinian conception of nature” and tentatively suggesting  a way forward in arriving at a fuller understanding of the world around us. Nagel’s positive thesis maintains that we can only arrive at a reasonably comprehensive view of nature if we somehow find a way of putting mind and consciousness at the centre of our understanding of the natural order. He further thinks that in order to do so, we will need to revive the discredited idea of teleology in nature, and work toward establishing a “naturalistic” teleology.

As I said at the outset this is an ambitious book.  I’m not sure that Nagel succeeds entirely in convincing the reader that we need to return to teleology, natural or otherwise; but he has certainly established beyond any doubt that there is a very real debate to be had – a debate which has important consequences for understanding the cosmos, and our place in it.

PATRICK KEENEY is a co-editor of Prospero, a Journal of New Thinking in Philosophy for Education. He is currently an adjunct professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University

 

 

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ENDNOTES – Bruckner from Saarbrucken

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Derek Turner

Anton Bruckner

ENDNOTES – Bruckner from Saarbrucken

STUART MILLSON is re-entranced by the magnificent Eighth

The recording of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony by the Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski is not a recent issue. Nor is it considered one of the front-rank performances, towering alongside those of Furtwangler and Karajan, Giulini and Gunter Wand, or more recently, a reading by Pierre Boulez. However, I have decided to write about it for Endnotes, because it is – in my estimation – one of the most carefully-created and emotionally satisfying of all the versions in the Bruckner discography.

Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was premiered in 1892 under the baton of Hans Richter, the great Wagnerian conductor. Work began on the piece in the middle of the 1880s, and like many of the composer’s works, underwent numerous revisions. Bruckner was born near Linz in 1824, and spent many years as the organist at St. Florian – his life devoted to religious music, teaching, composition and a veneration of Wagner. He also had romantic feelings – but nothing more – for one or two of his young female students, but as far as we know, these emotions were never reciprocated, and the musician remained a somewhat awkward, solitary, bachelor figure – an elderly gentleman of Upper Austria; the man who locked up the rural church when Sunday was over. But as an organist, Bruckner was one of the great performers of his day, and came to London to play on the magnificent instrument built for the newly-opened Royal Albert Hall. A somewhat naïve figure (known to present a coin or cakes to conductors who performed his music well – and dedicating his Ninth Symphony to God), he was nevertheless a giant of European music, honoured by the Emperor of Austria, and living out his days in lodgings provided by the Emperor.

Bruckner’s nine symphonies (the last of which was unfinished) represent a transition in music; taking symphonic sound and organisation away from the world of Beethoven and Brahms, and into a more troubled landscape overshadowed by the lengthy music-dramas of Wagner, and finding a pathway for Gustav Mahler (who studied with Bruckner) and the sumptuously-orchestrated, febrile world of the early modernists, such as Arnold Schoenberg. Although by no means atonal, there are passages of great disturbance in Bruckner. There is also a sense – not of night-time exactly – but of twilight, or a supernatural half-light; or of mountainous places or buildings touching the heavens, but with cloud, or storms swirling about them – a threatening, demonic undercurrent to the cumulative force, certainty, and affirmation of the music.

It is the latter feeling that I find in the Eighth Symphony, possibly one of the greatest works ever written, alongside Bach’s Passions, the Mozart Requiem, or Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. The first movement alone seems like a symphony in its own right: a low, suspended-in-space grumble of brass and heavy, dark, cellos and basses, leading to an equally slow, but determined ascent to some never-to-be-gained summit – similar in ghastly grandeur to the mountain scene in Das Rheingold when Wotan confronts the dwarf, Alberich. The Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Orchestra players perform this movement with utter conviction, restraining themselves from unleashing their full power until the very last (and thus, perfect) moment. The Saarbrucken brass section seems to me to be the near-equal of the great ensembles of Berlin and Vienna, which are usually credited with providing the optimum Bruckner performances; and under Skrowaczewski’s direction achieve what can only be described as sonic splendour. Skrowaczewski himself is a very interesting figure: the son of a brain surgeon, who at first considered a career as a pianist, rather than a conductor – and who, as a maestro, led the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in America, and appeared in Britain with the Halle Orchestra (in Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony) and with the Philharmonia at the 1984 Proms, in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He has an austere, serious look – and dare I say it, he resembles a figure from Cold War Eastern Europe, although he belongs to a generation of musicians (including, for example, Vaclav Smetacek) who existed for the seriousness of music, rather than for any marketing opportunity. The unrelenting quest for Bruckner, for musical perfection has made Skrowaczewski the extraordinary force that he is.

 The second movement of Bruckner’s Eighth breaks the tension of the previous 20 minutes, with a joyous, rushing mountain torrent – a scherzo which is said to contain the freeborn, rustic simplicity and life-affirming spirit of a German character, or more correctly, the character of Germans, known as “Deutsche Michel”. Austro-German music somehow mirrors the defiant, determined (some might say strident) tone of their spoken language, but all of these characteristics give voice to Bruckner’s unstoppable power. The heavy Saarbrucken orchestral tone now assumes something of the element of silver or mercury, but by the time of the third movement – the longest section of the work – we are drifting beyond this earth, into space itself, feeling our way past planets and stars, or so it seems. I cannot think of anything like it in all music – this vapour, this transmigration of souls. And just as it seems that we can go no further, Bruckner sets in motion a finale, whose shuddering, short, stabbing initial steps set a scene for a succession of curiously disconnected, unexpected happenings, but which all lead in the end to a final attainment of darkness-to-light brilliance. The monumental build-up of still-unspent energy and forces, which any other composer might have sacrificed much earlier, is one of Western music’s great legacies. It is more than honoured by this German orchestra and Polish conductor.

STUART MILLSON is the QR‘s Classical Music Editor

Originally issued by Arte Nova, the recording also appears on the Oehms label. Recorded at the Kongresshalle, Saarbrucken, October 1993. The Arte Nova recording was a co-production with the Saarlandischer Rundfunk.

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Fuzzy Math

Posted on October 10, 2013 by leslie

Fuzzy Math

STODDARD MARTIN steps gingerly into an ethical quagmire

Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz, Thomas Harding. Heinemann, Sept 2013. £20

Literature to do with the Holocaust implicates all of us. Any responsible person who has ever felt a twinge of anti-Semitism or other unwelcome prejudice reads with a growing unease: isn’t he too hiding a guilty secret? Disquiet of course travels further: what would he do were his society being directed by authorities who demanded a certain line of orthodoxy from him or else? When old Nazis were asked “Why did you participate in such horrors?” and responded “We were just following orders”, how many of us can truthfully say we would have stood out and not done the same? How many of us are willing to imperil our careers or the welfare of our families, to say nothing of our lives, in such heresy? The stakes are indeed high when one deals in literature of this genre, for the writer, for the commentator, even for the reader. A slight deviation in tone and one may produce the wrong inference. Terrible discomfort may afflict partial doubters. Descent into denial threatens moral collapse and/or relegation into a category of sociopath. An apt response may seem that of Martin Bormann Jr.: to relieve himself on his father’s picture.

Laws exist in Germany and Austria outlawing denial. In less implicated countries legislation seems extreme and, beyond cultural suasion, we are left to the mercy of our own intellectual/emotional responses to the evidence set before us. This is why veracity of memory is crucial and David Cesarani and other historians of the topic have worried about survivor accounts that bake facts, elide, exaggerate or otherwise distort, however innocently or – if not quite that – understandably. There are still frightful glissandos in this terrible saga. How many perished? Five million? Six? Many will say that to argue over figures is ghoulish and in any case beside the point: a massive state-sponsored crime. Yet perhaps it does matter to posterity that a chief executor of the horror first claimed that only ten thousand had perished in his camp, then later signed an affidavit saying two and a half million and was finally charged with and hanged for the death of four millions. How justice got to producing this staggering last figure is material to anyone used to weighing the reliability of evidence.

The executor in question was Rudolf Höss, a lower middle class Swabian, wounded in World War I, associated with Martin Bormann in dissident post-war activities and sufficiently trusted by Heinrich Himmler during the Third Reich to become commandant of Auschwitz. On a dark night in March 1946, Höss was captured in a barn on the Danish border by Hanns Alexander, an officer in the British army of privileged Berlin Jewish origin. By order and desire Alexander was impelled to hunt down war criminals. Hanns and Rudolf is a double biography of him and his prey by a great-nephew who knew nothing of Alexander’s war work until after his death in 2006. Thomas Harding (his branch of the family changed name) is a scrupulous person who has used all available means to unearth the truth in these matters, including testimony from Höss’s children and other relations, two of whom joined him in a visit to the death-camp. The account he gives is thus full of contradictions slight and grand. At one point he asks a Belsen survivor whom his father helped how people who experienced the same event from the same point of view could have very different recollections and she replies, “You can ask ten people who were in the same place at the same time and you will get ten answers” [i]. If this is normal, how can truth be made stable? “Through the research process”, Harding states in a postscript to his book, “I came to learn that history – like the story of the blind men describing the elephant – is never as clear as you would expect.”

When Hanns tracked down Rudolf on that cold night in 1946, he was leading a posse armed with axe-handles and motivated by “hatred for the bastards”. Höss was stripped naked and beaten, until a doctor told Alexander to “call them off unless you want to take back a corpse”[ii]. As prisoner, Höss was treated with not much more kindness nor interrogated with more gentleness than you would expect. One consequence of this, as the late Harold Pinter[iii] or other campaigners against torture might predict, is recorded by Harding in an endnote:

“Those ten minutes of abuse, along with allegations of further attacks by British hands, would be enough for scores of Holocaust revisionists to argue over the years that Rudolf Höss’ testimony was tainted. Their argument goes like this: Höss’ testimony was beaten out of him and therefore his evidence at Nuremburg, and later his autobiography, could not be relied upon. This led them, supposedly logically, to argue that because the ‘story’ of the Final Solution relied so heavily on Rudolf Höss’ testimony the Holocaust never really happened.” [iv]

Harding is right to imply illogic to the deniers’ conclusion. On the other hand, he follows many in seeing the testimony of Höss as crucial to the Nuremburg process – a much-needed ‘smoking gun’. He also sees the figures Höss eventually signed up to – the two and a half million, to say nothing of four million mooted in Warsaw (a Russian inflation) – as beyond credibility. “According to many historians,” he says in a further note, “including those at the Auschwitz Museum, the most likely figure is that 1.3 million people died at Auschwitz, of whom ninety percent were Jewish.”[v] This estimate ought to satisfy reasonable readers; it is compromised, however, by a previous note in which Harding states, “According to the Auschwitz Museum… 1.3 million or more people [were] deported to Auschwitz”. Did all of them die? The literature is now rich with tales of survivors. So between ‘died’ and ‘deported to’ which is the more accurate verb? What is the spectrum of probabilities?

Höss himself in both trial and memoir[vi] dismissed some of the larger figures as technically beyond the capacity of the killing apparatus he apparently so efficiently set up. His children, somewhat surprisingly given the atmosphere of admission and atonement in the culture they grew old in, maintained that – despite living within meters of the crematoria – they never knew what was going on. This they put down to having been kids at the time; but how easy is it to keep from a child’s eye all trace of crimes on the scale of even the lowest estimates now generally accepted? It is of course understandable that children should wish to retain doubt about evils ascribed to a father whom they prefer to remember as kindness itself; it is also understandable that, when pressed, they like others should retire behind the defence that he was only a cog in a machine, a soldier carrying out orders, and would have been punished had he behaved otherwise, perhaps even executed. And yet…

We are in danger of being led into a moral quagmire, a confusion hardly helped ex post facto by knowledge that successors to the victorious overlords of 1945 have seen fit to ‘sex up’ Gulf of Tonkin resolutions, weapons-of-mass-destruction dossiers and the like in order to pursue military adventures of dubious justification. Thomas Harding is a young man alive in a post-Watergate, post-Tony Blair era of unstable certainties. He is a Jew of a generation that has been enjoined to assert ‘never again’ and to believe that the ‘tough Jew’ is a necessity that too many of his great-grandparents’ era in Europe failed to credit, to their terrible cost. But what that cost was exactly his book is too even-handed to clarify. Prejudice, discrimination, threat, expropriation, extortion and exile are all established beyond doubt: these things happened to his forbears or were witnessed by them with their own eyes. The rest with all its subdivisions – how many to disease, euthanasia or starvation; how many to causes also being meted out to half a continent during the winter of ’44-’45 – relies on report, documentation, evidence and testimony; matters that require to be tested in court and in judgements whose probity must be validated not by the hot breath of immediate press report[vii] but by the cold eye of long-term history.

David Cesarani and others have been right to voice concern. No book on this topic can afford to be loose, let alone tendentious or sententious, understandable as those temptations may be. As we move on in time and new generations look back, more and more clarity, it is hoped, will emerge. Thomas Harding is an honest man who has done his best against some odds to find human dimensions in an arch-enemy of his forbears and take a cool measure of a family hero driven in large part by outrage, vengeance and hatred and with a penchant for pranksterish deception[viii]. None of this is easy. What it produces for us to ponder is, if not unpalatable, in any case a bitter pill. Little is resolved fully. Possibly it never can be. We are like blindfold horses turning the wheel of a mill, circling round and round imagining our progress to be towards clover-filled pastures, which we may never reach[ix]. It is easy to see how a writer may come to feel, as Anthony Julius confessed in the last paragraph of his six hundred page tome on anti-Semitism – Trials of the Diaspora – that he had staggered through ‘muck’ long enough and hoped he would never have to deal with the topic again[x]. Mystical and idealistic aspects of Jewish tradition are the pastures that those who truly care for this people may readily prefer to attend to.

Dr. STODDARD MARTIN is an academic and publisher

NOTES

[i] Lucille Eichengreen. See note page 314-15

[ii] Pg. 243. Höss’s whereabouts had been extracted from his wife by informing her that a train was about to take her 14 year old son to Siberia and that she would never see him again

[iii] The Nobel Prize winner’s views about torture are well-known and were vociferously expressed in person, in speeches, in plays and in his work for English and International PEN

[iv] See note pgs 318-19

[v] See note page 310. The apparently contradictory note which follows can be found on page 299

[vi] This was written largely in Warsaw when Höss was awaiting trial and was encouraged by the authorities there

[vii] Harding describes how Höss’s testimony at Nuremburg was reported instantly around the world, pg 259-60

[viii] Hanns enjoyed pulling off pranks from an early age, not least ones of identity with his twin brother Paul. This could provide comic outcomes, for example, in fooling girls whom one or the other wished to seduce

[ix] I am indebted for this Sisyphean image to the late Shusha Guppy whose award-winning memoir of her Persian childhood was entitled The Blindfold Horse (1988)

[x] Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 587: “Anti-Semitism is a sewer. This is my second book on the subject and I intend it to be my last.”

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Uncollected Folk – Roy Kerridge’s last column

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Derek Turner

The Ratcatcher’s Daughter, sheet music cover

Uncollected Folk

In his valedictory Uncollected Folk column, ROY KERRIDGE imagines how future folk songs (if there are any) might sound

To those highminded Victorians who took part in the literary discovery of folklore, it was a revelation to find out that humble and illiterate people had developed worthwhile art forms of their own. Thanks to folklore’s pioneers, we have classic books of collected folk tales, from the Brothers Grimm to Uncle Remus, not to mention The Arabian Nights. Then came the folk song collectors, whose works can be studied in the wonderful library at Cecil Sharp House near Regent’s Park. But what happens to folklore when “the folk” learn to read and write?

In America, spirituals gave way to gospel music, a sometimes excellent body of song that deteriorates the further it gets from spirituals. In England, folk songs became literary as early as the 17th century, as printed broadside ballads, the same rule applying. Among the many topical songs printed traditional favourites such as “Careless Love” and “Barbara Allen” cropped up again and again, just as they were to do years later in America as country and western or blues records. Then, in the 19th century, folk song metamorphosed into music hall song. According to the music hall song bible, Colin MacInnes’ Sweet Saturday Night (published by MacGibbon and Kee), some of the first music hall songs known were “Sam Hall”, “Villikins and his Dinah” and “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter of Islington”, all folk songs on the verge of becoming ‘half folk”. Just as with American country music, professional songwriters appeared, specialising in music hall songs. The archetypal country and western American was a manly cowboy, the archetypal music hall Englishman a comic costermonger.

In our time, “Sam Hall” has become a cowboy song, sung with great ferocity by Frankie Laine. Frankie’s narrator is no longer a murderous chimney sweep but a Western bad man. When I was a lad, “Sam Hall” had become “Nobby ‘All”, a “dirty song” sung by soldiers and older schoolboys. “Villikins and his Dinah” became the well known country and western song “Sweet Betsy from Pike”, as recorded by Ken Maynard. As for “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter”, I have heard it sung by Ernest, a venerable Sussex tramp, in the 1970s.

English “half folk”, or “commercial folk”, is now only heard at old-time pub or party sing-songs where music hall is remembered. In the East End of London, I was once shown around a deserted, semi-ruinous music hall, a place that resembled a crumbling galleried barn. (It was in use as a West Indian church.) But what if English folk songs had not come to a dead-end, but had gone on developing and keeping pace with the times?

As this is my farewell column, I shall end with a few “folk forgeries”of my own.

I had a little nutcase, nothing would he do

But lie on a mattress drinking Special Brew.

The King of Spain’s landlord punched me in the face,

All because of my little nutcase.

 

***

 

Can she heat a pizza pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

Can she heat a pizza pie, charming Billy?

She can heat a pizza pie in the twinkling of an eye,

She’s a young girl and cannot stand her mother.

 

***

 

As I was a-working on the Hadron Collider,

(To me way aye, blow the world up)

I made a black hole that got wider and wider.

(Oh give me some time to blow the world up.)

Chorus:

Blow the world up, boffins, blow it away,

Oh give me some cash to blow the world up.

 

ROY KERRIDGE is a folklorist, journalist and the author of numerous books

EDITOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank Roy Kerridge for his contributions to the Quarterly Review, in print and on-line, since 2007. It has been a great privilege to be able to feature his unique writing talents and the vast range of his recondite knowledge and experiences. Rarely has restless intellectual curiosity been tempered by such warmth and kindliness. DT

 

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EpiQR – The Spaghetti House, Kensington High Street

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Derek Turner

Spaghetti House, Kensington High Street

Spaghetti House is conveniently situated almost directly opposite the entrance to Kensington Gardens (thus making it a perfect lunch stop after a morning wandering the parks). Unmistakable, its exterior sports a traditional “Italian” look; honestly crying its wares at first glance. The interior is rustic and cosy, with walls red in either paint or bare brick, wooden tables and chairs, and some banquette seating in maroon colours that complements the wood and brick. A proliferation of large mirrors bounces light from the front windows around the room; whilst black and white photographs of food, cars and suchlike, and greyscale pictures of compasses lend a modern but tasteful air. The kitchen area is delineated in a light grey (with a hint of pink in the colour tone, which removes any trace of coldness), and is match-boarded in chunky wooden panels; while large items of furniture (such as sideboards) also bear this design and shade. There is a rather elegant and ornate door surround that struck me as really quite beautiful, and although metal pendant downlighters and anglepoise lamps lend a slightly ‘industrial’ air, these nevertheless tie in with the rustic interior and do not jar. The sadly ubiquitous pop music was not too loud, so not as offensive as it could have been – and towards the end of the meal it changed to more atmospheric and acceptable Edith Piaf – which I very much could have done with from the beginning!

We were seated on a banquette that was deeply comfortable and also nicely spaced from the other tables, thus allowing a decent measure of privacy. The service was friendly and very prompt (perhaps a little too much so – a waiter tried to take our orders before we had even opened up the menus); and we had barely taken our seats before we were brought welcome glasses of prosecco – this particular one being a very lemony-tasting, fresh, zingy wine. We were also presented at the same time with broad beans fried with salt and paprika which mysteriously disappeared while I was busy trying my prosecco (I knew I shouldn’t have let them place the dish anywhere within my husband’s reach…). The staff were dressed informally yet not scruffily (as befitted this unceremonious yet nevertheless professional type of restaurant), and there always seemed to be several waiters in attendance – although I fully accept that this may have been due to the presence of a journalist in their midst.

The wine list, brought next, offered a good range of Italian whites and reds – from a reasonable £18 up to £31, a couple of roses, a prosecco, cava and (interestingly) sparkling red, as well as a few rather fascinating-sounding Italian beers, digestivs and aperitivi.  The menu included a two course set menu; starters seemed perhaps just slightly uninspired, but there was a far better range of main courses: pastas; pizzas; meat dishes including burgers, saltimbocca and sirloin steak; roast salmon; and a few sides and salads as well. Everything on the menu was very reasonably priced (£7.95 to £18.95; the latter, most expensive thing on the menu, being the steak). Most, however, hovered around the £10-£13 mark – it crossed my mind, even before trying and thus being aware of the quality of the dishes on offer, that this was good value.

Italian wines being something of a weak spot in my armoury of wine familiarity and knowledge, I asked for a recommendation and, after some discussion, decided to essay the Peppoli Chianti Classico 2010. At first taste this appeared rather thin and slightly acidic but as it breathed in the glass during the meal, it developed a wonderfully rich and complex flavour (alas, the poor beverage was crying out meal-long to be decanted). It glowed with a ruby red colour, whilst its nose was of red berry fruits and brambles, with a hint of liquorice. The taste was dark, with coffee, chocolate and tamarind. Although it remained a little too much on the thin and light side for me, with such depth of flavour it would be an absolutely superlative wine were it a little more full-bodied.

Food arrived at a good pace – the starters after not too much of wait and the main courses after a fully respectable pause. We were just a little disappointed by our starters: in the Caprese salad the mozzarella was generally fine, albeit not the most sublime example of its kind that I had encountered, lacking in that creamy, light fluffiness that the finest mozzarellas boast; and the tomatoes were rather flavourless (admittedly it was not the tomato season). Mr Marshall-Luck had opted for bocconcini di pollo – chicken wrapped in breadcrumbs and parmesan and fried. This smelt absolutely exquisite but the taste was slightly bland in comparison to its tantalising odour. It was served with pleasantly, but not overpoweringly, spicy arrabiata sauce, which complemented the chicken well. The bread (arriving just shortly before the starters) was good – a dark-tasting, fresh and chewy sourdough, as well as crispy and moreish Sardinian music bread. Extra virgin olive oil was already present on the table (good) and a plate of fine balsamic vinegar was presented for dipping alongside the breads.

No complaints at all regarding our main courses – which were both excellent. My scaloppa milanese was, perhaps, not as thin as that to which I am accustomed – but was absolutely none the worse for that. The meat itself was flavoursome; the breadcrumbs pleasantly crispy and salty. Although the accompanying French fries were perhaps slightly non-descript, the broccoli all’aglio was good, with the broccoli itself perfectly done and in a beautifully buttery sauce, although the chilli was too overpowering for my (perhaps slightly delicate) taste-buds to cope with!

My husband’s pollo con funghi was also very good: the rich sauce complementing well the mildness of the chicken; the asparagus done well – not overcooked; and the resultant combination of flavours worked very well.  The accompanying potatoes were piping hot (to his initial chagrin!) but again, were not overcooked, and the rosemary lent a strong enough presence without becoming overbearing.

Dessert also impressed – the profiteroles were beautifully light and rich without in any sense being cloying, and their chocolate sauce had great depth in its flavour and was sufficiently complex (certainly not at all too sweet).  My tiramisu was served in a cup (which I found rather a nice touch – a little different), and the crunchy resistance of the amaretti biscuits which graced the top of the dessert provided a very good textural contrast to the creaminess of the tiramisu itself (as the mascarpone element was wonderfully full, thick and rich). The coffee flavour in the sponge was very intense (slightly too much so for me), and I slightly missed an alcoholic hit of brandy or amaretto – yet, I suppose, the Spaghetti House is a family restaurant and limits must be set! As a whole, the dessert worked very well indeed.

The staff seemed charmingly reluctant to let us leave without providing more examples of the culinary finesse of the kitchens and bar and so I allowed myself (although I can’t say I put up too much resistance) to be persuaded into finishing with a limoncello, with its cloying, sweet foretaste and sharp, physically pleasing bite of an aftertaste. This bestowed me with the perfect conclusion to what had been a superb meal overall – with excellent food and drink; a snug atmosphere; aesthetically pleasing surroundings and relaxed ambience, and top-quality, friendly service.

Perhaps nothing is better testament to how welcome, comfortable and well-looked after we felt than the realisation, as we all-too-reluctantly roused ourselves from the soft seats to depart, that we had been the first to arrive and, over three hours later,  were the last to leave.

EM MARSHALL-LUCK is the QR‘s restaurant critic

 

 

 

 

 

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ENDNOTES – Wagner, D’Indy, Handel and Verdi

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Derek Turner

ENDNOTES

STUART MILLSON

From Faust to The Flying Dutchman: Wagner from Scotland * An atmospheric collection by a French Wagnerian * Handel’s Xerxes * Proms farewell with Verdi

Chandos records continues to set remarkable standards in recording quality and presentation. Two of the company’s most recent releases include a first-class sequence of Wagner overtures and preludes, played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi, and an Early Opera Company performance on authentic instruments of Handel’s Serse, or Xerxes. Just a few months ago, the fifth volume in a series devoted to the music of French Wagnerian, Vincent D’Indy, appeared, so it seemed an opportune moment to mention the master of Bayreuth and his Gallic disciple.

There are many recordings in the catalogue of Wagner’s overtures, and Chandos itself (some 13 years ago) produced a similar pot-pourri: overtures to Rienzi, Die Meistersinger, Lohengrin and Parsifal, with the Danish National Radio Symphony under the baton of a conductor with the curiously Wagnerian name of Gerd Albrecht. So what distinguishes the latest CD? Although it repeats such well-known pieces as Die Meistersinger, maestro Neeme Jarvi has included three much lesser-known and infrequently-played works: the early Overture to Die Feen (The Fairies, an opera from 1834); the Overture to Theodor Apel’s play, Columbus (1835); the Overture to Das Liebersverbot of 1836 (an Italian-sounding composition, with a frenetic, near-comical opening – a foretaste, perhaps, of the Venusberg music in Tannhauser), and the stand-alone A Faust Overture, written during Wagner’s time in Paris (1840 – although the score was revised ten years later). My first encounter with the Faust piece was during the 1982 Proms season, a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert on Wednesday 4th August to be precise; and by chance, that very concert (given by the British late-romantic specialist, Norman Del Mar) also made room for Vincent D’Indy’s nature-worshipping symphonic poem, La fȏret enchantée. The Faust is a taut, thoughtful, expressively-romantic, eleven-minute orchestral study, more in the manner of Berlioz; not a showpiece, not showy, not even gripping, but an experience that draws you in to the troubled world of the subject – with a memorable, almost ‘questing’ motif on strings, welling up and dispelling tension, which appears a couple of times in this mini-drama.

However, the part of this disc which truly stands out is a very well-paced and beautifully-phrased account of the opera which first made Wagner’s name in 1842: Rienzi. Here can be found the beginnings of the composer’s true musical identity: a sound-world of high, uplifting, mystical themes, recognisably German, recognisably Wagner – especially in the dark, unfolding introduction; a gesture which, I am sure, would have made the opera audience at the Dresden premiere sit in solemn worship, gazing into the clouds of heroism and destiny. However, the opera is set in Rome, and concerns the life of “the last of the Tribunes”, the mediaeval Cola di Rienzi, a rebellious and revolutionary figure. But what is important is the accent of the opera: the listener can now truly feel that he, or she, is on the path to Lohengin, Tannhauser, and ultimately, the gold of the Rhine.

Recorded in the Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, the Scottish orchestra has a decidedly deep, dark-wood tone; spot-on, unfuzzy, clear horn-playing, and heavy brass which, as a whole, has real might, and which rings out through your speakers. An authentic Wagnerian blast of sound, then – with an arresting drum-roll in Rienzi that is neither booming nor hollow, but hard, crackling and growling. Jarvi also phrases one or two parts of the overture in a slightly different way from many other interpreters. Listen to the first clear theme, or tune, just a couple of minutes into the overture, and you may see what I mean… A notable CD, and an important contribution to this celebration year for Wagner, the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Vincent D'Indy

Vincent D’Indy (1851-1931) is one of the 19th century’s, or Romantic movement’s, overlooked figures. If a French counterpart to the English Music Festival existed, D’Indy would be one of the revived composers at the heart of the concerts. Overshadowed by Saint-Saens, by Debussy and Ravel, D’Indy is nevertheless deserving of discovery – particularly the works which appear in this rewarding journey, prepared for the inquisitive listener by Chandos. We are in La France profonde, D’Indy being a French patriot and devoted Roman Catholic. Yet from across the Rhine and into the Gallic hills and villages comes the echo of Wagner, although the Frenchman has, I believe, preserved the subtle, attractive, more easygoing ways of his country in many well-orchestrated pieces, such as the Symphonie sur un chant montagnard francais, Op. 25 (1886). A simple, folkish mountain air, and the air with which you would fill your lungs on a high ridge of the Auvergne or Cevennes (the work is subtitled Symphonie cevenole); D’Indy’s tone-painting gives a rare flavour of a region, an out-of-doors spirit and a memory of a much-loved place in the heart of a Frenchman. Once again, Chandos has honoured its composer with a flawless recording, in the form of a warm, sunny Iceland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rumon Gamba, with Louis Lortie, piano.

Handel, the German who became England’s most famous composer of the Georgian era, was a prolific writer of oratorio, opera, concerti, keyboard works, orchestral suites and anthems. Messiah (or extracts from it)and Zadok the Priest, Music for the Royal Fireworks and the Water Music can be heard each week on both Radio 3 and Classic FM. Today, the movement which demands an authentic, 18th century sound from period instruments has enabled us to appreciate these works through the prism of academic correctness: no more modern-instrument performances from modern chamber orchestras, or pared-down symphony orchestras, and certainly not the heavy, bold, well-upholstered sound of Beecham, Boult or Sargent’s Handel from the 1950s and ‘60s. As a result, the catalogue brims with lithe, delicate and dance-like, pure and astringent, church or cathedral-recorded crystal-clear renditions of Handel’s gargantuan output. And instead of yet another Messiah, Chandos has thoughtfully issued a three-CD set of Serse (Xerxes), the three-act story of the Persian king (written between 1737 and 8), in a version by the Early Opera Company, conducted by Christian Curnyn, a young, but already well-established musician, with performances at English National Opera and at Aldeburgh gaining him critical acclaim.

But Serses has one very well-known moment (again, often extracted by radio broadcasters and concert promoters), the aria in which the leading character (played by a mezzo-soprano, Anna Stephany) sings beneath the shade of a plane tree: Ombra mai fu (“Never was a shade”… [of any plant dearer or more lovely]). All the elegance of the baroque period seems to exist in this gorgeous, bittersweet tune, but if you purchase the new CD set – and I recommend you do so – passage after passage of the opera reveals other tunes, choruses, arias and recitatives of almost equal power and considerable beauty. The other leading characters, such as Arsamene (brother of Serses) and Atalanta (who is secretly in love with Arsamene, even though Romilda, her sister, is officially in love with him!) are well portrayed by David Daniels, Joelle Harvey and Rosemary Joshua.

Recorded at the Church of St. Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town, this is a production that will greatly appeal to enthusiasts of well-engineered, modern recordings, and admirers of a modern breed of artist which looks to the musical style and practice of nearly 300 years ago.

By the time this article is available on-line, the 2013 season of Henry Wood Promenade Concerts (now the property and branding of the BBC) will have ended. Verdi, like Wagner, was born in 1813, and the Proms celebrated the great Italian composer in the last week of the season with a beguiling sequence of operatic arias, performed by the tenor, Joseph Calleja, and the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, Giuseppe Verdi, conducted by Xian Zhang. But do not worry if you missed the evening’s broadcast. Fortunately, the relay of this very exciting concert is available via the BBC Radio 3 website for several weeks. An inspiring conclusion to a varied season, but I do wish that something could be done to improve the dynamic range, the ‘wideness’ of the radio broadcast sound. Having listened to several older analogue CDs of Proms performances, I am convinced that the high-definition quality of what we hear today just fails to capture the wide, open spaces (the richness and reverberation) of the Royal Albert Hall, leading to a sometimes dry, or too-close-to-the-microphone sound. I wonder if readers and Radio 3 listeners agree?

STUART MILLSON is the QR’s Classical Music Editor

Details of the recordings:

Neeme Jarvi conducts Wagner, overtures and preludes. RSNO. Chandos, CHSA 5126

D’Indy, orchestral works, Symphonie sur un Chant montagnard, Prelude to Fervaal etc. Iceland SO. Chandos, CHAN 10760

Handel, Serse. Early Opera Company. Chandos, CHAN 0797(3)

 

 

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Sadness and survival in Labour’s lacerated heartlands

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Derek Turner

Sadness and survival in Labour’s

lacerated heartlands

BILL HARTLEY attends two strikingly different manifestations of Northern working class culture

The 2008 Durham Miners' Gala. Photo: paul-thompson.org

Two annual events took place in the North of England this year. One was the Durham Miners’ Gala, the other the Lowther Show near Penrith. The former has been described as the last mass working class demonstration left in England, though as usual it struggled to attract senior representatives of the Labour Party. Ed Milliband made it in 2012, the first time a Labour leader had bothered to attend in 23 years. Alternative attractions this time included union bosses Bob Crow and Len McCluskey, after which it was downhill all the way into showbiz territory and the actor Ricky Tomlinson. As a demonstration of working class solidarity, the presence of a platoon of call centre workers hardly fitted in with the industrial heritage of the North East: the people who irritate us with cold calling walking behind the banners of the men who once toiled underground in dirty and dangerous conditions. These days the Gala is an enjoyable day out seasoned with a bit of nostalgia and a platform for class war enthusiasts. It might be more relevant to re-route the march through the nearby Beamish industrial museum.

June through to August is the season for country shows. The Lowther isn’t among the larger gatherings such as the Game Fair or the Great Yorkshire Show, with their numerous trade stands. Rather it lies somewhere between these big events and the homely village shows. A few manufacturers of the Land Rover and farming machinery variety show up but in the main the Lowther is about country sports; activities of the sort which presumably Labour would prefer to see confined to the dustbin. Yet the show is attended in droves by working class people of the white northerner variety, natural supporters of Labour you might suppose.

The local hunts are well represented, sending hounds to be submitted to the arcane judging processes which baffle the outsider. These aren’t the hunts of popular imagination. Up in the far North Country much hunting territory is just too rugged for gallivanting about on horseback. Going full tilt over dry stone walls on a horse would be a quick invitation to a broken neck. Instead the hounds on show belong to the fell packs. They hunt the fox on foot and followers need to be fit to keep up which is why the anti’s leave them alone; there are no horseboxes to provide a convenient focal point for demonstrators. Of course these days such activities are meant to be illegal but the Cumbria Constabulary seem to show little interest.

The people who attend the Lowther are an interesting mix: rural manual workers and tattooed townies with a seasoning of tweedy gentry types. A few years ago when the Lowther was still wedded to its origins as a carriage driving event with a country show thrown in, it wasn’t unusual to spot the Duke of Edinburgh mooching about among the working classes. These are the people whom the country writer Dickie Poole used to refer to as the “aboriginal English”. They come from all over the northern counties and what they have in common is an attachment to the land and country pursuits. Even in August their clothing is designed to deal with all vagaries of Lake District weather. The dogs that accompany them are an assortment of aggressive terriers and other working breeds, often giving a clue to the particular field sport which has brought the owner to the Lowther. Organisations representing different facets of shooting and fishing set out their stalls as do those bodies representing broader interests and allegiances. Service charities show up as does the Rugby Football Union. Even in far off Twickenham an effort is made to connect with the Cumbrian manual workers who play the game at grass roots level.

What links the Miner’s Gala and the Lowther is that each attracts the white working classes in large numbers. Whilst the Gala clings on to a heritage fast fading into history the Lowther in contrast reveals a vibrant culture which is wedded to field sports. In different ways neither gathering of the working classes seems important to senior figures in the Labour Party, perhaps because they can no longer communicate with the people who attend. Rather awkwardly the Lowther promotes some leisure activities which are ‘unacceptable’ to a party which claims to represent their interests. Perhaps it is easier to pretend there is a connection to the voters by settling for an allegiance to a football club on the basis that this provides sufficient common ground.

Labour politicians might find it instructive to observe those gentry types who mix with the working classes at the Lowther. Although well separated by education and social class from the mass of visitors, they have no difficulty in communicating with them because they share the same interests. It is safe to say that a Labour politician who came to the Lowther would meet people likely to show the old British value of tolerance and respect a willingness to look at both sides of the argument. It might help them better connect with the working classes too but just as they don’t much go to the Miner’s Gala you can be sure they won’t be at the Lowther show either.

BILL HARTLEY is a Yorkshire-based freelance writer

 

 

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