Nymphomania – Rusalka, at Royal Opera

Posted on February 23, 2023 by leslie

Armand Laroche, Diana bathing with the nymphs, credit Wikipedia

Nymphomania – Rusalka, at Royal Opera

Rusalka, lyric fairy tale in three acts, music by Antonin Dvorák, libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House conducted by Semyon Bychkov, created and directed by Natalie Abrahami and Ann Yee, Royal Opera 21st February 2023, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Rusalka, as music journalist Kate Molleson has pithily remarked, is “a blend of folk song, luscious nature evocation and Wagnerian epic”. As such, it lends itself to diverse interpretations, including that of feminism. On Radio 3, Freethinking, Feb 1st, the subject up for discussion was Mélusine, another mythic water spirit (nymph), as depicted by the 14th writer Jean d’Arras in the Roman de Mélusine. Doctoral candidate Olivia Colquitt referred pointedly therein to the “male gaze”. For as the story goes, only if Mélusine can find a man who won’t look at her on Saturday, can she live as a human and go to heaven. The Freethinking panel agreed that this represents a demand for women’s space and that it also bespeaks men’s concern about what women get up to in private. A mermaid, we were reminded, can be a temptress and a voracious sexual being.

That “wise, eternal spirit” Ježibaba, played in this new production by Sarah Connolly, tells Rusalka that: “Man is an abomination of nature who has turned his back on Mother Earth”. In a 2022 staging of the work by Jack Furness for Garsington Opera, the set in Act 2 (at the Prince’s palace) was reminiscent of an abattoir. The Prince, evidently obsessed with killing animals, disemboweled a deer and presented its heart to Rusalka’s rival, the Foreign Princess (see Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 19 June 2022; Dominic Lowe, Bachtrack, 20 June 2022; Robert Hugill, Opera Today, June 2022).

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Endnotes, March 2023

Posted on February 20, 2023 by leslie

Henri Rousseau, Sevres Bridge, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, March 2023

In this edition: premieres for the composer, Randall Svane; orchestral music by Francis Poulenc; reviewed by Stuart Millson

The Quarterly Review is always keen to champion new music that bucks the trend. In today’s terms, this means compositions that confront, not support, the modernist brutalism and iconoclasm that takes pleasure in turning accepted norms on their head. It is for this reason (and after sampling his work) that we have come to regard the contemporary United States composer, Randall Svane (born 1955) as a standard-bearer for the composition and art that takes us back to the world of the symphonic poem, to the unashamedly idealistic and patriotic occasional statement (his American Fanfare) and to the concerto, the chamber sonata and the liturgical works that celebrate Western spirituality.

Although Svane’s oeuvre has not yet achieved worldwide attention, we believe that a new Debussy or Vaughan Williams has come into being – such is the composer’s embrace of emotional warmth, tonality and, occasionally, a tincture of Impressionism. But warmth and tonality – scorned by extreme modernists – do not mean that the composer has decided to insulate himself from the anxieties of our time. In fact, the reverse is true: the resurrection of tonal music allows us to find our way again; to make sense of the world in a language that we can all understand. Art is collective and offers us all a revelation: thanks to this new American master, music becomes truly relevant.

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The Prisoner of Text

Posted on February 8, 2023 by leslie

Norman Mailer in 1948, credit Wikipedia

The Prisoner of Text

Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer, Richard Bradford, Bloomsbury Caravel, pp 304, £18, reviewed by Bill Hartley                           

The title may well be ironic, given Mailer’s wife beating habits. This biography has been published to coincide with the centenary of his birth and mercilessly examines his reputation both personal and professional. Born in New York to a Jewish family, Mailer was found to have an extraordinarily high IQ. At sixteen, he was considered ready for Harvard where he studied engineering sciences.

The author doesn’t waste time on Mailer’s childhood, indeed the only thing of lasting importance to note is that his mother was convinced she had given birth to a genius and retained this belief throughout her life. To her, Norman could do no wrong. Given subsequent events this stretches credulity beyond breaking point, not that it seems to have bothered her. On one occasion, Mailer slammed his wife’s head against a cupboard leaving her stunned. His mother arrived on the scene and asked him: ‘Are you alright?’

Mailer saw service in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War. During his induction the Army was astonished at his mathematical skills. As author Richard Bradford notes, it was certainly puzzling that he never sought a commission or a role in signals or intelligence. If he had a preference for infantry combat then this was hardly realised, since he spent most of his time on what the US Army calls rear echelon duties. However, out of this experience came one of the great novels of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead. The book broke through the clutter of war stories which were appearing in the late forties and for Mailer it was, to paraphrase Lord Byron, a case of ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’. The book even drew comparisons with Tolstoy from some reviewers. From this point onwards the real Norman Mailer emerges and it is probably safe to say that the author has no liking for his subject. Indeed it makes one wonder who could, save for his mother. Despite this he had no difficulty in attracting women.

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ENDNOTES, February 2023

Posted on January 30, 2023 by leslie

Ken Russell, Song of Summer; Christopher Gable as Eric Fenby, Max Adrian as Delius, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, February 2023

In this edition: a new Piano Concerto by Nimrod Borenstein; the spiritual intensity of Herbert Howells; music for a Prince, all reviewed by Stuart Millson

The imposing name Nimrod Borenstein immediately caught our attention during this month’s rummage through the many CDs sent to The QR for review. A British-Israeli musician (born 1969), Borenstein is an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music and has amassed a catalogue of nearly one hundred works. His compositions are increasingly appearing in the repertoire of the Philharmonia, Royal, BBC and Oxford Philharmonic orchestras; they have already earned good notices at such international venues as the Salle Gaveau, Paris, and Carnegie Hall, New York.

Written in 2021 especially for international soloist, Clelia Iruzun, and premiered a year later in São Paulo, Brazil, Borenstein’s Piano Concerto has now been recorded for the SOMM label by its dedicatee, accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the composer. Lasting nearly half an hour, this engrossing and exciting piece is grounded strongly in tonality ~ the composer commenting on how important the concerto form is for him; how vital it is to make the piano sound both “beautiful and complex”; and to place contrasts inside each movement, to avoid any trace of “monotony”.

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The Bible and the Ancient Near East

Posted on January 25, 2023 by leslie

The Deer Hunt Mosaic from Pella, c.300 BC, credit Wikipedia

The Bible and the Ancient Near East

Christopher Rollston, Susanna Garfein, Neal H. Walls (Eds.), Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of P. Kyle McCarter Jnr., 2022, SBL Press, $119.00, reviewed by Darrell Sutton

The history of ‘Oriental studies’ in America was chronicled by C.W. Meade, in The Road to Babylon: Development of U.S. Assyriology (Brill; 1974). Its European foundations were broad but not unknown. Beyond the arduous efforts of the decipherers of cuneiform, the roots of Assyriology sprouted mainly from seeds sown in the research of Julius Oppert (1825-1905) and Eberhard Schrader (1836-1908). Mesopotamian investigations prompted and accelerated wider studies, some of which appeared in, among others, Beiträge zur Assyriologie and The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, or in the pages of periodicals like The Babylonian and Oriental Record and Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis. The ripest fruits of Assyriology were accessible to persons proficient enough to grasp cuneiform content. Some significant and prolific figures were trained in the school of Friedrich Delitzsch (1850-1922). On the shoulders of those scholars whose scholarship today seems passé, a new generation of creative specialists have made their stand.

Collecting articles in honour of a notable scholar is hardly unusual. Original ideas in his or her areas of interest are often treated therein, although occasionally papers that would not pass the tests of an academic journal’s peer-review are submitted, accepted, then published. Technical fields of study tend to foster esoteric research. The study of Assyriology, Hebraica and Archaeology certainly illustrate this claim, offering disputable ‘scientific’ findings that are based on varied interpretations. The articles assembled here pay tribute to P. Kyle McCarter, the W.F. Albright Emeritus Professor in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. His research is wide-ranging, as can be seen from the editors’ comments (pp.xvii-xviii) and in Christopher Rollston’s Introduction (1-2). Jonathan Rosenbaum surveys McCarter’s considerable contributions to near eastern scholarship (xix-xxv); the latter’s knowledge of Egyptology is acknowledged. At times he delved into Sumerian to supplement his explorations: e.g., see ‘The River Ordeal in Israelite Literature’, (1973), Harvard Theological Review, 66.4.

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Best Westerns

Posted on January 15, 2023 by leslie

John Wayne, in The Comancheros (1961),
credit Wikipedia

Best Westerns, by Bill Hartley

In recent years the Western, once thought defunct, has undergone something of a revival. That said, recent releases shouldn’t be confused with what comes under the heading of ‘Modern Western’. This can be defined as something which takes aspects of the themes and character archetypes of the traditional Western and transplants them to a contemporary setting. Some of these have attracted positive critical attention and perhaps the key to their success is the presence of modern villains; the twenty first century versus the nineteenth, so to speak. Interestingly, some of the best come with a sound literary underpinning.

A good place to start is the multi Academy Award winning film No Country for Old Men, based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy. The picture was set in the 1980s and could be what launched the Modern Western. Filmed in the Badlands of West Texas, the story centres on Ed Tom Bell, an ageing sheriff. He is a man increasingly conscious of being out of his time. As the film progresses, Bell does an occasional narration and we discover he is a living link with the past, being the grandson of a sheriff. He tells us there was a time when some lawmen didn’t even see it as necessary to carry a firearm and whilst crime and violence have always been features of the work, its recent escalation is leaving Bell overwhelmed.

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Broken Myths, Broken Landscapes

Posted on January 8, 2023 by leslie

Broken Myths, Broken Landscapes

Broken Myths; Charles Sheeler’s Industrial Landscapes, Andrea Diederichs, De Gruyter, 2023, Berlin/Boston, Pb 267pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

By 1927, the market share of the once mighty Ford Motor Company had shrunk from 50 to 15%. Rebranding was evidently in order. If you won’t change the product, change the perception of it. The Philadelphia advertising agency N W Ayer and son, accordingly, commissioned freelance photographer Charles Sheeler to take a series of shots of the recently opened River Rouge plant in Dearborn where Ford’s ‘new’ Model A was being produced. Fashion, Firestone, cameras, typewriters – all had hitherto been grist to Sheeler’s mill. His brief now was to help Ford “regain [its] former status as market leader”. He produced 33 photos which were featured in ten issues of Ford News.

In his Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Frederick Taylor envisaged what the author terms “a perfect man-machine symbiosis”. Time and motion studies were employed by Taylor’s team to ascertain the quickest, most efficient method of performing any given task in a factory. Workers were viewed by Taylor as “predictable, machine-like objects”. His overriding goal was to reduce costs and thereby maximise profits. Work should be speeded up and the work force subject to an enhanced division of labour. In effect, the worker would be de-skilled and expertise transferred to the machine. Taylor thought that higher wages would compensate for any resulting boredom and fatigue.

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Endnotes January 2023

Posted on January 1, 2023 by leslie

Florence Cathedral, facade, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, January 2023

In this edition: Vaughan Williams from Midori Komachi and Simon Callaghan; orchestral fresco of Florence by Randall Svane, reviewed by Stuart Millson

In recent years, Midori Komachi has emerged as one of the most sensitive exponents of chamber music. With many impressive concert credits to her name: London, Warsaw, Tokyo ~ and even enterprising commercial relationships with airlines for in-flight musical entertainment ~ Midori effortlessly crosses national borders and musical genres. Several years ago, her sublime recording of Debussy’s Violin Sonata was characterised in this column as a performance of rare, subtle colours. Usually such an international performer of the younger generation would cultivate a cosmopolitan repertoire (i.e. not one centred on English romantic pastoral music, written by some tweed-jacketed, supposedly old-fashioned inhabitant of a Surrey country house). Not so, Midori. Here she is performing a remarkable collection on the MusiKaleido label in Vaughan Williams’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Minor, written, like the Debussy sonata, late in the composer’s life.

A piece from a Vaughan Williams era that includes the South Polar ice-wastelands of the Seventh Symphony and the unexpectedly spiky Eighth, the sonata is cast in three movements: Fantasia, Scherzo and Tema con variazioni ~ titles which themselves are reminiscent of the movements of Symphony No. 8. The sonata is a chamber work of substance, lasting the best part of half an hour; quite a muscular challenge, as well as musical, but nothing remotely insurmountable for Midori and her accompanist and fellow interpreter, the pianist Simon Callaghan ~ who emerges in this 1954 Vaughan Williams piece as a profound interpreter and exponent in his own right. (It would be good to hear Mr. Callaghan perform the Vaughan Williams Piano Concerto ~ and, incidentally, when will we hear Midori in the Elgar or Bax Violin Concertos? CD companies: please take note.)

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Silence Audible

Posted on December 14, 2022 by leslie

The Attack, Edvard Isto, the Finnish Maiden (Suomineito) attacked by the Russian eagle, credit Wikipedia

Silence Audible

The Northern Silence, Journeys in Nordic Music & Culture, Andrew Mellor, Yale University Press, 300pp, hardback, ISBN 978-0300-25440-2, reviewed by Stuart Millson

The music critic, Andrew Mellor, now a resident of Denmark, has produced in the pages of his ‘Journeys’ a fascinating insight into the Nordic culture and institutions which have clearly captured his soul.

The author begins his story within the glass walls of Helsinki Airport – the starting point that leads to the glass and concrete concert-halls of Scandinavia. The cold, crystal air is breathed in as we leave the airport: Mellor muses on the ‘inaudible breathing’ of the ancient forests of Scandinavia; the pools and boulders of the endlessly-unfolding countryside; and the music of Sibelius, in particular, the seldom-played tone-poem, Tapiola – imbued with the spirit of the innumerable trees, through which gimlet rays of winter sunlight occasionally penetrate.

Tapiola may be the key to unlocking the secret of Nordic music: the work’s tonal strangeness, ‘the rumbling kettledrum with which it sneaks into being’, as Mellor memorably describes it; the sense of diminishing light and the evocation of the silent realm.

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Of Human Bondage

Posted on December 7, 2022 by leslie

A hurrier and two thrusters, from The White Slaves of England (1853),  J. Cobden, credit Wikipedia

                     Of Human Bondage

                                By Bill Hartley          

In 2020, a group of students demanded that the David Hume tower at Edinburgh University be renamed. People will be wearily familiar with what comes next. Hume the philosopher and giant of the Enlightenment had allegedly committed the crime, in a footnote to an essay of his, of describing black Africans as inferior to white people. It has been argued that this was a misrepresentation of his work but even so the tower was duly renamed by the university authorities. Also in Edinburgh, the council has a ‘Slavery and Colonialism Review Group’. Good to know this is among the priorities of local government. North of the border they are considering changes to the school curriculum to focus on issues of slavery (Hume incidentally was against the idea of a British Empire). The Review Group reports that Scotland had one of the highest proportions of people benefiting from the ownership of slaves. Does this include Scots holding their own people in slavery? The Review Group might be surprised to learn that slavery was alive and well rather closer to home and arguably in conditions comparable to those caught up in the African trade.

Consideration is also being given to the creation of a National Museum for Slavery. This might provide an excellent opportunity for the Scots to learn what was going on in their own country, though it probably won’t happen, given the narrow definition of the term. Continue reading →

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