Author: Manuscript Notes

’Day by day, remind yourself that you are going to die.’ (St. Benedict.)

Now, there’s a cheery thought to open today’s post. I cannot recall the first time I became aware not so much of death, as specifically my own mortality. With the years elapsing ever faster, it seems, it is hard to avoid the blunt reality that what lies ahead is considerably less than what has passed. St.Benedict’s encouragement preys on me more regularly now.

Today the Christian calendar commemorates the feast of All Souls. As I write, it is a glorious autumn day and whether you subscribe to a faith or not, it is impossible on a day such as this not to marvel at creation all around us – and the ephemeral nature of it at the same time. Today will be yesterday before we know it.

And the Christian faith reminds us that ‘we know neither the day nor the hour’. Obvious enough, of course, but a caution which carries more weight as the years are ticked off.

On this feast day, I ponder how lucky I am to have reached three score years, but dare not, as a young child I might have done, assume I will be granted the ‘plus ten’ on top. Carpe diem makes more sense nowadays.

The more so, when we bring to mind the many we know who have predeceased us; and, as we approach the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, the millions unknown to us who never experienced adulthood. Teenagers, so many of them.

Teenagers. Some of them shot at dawn by their fellow men for cowardice in the face of the enemy, when in reality they were traumatised.

Today I turn to Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). Not for the first time, I know, (I’ve written about Rigoletto before) but the man had a way with tunes, and could capture heartache, passion, and emotion like few others. He was a musical giant in a turbulent Italy and in operatic terms, nothing has really come close to him in that country since. Or before, come to think of it.

So it is little wonder that his Requiem Mass, first performed in 1874 to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of the poet Alessandro Manzoni, has been viewed by many as being operatic in nature. It requires a large-scale approach, big choirs and a sizeable orchestra, to deliver sometimes deafening sounds. It is long, certainly; at about ninety minutes, it has rarely  been used liturgically, unsurprisingly, and some have tried to stage it, not very successfully in my view.

Amidst all the fire and brimstone, however, are passages of pure loveliness which tug the heartstrings to their very limit. The Agnus Dei, which is recited in a typical Christian liturgy, is one such: scored for soprano, mezzo soprano, choir and orchestra, it provides those few minutes for us to reflect on those no longer here, beseeching the lamb of God to grant them eternal rest.  Listen out for the strings whose searing ten second accompaniment towards the end goes directly to our sadness.

I have deliberately chosen a recording which benefits from two things: first, under Riccardo Muti’s direction (not, admittedly, amongst my favourite conductors), because it is taken at a slower, and hence, reflective pace; and secondly because there are no distracting visuals.

Click on the image below. With no such distractions, you can just close your eyes for five minutes and cherish the memories of loved ones (and others) who are no longer with us, or facing that moment now.

 

I was taught not to open a presentation, pitch, or letter with an apology.

Having avoided that with those words, I can now apologise for radio silence.

I don’t know where the time has gone. I always dread the arrival of September, marking, as it does, the end of summer, and a quite magnolious one at that.

This year, the final Test Match against India took place after The Last Night of the Proms, the occasion which I usually accept as the vestige of summer months. But there has surely never been a more emphatic announcement of its passing than the sight and sound of Mohammed Shami’s middle stump being uprooted, to give Jimmy Anderson his wicket-taking record.

One wicket required. Last batsman. No more matches this summer.

And then, in an instant, a split second if ever there was one, mission accomplished. With it, right then, summer 2018 and my first sight of a beach for over ten years, was over. Love this view.

None of which bears much of a connection to today’s musical offering, but serves as an elaborate excuse for my distractions. Except that the piece I’ve chosen clings on to those balmy days one last time, even if we are well and truly into autumn.

John Ireland (1879-1962) was one of those English composers whose name has been somewhat dwarfed by the likes of William Walton, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Benjamin Britten: most likely because he confined himself to predominantly miniature works, especially for piano; and with no symphonies or operas to his name, his legacy was always going to be an uphill battle. Happily it is gaining traction.

Ireland did not have a happy childhood. His publisher father, on his second marriage, was 69 when he was born to a mother thirty years younger than her husband. With a gap like that, you’d be forgiven for expecting her to get in at least one more spouse  – but she actually predeceased him when John was just 14. His father followed her the following year.

The impression you get is that of a lost soul, but the man had talent enough to go to The Royal Academy, where many years later he taught Britten (who was characteristically disparaging about him). His personal life was a struggle. In haste, he married a 17 year old pupil; but far from repenting at leisure, they were divorced with equal haste and without consummation. Tchaikovsky did the same sort of thing, and it is widely recognised that Ireland’s tendencies were similar to the great man.

Despite his internal struggles, he has left some lovely music. Many will be familiar with the hymn My song is love unknown, a personal favourite, for which Ireland composed the music. He was organist at both St.Luke’s in Chelsea and Holy Trinity, Sloane Square.

His music comes under the banner of English Impressionism. The Downland Suite was composed for a brass band competition in 1932 (it didn’t win) and has since been transcribed for strings. The third movement, The Minuet, is possibly the most famous.

There is nothing gushing about this and it could so easily have been written by Elgar. It is in praise of the countryside, especially Sussex, where Ireland is buried.

So, yes, summer is behind us, but this is charm and Englishness at its purest.

Click on the image for one last celebration of sun and greenery –

 

 

 

 

 

It helps to have some kind of a trigger or cue when writing these posts, but sometimes the desire to get a tune out to you is so overwhelming that I run the risk of not sharing it at all if I wait for that elusive prompt.

Today’s music is a case in point. It requires no link to anything; it is just one of those arias that once heard is loved for ever.

Mozart’s big four operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni are stuffed with melodies which are less plentiful in his others. There are individual arias aplenty in The Seraglio, but I doubt many people go around humming them with any huge enthusiasm. Or at all, for that matter.

Today I have picked an aria which was not even included in Don Giovanni‘s first performance in Prague in 1787. Elvira, one of the Don’s many, and discarded, conquests, was played by Caterina Cavalieri, who complained that her role did not have any standout arias for her to show off her skills. It’s quite possible to speculate that she felt her assets were being underutilized.

So she asked Mozart to address the matter. Be careful what you wish for, as they say.

She got herself a blockbuster of a melody all right. But it came at a price: it requires truly phenomenal breath control, and it separates the men from the boys – or whatever the female equivalent of that analogy  might be.

Don Giovanni is not just one of Mozart’s greatest operas, it is one of the greatest operas by anyone, anywhere, ever: a masterpiece which encompasses tunes galore, comedy, drama, all underlined with a clear moral message. Ingredients which combine to make it a favourite of many.

There is no need to embark on a lengthy synopsis. In short it is the story of a murderous lothario who is warned his time will come, as it does in spectacular fashion.  When the ghost of  one of his victims, the father of one his conquests, accepts the Don’s invitation to dinner, he is given several chances to repent; and in in refusing to do so is engulfed in the flames of hell.

Barbara Frittoli (b 1967) is the soprano who stands out amongst so many others in this aria Mi tradi...To sing it too slowly is to lose out on the dancing woodwind in the background, especially the clarinet, a ‘conversation’ device between singer and instrument which Mozart so ingeniously uses elsewhere. And to sing it too slowly is to cheat, because it avoids the breathing difficulties which come with speed.

There are a couple of minutes reflection before launching into the aria proper. Listen, in particular, to the passage 5.11-5.24 – thirteen seconds of acrobatics in one breath, it’s astonishing.

What’s she singing about? Oh, just the usual lament – you’re gonna get your comeuppance, you’re a cad and bounder, but I still fancy you, dammit.

Click on the image for coloratura singing at its very best.

 

 

All of us will have memories associated with the sea. As a wheelchair user, my own have, until recently, been distant ones.

We have been taking our children to Cornwall for the last twenty years. For the last fifteen, each visit has served as a slightly painful yardstick for my MS: ‘I could do this last year, but I can’t now.’ My most frustrating annual realizations were acknowledging that my golfing days with my son were behind me, as were my pathetic attempts at body-boarding with friends and the rest of my family.

If I’m honest, I used to spend more time at the water’s edge, standing in a Duke-of-Edinburgh-like pose with my hands behind my back, gazing out to sea; invariably with something on my feet, because I have this peculiar aversion to sand between my toes and the difficulty of getting rid of it later. What’s that all about?

But this year was different. It was the first time I was able to say “I couldn’t do this last year, but I can now.”

Through the generosity of a private charity, I now have an electric wheelchair which has something of a Heineken effect. From the house we rent, with no other building between us and the sea, I was able to negotiate terrain hitherto inaccessible and wonder at a view I hadn’t seen for over ten years.

That tiny speck in the distance  is me.

And this is what I feasted my eyes and ears on: an expanse of colour and sound which unfolded gradually as my chair edged closer. I felt like a child, experiencing it all for the first time, because I had quite forgotten what I had been missing until it was there in front of me.

It is little wonder that the sea has captured the attention of poets, artists, and musicians. In music there is a wealth of work to convey its mystery and power.

Dame Janet Baker has recently celebrated her 85th birthday and it is high time this blog gave her beautiful and distinctive voice an airing. Edward Elgar, about whom I have written in previous posts (pop Elgar in the Search box for more), wrote his song cycle Sea Pictures in 1894. The most well-known, Where Corals Lie, is a poem by Richard Garnett, beckoning its reader to the sea. It is just a few minutes long, and has this lovely, slightly haunting, melody, coupled with an almost nervous beat. Baker’s rich, dark voice is a perfect fit to both words and music.

Make sure you listen right to the end: I doubt there is a better rendition – and to abandon it early would be to miss the last chord, which is sweetness itself, and one which could so easily have come from the hand of his fellow Englishman, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

‘I must go down to the sea again…’, wrote John Masefield. It is an unfulfilled desire I’ve had for many years, at last accomplished this summer.

Oh, and I even pottered around the golf course with my son, too. So that’s two things I couldn’t do last year, and now can.

Click on the image and picture yourself by the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sport has once more interfered with my musical musings, the usual quota increased this year by the World Cup. I was not glued to every match, but it was a gripping contest in Moscow, even without England’s success – for that it surely was.

The Open at Carnoustie had all the ingredients for a thrilling last day, with over half a dozen players in the mix. The last hour promised to be the most exciting for years, until, one by one, every contender bar one decided it wasn’t for him. As a consequence, there was no multi competitor play-off, just an outright (and thoroughly likeable) champion.

Something of an anti climax. Just like the well-billed Blood Moon last Friday, whose visibility in the south of the UK was about as evident as a policeman when you really want one. (Which, aptly enough, is only likely to be, if ever, once in a blue moon.)

But it did have the effect of calling to mind one really magical five minutes of music which I encountered for the first time just weeks before. I had never been to a performance of Capriccio by Richard Strauss until this summer.

I have written about Strauss’s unparalleled writing for the soprano voice (Search on Home Page reveals all), but he was also a top-rate orchestrator (see parentheses above). Capriccio was Strauss’s last opera, first performed in Munich in October 1942. The year. Just imagine attending that evening, fully aware of what horrific misfortune could occur at any moment.

The opera does not need a lengthy explanation here: it is, quite simply, a lighthearted piece which debates (through two different suitors for a Countess) the perennial question of which art form is the more important – poetry/words or music?

They are, of course, inseparable.  The combination of the two throughout the opera is unsurprisingly sublime: at one point I counted eight different voices singing their own lines all at the same time, each unique to him- or herself, and each distinguishable within the group.

And then this.  As the Countess prepares to reflect on her dilemma, Strauss slips in these few minutes of Mondschein (Moonshine) music.  I have written about music connected with the moon in the past (in danger of repeating my above parentheses now). As the son of a horn player, he knew a thing or two about this instrument, which opens this brief passage.

There are a few recordings to choose from. Antonio Pappano can scarce do no wrong in my ears, but I think he takes it a tiny bit fast; and Barenboim’s live concert succumbs to the very smallest of blemishes on the horn.

I’ve picked one where the sound is perfect and the visuals are just irritating. So when you’ve clicked on it, I would encourage you to sit back and wallow in the sound, wishing, as I did when I first heard it a month ago, that it could go on and on and on. A single horn, then full orchestra with a couple of harps for good measure.

(The Countess’s final piece is often sung as a stand-alone concert aria. I saw Kiri Te  Kanawa perform it with Leonard Bernstein many years ago and had the pleasure of meeting them both afterwards. She, as you might expect, was divine. He, as you might expect, thought he was.)

Another new discovery. And a moon you can rely on, too.

 

 

 

 

If you are ever lucky enough to be a guest at the Salzburg Festival, you would not let slip that you weren’t a fan of Mozart; or Wagner at Bayreuth.

So while at the Aldeburgh Music Festival, which I have attended for the last few years, I have kept my mouth firmly zipped on site that I am not a great lover of the music of Benjamin Britten (1913-76). It would be an act of heresy, risking immediate expulsion and a ban to return for life. Some readers will be aghast at such an admission, about one of this country’s most gifted composers, and the man who set up the festival seventy years ago with the musician and his life-long partner, Peter Pears, seen below on the right with Britten.

From a modest start in Aldeburgh, its popularity grew to require larger premises and hence its move to Snape Maltings. The accoustic in the 832 seat concert hall is extraordinary.

We listened to a violin concerto in the first half of one concert without knowing whose it was, having left the programme in the bar. There were, in my view, isolated moments of real beauty, but not frequent enough for me to really want to listen to it again – which, I admit, is exactly what I would encourage you to do if you didn’t like one of my posts.

During the interval I tentatively asked what we’d just heard, to be informed that it was the Britten Violin Concerto.

Right, I thought, I’m really glad I hadn’t known that in advance, because I’d have made up my mind that I wasn’t going to listen to it properly. But I did; and when I learnt of its identity, my reaction was that I’m glad to have been made to hear it without knowing the composer, ticked that box, and no need to seek it out again. A view I still hold.

I’ve probably lost a few of you in disgust already. How lazy. How short-sighted. But is it really any different to ditching a book half way through if it hasn’t got hold of you by then?

And yet maybe that’s one approach when listening to a piece for the first time: give it your full attention without knowing the composer, and find yourself less biased and more curious. Then see if you want to hear it again, or, better still, seek out other works by the same hand.

(The second half of the concert, incidentally, was Dvorak’s New World Symphony, whose popularity since its very first performance has caused it to be so overplayed that I would never actively seek it out. He wrote eight others, only a handful of which get a decent airing. It was so brilliantly played, however, that, much to my annoyance, I have been humming excerpts from it ever since. A different result for my prejudiced thinking. Serves me right, I know. And if you haven’t heard the piece, which includes the backing for a famous bread brand advertisement, I would encourage you to ignore my temporary boredom with it and listen to it.)

The difficulty I have with Britten is that he couldn’t stand the music of Verdi (seriously?), Brahms, Elgar and Vaughan Williams. But his output was prolific, and his 16 operas redefined English opera. I know there are plenty of exceptions, it’s just that I find much of his music to be so – how can I put it? – bloody miserable!

I am an impatient listener, but when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced it is my fault. Not my words, but Britten’s, and that must be my admission henceforth. I’m conscious that this post is almost in breach of my mission to share pieces with you that I enjoy, and I’ve hardly bigged up Britten here – but here is one of those exceptions.

On the final day of the festival, we attended a recital given by the bass-baritone, Bryn Terfel. What a way to finish that was. Amongst his songs was this setting by Britten of the folksong Foggy, Foggy Dew. As an example of a major work, it is not; but it is a rare moment of fun, especially in the hands of Terfel and his gifted accompanist, Malcom Martineau.  The story is brilliantly told by both of them. Click below image.

 

We were treated to two encores. And here comes a gripe. The first was a humorous one about a dragon. After he’d finished it, with applause still strong, there were people all over this very open hall bolting for the exits to make a head start from the car parks. Can you imagine how awful that looks from the stage? And can you imagine missing this, one of Schubert’s most beautiful songs, Allerseelen, written for the Feast of All Souls? Serves them right, I say.

The last line was sung even more quietly than it is here, almost a whisper, and we heard every word. What a gem. Click again-

 

 

 

I remember well the first time I went to my first opera. It was Verdi’s La traviata. Nothing particularly special about that.

Except for the fact that I was just 12 years old – and it was at Verona. And believe me there is plenty special about that. This is what my first, and outdoor, opera experience looks like:

It was quite wasted on me, of course. We were on holiday with my grandfather on my mother’s side, and the children (that’s me, my sibs and a couple of cousins) had to be hauled along in the absence of anything better to do with them.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, today I discovered something else which was wasted on me. The main roles of Violetta and Alfredo were sung by Renata Scotto and Carlo Bergonzi. I can’t be certain they were on duty that night, but there has to be a good chance they were.

To put it in perspective, it’s a bit like being taken to a concert at the age of 6 and learning a few years later that the lead act had been David Bowie. Or Miles Davis.

In David Hare’s new play about the creation of Glyndebourne opera house, Moderate Soprano (on until June 30th and well worth a visit if you can), its visionary, John Christie, protests his dream against his doubters with the words “There are always a thousand reasons not to go to the opera!”

A hundred years ago, maybe. Not so today. Cost? Nah. You could attend any sporting fixture for the same or less; and if sport doesn’t interest you, your visit to the hairdresser, especially if you are in the high/lowlights game, could set you back far more – and you’d do that several times a year.

The worst two, that it’s “just for toffs” or “it’s not my thing” are tosh. In most cases, they are uttered by people who have never bothered to try. For the life of me, I cannot understand why, as long as you have been introduced to the right one at an age you will remember it, the immediate urge will not be to go again. Carmen, La Bohème, The Magic Flute, Aida, Rigoletto, Tosca, The Marriage of Figaro – any of these fall into that category. We took my son to Carmen, and his Christmas present to me that year was just the two of us going to the English National Opera. I rest my case.

And, little though I knew it at 12 years old, Verdi’s La traviata. Probably the most performed of all his operas, it is impossible not to warm to it. It  is the opera Edward Lewis takes Vivian Ward to see in the film, Pretty Woman (with a not dissimilar plot, except that only one has a happy ending – well, it’s an opera, what did you expect?). The tunes go on and on.

Here is one of my favourite singers, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who died far too young at the end of last year, fessing up to his son why he has just asked Violetta to give him up for the sake of their family’s reputation. Lovely, lovely singing, and listen to that last note, 14 seconds of it. Opera Holland Park is staging it now to ecstatic reviews: I know nothing of current ticket sales, but I do know that a few remain on the 19th June, when the proceeds all go to MS research. Go to the website to check, you will not be disappointed. http://www.operahollandpark.com

 

Indulge me, I cannot resist a quick bonus. I have noticed that the music for the forthcoming FIFA World Cup is something I added in an earlier post in memory of Dmitri. Here it is again. What a voice. What a sad loss.