Coleridge-Taylor: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast

Day 318

Coleridge-Taylor: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast

Anthony Rolfe Johnson

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

Kenneth Alwyn

It is hard now to believe just how popular this piece one was. Between the wars Malcolm Sargent conducted regular performances - sometimes for days on end - at the Albert Hall with massed singers all dressed up in ‘red indian’ costumes. It was an standard work for amateur choral societies - my mum had a score in her small collection of music, though I don’t remember her performing it during the time that I went to her choral concerts.

Yet now it is almost forgotten and is a relic of a bygone era. I have to say that I thought it was a very disappointing peice. I can see why people liked singing it so much - there is a big role for the choir, the vocal parts are not that difficult and it makes a good noise when everybody is singing at the top of their voices. But musically it was very thin. The melodic material is unmemorable and Coleridge-Taylor’s harmonic palette is very limited. After a while I became heartily frustrated with the rather facile way that he moved up the keys in repetitive phrases in an attempt to build up the tension. He was a young man when he wrote this and probably had little by way of models to go on, but it seems impossible that this was once a highly regarded piece. The words don’t help. Longfellow’s use of made up Indian names now seems very uncomfortable and the continuous trocahic rhythm of the poetry see on gets on your nerves. It also seems to have inhibited any sense of rhythmic freedom in the music. It is all too foursquare.

There are two other Hiawatha pieces to go with this one - I am sure that i will be in no hurry to hear them. The past really is another country sometimes - it is just so hard to understand just what this piece had the position in British musical life for so long.

Adams: Harmonium

Day 317

John Adams: Harmonium

BBC National orchestra and chorus of Wales

Grant Llewellyn 

I’ve very little experience of Minimalist music. I’ve heard a few odd snippets here and there and did once play in a performance of the Philip Glass violin concerto but I’ve never been particularly interested in the whole minimalist ethos and haven’t really had any inclination to explore it. So I didn’t approach this large scale choral work by John Adams with any particularly enthusiasm.

Rather to my surprised I really enjoyed it. These is something quite hypnotic in the way that Adams uses repetitive figures to build up the texture and to create waves of sound. The choral writing is highly effective and builds up to some impressive climaxes. It must be very hard to sing this sort of music and to keep you place when bar after bar is exactly the same. Adams is very practical about this, indicating at several points where the conductor is required to give specific indications to the choir to ensure that they are all in the same place.

Orchestral this must be extremely tedious to play (I certainly found the constant repetition in the Glass concerto frustrating and that is quite restrained compared to this piece) and I don’t know how players retain their concentration. Perhaps it is all done through adrenaline and the sense of being part of those whole wound world.  I can imagine, however, that in the concert hall the waves of sound can be very exciting. 

The second of the three movement is much less exuberant than the outer movements though it is still based on reputation of small figures.  I found it really rather expressive and lyrical and it formed a good contrast with what came before and after it. 

I was at one time tempted to think that there was no real musical skill in minimalist music and that it almost wrote itself. This piece certainly was not like that. There was a real musical mind here at work with complete command of the material and a sense of how to shape long paragraphs of music. It still would not be my preferred choice of listening but I ended up with much more respect for Adams than I anticipated when I selected this for today’s listening.

Lyadov: Three tone poems

Day 316

Lyadov: Three tone poems

Baba Yaga

The Enchanted Lake

Kilamora

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Alexander Titov

Lyadov is best remembered as the composer whose inability to complete the score of The Firebird led the way to Stravinsky being commissioned in his place. There is a lovely anecdote that he turned up to Diaghilev three months after being commissioned saying “I’ve brought the manuscript paper….”. As Richard Taruskin explains in his superb book on Stravinsky (see day.  ) this is not actually true. Lyadov was agreed to write the music in the first place. He was certainly approached but never agreed to write a score. And the story about the manuscript paper is, unfortunately, almost certainly apocryphal.

It is certainly true that Lyadov was ultra self-critical and that his output wasn’t extensive. It seems that these three symphonic poems originally formed part of a plan for a massive opera but when Lyadov realised that he would never actually get round to completing he extracted these three short pieces.

You only have to hear a few notes to know that this is Russian music. Rimsky Korsakov is the obvious point of reference - ironically Lyadov was thrown out of Rimsky’s composition class because of a poor attendance record, though he was eventually let back in. The music is colourful and the orchestration shows all of the flair of a Rimsky pupil. Perhaps the most interesting of three pieces is the Enchanted Lake, which is a mood picture almost devoid of melody - the gentle undulations and constantly changing orchestral texture really do evoke a sense of the water ebbing and flowing. Here there were some traces of Debussy and elsewhere some hints that Stravinsky was also lurking in the wings.

So an enjoyable encounter with a composer whose music was completely unknown to me. Not one of the greats, but certainly well worth listening to.

Weir: A night at the Chinese opera

Day 315

Judith Weir: A night at the Chinese opera

Soloists

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Andrew Parrott

I’ve been lucky enough to play several pieces by Judith Weir over the last few years. I’ve enjoyed exploring her music from the inside. What strikes me most is the clarity of her orchestral writing - her ear for sonorities is quite superb.

This opera was in many ways Weir’s breakthrough piece. It has so many facets. There is real drama in the outer acts and real fun in the parody of a Chinese opera in the middle act. And Weir has a natural affinity with word setting (she wrote the libretto herself) and the dramatic pacing is beautifully judged. Any British opera composer is inevitably in the shadow of Benjamin Britten and clearly his influence clearly shines though the score. But in many ways the stronger resonances are Tippett and Birtwistle. 

But ultimately Weir has her own voice and this is a major achievement for a first opera by a composer in her early thirties. I look forward to getting to know more of her operas - there are several to go at.

Wolf-Ferrari: Il segreto di Susanna

Day 314

Wolf-Ferrari: Il segreto Di Susanna

Judith Howarth

Àngel Òdena

Oviedo Philharmonia

Friedrich Haider

I though that this was delightful

I knew the overture, along with a few other overtures and intermezzi by Wolf-Ferrai, but I had never heard any of the operas in full. This is a short opera (45 mins) for two singers (and a silent character) - a man and his wife. The plot is wafer thin. The husband comes home and smells cigarette smoke, assumes that his wife is having an affair and storms out. He comes back in surreptitiously to catch her with her lover and sees that she is smoking a cigarette. They make up and enjoy a final smoke together.

Wolf-Ferrari clearly had great fun writing this score. It dates from 1909 and the spirit of Verdi's Falstaff , which was only 15 or so years old at the time of writing, is clear to see. In fact this is almost certainly the most successful post Verdi comic opera , with perhaps the exception of Gianni Schicchi, which followed Wolf-Ferrari's score a decade of so late. I particularly enjoyed the very sensuous music - almost Straussian in its luxuriance - for the scene in which the heroine smokes her cigarette. There is surely a nod to Tristan und Isolde here.  The whole thing is fast paced and dramatic, thought there are moments of reflection and some very attractive melodies. It was a real find.

David: Le Désert

Day 313

Félicien David: Le Désert

Soloists

Choir of St Hedwig’s cathedral Berlin

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Guido Maria Guida

Félicien David is largely forgotten as a composer these days, though his name is familiar to collectors of old vocal recordings because a few extracts from his operas were regularly features in the catalogues. But he was an important figure in his time and Le Désert is a key piece. It is scored for male chorus, tenor soloist, orchestra and a narrator and is one of the first pieces of orientalism in 19th century French music. As such it was huguely influential throughout the rest of the century. 

The key musical influence is probably Gluck, although there are also some hints of Spontini and, to a lesser extent Auber. Berlioz also lurks in the background. He is known to be an admirer of David’s music and one can see how Berlioz took some of the David’s ideas further than the composer himself.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the score is the Muezzin’s call. This is highly evocative and foreshadows much that it is to come - I was particularly reminded of the similar passages in The Barber of Baghdad.   Indeed much of the whole late 19th century French interest in the exotic can be traced back to David’s score. It may not be the most inspired score but without it much of what followed could not have happened.

Charpentier: Te Deum

Day 312

Charpentier: Te Deum

Les musicians du Louvre

Marc Minkowski

I’m not sure that I have ever heard any Charpentier (Marc-Antoine) before, though I may have heard the midnight mass at some point). As a Rameau enthusiast it is perhaps surprising that I have not investigated any of Charpentier’s operas - perhaps that will come in another project.

The opening of the Te Deum is famous/notorious as the theme music for Eurovision - particularly the song contest. Though anybody hearing this performance would be surprised at the speed that Minkowski adopts.  I have to say, though, that the piece largely passed me by without making any sort of impression = it was very much a case of in one ear out of the other. That doesn’t mean that there was anything unpleasant about the piece. It just seemed rather to be a piece of baroque painting by numbers. Everything was in its place and was effective but it just failed to make any sort of impact. Perhaps that is a little unfair - I didn’t have a score and my attention did wander from time to time.  Gustav is the Charpentier for me!