Robert Hugill Weblog
- Aug/sept 05
Tuesday 30th
August 2005
Back from Holidays;
at the end of last week we were at the
Edington Festival of Music within the
Liturgy. It was the 50th
Festival so to celebrate they performed
Tallis’s 40-part motet ‘Spem in Alium’
with one voice to a part, the singers
being taken from this year’s choirs
at Edington and past members; the alto
solo opening the piece was sung by Robin
Blaze;. The choir was directed by Jeremy
Summerly and the layout was the same
as for his Naxos recording (two choirs
at the High Altar, two choirs at the
West Door and two choirs in each of
the side aisles). Despite my
reservations about this on the disc,
I listen in ordinary stereo not surround
sound, it worked wonderfully well in
real life, even sitting just in front
of the fifth choir.
Wednesday 31st
August
Grieg’s ‘Peer Gynt’
is done and dusted, (link)
it made me long to hear a full performance
of Ibsen’s play but I know that I would
be disappointed if it was not accompanied
by all of Grieg’s music. Unfortunately,
the generous scale of it means that
this is just not likely; directors nowadays
tend to want productions to move swiftly
and the days of extensive instrumental
interludes and entr’actes seem to be
over. You have only to consider the
style of most productions of ‘A Midsummer
Night’s Dream’ to realise that contemporary
production values would not find room
of much of Mendelssohn’s music. Still,
we can but hope.
I am now returning
to my plainchant disc, Roman Gradual
in hand, so I hope I can write something
a little more coherent about the Pro
Cantione Antiqua disc of chant, which
is rather lacking in information in
the booklet.
Friday 2nd
September
Well, my Gradual was
only of limited use; I did manage to
track down the titles of all the different
plainchant (they were referred to by
function, Introit etc, on the
disc), but I think that Pro Cantione
Antiqua must have been using a pre-Vatican
II source for the plainchant so there
were numerous little differences and
some pretty major ones. It would have
been nice to know exactly what they
were singing, but the disc is silent
on this matter. So I had no option but
to actually listen to the music and
write about what I heard! (link)
I had yet another encounter
with Spem in Alium last night,
at the Proms. This time The Sixteen
under Harry Christophers; a rather higher,
lighter performance than the one in
Edington, veering more towards David
Wulfstan’s interpretation with the Clerkes
of Oxenford.
Tuesday 6th
September
With some of the budget
record companies, you do sometimes wonder
how some discs come to be selected for
issue; that a recording’s availability
can be a significant factor in its being
issued. We’ve all come across performances
which are pretty disappointing and give
the feeling that the discs were bought
in to fill in a gap in the catalogue.
These thoughts were prompted, possibly
unworthily, by the recent Naxos disappointing
disc of timpani concertos. The soloist,
Alexander Peter doubles as conductor
and as producer. Harrison Powley, who
produced the editions of the music used,
features quite heavily in the CD booklet,
he even gets his own little biography
and picture. If the music on the disc
had been more interesting, I would not
be having these thoughts, but as it
is I wonder whether Naxos decided to
have a disc of Timpani concertos or
whether they simply acquired a pre-existing
project – call me suspicious.[see Paul
Shoemaker's rather dismissive review]
Thursday 8th
September 2005
At first I was dismissive
of the recording of a complete S’lihot
service issued in Naxos’s Milken Archive
of American Jewish Music series. (link)
The solo contributions were astonishing,
but the choral music seemed to be pure
pastiche. But then I realised that I
was listening to it with ears conditioned
by a Western Christian tradition where
the choral contribution to a service
could be considerable and the musical
interest of the priest’s part could
be negligible. If you reverse this and
accept that the choir’s function is
to provide a harmonic basis for the
cantor’s flights of virtuosity, then
things start to make sense. I still
get the feeling of listening to early
music with a late romantic accompaniment;
a feeling akin to that when listening
to accompanied plainchant or to Bach’s
solo cello suites with Schumann’s piano
accompaniment. But the disc is not intended
to be a reconstruction of an earlier
day, simply a reflection of what happens
now, using music written by some of
the great composer cantors from the
late 19th, early 20th
centuries.
Wednesday 14th
September 2005
Naxos’s series Great
Violists is the sort of title which
is unfortunately liable to provoke a
series of Viola jokes; not that William
Primrose is in need of sheltering from
such. (link)
One of the first players to bring a
virtuoso touch to the instrument, this
new disc is admirable, but I’m not sure
of its wider appeal. Record companies
do not really seem to have picked up
on the viola wars which went on in the
middle of the 20th century
and a set of discs which explores this
would be truly fascinating. Despite
Primrose having been inspired to transfer
from Violin to Viola by an encounter
with Lionel Tertis, he and Tertis had
radically different ideas on how you
should play the instrument. Tertis used
a specially commissioned instrument
which had a rich, dominant tenor quality
whereas Primrose used a series of historical
instruments with lighter, alto sound.
They also disagreed on the amount and
type of vibrato to use. Tertis had galvanised
the musical community with his advocacy
of the viola as a solo instrument, but
not everyone appreciated the finer details
of his technique.
As an ex-viola player
myself, I’d love to have a series of
discs exploring this, allowing us to
compare and contrast different players
in the same or similar repertoire. But
is this too nerdish for words; perhaps
it would be even less commercially attractive
than Great Violists.
Friday 16th
September 2005
Sunleif Rasmussen is
a name that is not only new to me but
also, apparently, to the classical CD
catalogue. He’s from the Faroe Islands,
another first evidently, and his Symphony
No. 1 was commissioned for performance
there. The CD booklet goes to some trouble
to explain how he constructs his music
with reference to Tristan Murail, and
spectral music, basing his melodies
and harmonies on Faroese folksongs.
I’m never sure whether this sort of
information is useful; the booklet does
not really explain what spectral music
is and I don’t recognise a single Faroese
folksong, something that probably true
of many of the listeners to the disc.
Does it help listeners to know why music
is the way it is; need they know details
of construction? When writing programme
notes for my own instrumental/orchestral
music I am usually at a loss as I find
it difficult to believe audiences will
be interested in my methods of construction
(its better with choral/vocal music
as I can write about the words). Usually
I fall back on a simple history of the
basic idea. You can pick some of this
up from Rasmussen’s CD booklet, but
the music itself tells a different story.
Its not about intellectual forms, the
sights and sound of the Faroese landscape
and seascape seem to ooze from its every
pore; surely this is the sort of background
information which a foreign listener
would find useful.
I’m off on a course
for a week, so there’ll be lots of travelling
on public transport. I’m not sure how
much reviewing I’ll get done on the
8.30 from Paddington to Maidenhead;
usually I find travelling by train rather
stressful and end up disappearing into
a trashy novel. Still, we’ll see. I’ve
just started on some Jachet of Mantua
and Adrien Willaert and have a double
CD of Beecham’s surviving live recordings
of the Covent Garden Götterdämmerung
to tempt me. This latter is a recording
I’ve been dying to hear for years having
heard tiny extracts from Act 2 almost
30 years ago.
Jachet and Willaert
are composers that I feel I ought to
know and some of whose motets I’ve sung
over the years but who remain securely
on the fringes of my knowledge. I’d
been hoping this CD would broaden my
horizons, but I’m not sure yet; the
choice of five voices singing with a
quintet of sackbuts and cornets is not
quite my idea of a balance of voices
and instruments. I’ll report back.
Tuesday 27th
September
Well travelling for
90 minutes on public transport starting
at 7.30am is not conducive to coherent
listening I’m afraid. I did manage to
finish the disc of Jachet and Willaert
motets and my first impressions remain,
I don’t really like the balance between
five voices and five cornets and sackbuts,
no matter how historically informed
it is. Another annoyance was the fact
that the disc mixed and matched between
unaccompanied and accompanied pieces
but there was no explanatory note in
the booklet. I don’t mind people taking
informed decisions, but I do dislike
not being told why certain things were
decided. Well, I stop here, rant over.
The Beecham Götterdämmerung
was quite a find. The engineers have
had to patch it up a bit and rather
bizarrely the recording starts towards
the end of Act 1 and goes to the end
of Act 2. The engineers were present
on two evenings; perhaps they ran out
of time or resources though at this
remove in time (nearly 70 years) we
might never know. [see
also Jonathan
Woolf's review]
I’m now starting on
an 11 disc set of Vivaldi’s sacred music,
that should keep me busy.
Robert Hugill
