Rattle’s 1996 series
Leaving Home – Orchestral Music in
the 20th Century is slowly
making its way onto DVD. Volume 1 (Dancing
on a Volcano - review)
is now followed by volumes 4 and 5,
but don’t worry – there was no chronology
in Rattle’s approach, and all were self-contained
programmes, so an order really doesn’t
exist, except in the dates they were
first broadcast.
I am an ardent fan
of Rattle and greatly enjoyed this series
first time round, so I suppose I should
get my moans out of the way to start
with. Why are Arthaus only giving us
one episode per (quite expensive) disc?
Shorn of the adverts, they are barely
50 minutes long, so two or even three
could easily be accommodated on a single
DVD. It’s obviously down to making more
money out of us, and we could perhaps
forgive them if there were a host of
extras. In fact, the ‘bonus material’
is simply audio tracks of some of the
music featured, (admittedly in complete
performances but very ordinary sound)
and cheaply reproduced composer biographies
and photos, neither of which is likely
to sway a prospective buyer.
There was also a technical
problem on my copy of volume 4, where
synchronization of sound and picture
were not perfect. I’ve come across this
on odd opera DVDs and it can be very
irritating. Watching Rattle’s narration
to the camera is disconcerting enough
when there’s a slight delay, but the
problem even invaded the music extracts
– especially those involving percussion,
as in the snare drum and wood block
extract from Shostakovich 4. Happily,
there were no such gremlins on volume
5, and I do hope this doesn’t mar future
releases.
As for the programmes
themselves, I’ve nothing but praise
for Rattle’s easy, authoritative camera
manner, the superb choice of music and
soloists and the general quality of
the concept and presentation. Three
Journeys through Dark Landscapes
is basically made up of three short
films centering on Bartók (A
Journey into Exile), Shostakovich
(A Journey towards Truth)
and Lutosławski
(A Journey towards Freedom).
Using these three towering figures,
Rattle tries to examine the role of
the creative artist struggling to work
in hostile political climates and the
supreme sacrifices that have to be made.
As with all the films, he has to cram
an awful lot into a very short space,
so one has to admire his succinct linking
narrations and his apposite choice of
musical extracts. For the Bartók,
we get quite large chunks of Bluebeard’s
Castle, superbly performed by Otter
and White, the Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta, a fragment
of The Miraculous Mandarin
and the ‘elegy’ from Concerto for
Orchestra, which Rattle neatly links
back to Bluebeard.
The Shostakovich film
concentrates quite rightly on the symphonies,
giving us chunks of 4, 5 and, most movingly,
14, where Willard White’s sonorous bass
intones Küchelbecker’s ‘O Delvig’
while photos of many of the artists
who died under Stalin are flashed on
the screen. Rattle is obviously a paid-up
member of the Testimony club, quoting
liberally from it, but whatever your
view on the controversy, he shouldn’t
really be referring to it as ‘Shostakovich’s
book’.
The Lutosławski
film is even more personal, as Rattle
met him a number of times and talks
with great warmth of the man. Again,
the extracts may be obvious choices
but no less enjoyable for that, as they
all suit Rattle to a T. The pounding
opening to the Concerto
for Orchestra, Venetian Games
(where he has great fun getting the
CBSO not to play together) and
Symphony No.3 are all dispatched
with the utmost virtuosity.
If anything, The
American Way packs even more
into its modest time span, Rattle giving
us a useful overview of the musical
birth of a nation. I like his opening
morsel; ‘If European art was a very
long, marinated casserole, then American
art is the fastest, most brilliant stir-fry’.
We kick off with the tracing of black
culture and influence, jazz and tin-pan
alley, culminating in a superbly idiomatic
big-band Rhapsody in Blue extract
from Wayne Marshall. Other highlights
include a tantalizingly brief snippet
from the original Martha Graham choreography
for Appalachian Spring and a
healthy chunk of Ives’s Decoration
Day, played against suitably evocative
shots of New England countryside and
townships. Rattle really gets into his
stride when moving on to the post-war
period, particularly the contribution
of Cage and Feldman. He plays percussion
in the decent-sized slice of First
Construction in Metal, as well as
a short but energetic rendition of Riley’s
In C. He tries hard to encapsulate
the complexities of Elliott Carter’s
fanfare A Celebration of Some 100x150
Notes (1987, not 1969 as the caption
says) and finishes with a beautifully
gauged rendition of part of Harmonium,
John Adams’s setting of Emily Dickinson.
Rattle obviously sees the path from
the simplicities of Feldman to the eclectic
minimalism of Adams as a perfectly logical
one, something I would not argue with.
So, if you admired
these illustrated talks first time round,
you won’t need any persuading to get
them in better quality picture and sound.
The caveats are there, but the power
and persuasion of Rattle in this sort
of repertoire is pretty unbeatable.
Tony Haywood
ARTHAUS
MUSIK DVD 102039 [50 minutes] 
for
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