Bath International Music Festival

We are attending some of the concerts in Bath during their annual festival, directed this year by the brilliant and colourful pianist Joanna Macgreger. She has organised an eclectic programme of more than fifty concerts in which global culture permeates every aspect and includes medieval music of the Mediterranean, jazz, classical, World, folk and electronic music with new collaborations of musicians of every background connecting with one another. It’s a fantastic ambition and it seems – half way through the Festival – to be working. The city is full of local people and visitors. There’s a buzz.

I went to one of the earliest classical concerts last week in which the excellent Vanbrugh Quartet played Zemilinsky’s first quartet in A and the first of Beethoven’s four last quartets, No 132 in A minor. It was like two evenings in one, the music was so different. Zemilinsky’s delicious work passionate and lyrical, reminding us that Mahler conducted some of his work and like Shoenberg and Weill, thought very highly of him. Beethoven at his most anguished brought us into another world, breaking through traditional form into new dimensions, this work having five movements instead of the usual four, only the last providing some relief from the sober mood of the rest. Wonderful performances from this distinguished Quartet who are based in Ireland and have recently recorded all the Beethoven quartets. They played to an immensely enthusiastic audience.

Then a very different concert by the Ingrid Laubrock Quintet a few days later, part of the extensive Jazz Weekend which is a tradition of Bath Festival programmes. This was an extraordinary experience. We both like Jazz, my wife particularly. This was avant garde stuff for us, however, demanding an intellectual appreciation as much as an instinctive visceral one. All the pieces were composed by Laubrock, a brilliant saxophonist. German-born but London-resident she is a recent recipient of the Arts Foundation Award for Jazz Composition. Other members of the group were Barry Green on piano, Seb Rochford, fantastically energetic on drums in two items, whilst Larry Bartley on bass and Ben Davis on cello often played with their bows as a lyrical counterpoint to music that was otherwise extremely vigorous. We learned a lot.
B.R.

RODRIGO -again*

I heard Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez last night in a performance by the Australian guitarist Craig Ogden and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under their permanent conductor Marin Alsop.

There was a pre-concert interview with the soloist. He has had the advantage of contact with Rodrigo’s daughter who approves of his art. He has discovered the source of inspiration for the plaintive second movement, the heart of the work. It was written with the painful memory of the death of a child in infancy, and the last ascending chords moving into silence stand for the upward movement of the child’s soul. The second of two cadenzas in that movement is full of angst and anger, representing, Ogden suggested, the depth of personal loss. The concerto was written in 1939, the year when the Spanish Civil War was concluded, and I wondered if that was also part of Rodrigo’s pain over the loss of 410,000 men dying during the fighting and a further 200,000 suffering from the ravages of disease.

Craig Ogden told the story of a concert shared with his wife, the opera singer Claire Bradshaw. Their three year old son, Gabriel, was being minded by a friend but the little boy, hearing the music went in search of his parents. Walking slowly down the aisle, carrying his comfort blanket and sucking his thumb, he walked onto the platform, moving nearer and nearer to his father. Ogden went on playing until his son pressed so close to him that he had to stop. Engaging and very articulate, Ogden was as entertaining a raconteur as he proved to be skilled as a musician. It was a fine performance sensitively supported by Alsop and the orchestra. The person sitting next to me, who confided that her father had fought in the Civil War, said at the concerto’s end, ‘ beautiful and so-o Spanish’.

The other main work was Tchaikovsky’s 5th. Symphony conducted by the elegant Alsop with delicacy when needed, immense passion when required, and without a score. The last movement was a bravura performance and the audience rose to it. This orchestra gets better and better. Another concert recorded by the orchestra yesterday in Poole and including Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, is broadcast on B.B.C.’s Radio Three next Monday evening.

B.R.

* previous article on Rodrigo 25.07.05

Clare College goes Spanish

On a recent visit to Cambridge we had the pleasure of listening to a lunch time organ recital by Tim Harper, the Junior Organ Scholar at Clare College. The Music Society there had organised a week’s Hispanic Festival with Zarzuela songs, piano music by Granados and brass arrangements of Albeniz works. There was a concert devoted to de Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto. Trio Gitano – three guitarists originally meeting as students in Cambridge - also performed during the week. A concert I would dearly have liked to have heard was given by ‘Hispanica’, an ensemble of student jazz musicians playing music with a strong flamenco and jazz connection. We wished we had been around to hear more of this enterprising festival.

Tim Harper played some extremely energetic music on the bright sounding college organ. We enjoyed all of it but especially the Concerto 2 in A minor by the Catalan composer Antonio Soler. At the age of 23 he took Holy Orders (as did so many of the Spanish Renaissance composers, some of whom we have met), and for the next 31 years was a member of the monastic community at the Escorial. His 20 hour days were filled with prayer, contemplation and farming - a simple and unadorned life, and yet he managed to produce more than 500 musical works in those austere surroundings. Amongst these were around 150 keyboard works. His "Six Concertos for Two Organs" are still very much in the repertoire apparently, and have often been recorded.

The last piece Tim Harper played was by the contemporary French composer, Guy Bovet and was based on a theme submitted – the programme note said – by the ‘caretakers’ of Salamanca Cathedral who claimed, that it was about a donkey. The Dean of another Cathedral insisted that it in fact it was about a lady of ill repute. Whatever the origin or inspiration, Bovet begins the piece quietly with the sound of a drum and a piccolo and moves slowly to a mounting crescendo, ending ‘on all the reeds, via a fugato and many nods to the intricacies of the Spanish scale’. Indeed. It was a superb sound and performed with great panache.

B.R.

First Anniversary

It is exactly a year since this series of articles began, and we have been ‘sounding off’ – and on, often several times a week, ever since. This is the seventy first of the series. At the beginning it was all about Spain, its music, composers, artistes and orchestras . Then the Euroresidentes team suggested we move on to the wider musical scene which we did and then, again, I responded to their suggestion that I include some personal reminisces and accounts of more recent current concert-going, which is where we are now.

Music is not exclusive to one place and never purely nationalistic. Its horizons are as broad as the imagination of the people who compose it. Moreover composers are natural borrowers, and musicologists (I am not one) enjoy detecting the interaction of various influences. But as we have seen, there is something distinctive that can be associated with not only the tradition in which a composer writes, but also the country from which they originate.

So Debussy could never be anything other than French and Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ arise from England’s Malvern Hills and the symphonies of the Finnish master, Sibelius, have their sound-scape firmly in that distinctive country of winter snow and summer flowers. And only Albeniz could compose ‘Iberia’.

It was all new to me, the development of Spanish music with its strong regional basis. But the sound and the story were so evocative of a country for which I have great affection but have so much still to discover, that this little journey became for me another way of understanding the peninsula and its people, and to celebrate both.

I hope that may be true for others who have shared it.

B.R.