Tim Hugh

The cello has an unusual importance in British music. It was John Barbirolli’s instrument which he played in orchestras before he conducted them. Elgar’s cello concerto, the fruit of his later years, is probably played more than any other of his works apart from the Enigma Variations. Jacqueline du Pre and before her Paul Tortelier were notable interpreters of that work. The celebrated cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovitch had many concertos written for him and the same is true of the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, a pioneer performer of the instrument.

Tim Hugh, co-principal cellist of the London Symphony Orchestra and soloist with many international orchestras, is in that succession of great artists. He has made a dozen recordings for the Naxos label, many of them rare works not often performed in public. I have four of them and am particularly fond of his performance of Gerald Finzi’s Concerto with the wonderful plaintive sweeping melody of its slow movement and its fizzy finale. Finzi is a much underrated composer and although many of his songs are still sung, his orchestral works are unduly neglected in my opinion.

Hugh is a sensitive rather than a barn-storming artist. You meet the music as much as the man. That is especially evident in his recording of Walton’s cello concerto with its lyrical first movement but also in Arthur Bliss’s concerto (a Rostropovitch commission). I am agnostic about Bliss I’m afraid – although in his day he was highly regarded. I am never quite sure where he is. For me there is a lack of consistent personality in his music. But his cello concerto’s gentle second larghetto movement and robust third are played beautifully by Hugh.

When Tim Hugh is not touring or playing with his orchestra he is to be found in his home in Bath, where he and his wife run Dorian House, a very superior and welcoming Bread and Breakfast guest house. Euroresidentes approves of it, so it must be good. See Dorian House en Bath in the Spanish version. And you can buy copies of Tim’s CD’s there!

B.R.

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

‘The only consistent characteristic’ of this American composer’s music, says one critic, ‘is liberation from rule’, or as the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas puts it, ‘Ives music is in turns ‘gleeful, goofy, ecstatic, and nostalgic’. Firmly earthed in the old Yankee tradition of home, church and country, his music employing the normal forms of classical music, is utterly and uniquely his own. He turns incoherence into coherence, madness into sanity, dissonance into harmony. Deeply affected by his childhood experiences in small town America and his love of his band-leading father, his music is full of the echoes of what he realised was a fast changing world.

I have had for some time a recording of his second symphony (‘for a large orchestra’) and have recently bought a remarkable selection of seventeen of his orchestral, choral and vocal music selected by his champion, Tilson Thomas (Charles Ives: An American Journey - RCA label). Its not music to sit back and wallow in but nor is it hard to listen to and full of constant surprises. None more so than his setting of ‘General Booth Enters Into Heaven, a poem by Vachel Lindsay, with the repeated refrain by chorus and baritone of the evangelical cry ‘are you washed in the blood of the lamb?’, boisterous like so much of his music but somehow sober as well. This is seriousness with a smiling face. You can never be quite sure how much Ives is taking you for a ride, but if he is, the journey is exhilerating.

The music is often bass and brass heavy – you can hear the influence of his father’s travelling bands, several of which seem to be playing all at once and in different keys. It is restless music often but endearing and you feel as if you are meeting a real person with an intensely individual voice : a loud one but gentle too, and very moving.

Much of Ives music was never performed in his lifetime, and composing only at weekends he may never have expected it to be. Perhaps now he is coming into his own and in what little I have heard of his music, I can recognise the seeds of later American compositions including the famous musicals. The music has to be understood, but cherished too.

B.R.

Gibbons and Gershwin

The concert pianist Jack Gibbons has a love affair with the music of George Gershwin. Meticulously tracing and writing down the notes heard on the performances Gershwin recorded in the 1920’s, he brings to life a nearly forgotten era. Gershwin’s virtuoso improvisations are a testament to his skill as a pianist as well as the composer of songs, Broadway musicals, the opera Porgy and Bess and several orchestral works. His break-through from popular to ‘serious’ music paved the way for people like Leonard Bernstein to ignore the barriers that divide music into categories.

Apparently the legendary parties of New York and Paris at which Gershwin performed in the 1920s and 30s offered a line-up of guest entertainers and musicians that would have been the envy of any international concert venue. On the same evening one could have heard in intimate surroundings not only Gershwin, but Ravel, Heifetz and Horowitz from whose unpublished virtuoso transcriptions Gibbons has again reconstructed note-for-note from the original 78s music. The barriers certainly down in those fashionable parties often in the company of Charlie Chaplin, Adele and Fred Astaire and other luminaries.

Jack Gibbons whom we heard in Bath’s Independent Cinema this week personifies the same sort of freedom. He was not only playing but presenting Gershwin, talking to his audience about the music, much of which he has performed in several countries, notably in Carnegie Hall in New York. His enthusiasm was contagious and at the end of an astonishing performance of Rhapsody in Blue, he received a standing ovation. The next night he was due to perform Beethoven in Oxford where he has an annual residency each summer. Another Gershwin programme ends the present series on August 31st. I have a 1991 CD of music by Constant Lambert where Jack Gibbons is soloist in the fun piece ‘The Rio Grande’, performed at the Proms a couple of seasons ago. Gibbons has an informative website which shows the range of his musical sympathies.

His engaging style and brilliant pianism provided the perfect prelude to a showing of ‘An American in Paris’ (surely the perfect Hollywood musical) which followed. Some evening!

B.R.

Paul Creston (1906-1985)

Born Giuseppe Guttoveggio in New York City in 1906 of Sicilian parents, Paul Creston was still a child when the family visited Sicily, and the peasant songs and dances which he heard there awakened his love of music. When he returned to the States, he persuaded his parents to let him begin music lessons. By the age of 14 he had advanced beyond the abilities of his teacher. Leaving school at 15 to help support his family first as an errand boy, later as a bank clerk and then as insurance claim examiner, he used to get up early and work late into the night, practicing piano and composing.

Creston’s first employment as a musician was in 1926 when for the next three years he worked as a theatre organist for silent movies. Following the introduction of talkies, Creston was appointed organist of St. Malachy’s Church in New York, a post he continued to occupy for the next thirty-three years. His work began to be published and he won two Guggenheim fellowships. After receiving several awards he began to teach piano and composition at a School of Arts in Massachusetts. The 1950s were a period of tremendous creativity with premieres of over thirty new compositions. His international fame spread and his music was, along with that of Gershwin, Barber and Roy Harris, the most frequently performed American composer abroad. His work as a teacher provided him with the opportunity to set down his unique theories of music composition, especially rhythm, in his books Principles of Rhythm (1964) and Creative Harmony (1970).

By the late 60s, Creston’s music fell out of favour and although embittered at the atonal direction that music seemed to be taking, he continued to compose in his own natural style. His Symphony No. 6 received its premiere at the Kennedy Center in 1982, and the Prelude and Dance for two pianos was performed at the Convention of the National Federation of Music Clubs in 1983. In 1984, Creston was diagnosed with a malignant tumor from which he never completely recovered.

As I write I am listening to his second and most popular symphony in a CD performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi. It’s great music, full of vigor and panache, with broad flowing melodies, reminding me of the Scandinavian composer Carl Neilson. The Naxos label – from whose website much of the above information is borrowed - have recorded his first three symphonies. Another American composer whose work I would like to hear more of.

B.R.

Aaron Jay Kernis

I have been listening to a re-play of last Saturday’s Promenade Concert, given by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain conducted by Mark Elder. The massive Lennigrad Symphony of Shostakovich was the main work but the concert opened with the first U.K. performance of ‘New Era Dance’ by Aaron Jay Kernis, an American composer I had not heard of before but who is apparently very highly regarded in his own country. The music was fantastic; wild, dissonant but lyrical and with constantly changing rhythms. The 160 members of the orchestra were fully stretched for the six minutes duration of the work, the percussion section employing every known instrument plus several others including a pistol held aloft by one of the younger players. Fiendishly difficult to play and for me highly entertaining, though for another member of the family ‘an awful noise’! Whilst Kernis has written many works including two symphonies and a string quartet, this short piece is understandably his most frequently performed work. The score must be huge to include so much musical activity.

Mark Elder often addresses his audiences and on this occasion he said that the composer hoped that the work would presage an ‘imperative political and social change’ in the U.S.A. ‘It’s in the score, Elder said to justify the quote and the Promenaders laughed politely and there was a surge of applause. One of the experts interviewed after the performance referred to the fact that Kernis is regarded as a post-modernist, saying ‘that means his music is enjoyable’. I thought it was very enjoyable, proving that music can be fun.

Kernis’s publisher is G. Shirmer Inc. and on their website they claim that the list of people who have commissioned and performed Kernis’s work ‘runs a veritable who’s who of the classical music world, and his list of honors and awards make him among the most feted composers. He is one of America’s leading lights, having passed from youthful phenomenon to a genuine potent and original artist, possessed of an accessible yet sophisticated voice.’ The San Francisco Chronicle notes that ‘with each new work and new recording, Kernis solidifies his position as the most important traditional-minded composer of his generation. Others may be exploring musical frontiers more restlessly but no one else is writing music quite this vivid or powerfully direct’.

I look forward to hearing more of him.

B.R.