Kurt Masur

One of the highlights of the Henry Wood Promenade Season in London this year was an anniversary concert celebrating the conductor Kurt Masur’s 80th birthday. He conducted the two orchestra’s he continues to be associated with – the London Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de France. Together on the platform they performed Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. Sadly I didn’t hear it on the radio, but the critics raved about it the next day. The veteran conductor and his French orchestra played the same symphony yesterday in Bristol. I was there. It was one of those concerts where you feel privileged to be present. An event in itself and an overwhelming experience, wildly applauded by the audience, with Masur blowing kisses to the orchestra and to us.

It is 30 years since the only other time I have seen Masur conduct. He was then as he had been for many years, Director of the historic Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, East Germany with whom he gave nearly a thousand performances over twenty six years. The orchestra was on tour but were delayed and arrived at the Birmingham Town Hall thirty minutes late. It didn’t seem to trouble them. A stunning performance of Mahler’s 1st Symphony had many of us on our feet. Another memorable evening.

Masur still has immense dignity on the podium, full of authority in the Germanic European tradition for which he is famed, but with an enthusiasm and warmth that we responded to last night, as if he was a favourite Uncle but not one to be trifled with. He conducted without either score or baton. The Bruckner must be part of him. The music seemed to be in his body as well as in his mind, flowing out of him, as with an economy of gestures, he watched over the majestic progress of this wonderful work, played by his brilliant orchestra with passion and refinement.

Masur has been conductor of many fine orchestras and is following a rigorous programme of concerts in Europe and North America during the 2007-2008 season. The Bristol concert was one of five in the orchestra’s present English tour. Masur has a website which gives a good impression of this remarkable man’s long, fruitful and continuing career. I salute him!
B.R.

(There are other Bruckner postings in this series which you may be interested in, October 21st 2005 and September 2nd 2006)

Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)

Virgil Thomson was one of several composers in the U.S.A. who developed a classical form that can be justifiably described as ‘American’ .We have already met four such composers in these postings, namely Aaron Jay Kernis (06/08), Paul Creston(12/08), George Gershwin(24/08) and Charles Ives (28/08), and there will be others. The most notable was Aaron Copland, ‘the dean of American Music’, as he has been called. Both he and Thomson studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, the foremost teacher of her day, and for some years Thomson became part of the ‘twenties' culture of that city.

Thomson was a no-nonsense person. He once said that the style of a piece could be most effectively understood in terms of how much money the composer could make from it. If not a cynic, he was certainly a realist and earned less from his music than from his writings. He was music critic of the New York Herald-Tribune from 1940 to 1954 and his reviews were shrewd, entertaining, sometimes waspish, often offending the musical establishment. That may be one of the reasons why his music was less popular than it might have been.

He wrote two operas with libretti by Gertrude Stein: ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ and ‘The Mother of Us All’, famous for its all-black cast. He wrote incidental music for stage and screen and ‘musical portraits’ of people he knew. He would spend hours in a room with them before rushing off to finish the piece on his own. His subjects later confessed that they could recognise themselves in the finished composition, even if they couldn’t quite explain how.

I have just bought a disc of two of his film scores, ‘The Plow That Broke The Plain’ (1936) and ‘The River’ (1937), the work of the landmark American documentary director, Pare Lorenz. Both films are a response to poverty and the misuse of the land and reflect Roosevelt’s New Deal. The composer and director worked closely together, the music and the images identifying with each other, neither one dominant over the other. The scores have a vivid and for me moving simplicity, borrowing styles and tunes from the American heritage, and scored for a chamber orchestra that includes a banjo, guitar and harmonium. The works are superbly performed by The Post-Classical Ensemble directed by the Spanish conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez. There is a DVD of the film which I would love to see and which like the CD is published by Naxos.

Another ‘find’ for me.

B.R.