Elgar's unfinished...........

You probably know that the original ending of the Enigma Variations was a lot shorter.  After the first performance Elgar was persuaded to extend the final variation and today the revised ending is almost always played.   But not on Saturday!  I was playing contra in the Derby Concert Orchestra concert in Wirksworth church.  We had just started the finale when all of the lights went out.  We continued as best we could for a few moments but then it all inevitably fell apart and we had to stop.   We waited for the lights to come back on but after five minutes it was clear that there was a major power cut and we were not going to get the lights back.  So we had to abandon the concert and very carefully find our way out of a very dark church.

Never happened to me before.

The contra part in Enigma is not exactly the most extensive item in the repertoire and the only bit of sustained playing is in the finale!  So given that it took an hour to drive to the church for the concert I didn't exactly over exert myself

All aboard......

Sometime I put the IPOD onto shuffle play when I am in the car. Not only is this safer (no need to access the controls......) but I also enjoy the random juxtapositions that sometimes occur.



It has been a very busy couple of weeks and I was not feeling at my best when I drove to a rehearsal last night but I was immediately cheered up when the IPOD turned up this gorgeous piece for two pianos by Poulenc.  L'embarquement pour Cythère, was originally written for the film le Voyage en Amérique but was published as a separate piece .  Poulenc suggested that it was reserved as an encore piece.



This is a masterpiece of insouciance. It verges on the trivial but never slips into it.  The waltz theme is irresistible and the harmonic twists and changes of key keep the ear guessing.  And like so much of Poulenc there is an indefinable air of melancholy and wistfulness just under the surface.



My knowledge of Poulenc is pretty limited and I don't really know much of the more serious music but this little trifle is always one of my favourites. If you ever need cheering up I thoroughly recommend it.

Favourite historic recordings: Adelina Patti Ah Non Credea Mirarti

With my first two postings in this category no special pleading was required. On any level the performances spring to life out of the loudspeaker and no further explanation is needed.

Is that also the case for this posting - the famous recording of Bellini's Ah Non Credea from La Sonnambula.  Would a listener coming to this cold with no background immediately see the greatness of this performance or would they dismiss it as the sad and uncontrolled warblings of an old lady?


I think it is wonderful, but have known this for so long that I can no longer quite tell whether I am responding objectively to the sound or am influenced by the face that this is a recording of the most famous singer of the latter half of the 19th century, admired by Rossini and Verdi among others, and therefore a tantalising link back to the distant operatic past?   So am I projecting my own thoughts as to what I want this to sound like on top of what I am actually hearing?

I can' rule this out, but I really do think that this is remarkable singing.  The tone itself is not particularly attractive and this is clearly the voice of somebody at the end of her career, but what sets its part is the style.  The way that the legato line is floated over the accompaniment with subtle rubato reminds me of nothing as much as a performance of a Chopin Nocturne played by a really fine pianist.  It is all so effortless and she seems to have all of the time in the world to fit in the decorations in the vocal line.  And the technique itself is still in good shape - the trills are famous and the chromatically inflected runs are beautifully poised.

The cadenza towards the end is a bit rough - I suspect that she got too close to the recording horn in her enthusiasm, but you can can forgive this.


If you have never heard this before try it - do you hear the magic?


I love the story - which may be apocryphal but which deserves to be true - that when Patti didn't want to go to a rehearsal she sent her maid to stand in for her!  Those were the days.

Mendelssohn

Without really planning to I have heard quite a lot of Mendelssohn in the last couple of weeks.    I caught a performance of the overture Der Schonen Melusine on the radio on the way to work - I don't recall ever hearing it before and I was particularly taken by the delicacy of the opening.  And yesterday I listened to the whole of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Elijah is my mother's favourite choral work and I grew up with the Malcolm Sargent recording as an ever present background.  Yet somehow Mendelssohn is always an overlooked figure when it comes to evaluating the great masters.   He is in many ways the least "flashy" of the great 19th century composers and doesn't have that sense of excitement and daring of many of his contemporaries.  And somehow the comfortable circumstances of his personal life and his association with Queen Victoria don't fit with what we expect of a romantic composer.

Yet he produced at least half a dozen masterpieces which are worthy of comparison with anything else in the repertory.   A good case can be made for saying that the violin concerto is the greatest of all concertos for the instrument and the Octet is one of the masterpieces of the repertoire.   Add to these the Italian symphony, Fingals Cave and the music to A Midsummer Night's Dream (not just the overture) and Mendelssohn's place in the pantheon of the musical gods is secure.

The one piece I have problems with is the Scottish Symphony.  I've played it several time but have never really got to understand it - it always seems a bit heavy and turgid in comparison with the Italian.  And I am afraid that I regard the end - where a wholly new theme is introduced - as one of the two great miscalculation in the symphonic repertory (I"ll leave you guessing what the other one might be until a later post!).  I have a recording of the symphony by Klemperer and he obviously had the same thought because he scrapped Mendelssohn's ending in favour of a new ending of his own composition!  Outrageous of course and the musicologist in me could't possibly approve! - but I think that it works very well.


I remember at University discussing with my tutor which composers were the best orchestrators.  I remember coming up with the obvious names - Berlioz, Wagner, Strauss - and was very surprised when he suggested that I should add Mendelssohn to the list.  But of course he was right.   Being  a great orchestrator is not the same as being the most outrageous or eccentric in the use of the orchestra.  Mendelssohn gives another perspective - the command of the orchestra is so complete that the orchestration does not draw attention to itself - is simply fits the music like a glove.

There is still a  lot of Mendelssohn for me to get my teeth into - I'm gradually discovering the string quartets but I hardly know the other chamber music , the songs or the choral works beyond Elijah.

Favourite historic recordings; Sir Charles Santley The Vicar of Bray

This takes us almost as far back into operatic history as possible.   Charles Santley was a pillar of the British musical establishment for most of the second half of the 19th century.  He took part in the first staged performance of a Wagner opera in England and Gounod was so impressed by his performance as Valentin in Faust that he wrote an additional aria for him.  



Santley gave up the operatic stage relatively early in his career and concentrated on oratorio and ballad singing - in those days it was perfectly possible for a "serious" singer to perform ballads - indeed the ballad concert was a very important past of Victorian music life.



Santley made a number of recordings at the end of his career, mostly of the ballad repertory.  This is my favourite - the Vicar of Bray, recorded in1904.  Santley was born in 1834 so he was 70 when he recorded this.

Clearly this is the voice on an old man and you can hear the wear and tear in the voice. But what I love is the way that he projects the words so vividly.  The relish with which he delivers the last line of each verse "I'll be the vicar of Bray sir!" always makes me smile.

We really are linked a long way back through this recording.  In his memoirs Santley recalls a performance of Elijah in his youth (he was singing in the chorus) and talks about the difficulties of rehearsal because "this was a comparatively recent work"  .   Santley was a Garcia pupil, and Garcia's father was the creator of important tenor roles, most notably the count in Rossini's Barber of Seville.

The past is not as far away as we sometimes think!

Favourite historic recordings: Reynaldo Hahn L'île heureuse (1909)

My link to the Mapleson cylinders on my Meyerbeer post has got be thinking about historic recordings so I though that I would start a series of my favourite historic recordings.

This first brings together two of my current enthusiasms - Chabrier and Hahn. Like most people my early experience of Chabrier was Espana, which is in my view unparallelled as a single movement orchestral showpiece. And of course a great piece for a bassoonist to play. It is comparatively recently that I have got to know more of Chabrier's music and every discovery increases my admiration for his distinctive voice. If you want to experiment try the introduction to the unfinished opera Briséïs or the completely mad Duo de l’ouvreuse de l’Opéra Comique et l’employé du Bon Marché which has to be heard to be believed (anybody for a yodel!)

Raynaldo Hahn is a recent discovery - I heard a extract from the Susan Graham Hahn recital and was completely hooked. His melodic invention and evocative mood is captivating.

Hahn was a great musical all rounder - he was a composer, musical administrator and conductor but most importantly for my present purposes a singer. Judged purely on beauty of tone he can't be said to be up there with the greats, but what makes his recordings so memorable is their sense of style and total immersion in the idiom. 

 
Take this recording of what is probably Chabrier's greatest song. A modern performance, such as that of a singer like Felicity Lott with a professional accompanist like Graham Johnson is on a purely technical level more secure and accomplished. But nobody quite gets to the heart of the style like Hahn. Pinning down what makes it special is not easy, but I think that it has a lot to do with the very subtle rubato all through the vocal line. Hahn is essentially moulding the words and the vocal line into one seamless whole. And this is self accompanied. Again judged on purely technical grounds this has some problems - not least a few wrong notes - but again who cares when it is delivered with such panache. 

 
This was recorded in 1909 - not that long after Chabrier's death. I don't know for certain whether Chabrier ever heard Hahn sing it, but I would have thought that this was quite likely, because they certainly were part of the same musical circles.

The recording quality is pretty good for the time and you soon get used to filtering out the surface noise.

Antony Hopkins - RIP

The Guardian is reporting this evening the death of Antony Hopkins

Guardian obituary


I remember with great affection his series talking about music which was a fixture of the radio schedules when I was at school and university.  I mean no disrespect to my teachers and lecturers when I say that I probably learnt as much about music from listening to his talks on the radio as I did from any other person.

His narrative approach to musical analysis is now very out of fashion but to a young learner it gave me exactly what I wanted.   In the short time since I read the obituary I have been remembering the music that I got to know through his talks.  Three that come to mind - still on my favourites list are

• Tippett string quartet no 2
• Britten violin concerto
• Schumann violin concerto

I also remember a couple of talks on pieces I knew well.  First of all Scheherazade, where he was totally un-snobbish about a piece of popular repertory and was very illuminating about Rimsky managed to tell a story in musical terms.   Secondly a programme about Beethoven 5.  This was the days before historically informed performances but he played a version conducted by Hermann Scherchen, which at the time was one of the very few performances which didn't introduce a massive ritardando before the recapitulation of the opening motive.   I remember thinking that that was exactly the right way to do it.

I can't imagine that on the current radio 4 (or even radio 3) schedule such broadcasts could ever find a place, which is a great pity.  Hopkins was a broadcaster of real distinction.

Hopkins was a Norfolk man like me, and I think that he once acted as an adjudicator in a music festival I was playing in.  But I was only 8 or 9 at the time so I can't be sure.