Disappointed

I've had some great albums from Rattle Records, and I think they do a great job of promoting NZ music, both contemporary classical and jazz.   So one of the things I put on my Christmas present suggestion list was a relatively new album called Flight on Light, with a clarinettist called Manos Achalinotopoulos. You can read a biography of him on clarinet.gr.

Achalinotopoulos is a fantastic clarinettist, and a marvellous musician - there's no doubt about this.  He can get the clarinet to make sounds you couldn't imagine a clarinet making.  And on the album he produces some fantastic improvisatory music.  Achalinotopoulos is backed on the album by a number of NZ musicians, most notably John Psathas.

So what's the problem?  My wife and I listened to the album on the way back from Christchurch in January, and I've played it a couple of times since then.  Hearing it in the car we had ample space to listen more carefully than we might here at home where there are always other things going on.   But we were disappointed: Achalinotopoulos is given free range to play in any mood.  Unfortunately, he's chosen, or perhaps is mostly inclined to play, very moody, melancholy, reflective, often quite abstract music. There's little change in mood from one track to the next.  The only one that has a bit more life to it is actually given that life by the backing musicians, who set some pace and rhythm behind Achalinotopoulos.  He, in effect, plays as he does on all the other tracks.  This is not to say that he never plays at speed - he certainly does, but it's all within a fairly monochrome colour palette.  It's like being in a house that's painted in a variety of greys, and everything else - furniture and furnishings - fits into that grey colour scheme.  As some readers will know, we've just painted our house grey, with white tonings, and I realised the other day that our kitchen is grey - with white tonings.  And our bathrooms are both grey.  But the difference is there are plenty of other colours as well, so that the grey doesn't take over. 

For me, the grey takes over on this album, and after three or four tracks you want some red, or green, or yellow. 

Swamped by music

For most of the year I’ve hardly played at a concert or anything else musical. Now, suddenly at the end of the year, I’m loaded up to the gunnels. Last Sunday there was a charity concert to raise funds for a local rest home. It was combined with an end of the year performance by several of my old friend Arnold Bachop’s pupils. I didn’t play for any of the singers, but did manage to give a rather under-par performance of the four piano pieces I wrote this year.

Partly the problem was the piano: it’s an upright, set up high on four castors. In order for the pianist to reach the pedals, a small wooden block is set under them on which the pianist rests his or her feet. However, this block is not attached in any way to the floor, and has the tendency to slide gradually away from where it needs to be. Furthermore, the pianist’s bottom is perched on a smallish piano stool (small in terms of seating area proportionate to the pianist’s rear end) and this gives little leverage when you’re playing at either of the extremes of the keyboard. Which is what happens in my four piano pieces on more than one occasion.

But even blaming the piano won’t compensate for the fact that I just botched up things that I shouldn’t have botched up, and wouldn’t normally have botched up. Just one of those days. You think: I’ve played in public for more than 55 years. I won’t get nervous. I got nervous.

However, there was an up side to all this: I passed over the eight Peter Olds songs to a potential performer of them, and she didn’t faint with horror or regard them with any obvious distaste. And I caught up with several of Arnold’s pupils whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time. (We went out for a meal together after the concert.)

Next weekend I have to play for Michael Gray at some afternoon thingee in Port Chalmers. Michael used to be in Opera Alive, when I first met him. He was pretty young then, certainly at the low end of the starting age limit. But he was always very confident and competent. A great asset to the group. He’s currently moving upwards from being a baritone to a tenor. Interesting, because he often used to sing the tenor parts in the Opera Alive shows – mainly because tenors were always in short supply.

And that same Sunday morning I’m playing carols at my boss’s church. And the following weekend, another singing teacher, an old friend of mine, is putting on her end-of-year concert. And I’m accompanying everybody – except her husband and myself, when we sing Brush up your Shakespeare.

That doesn’t sound like much to do, really, but there are rehearsals all over, and, it being the time of year it is, there are various end-of-the-year dinners amongst this lot (at least three of them) and the possibility of having to play for the St Francis Xavier school musical – at very short notice. It’s all a bit much.

On top of all this, I got asked to go and have a biopsy in relation to my prostate – tomorrow. Someone else had cancelled out. (I’m not surprised, if they were having one of these biopsies. The process don’t sound comfortable! I might need some baby bedding just in order to lie down...)

Photo courtesy of Pa1nt, flick.com

HitTail provides the material for a surreal kind of dream

While watching movies on Korean Airways, sitting in my distressed oatmeal trousers, I mused and became distracted and thought about how I could extend Heaven into Hell, the reverse of what some characters in C S Lewis’ The Great Divorce attempt.
Kiri te Kanawa, seated behind me, was meanwhile wisely telling her manager that she refused to sing any compositions by John Cage, while another John, John Grey the philosopher (he was three seats back) was spouting forth to the New Zealand artist, Karl Maugham. Karl, I note, is now doing screen prints, as I saw one in the Milford Gallery the other day. I prefer his original paintings, because the colours are so rich, but his subject matter – abundant gardens – continues to appeal. A young man in the gallery was telling me that Maugham has hundreds of photos of gardens that he works from.
Further back in the plane there’s now some dispute about Alfred Hitchcock being regarded as an auteur, since the very word itself has gone skewhiff. At least Hitchcock never made a movie, someone else shouts, in which a horse climbs a ladder, as one does in Bandidas. Or supposedly does. I think Hitchcock would have included a ladder-climbing horse if he'd found the right place for one.
A couple of foreigners have just walked down the aisle, chatting. Mr Vanderlught and Benigno Aquino, neither of whom I have ever met, even though their names have appeared previously in this blog. tend, with their serious demeanours, to make the plane feel like Bleak House, or Miss Havisham’s home in Great Expectations, that book that Lloyd Jones’ writes so fondly of in his own story, Mr Pip.
The plane takes a sudden dip and we all think we’re headed for a shorter life than we expected, rather like the young man who sailed down Baldwin St in a wheelie bin.
As the plane flattens out again, I suddenly realise my namesake, Mike Crowl, from Conroe High School, is sitting across the aisle from me. He holds a full video card, because he has been taking endless photos of the actress sitting next to him, Alice Brockway. She is proclaiming forth that Yes, you can put lemon peel in a compost.
The last I see of her is when she rides away from the airport to the Penny Factory, on a pennyfarthing, which the proprietor of the aforesaid Penny Factory will no doubt turn into a piece of enamelled jewellery, such as a pendant, or a stud.

Hone Tuwhare and Music

I note in the ODT (the Otago Daily Times, for them wot don’t know) that the recently deceased NZ poet, Hone Tuwhare, is to be honoured in a musical composition.
Anthony Ritchie is going to work with young Dunedin singer, Matt Landreth, to create a new piece, with words by Tuwhare. Three of Tuwhare’s poems will be set to music, including the ubiquitous Rain, which is apparently his most well-known and anthologised piece. (You can find a copy of it here.)
Another young Dunedin singer, Michael Grey, is going to work with Auckland composer Jeff Linn. That piece will revolve around a poem by Li Yu, the last emperor of the Southern Tang dynasty. (It has nothing to do with a Southern Man, in case you’re wondering.)
I’ve accompanied Michael in the past, and he was also a strong and very musical member of the now defunct group, Opera Alive.
Anyway, there are six of these combo jobs going on around the country: six composers working with six emerging artists.
I was interested in this piece of news, because I wrote a song using Hone Tuwhare’s words some time ago, and only had it performed last year for the first time. (By another young and emerging artist, who also happens to be very keen on sport; it’s a moot point which ‘art’ will beat the other out.)
To have the song performed publicly meant getting permission from Tuwhare himself. At that time, for some reason, he wasn’t living in Kaka Point; he was up on Waiheke Island, and I had to contact him via an intermediary. He was pleased to have his poem used, apparently, and after a negotiation about a very small fee for the use of his words, the performance went ahead.
The poem in question was Sun O (2). I’m not quite sure what the (2) signifies. I don’t know of a poem by him called Sun O (1), but maybe there is one. Anyway, you can listen to a version of the song online at the SibeliusMusic.com site.