Verdi Requiem...live!

Thank you, Signor Verdi, for writing the world’s most operatic Requiem.  Thank you for the wondrous moments when tears come to the eyes at the sheer beauty of what you wrote, or when the heart surges at those fearsome fortissimos where all four soloists are singing their lungs out and the chorus is blasting us with primitive passion and the orchestra is doing huge runs and enormous crashes.  Or when everything suddenly hushes and a breeze passes by, or a bird, and the mezzo or the soprano appears from nowhere with another of your endless series of melodies. What a gift this piece of music is. (And how marvellously strange is the sound of the soprano and mezzo singing an octave apart - it ought to be the most simple thing in the world, yet it's just magic.)

In this work Verdi, freed from the constraints of the stage – peasant, gypsy or courtier choruses, duets between lovers, maleficent basses and scary contraltos – is able to indulge in the luxury of just writing wondrous music as and how he pleases.  Yes, of course he has the wonderfully dramatic lines of the Requiem Mass holding it all together, but he isn’t affected by the mechanics of getting people on and off the stage, and all the other typical trappings of a 19^th century opera.  And he’s working with a script that has more depth, perhaps, than any other libretto he used in his career.

You can see how this piece came into existence on Wikipedia.   More important is its effect on an audience, and tonight at the Dunedin Town Hall I heard it live for the first time ever.  I’ve known the work since I bought an LP of it back when I was a teenager, and I’ve loved it ever since.  The conductor was Pietari Inkinen, the 33-year-old Finnish conductor who’s presently the music director of the NZSO.  He looks a bit like a schoolboy, but he had no problem commanding the forces: a large orchestra, four soloists and a massive (very much expanded) Dunedin City Choir.   Lisa Harper-Brown was for me the highlight of the evening.  That’s not to say the other soloists were unequal to the task, but this soprano has a superb command of her vocal instrument and a massive sound.  Several times she held solidly onto her music stand as though the sheer power of what she was doing might blow her away.  But she was equally capable of producing a wondrous soft sound that still managed to hit the back of the hall.  She was just fabulous.

 

Soprano Margaret Medlyn took the mezzo/contralto part.  It requires a wide range (as does the proper soprano part) and in her upper register, Medlyn was terrific.  Sometimes the lower notes seemed to get overwhelmed, but it may have been where I was sitting in the audience.  I suspect that being off to one side meant that some of the sound went by me.  Rosario La Spina was the tenor.  He’s Australian by birth, of Sicilian descent, and a former bricklayer.  He has a big solid tenor voice, somehow ‘thick’ in its colour.  Someone else tonight described him as a Helden tenor, but I don’t think that’s quite what he is.  Anyway, he rang his voice around the Town Hall with ease. Jud Arthur was the bass, and what a great sound he has.  His part in the Requiem is reminiscent of many of Verdi’s dark bass characters, and Arthur brought that great dark sound to his singing.  

What wonderful things Verdi does with the chorus - sorry, choir.  They're things that he could never have achieved on stage: eerie whispering sounds, the edginess of hearing well over a hundred people all singing softly at once, joyful counterpoint, massive harmonic stretches and utter excitement.  This aspect of the piece was terrific. 

The orchestra has plenty to do, though I don't think it's ever stretched.  Much of what they play is similar to music Verdi provides for his opera orchestras; it's just on a bigger scale.   And yet his simple tricks (they're things he does throughout his operas, particularly the ones in the first half of his career) - the little echoes from wind instruments, the shrieking piccolo in the climaxes, the bass note on the beat from cellos and basses answered by a chord from the upper strings: this last could be so banal, and yet in the one particular moment when I became aware of it I thought how wonderfully evocative it was at that point.  And of course there's the great brass fanfares early in the piece, reminiscent of Aida.  Only very late in his career did Verdi start doing really interesting things with his orchestra - The Merry Wives of Windsor is quite unlike early Verdi.  He was never a great colourist, and you sometimes feel he relied on the well-tested tricks that Italian opera composers had been doing for a long time (and many of those techniques were based on Italian popular songs).  For all that, what he does in the Requiem always hits the spot, and every so often there are moments that a spine-tingling: that hectic rush up and down that the orchestra does at one point - it only happens once, I think - lifts you out of your seat.  

Did I enjoy finally hearing the Requiem in a live performance?  You bet I did!

Listening - or not - to Cage

After hearing quite a decent piece of music by John Cage yesterday when we were driving to the supermarket, something that had lots of fun arpeggios on the piano and people clapping rhythmically at other times, I thought I'd give Cage another go and listen to today's episode in the series the Concert programme is running. 

So far I'm remaining almost complete underwhelmed. It was interesting to hear in the introductory talk about this series that Schoenberg thought Cage had little sense of harmonic structure.  Certainly in the piece playing now (Concerto for prepared piano & chamber orchestra) he just seems to add note after note without any obvious musical connection: though of course he was into music constructed by maths/graphs and whatever, so perhaps that explains why it sounds like it does...

And you can hear the music of his followers echoed in every bar: the long held notes crescendoing and descrecendoing but going nowhere in particular; the burps and sudden interruptions from the brass, always in dissonance; the percussion sounding as though they've lost one of their mallets and are banging their way around amongst the instruments trying to find it; the sudden squeaks from the high instruments as though someone had pinched their bottoms; the modified ('prepared') piano making various interesting but unconnected noises. (I bet some pianos aren't prepared for the indignities that are 'performed' upon them!) The only thing missing are plucked notes from an Ovation guitar - perhaps it hadn't been invented when Cage was writing. 

The current piece has been going on in this vein for several minutes.  It must be very unsatisfying to play.   I can't quite figure out where the concerto element comes into it: the piano doesn't seem to be doing anything more or less than the other instruments.  They're all being as random as each other.  According to the link above, the piano and orchestra never play together in parts one and two of the three parts, and the thing as a whole was originally worked out from a 14 x 16 chart.  You need to read the explanation - and hopefully you can make more sense of the phrase towards the end: 'thus the prepared piano is released from its hunger for self-expression.'   Apparently self-expression was banned from Cage's later works. 

The Concert programme is just about to start playing Hector Berlioz' Requiem.  This is a wonderful piece of music, and I've seen/heard it performed live twice, once in the Dunedin Town Hall way back in the sixties, and once in St Paul's Cathedral in London - only a few years later.  The walls of St Paul's were reverberating with the vibrations coming from the multiple timpani.  

I wonder what Berlioz would think of Cage's mechanically-made music? 

John Foulds' A World Requiem

Last night we went to hear A World Requiem, by John Foulds. This hasn’t been performed since 1926 and the revival of it for Remembrance Day was very apt. It was first performed back in 1923, with Foulds himself conducting and his wife leading the orchestra (plus a choir of 1250 people) and it became a feature of Remembrance Day ‘celebrations’ for the next four years. And then it was dropped and vanished from sight. Foulds himself has virtually vanished as a composer, although he was prolific and popular in his day. I suspect his time has come again.
Anyway, the piece was presented at the Albert Hall with the BBC Orchestra and three adult choirs - totalling some 350 people - and a boys’ choir: the BBC Symphony Chorus, the Crouch End Festival Chorus, the Philharmonia Chorus, and the Trinity Boys’Choir. Alongside these there were three groups of trumpeters and drummers playing at the back and sides of the hall at one point, and four soloists (the soprano, Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, the mezzo Catherine Wyn-Rogers, the tenor, Stuart Skelton and the baritone Gerald Finley).
Unfortunately, from where we were, we couldn’t hear the soloists (especially the tenor and soprano) so well, and they sounded as though they were being swamped by the orchestra. I think it was just our situation in the hall that caused this effect. However we were in the right place to hear the boys’ choir, which started off in the top level of the hall (along with the soprano, a celesta player, two harpists and some strings). They were right opposite our seat. The trumpets and drummers were likewise just on the level above us and visible to us. Many of the people in the hall would have had quite a different experience of their sound.
I don’t think I’ve come across a piece of music that uses a celesta so often - it always accompanies the boys’ choir in the first half of the music, and then, when that choir, along with its accompanying instruments (and the soprano) all come down onto the stage for the second half, it plays in almost every section that follows. The two harps get a fair amount of work as well.
The piece is by degrees slow and funereal, frantic and overwhelming, subtle and sweet. An organ often adds a huge depth to what goes on in the orchestra as well. It’s not easy to pinpoint Foulds’ approach: the program talks about minimalism and the use of quarter-tones. In neither of these areas can he be regarded as anything too way out: there are quarter-tones audible at times, but they’re fairly scattered in a long score. And minimalism comes in the sense that Foulds uses musical phrases almost in an ostinato approach, building up across the orchestra. Equally, some of the singers’ music revolves around short repeated phrases, but there isn’t that sense of ‘I’m trying to drive you mad’ that you get with later minimalists. Foulds might more be said to be being economic with his material. Furthermore, it means that the listener can grasp things reasonably readily, because certain phrases become indented in the listener’s mind through the repetition.
The libretto is a collage of Biblical texts and peace-focused writing (even a bit of Hindu Sanskrit, apparently - Foulds had a great interest in Indian music), and comes across as the work of a believer. Seemingly he was seriously into Theosophy (his wife had introduced him to it) and the ‘occult’. In his case, however, ‘occult’ meant more that he felt there was a true spiritual element to music, and that it could affect people in ways that the other arts couldn’t.
Anyway, it was an experience to be at the presentation of a piece that hasn’t been heard for so long - and even better, it was being recorded for posterity. The CD(s) come out next year.