Season Starts!

 

 

 

 

 

 

It says something about the state of my knees that the most productive thing to come out of my visit to La Palau de la Musica for the first Saturday afternoon concert of the season was that I have discovered (probably exorbitantly priced) parking nearer to the concert hall, and I have further discovered the lift that takes we ‘walking wounded’ to the entrance of the Platea and to my roving seat.

     As I prevaricated for months about whether or not to buy a season ticket for the concerts, I was unable to get a ‘regular’ seat.  For me, the idea seat is on the centre aisle, but as these are premium places, they go very quickly, so I will have to be more agile in my book strategy if I decide to go for a season ticket next year.

     As these Saturday ‘afternoon’ concerts actually start at 6.30 pm, it means (I hope and trust) that my driving into Barcelona will miss the evening weekend flow into the city, and I should be just early enough to get a parking space – and leave before the traffic gets, um, difficult.  Late night driving in a city like Barcelona, especially in the centre, is not usually a happy experience!

     The concert itself, was a classical blockbuster with two sure-fire favourites in the programme: Dvorak’s ‘cello concerto and The New World Symphony – but it also included a piece by

Florence Price

 

(1887-1953) a composer who, I am ashamed to admit, was unknown to me.  Before the concert started a female member of the last desk of the first violins came to centre stage and gave an enthusiastic puff for Price who was not only a(nother) neglected female composer, but also a black American.  She was the first black American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer and the first to have her work played by a major orchestra.  And I’d never heard of her.  Goes to show.

     Her music was neglected after her death, and it is only in recent years that her reputation is being re-discovered – as indeed were a stash of her unpublished scores found in her abandoned summer house!

     Her inclusion in a programme with Dvorak is apt as she was influenced by his music, especially his use of native melodies, and the Andante Moderato (her orchestrated version of a movement from her string quartet) stands comparison with the melodic mastery of Dvorak’s work.

     The string section of the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès under the direction of Andrés Salado produced a lyrical rendition that was sensitive, bordering on the reverent, so that the ‘jazzier’ sections seemed even more exotic.  Price is a composer worth looking into and there is some discography to support the attempt, as well as some YouTube and miscellaneous information on the web to make the experience worthwhile.

 

 

     The soloist in the Dvorak ‘cello concerto was Anastasia Kobekina, who while looking thoroughly modern did, in some of her impassioned playing remind me of Augustus John’s Madame Suggia – though Anastasia was not wearing such an extravagant dress!  But her playing was exceptional and committed.  I particularly liked the ‘dialogue’ between soloist and the leader of the orchestra in the final movement where there seemed to be an enjoyable and real understanding between the two of them.

     The reception that greeted the end of the concerto was tumultuous, with the audience sounding more like football game crowd than the genteel enthusiasm I am used to. 

     Perhaps this sort of programming (and relatively early start) attracts a wider group of people than usual – a large section of the audience applauded between movements, which suggests that they are not seasoned classical music concert goers - and that can only be a good thing.  In the Liceu for an Opera performance the average age of the audience (at least where I am sitting in the stalls) is even greater than my retired age!  Anything that gets young people and first timers into cultural events like this is not only a positive, but an essential aspect of allowing this form of entertainment to continue into the future.

     The soloist was brought back a few times by the strength of the applause and, to the delight of all, the soloist and the conductor

 

played a duet, with the conductor on tabor which he played with hands and fingers, sitting, and holding it between his knees.  The music was a folksy-medieval sort of piece, and it went down very well, it was cutesy and brilliant with virtuoso playing by both, and yet at the same time it was somehow intimate.

     All sections of the orchestra were outstanding in The New World Symphony that ended the concert, though I felt that when the full orchestra was playing sometimes the sound was more of a block than detailed, but that may be more to do with the acoustics of the hall than the playing of the musicians.

     For me the strings and the woodwind sections were outstanding, but the taut conducting of Salado produced a finale that was electrifying.  And if I thought that the reception of the soloist was raucous, it had absolutely nothing on the audience response at the end of the concert, with whoops, yells, whistles, and people standing to give an ovation that clearly touched conductor and performers.

    This was an exhilarating start to the season and, with the car parking sorted and the life found, I look forward with real confidence to a musical year!

 

 

 

 

Present sounds: past emotion

I am now firmly plugged back into BBC Radio.  Like The Guardian, I can only do without it for the length of a short summer holiday.  No longer.

It is odd to consider that the whole concept of ‘going on holiday’ has changed utterly in my lifetime.

My first foreign holiday at the age of 7, was with my mother and father and my uncle and aunt.  We went by bus, train, train, boat, train, coach, train, train, coach, coach (taking well over a day) to Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava in Catalonia.  I loved it.  I spent the majority of my time in the sea, trying out my new swimming mask and losing one of my new flippers.  I ate my first squid. 

And I realise that as a well-behaved and utterly polite child with four grateful adults, I must have been spoiled rotten!  Perhaps that holiday more than anything, ingrained in me a love of sunshine that has lasted up to today – though ‘today’ is not the best advert for Catalonia as it has been raining solidly for the last two days!  That is, to be fair, unusual.

We spent 15 days on holiday and during that time we didn’t have any British newspapers, we didn’t phone home, we didn’t watch television – except for me to see, with wonder, Bonanza in Spanish, that I found endlessly funny!  We were, in effect, cut off from home – and thoroughly enjoyed it.

When I was old enough to go on holiday by myself, then all my parents expected was the odd postcard letting the know that I was still alive at that point in my vacation.  My only attempts to phone home were total disasters that ended up in my feeding public phone boxes with money for no link to Cardiff. 

Three weeks going down the Greek Islands from Athens to Crete and staying in what could euphemistically be called ‘basic’ accommodation; five weeks travelling across the United States; a couple of weeks in Italy – none of these had me phoning home, nor reading a newspaper, nor listening to the BBC. 

My holiday effectively erected a cordon sanitaire around my previous life that was only broken through when I came back to Heathrow, or Luton, or Paddington and made the phone call home.  While the ring tone sounded I mentally wiped out all my family and waited, with a concern that I had not (oddly) felt for the previous weeks of the holiday, for my mother or father to answer.  And then my first question was inevitably how my other parent was!

My next task was to catch up on the world news that sunbathing or scouring galleries or swimming had allowed to pass me by.  And, as I did so, each day would bring in the post cards that I had posted weeks before!

Nowadays, thanks to the mobile phone, kids are never beyond their parents.  Pictures can be sent immediately.  Keeping in touch costs nothing, no matter where you are in the world.  News is a click away.  Google Translate is there for those tricky moments that used to be solved by a combination of mime and use of any foreign words you might have known said in an accent appropriate to the country in which you were stuck!

It is deeply ironic that “getting away from it all” usually involves sharing with everyone you know exactly where you are and exactly what you are doing moment by moment!

Young (and indeed the old) are all linked in to modes of instant communication that will make the 3 week hiatus of my first backpacking Greek holiday as a situation akin to travelling with maps that had areas marked “Here there be dragons” on them.  Communication is good, but sometimes-enforced separation is good for the soul!

These thoughts came to me when listening to my new Internet radio, a Sangean SIR-100 (that looks suspiciously, exactly like a Roberts Stream 107 that it is replacing) and, having worked out how to use the pre-sets enjoying the morning music programme on Radio 3.  They played the second movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony with The Tune.  Beautiful.  Hackneyed?  Well, it is very well known and the sort of thing that Classic FM plays at least twice a day – but I wondered when the last time I had heard it was, and then, by progression on to the first time I heard it.

Music for me carries a personal history.  I can still remember the LP covers of the Music for Pleasure and Classics for Pleasure 

budget LP manufacturers when records could be bought for ten bob (10/- or 50p) and I was getting to know the Classical Canon.  Some music I recorded, Beethoven’s 1^st and 8^th Symphonies on cassette in my (ground breaking at the time) Philips portable cassette recorder.  Hearing the music takes me back to my bedroom in 32, Hatherleigh Road in Cardiff where they were first recorded and listened to, amazed at what sort of sound could be got out of such a small loudspeaker and even more amazed when played through my Boots Stereo Record Player.  But the tape hiss and the slightly cramped sound still stays with me.

Mahler’s 4^th is bottles; Nielsen’s Helios Overture is corn fields; Beethoven’s 5^th is a Constable painting; Immortal Melodies is a large flower bloom; Sibelius’ 1^st is broken snow mounds; Britten is Aldeborough; the 1812 is that graphic cannon – and so I could go on, remembering the cover art of my LP collection (now long gone in favour of CDs) but forever imprinted on my mind, and having some sort of intangible effect on the way that I heard the music and continue to hear it.

Place is also important.  The quickest way to learn new music is to play it.  As an inept trombone playing member of Cardiff Youth Orchestras as well as a member of a various Brass Groups and the School Orchestra I ‘learned’ a lot of music by being there.  I have to admit that in most orchestral pieces the trombones are usually tacet (i.e. being silent) and much of our time is taken up with counting bars (or asking the members of the orchestra in front who play more to give us a nod when ‘figure E’ has been reached in the score) and then lurching into action hoping that the embouchure was still good enough to get most of the notes!  But you did learn music and appreciate the structure of orchestral sound.

For trombone players the best pieces of music (or the most threatening) were when We Had the Tune.  The overture to Tannhäuser is an excellent example where the trombones come into their all, though the first time we played through this piece the awful realization that we were the only ones playing in the orchestra brought us all to an abrupt embarrassed silence!  I still get a little rush of combined panic and pleasure each time I hear the music!

All music, no matter how hackneyed it might appear to be, is new and original to somebody who has never heard it.  I was played the 4^th movement of Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony by my piano teacher in the days when it was still thought that I might be able to do more than the first few bars of Für Elise on the damn thing.  I was much taken by the music and bought a cheap LP of the symphony and when I listened to it, I was stunned by the second movement: simple repetitive and magical!  I was not at all surprised to discover that this movement was given an encore on its first performance!  My listening to the symphony is always in some ways bound up in my abortive attempt to master the piano, together with the patience and feel of the piano in my music teachers dining room in a house exactly like my own home but made so different by the decoration and the smell and feel.

There are also parts of well-known musical pieces that have associations.  The BBC National Orchestra of Wales has given me many and varied delights and I used to go to the concert series in St David’s Hall when I lived in Cardiff where some of the performances were among the best I have ever been to of the pieces played.  The orchestra that one hears today is a development from other variations on a National Orchestra that have been tried in the past.  I can remember as a school boy going to performances in the Assembly Rooms of the City Hall, other performances in Broadcasting House in Llandaff and yet others in the Coal Exchange in Mount Stuart Square.

One early performance stands out.  It was of Beethoven’s 3^rd The Eroica and the part that particularly stays with me is the horn’s solo.  The symphony was taken at a lively pace until the entry of the horns when everything slowed down for them to try and get the notes, then the music returned al tempo for the rest of the orchestra.  I still can remember my exquisite embarrassment for the horn section and my relief when such an exposed passage was over.  I still feel some of the tension whenever I hear that particular section.  Still.

Lest this memory be the abiding one from this piece, I should mention a couple of performances of the Turangalîla Symphony by Olivier Messiaen that I heard in St David’s Hall.  These were played spectacularly well and left me literally open mouthed in astonishment and musing about how far the orchestra had come in terms of sheer technical accomplishment. 

And, after all, I have an abiding debt to the orchestra from the time when I went to a performance of The Firebird that I had never heard before.  I was sitting in the middle of the audience and when the fff chord introducing a piece was played the entire audience jerked back in their chairs.  That sort of thing spoils you for every other performance because not one of them, on record or live, has had the same effect!

But, as always, I live in hope!