Musings

One for the Future

posted 18th January 2008

In January 2008 I came across a performer who may well become famous in future.

His name is Nathan Chan and he's a Canadian/American cellist of great promise. In February 2008 he will celebrate his 14th birthday.
So what, you may ask?
He has already made a recording, on an album by Roberta Flack, deputising for Yo Yo Ma. I first came across him on a youtube video, playing the Elegy by the Worcester based composer Ian Venables. On doing a bit of research, I discovered that he used to conduct, having made his conducting debut at the age of three. At the age of four he conducted the the Palo Alto Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

He has performed as a soloist with the Peninsula Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Sunset Youth Orchestra as well as performances for the National Cello Institute (Los Angeles), American String Teachers Association (Reno, Nevada & San Diego, CA), and California Summer Music (Pebble Beach, CA). He has also performed many benefit concerts for a variety of causes such as the American Alzheimer Association, Friends of Children with Special Needs (Autism), and the Foundation for the Fine & Performing Arts, and he even collaborated in string quartets with members of the San Francisco Symphony to help raise money for a local High School.

He also plays saxophone, piano & bass guitar. One to watch!

Arrangements

I notice that in both April and May we have concerts where works have been arranged; Shostakovich’s Octet (18th April) and Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain (9th May). (You could also add the Wallace and Gromit theme on the 13th of April!). It is accepted that arranging takes place; one has only to look at the piano reductions of the Beethoven Symphonies done by Franz Liszt or Stokowski’s Expansions of J.S. Bach. Sometimes it works although fanfares on a piano which I heard on one occasion didn’t work.

What if a composer has second thoughts about a piece? Is the later version an arrangement? I presume we will be hearing the later version of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony in April; the earlier version has a more enjoyable ending for the listener: the pauses which provoke applause from the ignorant only appear in the revision.

In Elgar’s The Music Makers at the end of May, he uses quotations from some of his other works. Presumably the quotation from the First Symphony counts as an arrangement when sung by the choir.

As well as arranging, there is ornamentation, which infuriated Berlioz on occasions. He recalled a particular encounter with a Dresden oboist in 1843 who insisted on ornamentation much against Berlioz’s instructions. One particular example of ornamentation from the 20th Century which springs to mind is Richard Bonynge’s vocal cadenza for Joan Sutherland in Handel’s Messiah (which was described by Sir Adrian Boult as the “mad scene from Handel’s Messiah”). However the most extreme example of ornamentation must be from pianist George Antheil who, in an effort to calm a hostile audience in Budapest, once placed a revolver on top of the piano before performing!

Liebermann's Third Piano Concerto

It was the Philharmonic Society of London who were the commissioners of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I have recently learnt of a rather different commission.
The Third Piano Concerto by the American composer Lowell Liebermann has been the result of no less than eighteen different orchestras jointly commissioning the work. For this new work, which has been favourably compared to the concertos of Rachmaninovm Liszt and Prokofiev, the composer selected the American pianist Jeffrey Biegel as his favoured perfomer. More about Jeffrey can be found here. Performances of this work have taken place both in the USA and in Northern Germany.
From the The Republican, Springfield, MA, January 20, 2007

Liebermann's Concerto [no. 3] was first and foremost superb piano music in the tradition of Liszt, Rachmaninov, and Prokofiev...his Op. 95 crackled with Beethovenian economy of means. Liebermann's ingenious manipulation of his material and clear-eyed-and-eared sense of form, drama, and orchestration produced a unified masterpiece of American composition, a worthy descendant of the Barber Violin Concerto and the Copland Third Symphony.
Maestro Rhodes and the SSO forged a brilliant partnership with Jeffrey Biegel in the presentation of Liebermann's Concerto. Once heard, Liebermann's music begs to be heard again. Thanks to Biegel's dedication in creating the 18-orchestra consortium for the commissioning process, the Third Concerto should have a long life, and a chance at eternity. It is surely the best piece of new music the SSO has presented in the last 20 years.

One wonders when something similar will happen in this country with various orchestras or choirs jointly commissioning a work.

Sleeper

A question for you. Which of the local orchestras has a published author amongst its ranks?
Give up?
The answer is the Hallam Sinfonia and the author is Paul Adam. One of his novels, Sleeper would be of interest to music lovers who like a good thriller. You can find out more here - including an interesting story of a meeting with the author.

Phamie Gow

I don't normally do predictions, but I think I might have found the next big thing on Classic FM!
Phamie Gow is her name and she's a 27 year old composer pianist from Scotland. Her new album is called Moments of Time and it is a beguiling collection of short piano pieces. I hestitate to say it's wonderful background music- it deserves more attention, but it is delightful listening.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Norfolk Rhapsody No 1

Among the anniversaries celebrated this year is the 100th Anniversary of a work by Ralph Vaughan Williams; his Norfolk Rhapsody No 1.

Vaughan Williams was a great collector of folk songs, and this work originally included five from Norfolk, although subsequent revisions reduced this number. One of these, The Captain’s Apprentice, was based on the true story of fifteen year old Robert Eastick, a former inmate from the St James’s Workhouse in King’s Lynn. At the time when
“workhouse-clearing men, who […], would parish boys to needy tradesmen bind;*”
this fate befell Eastick who was so severely mistreated by Captain Doyle on a tea clipper in the 1850s that he took his own life. The story had such an effect on the locals that the song developed and this was heard by Vaughan Williams when he visited King’s Lynn in 1905. “Through my cruel and bad ill-treatment / The very next morning this poor boy died.”

(*From George Crabbe’s work The Borough – the inspiration behind Britten’s Peter Grimes).

Also on the new CD is a piece by Arnold Bax, Tintagel. You may recall hearing this played back in 2004 at the City Hall by the Hallé with Mark Elder in one of the last concerts before the renovations. Gerald Finzi’s work The Fall of the Leaf is a rarely heard work that has found a place on this CD. An elegy for orchestra, you may have heard it five years ago when it was played at the Last Night of the Proms.

Carl Orff: Carmina Burana

Suppose you were a composer living in a time of repression. You search for ideas, but realise that any work will be forever tainted with the regime you live under. And then you have a brainwave; you’ll use a text from mediaeval times and hope people will ignore the time of the music.

That in essence is the story behind one of the most popular works of the second half of the last century. The libretto comes from a collection of song texts found in the Bavarian Court Library in Munich. In 1847 the Court Librarian, Johann Andreas Schmeller published a collection of some of these; some had texts in Latin, others were in French or Mediaeval German. For a title, Schmeller took the names of the monastery where they had been found originally, latinised it and called it “Carmina Burana”. It was in 1935 when a German composer found the publication and set about setting the poems to music. His name was Carl Orff and Carmina Burana is his best known work.

Although the work is often performed as an opera in the composer’s native land, in this country it is mostly performed as a cantata. In some respects this is to be preferred since it allows the audience to ignore the suggestive lyrics and just enjoy the infectious rhythms. You might recall the 1974 performance at the Proms, when Thomas Allen fainted and a music student took over (This was Patrick MacCarthy and these days he is renowned as a choral conductor around Colchester). For many it is the music to Timewatch and Excalibur, to aftershave and bread and recently I caught a snatch of it introducing TV’s X Factor. I suspect that not many will spot the reference in Carmina Burana to the English Queen lying in someone’s arms and fewer still will notice the triumphant close exhorting all to “weep with me!”

Josef Haydn: Symphony No 100 in G.

I don't normally comment on the choice of music played by orchestras, especially if the works in question are to be played by amateur orchestras. However, I recently attended a concert given by the Sheffield Chamber Orchestra and I don't think I can let the occasion pass by without comment.
The final work in the concert was Haydn's Symphony in G, no 100, known as the Military and it is the placing in the concert that I'm concerning myself with.
I recall another concert some thirty years ago, when the symphony no 88 was played at the start of the second half, but apart from that, any performance of a Haydn symphony is invariably pushed into the first half of the concert where it serves as a curtain raiser for more serious stuff and allows the audience chance to open their bags of toffees and for latecomers to find somewhere to park the car and make their way to the hall.
What we had on Saturday last was a major work by Haydn, promoted to a position of prominence in the programme (or as some might say taken seriously for once). Suddenly the work seemed to grow in importance and we heard it with new ears. More than this, we were able to appreciate the normally hidden detail.
Certainly the idea of programming Haydn as the major work seemed to be a masterstroke on this occasion (and the rest of the programme was pretty good as well - I'll look forward to seeing Evelina Puzaite in concert again and to hearing her debut album (now available) later in the year.

Edvard Grieg: Piano Concerto in a minor

Statue of Grieg decorated for the 150th Anniversary of the composer's birth

Grieg's Piano Concerto in a minor is frequently to be found on CD coupled with Schumann's concerto in the same key. However Grieg's work, though inspired by the Schumann, is one of Norway's most famous musical exports. Grieg himself performed it many times in concert and was on his way to perform it in Yorkshire when he was taken ill and died on 1907.
When I last visited his house Troldhaugen in the southern suburbs of Bergen, there was a recording of the concerto playing in the museum in the grounds. The orchestra was the Bergen Philharmonic and the pianist was Leif Ove Andsnes.
Each year this is the work which is part of the concert which brings the Bergen Festival to a close in the modern concert hall, the Grieghallen, in Bergen.
The concerto is one of the world's most popular piano concertos. It has come a long way since the days when the young Grieg showed it to Franz Liszt who played it at sight, combining both the solo part with the orchestral score. Liszt did make one suggestion regarding the orchestration, but Grieg eventually decided against giving the second theme of the first movement to the trumpet instead of the cellos. Liszt was particulary impressed by the ending of the work and the section where the theme introduced by the flute is slightly altered and played on the piano.
At the time of Grieg's 150th Anniversary in 1993 (see picture), Bergen really went to town celebrating the event (At the time of his centenary, the country was occupied by Nazi Germany). The logo for the 150th celebrations was a drawing of Grieg's profile with five strands of hair becoming a stave on which the first couple of notes of the concerto were shown.
One little known story about the concerto dates from the 1960s when Morecambe and Wise used it as the basis for one of their sketches. This material was later recycled for the famous sketch with André Previn.