Showing posts with label Tippett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tippett. Show all posts

Wednesday 2 July 2014

At Aldeburgh Festival 2014 : The Humphrey and Andy Show

This is a review of the t.v. documentary Benjamin Britten on Camera

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


2 July

This is a review of the t.v. documentary Benjamin Britten on Camera shown at - and as shown at - Aldeburgh Festival on Monday 23 June 2014


Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity


Humphrey Burton, of course, needed no introduction. When, having nonetheless been introduced (as, with his intense tan, we might otherwise have struggled to recognize him), Burton – in all seriousness – said something like I’m Humphrey, and this is Andy, it felt as though it was going to be Round the Horne, rather than the gentle parries of Sir Humphrey Appleby and Sir Jim Hacker (in the late but immortal Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington)…

The Humphrey and Andy Show proved to be one feeding the other prompts for what they had decided to say earlier, with the just slightly better hidden impression of news front-people, supposedly chatting casually to each other on a couch. Except that they were standing, had no notes / prompt-cards, and it had more class than with those typical presenters. Yet there was no challenge to Andy from Humphrey to say anything unprepared, but a united front to present this – well, what was it ?

We were in a nice cinema, with good sight-lines, but this was not Aldeburgh Documentary Festival, and Benjamin Britten on Camera was not a film (in the way that Rafea and The Great Hip Hop Hoax are, even though both were commissioned for BBC’s Storyville). And we had not, Humphrey, imagined for one moment that making this piece was just a matter of ‘splicing together’ material ‘in an edit-suite’ (even if we could easily credit that some do rarely see their finished piece on a screen such as this one) !

Even so, what was being screened did not have, much of the time, the aesthetics and approach of the powerful documentaries on the cinema circuit : they may then transfer very well to home-viewing, but those that are made for it will not always stand the test of this sort of public screening (as Poor Kids, for one, does). For the best of cinema demands greater rigour, and even greater attention to detail, than when such material is seen via its intended medium : the scrutiny that is given is necessarily more concentrated than at home, with its distractions, or even the scope for pausing a live programme to take a phone-call (or of recording it, and then introducing pauses when watching).

One critiques these two down at the front simply because Andy King-Dabbs, the documentary’s producer / director, might just as well have presented it himself. Needless to say, he did not (and never would), because he is not the draw at an event of this kind, and also because he has given a lot of screen-time in his programme to Burton, who is the draw – partly since he played (along with David Attenborough) an important part in the story of Benjamin Britten, BBC Television, and how they came to work together.

However, as Burton was quick to point out (by way, one supposes, of managing our expectations) – and as King-Dabbs cheerily and readily agreed – the story of Britten on ITV was not being told. Indeed, King-Dabbs additionally apologized that clips of musical performances cut away, when some might have wanted to stay longer with them, because the emphasis of the piece was on making these productions, rather than individual performance : this observation, perhaps unnecessarily even in the context of the title Benjamin Britten on Camera, served as a further elaboration of what this screened work was, and what it was not.

Simply put, introducing the screening without Burton would have been less interesting as an event, even to those of the same age-group as composer / conductor Oliver Knussen (born in 1952), let alone that of Britten and Burton themselves (born, respectively, in 1913 and 1931, respectively) – Knussen, because he had been allowed the most important contribution, that of talking in detail about how Britten’s compositions worked, which he did with concrete, thought-out examples (please see the foot of this posting, in the form of a question put to King-Dabbs).

And, naturally, we had Burton and David Attenborough, as movers and facilitators of the time, encouraging Britten to engage with t.v. as a way of sharing his music with Britons – for, not having a television-set of his own (but having acquired one to see the televised Owen Wingrave (or Billy Budd ?), he had not even been a (regular) viewer, and (as we saw, and were told) had to learn ways of working and engaging with what it is. As much as anything, this work considered how he came to grips with it, and it with him.

Therefore, it is a tribute to the BBC and to Attenborough and Burton that they helped Britten see the worth of this collaboration (even if, because of what we were told the cost of video-tape had been then, some recorded programmes ended up overwritten, and so lost to us) : when King-Dabbs was asked about the quality of the footage from Britten’s War Requiem, he candidly told us how what we saw, horizontal lines and all, had been produced simply by pointing a camera at a t.v. screen on which it was being received.

In complete contrast, technically, it was a ravishing Billy Budd for which we have, in part, to thank David Attenborough, crisply filmed, and full of tension and passion. Even so, it felt as though that achievement were gratuitously being undermined, by someone telling tales out of school concerning the recording : we heard how Peter Glossop, the singer playing Budd, when being led up to face his fate, and in take after take, kept missing the note, and so ended up having it hummed in his ear :

For, although this anecdote relates to preparing Britten’s work for broadcast, it effectively had nothing to do with Britten, and just diminished Glossop as a singer / performer, since it was not as if we were not told that this was done at his instigation. Whereas the story regarding the singer in Owen Wingrave, needing prompting about the lyrics (pistols and other weapons of war – and by way of signals, not with the note), at least seemed to show that BB had been in his own world as conductor, for he had apparently been unaware of these tricks of t.v.

That said, too much time was spent with footage and accompanying narration* on just the latter point, which surely could have been put to better use : here, t.v. showed its current leaning in the direction of entertainment, rather than educational purposes, as it also did by making a curiosity, an eccentric, of the already eccentric percussionist James Blades, with his drums, beaters, and thimbles. The effect of using this clip was, by association, to seem to trivialize the serious point about the interaction, between performer and composer, concerning the sound-world that the latter had envisaged when writing his score : in exploiting the person[ality] of Blades, the programme seemed too frothy, just to laugh about, Britten’s concerns for the use of drums in his ‘church parable’ The Burning Fiery Furnace.


The quick opening montage of scenes and shots from Britten in public had been on a different timescale and using another dimension, including much in a moment, and gave the impression that the programme was going to be a build-up to the recording of Peter Grimes at The Maltings, Snape, where Britten had founded his Festival, and which seemed presented as a unique requirement for agreeing to the project (which, since – as we had been told - Naughtie had written his own narration*, must have been down to him). Instead, Wingrave had equally been captured at Snape, and we had bypassed Grimes, whether we knew that it came first or second to Wingrave (presumably second, since the former had not been a BBC commission), and on to Britten’s burial, and to how that moment had been shared with the nation.

In between, for our modern audience, Britten and Pears were stated to have lived almost openly as a couple (probably defying society as Grimes defies The Borough’s mean conventions and morals, and Wingrave his family’s notion of military honour). Yet we had reserved to when Britten’s War Requiem was fleetingly featured any mention of his pacifism, with none of its consequences for him**.

In terms, then, only of its story-telling, this was no documentary worthy of a cinema, and, as to interpreting material to its viewer, did one have more than a scant sense of real curatorship ? One almost felt that someone had only just held back the question of whether PP & BB would, if living now, have done as Sir Elton John and David Furnish, and have a civil partnership and attempted to adopt a child, rather than addressing what it really meant to be gay at their time, prior to the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1956. Britten’s sexual orientation was included (as the extent of his pacifism was not**), but it might just as well not have been – it was not even obvious that it had any bearing on the BBC and Britten at all.

It was good to have the merest appearance of Sir Michael Tippett, a composer at least as much in need of our attention (along with Ralph Vaughan Williams, to name but one other), but it was just two or three sentences from a compilation concert, under Sir Henry Wood, to honour Britten. We had an even more meagre inclusion of some others, one of whom (Tom Service) had, much more recently than when Britten had been fêted ten years ago (and from when footage of a younger-looking Service had been taken), presented a long Radio 3 broadcast about the War Requiem :

So, a question was asked (one of only two, as Burton quickly decided, following the query about the quality of some of the footage – and on no immediate show of hands – to adjourn to the sunshine (or, rather, to being lionized in the foyer), this on the assumption that everyone had been satisfied…

Q : I am sure that people will agree that many of the contributions in the film were excellent, particularly those from Oliver Knussen, but blink and you missed Tom Service, and only a little less so for Charles Hazlewood, although these are the people on Radio 3, broadcasting about and interpreting Britten now – why was it worth including them, but giving them so little time ?

A : Burton opined that ‘Tom Service says a lot in a little while’ (and made no comment on Hazlewood’s appearance), whereas King-Dabbs elucidated that the footage of Service (and Hazlewood) had been from Celebrating Britten (around ten years ago). Moving swiftly on from why there had actually been so little from
Service (and nothing contemporary***), he told us that there had been good reason to include an academic from King’s College, London, as a cultural commentator who talked about Britten’s place in English life, but not what that reason was.



Reading between the lines, King-Dabbs appeared to be admitting that the programme had had to have popular appeal, and so featured Attenborough and Burton in priority over those now regularly broadcasting on the BBC’s own classical radio channel, and, perhaps for his authoritativeness and stature, giving over so much of the musical interpretation to Knussen, as a fellow composer.


Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity


End-notes

* James Naughtie was supposed to be the documentary’s narrator, but, for want of an overarching role, he might as well not have been.

** Going to the States with Pears, for three years from April 1939, and then, on their return, not immediately (and only on appeal) gaining exemption from military service (as a non-combatant). (By contrast, Tippett rejected even being allocated non-combatant duties, and served two months out of a term of imprisonment of three.)

*** At one point, it was mentioned in a caption that Knussen had been ‘Speaking in 2010’, but not flagging up, in that way, that Hazlewood and Service had been recorded earlier still.



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 1 July 2014

A musical Academy in Cambridge - other than the Academy of Ancient Music...



More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


1 July (updated 4 July)

This review is of some highlights of Britten Sinfonia’s (@BrittenSinfonia’s) / Britten Sinfonia Academy’s lunchtime concert at West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH), Cambridge, on Tuesday 1 July (At Lunch 5)


Strix, Philip Cashian’s difficult new piece for chamber orchestra, premiered at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge this lunchtime, with five members of Britten Sinfonia supporting, encouraging and (in the person of violinist Alexandra Reid) directing the twenty-four-strong force of its Britten Sinfonia Academy : Cashian himself, briefly spoken to afterwards to thank him for his piece, thought that they had played it pretty well.


In rehearsal, at West Road, under Alexandra Reid's direction
(by kind permission of Britten Sinfonia)


One could soon see why it was paired, for a slightly smaller group, with the opening movement (Marche introduction) of Stravinsky’s Danses Concertantes (from 1942) : the Stravinsky had been played beautifully, in a lively and sometimes spiky way, and with a cheeky ending, and Cashian’s work, of around twelve minutes, started in its orchestrational and rhythmic spirit, with a prominent triangle-note that led quickly to a pizzicato section, and to the unbowed cellos and double-basses coming to the fore, an exciting sound against the background of their fellow strings.

The next section melded oboe, flute and clarinet, forging a cry that echoed the roots in a compositional workshop that Cashian had held with the Academy players in the modern gallery-space of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum (@FitzMuseum_UK), and which had resulted in the young players’ responses to Graham Sutherland’s bird-based painting La Petite Afrique III (1955)*, whose writing Cashian took away and used in Strix : bassoonist Katherine Worster, in one of three interviews that Reid conducted with Academy instrumentalists during stage-movements, told us about how this process had worked, and how it had seemed strange to encounter what Cashian brought back to the group, after he had composed the piece away from them.

This cry, as it emerged, continued with the pizzicati lower strings, but with the intensifying use of syncopation, a prominent aspect of the piece, and one which placed demands not only on the players to keep count in bars of differing time-signature, but also on percussionist Tim Gunnell, who here, as at other times, had to provide a clear, regular beating : the feel was of the Stravinsky, who had been better known since Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) for his approach to rhythm and metre (a ballet that the programme-notes reference in relation to Walt Disney and Fantasia (1940)), and even of the jazz vibe that he used around this time**.

A pleasant nod in Igor’s direction, but the tock-tock that Gunnell then brought forth was taking us on, elsewhere – to the more irregular measures beloved of Sir Michael Tippett, with Claire Cormie now switched from flute to piccolo, and with the piano’s percussive quality ably laced into the mix by Alex Little (whose excellent technique had been evident earlier in an excerpt from Schubert’s famous Piano Quintet in A Major (D. 667)). With wood-blocks and high piccolo to the fore at the top of the sound, Little’s part shifted to a motivic role, with the rest of the ensemble delivering nicely jerky cross-rhythms, into which the angularity of bass-drum entered in.

The metrical nature of this composition, and of its emphasis on on the element of percussion, was by now evident. Cashian now, three times at least (but just for a fraction each time), gave us a momentary hiatus in the very impressive ensemble of professional and younger musicians : the percussive beating, which had returned, and the prominently and excellently played trombone (from Katherine Surridge), alongside Sinfonia’s Paul Archibald on muted trumpet, thrillingly halted, allowing us, perhaps, an unimpeded heartbeat.

Once more, triangle sounded, heralding a slowing – probably physiologically, as well as emotionally, for players and listeners alike… Again, we had Cormie’s flute, paired with Thomas Mullock on oboe, and with a feeling of suspension soon added by Little, and by Imogen Ridge (a Britten Sinfonia Academy Associate) on harp. Again, the sensation of a heart a-beating, before a transition to a different constellation of oboe, harp and trumpet. Maybe we sensed that we were nearly through, but the return of the pizzicato section, double-basses and cellos up front, clinched it : with a variation in the pattern of tones from the wood-blocks, the piece came to a sudden end.

And to very appreciative applause for this energetic and enlightening partnership, between older and newer, in an adventure in music !



Other highlights :

* Claire Cormie performing confidently centre stage as flute soloist, ringed by cellists, in Bachianas Brasileras No. 5, a well-worn path (comprising, in short sonata form, an Ária followed by a Dança) - not least as performed by Sir James Galway on his album Annie's Song (for which he made his own arrangement, for flute instead of soprano voice) - but sounding fresh, and with Caroline Dearnley's lead with the pizzicato (who is no doubt an inspiration to the seven younger cellists (not all playing full-size instruents as yet))

* Alexandra Reid's interview, both with Cormie, and with Joseph Cowie, who had just played double-bass in the extract from Schubert's unusually scored Piano Quintet (please see above) - it was a delight to hear Joe saying how playing a chamber piece had taught him that the visual cues between players are as important, if not more so, than what one hears one's fellow musicians doing : for the listener in the hall, watching that communication (be it nods to come in, or smiles at some lovely moment) is a valuable part of concert-going, just as seeing the bright joy that illuminates even, say, Dearnley's face (as a well-established member of the Sinfonia) at passages or turns of phrase that are clearly favourites (please see below)


In rehearsal, in advance of the concert at West Road
(by kind permission of Britten Sinfonia)


* A good choice of opener, the Coriolan Overture of Beethoven (Op. 62, from 1807) gave one the chance to observe Sinfonia and Academy players working together in solid repertoire as an ensemble - as well as hearing the piece not for massed forces or in the context of the all-too-frequent overture / concerto / symphony type of programme, but leading into some chamber pieces

* If any of the Academy's string-players were able to hear Britten Sinfonia's programme with Patricia Kopatchinskaja (as director and violin soloist, in Cambridge on 3 March 2014), they would have been able to feed into their gestation of Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances (from 1915) for this concert not only her 'unstraight' performance, but also her enthusiasm and passion for this music : needless to say, the suite was played with less of Kopatchinskaja's wildness, but movingly, with energy and delight (which one could see in Dearnley's smile), and with Reid's patent encouragement as director***

* Finally nailing that little tune, which marks the hours / divisions between segments of Radio 3's (@BBCRadio3's) Through the Night (and is only played marginally more frequently than Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 In F Minor (Op. 21) (which one can reckon on hearing, during this sequence of broadcasting only, at least once per week !)), as the opening of the last movement, the Madrigal - Nocturne, from Darius Milhaud's suite of film music (along with that of Honegger and Désormières) for La cheminée du roi René**** (1939)




End-notes

* With a strong resonance in Francis Bacon’s architectural approach to, in particular, his later work.

** As exemplified by his Tango, for solo piano, from 1940 (or, more simmeringly, in his Ebony Concerto, written for clarinettist / band-leader Benny Goodman in 1945).

*** It may be scored so, rather than being Reid's doing, but one could several times see three other violinists near her taking a phrase in turn, after her lead, in the solo part.

**** Which the programme-note translates, as if unambiguously, as 'chimney', although the word means 'fireplace', when used within a property...





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)