Last night was at Opera Holland Park's great production of Verdi's La Forza del Destino (see the review). Extra spice was added to our evening by the fact that we were in the second row, about three feet away from the trombone section and eyeball to eyeball with them, since the setup at Opera Holland Park doesn't have an orchestra pit.

To be precise, the instrument directly in front of me was something rather splendid that I'd never heard of: a cimbasso. It's a sort of ultra-long angled trombone: you rest the end of the long pipework on the floor, the bell end goes over your shoulder and the keys are at around chest height. The cimbassist (if that's the right word) explained that it's an instrument unique to the bel canto opera repertoire and that it plays like something between a bass trombone and a tuba. Wikipedia claims that it was first used in 1831 for Norma. In the score for La Forza del Destino, the part was labelled "Bombardone" (the Italian for tuba).

Being that close to the trombone and timpani section was interesting. It's the right opera for it: the first six notes of the overture are two triplets of huge brass chords denoting the onset of fate, and there are some more big trombone moments later. But also, hearing a couple of the parts so clearly gives you a real feel for the way in which Verdi adds colour and harmony: it's like watching the last few brush strokes that fill in the missing parts of a picture.

Of course, it can also be a little unforgiving: at one point, a series of quiet rolls on the military snare drum were a beat out of time on their entry, which was far more painful where we were sitting than it might have been elsewhere. And being that close to the stage means that the amount of voice that you hear depends very much more on the direction in which the singer is facing, especially as this was a tented outdoor venue with almost no reverberation.

All in all, though, a great and new experience!

30th July 2010

Classical music has been credited with many wondrous properties, whether it's relieving depression or improving the intelligence of your baby in the womb. Apparently, it's now contributing to the well-being of the sleep-deprived. In an, er, "innovative" piece of branding, hotel chain Travelodge has hosted a "Sleep Concert", in which guests were invited to a small concert hall to attend a performance of music specifically chosen to help them to nod off for a lunchtime catnap. Travelodge point to Sleep Concerts as being a roaring, if that's the right word, success in Japan.

Travelodge also claim that this is Britain's first ever Sleep Concert, which isn't strictly accurate: they were pipped to it by the University of the West of England in 2007 (see link), to name at least one. And the idea isn't new either: the American ambient composer Robert Rich was pioneering Sleep Concerts in the 1980s around Stanford University.

In contrast to Rich's specially composed music (his output of albums included such enticing titles as Trances and Drones), Travelodge's music was a compilation of Mozart and Bach alongside more recent material by Coldplay, Snow Patrol and others, provided by the quartet String Mania. The musicians must presumably have been in the unusual position of getting worried if any of their audience stayed awake.

I suspect that this is one concert where composers would not consider the inclusion of their works as a compliment...

21st July 2010

Yesterday evening saw us at a rather posh corporate hospitality bash at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. It's my first time at the Summer Exhibition, and I was well impressed. Like most modern art, there's only about 20% of it that I like - but out of that 20%, there was some really fantastic stuff that appealed to me enormously, not least the life-size King Kong made entirely out of wire coat hangers. I suspect it's the same with everyone, but most probably with a different 20%. So congrats to the RA, and many thanks to our hosts FTI Consulting: I'm sure the event will have done good things for their brand.

Which brings me on to music and another brand. The first hall of the exhibition contained a string quartet playing music which varied from the innocuous (Henry Mancini's Moon River) to the really rather good (two rondeaus by Purcell). But the piece they were playing as we entered really set my teeth on edge. I didn't know the name, but a swift glance at their sheet music revealed it to be the Flower Duet from Delibes' opera Lakmé.

I've never seen Lakmé, which is why I didn't immediately identify the piece, but I'm horribly, horribly familiar with the tune. For many years, the first twelve bars have been the music that you get when on-hold with British Airways (and, indeed, in BA buses, airport trains, advertisements and wherever else their brand police can place it). In my corporate days, I've spent more hours waiting on-hold for BA than I care to count, and there are many times when I would have cheerfully dropped a nuclear device on whatever call centre was putting this stuff out. The fires of hell would have been worth it.

Presumably, in its essence, the Flower Duet is a pleasant enough (if somewhat vapid) number. But there's not much music that will survive a few thousand repetitions, particularly when you're being played a lift-music version of it by a celebratedly customer-hostile company like BA. (There may be an honourable exception to this in the snatch of Tárrega known as the Nokia ring tone). But here is a case where the music and the brand do dreadful things to each other: the Flower Duet reminds me of how much I loathe BA, and I now realise that BA has made certain that I will never, ever go to see Lakmé.

25th June 2010

Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen has many hard core devotees. If you’re one of them, there’s a fair chance that it’s not just the music that attracts you: there’s something deeply intoxicating about the “Gods, heroes, dragons and curses” themes of Nordic mythology. My latest sight of this came from an unlikely place, a birthday present from my son of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, the latest posthumous publication of one of J.R.R. Tolkein’s creations, edited by his son Christopher.

Tolkien's vivid creative imagination didn’t only find expression in The Lord of the Rings and its associated mythology. He was first and foremost a linguist and scholar of Old Norse and Old English poetry (his students remember his magical readings of Beowulf). The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a pair of long epic poems on the same stories of the Völsungs that form the basis of Der Ring des Nibelungen, written in modern English but using many of the devices of Old Norse poetry.

For better or for worse, the Norse myths remained an oral tradition for many centuries longer than their Greek equivalents. As a result, while most variants of the Greek myths are fairly self-consistent, the Norse ones are not, with each poet in each country creating his own interpretation - many of which are wildly different. As Christopher Tolkien’s introduction explains, Wagner was following in this path, starting with the original Norse sources and creating his own artistic vision on top. Tolkien did something similar, albeit in a smaller scale medium and staying somewhat closer to the originals.

It made me wonder to what extent Ring fans know the original sources, and I thought it would be interesting to put together a brief reading list.

The definitive source is the collection of poems known as The Poetic Edda deriving mainly from the Icelandic manuscript Codex Regius, written in the 13th century (most editions include a small number of poems from at least one other manuscript). The poems are believed to be much older than this, but no-one really knows which parts come from when. The covers most of the characters and some of the events in Der Ring, although the names are different: Sigurd for Siegfried, Odin for Wotan, etc.

A little easier to read is the so-called Prose Edda, a sort of guide to writing skaldic poetry containing many worked examples, put together around 1220 by the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson. No-one is terribly sure how many examples are original or whether they were edited or even written by Snorri. This contains another chunk of the stories that ended up in Der Ring, for example the attempt to cheat the giants out of their payment that is central to Das Rheingold.

A somewhat later manuscript containing the same legend is the late 13th century Volsunga Saga (a.k.a. The Saga of the Volsungs, a prose rendering which includes the story of Sigurd and Brynhild (a.k.a Siegfried and Brunhilde).

Strangely, (according to Christopher Tolkein’s introduction), the most complete version of the Nibelung legend appears to have been little used by Wagner, namely the Nibelungenlied, an epic poem from Germany of around the same time and of uncertain authorship. The events in the Nibelungenlied are substantially different from those in the Wagner cycle: for example, a central character is Gunther’s sister Kriemhild and a central event is Hagen stealing the dragon’s hoard from Kriemhild and throwing it into the Rhine, where it becomes the Rhinegold.

Clearly, if you share Wagner’s fascination with Norse poetry and legend, there’s plenty for you to read. Here are some links to get you started:

If you're interested in the libretti of Der Ring, you can download some excellent shareware versions from this link. 9th May 2010

Our May Day week-end was spent in Sussex at the wedding anniversary party of some friends who are very much into the folk music scene. The dance band for the occasion was an all-female group by the name of JigJaw, who were great and had fifty or so people dancing away happily to their stuff. All ordinary enough, until you realise one thing: JigJaw don't play any instruments: their music is 100% a cappella voice. And although there was a P A system, there weren't any beat-box style microphone tricks either. The sense of rhythm and percussiveness that JigJaw created was very impressive: if you have been brought up with the idea that dance music starts with thumping bass and percussion (or even a heavily accented basso continuo), it was quite an eye opener.

There was quite a lot of folk music of various sorts being played on the week-end, mainly Breton and Scandinavian, with the room littered with fiddles, hurdy gurdies, pipes and squeeze boxes of various sorts. As we listened to Radio 3's early music show on the way home, and being a bit sensitised to the whole thing by our trip to the Monteverdi Vespers earlier in the week, it made me realise the deep extent to which classical styles have their roots in European folk music. You could listen to a piece of Corelli court music and understand that it was essentially the same music as the folk dances of its time, just played by crême-de-la-crême musicians who had a lot of tricks up their sleeves and could use them to do a great deal more with the base material.

When astronomers look at faraway stars, they are looking back in time: the further away the star, the longer the light takes to reach us, so what one sees through the telescope is a picture from a long time ago. Listening to good folk music today has the same effect: you're hearing today's classical music, just a lot further back in its development.

3rd May 2010

One of the good things about anniversaries is that they occasionally tempt you to go things you wouldn't normally consider that turn out to blow your socks off. Which is precisely what happened to us at Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, where the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment treated us to Claudio Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin ("Vespro della Beata Vergine" in Italian). We were tipped off by a friendly choral expert that it's a fabulous work, and that it's been rarely performed recently. In view of its 500th anniversary this year, there are several performances (see here for the list ).

500 years on, the work retains its ability to excite and enthrall. Even in the relatively non-resonant atmosphere of a concert hall, Monteverdi shows an ability to create a soundscape. It's as if the different vocal lines gradually fill in a painting, one brush-stroke at a time, until you're overwhelmed by a mass of colour. And if you think religious music is all staid and proper, think again: there's a wide variety of different styles and feelings: dance music, lovelorn romance and elegy all find their way into the proceedings. The result put me more in mind of an entertainment for a renaissance noble family than of an event for a large church or abbey: this may or may not be right since the music was probably written for the Ducal chapel at Mantua (but no-one's quite sure).

Part of the effect came from the way the work was played last night. The so-called "Choir of the Enlightenment" wasn't so much a choir as a collection of 20 soloists, as became clear through the evening when each of the singers displayed top-of-the-range virtuosity as they took solo or duet slots. When all were singing together, the combination of power and intimacy was spellbinding.

Finally, there's something special about seeing a work that's quite that old performed on authentic instruments. Two giant theorbos were a wonderful sight, towering above their players, and the sound of the renaissance cornetts and sackbuts is quite different from the brass in a modern orchestra, lending a colour all of its own.

It makes me marvel at the sheer diversity of classical music. Any time I might think I'm knowledgeable about the subject, something like this comes along to remind me that the Western classical music canon has 600 years plus worth of material from countries across the globe, and there's always something wonderful and different to discover.

28th April 2010

The same artists are performing the same programme on May 2nd at St George's Bristol.