Mini Review: Durham Concerto by Jon Lord

I've been rather remiss of late: this is my first post since the end of last month. Simply too busy, though I have thought frequently about writing something.

This post is the first of a regular (I hope) series of short reviews of recorded music I have heard. I don't intend these to be extensive discourses on the qualities of the music - I don't have the time or the musical expertise - but rather, a brief response and recommendation (I think it is safe to say that I won't bother wasting my limited time writing about works that do nothing for me. This one is the Durham Concerto by Jon Lord, better known as the founder of Deep Purple than as a composer of classical music.
Lord was commissioned to write a work for Durham University's 175th anniversary in 2007, and this is it.

Not a conventional concerto as Beethoven would have recognised, it has six movements, and various instruments have prominent roles at different times, so more a concerto grosso if you like. Jon Lord plays a subtle electrical keyboard in places

The movements are titled (eg I. The cathedral at dawn) and are obviously intended as musical pictures. The music is tuneful and mostly peaceful, the 2nd and 5th movements being lively and whimsical in part. It won't appeal to those who think contemporary classical music should be spiky and have no melody, but those people who like music should respond.

I think it is a very fine piece of music which would bear repeating at the Proms (I hold no hope of hearing it live here in Australia): sort of Howard Shore meets Vaughan Williams.

For a comprehensive review, see Rob Barnett's on Musicweb.

The recording is on the Avie label AV2145. More...

Out and about in Sydney #2

In the previous part of this post, I expressed my substantial disappointment in Billy Elliot the Musical, and concluded that when I returned to the topic of Sydney entertainments, I wouldn't be so negative. For the Tom Stoppard play, Rock 'n' Roll at the Sydney Theatre in the Rocks, I can hold to that promise, but not for the Archibald and Wynne art prize exhibitions.

I'm much less knowledgeable on art (as in drawing and painting) than I am with music, so I admit that my lack of appreciation for "modern" abstract art is probably partly ignorance. But I ask you, isn't a lot of this stuff really just "the emperor's new clothes"?

There surely isn't any skill in throwing paint at a canvas and letting it run down in dribbles, nor covering a large canvas in green paint and then daubing a few strokes of brown, white and black on it, portraying what may have been a kangaroo, but could have been just about anything, or more likely nothing.

The winning entry in the Archibald prize by Del Kathryn Barton was childish but had some skill (not much - there were a few that were better, without needing to be hyper-realistic like the Neil Finn portrait), but the landscape entries in the Wynne prize were, without exception, pathetic (the winner was an Aboriginal dot painting ).

The time away wasn't awful, as I might have given the impression, in fact it was really and enjoyable, if frustrating. Books and CDs were purchased, excellent food and wine was consumed, and it finished with the Stoppard play.

It covered the period from the spring revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the fall of communism, seen through the eyes of a English academic and communist (William Zappa), who sees his ideal society crumble and a (at the start) young Czech student in Cambridge (Matthew Newton - son of Bert, an Australian entertainment legend, for anyone reading this from overseas), who is obsessed by rock and roll, to his detriment when he returns to his native Prague after the failed revolution and the effect on their lives and loves.

Typically for Stoppard, there were lots of words across 2½ hours, lots of ideas, great music (Beatles, Floyd, Stones) and brilliant performances by the principals.

Thoroughly recommended. More...

Out and about in Sydney Part 1

I've just returned from a few days R&R in Sydney, and among the relaxations were two very different, but thematically connected, theatre experiences: Billy Elliot The Musical (BETM) and Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard. I wish I could say that I enjoyed both of them, but I can't, only the latter.

Billy Elliot, the movie, was good without being in the same class as Brassed Off and The Full Monty, with which it shares the common theme of the destruction of the northern industrial towns under Margaret Thatcher. Because it has the dancing connection, it probably was a logical choice to be turned into a stage musical, in these days when producers of mainstream entertainment don't seem capable of, or are afraid of having original ideas.

It has to be said that I am not a fan of musical theatre, and that my tastes in music have changed in the last decade. However, I have seen Spamalot, The Producers and Dusty in the last few years, and My Fair Lady remains one of my favourite movies and the stage version of it I saw in London's West End in 2002 is one of the greatest experiences of my life. Elton John - responsible for the music in BETM - wrote some of the best pop songs of the 1970s, and I had numerous of his albums. So it can't be said that I was totally opposed to the idea of BETM being good entertainment.

But it wasn't. It was easily the worst of those musicals listed above, and at times was no better than amateurish: the main out-of-the-floor prop - a column of kitchen, stairs and Billy's bed - threatened at times to fall over, so wobbly was it, and the floor that came up around it was loose to the point where I wondered when a Workcover inspector would come out on stage and put an warning barrier around it!

The boy playing Billy danced well - a fairly obvious pre-requisite - but couldn't sing to save his life and had minimal stage presence. There are a number of boys playing the role, including one from where I live, so I hope the one in our performance was low down the pecking order (it was a Sunday matinee after all).

But worst of all was the music, if it could be dignified with that title. There is nothing wrong with having a common theme - a leitmotif, if you will - running through an extended musical work, but there does need to be more than just this one theme, and it does need to be memorable. On this evidence, Elton John should have retired 20 years ago, after I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all bad. The closing scene in the first half, portraying Billy's frustration and anger at being denied by his father a chance of auditioning for the Royal Ballet School set against the police fighting the miners was very powerful. Immediately after the interval was a scene depicting the miner's lodge Christmas party and a send-up of Maggie Thatcher. It, too, was well done. Not long after this, Billy dreams of being a dancer, shown in a sequence where he dances, with a grown-up version of himself, to music from Swan Lake. It was very moving and impressive, and meant that there was at least five minutes of quality music in the 2½ hours! So, the twenty minutes before and after the interval was good to very good.

At the end, the miners return to the pits, beaten and seeing the end of their livelihood, as Billy catches the bus to London to pursue his dream. This would have been a quiet, but appropriate place to finish. But musicals don't work that way - they have to have a big all-singing, all-dancing finale, to send the crowd home happy. What did we get? Something that had no connection to anything that had come before, with mediocre choreography, another boring song and not even much spectacle. So perhaps it did have a connection to the rest of the show: it was a perfect summary of the faults!

Enough of this - I promise to be less angry in Part 2! More...

Classic BBC Radio

I've been slowly working towards a collection of the five great (for me) BBC comedy series of the 1950s, 60s and 70s: The Goon Show, Hancock's Half Hour, Round The Horne, Steptoe and Son and I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again (ISIRTA).

And through recent purchases, LPs from my father, recordings from BBC7 and various unofficial archive sites, I'm almost there. It won't be totally complete, as some early Goon Shows and ISIRTAs have been lost forever. Round The Horne and Steptoe are complete, and the best series of the others are likewise.

In their different ways, these are the cream of comedy without pictures. Of course, Steptoe came from the TV show so creating mental images is hardly difficult, but the Hancocks are not simply radio versions of the TV shows (which came later) and in most cases, are better: Anthony Aloysius was not a good screen actor.

The Goons were the most influential comedy of either medium ever, and inspired the Pythons and Goodies, who come together in ISIRTA.

Round The Horne is the last great old-style comedy, relying on double entendres and puns, but the wonderful writing of Marty Feldman and Barry Took (among others), and the consummate skills of Kenneth Horne as straight man, make it memorable.

If you want to know more about them, start at the BBC Comedy site. It will also point you towards BBC7, the digital channel, which broadcasts each of them weekly.

As for me, I'm going back to getting them assembled in an orderly way and listening to the recent arrivals! More...

On my bookshelf #1

The first of an occasional series, commenting on the books I'm currently reading. Usually, I have more than one on the go, and for the last few years, my tastes have shifted away from crime fiction to non-fiction: principally, history, travel and biography.

Just finished is Peter Moore's second travel book of Italy by Vespa, Vroom By The Sea, chronicling his trip around the coast of Italy, including the islands of Sicily and Corsica. It follows on a few years later from his first, set in Tuscany, Vroom With A View. He is now married and fatherhood is impending, so his wife allows him to have a last gasp of "freedom". "Sophie", his faithful, if unreliable, Vespa of the first book is in the mechanic's back in Tuscany, awaiting spare parts, so Peter buys a newer, cooler, more reliable and powerful Vespa, which he calls "Marcello": orange with white stripes. It is this change that makes the book less successful than the first, as he encounters few misadventures, and recounts (again and again) people's adoring reactions to his "bella moto".

I'm in the midst of a fascinating read on the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte - The Man Who Wrote Mozart by Anthony Holden - the libresttist for Mpozart's three great operas, Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi. Da Ponte began life as a poor Jew in a town north of Venice, changed his name when the family converted to Catholicism, became a priest and chased women unrelentingly, became the toast of Vienna with his words for Mozart Salieri and others, and then fell from grace, and saw out his last days in America.

Finally, the most recently opened is an expression of the Anglophile in me, rather than the trainspotter: a book by Simon Bradley on the history of St Pancras railway station in London, a grand neo-Gothic edifice, coming back to life as St Pancras becomes the terminus for the Eurostar.
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The "good old days"

I don't like to think of myself as someone who spends most of his time saying how good it was when I was growing up, and how lousy the music/TV/etc is now. However, there is something to be said for the sense of security in returning to those things which made such an indelible impression thirty years or more.

Over the last year or so, I have been working my way through the complete collections on DVD of Get Smart and F Troop, and though, for some episodes, I can almost recite them word for word, the sense of enjoyment is undiminished.

More recently, I have been savouring two very different characters: Charlie Brown from Charles M Schulz's masterpiece comic strip Peanuts, and David Callan, the British spy portrayed by Edward Woodward in the 1960-70s British TV series Callan.

Peanuts ran from 1950 to early 2000, the final strip published the day after Schulz died of colon cancer. The entire collection of almost 18,000 strips is now being published by Fantagraphics. Each volume of about 300 pages encompasses two years worth of strips and includes an introduction by a well-known person, who like me, was influenced by the strip as a young person. So far, in the first four volumes, Garrison Keillor, Walter Cronkite, Matt Groening and Jonathan Frantzen have contributed their thoughts.

In the first volume was a short biography of the creator, where I learned the comic title wasn't his choice, and that he, in fact, disliked it intensely.

David Callan is, on the surface, a very different character: a ruthless killer. However, when you think a bit more deeply, they are both inherently sad, taken advantage of by those around them - Charlie Brown by Lucy, Callan by Hunter - but basically good-hearted and caring (as strange as that may sound as a description of Callan).

Having had the opportunity to re-watch most of the great TV shows of the 1960s to the present day, I would have to say that Callan may just be the best TV drama there has ever been. A big claim, no doubt, but the quality of the acting and the scripts are unquestionable. The directing style is very static, which those used to the modern style fast-cut, short scenes would probably too slow, but it all adds to the ever-present atmosphere of brooding tension. This is further built on by the lack of bright colours - obviously intentional and now "enhanced" by the passage of time on the film stock.

Only the third and fourth series of Callan are available on DVD; series 1 and 2 are gone for ever, it seems, thrown out in the crazy emptying of black and white stock at the BBC which also saw losses of early Doctor Who, Dad's Army and Steptoe and Son, among others. Some have been recovered from the "archives" of amateurs (though how this have been possible in the pre-video era of the 1960s, I don't know). It is probably asking too much to hope that some of the early Callan episodes - particularly the last few in Series 2 when he was brainwashed by the KGB and kills Hunter - might re-emerge in this way.

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Concert programming

I am fortunate enough to be able to organise my daytime work commitments to allow a subscription to the Thursday afternoon Sydney Symphony series of concerts (a trip of 2½ hours by car and train from home).

The second one for the year was last Thursday, featuring Bernstein's Symphonic dances from West Side Story and the overture from Candide, and Karl Goldmark's Rustic Wedding Symphony.

The program was unusual in that it didn't include one of the "great" composers, which leads me to my soapbox topic for the week: "Why is it that classical concert programmers the world over feel that they can rarely stray beyond the realms of the big name composers?"

Now I'm not advocating that we scrap Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky et al. in favour of new music, which in most part, is uninspiring and forgettable, but rather the best works by composers who were contemporaries to the great ones. There are plenty of examples of marvellous works by composers who were prominent in their own time, but are now only known to aficionados of classical music.

Instead of Bach, Vivaldi and Handel, we could hear Telemann, Heinichen and Zelenka while in the galant period, Kraus and Vanhal could substitute for Mozart and Haydn. Feel like some early romantic, then how about Hummel, Field and Kalliwoda sometimes instead of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Chopin? Or some Russian drama? Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov or even Arensky or Grechaninov would do just as well occasionally as Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov. Parry or Stanford for Elgar, Miaskovsky for Shostakovich and Prokofiev, need I continue?

These "second-rank" composers (though Telemann and Borodin are hardly this) are championed by record labels such as Naxos, Hyperion Chandos and CPO, and to the best of my knowledge, they are doing quite well. In fact, better than the "big labels" such as DG and EMI, which seem only to produce new recordings of the standard repertoire with the next beautiful young thing.

Even with composers programmed frequently, the variety is poor. The best example I can give is the one closest to my heart: Ralph Vaughan Williams. The SSO does include him most years, but it is only the Tallis Fantasia or The Lark Ascending. No one can convience me that the uninitiated in the audience would not enjoy the London Symphony or Symphony 5 instead.

So what is the problem?

I have heard that the concert organisers fear that the audience will desert in droves if an unknown composer is scheduled. Well, last Thursday's concert was well attended, and I'm sure more than 75% of the audience had never even heard the name Goldmark. Certainly, it wasn't as well attended as the first concert for the year - an all-Ravel programme culminating in Bolero - but I've seen more empty seats at other times, when the programme was more normal.

Do they really believe their audience is so shallow that they are only interested in works they heard time and time again?

The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, which specialises in the baroque and early galant, programs just the mix I have mentioned, and it is almost impossible to get a decent seat if you aren't a subscriber!

It doesn't seem to be a problem for repertory companies and I suspect that the audience for classical music is very similar to that for plays. The company which I know best - the Sydney Theatre Company - mixes the well-known with the little-known, and doesn't seem to suffer.

Perhaps those of us who care about this, need to contact their local concert organisations and request a little more variety and imagination. In this way, they might be convinced that the world won't end, if in each program, there is a lesser known composer, or a lesser known work of one of the greats.
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