Winter into Spring

 

At last. The winds have abated. The floods are receding. We have snowdrops. And the first blossom on the trees. Glimpses of what I take to be the sun. At last.

 

Shine out, fair Sun, with all your heat,

Show all your thousand-coloured light!

Black Winter freezes to his seat;

The grey wolf howls, he does so bite;

Crookt Age on three knees creeps the street;

The boneless fish close quaking lies

And eats for cold his aching feet;

The stars in icicles arise:

 

Shine out, and make this winter night

Our beauty's Spring, our Prince of Light!

 

George Chapman (c.1559‒1634) from "The Masque of the Twelve Months". Set by Benjamin Britten as the Introduction to his Spring Symphony of 1949.  

Patiently waiting for the reviews

I went last Wednesday to the English Chamber Orchestra’s concert at Cadogan Hall in London. The orchestra was in tremendous form.

It was an extraordinary programme, featuring the world première of a new work by a Brilliant Young Composer ("Serenade for Strings"); a mature piano concerto by Mozart (No 23 in A, K488), directed and played by the same BYC; Tchaikovsky’s "Rococo Variations" for Cello and Orchestra, scintillatingly played by Michael Petrov and conducted by our BYC; and the fourth symphony of one of our best and best-established British composers ‒ a follower of Benjamin Britten ‒ David Matthews, and conducted by the BYC.

Hmmm… Britten. Didn’t he famously undertake all three roles - conducting, composing and playing concertos at concerts with the same ECO - half a century ago?

Surely our London music critics will all have been there last Wednesday? After all, it was a pretty rare occasion. What’s more, there was nothing else in the classical music line at the other leading concert venues in London that evening.

Really, I’ve been waiting, quite patiently, for the reviews. Thus far, there’s been not a word. And we’ll not need to hold our collective breaths any longer. Perhaps they all needed an evening off.

The Brilliant Young Composer, conductor and concerto pianist was, of course, the amazing talent that is Alissa Firsova.

The Little Sweep in Bristol

To St George’s in Bristol – my favourite music venue in Britain ‒ for Benjamin Britten’s The Little Sweep. In a superb production, full of strong performances, was the debut at ten of my grand-daughter Isobel.

The Little Sweep was created as the final part of Britten’s entertainment for young people, Let’s Make an Opera! He wrote it in 1949, just four years after the première of his breakthrough opera, Peter Grimes. And, although it’s written for children, there is no sense that it is dumbed down for them. This is real Britten.

At St George’s, the excellent musical director Mark Lawrence started proceedings by coaching the whole audience in singing the four “audience songs”.

Altogether a magical evening.

Pianist, composer and conductor

I suppose this combination was quite common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms…

But more recently? Benjamin Britten comes to mind.

A major talent of this kind for the future is Alissa Firsova, who led a performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London on Monday. She opened by playing and directing Mozart’s great A major Piano Concerto K488 and followed this by conducting the first London performance of her own “Freedom” Clarinet Concerto. She ended with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Altogether an amazing achievement.

Currently a conducting student at the Academy, she had around her some dazzling young talent. Anna Hashimoto was the clarinettist and soprano Fiona Howell the soloist in the Mahler. The orchestra seemed to be a gathering together of Firsova’s student friends from the Academy. They were extraordinarily good.

I first met the then teenage Alissa several years ago, introduced by clarinettist Mark van de Wiel, who brought her clarinet quintet “LOSS”, played by the Philharmonia Soloists at our local village music festival in King’s Sutton. And she has been coming back ever since.

A name to watch.

Creativity and the Inner Child

He lived most of his adult life as a rather well-organised trader in, amongst other things, coffee and guns in the Middle East and Africa. He kept neat books.

Yet between the ages of fifteen (in 1870) and twenty, he had written a series of extraordinary poems that led him to be regarded by many as the founding father of modern poetry. And then no more.

He was Arthur Rimbaud.

His poems can still disturb, even shock. “Je est un autre,” he wrote. “I is someone else”.

In his later life he went so far as to describe his own poetic creations as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting”. Endeavouring to make sense of the change in Rimbaud, his former friend and lover, Paul Verlaine, said: “One big reason, perhaps obvious, is that the child in him died.”

His work has gripped so many – not least the composer, Benjamin Britten, who made an electrifying setting of parts of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. That opens:

J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

I alone have the key to this savage show.