Slooshying Schubert

Richard Sykes writes to me in response to my question (following the Schubert Project at the Oxford Lieder Festival):  "Where were all the students in this great city of learning...?"

Roger, have you read A Clockwork Orange? Alex, reformed by the drugs and aversion therapy to which he is subjected, finds that his musical tastes have changed:

"It was like something soft getting into me and I could not pony why. What I wanted these days I did not know. Even the music I liked to slooshy in my own malenky den was what I would have smecked at before, brothers. I was slooshying more like romantic songs, what they call Lieder, just a goloss and a piano, very quiet and like yearny, different from when it had been all bolshy orchestras and me lying on the bed between the violins and the trombones and kettledrums. There was something happening inside me, and I wondered if it was like some disease or if it was what they had done to me that time upsetting my gulliver and perhaps going to make me real bezoomy."

I rather suspect that this is Burgess reflecting on his own experience of evolving musical tastes and the ways in which we experience some musical revelations only as we age. Certainly that was my experience with Lieder. As an Oxford undergraduate I loved "classical" music, and attended concerts in the city. But I would not have seriously considered attending a Lieder recital. Now, in my late 40s, something has happened inside me, few things give me more pleasure, and I love to slooshy Lieder in my own malenky den and in Oxford's malenky concert hall too. In years to come, I'm sure some of those students will, too.

So good to be reminded of the extraordinary polymathic Anthony Burgess, who regarded himself as both composer and writer, although his compositions have rarely been given airtime.

I came to lieder rather earlier than Richard Sykes – in my early twenties ‒ but if I’d been a student in Oxford before connecting with the genre, I’d have missed out too.

My own epiphany came when I bought Saga’s 1966 recording of Janet Baker singing Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. Still essential listening. Here she is with pianist Martin Isepp in Schubert’s ‘Der Musensohn’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSbNiy5aoxY 

 

 

The Last of Schubert

To the final concert of the Oxford Lieder Festival. My ninth in the series ‒ a mere sampling of the 109 events on offer over the past three weeks.

It’s been a magnificent achievement, including all of Schubert’s 650-odd songs ‒ the first time this has been done in Britain. And not just concerts, but also masterclasses, family events, study days, lecture-recitals, socials and so on.  

It has been the brainchild of the excellent accompanist Sholto Kynoch, who recruited the finest singers and pianists, old and young, organised the whole thing into brilliantly-conceived programmes, recruited a band of cheerful helpers, performed personally in many of the events, and was around meeting and greeting throughout. What a stunning achievement.

My own special memories?

The young Swiss baritone baritone Manuel Walser singing Schlegel settings and the even-younger Slovenian soprano Nika Gorič singing Schlechta; the Swedish mezzo Maria Forsström singing Schiller; Schubert’s Octet, brilliantly played by the Principals of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; from the older generation, Sir Thomas Allen singing Winterreise and the great Dutch bass Robert Holl singing Mayrhofer settings.

And, in the final concert yesterday, the seventy-something year old Sarah Walker, melting hearts with a superb all-female chorus in one of Schubert’s Serenades, and the last thoughts of Schubert in the Heine settings from Schwanengesang, sung with profound stillness by Jonathan Lemalu (above). Lastly the intimate playing of clarinettist Mark van de Wiel in “The Shepherd on the Rock”.

But… where were all the students in this great city of learning? Just a fiver for them on the door. Conspicuous by their absence.

Hurdy-gurdy man in Oxford

To Oxford again, latest in the Schubert lieder recitals. This time it was the wonderful baritone, Sir Thomas Allen, singing the great song cycle, Die Winterreise – the Winter’s Journey.

Schubert set this tragic series of poems by his contemporary, Wilhelm Müller. Although the composer admired Müller’s work immensely, he only set one of his poems as a single song, ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen’, the Shepherd on the Rock. But he set two long series by the poet which together established the song-cycle as a major form within music – Die Schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreisse.

Curiously, although I’ve known the Winter's Journey intimately from recordings over several decades, it was the first time I’d heard it in the flesh. And what an ideal introduction this was by Thomas Allen. He brings a lifetime of experience to it, not just of singing and acting, but also of life itself.

The journey starts with a young man, disappointed in love, and ends with him observing an aged street musician, an organ-grinder:

There behind the village,
stands a hurdy-gurdy man,
with stiff fingers,
he plays as best he can.

Barefoot on the ice,
he staggers to and fro,
and his little plate
remains empty for ever.

No one wants to hear him,
no one looks at him,
and the dogs are growling
around the old man.

And he lets everything go on

as it will;
he turns, and his hurdy-gurdy
never stands still.

Strange old man,
shall I go with you?
Will you turn your hurdy-gurdy
to my songs?

Schubert in Oxford

 

How blessed we are, to live near Oxford. Smaller than London, Paris or New York, but nevertheless with so much going on.

This month the city hosts a three-week festival – all the songs of Schubert. Over 650 of them.

It’s an amazing feat, the brainchild of pianist-impresario Sholto Kynoch, who has organised (and performed in) his Oxford Lieder Festival since its inception. Most of the events are at Holywell – not a ‘concert hall’, but an intimate ‘music room’ with ideal acoustics. Opened in 1748, is it the oldest public music venue in the world?  

And the performers this year – a dazzling array of the finest singers of German song, including Sir Thomas Allen, Wolfgang Holzmair, Sarah Connolly, Angelika Kirschlager, Ian Bostridge, Robert Holl and so many more. Plus the finest pianist-accompanists.  

I caught up with it at lunchtime yesterday – a recital of Schubert’s songs to poems by the brothers Schlegel. I was looking forward to the soprano Kate Royal, who was wonderful, as expected, but the revelation was the young Swiss baritone Manuel Walser (above), a pupil of Thomas Quasthoff. What an artist!

Was this his debut in Britain? It seems so. Such a future he has before him.

And I have tickets for several more concerts in the series. Hurrah!  

Birthday Bash with OAE

 

I used to have a birthday party every ten years. My fortieth was in Sydney, with the fiftieth at a half-built Shakespeare’s Globe in London (Endymion playing Mozart and Krommer), and since then they have been held in our village on the Northamptonshire-Oxfordshire border, King’s Sutton.

 

But, as time seems to be truncating (see welcome guest Julian Barbour’s The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics), I’ve been having one every five years.

 

This time around, we were lucky enough to get the Soloists of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment playing Schubert (the Trout Quintet and his earlier Adagio and Rondo Concertante in F), plus Hummel’s Piano Quintet in E flat minor. This last was the great discovery for many.

 

The church was filled with an appreciative audience, its acoustic near perfect, our 1870 Broadwood piano well-tuned, the players – a mix of wonderful old friends and brilliant young ones – in top form, with virtuoso double-bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku (above) at her most animated.

 

All this followed by a convivial tea party in the garden at home with family and friends – efficient waitress-service provided by daughter Dora and BFFs. Deep joy all round.

 

My Lost Kentucky Home

I’ve been listening to recordings made in the 1930s and early 40s by the black American contralto, Marian Anderson. She’s one of my very favourite singers, not only among altos, and one of the finest songs on the CD is her rendition of Stephen Foster’s ‘My Old Kentucky Home’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2cZBeAS8ok 

It seems such a pity that so many of Foster’s songs – which include ‘Campdown Races’, ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’, ‘Oh! Susannah’, ‘Old Folks at Home’ (also known as ‘Swanee River’), ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ and ‘Old Black Joe’ – are no longer deemed PC in modern America and have fallen out of the repertoire.

Impoverished, Foster died in Manhattan in 1864, aged just 37. America’s Schubert!

Musical multi-tasking

I very much appreciate musicians (and managers) who as it were have more than one string to their bow. One of my favourites from the past is the singer, pianist, conductor, composer and teacher, Sir George Henschel. (It’s how managers are grown in Japan.)

He was born in 1850 at Breslau, then in Germany (now Wrocław in Poland), and in his youth he was a close friend of Brahms. Over a long career, he toured as a concert baritone, accompanied his wife, the American soprano Lillian Bailey at the piano, became chief conductor of the newly-formed Boston Symphony Orchestra and later of the fledgling Scottish Orchestra, wrote much vocal music and, later in his performing life, dispensing with a separate pianist, accompanied himself in concerts and on recordings.

Here he is, singing and playing 'Der Leiermann' (the 'Hurdy-Gurdy Man') from Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle in 1928 at the tender age of 78: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URZQkGISVSc 

I love the story told by his daughter, contralto Helen Henschel, of the time when, conducting the Scottish Orchestra in a symphony (she doesn’t say which), the first clarinettist was taken ill: “My father sang the whole of his part, while conducting the symphony, and nobody knew anything about it.”

Above: Henschel by Alma-Tadema, 1879

Running through the Winter’s Journey

Over the last century good Australian tenors have been something like hen’s teeth. So first to hear Stuart Skelton as Peter Grimes, and then just a couple of weeks later Dominic Walsh in Schubert’s great song cycle, Winterreise, has been a double treat.

I was lucky enough to catch the young Mr Walsh in a private run-through at the Peckham home of his accompanist, the fine Schubertian pianist (and another Australian), Geoffrey Saba. Dominic Walsh was an Australian Music Foundation award-winner in 2012 and Geoffrey Saba has been mentoring him. We the privileged audience numbered just five.

Walsh and Saba are taking this saddest of sad works of lost love to Australia, with Saba then going on to Indonesia, so if you want to catch it, this is where they will be:

Melbourne: November 23, 24

Stanley Park, near Newcastle: November 30
Sydney: December 1 (Saba solo)
Medan, Indonesia: December 6 (Saba solo)
Surabaya, Indonesia: December 10, 11 (Saba solo)

Microphones changed the way we sing

One of the most important inventions of the early twentieth century was the microphone. It came into general use in the recording industry in the mid-1920s.

Of course, over time they became not only a means of transferring and enhancing sound, they also profoundly influenced the way in which singers sang.

No longer did performers need to project their voices to the back row of the gods, as opera and music-hall singers had always learned to do. In fact, they could sing very quietly and still be heard clearly.

An early example of this is Harry Plunket Greene’s recording of Schubert’s “The Hurdy Gurdy Man”. Born in 1865, the Irish baritone had necessarily learned the art of projecting his voice.

But by the time of the recording he was 69 years old and his voice was a pale shadow of what it had been in his prime. So he almost whispered into the microphone. The result is extraordinary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW04f0olXUY

Let me know what you think…