Overheard at "Literary Britten"

During the discussion of Rebekah Scott's paper on 'Britten's drops':

"Auden through the Thirties was preoccupied with things falling, like bombs and leaves and Rome."

"Literary Britten" (3-4 September, Cambridge)

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be able to attend the conference on "Literary Britten" at Girton College, Cambridge. It was interdisciplinary and deeply thought-provoking, with very many interesting people in attendance. And a great concert included in the price of attendance! I was so happy to get the chance to get to share some of my enthusiasms with people in person, rather than just through the medium of the internet.

Lucy Walker's talk on "Britten's early texts" introduced many of the conference participants to his classic early composition, "The rabbits stand around and hold the lights". Possibly those from the Britten-Pears Library were less enthusiastic, having had to listen to this and other juvenilia on loop for the six month span of their recent exhibition on Britten's childhood works. Still, "Rabbits" seemed to keep getting brought up in comments for the rest of the weekend.

Among other things it was mentioned in the discussion of Rebekah Scott's fascinating talk on "Britten's Drops." She explored instances of rain, tears and other droplets in the texts set by Britten, discussing his musical responses to this imagery, which seems to have fascinated him almost as much as that of sleep and dreams. You might think that this would be a limited topic but let me echo Flora's riposte regarding the pond at Bly: "Small? It's huge!" Someone whose name I didn't catch brought up Britten's childhood compositional fondness for cascades of notes linked by curving lines (to paraphrase his own description) and wondered about the idea of music as a metaphor for droplets merging into lakes and seas. A topic that deserves further exploration. "Deliquescence" is without a doubt my favorite word of the conference.

Will May gave a great talk on Britten, Austen and Mansfield Park, which you might be surprised to learn was one of the operas that Britten very seriously considered creating (but, obviously, didn't). We heard about the penumbra of uncreated works that inevitably hover around any creative artist, and about the textual links that connect Britten and Austen (they were both fans of Crabbe, for one thing). In discussion the main question at issue was: what attracted Britten to Mansfield Park and to the determinedly unartistic and unmusical Fanny Price? Performance is a theme in the story, to be sure, but was the possible immorality of performance really a subject of concern for him? It was Alison (?) who cracked this conundrum, pointing out that the issue that Fanny and Edmund have with the proposed amateur theatricals is the sexual content of "Lover's Vows," and in particular the way in which its themes threateningly echo the private lives and loves of the young would-be performers. Oh. Suddenly Mansfield Park sounds so much more Brittenish.

One of the great joys of the conference for me was getting the chance to meet John Bridcut, whose "Britten's Children" is in my opinion the single best piece of biographical writing on the composer, despite the limited scope of its topic. Among other things we discussed the recent Christopher Alden production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" at ENO, which I seem to have liked much more than everyone else did. Even so I was struck by Bridcut's suggestion that the production would have made more sense if all of the fairies had been schoolchildren, with Oberon as a sixth former infatuated with a younger boy. It makes so much sense to position the fairies as symbolizing the different world of childhood; I wish I'd thought of it myself. I would pay good money to see… well, any Bridcut production of a Britten opera, really.

Inevitably there are going to be corners of the topic that don't get covered. I was not the only one who thought it would have been nice to hear more explicitly feminist and/or queer readings of texts. I may have been the only one to feel the gap left by limited discussion of the role of Peter Pears in all of this. He did, after all, claim to be the literary one in the partnership. And Britten was so focused on writing for performers that a focus on his relationship with texts in isolation with no discussion of the instantiation of those texts in practice seems rather unsatisfying to me.

Hopefully there will be more work on "Literary Britten" in the future because it felt as if we only scratched the surface here. Everyone was overflowing with ideas and new angles to discuss. I hope to be able to post about further Brittenish excursions in the future!

Overheard at Glyndebourne

Q: "Are you a music student?"
A: "No! God, no. They're all gay. Gay and talented. I'm a historian."

Rejecting the binary: "If I had to choose between standing through four hours of Wagner and sitting in the stalls for two hours of that, I'd shoot myself in the face."

And from the department of You Could Have Looked It Up on Wikipedia: "That was a whole opera about a pedophile ghost!"

(Actually all three of these may have been the same person...)

Prom 19: Honegger, Bridge, Berg, Castiglioni, Debussy

Currently listening rather belatedly to Prom 19 with Oliver Knussen conducting. This is one of the few concerts this year where the programming itself is really exciting, unpredictable, intriguing. There's something in it of Reconciling the Seemingly Disparate, and yet I can't help but feel that programs like this ought not to be as unusual as they are. Every single concert ought to make you see familiar pieces afresh and help you discover new pieces that you wouldn't have considered.

Apparently attendances are notably lower for Proms concerts like this. Shame.

People who've never heard of Havergal Brian: Prom 4

While I was queuing last night for the Havergal Brian prom, the man in the queue ahead of me expressed his surprise that there were so few "Havergal Brian nerds" (him) in attendance and so many "people who've never heard of Havergal Brian" (me, by implication, and the woman next to me). Even if you postulate that all the hardcore Havergal Brian fans in the UK were in attendance, though, they can't have been that large a proportion of a audience composed of over four thousand people.

On reflection, my own conclusion about why the concert sold out so fast has nothing to do with the anoraks and nothing to do with people like me who read the articles in the newspapers and came to see a spectacle on a grand scale. It has to do with the simple fact that when you have lots of amateur choirs and lots of child choristers involved in a large and prestigious project, their families and friends are going to come and see them perform. I'd be willing to bet that a good percentage of those on-the-day ticket sales were to people who were determined to see little David or Jenny perform in the Royal Albert Hall. This is not to downplay the popularity of the concert, just to suggest that things may not be as they at first seem.

I was most stuck by the size of the choral forces amassed when I was outside queuing by the door for Gallery day tickets. Obviously the choirs' muster point was somewhere other than the hall itself, because half an hour before the concert they started filing past... and past... and past. "There are more of you than there are of us!" quipped one of the prommers. It's true that they had our queue beaten by miles.

Inside the hall, from the heights of a corner of the gallery, it was harder to get a full sense of the scene, especially with the baffles over the stage blocking a good portion of our view. I would have dearly loved to be in the arena for this one, but had been told by the stewards that there was a good chance no one in the arena day tickets queue would get in at all. As it was, despite having queued since 12.30pm for a 7pm concert, and being fifth in the gallery day tickets queue, I got one of the last, worst spots at the railing. (There's a post in here about the effect of weekend passes, but I'll save that for another time.)

So, how was the Gothic Symphony? It was... interesting. And loud. And long. I've never seen so many people bailing in the middle of a piece, although to be fair there was nowhere else they *could* bail if they couldn't handle the full two hours at a stretch.

It had some very striking moments, most of which were the ones where an individual performer stood out from the mass of sound. The solo violin at the beginning, so high and painfully attenuated in the immensity of the hall. The amazing xylophone solo in the third movement. The mysteriously absenting soprano, who sang as a gorgeous disembodied voice from somewhere I couldn't discern. These were the human moments. The mass of sound was just a mass, though who wouldn't love the organ and the thunder machine and the tubas and all those timpani?

Great moments, not sure whether the piece as a whole added up to anything in particular. To be fair it's hard to add up a two hour piece in your head on first listen, but I don't think I'm the only one who found the whole to be somewhat less than the sum of its parts. It was an experience well worth having but not one of my top proms concerts of all time.

Electric classical

(No, I'm not talking about the kind that involves amplifiers. Not in this post anyway...)

While setting up this blog I had to re-listen to The Turn of the Screw, just to make sure that I had correctly quoted it in the blog title. I've listened to it many times, obsessively. I find myself quoting from it at inopportune moments. ("Small? It's huge!" is always a favorite, in part because I can actually sing it.) And yet no matter how many times I come back to the recording, it always seems fresh. I speak of course of the recording, the original, composer-conducted, Pears-containing version.

Yet I would argue that a large part of its freshness is due not to Britten and not to Pears, but rather to the amazing acting of David Hemmings in his boy soprano incarnation. Every other version of the opera that I've heard, including the Oxford student production, had a better singer in the part. I wouldn't trade any of them for David Hemmings, who for all his wobbly high notes inhabits the role of Miles so fully that he makes him the most vivid character in the opera.

I have a lot of doubts about Greg Sandow's concept of "alt-classical," especially when the definition seems to boil down to "classical wot I like," but there's something to his argument that classical performance could stand to have more immediacy and passion. Hemmings had that passion and instinct for performing, which must have come less from his membership of the choir at Hampton Court Palace and more from his experience singing standing on tables in pubs with his father accompanying on piano.

It's rare that a performance has the sort of verve that makes you sit up and take notice. One other example that comes to mind is the Theatre of the Ayre production of Venus and Adonis led by Elizabeth Kenny, which I saw at the Sheldonian this spring. All of it had a quasi-improvisational lustiness and liveliness that was miles away from the tweeness of some early music, but the standout singer was Jason Darnell in the small role of the Huntsman. A Gramophone review of the recording of an earlier Wigmore Hall performance says that "Jason Darnell's virile Huntsman is a bit of a shock when he hurls out plenty of top Bs during a short passage but his contributions possess plenty of characterful verve." That's one way to put it. Even though I was sitting behind the stage, I could see his face turning scarlet and tell just how much effort and power he was putting into it. I leaned forward in my seat, I watched him for the rest of the scene in the hopes that he would have more to sing. Listening to the recording later, I found my eyes opening equally wide when I came to that passage. My knowledge of singing is still not good enough to judge his technical ability (is there some intentional pitch-bending in there? is that what makes it sound less strictly classical?), but wow, it was exciting. I keep checking to see where else he's performing in the hopes of seeing him do something more substantial.

Any other examples of really electric performances? It's such an intangible concept but I can't help agreeing with Greg Sandow... that sort of feeling is important.

Currently reading... and hoping to read...

After seeing Christopher Alden's thought-provoking production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the English National Opera--seeing it twice, I might add--I realized how little, relatively speaking, has been written about it compared with Britten's other operas. Philip Rupprecht hardly mentions it in Britten's Musical Language; Carolyn Seymour devotes eighteen pages to it in The Operas of Benjamin Britten but that chapter doesn't seem central to the arc of the volume.

One of the more satisfying treatments I've found is in Daniel Albright's Musicking Shakespeare, which I hadn't encountered before now. It's densely written, very much in lit crit style, but very insightful, particularly when it comes to the range of musical styles represented in the opera.

Says Albright:

"The smaller fairies and the fairy rulers and the mechanicals and the Athenian lovers all inhabit different musical spaces, different musical centuries; they scarcely speak the same tongue. Oberon, fluent in florid Purcellian, seems to have trouble making his wishes clearly known to Puck, an English speaker who can’t sing (or, more exactly, can only impersonate singing); and between Oberon and Lysander, who knows pidgin Italian Opera as taught by Wallace, Balfe, and Sullivan, there seems no possibility of communication at all. This Babel of musical languages mirrors the fundamental property of Shakespeare’s play: garbling."

He concludes that "Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a series of tumbles: first it falls from occluded chamber music into opera; then it falls from opera into minstrel show... I believe that, in the Pyramus skit, Britten is not just making a joke about opera but declaring that opera is itself a joke. Opera is flamboyant and meretricious and slightly smelly, at once the grandest of arts and beneath art."

Not being a native speaker of the language of opera myself, this Brittenish ambivalence makes some sense to me. Despite having been a keen opera-goer and opera listener over the past two years, I still haven't come to terms with the core repertoire of the genre. I leap uneasily from early to late and do my best to ignore most of what is in the middle. Does that make me a proper opera devotee or not? Perhaps I can settle for being an improper devotee... and perhaps, given my enjoyment of the Alden production, this is exactly what I am.

On the theme of fannish acculturation, I'm very much looking forward to Claudio E. Benzecry's upcoming book, The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession. His earlier article on the same theme, exploring the culture of fans queuing for standing room at an opera house in Buenos Aires, rang true to me based on my limited experiences at the Proms and (once) at the Met. It was, after all, a friend that I met in the Day Tickets queue who first encouraged me to try getting into opera, and made the idea of going to a performance at the Coliseum (a place I'd never heard of before that day) seem not so intimidating at all. Expect a review of this book as soon as I can get hold of it