Prom 5 - 15.07.13: Bamberg Symphony Orchestra

[Barbirollians]

[QUOTE=amateur51;313613]The editing out of the Lachenmann is all the more philistine because Nott is a noted advocate of his music and conducts plenty of 'modern music' in Bamberg. What's the point of getting him over if you're going to remove the performance of a piece that you (the BBC) believe that Janet & Joe Public wouldn't like

That distant rumbling noise is Lord Reith rotating [/QUOTE

I may have hated it and consider it pretentious rubbish but I agree once programmed it should be shown on BBC4 as well as heard .

It is interesting that it appears that neither the David Matthews piece or I hope Ades : Totentanz is to be edited out .

I have found some of the critical comments on that piece ironically amusing .

[Wallace]

The editing out of the Lachenmann is all the more philistine because Nott is a noted advocate of his music and conducts plenty of 'modern music' in Bamberg. What's the point of getting him over if you're going to remove the performance of a piece that you (the BBC) believe that Janet & Joe Public wouldn't like

That distant rumbling noise is Lord Reith rotating

Indeed, well said.
Jonathan Nott chose to bring us Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied followed by Mahler 5. He will have had reasons for this. At the moment they elude me but by I hope that by listening to the concert I will begin to understand. Well done Radio 3 for challenging us and broadening our musical education. This is what public broadcasters should be doing.

BBC Four however has chosen to broadcast only part of the concert despite having recorded the full concert. The BBC claims that “BBC Four aims to be British television’s most intellectually and culturally enriching channel, offering an ambitious range of UK and international arts, music, culture and factual programmes”. An “ambitious range”; I like the sound of that, but my verdict is that the BBC will need to try harder if it is be attained. Have a bit more bottle BBC. Aim to frighten the horses.

The omission of the Lachenmann from the TV broadcast is all the sadder because the clip appears to show the performers having an exciting time, Nott in particular.

[cloughie]

Exactly cloughie - we are consenting adults after all

Actually ams it reminds me of Les Dawson comment. After one of his performances an audience member came up to him and said 'can you take constructive criticism?' LD 'Yes' Audience member 'You were cr*p'. But he wouldn't have known that had he not heard/seen him!

[Nick Armstrong]

Indeed, well said.

Jonathan Nott chose to bring us Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied followed by Mahler 5. He will have had reasons for this. At the moment they elude me

I like the turn of phrase.

The illuminating point for me is to remind one a little bit how Mahler's music probably came across to early audiences - large, noisy, chaotic etc etc. - and in justaposition to demonstrate how Mahler now seems comprehensible, 'mainstream', almost classical by comparison.... and hence how taste and comprehension move on and become inclusive.

The omission of the Lachenmann from the TV broadcast is all the sadder because the clip appears to show the performers having an exciting time, Nott in particular.

Agreed. The music in the clip sounds pretty exhilarating to me.

I imagine it will surface in its entirety at some point. Still not the same as programming it as per, though

[Barbirollians]

I like the turn of phrase.

The illuminating point for me is to remind one a little bit how Mahler's music probably came across to early audiences - large, noisy, chaotic etc etc. - and in justaposition to demonstrate how Mahler now seems comprehensible, 'mainstream', almost classical by comparison.... and hence how taste and comprehension move on and become inclusive.



Agreed. The music in the clip sounds pretty exhilarating to me.

I imagine it will surface in its entirety at some point. Still not the same as programming it as per, though

Whatever its merits I don't think anyone does Lachenmann any favours by suggesting he is a composer in Mahler's league and it is simply unfamiliarity that is leading to contempt !

[Sir Velo]

Intriguing piece- hugely virtuosic. I suggest we all make it go viral. That will stick it up the BBC programmers!

[jayne lee wilson]

Yes, a Christmas No.1 perhaps? Delightful clip. I was grinning and giggling all over again...wonderful.

Just a reminder in the context of this discussion that David Matthews' Vision of the Sea has been edited out of that BBC4 Prom 6 transmission too ... we have to keep saying, and protesting, and someone might listen...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

[COLOR="#0000FFThe illuminating point for me is to remind one a little bit how Mahler's music probably came across to early audiences - large, noisy, chaotic etc etc. - and in justaposition to demonstrate how Mahler now seems comprehensible, 'mainstream', almost classical by comparison.... and hence how taste and comprehension move on and become inclusive.[/COLOR]

Well said, sir!

The drooling and emasculated simplicity of Gustav Mahler! That musical monstrosity which masquerades under the title of Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony. There is nothing in the design, content, or execution of the work to impress the musician, except its grotesquerie.
(New York, Musical Courtier, 9/11/04)


A Modern Symphony

One Saturday night at evening
The critic's work was done,
He sat within the Music Hall
The concert had begun.
And, by his side there might be seen
His little grandchild, Wilhelmine.

Young Peterkin was also there
With program-book in hand
And asked the critic to explain
What ailed the music-band.
What was the work that they had found
That was so big and full of sound.

The critic gazed upon the boy
That stood expectant by.
He knit his brows, he scratched his head,
He heaved a natural sigh.
'Tis some poor fellows score, said he,
That wrote a monster symphonie.

With chords of Ninths, Elevenths, worse
And dischords in all keys,
He turns the Music inside-out
With unknown harmonies.
But things like that, you know, must be
In every modern symphonie.

Great praise, the big brass tubas won,
And kettle-drums I ween.
Why, 'twas a very ugly thing
Said little Wilhelmine.
Nay, that you must not say, quoth he,
It is a famous symphonie.

(Boston Daily Advertiser, 18/2/14 after a performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Notice the reference to little children seeing the "truth" of the piece in contrast to the muddled adult. This is familiar for some reason I cannot quite put my finger on.)


If you are perverse enough to endure over an hour of masochistic aural flagellation, here's your chance! This grandiose Mahler "Symphony of a Thousand" , with all its elephantine forces, fatuous mysticism and screaming hysteria, adds up to a sublimely ridiculous minus-zero.
(Down Beat magazine, Chicago, 4/6/1952 - it's as if the critic found the work, I dunno ... "pretentious", I suppose.)

Not, of course, that such amusing comments are reserved for Mahler, nor confined to Music Critics: the eminent Art Critic (and Turner promoter) Ruskin in 1881, wrote:

Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsettings of bags of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.

... and, no doubt, thought that it was doing Beethoven no favours to compare his Music with that of Handel.

[Richard Tarleton]

Great verse ferney. Reads as if inspired by WSG's Bab Ballads, pub 1898!

[Richard Barrett]

The drooling and emasculated simplicity of Gustav Mahler!

I'm happy to see you've delved into Slonimsky to see what yesterday's equivalents of the "Lachenmenn=ENC" faction had to say about Mahler, because I was just about to do so myself. Actually I will anyway:

It is a matter of extreme difficulty to detect tangible themes in the second movement of ???????, and it is an almost impossible task to follow them through the tortuous mazes of their formal and contrapuntal development.

... the work in question being Mahler's Fifth Symphony. One of the most predictable things about this forum is the way that every year exactly the same words are used (no doubt by exactly the same people, though excuse me for not keeping tabs) to describe the more "modern" pieces at the Proms, expressed in a way that suggests the contributor is inventing some freshly-minted eloquent putdown à la Beecham (mention of whom always reminds me of John Fowles' description of him in The Collector as a "pompous little duck*rsed bandmaster who stood against everything creative in the art of his time"). Is that the best you people can do?

Helmut Lachenmann is not a composer I personally have a great deal of time for. I'd find it interesting to discuss his music in general and this piece in particular on the same level that people here would presumably expect a symphony by Mahler to be discussed, rather than on the level of "it's rubbish" - "no it isn't" etc. Is that too much to ask?

[Nick Armstrong]

Good stuff, ferney... and interesting how the contents of the hardware store are the perennial stuff of hostile criticism...

eminent Art Critic (and Turner promoter) Ruskin in 1881, wrote:

Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsettings of bags of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.

...the numbskull comment in the Radio Times:

"Helmut Lachenmann’s musique concrète piece – it sounds like someone bouncing on rusty bedsprings, thwacking at rats with a saw."

[BBMmk2]

Just watching, via iplayer, their Mahler 5. Jonathan Knott, certainly has grasped this score! Enjoyed it immensely. Wonder how his other Mahler interpretations are like?

[jayne lee wilson]

"It seemed to me as if doves and crocodiles were locked up together" - Critic of the Paris Tablettes de Polymie, 1811, after an (incomplete!) performance of Beethoven 2nd Symphony...

[bluestateprommer]

While I admit that I'm not sure what to make of the Helmut Lachenmann work, after 2 hearings (more or less - trying to listen on ear buds at work the 1st time barely registers, after a fashion), I have to admit that the Arditti Quartet, the Bamberg SO and Jonathan Nott played their socks off for it, so that it actually emerged for me as the better half of the concert, in terms of aiming for the bullseye and hitting it. I'd had some nodding acquaintance in the past with some of Lachenmann's music off several ECM New Series CDs of his music, so I sort of knew in advance to expect more of a sound collage rather than a more "conventional" work in the manner of Mahler. It was also very nice that Lachenmann was present to take a bow, especially with this as the first airing of any of his works at The Proms. Giving the work a second listen at home, without distractions (besides my cats), helped tremendously in trying to get to grips with it.

The Mahler was good, if not a world-beater, at least to me. I did get the sense of Nott going for the slow-burn approach and not trying for cheap thrills, which I do certainly appreciate. However, to me somehow, the slow burn never did quite catch fire at any point. Two small points of detail where I appreciate what Nott and the orchestra did was the very end of the 1st movement, where Nott had the orchestra do that final pizzicato chord softly, rather than the standard mezzo-forte "plunk" of years past. Gilbert Kaplan had an article in the New York Times last year about that chord:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/arts/music-in-one-note-of-mahler-a-world-of-meaning.html

Nott also had the orchestra dive in directly into the second movement, attacca, to emphasize the shock of the start of the 2nd movement, in contrast with that final gentle end of the 1st movement. I will admit that hearing some of the solo horn bobbles in the 3rd movement made me wince ever so slightly. But overall, as I said, the Mahler was good. And multiple cheers for giving Lachenmann airing on R3 (would never be on Classic FM, you can be sure - and probably not on 99.9999% of what US classical stations remain).

[Arcades Project]

I'd had some nodding acquaintance in the past with some of Lachenmann's music off several ECM New Series CDs of his music, so I sort of knew in advance to expect more of a sound collage rather than a more "conventional" work in the manner of Mahler. It was also very nice that Lachenmann was present to take a bow, especially with this as the first airing of any of his works at The Proms. Giving the work a second listen at home, without distractions (besides my cats), helped tremendously in trying to get to grips with it.

This remark of Lachenmann's, interviewed by Paul Steenhuisn & published in Contemporary Music Review, may help throw some light on the aim of Lachenmann's procedures & how he, at least, sees them as dialectical. For me Lachenmann's music can sound overdetermined, over-controlled, too much a closed system, but at its best I think it achieves that intensity / beauty relationship to a remarkable extent. It's not generally his fault that certain of Lachenmann's 'extended' instrumental techniques have become ubiquitous in aspects of (specifically German) contemporary composition. For Lachenmann their aim is, well almost redemptive (the son of a Protestant pastor he does use such language).

“For me my music has as much beauty as any conventional music, maybe more. Beauty is a precious idea. I want to liberate this term from the standardised categories. I will give you an example. I used to teach children and I presented them with the music of Stockhausen, etc. They said it was not beautiful and they did not like it. I asked them what they liked, what they thought was beautiful, and they first hesitantly named some pop music. The next week, I went there and brought two pictures with me. One was an attractive photograph of the movie star Sophia Loren. The other was a drawing by Albrecht Dürer, who had drawn a picture of his mother: very old, with a long nose, a bitter-looking face. She had had a hard life and her face was full of wrinkles. I showed them the two pictures and asked, ‘Who is more beautiful?’ They were totally confused, and then came a wonderful answer I will never forget—it was the highlight of my life. A girl said, ‘I think the ugly one is more beautiful.’ This is the dialectical way. Looking at this picture, one feels the precise observation of her son. Not to make it more beautiful, not idealised, just showing it. It was full of intensity. To me, as important as beauty is the word intensity. I search for this in my music.”

My filing systems aren't filing systems, alas, so I can't find the exact reference, I'm afraid.

YouTube clips

Gran Torso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MWZ-MGbtSQ

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulsKoqaX36o

Grido (Arditti Qt. in concert) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eQiTqVQdHk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwtBySRj26Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzPs6fAAjS8

Salut Für Caudwell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tI4GPh1eKM

"Mouvement (--- vor der Erstarrung)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1TpuBJxlfY