Prom 8 - 17.07.13: Britten, Lutosławski & Thomas Adès

[Sir Velo]

That strikes me as very harsh criticism of old Felix. His Variations Serieuses , the incidental music to a A Midsummer's Night Dream ,his Violin Concerto and Six organ Sonatas come from the last few years of his life .

Fair point Barbs. I'm actually a big admirer of some of FM's later works, but needed an analogy to fit the argument.

[Barbirollians]

Fair point Barbs. I'm actually a big admirer of some of FM's later works, but needed an analogy to fit the argument.

How about the Rolling Stones ??? Or indeed Paul McCartney

[Sir Velo]

How about the Rolling Stones ??? Or indeed Paul McCartney

Indeed.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

You make the almost identical comment about the Ades as the Guardian reviewer did about the Matthews, that it could have been "composed almost at any time in the last 60 years"... Hmm... that's a creative crime for - WHAT reason exactly? Does a composer have to invent a new idiom, or take a radical formal approach, every time they compose?

Strange criticism - I didn't hear in the Matthews anything of Gruppen, Atlas Eclipiticalis, Coptic Light, Harmonica, La Terre est un'HommeA Love Supreme or Sgt Pepper - a smudge of Mi-Parti and Earth Dances aside, and I'd've said it was about 70 years! Is this a "bad" thing? Well, it is a curious aspect of contemporary culture, isn't it? Did anyone in any Art form in any Century other than our own consciously produce work that ignored contemporary developments and adopted a style from a couple of generations earlier? Wagner writing like Mozart? The Brontës writing in a style of Austen? Vermeer painting like Caravaggio? Debussy (or Ciulionis) writing like Massenet? Perhaps their minor contemporaries, perhaps (I don't know) - but even "conservative" figures like Brahms didn't write Music that sounded like Hummel, and Bach was as knowledgeable about what was going on around him as was Stravinsky. This isn't a comment on Matthew's piece, which I haven't heard often enough to form an opinion of.

Perhaps only those most fastidious self-editors Dutilleux and Alban Berg ever managed that (maybe not even them), and what about Boulez' revisits & revisions? Oh poor Pierre, 50 years of rewriting for want of new ideas!

Rituel (48 years), Messagesquisse (45 years), Repons (29 years), Incises (18 years), Sur Incises and Anthemes (15 years) - that's some "want of new ideas"!

[jayne lee wilson]

Strange criticism - I didn't hear in the Matthews anything of Gruppen, Atlas Eclipiticalis, Coptic Light, Harmonica, La Terre est un'HommeA Love Supreme or Sgt Pepper - a smudge of Mi-Parti and Earth Dances aside, and I'd've said it was about 70 years! Is this a "bad" thing? Well, it is a curious aspect of contemporary culture, isn't it? Did anyone in any Art form in any Century other than our own consciously produce work that ignored contemporary developments and adopted a style from a couple of generations earlier? Wagner writing like Mozart? The Brontës writing in a style of Austen? Vermeer painting like Caravaggio? Debussy (or Ciulionis) writing like Massenet? Perhaps their minor contemporaries, perhaps (I don't know) - but even "conservative" figures like Brahms didn't write Music that sounded like Hummel, and Bach was as knowledgeable about what was going on around him as was Stravinsky. This isn't a comment on Matthew's piece, which I haven't heard often enough to form an opinion of.


Rituel (48 years), Messagesquisse (45 years), Repons (29 years), Incises (18 years), Sur Incises and Anthemes (15 years) - that's some "want of new ideas"!

I really hope you caught my irony about Boulez, fhg... glad someone's reading me anyway...

Yes, anyway... we've arrived at a cultural moment when any artist or composer might base a work on almost any previous style. (Does one hear earlier styles in Matthews more obviously than say, the baroque in the neo-classical? Probably not. But the cultural context has changed - much more diffuse, less easy to refresh). All that matters is that they make something fresh and memorable out of it. Something new then? It's getting harder to say that's even possible now. There seem to be fewer unexploited sources for new invention - perhaps especially in the context of "Western European Orchestral Music".

Was Lachenmann's Tanzlied really new? It certainly felt like a radically new experience, (yet self-reflexive of that orchestral tradition). Whereas the Matthews piece, for me, was fresh and enjoyable in itself, but also as it related to a century of sea-pieces (like Modernism never happened, perhaps? So?). (Hasn't anyone else, obsessed as you all seem to be with Britten, caught the most obvious "hommage" in A Vision of the Sea? An echo-location so clear as to be firmly in the Brahmsian any-fool-can-see-that category...)

I would add that influence-spotting can lead away from the experience of a work as much as towards it. You note the landmarks, tick the boxes, move on. This is also the paradoxical danger of the programme note, and why I try to read or hear as little as possible about a new piece before a first hearing.

[DracoM]

BUT that's the point, this is NOT 'a new direction', it was a mosaic of pastiches.
IMO, he's damned lucky he's got a band as good at new music as the BBCSO to carry him through.
So being tall qualifies you to be a good writer/ composer, does it? That excludes a bit of long list.
Or do people nudge each other with awe at gigs and say 'gosh, it's that Tom Ades!. He's so tall, he must be good'.

[edashtav]

BUT that's the point, this is NOT 'a new direction', it was a mosaic of pastiches.
IMO, he's damned lucky he's got a band as good at new music as the BBCSO to carry him through.
So being tall qualifies you to be a good writer/ composer, does it? That excludes a bit of long list.
Or do people nudge each other with awe at gigs and say 'gosh, it's that Tom Ades!. He's so tall, he must be good'.

I like a mosaic of pastiches - spot on DracoM.

Yes, silly me for throwing away that tall comment re Ades.

(As I was writing, I had a vision of the tall(!), dominant Ades sitting at a table in a cafe, probably in Manchester, after an ISCM concert. He was surrounded by small, clucking acolytes. At the time , I thought him a little like Stephen Fry: witty and worshipped by small fry.
I should have fast-tracked my memory to Cadogan Hall after a Prom last year. In its foyer was tiny, cool Mr. Huw Watkins:cool1:, surrounded, no enveloped, by a panoply of worshippers.

Size made no difference!)

[Master Jacques]

I was lucky enough to be there. I fully agree with the comments about the flaccidity of the Britten. The Lutoslawski was truly gloriously well done, and went down extremely well.

I'm not sure that I'd go along with the newsgroup opinions of Totentanz. The "mosaic" element was certainly part of what the composer was doing: his homages to Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Mahler (the dead march at the end) were as patent as the curious descent into a hellishly comedic echt Viennese waltz at the death of the monk! But pastiche... I think not. The effect was to present the death-dances through a distorted 2nd Viennese School prism, and the total effect somehow "said" something (as only music can) in the way of a requiem for the 20th century, and her music. The sonic timbres were very much the composer's own, reminiscent of the tonal washes in Tevot, or Asyla. It seemed a "big" work, a real occasion, and totally absorbing in its progress. Whether or not it is a masterpiece (whatever that may be!) must be left to time.

[Black Swan]

I was lucky enough to be there. I fully agree with the comments about the flaccidity of the Britten. The Lutoslawski was truly gloriously well done, and went down extremely well.

I'm not sure that I'd go along with the newsgroup opinions of Totentanz. The "mosaic" element was certainly part of what the composer was doing: his homages to Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Mahler (the dead march at the end) were as patent as the curious descent into a hellishly comedic echt Viennese waltz at the death of the monk! But pastiche... I think not. The effect was to present the death-dances through a distorted 2nd Viennese School prism, and the total effect somehow "said" something (as only music can) in the way of a requiem for the 20th century, and her music. The sonic timbres were very much the composer's own, reminiscent of the tonal washes in Tevot, or Asyla. It seemed a "big" work, a real occasion, and totally absorbing in its progress. Whether or not it is a masterpiece (whatever that may be!) must be left to time.

I totally agree with many of the comments. I am listening to the replay now and if I didn't know better I would have thought it was Zemlinksy, Berg, Schoenberg not Ades. I have always been a fan of Ades. I would give it a 2nd listen it is always a bit difficult listening to new compositions without the program notes. He has hit that stage where he is not a young composer and now has to move on to a more mature stage. I recently heard some of the Strathclyde Motets by McMillan another composer that I just don't understand or appreciate.

[edashtav]

I was lucky enough to be there. I fully agree with the comments about the flaccidity of the Britten.

"flaccidity" ; a hole in one [word] , Master Jacques.

[jayne lee wilson]

I was lucky enough to be there. I fully agree with the comments about the flaccidity of the Britten. The Lutoslawski was truly gloriously well done, and went down extremely well.

I'm not sure that I'd go along with the newsgroup opinions of Totentanz. The "mosaic" element was certainly part of what the composer was doing: his homages to Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Mahler (the dead march at the end) were as patent as the curious descent into a hellishly comedic echt Viennese waltz at the death of the monk! But pastiche... I think not. The effect was to present the death-dances through a distorted 2nd Viennese School prism, and the total effect somehow "said" something (as only music can) in the way of a requiem for the 20th century, and her music. The sonic timbres were very much the composer's own, reminiscent of the tonal washes in Tevot, or Asyla. It seemed a "big" work, a real occasion, and totally absorbing in its progress. Whether or not it is a masterpiece (whatever that may be!) must be left to time.

Thank goodness someone has made sense of this piece at last! Totally agree with all you say, Jacques (you at least name Ades' dancing measures among your pleasures...)
Well, I heard Totentanz. I think it's magnificent; a masterpiece? Probably as close as we'll get in 2013...

The Lubeck Totentanz is a tapestry of death, and that is exactly what Ades' piece is as well - the homages (hommages, in the French sense) are clearly intended as a history of death's expression, a breathing out of death, a weaving of 20thC styles (of music and death-in-music) into a continuous sequence of dances, each of which vividly portray the character invited to the dance. That is the reason for their allusiveness, intensity and their variety of mood. As Jacques says, it is Ades' voice, his orchestral idiom that you hear, seamlessly and powerfully absorbing all those styles he alludes to. The wonderfully tender music for the child seems to quote, very touchingly from Kindertotenlieder, but the end is extraordinary as the word "Tanzen" is repeated, fading, over the blackest of orchestral bass textures.

He has used earlier styles but made them magnificently his own, in the very way I discussed above; David Matthews does something similar in Vision of the Sea, where hommage a Debussy is his affectionate starting point from which other adventures in sea and style take off (though his coda is a marvellously fresh and original inspiration)....

http://simonkeenlyside.info/index.php/performances/performances-concert-recital-oratorio/concert-performances

...follow the links on this site to 2013 performances, then the Totentanz Prom, and you'll find the bilingual text of Totentanz. You should be able to follow it whilst using the pop-out radio 3 player. Then you'll see why the music had to be as it is. (And you'll find out exactly whose death is followed by that ferocious climax just after half-way through...)

As I said above (no.35), influence-spotting is too easy, and can lead you away from the piece, rather than submitting to it as a unity, an emotional encounter.

[DracoM]

Crikey, are you Tom Ades's PR manager?

[edashtav]

Where next will the Tardis take Ades?

...follow the links on this site to 2013 performances, then the Totentanz Prom, and you'll find the bilingual text of Totentanz. You should be able to follow it whilst using the pop-out radio 3 player. Then you'll see why the music had to be as it is. (And you'll find out exactly whose death is followed by that ferocious climax just after half-way through...)

As I said above (no.35), influence-spotting is too easy, and can lead you away from the piece, rather than submitting to it as a unity, an emotional encounter.

What a stout and well considered defence, Jayne Lee Wilson and I do hope that you're proved right. The proof of the pudding will be shown by the composer's subsequent progress - has his backward looking obsession been put to rest and does a questing 21st century spirit infuse his soul?
I shall be fascinated to watch and listen.

But... thanks (as always) for making me stop and think,- although I must admit that I remain concerned that Ades has turned a Walton style corner and that he will spend a complacent middle age in a "gated" community, hidden behind a notice that proclaims "No 21st century Mods and Rockers".

[Master Jacques]

Thank you Jayne Lee Wilson for a really illuminating post! In the RAH, the end of Totentanz (thuds on the massive, soft-grained Japanese [?] ceremonial drum and all) reminded me inescapably of the final image at the end of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, with the silhouetted sunset-image of Death leading the assembled company away, hand linked to hand, along the brow of a distant hill. It was a sombre, but intensely memorable, moment.

[Mary Chambers]

Ades is a mate of Philip Hensher. They don't like Britten - remember that Guardian article by Hensher a few months ago? Perhaps it was Ades's aim to make the Britten piece sound as bad as possible. I switched off after a short time, so I don't know what it was like eventually - anyway, I was only listening on the radio, a second-hand experience.

I'll listen to the Ades piece eventually. I suspect he's over-hyped, but it's hard to tell so soon whether a composer is a 'great' (silly term, I know) or not. It's a pity that I shan't be around in fifty years to see if his music has survived.