Prom 28 - 7.08.14: BBC SO, Oramo

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Thursday, 7 August
7.30 p.m. – c. 9.40 p.m.
Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven: Egmont - overture, Op 84
Luca Francesconi: Duende - The Dark Notes (UK premiere)

Stravinsky: Oedipus rex

Leila Josefowicz, violin
Allan Clayton, tenor (Oedipus)
Hilary Summers, mezzo-soprano (Jocasta)
Juha Uusitalo, baritone (Creon)
Brindley Sherratt, bass (Tiresias)
Duncan Rock, baritone (Messenger; Proms debut artist)
Samuel Boden, tenor (Shepherd; Proms debut artist)
Narrator TBA

Men's voices of the BBC Singers
Men's voices of the BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo, conductor

[Nick Armstrong]

Anyone going to this?

I'm afraid Oedipus Rex is one of the most impenetrable pieces ever written, for me - I tried during a 'Stravinsky phase' years ago, and again more recently... I'm afraid even if I were in Kensington Gore with a free ticket on Thursday evening, I'd try and find something else to do

Hope yay-sayers will come along and demonstrate that I'm an idiot

[Hornspieler]

Anyone going to this?

I'm afraid Oedipus Rex is one of the most impenetrable pieces ever written, for me - I tried during a 'Stravinsky phase' years ago, and again more recently... I'm afraid even if I were in Kensington Gore with a free ticket on Thursday evening, I'd try and find something else to do

Hope yay-sayers will come along and demonstrate that I'm an idiot

O M G !

Pass the Pomeroy's Plonk, Rumpole.

HS

[Nick Armstrong]

O M G !

Pass the Pomeroy's Plonk, Rumpole.

HS

Fan of O. Rex, Horny?

[teamsaint]

Fan of O. Rex, Horny?

I expect Our Brassy friend took time to to listen to this, to get to the bottom of it all.....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hjq1v

[bluestateprommer]

Just so all know, the soloist has changed, from LJ to Francesco D'Orazio, on electric violin, for Brett Dean's electric violin concerto Electric Preludes. Fortunately, the change of soloist is for a happy reason, as LJ had a baby back in May, so she's cancelled all engagements for several months.

I'm afraid Oedipus Rex is one of the most impenetrable pieces ever written, for me - I tried during a 'Stravinsky phase' years ago, and again more recently... I'm afraid even if I were in Kensington Gore with a free ticket on Thursday evening, I'd try and find something else to do

Well, if I were in London now, I'd take the ticket off your hands ;) . Oedipus Rex is on the bucket list of Stravinsky works that I have yet to hear live (as is The Rake's Progress), so I would go just to give it a shot.

Still waiting to find out who the speaker will be for the performance, so final updates to the Forum calendar will have to wait (maybe until the day).

[Nick Armstrong]

Well, if I were in London now, I'd take the ticket off your hands ;)

It's yours, my friend!

[EnemyoftheStoat]

Still waiting to find out who the speaker will be for the performance, so final updates to the Forum calendar will have to wait (maybe until the day).

It turns out it's Rory Kinnear - which provoked a big double-take, then I realised it was Rory, not Roy.

[Lento]

Apparently Stravinsky went off Rex somewhat, in his later years, notably the Speaker's rôle. I believe he deliberately mismatched the words with the music, or something, but I have never heard it.

[Serial_Apologist]

Apparently Stravinsky went off Rex somewhat, in his later years, notably the Speaker's rôle. I believe he deliberately mismatched the words with the music, or something, but I have never heard it.

Interesting if that is so. Eisler, who judged this work as Stravinsky's abandonment of modernism through its reversion to an archaic language, might have otherwise felt at home in its Brechtian alienation effect, intentional or not. Henze on the other hand loved it, and if I'm not mistaken quoted from it in his 1961 cantata "De Infinito Laudes".

[jayne lee wilson]

All that matters is... will The Dark Notes have Duende...?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Apparently Stravinsky went off Rex somewhat, in his later years, notably the Speaker's rôle. I believe he deliberately mismatched the words with the music, or something, but I have never heard it.

I think he was as enthusiastic about his Music as when he wrote it - apart from a reference to "here's when we bring on the Dancing Girls" at the coda of Creon's Respondit Deus, his comments in his book of conversations with Robert Craft, Dialogues are mainly positive - yes, it's the narration that at the end of his life he felt disrupted his Music. His word-setting is what it always was from Zvezdoliki onwards: the words prvide syllables and vowel sounds that Stravinsky put into Musical terms regardless of the spoken pronunciation. This is heard at the start of Oedipus Rex, where the chorus implore their king's aid, intoning his name three times, each with the accent on a different syllable: "Oe-di-PUS, Oe-DI-pus, OE-di-pus". This "cubist" word-setting really discombobulated André Gide when he collaborated with Stravinsky on Persephoné. "C'est curieux; c'est tres curieux" was all he could say before leaving the rehearsals never to return.

Oedipus Rex, as Bernstein pointed out (and Craft later confirmed from the sketches) is Stravinsky's first great homage to his operatic hero, Verdi (he specifically asked for Verdian voices whenever available). His last great homage is in the Requiem Canticles.

[jayne lee wilson]

STOP PRESS!! Duende out - Bret Dean's Electric Preludes in!

[jayne lee wilson]

Some freshness, some real invention, at The Proms at last!

Brett Dean, former violist of the Berlin Phil, has given us some pleasure in pure sound in his 6 ELECTRIC PRELUDES... here's a piece to sink into and float off with whatever images may come, or just bathe in the waves...

Among many delights I especially liked the otherworldly, spacious, spectralist drift to the second, which intensifies into a quasi-Ligetian climax; the thick, harsh cackling from the violin over the steady tramping rhythm of the abrupt 3rd; then the 4th begins with mere wisps from the orchestra, as the violin's swooping whistles soar across it like the Clangers on Acid.
The splendidly dashing No.5 begins as switched-on-baroque, then the violin transforms into a progrock guitar, before retreating back into its native sonority, cold and bleak in an echochamber - then back-to-baroque and a fadeout...

In the 6th the violin became a cello, in a band of cellos, growling and brooding upon its frantic adventures, with a reflective scalic ending. "All made from simple building-blocks" it seemed to say...

[Appendix: Movement titles:
1) Abandoned Playground
2) Topography: Papunya
3) Peripeteia
4)The Beyonds of Mirrors
5)Perpetuum Mobile
6) Berceuse]

[teamsaint]

Some freshness, some real invention, at The Proms at last!

Brett Dean, former violist of the Berlin Phil, has given us some pleasure in pure sound in his 6 ELECTRIC PRELUDES... here's a piece to sink into and float off with whatever images may come, or just bathe in the waves...

Among many delights I especially liked the otherworldly, spacious, spectralist drift to the second, which intensifies into a quasi-Ligetian climax; the thick, harsh cackling from the violin over the steady tramping rhythm of the abrupt 3rd; then the 4th begins with mere wisps from the orchestra, as the violin's swooping whistles soar across it like the Clangers on Acid.
The splendidly dashing No.5 begins as switched-on-baroque, then the violin transforms into a progrock guitar, before retreating back into its native sonority, cold and bleak in an echochamber - then back-to-baroque and a fadeout...

In the 6th the violin became a cello, in a band of cellos, growling and brooding upon its frantic adventures, with a reflective scalic ending. "All made from simple building-blocks" it seemed to say...

[Appendix: Movement titles:
1) Abandoned Playground
2) Topography: Papunya
3) Peripeteia
4)The Beyonds of Mirrors
5)Perpetuum Mobile
6) Berceuse]

Great post Jayne. Thanks.

I have been very wary of soundbathing since reading Wiliam Schuman's thoughts on the subject.
But now I am confused on the issue