This charming and heart-lifting moment from the second act of Richard Strauss’s opera ‘Der Rosenkavalier’. The young noble, Octavian, is despatched to present a silver rose to Sophie, on behalf of the man she is betrothed to, but never seen. Sophie is sixteen, pretty, innocent and just out of convent school. She is to marry the noble, but boorish, Baron Ochs, whose fortune will save her family.
Octavian arrives to great fanfare and presents the silver rose, with due formality. Sophie takes it, and overwhelmed by the solemnity of the occasion and the beauty of the ceremony, is unable to conceal her emotions. They are heavenly, not earthly roses. Roses from Paradise. A greeting from Heaven. When has she ever been so happy. Octavian is bewitched. He hardly knows himself. It is a moment neither will forget till they die.
Strauss plays the innocence and beauty for all its worth in a duet of sublime beauty. Sophie captures it - ‘for this is time and eternity in one blessed moment’.
The moment passes and Sophie chatters on, like the child she is. Octavian can’t take his eyes off her.
Teresa Stich Randall is Sophie, Christa Ludwig Octavian.
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Posted in Classical, Opera on Mar 28th, 2009 No Comments »
Monteverdi’s last opera, written when he was 75, is a celebration of illicit love. The final duet between Nero and Poppea as they find each other.
‘Just to look at you, to rejoice in you, just to hold you, to be joined to you. No more can I suffer, no longer can I die. O my life, my treasure.’
It is reticent and understated, as if discovering each other by faltering steps, each transfigured by the other’s gaze.
This is Magda Lazslo and Richard Lewis.
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Posted in Rock on Mar 26th, 2009 No Comments »
Van Morrison’s 1989 album ‘Avalon Sunset’ is not, it seems, generally regarded as one of his best and tends to get overlooked. I think part of the reason for this is that, like his earlier, and much less worthy, ‘Inarticulate Speech of the Heart’, the theme of religion runs throughout. The opening song, ‘Whenever God Shines His Light’, a duet with Cliff Richard, is the most well known and was issued as a single at the time. I guess the presence of Cliff and his Born-Again Christianism was a bit hard to take for Van Morrison fans. But, though the God theme is there it is not typical of the rest of the album.
The last four songs on the album - ‘Whenever God Shines His Light’, ‘Orangefield’ (a return to the Ireland of his childhood), ‘Daring Night’ and ‘These are the Days’ - are, in my opinion, among the best he has ever done.
The lyrics of ‘These are the Days’ are a bit pretentious, with its religious reference to the ‘one great magician turned water into wine’. But this doesn’t matter much. Van Morrison is best when he is at his most improvisatory, and here he is. Particularly towards the end, when, after the song is sung, he and the female backing group vocalise wordlessly – “na, na, na, na” – female wailing above him gospel fashion.
UPDATE: I have been requested by Web Sherrif to delete the link to this track. The album can be found here.
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Posted in Chanson on Mar 21st, 2009 No Comments »
Another French song much loved by the English, not because we understand it, but because it somehow captures what we want the French to be like. It is Jean Sablon’s Le Fiacre. I have it in my collection of 78rpm records and it was regularly played on the BBC’s Sunday record request programme Two Way Family Favourites in the 1950s and 60s. It was almost as popular as Charles Trenet’s La Mer.
The song is a rather risqué lyric about amorous doings in the back of horse drawn cab. Sounds of delight from within. But Madame’s husband passes by and recognises her voice. Indignant he rushes forward into the road to confront the adulterous pair. Sadly(?) the road surface is wet and he slips, and is knocked down and run over by the very cab containing Madame and her young lover.
So, a happy ending.
French insouciance is so alien to literal minded Englishmen like me. We can’t understand it. Perhaps that’s why we love it so.
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Posted in Classical, Opera on Mar 19th, 2009 No Comments »
This is one of the most haunting arias in all opera. I cannot understand why it is not more popular. It is from Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) by Erich Korngold. Korngold was one of the greatest of all Hollywood film composers - and one of the most underrated classical composers. This opera, written when he was a very young man, before he left for Hollywood, is about the city of Bruges, in Belgium. A city of grim churches, dark canals, decaying houses - all of which mirror the state of mind of the hero, Paul, mourning the death of his young wife. He meets Marietta, a dancer from Lille, who reminds him of his dead wife. She sings this song to him. Its words are trivial.
‘Joy sent me from above, hold me close my faithful love. In the darkness of the end of day you will light my way. Fear trembles in our hearts - hope rises up to heaven.’
Marietta leaves. Paul, now obsessed with her, stalks her through the night, watches her as she laughs and sings with the dancing troupe she belongs to. He becomes outraged by what he sees as her mockery of religion and the hope of the afterlife in which he might be reunited with his dead wife. Marietta, piqued by his obsession with his dead wife, tries to seduce him. Next morning, she is there at his house. She mocks him and the religous procession passing by below. She snears at the portrait of his dead wife, takes the braid of the dead wife’s hair and dances with it. Paul enraged strangles her.
But he doesn’t. It’s a dream, a vision. He is alone. The braid of hair is still where it was. Then Marietta knocks and comes in brightly. She has forgotten her umbrella and flowers. She smiles at him, shrugs her shoulders at his indifference and leaves. But she has brought him back from the land of the dead to the living. Paul is now reconciled to his wife’s death. He sings Marietta’s silly song. He can begin again
Here is the version from the first act, as Marietta sings it. This is Carol Neblett, with Rene Kollo as Paul. The end, where they duet, is immensely touching. Then she flies of.
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Dido’s great lament, her farewell to life at the end of Purcell’s opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’. If you’re English, the melody is in the blood. Heard among the dead silent crowd at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, it is heartstopping.
‘When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast. Remember me! But ah! Forget my fate.’
‘Remember me!’ - the same note repeated, the voice forlorn, almost pleading, unsure she will be remembered at all. Cupids come to cover her.
This is Janet Baker, recorded in 1961 - never equalled.
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Posted in Popular Song on Mar 14th, 2009 No Comments »
In February 1946 my father, on leave from the Army, came home- a week’s leave. It was all arranged. My mother and he got married the Saturday following. I have the photos of a drear, dark February day, mist around the church, my father in his army uniform, mother shivering in her white dress. A few days later he went back to the Army. He was demobbed in May. I was born in December.
Their favourite song was I’ll Be With You In Apple Blossom Time.
‘I’ll be with you in apple blossom time. I’ll be with you and change your name to mine. One day in May, I’ll hear you say, happy the bride the sun shines on today. What a wonderful wedding there will be. What a wonderful day for you and me. Church bells will chime. You will be mine In apple blossom time.’
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is, Noel Coward said. It’s potent not for its own qualities, but for the meaning invested in it by those who heard it, on the radio, valued it, danced to it, and sang it to each other. They knew it was cheap - but their feelings for each other weren’t.
In an odd way then it’s their feelings that, by a kind of reverse process, give the song a deeper meaning that it has in its own right. That’s what Coward meant, I think, and that’s why they loved it.
Here it is, sung by Jo Stafford.
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Posted in Chanson on Mar 9th, 2009 3 Comments »
I have a collection of old 78rpm records. Mainly of jazz and dance music from the 1930s. But included are one or two of the more popular French songs, that ended up being played regularly on Two Way Family Favourites, a BBC record request programme which was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
This is Charles Trenet singing his own song “La Mer”, which he composed on toilet paper on a long train journey. Many other singers, in England and America (including Frank Sinatra) have sung and recorded “La Mer” in its English version “Beyond the Sea”. But none compares with Trenet’s version. Here are the opening words of the song.
La mer qu’on voit danser le long des golfes clairs a des reflets d’argent
La mer des reflets changeants sous la pluie
The chanson continues in this vein for four verses, all much the same. In the last verse, while Trenet is still declaiming how the sea dances along the bay like a love song and gently caresses his heart, the massed female choirs of Montmartre rise up like a school of matronly mermaids behind him, singing along with him in marching tempo at the tops of their voices. It is absolutely hilarious. No other version can begin to match it for its wonderful comic effect.
The French, of course, never notice it.
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Posted in Rock on Mar 8th, 2009 No Comments »
Joan Armatrading’s recording from 1981 of her own song, “The Weakness in Me”, is about the bewitchment of new love, and its destructive power. Under its sensual pull she becomes self-deceiving, talking away the old love, half aware of what she is doing, witnessing the games and stratagems lovers play, hers as well, without owning up to them.
Why do you come here, and pretend to be just passing by?
And she honestly confesses her intentions.
But I mean to see you and I mean to hold you
She acknowledges the baseness in herself, in her longing for the new love and her treachery to the old, and she can do nothing about it.
This old love has me bound but the new love cuts deep.
One of you has to fall and I need You – and – You.
She is the and held trembling between the poles of old and new. She leaves it in the air. But the hard decision is hers, and hers alone.
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Posted in Jazz on Mar 7th, 2009 No Comments »
Jelly Roll Morton and his Orchestra recorded ‘Deep Creek’ in New York on 6 December 1928. It is a slow twelve bar blues. It is simple, so artless that it could only have been created by a most artful musician. Such was Jelly Roll Morton. For some he belongs to the Old Testament period, before Charlie Parker, and is consequently hardly worth our notice. If he is, it is with an air of smug condescension for his naivety. But ‘Deep Creek’ is is not naive. It is balanced and composed, careful and subtle, if you listen for it. Some of the players may not be quite up to Jelly Roll’s demands, but we can look through them to the conception beyond.
The opening is a seven note downward phrase played by the whole band. The trumpet enters with the theme, Jelly Roll’s salon piano behind, brass bass on long, low notes. Three full piano chords fortissimo introduce a trombone solo. Trombone and trumpet are a bit ill at ease, not quite composed.
Things get into the groove with the entry of the soprano sax, a busy confident solo with the band playing chord notes behind, growing louder as the solo progresses, the brass bass farting like a polite elephant all the while.
Jelly Roll’s solo is composure personified, assured, dignified and gentle, as if he is playing just for himself. Its elegance takes us back to a polite French and Spanish Creole society at the turn of the century, the society Jelly Roll long dreamed of being a part of. And he is no crude blues player. His playing is distant, nostalgic and dreamy. Towards the close of his solo he turns upwards full chords in double time then grace notes his way back down.
Russell Procope’s clarinet enters with a six note blues bent phrase that he repeats twice, building up the tension with the band behind him till he signs off high up in the air. The whole band comes in with the last chorus on a four note riff, soprano sax weaving away up in front.
Last word is Jelly Roll’s – a single faint chord high up, like a ghost come back to haunt us from over eighty years ago.
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