Old Fogey’s Favourites

Music for the season, by Cecile Chaminade. She was a French composer, mainly of piano music, who spent the first half of her life in the nineteenth century and the second in the twentieth. She would never be called one of the so-called ’serious’ composers. Her music is too unpretentious for that. It is intimate, nostalgic, dreamy and quite disarming. She’s usually judged as  a composer of ’salon’ music, of charming trifles. Well, maybe she isn’t Beethoven, Chopin or Liszt. There are no grand gestures, no angst or pain. But in its unassuming, simple and modest way, this is perfect. I love the way she weaves around the charming tune the bustling of the wind and the leaves.

It is played by Eric Parkin.

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Eight years ago, 8 October 2001, I was at a concert given by the mezzo-soprano Alice Coote and the pianist Julius Drake at Wigmore Hall, London. She was just starting out on her career then, as one of the BBC’s sponsored Young Artists. I’m not up to speed on where she lies in the current firmament of classical sopranos, but in a recent recording of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, with Mark Elder and the Halle Orchestra, she’s a radiant Angel.

Schumann’s Meine Rose is one of the most popular encores for sopranos, and Alice Coote sang it at the end of her recital. The recital was broadcast by the BBC and this is from my recording of it then. I’ve left in the applause and the announcer’s voice over at the end.

‘At your feet, I would like, to you as to a flower, silently pour out my soul, though I do not see your blossoming joy.’

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For the last twenty years of his life, the years of his superstardom, it became difficult to see much beyond the the rather grotesque, larger than life notoriety of Luciano Pavarotti. ‘Nessun Dorma’ fixed his fame in the wider public’s mind. It became hard to do justice to his real talent. His gargantuan size made him seem ridiculous. Opera fans began to disdain him in direct proportion to the growth of his world wide fame.

Pavarotti, for me, was simply the greatest tenor voice of the twentieth century. Others may have had greater dramatic talent - Jon Vickers, Placido Domingo to name two. But few, I think, had Pavarotti’s delicacy, and none his voice.

I’m not sure that it was in the big arias of Verdi or Puccini - ‘Nessun Dorma’ the most widely associated with him - suited him naturally - though his ‘Che gelida manina’ would rightly bring the house down. He was at his best, in my view, in the gentler, more reflective and wistful music of Bellini and Donizetti - the bel canto repertoire in vogue before Verdi’s dramatic revolution.

Here he is singing ‘A te, O cara’ - ‘You, beloved’ - from Bellini’s ‘I Puritani’. Nicolai Ghiaurov and Giancario Luccardi join in, with La Stupenda - Joan Sutherland - mooning about up top.

At his best.

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The ‘Rainbow’ melody, mentioned in my previous post on Judy Garland, was Chopin’s - from his Fantaisie Impromptu Op.66. It starts furiously, as if in a storm, clouds scudding across the sky, then the melody arrives like sun through rain. It could not be more appropriate for chasing rainbows.

This is Christina Ortiz. She doesn’t sentimentalise the lovely melody, and it’s all the more touching for that.

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Sometimes intense experience catches you by surprise. It’s an ordinary hum-drum day. You’re not expecting it. And when it hits you,  you wonder what hit you.

It was 1 December 1983. My career was on the slide. I didn’t fit in; I didn’t talk the same language. I was too intense. Things mattered to me that seemed of no consequence to those around me. They looked at me oddly, and, when at last I noticed, it was clear I was going nowhere.  So it was Friday and I escaped to the church of St John’s, Smith Square, which the BBC broadcasted a weekly recital. I didn’t know what the programme was, but I didn’t care, and stumped up the fiver to get in - for an hour’s relief from incomprehension.

The recital was given by the Austrian pianist, Edith Vogel. Three Beethoven piano sonatas, ending with the ‘Appassionata’. She was then in her early sixties, the same age as I am now. She didn’t cut an impressive figure. She seemed dowdy, grey steaked hair, no concern for her appearance. And when she played she wasn’t without faults. Like Schnabel there were fluffed notes. But the moment she sat down and touched the keyboard it was like icicles forming in air.  I could only listen with my mouth open.

This is from Beethoven’s Sonata No.21, the ‘Waldstein’, the first sonata she played on that programme. It starts with a slow Adagio which leads haltingly towards the final movement. Vogel plays the Adagio as tragedy, like a Shakespearean soliloquy, all internal self questioning and rage, unquenchable passion - then, at last, calmed, by that cascade of cooling harmony that is the heavenly melody of the final movement. Rage returns at intervals, but love and harmony win out in the end.

When I returned to work afterwards, I didn’t care. There were more important things.

This is my recording from that concert. For some reason, at the time, I edited out the applause, which is a shame, for it was tumultuous.

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This is one of the strangest and most remarkable sounds in popular music. It is ‘Bird Song at Eventide’ written by the English composer Eric Coates. Its melody is full of nostalgia for an England of golden summers before the First World War.

Usually it is played by an orchestra with bird song sound effects. Here is the version recorded in 1949 by the English entertainer, Ronnie Ronalde. He whistles. The central melody is done straightforwardly - it is his mimicry of the songs of the blackbird, nightingale and cuckoo that is astonishing.

It is beyond good or bad taste.

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I’ve never really understood the music of Igor Stravinsky. I like bits of it - ‘The Firebird’ and the exciting bits in ‘The Rite of Spring’, but the rest has rather passed me by. His music is more approachable that a lot of modern music, but I felt there was something arid about it, and slightly phoney. I know what I mean, but having recently listened to some of his religious music (’The Symphony of Psalms’ particularly) I know I haven’t got it quite right. There is something honest and deeply felt here which I hadn’t recognised before. There is no showing off - but trying to recapture a distant, hidden part of himself.

Here’s a short choral work, his ‘Pater Noster’. It lasts two minutes - about as long as it takes to read the prayer properly and mean it. In it there is an echo of Stravinsky’s Russian past, seen without nostalgia. It hasn’t the technicolor of Russian Orthodox choral music (see here for a comparison) but it is simple, clear, uncluttered and very beautiful.

It is sung by the Westminster Cathedral Choir conducted by James O’Donnell.

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From Catalani’s famous opera is one of the most hypnotic and haunting arias in all opera. Wally (absurdly named young woman) has been banished by her cruel father for refusing to marry the wealthy, but old, man he had arranged for her. She is a strange, rather wild woman, a child of nature who longs to live in the mountains. She determines to leave - ’I will go far away, alone, as far away as the sound of a distant tolling bell.’ Her voice mimics the insistent tolling of the bell, each word sounded on the same note, as if in a trance, before her anguish at leaving her mother’s home forever. 

The aria is famous too as part of the soundtrack of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s cult 1981 film ‘Diva’.

It is sung be the magnificent Italian soprano, Maria Chiara.

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There isn’t one, of course. But for some obscure reason Arnold Schoenberg felt the need of it. So he arranged Brahms’s 1st Piano Quartet for full symphony orchestra as a substitute.

It’s way over the top - massive orchestra, over 100, including xylophone! - and absurdly Romantic. It rather belies the notion of Schoenberg as the cold modernist. It has much in common with his own early Romantic works - ‘Transfigured Night’ and ‘Gurrelieder’ - lush, highly coloured tones, an almost sensual intensity. He explores Brahms like some demented Freudian psychoanalyst drawing out a hidden sexuality in the music barely hinted at in Brahms’s original.

It’s a travesty - but I adore it.

Here is the luscious slow movement, from a public concert on 1 November 1981 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf.

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This is Einojuhahi Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus - his Concerto for Birds and Orchestra - the third movement.

Swans are overhead, flying south. Their natural sounds intermingled with the orchestra’s.  We’re left here, where it’s winter.

It is Sibelius done for the digital age. The orchestra mingles with the sound of the birds in a joyous acclamation of life and natural love.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu.

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