‘DIARY’, CHURCH TIMES, 22 APRIL 2022
‘Friendship is terribly underrated in a world that thinks everything is about love.’01 May 2022
30 April 2022
Margolyes on Dorries (spot on!)
I’m no fan of Miriam Margolyes, but in a Radio Times interview (23-29 April 2022, p. 9), she is spot on:
‘Right
now, she is outraged by Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’s treatment of the BBC
and Channel 4. “It’s inconceivable to me that a woman of limited intelligence
can be given such a vital role. She doesn’t know anything about anything.”’
12 March 2022
Music: Parry’s De Profundis (St
Albans Cathedral)
CHURCH TIMES, 11 MARCH 2022
Garry
Humphreys hears
an acclaimed but rarely given work by Parry
THE
particular interest of the concert by the Hertfordshire Chorus, with the London
Orchestra da Camera, in St Albans Cathedral last month was a performance —
supposedly the first since 1921 (but see below) — of Psalm 130, De
Profundis, written for the 1891 Hereford Festival by Hubert Parry.
On
that occasion, the composer conducted “a production of very remarkable merit”
which “will assuredly come to be received as a masterpiece . . . [and]
remembered as one of the chief events of the Festival”, to quote a contemporary
review. And, indeed, it did receive further performances, beginning with one at
the following year’s Leeds Festival. It was heard again at the Three Choirs
Festival in 1905, and Hugh Allen conducted it at Oxford in 1922.
But,
after the First World War — and Parry’s death in October 1918 — his music was
decidedly out of favour, apart from Jerusalem, Blest Pair
of Sirens, and I was glad. In the latter part of the 20th
century, there was a welcome revival, concentrating more on the symphonies,
chamber music, and solo songs — now widely available on record — and in 2019 a
performance of the oratorio Judith — followed by a recording —
was given at the Royal Festival Hall, conducted by William Vann.
The
choir on that occasion was the Crouch End Festival Chorus, prepared by its
regular conductor, David Temple, whose interest was sufficiently stirred to
investigate other neglected works by Parry and to programme De
Profundis with his “other” choir, the Hertfordshire Chorus, for this concert
in St Albans on 26 February.
Scored
for solo soprano (Sarah Fox), 12-part choir in various combinations (three
four-part choirs, two six-part, and one 12-part) and orchestra, De
Profundis is not a work to be undertaken lightly, owing to its scale. But
it is relatively short (about 25 minutes), allowing Parry to express himself
concisely, avoiding the long-windedness to which several of his oratorios
(including Judith) can easily succumb.
When
the BBC celebrated Parry’s centenary in 1948, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote to
Sir Adrian Boult: “It seems to me a scandal that during the Parry celebrations
his finest work, De Profundis, should not be done. I wrote to
Atkins of Worcester about it. He says it is beyond them. Obviously it is a job
for the BBC. Please insist on its being done, and soon.”
Boult
did conduct it, in April 1949, on the Third Programme, with the Sale and
District Musical Society and the BBC Northern Orchestra. It had previously been
broadcast in the BBC Midland Region from Birmingham in February 1939, conducted
by Walter Stanton; and Boult conducted it again, this time with the Sheffield
Philharmonic Choir, on air in July 1960. But past hearings have been rare
enough to make this revival more than welcome.
Is
it Parry’s finest work? It may with confidence be claimed to be his
finest extended choral work: it comprises three choruses
separated by two soprano arias (with the soloist joining the chorus at the
end). Parry’s mastery of this large canvas is in no doubt: 12 real parts and an
independent orchestral accompaniment (not merely a mirror of the voices). But
the musical imagination is remarkable, with at times startling modulations,
challenging rhythms, and effective instrumentation; even the obligatory fugue
in the last movement manages to sound refreshingly unacademic.
If
the reverberant Abbey acoustic tended to obscure the words and cause the
orchestra to overwhelm the singers, this was no fault of the performers. The
Hertfordshire Chorus is a versatile and highly experienced choir, which can
fill a cathedral with sound or produce the most delicate pianissimos; and one
could not have imagined a better soprano than Sarah Fox, from her navigating of
the melismata in “A custodia matutina” to the stunning B flats
(and one B natural) soaring above the choir near the end.
The
concert began with The Black Knight, Elgar’s early “symphony for
chorus and orchestra”, written between 1889 and 1893, and ended with the
ubiquitous I was glad, set by Parry for the coronation of King
Edward VII in 1902 and resplendent in the acoustic of St Albans Abbey.
Another excellent article by Ian Pace, in London Review of Books, 10 March 2022:
Why cancel Tchaikovsky?
Ian
Pace
The
conductor Valery Gergiev, a known ally of Vladimir Putin who appeared in one of
his election campaign videos, has had concerts and contracts cancelled with the
Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Vienna and Munich Philharmonic Orchestras,
La Scala Opera House in Milan, the Edinburgh Festival, the Verbier Festival and
more. The soprano Anna Netrebko, facing the prospect of similar prohibitions,
has cancelled all performances until further notice. She has spoken admiringly
of Putin and posed with the flag of pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists.
The Royal
Opera House and the Met have cancelled appearances from the Bolshoi and
Mariinsky Ballets. Piano competitions in Dublin and Calgary have refused to
accept Russian competitors. The amateur Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has
withdrawn a Tchaikovsky concert including the 1812 Overture. The
Swiss Théâtre Orchestre of Bienne Soleure has cancelled its remaining
performances of Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa.
Some Russian
musicians, including the pianists Evgeny Kissin and Alexander Melnikov, the
conductors Vasily Petrenko and Semyon Bychkov, and the soprano Natalia
Pschenitschnikova, have spoken out against the war. They do not face
cancellations. At the same time there have been efforts to lionise music and
musicians who can be categorised as Ukrainian rather than Russian, difficult
though it may be in some cases to make a clear distinction.
There’s
nothing new about the enlisting of music and musicians to political causes.
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, the centenary of Beethoven’s birth, his music was presented in Germany as
embodying purity, health, strength and moral soundness, in contrast with the
alleged moral decline, debilitated health and decadence of French culture.
From the
other side, following the outbreak of the First World War, Debussy wrote to a pupil that ‘we are going to pay
dearly for the right to dislike the music of Richard Strauss and Schoenberg’
and ‘French art needs to take revenge quite as seriously as the French army
does!’ He began to call himself musicien français and
developed a new musical idiom rooted in ideals of antiquity and classicism,
further away from Germanic music (especially that of Wagner) than previously.
During the
Second World War, by contrast, the British pianist Myra Hess gave regular
concerts at the National Gallery in London, even at the height of the Blitz,
often playing Austro-German music, including Beethoven.
At the end
of the war, however, the situation became more complicated again. German
composers, conductors and performers including Richard Strauss, Hans
Pfitzner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Eugene Jochum, Walter Gieseking and
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf found themselves under intense suspicion and their
ability to perform limited. Denazification was applied inconsistently:
Gieseking for a while could perform in the French Zone but not the British or
American ones; Carl Orff found himself unable to work in Munich, but permitted
in Stuttgart, where one of the local theatre and music officers was one of his
former students – both cities were under US administration.
Less
suspicion fell on compromised citizens of other nations, such as the Romanian
conductor George Georgescu or pianist Dinu Lipatti, who had undertaken concert
tours of areas occupied by Nazi Germany, or the Japanese conductor Hidemaro
Konoye, who regularly conducted the Berlin Philharmonic and even recorded
the Horst-Wessel-Lied with them. Many key figures
involved in the development of new music in Germany after 1945 were also
presumed to belong to a realm apart from Nazism, such as Werner Meyer-Eppler,
the phoneticist, physicist, proponent of electronic music and teacher of Stockhausen. But Meyer-Eppler had been a prominent figure
in the Nationalsozialistische Fliegerkorps, and one of a group of elite
scientists working on major military programmes during the last year of the
war. The British occupiers forbade him from working at his university in Bonn.
Only by reinventing himself as a different type of scholar, looking at
phonetics and speech synthesis (without which the history of elektronische Musik might have been very
different), could Meyer-Eppler return to a full university position.
Most of
these musicians had been involved in activities that in some sense glorified or
propagandised for a genocidal regime. Yet concerns quickly receded,
denazification was relaxed, and German conducting in particular was dominated
for decades after the war by men with tainted personal and political histories.
The Cold War quickly became a much more charged arena. The propaganda value of
music competitions had been apparent to the Central Committee of the Communist
Party since Lev Oborin’s victory at the first International Frederyk Chopin Piano
Competition in Warsaw in 1927. There was a shock when the first International
Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 was won by the Texan pianist Van
Cliburn, who had studied with the Russian exile pianist Rosina Lhévinne at the
Juilliard School in New York. Cliburn became a US national hero,
receiving a ticker-tape parade for his triumphant return home. The Soviets paid
increased attention to their strategy for selecting competitors. The
competitions had become not only about the finest performers, but which
political system was better for nurturing talent.
Soviet
musicians’ international travel was carefully limited. Sviatoslav Richter, born
in Ukraine, was not allowed to visit the West until 1960, at the age of 45,
because his father, of German origin, had been arrested as a suspected spy in
Odesa in 1941 and executed. Other pianists such as Maria Yudina, Vladimir
Sofronitsky or Samuil Feinberg were rarely if ever allowed to travel, and
became known to a few Westerners only through hard-to-obtain recordings made in
the Soviet Union. Those who defected, including the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy
and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, received intense attention as propaganda for
the greater artistic freedom claimed by the West. When Soviet musicians did manage
to travel, their concerts were often embroiled with politics. After the
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 there were demonstrations outside a
performance by the State Orchestra of the USSR at the Proms
in London. A planned British tour by the violinist David Oistrakh in 1971 was
cancelled following tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, journalists and
academics by the UK and the Soviet Union. In the
late 1980s, musical and ballet events by Soviet artists in San Francisco were
met with protests as part of a campaign against the USSR’s policies preventing Jewish emigration to Israel.
The state
control of music-making in Putin’s Russia is not on a level with Nazi Germany
or the Soviet Union. A musician does not automatically ‘represent’ the country
or the regime, though the opportunities for those still in Russia to speak out
against the government are already limited and likely to become more so.
Putin’s nationalism differs in some respects from that of the 19th-century, when ‘Westernisers’ and ‘Slavophiles’ argued
about the country’s musical future as well as its interactions with the West.
But it cannot be wholly separated from those roots, which informed the musical
language of Musorgsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov and to an extent Tchaikovsky,
some aspects of which were perceived as specifically ‘Russian’, opposed in
particular to what were thought to be Germanic norms.
During a
time of war, it is inevitable and not necessarily inappropriate to limit some
cultural interactions with an enemy nation, not least as part of a strategy of
isolating an aggressor. If Russians cannot compete in international sporting
events, should musical competitions be different? Is it any more unreasonable
to want to postpone a performance of the bombastic and militaristic 1812 Overture than it was for the British
conductor Mark Elder to express doubts about conducting the Last Night of the
Proms following the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War? (Elder was promptly
replaced.)
Moral and
aesthetic considerations cannot be assumed to mirror one another. Too little
has been said about the roots of Geräusch-Musik (noise
music) in the militaristic and misogynistic worldview of Fascist-aligned
Italian futurists, in particular Luigi Russolo; this is a vital consideration,
but I would not wish the whole genre to be dismissed as a result. Conversely,
there is no reason to expect ‘good’ people to produce important art, or that
works which explicitly align themselves to a worthy cause – as with countless
9/11 memorial pieces; no doubt more than one lachrymose ‘Lament for Ukraine’
for string orchestra is currently being composed – should automatically be
thought to have any wider value.
In the
hoped-for event of an ultimate ceasefire and Russian withdrawal, what happens
to Russian music and musicians then? To ‘cancel’ them in the long term would be
futile and culturally impoverishing; I hope that there will still be further
chances to hear performances by Gergiev of music by Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev and others outside Russia. But we should not harbour
the delusion that such music stands above politics in some transcendent realm.
With thanks to my
doctoral student Sarah Innes for information relating to Soviet artists
visiting the UK.
25 January 2022
NIGEL ROGERS (1935-2022)
Nigel Rogers the great baroque tenor died on 19 January, aged 86.
In the 1970s, when I first heard him, his command of the baroque coloratura was unique and absolutely stunning. Everyone can do it now - though no one does it quite as well as him - but in those days the audiences were literally on the edge of their seats in amazement. It’s still thrilling to hear and, mercifully, well preserved on record.
He was particularly inspired by the technique of the Indian classical singer Bhimsen Joshi, though he once told me he had never actually met him, contradicting the well-known story that Nigel had heard him singing and went up to him and asked ‘Tell me how you do that’! He was a superb linguist which made his performances in German, Italian and French (as well as English) so convincing.
Two bits of trivia: he sings the role of Maintop in Britten’s Billy Budd, rather hauntingly, in the recording (and BBC Television relay, now on YouTube) with Pears, Shirley-Quirk, Peter Glossop, etc.; and is also in the choir as a choral scholar in the first television relay of the Service of Nine Lessons and carols from King’s College, Cambridge, in 1954 – also on YouTube. (He was also Mosbie, Alice Arden's lover, in the premiere of Alexander Goehr's Arden Must Die in 1974.)
I was privileged to have some lessons with him in the 1970s, but never even remotely succeeded in approaching his vocal skills in the baroque repertoire (and in any case, he insisted I was really a tenor, not a baritone!). I know it’s a tired old cliché, but he really was unique!
20 January 2022
DR FRANCIS JACKSON
THE CHURCH TIMES, 21 JANUARY 2022
Garry Humphreys writes: DR FRANCIS JACKSON, who has died,
aged 104, was for 37 years, from 1946 to 1982, Organist and Master of the Music
at York Minster; but he was in fact associated with the Minster for most of his
life. In 1929, aged 12, he became a chorister under the legendary Sir Edward
Bairstow — “the rudest man in Yorkshire”, according to some — whose biography
Jackson was to publish in 1996. He also recorded his complete organ works,
despite Bairstow’s aversion to the gramophone.
Jackson was an accomplished writer with
a delightful style and dry humour, and a keen observer of those around him, as
he revealed in his autobiography, Music for a Long While (adapting
the title of Purcell’s famous song), published in 2013, when he was 96. It
might be criticised for going into too much detail, but it is this detail that
makes it such an illuminating account of a world now largely lost.
He brings a more personal view of
Bairstow than in his formal biography, and one of the highlights of the book is
his charming description of a visit in August 1951 to the composer Ravel’s
house at Montfort l’Amaury, during a holiday in France. Ravel’s housekeeper
Madame Reveleau was still in residence. “It was a remarkable thing to meet her
who had been in such close touch with him,” he wrote; “as remarkable as seeing
the things he had had around him, exactly as he had left them.”
He had admired Ravel and Debussy from a
very young age and, as an organist, had promoted in his recitals the music of
Franck, Vierne, Widor, and Dupré.
Francis Alan Jackson was born at
Malton, 18 miles north-east of York, in 1917. His mother was a Suddaby — he was
second cousin to the soprano Elsie Suddaby, one of the original dedicatees of
Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music — and Francis could not
remember being unable to play the piano. The family were also enthusiastic
listeners to gramophone records.
“I was born with a natural talent,”
Jackson wrote; “and working at it and developing it was pretty well unalloyed
pleasure.”
After singing in the choir of Malton
Parish Church, he went at 12 to be a chorister at York Minster. Under
Bairstow’s guidance, he recalled, “my horizons were widened and I learned that
music was not just an exercise merely to be got through but rather a natural
expression of one’s very being . . . Bairstow . . . made music alive and, above
all, enjoyable and fulfilling . . . And music had to be beautiful.”
Jackson left school at 15, became
organist of Malton at 16, and from 1933 was a full-time student with Bairstow;
in 1937, he received the degree of Bachelor of Music from Durham University
(his doctorate followed in 1957). He succeeded Bairstow at the Minster in 1946.
The transition was a smooth one, but
Jackson’s sympathies were much wider than his predecessor’s; for, as a
composer, he wrote not only church music, but a symphony, an organ concerto,
chamber music, songs, and incidental music for plays. Among his more unusual
compositions are two monodramas with narrator, Daniel in Babylon (1962,
to celebrate the consecration of Coventry Cathedral) and A Time of
Fire (1967, for the Norwich and Norfolk Triennial Festival). Both were
written in collaboration with the actor-dramatist John Stuart Anderson.
Jackson regarded “Tree at my window” as
his best song, setting the poem by Robert Frost. It was written during the
Second World War when he was serving with the 9th Lancers in 1942 in the desert
campaign near Tobruk. He remembered writing it “in my tent by the light of an
oil lamp made from a cigarette tin. There is a bit where the wind blows in the
song, and it was actually blowing quite a gale in the desert at the time. I
know I kept wondering if the tent was going to fly off.”
Francis Jackson was an outstanding
organist — one of the foremost recitalists of his generation — in demand
throughout the world; he also acted as adviser to many churches and cathedrals
considering organ rebuilds. He was responsible for the rehabilitation of the
“Toccata” from Widor’s Fifth Symphony by using it instead of Mendelssohn’s
“Wedding March” at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Kent in York Minster
in 1961, preferring a genuine composition for organ to a hackneyed arrangement
of an orchestral piece. He served as President of the Royal College of
Organists from 1972 to 1974.
As well as his widely used settings of
the Canticles in G (“Me in G”, as he used to call them), he wrote a hymn tune
called East Acklam, after the village where he lived, as an
alternative to Ar Hyd y Nos for “God that madest earth and
heaven” for an Old Choristers’ reunion in 1957. But it was not until the
Methodist hymnwriter Fred Pratt Green wrote “For the fruits of his creation”
for it in 1970, that it achieved great popularity and wide use as a harvest
hymn of freshness and realism.
His colleague Simon Lindley, organist
of Leeds Parish Church, sums him up: “The affection in which FJ is held by so
many throughout the world stems not only from his professional distinction and
musical brilliance but also from a disarmingly modest personality — always
big-hearted and immensely caring of his fellow men.”
Francis Jackson never really retired,
spending his latter years “composing and giving organ recitals” — clearly an
effective recipe for longevity. He was appointed OBE for services to music in
1978; the CBE followed in 2007. He died peacefully on 10 January in a care home
in York, surrounded by his family. He leaves three children, Alice, William,
and Edward.