The wisdom of Pat Ashworth

 ‘DIARY’, CHURCH TIMES, 22 APRIL 2022

‘Friendship is terribly underrated in a world that thinks everything is about love.’

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.”’

 

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.

 

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!

 

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.