Kusama Addition

I have added to last year's entry on Yayoi Kusama and the revised page is here:
http://wandering-ninox.blogspot.com/2008/05/narcissus-garden.html

Fellows at St. James

The Sydney Symphony fellowship program provides opportunities for aspiring orchestral players to be part of the orchestra, and take part in performances and further education designed to assist them in their careers. It's part of what I recently heard described as the "academisation" of the beginnings of a career in music. There have been great changes.


Charles Mackerras was appointed second oboe of then ABC Sydney Orchestra at the age of 17, and by 19 was principal. Earlier, Neville Amadio joined the 2FC Broadcasting Orchestra at 15, and was principal flute of the ABC Orchestra by the time he was 21.

More recently, it was not uncommon for conservatorium graduates to obtain orchestral positions on graduation. Now it is much more competitive.

This year, David Papp, who was a member of the fellowship program in 2008, became the orchestra's youngest member, at the age of 24, when he was appointed second oboe.

Each year the fellows give chamber music concerts at St. James King Street; and I heard one of the best so far on 2 September.

There are all kinds of pitfalls in writing about concerts. The Daily Telegraph reports that the pianist and musical critic David Money, who died on July 17 aged 97, " liked to include positive remarks, but occasionally he was reduced to referring to 'a well-balanced program'."

When I read this, I was about to write enthusiastically about the program at this concert, which was very well balanced, and very well performed at well.

The first item was Mozart's Horn Quintet K407, scored for two violas, violin, cello and horn. As the excellent program note says, the scoring for two violas lends a warmer sound which complements the sound of the horn. The horn part, which is really like the solo in a concerto, was beautifully played by Alex Love. The fellowship string players were joined by Roger Benedict, SSO principal viola and artistic director of the fellowship program.

Next came Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola and harp. There is not, as yet, a harp player among the fellows, so the ensemble was joined by the fine player Owen Torr, for the this and the next item. As part declaration of interest and part excuse to wander, I should mention that a few years ago Mr. Torr, was my daughter's harp teacher.

This all began in the tropical warmth of the Sunday market at Port Douglas where we heard the delightful playing of a young man with a small harp. We asked where the harp had been made.

In due course I travelled to the Atherton tableland where I found the maker, surrounded by harps of various sizes in the course of manufacture. He was from the United States and had, I think, found American society uncongenial and exiled himself to the wilderness outside Mareeba. As well as the harps, he had a large aviary full of cockatiels. For those with the skills to do it, working with wood must be a very satisfying occupation, particularly when making something as attractive as the harp.

We soon learned that, attractive as they were, these harps were not concert harps, but ours was still fine for a beginner to use for practice.

Although I hadn't played it recently, I have a old vinyl LP including Debussy's Sonata played by William Schegler, Flute, Fritz Ruff, Viola and Helga Storck, Harp. I found that the piece, or parts of it at least, were recorded in my mind as a result.

I thought fellowship flautist, Lina Andonovska, played with great subtlety and variation. The first movement, Pastorale, seems to echo some of the cadences of Debussy's preludes while evoking the atmosphere of the jungle as depicted by his contemporary Heni Rousseu. Did Debussy have the tropical warmth of the Snake Charmer in mind, I wonder. Ms. Androvska played this with a marvellous smoky, lugubrious tone which was exactly right.

The mood changes in the second movement, Interlude, which does in fact provide an interlude between the more distinctive outer movements, giving Ms. Andononvska the opportunity to play with a brighter timbre.

The Finale is a reminder that we are in the musical world of the early twentieth century, with an edgy dialogue between the flute and viola, well played by Charlotte Burbrook de Vere.

Next we heard the Elegiac Trio of Arnold Bax, written for the same instruments at about the same time. Bax was about 20 years younger than Debussy, but his Trio lacks the modernist feeling of Debussy's Sonata. It was most interesting to be able to hear the two works together in the same program.

I heard the Trio as recently as 6 August at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, in the distinctly less elegiac setting of Jupiters Casino Ballroom. It wouldn't often have been played by finer musicians: Lorna McGhee (flute), David Harding (viola) and Sebastien Lipmann (harp), but I found, hearing it again, that the piece itself had made little impression, unlike the Debussy I recalled from a recording heard years ago.

The concert ended with a performance of the sextet from Capriccio by Richard Strauss. The sextet is so full of associations for those who have heard and loved the opera that it's difficult to talk about in isolation. It is similar to Debussy's Sonata, having contrasting passages of calm and agitation; the agitation in this case reflecting the anxious mood of the competing artists of the opera. The excellent acoustic of the church suited the string playing very well.

Perfectly balanced.


*****
For my notes on an earlier Fellowship concert:

http://wandering-ninox.blogspot.com/2007/09/st-james-church-sydney-symphony.html

Ethics in Edinburgh

The ABC has a program called The Philosopher's Zone which is often worth hearing. A couple of weeks ago there was a discussion on the morality of ethicists. Apparently, they steal library books.


I learned about ethics from Professor Alan Stout (whose childhood was spent in St. Andrews and who taught at Edinburgh before moving to Sydney). He talked quite a lot about honesty as an important factor in personal relations and social cohesion. I can't begin to imagine that he had any library book that was as long as a day overdue.

One of the speakers on the Philosophers' Zone was Eric Scwitzgabel from the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, who said:

I'd had a number of philosophers tell me anecdotally when I first started thinking about moral behaviour of ethics professors that they'd noticed that ethics books were more likely to be missing from academic libraries. So I decided to test that empirically. So what I did was, I looked at the library holdings in philosophy at I think it was about 31 leading academic libraries in the United States and in the United Kingdom, and compared the rates at which ethics books were missing, compared to non-ethics books in philosophy that were comparable in age and popularity.

So what it turned out was across the spectrum, ethics books were more likely to be missing.

There was no reason to suspect that this was a hoax of some kind; but there must be some limits to empirical testing. So just in case it's just a fiction, I note here that I have entertained the possibility.

The project had a theoretical element as well:

Yes, I guess there are two versions of that hypothesis. One would be a lot of professors go into ethics because they maybe don't have the same intuitive gut moral sense that other people have, and so they have to compensate for that by thinking rationally about things, than a lot of people would respond to much more naturally. Now I don't know if that's true or not. If it is true it would be nice if we could think of a way to measure that.

It was a coincidence that, shortly after hearing this, I came across Isabel Dalhousie. She is fictional. She edits the Review of Applied Ethics and is the protagonist of the Sunday Philosophy Club novels by Alexander McCall Smith. I had been looking for something set in Edinburgh to read. I knew about Ian Rankin, but after looking at a few pages of an Inspector Rebus novel in a shop decided it was not what I was after. Isabel sounded promising so I looked for her in the bookshop at Cammeray which had only the second book of the series, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, which I bought and took to read while eating lunch in the adjoining Simmone Logue cafe. The only table available was in the window looking out onto Miller Street and the expressway entrance.

I mention this because there is an interesting tic or repetition in the story telling, it is that Isabel and her friends are seated by the window of any cafe or restaurant they enter.

While it is true that I bought the book to reminisce about Edinburgh, it was a shock to find that it opens with a character making his annual visit to the grave of the poet Robert Fergusson in the Canongate kirkyard. A grave I had visited as recently as 13 May last.



When Robert Burns visited Edinburgh in 1787, he found that Fergusson had been buried in an unmarked grave. He commissioned the gravestone which we can now see there. The architect engaged to make it, named Robert Burn, took two years to erect it . Burns, accordingly, took a further two years to pay for it. He said:

"Considering that the money was due by one Poet for putting a tombstone over another, he may, with grateful surprise, thank Heaven that he ever saw a farthing of it."



Robert Louis Stevenson was concerned about the condition of the grave as he found it, and intended to restore it, but I don't think he did. I tried to find out more by chatting to the gentleman on duty in the front porch of the church.

" Ah, Jamie Fergusson" he said.

Not a promising start. He did have a copy of a guidebook to the graves of Edinburgh but this said nothing of Stevenson's plan.

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate was probably written before the statue of Fergusson by David Annand was placed outside the Canongate Kirk in October, 2004, as one guide books puts it, striding away from his grave. It is a very moving tribute to an energetic poet who died at the age of only 24 in 1774 .



Auld Reikie, wale o' ilka toun
That Scotland kens beneath the Moon;
Where couthy chiels at e'ening meet
Their bizzing craigs and mous to weet;
And blythly gar auld Care gae bye
Wi' blinkit and wi' bleering eye:
Owr lang frae thee the Muse has been
Sae frisky on the simmer's green...





Isabel Dalhousie is not only an ethicist. She is a music lover and makes large anonymous donations to Scottish Opera. She has an adverse opinion of the lists of donors which appear in theatre and concert programs.

Almost as soon as she is introduced to the narrative she is off to a concert at Queens Hall. It is explained that it was once a kirk, hence the high straight backs on the seats to ensure that members of the congregation assumed a correct posture. She avoids these seats and seeks out the more modern chairs placed in the centre.

I didn't know the history of the hall or the nature of the seats when I arranged to hear a concert there last December. I had heard the violinist Jack Liebeck at the Townsville chamber music festival and thought it something of a coincidence that he was playing in Edinburgh at the time of my visit. I was accompanied by a group of impecunious students; and not being aware of Isabel's views, we found ourselves in a neat row in the same posture improving seats which had earned Isabel's disapproval.


The concert was given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, (also mentioned in the novel) and included Points of View a new work by Scottish composer Thea Musgrave, who was interviewed before the performance.

She mentioned a dream she had in the 1960's in which orchestral players stood in their places and challenged the conductor. This gave her the idea of requiring players with a solo passage to stand while playing.


The orchestra also played a concerto grosso by Handel and Mozart's Haffner symphony. Jack Liebeck was the soloist in the recent violin concerto of Magnus Lindberg. This is an exciting piece which I have heard again on CD with Lisa Batiashvili accompanied by the Finish Radio Symphony. There are some reminders of the Sibelius concerto in the work I think: maybe just a feeling of the vast icy wastes of Scandinavia. Looking for some confirmation of this, I found the program note mentions "a momentary echo of Sibelius, perhaps," towards the end of the concerto.


Jack Liebeck is a violinist whose playing of more romantic pieces has an intense emotional edge which only a few can achieve; and though I was disappointed not to hear a work which might have allowed this to emerge, I was grateful for the introduction to Magnus Lindberg's concerto.


I'm pleased Isabel Dalhousie wasn't there. She is an ethicist, as I mentioned, and takes ethics very seriously. From time to time she is motivated by a sense of ethical duty to take action. It seems to me that this motivation arises somewhat at random, but when it does, analysis and duty force Isabel to intrude. Never mind that the objects of interest are bereaved families - there are two of these in the book - her duty must be done.


I am reminded of Mrs Jellyby, though in her case chaos at home resulted from her preoccupation with distant good works. Noel Coward wrote a story called The Kindness of Mrs. Radcliffe, concerning a woman whose smothering helpfulness led to disaster in every case, and I am sure there are others.


Isabel is also inclined to make remarks which would have better been left unsaid, leading to complications in her private life. She is not an attractive figure.


So I wonder if Alexander McCall Smith had heard of the missing library books. Isabel seems to lack " the same intuitive gut moral sense that other people have " and could have become an ethicist for this reason. Where others act out of empathy, she constructs a moral rule and proceeds without regard to the consequences for her victims.


If you can stomach this kind of thing, Lovers, Friends, Chocolate is an enjoyable book to read, particularly if you want to reminisce about Edinburgh.


My other reservation is that the plot turns on coincidences.



Postscript
16 February 2010

Last week  Alexander McCall Smith himself appeared on The Philosophers Zone and talked about Isabel. 

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/2814063.htm

Quite contrary to what I have said about her, he seemed to agree that she was "nice": 

Alan Saunders: This is an interesting aspect of her character. You're very good I think as a writer at creating nice people like Isabel and Precious who are still interesting, which is quite a difficult task for a writer I think. And part of what makes Isabel a nice person is something that you've already alluded to, the fact that she gets drawn into other people's lives, because she thinks that they have a moral claim on her.

Alexander McCall Smith: Yes, that is something which I find very interesting, and I suspect that most of us think about that problem from time to time. We think about it if we're walking along the street, and let's say we see a beggar, or somebody asks us for something. ...

Dear Isabel - I have no moral claim on you.

***

Jack Liebeck's CD on Sony, which is also on iTunes.
http://www.amazon.com/Violin-Concerto-Sonata-Sonatina-Liebeck/dp/B0024RA2LO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1251705825&sr=8-1

Magnus Lindberg and Sibelius

http://www.amazon.com/Sibelius-Lindberg-Violin-Concertos-Magnus/dp/B000SNUMFC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1251706054&sr=1-1

Burns Pomeroy Lawson MacDairmid

There are statues of Robert Burns all over the world, and we have one in The Domain. The sculpture is by Frederick Pomeroy (1856 - 1924), who also contributed four of the eight statues on Vauxhall Bridge in London.

Agriculture

Architecture
The Burns statue dates from 1905; and adopts the legend of the heaven taught ploughman, who leans on a large plough holding a small pen, or perhaps the stylus he used to inscribe verse on window panes.

He seems over dressed for ploughing and wears a Tam o' Shanter (rather than his farmer's hat) in tribute to his eponymous hero.
When Burns went to Edinburgh for the first time in 1786 , he adopted the persona of a rustic bard, attracting comment by wearing his farmer's boots everywhere. Pomeroy missed an opportunity by giving this statue less robust footware.

Australia's own bard, Henry Lawson, saw the statue unveiled and published this in The Bulletin:

Grown tired of mourning for my sins—
And brooding over merits—
The other night with aching heart
I went amongst the spirits;
And I met one that I knew well:
“O Scotty’s Ghost! is that you?
And did you see the fearsome crowd
At Bobbie Burns’s statue?
“They hurried up in hansom cabs,
Tall-hatted and frock-coated;
They trained it in from all the towns,
The weird and hairy-throated;
They spoke in some outlandish tongue,
They cut some comic capers,
And ilka man was wild to get
His name in all the papers.

“They showed no sign of intellect,
Those frauds who rushed before us;
They knew one verse of ‘Auld Lang Syne’—
The first one and the chorus.
They clacked the clack o’ Scotlan’’s Bard,
They glibly talked of ‘Rabby’;
But what if he had come to them
Without a groat and shabby?

“They drank and wept for Rabbie’s sake,
They stood and brayed like asses
(The living bard’s a drunken rake—
The dead one loved the lasses);
If Bobbie Burns were here, they’d sit
As still as any mouse is;
If Bobbie Bums should come their way,
They’d turn him out their houses.

“O weep for bonny Scotland’s Bard!
And praise the Scottish nation,
Who made him spy and let him die
Heart-broken in privation:
Exciseman, so that he might live
Through northern winters’ rigours—
Just as in southern lands they give
The hard-up rhymer figures.

“We need some songs of stinging fun
To wake the States and light ’em;
I wish a man like Robert Burns
Were here to-day to write ’em!
But still the mockery shall survive
Till Day o’ Judgement crashes—
The men we scorn when we’re alive
With praise insult our ashes.”

And Scotty’s Ghost said: “Never mind
The fleas that you inherit;
The living bard can flick ’em off—
They cannot hurt his spirit.
The crawlers round the poet’s name
Shall crawl through all the ages;
His work’s the living thing, and they
Are fly-dirt on the pages.”


If, like Lawson, you identify with the writer and the poetry, it's easy to dismiss the statues and the myth out of hand. But these emerged from the poetry, or some of it, as well and are interesting in themselves.

Lawson anticipated the thoughts of Scotland's 20th century bard Hugh MacDairmid (Christopher Murray Grieve 1892-1978) who wrote of:

"The world wide attention devoted today ( at least once a year) to the mere man and his uninteresting love affairs and the ramifications of the genealogies of his acquaintances and the poor bric-a-brac of his lars and penates and the witless lucubrations of the hordes of bourgeois "orators" who annually befoul his memory by the expression of sentiments utterly antipathetic to that stupendous element in him which ensures his immortality."
"The Burns Cult" reprinted in At the sign of the Thistle at 168
Compare Lawson (above):


We need some songs of stinging fun
To wake the States and light ’em;
I wish a man like Robert Burns
Were here to-day to write ’em!
But still the mockery shall survive
Till Day o’ Judgement crashes—
The men we scorn when we’re alive
With praise insult our ashes.”

And MacDairmid (A Drunk Man Looks at The Thistle):

Rabbie, wad'st thou wert here - the warld hath need,
And Scotland mair sae, o' the likes o' thee!
The whisky that aince moved your lyre's become
A laxative for a' loquacity.
I found the details of the statue and the poem by Lawson in an excellent guide book to the Royal Botanic Gardens, The Domain, and Centennial Park Sydney: Poetry of Place by Edwin Wilson.



For a further page on the Burns statue click here

Ethical Culture

J. Robert Oppenheimer the subject of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, which I saw at the Met earlier in November, attended school at the Society for Ethical Culture, so it was appropriate that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center was performing there during the renovations of Alice Tully Hall. I heard one of a program of four concerts given under the title “Night Fantasies”. It was lucky I didn’t chose the first concert on November 20 as this was cancelled following a small fire in the basement. I walked past that night and saw the fire trucks and concert goers milling about, but didn’t learn the concert had been cancelled and rescheduled until an announcement at the beginning of the concert on November 21. They had to extend the hire of some percussion which was on the stage on Friday but not used.

The seating in the hall is in two levels in a semi circular formation around a low stage.
Above the stage is an inscription:

"The Place Where People Meet to Seek the Highest is Holy Ground"

The acoustics were good as well. The program ingeniously included three fairly short works with a numerous short movements. The principal artists were the Pacifica String Quartet, which I was interested to hear as I recently purchased their CD of two of the string quartets of Eliot Carter, which I plan to use, if time permits, to see if listening to Carter as a stream of consciousness, (an idea discussed by David Robertson in his recent Stuart Challenger lecture) helps at all with this difficult music.

The performance I heard on 21 November demonstrated the quartet’s great commitment to and understanding of contemporary music.

The program opened with a performance of Gyorgy Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1 “Metamorphoses nocturnes”. My interest in Ligeti’s music was enlivened this year by a performance of his horn trio at the AFCM Townsville, but a CD I bought of this trio disappointed.

The String Quartet No.1 is about 20 minutes long and divided into 12 movements which are very short accordingly. They are fragments really. Each is different; and some of them had the same intense rhythmic drive I admired in the horn trio.

Next was another work of 20 minutes duration: Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land) for Electric String Quartet by George Crumb.

My only previous encounter with Crumb’s music was a performance of Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) (1971), for electric flute, electric cello, and amplified piano at the AFCM a couple of years ago. The musicians wore masks for that (I don’t know if the masks are required by the score). It was notable for the excellent whale song imitations of the amplified cello which were quite moving (suggesting that Alan Hovhaness went to unnecessary trouble in incorporating recordings of real whale song in And God Created Great Whales).

If I count correctly there are 13 movements in this work. I have seen the Kronos Quartet play with electronics attached to their instruments but in this concert the amplification seemed to be done by individual microphones on stands. There was more to it than amplification however. The members of the quartet also played tuned drinking glasses set up on stands behind them, struck gongs and sang or vocalised. There was also an intriguing passage in which the players bowed the neck of their instruments, yielding an early music viol effect.

13 movements in 20 minutes with such a variety of effects was certainly interesting if hectic, and I haven’t mentioned the references to “Death and the Maiden” and other works which I was unable to hear. I would describe the piece as interesting and fun but the composer had much deeper thoughts. “The numerous quasi – programmatic allusions in the work are therefore symbolic, although the essential polarity – God versus Devil – implies more than a purely metaphysical reality” is just part of a long note by the composer. Fortunately the music is not as ponderous.

After intermission the quartet was joined by soprano Claron Mc Fadden in a performance of Lyric Suite for String Quartet with Soprano by Alban Berg, which was also full of interest but which I will need to hear again before being able to comment.

The programmer recognised that there can be too much of a good thing, I think, and abandoned stark modernism to conclude the concert with the charming Chanson perpetuelle for Soprano and Piano ( Gilbert Kalish) Quartet by Ernest Chausson.

Bach Penderecki Beethoven

I haven’t heard much of the music of Krzysztof Penderecki. In 1973 I was greatly impressed by his opera The Devils of Loudun at the ENO in which Geoffrey Chard gave a memorable performance as Urbain Grandier. But that is a long time ago now. So to the New York Phiharmonic which performed his Concerto No. 2 for cello and orchestra directed by Lorin Maazel with Alisa Weilerstein as soloist.
The concerto begins with a long orchestral introduction which is loud and of ominous intent. It would be disrespectful to suggest that the work should be named 50 ways to feel really anxious. The strings make sounds like air raid sirens; there are bursts of staccato playing from trumpets and eerie bells and gongs.
The cello part which weaves in and out of this background was marvelously played by Ms. Weilerstein. It left me with the impression that it was a fascinating cello sonata trying to escape from the orchestra.

It would not be unfair to say that the program for this concert was strange. Prior to the Cello Concerto we heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, performed by two violas, two violas de gamba, cello, bass and harpsichord: the ensemble for which it was written. The unusual feature of the performance was that Mr. Maazel appeared to conduct it. I wasn’t the only person to think this was odd - the Times music critic mentioned it. I have enjoyed the performances of Brandenburg concertos which have ended Bach night at the AFCM Townsville in which ensembles of similar size have played the works with a vigour which makes the pieces sound as if improvised. There was no chance of that here under the conductor’s steady beat; but there was a lovely sound from the unusual combination of low strings.

After intermission there was an excellent performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The people next to me said they had heard it before and left at intermission. I may lack their sophistication but I stayed to the end.

New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall, 20 November 2008.

MADAM BUTTERFLY

I am now familiar with the Met’s production of Madam Butterfly having seen it in the two previous seasons and I wrote about it here last year. The performance was overshadowed by the death of its director, Anthony Minghella, in March this year. Like Baz Luhrmann, he was able to create an opera production which was both undeniably modern and true to the spirit of the work at the same time.
This Madam Butterfly is well paced, visually exciting and was again beautifully sung. The first time I saw it I was entranced by the Chilean soprano Christina Gallarda-Domas in the title role, and she returns in 2009, but on this occasion Patricia Racette was a fine Butterfly. Pinkerton was Italian tenor Marcello Giordani, in for Robert Aronica, who was ill. Mr. Giordani is here to sing Faust in The Damnation of Faust. He not only added Pinkerton but also sang both roles in the one day on Saturday when I saw his Faust at the matinee. The New York Times which, in happy contrast to papers I can think of, provides an interesting coverage of what goes on here, reported this and added:

In a statement, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said, “Marcello Giordani is a wonderful artist but also the iron man of tenors.”

The Act 1 duet was excellent, but I would have liked more real remorse from him at the end; but iron men probably don’t cry.

Sharpless, the consul was Dwayne Croft. I think there is more in the character than he was able to find. Suzuki was sung, as last year, and the year before by Maria Zifchak. It comes as no surprise that she is asked to return as she is perfect in the role.

Patrick Summers, a regular visitor to Opera Australia, conducted the Met orchestra. It was a very lyrical performance, downplaying the melodrama, but complementing the design and flow of the production perfectly.

The 826th Metropolitan Opera Performance of Madama Butterfly, Wednesday 19 November 2008 at 8pm.