Bach Evolution at the Royal Albert Hall

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Guest review by Doug Thomas

On 1 May 2019, the Royal Albert Hall dedicated a full evening to the music of J.S. Bach. The event, entitled Bach Evolution, was part of Deutsche Grammophon (DG)’s 120th birthday, and presented three of the most exciting figures in contemporary classical and electronic music: Vikingur Ólafsson, Peter Gregson and Clark.

Ólafsson, whom most of us have discovered through his first hugely successful release with DG, Philip Glass: Piano Works, has recently received the BBC Recording of the Year award as well as the ​Instrumental award for his latest album with DG, Johann Sebastian Bach. I was particularly excited to hear and see him. Ólafsson’s interpretation of Bach is incredible; the clarity of the articulation, the independence of the voices, the bouncing of each note – recalling Gould – all performed with modesty and elegance. The Icelandic pianist’s set was as diverse as his album; presented as an open canvas during his introductory speech, it included a pulsating Prelude in C minor, an angelic arrangement of the Prelude in E Minor by Siloti and a divine Widerstehe doch der Sünde, transcribed by Ólafsson.

Last year, Gregson took the challenge of recomposing Bach’s Six Cello Suites. The result, released by DG through their Recomposed Series, is a captivating set of double interpretations, where the composer turns around each suite to show different aspects of it. With his cello sextet (and an additional synth) Gregson performed a selection of movements of the suites that reflected both the purity of the original compositions and the modernism of the Scottish composer. It was very interesting to see how Gregson’s approach is very close to Bach’s; the cellist isolated motifs out of each suite and played around them, extracting all the musical material contained in it.

The real surprise of the evening was the electronic musician Clark’s participation. The outsider of the trio presented a set that would have started a riot a few centuries ago. Through a Zappa-esque premiere performance, the English musician (joined by composer and producer Olly Coates) deconstructed Bach’s music, including parts of the French Suites. The result was a sonic musical potpourri that tore, stretched, compressed, mistreated and distorted the music of the Baroque composer, through real time sequencing and looping. Part of the audience felt uncomfortable, dazzle,  and decided to leave the venue, while the remainder enjoyed Clark’s avant-gardism and novelty performance.

The hall might have been half empty at the end of the evening – due to Clark’s provocative performance – but it will certainly be full next time Ólafsson, Gregson or Clark returns. Whether it is through a flawless performance, a modern reinterpretation or a violent destruction, Bach continues to fascinate musicians and listeners.

When one is tired of Bach, he is tired of life.

Doug Thomas is a French composer and artist based in London.

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(header image: RAH)

Stepping inside Stanley Kubrick’s Mind

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Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick on the ‘Paths of Glory’ set.

 

There are many talented people in this world but there are few creatives who are really able to produce magic, whether we be talking literature, film, art or music. 

The ‘magic’ I am talking about is the tingling experience one gets when presented with a masterpiece. Of course people do not always agree on what constitutes a work of genius. In my case, it is a Rothko painting, Glen Gould’s interpretation of J.S Bach, Brendel’s Mozart Piano Sonatas and Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Imagine my joy when I saw that The Design Museum were putting on a show to mark the 20th anniversary of his death!

The exhibition, taking up the ground floor of the Design Museum, has several themed rooms dedicated to Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Eyes Wide Shut, and Dr Stangelove. 

‘If you want to step inside the mind of one of the greatest film directors of all time, this exhibition will take you there,’ says Alan Yentob.

The first port of call was the film Napoleon. Napoleon you say? But I haven’t heard of that one! Well you’d be right because it was never made! 

I stare at Stanley Kubrick’s library, old bookshelves, containing rows of leather-bound biographies on the little French General himself, his good wife Josephine, the famous politician Paul Barras, who Napoleon deposed in his Coup d’Etat, and military literature, lots on Waterloo!

Evidently Kubrick not only read these hefty volumes but developed his own personal colour coding system for ease of research. Napoleon books with green stripes, Josephine, orange if my memory serves me well. All this points to a meticulous approach which Stanley needed in  a pre-Google era. 

With Napoleon he hoped to make the ‘best movie every made’. Jack Nicholson or Oscar Werner were being considered for the role, Audrey Hepburn for Josephine. I peered into a class case containing an enigmatic letter to a Mrs Kubrick. In it Hepburn says she is in Switzerland and that at the moment she isn’t free and that she didn’t know when she would be available in the future! I take it the actress wasn’t interested!

Kubrick had gone as far as to negotiate with the Romanian army: 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry soldiers! Was he trying to emulate Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace – a Russian masterpiece of 8 hours duration! I say it’s a masterpiece – Kubrick however wasn’t overly keen on it!

Kubrick’s fascination with war, with the psychology of the soldier as being both victim and perpetrator, had already been seen in his Paths of Glory, a black and white film he made in 1957 starring Kirk Douglas. Also in Full Metal Jacket filmed thirty years later, set during the Vietnam War.

 In the screening room for Paths of Glory (1957) I watch an incredible scene, where Kirk Douglas, playing the part of a WW1 French Officer, makes his way through a long trench, lined with soldiers, packed in like sardines. Deafening explosions made me cower like the poor soldiers in their trench. I stayed on to watch a later scene. French soldiers, considered traitors, are lined up before a firing squad. In amongst the building tension, Kubrick injects some unexpected humour.  A dead man, strapped in a stretcher is propped up vertically to face his killers. This shouldn’t be funny but it was. This anti-war film was banned in France for many years.

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Trench scene in ‘Paths of Glory’ at exhibition

Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket also takes on the plight of soldiers, this time focussing on a marine outfit fighting in Vietnam. Dark humour abounds and the picture is made all the more atmospheric with pop tracks from the era. Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Were Made for Walking are used ironically as we see a young Vietnamese woman strutting her stuff in cheap shoes. The song is also a foreshadowing of what is going to happen subsequently, when young women who have survived as prostitutes, join the North Vietnamese soldiers. 

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At the exhibition a large, black and white photograph by Don McCullin’s Shell-shocked Marine Vietnam Hue 1968’ reminds us that Kubrick used McCullin’s photography for research. In a display cabinet we see Private Joker’s helmet (played by Matthew Modine) with its mixed messages; ‘Born to Kill’ and the CND symbol of peace.

In Clockwork Orange (1971) violence and sexual exploitation has become the norm in a futuristic society. I learnt that Kubrick had to work closely with the American Censorship board to tone down sexual content. The film was still criticised for glorifying violence. Taken from the Anthony Burgess book, it was Kubrick’s first screenplay.  When Kubrick received death threats against his family, Stanley pulled the film from UK distribution.  

At the show naked female mannikins bend over backwards and use their bodies as tables to serve ‘milk plus’ to their male clients. Overtly sexual and immensely provocative! We also see the locations Kubrick used for the bleak movie. Concrete tunnels, concrete everything. The brutalist architecture of the 1960s is the perfect backdrop to the cold, alien world he is depicting of marauding gangs. 

It was astonishing to see all these iconic films under one roof. It was necessary however to fully emphasise the huge amount of preparation work, of research, of man hours spent filming and editing each epic movie. I was particularly interested in Kubrick’s record of scenes, of actors, all written down by hand. His attention to detail in the lighting in Barry Lyndon for example. He insisted on natural lighting to give the film a more authentic feel. And the locations, photographic stills and index cards abounded.

At the end of the show, you just wonder how Kubrick managed to turn his hand to so many different film genres and to pull them off. Some films were maddeningly slow at first. But with Kubrick – patient pays off!

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Barry Lyndon

In 2001: A Space Odyssey there are moments of silence, of stillness. The depiction of space, of its terrifying beauty and strangeness (made all the more so by György Ligeti’s unnerving avant-garde musical score) is never forgotten. It is quite extraordinary to think that Kubrick made the film a year before the astronauts landed on the moon.

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In one of the final scenes, the astronaut, floating in what resembles the insides of a glowing-red toaster, is filmed from above. From this angle, he seems to have lost his head and we see him morph into robotic insect. De-humanising, unnerving and quite brilliant!

I often wonder what it was like growing up with an obsessive genius like Kubrick. After all, Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, was made to walk through a door 92 times until he provided the look Kubrick was searching for! What a hard task-master he was! Cruise’s marriage to Nicole Kidman broke down after the film. I doubt however that Kubrick was to blame!

 

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Masks from ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

On the press day I attended, Kubrick’s daughter speaking of her parents said: ‘It was like living with impressive over-achievers. Home was a combination of art college and art studio.’ 

Good or bad I ask myself? Hard to tell. The fact that she and her artist mother Christiane turned up at the show to honour papa Kubrick’s films, leans mostly towards the good methinks.

Not to be missed if you are a Kubrick fan!

 

KH

Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition is on until 15 September 2019

RISE: a sparkling debut disc from a vibrant young performer

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I first encountered saxophonist Jess Gillam at a private party given by a friend of mine. Still just a young teenager, she burst on to the stage in a gold-sequinned mini dress and black DMs, and proceeded to play an unaccompanied, foot-tapping saxophone solo with all the energy, commitment and confidence of a seasoned professional artist twice her age. Her vibrant presence was palpable and hugely engaging: it was clear even then that she was going to go far.

And so she has. A finalist in the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition, she had already made her name as “one to watch”, not only for her striking stage outfits (shiny trousers, a homage to David Bowie jacket, and those DMs), but her obvious pleasure in music making. I attended the grand final of BBCYM at the Barbican and was rooting for Jess. Her stage presence was – and is – charismatic, infectiously extrovert, and highly expressive. She was assured and very comfortable on stage, interacting enthusiastically with the orchestra and lifting the sound out of her instrument and into the audience.

If anyone is going to succeed at advocating classical music to the younger generation – the generation that concert promoters are so keen to tempt inside classical venues – it’s someone like Jess Gillam. She’s personable, intelligent, articulate, enthusiastic and attractive, and can reach out to young people by engaging them without condescension.

Rise, her debut disc, reflects her democratic, joyful and eclectic approach to music making, and offers an enjoyably varied selection across genres of music which has inspired her, including This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush – as tender and tear-jerkingly poignant as the original – and Where Are We Now? from David Bowie’s penultimate album (in an arrangement by Jess’s teacher and mentor John Harle). These sit well with works by composers as diverse as Dowland and Weill, Marcello and Milhaud, and reveal Jess’s musical versatility, segueing deftly between the sombre elegance of the Adagio from the Oboe Concerto by Marcello (which Bach “borrowed” to create an equally striking concerto for solo keyboard), and Milhaud’s playful Scaramouche. Her sound is rich in expression and vibrant colours, her intonation so sensitively controlled, at times one might think she’s playing a clarinet. If previously you thought the saxophone was a “jazz instrument”, listen to Jess’s John Dowland; here she perfectly captures the haunting simplicity of this Renaissance music.

Recommended

 

Rise is available now on the Decca label and also via digital download and streaming

FW

 

 

 

Exquisite intimacy, fluency and warmth: Sarah Beth Briggs plays Schumann and Brahms

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822252239829Schumann: Papillons, Kinderszenen; Brahms: Opp. 117, 118

Sarah Beth Briggs, piano

Avie Records AV2398

February 2019 was the centenary of the birth of Denis Matthews, a great pianist from an earlier era of British pianism, who was also a respected teacher and lecturer. Matthews studied with Harold Craxton (another pianist-teacher from an earlier era, and for those of us d’un certain age, a name forever synonymous, along with Donald Tovey, with ABRSM editions of the Beethoven piano sonatas).

Matthews’ most longstanding private pupil, the British pianist Sarah Beth Briggs, who commenced her studies with him at the age of eight, recalls her beloved teacher with great fondness and a profound respect for his intelligence, his insightful, fully rounded approach to teaching and music appreciation, and his own superb musicianship.

Denis Matthews was the most incredible inspiration. He was such a terrific all round musician. He made me understand that there was far more to being a good musician than playing the piano. Lessons would involve listening to Mozart operas, Beethoven string quartets, Brahms symphonies etc and then making the piano ‘become’ a singer, a string quartet, a pair of horns – always looking way beyond the dots on any given page!….So much was about the joys of being brought to great piano repertoire from a much wider musical perspective

– Sarah Beth Brigg, concert pianist

Matthews was renowned for his unaffected refined pianism. A performer who was more concerned to serve the interests of the music rather than the musician’s ego, his brilliant, questioning mind brought magic and freshness to his interpretations.

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Composite photo of Denis Matthews & Sarah Beth Briggs by Clive Barda

With her latest disc Sarah Beth Briggs pays tribute to her beloved teacher through the music that was central to her studies with Matthews and their joint musical passions: two sets of late Brahms piano pieces (opp 117 and 118), and Schumann’s Papillons and his popular Kinderszenen, music which was “the subject of a sort of ‘party game’ whenever Denis visited my family home, when he would begin one of the miniatures on one piano and expect me to take over – from memory! – on the other”.

While her debt of gratitude to Matthews is at the heart of Sarah’s new disc, Clara Schumann is the unifying thread in the selection of pieces included here. Kindeszenen was inspired by a comment by Clara about her husband’s childlike nature, while a sense of longing and unrequited love pervades Brahms’ late piano works. Sarah brings an exquisite intimacy, fluency and warmth to the late Brahms pieces, sensitively capturing their inherent poignancy and haunting tenderness with a refined dynamic palette, a glowing touch, supple rubato and a refreshing musical honesty.

The same intimacy is achieved in Schumann’s Kinderszenen: these pieces intended for children become grown up miniatures, reflective and touching, never sentimental. Traumerei, for example, too often the subject of clichéd readings, here finds a plaintive grace and elegant simplicity in Sarah’s discerning hands. Schumann’s Papillons, which opens the disc, has an expansive grandeur, but Sarah’s exceptional control of sound is always elegant and tasteful, even in the extrovert movements. The overall sound quality of the recording is excellent, the piano rich and colourful across its entire range, with an appealing sweetness in the upper register.

Recommended

FW

(this review first appeared on our sister site The Cross-Eyed Pianist)

A sonic sculptural wrapping: Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet at Tate Modern

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Guest review by Doug Thomas

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Gavin Bryars

In 1971, the British composer Gavin Bryars looped the recording of an unknown homeless man singing what was thought to be the religious hymn “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” over a dense minimalistic orchestral arrangement. The result is a mesmerising musical experience; first limited to twenty-five minutes on LP, then sixty minutes on cassette and finally seventy-four minutes with the CD version. Unfortunately, it appears that the old man never heard Bryars’ composition – and the composer himself later came to conclusion that the hymn had actually been improvised by the unknown man. Last Friday, 12th April 2019, a handful of lucky people gathered in the Tanks at London’s Tate Modern to experience for the very first time for a full twelve-hour live performance of the piece.

The event, scheduled at eight in the evening and running until the early morning, was organised so that the audience could stay for the entire duration of the concert, but with constant open doors to allow people to come and go throughout the night. Contrary to Max Richter’s eight hour lullaby “Sleep”, no beds had been arranged; actually no seating had been arranged at all. The audience spontaneously sat, and later lay down, in a semi-circle in front of the orchestras, while some people stood up and moved around, as one would do in a museum room. The orchestras were the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Southbank Sinfonia and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble (including my arranging teacher at university, Audrey Riley). On the side of the orchestras, Street Wise Opera, a choir of people with experience of homelessness, and in the middle of all that, on contrabass and later on the conductor’s seat, Gavin Bryars himself.

The piece started quite spontaneously with no announcement or introduction. And then something happened. To the words of the old man’s voice and the sweetness of the instruments, the entire audience remained silent and immovably mesmerised. Stanza after stanza, the instruments introduced themselves, then the choir started singing. There was the beauty of the music, the honesty of the musicians and the singers, the admiration and attentiveness of the audience. When I checked the time, I realised that what felt like minutes had actually been hours. Throughout the night, members of the orchestra took turns in performing while part of the audience remained, as night owls, until the early morning.

Everything about this experience was right. The venue, which broke with the austere standards of classical concerts venues, and allowed everyone to come, and go. The spontaneous audience: musicians, curious wanderers or simple art and music lovers. The performers: amateurs and professionals gathered around a communal sense of honesty and authenticity. And of course, the music. What had always seemed to me like a beautiful two-dimensional musical painting became a sonic sculptural wrapping, and a unique musical experience. How lucky I feel to have been a little piece of history of minimalistic music.

Doug Thomas is a French composer and artist based in London.

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Munch’s Scream Revisited at the British Museum

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The Sick Child by Edvard Munch 1885

You wouldn’t wish Edvard Munch’s childhood on your worst enemy. Munch was brought up in Kristiania (as Oslo then was) in a strict Lutheran family in the second half of the 19th century. Aged five, Munch lost his mother to TB and nearly succumbed to the same illness himself eight years later. As he lay on his bed coughing up blood aged thirteen, his father, a medical officer, told him to prepare for death. Severals years later, his beloved older sister was the next victim to die of consumption in their family. 

Most understandably, Munch escaped this house of doom as soon as he could. His art studies and student life put him in touch with local bohemian circles. What a breath of life-affirming air that must have been even if it meant teaming up with the local nihilist who advocated suicide as an affirming fingers up to society!

Munch survived and took to drinking, brawling and tortuous love affairs. Like a modern-day Instagrammer, Munch transformed his personal life into an art form.

The prints on show at the British Museum are the products of the formative years he spent in Kristiania, Berlin and Paris, right up until the end of WW1. 

Love is the overriding theme. The Kiss (1895) shows a naked couple in passionate embrace by a window with the curtains drawn back. Their complete disregard for privacy shows the all consuming aspect of love which ignores any rules of propriety. It’s Rodin’s passionate Kiss statue taken one step further. A wood cut alongside the print, repeats the theme but this time the couple is fused together, into a twisted opaque block. The print in this instance has become an abstract work.

 

 

 

 

The Kiss

 

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 In Vampire II a red-haired woman buries her face into her male lover’s neck. Her long strands spill over his shoulder, his hair and face. The print was originally called Love and Pain. Women as seductresses and destroyers of men was a familiar theme with artists at the time and it was one which proved popular with the art-buyers.

Meanwhile in Madonna, a bare-breasted woman, stripped to the waist, is presented as a life-bearing vessel. A strange foetus peers out at you in the bottom-left hand corner and swimming sperm inhabit the frame. The swirling paint making up the background is reminiscent of Van Gogh, who Munch much admired. It is interesting to note that in 2010, a Madonna print attained the highest price ever recorded in the UK £1.25 million, double its estimated value.

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The Americans and Europeans have been great collectors of Munch prints and we can see why. The emotion they ignite in the viewer is immediate.

Jealousy for instance below. The bespectacled  man in the foreground stares out pale-faced at us, encased in a black background. His eyes express the shock and despair of one’s first encounter with sexual betrayal. It is a magnificent portrayal of perhaps the most destructive of emotions.

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Other prints depict other violent states of mind: madness, despair, separation and illness. All universally potent themes.Most moving was one of the few paintings in the exhibition showing a young woman lying, pale-faced and in profile against her pillow (see Title heading). Her mother, head bowed and hands clasped prays at her bedside. The print version is even more harrowing. The young woman, still in profile, is alone now staring out at death. It’s a haunting image for any adult to behold. Munch returned to the image of his consumptive sister often.

Unknown-1The British Museum prints on show make up part of the collection that Munch called The Frieze of Life.

Probably the most arresting and most notorious image he produced in this collection was the iconic Skrik (Shriek), or The Scream. The skull-like being holding his ears with his mouth wide-open caused a furore in Munch’s Berlin solo show. He was forced to wrap up his canvases and prints after only a week! The young artists however loved it as you would imagine they would latch on to anything so radically new and unsettling. 

The print in the exhibition is a rare, black and white lithograph. It includes a faint inscription, absent in the colour versions: ’I felt a great Scream pass through nature.’ Nature seen as the screamer puts a whole new slant on things and sends a chill through me now.

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Munch was very much buoyed by the controversy sparked off by The Scream at his Berlin show. He knew that such adverse publicity would launch him in the art world and he wasn’t wrong.

 

 

KH

 

The exhibition Edvard Munch: love and angst will run to 21 July 2019 in the Sir Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery at the British Museum.

Mary Quant retrospective at the V&A

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The Victoria & Albert Museum always excels in its presentation of fashion – from the memorable Vivien Westwood exhibition back in 2004 to Balenciaga (2017) and the current blockbuster Dior show. Smaller in scale than the lavish Dior exhibition, but no less significant, this is the first international retrospective of iconic fashion designer Mary Quant, who, like Dior before her, shaped fashion and social mores for a new generation. Her colourful, witty clothes challenged conventions, encouraging women to abandon the traditional, ultra-feminine and often restrictive clothing of their mothers and grandmothers, and liberated them, literally and metaphorically, at a time when feminism and gender identity were of huge significance to many women (and men too) and social commentators. And by making her clothes accessible and affordable, she democratised fashion, prompting a retail revolution on the high street that has had a lasting impact today.

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Mary Quant at her apartment in Draycott Place, Chelsea, London, about 1965. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images

Quant herself personified the energy and fun of swinging London in the 1960s and as a successful designer and businesswoman, with a keen eye for promotion and the creation of a distinct corporate identity, she continually responded to and reflected the zeitgeist. She herself was the greatest ambassador for her brand, with her chic Vidal Sassoon haircut which matched the playful simplicity of her clothes.

The exhibition is organised chronolgically, beginning in post-war London and the opening in 1955 of Quant’s experimental shop Bazaar on the King’s Road. School girl pinafores and masculine tailoring, wittily “repurposed” for the female body, brought an entertaining and playful slant to fashion, at a time when dreary wartime utility clothing and clothes rationing were an all too recent memory. From these modest beginnings, Quant’s empire grew quickly into a wholesale brand available in department stores across the UK – the antithesis of couture and the beginning of mass-market fashion. With the widening of her empire into the US market, Quant’s clothing was accessible to a new generation of eager fashionistas.

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Three patterned ensembles, Mary Quant, 1964 – 1971, London ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In addition to the fashion displays, with many items drawn from the V&A’s own Mary Quant archive, there are photographs, films and other ephemera which set the clothing and the brand in context. Many of the outfits are displayed with a note about who owned and wore then, further connecting them to a real people rather than the couturier’s poker-faced mannequin. There are also displays of Quant’s make up range, with her iconic daisy logo, and the Daisy doll, her rival to Barbie, who wore doll-sized versions of some of Quant’s most recognisable clothes, from mini skirts and hot pants to baby doll dresses or full-length boho gowns.

It’s an enjoyable and uplifting show, and refreshing to note that few of the outfits on display appear dated; many of the shapes and styles, fabrics and tailoring are found in today’s fashion – especially fast-fashion – proof of both the enduring nature of “good” , democratic fashion, and Quant’s forward-looking artistic and business vision.

Until 16 February 2020, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Further information

FW