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Recollections of Britten's last visit to Russia Part I
Elizabeth Wilson
Benjamin Britten visited the Soviet Union six times between 1963 and 1971, and was honoured there as a composer and performer. The Soviet cultural authorities deemed his music “officially” acceptable, for it was rooted in tradition and bore scant reference to avant-garde experiment, despite its undeniable originality. More unusual for those times were Britten’s close friendships with Russian musicians, notably the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, and also with Dmitri and Irina Shostakovich, Sviatoslav Richter and Nina Dorliak.
Through a series of auspicious circumstances the author’s family was highly involved in Britten’s last visit to Russia in April 1971. It was a time when high political tensions not only adversely affected relations between the Soviet Union and the West but had a searing impact on the artistic community in Russia.
In the early spring of 1968 my father Duncan Wilson was appointed Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the USSR. A recognised expert in ‘communist’ countries, having already served as head of embassies in China and Yugoslavia, his Moscow posting was the logical summit of his diplomatic career. I myself was by then an established resident of Moscow, for since September 1964 I had been studying the cello in Mstislav Rostropovich’s class at the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire. I lived in the Conservatoire hostel, along with students from the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries, mixed with Russians and spoke the language freely.
Britten’s music was avidly studied in Rostropovich’s class. The Cello Sonata Op 65 was a particular favourite, and the Cello Symphony (like the Sonata, also dedicated to Rostropovich) had been premièred in Moscow in March 1964 with Britten conducting. I was fortunate to hear Britten’s performances during his two successive visits to Moscow, the first with the English Opera Group in the autumn of 1964, and the second a short concert tour in late December 1966, when Britten and Pears spent Christmas and New Year as a private guest of Rostropovich.
We Conservatoire students were also the first to hear Britten's Suite no 1 for Cello Solo when Rostropovich arranged a special play-through for us on the eve of his departure for Aldeburgh, where he was to give the world première at the 1965 Festival.
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Aram Khachaturian's Complete Chamber Music for Violin
Masayuki Kino
The distinguished Japanese violinist, who will be appearing at the Wigmore Hall on June 25, writes about his new recording of music by Khachaturian.
I have always been interested in Khachaturian’s music. I was familiar with his orchestral works since my early childhood from my father’s record collection and it evoked in me the sense of nostalgia and intimacy that was different to any other composers I had ever known. I had also watched some historical videos of him conducting and it further added to my images of the composer and his music.
Many years ago when I was still a young boy, Khachaturian was to make his sixth visit to Japan to conduct the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra performing his own music and I remember the sense of excitement and anticipation I felt, having got hold of a ticket. Unfortunately the concert was cancelled due to his illness and he died shortly afterwards. The chance to hear and see the great composer in a live concert was to remain a dream.
I learned Khachaturian’s music alongside other great Russian repertoire such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and in fact his violin concerto was one of the things I learnt shortly after arriving in the UK to study and I have since had the opportunities to perform the work with many different orchestras in Europe. It is a large-scale piece with rich ethnic colour and full of exuberance and his love for the homeland and it is one of greats in the violin repertoire. I think my special affinity with the composer and enthusiasm for the music show through my performances, as many people have commented “Khachaturian suits Kino”.
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'The Song of the Severn' by Ian Venables
Ian has described his new work, 'The Song of the Severn' as 'a celebration of Worcestershire through its history, people and landscape'. In shaping the work, he has chosen to set poetry that has a strong association with the county's 'sense of place' and its great artistic heritage.
The cycle consists of five contrasting settings of poets as diverse as Housman, Masefield, Drinkwater and Philip Worner. At the heart of the work is a tribute to the Malvern Concert Club’s founder, Sir Edward Elgar. Here the composer has set a poem entitled Elgar’s Music, written by John Drinkwater in 1935. This song incorporates a fleeting reference to one of Elgar’s major works; but, as the composer points out “it is distilled through my own musical language”. The title of this new song-cycle, The Song of the Severn, is also significant, as it is the “voice” of the river that will tell the story of Worcestershire.
It is hard to think of a more apt subject as our commissioned work and with Venables’ growing reputation, recently described in the BBC Music Magazine as “a song composer as fine as Finzi and Gurney”, this is a work that is going to be an important addition to the repertoire for the future.
To perform the work, the Club welcomes back the fine baritone, Roderick Williams, and pianist Tom Poster, who have both performed for us recently. The Carducci Quartet is one of Britain’s most successful young quartets, who have their own festival at Highnam, Gloucestershire.
With these musical forces, it becomes an ideal opportunity to perform Samuel Barber’s “DoverBeach” for baritone and string quartet. Barber set the poem by Matthew Arnold in 1931, while he was still a student. Interestingly, Barber, who had a fine baritone voice, sang at its first performance.
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Looking to New Vistas
Peter Reynolds talks to Artistic Director John Metcalf about Wales’s Vale of Glamorgan Festival past and present
“Its always been a mystery to me that people who want to know about contemporary literature or art, rarely feel the same way about new music”, comments John Metcalf, Artistic Director and founder of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, based in South East Wales. It’s a matter that he can talk about with some authority, as he’s been introducing audiences to some of the latest trends in contemporary music for well over forty years. “It’s not what you’d call a professional contemporary music audience,” he comments, when questioned about the festival’s audience, “but a very sensitive and sophisticated audience who have followed us and have trusted the programming.”
Contemporary music is riding high in Wales at the present time. Welsh National Opera have announced a forthcoming schedule of work that would have most mainstream opera companies screaming in fear whilst, at the other end of the spectrum, Music Theatre Wales are celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary. The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and both Cardiff and Bangor Universities have thriving contemporary music departments and concert series whist distinctive organisations like Charlie Barber’s Sound Affairs constantly push at the boundaries of new music. The Vale of Glamorgan Festival though is Wales’s most established platform for new music, much admired within Wales but, perhaps, still rather unknown on a wider stage.
The Beginning
Its origins go back to the summer of 1969 when, as a twenty-three year old composer, John Metcalf set-up the festival in the largely rural county of the Vale of Glamorgan, bordering on the Welsh capital city, Cardiff. From its modest beginnings, the first festival’s concerts broke new ground in terms of presentation: “The thing that was really unusual about the festival in the early days was the types of venue that we used,” remembers John Metcalf. “Obviously people already used churches, but they didn’t use private houses; that was very innovative and, I think, we were the first festival to do that. Our use of very interesting and atmospheric venues was a special feature of the festival, and remains so. And, because I was a composer, we did a lot of adventurous repertoire; those two things went hand-in-hand over the years.”
The 1960s were a period of unstoppable artistic growth in Wales. Festival fever was in the air and, alongside the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, many other Welsh festivals blossomed including the Fishguard Festival (1970), the North Wales International Festival (1972), Cardiff Festival of Contemporary Music (1967) and Lower Machen (1968). What John Metcalf particularly brought to the Vale Festival was a composer’s viewpoint with contemporary music always at the centre of its activities: an unforgettable concert by the Fires of London in 1978, featuring Peter Maxwell Davies’s new Ave Maris Stella and a performance by the John Alldis Choir of the Missa Brevis by the, then, virtually unknown Brian Ferneyhough. Just three years later, in 1981, Hans Werner Henze was in residence for the whole festival and conducted a thrilling performance of his Voices with the London Sinfonietta. The Sinfonietta was a regular presence at the festival in the late 1970s and 80s, often performing under the young Oliver Knussen.
A Change of Identity
For its first twenty or so years the festival featured a broad range of music, both past and present but, despite its long-established reputation for new work, the 1992 Festival took audiences by surprise. Overnight it underwent a major transformation into what the striking and elegantly produced brochure termed, “a celebration of living composers.” Not only this, it took a very particular aesthetic and polemical stance. Taking Milton Babbitt’s famous article, Who cares if you listen? as a starting point, the festival’s organisers cared very much that people did listen. “For most of the twentieth century the promise of new music on a concert programme has acted more as deterrent than a crowd puller,” wrote John Metcalf in a hard-hitting introduction to the brochure. “We aim to move beyond this. These concerts are intended for everyone who is interested in and cares about music.”
The composers featured that year, although long-established, had come very much to the fore in the contemporary music glasnost of the late 1980s, including Arvo Pärt, Kevin Volans, Gavin Bryars and John Tavener, whose The Protecting Veil at the 1989 BBC Proms had been an overnight success. It was a repertoire not at all to the taste of some but, for the festival, which had staked much on this change, it attracted capacity audiences, some of who had the shock of arriving at contemporary music concerts to find them sold out.
Armed with this degree of audience support, the festival carried out a manifesto in the following years to feature a new generation of composers alongside those whose music had received scant recognition in Britain. The 1993 Festival featured classics of Minimalism by Steve Reich together with composers whose music had emerged from that movement, including John Adams, Graham Fitkin (thrillingly played by the then new group Piano Circus), Michael Nyman, Steve Martland and Charlie Barber. In 1994 the festival boldly concentrated on almost two figures alone: Gorecki, whose Third Symphony was much in the news at this time and, more crucially, the Australian, Peter Sculthorpe. Three years of such intensive single-minded programming paid off in 1994 when the festival won the much-coveted Prudential Award.
Refocusing for the Twenty-First Century
Twenty years after that first all-contemporary festival, things changed again in 2012. With the support of the Arts Council of Wales (a crucial funding body from the outset) the bold decision was made to move the festival from its usual early September slot to May and increase it from five of six days to around ten or eleven days. With the expansion in size and timing came a refocusing of artistic policy. John Metcalf comments, “We have tended to link up with smaller countries, sometimes with young traditions. Even when they’ve been larger countries, like Australia, they’ve been a country with a young tradition. In the case of Estonia or Latvia, where it isn’t so young, the tradition is very particular and distinctive.” Now, over the next few years this interest in countries lying outside the immediate western tradition is likely to intensify. “I think that it’s quite likely that future festivals will feature composers from India, Africa or South America, from Chile. After all, at the end of the nineteenth century music was dominated by German culture whereas at the end of the twentieth century the situation could not be more different. I think we’re going to see the emergence of what I would call a classical art in many of these countries that becomes more and more developed. That classical art inevitably reflects their own inherent culture, but some of it will, over generations, transcend the circumstance of its creation”.
The 2013 Festival
The 2013 Festival is launched on 9 May. How does this embody some of the changes? “With the greater scope of the new festival it gives us the opportunity to present a richer and more diverse picture of what’s going on. We’ve almost added another element to what the festival has been in the past”, remarks John Metcalf. “The focus of the festival is on two composers, Graham Fitkin and Sebastian Currier, and then a number of international visits and the mini-portraits that offer us of the work of certain countries: for instance, Estonian, Lithuanian and Mexican groups coming to Wales, giving a different view on what is going on in contemporary music.”Why has John Metcalf chosen to feature Fitkin and Currier? “Graham Fitkin, who is fifty this year, is someone whose music has been at the centre of our programming since the early 90s and I have just watched him grow as a composer. In particular his music has grown in depth: it still has the terrific rhythmic impetus of the earlier pieces, but the quieter more reflective side of his personality, which was always there, has also developed and come to the fore.”
Fitkin’s music is paired with that of New York-based Grawemeyer prize-winning composer Sebastian Currier. “There are many parallels between the two composers”, comments John Metcalf. “Both are a similar age and both and are working in a tonal, or post-tonal, language. In the case of Currier, it is his first major exposure in Britain, despite the fact that he is a major figure on the American music scene and has received significant commissions in Europe.” As a result, he will be receiving many UK premieres at this year’s festival. His work Quanta follows on from our Chinese theme last year because it was precipitated by a visit to and commission from China”.
New Horizons
The focus in this year’s festival is not only on composers, but on countries and ensembles as well. John Metcalf explains, “there are a number of changes going on. There are these emerging classical cultures from countries that have not been considered in the past such as China (where the tradition is very new) and, to a lesser extent, South America. Then there are small countries like Lithuania who are very proud of their composers and have not in the past had the freedom of cultural expression that we have enjoyed in Britain.” Visiting groups from these countries will include Lithuania’s St Christopher’s Chamber Orchestra (10-11 May) and Mexico’s Onix Ensemble (10 May), both of whom will bring works from their native countries. Vox Clamantis from Estonia also visit with a range of premieres and work by Arvo Pärt (16-17 May) and there are performances by Percussions Claviers de Lyons (16-17 May). Additionally there is also a recital by Lithuanian accordionist Raimondas Sviackevicius (11 May): an instrument quite new to the festival.
Commissions
Premieres are an important aspect of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival’s work. “There’s nowhere else where you can hear that music and, even in the fast-moving present day, much of the work is not yet recorded because so many pieces are receiving their premieres and UK premieres.” Collaborations with groups such as Vox Clamantis have given the festival the chance to host new commissions by Aaron Jay Kernis, Galina Grigorieva and John Metcalf. Additionally, there is also the festival’s relationship with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales who give two concerts during this year’s festival including a premiere of a percussion concerto by their composer in residence, Mark Bowden. For John Metcalf it sits at the centre of what the festival is about: “having so many pieces and premieres, some of which even I haven’t heard is very exciting. So audiences will literally be taking a step into the unknown – in the safe hands of performers, in beautiful buildings by thoughtful and humane composers – so they will be at the cutting edge of very new programmes and experiences.”
How does this separate the Vale of Glamorgan Festival out from so many others taking place in Britain this spring? “If you come to the festival you will probably hear something that is unique to the UK this year”, explains John Metcalf, “and there’s a wonderful mix of extraordinary performers. How often do we get a chance of hear Mexican & Lithuanian groups in the UK or the French Percussions Claviers de Lyons? I hope we’re doing something very special. There are plenty of different promoting bodies and the more that people make distinctive choices, the richer and more diverse our culture will be. It’s certainly my aim to do that, though I don’t want to make ambitious claims for the festival, but I certainly feel that the programme should be utterly distinctive and I hope that ours is.”
Isn’t it quite a risk through to move from being, in essence, a relatively compact festival to one lasting almost two weeks? Can a rural festival, albeit on the doorstep of a musical centre like Cardiff, sustain audience figures? “Over the years the festival has gained a very sensitive and sophisticated audience who have followed us and have trusted the programming”, explains John Metcalf. “Now we have many more events though, we’re trying to develop audiences from further afield. We hope that people will come and hear events not only in the evening but also during the day. It can, of course, be quite demanding on the ears and on the intellect but we have built this year’s festival in two blocks of three to four days (9-12 May & 15-18 May) to make the experience more manageable and I hope that people will be able to immerse themselves in a concerted way.”
An important element in making this work are the various ancillary events threaded through the festival which is rich in pre-concert talks and lectures that will help to build the background to what the audience will hear. This element links into the opening event that, as John Metcalf explains, “is like a snapshot or opening a book, and looking at a table of contents of what’s coming up. It’ll be a chance to meet some of the main personalities who will be there during the events in an informal setting.” Informal the festival may be, but in its range and determination to look outside Britain and the tried and tested names of contemporary music, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival is quietly but very firmly striking out into new ground.
This year’s Vale of Glamorgan Festival runs from May 9-18. Details from www.valeofglamorganfestival.org.uk
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Rosa Ponselle: The Prima Donna of Missed Opportunities
Sophia Lambton
In 1897 in Meriden, Connecticut, a little girl was born into a family of immigrants. The immigrants had come from Caserta, a town in the Neapolitan region of Italy. Her father opened-up a grocery store on the first floor of their house, her mother played the role of good Italian housewife, and her elder sister Carmela was a budding dramatic soprano. The child was the precocious Rosa Ponzillo, who used to run her fingers up and down the window sill to imitate Carmela’s practice on the piano. She was thought to be musically gifted and had a fiery imagination. Her schoolteachers liked her homework; not so much her exams. For some peculiar reason – that had to do with Rosa’s best friend Lena being very good at homework – little Miss Ponzillo excelled in the work that was to be done without supervision, but had no knack for acing exams.
That said, Rosa Ponzillo did not worry when it came to exams; she was enamoured with several sopranos. There was Luisa Tetrazzini, the Florentine Coloratura; Emma Calvé, for whom Massenet had written a role; and last but not least, Nellie Melba, who was bewitching all seven continents with her sparkling charisma. When it came to Catholic Rosa’s Confirmation in 1911, the ritual called for her to adopt the name of a religious figure. She requested that the priest give her the name of ‘Rosa Melba Ponzillo’. The priest was not impressed, and bestowed upon her ‘Rosa Maria Ponzillo’ instead, giving her a harsh smack when she received the ceremonial slap that would ‘exorcise the sins of Satan’ from her.
Years later, when Ponselle would meet Nellie Melba, she would find herself relieved that the priest had made such an amendment to her wish: Melba was to attend Ponselle’s Norma in London, 1927. She gave Ponselle a brief lecture on what kind of reaction she would ‘have to expect’ from a London audience, regardless of the quality of her performance, and shortly later sent her a note excusing her not coming on account of the impending death of a friend. Melba did indeed show-up at Ponselle’s Norma, her dying friend either already dead or possibly a myth – but the magic dust surrounding her in Ponselle’s eyes had long been swept away by then.
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'The English will not have Verdi' - Henry Fothergill Chorley's 'Heresies'
Michael Aspinall
Concluding the author’ two-part survey of the nineteenth-century English music critic’s appraisals of Wagner and Verdi.
Music critic of The Athenaeum for over thirty years, Henry Fothergill Chorley has left us, in his two-volume work Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections London, Hurst & Blackett, 1862), some of the most vivid word-pictures we possess of the great singers of his day.
In his weekly articles he also gives us valuable information about musicians such as Liszt, Chopin, Moscheles, Clara Schumann, Paganini, Ernst and Joachim. We learn much about performance practices, including such things as cuts and encores. Surprises abound: who would have thought that Beethoven’s Choral Symphony was so frequently performed, and that Moscheles was described as the only man in England who could conduct it? And that Moscheles composed an organ part to support the chorus in the last movement? It is typical of Chorley that he fully approved of this, as Beethoven had written such un-vocal parts for the poor choristers. His tastes were firmly based on such classical composers as Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini, and among his contemporaries he loved Mendelssohn, Gounod, and even Chopin. He understood and loved the art of singing, and like Rossini and many others he did not admire contemporary trends in Italian singing. In 1838 the tenor Adolphe Nourrit visited Rossini, who told him: “You will see for yourself that there is no singer of talent in Italy. It is now no longer a matter of doing roulades, and the facility of a Rubini could not stand him in good stead today. What is wanted is expression and declamation.”
Reviewing the performance in Ernani of the great English tenor John Sims Reeves, who had perfected his singing in Italy, Chorley complains that “Verdi’s music, in its solo passages and closes, gives him scope for that slackening of tempo and elongation of favourite notes which are considered by “Young Italy” as the style dramatic.” (The Athenaeum, N° 1169, 23 March 1850, p. 320.)
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