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Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
composer, poet, critic, essayist

Thursday 27 June 2013

HowTheLightGetsIn: A Festival of Philosophy and Music

Talks / Debates: Hay-on-Wye, June 1 2013


In last fortnight’s issue of Wales Arts Review, Gary Raymond made a compelling case for arts criticism as an art-form in itself; a kind of writing which, at its best and most passionately engaged, not just distills and evaluates works of art, but springs from the same creative drive to explore the arts and their place within the wider culture. I too hold that good, enlivened criticism helps to enable artistic understanding and participation - and hence the arts themselves - to grow, and I believe that, central to this, lies the inter-relationship between the arts and the world of ideas, as well as the senses and emotions. Critical thinking and debate are as vital to the arts as to science, politics, history, philosophy - indeed, any aspect of a society aspiring to well-being for itself and its citizens.

HowTheLightGetsIn is a festival of philosophy and music which celebrates ideas and, as such, it is itself to be celebrated. Each year, the festival has a theme. This year, it was ‘Errors, Lies and Adventure’; investigating notions of truth and contingency, and the idea that new discoveries often seem to come from mistakes and ‘errors’ of thinking. On June 1, the sub-theme was ‘the Transcendental’, explored in gloriously diverse ways - and through many more talks and debates than one person was able to get to - in the sense of how we might venture beyond perceived limits of knowledge or understanding.

If there was one discernible thread running through the five events I attended, it was a celebration of paradox; perhaps encapsulated by the day’s highlight for me, an event curiously entitled ‘This Debate Has No Title’. But first came an event concerning a subject close to my heart: ‘Music’s Mystery’ was billed as a debate about whether theories to ‘explain away’ the power of music are a) possible or b) desirable (taking as a cue Pythagoras’ theories of mathematics and harmony). I am glad to say that none of the panel - made up of composer Joanna Bailie, physicist Michael McIntyre and science-writer Philip Ball - ultimately answered ‘yes’ in either regard, although Bailie was alone in showing no interest whatsoever in reductive analytical theories. Rather, she espoused the post-Cageian view that all sound can be music and that it is simply a matter of perspective, whilst quietly pointing out - for those who insist on seeing significance in a supposed correspondence between musical and mathematical ability - that Bach’s ‘maximising of the potential of the tonal harmonic system’ is ‘not the same as [his] being good at maths’.

Actually, to make a general point here, it does seem perverse that a festival focusing on music as well as philosophy, and at which a composer is invited to debate, should offer no live performance of their music - nor of any live contemporary art music, which is an art-form that often seeks consciously to explore matters philosophical, albeit in sonic form. Neither McIntyre nor Ball seemed ever to have heard Bailie’s music - and Ball seemed frankly uninterested in it - which is all too familiar in terms of the ongoing general malaise so often greeting contemporary art music. (You can hear Bailie's wonderful Symphony-Street-Souvenir below):






Alas, Bailie was not so eloquent as her musical hero John Cage might have been in putting their common aesthetic case, allowing McIntyre and Ball to go largely uncontested in their differing formalist approaches (regardless of Gabrielle Walker’s largely excellent chairing). Some interesting areas were touched on but I also found myself frustrated by the lack of a musicologist - or, even better, a philosopher of music - on the panel (Nicholas Cook or Lydia Goehr maybe?). Ball was keen to demonstrate that musical meaning can be found in such phenomena as the interruption of expectation through manipulation of harmony, and asserted that this is a key area of investigation for musicologists. But, whilst it is accepted that harmonic resolution or lack thereof is an important factor in our emotional response to some kinds of music, this kind of thinking is now largely confined to areas of music-scientific research within clinical psychology and neuroscience rather than musicology per se (a notable research team has been music-theorist Fred Lerdahl and linguist Ray Jackendoff, inspired by the very 1950s writings of Leonard B Meyer that Ball referred to in this debate); for very few musicologists now choose to privilege harmonic analysis over other musical parameters such as rhythm and timbre - precisely because harmony is only important to certain kinds of (largely western) music and in certain ways. Moreover, less and less musicologists conduct musical analysis in any form these days, choosing to look at issues of historiography, performance and cultural context, say, rather than technical aspects of musical composition, as indicators of music’s function and meaning. Nevertheless, Ball spoke interestingly and lucidly, as well as neatly refuting Wittgensteinian notions of music as logical process; contending that the whole point of music is that it bypasses logic.

McIntyre’s interest also focused on musical pitch but was - unsurprisingly for a physicist - more overtly scientific, encompassing pattern, musical memory and ‘organic change principles’ - including the idea that the harmonic series is a kind of ‘Platonic object’; a series of concepts that he went on to develop more closely in relation to perception itself in a fascinating and highly entertaining talk which he gave after this debate, entitled ‘Lucidity, Science and Acausality Illusions’. I confess to being suspicious of his somewhat glib references to ‘rules’ of musical harmony, which smacked of an outmoded text-book approach to music (not to mention his sweeping generalisation that the music of the Darmstadt School is ‘dead’). But there was nothing old hat or unsophisticated about his notion that we humans perceive a model of reality rather than an actual reality, shaped from unconscious, ancestral memories and by our biological need for simple, coherent patterns. Rather than make a doomed attempt to convey his highly complex ideas, I would urge anyone wanting to know more to read his paper ‘Lucidity and Science’ and, in particular, Part II: ‘From Acausality Illusions and Free Will to Final Theories, Mathematics and Music’ at: http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/mcintyre/papers/LHCE/lucidity-science-II.pdf

Philip Ball popped up again on another fascinating panel later in the day, with philosopher Christopher Hamilton and psychoanalyst Mike Brearley, for a discussion about the Enlightenment; namely, whether the Enlightenment has bequeathed us a legacy of false ideals and ungrounded optimism such that ‘Nasty, Brutish and Short’ - the debate’s provocative title by way of Thomas Hobbes - is actually all we can reasonably expect of life. Opinions were duly offered pro and con - citing social and medical progress on the one hand, against Schopenhauerian illusions of freedom and the fragility of the human mind on the other. But, interestingly, no-one posited the idea that the Enlightenment might still be occurring; that it might, as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and others have argued, be an ongoing project so to speak, despite the recent, now exhausted, distraction of the post-modernist turn. Whether this is a consideration that might alter the issues at stake - or make the answers more or less relevant - is perhaps beside the point, but the assumption that the Enlightenment is a matter of history is as intriguing as it is widespread.

Here, Hamilton and Ball proved the strongest debaters, with many interesting points made concerning key aspects of Enlightenment thinking, such as teleological notions of progress and the valorisation of reason; Hamilton pointed out, for example, that Christianity has played a key role in western society’s coming to laud the individual over the collective, as it is an inherently selfish religion in its focus on the ‘saving’ of the individual. Ball spoke of his frustration with rose-tinted, overly simplistic notions of Enlightenment ideals, given the lack of secular, truly democratic concepts found within 18th century thought, and the diverse nature of the philosophies, politics and social thinking active at that time (notably through the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire). All panelists agreed that, whilst social progress is palpable since the onset of the Enlightenment, there have been differing levels of scientific progress on the one hand and moral progress on the other, and that, whilst a state of war is now more of an aberration than the norm for western societies, there is no room for complacency because - as Brearley pointed out - human nature has not changed and ‘civilisation’ remains but a surface veneer.

One of the sharpest and most celebrated challengers of that veneer of civilisation, and the hypocrisy and failure of moral courage which lie beneath it, is the writer Oscar Wilde. In a talk/semi-performance event, literary critic Terry Eagleton set out to explore ‘The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde’, promising to ‘strip[s] the mask ... to reveal the depths that lurk beneath the gentlemanly facade’. I’m not sure what I expected, but I was disappointed that this turned out to be an ‘audience with’ Eagleton in which he more or less read extracts from his 1989 play Saint Oscar - a play currently out of print, but yielding many such talks over the years, variously titled ‘The Contradictions of Oscar Wilde’, ‘The Ambiguities of Oscar Wilde’ and so on. Eagleton’s main point was that Wilde straddles more cultural opposites than many people (still !) realise: as an Irishman/English ‘gentleman’, socialite/sodomite, socialist/would-be ‘aristocrat’ and so on. Clearly, notions of dialectics were but a sleight of hand away and, sure enough, Eagleton managed to cite Karl Marx in answer to a question about whether he could name a contemporary writer who has inherited Wilde’s brilliantly withering combination of pinpoint critique and merciless, un-self-sparing wit.

To be fair, Eagleton did at least cop to evading the question. But the taste of circular self-reference lingered after the event - if perhaps less sourly than it might have done, in the light of that superb, aforementioned ‘debate with no title’ earlier in the day, and to which event - though, admittedly, via my own sleight of hand - I come at last:

This was a discussion which aimed to explore the very phenomenon of self-reference as a paradox ‘found in mathematics, art and philosophy from the Greeks to Derrida’, with the help of panel members from each of those disciplines: the mathematician Peter Cameron, literary critic Patricia Waugh and philosopher Hilary Lawson (coincidentally, founder of HowTheLightGetsIn). The proposal was that such paradoxes, far from constituting problems to be resolved, might themselves ‘hold the key’ to deeper truths. Each panelist had the customary four minutes to outline their position before debate ensued, and Cameron kicked off with some playful examples of self-referential paradoxes. He held up a series of statements written on cards, beginning with  “the statement on this card is false”; which statement, he explained, can also be - logically speaking - true. He then held up another card on which was written “the statement on this card is true” - which, of course, can either be true or false - but not both as the first statement can be. From here, he went on to talk about the creative opportunities that such paradoxes afford for mathematicians, referring to the theoreticians David Hilbert and Kurt Gödel, who first grappled with crises of paradox and inconsistency in mathematical logic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Waugh took up the baton, speaking of the many ways in which literature - in particular, post-modern literature - actively engages with self-referential paradox; as happens, for example, when words are used to describe worlds, thus bringing those worlds into existence. Citing Samuel Beckett as a clear example, she described various circular ways in which language can refer to itself through the play of signifiers - and through the phenomenon of the narrator; an “I” both inside and outside the framework of the narrative, from whose dual positioning also arises the ‘instability of changing the self in the act of naming’. Literature, she concluded, amounts to ‘lies’ that have a ‘tremendous cognitive power’.

For Lawson, self-referential paradox has been a central problem of philosophy for the last 120 years, culminating in the post-modern circularity of ‘there is no truth’ and the consequent undermining of meaning. But, he maintained, it is language that is divided, not the world; that is, truth and falsity is a function of the system, not of the world itself. The problem arises when we see language as the point rather than a tool; for language is merely a way of ‘holding the world in order to make sense of it.’

It was agreed amongst the panel that some kind of closure of the system, so to speak, is necessary in order to make sense of the world. Much discussion ensued about the ongoing search for the resolution of paradox across the disciplines, with Lawson maintaining that most 20th century philosophy involves the language and perception of closure. Some fascinating points were made; for instance, regarding realism - which was described as a ‘mistake’ because it relies on a concensus of reality that always breaks down at some point. Indeed, Waugh suggested that the problem of self-referential paradox can be traced back to the Renaissance, when perspective was introduced into painting - and that art has been grappling with the problem ever since. In her view, a ‘yearning for the real’ is a key aspect of modernism; shown, for instance, by the constant cycling of assertion and negation through solipsist reflection that can be seen in James Joyce, as well as in writers that also straddle post-modernism such as Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges - for whom ‘the search for closure is presented as a kind of nightmare’.

Cameron picked up on Borges’ fascination with mathematical paradoxes and agreed that his writing utilised this fascination in seeking always to keep open the possibilities. But he disagreed that scientists would necessarily be threatened by Lawson’s proposal to imagine that we simply cannot describe the world; for, in Cameron’s view, mathematics is actually ‘the engine that drives description of the world’ - precisely because it holds the world conceptually rather than mistaking its description of the world for the world itself. Indeed, for Cameron, mathematics is the place wherein we can learn most about human beings because mathematics is entirely human-created and, therefore, a ‘closed’ world.

The panelists agreed that the imprisoning circularity of post-modernism was more or less burnt out and that, now, what is needed is a kind of neo-pragmatism, since irony is fine in art, but not fine in politics, say, where solidity is needed in order to act. And they agreed that, whilst we have no choice but to go on with the attempt to resolve the problem of paradox in order to ‘close the world’, in the final analysis, human maturity could be defined as the ability to live with doubt and uncertainty, and a truth that may not be ‘true’ but nevertheless ‘good enough’.

This debate amounted to a dizzying and quite thrilling hour in the company of thinkers who were not just articulate, but intellectually generous, and who sparked off each other with brilliant ease (helped by exemplary chairing from author and filmmaker David Malone) - and I hope, if nothing else, I have given a flavour of the sharp and creative thinking on display. The event epitomised for me the best of HowTheLightGetsIn; a place where questions are asked in the knowledge that asking questions rightly begets more questions than answers - and a place where the question ‘why?’ is understood to be at least as important as ‘how?’, and infinitely more exciting than the mere factual engagement of ‘what?’, ‘when?’ and ‘where?’. Nevertheless - as shown so beautifully in this particular debate - HowTheLightGetsIn aims not simply to interrogate meaning for its own sake, but to sift ideas for their practical utility in the world rather than in abstract realms of language alone. In both regards, the festival seems to me to be highly successful. May it continue to grow, remain free of celebrity clap-trap, and never lose its intimate feel.

Published by Wales Arts Review Vol 2 No 15: http://www.walesartsreview.org/howthelightgetsin-a-festival-of-philosophy-and-music-2/

Opera Review: 'Wagner Dream' by Jonathan Harvey: Welsh National Opera

Wales Millennium Centre, 6 June 2013

Conductor: Nicholas Collon
Director: Pierre Audi
Designer and Lighting Designer: Jean Kalman
Computer Music Designers: Carl Faia / Gilbert Nouno
Sound Engineer: Franck Rossi

Cast includes:
Singers: Richard Wiegold / Claire Booth / Robin Tritschler / Rebecca De Pont Davies / David Stout / Richard Angas
Actors: Gerhard Brössner / Karin Giegerich / Chris Rogers / Ulrike Sophie Rindermann



Jonathan Harvey prefaced the score of his opera Wagner Dream with a dedication ‘by the composer to the benefit of all beings’. This simple statement encapsulates a world of meaning and compassion - and would have been intended by Harvey quite literally, in the sense of his enduring belief that the ‘purpose of music ... is, in my view, to reveal the nature of suffering and to heal.’ Wagner Dream is ‘about’ many things but it is, most profoundly, a gift or ‘message’ from Harvey, in which he shares his beloved teachings of the Buddha through an imagined story about the death of Richard Wagner; a composer entirely opposite to himself aesthetically and temperamentally.

But the point is not the contrast between any two individuals - for it is Wagner’s own internal contradictions that concern Harvey; what he described as Wagner’s ‘immense egotism’ on the one hand and his compassion and aspiration to the divine on the other. The story of Wagner Dream turns on the perhaps surprising fact that Wagner himself nursed the idea of writing an opera on a Buddhist subject for many years (Die Sieger - The Victors), but died without realising the project. Harvey imagines that opera appearing to the dying Wagner in the form of the Buddhist parable he had hoped to make his subject, and Harvey uses it to show how Wagner’s suffering is caused by the obstinate resistance of ego, in the composer’s refusal to let go of the worldly attachments which keep him discontented and dissatisfied. It is only when Wagner relinquishes his ambition to manifest this final opera, and comes to understand that it is ‘already written’, that he can die peacefully after the heart attack that did, in fact, fell him on 13 February 1883 in Venice, where Wagner Dream is set.

In essence, Harvey’s opera consists of layers and layers of dream; it is Harvey dreaming about Wagner, and about what Wagner might have dreamt on his deathbed, and the underlying message is that life and death are themselves forms of dreaming, so to speak - or illusions, as a Buddhist might have it - experienced on the soul’s journey to enlightenment. Musically and dramatically, the piece is richly complex and subtly nuanced, and this production by Welsh National Opera - the first full staging of the work in the UK - is simply beautiful. Pierre Audi’s superb staging (a revival of the work’s world premiere in Luxembourg in 2007) contrasts and intertwines the realms of dream and nominal reality both literally and figuratively through the use of sets on different levels above and in front of the twenty-one musicians just visible centre-stage. Minimalist choreography and exquisite lighting by Jean Kalman contrasts the monochrome, unhappy darkness of Wagner’s domestic life with the vitality and sumptuously warm reds and golds of his imagined opera - the world of his potential spiritual awakening.

With speaking actors for the domestic scenes and singers for the opera-within-an-opera, the cast do a universally admirable job in holding our attention through the slow-paced but quietly compelling drama, during which many characters are on stage throughout. The parable itself concerns Pakiti and Ananda (exceptionally sung by Claire Booth and Robin Tritschler respectively, ably assisted by Rebecca De Pont Davies as Mother), whose unfolding story of transmuted, erotic love is observed by the dying Wagner (Gerhard Brössner) - to the consternation of his wife Cosima and mistress Carrie Pringle (Karin Giegerich and Ulrike Sophie Rindermann), who cannot see what he can see in that other realm. Straddling the worlds is the Buddha Vairochana (the splendidly deep-toned Richard Wiegold, beautifully complemented by David Stout as Buddha and Richard Angas as the dissenting Old Brahmin), who appears to Wagner as a teacher and to guide him through the process of dying; helping him to find the necessary calmness and resolution in submitting to the universe beyond ego, as Dr Keppler (Chris Rogers) calms him in the physical world without knowing what is happening to his spirit.

Harvey once said that ‘Messages can’t be avoided in music. Those who say that they are not interested in messages are really deluding themselves. Music is never value-free.’ Wagner’s final struggle is a portrayal of what, for Buddhists, is the crucial soul’s choice, and it is part of Harvey’s theological design that Wagner Dream should act as teacher and guide for us too, the audience, into the way of the Buddha. The original libretto (by Jean-Claude Carrière) was written in English (with Sanskrit mantras), but was widely seen as the opera’s weakest element; criticised for its unsubtle, didactic tone and lack of cultural authenticity. For this production, a translation was made into German and Pali with great success (the latter by Professor Richard Gombrich of the Oxford Buddhist Centre, with Russell Moreton, WNO Head of Music), utilising the 2000 year-old language which the Buddha himself would have spoken, and enabling the words in both the spoken and sung parts of the opera better to express Harvey’s cultural bridge-building - whilst, more importantly, helping the often pedagogic text not to interfere with Harvey’s mystical objective by ironically holding the opera earth-bound.

For it is the music wherein lies the real achievement of Wagner Dream and which carries most eloquently the heart of Harvey’s message. It is, in effect, a stunning portrayal of the ineffable - again, through many layers; here, expressed musically through his unique spectral-spiritual soundworld. Harvey tempers a post-Wagnerian, chromatic modernism with the underlying tonality seen increasingly in his later work, Eastern inflections and, above all, a love of translucent, ringing sonorities. His instrumental writing - performed here with exquisite feeling and attention to detail by the WNO ensemble under Nicholas Collon - is both delicate and vividly expressive, and the seamless entwining with electronic sounds lifts the music of this opera to the sublime. If I have one tiny criticism, it would be to suggest that the opening repeated ‘fog horn’ and attendant music could have been louder, better to set the watery Venetian scene and establish an important structural device. But, beyond that, the realisation was roundly magnificent and showed Harvey’s exceptional - and profoundly musical - talent for integrating acoustic with electronic music (thanks also to expert sound design by Carl Faia and Gilbert Nouno, who worked with Harvey at IRCAM and the live diffusion skills of engineer Franck Rossi). The audience were held simply rapt as the music swirled around the auditorium and generated the most moving climax as Pakiti was eventually accepted into the Buddhist order.

Death, for Harvey as for other Buddhists, is merely a transitional stage in an ongoing cycle of birth, death and rebirth - albeit a crucial one in terms of the opportunity it affords to shed unnecessary
‘baggage’. This production was, therefore, all the more poignant in its timing as a tribute to Harvey himself, who died last December after a long battle with motor neurone disease. To what extent the composing of Wagner Dream may have benefited him in his own preparation for death is impossible to answer. But the stages he shows of Wagner’s resistance bear an uncanny resemblance to the five stages of grief identified by the psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (with the author David Kessler), who described a process of, firstly, denial followed by anger, bargaining and depression before a coming to acceptance. The projection of Harvey’s picture onto the stage at the opera’s conclusion seemed not only to speak of the ultimate beauty of this process, but to offer a final blessing from this most modest and unassuming of men. 


Published by Wales Arts Review Vol 2 No 15: http://www.walesartsreview.org/wagner-dream-by-jonathan-harvey/




Opera Review: 'Lohengrin' by Richard Wagner: Welsh National Opera

Wales Millennium Centre, 23 May 2013

Conductor: Lothar Koenigs
Director and Designer: Antony McDonald

Cast includes: Peter Wedd / Emma Bell / Claudio Ortelli / Susan Bickley / Matthew Best



In 1860, Charles Baudelaire wrote adoringly to Richard Wagner after hearing him conduct a concert of his overtures:

‘it seemed to me that this music was mine, and I recognized it in the way that any man recognizes the things he is destined to love ... One of the strangest pieces, which indeed gave me a new musical sensation, is the one intended to depict a religious ecstasy ... I experienced a sensation of ... pride and joy of understanding, of letting myself be penetrated and invaded ... these profound harmonies seemed to me like those stimulants that quicken the pulse of the imagination.’

The ‘strangest piece’ to which Baudelaire refers is the Prelude to Lohengrin, but the supposedly narcotic effect of Wagner’s music has by no means so exhilarated all his listeners over the years. In an interview in Welsh National Opera’s programme, conductor Lothar Koenigs ‘insists that audiences should not simply allow themselves to be swept up into [Wagner’s] beguiling dreamworld’. Quite what the dangers therein might be beyond the inducement of intoxication itself is not made clear. But what is clear is that Lohengrin - albeit with passages of the most magnificently sumptuous music - is more reliant upon the suspension of disbelief than many operas (as all must ultimately be, if only through the inherent implausibility of theatre which is sung).

Indeed, the very crux of Lohengrin is the idea that belief - here entailing the leap of faith, as it were, in the stranger from afar - can offer possibilities of growth, renewal and redemption, and that tragedy ensues when that leap is not taken. On the one hand, Telramund is defeated by his lack of faith whilst, on the other, Elsa is brought down by a loss of faith; both falling prey to the interference of malign forces in the form of Ortrud rather than trusting in the purity of Lohengrin, who appears as potential saviour not just of Elsa, but of Brabant itself. Themes of innocence sullied by doubt and betrayal, the need to trust in deeds rather than words and the fatal arrogance of blind certainty as opposed to instinctive understanding; all feature in a plot which, nonetheless, relies somewhat too heavily on cut-and-dried notions of good and evil. Boorish Christianity is mixed awkwardly with Teutonic myth, fairy-tale romance is confused with grand historical drama, and all revolves around the perplexing fantasy of the Frageverbot or ‘forbidden question’.

Director Antony McDonald succeeds, however, in allowing what John Deathridge has described as the ‘[strange] medieval dualisms and theological mysteries’ of the opera to speak for themselves in a straightforward naturalistic setting and the result is an altogether convincing, and darkly moving, new production for WNO - with the exception of the faintly homoerotic swan entrance, which teeters on that treacherously fine line between innocence and kitsch - until, perhaps, when viewed in a rather different, retrospective light from the opera’s conclusion as we will see. That aside, McDonald’s decision to transport the action from the Middle Ages to Wagner’s own time broadly anchors the piece within the nationalist struggles that Wagner himself was passionately involved with in late-1840s Dresden, as well as emphasizing the sheer humanity of the characters’ various dilemmas. Placing the action within a bunker-come-council chamber makes the most of the chorus (here, on utterly splendid form) as witness to proceedings with the suggestion of burgeoning democracy - as well as, to my eyes, hints of chapel about the demeanour of the women in particular, which points to the opera’s claustrophobic social and religious codes, with ruthless punishment for transgressors. Within such a framework, Elsa’s romance with the outsider Lohengrin seems bound to fail - but, in any case, the disastrousness of their marriage certainly renders the universal popularity at weddings of the famous Bridal Chorus ironic.

On the podium, Koenigs proved a sure and steady navigator and was rewarded with some superb playing from the orchestra, who were by turns rousingly dramatic and subtly translucent, if not - albeit, perhaps, appropriately enough - transportative to realms of Baudelairean rapture. Nevertheless, they made a fine, intricate job of Wagner’s ‘smoke and mirrors’ (Carolyn Abbate); that is, his rendering of the supernatural into music through washes of apparently impossibly sustained, but actually overlapped, notes in wind and brass with divisi strings. The antiphonal brass fanfares from around the auditorium were notably impressive, but, musically and dramatically, the highlight was Act II, in which the outstanding Susan Bickley dominated the stage as an imperiously evil Ortrud.

The vocal problems suffered by some members of the cast proved the main challenge for the production but, at least for me, these were surmounted without detraction from the performance. Peter Webb began to strain at the furthest reaches of his Heldentenor role by Act III, but his depiction of an ecclesiastical rather than ethereal Lohengrin was stirringly - and tenderly - cogent nonetheless, whilst Simon Best as King Heinrich was heroic indeed in struggling on with a throat infection. Perversely, the occasional gruff patch to which he succumbed only seemed to enhance the sense of a kingdom on the brink. Claudio Ortelli performed with real passionate engagement at extremely short notice as Telramund, making for an excellent co-dupe to the central character - who, dramatically speaking, is Elsa rather than Lohengrin; for it is she whose actions and decisions drive the narrative and set the tragedy in motion. Emma Bell sang wonderfully throughout and made a dignified, rounded character of a potentially insipid victim, whose inherent naïvity can further hamper any sense of psychological credibility.

Lohengrin itself can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to hover in a kind of netherworld in Wagner’s oeuvre between number opera and fully-fledged, through-composed music-drama and the years he spent in political exile after its composition were to prove transformative. Wagner later expressed embarrassment at the work to the literary scholar Adolf Stahr, writing, ‘If I could have everything my way, Lohengrin ... would be long forgotten in favour of new works that prove, even to me, that I have made progress.’ However, the fact that he was happy for it to continue being produced - and that it was the first of his works never to be extensively revised - perhaps belies this claim, and many of the cornerstones of his mature artistic preoccupations are present in some form. Interestingly, it is the only work of his not to offer a final redemption - and McDonald’s production goes even further by closing on a strangely ominous note; when the murdered Gottfried is restored by Lohengrin before the Knight returns to his place with the Grail, the set darkens, Elsa falls lifeless and the inhabitants of Brabant cower in terror before their new, supposed ‘protector’, whose sword casts a threatening ‘spell’ over them. What McDonald is implying seems deliberately ambiguous, but redolent enough of demonic leadership to be powerfully suggestive in terms of German future history, as well as seeming to cry out for the sequel which, in terms of Wagner’s own oeuvre, may, in a sense, have eventually been provided by the Ring, and indeed, Parsifal - of which the hero is, of
course, Lohengrin’s father.


Published by Wales Arts Review Vol 2 No 14: http://www.walesartsreview.org/lohengrin-by-richard-wagner/







Interview: David Pountney on Welsh National Opera's Wagner-themed Season

This summer, Welsh National Opera is celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth with a Wagner-themed season. A new production of Lohengrin (director and designer Antony McDonald, conducted by Music Director Lothar Koenigs) will be followed by the first fully-staged UK performance of Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream (director Pierre Audi, conducted by Nicholas Collon and featuring a new libretto translation into German and Pali by Professor Richard Gombrich, together with Head of Music Russell Moreton).

WNO Artistic Director and CEO David Pountney spoke with me ahead of the season opening about twinning the two operas.



Steph Power: It’s Wagner’s bicentenary and Welsh National Opera is celebrating by twinning Lohengrin with a contemporary opera, the late Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream, which features Wagner as a character. What light does that throw upon each work?


David Pountney: In a way, bringing these two pieces together seemed pretty obvious really. There are not many composers about whom another opera exists - where that composer is a main character. Of course there’s lots of nonsense about Schubert and Chopin for instance, where they’re taken as romantic lead characters - and I believe Schnittke wrote an opera about Gesualdo - but Harvey’s opera is a really quite exceptional reference. So there is an obvious hook, if you like, of finding a way to make it a stimulating experience for an audience to experiment with a new piece on the back of seeing Lohengrin; maybe the audience will be encouraged to see what another composer would have to say about Wagner. There is a kind of synergy there that we hope will stimulate people’s curiosity.

And then there’s a deeper point, which is that, to some extent, in Lohengrin you find Wagner, for the first time I think, trying to find a musical language for a kind of transcendental state which arrives in the character of Lohengrin. We don’t know - or are not supposed to know - Lohengrin’s association with the Holy Grail when we watch the piece; we’re not supposed to know who he is or where he comes from.

No, it’s the big, forbidden secret, only revealed at the very end.

But it’s signaled very clearly in the music. And of course that music of transcendence is something that Jonathan Harvey spent a whole lifetime trying to find through his Buddhism and his profound interest in after-life experience. In a way, his whole exploration of the possibilities of electronic music is an attempt to find a language that he could postulate as a kind of interpretation of after-life experience, or a transcendental experience. What you have with Wagner Dream is a 21st century composer who is very preoccupied by sound - and sound in a spatial sense - and who is, therefore, to some extent creating an echo of a Wagnerian soundworld, but using totally 21st century means. 

Both pieces share an aspiration to the divine perhaps - but very differently?


Well, Wagner Dream is about the fact that Wagner was contemplating an opera on a Buddhist theme
for the final fifteen or twenty years of his life [Die Sieger - the Victors] and that, through his encounter with the writings of Schopenhauer in the 1850s, he had begun to get really interested in all kinds of theories of self renunciation; of stepping outside the self or shedding the self - which I suppose is what Isolde does at the end of Tristan und Isolde. So Wagner too was very interested in that transcendental experience - although, in contrast to Harvey, he was obviously also a deeply carnal and passionate and hedonistic human being.

Hence the paradox in him that Harvey was so fascinated by?

Yes, exactly. So I think we are trying to offer something in our summer season which, for those who want to take up the offer, is a very stimulating experience; of seeing two completely different visions of what opera might be like, but somehow very closely linked around the same subject and the same composer.

It strikes me that Wagner’s operas are full of that paradox between, if you like, the ‘will to power’ on the one hand and submission, the surrender of the will, on the other. And he is a composer who has split opinion on so many different levels! But Harvey seems to be more interested in Wagner’s internal divisions than in his external divisiveness as a cultural figure.

In Harvey’s opera, Wagner’s Buddhist mentors try to steer him towards a peaceful transition as he dies - which is what I guess a Buddhist would describe death as being; merely the moving from one state into another - that he should do this in as calm a state of mind as possible. And, in the piece, that is contrasted with banal scenes of Wagner’s domestic situation; he’s having a stupid row with his wife and there’s some pretty girl that he fancied from the production of Parsifal trying to come and visit him. So there’s a whiff of a rather absurd domestic scandal going on and I suppose that is a remnant of the sort of permanently chaotic, exhibitionist, egoistical state of Wagner’s actual personal life - which has never stood up terribly well to close scrutiny!

On the point of death, he’s still struggling with his own perception of his eternal destiny instead of just realising that it’s all up now, and that he’d better let go and relax. It is an entire opera about the process of death - you know, death usually arrives as a wanted or an unwanted conclusion towards the end of a story, but in this case death is the premise.     

I understand that this is the first time Lohengrin has been staged by WNO since the sixties. So it seems a good time to be bringing the work to a WNO audience with a new production.


It’s a work which suits our Music Director, Lothar Koenigs, very much and that’s one very good reason for doing it. It’s also a terrific showpiece for the chorus - of all Wagner’s operas, it’s probably the most reliant on the quality of the chorus, so that’s another very good reason.

Wagner’s later operas seem to attract far more attention than Lohengrin and people have, over the years, questioned how far the piece succeeds dramatically; the character of Elsa, for instance, has been criticised as too naïve and the morality is very unsubtle. What do you feel the piece is actually saying?


My own view is that it’s a piece that was very much part of the period in which Wagner was involved in the democratic revolutions of 1848.

When he was on the barricades at the Dresden Uprising?

Indeed. And so sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to get the link as it were, because you keep looking in the story of Lohengrin for some fight for liberty or democracy and there isn’t one. So what is going on? I think the point - which is something that’s hard for us to grasp, except maybe the Welsh would understand this very well - is that it’s enough simply to use the form of opera and to make the subject matter early German mythology. This in itself is a nationalist statement. And I think, in Wales, people would understand that you don’t have to tell a story about national identity to make a nationalist point. Simply by telling a Welsh story, a story that comes from your cultural past, in a forum which is of international significance, is to assert Welsh identity. And that’s what Wagner is doing in this piece. Until this point, opera has traditionally made references to Greek mythology or to ancient literature. But in Lohengrin, Wagner is making references to a totally German piece of mythological history and therefore asserting Germany itself as a cultural identity.

That’s one aspect and I think the other aspect - which is, in a way, truly revolutionary - is surely the point about Lohengrin turning up to be the saviour and then saying you have to accept me without knowing anything about me. This is actually where Wagner makes a totally democratic assertion - it’s saying I wish to be judged not by who I am but by what I do, and that my background - whether I’m an aristocrat or whether I’m a pauper or wherever I’ve come from - is not relevant. What is relevant is the way I behave and what I do. This is a very strong democratic statement and has, I think, often been very confusingly interpreted - but that’s what it seems to mean to me.

Also, I suppose, both Lohengrin and Wagner Dream are about knowledge and where knowledge comes from, and the notion of belief as a foundation of knowledge. In Lohengrin, the drama pivots around Elsa’s ‘need to know’ and in the Harvey, it’s Wagner who ‘needs to know’!

Right! And the question of who is redeeming who is another way of looking at that knowledge question because perhaps it is the case that Lohengrin requires Elsa’s belief in him in order for him to exist as a pure human being, unembellished so to speak by whatever his role is in the Knights of the Grail. That’s what it’s about isn’t it? Lohengrin wants to stand and say ‘I’m me and you have to believe in me as me’. And, actually, in other Wagner operas too I suppose there is also this requirement of total belief to enable the man to be redeemed. That’s the subject of the Flying Dutchman certainly.

Yes. And there is the notion of the suffering artist/hero who has to go away in order to be fully who he is - to realise his creative destiny.

Well there’s no doubt, that these pieces are all - as has often been said - in some sense portraits of Wagner himself. Clearly he was desperate to be believed in for his own sake and to be relieved of the obligation to prove that he should be believed in - but just be believed in. This is what he seems to be looking for in so many of his pieces.

Wagner didn’t manage to see Lohengrin himself in the theatre until 1861 because he was in exile. And during that time he wrote his treatise Oper und Drama and started sketching the Ring. So perhaps Lohengrin is pivotal in that sense of proving himself and defining the direction in which he wanted to push music-drama?

Yes - and obviously he’s expressing himself in Lohengrin in ways which would later seem to be crude. That is, he’s telling this mythological story without really owning it or transforming it in the way that he would later transform such stories in the Ring, for example, to become something much more about his own philosophy of life. That’s why I think we struggle a bit with Lohengrin, because it’s quite black and white. It has an obvious good versus evil, with clear goodies and baddies. It’s like a piece of folk art in a sense; it’s very clear which colour everybody is.

Both Lohengrin and Wagner Dream explore ideas of the old and the new in religious terms. How might we, as it were, locate Wagner’s philosophical and religious thinking in the light of Wagner Dream?

Well, I guess it’s part of the long journey that Wagner undertook and that’s one of the things that makes him such a significant composer. Both he and Verdi went on developing their world view, their idea of their music and their idea of theatre, right to the end of their lives, so they were constantly finding things to say. Wagner develops from this quite sort of primitive Christianity as expressed in Lohengrin, through the whole drama of Parsifal. Then he contemplates writing an opera about Jesus Christ himself before moving on from that to the Buddha. So, actually, his journey, again via Schopenhauer, has been a journey towards an extremely radical and modern position for a man in the 1870s, to be espousing the idea of renunciation and thinking seriously about Buddhism. Now it’s much more common that Western people might do that, but it was incredibly radical at the time.

It seems fascinating that Harvey has run with that and brought it into Wagner Dream.

I think particularly, as you would say, that in every other respect aesthetically and personally and socially they could not be more different people. So in a way you feel that Harvey is sort of reaching out to somebody who is his absolute opposite in almost every significant sense, but nonetheless finding this hugely communal aspect.

Could you say something about the decision to translate the original, English libretto of Wagner Dream into German and Pali?

Well I think the point is that the piece is constructed in two distinct worlds; one is the domestic situation on Wagner’s dying day and the other is really a Buddhist parable. I think the piece is enormously strengthened by not having both separate worlds diluted by being expressed through a third common language which is English. I found that makes it very difficult to make Wagner a convincing character because, for me, to hear Wagner speaking English didn’t make any sense. And then again, to have the exotic, foreign nature of the Buddhist parable also being somehow brought down to earth by rather plain English I found quite difficult. So I hope the translation into German and Pali really enhances the impact of the piece for people, because these two very different worlds will have their own very clear colours and not be muddied by both being rendered in a language which is actually relevant to neither.

I think it was Arnold Whittall who said about Harvey’s earlier music that there are times where the vocal element is less successful than the instrumental element - particularly where the electronics are so striking - in expressing that transcendental state that he seeks. But it seems to me that the translation into Pali in particular - should give the vocal music in Wagner Dream a much better chance in that regard.


I believe so. I went to the concert performance at the Barbican and it was very clear to me that this is what we should try to do and it’s fantastic that Professor Richard Gombrich [Founder-President of the Oxford Buddhist Centre] has been so helpful in agreeing to prepare the translation. Because it was a completely bizarre request! He’s had to work in a very painstaking way with Russell Moreton, our Head of Music, to change each line and to find a way of adapting the music to fit the Pali and so on, and he’s been very generous in giving a lot of his time. Harvey agreed to the translation and saw the whole libretto before he died, so he accepted what we were doing.

I think you can say about Harvey that his aural sense is extremely robust and the point about this piece is the soundworld of it. It’s very convincing and carries the story. Harvey is not an expert or revolutionary dramatist in the sense that Wagner is; that’s something outside his capabilities really, and he obviously doesn’t have the same kind of operatic experience that Wagner acquired through his life - although, by relatively early on, Wagner knows what he’s doing in a very impressive way! So I think, in the case of Harvey, he has this really very complex dramaturgical idea of bringing these two worlds onto the stage, and I think the thing that sustains that rather delicate operation is his aural sense and his spatial music with the electronics.

Obviously Harvey is building cultural bridges in Wagner Dream - and it’s fascinating that he is thinking about Wagner’s thoughts as a means of dialogue with him!

Yes, absolutely.

Wagner and Harvey were both composers of ideas in a sense.

Yes and I think this whole process of careful programming of pieces together - as we did with Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen and Berg’s Lulu - is very important; that, actually, an opera company should be a source of intellectual discourse within the society in which it operates. I’m not saying that everybody has to go in for that. Neither is it necessary in order to enjoy either piece; they can be enjoyed as purely sensual experiences. But I think if we’re going to go to all the effort and expense of having an opera company, it should be putting out material into society which is a stimulating subject of discourse.

Many thanks David.


Published by Wales Art Review Vol 2 No 14: http://www.walesartsreview.org/interview-david-pountney-on-welsh-national-operas-wagner-themed-season/








BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival: Two Concerts

BBC Hoddinott Hall, Wales Millenium Centre, Cardiff

15 May 2013:
Conductor: Richard Baker / Percussion: Julian Warburton
Works by Sebastian Currier / Mark Bowden / Qigang Chen

18 May 2013:
Conductor: Garry Walker / Cello: Raphael Wallfisch
Works by: Graham Fitkin / Justė Janulytė


This year, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival was able to add a second concert to its customary single programme from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, thanks to a welcome increase in funding. From an audience viewpoint, the benefits felt greater even than a doubling of BBC NOW contribution, in that the opportunity was given thereby to hear the orchestra play contemporary music under two different conductors at the same venue just days apart, in matched, twin programmes - at a point when the orchestra’s standard of playing is achieving consistent excellence.

The concerts focused in turn on Sebastian Currier and Graham Fitkin, both Featured Composers in 2013. On May 15, the baton was taken up by the superlative Richard Baker for a programme which combined two pieces by Currier - a UK and European premiere respectively - with a world concert premiere by Mark Bowden, BBC NOW Resident Composer, and a further piece by Qigang Chen, following the success of his introduction to Vale Festival audiences in 2012.

Currier’s music has been a revelation this year and, hopefully, he will begin to see the larger audience he deserves here in Britain, to join that of his native USA and elsewhere. The pieces performed tonight were a terrific showcase of BBC NOW at its hugely enjoyable, virtuosic best. The opening Microsymph was a model of compressed symphonic form, with a dazzling array of colours, ideas and sounds; not one of which felt ill-judged or extraneous to Currier’s purpose - which impressive feat was repeated in the second half’s Quanta. Whereas Microsymph whirled through a genuine five movement symphony in just ten minutes, complete with spectral waltzes, radiant adagio and bravura fanfares intercut by a ticking clock motif (‘a bit like Leonard Bernstein on speed’ according to one enthralled audience member), Quanta took concision to new heights, as it were, in its succession of epigrammatic fragments inspired by the composer’s travels in China and, specifically, by written Chinese characters. The architecture of this latter piece, too, showed real brilliance as myriad tiny, contrasting fragments, separated by silent pauses, gradually coalesced into a larger form. Both pieces were adroit and witty in a refreshingly unselfconscious way and were, above all, distinguished by a strongly sophisticated sense of harmony that seems all too rare in contemporary music.

Bowden’s Heartland Percussion Concerto (commissioned as a ballet score for the National Dance Company of Wales, with choreography by Eleesha Drennan), was inspired by a disquieting geopolitical idea, submitted in an article to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, that any totalitarian regime which came to command a posited ‘Heartland’ linking Europe, Asia and Africa would come to dominate the world. What relation this concept had to Bowden’s musical material wasn’t entirely clear, but the work was full of violence and brio in its multi-layered harmonies and timbres, with a constant, surging to-and-fro between the solo percussionist (the eminently capable Julian Warburton) and orchestra. Exchanges with the orchestral percussion in particular made imaginative use of the acoustic orchestral space, and Warburton’s forward-placed ranks of instruments made for a visually as well as aurally dramatic experience. Starting with soft sounds from maracas, the piece ebbed and flowed through three sections, featuring two cadenzas for the soloist, the highlight being passages for aluphone amongst the mainly tuned percussion; a specially-made instrument of hand-moulded aluminium bells with a singular, sharp resonance. Generally, the textures were engagingly extrovert, if a little over-written and unrefined in places, but full of what seems to be Bowden’s trademark, and ultimately good-natured, boisterousness.

The final piece on tonight’s programme was Enchantements oubliés by the Chinese composer Qigang Chen, providing, in part, a cultural link with Currier’s Quanta. But here, the inspiration was as much French as Chinese, in keeping with Chen’s sometime Parisian base, with washes of impressionistic colour, yearning romantic melodies and liberal use of whole-tone scales. Chen’s programme note describes his preoccupation with ‘the essence of beauty’ and a corresponding desire, in this piece, to set himself free from formal constraints in order to let the music ‘lead me to wherever it seemed willing to go’. Though clearly heart-felt, however, the piece lacked substance overall, with some frankly trite gestures in places, despite Baker’s best efforts to phrase with emphasis and clear direction. Perhaps the piece would have been better served by being placed earlier in the programme; at any rate, Currier would have made a more captivating finale to an otherwise gripping concert which - somewhat unnecessarily - wafted to a conclusion.

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BBC NOW were back to re-gather the intensity three days later on May 18; this time under the less outwardly bold, but no less sensitive or commanding baton of Garry Walker, for a much anticipated programme of Fitkin and the Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė. Tonight, there was an unannounced change of programme order, which had the audience scrabbling for their programmes, but which worked well in placing Fitkin’s beautifully enigmatic Cello Concerto first and his more ebullient ballet score Mindset last, to bring this years Festival to a rousing and celebratory conclusion.

The Cello Concerto was commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and premiered by Yo-Yo Ma at the Proms in 2011 to great acclaim, and it was a treat to hear it played in Cardiff by BBC NOW and another distinguished, if less overtly warm, soloist, Raphael Wallfisch. Those familiar with what Fitkin himself describes as his usually ‘note-crammed brazenly loud works’ would perhaps be surprised at the restraint and slow, unwinding thoughtfulness of this music. A pared down orchestration ensures that the solo cello is never acoustically swallowed by the ensemble but follows its own path, all the time resisting the ‘pull’ of the orchestra’s soundworld. The long, sustained bowing that sets the piece in motion also sets the contemplative but impassioned tone and acts as a pivot around which the strings, then woodwind, quietly unfurl an exquisite series of chords. In turn, this gives way to passages of gently rocking material, gradually building to tutti chords about halfway into the piece, and then on to the work’s climax about three-quarters of the way through. Points at which the cello and orchestra come together include repeated cadential figures which, however, never quite resolve and so we are left with the still, separate voices, having journeyed, on this occasion, through a poignant and often ravishing performance from soloist and orchestra alike.

Following the Concerto came Janulytė’s Elongation of Nights; an extraordinary work for chamber string orchestra in which layers of elongated sounds are stretched into a kind of infinity as an expression of lengthening nights and shortening days with the changing seasons. Janulytė was born in 1982 and has studied in Milan. Most of her works are written for ‘monochromatic’ ensembles, such as four flutes and so on. Here, though, the result is far from monochrome, as she gives each of the twenty-one players their own part, comprising sustained notes which alternately pulse in loudening or softening waves. The effect - based harmonically upon the natural tuning of stringed instruments in fifths - is to create an intricate and richly nuanced, other-worldly web of sound. Tonight, that highly evocative soundweb was simply - and magically - realised by Walker and the BBC NOW strings.

Fitkin’s Mindset was the sole piece in a short but satisfying second half. It was commissioned by the Royal Ballet and first performed, again to just acclaim, at Covent Garden in 2010, with choreography by Jonathan Watkins. Like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring*, to which the piece owes a clear stylistic debt, it also makes for a dynamic concert item away from the dance stage, stuffed full of flamboyant musical ‘characters’ and vivid conversations. Again, cyclical cadences are a feature but, here, operating within Fitkin’s more familiar driving, funky style, with liquid, repeated figures boiling to an ecstatic head of steam. One of the most impressive aspects of Fitkin’s music is his ability to move from section to contrasting section completely seamlessly; rarely dropping momentum and often utilising vertical and horizontal layers of sound. Mindset is full of quite wonderful such transitions as well as bursts of frantic colour and episodes of rollicking off-beat bravura, beautifully paced by Walker and an exceptional BBC NOW. It was a fabulous way to end a highly successful concert and Festival.

* last Wednesday, May 29, was the one-hundredth anniversary of the Rite of Spring’s notorious first performance in Paris.


Published by Wales Arts Review Vol 2 No 14: http://www.walesartsreview.org/bbc-national-orchestra-of-wales-at-the-vale-of-glamorgan-festival-two-concerts/

Sunday 2 June 2013

Vale of Glamorgan Festival: Four Concerts

Champagne Gala Evening, 9 May, St Donats Art Centre

Fidelio Trio, 10 May, Dora Stoutzker Hall, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff

Onix Ensemble, 10 May, Holy Cross Church, Cowbridge

St Christopher Chamber Orchestra, 11 May, Urdd Hall, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff



The Vale of Glamorgan Festival was founded in 1969 by composer John Metcalf and, since 1992, has focused exclusively on the music of living composers, making it one of the very few festivals in the UK to do so. Over the years, it has established an international reputation for the quality and diversity of its performances and its refusal to shy away from the path less beaten, programming established major composers alongside emerging and lesser-known voices, with an emphasis on celebration and discovery. The idea is for ‘Featured Composers’ to be present and available to audiences through various means; of course, through performances of their music, but also through interviews and discussion, profiles and contextual exploration.

This years festival is no exception; whilst there may be no ‘superstar’ presence of the likes of Philip Glass or Arvo Pärt - both visitors in recent years - nonetheless, the two composers featured this year are highly successful and well respected figures: Graham Fitkin is flourishing as a composer of vital and energetic music across a range of platforms from dance to multiple pianos via small ensemble, orchestra and multimedia. In 2013, he celebrates his 50th birthday with a second appearance at the Vale Festival following an acclaimed visit in 1997. Sebastian Currier is less well-known in the UK (despite having been performed at London’s Barbican Centre), but has won plaudits in Europe as well as his native USA, from where he too composes across a range of different platforms. His many prestigious awards include the Grawemeyer Award in 2007 for Static, given its UK premiere here at the Vale Festival’s opening Gala Evening at St Donats Art Centre (9th May).

The event began with introductions and a snap-shot of other things to come in the festival. Lithuanian accordionist Raimondas Sviackevičius gave a short but treasured glimpse into an astonishingly versatile instrument with a rich new music heritage; two pieces by Feliksas Bajoras and Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, encompassing note-cluster bursts, whistling lines and some almost organ-like colours, were performed from Sviackevičius’ forthcoming recital on 14 May - which I am frankly envious of anyone who was able to attend. Graham Fitkin then presented four of his own, characteristically engaging, highly rhythmic and often exuberant tonal works. After the quite lovely Powder Trap for lever harp and electronics, touchingly played by his partner, the renowned harpist Ruth Wall, Fitkin himself performed three affecting pieces at the piano; an assured and thoroughly enjoyable performance reflecting the easy-going nature of the composer and his music, and wanting only for the greater resonances of a superior instrument than that of the venue’s open bar area, from which we moved into the theatre for Currier’s Static.

Currier introduced his work personally with the assistance of the fine players of Mexico’s Onix Ensemble, who provided live musical examples for his talk before their excellent performance of the entire six-movement work. Scored for the classic Pierrot lunaire line-up of violin, ‘cello, flute, clarinet (with doublings) and piano, Static is an homage to the word’s antithetical meaning as unchanging equilibrium on the one hand and chaotic white noise on the other. With clear roots in 18th and 19th century formal traditions, the piece was an exemplar of textural clarity and varied, colouristic writing for the instruments. It inhabited a world clearly aligned with that of Schoenberg’s Farben (from his Five Pieces for Orchestra), based on a series of translucent, repeated chords and swelling motifs. There were touches of Messiaen too, say, in the bird-like twittering of violin and piano of the 4th movement Resonant. But the piece was indubitably Currier’s own and provided an intriguing insight into his preoccupation with time and musical memory; an insight which was all the deeper for the yet more atmospheric second performance of the piece on the following evening; a welcome opportunity to hear again music which repays repeated listening, this time as part of a concert by Onix which was mainly devoted to Mexican composers.

The first half of this ensuing concert in Cowbridge (10th May) presented pieces by Charles Halka, Juan Pablo Contreras and Samuel Zyman who, together, demonstrated the centrality of European modernist developments alongside indigeneous and Spanish-derived themes for younger and older generations of Mexican composers alike. The music was full of habaneric panache and fin-de-siècle wrong-note waltzes, with bold gestures which were by turn spiky, seductive and almost romantically lyrical. However, a certain similarity of approach, tempo and soundworld across the pieces began to wear somewhat by the conclusion of the first half, which might have benefitted from some contrasting material. Arguably the strongest piece was Contreras’ Silencio en Juárez, which was dedicated to the memory of fifteen teenagers shockingly murdered in Ciudad Juárez in 2010 and which was, unsurprisingly, both bleak and sombre in places as well as angrily and tersely expressed.

Onix is led by the flautist and composer Alejandro Escuer, who opened the second half with the UK premiere of Templos for solo flute and electronics, an essay in clearly relished ‘extended’ techniques, percussive effects and multiphonics. That splendid second performance of Currier’s Static was then followed by Paramell VI by Stephen Montague; an Anglo-American composer whose often witty inventiveness is familiar to UK new music audiences, and who titled this piece with an invented word as the sixth he had been asked to name before he had even started composing it. As it happens, to my ears, the sound of the word did convey some aspect of the music’s character as a moto perpetuo, which built up, then gradually deflated, as it were, like a balloon slowly floating upwards and away.

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My experience of the Vale Festival over the years is that warmth and intimacy lies at its heart whatever the scale of the forces on display at any particular event. This, together with superb musicianship was surely in evidence at the preceding lunchtime concert at the Dora Stoutzker Hall given earlier on Friday 10th by the Fidelio Trio, whose Beethovenian name perhaps belies their dedication to playing and commissioning new music. On this occasion, they performed a winning combination of Fitkin, Ed Bennett and Michael Nyman, having recently launched a complete recording of the latter’s piano trios for MN Records. Fitkin’s opening Lens was exquisite; combining rippling ostinati figures with delicate glissandi and repeated, pulsating open strings, opening out into a broad ‘cello melody whilst building via cross-rhythms to a passionate climax before subsiding once again into more ghostly, elegiac material.

The long, sustained bowing which featured here and throughout - but to greatest effect in Ed Bennett’s wonderful Slow Down - might have appeared effortless for these string players, but, in fact, it is extremely hard to execute, and their poise, timing and ensemble were second to none. Open strings and glissandi again featured in the Bennett, which was an unexpectedly tender piece from this usually most vigorous of composers. However, the music never lacked for dynamism of a quiet kind within the simple beauty of its plucked piano strings, haunting, slow motion melodies and unsettling harmonic field. As the music gently slipped in and out of consonance, the Trio held the audience rapt right up until the final conclusive/inconclusive chord.

Following this, Nyman’s Time Will Pronounce felt altogether more concrete - though I suspect the impressive performance here lent the piece more substance than it might ultimately embody. The inspiration is serious enough, in Joseph Brodsky’s poem Bosnia Tune, addressing the horror of ongoing death in Bosnia during 1992-3. Nyman responds with material utilising his trademark scalic figures, alternating slow-fast tempi and the repetition and displacement of driving rhythms. Structurally, sections of impassioned threnody were alternated with boppier passages and more thinly textured, static material, and the Fidelio moved as one in maintaining forwards momentum.

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The spirit of exploration was nowhere stronger than at Cardiff’s Urdd Hall at lunchtime the following day (11th May), in a programme which brought together the St Christopher Chamber Orchestra from Lithuania with two electroacoustic composers, one British and the other American. The encounter was nothing short of alchemical. First, conductor Donatas Katkus led his string orchestra in a highly intense acoustic work by Raminta Šerkšnytė, built upon oscillating minor thirds and repeated motivic fragments (notably a scurrying semiquaver movement), which grew into music of incredible emotional sweep. The sound of the orchestra was extraordinarily rich and resonant - a sound quite different from anything a British ensemble might produce, and which was utterly compelling. This sound had nothing to do with technical issues of balance, say - or even accuracy - and went beyond tone quality to an ethos; a kind of deeply musical embodiment of ‘soft attention’, which made of Šerkšnytė’s De Profundis a profound experience indeed.

Moving too, in a completely different way, was the piece which followed: Lexicon by Andrew Lewis - who also celebrates his 50th birthday this year. Lewis is a composer of mainly, but not exclusively, electroacoustic music. Based at Bangor University, he has worked there with the Miles Dyslexia Centre in the creation of this powerful articulation of the challenges - and the creative potential - of dyslexia. The piece brings together art and science, incorporating electronic sound diffusion with video to explore speech sounds; specifically the problems that dyslexic people have in accessing and analysing speech sounds and in linking these to letters - not forgetting the poignant and poetically expressive ‘accidents’ that can arise therefrom. Words from a poem by Tom, a 12-year old boy, describing his experience of dyslexia, were recorded and broken down into their constituent phonetic parts and rearranged, expanded, contracted and so on by electronic means. The impact of these verbal transformations was enhanced by the strong, correlating video images of words with their associations and altered meanings - ‘leaves’ becoming ‘lifes’, becoming ‘flies’, becoming scattered letters, for example; the combination creating a thought-provoking as well as deeply affecting aural and visual landscape.

It was the tragic ingress of land by the sea in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina that inspired the final piece in this visionary programme. Currier’s Next Atlantis was another example of multimedia composition at its best and most socially impactful; electroacoustic music is married with video (by Pawel Wojtasik) and live, acoustic string orchestra to create a profound elegy - as the programme note put it - ‘for a future that must not happen’. Part documentary, part haunting evocation, the piece transported the audience to a world of loss - as well as eerie beauty - on many scales, both human and of the wider, natural world. Glimpses of ruined, abandoned houses through shimmering spiders’ webs, the blank faces of traumatised survivors, the bright colours of industrial equipment, twisted against an azure sky - and, everywhere, water; still, gently moving, submerging and bubbling to the surface, the filmic images and electronically transformed water sounds wove in and out in melodic and harmonic dialogue with the strings and ghostly echoes from Bourbon Street Parade. The inclusion of live musicians with these scenes of desolation - in particular, the extraordinary tones of this orchestra on this occasion - added a pathos beyond words. Encircling players and audience alike with his beautifully sculpted sound diffusion, Currier created an unforgettable paeane to the power of nature and the vulnerability and impermanence of human endeavour. A great piece in a fantastic concert.

Published by Wales Arts Review 2:13 http://www.walesartsreview.org/vale-of-glamorgan-festival-four-concerts/

Interview: John Metcalf, Artistic Director, Vale of Glamorgan Festival

Composer John Metcalf MBE founded the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in 1969 and has been Artistic Director ever since. In 1992, the festival took the bold step of focusing entirely on the work of living composers and has received national and international plaudits, attracting major composers over the years such as Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. This year, the annual festival has expanded to cover a ten-day period from 9th-18th May, hosting a variety of ensembles and composers from home and abroad and featuring many World, European and UK Premieres. www.valeofglamorganfestival.org.

John spoke with me on the day of the Festival’s opening gala event at St Donats Art Centre for
Wales Arts Review 2:13: http://www.walesartsreview.org/interview-john-metcalf-artistic-director-vale-of-glamorgan-festival/


SP: The Vale of Glamorgan Festival has expanded considerably this year and seems to be going from strength to strength. In 2012, you shifted the dates of the festival from late summer/autumn to late spring, so this is the second year of that new scheduling. How is the Festival settling into it?


JM: Well last year some people said when it came to September we wondered where the Vale of Glamorgan Festival was, so I think after forty-odd years of being in either August or September it’s going to take us time to establish the new slot! But all the things that we thought would be pluses are pluses - in particular our ability to collaborate with other organisations; we’re just about to begin a three year collaboration with St David’s Hall, which would not have been possible in the first week of September. And those collaborations have brought partnership funding which has enabled us to expand the programme dramatically - it’s brought us a second concert of BBC National Orchestra of Wales, for instance. To be able to present new work on a large, orchestral scale is always a real opportunity - and for the BBC NOW themselves, who are excited to have a promoter in Wales that wants to do that, because most promoters want the very opposite - for no bad reasons; that’s just their remit.

In particular, partnership funding has been extraordinary - and, coming from a variety of sources, many of them from overseas, it’s brought a new and really fantastic investment in new work in Wales, with all the other benefits that come from that. So all that side is good. On the other hand, we are presenting three times as many concerts at a new time of year in the depths of a serious recession that’s been going on a long time, and people are feeling the pinch. So, as far as the new date is concerned, that’s our next challenge. Our first year in May came only eight months after our final September festival!

That was a very tight turn-around.

Yes, for a very small organisation, that was a really big challenge - but one we wanted and needed to take, and so now we’re embarking on a three year development plan for the festival. It couldn’t be more timely because of how difficult things are, but the plan has got several elements to it in addition to the collaboration with larger, national organisations. Another aspect is developing a more personalised ‘friends’ and ambassador scheme, and a third is simply having dedicated marketing and PR time which, until we’d moved the dates, and until we had this larger festival and funding, we weren’t able to do. So it’s very early days in that process and we still have not cracked the conundrum of attracting large - as well as enthusiastic - audiences to new music that we’ve done as well as anybody and better than most. But it’s an ongoing project.

In terms of your own music, I know that you’re working on an exciting project there too - an opera on Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. How does being a composer inform what you do as a festival curator? 

Well, on two levels. The first level is that, to have a new festival, you have to have new repertoire, so you have to start with repertoire first. I mean, obviously it’s wonderful to have all the recreative energy of, let’s say, another version of Beethoven’s nine symphonies - it’s wonderful to have that. But you can’t only have that and you can’t only have what the greatest performers of the world might bring to you if you’re lucky enough to secure their services for your festival in Wales. So renewal in music has to come from the repertoire, it’s the foundation of the building I think. There’s lots of grumbles about composers running festivals because they perform their own music. Well, if Yo-Yo Ma was running a festival - I’m not comparing myself to him in any way, just looking at the generic aspect of it! - then people would be very disappointed if he didn’t play.

And it’s saying something about the way we’ve come to not esteem new music, that having new music on the platform is more of a threat than a promise. So, having an Artistic Director who is a composer is actually an important thing because the music comes first! I can honestly say that in nearly every case I really love the music that we put on. I’m terribly excited to hear it - I don’t devise programmes that might fit into some important cultural agenda. It’s because this year, say, I genuinely think that Graham Fitkin’s and Sebastian Currier’s music is wonderful. That is something that I feel - and it’s also important for composers to come to festivals where they have that feeling.

Yes, and so a distinctive rather than a partisan approach - which can be so killing I think?


There can be partisanship and I’ve never been a fan of that, and I think it’s partly a generational thing. I think that partisanship is less strong in my generation than it was in the previous generation, and in the next generation it’s less strong again and I really welcome that because I don’t ever want to go on record as denigrating the work of another composer - because I know how hard it is to write really good music. And, also, the more I go on, the more I respect the breadth and the humanity and the different approaches of creative work; once you head out into the unknown, it gets more exciting as you go along.

You’ve been strong in going your own way as a composer, often defying convention - for instance, you adopted a type of pan-diatonicism at a time when the prevailing trend was to compose complex atonal or serial music. Would you say that you carry that independent spirit into your work as a curator? Does it inform the way you put programmes together?


Well, it’s a real blessing to be in Wales because nobody has any expectations of us; new music hasn’t had a huge press in Wales until now and it hasn’t had a huge place on the world platform and, therefore, there aren’t any particular expectations and no tricky agendas to have to respond to. So, automatically, the answer to your question is that, if you are in Wales, you’re already unconventional. On that level, we’re below the radar and so we can programme distinctively - and I  really believe in that with festivals. Apart from extremely large events like the Proms, I really don’t think that it’s important to be representative in any sense, because I believe that diversity comes from below and not above; if everybody makes distinctive choices, you have diversity. If, on the other hand, people try to hedge their bets as it were, then you end up with a blurry middle ground. Now that we’re a slightly bigger festival, I think we will take a different approach from before - for instance, we’re not likely to present thirty-two works by two composers again as we did in 1993!

That was ‘immersion’ before the term came to be familiar at music festivals!

Yes, that was immersion! And, you know, we are doing a lot of works by Graham Fitkin and by Sebastian Currier this year. But we also have strands of Lithuanian music, Estonian, Mexican and French music as well as a workshop of Welsh composers’ music. So these are all strands which are feeding in, with some cross-links in there and some returning composers from previous festivals. So there is a slightly different feel to it. And also, we’re increasing each year the discursive element, the building up of discussion and debate. This year, we’ve got a ‘Music and Inspiration’ event and have programmed more talks; tonight, for instance, the first night, Sebastian Currier will take us through his work with musical examples, as part of that increased discourse around the music. We need to expand, but there are limits to the expansion we can make until we can build the audience. But what we can do is to present more talks and more films during the festival and about the festival, and that’s something which will help to build that audience.

Over a period of very many years, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival has established a huge international network through artistic partnerships at home and abroad. Does that body of work enable the Festival now to be recognised on the international scene?

There are two trends that seem to me to be going on internationally if you listen through the internet and technology world. One of the trends is towards everything becoming bland and the same, with power being centred in large corporate blocks. But against that, almost the equal trend has been the freeing power of individual work that’s happened through the internet itself. Individuals are giving of things, everybody can have their own website, they can publish their own music and so on. Similarly, in terms of countries, you might think that Wales would not be a good partner for China, that there might be a slight population imbalance! But we have been invited to Beijing in December to meet with and hear the work of several young Chinese composers - and that’s the sort of thing the Festival can do. So, can a small country be a significant player on the international scene? Well Estonia is showing us that they can! Can Wales be a major player in new music? I think it can - and also because Wales hasn’t got any pre-history; it’s like the Wild West out here, the Wild West of the UK!

That’s a great image! So how might you encapsulate the artistic aims of the Festival at this point?

I think our aims are still the same. They come from the belief that an interest in and an understanding of - and an exposure to - a contemporary art music is something which might reasonably be expected to be part of the life of a cultured, humane person. You know, there are people who might be at a bit of a loss if they couldn’t name a finalist for the Turner Prize or didn’t know who won the Booker Prize. But, with contemporary art music, there’s still a situation where people might not know anything at all about it. You could go into a classroom of children and ask them to name a living composer and out of twenty children, just two might put their hands up. So that’s the audience we’re aiming for. We’re not here for our audience to be the new music profession; of course, composers, ensembles and publishers are an important part of our audience, but that’s not our aim. New music needs to go beyond that now - it’s really vital - and so our aim is to do that and to do that here in Wales.  

You must have seen huge changes in musical styles over the years. It seems to me that things have broadened out slowly but surely to a situation where there is not such a narrow focus on maybe a handful of styles, but rather a multiplicity of diverse styles and forms. Is it possible to pinpoint sylistic trends, if any, this far into the 21st century - if you like, in a kind of ‘post post-modern’ world?

Well I think it’s important to put it into a very broad historical perspective. If you take the year 1900, let’s say - to make a vast over-generalisation, but just to illustrate the point extremely baldly - the only music you could see was happening was by German composers. Well of course, in France, Debussy and Ravel were starting out and there was Spanish music and maybe Italian opera and so on - but essentially there was one music in a larger, perhaps available sense. But if you look at the year 2000 in Europe - you yourself are a composer, you can see the changes there! All the serious discussions that could be had when I was a student - you know, along the lines of, ‘can women really compose? They probably really can’t because there aren’t any of them are there’? Well, give me a break! So all that has gone and we’ve got an incredibly diverse circumstance.

But what I would say, is that there is still a tendency for critical judgement to be mistaken for critical discourse. In other words, if someone like me were to come out and say, well, actually the trends in music are this, it really wouldn’t be that helpful. And I’d probably be completely wrong anyway! But the important thing is, the way to develop critical understanding is to be able to really explore in depth; to examine all the elements, to observe but not to judge prematurely. Just think about certain judgements that have been made in the past, even by people like Weber who said: ‘Beethoven is now ripe for the madhouse’ - you could go on. Of course, people have made the right judgements about bad music - but that’s quite easy to do because, as so little music survives, you can justify being rude after the event by the fact that, inevitably, music gets sifted down and quite a lot of music doesn’t make the cut as it were.

So I would say that we’re at a place - I know this doesn’t sound very thrilling - where we could learn a lot about what’s going on and just allow the process of time in things filtering through to decide what transcends the circumstance of its locality and creation, and see what speaks to people beyond borders and beyond timescales. After all, that’s why Shakespeare is translated into so many languages; it’s because whatever he speaks about has resonance beyond the time that he lived and beyond England. So we’re in a unique position to be able to allow that process. I’ve long wanted to see that happen, to see that process of intelligent discussion and discourse happen, and I think the trends are for that. The trends are for understanding that you can’t just fire off in saying things about other people or writing funny put-down remarks. You know, if someone said the modern-day equivalent of Bernard Shaw’s remark about Wagner’s music that it has ‘great moments but boring quarters of an hour’, people wouldn’t necessarily find that funny these days because it’s just a sort of clever put down. And the world can do without it.

A festival like the Vale of Glamorgan provides a cultural snapshot; it’s an opportunity to come together in an intense way for a period of time, from which all sorts of debates, exploration and networking can happen. So there’s a chance there for dialogue also with the other arts?

I really hope that’s the case - and actually I do believe it is, because I know that a lot of our audience over the years has been writers, visual artists; that there has been a lot of cross-fertilisation with the other arts, even though only on a limited basis as yet. For example, we haven’t yet explored music theatre so I think that is important. And I would say that it is important to think of composers as people who are creative artists who work in music, so not just existing in a musical world or in a technical sense as musicians.

What are you most proud of over the years with the festival and what is your ambition for it? What would you most like to see realised?


Well they’re the same thing. I’m proud of the composers, the wonderful composers that have been represented in the festival. I’m proud of the spirit that they share with the most adventurous audiences and the trust of the audiences. I’m very proud when two quite elderly ladies will come and listen to seventy minutes of deafening electric guitar music about the dark night of the soul and I think there’s something incredibly heartening in that spirit of courage and exploration.

I believe I can see that on some levels there’s an enormous flowering going on in the arts at the moment. For various reasons of past studies and my involvement with music theatre, I’m very familiar with the Weimar era and how that period of flowering pre-dated the horror in Europe in the mid-twentieth century with the Second World War. We’re in a similar period now, in which we’ve seen a comparable economic catastrophe. But, equally, on the horizon is a climate catastrophe and I’m very keen that the values and ideas, the exploration and the humanity that creative artists can embody should - this time - come out so we don’t have the same conclusion. That we should move on from here and look to the humane values in our society; particularly the adventurous, unconventional ones - not necessarily ‘nice’ in terms of not fitting in - that those values should be the ones that pertain. I suppose it’s quite serious and idealistic and moralistic, but it is what I think and I suppose it’s not that unusual to want tolerance and humanity and kindness to pertain, but I do want that.

The arts are having to fight their corner so very hard at the moment, but without the arts, that would be really impossible because they express our humanity, in all its aspects. How we approach our arts says a lot about how we are as a society.


Yes. The arts are the formal expression of our cultural, spiritual and intellectual identity and so they’re incredibly important to us. It’s a bit like the forces of corporatism versus the strength that individuals have now. That dialogue is very focused right now and there are lots of important tipping points, especially in the climate change debate, it’s such a huge thing. We really are at the tipping point with that. Well that’s a rather serious note to end on but it is the case!

John, many thanks for your time.