|
Program One
Absolute and Program Music:
English Music at the Turn of the Century
Sosnoff Theatre
7 pm Preconcert Talk: Byron Adams
8 pm Performance: Shawn Patrick Moore, violin; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director
Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
Pomp and Circumstance March, Op. 39, No. 1, in D Major
The Sanguine Fan, Op. 81
Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major, Op. 55
Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 74
Saturday, October 27
Panel
Anglophilia and Imperialism
Olin Hall
10 am–noon
Ian Buruma, Leon Botstein, Deirde D’Albertis, Byron Adams, moderator
Program two
Elgar and the Next Generation
Olin Hall
2:30 pm Preconcert Talk: Peter Laki
3 pm Performance: Faculty and students of The Bard College Conservatory of Music
Frank Bridge (1879–1941)
String Quartet No. 1 in E minor (“Bologna”)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
On Wenlock Edge, for tenor, string quartet, and piano
John Ireland (1879–1962)
Piano works
Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84
The third weekend of the 2007 Bard Music Festival offered a wealth of very strong, even great performances of important music, some of it rarely heard in this country if at all, as well as a free-wheeling panel discussion on Anglophilia and imperialism. Although Saturday began with the panel, I’ll begin with the music and conclude with a discussion of the panel, since there are some issues I wish to address.
Introduced by Bard music historian Peter Laki, the afternoon chamber music program began with Frank Bridge’s First String Quartet in E minor, played with eloquence and vigor by Chinese students at the Bard Conservatory: Fangyue He and Xianbo Wen, violins; Liyuan Liu, viola; and Jia Cao, cello. Composed for a music competition sponsored by the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna in 1906 the work shifts between the severe and the elegiac, between French and German models. Since Bridge was a violist, he gave the instrument a more prominent part than usual, along with some especially luscious melodies. Liyuan Liu played these with fine sensitivity, and the group as a whole showed strong ensemble and a convincing sense of the composer’s style—which is impressive, considering that Bridge is something of an exotic item in this country, let alone China.
As fine as the quartet is, one cannot help perceiving a marked difference in quality in comparisonwith Ralph Vaughn Williams’ song cycle On Wenlock Edge, after A. E. Houseman’s poetry collection, A Shropshire Lad (1896). During the first two decades of the twentieth there was an immense vogue for these deceptively simple, folk-like songs. John Sparrow’s famous dictum that “poetry was for him a ‘morbid secretion,’ as the pearl is for the oyster” is reflected in the nostalgia and preoccupation with death in the poems, which made them particularly popular in wartime. Vaughn Williams’ cycle, which he composed in 1909, was not the only setting of songs from the collection (In the festival we have already heard George Butterworth’s settings of 1911.), but his is surely the greatest of them. While not tampering with the simple, linear progression of the poems, he set them to music with intensity and brooding sense of atmosphere. In this performance the distinguish Anglo-German tenor Rufus Müller was supported by Tina Zhang, Erica Kiesewetter, violins; Xinyi Xu, viola; Rachel Becker, cello; and Wei Zhou, piano. While the students and their instructor, Ms. Kiesewetter, delivered an idiomatic and expressive accompaniment, Mr. Müller gave one of the truly great performances of the Festival and of the music. His darkish tenor voice is coherent from bottom to top, and even his highest notes are full of color. Throughout the six songs, he centered himself in a measured pace which allowed each song to assert its full power. His phrasing was straightforward, as it should be, and his delivery was founded on the expression and circumstances of the text.
After Melvin Chen applied his strong pianism to two short, Debussyesque pieces by John Ireland, he joined Robert Martin, cello, Luosha Fang and Xianbo Wen, violins, and Shuangshuang Liu, viola in a powerful reading of Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 (1918-19), one of the great dark pieces of Elgar’s late years. This deeply moving work owes at least some its inspiration to a visit by the occultist and writer of phantasmagorical stories, Algernon Blackwood, who collaborated with Elgar on The Starlight Express. The three movement work is a complex construction of phrases of different length and rhythms, some strongly rhythmical and others long and drawn out. The mood varies from the threatening to the elegiac. The musicians, I thought, reached to the heart of the music through their coherent somber tone, strong, precisely uttered rhythms, their observation of silence, and sensitively phrased breadth in its more lyrical sections. This was, once again, a great performance, one which spoke its own language and made no attempt to imitate the manner of Elgar’s compatriot interpreters.
In my discussion of an earlier weekend in the Festival, I alluded to the problem of Elgar’s international reputation, or, better, the question of his works being taken up into the standard repertory outside Britain, and the relation of this issue to performance practices traditional in Britain—portamenti and ghostly hushes, soft textures—as much a feature of Elgar’s own recorded performances as those of Boult, Sargent, Barbirolli, and, today, Mark Elder. Do we need these hints of Englishness in our Elgar performances? Leon Botstein’s summer performances of Falstaff and the Second Symphony were free of them, and I found them lacking, partly for that reason. Friday and Saturday evening were a very different affair. Botstein’s Elgar First was thrillingly vital and, because of the clarity of texture, revelatory. I’ve also noted some unevenness in the American Symphony Orchestra’s execution. This weekend they were at their very best, which is highly impressive, very close to the grandes dames of American orchestras. And best of all, they were clearly enjoying their work, which is always immediately apparent with them.
The beginning “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 was brilliantly played, and Botstein brought his usual intelligence to the interpretation, with deliberate tempi and marked phrasing in the first statements and more flowing, grand articulation in the recapitulations.
Next came a rarity, Elgar’s only ballet score, The Sanguine Fan, and Byron Adams in his introduction seemed quite sure that it could well be its first performance on these shores. The Sanguine Fan is a lovely work, full of rich, fin de siècle colors and harmonies, one his Elgar’s dreamiest compositions. I’ve long admired it in Boult’s recording. Botstein, well trained by Dukas and the other French composers who have interested him lately, was right on the mark. He took care to treat it as a ballet, with danceable, clearly defined tempi, and clear demarcations between the different scenes. Harmonies and orchestral colors were gorgeous.
Elgar’s Moriarty, Charles Villiers Stanford, has also fared well at the Festival. On the first weekend his Concert Variations on an English Theme (“Down among the Dead Men”), for piano and orchestra, Op. 71 received a brilliant performance from Piers Lane and the ASO under Botstein, and now his Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 74 was equally well served by Shawn Patrick Moore, a student of Ida Kavafian’s at the Bard Conservatory of Music, winner of the conservatory’s concerto contest. This brilliant young musician deserves the most enthusiastic praise for his work in this difficult virtuoso showpiece, for not only is it full of spectacular difficulties, it is, as Stanford works tend to be, rather dense and somewhat crabbed, although, like the Concert Variations, it is without a doubt one of Stanford’s finest works. Moore and Botstein both projected its most appealing qualities, its tunefulness and the solidity of its composition. Stanford had worked with Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms had written his concerto, and his concerto is redolent of both. Apart from his impressive technical ability Shawn Moore showed a very appealing directness in his approach. There was not a trace of affectation in his playing, and he tackled the showy passages with an understated confidence, as if they were just music. Stanford placed the cadenza, by the way, in the slow movement. Both Friday and Saturday evenings, Shawn Moore’s playing deserved earned him applause after the first movement and a standing ovation at the end. Virtually everyone in the audience rose to their feet in appreciation. I imagine that this is only the first time that I’ll be praising a performance by this phenomenally talented young man.
The final work on the program and in the festival was Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major, Op. 55. The ASO and Leon Botstein gave it an absolutely superb performance, one of the best I have heard. Dr. Botstein’s clarity and straightforwardness served the music well, as did his decision to approach it as a work in the German symphonic tradition. Here Elgar is quite clearly the successor of Brahms and Wagner. In fact, as Byron Adams pointed out in his genial and informative introductory talk, Elgar purposely established a relation to Parsifal in choosing the unusual key of A flat for the symphony. There was even a moment or two when I thought of Bruckner, which had never occurred to me before while listening to this piece. In any case the First is a more tightly argued work than the rhapsodic Second Symphony, and Botstein’s treatment was just right for it.
When Leon Botstein conducts, his choice of tempo reflects authority, so that it is a statement in itself. After the two initiatory drum rolls the main theme unfolded at a deliberate tempo with great strength of pace. The wealth of orchestral color, textures, and passing dissonances which came through was extraordinary. I’ve never heard quite so much of the Elgar First before.
This was the very model of the sort of international style of Elgar performance which could lead to his wider adoption into the standard repertory around the world. Talking to Byron Adams, I see that he and others connected with the Festival look at it as a crusade to accomplish exactly this end. With performances like this one and that of the Piano Quintet, one can be sure that Leon Botstein and the other participants in the Festival have done everything one possibly could. All that remains is for audiences to listen.
---
The academic sessions of the festival came to an interesting and pleasant conclusion on Saturday morning in the panel discussion Anglophilia and Imperialism. Although Bard English professor Deirdre D’Albertis presented a formal paper, a well-argued discussion of imperialistic themes in late Victorian and Edwardian literature, it was to a great extent, as is only appropriate at the and of an extended scholarly endeavor like the Elgar Festival, a genial palaver (to use a word of suitably imperialistic origins) among four very smart people. Ian Buruma reminisced about his grand-father, a German Jew who emigrated to England and became a fanatical Anglophile. Leon Botstein reflected on a great range subjects. Moderator Byron Adams brought the conversation back to Elgar in the end, after numerous sharp questions from the audience.
However, I’d like to focus on one issue raised by Deirdre D’Albertis’ discussion of imperialistic themes in three poems, Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional,” and Thomas Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge.” She observed that these famous verses express an aspect of British imperialist ideology which she finds problematic. As much as the average Englishman may have been enthralled by the power of the Empire and the feeling of a divinely approved mission that came with it, there was an elegiac strain in it, which dwelt on defeats like that of the Light Brigade, death on foreign fields like Drummer Hodge’s, as well as an awareness of the transitory nature of empire. As Kipling put it in “Recessional:”
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
This sense of finitude would seem to contradict the basic principles of jingoism, which will not admit compromise. The unadulterated sentiments flourished, on the other hand, in truly vernacular utterances like those we heard during the summer in Derek B. Scott’s program, “God Bless the Music Halls,” above all the Great McDermott’s War Song of 1877, to which the word “jingoism” owes its existence.
Let them be warned, Old England is brave Old England still,
We’ve proved our might, we’ve claimed our right,
and ever, ever will,
Should we have to draw the sword our way to victory we’ll forge,
With the battle cry of Britons, “Old England and Saint George!”
That there is a class line between these two imperial ideologies is made clear by something we learned in Derek Scott’s program: that reformers, who acted on the values of the middle and upper classes, especially Protestant values, disapproved of jingoism as energetically as they disapproved of strong drink. “Recessional,” presented by the poet for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, not only represents his high interpretation of official doctrine, but the tempered view appropriate for respectable folk, just as college-educated Americans have their own version of political correctness today.
The benchmark of respectability, of membership in the ruling classes, was the classical education. At least early in the nineteenth century, an applicant for a position in the East India Company would have to pass rigorous examinations in Greek and Roman literature—which means that they, like any public school man back home, would have known their Virgil and their Horace, in particular Horace’s sympathetic portrayal of the defeated Cleopatra and the melancholy cross-currents of the Aeneid, the poet’s sense of loss as the destiny of Rome is fulfilled, or how destiny and duty lead the hero to abandon Dido. As in other aspects of British politics and society, the Victorian imperialist would have looked to Greece and Rome for the models not only of imperial ideology, but of propriety as well.
For more about Elgar on the Internet, visit the Elgar Society and Victorian Web.
|
