Sunday 29 July 2012

Violin Serenity

To clarify right at the outset: today's music is certainly not unknown to specialists in the violin, or specialists in the Baroque era.  But to the average music lover, Biber's Rosenkranz (Rosary) Sonatas are totally unknown, and that's a pity.

Years ago, I was marking papers in my classroom one day at lunch hour when the principal walked in to ask something, stopped to listen for a moment, and then said, "That's lovely -- so calm and serene."  This of course helped to explain why it was good music to accompany marking!

These sonatas were composed in or near the year 1676, which places them a half-century before the famous St. Matthew Passion of Bach, just to give a reference point.  From the title Rosary Sonatas it is plain that these works are related to Catholic ritual, specifically to the devotion  of the Rosary which was much favoured in Austria at the time they were written.

There's a tremendous amount of programmatic intention underlying the music, as the sonatas are each identified with one of the 15 mysteries of  the Rosary.  In each sonata, the first movement expresses the description of the action or the mood of the moment described.  The other movements are in some cases less relevant to the programmatic structure.  The best way to grasp the structure is to read a detailed description.

Technically, this is music of a difficulty far beyond anything else of its time, and these sonatas played no small part in making Biber known as a virtuoso violinist of the first order.  To cite only one point, each sonata requires that the instrument be tuned differently!

The wonder of the Rosary Sonatas is that you can ignore all the programmatic underlay and all the technical information and simply immerse yourself in the glorious melodic depths of the music.  And it is unquestionably music that invites immersion and meditation, even in its more vehement moments.

The recording I own comes from Virgin Classics and is played by John Holloway, with the instrumental ensemble Tragicomedia providing accompaniment on a diverse, piquant range of instruments.  Since scoring in Biber's day was haphazard and continuo instruments not specified, this is a perfectly defensible practice -- so long as you understand that in another recording the music could sound very different indeed!  At any rate, in Holloway's hands there is not a single dull moment in the two hours of music -- and there are many moments of sheer wonder and beauty that make you stop all else and just listen.  And that's something of a miracle indeed in our hurry-hurry age.

Thursday 26 July 2012

Sorrowful Beauty Part 3

I've spoken before about the English composer Herbert Howells.  In 1935, he suffered the cruel loss to polio of his son Michael (aged 9).  It was suggested by his daughter that he try to channel his grief into composition, and he began work on a large-scale choral work in memory of Michael.  It remained unfinished, but numerous other works large and small through his career attested to the continuing impact of Michael's death in his father's personal and creative life.

In 1949 Howells was asked if he would compose a large-scale choral/orchestral work for the 1950 Three Choirs Festival.  He dug out the unfinished torso of the memorial piece, and set to work on it again.  The result, premiered in September of 1950 was Hymnus Paradisi -- by any measure one of the true masterpieces of twentieth-century music.

Groundbreaking it is not, at least not at first glance.  There's nothing terribly revolutionary in Howells' handling of voices and instruments, nor in his melodic and structural approach.  What is totally unique is the style Howells evolved, distinctively his own, in which conflicting harmonies in differing choral or instrumental voices are used to generate a kind of harmonic tension in the music.  The result in Hymnus Paradisi was aptly described by Michael Kennedy as a tissue of luminescence, a glowing musical equivalent of the lux perpetua which is a recurring theme of the texts Howells chose -- the "white radiance of eternity" as Shelley called it.

With that clue in hand, it's easy to hear how the music does indeed begin to glow and pulse with light practically from its first bars.  Howells uses his orchestra and voices most imaginatively -- consider the intense burst of orchestral and vocal power in the middle of the second movement.  The texts, too, are carefully chosen and arranged to form a continuous line of poetic thought from beginning to end.  The first three movements, an instrumental prelude and two movements for choir, soloists and orchestra, are played continuously.  Then, after a pause requested by the composer, the last three movements follow one by one.  The final movement eventually returns to the single winding line of melody which opened the work 50 minutes earlier.

For me, the emotional heart of the work resides in the fifth movement.  A tenor soloists quietly utters the words of scripture, "I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, 'Write...'" and is overlapped in answer by the gently sung chording of the choir with the words: "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord".  Any lover of Brahms' German Requiem will instantly recognize this as the text set by Brahms in his final movement, and with that they spiritual kinship between the two works comes into focus.  Both composers are concerned, not with interceding in prayer for the souls of the dead, but with invoking consolation for the living.  Howells continues with a series of rhapsodic, freely sung cadenzas for tenor and soprano, but eventually the music fades quietly away on a simple cadence at the words, "...for they rest from their labours."

Hymnus Paradisi has been recorded just three times, and is very rarely performed outside of Britain (and not terribly frequently even there).  This is nothing short of scandalous, in my humble opinion.

Sir David Willcocks helmed the premiere recording in the 1960s for EMI, and it was and is a marvellous unveiling of a uniquely beautiful musical world.  I've also heard the much more recent digital Hyperion version conducted by Vernon Handley.  Interpretively, and in the choice of soloists, Willcocks has the edge but the Hyperion sound favours Handley and he also has the substantial and beautiful bonus of An English Mass for choir, organ and strings.  I've not heard the most recent Chandos recording under Richard Hickox, but if his other English choral recordings are anything to go by it is undoubtedly just as serious a contender.

Please, don't miss up any opportunity that comes your way to encounter this masterly evocation of grief and consolation, a truly great moment in the music of the last century.

Monday 16 July 2012

Some Further Thoughts on Asrael

Most unusually, I wrote and published my previous entry on Josef Suk's Asrael Symphony without having recently listened to the piece.  After publishing, I took it with me on a car drive and listened right through, and found out that memory, the weakest of all witnesses, had let me down in one or two details.

First: although the opening movement begins, proceeds, and ends in a relatively slow andante there are some faster passages, and a truly monumental climax, which my mind immediately interprets as an expression of the composer's rage at the cruel blows of fate.

The last movement, too, opens in a mood something like anger before finally spending its passion and finishing in a bleak, calm C major.

Also, in the slow 4th movement there is a frequently repeated melodic motif which opens with a descending major third played twice.  This seems like an unconscious or semi-conscious reminiscence of the opening melody of Dvořák's concert overture Amid Nature.  What else it might mean in the context of Suk's musical tribute to Otilka I can't imagine, which is why I'm less inclined to see this as a deliberate quotation (unlike the death motif from Dvořák's Requiem in the second movement. 

Another interesting point is that the orchestration of that second movement in places intriguingly anticipates the scoring of Schmidt's 4th Symphony, which was the subject of my previous major post.  I don't know if Asrael was familiar to Schmidt, but it seems entirely possible, even likely, that he heard it and perhaps even played it himself.

In sum: the Asrael Symphony is by no means all slow and solemn as I had previously written, but the dark and sombre mood certainly colours the entire work regardless of tempo.

Sorrowful Beauty Part 2

Hi again!  Sorry I've been off for so long, life just gets busybusybusy sometimes!

So here's another symphonic work created out of the impulse of grief.  The composer is a Czech, Josef Suk, who was married to Antonin Dvořák's daughter, Otilie (known familiarly as Otilka).  Suk was a pupil of Dvořák's at the conservatory, and the older composer was very much his father in art, as can be seen in Suk's earlier works.  So it was a very great shock to Suk when his father-in-law died in 1904, and a year later Otilka followed him to the grave.

Out of this double loss was born one of Suk's largest and most heartfelt compositions: a symphony in C minor which he entitled Asrael, after the name of the Islamic Angel of Death who leads the souls of the departed to Paradise.  Originally he planned the concluding portion of the symphony as a celebration of Dvořák's life and work.  But when Otilka also died, Suk revised his plans and began an entirely new fourth and fifth movement.  The first three movements (the tribute to Dvořák) are to be played without a break.  Suk calls for a pause after the third, and the fourth is specifically entitled "To Otilka".  The final movement then ends the work, after a final struggle, in a kind of calm acceptance of death and tragedy.

The symphony lasts for almost an hour.  Only the third of the five movements is in a fast tempo marked vivace.  Otherwise, the work is solemn and for the most part dark and sombre.  In the second movement, Suk repeatedly uses a 4-note motif from Dvořák's late Requiem:  D - D# - Db - D.  Suk's repeated use of this despairing sound in a limited time makes it even more a motif of death than the elder composer's unifying use of it throughout his massive cantata setting of the Mass for the Dead.

Lest all of this sound too dark and heavy, Asrael also has a kind of luminosity in its scoring which glows with subdued light throughout.  The composer's own voice comes through loud and clear, and the result is a piece which deserves more frequent hearings.

The famous commentator Norman Lebrecht selected Václav Talich's 1952 mono recording on the Czech Supraphon label as one of his 100 top recordings of all time.  I haven't heard it myself, but would like to -- Lebrecht's judgement in these matters is uncannily like mine so if it impressed him I am sure I would like it too.

The modern digital recording I have is certainly as fine a performance as you could wish to get in modern sound.  It's a Chandos CD from 1992 with the rich acoustic that is this label's signature mark, and a deeply-felt performance by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Jiří
Bělohlávek.