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VILDE FRANG
The Norwegian shares the many thrills of Elgar’s epic Violin Concerto
PUCCINI’S
Full November listings inside See p100
Di ’
How the animated classic burst onto the big screen
Thomas Tallis
The composer who survived four terrifying Tudors
Also in this issue… The composer seduced by the lure of witchcraft
We meet solo percussion’s big hitters Gregorian chant enjoys an unlikely revival 100 reviews by the world’s finest critics Record g & book – ee p72
The full score
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
Pick a theme… and name your seven favourite examples
French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca names the musical declarations of love with which he is smitten
Hailing from Aix-en-Provence, Christian-Pierre La Marca is a prize-winning cellist who has performed with ensembles ranging from the Orchestre National de France to the Philharmonia. He often collaborates with contemporary composers but is equally passionate about historically informed performance. His first recording for the Naïve label, Cello 360, took the listener on a journey from Dowland to The Beatles. His latest album, which comes out this Autumn, is a survey of musical love letters.
Gustav Mahler and Alma Schindler
Mahler Fifth Symphony – Adagietto
This is one of the most intense and profound expressions of love in music. From what I gather, Mahler’s relationship with his wife Alma was quite complex, and this piece is a real mixture of emotions, from happiness and brilliance to pain and fear. We often use this music to accompany sad moments, yet there is something more transcendent than sad about the work. And as with many great pieces, it is both harmonically and musically sophisticated, while remaining completely accessible.
JS Bach and Anna Magdalena Wilcke Bach Cello Suites
Since the original manuscripts of JS Bach’s Cello Suites have been lost, the most authentic versions we have are by the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach, the composer’s second wife. It’s beautiful to think that the Cello Suites – which are like the bible to us cellists – are connected to the relationship between this man and woman, and the obvious trust that existed between them. It’s wonderful to imagine Anna Magdalena being involved in these iconic pieces.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Constanze Weber
Mozart Vesperae Solennes K339 –Laudate Dominum
This piece from 1780 doesn’t exactly illustrate Mozart’s feelings for Constanze. For one thing, it predates their marriage; for another, you don’t get the sense that Mozart’s real-life loves had any direct influence on his work. What we do know, however, is that from the moment he met Constanze, Mozart became fascinated by the timbre of clear soprano voices such as hers. In this piece, which he wrote while still in a relationship with Constanze’s sister Aloysia, that high sound plays a very important role.
Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck
Schumann Cello Concerto
Schumann’s Cello Concerto is probably the last love letter
that the composer ever wrote to his wife. Not only does every phrase find a new way of saying ‘I love you’, but there is also the recurring ‘Clara motif’, so called because its descending interval of a fifth is similar in inflection to the sound of his wife’s name. This piece is a very honest declaration –not transcendent in the Mahlerian sense, but a direct expression of love.
Richard Wagner and Cosima Liszt
Wagner Tannhaüser Overture
Hans von Bülow – a German composerconductor and huge Wagner fan – played this piece to the teenage Cosima Liszt in an effort to seduce her. It worked and she did marry Bülow, but ended up leaving him for his idol. So, I like to think of the Tannhäuser Overture as the first thread that connected Cosima to Wagner. It’s a seductive work, with a confidence and vigour that makes you feel on top of the world. So, I’m not surprised it had such an effect on Cosima.
Hector Berlioz and Harriet Smithson Berlioz Symphonie fantastique
The inspiration behind this work was Berlioz’s love for the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson. Convinced that she wasn’t interested in him, the composer created this confessional that builds from a lover’s sense of dejection to a dreamy, phantasmagorical vision. He invited Harriet to the work’s first performance, but she didn’t show up! Later she got back in contact, before eventually becoming his wife. I love this story about a romance that so nearly didn’t happen.
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears
Britten War Requiem
Ostensibly about war, this piece, I sense, is also about Britten’s inner war – to be accepted at a time when homosexuality was forbidden. There is a darkness to this music, and a sense of something frozen – strange because Britten always came across as such a warm musician. But something in the War Requiem is stifled and not totally open. And it creates a very interesting tension.
Head over heels: Christian-Pierre La Marca pays tribute to affairs of the heart; (opposite) Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima; Harriet Smithson, who married Hector Berlioz... eventually
Magnetic north
The Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang is always drawn to a challenge – and, as she tells Ariane Todes, making difficult choices has helped her to grow as a musician
Elgar, Stravinsky, Korngold: no one can accuse Vilde Frang of taking it easy with her choice of violin concertos this season. And that’s merely before Christmas. But Frang has never shied away from intensity, risk or hard work. They practically define her playing style and help to explain why she’s one of today’s most individual and compelling players. ‘As a personality, I always need a bit of resistance – I always need to do it the hard way,’ she explains. ‘Once I start to coast or get the feeling that things are going my way, or people are being positive, I don’t know how to handle that. It unsettles me, because it’s not supposed to be easy.’
Not yet 40, Frang is on top of the violin world, with her pick of calibre collaborators: she recorded the Elgar
(released in September on Warner Classics) with Robin Ticciati and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and has been touring the work with the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano. She performs the Stravinsky with the Oslo Philharmonic and Klaus Mäkelä in Europe and the Chicago Symphony and Hannu Lintu in the US, and the Korngold with the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko. It’s not a bad dance card.
In person, she is softly spoken and thoughtful – tentative, even – just as her musical sound world is one of extreme delicacy and tenderness. One can understand why the cover of her first CD of Sibelius and Prokofiev concertos, in 2009 aged only 22, featured her softly wafting underneath a tree. This image belies
‘It’s not supposed to be easy’: Vilde Frang likes to test herself; (above left) Elgar, and Frang’s recording of his Violin Concerto
Power players
As the US prepares for the presidential election, Jeremy Pound names the candidates vying for the position of history’s most musical world leader
The rock band Ugly Rumours could so nearly have made it big in the early 1970s. Fronted by heartthrob singer and guitarist Tony Blair, the group announced themselves with a debut gig at Corpus Christi College, leading to a further five appearances at bars and junior common rooms across Oxford University. At that point, however, they folded, appreciating that they were, in fact, quite rubbish. Those six gigs were ‘probably six too many’, Blair would admit in a TV interview many years later, adding that ‘I always say to people that, if there had been social media around at the time I was at university, there’s no way I would ever have become prime minister.’
If Blair’s wayward musicianship had the potential to stop his political career in its tracks, governor Bill Clinton’s image was probably by no means harmed when he played a saxophone solo on the Arsenio Hall Show on US TV in 1992 – months later, he would be elected as the 42nd president of the United States. Blair and Clinton are just two of a number of world leaders in the course of history who have enjoyed not just listening to music, but actually playing it. Some have enjoyed showing off their skills in public; others have kept them largely to themselves. The competence levels, meanwhile, range from enthusiastic amateur to concert-hall pro.
And so, in a year that has seen a veritable deluge of elections, from India to the United Kingdom and with the biggest of all about to take place in the US, it’s time to look, in chronological order, at some of history’s most musical monarchs, presidents and prime ministers…
Nero (Emperor of Rome, 54-68 AD) Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned, they say. Except that he clearly didn’t, as violins didn’t come onto the scene until some 15 centuries after the Great Fire of Rome in 64AD. But if notions of the notorious emperor wielding the bow are far-fetched, he did at least have some sort of musical inclination. Coins from the era depict him playing the lyre, and his love of the instrument is also described in Cassius Dio’s Roman History, though in none-too-glowing terms. The emperor won every lyre-playing contest, notes the historian, but that was only because everyone else was barred from taking part; and when he accompanied himself singing, he ‘moved his whole audience to laughter and tears at once’. Cassius Dio even brings Nero’s plucky endeavours into a speech by Boudicca who, leading a revolt hundreds of miles away in chilly Britain, tartly observes that the Romans ‘are slaves to a lyre-player, and a poor one too’.
Frederick the Great (King of Prussia, 1740-86)
In contrast to Nero, the fluteplaying Frederick II (‘the Great’) was well received by his audiences. Take, for instance, a description by Charles Burney of a performance in Potsdam in 1772. ‘The concert began by a German flute concerto in which his majesty executed the solo parts with great precision…,’ reported the writer.
Political harmony: the piano-loving future president Richard Nixon accompanies comedian Jack Benny, 1959; (below left) Tony Blair live and unplugged, 2003; Nero plucks while Rome burns
Composer of the month
Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 4pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in November are:
28 October – 1 November Liszt
4-8 November Ballroom blockbusters
11-15 November Bud Powell
18-22 November Purcell
25-29 November Puccini
Tallis’s style
Polyphony
Few composers knew better than Tallis the art of weaving multiple strands of music together to create a complex vocal tapestry. In works such as the seven-part Missa Puer natus est nobis and the famous 40-part motet Spem in alium he hits glorious heights of intricacy and invention.
Intimacy While much of Tallis’s music grandly communicates the fervour and veneration involved in acts of Christian worship, he is also capable of more intimate emotions. His well-known anthem If ye love me has a disarming sense of tenderness, while the Lamentations of Jeremiah is notably melancholic and introspective.
Melody While shifting waves of harmony and rich, multi-layered textures are often more important in Tallis than individual melodies, concise, memorable tunes were also part of his armoury. The nine settings he wrote for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter show this, the third forming the basis of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Talllis by Vaughan Williams (above) in 1910.
Versatility Tallis was the ultimate professional, able to flip easily from one type of work to another – in Latin or English, for the Catholic or Anglican liturgy, for four voices or 40 – as the presiding monarch demanded. A sincere spirituality informs all of his work, regardless of the circumstances he was writing in.
Thomas Tallis
The Tudor era was rarely a safe place to be but, explains Terry Blain, its greatest composer had the guile and talent to survive its many perils
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
‘Tallis is dead, and music dies’. So runs the final line of Ye sacred muses, a consort song composed by William Byrd to mourn the passing of his friend and mentor Thomas Tallis in 1585. Probably a pupil of Tallis at one point, Byrd was not alone in considering him the greatest choral composer of his era. Tallis was, as one writer puts it, ‘the first important English composer’, and pieces such as the tender anthem If ye love me and the intricate 40-part motet Spem in alium are among the many works from his extensive output still performed today.
Yet while the broad pillars of Tallis’s achievement are obvious, detailed facts
It is unclear how long Tallis stayed at Dover, or whether his career as a composer started there. Scholarship suggests that the expansive Marian setting Ave dei patris filia and the Magnificat for four voices may date from this period, when Tallis was involved daily in Catholic worship using Latin texts. The days of Dover Priory were, in any case, numbered: it closed in 1535, an early casualty of King Henry VIII’s break with papal authority and his dissolution of the Catholic monasteries.
Where would Tallis fetch up next? Like the majority of English citizens in the 1530s he was a Catholic, and might have expected his musical career to hit a solid
Tallis’s ability to navigate nimbly the religious and political turbulence of the period kicked in
about his life are notoriously hard to come by. He may or may not have been born in 1805, perhaps in Kent: no birth record survives, and we have no details of his family. Tallis’s childhood also remains a blank. We know nothing about his early education, and there is no record of formative experiences he may have had while growing from a child into a teenager.
The first sure-fire glimpse we get of him is in 1530, probably in his mid-twenties. In September of that year his name is listed in an accounts book at Dover Priory (a Benedictine establishment), where he is labelled ‘player of the organs’. In that capacity he would have absorbed the hundreds of plainsong chants used by the monks in daily worship, some of which he used as building blocks for later, multi-part pieces. Most of the Priory has since been built over, but the refectory still stands.
wall in Henry’s reconstituted Church of England, now increasingly aligned to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. At this point, however, Tallis’s ability to navigate nimbly the extreme religious and political turbulence of his period kicked in. A year spent working as a singer (or possibly organist) at St Mary-at-Hill Church, Billingsgate, bought him time to gauge how Henry’s revolutionary distancing from Rome might impact in practical terms on patterns of daily worship.
Then, in 1538, Tallis went back to a monastic setting at Waltham Abbey, perhaps judging that the effect of Henry’s ecclesiastical re-shapings would not after all be so wide-reaching. He was wrong. In 1540, Waltham Abbey too was closed by Henry, the last working monastery to be dissolved in England. Tallis’s position at Waltham had been a good one. He was
Recordings and books rated by expert critics Reviews
Welcome
We appear to be rather en pointe this month with a flurry of ballet and dance music, but there isn’t a swan or fairytale princess to speak of! We have works written for leaps and bounds from Gershwin and his lesser-known contemporary John Alden Carpenter, a set of Khachaturian classics, a complete Don Quixote by Roberto Gerhard and a ride on Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel (replete with its ballet segment). And then there’s two brand new works by unlikely ballet composers RZA (of Wu-Tang Clan fame) and JB Dunckel (from French pop duo Air).
If you prefer the page to the stage then we have works inspired by Tennyson, Shakespeare (Brett Dean’s brilliant Rooms of Elsinore) and classic myths and legends from Persephone to the Ring. Michael Beek Reviews editor
This month’s critics
John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Terry Blain, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Garry Booth, Geoff Brown, Michael Church, Christopher Cook, Martin Cotton, Christopher Dingle, Misha Donat, Jessica Duchen, Rebecca Franks, George Hall, Claire Jackson, Michael Jameson, Berta Joncus, John-Pierre Joyce, Nicholas Kenyon, Ashutosh Khandekar, Erik Levi, Andrew McGregor, David Nice, Freya Parr, Ingrid Pearson, Jeremy Pound, Anthony Pryer, Paul Riley, Jan Smaczny, Jo Talbot, Anne Templer, Roger Thomas, Sarah Urwin Jones, Alexandra Wilson
KEY TO STAR RATINGS
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RECORDING OF THE MONTH
Sublime Schumann to sit down and savour
Rebecca Franks finds much to enjoy in this eloquent programme for oboe and piano from Nicholas Daniel and Julius Drake
C Schumann • R Schumann
R Schumann: Three Romances, Op. 94; Fantasiestücke, Op. 73; Three Pieces from ‘Fünf Stücke im Volkston’, Op. 102; Liederkreis – Mondnact, Op. 39 No. 5; Three Duos; Adagio und Allegro, Op. 70; C Schumann:
Three Romances, Op. 22 Nicholas Daniel (oboe), Julius Drake (piano) Chandos CHAN20295 75:41 mins
Robert Schumann only wrote one work for oboe – but that hasn’t stopped oboist Nicholas Daniel drawing together a gorgeous album of his music. Played with such warmth and eloquence, the arrangements chosen here often feel as if they were tailor-made for the instrument, while the sensitive
programming paints a loving portrait of the Schumann household. Through the prism of the oboe, we hear pieces written for an array of other instruments – violin, clarinet, horn and the rare pedal piano –arranged and edited by various names including Daniel himself and the late Howard Ferguson. Some numbers simply see the oboe taking the melodic line from violin and voice. Schumann often suggested alternative instruments in his chamber music so, as the booklet note’s author Stephen Johnson points out, the composer is likely to have been delighted at seeing his music take on fresh life.
The original work is the first one we hear, the Three Romances, which sets a mood of intimate introspection – and also sets up the hand-in-glove partnership between Daniel and his pianist Julius Drake. The recording beautifully captures the balance and trust between them, with Daniel’s lyrical lines sailing across Drake’s velvety accompaniments, though often the two are in sympathetic
Hand-in-glove partners:
Recording of the Month Reviews
dialogue. Three short pieces in ternary form, the Romances were written in 1849, a year characterised by both a decline in Robert’s mental health and an outpouring of creativity. He gave them as a Christmas present for Clara – and we hear from her next, with three more Romances, written in 1853. Robert’s set was both premiered by a violinist and also published for the violin, so it makes sense that Clara’s heartfelt and elegant violin pieces would work well for oboe too. The third, with its cascading piano accompaniment, is a joy.
There’s even more vocal lyricism on display in ‘Mondnacht’, a moonlit love song from 1840, the year that saw Robert and Clara finally marry, a milestone in their
tumultuous romance. Yet it’s a song whose atmosphere, marked ‘delicately, secretive’ ( zart, heimlich) rests almost entirely on the crystalline piano part – and Drake approaches it with moving tenderness.
The Three Duos turn a
Robert Schumann is likely to have been delighted at seeing his music take on fresh life
spotlight on one of the more niche areas of Schumann’s repertoire, drawing on the Six Studies in Canonic Form and Skizzen. These were originally written for the pedal piano, essentially a piano with a pedal board like an organ’s. Although the instrument never captured
CHOICE
Performer’s notes
Nicholas Daniel
Why was this the right time to record this repertoire?
Julius and I have played together since I was 18 and we’ve played those pieces and thought about them, talked about them, so much. In fact, the Schumann Romances were the first pieces we played together. Those major statement pieces have to be done at the right time; I think people record them too young, or before they’ve really lived with them for a long time. So in a way it’s a testament to having played them together for more than 40 years. What is Julius like as a performing partner?
the public imagination, Robert became interested in it in the 1840s – and these Bachian pieces from 1845 were written with the encouragement of Clara as part of his recovery from a breakdown. Daniel and Drake find within them profound emotion.
During his productive 1849, Robert wrote four other pieces programmed here. A storytelling quality comes to the fore in the five Fantasiestücke, while Daniel relishes the expansive lines in the Pieces in Folk Character. The Abendlied, which seems to bottle up the serenity of a peaceful summer’s evening, sets the seal on a recording you’ll want to sit down and savour.
PERFORMANCE HHHHH
RECORDING HHHHH
Playing with him is extraordinary because you get this feeling of being held, or embraced by the sound; it’s beautiful and a wonderful feeling to play with. These pieces are challenging for breathing and he actually makes it much easier; I’ve always felt that he’s almost breathing with me. He’s arguably one of the very greatest song pianists in the world, so he’s got all that experience of the Schumann songs and brings that expertise to the oboe music, so that’s a wonderful thing for me too.
You did some of the ‘edits’ of the pieces. What did that job entail? Well, for instance, in the Fantasiestücke the cello part (or the clarinet part, or the violin part) goes lower than the oboe’s range, so a small amount of octave transposition is needed. And when I looked at the manuscripts I noticed that the second edition is very different to the first edition, so I edited it in terms of playing it on the oboe, but Julius and I also looked afresh at the manuscripts to see if there was something we could do that worked.
Nicholas Daniel (right) and Julius Drake perform with great warmth and lyricism