LESSONS AND CAROLS
Christmas with the Bevans
Celebrate the festive season with Britain’s famous singing family!
Michael Tilson Thomas
A conductor’s life in music
Wendy Carlos
Enigmatic pioneer of the Moog
Jonas Kaufmann
When I forgot to appear on stage…
The full score
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
Pick a theme… and name your seven favourite examples
British soprano Susan Bullock selects the juiciest Wagner roles for singers to get their teeth into
Susan Bullock has sung in opera houses all over the world.
Attracted to roles of dramatic heft and complexity, she is closely associated with late-Romantic and 20th-century German repertoire, and has a particular affinity with the music of Richard Wagner: a marathon achievement was singing Brünnhilde in all the performances of The Ring at Covent Garden in the London Olympic year of 2012. Next summer she will play Cosima Wagner at the Longborough Festival in a new opera about the Wagner family by the Israeli-born composer Avner Dorman.
Brünnhilde
Brünnhilde has been part of my life for a long time but every time I sing this role, I find out new things about her. From the moment we meet her as this tomboy, a petulant teenager in Die Walküre, to her final immolation scene at the end of Götterdämmerung, she covers the breadth of emotional experience. And as a vocal workout, there’s nothing like this part, both in terms of the stamina it requires, and vocal tessitura: Götterdämmerung has everything from top C’s to bottom G’s. To go on that journey is shattering, but amazing.
Isolde
Another marathon lady: Isolde hits the ground running. We see her at the beginning of Tristan und Isolde, raging about having to go to Cornwall and about the way she’s being treated by Tristan. She is tempestuous and emotional but
also intelligent and loving. The moment when she’s standing there with Tristan, the man she really loves, while the man she’s married to, King Mark, is pouring his heart out about how much she means to him is heartbreaking. She is multifaceted and such a fantastic character to play.
Wotan
As a father, Wotan is a hero to Brünnhilde, and there’s an underlying dignity and godlike strength to his music. Even though everyone is warning him against it, he can’t overcome his need for power that only the Ring will give him. Then he gets that power, and he watches everything disintegrate around him: when we see him in Die Walküre he is increasingly conflicted and no longer the person that we met in Das Rheingold. The end of Die Walküre is especially emotional – parting from Brünnhilde is killing him. At that point in the show, there are always tears.
Siegfried
What I love about Siegfried is his freshness. He’s a pure child of nature: in Act Three of Siegfried, having already been singing for around five hours, he then has an amazing scene where he has to wake up Brünnhilde. He doesn’t know who she is, how to treat her, how to be with her. They spend that last hour dancing around each other and falling in love. For me that’s a real study in meeting the world – without fear, without any preconditioning. And there’s something incredibly moving about it.
Sieglinde
To me, Sieglinde is all things woman: she’s emotional, feminine, open and intuitive. She immediately recognises something in Siegmund – and then it turns out that they are twins who fall in love. The music reflects these qualities, not least in the third act of Die Walküre after Brünnhilde has urged Sieglinde, who is pregnant with the future hero Siegfried, to escape with her. Before she leaves, Sieglinde sings the stunning ‘O hehrstes Wunder!’. It is so expansive, full of emotion and warmth.
Tristan
When we first see Tristan in Tristan und Isolde, he’s very aloof. He’s trying to keep his distance, to save Isolde’s marriage to King Mark and to remain loyal to his king. He wrong foots Isolde so many times when she thinks she’s found a way in. And yet he’s an incredibly passionate, loving man, who sees in Isolde everything that he really wants. He is brave, complicated and enigmatic, and the audience really has to work to figure out who he is.
Brangäne
I used to sing lot of Cio-Cio Sans and the relationship between Madam Butterfly and Suzuki reminds me of that between Isolde and Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde. Brangäne is loyalty, she’s dedication, and she only ever wants to do the right thing. When she gives Tristan and Isolde the love potion, instead of the death drink, it comes from a good place. She soon realises that she has unleashed a disastrous situation that can never be put back in the box. There’s something very poignant in that. Interview by Hannah Nepilova
Dramatic highs and lows: Susan Bullock loves Wagnerian roles; (opposite) Stefan Vinke as Siegfried and Susan Bullock as Brünnhilde in The Ring, Melbourne, 2013; Anja Kampe as Isolde and Sarah Connolly as Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde at the Glyndebourne Festival, 2009
Family album
Rebecca Franks meets the delightfully jolly and energetic Bevan Family Consort – members of the multi-generational, multitalented Bevan clan – as they prepare to release a new album for Christmas
PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN MILLAR
hat says family more than Christmas?’ asks Sophie Bevan, hamming up the line and making us all laugh. Gathered around a pub table in London in blazing summer sunshine that’s decidedly inappropriate for talking about a Christmas album are four Bevan cousins. Four, I should point out, of 56. All of whom are, in one way or another, musical. The Bevan family sprawls, dwarfing the von Trapps and Kanneh-Masons (see p30). And a handful of them have formed the Bevan Family Consort, which makes recordings and gives concerts, and this year releases a gorgeous Christmas album. It features family party pieces and festive favourites as well as the premiere recordings of a Palestrina mass, Imogen Holst’s The Virgin Unspotted and David Bevan Snr’s Lute-book Lullaby
Dynamic dynasty: the Bevan Family Consort, photographed exclusively for BBC Music at St Mark’s Church, Clerkenwell
Relative values
Jeremy Pound ponders nurture, nature and ancestral trees as he admires the collective talents of history’s most musical families
‘So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodnight…’ You probably know the scene. It’s that moment in The Sound of Music in which all seven von Trapp children – Liesl, Friedrich, Louisa, Kurt, Brigitta, Marta and Gretl – take their leave from Captain von Trapp’s grand party by performing a little song. As their father looks on proudly in front of his admiring guests, each child does a charming little turn before heading upstairs – and only a curmudgeon would point out that, in the 1965 film at least, Kurt’s high F is clearly dubbed.
Little Kurt’s vocal deficiencies evidently didn’t trouble the critics, as the movie won five Oscars. It also proved one of the most commercially successful pictures of all time, introducing millions to a host of memorable songs and instantly making the von Trapps the most widely known musical family in history. This
was not just fiction, either, as the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was based on the exploits of the real-life Trapp Family Singers, who toured in Austria and then, after fleeing the Nazi regime, the US, performing everything from Monteverdi and Holst to folksongs and carols. As well as singing, they also played instruments and even composed their own music.
The von Trapps are among many examples of significant musical talent extending to more than just one member of a family. Not that we should be surprised by this. There’s the small matter of genes, for a start. And then there’s the effect of being brought up surrounded by music. Many are the young performers who tell of having been inspired by hearing parents or elder siblings play and wanting to have a go themselves – being able to make music within a family group often cements that enthusiasm further.
Sibling harmony: (top) the Trapp Family Singers with priest Franz Wasner; (above) JC Bach wielded greater influence than his father
Having a very large family increases the chances of producing a musical offspring, of course. Captain Georg von Trapp fathered an impressive ten children in total; a couple of centuries earlier, Johann Sebastian (JS) Bach managed twice that number, among whom were Wilhelm Friedemann (WF), Carl Philipp Emanuel (CPE), Johann Christoph Friedrich (JCF) and Johann Christian (JC), all of whom enjoyed renown as composers and performers. Remarkably, in fact, until Mendelssohn championed him in the 19th century, JS was by no means the highest regarded of the Bachs –CPE, a brilliantly inventive keyboard composer plying his trade at the court of Frederick the Great, and JC, the ‘English Bach’ whose operas and concert series made him the toast of London in the 1760s, both stood higher in the pecking order. Moreover, JC had a significant impact on the next generation of musicians, not least the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who, meeting him during a trip to London in 1764, played keyboard duets with him and, deeply impressed, returned home clutching several of his scores.
Perhaps the Haydn that left his trace most evidently in Mozart’s music was not Joseph, but his younger brother, Michael
Accompanying Wolfgang on that trip was, of course, his father Leopold, who recognised his son’s genius at a very early age and was determined to squeeze every last drop out of it. To what extent Leopold’s devotion to showcasing his son’s brilliance might have come at the cost of his own output as a composer is hard to judge – scholars seem to differ as to how good he was – though there is little doubt he was a phenomenally able violinist and teacher. More frustrating is the case of Wolfgang’s older sister, Nannerl, the other participant in the Mozart family talent tours of Europe. Also a child prodigy, this time on the keyboard, Nannerl saw her career brought quickly to an end when she reached a marriageable age (and as such, dare one suggest, was deemed less marketable as a performer). Tantalisingly, letters from Wolfgang suggest she may well have been a fine composer too… but no trace of her works survive today.
While Wolfgang was complimentary to his sister in his correspondence, he and Leopold rarely had good words to say about anyone else. JC Bach was an exception, as was Joseph Haydn, with whom the Mozarts rubbed shoulders in Vienna and to whom Wolfgang paid tribute with his set of six ‘Haydn’ Quartets Op. 10. Perhaps, though, the Haydn that left his trace most evidently in Mozart’s music was not Joseph, but his younger brother, Michael. Greatly admired as a composer by his renowned sibling, who rated some of his music better than his own, Michael Haydn produced a large volume of highly accomplished works including a Requiem that quite clearly foreshadowed Mozart’s own – both Leopold and Wolfgang were at the 1772 funeral at which it was first performed, so would have been familiar with it. Had the family name not
Melodic genes: (above) Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart; (left) Jeremy Menuhin (at piano) and father Yehudi; (above left) Mischa and Lily Maisky; (below) Michael Haydn
Composer of the month
Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 4pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in December are:
2-6 Dec Luise Adolpha Le Beau
9-13 Dec A Latin American Christmas
16-20 Dec JS Bach
23-27 Dec A Latvian Choral Christmas
30 Dec – 3 Jan Schubert
Anderson’s style
Structurally conservative Very inventive phrase by phrase, Anderson wasn’t a structural experimenter. Thematic material proceeds in simple chunks, with the ABA pattern the most common and ABAB the runner-up. This might be a hangover from his classical Harvard education, but it’s also the result of a simple desire for immediate communication with a wide audience.
A popular touch Popular taste also governs the genres deployed by Anderson: waltzes, marches, a tango or two, some sentimental reveries. Older dance forms like the sarabande also appear. Most of the pieces usually occupy around three minutes –perfect for fitting onto one side of the mid-20th century’s shellac discs.
Lively instrumentation Anderson initially found fame as an orchestral arranger, and his preference for bright, kaleidoscopic textures is equally clear in his original compositions. Illustrative effects (a speciality) are usually supplied by conventional orchestral instruments. Notable exceptions include the typewriter in The Typewriter and the three varieties of sandpaper scraped during The Sandpaper Ballet.
A sense of fun This is everywhere in Anderson, sometimes beginning with the work’s title, as in Plink, Plank, Plunk! (below) or Mother’s Whistler. Themes are varied with stylistic interruptions that take the listener by surprise, while a special joke is often employed in the final bars,
Leroy Anderson
Geoff Brown hears sleigh bells jingling and typewriters pinging as he celebrates the unique talents of America’s master of light music
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
In the blazing hot July of 1946, Captain Leroy Anderson, late of Military Intelligence at the Pentagon, was stripped to the waist, digging a trench at his Connecticut cottage, trying to locate some disused pipes. A jog-trot rhythm entered his head, suitable for horses’ hooves and sleigh bells. Once back inside, he sketched out some ideas, subsequently developed and polished over the course of a year. The end product was Sleigh Ride, an orchestral piece lasting under three minutes, premiered by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra in May 1948.
This winter bonbon had no specific Christmas associations, but they gathered
miniatures written by Anderson, a tall, blue-eyed American of Scandinavian stock, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who carved a niche all his own with what he termed ‘concert music with a pop flavour’. He brought to the task the crisp craftsmanship expected of a composer who had studied at Harvard, the local university, in the late 1920s. His main teacher was Walter Piston, recently returned from his own palette-cleansing studies in Paris. But Anderson also had a feeling for the melodies and rhythms of American popular songs, Broadway shows and jazz. Throughout his career he worked to marry popular and classical styles
A jog-trot rhythm entered Anderson’s head, suitable for horses’ hooves and sleigh bells
around it anyway as the piece speedily grew in popularity. The fame of Sleigh Ride was further boosted after its first recording in 1949 and the emergence in 1950 of a vocal version, with lyrics by Mitchell Parish that equally didn’t specify Christmas. By 2004, research had unearthed 214 Sleigh Ride recordings, a number that can only have ballooned since. And such a variety of performers! What other piece has been recorded in its time by the New York Philharmonic, the Spice Girls, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Luciano Pavarotti, Liberace, the cathedral choirs of Lincoln and Chichester, Ella Fitzgerald, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Judy Garland, the Nashville Mandolin Ensemble, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and the Tennessee Tech Trombone Choir?
The best known of all his compositions, Sleigh Ride was one of almost 60 orchestral
with skill and wit, crafting buoyantly optimistic musical jewels that surprise, delight and quickly lodge in the listener’s memory. The musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky considered him ‘one of the most completely inventive composers who ever lived’.
He was also one of the most self-critical. Chicken Reel of 1946 may have been completed in sketch form while waiting for the furniture movers, but other pieces, like Sleigh Ride, took months, sometimes years, to find their proper shape. Other pieces were simply withdrawn by the composer, notably the 19-minute Piano Concerto of 1953, his sole exploitation of a traditional classical format. But even when his ambitions were smaller, Anderson maintained strict quality control, ensuring a core output of orchestral sparklers unmatched in their verve and wit.
Recordings and books rated by expert critics Reviews
Welcome
Christmas music is just the thing to warm the cockles as winter creeps in, not to mention the perfect antidote to the daily onslaught of crises and crackpots. So I invite you to partake in our festive round-up, where you’ll find a dose of magic and sparkle courtesy of college choirs, musical families and fabulous soloists. There’s a sense of place this issue, too, with musical accounts of an Irish winter (our Orchestral Choice), two album snapshots of music from North America and an emotional response to the war in Ukraine (our Choral & Song Choice). And then? We unbox a trio of Michael Tilson Thomas celebratory releases, a final bow from pianist Kathryn Stott with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the winning recital from this year’s Leeds International Piano Competition. Michael Beek Reviews editor
This month’s critics
John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Michael Beek, Terry Blain, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Geoff Brown, Michael Church, Christopher Cook, Martin Cotton, Christopher Dingle, Misha Donat, Jessica Duchen, Rebecca Franks, George Hall, Malcolm Hayes, Michael Jameson, Stephen Johnson, Berta Joncus, John-Pierre Joyce, Ashutosh Khandekar, Erik Levi, Andrew McGregor, David Nice, Freya Parr, Ingrid Pearson, Steph Power, Anthony Pryer, Paul Riley, Suzanne Rolt, Jan Smaczny, Jo Talbot, Anne Templer, Roger Thomas, Sarah Urwin Jones, Kate Wakeling, Alexandra Wilson
KEY TO STAR RATINGS
HHHHH Outstanding
HHHH Excellent
HHH Good
HH Disappointing
H Poor
RECORDING OF THE MONTH
This exhilarating blast is the future of brass
Anne Templer falls head over heels for this thrilling rollercoaster of new works from exceptional trombone
Re:Build
quartet Slide Action
Ryan Latimer: C. Exigua; Laura Jurd: Swamped; Emily Hall: Close Palms; Alex Paxton: Hairy Pony Estampie; Joanna Ward: Playing Frisbee May 2022; plus works by Matthew Locke, Benny Vernon et al
Slide Action
NMC NMC D289 51:14 mins
The future of brass ensemble playing is – as yet – a relatively untapped area for contemporary composers. Brass bands, 20th-century big bands and some orchestral playing have certainly made inroads, but the real development of this soundworld is surely yet to come. If any group is likely to move this on in leaps and bounds it is Slide Action. This album commissions composers and arrangers (including significant
contributions from the group themselves) to harness the great harmonic, rhythmic and melodic timbres offered from a trombone quartet, and creators have gleefully leapt on these possibilities. Through live performance, the group has developed a concept of composing or arranging ‘Interludes’ to sit between new pieces, exposing the audience to connecting incidental music, like scene changes in a theatrical production. These interludes coalesce their shouldering pieces in different ways: a simple element such as pitch, or something more abstract like a theme, vibe or fragment. From the opening arrangement of Henry Purcell’s March from Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary to the funky, quirky, gospel grooves of Laura Jurd’s Swamped, the ideas are in abundance – and beautifully executed. For range and and original concepts, Jamie Tweed’s Smooth Place, Cool Drink (Interlude I) enters an intriguing soundworld reminiscent of a floating 1940s dream,
CHOICE
Recording of the Month Reviews
producing otherworldly sounds based on Jimmy Van Heusen’s standard ‘Here’s That Rainy Day’. A second Interlude – Sit by Benny Vernon – literally creates sound whilst the group are changing their playing position. Beginning with a timbre reminiscent of a South American rainmaker instrument, but actually created from sampled recordings of the quartet playing on chairs with random objects, the sound transitions into a harmonically static, meditative mood. The particular strengths of trombones in this are deeply explored; deliberate sliding around with the tuning and a big, fat sound at the bottom end. Deliberate and fresh exploration unique to this
set of instruments is what this ensemble is all about –producing uncompromising and outstandingly mastered dynamics, slide control, multiphonics and, at times, outrageously comical moments. The music unashamedly
For virtuosity alone, Alex Paxton’s work is a piece to entertain audiences of any age
takes the listener through a kaleidoscope of circus tricks and sleights of hand, drawing on influences reminiscent of Gabrieli right up to contemporary composers. If only one thing is listened to on this recording, however, then it must surely be the ingenious
Performer’s notes Joshua Cirtina
Pony Estampie by Alex Paxton. For virtuosity alone, this is a piece to entertain audiences of any age, but there is so much more to it than that. Sounding as if it has been inspired by Bob Mintzer, the piece starts with a great big band template but then progresses through a seemingly impossible ten-minute rollercoaster ride of sounds –including screamingly funny bombast, horse whinnying, vocals and such warm harmony. The scope of this creativity leads one to conclude that the answer to the group’s final rhetorical question –‘Where are we going next?’ – is an exhilarating and thrilling ride. What a blast.
PERFORMANCE HHHHH
RECORDING HHHHH
Slide Action are really pushing boundaries with this album... Absolutely. The trombone quartet is often seen as a bit of a pedestrian chamber music format – if it’s seen as a format at all – and there are lots that already exist comprised of the greatest orchestral players in the world. So we quickly realised that we needed a USP that was different, and the format just hasn’t developed since the 1960s. So we wanted to push the boundaries but also the capabilities of the sound you can make on the instrument. Do any of the new works push the limits of what is possible? Oh totally! Probably the most difficult is Alex Paxton’s piece, Hairy Pony Estampie; it’s just totally bonkers. Alex is an incredible trombone player, as well as a phenomenal composer; I have a suspicion that he’s secretly one of the greatest players in the world. He knows just how far to push the instrument. He also has a great way of describing things that is absolutely spot on; on our parts we had things like ‘Needs to sound more like gnomes in a tumble dryer’ and stuff like that.
Tell us about opening with the Purcell. It’s a surprising start. That was a way of lulling the listener into a false sense of security; particularly if there are brass players listening, or people less accumstomed to the contemporary stuff. They’ll be thinking, ‘Oh this is fine, I recognise that!’ and then it all starts to melt around them. So it’s tongue in cheek; I’ve been thinking of it as an homage to what’s come before, like ‘Thanks very much, you’ve done lots of cool stuff, but this is what’s next’.
Musical high-wire act: Slide Action are gleeful in their exploration of the trombone’s soundworld
Hairy