reviewing the review
2011 has been a fantastic year. I’ve heard more of my own music than ever before, and have had a great time, being flown around the country, meeting so many music lovers, making so many musical friends and enjoying the company of such talented colleagues. This is not in any way meant to be a carping blog but there is something curious about the coverage in one quarter that has puzzled me for some time and I think it is all right to share my thoughts, because it is an area that affects many artists and is very difficult to address without either becoming frustrated at one’s powerlessness or overreacting. Simply explaining it and inviting reflections from others seems a valid thing to do.
By 2008, I had noticed that a prominent reviewer in the Age newspaper in Melbourne seemed to have begun to ignore my performances. If I took part in a concert, my contribution would not be mentioned; if I gave a solo concert, it would be overlooked. I assumed I was simply being oversensitive. Anyway, arts reviews are hanging onto their place in our media by their fingernails, so it might well have been the result of quite reasonable sub editing. Then, by June 2009, I noticed that my compositions were receiving the same treatment, for reasons that remain unclear. Even when a concert including one of my works was reviewed, all works except mine would be addressed. Since my piece Black is the Night was played by the ACO in June that year, no mention of my work has been made. I noted this in my blog entry and included a link to the review by Clive O’Connell at the time. I did wonder what it meant, and began to be curious about how my year’s contribution to Musica Viva’s national programme in 2011 would be reported.
As it happens, it has been widely reported and I’m more than delighted by the opportunity, the wonderful performances, the chance to meet so many people, and of course just to hear so much of my music for the first time. The press coverage has been extensive, almost overwhelming, and generally very positive. In light of this, the continuing boycott by O’Connell is, I suppose, a minor thing, but it is still a mystery. The latest review is a good example. In May, the Brentano String Quartet played my first string quartet. This is what O’Connell had to say.
It has now been three years since I was mentioned in this particular column, and I have been involved in something like twenty Melbourne concerts during that time. Elsewhere, the coverage has been pretty much as one would expect. Melbourne is my home town. It’s a great city and a lot of superb art events happen there, supported by a music-loving, art-mad cultured community, who not only want to enjoy their art to the full, but are proud of their local artists and expect them at least to be given a look-in and critiqued by those in the local media who are paid to do that.
People are starting to ask me about it and I cannot tell them anything, except just to keep coming to the concerts and to enjoy them! The rest is beyond our control but we can, at least, remark on it, can’t we?
how to write a piano quintet
Relief. Quintet finished. I sip tea and reflect on notes and meaning.
It’s a haiku. Well not really, because there should be something about nature in it and also it’s laughably boring and solipsistic. But we are a musician after all, and self-reference is a big part of our daily ritual.
It is true: relief, the quintet is complete, in draft, and has been despatched to players for perusal and comment. Did I mention relief already?
Almost every questionnaire and interview I have entertained over the last year has posed a question about writers’ block, and I suppose it is the converse of that perennial fascination we have for ‘where artists get their ideas’. Where do the ideas go when artists are not getting them? Neither is easy to answer. Nor is the question, “What do composers do when it happens?” which, I suspect, is where the real interest lies. This year, although it might appear that the idea fairy has been kind to me, it is actually very much not the case. I don’t blame the fairy. I blame me. However embellished or romanticised the histories are, it is undeniable that Mozart and Beethoven, and a host of others, would simply not have written all they did if they waited until they were happy and well, and most great artists have a great talent for one thing before all others: hard work. Not sure my talent in this area is even in the ball park, but we shuffle along, don’t we? I have to say, this year has been helped along by some wonderful friends, and I am very grateful to them.
Elsewhere, I have said something about my first piano quintet, written in 2005 for my friends in the Flinders Quartet. It was intended for a tour we were to do together but a serious road accident in May 2006 put paid to that plan, and the lovely Caroline Almonte replaced me, on that and several other occasions. The work is a little unusual in its sequence of eight relatively brief movements, ordered so as to follow a day in the life of Erik Satie, from his waking and eating breakfast in the form of an egg and preparing for bed with a final cigar… In a way, I was thinking along the lines of a Graham Greene ‘entertainment’, like Travels with my Aunt: composers often like to write in serious and less serious modes.
The second quintet is a little less flippant. Well, not flippant at all. The piece has been formed from two earlier works, reworked and rearranged. The first movement is based on Dreams, my single-movement piano concerto from 2003, which featured at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. The second is more loosely built on Drought and Night Rain, a tone poem I wrote for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in 2005. Both works, in their different ways, allude to Judith Wright, fast becoming my main musical inspiration, and ironic too, considering her well-known antipathy towards musical settings of her poetry. In Dreams, though, it is really more of a personal response to her poetic world than any ‘setting’ of particular poems, and the opening theme, which pervades the piece in various transformations, was actually suggested years ago when I first began sketches in London. My wife Helen was busy at the time, working as a repetiteur on the Royal Opera House’s ‘Garden Venture’, a scheme to promote newly composed miniature operas, and our friend Jeannie Marsh was staying with us, cramming for a performance of a striking example by the (then) young British composer Luke Stoneham. His interesting use of long melismas and false relations set me thinking, and in some ways, Dreams was what came of it.
Some years passed between the first sketches for Dreams and its premiere in Brussels, and a whole period of my life in Tasmania came and went in the interim. So, looking back, it constitutes quite a journey for me, and I learned much along the way. When I came to write Drought and Night Rain, I had mapped it out as part of a projected symphony, just as Dreams is intended, still, as the first movement of a piano concerto. Anthony Peluso, then AA at the TSO, invited me for a three-year residency and I leapt at the opportunity to wrote a great big symphony. Silly boy. Australian composers do not write symphonies! They write little overture-y bits and 13-minute Australia Council-funded first-half fillers. Obviously, some symphonies do get written, but very few, and if I sound sarcastic, I apologise. It matters not: when the fairy returns, I will try to finish both the concerto and the symphony, which exist in scattered sketches all over the house.
There are some questions about this quintet that will be answered in performance, I imagine. Dreams was such a breakthrough for me, in its language and its structure, that I consciously borrowed both aspects in writing Drought, not imagining that they would ever meet. Are they too alike, then? I don’t think so. They both begin and end quietly, with rocking, harmonically ambiguous figures and build to crisis-like climaxes. Not only that, but some of the orchestral sonorities, like the appearance of the frogs and crickets right at the end, are difficult to emulate with the restricted resources of a piano quintet, even with the application of frog guiros and a rainstick or two. We shall see. In other ways, there might be advantages. No matter how much I clarified the original score, and how careful the conductor Gilbert Varga was with dynamics, the piano solo part of Dreams does get almost completely swallowed up towards the end of the nightmarish toccata. To my satisfaction, I should add! Somehow, it stands as an emblem of the solo pianist’s role: heroically battling the tide; in the 19th century, conquering; in the 20th, something else.
Who will win in the quintet? Come along and find out.
a long time ago in Mt Waverley
Anna Goldsworthy’s haunting Piano Lessons is making a reappearance as a play. Wonderful. Limelight magazine is asking for short reminiscences from colleagues about their own first lessons and first teachers. Here is mine.
Mr Hurst, whose first name none of us can recall, came into our lives on the suburban fringe of Melbourne with his dapper suit and Valiant sedan when I was six years old. With his cultured Jewish ways and kindly manner, he coaxed my elder brother Chris and me to play duet versions of ‘Hot Cross Buns’ and ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’ and patiently, if unenthusiastically, guided us through John Thompson’s lacklustre and old-fashioned Piano Course. Although he taught me exactly the wrong way to play octaves*, he did the one thing that all good teachers ought to remember to do: he encouraged. And along the way he introduced me to one of my lifelong loves, the sublime and gnostic musical world of Robert Schumann. Soon afterwards, I was sent to learn with a rather formidable lady, Marta Rostas, a Hungarian emigrée who had trained at the Liszt Academy and who brooked no nonsense from rough boys. I cried at my very first lesson, not because of any harshness of hers but because of the standard she embodied, which I instantly sensed was beyond me. She was best friends with Mr Hurst’s first wife, Hedy, who would teach me German and meet me in Vienna while I was a student there, many years later. But that’s another story.
*”Put your thumb on C; now, put your fifth finger on the C above. Clench your hand. All you have to do now is to hold your hand stiff and go up and down the keyboard.’ Do not try this at home, folks.
all about Erik
For a while, I was utterly fascinated by the idea of Erik Satie, the eccentric French composer of the once ubiquitous Gymnopédies. In fact, he has figured in my writing twice, and may well again. The piano quintet I wrote for the Flinders Quartet a few years ago was based on an imagined day in his life, but that work was in turn based on an earlier arrangement I made for the Australia Ensemble of his brilliant set of twenty-one pieces for piano known as Sports et Divertissements, which was in turn quite probably based on Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which was based on… I can’t remember, you probably do. As I wrote almost a chapter of my Masters thesis on these pieces, I thought it might be of interest to post some of that here.
Satie’s pieces have interpolated comments, the oration of which was expressly forbidden by the composer. However, they are so piquant, and so integral to the experience of the pieces — in fact, to virtually any of Satie’s pieces — that I ensured that they were not only included, but featured. For the Australia Ensemble concert, my father-in-law Gerald English provided the declaimed texts, quite brilliantly, as you can hear.
In 1934 Constant Lambert said of Satie that “English critics have been unanimous in their disapproval, and one has yet to see that their contempt is based on any knowledge of his work as a whole. Satie is looked upon (…) as a farceur and an incompetent dilettante.” Bearing this out, fifty-five years later Gerald Abraham obligingly wrote of Satie as “an amusing blagueur of miniscule talent”. It would be hard to argue that Emmanuel Chabrier and Gabriel Fauré were also merely the possessors of such mediocre gifts and yet their music is similarly neglected in the Anglo-Saxon musical world, although perhaps not so regularly maligned. Which just goes to show that Lambert was right when he said: “The theory that music is an international language may be compared to the statement that blood is thicker than water. They are both so obviously untrue that no one worries about them any longer or is likely to protest at their frequent occurrences in public speeches.”
It should not be forgotten, of course, that the criticisms were not limited to the English. Like Ravel, Debussy and the Russian émigré Stravinsky, Satie enjoyed his share of succès de scandale, particularly when his ballet Parade was performed in 1917 to hoots of derision and in the midst of the Dada movement. Whatever reaction his works caused at that time, and whatever one may make of them now, the idea that Satie was a naïve and unskilled artist is demonstrably false. Stravinsky, writing in his autobiography, declared “I liked him at once. He was a quick-witted fellow, shrewd, clever, and mordant. Of his compositions I prefer above all his ‘Socrate’ and certain pages of his ‘Parade’.” Ravel was interested enough to play Satie’s piano pieces on occasion but it was Debussy who was genuinely and significantly influenced by Satie’s unconventional ideas and what Debussy inferred as his musical “medievalism”. Opinions will probably remain divided, however, between those who view the egregiously eccentric and experimental nature of his work as just so much empty self-absorption and those for whom he represents a welcome way out of German Romanticism (and who simply like the music, it must be said).
Three years before the first performance of Parade, one of its precursors and one of Satie’s most exquisitely crafted works was made. The story of how the twenty-one pieces for piano solo that comprise Sports et Divertissements came to be composed in 1914 is fairly well-known, if only for the slightly apocryphal account of the financial arrangements involved. Lucien Vogel, publisher of magazines and occasional one-off art and music books, approached Stravinsky with a commission to write short piano pieces to accompany a collection of drawings by one of Vogel’s house artists, Charles Martin. Stravinsky declined, finding the proposed fee too low. It was one of Vogel’s designers, Valentine Gross, who next suggested that Vogel ask Satie. When the same fee was offered to Satie, he was inexplicably offended and, so the customary version goes, only agreed to the commission if the fee were reduced. In fact, as Volta argues, Satie, who was a rather touchy individual, may have been reacting to the advice of Roland-Manuel, then a friend but later a bitter enemy, to push for too much and so risk losing the commission altogether.
To the twenty drawings by Martin, Satie appended a chorale at the beginning, as he remarked in his own printed introduction. In doing so, was he deliberately making reference to Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire of 1912? Pierrot was arguably a parody of the German melodrama, an 18th- and 19th-century form comprising declamation and music, a typical example of which is Richard Strauss’ Enoch Arden op.38, on an epic poem by Tennyson. Schoenberg’s setting took twenty-one of Giraud’s poems (translated into German) concerning the commedia dell’arte character Pierrot, and famously notated the declamation in Sprechstimme, musically alluding to the cabaret forms so familiar to Satie, as well as a multitude of others. It is no coincidence, then, to find Satie alluding to Scaramouche (“La Comédie Italienne”), Pierrot (“Carnaval”) and the moon (“Le Flirt”, accompanied by a musical quotation from the folk song “Au clair de lune”).
The publication of the book was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I and the liquidation of Vogel’s publishing company. By the end of the war, however, Vogel had reconstituted his company and finally printed the collection in 1923, only two years before Satie’s death and six years after the appearance of Parade. Times had changed, meanwhile, and even if there hadn’t been a Great War Vogel’s fashion magazines would have reflected the one truth concerning their subject: constant change. Consequently, Martin, who had by this time come under the influence of Cubism, had replaced all of his drawings of 1914 and it is these new illustrations that were published alongside Satie’s music and text in three versions of the original deluxe edition: one with all twenty plates by Martin, one with only plates 1—10 and one with only one plate, chosen at random. The Vogel edition has never been republished in its original configuration, so that the full effect of the work as a synthesis of music, text and art can only be imagined. For this purpose, the Dover edition of 1962 is probably the most useful, reproducing the second (1922) set of Martin pictures with Satie’s original calligraphy, which is very distinctive. What is missing, and which can be inferred from Satie’s preface, is colour: apart from the coloured plates, Satie’s score featured black notes and red staves. What is also missing is the opportunity to compare the first and second versions of Martin’s illustrations and examine their correspondences with Satie’s music; in many instances, it is in the first version that the interplay between picture and music is most meaningful.
Both Davis and Volta demonstrate the extent to which Satie involved himself with the popular culture of the day, embedding Sports with references to music-hall and café life, of which he was an enthusiastic participant, and more specifically to the fashionable world of Vogel’s magazines Fémina and La gazette du bon ton. Sports et divertissements itself was in prominent current usage as an advertising catch phrase promoting the modern fad of the moneyed classes to travel to places like Dieppe and the Riviera to take invigorating holidays full of sport and amusements. A comparison between the contents pages of the spring issue of Fémina in 1913 and Satie’s collection is striking. It is a catalogue of contemporary pastimes that is, not surprisingly, caricatured and lampooned by Satie, along with the magazine illustrations’ captions, parodies of which form the basis for Satie’s inimitable “stream-of-consciousness” text inserts. Many of the associations that would have been immediately obvious to musically-minded readers of Vogel’s magazines are not at all obvious today, of course — who is familiar with the monthly Parisian magazines of 1913 and 1922? Some of Satie’s other musical references may not have been quite so easily recognised at the time of publication, though. Davis draws plausible conclusions regarding Satie’s subtle borrowing of material from a range of composers including Bizet, Widor and Debussy and shows that Satie did so knowingly and with considerable technical skill.
This arrangement of Sports was made for the Australia Ensemble, both in the conviction that the instrumentation of the ensemble (flute, clarinet, string quartet and piano) afforded a wealth of colouristic opportunities for creative arrangement, and that the work itself was full of potential for meaningful instrumental colour. Another consideration was the similarity with the instrumentation of Pierrot lunaire (narrator, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola, ‘cello and piano), with which it is connected. The existence of fine music that is rarely if ever played and heard in its original form, by virtue of idiosyncratic instrumentation (Grainger’s settings of Kipling’s verse, for example), by the use of obsolete instruments (Schubert’s sonata for arpeggione; Schumann’s pieces for pedal piano) or because the genre is no longer widely practised (piano duet repertoire and, to a lesser extent, organ repertoire), has always been the reason and justification for many arrangements and transcriptions.
Sports was published in a short print run of about 900 copies in 1923. It was known to a small circle of Satie’s friends and acquaintances and to the mainly dilettante clientele of Vogel’s magazines. By its nature, it has never been comfortable in the concert hall; it was almost certainly not envisaged by Satie to be comfortable or, in all likelihood, to be heard there at all. In any case, he is reported on several occasions to have warned against declaiming the words during the performance of any of his pieces, so that the complete experience of Satie’s world is removed one step further away if the the injunction is heeded in public performance. For this arrangement, texts were declaimed, against Satie’s instruction, after considering the alternative. Although declamation and piano mutually interfere in performing the original in this way, the transparency and spread of colours gained by transcription to a small mixed ensemble were found to complement the voice in a way that neither obscured the spoken words nor was obscured by them. To complement the aural performance, in which the original French texts were declaimed, slides comprising Martin’s and other illustrations, photos and translations of the texts were projected with each number.
THE PIECES
When Satie entered the Scola Cantorum in Paris as a mature-age student in 1905, it was in order to remedy a perceived lack of technical grounding that had undermined his confidence for years. Part of his studies involved the traditional discipline of counterpoint, which he found that he greatly enjoyed, especially the emulation of Bach’s chorale settings for four voices. In his introduction he mentions the reason for the inclusion of the extra, unillustrated piece, “Choral inappétissant”, dedicating it to “those who dislike me” and written for the “shrivelled up and stupefied”. In it, he writes, “I have included all I know of boredom”. Yet the piece, without such a caption, is not dissimilar to the Douze petits chorals (1906) or the single chorale-like pieces such as an unnamed one included in the Carnet d’esquisses et de croquis (1899—1913), none of which betrays anything more ironic than a careful and inventive regard for voice-leading. It is characteristic that Satie’s words and music form such a counterpoint, which would have to be viewed as deliberate and suggestive. In performance, of course, such music can acquire irony, both by reference to the text and by exaggeration.
The piece is crammed full of eleven syntactically correct appoggiaturas that might have satisfied d’Indy. The clarinet contributes sparingly and slightly incongruously to accentuate the fourth, eighth and last appoggiatura resolutions, the last emerging as violin II fades.
Davis draws attention to the parallels between Satie’s swing (“La Balançoire”) and the slide (“L’Escarpolette”) by Georges Bizet in his suite for piano duet Jeux d’Enfants (1871). Set for clarinet solo and pizzicato violin II and ‘cello, the only addition in the arrangements is a free vamp at the beginning and end; at either end of the piece the music emerges from, and regresses to, silence.
“La Chasse” and “La Comédie Italienne” are both arranged straightforwardly, using the distinct colour combinations available within the ensemble. The penultimate phrase of “Comédie…” is lengthened and the voicing modified so as to accentuate the comic and dramatic effect of the scale to top F corresponding to the text “Et le reste!”
“Le Réveil de la Mariée” is similarly lengthened by one bar in order for the words “Un chien danse avec sa fiançée” to be absorbed at leisure, while the pianistic figure in “Colin-Maillard” that complements the words “Comme il est pâle” is likewise expanded.
“Le Yachting” is subjected to more extensive arrangement. Repeating the piece allows some of Satie’s figuration to be elaborated in two ways. The original piano accompaniment to the text “Pourvu qu’elle ne se brise pas sur un rocher” is treated imitatively and extended at first hearing in the arranged version and further imitated by a third voice upon repetition.
The unfortunate Colonel whose club splinters as soon as he hits the ball is personified by a clarinet solo in “Le Golf”. Notably, the opening phrase predates the popular song “Tea for Two”. “La Pieuvre” is unaltered from Satie’s original, like “Le Traîneau”, as part of the overall scheme to spread the arrangement across a variety of instrumental solos and sub-groupings.
Like “Le Yachting”, “Les Courses” is repeated, so that two phrases, those corresponding to the texts “Achat du programme” and “Départ… Ceux qui se dérobent”, might be extended and developed, again polyphonically.
Davis remarks that Satie’s quotation of “La Marseillaise” near the end is remarkably similar to Debussy’s own quotation in “Feux d’artifice”, the last of the second book of his Préludes (1913).
Prokofiev’s cat-clarinet visits “Les Quatre Coins”, in which the four mice appear as string pizzicati. Actually, they are all children: “puss-in-the-corner” is a children’s game, and is featured as such in Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants, whose material is again quoted by Satie (Davis: pp.458—9).
Davis perceives a similarity with the opening of “Le Pique-nique” and the folk tune “Keel Row”, which may or may not be intended, as well as a snippet of cakewalk, which almost certainly is. Debussy’s cakewalk parodies, “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” from the Children’s Corner suite and Le petit Nigar, would doubtless have been well known to Satie, whose own popular song “La Diva de l’Empire” is written in the same style. The brewing storm that threatens to ruin the picnic is doubled in length in the arrangement, for exaggerated dramatic effect.
Satie’s few financially rewarding compositions included the waltzes and waltz-songs “Poudre d’Or”, “Je te veux” and the two early pieces “Valse ballet” and “Fantaisie-valse”. “Le Water-chute” parodies such waltzes, Satie’s stock-in-trade as pianist at the Chat Noir and other cabaret-cafés in Montmartre.
In a similarly light vein, “Le Tango” parodies the dance that was the craze of Paris just before the war. Evidently the charms of the tango were lost on Erik, whose performance direction “Modéré et très ennuyé” signals his evident antipathy, as does his subtitle “endless” (perpétuel), as the trend may have seemed at the time. For anyone wishing to take him at his word (like those misguided enough to take his comments regarding Vexations at their face value…), there is an innocuous repeat sign, with no obvious way of ending. For the purpose of clarity, the arrangement makes the one repeat explicit and makes a coda of the third hearing of the first clarinet phrase.
In “Le Flirt” Davis again discovers musical quotations, this time from a less well-known source, “Le Flirt” from Le Carnaval op.61 by the French organist Charles Marie Widor.
While some of Widor’s fine organ symphonies are known today, his piano music has largely fallen by the wayside. In 1914, though, Le Carnaval may well have enjoyed greater appreciation. Significantly, Widor was the composer of another piano collection, Vieilles chansons et rondes pour les petits enfants, published in 1912 in a lavish production that included colour illustrations by the fashion artist Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel. More than any other, perhaps, Widor’s collection provides the model for Satie and Vogel’s decidedly more sarcastic work for adults.
And finally, “Le Tennis”. Game!
string quartets and woodcuts
May is over, June begun and birthday coming up. Gemini time of year again. And no, I don’t believe in astrology. Not since Copernicus and Galileo dumped on Ptolemy and certainly not since the parallax was confirmed. But anyway.
The final performance of my first quartet From an exhibition of Australian woodcuts can be heard at Angel Place in Sydney at 2 this afternoon. The Brentano Quartet play like angels. Both Beethovens are superb, and 132 is about as good as it gets. We met for a read through before the first concert in Brisbane two weeks ago, and I think I’m already a groupie. It’s hard to describe the pleasure of hearing one’s own music performed in a way that reveals aspects that one did not know were there. They keep asking me to criticise, suggest changes, tweak details, but I keep telling them: it’s perfect, don’t change a thing. And I mean it. I suppose, as with the Eggners, it’s a thing I’ve developed as a player. The composer might have a very well defined concept of how a particular passage might sound, but I believe that it’s far better to allow good musicians to play in such a way that they are as unconstrained as possible, meaning that they will arrive at an interpretation that excites and involves them, ideally. It just so happens that the Brentanos really do recreate marvellously well exactly what I wanted, and I’m having the time of my life.
Musica Viva has posted a video of the last movement, “Tarantella on a Sydney tram” here
More anon. I have to get ready…
Jean Bogan Prize
Some years ago, I met the gentle Laurie Bogan, who gifted enough money to the Conservatorium of Music in Newcastle to establish a composition award in memory of his wife Jean. After Laurie died several years ago, his bequest to the university made it possible to continue the awarding of this prize in perpetuity, although there was a hiatus of a few years while the new protocols were worked out.
some old recordings
Ah, the archives of Mt Waverley are yielding some forgotten tapes tonight. I wonder what the shelf life of a cassette is, anyway. There’s a recording made by my brother Chris in 1973, interviewing all of us about our Christmas presents. Not for general release, clearly.
But there are a few things I’m listening to for the first time since they were recorded, and they’re bringing back memories of all sorts. Most of them are from competitions, studio recordings or concerts, but there are a few practice sessions as well. Excuse the lousy sound of some, like the Busoni Competition. Dolby was around, but obviously not much in use at RAI.
Rachmaninov Sonata no.2 1st movement
Rachmaninov Sonata no.2 2nd & 3rd movements
Part of my semi-final programme at the Busoni Competition in 1987. Annoying that the recording just misses the first bar.
Teruyuki Noda Ode Capricious
The set piece for the second round of the Tokyo International Piano Competition 1986. One of the four competitions in which I was ballotted pole position, not as good as it sounds. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not an early morning person, and a recital at 8.30am is not my ideal time. Still, it meant that this was the world premiere of this quite interesting and eclectic piece by a little known Japanese composer.
Mendelssohn Variations Sérieuses op.54
From May 1985, Mendelssohn’s Variations Sérieuses op.54. This was the set piece for the Maria Canals International Piano Competition that year. My brother Chris, cousine Penny, friend Alexa and colleague Vittorio all stayed together in two apartments on the Ramblas and had a fantastic time, although I got left alone later in the competition and only Chris came back. Memorable for the zumos, the bomb scare next door at the American Embassy during my second round, the Sagrada Famiglia and for the crazy Romanian…
Chopin Etude op.25 no.10
Also from Tokyo 1986, part of my first round, which contained a Bach Prelude & Fugue and four études. Four. How many do you need anyway?
Mozart Concerto no.9 “Jeunehomme” 1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement
From my first proper national tour of Australia in 1991, the amazing ‘Jeunehomme’ Concerto no.9 by Mozart. The best performance was with WASO, the lovely Isaiah Jackson conducting. This one was with the SSO at the Opera House with Jorge Mester. The other concerto I played was Tchaikowsky’s second. Thereby hangs a tale!
Tchaikowsky Concerto no.2 interview and part of 1st movement
I arrived in Hobart to play the Tchaikowsky concerto, somewhat depressed after having performed it in Melbourne with the MSO and Hiroyuki Iwaki, who did not like the piece, conducted it poorly and made little effort to help make it work. The TSO, by way of contrast, played magnificently, although in the middle of their own crisis due to the sudden departure of Dobbs Franks. The young Chinese conductor Yu Long came at short notice and did a fine job, as did Barbara jane Gilby and Sue-Ellen Paulsen.
Bartok Szabadban
Again from Busoni 1987, the fantastic Out of Doors by Bartok, a piece I once played a lot and hugely enjoyed. It’s quite barbarous in places, especially at the end, and the fourth movement, ‘Night Music’, is unique in its sonorities.
Saint-Saëns Concerto no.4 1st movement
2nd movement
And from more recently, one of my first performances after becoming a Tasmanian. Todd Handley was such a nice conductor to work with.
Beethoven Sonata op.31 no.2 ‘Tempest’ 1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement
From 1982, my first ABC recording, after the Young Performers Competition. Beethoven’s Sonata op.31 no.2 ‘Tempest’, a piece I absolutely loved. Don’t think I’ve played it since then. The Schnabel recording is still hard to beat, especially the slightly wonky spinning-wheel rhythm of the final rondo, like ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’. Listening to it again, it’s a good advertisement for live music. I remember the very special ‘golden’ tone necessary for the second singing of the limpid tune in the second movement, possible on the old German upright we had (still have) at home, and also analagous in a good Steinway. In the studio, and in this recording, it seems to be completely lost, and it is an apt metaphor for life, in a way. Enjoy it while you can — don’t wait for the replay.
More to follow.
autumnal thoughts
I’ve been sick as a dog, or a parrot. Or perhaps it was man-flu, as various amusing females have originally suggested. Whatever it is, it was grungy and full of yechh. If you were within ten feet of me, you’d have gotten it too, so you were smart to stay away! When I began this post it seemed like a good day to lie on the lounge room floor with the laptop with the new guts and wiped short-term memory and write a rambling but witty entry about the past fortnight’s music making. Instead you get this, finished off with a glass of elderflower liqueur on ice and The Cat Returns on the telly…
Last Monday was the final Eggner Trio performance of my trio Tales of Old Russia, and it was just a tiny bit sad to hear the coda rush to its end. These boys are quite amazing. When I heard their brave and unusual interpretation of Beethoven’s op.11, usually played as a clarinet trio, I knew that there were surprises in store. And so it was. During the delightful mini tour with the Flinders Quartet, Zoe Knighton introduced each concert with a few much appreciated remarks, including the observation that it is a privilege to be able to have the living composer on hand, and of course I agree. But just on occasion, it can be a relief not to have them there. As a player, I sometimes need to remind myself as composer to say what needs to be said, succinctly, and then leave it to colleagues to mediate the music in their own way. Otherwise, micro-managing can sap the life out of someone else’s fantasy, and if you’re lucky enough to be working with people like the Eggners, who have fantasy in abundance, then the best thing you can do is to check the notes, make sure everything works and is generally understood, and get out of the way. Or, I daresay you could just call it trust and leave it at that.
Here is the performance from Adelaide.
What I most enjoyed about meeting the boys again and being a part of their tour was that they express joy and playfulness, and don’t seem to give much of a damn for carefulness. Which is not to say that they are messy — far from it! But I do remember back to my earliest experiences of chamber music, and have vague recollections of men in dark suits, taking forever to start playing and going about their business like funeral directors. This is not the Eggner way. After each concert, we were probed by the delightful Katherine Kemp and questioned by the audiences, and much interest was expressed in the boys’ choice of shirts and cameraderie on long tours, all questions fielded with grace and wit. Many in the audience who stayed back to attend these post-concert conversations asked very thoughtful questions and it was a pleasure to ponder them and respond. But I have to say, it was the Australian Music Day in Canberra, when I spoke to a lovely gathering of school children, that I enjoyed most. Mostly, as you’d expect, the older students sat up the back (although a few were towards the front and yawned, the way teenagers do), and the younger ones were in the front row. When I asked who knew about Russian folk tales, all hands went up, and one girl straight away told a version of the maiden and the baba yaga. But the single most striking comment came from one of the youngest. I explained that, right near the beginning of the first movement, which is all about Vassilisa, who is sent into the forest to seek out the witch Baba Yaga, there is a tiny little musical figure that appears and disappears but grows more and more involved as the story goes on. I said that I wasn’t even quite sure what it meant myself and asked what they thought. Immediately, a little girl put up her hand and said, “Danger.” And she was not only dead right but she put it in a word — the absolutely correct word. I actually learned something about my own piece from a ten year-old.
Overwhelmingly, though, it was just the pleasure and privilege of hearing my piece brought to life with such fantasy and skill, by colleagues who found detail in it that I can honestly say I didn’t know was there. They really enjoyed it too. Bonus! And if I had a dollar for each time someone said to me, “I don’t normally like Modern Music but I thought your piece was [insert adverb] good”, well, I’d have a pocket full of dollars.
Roll on May.
after the quartet…
I don’t think anyone has ever written a poem for me before, so this one is a lovely surprise, from my friend Adrea. Thank you.
The New Sketchbook For Ian
The pale blue sky unfolds
against the entrance of the day
a single kookaburra flying by
sits upon a branch
and by his laughing sound
invokes the perfumes of bush gums
and yellow flowering trees.
The violets sit in random formations
and slightly sway
with the soft breeze
which dusts across the roses
while a petal quivers
as the keys on a piano under your touch
and the strings respond
to the garlands of thought
which dance upon a manuscript
before their eyes.
And gently lead us to the billabongs
or Leopold where Streeton
saw the water ripple
under the fluttering air of dragonflies
or the weightless form as a gumleaf opens
upon the lilting melody of the old country
transported by a convict’s swag
through the movement of a violin’s bow
and a lover’s lament about his Gargal Machree.
But it is the shower at sunset
and the haunting rain
sustained in the notes on a stave
which lifts the heart as the young girl falls
to her lover’s shot when he did not look
and the feathers of a dying swan
floating down upon her grave.
When all the rejection
and complex movements
are captured and set free
to glide upon the wing
then we hear your voice
and your music play
with a vibrant energy
in these new songs.
And I know you have returned
from the jagged paths
whose journeys were not wasted
during this imbroglio
but have found their meaning
in a new sketchbook
and the lingering note of a tearful cello
from their inspiration in your own refrain.
Monday 11th April 2011
POSTSCRIPT
I had forgotten that Adrea also wrote this memento of the trio performance in Melbourne…
This Is Not A Dream
For Ian Munro
The concert starts at seven
pushing through the cars in a rush
unexpected things with children
have added chaos to this life.
you ring, ‘where are you?’
‘nearly there, just parking’,
we sit alone at the edge of the row
close to the front of the stage.
Now you amaze me when you rise
to tell the story of your work
while the audience sits intent
on the composer and the snow maiden
as I ponder on the Russian
and think of all the concerts
where we have been
from London to the Teatro La Fenice
the many times I have heard you play
from the simple notes of a school choir
to Beethoven’s complexity
and when you sit
we discuss the role of patronage
then three men appear of similar age
dressed in red shirts, a violin, cello and piano
and silence falls.
Seated with you, I feel the artist waiting -
the ice is moulded in my mind
tingling moments, sketches filling with paint
whiteness slips away melted by the crystal blues
of spring and the violent oranges of summer
until I hear the horseman in percussion
galloping to outwit death,
my eyes are closed, you have taken me away
from all the pain which is now a stream
where once the young girl drowned,
then again the passion mounts
I can almost feel his touch as the image
beckons me with wistful surprise
an ethereal sound which tempers thought,
that this is not a dream.
9th April 2011
Mozart, Grainger and friends
Today has been a great start to my year of chamber music. Well, almost a start. We began rehearsals for the Australia Ensemble’s first subscription week yesterday and played our first lunch hour concert today in Leighton Hall, located in the magnificent newish Scientia building at UNSW. A slightly smaller audience than usual, owing perhaps to the change of venue, came to hear a medley of Grainger and my clarinet quintet Songs from the Bush. Quite a contrast but, being a Grainger-phile from boyhood, not one that in any way displeased me. His ‘Nightingale and Two Sisters’ for piano trio is a gem, and even the hardened Grainger sceptics had a tear in their eye. I suppose the two reasons why I’ve never had a problem with Grainger, and haven’t really understood those who do, are that I don’t regard bad taste as a major obstacle to good art, and I don’t regard perfection in artistic expression as a measure of it either. I mean, Robert Schumann, who was undoubtedly a far greater artist than Grainger, nevertheless continues to suffer from the judgments of those who find his orchestration and musical architecture amateurish, or worse. And yet I would say, focus on his musical content and you would never come to any other conclusion than that he was one of the greatest of all musicians. More importantly, you would revel in what he is and allow for what he isn’t, perhaps even find considerable comfort and humanity in his slight failings. I sure hope my own artistic failings are regarded in this way, otherwise I’m stuffed.
Then there is Mozart, now my constant companion. My friends in the Flinders Quartet and I are preparing his compact concerto in F major K.413 for our concerts together in April, and they correctly forecast that I have chosen quite lively tempi. I wonder where they got the idea… One day, I plan to pursue my theory concerning the Turkish introduction of coffee into Vienna and the effect on tempi in Mozart. One day. I have an admission to make. I did not persevere in researching this work, although it is one I have toyed with for many years and have wanted to play because of the gorgeous, understated Larghetto, with its discreet, irresistible echoes and harmonic twists. In my Dover edition, there are no cadenzas for the first two movements, so I looked for them elsewhere. They are not listed in his K624, so I assumed that he hadn’t written any, which is the case for a number of the most important concerti, like the great C minor concerto K491. So I wrote my own over a couple of days during the new year holidays.
Here they are…
And for the second movement…
Ok, so there they are, for what they’re worth. The only problem being: Mozart did in fact write cadenzas for these movements, as I discovered when Zoe produced the Bärenreiter edition at rehearsal. They might not have been officially published by Mozart but the copies are in Leopold’s hand and, just as significantly, are artistically genuine. Anyone who has tried to write a pastiche of Mozart quickly learns that it is almost impossible to imitate the essential art of the man. Imitate the mannerisms, yes, but the only point of that is to have fun, and the outcome is always dubious if the intention is more serious, because Mozart’s art is so often concealed and extremely subtle, not to mention technically brilliant, sometimes astonishingly so. Look at the details in construction of any great artist and you will find the same thing: alarming displays of genius in a myriad small things, making up larger things, making up the whole. That these cadenzas are by Mozart needs no handwriting expert for authentication: the art is in itself unique.
And yet, I will still play my own. I can’t offer a very philosophical explanation. I have always said to myself, if Mozart wrote a cadenza, then I will play it; if not, then and only then will I supply my own out of necessity. It has nothing to do with any fashionable idea that the performance practice of the era would demand that the performer (me) ought to improvise on the spot. Phooey, too hard, and too anachronistic, and too many other things. I would much rather hear Mozart played well than played authentically. Well and authentically, that’s another thing, naturally. No, it’s simply that I like the idea of artistic homage, and one of the curious and unique ways it is possible for us to pay homage as artists to much greater artists of the past is to include a piece of ourselves in the recreation of their art in our own time. That, whether we acknowledge it or not, is what we do all the time in our peculiar world of classical music, and a most marvellous relationship it is, too.
