on the bill with Beethoven 9
The final grab for something summery - Proms in the Park - is over, and we're into autumn. The high heid yins in London insist that this Last Night binge is to be done in the open air, but none of them did enough geography at school to understand that the climate up here is different from London....... However, thousands turn up to Glasgow Green and have a great time. Simple maths (the kind that even I can do) tells me that the vast majority that come to Glasgow Green don't normally come to indoor symphony concerts. There must be a powerful appeal - more than just to sit in the rain for four hours. It must also be about the worst way to see and hear the actual music. What is it that is so appealing? Doesn't that appealing element happen in our everyday concerts in the City Hall? If you're coming to Beethoven 9 this week (you won't be if you haven't already got a ticket), would you want the Red Hot Chilli Peppers as a supporting act, or vice versa? (Mind you, I would welcome their dancing girls to accompany anything that we do!) As players, we can't avoid being a bit detached from the big tribal gathering experience that is going on out there in front of us - we are more than pre-occupied trying not to make complete arses of ourselves playing in horrendous conditions. We're there, but we don't belong - wandering minstrels? I wonder if any of you noticed: in the main ´óÏó´«Ã½ 1 broadcast, during the rousing rendering of Rule Britannia, there was a sequence of shots showing the various crowds at Proms in the Park venues around the land, all waving flags and shouting. You saw Glasgow Green, you heard Rule Britannia......we were actually singing Highland Cathedral! Oops! Is the ´óÏó´«Ã½ colluding with our English overlords? A head should roll.
Enough levity. Back to Beethoven 9. What a piece. We don't often get a bash at it, and this Thursday it launches our season, the Merchant City Festival and it's live on TV. Did Beethoven realise what he was doing when he wrote this? He kicks down the walls of his deafness, bulldozes away the colonnades of tradition, and shouts out something that will go on to echo around Europe, and the whole world. Schiller's Ode might seem a tad effete.......until Beethoven put boots and dungarees on it. The audience at the first performance got the message - though legend has it that LvB couldn't hear them raving, and he had to be turned round to see. What sort of an artist do you have to be to achieve something like that? What sort of authority and credibility must you have? Did he have any vision of the place that he was taking in the history of art, if not in European politics?
Our warm up act in Glasgow is Janacek's Taras Bulba. I've raved about this before. All human life is there - and more. And it is just the warm up. The story makes me feel weepy even before the music starts; though I've never seen the graphic details mentioned in a programme note. You don't want to know. Suffice it to say that it shows the futility of violence, the endless cycles of pain, the cruelty and loss - unleashed if we can't tune in to ideals of brotherhood and equality. The lessons have never been more urgent, and the problems no less intractable. Some aspects have struck me. Janacek was writing in the aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The assassination blew the gasket on the pressure cooker of Balkan hatred, and launched WW1 (not to mention WW2 and all that came after that). The assassin, Princip, is quoted as taunting his captors to "nail him up and set light to him so that he can become a beacon for freedom". That is what happened to Taras Bulba. Did Janacek know this about Princip? Maybe Princip knew Gogol's story as well as Janacek? Also, Janacek's infidelities had led to his wife's attempted suicide - he was just embarking on a madly obsessive love for another married woman. The most touching and plangent moment in Taras Bulba is at the beginning, and it depicts Taras' son's traitorous love for a Polish girl. We repeat Beethoven 9 in Aberdeen, and the warm up act there is Elliot Carter's Three Illusions - three fantasies about what will make our lives better. The rare contra-bass clarinet appears again (see my last blog, '.....mutter.....mutter...'). This piece was premiered in Boston, on the same day that Soundings (wot we done the other day at the Proms) was premiered in Chicago - so there must be at least two contra-bass clarinets in America. There is no doubt about the respect that Carter commands, but can he prove that Janacek was wrong to say that "There is no music without key"? He is 100 in December, and so may not have too much time left to make his case.
Comments