Sunday 17 December 2017

One turn of the dial: Grigori Kozintsev on filming good and evil



It so happens that, by itself, the activity of a people – its selfless devotion to duty, its bravery – can be evaluated only when the goal to that activity is known. Sometimes the artist need not be explicit about the goals; the audience will perceive the action of the screen as though it were tuned in on a definite wave length of spiritual activity by an associative force, tuned in on a conditional reflex of attitudes toward good and evil.

During the Second World War, William Wyler directed his Memphis Belle. The film contains shots of a bomb run by flying fortresses, the life of the pilots, their military work, the return to base under fire.

The chronicle is filmed as entertainment: it shows the characters of the pilots, their mutual relations, tastes, customs. Their tastes are not demanding. A picture is painted on the side of an airplane: a bathing beauty sticks out her rear end. Returning from a run (mortal danger and the bravery of the crew is indicated; there are quite a few seriously wounded), the pilots slap the Memphis Belle on her behind; it’s a custom.

In this case, neither the drawing itself nor the conduct of the men is in any way attractive of itself. Wyler does not show the enemy: bombings are filmed from the plane (little squares for objectives, the smoke of explosions, shell craters). But the audience sees the movie as though tuned in on a certain wave length: hatred for fascism is already a conditioned reflex.

The American fly-boys, their bravery, and even their joke about the girl in the bathing suit, all seem attractive, profoundly human.

Now let us imagine this film in its entirety as taking place in Korea. Just as any turn, however insignificant, of the radio dial will tune in another station, so here everything becomes different and the interpretation makes an about-face. The men are murderers; their life is coarse. And the bawd in the bathing suit becomes a symbol: here are the ideals and the culture in the name of which these thugs have flown across an ocean in order to annihilate a people fighting for their freedom and human dignity.

From the notes of Grigori Kozintsev, made during the filming of his 1964 adaptation of Hamlet (with music by Dmitri Shostakovich), published in his book Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, which was translated by Joyce Vining in 1966.

Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Friday 15 December 2017

Galina Ivanovna's Nun

Galina Ustvolskaya, seen in the Dutch TV documentary Scream Into Space
For many years I worked in a music library. I know how many years passed there, but I couldn’t now divide the time and say what belonged to which of the years. Libraries are places where time collects and where ideas go to rest, but time and thought stand strangely still between the shelves. Libraries have cycles and habits, and they go on until one day, they stop.

An elderly, sprightly lady used to breeze through the gate and give a brief but sincere “hello”, and a “hope you’ve a lovely holiday” or the like as she left. These all passed between us as though we’d done the introductions long before, but in truth, I barely knew who she was, only that she was a rare exception, a library regular from outside our institution. At Christmas, she’d bring a box of biscuits and card, left with her usual economy. A smile, a few words, and gone again.

“Sister Andre sort of came with the library”, the Librarian told me. “She’s been coming for years. She’s a nun. She’s researching something.”

I think more years passed before I asked what it was.

-

“Dullaghan”, she said, in a way that sounded right and compact in her Irish brogue. “D-U-L-L-A…”

“Got it”, I said, finding her record and issuing her books. Sr Andre Dullaghan.

What did she do up in the reading room, I asked? She was working on her book, she replied, on the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya. I knew the name, a little of the reputation, though I didn’t know the sound of the music. Strange and intense, I’d heard. A recluse, who’d not long ago died.

And then, from the little nun to whom I’d nodded and smiled for years, came the story of the time she’d made it into the world of Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya, a tiny world sealed shut to all but a select few.

Galina Ivanovna lived in a nondescript apartment in St Petersburg. If one knew anything of her, it was that she’d been a pupil of Shostakovich. He’d even, it was said, proposed marriage. She declined, and later in life, she vehemently denied his musical influence and his personal friendship. Shostakovich “killed my best feelings”, she wrote.

In her later years, she cultivated the myth of her own singularity. Scholarly study of her music was forbidden. Early works were struck from her catalogue. Just a handful of musicians could perform her music to her exacting standards. She admitted no influences, no antecedents. She belonged to no tradition. And she’d withdrawn from the world, to that tiny flat that she shared with her husband. No one saw her. One did not visit Ustvolskaya.

Some time, in the 1980s, perhaps, Sr Andre had fallen under the spell of the music. In the pounding of Ustvolskaya’s brutally expressive, rhythmically single-minded symphonies and sonatas, Sr Andre had seen God, a raw and blinding image of Him that spoke intensely to her faith. A visit to St Petersburg, in 1993, gave her the chance to discover more than was then possible from the trickle of information reaching the West. She found scholars and musicians eager to share their knowledge of Ustvolskaya’s work, but speaking with the composer was out of the question.

Further visits followed, and the quest to learn more became a doctoral thesis. Finally, in 1997, at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance, Sr Andre took a risk and phoned Galina Ivanovna’s home number, a few days shy of the composer’s 78th birthday. She answered. Galina Ivanovna didn’t throw down the phone, but rather, spoke with Sr Andre warmly. News of Sr Andre’s passion for her music, and of her research visits to St Petersburg, must by then have reached her, even within her little fortress. Was this a way in? Sr Andre sensed that it might be, if she proceeded with care. A few days later, she phoned again.  

“I do not wish to see you”, said Sr Andre, “but at 5:30 I will ring your doorbell and leave you a present.”

Immediately: “There’s no need to.”

Sr Andre, though, had prepared. “I have already bought your present.” Chocolate-covered prunes – Galina Ivanovna’s favourite.

There was a pause – a long pause.

“What time did you say you’d call?”

That evening, Sr Andre arrived at the apartment, at the appointed time. She rang the bell, not expecting any response. But the door opened, and there stood Galina Ivanovna, dressed beautifully. She offered Sr Andre a warm embrace, and invited her into the apartment. They spoke for a while, and the composer asked this question: “Why do you love my music so much?”

“I love your music”, replied Sr Andre, “because every note touches my soul.”

-

She told me this story as I sat behind our library’s broad wooden issue desk. I read later that Galina Ivanovna referred to Sr Andre as “the nun”. And here she was - Galina Ivanovna’s nun - telling me of this precious meeting. I was at one remove from the most mysterious of the Soviet Union’s visionary musicians.

I stored it away in my mind. Years passed, I changed career, and eventually I set to writing something about Ustvolskaya. I knew who to contact first.

I had expected the routine to continue, even without me, and for Sr Andre to be regularly climbing the stairs to the reading room, to be reviewing her notes and shaping her manuscript at the big sloping table on the first floor. But she wasn’t; she isn’t. News came back from a colleague that she had passed away in 2015, eight years after and ten years the junior of her beloved Galina Ivanovna.

I don’t know what became of her work. The book she was shaping will never be finished. Perhaps the notes and the thoughts they hold rest somewhere, in a box or on a shelf of some little library, waiting for someone to pick up the threads and continue the work.


Sr Andre Dullaghan
The details of Sr Andre's meeting with Galina Ustvolskaya are related in the introduction to her doctoral thesis, Galina Ustvolskaya: Her Heritage and Her Voice (City Universtiy London, 2000) and are much the same as they were told to me by Sr Andre herself. Images used on this page fall under fair use and are intended to aid study and review. They will be removed upon request by the copyright holders. 

Sunday 12 November 2017

A Rare Russian Treat, Tomorrow on BBC Radio 3

Rozhdestvensky (right) at a rehearsal with Shostakovich and Rostropovich, in 1960.

Few great musicians of the era of Shostakovich survive now, but the legendary conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky is still out there, offering a very real link to the greatest of Soviet composers. Rozhdestvensky worked with Shostakovich between the early 1960s and his death in 1975, most notably on the late revival of the opera The Nose. Rozhdestvensky's appearances in the West are relatively rare these days, but he did appear, in Dresden, earlier this year, conducting the first and last Shostakovich symphonies. The concert is broadcast on Radio 3 on Monday 13th November, at 2pm, and will be available for 30 days afterwards for UK users.

Rozhdestvensky leads the Dresden Staatskapelle in tomorrow's broadcast. The orchestra has a fine history with Shostakovich, and recordings are available of them in symphonies conducted by another great Shostakovich maestro, Kirill Kondrashin. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).


Monday 6 November 2017

BBC Radio 3's Russian Revolution


Looking through the schedules for this week, I note with delight how much time is being given over to Russian music and culture on BBC Radio 3. I then wonder quite how I'm supposed to listen to it all. One programme at a time, I suppose. I've made a list of everything I could, though you'll note that some of these things are now in the past. UK readers can follow the links (for 30 days) to catch up with all that Russian goodness.

Composer of the week continues next week with music from the post-Stalin period. The anniversary (calendar-corrected) of the actual Bolshevik Revolution is marked by a special afternoon discussion on Tuesday of this week.

5pm – The Listening Service on Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony
5.30pm – Words and Music: Russia after the Revolution
6.45pm – Sunday Feature: Emigranti – 1917 Revisited
7.30pm – Concert of Tchaikovsky from the Verbier Festival
9pm – Drama on 3 – Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

9am – Essential Classics: interview with BBC foreign correspondent Bridget Kendall (all week)
12noon – Composer of the Week: Scriabin and Prokofiev
2pm – Afternoon Concert: Music by Tchaikovsky and Taneyev
7.30pm – Evening Concert: LPO in music by Shostakovich and Rachmaninov
10.45pm – The Essay: Ten Artists that Shook the World (all week)

6.30am – Breakfast: Live from the Mariinsky Theatre
12noon – Composer of the Week: Mosolov and Roslavets
1pm – Lunchtime Concert: Elisabeth Leonskaja plays Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky
2pm – Breaking Free: A century of Russia culture, live from Lenin’s London office
7.30pm – Evening Concert: Shostakovich and Rachmaninov from the RLPO
10pm – Free Thinking: Man With a Movie Camera
11pm – Late Junction: Russian Experimentalism

12pm – Composer of the Week: Myaskovsky and Popov
1pm – Lunchtime Concert: Alexei Vlodin
7.30pm – Evening Concert: Cedric Tiberghien plays Prokofiev and Mussorgsky
10pm – Free Thinking: Svetlana Alexievich and Stephen Kotkin

12pm – Composer of the Week: Shostakovich and Kabalevsky
1pm – Lunchtime Concert: Anna Vinnitskaya
2pm – Afternoon concert: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel
7.30pm – Evening Concert: Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov from the RPO
10pm – Free Thinking: Russian Art and Exile
12.30am – Archive recordings of Kirill Kondrashin

12pm – Composer of the Week: Prokofiev and Khrennikov
1pm – Lunchtime Concert: Vadym Kholodenko
2pm – Afternoon concert: Music by Tchaikovsky

9am – Record Review: Includes Gerard McBurney on Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony
12.15pm – Music Matters: Discussion with Teodor Currentzis
3pm – Sound of Cinema: Russian Revolution special
6pm – Opera on 3: Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth
1am – More archive recordings of Kirill Kondrashin

12noon – Private Passions: Interview with Simon Sebag Montefiore
2pm – The Early Music Show: Music form the court of Catherine the Great
7.30pm – Evening Concert: Music by Glazunov and Schnittke

The header image is from the BBC Radio 3 website and is one of a number of designs being used to promote this season. Read more about co-opting propaganda imagery here. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Sunday 5 November 2017

A Berliner Birthday Message to Herbert Blomstedt



Full marks to the Berliner Philarmoniker for this charming video in celebration of conductor Herbert Blomstedt's 90th birthday which he celebrated a few months ago. I saw him conduct earlier this year, and I only hope I'll take a flight of stairs as spryly as him when I'm that age.

Friday 3 November 2017

Tanks, Catcalls and Correcting a Correction


On August 21st, 1968, star Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was scheduled to play Dvorak's Cello Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall, and the irony was lost on no one. The day before, half a million Warsaw Pact troops had poured into Czechoslovakia, land of Dvorak's birth, to crush a remarkable flowering of liberal socialism which, in Moscow's eyes, could not be allowed continue. For months, under the leadership of Alexandr Dubcek, Prague had been reforming industry and freedom of speech. Soviet tanks rolling into Czech cities, on August 20th, signaled the end of Moscow's patience.

Rostropovich, alive to the symbolism of his performance of the greatest Czech work for the instrument, reportedly played with tears in his eyes. On stage beside him were the Soviet conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov, and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. The mood in the hall was electric, though as the performance began, the protests which threatened to drown out the music subsided. The concert, which concluded with Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, has gone down in legend as one of the 20th century's most remarkable.

These sort of events always attract a certain degree of myth. Did tears really stream down Slava's face? Did anti-Soviet protesters really drown out the music? A letter to BBC Music Magazine, printed in their new December issue, sought to correct this one. No, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser, the impresarios who arranged the concert, firmly state in relation to the second. They write:

"As we were responsible for negotiating the visit of the cellist Mstislav Rostropotvich and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra to the BBC Proms on 21 August 1968 and subsequently to the Edinburgh Festival, we wish to point out the inaccuracies in Peter Haydn Pike's letter (September)."

They continue:

"In view of the Soviet invasion into Prague, we were all expecting trouble, but there was absolutely no interruption during Rostropovich's emotionally charged performance of the Dvorak Cello Concerto, no 'catcalls' to drown out the Shostakovich symphony, and the concert was broadcast in full."

The concert was broadcast, and the two pieces were released on CD, the Dvorak by BBC Legends and the Shostakovich on a separate disc by ICA Classics. Trouble is - there are interruptions, and there are catcalls. Hecklers threaten to hold up the start of Dvorak's Concerto, though they stop before the first note is heard. Things are different, though, in the Shostakovich. Hecklers yell, though it's not clear what, and the first, quiet bars of the Symphony are lost in a melee of protest and lots of shushing. (The first movement is not to be found on Youtube; Spotify users can find the recording there).

I'm not taking aim at the Hochhausers here, who've mixed with the legends of 20th century classical music and without whom London's concert scene would have been much the poorer. But memory's a funny thing, isn't it?

I took a pic of the page in question. Also, you can enjoy the "gems" from Twitter and Facebook.



The header picture is credited to "YouTube", though I suspect they didn't take it. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Saturday 28 October 2017

Making a good impression: The music of The Death Of Stalin



Can brutal dictatorships ever be funny? Armando Iannucci thinks so, and he's crafted a hilarious and terrifying film about the farcical circumstances surrounding the death of just about the baddest dictator of them all, Joseph Stalin, in 1953. The humour in his film The Death of Stalin arises from a few things. People act absurdly as they second-guess everything that is ever said to them. Stalin's ministers scramble for position as his body lies on his office carpet, still warm. And then there's the way with language familiar from Iannucci projects stretching back to the news spoofs On The Hour and The Day Today (old collaborator David Schneider joins him in the screenplay credits). Iannucci and friends are able to render horrible insults and threats funny by their weird specificity (see Beria shouting, from a little window, that he'll gouge out someone's eyes one at a time "so you can watch it happen"). Some question whether this grim moment in history should be played for laughs (see historian Richard Overy's po-faced critique of the film's historical accuracy, for example), but the humour heightens the horror. No one here is making light of on-the-spot executions or Beria's hideous abuses.

Most in the audience will, I suspect, find themselves too gripped by the grim spectacle of Stalin's ministers climbing over each other to advance their careers / survive (often both) to have noticed what goes on on the soundtrack. Mozart and Tchaikovsky here rub shoulders with a Shostakovich-sound-alike score from Christopher Willis, who has worked on a previous Iannucci series, Veep. I suspect Iannucci - a keen classical music lover - knows enough about Shostakovich to have asked Willis for something along the lines of the 10th and 11th Symphonies, which come from 1953 (the year of Stalin's death) and 1957 (a year after Khrushchev's "Secret Speech") respectively.  Willis has done very well, contributing music that sounds like those pieces, and which nods in their direction without borrowing too heavily from them. Listen out for a moment of muted, glassy strings, recalling a favourite atmospheric effect of DDS's, used in a number of the symphonies. There's also a mini-piano concerto which blends the nervy pianism of the 1st Concerto with squawky wind-heavy orchestration of the 2nd. Willis elsewhere mentions Weinberg as a reference point too, though I'd have to know my Weinberg better to spot quite how. Interestingly, the symphonies are the reference point, rather than the workmanlike film scores that Shostakovich pumped out during this period. The decision has generally been taken to avoid the faux-propaganda stylings we get so often, and I'm glad of that.

One element of the plot which could have been developed further involves a concert pianist, seen playing Mozart's 23rd Concerto at the start and the end, who turns out to be Maria Yudina. She's not (I don't think) referred to by her surname during the film, and I didn't guess it was meant to be her until I read the credits later. Her anti-Stalin feelings are not in question - she was a rare example of an off-message voice who was tolerated - and her intense religious faith is hinted at in the film. She's played younger in the film, though, than her actual 54 years, and rather more glamorous too. The whole, rather brilliant, opening scene of the film is based around a story from 1944 (moved up to 1953 here) of the scramble to record a version of a live radio performance after-the-fact, after Stalin requested a copy, and the on-air rendition had gone untaped. The source for this story seems to be the Shostakovich "memoir" Testimony (and you might know what I think of that), though there may be corroboration elsewhere.

Shostakovich fans can go and see the film confident in the knowledge that a particularly skillful pastiche of their favourite awaits, and everyone else can enjoy the jokes and cower at the brutality hidden in plain view.

I should also mention that the film is based on the graphic novel by Fabien Nury; proof to the skeptical, hopeful, that those things can have some value.

The image at the top is the film's best poster, I think, which uses a different visual trope of Soviet propaganda to to slanty 1920s stuff we usually see. The image is used for the purposes of review and study and falls under "fair use"; it will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s)

Thursday 19 October 2017

Thing happens, revealing larger thing about classical music



Just recently, a thing happened to a person involved with classical music. While some found this thing amusing, and others still commented that sometimes things just happen, this thing revealed a larger, more troubling thing about classical music.

Many years ago, things happened, but they were different things. Now, increasingly, this sort of thing is all too common in the world of classical music. But what does this thing tell us about the state of classical music as it presently is? Jenny Squeakygate, director of the London Contemporary Percussion Quadrangle, says this sort of thing does happen in the modern world. "The thing is", she comments, "that these things are a consequence of the way in which things are done and the ways in which the public engages with those things."

But is it really fair to simply dismiss this thing as a thing that happened? The format of reports such as this, coupled with a need to pick holes in things, suggests not. "While this thing might have been an accident, it reveals that many within classical music are actually very complacent about a lot of things", says Phillipa Barline, blogger and freelance commentator on things like this. "While organisations are throwing money at things, they are in fact neglecting other things, which I have decided are the most important things".

Whatever the significance of this thing, one thing is clear: things will continue to happen, and they may or may not be indicative of larger things.

Wednesday 4 October 2017

At the Fault Line of Life and Death

I visited the Somme last year as part of a school trip. This piece was written shortly after, but I didn't post it at the time, for some reason. Before we left, our school chaplain, Father Jonathan, told us the story of his great grandfather. It is, in part, the story of this man that follows.

Arthur Robert Carpenter looks at us, on his wedding day, in April 1912. Beside him, his bride wears a remarkable hat and a blank, even downcast, expression. Flanking them are two parents; we can’t be sure whose. No one in this photograph looks very pleased on this special day. It might be because of the lengthy process involved in taking such a picture 104 years ago, though it could also be because Arthur’s new wife was already three months pregnant.


There isn’t much to be said about their lives at this point in time, not because they didn’t have lives, but because very little of them has reached us. There are, however, clues. The simple house at the back of the photograph is probably a farm cottage, and while Arthur wears a suit on his wedding day, his boots reveal his trade: they are the well-worn footwear of a farm labourer. But then something changes. After November 1914, records exist that tell us where Arthur was, and the detail becomes clearer as Arthur approached the summer of 1916. And then, at the moment of greatest clarity, it stops, because Arthur Carpenter was one of 19,240 known British fatalities of the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

-

100 years later, our school party is travelling to the site of the battle, getting out of the classroom and standing on the claggy, windswept fields where it all happened. The second stop of the first day of our Somme is one of the key parts of this 13-mile front, a kind of ground zero on this fault line between life and death – Beaumont Hamel, the Sunken Lane, and the site of the Hawthorn mine. I’ve taught the events that occurred in this little valley for some years now, but being here changes everything. I realise that I’ve got the scale all wrong. All the action which in my mind’s eye plays out on a vast stretch of land was, in fact, concentrated into a small natural theatre, hemmed in by barren rolling hills that bring the horizon to within little more than 500 metres in any direction. The men who climbed through the bushes from the Sunken Lane, whose ashen faces stare back at us in contemporary photographs, knew that they were the first wave, well in advance of the British front lines. Where I envisage the battlefield from a distance of 10,000 metres and 100 years, their view of this unfolding tragedy must have been localised to an almost absurd degree. German lines stretched left-to-right only 200 metres before them. Clods of earth, thrown up by the mine, would have pelted their position at 7.20 in the morning, a full ten minutes before their attack began. It threw debris thousands of feet into the air and flung back the British camera crew filming from the base of the lane. The tremor travelled along the front, a high-explosive alarm clock signalling impending attack and, as we now know, mounting disaster.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. After almost two years of war, the German lines that stretched from the English Channel to the border of Switzerland looked immovable.  Pressure from the embattled French led to a British plan, an attack of such staggering force that German lines would simply fall away. The plan would also bring into play Kitchener’s volunteers, those million-plus men who’d answered the call-to-arms in 1914. Arthur Carpenter was among them, his having volunteered in around November 1914. We might infer a little reticence in his relatively late enrolment, but in truth, his feelings and motives remain unknown. It’s just as possible that the late-summer harvest was a more pressing concern than playing war.

From here, the plan is well known. An artillery bombardment of apocalyptic proportions would rain molten hell on German trenches along the 13-mile front for more than a week. Nothing, surely, would be left. Then, on July 1st, a series of huge explosions would disintegrate the more heavily fortified German positions and, as the dust cleared, the first wave of British infantry would walk across no-man’s land and occupy the deserted German lines. With machine-gun-spattered hindsight, walking would seem the last thing anyone would wish to do across the Somme, but these were inexperienced and heavily laden men. Walking would be the simplest option.

A while after our visit to Beaumont Hamel, we stare in awe into the carefully-preserved crater at Lochnagar, several miles south of the Hawthorn mine. While the Hawthorn has grown its own dense carpet of vegetation and other craters filled in, Lochnagar has been kept as a huge, gaping memorial to the men who tried to cross the expanse of ground to its west. And at 7.28 in the morning, as the force of the blast lifted the ground into the air, those standing within sight of it – warned in their orders that “the concussion will be considerable” – would have never suspected that even before a single British company had left their trench, the plan was already unravelling.

While British shells pummelled the ground along the front, German personnel were, unknown to the British, cocooned in deep bunkers, carved out of the chalk beneath the battlefield. After a week of constant noise and shaking earth, the barrage came to an end when, at 7.20, the Hawthorn mine exploded, alerting the German army that something new was coming. By the time British infantry left their lines at 7.30, German machine gun crews the length of the front were in position, ready to reap a bloody, unsuspecting harvest of men. At some point after 7.30, probably within the first ten minutes, Arthur Carpenter followed his company and others of the 11th Battalion of the Suffolk’s over the top. As they traipsed towards the Lochnagar crater, the Suffolk’s took immediate and heavy casualties. Bullets from German machine guns did carve through the advancing men, but as many were killed by German shells, now returning the pounding of the preceding week. Private WJ Senescall of the neighbouring Cambridgeshire Regiment later wrote about the appalling effects of this fresh barrage: “A very large shell fell some yards to my left. With all the bits and pieces flying up was a body. The legs had been blown off right to the crutch. I have never seen a body lifted so high. It sailed up and towards me. I can still see the deadpan look on his face under the tin hat, which was still held on by the chin strap. He kept coming and landed with a bonk behind me”.

Some accounts, such as that of 11th Suffolk Battalion’s Corporal R Harley, were able to recall the scene with a sardonic tinge: “A great many of our Brigade not being bulletproof fell before they reached the German line, for the Germans were mowing the grass with machine gun fire. I managed to cross the enemy's front line, when I halted and looked around for my comrades. The nearest of them were about 50 yards away, so I thought I would wait for the reserves to come up. As I was standing there I felt something hit my left-hand top pocket, which reminded me I'd better move. I did so and a few minutes later a bullet passed through my left wrist.”

It is likely that Arthur Carpenter joined the fatalities in these opening moments. His body was never recovered.

-

As we criss-cross the battle field over the next two days, it becomes easy to lose track of the once-immovable axis of rival front lines. I often have to refer to a map to pick out the now-invisible path of the conflict, though the scattering of submerged shrapnel makes the line of battle clear enough to farmers and their reinforced ploughs. And danger still lurks: when we arrive at Mametz Wood, scene of horrendous casualties in Welsh divisions in the weeks following July 1st, an unexploded shell lies perilously close to the roadside. Local farmers are still killed by the munitions that failed to do their work a century ago.

Instead of trenches, long since filled by locals keen to return the land to productivity, cemeteries trace the edges of the killing fields. The rows of white gravestones give some small visual record of the inconceivable loses, but they also mark the process that all such seismic events undergo, as hot war solidifies into cold history. Already, in 1919, that process was underway. As both sides were still counting their casualties, the Treaty of Versailles set out the manner in which German war dead would be commemorated here. As we stand at Fricourt, one of only two German cemeteries in the area, we’re lashed by an icy downpour. I can’t help but imagine it’s a small punishment for the indignity done by our own antecedents to those buried within, crammed four-to-a-cross in this meagre corner of the Somme.

At the same time as the Germans were suffering the humiliation of Versailles, British mourning was being standardised and filtered through the concerns of the day. Across the Somme, we find a particular a kind of language with which we are all perhaps unknowingly familiar, hewn into memorials and graves. “A soldier of the Great War known unto God” is a phrase seen again and again in British cemeteries across France and Belgium, words that resound with a kind of biblical portent and elegance found in the poetry of this post-Edwardian era. We see it again in the small cemetery dedicated to the men of the Devonshire Regiment, cut down on July 1st by a machine gun that sliced through their advance to the south of Mametz village: “The Devonshires held this trench, the Devonshires hold it still.” It conditions us, once a year, into a sombre, reverent remembrance; when else would we hear people use a phrase like “Lest we forget”?

The evening before we reach the Somme, we visit the vast British cemetery at Tyne Cot. On the ground of Passchendale, where men once died in deep mud, we’re greeted by the most golden sunset imaginable, the ribbon of stone that encircles the top of the hill bathed in orange evening light. Usually, the crowds throng here. Tonight, we’re alone at this site of pilgrimage. Yet, with no ancestor to find or namesake to seek out, this seems to me a vacant panorama of loss, the anonymity of its scale deadening, rather than consoling. Are there people here, or only names? Must we check our displays of grief in the face of the good taste of its classical elegance? I feel as uneasy here as I did as a child, expected to bow my head in silence for an enforced remembrance. I feel, standing here, like we are all Rudyard Kipling, our view of this war caught between two quite different impulses: the regimented displays of respect that Kipling’s propagandist poetry wreathed in the language of duty, and our modern repulsion at the horror and the waste, which too overtook Kipling after the loss of his son. If we’re going to find meaning here, surely it has to be in the lives, and not in the architecture.

-

And so, I’ve borrowed a life. Before our visit, our school chaplain, Father Jonathan Beach, speaks to my students about his great grandfather, Arthur Robert Carpenter. Arthur’s life is a thread of family history that connects Father Jonathan vividly to July 1st 1916. He recalls his great grandmother never being without Arthur’s picture within a locket around her neck, even though she remarried and had eight more children. When Arthur died, she received a standardised notification, the gaps in which were filled with the scant detail of his death. She asked again, in 1919, if anything more could be known. It could not.



Our final stop is to the imposing monument at Thiepval, the great red-brick and Portland-stone tower memorialising the British victims of the Somme with no known grave. I go straight away to find the wall on which Arthur’s name is inscribed. As I’d expected, it’s positioned, frustratingly, high up on one of the internal piers, but it’s there: CARPENTER AR. Suddenly, the whole monumental structure is invested with meaning for me: I can’t imagine the lives and deaths of 19,000 people, but I can imagine something of the life and death of this one, whose face looked out at me from his wedding photograph.

I say a few inadequate words about Arthur to our gathered pupils, and our guide Alain, an ex-military man, tells us what he feels at this place. “I feel three things. The first is tremendous sadness. The second is unbelievable gratitude. The third is great pride.” Earlier in the day, Alain had asked me what this trip had made me feel. I’d said something about my appreciation of the geography and how I saw the landscape differently, but at Thiepval, I realise I’d misunderstood what he was asking me. In the minute’s silence we share after Alain’s words, I think about the men, who came from so many different places, in every sense. As we leave, I tell Alain that my feelings about the war itself are so complicated and conflicted. I feel I don’t know what this war was really about, ultimately. But what I really see in the moment of silence is the faces of those men in so many photographs, like Arthur, who seem so far from us in so many ways, and yet are right there, looking at us. In the end, it need be no more complicated than that.


Images in this post have been used with the permission of Jonathan Beach, great grandson of Arthur Carpeneter.

Tuesday 3 October 2017

Rachmaninov Uncovered

When I first thought about writing about music, I remember the limits of my ambition being the idea of writing the programme notes for my local amateur orchestra. One day, it happened - the man who did them retired, and it turned out it wasn't as sought after a job as I'd imagined. A little later, I started playing the violin with the orchestra, very very badly, at the back of the 2nds. The job of designing to posters also came up, and I tried that out too.

I thought of all this the other day when I saw an angry professor of music on Twitter taking exception to the design of the CD on the cover of the new issue of BBC Music Magazine. I like to think of the professor of music in question as a friend of this blog, though I don't bring it up here intending to weigh in on one side or the other. Rather, it got me thinking about the way in which design suggests intention, or maybe its lack, and whether when borrowing imagery from the past, we aren't sometimes a little blasé about its origins.

But back to those posters. The only tools I ever had at my disposal were MS Publisher and the image editing software Gimp, which was on the receiving end of a lot of swearing and which I never really figured out. One of my first efforts was for a concert we put on of Russian music and, far more ignorant of Russian history than I now am, I reached for as many cliches as MS Publisher was fit to hold.



I threw slanty propaganda-style text at it, a splash of anachronistic red (look at the composers involved) and an image of St Basil's Cathedral for good measure. I had remembered putting in some Cyrillic style backwards Rs, but I clearly thought better of it before submitting the final draft. This concoction of visual stereotypes seems rather ghastly to me now, but it did the job at the time.


Next for the over-literal-visual-treatment was the New World Symphony. You can probably spot some Morris tropes beginning to develop - the big white spaces (you couldn't have a hard edge or border because the cutting process wasn't that precise), primary colours, and a favourite MS font which sadly doesn't appear in more recent versions of the programme. You know what, though? I still rather like this one.


This next one came from the legendary occasion when we played a November 11th remembrance concert with a difference - the difference being the inclusion of the first movement of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, for reasons which made sense to us at the time. It was as incredible as it sounds. And a fun fact - the future principal trumpet of the Philharmonia was one of 4 trumpet extras we added to our existing two, just for that piece. 


Now this one, if I may say, was a visual coup. I still have no idea how I managed to get Beethoven's eyes inside the shape of a lark (again, look at the programme).


The same sea of white space in this Elgar one, but you know what? I stand by it. Nice job.


This was my last and, if I may say, Best Ever BSO poster. I had learnt what to do with the oodles of required information, and I think really maxed out the potential of MS Publisher. But enough of BSO posters already - what about Rachmaninov?

Rachmaninov left Russia for good in 1917, after the October/November Revolution. Florid programme notes (like mine) like to describe the eve of his departure, with bullets whistling down the streets outside while the composer, in a white-heat of inspiration, rewrote his youthful 1st Piano Concerto, barely noticing the sounds of the world changing. But he was no fan of the Bolsheviks, and the loss of his homeland was clearly a source of great distress to him.



So it's rather incongruous for BBC Music Magazine to have slapped a picture of Lenin (in stained glass??) on the front of their cover CD, which features a performance of Rachmaninov's Preludes. What did Rachmaninov have to do with Lenin? As little as possible, the joke might end. Our musicologist friend put this to the publication, who responded that Lenin had more to do with Prokofiev and the disc's artist, Sviatoslav Richter, though it's hard to know quite what - Prokofiev skipped the country a few months after the Revolution and only resettled in the country in 1936, twelve years after Lenin's death. And Richter, though based in the Soviet Union until its demise, had his international career thoroughly thwarted by Soviet concert planners, who clearly saw him as some sort of flight risk (this is covered in Bruno Monsaingeon's excellent documentary on Soviet music, The Red Baton (Notes Interdites in the original French), and quite possibly in his essential film-interview with Richter, though it's been years since I saw that so I can't remember).

So there's an issue of relevance, though that's hardly new - British cultural institutions are quite happy to wheel out the Russian visual cliches to shift their Russian concerts, etc, and I can tell you that when designing that first poster, I was just drawing on the sort of visual shorthands for Russia that are all around in PR (silly me). It isn't unusual to see musical programmes relating to aspects of Russian history that include music only very tenuously connected to it. I wonder if we'd accept the same sort of tokenistic approach to cultures more readily associated with the current interest in identity politics?

There's a deeper problem, though, and it has to do with the willingness to reach for imagery that has altogether more sinister associations. It's actually unthinkable that a CD company would decorate their disc with an image of Hitler, and highly unlikely they'd go for Mussolini, or Franco, yet the Soviets aren't so off-limits. Lenin didn't commit the crimes of Stalin, but his rule was based on a large-scale disregard for the lives of those deemed outside the Communist project, and it's worth remembering that his economic policies during the Russian Civil War led to the deaths of millions of people through starvation. What would we be saying about our attitudes towards or even knowledge of these issues if we thought of his image as something attractive to cut and paste onto out CD cover? It's certainly not "overthinking" the problem to ask this question.

It's not as though BBC Music Magazine is alone in appropriating the imagery of totalitarian Russia. We are particularly in thrall to Stalinist propaganda, and with some good reason - its distinctive, highly effective and visually appealing. But we have to ask what that style was in service of, and whether we betray a certain crass disregard for its implications by pinching it to spice up our PR campaigns. I suspect this problems arises from the lack of clean break with Leninist and Stalinist Russia, which never fell from Western favour with the force that some those European fascist regimes did in 1945. Stalin lived on, having really won the Second World War, and his own propagandist legacy never decisively became the other half of a binary shared with Western might and light, in the way Hitler's did.

So the imagery stays with us, but without the black and white moral colouring of an SS uniform. Images, though, do add up to something, particularly in combination with other images. Any designer should be aware that pictures from the past carry worlds of baggage and meaning, and that we must dip into the art-box of history with caution. 

There was some discussion about the preferred spelling of Rachmaninov - He himself was apparently in favour of Rachmaninoff, but I just can't do it myself. I do look forward to hearing the Rachmaninov disc, and to discovering if the cover article on Shostakovich and the Soviet government departs from the formula.  The image of the November issue of BBC Music Magazine was posted on their Twitter account. I made all those posters, so I suppose the copyright rests with me; any other images have been used for the purposes of review and study and fall under "fair use"; they will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s).

Saturday 30 September 2017

Out of Time: The Music of Alfred Schnittke


When I was a nipper, just getting the Russian music bug, it seemed that Alfred Schnittke was the natural successor of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and all those other Russian composers who had broken into the Western cultural consciousness. You don't seem to see his music on disc or in concert all that much any more, however, and I'm not sure why. I've written something over at Bachtrack, though, with the hope that you might be tempted to fire up the YouTube and dip into the music of this challenging but very rewarding composer. Here's me getting a bit florid on the subject:

"Schnittke’s music is nervy, fragile, and its textures delicate stuff. Even at its most vigorous and agitated, it seems that if we could hold it to the sun, light would bleed through. Past and the present exist together here. Like cities, all music is built on the ruins of the old, but in Schnittke, the sound of centuries otherwise lost to us is still there, like ancient wallpaper revealed where new layers have peeled away. The frisson is in the ragged overlap between both; neither old, nor new, but something else, a distant memory that resurfaced just a moment ago."


Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Monday 18 September 2017

O brave new world, that has such freebies in 't!


Last night I popped on the London Symphony Orchestra's live stream of Berlioz's Damnation of Faust, broadcast in full and for free on YouTube. Most of my Twitter timeline seemed to be there, at the Barbican in London, and I was able to join them, for free. Live. Did I mention it was free? And live? Well it was.

The LSO's big catch, Sir Simon Rattle, brings with him an expectation of innovation and outreach, and free broadcast on YouTube would seem one way to chip away at that thick wall of assumption about classical music's supposed remoteness and elitism. They're not the first to try this sort of thing - live online broadcasts (though very not free) have been pioneered by Rattle's previous band, die Berliner Philharmoniker; Bachtrack, too, have of late been hosting free streams (including a rather exciting one from Gothenburg this Wednesday with some rareish Shostakovich (yes please) and an actual symphony by a non-dead composer). The buzz of Rattle's opening concerts, though, seems like a sensible time to the LSO to really go for broke and reach a bigger online audience than ever before. They're doing all three Stravinsky/Diaghilev ballets next Sunday which should, in theory, be the night-in of choice for every A level music student ever.

Build it - with the world's most sought-after maestro and essentially a free ticket to events sold out months and months and months ago - and they'll come, right? Not, perhaps, on yesterday's evidence. The LSO put on a good show - high-quality sound and image, a variety of fixed camera angles (pleasingly straight forward in comparison to the swoopy BBC Proms TV coverage), pleasant and informal interval fluff, and a live chat feed if you like that sort of thing - but YouTube's own viewer counter never rose above 300, and hovered below 100 for some of the second half. Maybe their numbers weren't accurate, and maybe there were other ways of watching this that will have boosted the figures, but the data I could see suggested that we're some way away from teenage bedrooms around the planet and smart TVs in far-flung living rooms reverberating en mass to the sound of live-streamed orchestral splendour.

It's also not clear where the LSO wants this to go, and if the free model is the aim or the way into a Berliner-style monetised package. It could be a "pay us a few quid and watch on YouTube" deal with the occasional freebie intended to hook in some newbies. If it really was only 300 people watching one of the world's greatest orchestras and one of classical music's most recognisable figures, it suggests that there's a long, long way to go. And in a world of freebies, in which it's entirely possible to consume almost any entertainment for free if you know how, what is there to suggest that the LSO playing live and effectively gratis is any more worth your time than any of the other stuff that'll cost you nothing? Of course, it's really super-exciting-premium-freeness to me, and probably to you, but classical music's greatest problem isn't the price. Rather, it's the mental block that exists in the minds of the many, many people who believe it isn't for them. And we can't discount the failure of the great institutions of the art form to make the case for their own specialness.

So well done LSO, who are really trying things where others stick to the programme regardless of effect. I will pester people I know to watch it all online. But this is likely to be only one little piece in a much bigger picture. If the world does come to appreciate the hugeness of the bargain they're currently missing on YouTube, arts-marketing-types will need to have found the way to crack some much larger barriers than the cost of admission.

Overgrownpath has some interesting musings on some related issues, not least the way in which digital platforms have allowed entertainment megacorporations to monopolise culture.

The picture at the head of this blog is a screen shot from the LSO's YouTube channel. At the time of writing, the video version of the live stream has had just over 4000 views. The seating capacity of the Barbican Hall is 1943. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Thursday 7 September 2017

Tuesday 5 September 2017

Shosta-faux-vich

He's heard this one before.
A Proms performance of Shostakovich's ubiquitous Fifth Symphony at the weekend brought out all its accumulated myths and canards, gleefully repeated by critics, programme note writers and radio presenters. They're trotted out so often, so relentlessly, that they may as well be true now, but from my little corner of the internet, I may as well offer a little corrective, because in all honesty, who else will?

If the story of the Fifth is not known to you, here's a brief recap. In January 1936, Shostakovich was riding high from the success of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an adaptation of Leskov's 1865 grim novella of the same name. Such was its acclaim that productions had already been staged in Leningrad and Moscow, but after a two-year run, the piece was to suffer a spectacular fall from grace when Joseph Stalin decided to attend a performance. Stalin's party left before the end, and a few days later an infamous review appeared in the official Soviet newspaper Pravda, entitled "Muddle instead of music". It railed against the cacophonous decadence of the piece and, in a vein which was to become very familiar to Soviet composers, complained "the power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, 'formalist' attempt to create originality through cheap clowning." It concluded, ominously, "It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly."

It was clear that the review followed as a direct consequence of Stalin's visit, but the extent to which he himself dictated its contents has been a matter of some speculation. It's juicier, of course, to state that Stalin himself penned the piece, though I've never come across any evidence to support this one. There's then usually a compression of what happened next: Shostakovich, who was working on his Fourth Symphony in the early months of 1936, is often said to have abandoned the piece forthwith, taking the end of the review (that it "may end very badly") as a clear hint that trouble of the terminal kind may follow if his present musical path wasn't left behind. But that's not quite true.

In fact, he remained bullish, despite the shock of the Pravda review. His close friend Isaak Glikman later recalled the composer saying "Even if they chop my hands off, I will continue to compose music - albeit I will have to hold the pen in my teeth." And, despite what you'll read elsewhere, he carried on working on his wild and complex Fourth Symphony for months; he played it for Otto Klemperer in May, four months after the review appeared, apparently with every intention of having it performed at home and abroad. And it went on like this. In the Autumn of 1936, full orchestral rehearsals were held, and it was only at this point, after a number of such sessions had happened, that the composer seems to have been convinced to cancel the Symphony's first performance. Even then, accounts differ as to quite why: some claim that the orchestra and conductor were under-prepared for the difficulties presented by the piece, though the more often accepted story has Shostakovich having a visit from some Party officials and being talked into dropping the whole thing.

Why does this matter? Well, compressing the narrative gives a very different impression of Shostakovich's propensity to take fright and his willingness to compromise artistic principles. The Shostakovich of the compressed narrative emerges far more inclined towards saving his own skin, though given the show trials and widespread executions of the period, such an impulse would be eminently understandable. The Shostakovich of reality remained committed to his artistic path for some months in the face of some very open official intimidation.

He did cave in the end, though, and modified his music enough for his next symphony, the Fifth, to be widely regarded as a "corrective". This one unfolded in a much more traditional manner - sonata form first movement, scherzo, slow movement and an apparently triumphant finale - though its more conventional form did provide the model for similarly proportioned symphonies (the Tenth, and to a lesser extent the Eighth) in which he was able to say some quite complex things. It also provided the rhetorical cipher for a new sort of musical irony, one in which the music could be viewed as saying the exact opposite of what it superficially appeared to be saying. The ending, famously, could be a glorious celebration, or it could be an utterly hollow fanfare, with tears of defeat streaming down the face as the mouth grins on.

But before we get too deep into irony, it's worth stopping to discredit the most common canard of them all: the Symphony's famous subtitle, "a Soviet artist's response to just criticism". This phrase, replete with either contrition or irony, depending on your point of view, is often placed into the mouth of Shostakovich, but it doesn't seem to have actually emerged from there. Rather, it was coined by a journalist, writing about the Symphony (I don't know who, but I recall hearing someone give the identity of the author). In Laurel Fay's biography of Shostakovich, the composer is reported as having written "one [critical interpretation] gave me special pleasure, where it was said that the Fifth Symphony is the practical creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism", a quotation credited to an article with the composer's name attached in a Moscow newspaper. 

So the composer seems to have acknowledged the statement (assuming that the article was written by him, which they weren't always), but he didn't come up with it and, importantly, it doesn't appear on the score as any kind of a subtitle. It may well have been popularly associated with the Symphony, at the time and after, but there's a difference between that and it being the kind of official subtitle as it is often purported to have been. Why does this matter? Well, firstly because it's not true and is frequently stated as being true, and secondly because putting it into Shostakovich's mouth suggests an attempt by the composer to shape the literal interpretation of the work in a way that he seems to have been, at all points in his career, very reluctant to do. For a long time, the statement was taken literally; latterly and in the light of the "revelations" of the now-discredited memoirs Testimony, as a statement of brazen irony equal to that signaled in the Symphony's closing minutes. If Shostakovich didn't make the statement (which he didn't) then a move in the ironic shadow-dance is subtracted and we're left to look for our answers in the music.

One more thing. If we're going to preface our quotations from Volkov's Testimony with words like "disputed" or "widely disbelieved" or "thoroughly discredited", then don't we have to stop quoting lines like "your business is rejoicing!" and, in the case of the Tenth Symphony, "a portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking"?

Sunday 3 September 2017

Those were the Proms that were

Semyon Bychkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms (Photo: Andrew Morris)
It's gone so quickly, especially when seen from a distance. There may be two weeks left, but my Proms are over, save the delayed TV relays and the Last Night hate-watch which, as ever, I hope none of my non-classical friends tune in for. And the distance is because I have never lived further from Prince Albert's mighty, wildly unsuitable hall, so four visits was my lot this 2017 season.

One solitary promenade in the arena meant I stood for less than any season since 2002, but that one Prom was a whopper. Rattle's Gurrelieder - effectively beginning his LSO tenure in style - was the one I'd mentally marked on P-Day (when the Proms are announced and which, now I think about it, is NOT a good name). UK people with a internets can see it on the iPlayer until the end of September, and would be advised to seek it out as, like an eclipse, it's a heavenly wonder that doesn't come around that often.

The others were all Bachtrackers - two from the BBC NOW at the start of the season (Prom 5 and Prom 6), the highlight of which was Nicola Benedetti's completely incredible performance of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto (and you may have heard that I like him). My last visit was last week's BBCSO performance of Tchaikovsky's Manfred, which you can read about here (look out for a favorite character from Toy Story in the review. See, you want to know now.)

Friday 1 September 2017

Now where have I read that before?


How nice to see my words appearing in BBC Music Magazine, though, what's this? They appear to be in quote marks. So now, I'm wondering, if straight quotation from my liner notes makes up a third of the CD review, does that mean I'm owed some of the reviewer's fee? Probably not, though at least I spelled the composer's name correctly.


It's Boris GOLTZ, Michael.





Friday 7 July 2017

Igor Levit's monumental performance of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues

Birmingham Town Hall (Photo: Andrew Morris)
My long drive up to Birmingham was rewarded with an intense and riveting performance of Shostakovich’s mighty Preludes and Fugues from pianist of the moment, Igor Levit. Here’s the introduction to my Bachtrack review:

Deep into Igor Levit’s monumental Birmingham Town Hall performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s vast cycle of Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, I wondered if this work was some kind of Everest for pianists. It’s rare to meet it complete, in concert. The careful, transparent counterpoint places exacting demands on its interpreters and although it’s never flashy, there are devilishly difficult corners. Success here depends upon unwavering concentration from musician and listener alike. If you fell, there’d be no soft landing, and certainly nowhere to hide. But the mountain analogy only gets you so far. This isn’t music of lofty vistas, of high-wire daring or summit-triumph. Shostakovich’s immaculate miniatures are spare, interior, and their rewards quiet and very personal. When Levit reached the final page of the last, defiant fugue – the effort and intensity registering on his face and his hands pounding out its final unisons – it was clear that this was a long, lonely and intensely moving pilgrimage to some of the subtlest landscapes the piano can paint.



Friday 26 May 2017

Classical fans bemoan poor quality of yet-to-be-announced Proms season

A broken record


Music fans have freed extra time for whinging this year by bemoaning the poor quality of programming at the 2017 BBC Proms early, three weeks before season details are even due to be published. Twitter, Facebook and other forms of carping have been awash with complaints of slim pickings and dumbing down in the yet-to-be-announced concert series. Twitter user @classicalbore commented that there would be “not much worth seeing at the #2017Proms. Can tell already.” There have also been suggestions that Norman Lebrecht is to dust off his annual Proms-bashing article template and has been seen examining the more obscure composer anniversaries listed in the Boosey and Hawkes music diary in search of outrage-worthy omissions in the season’s programming.

Aficionados are also anticipating an excuse to whine about the dearth of British composers programmed this year, with music by such unsung greats as William Alwyn, George Lloyd and Kaikhosru Sorabji unlikely to be performed. A post on the Bax Botherers forum summed up the mood among many anoraks, complaining “The BBC think they can throw us a performance of Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony now and then and that we’ll stop going on about music no one else likes. In actual fact, every performance of a piece by a composer not born in Britain is another missed opportunity to play one of Brian’s 31 other symphonies.”

Meanwhile, Proms organisers are expected to continue their wearisome commitment to composers who aren’t dead by including new commissions in otherwise granny-friendly concerts. Jenny Squeekygate, head of new music at the Proms, commented “Believe me, none of us like this stuff anymore than you do, but we have noticed an inverse correlation between contemporary music and champagne-related accidents in the Albert Hall boxes.  And besides, it just wouldn’t be the Proms without a 7/8ths empty Oli Knussen concert, would it?”