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).

Proms week 4: Russians, Reich and Spaghetti Westerns

The Proms aren't just the London shop window for international orchestras; they're also just about the only chance for Britain's 'provincial' orchestras to display their wares in the capital.  Each visits annually; we've had the CBSO and Halle, and Prom 35 (BSO/Karabits/Tynan - Liszt/Gliere/Rachmaninov - 10th August) was the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's opportunity to show London the fruits of it's continuing relationship with Ukranian chief conductor Kirill Karabits. 

Karabits is a man with pet interests and most take in the music of Russia and Eastern Europe.  Shchedrin's music has featured prominently in the concert programmes and recent discography of the orchestra, and here it appeared that Karabits intended to dust off another infrequently heard Soviet era bit player.  Reinhold Gliere's name doesn't pass over many people lips too frequently, though Russian music fans (though Gliere was in fact Ukrainian) might have heard the Concerto for Coloratura Soprano given in the first half of this Prom.  I'm not as sceptical as Colin Anderson at Classicalsource, finding the work a pleasant if sugary diversion channelling Rachmaninov's Vocalise and some more fruity Italianate arias, but without the programme (which at £3.50 I'm refusing to buy) I never twigged that this sub-Tchaikovsky slice of lyrical kitsch could have been composed as late as 1943.  Special mention, though, goes to singer Ailish Tynan whose beautiful voice made the best possible case for what at best remains a curiosity.

I've made my thoughts on Liszt known before (though there are exceptions), and his symphonic poem Mazeppa didn't change my mind, sounding to me like a second rate Flying Dutchman.  Rachmaninov's Second Symphony is also a blind spot for me, amazing as that seems to be to anyone I admit it to.  I've always found it an over long work which fulfils the apparent cliches about his music that are avoided in many of his greatest works.  I was, though, swept along by the BSO's performance.  Karabits's direction was mostly swift and straight forward (aside from a fatally mannered delivery of the scherzo's second theme), though, as much as I enjoyed it, I remain unconvinced that the last movement is a strong enough answer to the undoubted weight and attraction of the first.

Steve Reich is 75 this year, though you'd not put him beyond 60 in his trademark baseball cap.  Prom 36 (Reich/Ensemble Modern - 10th August) celebrated his birthday (a little early) with three classic scores, two of which come from the very beginning of his classic minimalist phase.  Clapping Music is as simple as a duet can be, but must be fiendish.  The clapping parts phase out of synch until they reconnect at the end.  Standing but five metres from the great man as he clapped his way through it will stay with me, even if the hard walls of the Albert Hall worked against the amplification. 

Electric Counterpoint, of which I'm very fond, followed; but the centre piece was Reich's hour long statement of music as a gradual process: Music for 18 Musicians.  On paper it sounds like a recipe for tedium, but the unchanging pulse gets inside the audience over the course of the hour and the effect is strangely uplifting and collective in scope.  My feet fought against it, though, after standing through the Bournemouth Prom and ultimately I think Reich refined the process and acheived similar results in some of his later, shorter scores.

That was my last stand in the hall of the week, though I luckily got a seat to review Prom 39 (Spaghetti Western Orchestra) late on Friday and you can read my thoughts at Classicalsource.  For reviews of all the Proms I haven't mentioned, head to the Classicalsource main page.

Proms week 3: Part 1

Only a week away and yet so much Proms water is under the bridge.  I returned from six nights abroad on Saturday and was persuaded to go to Prom 21 (CBSO/Nelsons/Midori - Strauss/Walton/Prokofiev - July 30th).  Conductor Andris Nelsons is only 33 and is already the talk of the town.  He has a particular love of Richard Strauss's music and his Don Juan showed his supple control of its shifts of tone and texture.  At the other end of the programme was something of a Nelsons party piece: The Dance of the Seven Veils from Strauss's opera Salome, an odd choice of dessert to plonk after Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky.  Nevsky was bold and clear with smaller than usual choral forces making the vocal textures lighter than they can be, though I'd have liked a bit more terror in the famous Battle on the Ice.  Before that, Midori proved unpersuasive in Walton's little heard Violin Concerto; her performance might have been more appreciated in a smaller venue but didn't make the case for what seemed like an episodic work.

I caught the next few on the radio.  Prom 22 (BBC Phil/Noseda - Rachmaninov - July 31st), the latest in the 'choral Sunday' series, was a treat for Russian music nerds.  Rarely heard bits of Rachmaninov included his cantata Spring, composed around the time of his Second Piano Concerto; some short choral pieces and a pair of dance from his student opera Aleko.  All very nice, if not quite top draw Rach, though his own favourite amoung his works, The Bells, concluded the concert and made a better impression on me than previous hearings.  I couldn't take soprano Svetla Vassileva's warbling in Vocalise, though.

Prom 23 (BBC Phil/Noseda/Hough - Beethoven/Saint-Saens/Liszt - August 1st) took me back to my student days, when I heard Stephen Hough's magical performance of Saint-Saens's Fifth Piano Concerto (The Egyptian) with the LPO at the Festival Hall.  I'd never heard it before and was bowled over by its wit and stylistic sleight of hand.  Hough did it all again at the Proms on Monday, remarkably enough giving the work its first Proms outing since 1918.  It's still dazzling and great fun, though Hough took some of the charm from the finale by driving on too fast.  Liszt's Dante Symphony (another concert hall rarity) didn't completely hold my attention, so too swift a dismisal would be unfair - Liszt does still strike me, though, as a composer more remarkable for his inovations than for the general quality of his music.

The links above will take you to the Proms listings, from which UK readers can listen to the concert for a limited time only.  Prom 21 was broadcast live on BBC TV.