Music
Bright and whimsical
Robin Holloway
This month's second season combining opera at the Almeida Theatre in Islington with new music days centred around the Old Music Hall in Hoxton has been more elaborate than its predecessor, with more than twice as many events, embracing a wide variety of interests and pleasures. Some have moved beyond Hoxton High Street: Gainsborough Film Studios, the impressive hulk which once housed Hitch- cock and now hosts a Shakespeare compa- ny, pending its conversion to canal-side flats, has been twice commandeered (to present Berio and Viktoria Mullova). Back in Islington the Union Chapel, that bizarre outburst of Victorian repro-Bruges in the middle of a sober Georgian terrace, lent its evocative interior to a three-hour selection from the ten-hour totality of Cornelius Cardew's Great Learning, key work of the English idealist avant garde where radical and democratic infiltrate.
But the charming intimacy of the old music hall with its fancy ironwork and gilt mirrors remains the festival's heart. The concerts there cunningly combine contrast and complement; best of all came on 4 July, a collection of precious miniatures inhabiting the area even beyond Webern where frugal spareness approaches quasi- extinction — Kurtag setting Lichtenberg, Knussen setting Rilke, for unaccompanied soprano (Sarah Leonard, with magnificent authority), an etiolated instrumental duo each from Per Norgard and Kaija Saariaho. After which the meeting of all the forces for Birtwistle's Monody for Corpus Christi was positively climactic; its intricate spidery lyricism comes early in his output and already forecasts all that is greatest in it.
A complete evening of such small pieces, however, can be more tiring for audience and players alike than a single long haul. This was so with the first night, which pre- sented no fewer than 18 short new pieces by composers under 30 for an ensemble of seven. All were specially written, all but one new to London, nine of them new to the world. Charming, silly, pretentious, sometimes unwittingly wise were the young composers' replies to a canny questionnaire devised by one of the most gifted, Richard Baker (Q: How do you answer the ques- tion, 'What is your music like?' A: 'Reluc- tantly'; and another dares to say: 'All the excitement my life lacks'). The overall stan- dard was high: only two seemed to me to fall below in technical accomplishment and poetic fantasy. But this just made for a vague uniformity: everything was similarly bright, shiny, whimsical. The two excep- tions, whose greater intensity propelled the notes from within to communicate emotion as well as pattern or process, were the striking first half of Cheryl Frances-Hoad's Tread Softly and the whole of Jonathan Powell's Saturnine.
And so to the Almeida operas. All three were variously disappointing. I emerged from each quizzical and querulous, asking all over again why such manifest skill, sophistication and effort should result in something that fails to move the spirit or feed the imagination. It was particularly difficult to answer when, after Param Vir's Ion, I was greeted by its composer with an expectant smile: 'What did you really think?' Really becomes a bit unreal in such circumstances. What I really think is that a potent subject was lost to its full human expressivity in a texture of busy note-spin- ning, in itself admirably musical (albeit rather anonymous), but fatally deficient in variety of pace. For such a story a facility of notes is a liability. Monteverdi and Gluck knew better: concentrate the emotional essence by strangling all florid or compli- cated emoting. Ion, not being finished in time, was punctuated with spoken resume. One had neither desire nor curiosity to hear these gaps plugged with more music, and indeed welcomed the variety of pace and texture given by Janet Suzman's highly charged fill-in.
It's harsh on a score like this, manifestly composed with education and labour, that the simplistic collage of natural sounds, spoken and intoned texts, and a string group exploiting the harmonic series, which comprises Earth and the Great Weather, an evocation of Alaska by John Luther Adams (who has lived there for the last quarter century), made a stronger impression. It was pleasant to relax into images of wind- tossed branches on screen and barren shin- gle onstage, often lit with great beauty, while singers and tape told of plants, beasts, birds, winds and waters, snow and sunshine, seasons and mythologies — as innocent as Thoreau's meditations upon Walden Pond. The sweet naivety was answered by occasional furious and point- less breaks for virtuoso drummers, and more generally compromised by the dis- crepancy between the naturalistic subject and the the technology by which it was reproduced.
In contrast, Per Norgard's Nuit des Hommes works video as well as electronic manipulation of live sounds into the essen- tials of the genre. This expansion of Appol- linaire's lyrics to a span of symbolic plotless abstraction achieves that elusive, romantic goal, fusion of the arts. The cast of two he as lover and soldier; she as beloved, muse, mother, goddess of death; both in chorus — are in continuous voice from start to close (a personal triumph for both singers). A curious construct, combining table-and-chairs with astrolabe, descends rotating from the roof now and then, caus- ing strange shadows on the screen already filled with video images derived from the singers' faces and bodies, interacting with a fanciful explosion of visible words, the English of the French originals as sung, making a kind of apotheosis of the surtitle. The 'orchestra' (string quartet and assorted keyboards) is hidden up at one side but loudly amplified. All this certainly fuses, but only at the cost of a marked crudity of every individual element. The one that loses most is music, which should be prima- ry. If Ion suffers from 'too many notes', Norgard's work suffers from making its music too subsidiary. What he permits to survive is attractively supple, loose-limbed, malleable — as always the work of a distin- guished and experienced composer, here placed on automatic pilot in a well-meant endeavour to be self-effacing which results in self-marginalisation. One wanders off into the Islington night remembering noth- ing better than the visuals.
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