Mad King
John Bridcut
Perhaps the most original celebration thus far of the American Revolution was the performance at the London Round House last week of Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs fora Mad King, which tell of George Ill's wretched attempts to teach his bullfinches to sing. With the text by Randolph Stow, the work has had considerable success in the seven years since it was written, and this performance was recorded for television, so a note about its genesis may be opportune.
The score reveals that, in 1966, Stow was shown a miniature mechanical organ which was once owned by the King; it played eight tunes, and with it came two scraps of paper explaining that 'This Organ was George the third for Birds to sing', and that James Hughes, in whose family the instrument was to remain for nearly 150 years, was servant to the King for thirty. Stow was deeply disturbed by it, and imagined the King struggling to teach his bullfinches, or to sing with them 'in that ravaged voice, made almost inhuman by day-long soliloquies, which once murdered Handel for Fanny Burney's entertainment'. The eight poems incorporate recorded sentences of George himself, and are the King's monologue as he listens to the birds, sometimes trying to converse with them.
Maxwell Davies faithfully realises all this in musical terms. The four finches are represented by flute, clarinet, violin and cello, who also have mechanical birdsong instruments ; the percussionist of about twenty-four talents is the King's warder, sometimes helped by the pianist, who also plays dulcimer and harpsichord. The King is nominally a baritone, but needs a range of more than four octaves, so that by leaps, grunts and whines he can build up strange chords in the voice—which in part suggest the frothy sort of madness, yet also represent the mercurial jerks, mental or audible, which many of us know when alone. Here is the key to the treatment of madness: the composer observes that until recently it attracted only mockery ; now, with a greater understanding of psychiatry, we can be more compassionate, and, although one would have to be unbearably seriousminded not to find some of this piece very funny, the overwhelming impression is of the wretchedness of so pathetic a man; our sympathy is further engaged when he talks with sense ('Where is the Queen, why does she not visit me?'), or with beauty ('Sweet Thames, flow soft') or with awareness of his own predicament. That is the shaft that sears.
The King's musical efforts were staunch, if not generally crowned with success. Hence Maxwell Davies refers to other composers and quotes extensively from Messiah, for Handel suffered at the royal hands. The climax comes in the seventh song, where his 'Comfort ye' has its sense quite inverted, and the King dances round to a bizarre foxtrot, marked `smoochy'. Suddenly his mood changes, he grabs the violin-bullfinch from its cage, plucks the strings hysterically and then crumples it in his fingers. In one action he destroys the bird, surrenders to madness, acknowledges his own musical failure and murders part of himself, so that in the final song he can declaim his own death.
The experience was thoroughly haunting, heightened by the fraught, introverted performance by Donald Bell, resplendent in George Ill's purple dressing gown, supported by the Fires of London under the composer's direction. Prerequisite are baritones confident of their recuperative powers after venturing way above the soprano stave, and a supply of spare violins, but nevertheless this should join the repertoire of more chamber opera groups around the country.
The rest of the Fires' Prom concert was turgid by comparison, though the programme notes by Veronica Slater were fully comprehensible for once and refreshingly free from contemporary cant. Oliver Knussen's revised version of Ocean de terre had its national premiere. It sets a splendid surrealist poem by Apollinaire for soprano and chamber ensemble, but many dramatic opportunities in the text were missed, and the French sounded ill-stressed. Mary Thomas made no attempt to communicate with her audience as she turned the large pages of the score, and her wearying vocal monochrome did not assist the message. Maxwell Davies's Dark Angels is a bleak, spare setting for voice and guitar of two poems by George Mackay Brown about the death of the only two children in a dying Orkney valley. The composer lives there (a long way from the England where the programme would have him reside) and feels the tragedy keenly, yet the poetry itself is so rich and strong that the music is a vapid obstruction. Dominic Muldowney, like Knussen aged twenty-four, had his Solo/ Ensemble performed. Not quite as uninspired as the title, it is the product of architectural thinking—in the way the aspect of a building or sculpture shifts as one walks around it, the small ensemble change notes, timbres or registers among themselves ; meanwhile a percussionist perambulates between three groups of instruments, playing and pretending to play (which gets him a few inexpensive laughs). Gary Kettel, after Coming to the River at the Royal Opera, is becoming quite an accomplished itinerant performer.
Last Friday's Prom at the Royal Albert Hall was a Hungarian affair. Roger Woodward brought his ferocious aplomb to Liszt's Second Piano Concerto, in which the novel woodwind scoring in the gentler passages was well highlighted. The pro
gramme note for Basta's Concerto for Orchestra was rather too confortable for my liking, with Richard Steinitz admiring its skills in the same way he would those of Britten's Simple Symphony. But John Pritchard and the BBC Symphony Orchestra offered true grit; how, with that anguished cry from upper strings and woodwind at the first forte entry, this work can ever be seen as cosy is beyond me. Its integrity and nobility were especially stirring here, and the Shostakovich parody had the right touch of bitterness as well as ribaldry. TimothY Bond made his solo debut in Ligeti's two Studies for organ from the late 'sixties. Harmonies consists of a ten-note chord being sustained for nine minutes or so, with notes changed singly and adjacently after durations chosen by the player. The registration is always shifting, within the range of pp to pppp, which on most organs would not allow much variety. But Albert's is 110 tiddler, and Bond managed some very creepy sounds, as the composer wanted. This is a much more revealing test of sonority and colour than was the MuldowneY work. Coulee is a virtuoso feat: based on all open fifth, a harmonic cluster grows, expands, accelerates; Ligeti specifies jaipossibly that the piece should last three and a half minutes, which works out at twentYfive notes per second. Those with a degree of stop-watch mania will have timed Bond s rendering at three minutes fifty-five seconds—which, in the circumstances, Was not so much Olympic as Olympian.
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