Catherine Malfitano in Janacek's 'Jenufa'
The British public knows what it likes. A shame, says our classical editor Martin Hoyle, who suggests more creative programming
Catherine Malfitano in Janacek's 'Jenufa'
What do you think? Any suggestions?
We live in a golden age for the arts says Tony Blair (last admitted artistic experience: ‘The Sound of Music’), and certainly London offers some of the best professional training in the world. Traditionally (Berlioz noted it) London’s orchestral players are unequalled in sight-reading and busking decent performances on rehearsal time that the Berlin Philharmonic uses for getting their instruments out of their cases. Ability and dedication among the professionals, then: so why do the same titles recur week after week? Because management, ranging from the despairingly idealistic to the cynically opportunist, recognise the great British public’s abiding sin: It Knows What It Likes. Renaissance Florence this ain’t.
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Predictable programming of hoary old chestnuts is a blight afflicting London’s classical life from brows so high they evoke the Bride of Wildenstein to the knuckle-dragging depths of those beloved specials – for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Christmas – which bring in coachloads from the sticks. The average Raymond Gubbay promotion fields an interchangeable blend of ‘Your Hundred Best Tunes’ and favourite TV commercial themes. Hackneyed favourites from ‘Carmen’ (lust and murder) and ‘Cavalleria rusticana’ (lust and murder) can feature for Valentine romance or Mother’s Day.
But even high musical culture never stirs too far from a core repertoire forged from the second half of the eighteenth to the first quarter of the twentieth centuries. Of course new music is programmed, but usually balanced by a crowd-pulling guest soloist in something familiar. The virtuoso’s duty done, the spectacle of post-interval empty seats is depressingly familiar.
The only cure is time. Janácek once emptied Sadler’s Wells; today his operas are box office. Mahler has caught on in Britain only since the ’60s. Yesterday’s challenge is today’s toe-tapper. But it takes time. If the bottom line is funding just schedule another Beethoven concerto series or Sibelius symphony cycle.
Or, God help us, baroque. The Early Music bubble was predicted to be bursting 20 years ago. It’s still here, thanks to rediscovered masterpieces. But too often vaguely-labelled catchpenny ‘baroque’ programmes are shovelled on at tourist-trap venues like St Martin-in-the-Fields. Students, amateurs, pros filling in – it doesn’t matter. The pool comprises Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, Pachelbel’s Canon, Mozart’s ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik’, and Handel’s eternally arriving Queen of Sheba who’s come so often she’s obviously discovered multiple orgasm. All great music, but mercilessly plugged in nightmarish rotation week after week.
It’s up to audiences. And audiences are products of education. Despite Blair’s references to our golden age in his first major speech on the arts, great cultural eras have never depended simply on subsidies for flagships. They need a public, from Shakepeare’s raucous groundlings to the riotous galleryites who made or marred Verdi’s latest. Catch them young. And not just by inviting Oasis to Downing Street. Someone should tell Tony. How to liven up London’s superb musical resources?
What do you think? Any suggestions?
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Winfried Zillig
The snow-bound 1937 opera on the last days of Scott of the Antarctic, ‘Das Opfer’, by the distinguished German composer Winfried Zillig (died 1963), holds immediate interest for the British. The chorus of penguins representing the hostile forces of nature poses problems in an age with a livelier sense of the ridiculous than the Third Reich.
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August Bungert
(Died 1915) Not his opera tetralogy inspired by Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, a Wagner rip-off, but topical tone-poems like ‘Graf Zeppelin’s erste grosse Fahrt’, a graceful tribute to Teutonic technology.
Fidelio Finke
Finke (died 1968) was rediscovered and championed by André Previn. His father admired Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ and named his children after the opera’s dramatis personae, down to ‘First Prisoner’ and ‘Second Prisoner’. Finke studied with his uncle Romeo (presumably he had an aunt Juliet, following family tradition). His music covers a wide range of styles from late-Romantic to serial. Some of his titles – the opera ‘The Magic Fish’ and the song ‘I Am a House’ – suggest a tendency to surrealism.
George Antheil
Antheil (died 1959) was nicknamed ‘the bad boy of music’ (by himself). Relatively well represented on record, his livelier works call for eight pianos and aeroplane engines. American-born, Paris-based, friend of Ezra Pound and married to Schnitzler’s niece, he allegedly carried a gun in his pocket for protection against the audience. Or possibly he was just pleased to see them.
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11 comments
I don't volunteer for a whole evening of music which is rightly described as challenging, but I still want to be open to new music, so I like concerts that give me a chance to get accustomed to new pieces by mixing them with pieces that I know I will enjoy.
It's contradictory to recognise that education matters, whilst putting off huge numbers of people by the way orchestras dress. There's no resason at all to continue with formal dress from a hundred years ago. It leads so many people to dismiss classical music as "only for the elite".
Getting rid of this anachronistic convention will do much more to make orchestral music accessible than the embarrassing "best of" awards nights that have appeared in the last couple of years.
Once the Edwardian evening dress has gone there will be lots more room for imagination in developing performance styles that suit the target audience.
I've often sat in classical concerts and felt like tapping my toes and waving my arms about in time to the music. Why doesn't someone open a classical disco where we could fling ourselves about, but to classical tunes?! OK, I'd probably be too embarrassed to actually go, but it might catch on.
Maybe you should try living outside London to realise how lucky you are! Oh for the luxury of 'another' Sibelius cycle! In London of all places surely there's something for everyone, from the baroque hits for tourists (have you been to Prague or Vienna? - it's much more 'in your face') to the contemporary stuff for the hardline new music fan.
I agree with the previous comments - surely audiences vote with their feet and if they did not want to listen to a certain piece of music they would go elsewhere ?
I have attended many concerts at St.Martin's and whilst the programmes may be 'audience friendly' this is no bad thing and the performers are always top notch. So what if they actually play what people want to listen to ? Surely St.Martin's is the most successful non subsidised venue in the country, I do not believe that the St.Martin's or any of their performers are subsidised by the Arts Council (or Time Out) so they have to perform what makes economic sense to the best of their ability, and (as far as I can see) to the highest artistic standards. It is the role of the subsidised sector to perform works which would be non-economically viable in the market place. Surely it is time for Matin Hoyle to actually applaud the extensive musical work of St.Martin's, rather than every week make snide remarks about their programming - I do not see him doing any better ?! It is always easy to preach from ivory towers..
I've enjoyed concerts at St.Martins & recently heard "12 poems of Emily Dickinson",A.Copland by a
very talented singer.I've never heard this performed & feel
it was something different!
What is the problem? Your snide remarks the other week & again the opening line in your blurb.. Seeing everybody working so hard at St Martin-in-the-Fields producing enjoyable concerts for most (you can't please everybody ALL of the time..) makes me wonder what that chip on your shoulder stems from? Is it people working hard & giving many hours of live enriching, classical music to hundreds(even at the frightening looming risk to themselves with the building works being a tough hurdle) that gets your goat, or is it the fact that people actually find enjoyment in something you so obviously enjoy sneering at? They're not the same greased over businessmen that slick through the city in pin-striped suits etc. - instead they have a passion & are trying their utmost to keep music alive and available to the public at their own risk - I'd say that was quite brave & worthy, attributes which sadly seem to be lacking these days wouldn't you think?
I think the venues are one of the problems. Particularly the albert hall which has the worst acoustics and worst views of anywhere i have ever been too, yet it is our premiere classical venue. You are either on the circumferance miles away from the stage or down on the floor below the stage, staring at the scaffolding supporting the performers.
I think the middle three "unknown" composers in the sidebar in the magazine were invented. (Broughton is well known anecdotally if never performed; Anteil gets the odd outing in London -- I think I've heard maybe two or three works of his in London in the past ten years.) If they weren't invented, their works sound pretty bad, though of course you never know. They also seem to have composed predominantly music theatre, which is more expensive to put on and often harder to present since ideas as well as words become strange even if the music works. (This is true of a work as significant as Lady in the Dark, for example -- the book is unperformable these days because of its naive Freudian assumptions about gender, though the music and the dream sequences are still amazing.) But London isn't exactly short of new and rare music theatre, even with the loss of the Bridewell as a producing house and the potential lost of BAC.
For concert works, the Proms does its bit for lesser known last-century symphonic composers, though never enough for their fans. And maybe Nicholas Kenyon will bring a year-round Proms approach to the Barbican. The South Bank has the London Sinfonietta in residence, although their programming is fairly heavy on commissions.
It's not great, and things have perhaps become slightly worse since the wonder year of the Barbican's great American series in the late 1990s, but there there are plenty of opportunities for programming rarer concert works.
There are also many recordings available, although often of works that it is better or essential to hear in the hall. The recordings, though, aren't likely to encourage new listeners into the hall, even if the works are performed live. I'm afraid in the end the source of the problem lies in the way music is squeezed out of the national curriculum, so that many potential listeners don't know enough to know what they might like, or even where to start.
I'm sure people who regularly attend classical concerts in London would like the opportunity to see more challenging work, but there are many others - myself included - who have only recently learned to appreciate classical music. We are grateful to catch up with the classics like Carmen and even the Queen of Sheba.