Prom 25: Boulez/Birtwistle (Radio 3/ online)

Pierre Boulez is a composer notorious for reworking his music, sometimes over many decades, and never quite reaching a conclusion (he has commented that works of art are never finished, only abandoned), with the result that his catalogue is full of torsos and "works in progress". Ironic then, that due to the late running of the earlier prom and the vagaries of London's public transport network this late-night offering from the London Sinfonietta and the BBC Singers was already up and running by the time I got home and turned on the radio, so I only heard his recent completion of Dérive 2 as a fragment. I shall certainly be taking advantage of the excellent BBC Radio player to listen to the full work, though, as it was an extraordinary and beautiful work. Boulez is the man fingered by many of those who oppose all avant-garde music since 1900 who ruined it all, and I'll admit I have issues with parts of his aesthetic*, but you'd have to be fairly cloth-eared not to be able to revel in the luxurious sounds he conjures up here. I wonder how the fact that I shall hear the opening of his piece after the close relates to his ideas challenging the idea of a "complete" work?

Coupled with this sensuous, glowing music was another of the bogeymen of contemporary music, Harrison Birtwistle. Again, Birtwistle is a man much misunderstood, as the frequent extreme complexity of his textures belies a thoroughly direct, even blunt, approach. Neruda Madrigals is one of his gentler works, and its more austere sound world, conjuring up thoughts of the Northern landscapes that he inhabits, made an excellent pairing with the Boulez, and made me regret that it was impracticable for me to stay and hear it live. What a shame this sort of thing gets increasingly and timidly relegated to late night slots. One hopes that this is a trend that will not continue when Roger Wright takes over the Proms from Nicholas Kenyon (aka the Doctor out of Star Trek Voyager) next year.

Players and singers were as good as you'd expect, and isn't it good to see in Susanna Mälkki a woman at the forefront of was is still largely a male domain?

* Maybe I'll get round to writing a post about this eventually.

Proms 6&7 (Radio 3)

I dashed home after Ives and caught the first Late-Night Prom on Radio 3 (I might have stayed, but I'd never have got home). This was notable as it had made the news bulletins the previous day, featuring as it did the first modern performance of a Mass by Alessandro Striggio, a composer at the court of the Medicis, in which the choir divides into 40, and later 60, parts. If you know your early music this will sound familiar, as it was this mass, as well as a motet in 40 parts by Striggo, that inspired the Duke of Norfolk to ask aloud if there was an English composer who could match this feat, to which the answer was yes - Thomas Tallis stepped up to the challenge and composed his own 40-part motet, Spem in alium. All three of these works were performed here, and there's no denying that the sheer gloss of sound in so many independent voices sounding together is overwhelming. It should also be noted that Tallis comes out on top as the better composer (to these ears, at least), but the Striggio works were very much worth hearing, and the final Agnus Dei of the mass, where the choir divides into 60, was an extraordinary and special moment, a shimmering, gossamer texture that wafted the scent of the divine even into this embittered atheist's soul.

Last night's concert was equally special, the combined forces of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestre national de France coming together under the baton of Kurt Masur (celebrating his 80th birthday) to perform Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings and Bruckner's Symphony No.7. Tchaikovsky has such a reputation as a Russian misreablist that it's refreshing to hear a piece like this, all light and joy. At the risk of sounding like a Classic FM DJ, this really is music to soothe the soul. Bruckner is a composer I've taken a long time to appreciate - as a shallow youth I dismissed him as long-winded and dull, but I've come to realise how wrong I was, and that he's a unique composer of almost transcendental qualities, whose occupation of space-time chimes strongly with Tallis and Striggio's clouds of sound.

Prom 4: Berio/Rossini (Radio3)

Now that the new taste fascists have taken Modernism as their whipping boy, I worry that there will be a comprehensive purge of large swathes of musical history between roughly 1910 and 1980. Now of course there's an awful lot of modernist rubbish that deserves to be forgotten, but there's a lot of rubbish in any era that deserves to be forgotten, and it would be a terrible shame if some very fine composers were to be buried purely due to their use of a style that is now outdated. Berio is one such composer, and his Sinfonia, which forms the first half of tonight's prom, is a case in point, a highpoint of Modernist music (and indeed Post-Modernist) whose glowing textures and warm wit speak of a humanity that current received wisdom would deny could be present in this sort of music, as well as a determination to say something that is certainly becoming rarer. I wonder how much one could get out of it if one did not get the various references and quotations that it contains (in particular the extensive "commentary" on the scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony), whether it's enough to hear the surreal clash of the tonal and non-tonal. But this isn't something I can answer, although it seems Berio takes for granted in this a certain level of musical knowledge that you simply couldn't assume these days if you were aiming at anything beyond a vanishingly small group of people. Will this, rather than any stylistic fashion, be the death of this piece? I can only hope not, because it's a wonderful experience, and it's ably performed here by the Swingle Singers and the Chorus and Orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia, Rome under conductor Antonio Pappano.

The second half was an Italian classic from an earlier age, Rossini's Stabat Mater. This is one of those pieces I never enjoy as much as I think I'm going to, and so proved the case here, although the players did a very fine job and there were many lovely things on the way.

Happy Smith-Day!

I'm reminded by an entertaining article on BBC4's Front Row that today is Mark E. Smith's 50th birthday. Happy birthday, Mark!

Of course, in the unlikely event that he actually read this, he'd probably tell me to fuck off, middle-class wanker. He'd be right, of course.

You can hear Stewart Lee, among others, talk about why the Fall are great via the BBC's splendid listen again facility.


(Lego Mark E. Smith from here.)

Hooray for radio!

Maybe it's the Man-Flu making me even more of a grouch than usual, but isn't TV shit at the moment? The odd repeat (Life On Mars, Charlie Brooker) apart, it's wall to wall unwatchable trash that actually makes me wish Torchwood was still on.*

Thank god for the radio. Already today I've heard some great documentaries about memory, Woman's Hour, and some Beethoven. And I've got a Sibelius concert on Radio 3, a documentary on Herbie Hancock on Radio 2, Chain Reaction on Radio 4 and Lee and Herring on BBC7 to look forward to. And that's not even to mention all the stuff you can listen again" to on the interweb (like yesterday's editions of Ross Noble and Down the Line, for instance). And all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff on Resonance FM, where you really do never know quite what you're going to get (which is a Good Thing, of course). There's a ton of stuff there, so switch off the telly and use your ears.

Talking of radio, I've just heard professional shit-stirring twat Norman Lebrecht advertising his show this weekend on Radio 3, when his subject will be blogs. Read this, and then email him, and make him look like an ignorant fool.


*I must confess to a strange obsession with Deal Or No Deal, though. Especially this week, which has an astoundingly camp twat called Bunney on it, who sings a song about whoever's playing that day before he opens his box.