Proms at … Bold Tendencies Multi-Storey Car Park – Steve Reich – Multi-Story Orchestra/Christopher Stark, with Hannah Grayson [the midday sitting]
Steve Reich
Vermont Counterpoint
Eight Lines
Music for a Large Ensemble
Hannah Grayson (flute, piccolo & alto flute)
Multi-Story Orchestra
Christopher Stark
Reviewed by: Nick Breckenfield
Reviewed: 3 September, 2016
Venue: Bold Tendencies Multi-Storey Car Park, 95a Rye Lane, Peckham, London SE15
In its most daring relocation yet, the Proms once again headed east and south of the river, this time to the ex-car park in Peckham where Bold Tendencies has fashioned a artistic and community space over several floors, presumably a reason why resident orchestra, Multi-Story, is so named. With its spectacular views north to the skyline of the City and railway line immediately to the south – and open to the elements at the side – this is a world away from the hallowed (if immense) intimacy of the Royal Albert Hall.
For many of the audience this was a new venue – that in itself is important, and hopefully many will return to Multi-Story’s annual summer programme in the venue – and this first (of two) performances was packed for an 80th-birthday nod to Steve Reich (his birthday exactly a month hence).
Three works, growing in players between each, started with flautist Hannah Grayson playing against seven previously recorded lines of hers to create Vermont Counterpoint. The interleaving pattern had a curious 2D semblance, the seven parts issuing from loudspeakers being rather flat, compared to the 3D sound so obviously coming from Grayson’s flute, piccolo and alto flute. It left me wondering what a performance with eight live flautists might sound like.
In essence my hypothetical question was answered immediately, in Eight Lines. Two pianos, flutes, clarinets, violins, violas and cellos – all live, but amplified, making the bass clarinet particularly sound like a pumping saxophone – presented with aplomb Reich’s trademark slow progression underpinned by vibrant repetitive rhythmic cells that gradually change metre and harmony to provide the musical impetus. Christopher Stark can make his beat dance – ideal in this repertoire – even where it’s five beats to the bar. Cast in five sections, the fourth and fifth have the cellos enhancing the long lines offering a soothing balm to the other instrument’s continuous and infectious chatter.
Finally an increase to twenty-six players (unfortunately the ‘car-park ticket’-style, unfolding free programme did not name Multi-Story’s members) for Music for a large ensemble. Now the pianos had two players each, with also a batch of tuned percussion joining winds and strings, as well as four trumpeters who occasionally play unison long notes to add to the activity, specifically written to be just encompassed by a player’s breath. It occurred to me that amidst Reich’s busy figuration there is always a calming tread: somehow this music makes me breathe deeper. Coupled with his use of the piccolo – in all three pieces, which somehow just makes me want to smile – this programme had a cumulative joyous effect.
The performances were excellent. How the broadcast (of the second concert) coped with the car park – and the trains rumbling by outside (perhaps Different Trains would have been an appropriate work to include) – I’ve yet to find out, but sitting close to the Orchestra (and a loudspeaker) the acoustic was immediate and realistic. But spare a thought for the players who have an additional factor to accommodate: the necessity of clothes pegs to hold their parts in place, which means an extra level of co-ordination at page-turns.
I wonder if in future years there may be an exchange programme – Berliner Philharmoniker or Ensemble Intercontemporain performing at Bold Tendencies while Multi-Story tour to the Royal Albert Hall, hopefully taking some of their regular audience north of the river.
- The 3 p.m. concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 (available on BBC iPlayer for thirty days afterwards)
- BBC Proms www.bbc.co.uk/proms
Steve Reich message to Bold Tendencies and Multi-Story from Hannah Barry Gallery on Vimeo.
The latest offering of the Proms at… series was as much about the uniqueness of the venue as the performance. The low, concrete recessed ceilings of the Bold Tendencies Car Park provided an intimate, immersive acoustic, ringing with the anticipatory thrum of the audience in conversation and the periodic clatter of trains passing through the nearby Peckham Rye Station. In the semi-darkness, shafts of rectangular daylight framed a spectacular view of the London City skyline.
The Multi-Story Orchestra rendered an intense account of Eight Lines, opening with a measured clockwork quality, then with instruments hammering melodic phrases above the repetitive underlying structure to form a hypnotic web of sound. It was a pleasurable experience to tune into each contrasting element, appreciating the textures and then drifting back into the whole. At one point the metallic shriek of a passing train added a pleasing component to this rich and intricate mix.
Julian Anderson’s music has been heard at the Proms with some regularity since 1995. Harmony (for choir and orchestra) was commissioned to open the 2013 season and his latest work, Incantesimi, goes beyond mere effectiveness, exploiting the particular ability of Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker to spin long slow musical lines.
After the interval, Brahms’s Second Symphony, though cut from the same revisionist cloth, proved more rewarding as an interpretation. Rattle attempted a difficult trick, working to lighten textures physically while imparting at times a positively Wagnerian sense of shadow. Given his unexpectedly deliberate overall conception, the first-movement exposition repeat was off the agenda. However Rattle did ensure that the violins were placed antiphonally. Purged of emotional overkill and without the expected rhythmic foundation, the music risked seeming merely stodgy.
The first of two Proms given by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Simon Rattle.
Mahler is central to Rattle’s repertoire – he conducted the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony whilst still a teenager. A smoothly rendered tenor horn solo at the start of the Seventh suggested, in its poise, the polish and musicianship for which the Berlin players are renowned. From funereal beginnings we were soon swept into Alpine splendour, strings relishing their moments of ardour, with Rattle sustaining the first-movement’s epic sweep and heroic stance right through to a well-shaped climax and a coda that was no less intense.
Completing the Proms’ bijou bipartite Boulez bash (the Berliner Philharmoniker only just off the stage after starting its first Prom with Boulez’s Éclat – played with …er… éclat), Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain – which he founded forty years ago this year – returned to the Royal Albert Hall in its own tribute, together with the BBC Singers and Baldur Brönnimann.
There was another sense in which this concert celebrated Boulez’s contribution to the Proms: it was a late-night that garnered only a small though committed audience, especially given the earlier sell-out for Rattle, and a trend-bucker to the other ‘lates’ this season. It didn’t affect the quality of the performances, starting with Bartók’s spiky reaction to Stravinsky’s Les noces. Indeed, the first of his Three Village Songs from 1926 is about a wedding, contrasted with the subtler ‘Lullaby’ before the rumbustious ‘Lads’ Dance’. It was an ideal palette-cleanser after Rattle’s sumptuous Mahler 7, with the Ladies of the BBC Singers rising to the challenge to the Scenes’ guttural Slovak. Boulez had conducted two of the work’s three previous Proms performances, introducing it in 1974.
Boulez’s latter interest in electronics was next on the bill, with every sound created by violinist Jeanne-Marie Conquer and fed back by IRCAM’s computer wizardry to create a web of accompaniment that resounded across the vast interior, while our focus was on the single player. In six sections – opened, linked internally and closed by a passage entitled Libre – Anthèmes 2 dazzled and amazed until Conquer’s final pizzicato acted like a switch for the stage to be plunged into darkness. To be honest I was unaware of the passing of sections and indeed of the passage of time (it certainly doesn’t feel like twenty minutes), so mesmerised was I by Boulez’s freedom of imagination in a work dating from 1997.
A further stage rearrangement (pushing the concert to a twenty-minute overrun) set the scene for the largest ensemble of this Prom – twenty-seven players and thirty-two choir (two to a part) – for Boulez’s 1986 revision of his cummings ist der Dichter, which gained its title over a misunderstanding. For the Stuttgart premiere Boulez had written to the organisers that “cummings is the poet” which they mistook for the title and translated into German. The name stuck. Boulez’s response to the arch anti-capital letter poet’s single sentence (though elegantly spaced over a number of lines in the programme) is both witty and deadly serious, here presented, with éclat, as a glittering jewel to bring this tribute to Boulez to a close.
One of the grand seigneurs of Baroque ‘period’ performance, William Christie has opened out the music of Rameau, Lully and Charpentier, has been unfailingly true to the spirit of Handel’s operas, and conducted one of the most revelatory accounts of Monteverdi’s Vespers of recent memory.
The choral sound was devout and homogenous, and while these singers’ retreats into a hushed pianissimo for “Qui tollis” (‘Magnificat’) and “Et incarnates est” (‘Credo’) were beautifully controlled, they didn’t suggest the mystery made perfectly clear in the liturgy. You couldn’t fault the reverence of Christie’s overview of the work, but it was hard to imagine it as anything else but secular. There is a hard angularity to the ‘Kyrie’ that was smoothed down by suavely unfolding choral entries over an easy, moderato tempo.
This Prom opened with an impressive premiere, Bayan Northcott’s Concerto for Orchestra, finished this year. Northcott (born 1940 in London) – critic, author and composer – has written a concise piece full of appealing incident lasting about seventeen minutes that can be considered as a ‘symphony in one movement’ (and as such on a par in quality if not language with the respective No.3s of Lennox Berkeley, Roy Harris and Oliver Knussen). Furthermore, musical substance and compositional rigour far outweigh extraneous or obvious display.
It was then good to hear Mozart given with romance and esprit rather than as a quickstep lock-in. Sprightly yes, but not breathless or inflexible, and Baiba Skride was in elegant and exacting form in a reading that interacted nicely with a reduced and considerate BBC Symphony Orchestra. The slow movement was particularly touching in its heartfelt shapeliness, while the midpoint excursion to darker turns of phrase was especially poignant. The Finale danced along gaily if at some expense to its courtliness, and the ‘Turkish’ section has been more ‘percussive’ and tempestuous than this.
The music of Viennese-born Alexander (von) Zemlinsky (1871-1942) – better-known as a conductor during his lifetime and who ended his days in New York – tends to lose out considerably to Mahler’s oeuvre in terms of scheduling (and Alma Schindler rejected Zemlinsky for his rival), and he said himself that his Lyric Symphony, completed in 1923, was indebted to Das Lied von der Erde. Yet musically it owes less to Mahler and much more to Schoenberg, Gurrelieder specifically.
Particularly compelling was the fourth section (the second half of the slow movement), given to the soprano – “Speak to me, my love! Tell me in words what you sang” – which was total wonderment, spellbinding, and whether expressional or expressionist, the whole of Lyric Symphony here made a huge impression, ending with a glorious orchestral epilogue that is closely related to the twilight zone that concludes Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (written just a few years before), and which the BBC Symphony Orchestra had played three evenings before, wonderfully for Semyon Bychkov’s searching interpretation.
While both works in this Gustav Mahler Jungendorchester’s Prom are profound reflections on the end of life, when a hundred or more youthful musicians turn their thoughts to death there’s a fear that adolescent angst will triumph over sombre contemplation. In the end it didn’t, of course, and such disappointments as the concert contained originated as much from other sources as from the players themselves.
At least Jordan scotched any sense of the Ninth seeming like the bleeding stump of a longer work. Unfinished it may be; incomplete it is not – to the ear at least. The absence of Bruckner’s intended Finale leaves us with a satisfying three-movement palindrome, its central Scherzo-Trio-Scherzo a second palindrome within that. The third movement, Adagio, is a mosaic of musical arguments and self-quotation that goes through myriad colours until the mood stills into a conclusion of Mahlerian finality.
The concert had opened with a reading by Christian Gerhaher of J. S. Bach’s Ich habe genug. This extraordinary call for death’s release can be shattering, but in the German baritone’s account it felt more like a meditation and as such was something of a disappointment.
Kamasi Washington might not have been the most obvious artist for the Proms, yet the success of the triple album The Epic certainly propelled him to the forefront of the current jazz scene, making him a shoe-in for the Royal Albert Hall following high-profile gigs at last year’s London Jazz Festival and Glastonbury this year. With his seven-piece band of virtuosos, things were set for a late-night Prom such as threatened to burn-up a venue by no means unaccustomed to roof-raising sets from non-classical performers.
A further vocal number followed in ‘The Rhythm Changes’, Quinn’s imploring singing rather overawed by choral chanting that skirted monotony (Washington has spoken of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms as an influence that could have been more resourcefully deployed). There followed a premiere – ‘The Space Traveller’s Lullaby’, in which the band was heard to often hypnotic effect as its playing infused the RAH ambience. Energy levels were duly upped with a flood of blistering solos on ‘The Magnificent 7’ which rounded off the night.
Alex began his Promming career two years ago, at the age of four – seventeen years younger than I was when I began mine, in 1977. In the four decades since then, the Proms have lost most of the maverick glee that informed the front rows of the Arena. Some of the traditions remain: when the piano lid is raised, there’s still a “Heave!” from the Arena and a “Ho!” from the Gallery, and orchestral leaders still get a burst of applause when they play that A. But the days when each foreign ensemble was greeted by a shout in its own language (to the visible astonishment of the players) and other co-ordinated chants commented on the music are long gone. So it does my aging heart good to step into that vast space and feel it crackling with the energy it used to know all those years ago – no matter that it emanates from thousands of little people.
The concert began with the actors on the stage and starting to engage the audience. We need an orchestra, they said, and it duly trooped on, section by section, stood up and played. There’s a good idea, I thought, until I realised that no one could hear them or was paying attention in the first place. But a film presentation of the music and characters from favourite TV shows brought loud yells of recognition (not from me: I was out of my depth here).