Living Music Festival 2008: Concluding Comments

One thing I read before the Festival was a review of that Remembering Ligeti thing I talked about a while ago. This was of course in the super soaraway Journal of Music in Ireland. The reviewer (one Barra Ó Séaghdha) did the usual thing of going on about how great Ligeti was and how much fun it was to hear his music in Dublin, but he then launched into a bit of a screed against the then forthcoming Living Music festival. Basically, he reckoned that it has gone soft, and that by basic itself around nicey composers like Pärt it was trying to court a boring mainstream classical audience. As members of Frank's APA may recall from a zine by my beloved, a mere four years ago the festival was focussed on electro-acoustic weirdo music, attracting virtually no audience from outside the world of serious musicologists. The writer reckoned that following festivals based around Steve Reich and John Adams with Arvo Pärt, the festival has lost whatever edge it has; he predicts that the next ones will star the likes of Phillip Glass or (shudder) Michael Nyman.

Before going to the festival, I was thinking that Ó Séaghdha was maybe overstating things a bit. However, I became more sympathetic to his position afterwards, or could at least see what he was getting at. The age profile of attendees seemed much higher at this year's festival. I suspect this is because Pärt's music, whatever its other features, is something you can listen to without having a degree in musicology or being a hipster elitist. Put more straightforwardly, it is the kind of thing your mother would not mind listening to. That is not to knock it, as it is at least theoretically possible that there could be music that is both objectively good and accessible to a mass audience. It does make me wonder, though, whether the purpose of contemporary music festivals should maybe be to introduce people to music they may initially be uncomfortable with. Or maybe there is now a need for a Continuity Living Music Festival that will leave the nicey modernist music to RTÉ and focus itself on weird and uncomfortable new sounds.

This should not be taken as a criticism of Pärt's music, however. Fundamentally it should be possible to make music that is both challenging and appealing to the ear, and I think that he manages it. Oddly for one so associated with choral pieces, I found this to be more the case with the pieces that eschewed the use of human voice, but to each their own.

It was also maybe interesting that they kicked jazz out of the festival, after just introducing it last year. This is a bit of a shame, as the Big Satan gig was on of the highlights of the 2006 Living Music Festival. But maybe in the end the appetite for new music is rather pigeonholed with the jazzers not really wanting to engage with the contemporary classical and vice versa. This is surely unfortunate, and implies that the supposedly forward-thinking aficionados of new music are not actually that open-minded.

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Living Music Festival 2008: Sunday (part two)

Sunday, National Concert Hall

RTÉ Concert Orchestra
Ian Humphries & Darragh Morgan (violins)
David Brophy (conducting)

David Brophy was very enjoyable to watch conducting, for all that there was the slight fear that at any moment his mother might arrive and bring him home for being out past his bedtime. Tonight we heard three Pärt pieces before the interval, these being Collage über B-A-C-H (1964), Passacaglia (2003 / 2007), and Tabula Rasa (1977). After interval drinks, we had local composer David Fennessy's This Is How It Feels (Another Bolero) and two more Pärt pieces: Wenn Bach Bienen gezuchtet hatte (1976 / 2001) and Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977 / 1980).

One odd thing about this evening's entertainment was a sudden attack of TALKERS, not something you normally get at classical music events. There was one older lady near us, and she seemed not really to register that being at a concert is a bit different to listening to a record at home, so she was quite happy to chatter away over the music, particularly the tunes she was not so fond of. David Fennessy's piece in particular had her talking away; she was not the only person who found this work (a re-working of the Inspiral Carpets classic*) a bit much. I, however, am a forward thinking individual, and I found its abrasiveness highly enjoyable.

The Pärt stuff was deadly as well. Tabula Rasa might have been the most striking work. Apparently when it first appeared it was considered rather daring, in that it was like a retreat or a repudiation of high modernist experimentalism and a re-adoption of older forms. The whole thing is rather string based, but in the second movement it introduces a prepared piano, whose odd noises made it sound a bit different from the return to traditionalism one might have expected. All the other Pieces were string-heavy, and my conversion to all things string meant I enjoyed this evening's performance greatly.

Pärt came onstage at the end and we all gave him the clap. He seems like a nice old fellow, so it was pleasing to see him basking in the attention. And then he gave a little speech… in English! Wow, up to then the word had been that he didn't speak a word of our great language. Truly there is nothing that this man cannot do.

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*this is an untrue comment, being made here for the purposes of humour.

The Strange World In Which We Live

Link from Jim's Occasional Journal of Sorts

Warning: Mullets

Posting on my other blog about the giant golden statue of Turkmenbashi reminded me of the one person I know who has actually seen it, former work colleague Gordon. You may recall that last year I mentioned how he was going to drive off to Ulan Bator in a shitey car, for charity. I never said anything about him coming back, so maybe you have been worrying that he is still somewhere in central asia? Fear not, he made it back alive.

Pictures shamelessly lifted from the website set-up to chronicle the adventures of Gordon and his partner in crime, on which you can still donate money to his featured charities.

Living Music Festival 2008: Sunday (part one)

National Gallery of Ireland

RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet
Joanna MacGregor (piano)

This took place in the afternoon. Ms MacGregor only joined the Vanbrughers for one piece, a performance of a 1976 piece by the late Alfred Schnittke. The rest of the programme had everything that Pärt has ever written for the string quartet. This came to three pieces, Fratres (1977), Psalom (1986/1991), and Summa (1977/1991). They also performed Lamentations of the Myrrhbearer 2001 piece by some guy called Ivan Moody (not a local composer as originally inferred), and Schnittke's Piano Quintet of 1976.

I enjoyed this programme a lot more than I expected to, finding myself coming to the conclusion that maybe string quartet music is the highest form of classical. The Schnittke piece might well have been the best, having as it did a kind of doomy mournfulness that nevertheless retained a certain lightness of touch. The Moody piece, meanwhile, was so relaxing that a sharp prod from my neighbour was needed to rouse me from my slumbers. The Pärt pieces, all pretty short, were also greatly enjoyed, with Fratres and Summa providing an interesting contrast between Fast Arvo and Slow Arvo; the latter reminds me somewhat of the opening of the Rheingold, with the music flowing along in a similar kind of way. Apparently it illustrates this tintinnabulation thing that Pärt pioneered, but I wouldn't know about that.

So yes, top marks.

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Living Music Festival 2008: Saturday

Christchurch Cathedral

Polyphony
Stephen Layton (conducting)

This was all choral all the time, with these Polyphony people performing various short religious choral pieces by Pärt, and a couple of others by some Poulenc guy. Poulenc seems to have been some French shagger before he got religion and started writing loads of god-bothering work. Although there were no musical instruments being played, the singers were effectively being accompanied by the audience – not through their singing along or giving them the rhythmic clap, but through their inability to sit still despite the Cathedral's provision of the world's creakiest chairs.

What did I think of the music? Ah sure it was grand, it's always nice to hear the religious music in an actual church. I'm not sure if I was actually blown away by it, though, and I found myself wondering if choral music is not actually my favourite form of classical music after all. The piece were they just roll through all the ancestors of Jesus Christ was entertaining, though, and a great source of funny names to afflict on children.

We didn't get tickets to the evening performance in Christchurch of Pärt's musical scoring of St. John's Passion, but we heard from someone later that it was "fucking tedious", being just a load of people chit chatting away to each other only singing their lines rather than speaking them. This meant it never really gelled as actual music, though it might be something you could get more into if you were, you know, religious.

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Living Music Festival 2008: Friday

National Concert Hall

RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra & RTÉ Philharmonic Choir
Joanna MacGregor (piano)
Tönu Kaljuste (conducting)

The first piece was a non-choral 2003 composition of Pärt's called Lamentate. It was nice enough, but I could not really get much purchase on it. To extend the tactile metaphor, its surface seemed too slippery for me to get to get to grips with, so I cannot really say whether I think it is any good or not, which I suppose must be a criticism of either me or the piece.

After the interval we had the 1990 Berliner Messe. This was a choral & orchestral work, and when you realise that messe is the foreign for mass you get the idea of what they were all singing about here. However, there was no priest on stage, so this was not a real mass. I found this piece pleasant to listen to, as part of my general approval of choral music.

Credo was the last piece, another choral and orchestral piece, originally composed in 1968. I think it might be about Pärt's growing religious sense, or maybe his reacting against that, or something. It seems quite anguished with all its discordant noises and people shouting and stuff – maybe it represents some kind of crisis of faith and so on. But I gather it was an important transitional work for Pärt, representing the beginnings of his moving towards the style of music for which he is best known. I am mad for the discord, so this was my favourite piece of the evening.

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2008 Living Music Festival: Introduction

This seems like ages ago... I seem to be generating material faster than I can post it here. Oh well. Anyway, Arvo Pärt is this Estonian composer guy. He is quite old now, and has been writing his music for a long time, producing work that fits into the 20th century musical mould of dissonance and atonality as well as making tunes your mother would like. His religious faith seems to have increasingly informed his work as his career progressed, with much of what he does being choral work of a devotional nature.

This year Pärt was the featured composer in the RTÉ Living Music Festival. Unlike last year's composer (John Adams), Pärt actually showed up, which was nice. My beloved and I went to a good few of the concerts, though we missed a few because lethargy made it impossible for us to go for tickets before they were sold out. Sigh. I was particularly upset to miss the Crash Ensemble performances, as their stuff has typically been a highlight of previous Living Music Festivals.

I will talk about each concert we attended in turn.

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Albert Hoffman

You have probably heard already that Albert Hoffman died yesterday. He was the man who synthesised LSD while working for a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. He famously discovered the psychoactive powers of the substance after realising that he had ingested some through the skin on his fingertips, and that this was leading to odd visual effects. He then did what any respectable scientist would do, and orally ingested what he reckoned would be modest dose, and then tried to cycle home. Unfortunately, he had taken the equivalent of several hundred times the normal dose for a recreational user of LSD.

Mr Hoffman was 102.

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Pinups & Pricks: The Verdict

After listening to each record once, Cave's covers album wins. This might be because Kicking Against The Pricks sounds very like an early Bad Seeds record, more so than Pinups sounds like a proper Ziggy Stardust era Bowie album. Or maybe it is just that I listened to the Nick Cave record second, making it fresher in my mind.

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