Category: Classical Music

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Manchester Collective: Cries and Whispers – Live Review

The White Hotel, Salford

Saturday 14 March 2020

Everything they touch turns to musical gold

*****

Dmitri Shostakovich

This was a concert for troubled times. Manchester Collective’s Managing Director, Adam Szabo thanked us for braving the weather and the virus. He said that this performance, the end of a short tour, would be the end of Collective concerts for a little while. He asked us to share our thoughts with freelance musicians. For those who work in the gig economy, everything is uncertain.

We had been promised dark music, unsettling art for unsettling times. We began with the deep dark twisted fantasy of a madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo, set for string quartet, Moro Lasso whose original words began, 

I die, alas, in my suffering,
And she who could give me life,
Alas, kills me and will not help me.

The chromatic harmonies of the piece are as warped as the character of the composer, whose depraved history was mentioned in the introduction by violinist Caroline Pether. It would not be until the dark days of twentieth century when such harmonies be used regularly in western music again.

Caroline introduced the next piece, Benjamin Britten’s First String Quartet, as dark but also magical and human. Written in America during WWII, it began with sparkling partials from the upper strings, before the main theme appeared. At another point, the notes fell like gentle rain.

Throughout the piece, the variety of sound produced by just four string players was remarkable. Sometimes quiet and ethereal, at other times gutsy and grainy, always visceral. The playing was always passionately rhythmic, driven by a fierce musical intelligence. As the Collective themselves put it,

Our string quartet concerts are some of the most personal shows that we build. There’s something about that particular lineup which feels terrifyingly intimate – like there’s a direct connection between each of the four players, and every listener in the room.

This being the White Hotel, the venue itself provided its own soundtrack to the music. The garage door behind me rattled – was it just the wind, or spirits trying to get in, or out? Snatches of chatter, a ring pull on can snapping open, a police siren, a car rumbling past. In the middle of it all, the players sat undisturbed, watching each other with undivided concentration, external distractions somehow making the emotional power of the music even more focused.

The final piece was Shostakovich’s deeply personal eighth string quartet. It began with a doleful melody, then the sound of a wounded creature crying in the night. Painful sweetness led to stuttering, manic dance. Fierce sawing of bows, a lumbering rhythm, then eerie high strings. A nostalgic melody, then shimmering, aching beauty. Then a bitter calm. The performance was spellbinding, drawing us deep into Shostakovich’s dark and anguished world. It seemed to be over very quickly, as if we had stepped outside time for a while.

Having heard the Collective performing several times recently, I can now safely say that everything they touch turns to musical gold. Please come back soon!

Gesualdo Moro, lasso
Britten String Quartet No. 1
Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8

Caroline Pether Violin
Doriane Gable Violin
Ruth Gibson Viola
Jack Bailey Cello

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Britten The Turn of the Screw – Opera Review

Opera North

The Lowry, Salford

Wednesday 11 March 2020

A superbly creepy staging of Britten’s masterpiece

*****

Sarah Tynan as the Governess and Nicholas Watts as Peter Quint ©Tristram Kenton

The small scale of the forces involved in Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera was evident when the whole cast came on stage at the end to take their well-deserved applause; rather than the usual choruses of flower girls, matadors and several principal roles there were just six people. The orchestra was equally small, just 13 players. This creates a peculiar intimacy, ideally suited to this intensely claustrophobic and atmospheric ghost story. Every singer and musician was exposed, and they were all equal to the task.

The set played a vital part in creating the unsettling atmosphere, dominated by a huge bed which cleverly doubled as a puppet-theatre, and a stage coach, perspectives and images distorted and exaggerated like terrifying visions from a child’s nightmare of a fairy tale. Even inanimate objects took on a sinister aspect – the rocking horse in Act I became animated on its own; the gramophone in Act II crouched malevolently.

Image ©Tristram Kenton 02/20

The nightmarish quality of the sets was enhanced by some surreal touches. The opening image of the Governess, seen from behind as she travelled in a stage coach to the country house could have come from a painting by René Magritte. The wallpaper on the vast wall at the back of the set could have been by William Morris but on a surreally large scale. When the wall disappeared to reveal the garden behind, the flowers unnaturally bright colourful as if from a painting by Henri Rousseau. The windows through which Miles stared, looking for Peter Quint, were like the windows of a pagan cathedral. Sometimes the characters cast huge shadows behind them, and even the floor sloped unsettlingly, like images from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

This production worked like the best horror films where the viewer’s imagination weds powerful visual imagery to unsettling music to create a sense of the uncanny. The two apparitions, the dead Miss Jessel and Peter Quint appeared suddenly at the window or at the door; combined with evocative lighting, a little dry ice and sinister music the two human figures take on a menacingly eerie aspect. An analogy from the world of cinema is the 2014 psychological drama and supernatural horror film It Follows, in which the disturbing score by Disasterpeace (Richard Vreeland) inspired by John Cage, John Carpenter and Penderecki, and Goblin (who wrote the score for the original 1977 version of Suspiria) makes the ordinary human form seem extraordinary and terrifying.

All this would have been for nothing if the cast hadn’t made the impressive set their own. Sarah Tynan was on stage for virtually the whole opera, and we saw much of the action through her increasingly anxious eyes. Heather Shipp was a suitably caring Mrs Grose. The children were superb – Tim Gasiorek’s movement as young Miles was outstanding, particularly when he danced to the gramophone in the second Act. Jennifer Clark as Flora had a memorable moment as she climbed on top of the four poster bed and dropped puppets down, an eerie puppeteer. They both moved convincingly like sometimes naughty children; another highlight was when a ghostly hand pulled back the curtain at the back of the bed, and it was revealed as a child’s hand, a delicious jump scare. All the singers were in fine voice, despite very occasionally being slightly overwhelmed by the orchestra. Nicholas Watts as Quint relished his melismatic melodic lines addressed to Miles, and Eleanor Dennis as Miss Jessel was suitably ghostly. Their line (from The Second Coming by WB Yeats) ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’ lives long in the memory. And conductor Leo McFall brought out the taut instrumental lines from his skilled ensemble with great clarity.

And so out into the real world, where appropriately, it was a dark and stormy night but without the raw emotional storms we had just witnessed inside the Lowry.

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Poulenc Dialogues des Carmélites – Opera Review

RNCM soloists, chorus and orchestra

RNCM Manchester

Saturday 14 December 2019

A stunning staging of Poulenc’s emotional opera

****

This was the final performance of the RNCM’s staging of Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues des Carmélites, set in a Carmelite monastery during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. It’s a deeply religious work appearing towards the end of his life in the 1950s, a couple of decades after the sparkling frivolity of his early works was wrenched in a new direction by the violent death of a close friend and a visit to the sanctuary at Rocamadour,

A few days earlier I’d just heard of the tragic death of my colleague … As I meditated on the fragility of our human frame, I was drawn once more to the life of the spirit. Rocamadour had the effect of restoring me to the faith of my childhood.

The staging was superb, beautifully designed and evocatively lit. The main set was split into two levels, both painted a pristine white, the lower level sometimes looking like a Dutch painting drained of all colour by the stark white light. This was desecrated in Act III by the brief incursion of the Revolutionaries who had ripped the religious symbols off the walls, sprayed the lower walls with the slogan “god is dead”, the staircase with the word ‘liars’, and the upper wall with an anarchist symbol.

RNCM’s Dialogues des Carmélites (c) Robert Workman

And in Act III the stark, timeless simplicity of the nuns’ costumes contrasted shockingly with the brutal black leather of the riot police with their plastic shields and the garish colour of the revolutionaries’ costumes. The nuns remained at the still centre of the violently turning world.

But impressive and dramatic as the staging is, the opera is about the inner drama of the characters and the terrible beauty of the decision to nuns sacrifice themselves to the guillotine at the end of the opera. This was effectively staged, each nun throwing her head back and dropping her cloak to the floor to represent her execution, the human soul then leaving the body as each nun slowly left the stage. Poulenc’s music does most of the emotional work, the chorus of nuns becoming smaller and smaller as each nun disappears with the swift metallic sound of the guillotine. There were some tears in the audience.

The Soprano Yuliya Shkvarko was fresh-voiced and impressive as Blanche, youthful and convincing as Blanche de la Force courageously facing her moral dilemmas. A moment of horror was well-expressed when she dropped a figurine of the Christ Child from the upper part of the set and it smashed. Her young companion, the soprano Pasquale Orchard was equally good as Sister Constance. The older women impressed too – Molly Barker was moving as Madame de Croissy, sitting in anguished pain writhing in her wheelchair before she fell to the floor in a bathetic death that was too small for her, like an ill-fitting coat as the libretto says. Georgia Ellis as Mother Marie and Mariya Sevdanska as Madam Lidoine led the Sisters impressively, contrasting well with Blanche and Constance.

There were a couple of minor problems – the surtitles failed to fire up during the first Act, making it a little hard to follow, and there were some early tuning issues in the orchestra which gradually blossomed under Andrew Greenwood.

RNCM’s Dialogues des Carmélites (c) Robert Workman

But the final word belonged to Blanche, joining Constance at the very last minute to be guillotined, with a beatific smile.

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Manchester Collective: The Centre is Everywhere – Live Review

Manchester Collective

The White Hotel, Salford

Saturday 30 November 2019

A stunning concert of metamorphosis and a curious incident of a dog in the night time

*****

The White Hotel in Salford is neither a hotel nor is it white (more like a little off-white). It’s a former car repair garage, now a night club. It still feels more like a garage than a night club. And it was cold, very cold – to be fair, I had been warned. It reminded me of another local venue, The Haçienda, a former yacht showroom, which was cold and cavernous in the days before it became an extension of Ibiza and was always full. And before the concert itself started one of the songs sounded played by the DJ sounded like Manchester band The Fall, who played at the Haçienda.

I forgot the cold in the intense white heat of the stunning first half, as one piece metamorphosed into another to create a strangely coherent whole.

The Collective performed only a few feet away from the audience who surrounded them. And being so close to the performers (I could read the cellist’s score over her shoulder) meant that we felt part of the music making. The intensity of the performers’ concentration was almost visceral.

The first half began with a gently-sung, quietly kind, introspective Bach chorale which metamorphosed into some of the most fiercely rhythmic string playing I have ever heard, in part of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. There were also excerpts from Ligeti’s terrifying First String Quartet Métamorphoses Nocturnes, which echoes the quartets of Bartók to the extent that the composer György Kurtág called it ‘Bartók’s seventh string quartet”. Having just re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining for about the fourteenth time, Jack Nicholson limping through the snow with an axe in his hand and a snarl on his face, sound-tracked by Ligeti and Bartók, loomed in my imagination. The pieces were seamlessly glued together by interludes or Vignettes composed by Paul Clark, to make a cohesive whole.

The baleful barking of a lonely dog outside in the empty Salford night punctuated the first half of the concert; at one point I was convinced it was barking in perfect time with the music. A curious incident of a dog in the night time.

The second half began with Rakhi introducing The Centre is Everywhere, a new piece for strings by Edmund Finnis. She said we would need to listen intently to the sounds that Finnis conjures from the strings, starting with almost white noise. It’s a remarkable piece, with scurrying strings above more slow-moving themes, like the wind disturbing the surface of the ocean.

Then came Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, introduced by a quote from his diary, written as he sat in the ruins of Munich at the end of WWII,

The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.

Originally written as a piece for 23 solo strings, it metamorphosed into something entirely different in this version for seven solo strings. The post-Romantic, smeared, almost surreal blur of the original became at times as limpid as a Haydn string quartet, every line sparklingly clear. A revelation.

Bach Selected Chorales
Clark Vignettes
Ligeti Métamorphoses nocturnes
Vivaldi Four Seasons
Finnis The Centre is Everywhere
Strauss Metamorphosen

Rakhi Singh Solo Violin

Violin Steve Proctor, Caroline Pether, Helena Buckie, Will Newell, Will McGahon
Viola Ruth Gibson, Kimi Makino, Kay Stephen
Cello Peggy Nolan, Will Hewer
Bass Sam Becker

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My Father, John Charles Holmes 1933 – 1994

John Charles Holmes 1933 - 2024
John Charles Holmes 1933 - 2024

The festival of Christmas was central to my relationship with my Father who died thirty years ago, in April 1994. Every year, I used to listen to the Nine Lessons and Carols with him on Christmas Eve on BBC Radio 4. A week or so earlier, he would conduct his local church choir at St Werburgh’s in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester in his own version of the Nine Lessons and Carols. I was a proud member of his choir from age six until leaving for University 12 years later. My Father started me on the musical journey that still continues today.

I wrote this piece several years ago and first published it on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death:

It’s Christmas Eve and Durham cathedral is full. We got there early for the carol service but we’re still stuck behind the widest pillar.  We can’t see the choir singing the carols but it doesn’t matter. The lights go out and the choir comes in with candles. The sweet solo voice sings the first verse of Once in Royal David’s City, just as in the opening of the service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge.

The years roll back and I am with my Father again.

He always insisted we call him Father, not dad. We once played cricket with him in the park and two young urchins came to join our game. Cheekily, they called him Father Dear Father, mocking my use of the word. I hadn’t realised until then that his title was archaic. Later, when I was away at university, he wrote me letters and notes always signed just F, short for Father.

When I started to sign my letters simply with a letter N for Nick, my friends complained that this felt cold. Couldn’t I be bothered to sign my full name? But the simple F at the end of my father’s letters always seemed warm to me, a private, intimate code.

To others, he signed himself JCH, short for John Charles Holmes. He was the choir master of the local church and I was in his choir. The choir boys bought him a leather music case engraved with his initials. He carried it with him to every choir rehearsal. It got more and more battered, but you could still see the black letters JCH engraved on it.

I remember my Father walking home from church with me, carrying his music case as we discussed our visit to the local maternity hospital to sing Christmas carols. We went every year, to sing a carol service in the hospital small chapel. Then we came back to church to put away the robes we had worn for the carol service.

The choir vestry was a cellar beneath the church. We unloaded the robes from ancient suit cases and hung them up on long rails. We climbed back up the stone steps to the side door of the church and locked it with a heavy key. Then a shortcut across the grass to vault over a low wall, checking first that the Reverend Canon Ronald James Birchett – RJB – wasn’t watching.

RJB had been an army captain and took a dim view of civilians who took shortcuts across his churchyard. My father was in awe of RJB but they shared a deep belief in the true meaning of Christmas.

RJB is central to my childhood memories of Christmas Eve. He was tall, broad, proudly strong. His voice was deep and his face was sculpted from granite. So when this proud man went down on his knees to utter the words which marked the birth of Christ, the packed church was silenced by his humility before God.

After that, we choirboys could relax a little. We knew Jesus was about to be born and so Christmas presents were on their way. Midnight Mass actually started at 11:30 at night so there was a silent countdown until midnight came. Christ’s birth on the dot of midnight was marked by choirboys grinning and cheering silently across the choir stalls, always making sure RJB couldn’t see our celebrations.

So the service ended for another Christmas Eve, and my father greeted each choirboy with a cheerful happy Christmas and a box of chocolates.

Christmas Day itself almost seemed less important to him. Christ had been born, so the pagan rituals of exchanging presents, eating turkey and watching the Queen’s speech meant little to him. One year, he even forgot to buy me a Christmas present until my mother reminded him and he ran to the shops to buy something before they closed.

My father died 30 years ago and I don’t think about him every day now, although at the time I vowed I would. But he is still a part of me and at Christmas I feel particularly close to him. I said this to my wife as we were coming out of Durham Cathedral on Christmas Eve. She replied it was natural for me to remember him more at Christmas, because it was his time of year.