At least, the cheese came home with me. Wensleydale, natch, with cranberries. It has a small yet special role to play in Alicia's Gift and it's nice to find a seriously good one.
Meanwhile, Alicja Fiderkiewicz and I were delighted by the warm welcome of the Wensleydale Concert Series in Aysgarth Parish Church, and much enjoyed working together for the first time.
Alicja, who hails from Warsaw, trained at the Central Music School and Conservatoire in Moscow and is sought after as recitalist and teacher. She got in touch a while ago having noticed that the concert involved her name! In her hands, select pieces in the usual programme are replaced with the likes of Szymanowski and Bacewicz (WHAT an amazing composer!) and there's Chopin and Debussy to die for. Here are a few photos from Saturday.
If you were among the thousands of people who last Thursday lapped up the Royal Albert Hall showing of Independence Day with the score played live by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, you'll probably know by now that live film music is the concert trend de nos jours. The advance of digital technology has made it possible to strip out the music from the soundtracks and replace them with live orchestras while retaining the dialogue. Experience is proving there's a real appetite for the results.
Now classic after classic is being adapted. And one of the people at the forefront of the craze is the producer and presenter Tommy Pearson. I wanted to find out how it all works, and he's the man to tell us.
North by Northwest, coming up fast
Ahead of the first one to be done at the London Coliseum with the orchestra of English National Opera - Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest, with its blistering-hot score by Bernard Herrmann, coming up on 27 November - I asked Tommy a few questions...
JD: You're involved with a magnificent series of live film score concerts. It seems there's a huge explosion of enthusiasm for big-screen films with live orchestra at the moment. What's your role in all of this, and why is now the time for it to happen?
TP: I’ve been involved in film music concerts for a long time now, presenting and producing, and it’s been fascinating to see just how popular film music has become in the concert hall. When I first started in broadcasting (at Radio 3 in 1993) film music was still a dirty word and a lot of orchestras were nervous about performing it, simply because the people running the orchestras were either completely ignorant of it in the first place or didn’t think it was any good. There was also the problem of access to the music itself; since film composers recorded the music for their film in a studio and then left it at that and moved on, the orchestral parts and scores were packed away and often never seen again (and studios were terrible at looking after them). But slowly and surely, film music started to appear more in concerts, the composers would often attend, and orchestras saw that a new audience was coming to see them - an audience that might not have ever been to an orchestral concert before. Now almost every orchestra in the world performs film music in concert at some point in the their season, which is fantastic. On Saturday, I’m hosting two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall with the RPO featuring the music of John Williams - both performances are sold out. That’s a lot of people!
The Live Film genre has really developed out of this renewed popularity. Technology has had a lot to do with it (see below!). But the hunger for hearing film scores performed live has naturally developed into hearing entire scores played live to a whole film, which is ironic since that’s the way movies were presented before sound was invented! And as audiences demand more for the their money and are looking for more ‘event’-like shows, this genre is a great way to enjoy a film they love, with an orchestra playing the score live, creating a very special experience. And the studios are finally realising that this is a very effective way of reminding audiences about their back catalogues!
JD: What's involved in preparing these massive works for public presentation? For instance, where are the scores held, and how are they reconstructed?
TP: It differs from project to project. North By Northwest has taken about 5 years to get off the ground, working with Warner Bros, the rights holder, and dealing with the various estates to get the right to do it in the first place. But we also discovered that a lot of Herrmann’s score, because the film was originally mixed in mono, appears on the dialogue track. When we perform scores live, we have to remove the actual music soundtrack so that we replace it with the live musicians playing it instead. With modern films this is relatively easy because the music is on its own, separate track; so we can simply remove it without losing anything else (like sound effects and dialogue). But with earlier films (NBNW is 1959), this isn’t always the case. So, we have an amazing company in Los Angeles, Audionamix, who is, as we speak, digitally removing all the music on the soundtrack. It’s an incredible process and I don’t pretend to understand how they do it. They also removed the orchestra from the soundtrack to West Side Story so it could be performed live, but with the singing on the film completely intact - amazing. Herrmann’s music in NBNW, though, needs very little editing. There’s quite a bit of music that he recorded that wasn’t used in the finished film and there are quite a lot of cuts in the cues that are in the film. But nothing complicated. That’s in complete contrast to my most recent production, Independence Day Live, which was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall last week. That score took 9 months to reconstruct! David Arnold, the composer of the score, wrote and recorded the 2 hours of music in LA 20 years ago. So everything we had was handwritten by David’s orchestrator, Nicholas Dodd. And, once the score had been recorded, it was then often hacked to pieces by the editor, as the film was re-edited or the director made different choices about which bits of music to use where. So when we came to do Independence Day Live, we had to work ‘backwards’: we had all the original scores and the final movie soundtrack and had to make them the same, so that when we performed it live it would all work in synch. It was a huge, very complicated job and I asked a friend of mine, Tristan Jakob-Hoff, to do it - he reconstructed the score and put it into Sibelius, then the copyists produced all the scores and orchestral parts. The other important element is the conductor and how he/she synchronises all the music with the film: the score must fit the film exactly. This means creating a version of the film that only the conductor can see (on a screen in front of them on stage), which has all sorts of things on the screen: timecode, which is locked exactly to the version that the audience is watching; a visual click, which is a counter showing bar numbers and beats in that bar, so the conductor can always be in time; and various visual aids that also mean the conductor can ‘hit marks’ in the film (for example, when a door slams and the music also plays a big beat at exactly the same time). Most of these projects take about a year to put together and I spend a lot of time working with the studios, not just on the legal contractual stuff (and there’s a lot of that!) but also preparing the film itself and making sure it looks as good as it can. We almost always use computer files these days and play the films out via laptop. Amazing really.
JD: Bernard Herrmann is one of the all-time greats as far as I'm concerned. Please tell us something about him and why you feel North by North West is a prime candidate for this treatment? Might this showing help to cast new light on his music?
TP: Herrmann is one of the greatest voices in film music, no doubt about that. And the films he did with Hitchcock are surely the best work of both men. Herrmann is very well represented in film music performance and orchestras have been playing his scores for years: you’ll often hear the Vertigo overture, the Psycho suite and the North By Northwest overture in concert. And there are full versions of Vertigo and Psycho as live film performances which have been done all over the world. I came to North By Northwest in a roundabout way. A friend of mine works at Warner Bros and he’s a huge film music fan. We were just talking one day about live film concerts and I asked which classic films Warners owned; NBNW came up and I immediately seized on it since it’s one of my favourite films and has such a terrific score. Of the three greats - Vertigo, Psycho, NBNW - it is easily the most family-friendly and funny, so I went for it. When deciding which films to present in this way, I’m always trying to look for a great film which also happens to have a great score; it’s not enough for the film to just have an amazing score, it’s got to be something a general audience will want to go and see (since these projects are always quite expensive to produce). For me, North By Northwest is the perfect film. And Herrmann’s score is a masterclass in musical economy and drama. It’s been fascinating looking at his original scores and seeing what he does with the tiniest amount of material, how he develops it, uses it in so many different ways. There’s only 50 minutes of music in the entire film, yet it’s used so well, in exactly the right places for all the right reasons, that it makes a real impact, dramatically and artistically. I wish a lot of modern scores were like that! It will be great to hear the detail of Herrmann’s score. At times in the film, the music was mixed quite low so it’s often difficult to hear it. But when we do it in the Coliseum, we’ll hear every detail which is an exciting prospect.
JD: Why at ENO? Is it a one-off, or might they do more?
TP: I work with U-Live, the promoters; we put these projects on together. The idea of doing one of these projects in a London theatre came up and I think there had been a casual conversation about it with someone at ENO and it all developed from there. I think it’s a great idea; the Coli is a wonderful venue, with a decent number of seats, and the screen will look fantastic, filling the whole front of the stage. It’s going to be like the early days of film, with the orchestra in the pit playing the score. If North by Northwest works well, we are definitely looking at making it a regular relationship.
JD: It seems extraordinary that we still have to combat snobbery towards film scores when so much great music is contained in them. What are your thoughts on that?
TP: To be honest, I don’t really care about the snobbery. There’s room for everything. Back in the days when the snobbery actively stopped film music from being performed, it was definitely a problem. But now film music is everywhere, so who cares about the snobs? In my experience, most people in classical music who are snobby towards film music are doing it through ignorance: they think they know about film music, but probably haven’t actually listened to any for decades. The main accusation thrown at film composers is unoriginality. And it’s certainly true that film music does, a lot of the time, have a sound of its own (taken from Strauss et al and fashioned for the cinema by Max Steiner, Korngold, Alfred Newman and the other early masters); plus, the extreme time-constraints that film composers have to work to are astonishing: 2 hours of music written in 3 weeks is not unusual, so of course there are going to be musical shortcuts. But anyone with even a passing knowledge of the music of Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman, Elliot Goldenthal, Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, Alexandre Desplat, Tom Newman, John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, Michael Giacchino, Johann Johnannsson (I could go on) will know that there’s a lot of brilliantly original music out there. And are we really saying that none of the great classical composers ever took influences (or even stole) from other composers? There’s also the question of money: many people in classical music think that every film composer is fabulously rich and therefore cannot be a proper composer. Of course, film composers can do very well, but it’s only a tiny fraction of them. And in fact there’s never been less money in film music than right now. All the greatest film composers manage to combine creative and artistic credibility with huge popularity, which is not easy when dealing with a large number of studio suits, all of whom have an opinion on the music, the demands of the director who often knows nothing about music and cares even less, a producer trying to save money, and virtually no time in which to actually create the music. I have a huge amount of respect for film composers and I love working with them.
There’s a lot of great film music and a lot of crap film music. It’s the same as any other genre of music.
JD: Which other films would you most like to see reconstructed for live orchestral performance?
TP: ’m always on the look out for new projects and I have a few next year that I’m really excited about (but can’t mention yet!). I’d like to do a Korngold score since it would be a great play for the orchestra, but accessing the music and dealing with the films themselves (technically) might be rather challenging. And I’d do anything by Elliot Goldenthal because he’s a genius. His score for Batman Forever is, in my opinion, one of the finest (and certainly one of the most outrageous) scores of the last 25 years; trouble is, I think the film is awful! Last year I produced Planet of the Apes (1968) live in concert at the Royal Festival Hall and that was a dream come true as Jerry Goldsmith’s celebrated serial score is my all-time favourite. It’s a true original. I can’t wait to do that again. So I’d love to do more Goldmsith too. But stay tuned, because next year will see some really diverse projects coming your way! North by Northwest Live, London Coliseum, 27 November 3pm and 7.30pm. Booking here.
I interviewed him back in 2009 for the magazine of the Musikverein in Vienna, an interview that was translated into German and didn't come out in English at the time, so I hope my lovely editor there will forgive me if I run it now, in a slightly shortened form, by way of tribute.
Interview with Sir Neville Marriner (2009)
In 1958 a young
orchestral violinist in London gathered together a small ensemble of musical friends
to play for fun, with no conductor. Nobody knew that this would be the start of
one of the best-loved orchestras in British musical life: the Academy of St
Martin-in-the-Fields. The violinist’s name was Neville Marriner; and when a
venture into larger repertoire eventually demanded that someone must conduct,
as the leader it had to be him. The rest, as they say, is history.
The orchestra celebrated
its golden jubilee in 2008 with an intense programme of touring. Frequently it
still performs without a conductor – Marriner, now 84, says he is “a sort of
godfather” to it. Yet he and the ensemble have remained virtually synonymous to
their enthusiastic audience, not least thanks to the vast number of recordings
they made during the industry’s heyday, which coincided with the orchestra’s
early years.
Sir Neville Marriner. Photo: (c) Decca
...Performing in Vienna carries
a sense of occasion. “It’s the focal point of classical music in Europe,” he
says. “I think it is the ambition of every musician in the world to perform in
the Musikverein. Other places would be the Philharmonie in Berlin, La Scala in
Milan, or Carnegie Hall, but somehow the Musikverein takes precedence – you
want to prove yourself in the heart of the classical music tradition. There
have been so many great performances in there that you’re challenged every time
you step onto the stage.”
It’s quite a distance
to the Musikverein from Marriner’s relatively humble origins in Lincoln, where he grew up in the shadow of
one of the UK’s most beautiful cathedrals. His father was a keen amateur
musician: “He could play the piano and the violin and he conducted the local
choir. Although he was a builder, his life was really about music. I don’t
think I ever went to sleep as a kid without some sort of music going on in the
house.” Aged 13, the young Neville went to London to play to the principal of
the Royal College of Music. “The examination he gave me was absolutely
terrifying! And he had a beard and the Victorian manner to go with it. But I
knew it was a turning point in my life.”
At the RCM, Marriner studied
with two extremely distinguished violinists: Albert Sammons and WH “Billy”
Reed. “On the first day at college, you discover that although you might have
been the brightest spark in your particular area of the country, suddenly
everyone plays better than you do and it’s quite alarming!” Marriner recalls
wryly. “Billy steered me through that, and Albert was very helpful later on.” Reed
was the leader of the London Symphony Orchestra and had been Elgar’s closest
consultant when writing his Violin Concerto. “Billy had the first pages of the
Elgar Violin Concerto – he kept the manuscript because there were so many of
his suggestions in it that he felt he’d virtually written it himself. Certainly
most of the technical passages that Elgar himself couldn’t have achieved were
entirely due to Willy’s advice.”
It was partly an
encounter with another legendary violinist that made Marriner decide to hang up
his violin for good. He spent some years in America studying conducting with
Pierre Monteux, and in 1969 he founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. “In
Los Angeles, Jascha Heifetz was one of our neighbours – and after playing in a
string quartet with him, I thought maybe it was time to stop!” He doesn’t miss the
instrument: “It was a sort of albatross around my neck, because if you don’t
work each day you feel guilty. I had lived with that discipline for 30 to 40
years – it was quite a relief to give it up.”
His orchestral experience
proved invaluable when he began to conduct. It’s intriguing that many
conductors begin instead as pianists; but both routes, he suggests, have
advantages and simply produce different styles on the podium. “If you’ve played
in orchestras, it’s useful because you understand them psychologically: you
know how hateful it is to be pushed into doing something that you don’t really
like, and musically speaking you tend to know what the musicians would prefer
you to do. As a pianist, though, you can learn the score at the piano in half
the time it takes when you’re a string player with an instrument that involves
just one line. The pianist-conductors speak more in musical generalities; if
you’re a string player you tend instead to identify particular instruments and
their problems.
“Because I’d been
playing the violin most of my life, I’ve always thought that the physical
gestures I made were much more natural than if I’d been sitting at a piano and
hunching my shoulders. I often remember Solti, who was all shoulders and sometimes
made rather uncomfortable gestures, compared to, for example, Monteux, who was a
violin and viola player and always looked so comfortable as a conductor.”
The Academy began
life, as Marriner puts it, as “refugees from conductors”. At first, it was
simply a group of players who, though excited to work in symphony orchestras,
felt that they wanted “to take more responsibility for expressing their own
musicality”. For the first two years they played informally at Marriner’s house
and had no intention of performing. “We only began because the keyboard player,
Jack Churchill, suggested it.” His Sunday job was playing the organ at St
Martin-in-the-Fields, the famous 18th-century church on the corner
of Trafalgar Square in London. “He said that we could always give a concert
there. We were rather grudging about it, but eventually he persuaded us. Then
someone asked us to make a record – and it all happened. We were stuck with it!”
Much influenced by the
musicologist Thurston Dart, Marriner found himself and the Academy at the
forefront of what would become a revolution in performing style. “Having played
in symphony orchestras for a long time, I used to feel there was something that
we weren’t quite catching,” he explains. “The bulk, the weight of the sound,
couldn’t quite bring off certain qualities that were latent in the music. The
texture was the first thing the Academy aimed for – a transparency, vitality
and virtuosity that you couldn’t achieve with a hefty symphonic sound. That was
our earliest ambition. The great thing about the Academy was that, being a
small group, we were able to discuss these things; sooner or later we achieved
a style that seemed to suit everyone.”
Since then, he adds,
the ‘early music movement’ has become somewhat beset by what he terms
“navel-gazing”. “The extreme types of early music performances I find a little
bit tedious and not necessarily helpful,” he admits. “It’s sad that symphony
orchestras don’t really play Haydn and Mozart any more. They play Beethoven,
but critics turn their noses up, and that’s a loss. But there are some very
good contemporary groups of players who specialise in early music and sort of
early instruments – even if the instruments are reproductions and were made yesterday!”
With 2009 marking the bicentenary
of Haydn’s death, Marriner is glad that everyone will have a chance to reassess
the composer’s work, not least because Haydn is constantly overshadowed these
days by his pupil and friend, Mozart. “Interestingly, Haydn showed much more
mastery of the orchestra in his early years than did Mozart,” Marriner says. “I
always think of Haydn as the precursor of Beethoven: the late Haydn symphonies
and the early Beethoven ones overlap very much stylistically and in their
technical achievements. In many ways he was more important to the tradition of
classical orchestral writing than Mozart.”
Looking ahead,
Marriner insists he has no intention of retiring. “I think I’ll die before I
retire,” he remarks. “I’m planning my diary into 2012. Mostly it’s a sort of
hangover from being young, unsuccessful and terrified to look in the diary and
see nothing. That sensation never seems to go away as you get older.”
As for the orchestra, though
the musical climate in general has never been tougher he is confident that the
Academy will weather the blast. “I’ve always hoped they will keep their
fundamental objectives – a form of stylistic integrity – and because they are
known to have achieved this they will always be desirable,” he says. “The
public seems to stay with them, and I think as long as they insist on keeping
their standards, they’ll survive very well.”
Wanted... Mary Bevan as Zerlina and Christopher Purves as Don Giovanni Photo: Robert Workman
WANTED. A huge poster of Christopher Purves as a gangster-like, shaven-headed Don Giovanni, states as much. He's wanted for murder...but also, for other things, by every woman who crosses his path, to say nothing of the occasional bloke. Sensuality, magnetism, confidence and the knowhow of the older man, backed up by threat, are working their illogical yet eternal magic.
In an age in which subtlety is not generally much valued, Mozart's operas seem to be getting harder to stage. They defy easy classification. Just when you think one of them will be tragic, it makes you laugh; and you decide something is a comedy of manners, only to have it kick out your guts. So what to do with Don Giovanni, that peerless "dramatic comedy" about sex, violence and hellfires, in a 21st century inured to the first two and disbelieving of the third?
Whatever you think about that, you may not have foreseen the utterly brilliant twist that the director Richard Jones brings to the denouement in his new production for English National Opera. It's tempting to spill the beans, but suffice it to say that whatever puzzles you in Act I, such as the presence of a Leporello look-alike, may come home to roost after the interval; and that the dizzy episodes of mistaken identity assume a more important position in the drama than usual. Problem: the meaning of the end is changed. But one can puzzle over that conundrum only to decide (as I did) that it's so flipping clever you just don't mind.
Jones's set designer, Paul Steinberg, offers a gloomy, impersonal scene full of doors, resembling a dingy hotel sometime before mobile phones were invented; a phone box has a vital role to play. Looming yellow streetlights and a desultory party scene do little to liven it up. Act I begins with Giovanni rapidly servicing a stream of black-clad female clients (plus a man); the attack on Anna is transformed into a sex game, the sounds interrupting her father's session with a hooker in the room opposite. Derangement soon seeps in around the edges - perhaps the result of the constant hot-cold manipulation Giovanni foists on those around him. Elvira is basically nuts, as are strange shivering, gyrating dancers at the party; by the start of the final scene, Leporello too is losing it a bit.
Allan Clayton as Don Ottavio. His expression was common to many of us by the end. Photo: Robert Workman
Mark Wigglesworth is back in the pit he recently elected to leave when he resigned as ENO's music director. His Mozart certainly shows us what the management has lost with his departure. He's a rare, self-effacing conductor, modestly picking (mostly) excellent tempi, accompanying (mostly) ideally and leading a light-stepping, supple account of the score. One tricky moment when the stage and pit parted company will probably vanish with the first-night nerves. Meanwhile we wish, wish, wish he was staying.
The cast is very fine, with Clayton outstanding in the two tenor arias and the American soprano Caitlin Lynch as a characterful and precise Donna Anna. Christine Rice is quite a surprise as Donna Elvira; we more associate her with mezzo roles, yet her voice seems to be growing in both range and amplitude. And even if I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that Elvira is off her trolley - she is far too subtle and fascinating a character for that - Rice brings her a convincing sense of desperation as the love she loathes simply refuses to die. Zerlina is Mary Bevan, pure-toned and full of warmth, clad in white while all around wear black. Nicholas Crawley is a strong, bitter Masetto and James Creswell as the Commendatore delivers a magisterial cameo.
But it is the double-act of Christopher Purves and Clive Bayley as Giovanni and Leporello on which the show hinges, and they don't disappoint. Purves's soft, velvety, sensually nuanced singing brings an edge of sinister magic to the Don; Bayley, as professional sidekick, is deeper and louder, yet meshes beautifully. The relationship is splendidly worked, full of details such as a much-lived-in drinks-serving ritual; and even if their modus vivendi seems balanced and settled, the master's more than callous treatment of the servant proves that any suspected affection is in fact non existent. You can be left wondering how many Leporellos the Don gets through, each one perhaps presented with the same glasses and red wig.
Would one really be irresistibly seduced by this Don Giovanni? Personally I wouldn't buy a second-hand cat-basket from him, let alone a car. But ahhh...there's the voice, that voice... He can call my landline any time.
...it's a wonderful word, tra-la-la-la [=> Marx Brothers]. Meanwhile, the ambiguity of the great Così fan tutte is laid on with the proverbial trowel at Covent Garden. I've reviewed it here for the Critics' Circle reviews site. And found it...a bit così-cosà .
Just to add, though: it has had a lingering aftertaste. The music has stayed with me in a way that it rarely has before - the sheer sublimity of it. And whenever I run into to someone else who also saw and heard it that night, they say more or less the same thing. They come out thinking, as I did, "My God, I love Mozart so much..." - which means that someone is doing something very much right, and probably on the conductor's podium. Thank you , Semyon Bychkov!
Taster:
The music of Così is so sublime it’s a difficult show to
ruin. However often a production flies in scenery during the most
beautiful passages – I could have lived without the brightly-lit cinema
frame descending from the heavens in the middle of ‘Soave sia il vento’ –
Mozart transcends everything. In this new production, the Royal Opera
House debut of the German director Jan Philipp Gloger, that’s just as
well.
Two young couples arrive at the front of the stalls as the cast of an 18th-century opera (Così fan tutte?)
take their curtain calls during the overture. One of that cast, our Don
Alfonso, whisks the two boys up to the stage and makes a bet with them
that he can prove their beloveds – selfie-snapping and hard-drinking
girls – are unfaithful. Don Alfonso transforms into a movie director and
the young people act, and act some more while scenes morph around them:
a wartime farewell under a station clock, a bar in which the cynical
Despina, devoid of morals and goodwill, shakes the cocktails, and a
Garden of Eden with green plastic snake (aha: temptation! No, really?)...
