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Smashed Hits London
Union Chapel, Islington
11/16/1998 -
Catalan folk song El Cant des oçells
Alan Bush :
Voices of the Prophets Parts 1, 3 & 4
Dmitri Shostakovich : Four
Monologues on Words by Pushking
Conlon Nancarrow : from 37 Studies
for Player Piano
Francis Poulenc : Deux Poémes d'Aragon
Olivier Messiaen :Quatuor pour la fin du Temps
Jill Gomez (soprano), Philip Langridge (tenor),
Robert Lloyd (bass)
David Owen Norris, Eleonora Bekova, Simon Rattle (piano), Rex Lawson
(pianola), Lynn Harrell (cello), Tamsin Little (violin), Antony Pay
(clarinet) An evening of banned music was a fund-raiser organized by Simon
Rattle and Candace Allen, who is married to Rattle, for Index on
Censorship, a British magazine which reports on free-speech issues and
monitors censorship around the world. The Union Chapel, Islington (at the
non-trendy end of Upper Street) was chilly but otherwise excellent as a
venue with its long and continuing history of radicalism and community
action, and its Victorian Gothic architecture recalling William Morris.
And the programme, like the performances, was excellent. It avoided the
glaringly obvious, and combined comparatively familiar suppressed works by
Shostakovich and Poulenc, and Messaien's sublime Quartet for the end of
time from a German prisoner-of-war camp, with an almost unknown work by
Alan Bush, a British composer who remained unperformed because he was a
communist, and an exhilariting rarity, a work for pianola by Conlon
Nancarrow, who suffered similar suppression in the United States.
The evening began with Jill Gomez, heroic in white Grecian drapes, singing
a passionate version of the Catalan song which became a focus of resistance
to Franco, The song of the birds. This is probably best known in
Casals' sublime cello arrangement, and Gomez' delivery seemed a little
melodramatic by comparison. Her theatrics were superb, though, for the two
Poulenc songs in the second half, which Simon Rattle accompanied. These
were settings of surreal and implicitly anti-Nazi poems by the communist
poet Aragon, composed in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Fêtes
galantes is a skittish-seeming carabet song, with images of boulevard
life interspersed with images of horror. Ç is a lament for
France, built from lines ending in the syllable of the title.
Philip Langridge's performance of Bush's Voices of the Prophets was
totally committed, and very powerful, but it is possible to imagine that
Bush has remained obscure for reasons other than his politics. Two of the
three texts in tonight's selection -- from Isaiah and Blake's Milton -- are
stirring enough, and the short Milton setting at least has a heroic drive.
But the third and longest setting, from My song is for all men by
Peter Blackman, is desperately prosaic in both words and setting. It is a
vision of international harmony (happy children of all colours looking to
the future made bright by love as powerful as the atom) that might have
made an apparatchik blanche. Bush was performed mainly in the German
Democratic Republic, though they would have done much better to programme
more Eisler instead.
Robert Lloyd gave a moving performance of the Shostakovich
Monologues, superbly accompanied by Eleonora Bekova. He moved the
third section, "In the depths of Siberia's mines" to the end, on the
grounds that it is so powerful that it overwhelms anything that follows.
His performance was certainly powerful, ending with a stirring vision of
freedom, but the effect of ending with "Farewell", in which the prisoner
recalls his last glimpse of his beloved "before the bars descend", can also
be overwhelming.
Conlon Nancarrow's pianola pieces were superbly entertaining, subversive
only in the way they push piano music to extremes of excitement and sound
by removing the constraint of the player's fingers. Definitely liberating.
The closing work, Messaien's profound statement of faith de
profundis, was never suppressed, and deals with conventional religious
themes. But it is an expression of hope and even love of the world by an
imprisoned composer whose life, and country, his captors are trying to
destroy, and as such makes an entirely appropriate conclusion. Each of the
quartet gave an intense, totally engaging performance of their solo
movements, an unaccompanied everlasting birdsong for the clarinet and
piano-accompanied hymn-like meditations for the cello and violin.
H.E. Elsom
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