MUSINGS ON MUSIC - 10/11/20

As usual, if you would like to listen to this blog rather than read it, please press  HERE

I was going to write a little pre-amble to all this, but felt it would spoil the flow.  So it’s been stuck at the end as a… post-ramble… I suppose.

Anyway, to business:-

Music has always played a big part in my life, both as performer and listener - more the latter as I get older.  My very earliest memories, going back to when I was very  young indeed, were of Danny Kaye singing 'Tubby the Tuba', played from a '45' (remember them?!) on my parents' portable record player.  This was quickly followed by a Vivaldi concerto for two trumpets, which was generally played as 'getting-up' music of a Sunday morning…

In the late '60s my brother gave me a wonderful LP: Tanzmusik der Paetorius-zeit - an Archiv production - which opened my eyes (and ears) to the joys of early music.  At around the same time we had a ground-breaking recording of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, which was just coming into the modern consciousness.  My very first solo outing after passing my driving test was to escort my mother to an amateur peformance of said piece at St. Mary’s College in the City of London. Thank heavens it was a Sunday!

Then in my late teens, at public school, my wonderful music master fostered an interest in Richard Strauss, by lending me his recording of the Solti ‘Elektra’ with Birgit Nilsson.  That was an eye-opener.  At a time when everyone else was listening to Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan et al, I distinctly remember putting my loudspeakers on my study window sill and broadcasting Clytemnestra's chilling, blood-curdling death scream at full blast.  It raised some very startled looks from passers-by in the quad below...!  As an aside, some wonderful - perhaps deranged - person has put together a montage of the best screams from various recordings.  What a wonderful place YouTube is!  ;-)

After a lifetime of going to concerts, operas and even, occasionally, musicals, I find myself tied to recordings these days.  There are some wonderful internet radio stations out there and this is what sparked this little piece.  By chance I heard Heinrich Biber's absolutely magnificent 'Missa Salisburgensis'.  Initially, I thought it related to Salisbury Cathedral but, in the end, discovered it was a commemorative piece for Salzburgh!  Having eventually tracked down a recording on YouTube, I have even, finally, worked out how to broadcast such things through my hi-fi speakers; a revelation.

                (Photo: Diego Delso   CC BY-SA 4.0  Delso Photo)

As it is this piece which sparked this whole episode, let me tell you a bit about it and then urge you to click on the YouTube link  below to watch and listen to it.  Written for the 1682 commemoration of the 1100th anniversary of the Archbishopric of Salzburg, it was rediscovered in the 1870s in the home of a greengrocer, waiting to be used as wrapping paper…  Wikipedia describes the piece as an archetype of the 'collossal Baroque' and indeed it commands an immense force of performers - some 53 ‘voices’ (ie: individual parts) placed strategically around the cathedral.  Unlike, say, the Tallis 40-part motet ‘Spem in allium’ (sometimes irreverently translated as ‘we hope for onions…’) which just tends to come across as a wash of sound, Biber manages the immense forces at his disposal with some skill, to create some remarkably clear music.  The performers being placed in different parts of the cathedral’s splendid baroque interior, it must have been quite some performance!

Someone who shall remain nameless commented that Biber's music rarely modulates, but to me it's the sound that appeals.  Years ago, when I was studying singing, we had to analyse a Beethoven sonata, for some unknown reason.  I have never liked dissecting music and I'm afraid I walked out of that class - which earned me a visit to the Principal's office, but hey.  It is the same with this mass, I just sit and enjoy it, not worrying about key changes or A-B-A-B-As...  and I hope that perhaps you will too - and be a devil and try some of the other YouTube suggestions that come up! 

Since planning out this post, I have come across another wonderful concert of music, by Buxtehude and his contemporaries, from the 2017 Utrecht Early Music Festival.  It's the most wonderful music and I'm a huge fan of these full-on, positively voluptuous performances.  Something to just sit back to and enjoy in these difficult times. It has to be said that, even in plague-free times, it would be almost impossible to find a performance like this within two or three hours of where I live…  Oh the joys of country living.

And on that note, it’s good-bye from me.

Links to:  

Tubby the tuba

Tanzmusik der Praetorius-zeit

Clytemnestra’s scream

Biber Missa Salisburgensis

Utrecht concert

POSTRAMBLE -  I feel I should just say I am not a music expert - in the academic sense - or indeed a professional critic, but sixty-odd years of listening to music (and indeed performing it) has left its impression on me.  All my family are musical (my mother was a professional singer - as indeed is her grand-daughter), my godmother was a well-known harpsichordist and several years studying singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama all left their mark.

And with that,  it’s good-bye from him…