Category: Music

With no fully staged, large-scale opera production at this year’s Edinburgh International festival, this concert performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser had been eagerly anticipated. Its fantastical and elaborate plot make it a tricky work to bring coherence to in a semi-staging, but Sir Donald Runnicles and Deutsche Oper didn’t disappoint.

The young knight Tannhäuser is torn between the carnal allure of the goddess Venus and his longing for the pious Elisabeth. After disgracing himself by singing in praise of Venus at a song contest, he is exiled to Rome to plead for absolution. On his return, he tells how he was rejected by the pope, who informed him that he would only be forgiven when green leaves grow from the papal staff. Heartbroken, he finds his beloved Elisabeth has died praying for his salvation, only to learn from a group of pilgrims that the pope’s crosier has, in fact, sprouted leaves. Wagner went to great lengths to stress that Tannhäuser was not a morality tale, and the opera’s imperatives are notoriously ambiguous.

Making his role debut as Tannhäuser was the American tenor Clay Hilley, whose bright and robust voice is made for its technical demands. Hilley sang with zeal and commitment; it was only slightly disappointing that he was the only singer requiring a score, which lessened the immersive quality of the drama at certain points.

The other soloists were equally impressive, despite apparently having been held up en route to Edinburgh and so performing on only four hours’ sleep. As Wolfram, the US baritone Thomas Lehman (one of the Deutsche Oper’s ensemble members) brought an understated emotional sincerity to the role with a light but rich timbre, effortlessly filling the Usher Hall.

Festival-favourite Emma Bell was superb as Elisabeth, capturing both the divine and vulnerable aspects of her character. Her voice soared effortlessly above the orchestra with a celestial intensity. Irene Roberts, singing Venus, was almost as irresistible, with a suitably beguiling tone.

Under the baton of Runnicles, orchestra and chorus brought Wagner’s score (here the opera’s earlier Dresden version with the addition of the Paris Bacchanale) to life, articulating a huge dynamic range from hushed pianissimos to supernatural fortissimos, and painting a soundworld that went a long way in making up for the lack of staging.

The gospel troupe’s latest album is named after the radio show that first booked them, way back in 1944. The Boys, from the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind, modelled themselves on black groups such as the Golden Gate Quartet, but under the south’s Jim Crow laws they were bizarrely allowed to sing only white gospel. From this modest beginning the group’s ever changing roster has come to embody gospel and its spirit of perseverance and sanctity for a global audience, helped by star-laden collaborations and inspired cover versions (Waits, Dylan, Stones). Here the focus is on tradition; the whooping, frenetic Send It On Down and Nothing But Love, the testimony of You Can’t Hurry God. The voices – rich and grained, with the occasional surprising falsetto – are backed by a minimalist four-piece that adds a 1940s swing to Work Until My Days Are Done. There’s a moving, ruminative cover of Friendship, made famous by Pops Staples, while Curtis Mayfield’s Keep On Pushin’, a piece of c ivil rights optimism, is here slowed to stubborn resistance; such are the times. That two members of the group have died since recording adds poignancy to The Last Time (We’ll Sing Together), but the Boys endure.

Ten days ago, Sakari Oramo took over a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert at short notice to conduct Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. But his major Mahler commitment with the BBCSO at this summer’s Proms was always going to be an even more massive symphony, the Third, a performance that also involved the upper voices of the BBC Symphony Chorus, the Trinity Boys Choir and the mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt.

By their sheer scale alone, performances of Mahler’s Third are always special events; some of those, conducted by Claudio Abbado (twice) and Bernard Haitink, rank among the most memorable concerts I’ve been lucky enough to attend. Fine as it was, Oramo’s account didn’t quite come into that special category, lacking Abbado’s ecstatic intensity and Haitink’s epic sweep, but it was impressive in its own right, superbly played by the BBCSO, with the brass in particular outstanding, though the vagaries of the Albert Hall acoustics, with a few new eccentricities apparently added this year, were sometimes distracting.

Coming in at around 95 minutes in a work that can easily last over 100, Oramo’s performance was on the swift side. But nothing ever seemed rushed or forced, though there was a real snarl and snap to the martial episodes of the huge first movement. The dreamy post horn solos that interrupt the third-movement scherzo were given plenty of space, while the cool-toned Carlstedt was allowed to make the Nietzsche setting of the fourth a moment of wondering reflection; the great paragraphs of the finale, part hymn, part apotheosis, were unfolded with unwavering certainty.

After the Mahler there was something that has become too much of a rarity under the current Proms regime, a late-night programme of smaller-scale contemporary music. This one was given by the Manchester Collective, who presented a typically eclectic sequence of pieces. It began with two works combining electronic and pre-recorded sounds, Hannah Peel’s shimmering Neon and Ben Nobuto’s joyously witty and bewilderingly discursive SERENITY 2.0, and then contrasted Oliver Leith’s quirky string arrangement of a 17th-century fantasy by Matthew Locke and the seventh of David Lang’s fragile solo-violin Mystery Sonatas, beautifully played by Rakhi Singh, with Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, in which the six members of the collective were paired with pre-recorded versions of themselves. A wonderful contrast in every respect to the great symphony before it.

Billy Bragg has released a response song to US country singer Oliver Anthony’s viral hit Rich Men North of Richmond.

The Virginian’s song, which purports to be about workers’ rights, has clocked up nearly 30m views in 12 days after supposedly being discovered and promoted by a local radio station. It has found favour amid conservative politicians and commentators, who have wielded it as a cudgel in the culture wars.

Critics, meanwhile, have noted its individualist streak: Anthony perpetuates the myth of welfare scroungers, questions why his taxes should pay for healthcare issues related to obesity, amplifies conspiracy theories about paedophiles (“I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere”) and suggests that the US “kickin’” down “young men” is responsible for a suicide epidemic.

Anthony has since stated: “I sit pretty dead centre on politics” and declined requests for interviews.

Bragg titled his response song Rich Men Earning North of a Million. In a video introduction, the British songwriter and labour rights advocate said: “Since I saw that clip of Oliver Anthony singing his song Rich Men North of Richmond, the ghost of Woody Guthrie has been whispering in my ear. ‘Help that guy out,’ Woody keeps telling me. ‘Let him know there’s a way to deal with those problems he’s singing about.’ So today I sat down and wrote this response to Mr Anthony’s song, for people like him and people like you.”

Bragg’s song advocates taking action and joining a union, and rewrites lines from Anthony’s song. The original first verse went:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away

Bragg’s rewrite runs:

If you’re selling your soul, working all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
Nothing is gonna change if all you do is wish you could wake up and it not be true
Join a union
Fight for better pay
You better join a union, brother
Organise today

Bragg’s song goes on to posit unions as the way for workers to create problems for the “rich men earning north of a million”, and denounces Anthony’s individualist politics: “So, we ain’t gonna punch down on those who need a bit of understanding and some solidarity,” he sings. “That ain’t right, friends.”

He takes Anthony’s comments about obesity to task, reframing them within the context of the US healthcare crisis: “If you’re struggling with your health and you’re putting on the pounds / Doctor gives you opioids to help you get around,” he sings. “Wouldn’t it be better for folks like you and me if medicine was subsidised and medicine was free? / Join a union.”

Bragg concludes by addressing Anthony directly:

Know your culture wars are there to distract while libertarian billionaires avoid paying tax
You want to talk about bathrooms while the flood waters rise, the forest is on fire
They want to divide us because together we’re strong
Are you gonna take action now you sung your damn song?
You don’t like the rich man having total control
You better get the union to roll

The success of Anthony’s song comes in the wake of Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town, released in May. Another intentionally divisive country song, it hit No 1 in the US in August and caused controversy for its suggestion that “good old boy” Americans take justice into their own hands, warning anti-police, anti-patriotic individuals against bringing their politics to a small town “full of good ol’ boys, raised up right”.

The video, released in July, featured images of masked Black Lives Matter protesters, molotov cocktails and a burning US flag, and featured scenes filmed in front of a Tennessee courthouse where a white mob lynched a young Black man, Henry Choate, in 1927. It was pulled from Country Music Television days after its release.

Aldean responded that the song had nothing to do with race: “In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests,” he tweeted. “These references are not only meritless, but dangerous.”

“Try That in a Small Town, for me,” he continued, “refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbours, regardless of differences of background or belief.”

In response to Aldean’s post, country star Sheryl Crow tweeted: “I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence. There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence … This is not American or small-town-like. It’s just lame.”

György Kurtág is not speaking metaphorically when he says he is quite content to spend the time he has left “living on Ligeti street”. He is with a small crowd gathered outside the Budapest Music Centre – in which he also resides – for the renaming ceremony of the road on which it stands. Formerly Imre Utca (street), it is now György Ligeti street, to mark the centenary of the Hungarian composer who was Kurtág’s longtime friend and mentor.

Kurtág, whose intense, intimate and often brief music could hardly be more different to Ligeti’s, spent years in the latter’s shadow; international recognition only came in the 80s. But even 17 years after Ligeti’s death, he can scarcely contemplate a conversation or a composition without referring to him. He rarely gives interviews, but has made an exception to mark his friend’s anniversary and the UK debut of his first opera.

He makes no secret of his insecurities, episodes of mental illness which sometimes paralysed – his word – his creativity for years at a time. Now 97, he wants to use his remaining years to concentrate on his music.

In the BMC he attends a rehearsal of the piece he has written to commemorate his friend. As Concerto Budapest performs Ligeti’s Century – Roaming in the Past, Kurtág sits behind its music director, András Keller, shadow-conducting from the score which quivers in his hands, and making the sounds he thinks the instruments should be making. “Yo-reee, not yo-ri”, he says. “Pa-DAL!”, he shouts, his elbow pushing into the arm of his wheelchair.

“The sound should be shredded, not whole,” he instructs the orchestra, or, he urges the cellists, who are playing pizzicato, to “enjoy the resonation more”; at another moment, “here you should convey a kind of doubt, and not be so confident”. A clarinet is admonished for allowing a horn to muffle its sound. There is much banter and laughter. It is pure entertainment to behold.

Kurtág is the last survivor of an outstanding generation of postwar avant garde composers that includes Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, but he emphasises how important Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály also were to both him and Ligeti. While Kurtág largely stayed in Communist Hungary, Ligeti escaped and settled in western Europe, though the two managed to remain closely connected.

Sitting in a wood-panelled rehearsal room at the BMC, Kurtág, speaking in German, clad in his house slippers and a tailored jacket, recalls their first meeting as being “like a lightning strike”, during the entrance exam for music school in September 1945.

“I read his scores and I could see that this was no student, but a full-blown musician. From that moment on, I was his follower, I was his satellite and orbited around him, and that was how our lifelong relationship was,” he says. “Even after his death I feel the connection to him, to his undiminished curiosity.”

The time Kurtág spent in Paris with his wife, Márta, a concert pianist, almost immediately after the Hungarian uprising in 1957-8, was vital to his creative development. It also helped him escape the stifling atmosphere under a dictatorship. “It was like a liberation. I remember suddenly noticing how Márta and I spoke to each other on the street, and that we no longer had to lower our voices. That was when I understood how scared we had been.”

It was also in Paris that Kurtág met Marianne Stein, an art psychologist who helped him recover from a creative block. “This encounter really freed me,” he says. “It made me realise I should compose in the way that felt right to me, not to others, that I should seek the truth.” His sense of gratitude towards her is embodied in the string quartet he wrote and dedicated to her in 1959 after his return to Budapest, which he said marked a crucial turning point; he refers to this piece as his Opus 1.

“She had told me I should concentrate on Einzeltöne, single notes,” Kurtág says. “She told me to bring two notes together in conjunction with each other. She meant I should create a melodic unity, but I had understood her to mean that I should write pieces beginning with one note, like a C, and ending with, say, an A. The misunderstanding triggered a new thought process in me about how I should compose.”

The result was a distinctive style in which Kurtág’s compositions became like laboratories in which he experimented with sounds and expressions. They are typically fragmentary, condensed, crystalline and intensely personal; when asked to describe his method, he takes a pen, holds it tightly and concentratedly and produces a heavy black whirling dent on the page, so compressed that on first glance it resembles a squashed fly. There is a brief glint of mischief in his eye.

The concentrated brevity of Kurtág’s output means that his entire published works could be heard in approximately 10 hours. He has a reputation for being uncompromising and difficult, but musicians who follow him, disciple-like, rhapsodise about his versatility, as well as the challenges he sets them.

Cellist Steven Isserlis describes him as a benevolent but intensely demanding father figure. “He is so critical, and I love it. He stretches me, he makes demands of me and it’s great.” His music, Isserlis says, has a vulnerability to it, and information in every moment. “You have to be absolutely convinced when you play it. What he’s taught me above all is just how much intensity there can be in each note.”

Víkingur Ólafsson, the star Icelandic pianist, became hooked as a boy, he says, listening to recordings of Kurtág that his father played obsessively. He marvels at his ability to extract new sounds out of instruments, “the kind of sonority that you really wouldn’t think is possible. He makes the violin play as if it were the whole orchestra, it becomes a kind of cosmic instrument. He transcends and redefines the piano and leads me to question myself and whether I do indeed actually know the piano.”

This week, Endgame, his first and only opera, whose libretto is taken from Beckett’s play, comes to the Proms with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ryan Wigglesworth. “It was Ligeti who had led me to Beckett – he had written to tell me I should see Waiting for Godot,” Kurtág says. “I saw Fin de Partie [Endgame] on the stage in Paris in 1957, though back then my French wasn’t good enough to understand it.” A shared love of Beckett was also part of the lifelong bond he held with Márta. “That’s why he has remained so important to me my whole life,” he says.

He might even have met the Irish writer, he admits, had his shyness not got in the way. “We were in Berlin at the same time [in the 1970s]. But I avoided a meeting because I knew I didn’t have any intelligent questions to ask him.”

The opera commission came in 2010, and he spent the next two years, “just studying the text. From there I began working on the composition. In all it took me over seven years.” At his side, sitting next to him at the piano, was Márta. “I called her my Muse Gendarme,” he says with a smile. “She recognised that I had a kind of depression so she made sure I sat there and worked on it. Every day. And that’s the only reason I was able to finish it.” The work was premiered at La Scala, Milan, in 2018.

He insists however it is still not actually finished. “Important elements are missing,” he says. They include Hamm’s toy dog, his “bon objet”, which he later discards. “When Clov hits him with the dog, this is the strongest and most tragic moment in the piece. I’ve yet to set it to music, but without it it’s lacking.” Asked if he might complete it in time for its UK premiere, he raises his eyebrows. “Perhaps.”

But his greatest desire, he says, is to “lay down next to Márta,” who died in 2019 aged 92. “Márta and I were married for 73 years, but it feels like no time at all. I’m simply waiting until we can be together again.”

The couple’s performances on stage were legendary, literal embraces at the piano, their hands interlocking over the keys, the intimate interactions reflected in the scores – dotted lines dancing between the notes like their arms around each other. Their collaboration amounted to one of the longest and most meaningful relationships in the history of music.

He still talks to her, he admits. “I still hear her chiding me for being too pompous and priest-like, too polite.”

Everyone around Kurtág readily admits to feeling her presence – from the Concerto Budapest’s chief flutist, Orsolya Kaczander: “Márta is in the room when we play, looking over our shoulders”, to Keller, who says: “Márta’s still with us, listening in.”

What Kurtág does not do any longer he says, is to follow the news. “Márta was always curious about everything new going on in the world, but I don’t have that need, since I lost her.” He will not be drawn on the rightwing politics of the government of Viktor Orbán that has prompted some musicians, including his former pupil, the pianist András Schiff, to refuse to perform in Hungary while he is in power. “I don’t read newspapers or watch television. I am independent of the political situation,” he says firmly.

Everything these days is a bit of an illusion, he admits. “It’s lovely living in the centre of music and now to be resident on Ligeti street, but actually none of it is as important compared to the friendships I had, or my memories of them.”

It’s been well over 30 years since I first reached into a school crate and pulled out a plastic descant recorder, and yet I can still remember the visceral thrill I got from coaxing birdlike sounds with my fingers and mouth. I was a shy five-year-old – I hadn’t started speaking until I was two – and although it might seem corny to suggest that this eight-holed baton acted as some kind of magical wand for my confidence, I don’t think that my trills and toots are wholly unrelated. They gave me a voice.

Like most of us, I was introduced to the recorder during rowdy group classes at my state-funded primary school. But unlike most of us, I chose to keep playing it well into my 20s, swapping my plastic descant for a larger wooden treble in order to tackle the baroque melodies of Telemann (with a hit-or-miss approach). There was something about its sensitivity to touch and breath that hooked me: a tender and earthy warble (if played well) v a squealing and screeching racket (if played badly).

Perhaps that’s why I fell for it so fervently. It’s arguably why the 600-year-old instrument is so regularly mocked as the Marmite of the woodwind world – a description I bristled at only last month when news of its impending extinction in UK schools gave rise to yet more jibes. It may well be a shrieking tool of torture for some. But for me, and so many others, it’s provided a gateway to some of the greatest, and most beautiful, music I’ve ever heard.

“In another world I would have loved to be a singer,” Evelyn Nallen muses as we discuss our shared love of this much-maligned instrument. Nallen made her debut on BBC radio as a recorder player at the age of nine, and, up until her recent retirement, taught the instrument at the Royal Academy of Music’s junior department. Nallen was also drawn to the recorder for its anthropomorphic qualities as a young child. “The recorder is the nearest thing to the voice that there is,” she tells me. Practising when she was younger, in the 1950s and 60s, Nallen would listen to popular singers in order to develop her skills. “I mean, if you want to learn how to phrase something, listen to Frank Sinatra.” A fast vibrato? “Listen to Nat King Cole.”

At the heart of the recent headline flurries lies a much deeper story about the future of music in schools in the face of successive funding cuts. Added to this, a Covid crisis that has dissuaded many children from picking up shared classroom instruments. It’s not just a crisis affecting the recorder: the numbers have dropped for woodwinds in general. “There was a time when you couldn’t turn around without bumping into a flute and clarinet,” says Nallen. Now they’re being taught privately. Perhaps what has fuelled the crisis for recorders more specifically is its ubiquity – which has fostered a kind of devaluation as a result. “Being cheap is a double-edge sword,” Nallen says. Yes, it makes the recorder accessible, but it can also be taken for granted, “because you can just throw it into a cupboard drawer.”

And yet “it’s a vastly complex instrument,” says Sarah Jeffery. “It’s even a little bit dangerous”, she adds with a smile, “because every little move you make can be heard.” My first encounter with Jeffery, a classically-trained recorder player and educator, was via her YouTube channel Team Recorder, a platform where she publishes weekly tutorials on all aspects of playing and music-making. Started in 2016, and triggered by a frustration that “there was no information about the recorder online at all,” Jeffery filmed her first video sitting on her bed, and it immediately took off.

“I try and keep it real,” she says. “One week I’ll be talking about French baroque ornamentation, and then I’ll do a tutorial on Taylor Swift because that’s what I’m listening to,” she laughs. The channel now boasts 191,000 subscribers, and has brought her into contact with passionate communities from all over the world.

“Music should be fun,” she emphasises. But her YouTube channel is also there to inform. Where there is indifference, there is also ignorance. Quipping aside, how many of us could name a recorder outside of the four types – soprano, alto, tenor and bass – that we tried at school? “The smallest is the garklein which is an octave higher than the descant at 15cm,” Jeffery says, taking me through the upward size shifts. “Then there’s the sopranino, followed by the descant, treble, tenor, bass.” She pauses. “Great bass, contrabass, sub great bass, sub contrabass, sub sub great bass, sub sub contrabass.” She gasps for breath. “As it stands, the longest recorder is 4.8 metres.” How do you play that? “They’ve actually coiled it like a bassoon,” she says. It still stands at around seven feet tall.

“The recorder, as we know it, has existed for centuries in many forms,” Jeffery reminds me. The earliest known document that refers to “a pipe called recordour” was written in 1388. What this means for players in 2023 is that there is a huge variety of music to explore. The golden age may have been in the baroque period of the 1700s (that’s your Handel, Vivaldi and Bach) but one of my favourite composers in my mid-teens was a late Renaissance Venetian called Giovanni Bassano. Even Henry VIII was a devoted player. Upon his death, in 1547, a collection of 76 recorders were found in his personal collection.

But to consider this woodwind instrument as solely a historical artefact would be wide of the mark. I wish I had kept the letter I wrote to the NME, when I was 18, begging for work experience. In it, I listed all the pop records I loved that featured my beloved recorder: Van Morrison’s Streets of Arklow, Jefferson Airplane’s Comin’ Back to Me, the Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Were they persuaded by my playlist? It’s hard to tell – but either way, I got the gig.

Since its baroque-pop revival 50 years ago, many musicians have embraced its lithe and woody sound. From Sufjan Stevens to Jonny Greenwood – who in 2019 paid tribute to his childhood recorder classes when accepting his Ivor Novello award. “Since the 1960s, there have been more pieces composed for the recorder than in all the centuries before,” Jeffery says. Even in my own sheet music collection, the 17th-century preludes of Jacob van Eyck are sandwiched between the 20th-century English pastoralism of Robin Milford. Its reach goes far beyond the confines of the Greensleeves folk ballad we’re all familiar with.

In fact, it’s riding a bit of a wave with soundtrack composers right now, Jeffery tells me. In 2020, for instance, Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian aired its first episode to the eerie soundtrack of a trio of bass recorders composed by Academy Award-winning composer Ludwig Göransson.

“I’m always surprised when I hear of regular bands playing recorders now,” Charlotte Barbour-Condini says with a smile. “When I was younger, there was a hesitance on my part to tell people that I played it, and that I took it as seriously as the violin.” Known for being the first recorder player in the BBC Young Musician prize’s history to win the woodwind category in 2012, much has changed since Barbour-Condini first began playing at primary school. It didn’t take long for her to discover the many benefits of its freewheeling individuality.

“It’s not an orchestral instrument so there’s not many expectations around it – you can kind of do what you want,” she says. For instance: “Nobody’s going to ask you to join the symphony orchestra to play some Mahler.” Bearing this in mind, recorder players are encouraged to do their own thing as they advance in skill. “You’re actively looking for repertoire far more than if you were a violinist,” she explains. “At the [Royal Academy of Music] we collaborated a lot more with the composing department than others.”

For many recorder players, it is this sense of freedom that enables them to keep pushing the boundaries of what the instrument can do. Only recently, Tali Rubinstein, an Israeli American contemporary jazz and classical recorder player, bought two amplified recorders so that she can play around with effects. With few recorder reference points in the jazz world, her development as a player has been pretty self-determined: Rubinstein is looking to explore and the recorder’s versatility helps her with that. It makes such a beautiful sound, she muses, but it’s also incredibly reactive: “The tiniest movement changes everything.”

People tend to disparage the recorder because it’s a training instrument, says Barbour-Condini. But its recent decline is also connected to a wider issue, she underlines, and that’s the increasing marginalisation of music in our schools. “If anything can survive, the recorder can,” Nallen predicts, optimistically. What it needs, Jeffery urges, is to be valued.

In 2020, I picked up my treble recorder after nearly a decade of neglect. It would take a global pandemic and a lonely lockdown for me to search for it beneath a pile of dusty magazines. Was I simply looking for a distraction? I like to think that my excavation ran deeper than that, bringing me closer to the day I fished one out from the school crate. My playing may be rusty these days, but the feeling it gives me is strangely the same. A trill and a toot. Those birdlike sounds, giving me a voice.