Category: Music

You are rarely more than a few days away from a symphony at the Proms, but at the Albert Hall this coming week it is a particularly big one for the orchestral statement piece that’s been at the heart of the classical music tradition since, well, roughly the French revolution. On 13 August it’s canonic centrepiece Beethoven’s Symphony No 3, known as the Eroica (Heroic), then through the following week further crowd-pleasers Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10 and Mahler’s Third Symphony. Moving beyond the heavyweights, the programme also features a symphonic gem composed by Croatian Dora Pejačević (1885-1923) during the first world war while she was working as a nurse, and a work that’s fresh off the press.

How can this single form have had such an enduring hold over the imaginations of composers and audiences alike for (at least) two-and-a-half centuries? What, exactly, is the symphony’s secret?

The roots of the genre lie in opera. Composers around Milan in the early to mid-18th century developed the instrumental overtures that preceded the onstage action, often known as sinfonia, into a stand-alone form. But it was when composers in Vienna got involved – first Haydn, then Mozart and Beethoven – that things really began to take off. Ensembles got meatier, adding wind and brass, and so did the symphony’s musical ambitions, focusing on the evolution of one kernel-like theme over – usually – four complementary sections, called movements, each with a different musical character. (Side note: typically people don’t clap between movements, but life is far too short for it to matter if you do.)

Much of the reason the symphony has maintained such heft since then is because it supposedly represents timeless values. It has a tricksy ability to tread a line between repelling meaning – ie it’s pure music, not about anything except music – and attracting meaning like iron filings to a magnet. Not just any old meaning, though. Big and important meanings with philosophical grandeur, about self and society. And it is when symphonies succeed in tapping into a vision of our collective ideals – the society we would like to live in, the people we’d most like to be – that they really shine.

Symphony means sounding together. Not for nothing has the musical form long been linked to the idea of democracy – boots on a march, voices in a protest – with 19th-century thinkers arguing that all the instruments playing their parts to make a whole modelled the harmonious functioning of society. (It is also true that symphonic music’s collective idealism has proved politically unscrupulous, and many pieces bear the memory of their use as a soundtrack within totalitarian regimes.)

It was Beethoven’s Eroica that gave us the origin story for symphonies being interpreted as a vision of heroic struggle and triumph, of human self-realisation in the face of adversity. The status of instrumental music within the hierarchy of artistic forms shifted in the early 19th century when the Romantic philosophers stormed in with newfangled ideas about music’s preeminence among the arts. Putting Beethoven’s symphonies right in the foreground of this new philosophy, writers such as ETA Hoffmann (better known for his gothic horror) argued that symphonic music was transcendent, transporting us into an “unknown realm” that revealed universal truths about human yearnings.

Critics and audiences have been enthralled ever since by a genre they believed told bold, powerful or tragic stories about what it means to exist. Think of Mahler building whole worlds for the listener to inhabit; Florence Price insisting on her Black American musical heritage in her symphonies by subtly (and not so subtly, in the case of her syncopated Juba dance movements) weaving musical techniques inspired by African American musical traditions through her scores; Shostakovich expressing the misery of life in Stalinist Russia, where even your thoughts were barely your own, through musical veils and mirrors – most famously, we hear his gritted teeth as he seemingly bombastically celebrates the regime in the fifth symphony. All convey a sense of subjective struggle.

Beethoven’s hero in question was none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, to whom he initially dedicated the Eroica (although the dedication was later forcefully scratched out). As the story goes, the Eroica was intended to celebrate Napoleon’s status as a liberal humanist revolutionary; when Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French, becoming “a tyrant”, it was more than Beethoven could stomach. (Although the story was likely not quite as clearcut as this.)

And that is all well and good if you are the kind of person who wakes up with a hankering to conquer the Holy Roman empire. But what if you’re just going about your 21st-century business of recovering from a pandemic? In an era of social justice movements that emphasise diversity of experience, it also becomes harder to believe in the Romantic universals that the symphonies of Beethoven and other composers (nearly all of whom are dead white European men) have been taken to represent.

Do symphonies and the values they represent still matter now? Samy Moussa, whose terse one-movement Symphony No 2 will enjoy its European premiere at the Proms, certainly thinks so. “[The symphony is] the wish of the composer to be universal,” he tells me from Montreal. What he suggests the form offers 21st-century composers is the opportunity to participate in an important act of cultural continuity, to sustain something greater than themselves into the future. “You’re just part of something, a tiny little part of it,” Moussa says. Rather than the egos of individual composers, it is the symphonic tradition that he believes matters.

Perhaps rightly so: with almost a weight of its own, the symphonic tradition is incredible – and wildly varied. And the very question of what a symphony actually is is not a subject for the faint of heart – the number of exceptions to almost any given definition is so great that the only thing that really makes something a symphony is the fact that a composer called it one. The crown for the longest ever may go to British composer Havergal Brian, whose Gothic Symphony clocks in at a bladder-testing one hour and 45 minutes. Naming the shortest is harder – although a solid choice to have up your sleeve is Anton Webern’s two-movement Op 21 that lasts around nine minutes, because Webern explores brevity itself, purposefully collapsing the late-Romantic monumental hero complex.

But all this earnestness isn’t to say there hasn’t been any symphonic fun (Haydn’s Surprise symphony, anyone?), and plenty tend towards the weird and the wonderful. For the strangest, perhaps try Nikolai Myaskovsky’s Collective Farm Symphony, an example of Soviet realist aesthetics. And any of the iconoclastic works of American composer-cum-insurance salesman Charles Ives would do for the most wonderful. Ives liked to do things like have multiple orchestras playing at once, as in his (sadly unfinished) Universe Symphony.

While it can be hard to feel especially heroic in 2023, perhaps what we need from symphonies is a reminder that we, like Napoleon et al, can withstand difficult things. The history of the symphony has undeniably been shaped by exclusion: if it hadn’t, you would be much more likely to have already heard of Dora Pejačević. Reaching back to those collective ideals, at their best symphonies might also remind us that we’re all in it together, and that democracy isn’t dead – what it means to “sound together” but also to listen with hope for something unknown and beautiful.

César Franck composed four operas. Two of them were early works that remain unpublished, while neither of the others was performed in his lifetime. Hulda, which Franck completed in 1885, was the first to be heard after his death, in a much-pruned version in 1894, but it has remained a rarity, little performed and only recorded complete for the first time in 2019, a performance in Freiburg that was subsequently released by Naxos. This new version is based on concert performances in Belgium and Paris last year, and as ever with Bru Zane, it comes in a superbly furnished package, with informative essays and the complete French libretto and English translation.

Based on a play by the Norwegian Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Hulda is a bloody revenge tragedy, set in medieval times, in which the title character exacts revenge on the Aslaks, the family that has murdered her father and brothers and taken her prisoner. Though the influence of Wagner is certainly clear in the score’s chromatic harmonies, and the two big Tristan-esque love duets that are among its dramatic turning points, the structure of the work, in four acts and an epilogue, follows the pattern of a French grand opera, with set-piece arias, ensembles and choruses, and even a ballet at the beginning of the fourth act.

Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify

For all the grand guignol, though, dramatically it’s unconvincing. Apart from the central role of Hulda herself, who moves from victim to ruthless avenger in the course of the opera, the characters are scarcely credible, despite the best efforts of conductor Gergely Madaras and his cast. As Hulda, Jennifer Holloway copes wonderfully well with what is a fearsomely demanding role of Wagnerian proportions, even if her tone sometimes hardens uncomfortably, while as Eiolf, the opera’s closest thing to a hero, Edgaras Montvidas, certainly brings some charisma. The rest of the cast is very capable, too, while having Véronique Gens as Gudrun, the ruler of the Aslak clan, is a nice touch of luxury casting. Connoisseurs of operatic curios shouldn’t hesitate.

This week’s other pick

Also released recently in Bru Zane’s French opera series is an outstanding version of Gaspare Spontini’s La Vestale, the tragédie lyrique, first performed in 1807, that is often cited as the link between the Paris operas of Gluck and the 19th-century developments of Berlioz and Meyerbeer. Christophe Rousset’s thrilling performance with the period instruments of Les Talens Lyriques certainly brings out the richness of Spontini’s score, while as Julia, the vestal virgin of the title, Marina Rebeka’s dramatic commitment seems total.

“This is mind-blowing – it’s my dream come true,” says Monk, as we walk through Leeds City Museum, where boxes of hip-hop memorabilia are scattered everywhere.

A record shop is being constructed in one corner, a 1990s bedroom studio in the other. Behind me a full-size replica of a graffiti-covered 1980s New York subway train is being finished. The revered Leeds MC and artist LSK hands me a pen and instructs me to tag the train. Bereft of talent or ideas, I hastily scribble my initials in a childlike scrawl. He nods for me to do more, so on gothe names of my wife and my dog.

Co-curated with the Hip Hop Historian Society – founded by Monk, a Leeds MC, graffiti artist and educator – A Hip Hop Journey: 50 Years of Kulture is an exhibition focusing on five pillars of hip-hop: DJing, MCing, aerosol art, B-boy and B-girl style, and knowledge. But unlike most retrospectives, it also focuses on Leeds’ own hip-hop history. “Leeds has been so slept on,” says Testament, a Leeds-based MC, writer and world record-breaking human beatboxer. “It’s still slept on.”

As with many musical revolutions in the UK, its roots can be traced to sound system culture, from the Count Johnny system in the 1960s to Chapeltown’s Jungle Warrior system and the Iration Steppas. “It was a big thing for us as kids,” says George Evelyn, AKA Nightmares on Wax, whose new track Come On Then nods back to this early hip-hop era. “But we weren’t old enough to go, so you’d just get snippets.”

Something more accessible soon landed: Evelyn remembers being a 12-year-old in 1982 when Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo Gals aired on Top of the Pops. “At school the next day, everybody was breakdancing and body popping,” he says. “It was insane – a massive paradigm shift.”

Paul Edmeade, AKA Oddball, who later became a member of the influential Leeds hip-hop group Breaking the Illusion (BTI), also remembers the track hitting hard. “Calendar did a feature about it,” he laughs, recalling the regional TV piece. “Someone was scratching on a turntable so straight away I went to my mum’s record player.” Edmeade’s house was broken into and a VCR player stolen and the insurance money afforded him a single Technics turntable to practise his new obsession.

“Hip-hop came along and it was like, I’ve got a voice,” Evelyn says. “It brought something different out in everybody: graffiti artists, MCs, dancers, turntablists. All of a sudden we were like local superheroes because we were given these abilities.”

Evelyn joined the Bradford breakdancing crew Solar City Rockers and it was serious business. They had a manager, sponsorship from a local hairdresser, and custom-made tracksuits. Competitions were fierce and intense. “You could feel the pressure in the room,” Evelyn says. Events were such a draw that he recalls one promoter running off with all the door takings.

While kids in homemade tracksuits furiously windmilled on hired badminton courts to the “out-of-this-world and alien” sounds of Afrika Bambaataa, a veteran of the sound system scene, MC Daddy Speedo, became Leeds’ first MC of note in this new era. Rapping locally as early as 1983, he later joined a pre-Faithless Maxi Jazz in his hip-hop outfit the Soul Food Café.

Hip-hop, electro and the burgeoning dance scene were initially all connected. DJ Martin Williams, an early collaborator with bleep techno pioneers LFO, sought out Edmeade’s scratching skills in return for teaching him how to mix, while Evelyn was increasingly blurring lines between electro, hip-hop and proto-rave.

By 1989, BTI had signed with Manchester label Play Hard, run by Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam and Nathan McGough. “Nathan was giving me the usual manager spiel,” says Edmeade. “Saying, I’ve got this other band, but don’t worry, I’m gonna dedicate all my time to you.” The other band? Happy Mondays. “We had no idea who they were,” says Edmeade, laughing. “We were innocent wide-eyed, hip-hop kids. Obviously, they blew up and then these guys had no interest in us. So, Tom [Stewart, of BTI] was like: ‘Let’s do it ourselves.’”

Low Life Records began in 1992 and would become the biggest UK hip-hop label, featuring another talented Leeds rapper, Braintax; MCs such as the late Tozz 180, heard on Nightmares on Wax’s debut album, resulted in Leeds becoming a flourishing centre.

Many artists brought up on the template of US hip-hop were now beginning to wrestle with their own British, even regional, identities. Edmeade left BTI in 1993 and joined the major label-signed outfit Kaleef. “I remember rapping and they started laughing,” he says. “They were like: ‘What are you rapping all Yorkshire for?’ They were doing all this pseudo American stuff.” But the outfit leaned into their British roots more, sampling the Stranglers and the Pretenders, resulting in a string of tracks nearing the top 20.

“When I moved to Leeds in 1997, I was still rapping in an American accent,” says Testament. “I was in the final of a rap battle with Tommy from BTI and he won but Monk and Oddball took me aside and were like: ‘Bro, you could have won that if you didn’t have an American accent.’ I’m now an adopted Yorkshireman and very proud to represent.”

By 1999, Huddersfield rapper Jehst – who made music inspired by the harsher elements of Yorkshire life “fuelled by the bleak reality of the smack-infested post-industrial north” – had set up another local label, YNR Productions, with Leeds’ Tommy Evans. In 2001, the thriving local scene formed a hip-hop collective-cum-cooperative, the Invizible Circle, with 30 members each chucking in £20 a month for a communal fund. “We set up a recording studio and a label,” says Monk. “We became a close-knit community that was different to anywhere else in the country.”

By 2003, First Word Records – later voted label of the year by Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM – had also set up in Leeds, and Low Life, even though now moved to London and under sole control of Braintax, had become a vital label, releasing work by Task Force, Jehst, and in 2004 the game-changing Council Estate of Mind by Skinnyman, another rapper who was born in Leeds. The album was quintessentially, unashamedly British – initially written as poems while he was in prison, reflecting on contemporary working-class life in Britain.

In 2005, BTI returned, just as Stewart, after a prolonged break with a proudly West Yorkshire anthem. “L.E.E.D.S!” Stewart shouts out on Never in a Million, kicking off a brilliantly self-deprecating track about all the things he will never achieve in life – a dour yet acerbic antithesis to the swagger of mainstream club rap of the time.

But just when Leeds and UK hip-hop’s voice felt at its most potent and mobilised, momentum haltered. Skinnyman wasn’t able to capitalise on the success of his record due to repeat prison stints, while the London-centric grime had shifted from underground movement to chart music. “Grime was a gift and a curse,” reflects Jehst. “It empowered us as much as it took our power away. It changed the perception of what UK rap music is, but it also created a lot of weird stigmas. The narrative was: hip-hop is never gonna work in the UK but grime is the future – but breakout hits like Fix Up, Look Sharp was a Billy Squier beat that had been a hip-hop break for 20-plus years, famously rapped over by Run DMC. It was a false equivalence to separate that shit.”

The focus around this time was heavily on London. “Anything outside the M25 was like sheep land to a lot of people,” says Monk. A further fracture in the UK hip-hop community occurred when Low Life ended suddenly in 2008 with Braintax “literally disappearing”, according to Jehst. Many artists on the label allege significant money owed, with Skinnyman claiming he has never earned a penny from his landmark album. “For some people it had a huge impact on fucking their lives up,” says Jehst.

Many of Leeds’ brightest talents, such as producer and prolific beat-maker Kidkanevil – who has gone on to work with MIA, Massive Attack, and Ocean Wisdom – left the city, as did First Word. “The talent is there but that’s what happens when the business infrastructure isn’t,” says Jehst, who also left for London years earlier. It has emerged that MF Doom, the linchpin of US underground rap, was living in the city when he died, but was way off the city’s hip-hop grid: “We found out [he was here] just after he passed,” Monk says. “It was quite a secret.”

But a new crop of Leeds artists has sprung up and found success, continuing the city’s rich lineage. The more R&B-leaning Cole LC is signed to a major, while the likes of Graft and Dialect are proudly Leeds in their work. The latter’s supreme battle rap skills have seen him take on big hitters such as AJ Tracey – he was voted man of the match in said battle – as well as an especially memorable one with the rapper Daylyt. In it, the American strips off until he is completely naked except for what looks like hospital-issued underwear. Panic, bewilderment and unease fills the crowd until a deep Leeds accent cuts through it, yelling out: “Ya sexy bastard!”

Many of those from the original Leeds scene who are still in the city are all deeply invested in community work through education, workshops, and working with at-risk youth. It has been vital for Monk, and underpins much of the intention behind the exhibition. “Hip-hop has been such a positive force for me,” he says, surrounded by history. “I grew up on a council estate and it genuinely saved my life. Giving that positivity back and trying to uplift the community has been my lifelong journey.”

Derrick Skye was born in Los Angeles in 1982, the year after John Adams’s breakthrough work Harmonium was premiered in San Francisco. His new 20-minute orchestral work Nova Plexus – a Proms commission, premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and its California conductor Ryan Bancroft – shares that west coast sensibility of maximalised minimalism. Three amplified instruments – electric bass, electric guitar and synthesiser – represent the ways in which the sun’s power reaches Earth, from radio waves to cosmic particles. Sounding suitably massive, these stimulate responses in the earthly, unamplified instruments of the rest of the orchestra: one tune for flutes and unison strings sounds like birdsong. Skye draws on a plethora of musical traditions – west African, Persian classical, Balinese. A solo cello plays a simple melody whose notes are tuned according to an unfamiliar, non-western scale; cellos and basses make drums out of the bodies of their instruments. It’s rhythmically powerful stuff, at times an invitation to dance. But harmonically it feels static, and those complex rhythmic patterns are largely grouped into predictable, four-to-the-floor phrases that make the music feel bound by its dance-like energy rather than freed by it.

The all-American programme moved east coast-wards for Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, the soloist Annelien Van Wauwe treading the lazy opening waltz with a beautiful sense of openness and turning all the somersaults later on with the same lively, pinging clarity she brought to her encore, the third of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet.

Then it was back to California for Harmonium. This choral symphony on words by John Donne and Emily Dickinson brought a barnstorming performance from the massive choir – more than 200 singers from the BBC National Chorus of Wales and the Crouch End Festival Chorus. If the sheer size of the space meant that some of the volume-fluctuating effects in their music were a little blunted in the first movement, this didn’t apply to the brass, who shared notes that seemed to scythe across the stage. In the elegiac second movement time seemed almost to stand still as Dickinson’s lines turned towards eternity – only for choir and orchestra both to explode upwards again in the glittering finale, the choir sounding truly monumental.

Nick Hallam, DJ/producer

Rob Birch and I have known each other since we were kids, growing up as nextdoor neighbours in Nottingham. I moved to London at 18 to do music and Rob followed to study photography. His brother Dave was a session guitarist who played in punk bands and we all ended up sharing a house in Clapham. I was into electronic acts like Yello and Cabaret Voltaire. I started messing around, making tape loops on an old Revox machine by actually looping the tape over a Biro. This was before samplers.

I was working in a restaurant, doing washing up, and would listen to Mike Allen’s rap show on Capital Radio. He played US artists like Trouble Funk. We used to go to Covent Garden to watch all the breakdancing and breakbeating that was happening on the street, in performances for tourists.

We recorded our debut album as Stereo MC’s in 1989 with backing vocalist Cath Coffey and drummer Owen If. When we started getting gigs, we thought it would be fun to have live drums, even if they made the turntables bounce around. But when we went to the States, the US branch of our record company said: “We’re not paying for a drummer to come on tour, because you don’t do that with this type of music.” They assumed we were just a rapper and a DJ, but we insisted – because the drummer was part of the band. Soon we were touring with De La Soul, Living Colour and A Certain Ratio, then we went to New York to do our second album, Supernatural.

Connected, from our third album, came off the back of touring for pretty much three years. We’d moved away from being seen as a rap band and were embracing acid house. The rap scene in London was violent. You’d go out and there’d be fights everywhere. Then you’d go to a rave and everybody was hugging. Connected was one of the last tracks we did for the album. We had the chorus, but had hit a cul-de-sac. Rob and me went to the studio, put the track on and thought: “Let’s see if we can at least get the vibe we need to nail it.” Rob started jamming around the vocal: “Aiii Aiii Aiii.” We looped it up and put it through the whole song. Then Rob went back in and did the rest of the vocals – and that was it.

Rob Birch, vocalist

We had the groove kicking about, but we were a million miles away from figuring out what the track was all about. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I tried rapping but it was like – nah. Then I tried singing and Nick said: “Let’s loop that.” And it became the hypnotic part of the tune. I jammed the rest in two takes. It was one of those moments: drop everything, forget your preconceptions, open up and see what goes.

Connected got played at all sorts of clubs, even at house ones, which is surprising because at 100bpm it’s pretty slow. Somehow, the feeling embraced different vibrations: it had the hypnotic quality of dance music, the attitude of hip-hop, and its vocals were unplaceable. It’s not indie, it’s not rock – it’s a hybrid. We were from the wave of musicians making groundbreaking music by having to re-educate ourselves. When we started getting into rap, we had to forget everything we knew about music because we didn’t know how people made these sounds. In those days, there were no computers or sample packs. It was all in your ears and soul. You had to listen and go: “How can I make that sound?”

We had got ourselves a rudimentary sampler, called a Bel Delay Unit, which we used for the “Aiii Aiii Aiii” bits. It was a godsend: you could get a beat up and running in two minutes flat. I had to push the button to retrigger the sample over and over, until my finger bled on to the machine.

The song has become so recognisable. It was used in ads for The Carphone Warehouse and has featured in film soundtracks. You can make a living these days by getting your music synced to film or TV, but I don’t pay too much attention to that. I’m more interested in our label, Connected, which puts out Afro house – dance music rooted in African origins. And I still want to get out there and play live, even if it makes me nervous as hell. I think of every gig as a once-in-a-lifetime shot. You may never see these people again. So give them something special.

The Hallé made its London Proms debut 70 years ago this summer – the first regional orchestra to appear. The audience was reportedly “very large” and the reviews warm, although the Daily Mail grumbled about conductor John Barbirolli’s approach to rhythm: “A tighter rein would make all the difference”, the critic sniffed.

No one could make the same complaint about the orchestra’s performance this year. The combined Hallé Choir and BBC Symphony Chorus (massive forces even in the monumental Royal Albert Hall) rose neatly at a single baton-twitch from Mark Elder. A pointed finger temporarily spotlit single instrumental lines; a grin coaxed luxuriously rich sound from the strings; tiny hand movements kept sprawling, rhythmically complex textures absolutely together. Reins don’t come much tighter than this.

Precision isn’t everything, of course. But after more than two decades with Elder as music director, orchestra and conductor seemed last night to think, breathe, feel as one.

Rachmaninov’s choral symphony The Bells began with delicate filigree and blossomed into an easy elegance topped suavely by tenor Dmytro Popov. Its later movements were increasingly dark and raw, Elder serving up a performance devoid of sentimentality. Making Proms debuts, soprano Mané Galoyan and baritone Andrei Kymach offered respectively a ripe, seductive counterpart to the orchestra’s grit and dark vocal heft that blended seamlessly into the chorus. The chorus itself was excellent throughout, their diction clear, their entry in the third movement big-boned and bullish.

After the interval, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony – always a draw – was greeted by a newly palpable concentrated silence from the capacity audience. That silence was crucial. The first movement was precise, cool, even undemonstrative – and exquisitely quiet at times, making the violence of the rhythmic tattoo that eventually emerges from the lower register of the piano all the more brutal. Only gradually did Elder allow musical momentum to accrue and melodic lines to gather weight until they might have been hewn into rock, not air. The closing apotheosis was tremendous, powerful precisely because of the journey travelled to reach it. As the final drum strokes faded, the audience exploded – and no wonder.