John Adams, composer... and Simon's friend.

John the composer and Simon the conductor have been friends for a very long time. They admire each other and they know each other very well. Back in November 2006 they could spend some time together while they were getting A Flowering Tree on stage.  And a couple of months ago, when Sir Simon and the Berlin Phil were on their american tour, they had a few hours as well.  John Adams writes about what he feels for his friend’s talent on his blog, just as he goes to meet him in San Francisco so they can hang out and listen to some jazz:

Simon is a musician of lightning-quick reflexes and an endlessly inquisitive and comprehensive mind. I don’t know of anyone in the world of classical music who has the range that he possesses. He is able to give a stylistically detailed and musically thrilling performance of Haydn or Mozart with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment one week and then turn around and do Ligeti’s Violin Concerto or a new Thomas Adès piece the next. He is a great Messiaen conductor.

And Adams tells us about something more: Simon’s modesty and his kindness.

He tells me he lives in the shadow of Carlos Kleiber. This a genuinely modest remark and doubtless sincere, but compared to Simon’s, Kleiber’s range of repertoire was a sliver of micron-thin density.

Like Peter Sellars, another artist of depth and imagination, Simon is also a person of rare generosity and kindness. Thursday night could have been a precious evening free for him in the middle of a long, exhausting US tour with the Berlin Philharmonic. If it were my night off I would probably have spent it collapsed on my hotel room bed. But Simon agrees to spend two very intense hours on Thursday night trying to pull meaningful music out of an orchestra of not very skilled young musicians.

This gives Adams the time to meditate about how people perceive his friend’s music making:

Simon Rattle and the kids at San Francisco: working the sound

Some listeners will crab about what they deem Simon’s overly hands-on shaping of the music. A New York critic last week described him “laboring to extract performances forcibly from the players”. But those responses more often than not come from minds that don’t wish to be jostled out of their comfort zones. In truth I don’t know of a single musician who more regularly locates the core of a work’s meaning, who asks the right questions, than Simon does.

Aaaand there’s the juicy anecdote too: our man can resist a hangover…

After a night in Lyon eighteen years ago that featured some serious drinking of armagnac, he took his throbbing head and groggy eyes onto the podium of—I kid you not—L’Auditorium Maurice Ravel and proceeded to lead his Birmingham band through a morning rehearsal of “Daphnis” that swept me into another universe of color, melancholy and feverish sensuality. My own throbbing head switched its throb from pain to ecstasy.

For Adams, watching his friend in action with a group of kids is a revelation:

John Adams also has his own experience at workshops..

It’s a “workshop” with the emphasis on “work.” The first time through every new passage in the Wagner appears dead on arrival. The phrases are stillborn, colorless, without shape or direction. (…)

They have trouble following him, lurching ahead in a misguided attempt to catch up with his beat rather than moving confidently a millisecond behind it. A more ordinary conductor would have drilled these students on playing together, but Simon spends a good fifteen minutes just trying to draw a sound he wants out of the celli, trying to make it come awake, arouse it from its lifeless condition. Most of the rehearsal is about making the sound come alive, and I note, most of it is focused on the strings.

He works incredibly hard, alternating humor with tireless urging. The sound in the Conservatory concert hall moves in and out of focus, occasionally convincing the listener but then suddenly becoming blemished by bad intonation or unbalanced timbres. Even with all these problems, it’s impossible not to be moved by this music. I think once again how very very serious Wagner can be, serious because when Tristan approaches Isolde on board the ship for the first time to those grave ¾ rhythms, you know that they both are already headed down the chute, on their catastrophic way to breaking a profound social covenant. The music tells us that this can only end in pain, remorse, wrenching heartache and death.

But all this richness, all that sensitivity and all that ability to get the soud out of people come from hard and detailed study:

Afterwards Simon tells me how audiences at first didn’t understand the ending to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony because in 1885 hardly anyone knew the Mozart G minor symphony. They had little context for a symphony that ended tragically. Only a few people at the time understood the depth of Mozart, and those were mostly composers like Wagner and Mahler.

It’s that time of the year again… and many, many, many people wait for it eagerly: the New Year’s Eve Concert at the Philharmonie’s Hall.  Sir Simon Rattle, his loyal Berliners and kick-ass pianist Lang Lang will deliver the russian goods: Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky.

Lang Lang rocking...

Conducting is an art form. Sure, it may seem like the man (or woman!) on the podium doesn’t do a whole lot, or, even worse, is simply there for show, and, indeed, sadly, this is many times the case. Unfortunately (or fortunately for you, the reader) this is a tirade for another day. No, this particular rant is brought on by what I as a practicing musician see as a disturbing trend in conductors and conductor wannabes both young and old today. I am speaking of what I call the “YouTube Undermining Conductor Competence” phenomenon, hence referred to as YUCC.

YUCC, in a nutshell, is the use of YouTube as a primary step in a conductor’s score study process. For those of you uninitiated into the inner workings of being a conductor, let me briefly bring you up to speed. A conductor’s job is essentially to guide a group of musicians through a musical performance, shaping and interpreting whatever the composer gave him or her to work with. To do this, the conductor must obviously (though not as obviously as one might think) know the score inside and out very intimately. Thus, the term “score study.” Now, score study is a highly personal thing. Everyone has different priorities and interests when approaching a musical interpretation, and there is rarely a “correct” or “incorrect” viewpoint – though some ideas are so obviously out in left field it hurts. Music has certain inherent traditions and conventions and…I digress. I simply must reign in myself and stick to one topic (ish). Anyway(ssssss), back in ye olden days, a conductor was limited to the printed score and a piano for his (not usually her back then) study. This meant he either had to have wicked good aural skills and be able to hear music just by looking at it, or have wicked good piano skills to be able to play from a full score. Preferably, he’d have both. Then, he’d sit for hours learning every note contained in whatever masterpiece he was working on. Nikisch, Wagner, Toscanini, Furtwängler, Karajan…all the greats of yesteryear had to go through this process. What this resulted in was phenomenal performances, many times by memory, simply because of the hard work put in by these men (and it also helped that each was a genius in his own way.)

Then came recordings. With the dawn of the recording age and the saturation of the market with LPs and later cassettes (remember those?), CDs, DVDs and mp3s of almost every conceivable main-stream repertoire piece (in multiples), then students of conducting began taking shortcuts. Recordings started to be used to give the conductor a sense of what the music was “supposed to sound like” even before they would look at a score. This precursor to YUCC was “Recordings Obstructing New Greatness” (RONG), dubbed so because it resulted in what amounted to be failed carbon copies of previous interpretations. Instead of new individual approaches to familiar works, young conductors fancied themselves miniature Reiners, Bernsteins and Soltis and satisfied themselves (though not their orchestras or audiences) with lackluster concerts of rehashed traditions. For some, study would even include conducting along with the recording thus teaching the young baton wielder to follow as opposed to lead. As video recordings became more prevalent, RONG worsened. Conductors could now put on the facade of others. Why should one spend as much time in front of the score when one could just as easily purchase a DVD of Abbado conducting the piece in question? Undeniably a musical genius, he leads orchestras with great skill and finesse, and if it works for him, obviously it will work for me…right? RONG here directly leads to YUCC.

Enter YouTube. Failed dating site turned internet phenomenon. Where overnight an overweight young man dancing and mouthing a dubbed Romanian pop song can became a sensation, and where self-declared teenage Broadway stars, bootleg movie clips, and kittehz in yer biznez doin stuf n bein cute (LOLZ!) can co-exist as peacefully as the commenting public masses will allow. Never before has it been so simple and fast to claim your fifteen minutes of fame…packaged in a video clip limited to ten. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany, or cute little kids being funny. Fame and infamy await you on YouTube. With this great power comes great responsibility. Copyright law states that…aw, hell. What the f—? Let’s just put whatever we feel like on the internet, copyright be damned!

Naturally, music lovers jumped all over this shit. Why go out and buy a CD/DVD (or even go borrow one from your local suffering library to rip onto your harddrive) when you can look it up for free on the internet? Thus, score study just got easier! Conductors need to learn a new work? All they need to do is hop on their computers (or, better yet, their iPhones on their way to the gig), watch Ozawa or Tilson Thomas do it, and they’re good to go!

Thankfully, not all conductors of today utilize RONG or YUCC, and those that do, many use it in moderation to simply aid their traditional study. However, in a field full of charlatans who make a whole lot more money than I ever will, the trend is unnerving to someone who appreciates dynamic, fresh, new interpretations of the music that made me want to live in a box for the rest of my life.

Stay in tune.

Robin Ticciati: the young maestro

Uneven.

That seems to be the final verdict.  But the critics were not harsh: the Scotish Chamber Orchestra was in shape, Ticciati showed a lot of promise -wonderful promise- and our lady was really good. But for Rowena Smith from The Guardian, this was not enough:

Apotheosis rather than excitement or quirky iconoclasm seems to be the trademark of Ticciati’s style. In Brahms’s Second Symphony this meant striving for a breadth and grandeur unusual in a chamber orchestra performance. It didn’t always quite come off; there were structural moments where the ensemble wasn’t solid, but the overall effect was ambitiously complex, probing well beneath the work’s surface. Earlier in the concert, Ticciati demonstrated his attention to detail with the gossamer colours of Henze’s First Symphony and showed himself to be a sympathetic accompanist for Magdalena Kožená, not exactly the ideal interpreter of Mahler’s Wunderhorn Songs, particularly in a large space. But it was the Brahms that gave the clearest demonstration of Ticciati the interpreter and suggested that it will be interesting to see how this partnership with the SCO develops.

Richard Morrison fron Times Online was even more honest:

“Ticciati’s accompaniment, though flexible, needed more pungency. It was all rather genial.”

“The Henze was another matter. It’s not the most exhilarating 16 minutes in the chamber orchestra repertoire, but there’s a desperate brittleness to this elegantly crafted score that attests powerfully to what Henze’s generation of young Germans felt in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Ticciati’s understated but detailed interpretation captured this well. And the SCO’s principals seized their solo opportunities — particularly Jane Atkins (viola) with a stunning lament in the haunting Nocturne.

But Brahms’s Second Symphony left me cold. Prissily chopped-up phrasing, no sense of the long line, climaxes that lacked ballast, little feeling of emotional involvement — and it wasn’t even very crisp or together. Why conduct Brahms in your mid-twenties? It’s an old man’s game.

And he did notice Ticciati’s freudian slip:

The oddest moment was when Ticciati came out to conduct the Mahler, excused himself and rushed backstage, leaving Kozená standing like a lemon on the platform. He had forgotten his baton. What would Freud have made of that?

Magdalena Kozena: singing with the young maestro

I know, I know: is the baton a phalic symbol?’?????  And then, Ivan Hewett from The Telegraph joined the chorus of “good but not so cool”:

Debuts tend to be a mixture of brilliance and uncertainty, and this feeling was magnified by the first piece, which was also a kind of debut: the 1st Symphony of Hans Werner Henze, written in 1947 when the composer was only 21.

By the end the character of that slight tousled-hair figure on the podium was starting to emerge. Ticciati is alert to subtle shades of tone and meaning; he likes twilight and moments of doubt, but he can also galvanise a phrase with sudden energy. They were useful assets in the songs from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (sung by Magdalena Kozena, who registered the tender moments with great beauty but missed the songs’ satirical bite). Best of all was Brahms’s Second Symphony, which had a lovely swaying lilt and an unusual transparency to the sound, but also a veiled melancholy which here and there became real distress. I’ve rarely heard the emotional ambiguity of the piece so well captured.

Well, they decided to keep us gessing about repertoire and about if there’s going to be any soloists of any kind at all. But this blog will go on posting our man’s coming gigs, even if we have to wait for concert night or for the review to know how it went.  So this December, Vienna and Berlin: you’re it!!!!!!!

Name	Simon Rattle
Date	18 Dec 2009
Venue	tba
City	Vienna
Country	Austria
Repertoire	tba

Name	Simon Rattle
Date	22 Dec 2009
Venue	tba
City	Vienna
Country	Austria
Repertoire	tba

Name	Simon Rattle
Date	22 Dec 2009
Venue	tba
City	Vienna
Country	Austria
Repertoire	tba

Name	Simon Rattle
Date	29 Dec 2009
Venue	tba
City	Berlin
Country	Germany
Repertoire	tba

Name	Simon Rattle
Date	30 Dec 2009
Venue	tba
City	Berlin
Country	Germany
Repertoire	tba

Name	Simon Rattle
Date	31 Dec 2009
Venue	tba
City	Berlin
Country	Germany
Repertoire	tba

Remember: our man went nuts with this piece. He wanted everyone to know about it and to love it.  So, he conducted his loyal berliners through it:

As said by Louise Jury for the London Evening Standard:

In a move hailed as a triumph for London audiences, the venues will split engagements between 20 and 23 February in 2011. Chamber works at the Queen Elizabeth Hall will include Schubert’s Quartettsatz and Schönberg’s String Quartet No 2. Two concerts of orchestral works including Stravinsky, Haydn and a new commission will be performed at the Barbican before the final concert at the Royal Festival Hall, featuring Mahler’s Symphony No 3.

2011: London.

Of course everyone remembers that Simon was not the biggest fan of concert halls in London, but since the Royal Festival Hall has been renovated, well, they managed to seduce him into getting the berliners -and himself- back to London…  and it will finally happen in 2011.

Well, my first term with Stirling University Choir has now come to its conclusion with a lively performance in Dunblane Cathedral of Mozart’s final work, together with two other works by the Master, rounding off with Justorum animae by Lassus.

The concert, on the 218th anniversary of Mozart’s death (5 December 1791), brought together two works from that fateful year, together with a work honouring fellow Freemasons. The Requiem is an interesting work to approach, as it was unfinished at the composer’s death, and had to be completed by Süssmayr; for all the faults of this version, we owe a debt of gratitude to Süssmayr for completing it. (It would be interesting one day to prepare and perform the work in one of the other completions – perhaps the one by Maunder.)

Although it’s probably inappropriate for me to comment on how the concert went musically (that privilege has to be left to others), I’m really proud of the Choir for all their hard work and focus, that enabled what I think was an excellent performance. Well done!

The four soloists (Clare Tucker, Rebecca Afonwy-Jones, Warren Gillespie and Michel de Souza) blended well, and were a delight to work with, as were the orchestra, guided by its leader, Bernardus Buurman.

The programme began with Ave verum corpus, accompanied by strings and organ, chosen as a link to the last concert by the Choir’s previous conductor, David King. I’ve often thought of this as “perfection in 30-odd bars”. Gorgeous.

The City of Glasgow Symphony Orchestra performed Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music, a delightful piece that’s worth getting to know. Although financial constraints meant there was a rather small string section (43221), with four of the wind parts having to be taken by the organ, played by the Cathedral’s organ scholar, Steven McIntyre, it was definitely worth doing, if only for the gorgeous sounds from the wind and strings.

Basset horns were employed again in the main piece of the concert, the unfinished Requiem, and these provided the dark colour required for the opening movement.

This work is definitely one of contrasts, and not only in its composition. String bows almost caught fire in the ‘Dies irae’, with what must be one of the fastest performances of all time! The ‘Recordare’, described by Mozart’s widow, Constanze as one of his favourite compositions, was beautifully sung by the soloists – and it’s still going through my head!

At the end of the Requiem, soloists and choir joined together to sing Justorum animae by Orlando di Lassus (“The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God… they are at peace”).

So how do I think the choir’s performance went?

• They responded really well, with conviction and passion, and sensitivity to the texts.
• I think there were good fugal entries and generally well-supported singing.
• The weakest moment was probably the beginning of the Lassus, with momentary insecurity, but it quickly recovered. And having only seven tenors meant that the “ne absorbeat” entry was a bit weak (although they were giving all they had!).
• The best bits, I think, were the exciting ‘Kyrie’ and ‘Dies irae’, and the Offertorium movements, ‘Domine, Jesu Christe’ and ‘Hostias’, which portrayed a range of styles and emotions from dance to terror to confident hope.

Performers

Clare Tucker soprano
Rebecca Afonwy-Jones mezzo-soprano
Warren Gillespie tenor
Michel de Souza baritone
Stirling University Choir
City of Glasgow Symphony Orchestra (Bernardus Buurman leader)
Alistair Warwick  conductor

Was anyone reading this (if anyone is reading this!) at the concert? Please comment below.

Image via Wikipedia

In 1912 in Tartu, Juhan Simm (1885- 1959) who studied in the University of Tartu, founded a university male choir (now Tartu Academic Male Choir). Almost hundred years old, this choir is still rocks the world with positive energy and wonderful songs.

Juhan was a student and differently from many other fellow students, for whom humming together with fraternity brothers was the end of musical aspirations, his desire was to make beautiful choral music. As a future mathematician, he understood the combination of factors needed to get a combination of pleasant harmony and united singing. Despite the opposition of many students and student associations, a male choir was established in the beginning of 1912 with sufficient number of singers from several student organizations. Success came fast – a complicated repertoire was performed in the first concert some months later… From this point on, a lack of singers was never a problem.

Conductor Simm eventually run out of energy, which he needed to devote to Vanemuise orchestra and conducting several choirs. Therefore, in 1924 a professional singing pedagogue Leenart Neuman took over the conducting of the choir with its almost 100 members.

Which songs do the singers of TAM love to perform? It seems that when singing the softer side of otherwise tough men is revealed. Men love to sing about the sea, storm, pirates and gunmen, but at the same time they are dissatisfied when songs about fatherland and mother tongue are not included in the repertoire. And although not all men have passed philosophy courses at the university, they can nevertheless perform music tackling the eternal themes in Golden Beach, A Song Unsung, and The Singer’s Winter Solitude in an inspiring manner… The songs which are loved throughout times speak about home and fatherland, looking for and finding, love, children, fathers, mothers and ancestors. [Source of the  text: http://tam.eu/en/?cat=24&target=]

Listen/watch them perform “Koit” by Tõnis Mägi.

When Sir Simon led the Berliners into the music that Tom Tykwer and his friends had composed for Perfume: the story of a murderer, many Berlin-Phil fans raised their eyebrows and, as one youtuber put it, they asked: the best orchestra in the world doing that?

Perfume, the poster..

Well, yes. And like many other fans, this Rattle follower thinks that this soundtrack is one of the most luxurious in film history… but then again, an orchestra if used properly, will give you that result. And Tykwer had a very good notion of what he wanted and how he wanted it:

“I asked myself, how do we approach the olfactory substance in this film? How do we treat the fact that this film is all about the realm of scents and odours? I realised that, if at all, this could only be done through music. The parallels with music are also pointed out in the novel — the whole alphabet of perfumery is taken from music theory, in the perfumery business you also speak of chords and single notes.”

It was a complex goal, but the media required simplicity, for you see: music for film is not the same as music, alone in her realm… and many people noticed it:

What we have here, then, is a world-class orchestra performing relatively simple music, both in harmony and rhythm. (…) To have Rattle and the Berlin Phil perform this music brings to a mind a gorgeous Maserati purring at 25 miles per hour, gliding interminably through residential streets, encumbered with stop signs every couple of blocks. Gorgeous to look at, in other words, but a waste of effort, not to mention gasoline.

Perfume, the cd.

So the thing is: are we talking about a great medium -the Berlin Phil- used under its possibilities? or are we talking about the perception of the Berlin Phil as on of the few bastions of high culture, and how this experiment makes it look dangerously comercial?????  for many, that is the real danger.  As for sir Simon, this is what happened:

But this not the first time that sir Simon has done film music.  In his Birmingham years – 1989, to be exact-  he conducted the soundtrack composed by Patrick Doyle for Henry V, one of the many Kenneth Branagh’s great film versions of Shakespeare’s plays.. here is how it sounds:

Again, the goal was complex:

Henry V, the soundtrack...

In his notes, the director states how he wanted the film “to move people to every possible extreme of emotion”. Realizing that music would aid his intent enormously, Branagh openly encouraged Doyle to adopt “the epic approach; thunderous, full-blooded, heroic” whilst at the same time wanting the music to strike a delicate balance with “Shakespeare’s golden words”. A tricky task for any composer, and one that must have seemed particularly daunting to a first timer.

But sir Simon and the CBSO did great and produced the compelling and moving sounds that Branagh wanted for his epic film.

Henry V, the poster..

Now there are other things to consider. Of course, film music is a very good colaboration of art forms and artistic media. A good movie is not just about unforgetable images and acting, the music and the sounds are also essential part of the story since they enhance many of the subtextual meanings.  Many of what is not said by the actors but that they performe with their gestures can achieve greater relevance because of a good original soundtrack played by the right instrumental and vocal forces. So that is why I do not frown upon the Berlin Phil doing this, since they are a powerful instrumental force that brought a lot to the story and for those of us who read the book -several times, if I might add- reminded us of many of the amazing ideas that Süskind displays in his novel.

Also, there is the money and the publicity thing.  In this age of variety in funding, a cultural institution such as the Berlin Phil can not rest on their fame and wait for the deals to come to them. They are great and inspired musicians, but they also have to eat, so this gigs are a wonderful way to keep their finances healthy. As for the publicity, it is possible for an original soundtrack cd to get more circulation than a cd of classical music since many people will be out looking for the magical music asociated to the motion picture.. and what a surprise, the band that plays that kick ass music happens to be one of the icons of classical music!!!!!!!

Yes, this is a bold step for an orchestra that seemed to be so far away from the world. Even the films of the Karajan era are somewhat strange if you compare them to the visual culture of the seventies and the eighties. And now, with these film soundtracks it comes closer… many people will get dizzy being that close to their idol.

.. And he says had not tried it before…

And Naxos will give it to you, so you can enjoy this year’s russian Waldbühne: Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Rachmaninov…. rich, don’t you think?  Here is a preview:

Pictured above is an ex-Northampton Corporation Daimler CV6G in May 2009. Along with many other classic vehicles, it was providing an intensive bus service on routes in and around Minehead, Somerset. Click on the picture for a larger view. Photo © Bob Brimley.

My driver and I were relief crew on that day and the cameraman has caught us as we took the Daimler on its next duty while its rostered crew had a lunch break.

Although of a traditional design, this bus was actually built well into the era of rear engined buses. Supplied to Northampton Corporation in 1967, the Roe body on this Daimler includes teak framing and is one of the last buses built to this longstanding method of construction. It is powered by a Gardner 8.4 litre 6-cylinder engine, driving through a 4-speed preselector gearbox.

It is often said that municipal operators would specify a preselector gearbox to save the expense of training its ex-tram drivers to drive a manual gearbox bus. There was no clutch on these, just a gear-change pedal in addition to the normal brake and accelerator pedals. The gears were selected in advance using a lever mounted on the steering column and pressing the gear-change pedal initiated the change.

Some car manufacturers in the inter-war years also offered a preselector gearbox.

My driving assessment, due to take place tomorrow, has been postponed so you’ll have to wait until next week to find out how I got on.

It was not all about the concerts. And you know Simon: if he can spread the word, he will. Any time, any place, any crowd.  And this month the crowd was the San Francisco Symphony orchestra:

“Don’t do anything correct,” he insisted. His next command was the order of business for last Thursday evening. Play Wagner!”

Oh yeah… that is one wild direction to get from your conductor, but there is a catch:

Time and again he urged them, in a series of admonitions, not merely to play, but to exude.

You have to give me all the sound and passion possible … Join every note … There’s no such thing as a single note in this piece … It’s not dark enough … It’s not deep enough … They take five hours to die … Now shock the hell out of us! … You’re playing exactly what it says, but nothing that it means.Make it a whole lot more caloric … More threatening — and make it dark! … I have to understand what you feel about this! … It should never be like this building; it should be like waves … There are pebbles in the water — I want the ripples, but not the pebbles … Every single person has to play something transcendent … It’s a soup of quivering long notes … In Wagner, not sweet, but SWEET!

You are in your 20s — is this all the sound you are going to give me for the end of the world? … Use your whole body — you cannot sit there like lumps … How about a nuclear explosion? Think of North Korea.

Striving for perfection.

Go insane, let it transform you, let it alter you… now that is soooo tempting. But that doesn’t mean that you go all wild and forget your training and your skill… oh no… it means you master it:

“dynamics” …  “If you have something to say, don’t say it fast”

And these kids experienced what other musicians have experienced with this man for years:

I thought it was amazing because he was demanding that we reach the potential that I feel like we’ve always had. And I’ve never heard the orchestra play that loud, ever. And the pizzicato: When he was working on that, the cellos were like Boom! Wow! Where did that come from? I thought, “Who are these people?” And he does it in such an inoffensive way. It’s like “That doesn’t sound good. Do it again.” I’m like “Oh, OK.” He’s polite, but also demanding, which is the perfect combination to pull something out of you.

Rattle and his berliners took  San Francisco by storm. This visit was eagerly awaited since 2003 and of course, this wait was worth all the while.

Rattle leads the way..

The guys at Mercury News just melted in the luxurious music that the berliners produced in their renditions of Brahms and Schoenberg:

And in the best moments of this Brahms-based program, they played with a brand of Old World clarity and elegance that opened up vistas. To hear it was something akin to staring into an oil painting, a large landscape, enjoying the rich luster and glaze of the colors; noticing a fabulous detail or two over in the corner; and sensing the many layers concealed beneath the surface world.

Even the imperfections were part of this evening to treasure:

Not that the program — presented by the San Francisco Symphony — was somehow superhuman or even flawless. There were small gaffes: an out-of-tune clarinet, a not-quite-on-the-money trombone entrance.

But this is an orchestra to savor. Just the sight of it: Its members give themselves over to the music in a physical way that isn’t often seen in this country. At times, it was a sea of motion onstage, especially among the strings, which have a sound almost drenching in its richness.

After intermission, the orchestra played Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in C minor, and that drenching sound, with its tremulous buildup over the timpani-driven introduction, threatened to rock the house.

Not this time: Rattle held it in check.

There was to be no revolution of the familiar, as in 2003. Only some very good Brahms: the incomparable sky-glide of the third movement; a clean explosion of pizzicato in the finale. And then Brahms’ famous melody, his tip of the hat to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” performed with strength but also sweetness.

Rattle, again, kept the storm front at bay. And we in the audience settled for mere beauty, not transcendence.

Not such a bad thing.

Rattle and the Berliners go all the way..

Indeed….  But that is not all.  The Examiner valued the deep conections between the stars of the program offered by Rattle and his orchestra: Brahms, Shoenberg and Wagner:

It is hard to imagine a better program to illustrate the musical tensions of the latter half of the nineteenth century and their impact on the early twentieth than the one prepared by Sir Simon Rattle for the second concert by the Berliner Philharmoniker in Davies Symphony Hall last night. On the one hand we had Richard Wagner, trying to transcend the musical conventions of his time by serving the dramatic visions of his own idiosyncratic version of hero mythology.  That transcendence would carry him into unknown territories of ambiguous harmonies and sinuous melodies that never seemed to come to closure.  On the other had there was Johannes Brahms, clearly laboring under the influence of Beethoven but always seeking out new approaches to structure to fend off succumbing to that influence.  Brahms believed one could move forward without rejecting the past with the flamboyance of Wagnerian transcendence.

For this critic, the Schoenberg piece was a triumph:

The real analysis, however, comes from those who aspire to do this work justice through performance, caring less about each “tree of intellect” out of preference for the forest of “the music itself.”  Rattle has had this aspiration at least since his days with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which provided his first serious “laboratory” for mastering Schoenberg performance technique.  Now he has brought that mastery to Berlin to expand the scope of an orchestra that pretty much sets the bar when it comes to performances of both Brahms and Wagner.

The result was nothing short of dazzling.  Schoenbergian passages that have left other conductors in a fog emerge in crystal clarity under Rattle’s guidance.

Oh, what a night!!!!!

He was getting noticed, all right… well, to begin with, that hairdo will make you stand out in the croud, don’t you think?

Simon Rattle conducting by John Minnion.

And the eyebrows, and the facial bone structure… because you have to remember that our man is photogenic…  but definitly, it’s about hair. Lots of it. And curly.

Summer seems such a long time ago now but, whenever I think back a few months to when the “Exmoor Explorer” service was in full swing, I can’t help recalling some of the regular faces we’ve seen.

Due to the fact that Concessionary Buses Passes are valid on our service, quite a few local people will travel quite regularly. There were some real characters among them and that’s one of the benefits of conducting; I get to meet some fascinating people.

There’s one elderly lady who seemed to be on board almost every time I was rostered. She would only sit in the lower saloon. “It’s too windy up there for me!” she would tell me. Even so, she enjoyed watching the wonderful Somerset scenery roll by and I would often sit and chat with her between stops.

Then there’s a middle-aged spinster who normally travels on a Sunday, again only on the lower deck. I’m sure she loves the scenery too but, after reading through her church notice sheet, she always falls asleep!

Every year an old-ish chap comes along several weeks in a row. He brings his wife and his disabled daughter with him. They stay at Butlins for about a month. After we get his daughter comfortable and stow the wheelchair between some seats, he insists on telling me how great Butlins is and how many years they’ve been coming. He’s a cheerful old chap (his wife doesn’t say much) but he will insist on wearing shorts. I do wish he wouldn’t!

I go out of my way to talk to one passenger who always seems like a bit of a loner. I guess he’s in his twenties and local but often travels. When he first rode with us it was very awkward. My driver and I were sitting at the back of the bus during our break, chatting about this and that. I was gradually aware of this chap hovering by the open platform. Most people who do that want to ask a question but don’t want to interrupt a lunch break in progress. Anyway, I jumped up and asked him if he was riding with us on the next trip. Awkward pause. The conversation went like this:

“Yes, I suppose so,”

“We leave at 2.15 so you’ve got about an hour to wait.”

“Oh.” Another awkward pause.

“Are you going to wander about for a bit or do you want to come on board now?”

“I don’t know.”

(Thinks to self: good grief what have we got here…) “It’s up to you, we’re stopping here so you’re welcome to come on now if you like.”

“Alright then.”

Chap then follows me back into the bus and sits right next to my lunch, looking glum. I had to forget the conversation I was having with my driver and try to make conversation with Mr Glum. I shouldn’t poke fun at him really, I’ve since discovered that he suffers from depression in a big way. He comes on the bus for a bit of a change. “Nothing exciting ever happens,” he would murmur. To himself mostly. I suppose that if you’re stuck at home, on medication, no job to go to and just your four walls for company, then a journey on an open top boneshaker must be quite stimulating. Next year I plan to try and make him smile.

This is hot from the oven:

Sir Simon Rattle ha renovado su contrato de grabaciones con EMI Classics. Durante los próximos cuatro años, Rattle y su orquesta, la Berliner Philharmoniker, harán doce grabaciones, entre las que se incluyen un Cascanueces completo, un programa de múisca norteamericana que incluye un encargo a Wynton Marsalis, y un disco con Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (Música para una escena conematográfica) de Arnold Schoenberg.

ok, ok.. translation is in order:

Sir Simon Rattle has renovated his recording contract with EMI Classics. For the next four years, Rattle and his orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker will make 12 recordings that include a whole Nutcracker, a program of american music with a comissioned work by Wynton Marsalis and a recording of Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (Music for a cinematographic scene) by Arnold Schoenberg.

Oh yes, he is veeeeery excited about that.

Since his beginnings, EMI has been there... and will be there...