The Filter^ REVIEW

Der Blumenstrauss, Basel Martinu Festival

9.11.08, Elisabethenkirche, Basel, Switzerland

The first concert of Basel’s latest annual celebration of Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů presented a rare and fascinating chance to hear Der Blumenstrauss (‘The Bouquet of Flowers’), the composer’s 1937 cycle of folk texts for vocal soloists, choir, children’s choir and orchestra. The piece is fascinating but hardly ever heard; there’s only one poorly captured recording in the catalogue. As the assembled forces at Basel’s Elizabethenkirche dug vigorously into Martinů’s angular, brittle score, it wasn’t hard to see the main reason for Der Blumenstrauss’ neglect: it’s fiendishly difficult.

And those assembled forces were a mixed bag. If Basel’s famous for one thing, musically speaking, it’s the Basel Chamber Orchestra. So where was it? Otherwise engaged, maybe, but one hopes its current form would have produced a better ensemble sound than that of the Ensemble Basilisk, which seemed like it’d been thrown together. In Mozart’s C minor Adagio & Fugue that opened, the strings struggled to tune the more chromatic intervals and scurryings of the fugue. The orchestra faired rather better in the Martinů, rising to the challenge with spirited tutti playing, but the strings again were ragged and underpowered, whilst the timpani cried out to be hit with sharper, thinner sticks to bring out the Janáčekian eccentricity of their frantic salvos.

The overall performance of Der Blumenstrauss was, however, satisfying – due largely to the vocal contributions. The biggest challenges of the piece are handed to the adult chorus, who have to pitch a number of tricky chords from thin air. The Prague Chamber Choir managed that, and also sang with perfect diction and appropriately skewed, jabbing phrasing in Martinů’s more idiosyncratic passages. The tenors and basses produced an effortlessly still pianissimo in the deep, delicate sixth movement ‘His Kind Sweetheart’, which sounds like Martinů-cum-Mussorgsky. Clipped consonants, decent tuning and an appropriately villagey tone were also supplied by the children’s choir SurseeCantorei – though disciplined, they sounded like they were enjoying themselves.

Of four superb soloists, the soprano and mezzo stood out, largely because of the utterly unique, sit-up-and-listen music Martinů gifts them. Again, pitching some of Martinů’s entries is fiendishly difficult; the duet between the two female soloists in the second movement ‘Cowherd Song’ is every bit nature music – an impassioned caterwauling to which the chorus responds with trickily slipping wordless chords – and it had an intense beauty and honesty here, not least in its many music-filled silences. Mezzo Nina Amon was exquisite; her rich voice has a tinge of Slavic sadness which was delivered with passion and honesty.

The Elizabethenkirche is small, boomy and tall, which renders it as unsuitable as can be imagined for Martinů’s fast, rollicking movements; detail, including the tinkling piano part, was all but lost. The experienced Conductor Gerd Albrecht maintained control and initiated decent tempi in these quick movements, but he seemed to do little more in between; there were passages that were crying out to be phrased more keenly or have their rhythms pulled around. His tempi in the slow third movement, ‘Idyll’ – the orchestra-only interlude sometimes plucked out of Der Blumenstrauss and performed as a stand-alone work – was a touch quick, and Martinů’s trademark ‘fallings’ into perfect cadences passed without anything like their implied magic. It’s wonderful to hear a fantastic neglected piece like this at the hands of a modest and intriguing little festival, but you couldn’t help thinking – especially given the capacity audience – that lurking behind this valiant attempt was something of a missed opportunity.

Andrew Mellor

Some Orchestras

Welcome – retrospectively – to the month-long period when the UK benefits from the tail-end of the Proms season and the launch of the domestic orchestral season. Yes, it’s a little crude, but the opportunity for comparison is irresistible. 

New York Philharmonic, Thursday 28 August

One of the Proms’ big attractions was the New York Philharmonic, visiting under Music Director Lorin Maazel. On 28 August Maazel began with a new work by Stephen Stucky, which he seemed to tackle at arms length. Rhapsodies for Orchestra is an attractive piece, and its spasmodic moments of grandeur echoed satisfyingly around the Royal Albert Hall. The building also came into its own during Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, in which it seemed to trouble the big apple’s percussionists who lagged despite Maazel’s piercing stare and semaphore beat. But Maazel pulled moments of fascinating nuance from some of Stravinsky’s darker corners. Overall though, Maazel’s orchestra impressed most in Gershwin’s Piano Concerto, in which Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s piano was met by a violin sound of extraordinary silky sheen slipperiness rarely heard even from the ensembles who boast that as one of their characteristics. Some of the solo attempts at jazz playing from the brass and woodwind seemed disappointingly…well…un-American.

Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Saturday 30 August

A few days later the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, another ensemble of fine reputation, was on the same stage under its Principal Conductor the Finn Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Another new work opened; a moving piece of Mahlerian emotional scope from another Finn, the composer Magnus Lindberg. In fact, Seht die Sonne was the highlight. Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto was delicately introduced by the orchestra and Nicolai Lugansky. It continued delicately, too. And finished delicately. There just didn’t seem anything of differing substance in between. Sibelius’ First Symphony came next, the symphony that perhaps seems more immediately Finnish than any of the other six. Saraste’s pace at the opening was quick, which muddied the intricate scales with which the first movement folds outwards. This was a tight performance; too tight for the Royal Albert Hall – at least from where I was sitting. Saraste is back in London this Wednesday (15 October), where he’ll direct the London Philharmonic in the same Rachmaninov concerto and Sibelius’s Fifth; one suspects he’ll please a little more in that hall.
 
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Friday 12 September

Ah for a fine acoustic! It was to Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall on September 12th for the opening night of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s new season. Vasily Petrenko was joined by local boy and recent Gramophone Record-of-the-Year-winner Paul Lewis for a decent and sensitive Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, preceded by a fascinating piece from the pen of another local musician Kenneth Hesketh - Graven Image - premiered by The Phil at the Proms a few weeks earlier. But the main event came after the interval: a blistering account of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony that seemed charged by an almost supernatural momentum. Petrenko wringed the broad, searing phrases of the first movement for everything. As the nightmarishly vivid second movement motored to a finish, a collective gasp shuddered through the capacity audience. The orchestra kept something in reserve for a devastating finale, with Petrenko releasing the tension with an astonishing combination of discipline and dramatic intuition. The Phil’s woodwind were collectively superb; its strings energised and virtuosic. The brass just about kept up, too. A very special evening.

Philharmonia Orchestra, Tuesday 23 September

Back to London for the opening of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s new season. This was a special ‘gala’ concert as it formed new Principal Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first in post, despite his 25-year relationship with the orchestra and a spell as Principal Guest Conductor. The programme had Salonen written all over it – except, perhaps, for the lack of a new work. Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin snarled wonderfully. Then came Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto (soloist Vadim Repin) and, after the break, Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. Both are superlatively tough pieces to play, and both were tight, perfectly balanced and pleasingly luminous. Very impressive, yes, but also a little dry; if the Philharmonia bosses were expecting fireworks at the Royal Festival Hall, they would have been disappointed. Still, it’s difficult to find tangible reason for celebration when, as important and visionary a talent Salonen is, he’s effectively been with the orchestra for over two decades. The only excitement lies in the change on the orchestra’s letterhead, and the prospect of some interesting repertoire to come. Watch this space.

Andrew Mellor 

Monte Carlo: Orchestre Philharmonique & François-Frédéric Guy

Nestling twixt the giants of the Monaco's social and sporting calendar is a fascinating miniature arts festival, Printemps des Arts. You wouldn't think it so miniature from the hoardings and posters that are plastered around the Principality, but this is a festival during which you could happily attend every event without any onset of performance fatigue. A perfect size, you could say.

Two-thirds of the way into this two-week long, boldly programmed affair the pianist François-Frédéric Guy was well into his performance of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas. In two concerts last Wednesday (9 April) he played Nos 15-21 at the Salle Empire, part of the spectacular Hotel de Paris complex adjacent to the famous Casino. It took a while to get used to Guy's style of playing in Sonatas 16-18. His it not scientific Beethoven, more philosophical - and the unevenness of some of his runs and ostinati were uncomfortable, as was the lunging drama of his interpretation.

In the second of the performances (beginning at 9pm - this is a town which comes alive at night), Guy seemed more settled into his Beethovenian vein. He picked out lines in the textures of the 15th and 20th sonata with a graceful beauty, and his 'sturm und drang' performance manner was more at home with the lyrical, almost operatic feel of the later sonatas, even if his dramatic conceptions occasionally trespassed on the music's sense of line and radiance. And you wouldn't have wanted to be the careless mobile-phone user who found him or herself on the receiving end of Guy's dagger-stare after his Beethovenian tirade was interrupted.

The following night, after aquarium, palace, museum, restaurant and opera house visits (the latter is quite unique and a genuine treat), it was off to the cliff-edge Auditorium Ranier III for a performance from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, a 150-year-old ensemble that says goodbye this year to distinguished maestro Marek Janowski, saying hello to Yakov Kreizberg in his place. But for this concert, the functionally titled 'Portrait Schoenberg', it was Eliahu Inbal who took to the podium.

The Auditorium Ranier III isn't the finest place to witness a concert - think London's Barbican Hall with the ceiling lowered by more than half its height, and you've got something of a picture - and the audience was inexplicably small. Beginning was a new work by Gilbert Amy; an interesting, entertaining and taught piece of post-Schoenbergian orchestral music which despite some special moments didn't quite hang together; harshly judged, a bad piece of good music. In Schoenberg's Violin Concerto the Orchestra played with discipline if not flair, but the talents of soloist Kolja Blacher made up for that. He tamed the beast, giving a warm but prickly performance of this slippery piece and finding new lyricism in many an obsinate corner.

The main-course was mouth-watering even when viewed from the menu: Schoenberg's gloriously luscious and only-just-pre-serialist tone poem Pelleas et Melisande. The murmurings that open the piece were rather clinical, but with encouragement from the rich, Romantic first violins the Orchestra soon got into its tragi-heroic stride, negotiating the sudden lunges, halts and introspections of the piece with genuine passion. As it climbed the peaks of Schoenberg's work, the Orchestra was stifled a little by the auditorium's unforgiving blast, but this was a fine performance nonetheless, which did its best to transcend the confines of an atmosphere-less hall. So if any Monte Carlans out there are wondering what to do with that spare 70-million euros, how about building a new orchestral cocnert hall for the Principality? This innovative festival and orchestra both deserve one.

Andrew Mellor

Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, 5.12.07

Not heard of Tampere? It's Finland's third-largest city, often compared to Manchester, and its municipal orchestra has been making its debut tour of England this week (The Filter itself will touch down in Tampere on the 10th January en-route to Helsinki as part of Finland Filtered). The 77-year-old Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, under Principal Conductor John Storgårds, has been taking in a succession of not-quite-major concert halls in the South East and Midlands since its arrival earlier in the week.

At Cadogan Hall in Chelsea the Orchestra presented an all-Sibelius concert (Pohjola's Daughter, Violin Concerto, Symphony 4), and it felt like every Finn in London was there - with plenty of trendy spectacles gracing the post-show reception celebrating 50 years of Finnish independence (in the same year as we mark 50 years since the death of Jean Sibelius). With this distinct feeling of home territory in terms of repertoire and audience, a spacious European rehearsal schedule no-doubt consolidated by the tour, and the 'generous' playing atmosphere of Cadogan Hall, one would do well to keep the superlatives in check. But there's no getting around it: the Orchestra's performance was breathtaking.

Initially striking was the warm, organic violin sound. Their 'step-up/step-down' sequencing, a Sibelius symphony hallmark, was played with subtlety and impeccable blend. So much of the composer's symphonic writing demands patience and intuition from players, and here that patience sculpted a smooth, delicate panorama which seemed carried by its own invisible Karelian breeze. From the opening attack of the cellos that launches the symphony you knew you were in for a piercing and illuminating account, and the brass followed suit with strong but shapely cascades; the rasping horns were magnificently sensitive. There are some who have long wondered what Sibelius is 'supposed' to sound like, why the orchestration can sometimes seem burdensome, and what his often unorthodox musical ideas mean. This performance of the composer's most elusive and introspective symphony provided one perfectly conceived answer, almost as if Sibelius himself was leading the first violins. A deeply moving experience.

Jennifer Pike's performance of the Violin Concerto exposed her main asset: a rich, wooden, almost Jewish tone in lower registers which gave much of the performance a sense of urgency. But the last movement was a touch too quick for her - Sibelius himself once commented that this movement should be taken 'fast, but no faster than it can be played perfectly' - and whilst the sound musical sense of her playing wasn't lost, she struggled to keep up and tuning suffered. Still, this was an engaging, stylish and sensitively accompanied performance.

Conductor John Storgårds steps down as the Tampere Philharmonic's Principal Conductor in 2009 to become Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic. Understated in terms of technique, it was his gentle pull of the Sibelian ebb and flow that showed he was inhabiting the music. The encore, Finlandia, was menacing from its opening brass salvos, and rose to an almost crushing climax. The obvious and perhaps passé question is, can only a Finn read Sibelius like this? Perhaps not, and this reading was different to those of Oramo and Berglund - more languorous, more shiny. But Storgårds' real achievement seems to be his building of this Orchestra's sound, For this part-time critic at least, not since the Mariinsky in January 2005 has a visiting orchestra in London played with such sonorous unity and instinct.

A performance as special as this should have been gifted to a busy Royal Festival Hall - it would have had everyone out of their seats by the encore. But this is an orchestra that needs spotting, and before its peaking form begins to wane. Proms, Barbican, Southbank, Bridgewater, Symphony Hall, Millennium Centre bosses - if you're out there, please get the TPO back here, and soon! 

Lahti Symphony / Bergen Philharmonic, 15-16.8.07

First there was Gustavo Dudamel's Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra playing a rapturous Mahler 5 in an acoustic test at the then not-yet-opened Royal Festival Hall, and now two months later we've had visits from two Scandinavian orchestras on consecutive days at the Proms. So for those interested in Scandinavian music and musicians, happy days. Members of the invited audience for Dudamel's concert on 2 June were forbidden from commenting on the concert in public arenas, but now it's probably safe to say that the 25-year-old Venezuelan presided over a performance of incredible maturity, direction and intellectual sense: the prospects posed by his future career for once live up to the hype of the press releases. He becomes Principal Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the national orchestra of Sweden, this autumn (and Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009), and I can feel the Scandinavian Airways loyalty card beckoning already...

Back to real time, and Osmo Vänskä's Lahti Symphony Orchestra playing an all-Sibelius programme on Wednesday night, in this the 50th year since the composer's death. Vänskä has led the orchestra for over twenty years, putting it on the musical map in the process (though Lahti still seems uncannily tricky to find on the actual map - apparently it's some miles north of Helsinki). The Lahti Symphony certainly has a singular approach to this music, both in concert and on record, and Sibelius's Seventh seemed even more concise than usual - at its opening brisk, angular and breezy rather than lingering and retrospective. That said, the Lahti strings found genuine atmosphere in the first movement, conjuring an icy, opaque northern feel to their impassioned climax that seemed hewn from Finnish granite. The silhouetted solos from the trombone and thereafter other brass were also quite different and somehow un-romanticised - certainly a refreshing view of Sibelius, or is this how we should hear his music all the time?

On Thursday Norway's Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra marked the 100th year since the death of Edvard Grieg, who was born in Bergen in 1843. This is a more globalised ensemble than the Lahti - the personnel list included a smattering of Anglophile names, players that Music Director Andrew Litton may well have coaxed from his previous ensembles in Bournemouth and Dallas on the promise of clean, mountainous air and a beautiful lifestyle. And with New-Yorker Litton at the helm, the orchestra's sound was distinctly more globalised - or dare one say American - too. There weren't the introspective and opaque qualities of the Lahti players, but rather a sound that was full-on, almost brash; seriously impressive nonetheless though. In Grieg's Piano Concerto and Funeral March for Rikard Nordraak the quality of every orchestral section was apparent - particularly the low strings and brass who played with fine blend and intuition. But a layer of American gloss seems to have fallen with Litton's leadership - 'Norway' and 'Grieg' aren't at its heart in quite the same way as 'Finland' and 'Sibelius' are with the Lahti ensemble.

Boris Berezovsky was a delightfully understated soloist in the Grieg - his glissandi sensitive, smooth and atmospheric - but communication suffered at times and there was the occasional lapse in piano-orchestra ensemble. The soloists who joined the Lahti the night before deserve a special mention. Firstly double-bass player Petri Lehto, who stepped up to sing the tenor role of Trinculo in Sibelius's incidental music for The Tempest before returning to his stool to continue on the bass. Quite extraordinary - and if it weren't for his evident talent in both roles it might have seemed like amateur night.

Then there was soprano Helena Juntunen, who sang Juno in The Tempest before turning to a selection of Sibelius's orchestral songs after the interval. Clearly Juntunen was relishing her first appearance at the Proms, and the audience was similarly enthralled by her excitable outward gaze and frank, athlete-like preparation before each song. Her voice has a particular light and agile quality, and she immediately conjured an atmosphere from the opening phrase of Hostkvall (Autumn Night). But it's her poise sets her apart - she has an unpresumptuous yet striking stage presence, and here injected her performances with character; never patronising her audience or over-egging the drama of her delivery. For a country of 5 million, Finland has produced a staggering number of exceptional conductors and soloists, many of whom are active all over Europe and beyond - at the Proms and with UK orchestras in particular. Let's hope Helena Juntunen joins their ranks before too long, and gets the chance to capture the imagination of a UK audience with her peculiar Nordic charm. Otherwise it really will be Scandinavian Airlines to the rescue... 

Andrew Mellor

Westminster Abbey Choir / St James's Baroque (Lufthansa Festival)

Westminster Abbey was the venue for the penultimate concert in the 2007 Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music: a performance from the Abbey choir and St James's Baroque under Master of the Choristers James O'Donnell. And the airline executives were out in force, perhaps tempted by some home-soil programming in the form of motets, cantatas, sinfonias and the rare 'Lutheran Mass' by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Abbey choir was on unfamiliar ground here, literally speaking: positioned on staging in front of the quire screen and perhaps a little perturbed to be without the antiphonal reassurance its members are used to in the stalls. And you don't have to be Larry Kirkegaard to realise that this isn't the best spot acoustically for singers or players (or audiences, for that matter) - the choir sounded hesitant and underpowered (which they usually don't), and when the orchestra welcomed its trumpets and drums, they too seemed a mile away. In fact, it was only in the final work, the cantata O ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe (BWV34) that the choir and orchestra settled into some sort of effective dialogue and equilibrium, a default symptom, perhaps, of the cantata's frequent forte dynamic markings - at least they could hear each other. If there was one moment of impressive musical focus and style, it was in this cantata's final chorus, well-paced and effectively cast-off by O'Donnell.

But elsewhere there were problems, perhaps stemming from the hearing difficulties of the performance area, or perhaps from the occasional ambiguity of the bar-to-bar beat provided by O'Donnell - a fine musician with a deserved reputation for interpreting renaissance polyphony (and other hardcore, non-orchestral liturgical fare), but who didn't reveal the punchiness of Bach's instrumental writing. Stand-in soprano Rebecca Outram was characteristically bright and baroque-savvy, but struggled periodically with the sheer complexity of the music which one imagines she'd first read just hours before, whilst counter-tenor Charles Humphries wasn't always in control of his nevertheless attractive and powerful voice.

In its unaccompanied pieces, particularly the motet Komm, jesu, komm (BWV229), the Abbey choir phrased impressively and maintained impeccable tuning, but there could have been more light and shade, and from a choir known for its clipped 'Englishness', a more sophisticated blend. The strings of St James's Baroque played sensitively and with direction and shape both in the choral and purely instrumental works (their leader Sophie Gent stepping up to play solos with poise and elegance) but the brass were rather more gung-ho - though you felt for them back there, blasting it out may have been the only way forward, and one struggled to hear the woodwind at all. It had you wondering why we couldn't have heard the same concert at St John's Smith Square, the venue for the rest of the Lufthansa Festival. It might have been a squeeze on the stage, but at least we'd have had the clarity that this programme deserved. Besides, the ensemble could have done with rubbing shoulders a bit more, both literally and musically.

Andrew Mellor

Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin / English Voices (Lufthansa Festival)

The bosses of the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music, now in its 23rd year, have managed again to assemble a baggage-carousel of mouthwatering concerts that use local as well as international talent; each concert seeming - in terms of repertoire at least - as tempting as the other. This is also a festival that has a knack of providing a platform for artists who don't always hog the early music limelight but prove scintillating talents nonetheless, of which Saturday's concert at St John's Smith Square proved another keen example. Unfortunately though, the performance of Handel's Solomon was revealing an airport-like logistical fatigue even before it had got off the ground: soprano Veronica Cangemi, cancelled; conductor Ivor Bolton, cancelled.

Enter stage left (or rather, up the asile) Bolton's replacement Timothy Brown. He happens to have prepared the professional chorus English Voices for this performance, so might have been the natural choice as a substitute conductor, and anyone who was lucky enough to hear his peaking turn-of-the-century choir at Clare College Cambridge will be aware of his outstanding gifts as a trainer of ultra-disciplined choirs. And he didn't disappoint here, either, maintaining watertight control of tempi and blend, even if some in the otherwise-perfect chorus attempted the odd crude breakout (yes, we know you're all aspiring soloists!).

If Brown's primary concern was the chorus, then the instrumentalists from Berlin's Akademie fur Alte Musik did nothing but support and inspire. Framed by Brown's tempi - which seemed as on-the-mark as those of Paul McCreesh - the instrumentalists phrased and shaped Handel's sequences and repeats with great beauty and understanding; 'da capos' were never labored, and there was interpretative invention in almost every bar. This is a period instrument ensemble without, it seems, the rough edges, whilst its Leader, the clearly inspiring Stephen Mai, seemed with his players to be grateful to Brown for a sensitive, democratic approach (there was no interfering in the shaping of the recitatives or accompagnatos here as with the Freiburgers the other week).

Of all the soloists, Joanne Lunn stunned the hall with Will the sun forget to streak, delivered with a poise and sensitivity that wasn't always on offer from the rest of the cast, whose curtain-call confusion was reflected musically in their occasional misunderstanding of the 'in-concert' format and a pot-pourri of comings and goings (why not just use six chairs?). Still, the younger singers had a master to learn from in the form of James Gilchrist, whose delivery is always clear and sensitive and never patronising: you don't need to walk slowly and haughtily onto the stage gazing skywards to create an atmosphere, you just need to perform well, unfortunately counter-tenor Timothy Mead did both when the latter would have sufficed. That said, you couldn't fault any performance vocally, give or take a period of settling into the wham-bam acoustic of St John's.

Apparent in this performance, and singularly lacking in some other similar promotions in London recently, was a sense of enjoyment and discovery. Is it the label of a 'festival' that does this? Is it the enthusiasm and focus of a conductor and his players? Is it the infectious momentum of Handel's music? It's probably when all these factors meet on a single co-ordinate, and that doesn't always happen. When the timpanist Friedhelm May urged his colleagues towards Handel's climaxes with his sharp rolls on 'authentic' sticks and drums, the excitement and anticipation were palpable and spine-tingling.   

Andrew Mellor

Sting does Dowland

The more you think about Sting's turning to the music of Tudor lutenist John Dowland, the more pop-icon's project makes sense. A curiosity? Only in the context of the illogical xenophobia with which music of different times is viewed by some in the pop music world - and perhaps in the lack of lack of high-profile precedents to the Sting does Dowland project. For what lies at the centre of Sting's approach to these works is that they're not all that different to his own songs. 'The popular music of its day' Sting has termed it, in a parallel that’s admittedly frought with non-musicological problems which the persona of Sting himself highlights (today's 'I make a record and you listen to it' popular music market being the elephant in the room) and not altogether devoid of musicological ones (the complexity of some of Dowland's accompaniments point to a deeper plane of conception than that associated with the popular song - something Sting would no doubt acknowledge, but which he might concurrently view as irrelevant).

Rehearsing earlier this week at LSO St Luke's (with his partner in the project the lutenist Edin Karamazov) for a performance of songs from the newly released album on Deutsche Gramophone, 'Songs from the Labyrinth', Sting demonstrated a striking affinity with the character of Dowland's music (or songs, at least). In a classical music world contained and monitored by academics and sticklers for detail - more obsessed than ever with so-called 'authenticity' - Sting's early music foray is wholly 'authentic'; his untrained tenor voice ('rough' in his own words to the small audience invited to the rehearsal) is what you can expect to have encountered if stumbling upon a performance of Dowland's music in a tavern or house in the early 1600s. This he couples with a prepared, sympathetic but individual approach to the phrasing of Dowland's vocal lines and the shaping of his words and their vowels - and individual and heartfelt response to songs of direct, singular emotional quality which equates them to many by Sting himself.

With Karamazov – whose reputation as a lutenist is great and deserved – and Sting himself rehearsing with their lutes at St Luke's the pop-star turns to his own song Fields of Gold, and the music seems immediately to have a synergy with that of Dowland; hewn from the same rock of attractive, proportioned melody and frank expression. But he's kept his own works off the resulting disc, and he's largely kept the bullshit off it too; one wonders if some crass producer suggested synth-strings and heavenly choir effects in the studio - mercifully nothing of that sort gets through, though the reverb occasionally sounds fake, and the bell-tolling and ‘Tudor noise’ that accompanies Sting's contextual readings of letters from key moments in Dowland's life sounds like a throwback to a school history video (whilst the letters skew the context and seem to take away from the otherwise striking contemporary resonance of this music).

Sting talks of a journey, which is an interesting answer to those who have begun to point to already issued recordings of Dowland songs by the likes of Andreas Scholl and Emma Kirby. Isn’t the business of offering strikingly alternative versions of the same notes on the page what separates us in the classical music world from our colleagues in popular music spheres? Sting is no doubt attracted by this idea and probably knows that his album will attract a different market from the likes of Scholl and Kirkby (the former uses Karamazov too, though). What the artist is at pains to point out in his various media interviews is that he’s not a pop musician who’s got bored – or at least that’s not his reason for doing Dowland. He's simply a decent musician; talented, inquisitive, and aware of his place in the big (and in Sting’s case, the really big) picture. 'If you think you're an arranger, listen to Ravel. If you think you're a composer, listen to Bach and be humbled' he said in a recent BBC interview. With the media furor aside, the star of this show and of Sting’s disc is Dowland - something for which the Sting must have had to use his significant weight and ego as an international pop icon to achieve, and an act of integrity for which he should be respected, whether or not you prefer the rock-star’s Dowland to the counter-tenor’s.

Andrew Mellor

Steve Reich at the Proms

As this new millennium progresses, it renders many radical artists of the 20th century OAPs. Whilst the 70th birthday of American composer Steve Reich is marked this year at the BBC Proms, those of us who have only been elightened by the American minimalist movement within the last decade can easily feel cheated by our own youth.

That it still seems unusual and exciting to hear a symphony orchestra launch itself into a piece of Reich, Adams or Glass with a telling look of fear that the extreme momentum of this music won't be kept in check is either a testament to the quality of the writing or a lamentable side effect of the fact that it is still not programmed enough by orchestras. In an age when atonal music is still largely abused (and worse, ignored) by audiences, programmers and commentators, why aren't those who don't favour atonalism championing the movement that stood against it - or at least citing that movement as an alternative? As it happens, I don't believe one can't appreciate both. What one must appreciate though, is that art music faced extraordinarily huge questions in the middle of the twentieth century, and the route proposed by the minimalists consistently addressed so many of the problems whilst providing audiences with a suitable degree of entertainment and acknowledging the immediate developments of the world around them (a sentiment touched on in the post Why I Love John Adams).

Not that you'd immediately call the programme presented by a handfull of young male percussionists at yesterday's Late Night Prom 'entertaining'  - musically speaking at least - as this was a line-up of classic Reich in his most theoretical vein, exposing the very roots of minimalism that were to be realised with more standard tools by Adams and Glass. The nonchalantly duplicated cadence of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ satisfied those of us who appreciate the harmonic charm of the minimalists, and was executed with extreme cleanliness by this ensemble (which included the paradoxically young and all-male line-up of current percussion talent in Colin Currie, Richard Benjafield, Joby Burgess, Antoine Bedewi, Adrian Spillett, Dave Jackson, Owen Gunnell and Andrew Cottee), which given the complexity of this highly detailed but ultra-smooth surface was quite an achievement. Micaela Haslam, Amy Haworth and Heather Cairncross placed a vocal veneer atop the marimbas and organ which seemed inhuman in its synergy with the instruments - at one with Reich's soundworld as they closed their mouths to stop their voices from sounding - almost like mechanical organs. Such blanket unity of sound is seldom achieved without the wizardry of the studio.

Currie and Benjafield opened the concert with Reich's Clapping Music, written for two percussionists and their hands, and a simple and effective demonstration of Reich's principle of two parallel patterns lurching apart and then rejoining one another. The performance was captivating; both musicians placing real depth of musicianship on top of a rock-solid technique - they've obviously been supporting their fellow musicians a fair bit to get the clapping practise in. It sounds like an old cliche, but this music is so delicate and easy to deface; here it was blessed with performances that thrusted Reich's musical principles into the foreground with great understanding. The same two musicians faced each other for a fascinatingly visual and equally virtuosic performance of Nagoya Marimbas, an intense discussion for two players, and one that the protagonists treated personally whilst also allowing to permeate the hall with great depth.

Experiencing the last piece of the programme, Drumming, must be somewhat like attending a lecture from Reich himself. In this extended work in four sections - three rhythmic tirades on different sections and a fourth bringing them together - Reich's work seems more separate than ever from what would be (irritatingly) called 'classical' in its sound. But it is intensely classical in its approach; this is music of complete reliance on the performing community - a community that shapes the work even as it progresses, for every hearing is different. The work is Reich's manifesto for rhythmic textile and layering - at once hugely effective, but one wonders if what is achieved is a physiological aesthetic rather than a musical one. If anyone was crying out for some harmonic interest by the end of Drumming then that's understandable, but it may be to miss the point of Reich's work. Besides, John Adams conducts John Adams at the Proms tonight - so there's your harmony for you.

Andrew Mellor

Sonic Youth: Rather Ripped

2004’s Sonic Nurse album seemed to bring together two often disparate elements in SY’s music - the droning squal of incinerated guitar noise (stemming from Ranaldo and Moore’s time with Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra), and the skewed broken melodic pop of ‘hits’ like ‘Teenage Riot’ and ‘Sunday’ - the latter of which was used as a blueprint for Blur’s ‘Coffee and TV’. The band’s output since 2000’s experimental ‘NYC Ghosts and Flowers’ has been peppered with a tension between the urges to make pop songs on the one hand, and seething soundscapes on the other, often at the expense of cogency. It has also seen some of the most consistently enjoyable music in recent years. Of these urges, Sonic Nurse seemed to present a decent synthesis - edgy and raw, but compact and melodic also, with ten songs of similar length all pointing in a similar direction. The urge towards experimentalism and noise emerged here more softly, adding texture and a density to breezy melodies and riffy hooks, the presence of fifth member Jim O’Rourke bringing a fullness to a sound that had previously been rather bare. It wasn’t both feet in the pop camp by any means, but the dissonance of NYC G&F was severely toned down.
Two years on, the band well into their third decade together, and another album, now without bassist Jim O’Rourke. This time around the pop has definitely wrestled the crown from the noise - and quite straightforward ‘rock’ rears its head on more than one occasion. But this isn’t necessarily a new direction for a band that have been influncing pop acts for the past two decades; the fact that ‘The Neutral’ bares more than a passing resemblance to Sleeper’s ‘Inbetweener’’, and ‘Pink Steam’ could have been written by a more dreamy Placebo only serve as proof of this, rather than criticisms. And the album isn’t really as straightforward as the first two songs would have you believe; the glassy sounds of ‘Do you believe in rapture?’ are more tone poem than rock song. What is perhaps lacking though, is the feeling of looseness and flow that were present on ‘Sonic Nurse’ and on 2002’s excellent ‘Murray Street’. From the opening track ‘Reena’, the sound is tighter and more palpable.
The photo of the band beneath the CD says a lot about the musical content - a posed action shot with guitars and amplifiers - black and white with a New York cityscape behind. It’s clear, visceral and real, four people playing intruments; Sonic Nurse had the band in a gallery, standing in front of Richard Prince’s patchy ‘Nurse’ paintings which also grace the cover. Whatever the intention, the effect is one of simplifying - the emergence of a more straightforward, unpretentious rock band aesthetic. And there’re the obligatory rock band sounds as well; songs that start with clicking 4/4 drum beats over fuzzy feedback, the odd bluesy riff, the occasional chorus. And like Sonic Nurse there’s also an apocalytic Lee Ranaldo number (Rats) and a breathy vocaled Kim Gordan track (Jams Run Free), which left me feeling that the whole thing was a little formulaic - there are also a couple of melodies that are lifted straight from the previous album. Are Sonic Youth growing less creative as they mature and mellow? Perhaps a lack of substance had previouly been shadowed by showy experimentalism and arbtitrary noise. Well, maybe a little.
To focus too much on the failings is unfair though, particularly if we take the album in context. In fact the band continue to release more experimental music on their own label, and this album represents only one side of their output. Also, the fact that this is their fourth album since 2000 is testament to their herculaic prolificacy - one can’t imagine Keane lasting so long, and remaining credible. It also has some moments of quite dazzling beauty; 'Pink Steam' seems to be aiming for the heavens, and the wonderful ‘Incinerate’ is as bouyant a moment of gleeful pop riffing as you’re likely to hear all summer. It’s not in any way perfect, but Sonic Youth albums always feel a bit like works in progress, and that’s something I really enjoy about them.

Thomas Conolly

Further information and full album stream here.