John Bald/language and literacy

Sir Thomas Allen, Royal College of Music.

 

To the Royal College of Music, for a masterclass by opera star Sir Thomas Allen. Three hours of teaching, closely matched to the highly varied requirements of five young singers, moving from intense concentration to hilarity as appropriate, and enhanced by his own singing, technique and stagecraft, beginning when he entered to thunderous applause and looked around him as if startled. Eric Morcombe could not have done it better. Sir Tom goes for subtlety, sound and phrasing based on deep understanding of the text and how its meaning is brought out and enhanced by the music, creating a new work of art. He spoke of living with texts for long periods before performing them and went into the smallest detail of pronunciation, such as whether or not to pronounce a final consonant to maintain a line, as if playing it on a cello. A Soft Day, sung here by Sharon Carty, shows the goal and the difficulty, for example, near the end, in a tiny diminuendo of four repeated words, from a very soft start.

The Royal College has an exciting programme of concerts by international artists and students, at very reasonable prices. Well worth keeping in touch. 

Patrick Hemmerlé's new website.

Patrick Hemmerlé, international concert pianist, Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and gifted teacher, has a new website, here. Strongly recommended to anyone who has the opportunity to study with Patrick, to have their children learn with him, or to hear him play. 

Patrick Hemmerle CD - Crowdfunding initiative.

Patrick Hemmerle is one of the finest pianists in the world, and the finest classical player I've ever heard, either live or on record. He is currently based in Cambridge, and his friends and admirers are crowdfunding a professionally recorded CD, which will cost £3500, to be recorded in Madrid. The funding website, which includes a recording of Chopin's Etude Opus 10, No 11, is here.   A review of a stunning Beethoven concert at Clare Hall is here.

Interlude: Digby Fairweather, great British jazz.

 

 

Digby Fairweather is my knd of jazzman - clear, melodic, swinging as high as it will go. Click on the pic to reach his website, with all kinds of information on his career, gigs etc.  Anecdote - Edinburgh Festival, around 1980, Digby on stage with a pick up group of big American stars, just flown in, no rehearsal, and standing around on stage sorting out who was going to do what. Not the best, and upstaged by a good bunch of local chemists, the Apothecaries of Jazz.  Next morning, Digby was booked with some local players in a pub. My companions decided they'd had enough. I remembered going to see Max Wall three times in London in the seventies, the first two ok-ish, and the last the funniest evening I've ever had, at the Greenwich theatre, his home ground. Max was teling each joke before you'd finished laughing at the previous one - it was actually painful.   

Digby blew the roof off the pub, lifting his local band as he did so. Best British jass I've ever heard  I bought him a drink, and he had an orange juice. I was disappointed, but now understand that musicians need a clear head. 

Phonics, reading, spelling and piano playing: some common ground.

My patient piano teacher, the distinguished international pianist Patrick Hemmerle, thinks that my own problems with learning have helped me professionally. I'm sure he's right. My difficulties, first with handwriting and later with geometry, which involved making hard work of things that are very simple if you understand them, helped me to see both the frustrations of people who find reading and writing difficult, and the need for clear explanation and practice on points that can be taken for granted by people to whom learning comes easily.

Reading and spelling in alphabetic writing systems are based on a correspondence between sounds and letters, beginning with one letter corresponding to one sound, as in cat, red, etc. On the piano, a basic C scale is played with one finger at a time on adjacent notes - with the left hand, you play the first five notes in a row, beginning with your little finger. Play a wrong note, and you lose the harmonic links in the sequence. Play a note with the wrong finger, and you risk not having a finger free to play the next note. In both cases, you lose the music.

Returning to the Gilbert and Sullivan tune I posted on over Christmas, I found that the beginning depended on my playing an  D below an F, not with the third finger, that falls naturally, but with the fourth, which involves a slight stretch. Make the stretch, and the introduction flows pleasantly. Use the natural finger, and you don't have a finger free to play one of the notes later on.  The score is marked with the figure 4 below the note, but it doesn't say "Make sure you play the note with this finger, otherwise you won't be able to complete the run".  It just says, 4, and we should be grateful even for that. Professional orchestral musicians, to whom these variations are second nature, have told me they find it annoying when other players have put pencil markings on scores, as it interferes with their thinking as they play.

My 13 year old pupil yesterday morning had missed a lesson on severe weather. I asked him to write this down, and he wrote sevire wether. In the first word, he had used the wrong group of letters - ire rather than ere - perhaps thinking of the i in machine - and in the second, he needed to use an extra letter to make the voice or vowel group, ea. The word as he has written it is phonically regular and accurate, and indeed a word in its own right (it is a castrated sheep). To spell both words, he needs to know the variation on the straight sound-letter correspondence that he must use in their context - severe, for example, does not use the same group as auctioneer. In music, the correct finger most of the time becomes the wrong finger for Sullivan's tune. Play a Bflat in stead of a B, or indeed a B where you need a Bflat, and you have a similar problem with discord.

In both music and spelling, fluency depends on automatic recognition of variations from the original pattern, which become instinctive with practice. If you have to stop to work them out each time, it takes attention away from saying what you mean, or from playing the tune. On balance, it seems the music is more dificult, as far fewer people manage to do it. The underlying mental processes are, though, very similar, and my pupil is not being helped at school as he is not doing enough writing to give him the practice he needs. This is a national problem. Writing is avoided because pupils find it difficult - and so many never learn to write.

 

 

Interlude: Voskrensenje (Resurrection) Choir, St Mary's, Linton, 9th Nov 2013.

 

Amazing that a professional choir from St Petersburg should find itself in a village church thousands of miles away. The music was even more amazing   - just eight people, seven of them soloists, and a wonderful balance of harmony and power across the full vocal range from top Soprano to a rare and genuine basso profundo in Anatoly Artamonov. Anatoly's drinking song is on You Tube here, but the choir has improved on this version. He stands like a rock in the centre of the choir, a twinkle in his eye and an icon. Lidia Vorontzova (soprano) and Marina Trufanova (alto) have glorious, melodic, colourful voices, and Ms Vorontzova's high notes are genuinely breathtaking. The first half is Russian religious music, the second folk songs, with the ladies marking the change by putting colourful shawls over their elegant long black. Much credit to maestro Lurii Maruk, not least for standing aside while the singers took the applause.  If you get a chance to see them, don't miss.

Piano practice, how slow is slow?

Sir Thomas Allen takes care to ensure that everyone who wants to hear him can do so, and peforms to the same standard in a school hall as at the Royal Opera House. Last weekend he was at St Christopher's hospice in Sydenham, and the person sitting next to me happened to be a professional pianist. I mentioned to her that I was having trouble practising slowly enough, and she said that she also had to practice extremely slowly, sometimes even stopping with her hands in the correct position when she had to play difficult pieces. 

Patrick has told me something between 500 and 1,000 times that I go too quickly, and this is probably going to prevent me from playing as I would like to unless I can stop it. As soon as I manage to play part of a piece properly, I tend to speed up on that part, creating uneveness. Following this conversation with my kind neighbour, I've moved to seeing how slowly I can manage to play, with the idea of getting all of the information from the score into my mind without the pressure that leads to jerky playing. It seems to be working - my Mozart sonata is a little better, and I'm playing things by Fanny Waterman, who puts pianistic technique into the simplest pieces, with more confidence. 

Catherine Edwards' lovely new recording of Stanford's music for violin and piano ls here. 

Interlude: Sir Thomas Allen, Chancellor of Durham University.

This is one of the most appropriate public appointments ever, and Sir Thomas's response shows how keenly he feels about the North-East and its cultural centre, Durham Cathedral, which he rightly says is one of the greatest sights in the world. Here are some links, courtesy of my wife Enid, who was at school with the great man:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wear-15269885

http://www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=12950

http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/9299798.World_famous_opera_star_is_new_Chancellor_of_Durham_University/

Glorious - Sir Thomas Allen, Dame Felicity Lott and Eugene Asti, West Road Concert Hall, 6.8.11

Just occasionally, musicians rise above excellence to a level that sums up the best in what people can do and can be. Before tonight, I'd seen this three times - Louis Armstrong, late in life at the Hammersmith Odeon; a recital by Segovia at the Festival Hall in which his hands and fingers seemed to flow, gently but without pause, for three hours; Sir Thomas Allen with Sir Simon Rattle and the CBSO in Don Giovanni; and now himself, Dame Felicity Lott, and their wonderful, lyrical accompanist Eugene Asti in the finale of this year's Cambridge summer music festival.   

The format was their practised and highly successful "Knight and Dame", which offers mostly classical songs in the first half, and mostly popular songs in the second. It's played both seriously and for fun, this time with Purcell, sea songs, Bridge and Schumamm followed by Saint-Saens, Poulenc and Faure, then moving, via John Wilson's arrangements of All the Things You Are and The Folks Who Live on the Hill, to a series of popular songs leading up to People Will Say We're in Love.

That's more or less what they did - how they did it was something else. The classical pieces had clarity, sensitivity and verve, sustained by piano playing as lyrical and expressive as the singing. Mr Asti would have been - no doubt, is - a phenomenal soloist, but in this company he became an inseparable part of the blend, at times breathtakingly quick (Dame Felicity's breath, at the end of Messager's De Ci, De La), at others quietly, expressively precise, holding everything together, singing into himself as he did so, as many conductors do. His illustrious partners quite rightly put him in the centre more than once for the loud applause that punctuated and celebrated the evening. This was the best piano accompaniment of singers I've ever heard, and made the difficult, pale-textured Estuary by Head a real showstopper for Sir Tom.

Dame Felicity's soaring, glittering French would justify her Légion d'Honneur if she could not sing a note. Put together with her rich voice, perfect stagecraft, gorgeous appearance and partnership with the best actor on the operatic stage, it was simply unforgettable. Then a hint of a sway, one tap of a foot and she was a vamp - more  Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered  than Ella Fitzgerald and more alluring than Billie Holiday. Sir Tom's knack of getting the most out of the smallest gesture, fixing our attention even when three-quarters turned away from us, meant that between them they brought out everything from each duet, and especially from People Will Say We're in Love. This is reputed to be the "our song" of the Queen and  Duke, though HRH apparently told Ken Dodd that he'd never heard it in his life. We can only hope they get to hear this version. 

"We sing opera, 'Er and Me," said Sir Tom, introducing one of the encores, La Chi Darem La Mano, which again brought together that wonderful combination of stagecraft and glorious voice that made it seem not just as if they were living it, but as if we were too. At the end, a kiss on the forehead for Flotte was just enough to remind us that it was stagecraft. Ah yes, I remember it well, perfect, by turns flamboyant - Dame Felicity's Spanish flourish - and subtly touching in the ensemble singing, was the right conclusion. If Hepburn and Tracey had seen it, they would have been torn between envy and admiration. Remember it well. We certainly will. I think they might, too.

 

 

 

 

Patrick Hemmerle, Hammerklavier Sonata, Emmanuel College

Patrick's performance at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was a tour de force that did full justice to Beethoven and to the college's magnificent Bösendorfer.  Patrick has been studying this great work for over a year, and his combination of deep sensitivity, and dazzling technique when required - he does not need to show off - made for a great experience, as well as a fantastic bargain, thanks once again to Emma's Music Society. Patrick still has room for piano and vocal students, and is a first-rate teacher as well as a great player. Contact him on   [email protected]