25.08.10
In days gone by, a notorious reporter of le demi-monde for the News of the World often signed off his stories with the evocative coda: "At this point, I made an excuse and left". Legend has it that during his Hollywood years, Arnold Schoenberg once responded in similar fashion when a fellow guest at a party sat at on his lap, threw her arms around his neck and demanded "c'mon perfesser, play us a toon". Prof. Schoenberg wasn't always so prissy. As an upwardly mobile musiker in Vienna c. 1900, he arranged and performed other composers' toons for cabaret performance, slumming it to make a living, just as Brahms had done in Hamburg's red light district – and as Schoenberg's contemporary neighbour, the even more obscure artist Adolf Hitler, did by churning out cheap picture-postcards.
I was put in mind of the music professor as party pooper during a recent conversation with an old friend. Born and bred in Barry, Andrew Keener has long been among the most sought-after producers of classical music recordings. He's won all the prizes going in an international industry, acting – in his own self-deprecating but vivid phrase – as "musical midwife" to many modern virtuosos. To judge by ongoing demand, not too many of his patients have suffered post-natal depression. I'd guess that most of my cherished and discriminating readers have a number of Andrew's CDs on their shelves. Perhaps his best-known achievement is renowned as the longest-running series in the entire genre, Hyperion's "The Romantic Piano Concerto"; as hardy a perennial as "Gardeners' Question Time". Andrew was working at the BBC's Hoddinott Hall with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Thierry Fischer and soloist Marcus Becker on the latest instalment of this epic – putting No. 50-something in the can – and invited me along. Like many others (I suspect) this aspect of disc-making had largely escaped my attention since the '60s, when reading John Culshaw's account of producing the first complete Ring for Decca. A.K. is perfectly comfortable with the fact that his calling is an "invisible art", and modestly accepts its secondary order status in the great chain of musical being. He sees himself and his team pretty much as the boys in the back room. "Each skill is a mystery to the outsider", as he put it, deflecting any praise. Yet in practice not one but a dozen discrete skills are deployed: rigorous quality controller, diplomatic negotiator, social catalyst, time-and-motion man, programmatic tactician; all this on top of knowing the score – meticulously. Of course, interpretation remains the performers' prerogative. Nevertheless, a very high proportion of what we ultimately hear on any CD or MP3 is the result of editorial decision-making – not just during recording but post hoc, propter hoc. For me, being in the control room was exciting and revelatory, like watching a single supercharged technician in absolute command of a moon-landing.
After three hours' work and well over 100 takes, Andrew agreed to an interview as readily as if we'd been taking a walk along Barry Island beach. I asked him about the state of music in Wales, "not enough profile" was his broad feeling. Admitting that his own milieu was the instrumental repertoire, A.K. attributed our limited horizons to the dead hand of the choral tradition and the exclusively vocal proclivity it encourages. Of course, he saw the positive side of this history. There's no arguing with the impact of "Cardiff Singer of the World" – and its dazzling supporting cast – Wales's apostolic succession of great singers, from Geraint Evans via Gwynedd Jones, Stuart Burrows, Robert Tear (et al.) to the current High Priest-cum-Bad Boy, our Bryn. And how could we possibly overlook the incomparable Gio Compario – aka Wynne Evans.
A.K.'s musical mentor at Barry Comp was Dyfrig Thomas, who at the age of 88 recently turned up for a recording session to hear Bryn Terfel (in The Dream of Gerontius). Fair enough – who could not admire B.T.'s voice and presence – but surely A.K.'s overall pessimism is valid. As I write, BBC Wales is about to bring on yet another programme about the male voice choir. Some of us would almost rather spend an evening with a gazooka band – even, in extremis, the vuvuzela crazies. In any case, it was Professor Hubert Parry (Cantab), not Professor Joseph Parry (Aber, alas!), who exhorted his students to "write choral music, like Englishmen and democrats". As Stephen Rees (Bangor University) remarks in a concise but wide-ranging lecture our choric patricians, manic street preachers of eighteenth-century Bala and Bethesda, were inspired to purge the popular music of rural Wales. In the tradition of Henry VIII's music man, the composer John Taverner (suspicious surname!), who consigned almost the whole of England's medieval legacy to the flames (ostensibly) in the name of Reformation, Thomas Charles's creative programme was designed primarily to destroy the musical remnants of Wales's Catholic past. Singing by females was too innately sensual, dancing was – to conscript the words of a modern wit – "the vertical expression of a horizontal intention". All of this was the work of Pope and Devil, brewer and vintner! (If we had a James McMillan there would already be an opera about all this.)
In 1946, a biographical guide to British Music listed a total of ten Welsh-born artists among over 700 other notables.* Eight of this meagre band were singers. Of the other two, one was conductor Rae Jenkins whose passion for the lesser-known Haydn symphonies illuminated my younger days. Perhaps the most famous of the vocalists was Parry Jones, who survived the sinking of the Lusitania to sing at the dedication of the Unknown Warrior memorial in 1919. Doubtless still at their lecterns in some celestial space, Thomas Charles, William Williams and the like now have renewed cause to rejoice, with the triumph of "Only Men Aloud" over the Bishop of Rome's direct challenge in the Classical Brits Award earlier this year. A.K.'s main gripe is that there's still little space or climate to encourage instrumentalists: "For example, north Wales could really do with an orchestra." He sees little indigenous dearth of good players but no sign of a composer of sufficient appeal to provide for them. We ranged with voluble economy of words over the recent past. A.K. nodded to Hoddinott and bowed slightly to Mathias. I lauded Dan Jones (shame there's no heckelphone in his marvellous final Symphony!), "...but all Professors" – we glumly agreed.**
Perhaps this is why – in the 60th anniversary of his death – George Bernard Shaw has received no nods, bows or other obeisances from the musical fraternity. G.B.S. was the scourge of the professoriat and they're never likely to forget the fact. Deeply alienated by interminable professorial oratorios called Jacob or Judith or Jerusalem, he struggled to suppress his sympathetic resonance to the Irish Symphony of his fellow-expatriate Professor Stanford (Cantab. of course). Ashamed of the pleasure got from its ingenious treatment of the catchy "toons" of his homeland, wary of inadvertently displaying ethnic prejudice, Shaw admitted that Stanford "had certain traces of a talent for composition, which is precisely what the ordinary (i.e. English) professor, with all his grammatical and historical accomplishment, utterly lacks". G.B.S. was a radical – progressive, Marxist, scientistic – who had come to music reviewing by accident. He'd been hired as a political reporter, but the editor hated his opinions and shifted him to something supposedly less controversial. Thus politics is "close allied" to music – in the same way as genius and madness. For all his socialism, his pluralism, his sense of a libertarian future, Shaw was yet a Victorian and a patriot for Ireland.
Like the unviable "Corno di Bassetto" Hecklephone admits to an unremarkable but irrepressible patriotism. He is glad now to praise famous Welsh persons. For there are stirrings in the wilderness, signs of something other to the prophet's voice, an alternative to the choral sonderweg. We've already had a great orchestral conductor, whose stormy career and recent death went by little noticed in Wales: Wyn Morris. A star in the galaxy of outstanding Mahler interpreters of the '60s and '70s, and not at all bad at Beethoven, Morris was seen – in the facile put-down of the professoriate – as "his own worst enemy". True, he had a few Dylanesque demons inside him. As some sour sceptic once remarked, how can music soothe the beasts when it can't even calm the musicians. Yet Morris constantly won public acclaim, attracted huge interest from private patrons, formed and dissipated orchestras as promiscuously as Beecham, and left us a tremendous recording legacy. His Des Knaben Wunderhorn (with Geraint Evans and Janet Baker) is just one example I will always want to keep in handy reach. Wales can take solace, too, in its nurture of Paul Griffiths, one of the most influential musicologists (or better, music-philosophers) of the present day. One of Griffiths' profounder hypotheses concerns the relationship of music to time and space. Feeling a tad out of my depth here, I'm going to kick for touch... Time and space have run out (for the time being). That's all your "Silly Symphonies" for tonite, folks.
Hecklephone
* Russell Palmer, British Music (London: Skelton Robinson)
** This is already changing for the better, I fancy – and the new generation are not all professors. Perhaps more anon...