paul griffiths
home work record notes online
Information may be found at Wikipedia. Messages may be sent to paul@disgwylfa.com.
T H E S U B S T A N C E O F T H I N G S H E A R D
- essays on Berio, Mozart, Birtwistle, Wagner, Stockhausen, Schoenberg, Boulez, etc., etc. -
now available to website visitors at a special price of $30/£20 inclusive of postage.
latest publications
essay in Alexander Goehr (Akademie der Künste Berlin)
note for Miklós Perényi album (ECM)
note for Dénes Várjon album (ECM)
H A J I T O M I
after the noh play
Someone comes to the temple. They bring an offering. This is all you can know of them: what they offer.
The traveller had taken a vow to bring, here to Unrin’in, flowers throughout the months of spring and early summer. Now and again he would find himself coinciding with another visitor who also came with flowers: a woman dressed in white. White, too, were the flowers she brought, which she always held with the stems wrapped in a piece of cloth.
Careful, she said (under her breath, impossible for him to hear), if I were to touch these flowers they would spoil.
How could she not have raised a question in his mind? How could he not address her?
Excuse me, he said, but we seem to be regulars here, and I cannot help wondering what these flowers are that you appear to bring every evening, and that have such an intoxicating scent.
You do not recognize them? she said. This is their hour, twilight. They are moonflowers.
And you, he said, might I ask your name?
Not now. Not yet, she said. You could say that I come from somewhere beyond these flowers.
Beyond the world?
Well, my house is over there.
She gestured to the right with the flowers in her hand. The traveller looked in that direction, and by the time he looked back she had gone, leaving only the perfume of her moonflowers in the still air.
The next evening he explored in the area she had indicated, and came upon a decaying house around which moonflowers were indeed growing, just about to open themselves to the moon. An ancient poem began to speak in his mind:
Old desolation
Into weeds at the window
And then he heard the third line added by a voice from the house:
The house is sinking
Please show yourself to me again, he said.
With a screak of rust a lattice casement fell open, and there in the interior darkness she was, framed by the moonflowers growing up the wall on either side.
Yes, he came here, Radiant Genji, she said. He asked me the same question you did, but in the form of a poem:
What is this flower
That will linger by the wall
Or come over here?
I offered him a moonflower on a white fan, and he took it. He came into this house, into this room. It was evening, and the moon shone in through this window, onto his silver shoulder. Silver and gold: he had these metal colours, but soft metal, living metal, supple as well as strong.
I would not tell him my name. He knew my father was only a fisherman, and he said that this did not matter. Why, then, bring it up? I wanted to stay in the shadows, have him also in the shadows, have this be the nature of our love. He seemed to accept that. He sent me another poem:
Not in the daytime
I want always to see you
Only by moonlight
So it was. Then it was over.
The traveller had taken a vow to bring, here to Unrin’in, flowers throughout the months of spring and early summer. Now and again he would find himself coinciding with another visitor who also came with flowers: a woman dressed in white. White, too, were the flowers she brought, which she always held with the stems wrapped in a piece of cloth.
Careful, she said (under her breath, impossible for him to hear), if I were to touch these flowers they would spoil.
How could she not have raised a question in his mind? How could he not address her?
Excuse me, he said, but we seem to be regulars here, and I cannot help wondering what these flowers are that you appear to bring every evening, and that have such an intoxicating scent.
You do not recognize them? she said. This is their hour, twilight. They are moonflowers.
And you, he said, might I ask your name?
Not now. Not yet, she said. You could say that I come from somewhere beyond these flowers.
Beyond the world?
Well, my house is over there.
She gestured to the right with the flowers in her hand. The traveller looked in that direction, and by the time he looked back she had gone, leaving only the perfume of her moonflowers in the still air.
The next evening he explored in the area she had indicated, and came upon a decaying house around which moonflowers were indeed growing, just about to open themselves to the moon. An ancient poem began to speak in his mind:
Old desolation
Into weeds at the window
And then he heard the third line added by a voice from the house:
The house is sinking
Please show yourself to me again, he said.
With a screak of rust a lattice casement fell open, and there in the interior darkness she was, framed by the moonflowers growing up the wall on either side.
Yes, he came here, Radiant Genji, she said. He asked me the same question you did, but in the form of a poem:
What is this flower
That will linger by the wall
Or come over here?
I offered him a moonflower on a white fan, and he took it. He came into this house, into this room. It was evening, and the moon shone in through this window, onto his silver shoulder. Silver and gold: he had these metal colours, but soft metal, living metal, supple as well as strong.
I would not tell him my name. He knew my father was only a fisherman, and he said that this did not matter. Why, then, bring it up? I wanted to stay in the shadows, have him also in the shadows, have this be the nature of our love. He seemed to accept that. He sent me another poem:
Not in the daytime
I want always to see you
Only by moonlight
So it was. Then it was over.
forthcoming
Jun 18 : conversation with Helmut Lachenmann (Aldeburgh Festival)
Apr 2013 : première of Gulliver, music by James Wood (Utrecht)
May 23, 2013 : talk on The Rite of Spring (RLPO)
May 23, 2013 : talk on The Rite of Spring (RLPO)
summer 2013 : publication of Pavillon lunaire (La Différence)
Dec 2013 : première of let me tell you, music by Hans Abrahamsen (Berlin)
❧
record of the week
3 Three works emanating from IRCAM make up the programme for a Pierre Jodlowski collection (Kairos 0013032 KAI), two featuring the Ensemble InterContemporain under Susanna Mälkki, two (not the same two) including recorded sounds. The piece without these, Drones, works hectically with rather trivial material. Jodlowski’s talent seems to be for cinematic narrative, using sounds to evoke both the physical world and psychological states, and his work is more effective when he has electronic access to dramatic soundscapes. It is more effective, too, when pared down. Both the ensemble pieces, despite being strongly and beautifully played, convey a lot of raw, undirected tension and energy; the temperature starts high and remains so. Barbarismes, like Varèse’s Déserts, has windows into an electronic space, and though, like Drones, it keeps one interested in what will come next (a thunderstorm at one point), its musical ideas can be disappointingly elementary. Film music, it might be, for a lost film. Dialog/No Dialog, for flute and recording, is much more self-sufficient in its drama, much richer and more persuasive. At the centre of the recorded sound is a female voice, whose moments of conjunction with the flute are strikingly managed. ‘Écoute[s]’, she says at the start, and we do – and the flute does. Indeed, it may seem that the recording is listening to the flute as much as the flute to the recording. Sophie Cherrier is the excellent performer. The documentation, though, is incomplete, and one has to go to the composer’s excellent website to discover even the dates of these works.
2 Anaïs Nin had an off-centre place in music thanks to Varèse’s Nocturnal; now Louis Andriessen given her the full spotlight with a portrait, Anaïs Nin (2009-10), recorded at a London Sinfonietta concert last year, along with his De Staat (Signum Classics SIGCD 273). Andriessen’s setting – a lot more conversational than Varèse’s – is of diary entries that speak of Nin’s erotic relationships with Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller, René Allendy and her father, the composer Joaquín Nin. The voice Andriessen gives her is light and casual; he designed the work for Cristina Zavalloni, whose singing boders on jazz and cabaret, and those affinites are strengthened by the instrumentation, for saxophones, horn, trumpet, violin, bass, piano and percussion. His choice of this formation was dictated, according to his note, by the period concerned, 1932-4; we are – though this he does not make explicit – very much in the world of Weill.
Since the whole piece operates on this level of irony, it is perhaps too much to ask for some Weillian acid, or even some Weillian sweetness. Besides, Anaïs Nin is no Brecht, and what strength her writing has, which is principally naivety, is compromised when someone else is speaking or, as here, singing for her. Possibly naivety and sophistication, frankness and self-delusion, openness and danger, warmth and heat could all have been combined more effectively had the model instead been Berg’s Lulu (also right for the period). That, however, would be to wish for a wholly different piece.
In any event, Anaïs Nin has other problems, of genre. We are told that film formed part of the performance, and no doubt its presence changed the nature of the space the music occupied. The songs alone, plus recordings of an actor in the roles of Artaud and Miller, sound incomplete.
Not so De Staat, of course, which receives a polished performance under David Atherton, with Synergy Vocals providing the choral elements.
1 Old Lockenhaus and new are represented on a disc offering two concertos by Sofia Gubaidulina (ECM 2256): The Lyre of Orpheus, written for and played by Gidon Kremer, in a recording from 2006, and The Canticle of the Sun, where the soloist is Nicolas Altstaedt, performing four years later. They are concertos of different sorts, the first a passionate monologue (occasionally turning into a duologue involving cello) for solo violin with strings and percussion, the second a one-of-a-kind piece in which the solo cello, again with prominent but never overwhelming percussion, instigates and resonates with choral chanting of St Francis’s hymn of praise. Playing for over forty-five minutes in this recording, The Canticle of the Sun is also almost twice as long as The Lyre of Orpheus. On the other hand, the two pieces have much in common – and much in common with other works by this composer. In both the solo instrument is the subjective centre, a frankly singing voice. Both make play with fully tonal material – fifths, octaves, triads, overtone series – to convey an impression of light discovered within darkness. Both also resort often to the glissando, especially the upward glissando, as an expressive gesture. And both feature a short melodic motif recurring often to grip the music in a unified character.
Gubaidulina’s own notes, printed in the brochure, warmly endorse Rostropovich as the solar personality for whom she wrote The Canticle of the Sun, but the piece has now been recorded by three other cellists: Wispelwey and Geringas as well as Altstaedt, who in his account suggests heat not so much by expansiveness as by intensity and close focus. This new recording also benefits from the clear voices of the Latvian choir ‘Kamer…’, whose long burst of light – the climax, rather more than halfway through – is thrilling.
Not recorded hitherto, The Lyre of Orpheus has points of wonderful iridescence when soloist or orchestra sound off overtones in successsion, providing the sense indeed of some enormous instrument being spanned by giant hands. Gubaidulina in her note indicates that the governing idea has to do with difference tones in the low bass, but this is not easy to hear. One is held much more by a Gubaidulinesque sense of desperation and continuous search for what can never be found.
2 Anaïs Nin had an off-centre place in music thanks to Varèse’s Nocturnal; now Louis Andriessen given her the full spotlight with a portrait, Anaïs Nin (2009-10), recorded at a London Sinfonietta concert last year, along with his De Staat (Signum Classics SIGCD 273). Andriessen’s setting – a lot more conversational than Varèse’s – is of diary entries that speak of Nin’s erotic relationships with Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller, René Allendy and her father, the composer Joaquín Nin. The voice Andriessen gives her is light and casual; he designed the work for Cristina Zavalloni, whose singing boders on jazz and cabaret, and those affinites are strengthened by the instrumentation, for saxophones, horn, trumpet, violin, bass, piano and percussion. His choice of this formation was dictated, according to his note, by the period concerned, 1932-4; we are – though this he does not make explicit – very much in the world of Weill.
Since the whole piece operates on this level of irony, it is perhaps too much to ask for some Weillian acid, or even some Weillian sweetness. Besides, Anaïs Nin is no Brecht, and what strength her writing has, which is principally naivety, is compromised when someone else is speaking or, as here, singing for her. Possibly naivety and sophistication, frankness and self-delusion, openness and danger, warmth and heat could all have been combined more effectively had the model instead been Berg’s Lulu (also right for the period). That, however, would be to wish for a wholly different piece.
In any event, Anaïs Nin has other problems, of genre. We are told that film formed part of the performance, and no doubt its presence changed the nature of the space the music occupied. The songs alone, plus recordings of an actor in the roles of Artaud and Miller, sound incomplete.
Not so De Staat, of course, which receives a polished performance under David Atherton, with Synergy Vocals providing the choral elements.
1 Old Lockenhaus and new are represented on a disc offering two concertos by Sofia Gubaidulina (ECM 2256): The Lyre of Orpheus, written for and played by Gidon Kremer, in a recording from 2006, and The Canticle of the Sun, where the soloist is Nicolas Altstaedt, performing four years later. They are concertos of different sorts, the first a passionate monologue (occasionally turning into a duologue involving cello) for solo violin with strings and percussion, the second a one-of-a-kind piece in which the solo cello, again with prominent but never overwhelming percussion, instigates and resonates with choral chanting of St Francis’s hymn of praise. Playing for over forty-five minutes in this recording, The Canticle of the Sun is also almost twice as long as The Lyre of Orpheus. On the other hand, the two pieces have much in common – and much in common with other works by this composer. In both the solo instrument is the subjective centre, a frankly singing voice. Both make play with fully tonal material – fifths, octaves, triads, overtone series – to convey an impression of light discovered within darkness. Both also resort often to the glissando, especially the upward glissando, as an expressive gesture. And both feature a short melodic motif recurring often to grip the music in a unified character.
Gubaidulina’s own notes, printed in the brochure, warmly endorse Rostropovich as the solar personality for whom she wrote The Canticle of the Sun, but the piece has now been recorded by three other cellists: Wispelwey and Geringas as well as Altstaedt, who in his account suggests heat not so much by expansiveness as by intensity and close focus. This new recording also benefits from the clear voices of the Latvian choir ‘Kamer…’, whose long burst of light – the climax, rather more than halfway through – is thrilling.
Not recorded hitherto, The Lyre of Orpheus has points of wonderful iridescence when soloist or orchestra sound off overtones in successsion, providing the sense indeed of some enormous instrument being spanned by giant hands. Gubaidulina in her note indicates that the governing idea has to do with difference tones in the low bass, but this is not easy to hear. One is held much more by a Gubaidulinesque sense of desperation and continuous search for what can never be found.