This production’s steps apparently aren’t actually out of the dark ages but might as well be; it’s the kind of pure classical pastiche show that mainly pleases those who want to be impressed by all the most skillful classical steps being executed precisely and with elegance; but not necessarily much imagination or characterisation. In other words, then, the sort of show that a dramatic reading of the score can rescue, but can equally seem a bit grey around the gills if the music is pedestrian and pretty ropey. What I mean is; no matter how immaculate the dancing (and it was pretty terrific), if the musical climax doesn’t come off, you couldn’t care less whether or not he a) turns in to a swan, b) dies or c) other.

I’m aware that these irritations are commonplace, and indeed these visits from Russian companies peddling the most traditional imaginable productions are quite frequent. Clearly the ballet community continues to turn out in droves on the strength of the visuals – fair enough, but I personally can’t reconcile the shoddy playing with the £23-for-the-cheap-seats price tag. I’m reminded of a row on fb over whether or not Matthew Bourne should be using a recording when he takes his Cinderella on tour. A rubbish orchestra is irritating for the same reason: that it’s easier/cheaper for the pro ballet companies if the audience just disengages its ears and concentrates on watching the steps, and the Bournes and Russian Traditionalists of this world – the ones you’d just love to come with awesome orchestra as standard – are in fact the ones relying on their awesome physical prowess to get by on those terms.

What’s strange is that I know that the average dancer is not inherently passive or ignorant where the music is concerned – anyone at a dancing school can tell you that both the RAD and IDTA demand an emotional response to the music from the very early grades. This audience could demand more from their idols, something spontaneous and unpredictable being interpreted with each performance – or, failing that, vote with their feet and at least give the Russians a miss for a good long time.

Whilst I could happily go to a concert performance of Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, I’d probably be sated by just the highlights from Lake – and then there’s be a problem when it struggled to live up to this, which is how it should be done.

The scenery is already pretty dramatic by the time you’re past Grenoble, and possibly long before that – coming from Geneva you’d see the completely different chalky hills of the Chartreuse, pretty serious peaks except that they happen to be right by the Alps. Yes, the place where they make the drink. They pronounce the ‘z’ at the end round those parts, as in ‘Berlioz’ (not to mention Boulez), who was born in this ball park. And the ‘X’, as in Aix-Les-Bains, which is a pretty place to stop halfway down.

The proper alpine stuff kicks in right after you’ve passed Vizille, and the real Bond-style hugging-the-rockface winding roads really start after you’re through a group of villages called the Stations d’Oisans (Bourg d’Oisans, La Garde d’Oisans, etc.)

Google maps suggests a more direct route but doesn’t mention that after turning left at Chamberry you’re soon faced with two mountain passes, the second of which, the Col du Galibier, is really hardcore, up to 3000 metres, hairpins for ages. They use this road as the thigh-cruncher to end all thigh-crunchers at the end of the Tour de France (and you’ll pass lots of people getting training). The road is best enjoyed on a day trip, having set off early so the skies are still astonishingly blue and the cows (there are a few) are standing on the verges (chasm side) waiting for, well,  breakfast, I guess (there isn’t exactly much grazing to be had up there). It does, however, make G maps’ “2 hours 42 mins” somewhat ambitious. Especially if there’s a single motor home up there and, bizarrely, there are loads.

The Col du Galibier

A view from the top

Various Messiaenologists (and, this year, Boulezologists) give talks at the friendlier end of academic on on-topic topics, and everybody from the High Alps just laps it up.

This year Boulez was invited to respond to everyone, and was in talkative mood. You just mentioned a topic and off he went… It really was the sort of thing people transcribe and sell in hardbacks for £12, and lengthy, so I won’t bang on about it here – plus my French is less than great when it comes to rapid-fire technical stuff. Nevertheless I was able to actually ask Boulez a question about Incises turning into Sur Incises, leading to me getting an awesome inscription on my Sur Incises score: ‘En souvenir cordiale de Notre Dialogue’. Particularly awesome because ‘Dialogue’ is such a classic Boulez word, as in, the wicked performance of Dialogue de l’Homme Double that I heard the night before.

Turns out that Incises was completely done and dusted before he conceived Sur Incises, he then treated it as a found object. Apparently Pollini wanted a piano concerto, but Boulez felt that Beethoven and Brahms (yes, Brahms) already had piano concertos licked.

I reckon, now that I’ve finally heard it, that Page d’Ephéméride ought to be ripe for a similar treatment, but I didn’t want to ask – in fact the only person to get a non-cordial response from the great man was the MC who fell in to the trap of asking whether something else of that nature was coming next. Says Boulez, “that will be announced!”

Things I’ve heard about what Boulez is doing at the moment:

-Orchestration (and, inevitably, exploding out) of more of the Notations

-An Anthèmes 3

-Violin piece for Anne-Sophie Mutter (could be the same thing as Anthèmes 3?)

- Finishing the 3rd sonata – seriously, man, with respect, where’s the rest?! He has said in interview that the other movements are “not a mystery to [him]“. Let’s hear ‘em then!

-The completely sensational Waiting for Godot rumour that all the Boulezologists at La Grave seemed to think is somewhat wishful thinking. I agree, it sounds made up.

Solo Viola Shizz

Violist Lise Berthaud tears in to the Ligeti sonata incredibly convincingly. 1st movement very soulful and melancholy, microtones executed perfectly and as though the instrument were actually built that way. Hadn’t really appreciated, until now, the build up of noise, the sheer amount of sound in the central fast movements of theis piece. It was like watching someone play Devil’s Staircase or Infinite Column from the piano Etudes on viola, that sort of impressive.

As a young contemporarily-enthused viola player she is presumably staring in to the abyss of playing loads and loads of Kurtag for the next 50 or so years. We got op. 5 which I guess was fun and full of standard Kurtag viola noises.

Bach Cello Suite transcription for viola = rustic. Kind of Bach playing you might hear up the side of an Alp; incidentally the concert was in fact at an even tinier church in an even more remote place called ‘Les Hieres’, which you have to go up another series of hill-climbing hairpins to get to.

Structures/Visions de L’Amen

Again, despite the decent Aimard recording (it was the second book), I appreciate this piece far more now that I’ve heard it from 10 paces away. The building probably helped (back in La Grave now) as i heard various resonances which never really hit the spot on the record. The performance was stunning, it’s an obvious thing to say but this piece really does have a fascinating structure which I was totally drawn in to. The second pianist, whose name escapes me, it’s not either of the ones listed but I’ll dig it out, battled on despite bits of the church roof flaking off all over her keyboard and head.

Change of pianist for Visions de L’Amen. Edith Klukson = muscular (very, actually managed to save some for the very end as well, just about. Denzö Ranki must have been muscular as well, but he was obscured by a pillar, I was sat right behind Klukson and it really was impressive, even the irritating stuff in the middle one that sounds like Poulenc. Yet another piece to hear very close-up.

Astonishing Dream Programme

Boulez: Piano Sonata No. 1, Incises, Page D’Ephemeride, Dialogue de l’Homme Double, Anthemes 2

Excuse my lack of accents.

Fantastic to hear Incises having never heard it before but already being ‘intimate’ with Sur Incises. The new(ish) piece Page d’Ephemeride has some incredibly tasty resonances in it also a la Sur Incises. There is some serious work with the pedals and with sympathetic resonance that sounds like squeezing the juicy bits out of the chords. The piece really openly dwells on the internal make-up of its sounds, like other bits of Boulez but none that I can think of in the piano music. There is some delicate rapid repeated note stuff later on. The opener was the 1st Sonata, which Marie Vermeulin actually played with a bit of tenderness, which seems telling as she’s been working on it with Boulez for months.

Dialogue was for me the surprise highlight, incredible virtuosity from Jerome Comte. Everything, the fast stuff and the effects, was incredibly clear, and I hadn’t until that night appreciated the power of the (simple) visual element: during the sustained live high note at the end, having worked his way round the six music stands, the live clarinettist is ‘transfigured’ in a thin column of light, at the back of the stage, back to the audience, while the tape part goes berzerk.

Anthemes 2 was played by that woman from ‘that’ CD, not quite as perfectly in tune or in time but, staggeringly, from memory. The diffusion in this piece was really effective, in this slightly larger community hall type affair in Le Monetier Les Bains.

String Quartet Stuff

Only disappointing concert all week. Definitely don’t need to hear the Boulez Livre Pour Quatour again in a hurry, or the dire, predictable, undergraduate-level tempo-hyperbole fest Fairies by Bruno Mantovani. Or even the Messiaen piece for piano quintet, which has chunks of some of the usual juicy Messiaen noises in it but sounds like he’d been given about 20 minutes to write a piece.

Le Marteau Sans Maitre

Obviously epochal and conducted by the man himself, in a concert which also featured Derive 1. Marteau now appears to take about 40 minutes – and not in a ‘conductor getting old’ kind of way, in a meaningful, resonant way!

8 cellos

Astounding concert at 11AM of all times, although a good two hours of it. The veritable virtuoso Marc Coppey brought a crack team of cellos and tucked in to Dutilleux, Bach and Huber by himself, and Berio, Boulez and a premier of Durieux’s with the rest of them. Was delighted to here Berio’s Korot, which has a creepy pull-the-plug-out coda like the amazing one in Ekphrasis (which is available on this disc which I’m evangelical about). Also really enjoyed the Durieux premiere. Messagesquise = yet another Boulez piece which made (even) more sence live, it felt very ritualuistic with the protagonist setting everyone else off.

As I’ve hinted, and it’s probably not uncommon knowledge among proper travel-bloggers, the pound does seem particularly weak against the Swiss Franc. Harrumph. The Euro does too. It’s to do with diplomats, and posh watches.

In it’s favour Geneva must be the most cosmopolitan city I’ve visited in Europe, and, in an inversion of most places, the trend seems to be that the more exotic the origin of the person, the more wealth is just dropping out of them in to watch shops, lakeside events, ’wealth management’ facilities etc. etc. This makes it a great place for latent-racist people-watching (this year’s must have fashion accessory is the  latest spanky white Ferrari, I saw 2 the same on consecutive nights, each having plates from a different United Arab Emirate).

‘These people’ aren’t uniquely diplomats, that’s just the standard thing to say after you’ve seen a few red reg. plates, the United Nations presumably frowns on all this money-showboating anyway; it is of course more to do with tax havens. Nevertheless Geneva does well out of this week in the international ‘season’. Speaking to a guy ‘in the know’ in the restaurant I’m about to bang on about, it seems that, for these pricelss - really priceless – watchmakers in the centre of town, it can be ‘make or break’ in terms of whether or not some oil sheikh (his stereotyping not mine) drops in and takes twenty. This specifically happens during fete week.

The other reason why you might choose here to host this jamboree of international dropper-inners would be the setting, this corner of this ginormous lake where you just happen to be able to see Mont Blanc between a couple of foothills, an hours caning-it-up-the-motorway away though it may be. At dusk, it goes pink and hazy. Then, as the light fades more, it goes a sinister white-and-charcoal grey, astonishingly regaining definition before disappearing altogether. At risk of romanticism, if one finds yerself at the fete, the best place for some peace and quiet is, er, anywhere where you can actually the aforesaid Mont, the jetties are and outcrops are quiet, all the deniyens who like to wear their labels on the outside are instead staring at the dodgems.

One may long, surrounded by it, for France, or simply for some trad. Swiss Fondue. In either case, I can recommend La Grappe d’Or on the Rue des Paquis, actually an Italianate-intentioned place with a pretty long list of pizzas. The pizza’s great, rustic, tough (in a good way), sweet tomato, great torn off strips of chicken (on the one I had). The steak behaves just like you want a continental steak to. It was the magnificent lasagne that had me going back for more of the same (actually bit watery second time round but still ludicrously tasty). The ice cream’s good too.

The place feels pretty Parisienne, in a full-on restaurant-spilling-on-to-the-street way rather than most of the bars/ashtrays you pass on the way in, which are also ‘blackboarding’ steaks starting at 19 Swiss Francs (seems to be the bottom line regardless of quality). At La Grappe, you can get something really decent for that, the pizzas/omlettes etc. start at 15 Swiss Francs.

The hostel is probably the cleanest i’ve been in, having a swimming pool-type decor once you’re in to the accomodation chunk (just realised the swimming pool bit doesn’t apply if you’re in the Rothschild Wing, soz – go to a swimming pool instead, if that’s your bag). The staff aren’t exactly ‘warm’ but do at least have a Swiss-type efficiency about them (except when the system goes down, like it did yesterday, very rare I’m told). Breakfast is fine if you like grown-up cereal and yoghurt; there is bread but they do not seem to have discovered ‘the toaster’.

Internet access = available (I’m doing it now). Showers good and reasonably powerful as these things go.

Evening meal is expensive to the point where you might as well go in to town and actually have something nice, bearing in mind that any trip to Geneva comes with standard-issue money-haemorrage.

The hostel is ideally situated for a stroll up the west side of the lake where it rapidly gets pretty peaceful. Come back through the botanical gardens if you’re in to plants, I’m not but there’s clearly some pretty serious botany going on. A full-on ramble in that direction would get you as far as Versoix, which is also available on the orange bus. One of the orange buses. Equally it’s only a short walk DOWN the lake in to town, i was there during the fete (an annual extension of the national holiday on August 1^st) so this mainly gave me a faceful of vaguely high-class travelling fairground ennui. In this direction you may also glimpse the really repulsive Hotel President Wilson, a genuiney shocking-looking building.

Being at the hostel gets you free public transport use, much appreciated as the buses are predictably efficient and the free zone goes right up to the French border on the other side of the lake, and out to various foothills for things like CERN.

The hostel more or less runs of solar power, so, yeh, go team!

Observe, it is tiny and a cheerful blue. You can imagine him bursting out of it and enacting ‘The Sudden Walk’, which contains my favourite long sentence and which I really like the sentiment of, despite it being hot and sunny and me only living with one other person who wouldn’t bat an eyelid if I left the house late at night. The abruptness would also, in all likelihood, be reduced somewhat by our wonky lock.

The Sudden Walk – Franz Kafka

When you seem finally to have made up your mind to spend the evening at home, when you have put on your smoking-jacket and settled down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually occupies you till bedtime, when the weather outside is so unpleasant that it makes staying at home the obvious thing to do, when by now you have been sitting quiet at the table for so long that to go out would cause general astonishment,when the staircase is anyhow dark now and the front door locked, and when despite all this you get to your feet in a sudden fit of restlessness, change your jacket, promptly reappear dressed for the street, explain that you have to go out and after a brief word of goodbye actually do so, estimating the degree of irritation you may have left behind from the force with which you slam the flat door, when you then rediscover yourself down in the street, your limbs responding with particular agility to the unexpected freedom you have procured for them, when you feel all your decisiveness concentrated  within you as a result of this one decisive act, when it strikes you with more than usual significance that your power to effect the swiftest of changes with ease and to cope with it outstrips your need to do so, and when in such mood you go striding down the long streets, – then for the space of that evening you have completely broken out of the ranks of your family, which veers off into the void, while you yourself, firm as can be, black with your sharpness of outline, slapping the back of your thighs, rise up to your true stature.
All this is intensified still further if at so late an hour of the evening you look up a friend to see how he is.

—

Post Scriptum – Terrible Mime Found

Didn’t expect to find when searching for this text a stage interpretation of it.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xap70k_kafka-the-sudden-walk_creation

It’s sort of reassuring to know that someone, somewhere has had an even less logical idea than you for a theatre piece, and has actually gone through with it and not been pelted with rotten tomatoes Bash-Street-Kids-style from the audience. Not only does this staging deal with a purely philosophical text in which nothing happens except a dude sits around the house for a bit as normal, then leaves, but it actually manages to leave all the nice details, such as there are any, out! There are no co-habitants to get upset, he doesn’t knock on a friend (which I suppose is an optional extra), he doesn’t slap his thighs (unless I’d completely switched off by that point); he certainly doesn’t ‘rise up to [his] true stature’, which is the whole point. Sorry, I’m just in awe of the fact that a guy has staged a 300 word story, which isn’t even a story, and ignored about 270 of them. Will post more terrible mimes if I come across them.

This is all very well if you happen to be ‘just passing’ the Albert Hall, but some of us need reason to get on a lengthy coach.

Travel-based gripes aside, why I don’t appreciate this mentality is as follows: Last couple of years,the most amazing proms were the ones that were an onslaught of one thing, e.g, the Birtwistle birthday prom, the George Crumb prom, St. Francois. Stockhausen day. Obviously I’m being biased towards modern stuff here, but I’m sure I could say the same about other eras… The gorgeous all-Rameau prom a few years ago springs to mind (they were dancing on a clthes rail, yes?). Also, those proms with more mix-and-match programmes leave irritating memories… The prom last year that I blogged about with the 2 dazzling Xenakis performances makes me think immediately of the way Shostakovich 9 brought it back down to Earth before we all went home- and, from the other side of the fence, Shostakovich fans largely didn’t even turn up, opting for something more than just pithy irony from the great Russian audience-polariser.

There’s also the fact that contemporary music is very well represented, but by the up-and-coming and haven’t-heard-of-them-yet generation. I’d normally come out deeply in favour of all this commissioning, but they seem to be at the expense of the previous generation, of which there is plenty to choose from and which we already know is dazzling, and which barely features at all, or in very tame doses. Boulez, Berio, Xenakis, Nono this year? Nope, nor any Pousseur despite the fact that he died since the last season. Ligeti? A few short atmospheric choral pieces, and an orchestration of Musica Ricercata – but just the second movement, the one with just the three pitches (from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut) which will briefly bore the living shit out of everyone out of context and seems like a token gesture. It doesn’t help that the actually-brand-spanking-new works don’t have a very high hit rate, especially from certain composers who the Proms return to year after year. Mark Anthony Turnage seems to get a commission every year, and it always fulfills everyone’s gripes about modern music, being as it is both impenetrable and bland.

Nevertheless, here are a few that caught my eye (after the obvious exciting grandeur of Proms 1 and 2).

Prom 15

Could be worth it just for the rare chance to hear Stockhausen’s Jubilee with some nice diffusion. I thoroughly enjoyed the vaguely similar setup of Mixtur a few years back at Queen Elizabeth Hall although the sounds seem somewhat arbitrarily thrown together and it’s a bit of a relic of the old ring modulation days. Written ten years later, Jubilee is probably a vast improvement, and probably a lot easier to understand on a first listen to, as it’s from his later formula-expanding approach to generating material, Indeed, it’s from just before he started on the ultra-motivic opera cycle Licht.

Was appetised to see Birtwistle although it turns out the piece is barely even a fanfare. Then, the following three items could all go either way. I suppose this programme is worth a punt, especially if you can find drama in Matthews’s work, which seems a reasonable suggestion, I couldn’t track down the violin concerto but the Cello Concerto is on youtube.

I don’t get what Schumann 3 is doing in there. I don’t dislike the piece, but it seems an underwhelming ending in the same way that Shostakovich 9 was after Xenakis, and even if it were my favourite, Schumann 2, It’d still be an anticlimax in a concert like this, in anything other than a blistering performance. I don’t mean that ‘all this new music > Schumann’, just that you won’t be in the mood for it at that point.

Proms 24 – 26

This could be a really nice short-break-in-London were it not for the conductors. But Runnicles was a complete non-event in Das Lied the other year and I can’t imagine his Mahler 3 being anything other than even worse. Then the idea of Mahlers 4 and 5 in the same evening the next night is fine if you don’t mind Gergiev trashing the structure.

This is particularly annoying because there’s a fantastic idea for a late prom in between. Bach’s and Stravinsky’s versions of Von Himmel Hoch next to each other, well why not, the Bach piece is good enough to stand two listenings and the Stravinsky is actually better. And then the Threni, which could be Stravinsky’s most underrated piece. It’s just never, ever on, amazing, and ideal for a late night prom. Maybe I’ll sit through the Runnicles and brave the Gergiev after all. Probably not.

Prom 47

The centrepiece is Feldman, but why go to the Albert Hall to see something so quiet? Well, do go. If the late George Crumb prom (the prom was a late one, he hasn’t died) last year is anything to go by, the setting will be perfect. Actually, this concert was (almost) on on Hear and Now the other week, it’s good, the Skempton is still boring (yeah it’s that Skempton) and not much to do with the concerns he shared with Cardew, but the Cardew is a good noise and reminded me of early(ish) Stockhausen, and the Feldman is a good’un (and actually not that quiet). Cage = fine.

Prom 62 and 66

Yeh, I just plain want to go to these two. The Schoenberg five pieces were not great last year (as I blogged), but Rattle, for all his druidic zoned-outness, is great in this repertoire and will do a much better job. And it IS kinda cool having the Schoenberg, Webern and Berg pieces all in one go. You should even be able to find stuff of potential interest during the rest of the week, (Rameau, Ferneyhough) even if it is surrounded by unknown quantities.

On the whole, though, I’m glad my summer plan is to hit Europe.

1) I ask Lib Dem Voters, out of curiosity more than anything, if they’re happy with the result- their man Clegg sat in cabinet with Tory deadbeats like Hague and IDS (I thought the party was supposed to be young and vibrant now?)… the country denied the full fruition of Cable’s expertise because Cameron and Osborne are ‘very close’… Some hazy chance of reform but not in a version the public can probably even be arsed to turn out for a referendum on…

The thing is that all the ‘new’ lib dems I’ve spoken to are lapsed labour, or if new to politics altogether, found themselves weighing up the pros and cons carefully of those two parties. Many of either party’s eventual voters were even half-hoping for a red-yellow pact, most people hadn’t computed the yellow-blue one was even a possibility (despite my linking to the Kaletsky LOL). And the Tories I come across are just plain Tories. This might be symptomatic of living in Sheffield, but look at the fb groups… ‘national not voting Conservative day’ got well over one hundred thousand members; ‘national not voting Labour day’ never got out of 3 figures. More seriously, after the first Prime Ministerial TV debate, The Times printed the results of a poll of Lib Dem MPs in which only 17% said they could work in a pact with the conservatives – obviously everyone was being deliberately cagey about pacts back then, but 50% said they could go with Labour.

OK, so for whatever reason, as soon as they hit negotiations it was D.O.A, but what a shame and I think we should be told why But at least tories vs. progressive coalition would have manifested the natural way of things, rather than a whore party shoehorned in to cabinet via some sort of public/private school mason’s handshake.

2) If the Conservatives can’t get an overall majority in this election, when the hell do they ever expect to get one again? Banking crisis, parliamentary scandal, unpopular PM, and ridiculous amounts spent on the campaign and they still couldn’t manage it. Now that sort of thing renews your faith in the country- under these conditions, supporting the opposition could be a laugh.

This may be an uncorrected version.

—

Stravinsky – Four Russian Peasant Songs (Version with Four Horns, 1954)

The 1917 unaccompanied version of these songs dates from the period when Stravinsky was working on Les Noces, and although they do not directly share any material, the songs might be seen as sketches for the vocal elements of the Ballet to come. They feature the same irregular rhythmic patterns and experiments with awkward syllabic emphasis, and as in Les Noces these sparse dry passages are contrasted with outbursts of rich sonority.

Les Noces underwent several drastic re-orchestrations over the next few years before Stravinsky finally arrived at the wildly inventive instrumental combination we know today. Returning to these four short songs and adding four horn parts seems a brainwave of similar inventive magnitude, and is completely unprecedented after the 37 years of stylistic changes that Stravinsky had gone through in between.

The four texts are unrelated but for their origins in folklore, from a bejewelled fish (The Pike) to a tale of agricultural sabotage (Master Portly). Ovsen is a solar deity from Russian mythology.

Xenakis – Nuits (1968)

Xenakis is most immediately associated with the highly complex mathematics from which much of his music is derived. As a former architect, in the fifties he was drawing on esoteric corners of calculus, statistics and game theory, which made the pre-compositional structures of the serialists look tame. The results are dense, often harsh and confrontational sounds which some find impenetrable (e.g. Metastasis 1954). Later on in his output, however, such compositional devices are put to more programmatic use. In contrast to his mathematical obsessions, Xenakis also liked to evoke primitive man (many of the titles in his unnavigable catalogue are in an ancient, obsolete form of Greek), and this is particularly clear in some of the vocal works.

Nuits comes from a period when Xenakis was particularly concerned with such themes. He had recently completed Polytope, a site-specific composition for installation at Persepolis. Nuits is the result of a comission from the Shah of Iran that followed soon after. Xenakis’s trip to the Persian heritage site must have roused some strong emotions, as he dedicated Nuits to four political prisoners in direct protest at his commisioner. It is the primitive end of his sound pallette which he draws on to explain his deep-seated response to the injustice. The more directly confrontational Nomos Gamma was written at almost exactly the same time, in which the audience stand amongst the orchestra and encircled by almost tribal drumming from ten sets of tom toms and two sets of timps. Nuits is a more subtle protest; the bird whistles and animalistic sounds could at first appear comedic, but hopefully achieve a more mournful sentiment by the time this rather sinister soundscape has been wholly revealed.

In Nuits, the detached repeated syllables evoke the earliest stages of the development of language (another example would be Aïs, for amplified baritone, percussion and orchestra (1980), in which the soloist seems stripped of any civilised form of comminication and squawks like a bird). The group glissandi and agressive attacks are somewhat barbaric, somewimes disorganised, at other times coming together in a kind of mob mentality.

Schubert – Ständchen D920

This sumptuous serenade is a response to a comission from Schubert’s pupil Anna Fröhlich, for a birthday party. Though it avoids the portent of much of the output of this final year of Schubert’s life, it displays his mastery of harmonic timing. It also exists in a version with ladies chorus D921.

Bach – Cantata BWV Christ Lag in Todesbanden

When considering The Church’s year in terms of the music of Bach, if the Matthew Passion, as a Good Friday meditation, ends mournfully, unsatisfactorily, with Christ still in the tomb, then this cantata is the resolution (and salvation) that Christianity is anticipating two days later. Hence it embodies the most fundamental principal of the faith. Bach avoids expressing this journey from darkness to light through tonality (as is common in the cantatas), instead rendering the whole thing in verse after verse of relentless E minor. What’s truly remarkable about this piece is not the way in which the thematic material is derived from the original lutheran chorale melody, which, even by Bach cantata standards is very direct, but rather the enormous stylistic variety Bach includes in spite of this. It is a true and highly unified set of variations.

First, the cantata is foreshadowed by a yearning Sinfonia which, with its second viola part sounds almost proto-romantic. Then, Bach contrasts punchy, marcato imitative verses with almost indulgent, espressivo slow movements. Verse II is absolutely saturated with close, warm dissonance, and the languid lines of the Bass solo in Verse V seem to mark the maximum possible expansion of the short initial melody.

Bach’s commitment to drama through harmonic tension can be observed by comparison with the melody as it would have appeared to Lutheran congregations. His sharpening of the second note in the chorale, to a tritone above the eventual tonic, seems a change entirely for the purposes of starting each verse with an immediate and jolting modulation.

BWV numbers can be misleading, but this cantata is genuinely an early work, probably dating from his early twenties, even from before his time at Weimar, and already it shows his total mastery on all fronts.

Ligeti – Lux Aeterna (1966)

In the late sixties and early seventies, Ligeti was somewhat concerned with creating dense textures. One way in which he did so was to have the same monody played by many parts but all progressing through it at different rates, resulting in an ever increasing cloud of pitches. The great orchestral example is Lontano (1967), but the same trick features several times chorally in Lux Aeterna, for which the choir is split in to 16 parts. The piece is largely intended to sound distant and ethereal, the consonants gentle and the words indistinct. The interplay between vowels often produces rich results, Ligeti arriving at the same effect as Xenakis via a completely different route. Naturally, the piece is a perfect evocation of the vastness and mystery of space, and is familiar from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oddyssey, the scene on the moon-bus just before the monolith is sighted. Ligeti first learnt of it having been used in the film when he went to see it himself in the cinema. It is now a matter of legend that he called his lawyer the next day ‘who made him very rich’.