A Cunning Blog

Long words. Short words. Words that say something.

25th September 2017
by harryfiddler
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Tea Time Dreaming

Ensemble Offspring
WHO DREAMED IT?
Carriageworks, 23 Sept 2017

150910-dreamsleep-stockThree new Noisy Eggs have hatched. Thanks to the generosity of patrons (including the AMCOS Art Music Fund, Kim Williams and the Noisy Egg Creation Fund) three substantial new works have had their first outing in Ensemble Offspring’s latest concert. Each composer was asked to respond to Unsuk Chin‘s fantastical Akrostichon-Wortspiel with a fantasy of their own.

Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh is currently based in San Diego where she’s completing a PhD and before that she studied in Melbourne with Brenton Broadstock and Stuart Greenbaum. Her new work, Half-Open Beings, is a tantalising smudge of organised sound which, like Bachelard’s image of the half-open door, both invites and obscures. Instruments make tentative bonds between each other, which melt into fuzz as another pitch, another timbre is added, like the elusive dream which flashes across your consciousness then evaporates, leaving only a vague sense of a memory of a feeling.

Anahita Abbasi‘s Incipio, Bibo follows Unsuk Chin’s lead by taking inspiration from Alice in Wonderland for a playful exploration of the weird and wonderful land of dreams. Soprano Jessica Aszodi is the adventurer who, in the unalienable logic of the dream state, must close her eyes to see better. Meanwhile, a desk top bell invokes that very special time, the Time of Tea. This is dizzyingly sophisticated reverie, using multilayered performance gestures, from words to notes to melodies to noises, brilliantly performed. If only Abbasi, originally from Iran and now resident in San Diego, could have been in Sydney to hear it.  Thanks, Donald. 

Lisa Illean‘s Cantor is an impressive, impressing work. She uses a wide palette of strings, winds and percussion with deft coherence, weaving together complexities — microtones and microtimbres abound — to somehow, miraculously, create clarity. I have no idea what it is about. I just know it makes my ears and my brain and my heart sing. It’s a real achievement and it’s good to know that, besides being recorded for broadcast on ABC Classic FM, Cantor will go on to have performances in the Netherlands, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

c86219768d57a823960200114638aec3-victorian-photography-vintage-photographyEnsemble Offspring framed these three noisy eggs with two vintage works. Unsuk Chin’s Akrostichon-Wortspiel was written in 1991 for the Gaudeamus Foundation: practically early music, in Offspring’s repertoire list, but drinking well now. It says something about the dedication of these musicians that, after a good 60 minutes of freakishly tricky music, they could come back on and perform a work demanding this level of precision and technical extension. Jessica Aszodi, in particular, demonstrated of stamina and control most could only dream of. Respect.

j_walshe_2011

Photo: Blackie Bouffant. Bluebell Woods, Knockvicar, Co. Roscommon, Ireland

Finally, as with all good dreams, back to the beginning. Irish composer Jennifer Walshe wrote Everything you own has been taken to a depot somewhere for Ensemble Offspring’s 2013 season. It’s a nutty melange of speech, sound and gesture where three game performers variously pour water, play nintendo, do physical jerks and make the occasional musical noise. The Offspring trio of Claire Edwardes, Jason Noble and Lamorna Nightingale — fab dress, btw — go far beyond the usual remit of musicians, singing, shouting and clowning with gleeful conviction. 

Everything you own… is frequently irreverent and often hilarious. The composer  confesses her interest in sounds that ‘are normally considered flawed or redundant.’

Like… new music, perhaps? 

It’s a ballsy move to open a concert of such uncompromisingly demanding (albeit beautiful) music with a work which systematically undercuts artistic pretention. But when you play these works with such persuasive articulacy, you can get away with pretty much anything. Bravi.

This concert was recorded for ABC Classic FM. Not sure when it’ll be on. Also, Incipo, Bibo and Everything you own… are both quite visual works. I’m not sure if Incipo, Bibo was videoed, but you can see Ensemble Offspring in an earlier performance of Everything here.

18th September 2017
by harryfiddler
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Parnassus or bust

The Sound of Pictures
Australia Ensemble @UNSW, September 16

Master and Pupil
James Fraser and The Marais Project, September 15

I’m currently fascinated by hierarchies in the arts. (Please don’t ask. I’ll try and explain and then we’ll be here for hours, and it’ll end up in an inarticulate and quite possibly drunken heap.) To cut a long, messy story short, who wins: pure or applied? Pure music, that Parnassian goal of the essentially useless work of art; or applied music — soundtracks, anthems, songs of praise, theme tunes, jingles, war cries —  which, in the hands of a skilful artist can transform how we perceive the world, change our behaviour, even change our minds.

3303All this as a prelude to thoughts about two recent gigs. The first, the Australia Ensemble’s The Sound of Pictures, an illustrated talk, or an annotated concert if you like. Or perhaps just two hours of interesting stuff involving live music, music and film, and the mellifluous musings of composer, writer and broadcaster Andrew Ford in an inside-out inspection of how composers and directors and music and film interact.

Ford talked us through a number of classic examples: the shower scene from Psycho; the party scene from Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet; and the glorious climax of the assassination attempt in Hitchcock’s 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too MuchThis was fun — lots of in-jokes, with a composer-who-knows to elucidate. It’s Arthur Benjamin’s The Storm Cloud Cantata, arranged and extended by Bernard Herrmann, who is seen on film, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Death by music. Now there’s a way to die…

As for the concert repertoire, the Australia Ensemble were on hand to perform live. Two full-blooded movements from Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet bookended the program, no visuals required. Arthur Benjamin’s Suite from various Scarlet Pimpernels (arranged by Ian Munro) was, to a 21st century ear, a quaint dip into 1930s Britain, played with exacting insouciance. Nino Rota’s Trio (1958) had more bite, and the musicians delivered it with great flair, but — ah, you knew there was a but coming — but it felt, somehow, inconsequential — no headway up Parnassus, but no emotional buttons pressed either. By comparison, the ensemble’s rendition of Bernard Hermann’s Psycho Suite (originally for strings, arranged for string quartet by Richard Birchall in 2010) ticked all the boxes: a whistle stop tour of the most memorable themes (including the dreamy driving music, beautifully articulated by Dene Olding) spliced into a satisfying musical arc. Film music, but on the composer’s terms, not the director’s.

Psycho_28196029Which brings me to the highlights of the evening, two recent works by Australian composers combining film and live music. The first was Scherzo Perpetuo by Andrew Ford, written in 2014 for the Flinders Quartet as an accompaniment to Le Sculpteur express, a silent short from 1907. The music is made up of funky riffs, layer on layer of rhythmic patterns, match and mismatching, bouncing off each other, regrouping and reinventing. Endless play, if you like. Interestingly, it’s not closely aligned with action on screen, which consists of a sculptor (and his rather intense assistant) modelling faces in clay, making them smile or grimace then, with a punch to the jaw, breaking down the clay to make way for a new face. So the music is not a literal, descriptive accompaniment so much as a commentary on the frantic art-making and breaking; two works in parataxis.

The premiere performance of Felicity Wilcox‘s Vivre sa vie — Composer’s Cut takes this interplay between screen and stage further still, by adapting the film, Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962) to an original piece of music. The inventive synergy between the two is a big part of the work’s impact: there are no words, but clarinet and flute manage to provide most eloquent dialogue; and when the ensemble break into an irresistible groove, the main character on screen can’t resist dancing. It’s playful, it’s dramatic, and it nudges the boundaries between live and recorded, screen and stage, concert and film with a delicious sense of exploration. And it manages to condense the movie into a gripping ten minutes which retains the sense of beauty and mystery and urgent, existential enquiry of the original. That works. 

**178137122493be2a0991746a19bd1a30-alain-corneau-matinsJust across town actor James Fraser and four musicians of the viola da gamba-centric group, The Marais Project, presented Master and Pupil as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival. Inspired by the movie Tous Les Matins du Mondebased on the lives of French composer Sainte Colombe and his protégé Marin Marais, it brings the wild and wistful monologue of Marais together with live performances of the music of his time. It’s an intimate piece, and rightly so. The viola da gamba has a soft, almost submissive timbre — it won’t make you listen to it, if you don’t want to. But, with The Marais Project, you do want to. You listen, and the ear tunes into the subtleties. Meanwhile Fraser, who created the script himself, sustains the intense, listening environment created by the music with a delicate but moving evocation of longing and regret, creating all the characters from the reclusive and angry Sainte Colombe to the earnest and frustrated Marais to poor, abandonned Madeleine. It’s a fine performance. Ultimately, however, it leaves the audience with their own question to answer:  if an artist creates in the forest and none is there to see it is it art at all?

Still pondering.

 

 

 

11th September 2017
by harryfiddler
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Brahms and Borodin

The Omega Ensemble launched their ambitious and very busy 2018 Season last week. Two concert series, plus a festival appearance and a chamber opera casually dropped into the mix, adds up to what looks to be an exciting year. Omega’s programming revolves, inevitably, around the instruments of co-artistic directors David Rowden (clarinet) and Maria Raspopova (piano). This pulls the repertoire into some zany areas — who knew Elgar wrote a Romance for bassoon and strings, or that Bruch wrote clarinet trios? — but also drives a diligent hunt for new repertoire. In 2018, they premiere works from composers including Samuel Hogarth, Ian Munro and David Bruce. Lee Abrahamsen returns with songs by Poulenc and Alexandra Osborne, acting assistant concertmaster of the Washington-based National Symphony Orchestra, appears in several of the string-y programs. I recommend you take a look, especially at their Master Series, presented in the intimate setting of the Utzon Room.

Image 11-9-17 at 12.57 pmBefore we get to next year, however, last week’s A Brahms Affair. For this, their latest gig at City Recital Hall, Omega presented a swirl of Romanticism: Schumann, Borodin and Brahms. Rowden and Raspopova gave a mostly glossy performance of Schumann’s Fantasiestucke for Clarinet and Piano, but a few hiccups — intonation and notes — took the edge off the shine. Alexandra Osborne led Borodin’s String Quartet No. 1 in A Major with a similarly fastidious approach, making a gloriously clear sound in the opening movement. However, there was something about the ensemble’s care and attention which made the performance somewhat introverted. Which is fine in a rehearsal space, but less so on stage. It wasn’t so much a lack of sound as a lack of connection — between the stage and audience, and between the players themselves. The second movement was hushed, the harmonics of the final movement were wonderfully ethereal but, ultimately, it felt like four individuals, playing to themselves.  At this point the City Recital Hall felt very big and lonely.

Brahms’ Quintet in B Minor for Clarinet and Strings was more successful, with Rowden’s clarinet leading the way with mellifluous warmth, in spite of some technology problems. Again, though, there seemed to be something holding the music back, moderately the big climaxes, as if unwilling to unleash the full excesses of the Romantic soul. Happily their encore, the final movement from Weber’s Clarinet Quintet, unlocked a sense of joy, bringing the concert to an exhilarating close.

8th September 2017
by harryfiddler
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Trills and trolls

Australian Chamber Orchestra
City Recital Hall
September 1, 2017

Some composers have a voice that is instantly recognisable, and Ross Edwards is one such. The tumbling gestures, the lilt and jolt of his uneven metres, the sunny thirds… It’s tempting to sit back and nod as you listen to a new work. Ah yes… there’s a restless dance figure. Oh look,  there’s a minor second… It’s easy to assume.

Easy but wrong. The world premiere of a new work, Entwinings, commissioned for the Australian Chamber Orchestra with the assistance of Rob and Nancy Pallin, begins predictably enough, with shiny fragments and enticing drones gradually building a soundscape. It’s brilliant stuff, fascinating and transparent, with Edwards’ acute ear — for both natural and manmade sounds — transforming the orchestra into sun-slashed scrub. The music flows — it’s almost like taking dictation from nature. Until, that is, the elements which seem so delicate, begin to grow, to jostle, shaking the natural order and tipping the music into chaos. Natural order? Let’s not kid ourselves. Nature is complicated, and Entwinings embodies this complexity. Not the formative complexity of High Modernism – no, as the program note suggests, Edwards has been there, done that, moved on. No, the complex texture of Entwinings feels more like a tense and sometimes dangerous play with chaos, especially in the climax to the first movement.

The second movement takes us back from the edge, as patterns become phrases become melodies become variations. The returning theme glows and comforts, but it also changes constantly. Like humankind, like nature, like the music of Ross Edwards. It grows.

Theodor_Kittelsen_-_Skogtroll2C_1906_28Forest_Troll29

By Theodor Kittelsen – Unknown, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=225211

Before the internet, before social media, trolls were the mystical natural spirits of Scandinavia. They roamed the dense forests and icy caves of Norway, capturing princesses, haunting burial sites, generally making life a little bit spooky. And while you probably wouldn’t want to meet one on a dark night, they dance through the music of Edvard Grieg with a delicious, malicious lurch. Especially when played by the Australian Chamber Orchestra led by Norweigan violinist and Guest Director Henning Kraggerud.

The opening work, Nordic Melody, ‘In Folk Style’, felt a little underdone, but the ensemble found much trollish drama and delight in Grieg’s String Quartet in G Minor (in an arrangement for string ensemble Richard Tognetti). Likewise, their performance of the Violin Concerto No. 3 in C Minor Op. 45 (an arrangement by Henning Kraggerud and Bernt Simen Lund of Grieg’s third violin sonata), was full of lush textures and captivating detail. Kraggerud makes a slightly awkward frontman, speaking in heavily accented English, but he plays the violin like a dream, with an intense, clear sound which projects across the orchestral texture without feeling in any way forced, and sashaying through the trollish folk melodies with great beauty. That concerto – it’s a keeper.

Completing the program is Kraggerud’s own composition, Topelius-Variations (From Topelius’ Time). Just as Grieg’s Holberg Suite is a shameless homage to the Baroque, Topelius-Variations is a shameless homage to the Norweigan romantic tradition, epitomised by the poetry of nineteenth-century author Zachris Topelius and, of course, the music of Edvard Grieg. It’s a very convincing, deeply idiomatic work for strings which sits brilliantly well alongside the Grieg.

You can still hear the trollfest in Melbourne (10 & 11 September), Adelaide (12 September) and Canberra (tomorrow) if you book quickly. 

2nd September 2017
by harryfiddler
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Cold Comfort

The Rape of Lucretia
Sydney Chamber Opera
24 August 2017
Carriageworks

There’s nothing like red on white. From the moment I saw the stark white amphitheatre I was waiting for the blood. And blood there was. Buckets of it.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s latest production is a taut and not entirely comfortable night in the theatre. The Rape of Lucretia, with music by Benjamin Britten and libretto by Ronald Duncan, is as stark as its immediate predecessor, Peter Grimes, is lush. The drama is remote, the score is spare and the message is difficult. The libretto’s verse is spookily pristine; the Male Chorus, who narrates, is impossible to read. SCO’s creative team, led by director Kip Williams and music director Jack Symonds, grapple with the complexities of this obstinate masterpiece to produce a thrilling but problematic piece of theatre.

The thrills – and problems – begin with Williams’ bold concept of taking each of the six Roman characters and fracturing it into multiple elements. Thus the three warriors, Tarquinius, Collatinus and Junius, are voiced by Nathan Lay, Jeremy Kleeman and Simon Lobelson respectively, but acted – embodied, if you like – by Jessica O’Donoghue, Anna Dowsley and Jane Sheldon, who voice the three women, Lucia, Lucretia, and Bianca, who are acted by – you guessed – Lay, Kleeman and Lobelson. Confused? Good.

It’s an ingenious device for several reasons. First, it’s deeply discombobulating. The lip synching is almost, but not quite, perfect, and if you try hard, you can imagine that Lay’s rich baritone is coming out of O’Donoghue’s mouth, or that Dowsley’s supple soprano is really Kleeman’s own. A falsetto, perhaps? Or maybe not? The whole thing creates a visceral sense of unease, which is entirely appropriate to this disturbing story.

Second, the device engages with notions of gender in a brutally hands-on way. The libretto, while by no means sympathetic to the male characters, makes liberal use of gender stereotypes. Putting the men’s words into the mouths of women is like hearing them through the looking-glass. It dismantles the stereotype, and shatters preconceptions. What would these words sound like, from a woman? If a man said that, rather than a woman, what would you think? Does the meaning of ‘no’ depend on who is saying it? Further, it subtly undermines the authority of the every character except, perhaps, the Male Chorus: the male characters are only women dressed as men; the female characters are men in dresses. Who do we trust? Who do we believe?

It’s a brilliantly executed coup de theatre: the acting characters and their vocal avatars work together in intricate tandem, complicating and amplifying the emotion. (And it’s impressive, technically: the singers have each learnt two roles, word perfect). But the device is also, ultimately, problematic: once it has sunk in, once the doubling of characters has become almost normal, it becomes a bit of a dead weight. The point is made, but now we’re stuck with it. O’Donoghue and Kleeman – Lucretia and her husband Collatinus – do eventually revert to their own genders (although Kleeman never gets his trousers back), but by the time they do, it seems a bit arbitrary.

The other downside of the gender doubling is that the layers of meaning – voice, movement, clothing — distances the audience from the characters. This is an all too plausible story of male brutality and domestic violence, but it feels remote, archetypal. Cold. The warmth of Britten’s music – the goodnight chorus, the final prayers – only alleviates a little.

The cast and orchestra give an impressive and compelling performance of this challenging score. Jane Sheldon soars with the brittle clarity as Lucia, while Jessica O’Donoghue is a dark and swaggering Bianca and Anna Dowsley a delicate and lyrical Lucretia. The vocal honours, however, must go to Andrew Goodwin, as the Male Chorus. There’s his sombre scene-setting and a thrilling romp as he calls Tarquinius’s gallop towards Lucretia, but it’s the final moments which prove most chilling. After the threats, the chase, the rape, the blood, he must stand up, in full clerical robes, and bang on about how Lucretia’s sacrifice is somehow analogous with the suffering of Christ, with deadpan piety. Britten and Duncan leave the words and music just hanging there, all raw, faith in the face of tragedy. It’s hard to take. Are they daring you to jump out of your seat and yell, “No!”?

This production certainly yells. With Lucretia duly drenched in blood, the surviving characters don purple robes and gather round the Male Chorus, in full bishop regalia. It’s in-your-face (and, frankly, heavy-handed) but it does leave a delicious trail of doubt worming its way round the moral compass of the piece.

 

A final note:

The Rape of Lucretia was commissioned by American millionaire Dorothy and her husband Leonard Elmhirst, to inaugurate their new theatre at Dartington Hall, which had been designed by one Walter Gropius, en route from Nazi Germany to his final home in the US. The original production fell through: Glyndebourne ended up giving the premiere in 1946, and Dartington didn’t get it until 2003. But the surgical precision of David Fleischer’s set looks for all the world like Gropius’s architectural drawings for Dartington’s gardens. I wonder if he knew…

 

 

12th August 2017
by harryfiddler
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A Day in the Life

It’s the last night at Dartington Summer School week 2, and I’m typing this as I listen to the sounds of the Ceilidh in the Great Hall. (Ceilidh. Brilliant solution to all those middle-aged “I don’t disco” loonies who still like to shake their wobbly bits.) Given that I’m heading for the real world tomorrow, thought I’d jot down a day in the Dartington Summer School life…

6.30am Alarm goes off. Yes off. (Why was it ever on?)

7.55am Bugger. Fell asleep. Time to get up.

8.00am Tai Chi with Joe on the lawn. Spend ten minutes thinking ‘Why am I waving my arms pretending to fly like a pigeon?’ and another 20 minutes thinking, ‘Wow, this is so relaxing, I have found the secret of life, the universe and everything…’

8.30am Breakfast. The smell of floor polish and burnt toast is like Proust’s madeleine to me. Vow to eat more fruit and less bacon tomorrow.

Writing colleagues waiting for the key to the Playhouse. An idyllic writing retreat if ever there was one…

9.00am Gather stuff for first class of the day, Crime Writing with James Runcie. Not your average Summer School class, it has to be said. There’s six of us in the Playhouse, discussing the finer points of character and motive. Actually, to be honest, mostly talking about how interesting people are, how strange we are, and how it could be a great story…

10.45am Coffee

11am  Hike to Aller Park with violin. I swear it was about 2 miles when I was younger. It’s now about 2 metres. The biggest obstacle is the gate into the field, which is not big enough to get through if you have a viola and a backpack. (It’s OK. We rescued her eventually.)

Chamber music at the Summer School can be hit and miss, but that’s part of the fun. You might be the best, you might be the worst, you might end up playing obscure piano trios by little-known-for-good-reason composers. Happily for me, this week’s group has been outstanding: we all share the keep-going-at-all-costs ethos, and we all play in tune. Dochnanyi, Shostakovich, Elgar – it’s a feast!

12.45 Lunch.

2pm. Naptime.

 

2.05pm  Recorder ensembles begin. Naptime ends. A walk in the garden, a few words written.

5.15pm The early concert – sometimes a student group, more often a brief showcase from teachers or visiting artists. I sneak into the private garden and listen from outside.

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6pm Dinner

7.30pm Time to bag a seat for the main concert. Tonight it was the end of week jamboree, the Big Choir and Baroque Orchestra performing Handel’s Samson. It’s a choir of allcomers but the director, Laurence Cummings has whipped them into shape for a genuinely gripping performance.IMG_0851

10.30pm Drinks at the White Hart. Hugging and passionate farewelling begins.

11pm Ceilidh in the Great Hall. 100 revellers creating the closest thing to tropical heat you can get in Devon in summer.

12 midnight Retire wounded. Consider setting an alarm. Fall asleep.

 

10th August 2017
by harryfiddler
0 comments

Last words

It’s Baroque week at Dartington. As I type, there are three guys in jeans and t-shirts playing natural trumpets and horns on the ramparts. As you do. Elsewhere, recorder music billows out of every other room, with the spiky twang of harpsichords clattering away in the background.

I’m more at home with 440 hz, so this week I’m spending time playing my other instrument, the imagination. James Runcie, writer, director, curator of ideas, is giving a course in crime-writing and I’m on it. Every morning we meet at the Playhouse, a ludicrously cute cottage in the gardens with a thatched roof and leadlight windows and talk about MURDER; who, where, how and, most importantly, why.

 

Last night, James Runcie talked death in a different way, in a meditation on last words, the end of life, and what we leave behind. Poet John Keats, philosopher David Hume and writer Virginia Woolf knew all too clearly that they were about to die. For Keats and Hume, they were aware of the illnesses taking over their body. For Woolf, it was the illness taking over her mind.

Runcie read their letters to loved ones and, in the case of Hume, part of a succinct but profound life summary, written over the course of a few hours in the days before his death. It goes without saying that they were intense and moving.

In addition to these trenchant words, we also had music (from Joanna McGregor at the piano), playing works written contemporaneously with the words; Haydn for Hume, Beethoven for Keats and, for Woolf, Regard de la Vierge from Vingt regards sur L’Enfant Jesus by Olivier Messiaen. Again, it goes without saying that the music was moving: in particular, MacGregor drew a radiant sound from the piano in the Messiaen, like big blobs of pure colour dropping into a pool of water. But more important, the music served an important purpose by giving the words we had just heard space; space for contemplation, space for resonance.

I’m still thinking.

9th August 2017
by harryfiddler
1 Comment

Tales from the Annexe

totnesGreeted at Totnes Station by blue grey skies, green fields and a welcome drop of twenty degrees in temperature. And my father, standing on the platform, all small and wonky and smiling. It’s been a year since I saw him and, as always, I scan him to see if anything’s changed. He’s perhaps a tiny bit shorter, but otherwise looking remarkably robust for 85. He insists on taking a bag as he walks me to his car, which is wedged awkwardly between the wall and a panel van with a slip of paper under the wiper.

“Apparently I scraped his wing,” says my father.

‘Apparently’ used in the sense of ‘Allegedly’.

“I didn’t feel it. I don’t believe I touched him. But the fellow in that minibus over there made me leave a message.”

I look where he’s gesturing. The local bus mafia looking after their own, his gesture says.

The minibus is just pulling away from the kerb. My father watches as the driver weaves his way out of the car park and turns onto the main road.

“Made me,” he says. Hurt.

I look at the wound, lick my finger and give the paint a quick rub. It’s just a scuff. And it’s yellow. My father’s car is blue. There is no trace of blue anywhere on the wing. I look over my shoulder and then remove the piece of paper.

“Wrong colour paint, Dad. You car’s not yellow.”

dartington-hall-gardens_large2We drive to the Hall with the quiet dignity of the falsely accused, weaving our way round parked cars (“Trippers…” says Dad) and construction vehicles. They’re digging a hole in the water meadows by the Gatehouse. It’s full of milky grey water, the colour of the sky.

“Funny place to build,” says my Dad, with a sniff. It’s a sniff laden with layers of disapproval on regret on self-knowledge. He knows better than to rail against change. He’s been embracing change all his life. But sometimes you want to hang on.

Saturday is changeover day at the Summer School. Bags and instrument cases and reunions and the solitary visitor, wondering what next. I go to a welcome drinks reception in the Private Garden, and am instantly enveloped by old friends. Judith presses a drink into my hand, saying “I’ve run out of wine glasses. Shelley told me I couldn’t serve wine in tumblers, but I said I’d serve it in a bucket if that was all I had…”

Family friends and faces I should recognise say hello, enquire politely after me, my family, my book. I deflect questions and dodge eyes. I’m not here to talk. I’m here to listen and play and write.

Then, after speeches and rattly applause, it’s time to drift in, have dinner and take our seats in the Great Hall for the first concert of the week. Summer School has begun.

 

I’m writing a book about the Summer School! Please come and view my author page at www.unbound.com/books/sanctuary and then pledge lots of money. Alternatively, send chocolate.

 

6th August 2017
by harryfiddler
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Musique Cordiale #4: Siegfried and the Wolf

IMG_0838

All set up, ready to play in L’Eglise San Leger, a Romanesque Church from the 11th century. This will be my last concert in France as tomorrow I head north to Dartington. It’s been a mighty week. Old friends and new colleagues and ridiculously beautiful medieval villages and all the rose you can drink. Wish me luck holding my own in the Siegfried Idyll and Peter and the Wolf. It’s been a privilege to play in the Musique Cordiale Orchestra. I’ve enjoyed every minute, and I’m immensely grateful to the inspiring director, Pippa Pawlik and her dynamic team of assistants, volunteers, musicians, donors, singers, players, actors, chefs, drivers, stand-luggers and water-bottler hander outerers. Gros Bisous.

Now, as a mistral blows into town sweeping away the Saharan Desert air, they’ll be rehearsing for a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers later in the week. Making music, making friends. Vive la musique entente cordiale.

 

 

6th August 2017
by harryfiddler
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Musique Cordiale #3: Melting moments

IMG_0823Another day, another 11th century Church, this time L’Eglise de Saint André in Tourettes. Thank God, literally, for thick stone walls, which provided some respite from the searing heatwave conditions outside, but there would still have been plenty of sweaty moments and sticky fingers, no doubt, for the performers.

The concert featured the ten students of the Musique Cordiale Academy 2017, young artists aged from 15-20 who work with a team of experienced professionals (lead by Levon Chilingirian) to develop individual and ensemble skills. At the end of a ten day stint they joined in with the Musique Cordiale Orchestra and also presented solo and chamber items in their own concert.

tourrettesAs ever, their endeavours were inspiring. I mean, what’s not to love about young players, full of potential, full of enthusiasm, playing at a consistently high level, with frequent  flashes of brilliance thrown in for good measure. There was some spirited ensemble playing and solos ranging from brave but blustery to utterly amazing. There were also poignant moments: the audience were there with one player as she stumbled, stopped, thought about giving up, then took a deep breath and pressed on; we drank up the delight of a new work, composed that week, by one of the students; and we saw their glee at sitting right in the thick of an orchestra, alongside professional players.

The Musique Cordiale Academy is not your average music camp: it’s exclusive stuff, elite training for elite students in a bijoux festival in the South of France. But it its own small way it demonstrates the importance of the generational transfer of skills and knowledge, as cherished artists pass on their wisdom and — who knows? — perhaps refresh their own artistic lives as well.