John Joubert: Jane Eyre April Frederick, David Stout, English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Somm)
Traditional musical formats rarely suit the individual talent, but the highly-motivated player always finds a way. I first got to talk to Alec Frank-Gemmill in the very sociable surroundings of the Pärnu Festival in Estonia, a gathering most musicians describe as the highlight of their year, with the phenomenal Estonian Festival Orchestra brought together by Paavo Järvi as its core. Frank-Gemmill's secure base is the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, another army of unusual generals. His solo engagements take him to extraordinary places, and thanks to the long-term support of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, an organisation whose roster of young musicians reads like a musical who's who, he's just been able to record a horn and piano recital with a difference.
The subtitle of the disc, reviewed today on theartsdesk by fellow horn-player Graham Rickson, tells of its idiosyncrasy: "Music for horns and pianos of the 19th century". In other words two natural, two valve horns, and pianos by Lagrassa, Streicher, Blüthner and Bechstein. It's a captivating CD, unusually amenable for a recital to listening through at a single sitting; I've already played it four times. And it justifies the unique possibilities of the recorded format. Frank-Gemmill has also made individual commentaries on each of the pieces, which punctuate the interview. He told me about the motivation, and the larger question of orchestral versus solo work, on his lunch break from work as a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
DAVID NICE A normal horn and piano disc could be monotonous, but your idea of varying the horns and varying the pianos too – that must have taken a lot of thought and work.
ALEC FRANK-GEMMILL Well, there's so many CDs out there. I could see the point – I'm interested in hearing other horn players and their interpretations, but there aren't that many differences between players of any instrument these days, and if you aim to do something different for the sake of it, that could be quite cheap. But to do this is actually providing some historical context, and was just a means for me to do something new. So it is hopefully in some way original and worth doing.
I think actually – well, not in the case of all the pieces, not the later ones like [Glazunov's] Rêverie – with the other ones you could find on the internet each individual track [done authentically] and shove them together, however you wouldn't get the same person playing, so you wouldn't really be able to compare the sounds. Also my interpretations were based in part on what the horn wanted to do. That was part of the inspiration – I'm trying to make a distinction, not to do something definitive or claim it's the right way, but just for me to present it, so if this horn wants to play the piece like that and it's a horn I know the composer would have recognised, then that immediately inspires me to do something in a particular way, rather than – say, if I'd been born 30 years earlier, I might fall into the trap of saying, this is how it went then. And these 19th century horns are so different to each other – even a horn made in Paris in 1820 to the same design as one made in Berlin, that could change the sound utterly, so it's sort of a nod to authentic ideas. I'm not suggesting that this is the definitive recording, but I'm suggesting that it is something which could maybe enlighten us about how it might have sounded, so to that degree it is historical.
...And how you can actually physically play, because if you've got weak and strong notes on the natural horn, it dictates the tempo...
Absolutely. For me, that was a joy. But I'm sure if I'd come to the disc as a different sort of player who already likes his particular tempos, it would have felt like a hindrance. So for me it was lovely, it gave the pieces some new reasons to be done. Especially on disc, because then you can sit down from beginning to end and hear the different sounds.
And it makes a fine programme, too.
Yes, it was nice because I could choose all the best pieces from the 19th century, rather than just thinking, oh, this has been done a million times. [Schumann's] Adagio and Allegro, someone has played it on a modern Vienna horn, and I think there's a recording somewhere on an old Vienna horn. They are very similar instruments, but rather like horns made now instead of in 1905, they are bigger and more orchestral and fatter and less intimate. That Beethoven Horn Sonata, quite a few people have recorded that now on natural horn.
Do they get the flourishes as well as you do at the end of the first movement, those fantastic arpeggios?
Well you know, that bit on natural horn just works – I didn't have to practice. That's lovely because it doesn't just feel like an easy piece with a couple of hard bars, it feels like a nice piece and you're just working on how to phrase it. [Below: the first of four films in which Frank-Gemmill introduces the different 19th century horns on the disc]
Do you have a particular favourite sound amongst all those?
I think it's totally subjective – it's clouded by what I found a struggle and what came easily. Probably my favourite thing is the Rossini [Prelude, Theme and Variations], because I never liked the piece before this disc, and I find it really attractive now played on the natural horn. But maybe with a bit more distance, the Rêverie sounds so right on that horn with an old fashioned, almost proto-Hollywoodesque sort of warmth but also a bit of clunkiness – ahh, it was so nice to play that piece like that!
The essence of the horn to me is the warm, rounded Brahms sound – how do you feel about that now?
I touch very briefly on that in the notes [in the CD booklet, excellent] when I talk about Franz Strauss, because we now have the view of what the horn is, and these pieces might give a slightly different perspective; but I agree, that's why we all took up the horn, and I think that's the universally appealing, romantic, deep sound, and Brahms understood that immediately. But what's interesting about Brahms is that he often preferred the natural horn because it got closer to that, and probably in the 19th century – I've only just thought of this since you said that – maybe the whole development was about finding the esence of what the horn is in the romantic era. And now you can buy horns that are much harder to miss notes on. I think I could play on those because I've got my own job and I could just decide what technology I wanted, but I wouldn't let any of my students play them. Because it's not what the horn is – some of the beauty of it is to do with the struggle. The natural horn is of course much harder than the modern horn, but then when you do manage, it's that much more beautiful as well. Actually, that's bad advice, better not think that [big laugh].
When you were studying, was there a particular sound you were aiming for, or you were told to aim for by your teacher?
I could be swayed a bit more easily at the time. And like a lot of people I took up the horn because of Dennis Brain, and that sound – you couldn't really be employed making the kind of sound he made. Well, you could as a soloist, I suppose, but you would be out on the lunatic fringe. Which might be quite nice. Then my problem, or my luck, is that I feel inspired by different orchestras and different players in different repertoire, so I don't have any idol for every single piece, and maybe half my problem but half my success has been searching to the n-th degree for a particular way of playing a particular composer with a particular sound.
But that's the ideal, isn't it, it's about the music and not about the player...
Exactly. But some of my teachers were astonishing. Anyway, I love listening to the Vienna Phil playing Mahler, I love listening to the LSO playing Mahler, then probably hearing the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a Mozart symphony
There are lots of orchestras doing brilliant things all the time but I have my particular tastes. It's funny because sometimes orchestras ring you up and offer you work, or even offer you a concerto, and they don't say we'd like this concerto, or this patch of work is this composer, and you think, I don't know if I want to do this, because what if it's my least favourite Shostakovich symphony with nothing to do in it, or what if it's Mahler Nine, that seems crazy to me. At some point you've got to earn money, but I'd quite like to earn money and pick and choose my favourite music.
Next page: on future options, the music not the player, and more on the choices of horns and pianos
For the first performances of his Eighth Symphony in Munich, Mahler conducted 11 rehearsals. He arranged for the bells of the city’s trams to be silenced during the concerts. He left nothing to chance. On Saturday night, for once, one felt that all concerned had done likewise.
Alan Gilbert chose a surprisingly low-key programme to open the New York Philharmonic’s three-day Barbican residency, Bartók’s genre-defying Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Mahler’s modest Fou
Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics; Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam; NHKSO Tokyo. Would you have thought of putting the Japanese orchestra in the same league as the top Europeans? I certainly wouldn't, at least not until last night.
Only four flutes were on stage at the start of Jakub Hrůša’s latest concert with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the reins of which he took over from Jonathan Nott last September. Charles Ives would have been amazed to hear his “Voices of Druids” on the strings sounding, along with the solo trumpet, from the distance. I suddenly realised why Hrůša smiled enigmatically when I had asked him in interview the previous day whether he would segue straight from The Unanswered Question into Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude (impossible without strings on the platform, of course). The idea was, in fact, to go immediately from Cage’s 4’33" of (nominal) silence in to Brahms’s Fourth Symphony in the second half, but reactions were different in each place the programme was played, and while in Schweinfurt there had been a near-riot, the Bamberg audience kept quiet and applauded enthusiastically before the Brahms could begin.
The unpredictables were clearly part of Hrůša’s brilliant programming In Bamberg's excellent concert hall (pictured right). But more brilliant still was his utterly discombobulating performance at the concert’s heart of Czech master Martinů’s unofficial Sixth Symphony, the Fantaisies Symphoniques of 1955 dedicated to the great Berlioz conductor Charles Munch. Here pinpoint detail was matched to gut-wrenching climaxes – much the deepest as well as best-articulated performance of the work I’ve heard, and that’s saying something since Hrůša’s teacher Jiří Bělohlávek would seem to own the work. It turns out, for reasons Hrůša gives below, that I could just as well have come to his first concert as official music director, featuring Mahler’s First Symphony, but here was confirmation of what we already knew from the eight operas he’s conducted at Glyndebourne, that a leading light among the younger generation of conductors – Hrůša is 35 – can now be numbered among the greats. I talked to him about Czech roots – the orchestra’s as well as his own – and how Mahler, as well as Martinů and Smetana, whose epic Má vlast he has just recorded with the orchestra (see Graham Rickson's review) is very much part of that picture.
DAVID NICE The fascinating starting-point for me is that the Bamberg Orchestra was formed in 1946 from players in Prague’s German Theatre Orchestra, expelled after the war. For you is there still a Czech tradition or are you having to make it? Because I assume there are no Czech players here.
JAKUB HRUSA It's somewhere in the middle. There is a consciousness of the tradition in the institution, among the players and in the management, but as you say there's no Czech player, and there's a generational gap, and so I wouldn't say I have to build it anew, but it's like a substream of what the orchestra is. I would never say the Bamberg Symphony is a Czech orchestra, or a Bohemian orchestra, and I can compare with the Czech Philharmonic and all orchestras in my country which I have the honour to conduct. But it's true, on the other hand, that among German orchestras there is a clear affinity, if nothing else, in the first place, then in the relationship to Czech and Slavic repertoire here. You notice sometimes a certain superiority of German orchestras to maybe less well known Czech music. No-one has any questions about Dvořák, but anything else including Janáček, unlike in some other countries, is sometimes seen maybe as slightly inferior to the most important German traditions. I feel there has never been this feeling in Bamberg, not only because of the roots but because of the knowledge of that music, I think the orchestra played Czech music more than other German orchestras and therefore can evaluate its beauties.
I got to know and love the Martinů symphonies through the Bamberg recordings with Neeme Järvi, I don't know whether you can say there is anything like a Czech warmth about this orchestra, but it seems like a very warm sound, with especially beautiful wind playing.
I think so. The other day someone asked me about this Bohemian sound which is often mentioned in the media and public talks, and it's extremely difficult to verbalise – it's exactly that kind of phenomenon which is not meant to be verbalised, it's meant to be experienced.
But you're very aware of the sound.
I realised that what is called Bohemian sound is not a static acoustical phenomenon, but sound in terms of how a person creates sound in music, and I would involve this in what Bohemian sound means – the way of phrasing, the way of giving the music line, the warmth you mentioned, the common and very harmonious breathing and I always thought, after I got international experience, that what is somehow typical for Czech music-making, if I can at all analyse that feeling as I'm part of it, is a certain amount of intuition in playing music. And I think that differs a lot from Germanic traditions which tend to be much more aware of all the details of what one does. Whereas Czechs sometimes, and this has been criticised many times too, stop thinking about music and just give themselves to the current moment or inspiration, even if it's not most logical or rational. That's also true of composition, this is what distinguished Dvořák from Brahms, this tendency to be more intuitive and not controlling all possible aspects of music.
So that's just one aspect. I would not say the Bamberg Symphony is not controlling – they actually are German in the best sense of wanting to give structural aspects full attention, but at the same time there is this ability to relax into music in a way that is not occupied by brain all the time, and that's only possible when the spirit in the institution is harmonious, and when the community is friendly, that's the case here.
It's interesting when you talk about freedom in Dvořák. This is what one comes to expect most about Martinů (pictured left) – clearly he's very organised, but in works like the Fantaisies Symphoniques there is this seeming freedom, and people who want a logical sonata form are quite confused.
They protest, yes. It's interesting to observe that in every orchestra, ultimately Martinů's music works, if you do it with full passion and attention and if you choose pieces well – not every piece is on the top level, he was so prolific, I think that's a fate of all composers who were so prolific to produce some pieces better than others. But if you prepare the piece well and, as conductor at least, are fully convinced of what you do, in the end the orchestra is won over by Martinů. But there always remains a certain group of people either in the public or in the orchestra who say, it's great, it's fantastic music, but I still don't really understand what he's doing, in this place and this motif, it doesn't seem logical, things like that. And I tend to reply, well, maybe you appreciate the music most if you stop asking this way, if you accept it for what it is, a bit closer to life itself. It's like in life, you always see a certain logic, but then there are moments when the logic completely ceases to exist. And then I think the best recipe is just to accept it.
I took the eight-year-old son of a friend to a Prom to hear Stravinsky's Petrushka. The concerto was the Martinů Concerto for Two Pianos, and that was the piece that really caught his imagination. And I thought he would find it difficult. It struck me that a child questions less because every moment in great Martinů pieces can be alive, therefore you just accept it. Maybe the thing is to throw off all the baggage that you acquire as you get older.
Indeed, and I think it was his artistic credo, he felt this way of approach to art is more faithful to what art should bring to people's lives – that it probably shouldn't be so preoccupied with preconceptions and be a little bit freer in its fantasy, especially in his latest period, to which the Fantaisies Symphoniques belong, I think he tried intentionally to find a different component which makes the music hold together than the traditional form blocks, so to speak.
Which is why he called the work Fantaisies Symphoniques instead of Symphony No. 6
Actually, I make this mistake as well, calling it a symphony, although it has the seriousness and depth of a symphony.
You say you find some pieces weaker than others, but do you agree that the six symphonies, which are all written, the first five at least, in a short period of time later in his life, are all masterpieces?
They are all masterpieces, but nevertheless I have my favourites there, unlike in Brahms, where I cannot say which I prefer, or Dvořák's last four or even five symphonies – well, to be really accurate just the last three, I have a personal affinity to No. 6, I really love it. Five is the first which really grabs your attention fully. But it's true that it has certain weaknesses, but 7,8,9 – I cannot say which I love more, same for Brahms. In Martinů I have preferences.
For which ones?
I've recently done Five, and I cannot help but think that this symphony has a little bit less depth about it. I didn't say it's less interesting, but compared to Symphony No. 3, or 6, or the slow movement of Symphony No. 1, there I would completely agree with Charles Munch, who said that this slow movement is one of the most beautiful achievements of 20th century music. I just feel it goes deepest in searching for miracles in music, touches maybe briefly and in all its complexity some of the mysteries of what music can do.
You're from Brno, and Charles Mackerras always said you had to hear the Janáček Sinfonietta (Hrůša's listening guide for the Philharmonia above) played by the Brno Philharmonic to know what it should sound like. So that's a different sound to the Bohemian one – is Moravian culture different too?
Yes, I am a proud Brno native, but I don't read into it too much. It so much depends on who is conducting, what the constellation is, what quality of playing, etcetera. And there is too much of a false reliance on what is tradition, and so on. I would rather say what is more immediate in Brno, and I would guess that is still true, is that the relationship with Janáček is created more immediately. Not necessarily in these globalised times in the public, but the musical culture. Janáček is more strongly an integral part in the upbringing of musicians, the context of what it means to become a musician, and there Janáček is omnipresent and he's not seen as – of course, not as anything exotic, or from far and undesirable but something really from here. The institutions, obviously and thank God, tend to play Janacek more than elsewhere, there's a Janáček Festival. And I think in the opera they can, it's not only the Philharmonic, and now I'd like to talk about Janáček opera if I may...
Yes, please do.
It's now going through nice times. And there is a certain pure approach, without any additional stuff, if there's a good constellation of performers, you can breathe Janáček culture with more immediacy than elsewhere. But it goes so much with the care of the particular people who are in charge, and also if you look at the history of recordings, some are more, some less interesting – the truth is how Brno lived Janáček's music is valid and relevant, but we should be particular about it. Maybe that was what Sir Charles meant.
I think he particularly meant the sound of the trumpets, because the brass playing, when we travelled around Moravia, was ubiquitous in every place.
Actually that's right. You're right. Obviously Janáček in the Sinfonietta wanted an army band, and that says something about his concept of it – it shouldn't have been a cultivated, cultured, well-educated sound but something rougher. And it's true, the roughness, and also moving in a way, you're right, and I realised recently when I conducted Mahler's Third Sympony with the Bohuslav Martinů Orchestra in Zlin, which is a smaller town...
With the Bata shoe factory and amazing modernist architecture.
And there is a good concert hall now, it's actually in some ways the best concert hall in the country, if you don't count Prague's historical Rudolfinum and Municipal House and so on. And in Mahler, you also have these countryside village trumpets and all of a sudden I didn't need to describe what I wanted from those trumpets. If you take Mahler One, there's this funeral sound of the pair of trumpets, and it's this village funeral, and it's slightly ironic but also seriously meant, it's exactly some way in between, and it doesn't take any effort, actually it may be in some way a metaphor, to think that maybe that those players in the Mahler will go the next morning to play exactly at such a funeral, this connection between artificial music-making and village music-making is very strong. And so many of those brass players in Moravia simply play in the brass bands and at the balls and funerals and so on, and that distinguishes it for sure from the situation in London or Tokyo.
Jiří Bělohlávek liked to claim Mahler as a Czech composer – in a sense there is a Bohemian root there, isn't there, or a middle-Czech root...
If we should be scrupulous we shouldn't say Czech, but he was Bohemian. I mean, geopolitically that is not a claim, it's a reality, but Czech is something else, Czech is connected with Czech language in terms of culture, and then Mahler was not at all. But Bohemian in connection with a country and cultural roots, and maybe some features of character and so on, although the Jewish part there is very strong, but this affinity to Czech lands, Bohemia, home of his birthplace Kaliště [the house pictured above] or Bohmia – that's valid.
Woods and fields and hills.
And it's actually very moving to realise that he was born extremely close to places where Smetana and Martinů were born, so he is a child of the same land. But of course culturally of a different stream, of that area which is exactly the background of the Bamberger Symphony, hence their somewhat very special natural relationship to Mahler's music, and therefore even if I was aware of amazing, fantastic achievements of the orchestra with Jonathan in the field of Mahler, I nevertheless chose Mahler One for my opening concert, because I thought – first of all, I think I am a profoundly different kind of conductor to Jonathan [Nott]...
How, would you say?
In a way I think it's quite clear, starting with the way we show with our arms, through our background and how we were educated in music, from where we come and stem, rehearsal style and general personality. It's just my guess, I've never met Jonathan, but I know him from his creations. So I thought I would like to experience this music which is so dear to the orchestra and me together. It would be a mistake, or I simply cannot imagine to avoid it because it has been played a lot, and it was truly a tremendous experience, everyone said it was different from what they used to play like, and yet another view of this beauty.
That has to be the backbone of any orchestra's repertoire, Mahler, along with Beethoven and Brahms.
But here especially I think it's really a visiting card of the orchestra if we are lucky enough, it really seems we are going to continue as the negotiations suggest, in exporting this abroad, because I think it's really a unique melting-pot, crossroads, culturally, where so many cultures meet – my presence here, this Czechness or Bohemianness or Moravianness comes even more into the play. I'm very much thinking lately culturally about streams of traditions and I realise more and more that it's almost impossible to insist on so much distinction within the central European region, because it was always very colourful in terms of shades and culture, and I really feel that the whole region, especially if you say Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, maybe a bit of Hungary too, Slovakia, lower part and maybe the very north of Italy, there's this what used to be, more or less with the exception of Bavaria Austro-Hungary, that really seems like a genuine whole of one culture with various shades.
Hungary seems to me a place apart – it's much more raw.
Probably, yes. But in some way when you compare folk music of eastern Moravia with folk music of north-western Hungary and that corner of Slovakia, it seems very close.
I'd say that was different from Bohemia and Austria.
But nevertheless I think even if you just follow the musical careers of people like Mahler, Budapest would always have been somehow included.
Next page: on studies with Jiří Bělohlávek, other great Czech conductors and the quiet of Bamberg
Symphony is a word carrying heavy historical baggage. It’s understandable when composers dig for inspiration elsewhere. All the same, Mark-Anthony Turnage has grasped the symphonic nettle with Remembering – In memoriam Evan Scofield which received its first performance last night. Many more will follow, I’d venture.
Time was when the principal conductor of a top orchestra could afford to refine mastery of a small and familiar repertoire, covering a century and a half of music at most. The rest he (always he) would leave to loyal or youthful lieutenants. The days of such podium dinosaurs are numbered. The likes of Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Riccardo Muti are outflanked by colleagues, mostly a generation or two younger, who have been trained to view the entire history of Western ensemble music – at least three centuries’ worth – as the right and duty of an orchestra to promote.
August 1914, September 2001, all of 2016: these are the dates Hungary's late, great writer Péter Esterházy served up for the non-linear narrative of his friend Péter Eötvös's Halleluja - Oratorium Balbulum. Its Hungarian premiere in one of the world's best concert halls, part of the astounding Müpa complex on the Danube in Budapest, was bound to challenge Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's anti-immigrant policy with the libretto's talk of borders and fences, and fear of the other.
Is there anything on a concert programme more guaranteed to make the heart lift – or to prove that a conductor has their musical priorities straight – than a Haydn symphony? If you're tired of Haydn, you're tired of life: there’s no music more joyous, more inventive or more resistant to vanity. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla chose his Symphony No 6 of 1761, called Le Matin for its opening sunrise and the freshness of its ideas, and it was a delight.