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Spring 2001
Leading notes
Peter Phillips on touring China
In memoriam
Arnold Whittal pays tribute to composer Iannis Xenakis
Articles
Mystères de l’instant Anthony Gritten
reflects on the epiphanic nature of the listening experience:
“In live performance, the nature of engagement may well be
different to that of private activity, not only because the listener
sees and co-performs, but also partly because recordings embody
a dangerous, if necessary, assumption (particularly acute in ‘live’
recordings) that the act is more permanent than it is, and that
we somehow ought to have a choice as to when and where to face up
to what we know and can say about it. But it is worth asking, Is
not what is not permanent more human than what is?”
 Offrandes
oubliées 2 Nigel Simeone traces the epistolary
relationship between Olivier Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger:
“In February 1931, it was to Boulanger that Messiaen wrote in
connection with the first performance of his recently completed work
for soprano, tenor, violin and piano ... These letters reveal the
eager young composer fretting anxiously over arrangements for the
premiere of the work.”
Springing surprises Marc Wood commends
the music of Henri Sauguet:
“Like so many French composers of the mid-twentieth century,
Henri Sauguet is mostly known to British audiences as just a reference
in a textbook, mentioned in association with the circle of composers
influenced by Satie. His music is virtually never played in Britain
and remains largely unrecorded on British record labels. The centenary
of his birth, on 18 May 1901, provides a welcome opportunity to
re-evaluate the life and music of this quintessentially French composer,
whose oeuvre contains not a few surprises.”
Look to the lady John S. Jenkins charts
the shadowy career of a versatile eighteenth-century musician:
“We next hear of Cassandra Frederick, not as a keyboard player,
but now as a soprano herself. On 31 December 1757 the Earl of Shaftesbury
wrote ‘I saw Mr Handel the other day, who is pretty well and
has just finished the composing of several new songs for Frederica
his new singer, from whom he has great expectations. She is the
girl who was celebrated a few years since for playing on the harpsichord
at eight years old’ ... However, Mrs Delany, who attended Cassandra’s
debut, said ‘the performers are the same as last year only
there is a new woman instead of Passarini who is so frightened that
I cannot say whether she sings well or ill’.”
Capital gains Ian Payne investigates
a possible Handel-Telemann borrowing:
“It is common knowledge that in borrowing fugal material, whether
from Telemann or anyone else, Handel often used only the smallest
motifs for inspiration, which he freely reworked and expanded. Critics
today are perhaps better placed (and better disposed) to consider
Handel’s borrowings objectively than at any time since the
eighteenth century; and many scholars now require much higher evidential
standards when considering the question ‘when is a borrowing
not a borrowing?’ than used to be the case.”
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Review articles
Bottoms up Andrew
Thomson toasts two new additions to the Gerhard bookshelf |
Absolute values Wilfrid Mellers enters
the world of French Baroque opera in a review of Music and theatre
in France 1600–1680 by John S. Powell, French baroque
opera: a reader by Caroline Wood & Graham Sadler and Lully
studies, Edited by John Hajdu Heyer.
Running softly Richard Drakeford explores
some of the byways of twentieth-century British music in considering
Nothing so charming as musick!: the life and times of Frederic
Austin – singer, composer, teacher by Martin Lee-Browne,
Alan Bush: music, politics and life by Nancy Bush, Arthur
Oldham’s autobiography Living with voices, and As
I live and breathe: a singer’s story by Norman Tattersall.
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Controlling forces John Steane reviews Puccini:
his international art by Michele Girardi (translated by Laura
Basini)
Left: Denis Dowling as Gianni Schicchi in Arnold
Matters’s production for Sadlers Wells Opera of Puccini’s
comic masterpiece
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Northern lights
Arnold Whittall on Sibelius studies, Edited by Timothy
L. Jackson & Veijo Murtomäki |
Material issuesPeter Holman reviews two new works
on Purcell: Purcell manuscripts: the principal musical sources
by Robert Shay & Robert Thompson, and Henry Purcell’s operas:
the complete texts edited by Michael Burden
Dead and gone? The music of John Ireland
Fiona Richards: reviewed by David Wright |
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