PJ Harvey - Is This Desire ?

PJ Harvey's Is This Desire (1998) has a lot more going for it than the Songs ... (2000) I listened to yesterday.  ... Desire is an intriguing mixture of harsh, industrial sounding tracks and solemn ballads that are drenched in a otherworldly, almost biblical (or is it post-apocalyptic) atmosphere. And yet it forms a compelling whole. Beyond the grungy clamour there is an undercurrent that is meditative and resigned but also prophetic, mysterious, full of anxious anticipation. When I listen to this music I'm always reminded of the inimitable mood of Stanley Spencer's early paintings. Lovely album. I'm looking forward to her new work, Let England Shake, to be released in just a couple of weeks.

PJ Harvey - Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea/Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Another few days of intense travelling. First to Stockholm, then to Amsterdam. As a result there has been precious little music. In the car back and forth to Holland I looped PJ Harvey's Stories ... . It's not my favourite disc of hers. Fairly smooth and approachable it misses the raw energy and vampy excess of To Bring You My Love and the mystery of Is This Desire. It's not a bad disc. In fact, it's eminently listenable. But I feel there is a lot of potential wasted. Songs are too short to start with. Most of them just over 3 minutes, recycling the same old ABA template, and sometimes boil down to just an AAA crescendo. I would have like PJ to take a little more risk and dig a little deeper.  The Mess We're In, a duet with Thom Yorke which features quite beautiful overlapping vocals, is a case in point. It's starts promising but then stagnates into a repetitive rant. PJ's parlando vocals just sound corny here. Anyway my favourite tracks are A Place Called Home, The Whores Hustle and the Hustles Whore, Kamikaze and Horses in my Dreams.

A few months ago I've also been tempted in buying Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, at that time the hype of the moment. It's one of the dumbest things I have heard in a long time. Gee, what a stupid, shallow, overproduced piece of junk. And horribly recorded at that. It's barely listenable on the car audio, let alone on the living room hifi. Quite unbelievable frankly how this ended up as record of the year in many critics' Xmas shortlists. I'll think I'll use it as a coaster.

Petrassi - Quarto Concerto/Bartok - Divertimento/Hoddinott: Scena for Strings/Martin: Etudes/Hartmann: Symphony nr. 4

We are inching our way through the Petrassi Concertos. The Fourth (1954) concludes the first CD. It's a weird work, written for strings only. Again, as with the previous two concertos it is not easy to put exactly the finger on what the weirdness is about. The musical idiom is approachable and relies on a loose and expressive twelve-tone technique. Formally, one senses an interesting combination of compositional rigour and improvisatory flair. The music commences somberly with a questioning, arch-like theme that seems to anchor a quasi-monothematic edifice. After a scherzo-like menacing 'allegro inquieto' the musical fabric starts to disintegrate until it is sucked up by a giant black hole, the 'lentissimo'. Here the musical process comes almost to a complete standstill. It's a night music of great intensity that explodes in an anguished climax. The finale is an energetic and tight-lipped 'allegro giusto' that towards the end returns to a serene reprise of the questioning theme with which the work started. All this is played without breaks between the movements. The overall shape of the work does remind somewhat of the Third Concerto, where the energetic opening also leads to a progressively more transparant and hesitant musical process.

According to Paolo Petazzi, who wrote the liner notes of the CD, the Quarto Concerto confronts itself with the model of Bartok. After having heard the Concerto five or six times during the last couple of days, I don't think that connection is obvious. In conjunction with the Concerto I listened in quick succession to a couple of other works for string orchestra: Bartok's Divertimento (1939), Martin's Etudes for string orchestra (1955-1956), Hoddinott's Scena for Strings (1984) and K.A. Hartmann's Symphony nr. 4 (1947-48). It's fair to say that there is something of all of these works in the Petrassi. I think Hoddinott's dreamy, shadowy Scena, Hartmann's somber, ruminative symphony and the dark slow movement of Bartok's Divertimento connect very well to the overall sense of deep and meandering meditation that pervades the Concerto. But there is neoclassical lightness and poise too, as in Martin's Etudes, and a sense of rythmic propulsion as in the fast movements of the Divertimento. truth be told, I think that amongst all of these works the Bartok Divertimento sticks out as the most accomplished achievement. It is such a wonder of balance, movement and colour. After having listened to it quite intensively a few weeks ago, it was refreshing to return to it once again. Now I listened to the phenomenal recording with Zehetmair and the Camerata Bern,on ECM.

Listening to the Hartmann symphony was a first for me. I had the full set of 8 symphonies with Ingo Metzmacher and the Bamberg SO already for a while but have not listened to it. It definitely seems worthwhile stuff, although I must admit to finding the Fourth rather longish. However, I am suspending judgment for the time being. Meanwhile I ordered the version on ECM with Christopher Poppen and the Münchner Kammerorchester to hear another take on this at first sight rather inscrutable work. Incidentally, Hartmann's Fourth Symphony and Petrassi's Fourth Concerto where both premiered by Hans Rosbaud.

Brahms - Hungarian Dances

A light interlude, but great fun. After being on a CD diet for a while, the recently auditioned Stravinsky/Silvestri LP wetted my appetite for the vitality of good old vinyl. I picked a selection of Hungarian Dances on a delightful vintage LP recorded by Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic (a bargain I picked up for 1 euro at Pêle-Mêle in Brussels, but the Keith Monks has thankfully worked its magic on it). John Hunt's discography ('Philharmonic Autocrat') learns me that the recording date was September 4, 1959. Karajan works his way through the dances at breakneck speed, sometimes a little too impetuous for my taste. And it's a typically stilized approach that keeps the rustic charactar of this music at bay. But that doesn't detract from the validity of this interpretation. And there's no denying this is brilliant playing from the BPO. The sound is very good, with only tutti towards the end of the disc sounding a little constricted. I love the layered textures of the strings and the grainy tone of the woodwinds as only vinyl seems to be able to reveal.

Well, maybe it's not only the vinyl. I also listened to a competing version on LP: Abbado's digital recording of the full set of Hungarian Dances with the Vienna Philharmonic (1983). After listening to the Karajan I found the Abbado rather urbane, partly because of the rather more sedate tempos. But my impression will likely also relate to the more generic character of this early digital recording. Anyway I enjoyed this rambunctious little romp with these old warhorses.

Stravinsky - Symphony in Three Movements/Petrassi - Recréation Concertante (III. Concerto) per Orchestra

Today I just felt like listening to some vinyl and I picked from my collection of cleaned but unplayed LPs a 1961 recording of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (1945) by the Philharmonia Orchestra led by Constantin Silvestri. A very happy choice for several reasons. First, it's a superb performance that has been captured in a very authoritative and transparent sound by the EMI engineers. Second, because it's such a wonderful pendant to Petrassi's Third Concerto (1952-53) that I listened immediately afterwards. I had been cursorely listening to the Recréation Concertante over the last few days and found it a remarkable but even more enigmatic work than the Secondo Concerto. It starts with a very energetic Allegro sostenuto ed energico that leads over to an elusive moderato that connects back to a fast movement (Vigoros e ritmico). The scoring becomes progressively more diaphanous, even more so as we move into a most remarkable Adagio moderato - a fantastic episode of great, mysterious beauty - to conclude with a laconic and light Allegretto sereno. Although Petrassi starts to rely here on twelve tone material, there is nothing disorientating about the music. There is a definite sense of harmonic direction. Apparently, the interval of a third is the most determinant element of the material used in constructing the Concerto (PP. Petazzi in the liner notes). Maybe this is a case of metatonal music? I feel there is an obvious kinship with the Stravinsky symphony in the compactness of structure, the granitic energy of the opening movement, the concertante character of much of the scoring (with piano and harp particularly prominent in the Stravinsky), the deceptive mildness of some movements (I found references to Rossini in relation to both works) and likely also the minor-major tensions in both compositions.

The National - 'Boxer' and 'Alligator'

Oh yes, on the way up and down to France we listened to some stuff of the American indie rockband The National. Last summer I found their moody High Violet a genuine discovery. A little later I also bought two earlier CDs, which had to wait until now for an audition. Boxer (2007) is slow in getting up to speed. It sounds a bit disjointed too. The first half leans toward their more rambling style on Alligator (2005), whilst in the final six tracks the more distinctive voice of their last recording shines through. Cute, for in the car.

Petrassi - Secondo Concerto

We've been off for a few days to France and as a result I haven't been able to listen to a lot of music. I've had a lot of Honegger's 4th Symphony swirling around in my head. And I listened once more to Petrassi's Secondo Concerto. There is an echo there that initially escaped me, but once you have heard it is very obvious. Indeed, there is a fair amount of Malcolm Arnold in this work, particularly in those kinds of half-jaunty, half-questioning motifs for the winds. Also the light, transparent scoring connects to some of Arnold's slow symphonic music. But the Petrassi never charges into the kind of slapstick and nose thumbing that Arnold is occasionally indulging in. Nevertheless, the parallel is really quite striking. Interesting is also that these composers are roughly contemporaneous. Arnold's Symphony nr. 2 dates from 1953, and therefore follows very closely in Petrassi's tracks with his Secondo Concerto. I assume it's unlikely that there has been a mutual influence. But one never knows! Kenneth Leighton and Peter Maxwell Davies are two respected British composers who studied with Petrassi. Anyway, if there was, it was only a passing attraction as Petrassi seemed to move in a slightly different direction with his Third Concerto. 

There is a review of the Tamayo CDs circulating on the internet (written by Guy Rickards for the scholarly journal Tempo, published by Cambridge University Press) which draws an interesting parallel with two other composers: Busoni and Hartmann. I have Hartmann's symphonic cycle in my collection but I haven't listened to it yet. I need to brush up on Busoni's (smaller body of) symphonic work too. I have a CPO disc with a mixture of shorter works (A Lustspiel Overtüre amongst them) and then of course the Sarabande and Cortège from Doktor Faustus. To be further investigated.

It's early days but judging from what I heard of the first four concertos I find these compositions extremely rewarding. It's serious music, ostensibly written in a personal voice without indulging in a quest for effect whatsoever. I was surprised to read in a program note by David Fanning on Rodion Shchedrin's First Concerto for Orchestra that "... some, such as the Italian Goffredo Petrassi, who composed eight examples between the 1930s and 1970s, have followed Hindemith’s cue, producing frankly recreational music, designed primarily to show off the qualities of the modern orchestra." I don't find Petrassi's music 'recreational' at all (despite his Third Concerto being misleadingly titled Recréation Concertante). Despite the obvious transparency of the orchestral writing and the predominantly tonal harmony it is music that is not easy to approach. I believe this may have something to do with the architecture, which does not seem to rely on traditional templates such as sonata form. Nevertheless, it does sound symphonic! Also, in Concertos 2-4 movements are played attacca, so it's not always easy to orient oneself when one cannot keep track of the indexing on the CD player (as in my case). Unfortunately the rather wordy booklet essay written by a certain Paolo Petazzi is of little help in understanding the formal aspects of the music.

One thing that captivates in all of the first four concertos is the gravitas of the slow movements. They seem to be the emotional heart of these works. They are also a vehicle to showcase Petrassi's masterly skills in orchestration, weaving ravishing sonorities into a somberly meditative, nightlike atmosphere. I've just dipped my toe into the Third and Fourth Concertos now and I look forward to continuing the journey.