Staircases

A very interesting article on the stairways of LA. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23724797

Apparently the one that Laurel and Hardy tried to take the piano up in that 1932 film, is still there in Silver Lake.

We think of San Francisco being hilly, but so too in parts is LA.

Angel's Flight, Downtown

 

Ghosts of famous names past

A nice place to spend a summer's evening.

Hollywood Bowl

I couldn't help thinking of what I'd read about Max Reinhardt's famous production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s, where he had a torchlight procession come down through the hills and end up on stage in time for the finale.

Nor, I suppose, of Bugs Bunny putting a mop on his head and being mistaken for Leopold Stokowski!

  

Liszt's "Hamlet"

Continuing my series of program notes

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Hamlet, S104/R421

After travelling the world for 25 years as a piano virtuoso, the Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt settled in Weimar in 1848 and became Weimar's ‘kapellmeister-in-extraordinairy’. Conducting was among his duties, but there, as a composer, he established the ‘symphonic poem’, his unique contribution to musical form.

By ‘symphonic poem’, Liszt meant ‘a preface added to a piece of instrumental music, by means of which the composer intends to guard the listener against a wrong poetical interpretation, and to direct his attention to the poetical idea of the whole or to a particular part of it’. Liszt used the ‘poetical idea’ as a means to generate new musical form. Most definitions of ‘symphonic poem’ describe it as a single-movement sonata form which contains within itself the structural demarcations of a whole symphony. But some symphonic poems are less like four-movement digests than others. Of Liszt’s13 symphonic poems, Hamlet most resists classification.
Hamlet, composed in 1858, was originally intended to be an overture to the play. The work begins with a very long introduction, which some have associated with the appearance of Hamlet’s father’s Ghost above the fog-bound battlements of Elsinore Castle at the beginning of the drama. More than mere prelude however, it contains themes which will be developed later: a short motif that follows the shape, if not the chromaticism, of Wagner’s ‘Tristan’ motif and a rising theme which is dotted with reminders to play ‘very gloomily’. Even though thematic presentation has been pre-empted by this introduction, what sounds like an exposition-proper begins at a section headed Allegro appassionato ed agitato assai. This also contains what little contrasting second subject there is in this highly unusually work, a passage Liszt specifically identifies with Ophelia; he actually calls it ‘an insertion...’ (it was added later). There is drama in the development section which could arguably be viewed as the duel between Laertes and Hamlet. The recapitulation is very short and truncated, and leads into a funeral march which functions as coda.

Steven Vande Moortele regards Liszt’s Hamlet as a ‘sonata deformation’. But others have seen it as not a sonata at all. It might be an arch perhaps, with the Ophelia music dividing two broadly appassionato sections. While it may be misguided to read the work as exclusively programmatic – it certainly doesn’t follow the play step by step - it may be possible to see the work as a digest of the play in the manner of Liszt’s piano réminiscences.

This would accord with the recollections of Edward Geibel, a playwright, who found that in discussing Shakespeare with Liszt, Liszt would concentrate on key scenes of a play and then improvised a complete poem around them at the keyboard. It would also appear, from the testimony of Lina Ramann, Liszt’s biographer, that Liszt had very specific moments in mind. At the beginning of a performance of the two-piano version of this work in 1884, Liszt whispered in her ear, ‘To be or not to be’, and later, in the body of the work, at the onset of a series of ‘stabbing chords’: ‘Polonius – die Ratte’. In light of this, Joanne Deere has theorised that Hamlet is based on key scenes in the play - Act I scene v (so, hearing the ghost at the beginning is justified); Act III scene i (where Hamlet rejects Ophelia); and Act III sc iv (where Polonius is stabbed behind the curtain). That turbulent music is not the duel between Laertes and Hamlet. There is however, the funeral march at the end.

Much of Liszt’s Hamlet may be explained by the fact that it is Liszt’s interpretation of Hamlet, the character. It is all seen from Hamlet’s perspective, even Ophelia. Liszt was heavily influenced in his view of the character from his friendship with the actor Bogumil Dawison, who portrayed Hamlet, unusually for the time, as a man of action. Though Liszt may have later acknowledged that side of Hamlet which is ‘pale, fevered...the prisoner of his doubt and irresolution’, it is really the other side of the coin which attracted him: ‘a prince with his battle-plan awaiting his moment to exact revenge’. All that turbulence in the music is Hamlet’s inner turmoil, not externals of the plot.

Friedrich von Amerling's portrait of Dawison as Richard III

What is also significant in all this, is that Liszt’s Hamlet may also be the portrait of Dawison’s ‘interpretation’. Liszt recognised in Dawison a fellow virtuoso. It is interesting to reflect that, though Liszt may have achieved long-term goals as a conductor and composer in Weimar, he was still within those roles, a soliloquist, a recitalist - a pianist at heart.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2011

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013 
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013  
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013 
Wagner's  Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013

Outlets - Los Angeles whimsy viii

What's with the wacky liquor store outlets in this part of the world? This on the corner of Lankershim and Burbank - but there are others.

Свадебка - Stravinsky's "Les Noces", orchestrated by Steven Stucky

Continuing my series of program notes:

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Les Noces (The Wedding/Свадебка (Svadebka))

orchestrated by

Steven Stucky (born 1949)

Part One

Scene 1: At the Bride’s House (‘The Tresses’)

Scene 2: At the Bridegroom’s House

Scene 3: The Bride’s Departure

Part Two

Scene 1: The Wedding Feast (The Red Table)

When, in 1915, Stravinsky first played Les Noces to the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, Diaghilev wept. According to Stravinsky, Diaghilev said it was ‘the most beautiful and most purely Russian creation of our Ballet. I think he did love Les Noces more than any other work of mine.’

The ‘Russianness’ of Les Noces’ may not be so apparent to listeners expecting the colourful fantasies or ecstasies of a Rimsky-Korsakov or Scriabin, or the melancholic depths of a Tchaikovsky. But it does have an earthy authenticity and a two-dimensionality (there are basically only two tempos) that remind us of folk art. The original production choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska (Nijinsky’s sister) and designed by Natalia Gontcharova (and viewable on YouTube in productions by the Royal Ballet and the Mariinsky) looks as if inspired by woodcuts.

Les Noces is, in a sense, a black and white follow up to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, except that in The Rite the virgin dances herself to death; in Les Noces, she is led away with her groom to begin a rustic marriage. The libretto, created by Stravinsky from traditional lyrics compiled in 1911 by the ethnographer, P.V. Kireyevsky, is a suite of four episodes told through quotations of typical talk. As Eric Walter White says, ‘...it might be compared to one of those scenes in Ulysses in which the reader seems to be overhearing scraps of conversation without the connecting thread of discourse.’ There is no narrative; only occasional stage directions. But we can work out the broad action – the plaiting of the bride’s tresses, the preparation of the groom’s locks, their departure for the marriage bed and the wedding festivities including some very drunk guests. Voices are assigned freely to various parts. All-up, the effect is, as Stravinsky wanted, impersonal – but perhaps deep as a result. Just as in his Mass, Stravinsky could be regarded as aspiring to the practical virtues of a genuine ritual.

As far as the music is concerned, Stravinsky’s metres often follow the irregular patterns of Russian popular verse, and there are some pre-existing tunes, such as the altered liturgical chant for a duet of basses. Stravinsky’s cellular melodic structure may be derived from Russian folksong, but in his permutation of the cells we can perhaps glimpse the Serialist that he became in later life. It’s in the area of orchestration that the work retains its focus tonight.

A work for soloists and chorus was always at the forefront of Stravinsky’s mind. But instrumentally, Stravinsky first wanted a ‘super-Sacre’ orchestra, that is: one comprising 150 musicians, bigger than the juggernaut he had created for Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). No draft of this version exists, but a later version (1915-17) is scored for, what tonight’s orchestrator Steven Stucky calls ‘an idiosyncratic combination’ of 27 winds and brass, eight strings, harp, piano, harpsichord, and Hungarian cimbalom. Next came another idiosyncratic version for two cimbaloms, harmonium, pianola, and percussion. Finally, in 1922-23, Stravinsky struck on the ‘perfectly homogeneous’ combination of four pianos and four percussionists, the version most often heard today.

In 2005, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Esa-Pekka Salonen asked Steven Stucky to write a version of Les Noces for conventional orchestra, which was premiered in 2008. A Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, whose recent premieres include Silent Spring with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Stucky has had a long association with the LA Phil, most recently as Consulting Composer for New Music.

Stucky has said that he ‘kept Stravinsky’s four percussionists intact, simply replacing the four pianos with an orchestra of conventional size and makeup.’ The task was not simple though, as he had to learn Stravinsky’s language thoroughly to remain faithful to the work. Removing the mechanical sound of the four pianos had a significant impact on the impression made by the music, but this new version, he says, will ‘help reveal the close relationship between this music and Stravinsky’s earlier, more familiar Sacre and Petrushka’.

It may also dramatise a smoother transition between The Rite and Stravinsky’s later neo-classical works. In any case, says Stucky: ‘My orchestration is not meant to replace Stravinsky’s definitive 1923 version, but rather to offer a fresh lens through which to appreciate this uniquely original masterpiece.’

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2012

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013 
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013  
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013 
Wagner's  Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013

For more on Stravinsky, see Igor in Oz - Stravinsky Downunder, published 12 July 2012 

Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993

Since it's the 6th, I thought I'd reprint this story which I first published this time last year.

My friends, Neil and David Bell, and I were out on the path of the Kungka kutjara, a Central Australian travelling songline  – one of those epic Central Australian chants that are meant to have come into being in the Tjukurpa (eternity), or Altjira as the Aranda call it. We were hoping, perhaps too blithely, to make a radio program about it for ABC Classic FM.

We had got some recordings down at Mutitjulu, had just dropped N and B off at the Loritja camp at Hermannsburg and were heading back towards Alice Springs. We sang some of the chant as we rattled over the corrugations of the dirt road, a bit of the song that stuck in our memories – ‘Yulatji luma, Kunpatji luma...’ – not so much as to ‘bring the country up’ as Bruce Chatwin observed aboriginal travellers doing, as to make the time go faster.

As we turned a corner near Ellery Creek we came across a burning car. A Western Desert man was standing beside the car trying to beat out the flames which had already spread, quickly in this heat, to the grass by the side of the road.

Ellery Gorge, photograph: courtesy Andrew Schultz

Neil pulled up and spoke to him. ‘Nyaa palyanin?’ and they had a conversation. As we pulled away, David, Neil’s son, said, ‘Did he say someone’s dead down there?’

We descended to the creek and saw two women stripped to their waists, wailing and hurling dirt in the air. In the dry creek bed we saw a man cradling another in his arms.

A carload of people had been driving from Alice Springs to Kaltukatjara (Docker River). They’d been drinking. At Ellery Creek they jumped into a waterhole and this fellow hadn’t come up.

‘How long has he been like this?’ we asked.

‘Half an hour’.

Back at Hermannsburg the police looked as if they’d hurriedly thrown their khaki uniform shirts over shorts and thongs. It was New Year’s holiday. We took the man’s body inside the station. Then there were a series of interviews. Neil translated, but there were still misunderstandings. ‘Name?’ the police asked one interviewee. ‘Stephen Bradshaw,’ he said (I use a fake name). ‘Well, if you’re Stephen Bradshaw, who’s he?’ they indicated the body bag and opened it. They had identified the deceased by the cicatrice scars on his shoulder. But distinguishing Central Australian aboriginal people by scarification on their shoulders will not get you far.

The police had to go back out to Ellery Creek and gave David and me a choice: sit outside in the 50 degree (122F) heat, or in here with the body. We chose the air-conditioning.

We sat in silence. But I was coming to understand what T.G.H. Strehlow had meant when he said that nowhere else in the world are death and eternity bound together so tightly as in Central Australia. The eternal myths, such as Kungka kutjara, are present in the daily lives of living people; death is out-in-the-open and an all-too-frequent occurrence.

At the end of the day, after five or six hours of witness statements, I was standing outside watching the sun set, waiting to finally get back on the road to Alice Springs. The driver of the Docker River people’s car came over, the car that I later learnt had been burnt in grief. I said, ‘Not a good way to spend New Year’s Day.’ He said, ‘Bad day for me.’ I wondered why him in particular, but was told later that as the driver of the car he could pay for this in a big way. In the past he might have been speared. How was it his fault? When the drowned man’s mother had been dropped off at the Loritja camp, the women had come over and struck her. I don’t know how they’d have known what happened. Something specific in the way she was wailing? But why strike her? These were graphic illustrations of the Central Australian concept of ‘duty of care’ and ‘tribal responsibility’. Awesome obligations of reciprocity necessary I suppose in an environment which will kill an isolated human if they’re not paying attention.

And all we had wanted to do really was make a radio program about an Australian form of music. To help Australians gain a bit more insight into the cultural riches of our land. ABC Classic FM never got that radio program on the Kungka kutjara, but we certainly got more than we had bargained for.

If you liked this blog, others of mine touching on Central Australia are:

Journey to Horseshoe Bend - ten years on, published 28 May 2013

@  http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2013/05/journey-to-horseshoe-bend-ten-years-on.html

Carving up the pie, 17 December 2012
Life-changing statements, 16 December 2012
Ah, Nathanael, 29 November 2012

Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
@  http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/11/victory-over-death-and-despair-in.html

Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Conocotarius, George Washington, 5 July 2012

Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/05/considering-land-of-altjira.html

Two deserts

There is something about having a line of hills on the horizon, like this, the view of Mt Sadadeen from Stott Terrace over the old Melanka Guest House guest house site in Alice Springs.  

Here in Los Angeles, they're mountains - the San Gabriels behind the Verdugos, but I look forward to seeing these two high lines every time I go down to North Hollywood Metro Station.

So much for comforting similarities, but there are some 12 million people in Los Angeles county. I also like seeing 'just horizon' when you're driving certain places around Alice.