Salon des oubliés: Havergal Brian's Gothic, a true symphony of a thousand, gets rare live performance today

Imagine spending your entire life scraping out a living as a copy editor and music copyist, so you can spend every free moment as a composer who no one is seriously interested in.

That, oversimplified, is the story of English composer Havergal Brian, who died, aged 96, in 1972. (Click on the link for everything you may want to know.) He left behind stacks and stacks of music -- including 32 symphonies -- that not many people could get excited about. An old guard of influential Englsh musical figures, including Proms founder Sir Henry Wood and conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, did their best to champion Brian's work.

Today, the Proms give us a very rare opportunity to hear his most notorious creation: Symphony No. 1, called the Gothic. Brian spent eight years crafting this two-hour behemoth, which calls for a huge main orchestra, organ, four offstage brass bands, a children's choir and an Edwardian choral society-size adult choir and, as you can imagine, a gargantuan stage.

Thank goodness for Royal Albert Hall.

Today's Proms performance, with live streaming audio, features more than 1,000 performers, according to the BBC. After the live stream, the concert will remain available for listening for seven days.

You can find all the details of the concert here.

Havergal completed the work in 1927. It was published in 1932 as his Symphony no. 2, then renumbered by Brian three decades later. Apparently, it made it in to the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest symphony. It didn't have its premiere until 1961.

It's difficult to describe the style of Brian's writing in this symphony; it's so eclectic that it echoes a little bit of everything inside its massive sprawl. It's like a big sonic tapestry where the creator keeps changing the colour and thickness of the yarn, while reinterpreting the design, as the loom chugs along.

That sounds awful, but it isn't, really. It simply demands a different kind of listening. I've imagined myself as a passenger on a long train ride, with the Gothic Symphony a grand succession of unfolding panoramas that come and go as I sit back in wonder.

Here is the first of three sections of a messily exuberant setting of the Te Deum that make up the work's second half. This is from a 1989  Slovak Philharmonic recording -- the first official recording (there was a bootleg LP of a live concert floating around before that):

In a jollier vein, here is a Comic Overture ispired by J.M. Synge's 1909 play, The Tinker's Wedding. The music dates from 1948. The performance is by the late, great Sir Charles Mackerras and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic:

To close, Roger Vigoles accompanying baritone Brian Rayner Cook in Brian's overwrought, 1910 setting of Robert Herrick's poem, "Why Dost Thou Wound and Break My Heart:"

Organist Cameron Carpenter boldly flying uncharted galaxies as a champion of a virtual one-man symphony

 

Cameron Carpenter in rehearsal at Koerner Hall on June 15, 2011. Photos: John Terauds

Boldly unorthodox American organist Cameron Carpenter, who turns 30 this year, has never been more focused about changing the culture surrounding pipe-organ concerts.

Moses Znaimer invited him to this year's IdeaCity conference, which was held at the Royal Conservatory's Telus Centre last week. Carpenter had thought he would give a concert, but Znaimer also wanted attendees to hear about the organist's quest to build the perfect electronic substitute for the notoriously cranky and maintenance-intensive traditional pipe organ.

I sat down with Carpenter a few days later to catch up over a long breakfast.

It's been a year of changes for him: He's now with mega artist-managers CAMI and has moved to Berlin, which has turned into quite the Mecca for adventurous younger creative souls in search of open-minded audiences and cheap rents.

In Berlin, Carpenter has found the perfect large hall to house his dream instrument: a five-manual virtual concert organ designed to make any sound he desires, require (virtually !) no maintenance and be easy to pack up and ship to any location with an electrical wall outlet.

The organist is trying to raise $1.5 million (U.S.) to make this all happen. Although this sounds like a ridiculous amount of money for a pipeless pipe organ, my guess it's less than half of what it would cost to build the real thing -- and the real thing would not be going anywhere in a hurry.

The electronic engineering expertise for all this comes from Marshall & Ogletree, a small outfit in suburban Boston that has developed a particularly effective way to generate the complex waveforms needed to make a digital pipe organ sound like the real thing.

Carpenter himself is the specification brains -- figuring out just what kinds of sound should be assigned to each stop, how to arrange groups of stops for each manual, and how they can each (and all) be combined and recombined on the fly.

As we spoke, Carpenter revealed how he has even dabbled in the oh-so-fine art of modifying the sound waves of one tone to sound like another.

It's all a bit mind-boggling, but the short version of all this is that Carpenter is one of the rare artists who has the brain power and outside-the-box creativity to completely reshape their artform.

Exhibit A: Him rehearsing his paraphrase of Franz Schubert's Erlkönig on a Mighty Wurlitzer theatre organ for his latest album, Cameron Live!:

If you take Carpenter out of his creative context, it's easy to mistake him as arrogant and, at the extreme, a lunatic. Many professional organists look askance, because he repeats and over and over again how organists need to get out of the way of their own instrument.

Given how small and rarefied the world of concert organists is -- and how small and rarefied are its audiences -- I think people like Carpenter should be given as much encouragement as possible. 

There is no other instrument in the history of humankind that is capable of the breadth of expression as the organ. As the great English and French organ builders of the late 19th century intended, it is literally an orchestra in a box -- so why not approach it like Gustavo Dudamel and blow an audience's hair sideways in the process.

As for the electronic organ, there are so many bad ones out there, that it's difficult to keep an open mind.

I haven't been happy with the sound of the virtual organ Cameron has now used twice in Ontario concerts (a digital replica of a beast made in 1928 by E.M. Skinner for Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Chicago). But Carpenter insists that his great Dream Opus (my name, not his) by Marshall & Ogletree will be wart-free.

It will even have special features, such as the ability to change each stop's temperament (the tuning setup) on the fly. ("Equal temperament can be so boring, after a while," said Carpenter.) The organist told me how, in one piece by Bach he has recorded, he goosed the tuning towards a towering climax, just to heighten the experience.

Purists are, justifyably, turned off by this sort of interpretive license. But there are many orchestras in the world -- the New York Philharmonic comes to mind -- that tune their strings sharp for the very same reason. They just can't do it in the middle of a piece.

The debate will continue over the pros and cons of showmanship vs toiling in relative obscurity. I'm happy to be around to watch and listen.

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Since my main skepticism with digital organs is over the quality of their sound, I played several videos Marshall & Ogletree have made of their Opus 5, installed in 2008 at Florida's newly minted Ave Maria University chapel -- with specifications by Cameron Carpenter. It's sounds very impressive on my Bose speakers.

This organ has many of the features Carpenter would have on his own instrument. The first video, of a Tuba Tune by C.S. Lang, provides a visual tour of the console and speaker array and Doug Marshall makes the merry noise.

The second video is of Brian Gilkes playing Olivier Messiaen's Dieu parmi nous (if this isn't totally convincing as an affirmation of faith, I don't know what is) on Marshall & Ogletree's more traditionally executed digital Op. 6, at Gordon College (in the Boston area).

The third clip is of the Tuba Tune by Norman Cocker played by the great traditional English organist Colin Walsh at one of my favourite traditional English organs, the great 1898 Father Willis at Lincoln Cathedral.

This summer marks 400 years since the death of Renaissance choral master Tomás Luis de Victoria

There's no obvious Australian connection historically, but St. James King Street, which calls itself the oldest remaining church in Sydney, is hosting a four-concert festival in honour of Tomás Luis de Victoria, the most famous composer from Renaissance Spain, and one of the great masters of polyphony. August marks the 400th anniversary of Victoria's death.

The Aussies even have a countdown clock on the website.

My not-so-recent Grove dictionary says that the known works by Victoria include about 20 settings of the Mass, a Funeral Mass, 18 Magnificats, a well-known series of anthems and motets for Holy Week published in 1585.

The image is from a section of the Gloria from Victoria's Missa Gaudeamus, published in 1576, just before the 28-year-old returned to Spain from a long stint in Rome, to go work as the chaplain to Philip II's sister, the Dowager Empress Maria.

You can check out more on Victoria here.

One of the qualities that makes Victoria's music special is the skill with which he matches textual meaning and musical expression. He is also a master of creative dissonance.

As a substantial sample, here is the choir of St. James King Street with a gorgeous interpretations of the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei from Victoria's Mass for the Ascension of Christ (which would traditionally be performed on the Feast of the Ascension, which happened this past Thursday, this year) from an album they've recorded, titled No Ordinary Sunday.

The choir's music director is British-born Warren Trevelyan-Jones (there's an interesting interview about the church, the history of sacred choral music and the difficulty in finding good "consort" singers in a culture dominated by opera with Trevelyan-Jones from a half-hour May 1 radio broadcast available on the ABC website).

Tomorrow: John Tuttle's music on CBC Radio 2 and Detroit Symphony streams for free in HD

Organist and choir director John Tuttle is retiring after 30 years as the founding music director of the Exultate Chamber Singers. They give their final concert together at Grace Church-on-the-Hill a week from today, on May 13.

Tomorrow, Tuttle is the guest on This is My Music on CBC Radio 2, from 10 a.m. to noon. I'll be listening to find out how Tuttle's wit and broad musical horizons translate into his favourite pieces of music.

There's another musical moment to pay attention to tomorrow, across the river from Windsor. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which has somehow managed to scrape out a few spring concerts at the end of a strike-demolished season, is streaming its evening concert, starting at 8 p.m. It features Leila Josefowicz performing Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1. Also on the programme is Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 and Shostakovich's perky Festive Overture. The conductor is Norwegian Arild Remmereit, who takes over as music director of the Rochester Philharmonic on Sepetember.

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Here, just because it's there, and because it is Franz Liszt's 200th, here is ever-elegant Cuban pianist Jorge Luis Prats performing Liszt's transcription of J.S. Bach's Prelude and Fugue for organ, in A minor:

Miraculous art of improvisation is built on thousands of practice hours at the keyboard

There's an excellent article in the current issue of Seed magazine on what makes it possible for musicians to improvise. It's in two parts: the first focuses on pianist and Mozart expect Robert Levin, and how he mastered the art of improvisation; the second looks at how all of this takes place in the brain, based on research by cognitive ethnomusicologist Aaron Berkowitz and University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari.

I can't speak to the science, but everything on the musician's side makes perfect sense.

Essentially, the musician needs to assimilate all the elements needed to fluently make up music through thousands of hours of practice. Then, the musician can switch off the omigod, what an I going to do next? part of their mind, and let the neurons and brain cells do a little dance through to the fingers.

As much as I was hoping for a pushbutton answer (something like a diet pill or Prozak), the truth is that the miracle of improvisation is not possible without some sort of punishing bootcamp. Fortunately, the reward is worth it.

Here is improviser extraordinaire Gabriela Montero, doing her things with "Je ne regrette rien," in concert, followed by my favourite organ improviser Daniel Roth, the titular organist at Saint-Sulpice church in Paris, teasing out a little something tweety on a Beethoven theme earlier this year:

 

An organist's nightmare: How not to end the Hallelujah Chorus

A chance to hear artistically adventurous, intellectually provocative Dark Star Requiem tonight

Today -- World AIDS Day -- at 10 p.m. on CBC Radio 2, Laurie Brown on The Signal presents a broadcast of Dark Star Requiem, the oratorio premiered by Tapestry New Opera Works at last summer's Luminato festival.

It's well worth catching. Here's my review from the premiere performance at Koerner Hall:

Artistically adventurous and intellectually provocative, the world premiere of the oratorio Dark Star Requiem is exactly the kind of project that the Luminato festival wants to be about.

Add to the list a fantastic, tight production, excellent singers and a crack team of musicians, and you have all but one of the ingredients for a truly memorable experience. The one, final - and crucial - piece missing here is a powerful, personal connection that could send the themes in this work straight through our hearts.

This Luminato-commissioned oratorio is sort of an opera in concert form. Dark Star Requiem is a monument to, as well as a memento mori of, the generation-old scourge of HIV-AIDS.

In its 80 minutes, composer Andrew Stanilands and librettist Jill Battson create a multi-hued dramatic quilt in which each of the 14 short movements focuses on a facet of the pandemic, be it scientific, natural, human or cultural.

Through workshops by producing company Tapestry New Opera Works, and a remarkable staging by dramaturge Tom Diamond and designers Beth Kates and Ben Chiasson, Dark Star Requiem was turned into a tight, gorgeous show for its debut at Koerner Hall on Friday night.

Just as the lighting, projections and complex choreography unfolded flawlessly, music director Wayne Strongman's execution of the music was tight from beginning to end.

The Gryphon Trio and two percussionists deftly overcame the music's many technical challenges. And the soloists - soprano Neema Bickersteth, mezzo Krisztina Szabó, baritone Peter McGillivray and bass-baritone Marcus Nance - each made exceptionally fine showings, backed up by the Elmer Iseler Singers.

This was the sort of presentation that compares well with the best executions of new music you can find anywhere in the world. So it was all the more disappointing to find that the episodic nature of Dark Star Requiem failed to land a satisfying, visceral punch.

A problem with any world-scale crisis is that, ultimately, it is hard for individuals to fully grasp it unless they have a personal connection.

Like the way most of us relate of HIV-AIDS, Dark Star Requiem keeps the deaths of 25 million people, and the quiet suffering of the 40 million infected with the virus, at an emotional arm's length.

But at least we are being given a chance to think about it in novel ways, which, in itself, is reason enough to go witness this piece.

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World AIDS Day made me think of Joseph Dobos, the first of several friends I lost to AIDS before scientists figured out how to keep HIV at bay. He died exactly 25 years ago. He was studying organ, and left me a big pile of scores, which I still use today.

Here, for no other reason than because it's pretty and powerful, is an improvisation by Jean-Claude Guidarini at the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ at the cathedral of Saint-Alain in Lavaur, France, performed in May:

One more flash Hallelujah Chorus, this time in Philadelphia

It's Hallelujah Chorus day! This one is from the old Wanamaker's department store in Philadelphia -- now a Macy's. The store's most famous fixture is a grand organ, one of the largest ever made, and still played regularly during prime shopping hours.

This flash Hallelujah Chorus is a bit less focused than the one in Wellang -- but at least it has the combined power of 650 voices, organized by Opera Company of Philadelphia:

Stephanie Martin releases new CD of her choral music at Church of St. Mary Magdalene at 3 p.m.

One of Toronto's exceptional, under-the-radar classical musicians is Stephanie Martin, director of music at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, director of the Pax Christi Chorale and professor of organ, harpsichord and music history at York University. She is also an accomplished composer.

The latest fruit of her labours is a new disc that has her imprimatur all over it: Alleluia: Sacred Choral Works by Stephanie Martin. She is the composer, the conductor of the church choirs and the producer of the CD. (For information on the disc, click here, or check it out at Atelier Grigorian.)

Martin and the choristers launch the disc at 3 p.m. today with a concert at St. Mary Magdalene, 477 Manning Ave. (at Ulster St.). Admission is $25. Besides a short concert, the afternoon includes the first screening of a new Bravo! video featuring the all-female Schola Magdalena choir.

I've listened to the disc a half-dozen times. It's a quiet, modulated treat. The magic in Martin's music is how it serves its intended purpose: to enhance the worship experience without intruding into it, and sound timeless without being totally generic.

There are no bold dynamics, no vocal trickery, to hey-look-at-me technical feats here, just carefully wrought close harmonies that pay homage to the Plainsong tradition and the emphasis of text over melody that are an integral part of the St. Mary Magdalene experience. The gentle push-and-pull between consonance and dissonance is very much also in the tradition of Healey Willan's musical legacy at the church, which Martin honours without being a slave to it.

As someone who has sung and worked in churches for most of my life, I have nothing but admiration for Martin's accomplishments. 

There are straightforward anthems, such as "Hear My Prayer," settings covering specific liturgical needs, including the Ordinary of the Mass and the Kontakion, and tidy little motets such as "Ave verum corpus." 

The choirs are beautifully balanced and delicately directed, providing a not-quite-of-this-world effect. I prefer my music and the way it is sung to be a bit more earthly, but Martin's selection of pieces for this disc comes together as a fantastic meditative break at the end of a stressful day or week -- whether or not you make any spiritual connection with the texts.

For a tiny taste of the church and Martin's music, here is an old promotional video:

CD Reviews: An ethereal Mozart from Toronto quartet and Messiaen to stir the depths of our souls

Here are two great classical releases that satisfy the soul in two very, very different ways. Both deserve ***1/2 (out of 4). For details on each album, click on the performers' names:

EYBLER QUARTET & JANE BOOTH
Backofen & Mozart, Theme & Variations (Analekta)
Made up of three members of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (violinists Aisslinn Nosky and Julia Wedman plus violist Patrick Jordan) as well as a frequent Tafelmusik freelancer (and very busy cellist-about-town) Margaret Gay, the six-year-old Eybler Quartet's specialty is presenting Classical-era chamber music on period instruments. It's been a long wait for this, the group's second album. On it, they are joined by accomplished period woodwind player Jane Booth. The disc's centrepiece is the exquisite, four-movement Quintet for Bassett Clarinet and Strings, K. 581, written by Mozart in 1789. It's longer than most of the composer's symphonies and concertos, showing off clever craftsmanship and, best of all, line after line of gorgeous melody for this flexible, mellow-voiced woodwind. This recording does the work full justice, rendering the music with meringue-like crispness and delicacy. Two quintets by German composer Johann Backofen (1768-1839) are also pretty, much less interesting musically (violist Max Mendel plays second viola on the B-flat Major piece). There is a particular combination of delicacy and texture that one gets from period instruments that feels especially well-suited to chamber music. All of this makes for 75 very satisfying musical minutes.

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PAUL JACOBS
Olivier Messiaen, Livre du Saint-Sacrement (Naxos)
American organist Paul Jacobs is such a phenomenal talent, not only technically but in how he manages to coax every conceivable colour out of any instrument he confronts. The man who became head of the organ faculty at the Juilliard School at the age of 27 (in 2004) has made a specialty of the music of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). Here, in a two-CD set, her presents the pinnacle of Messiaen's contribution to the organ repertoire, the Book of the Holy Sacrament, 18 meditations he completed in 1984 that transcend time, space, sound and conventional notions of musical narrative. As titular organist at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris, Messiaen's output is directly tied to the Roman Catholic Mass as well has his own deep spirituality. Jacobs recorded this music in the incense-filled, neo-Gothic time capsule that is the Church of St. Mary-the-Virgin near Times Square in Manhattan, with its generous reverberation and fabulously massive Aeolian Skinner organ. Divorced from the atmosphere and environment that this music was written for, these tonally daring meditations and transports come across as dense and difficult. With eyes closed and mind cleared of everyday cares, it is music that can insinuate itself into the deepest recesses of the soul.

To give you a taste, here is movement 15: "The Joy of Grace," performed by French organ master Olivier Latry at his organ at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris: