BCMG: Celebrating Talent

Michael Betteridge

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group has gone through a tough time recently.  Birmingham City Council’s short-sighted option to cut full funding to all arts organisations bar the 7 ‘biggest’ hit BCMG, as the 8^th largest arts organisation in the city, the hardest.  Luckily there was uproar from the press (mainly The Guardian), musicians and public alike which led to an 18% cut in funding for the next season rather than 100%.  One cannot help but wonder whether BCC’s change of heart was based on disrupting a reputation linked directly to the city, or whether it was rewarding the outstanding quality of music making (at all levels) that BCMG offer.  Unfortunately our modern politicians are absolutely oblivious to quality within the arts, so BCC was probably just ensuring it did not ruffle too many important feathers.  Until next time anyway.

The term ‘internationally renowned’ is banded about a lot these days – any organisation that has positive press coverage abroad can claim this title I suppose.  BCMG can fairly grab this title with ease.  I am always gobsmacked by the consistent quality of BCMG’s work whether it is in the ambitious programming, performing, newly commissioned works or their learning projects. 

Last night’s concert once again screamed excellence.  When the team at BCMG are under the baton of Oliver Knussen the ensemble perform with a panache and accuracy which is rarely matched elsewhere.  A lot of contemporary music can lose its impact if not realised correctly, even if the most talented performers are involved.  BCMG’s line up featured a few non-standard performers (the lack of Melinda Maxwell on oboe and Alexandra Wood on violin were the two most notable), but in terms of the quality of performance this was hardly noticeable.

The evening started with a fantastic little minimalist number by Jo Kondo entitled Standing for ‘three instruments of different families’.  Originally performed in 1973 for flute, marimba and piano, this performance featured violin instead of flute.  Executed expertly by the performers the focus was on the rhythmic propulsion and articulation of the music successfully taking the audience on a journey from linear to polyphony and back again. 

Next came Stefan Wolpe’s Piece in Two Parts for Six Players – modernist, yet highly expressive and gestural.  Wolpe’s output was always eclectic ranging from jazz and popular to serialist, but his music is always genuine and beautiful regardless what idiom he uses.  Knussen conducted this particular piece with great attention to detail, and a special mention to the winds who took the tricky, virtuosic parts in their stride. 

The first half culminated with the wonderful Requiem – Songs for Sue by Knussen.  Knussen’s output as a composer has severely diminished in the last decade and often his works are in celebration or memory of others.  This piece, an obvious requiem for his late wife, is a wonderful example of how phenomenally talented Knussen still is as a composer.  The work is highly emotional, and has a fantastic pace, never lingering too long in a certain emotional sphere although entirely underpinned by a feeling of longing and insecurity.  Knussen’s word setting is outstanding and gives perfect clarity to the texts; the ensemble’s lines too are brilliant meandering alongside and against the melody so beautifully.  Claire Booth was on top form as ever performing with an emotional integrity that never seemed forced or contrived. 

The second half began with a newly commissioned work by Kondo Three Songs Tennyson Sung.  Unfortunately, despite an interval to break it up, it could not match the wonderfulness of Songs for Sue.  Kondo’s work still maintained his minimalist aesthetic, but it seemed muddied.  His vocal lines were beautifully compact, especially the first setting ‘Sweet and Low’ – a lullaby, but were rarely enhanced, or even comfortably supported by the ensemble.  Also there was too much text squeezed into a relatively short time, leaving no space for Tennyson’s words to breathe.  Despite this I was absolutely struck by his sparse use of piano within the ensemble.  Predominantly used as a distant chime Kondo repeated a beautiful, but highly charged, chord (one which I will be fiddling around on the piano for days to work out) throughout the work as a focal point.  It was exceptionally haunting and fantastic use of an instrument that is so often overused within ensembles.

Next came Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life II.  As with a lot of Stephen Newbould’s programming there is a teacher-pupil relationship in the concert: Feldman was a pupil of Wolpe.  As Paul Griffiths notes in his programme notes for the piece (written in 1970) this work harked “a return to conventional notation after two decades of working with various kinds of indeterminacy” but still maintained Feldman’s sense of space.  The ensemble, led by the exceptional Christopher Yates, performed flawlessly never letting their playing obstruct the delicate music which is so easy to overpower. 

Finally came Birtwistle’s seminal Silbury Air and what a way to end a concert.  Silbury Air is an incredibly colourful and powerful piece showing Birtwistle at his best.  Sometimes solitary, sometimes abrasive the music is not intended to romanticise the mysterious Silbury Hill that the title is derived from, but to take the mound as a static block or object and transfer these into musical ideas that are juxtaposed against one another.  Regardless of the technical efforts of Birtwistle the music is so vivid and rich both orchestrally and gesturally that one cannot help but feel romanticised by it all.  The ensemble excelled far beyond expectation in this piece, with the strings and brass especially performing at the highest calibre.  One gripe was balance: the winds could have been louder, but this hardly put a damper on what was a fantastic rendition of a challenging and complex piece.

Despite all the wonders of the concert the stars of the evening were Stephen and Jackie Newbould – the husband and wife team that have run BCMG for the last 20 years.  The Royal Philharmonic Society presented them that evening with The Leslie Boosey Award for their services to contemporary music.  The award recognises those behind the scenes who are often overlooked.  Knowing Stephen and Jackie personally, and professionally, their hard work and dedication to BCMG and the wider world of contemporary music is unrivalled and this devotion is demonstrated by the top class performing we see at every concert. 

The arts will be resilient to the horrors we are facing from the highly ignorant politicians of this day; even more so when the excellent standard is championed by the foresight and talent of those behind the scenes.  BCMG is an example to those who will fight for the safety of the arts.  

Anna Nicole: A new type of culture

Michael Betteridge

“A musically rich, audacious and inexplicably poignant work” The New York Times

“It’s a musical-theatre hybrid, so simplistic in its construction and vocal scoring, so cheap in its pseudo-sexual thrills and narcotic spills, that it wastes an opera house’s resources.” Financial Times

Like it or loathe it Turnage’s Anna Nicole has caused quite a stir at Covent Garden over the last month.  Any opera group or music organisation is always taking a risk throwing often extortionate amounts of money at lavish productions and even more so at a ‘contemporary’ piece.  Initially I was going to avoid commenting on the opera mainly due to the abundance of reviews, thoughts, anecdotes, etc found on blogs, Twitter, in the press and even on the BBC news at Ten, yet after this recent article by Mark Prescott (www.guardian.co.uk/music/theatreblog/2011/mar/01/opera-reviews-music-critics?cat=music&type=article) I thought I would do my take on the now infamous (in more ways than one) Anna Nicole.

Is music the most important thing in opera?  Opera is the ultimate art form in many respects as it draws - or can draw on - the wonders of dance, music, theatre, text, visual art and much more.  Many would argue the plot and libretto make an opera, some may say the characters, but where would we be without the fantastic and emotional outpouring that music can provide?  Whether you believe music has emotional depth or not composers have used the wonders of the human voice to portray human emotional at its most raw and intimate.

Of course that’s not necessarily the point of opera at all, but it is one, regardless of one’s musical education, that anyone can relate to.  And I bring this up for several reasons.  Firstly Anna Nicole was a very contemporary figure.  Not just in terms of her recent life and death, but how she was a prime of example of celebrity culture, and how she entirely succumbed to it.  Other opera portraying contemporary figures (Nixon in China for example) fail in their attempt to create human characters, whether it was the creative team’s purpose or not.  By choosing a vulnerable individual who we as a society were subjected to her every movement, even during her downfall, we identify characteristics of her ego and drive that we may resent in ourselves.  Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” never seemed so true.  Who won the X-Factor two years ago?  Also imagine if the subject of the opera was the late Princess Diana?  We still emotionally engage with her story and personality rather than just her circumstance.  When we depict politicians or historical figures we subject them to satire to humanize them; the culture of celebrity is so shallow there is nothing to satirize.

To deal with such a larger-than-life character (definitely in more ways than one!) must be tricky, even if the operatic treatment would highlight her eccentricities – how do a creative team prevent creating a two-dimensional bimbo?  One critic (twitter or elsewhere) suggested that Turnage’s music was subservient to the libretto.  There is a fine line between the music serving the text well and bowing down to it.  On occasion, unfortunately, I felt the latter was true, but only very rarely.  Thomas’ text, despite attempting to shock us (can you shock a modern audience?), was exceptionally refined compared to his Jerry Springer: The Opera.  The text was beautifully written: abrasive, lyrical, compact, emotional and powerful in all the right places.  Turnage’s melodies served them well, though sometimes too well: the contours and shape of phrases, especially halfway through the first act, didn’t travel and move as I felt they wanted to.  This was rectified in the second act, and maybe Turnage saved his most lyrical, beautiful moments for the more touching scenes. 

Despite this complaint Turnage’s score was nothing less than fantastic.  Many have noted references to Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and a mutated version of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, but I heard much more than this.  There were moments that screamed Bernstein’s West Side Story; the shapes of the melodies were sometimes Sondheim, sometimes Stravinsky.  Jazz was evident a lot especially the broad big band sound enhanced by virtuosic writing for the kit, brass and horns.  Whether these moments were pastiche or reference only a careful examination of the score (and a good knowledge of 20^th century American music) could say, but what intrigued me the most was Turnage’s use of these moments.  Either these sections were happily mocking our protagonist and her situation, or were supporting her and provided an emotional outpouring for the characters on stage in an idiom that was familiar to said characters.  For the former Turnage would use irregular and disruptive time signatures often with dissonant harmonies and confused cross melodies; for the latter the music (pastiche or reference) would feature clearer harmonies with a steadier pulse.  The characters in Anna Nicole are dumb – they cannot understand the complexities that the music throws at them.  They can only speak the language of emotion when an idiom that is safe and familiar appears.  The only character to go against the grain is Anna’s mother who eventually becomes our narrator and Greek chorus (the chorus themselves by the end of the opera mostly become mute, faceless television cameras scrabbling at the left over rubbish).  Her aria towards the end of Act II is exceptionally heartfelt and one that I hope becomes a staple of the contemporary repertoire in years to come. 

What perhaps impressed me the most was the pace and construction of the work.  Unfortunately some operas from Monteverdi to John Adams are not structured in a way that has dramatic thrust and impetus.  Initially the stage and scene is set as a reality television show with the chorus and audience pawing and clambering their way into Anna’s life.  Throughout the work the focus is slowly mutated so we are no longer a passive audience watching through the glass of a television screen, but seeing a desperate, private life as a fly on the wall.  Sadly Anna’s life was never private, but we, as an audience, feel like we are invading her life.  Yet it is impossible to say if our Anna is even aware of her very existence due to the multitude of drugs she is on – she is a sad and disgusting character, and yet we still watch and will her on to feed our celebrity fix ignoring those flaws that we see within ourselves.

Opera is designed to be a spectacle.  It is designed to draw in the masses.  It is supposed to be satirical and witty, yet highly entertaining.  Anna Nicole despite its few flaws definitely fulfils these requirements.  The text is painfully contemporary and relevant; the music, even if alien to some, embraces many familiar styles.  Celebrity culture, for many, is the fuel of our every day lives.  Anna Nicole is both a stark warning and a perceptive and human take on an individual who succumbed to the failings of our fast-food, fast-living society.

Anna Nicole: Triumph for contemporary opera

Emma Shires

The Royal Opera House’s recent commission from Mark-Anthony Turnage, Anna Nicole, has been the talk of the British opera scene since well before its premier. With every performance sold out Anna Nicole made opera news worthy again after it has been sidelined by popular music in the British press ever since the 1980s. As a result the country's music critics were out in force for the opening night creating the sort of excitement that, as someone educated during the noughties, I never dreamed classical music could evoke. The Royal Opera House kept up this hype by littering the foyer, corridors and auditorium with pictures of the infamous playboy pin-up. Most notably, as all the papers noted with either horror or excitement, the red curtain was replaced with a pink one and Anna Nicole’s face grinned at us from the Queen’s usual spot.

As an opera lover who has long been wondering how to encourage others to take an interest in the art form the excitement for me was not found in the risqué plot, foul language or sexual content but the hype itself. I love opera for the very reasons that some of Anna Nicole’s audience found the work so offensive. Opera has always been a spectacle; over the top and voyeuristic. A glance at some favourite operatic femme fatales finds Anna Nicole in good company. One could argue that the popularity of the operas in which sexy Carmen, Violetta, Salome and Lulu find themselves in is due to the slightly perverse attraction we feel towards these characters. In these instances I have always thought it odd that certain people are happy to see these stories played out in opera but would find them repulsive if they figured in a TV soap. Opera has thus allowed many to hide their normal human curiosity about such openly sexual creatures as Carmen or Lulu behind a facade of high culture.

Now that Anna Nicole has pushed opera across the invisible line separating it from popular culture opera lovers, and indeed those who assumed opera was stuffy and closeted, do not know where to look. I for one could not be happier that this path has been taken. Popular and classical music are no longer the arch enemies they were painted as being at the turn of the twentieth century by the philosopher Theodor Adorno. The two genres have been drawing from one another for centuries with some of the most famous composers such as Mozart, Chopin and Shostakovich borrowing forms from popular dances and rhythms from folk music. Similarly Copland and Gershwin drew on jazz influences to infuse their music with exciting rhythms and unusual harmonies. On the other hand in popular music musicians like Paul McCartney and Frank Zappa have shown a strong awareness of classical music traditions, incorporating modernist ideas into their own output.  Turnage’s opera is clearly a further case in point. A number of reviewers, see John Allison for the Telegraph and Alexandra Coghlan for The New Statesman, argue that the work’s musical language reveal it to be a work of musical theatre rather than opera. Turnage’s allusion to the theatrical language of Bernstein and Sondheim is clear in Anna-Nicole’s jazzy rhythms and lilting melodies. However the work also draws on Stravinsky and the modernist British tradition of composers like Birtwistle in its use of dissonant harmonies and in the haunting lines of Anna Nicole’s arias. The result is thus a truly post-modern opera in which, like his operatic composer peers Adès and Adams, Turnage demonstrates how ridiculous it is to divide music into popular and classical in the twenty-first century. In my experience, although arguably being a music graduate I come from a somewhat biased perspective, music lovers do not listen to just popular or just classical music but dip into anything that captures their imagination with little concern as to how it may be labelled. Turnage’s opera thus perfectly encapsulates this atmosphere.

Before the Anna Nicole hype I cannot say I was ever interested in the real Anna Nicole Smith’s life the subject matter for this cross-genre work could not have been better. It is thoroughly modern and draws on a number of modern issues that its audience could associate with; the pressure to look good and be noticed, the greed for wealth and need for instant gratification of physical hungers for food and sex. All of these desires result from the very nature of our mass-produced, media-obsessed capitalist society, making Anna Nicole a character we can all identify with on some level. The subject matter of the work thus shows that opera to be thoroughly modern and yet following operatic tradition by its ability to shock and titillate. Three cheers to Turnage and the Royal Opera House for being bold enough to make the move. I cannot wait to see which composers will dare to follow.