“The city may have been segregated, but my taste in music wasn’t.” The American composer Philip Glass’s description of his childhood in Baltimore resonated sharply last week. He was in the UK to participate in concerts of his music and to celebrate the publication of his new memoir. Back in Maryland, the same night he was playing to a sell-out Barbican, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra gave a spontaneous free outdoor concert, conducted by their music director Marin Alsop, in response to the city’s current riots.
The universal language of music “can transcend differences”, Alsop said on a news bulletin, surrounded by an audience of all colours and ages fanning themselves in the hot sun after a shot of upbeat Handel. A member of the orchestra was more sanguine. Music won’t stop riots, he acknowledged. But this event cheered people, made a change to the sound of sirens and, he added, got a million likes on Facebook.
US riots and a UK general election hardly equate, but with polling day imminent it is difficult to find any sign of collective political life in the musical fraternity. British classical musicians, whose relentless schedules leave little time or energy to spare, tend to be politically impassive compared with their rock music or theatre colleagues. An exception is the London Sinfonietta which, under the title “Notes to the New Government”, has commissioned 16 new songs to be premiered at the Southbank two days after the election. Composers include Kerry Andrew, Jason Yarde, Emily Hall and Colin Matthews. Topics range across the NHS, climate change, sex-trafficking and homelessness. Obligatory listening for the new arts minister? If only.
Glass, not so much a politician as a peace campaigner throughout his half-century career, has always preferred to see the bigger picture. This is true of his music too, where grand design matters more than close-up, tiny detail. It’s one reason why ears attuned to the dense complexities of modernism may struggle with his airy, forward-moving oscillations and repetitions. To be accurate, his comment quoted at the start was chiefly musical rather than social, reflecting on his one-world taste, from jazz to Cage to Indian raga via Bach and Chopin.
All these influences were audible in his 20 Etudes, performed by five players including the composer himself, in a single evening. They were written over a period of two decades beginning in 1994. As their name indicates, these are keyboard studies. Glass wanted to improve his own piano technique, whether scales and broken chords or trills and arpeggios. This was his chosen method. Some are mellifluous and dreamy, others stark, others ebullient. Chopin, Schumann, Bartók and Debussy head the long list of pianist-composers who wrote such studies.
While their works in this form may offer more harmonic variety, the Glass Etudes provided contrast in the act of performance itself. Each pianist was entirely different in style and interpretation. The young British rising star Clare Hammond was a dazzling athlete; Iceland’s Vikingur Olafsson a tender, oversized poet; New York composer-pianist Timo Andres brought muscularity and intellect; the Japanese Maki Namekawa, a long-time Glass interpreter, had a serene wisdom. In the four studies he played (1, 2, 16, 17), Glass himself was far more approximate, his fingerwork less than dexterous. Warmly received, he remains the admired grandfather-creator, gradually relinquishing his career as performer, still hard-working as a composer.
“Etude” may sound effortful. “Ballade” always seems to promise something lightweight and lyrical. Instead, Chopin’s four Ballades are like compressed concertos for piano. These huge works formed the centrepiece of Stephen Hough’s recital in the Southbank’s international piano series, with works by Debussy at the start and finish. There are many ways (all polite) to describe Hough, a Cheshire-born, Julliard educated, British-Australian pianist who also has a substantial catalogue as a composer. He is a well-known blogger, one of those few who are really willing to speak and tweet out. He is less well known as an award-winning poet, spare-time theologian and patron of two charities which take music into prisons and hospitals.
Whether or not we need to know all this – though why not praise good works? – to appreciate Hough’s pianism is another matter. I find it all revealing. Offstage he is flamboyant. Onstage he is still to the point of austerity, poised, erect, face all but expressionless. Only in explosive moments (as in the first Ballade) does he break free of that physical control, yet his rhythmic flexibility is so secure as to be almost nonchalant. Everything is communicated through his fingers, whether the melancholy of the andante opening of Ballade No 4 or the transparent, whole-tone bubbling mood of Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse, or the smiling wit of his own Ozmanthus Romp, which he played as an encore. There is no frowning or emoting. With Hough the notes do all the work. All he asks is that we listen.
Star ratings (out of 5)
Philip Glass: The Etudes ****
Stephen Hough ****
