Flexatone or musical saw?

Preparing my pre-performance talk for the London Philharmonic Orchestra's concert last night, which included Khachaturian's lumpy behemoth of a Piano Concerto, I was expecting this in the middle movement:

whereas what we got was this:

Which was a pity, because the Khachaturian concerto has only two redeeming features: its opening melody, done to death, and the novelty value of what ought to be a solo for flexatone, not musical saw. The former instrument also has notable roles in Shostakovich - The Nose, The Golden Age, Hypothetically Murdered and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (for the Schoolteacher with his Gogolian question as to whether frogs have immortal souls) - Schoenberg (unlikely - the awful Variations for Orchestra) and Křenek's Jonny spielt auf; I had the lively 'Leb'wohl, mein Schatz' foxtrot lined up for the talk but didn't use it when I realised that one tantalising soundbite of the flexatone was enough if the audience wasn't going to hear it live in the concerto. Here's Khachaturian and piano, though I believe the concerto was too difficult for him to play.

For a clear definition of the flexatone, I resorted as so often to Norman Del Mar's A Companion to the Orchestra: 'the curious penetrating whine it produces is created by rapid oscillation of two little wooden knobs at the end of thin flexible strips against the broad curving metal plate, whose curvature - and hence pitch - is controlled by the thumb.'

The distinctive rattling timbre is nothing like that of the musical saw, but at least we got something in the form of consummate saw-ist, chanteuse and actress Katharina Micada, who I'm sure is the glammy lady pictured in the unattributed Wiki image above; I checked my Russian Disc recording with Nikolai Petrov as the pianist and Khachaturian conducting, and there's nothing, only violins taking the melody. David Fanning writes in his excellent programme notes: 'The instrument [flexatone] was only patented in 1922 [the concerto was written in 1936], and there is some evidence to suggest that in the 1920s and 30s 'flexatone' may also have been used to designate the musical saw, an 'instrument' known in traditional Russian and Armenian music'.

Well, I'm not convinced, since the tone-qualities are so dissimilar. Anyway, Micada has quite a career; she was off, a player told me, to Amsterdam today. And many contemporary scores do engage the musical saw; I can see why, even if it was a bit 'pitchy' last night.

But fundamentally I didn't care, since not even the virtuosity and shading of Marc-André Hamelin (pictured above by Sim Canetty-Clarke) could redeem the boggy meanders. He does Khachaturian no favours by reviving it; at his best, the Armenian can induce hilarity and exhilaration with wildly OTT scores like Spartacus, as I found at a delirious Bolshoi Ballet performance a couple of years ago, but this is (almost) his turgid worst. Anyway, here's the second movement, actually sounding more artistic in the hands of that profound musician Boris Berezovsky. The orchestra from the Urals furnishes a proper flexatonist, answering my question as to whether any still exist, though the sound is faint: he enters 2m18s in.

Hamelin disappointed, too, in his encore by bringing out yet again his unfunny-once-heard-once distortion of Chopin's 'Minute' Waltz. I'd have loved it if he'd played even only the last third of Balakirev's original Islamey.

For this, the only first-class work on the programme, we had Casella's overblown but entertaining orchestration to begin, allowing me to cue Lezginka links in the talk. Call me callow, but I didn't stay for Osmo Vänskä's interpretation of Kalinnikov's quite interesting First Symphony because a) I didn't have to - I wasn't reviewing, b) I thought I had to get up at 6am to travel to Bordeaux, though it turned out early this morning before I set out to catch the Eurostar that I'd got the day wrong and I leave tomorrow and c) I'd heard my hero among conductors Neeme Järvi conduct a really wonderful performance with this very orchestra and I don't much care for Vänskä's slightly bullying style. If you want to hear the complete concert, it's on the BBC Radio 3 iplayer for the next six days, and the Khachaturian concerto, of all things, seems to have been selected for 'clip' status which means it may never go away.

But all this Russian/Soviet stuff is small beer compared to what's happening as Kiev goes up in flames. Shame on Putin for labelling a people tired of a dictator terrorists - though there are extremists as in any situation which has gone too far - and on Medvedev for raising the spectre of a divided Ukraine, which according to many who live there - admittedly those with western contacts - is such a distortion of the situation (and latest reports suggest help for the protesters and obstruction of the military from all parts of the country, including the east).

Maybe the time for laughing at those two is over, but it's been a good way of dealing with Sochi. Peter Tatchell, whom I'm invoking for the second time in two days, produced a neat Valentine's Day card last Friday.

Seriously, my thoughts are with the poor people of the Ukraine. I watch developments with a terrible anxiety.

Interstitial

Without quite understanding why or necessarily believing, I always find the space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday the best limbo of the year – a time full of leisurely possibilities. The crucifixes and reliquaries remain shrouded in purple, like the one above at the Hofkirche of St Leodegar in Lucerne when I visited it less than a fortnight ago, feeling deliciously suspended between concerts and away from the Easter Festival hurly-burly. In fact that Christ crucified on the elaborate choir screen, as I saw from what my postcard told me, boasts real hair (‘mit echten Haaren’, hmm, creepy).


Of unequivocal splendour, on the other hand, is the pair of silver and parcel-gilt gates thought to have been presented by Catherine the Great around 1784 to the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, now in the Gilbert Collection so opulently housed on the first floor of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The gates have had a more profane recent life, if you can call it that, glimmering in Randolph Hearst’s Citizen Kane mansion and then in the California swimming pool of the equally wealthy Sir Arthur Gilbert. But they would, of course, have stood at the centre of the iconostasis, to be flung open at the climax of the Eucharist. If I’ve understood this right, their parting would play an even more dramatic part at the end of the all-night vigil to the cries of ‘Christos voskreseniye’ – ‘Christ is arisen’. The top two panels illustrate the annunciation and Christ’s entry into Jerusalem


while beneath are the four evangelists.


Here’s a little more detail of St Mark with his lion.


I think at this suspended time of year especially of quite a few friends and acquaintances who are suffering terrible, in several cases terminal illnesses. Been listening, of course, to devotional Bach, but in a secular context what touched me no less were the once so golden tones of Anthony Rolfe Johnson accompanied by Graham Johnson in Poulenc’s painfully sensitive setting of Apollinaire’s ‘Bleuet’, a poem from the trenches.



Since no translation is given above, and it’s essential, I provide it here, unpunctuated like the original French:

Young man
Of twenty
You who have seen such terrible things
What do you think of the men from your childhood
You know what bravery is and cunning
You have faced death more than a hundred times
You do not know what life is
Hand down your fearlessness
To those who shall come
After you
Young man
You are joyous your memory is steeped in blood
Your soul is red also
With joy
You have absorbed the life of those who died beside you
You are resolute
It is 1700 hours and you would know
How to die
If not better than your elders
At least with great piety
For you are better acquainted with death than life
O sweetness of bygone days
Slow moving
beyond all memory.