Masters’ farewells: Strauss and Parry

Until I worked on the programme notes for a very curious concert a month ago at St John’s Smith Square which I’d been asked to talk before and during, I wondered what Tim Reader, conductor of the newly-formed Epiphoni Consort (pictured below on the day of the concert), and his colleagues were thinking of: could great-blaze masters Richard Strauss and Charles Hubert Hastings Parry have much in common?

It soon became clear: Parry’s six Songs of Farewell, of which I only really knew the first from All Saint’s Banstead days, ‘My soul, there is a country’, are total valedictory masterpieces in their sphere, equal in their own more extended, specific way to Strauss’s Four Last Songs (by the way, the top picture should have been a sunset, but I settled on the rainbow we caught on a drive back from the high Maiella range in Italy’s Abruzzo region to our lodgings in 2009 simply because we were playing what I still think may be the best 4LS I know on disc – Harteros’s with Luisi and the Staatskapelle Dresden – and had to stop the car to listen to ‘Im Abendrot’).

Parry’s medium is a cappella choral writing, from four to eight parts. His instrumentation has never struck me as anything special, though well-padded orchestration supports those earlier panoplies ‘I was glad’ and ‘Blest pair of sirens’ well enough. But leave him alone with a choir, and wonders result. Listening and score-gazing, I marvelled at the modulations and the word-sensitivities, most moved by what would be a perfect funeral anthem, ‘There is an old belief‘, a nuance-perfect setting of a poem by John Gibson Lockhart. The one to hear on CD is the incomparable Tenebrae's (the Epiphonis are very much of that ilk) but I'll settle for YouTube's Vasari Singers, a notch below both - you may need to look up the words, which are essential*.

Tim asked which of the six I’d recommend for performance; after some discussion, I’m flattered that we settled on this and its successor, the very rich realization of Donne’s ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’. 

I knew the Epiphoni Consort would be first-rate, and the choir's interpretation of Strauss’s Deutsche Motette, the toughest work on the programme, was infinitely finer than the BBC Singers’ Proms performance (no wobbles, richer body of sound, better soloists – I already knew that Catherine Backhouse is a star, and I loved the tenor sound of William Morgan). But I was pleasantly surprised by the instrumentalists’ contribution. The Bloomsbury Chamber Orchestra is an amateur ensemble, of course, and with the usual attendant problems of intonation, but what a difference it makes when a conductor is firm of purpose, as James Lowe was in Tod und Verklärung. Sounded to me, too, as if they had imported a professional first trombonist, and the horns were very fine, too.

Biggest surprise of all was how well soprano Charlotte Newstead coped with the insanely long phrases of the Four Last Songs: the top isn’t the freshest, but the middle range was golden, the overall assurance again streets ahead of the Proms singer, Inger Dam-Jensen.As a result, this one actually moved me.

Enjoyed, too, working on the note for Brahms’s first choral gem, the Geistliches Lied he composed at the age of 23, even if it was a tad thrown away right at the start of the programme. I haven’t tuned in to any of Radio 3’s Brahmsfest, but I’m more in love with this genius than ever thanks to three programme notes for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Exploration of the profound Horn Trio led me back to the fabulous recording by Isabelle Faust, Teunis van der Zwart and Alexander Melnikov. I hadn’t listened properly before to Melnikov’s performance of the Op. 116 Fantasien. It totally won me round to the 1875 Bösendorfer on which he plays here: the Allegro passionato has a tumultuousness which just doesn’t sound the same even on the most resonant of contemporary Steinways. Anyway, Melnikov is one of the relatively unsung greats, and this confirms it. None of his Op. 116 is up on YouTube, so I've settled for his performance, on said Bösendorfer, of the Op. 4 Scherzo.

As for the piano concertos, now that I’ve done proper homework on them I’m  even more eager to hear my idol Elisabeth Leonskaja in a never-to-be-repeated evening of both with Okko Kamu conducting the SCO – worth travelling to Glasgow or Edinburgh to hear, I’d have thought. One special fascination was cued by a typically brilliant observation from the late, lamented Calum MacDonald. He points out that Brahms’s manuscript words ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’ below the violin melody of the First Concerto’s Adagio may refer to more than just the Latin Mass. They’re also the inscription above the entrance to the abbey where Hofkapellmeister Kreisler seeks refuge from disappointment in E T A Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, my second-favourite comic novel (Don Quixote will always remain No. 1).  As this was also one of the young Brahms’s favourite books, and he was himself known as Kreisler by his circle, the connection seems plausible. At any rate, it furnished further quotations from Hoffmann for the note which link back to the concerto’s turbulent opening.

I’d forgotten that Hoffmann lived in Bamberg for a formative four years, shortly after which he brought out his first collection of tales, Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner (annotators also overlook this when writing about Mahler’s forest funeral march in the First Symphony, also in Callots manier). So apart from the unreal, extensive and other-worldly beauty of Bamberg which so overwhelmed me when I was there recently, the Hoffmann connection was a bonus. 

The House-Museum was closed on the days I was there, but we walked around the square which embraces not only the great man’s poky dwellings but also the theatre where he was engaged, first unsuccessfully as the director and then as machinist, scene-painter and composer. 

Its interior is, I’m told, preserved as it was, but the shell is modern. At least it includes his own caricature on the glass

and there's a recent statue of writer and cat in the space before the theatre.

In a street winding up one of the town’s seven hills, the curiously-named Eisgrube leading to St Stephen's Church, there’s also the door-knocker which in Hoffmann's most fantastical story The Golden Pot turns into the face of the ugly old Apple Woman of the Schwarzthor. The tale is nominally set in Dresden, but it seems imbued with the more medieval atmosphere of Bamberg.

My cicerone, Matthias Hain of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, told me the famous knocker now turns up everywhere – as candy, mementoes etc. I had no idea, and saw none. Anyway, it was good enough to turn me back to re-reading the tale. And I feel in a mood for Murr again; but there’s Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers to surmount first. And I owe a few reflections on the second reading of Doctor Faustus here. Eventually. Long-overdue Norfolk Churches Walk chronicle next, with apologies for work deadlines getting in the way.

*so here they are:

There is an old belief,
That on some solemn shore,
Beyond the sphere of grief
Dear friends shall meet once more.

Beyond the sphere of Time
And Sin, and Fate's control,
Serene in changeless prime
Of body and of soul.

That creed I fain would keep
That hope I'll ne'er forgo.
Eternal be the sleep,
If not to waken so.