A Mali without music?

Unthinkable, isn’t it? And yet that would certainly have happened if the Islamist extremists, having taken Konna the other Thursday, had been able to plough on to Bamako. There have been well-reported programmes on the World Service filling us in on the situation in Timbuktu and elsewhere in the north: no sounds of music allowed, not even on the mobile phone. The Festival in the Desert has, of course, been a fatality, though by the sounds of it that had been corrupted from its original Tuareg base to an international event for very well-heeled tourists featuring a lot of crap bands from abroad who wouldn’t have been tolerated anywhere else. Sophie tells me that part of the set-up now reassembles at Segou between Bamako and Djenné.

Just how relaxed the music scene in free Mali is can be seen from these photos, which I apologise to those with a long enough memory for repeating from 2009. Yes, women singing, playing and dancing: something not tolerated in Iran or any of the more extreme Muslim states. It only goes to show the easy-going nature of Mali’s sufi-based religion. We caught the good women of Diabolo (not to be confused with Diabaly, much in the news of late) performing for their village when we took a horse-driven excursion with Sophie from nearby Djenné, and they were quite unfazed by our presence, OKd by the local headman. True, they were performing for tourists the following week, but the crust-earning seemed well deserved.

I’ve been listening to the great, late Ali Farka Touré, guitarist-vocalist ‘king of the desert blues’. The booklet for his last solo album, recorded at Bamako’s famous Hotel Mandé by World Circuit , is exemplary (and unusual in the so-called world music scene) in giving us notes by The Man with translations of the songs. I’ve chosen this one about Beto, the river god of neighbouring Niger, because the text is appropriate: ‘Beto, will you share with us this special day of the new year? Yes, Beto, indescribable Beto, Beto, speak, we are listening. Beto, tell us…are the ancients angry?’

The special sound on the next track, Savane, is that of two ngonis, unusual west African stringed instruments.

The famous Basseko Kouyaté is one of the players, and (27/1) was playing at the Barbican last night when I was duty bound to hear Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius over at the Royal Festival Hall; see Howard Male's review on The Arts Desk. The rest of the photos, by the way, obviously aren't mine.

Ali Farka Touré also recorded a Hotel Mandé session with Mali’s most celebrated exponent of the lovely 21-string harp called the kora, Toumani Diabaté.

It was, as AFT explained, an unusual conjunction ‘since I am from the Songra/Peul culture in the north and he is a Mande from the south. It’s rare that musicians meet like this from different cultures’.All too familiar contrasts between music’s hand of friendship and more common daily hostilities has just been strikingly illustrated by intelligence well documented by Amnesty and in the Guardian that the Malian army, whose fighters are mostly from the south, has been committing atrocities against the Fulani people of the north.

Anyway, the result of the meeting between guitarist and kora-player is, to our ears, pretty basic – improvisations on two chords in each number – but beguiling thanks to the sonorities of the two instruments. This is 'Monsieur le Maire de Niafunké'*.

Meanwhile the Bach cantata for the week is ‘Meine Seufzer, meiner Tränen’, BWV 13, composed for Leipzig performance in January 1726. The Gospel reading for this second Sunday after Epiphany treats of the Marriage at Cana where Christ miracled water into wine (detail below from Veronese’s vast canvas of the scene; the musician on the left is believed to be a self-portrait). 

The subject-matter and the prevailing musical mood of Bach's cantata, however, could hardly be further removed from the expected. Only two lines deal with the happening – ‘God can with ease/Turn bitterness into joyful wine’ – and the rest is numberless tears, groaning, the sickness of sorrow, in other words the earthly misery to be transfigured. John Eliot Gardiner writes that in the opening aria only the tone of the oboe da caccia we met two weeks ago, intermediary here between the tenor and the two recorders, softens the dissonances.

The bass lament at the heart of the piece has to be one of the bleakest numbers ever composed (the Germans have a word for it I found applied by Hofmannsthal to Elektra: ‘lichtlösigkeit’ or ‘light-less-ness’). This time the recorders double the violin obbligato at the octave, wraith-like; the soloist only partly fills the chasm between them and the bass line. Even when the central portion of the text speaks of solace and joy, there is hardly a sliver of light. Detail below from Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition.

On the other hand, the alto’s earlier chorale, crying out to God in vein, is wreathed in joyful strings, as if to contradict the hopelessness with a promise of better things. Otherwise, this is a stark revelation of the human condition, and I marvelled at Gerald Finley’s restrained performance of the big number in the Gardiner Bach Pilgrimage performance. Once again, there's a slightly less special alternative on YouTube, part of Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium series:

We had extremes of joy and despair in last night’s bumper LPO/Jurowski Strauss concert launching the Southbank’s much-touted The Rest is Noise festival, including a revelation of mighty Richard's death haunted symphonic poem for voice, violin and orchestra Notturno. Read all about it on The Arts Desk - a long review for a very densely packed programme. Ambitious though it was, I got more consistent enjoyment out of the execution in John Adams’s LSO spectacular three days earlier, as recounted here. Much more to come now that the concert season is back on the boil.

*STOP PRESS The ever vigilant Sue Scheid has alerted me to a wonderful video of Mali's great musicians uniting to plead for peace. I can't say I know them all, but if anyone can tell me who's who among the terrific lady vocalists, I'd be grateful. Though Sue has the links below, I'm posting it here for easy access. I believe it's our kora-ist, Toumani Diabaté, kicking off.

A great Britten symphony

Had he not styled it a Sinfonia da Requiem, and run its three continuous movements - 'Lacrymosa', 'Dies Irae' and 'Requiem Aeternam' - at a highly compressed 20 minutes, Britten's early masterpiece would be officially up there with Elgar's and Walton's two symphonies and the best of Vaughan Williams's nine, not to mention the darker monuments of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Britten's two, showing he could achieve symphonic continuity outside the opera house, are this and the even thornier Cello Symphony for Rostropovich, which I love yet more dearly. This CD is an indispensible one, though Rattle's recording of the earlier work is one of his best.


Our new Rattle, Ed Gardner, dared to harrow us with the Sinfonia da Requiem right at the start of another BBC Symphony Orchestra blockbuster event on Saturday, and you can hear the results this afternoon on Radio 3; for some reason, broadcast has been delayed, but it will soon be on the iPlayer for the next week. My colleague and perceptive Britten scholar Alexandra Coghlan reviewed the concert for The Arts Desk. As I'd discovered for the class, and consequently for the pre-performance talk, there were several points of connection with the other epic bookender, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, which I haven't heard in concert for years. That reminds me I ought to get to the John Martin exhibition soon; his doomy canvases used to appeal to my adolescent love of extremes.


The links? Not only were Walton in 1929 and Britten a decade later young men still in their twenties when they set out on adventures which changed course; both works start - though Walton's takes time to settle - in a D minor lament. Britten's resolves in D, Walton's in the relative major, F, with jazzy accents to the last and a hint at the tritone which, of course, holds the tension to the end of Britten's later lamentatory masterpiece, the War Requiem.

Much to illustrate in the talk, then - too much bearing in mind the BBCSO brief of covering all bases, which meant a not unwelcome injection of what I could bring to bear on the three fascinating Sibelius orchestrated songs in the programme - 'On a terrace by the sea', much blacker than its title suggest, also holds tritonal terrors and modernistically anticipates the Finn's Fourth Symphony by some years - and Sibelius's little suite of incidental music to another Belshazzar's Feast, modest but personal as ever. One thing I hadn't realised at the time was that Sibelius made his orchestration of the Twelfth Night setting 'Come away, death' just before his death in 1957. Delighted to find it on YouTube in Jorma Hynninen's performance. I'd been blown away by his performances of the songs when I was preparing the talk, and though Gerald Finley was fine and cut through a sometimes very heavy orchestra, he doesn't have Hynninen's lower centre of gravity.



All the more fascinating, given the terminal circumstances of the arrangement, that the last chord leaves matters unresolved. 'Komm nu hit, död' ties in two other dying composers' significant end-pieces, Rachmaninov's piano transcription of Tchaikovsky's 'Cradle Song', written in the year of the junior master's birth, and Stravinsky's instrumentation of two pleading-with-God Wolf songs.

So it was quite a death-haunted programme as we enter the silly season; and we can still go deep this Friday when that phenomenal Sibelius interpreter Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducts Sibelius's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. Why the Bosch above? Well, partly because the Sinfonia da Requiem is a triptych, too, though with a fast-motion hell at the middle, and partly because that Dies Irae's fluttertonguing flutes and muted brass delineate Boschian creatures while not forgetting to hothouse the terror and weave in on alto sax the ever-changing lament of the first movement (it achieves resolution in the finale, but not a falsely triumphalist one).


Such details would have led me to guess that the work was influenced by Shostakovich's even more harrowing Eighth Symphony, were it not for the fact that the Russian masterpiece had not been composed at the time of the English one's belated premiere. That took place under Barbirolli in New York in 1941, the Sinfonia having been unsurprisingly exiled from the concert for which it was commissioned, a 200-player celebration of Japan's 2,600 year old empire at which Richard Strauss's noisy occasional-piece Japanese Festival Music WAS performed, and at which the Nazi salute was held during the playing of the Japanese national anthem. Once again, the unwitting Strauss was in the wrong place at the wrong time; but so would Britten, and Britain, have been, had the Japanese royal representatives not objected to his 'gloomy', 'discordant', 'Christian' and of course very uncelebratory work of youthful genius.

Two cheers for three cantons

That oath on the Rütli pictured above by one-off Fuseli - there's a great Swiss-born artist for you - and ingeniously composed by Rossini for different choruses representing the ‘men of three cantons’ was an absolute highlight when I heard Chelsea Opera Group perform Guillaume Tell in concert last year and fell in love with it properly. At last night’s Prom,I wasn’t quite so convinced: the performance was undeniably sleeker and more nuanced, as you’d expect from a great animator-conductor like Antonio Pappano who’s been performing this operatic swansong with his Accademia di Santa Cecilia for quite a few years now. But it may well have been the alienating effect of being too far right and above the orchestra in the treacherous South Ken colosseum which made me feel far less involved than I had been in the Queen Elizabeth Hall with COG’s valiant effort. Yesterday I found myself longing instead for the way Verdi does the whole oath stuff so much better.


Several friends were a bit puzzled, too, that I’d flagged up Act 2 as far and away the greatest of the four. It didn’t sound it, and that may have had quite a lot to do with accomplished soprano Malin Bystrom – my pal Igor on The Arts Desk hits the nail on the head when he says that her 'buttery voice had a tendency to melt away just as you were beginning to believe in it' – not having a great rapport with star tenor John Osborn. I take it all back re the tenor: he was vocally even stronger than the compelling Mark Milhofer for COG, and cut through the Albert Hall oilslick effortlessly, but ultimately the voice wasn’t quite as singular nor the introspective moments as sensitive. As I think perhaps you can just about gauge from this soundclip of Milhofer singing 'Asile hereditaire' on YouTube - maybe from that very performance, it doesn't state the source.



The crucial solo of the fisherman Ruodi has also found its way onto YouTube from the COG performance, where Luciano Botelho's tenor made more of an impact than the perfectly good Celso Albelo last night. COG fixer Duncan Orr certainly knows where to find them.



Now I’m going to say something which, if I were on reviewing duty, would have me taken out and shot, and rightly (I’ve only ever left one event halfway through during my official critical years – a beyond-bad military band massacre of Grainger earlier this year – and incurred a stream of invective for saying so). What I decided to do at the end of Act 2 was to go home and listen to the rest on the brand-new Pappano recording.


Why? Artistically speaking, because I thought I’d rather hear Gerald Finley in Tell’s famous command to his apple-topped son, ‘Sois immobile’ than the grainy oldster Michele Pertusi, taking over for the Prom. That also meant I didn’t get the live sensation of Osborn’s top Cs and C sharps in the cabaletta to ‘Asile hereditaire’ (still think Milhoffer did a better job here, from the evidence of the recording). But I reckoned that from where I was sitting I wasn't getting the full impact of a live performance anyway.

Personal reasons: didn’t want to leave the diplo-mate pining at home - yeah, right - for longer than I had to, and needed to provision at Whole Foods (a rare luxury, and boy is it overpriced) before it shut at 10pm. How bourgeois and shallow can you get? Here's what I left behind - the Accademia looking sweepingly elegant and sounding better under Pappano than I've ever heard it. The photo is by Chris Christodoulou, whose professionalism leaves most others standing: for TAD, we get pictures in the interval, if possible, and at the end. Quite apart from all that, he's the best; the photo gallery of conductors which he kindly supplied to TAD last year shows his range superbly. Helps, I suppose, that the BBC Proms office is so well resourced.


Anyway, the serious listen to Acts 3 and 4 was postponed until this morning. And then, of course, I had a shock: on the recording, as in the Prom (or so the programme informed us), Pappano had cut the women’s woodwind-accompanied trio and the prayer in Act 4. Crazy: this is some of the most sensitive music in the score, and I see when I look back on the review that I loved the trio as a 'moment of stillness' in the COG performance. You get it all here, albeit in Italian, in Muti’s La Scala performance, Studer leading the way – and, no, it isn’t anything to do with the Italian version; these numbers were part of the French original.



Naughty Maestro P. Especially as the lovely Pat Bardon at the Prom would have been deprived of her finest moments. Never mind; this was certainly an event worthy of the first Proms weekend, and gave huge pleasure to everyone I spoke to.


The ending, of course, is unexpectedly glorious, and absolutely worthy of Turner's pioneering take on Switzerland from a quarter of a century earlier (that was Ruskin's visionary view of Lucerne's old walls above, by the way): a new dawn for 1829, except that Rossini had already sung his major operatic last...Here it is in the same Scala version.



One bonus to the COG experience: Pappano conducted all the ballet music, including the Act 1 Pas de Six better known in its Britten arrangement as the first of the Matinees Musicales but conducted here by Toscanini. Why the fryup picture I've no idea, but the sound is decent enough:



Think we ought to see Toscanini conducting a version of the Overture that begins with unison cellos, not the solo who so spellbindingly launched last night's prom. But stick with it for some extraordinary results later.



And That Galop sprang more lamb-like with Pappano. I have to end on a splendidly vulgar note with the sublime Australian yodeller Mary Schneider segue-ing naughtily between Tell, Carmen and Orpheus. Thanks to our friend Phillip Thomas for introducing us to this. Enjoy.