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Posts tagged ‘Matthew Bourne’

Dec 21

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At Blackheath Halls

Yesterday, the eve of the winter solstice, turned out to be a good one for music. Looking for a Christmas present, I found myself in a clothes shop where the sound system was playing Al Green’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times”, making me wonder for a moment if there had ever been a finer performance by a soul singer of a country ballad. Then, while I was having a cup of coffee, the café’s playlist surprised me by including Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ soaring “The Bells of St Mary”, from Phil Spector’s Christmas Album, a piece of art which seems — unlike Gesualdo’s madrigals and Caravaggio’s paintings — to have been widely cancelled in the present era.

In the evening I took myself to Blackheath Halls, a really splendid venue for music, to hear The Westbrook Blake, a suite of pieces which has been in constant evolution since in 1971, when Adrian Mitchell invited Mike Westbrook to provide musical settings for some of William Blake’s poems, as part of a piece for the National Theatre called Tyger.

I’ve written about it before, here and here, so I won’t repeat myself, except to say that it’s one of the glories of contemporary English music, and the chance to see any performance of it is to be grabbed with some urgency. Last night the two wonderfully expressive solo singers (as always, Kate Westbrook and Phil Minton) and the five-piece band were joined by the 30 or so singers of the Blackheath Halls Community Singers, directed by Paul Ayers.

While Mike Westbrook’s place at the piano was taken by the brilliant Matthew Bourne, the composer himself took the stage in a wheelchair, from which he recited a couple of Blake’s more trenchant poems with clarity and feeling. The spectacular solos from the accordion of Karen Street, the violin of Billy Thompson and the alto saxophone of Chris Biscoe were more than worthy of the spontaneous applause they drew. It was an evening of proper music-making, full of communal warmth, often thought-provoking, and generally good for the soul.

Nov 25

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William Blake in Piccadilly

Although any performance of the Westbrook Blake — as Mike Westbrook’s settings of William Blake’s words have been known for more than 40 years — is a powerful event, the emotional impact of last night’s concert by Mike and Kate Westbrook and their musicians at St James’s Church, Piccadilly was intensified by the knowledge that this Christopher Wren church, consecrated in 1684, was the place where the English poet, painter and visionary was baptised in 1757, soon after his birth in Soho.

Titled Visions and Voices: Echoes of William Blake, the evening began with Kate Westbrook delivering “London”, one of the most harrowing poems in the English language, before Phil Minton took over for “Let the Slave”, the next in the sequence of poems linked and illuminated by instrumental solos. Billy Thompson’s fiddle summoned angels and demons, Chris Biscoe’s alto saxophone spoke to the human capacity for joy, Mike Westbrook and a guest, Matthew Bourne, delivered absorbing piano solos, Steve Berry’s bass was lifted out of a solemn reverie by artful background figures, and most of all the accordion of the remarkable Karen Street transfixed the audience with a long unaccompanied improvisation that soared and dived and spun as if a flock of birds of many shapes and sizes but linked by an avian telepathy had found their way into the church. It was, I think, the most astonishing single piece of playing I’ve heard this year.

You might have seen the Westbrook Blake a few times over the years, and be familiar with the recordings, but its grip never slackens. In fact as the country collapses, hollowed out by a greed that Blake identified two centuries ago, it grows more strikingly relevant. As usual, Mike Westbrook recited passages as urgent and resonant in today’s seemingly very different circumstances as they were when first written:

Compel the poor to live upon a crust of bread, by soft mild arts.
Smile when they frown, frown when they smile; and when a man looks pale
With labour and abstinence, say he looks healthy and happy;
And when his children sicken, let them die; there are enough
Born, even too many, and our earth will be overrun
Without these arts...

A few years years after creating his Blake settings, Mike Westbrook composed an extended work for band and orchestra titled London Bridge Is Broken Down, commissioned by and first performed at a festival in Amiens in 1987. Inspired by travels around Europe and meditations on its history at a time when an old order was falling apart, it is divided into sections titled London Bridge, Wenceslas Square, Berlin Wall, Vienna and Picardie. A much admired studio version came out on Virgin the following year. Now there’s the release of the recording of a performance in Zürich in 1990, with Westbrook’s 11-piece unit and the 35-piece Docklands Sinfonietta. Even if you already have the original release, I recommend hearing this one, too, for the exceptional spirit with which the work is played and sung (by Kate Westbrook, using texts from Goethe, Siegfried Sassoon and others).

All Westbrook’s virtues and trademarks are allowed to flower in this 80-minute performance, which stands tall among his catalogue of extended works. The 23-minute sub-section of Vienna titled “Für Sie”, with solos by Alan Wakeman on soprano saxophone, Paul Nieman on trombone, Chris Biscoe on baritone and Pete Whyman on alto, is a slowly unfolding kaleidoscope of exquisite shapes, sounds, trajectories and textures.

* Mike Westbrook’s London Bridge: Live in Zürich 1990 is released on Westbrook Records (www.westbrookjazz.com)

Nov 20

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‘Goal by Garrincha’

Club Inégales

It’s hardly surprising, I suppose, that music in praise of football and footballers tends to concentrate on South Americans — I’m thinking of Jorge Ben’s “Filho Maravilha” and “Ponte de Lança Africano” and Manu Chao’s great song in celebration of Diego Maradona, “La Vida Tombola”. Alexander Hawkins’s “Unequal Baobabs (Goal by Garrincha)” is something different on the same subject.

The piece was given its debut in London last night as part of Expect the Unexpected, a two-night affair in which 25 composers were each invited to submit a one-page score to be performed, without rehearsal,  by the band of Club Inégales, led by Peter Wiegold. Part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, the second night in this basement bar off Euston Road featured pieces by Alice Zawadzki, Orphy Robinson, Mark Sanders, Matthew Bourne, Pat Thomas and others, interpreted by a 13-piece ensemble of improvising musicians — an expanded version of Wiegold’s regular band, Notes Inégales.

I had a particular interest in Hawkins’s piece since its existence is the indirect result of a conversation we had a couple of years ago, on the subject of football, during which I recommended a book by the Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano called Football in Sun and Shadow, published in an English translation 20 years ago. Galeano’s brief chapters include one called “Goal by Garrincha”, in which he described the effect of a particularly dramatic strike by the great Brazilian winger during a World Cup warm-up match against Fiorentina in 1958.

Hawkins’s score consists of eight “cells” of note sequences, with written instructions such as “Proceed at own rate; no need to synchronise” and “Any cell may be transposed into any octave”. Galeano’s words were read by Zawadzki, who was also playing violin and singing in the group, and by Notes Inégales’ regular percussionist, Simon Limbrick. The piece began with a drone on G and ended after about 20 minutes with all the instruments sustaining their highest possible pitch, at minimal volume. “Hold this final drone for as long as we dare,” Hawkins instructed, “and even then a little longer.”

I meant to ask the composer if he’d also read Ruy Castro’s classic biography of Garrincha, where the author describes the other Brazilian players’ reaction to the goal — in which the player dribbled past the entire Fiorentina side before making a fool of the goalkeeper as he scored. Garrincha’s team mates refused to celebrate with him and were bitterly critical afterwards, complaining that any attempt to repeat such an individualistic feat during the World Cup itself would risk damaging their chances of winning the trophy (which they did, of course).

Football and jazz: both are completely dependent on improvisation, individual and collective, on players with a sense of adventure and possibility but also with a sensitivity to the potential of their colleagues. The two hours of music I was able to hear last night, featuring pieces by Robinson, Sanders, Zawadzki and Helen Pappaioannou as well as Hawkins’s contribution, was full of those qualities. I particularly enjoyed the playing of Hyelim Kim on the taegum (a Korean bamboo flute), Jackie Shave on violin, Ben Markland on bass guitar, Torbjörn Hultmark on trumpet and Chris Starkey, whose interventions on an orange plastic-bodied Airline electric guitar were often startling and always stimulating.

The moods ranged from the refined beauty of Zawadzki’s “In an Old Theatre” through a strange almost-irony in Sanders’ variations on “What a Wonderful World” to the broad humour of Robinson’s piece, whose changes of direction were indicated by the composer via commands displayed on his iPad, the last of which instructed the musicians to blame each other. For once, post-match recriminations were not confined to the dressing room.