Lucy Porter
24 February 2023
Last Saturday we were at The Stables in Wavendon to see the comedian Lucy Porter. I was familiar with Lucy Porter from her appearances on ‘The News Quiz’ on BBC Radio 4 but I had not seen her live before. This show was part of her ‘Wake-Up Call’ tour which focuses on midlife crisis management and happiness. She is a very accomplished stand-up comedian with a likeable personality and a gentle approach. She is clearly a very thoughtful writer: her set was carefully crafted with lots of clever running jokes and returning themes. Her material is mostly domestic and observational - nothing too political - but very funny. And it was lovely to see a 2-hour stand-up comedy performance with hardly any swearing and a comedian who never stopped smiling.
Labels: Comedy, Theatre
'Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps' by JMW Turner
17 February 2023
One of the things I most enjoy about playing in an amateur orchestra is discovering, learning and understanding music I didn’t previously know. And the more you find out about a piece of music, the more you appreciate it. We have just started rehearsing for our next Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert, on Saturday 25 March, which is a complete programme of works by female composers (see: https://www.nso.org.uk/). One of the pieces we are playing is ‘Turbulent Landscapes’ by Thea Musgrave - a suite in which, like Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition', each movement is inspired by an artwork, in this case paintings by JMW Turner. Each movement also features one member of the orchestra as a soloist. I am beginning to get to the grips with the significant challenge of playing the solo horn part in the third movement, ‘Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps’. I thought I should have a look at the painting so I searched for it online and went down a fascinating rabbit hole. Turner’s picture depicts, as you might expect, Hannibal and his soldiers (complete with elephants) crossing the mountains in the face of an oncoming storm, during the Punic War in 218 BC. But what I hadn’t initially realised was that Turner was painting it during the Napoleonic Wars and it is really a jibe at Napoleon. The French painter Jacques-Louis David had previously painted a triumphant portrait of ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’ over the Great St Bernard Pass in May 1800 and this was Turner’s response. Turner shows Hannibal/Napoleon as a tiny figure on an elephant in the distance, overwhelmed by a whirling blizzard as mountain-dwellers attack his troops. Turner’s painting was first exhibited in 1812, and was considered to have been prophetic when, later that year, Napoleon was forced to retreat from Moscow by the Russian winter (the subject of another famous piece of music - Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’). So as I practise playing Hannibal’s rallying cries to his troops over the ominous rumble on the approaching storm, I am now also reflecting on the subtext of the Napoleonic Wars.
Labels: VisualArt
Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert
8 February 2023
The composer Malcolm Arnold - who, as I never tire of telling people, played trumpet in the Northampton Symphony Orchestra as a schoolboy in Northampton - wrote the music for many films. These included ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ - a 1965 British war film directed by Anthony Mann based on the true story of the Norwegian heavy water sabotage during the Second World War. Like many films of its era, the music commissioned for the soundtrack became the property of the film company and the parts used by the orchestra during the recording were routinely destroyed afterwards. The music from ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ had therefore never been performed live, until the Malcolm Arnold Festival decided to attempt to resurrect this classic film score. In 2017 John Gibbons was asked to reconstruct the music and spent several weeks in a cottage in the West of Ireland listening to the film over and over again to piece together the orchestral score. This was a painstaking process of detective work and careful listening - aided by a deep understanding of the way Malcom Arnold orchestrated his symphonies. John was also fortunate to discover a note in Malcolm Arnold’s archive which told him the key of the film’s main theme (as the running speed of cine film can vary, so what you hear is not always exactly the pitch the music was performed). John’s concert suite of the music from ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ was performed at the Malcolm Arnold Festival in 2017 and this week it got a second performance by the Northampton Symphony Orchestra at our concert in St Matthew’s Church, Northampton, conducted by John Gibbons. It was fascinating to talk to John about the process of arranging the music into a piece that would work as part of a concert - which involved changing the order of some of the main themes to make more sense as a single piece of music, rather than simply following the plot of the film. The music includes a typically stirring heroic Malcolm Arnold tune, lots of tension-building dissonant chords, the whole orchestra whistling innocently and a German marching band - which featured some stunning tuba playing by Nick Tollervey. It was great fun to play ‘The Heroes of Telemark’, particularly having recently watched the film on BBC iPlayer - and exciting to be part of this rediscovery of a classic film score. Our concert also featured the lovely ‘Piano Concerto No 5’ by Saint-Saens, brilliantly played by Julian Chan. We finished the concert with ‘Scheherazade’ by Rimsky Korsakov. This is the third time I have played ‘Scheherazade’ with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra (I reviewed our previous performance here in March 2012) and I don’t think it is recency bias to say this was the most complete of the three performances. The wind and brass solos were all wonderful - with Sian Bunker (bassoon), Naomi Muller (clarinet) and Graham Tear (flute) all truly outstanding. And the solo violin part was played beautifully by Emily Groom, with the haunting final high harmonic note floating, almost inaudibly quiet but somehow catching your ear throughout the closing orchestral chords. It’s a thrilling piece to play - particularly the rapid fire final movement which feels physically exhilarating to be part of. It was a thoroughly enjoyable concert.
Labels: Concerts, Music
'Black Cuillin' by Duncan Chisholm
3 February 2023
‘Black Cuillin’ is the new album from Scottish folk fiddler Duncan Chisholm. The album is inspired by Sorley MacLean’s poem ‘The Cuillin’, written in 1939, which uses the Cuillin mountain range on the Isle of Skye as a symbol of hope for the war with Nazi Germany. I’ve long been an admirer of Duncan Chisholm, particularly his gentle, lyrical fiddle playing. I loved his 2008 album ‘Farrar’ - a hauntingly beautiful collection of slow airs and laments - and I wrote here about its successor ‘Canaich’ (reviewed here in December 2010) - truly beautiful music. Duncan Chisholm has the ability to make the fiddle sound like a human voice. I was lucky to see him live in 2014, accompanying Julie Fowlis (reviewed here in May 2014). ‘Black Cuillin’ is a varied collection of instrumental tracks, some more upbeat folk/rock and some the slower, wistful melodies that he does so well.
Labels: Albums, Music
