RNCM Symphony Orchestra with Delia Stevens

RNCM Symphony Orchestra with Delia Stevens

RNCM Concert Hall, 17 May 2013

We are up to the seventh symphony so far, and it just keeps getting better.

Not only the astounding music and the pleasure of the performance but the proximity of the orchestra, that’s what makes this series of concerts so special.  You’re sat close to, there is a wonderful immediacy to it all.

Rather fine, too, were the pieces that preceded Beethoven: Britten’s Sinfonia da requiem and Avner Dorman’s Percussion Concerto.  The latter work, an unusual form, was graced by Delia Stevens’ busy, brilliant performance on percussion.  She was a blur of artistry and athleticism yet there was no boy to hand her a towel between movements, as by rights there really should have been.  The RNCM has not yet embraced such practices.

Details of day 8 of the Ludwig van Festival can be seen here.

Vertavo String Quartet

Vertavo String Quartet

Manchester Chamber Concerts Society

RNCM Concert Hall, 11 February 2013

Whoever selected Bedrich Smetana’s ‘From My Life’ for this concert deserves a grateful pat on the back; it is soul music by any other name.

The music’s candid confession eclipsed almost the three previous pieces, though since two were works by Mozart you’ll understand that that wasn’t entirely the case.

If forced to ascribe one concrete quality to Smetana’s String Quartet no 1 in E minor I’d turn to Laura Riding’s words and say that it possessed ‘the mercy of truth, which is to be truth’.  Not always, but sometimes certainly, integrity creates its own beauty.

Go seek out Smetana’s other music, and do it sharpish, that’s what the concert told me.

Details of future Manchester Chamber Concerts Society concerts can be found here.

RNCM Symphony Orchestra with Sarah Bennett

RNCM Symphony Orchestra with Sarah Bennett

RNCM Concert Hall, 1 February 2013

After the blissful enchantment of Lowell Liebermann’s Flute Concerto, which saw Sarah Bennett bringing her considerable sonorous gifts to the fore, we were awoken by Beethoven’s Eroica.

It isn’t often that you are granted the opportunity to hear a live performance of any Beethoven symphony, and already with the Ludwig van Festival were on to the third, with others due to follow.  Interestingly, the festival means one is able to examine the music in terms of the composer’s development, from the standpoint of mastery and control.

Inspired by cataclysmic historical events and no doubt much else, not forgetting all that sui-generis stuff, Beethoven alternates ferocity with gentleness and even a semblance of quietitude, but keeps the music moving always forever forward.

The beauty of a lion is of a piece with its power and majesty and that’s true of this symphony too.

A memorable experience.

There’s no sighting of a t-shirt associated with the festival as yet, a pity considering the number of striking images that have been produced.  Anyway, further events in the Ludwig van Festival can be viewed here.

RNCM Opera Gala

RNCM Opera Gala

RNCM Theatre, 22 January 2013

It is the Opera Olympics, no less.

The evening promised world-class arias by world-class composers and it yielded world-class performances of the same by RNCM alumni and students and the Orchestra of Opera North.  Each performance – and there were 17 all told – was a highlight.

Just as with Opera North’s staging of Wagner’s ring cycle, the orchestra were up out of the pit, the choir behind them, the singers taking their place front of stage.  A smart set-up and it worked well here.

Pure indulgence, this concert, just like eating cherries: pleasure that does you good.

Till Fellner Piano Recital

Till Fellner Piano Recital

RNCM Concert Hall, 19 January 2013

Apparently difficult and actually difficult, Till Fellner made this recital of works by four very different composers seem altogether easy-peasy.

By the end you were left impressed by how crisp and vital his playing was; he not only brought each work to life, he allowed it space in which to breathe.

Mozart laced his Sonata in F major (the second work of the evening) with lovely melodies, especially in the second movement, and Schumann’s variegated Symphonic Etudes (the fourth and closing work) had during one long passage the stirring jauntiness of a drinking song.  Till Fellner consummately brought out these very different colours – amongst many others – and in his hands, they shone.

RNCM Session Orchestra

RNCM Session Orchestra

RNCM Theatre, 10 January 2013

RNCM Session Orchestra. Photo credit: Paul Cliff

It got off to a flyer this concert, with a high-octane performance of the Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’, and it never lowered the pressure by even so much as a notch.

Stevie Wonder’s ‘Living for the City’ followed right after and altogether there must have been exhilarating performances of about ten up-tempo pop tunes.

The highlight for me was undoubtedly ‘Labour of Love’, Hue and Cry’s fine song.  A slick, quicksilver arrangement and the lyrics delivered with a crystalline poise (and pose).  Attitude, albeit a restrained and stylised attitude, is all important with this song: and it was present in the performance in spades.

That the concert packed such a punch was due in large part to Andy Stott’s brisk direction.  Once one song ended, another began virtually straight after.  It was a lean, muscular set with no fat anywhere.  And it was over much, much too soon.

The concert can be viewed again here.

And some of the musicians who made up the RNCM Session Orchestra are in action again in Manchester shortly.  On 22 January they play at the Club Zoo on Grosvenor Street, and on 24 January they’re at the  Night and Day Café on Oldham Street.

Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo

Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo

The Complete Flash Gordon Library, Volume 1

By Alex Raymond

Titan Books, 2012

ISBN: 9780857681546

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

So, you are wondering: how does it all begin?

Well, as set out above: Flash Gordon, a ‘Yale graduate and world-renowned polo player’ (so one of the world’s finest: smart, sporty and surely flush with cash), is forced at gun point into a rocket ship.  He’s accompanied by a pretty young woman, wouldn’t you know it, name of Dale Arden, and the two have just become intimate, well kind of, by parachuting out of a plane together.  As for the fellow holding the gun, that’s a brilliant though mad scientist called Hans Zarkov.  The rocket ship, Zarkov‘s own invention, heads towards a feral planet that’s on a collision course with our own.  The aim is to save our world by deflecting the wayward planet off course, and this they succeed in doing, but at a price.  They crash land on the planet’s surface – see strip below.  Yes, that’s pretty much how Flash Gordon’s adventures begin…

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This sumptuous volume has nine complete stories in total, originally published from 1934 to 1937.  The full-colour comic strips (this was way before comic books, never mind graphic novels) have been beautifully restored by Peter Maresca, and for those who were introduced to Flash Gordon by watching black and white serials on a Saturday morning in the local cinema (it was The Rialto in Salford and Bury Odeon for me), Alex Raymond’s artwork will come as a revelation as well as a return to childhood.  His colour illustrations are magical, wonderfully exciting, enchanting and (let’s be frank) just a wee bit kinky at times, just like the serial.

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

For at the basis of Flash Gordon is a love quartet: Ming the Merciless desires Dale and his daughter Princess Aura lusts after Flash.  Aura was always kidnapping/enslaving/punishing girlish and innocent Dale, her love rival, and Ming had it in for Flash too.  Dale is always rescued by Flash (eventually) and Aura constantly saves Flash from her father’s clutches.  Capture, play, escape; escape, capture, play…  Looking back, it was all very strange to see this stuff  in a children’s serial on a Saturday morning.

You wanted to be Flash Gordon, of course, because he was the hero, brave and strong and noble, able to withstand torture…  But Ming’s gig – Emperor of the Universe, infinite power, all those lackeys at his command – didn’t seem too bad either.

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In this book, there are appreciative introductions by Alex Ross and Doug Murray, which set Alex Raymond’s creation in context.  Flight was still something new in 1934 and sci-fi was an inchoate genre.  Wells, Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs fed Raymond’s imagination and he in turn influenced many others (Joe Kubert and George Lucas, to name but two).  There’s also some of Alex Raymond’s hitherto unpublished artwork.  It’s a terrific package, all told.

Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo by Alex Raymond, Volume 1 of The Complete Flash Gordon Library, is out now from Titan Books, priced £29.99.  The publisher’s description of this wonderful book can be read here.

Neil Young: Journeys

Neil Young: Journeys

Directed by Jonathan Demme

USA, 2011

Cornerhouse, 26 December 2012

Another Demme documentary about Neil Young, this one a snapshot of the rock’n’roller circa 2011.

We first see him driving around his hometown, reminiscing about his childhood and the places no longer there.  Think on it, how memory alone preserves what is lost.

The latter part of the film is Neil Young performing some classic and recent songs at a concert in Massey Hall.  One recent song, ‘Love and War’ (2010), is right up there with his best and shows that he has not lost his touch, either as singer-songwriter or performer.

There are some tricksy, close-up shots which are problematic – I liked ‘em, personally, for me they brought out the punch in the music – but Demme is at his best when he plays it straight.  When he uses the camera as a window, in so far as that’s possible, to capture Neil Young’s power and presence onstage.

Goldner String Quartet

Goldner String Quartet

Manchester Chamber Concerts Society

RNCM Concert Hall, 15 December 2012

A splendid concert with which to close the year, the great discovery of the evening being Three Idylls by Frank Bridge.

They were exhilarating and beautiful but also achingly melancholic, each one documenting both a perfect moment in time and an awareness of its inevitable passing.

Bridge’s pupil Benjamin Britten provided the second piece, this a performance of his String Quartet No 1 in D major, one proud of possessing its own particular qualities.

An interesting pairing these two, contrasting nicely with Franz Schubert’s great and even now enigmatic work, the String Quartet No 14 in D minor, which took up the whole of the second half.  That set the seal on a marvellous evening.

These four fellows were an astounding, supremely accomplished quartet.  In their hands the music had a life of its own.

Details of future Manchester Chamber Concerts Society concerts can be found here.

Maxim Rysanov and Ashley Wass

Maxim Rysanov and Ashley Wass

Manchester Chamber Concerts Society

RNCM Concert Hall, 19 November 2012

Maxim Rysanov. Photo by Pavel Kozhevnikov and Irina Podushko.

Great viola players are rare, Maxim Rysanov is unique.

He plays a broader range of repertoire, from Bach to Bibik one might say, and has done most in recent years to revitalise the viola, that wondrously fabulist instrument.

The concert in fact began with Bach, a work arranged for solo viola by Simon Rowland-Jones, and ended with Richard Dubugnon’s Incantatio.  There were works by Faure, Debussy, Ravel and Bohuslav Martinu along the way.

Ashley Wass’s piano played a part in all but the Bach, and what made the concert flow, really, was the evident rapport between the two players.  You might characterise Wass’s piano style as being a bit like his suit: bright and businesslike, yet with the occasional delicate feature.

They were called back for, I think, two encores.  A very fine concert indeed.

For details of future Manchester Chamber Concerts Society concerts, kindly click here.