My Pop Life #62 : 4th Symphony (#3 : Ruhevoll) – Gustav Mahler played by Chicago Symphony conducted by Sir Georg Solti with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa

4th Symphony (#3 : Ruhevoll)  –   Gustav Mahler

I know next to nothing about classical music, but I’ve been steadily educating myself for the last 30 or so years in a hit-and-miss fashion.   I treat it like any other form of music – in other words, I either like it, or I don’t.   I’ll always give it a chance though.   This piece was a very early discovery for me, at some point in my mid-twenties I bought a cassette of Mahler’s 4th symphony – it has a 4th movement song and the singer was Dame Kiri Te Kanawa whom I found both attractive and recognisable.  Call me shallow, but decisions are formed from such primal simplicities.

Furthermore, the conductor was Georg Solti whom I had also heard of, and have since discovered to be one of the great dependable elements, especially when purchasing Wagner.   I’m sure he’ll forgive me if I don’t call him Sir Georg.    In fact there are better versions, but it’s all taste so go and hunt down your own.   There are three different conductors below this piece.   So there I was aged twenty-something, with a small handful of classical LPs and an even tinier selection of cassettes – useful for car journeys of course in those days.   I’m particularly fond of long car journeys – if I’m driving especially.   And this cassette got plenty of plays because it is a very sweet-sounding and romantic piece of work.  My favourite part is the 3rd movement – so yearning and pleading and tragic that I used it on my first ever showreel – an actor’s ‘greatest hits’ – shouldn’t be too long, in and impress them and out.  If you can.

I had only played one lead part by then (I have permanent supportyitis) which was a Channel 4 drama called Say Hello To The Real Dr Snide.  I played an alcoholic who thought he turned into a black cat when he was drunk.  My wife was the incomparable Celia Imrie and my therapist the equally brilliant Linda Bassett.  Lucky me.  Directing was the young Peter Cattaneo who would go on to direct The Full Monty, go to Hollywood, come back and the last time I met him he was directing Rev, a BBC series about a vicar.  Such is showbiz.   Ups and downs, swings and roundabouts, ripples, waves and all that.  And there we were in London 1990 filming this drama, and I enjoyed most of it and did all right I thought.   Mostly.   Celia Imrie was a total delight.   Linda Bassett was wonderful.   Not sure how great I was though, in retrospect.    I distinctly remember one scene where I was lying against a wall in some derelict area, drinking from a whisky bottle and talking to myself, in denial, in crisis.   Looking back, I really didn’t do the scene that well.   I didn’t melt – I couldn’t melt – as Paul Schrader would say years later about de Niro (he’s wrong by the way {Awakenings?} but it was interesting that he would say that about such a great actor in front of other actors).   I was too tightly wound to be able to collapse my personality on camera and the scene ends up being too tight and forced.   I watched it while making the showreel.   I may have even included it, I can’t actually remember, but if I did I would have plastered Mahler 4 all over it to try and make it more acceptable hahaha.  The music alone makes me melt these days.   Music can do this to me without warning, tears in the eyes.   When I was young – no, I liked it, but no tears.  I have no trouble melting now that I’m older and more vulnerable than I ever was when I was a young man : “the survivor”.   Now that I’ve apparently survived, I am unpeeling gently, unwinding, slowly, and letting the world in.   I was screwed up tight because I’ve always been terrified of having a nervous breakdown – due to my Mum’s particular affliction, whatever label is currently in vogue for her vulnerability.   So I compacted myself inside when I was young, and kept it there.  No ambush could unlock it.  Weird now I think about it that I could even have a career as an actor.  My own feelings were hardly available to me.  I was forced to ACT.   And sometimes I just didn’t get there.  I can say that now, looking back.  I have got better since then, but I still have limitations.  (Everyone does).

And sometimes if you put great music under a limitation, people don’t notice.

Gustav Mahler was a jewish Bohemian by birth who converted to Catholicism to secure the directorship of the Vienna Hofoper (now State Opera) due to the anti-semitism of the era.   I don’t believe he was religious at all in fact, but spent his life having to deal with anti-semitism.   He conducted for the early part of his life, famously Wagner, and wrote in the summer holidays.   The 4th Symphony was completed in 1900, thus Mahler’s work bestrides both the Romantic era and the modern.  I’m not going to discuss Der Knaben Wunderhorn, a series of German folk poems which inspired the first 4 symphonies because I’m well out of my depth there.   Don’t panic.   I like all of his symphonies now that I’ve heard them all.   I’ve watched my father singing with Huddersfield Choral in the 8th Symphony, performed with up to one thousand voices (Symphony of a Thousand);  the 2nd Symphony (Resurrection) is powerful and exciting;  the 5th is famous for its use in the film Death In Venice, and a vocal symphony (8 and a half?) called Das Lied Von Der Erde (Song Of The Earth) is probably my favourite work.  This – the 4th – was my first, and is the most familiar to me.  The yearning, tragic 3rd movement is utterly fantastic, equally uplifting and tragic, and is below this piece of writing if you have a spare twenty minutes.  It is astoundingly beautiful.

Leonard Bernstein conducts the 3rd movement of the 4th Symphony

the entire 4th symphony conducted by Claudio Abbado

the romantic doomed magnificent 3rd movement of the 4th symphony (George Szell, Cleveland Orchestra) 

My Pop Life #43 : Finlandia – Jean Sibelius

Finlandia   –   Jean Sibelius

1963  front row : David Bristow, Valerie Spiller, Joanna Payne, Me, Mick Spiller & brother Paul – who are the people standing behind us ?

A version of this blog will appear in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice.  Watch this space for details !

RB

My Pop Life #24 : Requiem (Sanctus) – Gabriel Fauré

Requiem  (Sanctus)  –   Gabriel Fauré

I stopped going to Sunday school when I was 11, after I’d passed the eleven-plus and was readying myself for the bus journey to Lewes Grammar from my tiny Selmeston village home.   Now I had the perfect excuse to cut that out of my schedule.   “Homework”.  The bible stories were all over-familiar and draped in languid irreproachable moral conclusions, I was tired of their parables and lessons, my brain knew there was something else out there.   I was already an atheist at 11 years old.   No offence to any religious readers of course – my wife is a practicing Catholic.   But I’m still an atheist.   I remember my dad describing himself around this time as an agnostic.   Sounded cool.   But it meant “don’t know”.   ‘Not sure.’   I wasn’t an agnostic.   I was sure that God, as taught me in Sunday school and other places, Didn’t Exist.   And I’m still sure about that, which is why I define myself as an atheist.   My wife, in contrast, has faith.   Fair enough.

I was brought up as a Christian.   Bible stories.   Moses.   Adam and Eve.   Abraham.  Those three in particular I find frankly laughable now.   Less than worthless.   Dangerous nonsense.   The New Testament was always different.   It had revolutionary zeal, disobedience, miracles, betrayal, a hero who died and was reborn.  I treat this is a true story which has been shaped by men.   Since growing up I’ve discovered the Gnostic Gospels with more lines for Mary Magdalene and other women, and come to see St Paul as a problematic figure who rewrote sections of the Bible and divided men by nationality.

I’ve studied all the main religions over time with the help of Joseph Campbell and his books such as Hero With A Thousand Faces, The Power Of Myth  and other examinations of comparative religion – they are brilliant works of scholarship and imagination, showing how each culture creates a religious story out of the same basic elements, a tale with choices, wonderful happenings, a hero’s journey, a chosen people and death.  Most religious books also have an “end times” climax right at the end = the Christian one is called Revelations.   It describes the the end of the world   “…people will be gambling, selling and buying each other, cheating, lying and stealing, killing and despoiling the earth.  Then the end will come.”   This is clever because of course it describes the earth exactly as we know it, thus leading to the inevitable conclusion – we’re doomed, we may as well pray for our souls.   It has worked for centuries.   Interesting to note that since the rise of science and in particular Darwin over 150 years ago, other myths have taken over the “end times” scenario – notably ourselves – homosapiens – in the form of war, climaxing in the atom bomb which loomed over my childhood rather like Revelations must have loomed over my ancestors.   Since 1989 and the dismantling of the Soviet Union we have grown to fear first ‘the greenhouse effect’ and now ‘climate change’.   The “We’re Doomed” lobby will always have a scenario, and an audience.

All of which is to say that Sunday for me, as an atheist, is still special.   It used to be a vacant empty day – no shops, no work, a day for “family” and so on & so forth.  But since capitalism needs to survive and we all need to keep buying more shit to keep the charade going, Sunday became just another shopping day, and large temples to spending grew up on our ring roads where people flocked on Sunday to worship their Stuff, to buy it and hoard it.   But for me Sunday morning is for classical music.

I can’t remember when this started but as far away as university I’ve put on a classical record first thing on a Sunday morning.     The record won’t necessarily be religious, although many of my favourite classical pieces are.   Well the church was the main source of income for musicians for hundreds of years, so most of Bach, Vivaldi,  Haydn and lots of early music emanate from God and his works.  I’ve never had a problem with this.  Why would I ??   I think the finest piece of music ever written is probably the St Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach.   If you don’t know it, you’re in for a treat, it’s immense, pure, and beautiful.  If you know it, you know exactly what I mean.

I’ve been listening to Fauré’s Requiem since the 80s – I couldn’t put a date on it, or a reason why I bought it, or who introduced me to it, or any interesting biographical moments or details.   But if I had a magic counter on my musical choices (which I used to fantasise about as a teenager – my own pop charts!) then this piece of music would be in the top 3 Sunday morning selections, I’m very sure about that.    It’s really short, and absolutely stunning, especially, for me,  the Sanctus.   I have been known to chop it back, rewind selector, the same short piece which is just so mysterious and perfect that I can scarcely believe it.   Like that moment in “If…” the Lindsay Anderson film where Malcolm McDowell is listening to Peter Kamau’s African Sanctus and continually lifts the needle back to the haunting infinite opening chords.  Except Fauré is better.

Gabriel Fauré was a 19th century French impressionist composer (my definition) – the Requiem dates from 1890, was revised and finished in 1900 and is composed of seven short pieces (the Sanctus is 3 minutes long).   It’s largely a vocal piece and most of the great singers have tackled its refined and subtle beauty.   I don’t have a particular favourite version, but I’m listening to it soothe me (baby) right now.     Long live Sunday mornings.