I went to a wonderful prom at the Albert Hall on Tuesday featuring Benjamin Britten’s Sea Interludes from the opera Peter Grimes. It is the most beautiful and beguiling music. For me it has a strange hallucinatory quality and as I sat listening to it I was transported to a small boat in the middle of the sea, with land visible in the distance, but all around a great expanse of silvery water and an invigorating iodine whiff of the ocean. I sat in the boat marvelling at the beauty of it all.
Ordinarily, I might think this was a tourist trap. Here they all are, ambling into the newly-restored church (yes, I did write church) with that complacent and vacant two-week-holiday-smile, all long shorts, cameras-round-necks, baseball caps and rucksacks. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ jibe about tourists wandering around aimlessly:’Why don’t you look around and start enjoying the life you’ve chosen for yourself… instead of calling the travel agent and buying the budget deal to T-shirt Nirvana?’
So why am I here too?
Well, I’m in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square, right in the heart of London’s summer season square mile of tourist-ville, but where there is also a regular programme of classical music as well as religious worship (and a variety of other activities, including care for homeless people). I’ve come, with my wife, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem.
I’m a dabbler in classical music. I love much of what I hear, but it has to compete with a variety of other interests (and writing time) and so I only end up going to concerts perhaps six or seven times a year if I’m in the country, often as the guest of greater enthusiasts than I.
This summer’s classical music programme has so far consisted of Verdi’s Macbeth at Glyndebourne, a mixed programme including part of Carmina Burana at the Barbican and Mozart’s Requiem and Verdi’s Gloria in D minor at St Martin in the Fields Church in London. Still to come are a couple of proms at the Royal Albert Hall: Part and Britten in the first and Beethoven in the second.
I really wanted to hear Mozart’s Requiem being performed because I think it is such a uniquely awe-inspiring work. Unlike most of the rest of Mozart’s work that I’ve come across, it is extraordinarily dark at times, providing beautiful, vivid, haunting, and at times tempestuous musical portraits of the concepts of heaven, hell and the act of divine judgement. This is hardly surprising as Mozart was ill for most of the time that he was writing the piece and, indeed, he died before he was able to fully complete it. The work to me suggests a brilliantly creative mind struggling, though fruitfully so, with the idea of death.
I wanted to be blown away by a combination of beautiful music, baroque passion, existential despair and the sheer volume of orchestra and choir combined drowning my pathetic little brain in the glory of Mozart’s music. Perhaps it was an unrealistic expectation. I did love the music and technically it seemed faultless but — and here I’m sure I reveal my shortcomings as a musical critic — it simply wasn’t LOUD enough. I want to listen to this piece being performed by five orchestras and a choir of 200. That Dies Irae (see below) should make my ears bleed. Instead, the choir of about 25 seemed to struggle to fill the small church with the volume needed to convey the full drama of the piece.
I realise that this reveals me as a philistine of sorts; a classical music lover in the same sense that the majority of people who turn up to performances of Hamlet are lovers of literature, or in a similar way to Laurence admiring his bound set of the The Complete Works of Shakespeare in Abigail’s Party (shortly before his heart attack). The type of lover of classical music who admires Beethoven’s Ninth and Verdi’s Requiem but who lacks a delicate ear and the patience required to enjoy more subtle works of the orchestral art. Should I wear a t-shirt with the announcement: ‘I like my Mozart LOUD’?
This is a slight overstatement of my true position but it’s clear that despite my slightly rude description above of tourists ambling in to the concert, I am no better — and quite likely more poorly — qualified, than they are to appreciate and criticise this music. Perhaps many of them play in orchestras and have voluminous record collections of Berlioz, Stravinsky, Handel, Bach and Poulenc which they listen to regularly. Perhaps if we had a conversation I would run out of things to say in less than a minute while they could talk for hours about the merits of Mozart’s trombone parts. I, on the other hand, would probably be limited to: ‘I enjoyed it . . . I just wish it had been a little louder. Enjoy the rest of your holiday. Bye now.’
Mitch Mitchell is dead. To those of you who don’t know he played drums and was best known for his sensational performances with Jimi Hendrix - most famously in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, who with Mitchell’s death have now all shuffled off their mortal coils. He also drummed in the Gypsy Sons and Rainbows Band which played at Woodstock in 1968.
This footage is from 1969 when the original Jimi Hendrix Experience trio of Hendrix, Mitchell and Noel Redding on bass had reformed. They’d had their differences, particularly Jimi and Noel, but one of the things I love most about this clip is the fact that they’re all obviously having an amazing time playing music together. Mitch looks like a long-haired Peter Pan: youthful, bright eyed and exuberant. And there are few better four minute bursts of Jimi’s guitar playing. They are ROCKING the joint.
