Tsunami

BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus conducted by Sir Andrew Davis

Music by Vaughan Williams, Dominic Muldowney, and Holst

Barbican, Friday 9th May, 19:30pm 2008

The concert will also be aired on BBC Radio 3, Tuesday 13th May on Performance on 3 from 7pm - 8:45pm UK time. You will also be able to listen to the concert via BBC Radio 3 website and continue to do so for up to 7 days after the broadcast.

Introduction

Marking the 50th anniversary ofVaughan Williams's death, Sir Andrew Davis returns to the BBC Symphony Orchestra to conduct VW's Sixth Symphony - the last of the trio of symphonies perceived by many (to the composer's apparent consternation) as his 'war' symphonies. Just as its muted Epilogue seems to pose questions rather than offer affirmation, the composer's setting 40 years earlier of Wait Whitman's Toward the Unknown Region also hints at the darkly spiritual.

The spiritual becomes mystical in Hoist's unjustly neglected Hymn of Jesus, which merges Eastern religious thought with ancient Western plainchant; while tonight's world premiere of Dominic Muldowney's Tsunami ~ featuring Australian actor-singer Philip Quast - draws us from the universal to the personal, in setting new poems by James Fenton centring on one man's struggle as he copes with lost love.

Tsunami (2006-7)

RPS Elgar Bursary, commission: world Premiere, which is administered by the Royal Philharmonic Society. Poetry by James Fenton commissioned by BBC

1. Was that your idea of love?

Was that your idea of love?
Was that your idea of love?
Those brilliantly confected lies -
They hit me straight between the eyes ..
Was that your idea of love?
That endless digging for the dirt,
That motive-seeking where it hurt -
Was that your idea of love?
And all those accusations you made
About the subtle ways you'd been betrayed -
Was that your idea of love?
It felt like drowning. It felt like an immersion
In a dark sea of blame
Until I found out that it was all a diversion.
You had a secret game.
You had a game to play and you played rough.
Was that your idea of love?
Funny I never noticed it creeping up on us,
This vengefulness and spite.
Funny how long I went on thinking
There must be a simple way to put things right.
And funniest of all to think of you
Pretending to seek professional advice,
When what you wanted was to be shot of me
At any cost to anyone,
At any price
To me ...
Was that your idea of love?
Was that your idea of love?
Resentfulness disguised as charm,
That care in plotting future harm -
Was that your idea of love?
That skilful use of evidence
To batter down each last defence -
That conjuring of bad from good,
That mimicry of victim hood -
Was that your idea of love?
You certainly deserve congratulation
On an effective campaign.
I'd like to know the terms for outright capitulation
But I suppose you've made it plain
They're going to be tough.
Is this your idea of love?
Be shot of me, I beg you. Let me be.
Tell me again you want no more of me.
Was that the reckoning?
Was that the sum?
Or is there more of this -
Is there more of this to come?
Be shot of me, I beg you. Let me be.
Tell me again you want no more of me.
Is this your idea of love?

2. The Alibi

My mind was racing.
It was some years from now.
We were together again in our old flat.
You were admiring yourself adjusting your hat.
'Oh of course I was mad then,' you said with a forgiving smile,
'Something snapped in me and I was mad for a while.'
But this madness of yours disgusted me,
This alibi,
This gorgeous madness like a tinkling sleigh,
It carried you away Snug in your fur, snug in your muff and cape.
You made your escape
Through the night, over the dry powdery snow.
I watched you go.
Truly the mad deserve our sympathy.
And you were driven mad you said by me.
And then you drove away,
The cushions and the furs piled high,
Snug with your madness alibi,
Injured and forgiven on your loaded sleigh.

3. The New City

I write a rent cheque, sign for a set of keys,
Study and countersign two inventories,
So many pillows and plates, so many knives
Rituals, these, of lucky ruined lives
In lucky ruined cities where the trees
Have grown again around new amenities
And civic pride is fostered with self-worth
And fire is but a memory of the earth.
The city fathers care for health-giving things:
Chess for the old and, for the children, swings.
On wires by the infant playground, placards say:
'All unaccompanied adults - stay away.'
But where do the lost, the devastated run?
Where are the cinder tracks for the undone?
Weights for the cheated at the sparkling gym?
Which are the lanes for the betrayed to swim?
Beyond the Marine Aquarium Parking Zone
I came to a garden where men smoked alone.
One hazarded a dim, prenuptial sign.
I felt no fire to cross his grief with mine.
Though I stood free from love and lovers' ties,
Framed for a villain in my children's eyes,
Had lost my home, seen half my friends defect,
I was not yet as free as I was wrecked.
My wreckage clung to me and dragged me down.
Only my anger would not let me drown.
My wreckage clung to me. It dragged me down.
Only my anger would not let me drown.

4. Tsunami

This furniture is arrogant. It gives itself airs.
I put away some studio glass and rearrange the chairs
And fill a bowl with bright, unblemished fruit
And place it near the lamp,
Find a green vase and shove some anemones in it.
None of this fools me for a minute.
It hardly even helps to pass the time
But optimism is no crime
And the anemones know what to do
Opening in black and the profoundest blue.
Accommodating flowers:
Cut, crated up, they travel for hours
And come out looking only a little crushed.
And see how quickly they revive! T
hey are exemplary. They are so blue.
They're too generous to be true.
They almost make you glad to be alive.
I have a world at my command.
I eat alone with the remote in hand.
Night after night, they play the same footage over
And the great wave comes crashing through the tree line
Hitting the palms at coconut height.
You want to say: that can't be right -
The water is out of scale with the trees.
Run it past me again please.
Now here it comes again, the great wave.
Here comes the wave straight through the crown of the trees.
And oh, it has taken all I have:
Wife, children, home, all gone,
Gone, sucked back down through the coconut line,
Beyond the sand bar, out over the reef,
Beyond the reach of human strength and grief.
The first thing they knew
The whole of the sea had disappeared from view
So fast it left a beach covered [with fish].
A miracle upon the shore, something never seen before,
Like the fulfilment of an idiot's wish,
And the children ran down to fill their arms with food
Shouting and laughing at this absurd surprise
And quite unable to hear the cries
Of those who called them back. Then came the wave.
Then came the wave. The fishermen out at sea
Felt only one green force heaving the boat
Which left them all undamaged and afloat.
Yet still they marked the moment by the sun,
Not calibrating in that instant all they'd lost-
Wife, children, home, village all gone
With every landmark of their native coast -
Till, caught in a solemn dread for what was theirs,
They steered for the shore
And making landfall, looking each to each,
Dragging their keels up what had once been beach,
They knew themselves a fleet of widowers,
The lucky ones, the absentees,
Alone, alive among the uprooted trees,
Unwelcome to the objects of their love.

5. How can the heart live?

How can the heart live that loved once so well?
The body that knew love without deceit?
For I remember now I was not mad
Loving my bright unblemished luck
And finding a simple joy in what I had.
And I remember now I was not deceived.
The tongue lies. Really, the body does not lie.
And long before the breaking of the wave
I knew there was some great good
I had mislaid And logic tells me what I lost was love.
Affection with an electric charge of hope
Is what love was. Affection died in the flames.
There's no insurance: earthquake, fire and flood,
War, famine, pestilence - all such are deemed
The visitations of some love-crossed god.
On some remote Olympus of the soul,
Hidden beyond the brain's cloud-forest line,
Some ancient grudge-match is being fought to the last.
It seems that we were proxies in the fight
And there's no compensation, no redress.
Live without hope for a time, unlucky heart.
Unlucky lover in this ruined city,
Live with this loss, these lucky ruined lives.

Summer in the city…

by Mark Shenton, Shenton's View, The Stage Blog, May 12, 2008

London was in glorious weather this weekend; and I was in (mostly) glorious theatre for much of it. Even the Barbican Centre becomes nearly palatable in the good weather: though the lakeside terrace may be an entirely man-made oasis in the midst of the bleakly (dys)functional urban cityscape it is part of, but at least you get the illusion of nature. And on Friday night, going there to hear the premiere of a new Dominic Muldowney piece being presented as part of a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert, I met the reason for me going to it at all out on the terrace: Philip Quast was mingling informally with his family, before it began.

That's the great thing about open spaces like this on warm sunny evenings: it democratises the concert going experience. (And the BBC Symphony chorus were also out of the terrace earlier, doing a group photoshoot). But if it was a nice discovery to find Philip out on the terrace, it was, of course, even more special to hear him inside, taking on such a demanding new classical piece so commandingly.

Ever since he did his Divas at the Donmar stint in 2002, when I came out of the show thinking he was probably the greatest leading man of musicals currently alive, I have been devoted to his immense talent - though I go back even further with him, since I remember interviewing him before his London break-through role when he starred in the National's UK Premiere of Sunday in the Park with George in 1990. But his Divas show, which happens also to be the best male cabaret I've ever seen (admittedly not, as my companion on Friday night remarked, a large field), showed something else: a musical actor with equal emphasis on both words, possessed of both a fierce, illuminating baritone, but also bringing himself to every choice with warmth, humanity and informality.

All of those qualities were abundantly in evidence on Friday evening as he sang Muldowney's Tsunami, set to words by James Fenton, and how amazing it is to find him here at the Barbican Hall after his last gig on the other side of the river in La Cage Aux Folles at the Menier Chocolate Factory. That's another thing about him: he isn't grand. Only his talent is.

From triumphant aspiration to utter desolation

Ivan Hewett reviews the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Andrew Davis at the Barbican

The Telegraph, 12 May 2008

What a way to start a concert; all the way from a lofty peak of triumphant spiritual aspiration, with orchestra and massed choir shouting radiant harmonies, down to a state of total frozen desolation, all within the space of about half an hour.

And the source of all this emotional tumult? Ralph Vaughan Williams, that plain-speaking, ruggedly agnostic, pipe-smoking Englishman, whose half-centenary we're celebrating this year.

The exaltation came from his Towards the Unknown Country, a setting of Walt Whitman's famous lines about the Soul's journey into a region where all ties drop away and there is only Time and Space. The desolation came in the last few pages of his Sixth Symphony.

The performers - the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Andrew Davis - brought a wonderful fervour to the first piece. But what was interesting was the way Davis revealed the kinship between the two.

There was a radiance or even excitement trembling under the symphony's bleak closing harmonies, almost as if they, too, are a glimpse of an unknown country.

Then we came down to earth with a bump for Tsunami, a new piece commissioned by the Elgar Bursary and co-authored by composer Dominic Muldowney and poet James Fenton.

This offered a sung narrative in which an unnamed man tells us in savagely embittered tones about the break-up of his marriage.

He rubs salt into his wounds with masochistic gusto, while the orchestral backdrop summons up with brilliant suggestiveness a bitter-sweet, lonely-city ambience, in a style not so far from Stephen Sondheim.

Baritone Philip Quast had just the right tone as the man, emotionally distraught and yet musically exact. In his lonely rented flat, he obsessively watches footage of the 2004 tsunami on television, while the music builds in agitation.

You get the symbolism. As with the fishermen in Thailand, a great tidal wave has washed through the man's life, leaving a trail of devastation that time gradually heals.

But, really, isn't there something tasteless about using a vast human tragedy as a picturesque backdrop for one man's marital troubles?

The radiance of the following pieces, Charles Ives's General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Gustav Holst's Hymn of Jesus, carried us back to an era where that kind of miscalculation was impossible; an era when values were solid and real, even if the belief that at one time underpinned them was already ebbing away.

Songs of the tsunami

Interview with James Fenton, The Guardian, May 5, 2008

Alone in Hamburg in January 2005, the poet James Fenton was bombarded by images from the Boxing Day tsunami. He tells how he came to write the lyrics for a commemorative piece of music

A few winters ago, I loaded up my car with books, papers and computer, and drove to Hamburg, arriving in the new year to take up a visiting fellowship: I was to finish a book. People who offer this kind of help to authors are in the habit of saying that the writer needs solitude and support in order to "confront his demons". I could well imagine, though, that these radical acts of self-dislocation - winter in Hamburg was pretty radical in this respect - are a way of conjuring up new, unsuspected demons. These furnished apartments, however pleasantly equipped (and mine was pleasant enough), put us in the position of the newly divorced: a new place to learn, a new life to devise, new absences.

The great tsunami had struck on Boxing Day 2004, just before I left home, but its devastation was only now becoming fully apparent, and the extraordinary images played repeatedly on television. These had a particular resonance for me, although not because I knew the areas of the worst destruction. What I did know, what I had known rather intimately, was the life of the maritime poor in south-east Asia - the fishermen, the small farmers, the traders of coastal villages such as those that had been wiped out in a matter of minutes. I knew the world of the hurricane belt, with its endless discouragements, its eroded mountainsides, its beaches disappearing overnight, the snapped palms. But the tsunami itself was beyond my repertoire.

Love and the loss of love are the great themes of song, and when, a couple of months later, I received a visit from my old friend, the composer Dominic Muldowney, our talk was all about words and music, theatre, opera and song. I had worked with Dominic twice before, once on a song cycle called Out of the East (which reflects some of my experiences in south-east Asia), and once on an oratorio about the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus - our idea of a suitable subject for the millennium. Now Dominic had received an Elgar bursary from the Royal Philharmonic Society, and he was looking for a text to set.

Dominic has for a long time worked in the theatre, and a preoccupation of his over the years - one that sets him somewhat apart from other composers I know - has been with the possibility of writing serious work for the theatrical voice. The shorthand for this is to say that he likes to work with actors who can sing, in preference to singers who can act. It would be wrong to call such theatrical voices untrained, but they do not have to be trained in a certain kind of vocal production. Indeed, the operatic voice can seem positively out of place in a certain repertoire - unidiomatic, overproduced, inappropriately keen to please, like a duchess going slumming.

Dominic's piece, which will be performed this week at the Barbican in London, achieved his aims. He wanted to write a song sequence for the powerful theatrical voice of the Australian Philip Quast, to bring a distinguished performer from the musical theatre into the concert hall, and to give this kind of voice the chance to be heard with a symphony orchestra. This type of combination may be familiar enough from evenings when an orchestra "lets its hair down" and goes pop for a night. What is much less familiar is to find original and serious music written for such a combination. This is nothing to do with "crossover". It is more a matter of saying to musicians in the classical tradition: this kind of voice is a wonderful expressive instrument we ought to be using more often.

Whenever such a collaboration between poet and composer is discussed, people want to know one thing above all: which comes first - words or music? The answer varies according to the genre. Some composers cannot read music; what they can do is work out a chord sequence and a melody, record it or play it over to an orchestrator, and give instructions as to the kind of end result they want. In such cases, it often makes sense for the lyricist to fit the words to a given tune. This is a special skill, and it is very hard to produce a result that is not formulaic.

The other way round, the poet or lyricist produces something that is in principle singable, and it is up to the composer to discover the possibilities inherent in the material. This was the way we worked. For the writer (unless they are a singer-songwriter, in which case they may be happier to work solo), the key to sanity is to know where your job ends. If you come to the collaboration with a secret desire to play the composer's role, you may end up unhappy, since composers are good at sensing what a writer anticipates from them; it makes them all the more eager to take an unexpected route. The most you can hope to provide is something that could, in principle, be set one way - because if a line can be set one way, in all probability it can be set another way. I wrote a song cycle of five poems; I didn't consciously hear music as I wrote, but I aimed to keep the words as clear and pronounceable as I could - no tongue-twisters.

The best advice I was ever given in this area came from Mark Elder, when we were working on Jonathan Miller's production of Rigoletto. Mark said that if you want to know whether a line is singable, you should try shouting it aloud. The chances are, he said, that if it shouts well, it will sing well.

Beyond a few passages played on a computer in Denmark Street, London, where Dominic has his studio, I've not yet heard what he has done with my words. My job ended with making certain minor adjustments to the text - the kind composers can't quite explain, but which ease the setting of the line. The story behind the songs is as simple as I originally envisaged in Hamburg. A man loses everything in a divorce, and moves to a strange city where he licks his wounds. It is a city much like Hamburg, but it could just as well be Rotterdam - somewhere that was once, itself, destroyed. The time is the time of the Boxing Day tsunami.


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