Claudio Monteverdi – • Sì dolce è’l tormento SV332 • La mia turca che d’amor
Trad/Sephardic – La Prima Vez arranged by Karim Sulayman & Sean Shibe
Trad/Andalusian – Lamma Bada Yatathanna arranged by Karim Sulayman & Sean Shibe
Sayed Darwish – El Helwa Di arranged by Karim Sulayman & Sean Shibe
Ziad Rahbani – Li Beirut based on Joaquín Rodrigo arranged by Karim & Fairuz Sulayman & Sean Shibe
Jonathan Harvey – Sufi Dance
Layale Chaker – A butterfly in New York
Tōru Takemitsu – I. Wainscot Pond (after a painting by Cornelia Foss) from In the Woods
Benjamin Britten – Songs from the Chinese Op. 58 • The Big Chariot • The Old Lute • The Autumn Wind • The Herd-Boy • Depression • Dance Songs
Encore: Tomás Méndez – Cucurrucucú paloma
We were fully engaged from the Purcell through to and including the enchanting Li Beirut arrangement.
The more modern music, as is often the case, was a struggle for us. I never have “got” those Britten songs and I’m sure now I never will.
Still, the concert was a triumph. Janie especially liked the baroque pieces -not least the Italian songs, and the encore. Which is is just as well because we shall be returning to the Wig three days later (today, as I write) for some more of that sort of thing. Indeed I have only just (subsequent to booking) realised that Karim Sulayman is part of the ensemble that we’ll be hearing.
If you are keen to hear pretty much the whole Broken Branches thing, here is a stream from 2024, when the pair performed the same concert in Philadelphia:
I was keen to see this concert of young award-winning artistes, including two young guitarists, Jesse Flowers and Andrey Lebedev, who would be performing Elizabethan music. Actually, the Elizabethan theme included both Elizabethan periods – i.e. Tudor music and also music from the last 60 or so years.
Ian Pittaway gets really irritated when I mention Janie’s aversion to the lyrics of a certain type of Tudor secular song, which she describes as “Hey Nonie No” music.
Ian P points out, perhaps with some veracity, that there is only one Elizabethan song that actually contains the offending words, “Hey Nonie No”. Well, Ian ran out of road today, as the concert contained, amongst many other things, Thomas Morley’s It Was A Lover And His Lass, which certainly contains that line. I felt some of Janie’s finger nails digging into the back of my hand when we got to that bit.
But the Dowland songs were his usual darker stuff: In Darkness Let Me Dwell, Now O Now I Needs Must Part and Come Heavy Sleep, which Janie and I both tend to prefer both musically and lyrically.
Janie wondered why the words to these more substantial songs are not credited to their authors. I didn’t know the answer to that question but my guess is/was that they are words that had been handed down through oral tradition and that the first time they were published along with (e.g. Dowland’s) music, the authorship was lost in the mists of time. But at the time of writing I seek an authoritative view on this point.
Anyway, below is a more comprehensive list of the music played, taken from the programme.
Both of the guitarists played using modern, vertical fingers on the right hand rather than the horizontal finger technique Ian P is encouraging in me. I must say I thought the Tudor music sounded lovely on the modern guitar in the hands of both of these guitarists.
Janie and I also both enjoyed the modern-Elizabethan solo guitar pieces; Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland and Philip Houghton’s Ophelia…a Haunted Sonata. Let’s just say that we found the modern songs too difficult for us.
I had spotted sitting near to us one of my occasional real tennis pals from Lord’s, Michael, who I knew was an accomplished guitarist, as he had studied Benjy (my baritone ukulele/Tudor guitar) with great interest one time at Lord’s.
We chatted with Michael for a while during the interval, choosing not to bother with refreshments at that hour, before hunkering down for the short but more difficult second half of the concert.
Janie and I had never been to a Saturday lunchtime concert before and I’m not sure we’ll be returning on a Saturday lunchtime again in a hurry. It just doesn’t time well with our other regular activities, so it all felt like a bit of a rush, early in the weekend, getting to the Wig on time. Mind you, it is surprisingly easy enough to park around there on a Saturday lunchtime, we learnt…
…and we did very much enjoy the concert. Janie has decided to hedge her bets in the matter of the term “Hey Nonie No” music, by rebranding it as “Ring Around The Rosebuds” music. Very cunning.
Meanwhile I cannot find any examples of these youngsters playing Tudor music on-line, but here is a very young Jesse Flowers playing some Bach lute music transcribed for guitar, beautifully:
Just a few days after seeing Miloš at The Wig, Janie and I saw another guitar concert, this time Laura Snowden at SJSS.
A bit unfair on Laura, the comparison. She is very good indeed, but clearly not Miloš level; at least not yet.
Her musical choices were a little tougher too. I really like the Villa-Lobos guitar stuff, but it isn’t everyone’s taste. None of the stuff she performed would be.
But she plays with great clarity and warmth.
We enjoyed our evening and I vowed to return. So far, just the once and alone to a lunchtime concert – click here. But Janie liked her too.
Janie tends to makes a fuss about traipsing to SJSS, then tends to be pleasantly surprised at how near it is and how easily she can park. This evening was no exception.
It was Britten centenary day, so the centrepiece was Britten’s Dowland-inspired Nocturnal, although we did get some Peter Phillips to get a genuine Tudor feel and also some Bach and others to cruise us through the centuries.
Here is a YouTube of Zanon playing some Scarlatti…
…and here is a YouTube of someone else playing a Peter Philips pavan on the lute…
..and here is a Julian Bream masterclass on that Britten Nocturnal:
After lunch at The Wig, we went on to see an exhibition about Zoroastrianism at SOAS, but that’s a different story – click here or below:
Another CBSO with Simon Rattle concert and another note in my diary wondering who joined me for this one. My prime suspect this time is Bobbie. For sure she was around again by then, as she had been away for most of August that year but for sure was back by the end of the month when we saw the Merchant Of Venice:
No doubt about it – Bobbie joined me for this one. She was keen to see the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under the auspices of the great Czech conductor Libor Pešek. I was keen to see how he would deal with one of my favourite works, Smetana’s Má Vlast.
Strangely, although the national papers promoted this concert widely in advance, none chose to review it by the looks of it. Typical.
Here’s one of the sea interludes performed by the very outfit we saw:
Here’s Stephen Hough with the BBC Symphony from the first night of the Proms 2013 with the Rachmaninov Paganini:
Here’s Libor Pesek and The Royal Liverpool mob playing their four movements of Ma Vlast in Libor Prom order:
Alternatively, if you want to hear that recording in full in Smetana sequence, I have made it available on this playlist – click here. Do not be put off if you see a seemingly erased link – you can hear it whether or not you have a YouTube Music account – you just get adverts of you don’t.
In truth I couldn’t bring to mind Skocná – Dance of the Comedians, but James Levine & the Vienna lot brought it all back to me:
I’m really not at all sure that Entry of the Gladiators belonged with this concert, but that’s what they did. The piece was originally written as a serious piece of military marching music, although how anyone with that moustache composing that piece expected to be taken seriously, even back then, I cannot imagine.
On reflection, I think the use of that piece as a second encore was a mistake. When Libor Pesek suggested that they play a second encore, one of the scouse musicians loudly expressed his discontent with the traditional local expletive, but unfortunately Pesek thought the fellow said:
I combined with a posse of other boys to play the handbells for music teacher Graham Caldebank’s hugely ambitious project, to perform Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde at the school.
I blame/thank Guy Bertrand for my involvement in this one. I’ll write some more about Guy Bertrand in other contexts. He was one of the more active senior school boys, whom I got to know through the school library.
Guy was the most senior of the pupil librarians and I was a keen scout for volunteering there too – because I liked hanging around in the library browsing through books and didn’t mind doing some chores to give me an excuse to be there.
Whereas Guy found an enthusiastic helper for the library, I was far more reluctant when he suggested that I participate in Noye’s Fludde. I’d had my fill of Graham Caldebank’s Benjamin Britten projects the previous year – you can read all about my dismal attempts to play the family instrument (violin) and even hear the discordant tones of my string-playing as I recorded my Psalm 150 for posterity – all in this one – click here or below:
I’m leading the handbell choir. It’ll be a laugh. Come on. Give it a go…
…or words to that effect. Persuasive chap he was, Guy. I wonder where he might be now? Someone out there in the Alleyn’s alum community should know.
Thus, suddenly, out of the blue, my diary is no longer dominated by the ups and downs of my Sunday School Newspaper project. Instead, 10 days dominated by the bells.
Wednesday, 10 March 1976 CCF, good. Bells. TV Man About The House, Eric and Ernie [Morecombe & Wise], One-upmanship.
Thursday, 11 March 1976 – drama good. Bells. TV Happy Ever After, When The Boat Comes In
Friday, 12 March 1976 – NF [Noye’s Fludde] rehearsal. TV Yes Honestly, Liver Birds, Open All Hours.
Saturday 13 March 1976 – OK. Exeat [no school]. TV Celebrity Squares, Grandma Jenny.
We Interrupt This Tale Of Noye’s Fludde & Handbells With Sorry News From My Newspaper Project
Sunday, 14 March 1976 – all not ok. Comicals out – bad, TV Now Who Are You?
Ironically, a movie named “When Eight Bells Toll” followed on LWT that evening, but I don’t record having watched it. I was probably too busy licking my publishing wounds and/or reworking the pages of Shalom to expunge the censored “comicals”.
I don’t remember who was the main instigator of the censorship – possibly the Rabbi – who might have felt, with some justification, that jazzing up 1st century history with journalise was just about OK, but riddling the “newspaper” with comedic material on such serious subject matter was beyond the pale.
I have a feeling, though, that the effective censor was Jonathan’s dad, who, as voluntary printer, put his foot down on the length of the paper, given the costs of each page of print on his spanking new office photocopying machine. As an editorial team, we had to bite the bullet and realised that it was the comicals section that needed to go.
As the whole project is lost in the mists of time, I can claim, without fear of evidenced contradiction, that my newspaper project, Shalom, would have been the Private Eye of satirical classical antiquity journalese, if only it had been allowed to flourish with a blend of serious satiricals and comicals within the same organ.
That’s not even remotely funny. Still, thanks Nano Banana Lite 2 via Google Flow.
Monday, 15 March 1976 – NF [Noye’s Fludde] rehearsal. TV Ask The Family.
Tuesday 16 March 1976 – Noye’s Fludde went well, singing [?] good.
Wednesday, 17 March 1976 – Noye’s Fludde went well. (Tintinnabulation)
Thursday 18 March 1976 – drama good. TV World At War, When The Boat Comes In.
Friday, 19 March 1976 – music, good. Brilliant handbells performance by us.
Saturday, 20 March 1976 – school ok. Not a very good bell performance.
I love the extremes of my self-criticism in the diary, contrast the Friday review, “brilliant handbells performance”, with the Saturday one, “not a very good bell performance”.
Let’s allow the official critic, Trevor Tindale, to have his say on whether the production was good, bad or ugly. Here are his fine words from Scriblerus – the headline picture is also from that article.
Lovely touch, spelling his name “Tyndale” for that review. A 50-year-old pun that I have only just got when digging out the old piece. I’m sure I didn’t spot it at the time.
“But is Noye’s Fludde ‘discordant rubbish’ regardless of who performs it?”, I hear readers asking left, right, and centre. I thought we should all judge for ourselves, so I found a similar type of school performance on YouTube which, helpfully, mercifully, limits itself to the concluding three minutes.
The handbells come into their own right at the end of the show, although the editor of the following vid rather cut them off just as their final coda starts to ring out.
Personally, I do find Britten discordant and not to my taste, but whadda-I-know?
As most readers do know, YouTube “helpfully” uses AI to choose a follow-up video to keep viewers tuned in, these days. For me, after I watched the above video, it selected, for reasons I cannot really fathom…
…Oh Bondage, Up Yours! by X-Ray Spex. Now THAT’s satire.
It would be a year or more after the Alleyn’s production of Noye’s Fludde that we were all treated to the joys of X-Ray Spex, of course. Personally, if I could only take one of the recordings to the desert island with me, it would be the latter. In truth, I cannot imagine Noye’s Fludde making it to my top 8,000 on Desert Island Playlists.
I somehow remained in the Lower School Orchestra that season, despite having shown no aptitude whatsoever for playing the violin, even though the violin was “the family instrument” on my mother’s side.
My mother’s pain at my musical ineptitude was exacerbated by the cruel fact that Andy Levinson, from our street, showed some real talent for the violin. How could that be fair? The Levinsons were a medical family. Andy should have been fiddling around with medical instruments, not literally fiddling with far more musical instrument success than Ian, who was, after all, trying his very best.
Me switching to the viola for a while didn’t help. For the March 1975 concert, I was consigned to the second violins, ensuring that I had a little less to do, thus causing minimal disruption to the overall sound of the orchestra.
“There are other options, little Ian. Have you considered viols, viola da gamba…”
Anyway, all of the above is context…as is the fact that my mum was still grumpy and still hobbling around the place in mid to late March, I think with walking sticks rather than crutches by then, having had her hip replaced in mid February.
Here’s the diary:
Here’s a transliteration of that diary page.
Sunday, 16 March 1975 classes good. Feld’s lunch. Came home with Grandma Anne. Kalooki 2p up. TV Golden Shot.
Monday, 17 March 1975 – Fives good. Prepared for Tuesday. TV Likely Lads, Alias Smith and Jones, Goodies/Rolf Harris.
Tuesday, 18 March 1975 – first day of concert. In my opinion a big flop. TV Flintstones (Rock Quarry)
I’ll return shortly to the question of whether or not the concert was a big flop.
Meanwhile, and far more interestingly, for some reason I thought it important to note the name of the Flintstones episode I enjoyed that same day. This meant that, 50 years later, I could track that episode down and include it in Ogblog. I might have had five thumbs back then but clearly I also had forethought.
Wednesday, 19 March 1975 – concert went well this evening. Watched Trial By Jury. Mr. Tindale very good indeed.
“It’s hard to tell how the concert went from these conflicting reviews, but the judgement on Mr Tindale as the judge is very clear”, Tindale J.
Thursday, 20 March 1975 – some good results. Classes good. TV Man About The House, Dave Allen.
Friday, 21 March 1975 – concert went well. TV Porridge, MASH.
Saturday, 22 March 1975 – went to 1st soccer match Chelsea V Middlesbrough. Concert, mum & dad, Trial By Jury.
I have written up my first ever visit to a football match – a visit to Stamford Bridge, previously – click here or below:
But had the concert been any good or not? We need evidence. Below is an extract from Mr Kingman’s Scribblerus review of the entire event, mostly covering the Psalm 150 bit which was the bit in which I participated.
If you are aching to read the entire review, including the review of Trevor Tindale’s performance in Trial By Jury, click here for a pdf of the full page.
Sunday. 23 March 1975 – classes mock Seder. Recorded Psalm 150 and me. Took up most of the afternoon and evening.
Good gracious! Is it possible that the recording of me & Psalm 150 has survived these 50 years? Of course it is more than possible.
Firstly, my rather lengthy intro, which is also a supplement to my diary notes, I suppose:
Then the five minute concert piece recording that apparently took much of the day. Arguably, that was not time especially well spent. Had I spent more hours learning my instrument than twiddling knobs on the tape recorder, who knows how my playing might have sounded. As it is, you need a trigger warning, only click if you have robust hearing and a broad mind:
Mercifully, that is the only known recording of my attempts with the violin.
My final recollection from the concert is my mother’s comment, in the form of a question, after my performance:
Why was your bow going up at the same time as everyone else’s coming down…and coming down while everyone else’s was going up?
