These three composers - two English and one Japanese composer, all born after the turn of the 20th century - must make for some pretty unusual content. The names of Britten and Walton might give the evening's programme a degree of familiarity, but otherwise this could have been something more commonly found on Wednesday contemporary concerts. Above all, this was a catholic programme in which elements of East and West were mixed and presented from different perspectives: Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas assimilating Balinese influences into the Western classical style, and Matsushita's Hi-Ten-Yu fusion of Western orchestral palette and traditional Japanese percussion into a paean of celebration.

It proved to be a rewarding experience for those with adventurous tastes. Visually, the cyclopean eye of the wadaiko staring balefully from the back of the stage only served to confirm the atypical nature of what the evening was going to bring: it was going to be the type of concert which you're unlikely to come out whistling any tunes, but maybe with odd bits and pieces from here and there sticking in the mind.

The Prince of the Pagodas was Britten's first major ballet score, and one which he produced with tortuous difficulty. Arranged into a concert suite by two of his friends, Donald Mitchell and Mervyn Cooke, the result was a wonderful series of character pieces not unlike Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. It is all the more surprising that this charming work does not receive more exposure than it deserves.

 

Field of New Music As Associate Conductor of the MPO, Kevin Field is the intrepid voyager who spends more time exploring strange new musical territory, than cruising in familiar classical and romantic waters. Benjamin Chee, also travels quite a bit (in more ways than one), met up with him. Tell us about the music you perform. When we started out, we established our reputation with late 20th century repertoire - there are so few orchestras interested in performing contemporary works. But we do perform music by modern composers. For instance, we're going to do a piece by Joyce (Koh) - my attention was brought to her by a friend. We also hope to represent more composers from the region, especially of course Malaysians. Did the response to the contemporary concerts surprise you ? The response to these concerts has been amazing.We're talking about selling out the DFP on weekdays (even if it's ten ringgit). In a whole season, we may have about six concerts of new music - which doesn't appear to be much, but it's quite a lot over the course of a whole season. We do music from people like Henze, Schoenberg, Ades and Turnage. How is Kuala Lumpur different from where you came from ? In the UK, culture is spelt with a small "c". Here, without the preconceived resistance, you don't have to take it all on the chin, as it were. Back in Bournemouth, I started Kokoro - that's Japanese for "heart" - but really it was a new music ensemble out of the Bournemouth Symphony. We would do works like A Soldier's Tale. It was like having two concerts in one, like a late-night jazz club, offering small snippets to the audience of maybe 500,600 people. It was like a moon orbiting around a large planet. So you do the same here now.... My role here now is to bring in new music, apart from the standard classico-romantic repertoire which Kees (Bakels) does. Boulez once said that you should run with a full orchestra with 130 musicians, but rotate them between standard, contemporary and baroque repertoire. That's what the St Paul Chamber Orchestra did, splitting the conductorship. John Adams the composer, Christopher Hogwood was the baroque specialist, and a certain up-and-coming hotshot named Hugh Wolff... That's exactly it. Not too long ago - by that I actually mean last season - in one amazing week we did a baroque concert (conducted) by Paul Dyer one weekend, then played Thomas Ades on Wednesday, and at the end of that week we did a Bruckner symphony. But surely you must have rotated the musicians? Yes, of course, we did that, but not that much - so some of them would have done the baroque and then contemporary, for example; or played in the contemporary concert and then the Bruckner. So they would have performed in different styles within the space of a week. How do you get exposed to so much new repertoire ? By email. Word of mouth. And of course people send you their music. I keep in touch with most of the major music publishers, and they know what I want. We also commission our own works - I have one work from Fernando, and another from Tajuddin - a full symphony. In our next season, someone from the region will be represented in each contemporary concert. Let's talk about tonight's concert. Tonight's programme is very challenging. Kees saw a video of Hayashi sometime back and thought we might want to do that. As for Britten - I love Britten. When he was in Bali - he was in Bali once, did you know that - he heard the gamelan and it influenced the music he was working on. When we performed Adams (Short Ride on a Fast Machine), I stuck in a gamelan ensemble in the arrangement by Clarke. It was interesting to find Britten putting all gamelan music into Western orchestra. I had musicians in the orchestra, after one of the rehearsals, coming up to me and telling me they recognized the gamelan themes (from Britten) from one of their recent trips to Bali ! How about your education and outreach programmes ? Recently, we took the orchestra to an international school in the Klang Valley. We insisted it to be opened to other schools as well, and I think we might have played to about 1,000 kids in 3 concerts. Here, we're talking about kids which have never seen an escalator before - well, not literally that, you know what I mean - and they were watching this orchestra for the first time. They heard (Stravinsky's) The Firebird, Mambo from West Side Story, Lerner & Loewe's I Could Have Danced All Night and something snappy from Riverdance. The effect on the audience was astounding.

After an idiomatic Prelude, Kevin Field fecklessly led the MPO through each of the four character dances: spiky Prokofievian rhythms for the King of the North, surreal arppeggios of strings and high horns for the King of the East, inimitable wit and quasi-parody of avant-garde for the King of the West and an irrepressible menace con fuoco for the King of the South. Field wove a sinuous tapestry of the dance music with much charisma and style, eliciting good response from the orchestra.

The latter movements proved even better. The Pagodas Revolve like Merry-go-rounds allowed the percussion section to come to the fore with some superb musical evocation on xylophone, celesta and piano, with motifs based on actual Gamelan themes. More Balinese-influenced music emerged in The Salamander, with Field evoking a different brand of quietly confident nobilissimente from the moustache-twirling, stiff-upper-lip grandiloquence on associates with British composers.

One could readily sense that Field was very much at home with Britten, rendering the balletic idiom with style and verve. The sumptous build-up to the revelation of the Prince's identity was a magnificent piece of work between conductor and musicians, leading into a lovely pas de deux featuring the cor anglais and harp in the eponymous The Prince and Belle Rose.

I have to add here that each of the movements was played right through with minimal stoppage in-between, and latecomers missed the work in its entirety. However, this had the distinct advantage of allowing both audience and musicians to retain concentration and unity in the music-making from crowd disruption - a wise decision, even if tardy audiences suffered all the more for it.

Isao Matsushita (b.1950) is a Tokyo-born composer who studied composition in his native Japan and Germany. His manifesto in comingling elements of Japanese philosophy and music with contemporary Western forms led to the creation of experimental works such as Hi-Ten-Yu. Literally meaning "fly-heaven-play", this can also be taken to mean (like the Frank Sinatra song goes) "flying to heaven to play among the stars" - and in apparition, it was an ersatz concerto for taiko drums and orchestra.

Originally composed for an 8-piece ensemble of wind-and-strings, here it was performed in Matsushita's own transcription for full Western symphony. The centerpiece of attention - the oversized wadaiko - is actually a traditional Japanese drum used in special ceremonies as a representation of the unification of heaven and earth.

In the solo spotlight was Eitetsu Hayashi (below), arguably the world's first exponent of symphonic wadaiko. As would be expected, the sonority of the almighty drum was erumpent, or what writer David Foster Wallance might describe as "flatulence-of-the-Gods". I for one was glad this was a properly acoustically designed hall (and not, say, the University Cultural Centre), which imparted a comfortably rotund reverb to the subterranean bass frequencies.

As with all percussion showcases, the visual element was visceral in its intensity, yet spiritual in its approach. Matsushita's instrumental tone-painting conjured, for me, shades of Schoenberg's Vier Orchesterstücke. With its frenetic moments of full orchestral ad libitum, Field latched onto the spiky instrumental configurations with conviction and displayed his immaculate grasp of the music's rhythmic texture and complexity.

The result was a combustible, if not beguiling, tour de force of symphonic virtuosity from all quarters. Even without the soloist, this was especially a masterclass from the percussion section of the MPO. In the "cadenza", Hayashi's pulsating thrumming reached otherworldly levels of vertigo-inducing potency in an extended ascent of unremitting drumstrokes towards the inevitable apotheosis. This man made Riverdance look like a Boy Scouts' campfire.

No surprise that members of the audience leapt to their feet to give an ovation. After three curtain calls, Hayashi obliged with an encore. It was his self-composed Utegi, aptly meaning "celebration", which had the audience flouncing away in their seats; tapping their feet; headbanging to the beat. Utegi alone was worth the price of admission, if only for the rare opportunity to watch a wadaiko master in action.

Not unexpectedly, the audience seemed leaner after the break. Walton's First Symphony may not be on many people's A-list of favourite big works, and weighing in at forty-five minutes doesn't help its case any. Mirroring the composer's own emotional turmoil, Walton's Symphony was a highly anticipated event after his successes with Façcade (1922), Sinfonia Concertante (1927), Viola Concerto (1929) and Belshazzar's Feast (1931). It was presented with only three movements in 1934, and the full premiere not given until the following year.

From the opening timpani, horns and repeating oboe motif, Field set the mood of disquiet for the rest of the music to follow. This was not the pungency of chords and jagged rhythms evoking a sense of tension as much as simmering nervousness that was not allowed to reach a full boil. Certainly there was lots of bombast from the racuous brass adding their prickly shards into the mix, much as there was thrilling interplay between the various instrumental sections. But the agitation was not palpable - not by the end of the first movement, anyway.

In the central movements, the con malizia of syncopated chords and displaced rhythmic angularity was dispatched with more of the same subsultus from before. Field's affinity for this music was always in abundance, bringing out some excellent playing from the players - the woodwind choir, with their broad thematic arc, was given ample latitude to essay Walton's writing. In particular, the solo flute passage doloroso molto expressivo was sweetly done, as was the viola section in the third movement.

The final movement - appended separately and commonly less regarded from the first three - saw Field bringing out some dextrous playing from the orchestra in the meaty yet lyrical fugal passages. Splendiferous brass again punctuated the music with aplomb, while Section Principal Paul Philbert continued his fetish with the timpani (something which began in Hi-Ten-Yu). Much tension redux, and then Field unleashed everything over-the-top in the coda (including timpani in the mushroom-cloud range). I have to confess, Walton has never been my cup of tea - but this was a cathartic, wrenching experience all the same.

BENJAMIN CHEE favourite musical travelogue is Elinor Armer's Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts.

Return to the Classical Index!... or Visit the Inkvault archives!

11.4.2002 © Benjamin Chee

All original texts are copyrighted. Please seek permission from the Classical Editor
if you wish to reproduce/quote Inkpot material.