I love my city – Bristol. For sure, there are things that annoy me – the lack of a mass transit system – why? And certain derelict buildings that have stood like eyesores for decades. But overall, Bristol is a great place to live. Always stuff going on, a festival city, a city of hills, parks and waterways. I know I am lucky to live here. I can certainly recognise the joy and gratitude that Walt Whitman had for Manhattan:
A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men,
City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!
Continuing on my journey through recent concerts I have attended, here’s Bristolian Spring Part 2.
April 12 London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano. Alison Balsom Trumpet – Bristol Beacon
I am so glad I bought my ticket for this concert six months ago. I’m pretty sure I got the best seat in the house to see Alison Balsom’s incredible performance of Wynton Marsalis’s epic Trumpet Concerto. I have to say that Balsom reminded me of a deep sea, free diver with the way she was able to control her breathing and play this magnificently demanding 36-minute work with such precision, deftness and gusto. She made it look so serene and effortless. It was jaw droppingly good with wonderful use of the full range of trumpet furniture. An absolute tour de force and I cannot wait for a recording to be made of this. The LSO were again on top form and Antonio Pappano was in a different league. Daphnis and Chloe by Ravel completed the bill. Despite finding an hour-long piece challenging at the best of times, I absolutely love Ravel’s climaxes and orchestration. In an ideal world I would have traded my seat in the stalls for a tiered view to better see the brass, woodwinds and percussion in the second half (but you can’t have everything!).
April 14 National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain – Bristol Beacon
Although it’s hard to beat the experience of a top-notch orchestra, conductor and soloist playing to perfection, you can get a similar level of satisfaction from watching children play. A couple of days after the LSO and Alison Balsom I no doubt witnessed a few stars of the future as part of the National Children’s Orchestra showcase. (I was amazed to find out recently that the NCO are based in Paintworks in Totterdown, less than a mile from I live!). This was really well presented and highly engaging stuff featuring 150 kids playing Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It was lovely to see so many proud and expectant Mums and Dads in the audience perched on the end of their seats. Very uplifting stuff. My highlight was the incredible co-ordination of the percussion ensemble in their rendition of Stinkin’ Garbage by Ed Argenziano played on aluminium dust bins. Watch the video below to get a feel for the sheer exuberance of this piece – sure to put a smile on anyone’s face. As always with youth orchestras, they seemed to have a natural affinity with Latin music (Que Rico el Mambo by Perez Prado), the all-important double bass spins and the mighty crescendos. A grand job!
April 19 University of Bristol Department of Music Lunchtime Concert with The Bristol Ensemble conducted by John Pickard. Tomáš Klement piano – Victoria Rooms
The credit card machine wasn’t working at the Victoria Rooms so 50-60 strong lunchtime audience were treated to a fantastic free concert of almost completely new music. This concert more than any others above exemplified the fact that new music is vital, because it speaks of today. Sadie Harrison’s Nightingales of Afghanistan deals with recent events in Afghanistan particularly the chaotic allied exit in 2021. Essentially a mini piano concerto for left hand, it is moving, thought provoking and visceral and deserves a much bigger audience. Four pieces in all were played including A Birthday Letter by John Pickard, who was also conducting. This, 70th birthday tribute to fellow composer Richard Blackford is a top-notch chamber work – definitely the sort of present to treasure. In the words of the composer “the implications of the opening clarinet theme are continuously pursued through different sorts of moods, speeds, textures, ranging from wistfulness to ferocity”. Both A Birthday Letter and the miniature Breathe Shallow by Carmen Ho were receiving their premieres and all three composers were in the audience. It was great to be there and congratulations to everyone involved.
April 21 Schools’ Gala Concert: A Celebration of Light and Music. Bristol Youth Orcestra and Bristol Youth Choir – Bristol Beacon
Oh my goodness, I wasn’t expecting this. Lots of hooked on classics done very well but also three new pieces and again three composers in the house. David Ogden got everyone in audience singing along to the South African traditional Freedom is Coming. It made me want to go and join a choir immediately. During the interval the Jazz Ambassadors played on the Bridgehouse Stage in the foyer and that was really high class too.
There was a lovely new choral work called Light by Esther Bersweden and the final piece by Toby Young set the words of impresario Peter Sellars in a piece called The Importance of Music.
Music is about everything else we care about, we think about, we feel.What I get to do is to put music on a stage to describe people’s lives, to describe people’s hope, to describe everything people long to have in this world. Which comes in its first form from music.
We need music in the schools we need music in our homes in our lives in business and in politics. (Please!)
And we need music in prisons and refugee camps.
Music is about everything we are hoping for and is not here yet.
And music is here ahead of its time to tell us it’s coming.
If you didn’t come out of this concert with a spring in your step, I don’t know what’s wrong with you? Incredible joie de vivre and all for the price of a fancy cup of coffee!
April 24 The Death Songbook – Paraorchestra with Brett Anderson, Charles Hazlewood, Gwenno and Nadine Shah – Roundhouse in London
This makes the list as the Paraorchestra (who are made up of disabled and non-disabled performers) are based in Bristol and Harriet Riley (of the Sound World Ensemble) was playing percussion. Together with Suede frontman Brett Anderson, Charles Hazlewood and guests presented songs from their new album The Death Songbook. It was quite a night – Anderson has lost none of his showman persona and still has a great voice capable of wonderful things. Lots of highlights with songs by Suede, Mercury Rev, Japan but the stand out was Jacques Brel’s My Death. It’s great when you hear one of your favourites do a song by another of your favourites and pull it off. The version on the album (also live) doesn’t come close to the performance on the night. (Is it me or is there some synergy between My Death and Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, D940? Listen to the Spotify playlist in Bristolian Spring 1).
Back in the mid-90s Suede didn’t do encores, however much you clapped and cheered. Gone are the brash days of youth – on this occasion Brett was a bit sheepish as he admitted that they didn’t have an encore up their sleeve so they simply performed the first song from the show again. It was a shame as I was holding out my hopes that a concert all about death which ended with the ironic song Wonderful Life by Black would be followed by Anderson’s incomparable Still Life – the final song from the seminal Dog Man Star album. Such a shame as that would have brought the house down.
An aside: My thoughts on Suede
Suede are an incredible band. I’ve seen them three times live (at the Colston Hall (now renamed The Bristol Beacon) back in 1995, the National in Kilburn in 1996 and by complete fluke at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen in 2015). As far as I’m concerned no one else writes lyrics with such vivid descriptions of deprivation and make them sound so full of grandeur – there are mentions of bouquets of cellophane, car alarms, pebble dashed graves, squalid bedsits, nuclear winters and romances ruined by drink and drugs. This is the stuff of a dystopian now – the subject matter is often bleak but there is a tremendous will and an admirable strength in the characters involved in these kitchen sink dramas.
Albums are Suede’s forte – every one is best listened to from start to finish. You know when a Suede album begins and you know when they end. On numerous occasions the final song takes you skyward and comes to a conclusion with a full stop. No need for hidden songs five minutes after the last track – the band have said what they want to say and left the building! The Next Life, Still Life and Faultlines are just some of their peerless closing tracks. I don’t know any other band that so consistently finish an album with such symphonic bravura and clarity – this firmly cements Suede’s place in the pantheon of rock history.
Bristol New Music 2024 – A City Wide Festival of Contemporary Music and Sound
April 25 The Ringing World Sarahsson with Impermanence at The Mount Without
The Mount Without is a perfect venue for any gothic piece. Sarahsson performed prose, multi-instrumental playing whilst Impermanence provided the dance elements. I’m not really a fan of the spoken word set to music although this must be in vogue at the moment (the support act Faker Villain at the Roundhouse the night before, did something similar). I found it hard to follow the narrative but I think it was the story of the ancient church and all the things, good and bad that had happened there through time. The lighting by Roo Macphee and sound were very impressive as was the magisterial flag waving by Joshua Ben-Tovim at the start. The stand out moment for me was the cataclysmic sound of the amplified musical saw and lighting effects through what I perceived was the Second World War Blitz. That was truly something else.
April 26 Earth – Piano – Sky – Marie Vermeulin (piano) Neal Farwell (sound diffusion) at the Victoria Rooms (lunchtime concert)
More pyrotechnics were served up the following lunchtime by pianist Marie Vermeulin in another absolute belter of a concert at the Victoria Rooms! Like the week before I was ushered in without paying! Not sure what is going on there? The University of Bristol’s Neal Farwell’s Concerto for Piano and Loudspeaker Orchestra was given its English premiere. It’s clearly inspired by Messiaen but for me it was like a scintillating cocktail where Copland’s Piano Variations, his Piano Sonata and Piano Fantasy had been shaken together and served up with added sounds of nature: bird life (I picked out Wrens and Great Tits) running water and all sorts of other interesting things. The Concerto accomplished maximum percussive resonance when Vermeulin stretched into the guts of the piano and bashed the strings – great stuff! This had all the hallmarks of a piece that will find a place in the repertory. I really hope so.
There was simply no lull in the concert. Thierry Pecou’s Gamelan bien tempere no 3 and 5 (well tempered Gamelan) written in 2022 and Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jesus were superbly played as well. I have heard someone say that it is not enough to hear Messiaen played you need to see it with your own eyes. This concert attested to that. Vermeulin’s playing was some of the most virtuosic piano work I have ever seen and equally as impressive as Alison Balsom’s trumpet masterclass a few weeks earlier. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who missed this concert, but, the next best thing……. you can watch a YouTube video of the world premiere at Queen’s University Belfast below:
April 27 Austerity Music – Middle Aisle Ensemble at the Cube Microplex
And now for something completely different…… There was more than a bit of influence from Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python in this lunchtime performance of funny sketches with music written in response to the defunding of arts in the UK. All the performers were University of Bristol students and all the music was written by the ensemble which included flute, French horn, piano, viola, cello and double bass as well as stylophone, recycled keyboard, bottles and jars. Performers included Samuel Pradalie and George Owen who I have encountered previously at Sound World gigs. One of the pieces (A duet to pass the time, Upcycled) was apparently written by the former and then upcycled by the latter. It was given a time limit of three minutes – it definitely left the audience wanting more.
The most instantly engaging tune was Just the Accompaniment ‘Just the condiments’ composed by and performed by Richard Jones on a slightly beat up piano. This sounded like Ben Folds improvising on a theme of Vince Guaraldi (i.e. Charlie Brown music). I would happily listen to that again and again.
Like all sketch shows, some gags hit and some missed but all round it was very entertaining. I hope they keep this up. Too often, classical music is a bit too elitist, staid and takes itself too seriously. Also, this provided a very important message – these aspiring composers/performers are producing music now and need to make a crust. We should be investing more in the arts, not less, and as Peter Sellars suggests above, our society will be far better off for it.
April 27 & 28 Kathy Hinde: ‘Earthquake Mass Reimagined’ – The Crypt of St John on the Wall
The most exquisite way to end my Bristolian Spring. 12 turn tables with their own integral speaker each playing one of the individual voice parts from Antoine Brumel’s ‘Earthquake’ Mass (c.1497). The installation (a collaboration between audio visual artist Kathy Hinde and Mexican choir ‘Staccato’) allowed visitors to stand in the centre of the sound world and become completely immersed. This would be special on its own but the turntables were adapted to respond to seismic data from Mexico enabling the sound to become “splintered and disintegrated”. In addition, throughout the process the individual styli moved up an down on the vinyl which added an additional hypnotic effect. Simply stunning! I loved it so much that I went back the following day with my wife Sheena and my Mum.
Helia Asadbeck and Sam Hothershall stand at the centre of ‘Earthquake Mass Reimagined’ at the Crypt of St John on the Wall
A final word
Just a note – most performances like the ones above are only possible with generous support from patrons (as well as funding bodies). You can do the maths – the ticket price alone covers only some of the costs and FREE events make no money at all.
You can make a donation to the various groups mentioned in my two Bristolian Spring blogs above by clicking these links:
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