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David McGuinness's diary - Sep-Dec 2000 Wednesday
20 December 2000 My brain declares a holiday – tired from all the various projects of the last few months, and, I have to admit, a bit of token partying this week. Today I did a bit of planning for the McFall’s sessions in a couple of weeks’ time, and caught up on some correspondence. There were plenty of interesting things, including a note from Davitt Moroney with some news on Oswald’s pseudonyms, and an enquiry from Finland about John Clerk. But now it’s time for some R&R. Monday 18 December 2000 Last week turned into a bit of a Haydn-fest. Besides the Harmoniemesse with the SCO, which was deadly dull on the first night, but livened up a bit on Friday, Melvyn Tan was in town playing a lunchtime date at the RSAMD, finishing off a flurry of BBC programme-making activity on my part. I'd persuaded him to play the fortepiano, even though he really concentrates on what I call 'big black piano' these days. And he gave a wonderfully reckless and dramatic performance, taking huge risks, and drawing all kinds of musical colours out of the instrument. If something didn't quite come off technically (and there were plenty of things that didn't) he'd just try something else even more outrageous. He played the big Haydn E flat sonata and Beethoven's op10 no2, which I learned for my Grade 8 exam 20 years ago, and it was such a relief after the good-natured but sterile experience of playing for a certain conductor (see previous entry), to hear someone equally good-natured not be ashamed to communicate their personality through their playing. Emboldened by this and some great sushi, I improvised tastefully but extravagantly throughout the Rameau suite that evening, and drew some smiles from the rest of the band, and, once, even from the conductor. Whoa - music as communication - this actually seemed like a radical idea after the previous night. My other BBC activity in the last few weeks has been making Opera in Action for Radio 3. This is an interesting challenge for me, as although I've got nothing against opera itself, I find the culture that surrounds it repellent and I avoid it at every opportunity. Still, I had the chance to book some fun contributors, especially the promoter Raymond Gubbay talking about classical music in a world without subsidy, and the frail but utterly charming John Mortimer on Mozart's greatest librettist Lorenzo da Ponte and his working methods: sex, drugs and recitative basically. On Saturday I dashed over to Edinburgh in the evening to hear The Bach Players at St Cecilia's Hall. Nicolette Moonen, who runs the group, is an occasional guest leader of ConCal and is a wonderfully organised player, always a delight to work with, as she makes things easier rather than more difficult. Paul Nicholson gave a great account of the difficult bits in Brandenburg 5 on the fake Kirckman harpsichord that lives in the Russell Collection - I went round to see him at the end to discover he'd already gone to catch the night bus to London, as he had to play the organ for a service the following morning. Glamorous huh? I was surprised to find Alison McG was playing cello, and even more surprised to see she was playing a whole Bach cello suite (and from memory) - she hadn't mentioned the concert at all at lunch the other day. Mysterious people, these cellists. After the concert, Grant O'Brien, curator of the Russell Collection took me aside with a conspiratorial look in his eye, and said 'come upstairs'. In the Gallery, beside the two most famous French harpsichords in the collection, sat another, made in the same street in Paris around the same time in the 1770s. Richly decorated with unusual delicacy, it looked astonishing, covered in mischievous Cupids, and the few notes that worked sounded pretty remarkable too. It's being looked after for someone (this is where I get oblique) with a view to being restored to its full glory and playing condition - Grant told me with some glee that one just like it was recently sold at auction for £3 million. It seems to have been taken from France to another far corner of the globe as loot at the end of WW2. In amongst all of this, I bumped into James Waters from the Edinburgh Festival backstage in the Queen's Hall. After giving me his opinion of the concert (which I won't reproduce), he said it would be mid-January before they could give us a decision on The Gentle Shepherd for next year's Festival. So limbo continues there. Today I got a copy of John Harley's new book on Orlando Gibbons in the mail, and was delighted to discover not only that a little paper I published 5 years ago is in his bibliography, but that he also discusses its contents, on Gibbons's solo songs. I'm in four footnotes - does that make me an academic? He did spell my name wrongly though. Wednesday 13 December 2000 This morning I mended the garden fence that had blown down in the night, and then went off to a meeting with our accountant, to sort out some tax problems to do with ConCal's incorporation as a limited company last year. It looks like we'll have to give the Revenue a sum of money, only for them to return it in another form some time later. This happens to me a lot - I get a whopping great bill, find a way to pay it, and then a few months later, they give me all the money back under a different name. A great way to keep lots of civil servants in work. Marie and I stayed on in the convivial surroundings of the café to meet Alison McGillivray for lunch. She's up teaching in the RSAMD, and just got back from a month-long American tour as principal cellist in the Academy of Ancient Music. She said 'it's nice to be here, it reminds me I have a life'. I was in SCO rehearsals for the rest of the day, with Harry Bicket conducting Handel and Rameau. For all Harry's faults (he's not Mr Charisma, and is far better at working with singers than with instrumentalists), he has the rare talent of almost always picking perfect tempi. In Baroque and Classical music this is absolutely vital, as so many other things will just come right if you play the music at the right speed. But a conductor who can do this is all too rare. The orchestra quickly got bored, and were completely undisciplined by the end of the afternoon session (I spent a lot of time making unprintable anagrams of the names of players around me), but at the end of the day we played through the Rameau Les Boreades suite and it lifted everyone's spirits. At one stage in tonight's rehearsal, I heard the fateful words 'Oi! Slasher!' ring out across the cello section from Kevin McCrae. A few years ago the principal cellist, Ursula Smith gave me the nickname Slasher, but could never quite come up with a reason why. Answers on a postcard please ... Had dinner with Robert McFall and Alison Green in a great little Thai carry out just up from the Queen's Hall, and Alison read Hello! magazine while we planned January's Mr McFall's Chamber recording sessions. It now looks like Linn Records might release the McFalls tango record I produced for them in September. Robert mentioned he'd found this diary on the internet last night, so if you go to his diary by clicking here, you may just find his account of our conversation. Or maybe not. I spent the train journey to Edinburgh listening properly to the Prefab Sprout demos that Calum Malcolm sent me, and making some notes about possible orchestral arrangements. That job could just be easier than I'd thought. And now I'm on the train home with a nice bottle of beer, and I'm going to stop writing this and write a letter to another accountant. Sunday 3 December 2000 It was difficult
to make much headway with ConCal work last week – we’re waiting for some
figures from our accountant to go into a funding application, and waiting to
hear from the Edinburgh Festival about the Gentle Shepherd.
The Festival have said ‘it looks like we’re moving towards a yes on
this one’, but that’s not quite the same thing as a simple ‘yes’.
If it goes ahead, then all our energies will get channeled into that for
a while, finishing the Mungrel Stuff CD to launch at the same time,
researching and preparing the performances, and planning how to make the most of
the exposure. But we don’t know
if it’s happening yet. Still,
there’s plenty to occupy me in the meantime, making radio programmes,
producing McFall’s (back in the studio on Tuesday), and deciphering Prefab
Sprout demos. I gave a lecture at
the RSAMD on Friday – the students came up with some good answers as to why
learning from and about the past is a good idea, but trying to reconstruct it
isn’t. We were talking about
baroque music, but it could have been about anything really. The
composer Andrew Cruickshank dropped round this afternoon to borrow a DAT machine
– we were in a jazz band together when I was 15, playing mostly Coltrane
numbers. Andrew played bass, and
also took blissed-out flute solos. Now
he writes music for films (he won a BAFTA last year), and Greg from McFall’s
is playing in a gig of his tomorrow: a live performance of a film score,
followed by the film itself. At
least I think it’s that way round. This
morning I learnt something very useful: my harpsichord doesn’t fit in my car.
Normally I don’t move it myself, but the minister of our local parish
church asked me a while ago if I’d play in this morning’s service. I
ended up driving it round to the church at about 3 miles per hour with the
keyboard end sticking out the back, as the minister and another valiant
parishioner followed behind, hanging on in case it slipped.
It must have looked like we were transporting a coffin, after the hearse
failed to show up. Friday 24 November 2000 Today's been busy. Had a meeting with Marie first thing to talk over last week's ConCal board meeting, and discuss ideas for venues and promotion. After a bit of brainstorming, we came up with a feasible plan for a series of late-night chamber concerts in St Andrews in the Square in Glasgow, where we made the John Clerk record. It all depends on various other parties being able and willing to be part of the project in one role or another, so I think I'll be spending Tuesday writing emails and letters to see if there's a chance it might happen. For most of today I worked on the 2nd edit of the McFalls tango album, then dashed over to the City Hall for tonight's SCO concert with Thomas Zehetmair, dropping into the BBC en route. Herr Zehetmair is VERY serious - I thought you were allowed to crack a smile occasionally in Mozart, but apparently not - but he has lightened up a bit since Inverness on Wednesday. I enjoyed playing tonight, for the first time this week. Tuesday morning's meeting with Brian McMaster at the Edinburgh Festival went OK ('much better than I expected' said James Waters afterwards). Brian has the knack of being extremely rude about everything, which is great, because you can be rude back without him taking offence. My opening line was something like 'James tells me you think The Gentle Shepherd is a load of crap', which seemed to get his attention. Anyway, after an entertaining 45 minutes or so in which we batted about ideas for staging it, James and I hashed together a rough budget, and now it's up to the two of them to decide if it happens. Let's hope so: we could do with some high profile gigs. Apart from anything else, we have a CD to launch! It's been an interesting week: even although there's been three concerts in it, the playing's been completely incidental to everything else. Most people get into the music business through playing an instrument, and I suppose I have got up on stage three times this week and played. But it's felt like an appendage to all the business, planning, research, and for that matter the sitting at a computer editing an album. There's an economic context too: the SCO pays quite well, but if I were playing in the RSNO this week as a principal, I'd be paid less than £70 for each day I worked. It doesn't take much imagination to realise that sitting in a office filling in forms for someone is rather more profitable than fulfilling your "musical calling". But then it's like plenty of other professions - the only way to earn a decent living is to get promoted out of what you're really good at. The rant above is of course my way of salving my guilty conscience at not having done any practice for a couple of weeks ... Monday 20 November 2000 I've been reading the text of Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd as preparation for seeing Brian McMaster (director of the Edinburgh Festival) tomorrow. There's just a chance he might be talked into letting us do it in some form next year, but he's not wild about it as a piece. As far as I can make out, the last professional production was at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949. Still, things are looking up for a possible visit to Rome in March, sharing a bill with the folk band Old Blind Dogs, courtesy of the British Council. If it comes off, I hope we can persuade OBD's singer Jim Malcolm to do a number or two with us as well - last summer we did Auld Lang Syne together, to the old tune, for a live radio broadcast for the opening of the Scottish Parliament. I've been editing the tango album for Mr McFall's Chamber this past week - I set up all the gear at one end of our kitchen, which on the face of it is a funny place to edit a record, but it feels very civilised. The company of inquisitive children and the smell of cooking are far preferable to the confines of a commercial studio. I'm working on headphones quite a lot though, as the strains of Astor Piazzolla, heard only in repeated three-second bursts, were driving everyone in the house insane. Calum Malcolm did the remixes from the multitrack tapes at his house last Wednesday, and he mentioned that Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout had written a record's worth of orchestral music on his computer - would I be interested in sorting out the scores for him? So in the next week or so I'm expecting a demo CD and a disk of the MIDI files, to see what I make of it. Prefab Sprout were certainly a cut above your average 80s band, so it could turn out to be very interesting ... This week I'm playing in the SCO, directed by the violinist Thomas Zehetmair. I heard his string quartet on the radio when they were in Edinburgh last summer, and they sounded quite superb - one sign of their musical commitment is that they play everything from memory, which is quite rare for quartets. Alison McGillivray plays in a baroque group, Ricordo, that does the same. All I'm doing this week is playing harpsichord in a Haydn symphony, which isn't exactly high profile, but it's always enlightening watching a really good musician rehearse. The SCO are good company too. Ursula Leveaux gave me a lift to the station after the rehearsal - she's just come back from Japan, playing with Katherine McGillivray in Jiggy Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage. This should be a cue for lots of scurrilous JEG stories, but no, this is not the place ... Friday 10 November 2000 Not the most productive of weeks - I've been ill. This is not something I'm used to, having inherited the stubborn constitution (and attitude) of my father, who never lost a day's work until he was well into his 60s. But on Wednesday I was reduced to a shivering mess wrapped up in a duvet on the floor, drifting in and out of sleep in front of the fire. It must be about 15 years since I was last ill enough to stop moving for more than half an hour. Today I felt strong enough to don my BBC hat and look after Nancy Argenta and Maggie Cole's lunchtime concert at the RSAMD. I've never been a great fan of Maggie's harpsichord playing (although I did once consider having lessons with her, just because our styles are polar opposites), but her fortepiano accompaniments were exemplary. Listening to her made me realise I've still got a long way to go playing those things. Strangely enough, Gary Cooper and I had a brief guilty conversation after his gig the other week along the lines of 'Have you got the hang of this fortepiano lark yet?' 'No.' 'Me neither.' And he's just made a great record of the Mozart piano quartets with Sonnerie - hope he doesn't read this. Nancy had a terrible cold, and by halfway through the concert her speaking voice had pretty much gone (she went straight for the inhaler every time she came offstage), but her singing was uncannily precise, and vividly coloured. You'd never have guessed she wasn't a picture of health. And then she went on to give a long masterclass immediately afterwards - what a pro. Brian McMaster at the Edinburgh Festival wants me to go and see him to talk about The Gentle Shepherd, so I'm going to have to do some swotting up over the next week or two to try and convince him it's worth putting on. Apparently he's not wild about it as a text, so perhaps I can sell it to him as an essential piece of Scottish theatre history: it did run for about 70 years in Edinburgh, so it can't be complete tosh. Monday 6 November 2000 It's been a while since my last diary entry - Marie and I have been ploughing on, talking to various promoters about next year's plans, and preparing a funding application for another
record. This always seems simple in prospect: you have an idea, then you look for someone to back
it. But it inevitably turns out to be more complicated, as you try to figure out just what it is about the project that the So-and-so Foundation will be interested in, and how to sell it to them. As I was typing this, Ben from the SCO rang to offer me a harmonium-playing job accompanying Wolfgang Holzmair in January. By chance, I'd come across my copy of August Reinhard's Harmonium-Schule when I was clearing out the study the other day, so I'd better get my ankles and knees in training now. I suppose the only modern instrument that involves moving your knees in and out is the pedal steel guitar - not many people play that either. Friday
27 October 2000 Made a
quick call to Marie first thing this morning to discuss the various materials
we’re sending out to promoters, hustling for next year’s gigs. This week’s principal victims are York Early Music Festival
and a British Council event in Rome. After
that, I spent the rest of the day as a producer of one sort or another.
Last night
an old colleague from my days writing music for TV rang to see if I was
interested in doing a theme tune. Haven’t
done that kind of thing for a few years now, but it wasn’t an urgent job (telly
jobs are usually very urgent, as no-one thinks about the music until it’s
nearly too late), so I said yes. I opened
this morning’s Guardian to see that a CD that I’d produced was
‘Classical CD of the Week’ – a live recording of Judith Weir’s A
Night at the Chinese Opera with the SCO and Andrew Parrott, recorded in
Glasgow last February. Most
‘live’ CD recordings are made over a number of nights, perhaps with
additional patching sessions to fix the dodgy moments, and then hundreds, or
even of thousands, of edits are made to stick all the best bits together.
Not so this one – one performance, with the sound tidied up a bit.
It sounds pretty good if I say so myself. Then today
saw the first of a series of lunchtime concerts I’m producing for the BBC at
the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
Carolyn Sampson gave a wonderfully dramatic performance of Haydn’s Arianna
a Naxos with Gary Cooper. The
last time I heard that piece I was playing it on the radio myself with Catherine
Bott, and I hadn’t realised before now just how fast we take some of it: our
version is about 3 minutes shorter!
Gary’s playing just gets better and better – we resolved to play
duets and drink beer sometime when I’m in London – and Carolyn is a star in
the making. This
evening I had a meeting with some of Mr McFall’s Chamber about the second CD
that I’m producing of theirs. I
nearly talked myself into playing a harmonica solo on one track, but I think I
was just reticent enough about the idea to be able to back out of it again
gracefully. As a point of principle, all the advance plans
for both of these CDs have been made on the back of one large brown envelope –
it’s getting a bit grubby now. Sunday
22 October 2000 Well,
holiday’s nearly over, but I managed to get a few things done in the meantime.
I mastered enough of Sibelius (the program, not the composer) to make a
set of Muffat parts and an edition of Clerk’s violin sonata.
I got our music library reorganised - I got my study reorganised, come to
think of it, to make room for the harpsichord, now returned from Marie’s house
where it’s lived for a year or so. And I found
time to do a bit of reading: the thing about researching 18th century
Scottish culture is that nearly all the books on it are out of print, so
there’s a certain sense of achievement just getting hold of them in the first
place, never mind digesting the contents. Meanwhile,
the local paper said the following about our concert in Crieff: Thursday 12 October 2000 Yesterday I found myself re-reading Robert Fripp's reasoning behind internet diaries. I quote: My own aim, in asking the other players to contribute Diary entries, is to engage the listening community at an earlier stage in the creative process. Usually, the engagement begins when the audience enters the performance space. Now, this may begin when the performer / composer begins to work with a particular idea. The listening community might then enter the performance space already up and running. If they wish.I like the 'If they wish'. Well, today certainly counts as early in the 'creative process'. If you wish to engage with it, here it is. I spent most of this morning writing to friendly concert promoters ('remember us?'), and then out of the blue a radio producer rang to see if I would be interested in taking part in a feature about James Oswald, and Scots in London - could be promising. Then off I went to Glasgow University to re-register at the library, leaving with two different editions of The Gentle Shepherd, one of which includes an account of the first performances in the 1720s. Across the road in the Concert Hall, Mr McFall's Chamber were giving a lunchtime concert, so I popped in to listen, and to drop off my annotations on the multitrack tapes of their tango album. Robert's going to pass the tapes on to Calum Malcolm, he of the legendary 1980's Blue Nile albums (and the forthcoming Concerto Caledonia CD come to that), who's going to remix for us in November. Ninian was guesting on bass with McFalls today, so it was fun to watch him in action from the audience rather than from just across the stage, as his ever-animated expressions move from intense concentration to relaxed enjoyment. Bass players and cellists are usually good to watch - it's probably just the physicality of having to wrestle with such a cumbersome instrument and make it flow. Sometimes I wonder if it's a bit rude that I play with my back to the audience, but it does mean I get the best view of the rest of the band, which can be very entertaining in itself. A quick post-concert discussion of fortepiano maintenance with Prof. Graham Hair, and then off to the shops in Nin's car for computer sundries and a load of filing stationery. My copy of the score-writing program Sibelius arrived today, so next week's supposed holiday will probably mutate into an extended software tutorial and exercise in music librarianship. Most of the music preparation for Concerto Caledonia involves scissors and photocopiers, and given the varied legibility of some of the 18th century material, it's about time I started typesetting it properly for the good of everyone's eyesight. The Muffat parts in last week's concert gave rise to some complaints ('is that supposed to be an F sharp?'), as the photocopier in Marie's local shop had been a bit under the weather the day I did the cut-and-paste job. Add to that a chat on the phone to our accountant, and this evening spent looking after the kids, and there you have it: the early creative process. Not very glamorous, is it? Tuesday 10 October 2000 A whole day spent working at home with no interruptions - what luxury. In the end I did no ConCal stuff at all (apart from ringing Marie to see how she was getting on), but I sat in front of the fire with a DAT machine and a pile of tapes, plotting the edit for the Mr McFall's Chamber tango CD. There's some seriously sexy singing from Valentina - I confidently predict that when the CD comes out, lonely young men across the globe will listen to it late at night with headphones on dreaming of Ms Martinez. Went to hear the OAE with Andreas Scholl on Saturday. It was nice to hang out for a few hours in the orchestra's hotel bar afterwards, as there's a very specific atmosphere that only prevails in a touring orchestra's residents bar after a gig. After all, it's not going to close until they all leave. I just wish the concert had been as enjoyable. I only go to concerts as a punter 2 or 3 times a year, and when they don't connect with me I find it a bit depressing. The hall was far too big for the band to make any impact, and although Scholl has a wonderful voice, he might as well have been singing his shopping list for most of the time. It's not enough just to be presented with something beautiful; it has to say something to you as well, and it sounded like he didn't know what the songs were about. He's an intelligent guy, so maybe he just hasn't figured out yet how to communicate it. Still, shouldn't moan, as he let Jo Parker take his flowers so that I could bring them home for Helen. So now you know where soloists' bouquets end up after posh concerts ... Saturday 7 October 2000This week I
got round to some of the chores left over from last week’s concert, like
filing all the parts away. I must
reorganise our music library sometime: at the moment it’s all in folders which
live somewhere near my study ceiling, in cardboard boxes which originally held
containers of dialysis solution. They’re very strong boxes. On Thursday
I went to the launch for next year’s Celtic Connections festival and
caught up with a few promoters, and on Friday had lunch with James Waters at the
Edinburgh Festival, where we batted about the idea of doing The Gentle
Shepherd next year. I wasn’t
quite prepared for his enthusiasm, so I’ll need to do some more research
pretty quickly if he really wants to do it.
Let’s see. Tuesday 3 October 2000 Alison and
her dad, who’s a tireless supporter of the group, and generous source of
accommodation for visiting musicians, dropped in last night to help me drink the
bottle of champagne that Mr McFall’s Chamber had given me at the end of their
sessions last week, kind souls that they are.
And then an email arrived from Joanna Parker saying she’ll be in town
next weekend playing in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (or
Embezzlement as it’s usually known amongst musicians), so we can meet up.
It’s got
very sociable all of a sudden – I’ve gradually got used to the fact that
most of the band live hundreds or even thousands of miles away, so that casual
encounters to talk shop or just to hang out don’t happen on the whole. Only
two of the core group live within 50 miles of here, most live round about London
where the nearest jobbing work playing on old instruments is, and Chris is 3000
miles away in Baltimore. It’s
curiously artificial, but it’s also a necessity when what we do is so
specialised. Other similar groups
have the same problem: Andrew Lawrence-King’s group The Harp Consort are
scattered all over Europe. But it’s always very gratifying when we get together and
gel so quickly, as though we hadn’t been away. The real
down side is that for us to work at all is very expensive, as pretty much
everyone has travel and accommodation expenses on top of our fees. I suppose we’re a ‘luxury item’.
That’s why I like recording so much – you take an event that’s
extremely costly, and by the end of the process a large number of people can buy
it in a record shop for under fifteen quid, or hear it on the radio for free.
Great. Sunday
1 October 2000 The concert
in Crieff on Wednesday was great fun, but by the middle of the afternoon I’d
become completely dispirited, as we were playing in the Hydro’s drawing room,
where about half the wall area is covered by floor to ceiling curtains.
It’s about as unflattering an acoustic for old instruments as you can
imagine. Still, once we got to the
Scots repertoire it all came alive a bit – I suppose the lesson learned is
that if you’re in a dead acoustic, play louder – and the concert itself was
terrific. They want us back to do
something bigger next year, which is always a good sign. Rod Cameron
(legendary flute maker) was there, and just happened to have a
couple of digital recorders and some very classy B&K mikes about his person,
so he made an ‘official bootleg’, and is going to send me a CD sometime.
Alison had brought beer and crisps for the bus on the way home – by far
the best way to wind down after a gig. Ninian saw
a truck on his way there bearing the legend ‘George Moffat & Co’ – I
wonder if we can track it down and be photographed in front of it, as part of
the continuing quest to have Georg Muffat recognised as Scottish … Tuesday 26 September 2000Exhausted
after long rehearsal today, but it was fun.
The McGibbon stuff, which we haven’t tried out before, went like a
bomb, and the Muffat pieces that are new to us worked well too. The old Oswald favourites come out sounding different every
time, which is great – we’re familiar enough with the style now not to have
to worry about every note, or who plays when. In the
evening session we were in the hands of Ben Twist for a stagecraft rehearsal –
just practising the mechanics of going on and off, bowing or not as the case may
be, trying to get me to stand still while talking to the audience. Hard work. How
much of it we’ll remember in the course of a long concert remains to be seen,
but it’s very valuable to put time aside to deal with all that side of things.
There’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter how good you are, if you
can’t project it in a convincing manner. Friday 22 September 2000Starting to
get my head around the music for next week’s gig.
I always find it difficult to know exactly how to prepare for rehearsals,
as so much depends on how the musicians’ personalities interact.
With some people, you can start completely open-minded and wait to see
what happens on the day. And with
others, it’s a good idea to decide beforehand how every single note goes, and
then just dictate it ruthlessly. So
I’m sitting at the harpsichord thinking ‘how would so-and-so play this
bit?’ What
makes it more difficult is that there’s no singing in this concert. With vocal music, there’s a text which usually means
something, so you can say in rehearsal: this bit should be angry, sexy, tired,
contented – whatever, and there’s an instant sense of common purpose.
But when you’ve only got notes, they can mean precisely opposite things
to two different people, and then those people still have to play them together.
Still, I recognise this musing as my usual week-before-the-gig spell of
self-doubt, which will pass soon enough. Had a long
meeting with Philip Hobbs at Linn Records this week – as is our wont, we
talked about everything other than the next CD, and I got home at about 2am
wondering if casting Ewan McGregor in The Gentle Shepherd would really be
such a bright idea. Monday 18 September 2000Costed out
a future recording project in detail this morning, as the first stage in the
search for a financial backer for it. It’s
not cheap (for us anyway) but then nothing ever is when you look at the bottom
line. Look higher up the
spreadsheet and no-one really gets paid that much.
Catherine
Bott emailed me a kind review of a recent concert from the Birmingham Post –
rather than being described as her ‘accompanist’ (a label keyboard players
are prone to take with slightly hurt feelings), I’m apparently her ‘artistic
partner and foil’, which is rather nice.
A Dudley Moore to her Peter Cook perhaps?
The review signs off with ‘when such a fortepiano is played by
McGuinness, who needs a pianoforte?’ As
I remember, a good ol’ black pianoforte would have been quite welcome that
night, as the little Viennese thing I had to play wasn’t in the best of
health. And it was on the radio as
well – I’ve never dared listen to the tape, although it’s sitting here on
the desk in front of me. Halfway
through the afternoon, Malcolm Greenhalgh, who was tuning and did a wonderful
job turning the thing into something approaching a musical instrument, exclaimed
‘I hate fortepianos! Give me two
organs and four harpsichords any day’. I had a
chance to talk fortepianos this afternoon with Philip Jenkins, who’s head of
keyboard studies at the RSAMD. I
was in there as external examiner to someone’s harpsichord re-sit – it must
be a dismal business, having to prepare for an exam when all the other students
are still on holiday. We ended up
talking about the downturn in music education in British schools, which is now
making itself felt a bit higher up the ladder.
Nearly all of his star postgraduate students are now from Eastern Europe
or the Far East – the British ones don’t seem to make the grade (or maybe
they just go elsewhere). Saturday 16 September 2000 A useful couple of days' research. I spent Thursday morning in the Mitchell Library with their (possibly now unique) copy of Alexander Reinagle's book of Scots Tunes for harpsichord, and two different editions of McGibbon's tune books. The librarian tells me that their priceless collection of old music is sitting 'baking on a metal shelf' somewhere out the back, and muses on how nice it would be to be funded properly. The old card catalogue says they have two copies of the 1761 McGibbon book but an extensive search by two people only turns one of them up. Anyway, it's very nice to be back in a great old public library, founded by bequest back in the days when at least some rich people thought that education was a good thing. I used to go there a lot in the evenings when I was about 14, and when most of my schoolmates were probably out drinking Bacardi and coke, trying hard to lose their virginity. The library had a great music and audio lending section, and I used to leave with Stockhausen scores under my arm, to go home and lay them out on the floor while listening to the records. My friend James and I were soon well acquainted with the works of Stockhausen, Cage and the occasional Dave Swarbrick album (more of which later). I suppose my interest in old music began with hearing David Wulstan's LP of reconstructed Gibbons verse anthems, borrowed from that library one rainy evening. Anyhow it's strange to go back after such a long time: I'm still wary of getting static shocks off the lift buttons, and the photocopiers still smell exactly the same. Reinagle's book is more interesting than I'd expected. I'd pretty much stopped looking for good Scots keyboard music of the period as it usually turns out to be junk - this is mostly junk, but there are some great fun bits which make up for it, including some pointless flights of virtuosity. After Reinagle emigrated, he published the book again in Philadelphia, hence Olivier Baumont's interest for his CD. I think a Reinagle tune will find its way into our concert in a couple of weeks as an added extra. While learning this at the harpsichord on Friday morning, I took the opportunity to play through Oswald's collection of 'the best Scotch and English Songs', which I've somehow never got around to. There's a huge pile of folders on my study window-sill containing masses of photocopied material from various libraries' collections, waiting for me to work my way through it, and this one's time had come. Going through Oswald's publications is a frustrating process. He was an astute businessman, which sometimes meant that volume of product took precedence over inspiration - put bluntly, a lot of his music is crap. I'd got about halfway through the book, and I'd just got irritated at the lazy banality of his harmony for 'Rosline Castle' and was about to give up, when I found his version of 'Wat ye wha I met yestreen'. His arrangement is so utterly bizarre that I didn't even recognise the tune (which I knew originally from an old Dave Swarbrick album - thanks to the Mitchell Library again). Oswald's Airs for the Seasons are the same - trawling through 96 sonatas, you're just about to lose the will to live when he plays a blinder and comes up with something really inspirational. Anyway, Wat ye wha etc. is the one song missing from the music printed at the back of the 1788 Glasgow edition of Ramsay's ballad opera The Gentle Shepherd, so I must look and see if Ramsay's words fit Oswald's strange harmony. One of many long-term repertoire projects is constructing a score for the opera based on various 18th century sources - Corn Riggs (an .mp3 of this is elsewhere on this site) is the finale. Wednesday
13 September Just got
back from playing harpsichord in a Haydn symphony with the BBC Scottish Symphony
Orchestra. I don’t normally enjoy
playing in symphony orchestras and as a result I usually just refuse to do it,
but this was quite fun as it was Martyn Brabbins conducting: he knows the
orchestra well and is an open-minded and open-eared musician.
He’s also very good at encouraging people to give of their best.
That said, it wasn’t the most stylish or exciting performance in the
world, as classical symphonies aren’t exactly the SSO’s strong point, but
Haydn’s music always amazes – it’s just so fresh.
Speaking of freshness, I’ve been listening to some recordings of symphonies by Johann Stamitz. He was the Earl of Kelly’s teacher – I’ve always loved the way Charles Burney puts it: ‘before he travelled to Germany, he could scarcely tune his fiddle, [but] he shut himself up at Mannheim with the elder Stamitz, and studied composition’. It’s a record the Academy of Ancient Music made in 1975 – I don’t think it’s been reissued on CD, and I don’t think it will be either – a lot of the playing is really ropey. But that’s all there was in London in 1975 I suppose, and occasionally it lends a genuine excitement. Transcending
all the technical inadequacies, Alan Hacker plays Stamitz’s clarinet concerto
on an instrument from around 1760, which he told me recently had been found in
an Edinburgh dustbin, was subsequently ruined by over-enthusiastic restoration,
and is now unplayable. There’s an
amazing bit where he plays a loud low note deliberately out of tune and it
sounds fabulous. He was telling me
that he thinks that most people who play on old instruments these days are just
trying to make them sound like modern ones, and I think he’s right. The whole period instrument bandwagon has just become another
branch of the industry – it sold a lot of records in the 80s and 90s, but now
what? Where’s the sense of
discovery? Anyhow, one of my
all-time favourite records is Alan playing the Weber clarinet quintet – Decca
had the sense to reissue that one – and it’s got our Carolyn playing viola
on it into the bargain. It’s
dangerous chamber music: how seldom you can put those three words together. Heard the
Sonata of Scots Tunes on the radio today, and it took me a while to realise it
was us playing it! It sounded so
polite and well-bred. The way we
play it now is much wilder – we did a piano trio version in the Edinburgh
Festival, complete with foot-stamping, and it brought the house down. Got an
email from Davitt Moroney this afternoon asking if I could go to the Mitchell
Library for him, to locate some harpsichord variations on Scots Tunes by
Alexander Reinagle. It’s for a CD
Olivier Baumont’s making for Erato of 18th century American
harpsichord music. Apparently
Boston Public Library have lost their copy, and it just so happens I’m going
to the dentist in the morning, which isn’t far from the Mitchell, so I can pop
in and have a look. Isn’t that
handy? Monday
11 September 2000 Tonight
I’ve been listening to Orlando Gibbons’s consort music for a CD review
I’ve just finished writing, and it’s struck me how similar he and another 17th
century figure Georg Muffat seem to be in musical temperament.
In a couple of weeks we’re playing two sonatas from Muffat’s Armonico
tributo of 1682 at our concert in Crieff, as part of my long-term campaign
which may or may not be a joke, to have Muffat recognised as Scotland’s
national composer. He never set
foot in Scotland of course, but his parents probably moved from the Borders to
Savoy in France in the early 17th century.
He’s not the only baroque composer in France to be of Scots extraction
either – Forqueray must surely be a Francophone version of Farquhar. Anyway, what had always struck me about Muffat is that his music is structurally simple, but emotionally complex: he says a lot with relatively simple means. And then what hit me listening to Gibbons was that they both have a very personal form of communication. You feel that they’re speaking to you directly as an individual, and not just as part of a wider public. And they’re composers that people develop an attachment to. Katherine McGillivray said to me a while back that Muffat was one of the musicians from history she’d most like to meet, and then when we played on the Ferry in Glasgow last year, I mentioned my Muffat campaign to the audience for a laugh, and someone (only one person, mind you) cheered! I thought ‘great, here I am on a boat in the middle of Glasgow mentioning some little-known court composer from 17th century Europe and he gets a cheer of support‘. Thursday 7 September 2000 A time for
planning ahead. Our plans for a
huge 4-part concert/ pub session/ rabble-rousing drawing-room cabaret (!)/
ceilidh at next year’s Bath Festival have now fallen through as the dates
won’t work, so we’ll have to try again for 2002.
We also have to come up with some concrete plans for next year’s Celtic
Connections festival in the next week – there’s a few possibilities there,
but all it takes is for one person to be a bit elusive, and all your planning
has to go on hold until they get back to you.
Very frustrating. Spoke to
Chris Norman on the phone from Baltimore on Tuesday about our coming gig in
Crieff – he’s fixed up some flute workshops to do while he’s over here and
hopefully a radio interview along with the great flute-maker Rod Cameron.
I faxed him McGibbon’s variations on the tune Maggie Lauder and some
vague ideas about what we might do with them.
They’re a bit fiddly really, so perhaps he’ll jam something while
Adrian Chandler plays what McGibbon wrote – who knows until we’re all there
playing it? The thing about running
a group is that the music is the easy bit; the difficulties and the problems all
arise from just trying to get everyone into the same room for a few hours. I’ve been
playing fortepiano all the way through the Edinburgh Festival, in Mozart’s Clemenza
di Tito with the SCO, but also in a great series of concerts of Scots songs
put together by Sheena Wellington and Kirsteen McCue. It was a very useful chance to stick some classical and some
traditional musicians together and see what happened, and the best bits were
very good indeed. Highlights for me
were busking tunes on fortepiano and clarsach with Wendy Stewart (the Scotsman
called the results ‘surprisingly neat and nimble’), and Jim Malcolm
accompanying Mhairi Lawson on moothie and guitar in The Lea-Rig, which
was pure delight. Oh, and I made my
concert debut as a Gaelic singer with Kenna Campbell, which I still think may
have been a dream. © 2000 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia