Gulda Cello concerto

I had a whale of a time on the Edinburgh Fringe with St Clements Wind Ensemble. We had a fantastic programme for our two concerts in Canongate Kirk.

We started with arrangements by Michael Round for wind ensemble of three Debussy piano preludes: "General Lavine - Eccentric", "Canope" and "Les collines d'Anacapri".

Then we played the three movements with tenor solo from the Schoenberg chamber arrangement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. "Mahler" and "chamber music" don't naturally sit in the same sentence. One associates Mahler with huge orchestral forces - his original orchestral version requires 3 flutes, 1 piccolo, 3 oboes (1 doubling cor anglais), 3 clarinets, 1 Eb clarinet, 1 bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (1 doubling contra), 4 horns, three trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, celesta, harp, mandolin, sundry percussion and strings to accompany the two solo singers. So a chamber arrangement for string quartet, double bass, wind quintet, piano, harmonium and percussion (1 player) really ought not to work at all.

And yet it does. Admittedly, in the opening to the first movement "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde" the strings are sawing away madly and can't much be heard above the wind and percussion, but it settles down after that, and you learn something about Mahler which isn't instantly obvious from the large orchestras he asks for. For quite a lot of the time, he uses the forces available in order to construct ad hoc chamber ensembles in varying combinations. And so, Das Lied can be played with a chamber ensemble, you just have to change round the instrumentation. And that is what Schoenberg did with the first movement (the rest of the arrangement was finished off by Rainer Riehn).

Then we played an arrangement for double wind quintet I have put together of Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, partly because it is the bicentenary of Liszt's birth this year, and partly because I just plain like the piece, and think it is unfair that pianists have so many good tunes that other players don't get a chance to have a go at! No smaller group would really work, because there are times when the piece is all down in the bass, and I need 4 or 5 instruments capable of managing that range, and sometimes both hands are up around the top of the treble stave. Of course, I gave the opening rather portentious tune to myself to play as a horn solo, but tried to make sure just about everybody had some interesting stuff, and I was really pleased how well it all seemed to fit together.

The last piece in the programme though was the highlight as far as I was concerned, Friedrich Gulda's Concerto for Cello and Wind. On one of the cello forums a contributor has described the piece as "A pioneering work of jazz-rock-classical-marching band fusion". Although it sounds like he's taking the mickey, that is actually a very good and accurate description. It is a completely mad piece, but absolutely tremendous fun to play.


The instrumentation is eccentric. Solo cello, flute doubling piccolo, 2 oboes. 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 trumpets, 2 horns, trombone, tuba, guitar, double bass, drumkit. The guitar and double bass have to be amplified, and so does the solo cello for the outer movements.

The first movement (Overture) opens in big-band style, with a cello riff over percussion accompaniment with an occasional interjection from the brass, and then with a trill and a cadence the mood changes completely, with a gentle tune in the woodwind, taken over by the solo cello with the first horn. Another trill and we are back to big band style.

The second movement (Idylle) starts with a slow gentle chorale for lower brass, the first horn taking the tune initially, before the cello repeats it. And then the mood abruptly changes again into an Austrian ländler, the oboes and clarinets yodelling up and down, before the cello takes over, and the chorale returns for the end.

The third movement (Cadenza) is for unaccompanied solo cello, nearly 7 minutes of it, and Gulda seems at times to take the piss out of over-long and elaborate romantic cadenzas, and also out of the kind of "squeaky gate" music that was all the avant-garde in the 60s and 70s (the piece was composed in 1980)

The Menuett has a renaissance dance feel to it, and also rather reminded me in tone and style of Rondrigo's Fantasia para un Gentilhombre.

The Finale alla Marcia is a rather mad marching band, the horns and trumpets are given full license to make the most raucous din possible "Stürze hoch" (bells up) and the cello has notes flying in all directions. There are elements of Sousa that are entirely recognisable. At one point it all quietens down into repeated chords and it sounded as if the tenor soloist from the Mahler ought at this point to come in singing the Toreador song from Carmen! There is passage designed to sound like a steam train, there are trumpets playing mariachi style. The whole thing is just gloriously crazy. You can't do this piece justice if you merely try and play it, you have to completely throw yourself into it.

We nearly weren't able to perform it at all, as our intended soloist Johannes Osterlee went down with tendonitis a week or so before the concert and couldn't play, necessitating a frantic search for a replacement. We were really lucky to get Thomas Carroll to step in at such short notice, and he played the piece with incredible verve and vigour, and he deservedly had a standing ovation from the audience for both performances.

I can't remember when I last had such a huge grin plastered across my face at the end of a concert!

Bob Paxman

I've just seen the following notice on Paxman's website.

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Bob Paxman.

Bob passed away after a short illness on the morning of Monday 25th July.

A tribute to Bob and information on a service to celebrate his life and achievements will appear here as they become available.

Our thoughts and sympathies are with his family at this time.

Bob Paxman was a director of and until 2000 the owner of Paxman Musical Instruments, the world-famous manufacturer of horns. In 1993 he was awarded the MBE for services to music and industry.

I met Bob a few times, he would come and listen to the concerts of the Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra. He would always come round and say "hi" and "well done" to the horns afterwards.

A thoroughly nice man, and a great loss to the world of the horn.

A student experience of Stockhausen

When I was a student at the Royal College of Music in London, one of the professors strongly held the opinion that no potential professional musician should go through college without having played some "modern" music (i.e. something atonal or similarly unpleasant-sounding). Like the music or loathe it, I think he had a good general point, in that musicians owe it to the composer to give a new piece the best possible performance, and to be appropriately trained to do so.

Anyway, one term, he managed to arrange for the college symphony orchestra to play Stockhausen's Carré. (Carré means "squared" in French.) This was a square piece, for 4 orchestras positioned in the 4 corners of the hall. The conductors stood in the corners facing inwards so they could see each other and coordinate the beat, and the orchestras faced outwards each towards their own conductor, with the audience in the middle. Each orchestra was a couple of desks of each of the strings, a varied selection of woodwind & brass, an 8-voice chamber choir, and pretty much a full symphonic percussion section. Maybe a keyboard or two thrown in for good & useless measure.

The piece hadn't been performed in London for 15 years. We soon discovered why.

I can honestly say that this is the only piece I have ever played where for the entire duration of the music I couldn't actually tell whether I was playing the right notes or not. The singers had tuning forks more or less permanently to their ears to try and help them pitch their notes. There were really no cues you could take from the players around you.

The students rapidly took a fairly lighthearted approach to rehearsals, to the annoyance of the professors. There was a harpsichord player in the 4th orchestra, who rapidly cottoned on to the fact that nobody could hear her over the percussion, and practised Bach and Handel throughout the rehearsals.

We all assumed that nobody would want to come & hear this junk, even though RCM concerts were free for the public. When we filed into the hall for the concert, we were astonished to find the place absolutely packed with people standing in the gallery.

We later discovered that someone had publicised the concert in a modern music magazine, and because it was so long since the piece had been played in London, all the atonal music junkies had come to hear it. In London, there are just about enough Stockhausen fans to fill a medium sized concert hall if they all turn up on the same night.

Anyway, all went fine in the performance, we made a raucous din for about 30 minutes. The problem came towards the end. The conductor of the 4th orchestra got lost and out of time with the other three. As a result, in the 4th orchestra we finished about 30 seconds early.

Nobody noticed. We got a standing ovation and a rave review from the Times music critic.

Sometimes, less is more

I had a thoroughly enjoyable concert last Friday with the Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra. As it was the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the orchestra, the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Hillingdon Choral Society and the conductor's 60th birthday, the choir and orchestra held a joint concert. it was a bit of a celebration all round, with the programme full of "lollipops". We had Walton's march  "Crown Imperial" and Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 4", Parry's "Blest Pair of Sirens", Vaughan Williams' "Toward the Unknown Region", and the the second half, the overture Die Fledermaus and lots of favourite bits from the operas.

But for me, the most satisfying moment musically was during the quiet second theme of Pomp & Circumstance No. 4. Elgar starts the piece in typically bright and celebratory mood, but the second theme is a slow stately dignified march.

The first violins, all 4 horns, and the first clarinet share the tune, all marked piano. Wind players in an orchestra so rarely have the tune, that when it does appear the temptation is always to play the tune as if it is a solo. But it isn't necessarily so, and this is a case where it isn't. This particular theme is owned by the first violins, the horns and clarinet are there just warm the tone a little bit and smooth it out. So the horns (all 4 of them combined) need to be quieter than the violins.

In the final rehearsal, I realised that the balance wasn't right, that one or two of the horns were playing a solo piano. I briefly explained that we needed to be quieter as it wasn't our tune, we were just supporting the violins. In the concert, they got it exactly right, with just enough sound to support the violins, and it sounded wonderful!

St Clements Wind Ensemble in Edinburgh

The programme for St. Clements Wind Ensemble in Edinburgh this August has now been worked out. And it is a very ambitious set of works!

Friedrich Gulda: Concerto for Violoncello and wind band. Soloist: Johannes Oesterlee

Mahler arr. Schoenberg/Rainer Riehn: Das Lied von der Erde (chamber version)

Liszt arr. West: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

I've just been having a listen to a recording of the Gulda. It is weird, but sounds great fun! Part chamber work, part jazz, part town band, part cello concerto. The instrumentation is flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 trumpets, 2 horns, trombone, tuba, guitar, double bass, percussion, solo cello.

The Mahler is more familiar. I've not played Das Lied von der Erde before, but I have played various of the symphonies and other song cycles. Schoenberg started working on a chamber arrangement of the first movement, but never competed it, and the conductor Rainer Riehn finished it and the other movements in 1980. I remember hearing it at a late night concert in the Usher Hall in the Edinburgh Festival about 10 years ago. The instrumentation is 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, flute/piccolo, oboe/cor anglais, clarinet/Eb clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, harmonium/celesta, percussion, solo mezzo soprano & tenor.

Mahler normally goes in for pretty huge orchestras, he commonly asks for 6 or more horns in his symphonies and lots of woodwind. So one would expect a chamber version of one of his great works to lose so much that it is unrecognisable. But strangely, it does seem to make sense in this smaller arrangement. But having had a listen to a recording of it, I can tell that I will have a lot of work to do, and will need to be in tiptop condition to make it through. Mahler is hard work when you are merely one horn in 4, 6 or 8, it is going to be much harder when I'm the only horn!

The Liszt is a bit of a romp. It is my own arrangement for double wind quintet of the 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, with the 2nd flute playing piccolo throughout. Ever since the music was used for a Stella Artois beer advert featuring ice-skating priests, I've been meaning to make a wind arrangement of the piece, and I was prompted to get on with it by Maren Heidemann (who runs SCWE), since this year is the 200th anniversery of Liszt's birth. This will be the arrangement's first performance.

The concerts will be on Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th August 2011, at 5pm
Tickets £10, (concessions.£7) at the Fringe Box Office
and on the door at Canongate Kirk, 153 Canongate, (Royal Mile) Edinburgh EH8 8BN (Venue 60)

If you are in Edinburgh for the festival, do please come and see us!

Student attitudes at the London College of Music

I've been asked to play a concert with the LCM (London College of Music) Community Sinfonia, performing Shostakovich 5th Symphony at St Barnabas Church in Ealing on May 11th.

On Saturday, there was a day of rehearsals at LCM for the concert. And I was quite frankly appalled at the attitude of many of the LCM students to the rehearsal.

About half the strings didn't turn up at all. I learned that about 8 or so students had originally said they would take part, but had simply not arrived for the rehearsal, with no reason given. The conductor had smoke coming out of his ears, he was so angry about this! And he had every right to be.

The rehearsal was supposed to start at 10am. I arrived with 10 minutes to spare, and found that there were only 3 or 4 people in the rehearsal hall. Various people rolled up over the next half an hour, and we finally got started about 10.20. More students quite casually strolled in even later, not apparently concerned about the fact that they were seriously late. One wind player didn't arrive until the afternoon rehearsal at 2pm, he apparently had had a party the previous night and had overslept. By not being there, you impede the conductor's ability to sort out balance and timing, and to ensure that instructions about beats and tempi need be given out only once. You waste other people's time by not being there when you should.

There was a lunch break from 1pm to 2pm. I was ready in my seat at 2pm, but again, many people were missing. The leader of the orchestra didn't return from lunch until 2.10, and three of the four flutes appeared at 2.15. While exceptional traffic or transport problems can make you unavoidably late for the start of a rehearsal (though you should always allow enough time for all but the most exceptional of conditions), nothing justifies you being late back after a break.

Then there was the attitude to rehearsals. It was quite clear that since the previous rehearsal 10 days before, few of the students had made any serious attempt to practice their parts. And I suspect even fewer had attempted to listen to a recording of the piece to find out how it went. This meant that they frequently got lost and couldn't find their way back again.

Shostakovich 5 is not a simple piece of music. It has complex rhythms and harmonies, and abrupt changes of speed. In the first movement, there are places where the tempo suddenly doubles or halves. Even when the conductor explained exactly how he was going to handle one of these transitions, still it almost always happened that somebody had not listened or understood, and carried on at the old speed. Also on many occasions, players just put their heads down and concentrated solely on playing the notes, giving no regard to whether they were going at the same speed as the conductor's beat. Sometimes there were three tempi going on at the same time. However many or few notes you play, you must go at the same speed as the conductor. Any note played at the wrong time is a wrong note!

Not knowing your part, when you've had ample opportunity to practice, is just not acceptable. As a new young musician starting out in the profession, you will need to be able to compete with people who have performed a piece 20 times, and play it as well as them. Shostakovich 5 is one of the standards of the orchestral repertoire, and this is an ideal opportunity to get to know it when there is no serious pressure. As a student, you should be lapping up every single opportunity to play every piece of the standard reportoire you can get your hands on, so that you don't have to sight-read it professionally. Even though I'm only an amateur, I have played Shostakovich 5 before, more than once, so I do know how it goes. But even so, I had a listen to a recording to remind me about it, since it is a few years since I last played it. It is a courtesy to the conductor and the other players to be as ready as you can be.

If you are a music student wanting to take up music as a career, your task at present is to learn how to be a professional musician. That involves doing more than practicing concertos. Many student musicians (especially violinists and pianists) imagine that they are going to become international soloists, and so will spend their whole careers playing the Tchaikovsky or Sibelius concertos. Phooey. There are about 30 international soloists on the violin in the whole world. There are more violinists than that in any major orchestra. If you are going to make it at all in professional classical music, you are almost certainly going to be in an orchestra. So you must take orchestral technique and rehearsal etiquette seriously. Otherwise, you will wreck your career before it has even begun.

Now, I'm just a former music student who chose not to go into the profession. I only play as an amateur. But even so, I have some tiny influence: for the amateur orchestras I play for, I help with fixing extras, and I keep a list of names and phone numbers for the purpose. Nothing about Saturday's rehearsal has given me any reason at all to get out my diary and take the names of any of the students. For the most part, I simply couldn't trust most of the students present both to turn up and to play, even to the standard necessary to manage an amateur concert on one rehearsal.

Now, suppose I had instead been an amateur player who, instead of leaving the music profession altogether, had gone into music administration, and was involved in fixing extras for one of the major London orchestras. It isn't uncommon after all for those in music administration to have studied music and to have kept it up in an amateur way after they gave up the idea of a professional playing career. If I were in that position, I would have quite likely taken an even dimmer view of proceedings than I actually did, and I might well have decided to made a note of names for the purpose of making sure that they didn't ever play with the orchestra I worked for. Those students' professional careers would have been seriously damaged even before they left college. Such a waste of so much time spent studying, all gone because of a failure to do something as simple as get back from lunch on time.

As a musician, whether you are professional, amateur or student, you are on show all the time you have your instrument with you. In performance and even in rehearsal, you never know who will hear you and see you. So you need to try and make a good impression at every opportunity.

There are far, far more students graduating from the music colleges than can possibly be accommodated by the music profession. Many years ago, I calculated that on the horn, there were probably 10 times more students graduating than there was space for in professional orchestras in Britain. That ratio will vary a bit from one instrument to the next, but it serves to indicate how cutthroat the competition is.

That means that orchestras and other employers need very little excuse to decide against employing somebody. Even outstanding musicians won't get employed if they can't be bothered to turn up on time and prepare their music.

Saturday's rehearsal at the London College of Music was a perfect example of how not to approach the music profession. If any students who were or should have been at Saturday's rehearsal read this, then I have to say that you need to either change your attitude or abandon any idea of playing music professionally, because you just won't make it if you carry on as you are, no matter how well you think you can play concertos. In fact, if you can't be bothered to turn up on time, you won't make it in any profession, never mind one as competitive as music.

Contradictions and meanderings

James Boldin has recently published an article on his blog, in part about playing softly. In it he quotes various authorities on what you need to do to play softly.

They are all agreed on the importance of it, and the need to practice properly, but they have remarkably different ideas about what you do to physically produce soft notes. There are flat contradictions between the different visualisations involved. Everyone has their own idea as to how it is all working, and some of these (possibly most of them) are physiologically wrong. And yet they all work for the people concerned, since they are professional players and teachers who have definitely mastered the art of soft playing.

This is a real problem with wind teaching. Almost everything about wind playing is either happening internally within the body or in minute and outwardly almost imperceptible changes in the embouchure. It sometimes makes me wonder how anybody manages to learn a wind instrument at all!

I don't know "how to play the horn". All I know is how I play the horn. I could describe how I play softly. But would it be of any use to anybody else? I've seen and heard and read so many conflicting ways you should go about playing the horn. Some I agree with, many I don't. I have a few approaches that I haven't heard mentioned by others. They seem to work for me - I claim nothing more for them.

There seems to be such disagreement as to what is going on. If we all disagree, we can't all be right and most of us are wrong. But then there is great disagreement in the best approach even for such apparently simple things as teaching children how to read. And yet most of manage to learn it somehow.

So that's why I've tended to talk here more about musical aspects of horn playing rather than the technical aspects of producing the sound. I've no reason to regard my own particular synthesis of ideas on horn technique as being superior to anybody else's. But musicality is talked about less than technique, and so I feel there is a gap to be filled there.