The complex being of 'Woman'

Maria Mater Meretrix: music for voice and violin by Holst, Crumb, Dufay, Martin, Kurtag, Hildegarde von Bingen & more
 

"This is the theme of this album, Maria Mater Meretrix – a study of the three classical female phenomenologies into which, since time immemorial, the (un-female!) eye and ear have divided up the complex being of ‘Woman’: as Saint, Mother, and Whore."

Thematic albums like this new disc from soprano Anna Prohaska and violinist/conductor Patricia Kopatchinskaja, with the Camerata Bern, have recently become more popular in the classical music sphere. Back in 2016, Patricia Kopatchinskaja released a marvellous album around the theme of "Death and the Maiden"; in my review I called it an "illuminating, moving project." We have another such winner here.

The quote at the top of this review is from a fascinating essay by Christine Lemke-Matwey. She highlights the Virgin Mary - and Mary Magdalene - references in the huge range of music included here: from early works by Hildegard von Bingen, Walther von der Vogelweide and Tomas Luis de la Victoria to 20th century music by Frank Martin, Gyorgy Kurtag and Gustav Holst. Clever arrangements, by Michi Wiancko and Wolfgang Katschner, are included with original chamber and orchestral works. The resulting common sound-world allows one to truly appreciate the common themes in this incredibly diverse music. This album rewards close and careful - and repeat - listens. I feel like I learned more each time I sat down with this music.

I'm reading Adam Gopnik's new book The Real Work: On the Mystery of Meaning, and I feel this passage applies here:

"We find meaning in one thing by enlarging the area of reference, making it not more precise but less, by a horizontal leap relating it to something larger. Meanings expand as our contexts expand. Art only becomes articulate within a history..."

The wonderful cover photo of Prohaska and Kopatchinskaja is by Marco Borggreve. There are two equally fine shots of each of them inside the cover.

Authentic Holst & Elgar from Bergen

Holst: The Planets; Elgar: Enigma Variations

The presentation of Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations in 1899 single-handedly destroyed a stereotype about Un-Musical Britain. It was a new masterwork of orchestral music for the 20th Century, and it was followed in 1916 by another: Gustav Holst's The Planets. Both are now staples of the orchestral repertoire around the world, though perhaps not as totally beloved as in Britain, with its flag-waving Proms audiences. It's instructive, then, to see how many great recorded performances come from outside of the UK: Montreal, Chicago, Berlin, Vienna, to name a few. Andrew Litton, who has made memorable recordings of the Holst from Dallas, and the Elgar from London, provides a musically flawless and authentic performance of both from Norway, with the very fine Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. So often used as demonstrations of high-end audio, these two works both sound very good, partly because of the BIS engineers, but let's face it, both composers wrote this music to sound good! I should mention that I listened to the stereo version, but I'm sure the surround-sound one is awesome.

Another flawed film, with fine bits

I'm a big fan of the classical music documentaries Ken Russell made for the BBC's Monitor program in the 1960s. I agree with John Bridcut that the 1968 Delius film Song of Summer was the best of these, but there are so many: about Prokofiev, Bartok, Debussy, and, another favourite, Elgar.  Here is the Delius film; Max Adrian's portrayal of the invalid composer is a comic masterpiece.



When the success of his feature films brought him larger budgets (Women in Love, for which he was nominated for a Best Director Oscar, was only 2 years after the Delius film), he unleashed his imagination and began filling his films with an endless series of Russell tropes: Nazis, naked women, fire, crucifixion. It wasn't long before he was officially Over the Top. Here's a typical scene, from 1974's Mahler.



There's a point to this clip, of course, but it goes on rather long. At least Russell's sense of humour is still in operation here; it goes on and off during his career. It can take a long time for Hollywood to run out of patience with a wayward director, but by 1983, when he was once again making classical music films for television, this time for ITV's The South Bank Show, the bulk of the money had run out. So Ken Russell's View of The Planets is a low-rent affair. A (very fine) recording of The Planets from The Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy is matched with "found", or stock footage, cleverly edited.

Finally available on DVD and Blu-ray, the Holst film shows how far Russell had come since The Music Lovers, Mahler and Lisztomania in the 1970s. The means are very slender now, but Russell's imagination is often lit up. All the same obsessions are there, this time in a low-tech environment not too different from a YouTube amateur of today. There are still flashes of humour: the great Barbie Doll ending of Venus, and the surfing beginning of Mercury are both fine gags. But there is also great artistry in his Saturn sequence, a brilliant environmental satire of planned obsolescence. This is another flawed film with fine bits, by a director who specialized in just that.

There are fine bits in the official trailer from ArtHaus for the DVD/Blu-ray as well: