An Ode to Olly

Much has been made in the current Proms season of superstar visits from Gustavo Dudamel and Nigel Kennedy – and quite right too, for apart from their mere presence in the Royal Albert Hall they have asked pertinent questions about the music they have been performing.

However there has not been so much noise about an especially valuable asset of British musical life, the conductor and composer Oliver Knussen, whose health happily appears to be much improved these days. His program for Prom 19 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, of whom he is 'Artist in Association', was characteristically imaginative – and though given to a small audience it strongly emphasised his worth to music from the 20th century and beyond.

Listening again to this Prom on the radio, I was struck by Knussen's easy conversations with Petroc Trelawny about the music. He spoke about Honegger's love of trains before opening with Pacific 231, then the similarity of Pastorale d’été to the theme from Dr Finlay’s Casebook, and later on provided a revealing nugget of how he and the composer Henri Dutilleux were strolling along the sea front at Aldeburgh. After moments of silence Dutilleux looked at the sea and exclaimed, "This is the sea that Debussy had in mind when he wrote La mer."

Such revealing asides helped put the concert in greater context, as did the linking of several threads through the beautifully performed program. We had Alpine scenes from Honegger – unusually relaxed for a piece in the musically reactionary 1920s – and from Castiglioni, whose Inverno in-ver was an extraordinary piece of frostbitten cold for the upper registers of the orchestra, given a bright metallic glare through a battery of percussion.

Fascinating, too, was the vivid Bridge tone poem There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook, before the three songs on wine set by Berg to Baudelaire poems, Der Wein showing once again how Knussen and the soprano Claire Booth work so well together.

This was not the first time Knussen had produced a radical program, however – he has been thriving on these sorts of concerts for years. One of the highlights of the 2007 Proms season was his Rite of Spring, coupled with Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces , the world premiere of his Violin Concerto and Henze’s Sebastian im Traum . That same season he conducted the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, successfully reading the collective minds of the audience by repeating Webern’s Five Orchestral Pieces.

The point of these examples is to show that right now there is nobody quite so bold in their programming as Knussen – and his interpretations offer a composer’s insights to boot, often shedding new light on familiar music or revealing hidden masterpieces, as in the Castiglioni. To watch him conduct is to see somebody completely shunning the spotlight for the music’s sake – and the BBC Symphony Orchestra clearly get as much out of their partnership as he does. More power to his elbow!

Schumann - a birthday wish

Two centuries ago this year, one of my favourite composers was born – Robert Schumann. His influence on his contemporaries, notably Brahms, is considerable, while Elgar, Shostakovich and more recently Kurtág are just three composers to acknowledge his influence and recognise his subtle innovations and melodic skills.
In this month's Gramophone magazine, the cellist Steven Isserlis, an ardent exponent of the composer, delights in his unpredictable style, focussing on more unsung pieces such as the piano trios to prove his point, and pointing out that these, along with several Schumann chamber works, are now regular features of the concert repertoire.

And yet it remains fashionable for journalists and critics to take pot shots at him, and they find it all too easy to criticise orchestration, melodic style, harmonic invention and form. On one of the sites for which I regularly write, I have found three separate reviewers condemning the 'Rhenish' symphony as a deeply flawed work. One even goes as far as to say that 'most famous for his lieder, Schumann's skills as a symphonist are questionable to say the least'.

This, in my view at least, is utter rubbish - whichever of the composer’s four symphonies you choose to listen to. Steven Isserlis also argues on the composer's behalf, both in the characteristically passionate Gramophone piece and in an interview I did with him for musicOMH, where he affirmed Schumann to be his favourite composer.

In my opinion, Schumann proves a highly gifted melodist, an extremely perceptive mood setter, and a composer with a beautiful harmonic turn to his writing. Many of his works bear this out - and as I write I continue to discover more. Two examples will suffice, however, despite the temptation to turn to the piano music – the first the glorious Adagio and Allegro for horn or cello and piano, and the second the unfairly maligned 'Rhenish'.

That no less a figure than Oliver Knussen performed the symphony at the Proms recently shows how much esteem in which he holds the work. In the best performances this piece bursts from the blocks with an expression of undiluted joy, and in the two period instrument performances I have been lucky enough to enjoy that has emphatically been the case.

Sure, there are plenty of notes at times, and the good tunes are repeated relatively frequently, but the notion these techniques are somehow backward is a hackneyed one. Indeed, when Mahler revisited the symphonies to change some of the orchestration and form this was out of love and admiration, so that he could use them as a conductor – a fact lost on several writers who have used this as another stick with which to beat the composer.

So let's hear it for one of the 19th century's true musical greats and finest composers, and let's hope he gets his due recognition, despite the current state of misunderstanding.