MUSIC: Luncheon with Aesop
A provincial interlude
My value-for-money tip this week is the three-course lunch at the Albert Hall for only £7.95. I refer, of course, to the Albert Hall, Nottingham.
Scarcely one week back in London, and already I felt my palate jaded, my soul full of anomie, weltschmerz, apathy, spleen, schadenfreude and other such-like foreign-type afflictions. Like enough these could be mostly attributed to the utterly worthless revival of Ambroise Thomas’s ludicrous ‘opera’ Hamlet at Covent Garden. True, this was a cheapo borrowed production, but after it had died the death at Geneva where it originated, why inflict it on others? I needed a stiff dose of something English, away from the effete frippery and artistic sado-masochism of the capital. What better antidote than a provincial organ recital?
We tend to forget, in London, that in many parts of the country such recitals constitute a major proportion of available ‘serious’ live music. Organs by Willis (made in London) or Binns (produced in Leeds until 1952) were the pride and glory of many an English church and town hall and where they survive in working condition their splendour is not easily matched. It is true that audiences for such concerts these days are not enormous. Look in at a recital in Birmingham, Nottingham, or wherever, and you might see a crowd of 100 or 150 which you could easily mistake for a gathering of the local Conservative Party. In fact they are certainly largely co-terminous; middle-class almost without exception, white and mostly over sixty. But they are carrying on a noble tradition. At least since Mendelssohn barnstormed the Midlands in the 1830s, organ recitals have been the respectable way for English bourgeois out of London to indulge publicly in music.
Nottingham’s Albert Hall began life as a Methodist mission. Situated opposite Pugin’s Church of St. Bartholomew and adjacent to the Nottingham Playhouse, (whose courtyard contains a ravishing giant convex mirror sculpture by Anish Kapoor) little of its external architecture remains visible. Inside the lower level has been simply but pleasantly restored to provide a restaurant, bar and seating area; but the Great Hall itself is the prize, a light vaulted space, seating about 800, with one end dominated by the gigantic four-manual Binns organ donated in 1909 by the local magnate Sir Jesse Boot, its cabinet work fashioned by Boot’s own shopfitters. The organ was fully restored ten years ago to its original specifications; that is, no replacement of the pneumatic mechanisms by electronics. The bottom notes can be felt rather than heard, the stops present a vast range of colour — it is Edwardian through and through, and it sounds it. As one who in his youth used to have the run of a not dissimilar instrument which once graced Hove Town Hall, I can testify that being at the keyboard of such a monster is enough to gratify the most overweening of superiority complexes.
Fortunately our maestro for the afternoon was of that particular English breed of organist who can take such magnificence in his stride. Kendrick Partington’s mild and genial exterior clearly conceals a lion, or perhaps I should better say a lion-tamer; well into his seventies, and now happily recovered after being laid-up for much of last year by illness, he proved convincingly his control of the beast.
Partington is a Nottingham man, for many years organist at St. Peter’s Church, and had tailored his programme to the instrument he was playing. We began appropriately enough with Mendelssohn’s Sonata no. 1 and the remainder of the programme was nicely divided between England and France. Thus we had an adagio molto of Stanford, evoking the desolation of the period of Verdun, and quoting an echo of ‘La Marseillaise’); a fantasy and fugue by the Boëly, a classicist of early-nineteenth century France who was in fact dismissed from his post as organist at S. Germain l’Auxerrois in 1851 for his insistence on playing the music of Bach; and some gloriously non-authentic arrangements, including thundering pedals and trombone stops, of pieces by the eighteenth century John Stanley.
For your critic, the most interesting item was Partington’s own arrangement for organ of ‘Le Festin d’Esope’, an extravagant series of piano variations by my hero Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1883). (Alright, I confess it, that was what dragged me up the M1 in the first place). The original fable relates to the command given to the slave Aesop to prepare two feasts, one prepared with the most precious of ingredients, the other with the most base. In both cases, Aesop served up variegated platters of tongue. Alkan makes his point at the start with a theme which is partly the minuet from Mozart’s 40th symphony and partly a Hasidic stampfdanz. There follows in the original a series of 25 dazzling variations which stretch both the competence of the pianist and the capacity of his instrument to the limit.
Partington embarked on his transcription at the urging of a friend, but it soon became, in his own words ‘a labour of love. I was particularly concerned to use the colours of the organ to bring out Alkan’s wit and his wonderful sense of colour. And I remembered what I was taught many years ago — if you’re going to transcribe something, it must always sound as if it was originally written for the instrument’. And he was helped by the specification of the Binns organ itself — the carillon stop was perfect for the 10th variation, marked ‘scampanatino’ (bell-like), and the trumpet stops spot-on for the ‘trombata’ variation 14. Other nice touches in Partington’s version included the high notes just on the threshold of hearing in variation 16 (‘preghevole’ — prayerful), and the relentless explosions of sound in variation 20 (‘impavide’ — not in my Italian dictionary, but I suppose ‘fearlessly’). I have to say that the Binns mechanism did work against the performance somewhat, in that pneumatic stop-changes required breaks between the variations, damaging the flow — nonetheless, it was, as the phrase has it, ‘something completely different’, and quite as wacky and enjoyable as anything produced by M. Python.
I was also interested to note some signs of diversity in the audience, which included a couple of slightly-aging hippies and a heavy metal fan complete with tattoos, bandana and suitably attired girl-friend; they all clearly enjoyed every minute. I suppose a Binns organ is one of the few things that can physically drill you through like Guns ‘n' Roses.
All this plus the excellent aforementioned lunch and a stroll through what is left of the old town added up to a thoroughly worthwhile excursion. I must get out of London and into England more often.
Future recitals this year at the Albert Hall by other guest performers include Dame Gillian Weir (this autumn), Nigel Ogden playing ‘a selection from the 1953 Hit Parade plus music by Rossini, Meyerbeer and Eric Coates’, and the first-ever transcription for organ of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony.
Allen Buchler, February 6, 2003 01:54 PM