As yesterday’s photograph of the work on the new Colyer-Fergusson centre for Music Performance shows, the fourth wall is now in place, outlined by the steel girders. This gives a clear delineation of the eventual space the hall will occupy.
The skies may be grey overhead, but the outlook is bright.
Be My Guest: an occasional series featuring guest posts and contributions. This week, for one former musical alumnus, going to a performance of Handel’s Rinaldo at this year’s Proms raises some serious questions about which man she wants in her life…
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Remember how I went out with N.? How it was all lovely and picture-perfect, but neither of us really felt a spark? Well, seeing as we’re nearing our one-year anniversary of that date (and haven’t really been in touch since) we decided to repeat last year’s performance and go to the same outdoor festival. Now, I’m still not really in the market for dates, but this seemed to be more a reminiscent outing than anything else- we had a fun time watching a movie last year, so why not do it again.
The organisation was very simple- after all, we’d done this date before. The only apparent problem was that on the day of the festival, it was raining like mad (what with it being August in London and all), and I couldn’t really see us sitting outside on the ground, huddling in the downpour, trying to keep the mud from seeping into our mats and blankets, all while balancing umbrellas, trying to see the screen and eating sushi. I guess you can see my priorities here.
Either way, I proposed what I thought of as an excellent alternative to outdoor cinema: Prom 55. It has the same picnic + culture spirit as the original plan, but instead of in the rain, we’d sit in the Royal Albert Hall. I love opera, I love Handel, I love Handel operas- I was already completely sold on the idea. In a quick text, my date agreed and we settled where and when we’d meet.
I spent half the afternoon researching Rinaldo, reading synopsis and interpretations and pre-listening to important arias online. I was positively giddy when I arrived at our meeting point. Also because I was curious to meet N. again. But yeah, mostly for meeting R.
Our pre-Prom queue banter quickly showed that N. hadn’t even realised he was going to a partially-staged opera performance instead of an orchestral concert. His face twitched slightly when he asked “Oh, with singing and everything?”- which should have warned me. However, I was in my own little bubble of enthusiasm and just replied “Yes, it’s going to be amazing!” instead of picking up on his scepticism.
We got gallery tickets, and found space to sit near the bannisters about in the middle of the gallery. Excellent promming! We could see the entire stage, albeit through “prison bars” as my date charmingly put it, and I got even more excited.
I was enthralled from the first notes of the ouverture (go listen to it here). Prom 55 was the Glyndebourne 2011 production of R. by Georg Friedrich Handel, where the Crusade Age plot is re-imagined as a revenge-fuelled school boy’s dream after he’s been bullied one time too many. Seeing as the original baroque opera’s plot is confusing at best, and racially, sexistically and religiously insensitive and bigotted at worst, I thought this was a clever choice(although on a whole the “transported in modern time through one thing or other” strategy isn’t my favourite staging tool) and overall, the transformation into a teenage fantasy worked for me.
Sadistic teachers, wise teachers, mean girls, luring synchronised swimmers, armies of bicycle riders and football playing boys- R. filled his dream with some too-well-loved stereotypes and cliches along with some very bright ideas. While the latex-clad Armida as teacher with cane and posse of St Trinian lookalikes felt a bit heavy-handed for me, I found the reimagining of the final battle scene of christians and muslims as a slow-motion football game that ended with R. scoring into the orchestra simply ingenious.
The Orchestra of Enlightenment was fantastic, and although I wasn’t entirely convinced by his harpsichord solos, I really liked Ottavio Dantone’s musical direction. The singers were spirited and lively, with Sonia Prina’s title role a special treat.
You can tell, I adored it from the first minute. Poor N. really didn’t. He hadn’t read the plot beforehand, and my hastily whispered 45 second introduction to a story along the lines of “…and then A dresses up as B and her lover C falls in love with her in costume, so she plots revenge together with B’s lover D, who she has imprisoned earlier. Oh, and she’s a witch!” didn’t really enlighten him either.
The Prom performance was not surtitled like most other foreign language opera performances (a decision I don’t understand), N. thus had hardly any chance to understand what was going on for the next two-and-a-half hours.We discussed our experiences in the first interval, and it became clear he had resigned to just listening and ignoring the plot completely. And although he was too polite to explicitly state it, it was quite obvious that baroque opera was not the music he would usually choose to listen to for an evening while sitting on the linoleum covered floor amidst a bunch of opera-fanatic strangers.
This essentially gave me a choice to either a) be a very nice person, suggest to leave during the interval and get some drinks instead and spend some more quality time with X. or b) resist the social clues, stay for the rest of the opera and spend some more quality time with R.
I went with b). Because I truly fell in love with R. I’ve been obsessively listening to the recording over and over again in the past days. I’ve imagined our future, how I’ll buy the DVD when it comes out and how I’m going to go to all future Glyndebourne proms. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends, and just writing it down now makes me smile.
N. took it very gracefully, and I promised him non-operatic drinks next week.
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(Read more from about our guest’s grappling with life on their own blog here).
Simply writing a review of last year’s musical activities here at the University has made me realise what a terrifically versatile, extra-curricular department we have: everything from formal classical Cathedral concerts (too much alliteration ?!) to informal jazz gigs, music theatre productions, Scholars’ recitals, and far too many other activities to mention here. Students, staff, alumni, members of the local community, visiting professional players – all contributing to a rich and varied aspect of the University’s cultural life, and creating a vibrant social side to everything that goes on here.
Including some fine photographs courtesy of Mick Norman, here’s the review of last year; and if you think that’s good, wait until you see what’s lined up for this year when the Autumn brochure is published shortly…
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Or click here to download the PDF.
There is something almost unbearably melancholic about Satie’s elegaic song, ‘Je te veux,’ especially in this beautifully nuanced performance by Jessye Norman.
That initial gesture is the key to the whole piece – a yearning, a reaching for something (or someone), with the arch-shape of the melody going beyond the tonic and and moving over it. without staying on it for any significant length. The fact that the melodic line doesn’t dwell on the tonic gives the piece its rootless, moving quality. The only time we really feel at ease is at the end of the verse (and its subsequent reprises), when the line finally descends onto, and remains on, C, a fact Satie emphasises at the eventual end of the piece when the melody ends with those final three descending notes (E to C) transposed up an octave.
(You can see a copy of the score for solo piano here.)
Satie published it in several incarnations – piano and voice (1903), orchestra, brass and piano solo. For all his riotous tricks in the later ballet scores Parade and Relache, the quirky titles and in-score annotations for the performer to read in piano works such as the Sonatine bureacratique, Je te veux is perhaps a rare moment of Satie wearing his heart on his sleeve. It’s a short, lyrical, and somehow achingly sad moment amongst the rest of Satie’s challenging output.
In the heat of the summer holiday season, things are hotting up with the new centre for Music Performance; the steel girders are beginning to define the outline of the new building. Exciting times!
It’s 9am, and the doors have just opened to this year’s University Open Day; we’ve been here since 8.15 setting up, and the ‘Making Music at Kent’ stand is bursting with colour in the display of posters and photographs from recent years’ events. (If we can, I’ll get a photo uploaded to show
you!).
The Director of Music arrived with bags of sweets to sustain us throughout the day, and has already had her first cup of coffee; it’s always important to know when the tea-booth has opened. We’re looking forward to a stream of visitors interested in making music and the Music Scholarships.
We’ll keep you posted throughout the day as to how it’s going, thanks to wireless technology here in the Sports Hall.
10am: an hour in, and we’ve seen ten visitors and their families, coming from Norfolk, Surrey and elsewhere: the prize for the visitor who’s travelled the farthest is currently held by someone from Swansea. The Director of Music is celebrating a short lull by cracking open the ‘Revels’ as I type, and I’m going to grab my first cup of tea – I wonder if there’s any Earl Gray ?
11.45am: I’ve only just managed to get the tea (no Earl Gray, alas) as suddenly there was a swathe of visitors from especially far-flung corners of the globe: the number of people arriving at the stand has now risen to thirty three, with a particularly international appeal: the record for Visitor From The Farthest Place has now been smashed by someone from Hong Kong, although there’s competition from people from America and Italy. And I thought Kent was the UK’s European university ?!
1pm: four hours in, and we’ve now seen forty five visitors: that’s roughly ten an hour, one every six minutes: the interest is coming now from Devon, Essex and Oxford, with lots of singers, saxophonists, flautists and brass players. I nabbed a suitably toothsome-looking sandwich from the tea-booth back at 12pm, and it’s been sitting here ever since waiting to be consumed. There might be a slight lull now it’s lunchtime: let’s see…
1.40pm: good and bad news; we’ve managed to fit in lunch, but have eaten all the ‘Revels.’ Woe indeed…
2.15pm: visitor numbers have now reached over sixty, coming from Bucks, Berks, Harrogate, Leicester and Hampshire. With only forty-five minutes left, the end is in sight; our voices are starting to tire, but morale is boosted by the chocolate biscuits the Director of Music is about to open… There’s a definite sense that music is becoming an increasingly attractive provision for students making their university choices, wanting to continue with making music and taking instrumental or singing lessons alongside their formal degree programmes; with the new music building set to open its doors shortly before these visitors would arrive as first-year students, they’re in for a fantastic time.
3pm: and that’s it. Final count 67 visitors, including several more from Oxford, Windsor, Kent, and one from Sweden competing for the Farthest Distance Travelled. The winner must be the one who came from Hong Kong, surely ? Thanks to everyone who came to the music stand today, we’ve met a great many interesting and talented musicians: safe journeys home to all. We’re signing off: see you all again.
Work continues on the new Colyer-Fergusson centre for Music Performance, and here’s the latest pictures, courtesy of Tim Ronalds Architects.
It’s that time of year again: the University Open Day, when we’ll be at the ‘Making Music at Kent’ stand for all your enquiries about musical activities at Kent, as well as information on music scholarships and how to apply.
And as we’re hi-tech hip over here, we’ll be blogging live from tomorrow morning again, as we did last year. We’ll be in front of the stand emblazoned with spectacular images of our music-making over recent years, and you can come and collect a copy of this year’s brochure to discover what happens musically during the year. From choirs to jazz bands, orchestras to rock bands and madrigal consorts to music theatre, we’ve got something for everyone.
If you’re coming to the University Open Day tomorrow, we’ll see you there!
