walton #1

The Irish composer conductor Hamilton Harty would have been surprised to discover that, 70 years after his death, he is best remembered not for his own pieces, but for an arrangement he made of bits of Handel's Water Music. The original suites are long, fragmentary and scored for a small orchestra of string section plus a few winds and brass, so Harty made an arrangement of his favourite bits for full symphony orchestra (minus trombones) lasting 16 minutes. It suited professional orchestras of the day, short, full of good tunes, and is still often played now; in fact we performed it at Halifax last night.

Another minor claim to fame of Harty's is that in the mid-thirties he gave the first performance of William Walton's Symphony No 1. Actually Harty gave, paradoxically, two first performances, one with the LSO of the first three movements, when Walton had struggled for the inspiration needed to complete the work, and the second with the Halle when he had finished the job. At Halifax we were unaware of the Harty connection when programming both the Handel and Walton for last night's concert.

There was another poignant connection for me - HSO's first trombonist, Frank Mathison, played bass trombone on the record of Walton 1 I had as a teenager, played by the LSO under Previn. I liked the piece then, for its grim Sibelian severity, swept aside by the exuberant finale, but hadn't heard it for years - it isn't often played - and was curious to rediscover it; and to rediscover whether I liked it.

On the whole, no.

The musical world of the 1930s was a divided one. From Europe, and from Vienna in particular, came new sounds and structures which alienated as many as they attracted. For the Anglo-Saxon wing (remember that America is now an important part of this equation) there was one composer who stood as an antidote to the new cacophony - Sibelius. By any standards the Finn was a great composer, and, vitally, he showed it was still possible to write great music in C major. In Britain critics and composers looked to Sibelius for inspiration. The final chapter of Constant Lambert's wonderful book Music Ho!, published in 1934, is entitled Sibelius and the music of the future; as late as 1944 Vaughan Williams dedicated the 5th Symphony to Sibelius. Until Benjamin Britten's star burst onto the London musical scene in the late 30s, British music-making set its face against developments in Central Europe, and looked north.

If it's not surprising that the young Walton, embarking on his first symphony, should look to Sibelius for his model, it is surprising that he should borrow so wholeheartedly. It's not just the long pedal points, the harmonic tics (for example the major chord IV in minor key passages) or the brass chords emerging from the orchestral texture to end up dominating it; Walton steals whole melodic ideas, from the Lemminkainen Legends amongst others, but most egregiously from the Fourth Symphony (a tune in tritones in the scherzo, but also the unison string notes which close the Fourth's slow movement, and which Walton uses to open and close his own slow movement: so slavish is the copying that Walton even uses the same pitch, C sharp).

Does any of this matter? Perhaps not - there's a lot of Haydn in Mozart, for example, and a lot of Beethoven in Brahms. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, can anyone say they really enjoy hearing one person flatter another? The imitation is so sincere, particularly in the first movement, that Walton's own musical personality is very largely effaced, emerging strongly again only in the finale. Moreover, it is only Sibelius's outward manner that Walton is aping. He shows no taste for or understanding of the truly distinctive features of the Finnish master's style, nothing of his economy, or capacity for transforming and connecting musical ideas. Instead we get big brassy fanfares and interminable ostinati, taken from Sibelius and fed steroids, but without any understanding that in Sibelius these are merely external manifestations of a process, not the process itself.

I have conducted some Bruckner, a composer notorious for rambling and semi-coherent structures, and felt that by the time the concert arrived I had got to grips with the direction of the music. With Walton 1 I was no wiser after weeks of rehearsal - particularly in the first and second movements.

There are four problems. The first is that Walton does not know how to write a climax; or rather he does not know how to use a climax. By definition, a climax is a point set apart from surrounding events; by definition these surrounding events must be of a different character. In music you show these differences by technical means - contrasts of volume and orchestration, for example - and by the character of the music itself. But Walton bangs on, particularly at the end of the first movement, with almost permanent orchestral tutti, the high points emerging rather like Dartmoor tors, pimples on a drab landscape, rather than mighty alps, amidst a musical affect of near-continuous angst. The effect is wearing.

Secondly, at nigh-on forty five minutes the symphony is simply too long. Again, the first and second movements are the chief culprits. At the start of the piece Walton says nothing after the first ten minutes that he hasn't said already in the first ten minutes. So why carry on? The scherzo, a dancing gremlin of a movement, does its stop-start, bang-crash, pp / ff business (very much derived from the scherzo of Sibelius 1) for five minutes or so; and then just carries on doing the same thing for a few minutes more. There is no emotional or psychological conclusion or development towards the end - for all its jittery jumpiness, after a while it is just boring.

Thirdly - and this is perhaps another aspect of the same fault - Walton has no idea how to do pacing, that most elusive of the musical arts; in other words how quickly to make the music move on from one passage or area of feeling to another, the instinctive dramatic grasp of when the listener will have heard enough of a particular section and want to continue to the next, when to make the music stop, when to make the flow continuous so the listener is caught up in its momentum. In part this is because the first three movements of the symphony always inhabit pretty much the same area of feeling; so how can he move on when the music is largely always saying the same thing? But within this continuous mood there are differing areas of tempo, and the first movement spends too much of the middle five minutes marooned in a tasteful angst-ridden torpor; the pace quickens for a couple of pages, then - and my heart sank every time we played it - back comes the second subject, slower, a wide-intervalled tune, usually in the horns - and at a stroke the momentum is gone again.

Lastly, orchestration. There is a moment, towards the end of the scherzo, where Walton has made up his mind that, having said all he has to say in this movement, he is going to say a bit more of it anyway; here a simple rhythmic idea is bounced between the woodwind and the strings. The ear greets this easy juxtaposition with a sigh of relief. For once Walton has written a simple open texture, devoid of doubled melodic lines, without complex divisi strings, without rampaging brass. But this is a rare moment, for I have never conducted a piece so over-orchestrated, so determined to be complex when being too simple would have been better (and to be sometimes simple and sometimes complex would have been better still). There are reams and reams of notes in this symphony which could simply have been erased. No one seems to have told Walton that sometimes it is better to withhold - because by witholding something its reintroduction is itself an effective musical ploy. If you want a climax, work out where that climax is going to be, then distribute your musical forces so that they have maximum impact at the moments when you need them; then start taking them away again.

All of which brings us back to Hamilton Harty. His Water Music arrangement is wildly anachronistic in this day and age; it bears little relation to Handel's original, and even given the early 20th century full-orchestra premise, there are some bizarre moments capable of making the modern musician gape with appalled wonder. And yet here was a man who knew how the orchestra works, and understood the psychology of the listener. The textures are spare and clear; the different orchestral groups are used for contrast rather than relentlessly mixed. The trumpets are cunningly held back to the last movement so their introduction comes as a thrilling fillip. You might even call the orchestration Sibelian. No wonder people still want to play it.

As for Walton, for all its pacing problems, in the last movement the composer does at last cast off his Sibelian shackles, with some glorious brass writing, a few poignant pages of tenderness amid the mayhem, and an over-the-top conclusion complete with ringing tam tam and cymbals.

Perhaps after the first first performance Hamilton Harty had a word with him.

liberal intervention in Libya

Until recently it had all gone rather quiet on the liberal intervention front. True, our gallant lads were still coming home in body bags from Afghanistan, but the issue of what we're doing there hasn't cropped up in any saloon bar conversation I've heard; Iraq rumbles on with occasional reports of a car bombing here, a victory for democracy there; Kosovo has gone quiet; can anyone remember exactly what we did in Somalia? Was it Somalia?

But now comes the Jasmine Revolution. In North Africa, governments have been swept from power in Tunisia and Egypt, and rebels in Libya have decided that they might as well have a go too. Of course in Tunisia and Egypt it was easy for the West - those in charge had just enough grip on reality to realise the game was up. Not so in Libya however, where Gaddafi is clearly mad enough (and then some) to imagine that the people against him are drug fiends or Al Qaeda stooges. Gaddafi is fighting back. So what should the West do?

I am posting this at a time when it's far from clear what the outcome will be (it seems more honourable than waiting to see who wins, and then deciding what you think). It's been fascinating to read the British papers in the last couple of weeks. The Left, adhering to its view that intervention in Iraq was a disaster, is on the whole against it in Libya, but is enjoying a bit of hand-wringing over what Gaddafi will do to his opponents if the coup fails. The Right has never had much time for arabs, and is sceptical about the equation arabs + islam + democracy = happiness. Moreover, they say, we couldn't afford to do anything even if we wanted to - we don't have the money, and defence cuts together with our other commitments (see Afghanistan above) mean that we don't have the manpower or materiel. Best let Johnny Foreigner get on with it.

A plague on both their houses. There is something we could do, if not on our own then with other nations. We could enforce a no-fly zone over the east of Libya, which would prevent Gaddafi's air force bombing his own citizens, or bombing the ammunition dumps which might provide his citizens with the means of overcoming him. We could even, if we wanted, bomb the living daylights out of Gaddafi's bits of Tripoli. After all, it worked with Slobodan Milosevic. We could in other words decide that this is the tipping point for Gaddafi, and with one or two firm shoves consign him to the dustbin of history.

But we probably won't. Why? Firstly, because the Americans don't want to get involved: President Obama talks the talk of freedom, but is less interested in walking the walk required to get there. Secondly, because getting involved would require competence and resolve from Messrs. Cameron and Hague, who have, on the contrary exhibited all the resolution of Hamlet's jellyfish siblings. They floated the idea of a no-fly zone in public, but were firmly slapped down by the US and have gone quiet since. Thirdly, the UN would never sanction it.

As well as the financial, legal and diplomatic considerations, there's something else. After Bush and Blair sanctioned the invasion of Iraq, they faced a tsunami of criticism, ranging from electoral hostility to threats of war crimes prosecution via serial public inquiries, criticism from people who were less interested in the opportunity for democracy the invasion presented to Iraqis and more interested in getting after political leaders they disliked. If you were leader of a Western country now, would you want that kind of hassle? 24 hour police guard? Indefinite trip to the Hague ten years down the line? I know I wouldn't.

So if Western countries are physically exhausted by the financial, legal and diplomatic fall-out from Iraq, they are also facing a kind of moral exhaustion. Our politicians would rather do nothing than get involved; and that is because we too are happy for them to do nothing. I hope Col Gaddafi doesn't win. But I fear he might.

PS The BBC's lunchtime news reported that rebels have retreated from the town of Bin Jawad and have fallen back on the oil terminal of Ras Lanuf. John Simpson has reported that "There has been quite a lot of bombardment here over the past couple of hours". Good old Libyan air force. The BBC's website now reports that rebels are now "fleeing" Ras Lanuf as well.

PPS Events have rather moved on since I wrote this post, and having made the schoolboy error of predicting what was going to happen in excessively concrete terms, I am now going to wait until the dust settles a bit before writing about how wrong I was.

AV - 2nd past the post?

And so the juggernaut gets under way. On 5 May Britain will vote whether to adopt AV for Westminster elections. As ever, a certain drowsy numbness pains my sense (Keats? Can't bother to look it up, I'm afraid) when confronted with the need to master this kind of issue. How much time d'you have to put in before you can justify making the trek to the polling station? How is it the intellectual faculties required can still be demanded of the middle-aged, faculties last given a gallop at the towering fence marked "quadratic equations", and ever since then immured in a darkened stable?

OK. I confess. I actually have thought about AV a bit, and here is my gift to the No campaign.

If AV means anything, it means that the candidate with the second largest number of 1st preference votes can win. This happens because if the "winner" gets less than 50%, 2nd preference votes are taken into account as well. And they are given the same weight as 1st preferences.

Why does this matter? Because the likelihood is that people will have put a cross by their 1st preference candidate with a great deal more enthusiasm than for their 2nd preference candidate. To put it another way, why should my vote for the candidate I really wanted to win count for no more than your vote for the candidate you could just about tolerate?

In some cases 3rd, 4th and 5th preferences will be taken into account too. Here it's even worse. Here my 4th preference vote for a candidate I wouldn't touch with a bargepole counts just as much as yours for the candidate you really wanted.

There are a number of other arguments against AV. The counting arrangements will be more expensive. The results will be more susceptible to delay. The Lib Dems will probably do better and a hung parliament will be more likely. Of these, the possibility of not liking the result seems to be the weakest. But the strongest is the sheer unfairness of the process set out above.

Enthusiasts for AV say that the public is crying out for electoral change, and that it's necessary for rejuvenating faith in the political process. Really? Seems to me that what destroys faith in politics is politicians relying on spin, refusing to give straight answers, fiddling their expenses, saying one thing in opposition and doing another in office, preferring lies the public will swallow to hard truths, and putting short term electoral gain ahead of long term benefit to the UK. These are the things destroying faith in politics, not the electoral system.

Still confused? OK. Here's a much easier test. Which side are the Luvvies on? You can save yourself a lot of effort in these situations by simply voting against the people with most Luvvies on board. Because they are almost certainly wrong.

The No to AV campaign have a mixture of politicians from Right and Left, but no one beautiful.

But the Yes campaign! John Cleese, Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard and Stephen Fry! And Helena Bonham Carter! And Colin Firth!

That clinches it. AV = 2nd past the post. You read it here first.

Steve Coogan and the Mexicans

"Court bans man with low IQ from having sex", read the headline on the Torygraph's website.

Afraid of what this might portend for my marriage, I clicked instead on a story about the Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, who had uttered the following on a recent show: "Mexican cars", said the Hamster, "are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat".

This laboured piece of invective has provoked an angry reaction from, amongst others, the comedian Steve Coogan. Writing in the Observer, Coogan laid into this "casual racism" and lambasted the BBC as "pitiful" for defending it.

Lacking the required interest in cars, I am not a Top Gear fan; but there is something wrong here and it is not necessarily Richard Hammond.

Firstly, is it racist to say what he did about Mexicans? The overwhelming majority of people in Britain - and in particular those who inhabit media-land - have long got over the idea that a person with a certain skin colour or width of nose is going to have certain behavioural characteristics (penchant for ponchos, perhaps). So it seems unlikely to me that Hammond was making a racial point; I'd be willing to bet that some of his best friends are black. Much more likely that Hammond was making a cultural one; and it doesn't seem to me wrong to criticise or lampoon someone else's culture. In parts of Muslim North Africa, for example, forced clitirodectomy of young girls is compulsory. If we are free to deplore this choice cultural practice, surely we should be free to criticise any other?

In his Observer article Steve Coogan unwittingly acknowledges this. He cites the BBC apology to the Mexican ambassador, which compared Hammond's remarks with "the more benign rivalry that exists between European nations (ah, those arrogant French, over-organised Germans)", and deplores it for "neatly sidestepp(ing) one hugely important fact – ethnicity. All the examples it uses to legitimise this hateful rubbish are relatively prosperous countries full of white people."

But Coogan has driven coach and horses through his own argument. If he can accept that remarks about white people might have been legitimate comments on a country's culture, why does he automatically assume that similar comments about the inhabitants of Mexico must be racist? Would it have been OK to poke fun at the food and clothing of white Mexicans? And if so, what difference does skin colour make? It begins to look as if it is Coogan who is making race matter here, not Hammond or the BBC.

To be clear, I'm sure Hammond's remarks were offensive. And? There is no right not to be offended. Moreover, in a properly functioning democratic society, the freedom to criticise or make fun of someone else's habits, is not just desirable but essential. That's how we stop, say, forced clitirodectomy happening here. On this occasion Top Gear's biggest crime was just not being very funny.

Sure, the programme is often crass and pleased with itself, but for every Top Gear there are hundreds of TV shows which are so bland that, far from holding the ring fairly between competing opinions, they actively promote a PC view of the world which is of itself an opinion. In this context Top Gear strikes a rare note of authenticity and freedom. That's why so many people like it.

A final note about Steve Coogan. Mexico is mired in corruption, lawlessness and violence because of the activities of the drug cartels. These cartels thrive and prosper because Mexico is the main conduit for illegal drugs into the USA over the border to the North. No doubt many imported drugs are taken by deadbeats, seeking to inject some excitement into their mean existence. But many are also taken by celebrities like Mr Coogan, seeking to inject some excitement into, er, their pampered and self-indulgent lives.

I said like Mr Coogan, but actually I meant including Mr Coogan. For if you google "Steve Coogan cocaine" you will find a variety of news stories (including some on his own website) detailing the great man's use of the drug. These range from hotel room sessions with lapdancers to binges with Hollywood actor Owen Wilson. Even Courtney Love, veteran of a relationship with Kurt Cobain (found dead with grammes of heroin to hand) feels moved to tell a magazine, "I tried to warn Owen (about Coogan). I tried to warn his friends. I hope from the bottom of my heart that Owen stays the hell away from that guy".

In doing his bit to ensure there's plenty of demand for the drug cartels' wares, Coogan is in no position to pontificate about doing right by Mexicans. Comically unaware of the abyss of hypocrisy yawning beneath him, he writes in the Observer, "I can tell you from my own experience, living in the US, Mexicans work themselves to the bone doing all the dirty thankless jobs that the white middle-class natives won't do." Like polishing the glass tables after you've been snorting off them, Steve?

"Court bans man with low IQ from having sex", read the Telegraph headline. If I were Coogan I'd be looking over my shoulder.

yet more sexism in the workplace ....

I'm not at all surprised that football pundit Andy Gray was sacked for inviting a female colleague, Charlotte Jackson, to stick her hand down his trousers to adjust his microphone. My sympathy for him is limited. So is my sympathy for Ms Jackson. Did she get the job because she knew lots about football? Or could it have been because she was blonde and sexy?

No-one deserves to be spoken to like Andy Gray spoke to Charlotte Jackson; but perhaps she has less right to complain than she would have if she hadn't accepted substantial sums of money for appearing thus to readers of Loaded magazine:

Actually Ms Jackson hasn't complained at all, which is greatly to her credit. Perhaps she senses the weakness of her position.

But what about Richard Keys? All of his published utterances make him sound like a very unattractive personality. And yet. Being sexist is one of life's opinion options. It certainly isn't confined to Mr Keys, and it isn't confined to men either - has anyone watched Loose Women recently? And just as I am appalled at Gray and Keys's sexism, I have absolutely no doubt that I have opinions which a lot of other people find offensive. Should I lose my job for uttering them?

Being a grown up means being willing to mix with other people you don't agree with and don't like. That's true for anyone whose work and leisure activities bring them into contact with others. Seeing the self-righteous monstering inflicted on Mr Keys by the media generally and by Jane Martinson and Tanya Gold in particular in this morning's Guardian, the faintest stirrings of sympathy for Keys and dislike for those standing over him administering the kicking begin to arise.

Here's Jane Martinson -

If these remarks go some way towards changing behind-closed-doors behaviour, we can all claim a victory.

And here's Gold -

It will no longer be possible to casually spout your prejudice at work and feel secure.

Yes, Gold thinks that's a good thing. And Martinson wants your behind-closed-doors behaviour to change. If she doesn't like what she thinks you're doing.

The line between doing what Gray did and doing what Keys did is a fine one; but it's there, just. One person's prejudice is another person's opinion. And the day when having the "wrong" opinions gets you the sack is a bad day, not a good one.

lucky Miriam O'Reilly

So Miriam O'Reilly won her case against the BBC for age discrimination. Good for her. Obviously it's wrong for people in her sort of job to be sacked for being too old.

But was that really why she was sacked? I found myself thinking this morning about good old Robin Day. The bow-tied curmudgeon got into a lot of hot water once for suggesting that Anna Ford, pulchritudinous 70s newsreader, had only got her job because men wanted to sleep with her. The spirit of the age was against Day, and he was duly shouted down, but I suspect that he was right.

That's not to say that Ms Ford was incompetent; far from it. But perhaps she got the job because, of all the outstanding candidates for it, she was the sexiest. And this is TV after all. Perish the thought, it might even be the case that one of the other applicants - someone else a bit less heavenly looking - could have done it better.

What's this got to do with Miriam O'Reilly? I have never watched Countryfile (although my wife, an insomniac, tells me that she was a dreary and hectoring presenter on Farming Today), but judging from the pictures in the paper this morning, she must once have been a bit of a looker. And the thought did cross my mind that perhaps a few years ago Ms O'Reilly got the job rather than anyone else because she was nice-looking; and that complaining about losing it when she was no longer quite so nice-looking might be a bit rich.

This morning Ms O'Reilly will be coasting downhill with the wind of bien-pensant opinion in her sails and a few extra quid in the bank; but I think she lived by the sword and died by it. Lucky Ms O'Reilly.

Paying for Mr Pappano

In the wake of Arts Council cuts, it was no surprise to read press reports the other day that the BBC is willing to talk to other beleaguered arts bodies about orchestral funding. Whilst inherently sympathetic to their plight, I was reminded of another story last week about the salary earned by Antonio Pappano, MD at Covent Garden. I forget the exact figure commanded by Mr Pappano, but the sum which has stuck in my mind is £690,000. Now Pappano is no doubt a fine musician, but is he really worth the best part of £700k? To put it another way, could another musician, perhaps equally fine, have been found to do the job for, oh I don't know, £500k? £300k? Might not Pappano himself have been prepared to do the job for a lower sum?

For my work on the day of a concert an amateur orchestra generally pays me about £250 (yes, that's £250, not£250k). I am not suggesting that I could do as good a job as Mr Pappano (although I'd be willing to give it a shot), but one thing I have learned since I started conducting is that there are, even in amateur music circles, an awful lot of very fine conductors out there. And that's just in NW England. The idea that there is only a small group of people in the world who are capable of leading a top opera company (or a professional symphony orchestra, whose conductors are paid comparable sums), and that salaries like Mr Pappano's have to be awarded to secure their services, is pure tosh. The reality is that in every country there are dozens and dozens of terrific musicians who would do the job for less. Some of them would do it for next to nothing. If I did not have to eat, I would organise, rehearse and conduct great music free of charge. In fact if I had to, I would crawl over broken glass to do it. The experience is its own reward.

Why does any of this matter? Surely it's up to the ROH to decide how much it pays its Music Director? Well no. Firstly, Pappano's salary is obscene when compared with the wages of the players, which will be less than a tenth of the amount (extras at one of Manchester's professional orchestras are paid about £100 per day, and I believe it's among the most generous). Secondly, there's something rather horrible about anyone earning this kind of money when many ordinary people, who couldn't afford to go to the Royal Opera even during the good times, are losing their jobs.

And thirdly, the ROH receives public money. Yes, you and I are paying taxes in order to help the Royal Opera pay Mr Pappano £690k p.a. That makes me feel quite bad.

Should any organisation which has so little idea how to run a tight financial ship that it pays its chief the best part of a million quid a year really be getting a penny from the public purse?