Genius and Craft

Many years ago, when I was working at the National Theatre, I met a very charming man , Bill Byers, who died about ten years ago. Bill had been contracted to orchestrate a rather disastrous new musical, "Jean Seberg". He was at that time the doyen of American arrangers, dividing his time between Hollywood movies and Broadway shows. As a fairly busy arranger myself at the time. I was humbled, not only by his skill. but by his craft. I would write fast and rely on my ever loyal copyists to correct my mistakes - my main guy reckoned he could tell how late I'd worked the night before and whether I had resorted to the brandy bottle. Bill wrote faster, in ink and never made mistakes.

This may be music biz trivia, but Bill was, in his way, a genius. Maybe he wasn't a genius in the way that Mozart or Bach were, but they shared with him an extraordinary concentration and craftsmanship which was a crucial part of their genius - look at facsimiles of their manuscripts, hardly a crossing out, music flowing as fast as the pen could. The craft and art were inseparable in the same way that Picasso could draw conventionally faster than most men could talk and Shakespeare somehow managed to write hundreds of thousands of words with scarcely a dud phrase.

Have spell checks, movie writing and music composing software blunted this art and craft symbiosis? I hope not, because I can't help thinking that you can't have one without the other.

A Salaried Wit

After a few days spent filling in the sixty five pages, in triplicate, plus supporting documents for an application to the MEDIA 2007 development fund of the EU, I am all but spent, as it were. So all I can muster for this blog is a sales pitch; The Gramophone, that estimable source of all things to do with recorded music, has given Capriol Films a nice review. This is for our DVD of "A Salaried Wit - Grossmith, Gilbert and Sullivan", a one hour documentary with performance written and presented by the multi talented Simon Butteriss.

Simon is the modern day version of George Grossmith, Gilbert and Sullivan's original "patterman" and comic inspiration and, at the risk of sounding big headed, I believe the film is excellent. (I would do, I produced and directed it). If you haven't sampled it already, why not go to the Capriol home page, and then to the Salaried Wit page and download some excerpts. Excited by these and fuelled by the Gramophone review, you will doubtless want to purchase the DVD, which you can do by hitting the link from our website.

That's it for sales talk, tomorrow I will revert to neutral analysis of something more altruistic, whilst quietly dreaming that music and arts fans the world over will buy "A Salaried Wit" and enable Simon and I to get cracking on our next collaboration, details to be revealed in due course.

The American Way

And so, a Saturday matinee of "Little Shop of Horrors" at the Duke of York's Theatre. A family group, age range 15 - 58 who all enjoyed the show, even if they were a little less demonstrative than me. We left the theatre and walked up St Martins Lane past the Albery, sorry the Coward Theatre, where the equally engaging "Avenue Q" is playing. Both shows are small scale, albeit with wonderful puppetry at "Avenue Q" and a truly monstrous walking talking plant at "Little Shop". Young and manically hard working casts, loud but undistorted music and imaginative, 'tho hardly revolutionary design and direction.

The recipe for Broadway and West End Success? Well, yes, but there has to be more than that, and if British musicals writers could crack the formula there might be genuine competition for the successful, but somewhat portentous monopoly of Lord Lloyd Webber. Lloyd Webber's music may nod towards Puccini and Mendelssohn, to name two well known examples, but it does at least reflect his compositional voice. The music for "Little Shop" and "Avenue Q" is actually much more derivative, but the shows undeniably work.

Perhaps it is because the composers unashamedly plunder Broadway. We know we have heard the songs before, but they are so rooted in the genre that it doesn't seem to matter. The three girls of the chorus in "Little Shop" (and I mean chorus in the Greek tradition) are named Chiffon, Crystal and Ronette and their music tells us so. The wonderfully un PC "Every one's a Little bit Racist" in "Avenue Q" traces it's musical roots directly to vaudeville.

So, British composers and lyricists- its simple - go back the the Beatles, or George Formby or Gilbert and Sullivan and we can look forward to a West End full of home grown musicals.

Or maybe not.

Satyagraha

I'm afraid I'm already breaking my undertaking not to post negative comments. Imagine you are a child, messing around on the family piano. You find the chord of C major and then work down - C major, B flat major, A flat major, G major - bingo! You have Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Why should I die" sequence from "Jesus Christ Superstar", which as you may recall, goes on for quite a while. It is as nothing compared to what I heard last night at EnglishNational Opera - the same four chord sequence played for the first twenty five minutes of the British premier of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. This was followed by about fifteen minutes of a three chord sequence and then topped off nicely with a chunk of frenetic woodwind action.

During this time the singers intoned some quite pleasant, defiantly tonal lines in Sanskrit- without sur titles, just some projected scene headings. (Funny that, ENO has a policy of opera in English with surtitles). The director, Phelim McDermott, from the wonderful Improbable Theatre, did what he could, but was reduced to making the cast wander round in a kind of African Noh play torpor, which induced in me a torpor that lead to sleep, snoring and disapproval from the person next to me. I felt obliged to leave at the first interval.

Philip Glass writes extremely clever and sometimes mesmerising systems music, the ENO chorus and orchestra were as impressive as ever - the last ten minutes of act one seemed to have no gap for breathing, and the singers and woodwind players pulled it off magnificently. But in the end, is it opera? I think not, it is some form of stylised oratorio, totally lacking in the musical and thus theatrical dynamic which defines good music theatre of any type. Please, ENO, look around you at the plethora of wonderful writers and composers in the UK, and give them a chance. The last homegrown "new" opera, (and I don't count the recent Gaddafi experiment) was Turnage's "Silver Tassie" - A long time ago, but genuine opera and hugely successful.

Crossover

I have been involved in my fair share of crossover music over the years - some of it good - Georghe Zamfir playing Bartok on the panpipes, some of it reasonable - Judy Collins singing "Jerusalem" and some of it, a Little dodgy.

As composer of the Champion's League anthem, which crosses over fairly firmly with Handel, I have been responsible for the on pitch musical entertainment at several European Cup finals. The Opera Babes had their first outing in Munich some years ago, standing in the middle of the pitch and puzzling the fans, who had no idea what they were doing there. Then there was the final between Bayern Munich and Valencia at Milan's mighty San Siro ground. the whole event was opera themed and various "crossover" artists performed to a completely indifferent crowd who were only there for the football. Various UEFA bigwigs were urging me to cancel the big event and as the entire chorus of La Scala Milan filed on to the pitch to sing, unaccompanied Verdi's "Va Pensiero" I confess my heart was in my boots. Eighty thousand rabid German and Spanish fans started to calm down and with the exception of some Leder hosen louts, who were hushed by the rest of the crowd, the choir performed to virtual silence and tumultuous applause.

Crossover? - not a bit of it, just great music doing its thing. Last night's Harvey Goldsmith tutorial on channel four was just the opposite - a small opera company desperately trying to make its mark by coming up with - "Arias on Ice". Enough said, what will be next? Concerto's in caves? Symphonies in swimming pools? I'm not a snob, by all means lets have crossover - I've done very nicely out of it, but let's not get to the point of forever patronising the audience - it doesn't give them a chance.

John Lennon

A million years ago I produced and directed the music for an American television film rather unimaginatively entitled "John and Yoko - a love Story". Sitting in an edit room at Abbey Road Studios transferring actual Beatles master tapes,(and what a lot of edits there were) was an existential experience. As I recall, the film was quite good, although, like most Lennon bio-pieces it tended not to dwell on Lennon's undoubted darker side - although it didn't airbrush his "lost weekend" with May Pang and a gun toting Phil Spector in California.

Like most people of my generation, I can remember what I was doing when Lennon was shot as clearly as I can remember, (as young child!), Kennedy's demise. Watching the documentary "The US v John Lennon" last Friday served to underline the importance of a man who used his fame to promote his cogent but naive theories on world peace. Cynics then were dismissive,as they now are of our honorary Irish knights Geldorf and Bono. True, Lennon didn't raise millions for a starving third world, but his clarion call for a simple objective, whether from a bed in Amsterdam or a concert in Ann Arbor, resonates down the years. The urgent simplicity of songs like "John Sinclair," performed at Ann Arbor, masked a musical sophistication that is often overlooked. The cynics can hardly gainsay the romantic eloquence of "Beautiful Boy" or the power of the four bars of "Give Peace a Chance", which became the anthem for the international peace movement.

Lennon's opposition to the Vietnam war was focused enough to bring him to the unwelcome attention of J. Edgar Hoover, the spiritual guide to the present gang of neo-cons who run the White House, and thus the world. Where is today's John Lennon, someone driven enough to be a fool to fight the foolishness?

The Star Factor

Looking at a picture of the captivating Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra in yesterday's Sunday Times, I was transported back to Glyndebourne 2005. David McVicar's vibrant production of Handel's "Giulio Cesare" introduced this young star in such a way that it had a preponderance of red faced gentlemen struggling with their bow ties and praying for the paramedics. De Niese's sex charged kitten was ably countered by Sarah Connolly's magnificent Cesare, and for once the interminable do capo arias flew by.

More recently my heart was recaptured by Natalie Dessay in Donizetti's "La Fille du Regiment" at the Royal Opera House - a performance which had wit, charm and vocal gymnastics in equal measure. Ms Dessay was partnered by the young Peruvian tenor, Juan Diego Florez, who's insouciant top C's had the blue rinsed heads and pearls bobbing and rattling in ecstasy.

Both these productions are, or will be available on DVD, from Opus Arte I think, (although this, plus relays for the BBC in the UK, ORF in Vienna and, presumably cinema shows from the Met does seem to be egging a confection which is probably the silliest opera plot of all time). I will buy these discs, which will doubtless afford me much pleasure in my dotage, but it does beg a question:

What about all the hundreds of opera DVD's currently available? There are something like ten "La Traviata's" listed, do people really want all of them? Owning a copy of a performance one has seen and loved is one thing; are there people out there who, like serious classical CD collectors, have to have every version? If that is the case, are they not disappointed by the countless rather less inspiring offerings that often emanate from quite mundane productions that cost relatively little to film? If the model works, then full marks to the various companies issuing these discs, but I have a feeling that this rush to immortalise singers and productions you have never heard of is somewhat finite.

Not an April Fool

This may seem like a less than propitious date to launch the Capriol weblog, but I had to start sometime. The article in today's "Observer" about the BBC also galvanised me into action. Assuming this is not a 1st April jape, it would seem that the BBC intends to instigate a review entitled "household value", which essentially addresses the concern that the corporation is too "upmarket". Whilst it is true to say that this publicly funded organisation should endeavour to serve the needs of all of its audience, it does raise concerns about the amount of money and screen time that may be allotted to the arts on television in future.

More broadly, this ties in with the long term aim of this blog - to look at the performing arts in the UK and beyond and try to create new synergies with broadcasting for the new age. The concept of the "long tail" has been much trumpeted, but it is surely going to be an important part of the future of broadcasting. The concept of relatively small communities who want to watch what is increasingly being labelled "niche material" is here today and will be widely in use tomorrow.

I want to create an online community that discusses the performing arts in a non elitist manner. Further down the line, as Capriol Films increases its reach via DVD sales and Internet protocol television (IPTV), the community can tell us what films they would like to see and we can ask them if the films we want to make might interest them. I'm not talking about conventional opera/concert/stage relays, although these have their place, (more in a future posting). I'm really interested in the more quirky types of film that I strongly believe can engage a contemporary audience.

For the time being, lets try and create a forum of good humoured comment - if something that I have seen or researched interests me I will talk about it, if something appalls me, (and plenty does!) I will probably not. In a world beset with bad news this might be refreshing!

So in this spirit I will return to the BBC - its not all bad news when you can watch two hours of Chris Douglas and Nigel Planer's sublime creation, Nicholas Craig, tonight at 9.00pm on BBC4. He will doubtless have his view on this blog - hopefully lots of people will - tell your Friends and voice your opinions!

Tony Britten