As almost everyone knows from the much-loved fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty can awaken only after she has been kissed by a handsome prince. But did you know there’s another Sleeping Beauty? She is not nearly as famous as the young lady in the fairy tale, of course. But she is no less important. In fact, she may even be MORE important than her somnolent counterpart.
She has a wondrous golden glow about her, especially when in the spotlight. And, unlike a number of her close relations, her neck has never been replaced. But unlike her cousin in the fairy tale, she doesn’t respond at all to the kiss of a prince. In fact, for this Sleeping Beauty to awaken, she needs to be stroked by a horsehair bow – and then she sings with a seductiveness that has ensured her fame ever since she came into the world in a workshop in Cremona, Italy in 1704.
Just the other day, there’s been coverage in the news about the oldest man in the world. He is 113 years old and lives in Britain but Sleeping Beauty is far older than that. In fact, she is more than THREE hundred years old but she looks and sounds considerably better than that British geriatric.
An audience that packed the Concert Hall almost to capacity at the weekend, saw just how beautiful this Sleeping Beauty looks. And when Isabelle Faust, to whom Sleeping Beauty is on loan from a German bank, stroked her with her bow, she sang with the sweetest, most silvery of voices. I dare say, though, that it might be her great age that caused her exquisite voice to sing unusually softly so that at times it was necessary to lean forward in one’s seat in the 17th row to catch every fine detail of the solo part of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. And apart from a less-than-assured opening moment, it was clear that the soloist is profoundly musical and technically adroit although her stage presence was curiously lacklustre. Faust was impressive in steering a faultless way through the cadenza – and trills were immaculately spun in the slow movement.
Although Mendelssohn wrote a number of concertos, it is this one that is far and away the most loved of them all. And it was good to hear this queen of concertos offered with such understanding on the part of the soloist. An earlier concerto for the violin is a juvenile effort of little moment. And a concerto for violin and piano soloists was recorded on the HMV label in the 1960s with Yehudi Menuhin and Gerald Moore as soloists. It’s sinking into deserved oblivion. And Mendelssohn’s two concertos for piano, like drooping aspidistra leaves, thoroughly deserve to disappear from the repertoire as well.
An orchestra is as good as its conductor – and when the baton is waved by a gifted musician, the W.A.Symphony Orchestra more often than not responds impressively and has done so at exceptional levels in recent years. But this was not always the case at the weekend where, too frequently at climaxes during Weber’s overture to Oberon, the brass section sounded uncharacteristically coarse – and one would have hoped for a more uniform tonal sheen from the strings. This playing was so out of character for the WASO that one wondered whether sufficient rehearsal time had been devoted to the program. Much the same could be said of Beethoven’s Symphony No 1.
Her dirt poor parents in Boulder were so short of money, that her clothes were made from old flour sacks – and hershoes were hand-me-downs two sizes too big for her. It’s almost certain that these slights and embarrassments made the little girl long to be famous and rich. And that is what happened to Eileen Joyce – or little Ellie as she was known in Boulder where her parents settled not long after Ellie was born in Tasmania in 1908.
One hundred years on, there will be many a commemorative recital in her honour around the world. So, too, in Perth which loomed large in Joyce’s affections, so much so that towards the end of her life, she donated significant monies for the building of the Eileen Joyce Studio on UWA campus in memory of her parents.
During the 1940s and into the 1950s, Eileen Joyce was arguably the second most famous of living Australians, second only to Don Bradman – and she earned buckets of money in the process.
She was glamorous, she was feted wherever she went – and the clothes she wore were almost as a big a talking point as her performances. Eileen Joyce would say that, in her mind, certain colours suited certain composers: lilac for Liszt, yellow for Schumann, blue for Grieg, red for Tchaikowsky and so on. And she would frequently give recitals in which she would wear a different concert gown for each work on the program, a habit that would surely have been sweet compensation after her poverty-stricken youth. And these were not gowns made by some anonymous suburban dressmaker. On the contrary, they sported the labels of some of the priciest couturiers in the world, such as Worth and Norman Hartnell, the Queens’ dress designer.
For years, she was very frequently written about in women’s magazines which informed their avid readers that even Joyce’s hairstyles were dictated by the music she played: hair piled high for Beethoven, drawn back tight for Mozart and let down for Debussy!
Some critics blasted her for these “tasteless distractions”, “prostitution of her art” and “cheap tricks”. Eileen laughed all the way to the bank.
As a child, Ellie liked to play the harmonica but when an aunt moved in with the family, she brought an item of furniture that would change Ellie’s life forever – a battered old upright piano to which the little girl took like the proverbial duck to water.
Ellie was taught the piano at the convent school she attended in Boulder. Enter one Charles Schilsky who would by now be totally forgotten if not for being the first senior musician to spot Ellie’s extraordinary potential and do something about it. Schilsky had come to Boulder as an examiner for Trinity College of Music, London.
After hearing young Ellie, he approached the local priest and told him the little girl had a giant talent and needed top tuition. The Catholic church came to Ellie’s musical rescue. Monies were raised in improbable ways. Hats were passed around in Boulder taverns – and more than a few of the winnings from games of two-up found their way to the growing fund. Ellie went to Perth as a boarder at Loreto Convent where Sister John gave Ellie the music guidance she needed.
Enter Charles Schilsky yet again. Invited back to Perth to adjudicate at an eisteddfod, he immediately recognised that Ellie was moving forward by leaps and bounds, put in a good word or two and before long young Eileen was on her way to Europe for lessons in Leipzig, Germany from Robert Teichmuller. Here, too, she flourished, absorbing her teacher’s wise counsel like blotting paper. Then she went to England. Sir Henry Wood, founder of the famous London Proms, conducted her debut concerto performance; it was a huge success. Eileen Joyce was on her way to justifying Percy Grainger’s comment that “she was the most transcendentally gifted pianist I have ever encountered.”
Her big break came in London. She’d decided to make a piano recording privately which she intended to use as a sort of musical calling card when looking for concert opportunities. But when she returned to the studio to pay for the recording she had made days earlier, she was told, to her pleasant surprise, that her playing was so impressive that, not only did she not have to pay for the recording, she was instead offered a contract to make further recordings on the Parlophone label – and that was the beginning of a career during which many of her records became best sellers, making a fortune for both the recording company and Eileen.
This was also about the time that Eileen, a compulsive liar for most of her life, began manufacturing fanciful fictions about her life and career – and these fabrications became increasingly complicated until, later in life, she had difficulty herself in remembering what was true and what was not. Early on, she claimed to have been born in 1912 – but then, many movie actresses also hid their year of birth.
In 1937, Eileen married stockbroker Douglas Barratt by whom she fell pregnant. It was not a happy union – and their son John was born sixteen hours after Britain declared war on Germany. Not long after, Douglas was killed on active service.
Later, Joyce metChristopher Mann – and although presenting themselves as a married couple, there are still doubts whether they were legally married or not: another one of Joyce’s lies?
Whatever the state of their union, Mann proved a brilliant agent; his connections and shrewd business acumen transformed Eileen into a superstar and earned them a fortune. Her son, though, was to have a traumatic youth and adolescence at Eileen’s and Christopher’s hands. He was packed off to boarding school at the earliest possible moment. And Mann’s attitude towards the little boy would make David Copperfield’s stepfather seem a paragon of enlightenment and compassion by comparison.
For the rest of his life, Mann treated John appallingly, at best treating him like some barely tolerated house guest and insisting on the most detailed accounting, literally to the very penny, of the parsimonious allowance he so grudgingly gave the child who was more often than not dumped like some unwanted parcel at boarding school. To her eternal discredit, Eileen never intervened, passively allowing Mann to wreck John’s childhood and adolescence. This indifference to her only child became ever more obvious towards the end of life when Eileen lavished far more affection on her dogs than her only child.
When she died, she left money for guide dogs for the blind. Would that she had been equally caring about her son John to whom she left nothing – nothing! – so that, to acquire some dearly loved childhood artefacts, he had to engage an agent to purchase these at an auction sale of his mother’s possessions. But Joyce did leave money to John’s young son, to be held in trust until he turned 25 years old. John did not attend his mother’s funeral.
Mean and neglectful she may have been towards her son but in other ways Joyce was generous with her time and abilities. She rarely turned down an appeal to play to raise funds for this or that charity. And in wartime England she worked unceasingly, as did, say, Yehudi Menuhin, to play for the troops in hospitals and munitions factories up and down the land. This, too, brought record crowds to her performances whether as recitalist or concerto soloist.
Joyce’s success on the concert platform or the recording studio was based on a very shrewd self assessment. A superb technical facility allowed her to play, with ease, any work she attempted at the piano. But she lacked interpretative depth – and she knew it. So she avoided music like the late sonatas of Beethoven, for instance, with which she could not identify compellingly. Hers was essentially a superficial gift – and sheexploited it brilliantly. It won over a huge international audience.
Much later in life, she developed an interest in the harpsichord and this at a time when
baroque performance practice was almost unknown – and she is rightly credited with doing valuable pioneering work drawing attention to often neglected early music.
In old age, Joyce very much wanted to honour the memory of her parents and she did so, on the advice of the late Sir Frank Callaway, founding professor ofUWA’s School of Music, by donating significant monies to the university to purpose-build a small auditorium on campus. And it is widely agreed that the Eileen Joyce Studio is one of the most beautiful appointed and situated venues of its kind in the world. It houses a collection of historic pianos as well as water colour paintings of Joyce as concerto soloist at London’s Royal Festival Hall. There is also a fine Augustus John portrait of Joyce when young. There’s also an oil paining of her in doctoral robes (she was awarded an honorary doctorate in music by UWA).
To mark the centenary, Piers Lane who stood in for Joyce years earlier when her hands were not up to the job, will give a recital of works close to Joyce’s heart at the Octagon on Sunday March 16th at 5pm: the program includes the 24 Preludes, opus 28 by Chopin and Grainger’s arrangement of the first movement of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor.Perhaps the recital organisers will arrange to have the paintings and drawings of Eileen Joyce displayed in the Octagon foyer on the day of the recital.
Since Peter Tanfield took over the direction of the Faith Court Orchestra, it has improved so significantly that it sounds like an altogether different – and more proficient – ensemble to that of, say, a couple of years ago.
Tanfield comes to Perth with impressive credentials. A former student of Yehudi Menuhin, he was a prizewinner at the Carl Flesch International Competition. He has taught extensively in Britain, Spain and Germany. Tanfield came to University of Adelaide in 1998 to lead the then-Australian String Quartet. He has been co-ordinator of classical strings at WAAPA since last year.
Ben Martin
Tanfield’s direction of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5 was impressive. I had wondered whether tackling this masterwork might have been overly ambitious. In the event, my reservations evaporated only moments into the work.
While a uniform tonal sheen in the various subsections of the strings is, on Wednesday’s evidence, still more a hope than a reality at present, and although some of the lower woodwinds need focused work in relation to intonation and tone quality, the overarching, grand sweep of Tchaikowsky’s Fifth was most commendably achieved.
Tanfield did wonders in extracting fine detail from his forces, his face eloquently mirroring the emotions he so skilfully coaxed from his young players. It augurs impressively for the FCO’s long-term prospects.
I particularly liked the tone of the brass choir, now bold and assertive, now warmly expressive, especially the French horns who gave a most musical account of themselves. A bouquet to Samuel Parry for consistently musical work on the oboe.
Ben Martin was soloist in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2. As ever, this prince of the piano did wonders at the keyboard, in an interpretation that was in the best sense lucid, cogent and stylistically apt. It is perhaps quibbling to point out some minor slips in the finale. Certainly, the overall effect was first rate, not least for Martin’s finely honed skill in unbottling the often turbulent genie that lies behind the printed note.
As for the accompaniment, one wondered whether the lion’s share of the FCO’s rehearsal time had been devoted to the symphony because there were moments in the concerto when ensemble weakened and entries were tentative.
Katja Webb (soprano), Sarah-Janet Dougiamas (mezzo), Roberto Abate (tenor) and Robert Hofmann (bass)
Winthrop Hall
reviewed by Stuart Hille
There are many sections of Bach’s ‘Mass in B minor’ which radiate unique inspiration and a masterful handling of the technique required to evoke and develop it. So much of the ‘Symbolum Nicenum’ (Credo), as an extended example, has an incandescence and spiritual profundity rarely attained by other composers. But then there are other tracts of the Mass, particularly in the ‘Gloria’ (containing nine separate divisions), where one perceives a relative lassitude in the presentation and unfolding of ideas. Perhaps these ‘weaker’ moments – remembering we are discussing ‘weakness’ at the masterpiece level – result from Bach’s habit, born of necessity, of reusing material. One can always assume this to be a standard practice in his larger works. He used material from past works in present works and he reused material from present works in future works. This is certainly the case in the ‘Gloria’ where one is all too aware of hearing something one has heard before, probably in a cantata. So what is the cumulative effect of a merger of the strikingly original and the annexed?
There isn’t one: either the writing is brilliant, good or mediocre…for J.S.Bach. This Mass contains it all. Besides, one doesn’t get to sixty five years of age, marry twice, raise twenty children on a musician’s salary, travel and then compose vast amounts of music, often in great haste, without ‘borrowing’ and reworking old material! Composers have done this throughout history but Bach, due to his eminence within the firmament of great composers and therefore subject to greater scrutiny, makes it more obvious.
Yet not only do a large number of musicologists describe the Mass in B minor as “sublime” or “supreme” but this determination has also become a part of the general collective thinking. Perhaps it would be more practical to describe the work as a collection of the sublime, the good and the purely utilitarian, bordering on prosaic (and written over a substantial period of time). In a quirky fashion, it is the variety of creative fashioning which makes the music even richer.
The ways in which the music is held together should have little to do with the performance of it. They are, in a very real sense, separate considerations, although, it must be said, that the better the performance of a poorly written work, the more noticeable its flaws become. On this occasion the UWA Choral Society’s reading was courageous though sometimes uneven. While there were some areas where the singing deserved high praise for its clarity of line and balance of harmony, there were others which were less successful because of inaccuracies in exact pitching and a blurring of the contrapuntal texture (inexact rhythmic definition).
The opening of the Kyrie asserted its presence with a stamp of authority. Through dynamic strength, inner balance, nicely rounded phrases and a comfortable tempo, one’s sense of positive anticipation was wakened. This was indeed a bold statement. But there were a few worrying signs: the sopranos pitching of high notes and the tenors and basses pitching of lower notes. However at this stage, these were not sufficient to cause anything more than a ruffle in the texture.
By the time the duet ‘Christe eleison’, sung by Katja Webb (soprano) and Sarah-Janet Dougiamas (mezzo), had concluded, the previous choral concerns seemed to be forgotten. This is probably due to Webb’s good rhythmic clarity and accuracy of pitch, and Dougiamas’s full, rich tone (although it could have been projected with slightly more penetration). As a unity they formed a convincing exchange, a well poised reciprocity.
With the second ‘Kyrie eleison’ the balanced give-and-take shown by the vocal soloists (above) was not mirrored by the choir. Concerns began to resurface. After such a clear and spirited opening to the Mass, the four sections now seemed more intent upon displaying divisional prominence rather than working towards an overall unity of sound. Consequently, the counterpoint, which is always reliant on balance, became muddied – blurred by singers more concerned with allegiance to the division rather than to the whole. One could see Burhan Guner (conductor), while keeping a firm grasp on the tempo, was attempting to tone down the sopranos and basses. If he could detect unevenness in the fabric while being so close to the action, it requires little imagination to sense how it sounded at the rear of Winthrop Hall. Even experienced choristers, such as these, need to be reminded, from time to time, there is no place for divisional ‘egos’, if one can put it that way, in contrapuntal singing.
In the Gloria, taken as a whole, these difficulties of balance and pitch didn’t vanish but became less assertive. Some of the places within this beautifully symmetrical architecture – the spirited trumpet in ‘Gloria in excelsis’ and the very fine texture of the ‘Laudamus te’ – were like scarabs in the design. Yet there were other places where new problems were exposed.
The most significant of these, shown in both the ‘Et in terra pax’ and the ‘Gratias agimus tibi’, was a growing tendency, throughout the choir but most notably in the sopranos, to be too casual with ‘gap-fills’ (the string of smaller notes between more prominent notes in the melodic line). These needed to be better articulated, through awareness of breath control, without becoming exaggerated. However, when the line is too relaxed, as it was on this occasion, the prominent notes become altogether too conspicuous. Similarly, the ‘Cum sancto spiritu’, although well paced and better pitched, was uneven in its flow because the gap-filling was somewhat perfunctory.
The Gloria also allowed the soloists greater prominence. It is curious to note that Bach only introduces the tenor as a true soloist towards the conclusion of the entire composition. We first hear him (Roberto Abate, in this performance) in duet with the soprano. His melodic line, at this point in the work, seems more utilitarian than florid, so Abate was put at somewhat of a psychological disadvantage as soon as he sang his first notes. Not surprisingly, therefore, he and Webb didn’t quite ‘knit’ their respective parts into a persuasive duet. This is unfortunate because both singers have vocal qualities. They both displayed excellent pitch control and good penetration. Their duet – ‘Domine Deus’ – is placed at the core of the Gloria’s frame, the central line of its equilibrium, yet Bach uses music from an earlier cantata and does so in a rather matter-of-fact manner. Whether this, in any way, explains the business-like nature of the tenor’s part, I can’t say.
The bass soloist (Robert Hofmann) was first heard in the ‘Quoniam tu solus sanctus’, the penultimate section of the Gloria. One was immediately struck by the clarity of his diction (and that’s quite a rare compliment to pay a singer). In purely musical terms, he showed an evenness of timbre throughout his range, a most desirable quality in sacred vocal music, although his penetration could have more incisive. Also, while his pitch accuracy is to be commended, he projects the notes with a little more breath than they warrant. The horn (corno da caccia) was deftly handled in this rendition and formed a nice discourse with the bass voice.
The ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’, which closes the Gloria, yielded some good details in the choral parts. As a unity, they functioned with greater accord here and the two soprano lines (remembering Bach ‘splits’ the choir into four, five, six or eight parts at various stages throughout the work) touched their high notes with pleasing precision and just the correct degree of force. But elsewhere there were problems afoot.
One always hesitates before mentioning troubling features within the male vocal parts because, quite frankly, good tenors and basses are far from aplenty. The UWA Coral Society’s male singers are, generally, proficient and very effusive. They form the bedrock of the harmony and they do this well. Notwithstanding, several times during their performance they showed a lack of precision or definition in terms of rhythm. In the first item of the Credo, for example, they were noticeably lacking internal cohesion.
This was to an extent that one could have sworn some of their numbers had been caught off-guard. In other words, some appeared to enter correctly and some didn’t. Fortunately the sound settled with better rhythmic bonding as the second half progressed but the seeds of uncertainty had been sown.
A great deal depends on the register of the first note of entry: the higher the entry, the more likely problems will ensue in the tenors (who have an almost universal tendency to ‘fudge’ pitches in their higher register anyway). And although it wasn’t substantially manifest in the ‘Et incarnatus est’, both tenors and altos were tentative in their entry and unfolding. With everything having its equal and opposite, the male vocal parts were beautifully negotiated in the ‘Confiteor’ (Confess). It’s in sections where everything seems secure that one is reminded of those areas where they were not…and to question why there’s a difference.
The only other word of caution one could offer the choir, after hearing its performance of the ‘Sanctus” and ’Hosanna’, both of which are swift-footed, is to not overexpose the beat. In the ‘Hosanna’ there are relatively long passages based on single syllables so the natural inflection of words can’t be used as a steadying factor. But in their effort to sustain the beat the choir strongly accented the first of every bar and the music lost its fluency at a time when it most needed it. I’m not sure what Burhan Guner could have done, or even if there is such a gesture in the ‘conductors’ manual’, to reduce the accentuation of the beat. I suppose the best any conductor can do is to remind the choir beforehand: “Think but don’t accent the beat, unless notated”.
Roberto Abate, nicely accompanied by flute obligato, was finally heard to full advantage in the ‘Benedictus’ and he rewarded our waiting with a performance which displayed a good sense of dynamic shaping, well controlled breathing, and a most pleasing and accurate sense of pitch. In fact, all the soloists, at various points during the performance, brought these same qualities into focus.
The closing ‘Dona nobis pacem’ uses the same music as the ‘Gratias agimus tibi’ from the Gloria (which is itself a remodelling of music taken from an earlier cantata). The tempo here, though, is one of majesty and brilliance. In its performance, the choir, very much to Guner’s credit, mirrored this beautifully. It brought to a conclusion a most interesting and valorous account of one of the most challenging works of the repertoire.
NB. It would have given me much pleasure to mention the names of key instrumentalists, who presented their parts with poise and excellent baroque style, but having been denied a program booklet, despite asking twice, makes that impossible.
Half a loaf is better than none, as the old saw goes. And experiencing Offenbach’s zany Orpheus in the Underworld to an accompaniment not by orchestra but a single piano might not have been ideal – but it was certainly better than nothing in this part of the world where Offenbach’s work seldom gets the exposure it warrants.
With the lightest of directorial touches, Jane Davidson brought this comic opera to sparkling life. Certainly, her young charges seemed positively to relish coming to grips with this much vaunted although seldom mounted work locally.
It was an inspiration to use an English version of the libretto by Jonathan Biggins, Phil Scott and Ignatius Jones. With its many witty Oz allusions, it prompted gales of laughter from a capacity audience.
Kathleen How as Public Opinion, dressed up as Moonee Ponds’ most distinguished representative, brought the house down again and again. Here was a Dame Edna Everage clone at her most vivacious and effervescent with her mauve-pink hair do, trademark bunch of fake gladioli and those unforgettably tasteful spectacles, all ensuring the laughter level was high.
On the debit side were a number of singers whose pitch was not quite spot-on but, time and again, the sheer vivacity with which they tackled their roles went quite some way as compensation. And this cheerful energy, not least in the galop finale, ensured a constant chuckle level. And allusions to that most recognisable of Gluck melodies – Che faro senza Euridice – were consistently musical.
Laurels to Daniel Sinfield who seemed positively to revel in the role of Pluto disguised, not, as in Offenbach’s original as a shepherd cum beekeeper but as a black-clad tough on a motorbike, singing and strutting about the stage as if it was his natural milieu. His diction was first rate.
In a smaller role, Dudley Allitt was altogether convincing as the Hades-based, creepy John Styx. With a sepulchral pallor and his hands unctuously clasping and unclasping, he did Offenbach proud – not least for absolutely first rate diction, an object lesson on how to project speech impeccably.
A thousand flowers, as the Chinese say, to Juliet Faulkner who breathed life into a piano reduction of the orchestral score. Surely, she deserved better than being labelled in the printed program solely as repetiteur. The latter would certainly apply to her work as rehearsal pianist – but on stage, she was a pivotal participant in the production.
Standing to one side of the stage close to the piano while giving discreet cues to the cast was music director Francis Greep.
Décor was basic but effective as was the lighting design by Jake Newby – and the splendid costumes were designed and made by the cast.
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