21st Century Conductor

The Composer in Antarctica 

This concert was with the enterprising Oulu Sinfonia in Finland, the world's northernmost full size symphony orchestra.  Along with video artist, Mike Newmann, we performed Maxwell Davies' Antarctic Symphony with multimedia video installation on Thursday 29th March in front of 700 invited schoolchildren and a full house of music lovers from Oulu.

The programme also contained Nielsen's Helios Overture and Sibelius' Lemminkainen and the Maidens of Saari. Conducting Sibelius in Finland remains a great honour for foreign conductors like myself.

This review, by Juha Sutela

Symphonic Travelogues 

Concert: Oulu Symphony Orchestra with Conductor Paul MacAlindin.
Madetoja Concert Hall in Oulu 29.3.07 (images below from the video)

Peter Maxwell Davies, born in 1934, is a productive British composer with international success, but over here his music is still relatively little known. To fill this gap in our cultural education came conductor Paul MacAlindin, whose repertoire places Davies in its central position.

Antarctic Symphony (2000) is the composer’s eighth symphony and parting from the others in that it is strongly programmatic. Davies lives in the Orkney Island in Scotland and is also known as an environmental activist. The spark for creating an Antarctic symphony was an expedition that the composer took part in in the Antarctica in 1997.

A film, co-directed with Mike Newman, was presented alongside the music. Thus, the experience offered in Madetoja Concert Hall was an audiovisual spectacle consisting of modern symphonic music and mainly black and white motion picture.The music and images seemed to be conveying the same message but with different rhythm tics. The story was told simultaneously from two different viewpoints. You could sense a boat scratching the sides of an iceberg in the music, while at the same time the video was showing past explorers skiing on the ice field.

The message was clear visually. From Stonehenge to the dark side of modern times, images of continuous flow of traffic and increasing energy consumption were flashed with chaotic speed. There was almost too much information at once, although for someone accustomed to modern music video aesthetics, the rhythm of the editing may have seemed too slow.

Davies masters the great dimensions well. The music painted images of vast distances, coldness and dangers lurking in the future horizons. Massive levels of sound sliding down effectively like gigantic waves. By contrast the micro level work was lively and surprising.

The opening with Carl Nielsen’s Helios-Overture was a pleasant surprise. After the initial phase, traces of fragility and uncertainty were flushed away by MacAlindin lifting the orchestra fast into an exultant, festive delight of tones. Jean Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari rang as a fit interpretation. The entity of expression was springy and colourful, except for a slight feeling that there was scope for more.

 

Juha Sutela, Kaleva
Translation Sari Tanner

The pdf of the original review is here:

AntarcticSymphonyarvostelu.2.pdf

 

 

As a change to printing my biography, Riikka Vuorijärvi e-mailed me some questions to answer for the booklet (with pictures here by me of Oulu): 

Firstly, it would be interesting to have you comment on the relationship  between the  works performed. What kind of connections do you hear  in the music? And what  about the connection between the multimedia  show and music? Could you tell more  about this?

 

All three composers this evening have a stunning awareness of light and translucency in their orchestration. Significantly, they are all deeply involved in harmony.  You have to get inside the inner voices of each piece to hear the engine that transorms the light and shade. In Sibelius and Max, it's the tenor and baritone instruments, such as violas, cellos, horns and trombones who, like medieval music, provide the backbone of the structure from which the deeper and higher voices fan out. They also know how to use proportions to bend time. In Nielsen, we have the sun arching across the sky  in a single day, but in Maxwell Davies, I feel the perception of space, light and time being shifted, mountains that seem closer but are hunderds of kilometers away, the 6-monthly daylight fracturing through icebergs to create pinks, blues and greens, making the whole relationship between light and space unique. 

 

The multimedia show is primarily Mike Newman's, who created his own arch, sometimes working with and sometimes against the musical structure.  This is important. When you're adding the projected image to the experience of sound, you have to be aware of how the two mediums shift naturally towards and away from each other. (Pictured left: Mike Newman and me).

 

 

 

Maxwell  Davies has said that he is a great admirer of  Sibelius and the  northern quality of his music. What kind of similarities do you  see in the musical language of their works?

 

The northern quality in the programme is defined not only by orchestral colour as metaphor for light, but more importantly by the feeling for space, distance and cyclic time in nature, all part of understanding Finnish culture and Max's own isolated existence in Orkney.  No orchestral composer before Sibelius had concentrated on curving the perception of  structure so effectively. This Sibelius did through his so-called cellular technique, where layers of process rise up into concious expression and return to the deep undercurrents.  Ever since Max's early works such as the Taverner Second Fantasia and Worlde's Bliss, you can hear him taking this even further.

 

For both composers, the humble role of humanity in nature is often represented by popular music. Beethoven gave us a first well known example with the peasant's dance followed by the storm and pantheistic finale of his 6th symphony.  In Lemminkainen and the Maidens of Saari, we hear folk music elements in  the women dancing and the journey of Lemminkainen to and from Saari.  In Antarctic Symphony, we have military tunes referring to the naval presence in Antarctica, symbols of  mankind cutting through nature, and to Max's previous works which he consigns to „the musical junkyard“, briefly stated perhaps because of their insignificance in the millenial timescale and spirituality of the  landscape and evolution of wildlife. Both composers understand how to represent humanity's smallness. Significantly, they also understand how these references can ground the listener in their spiritual journey through the composition.

 
 

Maxwell  Davies also represents a composer  who is aware of the newest trends and yet he  sounds original and  unmistakably himself. How is this possible? Do you think  about  this challenge in your work? Is a "personal voice"  something  that can be pursued consciously?

 

Any real composer can write down four or five notes for any solo voice, and you'd be able to identify him or her immediately.  The style is irrelevant. Even the composers who idealogically try to escape personal style, such as John Cage or Pierre Boulez, reveal themselves.  A personal voice is something that you discover and protect over a lifetime.

 

It's true to me that the correct articulation of  the compositional structure releases the emotional power of the work, not an “interpretation“ that I might smear the score with.  Having said that, Sibelius, Max and Nielsen wrote knowing that their work would be conducted by people they had no control of,  so any individuality I do bring to performance is with their understanding.

 

How would you  comment on the massive  proportions of the Antarctica symphony? What  kind of connections do you have to  Maxwell Davies? What about  your connections to Finland?

 

By the time Max was asked to write his Antarctic symphony, he had already completed his cycle of seven symphonies, the Sibelius number, and the seventh was constructed to lead into the beginning of the first musically, thus sealing the cycle forever. 

 

Although the Antarctic uses elements of classical stucture in one 35 minute movement, the difference is that the musical metaphors come from Max's experience of Antarctic science and the vast environment. That feeling of vastness is one thing that Max has always done extremely well. It comes partly from understanding Sibelius, but also from the skillful contrast between long passages of slow, still music and sudden bursts of violent drama, such as the opening with the icebreaker ship cutting through the frozen sea.You can hear this in many smaller works like „8 Songs for a Mad King“. People remember the King's screaming, the chaos and parody, but the real power comes from the stillness in between. Another trick is in the percussion writing which made Max's famous ensemble, The Fires of London, feel and sound bigger than they were, and which we also find in the Antarctic Symphony.

 

I remember going to a New Year's Party in 1998 when Max was in Antarctica. On coming  back home, I pressed the answering machine, and there was a very metallic message from Max, wishing me a happy New Year. He was in the middle of nowhere in a tent and a satellite happened to be passing overhead, so his colleague from the British Antarctic Survey in Rothera Base gave him a special phone. I remember feeling deeply that he had put himself  as far away from humanity as possible, and still found a way to communicate. That sums up much of what he does.

This picture of me with my father, who flew from Scotland to Oulu especially to hear the concert.  As a "thank you", I'm plugging his most successful book, "No Port in a Storm" in a link below. 

 

As a postscript, even Oulu, 600 km north of Helsinki, has had its warmest ever winter. They should have had 15 inches of snow, but instead, it was well on its way to melting. The Antarctic is fast becoming a timely piece for a generation facing global warming.

Max's Antarctic Symphony is at:

http://www.maxopus.com/works/symph_8.htm

British Antarctic Survey is at:

www.antarctica.ac.uk

Mike Newman is a world acclaimed video artist who has worked with Tan Dun and Mike Oldfield among others:

http://www.mnprod.co.uk/

Oulu Sinfonia is at:

http://www.oulusinfonia.fi/sivu/en/

 

Dad's book, "No Port in a Storm" is at:

http://www.amazon.com/No-Port-Storm-Bob-Macalindin/dp/187...