This month, I have delved into a ‘back-catalogue’ recording, as I think about the programming issues we are exploring in some of my classes. In every class, I ask who amongst the students still listen to most of their music as a complete album, in this age of digital download that makes it so easy to isolate tracks. In several dozen students and staff, only a scant handful have raised their hands (and I wasn’t one of them). One student was quite passionate about why he still listened in this way. It is important to continue to do, he said, because the sequencing of different works is so fundamental to our listening experience.
He hit the nail on the head. Programming is part of a performer’s craft, one that often gets overlooked. In the early twentieth-century, the topic exercised many a writer, from the reclusive pianist-composer Kaikhosru Sorabji in an article for the Musical Times in 1925, to the eminently practical tenor, Harry Plunkett Greene, inThe Interpretation of Song. A particular favourite of mine is from Gerald Cooper, who wrote in Music & Lettersin 1943:
“Some people seem to think that if you put enough good material together in any old hugger-mugger way the values will sort themselves out, and the poor listener will enjoy what he likes and suffer the rest gladly. But what a hope! The ear is easily tired, and the all-too-human being is easily bored. I feel sometimes that I should like to have a word with a recording angel who could assess the percentage of boredom in a concert audience.”
(And yes, I have yet to find writing by a woman on programming pre-WWII. If anyone knows one, please do let me know. I would be excited to add her to my collection.)
Interest in programming seems to tail off after about 1950, and although it has picked up slightly in the past two decades, it still seems often to be relegated to the same level as the type of vehicle used to transport a performer to their gig – necessary and always present, but not really interesting enough to be spoken about. Yet all of us know how different a listening experience can be, depending on what we hear beforehand, and even afterwards. This goes deeper than the “menu” or chronological models that still often provide the structure (and this is no criticism of either, which have clearly “worked” for so long), especially when we are confronted with a programme consisting of works all by one composer.
It is here that Theresa Bogard’s tribute to the piano music of Louise Talma succeeds. Released in 2007, it does not take the easy option of a chronological or generic grouping, but rather, combines the chosen pieces into a listening experience that lends diversity and narrative to the whole. From the opening first Piano Sonata (1943) to the concluding Duologues for Flute, Cello and Piano (1987), we traverse aural landscapes rather than any conscientious tracing of an unfolding style.
This seems to me particularly important for Talma’s music. Despite Talma herself suggesting (the somewhat ubiquitous) three periods for her output, one can never mistake her distinctive voice. This could lead to Cooper’s lament of tiredness and boredom on the part of the listener, but Bogard avoids this in her structuring. Here, the two piano sonatas are separated by the suite of six etudes and the three clarinet and piano Duologues, while Alleluia in Form of Toccata precedes the concluding chamber work, Seven Episodes for Flute, Viola and Piano. It makes for a balance between variety and cohesion.
Talma’s music always seems to me to have a luminosity, an underlying joy, even in the most angular of her works. Bogard captures this well. The transparency of her textures is always striking, and while at times she seems to choose a fairly hard edge to the sound, most of the playing displays a radiance that matches Talma’s desire to provide “a tonic to encourage optimism”, as she described her Alleluia. In the first Piano Sonata, the elegance of the opening Largo allows for an appreciation of the piano’s resonance. The Sonata itself has an extraordinary narrative arch over all three movements, that arises from this opening section. Even without being consciously aware of the specific thematic relationships being created, the cohesion is recognisable.
The 1954 set of Six Etudes are next. It’s always interesting to reflect on ideas around cycles versus sets, in collections like this. The Etudes are so clearly interconnected in subtle ways, yet it is much more common to remove single works from a set of etudes, in a way that we won’t for other works that are not necessarily cycles (this is particularly the case for song, even where there is no clear “plot”). Why is this? Is it as simple as our expectations around key relations, or genre, or this part of the complex web we have built around notions of “complete” listening to “complete” works? (This is indeed so complicated that I will leave deeper reflection for another post.) In any case, in our current album experience, these etudes do indeed work as a whole – I am reminded, in fact, of Marie Bigot’s Suite de Etudes, which also contains six pieces. Listening to the six back-to-back in both (stylistically worlds apart) sets felt as if it allowed me the space to notice detail in a very different way.
Our early twentieth-century writers would no doubt have approved of the insertion of the Duologues here, the clarinet (played by Gregory Oakes) providing a tonic for our ‘piano-saturated’ ears. There feels to be a slight pulling-back of the trademark Talma drive here, which also provides a change of pace.
The second piano sonata, of 1955, follows, providing the other large-scale work of the disc. There is certainly a symmetry at work here in the larger programme of the CD.
Moving into my favourite Talma piece, the Alleluia in Form of Toccata, I found the performance of this the least convincing, perhaps because of my preference for some dynamic flexibility around the edges of phrases in this piece, something that seems to have been sacrificed for Bogard’s trademark clarity. Nevertheless, as always, I was transported by the irrepressible optimism. The programme of the CD is completed by the 1987 Seven episodes, in which Bogard is joined by flutist Rod Garnett and violist James Przygocki.
There are sleeve notes to the recording, which can be found online. They feel perhaps rather outdated now, being concentrated on information rather than context; but if we are feeling the full album experience, it’s worth seeking them out. In a world of compartmentalised and instant listening, perhaps it’s worth thinking about how our expectations are shifting, especially in relation to the rarefied and enclosed live listening experience that still tends to dominate in classical music concerts. I’m not advocating a return to Hanslick’s disapproval of what he termed “passive’ listening; but sometimes it’s good to let ourselves be immersed in the architecture built by composer and performer alike. If someone has gone to such lengths to programme a structure so carefully, then I, for one, feel a responsibility to meet them there.