The Cool Web : A Robert Graves Oratorio

Author: Sue

Opera and Oratorio

An oratorio is a large musical composition for orchestra, choir, and soloists. (all quotes are taken from Wikipedia)

Our oratorio, The Cool Web, uses a chamber orchestra of sixteen, a choir of twenty-four, one main soloist (the voice of Robert Graves) and a children’s choir of forty.

Like an opera, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias. However, opera is musical theatre, while oratorio is strictly a concert piece—though oratorios are sometimes staged as operas, and operas are sometimes presented in concert form.

In an oratorio there is generally little or no interaction between the characters,

no props

or elaborate costumes.

which, of course, makes them much cheaper to stage..

A particularly important difference is in the typical subject matter of the text. Opera tends to deal with history and mythology, including age-old devices of romance, deception, and murder,

Our first opera, Vice,based on The Revenger’s Tragedy,

followed this tradition closely; there was very little else to the plot except romance – well, sex, really – deception and murder. And, of course, revenge. And damnation. And, as you would expect with this kind of mix, quite a lot of comedy.

…whereas the plot of an oratorio often deals with sacred topics, making it appropriate for performance in the church. Protestant composers took their stories from the Bible, while Catholic composers looked to the lives of saints, as well as to Biblical topics. Oratorios became extremely popular in early 17th-century Italy partly because of the success of opera and the Catholic Church’s prohibition of spectacles during Lent. Oratorios became the main choice of music during that period for opera audiences.
The word oratorio, from the Italian for pulpit, was “named from the kind of musical services held in the church of the Oratory of St Philip Neri in Rome (Congregazione dell’Oratorio ) in the latter half of the 16th cent.”[2]
Although medieval plays such as the Ludus Danielis, and Renaissance dialogue motets such as those of the Oltremontani had characteristics of an oratorio, the first oratorio is usually seen as Emilio de Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo.

I saw Rappresentatione in Salzburg, when my ex-husband and I were lecturing there. It was an experience that will live with me for ever. It was performed in the Basilica of St Peter, a magnificent Baroque church. The choir were dressed like angels; all in white and gold with tightly curled golden wigs. They sang down to us from the galleries. It was as if the church itself had found its voice.

The origins of the oratorio can be found in sacred dialogues in Italy. These were settings of Biblical, Latin texts and musically were quite similar to motets. There was a strong narrative, dramatic emphasis and there were conversational exchanges between characters in the work. These became more and more popular and were eventually performed in specially built oratories (prayer halls) by professional musicians. Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo is an example of one of these works, but technically it is not an oratorio because it features acting and dancing. It does, however contain music in the monodic style. The first oratorio to be called by that name is Pietro della Valle’s Oratorio della Purificazione,
During the second half of the 17th century, there were trends toward the secularization of the religious oratorio. Evidence of this lies in its regular performance outside church halls in courts and public theaters. Whether religious or secular, the theme of an oratorio is meant to be weighty. It could include such topics as Creation, the life of Jesus, or the career of a classical hero or Biblical prophet.

Our choice of subject, the commemoration of the Great War, with a libretto composed of the poems of Robert Graves, who was himself one of the soldiers straight from school who walked at 19 into the Somme, is completely in the tradition of secular oratorios; few subjects could bear more human, historical, and artistic weight. It also tells its story, as Graves himself did, through references to Biblical heroes and Greek Mythology. When his beloved friend David was killed, the poem he wrote describes his death as that of the biblical David, not slaying, as in the Biblical tradition, but slain, in the cold light of the trenches, by the overwhelming might of Goliath.

And, when his death is mourned, it is grieved over by a faun.

The Georgian era in England saw a German-born monarch and German-born composer define the English oratorio. George Friederic Handel, most famous today for his Messiah, also wrote other oratorios based on themes from Greek and Roman mythology and Biblical topics. He is also credited with writing the first English language oratorio, Esther.

The story has it that Handel’s main reason for developing the oratorio further was the fact that the popularity of his operas was starting to wane, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to find producers willing to put up the money. An oratorio was a great deal easier to finance…

October 23, 2014
Introducing… Endymion.. the orchestra of The Cool Web

Endymion playing in a Steve Reich concert at the Proms, 2014

“The brilliant Endymion” (Sunday Times) exists to deliver world-class performances of chamber music throughout London, the UK and abroad. It nurtures the UK’s most dynamic and original composers, inspire younger and new audiences and champions mixed chamber music of all genres, through performance, commissioning, recording and promotion.

Since Endymion was formed in 1979 from a group of outstanding National Youth Orchestra students, it has built a secure reputation across a broad and often adventurous repertoire and won a strong following among audiences throughout the UK and abroad, touring in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Finland and Mexico. Unusually for chamber groups so well established, Endymion retains most of its original players. These performers now number among the best soloists and chamber musicians in Europe, including Mark van de Wiel, Stephen Stirling, Melinda Maxwell, Michael Dussek and Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE. Performing together for over thirty years, Endymion has been called one of the few chamber groups as much at home with Mozart as with Birtwistle.

Endymion has made a speciality of 20th century music theatre and chamber opera, including collaborations with the Royal Opera House’s Garden Venture, Women’s Playhouse Trust and Opera Factory, with which it undertook a European tour of Dido and Aeneas and Curlew River in 1995.

Endymion has appeared at most of the major British festivals, including nine times at the Proms, and was in residence at Blackheath Concert Halls for several years. Recent appearances at Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, Kings Place and at the Cheltenham and Spitalfields Festivals have included works by Kurtag, Simon Holt and Simon Bainbridge, premières by Vic Hoyland, Philip Cashian and Brian Elias and an Elisabeth Lutyens portrait concert. A retrospective of Anthony Gilbert’s music featured a dozen especially composed musical tributes by distinguished contemporaries, including Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, Colin Matthews and Anthony Payne. Endymion’s collaborations with the BBC Singers have included world premières of Giles Swayne’s Havoc (Proms, 1999) and Edward Cowie’s Gaia (2003), as well as the UK première of Birtwistle’s Ring Dance of the Nazarene at the 2004 Proms (“startling virtuosity from all concerned” – Daily Telegraph)

A particularly successful (and much imitated) innovation is the wide-ranging series of Composer Choice concerts staged by Endymion at the Southbank, which have included Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Oliver Knussen, Gavin Bryars, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Judith Weir, John Woolrich and Michael Berkeley.

In June 2009 Endymion celebrated its 30th Birthday at Kings Place with the Sound Census festival. Alongside a celebration of classical chamber music repertoire, 20 British composers were commissioned to write new works for Endymion. These were recorded for release by NMC Recordings. This disc will join a host of other recordings by Endymion including works by Lutyens, Stravinsky, Britten and Magnus Lindberg and (with the Dutton label) York Bowen, Edmund Rubbra, Thomas Dunhill, Lennox Berkeley, Erno Dohnanyi and Zdenek Fibich.

In 2011, a major collaboration with EXAUDI vocal ensemble included performances at Southbank Centre, Sound Festival Scotland and Wigmore Hall, (where Endymion will be returning next year as part of the Wigmore series), the premieres of four new commissioned works by young British and Irish composers, and programmes focusing on Morton Feldman and Arvo Pärt. 2011 also featured Goodbye Stalin! – a three-day festival of chamber music by Shostakovich and Schnittke at King’s Place – and the UK premiere of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Quintet.

In February 2014 Endymion celebrated its 35th Birthday at Kings Place with a weekend of concerts focused on Brahms chamber music for wind and strings, as well as a programme of music for flute, viola and harp. Two of these concerts were part of the “Top 50 Chamber Classics Unwrapped” series, presenting favourite works voted for by readers of BBC Music Magazine.

Endymion’s wide range, its genuine enthusiasm for the work of new composers combined with its irreproachable understanding of the classical repertoire, makes it the perfect ensemble to premiere The Cool Web.

Endymion performing Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet at Kings Place in 2009

a powerful sense of energy and mystery ‘ – The Daily Telegraph

October 10, 2014
Introducing… the Philharmonia Voices

Philharmonia Voices sing Berlioz requiem at The Royal Festival Hall

On October 30th, The Cool Web will be sung by a 24 voice choir, hand-picked for this production, from Philharmonia Voices.

They will be jointed by Edward Grint, Soloist, and The Melody Makers of Bath Abbey.

Philharmonia Voices was formed by Aidan Oliver in 2004 to collaborate with the Philharmonia Orchestra on a huge range of repertoire. Since then the choir has established itself as one of the most exciting professional choruses in London, attracting consistently high praise from the critics for its performances with conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lorin Maazel, Richard Hickox and John Wilson.

Notable triumphs have included performances of 20th-century masterpieces such as Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (subsequently released as a critically lauded live recording), while major operatic milestones have included the European première of Shostakovich’s Orango and an acclaimed performance of Dallapiccola’s neglected Il prigioniero. At the lighter end of the repertoire, performances of Singin’ in the Rain, Yeomen of the Guard and Die Fledermaus have led to a burgeoning relationship with John Wilson, while Philharmonia Voices has also been central to the orchestra’s groundbreaking multi-media projects, including the award-winning touring installation ‘Universe of Sound’ and the first-ever screenings of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with live soundtrack.

Under their director Aidan Oliver, Philharmonia Voices has also performed independently in festivals including Easter at King’s (King’s College Cambridge), the Roman River Festival (Essex), and the Tonbridge Arts Festival, presenting imaginatively themed programmes featuring actors including Simon Callow, Tim Pigott-Smith and Timothy West.

Their reviews have been of one voice:’ stunning’, ‘outstanding,”rapturous’ ..

.magnificently pungent choral effects that were virtuosically realised here by the young Philharmonia Voices.” – The Times on Graffiti

“The two choral interjections were stunning. A half-hearted semi-staging seemed unnecessary: Dallapiccola’s music and the singers said it all.” – The Telegraph on Il Prigioniero

“…electrifying choral singing” – The Guardian on Gurrelieder

Philharmonia Voices created a mirage of intoxicating sound.” – The Daily Telegraph on Death in Venice Recordings

Aidan Oliver

Aidan Oliver pursues a diverse career at the heart of London’s musical life, working variously as conductor, chorus master and music staff with organisations including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, and Westminster Abbey. A much sought-after choral conductor, he is increasingly active in the fields of opera and orchestral conducting.

For the Philharmonia Orchestra he directs Philharmonia Voices, an elite professional chorus which he founded and which collaborates with the orchestra on many of its most high-profile projects. Working particularly closely with the orchestra’s Principal Conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Aidan has also collaborated with conductors including Ashkenazy, Maazel, Schiff, Dohnanyi and John Wilson. Aidan has worked as assistant conductor to Salonen on tours of Europe and the USA.

For the Royal Opera House, Aidan has worked as music staff on numerous productions, most recently as Assistant Conductor on Puccini Tosca, and as off-stage conductor and organist on productions including Peter Grimes, Il Trittico, Les Troyens and Robert le diable. For English National Opera, Aidan has prepared the Chorus for an acclaimed 2012 Proms performance of Peter Grimes, as well as productions of Fidelio and The Twilight of the Gods.

Aidan is the Associate Conductor of the St Endellion Summer Festival, where he has conducted performances ranging from Wagner Wesendonck Lieder with Rachel Nicholls (soprano) and Stravinsky L’Histoire du soldat with Rory Kinnear (narrator) to Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem and Poulenc Gloria in Truro Cathedral. The Festival’s international status was established by Richard Hickox, whom Aidan assisted on numerous Chandos recordings and concert performances.

Aidan is one of the UK’s most respected choral conductors and choir trainers. He is Director of Music at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey, where the organist is Thomas Trotter and services include many high-profile occasions connected with Parliament. He has worked regularly with groups including the BBC Symphony Chorus, Exaudi, the New London Chamber Choir, and the BBC Singers, who awarded him one of their inaugural Conducting Fellowships. He is also the Musical Director of Dulwich Choral Society.

Aidan Oliver began his musical career as a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, later studying at Eton College and at King’s College Cambridge. After graduating with a double First in Classics, he pursued further studies at Harvard University (as a Kennedy Scholar), the National Opera Studio and King’s College London. He was the recipient of a Churchill Fellowship to study sacred choral music in Russia.

This is a brilliant young choir, like our soloist, Edward Grint, perfect for this oratorio, which, based on the work of a nineteen-year-old Robert Graves, and written by a young composer, is fresh, passionate, and electrifying.

Don’t miss it.

“

October 3, 2014
Shell Shock: Robert Graves’ own description

Soon to be young officers 1914

Shell shock, by Robert Graves

This is Robert Graves’ own dispassionate account of the deterioration of young officers at the front.

Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line; he did not know his way about, had not learned the rules of health and safety, or grown accustomed to recognising degrees of danger.

Young Officer 1914

Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or 10 months, unless he had been given a few weeks’ rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or 15 months he was often worse than useless.

Dr WHR Rivers [the famous psychiatrist at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh who was both doctor and mentor to Siegfried Sassoon] told me later that the action of one of the ductless glands – I think the thyroid – caused this slow general decline in military usefulness by failing at a certain point to pump its sedative chemical into the blood. Without its continued assistance the man went about his tasks in an apathetic and doped condition, cheated into further endurance. It has taken my blood 10 years to recover.

Patient suffering from shell shock

Officers had a less laborious but a more nervous time than the men. There were proportionately twice as many neurasthenic cases among officers as among men, though a man’s average expectancy of trench service before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an officer’s. Officers between the ages of 23 and 33 could count on a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young. Men over 40, though not suffering from want of sleep so much as those under 20, had less resistance to sudden alarms and shocks.

The unfortunates were officers who had endured two years or more of continuous trench service. In many cases they became dipsomaniacs. I knew three or four who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before being lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way. A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions is still alive who, in three shows running, got his company needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear decisions.

• Extracted from Robert Graves’s autobiography, Good-bye to All That (first published by Carcanet in 1929).

September 23, 2014
David

The wonderful thing about the internet – and about having an excuse to write blogs – is that whatever you are searching for, there is always the possibility of glimpsing something unexpected and beguiling that leads you down a garden path into unknown territory.

I was wandering around on google, minding my own business, when I glimpsed an article that dropped into my lap, out of the blue, a treasure so precious it brought me to tears.

I have been reading everything I could find about Graves’ war experience, but at the centre of it all there was something of a gap. Both Graves and Siegfried Sassoon were profoundly affected by the death of a friend of theirs called David Thomas, with whom Sassoon was deeply in love. Two poems in the oratorio, Goliath and David, and Not Dead, are about David. He is mentioned, mostly in passing, in Goodbye to All That, and is fictionalised in Sasson’s Sherston Trilogy, as Dick Tiltwood.

This man has become for us the central focus of the grief felt for the terrible losses at the front. We thought, when compiling the poems for the oratorio, that it was better to consider the impact of one death, in order to understand the enormity of the death of millions, and David’s had clearly moved Graves deeply.

But there were no pictures, very little detail, no clear view of him. And then I saw this article, about a discovery of some photos of David as a schoolboy, just before he joined up, and as a soldier. All photographs have been made available on the People’s Collection Wales website.

And there he was.

David was the son of Evan and Ethelinda Thomas of Llanedy Rectory, Pontardulais, Glamorgan. His first commission was as a Second Lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, the same regiment as Sassoon and Graves. He was then trained and posted to the same regiment’s 1st Battalion, which was then attached to 22 Brigade, itself part of 7th Infantry Division.

Graves describes meeting him, in Goodbye to all That (from which all subsequent quotes are taken) very matter-of-factly:

..I played full-back for the battalion. Three other officers were members of the team: Richardson, a front-row scrum man, Pritchard, another Sandhurst boy, the fly-half, and David Thomas, a third battalion second-lieutenant, an inside three-quarter. David came from South Wales, simple, gentle, fond of reading. He, Siegfried Sassoon and I always went about together…

And here he is, in a team photograph, at his school, sitting in a chair, far right.

He was also a member of his school’s cricket team:

David in in the front row, far right

And clearly carried his love of this sport into the army too: a week before he died, Sassoon wrote a sonnet about him as a cricketer, which is published as follows:

12. A Subaltern

HE turned to me with his kind, sleepy gaze
And fresh face slowly brightening to the grin
That sets my memory back to summer days,
With twenty runs to make, and last man in.
He told me he’d been having a bloody time
In trenches, crouching for the crumps to burst,
While squeaking rats scampered across the slime
And the grey palsied weather did its worst.

But as he stamped and shivered in the rain,
My stale philosophies had served him well;
Dreaming about his girl had sent his brain
Blanker than ever—she’d no place in Hell….
‘Good God!’ he laughed, and slowly filled his pipe,
Wondering ‘why he always talked such tripe’.

but this first draft, written in pencil in the trenches, is touchingly different:

HE looked at me with his kind, sleepy gaze
And blonde face brightening slowly to the grin
That always makes me think of summer days,
With twenty runs to get, and last man in.
He said, when he was having a rotten time
In trenches, wondering when the crumps would burst,
With hateful rats scampering across the slime
And the blank, bitter weather doing its worst,

He’d thought of me, and in his ugly plight,
My stale philosophies had kept him going;
When ‘thinking about his girl ‘had made the night
Blacker than ever—and all the skies were snowing….
Then, while my heart rejoiced and crowned him King,
I said, ‘We’ll have them beaten by the Spring!’.

On 18 March 1916 David was leading a working party to repair wire emplacements in No man’s land at the Citadel, near Fricourt in France when he was shot in the throat. Graves had had a brief encounter with him earlier on that day:

David, bringing up the rear of ‘C’, looked worried about something. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m fed up, he answered, and I’ve got a cold.’

and then,

About half-past ten, rifle-fire broke out on the right and the sentries passed along the news, ‘Officer Hit’ Richardson hurried away to investigate. He came back to say:‘It’s young Thomas, A bullet through the neck; but I think its all right. It can’t have hit his spine or an artery, because he’s walking to the dressing station’ I was delighted. David should now be away long enough to escape the coming offensive, and perhaps even the rest of the war.

Then news came that David was dead. The regimental doctor, a throat specialist in civil life, had told him at the dressing station: ’ You’ll be all right only don’t raise your head for a bit’ David then took a letter from his pocket, gave it to an orderly, and said Post this! It had been written to a girl in Glamorgan, for delivery if he got killed. The doctor saw he was choking and tried tracheotomy, but too late.

Sassoon wrote the next day: “Tonight I saw his shrouded form laid in the earth – Robert Graves beside me with his white whimsical face twisted and grieving.

“Once we could not hear the solemn words for the noise of a machine-gun along the line; and when all was finished a canister fell a hundred yards away and burst with a crash.

“So Tommy left us, a gentle soldier, perfect and without stain. And so he will remain in my heart, fresh and happy and brave.”

He is buried at reference D3 in Point 110 New Military Cemetery at Fricourt.

Graves wrote: “I felt David’s death worse than any other since I had been in France, but it did not anger me as it did Siegfried.

“He was acting transport-officer and every evening now, when he came up with the rations, went out on patrol looking for Germans to kill.

I just felt empty and lost.”

September 21, 2014
BRSLI Talk on Oratorio on October 22nd.

The original BRSLI building, demolished by the Council in 1932

Anyone thinking of coming to the premiere of the Oratorio on October 30th might be interested in a talk at the BRSLI at 16 Queen Square, Bath, BA1 2HN, 7.30 0n October 22nd.

Sue Curtis will be talking about the poetry of Robert Graves as it is used in the oratorio, Jools Scott will play a recording of some of the music from the oratorio, and Tim Snowdon will read the poems being discussed. There will be an opportunity to ask questions of the compiler and composer about the piece.

The Cool Web is an oratorio based on the poems Robert Graves wrote at the front as a young officer. As such, it offers a moving glimpse of a poet struggling to write about an unbearable experience as it happened. In this talk Sue Curtis, the compiler, talks about the poems she and Jools Scott chose to include, why they are there, what they mean to her, and how they have informed the emotion, narrative and intensity of the music itself.

The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution has been central to the intellectual and cultural life of Bath for centuries.

BRLSI originally occupied a purpose-built building at Terrace Walk in the centre of Bath, near the Abbey and overlooking what is now the Parade Gardens. Opened in 1824, it occupied the site of Harrison’s Assembly Rooms, a regular haunt of Beau Nash, which had burnt down in 1820. A century later an equally terminal fate befell the BRLSI building, when the local Council decided to demolish it to make way for a traffic scheme…

The Institution building on Terrace Walk, Bath had housed the collections, lectures, libraries and all manner of events for 108 years. The demolition of the building, which began in December 1932, took eight months, such was the enormity of the task. Many believed the building to be of outstanding architectural importance, and lobbied that an alternative to demolition be found.

Many suggestions were put forward by such bodies as : Old Bath Preservation Society, Bath City Council and others regarding a relocation of the building ( the Portico being of particular importance) however no solution was found. By September 1933 no trace of the Institution building remained on the site.

In the photograph above, the front entrance of the Institution can be seen clearly; the impressive Portico was unmistakable. Many believed (and still do) that this Portico was part of Harrisons (later renamed Kingston) Assembly rooms which stood on this site until 1820. Much controversy surrounded the pedigree of this Portico, the original being designed by William Wilkins (who went on to design The London University College, The National Gallery London etc.) in 1808.

The BRSLI today

September 19, 2014
Introducing – The Melody Makers of Bath Abbey – the children singing in ‘The Cool Web’

The Melody Makers of Bath Abbey

We are delighted to introduce the performers who will sing the parts written for children’s voices in The Cool Web.

Their presence is very important to us, and central to the narrative of the oratorio, which not only focuses on the journey from the vivid responses of youth to the wariness of experience, but also returns again and again to both the joys and the nightmares of childhood.

Robert Graves, like so many of his contemporaries in the trenches, was only 19 when he arrived on the Somme; the memories of childhood were not far behind him, and a natural source of emotional reference for his poetry.

The Melody Makers will be singing in very distinguished company; under the baton of Robin O’Neill, they will join Endymion, Philharmonia Voices, and soloist Edward Grint in the first ensemble ever to perform this vibrant and exciting new oratorio.

We are so grateful to them for joining us; we know they will add that final touch of enchantment to what promises to be an exhilarating evening.

The Melody Makers were founded in January 2011 by Bath Abbey’s Assistant Director of Music, Shean Bowers. The group has grown consistently over the years and now has forty members from all over the city who regularly meet for music, song and friendship.

The choir sing a lively and varied repertoire which is accessible to all and always enjoyed by both the children singing it and those listening to it.

As well as one-off performances during the year, the youngsters also give a number of regular concerts, including a slot at the opening of Party in the City, they always turn out to give a warming rendition of carols at the Christmas market and never fail to delight at the Carols for Choir and Audience in the Abbey, where they get to sing alongside the Girls’ and Boys’ choirs too.

Shean Bowers with the Melody Makers

The group have travelled a fair amount in their short history, singing in places such as Salisbury and Gloucester Cathedrals and Stroud Town hall, as well as lending their voices to various performances, including Carmina Burana, Britten’s Friday Afternoons and even appearing BBC Radio 4.

Many of the children will go on to join the Bath Abbey Girls’ and Boys’ choirs when their time as a Melody Maker comes to an end, and it’s with great joy that we help them develop their singing to a point where this is achievable.

We can’t wait to hear them.

September 9, 2014
Edward Grint CD

Edward Grint, who sings the part of Robert Graves in The Cool Web: A Robert Graves Oratorio, features in a new CD just released and on sale on Amazon. He has a glorious voice, and we can’t wait to hear him on October 30th. Or to buy the CD!

September 7, 2014
Introducing Robin O’Neill, The Conductor of ‘The Cool Web’

Robin O’Neill at the Wimbledon festival

As the time for the actual performance of the Oratorio grows near, we want to celebrate the people involved with the first performance of this new work.

Robin O’Neill has been part of this project from the very beginning.

Robin knew of Jools’ music from his sound-track to The Door, a short film by Andrew Steggall,

<a href="http://joolsscottmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-door-original-sound-track">The Door – Original Sound Track by Jools Scott | Composer</a>

Andrew with Charles Dance, who starred in ‘The Door’

who directed The Soldier’s Tale at the Old Vic, (stay with me here)

The Soldier’s Tale at the Old Vic

for which Robin directed the music.

Commenting on Robin O’Neill’s work as music director of The Soldier’s Tale (in a European/Iraqi collaboration which took him to Baghdad in Sept 2005 and then on a two week run at the Old Vic Theatre) the late Sir Charles Mackerras said “I would like to congratulate Robin O’Neill on his marvellous conducting of the whole ensemble, whether European or Iraqi. I particularly admired the fact that a great deal of the Stravinsky seemed to be played from memory. This in itself is a tremendous feat!”

Iraqi musicians in The Soldier’s Tale

We met to discuss the project over lunch in London at the point where we had a rough idea of the libretto, but had written none of the music at all. Robin’s enthusiasm and genuine interest was one of the spurs which turned a good idea into a real piece of work.

Since then he has stayed faithfully with it, consulting on the score, pointing us in the direction of the right orchestra, Endymion, and the Philharmonia Voices, whose work he knows through his own long association with them, and now conducting it at Bath Abbey eighteen months after our first meeting.

The Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall

In the past few seasons Robin O’Neill has conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus (with whom he gave the orchestra’s first performance in London’s newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall), London Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Nordic Chamber Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, Bogota Philharmonic, Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa Japan, Orchestra Cittaperta and the Orchestras of the Guildhall School of Music, Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, where he is professor of conducting.

Robin O’Neill’s conducting has been praised for it’s balance of intellectual rigour, immaculate line and visceral excitement. A performance of the Sibelius 7th Symphony prompted one reviewer to note that “he obtained a rock-like stability to the tonal structure that underpins the disturbances, thereby creating a symphonic statement both powerful and concise.”

Matthew Rye in the Daily Telegraph has commented: “Robin O’Neill conducted them (London Philharmonic) in sleek, suave performances where phrases were ideally shaped and balance nigh perfect” and the Financial Times has commented that: “Robin O’Neill conducted the brilliant Philharmonia Orchestra in faultless up-tempo style.”

Stephan Kovacevich

Robin O’Neill has collaborated with musicians such as Mikhail Pletnev, Boris Berezovsky, Mitsuko Uchida, Christoph Eschenbach, Pascal Roge, Stephen Kovacevich, Alexander Madzar, Pinchas Zuckerman, Salvatore Accardo, Isabelle Faust, Gautier Capucon, Michael Collins, Alina Ibragimova, the Lars Jansson Jazz Trio and actors such as Jeremy Irons, Julian Glover, Paul McGann and Hugh Dancy. He has also performed by invitation for His Royal Highness Prince Charles the Prince of Wales.

Jeremy Irons, who read the soldier in the first production of ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ Andrew Steggall directed at the Old Vic

Robin O’Neill regularly broadcasts on the BBC and has also had concerts broadcast on Swedish Radio, South African Radio and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. He has made two CDs with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra on the Hyperion Label.

In his parallel career, Robin O’Neill is principal bassoonist with the Philharmonia Orchestra and has held the same position with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the English Chamber Orchestra. He is a member of London Winds and the Gaudier Ensemble.

He is a Grammy nominated recording artist and has recorded virtually the whole of the core chamber music repertoire with more than 40 CDs to his name on labels such as Hyperion, Chandos, Decca and Philips.

Robin O’Neill is an Honorary Associate and Visiting Professor of Bassoon at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has coached bassoon and wind sections for several summer festivals including Canton International Summer Music Orchestra in China, the Lindenbaum Festival in South Korea and the Adam Mickiewicz Iculture Orchestra in Poland.

And now, what an immense privilege it is to have him shaping and conducting the first performance of The Cool Web.

Don’t miss it.

September 6, 2014
Shell shock

By the end of World War One , according to the BBC History site, the British Army had dealt with 80,000 official cases of shell shock, including those of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

It is difficult for us to imagine how anyone exposed to trench warfare came back entirely sane; how many silent victims were there, sheltered by their families, who never sought treatment?

My grandfather served in the trenches. When I was a young teenager, I asked him to tell me what it had been like. He would say hardly anything at all about it; the only detail I remember was that he told me they had to use their own urine to shave in. Looking back as an adult, I now realise how impossible it must have been for him to begin to tell me what it had been like. If I had only known it, the real evidence was right in front of me. I just didn’t connect the dots.

It was well-known in the family that Granddad had ‘black moods’. We were all used to them. Every now and then Granddad would sit, yellow-stained fingers clutching an inevitable cigarette, and stare into space, refusing to talk to anyone, hardly moving; not just for hours; for days on end. And we just worked round him. I don’t think anyone thought that that might have been something to do with the war..

He was an architect and builder, so in the second world war, when he was too old to fight, he had the enviable task of going into bombed buildings and figuring out the safest way to get victims, dead or alive, out. He never spoke about any of that either. Except once, my mother told me, when he came home and sat at the kitchen table and cried. He had been keeping a special eye on the young wife and baby of a lad he knew at the front. He found them in their house crushed behind the front door as they tried to get out.

On 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He had been taken from the battlefields and deposited in the East Suffolk and Ipswich Hospital suffering from ‘shell shock’. In his words, his breakdown was related to witnessing ‘a terrible sight that I shall never forget as long as I live’. He told his mother:

‘We had strict orders not to take prisoners, no matter if wounded my first job was when I had finished cutting some of their wire away, to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came out of one of their deep dugouts. bleeding badly, and put them out of misery. They cried for mercy, but I had my orders, they had no feeling whatever for us poor chaps… it makes my head jump to think about it.’

Hubbard had ‘gone over the top’ at the Battle of the Somme. While he managed to fight as far as the fourth line of trenches, by 3.30pm practically his whole battalion had been wiped out by German artillery. He was buried, dug himself out, and during the subsequent retreat was almost killed by machine gun fire. Within this landscape of horror, he collapsed.

Arthur Hubbard was one of millions of men who suffered psychological trauma as a result of their war experiences. Symptoms ranged from uncontrollable diarrhoea to unrelenting anxiety. Soldiers who had bayoneted men in the face developed hysterical tics of their own facial muscles. Stomach cramps seized men who knifed their foes in the abdomen. Snipers lost their sight. Terrifying nightmares of being unable to withdraw bayonets from the enemies’ bodies persisted long after the slaughter.

The dreams might occur ‘right in the middle of an ordinary conversation’ when ‘the face of a Boche that I have bayoneted, with its horrible gurgle and grimace, comes sharply into view’, an infantry captain complained. An inability to eat or sleep after the slaughter was common. Nightmares did not always occur during the war. World War One soldiers like Rowland Luther did not suffer until after the armistice when (he admitted) he ‘cracked up’ and found himself unable to eat, deliriously re-living his experiences of combat.

These were not exceptional cases. It was clear to everyone that large numbers of combatants could not cope with the strain of warfare. By the end of World War One, the army had dealt with 80,000 cases of ‘shell shock’. As early as 1917, it was recognised that war neuroses accounted for one-seventh of all personnel discharged for disabilities from the British Army. Once wounds were excluded, emotional disorders were responsible for one-third of all discharges. Even more worrying was the fact that a higher proportion of officers were suffering in this way. According to one survey published in 1917, while the ratio of officers to men at the front was 1:30, among patients in hospitals specialising in war neuroses, the ratio of officers to men was 1:6. What medical officers quickly realised was that everyone had a ‘breaking point’:

weak or strong, courageous or cowardly

– war frightened everyone witless.

In the early years of World War One, shell shock was believed to be the result of a physical injury to the nerves. In other words, shell shock was the result of being buried alive or exposed to heavy bombardment. The term itself had been coined, in 1917, by a medical officer called Charles Myers. But Myers rapidly became unhappy with the term, recognising that many men suffered the symptoms of shell shock without having even been in the front lines. As a consequence, medical officers increasingly began emphasising psychological factors as providing sufficient cause for breakdown. As the president of the British Psycho-Analytic Association, Ernest Jones, explained: war constituted ‘an official abrogation of civilised standards’ in which men were not only allowed, but encouraged:

‘…to indulge in behaviour of a kind that is throughout abhorrent to the civilised mind…. All sorts of previously forbidden and hidden impulses, cruel, sadistic, murderous and so on, are stirred to greater activity, and the old intrapsychical conflicts which, according to Freud, are the essential cause of all neurotic disorders, and which had been dealt with before by means of ‘repression’ of one side of the conflict are now reinforced, and the person is compelled to deal with them afresh under totally different circumstances.’

Consequently, the ‘return to the mental attitude of civilian life’ could spark off severe psychological trauma. The authors of one of the standard books on shell shock went so far as to point out that a soldier who suffered a neurosis had not lost his reason but was labouring under the weight of too much reason: his senses were ‘functioning with painful efficiency’.

How were these men to be cured of their painful afflictions? From the start, the purpose of treatment was to restore the maximum number of men to duty as quickly as possible. During World War One, four-fifths of men who had entered hospital suffering shell shock were never able to return to military duty: it was imperative that such high levels of ‘permanent ineffectives’ were reduced. However, the shift from regarding breakdown as ‘organic’ (that is, an injury to the nerves) to viewing it as psychological had inevitable consequences in terms of treatment. If breakdown was a ‘paralysis of the nerves’, then massage, rest, dietary regimes and electric shock treatment were invoked. If a psychological source was indicated, the ‘talking cure’, hypnosis, and rest would speed recovery. In all instances, occupational training and the inculcation of ‘masculinity’ were highly recommended. As the medical superintendent at one military hospital in York put it, although the medical officer must show sympathy, the patient ‘must be induced to face his illness in a manly way’.

Sympathy was only rarely forthcoming. Men arriving at Netley Hospital (for servicemen suffering shell shock) were greeted with silence: people were described as hanging their heads in ‘inexplicable shame’. No-one better described the mix of shame and anger experienced by the war-damaged than the poet, Siegfried Sassoon. In October 1917, while he was at Craiglockhart, one of the most famous hospitals for curing officers with war neuroses, he wrote a poem, simply called ‘Survivors’:

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain

Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.

Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again’, –

These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, –

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter’d their pride…

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

After the Somme

August 29, 2014