Hello and good greeting, as Ed Balls would say. Welcome to this month’s edition of ‘I am working too hard so have a few album covers rather than five’ Favourites. See below this month’s picks of top shelf covers.
Takin’ It To The Streets – The Doobie Brothers (1976)
Picture the scene – it is Monday evening. I have just sat through a 7.5 hour mediation at work over a relatively small claim for some encroaching vegetation. I am shattered beyond the normal level for a Monday. Charlotte, my guardian angel, comes over and cooks me a beautiful walnut, pear and gorgonzola risotto. It Keeps You Running by the below band comes on. I am in heaven. Enjoy this splendid cover!
The Dreaming – Kate Bush (1982)
Oh Kate Bush, my lionheart. The below has features as our resident writer Nick’s album of the month for May 2022. I could not help but pay his impeccable taste homage in having this as one of the three favourites. Depicting a passage from the song Houdini:
The album cover depicts a scene described in the lyrics to the song “Houdini”. In the picture shown, Bush is acting as Harry Houdini’s wife Bess, holding a key in her mouth, which she is about to pass on to him. The photograph is rendered in sepia, with just the gold key and Bush’s eye make-up showing any colour. Wikipedia
Queen – The Miracle (1989)
This absolutely horrifying number was Queen’s 1989 album. The album was recorded as the band recovered from Brian May’s marital problems and Freddie Mercury’s HIV diagnosis in 1987 (which was known to the band, though not publicised at the time). The cover itself is very strange indeed. I am not sure that I possess the vocabulary to describe the level of horror this induces inme. The merged eyes are particularly disturbing. But it is certainly a memorable cover!
Join me next month for the July Edition of (?) Favourites.
Once again, I have been given the great honour and privilege of writing this month’s edition of AOTM on the magisterial webpages of Cedric Suggests. This year I have chosen an album by an artist I ignored for years: Kate Bush. Friendship can often form around shared interests and pursuits. For this reason C.S Lewis envisioned friends as being side by side, in pursuit of a common goal or truth. But every so often a friend will also introduce you to something or to someone you had previously ignored and perhaps would never have discovered without them. This was certainly the case with Mrs Bush, who I had dismissed out of hand quite frequently despite Master Conboy’s many pleadings, but who I now love because of my friendship with him.
The first track is ‘Sat in your lap’. Musically, I think I would best describe it as drum-led and up-tempo. It makes for a very energetic start to the album to say the least. The lyrics concern someone who wants knowledge but does not want to expend the effort necessary to acquire it. Instead, the protagonist desires a quick fix summed up by the lines “Ooh, just gimme it quick, gimme it, gimme gimme gimme gimme!”. One of life’s paradoxes is that in order to achieve a level of effortlessness we are so often required to put in a great deal of effort to possess it. To play the piano with real ease, for example, means one must put in hours upon hours of sometimes painful practice to get to that level. Sometimes the work one puts into acquiring something is integral to value of having that thing. The man who reaches the summit of a mountain via an elevator, might enjoy the view, but he can hardly pride himself as a hiker.
“Bush as Dunce”
In the chorus the protagonist sings that “I must admit, just when I think I’m king (I just begin)”, which reminds me of those times I have thought I understood something but later realised I did so only rather superficially. So often, our knowledge of things is rather skin deep, a point that can cause us quite a few problems if we begin to think we are a “king”. The philosopher is defined by the knowledge of how little he really knows, the saint by his knowledge of how little he has of anything when compared with the fullness of God. “A little learning is a dangerous thing”, as Alexander Pope said, “drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring”. But I regret to say a little learning is a more common thing than a “deeper understanding” and is if to exemplify that I have quoted Pope without having read the whole poem!
The third track, “Pull out the Pin” is I think a Kate Bush classic. I particularly enjoy the upright bass part as played by Danny Thompson in this track. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame provides backing vocals. The lyrics are from the perspective of a Viet Cong soldier which I think testifies to the tremendous diversity of Bush’s subject matter (which might be unparralled in pop). The protagonist sings of how close they are to the village and the innocents left behind, of the smell of “baccy” and “Yankee hash” of his enemy, of his “silver Buddha”, and of his tremendous will to live which is in opposition to this life-destroying invasion:
Just one thing in it:
Me or him
Just one thing in it:
Me or him.
And I love life!
“Mrs Bush at War (not Barbara)”
Another track I love from this album is “the night of the swallow”. The lyrics outline a dialogue between two lovers, the woman pleading for the man to stay, the man desperate to leave and start his adventure. It seems to be some kind of illegal mission, perhaps smuggling something or some people, for which he will serve as pilot. The logic of the lady’s position appears to be the opposite of Bruenhilde’s thinking in the prologue to the Goetterdaemmerung, who says to Siegfried: “wie liebt’ ich dich, liess’ ich dich nicht?” (“how do I love you, if I do not let you go forth”). I love the Irish folk music that backs the chorus and provides an excellent contrast with the more restrained verse sections, echoing the chasm between the protagonists’ positions.
“Bush, the Irish Bard”
The final song I wish to speak about, for the sake of brevity, and in order to complete this post within this month, is “Houdini”. This is the source of the rather interesting album art for “the Dreaming”. Bush, playing the part of Houdini’s wife (Bess), prepares to kiss the great escape artist with a key on her tongue that he will use to escape from the handcuffs. The album art I think illustrates well how Bush transcended our modern pop conception of “sex symbol”. She is perhaps “sexy” here, but I think it is an expression of her own sexuality and will, and is not the same as our contemporary game of peep show disguised as “liberation”. I rather suspect that for those who did/do fancy her, she was no mere object to gorp at. But it is such musings that have led Paul Conboy to suggest Mrs Bush might need to file for a restraining order against me, so I best stop…
“A Key Moment”
The song’s lyrics discuss how Houdini’s wife attempted to speak to her husband after his death through the occult. Houdini had apparently come up with a solution while still alive to ensure that when Bess did reach him through a séance, she could be sure it was no hoax. The code was apparently “Rosabel believe” and the lyrics suggest she heard him say this during a séance. Now I do not agree with “this sort of thing” myself, but it makes for an interesting song as does the bass and strings parts. All in all it is gripping story telling.
“Careful now, with these séances!”
I have only just dipped into the surface of the brilliance of this album in this blog, so please listen yourself and drink deep the springs of its genius. Lest we be guilty of thinking we are “king” when we have only just begun.
We must all remember we are only at the beginning of things. We have just begun being friends, just begun being lovers, just begun our mission to perfect and regulate our love. Our King, who is alpha and omega, the beginning and end of all things, will find us at our beginning and lead us to our ending.
Please note I have inserted timings for moments in the symphony that I have discussed in the blog. These timings relate to the recording linked at the bottom of the page if you should wish to listen along while reading.
Around eight years ago, during one idle summer, I stumbled across a youtube video with a recording of Leonard Bernstein performing Mahler’s 1st symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. I was immediately drawn by the symphony’s unusual nickname “the Titan”. Titanic symphonies of almost an hour length were a passion of mine at the time and so I was keen to give it a try. I sat stunned as the mysterious introduction unfolded, just as I had been when hearing the openings of Beethoven’s 9th symphony and Bruckner’s 3rd. But this was different, while in Beethoven’s 9th the first D minor theme proper had quickly emerged from the mist with a tutti outburst (as was the case more or less with Bruckner’s 3rd albeit with a good deal less haste), the introduction of this symphony seemed to remain in a kind of musical stasis for much longer. When eventually the first theme did surface I was faintly horrified. It seemed to me to be a tune of such absurd banality that I was stunned. How could this Mahler follow something so sublime with a theme like that?! I turned the video off immediately. Over the years I have learnt to appreciate and indeed love this contrast of the sublime and banal that is so typical of Mahler’s music, but it has been a long process. Let us take a closer look and see if we can re-evaluate things from the beginning.
What are the special ingredients of this hushed opening that so attracted me on that occasion. The first element is an A natural drone spanning several octaves (the same note played very quietly, moving up by an octave in a glissando), about as close as one can get to a kind of musical quietude (0:05 to 0:11 of track 1). This drone is soon joined by the second element, an interval of a descending fourth played in a call and response type fashion by the woodwinds, and a little later forming a short motif based on this descending interval (0:11 to 0:34 of track 1). This is then joined by a fanfare motif first played by the clarinets (0:35 – 0:43 of track 1), then eventually by muted trumpets (Mahler calls for the latter to be played in the distance as if they are heard far away) (1:07 – 1:14 of track 1). The clarinet imitates the call of a cuckoo but with a slight twist, unlike in nature the interval is here once again a descending fourth (1.28 of track 1). We now have a beautiful chorale theme in the horns that sounds full of innocence like the new morn (1.33 – 1.49 of track 1). From the musical void we are beginning to hear stirrings of life. A chromatic bass-line brings the first signs of any real tension to the music urging it towards a new direction (2:21 of track 1). Soon the “banal” theme emerges, but listen closely to how it starts with that same interval of a descending fourth that has been so prominent thus far in the music (3:02 of track 1). The theme has been prepared all along.
The question we may well ask is what does this strange and quiet introduction signify? Mahler gives us a clue in the score, he marks this section “Naturlaut” (sound of nature). In other words the music is conveying the hushed sounds of nature at its most tranquil, the impression one gets when alone in a wood perhaps. And what about the meaning of the main theme? Here, we also have some indication from Mahler. The melody is derived from the song “Ging Heut’ Morgen über’s Feld” (which describes the happy sensations upon observing the natural world) from Mahler’s song-cycle “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen” (“Songs of a Wayfarer”). This theme seems to represent nature, or a view of nature, at its most joyously innocent. The contrast was necessary: Mahler wanted to represent both views of the natural world, the sublime and the naïve. With all the musical elements in place Mahler now draws both from the introduction’s motifs and the mono-thematic exposition to construct a movement in unconventional sonata form. Close attention should be paid to the role the descending bass-line motif plays in injecting drama and tension into the movement, and the role of the fanfare motif in overcoming that tension.
The second movement begins with a Ländler, the country cousin of the Viennese Waltz, beloved throughout the Habsburg lands including in Mahler’s own native Bohemia. This rustic music has a surprisingly raucous atmosphere for the concert hall. Mahler would certainly have heard music like this as a boy in his father’s tavern in Iglau (modern day Jihlava). The horns are required to use a technique called “stopped horn” whereby the player blocks the bell of the instrument with their hand creating a veritably gnarly and uncouth sound. The central trio section is more elegant and intimate in tone and provides a respite from the stomping jollity of the peasant dance in the outer sections (2:50 – 5:36 of track 2). One more contrast in this symphony of contrasts.
If I had been patient enough to listen past the opening movement on that first occasion, there is no doubt I would have been shocked further still by the third movement, one of Mahler’s most unique creations. It begins with an eery funeral march which employs the tune of the popular round “Frère Jacques” refashioned in the minor mode (Mahler marks it “Bruder Martin” in the score). Here, then is a yet more bizarre contrast, nursery music used to create a solemn funeral march. The strangeness is intensified by the choice to introduce the melody with a solo double bass – an unusual instrument to say the least for a solo (0:10 of track 3). Later, the music gets weirder, sounding to many audiences like a Kletzmer band (2:27 of track 3). It seems unlikely that Mahler was actually channelling Kletzmer here as he had almost certainly not heard such music at this point in his life and this part of the movement probably owes much more to the Bohemian folk music he would have heard as a child. One thing is for certain though, this sped-up almost grotesque folk music provides for a very odd juxtaposition to the solemnness of the opening march.
Mahler explained that the movement had been partially inspired by a famous engraving known as “the Huntsman’s Funeral” by Mortiz von Schwind. The engraving depicts a torchlit funeral procession of forest animals carrying the body of their deceased enemy the hunter. The beasts appear to celebrate his demise with an unrestrained whimsy that gives the engraving a sharply ironic air. It is that same juxtaposition of earthy revelry and themes of death and loss that permeates the main music of the third movement. A lyrical contrasting section is set against this morbid humour (5:20 – 7:19 of track 3). It is based on music from the fourth stanza of another of Mahler’s songs “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen”: “Die Zwei Bluen Augen”. The text of the song describes how the protagonist and spurned lover has set out into the wide world and eventually found comfort asleep under a Linden tree. As with Schubert’s “der Lindenbaum”, we sense that there is a longing for the consolations that might come through death and an end to earthly miseries.
“The Huntsman’s Funeral” by Moritz von Schwind
The final movement is the dramatic linchpin of the whole symphony. Mahler gave the movement the title “Dall’ Inferno al Paradiso” (“from the Inferno to Paradise”) and it appears to represent a battle between these two oppositional forces for one man’s soul. The movement begins abruptly with a cymbal clash followed by an orchestral outburst that Mahler described as the “outcry of a deeply wounded heart”. There ensues are short introduction with several motifs taken from Liszt’s Dante symphony, for example the motif first heard at (0:09 of track 4) is based on Liszt’s crux fidelis motif (used in the Dante symphony and elsewhere by Liszt), though Mahler has modified the intervals so that it conforms to the minor key. Another motif taken from Liszt’s Dante symphony follows based on chromatically descending triplets (0:11 of track 4). Out of this infernal introduction arrives a terrifying march-like main theme, its first four notes taken from the minor-version crux fidelis motif (1:06 of track 4).
Mahler at the time of writing his First Symphony
This first theme is developed, hogging the stage like a rude bully, before finally culminating in swelling sounds in the brass and sneers based on the descending triplets (2:41 – 3:16 of track 4). A transition section follows that leads into a surprisingly beautiful song-like second theme that in turn builds to a sumptuous outpouring of emotion (3:17 – 5:48 of track 4). Does this theme perhaps represent the divine love that must necessarily save us from our ruin? Whatever the case may be we are not allowed to rest too soon, the exposition closes with music from the first movement’s introduction now combined with the minor-version crux fidelis motif and the descending triplets motif heralding a return to the stormy beginnings of the finale (5:49 of track 4).
The development begins dramatically with a combination of the minor-version crux fidelis motif and another inferno theme from Liszt’s Dante symphony (6:13 of track 4). Yet out of the maelstrom emerges hope, with fanfares reminiscent of the first movement returning followed by the crux fidelis motif now in the major mode with its original intervals restored and combined with an adapted version of the grail theme from Wagner’s Parsifal (6:58 – 7:14 of track 4). The trumpets attempt to mount a chorale-like theme which is interrupted by a return to the minor key and the tumult of the beginning (7:15 – 7:25 of track 4). The theme of victory first heard at (7:01 of track 4), however, soon emerges again but now fortissimo and what is more it leads to a surprising and spine-tingling modulation to D major (the key by which Mahler is to represent paradise) (8:25 – 8:39 of track 4). The chorale-theme returns resplendently (8:40 of track 4), its source of inspiration being the theme first heard at (0:25 of track 1) at the very start of the symphony based on descending fourths. From 8:51 of track 4 try singing “and he shall reign for ever and ever” to the melody and you might find yourself also believing Haendel’s Hallelujah chorus had some influence here too.
Motifs from the first movement now return at the conclusion of the development like memories of a past innocence fast receding but not forgotten (9:46 of track 4). They are heard, however, alongside motifs from the finale such as the devilish descending triplets motif. From memories of youth, we return to the song-like second theme which mounts to a beautiful though almost heart-breaking climax (11:33 – 13:14 of track 4). The dreaded march-like theme comes back and seems at first in danger of gaining momentum but it soon dissolves preparing a recall of the climatic passage which came near the conclusion of the first movement (13:15 – 15:15 of track 4). Fanfares herald the return of the motif of victory, a modulation to D-major and the finally the chorale-theme that leads us on triumphantly to a glorious conclusion (15:16).
And so a symphony of contrasts, of both sublime and naïve elements, the beautiful and the grotesque, ends with the greatest contrast of them all: that between heaven and hell, with heaven victorious at the last.
Hello and welcome to this month’s edition of my favourite album covers. Regrettably my new role at work is rather demanding so I am unable to listen to as much music as I might have done previously. However, I have three excellent covers for you below.
Phillipe Herreweghe – Fauré Requiem (2007)
I did think this cover looked familiar to me. The reason being that I have seen this beautiful sculpture of Saint Cecilia by Stefano Maderno in the church itself, while I lived in Rome. This cover is simple but effective. One comment I read in the Amazon reviews of the CD of this album (Charlotte had the inspired idea to gift me the vinyl for my Birthday, which I listened to on the day of writing this post) described it quite well. It read “I felt like the sculpture in the cover when the album was over”!. An inspired piece of music, and an exquisite cover.
Bruce Hornsby ‘Flicted (2022)
Originally a member of the Grateful Dead (don’t you know), Bruce Hornsby’s 2022 offering was sighted on a new joint playlist my father and I made on Spotify. In the playlist I was struck by a rather amusing cover, with Hornsby standing by a house in the shape of a cafetiere. And, as an additional boon, this is the most recent album to feature in this list.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – Brian Eno and David Byrne (1981)
This album threw itself at me with shocking force. The Rothko-esque cover is alarmingly colourful. I love the gradual waves of colour and the nothingness of it, which indeed mirrors the album in a way, which is a landmark in its own right.
As David Byrne describes in his liner notes, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts placed its bets on serendipity: “It is assumed that I write lyrics (and the accompanying music) for songs because I have something I need to ‘express.’,” he writes. “I find that more often, on the contrary, it is the music and the lyric that trigger the emotion within me rather than the other way around.”
I shall see you again for the June edition of (?) Favourties!
Charlotte and I were delighted to find Mahler 1 was playing at Symphony Hall last month. We went to see it and were spellbound from start to finish. Each of the movements are so distinctive from one another. The last time I wrote a classical AOTM was my favourite recording of the Bach violin concertos, which took some hours of research. Alas I do not have such a luxury at my disposal so I shall write about this symphony briefly.
Mahler’s first four symphonies are often classed as his “Wunderhorn” group owing to thematic and emotional links with settings of songs from the anthology of German folk poems “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (“Youth’s Magic Horn”). Strictly speaking, the First Symphony doesn’t fulfil this criterion for inclusion as a “Wunderhorn” symphony as its thematic and emotional links are with Mahler’s first song cycle, “Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen” (“Songs of a Wayfarer”), of which both words and music were written by him under the influence of first love and rejection. But it’s a useful classification because the Wayfarer songs and the First Symphony do inhabit the same thought and sound world of symphonies 2,3, and 4. Musicweb
The first movement starts with a glorious a seven-octave-spread A, played “as quietly and ethereally as possible by the strings, a shimmer of sonority that sounds out the whole compass of the orchestra” according to the Guardian. Mahler first conducted this in 1889 in Budapest. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be in the audience. Mahler wrote in 1893 that the first movement represented the waking of Nature after a long winter.
The second movement is a lot of fun, with a dance-like motion evolving into crescendoing (yes that is a word) dynamic and tempo and then back to a waltz.
The third movement is based on the tune of Frère Jaques. It starts off slowly but picks up beautifully over the course of ten minutes. Mahler described this movement as a satiric cartoon of “The Hunter’s Funeral” turned into musical life, a vision of a hunter’s coffin drawn by animals.
…with a slow movement that incorporates street bands, klezmer inflections, and the tune known as “Frère Jacques”, and whose final movement will rail against the cosmos with symphonic music’s most terrifying expressionist outburst, and which, at the end of its drama, will find a sheer musical joy that’s both a transcendence of the bodily and the spiritual, in the most uninhibited, tumultuous noise the orchestra had yet made. Guardian.
The fourth movement is described by the composer as “Dall’inferno” or, ‘from Hell’. The opening is breathless and breathtaking. It continues throughout on the theme of ‘a great cry from a wounded heart’, which the conductor has ascribed to it. This recording is taut, without any hint of over expression or exaggeration. The middle section is deceptively calm and calming after the outburst from the beginning, but one does not rest easy for long, with the final minutes erupting in devastating fashion.
…the achingly moving slow music at the centre of the finale that balances the terrifying cry into the abyss the movement opens with, the way Mahler paces the final climax, storming the orchestral heavens with an apotheosis of D major. Guardian
By 1896, Mahler referred to Symphony No.1 as simply “Symphony in D Major”, so as not to limit its potential meaning. Whichever nomenclature we choose, this piece is an absolutely staggering all encompassing experience. It still captures, in this recording, the freshness and excitement it has in 1889. Mahler 1 holds an eternal quality, standing on the musical shoulders of Bruckner and Beethoven, morphing these two main influences into something large and frightening. It shocked Charlotte and I to our core, leaving us both stunned and speechless for many minutes afterwards, as we drifted on a cloud down Broad Street in the dark.
Hello and good greeting. I have decided to downsize my five favourite feature to three favourites on account of increasing time commitments not enabling me to listen to as many albums as I should like. Here are three which stuck out to me this month.
J. J. Cale – Naturally (1974)
This is by all accounts an excellent cover. A racoon in a nice red coat with a top hat and tails is quaint and delightful.
Michael Jackson – Thriller (1982)
An iconic cover by anyone’s rating system. Michael, leaning backwards, looking aloof in a dazzling white suit. The tiger is a bit off putting with our modern easily horrified glasses and clutched pearls on. However, reading an excellent article about this cover, I found out that the photographer, Dick Zimmerman, lent Michael his suit for the shoot after not liking the options available in the wardrobe department. An amazing cover which captured a unique moment in music history.
Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds (1978)
Finally, feast your eyes upon the exquisite cover of Jeff Wayne’s 1978 masterpiece. Charlotte and I listened to this album on a 178km stretch of highway in France, heading to Calais. This was a particular highlight of the trip for me. I was so glad to be able to share this album with my darling. The cover shows the Thunderchild’s valiant heart being melted by one of the Martian tripods, a dramatic moment in the album.
I shall see you again for the March edition of X Favourites.
“The Huntsman’s Funeral” by Moritz von Schwind
Mahler at the time of writing his First Symphony
