Philip Venables

A composer of ferocious dramatic instincts
— Alex Ross

Tag: Venables plays Bartok

Venables plays Bartók
Programme Note

In November 1993 I was 14 years old and practising for my Grade 6 violin. My teacher, Marilyn Shearn, took me and three other pupils to play for her old teacher, Rudolf Botta. I played Bartók’s Evening in the Village — a perennial favourite on the ABRSM Exam Syllabus. Marilyn videotaped the masterclass, and nearly 25 years later, I found this tape in a shoebox while my parents were moving out of our family home. This discovery started the process of researching and writing this concerto-of-sorts — a ‘radio music drama’ that celebrates the confluence of musical lives that led to and followed on from that moment in November 1993.

Rudolf Botta had a remarkable life. He was born in 1918 and, as a teenager, pursued two passions: violin playing and fencing. During WWII he was prominent in the Hungarian Army, and then later in the anti-Soviet resistance between 1946 and 1956. As a result, in 1952 the Soviets sent him to a labour camp and, knowing he was a professional violinist, tortured him to the extent that he was never able to play again. He was released in 1953 in the amnesty following Stalin’s death and proceeded to set up a music school in his hometown of Bonyhád, only three years later to find himself a regional leader of the 1956 revolution. Following a tip-off about his imminent arrest, he fled Hungary with his wife Leonka and their two daughters, Alexandra (Emöke) and Genevieve. They found a warm welcome in the UK and, after a short stint as a window cleaner, Rudolf became a teacher at what is now the Royal Northern College of Music. Rudolf’s gift was teaching, and over a 30-year career he touched the lives of hundreds of violinists and future music teachers; Marilyn Shearn was one of them, and Botta’s rigorous, pragmatic and inspiring teaching she, in turn, passed onto me.

Venables plays Bartók,written in 2018, is a series of musical postcards built around six of Bartók’s arrangements of Hungarian or Romanian Folk Dances and two of his own miniatures (The Night’s Music and The Chase):
1. Evening in the Village
2. Romanian Polka / Fast Dance — 1944, Bonyhád, Hungary
3. The Night’s Music — 1946, Griffen, Austria
4. Stick Dance — 1956, Bonyhád, Hungary
5. The Chase — 1956, A refugee camp in Vienna
6. Dance from Bucsum — 1957, Burnley
7. Bear Dance — 1952, An unknown location in Hungary
8. Evening in the Village (reprise) — 1938, Bonyhád, Hungary
9. Standing Still
These postcards are paraphrased ‘diary entries’ that alternate between two timelines: the first is my own journey of working with Pekka, interviewing Botta’s family members and ex-pupils and reading his extensive memoirs; the second is Botta’s journey through WWII, imprisonment, fleeing Hungary and arriving in the UK. Those two histories meet at that moment when I played Bartók to Botta, 25 years ago. The hope is that I have created a piece that reflects on the ‘violin genealogy’ that connects me to Marilyn to Rudolf, and which ultimately allowed me to become a musician and to write this concerto.

Details

Text: Philip Venables / Rudolph Botta (in english)
Commissioners: BBC Symphony Orchestra / BBC Radio 3
Premiere: 17th August 2018, BBC Proms, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Pekka Kuusisto (violin), Sakari Oramo.
Duration: 34′
Ensemble: solo violin, tape (stereo) and orchestra (2.2.2.2 / 4.2.2.1 / piano.timp.3perc.soundcue operator / min:12.10.8.6.4).

Published by Ricordi Musikverlag GmbH

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Guardian article

Click here for an article about the concerto for the Guardian.

Press

“It could have all been so self-indulgent or pretentious, especially as the piece culminates in the audio from that childhood masterclass video, with the young Venables playing the piece with which the soloist, Pekka Kuusisto, had started the work’s journey. But there was something intensely moving, profound even, in the way the work unfolded, the mundaneness of creativity as narrated by the composer contrasting with Botta’s often searing reminiscences (spoken by actor Jot Davies), and with the music of Bartók and Venables illuminating each other, the Hungarian’s folk dance arrangements giving familiar touchstones to the musical flow. Indeed, such was the interplay between soloist, orchestra and voice-over (the latter not always ideally balanced in the hall for ultimate clarity, it must be said, and with a handful of technical glitches) that the focus at any one time was surprisingly clear-cut and connected directly to ear and brain.” — Bachtrack

“The interaction of Bartok’s music with Venables’s, and of recorded spoken text, both the excerpts and bits of the actual coaching with Botta, with one aspect prominent and then receding as the focus shifts to another (at one point I found myself remembering Stravinsky’s comment about the first time he heard Pierrot Lunaire–that he wished the singer would shut up so he could hear the music–and then at another regretted the music’s making it hard to understand the speaking), the clarity of the time shifts in the stories, and the control and balancing of density of textures, is always engaging and interesting, but the unfolding of aspects of one person’s life and how it and he then go on to impact other lives in various ways is completely compelling and very moving. It was impressive in its conception and its masterly realization, and completely satisfying as a total experience.” — Sequenza 21

“The half-hour work mixed Botta’s taped reminiscences, eight little folk-based pieces by Bartók, the tape of Venables playing to Botta and Venables’s own cluster-rich, atmospheric music. Brilliantly played by Pekka Kuususto in an otherwise unremarkable BBC Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Sakari Oramo, the concerto was strongest when evoking the horrors of Soviet occupation, and weirdest when incorporating Venables’s commentary on how he wrote it.” — The Times
News about Venables plays Bartók
18 September 2018

Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson

This profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson (pictured above, photo by Anton Lukoszevieze) is adapted from a profile that first appeared in a programme-book for the BBC Proms 2018, for the premiere…

3 September 2018

Successful premiere for ‘Venables plays Bartók’ at the BBC Proms

Venables plays Bartók, my new violin concerto written for Pekka Kuusisto, received a warm response at its premiere at the BBC Proms on Friday 17th August, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra…
17 January 2020
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson

This profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson (pictured above, photo by Anton Lukoszevieze) is adapted from a profile that first appeared in a programme-book for the BBC Proms 2018, for the premiere of Venables plays Bartók. Please contact Tim directly via his blog here if you would like to license this profile for your own programme or website.

Philip Venables’s work has always been concerned with continuity and discontinuity. His works cover subjects such as mental breakdown (the opera 4.48 Psychosis, 2016, after the play by the late Sarah Kane), gender politics (Illusions, 2015–17, and The Gender Agenda, 2018, created in collaboration with the ‘anti-drag’ performance artist David Hoyle) or the postmodern collapse of meaning (numbers 76–80: tristan and isolde and numbers 91–95, setting words by the late Simon Howard; both 2011). He has said that his music engages with ‘politics and sexuality, gender and violence’, yet it is equally interested in historical connections: the relationship of new work to old (Klaviertrio im Geiste, 2011), compositional kinships (Metamorphoses after Britten, 2010; Time Stands Still, 2008, after Dowland), and in his violin concerto for the BBC Proms, the intertwining of life stories involved in learning and being taught an instrument.

Venables was born in Chester and now lives between London and Berlin. He studied at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music (with Philip Cashian and David Sawer), and with Julian Philips and James Weeks as Doctoral Composer-in-Residence at the Royal Opera House in a partnership with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. This last led to the creation of 4.48 Psychosis and, in the wake of its success, a burst of sudden acclaim that includes a portrait CD for NMC Recordings and revivals of the opera in London (2018) and Dresden (2019).

Venables’s interest in formalised violence – not the blood and guts of Hollywood movies but a cool, aesthetic consideration – can take many forms. In The Revenge of Miguel Cotto, two percussionists create a steady pulse by thwacking punchbags with pieces of wood. In other works, such as the Howard settings or the music-theatre work

Illusions, the music continually cuts into and interrupts itself to throw into question what we think we know. In 4.48 Psychosis, the central character’s psychological collapse is portrayed in a score that jumps from robotic minimalism to waiting-room muzak to Purcellian lament.

Since 2011 the other constant has been text. Like two forebears on whose music he has composed commentaries, Dowland and Britten, Venables is a sensitive and innovative composer in English. For him, this means contemporary British English in all its registers from the street to the academy – the language in which Kane, Hoyle and Howard revel and revelled. Like them, Venables speaks a language that can dance as well as fight, and that reflects (or deflects) as much as it punches.

18 September 2018
Successful premiere for ‘Venables plays Bartók’ at the BBC Proms

Venables plays Bartók, my new violin concerto written for Pekka Kuusisto, received a warm response at its premiere at the BBC Proms on Friday 17th August, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo. A huge thanks to Pekka, Sakari, the orchestra, Ian Dearden and Jot Davies for their roles in the performance.

Press reviews were generally good, including a 5-star review in Bachtrack (“something intensely moving, profound even, in the way the work unfolded”) and 4 stars in the Guardian (“virtuosity and substance”). I also wrote a piece for the Guardian in the run up to the premiere about the providence of the piece and the life of Rudolf Botta, the main protagonist of the piece – you can read it here.

The BBC Radio 3 broadcast is still on BBC iPlayer until Sunday 17th September. The preamble and interviews to the concerto begin around 18’30” and the performance (with the introduction by Pekka, which is part of the piece) at 27’30”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/evv4mb/play/ajbpd4/b0bf4kvq

3 September 2018