During my time in the sixth form at school one of my
fellow-students was also an organist, Michael Overbury. He claimed that the ideal programming for an
organ recital was to lead up to the Bach work.
He believed Bach to be second only to God in the hierarchy of human
existence. He argued that no music he
would play was equal to Bach, so if you followed Bach with anything else it
would be an anti-climax, while preceding Bach with other music created a sense
of building to a climax.
I thought he was mad.
But that was then.
At the age of 17, when Michael could toss of a Trio Sonata every bit as
easily as he could Mulet’s Tu es Petra - both of which I struggled to master then, and
have never fully succeeded in mastering since – I was happy to disguise my envy
with statements relating to Michael’s weird state of mind. I regret my thoughts then, spoken and
unspoken.
But I still think he was mad.
I would not argue against his belief that Bach’s music
was (and is) the pinnacle of the organ repertory and that everything else might
be perceived as anticlimactic. But I am
even more certain now than I was back then that this is bad programming. The trouble is not the musical quality, it’s
the audience quality. Audiences for
organ recitals comprise mostly (if not exclusively) people who love the sound
of the organ way and above the intricacies of the music it plays. Why else do so many people drool over Cocker’s
Tuba Tune, Widor’s Toccata or, really scraping the barrel
here, anything and everything by Percy Whitlock? It’s all third rate music. As Arthur Wills memorably wrote, the trouble
with organ music is that it is too ambitious for the organ but too weak to
justify the time and effort involved in transferring it to the orchestra.
So, whether we like it or not, the best organ recitals
stick Bach before the end (I usually put it in the middle – when I play it,
which is not often, because I play it badly) and have as their climax some predictably
uninventive French Toccata which is made up of the kind of material sixth form harmony
students regard as juvenile, but which sends the shivers down the spines of
otherwise spineless organ buffs.
However, Michael’s approach works once you get away
from the organ. I attended a short
violin recital yesterday in which the Bach unaccompanied Sonata in D minor
(BWV1004) was both the culmination and the climax of a programme so well
conceived and executed, one wished it had been recorded as an example to others
on how to do such things.
Musicians often fail to understand the value of good programme
building. Students fail their diplomas,
young and unknown musicians find audiences unwilling to attend their recitals,
and established figures earn a reputation for being tired, not because of their
playing or their musicality, but because their programming is poor. Anyone who argues that chronology makes
logical programming clearly has never sat through the tiresomely boring and utterly
unmusical sequence of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninov time after
time. When I examined diploma students,
the one who might programme it as Chopin, Beethoven, Rachmaninov and Bach got
my vote simply because it showed musical thought rather than predictability –
and that had to be mirrored in the playing itself, subconsciously or
consciously. It certainly made me sit up
and listen more intently.

A former student in Singapore and now studying with
Midori in Los Angeles, Orest is an outstanding player by any standards. But he enters a world crammed full of outstanding
players; how is he to make his mark?
Orest will make his mark, of that you can be sure, because of his
intelligent, imaginative and inspired approach to programme planning.
He performed four works, and while there was a
coherent theme linking them (which is a pre-requisite in any successful
programme) it was the order in which he performed them which gave this recital
great distinction. He began with a work
by a Ukrainian composer called V. Vyshynsky (we weren’t given the composer’s forenames
and I am ill-equipped to transliterate them).
This was a fine piece modelled on a Baroque suite in reverse (it began
with a “Giga” and ended with a “Sarabande”), and which, in its fairly light character,
its short and varied sections, and its exposition of colours and techniques
possible in solo violin playing, caught the audience’s attention, settled them
down and got us all interested in the player.
Late-comers (an essential aspect of any Asian event)
missed that, but were seated in time for another Ukrainian work, a lament
called Kommos by O. Bezborodko. This was a deeply moving piece which clearly
had a profound emotional impact on Smovzh and which he communicated with
exceptional power. With this the
audience had a heavy dose of emotional intensity, and being quite short, there
was an almost tangible sense of release when it came to the third piece, Remnants of the Spring by Singaporean Kong
Meng Liew. This was a clever placing for
as the weakest work in the programme, its fresh qualities were uppermost in the
aftermath of the seriousness of the Bezborodko while its musical weaknesses were
easily overlooked in the audience’s over-riding need for something less emotionally
draining.
But Liew, albeit inadvertently, brilliantly paved the
way for the Bach. We had settled down
after the fun at the start, we had enjoyed moments of emotional intensity and musical
superficiality. Now, and only now, were
we ready for the high intellectualism of Bach.
I spent more time looking at the audience than the
player during the Bach Sonata, and every face was rapt and enthralled for the
entire length of the work. To achieve
such a high level of attention from an audience, which included at least two under
the age of 10, was a testament, not so much to the playing as to the ingenious programme
building.
I would go to hear Orest Smovzh play again, not simply
because he is an inspired player, but because I know his programmes will be interesting,
finely-crafted and, above all, superbly sculpted to create the maximum musical
effect.
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