Another Prom-inspired post today; this time, from Daniel Barenboim and his East-West Divan Orchestra’s version of Ravel’s Bolero. Remarkable I think for demonstrating both social and musical awareness of reality even if opposed to tradition.

The non-musical side first: I think the first conventional ‘classical’ Prom I have seen where colour was allowed onstage other than for soloists. The men, in fact, were in suit and tie rather than white tie or all black (black tie seems to be the amateur uniform in general), perhaps acknowledging that in practice hardly anyone wears evening dress of whatever monochromicity on any regular basis.

Then as to the performance: a few introductory notes might be required here for some people (skip them if you know the piece). Bolero is based around a single snare drum pattern that goes on for its whole quarter-hour duration, over which is placed basically a single tune, one variation on it and innumerable different orchestrations and accompaniments, and then a very brief coda at the end. There are no changes of speed or rhythmic pattern. I could write about the historical and stylistic significance of that but it’s not really important here. It was written I think about 1920, I can’t be bothered looking up the exact date, do it yourself if you want to.

Now the main role in performance of your typical orchestral conductor (choral conducting is usually a little different) is to act as a silent human metronome, giving the pulse in standard patterns of arm-waving. What they do in all the preparation phases is another matter, and most conductors indicate a lot more than the beat as well, but that is the basis. Barenboim, on this occasion, probably only did that for about a quarter of the piece in total. If your snare drummer is good, then why bother duplicating? Better to avoid potential discrepancies and just get the orchestra to follow his (it was a man on this occasion) pulse instead. Barenboim did fully conduct some sections, particularly the ending when there must be about a hundred musicians playing all at once, did do a certain amount of indicating mood, volume etc., and did cue a lot of the more important entries (there are some very very long rests in Bolero!). But nonetheless he spent a fair amount of time just waiting for the next point where his involvement might actually add something, at least security. At one point the live director decided to cut to him, showing him leaning against the rail around the podium and with his arms folded. Hardly the image of artistic reverence usually expected of renowned conductors!

As well as being deliberately recruited from across the Arab-Jewish divide in the Middle East, the East-West Divan Orchestra are a fairly young ensemble by classical pro standards. This may be involved with the more relaxed dress code, at least one visibly heavily pregnant wind player and openness to musical experiment. Which brings me on to jazz and Ravel.

Ravel definitely listened to early jazz as well as its ragtime and other precursors, though whether through bands travelling to Europe, the early recordings that were made in the US from 1917 and gradually became available across the Atlantic or both I don’t know. For my grade 8 exam, I played the middle movement of his Violin Sonata, subtitled ‘Blues’ and involving a lot of suitably crunchy major-minor chords, slides and banjo-style strumming (which I once practised for so long in an effort to nail down the rapid alternate-picking rhythm patterns that I got a blister on my finger. No picks for violinists sadly); it sounds a lot more like a trad jazz number with ‘blues’ in the title than what we would probably think of as early blues, but the influence is unmistakeable.

Bolero has some decided jazz influences in some of the harmonies, melodic shaping and chromaticism. But it’s often not taken much notice of by performances usually more interested in Spanish influences or proto-minimalism. The orchestra involved is huge, but there are some parts which can be missed out or transferred to other instruments; this is often done with the (apparently) three saxophone parts. Barenboim opted to include two of them, soprano and tenor, which isn’t bad out of three; and perhaps in line with that, relevant players notably in the reed and brass sections had clearly been instructed – or at the least permitted – to play up the inter-war jazz potential of their solos. The principal trombonist was certainly hamming it up to heaven with thoroughly undignified slides and vibrato (hardly ever used by orchestral brass nowadays); and the soprano sax player’s blue notes and glides from one note to another drew a wonderful grin from the principal bassoon sitting next to him at just the same time that my face did something similar. There’s also a long chunk of writing where the strings pluck chords in rhythmic patterns rather like a harp or even a minimal guitar part; where normally the only acceptable mode of pizzicato playing is with the instrument in the position used for bowing and the first finger, the East-West Divan violins and violas were certainly holding their instruments across their knees like undersized banjos, though I didn’t get enough close-ups to see if they were using their thumbs as the position would suggest.

All of which, in my view, constitutes a look at what is actually there in the music, with accretions of tradition largely about orchestral music performance in general stripped off. It’s a process classical music has been going through in a lot of areas in the last generation or so, discovering in the process that a lot of the music it plays (basically anything written before about 1900, possibly even later) wasn’t actually conceived with the sort of interpretation and context it now gets, or used to get in the first half of the twentieth century, in mind. Never mind applauding between movements, Beethoven’s symphonies were premiered with whole other pieces played in between the sections. Mozart probably expected keyboard continuo throughout, even though there’s no figured bass in most of his scores; Haydn and Beethoven certainly both conducted from the keyboard. Even as late as Wagner or Brahms, orchestras would not have been using continuous vibrato (which I was trained to do around the millennium!) or synchronising their bowing.

Perhaps, if the burden of questionable tradition were less universal upon the people that interpret earlier people’s music – in any genre – there might be less worry about curious details of performance and more focus on the material in hand; and we, the audiences, might find that material more striking and less uniform and unchallenging than we had thought.