London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: June 2017

Keep the customer satisfied

In a sense, there isn’t much to report from my two classical performances over the weekend that isn’t the same as what I wrote about last week’s lunchtime recital. I was playing most of the same material (plus, on Saturday, two movements of a charmingly galant-styled trio by JS Bach’s only composer grandson – see photo) to a not dissimilar demographic of audience, and with I think a similar response.

What does this have to do with the post title? Well, in general my instinctive approach is one that suits some customers better than others. Listeners, or rather listener-watchers, who aren’t particularly classical purist aficionados, tend to respond well to me directing my energy to engaging performance, even at times at the expense of strict technique (though my technical accuracy is certainly getting better all the time, particularly every time I perform these pieces for real with piano and audience). Slips are literally overlooked if the overall experience is compelling. At least that is the feedback and the impression. This approach may even succeed in turning people from an audience of student violinists and violists and their families on to the viola as a solo instrument (!) – so reports my teacher on what was said to her anyway.

But what works to convey the accessibility, the humanity, interest and expressiveness of sometimes perceivedly ‘difficult’ music (certainly the two modernist pieces I’ve been performing lately) to relatively unaccustomed audiences may not make a favourable impression on Trinity’s examiner, surely from my point of view the ultimate classical specialist audience and likely to be too busy making notes and following copies of the music to even look up at what I’m doing 90% of the time. The battle to convert extroversion into precision and gesture into sound is still on, but it is temporarily the only game I’m playing as a violist. Winning over audiences can come back to the fore in ten days.

Dancing in the aisles

Not a huge amount, but there literally was some!

I think this is the first time I’ve done a performance where it was considered a major risk that one of the band might stumble backwards into an (empty, and uncovered) baptistry from the stage …

If Kindred Spirit‘s gig at Twickenham Green Baptist Church on Saturday proved nothing else, it showed that rock audiences can come from all manner of unexpected places – and be as unexpected in their behaviour. This was a sizeable audience, much bigger than our last gig in a Twickenham church (!), and for my money the most responsive and lively crowd that band have played to for a while. And where many audiences look somewhat blank at all originals (or anything else they don’t know) and suddenly liven up when they recognise a song and reckon they know the chorus well enough to sing along, this bunch were pretty much equally responsive to numbers most of them couldn’t have known. I’m tempted to construct a theory about how frequently the church’s musicians throw previously unknown hymns into services, but it may be down to long-term band followers in the crowd or any number of other things. Either way they gave a lot back, and despite intense heat and very little ventilation (and, in my case, being the second public performance since lunch that day) that spurred us on to pushing a lot of energy out.

Proof that (if you pick your words with a little care) sanctity is no barrier to being rock-n-roll…!

Next gig with the full band isn’t till the 21st of July, in Farncombe; but Elaine and I are out this Saturday (1st July) as a duo at Hornsey Music Festival in the afternoon and the nearby Great Northern Railway Tavern in the evening. And I have a very English classical early July, with Baroque music of my ‘homeland’ in Chichester on the 8th and its Modernist descendants in Wantage on the 15th. Plus, less in keeping with a notional theme, one-act Puccini in central London lunch breaks and after work. Catch you soon!

Going solo

Well, actually not of course. I will continue to emphasise that most good music for a string instrument and piano is even-handed duo writing and so the pianist is a collaborator or sparring partner – the word ‘accompanist’ could quite happily be deleted from my vocabulary.

Nonetheless, it’s a while since I stepped in front of an audience to do a booked, advertised concert performance with as little musical company as one other player, implicitly in a somewhat supporting role – and I don’t think before Wednesday I had ever done so with my name on the promo material as solo performer and my performance constituting the entire programme.

So how was it? Well, in many senses, more familiar than that would suggest. The lunchtime concerts at the Cramphorn Theatre are relaxed affairs, not always with ‘strict’ classical artists and certainly with crossover performance environment – spoken introductions very much the norm apparently (thank God public speaking doesn’t faze me, since I only found that out for definite about 10 minutes before going on!) and audiences unlikely to observe such niceties of classical decorum as not applauding between movements of a longer work (this is in no way a complaint – regular readers will remember I have a longstanding grudge with the imposition of more or less arbitrary traditional ways of presenting and receiving art music, not least because I think the music is good enough to stand up without them).

What about the actual playing, and reception, then? Of course this was the programme for my diploma exam, most of which I’ve been working on fairly intensively for getting on four months. Not too much to surprise me there perhaps. But I hadn’t performed any of it before, and I know only too well that I play very differently in front of an audience to shut away in a practice room (who that gives a performance worth anything doesn’t, it might be asked). I’d also only had one full rehearsal, plus a bit of running beginnings and tricky spots to get used to the piano, acoustic and setup, with my pianist for the day – plenty enough for him to grasp what I was doing (thanks again Chad! it really was a pleasure), but leaving me at a point where occasionally I might still not be consciously anticipating the interlock of my part and his. In an ideal world, I think all ensemble music, even duos, would be given a couple of runs as the full ensemble fairly near the beginning of the learning process – but unless you do all your playing with fixed lineups who can be called upon to rehearse prospective repertoire, this simply isn’t practical. So most of us learn repertoire with a slightly wonky impression of how it works, then fit it together and make adjustments accordingly.

In any case, I think what came out matched my established musical personality rather well – even perhaps too well. Doing this for real, at least in front of a fairly responsive audience (and to be honest, given how far this is from home turf for me, I was glad to see any audience at all!) it became natural to move around, to gesturally and facially enact the emotion I see in at least critical points of the music – not of course to leap around the stage throwing posture and technique to the winds like I do with the Filthy Spectacula, but to be on the unreserved and even eccentric end of the classical performance spectrum. And this worked on that audience, who were appreciative at the time and I’m assured were making lots of positive comments on the way out (though none stayed to comment to me directly). What I am aware of is that the ‘theatrical’ (a term used, probably coincidentally, by Chad talking afterwards) performance probably covered up for them a few technical slips that would carry a lot more (negative) weight with performance examiners. I know how I would rather trade off as a performer (and I see performing as real music work and exams and auditions not, but what can you do?), but the mission for the other warm-up performances that will let me run almost the whole programme again before the exam has to be more precision and polish – even, just possibly, at the expense of engaging dramatic performance. Just this once.

If you want to see either of those performances this weekend, here they are:

 

I promise I will stop rabbiting on about this exam and its music soon! In the meantime don’t miss Kindred Spirit in Twickenham this Saturday:

Classic week incoming

Well, technically more like 9 days, but that just doesn’t roll off the tongue, or even the screen, as well, does it?

While there is a Kindred Spirit gig in the middle of there, the stretch of my musical life from this weekend to the weekend following is mostly about classical music – and classical viola at that.

This Saturday, 17 June, sees a fairly typical orchestral gig for me – this time accompanying the New Tottenham Singers in Vivaldi’s Gloria, plus Barber’s Adagio, Gershwin songs (for choir, with and without orchestra) and a Wizard of Oz medley. Notable for a smaller orchestra than most of the choral society concerts I do (only as large as the Vivaldi dictates), which makes a nice change from spreading Romantic forces, and for probably the largest proportion of in-house arrangements / additional transcriptions of any gig where I haven’t been doing at least some of the arranging myself! Also for the unusually civilised touch of bothering to get the orchestral musicians together for two rehearsals, one in advance of the concert date, to be able to sort out any real problems, and paying proportionately more than your typical afternoon rehearsal – evening gig one-day booking, while leaving the other Saturday evening opening for another gig if needs be.

However, it’s after that that the performance machine really kicks in (rehearsals for some items on the following list have already started). On Wednesday 21 June I make my full-length recital début! playing my ATCL (Trinity performance diploma) viola programme entire, at the Cramphorn Studio in Chelmsford. If you’re up that way and free at lunchtime, please come along at 1 and give me some support and feedback, as well as enjoying the excellent Chad Vindin on piano, who I’ve managed to secure as sparring partner for that date. More on that recital series here and its organiser here.

On the following Saturday afternoon, 24 June, I’m performing a couple of numbers in a mixed chamber music programme at Putney Methodist Church:

My involvement includes a couple of movements from a trio by J S Bach’s only composer grandson, in which the viola as lowest instrument gets to pretend to be a cello and play bass lines, and the main work (a sonata by Hummel) from said diploma programme – this time teaming up with Roger Beeson.

I’ll be heading straight from that concert to soundcheck with Kindred Spirit for a high-profile gig, a whole evening’s proper ticketed performance (you even get some free food with your entry) up the river in Twickenham (see Facebook event). Expect all the usual things from that band in a sympathetic setting, with a heavy emphasis on Elaine’s originals (particularly compared to bar gigs) but some carefully selected covers too, plenty of folksy instrumental sections and oodles of electric violin and flute duelling / soloing.

The following afternoon (Sunday 25 June, keep up) sees me round off the series by heading up to north London for a showcase concert of pupils of my viola teacher, Marie de Bry.

I’ll nearly get to complete a second round of the diploma programme with the two afternoon concerts together, here teaming up with ‘house pianist’ Gabija Butkute to play Vieuxtemps’ ‘Elégie’ and Piston’s ‘Interlude’ – the latter of which I will warn you now Google will not yield much about, not even a professional recording on Spotify or Youtube. You’ll have to turn up and hear it played live! The only piece left ‘out in the cold’ appearing only in the full performance in Chelmsford is Bridge’s Allegro appassionato – which I love, but is under 3 minutes long and liable to be first to get cut in programming.

Of course, in a sense that’s not it. The real destination of the list is me taking the ATCL exam on 7 July. But I can’t invite anyone along to that, so little point publicising it!

Making the best of it

Following on from the theme of yesterday’s post, some gig mishaps are, however, not of one’s own making or liable to one’s own solving …

Like, for instance, when you show up to the venue to find the keyholder went away for the bank holiday weekend and the organisers have not yet managed to gain entry, five hours after they hoped to. By the time The Filthy Spectacula and the night’s other three acts finally got in, doors were scheduled to open in 15 minutes. Audience did indeed start to come in, but clearly getting music playing on time wasn’t going to happen for anyone unless we were doing the literally unplugged set.

However, the camera doesn’t lie. In this instance. A set was played, and enjoyed, and I got a bit closer than that to the audience too. Not before a still unidentified glitch (possibly somebody else’s radio mike) sadly caused me to have to resort to old-fashioned jack lead input as the wireless signal was coming and going like Nigel Farage from the UKIP leadership position (and that is the most politics I’m allowing myself online. Promise.). But being flexible in adapting to circumstances, and not being too much of a diva about monitor mixes, is the sort of thing that makes promoters like working with this band, however much the audiences love us acting like idiots once the set starts.

Luckily steampunks are a patient bunch, since they had to wait through one more soundcheck before getting the other three acts (in this order, the Wattingers, Victor and the Bully and Professor Elemental) – all of which know at least some of us and the first two we’ve shared a stage with before. Probably about the closest to a scene I’ve ever felt like the disparate threads of music booked for steampunk events have achieved. Though even here I’d have to admit the most in common you could plausibly propose for those four acts is ‘Well, they all have vocals. And some of all their words are about old-fashioned stuff?’

At this point we Filthy crew take a moderate breath from having got the summer started, before really rolling with the punches next month through to September. At that point the all-knowing (don’t quote me on that) gig list shows we are doing a nominally steampunk one-off event with gothic and punk support acts (actually a much better musical fit for our style – don’t tell the steampunks); an evening at a scooter rally (Mods ahoy! good luck reclaiming the union jack / RAF roundel … again … ); the UK’s first steampunk bar, which strangely becomes some kind of very well-dressed sweaty rammed rock pub whenever we play; and the steampunk festival in a West Country market town where we met the Wattingers (and Miss von Trapp, but that’s another story). In the space of about six weeks, playing anything from 40 minutes through headline to the whole evening to ourselves. I’ll give you another heads-up nearer the time!

For my own gig list (it’s on the homepage btw), the immediate future looks a bit, er, quieter. In literal volume terms, not frequency of engagements: this Saturday sees a rare return to bar gig work for Kindred Spirit Duo, out in Staines at the Wheatsheaf and Pigeon. The eight days from 17 June are a blizzard of unusual (for me), in one way or another, classical performances, which I think also deserve another post to themselves. If you want dates, homepage has them – otherwise, watch this space …

Disaster averted

Blogging is running a bit behind my actual musical life, thanks largely to almost certainly my only actual holiday of the year bookended by weekends playing. Hopefully I’ll catch up over the next few days, freelance publishing work permitting.

Anyway, casting my mind back to Saturday 27th May, I was gigging down in Sutton (or technically its sub-suburb Belmont), on the south-eastern fringes of London, with Kindred Spirit. We were doing essentially a full evening’s music, barring a short warmup set from one-man covers act Nick Higton, who trades under The Aultones. Now in general that band have tech setup down fairly slick when we’re using our own PA (house sound techs tend, understandably, to draw a sharp intake of breath at a five-piece with four vocs mikes and instrument range including violin, flute and saxophone!). However, a few years of changing violin strings annually in order to keep a good sound, rather than because they were in danger of snapping, had led me, dare I admit it, into some complacency over the real need to carry spares amid the bustle of other life events. The D string on my electric violin took it upon itself to correct this fault by developing a fault of its own – when I opened up the case it was unravelling and clearly there was no way it would sustain any tension.

This was looking very grim, until a brainwave from Kindred Spirit’s guitarist, frontwoman and general mainstay Elaine. Who simply suggested using one of her spare guitar strings. I should say at this point that I would never dare do this on an acoustic instrument! But the electric violin is a much more robust and (mechanically) simple piece of kit, as well as a much cheaper one that could easily be replaced like for like if everything went terribly wrong. And at least ball ends are pretty much the same on any string, so there was enough of a starting-point. We went through a bundle of guitar strings, comparing widths and settling on trying a G. One mystery to me even as an occasional guitarist is why the strings are always so very much longer than they need to be! Of course this was much more true fitting to a shorter instrument, and violin pegboxes don’t allow you to wind lots of string round the peg the way you can on a guitar headstock, so a pair of scissors and significantly more effort than I expected trimmed the string down to a feasible length.

After all of this I was expecting trouble on many fronts – not least that violin strings always stretch and go flat for the first little while, and my experience as a guitarist is new strings there slacken more when they are first put on. Here I had a gig to play! Actually, the new string kept tuning better than I would normally expect of a violin string. And, just as much to my surprise, it sounded fine once fed through the pickup and amplification chain – even blending adequately evenly with the other three ‘proper’ violin strings (admittedly they are also all-metal strings, recommended for use with a piezo bridge pickup, and the similarity in construction presumably helps). I’ve actually played another gig since on the same string and may leave it in place for one more if that allows me to put on a full new set of strings and have a set of spares, rather than an another interim fix.

Morals of the story: firstly, never say die! The gig actually went off well and the string crisis didn’t cause problems once we were going (unlike the sheer heat and humidity, which caused my violin as a whole to go about a quarter-tone flat by the interval!). Secondly, if in desperate need, guitar strings can be used as violin string substitutes (but I still don’t recommend it except on a solid-body instrument you’re reasonably cavalier about) …

Come back next post for more gig-related dramas, this time less of my own making and taking place at a steampunk convention in Crewe.