London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: August 2020

Enter Opera, upstage centre

Before playing my first post-lockdown live performance, I had already attended all the rehearsals for my first post-lockdown public performance (are you following these distinctions carefully?).

However, the importance of this project as a personal milestone is rather eclipsed by its significance as a historical one. Those who ought to know appear very confident that Hampstead Garden Opera‘s outdoor production of Holst’s Sāvitri at Lauderdale House is the first live opera staging in London after the phase of lockdown in which any such performance was impossible, and the only one in London this month (August 2020).

Sāvitri is a compact work in all directions. Composed for outdoor performance, it plays for little over half an hour, continuously. The cast in the normal sense is just three (the titular heroine, if that is the right word, her husband and Death). The ‘orchestra’ consists of twelve solo instrumentalists (two string quartets, mostly treated as distinct subgroups; two flutes, oboe doubling cor anglais, double bass), though it makes more sense to associate the four-part (in this production, eight-strong) wordless offstage female chorus to them than the dramatic cast. It would be perfectly dramatically possible to perform the work with no set at all and perhaps even no props, though a certain amount of minimal production design seems to be preferred by most performances, including this one.

Inherently, playing a work of this nature is most like performing Modernist (Sāvitri was composed around 1908) chamber music – arguably combining the difficulties of that with those of accompanying staged opera, though at least we have a conductor to maintain connectivity beyond how much it is possible to hear what is going on ‘onstage’ (or conversely for the cast to clearly hear the orchestra). Certainly neither aspect is known for giving the viola players (it makes little difference, though not none, that I’m in ‘quartet A’) an easy time or the opportunity to be thoroughly inaubdile as much as stereotypes of earlier and more conventionally orchestral music!

In practice though, the hardest thing about the rehearsals was certainly playing / singing / acting in temperatures up to the mid-30s (Celsius!), with little shade, high humidity and, for me and several others, having arrived by way of a train, the Northern line (wearing a mask on both of course) and a steep walk up Highgate Hill carrying an instrument case. Though for the performances (there are two each night) last Saturday, the production team did have to carry out some hasty (and, I should stress, efficient and effective) alterations to safely perform in temporary-monsoon downpours. As I write, on the afternoon of Thursday 20th, it looks likely we will be spared rain and only have lesser heat to contend with tonight – but I have very limited faith in the English weather or forecasts of it, in any season, and consider the final night the day after tomorrow to be anyone’s guess …

I would normally at this point, or between rehearsals and opening night, be trying to plug for more ticket sales. However, all the performances were in principle sold out before we opened (a surprising number of those spaces-on-a-lawn going to reviewers, jumping at the chance to see and write about something live in person after only having on-screen experiences for five months, even if something this modest would normally be below their editors’ notice). Some extra tickets are being released on a night-by-night basis as locations are allocated to groups and spacing better tied down, but perhaps for once (especially as ticket sales and donations have already actually brought the takings over budget) I should warn you to be prepared for disappointment rather than plead with you to fill up a few more seats! Long may that aspect at least continue …

Out of hibernation

By a whisker and a bit of a technicality, my first performance to a live audience since lockdown was a week ago today, Wednesday 12th August.

I say ‘to a live audience’ because it wasn’t public; in fact it was the locus classicus of a ‘private function’, a literal garden party. Goldsmith’s Community Centre had been approached for a classical performance at the 87th (I think) birthday party of the wonderfully named Belita Childs, by her daughter Sophie, as part of their ‘Give a Song’ project. They didn’t have any classical musicians on their books, but managed to find me through Lindsay Ryan (thank you again Linz!), conductor of Harmony Sinfonia, who I played with pre-pandemic to keep my social life going and remind myself I didn’t initially take up playing music to make money from it …

Sophie’s budget was sufficient to make an appreciative and appreciated donation to Give a Song and pay me to supply a duo at a rate that certainly made us happy after so long of no live playing! So I tapped serial collaborator Alleya Weibel to play violin, played viola myself, and we did a collective endeavour of digging through archives, basic arranging, downloading suitable or near-enough suitable arrangements and busking off lead sheets.

(Incidentally, I’m been doing so many of these scratch function chamber groups lately that I’m seriously considering giving them a brand, page of this website and email address for potential extra bookings. What do you think?)

I had been sent a very extensive list of possibilities / suggestions, and almost everything we played came from it. The resulting set list (we were only asked for up to 40 minutes of music) is interesting enough to be worth reading I think (I’ll forebear to share the original ‘inspiration list’, so called!):
La Cumparsita
Myers Cavatina
Autumn Leaves
Fauré Pavane
The Girl from Ipanema
Vivaldi concerto for lute, 2 vlns & continuo, slow mvt
Bach Air from Orchestral Suite in D
Dvorak Humoresque
Summertime
You are my Sunshine
Because you still can’t quite take the classical musician out of me on function jobs, I’d said ‘take these violin-viola duos to sight-read a movement of if we need an encore’. ‘You are my Sunshine’ evidently had personal significance to the family as most of the small audience were in tears by the end of it; we really couldn’t leave it there and played a minuet from Carl Stamitz’s op 18 no 1, which wasn’t quite as straightforward as I remembered that set being!

The audience and clients were certainly appreciative (and full of nuggets of information; I am definitely saving the guest of honour’s insight that there was a musicians’ campaign (sadly unsuccessful) to make (classic tango number) ‘La Cumparsita’ the national anthem of Uruguay, for future quizzing and/or between-number chat.

And so were we! It is a rarely considerate gig, function or otherwise, that supplies a gazebo for shade, finger food, prosecco and two dogs willing to pretend to love me as long as I didn’t make it too obvious they weren’t getting any of my sandwiches.

So thank you Sophie, Belita, Give a Song and Alleya for a great restart to live performing. Read my next post to find out about my first public performance post-lockdown, and numerous other firsts!

A think piece

( … doubtless highly subjective and trying to be open to civil / reasoned correction.

This shouldn’t be about laying blame; I’m not even that interested in the reasons for the things I describe right now, just trying to perceive truth that has perhaps been missed.)

I think there are two trends to how performance, especially though not only music, has been seen and/or presented that may be very dangerous to maintaining high-level professional performances.

Firstly, from buying to tipping. In the UK at present, public indoor performances are illegal (even if a few organisations are circumventing the rules, as always happens). Performances can be broadcast or recorded for an audience not physically present, or take place outdoors. The problem is that, for different reasons, both of those contexts are hard to put behind a paywall, certainly compared to where the performance is conveniently surrounded by physical walls. Outdoor performances can be ticketed, of course, but the infrastructure to do so requires upfront investment beyond the budget of most arts organisations; so most outdoor performances currently are free to access with a hope of collecting tips/donations – they are essentially pretty much busking, unless underwritten by (usually fairly invisible) sponsorship of some kind. Arts online have been extremely difficult to sell, as opposed to ask for donations or possibly have subscription-model access, for years – and perhaps paradoxically, ‘live’ video, whether in real time or not, is more difficult to monetise even than downloadable recordings.

The problem with this shift is that it makes audiences in general used to not having to pay for the arts. (Even more used, I should say; it is only accelerating pre-pandemic trends.) Even if they do pay, it feels more like a charitable donation or even a personal favour. Therefore, the arts are de-essentialised and potentially downgraded to somewhere between a hobby and begging leverage.

The other misrepresentation is that the arts ‘just happen’. The slightly tongue in cheek but overwhelmingly common media presence of musicians, dancers and actors playing from their balconies, filming ensemble pieces from their bedrooms and generally continuing to do art while artistic institutions are closed and empty gives the impression that performers perform as it were innately, through some (fictional) combination of unschooled talent and personal categorical imperative.

This is not only untrue but highly dangerous. If musicians will still perform and record Mozart and Wagner without concert halls, audiences or even being able to meet to rehearse (runs the subconscious line of thought), then why should the price paid for the music reflect the time they spend rehearsing, practising, being taught, studying? If they will carry on producing art while locked down, and if they need to act / dance / sing so much they practically can’t stop themselves, couldn’t they just all get day jobs to pay the bills and play the bassoon on the side?

Let me be clear for anyone who doesn’t know this already. Professional-standard music does not just happen. It requires years of training and thousands of hours of study to achieve. But it also requires hours every week of intense concentration and hard work offstage to maintain – even besides rehearsal to learn new material and polish coherent performances. Unless you possess exceptional levels of energy, resilience and self-discipline (and remarkably few responsibilities), it is just not possible to do a job that will cover living costs (especially in 21st century London) and continue to play at the level that has been expected of a professional ‘art’ musician for the last couple of generations or more.

That is why, at some stage in the process, someone has to ‘buy’ performed art. That is why, for there to be the sort of music, drama, dance etc. we are used to, performers have to be able to earn a living wage from performing alone.

New things, new-ish ones, changes, and changes back

I thought I’d try a bit of a format shift in last Thursday’s stream. So I dropped the singing and reshuffled the instrument segments: mandolin (instrumentals) segment into the middle, viola to the start and fiddle to the end.

I also played one absolutely brand new piece of music and one technically new transcription. The transcription was J Scott Skinner’s violin solo ‘Le Messe’ [sic; unless there’s something I don’t know about, his French grammar was a bit ropey, ‘messe’ as in Catholic Mass is feminine not masculine]; I’ve played several of its siblings in their violin originals in recent streams but I was sure I could make a better job of this on viola, and to make life easier on my brain wrote it out a fifth lower, in alto clef and with a couple of decisions about technical intention ‘clarified’ in the new copy.

The new piece was what I’m naming as my third ‘prelude’ for solo viola; though whereas the first two had (I think) quite clearly identifiable roots in the quasi-improvisatory prelude movements of baroque solo instrument suites, this is essentially a (fairly unambitious) viola version of the solo piano nocturne.

Response to both was certainly positive, though probably more oriented to my playing than the writing; I certainly don’t expect to garner very many more compliments on my left-hand pizzicato in my playing career, though it is slightly easier to make it a slightly more effective device on viola than violin (in my opinion; I don’t think it’s just that my viola technique in general is better).

However, the vox populi is that I should take the mandolin back to accompanying songs. So, while you can expect one instrumental number on that (barring any late-arriving requests), I will be doing a couple of (hopefully!) entertaining vocal numbers. What the audience wants, the audience (if I can deliver it) gets …

One thing I won’t sadly be able to deliver is livestreams on the two Thursdays following 6 August. Shockingly, I actually have gigs with other musicians to live audiences on those dates – and they aren’t in breach of the Covid-19 safety guidelines. Watch this space for more information on that.