Raging against the machines

Maria Callas as Madama Butterfly

For all that technology can bring us some really wonderful things, and enable us to do so many things we couldn’t do previously, it can also be tremendously frustrating.

As I’ve noted previously, tech isn’t always a greatfriend to the classical music listener. 

And since penning a frustrated piece about iTunes almost two years ago, things have not actually become much easier.

To begin with, it was disappointing to learn, earlier this year, that Apple has discontinued the classic iPod, which could carry a vast amount of music around – perfect if your collection (which is still growing) includes full operas.

Discovering this, I decided to get one of the most recent iPods, with the largest amount of memory possible, and mothball my old classic for a while, since they’re now selling for a lot of money.

While the new one is smaller and less weighty, it also has nowhere near the memory of its predecessor.

This is partly to do with the cloud. The trouble is, I don’t like the cloud. I don’t buy digital music these days for a reason: it’s my collection, which I have paid for, and I do not want the risk of any hacker or even a company deciding, via technology, that they can control my music (or any other data – and we know what’s happened to some very personal photographs out there).

I do not wish to have to ‘stream’ my music when I want to listen to it.

If people do, then fair enough. But I do not – and I should be able to have that option. I should have the option of not having my device (in this case, my new iPod) showing every piece of music that I have purchased digitally in the past – and then insisting that, if I want to listen to them, I stream them, even though I downloaded copies originally and, in an odd case, have backed them up on disc.

So they exist, in effect, in my computer, but I can no longer decided whether or not they appear on my iPod and, if they do, it seems that they are not the copy I downloaded, but one that I can stream, because the iCloud says: ‘Oh look – you downloaded this freebie six years ago, so that means you want access to it at all times, even if you have not checked it when trying to organise your portable music. In which case, I, the all-seeing, all-knowing iCloud, will put a picture of the relevant cover art onto your iPod for you, so that you can stream it whenever you wish’.

Except, of course, I don’t wish. It clutters up what I want.

And what I want to carry with me to listen to is currently undergoing an extremely rewarding expansion phase.

Opera has been a very gradual learning curve for me. Even after visiting the English National Opera a few times, the damn has only been truly broken this year with our going to the Royal Opera House.

While the ultimate operatic experience is always going to be seeing a production live, listening is a wonderful way of learning.

And with such a wealth of historic recordings to choose from, you can listen to more than one and, therefore, learn to compare productions, the speed of playing a score, which parts of the orchestra are emphasised and which are the truly great voices.

Herbert von Karajan

When you can get hold of a copy of, say, Madama Butterfly, with Maria Callas and Herbert von Karajan, for just £3.97, then this isn’t an expensive exercise either. You wouldn’t get a pint of beer in London for that these days.

Actually, I’ve had a marked reluctance to do the comparison thing: I try to look at authoritative sources such as Gramophone to discover what is the ‘best’ recording ever – hence my having invested in Solti’s Ring over von Karajan’s – but that doesn’t necessarily teach you much when you don’t compare it to anything else.

It’s a slightly odd approach, since I have several cases of musicals where I have more than one recording – and also of orchestral music: there is more than one Rites of Spring on the shelf and more than a single copy of Mozart’s Requiem, while I did a little experiment a year or so ago, using digital downloads of the final movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony by various conductors in an attempt to compare – and it is amazing what differences there can be.

But I shall strive to overcome this reluctance.

Television can also offer some opportunities to explore more.

Just recently, for instance, The Other Half spotted that Sky Arts 2 was screening the Royal Opera House’s 2013 production of Puccini’s Turandot.

I was utterly absorbed for the duration: Lise Lindstrom is wonderful as the eponymous ice queen and young singer Eri Nakamura excels as the tragic Luì.

Marco Berti in Turandot

Marco Berti is a bit sort of … well, wooden …  as Calaf, but comes good in the end when he gets to sing that iconic aria, Nessun Dorma. And then there’s Andrei Serban’s staging – a visual treat. The plot may be flimsy, but the music is more than adequate compensation.

It’s worth pointing this out, because this film is available on disc and is also bound to crop up on TV again at some future date.

Enamoured with the music, I decided to get a copy (and upload it onto my iPod). It was easy to find a recording to pick: Zubin Mehta conducting Joan Sutherland. Luciano Pavarotti, Montserrat Caballé and Peter Pears (along with other names I am not familiar with).

And it is sumptuous to listen to.

We’re on a roll with Puccini: I’ve managed to get tickets for a run of La bohème at the Royal Opera House in July. It’s the final night, with Plácido Domingo guest conducting, which itself is a thrilling thought – I have vinyl recordings of Domingo from several decades ago: my love of music is far from new; just the broadening of my experience and horizons.

And here’s a thing: the ROH website is brilliant for booking, as it has a picture for each seat and for the view from that seat.

I had long fallen into the trap of assuming that the ROH is always very expensive, but have been thankfully disabused of that – together with a fear that it might feel rather intimidating.

Our seats for July rolled in at £40 each, which is cheaper than most of the theatre tickets we’ve had in recent years and easily comparable to sporting events these days. And the view look excellent.

In the meantime, I have a Pavarotti recording to prepare myself for that night – so I’ll know the story better and won’t find myself concentrating too much on the surtitles.

The only problem I can see is running out of space on the iPod and then having to fart around within the classical genre rather than simply uploading all my classical music.

Bloody machines.

I’d have to resort to reading while commuting – mind, Michael Tanner’s Wagner, which challenges a number of attitudes toward that musical giant (including some utter daftness from people who should know much better), has been a fascinating and highly informative read.

Old and new – there are plenty of options in this musical voyage of discovery.

Goya's visions from a troubled mind

Mirth

Reading about art over the last couple of years, one thing that I’ve come to realise is that defining anything in the art world is rarely as easy as might first appear – and not least when you take into account tension between the academic world and the non-academic one.

That’s particularly the case in terms of ‘modern art’.

The question has long been asked as to what modern art is – or more to the point, when it started – and there are probably as many different answers as people who’ve asked it.

And since relativism is not the aim here, it’s important to note that some are simply based on unthinking and uneducated stupidity.

Only a week or so ago, I came across a response to a national newspaper art review where someone had dammed all ‘modern art’.

I admit to having posted a sarcastic riposte that, since many regard Manet as the father of modern art, the poster making the comment presumably considered Impressionism as a whole to be a load of old cobblers.

Just can't go on at the age of 98

Of course, what many people mean by ‘modern art’ is actually contemporary art – and even more specifically than that, non-figurative art and conceptual art.

But going back to the more academic approach – that the father of the modern was Manet (1832-1883) – that doesn’t mean that what he did came out of a vacuum.

We can see the roots of modern art in the likes of Turner (1775-1851); in the works of the much earlier El Greco (1541-1614) and in those of Goya.

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker, regarded as being both the last of the Old Masters and the first modern one.

While paintings such as The Third of May 1808 (1814) have become iconic, he’s not an artist that has made any great impression on me personally – to be frank, I cannot really recall seeing any of his works in life, although it’s probable that I have, since I’ve visited the National Gallery more than once.

Mother Celestina

But the Courtauld Gallery in London has recently been hosting an exhibition of some of his late work, which I’d noted in the autumn and fully intended to see.

It’s been the nature of the last few months that I had all but forgotten what was on in any of London’s galleries this spring. In the case of this Goya exhibition, it was only by chance – walking past Somerset House a couple of weeks ago – that I remembered and dashed in to ensure I caught it.

This is the first time that all the surviving drawings from the Witches and Old Women Album together since they were broken up after the artist’s death.

In 1799, Goya had published a series of 80 prints, titled Caprichios, illustrating what he described as the “innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual”.

One of a number of albums drawn in the last decade of his life, the pieces in Witches and Old Women Album – produced around 1819-23 – were, unlike the Caprichios, never meant for public consumption.

Working essentially for himself, Goya gave free rein to his creativity, inventing images that range from the humorous to the downright macabre.

I can hear snoring

These remarkable drawings act as a commentary on human hopes, fears and delusions – not least, the fear of aging and mortality.

There’s a dark bite to some of his visions. One drawing satirises an elderly woman deluding herself that she’s still likely to meet and marry a dapper young man, while others portray witches carrying off or even preparing to eat babies.

Whatever the exhibition title suggests, though, the targets of these pieces were not limited to members of the fairer sex: there are plenty of men represented here too – including a number of clerical figures, and religion is certainly one of the themes that can be seen here.

The pictures are merciless and manic – yet among the darkness there are also scenes of joyfulness.

But whatever the subject matter, the drawings are deceptively simple, possessing great sophistication. And his use of washes is an education to behold.

Dream of a good witch

The exhibition as a whole includes other works by Goya that help to provide further context, but the core exhibit includes, as an example, the following: Just can’t go on at the age of 98 features an elderly man with two sticks.

It’s a sublime piece of work: just look at how few marks there are to convey so completely the subject.

Mother Celestina – a name that recurs – adds complexity, since Celestina is a Spanish name associated with a procuress/bawd, thus being one of the ways that Goya brought sex into the equation. In the picture I’ve used here, the character sits, waiting, grasping something – a pouch of money, perhaps?

The ironically-titled Dream of a good witch shows a hag bearing a bundle of babies.

I can hear snoring has an elderly man waking at the sound of his own snoring. Who hasn’t experienced that?

Mirth, on the other hand, portrays an elderly couple appearing to dance in a space. It’s a joyous image.

While She won’t get up till she’s finished her prayers presents us with an old woman praying with her rosary – and just look at the use of light and shade here.

She won't get up till she's finished her prayers

Goya was ill during the final years of his life. Some have suggested the cause was cumulative and severe lead poisoning, given the amount of lead white paint he used in his work, while other analyses since his death have pointed toward paranoid dementia.

Against such a background, it hardly seems farfetched to suggest that these works are not simply satires in the conventional sense, but also shine some light into the dark and troubled corners of the artist’s own mind.

In looking at pictures like these; in exploring darker aspects of human experience; in seeing the violence and the brutishness that some of them show, there is something that we can perhaps see as a harbinger of the modern world and art’s response to it.

That, though, plays to a view that the past was rosier than it was in reality.

But however you interpret the pictures, this is a fascinating exhibition that’s well worth catching if you have the chance in the next couple of weeks – and one where buying the catalogue genuinely pays dividends, because you really will want to look back at the pictures.

And the Courtauld should be applauded for bringing together the long-scattered pages of this album.

• Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album runsuntil 25 May at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

Sonia Delaunay – colour, form and application

Yellow Nude (1908)

This spring has seen the Tate Modern open the first ever UK retrospective of Sonia Delaunay – and it makes for a fascinating and educative experience.

Delaunay (1885-1979) was one of the pioneers of abstract painting and a key figure in the Paris avant-garde, particularly in the early 20^th century, and this exhibition gives us the chance to explore the breadth of her work.

Born in Odessa, at the age of five she went to live with a wealthy uncle in St Petersburg, before studying art in Germany and then moving to Paris in 1906 – a year after the sensation-causing, game-changing Fauve exhibition.

Shortly thereafter, with her somewhat disapproving parents wanting her to return to Russia, Delaunay married gallery owner Wilhelm Uhde – probably a marriage of convenience in order to facilitate her stay in the French capital, given that he was gay.

It worked for both of them: Delaunay gained access to the art world through Uhde and he was able to wear heterosexual married respectability.

Portrait of Philomème, 1907

Sonia met Robert Delaunay via the gallery in 1909. Divorce from Uhde was finalised the following year and she and Robert were married in the November, with a son, Charles, born early in 1911.

But so much for the background – now for the work.

Early paintings show the influence of both the Fauves and the likes of Gauguin – in particular, the superb Yellow Nude (1908), which echoes both the cloisonnism and colour of the former’s Yellow Christ and the latter’s use of other colours. 

And we can see the same influences in other works, including several portraits of her dressmaker, Philomène, and a series of paintings of young Finnish women.

So if you’re not familiar at all with Delaunay’s work – or only through the later abstracts – then it’s a great way to gain an understanding of just how good she was. (God, she was better than Derain).

But from the earliest days of her career, she was also working in non-traditional art forms, and we get a taste of this in the second room: embroidery, for instance, an abstractly-painted toy box and a patchwork cradle cover the for the young Charles.

Indeed, Delaunay thought that, after creating it, the cradle cover ‘evoked Cubist conceptions’.

 

Coat – possibly for Gloria Swanson

For many critics, this is the period that the Delaunays – whose partnership occurred in art as in the bed – create what legendary poet, novelist and critic Guillaume Apollinaire christened in 1913 as Orphism, the couple’s own version of Cubism.

It’s one thing, though, to decorate your own home, but entirely another to take such techniques into the public realm.

Visiting Spain when WWI broke out, the couple decided to stay in the country. But in 1917, as the Russian Revolution saw financial support from her family dry up, Sonia took those techniques and started to make money from them.

Showing great business nous, she started her own company, Casa Sonia, selling her designs for fashion and interior décor. She also decorated a casino, designed costumes for Diaghilev for the ballet Cleopatra and also for opera.

This is a real case of the ‘applied arts’, and remains an illustration of just how blurred the lines are between the ‘fine arts’ and any other form of art.

Prismes electriques, 1914

It continues: next year, for instance, sculptor Anish Kapoor is set to design a new production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde at the English National Opera, which is part of the selling point of that production.

This was also pretty new terrain for me: there’s a reason I’ve hardly ever been inside the V&A – I’m not particularly interested in fashion, textiles and so forth.

But one of this exhibition’s really big pluses is in showing just how blurred those lines are, and keeping the likes of me interested in the applications of Delaunay’s art.

There are fashion drawings, rolls and swatches of fabric, and finished garments – including an extraordinary coat that is rumoured to have been made for Hollywood star Gloria Swanson: even a bookshelf designed for student accomodation.

This is not art as elitism.

There are also obvious points at which a venn diagram of this exhibition and one of last year’s wonderful Matisse cut-outs would overlap – and that’s excluding the Fauvist influence that I mentioned earlier.

Propeller, 1937

Like Matisse, Delaunay worked to link text and image – not least in illustrating Blaise Cendrars’s poem, La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. The exhibits also include paintings of dresses designed with brief poems on them.

In Matisse’s case. A limited number of designs were incorporated into fabrics such as scarves.

After the war she and Robert returned to Paris and, in 1937, she produced three vast canvases for the International Exhibition of Arts and Technology – murals of an aeroplane propeller, an engine and a dashboard.

All of them are exhibited at the Tate Modern: all of them still feel incredibly modern, not least because of their graphic – and indeed, deeply technical – approach to their subjects.

Robert died of cancer in 1941, and Sonia dedicated much energy to looking after his legacy.

Yet there is plenty of work here from after that period too. As The Other Half noted in the final room, containing works produced in her eighties, staying active; keeping busy – it makes a difference.

There is plenty here to enjoy and to be educated by.

Bal Bullier (1912-13)

As I’ve already noted, she took her art into a variety of applied directions – initially motivated by the need for an income – but the use of designs for clothing, interiors etc can be argued to increase access to art and design.

The exhibition includes many examples of her abstracts – it is intriguing to see how she developed recurring abstract themes over the decades, changing media and palette – while some works, such as Bal Bullier (1912-13), illustrate her breaking down of the barriers between the purely abstract and the purely figurative.

Many of the works have a great sense of rhythm and movement.

All in all, a fascinating exhibition and one that’s well worth visiting: there’s little that is static here.

I was previously only really familiar with Delaunay from our visit to the Pompidou last July, but this allowed me to appreciate an extremely fine artist very much better.

I heartily recommend that you take the same opportunity.

• Sonia Delaunay is on at the Tate Modern until 9 August.