Something Wonderful

Went to see the John Wilson Orchestra at Birmingham Symphony Hall on Saturday, on the first night of their Rodgers & Hammerstein tour. A glorious evening’s entertainment: this is music with a wry smile on its face, a cheeky glint in its eye, and an unadulterated spring in its step.  

Everything about this performance was uplifting: superb, nuanced musicianship; terrific arrangements and varieties of mood; some wonderful singing; and, at the heart of it all, the art and craft of some glorious ‘popular song’ - memorable melodies and clever, literate lyrics. I realise that there’s a lot more going on here than my objective critical outlook: a lot of these songs are bound up with my childhood memories, and associations with loved ones, but I can see past that mist of personalised romanticism clearly enough to realise that these are not (just) ‘show tunes’ - I think that this is great art.

It’s well-known that Wilson has revivified this genre through his painstaking reconstructions of the arrangements (the studio scores of which were lost), and I have seen enough of his work at the Proms to be a fan of the music and of his approach. But seeing these songs, overtures and ballet sequence music performed in a concert hall has somehow opened them up to me in a different way. For a start, seeing the interplay between singers, conductor, and orchestra from a single vantage point (rather than the multiple camera angles and cuts of TV coverage) makes you realise what a great achievement it is to be able to change pace and tone while maintaining a sense of momentum and coherence:  the music sweeps through all sorts of moods, led now by the sweet, romantic strings, now by a melancholic oboe, and now by the jazzy swing of the brass section. These different focuses are swapped back and forth among the sections of the orchestra, sometimes fading into the background as the vocal lines dominate, but always providing the solid undertow above which the main tide of the melody flows.

The singers were uniformly excellent. The soprano Annalene Beechey was new to me - she has a lovely rounded voice, sweet and rich, and her accuracy and security throughout were faultless; beautiful to listen to. I’ve seen/heard Julian Ovenden and Kim Criswell often enough on Proms broadcasts to know that they are class acts in this repertoire: Criswell always convinces as the knowing, slightly rumpled female lead, and Ovenden brings a weight and authority to the songs that can seem surprising given his slight frame. Sir Thomas Allen’s baritone is also a weighty instrument, albeit slightly quavery in the upper register in places; that said, once he got into the full flow of the songs, the dynamics of the voice seemed to change, and the climaxes of Some Enchanted Evening and Come Home were irresistible, and hugely pleasing.

Thomas Allen’s an interesting one for me: I haven’t always found him convincing in this repertoire: there’s something about the residual overtones of classical technique that get in the way of me seeing him as ‘truly inhabiting’ the song. I’m using the word ‘convincing’ a lot here - because for me this repertoire’s success rests on the authenticity of the singing and acting: the dissolution of the performer into the song and its sentiment, such that you stop seeing the performer and the song as separate entities; this is always a magical effect, and there are many barriers to its achievement. With Allen, the barriers seemed to be gradually dismantled as the momentum of the songs picked up.

Another element for me here is that the singers of each song have a line of ghosts standing behind them: all the previous performers who have inhabited the role. Some of these performances are iconic - be it from film version, classic stage run or recording - and their presence haunts the present. So for me Criswell is always channelling Ethel Merman or Judy Garland, Ovenden draws on Howard Keel and Joel McRae (in delivery if not in pitch), and Beechey on - in particular - Julie Andrews. The real trick here, it seems to me - is to make the audience conscious of these ghosts while making sure that your own performance is uppermost. When this happens, again there’s a magical effect.

I have a different kind of relationship with this music than I do with ‘art song’. The latter is ‘closed’ to me, in a way, because I have little personal, emotional connection with it: partly because I am largely ignorant of its technicalities, conventions and historical contexts; and partly because much of the meaning is obscured by foreign languages and opaque forms. Sure, there’s some of the repertoire that reaches through and touches me, but my attachment to this kind of music is mostly cerebral and admiring rather than direct and emotional. My relationship with the ‘popular song’ that the Rodgers and Hammerstein repertoire typifies is much warmer and more ‘felt’. Partly this is because I have family associations with it: it’s the kind of music that would have been on my grandparents’ and parents’ radios and record players when I was young, and the repertoire and its warm, romantic imagery and sentiment has seeped into my psyche through repeated exposures via TV showings of the films. It’s almost as if this music has been absorbed by osmosis, diffusing deep into the structures of brain and memory. 

When the enchanting melodies and smart lyrics reactivate those stores of memory and sentiment through such a skillful and charming performance as this, it’s hard not to conclude that the art of the popular song is indeed ‘something wonderful’.