Culture

Oxford Lieder Festival and the art of curation

November 02, 2010
Oxford Lieder Festival
Oxford Lieder Festival

After 16 days of the amazing Oxford Lieder Festival—miscellaneous events in the daytime and formal classical song recitals every evening—I find a funny old slogan going round my head. “Science is social relations,” or so the radical scientists used to say in the seventies, and they may or may not have been right. No doubt about it, though, music is social relations.

To the uninitiated, recitals of classical song are hideously artificial. Not that the uninitiated have much to go on: the majority of the audience always seem to be very experienced indeed, with memories of recitals stretching back over years, decades, or—you might think to look at some of them—centuries. The singer and the pianist (and the page-turner too) go to their positions on the stage to polite applause and without any faffing around, without a second’s delay, they’re off. The silence of the audience is almost palpable: a silence of intensely shared concentration. There may be an occasional pause between songs for a cough and a round of applause, and so it continues to an interval, and the same procedure is repeated in the second half, with some serious applause at the end. In a couple of hours it’s all over: as austere a piece of formalised ritual as you could ever imagine.

Except that, for those of us who are moved by this sort of thing, it means complete and delighted involvement with the topics of the songs—love and death are never far away—with the words and how they are sounded, with the stories and how they are told, and with the piano accompaniments (though that word is far too restrictive) which provide a sort of framing commentary on them all.

You might think it would get boring, sixteen evenings in a row. But you would be wrong. Appreciating art is a comparative matter after all—not comparing better with worse, necessarily, but comparing one approach with another: in this case comparing voices with voices, words with words, music with music, phrasings with phrasings; and comparing the most durable parts of the repertory (the Schubert cycles) with two world premieres (both fabulous: new works by Stephen Hough and Ned Rorem). At the end of it everything in the world—yes everything—seems more interesting than it did before.

There was only one fly in the ointment, as far as I was concerned. Willard White’s recital was billed as a gala event, and his is indeed one of the great voices of our time. The same could be said of lots of the others we got to hear, though; and the trouble with his performance was that he talked: he gave his opinions of what he was singing, he reminisced a little, and he complimented us on being a wonderful audience. Of course no one has a more beautiful speaking voice than White, and he can’t have spoken for more than a couple of minutes in a recital of two hours, but it broke the implied contract, and shattered the hallowed conventions. The great thing about a great recital (even, perhaps especially, with great performers giving the performances of their lives) is that everyone in the room, on stage and in the audience, is thinking about the work, subordinating themselves to what it means, to the remembered and unremembered lineages of past performances, and perhaps to the prospect of different ones to come. But now the event was focused on the performer—wonderful performer that he is—rather than the works, and the spell was broken.

Which all goes to show that there’s more to putting on a classical song recital than booking the performers and selling the tickets. The indefatigable boy-wonder Sholto Kynoch—himself a notable pianist (terrific in a two-night marathon of all the Mörike poems of Hugo Wolff)—created this festival out of nothing, nine years ago, with the help of the wonderful Hilary Forsyth. They have created a critical and enthusiastic audience where there was not one before, and an environment that attracts some of the greatest performers in the world. Curating a festival is also an art, and they have carried it off triumphantly. Someone should give them a medal.