The year 1000 of the Incarnation of the Lord was dawning when my brothers set out on the roads of this world. The nocturnal shadows had not yet withdrawn from the ground, and they were already descending the promontory where the monastery was situated. With their mules laden with crucifixes, statues of enthroned Virgins, loaves of bread, cheeses, honey and water for the journey, they forded the swollen stream and took the first path they came upon on their left, eager to publish the signs of the Last Judgment throughout the villages of the kingdom.

Vision 1 The Lord of the Last Days – Visions of the Year 1000 by Homero Aridjis

On Friday night Benjamin Bagby and Norbert Rodenkirchen of the now Paris-based Sequentia, armed with ancient instruments (replicas) new to me performed Fragments for the End of Time. The program at UBC School of Music’s intimate Roy Barnett Recital Hall, presented by Early Music Vancouver was all about doom, gloom and corpses burning for eternity in hell. There was no element of hope except that if you were one of those lucky ones to be born a saint then you could skip it all and not  worry about it. In that first millennium after the birth of Christ many thought that ending of the world was close at hand. Sequentia explored that preoccupation in both pagan and Christian cultures of the western world.

Unfortunately (and paradoxically fortunately, too) we are not saints and some of us (me) who were raised as Roman Catholics are attracted like lemmings to anything related to the apocalypse.

Watching this duo, Bagby reminded me of actor Robert Duval playing a funeral director, and Rodenkirchen was a Teddy Bear version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin luring children to their deaths, I was transfixed by their performance. Bagby sang, acted and performed with great drama, while Rodenkirchen played on his swan-ulna-bone flute with a smile on his face. I could have easily been lured to jump over the cliff with glee!

The 75 minute performance, with no interval, ended in applause. I was sitting next to EMV Board President Sharon Kahn. I whispered to her, “Do we want more doom and gloom?” Thankfully Bagby and Sequentia (which Bagby founded in Basle with Barbara Thornton in 1977) knew when to quit. And they did.

At this point you might suspect that I was not too happy with the performance.

You would be completely wrong.

This kind of stuff clears the air of that sometimes unwanted sweetness and the banality of social networks and life in the 21^st century.

In fact I am now going to re read (inspired by Sequentia), The Lord of the Last Days – Visions of the Year 1000 by Homero Aridjis, my Mexican poet/novelist friend. As a Mexican (and I lived in Mexico for 18 years) he and I are obsessed (the right word) with death, destruction, gloom and doom. It is all natural and inevitable. No amount of Air Miles points will change that. 

Aridjis was a shrewd man who opted to publish the edition in English in 1995 (originally published in 1994 as El señor de los últimos días, visions del año dos mil) knowing there would be an interest in such a novel as the 20^th century came to a close.

 Today, Monday, could be the last day of the world. Perhaps tomorrow, Tuesday, the Virgin without sin would appear in the firmament. And perhaps the day after tomorrow, the radiant dawn of the new millennium would shine over the world. Each day the miracle we had never seen could happen, the miracle we hope for would happen on earth each day during the last thousand years. …García Cabezón ordered the ram’s horn to be blown so that the knights, clerics, cotters and all others who wanted to do battle with the emissary of the Evil One might come to join us. 

The Lord of the Last Days - Homero Aridjis 

It was difficult for me to pin down exactly Bagby’s performance. Is he a singer, an actor, a slam poet, a troubadour of old, or what? I could not even secure his voice. I had to ask Liz Hamel, recorder musician, a soprano or mezzo (she is one or the other depending on the day) and now a deacon of the Anglican Church. She told me, Bagby is a baritone.

The name of the musical group, Sequentia and the calling of their pieces sequences had me in total ignorance. They seemed to be some version of early Gregorian Chant (but definitely not quite). They seemed to be religious and in Latin. They seemed to expand or transfer from purely religious to mythical lore and thus into other languages, languages not of the church.

I had to look it up in my musical reference book for dummies, The Oxford Junior Companion to Music, Second Edition 1979 and upon reading the definition I was not much the wiser:

Sequence: The repetition of a short passage of music at another pitch. In the following hymn, the soprano and the bass parts are repeated three times – ‘sequentially’.

The short definition then added that there are two kinds of sequences, real and tonal. The example given below is a tonal sequence, because the repetitions are not absolutely exact, semitone for semitone.

Flummoxed I decided to scrap further investigation as to what is a sequence and I state here that Sequentia’s Fragments for the End of Time was a riveting performance in which the two players in some moments took me to a medieval plaza Sunday fair where I was an unwashed commoner rapt to listen to a story perhaps after a passion play. And at other times, in the smallish Roy Barnett Recital Hall I was Charlemagne himself, surrounded by my courts listening to Alcuin tell me that like Michael the Archangel I was singly responsible for defeating the dragon ( an a myriad of snakes) for the redemption of mankind.

The last sequence of the evening was A felir austan um eitrdala or the ‘Prophecy of the Völva, from the Old Icelandic Edda (Iceland 10^th century). 

At one point after all the doom, gloom and destruction of all singers of the previous sequences I thought this one was going to end on a positive note:

She sees com up earth out of ocean once again green. The waterfalls flow, an eagle flies over, in the hills hunting fish.

Sér hon upp koma

öðru sinni

jörð ór œgi

iðjagrœna;

falla forsar,

flýgr örn yfir,

sá er á fjalli

fiska veiðir.

But it was not to be:

Then comes the shadowy dragon flying, glittering serpent, up from Dark-of-the Moon hills.

As she flies over the fields he carried in his claws: corpses.

Þar kemr inn dimmi

dreki fljúgandi,

naðr fránn neðan

frá Niðafjöllum;

berr sér í fjöðrum

— flýgr völl yfir —

Niðhöggr nái.

Nú man hon sökkvask.

I left the hall entertained but sober and making the resolution to myself of perhaps at this later date of my life that I must become a kinder person. I felt sort of like leaving the confessional purified (if only temporarily). 

Addenndum:

Rosa 'Paul Ricault'Add caption

Perhaps this holiday Monday, August 4 some of you Wreck Beachers might cut your al fresco tanning and mosey over to the UBC School of Music, room 116, not far from the Nitobe Memorial Garden.

The Sick Rose

By William Blake (after 1789)

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

Botrytis cinerea is a necrotrophic fungus that affects many plant species and in my garden it attacks some of my old albas (Maiden's Blush and Könegin von Dänemark) and hybrid perpetual ( Reine des Violette). There is not much I can do as all effective fungicides have been banned. I alternate between sulphur and copper sulphate in spring to some effect but at almost the end of the season (they flower only once) the buds get yellow and fall off.  I found out about Blake's poem from my friend, poet George Bowering.

The lowest notes on the theorbo or archlute have a remarkably profound and projecting sound.  This is partly due to the lowness of the notes (below the low C of the cello), but especially because the colour of these notes is very rich in overtones and high partials; the length of the bass string (often over 5 feet) means the strings can be relatively thin, making them bright and penetrating, despite the low pitch.  A short, thick string, by comparison, would sound dark, dull and lacking in overtones.

If you are as confused as I am as to the differences among lutes, theorbos and archlutes look here and you will still be as confused as I still am! 

Stephen Stubbs - chitarrone - copy mid 17th century Italian model by the English Luthier Stephen Barber in 1995.

Suffice to know that this instrument has a sound that is rarely heard in an ensemble. I cannot compete with string instruments. It shares some ignominy with its continuo partner the harpsichord. In many baroque performances I have attended in the past I can see it but rarely hear it. And until I went to performances by Richard Eggar and of Alexander Weimann (who has just moved to Vancouver) I did not appreciate the pleasant capabilities of the instrument. In fact my memories of the instrument have been haunted by having seen Vincent Price in Roger Corman's  House of Usher (based on Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher) playing a harpsichord while Technicolor blood oozed from surrounding walls with the sounds of a woman (not quite dead?) moaning.

Alexander Weimann

It was Weimann who once told me that a lot of the music that he plays on the harpsichord as continuo accompaniment (sometimes the instruments can also be, the viola da gamba, the cello,  the bass, the organ and, yes, the lute) was not written so he had to improvise. Since I love jazz, that opened my eyes to the instrument. Some of have been lucky enough to listen to Weimann play jazz on the harpsichord.

In the pre-concert talk with EMV Artistic Director Matthew White and the two performers I found out that as the quantity of courses went up as the lute players attempted to compete with the harpsichord, the complexity of playing the instrument finally set it on a decline. Interesting to me is that Vancouver keyboardist extraordinaire Michael Jarvis once played for me his antique pre US Civil War square Chickering piano that had a lever that could give the instrument a waterfall sound. And that waterfall sound mimicked the sound of a harpsichord! It would seem that the lute tried to imitate the harpsichord and when the harpsichord went in decline the interloper, the piano could in some instances mimic it.

Alexander Weimann, Matthew White & Lucas Harris

Last night’s concert featured these composers. Since little music seems to have been composed for the lute and the harpsichord as solo instruments in tandem the performance began with only one of two where Weimann and Harris played together. This was Gregorio Strozzi’s (1615-1687) Sonata a basso solo. Weimann played it on José Verstappen’s (former EMV Artistic Director) harpsichord which he made in the Italian style. Weimann gave us the opportunity to listen to it and Craig Tomlinson’s ( West Vancouver) French style instrument. The former was precise, sharp with a short decay of sound. The French-style instrument’s sound lingered and seemed to me more subtle.

The other piece played by both was Sylvius Leopold Weiss’ Adagio & Allegro in which the second instrument part ( a lute) was reconstructed by Karl –Ernst Schröder and adapted by Weimann.

Lucas Harris playing Ray Nurse's 10-course lute & Weimann at Verstappen's Italian harpsichord

The other pieces were all played with great virtuosity including Bach’s Fantasia cromatica & Fuga in d minor BWV 903 which was so taxing for Weimann’s fingers that after a wonderful long flourish of notes and when Harris began that other virtuoso piece for lute, Bach’s Prélude & Fugue in E flat major BWV 998 I could see Weimann frantically extending and contracting his fingers.

Since the harpsichord has no pedals like a piano, Weimann who is the Artistic Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra or has been leader for many EMV concerts, sometimes has the task of having to direct while playing the harpsichord or organ. He likes to do this standing up. It was interesting to see how Weimann when playing the Bach fugue, and in some places only used his right hand, he would close his left hand in a point and direct himself! I found this charming.

As for Harris’s Bach fugue performance, a most complex and difficult piece that had stumped him for years, a tragic event made it possible for him to play it. The death of his mentor and teacher, American lutenist Patrick O’Brien two weeks ago saddened him but as Harris explained, O’Brien was somehow a third man on stage last night. So we had two men, very close, playing with a degree of intimacy that was frightening and that may have been haunted by a ghost.

I should end here and against the advice of my wife Rosemary who was shocked when I told her of the plan I shall soldier one with my conclusion.

In 1985 I went to New York City with a male writer friend. One evening, I was comfortably reading in bed he told me, “I am going to 42^nd Street (William Gibson called it Forty Deuce Street) want to come along?” I declined as I was not interested in watching a live sex show which was what the street was notorious for.

Somehow last night there was a level of mutual communication between two men who have known each other for 15 years that approached an instance  that for me almost uncomfortable. I felt that I, and the people around me were superfluous to the performance. At the same time I knew we were lucky to be there even if we didn’t belong. It wasn’t sex, but close enough.


Next this Friday

Harris playingStephen Stubbs' 13-course lute by Michael Lowe, Oxford

Almost as close as the sound of that bass note of the lute or the final note of Weimann’s harpsichord in that Weiss Allegro. The bass note sounded suspiciously like (but not quite) that of the lute! 

From David Macaulay - Cathedral -The Story of its Construction

Betty Mayfield - Photographs Clyde Umney

Not too long ago when the Drake Hotel closed, one of its former owners, Jack Cooney called me up and told me, “There are some pictures here. We found in the  dancers’ dressing room, in one of the drawers. They look like yours. Do you want them?”

 I went but they were not mine. The folder, with pictures, almost all in colour were faded and the colours were all off. The folder had the name Betty Mayfield. One of the contact sheets had a stamped name, Clyde Umney. I told Jack that I had never heard of the photographer. If Umney, was indeed the photographer. We looked at the pictures and we identified Betty Mayfield as a young woman both of us had known as Cheri Partridge. The only other clue was an address 757 Willington Ave in East Vancouver.

  

Jack told me that he was prepared to throw the folder away so I told him I would take it.  Just a couple of days ago I found the folder and decided to scan some of the faded pictures as they are rather good. They seem to convey a look of the time.

  

Google searches for Clyde Umney only had info on a Stephen King short story called Umney’s Last Case that was first published on line in 1993. Further investigation led me to Raymond Chandler’s Playback in which Clyde Umney is a lawyer.

 

In 1962 when I was 20, I listened to the music of an Italian composer called Frescobaldi in a baroque church in Mexico City. The music was unlike the music my mother, a pianist, loved, Grieg, Chopin, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff. To this day baroque music sounds as inventive, fresh, and as new as if I were listening to it for the first time. Baroque music is New Music of the past.

With the likes of our very own Early Music Vancouver in the swing of their annual Summer Festival (2014 Vancouver Early Music Festival) chances are that, indeed, what you will witness in performance will be brand new. Brand new in the sense that you will probably have never ever heard it live. And more so now that Early Music Vancouver is putting emphasis in the baroque music of the 17^th century.

Ellen Hargis & Matthew White

The baroque period that spans the 17^th and the 18^th century paralleled the Age of Enlightenment. This age was ushered in by scientists like Newton and Leibnitz and by explorers that embarked on their wooden ships to find new worlds. Galileo and Copernicus took found new worlds elsewhere.

In this age of precision where man could do anything imaginable by reason there would seem to be no room for emotion. This, to me is the lovely paradox of baroque music. It seems metered, precise and yet if you happen to look at the faces of our performers you will note their smiles of pleasure.This can be contagious.

This was not more evident than on Sunday night at the Roy Barnett Recital Hall at the UBC School of Music.

Natalie Mackie, Christopher Bagan, Marc Destrubé & Ellen Hargis

I will be blunt in stating here that although I am crazy about baroque music I usually pass on the French variety. Worse still is French Baroque for the harpsichord (and yes that's Couperin). In a recent past I could not abide by the harpsichord so I was happy that most of the time it was inaudible, usually drowned out by the louder instruments that I could appreciate.

But thanks to the Pacific Baroque Orchestra’s Artistic Director and virtuoso harpsichordist Alexander Weimann I have learned to appreciate the harpsichord.

Tonight the little trio of Marc Destrubé, violin, Natalie Mackie, viola da gamba and Christopher Bagan, harpsichord, took care of that second prejudice with more Rameau than I have ever heard before in one sitting.

The trio played two Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) Cantatas (Ellen Hargis, soprano and Sylvia Szadovszki, mezzo-soprano) and two Pièces de Clavecin, the Deuzième concert (Second Concert in G major) and the Cinquième concert (Fifth Concert in D minor).

I approached Marc Destrubé after the night’s performance and asked him, “Why was that Second Concert so complex, elaborate, interesting and wonderful?” He answered, “Because Rameau was complex, elaborate, interesting and wonderful.” I then asked him, “Why was the Fifth Concert so charming?” His answer was short (I would believe that Destrubé must have had ancestors who were scientists in the French Enlightenment), “Because Rameau was charming and perhaps because his fifth was his last.”

The harpsichordist Christopher Bagan (if you have never seen him before) has a penchant for wearing very slim black pants and with his short hair and youth you might suspect that he is the page turner. This is not the case as he has a doctorate and is a professor. 

Sylvia Szadovszki

Natalie Mackie our expert (and passionate, too) viola da gambist (or is that violist da gamba?) chose to sit stage right. I had to ask as the continuo section of any baroque orchestra is always on stage left. She was there so she could connect with Bagan, while Destrubé took care of everything centre stage.

Since I am no music critic I can only attest to the fact that the instrumental music of the evening was excellent and that I will now appreciate those Frenchie composers much more.

It was the cantata section of the concert that was the most interesting, thanks to the pre-concert chat between Ellen Hargis and Early Music Vancouver Artistic Director Matthew White.

White know his singers as until he went on a sabbatical he was one of the best countertenors in our nation and good enough to have sung in Versailles even though the Sun King was not in attendance.

It seems that White last year spotted mezzo-soprano Szadovszki (who has been banned from inserting her name in Scrabble) performing at the opera. He approached her and asked her if she had ever sung French Baroque. Her negative was countered by an offer that we the audience are extremely glad she accepted. It seems that opera singing and singing a baroque cantata are not quite the same thing. There might be a parallel here similar to the subtlety of a baroque violin and the power and loudness of a modern violin.

Szadovszki learned fast and learned from the best. The best is Ellen Hargis who has been coming to perform (Early Music Vancouver Summer concerts) and teach baroque singing performance at UBC also in the summer for many years. I have been told that she is an excellent teacher and Szadovszki’s stellar performance attests to it. But I must add that of all the sopranos that I have heard and hear, my all-time favourite is Hargis.

I asked baritone and lutenist Ray Nurse tonight why this is the case that Hargis is so good. His answer floored me as it was an unexpected one. It was particularly unexpected in that I love Hargis because her singing is full of emotion and sweetness. Nurse said, “It is because of her phenomenal intelligence.”

Again that is another indication that the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason could and did accommodate emotion, too.

Hargis sang Rameau’s Orphée (ever so sweetly)  and Szadovszki his Diane et Actéon. 

This coming Tuesday, July 29, also at the Roy Barnett Hall, Alexander Weimann and Lucas Harris will play a bit less French baroque music (alas!) but some Strozzi, Rossi, Bach, Couperin, Piccinini,  Robert de Visée and if some of these are not known to you, surely you will have heard of Sylvius Leopold Weiss. He and Bach were up to something. What you ask? Find out on Tuesday. 

Addendum: You might note the beautiful harpsichord in my photographs. It was built by West Vancouver's Craig Tomlinson for Bruce Wright. The painting on the harpsichord cover is by Colombian painter (lives in Vancouver) Marco Tulio. 

My Argentine painter friend Juan Manuel Sanchez, well into his late 70s could make any woman he met; divest herself of all her clothes within minutes of having met them when he told them he was a painter.

I thought I was very good at this until one day when both of us where in my studio and we had requested the presence of a beautiful Latin American woman. She entered my studio. I checked my watch and two minutes later she cast off everything she had been wearing.

Perhaps it was Juan’s face. He had Spanish blood from Galicia. In Buenos Aires you might have easily seen him as a waiter. But this he was not. He had one obsession (I would like to qualify that as huge, but then when is an obsession not that?) and that was to render the woman, a woman, the essence of woman on his canvas.

Unlike this photographer who needs a woman of flesh and blood to face my camera, Juan can conjure woman with his imagination. One day as I noticed the simplicity of his paintings I asked him what was going on. He explained that the concept of woman was a problem that needed a resolution. One, day, perhaps close to his death he would paint a line on a white canvas and the white line would be a platonic woman, the perfect woman resolved with nothing missing and nothing to be added.

 When I last saw him in his studio in Buenos Aires last September his drawings were as clean and as perfect as I could have imagined. It would seem that by now at age 84 his talents were super attuned to the problem of hand. How can one convey the universal woman?

On August 31 I will be 72 and I find that there is no way I can compete with Juan to convince women to face my camera undraped. I don’t have a Galician face or perhaps I am seen as a viejo verde (a green old man is Spanish for a dirty old man). Whatever it is my output is definitely in decline.

What comes to mind these days is the wonderful but sad scene in The Magnificent Seven when Robert Vaughn (Lee) as a former quick-draw gunfighter now with a streak of cowardice spots three flies. He swoops at them with his hand and catches two. He says, “At one time I would have caught all three…”

It was perhaps some 25 years ago that at the Railway Club (I met with friends on Thursdays for lunch) I had noticed a beautiful woman (a bleached blonde) who always showed up at around noon. One day I simply got up and said to her, “My name is Alex and I would very much like to take you photographs without anything on.” She looked at me and quickly said, “Fine, this is my phone number.” And that was that. Now the flies buzz around but I am not catching any of them.

 I may have been around 1982 when I first met Julie Menard. I called her the watch lady. In her profession she divested herself of everything within minutes of her performance. But she always kept her Cartier watch. Menard reminded me of a sophisticated version of Susan Sarandon. Menard’s skin looked like the coating on white Limoges china. She had a liking for red lipstick that set off her unsaturated skin.

There was a streak of existentialist sadness in her demeanor. But I was told she was tough. She had a little daughter and she did her best for her. One day I asked if she would pose for me. I remember that she lived right next to Grandview Park on Commercial Drive not far from where I was to photograph Dave Barrett by his Volvo a few years later. I picked her up in my yellow Fiat X 1/9 and we drove to Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver. We walked to the cliffs where I took the pictures on a hot sunny afternoon in summer.

I note that I used four film stocks. With my Pentaxes I loaded one with Kodak b+w infrared and the other with Kodak Technical Pan. With my Mamiya RB-67 I used Kodacolor in 120 and a Fuji HR- 100. The latter really shows off Menard’s white skin but unfortunately the negative has stained in places and you might note that there is some yellow in her white slip.

Shortly after I took the pictures she told me she was going back to Montreal and I never saw her again.