Presidential Address: Roger Vignoles

• Annual Conference 2008 Home
  
• Sir John Tusa: State of the Arts; Arts of the State
  
• Prof Frank Furedi: Is There a Place for Truth in Music?
• James Fenton: Words and Music, Words About Music (coming soon)
  
• Incoming Wardens' Addresses

ROGER VIGNOLES

Roger Vignoles was inspired by the playing of Gerald Moore to pursue a career as an accompanist after leaving university. He completed his training with the distinguished Viennese-born teacher Paul Hamburger.

Since then, reviewers around the world have consistently recognised his distinctive qualities as a performer. Among his first partners was the Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström, whom he regularly accompanied throughout the 1970s and 80s. During this period he also developed fruitful collaborations with Dame Kiri te Kanawa; with Sir Thomas Allen, recording many works including Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Schubert’s Winterreise; and with Sarah Walker, in a wide repertoire of song from German Lieder and French Mélodies to cabaret songs by Gershwin, Britten and others.

Recent seasons have included tours with Sylvia McNair, Dame Felicity Lott, Susan Graham, Véronique Gens, Sir Thomas Allen and Joan Rodgers, as well as recitals with Olaf Bär, Kathleen Battle, Christine Brewer, Brigitte Fassbaender, Bernarda Fink, Christine Schaefer, Thomas Hampson, Lorraine Hunt, Stephan and Christoph Genz, Monica Groop and Sarah Walker, including appearances at the Bath, Cheltenham, Brighton, Aldeburgh, Prague, Schleswig-Holstein, Verbier and Ravinia Festivals. He is also a regular visitor to the Schubertiade in Feldkirch.

In 1997, the Schubert year, he devised and directed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall a week-long series entitled ‘Landscape into Song’, in which his culminating performance of Winterreise with Robert Holl was described by The Times as ‘one of the most memorable performances of the year’. In 1998 he inaugurated the Nagaoka Winter Festival in Japan, giving recitals and masterclasses based on Schubert’s Winterreise, and has subsequently returned each year as artistic director. In 2001 he took part in the Schumann Festival at London’s South Bank, giving recitals with Wolfgang Holzmair, Christiane Oelze and Robert Holl, and gave staged performances of the complete Britten Canticles in Barcelona with John Mark Ainsley and Michael Chance.

Among his recordings, La Belle Epoque with Susan Graham (devoted to the songs of Reynaldo Hahn), Nuits d’Etoiles with Véronique Gens (Fauré, Debussy, Poulenc) and a CD of Strauss, Mahler and Marx with Katarina Karneus have all been nominated for Gramophone awards, while his recording of Beethoven songs with Stephan Genz on Hyperion won the 1999 Award in the Song category. Recent releases include the complete Wolf Mörike-Lieder with Stephan Genz; Canciones Amatorias, a CD of Spanish songs with Bernarda Fink; and Strauss songs with Christine Brewer on Hyperion.

Future engagements include recitals with Christine Brewer, Christine Rice, Kate Royal, Measha Brueggergosman, John Mark Ainsley, Bruce Ford, Robert Holl, Miah Persson, Wolfgang Holzmair, and Mark Padmore. In 2007, Roger Vignoles became the artistic director of the Leeds Lieder Plus Festival.

I can’t help thinking back to the day some two and a half years ago, when I walked around my garden talking on the phone to George Caird. He as I recall was halfway up a mountain in Wales or somewhere, and it had been suggested to me by Neil Hoyle that I should pump Geordie on the duties of the President. I had just been asked whether I was prepared to stand, and was concerned about how much I would have to fit into the diary. Geordie was full of encouragement – perhaps boosted by fresh air and exercise – and told me that it was actually pretty straightforward. 'All you have to do is chair six meetings and host the Annual Conference. The Conference is fun because you get to plan it all, and the meetings are easy because Neil sits at your side and briefs you in exactly what to say at every turn.'

As is evident, I accepted the great honour and indeed found it all remarkably plain sailing; everybody was very helpful and friendly and at my more Jim Hacker-like moments Sir Humphrey was at my side in the person of Neil to get me out of trouble. So far so good, until December when I received a letter from Neil informing me that he had found his dream castle in Scotland and would with great regret be leaving the ISM in three months. When I phoned and asked whose job it was to appoint his successor, he said 'yours'. As you can imagine, that was my ultimate Jim Hacker moment, this time with no Sir Humphrey to come to the rescue. However official help was at hand, in the form of my fellow Presidents past and elect and the honorary treasurer. I accordingly got on the phone to Barry, Colin and Roddy, and also to the then President Elect-designate Kenneth Ian Hÿtch, and we all got extremely busy for a few weeks.

I need not take Conference through all the details of the process. Let me just say that with the invaluable support of my colleagues together with Teresa Cahill and Trevor Ford who joined us on the final interview panel, and with excellent professional assistance, we were able to appoint a first-rate successor to the post. Some of you may have had the opportunity to meet her yesterday afternoon. Deborah Annetts is a highly qualified lawyer and an experienced Chief Executive. Her name may already be known to some of you – as Chief Executive of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, later renamed Dignity in Dying, she carried out a sustained and extremely effective campaign over six years on behalf of a cause of major national importance. Among her credentials in the arts world, she has been a Trustee of the London Museums Agency, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and since 2007 has been Consultant to Hackney Empire Theatre, which since its recent refurbishment is enjoying a magnificent renaissance, playing to packed houses of an ethnic diversity that would warm the cockles of Margaret Hodge’s heart.

Deborah has plenty of experience in the lobbying arts, and I believe we can look forward to her acting as an eloquent and persuasive voice on behalf of the ISM, its members and of the music profession as a whole. I need not add that in this she will be carrying on in the tradition of her predecessor. As you all know from reading his editorials in the journal, with their racy polemical style, Neil has never been afraid to put his head above the parapet on the ISM’s behalf, and my editorial in this month’s journal puts on record his achievement in turning the Society around. To recap, when Neil joined Head Office 18 years ago, full membership was 3,800 and falling; it is now more than 4,700 and rising. Then there were £350,000 in the reserves; now there are close to £2.5 million. One thing Neil was always adamant about was the need for the ISM to be financially independent. He rightly insisted that this was the only way to remain politically independent, and he has done a good job in ensuring that the ISM can continue to be so.

We have all benefited from Neil’s stewardship, but as he himself wrote to me 'there is always more to be done, and it could be done differently. My departure may be an opportunity for the Society to stand back and look again at the direction it has taken on various fronts'. Well, as they say, watch this space. And let me say this – if you have any views on any of these matters (and most of them have been aired at a variety of dynamic levels during this Conference) please make them known. Head Office and your new CEO will be listening.

Speaking of Head Office, there has inevitably been a brief interregnum between Neil’s departure and May 12, when Deborah Annetts will take up the post, and I would like to thank Alison Pickard, both personally and on your behalf, for all she has done and will continue to do during the coming weeks to keep the ship running smoothly. As always, her briefing skills and behind the scenes attention to detail have been well on display during this Conference (not least in her impeccably prepared presentation this morning of the Annual Report) and we are all extremely grateful to her, as also to Kim and the rest of Head Office.

So it has been an eventful year, during which I have learnt a lot that rarely crosses my path during what you might call my day job. In spite of having served previously as Warden of the PCS, I believe I have learnt a great deal more about the ISM, what it offers to its Membership and the profession at large, and about the skill, dedication and expertise with which its members go about their business. This is particularly true of those involved in school music teaching. In yesterday’s MES meeting, I was particularly struck by a remark of Rachelle Goldberg, something to the effect that music teachers are so devoted to their subject that they will do anything to keep the ball rolling. Which of course is just what the penny-pinching, target-setting bureaucrats rely on. And why we at the ISM must continue to be vociferous in fighting the MES’s corner.

As Ken Hÿtch remarked to me, the MES meeting is always exciting, and Rachelle’s presentation gave much food for thought. But I would also like to highlight the intervention by Anne Dunn on the subject of adult music education, and as my successor as President pointed out, the predictable results of the Government’s decision not to fund any adult student who is already in the possession of a first degree. Whatever happened to 'education, education, education'? If this Government was really interested in the cultural health of the nation, it would support its mature students. After all, we’re not just talking about Oldies here. Unless I am mistaken this applies to any graduate wishing to retrain at any age. And in the field of music it can only have a damaging effect on the adult audience for music in this country, which we are meanwhile meant to do everything we can to expand. As usual, unjoined-up thinking meets the law of unintended consequences.

However, as I was moved to remark in the MES meeting, it is not all gloom and doom, and there are some grounds for optimism in other parts of the landscape. Sir John Tusa, in his highly informative keynote speech, painted a picture of a profession that had not totally rolled over at the Government’s behest, and of a DCMS that was at least in part attempting to change the terms of debate. The fact that the McMaster report could openly contain the word “excellence” is in itself to be welcomed. And I thoroughly applaud the recommendations of the Tory-inspired Arts Task Force under Sir John’s Chairmanship, which included separating Sport from the Arts, and abolishing the arms-length principle for the big performing Arts houses. To quote Sir John, it would indeed create a New Landscape for the Arts if the government could bring itself to join up the thinking contained in these two reports.

I was however struck by one strange thing, in listening to both Sir John and Frank Furedi. It seemed to me that the longer people spend talking about “music” or “classical music” the less the words seem to mean. Especially in all the political talk that Frank dissected so brilliantly – about “music” bringing communities together, reducing crime, raising people’s self-esteem – but also in the debate about inclusion or exclusion – i.e. are we talking about classical music versus the rest, or about classical music as just one of the whole range of available musics?

I began to see this strange vision of 'music' as a kind of amorphous, sticky substance to be applied like a sort of cultural ointment. Because, for all the talk of exposing babies to 20 minutes of Mozart a day, what the politicians are talking about effectively is muzak, not music. And I fear that once you start talking about classical music versus the rest, the whole range of Western music in all its vast and wonderful variety gets subsumed under this single umbrella and thereby somehow belittled. In one way 'classical music' comes to mean 'anything played in a concert hall', which already begs a question about all the pieces of great music that were written to be sung in church, in the hall of a great house, in the open air, in one’s own home, to be prayed to, to be danced to, to make love to.

I fear we already do something similar when we talk about 'modern' or 'twentieth century' music. I have been reading the book that John Tusa mentioned by Alex Ross, the music critic of the New York Times. It’s called The Rest is Noise, the subtitle is Listening to the Twentieth Century, and it tells the story of music from 1900 to 2000. As one reviewer wrote, it reads like a great novel with a huge cast of characters. Many important works are described with such panache that one wants immediately to listen to them. (Personally, I never expected to be smitten with an insatiable urge to go home and listen to all the orchestral works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but such is the persuasive nature of Ross’s writing). The point is that what you get is not so much a history of music, but a history of the decisions by composers that shaped that music. And isn’t it those decisions that David Owen Norris asks us to engage with when he says performance should be 'thought processes made audible'?

As an accompanist I am aware that I lead a pretty rarefied existence. I go around the world playing to small but dedicated audiences, whom I regale with settings by long-dead composers of old-fashioned poetry in foreign languages with which I am lucky if the audience has a passing familiarity. I do it of course because I love the repertoire, and because I love the infinitely varied challenge of the four-way relationship between poet and composer, singer and pianist. And yet I also have to believe in a deeper justification. That it has – to use one of the most annoying of buzzwords in the English language – relevance.

For me this is proved by the very fact that my work involves the interface between words and music. Once you begin to analyse the way a composer responds to a poetic text – illustrating the imagery, dramatising the emotional journey that it contains - it becomes clear that music itself is a language. And by extension, that the inherited vocabulary of Western music is intimately bound up with spoken language.

Think of the contours of musical phrasing, how the highpoint is almost invariably literally that, the highest note, in the same way that we naturally emphasise an important word by placing it higher in the voice. Think of the almost ubiquitous use of the appoggiatura, the musical sigh. Because all human beings sigh, with love, with longing, with sadness, with regret, with pain, with joy, the appoggiatura appears with expressive significance in almost all forms of Western music, certainly from the Renaissance onwards.

Then think of the diatonic system. Almost all western music involves tonality (even that which is expressly atonal) and involves the contrast between keys, between major and minor, the sense of travelling away from a starting-point and returning home after a series of tonal digressions that are more or less dramatic according to the implied plot of the piece. But these are not just abstract games, pace those who believe in the concept of absolute music. They are mirrors of human experience.

Let me give you an example. Schubert’s Winterreise is a song cycle in which a lover has to come to terms with rejection. From the outset his bleak situation is depicted in appropriately bleak minor keys, while the happiness he has lost is cast in either tonic or relative major. As the cycle progresses however, he comes to obsess less about his lost love and more about finding a way through the dark night of the soul in which he finds himself. So the major tonalities that were associated with looking back, now embody the aching longing for rest, for the resolution that evades him.

Benjamin Britten, the Schubert of the twentieth century, does something similar in the last song of Winter Words, his song cycle on poems of Thomas Hardy. 'A Time There Was' is a nostalgic lament for original innocence, which Hardy locates in some primeval time 'before the birth of consciousness'. If only men didn’t feel, he is saying, life would be bearable. Britten’s setting is eloquently simple in its means, supporting a high floating tenor line with close-packed major triads in the bass of the piano, like the underlying strata laid down during the ages of innocence. Every now and then the music pauses for a simple plagal cadence – quietly affirming the words 'when all went well'. But then, enter what Hardy calls 'the disease of feeling', and Britten’s left hand triads start to churn chromatically, creating increasing dissonances against a rising sequence in the vocal line, until they finally resolve once more into the simple D major of the opening, now transformed into a despairing plea for 'nescience', for feeling to be expunged. The tenor’s repeated cry of 'How long?' rings on in the piano’s final cadence.

Britten ends in the major, but it is a major replete with loss, a major of the kind that Schubert himself so often manages to invest with equal poignancy. Winterreise however ends unresolved in the minor, the emotional drama of the preceding music now reduced to the virtual nothingness, the repetitive drone of the Leiermann. In each case, musical means – above all tonality – is used to crystallise something that is universally recognisable in human existence, which I would incidentally define as one of the true functions of art.

When I am not actually performing I spend quite a lot of my time giving masterclasses, working with duos of young singers and pianists, and it recently occurred to me that what I am doing above all is teaching them how to read the score, how to identify the decisions the composer has made and by engaging with those decisions to create a vital performance. Let me take another example from Schubert, Gretchen am Spinnrade (D.118). Now what we all know about Gretchen is that it has a famous ostinato piano part of continuous semiquavers which represents Gretchen’s spinning-wheel. We also probably know that Gretchen is a girl who has been abandoned by her lover and that the song is a huge double arch of sexual longing, in which the first climax breaks off at the words 'his kiss' while the second one takes her, so to speak, over the top, declaring that she wishes she could 'die' under his kisses. We may have noticed other things. How the spinning wheel figure rotates around the same few notes in a picture of Gretchen’s obsessive state. How there is a similar circularity to the overall structure. The song ends as it began, with a simple triad of D minor, made up of a bare fifth in the left hand with the defining minor third F at the top. Where we begin and end is with the simple chord of a simple girl, who is simply unhappy.

But there is lots more. Goethe’s poem is made up of incredibly short, two-foot lines, where almost all the important words are monosyllables:

'Meine Ruh ist hin
mein Herz ist Schwer
ich finde sie nimmer
und nimmermehr'
etc.

On the page we see the poem as a tall thin column of words. Schubert takes these lines and stretches them. To be more precise he takes the important word in each line and stretches it to almost a whole bar’s length. This way by musical means Schubert makes us listen not so much to the surface of what Gretchen is saying but to the underlying emotion. 'Ruh', 'Herz', 'finde', 'nimmermehr'. Schubert is always held up as wonderful setter of poetry but there are places where this insistent figure makes a nonsense of the poetic scansion – 'Mein Busen drängt sich / Nach ihm hin' – but no matter. Gretchen herself is not in a state to trouble about grammatical niceties.

On the surface the song’s texture is deliberately monotonous. Except for the break in the middle, where the spinning-wheel stops and has to be restarted – a simple but inspired touch that needs no explanation – the piano’s semiquavers never stop. Likewise the voice repeats the same rhythmic pattern over and over again. But in terms of tonality, harmony and vocal pitch, Schubert deliberately treats each of the three great waves that make up the structure in a significantly different way. In the first wave, Gretchen describes her wretched state. Though the voice rises to the top of the stave before sinking down in dejection, the harmony sticks to minor tonalities and returns to where it began. In the second wave she tells us about her love for Faust, how it’s only for him that she looks out of the window, only for him that she leaves the house (here it’s the tiny but significant word 'ihn' that is emphasised by repetition and elongation). As she warms to her theme the harmony also warms. D minor becomes F major and her enumeration of Faust’s wonderful qualities sets off a rising sequence powered by a chromatic chain of dominant sevenths ending in the climactic diminished seventh on 'Ach – sein Kuss'.

In the third and final wave, having told us how she feels about Faust, Gretchen tells us what she’d like to do about it. She begins by repeating her refrain 'Meine Ruh ist hin', etc, but then at the words 'Mein Busen drängt sich' Schubert screws the key up by a semitone, raising the temperature at a stroke and immediately setting off another and far more violent chromatic sequence of dominant seventh/tonic progressions that leads to the ultimate climax. On the way there is a wonderful moment when the music marks time harmonically, Gretchen seeming literally to swoon as she imagines herself perishing under Faust’s kisses, before breathlessly driving herself over the brink with a couple of ringing top As. Thereafter both she and the music are spent, she just manages a final repeat of her refrain before the wheel spins to a stop and to the simple D minor triad with which the song began.

I hope you will all forgive me for having gone to such great lengths in this description, especially if all the details are already totally familiar. The point I would like to make is the same that David made on Tuesday. If you ask a singer to imagine she is a young girl who has been seduced and abandoned and then ask her to perform Gretchen, you may get something rather embarrassing, like witnessing your next-door neighbour doing something rather personal to herself on the kitchen table. But if you demonstrate all of the above and then ask her to engage with Schubert’s musical decisions, then Schubert’s Gretchen will come to life before your eyes. (How a boy of 18 knew how to do that in the first place is of course the mystery of genius).

Frank Furedi began his talk by asking whether there is truth in music. I believe that by engaging with a composer’s decisions, especially with those of a great composer like Schubert, one can indeed find a profound and life-enhancing truth, and it is our job as performers to do everything in our power to reveal it.

I have moved a long way from where I started, so let me return to my Presidency in its last few hours and say that it has been an honour and a privilege to serve you. I am immensely grateful for all the support I have received during the past year from Neil, from Alison, from all at Stratford Place, from my fellow elected officers, from the members of Executive Committee and Council and finally from all of you, my fellow members.