Dr. David Vernon, author of Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama wrote…
Stephen Johnson's Clarinet Quintet 'Angel's Arc' is really very special. A gorgeous psychological tapestry of tenderness, pain and enraptured agitation, the textures and wandering emotions are dazzling.
Performed here by the @CarducciQuartet & @matthunt3. https://t.co/OTKbaeCRaW pic.twitter.com/Hj2nmGJ22H
— Dr. David Vernon (@DrDavidVernon) December 1, 2021
Stephen Johnson’s Angel’s Arc for clarinet and string quartet was written as a tribute to an area of the Pennine moors which he explored during his teenage years, though there are also music quotations which reference people who were important to him at that period. The Carducci Quartet were joined by clarinettist, Matthew Hunt (from the Orsini Ensemble). The worked opened with lovely rhapsodic moments for the clarinet over quietly sustained strings.
There were moments of dialogue, but the clarinet was very much to the fore and I kept thinking of Finzi’s writing for clarinet. The middle section was a sort of furiously intense scherzo, with fast movements between different emotions yet still with time for the clarinet to meander, despite some furious string playing. The world of the opening section returned, with a sense of unwinding. Despite moments of loveliness and some thoughtful clarinet playing, Johnson also created a feeling of unease in the music resulting in a strikingly complex piece.
https://www.planethugill.com/2021/10/hatfield-house-chamber-music-festival.html
June 11, 2020 by manchestereviewofbooks
The title of this book seems to contain another, perhaps earlier title. It feels like it might have been called ‘How Shostakovich Changed The World’, only later downgraded to the more modest ambition of How Shostakovich Changed My Mind. But there is something to be said about this ambition and the usefulness of this book. I think its more modest ambition is, in a weird way, a much higher one.
by Jonathan Taylor 9 June 2020
In William Nicholson’s Shadowlands, C. S. Lewis famously declares: ‘We read to know we’re not alone.’ Stephen Johnson’s remarkable essay-cum-memoir, How Shostakovich Changed My Mind, claims the same for music, and particularly Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies and quartets: we listen, that is, to know we’re not alone. In Shostakovich’s music, Johnson finds a mirror for his own mental illness, trauma, near-suicide: ‘emotions and thoughts I had experienced as terrifying vast, chaotic and threatening acquired … a sounding form. In the midst of my long-drawn-out isolation, Shostakovich reassured me that I was not utterly alone. Someone else knew what I felt – perhaps even in some mysterious sense “heard” me.’
By PPO Kane 1 June 2020
This extraordinary book is in part a memoir, in part an appreciation of the music of the great Dmitri Shostakovich (and a meditation on the composer’s life), and in large part also a heartfelt affirmation of the power of music to heal.
Mahler in the foyer of the Vienna Court Opera, where he was director until 1907. Photograph: DEA/A Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Image
Stephen Johnson ends this thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8, and much else besides, with a quotation attributed to Beethoven, of which Oscar Wilde would have approved: “Sometimes the opposite is also true.”
During the Mahler anniversaries of 2010-11, Norman Lebrecht published a book called Why Mahler? Now, as then, even the most fervent Mahlerian might well ask of any book on this subject, “Why Another Book About Mahler?” Musicologist, author and lapsed cellist, Stephen Johnson, has given us a compelling answer in the form of his latest volume, The Eighth: Mahler and his World in 1910.
Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is an extraordinary creature, vast in its ambitions and almost megalomaniacal in its demands. Eight top-rank vocal soloists; two large mixed choirs and a boys’ choir; 22 woodwinds; 17 brass; an offstage brass band of seven; nine percussion; celeste; piano; harmonium and organ; two harps; mandolin; and full strings to match…
“All my previous symphonies,” Mahler wrote, “are merely the preludes to this one. In the other works everything still was subjective tragedy, but this one is a source of great joy.” It was a huge success, crowds surging towards the platform after it had finished.
In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson leads us through all the complexities of the work with skill and sensitivity. It’s clearly a piece that he reveres. In its embrace of joy and spiritual uplift, it has been the most controversial of Mahler’s symphonies in our own day, lacking that juxtaposition of sublimity and the banal that makes the composer such a postmodern pin-up.
Johnson’s defence involves not only a journey through the piece itself, underlining the subtlety and complexity that defy the overkill; but also a look at the world from which it sprang and the extraordinary and tangled personal story which somehow, despite all that objective joy, it still embodies.
This is a special book with extraordinary insights, beautifully expressed. It speaks not only to those who love Shostakovich, or even to every music lover, but it addresses the complexity of being human.
It is often said that music exists only in performance: a score is an inert gathering of marks on pages, awaiting realisation. But, of course, music exists to be heard. It makes itself – and always anew- in the mind of the hearer, note-by-note as it unfolds. And each listener hears it, even when it is familiar, always as a new event. That which was heard in the past no longer exists, but at most is remembered.
The opening pages of music broadcaster and composer Stephen Johnson’s How Shostakovich Changed My Mind detail what is clearly one of the most moving interview experiences of his career. He is in the St Petersburg apartment of Viktor Kozlov, one of the few surviving members of the orchestra that performed the triumphant debut of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in 1942. He describes, with the clarinetist’s assistance, how that performance was pulled together against all odds. Leningrad, as it was known at the time, was under siege, and Stalin not only wanted an opportunity to galvanize the beleaguered citizens, he wanted to send a message to Hitler who was waiting within earshot to celebrate victory. As an artist within a system that could turn against him in a heartbeat, the burden on Shostakovich to deliver a suitable masterpiece was immense. In the end, it was a rousing success. He managed to speak directly to the people’s emotions, and give them a reason to feel united in a time of war. The invigorated audience responded with an ovation reported to have lasted over an hour.