The Chaos

‘Oh the chaos, but what’s it got to do with us?’ The Futureheads declare on the opener of the similarly titled album. Since their dramatic explosion into public consciousness with their dramatic reworking of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds of Love’, The Futureheads have somewhat dropped out of the public consciousness despite releasing good record after good record. The problem is they haven’t made anything truly great. The Futureheads seem to have decided upon submerging themselves in chaos. As a band they revel in life’s ambiguities, the confusions, the questions left unanswered, and have decided to envelope themselves in chaos and abstractions. Full of contradictions, and priding themselves on ‘singing out of tune’, The Futureheads revel in The Chaos.

‘All of us are genius’ , Singer Barry Hyde declares in the pun-filled ‘Struck Dumb’, illustrating the humour and irony of The Futureheads which has endeared man to them. ‘Heartbeat Song’ is fairly generic sub Buzzcocks guitar fuzz. Declaring a delight in singing out of tune, such bouncing optimism is what makes the band’s best work great. Speaking of tunes, vocalist Hyde is right this isn’t really one. ‘Stop That Noise’s’ tense riffing is a step back on track, featuring a near endless, feverish wind up, as drums and bass leap and bounce wildly against the furious guitar. You get the impression with the Futureheads that the songs that they write are compulsions. ‘Stop That Noise’ describes an attempted Faustian pact with the Devil; wondering what they can learn, their solicitations end them up in the position where they wish they could stop the noise. Fortunately for us, the noise they create on this song album is a lot of fun, and a hint of things to come.

The band have a sharp sense of irony and idiosyncracy, however on ‘The Connector’ they push any sense of irony to the limit. The thing about irony is you have to establish the ironic against something. In ‘The Connector’, they launch straight into weirdness without looking back. This is the trap that the Futureheads fall into. They make concessions to no-one following impulses, and ideas occurring. The problem is, like most of us, not all the ideas we have are all that great. ‘I Can Do That’ follows on the impulsive ‘can do’ approach, producing similarly disappointing results to ‘The Connector’. Whilst ‘Sun Goes Down’ shifts the mood away from the hyperactive jubilant avant-pop, with a subterranean dark groove, full of paranoia, and creepy songcraft mirrored in the juxtapositions of weird slides that dance ghoulishly around the Beach Boy harmonies in ‘The Baron’. And this is where ‘The Chaos’ is at its best, when the Futureheads embrace the oblique in a less one-dimensional form, working thoughtful songcraft into their irrepressible bounce, unfortunately they don’t do it enough. It makes the album for those willing to persevere better, but not great.

In ‘The Chaos’ Futureheads answer no questions, but in the process of unleashing their creative impulses they thrill with near boundless energy, unlike most albums the latter half is much better than the first. For most people chaos isn’t exactly desirable, for The Futurehead’s it’s their muse, they embrace it to frequently interesting effect. But chaos seems at its best when refined into something more, and ‘The Chaos’ just wasn’t it.

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Maxim Shostakovich and the Royal Philharmonic – Warwick Arts Centre 17/03/2010.

Dmitri Shostakovich has been accused of many things amongst others critics paint Shostakovich as a propagandist, a Mahler impersonator, (a poor one at that), trashy, and unsubtle. Equally for many he is seen as a genius, a hero, and perhaps the greatest of all Twentieth century Russian composers. His son Maxim Shostakovich, came to conduct the Royal Philharmonic, in all Shostakovich program to add his voice to the debate. In the pre-concert talk Maxim seemed intent to dispel the myths and let the music do the talking. For Maxim this was not a debate. Despite our very own Paul McGrath, Director of Music at Warwick’s best efforts to draw Maxim into dialogue about the various different layers of messages and meanings supposedly hidden within the Fifth Symphony, the Second Piano Concerto, or the Eighth String Quartet played tonight Maxim made clear first in the talk and even more emphatically in the performance that this music was about his father as an individual. The music was his expression and his alone. Indicatively, when asked ‘With regards to the triumphalism of the final passage [in the Fifth Symphony] does this make the piece a Stalinist hymn, or an ironic statement about coercion?’ Maxim simply answered ‘It is neither. The triumph in the piece is neither a hymn for Stalin, nor ironic. This music was written by my father, for my father, it is about him as an artist.’

If the job of a successful conductor is to inject the music with the meaning and the feeling that he wants in the playing of the orchestra, through, tempos, rhythms, volume and the ever elusive emotional character that all conductors and orchestras strive for then this concert was a quite literally roaring success. Maxim induced dramatic, and triumphant playing from the Royal Philharmonic. They played with gusto, lyricism, but also subtlty. This was an unusual program tonight, the Philharmonic opened, with the Eighth String Quartet, one of the most emotionally intense pieces in Shostakovich’s oeuvre, supposedly written on verge of suicide, and dedicated to the victims of fascism, Maxim conducted what is usually a piece for a quartet as a Chamber symphony, and my did this work. The intensity of the piece was racked up as the extra strings written into the Barshai transcription transformed a work of near hysterical isolation through the sparsity of the quartet version into a titanic embodiment of extreme disturbance of the human psyche.

Maxim’s conducting was one of complete emotional engagement, he cut a towering figure throwing himself around the podium as though he were feeling each infamous blow struck within this often difficult piece. The first movement was taken extremely slowly, allowing time for the viola, to really weep over, the rumblings of the cellos, it features the ‘DSCH theme’. Shostakovich’s initials, are written into the score musically. The initials are almost always inserted into Shostakovich’s music in the most personal passages of his work to suggest his personal engagement with the piece. Maxim’s slow tempo meant that we really gained the elegiac element of this musical expression, and importantly that ever elusive emotional character. The stark contrast of the roaring second movement, the rumbling cello lines were amplified in the full orchestral setting, enriched by the deep double bases. The stabs of which within the Fourth movement, so often identified as bombs upon Leningrad due to the dedication of the piece to ‘the victims of fascism’. Instead Maxim’s conducting made them feel like emotional heartattacks felt by his father. The feeling of which seemed to charge through Maxim’s body, convulsing as though he were channeling the spirit of his father. Maxim used his shaking left hand to twist and curl moods out of the orchestra. This was truly phenomenal interpretation of a work that clearly means a lot to the Shostakovich family, and was shared with us at the Arts Centre tonight.

The most rapturous reception of the evening came for the second Piano Concerto. A much lighter piece, than the preceding Chamber Symphony the Second Piano Concerto allowed the virtue of diversity within the orchestra, conductor and composer to be illustrated. The joy of youthfulness that Dmitri found in Maxim whom the Concerto is dedicated to is evident, and though the pianist Natasha Paremski seemed a little overawed by the frenetic pace that the orchestra had worked up in the preceding piece she soon found, a beautiful groove in the more mournful second movement, and from their on in she never looked back. In a program high on drama but often lacking in lyricism, rising piano star Paremski extracted every last bit of lyricism from this contemplative and tense second movement before bursting out into the defiantly joyful final movement. Parameski appeared to become embolden by the preceding struggle, and flew through the final movement to the delight of the audience. The lightness within the performance was lapped up by the audience whose reaction was mirrored in the face of Maxim Shostakovich.

After a short break we were greeted by what is seen by many as Shostakovich’s first great orchestral piece, the Fifth Symphony. The Fifth is known most for the complexity of composition. The piece opens with the defining elements of the Symphony. The Fifth uses symphonic form to its truest potential, utilizing the reliance of themes and motifs to develop, twist, transform, and harmonize, cloaking the variety of emotions through shifting rhythms, in seemingly endless struggles. Maxim chose a pace for the Fifth as throughout the concert that was razor sharp. The strings rose and fall as though on the brink of a precipice. This feeling of dramatic intensity, liable to turn on the whim of a clench of the conductor’s fist, is inherent in the work of the notoriously neurotic composer. The intensity of the piece, amplified by the brooding complexity within the score was managed perfectly by Maxim. The ecstatic applause that met Shostakovich at the end of the performance were met simply with him raising the score above his head, pointing vigorously to his Fathers name. It was a touching end that emphasized that like symphonies attempt to in themselves the resolution of often contradictory and contrasting themes through artistic expression. If the concert was about legacies Maxim affirmed his father’s magnificently raising the music above all else.