Jesse Owens & Preludes in Our Time

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"CRITICS CHOICE: The songs provide a good overview of both Jesse’s triumphs and his struggles. Stimpson’s expressive, immediately accessible music reveals hints of the blues and period popular music, but mostly it has a firm classical grounding, evoking the dignity and historical importance of Owens’s life and achievements. 

 

The third number, 'Minnie’s Song', is a standout, set in the wistful mode of G harmonic minor, as she contemplates what exactly she loves in Jesse. Kelly gives an arresting, well-controlled performance of this gentle but emotionally probing number, all the way up to a very expressive high C. 

 

The five tracks of incidental music, however—sumptuously played by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Stuart Stratford—indicate that the complete work contains plenty of variety. This collection thus proves to be a good argument for a complete recording of the full opera.”

(Opera News)

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At the end of my review of Michael Stimpson’s Dylan and The Drowning of Capel Celyn I expressed the hope that I would be able to hear the Philharmonia’s recording of music from his opera Jesse Owens, which at the time was already ‘in the can’. Well, my chance has come, and I’m glad it has. Jesse Owens is a full-scale four-acter dealing with the life of the great African-American athlete who met with extraordinary success at the Berlin Olympics of 1936, only to find fulfilment and prosperity frustratingly elusive thereafter. The opera was completed in 2011, but it is not clear to me that it has been performed in its entirety. What we have on this disc are two composite works which derive from it. The Philharmonia appear only in an eleven-minute orchestral suite consisting of five short pieces (referred to by Stimpson as “incidental music”); and then we have a rather more substantial cycle of eight of the opera’s vocal items, arranged for soprano, baritone and piano. The disc is rounded off by a set of five preludes for solo piano which have no apparent connection with the Owens project, but were inspired in part by the Beijing Olympics of 2008.

For those unfamiliar with his work, it must be said at once that Stimpson’s idiom is essentially tonal and immediately approachable. He emerges on this disc as a most proficient orchestrator; but I would say that his prime gifts are probably his ability to set words in a sensitive and melodically attractive way, and his capacity for creating a wide range of atmospheres using restrained, tasteful and, on the whole, relatively conventional musical processes.

Stimpson is often at his best, I find, in slower, rather contemplative pieces. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that, even when its subject matter is a sprinter of phenomenal swiftness, his orchestral suite from Jesse Owens should contain a preponderance of moderately paced music. The first movement, ‘Overture’, has a tempo marking of “running”, and, following an initial strike of a (starting?) gong, Stimpson sets his violins going at a considerable, if slightly hesitant lick. Before long, however, as the other instruments join a basically fugal structure, the music slows down considerably – mirroring, programmatically or not, the poignantly anti-climactic nature of Owens’s life after athletics. The second movement, ‘Home’, is a nostalgic, but melancholy, picture of the farm in Alabama on which Owens grew up. It is launched, and then underpinned, by an ostinato for harp (an instrument with which Stimpson seems to have a particular affinity), over which woodwind in particular rhapsodize in a way that, cumulatively, conjures up a rather Coplandesque ‘open air’ atmosphere. Speed, volume and the prominence accorded to brass and percussion instruments all increase for a violent middle movement depicting the Klu Klux Klan. The fourth movement, ‘The Games’, then brings a slightly curious mix of German-style oompah and slower music based on popular songs; but the suite very much returns to form for its finale, ‘The Empty Stadium’, which includes music from the very end of the opera. It depicts Owens and his wife Ruth on their return to the Berlin Olympic Stadium after the war, re-living old triumphs and pondering immortality, to music of considerable beauty and tenderness. The Philharmonia’s playing under Scottish Opera’s Stuart Stratford has, here as elsewhere, both polish and conviction.

In the opera, according to Stimpson’s note, the role of Jesse Owens is divided amongst no fewer than four singers: a treble for the boy Jesse, a tenor for the athlete, a baritone for the middle-aged man, and a bass for the old one. In the song cycle we hear on this disc, Jesse’s words are sung only by a baritone, the excellent Johnny Herford – a solution which works perfectly well. The soprano soloist, however, has to cover a variety of roles – principally that of Ruth Owens, but in two songs Jesse’s (male) coach Charlie Riley and, in one, his friend the German long-jumper Luz Long. The short passages assigned to Riley work well enough, but in Long’s lengthy contribution to the song ‘Go Find my Son’, which is in many ways a hymn to specifically male bonding, one does feel the want of, say, a tenor. It’s not as bad as, for example, Leila participating in the Pearl Fishers’ Duet instead of Nadir, but, at least for a perhaps less imaginative listener like me, it doesn’t quite work.

Of the eight songs ‒ punctuated after the fifth by a brief piano interlude ‒ five, perhaps six are predominantly slow. The exceptions are ‘Jesse Meets Minnie’ (a.k.a. Ruth), a scherzo-like item depicting the teenage Jesse’s playful flirtation with the girl who was to become his wife; and ‘Four World Records’, which portrays his family’s breathless excitement on learning that he has broken the four (in the space of some forty minutes!) at a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1935. Even that song ends in a rather sombre mood, however, as Jesse reflects that “It all counts for nothing/If the battle over myself ain’t the battle I win”. An element of febrile excitement is conveyed also in ‘Money Lies’, in which the older Jesse reports on phone calls he has received offering him money to play baseball and race against horses; but here the strain of melancholy that affects many of these songs takes over pretty swiftly, as the baritone considers the indignity and injustice of a situation in which “there’s no work, no advertising,/ At least not for my pigment./And the pie from heaven is still not sent”.

Elsewhere we meet, in the songs ‘Home’ and ‘The Empty Stadium’, at least some of the material we have already encountered in the orchestral suite. One slightly misses the harp in the former, but the latter is transformed by the addition of words and vocal lines into a profoundly moving duet. ‘Minnie’s Song’ is a perhaps more conventional love song – and one in which Abigail Kelly’s appropriately slightly husky soprano falls prey to its occasional tendency to wax thin and shrill at the top. ‘Jim Crow’, however, movingly encapsulates the unreconstructed racism of Owens’s America, as we witness the great man having to send his coach to fetch food from a restaurant from which he himself would be excluded and, in Riley’s absence, proceeding to deliver a very strong arioso, ‘Them Poplar Trees’, which is modelled on Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’.

Mention of Holiday reminds one of Stimpson’s statement, in the booklet, that his “musical influences are varied, from the early blues and 1920s jazz to hits of the day and some music of Germany”. Whilst his music does not seem derivative to any damaging degree, one can indeed discern influences of these modes in it; I find it interesting, however, that he does not specifically mention the African-American Spiritual as a significant influence. Certainly, songs such as ‘Home’, ‘Jim Crow’ and ‘Money Lies’ brought the poetic and musical conventions of Spirituals quite frequently to my mind, as did the overall tone of dignified yet wrathful lament that often characterizes particularly Jesse’s music.

The five Preludes in Our Time which complete the disc were, Stimpson tells us, composed at a time when “the world was looking eastwards – China at the time of the Beijing Olympics was a staggering contradiction of energy and the outrageous”. This does not mean, however, that with the possible exception of the short first prelude, the music seems oriental in any pervasive or systematic way. It is perhaps slightly more obviously ‘modern’ in style than the Owens items: but the overtones I thought I sometimes heard were of composers such as Debussy, Ravel, maybe even Scriabin, rather than anything remotely avant-garde. Perhaps the most interesting single aspect of the preludes is their skilfully wrought form. Each is approximately double the length of its predecessor, with the result that Prelude I lasts 49 seconds and Prelude V 9½ minutes; and the final Prelude includes, in its second half, “a coda for each prelude, starting with the fifth and working back so that the final coda is a reflection of the first prelude”. I didn’t in all honesty find this process consistently easy to identify or assess, but certainly the piece does convey the general sense of describing a satisfactorily full circle. It has considerable, if not always memorable, rhythmic and melodic interest; and Megumi Fujita’s performance is one of exemplary musicality and technique.

It will be obvious from the above that I consider the works on this CD, and indeed Stimpson’s music more generally, to be well worth hearing. It is approachable, honest, well- crafted and eloquent. If forced to nominate one work by him that shows his individual gifts in their most favourable light, I would, I think, still point to Dylan. But not by much. This CD also contains much fine, humane music, which it is worth anyone’s while getting to know.

(Nigel Harris, MusicWebInternational)

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Back in November 2013, when I was reviewing Elžbieta Sikora’s opera Madame Curie, I made a number of observations on the long and honourable tradition of biographical opera, when a composer constructs a whole evening around the career of a prominent figure of the past – a tradition to which Michael Stimpson’s Jesse Owens clearly falls heir. I did not however mention the consideration of plot construction in that context: more precisely, should the opera follow a strictly chronological approach, or should it blend together incidents from different eras of the protagonist’s life? Here Stimpson and his three fellow-librettists credited in the booklet generally follow a standard time-line beginning with the athlete’s impoverished upbringing in America’s Deep South and progressing to his final ruminations in the deserted Berlin Olympic stadium at the end of his life; but the final scene includes reminiscences of earlier times, including a ghostly appearance of his memory of the German athlete and fellow-competitor Luz Long. In order to encompass this extended period of time, the title role is assigned to no fewer than four singers – a treble (Owens as a boy), a tenor (the young athlete), a baritone (the middle-aged and disillusioned hero) and finally a bass (the old man looking back over his career) – with all four combining during the closing pages of the opera.

This is not however made immediately clear in the cycle of songs extracted from the opera, nine excerpts assigned simply to a soprano and baritone soloist. The baritone takes the role of Jesse throughout, but the soprano has to undertake not only Jesse’s girlfriend and later wife, but also the parts of his coach and Luz Long, both of which were presumably originally written for male singers. Nevertheless the excerpts we are given here, despite the evident need for considerable re-arrangement, serve to give a sample of an opera where the feeling for the voice is clearly demonstrated and the emotional charge often runs high. The last two items in the cycle in particular, which seem to be continuous in their context, certainly bring a sense of finality and reconciliation which is moving in the extreme. This is demonstrated even more convincingly in the final movement of the orchestral suite which the composer has extracted from the opera and which precedes the songs on the disc; it is only an abridged version of the closing scene, but it displays a bruising sense of yearning which one can imagine working superbly in the theatre. The second movement of the suite also reflects material from the songs; the other three movements stand alone, but none of them exceeds three minutes in duration, which does leave a rather bitty impression of what is clearly designed as an extended score.

The orchestral excerpts do however also serve to demonstrate Stimpson’s delicate sense of instrumentation in a manner which Megumi Fujita’s piano reduction struggles to reproduce in her accompaniment to the vocal excerpts. Some of the busier figuration seems rather one-dimensional in the context (I was reminded in places of Alan Bush), and the solo instrumental lines in 'Minnie’s song' for example (track 8) positively cry out for the warmth of woodwind and strings. The two solo singers cope well with their idiomatically written vocal lines; but ideally one would welcome a greater sense of dramatic involvement as well as lyrical delivery, and Abigail Kelly, having to cope with multiple roles, shows signs of unexpected huskiness in places which suggest that she might have been suffering from a cold at the time of the recording. For similar reasons Johnny Herford, fine when he has to cope with high-flying (possibly originally tenor) lines, sounds gritty when he has to descend into the bass register.

What all this means, in total, is that what would be still more rewarding than these excerpts from what is clearly an expertly constructed and well-written score would be a complete performance of the four-act opera in its entirety. It is distressing that opportunities for non-commissioned operatic scores to achieve concert performance – let alone staging – are so limited in Britain. The BBC, who at one time seemed willing and able to mount studio recordings of rare and unperformed British operas, seem to have abandoned their efforts in this regard, presumably on grounds of expense. Recording companies tend to prefer to issue live recordings of stage presentations only (with all the attendant hazards attached), but if perhaps this disc is intended as a sampler with a view to the promotion of a complete performance of Jesse Owens then I wish it every success.

The five piano preludes which conclude the disc, with the same pianist as in the Jesse Owens songs, are less immediately impressive pieces although their structure – with each prelude doubling in length so that the final movement is nearly as long as the preceding four added together – is intriguing and convincing. They are superbly played by Fujita, and in the orchestral suite Stuart Stratford obtains a committed and involved performance from the Philharmonia, well recorded.

By the way, the excellent booklet (which includes the complete text of the sung poems) is silent on the date when the composer actually completed his opera. In an earlier review for this site Nigel Harris gives this as 2011; but the booklet states that he was still working on the score when he wrote The Drowning of Capel Celyn, which was only first performed in September 2013. At all events the musical setting was presumably finished by the date of this performance of the orchestral suite in February 2014. (I note also that Nigel Harris in his summary of the plot of the opera refers to approaches made to the athlete after his Berlin Olympic triumphs to play baseball; this is in fact a misinterpretation of the even more demeaning situation, that he was asked to run in competition with horses during intervals in baseball games.)

(Paul Corfield Godfrey, MusicWebInternational)

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