Mozart 252 : Michael Nyman Band, Summers, Slater

MOZART 252
Music Composed by Michael Nyman

1. In Re Don Giovanni
2. Revisiting the Don
3. Trysting Fields
4. Not Knowing the Ropes [otherwise known as 2M6]
5. Wedding Tango
6. Wheelbarrow Walk
7. Fish Beach
8. Knowing the Ropes
9. O my Dear Papa
10. I am an Unusual Thing
11. Profit and Loss

Michael Nyman Band
Hillary Summers, contralto (alto)
Andrew Slater, bass-baritone

This album was designed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart in 2006, but it seemed more appropriate to miss the boat, by two years - hence the 252. It could equally have been Mozart 30, since it is 30 years since In Re Don Giovanni originally saw the light of day in 1977 in the very first Campiello Band concert, in the National Theatre foyer. The Campiello Band was born out of the onstage band used for my arrangements of 18th century gondoliers’ songs for Bill Bryden's production of Goldoni's ‘Il Campiell’, which opened the Olivier Theatre in October 1976 and was thus the father of the current Michael Nyman Band.

Two main bodies of Mozart-derived works are presented on Mozart 252; the soundtrack to Peter Greenaway's ‘Drowning by Numbers’ (1988), and songs and duets from ‘Letters. Riddles and Writs’, a TV film developed in 1991 with the director Jeremy Newson as part of BBC2's Not Mozart series, which marked the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death.

My “Mozart music” is best understood by reading Pwyll ap Sion's impressive analyses in his book The Music of Michael Nyman:Texts, Contexts and Intertexts (Ashgate, 2007). But, briefly the first Nyman/Mozart collaboration, In Re Don Giovanni effectively samples and remixes the first 16 bars the Catalogue Song from ‘Don Giovanni’, and Revising the Don (a Radio 3 commission for the 250th anniversary) is a lyrical and literal revisiting of In Re.

The ‘Drowning by Numbers’ score is derived, in accordance with Greenaway's strict instructions, entirely from the slow movement of the ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ for violin and viola: Trysting Fields simply 'lists', in order of occurrence and each repeated three times, all the “unprepared” dissonances, (appoggiaturas) from the Mozart piece, and at the end introduces the 8-chord E flat/C minor/A flat/B flat/C min/E flat/A flat/B flat 'rock 'n' roll' sequence which ends the exposition of the movement, and which, along with a kind of retrograde version, is heard throughout Sheep 'n' Tides, Wheelbarrow Walk, Fish Beach and Not Knowing the Ropes (so called because on the ‘Drowning’ soundtrack album it is erroneously called Knowing the Ropes!).

Wedding Tango is built out of a chord-by-chord alternation of both the minor key version (from the very end of the movement) and more familiar major key versions of the 8-chord sequence. Knowing the Ropes, like Trysting Fields is a musical list (though with more conscious structural organization) - this time of a wiggly semiquaver motif, which is threaded through the movement and ends with a grand statement of the theme that is accompanied by the 8-chord sequence in the Mozart original.

‘Letters, Riddles and Writs’ deals in general, through texts taken from Mozart’s letters and riddles (the writs have to do with my frequent theft of Mozart's music) with his relationship with his father (O my dear Papa, a remake of O Isis und Osiris from The Magic Flute), with his own mortality (I am an Unusual Thing, which uses the texts from one of the riddles that Mozart wrote and distributed in Vienna during the 1787 Carnival and is based entirely on extract from two of his Haydn quartets) and with his business acumen (Profit and Loss, modeled on In Re Don Giovanni)
( MN RECORDS )