Gay marriage (play); Music’s Odyssey (book); Wigmore Hall (concerts).
“Daniel’s Husband”, the play by Michael McKeever now at the Marylebone Theatre until January 10, should be seen. Its characters and our feelings about them keep changing. At first, admittedly, it seems just another play about gay men in New York talking about their lives. For those who admired Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance” (2018) - I was in the minority who didn’t - here, it seems, is its cousin.
A pleasure I don’t remember from “The Inheritance” is that these four men are vividly individual, even before the play start changing our minds about them. And soon we find we’re witnessing an argument about gay marriage: Daniel, an architect in whose living room the action takes place (Joel Harper-Jackson) and Michael (Luke Fetherston) have always been happy living together for years - apart from being entrenched on opposite sides about getting married to each other.
We hear the argument from both sides. And what’s better is that we see each character from more points of view than one - we never quite know where we stand on any of them. We’re also introduced to Daniel’s mother, Lydia (Liza Sadovy), who, like her son, wants them to marry; and she, too, changes in our minds as we follow the story. She’s an affectionate, loyal mother: only gradually do we see why Daniel has deep problems with her.
He, lovable in most respects, suddenly suffers a serious stroke during the course of the play, without having married Michael. What now will happen to him as his life continues? Who will take care of him, and where? What are the respective rights of lover and parent in such a situation? The case goes to court.
As McKeever writes them and as Alan Souza directs them, all four men and Lydia reveal depths and facets that makes “Daniel’s Husband” continually surprising as well as moving. This play was new in 2015, has been an off-Broadway success, and has been staged in successive productions in various states of America: no wonder. It’s most welcome here in London.
II.
Robin Holloway is a composer, a music academic, and a critic. History should be impressed by the number and calibre of other composers who have studied composition with him - Judith Weir, Jonathan Dove, George Benjamin, Thomas Adès. Over the decades, however, he has often proved a critical writer of singular acumen and eloquence. A wide array of important music critics contributed to Alan Blyth’s six-volume “Opera an Record” and “Song on Record” series (1979-1991), most of them admirably, but it’s the chapters by Holloway that have the greatest distinction.
It’s hard to read “Music’s Odyssey - An Invitation to Western Classical Music” (Allen Lane £45) sequentially through its 1180 pages. But early on (p.18) he writes “this is a book for dipping/browsing/skipping”. Once you approach it this way, it becomes compelling company.
I began this approach by reading the chapters on two dissimilar composers - Haydn and Tchaikovsky. These at once show us Holloway as a critic whose brain and heart work together and as a multifaceted historian. Of Haydn: “He is the purest of all composers; his art has the fewest external referents, is more completely about itself than any other…. The music is pure because it cannot be translated. Despite one’s ready recognition of a ragbag of tropes and types - snippets of nonsense from opera buffa and pathos or elevation from opera seria, tags from textbooks, snatches of folksong ‘from Croatia’s woods and fields’ or urban serenade from Vienna’s back alleys, opening and closing gambits from contemporary cliché - it owes less than any other to metaphor, simile, association…..
“He is music’s supreme intellectual….. There is an omniscience to his art that surpasses even Bach’s, who knew everything about the science of music but was, one senses, unconscious of what his music was saying through its extraordinary transcendence of its stylistic norms and ostensible aims. Bach is the profounder artist; Haydn is the greater realist. None of which makes him any more graspable. Haydn the Ambiguous to the last. And how appropriate for Haydn the Ambiguous that his most inspired movement, ‘The Representation of Chaos,’ should be simultaneously the representation of Order in a perfectly formal introduction-sonata, the weird contradiction expressed in sounds that sometimes come from some chuckling Biedermeier serenade (bars 28-31), sometimes grope into Bruckner at his creepiest (bars 32ff.), sometimes heave and pant with th sheer physical strain of giving birth (bars 26-7, 48-9), touch upon the metaphysical without strain throughout, and for the final ten bars (till the cadence) stray into the ‘music of the future’ fifty years before its time….”
Writing of Tchaikovsky : “Melody is the means by which music exerts most immediately its power to ‘raise and quell’ the passions. More even than Handel, Schubert, possibly Verdi - the other supreme melodists - Tchaikovsky depends upon it, to liberate with incomparable generosity music’s emotional potential. Above all, he is audacious. He risks everything. But he has the resources - the range, copiousness and sheer genuineness to carry it off….
Most of the musical intellectuals who praise Tchaikovsky at all dwell on the orchestral suites, on the Fourth Symphony, on “The Queen of Spades”. Holloway praises Tchaikovsky’s three ballets as “the summit of his work.” “Tchaikovsky of course is always utterly physical. The whole body, not just the feet, wants to move - he’s written the instructions m, in the imperative and seductive mode. And whereas Wagner is metrically galjmphing and not very various, Tchaikovsky’s range is huge - The Sleeping Beauty in particular is a compendium of gestural and rhythmic models….”
On “The Nutcracker”: “The music is indefatigably alive and (with one exception) all straight from the top drawer. The battle, for instance, keep up a prolonged sparky animation with at least as much brilliance as anything in the symphonies. The transformation of the Christmas-tree from domestic parlour to fir-forest deep in snow is one of the great Romantic moments, the equivalent in this ‘thin’ medium of the great scene-changes in the outer acts of Parsifal. The one slightly duff number follows follows, a snow-flake-valse where tinselly, wordless voices harmlessly reiterate a less-than-initiate tune.) The total void, once the land of confiture is reached, in such plot and characterization as have always been vouchsafed, is solaced by the sequence of character-dances familiar in part from the Suite - ‘light music’ so distinguished that the adjective simply drops away. Then there’s the celesta; then a glorious pas-de-deux more for Faust and Helen, or Antony and Cleopatra, than its actual occasion; then the best-ever final waltz.”
There are incidental mistakes here (the celesta follows the pas de deux) and points worth challenging (the wordless voices in the Snowflake waltz and their tune are a short section of a largely inspired scene), but this is thrilling writing that deepens and enlarges my admiration for a score with which I have spent much time.
I will carry on dipping into “Music’s Odyssey”, but, while, inevitably, I question Holloway’s taste in some areas, I’ve already found that my dips into multiple chapters, ranging from Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” to Britten’s “Our Hunting Fathers”, have enlarged my mind on many areas of classical music. I have been returning to this book, and shall continue to do so.
III.
On Tuesday 30, the pianist Llŷr Williams tonight gave a recital of music written between 1835 and 1952 - Schumann, Franck, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, with Brahms as an encore. All of it was subtly taxing, especially the Franck (Prelude, Choral, and Fugue) and Schumann (Sonata no 3, op.14), in which Williams’s long fingers were continually and rapidly like spiders, rippling every which way. Williams’s personality is oblique: brainy, charmless, but endlessly resourceful and full of thought and feeling: you could learn endless lessons about rubato alone (never used in excess) from observing him. Both Rachmaninov’s Variations on a theme of Corelli (1931) and the three preludes and fugues by Shostakovich (1960-1851) were important modernist plays with old forms. It’s not always clear who Williams himself is, and yet there’s never a doubt that he is an musician at every level, intelligent and sensitive.
IV.
The following evening, New Year’s Eve, the countertenor Iestyn Davies and the English Concert, gave an all-Bach gala evening, with Lars Ulrik Mortensen conducting from the keyboard. For many, Davies is the embodiment of the purity they love in countertenor singing.
For me, his sound tends to be too disembodied. He sang Bach’s “Widerstehe doch der Sünde”, of which Holloway writes that “contralto soloist… must be deep, gravelly, dramatic, melodramatic - Medea, Ulrica, Clytemnestra, Jocasta” - adjectives and characters at the opposite end of the spectrum from Davies.
But the concert was not all Johann Sebastian Bach: Davies and colleagues gave a cantata by Johann Christoph Bach (cousin to Johann Sebastian’s father), “Mein Freund ist mein, und ich bin sein” (“My beloved is mine, and I am his”, from the “Song of Songs”). Here Davies’s purity, beautifully finding qualities of emphasis when returning to the same note, was at its most eloquent.
Nor was it an all-Davies concert. The English Concert opened the concert with Kanon zu acht Stimmen BWV1072, a perfect introduction to Bach’s gift for building simplicity into complexity. Later, they played two of the Brandenburg concerti. The familiar No 3, in particular, abounded with energetic, focused, musical play.
As an encore, Davies and the Concert played the cantata “Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde” - a marvellous piece, with bells, once attributed to J.S.Bach, now more usually credited to Melchior Hoffmann. The words say “Sound your knell, blest hour of parting, Quickly dawn o happy day! Angels! haste to my release!…. Let me hear the last hour tolling, That shall call my soul away.”) The choreographer Mark Morris choreographed this in 1992 as “Beautiful Day”, danced by man and woman in seraphic calm. This was a sublime work with which to end the old year.
@ Alastair Macaulay 2026