25 Brook Street – Interview

25 Brook Street – Interview

18 March, 2009
by: Alun

It's 250 years since George Frideric Handel's death, but his reputation as one of the finest composers ever to have been adopted by England is as robust as ever. Numerous tributes are scheduled for the rest of the year, and one of the most intriguing is the premier of a new oratorio entitled 25 Brook Street. Named for the house in which Handel lived during his 36 years in London (now Handel House Museum—the institution responsible for commissioning the piece), it proceeds from a dramatised account of the composition of his final oratorio, Jephtha, to an introspective investigation of his life.

I spoke to three of the four composers involved in the project, Mark Bowden, Christopher Mayo and Charlie Piper (the absentee being the Manchester-based Larry Goves); and the librettist, Helen Cooper. They were kind enough to speak back.

Alun: The oratorio is a fairly anachronistic genre, and it's more static and low-key than opera; what made you want to present the story this way?

Mark: When the idea first came up we were just going to put together a collection of 18th-century poetry. But I asked Helen and she was more interested in writing something original.

Helen: We thought it would be lovely to create a portrait of Handel and to set it at the end of his life, since this is the anniversary of his death.  We all got together with [Handel House Director] Sarah Bardwell, who's really the producer of the work; she wanted to use some of Handel's music for inspiration and she chose Jephtha—that was a wonderful place to start. Because Handel was blind he was dictating the music to an amanuensis, and to get more drama in it we thought of making him see his past selves: Handel as a young boy and in his middle age, when he was at the top of his game. It gives quite a good portrait of different aspects of his life.

Alun: This is the first time you've written a libretto for an oratorio; was it particularly challenging?

Helen: I focused on the Jephtha oratorio, and was very inspired by the shape and form. It took me a long time to get started, a long time to find the voice for it, but once I found it I really enjoyed it.

Alun: You've mentioned the influence of Jimi Hendrix, who lived at 23 Brook Street during the late ‘60s...

Helen: I listened a lot to him, and to Bob Dylan and Jephtha – I listened to all sorts of music!

Alun: It makes me wonder about the risk, in a project like this, of producing something very dry that doesn't connect with a modern audience...

Christopher: The risk comes from the fact that it's basically a bunch of people standing up and ‘delivering', but this piece is quite personal. It helps that everything's essential and nothing's frivolous.

Helen: When you do big mythical figures the most important thing is to lose the aura; you have to get to the human rather than the myth.

Alun: Handel has a significant mythical cachet—he's one of the sacred cows of classical music. Do you feel like his work had a strong influence on 25 Brook Street, or is he just an indistinct ancestral figure?

Charlie: The libretto has lots of quotations from Jephtha, so I did start putting in references to Handel's music in my section.

Christopher: There were references in all of the sections. There's one large chunk of text from Jephtha in mine, and I composed a ‘misquotation'; it's not exactly the same.

Mark: We couldn't avoid having a connection to Handel, because we were writing an old-school oratorio with arias and recitatives, for a period orchestra...

Christopher: And all of the characters in the oratorio are Handel.

Mark: Yeah—you can't escape him.  A lot of the time I was writing it, I was thinking about Baroque composers and how they approached things...their techniques and traditions.

Alun: You haven't conferred that closely in writing your individual sections; does it all fit together?

Helen: When we heard it in the first rehearsal I couldn't get over how it dovetailed.

Christopher: It just speaks of the fact that the three of us spend too much time together [Mark, Christopher and Charlie perform together in the Camberwell Composers Collective]; our music is rapidly becoming identical.

Helen: But it wasn't identical. There were separate voices, but it dovetailed. That was so beautiful.

Mark: We did confer, but not massively. Each of us tried to make links with the sections around our own. I tried to make a link with the end of Larry's, and I took some of Charlie's music and put it into my section.

Christopher: I saw Charlie's as a whole before I finished mine, but I didn't really change anything. I did notice that it finished on the same note that mine started on; it could have been part of mine. It's also the instrumentation; as we discovered, there's only so many things you can do effectively on period instruments.

Charlie: Actually writing for these instruments made me think a lot about tonality...

Christopher: You get a much better understanding about how composers of Handel's era worked; you realise that a big reason for Baroque music being what it is, is because that's the best way to use the instruments. We tried so many things out that just didn't work on them.

Charlie: It makes you appreciate how skilled Handel was to get the results he did.

Alun: It's interesting to have so many composers involved; what was the origin of that?

Mark: We thought that the idea of a collaborative project would be quite interesting.

Alun: Was four a fairly arbitrary number?

Mark: I suppose it is fairly arbitrary, although it's an interesting idea to have four composers. There are precedents like [NYC new-music ensemble] Bang on a Can...

Christopher: They did a piece called Shelter [a multimedia opera/oratorio], and they've done a few operas. Not the same way we did; they composed alternate scenes, so it's a bit more interwoven. Even earlier, there was a piece performed in LA that was done by all the ex-European composers who'd settled there: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Castelnuovo-Tedesco...

Alun: What was that?

Christopher: It was called the Genesis Project; they each wrote a little piece about the book of Genesis. I don't think it was very good. Sometime in the ‘50s.

Mark: Apart from that, Handel famously used to borrow music from other composers and rewrite it. Operas and oratorios weren't seen, up to the 19th century, as being ‘total' works; you could just take things out and slot things in.

Christopher: And a lot of people did that with Handel's music, too. There are pieces by other composers that consist entirely of Handel's music. It's like—I don't know if you've seen this genre of Chinese kung-fu movies from the ‘80s where they'd literally just take three other movies and cut them together. Ninja Terminator is one.

Alun: This idea of composers collaborating on big projects together doesn't have many precedents in recent history though; I feel like it points to something healthy coming out of the rarefied world of academic orthodoxy that a lot of modern classical music seems to inhabit...

Christopher: The Camberwell Composers Collective is about bridging the gap between the academic world and this other area that we're all trying to define: putting on our own concerts and being in control of everything.

Mark: I think you can occupy a range of roles as a composer, and there are lots of other groups doing this—exploring contemporary music in different ways. It feels quite natural to us, because our generation is quite used to the idea of bands—not that we're a band—but doing things collaboratively...

Alun: There are stories about Handel selling tickets from the window of his house for concerts in the upper rooms...

Helen: He was an impresario.

Mark: He wasn't like other 18th-century musicians, bound by a royal position—he owned his own company.

Helen: He was commercial.

Mark: Yeah, that's quite exciting about Handel, in contrast to Bach, who always wrote for the Church. He moved with the times; he could read the public's taste.

Alun: One other thing that's interesting about him is his status as an English composer; he's very much a national figure. Mark and Helen, you both have Welsh heritage, and you previously collaborated on an opera called the Song of Rhiannon, based on an old Welsh myth—do you think notions of nationality still inform music?

Mark: I don't think about Handel's nationality, really.

Helen: He became plus Anglais que les Anglais [more English than the English].

Mark: But he always spoke in a thick German accent.


25 Brook Street will be premiered by the London Handel Orchestra and Laurence Cummings at St. George's Church, Hanover Square, Mayfair on Thursday 2 July. Book tickets via the Handel House website

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Alun