Liner Notes: Il Sogno
“I was extremely surprised to be asked to write music for dancing,” Elvis Costello confesses. “In truth I knew very little about that world. When a very serious French publication inquired, ‘Who is your favourite dancer?’, I had replied honestly, ‘Cyd Charisse’.”
The creation of Il Sogno began in 2000, when the Italian dance company Aterballetto approached Elvis Costello to provide music for their adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The recorded work retains the name derived from the play’s translated title, Sogno di una node di mezza estate. Following a visit to see the company give an impressive performance in their hometown of Reggio Emilia, Costello met with choreographer and artistic director Mauro Bigonzetti and his colleagues Nicola Lusuardi and Karl Burnett and accepted their commission.
Elvis Costello: “I wanted to distinguish the different forms of existence in the play with contrasting music. The people of the court are accompanied by ft grander orchestral gestures and an element of porn and musical parody, while the workers are announce by folk dances and marches. When it came to the supernatural beings, I thought it only appropriate that they should be swinging fairies. As the story unfolds and the characters undergo their transformations these different threads of music become entwined.”
Forever associated in many minds with a handful of fine pop singles and rock-and-roll albums, Costello has followed his curiosity into a number of unlikely musical adventures, Collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet, Burt Bacharach and Anne Sofie von Offer have all found a place in his large catalogue of recordings that began in 1977.
In the last ten years much of this work has only existed in the concert hall. Following the 1992 release of The Juliet Letters and subsequent tours with The Brodsky Quartet, Costello began arranging and composing songs tor chamber groups and small orchestras. His work for the Composer’s Ensemble, Fretwork, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the Charles Mingus Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony and the composition of Three Distracted Women, a set of songs for Anne Sofie von Offer and the Brodsky Ouartet, often ran parallel to recordings and appearances with his rock-and-roll groups, the Attractions and the Imposters and concert tours with pianist Steve Nieve.
While Costello’s earlier experiments in arranging were carried out in the recording studio by trial and error, with the more complex written orchestrations being delegated to professional arrangers, the concert work was undertaken after he had finally got to grips with the mysteries of musical notation in the early 90s. Having already written over 200 songs, Costello began exploiting his ability to communicate with a wider range of musicians from different disciplines. This new I arrangement and compositional style, in which classical instrumentation was married to elements of the jazz ensemble, culminated in Costello’s orchestrations for the album North, which could be said to lead the listener’s ear to the more delicate passages in II Sogno.
In the summer of 2000, Costello began composing material suggested by Aterballetto’s written descriptions of the proposed dances, representing the characters and events of Shakespeare’s narrative in music without employing his language. He quickly dismissed the idea that he should include any songs in the production. “I also deliberately set aside modern composing methods involving computers, preferring a pencil and paper. The 200-page score was completed in approximately ten weeks, the latter 170 pages being written against the pressures of a deadline directly into full score. My orchestrations may not obey certain conventions, but they sound just as I imagined them. I have learned by listening. I’m just using common sense and writing down what I want to hear. I don’t come in and pretend to know more than I do.”
Rehearsals for the first performance were not entirely without comic interludes: celesta players who disappeared without warning leaving dancers making unaccompanied entrances and the failure on the part of the inexperienced “orchestral composer” to appreciate the difference between a jazz drummer and an orchestral percussionist being asked to play “time”. Costello recalls: “Due to a breakdown of communication, I arrived in Bologna to find a harpsichord sifting in :he orchestra but not a hammer dulcimer in sight. The orchestral management had assumed the request for i‘cimbalom’ was a misspelling of ‘cembalo’. Only days before the opening night, a Romanian traditional folk musician was located working in a restaurant in Rome. He didn’t read music but managed to memorize much of the intended part.”
The premiere of the dance production took place at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna on 31 October 2000. It was also staged at a number of other Italian houses. The Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale made a recording of the first draft score for the purposes of taking the Aterballetto production to venues that could not accommodate live music. Over the next couple of years, the company used taped accompaniment to perform the work in theatres and dance studios throughout Germany, France, Russia and for a performance at the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts in Southern California.
“The opportunity to work with Aterballetto and the orchestra in Bologna,” Costello says, “is one for which I will always be thankful. The fact that Mauro and his colleagues believed that I could write this music took away any fear and doubt that I might have had about attempting to write something on this scale. It is an overwhelming experience to sit in a darkened theatre and hear music that one has imagined performed by orchestra, and to see it motivate and support the action on stage. Any momentary frustrations on my part were more than balanced by the many elements of the score that I immediately wanted to re-consider. I am extremely fortunate that such an opportunity presented itself when Deutsche Grammophon decided to make this recording.”
Indeed, Costello now had the chance to re-fashion the score as a purely musical work. He was introduced to the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who began running a critical eye over the music and encouraged him to get the very best out of his material: “We mould read through the cues bar by bar and Michael would say, ‘What is happening in this passage? There’s no activity there’. I’d say, ‘That’s where the dancers do something very active against a background of still music’, and he had to remind me, ‘The dancers won’t be there!’ In the end, I tried to create a piece of music to which people might respond without any visual cues. I took out a lot of repetitions demanded by the choreography, re-orchestrated some passages and composed several new transitions and resolutions.”
Costello adds: “The score already featured some of my favourite instruments, including the cimbalom and the vibraphone, but for the recording I approached John Harle to play newly added soprano saxophone solos that are partly notated and partly improvised. I also invited the jazz drummer Peter Erskine to play on the cues representing the enchanted beings and their influence upon the lovers.”
The recording was made in Studio One at Abbey Road, London over four days in April 2002. Costello attended the daytime sessions at which he consulted with Tilson Thomas and Deutsche Grammophon producer Sid McLauchlan. “I should like to thank the members of the LSO for their generosity and their most elegant and sympathetic performance, and particularly for being tolerant of me singing the phrasing that I had intended on the few occasions that my notation was found to be wanting. Needless to say, my most special thanks go to MTT, who couldn’t have been more helpful and encouraging. I think he has conducted the music with tremendous wit and understanding.”
Tilson Thomas was intrigued by Costello’s music, and impressed by his creative energy: “I think he just uses his ears intrepidly. There’s a lot of jazz in this score, and there are parts that sound quite impressionistic or Russian. Elvis has imagined the characters in Shakespeare’s play having come from different worlds: from pop or jazz or classical. He keeps coming back to these unusual Debussy-like harmonies that begin the piece. They’re always there in some way.”
Costello is not making any grand claims: “I am not attempting to depart completely from recognizable forms or propose some entirely unprecedented musical language just because this is a new composition. There are elements of parody and humour in the piece, as well as passages representing contusion, jealousy, anger and turmoil. These cues have the edges, angles that I go looking for in rock-and—roll, but the way they are achieved is utterly different. I think there are also moments of tenderness and beauty, where the emotions of the lovers come through. Having now written over 300 songs, this is my first full orchestral composition. Naturally, I hope it appeals to all my tavourite parts of the human being. It is for the listener to decide what they take away from it.”
Vaughan Sinclair
