Boulezian

Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 18 May 2013

2013-05-19T12:32:00.001+01:00

Glyndebourne Opera House

Music-Master – Sir Thomas Allen

Major-Domo – William Relton
Lackey – Frederick Long
Officer – Stuart Jackson
Composer – Kate Lindsey
Tenor. Bacchus – Sergey Skorokhodov
Wigmaker – Michael Wallace
Zerbinetta – Laura Claycomb
Prima Donna, Ariadne – Soile Isokoski
Dancing Master – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Pianist – Gary Matthewman
Naiad – Ana Maria Labin
Dryad – Adriana Di Paola
Echo – Gabriela Iştoc
Harlequin – Dmitri Vargin
Scaramuccio – James Kryshak
Truffaldino – Torben Jürgens
Brighella – Andrew Stenson

Katharina Thoma (director)

Julia Müer (set designs)
Irina Bartels (costumes)
Olaf Winter (lighting)
Lucy Burge (movement)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

Katharina Thoma’s Glyndebourne debut had been heavily publicised. Sad to say, not only does her production of Ariadne auf Naxos fail to live up to any expectations that might have been engendered; it fails dismally to live up to Strauss and Hofmannsthal, indeed even so much as to engage with them. Audience members would apparently erupt into uproarious laughter when someone, anyone, so much as walked onstage seemed delighted, but there was more sign of the artwork we know, love, and desperately wished to have interrogated in the miserably paraphrased surtitles – is it that difficult to offer a reasonable translation? – than on the Glyndebourne stage, at least during the Opera proper.

The 1940s seem almost to be de rigueur for a certain breed of opera directors at the moment; this staging follows in the dubious footsteps of David McVicar’s not entirely dissimilar Médéefor ENO. A pandering desire to ‘entertain’ – ironically here, given the concerns of the Prologue, though the irony seems entirely accidental – replaces genuine dramatic, or indeed almost any other variety of, engagement. And yet, of course, Zerbinetta does not appeal to the lowest common denominator; that she both amuses and touches is owed to an expected level of Kultur on the part of the audience. Insofar as what she offers is ‘low’ culture, and that is a considerable ‘insofar’, that only has meaning in terms of contrast with its ‘high’, seria antipode – or cousin. Here, we simply have her reduced to a ‘mad’ person, straitjacketed in a wartime hospital, who, tedious ‘joke’ of tedious ‘jokes’, sings some of her high notes whilst having an orgasm induced by a visitor. I am not sure what is more offensive: the transformation of mental illness, presumably a product of wartime, into fodder for laughter, the refusal so much as to listen to the text (and no, the orgasm does not betoken serious study of the score), or the fact that so many seemed to respond so positively to Carry on Ariadne. Naiad, Dryad, and Echo are nurses, whose every shaking of a sheet elicited helpless guffaws from that vocal section of the audience.

A still greater indignity suffered by the work comes at the end when Ariadne, reuinited with her fighter pilot Theseus, has him land himself on top of her behind a curtain. It was difficult to decide whether such prudishness were preferable to a more full-frontal vision; either path would simply have been embarrassing in context – or rather, weirdly out of context. Hoffmansthal’s concern with transformative myth receives not so much as a nod, but then nor does the transformative power of Strauss’s music. Goodness knows what the Composer has been doing, wandering around the Opera, not unreasonably lost; to start with I thought he was a doctor, then a patient, but he really seemed to be there to give the false impression that what we see is somehow connected with the Prologue.

For that is the greatest problem of all with this staging, bafflingly so, since one would have thought that, whatever Konzept or none, it would have been pretty straightforward to get right. Much of the Prologue is presented reasonably enough: no particular insight is gained, but it does not jar especially with what we are seeing and hearing. (Many audience members appeared to be doing neither, instead reading the shoddy titles and responding accordingly, that is when they were not simply chattering to each other. Stony glances had no effect whatsoever upon them.) The setting is said to evoke the Glyndebourne of the period, that is of the arbitrarily selected early 1940s, though I am not sure one would have known that without being told. But things happen pretty much as they should; rather in the sense of an ultra-conservative staging, one gleans little but has ‘the story told’. (Christof Loy, as his wilful, equally un-engaging Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten shows, is not necessarily the most sympathetic director of Strauss, yet he engages with the Royal Opera House in a considerably more revealing version of the site-specific approach in hisstaging of Ariadne.) Then suddenly, at the close of the Oper, the melodrama of an air attack bursts upon the scene. Some people, apparently, ‘just loved’ the ensuing fire: an effect quite without cause, slightly to misquote Wagner on Meyerbeer. For the rest of us, it seemed more akin to a desperate attempt to ‘do’ something with or to the work, given that for some, unspecified reason, the richness of Strauss and Hofmannsthal was not nearly enough for Katharina Thoma.

But far worse is to come, for any idea of the Opera as a staging suggested in the Prologue appears to have been thrown out of the window. There really is no connection between the two sections of the work. Instead one has the house transformed into a wartime hospital, in which for some reason Ariadne awaits the return of her aforementioned fighter pilot. The very essence of the work, not just its delicious satirising of responses to ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, but its metatheatrical probing of opera as a performative art, has simply been passed over. Thoma comments in a programme interview, ‘But sometimes when I leave the theatre and see the news, and there are catastrophes, think, what have I been worrying about? There are more important matters in the world.’ Unfortunately, the æstheticism of the work and its creators is not so much undercut as rejected in favour of uninvolving incoherence.

Musical performances were better, though I suspect – and hope – they will improve as the run proceeds. Vladimir Jurowski had the excellent LPO on a tight leash: often too tight, harrying the score rather than giving it time to speak. Strauss of all composers does not need to be sentimentalised, but, despite certain kinship or rather pre-emption, this is not Stravinskian neo-Classicism. A half-way house, akin to Busoni, would be perfectly justifiable, intriguing even; however, for much of the time one desperately wanted to ask the conductor just to calm down a little, perhaps more than a little. The Opera fared somewhat better than the Prologue in that respect, though its musical course did not come across, as it should, as if in a single, long breath. Strauss may be an ambivalent Wagnerian here, but a Wagnerian he remains, especially in that requirement for understanding and communication of the melos.

Although the voice is not what it was, Thomas Allen still imparted to the Music Master a theatrical authority so evidently lacking in the stage direction; Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke provided an effective foil as Dancing Master, though he was perhaps inclined to overact. Of the principal characters, Laura Claycomb’s Zerbinetta was by some distance the most successful. Notwithstanding an unfortunate passage of extremely stray intonation during her big aria, she otherwise managed her coloratura very well, and acted the part in as lively and sympathetic fashion as the staging would permit. Soile Isokoski’s Ariadne improved as the Opera progressed, her music before ‘Es gibt ein Reich’ having suffered from severe inability to sustain, let alone, to float a Straussian phrase. Yet, though matters improved in that respect, hers was not an involving portrayal. (Much of the fault may of course have been the director’s, but not all of it.) Sergey Skorokhodov experienced technical difficulties as Bacchus – one can readily forgive some of them, given Strauss’s cruel writing – but also managed on occasion to display greater mettle; his is certainly a performance I can imagine becoming more impressive on subsequent evenings. Kate Lindsey, though she threw herself commendably into the role of the Composer on stage, disappointed vocally; the voice lacked any of the richness, even vocal variegation, one longs for in the role, however unfair it may be to hark back to Irmgard Seefried. Smaller roles were generally well taken, offering a properly ‘Glyndebourne’ sense of theatrical company; Dmitri Vargin (Harlequin) is a singer whose future we might be well advised to watch.

Yet, despite the wonderful surroundings and some more than creditable music-making, the evening was sorely let down by Thoma’s staging. It offers neither ‘fidelity’, whatever that slippery concept might mean, nor the courage to try something new and to pursue its conclusions; the incoherence is its ultimate problem. Where the work presents a myriad of possibilities, the production closes them down, without offering anything satisfying in their stead. And if that makes me of the Composer’s party, so be it. Ultimately, we all know that, though Strauss plays his games of masks at least as cleverly here as anywhere else, the moment when they drop, when we hear his voice, is the Composer’s ‘Musik ist eine heilige Kunst...’. All of us, it would seem, except Thoma.

Dido and Aeneas/The Lighthouse, Royal Academy Opera, 16 May 2013

2013-05-17T23:18:00.000+01:00

Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Dido – Sarah Shorter

Belinda – Sónia Grané
Second Woman – Helen Bailey
Sorceress – Rozanna Madylus
First Witch – Tereza Gevorgyan
Second Witch – Irina Loskova
Spirit – Rosalind Coad
Aeneas – Samuel Pantcheff
Sailor – Ross Scanlon

Sandy, Officer 1 – Iain Milne

Blazes, Officer 2 – Samuel Queen
Arthur. Officer 3, Voice of the Cards – Andri Björn Róbertsson

John Ramster (director)

Jake Wiltshire (lighting)
Patrick Doyle (costumes)

Chorus

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Iain Ledingham, Lionel Friend (conductors)

Samuel Queen (Blazes), Andri Björn Róbertsson (Arthur) and Iain Milne (Sandy).
Pictures © Royal Academy of Music, May 2013

Not the most obvious of pairings, perhaps: Dido and Aeneas and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse. One can certainly find connections if one tries, as director John Ramster valiantly did in his director’s note, especially with respect to the role of Fate. And of course one can make connections between most things if so inclined, when placed together. This, however, seemed more like an evening of two halves.

The performance of The Lighthouse was spectacularly good, at least a match for the recent English Touring Opera production, and arguably still more theatrically gripping. (How fortunate we are to have had two stagings in close succession!) There was not a great deal in the way of scenery; much was done with Jake Wiltshire’s brilliant – at some points, literally so – lighting, by turns suggestive of the lighthouse itself, the red eyes of the Beast, and much more. Ramster and his colleagues engendered a terrifying sense of claustrophobia and whatever horror – production, like opera, leaves matters tantalisingly unclear – it is that actually takes place. The sheer hell of being cooped up together, the promise of release having clearly been frustrated more than once, is conveyed viscerally, more by the characters’ interaction than anything external, and thus all the more powerful for it.

For that, of course, the three singers should claim a great deal of credit. Andri Björn Róbertsson struck Calvinistic terror into the heart as the hypocritical fundamentalist, Sandy. From the moment of saying grace, his sonorous deep bass, combined with charismatic stage presence, had one thinking of a perverted (anti-)Christ figure. His physical excitement during Blazes’ song, offered attempted release in more than one sense. Samuel Queen and Iain Milne presented a nicely ambiguous Blazes and Sandy, quite as impressive as actors as singers. Lionel Friend’s direction of the Royal Academy Sinfonia was quite beyond reproach; after a lacklustre showing in the first half (about which, more below), the orchestra sounded rejuvenated: precise, sardonic, and at times overpowering. The knife-edge balance between fatalism and human agency on stage was replicated, indeed engendered, in the pit. Quite outstanding!

What a difference a conductor makes, for Iain Ledingham’s direction of the same orchestra in Dido and Aeneas had been disappointing. Adopting that strange practice of having modern strings simply eschew vibrato, as if that somehow were enough to qualify as an ‘authentic’ performance, whatever that might be, Ledingham set the tone for what was to follow in the Overture: listless, hard-driven, and with sonority redolent of a school orchestra. (It was certainly not in any sense the players’ fault, as The Lighthouse demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.) If only Friend had conducted both. Vocal performances were less impressive too, or rather they were in the title roles. After a shaky start, Sarah Shorter recovered well, but was so let down by Ledingham’s conducting that it was difficult to reach any proper judgement. Samuel Pantcheff sounded out of sorts as Aeneas; maybe he was under the weather. Not for the first time, though, Sónia Grané shone, this time as a mellifluous Belinda. Rozanna Madylus made for a nicely malign Sorceress, ably supported by weirdly snarling witches, Tereza Gevorgyan and Irina Loskova. Ross Scanlon almost threatened to steal the show as a wickedly camp Sailor.

Ramster’s staging of Purcell’s masterpiece presented a similar meeting between camp and stylisation, perhaps strongest in the choreographed dances. Maybe that match was an expression of his ideas concerning Fate; it would make a good deal of ‘Baroque’ sense on paper. However, I could not help but agree with my companion’s observation when, slightly ruing her inability to watch a Eurovision semi-final, she said that it was actually all to be seen here. Certainly the strange portrayal of the underwear-flashing witches did not seem so very distant from what one might have imagined unfolding in Malmö at the same time. Despite some fine offstage choral singing, I felt strangely unmoved by what should be one of the most tragic of all operatic final scenes. (‘Tristan und Isolde in a pint-pot’, was Raymond Leppard’s wonderful description of the opera.) No matter: it would have been worth travelling a long way for a performance such as we heard of The Lighthouse.

'My favourite album'

2013-05-12T21:14:00.003+01:00

Evan Tucker is running a series on his wonderful blog. (Any of you who do not know it already should remedy that straight away). It occurred to me that some readers might be interested in my contribution, for which please click here; for Evan's own contribution, click here.

Wozzeck, English National Opera, 11 May 2013

2013-05-12T11:04:00.001+01:00

The Coliseum

(sung in English)

Wozzeck – Leigh Melrose
Marie – Sara Jakubiak
Captain – Tom Randle
Doctor – James Morris
Drum Major – Bryan Register
Andres – Adrian Dwyer
Margret – Claire Presland
First Apprentice – Andrew Greenan
Second Apprentice – James Cleverton
Madman – Peter van Hulle
Marie’s Child – Harry Polden

Carrie Cracknell (director)
Ann Yee (choreography)
Tom Scutt (set designs)
Oliver Townsend, Naomi Wilkinson (costumes)
Jon Clarke (lighting)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Handley)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

If a production, and I include musical as well as staging elements here, has one more strongly confirmed in one’s judgement that Wozzeck is not only the greatest opera of the twentieth century but one of the greatest from any century, then it has accomplished its principal goal admirably. The first night of ENO’s new production unquestionably achieved that, reminding one yet again how paltry most operas, whenever they were written, seem when placed anywhere near Berg’s shattering drama. Tears certainly came to this reviewer’s eyes more than once during the third act, only to be superseded by a numb sense of utter horror at the child’s future prospects, or rather lack thereof, in the final scene as music and drama so chillingly came to their celebrated halt: no conclusion, simply the most abject desolation.

Carrie Cracknell’s contemporary – to us – production may not encompass everything suggested by Berg’s work, but most sensible people would agree that a single interpretation need not; it is perfectly possible to concentrate upon certain ideas, and to leave others for another time. There may be losses entailed in that course of action – for me, the Doctor’s experiments sat somewhat oddly, some might even say nonsensically, with the rest of the action – but there will be gains too. We are in a barracks town, suffering from disorder both social and, in Wozzeck’s own case, post-traumatic. The wretched vision – is it only his? Or is it real? – of a coffin draped in the Union flag, its pallbearers, and a soldier in action hammers home the point (some might say a little too heavily, but I was won over). The squalor of Marie’s council flat tells its own tale, as does the centrality, somehow greater than one generally senses, of the tavern to this town’s horrible, hopeless life. Though not a barracks town, and Aldershot or somewhere might have been a better example, something about the portrayal suggested a certain, perhaps rather dated, view of a northern city such as Hull.

The odd thing about Wozzeck, set against such a backdrop, is that he seems less ill, more philosopher. There is of course an element of that in the opera in any case, but it is brought out more strongly here. Madness gives way to ‘Hamlet in Hull’, who eventually resolves, with a greater degree of calculation than one might expect, to kill Marie and then himself; we seem more to be in the realm of EastEnders perhaps, as Marie’s flat floods – there is no lake as such – and turns partly red. One also senses more strongly than usual that this is one level the story of a crime, explicable yes, but still a murder, one that led, of course, to a celebrated trial. (The city museum in Leipzig to this day has a fascinating section of its permanent exhibition on the original case as well as Büchner and Berg.) Violence hits home too, whether that of Wozzeck’s crime, that of the Drum-Major’s vile abuse of him, or that simply endemic to society both particular and general.

Designs are properly ghastly, enhancing claustrophobia and the town’s desolate tackiness. The former quality hits home all the more strongly given the excellent decision to have all locations present on stage at once, sometimes used and/or lit, sometimes not; there is no escape from what becomes very much a community drama in the most negative sense. There is perhaps a sense that this was conceived more as a piece of spoken theatre, or at least closer to that tradition than might in principle be ideal, but on those terms, it works very well, Richard Stokes’s exemplary translation contributing powerfully to the drama, without drawing undue attention to itself.

I was fascinated by Edward Gardner’s conducting of the score. Gardner’s method is certainly not what I have become accustomed to, nor what I am ultimately likely to favour, but the well-nigh neo-Classical bent imparted to Berg’s closed forms brought revelations of its own. Rarely if ever can the inner workings, the ‘constructed’ quality, of Berg’s score have been lain so bare. The ENO Orchestra, a very few, quite forgivable, slips aside, followed his direction admirably indeed. There was certainly hyper-Romantic, expressionistic loss, especially earlier on, yet the final Interlude retained most of its horrifying impact; at last, it seemed, there was opportunity properly to cut loose. As an additional standpoint, quite distinct from those offered by great interpreters such as Abbado, Boulez, Böhm, and Barenboim, this musical narrative of mechanisation briefly wrenched into human subjectivity, if only in death, had me thinking in various ways not only about the score but about the drama as a whole.

Leigh Melrose made a wonderfully human hero, as starkly opposed to such mechanisation as to the barbarity of his social conditions. The aforementioned ‘Hamlet’ quality of philosophising and indecision was at least as much his accomplishment as the production’s, not quite so ‘intellectual’ as Fischer-Dieskau’s controversial portrayal, but complex in a different and not entirely unrelated fashon. Marie is a very difficult role to bring off convincingly; ideally, one needs to be Waltraud Meier, but what to do if one is not? Too much of the whore and not enough of the angel, or the other way around? Sara Jakubiak managed the tricky balance very well, soaring moments of radiance pitted against the grime of quotidian existence. Tom Randle was, as usual, excellent beyond the call of duty as the Captain, he and James Morris as the Doctor offering exemplary clarity of line and diction, as well as fully inhabiting their flawed characters. (We should, of course, remember that their flaws are in large part also to be attributed to the viciousness of society; Wozzeck and Marie are not the only victims.) Bryan Register’s thuggish Drum Major horrified in the best sense, whilst Adrian Dwyer and Clare Presland offered finely-etched portrayals of the ‘other’, surviving couple, Andres (perhaps his wheelchair proved a cliché too far?) and Margret. Presland’s crazed, dramatically truthful moment in the tavern limelight proved a powerful moment in its own right, presaging Wozzeck’s deeds yet also offering an alternative. Peter van Hulle offered another example of truth in madness, the hallowed tradition of the Fool cast in new light. Harry Polden – how one felt for him, cowed under Marie’s kitchen table as she entertained the Drum Major in her off-stage bedroom! – and the other children had us shiver, shudder, turn in righteous anger against the wickedness of a society, our society, which we know will perpetrate the same horrors upon them. Who cares? Certainly not our political class; yet do we? Truly? Wir arme Leut’...

Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein

2013-05-10T17:46:00.001+01:00

I wish I could begin to understand the hysterical cries from people who, though not having seen a staging of an opera or indeed of anything else, consider it so offensive that they demand - in this case, successfully - that it be withdrawn. Like them, I am in no position to offer any sort of criticism of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein's production of Tannhäuser; I have not seen it and now it looks as though I never shall. What little information has come my way from reports is insufficent to enable any of us meaningfully to engage with the staging, though what I have heard concerning the director's Konzept strikes me as far from intrinsically absurd. I spend a silly amount of my time and energy fighting lazy, ignorant connections being posted between Wagner and National Socialism, but to inform a staging of one of his dramas with themes drawn from later - for that matter, contemporary or earlier - German history - does not seem to me questionable or even controversial.

Of course the Third Reich and the Holocaust are, rightly, sensitive topics. Yet, bizarrely, there often seems to be far greater controversy when they are interrogated than when - sickly, to my mind - they are treated as material for mere 'entertainment'. There was often particularly shrill criticism of a fascinating staging I saw at the Edinburgh Festival from the Cologne Opera of Strauss's Capriccio; I found it especially thought-provoking, but doubtless it enraged those only wished to see 'pretty' frocks, rather than to ask about the compromises Strauss and German culture engaged with, let alone to interrograte themselves. Again, I do not know into which category - interrogative, entertainment, or perhaps some other - Burkhard C Korminski's production fell, thoigh so far as I can discern from reports, there appears at least to be an element of the former. It may well have turned out to be needlessly 'controversial', unmusical, or all manner of other bad things; only those who have seen and thought about it are in any position to know, and they of course may have their minds clouded too. Nevertheless much of the public laps up with quasi-pornographic relish endless documentaries, films, popular histories about the Third Reich and Hitler in particular as if there were no tomorrow. Moreover, arrogantly uninformed productions - 'I could have approached The Damnation of Faust by reading a great deal about Berlioz but I avoided that' -such as Terry Gilliam's Damnation of Faust treat the Third Reich as little more than fodder for theatrical spectacle and are lauded for it. I thought Gilliam's production truly dreadful, indeed offensive, but it never occurred to me to agitate for the English National Opera to shut it down; nor, so far as I am aware, did it occur to anyone else to do so. Likewise, the exit of Elisabeth into a gas chamber in Sebastian Baumgartner's Bayreuth Tannhäuser struck me and many others as offensive, largely on account of its gratuity; it seemed quite unmotivated in what was in any case a highly arbitrary, indeed quite incoherent, production. People have every justification, every right, to discuss any staging, though it helps of course if one has actually seen it, but to seek to silence those with opposing standpoints?

So what was different on this occasion? That genuinely puzzles me. Part of the answer may lie, not in the circumstances of this production, but in an increasingly noisy, though, it would seem, for the most part numerically insignificant, faction amongst opera audiences and, still more, amongst people who - yes, I have to plead guilty here! - spend too much time talking about opera and music on the Internet. Their enemy is something they call either Regietheater or, still worse, 'Eurotrash'. (The latter seems to be originally an American term, though it is no longer confined to the other side of the Atlantic, and exhibits a curious, some might say imperialist. claim to 'ownership', or at least to 'protection', of an artistic phenomenon from another culture.) Lazy phrases such as 'the composer's intentions' - some peddlers seem even to be unaware that Wagner was highly unusual in writing his own poems, and that the librettist might actually deserve some consideration - or Werktreue are angrily chanted with all the self-reinforcing fervour of a self-selecting single-issue lobby, or even a quasi-religious sect. Drama goes for little, or nothing, in this world; instead, its heralds not only desire but demand a series of set and costume designs that monumentalise the worst taste of the 1950s. There were wonderful productions during the 1950s, so far as we can tell, just as there have been terrible productions, 'traditional' and 'radical', during the early twenty-first century. Yet the success of a production goes far beyond its designs; one can tell very little from a photograph or two, which is all most protestors have had to go on, and indeed one may be entirely misled by a decontextualised image.

I may be entirely wrong about this, and hope that I am, but it seems that the present debacle has more to do with an opportunistic attempt to berate a German theatre - German opera houses tend, for various reasons, to be more open to experiment than their British, let alone American, counterparts -through exploitation of the very historical phenomena about which the protestors claim to protest. It may not have been consciously designed as such, for fanatical fervour tends not to operate in that way; 'the cause', however incoherent, becomes internalised. One of the functions, indeed imperatives, of great art is to try to liberate us from such a Nietzschean 'herd mentality'. Yet uninformed insistence that 'unwholesome', 'degenerate', art must be eradicated, in order to 'protect' that which is 'good' and 'true': have we not heard such claims somewhere before?

Pike/Arensky CO/Kunhardt - Ravel, Couperin, and Beethoven, 7 May 2013

2013-05-07T22:26:00.002+01:00

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Ravel – Le Tombeau de Couperin
Couperin – Concerts royaux (excerpts)
Beethoven – Violin Concerto in D major, op.61

Jennifer Pike (violin)

Arensky Chamber Orchestra

William Kunhardt (conductor)

Matthew Sharp (actor)

Simon Gethin Thomas (lighting)

It is an obvious thing to do, or at least one might hope it would be, to perform Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin with music from Couperin’s Concerts royaux; the problem is that to do so nowadays is to take on the ‘authenticity’ Taliban, a task which many, in the teeth of such vociferous hostility, have decided is no longer worth it. They are wrong, yet one can understand the reasons for their wariness. After all, even Pierre Boulez, not a stranger to controversy, once ruefully remarked, concerning Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, ‘... even as I was making my way forward, until about 1978, the specialists were simultaneously taking over. They were starting to say, “If they’re not played in the true baroque manner, with baroque instruments, it’s useless to play them any other way.” Then one isn’t going to play them at all.’ One would have thought it axiomatic that, in Boulez’s words, ‘A musician approaching an eighteenth-century work after playing something from the twentieth would have a much broader view than these eighteenth-century specialists who end up locking themselves in an antique armoire.’ Alas it has taken longer than anyone, perhaps even Adorno, might have feared to escape the armoire, a state of affairs compounded by the culture industry’s compartmentalisation of ‘period’ music as something akin to so-called ‘costume drama’. Three cheers, then, to the Arensky Chamber Orchestra, already having made quite a name for itself in terms of bold programming and bold presentation, for defying the armoire fatwas!

Anyway, irrespective of inclement performing conditions, the concert’s the thing. Interspersing movements from the first, third, and fourth Concerts royaux with those from Le Tombeau de Couperin proved an inspired choice. The ‘Prélude’ was swift, fleeting even, perhaps a reflection of the relatively small forces (strings 6.5.4.4.2) but perhaps not. The sharp attack and unanimity I have noted on previous occasions again proved a hallmark of the ACO’s excellent ensemble. William Kunhardt conducted without the score (though he would use one for Beethoven.) Urgency was perhaps underlined by the players’ standing to play (save for cellos and basses). The ‘Prélude’ from the Third Couperin suite was taken, as indeed were all the Couperin excerpts, with darkened lighting, focused upon the soloists, a chamber rather than orchestral approach having been decided upon. It was a good choice to follow the Ravel, not least on account of the continuity of oboe-playing (here, beguilingly played by Johnny Roberts). Strings, who had definitely been ‘accompanying’, came into their own in the ensuing ‘Forlane’ from the fourth Concert royal. Rhythms were nicely turned throughout. Ravel’s ‘Forlane’ was characterised by freshness, by a spring in its step, rhythmic alertness apparently ‘carried over’ from its Couperin predecessor. The ‘Menuet’ was more relaxed, indeed affectionate, Kunhardt differentiating it nicely from the previous dance. Harmonic echoes of, for instance, the Pavane pour une infante défunte were allowed to speak; rubato was well judged. There was a true sense of a world – ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’ – lost. The ‘Menuet en trio’ from Couperin’s first suite had a good degree of give-and-take between parts; violin, flute, and cello were equal partners in a graceful reading. Strings again played alone in the ‘Rigaudon’ from the fourth: a catchy reading, somewhat akin to courtlier Purcell, with especially fine articulation from Charlotte Maclet’s violin. Ravel’s own ‘Rigaudon’ perhaps suffered a little from less-than-ideal balance, the brass somewhat dominating the small orchestra. Otherwise, it was a lively account, with welcome hints of greater languor in the central section.

Beethoven’s Violin Concerto followed the interval: a contrast rather than a connection, but no less welcome for that. Actor Matthew Sharp, dressed as Beethoven, seated at a desk, read the ever-moving Heiligenstadt Testament (in translation), after which Jennifer Pike, a former BBC Young Musician of the Year, joined the orchestra onstage. Wind instruments were naturally more prominent in a small orchestral performance than they would have been with a full symphony orchestra, and very good they were too. But there was, from the outset, a febrile intensity to the string playing too. Kunhardt led a relatively swift, but never hard-driven, performance of the first movement, Pike proving a bright- and clean-toned soloist, quite ready to yield where necessary. Ensemble was again excellent throughout. If the soloist’s intonation were not always perfect, nor were any such shortcomings other than minor. Certainly, taken as a whole there was a proper sense of the goodness of composer and music, as heard in the Testament, and anyone who does not regard Beethoven’s music as concerned with ethics has no business performing it. Small string forces emphasised the kinship of the slow movement with chamber music, poised in this case not so very far away from the Beethoven of the string quartets, whilst woodwind offered a quickening sense of the world of the outdoor serenade. Pike’s silvery tone brought the music closer to Mendelssohn than one often hears. The transition to the finale was very well handled by conductor and orchestra alike; that movement brought with it more than a faint echo of the Mozartian ‘hunting’ finale, more ebullient than often, and rather winningly so. Horns and other wind unquestionably sounded in their element.

Arditti Quartet, JACK Quartet - Clarke, Mincek, Pelzel, and Lanza, 6 May 2013

2013-05-07T09:30:00.001+01:00

Wigmore Hall

James Clarke – 2012-S, for two string quartets (2012, British premiere)

Alex Mincek – String Quartet no.3, ‘lift – tilt – filter – split’ (2009-10, London premiere)
Michael Pelzel - ... vers le vent ... (2010, British premiere)
Mauro Lanza – Der Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten, for eight strings (2012, British premiere)

Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlhers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)

Christopher Otto, Ari Streisfeld (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)
Kevin McFarland (cello)

A hurricane had prevented the Arditti Quartet and the JACK Quartet from coming together in November to present these two British premieres from James Clarke and Mauro Lanza. The Ardittis had nevertheless presented a programme of four quartets, one of them as shockingly old as to date from 2002-3, again a Clarke work, his first string quartet. Now we heard the postponed premieres, plus two more: Alex Mincek’s third string quartet (a London premiere, anyway) and Michael Pelzel’s ... vers le vent ....

Clarke’s 2012-S is written for two string quartets rather than a string octet, the point being the relationship between the two quartets, who sometimes play together, but at others pass material between each other, transform it, or, in the composer’s term, ‘contradict’ it. The quartets might, for instance, play at slightly different speeds, ‘all ... precisely written and timed’. Effort seems very much part of the sound – and the meaning? There is real violence in the conversation, and yet, even if at some remove, the quartet convention of ‘conversation’ seems to remain – as it did in this fine performance. Polyphony, even cacophony, is part of the extremity, and yet a sense of unity remains, almost akin to older homophony, and not only in the lengthy sustaining chords whose obvious contrast lies with much faster material.

Alex Mincek’s third quartet, ‘lift – tilt – filter – split’, concerns itself at one level with representation, in the composer’s words, of ‘physical shape, tactility, and movement’, the listener being permitted ‘to bounce back and forth from the recognition of the unique parts and the undifferentiated whole’. Near, though not total, identity, may often be found between one phrase and the next, but change, be it in ‘composite rhythm’, timbre, pitch, and register content, nevertheless occurs; there is not the slightest sense of static. Insofar as I was able to tell, the JACK Quartet captured that process very well indeed, proving fine advocates for the work. The performance opened as if on a coiled spring, with tight rhythmic focus and attack. Quasi-echoes in harmonics offered a contrasting soundworld, as did the scurrying of high violins, perhaps echoing, if only accidentally, certain string writing of Schoenberg, which one might trace back at least as far as Verklärte Nacht. There was, in what seemed to me a clever piece of programming, a continued yet different sense of Either/Or – and not just on account of Kierkegaard’s bicentenary, celebrated the day previously. It may not be uncommon for a quartet, or indeed for chamber music more generally, to conclude by disappearing, as it were, into the ether, but this provides a spellbinding example.

Michael Pelzel’s string quartet, ... vers le vent..., was performed by the Ardittis. In three movements, it is perhaps in some senses more ‘traditional’. According to Pelzel, the first movement is intended to depart from the idea of ‘a passacaglia on a rhythmic ground with figurative variations, steadily digressing from its original idea until culminating in a homophonic line with great energetic intensity.’ There was certainly that sense of departure in the performance we heard, indeed from the very opening, viola answered by cello. The second movement offered a ‘frozen’ opening, vertiginous harmonics melting to a certain degree thereafter; Pelzel thinks of it as similar to ‘a film in which different narratives unfold simultaneously,’ but also draws attention to its role as something of a slow introduction to the third movement, ‘a scintillating, filigree and virtuoso “Toccata volubile”.’ The quality of a perpetuum mobile in contemporary terms was one that struck me before having seen the composer’s notes. There was, both in work and performance, perhaps even something of the quality of a latter-day Haydn, or better Bartók, finale: tradition present, but reimagined.

Both quartets came together for the British premiere of Mauro Lanza’s Der Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten, inspired in some sense by Breugel’s depiction of the battle between feasting and fasting, which is broadened, as Lanza points out, to a conflict between ‘meat and fish ..., winter and spring, tavern and church, whose literary pendant can be the battle between [the monster] Quaresmeprenant and the army of sausages in Rabelais’s Quart Livre.’ Punctuating chimes – I could see neither where they were, nor who sounded them – and more than a little reminiscence, especially early on, from Lanza’s work with electronics at IRCAM made their presence felt. So did a slow sense of progression, more so, at least to my ears, than the dualism signalled in the title, which would certainly have provided continuity with works in the first half. I am sure the problem was mine, but confess that I did not find the work, however excellently performed, as compelling as its title might have suggested, at least until its rather magical coda-like conclusion, more delicate, fragile even. A second hearing would doubtless reveal more of the dialectic to which the composer appeals.

Sir Colin Davis: some personal highlights

2013-05-06T01:15:00.001+01:00

A touching documentary (click here) will be available until Friday. Thoughtful, profound, without intellectualising, this is the Sir Colin Davis we knew and loved, above all through his music-making. Haunted by death but not afraid of it, it is the Davis we heard in so many of his later performances. It also has some wonderful footage of Sir Colin's earlier career, including a performance of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet.

It is a difficult, indeed impossible, task, but I thought I should select five great live performances, not necessarily 'the greatest', if such a thing should exist, but which nevertheless touched me greatly and whose memory continues to do so. I have restricted myself to those about which I have written here, so we are dealing only with the period 2007-12. You may click on the titles to read the full reviews. (Numerical position in the list indicates nothing.)

Berlioz Requiem

Not quite his final performance, but one of the last, and the last time I heard him. The orchestra and chorus who adored him, the London Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Chorus, could not have done more. It was fitting, no doubt, that it should be with the composer for whom he had done far more than anyone else, Berlioz, that I should bid Davis farewell. At the time, I concluded (and as I sad, the full review may be read by clicking on the title): 'Cyclic completion, which if not exactly symphonic is not entirely un-symphonic, brought a satisfaction which, if not of the nature of a peace that passes all understanding, nevertheless passed beyond mere understanding. We heard the wisdom and cogency of a performance that seemed to sum up the devotion of a career – except that, nowadays, whenever one thinks that Sir Colin has crowned that extraordinary career, one is likely to experience a subsequent coronation a month or so later.' Though it was to prove a final coronation, what a coronation!

Beethoven Missa Solemnis

With the same forces, but at the Proms rather than in St Paul's Cathedral for the City of London Festival, this was a performance of the previous year every bit as profound, as granitic, as ready to wrestle with the angels, whoever they were. Again, this was a conductor of wisdom looking death - and Beethoven - squarely in the face and communicating the consequences. I know of no performance since Klemperer - certainly not the vaunted Bernstein, or indeed Karajan - who came so close to unlocking the secrets of this most enigmatic and perhaps greatest of all Beethoven's works. If anything, and if only on account of the work itself, it was a still more astounding performance than that of the Berlioz. Sir Colin had a point when, in the aforementioned documentary, he described this as the last great Mass (Requiem Masses being another matter). Whatever one thinks of that claim, he conducted it as if it were, and with all the consequences to which such a final reckoning with the Almighty might lay claim.

Haydn, The Creation

This oratorio will always have a very special place in my heart, not only because it - along with The Seasons - was the subject of what I count as my first piece of academic work, my third-year undergraduate dissertation. Its combination of joy, sublimity, and profound humanity would have seemed made for Davis, and so it was, though this seems - rather surprisingly - to have been the first time he had conducted the work. Once again, the LSO and LSC did him proud, even if the solo singing were patchier. Indeed, I thought then, and continue to do so, that even the legendary Karajan Berlin recording had almost met its match here. If Karajan's soloists will surely always have the edge, orchestra, chorus, and perhaps even conductor may well have excelled further at the Barbican. At any rate, it was a model performance, seemingly effortlessly variegated and yet unquestionably sure of divine - and human - purpose.

Così fan tutte

Mozart's music was of course Davis's greatest love, as it is mine. This was quite simply a performance such as I could never have dared think I should hear. In an age tormented by absurd ideas of 'authenticity', about which he would from time to time most trenchantly express his views, it had become almost unheard of to hear Mozart treated as music, let alone both to resound so profoundly and to ravish the senses so beautifully and yet so cruelly. In Mozart's most perfect opera, so ludicrously misunderstood by many from at least Beethoven onwards, one should experience, yet rarely does, a reckoning with the world's darkness that is both tragic and anything but. The experience became all the more painful given the contrast with Jonathan Miller's tawdry, anti-Mozartian production; Sir Colin's and Mozart's victory somehow became all the more sweetly, deliciously, and yes, tragically ambivalent.

Benvenuto Cellini

Not quite his Berlioz operatic swansong, for I should later hear a wonderful Royal Academy Beatrice and Benedict, this was a performance that almost vied with the stunning 2000 Proms account of The Trojans. (That would certainly have been included, had I been writing at the time.) Again on the home soil of the Barbican with the LSO and LSC, Sir Colin communicated, relished Berlioz's mercurial vision as scintillatingly as anyone can ever have done - the contrast with a hard-driven, largely uncomprehending performance I should hear soon after from Valery Gergiev was telling - but form was of equal importance. As I wrote at the time, 'The authority with which he approached the score was evident from the first to the last bar, and the Overture set the scene for both work and performance. Orchestral weight and lightness of touch stood in perfect equilibrium. There was never any question, given the conductor's long experience with this work and with Berlioz's œuvre as a whole, that he knew precisely where he was going and that every episode would fall precisely into its allotted place.' If that makes the performance sound dull, then I have failed, and I fear that I have. For there was here, as in the performances above, an apparently straightforward 'rightness' to the performance, which opened up vistas not for a physical stage, but for a concert-performance theatre of the imagination. And for Berlioz, imagination is everything.

Keller Quartet - Bach, Art of Fugue, 1 May 2013

2013-05-03T14:15:00.001+01:00

Hall One, Kings Place

Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080

András Keller, Zsófia Környei (violins)

Zoltán Gál (viola)
Judit Szabó (cello)

How to perform The Art of Fugue? Period zealots sound even more ridiculous here than usual when they foam at the mouth concerning their beloved ‘authenticke’ practices, entirely missing the point of a work almost beyond performance, which nevertheless comes to life as much as in the performative act and its reception as in reading of the score. Post-Romantics that we are – and those who rebel, only end up being all the more so – we love the idea of an almost Platonic Idea of the artwork; yet we want and need to hear it. The piano works very well; the best performance I have yet heard came in a superlative Wigmore Hall recital from Konstantin Lifschitz. Orchestral renditions have their place too; Hermann Scherchen demands to be heard. In an otherwise highly questionable programme note – taken, it seems, from the Keller Quartet’s ECM recording – by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, the writer, enthusiastic, as he doubtless had to be. for performance by string quartet nevertheless sounded a note of caution, in that the formation is to our ears is so strongly associated with Classical-Romantic repertoire from Haydn onwards. Yet the quartet offers notable advantages in terms of clarity; moreover, associations with later music, even later forms, offer their own advantages.

It seems that the Keller Quartet’s relative – though far from total – abstinence from vibrato may be understood in this light. (I wonder what they do when pairing Bach with Kurtág: is contrast intended, does Bach acquire a more Kurtág-like sound, or does Kurtág veer towards the low-vibrato end of the scale?) At any rate, the initial sound took some getting used to, though that process was certainly assisted, even within Contrapunctus I, by the leavening of tone, especially in first violin flourishes from András Keller, by a more generous approach. Taken as a whole, the fugue was considerably but not exaggeratedly inflected: a compromise perhaps, between allegedly ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, but with virtues of its own. The second and fourth fugues, being performed considerably quicker, more rhythmically propulsive, stood in contrast to the first and third, offering variety as well as continuity. Contrapunctus III benefited from further loosening of the low-vibrato noose, followed winningly by a more dance-like Contrapunctus IV. The opening second violin entry of Contrapunctus V managed to impress upon us that this might in some ways be considered a new section of the work: something, doubtless, to do with the fact that the subject is first heard in the second voice, but not only that. ‘Style’ of course played a part in performance of its successor: ‘Contrapunctus VI, a 4, in Stylo Francese’. Characterisation and differentiation convinced; they were certainly present but not overriding, not a substitute for the true musical substance in harmony and counterpoint. Rhythm propelled rather than put on a display. Harmonic shifts in the eighth fugue seemed, quite winningly, to offer ready assimilation into the ‘string quartet tradition’ from which the Kellers had earlier somewhat distanced themselves – ironically, perhaps, given that the second violin remained silent for this Contrapuntus a 3. Perhaps, bearing Mozart in mind, it was actually the string trio that was more operative as an idea, conscious or otherwise. The kinetic energy of Contrapunctus IX brought late Beethoven, if still at something of a remove, to mind. (We know that Beethoven studied this particular work. Indeed, we can surely hear that he did.)

An interval separated the ninth and tenth fugues. Contrapunctus XI again offered links with quartet tradition, ‘progressive’ in an almost Classically developmental sense. Sinuous chromaticism again could not help but make one think of Mozart, whilst well-nigh motivic diminution rivalled, indeed presaged, Beethoven. Canons, partly through rhythm but also through their two-part texture (first violin and cello), brought Bach’s English Suites and Inventions to mind, though their particular character remained. Utterly satisfying in musical terms, one simply wished for them to go on and on – as, in a sense, prophetic of the post-war serialism of Boulez and Stockhausen, they well might. (Not for nothing did Boulez present this very work in his Domaine musical concerts.) It was unclear to me why the third canon marked a return to relative astringency of tone, but its working out suggested a progressive performative choice; that is, greater warmth infused the notes as time went on. Whole epochs of music seemed to resound through the final movement; the golden ages of polyphony summoned before us, as present as Bach’s incalculable legacy to his successors. The appearance of the BACH motif and the ending in midstream (no chorale, let alone completion) turned our attention to the more recent past, to Schoenberg (not least his Op.31 Variations) and indeed to the modernist fragment, whether unfinished (Moses und Aron) or a work that so chillingly stops rather than ends (Wozzeck). Sometimes one wonders why anyone bothered to compose music after Bach; then one hears the imperative to do just that.

For May Day: Eisler's Lied der Komintern

2013-05-01T14:40:00.000+01:00

La bohème, English National Opera, 29 April 2013

2013-05-01T12:45:00.002+01:00

The Coliseum

Marcello – Richard Burkhard

Rodlofo – Gwyn Hughes Jones
Colline – Andrew Craig Brown
Schaunard – Duncan Rock
Benoit, Alcindoro – Simon Butteriss
Mimì – Kate Valentine
Parpignol – Philip Daggett
Musetta – Angel Blue
Policeman – Paul Sheehan
Foreman – Andrew Tinkler

Jonathan Miller (director)

Natascha Metherell (revival director)
Isabella Bywater (designs)
Jean Kalman, Kevin Sleep (lighting). Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Genevieve Ellis)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Oleg Caetani (conductor)

This second revival of Jonathan Miller’s La bohème was the first time I had caught the production. Miller has often been over-praised, particularly by those ‘of a certain age’, apparently unaware or unwilling to accept that the world has moved on from the 1960s of their youth; indeed, Miller’s Royal Opera Così fan tutte is not simply bad, but one of the most objectionable stagings I have seen of anything. This Bohème, whilst hardly groundbreaking, does its job reasonably enough. For some reason, the action is updated to the Paris of the 1930s. Beyond imparting a certain cinematic quality – though not necessarily nearly so much as Miller and his designer, Isabella Bywater seem to think it does – it is not clear what is gained, but nor for that matter is a great deal lost. An individual’s fondness for the photography of George Brassaï does not in itself seem to me justification for a production, but anyway... The characters are for well directed on stage, for which revival director, Natascha Metherell should doubtless receive much of the credit. (Both Metherell and Miller appeared on stage to take a bow.) Occasionally, I wondered whether the action were a little too prey to domestification of the wrong way; the meeting between Rodolfo and Mimì is decidedly low-key, more akin to a neighbourhood watch meeting than an ignition of passion. However, the selfishness of ‘Bohemian’ youth comes across at least as strongly as I can recall upon other occasions: are not these boys to some extent playing at poverty, whilst Mimì’s suffering is the real thing?

Described in the publicity blurb as a ‘cast of young British talent’, that is for the most part what it is. I have little patience with those who castigate ENO – or Covent Garden, for that matter – for ‘failing to promote British artists’. The arts world has, let us be grateful, yet to capitulate to the insidious yet hysterical nationalism pervading much of our political class and media. What we want are singers, artists in general, who are good, and preferably more than that. With the exception of Gwyn Hughes Jones, we did pretty well. Though his Rodolfo improved somewhat during the third and fourth acts, and was not without sensitivity, there was too much that was simply crude, almost an allegedly ‘Italianate’ parody, or strangely faceless. The vacuum extended to stage presence too; it would have been well-nigh impossible to believe in him as a Romantic lead. Kate Valentine’s Mimì, on the other hand, was a credit to her and to ENO. Nobility of spirit was allied to sterling, necessary musical values of phrasing and tonal variegation. It was a delight to make the acquaintance of the charismatic American singer, the splendidly named Angel Blue (an exception in terms of nationality, but certainly not quality). She sang as well as she acted, holding the stage without effort, imparting both ‘artistic’ superiority to Musetta as singer and, increasingly, warm humanity to her as woman. Richard Burkhard’s Marcello impressed too, as did the excellently sung – and acted – Colline of Andrew Craig Brown and Schaunard of Duncan Rock. It was a pity that Simon Butteriss over-acted – ‘silly voice’ rather than expression of the text through singing – in the role of Benoit; maybe he was doing so under orders. A greater pity was the banality of Amanda Holden’s translation; making Puccini sound satisfactory in English is not the easiest of tasks, but too often, a tin ear revealed itself in the straightforward incompatibility of words and vocal line.

Oleg Caetani made a very welcome return to the Coliseum. His direction of the ENO Orchestra was splendid, rich in tone – sometimes, a little more, alla Daniele Gatti, would have been appreciated there, but then Gatti, last summer, had the Vienna Philharmonic – but above all, dramatically alert. Temptations to linger, to sentimentalise, were eschewed, without draining the drama of its lifeblood. Wagnerisms – I noticed some especially Tristan-esque progressions – and modernisms were not necessarily underlined, yet, given Caetani’s ear for balance and line, caught one’s ear nevertheless. I should love one day to hear a properly modernistic Bohème – or Tosca. This was not it, but refusal to play to the gallery, and underlining of solid, yet certainly not stolid, musical virtues proved a great relief for a work in which superficial gloss can all too readily hold sway. Choral singing and direction of the chorus also proved estimable throughout.

Hannigan/LPO/Jurowski: Webern, Berg, Bartók, and Martinů, 27 April 2013

2013-04-28T12:27:00.000+01:00

Royal Festival Hall

Webern – Variations for Orchestra, op.30

Berg – Lulu-Suite
Bartók – Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
Martinů – Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani

Barbara Hannigan

London Philharmonic Orchestra,

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

It was good of Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO to dedicate this concert to the memory of Sir Colin Davis, although in reality it was not a very Davis-like programme. No matter: the focus was on ‘Music from Dark Times’, Berg’s Lulu-Suite having been written in 1934 and Webern’s Variations for Orchestra in 1940-1. There seems to have been some confusion concerning ordering: Jurowski at the opening claimed that the programme had been reordered, so that the pieces would be heard chronologically backwards. If so, Martinů’s Double Concerto should have swapped places with the Berg work, the earliest on the programme. As it was, it certainly made some sense for Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and the Martinů to be heard together, though Martinů’s work, despite what was undoubtedly the best performance of the night, could not help but pale into relative insignificance following Bartók’s masterpiece.

Anyone who programmes Webern’s Variations deserves a vote of thanks. It seems extraordinary that we find ourselves just as starved of Webern performances as audiences were decades earlier. A while ago, Pierre Boulez was asked whether Webern was back in purgatory, and responded by asking his questioner whether Webern had in fact ever left. That one of the most important, most intensely expressive composers of the twentieth century or indeed any other still languishes unperformed reflects poorly on all concerned. Whatever the shortcomings of this performance, Jurowski’s enthusiasm could not be doubted, both when he held the score up for applause at the end and when his spoken introduction helped prepare the audience beforehand. There was much to admire: this was highly dramatic Webern, almost as if communicating via a serial version of Baroque Affekt. Pieter Schoeman’s violin solos were especially well judged, sweetly Romantic, even hyper-Romantic, just as Webern’s music demands. However, the LPO’s performance suffered from a few loose ends, including one especially noticeable false entry. Moreover, this was a perhaps surprisingly pointillistic, or indeed intervallic, performance, at least earlier on; sometimes one longed for Jurowski and his players to join up the dots more audibly. It was closer, say, to the Boulez of his first, Sony Webern than to the later recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, though without the pinpoint accuracy. That said, one nevertheless emerged, especially from the later variations, with a proper sense of ‘late Webern’, that is, of straining towards larger, more extended forms. And Jurowski’s commitment was something to treasure in itself.

Berg’s Lulu-Suite immediately sounded more fluid in conception, as if heard in the opera house. The first movement was a little on the fast side, with the effect of somewhat skating over the admittedly beautiful surfaces; at least, if fast, it was not harried. Moreover, if weight had been lacking earlier on, there was an emotional payoff at the opening of the ‘Hymn’ that marks that movement’s conclusion. Dance rhythms were etched sharply, though not didactically. A tighter hand on the formal reins might, however, have put paid to nagging suspicions of sprawl, however wonderful it may be to luxuriate in Berg’s sonic tapestry. (One certainly never harbours such doubts with Boulez or Abbado.) There was excellent saxophone playing to be relished from Martin Robertson. The second movement was altogether tauter, more focused; it really packed quite a punch. Tempi, including transitions between them, were very well judged, simply sounding ‘right’. Barbara Hannigan arrived on stage for the ‘Lied der Lulu’, very much dressed for the role. Indeed, she offered a more ‘acted’ performance than I have hitherto encountered in the Suite, her use of the text very much bound to her visual expression. There was just the right degree of lilt to her performance, as there was to that of the LPO. High notes hit the spot in every sense, and coloratura told dramatically as well as musically. One longed to see her in the entire role. Jurowski balanced his forces and shaped the musical argument well. Berg’s extraordinary cityscape was relished at the opening of the fourth movement, almost as if this were Petrushka, albeit ‘Petrushka im Bauhaus’, with liberally applied sleaze. It was not all dramatic action without a stage though; variation form was audibly communicated throughout. The ending was somewhat abrupt, though. Grim foreboding characterised the closing ‘Adagio’; this was undoubtedly a different world, that of Whitechapel. The darkness of tragedy unfolded, though so eventually did the warmth of that reconciliation the young Boulez found so suspicious in Berg’s later work. Jurowski undoubtedly dug deeper here than in the first movement, and with excellent results; there was more than enough to make one keen to hear him conduct Berg’s operas in the theatre. Hannigan’s reappearance proved harrowing and yet consoling, like the opera itself.

Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta had its moments. The first movement was very good indeed: the build-up potent, emotionally satisfying, with true depth to the LPO strings, expertly guided by Jurowski, their subsiding equally impressive. There was precision, though not always quite enough, in the ensuing ‘Allegro’. Perhaps, though, it was taken a little too fast; at any rate, the performance seemed unable, for whatever reason, to dig deeper, to take the music by the scruff of its neck. Catherine Edwards’s contribution on the piano was, however, excellent. The third movement was nicely alert to the apparent paradox, properly generative, of the clockwork nature to Bartók’s ‘night music’, having one think also of a not entirely dissimilar paradox, or dialectic, with respect to Webern’s ideas of Nature. The finale again seemed too fast to permit the full strength of the strings to shine through, though that may well have been a deliberate ‘lightness’ on Jurowski’s part. There was nothing especially wrong with it, but again, the music seemed skated over at times, almost balletic. A strangely excessive holding back of tempo just before the end caused confusion, seemingly catching the orchestra unawares.

Martinů continues to have his cheerleaders, and this Double Concerto certainly did not find him at his worst; by the same token, it hardly benefited from being performed in the same concert as Webern, Berg, and Bartók. Jurowski and the LPO nevertheless gave the concerto as convincing an account as conceivable; for one thing, it sounded more thoroughly rehearsed than the Bartók and Webern works. Rhythms in the first movement were ominously generative. Stravinskian motor-rhythms were relished, making one long to hear these musicians in the ‘real thing’, for instance the Symphony in Three Movements. Neo-classical – or better, neo-Baroque – form was sharply delineated, the implicit violence of such playing with time rendered explicit. Edwards again proved excellent in the slow movement. Jurowski could not dispel my doubts regarding the apparent emptiness at the heart of the composer’s note-spinning, though he did a good job in trying. It seems that Martinů’s music is attempting to depict turbulence from without rather than actually being turbulent; that, however, is not the performers’ fault. Again, rhythmic command was excellent in the finale. I wish I could have felt more enthusiastic about the music itself, which, despite its apparent ‘excitement’, is little more than derivative. Some Hindemith (the Nobilissima visione Suite?) or perhaps Honegger’s Second Symphony might ultimately have worked better, despite the outstanding performance and the second-half Paul Sacher connection.

Royal Academy of Music/BBC SO/Denève - Poulenc and Ravel, 26 April 2013

2013-04-26T22:44:00.000+01:00

Barbican Hall

Poulenc – Les Animaux modèles

Ravel – L’Enfant et les sortilèges

The Child – Rozanna Madylus

Mother, The Dragonfly, The Ottoman – Fiona Mackay
The Bergère – Rosalind Coad
The Chinese Cup/The Female Cat/The Wicker Chair – Saraha Shorter
The Fire/The Nightingale – Jennifer France
The Princess – Sónia Grané
The Bat/Animal – Tereza Gevorgyan
The Owl/The Settle – Helen Bailey
The Squirrel – Irina Loskova
A Shepherdess/The Sofa – Alice Privett
A Shepherd/Animal – Katie Howden
The Armchair – Samuel Queen
The Grandfather Clock/The Tomcat – Samuel Pantcheff
The Teapot (Black Wedgwood) – Ross Scanlon
The Little Old Man (Arithmetic) – Bradley Smith
A Tree – Nicholas Crawley
The Frog – Iain Milne
Animal – Gwilym Bowen
Animal – Andri Björn Róbertsson

Stephen Mangan (actor)

Members of the Royal Academy of Music

Jean-Baptiste Barrière (video)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Stéphane Denève (conductor)

A good number of my finest and enjoyable operatic experiences in London over the past few years have come courtesy of our conservatoires rather than our big houses. Royal Academy Opera seems to be on an especial high at the moment, this season having offered excellent performances of both Lavera costanza – the best performance I have attended of a Haydn opera anywhere – and Eugene Onegin. An enticing double bill awaits next month: Dido and Aeneas and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse. This evening, however, a good number of familiar voices crossed town to the Barbican, to sing in a concert performance of L’Enfant et les sortilèges, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Stéphane Denève, a highly laudable form of collaboration, which one can only hope will continue.

There is absolutely no need for condescension when treating with these young singers; indeed, their contribution in many respects outclassed that of the orchestra and conductor. Not that, once past some very un-Ravelian imprecision at the opening, there was anything terribly wrong with it, and perhaps I am being grossly unfair, retaining very fond memories of a Berlin performance I heard from the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle in 2008, but a more luxuriant canvas might well have heightened the sense of fantasy. Denève’s drier approach offered, I suppose, a valid alternative, though I could not help but wonder whether it was in part a response to the thinner tone of the orchestra.

Anyway, the singers did Ravel proud. From such an extensive cast, it might seem hyperbole to say that there was not a weak link, but there really was not. Singers, save The Child, centre-stage throughout, came together at the side of the stage for the chorus, whose contributions were notably well directed by Denève, and moved to the front when required for solos. First amongst equals had to be Rozanna Madylus as The Child, impetuous and wide-eyed, as Ravel demands. Equally impressive, if anything more so still, was the star turn offered by Sónia Gráne’s beautifully floated yet splendidly precise Princess; I was delighted to read afterwards in her biography that she is about to join the Berlin Staatsoper, whence I have just returned, as a Young Artist there. It was a pleasure, moreover, to hear light, convincingly ‘French’ voices, with a fine command of language and idiom, from singers such as Ross Scanlon and Samuel Queen. Jean-Baptiste Barrière’s video sequences I found a little on the dull side, too straightforwardly representational, though at least they made a change from his screen-saver-cum-wallpaper contribution to a Philharmonia performance of Wozzeck a few years ago.

Perhaps Denève was simply being ‘considerate’ – not that I think it was necessary – to his soloists, since there was more bite to the first-half performance of Poulenc’s suite from the 1940s ballet, Les Animaux modèles. The opening ‘Le Petit jour,’ offered enticing echoes of Daphnis et Chloé, with a definite ‘French’ quality to the BBC SO’s sound, strings especially, with a vibrato it is difficult not to define as ‘glamorous’. The slight lack of body here was less of a problem; indeed, it arguably added to a sense of idiom, recalling recordings of Poulenc’s own time, some of them involving him. I was less sure about Stephen Mangan’s delivery of contemporary versions of La Fontaine’s fables, all too audibly miked. Surely an actor should be able to project without? The greater part of the audience, however, seemed to be eating out of his hand, so perhaps I am just being grumpy. (Might we not at least, however, progress beyond the idea that employment of a generic ‘Northern’ accent is intrinsically amusing?) ‘Le Lion amoureux’ offered similar sonic ‘glamour’ to the first movement, though brass at times seemed a little loud. Denève’s glittering, unsentimental direction of ‘L’Homme entre deux æges et ses deux maîtresses’ again recalled, or in this context, presaged Ravel, though with a more cinematic bent, whilst the opening gravity of ‘La Mort et la bûcheron’ was finally matched by the elegant, vielle France of Death as a duchess in response. Prokofiev-like spikiness at the opening of ‘Les Deux coqs’ was likewise balanced by the most chic of hen-houses. There is surprising weight, relatively speaking, to the final movement, ‘Le Repas de midi,’ though is that what Poulenc does best? I tended to think it was a bit like going to Bach for slapstick. Fine performances, anyway, for a little-heard score.

Götterdämmerung, Berlin Staatsoper, 21 April 2013

2013-04-24T14:39:00.002+01:00

Schiller Theater, Berlin

Siegfried – Andreas Schager

Gunther – Gerd Grochowski
Alberich – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Hagen – Mikhail Petrenko
Brünnhilde – Iréne Theorin
Gutrune – Anna Samuil
Waltraute – Waltraud Meier
First Norn – Margarita Nekrasova
Second Norn – Waltraud Meier
Third Norn – Anna Samuil
Woglinde – Aga Mikolaj
Wellgunde – Maria Gortsevskaya
Flosshilde – Anna Lapkovskaja

Guy Cassiers (director, set design)

Enrico Bagnoli (set design, lighting)
Tim van Steenbergen (costumes)
Arjen Klerkx, Kurt D’Haeseleer (video)
Michael P Steinberg, Detlef Giese, Erwin Jans (dramaturgy)
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (choreography)
Luc de Wit (choral choreography)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Staatkapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

(Image: Monika Rittershaus)
Iréne Theorin (Brünnhilde)

This, I know, has become wearily repetitive, but the rewards of the Berlin Ring were once again shown to be entirely musical. Götterdämmerung had for some reason acquired a third dramaturge, prior instalments having relied upon a mere brace. What they might have done, or rather what director Guy Cassiers might have listened to, is utterly beyond me. For all its faults, and it seems to me undeniable that Götterdämmerung was a bit of a mess dramaturgically, Keith Warner’s Covent Garden Ring had ambition, had ideas, and some of the time managed to communicate them. This sorry co-production with La Scala, brought to us courtesy of the Toneelhuis Antwerpen, appears, quite literally, to have nothing whatsoever to say to us. That would be odd in the case of any musical drama worthy of the name – many are not, but that is another story – but, in the case of Der Ring des Nibelungen, it is simply beyond comprehension. Yet again, we are simply faced with a few ‘tasteful’ costumes and effects, and in this case, far too much video. The Tarnhelm dancers return, rather to my surprise offering the saving grace of the staging. Their menacing writhing around Brünnhilde during her shameful and shaming possession by Siegfried struck a note of rare, indeed unique, dramatic power. The appearance of sub-Damien Hirst creatures in formaldehyde offers slight variety, but no discernible point, and more than anything irritates in its acquiescence to the wearisome stylisation of the designs. As I said with respect to Siegfried, we might as well have been at the Met. Of Wagner’s desired ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’, Cassiers offers neither emotion nor intellect, let alone a dialectic between the two. Baffling!

If not on quite such superlative form as in Siegfried, Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin nevertheless did Wagner’s score proud, a more than promising augury for the forthcoming Proms performances of the Ring as a whole. (I shall be speaking at an introduction to Siegfried.) Line and dramatic momentum were impressive, though tension sagged slightly – and surprisingly – at a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion to the second act. Maybe that was a matter of tiredness more than anything else. Barenboim’s almost ‘French’ ear for colour – he knows that Wagner leads to Debussy as well as to Schoenberg, and indeed employs that ear in the music of the latter composer too – offered more than its fair share of textural revelation, the Staatskapelle’s woodwind as euphonious here as in Mozart. Eberhard Friedrich’s chorus acquitted itself very well throughout.

There was a great deal to praise in terms of singing too. Waltraud Meier as Second Norn must be the very definition of luxury casting. Stage animal that she is, she made something out of the non-production even here, let alone in her well-nigh definitive Waltraute (also one of the very few redeeming features of the recent, dismal New York Götterdämmerung). Meier can have few peers, if any, and certainly no superiors, in her melding of text and music, in her instinctive yet searching theatrical communication. She offered a standing rebuke to the vacuity of the contribution from Cassiers. Iréne Theorin continued to present a creditably variegated account of Brünnhilde’s part. There was more of the lyrical, less of the heroic, than one often hears, though there remained plenty of the latter nonetheless. I wondered occasionally whether her choices with respect to scaling down, to containment, always made the best sense, but there was a great deal to admire here. Mikhail Petrenko’s Hagen remains controversial. I first heard it in Aix-en-Provence, under Simon Rattle. During the first act, I was less convinced, the relative lightness – this is definitely not the black-toned Hagen we have come to expect – veered on occasion towards the non-committal, though of course Cassiers did not help. However, menace asserted itself, psychotically so, ensuring that the darkness of Hagen’s character duly struck a terror quite lacking in the staging. Gerd Grochowski offered more in the way of clear verbal projection than psychological depth, but again the fault for that may really have lain elsewhere. Anna Samuil’s Gutrune, alas, seemed a victim of miscasting; there was little sense of character and her blowsy delivery, though reined in during the third act, was by any standards stylistically quite inappropriate. The trio of Rhinemaidens (Aga Mikolaj, Maria Gortsevskaya, and Anna Lapkovskaja) was truly excellent, both in solo and ensemble terms.

Andreas Schager’s Siegfried I have left until last. Schager was a replacement for the advertised Ian Storey, Lance Ryan having taken the part in Siegfried, but not Götterdammerung. (Schlager had also had to step in for Ryan in the previous cycle, when the Canadian tenor arrived late to the theatre, missing the first act.) I am not sure that I have heard so excellent an account of the role in the theatre; I have certainly heard none better. We can hark back to Melchior all we like, even to Windgassen, but we all know that such expectations are, for whatever reasons, entirely unrealistic. Schager’s Siegfried was of the here and now, dramatically committed – certainly not something of which one could always accuse Melchior – and finely sung, without a hint of the dreadful barking, let alone shouting, that disfigures so many performances. There was no discernible tiring; indeed, a portrayal of youthful, naïve enthusiasm did much of the work the staging ought to have been doing by itself, contrasting tellingly with the corruption of the Gibichung court. This is a production, then, that should be discarded as quickly as humanly possible; it remains just possible, however, that a star may have been born amongst this all-too-tastefully-designed ‘heap of broken images’.

Die Feen, Oper Leipzig, 20 April 2013

2013-04-23T15:09:00.001+01:00

Images: Tom Schulze
Igor Durlovski (Fairy King)

Leipzig Opera House

Fairy King, Voice of Groma – Igor Durlovski

Ada – Christiane Libor
Zemina – Viktorika Kaminskaite
Farzana – Jean Broiekhuizen
Arindal – Arnold Bezuyen
Lora – Eun Yee You
Morald – Detlef Roth
Drolla – Jennifer Porto
Gernot – Milcho Borovinov
Gunther – Guy Mannheim
Harald – Roland Schubert
Messenger – Tae Hee Kwon
Children of Ada and Arindal – Lukas Gosch, Leon Heilmann

Renaud Doucet (director)

André Barbe (designs)
Guy Simard (lighting)
Marita Müller (dramaturgy)

Chorus of Oper Leipzig (chorus master: Alessandro Zuppardo)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Ulf Schirmer (conductor)

What is it about London buses or, in this case, buses in London and Leipzig? Hot on the heels of the Chelsea Opera Group’s concert performance of Die Feen last month, a fully-staged production has followed from Oper Leipzig. (In fact, its premiere took place in February, but this was my opportunity to see it.) The COG’s performance was a valiant effort, and boasted some fine singing, but was sadly let down by an apparently under-rehearsed orchestra. Leipzig did its greatest son proud, in a production and performance that made the case beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Die Feen deserves a regular place in the repertory. It is not Parsifal, of course, yet what is? The Bayreuth ‘canon’ has done a great deal of harm, yet there is no reason why reparations should not be made, and in this of all years.

Since the Munich premiere in 1888, a production that received numerous repeat performances, stagings and concert performances have been sporadic. Angelo Neumann staged the work in Prague in 1893, as part of his cycle to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of Wagner’s birth and the tenth of his death. The first Leipzig performance took place in 1938, conducted by Paul Schmitz and directed by Hans Schüler, with designs by Max Elten, forming part of another cycle, in this case the Geburtstadt’s celebrations for Wagner’s 125^th birthday. In more recent years, especially celebrated was Wolfgang Sawallisch’s 1983 cycle of the complete operas; other stagings have been proffered by Munich (Gärtnerplatz, 1989), Kaiserslautern and Würzburg (2005), and the Châtelet (2009, on period instruments). Though the present production is offered in collaboration with the Bayreuth Festival, Bayreuth’s performance of Die Feen is, somewhat oddly, and unlike those of Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi, to be in concert. (None of the performances will belong to the Festival proper, but will instead take place in July, in the Statdhalle.)

So Leipzig may well be the only opportunity we have; it should be seized by anyone who can. As Wagner himself, far from ashamed of his first completed opera, put it in Mein Leben:

While I had written [the incomplete, preceding] Die Hochzeit without operatic embellishments and treated the material in the darkest vein, this time I festooned the subject with the most manifold variety: beside the principal pair of lovers I depicted a more ordinary couple and even introduced a coarse and comical third pair, which belonged to the operatic convention of servants and ladies’ maids. As to the poetic diction and the verses themselves, I was almost intentionally careless about them. I was not nourishing my former hopes of making a name as a poet; I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto, for I now realised nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.

Ada (Christiane Libor), Arindal (Arnold Bezuyen)

Renaud Doucet has a background in dance, though by now he has directed a good number of opera productions too. On this basis, I should happily see more, metatheatricality worn lightly, humorously, yet tellingly. Following a Saturday evening family meal, a father tunes in to a live broadcast of Die Feen from Oper Leipzig. The rest of the family departs, leaving him in peace to listen. (A nice touch is his turning up the volume for the Overture as the conductor does similarly in the pit.) Music becomes the key to the work as a whole; it enlists his emotions, transforms his understanding. In something of a modern fairy-tale, his living room becomes the performance space, not entirely unlike The Nutcracker, or indeed, closer to home, the tales of ETA Hoffmann. Romantic, pseudo-Nazarene mediævalism, Wagner’s (relative) youth, and our own time come together, in a (Midsummer Night’s?) dream-like mélange that prompts rather than answers our questions. What might seem a counterpart to all-too-comfortable Biedermeier home life soon has its tensions exposed: though the paterfamilias – and he is at best a weak example of the type – welcomes back his wife at the end of the broadcast, and leaves Ada to the fairies, beret-clad Wagner included, will he tire of his quotidian existence and hanker again after the immortality of that other world, that to which, as Arindal, he had exceptionally been admitted?

Wagner’s subsequent intellectual journey, via Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality, complicates the notion further. It is fitting, then, that Romanticism is both embraced and kept at a distance. (There is more than a little Romanticism in Feuerbach’s writings and indeed in Schopenhauer’s too.) At the time of writing, it was, especially in its German manifestation, at the time a somewhat problematical notion. (One might ask, in Goethian fashion, whether it has ever not been.) In the context of Metternichian repression, Heine and Young Germany suspected and attacked its reactionary tendencies, yet its progressive – a loaded word, but let us have that pass just for the moment – seeds were far from fruitless yet, especially in the musical world. The celebratory final scene, in some senses perhaps an early presentiment of the Festwiese scene from Die Meistersinger, is thus neither presented nor received straightforwardly. As ever with Wagner, we are left with more questions than we started with.

Ulf Schirmer’s conducting of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra proved well-judged. Influences were apparent, Weber and Marschner especially but far from exclusively, but so, as in the staging, were hints – and sometimes rather more than hints – of what was to come. A phrase here or there might be ever so slightly underlined, or so I fancied, to alert one to a similarity with a phrase in Lohengrin, and indeed beyond. More importantly, the straining even at this stage towards through-composition was readily apparent, without entirely undermining the ‘number’ structure of this Romantic opera. Wagner without a great, or at least a very good, orchestra really is a waste of everyone’s time; the dark, ‘German’ sonorities of the Gewandhaus Orchestra suited Die Feen to a tee. What a relief it was to hear that this great orchestra’s traditions have not been traduced by ill-advised forays into pseudo-authenticity at the hands of the bewilderingly fêted Riccardo Chailly.

The cast was strong too. Early Wagner, like early Mozart or early Beethoven, does not take kindly to condescension; there was not a hint of that here. First among equals was Christiane Libor’s stunning Ada, her insane, Abscheulicher-squared aria fully realising Wagner’s Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient-inspired vision. Arnold Bezuyen, quite understandably, tired a little at one point as Arindal, but otherwise impressed with a fine combination of heft and tone. Detlef Roth was everyone would have hoped for as Morald, words and vocal line in properly Wagnerian, even musico-dramatic, tandem. Jennifer Porto and Milcho Borovinov delighted as Drolla and Gunther, their buffa duet cut in the COG concert performance yet triumphantly vindicated by its inclusion here, even though one could readily tell that it marked for Wagner more or less the end of a line, give or take a Liebesverbot. Only Eun Yee You’s Lora was a little disappointed, outclassed by COG’s wonderful Elisabeth Meister; the voice simply did not seem big enough and tuning was more than occasionally awry. Choral singing was of a consistently high standard throughout, as was direction of the chorus on stage.

London desperately needs a first-class performance of this wonderful work. If none of our companies can marshal the resources for a new production – and frankly, it is a matter of priorities; there is no reason why it should not be done – then I strongly urge bringing this staging here. Let us hope, also, for a DVD release. In the meantime, if at all possible, a visit to Leipzig approaches the mandatory for anyone with an interest in Wagner.

La finta giardiniera - Die Pforten der Liebe, Staatsoper Berlin, 19 April 2013

2013-04-23T12:50:00.000+01:00

Images: (c) Ruth Walz
Sandrina (Annette Dasch), Belfiore (Joel Prieto)

Schiller Theater, Berlin

Podestà – Stephan Rügamer

Sandrina – Annette Dasch
Belfiore – Joel Prieto
Arminda – Alex Penda
Ramiro – Stephanie Atanasov
Serpetta – Regula Mühlemann
Nardo – Aris Argiris
Countess – Elisabeth Trissenaar
Count – Markus Boysen

Hans Neuenfels (director)

Reinhard von der Thannen (designs)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Henry Arnold (dramaturgy)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Christopher Moulds (conductor)

Hans Neuenfels’s production of La finta giardiniera, to which the subtitle – or should it be surtitle? – Die Pforten der Liebe (‘The Portals of Love’), has been added, received its premiere in November last year. The cliché of being destined ‘to divide opinion’ seems unavoidable here. I found it in many respects fascinating, causing me to reflect not only upon the work, but once again upon the concept of the musical artwork, especially in performance. That is not to say that I thought every aspect of Neuenfels’s reworking – it seems that designer Reinhard von der Thannen and dramaturge Henry Arnold (of Heimat 2 fame) deserve credit here too – convinced or was indeed ‘necessary’, but then one could say the same about most allegedly ‘traditional’ stagings. I am certainly not claiming that there is anything wrong with presenting the work ‘as it is’, or rather ‘as it has come down to us’, which is not really the same thing at all, but there should be room in theatre and in musical performance for re-examination, for disruption of what one might perhaps, in Benjamin-mode, call disruption of the work’s aura, not least when reception history plays a role, as it does here.

Arminda (Alex Penda) and actors

For there is something of a resurrection, or better, resuscitation, of the Singspiel-tendencies within the work and its history. It was, after all, as early as 1780, just five years after the Munich premiere, that the work was reimagined as Die verstellte Gärtnerin for Augsburg, a reworking with which Mozart may have been involved. The original Italian version of the first act having been lost for almost a century, La finta giardiniera as we understand it would not be revived until 1979, in Munich and Salzburg. I do not share Neuenfels’s poor opinion of the libretto, but nor do I think it an inviolate masterpiece, should indeed such a thing exist at all. (One can esteem Da Ponte’s libretti, without prescribing cruel and unusual punishments for those who might wish to make changes in particular performing circumstances.) There is, then, reordering. Recitativi secci are, without exception, cut. And we have introduced Neuenfels’s own German dialogue, centred upon an elderly Count and Countess: less a matter of flash-back to the action we recognise, though there seems to be an element of that, than of collage and sometimes of interaction. ‘German humour’ does not necessarily communicate itself well to foreigners, even if Emanuel Schikaneder suggests otherwise, and I cannot claim that all of it does in this particular case, though there are some splendid moments, not least that involving painful delivery of carrots from actors’ trousers, in preparation for their reduction in an electric blender (pictured above, with oranges). Eyebrows might also be raised by the return of Neuenfels’s wife, Elisabeth Trissenaar, as the elderly Countess; a Berlin friend tells me that she reappears with wearing regularity in his stagings. That said, I thought she performed her role splendidly, and there are plenty of conductors who cast spouses or lovers more often than might be strictly necessary.

More fundamentally, there remain an alertness to the darkness of ‘love’, whatever that might be, without turning to tragedy, a sense of fantasy, by turns wide-eyed and surrealistic that seems to point in some sense towards The Magic Flute, and a sense in theory, if not, alas, always in practice, that Mozart’s music is the principal reason for our interest. Probing our conceptions of love seems to me a definite advance upon what is in some respects a stock buffa libretto. My thoughts turned to Neuenfels’s Così fan tutte, which I saw in Salzburg in 2000, and almost alone seem to have admired. There was kinship too with Stefan Herheim’s brilliant rethinking, again for Salzburg, of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, a work transformed into a new and yet ancient parable concerning love, sex, and gender. Herheim’s staging is more thoroughly thought through, partly, I suspect, because he has a superior ear for music, and also, perhaps a related point, because he never stoops to banality, but if, as I hope, the Neuenfels ‘work’ should prove be released on DVD, it ought to be seen. It would, moreover, be interesting to see whether the shock of the new would bear repetition. There is, in any case, more than a hint here of Berlin’s Komische Oper invading the Staatsoper, just as Harry Kupfer once made that same journey, a sense of welcome cross-fertilisation in the city’s operatic world.

The Staatskapelle Berlin was on excellent form throughout. Though not so often recognised as such, this is one of the world’s great Mozart orchestras, indeed one of the world’s great orchestras. There was fullness of tone without over-ripeness; woodwind contributions were simply delectable. If Christopher Moulds began the Overture with incessant haste, his reading soon calmed down, without that entailing a loss of inner life. The delights, and they are manifold, of Mozart’s scoring were present for all to hear, even if listeners, as many understandably did, were confused or even appalled by what they saw on stage. The cast was excellent too. Joel Prieto’s honeyed tone made light yet substantial work of Count Belfiore. The match with Annette Dasch’s somewhat more hochdramatisch soprano might on paper have seemed questionable, but in practice worked very well, Dasch’s Sandrina offering cleanness of tone and dramatic commitment in equal measure. Alex Penda’s Arminda impressed in very much the same fashion, seizing her role by the scruff of the neck, and turning it into something beyond the call of duty. Aris Argiris offered a different experience, as befits Nardo, warmer, more buffo, welcome in its reinstatement of tendencies of character and genre the staging sometimes overlooked, or at least played down. But all of those participating brought something, both individually and collectively, to the experience. In an opera of this nature, and a staging of this nature, one needs a true sense of company, a sense that was here most impressively achieved, whether in vocal, acting, or orchestral contribution.

Siegfried, Staatsoper Berlin, 18 April 2013

2013-04-21T12:19:00.000+01:00

Schiller Theater, Berlin

Siegfried – Lance Ryan

Mime – Peter Bronder
The Wanderer – Terje Stensvold
Alberich – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Fafner – Mikhail Petrenko
Erda – Anna Larsson
Brünnhilde – Iréne Theorin
The Woodbird – Rinnat Moriah

Guy Cassiers (director, set design)

Enrico Bagnoli (set design, lighting)
Tim van Steenbergen (costumes)
Arjen Klerkx, Kurt D’Haeseleer (video)
Michael P Steinberg, Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (choreography)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Image: (c) Monika Rittershaus

And so, the Berlin State Opera’s Ring nears completion. Nothing has changed with respect to the bafflingly vacuous production served up by Guy Cassiers and his colleagues from the Antwerp Toneelhuis. It is not that ideas are banal or underdeveloped; rather, there seem to be no ideas at all, a truly extraordinary state of affairs when it comes to Wagner, of all dramatists. The production apparently aspires to the condition of something one might see or have seen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, whether Otto Schenk or the still worse Robert Lepage, albeit with refined visual taste. Quite why anyone would think tasteful Wagner desirable is quite beyond me. There are pretty stage effects, sometimes from video, sometimes not, but effects without cause they remain. Oddly, given the plentiful use of video, the dragon is conjured up by the Eastman Company – yes, I am afraid the dancers are back – and some sheets. It starts off rather well, viewed with disinterested æsthetic contemplation, only to degenerate into a vision more akin to a group laundry activity. There is doubtless some enjoyment to be derived from the lithe dancers, choreographed well enough in the abstract, but what any of it might have to say about the Ring is not even obscure. If Cassiers presents, as is claimed, a Ring for the twenty-first century, may God have mercy upon our culture-industry-enfeebled souls. Politics, religion, any variety of thought, even any variety of drama, have been banished to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is enough to have one wish to embark upon a spot of time travel.

Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin came to the rescue. I have not heard a better conducted, better played Siegfried, even from the Royal Opera and Bernard Haitink. The Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle may have offered breathtaking orchestral virtuosity in Aix-en-Provence, but there was something of virtuosity for its own sake in that case, partly, I think, because Rattle’s reading failed to dig anything like so deep. This was Barenboim at his more than estimable best. The great paragraphs of Wagner’s imagination unfolded with unforced, unexaggerated inevitability, not monumental in, say, the Knappertsbusch mode, but teeming with dramatic life born of the musico-dramatic material. Scenes, dialogues, phrases were sharply, colourfully characterised, playful yet steely Beethoven to the fore in the final scene of the first act, a grinding sense of peripeteia possessing us at the opening of the third. There was none of the reluctance one encounters from lesser conductors to let the orchestra speak as Greek chorus, no alleged ‘consideration’ for vocal fallibility. This was above all orchestral drama, as fully achieved in a Furtwänglerian sense as I have heard from Barenboim in Wagner.

Lance Ryan had his moments as Siegfried, especially during the second act. Up until the scene with Brünnhilde, I should have said that at least he did not tire – quite an achievement in itself – but alas, a pattern of too much shouting and not enough singing took its toll. Iréne Theorin’s Brünnhilde, by contrast, was highly variegated in tone, at times almost too much, having one strain to hear the words. A rather wooden Wanderer from Terje Stensvold was shown up by Johannes Martin Kränzle’s vivid, detailed Alberich. Peter Bronder was very much the singing actor as Mime, stronger in tone than one often hears, but sometimes edging too much, against Wagner’s urgings, toward caricature. Mikhail Petrenko’s voice seemed to have lost some of its darkness, but there could be few real complaints about his Fafner. Anna Larsson’s otherworldly depth of tone reminded us why she is very much the Erda de nos jours. Rinnat Moriah navigated the Woodbird’s lines with admirable ease. It remained, however, Barenboim’s and the Staatskapelle’s show.

Die Zauberflöte, Royal Opera, 16 April 2013

2013-04-19T11:11:00.000+01:00

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Tamino – Charles Castronovo

Pamina – Ekaterina Siurina
Papageno – Christopher Maltman
Papagena – Susana Gaspar
Queen of the Night – Albina Shagumuratova
Monostatos – Peter Hoare
Sarastro – Brindley Sherratt
First Lady – Anita Watson
Second Lady – Hanna Hipp
Third Lady – Gaynor Keeble
Speaker – Sebastian Holecek
First Priest – Harry Nicoll
Second Priest – Donald Maxwell
First Armoured Man – David Butt Philip
Second Armoured Man – Jihonn Kim
First Boy – Archie Buchanan
Second Boy – Luciano Cusack
Third Boy – Filippo Turkheimer

Sir David McVicar (director)

Leah Hausman (revival director)
John Macfarlane (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Leah Hausman (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Julia Jones (conductor)

A shadow hung over this performance of The Magic Flute, the shadow being that of the late SirColin Davis. Yet at the same time, as Sir Antonio Pappano reminded us in a touching introductory speech, this was an especially fitting memorial, for if one wanted a sense of Sir Colin as a person, this was perhaps the work to which one should listen. The last time around, in 2011, had not necessarily shown Davis to his greatest advantage, though a variable cast shouldered much of the responsibility. But no one who heard Sir Colin in 2006, whether in the theatre or on the much-loved DVD of this production, is likely to forget so magical an experience.

It would have been an invidious situation for any conductor. With the best will in the world, one could not claim that Julia Jones proved a match for our pre-eminent Mozartian. Nevertheless, tempi were generally well-chosen, if occasionally a touch on the fast side. (Such things are relative; the provisional wing of the ‘authenticke’ movement would probably have had her knee-capped for Klemperer-like backsliding.) There was fluency, but little in the way of Davis’s twinkle-in-the-eye magic. Though the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, a few slips notwithstanding, played admirably on the whole, boasting a fullness tone that might almost have been intended for Sir Colin himself, the brass, trumpets especially, presented a significant fly in the ointment. Insensitive, undifferentiated rasping and blaring worthy of the likes of René Jacobs or Roger Norrington sounded entirely out of place in a generally cultivated performance. Jones should certainly have had them blend better. Rather to my surprise, the chorus, normally so dependable for its excellence, appeared to be having some of an off-day too, oscillating a little too much between shouting and the slightly lacklustre.

Charles Castronovo’s Tamino marked a significant improvement upon his recent Ferrando (under Davis). Style was more Mozartian, phrasing mellifluously handled, without detriment to welcome vocal heft. If his German fell somewhat short of perfec, that, sadly, was a failing common to most of the cast, with the exception of Christopher Maltman’s winning Papageno, ever alert to pathos as to humour, and to the pathos within the humour. Sir Colin would surely have applauded. Ekaterina Siurina made a lovely Pamina, clean toned and touching. Though Albina Shagimuratova’s first aria as the Queen of the Night was a little uncertain, noticeably slowing down towards the end, there was still a great deal to admire; her coloratura in the second aria came closer to what Mozart wrote than one generally hears. It was certainly a pleasure to hear a fuller-toned voice in the part. Brindley Sherratt’s Sarastro did the job without offering anything especially memorable; his well-judged low notes were perhaps an exception. Peter Hoare made an excellent Monostatos, more of a character, less of a mere caricature, than we have come to expect. An especially strong impression was made by the Three Ladies, more womanly than one often hears, and all the better for it. If only, here as elsewhere, more work had been done on the German, and not only in the dialogue, whose difficult racism – at least to our ears – had been excised, if not necessarily with sufficient care for continuity.

Sir David McVicar’s production had looked rather tired in 2011. I am pleased to report that it seemed to have gained something of a new lease of life under Leah Hausman. The sense of interplay between the timeless and the eighteenth century remains impressive, doing much to impart that sense of wonder lacking on this occasion from the orchestral contribution. The final scene still seems a miscalculation, an almost blinding light rolled on like a huge cheese; there is more to the Enlightenment, let alone to the stranger reaches of Rosicrucianism, than that. Revival of this production, however, remained a happy coincidence in the light of Sir Colin’s passing.

R.I.P. Sir Colin Davis, 1927-2013

2013-04-14T22:31:00.002+01:00

Any regular readers I may have will by now be well aware of the great esteem - that almost seems too lame a description - in which I held Sir Colin Davis. Latterly peerless as a Mozartian, indeed well-nigh universally recognised as the greatest Mozart conductor after the death of Karl Böhm, and quite simply the greatest champion Berlioz has ever had and could ever have, Sir Colin’s greatness as a musician went far beyond those composers. (He was as highly esteemed in the music of Sibelius, but I am afraid that music remains a blind spot for me.) I heard from him perhaps the greatest performance of the Eroica I have experienced in concert, unquestionably the greatest of any Mendelssohn symphony and of Haydn’s Creation; I could go on and on, and some day probably should.

Living within London’s musical orbit as I do made Sir Colin an abiding presence in my personal musical life, given the opportunities I was afforded to hear him both with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Opera. Mozart requires but one thing, perfection, and more often than not, his operas received it from this conductor. Single-handedly rescuing Così fan tutte from an insufferably objectionable production was not the least of Sir Colin’s achievements; I doubt that even a Böhm performance would have ravished quite as that did, nor spoken with greater, more lightly-worn wisdom. Moreover, I cannot imagine a more loving performance than those I heard from his baton of Ariadne auf Naxos and Hänsel und Gretel. As for a 2000 Proms performance of Les Troyens, ‘definitive’ would almost seem inadequate to express the ‘rightness’ of every aspect of the conducting, utterly unforced, utterly convincing.

Two of his most recent towering achievements, both with the LSO, and equally important, with the London Symphony Chorus, were his Proms performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis – is there any sterner test? – and a City of London Festival performance, in St Paul’s Cathedral, of Berlioz’s Requiem. The latter must have been one of the last concerts he gave. (It may even have been the last; I am not ghoulish enough yet to check.) It was recently released on LSO Live, and would surely make the most fitting of memorials for any of us to acquire. Even at the time, both performances seemed especially haunted by intimations of mortality and yet all the more strengthened by humanistic resolution.

Yet it is ultimately the generosity, indeed greatness, of spirit that will linger still longer than any particular performance. When fully reunited with the LSO in 1995 as Principal Conductor, he accepted on condition that he should hold no management responsibilities, believing that power corrupted, and could only stand in the way of making music. (Not for nothing was he horrified by the excesses of the Thatcher government.) No martinet could ever hope to conduct Mozart sympathetically; Sir Colin’s humanity seemingly informed every note he conducted, and as he grew older, a still greater awareness of the tragedy lying behind Mozart’s every utterance grew evident. ‘Smiling through tears’ is a phrase I have employed perhaps too often for Mozart, but it seems especially appropriate now that we mourn one of his greatest servants. He will surely be in everyone's mind as the Royal Opera's revival of The Magic Flute opens on Tuesday.

(P.S. The above represents my spontaneous appreciation, written as soon as I heard the news of Sir Colin's death. I thought there might be some value in leaving it as it was, rather than revising. However, a fuller, somewhat more detailed version may be read as an obituary here at Seen and Heard International.)

Letter to Glenda Jackson, MP, 12 April 2013

2013-04-12T11:18:00.000+01:00

(Text of a letter sent to Glenda Jackson, MP, following her speech in the House of Commons)

Dear Ms Jackson,

I thought twice about writing to you, not because I doubted that it was a good thing to do, but simply because I was sure that you and your staff would be drowning under a considerable number of similar missives. Nevertheless, I wanted to congratulate and, equally to the point, to thank you for your speech in the House of Commons debate on Margaret Thatcher. Not quite singlehandedly, but not so far off, you transformed a dubious state-sponsored eulogy into something a little more akin to a debate and, needless to say, found yourself heavily criticised for having done so. Although there will doubtless be no need for such reassurance by this stage, I can certainly say that you gave voice to a significant proportion of the population, both in and beyond London, a group which, in the face of relentless hagiography and stifling of our ability to speak, has found itself almost voiceless, at least in any official context. What I thought most admirable was the combination of a reminder of just how desperate our social plight had become during the last years of Conservative government and your concentration not upon personality but upon ideology and policy. A personal attack would have been unnecessary, or at least not the priority. (Thoughts of General Pinochet might tempt me to say otherwise, but let us leave him on one side for the moment.) However, to attack the catastrophic consequences of policies pursued and, in many cases, intensified during succeeding governments was absolutely necessary, especially in the context of the present government’s seeming intent to exceed the wildest of Margaret Thatcher’s expectations and dreams.

This is probably the last thing you would want to hear, but I cannot help but wonder whether you might be persuaded to consider standing as a future candidate London’s mayoralty. Someone needs to say these things, to repeat them, and to continue to do so in public political life; we shall certainly not hear them from the present Mayor of London with his insidious cocktail of infantilising demagoguery and extreme neo-liberal ideology.

Yours sincerely,

Mark Berry

Andsnes - Beethoven, Bartók, Chopin and Liszt, 10 April 2013

2013-04-11T11:38:00.000+01:00

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.22 in F major, op.54

Bartók – Suite, op.14
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.28 in A major, op.101
Liszt – Pensée des morts, S 173/4
Chopin – Nocturne in C minor, op.48 no.1
Ballade no.4 in F minor, op.52

Leif Ove Andsnes (piano)

Let there be no doubt about it: Leif Ove Andsnes is a pianist and a musician of great distinction, and this was a recital of distinction. Beethoven’s op.54 sonata opened the programme, Andsnes’s tone and touch announced as being to die for. (There would prove no exception whatsoever to that.) The pianist captured to perfection Beethoven’s marriage of stylisation and human warmth; then came the still shocking canonic disjuncture. Control of line during the reprises of the minuet stood almost beyond praise, as did the meaning imparted to its progressive decoration. The second movement exhibited a rare kaleidoscopic quality – such light and shade! – throughout its moto perpetuo; tempo was strict, and yet the music breathed, rhythmic propulsion achieved without the slightest exaggeration. It was riveting from beginning to end.

Bartók’s op.14 Suite was granted a rare performance. The Allegretto showed a perfectly judged balance between insistence and flexibility, Andsnes’s voicing quite mesmerising. Much the same could be said of the scherzo, whose vivid theatricality evoked the world of The Wooden Prince and even, peering into the future, that of The Miraculous Mandarin. Neo-Lisztian diabolicism, albeit more ‘Hungarian’ in Bartók’s terms, was the hallmark of the Allegro molto third movement. Fullness of tone was never sacrificed to technical necessity. The final movement emerged beautifully from its predecessor, as seductive as Liszt and indeed as ‘suspended’ as anything from his late years. It was unsettled and unsettling in its almost Schoenbergian beauty.

A major, wrote William S. Porter, in his 1834 Musical Cyclopædia was ‘Golden, warm, and sunny. Its brilliant effect is shown in many passages of Haydn’s Creation.’ That spirit and perhaps still more that of Mozart in A major – think, for instance, of the great KV 488 piano concerto – was captured in the exquisite yet honest presentation of the first movement of Beethoven’s op.101 sonata. Except, of course, quite rightly, there was always a sense that Elysium was already unattainable, the tragedy of Beethoven. Syncopated chords tolled like ambivalent Mozartian bells of joy; here Beethoven, like Mozart, smiled through tears. Andsnes, without in the slightest sentimentalising the music, imparted to it a poignancy that hinted at Schubert, whilst retaining echt-Beethovenian quirkiness. The second movement offered contrast, but a dialectical contrast, connected even if one could not explicitly say how. ‘Melting precision’ was the somewhat paradoxical – or perhaps better, dialectical – phrase I summoned up to describe Andsnes’s performance, delivered with a lightly-worn rhythmic insistency that was indubitably generative. The trio integrated characteristics both from that march and from the first movement, its almost seraphic quality preparing the way for a third movement that spoke with the integrity and beauty of a Bach arioso. I wondered slightly about the tempo for the finale. Was it a shade too fast? What it perhaps lost in sublimity was gained in a Haydn-like sense of play, in context a perfectly valid alternative to the ‘finale problem’.

The second half opened with Liszt’s Pensées des morts. Mysterious, sepulchral, the ‘voice’ remained eloquent. There was nothing murky to the left-hand chords; one imagined that, like Liszt himself, it would simply not be possible for Andsnes to do other than elicit a beautiful tone from the instrument. Understanding and communication of harmonic rhythm were impeccable. It would be wonderful to hear more Liszt from him, perhaps the Sonata, the Années de pèlerinage, or indeed the rest of the Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses.

Chopin’s C minor Nocturne, op.48 no.1, was uneasy from the start, benefiting from a dramatic tension I have rarely heard here, tension apparently arising from the conjunction of well-chosen tempo – it is easy to take the piece too slowly – and voicing of the left-hand line. Cumulative power was awe-inspiring, the nocturne heard as if in a single breath. Chopin was granted dignity without sentimentality. The Fourth Ballade followed on in wonderfully ‘natural’ fashion, a splendid piece of programming. It spoke initially with a similar unforced eloquence, to which again a well-judged tempo and equally finely-judged rubato contributed. What ultimately I felt it lacked – and this was really my only disappointment of the evening – were the electricity that a great Chopin player such as Maurizio Pollini would impart to the work and a more revealing approach to voice-leading. Some avenues were smoothed out rather than brought into relief. Otherwise, however, I shall repeat myself in describing this as a recital of distinction.

Kairos Quartet/Experimental Studio des SWR: Haas, Stroppa, and Rusconi, 7 April 2013

2013-04-09T16:22:00.002+01:00

Hall Two, Kings Place

Georg Friedrich Haas – String Quartet no.4 (2003)

Marco Stroppa – Spirali per quartetto d’archi ‘proiettato’ nello spazio (1987-88)
Roberto David Rusconi – String Quartet no.4, De imago (Materia) Sonora (2012, world premiere)

Wolfgang Bender, Stefan Haussler (violins)
Simone Heiligendorff (viola)
Claudius von Wrochem (cello)
Thomas Hummel, Simon Spillner (sound projection)

I wanted to enjoy this concert, but ultimately found that expectations exceeded reality. It is perfectly likely, of course, that I simply did not properly understand or even appreciate the works performed, all of which I was encountering for the first time. It is even possible that they may have been left down in performance, though I doubt it; insofar as I could ascertain, the players of the Kairos Quartet and the Südwestfunk Experimental Studio offered committed advocacy. Yet, on a first hearing, I cannot say that I was entirely convinced by two out of the three pieces for string quartet and electronics.

Georg Friedrich Haas’s Fourth String Quartet was, according to the programme, his first work to employ electronics; I had a slight sense that it might have been out of duty rather than powerful inclination; indeed, there seemed to be something rather dated about the practice, which though ‘live’, had an air of early, 1950s tape experiments rather than the first decade of the twenty-first century. Much of the first half of the work was a story of gradual transformation, though the pace of that transformation picked up somewhat with time. A surprisingly lyrical section, initiated by viola, offered some respite from what was beginning to sound merely grey. (Try to imagine electronic, microtonal Hindemith Gebrauchsmusik.) Sections were clearly demarcated and, at least in retrospect, the work’s architecture was readily discernible, but drama tended to come from the ‘effect’ of the electronics rather than anything more intrinsic to the material. Or perhaps I was just missing the point.

Marco Stroppa’s Spirali plays, as its title suggests, with spirals in spatial form, as realised by electronics. It seemed to me a far more interesting work. Electronics sounded more integral to the experience, and from the very outset; the material itself, apparently derived from a latent chorale, also seemed to be of greater interest. There was certainly a greater sense of drama and of the material being in flux. One could even experience intensity simply from watching the sound engineers, let alone from hearing. The ‘involved’ quality of the music at some points, even if only coincidentally, might have been glancing back to Schoenberg’s quartet writing. There were, then, complexity, expressiveness, and complexity in and of expression, aided and furthered by ‘voices’ emanating from electronics. The magical conclusion might almost have been said to have possessed an air of spectralism.

Roberto David Rusconi’s De imago (Materia) Sonora also made fuller use of electronics, indeed arguably more so still, and again from the outset. Rusconi’s work, receiving its first performance, gave a strong sense of ‘landscape’, not necessarily as opposed to a journey through time, though not necessarily unopposed to it either. As with Haas’s work, however, the quartet as a whole sounded very sectional. Though full of incident, it was unclear to me quite how it all added up. Perhaps, however, I was again merely missing the point.

BCMG/Benjamin - Into the Little Hill, with works by Antonioni and Sawer, 6 April 2013

2013-04-07T14:39:00.001+01:00

Wigmore Hall

Francesco Antonioni – Ballata (2008)

David Sawer – Rumpelstiltskin Suite (2011, world premiere)
George Benjamin – Into the Little Hill (2006)

Susanna Andersson (soprano)
Hilary Summers (contralto)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
George Benjamin (conductor)

This concert was the final event in the Wigmore Hall’s George Benjamin Day. A morning concert, which I had been unable to attend, had offered various chamber works, from Carolin Widmann (violin), Adam Walker (flute), and Marino Formenti (piano). There had also been a pre-concert interview between Benjamin and Wigmore Hall director, John Gilhooly, the interview reminding one just what a difficult business composition is, especially for someone so self-critical and exquisite in craftsmanship as Benjamin.

Francesco Antonioni’s Ballata was a Birmingham Contemporary Music Group commission, first performed in 2009. Its material is derived from a lullaby, sung by an unidentified female singer, recorded in the 1950s by the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and a fourteenth-century ballade, Ecco la primavera – might we dare hope for that at long last? – by Francesco Landini. Written for strings (three violins, two violas, two cellos, and one double bass), it inevitably elicits sonorities that put one in mind of otherwise quite dissimilar pieces for string ensemble or orchestra. That the odd chord-spacing reminded me of, say, Strauss’s Metamorphosen or Honegger’s Second Symphony probably has no further relevance than that. One was perhaps a little closer to the mark in hearing hints of post-Ligeti swarming, albeit with a post-Romantic sensibility that remained at least as strong. Certainly a lyrical impulse, unsurprising given the inspiration, persistently manifested itself. There were some beautiful ‘frozen’ or, perhaps better, ‘freezing’ moments too. Sections were sharply characterised without sounding ‘sectional’. The BCMG musicians appeared to give a fine account under Benjamin; commitment was certainly palpable.

David Sawer’s Rumpelstiltskin Suite, co-commissioned by the BCMG and the Wigmore Hall, received its world premiere. I was struck by the balletic quality to much of this often very pictorial music. Prokofiev’s sense of fantasy never seemed far away, likewise Stravinsky in various respects: sonority (at times Symphonies of Wind Instruments, despite the mixed nature of the ensemble), rhythms, and a sense of music theatre that inescapably brought impressions of The Soldier’s Tale. There was woodwind rejoicing, mixed with foreboding, during the section I assume to have been depicting the wedding of the miller’s daughter to the king and her coronation; there was spinning from the strings and harp. And it was difficult not to hear some sort of homage to The Rite of Spring in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’s Last Dance’. It was colourful, full of character; an excellent choice, I should imagine, to introduced children to ‘contemporary music’.

Benjamin’s masterly chamber opera, Into the Litte Hill, followed the interval, Susanna Anderson and Hilary Summers the soloists. It is extraordinary, though gratifying, to think that, although it was only first performed in 2006, this wonderful opera has already, quite rightly, attained ‘classic’ status. Martin Crimp’s libretto helps, offering the conjunction of a timeless morality of politicians and broken promises, with the opportunity for particular resonances at particular times, as well of course as being finely judged in the potential it allows for music. ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’ To which the man, Benjamin, and we, reply that nothing could be further from the truth. ‘This is our home. Our home is under the earth./With the angel under the earth./And the deeper we burrow the brighter his music burns.’ This country may be less obsessed with Jimmy Savile than it was a few months ago, but issues concerning child abduction and paedophilia insinuate themselves nevertheless.

Hearing Into the Little Hill again, so soon after the Royal Opera’s performances of Written on Skin, one appreciates that the path is not straightforwardly linear from the former to the latter. Some of the sounds, and indeed the ideas, are arguably more dramatically rebarbative than anything in the Pelléas-soaked world of Benjamin’s – and Crimp’s – second opera. For me, the furious crowd interventions, voiced though they may be by two singers alone, evoke the viciousness of the turba choruses in Bach’s Passions. ‘Kill them they bite/kill them they steal/kill them they take bread take rice...’ The rats in our present-day climate could be ‘benefit claimants’ at the mercy of the mob. Benjamin’s score is, as one would expect, beautifully crafted in its entirety, always revealing more, the short Interlude between the fourth and fifth scenes, for instance, offering a disturbingly exquisite hesitant journey somewhere between pointillism and arabesque. The hieratic quality at the beginning of Part Two perhaps brought echoes – at least in this listener’s head, on this occasion – of Messiaen and Boulez. And the sense of a breakdown of musical mechanisms at the end sounded both utterly characteristic of Benjamin and evocative of earlier examples from Prokofiev (the close of the Fifth Symphony) to Knussen. Once again the BCMG did the music proud, as did Benjamin’s own focused direction. Andersson proved an intrepid, seemingly fearless soprano, as beautiful of voice as precise of pitch. High notes thereby registered with full expressive attention rather than mere technical achievement. Summers’s extraordinary contralto remains quite unlike any other voice I have heard. It sometimes seems to possess an almost primæval, ‘untrained’ quality, musicianship worn lightly, and offered not only excellently judged contrast with the soprano but also winning alchemy with Karen Jones’s bass flute. A masterpiece confirmed, then, and given a new lease of performing life.

Anderszewski/LSO/Znaider - Mozart and Mahler, 4 April 2013

2013-04-04T23:03:00.000+01:00

Barbican Hall

Mozart – Piano Concerto no.25 in C major, KV 503

Mahler – Symphony no.5

Piotr Anderszewski (piano)

London Symphony Orchestra

Nikolaj Znaider (conductor)

Two stern tests, very different, for any conductor: Mozart and Mahler. Nikolaj Znaider performed more than creditably, though his Mahler will doubtless be very different in ten years’ time, let alone forty. Perhaps most surprising was the revelation of a Mozartian spirit that eludes more than a tiny number of conductors of whatever degree of experience. The opening ritornello of the twenty-fifth piano concerto was crisp, majestically full-bodied, imaginatively coloured without being in the slightest fussy; Sir Colin Davis would not have been ashamed of the results. There was, the Almighty be praised, no nonsense with ‘natural’ trumpets or hard sticks on the kettledrums; there were none of those infuriating ‘effects’ employed to distract one from the sad reality that a conductor has no feeling for the harmonic rhythm of the work. And so the contribution from Znaider and the LSO continued. Piotr Anderszewski’s response was finely shaded, especially when conversing with the woodwind, who proved, without exception, their usual exquisite selves. Anderszewski’s playing was often characterful, though occasionally it could fall into the ‘neutrality’ that plagues many a performance of Mozart in C major. His left-hand trills were to die for, though, even if the patchwork cadenza – presumably his own – were not. The slow movement was serene, long-breathed, and taken at an unhurried tempo of which one might have lost all hope today. Crucial to its success was the ability to phrase, from all concerned. In short, it was a true slow movement, and not just in terms of tempo. (Sadly, the bronchially challenged, the leg scratchers, the jewellery janglers, the wristwatch alarm enthusiasts, and other terroristic forces were out in good number, but they annoyed rather than overwhelmed.) Anderszewski’s ornamentation was judicious both in style and execution. The finale again benefited from a well-chosen tempo, permitting of grace and ebullience. Some of Anerszewski’s playing was rather sec, even Gould-like, for my taste, but it was full of contrasts, never un-eventful. Once again, Znaider showed himself a highly sympathetic Mozartian, alert both to harmony and to rhythm, flexible too. The LSO woodwind soloists showed themselves once again at the top of their – and Mozart’s – game: ravishing!

If Mozart is the most difficult of all composers to perform, then Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is as difficult to bring off as anything by Beethoven. I was privileged last year to hear a truly great performance, from Daniele Gatti and the Philharmonia, but more frequent has been the experience of conductors, some of them highly esteemed indeed, having their fingers burned. (I shall resist the temptation to provide names and telephone numbers...) Znaider’s reading was not on the level of Gatti’s; no one could reasonably expect it to be. However, there was enough promise in it to suggest that this might stand at the beginning of an interesting Mahlerian journey, not a claim I offer lightly. It is perhaps worth noting that, unlike the Mozart concerto, the symphony was conducted from memory. Znaider placed the violins together on his left, but violas rather than cellos on his right.

The opening of the first movement was brash, cataclysmic, with superb playing from the first trumpet, Philip Cobb. More Bernstein than Kubelík, this was certainly exciting in its way, and commendably flexible too, with sharply drawn dramatic contrasts. As befits a violinist, there was considerable attention paid to the projection of individual string parts. And yet, there was something not quite ‘right’, at least to my ears, about the overall sonority, and that was not just a matter of the vibrato-laden brass. Perhaps it was more a result of Valery Gergiev’s ill-fated LSO Mahler cycle than of Znaider’s intention, or perhaps he has been spending too much time with the Mariinsky Orchestra. Sound and balances seemed at times closer to Prokofiev and even Shostakovich than to Mahler. It was never dull, but it was not always clear where this Mahler had come from: certainly not from Wagner, still less from Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach. The second movement was rightly taken quickly, as the conclusion of the first part of the symphony, though that did not prevent Coughers’ Awareness from renewing our communal awareness. Tension was less prone to sag than in the first movement, and again tempo fluctuations were considerable, though not unreasonable. Wagner now was certainly to be heard from the violins, with their Tristan-esque insinuations: excellent! If sonorities still sometimes sounding a little odd, especially in the case of the ‘Soviet’ barrage from brass and percussion, then that was less of a problem than earlier on. There was, moreover, some gloriously ‘deep’ playing from the cellos, and later on from the string section as a whole. And if the first appearance of that extraordinary chorale of frustrated promise sounded with more Technicolor than was ideal, Znaider and the LSO captured the right degree of hollowness, which ultimately is more important than any question of ‘accent’.

The scherzo opened most successfully, with splendid swing and real bite to its counterpoint, which offered premonitions of the Bach on acid of the Ninth Symphony’s Rondo Burleske. It was clear by now that this was not going to be Mahler as progenitor of Berg and Webern, yet, taken on its own terms, it was working increasingly well, certainly far superior to Gergiev’s bizarrely unidiomatic attempts. Tricky – a gross understatement! – corners were skilfully navigated. Above all, there was a sense of this second part to the symphony as equivocal pivot. And the conclusion – which is of course anything but – both thrilled and terrified, even though both experiences would have been heightened with greater preparation.

Znaider’s tempo for the Adagietto struck me as ideal: neither maudlin, nor aggressively ‘revisionist’. No ‘point’ was being made; the music was permitted to speak. And so it did, to great advantage, now that the orchestra was shorn of the ‘colouristic’ excesses of brass and percussion. Grave beauty emerged from Mahler’s variegated string writing. Moreover, Znaider never confused sentiment with sentimentality; the clouds began to clear in earnest. This movement proved well-nigh exemplary, quite an achievement for any conductor. Equally impressive was the conductor’s manipulation of connections through pitch and rhythm to ensure that the finale grew out of its predecessor, rather than simply following on. Counterpoint was for the most part clear, and at its best, the movement exhibited an almost Haydn-like sense of play. If the ‘accent’ once again wandered at times, and there were a few instances of a fuzziness perhaps born of tiredness, much of the spirit remained. Crucially, Mahler’s enigmatic quality endured; there were no easy answers.

Igor Levit - Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Prokofiev, 2 April 2013

2013-04-02T22:53:00.001+01:00

Wigmore Hall

Bach – Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo, BWV 992

Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.30 in E major, op.109
Schubert – Allegretto in C minor, D 915
Schubert-Liszt – Du bist die Ruh, S 558/3
Aufenthalt, S 560/3
Auf dem Wasser zu singen, S 558/2
Der Wanderer, S 558/11
Prokofiev – Piano Sonata no.7 in B-flat major, op.83

This was the first time I had heard Igor Levit, already a BBC New Generation Artist and recipient of an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical; I certainly hope that it will not be the last, The recital opened arrestingly with Bach’s B-flat major Capriccio, ‘On the departure of his most beloved brother,’ Levit’s opening bars voiced with Couperin-like delicacy (perhaps even Couperin-Strauss), and not only in terms of the ornamentation. Beautifully clear, the performance lacked nothing in tonal warmth. A fine balance was struck between necessary ‘improvisational’ quality and an equally necessary sense of the music, being Bach’s, being most definitely ‘composed. Bach’s chromaticism was equally expressive, but the overriding impression was of something more ‘courtly’, more ‘French’ in character than one expects from the composer. (It is, after all, an early work.) And yet, if the trumpet-theme of the fugue is unusually Handelian in character, the working out is – and in performance, was – undeniably that of the great Johann Sebastian. Perhaps most surprising of all was the way Levit managed to hold off applause, so as to continue into the Beethoven with but a short pause.

With the first movement of Beethoven’s E major sonata, op.109, we unmistakeably moved from music that works supremely well upon the piano to music that was definitively written for it. In this performance, we heard Beethoven as the gateway to later nineteenth-century composition, Chopin as well as Liszt. This was Beethoven for the bright-toned Steinway, not the mellow, more Viennese Bösendorfer. It was certainly not jejune, but it was a young man’s late Beethoven, quite rightly, rather than an attempt to feign the wisdom of a lengthy career. Voicing of chords was often especially beautiful. The second movement was characterised by a heightened, almost kaleidoscopic, sense of drama; again, it was intriguing to hear late Beethoven voiced with youthful radicalism. The finale came off a little less well. It certainly sounded beautifully, but without the noble simplicity the greatest Beethoven interpreters can summon. Much was exquisite, in almost Chopin-like fashion, not least on account of Levit’s well-nigh ‘Golden Age’ touch. There was great variety: more pointillistic passages vied with a positively rambunctious account of the fugal fifth variation. Ultimately, however, the movement emerged more as a compendious than an integrated or integrative set of variations. There seems, however, every reason to suspect that the latter will come before long.

Schubert’s C minor Allegretto concluded the first half. It benefited from an unexaggeratedly Romantic yearning, perhaps more apposite here than in the Beethoven finale. Ruptures were relished every bit as impressively as line was spun. Levit certainly had an impressive command of major-mode balm, however fleeting – and the brevity of that balm was of course a good part of the point.

An exquisite – sorry to use that word again, but it does seem fitting – group of Schubert-Liszt songs followed the interval. Du bist die Ruh exhibited left-hand strength and subtlety, as well as an excellent feeling for rubato. Climaxes were undeniably Liszt’s rather than Schubert’s. Aufenthalt became a true song without words; indeed, its narrative quality hinted at the ballad. Auf dem Wasser zu singen opened with a fine sense of coming de profundis, Levit’s touch soon revealed to be every bit as melting as in the preceding songs. ‘Atmosphere’ and clarity were well balanced, and virtuosity made its point without excess. The same could be said of Der Wanderer, which maintained an impeccable sense of line and direction.

Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata received a performance for which ‘outstanding’ would not be an exaggeration. Its first movement opened with an excellent sense of the diabolical and of whimsy. The roots of Prokofiev’s wartime writing thereby extended deep, recalling not only the composer of The Love for Three Oranges but even the experimental creator of the Visions fugitives. (Why do we not hear them more often?) Harmony was certainly made to tell in forging such links, whether conscious or otherwise; the claptrap ideology of socialist realism was banished for good. It was a broad Romantic, or perhaps better neo-Romantic, canvas upon which Levit painted, not dissimilar from that of the Beethoven, but certainly more fitting. That is not, however, to say that his playing could not be rhythmically taut when necessary. The side-slipping, balletic neo-Romanticism of the slow movement was captured to a tee. Something utterly personal, both for composer and pianist, was forged from what can be daunting eclecticism. Prokofiev as heir to the virtuoso Liszt was apparent too, not least in the superlative visualisation of the composer’s half-lights. If not exactly more yielding than the awe-inspiringly implacable Maurizio Pollini in his classic recording, Levit, as in the first movement, offered a greater sense of whimsy in the finale. There is room for both approaches; that one might even be moved to speak of a pianist in the same breath as Pollini speaks volumes of the distinction of this reading. Make no mistake: this was tremendous pianism – and musicianship too. Levit offered edge-of-the-seat excitement in the very best, Precipitato, sense.

As an encore, we were treated to Liszt’s transcription of the ‘Liebestod’ – yes, it is his fault we call it that, rather than Wagner’s ‘Verklärung’ – from Tristan und Isolde. The combination of magical showmanship and an utter lack of the meretricious once again showed Levit to be an uncommonly distinguished Lisztian. This performance impressed – and it moved. The kinship with Liszt’s older operatic fantasias was clear – for once Hans von Bülow’s quip concerning Wagner’s ‘bel canto opera’ did not seem entirely absurd – but the incommensurate development in terms of material was equally apparent. An excellent conclusion, then, to an excellent recital.