Where's Runnicles

Antigone at the National Theatre, or It's All in the Delivery

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Thu, 24 May 2012 21:54:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the second Preview performance. Press Night is on Wednesday 30th May.

The life lessons I gleaned from this show can be summed up in three statements:

1) It is an almost infallible rule (the only exception I can immediately think of being the original London Into the Woods) that putting a clock which changes time during the show on stage is a serious mistake.

2) “There is no hatred more terrible than that of two people who used to love each other.” As someone who has endured an unpleasant divorce I know this to be all to sadly true.

3) It's all in the delivery.

Life Lesson No.3 became apparent because almost nobody manages to deliver the text effectively in this show. There is such a widespread problem of odd pauses and emphases as to make me wonder if some kind of foolish directorial instruction has been given, but whether actors or director are responsible swift action is required. For in much of this play everything depends on one believing what one is being told. The chorus has to make you see the things they describe. They have to make you believe in their fears. There are occasional flashes of this but nowhere near enough. Another factor may well have been the decision to split the chorus's lines around an ensemble of ten. None of them are given much individuality by costuming or direction, or enough lines to really establish their presence. They fade in, speak a few lines (too often to little effect) and fade out again.

The principals are, I'm afraid, similarly unimpressive. Luke Newberry's Haemon probably comes the closest to sustaining a convincing performance through an entire scene. I thought at the beginning of his scene that Jamie Ballard's Teiresias was going to stop the rot but by the conclusion he was ending his sentences with unconvincing wails. The biggest problem is Christopher Eccleston's performance as Creon. He has to be frightening. He must exude a sense of power. You have to believe in his strength which becomes tyranny or his collapse (and indeed the whole plot) goes for nothing. I'm sorry to have to report that at the moment Eccleston's performance simply is not working. It's too much on one level, I didn't find him at all threatening, and he fails to make the words live.

Finally there's the set. It's basically a modern largely open plan office with faxes, post-trolleys, photocopiers. This creates an awful lot of busyness which does nothing to support or give added point to the text. In the centre is a closed in office for Creon with the aforementioned clock. At points Creon and members of the chours disappear in there. This closes them off still further from the audience, does bizarre things to the voices, and once again adds nothing to the drama.

Overall an uninvolving evening. It is obviously too late for Polly Findlay and her team to discover a more convincing scenic vision for the piece, but there may still be time to sort out the delivery of the text. Unless that undergoes substantial improvement by press night this show cannot be recommended.

Flora the Red Menace in Walthamstow, or, Break Heart, I prithee Break

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Thu, 24 May 2012 07:01:00 +0000

I first saw this show in a production by the Dundee Rep at the Edinburgh Lyceum in 2004. I fell for it then and have been a devoted advocate ever since, an absolute believer that Kander and Ebb's first collaboration is a musical theatre masterpiece. I was thus thrilled when I saw that a London fringe production was being put on (the first professional production in the city in 17 years and, as far as I'm aware the first professional production in the UK since Dundee in 2004). As I say I was thrilled, but I was also afraid that I would be disappointed. Thankfully this was not the case. Everything in this production is not perhaps as it would be in my ideal staging. The company is not as uniformly well cast as might be desirable. But there is plenty to like in both, overall they allow this great work to shine, and, above all, this is an evening blessed with a stunning performance by Katy Baker in the lead role (deservedly nominated for an Offie).

For those who don't know this work, it is set in depression era New York and follows the attempt of our heroine Flora to get a start in life (alongside a community of her friends), and as a result her meeting and romance with Harry who turns out to be a Communist. Both book and lyrics are often witty, and the musical includes, for my money, some of Kander and Ebb's best numbers including Flora's introductory 'The Kid Herself', Harry's paean to the Communist party ('Sign Here'), and the little gem of a trio 'Where Did Everybody Go'. And yet this show has not entered the mainstream and remains better known for giving Liza Minnelli her start.

Director Randy Smartnick advances a view in his programme notes that the reason the show has not become a success like Cabaret or Chicago is because it “has always tried to take itself too seriously.” To combat this he has, in his own words, introduced “a little Broadway cheese.” As far as I could see the main way this manifested itself was in quite a lot of fairly standard Broadway big number choreography via Kate McPhee. Now there is a great deal of wit in lyrics and music in this show and some of these attempts to play this up work quite well. But this remains a serious piece of work. If you want a fluffy musical go watch Crazy for You. I think that seriousness is actually a key part of what makes the show so special.

I have a suspicion that the other problem may be that some people feel the politics are too light – that is that the show falls between two stools. I don't find that – but then I prefer my political satire to have Flanders and Swann wit rather than The Thick of It profanities. The destructive nature of Party rigidity, the doom pronounced on someone for crossing a picket line, the threat to the principle of independence are powerfully represented through Flora. There is much more at stake in this show than the fate of our lovers.

A successful production of Flora depends particularly on the lead and this is the other reason why theatergoers should be flocking to Walthamstow. Baker's Flora wears her heart in her face and in such an intimate venue watching the emotions so freely expressed there is a powerful experience. Baker doesn't just seize the money numbers like 'Sing Happy' but the little moments like 'Dear Love', the Act One finale. Despite being surrounded by giant pink hearts and flashing lights Baker's Flora remains fragile, poised in hope and fear. As the evening drew on her performance bound me, and brought tears to my eyes.

The quality of the rest of the cast is a bit more variable and this means that their doubling as passersby/random Communists is less successful than in the other two productions of the show I've seen. Generally speaking too voices are just a bit too small for their parts. Sam Linscott's Harry transcends this shortage of vocal heft by a compelling characterisation – he really does look like a stereotypical Communist activist, and there is real chemistry between him and Baker. I was less keen on Ellen Verenicks's Charlotte who somehow doesn't quite fully inhabit the part but delivers with Baker and Linscott an excellent account of the act two trio previously mentioned. Of the rest I would pick out Kimberley Moses's Maggie, who also doubles well as Mr Stanley's obnoxious secretary. The one bizarre casting decision is Will Pearce's Willy. His character is supposed to be a clarinettist. This is a crucial part of the character, and in other productions I've seen the occasional bit of on-stage clarinet playing adds needed colour to the music. Pearce although he occasionally brandishes the instrument never plays it. I find it difficult to believe that no clarinet playing actors were available in a city the size of London, and Pearce is not so special as a non-clarinet playing actor to justify his being cast in the role.

But the real test of a production is whether it transcends what flaws there may be. It is a sterner test when you are presenting it to somebody who knows the work very well and treasures it. This production passes that test. It confirms what a masterpiece this show is. And Katy Baker's Flora broke my heart. If you know and love this musical as I do, then you will want to see this revival. If you don't know the show this is a rare opportunity for discovery and one not to be missed. In short, go.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Remembered

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Sat, 19 May 2012 21:32:00 +0000

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died on 18th May 2012, a little over a week before his 87th birthday. He was without doubt one of the finest lieder and opera singers of his, or indeed any, generation. I will leave the writing of obituaries to others, but I thought I would put together some of my favourite recordings. The result can found in this Spotify playlist:

It would be difficult to begin anywhere but with Schubert lieder, works with which Fischer-Dieskau is probably most closely associated and which he recorded prolifically. Der Taucher (D77) is probably not the most obvious starting point. However, it is where my interest in his performances of the works first really began. In a bid to get to know them, I had picked up his mammouth 21 disc box set with outstanding accompanist Gerald Moore. The first song that really grabbed me was Der Taucher, which comes towards the end of disc one. Based on a Schiller poem, it vividly tells the story of the eponymous diver, plunging again, and again, into the depths to retrieve the king's chalice, until....

Fischer-Dieskau was, for me, one of the finest Kurwenals on record, something that he demonstrated on two of the finest recordings of Tristan und Isolde, made at either end of his career. From the first, the legendary recording with Wilhelm Furtwangler, I've chosen the start of act three, one of my favourite moments in the opera, as they await the arrival of a ship. Nearly thirty years later, with Carlos Kleiber in the pit, Fischer-Dieskau's performance is no less compelling. I considered selecting a different exert from that recording, but I liked the symmetry and so the same section is to be found as the penultimate track on the playlist.

Next, to lighten the mood, I have turned to another end of the operatic spectrum, and Mozart's sublime comedy Le Nozze di Figaro. Fischer-Dieskau features as the count in Karl Bohm's Deutsche Oper recording and is on fine form here in the comic conclusion of act two as, Figaro, Suzanna and the countess having temporarily got the better of him, he pleads for forgiveness. Although a broken flowerpot is just around the corner...

I had initially thought I might select a different Schubert lied every other track, but in the end I've opted for fewer than that. I first met Der Erlkonig (D328) not as a lied, but rather in Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst's fiendish arrangement for solo violin after Rachel Barton Pine performed it in a dazzling encore at the end of her last visit to Edinburgh (a regrettably long time ago now). I was instantly won over to it and have found the ghoulish original no less compelling.

You could probably argue that I should have chosen Otto Klemperer's recording of Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem, and I would probably have to concede that it is overall a finer and more satisfying performance than the one I have ultimately selected. However, I have gone instead to Edinburgh in 1978, where Fischer-Dieskau performed the work together Ilena Cotrubas, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Carlo Maria Giulini. Fischer-Dieskau had a long association with the Edinburgh festival, which also occupies a special place in my affections, so I wanted to represent it.

We've had lieder, opera, requiem, next oratorio. Fischer-Dieskau sang Christ in Bach's St Matthew Passion several times, but I have opted for Furtwangler's regrettably cut performance, and in particular the scene where Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him. Furtwangler's conducting will not be to all tastes, certainly not for those inclined towards historically informed performance. However, he also recorded it with Karl Richter.

Schubert again, and another favourite lied, this time one that I first heard in recital at Aldeburgh (though I cannot now recall either the singer or the accompanist). In a performance of Schwanengesang, it was Der Doppleganger that grabbed me most. Fischer-Dieskau and Moore give it a searingly dramatic performance.

Benjamin Britten wrote his War Requiem with three singers in mind, including Fischer-Dieskau. In fact, it is here that I would ideally chose to turn to Edinburgh, where, in 1968, the original trio performed it with the Philharmonia, with Giulini on the podium and Britten conducting the chamber ensemble. My parents tell me it was an extraordinary performance (as indeed do other people I've met who were lucky enough to be there). Giulini's recording, made a year later at the Albert Hall, bears this out. Alas, by then only Pears remained of the original soloists. However, Fischer-Dieskau was caught for posterity on the composer's own outstanding recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Melos Ensemble. The exert I've chosen is Be slowly lifted up, for the singing of course, but also the wonderful brass work behind it.

It might be said with some justification that, Figaro aside, this is a rather depressing selection, so in the interest of lightening the mood somewhat, let us return to Deutche Oper for Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Fischer-Dieskau sang Sachs on Eugen Jochum's fine recording and is on good form at one of my favourite moments, as he judges Beckmesser's performance by hammering his shoe. I've just included one track from the disc, but here, as elsewhere, you may want to click through and listen all the way to the act's conclusion.

I tend to prefer Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with a mezzo or a contralto (and on disc ideally with Kathleen Ferrier), but if anyone comes close to convincing me of the merits of a baritone it is Fischer-Dieskau, here with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

I've closed the playlist with one final Schubert lied. It seemed fitting to turn to the start of Winterreise and Gute Nacht. Of course, at this point there are many choices, as he recorded it many times. Moore is already well represented on this playlist and so I have looked elsewhere and opted for his performance with that incomparable Schubertian Alfred Brendel.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau leaves a vast and rich legacy on record, and this is no more than a small and probably not very representative sample, which perhaps doesn't range as widely as it might, but it does represent how I for one will remember him best.

Wonderful Town, or it pains me to say this, but...

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sat, 19 May 2012 21:15:00 +0000

I wanted to love this performance, I really did. In fairness everybody on stage and in the pit are giving it their all, and that includes the most problematic performer of whom I shall have cause to say more later. But beyond that particular issue there is something broader that isn't quite right with this show, and when I observed that both choreographer and designer were also involved with last year's Singin in the Rain, the nature of the broader issue became clearer. It isn't that anything in design or choreography is mistaken but somehow that quality of naturalness, of humanity – that thing that makes you feel this story is being lived now before your eyes just wasn't quite there. Now it is true that this performance had a very tough benchmark to live up to as the last time I saw this show was in the marvellous Broadway revival with the incomparable Donna Murphy as Ruth and Gregg Edelman as Bob. However, I think this performance could have come a lot closer, even with the caveat already mentioned, but for the other elephant in the room.

For the sad, harsh truth is that Connie Fisher is not good enough to play Ruth Sherwood. This is not for lack of effort on her part. She tries to project the necessary personality which done right should make the character the electric centre of every scene she's in, but she just doesn't have it. And there is a more serious problem – the state of Fisher's voice. Despite miking it simply isn't strong enough for this kind of lead performance, and this is sadly exposed every time she's in a duet situation – Lucy van Gasse (Eileen), Michael Xavier (Bob) and Tiffany Graves (Helen) all sing her off the stage. If Fisher were able to compensate for vocal weakness with stage presence it might have been okay but as already noted that presence just isn't sufficiently there.

The issues with Fisher forces me to consider again the merits of the BBC's various talent contests for West End roles. Fisher of course famously won the contest to become Lloyd Webber's Maria and, equally famously, then suffered vocal problems which have turned her from soprano to contralto. I watched the show (and the subsequent searches for Nancy and Dorothy) and at the time disagreed with a relative who works in the business who disapproved of this whole method of finding a leading man/lady. But after this I begin to wonder if my relative was right. I can only assume it was thought by the producers that Fisher would sell tickets because the public would know her from the past (judging by ticket availabilty for today's shows in Nottingham there is some doubt on this point). Either way though the result is to cast someone who is not appropriate for the part. Moreover I really question whether Fisher can undertake further lead roles – the voice just does not seem to me on this showing to be strong enough.

Among the rest of the cast there are some strong performances. Michael Xavier is in excellent voice as Bob but more chemistry is needed between him and Fisher. Lucy van Gasse is suitably flirtatious as Eileen. There are nice supporting turns from Tiffany Graves as Helen, Nic Greenshields as the Wreck and Sevan Stephan as Appopulous. The support from the ensemble is strong.

In the pit the orchestra play superbly and really let rip where they can, most notably in the Overture and the Village Vortex Ballet. I'd expected from comments beforehand to feel the tempi were too slow, but generally it seemed to me James Burton got it right. Rather for me it was a problem of that living element I mentioned at the beginning. Little things just don't quite come off – the Conga Finale is not crazy enough (and I'm sure some of Comden and Green's lyrics have been messed around with – there is definitely a reference to Charles G. Dawes on my recording), and the direction of What a Waste also does not work – in particular sending Fisher off-stage just so she can reappear in a different costume at the end of the number is bizarre – the whole point of the number being to teach her a lesson. One other area that requires comment is the accents which struck me as odd in places, again I'm afraid particularly with respect to Fisher who sounded to me like she was hailing from somewhere in the South rather than Ohio. The rendering in Ohio of “better go home” as “bitter go home” was a notably bizarre effect.

There are enjoyable things about this show. It gave me a real thrill to hear the Overture and the Village Vortex Ballet played live again, and you cannot fault the commitment of cast and pit but ultimately that crucial central spark is missing. There's still no doubt in my mind that this show deserves to be better known and more frequently revived than it is but to revive it with real success you need someone with true star quality to play Ruth which Fisher, it saddens me to say, just has not got.

Globe to Globe's Balkan Henry VI, or Shakespeare transcends the Language Barrier

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:39:00 +0000

You're going to all three parts of Henry VI in three different Balkan languages? Are you mad? That is what I suspect most people would have said to me had I informed them this was what I was up to yesterday. However, after some early qualms when I gathered the surtitles would only indicate scenes and characters I can say it was a fascinating, for long stretches enthralling, day, which I would have been very sorry to have missed.

We started with the National Theatre of Serbia in Part One which they dismissed in two hours. There was some fine Shakespearean delivery from the start with Predrag Ejus's delivery of the Bishop of Winchester's eulogy on the deceased Henry V. Excellent use was made of the set of metal tables and chairs, for sound effects, for emphasising the division of kingdoms, for allowing ambush parties to rise up from beneath and drag bodies to their doom. Indeed one of the things that not understanding the language makes one appreciate far more is the movement and gesture. In this first part I was also much beguiled by Talbot's duel with Joan of Arc (or rather with the whole of the rest of the company), and her trial scene. However the highlight was the comedy turn of two messengers (I think but can't be absolutely certain played by Pavle Jerinic and Bojan Krivokapic). I can't recall how these figure in the original text, but having in the opening scene given us two nicely disputed versions of events in France, they rounded off this interpretation with a mostly mimed summation of the genealogy of the plot thus far – the payoff being that in a final attempt to get everything clear they deploy Henry V's ashes (which sat balefully overlooking proceedings through the rest of the play) as a prop, with predictable but entertaining results. All in all it was an auspicious beginning.

Things did sag a bit in the second installment performed by the National Theatre of Albania. This segment had the least sense of much in the way of ideas about the piece – or at least much being conveyed, the acting did not seem as compelling, and the pacing seemed to drag. There were some nice moments including the solo clarinet, and a nicely characterised hapless performance of Henry VI himself but somehow it didn't quite take off and I was rather glad when the conclusion arrived.

Fortunately, the best was being saved for Part Three, although it is also true that Part Three is a superb play that deserves to be staged more often than it is – although whether it would work as a stand alone piece I'm not sure. This was performed by the National Theatre of Bitola. The company included several standout performances which pretty completely transcended the language barrier. Henry VI's (Peter Gorko) monologue on the battlefield at Towton was harrowing, as were the laments of the fathers and sons. Richard's (Martin Mirchevski) monologue – there was no mistaking the repeated “Stare! Stare!”, Margaret's (Gabriela Petrushevska) all round performance and the dark for bidding manner of Sonja Mihajlova's Warwick (Sonja Mihajlova) were also highlights. Music and movement were beguilingly used. There was on-going piano accompaniment provided by Mitko Ivanovski which suited the mood of the piece perfectly, and battle scenes were stylised dance with telling use of staves (an excellent solution if you don't want to use swords).

I suspect that my enjoyment did benefit from having seen the trilogy in the 2008 RSC cycle which meant that a lot of scenes and speeches remained fresh in my mind helping me to situate myself in the narrative. But I also felt over the course of the day, and especially in Part Three, that Shakespeare transcended language – the emotional punch and in some strange way the lyricism came across despite my technically not understanding a word being said. Again especially in Part Three, I was reminded of the Burgtheater's performance of Maria Stuart at the Edinburgh Festival. On that occasion much more of the text was being surtitled, but I remember then too losing the need for the translation because the delivery was so clear and compelling.

Talking to a fellow groundling in one of the intervals I learned that he was doing the whole cycle. At the halfway point he reported only two duds. On the strength of yesterday I can well believe him. The best advice I can give is to repeat what I said after the Taiwanese one-man King Lear at last year's Edinburgh International Festival. Challenge your preconceptions and try out one of the rich selection of performances still on offer in the remaining weeks. It's a unique opportunity and the odds are very good that you won't be disappointed.

The Flying Dutchman at ENO, or in which the ship just never quite sets sail

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sun, 13 May 2012 10:19:00 +0000

This ENO production has been widely praised. It left me completely cold and fairly unimpressed. Pondering this overnight, I do think it is possible that going straight from Glass on Friday to Wagner last night simply overloaded my system and I was just not in the right place to get on with this performance. I also think it's possible that my ears were spoilt for this by having so recently heard really first rank Wagner under the baton of the man himself in Berlin. Finally, I conclude that this is an opera that I just do not like very much. Allowing for all these caveats, let me try and explain why for me this evening did not work.

The first issue is the work itself. This is only the second time I've heard it live. The previous occasion was the last time ENO mounted it in the unsuccessful elastic band production. It didn't make much impression muscially on me then, and a second hearing has not changed my mind. It does not seem to me that the Dutchman shows much evidence of Wagner having developed beyond the thin inspiration of Rienzi, and I find it interesting that the far more developed and fascinating Tannhauser fails to hold a comparable place in the repertoire.

The second issue is the problematic question of benchmarks. Quite a few of my recent Wagnerian performances have been truly musically great – in this category I would include the Berlin Lohengrin, the Glyndebourne Meistersinger, the Royal Opera Tannhauser and Lohengrin – all of them were strong (in two cases extremely powerfully so) in production terms. I just do not think that this performance/production of The Flying Dutchman got near that category. In a sense it seemed to me to illustrate the gulf that exists between the Coliseum and those other companies. Now you can of course argue that those other companies have greater resources, can employ the best singers and conductors in the world and so on and so forth. Perhaps the comparison is an unfair one, but I found it last night inescapable.

Turning to the specifics of the evening. I had high hopes of Jonathan Kent following his blazing Die Frau ohne Schatten at last year's Edinburgh Festival, but this production is regrettably half baked. Kent can't quite seem to make up his mind whether all the action is taking place in Senta's mind or in reality. This indecision rather hampers one's emotional engagement. The production lacked the knack of creating telling tension and engagement between the principals – something which the Berlin Lohengrin despite other flaws was more than capable of doing. There are some striking visual images – the brooding presence of the Dutchman's ship in particular, but there are also unsuccessful elements of the bizarre like the inflated cactus (and indeed the costuming generally) in the party scene.

With respect to the singers I just didn't think that most of them could be considered to be of the first rank. With the exception of Stuart Skelton's Erik none of the others really have voices big enough or rich enough for the parts they are trying to sing. James Creswell as the Dutchman and Clive Bayley as Daland make creditable efforts but still sound underpowered in places. Orla Boylan as Senta I found just not up to it. She sounded strained and was unpleasant to listen to for much of the evening, and the less said about her diction the better. She does deliver her final notes with power and richness, but this was for me sadly a case of too little too late.

The chorus generally sang well, although there were still moments when I thought there was fractional failures of precision. The off-stage chorus of the Dutchman's crew sounded very bizarre, even possibly recorded. Like a similar effect in the recent Hoffmann this was a mistake. The orchestral playing was similarly perfectly fine, my problem was with Gardner's interpretation of the score. For me (and bearing in mind the caveats with which I began) there was a lack of that crucial sense of intensity and momentum. His reading just did not compare to the readings of those other operas by Runnicles, Bychkov and Jurowski. Those conductors showed themselves to be truly first class Wagnerians – Gardner has, on this reading, got some way to go.

As I said out the outset, this may have been a problem with me not with what was going on on stage and in the pit, but this was a performance which just did not grab me.

Einstein on the Beach, or, Satirising the Form will Carry You Only So Far

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:31:00 +0000

I had in my head written a number of openings to this review before I left for the show (which of course one is not supposed to do). Given what I had read about it I anticipated ripping it to shreds as it seemed likely to fail fundamental requirements for my having an enjoyable evening. I even thought that it might finally be the show to shift the legendary Edinburgh Festival Three Sisters off its podium as worst show a Pollard has ever endured. But my reaction to it was nowhere near as extreme as this. I was neither bored out of my mind, nor ecstatic. There are a number of interesting, even some striking, things in this show but it does not stand up to four and a bit unremitting hours of scrutiny.

The first point that has to be acknowledged is that this is an opera. Some may well be discomforted by the idea of placing this piece alongside such operatic luminaries as Mozart and Wagner but it is I'm afraid inescapable. Glass clearly has a knowledge of the form – arias, choruses, orchestral interludes are all to be found here.

To a certain extent the way this piece plays with operatic conventions and styles is engaging. The libretto is (until the very last scene) almost entirely meaningless – or at least extremely ambiguous – and there are plenty of operatic librettos that are not far from that or are nearly rendered to that state by being set to music. Numbers are placed in no particular order, cannot reinforce emotions or plot (because basically there is none of either) and again, as the piece goes on one feels that, on one level, a big joke is being had at the expense of the unrealism of the form.

The conceit is supported by some very striking visuals – indeed far more striking visuals that one often gets in the average operatic staging. Much of the set is impressively moved around on wires, performers become airborn on several occasions and there is a sense of joy about the design which is actually quite refreshing. I shall remember for a long time the moonlit train carriage simply for its visual impression.

The final big point in the show's favour is the extraordinary commitment shown by performers and band. This must be an utterly exhausting show to be in but they never reveal fatigue. I would particularly single out Kate Moran's Character 1 who has an especially expressive face and who frequently manages to give point to the text despite its determined lack of it – her repeated monologue about bathing caps is the most effective single moment in the piece.

But all of this does not, regrettably, a great modern opera make. The first big problem is the ultimate thinness of Glass's musical inspiration, about which a number of other critics have already commentated. Having listened to one of his repeated phrases once you have pretty much heard all he has to offer. The repetition may be the central point – but four hours of it is frankly asking it to support more than it is capable of. Very occasionally, and oh what a blessed relief it is, Glass discovers that other instruments beyond synthesiser and violin are available. About three quarters of the way through there is a section for what sounded to me like improvised saxophone and it is the musical highlight of the piece (I would be curious to know whether this is actually notated by Glass, or whether the instruction simply tells the saxophonist to improvise).

This same issue of repetition which tires applies to staging and movement – much of it is impressive – but when you're watching a train moving with painful slowness from stage right to stage left for the third time, or dancers repeating a very long (and not terribly choreographically inspired) dance number they already did about an hour before one's interest starts to falter. Just about every scene in this show overstays its welcome – and by the time we got to the third act I increasingly felt that Glass and Wilson simply did not know how to stop.

And finally there is the problem of meaning. This is a show basically without characters, without plot and without emotion. It says a great deal for some of the other qualities I've mentioned that I did not come out wanting to murder its creators. It also might be regarded as the holy grail for all those wretched modern opera and theatre directors who seem determined to attempt the removal of those things from plays and operas in which they are more abundant. Indeed, I began to think in the course of this show that I had found the solution to this problem – next time an artistic director thinks he should do something new and avant garde, instead of destroying a classic by a production totally at variance with text and music, he should just put on Einstein on the Beach where there are no characters, plot or emotion for the production to be at variance with. To get back to this show, however, the point is that not having these things means that there is not that sense of production at odds with the work which so often happens and which makes me want to scream. This is a strength, but for me, ultimately, there is a barrenness to it, and this was brought home to me most forcibly by the final scene.

For the first time we actually get a coherant bit of narrative in the libretto about two lovers talking about how much they love each other. Sadly it gradually becomes clear that the intention here is to mock any such silly love talk. Obviously this is again playing with the form. But it seems to me, as it has often seemed to me in productions of operas and plays which end up mocking the text and music that there is an emptiness to this. To put it at its most basic one may well say that such declarations of love in opera or straight theatre are ridiculous. But I think there is something powerful and moving about those dreams. Real life is bleak enough. And I do not think such declarations are merely silly.

Thus, there is entertainment in this show. There are fine performances. There are some moments of visual and aural beauty. But lacking heart and humanity this is ultimately, for me, a failure.

There's Runnicles, Don Carlo at Deutsche Oper or A Dramatic Reading Triumphs Over the Odd Obstacle

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:42:00 +0000

My brother came out of this production cursing the director and indifferent about much of the singing. From the perspective of the head I could to some extent see his points, but I found this performance so dramatically compelling that flaws which on another night might have had me cursing too faded into insignificance.

This was the more remarkable as the version which Runnicles chose to perform here was the significantly truncated four act version. The first time I saw Don Carlos staged was in the classic David Pountney production at the Coliseum, sadly never revived. On that occasion the five act version was performed, including not just the Fontainbleau Act which is now usually included but also the opening chorus of lamenting French peasantry. I am a firm advocate for the inclusion of both these elements, and I above all think that if performing the Fontainbleau Act you should never omit the chorus whatever version you are using as it gives crucial dramatic point to Elizabeth's acceptance of Philip. In last night's performance, we began in the monastery at St Juste. It says a great deal for the dramatic cogency and musical power of the performance which followed that I forgave the truncation.

Marco Arturo Marelli's production has one major problem. It involves a lot of manouvrable walls and the painful fact is that the technical staff at Deutsche Oper are able to manouvre them neither sufficiently fast nor sufficiently quietly (nor on one occasion sufficiently inconspicuously). This is a pity as the grey, dim, closed in environments created really reinforce the darker qualities of the score. The set also seemed, as with Rienzi, to cause the odd problem for choral sound. The Additional Chorus of Deutsche Oper were once again credited but in two crucial places – the auto-da-fe scene and the insurrection following Posa's death – the choral sound just was not loud enough. In addition to the forboding atmosphere there were a couple of striking variants on usual habits. The heavenly voice (well sung by Kathryn Lewek) was personified as a mother with child stage centre as the heretics burn at the back. The image created was powerfully effective. Later the Flemish deputies were kept much more conspicuous than is usually the case, an ongoing reminder of the political tensions of the piece. The connections between Elizabeth, Posa and Flanders were played up. Strikingly, at the end of Act 3 of this version, Elizabeth is left kneeling by the body of Posa who is then borne off by the Deputies. Their massacre at the conclusion was a powerful final image.

Casting this opera is always tricky, and it will come as no surprise that six of the greatest singers in the world were not on stage, and the vocal contrasts between the six singers we did have did not always make for effective balance in the ensembles. That said there were two stand out performers and everybody else managed very creditably – again flaws which on other nights might have driven me mad were subsumed in the evening's overall dramatic punch.

The two outstanding performances were delivered by Markus Bruck as Posa and Anna Smirnova as Eboli. Posa's intellectualism was nicely implied by satchel and glasses. He sang with power, beauty and intelligence throughout and his death was movingly done. Anna Smirnova didn't quite have the necessary vocal flexibility in the Veil Song, but elsewhere she had secure power, and her O don fatale was utterly thrilling. In fact I can't recall another live performance of it I've heard which has reached the same level. I would take such a performance over flexibility elsewhere in the part any day.

Alastair Miles who I last heard as Pognor in the Glyndebourne Meistersinger sang Philip II. He has the makings of a fine Philip but the voice does not yet have quite enough power and weight. He was slightly in danger of being out-powered by the Grand Inquisitor in the confrontation scene, and in other ensemble moments he didn't always carry loudly enough. That said his Ella giammai m'amo was well done and the interpretation of the part from an acting point of view suited his voice. Kristinn Sigmundsson made a suitably chilling Inquisitor (far better than the miscast John Tomlinson in the last Royal Opera revival).

I was more favourably disposed to the Carlo of Massimo Giordano than other members of the party. He produced some singing of fine, ringing power, and was never to my ear unpleasant to listen to. If occasionally he too disappeared under the orchestra this was again a price I was prepared to pay. Finally we come to the weakest link of the six, the Elizabeth of Meagan Miller. In the early acts there was a worrying thinness of tone and sense of insecurity and I awaited the Act 4 scene with some trepidation. However, while not perfect, I thought she improved here and again the overall sense of drama mitigated the flaws.

Once again the Orchestra were on fine form and Runnicles conducted, as will by now I imagine be clear, an intense, highly dramatic performance of this magnificent score. For me it was a glorious ending to a great ten days in Berlin. Hopefully it won't be too long before I can get back there.

Rienzi at Deutsche Oper, or, Not Quite the Conflagration I Was Banking On

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:45:00 +0000

Wagner's Rienzi is rarely performed. It is now quite clear to me why. This an apprentice work which has deservedly fallen into obscurity. Deutsche Oper performed a heavily cut version clocking in at some two and a half hours. The original premiere apparently lasted six. All I can say is, Lord preserve me from ever having to listen to it.

The basic problem is very very simply. This is a distinctly uninspired score. It doesn't quite invite the remark made by cabaret duo Kit and the Widow about Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard (“We wanted to pay tribute to the big tune in Sunset Boulevard...the trouble is we couldn't find one). Wagner does have one big tune. Unfortunately he has already used it by the end of the overture (and on several occasions thereafter). Elsewhere there is the occasional moment when one is deceived that something musically engaging is going to happen, but it doesn't really. Instead the evening plods on, and on, and...well you get the idea.

For once no blame can really be attached to the production, although again the highpoint comes during the overture which features Hitler/Mussolini (there is some merging of historical personages at work here) sitting in Berchtesgarden, conducting a gramophone. Thereafter we are on a gradually declining slope from chaos of Weimar, through Fuhrer rallies and disastrous war to the Bunker. Torsten Kerl in the title role becomes nicely deranged – his bulging eyes in the filmed sections are especially notable. The chorus keep on stoically in a production which often by its positioning did not appear to be doing their sound and precision any favours. Generally, visually, it looks fine, but it can't rescue the score. It also has to be said that things become a tad confused and repetitive after the interval. After you have seen Kerl hammily delivering a speech once the novelty value is past. In addition, the management of personnel is problematic – Adriano apparently fails to assassinate Rienzi, is then locked up in the bunker (fully in view of the audience) but soon emerges having without difficulty escaped to try and persuade Irene to flee. The final disappointment comes at the conclusion when, given the bunker setting, I had anticipated some fire – there is sadly none to be seen and quite frankly this is a opera that badly needs some such visual excitement by this point!

Of the singers the standout by a country mile was Daniela Sindram's performance as Adriano. Combining a wonderfully rich chest voice with some ringing top notes she was a joy to listen to. Torsten Kerl keeps nobly on through the heavy title role, but the voice lacks freshness and in too many places sounded over-strained. Manuela Uhl as Irene received loud bravos from the audience but I'm afraid I pretty wholly dissented. She had a couple of full force moments of power but elsewhere the voice was squally, the passage work was desperately strained often unpleasant to listen to and to my ear her tuning sounded questionable.

The Chorus and Orchestra again did some good work, but they were not up to the standard set in performances earlier this week of Lohengrin and Jenufa. There were noticeable fluffs to entries, and a general weakening of precision. Sebastian Lang-Lessing in the pit directed matters fairly serviceably, but the weaknesses of the score are such that this is probably not the fairest test of his capacities.

The completionist in me is glad to be able to tick Rienzi off the list of operas I haven't seen. I think it rather unlikely that I shall ever need to see it again. There are quite a few things I criticise the British houses for not staging, this will not be one of them.

There's Runnicles – Jenufa at Deutsche Oper, or Christof Loy makes very nearly good

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:35:00 +0000

In advance, the odds of this performance scoring with me were finely balanced. On the one hand the man himself was in the pit and conducting possibly my favourite of all Janacek's opera scores. On the other, the director was Christof Loy, whose ROH Tristan I detested. In addition, the last time I saw this live at the Coliseum in the unusually excellent David Alden production, I found it an overpowering experience, and such a memory can often overshadow the next live performance of a work one hears. I'm pleased therefore to be able to report that, by Act Three, this performance had brought tears to my eyes.

Both conductor and director took a little time to settle. Indeed Loy nicely confused my brother who came out of the first act convinced that everyone was being doubled. This was an understandable confusion, partly because without English surtitles the specifics can become blurred, but also because of the way Loy deployed his personnel which in this act was not conducive to clarity. His big opening idea is that we start with the Kostelnicka in prison. This adds very little, Loy blends her back into the action in a rather muddled way and from then on we see no more of this so that one really wonders why he bothered: the more so given that the rest is a fairly minimalist production focused on effective direction of the protagonists. The white house, in which most of the action plays, does have a rather moveable rear wall, a little reminiscent of the pointless curtain in the ROH Tristan, but it functions here far more effectively. A few sparse landscapes are shown beyond the house – a telegraph line with a cornfield beneath it in Act One, changed to snow covered for the later acts – but basically we are confined within the house in a remarkably similar way to the Alden setting at ENO.

Among the singers the standout performer for me was Will Hartmann's Laca, commandingly sung and acted throughout. Jennifer Larmore's Kostelnicka in the first two acts I occasionally found a little underpowered vocally, but as the tragedy moves inexorably forward her acting carried me past this and the vocal performance strengthened in the third act. Her mental disintegration here was completely compelling. Similarly I would have liked a little more vocal warmth from Michaele Kaune in the title role who initially failed to erase memories of Amanda Roocroft at the Coliseum – but again she picked up and was spell-binding in the third act. All the supporting parts were well sung, with particularly fine turns from Stephen Bronk as the Mayor, Liane Keegan as his wife and Martina Welschenbach as their daughter in Act Three.

Both the Chorus and Orchestra were on top form as in Sunday's Lohengrin. On the podium I felt in the first two acts that Donald Runnicles didn't quite have the white heat that Mikhail Agrest brought to the ENO run, or that Charles Mackerras had in the ENO Makropulos Case but this was not the view of the rest of the party, and in Act Three I thought he was spot on.

It was wonderful to hear this opera performed live again. It reminded me what an extraordinary intense moving experience the third act is. It was a thing of wonder both at ENO and here to experience the way Janacek in those few moments at the end completely turns the mood around and offers hope after all the pain. It was also a privilege to be close enough to the stage to appreciate the detailed acting performances Loy drew from his company. The last performance of the season has now played, but a revival will be well worth catching.

Kozena, Kaufmann, Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker's dazzling Carmen

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:07:00 +0000

Berlin's Philharmonie impressed me greatly on my last visit, both for its design and its acoustic. If anything, my second trip leaves me more impressed. Initially I was concerned we'd been shortchanged on our tickets: pretty well side on with many of the band facing away, this did not seem like the second price bracket from the top. And yet excellent seats they proved to be, not only providing a fine view of both conductor and soloists but also seemingly not suffering acoustically. Sit in the nearest equivalent seat in Edinburgh's Usher Hall and you'll struggle to hear the cellos properly.

We were there to hear a concert performance of Bizet's opera Carmen, conducted by Simon Rattle and with soloists Magdalena Kozena and Jonas Kaufmann in the lead roles. It is far from being my favourite opera, but when performed as well as this, it made for a thrilling evening.

Kozena dazzled in the title role, in large part due to her dramatic stage presence, whether she was dancing seductively for Don Jose, clicking her castanets, or scornfully rejecting him later on (not to mention her flirtation with some of the wind section). Vocally she was on fine form too.

Kaufmann's singing probably stole the show overall, such as with the power he displayed in a long entry from offstage, building to an impressive climax as he entered. His acting was excellent too, and together they made a compelling pair of lovers.

Perhaps inevitably, the rest of the cast paled somewhat in comparison, though that is not to say they were in any way weak; they weren't. The chorus and the children's chorus of the Staatsoper also sang well.

On the podium, Rattle kept a firm grip on proceedings. Often he took quite brisk tempos, and it is a testament to the skill of the Berliner Philharmoniker that they responded superbly to whatever demands he placed on them.

All told, it was rather a treat and possibly the most satisfying live performance I have attended by this team. Certainly it was well worth having to get up at 6am on a Sunday last month in order to secure the tickets. It will doubtless appear in the digital concert hall in due course and should be well worth checking out when it does.

Babes in Arms at The Union, or A Show to Make You Smile

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:29:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the first preview on Wednesday 18 April. Press Night is Friday 20th April.

Note: This review carries a shameless plugs tag because the Music Director was a member of my old Edinburgh theatre society, though after I had left.

I booked for this show with a mixture of hope and anxiety. I previously saw Babes in Arms in the magnificent 2007 production (as an aside it is an indication of the flaws of the West End that the Chichester Singin' in the Rain was transferred there and Babes was not). My more observant readers may have noticed that I am notoriously picky, and I have a theory that the second time you see a show when the first time you were knocked out presents particular challenges. The novelty has worn off, and you have a strong memory against which to compare the new team. I'm delighted therefore to be able to report that this ensemble completely won me over. Yes there are a few rough edges. Yes a few voices are still settling into their roles. But there are some standout performances already, and if you don't come out of the theatre whistling some of the many fine tunes and smiling broadly then you're clearly even more cummudgeonly than me and there is no help for you.

For those of you unfamiliar with this show it's about a group of youngsters (I think the idea is that most of them are late teens, with Val slightly older, and Bunny older again) who are working as something approaching slave labour in a decaying theatre in Cape Cod. While preparing to put on an impressively ghastly new play The Deep North they are secretly rehearsing the review Valentine (James Lacey) has written. Incidentally, those who saw the Chichester version will probably suffer some slight confusion as this is not the same. However the big questions are unchanged. Will they succeed in putting on the show with the bigshot producer in the audience? Will the various love traumas resolve themselves by final curtain? Well this is a 1930s musical, so the answers should be fairly obvious, but it's so lovingly done that the occasionally slightly rickerty plot doesn't matter. Moreover the plot is supported by a witty George Oppenheimer book (I especially enjoyed the running gag about the maid, not to mention the ghastly dialogue of The Deep North) and a whole string of Rodgers & Hart's finest numbers including I Wish I Were in Love Again, My Funny Valentine, Where or When and The Lady is a Tramp.

Although all the main parts are well taken the standout performers for me were Jenny Perry as Bunny and Catriona Mackenzie as Susie. Perry has unquestionably the strongest voice in the company and is excellent in The Lady is a Tramp. But she also has a great line in quirky expressions, the slight twist to the mouth or the raised eyebrow. Mackenzie doesn't yet sound completely comfortable vocally, but she makes up for this with great character and presence, particularly in the second act when everybody began to seem more settled, and she was really moving in the reprise of My Funny Valentine. They and the other principles are well supported by an excellent ensemble who as in Bells are Ringing deliver more choreography than you would have thought the space could support (for which credit goes to Lizzi Gee). I also worried a bit beforehand when I saw that there was only to be a three piece band, but Musical Director Sam Cable leads his small forces with sufficient panache that I didn't miss the richer sound.

This is a lovingly performed revival of a muscial that deserves to be better known than it is. I may be a Sondheim afficionado, but just occasionally its a joy to see a show where you can rest assured from the beginning that everything's going to end up happily. Well worth catching.

The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar, or, The Moment at the End of the Play

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:43:00 +0000

The first and last time I saw this play was at the Edinburgh Fringe a frightening number of years ago played by an excellent school company at the Venue 40 with which I was then involved. The first surprise of seeing it again a couple of nights ago was to discover how many of the lines I remembered.

As the many other critics who have got to this before me have remarked this is a lovely, funny new production. As so often the Donmar auditorium is transformed with oodles of candles, chandeliers, lanterns, beams – it looks wonderful and fits the play to typical perfection. Matched to this spot on design is an excellent ensemble cast. It was an especial joy to me to see Nancy Carroll again who brought back memories of the Almeida's extraordinary production of Waste. She is especially superb here when Silvia becomes Wilful. She is well matched by Tobias Menzies's Captain Plume. He has something of a Blackadder flounce about him but also something deeper which emerges as required to give emotional depth to the character and the plot. As the other pair of lovers, Nicholas Burns's Mr Worthy rails piercingly, and Rachael Stirling's Melinda does the best comedy accent turn I've heard for ages – but again they under Josie Rourke's direction take care not to lose sight of the humans beneath the caricatures. Finally, doing his level best to steal every scene he's in, not to mention cast his wandering eye at as many female members of the audience as possible, there is Mark Gatiss's Captain Brazen.

The other great pleasure of this show is the band headed, I hope I'm right in saying, by Stuart Ward. Live music is welcome in almost any show, but it fits this one especially well warming the audience up before the start, filling in an interlude here and there (including a wonderful barbershop number), before packing an absolute emotional punch at the conclusion.

For it is the final moments of this show which truly lift it into the front rank. For most of the previous two and a half hours I laughed, smiled, and was happily back in Marlborough's England. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, and with clever subtlety Rourke contrived to remind me how applicable much of the play is to many more recent times so that I left the theatre sombre and rather moved.

This is a marvellous start to the new regime at the Donmar. One or two tickets have been coming back on sale otherwise I would have missed it, but if these are now gone, it's well worth queueing for a return.

Classical music download stores in 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 15:45:00 +0000

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a blog post asking the following question: why are music download stores so useless? It had the particular perspective of a classical music loving Mac / iPod user who cares about high quality, of which more, much more, later. In the intervening years, the landscape has changed quite a bit and a new survey is probably overdue. Sadly, while in general it has to be said that things are better, for my money they are still astonishingly far from where they should be. All too often, trying to buy high quality classical downloads is a more frustrating experience than it has any right to be.

To be honest, given the choice, I'd now buy all my music as a download at CD quality or better (and I've not picked up a couple of new releases from labels that, for reasons passing understanding, refuse to sell their material in this manner). The three main reasons for this preference are the potential for better quality, more or less instant gratification (compared to waiting for a CD to arrive in the post) and no shelf-space required, which is a not inconsiderable issue for me.

Quality will be a major feature, or bugbear, depending on your perspective, of this post. If you're happy with 320 mp3 or 256 aac, as many people seem to be, then the download market is well served by the likes of Amazon and Apple. Many people seem almost proudly to claim that they can't hear the difference, yet for some reason the same issue doesn't dog the likes of blu-ray or the HD video downloads Apple offers. That is arguably a rather spurious apples to oranges type comparison, but for me the difference is normally similarly night and day with HD audio.

This issue of quality excludes many stores from this survey. By way of illustration, take Apple's iTunes. There has been no change here since my last survey. Apple's continued refusal to offer no more than 256 AAC means I don't purchase from them. This puzzles me, given they sell films in HD, are so concerned about quality in most aspects of what they do and have their own lossless audio format. Here's what I said three years ago:

Let us start with the big beast of online downloads, Apple and their iTunes store. This being Apple, everything is easy and works. Search works fairly well and typing, for example "Ravel Abbado" will bring back Abbado's recordings of Ravel (not the case on all sites). Often you are not allowed to download every individual track, but since I'm only interested in complete classical works this restriction doesn't bother me. Buying is simple and the download goes straight into your iTunes library (and then straight onto your iPod when you plug it in). True, it wasn't always DRM free, but it is now. It's simple. It is perfect, it's exactly what music downloading should be. Why would you want to buy anywhere else? The answer, of course, is that there is a but, a very big but: sound quality. 256kbps AAC is not really good enough (especially when using the Amazon marketplace it is often possible to source the CD cheaper). With the exception of a live Mackerras concert from Sydney (where there was no way to get the music losslessly) or for some Radio 4 comedy, I have therefore never used it, and will not until they address this. It is a shame, because with every other download site, once the music is on your computer, you then have the extra step of importing it into iTunes.

Reading that quote back, one nice point to note is the mention of DRM. While digital rights management crippled early download stores, making life difficult, it is now basically non-existent (would that Apple's video download service or any of the various major ebook providers would similarly see the light). Indeed, as I go on to survey the various stores I have used lately, the term DRM will not appear once.

One final point (on iTunes): it does seem that Apple may finally be inching towards higher quality. While the recent launch of mastered for iTunes (read trying to make 256 aac sound better) seems on the face of it to be going the wrong way, articles like this indicate that things may be moving in the right direction after all.

Until then, here's my roundup of stores offering CD quality or better.

Hyperion Records

I'll begin with a store I haven't written about before, and one which comes so close to perfection: Hyperion. It has one fairly obvious limitation in that it contains only recordings on their own label, rather than being a general store, however I do not count this against them. It's pretty difficult to ever find Hyperion physical CDs at a big discount (even on Amazon's marketplace) and in a world where downloads often don't seem to offer nearly the savings that by logic they ought to, the Hyperion site is a refreshing change. Take, for example, my most recent purchase: Marwood, Volkov and the BBC SSO's new recording of Britten's violin concerto. From the site the CD will cost you £13.99, or to download £7.99. By contrast the lowest Amazon price (taking postage into account) is £9.99 for the CD. This is fairly typical of my experience with the site. Interestingly, Hyperion charges the same price whether you opt for mp3 or CD quality. CD quality downloads used to be restricted to the flac format (great unless you're an iTunes user), but recently they've added Apple Lossless (alac). This may be a result of Apple's decision to open source the codec at the end of last year - hopefully more sites will follow Hyperion's lead on this. Another nice point about Hyperion's store is that it remembers your format of choice, so now every time I go there it offers me alac without my having to select it. Contrast this with The Classical Shop where every single time I must override the default mp3 choice (doubly annoying since the CD quality price is not displayed there by default). Hyperion also offers a percentage discount scheme the more you spend (10% over £20, 15% over £40 and 25% over £59) which can prove expensive.

Purchasing is smooth, as is downloading. When the store first launched, you had to either click and download each track manually or they recommending using a third party download manager. This is fine if like me you are comfortable installing such Firefox add ons as DownThemAll, which works well with the site. For the less technically adept, this is problematic. Fortunately Hyperion now offers its own download manager, which will open (or install if you're using it for the first time) in a few clicks from the download page. It's built in Adobe Air so should work fine on PCs as well as Macs. It smoothly downloads all the tracks and, in a nice touch, also downloads the booklets automatically. A lot of other sites provide the booklet, but normally you have to download them separately. Hyperion rightly assume that listeners like me might want it by default. Once downloaded (and you can specify any folder you like to download to), it's just a few clicks to get the files into your player of choice. At which point comes the vexed question of tagging. I'm sure all classical music fans have evolved their own slightly different systems for tagging music files and so no store is going to be quite ideal. However, in general I've found Hyperion files require very little rework.

I really have just one criticism of Hyperion: they do not offer downloads at better than CD quality. Offer me studio masters and they will have the best store out there (given they have a good store, they might also consider building it up and bringing in other labels). A hopeful sign is that when I raised this with them via Twitter, they indicated higher quality might be coming. And, indeed, as I was preparing the final draft of this piece, Hyperion announced studio master quality downloads. This is excellent news. Only a few are available so far but doubtless this will increase with time. Prices seem reasonable compared to HD recordings on other stores and Hyperion are unique in offering these HD downloads in alac format. I haven't tested any yet, so cannot comment on sound quality (mainly because none of the few releases so far has been one I have wanted to own, or rather the ones I would like I've already bought at lower quality), but I doubtless will in due course and will update this post when I do.

eClassical

Another store I didn't cover in my previous roundup is Swedish site eClassical. A big chunk of their catalogue comes from their compatriots at the BIS label, but others can be found there (though often the range from these other labels is far from complete). Rather unusually, they have opted for a per second pricing model. This can have an advantage in making shorter discs (such as many from Neeme Järvi's rather fine Sibelius cycle) much more attractively priced. It also means you don't get penalised if you just wish to buy individual tracks or works. Pricing is all in US$ but once converted into UK£ it seems pretty reasonable.

Unfortunately, searching isn't as effective as it should be. This is mainly in terms of the order of the results not being very helpful, rather than failure to find discs altogether. Type in, for example "Suzuki Bach 30" and the top result isn't, as you might expect, volume 30 of Masaaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan's survey of the Bach cantatas (a fabulous disc, in large part due to the presence of Carolyn Sampson). It does find that disc, about two thirds of the way down the page, but a bunch of Suzuki's other recordings head the list for no readily apparent reason. The only possible explanation I can see for its selection appears to be that those listed first were released on the 30th day of a given month. It seems a bizarre thing to prioritise, to say the least.

Downloads are either in mp3, CD quality flac or 24 bit flac (at a range of sample rates depending on the recording). The sound quantity has been excellent on the 24 bit recordings which I have downloaded. When buying a full album it comes as a single zipped file so downloading is fairly easy (I haven't tried purchasing individual tracks so can't comment on how simple that is). If you buy several discs at once you must manually download each one. Booklets are offered but must be downloaded separately. They do offer a download manager, but it is PC only so I haven't tested it.

Since they don't offer alac, if you use iTunes there is an extra step before you can import your music. This is my biggest criticism of the site. And now that alac is open source there is no reason not to offer it. For me, conversion is just a slightly annoying extra time and effort, however it may put off those less technically confident. My other gripe is that tagging can be problematic, to such an extent that once the new disc is imported into my library of over twenty thousand tracks, it can take longer than it should do to find it. For example, on many of those Järvi discs, the conductor's name was misspelled. (That said, there is a fairly easy solution to this problem - see the end of the article.)

On the whole, though, eClassical offers a good experience, and with a few minor tweaks it would be great.

The Classical Shop

One of the older specialist classical download sites is Chandos's The Classical Shop, which came in for something of a grilling in my original post. It was subsequently improved after a relaunch about two years ago. How does it fare in 2012?

On the plus side, it offers a comparatively wide range of labels, and is the only place I'm aware of where you can download the likes of the LSO's and the Halle's house labels at CD quality (this isn't quite true as a few LSO Live discs are now starting to appear on HD Tracks, of which more anon). Annoyingly, new releases from third party labels often take longer than they should to appear, though the label may be to blame for this. There is a reasonable range of download choices: mp3, flac, aiff and wma. I find the site's defaults on these matters frustrating, and it has no memory of my past choices, unlike Hyperion. They offer a reasonable number of discs in studio master 24/96 quality and some that I've tried, such as Louis Lortie's Années De Pèlerinage sound absolutely stunning.

Unfortunately, there has also been a big step backwards. Back in April 2010 you could choose to get your music as a single zipped file, making for a slightly simpler download process. They have now replaced that with a download manager. Fine in principle (see Hyperion above), but their execution of this would politely be described as inept and delivers a user experience so poor that it is hard to imagine it has actually been tested. Fortunately, Firefox users comfortable with DownThemAll (or equivalent) can simply use that. Otherwise, you must use theirs. It is Java based, so runs in the web browser rather than as a stand alone app, but it is badly flawed. If, like me, your music is stored on an external hard disk, tough: you cannot choose to download the music straight there. (Actually, subsequent testing of another download manager based on Java indicates I may be wrong about this, however if it is possible it is only in such a roundabout way that I missed it completely. For obvious reasons I am not keen to test it again.) Worse, the manager hijacks your web browser for the duration of the download. You cannot switch tabs, open a new window or do anything (I have found this in whichever Mac browser I've tried). If you don't have your own download manager, the best workaround is to use a separate browser just for shopping there. Otherwise, if, like me, you have numerous tabs open at a given time, and are in the middle of various things when you decide you'd like to download something, it can be infuriating. And if you're downloading a large HD quality album, it could be some time (especially as Chandos's servers aren't all that quick).

There are a couple of other gripes. It offers aiff downloads which will play in iTunes with no conversion, which might be seen as a plus. However, they are much, much bigger than flacs, so will take longer to download and run you up closer to whatever download limits your internet provided imposes. I download flacs and then convert. Ideally they would replace aiff with alac.

Arguably more annoying is their tagging, which again isn't all it could be. One particular horror story involved Louis Lortie's complete Beethoven piano sonatas. Many of the tracks were mislabelled, and I don't simply mean not to my taste, I mean one track was titled as another. It took several frustrating hours to sort out. I realise tagging will never be perfect, but it needs to be better than that.

A final irritant is pricing. Generally this is fairly reasonable, but occasionally things are insane. Take, for example, their Percy Grainger edition. The physical 19 disc set is £53, which is exceptional value. But what if you want to download? Sorry, you can't. Well, that's not quite true, you could download each of those 19 discs individually. But you'd only do that if you have more money than sense, since that would cost you £189.81. I did query this with Chandos a while back. Their response:

The bargain price is only applicable to the CD box set. Individual volumes in the Grainger Edition series can still be downloaded from The Classical Shop, but at the usual download price.

In other words, we're aware of this absurd situation and don't appear to have any problem with it. A somewhat disappointing attitude, to say the least.

In short, Chandos's offer is not bad, but could and should be better. Some of their catalogue is on eClassical, sadly though not everything (if it was, there would be little reason to use The Classical Shop).

Linn Records

Linn Records is an offshoot of Linn, a Scottish hi-fi manufacturer. There is a logic to this: having dedicated substantial effort to reproducing recordings as well as possible, why not make them too? Of particular interest to me, they have for several years now had an association with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which includes several recordings with the late great Sir Charles Mackerras. Indeed, their recordings of late Mozart symphonies are among the gems of Linn's catalogue. These are far from the only highlights though: listen also to this fabulous disc of Mozart wind concertos, featuring soloists drawn from the orchestra. They also stock several other labels, such as Resonus Classics (a fairly new digital only label whose catalogue includes some excellent recordings by the Eroica Quartet).

Also of note, especially considering the abysmal quality of Universal's own store (see below), recently items from both Deutsche Grammophon and Decca were added. They launched with only five discs, though both Linn's announcement, and also the catalogue numbering, suggests that more are to follow (and, indeed, since I first drafted this paragraph, they have already reached figures). The initial five were not a massively attractive set to me. Solti's Mahler 8 will doubtless appeal to many, and it is a pretty decent performance, though the recording, at least on my CD version, is not absolutely ideal - Sinopoli and the Philharmonia (also Universal) surely make for a better showcase of the work in high quality sound. On the one hand, it's great that Linn have got this stuff out of the vaults of the majors, but on the other it's puzzling that Universal show no inclination to release it themselves. Especially given the markup. I bought Colin Davis's Concertgebouw recording of the Symphonie Fantastique and the £18 price tag, as against the £3.97 for which Amazon are selling the CD version at the time of writing, should surely have record label executives salivating madly. For the record, the Concertgebouw are beautifully caught on the disc. It's also a pretty compelling performance of a work that I'm extremely fussy about (though despite the high definition sound, it will not replace Markevitch's account as my favourite, and buyers looking for a high definition recording of the piece may wish to wait for the April release of the SCO's new recording). Part of me wishes I'd waited a day, by which time Jochum's Carmina Burana and Britten's own recording of Peter Grimes had appeared. Indeed, the Britten is particularly fine: a great performance, and it is good to hear the extra detail in the likes of the sea interludes.

The store ticks most of the boxes: searching and purchasing is pretty straightforward, tagging of files is pretty good, it appears to be well curated and most recordings are available in very high quality (up to 24/192, though I haven't tested the highest quality files as my equipment will not support them). Like Hyperion, they provide an Adobe Air based download manager that easily installs and, once there, in a few clicks easily downloads all the music files, art and booklet to a folder of your choice. You can just as easily use your own browser based download manager if you prefer. Sadly lossless downloads are limited to flac or wma, so no alac, meaning conversion is necessary. My only other quibble concerns pricing. A studio master quality album goes for £18 which is not especially cheap. This is significantly more than the physical disc, and given the physical disc is an SACD (and thus high quality) that seems hard to justify. Another puzzle is that as the price rises, from £8 for mp3, to £10 CD quality flac, and so on, it then stalls at £18. 24 bit flac at 88.2khz is priced exactly the same as 24 bit at 192khz, despite the latter being significantly higher quality and a bigger download. This seems rather confused. A top £18 price for a 24 bit lossless recording also seems a little on the high side compared to eClassical. Generally, though, the site is a pleasure to use and if it would only offer an alac option as well it would be more or less perfect. The addition of Universal albums makes it especially attractive going forwards.

Passionato

Passionato launched with some fanfare in 2008, amid headlines that included "classical music downloads done right". This was never entirely my experience, not least as too much of the catalogue was below CD quality. Yet it was the one place where EMI downloads could be found at CD quality. Sadly, as was revealed as a result of our reporting last year, the site is now all but defunct, with just items from Universal's catalogue remaining (despite claims on the website to the contrary). In fact, a further check while writing this post shows it is now totally gone and no downloads, not even from Universal, are available, the page now pointing to one that offers physical CDs. In response to my article James Glicker, president of Passionato, indicated that the terms requested by the labels were such that the site wasn't viable. In the case of labels like BIS this seems odd (as their content can be found elsewhere), but for the majors I find this only too depressingly easy to believe.

Hopefully Passionato will one day return in an improved form, but I will not be holding my breath.

Universal (Deutsche Grammophon and Decca)

The Universal labels, primarily DG and Decca (which now includes Philips), have for some time had a download store that can be accessed via their online catalogues. I think it existed at the time of my earlier write up, however it did not offer better than 320 mp3. That has since changed to include CD quality flac as well. The front end is slightly different depending on which site you access it through, but you can search the entire catalogue on both, and almost everything is available, though there do tend to be some puzzling omissions among recent issues. Why isn't the recent box of Giulini's Chicago recordings available when the roughly contemporary set of his Los Angeles ones is? I asked why this might be the case, to which I received the following unhelpful reply:

The requested item is only available in a cd format not a download. Certain items on the web store will have both formats available or just one available.

Which didn't actually answer my question (a further e-mail pointing out that fact went unanswered). Bafflingly, the set is available as a lossy download elsewhere and is on Spotify, but not in flac on their own store.

Sadly such puzzling gaps in their catalogue are the least of their problems. As evidenced by the Giulini / LA link above, the flac download prices are not always reliably below the cost of the physical CDs as they clearly should be (Amazon will let you have it for £12.99 as against £28.99 for the flac download, and indeed the £26.99 that DG will charge if you buy the physical discs direct from them). A much more significant problem comes with the tagging of the downloads which is basically non-existant. I bought Helmut Walcha's recording of Bach's Well Tempered Klavier (for reasons passing understanding it is no longer available on CD). Things start off well, in that you get a single zipped file containing all the tracks, but it unzips to a single folder of all 96 tracks, the metadata on each of which consisting of just the title and the artist. The titles do contain the track number at the start, but this isn't separately encoded, meaning that what imports into your library is all the track ones, then the twos, and so on. Getting it into a proper order so that you can actually listen to it is the kind of experience that leaves you badly in need of some of just the sort of soothing Bach with which you're wrestling. Things were better when I downloaded Adrian Boult's mono survey of Vaughan Williams' symphonies with the London Philharmonic, the zip file unpacking into separate folders for each CD so they can be imported one at a time and thus making it marginally easier to sort everything out. However, there's still far too much time to be spent comparing the timings of the imported tracks against the website to get them sorted out. (At this point you may be wondering why I was looking at the web and not the supplied digital booklet, which is because Universal don't bother to include one.) But it could be worse, I could have bought Ruldolf Serkin's Mozart piano concerto recordings with Abbado and the LSO (as @higgis did): with seven tracks titled simply allegro and six andante and so on, well, you get the idea. As if that wasn't enough, I made the mistake of downloading Neeme Järvi's second recording of Sibelius's symphonies. To add to the problems mentioned came an additional one: the last ten seconds or so of several tracks was missing. This was most glaring at the end of the third movement of the second symphony, thus totally ruining the transition into the finale.

That was at the end of November. I contacted Universal to request they issue the corrected files. Shortly thereafter I was rather surprised to find my card refunded, which wasn't what I asked for. I wrote querying this. The same unhelpful chap who answered my earlier question was no more illuminating:

This download has been deactivated as our Technical team are currently looking into the problem of what is wrong with this download once the problem has been rectified we will notify yourself via email.

That's directly copied and pasted from his e-mail, if you're wondering about the lack of punctuation. I await the promised e-mail. I could have fixed this problem in half an hour. But Universal is a multinational company, bless them, so I suppose it's understandable that nearly four months later it hasn't been rectified and I still haven't got the things I tried to buy..... Finally, in mid-March I did receive this response (rather annoyingly addressed to "Dear Customer", instead of using my name):

We have found out the cause of the bug that led to some of your tracks being cut off by a few seconds. It results from the migration of a key system a few years ago in our supply chain. For some albums in a specific set of circumstances a muddle to do with between-track pause times caused the encoding of these tracks to be these few seconds shorter. We are currently finding out exactly how many albums this applies to and re-delivering them to our shop.

In the meantime the digital product you purchased has been removed from the DG Web Shop. Thank you very much for reporting the bug!

So hopefully it will be resolved soon. But I'm not holding my breath.

More recently, I discovered that Mercury is now part of Universal. This was rather good news, as I wanted to pick up Kubelik's 'Living Presence' recording of Smetana's Ma Vlast (which comes as part of this very attractive box). Despite all of the above, my desire to acquire this disc (no longer available on CD) was such that I tried to download it. Sadly, despite several attempts, their site refused to complete the purchase. Or rather, did so but then gave an error message that implied it hadn't gone through. Unwisely, I tried again, which you shouldn't do because you'll just get charged again but again receive no goods. The wording is at best misleading and getting my money back took far longer than it should have (sadly they were unable to provide what I really wanted, namely the download).

I wrote to Universal again, in particular querying whether it was safe to buy anything from their store. Again, their response was vague and didn't really answer my questions.

As you may be aware, we have switched our platforms for distribution to Universal Music. Whilst doing so, the service has encountered a few temporary technical issues that require slight adjustments. We don't envisage that the issue will take much longer to resolve, and we thank you for your continued patience.

Worryingly, the set is still listed for sale as a flac download, yet they have not confirmed to me that it is safe to purchase it. My view is that at present it is simply not safe to purchase items from Universal's download store and until I receive a reassuring response from them, I have no intention of doing so.

You could be forgiven for thinking that companies like Universal don't actually want to sell any music. Still, if they don't want my money, I can always head off to eClassical or Chandos and pick up the Naxos reissues of the recordings (though I'd prefer to have issues taken from the original masters if at all possible).

On the one hand it's nice that Universal are vaguely trying - you can't get legal CD quality downloads of a disc on Warner or EMI classics anywhere that I am aware of (though the latter may, I suppose, change as Universal are acquiring that bit of EMI). And yet their efforts fall so far short of what can and should be achieved that it is almost comical.

Society of Sound

Another hi-fi manufacturer, Bowers and Wilkins take a rather different approach with their Society of Sound download store, basing it on a subscription model. Essentially you pay $60 a year (or $40 for six months) and get two, or sometimes more, albums a month. As this article is primarily concerned with classical music, the classical offerings are limited to releases from the London Symphony Orchestra's house label LSO Live. The other monthly disc can be more or less anything and can often be a very pleasant discovery, but if you're looking for classical music only it probably offers poor value for money. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the LSO are starting to add their catalogue to HD Tracks (an odd choice over, say eClassical, for reasons outlined below). Personally, I rather enjoy it, but most of the gems haven't come from the LSO. Highlights include the discovery of Dub Colossus, via their superb album A Town Called Addis, Peter Gregson's Terminal and Thomas Dolby's A Map of the Floating City.

With the LSO releases there are certain problems. First, they don't in general seem to have issued any of what I would regard as the crown jewels of the LSO Live catalogue. There has been a fixation with Gergiev's Mahler (some like it, I know, but I am not among them). We've had a couple of releases from Haitink's Beethoven series, but sadly not the exceptional disc of 4 and 8.

A bigger problem is that the sound quality on LSO Live is often poor. In part this is down to a poor acoustic at the Barbican, but their skill at taming it is more variable than it ought to be. Society of Sound is in part marketed on sound quality, thus it is baffling to see releases like Haitink's Bruckner 4 there, the sound quality of which is terrible. I found it a little frustrating that last month's download of Gergiev's recording of Ravel's Bolero was a video rather than just HD audio (though I suppose some people may prefer this).

The user experience is pretty decent. It uses an Adobe Air based download manager which manages things nicely. Files are in flac. There is an alac option, but annoyingly only for CD quality, quite why this should be I don't know. However, they are very responsive to feedback: one LSO Live disc was tagged as two separate CDs - why hold to the physical restriction with a download, I asked? Next time round, they numbered it as one continuous recording.

I enjoy Society of Sound, more than anything as it introduces me to new things, and will probably renew my subscription when it comes due, but not for the LSO offerings. Whether or not the subscription offers value will be a very personal calculation.

HD Tracks

I mentioned HD Tracks once or twice above. It looks great in principle, but I have purchased little there. A lot of the classical content can be found at better value on some of the stores already mentioned and their search facility is, to put it mildly, not very effective. To start with, it is not clever enough to search multiple criteria but can only check one thing at a time. It defaults to artist. Thus, typing in "Gergiev Debussy", say, which is the way I would normally search, will get you nothing, even though Gergiev's LSO Live Debussy disc is available there. Searching under artist for "Gergiev" will get you to a page that then links to the album, but this represents too many clicks required compared to any other store I've ever used. You might think that if you searched under album for "Debussy La Mer" it would get you there a little quicker. But you would be wrong. In fairness, it should be noted that typing just "La Mer" does work. However, this discrepancy is indicative of how unsatisfactory, unreliable and unintuitive the search facility is. And if you can't find something you can't buy it. Given that rather basic truth, it's surprising HD Tracks haven't developed something better.

Let's try another tack and browse by label. This too would be a mistake as too often it simply brings you to a page saying "coming soon" (even when they have items from that label available). You might be forgiven for imagining that a surefire route to success would be to click on one of the items promoted on the front page. Sitting there very enticingly is The Who's Tommy, which I would dearly love to own in HD, but which, when you click on it isn't actually available. Or rather, it appears not to be available. There is a partial solution: if you use Google's site search rather than HD Tracks' own useless search facility (i.e. into google type "site:hdtracks.com [your actual query]") you can find things, though still not as well as on a store with a decent search facility. In short, the site's search is unusable and the curation is very poor indeed. Before even attempting to buy anything the store has produced an immensely unsatisfying user experience. So much so, that were it not for a desire to make this piece more comprehensive, I doubt I would have done so.

But try I did. Alas, I did not meet with much more success than I had when attempting to search. Bitter disappointment set in immediately: on attempting to buy Tommy a message was displayed that it is unavailable to buy as I'm in the UK. The same is true of Miles Davis's final masterpiece Doo-Bop. In fairness to HD Tracks, they blame the record labels who are clearly as much a bunch of morons as Universal and apparently have no desire to actually sell things and make money. It is insane: after all, I can order a CD from the states via the Amazon marketplace with no problems. I should note that this problem doesn't apply to all of the HD Tracks catalogue: the LSO's few HD issues are available to purchase if you're in the UK and doubtless some other stuff too. Annoyingly, the only way to discover is to try to buy them.

Finally, though, I found a disc I wanted to buy that I was allowed to buy. Again, I must note that were it not for the fact that I wanted to include a full write up of the site, I would likely have given up before this point. I picked up Miles Espanol, a successor to Miles Davis's masterpiece Sketches of Spain featuring many Davis compositions and former sidemen.

Pricing is not especially compelling. HD Tracks does have a download manager, but it is a pretty sparse Java based affair (it run outside the browser so at least doesn't lock it up like The Classical Shop does, which is a plus). It is possible to download files to an external disk, but only with some difficultly and in a way that isn't very intuitive. Servers are pretty slow. However, once the files are there, they do sound very fine. Still, for all the reasons outlined above, until there is a marked improvement in their service (or unless they have some must buy disc that I actually can buy), I am unlikely to purchase from them again in the near future and cannot recommend their service.

Highresaudio

Highresaudio, a German site, also looks tempting at first glance. One interesting point is that they list a number of the same Decca and DG recordings as Linn and quite a few others. This suggests that such gems as Erich Kleiber's Figaro could be arriving on Linn soon (though still not at the time of writing - I am reluctant to buy it from Highresaudio as it lists the wrong number of discs, giving me concern that theirs is not a complete issue).

Sadly, this is another site with poor usability. Perhaps it's just my browser, but every time I set the site to English, it jumps back to German on the next page. I also object to having to agree to be sent marketing emails when I sign up. Purchasing for the first time isn't exactly easy. You must first register, then click the confirmation link in the e-mail. Doubtless this was just bad luck, but once the e-mail had come and I'd clicked it, their site had fallen down. I can't recall an online store that doesn't let you register and complete the purchase all without leaving your browser. Unhelpfully, you are not then taken back to the thing you were trying to purchase. Clicking the link doesn't in and of itself log you into the site, so if you then make the mistake of thinking you're good to go and search back the album and try to purchase it, you'll once again be told you need to log in. Of course, you're now armed with a working log in, which, when used, once again doesn't take you back to the album you were trying to purchase. One begins at this point, actually some point way before this, to question whether they have any interest at all in selling any music. Finally you add the item to your cart, but you aren't then taken to the cart and asked if you want to go to the checkout, instead an extra click is needed. Indeed, the process is such that you could be forgiven for thinking that clicking the link to buy hadn't actually worked.

Prices look a little steep at around €21 for a 24/96 album, but actually when paying by Paypal (at the time of writing) that converted to £18.15, so roughly equivalent to Linn. When it comes to actually downloading, they have native download managers for Mac, Windows and, impressively, Linux. Sadly, it's clear they aren't real Mac users since they haven't opted for a simple drag and drop install. Indeed, the install process is both poor and annoying. In comparison to the smoothness of Linn or Hyperion it leaves an awful lot to be desired.

The download manager is functional but ugly. Setting it to download to an external drive is convoluted. The way the progress markers display is highly unintuitive, so you could be forgiven for thinking the album wasn't actually downloading at all. However, it does download art and (if applicable) the booklet automatically. That said, if I was buying again, I suspect I'd stick with DownThemAll.

Overall, Highresaudio is not as bad as HD Tracks, but it is still hard to recommend.

The Rest?

If you're in France, qobuz looks great (and @meltsheep thoroughly recommends it). It has a vast range at CD quality and some stuff at higher qualities. Sadly, as I don't have a French postcode, it won't let me purchase any of them. As such, this survey does not cover it and I cannot recommend it. So much for the free market.

Bandcamp deserves a quick mention. Intended for artists to sell their own music direct to listeners, it is the place to go if you want to pick up Peter Gregson's Terminal or Philip Sheppard's soundtrack to Bobby Fischer Against the World. It allows the artist to set a minimum price, normally pretty low, which you can top up should you feel inclined. It offers a range of download formats, though here I have a gripe: it doesn't always specify what quality of flac you're getting, and sometimes the flacs are higher quality than the alacs (so if the alac file size indicated looks too good to be true in comparison to the flac, that's because it is). The download is a single zipped file, and overall purchasing is fairly smooth.

Since this survey is primarily about classical downloads, it seems perverse to mention a site called Non Classical. Founded by composer Gabriel Prokofiev, the non has more to do with breaking classical out of the standard concert hall environment. I've only used it once to download Prokofiev and Gregson's recent EP Jerk Driver, but it was fine to use. My only quibble would be that the download was limited to CD quality.

Finally, there are a couple of services I included in my original post that I have not used since. The online shop on the Philharmonia orchestra's website is still limited to 320 mp3 and thus too low quality. Their catalogue is available losslessly via The Classical Shop, so there is now no reason to consider direct purchase. Similarly, I have never felt tempted to go back to emusic. The combination of low quality (just 192 mp3) and a frustrating subscription model that isn't to my taste is not enticing. It used to have some utility for more cheaply trying out recordings I wasn't sure about, but for this sort of purpose it is in every respect (including sound quality) absolutely trounced by Spotify.

Speaking of which, Spotify offers two subscriptions, £4.99 a month gives you unlimited listening without adverts. For £9.99 you get that plus 320 ogg (up from 160) which is not a million miles from CD quality and better than iTunes and Amazon (you also get the ability to save tracks for offline use and use of the phone app). The catalogue is good, though there are some frustrating absences, in particular Chandos. I find it invaluable for trying before I buy. Often, after one hearing, I've decided not to waste my money. Probably more often, though, I've tried out something that I might not otherwise have considered and then gone on to purchase it. You can purchase tracks through Spotify. Annoyingly, though, this is at 256 or 320 mp3 rather than the superior 320 ogg at which content is streamed. I presume there's a logical explanation for this......

Conclusion

There you have it: some good things, and in general progress in the right direction. Still, I can't help feeling these are things that it is not as difficult to get right as some of these companies make it appear. Of late, I have particularly enjoyed using both Hyperion and eClassical. Indeed, in recent times my purchases of items on labels such as BIS and Hyperion have increased while my purchases from the majors have fallen. That isn't a coincidence, but rather in part because they offer me a better service. Hopefully things will improve further and this post will soon become redundant....

In the meantime, if there is anywhere else I should be aware of, please let me know via the comments. I'd be especially interested to find somewhere I could buy EMI and Warner issues at CD quality or better (not to mention a usable outlet for Universal recordings).

Flac into iTunes

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with Apple. They do make some fantastic kit and software. At the same time, they exhibit an infuriating pigheadedness on some issues, chief among them for me being their refusal to support flac, which is the dominant format for high quality downloads. Given it's open source, there's no good reason not to support it. It's not even as though they're leveraging their own sales by only supporting their own equivalent, since they won't sell high quality downloads.

There are workarounds that will let you play flac files directly in iTunes, but having played with them they are somewhat temperamental. More reliable is simply to, albeit reluctantly, give into Apple and convert the downloads to Apple Lossless. This best, and pretty simply, done with XLD (X Lossless Decoder). This is a free piece of software that converts between different formats. It will also rip discs to a higher standard than iTunes, but that gets a little technical.

Simply bring up the preferences, set the output format to Apple Lossless and choose an output directory. There is also an option to add the converted files to iTunes directly. A particularly useful feature is that they can be added to a specific playlist, meaning that it's then easy to find the discs in your library and fix the tagging.

Once in iTunes, I set the 'group' tag on all my high quality downloads to 'lossless', and then have a smart playlist to pull them all together, thus giving me effectively a separate browsable lossless library of discs I may want to play through my hi-fi (separate from the low quality rips for my iPod).

A final piece of the puzzle comes via Bit Perfect. This application integrates with iTunes and ensures bit perfect output, cutting out any processing that Apple's software might be doing, thus giving maximum quality digital output direct to your DAC. It also blocks out any other sounds, such as system alerts, skype calls, or whatever, that might interrupt your listening. It is available from the App Store for the bargain price of 2.99.

Of course, another option would be to use Songbird, since that would play flacs directly, and I did use this previously, but on the Mac at least it is a horribly buggy piece of software. It is also full of annoyances: for example, it stores album art in the cache folder, which it shouldn't do as this isn't a place for permanent data and means, say, when you upgrade the operating system, you lose dozens of CDs worth of album art and have to replace it all. Another irritation with Songbird is the frequency with which it fails when bulk retagging files. Except that the files show up as tagged successfully, even though they aren't, making it very difficult to fix. In short, I've found moving my lossless files to iTunes makes for a far more pleasant user experience.

In Basildon at the Royal Court, or, An Eloquent Sofa

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 23:20:00 +0000

Dominic Cooke has after this evening had his name added to my list of creators of great theatrical mysteries. This is because he has discovered a definition of theatre in the round that I was not previously aware existed. If you buy a ticket in the Stalls for this production you will be warned that visibility for all seats is occasionally obscured. This is a thoroughly misleading piece of salesmanship, as is the selling of seats in rows AA-FF at the same price as rows A-J. I was seated in row EE in a seat in the £20 bracket for which I got to spend about 75% of the show staring at the backs of the actors – Indeed, it almost felt as if I saw more faces when the performers deigned to take a curtain call in our direction than in the previous two and a half hours. The scale of Cooke's near complete lack of understanding of what doing theatre in the round requires is demonstrated in the final scene. For the first time one of the main pieces of set, a large sofa, is placed so that anyone sitting in it would be directly facing the audience members in rows AA-FF. Nobody sits on that sofa for the whole scene.I frankly had the impression that the actors were scarecely aware that there was anybody sitting in our part of the auditorium, and one certainly comes to the conclusion that not a single member of the directorial team actually sat there during rehearsals. What makes this whole business the more baffling is that the play itself is actually a classic living room narrative (with an unconvincing flashback tacked on at the end). I cannot work out from the script why Cooke thought that playing it in the round would add anything.

The experience I have just described is sufficiently alienating (as may by now be apparent) that it is quite difficult to make a reasoned judgement about the play or indeed the performers. Whether through the failings of the staging or the performers I don't know, but I was largely unengaged by the plight of any of the characters. The payoff at the end didn't seem to make much sense of the earlier tensions and the dialogue largely failed to make me laugh, though there was a fair amount around me and elsewhere in the auditorium. I got especially irritated with the play during the first scene after the interval which turned into a discussion of why different characters voted for the Tories or Labour in recent elections. This struck me as a classic case of issues trumping character.

My experience this evening leaves me utterly baffled by the raves this show has received. As my neighbor and I agreed during the interval, we felt totally cut off from the performance. If you are considering this my strong advice would be avoid rows AA-FF in the Stalls like the plague, and if you have a ticket for that area get reseated for the reasons I have already outlined. It may well be a completely different evening from elsewhere in the house, from where I was it left me bored and increasingly irritated.

A Further Note

I received a very generous e-mail from the Sales Manager at the Royal Court this evening, offering me the opportunity to give the play a second chance by viewing it from the other side of the auditorium. Because of the day job, living outside of London and the near end of the run this is unlikely to be possible, but I would like to record that I was most impressed at the customer service of the Court in this regard (though obviously we differ about the nature of the view from Row EE) and that I am sorry that I almost certainly won't be able to take up the offer. The point made by my correspondent at the Court was that the view of the action is equally clear from either side of the auditorium - In case I wasn't quite clear in my review last night I should say that it was not that I could not see what was going on per se, but from my point of view I could see very few faces with the results already detailed. My correspondent also advises that other audience members have sat in those seats and have had no problem with the view - I would be most interested to hear what others experiences have been of the seating arrangements for this show, particularly if we have any readers who have sat in Rows AA-FF.

EIF 2012, The Opera and Drama Programme

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:27:00 +0000

Opera

Last year's EIF opera programme was, as I think I blogged at the time, the most exciting for me since Mills took up the reins. However, Rossini and Strauss are two of my favourite operatic composers so it is possible that I was not an unbiased witness. This year's offerings are not nearly so much to my personal taste, but with one notable exception you can't fault Mills's bookings in themselves.

The banner show is a new production of Janacek's The Makropulos Case marking a return to the Festival for Opera North (I think this is the first time they've been back since Schumann's Genoveva which is now a frightening number of years ago, but I may be wrong on this). Living as I do in Lincoln these days I've had occasion to see rather more of Opera North than previously and for my money they are currently the strongest of the three non-London majors. Among excellent work of theirs I've been able to see have been rarely performed musicals by Gershwin and Bellini's Norma. Of equal note is that they have recent Janacek pedigree under Richard Farnes's musical direction. I sadly missed their Broucek but they did a marvellous From the House of the Dead last spring.

The lead role is to be taken by Swedish soprano Yiva Kihlberg of whom I know nothing. The world wide web reveals an eclectic range of roles, many at the Royal Opera, Copenhagen, ranging from Mozart to Wagner. Of the other singers Paul Nilon I heard some years ago as a fine Lurcanio in Ariodante at the Coliseum (and I find examining his bio that he was also in the production of Genoveva already mentioned).

The production is being directed by Tom Cairns. Google unhelpfully points me only to a site that lists productions up to the early 90s – although this did also reveal that he was the man behind the Opera North production of Tippett's King Priam of which I have fond memories. I haven't been able to spot anything more recent that I've seen but the omens would certainly seem hopefully. He is joined by the familiar Hildegard Bechtler as set designer and the less familiar, to me, but possessing a long opera resume Bruno Poet as lighting designer.

The second major staging is of Charpentier's David et Jonathas which comes from the Aix-en-Provence Festival. I am emphatically not an early music man generally, but William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have impeccable credentials in this repertoire, and it is good to see Neal Davies's name among the cast. It is to be directed by Andreas Homoki who has a long list of operatic productions mostly in German houses to his credit but whose work I cannot recall ever having previously seen. Staging wise then this could probably go either way, but as a rarity under these forces it should be musically well worth catching.

Finally as far as staged opera is concerned we have four new works from Scottish Opera: James MacMillan's Clemency, Craig Armstrong's The Lady from the Sea and a double bill of Huw Watkins's In a Locked Room and Stuart MacRae's Ghost Patrol (which is going on to the Linbury in London). This is a brave move by Mills given the notorious conservatism of Edinburgh audiences when it comes to anything even vaguely musically new. Of the four I shall be particularly interested to see what the composer of the score of Moulin Rouge! comes up with in the opera line. I previously saw Stuart MacRae's first opera, The Assassin Tree at the Festival and was not wowed, but I don't think the work was helped by a poor staging. My brother has sung the praises of a number of MacMillan's works, but I have to say the only piece of his I've heard live was a concert performance at the Festival of Parthenogenesis which did nothing for me, that this is being directed by Katie Mitchell is also not specially encouraging. There is as yet no news on casting.

The opera side of the programme is completed by two concert performances. The first, of Purcell's King Arthur, is a really exciting prospect. Soloists include Jonathan Lemalu and Sophie Bevan who was marvellous in the recent ENO Rosenkavalier. Harry Christopher and The Sixteen are leading figures for this repertoire and although I've missed their previous Festival gigs, I've heard high praise from those who attended.

Finally, we have the one piece of programming that strikes me as a mistake. Welsh National Opera are bringing a concert performance of Tristan. This in itself would be fine but they have lined up Ben Heppner to sing the title role. He was singing the part the last time I saw the opera at the Royal Opera House during the second act of which I really doubted whether he would reach the end. Nothing I've read subsequently suggests to me that the voice has recovered sufficiently to be able to bring the part off especially in the Usher Hall where balance in concert opera can be a problem. My advice would strongly be to give this one a miss and wait for the Runnicles/BBCSSO installments later in the year.

Drama

I can remember a number of years when there have been loud complaints about the thinness of the drama programme. I can't imagine that anyone will level such a complaint at this year's festival which boasts a total of ten productions (in fact I'm not sure that in 14 years of Festival-going the Theatre line-up has ever been so extensive). At face value it looks a very exciting programme, but as I delved, through the magic of the world wide web, into the character of these various companies I did begin to have a few qualms.

The centre piece is clearly the return to specially constructed spaces at the Royal Highland Centre at Ingleston. Three shows will be staged here – 2008: Macbeth by TR Warszawa (previously seen at the 2008 Festival in 4:48 Psychosis), Meine faire Dame – ein Sprachlabor by Theater Basel and Les Nuafrages du Fol Espoir by Theatre du Soleil. Of these the latter two are the most intriguing.

Theatre de Soleil is forty-five years old and specialises in the production of dramas so epic (Wagner would seem to have nothing on some of their shows) that apparently they are not often seen outside of their Paris base. According to a review in The Guardian this show originally included the actors serving the audience dinner, while according to the festival brochure D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille are among the influences. The full review can be read here. This sounds like a genuinely unique theatrical experience and is my top tip for this year's drama programme.

The second of the three shows appearing at Ingleston, Theater Basel's take on My Fair Lady is obviously of interest to me because of my love of the American musical. In the early years of the Mills reign it seemed as if the Festival might be prepared to venture rather more into this territory (which it has usually left to the Fringe) with concert performances of Bernstein's Candide and Weill's Mahagonny – obviously the latter is more generally classed in the operatic category but it is a bit of a blurred case. These however proved to be it and there has been little else in this line in more recent years. The extent to which Theater Basel's effort will actually link to Lerner and Loewe's masterpiece is doubtful, the programme warns that it is “very loosely” based on My Fair Lady and such reimaginings of the classics have had a tendency at Festivals past to be total disasters. This intriguing piece on director Christoph Marthaler reinforces my feeling that this could go either way. On the one hand it speaks of “heart-warming” productions (an area in which EIF Drama offerings have failed time out of mind and of particular importance to me) but equally talk of “extreme stretching of time” does not fill me with confidence. Nor does Mark Berry's take on Marthaler's often revived production of Wagner's Tristan at Bayreuth. The jury is very much out on this one.

Mills's final offering at Ingleston, 2008: Macbeth, will be another in the long list of reimagined Shakespeare productions the Festival has offered over the years. Again the ones I've seen have not been notably successful. I didn't see the Sarah Kane play which this company brought in 2008 so I can't comment on their style. The opening query of a New York Times review of this show back in 2008 is not hopeful - “What's up with the guy in the rabbit suit?” and nor is Charles Isherwood's larger judgement that the show “is ultimately tedious and uninvolving”. I suspect it will be advisable to wait for the reviews on this one.

There are two other Shakespeare shows in evidence this year. Dmitry Krymov's Laboratory School of Dramatic Art Theatre Production apparently offers us two plays for the price of one with A Midsummer Night's Dream (As You Like It). We are again warned to “expect his take on Shakespeare's most magical of comedies to be unlike any Dream you have seen before” and as I've already noted these kind of things have often come to grief at the Festival. This is having its world premiere at Stratford prior to coming to Edinburgh so again there are no reviews to go on. Google produces a warm Moscow Times review of another of his shows but I have to say that the actual description of what goes on in that show (lines rattled off at unintelligible speed, women stuck in boxes and the dread word deconstruction) does not fill me with confidence.

Finally in the Shakespearean vein, we have another staging of something not originally written to be performed, the poem The Rape of Lucrece. Camile O'Sullivan performs this one woman show which was originally staged by the RSC last year. O'Sullivan has had a varied career embracing appearances with La Clique at the Famous Spiegeltent in the Fringe, as the Beggar Woman in Sweeney Todd in Dublin and as a solo cabaret performer in a variety of repertoire. Again this sounds an intriguing prospect.

Also reimagining familiar sources is the Suzuki Company of Toga's Waiting for Orestes: Electra. This will be the company's first visit to the United Kingdom, according to their website, since 1985, although the show has toured to Turin and arguably Edinburgh is arriving to it rather late since it was first staged in 2008. I have for the moment restricted the amount of time I'm coming up to Edinburgh this year, but if I were to stay longer on the opening weekend, this show would be top of my list of things to catch, drawing as it apparently does on both Euripides and Hofmannsthal's Electras and because I have a general fascination for Greek myth inspired work. Some footage of the show can be seen in this link. From this it seems likely to be fairly visually striking but I do wonder how far it will retain an emotional punch.

Also featuring in the opening weekend is the Gate Theatre's production of Samuel Beckett's Watt. The company were last at the Festival with three Brian Friel plays in 2009, again shows I missed. This show is a one man adaptation of Beckett's second novel, performed by Barry McGovern, which has already toured successfully in the USA. Beckett is not to everyone's tastes but this company has an unsurprisingly long history with his work, and this one sounds well worth catching.

The end of the first week brings another Mills returnee, the Radu Stanca National Theatre of Sibiu, Romania, and director Silviu Purcarete who bring a version of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Their previous visit in 2009 was the last time the Festival ventured to Ingleston, with an epic production of Faust which I did not see. Again re-reading certain of the reviews slightly makes my heart sink as it sounds rather as if spectacle trumped emotional engagement in that show. Swift's novel certainly presents a lot of potential visual challenges for a stage director so it could well play to Purcarete and the company's strengths. A google search does not reveal any reviews, so your willingness to book early will probably depend on whether you think Swift's work can be staged and whether the 2009 Faust appealed to you.

The final piece of reimagination comes on the last weekend from Scottish company Vanishing Point, who turn their attentions to Lewis Carroll in Wonderland. Their mission statement states that they want to tell “dark and beautiful stories” and “take our audiences on adventures into strange, dreamlike landscapes”. This will be my first encounter with their work but there is a lot of potential in the source material, and the mission statement sounds promising. Previous shows have ranged from a site specific work for six audience members at a time performed at the top of a Glasgow tower block (Home Hindrance) to a version of The Beggar's Opera. Of the numerous reimaginings at this year's festival this seems to me to have the potential to be one of the most interesting.

Lastly, we have Teatro Playa with two one act plays Villa+Discurso at the Hub. A search on Google reveals little more to me than is in the Festival brochure, so I can only report what is there printed that the first play explores Pinochet's problematic legacy to Chile, while the second deals with more recent Chilean politics.

As I said at the start of this write up, no one can fault the scale of the Drama programme this year. If you like the more experimental end of modern theatre, the companies that deconstruct and reinvent the classics, this is probably an enormously exciting programme for you. I can't help feeling though that it would have been strengthened by just one good solid world class production of a classic. Of course this line up could produce a series of new classics of the reinvention genre, it could equally produce a whole series of evenings where one comes out baffled as to what on earth the point of it all was. Until August then, the jury is out.

There's Runnicles and more - the BBC SSO unveil the rest of their 2012/13 season

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:18:00 +0000

The prime fillet, or rather fillets, of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's 2012/13 season were announced a couple of weeks ago: a three concert series conducted by Donald Runnicles, each featuring an act of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

However, as those attending their performance of Brahms' 1st symphony tonight will find, there's much more than that on offer (subscribers will already be aware of this, as advanced information dropped through their letterboxes on Monday - I like that the orchestra tells their subscribers first rather than the press).

The first thing to note is that the Glasgow season is now 16 concerts, up one (lucky Glasgow). The second is an interesting Polish theme, featuring Chopin's piano concertos, Szymanowski (the wonderful 1st violin concerto, the 4th symphony and more) and Lutoslawski. Those wondering if they should head over to Edinburgh during the festival to hear Benedetti play the Szymanowski may like to know she's also doing it in Glasgow in November with the BBC SSO and Litton.

Another theme is dance, so works from ballet scores (Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin Suite and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring) feature alongside Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story and, of course, Beethoven's 7th symphony, which Wagner described as "the apotheosis of the dance". The Rite celebrates its centenary, which in turn is the reason for this strand.

Elsewhere, Andrew Manze continues his survey of Vaughan Williams' symphonies, though for me the more compelling aspect of these concerts is the presence of Steven Osborne for the accompanying pieces: one pairs the Pastoral symphony with Beethoven's 4th piano concerto, the other the 9th with the Emperor. Indeed, this marks the start of a full cycle.

When discussing the new RSNO season, I noted that there was a nice chance to hear Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez but that I wasn't altogether taken with the accompanying material. When the BBC SSO do it with Sean Shibe on guitar and Andrew Manze conducting things are more to my taste, with Mozart's Jupiter symphony, Manze's own orchestration of Mozart's Adagio for Glass Harmonica and John Maxwell Geddes's Ombre.

The first of the non-Wagner concerts from Runnicles is a programme featuring Berg's violin concert with Julian Rachlin and Beethoven's 5th symphony (Johann Strauss's Blue Danube waltz also features but I can live without hearing that, though Webern's orchestration of some Schubert dances may be interesting). In addition, there is the post concert coda of Rachlin and Runnicles in recital. Then in April we get Rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto, Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem and Shostakovich's 9th symphony.

Matthias Pintscher's two concerts are interesting, one pairing Weber with Lutoslawski's cello concerto and Beethoven's 7th symphony, the other a new and as yet unnamed work by Pintscher with The Rite of Spring. Ilan Volkov only appears once, but his programme of Lutoslawski and Szymanowski should be worth hearing.

All in all, it appears to be a strong season, with some interesting strands running through it. If only more of it was available in Edinburgh....

Update

Details available on the BBC SSO website. Brochures: Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra announce their 2012/13 Season

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:57:00 +0000

Last year, when the SCO launched their season, I noted it was a shame that Robin Ticciati had opted to do so with Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique rather than to turn again to concert opera, as he did in his first full season with Don Giovanni. It seems unlikely this is the reason they have decided to perform Così fan tutte, but the choice is most welcome nonetheless. Ticciati did well with the Don and I have heard excellent reports of his Così at Glyndebourne. The cast includes Sally Matthews and Christopher Maltman.

Speaking of criticisms rectified, ever since he stood in and provided some rather excellent Beethoven four years ago, we have been asking why the orchestra hasn't engaged James Lowe for a regular season concert. Alas, they have not done so this year. However, he does conduct the orchestra's family concert. In much the same way as they did with Voice of a City, the orchestra are giving a place on the stage to local school-age musicians, this time the Edinburgh Primary Schools Choir for Stephen Deazley and Matt Harvey's A Little Book of Monsters (co-commissioned by the orchestra for the occasion). It ranks among the items I am most looking forward to. Indeed, while I say it is not a main season concert, I mean it isn't lumped in with the subscription series and isn't in the evening. I'm glad to see the SCO have put it in the main section of the programme with the main season rather than hiding it away. Next year, though, SCO, you know what I want.....

Another potential highlight involves some of the soloists the orchestra has engaged. David Watkin plays Schumann's cello concerto, Alec Frank-Gemmill plays the horn in Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings (one of several items by the composer to celebrate his centenary next year) and Maximiliano Martin and Peter Whelan are on hand for Weber's clarinet and bassoon concertos respectively. The eagle-eyed will note that these fine players lead their respective sections in the orchestra. That the orchestra has such talent to draw on is one of its great strengths and previous such performances have been rather special. Alexander Janiczek directing while Watkin, Whelan and oboist Robin Williams solo in Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante is similarly not to be missed. Indeed, I find these concerts a more exciting prospect than many a hired gun they have brought in over the years. (The fact that the orchestra, Martin and Whelan have recorded the Weber, due for release shortly before the concert, is probably not a co-incidence, but given previous fine wind concerto recordings they have made, I do not begrudge this.)

Another soloist highlight is Maria Joao Pires, who plays Mozart's wonderful 17th concerto with Ticciati, the programme also features Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and continuing one of this season's themes, Beethoven's pastoral symphony. Though here it must be noted that there is rather too strong a sense of deja vu, with the second piano concerto and the 3rd, 6th and 7th symphonies all making a repeat appearance for a second year running. Elsewhere, after his fine Haydn last season, it is good to see that Ticciati is bringing at least one more symphony next year.

There is a reasonable dose of new music. High on the list is Baldur Brönnimann's concert in October which includes the premiere of Lyell Cresswell's triple concerto together with Toru Takemitsu's How Slow the Wind. John Storgårds conducts the UK premiere of Einojuhani Rautavaara's Into the Heart of Light in a programme with Mendelssohn's Reformation symphony and Beethoven's 2nd piano concerto, for which Artur Pizarro returns. Thierry Fischer conducts the Scottish premiere of James MacMillan's oboe concerto (with Francois Leleux) along with Stravinsky's beautiful Pulcinella suite and Mendelssohn's Italian symphony. The concert conducted by George Benjamin is also interesting, featuring Birtwistle's Carmen arcadiae mechanicae peretuum and a repeat performance of Martin Suckling's storm, rose, tiger. This second is welcome on two counts, first because often works are commissioned and then vanish, but also on a personal note because I was unable to attend this season's performance.

It is a shame that among the Mendelssohn symphonies they are not giving the SCO chorus a workout with the underrated 2nd, Hymn of Praise. Yet the chorus will get to have fun with Haydn's Nelson Mass under the baton of noted Haydn interpreter Adam Fischer, who also brings The Clock. However, in general I find less to be excited about among the chorus's contributions than I have in recent seasons.

There are a fair few Schubert symphonies, with David Afkham bringing the Great C Major, Richard Egarr the Little C Major, Robert Levin wraping up the season with the 2nd and Ticciati conducting the 5th. That programme also features the adagietto from Mahler's 5th symphony. Given that a week later they are joined by soloists Toby Spence and Karen Cargill for Das Lied von der Erde (interestingly Glen Cortese's arrangement and not the more famous Schoenberg and Riehn one), it makes me wonder if I missed trick a few years ago when I nearly did an April fool write up of the orchestra's season announcement which would have featured a Mahler cycle with contemporary composers commissioned to arrange those without chamber versions. Sadly as these days the orchestra announces their programmes in March you are unlikely to read of MacMillan's take on Mahler's Resurrection, Oliver Knussen's interesting choices of orchestration in the 5th, Runnicles making the leap to conducting a version of the 8th with just single parts (a big change from the last time he tackled the work) and Mustonen completing the 10th on piano alone. But I digress..... On a more serious note, it is a shame that Oliver Knussen does not join the orchestra this year.

Earlier I mentioned the celebrations of Britten's centenary. These also include Richard Egarr pairing him with Purcell, something that has not wholly convinced me when I've heard it done before, and Part's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. He also crops up in the second of this year's two chamber concerts (sadly we're back down to two this year). Of course, if they really want to do him proud, the ideal way to open the 2013/14 season might be with one of his chamber operas. Given the small scoring of something like The Rape of Lucretia, it need not break the bank.

In summary, it looks a promising season, and one that makes me wish I didn't have other commitments on Thursday evenings which keep me from going to as many concerts as I would like. (Full details will be published on the SCO website later today. Links to brochures will be added once they are available.)

Update

Links to the season brochures: Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews. The orchestra is again offering a combined season with the RSNO in Aberdeen.

Oundjian and the RSNO launch their 2012/13 season

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:14:00 +0000

Today marks the announcement Peter Oundjian's first season as music director of the RSNO. There are certainly a number of interesting concerts on the cards, though personally I would like to see more of a sense of curation, with themes running more strongly through the season.

The closest it comes to this, is the emphasis on American music to be found in a pair of concerts in February and April. In the first, Oundjian brings the overture to Bernstein's Candide, Gershwin's piano concerto in F and, most enticingly for me, Adams' Harmonielehre. The second sandwiches piano concertos by Barber and Copland between the latter's Appalachian Spring and Adams' Dr Atomic Symphony. This last is a superb piece, but then it helps that I am a fan of the opera it is drawn from. The symphony works well, or at least it did when I heard the composer conduct it with the LSO, most notably when the aria based on Donne's Batter my heart is transferred to the trumpet.

The season opens with a pair of concerts from Oundjian, the first combining Tchaikovsky's violin concerto with Shostakovich's 11th symphony The Year of 1905, the second mixing Britten's Four Sea Interludes with Brahms' 1st symphony. I'm particularly looking forward to the Shostakovich as it is probably my favourite of his symphonies.

Among the more interesting items, in March we get Smetana's Ma vlast. What makes it interesting is that Oundjian will, as he apparently has in Toronto, pair the work with photographic projections (or photochoreography as the programme terms it) by James Westwater. I don't know how effective that will be or whether it will add anything, but I'll be interested to see one way or the other.

New music seems a little thin on the ground and although there is actually more by living composers than last year, we are a far cry for the Ten out of 10 series. Aside from the two Adams pieces, there is Swedish composer B Tommy Andersson's The Garden of Delights, Thomas Adès's Dances from Powder Her Face and Victoria Borisova-Ollas's Open Ground. I rate Adès highly, but I don't think Powder Her Face is his finest musical hour. Andersson and Borisova-Ollas form part of a Swedish trio with Lars-Erik Larsson's En Vintersaga. (Borisova-Ollas is originally from Russia but now settled in Sweden.) Larsson's composition doesn't really rate as new music, having been composed around seventy-five years ago, though since it will be unfamiliar, the orchestra deserves points. However, it is a shame they haven't tapped compatriot Anders Hillborg whose compositions have impressed me greatly.

It seems we cannot have a Scottish orchestral season where none of the three bands does Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Indeed, November's performance will be by my reckoning the 4th the Usher Hall has heard in two years (the second by the RSNO). I love the piece, but enough already, you're going to wear it out. True, it will be interesting to have it undressed as part of Paul Rissmann's Naked Classics series, but after this can we put it to bed for a while. The other two concerts in the series feature Stravinsky's The Firebird and de Vlieger's orchestral abridgement of Wagner's Ring, the latter will see Rissmann tread dangerously close to the late great Deryck Cooke's toes.

Several concerts are conducted by new principal guest conductor Thomas Søndergård. One pairs Mahler with Sibelius's 2nd symphony (hopefully memories of Nelsons' festival performance with the CBSO will not still be too fresh), the other Dvořák's cello concerto with Stravinsky's Petrouchka (he also conducts the above mentioned Berlioz). The Dvořák is particularly nice to see as it marks the return to Scotland of Truls Mørk, who back in 2009 had to pull out of a performance of the Elgar concerto due to illness, to such an extent that it was uncertain he would be able to play again. We're delighted he has recovered and is returning here.

Also of interest is Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, played by Miloš Karadaglić, though the Respighi and Martucci that join it in Gilbert Varga's programme are less compelling.

Regular guests such as Neeme Järvi and Andrew Davis return. The former with Prokofiev's 3rd piano concerto (with Nikolai Lugansky) and Tchiakovsky's Manfred Symphony, while Davis brings Mendelssohn's Elijah. This provides some meat for the RSNO chorus, as does Carl Orff's popular Carmina Burana (under Oundjian). They also have the annual performance of Handel's Messiah (for reasons unclear to me, moved to March, which I'm afraid does not make it any more attractive to me). However, for me the chorus's most interesting outing comes in the season finale, where Oundjian conducts Walton's score to the film Henry V (joined by an as yet unnamed "guest actor", meaning presumably they haven't managed to book anyone yet).

All in all, while there are some interesting things, and will doubtless be some fine concerts, it is not the most compelling season the RSNO have announced in recent years.

Full details should be on the RSNO website soon. Unfortunately they appear to have had their launch this evening and left their website in an odd limbo with just the barest minimum of details of upcoming concerts. (Links to the season brochures and website will be added once they are available.)

Update

And here's the link to the RSNO announcement and separately the actual listings. Brochures are to be found here (and here are direct links to Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow). As was the case last year, Aberdeen is a joint series with the SCO.

Sondheim's Company, or Third Time Round is the Charm

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:06:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the repeat cinema relay of this semi-staged (actually pretty fully staged) performance from the Lincoln Centre in 2011.

It's my impression that Company is one of Sondheim's best known and most often performed shows. I came to it late, having developed a love of Sondheim through Into the Woods, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park with George. This was the third time I'd seen it live, and on the previous two occasions somehow it just hadn't worked for me. This wasn't because there aren't wonderful musical numbers, or telling scenes, or (at least on the second occasion in Sheffield last December) great performances, but it just didn't get me emotionally in the way that those other Sondheim shows have. On this viewing, I came to the conclusion that this is because there is absolutely no room to hide in this show, and you can't afford to have any weak links. That is, it isn't enough here to get some scenes and songs right, to have a couple of individually great performances – you need an outstanding ensemble across the board – and you need them to get not just the money notes, not just the laugh lines, but those small telling little moments in which the work's emotional centre lies. It is a measure of how challenging it is in this particular show, that even this enormously talented cast can't nail everything but it is so very nearly there that I forgave them the moment or two where I felt a line needed something more.

At the centre of the performance's success was Neil Patrick Harris's Bobby. Harris has the effortless charm, grace and good looks which the part needs, but he also possessed the emotional weight to make me care about a character who can seem a little tiresome. Harris also manages the role's vocal demands, with blazing performances of Marry Me a Little and Being Alive.

The biggest other name in the line up was Patti LuPone as Joanne. Not disimilarly to Francesca Annis in the Sheffield production I thought she wasn't quite there in The Little Things You Do Together and this was the one place where I would quibble with Gemignani's tempi – I think this is a number where there needs to be a slow enough pace for the archness of it to really have its effect – and both at Sheffield and in this relay I found it rushed. However, Joanne's big number comes in Act Two, The Ladies Who Lunch, and this LuPone absolutely nailed. She nails it because she has a superb voice over which she can then lay the drunkenness, the sarcasm, the bitterness. But to really work, to slam you back in your seat which is what the number has to do it needs first that vocal quality. LuPone duly spellbinds.

Other equally fine musical performances come from Katie Finneran's Amy in Getting Married Today and Anika Noni Rose as Marta in Another Hundred People. Finneran never misses a word or fails to make them count, Rose has the ability not just to get the words out but also to soar warmly in the more lyrical sections. Finally, among the women especially worthy of mention (though it is important to say there isn't a weak link) was Chryssie Whitehead's Kathy. Her voice isn't quite right for the solo in You Could Drive a Person Crazy but she has a wonderful quirkiness of expression which makes up for it. The scene where she makes it clear to Bobby that she would have married him if he'd ever asked was movingly done. Every time she was on stage there was something in her face that held me. I shall hope to see her on Broadway in a larger role some time soon.

The men (apart from Bobby) have significantly less to do in this show but all of the ensemble give strong, telling characterisations. Behind them the New York Philharmonic delivered a sparkling performance of the score and Paul Germignani's conducting was spot on with the one tiny exception already mentioned.

I mentioned at the top the fact that this is actually a fairly extensively staged production, directed by Lonny Price. I rather pitied the poor ensemble singers who got to join in one or two choruses and spent the rest of the show whizzing everybody else around on sofas (although several of the girls got a moment in the sun in the dance number (Tick Tock)). Frankly there was almost as much staging as in the fully staged Sheffield performances and I never felt the lack of anything in that respect. The finest choreography (the work of Josh Rhodes) comes in the Act Two opener Side by Side by Side/What Would We Do Without You. This is one of many places in this show where it's terribly easy to go wrong. It is a pastiche of the classic musical chorus line but it has to be a pastiche with bite and edge, a scene where Bobby is walking a precipice and suddenly that blank emptiness that there is no one beside him stares him in the face. This was wittily, bitingly done.

This evening, looking for something to listen to on the walk to a choir rehearsal, I put my CD of Company on. For the first time I didn't feel like skipping songs, and listening to them my mind was back watching these performers in action. It was then I knew this show had finally got me; proof that cinema can transmit successfully the magic of live performance. More Broadway relays please.

From Bach to Beamish, a weekend of playing and singing by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:12:00 +0000

For various reasons it's been a little while since I was last at a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert, and longer since I reviewed one. To make up for that, this weekend I found myself at two within less than twenty-four hours, and rather fine they both were.

At the centre of Saturday's programme was a piece that had jumped out at me when the season was announced this time last year: Sally Beamish's new percussion concerto. It attracted me in part because I like to support new music, but also because percussion concertos are generally rather fun as they tend to showcase a range of textures beyond that which one normally gets (they are normally also enjoyable to watch). Beamish's Dance Variations did not disappoint.

Based on several different themes, she chose to focus on just a few instruments in each variation, which was an effective choice. So, one variation might be largely on the vibraphone, another on a drum kit. One potential pitfall of the percussion concerto is kitchen sink instrumentation, in that too many or too outlandish instruments may not work. In general, this was not a problem, and some, such as the 'are you being served' type bell and the hanging glass bottles were very effective. Only the rain stick didn't quite fit for me, in part due to the slightly hurried way it was used.

Throughout the concerto, percussionist Colin Currie gave a tour de force performance. My only regret is that I failed to fully read the programme and realise that the piece's seven variations were themed around the seven deadly sins, so I can't really comment on how well this aspect was realised. Hopefully it will be performed again before too long and I will have another chance.

The concerto was preceded by Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks. Under Joseph Swensen, the orchestra gave an energetic performance. Scored for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horns and just ten strings, it gave the orchestra's excellent wind section a nice chance to shine. Particular treats were to be had from the rich sounds produced by bassoonist Peter Whelan and Maximiliano Martin's ever fine clarinet work.

The second half was given over to Beethoven's 7th symphony, a favourite of mine, and doubtless many others. I think the last time I heard the orchestra play it was Charles Mackerras's legendary performance at the 2006 Edinburgh festival, and even if they have done so more recently, that will forever stick in my memory. Nonetheless, Swensen's reading stands well in comparison, helped by the fact that he took a rather different approach. To begin with, brass were playing modern instruments. This was in keeping with a generally heavier approach. Indeed, the stormy and violent take on the opening movement was more in line with what you might expect in the 5th. To be sure, this wasn't the unrestrained joy that I would tend to prefer in an interpretation, but it was an approach that the work responded well to. And there was still plenty of joy and excitement to be had, certainly the orchestra seemed to be having fun (if the almost Cheshire Cat wide grin on cellist David Watkin's face was anything to go by). The SCO play Beethoven as well as anyone and this exhilarating performance was evidence both of that and that, as with all great works, there is no shortage of valid approaches.

Sunday afternoon saw a rather different programme in the form of one of the orchestra's series of chamber concerts. This is actually the first one I've made it to this year, so I don't know if the format of slightly more than an hour with no interval has been the norm for this season, but I think it works rather better. It must be noted that one might quibble as to whether it can accurately be described as a chamber concert when you have fifty odd members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus on stage, but when the music making is so fine there is little need to. (Odd, just for the sake of clarity, used here in the sense of approximately, lest anyone misinterpret that as a comment on the chorus members themselves.) True, for such forces I would probably rather have been a little further back, but at the front of the stalls it was by no means overpowering.

When I interviewed SCO chorus master Gregory Batsleer, who also conducted the concert, he made clear the importance he attached to the choir doing a capella work as well as performing with the orchestra. On the evidence of this afternoon, he can place a large tick in that box. They began with Poulenc's Quatre Motets pour un temps de penitence, the choir's harmonies filling the Queen's Hall beautifully. It was also nice to see the chorus's Claire McBride taking the soprano solo part so well.

Poulenc motets were paired with one of J S Bach's, Jesu, meine Freude, BWV 227. Here the chorus were joined by cellist David Watkin and chamber organist Stuart Hope. Again, they turned in a beautiful performance, with Batsleer shaping the music well. Here the young quintet of soloists had been drawn from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Not only is it good to see such links being fostered, but they sang generally very well, sopranos Hazel McBain and Fiona Wilkie and mezzo Brynne McLeod in particular. Only tenor Raoni Hubner de Barros occasionally seemed less secure than the others.

Between these two sacred works, we were treated to David Watkin giving us Bach's second cello suite in D minor BWV 1008 (an extremely pleasant surprise, given it wasn't listed in the season brochure). Regular readers will know I am a great fan of Watkin's playing as the orchestra's principal cellist, and as a soloist he acquitted himself no less well. Playing what seemed to be a period cello, he gave a beautiful and unmannered reading, yet one which did not lack for emotion.

All in all, it was a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Thanks to The Queen's Hall for providing the photos. Click on any of the photos to see the full size image or take a look at The Queen's Hall's entire Flickr stream.

The 2012 Edinburgh International Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 07:44:00 +0000

As regular readers will know, Edinburgh festival programme launch day is eagerly awaited in the Pollard household (or rather households). This year it didn't get off to the surest start as I found myself contending with water coming through my ceiling, not, as SCO violinist Rosenna East noted on twitter, quite the deluge I was expecting. Still, such crises were not sufficient to upstage the artistic announcement and by lunchtime I was in full planning mode, aided by highlighter pens, colour printers and my trusty Lamy 2000.

The first thing to note is that unlike the last two years, which had strong overarching themes, there is nothing similar to tie everything together this time round, which is a little bit of a shame. However, this isn't a vast problem given there appear to be a lot of good things.

One big question I had prior to the announcement concerned the start date, which last autumn was announced as being a Thursday. This gave pause for concern that they might actually put the opening concert on a Thursday, though I suspected it was more likely simply that UVA's Speed of Light performance art piece which runs, literally, around Arthur's Seat, would start a day earlier, and so it proves.

This year the RSNO are on opening concert duty with Delius's A Mass of Life. I'm not familiar with the piece, but Andrew Davis is conducting and they perform well for him. They will be joined by the festival chorus. Indeed, these same forces, albeit with David Robertson on the podium, also share the closing concert duties in a programme that features Belshazzar's Feast. This last isn't a massively exciting prospect, even though it's some years since I heard it last. That said, it is paired with Ives' The Unanswered Question and Feldman's Coptic Light, both of which I would rather like to hear.

Between these two is an interesting Usher Hall programme. There is a lack of big name international orchestras, though British bands are very well represented, and given the quality available here it by no means feels like we are being short changed. Biggest among these is a mammoth four concert residence by the London Symphony Orchestra which pairs Brahms' symphonies with Szymanowski's under the baton of Valery Gergiev (after his appointment as the festival's honorary president last year, it seems clear the festival is going to get their money's worth). Szymanowski's rather fine violin concertos also feature, and Nicola Benedetti is the soloist for the first, which will please the local audience. For me, the major unknown is how well Gergiev will fare with Brahms.

The LSO is joined by its main London rivals, as Jurowski brings the LPO for an eclectic programme and Salonen the Philharmonia for Bruckner 4. Both conductors impressed mightily last year (Jurowski with the OAE and Liszt's Faust Symphony and Salonen and the Philharmonia with The Rite of Spring) so both are high on the must see list this time round.

Rounding off the English orchestras is a visit by the CBSO under Andris Nelsons. After recent impressive Proms performances, I'm very grateful for the chance to hear them live, especially as they'll be playing Sibelius 2 (and since I'm having to miss their April performance of Gerontius in London that I had planned to attend).

And what of the man himself? He brings but one concert this year, but it promises to be quite something. The Alpensinfonie is one of my favourite works by Strauss and as his recent exerts from Rosenkavalier show, Runnicles is a dab hand with the composer. This coupled with his flare for the placement of offstage brass means it should be a treat. In the first half is Beethoven's pastoral symphony.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has an interesting programme under Robin Ticciati which includes Britten's arrangement of Mahler's What the Wild Flowers Tell Me and Shostakovich's 14th symphony. Their earlier concert, featuring Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream under Roger Norrington is a less attractive prospect.

Probably the biggest international orchestral name is that of the Cleveland Orchestra. We have fond memories of their residence in 2004. Sadly when they retuned in 2010 they seemed a shadow of their former selves. This coupled with a somewhat bizarre decision to split Smetana's Ma Vlast between two concerts leaves me a little ambivalent.

When we set up this blog, it was in part to bemoan the absence of a certain conductor from the Edinburgh festival. That was thankfully soon rectified, however another absence we lamented at the same time has taken rather longer to address. So, after six years, it is wonderful to see the impressive Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester making a return under Daniele Gatti with Mahler 7 and exerts from Parsifal. In line with a strong youth strand this year, the EU Youth Orchestra are also coming with a programme including Busoni's piano concerto and the UK premiere of Richard Causton's Twenty-Seven Heavens.

This year's opera programme is pretty impressive. First things first, we get the premiere of a new production of Janacek's Makropulos Case. I'm a big Janacek fan and it is one of my favourite operas, add to which it is coming from Opera North and conductor Richard Farnes who have impressed before.

The other thing that jumps out at me is Scottish Opera's contribution which is comprised of new or newish works by Craig Armstrong, James MacMillan, Huw Watkins and Stuart MacRae. This is a bold piece of programming: I can't remember a festival before that had three opera world premieres. They are to be commended for it.

In terms of concert opera, Welsh National Opera bring Tristan und Isolde, but based on reports I've heard from people who have heard Ben Heppner sing recently, this is not a tempting prospect, the more so as Runnicles and the BBC SSO are doing it in concert next season with the likes of Nina Stemme.

Meanwhile, in the theatre there is Shakespeare in Polish and Russian and a rather intriguing adaptation of Gulliver's Travels in Romanian from the team behind 2009's epic Faust. Gate Theatre Dublin bring Beckett's Watt.

Three of the theatre productions, including 2008: Macbeth, updated against a backdrop of the war against terror and middle eastern conflict, take place at the Royal Highland Centre (sadly the tram line that may one day take people there quickly is far from complete, though bus access is pretty decent).

Vanishing Point's Wonderland, described in the programme as "a darkly subversive take on the themes of Alice in Wonderland" looks rather interesting, though the programme also notes that it isn't suitable for children.

My brother will write up the opera and theatre more fully in due course.

I mentioned the festival are working Gergiev hard. In addition to his four LSO concerts, he is also bringing the Mariinsky Ballet with Prokofiev's Cinderella.

Meanwhile, Juilliard Dance (from the eponymous New York school) bring an interesting triptych that includes a ballet based on Beethoven's Waldstein sonata.
Also of note is Ballet Preljocaj's programme, which includes a piece based on Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helikopter Quartet and Leigh + Dancers who bring Impulse, based on Michael Nyman's second string quartet (of note, since Nyman scored one of the most impressive ballets I've seen).

Returning to music, there is also the Queen's Hall series, highlights of which include the return of Maria Joao Pires after her visit last year, a recital by the impressive Leif Ove Andsnes and a recital by Dietrich Henschel, accompanied by Steven Osborne. Also intriguing is Les Vents Francais, a quintet of oboe, flute, clarinet, horn and bassoon whose programme includes, among other items, an arrangement of Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin.

After not using the venue last year, the festival returns to Greyfriars Kirk. At £20 for an hour, in unreserved seats, prices are frankly too steep (especially if you're coming from work, and thus won't be early enough to get a good seat). The festival should either examine the pricing or do as Aldeburgh does for its church concerts and reserve seats. All the same, a few items here jump out, especially the impressive Hebrides Ensemble, who play MacMillan's new Since it was the day of preparation.... The Alim Qasimov Ensemble, who joined Kronos in Glasgow last year, close the series.

As ever, the SCO wrap things up with the fireworks concert, this time including music by Walton, Prokofiev and Vaughan Williams.

All in all, there is plenty to get excited about and too much I want to go to - always a sign of a strong programme. It would be a dark year indeed if highlighter pens and printed programme pages were not required.

Full details are available via the festival's website (pdf download of the brochure can be found here). Public booking opens a week on Saturday.

Dvorak's Rusalka at the Royal, or Much Ado About Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 10:14:00 +0000

If you have been reading the papers you might be forgiven for imagining that something provocative and exciting is going on down at the Royal Opera House. It seems the production was offensive enough to some to provoke opening night boos, and sufficiently engaging to others to provoke one fellow critic to denounce the booers as philistines (boulezian). As far as I could see there is nothing here to get particularly excited about.

Part of the problem is unquestionably the opera's story. Now I must confess that owing to a rather exhausting week at work I fell asleep during part of Act One but aspects of the story do seem a bit obscure. It concerns a water nymph, Rusalka, who wants to experience human love. A witch, Jezibaba (who in this production resembles a fairly decrepid elderly Eastern European bag lady with a cat which undergoes remarkable transformations in size) agrees but says she must sacrifice her voice. According to the synopsis if she then does not attain love she will be cursed by the water powers. Naturally enough, having initially ensnared the Prince, he promptly loses interest. Rusalka's voice is apparently restored by conversing with the water goblin, Vodnik whose motivations in the piece seemed confused. In Act Three it appears the prince is also cursed by having abandoned her, Rusalka having killed herself in despair appears to him, and kills him with a kiss before commending his soul to God. Among other problems quite why it is speaking to the water goblin that establishes she has not attained love, and why God is suddenly introduced into the equation at the end were particularly notable.

The production team faced with this relocate the action from woods, pools and fairy tale castles to a brothel. Beforehand I had expected, given reactions, to feel that this was violently at odds with the text. This was not how it struck me. Some of it seems to work fairly well – the idea of the other water nymphs as rather bored prostitutes, Jezibaba as the forbidding Madam. The production also benefits from the fact that the directors are capable of creating the right tensions between the characters at certain points – most successfully when relations are breaking down between the Prince and Rusalka in Act Two. However there are incongruities, Rusalka appears in mermaid costume at the beginning, and the water goblin's costume and appearance doesn't ever quite seem to fit with the brothel setting in which the nymphs are placed. In Act Three there are outbreaks of performers being given silly things to do by the director, the nymphs/prostitutes ransacking Jezibaba's handbag, Jezibaba messing around with a lot of high heeled shoes while Rusalka is lamenting her fate but these are far less serious than in many productions. The biggest problem to me is that the sordid setting does conflict with the unearthly beauty that the text implies Rusalka possesses for the Prince, and overall there is a sacrifice of fairy tale magic which might possibly have strengthened one's emotional engagement with the characters.

The performers all do their best with what they are given and the quality of singing and playing is very fine. Both Camilla Nylund (Rusalka) and Bryan Hymel (Prince) have excellent stage and vocal presence. Hymel indeed has one of those ringing tenors that is exciting to listen to – a richness of tone denied to Luis Chapa in the Opera North Norma (though the demands of the parts are obviously very different). Agnes Zwierko's Jezibaba was wonderfully dark and menacing, and commanded the stage in her Act Three scene. Alan Held as Vodnik was less successfully directed and seemed to spend a lot of time emerging from trapdoors or writhing around on the stage, but he also had a fine, penetrating sound. Petra Lang's Foreign Princess had less vocal richness than I remembered but still pierces through the ensembles as required. The remaining parts were similarly well taken. Yannick Nezet-Seguin making his Royal Opera House debut drew typically fine playing from the ROH Orchestra, making the best case possible for Dvorak's score.

And this sadly is the other big problem. Musically this just isn't a very interesting work. It would be too extreme to say that there is one good tune – the Song of the Moon – and it happens in the First Act, but one of my companions put his finger on it when he suggested that while there is some beautiful orchestration and some lovely tunes taken as a whole it does not sustain one's interest through three hours. Act Three dragged especially badly. The water nymphs trio repeats the same verse three times (it's not a good enough tune and it seemed to go on forever), and Dvorak has a real problem with the ending (not helped by a laughable corpse disposal moment).

In sum then, I can see no reason to get exited beyond the musical performance, and the quality of that is undermined by the second rank nature of much of the material. One performance remains, I would not feel that you need to rush to catch it.

Here's Runnicles, with Tristan und Isolde

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:15:00 +0000

The full launch of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's 2012/13 season is still a couple of weeks away (scheduled for 22nd March), but it was a pleasant surprise yesterday afternoon when an e-mail arrived from the BBC SSO announcing what seems likely to be the biggest highlight (or, if it isn't, part of a very exciting season indeed).

Concert opera is a cornerstone of Runnicles' relationship with the orchestra, indeed it is how they first came together, for a performance of the Berlioz's Les Toyens way back in 2001 at the Edinburgh festival. Since he became chief conductor it has featured in their regular season too: in 2010 they opened their season with the first act Die Walkure and last November we were treated to Runnicles' own arrangement/abridgement of Der Rosenkavalier. Next season they go one better, bringing us the whole of Tristan und Isolde, in part to mark Wagner's bicentenary in 2013.

There is, it must be noted, a slight catch. Presumably in part for economic and logistical reasons, it is not a single concert performance, but rather will be spread over three with one act each in September, November and April. This formula has worked well for Runnicles before, with similar arrangements providing the basis for his recording of the work with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Christine Brewer in 2002/3 (review here). And, indeed, it makes for three blockbuster concerts rather than just one.

A slightly bigger gripe concerns the fact that the cast will not be constant throughout. Though we are treated to Nina Stemme for acts one and two (and having heard her sing it, a treat it should most certainly be), her place is taken by Petra Maria Schnitzer for the last act (a quick google isn't too promising, but she has sung the role with Runnicles in Berlin). Then again, act three does bring us the King Mark of Matthew Best, whom Edinburgh audiences will surely remember fondly from his performance as Wotan in Scottish Opera's Ring cycle (act two's Mark is Peter Rose). Rose, along with act one's Kurwenal (Boaz Daniel), is veteran from Runnicles' recording, Boaz in particular gave a memorable account on that occasion. Tristan is sung by Ian Storey in acts one and two, with Robert Dean Smith taking over in act three.

The concerts pair an act of Wagner with Rachmaninov's The Isle of the Dead, exerts from Berlioz's Roméo and Juliette, and in the final concert Strauss's Metamorphosen. All three concerts will take place both in Glasgow and Edinburgh and presumably this will be the whole Edinburgh season for the orchestra. In a change from the last few seasons, they are trying an earlier start time of 4pm on Sunday. Whether this will lure a bigger audience is uncertain, but the Usher Hall has been bafflingly empty on Sunday nights. If people miss these, more fool them. In addition, the orchestra, is bringing pre concert talks to Edinburgh, in the same manner as they already do in Glasgow. There is no sign of the post concert codas, but I'm not sure you'd want anything else after an act of Tristan (well, save one or two more).

Conductor and orchestra will be there throughout, and that should mean a treat. Runnicles is a fine Wagnerian, as evidenced both by that concert Die Walkure and also by the fine reading of Der Ring I saw him direct in Berlin two years ago (and, hopefully, as he will show again when he conducts Lohengrin on our next visit there this spring). The man himself had this to say:

“These concerts bring the orchestra and I back to the roots of our relationship together, in 2001, in concert performances of opera. That was when I fell in love with this orchestra - the musicians were so extraordinary and enthusiastic that I have been genuinely impatient for many years to bring this Tristan project to Scotland.”

When I interviewed Runnicles back in 2010, I asked him about concert opera. In addition to mentioning the slightly different perspective a symphony orchestra brings, and indeed that the listener hears the opera differently compared to the experience in an opera house, he did say that I could expect more concert opera. Perhaps he was referring to this.

ENO's The Death of Klinghoffer, or, A Superb Performance of a Masterpiece

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 23:36:00 +0000

In reviewing this evening there is a first principle that has to be established. It is incredible (and says much about our capacity to evade the unpalatable) that it has not been established long before this. That principle is that John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer is a twentieth century masterpiece of the genre and it should be being staged by every major company.

It was greatly to the credit of Scottish Opera that they staged the UK premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005 (and it was nice to see that acknowledged in tonight's programme). It is equally to the credit of English National Opera that they have brought this stunning work to the London stage.

More to the point, it is cause for considerable rejoicing that at long last John Berry's various strategies have really paid off. This is a contemporary opera which urgently deserved a staging, and Tom Morris on his ENO debut proves to have an excellent grasp of what is needed to make a compelling operatic production. There isn't a weak link in the ensemble, and the ENO Chorus and Orchestra under Baldur Bronnimann play with precision, drama and passion. The whole experience took me back to company days of yore – in fact I think this is quite possibly the most complete work they have done since John Berry became artistic director.

Adams's score proves even more powerful on a second live hearing. Both my brother and I were much struck by it at the Edinburgh performance, but this evening I heard all sorts of things which I had completely forgotten. Twice I had tears in my eyes, as Klinghoffer tries to make his wife smile, and as she later rails at his death. It's fascinating to realise how cleverly Adams uses the operatic forms – the mixing of choruses, orchestral interludes, solo arias and ensemble sections is masterfully done. But he is also supported by what is, in the main Alice Goodman's very powerful and telling libretto. Of course this is the weapon which has allowed detractors to frighten houses into not staging the work. To give terrorists a voice is it seems deplorable to some. It is true that there are unpleasant moments in the text (the various diatribes some of the terrorists utter against the Jews in the second act are perhaps the most troubling). But what is so striking about this is that, leaving aside the fact that unpleasant things don't go away if we put our fingers in our ears, here these remarks, at least from my point of view, served to turn my sympathies away from the terrorists. Similarly, the moment in Act One when the Captain, having heard Mamoud's description of the exile history of his family, urges him that if he told his story like that to the world peace must come, and is brutally dismissed by the terrorist. To a considerable degree the terrorists are given a voice and condemn themselves.

To put across this challenging piece ENO has assembled a very strong cast. Christopher Magiera (The Captain), Alan Opie (Klinghoffer) and Michaela Martens (Marilyn Klinghoffer) give superb performances. The four terrorists are well differentiated and sung by Edwin Vega, Richard Burkhard, Sidney Outlaw and Jesse Kovarsky. Also especially worthy of mention is Kate Miller-Heidke as the British dancing-girl – a little vignette that I had completely forgotten. All of them give the text real, powerful point.

The production is much more active than I remember Anthony Neilson's being in Edinburgh but the key point about it is that it is still when it needs to be still. Tom Morris understands the value of allowing singers sometimes just to stand and deliver the music to one another and there are some overpowering stage pictures – perhaps most notably as Marilyn Klinghoffer talks to the Captain about her husband while in the background we watch the terrorists getting ready to wheel him away. Just occasionally I thought there was a little too much choreography but I can see why Morris and choreographer Arthur Pita have gone with the approach they did and in general it yields major rewards.

Others have commented (I'm not sure if I picked this up from members of the production team or from other critics) about the way that we often talk about trying to make opera relevant and here is an opera that really is powerfully engaged with contemporary issues. Unlike some others I felt this did come over in the Scottish Opera production but it comes across equally powerfully in this one. We may not like this story, people in it may say things that appall us, but these are things we need in my view to face. Moreover, to me this is also ultimately an opera about the small tragedies perhaps most acutely caught in Klinghoffer's movingly commonplace final line before his murder - “I should have worn a hat.” People should stop being afraid of staging this work and let it speak for itself, it deserves to be able to do that. Considerable congratulations are due to English National Opera for giving it an important opportunity to do so. Put aside any preconceptions you have and go and see it.