Mayer/Berliner Barock Solisten/Goltz - JCF Bach, CPE Bach, JS Bach, and Johann Christoph Bach, 11 December 2023

Kammermusiksaal

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach: Sinfonia in D minor, WFV 1/3
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (arr. Albrecht Mayer and Matthias Spindler): Oboe Concerto in G major (after harpsichord concerto, Wq 9)
Johann Sebastian Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.3 in G major, BWV 1048 (early version)
Johann Christoph Bach (arr. Spindler): Lamento: Ach, dass ich Wassers gnug hätte
CPE Bach: Symphony in E-flat major for strings, Wq 122/2
JS Bach: Oboe d’amore concerto in A major, BWV 1055R

Albrecht Mayer (oboe, oboe d’amore, English horn)

Berliner Barock Solisten

Gottfried von der Goltz (violin, director)

It is always time for Bach, likewise for the Bach family, but some times seem still more so than others. Advent is surely one of them, and this Advent seems all the more necessary than ever as a source of hope and light when sorely needed. Here, members of the Berlin Philharmonic, in their guise as the Berliner Barock Solisten, led by violinist Gottfried von der Goltz, were joined by their Philharmonic colleague oboist Albrecht Mayer in a programme of music by Johann Sebastian, two of his sons, and his first cousin once removed, Johann Christoph, described in Sebastian’s 1735 genealogy as ‘ein profonder Componist’. 

First, a fine curtain-raiser: a Sinfonia in D minor by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, JS Bach’s fifth son and only three years old when his father (we think) compiled that genealogy. This short three-movement symphony probably stood closest to CPE Bach of Bach’s other sons, though without his radicalism/mannerism (delete according to taste). It nonetheless offered invention and the occasional surprise, in more-or-less Sturm und Drang mode. In the opening ‘Allegro’, the ensemble offered cultivated, dramatic playing which, as elsewhere in the programme, rightly saw no need for mere ‘effects’. Committed, communicative musicianship, which recognised and demonstrated both the importance and joy of listening to one another, was enough. The slow movement, ‘Andante amoroso’ was announced in veiled, somewhat astringent intimacy, taking its leave from the director’s muting of his instrument. Its aria-like unfolding also suggested an organ piece; indeed, Goltz’s violin tone had something of a viola da gamba stop to it. Vigour and dynamism characterised a finale that was conceived and felt as such. 

Emanuel Bach’s G major harpsichord concerto was here arranged for oboe. If there were times when I was not entirely convinced, they were rare, and one can hardly blame an oboist for wanting to expand his instrument’s repertoire. From the outset, contrasts and mood-swings made the composer’s identity clear, though a rare instance of tentative string entry might have had me wonder. Mayer clearly relished the language and the twists and turns of this first movement, as did the ensemble, the physicality of whose playing had one feel in the best sense bows and rosin flying from their bows. This went ‘down’ all the way to the violone/double bass, Ulrich Wolff’s playing as nimble and expressive as that of anyone else. Another aria-like second movement followed, Mayer splendidly long-breathed, strings varying vibrato for expressive rather than dogmatic reasons. I found the harpsichord registration (a lute stop, I think) distracting, even irritating, but could see others in the audience responding more positively. Dramatic string interjections prior to the cadenza would surely have impressed Gluck. Likewise, in the finale, gestures told, whilst always forming part of a larger picture. Bright, incisive, string playing was matched by Mayer’s perky despatch of his part. It was a fine dialogue, enjoyable and nourishing in equal measure. 

The Third Brandenburg Concerto was given by three violins, three violas, two cellos, one double bass, and harpsichord continuo. Polished and lively, the first movement was a model of chamber-scale performance, wondrous transparency ensuring one could feel the import of every contrapuntal line and its direction. Whatever the virtues of his sons’ music – and they are great – Sebastian Bach cannot help but put them in the shade, his music once again proving so satisfying, engrossing, and yes, inspiring. All contributed equally, listening as keenly as they communicated. A rich harpsichord lead-in from Raphael Alpermann to ‘those’ two chords navigated passage to the finale. This I found a little too hard-driven, however impressive the playing, but it met with an enthusiastic reception. As a surprise ‘encore’, we were given the Sinfonia to ‘Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis’, BWV 21. One of Bach’s most extraordinary most memorable, and indeed most extraordinarily memorable cantata movements, it showed Mayer and Goltz in truly harmonious dialogue, violone pizzicato, bowed cellos, and the rest adding not only harmony and texture, but a glimpse of an entire theology. It flowed like tears, fermatas intelligible and meaningful to all, the drama leaping out as if from the aural equivalent of a stained-glass window. 

Johann Christoph Bach’s grave Lamento, arranged by Matthias Spindler, for English horn rather than contralto solo, against strings and continuo, was very much what it ‘said on the tin’, even before Mayer’s entry. Again, the keenness of unfolding dialogue between Mayer and Goltz (later, others too) was touching. Venetian antecedents were apparent, yet so was a more ‘German’ sense of melodic development. I could not help but think the loss of words here withheld from us a key to understanding; without that, the piece felt a little long, though it remained a rare and welcome opportunity to hear it. 

Emanuel Bach’s E-flat String Symphony came next, continuing and developing earlier tendencies of characterful performances which trusted the score without need for weird, ‘early musicke’ fetishisation, whether of instrument, articulation, ‘rhetoric’, or anything else. Alert, clear, directed, the first movement’s nerviness, present without exaggeration, was carried through into the ‘Andante’ minuet: a splendid surprise, all the more so for eschewing current fashions to take such music far too fast. Here, there was plenty of space for neurotic detail, and it was all the better to swing too. The players may have been relatively few in number, but they knew how to fill a hall with music (as much a matter of conception as of tone or mere volume). Catchy and disorienting, the finale proved just the thing both in its concentration and in the fascination of its plot-twists. 

And so, once more to Sebastian Bach, for the final piece, the (reasonably) well-known ‘return’ of the A major Harpsichord Concerto BWV 1055 to a putative oboe d’amore original. Whether an ‘authentic’ version or not – who cares? – the sheer ‘rightness’ of the music ‘itself’ brooked no dissent. Once again, the satisfaction of its construction, vertical and horizontal in perfect, productive balance in a way never surpassed and rarely matched, left one in no doubt as to the identity of the greatest Bach. That was partly, of course, a matter of the performance too: enlightened, surely, from whatever ideological standpoint (or none). Solo phrasing was so excellent one did not notice it. Tempi were just right, as was the sensitivity of dynamic shading, perhaps especially revealing in the ‘Larghetto’. An ebullient, even declamatory finale, as catchy as any Brandenburg Concerto, was taken quickly, without ever feeling rushed. As an encore, we heard Mayer and the ensemble in ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from Handel’s Rinaldo: a nice touch, not only permitting Kristin von der Goltz a wonderful cello solo leading us back from the ‘B’ section, but also lightly reminding us that Bach’s path to greatness is not the only one, tempting though it may be to think so when under his spell. Handel may look ‘less’ than Bach, but he can hold his own, and did here.

’20 Sonatas’ – Stefanovich: Bach, Soler, Scarlatti, CPE Bach, Ives, Bartók, Eisler, Hindemith, Scriabin, Roslavets, Janáček, and Ustvolskaya, 27 February 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Bach: Sonata in A minor, BWV 965, after Reincken
Soler: Sonata in C minor, R.100
Busoni: Sonatina seconda
Scarlatti: Sonata in C minor, Kk.158; Sonata in G major, Kk.13
CPE Bach: Sonata in G minor, Wq.65/17
Ives: Three-Page Sonata

Scarlatti: Sonata in C major, Kk.406
Bartók: Sonata, Sz.80
Scarlatti: Sonata in G minor, Kk.450
Eisler: Sonata no.1, op.1
Soler: Sonata in D-flat major, R.110
Hindemith: Sonata no.3 in B-flat major

Soler: Sonata in G minor
Scriabin: Sonata no.9 in F major, op.68, ‘Black Mass’
Scarlatti: Sonata in G minor, Kk.8
Roslavets: Sonata no.2
Scarlatti: Sonata in B minor, Kk.87
Janáček: Sonata in E-flat minor, 1.X.1905, ‘From the Street’
Ustvolskaya: Sonata no.6

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Twenty piano sonatas over three fifty-minute-long recitals; avoiding the ‘core’ Classical and Romantic (broadly speaking) repertoire, from Haydn to Liszt; asking why composers might time and time again have returned to this genre, if indeed it can be considered the same genre at all. What would you choose? Why? There are no answers, of course, or rather no definitive answers, only an almost infinite host of opportunities. Such is the embarrassment of riches, usually a blessing but just occasionally a curse, of the piano/keyboard repertoire more generally. Tamara Stefanovich’s selection proved typically imaginative, committed, and both spiritually and intellectually nourishing, as well as an outstanding feat of musicianship and pianism.

The first selection began with Bach. (Does not everything?) Here we heard him in the sonata ‘after’ Johann Adam Reincken’s Hortus Musicus trio sonatas: some distance, perhaps, from what we generally think a sonata to be, but perhaps that was part of the point. No one would deny the glories of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, et al., but they can sometimes obscure other paths, especially earlier ones. Stefanovich left us in no doubt that this was a performance for the piano. (If you want to give a harpsichord performance, surely you should do that on the harpsichord.) Voicing gave the sense of a small orchestra at her disposal, a flute answering an oboe, a cello a viola. ‘Ornamentation’ was shown to be melody. There was declamatory joy, a strong sense of harmonic motion, and throughout a vivid, directed performance, culminating in a splendidly ‘present’ Gigue. Antonio Soler offered a very different voice, with both greater pathos and lightness. Stefanovich’s performance drew one in to listen. Busoni’s Sonatina seconda grew out of its close. Restless, diabolical, or better Faustian, it took us to the edge of atonality in a performance of virtuosity entirely at the service of the music, recalling what we know of Busoni's own pianism. Long-range coherence and incident of the moment were two sides of the same coin. 

Domenico Scarlatti made the first of several appearances, with a finely contrasted pair of sonatas (as we often hear his music). The first notes of the C minor Sonata, Kk.158, sounded truly disorienting, emerging as they did from Busoni. Where were we? In a liminal zone, so it seemed, in which eighteenth-century tonality reassembled itself. Both performances seemed thought out from first principles, from individual materials. What joy there was to be had in hearing the second’s repeated notes (more difficult on the piano than they sound). A sonata by CPE Bach, in G minor, followed. Its opening benefited from the grandest, most magnificent opening to a work of his I can recall, rhetoric harnessed as if to the rise of a velvet curtain. The first movement’s fantasia-like swings of mood and material were disciplined, just about, into a whole, yet never too much. This justly lived on the edge. The central Adagio sarabande, still duly involved, nonetheless offered some sense of relief, its arioso quality finely captured. The sheer strangeness (Sturm und Drang, one might call it, I suppose) of the third movement was again relished, never tamed. From one avant-gardist to another, we moved to Charles Ives’s Three-Page Sonata. Strikingly Schoenbergian language—close, not identical, and only for a moment or two—unleashed a parade of restless, radical, and wry freedom, whose chimes were almost the least surprising feature. The vehemence of disciplined chaos to its close made it almost impossible, had I not seen it for myself, to credit that there were only two hands at work here. 

The second recital was announced by Scarlatti: full of incident and pictorial character and contrast. ‘Percussive’ is a word we often hear used to describe Bartók’s piano-writing. One can understand why, but in reality it begs still more questions. (No bad thing.) For here, in his strangely neglected Piano Sonata, there were such profusion of melody, such variegation in the entirely unfussy weighting of each chord, propelled by rhythm and harmony alike, it seemed more than usually inadequate. A relentless first movement paved the way for a second of equal (at least) emotional intensity. The finale was every inch a finale in its substantive release. Rightly, for the first and only time within a recital, the pianist paused for applause. Returning to Scarlatti, it was fascinating to hear his repetitions and other, lighter obstinacies through the shadow cast by Bartók. 

Hanns Eisler’s opus one brought us fascinatingly close in its first movement to the language of the serial Schoenberg, yet held its distance too: more skittish, Scarlatti an excellent preface. Structure on paper became living form in liquid performance. Prokofiev seemed close at times too, perhaps particularly in the second of the three movements, its line unerringly traced and projected. The care and abandon with which not un-Schoenbergian idiosyncrasies were integrated in the finale typified the performance as a whole. Following an unexpectedly fragrant ornamental flowering from Soler, its harmonies taking a while to get used to after Eisler, we moved to Hindemith’s Third Piano Sonata. In its first movement, siciliano rhythms immediately standing out, they sounded as if formed by their surrounding harmonies. A scampering scherzo and two deliberate yet purposeful movements to follow led us to a sense of hard-won victory. 

Soler opened the third and final instalment: courtly yet capricious, ornamentation speaking of a freedom of which we stand in greater need than ever. Scriabin’s ‘Black Mass’ Sonata suggested dissolution as another, more dangerous form of emancipation, even through the burning fire of Bakunin-like anarchism (very different from Ives’s). There was wayward alchemy, though, and direction to be appreciated looking backwards from where we had come, even if we were uncertain at the time where we were heading. Command of detail was crucial to that greater sweep, just as it was in the dignified pathos of the Scarlatti sonata that followed. The post-Romantic constructivism of Ukrainian Nikolai Roslavets took a different path from Eisler (or Schoenberg) yet could nonetheless be felt as something of an antidote to Scriabin. There were moments of languor, yes, but motivic construction and transformation won out. Once more, the strangeness in context of Scarlatti’s harmonies was to be relished as a pendant.

Janáček’s Sonata, 1.X.1905 could hardly fail to have particular resonance given the state of the world around us. It went beyond that, though, in a moving performance of proud dignity and deeply communicative humanism, fusing the subtle and the direct. Its second movement was more songful, yet no less impassioned, through rather than despite its fragile nerve endings. For the final work of the day, Stefanovich donned black gloves to tackle the immediate yet reflective violence of Galina Ustvolskaya’s 1988 Sonata no.6. More unremitting than Bartók, blacker than anything we had yet heard or wished to hear, it duly bludgeoned, yet spoke of and with an integrity that refused to offer easy answers. Was there, perhaps, a glimmer of hope in there somewhere? It was probably something more equivocal than that. And then it was gone.

Esfahani - ‘Bach: Before and After’, 21 October 2021

Wigmore Hall

Pachelbel: Fantasia ex dis
Georg Böhm: Partita on ‘Wer nun den lieben Gott lässt walten’
Pachelbel: Chaconne in D major
Samuel Scheidt: Allemande: ‘Also gehts also stehts’, SSWV 137
Sweelinck: Fantasia cromatica; Six Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein End’
Johann Kuhnau: Frische Clavier-Früchte: Sonata no.6 in B-flat major
C.P.E. Bach: Sonata in G minor, Wq.65/17
Johann Wilhelm Hässler: Grande Gigue in D minor, op.31
W.F. Bach: Sonata in D major, F 3

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

I have been to recitals by Mahan Esfahani when I have known, or rather been acquainted with, all the music; only, I think, though, when the programme has been devoted to Bach (and not even always then). More often than not, there has been a good part of the programme that was entirely new to me. In this case, all but three pieces were. What a varied conspectus of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century keyboard music this was, both as works and in their performance.

Pachelbel’s Fantasia ex dis offered a bejewelled portal. Clear where it was heading but always with time to admire the view, to make a telling agogic point, Esfahani’s performance offered the ideal introduction. A similar balance was struck in Georg Bohm’s Partita on ‘Wer nun den lieben Gott lässt walten’. Sparing, typically intelligent use of two manuals, in tandem with imaginative, meaningful changes of registration furthered character and progression. Rhetoric was stronger, more fantastical in one variation, in which registration altered after (almost) every phrase. Pachelbel’s D major Chaconne is more virtuosic, perhaps a little lighter in style. (Bach’s example can mislead.) Esfahani relished its potentialities, the piece’s seeds growing into a fine tree indeed. 

For the next set, we moved to Samuel Scheidt’s Allemande, ‘Also gehts also stehts’. Hearing such variation in variation writing, as it were, proved both illuminating and frankly enjoyable, Esfahani teasing out and communicating the music’s secrets. Sweelinck’s Fantasia cromatica, chronological distance notwithstanding, seemed to me to come closest of all the works to that of Bach—though I suspect that says at least as much about my own conception of Bach as the composer’s own self-understanding and practice. At any rate, its darkly chromatic world, unmistakeably of the North, and dazzling instrumental drama in an almost Brahmsian sense (again betraying my own prejudices!) proved richly satisfying. The same composer’s Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein End’ offered yet another varied variational journey, Esfahani ever the enlightened guide. The nice sense of return at the close here was echoed in the last of the five movements of Johann Kuhnau’s B-flat Sonata. Bach’s predecessor as Thomaskantor offered music that was catchy, exuberant, and much more besides. Architecture was keenly communicated, as was detail, the two clearly linked and mutually reinforcing. 

The second half of the programme took us beyond Bach, or rather beyond Johann Sebastian. Two of his sons and one of his grand-pupils were heard, each with pleasure (certainly by me). Carl Philip Emanuel Bach’s 1746 G minor Sonata opened in declamatory fashion, with a heightened sense of musical theatrics and well-nigh kinetic energy. Wild yet ultimately coherent and disciplined, this first movement only underlined the composer’s reputation for avant-gardism. A true Adagio, albeit with typically clever complications, led to a finale that both mediated and concluded. Many, I know, are sceptical about CPE Bach’s modernity, but it remains real and admirable to me. Johann Wilhelm Hässler’s piece offered enjoyable light relief as well as opportunity for virtuosic display. Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s 1745 D major Sonata was for me a fascinating discovery. A first movement imbued, not unlike the music of his brother, with nervous energy prepared the way for an Adagio just as restless in its way, prior to a lovely, galant ‘au revoir’ in its finale, Esfahani a compelling advocate throughout. For an encore, we headed south, to Domenico Scarlatti’s B minor Sonata, K.87, in an Apollonian reading that acknowledged yet never exaggerated discord beneath the surface.

BPO/Nézet-Séguin - CPE Bach and Brahms, 19 October 2017

Philharmonie

CPE Bach: Heilig, Wq 217

Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem, op.45

Hanna-Elisabeth Müller (soprano)

Wiebke Lehmkuhl (contralto)

Markus Werba (baritone)

Berlin Radio Choir (chorus master: Gijs Leenaars)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor)

A slightly – well, perhaps more than slightly – baffling programme this. One might have presumed that the short CPE Bach cantata (eight minutes according to the programme, but I did not check my watch), Heilig, were present as a curtain-raiser for Brahms’s German Requiem. Brahms, after all, thought highly of Emanuel Bach, editing some of his music. And perhaps it would also have offered another opportunity for one of the vocal soloists. But no, the vocal types are different, so we had Wiebke Lehmkuhl sing a short solo and disappear for the rest of the evening. Perhaps even odder, the two works required different platform arrangements, so we had an interval in between them. Might it not have made more sense to have heard a selection of earlier music – Schütz, perhaps, even JS Bach or Handel? – with a more overt connection to the specific Brahms we were about to hear?

 

Anyway, we did not. It was a welcome opportunity to hear this 1776 cantata, for solo contralto, double chorus, and double orchestra, its text drawn from Herder, Isaiah, and the Te Deum. I cannot say that I found anything, save for its forces, especially individual in the writing: far more conventional than, say, many of CPE Bach’s orchestral or piano works. It would be difficult to begrudge it its Berlin Philharmonic premiere, though, and I have no wish to do so. Orchestra and choir (Berlin Radio Choir) alike offered a glorious sound throughout, antiphonal (Handelian) contrasts registering – although perhaps not quite so strongly as they might have done. Lehmkuhl’s performance sounded beautifully sincere, verbally and musically. It is always enjoyable to hear a little trumpet-led rejoicing too, and so we did. Yannick Nézet-Séguin ensured, greatly to his credit, that there was nothing unduly hurried to the performance, encouraging and retaining a note of necessary grandeur. It was nevertheless soon over, though, and I at least was left wondering ‘why?’

 

There was certainly nothing ‘off-the-shelf’ to Nézet-Séguin’s German Requiem either, conducted from memory. If I cannot say that his conception of the work was particularly close to mine, that is no reason to disqualify it; indeed, it was every reason to try to engage with it on its own terms. As sound, it was difficult to fault the performances of choir and orchestral alike, and again I have no wish to do so. What a joy – although is joy really what we should feel here? – it was, for instance, to hear those lower strings at the opening of ‘Selig sind, die da Leid tragen’. The blend of orchestral sound, moreover, was irreproachable, whilst offering plenty of opportunity to hear individual instruments and sections: the three harps, in particular, stood out beautifully, even celestially. And there was real warmth, even consolation, to that opening chorus, although I have heard Brahms sound darker, much darker. I was not at all sure, however, why we heard quite so robust an emphasis on ‘Freuden’; it came out of nowhere and merely sounded mannered. The great second number, ‘Denn alles Fleisch’ was a little darker, as surely it must be, but with a strange touch of ‘glamour’ to it. It was certainly worlds away from Klemperer or Furtwängler. What the performance did have, in spades, was clarity. Nézet-Séguin shaped the movement well, preparing transitions, rendering them convincing, the winding down at the close was handled especially well. What I missed, I think, was a greater sense of ‘meaning’: not just theological or even verbal.

 

Markus Werba proved a relatively light-toned soloist, which seemed to fit with the general approach. In ‘Herr, lehre doch mich,’ however, I could not help but think that the orchestral sound was a bit too close to Strauss; there is no single way that Brahms sound, of course, but I am not sure, by the same token, that just anything goes either. It would be churlish, nevertheless, to deny the sonic pleasure of the build-up above the movement’s pedal-point. Following a duly lieblich ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen,’ Hanna-Elisabeth Müller got off to a shaky start in ‘Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit’. Brahms’s solo writing here is exposed, even treacherous, and so it sounded. She settled down before too long, though.

 

Nézet-Séguin took the opening of the following number, ‘Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt,’ very deliberately: not just pace, but choral enunciation too. It certainly focused attention on the words, whatever else I thought of it. However, the blazing, almost ‘operatic’ approach – more Strauss again, even Wagner, than Brahms, I thought – to the Last Trump seemed somewhat out of place. A cappella writing in the final ‘Selig sind die Toten’ reminded us that the choir was in itself just as impressive as the orchestra. It flowed nicely, and sounded consoling. Concerning what, however, did we need to be consoled?

LSO Chamber Orchestra/Antonini - JS Bach, WF Bach, CPE Bach, Telemann, Haydn, 13 January 2017

Milton Court Concert Hall

JS Bach – Orchestral Suite no.1 in C major, BWV 1066

WF Bach – Symphony in F major, F 67
CPE Bach – Symphony in G major, Wq 182/1
Telemann – Recorder Concerto in C major, TWV 51
Haydn – Symphony no.49, La Passione

LSO Chamber Orchestra

Giovanni Antonini (recorder, conductor)

It is a rare delight to hear the LSO, even if in ‘chamber orchestral’ formation, play music from the first half of the eighteenth century. Since the death of Colin Davis, it has even been something of a rare delight to hear the orchestra in eighteenth-century music at all. (I suppose we should at least be grateful to have been spared ‘Gergiev’s Haydn’.) Moving across the road from the Barbican to Milton Court was, in such circumstances, a sensible move; it certainly ensured that a small orchestra did not sound too small. The one problem, and I am afraid it was at times well-nigh insurmountable, was the conductor, Giovanni Antonini. Frankly, the LSO – and we – deserved better.

I kept an open mind for as long as I could. If, for these ears, trained on Klemperer and Richter, the introduction to the first movement of Bach’s C major Orchestral Suite sounded light, airy, and, alas, all too short-breathed, perhaps there would be a way of challenging those ears to listen differently, to take the performance on its own terms. The problem, despite the break-neck speed that ensued, was less of tempo as such, then of the lack of space for the music to breathe. Gorgeous, bubbly, woodwind playing offered some compensation, though. A courtly, undeniably Gallic Courante fared better, as did a surprisingly vigorous first Gavotte, its companion quite the textural contrast. Counterpoint was admirably clear. Alas, Antonini conducted with all the musical awareness of a sewing machine. The Forlane impressed with its vigour too, although greater warmth from the strings – low, but thankfully not no, vibrato – would have been welcome. The Minuets had a reasonable sense of character; the Bourrées were excitable, closer to Vivaldi (!) than to Bach; the Passepieds were suavely enough despatched. I listened in vain, however, for Antonini to show the slightest awareness of harmonic rhythm; and without that, Bach is lost.

 

The F major Symphony by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach is more of a rarity, and thus scored points on that alone. Its first and third movements were performed with a sense of the strangeness of their disjuctures, yet Antonini seemed incapable, or at least unwilling, to mould a series of rhetorical gestures into something greater than the sum of their parts. Nervously dramatic playing again offered some compensation. The intervening Andante really needed more space, less metronomic regularity, although the LSO strings sounded impressively dark. An air of galanterie was welcome in the closing pair of Menuets, but Antonini needed to dig more into the music, the prevailing impression being one of curious neutrality – as if the players were being prevented from playing.

 

CPE Bach’s G major Symphony, Wq 182/1 concluded the first half. The opening Allegro di molto offered greater continuity: that is partly the work itself, but was not, I think, just the work. The seeds of something Mozartian were to be heard, if one so wished – a turn of phrase, a harmonic progression – without compromise to this most individual of musical voices. The slow movement emerged stylistically similar – too much so? – with Antonini again far too static in his conception. A finale somewhere in between again had me wishing that he might take more account – some account – of harmony and its role in propelling the action. This is, after all, the composer who declared that his ‘and my deceased father’s basic principles are contrary to Rameau’s’; we need to think about what that might mean.

 

The C major Recorder Concerto by Telemann, TWV 51, is no masterpiece. It, however, received perhaps the most compelling performance of the evening, at least until the interminable finale. One was better advised to close one’s eyes, though, unless one wished to follow the lead of many audience members, attempting, some with greater success than others, to stifle the giggles. Even before Antonini began to play, we were treated to bizarre dance movements; once connected with his instrument, the impression was of a cross between a snake charmer and something more pornographic. It was, I suppose, a spectacle of sorts. Poor Telemann seems increasingly to attract the bizarre: a couple of years or so ago, it was Simone Kermes in a state of perplexing ecstasy. There was alert, characterful playing, especially from the orchestra, which seemed to benefit from not being conducted. In the slow movement, having given a passable impression of a baby eagle not quite managing to take flight, Antonini concentrated on his playing, the LSO’s performance sounded all the more cultivated as a result. At one point, however, I felt it necessary to stare at an emergency exit sign. Solo playing became more wayward in the Andante, Antonini seemingly not listening to the orchestra, concentrating instead on his own peculiar self-choreography. The Lang Lang of the recorder? Perhaps, but with lesser technical ability. There was undeniable virtuosity, though, to the finale. It went on and on and on, though. Until then, I should have been happy to testify to a Telemann performance that had at least not bored me.

 

Seemingly emboldened by that display – and cheers from a small yet vocal group of partisans – Antonini continued to inflict ‘flamboyant’ gestures on the music, in this case that of Haydn. Quite unconnected with what we heard, they might have offered amusement, but there is more than enough interest in Haydn’s music for such an ‘approach’ to be quite unnecessary. The LSO’s playing had a grave, sonorous beauty; if only Antonini had had some conception of how to phrase. In the first movement, and indeed beyond, bar followed bar, at best phrase following phrase, with no sense of a greater whole. Alert, febrile playing characterised the second movement; if only Antonini had permitted the form to fulfil its dramatic potential. The Menuet and Trio were definitely better heard than watched; if only Antonini had not stunted the dances’ lilt with such metronomic regularity. Likewise in the finale, the energy of the playing notwithstanding. I should love to hear the LSO play this symphony with another conductor, or indeed with none at all.

Aurora/Butt - JC Bach, Mozart, CPE Bach, and JS Bach, 16 January 2016

Hall One, Kings Place

JC Bach – Symphony no.6 in G minor, op.6 no.6

Mozart – Piano Concerto no.1 in F major, KV 37
CPE Bach – Symphony in D major, Wq 183/1 (H663)
JS Bach – Brandenburg Concerto no.1 in F major, BWV 1046
Mozart – Adagio and Fugue in C minor, KV 546
JS Bach – Brandenburg Concerto no.3 in G major, BWV 1048

Aurora Orchestra

John Butt (harpsichord/director)

 

With this very fine concert, the Aurora Orchestra launched a five-year series, in which all of Mozart’s piano concertos will be performed. I recall Pierre Boulez – a Mozartian to be reckoned with, Don Giovanni being one of the three operas he said he wished he had conducted, yet had not – suggesting the concertos as a linking theme for an orchestra within a season, and he had long previously begun a recorded version of that with his Domaine musical orchestra and Yvonne Loriod, never, alas, proceeding further than the fourth. (Do seek out the recording of the first four!) It is, one would have thought, quite an obvious idea, and yet has rarely been pursued. Increasingly, audiences – or at least the most reactionary elements within them, which, for some reason, more often than not prove triumphant – seem to prefer second- or third-rate scores which simply use large orchestras and sound rather like film music; perhaps they always did. This, then, is an undertaking to be applauded in principle; on the basis of this first instalment, it is certainly to be applauded in practice too. The orchestra thinks this might be the first time a single orchestra has done such a thing in a single venue; I know of no predecessor and should be interested to hear if there has been one.

 

For this concert, John Butt joined the orchestra as harpsichord soloist and director. I hope it will not be the last such occasion, for the results made for a delightful and genuinely thought-provoking concert. The title he came up with was ‘Bach is the father, we are the children!’ It is, of course, a celebrated saying of Mozart’s, only referring to Emanuel rather than Sebastian. And so, the first piano concerto was framed by works from JC Bach, arguably the greatest compositional influence upon the boy – and not only the boy – Mozart, and his elder brother, Emanuel. That tragic, ultra-Bachian utterance, the C minor Adagio and Fugue, formed the centrepiece of the second half, framed by two of the Brandenburg Concertos: not, then, imputing direct influence, although there was certainly plenty of that during the 1780s from other works by JS Bach, but rather setting up a pleasing dialectical twist in which Mozart at some what take to be his most severe – I can hear why, but I am not entirely in agreement – with Bach at his sunniest, contrapuntal learning fundamental to both, yet undeniably more overt in Mozart’s case.

 

Johann Christian Bach, the ‘London Bach’, is buried just a few minutes’ walk away from Kings Place, in the churchyard of St Pancras, in a genuine pauper’s grave. Here he sprang instantly back to life, enriched by an excellent performance. The G minor Symphony, op.6 no.6 (not just op.6, as the programme had it), opened in alert, vigorous fashion, its first movement vividly alert to the composer’s rhetorical flourishes, without those substituting for phrasing, let alone a longer line. (That happens far too often in ‘period’ performances of eighteenth-century music: think of the often preposterous distortions of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, et al.) Sometimes, unreconstructed modernist that I am, I might have preferred more vibrato from the strings, but that was only a matter of degree, and is merely a personal observation. Confounding of preconceived ideas was a welcome aspect, for JC Bach is often thought of as amiable, ‘pre-Classical’, and so on; a work in which all three movements are in the minor mode, and a performance pursued with such vigour did the trick nicely. One heard, moreover, the importance of woodwind even in a string-based work: clearly prophetic for Mozart. The slow movement was also rhetorical in the best sense, poised between recitative and aria. This is highly inventive music, and so it sounded. The finale sounded, again, quite different in character, perhaps a little more ‘Baroque’ at its opening, yet flowering into something arguably more ‘Classical’ thereafter, with many points of contact with Mozart as symphonist in the 1770s. An astonishingly alert performance from the Aurora Orchestra, directed by Butt with great wisdom, lightly worn, concluded with a perfectly-judged throwaway ending.

 

The First Piano Concerto – perhaps we should refer to it here as a Keyboard Concerto, but who cares? – was performed on a French harpsichord rather than a German instrument; Butt assured us that the sound was very close in any case. It was for me a splendid opportunity to hear for the first time ‘in the flesh’ a work I have known for many years, since first, as an undergraduate, acquiring Daniel Barenboim’s recording of the complete concertos with the English Chamber Orchestra. (It is still, to my mind, the greatest ‘set’; although in a number of works, certainly not all of them, I might favour Barenboim’s later Berlin readings, he never re-recorded the very earliest works.) The orchestral sound was very different (leaving aside, of course, the solo instrument and its use as a continuo instrument). The Aurora players, unsurprisingly, sounded a little ‘earlier’, although in no way aggressively so, less sustained, perhaps less poignant, but full of rhetorical life. Interestingly, the harpsichord sometimes sounded more prominent as soloist than Barenboim’s piano, the orchestra tending, at least some of the time, to play itself down during solo passages. Again, the woodwind, connecting with the ‘London’ Bach performance, seemed prophetic of the later Mozart. Whilst the outer movements are Mozart’s reworkings of popular sonata movements by other composers – HF Raupach and Leontzi Honauer – it is now thought by some scholars that the slow movement is entirely Mozart’s own. (I might add: presumably with the help of a correction or two by Leopold.) Perhaps what most interested me upon hearing it again, after quite a few years, was that much of it, perhaps excepting the shift to the minor mode, sounded no more ‘characteristic’ – nor, for that matter, no less ‘characteristic’ – than its bedfellows; not that it was not delightful, of course. It was taken quite swiftly, largely to good effect: arguably still more so when one imagined the eleven-year-old himself performing it at the keyboard. The finale’s wonderful catchiness was captured to great effect. Above all, the joy of these fine musicians shone through. Butt’s own cadenza was harmonically quite adventurous, as if to signal the beginning of a tonal journey Mozart would pursue throughout this series of works.

 

CPE Bach’s D major Symphony, Wq 183/1, announced its show-stopping originality at the very outset.  The arresting, even bizarre, nature of the opening to the first movement – not just the tension of those repeated notes, but the undeniably peculiar tessitura – was swiftly contrasted, one might almost say neurotically, with woodwind balm, and so it would continue: not just throughout the movement, but throughout the symphony as a whole. The shifts of mood were brilliantly conceived and, so it seemed, relished. And somehow – something often missing in performances of these works – there seemed a degree of logic to the strange course followed. The increasing importance of the woodwind, superbly played, seemed again to point to Mozart, whilst also marking out Emanuel Bach as having a closer kinship to ‘French’ orchestral writing than many might suspect. Melodic grace in the slow movement was underpinned, paradoxically and uncomfortably, by unease beneath. If that sounds a little weird, the weirdness is intentional. A vivacious account of the finale, albeit with strange, compelling interruptions rounded off a fine performance.

 

The First Brandenburg Concerto received a well-nigh ideal performance, small forces suited to the small hall. (Not that I shall ever forsake Klemperer – nor, for that matter, the Busch Chamber Players.) The tempo of the first movement, and pretty much everything about it, simply sounded ‘right’. Balances and phrasing were such as to allow Bach’s miraculous balance of counterpoint and harmony to do its work, belying the complexity at work in the background. The Aurora players’ cultivation was seemingly matched by their joy in Bach’s invention. What beguiling oboe playing opened the second movement, answered in turn by violin, bassoon, and so on! Again, there was an ineffable ‘rightness’ to what we heard. The following Allegro went with an insouciant swing, although what learning lies behind it! It may be clichéd to say so, but ‘courtly’ was the first word that sprang to mind during the Menuet. And yes, swing persisted, a ‘courtly swing’. The first Trio was equally delightful, pure chamber music. Understated elegance characterised much of the Polacca, whilst the second Trio proved straightforwardly life-affirming. This was a performance that reminded me of why I first fell in love with these works, in the recordings by the ECO and Philip Ledger.

 

It was in Mozart’s C minor Adagio and Fugue – a favourite, far from incidentally, of Boulez – that I felt myself a little out of sympathy with the performing decisions: not that they were unjustifiable, and indeed in terms of that dialectical twist I mentioned earlier, they had their own justification. It was only here really that I felt the lack of a longer, more vocal line, ‘rhetoric’ perhaps coming too much to the foreground. Balanced against that, the constructivism of Mozart’s writing was laudably clear. It was very well played; I simply favour a more Schoenbergian reading of this complex, fascinating work.

 

The Third Brandenburg Concerto completed the programme. Its first movement was taken at a fast tempo, but there was still plenty of space for the music to breathe, to live. Again, sheer joy and musical delight pervaded the performance. In lieu of a small movement, Butt and Thomas Gould (the orchestra’s leader) performed with elegance a movement from the G major Violin Sonata, BWV 1019, ending on the right cadence. There was splendid swagger to the finale, offering what seemed to be certainty in accomplishment – perhaps, and if so, quite rightly, in performance as well as in the work itself.

This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 7.30 p.m., and available on iPlayer for thirty days thereafter.

Proms Saturday Matinee no.2 – Hardenberger/Lapland CO/Storgårds: C.P.E. Bach, Birtwistle, Honegger, Davies, and Sibelius, 9 August 2014

Cadogan Hall

C.P.E. Bach – Symphony in B minor, Wq 182 no.5

Birtwistle – Endless Parade

Honegger – Pastorale d’été

Davies – Sinfonia

Sibelius - Rakastava

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)

Lapland Chamber Orchestra

John Storgårds (conductor)

 

A principal theme of this year’s Proms has been the greater-than-ever variety of ensembles from across the world, many of them making their debuts here, whether at Cadogan Hall or a short walk away at the Royal Albert Hall. This Saturday Matinee offered the Proms debut of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, the most northerly orchestra in the European Union, conducted by its Artistic Director, John Storgårds, with trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger joining for Birtwistle’s Endless Parade.

 

To hear an orchestral work – or indeed any work – by C.P.E. Bach is a rare treat. Unfortunately, the performance of his ‘Hamburg’ Symphony in B minor, Wq 182 no.5 (a Proms first), was not the most ingratiating; indeed, the first movement proved downright abrasive, and not only on account of some dodgy intonation. The strangeness of Emanuel Bach’s orchestral tessitura registered, as did the disjunctures – a canny programming presentiment of Birtwistle? – but there is more to the composer than that. A slightly fuller tone was permitted to the small orchestra (4.4.3.2.1, expanded for the following works) in the slow movement, and the finale was frenetic in a good sense. Still, it is sad to reflect that, on the few occasions when modern orchestras feel able to perform this music, they nevertheless so often feel constrained to ape ‘period’ mannerisms. If you have modern strings, make use of them!

 

Birtwistle’s Endless Parade offered what the composer, in a brief conversation with Clemency Burton-Hill, called a ‘piece of permanent discontinuity’, after Cubism, and more particularly after Picasso. The orchestra now sounded more at home, doubtless helped by the virtuosity and musical understanding of Hardenberger. Indeed, it would be little exaggeration to speak of ‘supreme command’ in his case. The piece was played as chamber music writ large, material tossed between soloist and various orchestral instruments. In its syncopation, it even approached ‘swing’, though jazz enthusiasts would probably beg to differ. It is, of course, a typically perspectival work, but I was struck – as was my companion, new to Birtwistle’s music – at the continuity that yet dialectically emerged from discontinuity. As Birtwistle commented, Beethoven is a true master in such matters, working, however, with the disadvantage (!) of tonality. Birtwistle’s language, technique, and for much of his career, eschewal of goal-orientation might seem to make him and Beethoven odd bed-fellows, but the comparison is well worth reflecting upon. As ever, of course, there was a keen sense not only of drama and landscape, but of drama through landscape, and of landscape through drama.

 

Another great English musical knight, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, was represented by his early (1962) Sinfonia, one of the works he wrote after – in one sense or another – Monteverdi’s Vespers, which, in a performance under Walter Goehr, had so inspired him and many others. (What a pity no recording seems to exist of any of Goehr’s performances! If anyone knows differently, I should be delighted to hear.) Davies admitted that he had not heard the piece since having conducted it during the 1980s with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and that he would take a red pencil to it now. I was interested to hear it, but should not necessarily rush to do so again. The opening clarinet solo was properly ‘recitando’, the first movement being marked ‘Lento recitando’, and that movement as a whole was full of expectant energy. None of the piece, though, seemed especially characteristic. The slow onward tread of the last of the four short movements came across very well in performance.

 

I could not bring myself to become excited about the other two pieces on the programme. Honegger’s Pastorale d’été ideally needs a greater cushion of strings than was available here. However, the essence of the music was well conveyed, greatly helped by steadiness in the rocking movement upon which it rests. Woodwind playing especially impressed – as indeed it had in Birtwistle. Sibelius’s Rakastava, the third of the pieces receiving its first Proms performance (Sinfonia having been the second) received an idiomatic, committed performance, if with smaller forces than it would doubtless often receive. (In this hall, it did not seem to matter.) Despite the characterful muted playing in the second movement, and especially fine solo cello playing throughout from Lauri Angervo, it remained for me a largely bland work. The encore, a Romance by Nils-Eric Fougstedt, was pleasant enough in a generic film-music sort of way.

Esfahani - Couperin, J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, G.A. Benda, Takemitsu, 15 July 2014

 

Wigmore Hall

Couperin – Quatrième livre de pièces de clavecin: 26^th ordre

Bach – The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I: Preludes and Fugues in D minor, BWV 851; C-sharp minor, BWV 849; B major, BWV 868

Toccata in F-sharp minor, BWV 910

C.P.E. Bach – Sonata in B-flat major, Wq. 48 no.2

Georg Anton Benda – Sonata no.4 in F major

Takemitsu – Rain Dreaming

C.P.E. Bach – Sonata in F-sharp minor, Wq. 52 no.4

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

 

This was a splendid recital, my only (minor) reservations reserved for a couple of the pieces, certainly not for Mahan Esfahani’s performances of them. No such reservations were felt, naturally, for a first half of works by Couperin, J.S. and C.P.E. Bach. The 26^th ordre from Couperin’s Fourth Book was no warm-up, Esfahani showing himself immediately at ease, with a lilting rubato that emerged from within the music – and, to a certain extent, the instrument too – rather than being applied to it. This first piece, ‘La Convalescente’, and the subsequent movements were all well characterised, without the slightest danger of falling into the all-too-precious caricatures which bedevil so much present-day Baroque performance. The expressivity of spread chords was a case in point; so was the sense of dramatic, even declamatory, unfolding, reminding us that we were not necessarily worlds away from the Classical drama of Corneille and Racine. The Gavotte and ‘La Sophie’ were guided by a propulsive, yet never restrictive, sense of rhythm; whatever the tempo, there was space to breath. ‘L’Epineuse’ seemed to afford a glimpse of the vocal Couperin, perhaps even of what an opera from his pen might have been, not that that precluded harmonic, developmental ‘involvement’ which was very much of the keyboard world. The final piece, ‘La Pantomime’, benefited from a harmonic grounding that took one back to a time when musicians just happened to be harpsichordists, rather than having invented an aggressive, ‘Early Music’, alleged revanchism; more than once, I thought of George Malcolm.

 

Three Preludes and Fugues from Book One of the 48 followed. The D minor Prelude was very much a ‘prelude’ to what was to come, a fugue that danced without didacticism. A deeper, darker hue characterised the C-sharp minor Prelude, though it was yet recognisably of the same ilk. The stile antico opening to its fugue looked bark to a golden age of polyphony, not in a dreary quasi-archaeological sense, but as sustenance and, crucially, as inspiration. It was expressive and developmental, in keeping with, but not restricted by, the ‘Baroque’ period to which Bach stands in a far more complicated relationship than many care to realise. This was the Bach who inspired Mozart. A bright contrast of tonality and general mood came with the B major Prelude and Fugue, played with good humour, even a sense of fun. The F-sharp minor Toccata was rightly more exuberant, less innig, drawing upon earlier keyboard masters and their sense of Affekt and rhetoric. In a flexible account, the proximity to Bach’s early organ works was announced, the whole unfolding with great dramatic flair.

 

C.P.E. Bach offered a very different voice, already hinting at some of the keyboard music of Haydn and even Mozart, though the rhetoric is undeniably personal. In the B-flat Sonata, composer and performer offered a kaleidoscope of expression utterly distinct from Haydn’s thematic single-mindedness. Registration was perhaps especially telling during the slow movement, in which we heard an almost operatic dialogue at times. The finale was refreshingly bright and high-spirited. We returned to Emanuel Bach at the end. The opening flourish of the F-sharp minor Sonata was extrovert yet controlled: very German! Wrenching of mood was almost violent; ‘strangeness’ was neither smoothed out nor unduly exaggerated. The slow movement exhibited great metrical freedom, following an almost stream-of-consciousness approach: as, after all, does the score. Twists and turns, both melodic and harmonic, were savoured. The finale offered a nice contrast, emerging almost as an extended fantasia: part-way on the road to Mozart? Its conclusion came properly as a surprise.

 

Between the two C.P.E. Bach sonatas came a sonata by Georg Anton Benda and Takemitsu’s Rain Dreaming. I am not sure that I can quite share Esfahani’s enthusiasm for Benda, at least on the basis of this piece, but there could be little doubt that he proved an able advocate. Benda offered a more overtly ‘Classical’ voice, though not without audible connection to the world of Emanuel Bach. The first movement of the sonata benefited from an excellent performative balance between stateliness and exuberance, but I missed a real sense of development. Perhaps, as Esfahani suggested in his note, that is an æsthetic choice on the composer’s part; perhaps, but is it a good choice? The slow movement was, however, nicely contrasted, and more consistent as a compositional whole, whilst the finale’s byways charmed rather than perplexed.

 

As in the case of other works I have heard by Takemitsu, I was not entirely convinced of the substance of Rain Dreaming. Nevertheless, in this context, and whilst it may be a stretch to call the piece toccata-like, or imbued with a Neue Empfindsamkeit, there did seem to be a post-C.P.E. Bach or even post-Benda quality to the writing: testimony to canny programming. It was attractive enough as contrast, if hardly Ligeti, let alone Bach. Messiaenesque figuration was for me the most intriguing feature. A first encore of the Rameau Gavotte which Klemperer orchestrated whetted the appetite for Esfahani’s forthcoming release later this year of the composer’s complete keyboard works.

 

 

Wishing C.P.E. Bach a very happy 300th birthday...

In case you thought that the music of the most original, most misunderstood, and, above all, the greatest of Bach's sons need sound charmlessly emaciated and absurdly hard-driven, listen to this from 1967. Rarely has Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's sounded with greater enlightenment - and Enlightenment. The concerto emerges as both good fun and a substantial work to be reckoned with: just the right balance for the forces, here deployed to excellent effect. Raymond Leppard conducts the English Chamber Orchestra. The four harpsichordists are the sorely underrated - at least today - George Malcolm, Simon Preston, Geoffrey Parsons, and Valda Aveling. For more on music at the court of Frederick the Great, please click here.





Here below are a few recommended recordings of CPE Bach's music, vocal, instrumental, and orchestral. There is more to explore, but I hope that these will offer a taste:

The King in Prussia: Frederick the Great and Opera

As many readers will doubtless be aware, Frederick II of Prussia turned 300 this year. I was asked to write a piece on his relationship to opera for OPERA magazine. The article appeared in its 'Festivals' edition and is reproduced below.

24 January 2012 marked the three-hundredth birthday of Frederick II, ‘the Great’, Elector of Brandenburg and King in and, from 1772, of Prussia. Those amongst us who are sticklers for detail like to correct those employing the wrong preposition: not merely out of dry pedantry, but because, as with the ‘und’ of Tristan und Isolde, there will often prove to be a wealth of meaning in but a single, small word. The Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I , had acknowledged the coronation of Elector Frederick III as Frederick I, King in Prussia (Rex in Borussia), in return for support during the War of the Spanish Succession, but only because the erstwhile Duchy of Prussia, as opposed to Brandenburg, lay without the Empire – and also, falsely, as it would turn out, reassuring the Poles as to claims upon their territory. (Various other formulations had been considered, the most outlandish being ‘King of the Vandals,’ perhaps not the most promising title for an æsthete such as Frederick the Great to inherit.) It would be thirty-two years after his accession, following the First Partition of Poland, before Frederick II would alter the preposition. Why, the reader might ask, is that of any relevance to an article concerning Frederick the Great and opera? Apart from the not entirely insignificant matter of bestowing the correct title, it reminds us of the monarch’s complicated relationship with German culture, for all the admiration felt for ‘der alte Fritz’ by later nationalists. Frederick’s statue may stand proudly on Berlin’s Unter den Linden, close to the opera house he commissioned shortly after succeeding to the throne; yet not only should he be considered more Prussian than German, he remained for the most part aloof from the rise in cultural German nationalism that characterised the eighteenth century just as well as the nineteenth.

For though, in the same year that Frederick adopted the second of his regal prepositions, his fellow Prussian Johann Gottfried Herder wrote his Treatise on the Origin of Language, a landmark for the history of cultural nationalism in general and German nationalism in particular, Frederick continued not only to write in French, but to disparage the German language. It was, he wrote in his 1780 De la littérature allemande, a semi-barbaric language (‘à demi-barbare’). His model rather was the French of Voltaire, just as his model for courtly life had been that of Versailles (minus the women). Indeed, in 1775 – as Tim Blanning has pointed out, only one year before the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther – Frederick wrote to Voltaire that Germany’s level of cultural attainment lagged about two-and-a-half centuries behind that of France. German opera was even worse than that German literature, the Shakespeare-admiring Goethe included (Götz von Berlichingen an ‘abominable imitation’ of the Englishman), disdained by our Classically-inclined monarch. He declared that he would rather listen to the neighing of his horse than to a German soprano, though the example in the 1770s of Gertrud Elisabeth Mara seems somewhat to have softened his attitude. If so many of his intellectual influences – which is not necessarily to say his militaristic practice as a ruler – were to be found in the French Enlightenment, the King looked to Italy in matters operatic, a prejudice, be it noted, as common amongst singers as amongst singers. Gottlob Stephanie, libretto reviser for Die Entführung, and who had himself been conscripted into Frederick’s army during the Seven Years’ War, would bewail even in 1792, in a preface to his collected Singspiel texts, that not only were there too few original German operas but that singers were far readier to sing texts written in the Romance (‘welsch’, a word featuring in Hans Sachs’s Meistersinger peroration) tongues of French and Italian.

During the difficult period awaiting accession to the throne, the flute-playing Frederick was bullied and imprisoned by his frankly philistine, Calvinist father, Frederick William I, who for good measure also had one of his son’s friends (possibly his lover) executed in front of him. Frederick nevertheless managed to maintain his musical interests alongside the military preparations that eventually won the approval of Frederick William. Johann Joachim Quantz acted as flute teacher, whilst Frederick in 1735 lured from Dresden Carl Heinrich Graun as chief of his musicians in Ruppin. On moving residence to Rheinsberg, near Potsdam, the following year, the Crown Prince was accompanied not only by Graun, but also his brother, Johann Gottlieb, another alumnus of the Kreuzschule, as well as musicians such as Franz and Johann Benda. Johann Gottlieb would be made first concertmaster of the Berlin Opera, whilst Carl Heinrich – hereafter ‘Graun’ – became King Frederick’s first Kapellmeister. In addition to Voltaire, visitors to Rheinsberg included French men of letters such as Fontenelle and Maupertuis, as well as Francesco Algarotti, philosopher, art critic, friend to Tiepolo, and soon-to-be Count and Chamberlain under the new, Frederician regime. (Algarotti’s 1755 Essay on the Opera would prove an important influence upon the reforms of Gluck and Calzabigi.)

Siegfried Matthus, himself born in Rheinsberg, sets his eighty-minute chamber opera, Kronprinz Friedrich (1998-9), revived at this year’s Schloss Rheinsberg Festival, during Frederick’s period as heir to the throne. Frederick William would doubtless have been by turn reassured and horrified by the gender implications of presenting him as a baritone and as mezzos both the eighteen-year-old Frederick and his executed flautist friend, Hans Hermann von Katte, attempting to flee grim Prussia for Hanoverian England. Hans Werner Henze’s more celebrated Der Prinz von Homburg – its hero another, earlier Prince Frederick – is not the only twentieth-century opera to deal with high-political conflict between love and duty in Brandenburg-Prussia. In 1744, Frederick granted the palace to his brother, Henry, who built an open-air ‘hedge theatre’ (Heckentheater), which provides the setting for this year’s performance. An 1880 guide by Andrew Hamilton, Rheinsberg: Memorials of Frederick the Great and Prince Henry of Prussia, would draw upon a 1778 work by Henry’s Court Surveyor, Karl Wilhelm Hennert, thus: ‘There is the natural Theatre in which everything is hedge-orchestra, pro-scenium, stage, dressing-rooms, all of live hedges of various heights. Hard by that is the Chinese garden, full of pagodas, and mandarins, and apes, and cages of gilt wire holding birds of brilliant plumage.’ In the summer of 2012, then, that eighteenth-century world of opera and chinoiserie will find itself partly brought back to life at Rheinsberg – though the events in question took place in 1730, before Frederick had moved there. Katte, whom Frederick would rarely so much as mention after emerging from a period of grief, will receive a resurrection, or at least reacknowledgement, of sorts.

Back, or rather forward, to Berlin, to Frederick’s accession on 31 May 1740. Within two months, and thus a good few months before the invasion of Silesia, often described as his first major political deed, Frederick commissioned Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff – who would also design the great summer palace Sanssouci, at Potsdam – to build the Hofoper. (It is now the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, temporarily in exile at Charlottenburg’s Schillertheater, whilst renovation work is conducted). Kapellmeister Graun was sent to Italy, to offer employment at the Prussian court to Italian singers. Johann Mattheson, composer and critic, arguably the first German musical journalist, lamented from the safety of his position as Kapellmeister to the Duke of Holstein: ‘When will we give up our blind worship of foreigners and learn to judge our own countrymen fairly?!’ Graun’s first trawl, recruited during an eight-month tour, failed to satisfy Frederick, but by 1743, a starry ensemble including notable artists such as the prima donna Giovanna Gasparini, the castrati Felice Salembini and Antonio Uber (Porporino), and the tenor, Antonio Romani, had been engaged. Voltaire and Algarotti assisted, both in the recruitment of singers and in that of Parisian actors and dancers for Frederick’s French theatre and ballet. CPE Bach and Quantz joined the orchestra as harpsichordist and flautist, the latter’s salary increasing from 250 thalers in Dresden to 2000 in Berlin. Singers commanded salaries higher than those of cabinet ministers. By 1754, some forty instrumentalists alone were in the King’s pay. This was a rather more serious commitment and investment than ‘Cool Britannia’. Moreover, Frederick was of course not only a musical patron, but a librettist and composer himself.

Graun’s Rodelinda had been performed in December 1741 on a temporary stage in the King’s Berlin palace, but it was with the composer’s Cesare e Cleopatre that the Hofoper opened, a year later, on 7 December 1742. The following year saw a performance of the Saxon Johann Adolf Hasse’s La clemenza di Tito (composed in 1735 to Metastasio’s libretto, and heard by Mozart in Cremona, in 1770, twenty-one years before his own setting). The musical shadow of Italianate Dresden which had first made itself felt upon Frederick on hearing Hasse’s Cleofide there in 1728, would continue to be keenly felt; Prussia had a great deal of cultural catching up to pursue. (Primacy of Italian opera in Dresden would persist until Weber.)

Even when not acting as librettist, Frederick took a great interest in the plots set by Graun, who composed almost all of the new works performed in Berlin, often two per season. Moreover, Frederick often suggested the plot outlines in the first instance. He would criticise Graun’s work and have new arias composed to replace those that failed to meet with his approval. Frederick’s œuvre as librettist (in French) includes Silla (1753) and some parts of I fratelli nemici (1756) and Merope (1756, shortly before the Seven Years’ War had the opera closed), translated into Italian by the court poet, Giampietro Tagliazucchi.

Another such work was Montezuma, the twenty-fourth (!) of Graun’s Berlin operas, premiered on 6 January 1755, and generally considered to possess the finest of Graun’s libretti. Having been performed in concert by the Staatsoper earlier this year, it will be staged at Sanssouci as part of this year’s Postdam Festival. Frederick himself was involved in the 1755 staging, and it was revived in 1771, though a subsequent performance does not seem to have taken place until that in Saarbrücken (ironically, in German) in 1936. Montezuma, a just sovereign, meets his death at the hands of the conquering, fanatical Cortes, who also lusts after the Aztec leader’s beloved, Euparofice. The Voltairean Frederick had never paid more than lip-service, if that, to Christianity, once even going so far as to declare his willingness to build a mosque in Berlin, should it attract useful citizens. If the Spaniards considered the indigenous inhabitants of Mexico barbarians, their avaricious, murderous conduct suggested that Christian ‘civilisation’ might well prove a misnomer. It was, as Frederick well knew, a classic Enlightenment – and specifically French Enlightenment – tactic to evade the censor by implicit criticism: Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and Voltaire’s Lettres anglaises both provided shining examples of works which, through lavish praise of other societies, be they Persian or on the other side of La Manche, cast doubt upon the achievements of their own. If the librettist were the King, of course, criticism might no longer have any need to remain implicit. What Frederick and many other Enlightenment writers certainly held in common was the appreciation, in the wake of the Voyages of Discovery, that other, non-European civilisations had survived and indeed prospered in (blissful?) ignorance of the Christian faith. Interest in China – even at the level of Rheinsberg’s chinoiserie – was not entirely unconnected with that ideological impetus.

Whilst the critical jury, even on those occasions when it cares to assemble in the first place, seems still to be out on Graun’s compositions – Charles Burney was an early detractor, accusing Graun of old-fashioned writing and a lack of originality – we can certainly say that they offer, from our musico-historical perspective, a number of ‘forward-looking’ aspects. Da capo arias are often replaced with two-section cavatinas – in Montezuma and a number of other cases, it seems, expressly at Frederick’s command. Moreover, ensembles prove sometimes to further the action in a fashion that might tempt us to think of Mozart. Christoph Henzel implicitly counsels against such an interpretation, when he points out that ‘the aim was to find a structure – one with short, concise scenes and as much lyrical music (and as little recitative) as possible – that would stress the visual rather than the psychological impact of the drama for an audience with scant knowledge of Italian language and literature.’ We might nevertheless, if so inclined, respond that motivation and influence may differ. Gluck was certainly not the sole influence on Mozart’s operatic developments, and Algarotti’s influential Essay specifically cited Montezuma as a model work in which the requirements of singers were subordinated to a properly coherent poetic idea.

By the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, it is probably fair to say that the King’s musical interests had become set in stone. Whereas many other German states showed themselves supportive of new musical developments – the courts in Mannheim, Munich, and of course Vienna are but a few celebrated instances – Frederick remained loyal to Hasse and Graun. Though Emanuel Bach was employed as harpsichordist, the King evinced little or no interest in his music, whilst Haydn’s music was dismissed as ‘a shindy that flays the ears’. Whereas the new Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, vigorously supported the promotion of German culture, even at the cost of outright revolt in his non-German lands, Frederick’s tastes had barely changed, if at all, since his time at Rheinsberg. Friedrich Gottlob Klopstock, purveyor of patriotic odes, complained, ‘The Emperor loves his fatherland – but Frederick does not!’ Whatever the truths concerning Joseph’s treatment of Mozart, and the record is more mixed than many allow, it seems that the Prussian King had never even heard of him. Moreover, Frederick’s interest in music tout court, as E. Eugene Helm noted in his study, Music at the Court of Frederick the Great, waned in tandem with the deterioration of his flute technique and thus his activity as a performer. The music-lover, then, will be more likely to speak of the King in Prussia.