Fin de partie, Opéra national de Paris, 30 April 2022

Palais Garnier

Hamm – Frode Olsen
Clov – Leigh Melrose
Nell – Hilary Summers
Nagg – Leonardo Cortelazzi

Pierre Audi (director)
Christof Hetzer (designs)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Klaus Bertisch (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Markus Stenz (conductor)

Images: Sébastien Mathé/OnP

Modernism’s endgame, modernist opera’s endgame, opera’s endgame: all have been proclaimed time and time again. One might say the same for Romanticism, Classicism, sonata, symphony, and other isms and genres. Whatever the truths of the matter—we can no longer justifiably speak in the singular, if ever we could—this first opera by György Kurtág, first heard in Milan in 2018 and now receiving its French premiere, suggests that twilight, however prolonged, has once again proved as productive, as challenging, as illuminating as first dawn or zenith. The owl of Minerva may or may not be spreading its wings; Kurtág may or may not be almost the last modernist standing; opera may or may not be stronger, more varied, more resistant than ever before. These are inevitable and may even be important questions. What matters above all, though, is that Kurtág’s Fin de partie/Endgame emerges, even from a single hearing, a single experience in the theatre, as an unqualified masterpiece.   

Janus-faced, like most—all?—artworks of stature, Fin de partie takes Beckett’s masterpiece, which Kurtág first saw in Paris in 1957, and, in concluding a modernist chapter, perhaps even a book, appears also to open several more. Although it feels very much a finished work, it remains at least in theory a work-in-progress, to which Kurtág might add further ‘scenes and monologues’ from Beckett’s play—or even conceivably from elsewhere, given its second Prologue (the first being purely orchestral) is a setting for Nell, startlingly in English rather than French, of the poem Roundelay. This ‘dramatic version’ of the play, in most respects literal, with the slightest addition here or somehow seems always to have been conceived for music, indeed seems never to have existed without it. Libretto (if one may call it that) instructions are as detailed musically—‘comme une mélodie de Debussy’—as they are scenically, or both: ‘mouvement très lent d’interrogation avec la main gauche esquisse le “et puis” de Gr. C. et Piatti … assez grand changement de ton’. Many thanks are due to the Opéra national de Paris for reprinting it: an invaluable resource for future study and reflection, as well, I hope, as for subsequent preparation.   

The ultimate synthetic distillation, though, is musical—just as one often fancies Beckett’s words to point not only to the limits, the endgame, of language, but to the beginning, the necessity of music. (His Schopenhauerism extended way beyond mere ‘pessimism’, to the truly aesthetic.) Words here are everything—one hears, and hears measured every one—until they are not. That ancient operatic alchemy we trace back at least as far as Monteverdi is once more at work, and Monteverdi—the Monteverdi of the dramatic madrigals and the two surviving late operas in particular—comes to mind among many ghosts of the opera-as-sung-play past. Mussorgsky, Debussy, Berg, Janáček stand prominently among them, as well inevitably—if perhaps more tangentially—as Wagner, Bach (‘not an opera composer, but’), and even Boulez (ditto?) Are these affinities or similarities, or are they actual influences? Does it really matter? It seems both to do so, as we reach the end of the game, but also not. After all, what does matter when we reach the end of the game, that any game, any game? 

For, apart from his own voice—what a strange provision!—that which comes most strongly to mind is another supreme writer of vocal-dramatic music on the smaller scale, whom we yet imagine desiring, wishing, ultimately aiming to bring forth an operatic synthesis. As it was in the beginning, it still is now: Webern. Perhaps not even in Webern have I heard such sustained, certainly not such dramatic, development of intervallic relationships, in themselves and in relation to timbre (probably other parameters too) so as to fulfil the tragic necessity of rebuilding a shattered universe: the same task, yet always different. Every note counts, of course, yet every note is heard and felt, and bears the ultimate weight of tragic and tragicomic existence that we may know it counts. The affinity with Beckett’s language and what some understandably, straining at the bounds, will term in despair anti-literature is clear; but music is no representative mirror, any more than it is in Monteverdi, Wagner, or Webern. Its autonomy, its pairings—here as crucial as any in Bach or Bartók—and so much else continue: in hope, if you like, yet only in the strange sense that Beckett does. Until, I think, the close, when something strange happens, a musical synthesis taking wing and building, such as can often happen almost irrespective of intention. Think, for instance, of Wagner. This is less evidently redemptive, though stirrings of sympathy for Hamm and Clov are not entirely denied. Fin de partie, however, seems to speak or sing of something that might refashion redemptive ideas through shattered glass, shattered lives, the fragmentary challenges of modernity and modernism.

 

An orchestra used sparingly and with very different balances from that of the Romantic past—a modern ‘ensemble’ writ large—tells us that throughout. Just five first violins and five seconds, against eight violas, eight cellos, and six double basses, and indeed five flutes, six percussionists, two bayans (Beckettian vaudeville movingly transmuted via Sofia Gubaidulina), and so on have seeped into our consciousness, yet rarely if ever together. Mahler haunts, but he cannot live. Conducting, as he did earlier performances in Milan and Amsterdam, Markus Stenz understands or at least appreciates—can anyone ‘understand’?—communicates, and lets that fragility breathe and expire. We all listen, whether something can be said or sung, or not. For what else is there to do? Not listen, of course, but which of us wishes to assume Nagg’s fate? We know there will be no sugar-plum at the end, celesta notwithstanding. 

And yet, music endures, as does theatre—as, perhaps, do literature and drama too. A wonderful quartet of soloists ensures that, as does Pierre Audi’s careful direction, doubtless treading a minefield of what the dread estate, as well as the dedicated composer, would permit. Action/inaction takes place outside the house, but it looks very much as we should expect, without ever feeling expected: post-drama, we might think, of the post-absurd. Frode Olsen, struggling with illness, nonetheless held the stage with a fiercely committed performance as Hamm, holding it all together, in the tragicomic absence of any ‘it’ to hold. Leigh Melrose’s protean Clov, wounded yet spirited, alert and alive, yet quite without hope, struck me as definitive, however illusory the idea. An outstanding artist whenever I have heard him, Melrose may have given his finest performance yet. Hilary Summers offered a masterclass in extracting much from little, as Kurtág and Beckett do themselves. Transformation of a vocal line, through pitch, dynamics, shifting colour said, as with the rest of the cast, the rest of the work, both something and nothing, often in chamber collaboration with an instrument or two from the pit. Crucially, Nell’s death could neither have been more nor less heartbreaking. Leonardo Cortelazzi’s made for a fine sidekick, his Nagg splendidly, pointlessly excitable yet resigned. Steeped, like the others, both in the text and in its twin possibilities and impossibilities, he closed and opened the square that should have been a circle. 

Here, then, is a masterpiece in a way that seems, both modestly and defiantly, not of our age. Many composers would now, quite understandably, tell us such is not their interest. They are not attempting to write works such as Fin de partie and failing, ‘better’ or otherwise. Given the ideological issues at play, we can all understand that. When, however, a work—and this is, emphatically, A Work—such as this comes along, it brooks no dissent. To be there is akin to being there for Gawain (may its composer now rest in peace), for Mittwoch (likewise, on Sirius), maybe even for Wozzeck or for Tristan. Kurtág may or may not have been writing for posterity. Until one of our politicians hastens the final endgame, perhaps tomorrow, posterity will nonetheless hear and listen to Kurtág.

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (1) - The Rake's Progress, 11 July 2017

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Actors, Chorus, Mother Goose (Hilary Summers), Tom Rakewell (Paul Appleby), Nick Shadow (Kyle Ketelsen)
Images: © Patrick Berger / artcompress

Ann Trulove – Julia Bullock

Tom Rakewell – Paul Appleby

Nick Shadow – Kyle Ketelsen

Nick Shadow 2, The Keeper of the Asylum – Evan Hughes

Trulove – David Pittsinger

Mother Goose – Hilary Summers

Baba the Turk – Andrew Watts

Sellem – Alan Oke

Actors – Antony Antunes, Kirsty Arnold, Nichole Bird, Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Andrew Gardiner, Chihiro Kawasaki, Maxime Nourissat, Jami Reid-Quarrell, Gabriella Schmidt, Clemmie Sveaas

Simon McBurney (director)

Gerard McBurney (dramaturgy)

Michael Levine (designs)

Christina Cunningham (costumes)

Paul Anderson (lighting)

Will Duke (video)

Leah Hausman (choreography, design assistance)

English Voices (chorus master: Tim Brown)

Orchestre de Paris

Eivind Gullberg Jensen (conductor)

Auction guests, Baba the Turk (Andrew Watts) and Tom 

I thought it was longer than it had been since my most recent Rake’s Progress. When I checked, I discovered that had only been a couple of years or so ago, at the Royal Academy: and very good it was too. Nevertheless, this new Aix production from Simon McBurney proves mightily refreshing. It has something in common with the RAM staging (John Ramster) in that it concentrated on the opera as an opera, rather than the debates surrounding it – although those can surely never be far away from most of our experience, whatever Stravinsky, with typical disingenuousness, might have suggested. But the emphasis and the illumination are different, which is surely just as it should be.

London stands at the heart of this Rake. Not, thank God, in a particularist sort of way: that would be especially absurd for a staging in Provence. This is not only the city of Hogarth, but also the city that was, for all its flaws, indeed in many ways on account of them, until recently the greatest in the world. It destroyed itself in part, of course; ‘its’ greed, both in the eighteenth century and under neoliberalism, rightly provokes revulsion, none greater than that of those who live or have lived there and are not members of the ‘banking community’ and other such delightful trades. But for those of us estranged from our country at the moment, Theresa May’s ‘citizens of nowhere’, we know who really did it. We are also able to recognise our city with all the delicious agony of an exile, internal or external, in what we see before us, without collapse into the merely didactic. For the great, indeed diabolical con trick that is capitalism, whether neoliberal or in an early mutation, is in large part the parable here; it always was, whatever Stravinsky or even Auden might have told us. (Repeat after me. Intention is not everything; sometimes it is very little at all.) When Tom goes to London, he goes to the City; he goes to one of those plush, joyless, ‘pleasurable’ towers, from which one may see other towers. He has well-dressed, superficially attractive – very attractive – people fawn over him, change his clothes, transform him into one of them. He is – and this would hit home as strongly as I have ever known it do – ‘weak’, as Ann tells us. Christina Cunningham’s costumes are a profoundly important – and knowingly shallow – contributor to the drama; they make us envious, even complicit, wishing or at least in danger of wishing we were part of the tragedy we know this pleasure garden to be.

Nick, Tom, and images of Baba

When Mother Goose’s establishment comes into view, the emphasis shifts to eroticism that is both blatant and subtle. Again, most of us probably want it, although we know we should not. A subtle orgy might seem a contradiction in terms, at least to those of us on the outside of this world, but Leah Hausman’s choreography really does its work here. Far more is suggested than actually depicted; our minds, our imaginations are made to do the dirty work. Pornography, the pornography of late capitalism, is thus dramatised and accused. I could not help but think of Antonio Negri’s Constitution of Time. In all the pleasure, the beauty of the young bodies, there is of course neutralisation too. Everything becomes the same; it does not matter whom one chooses, whom one adds to one’s iPhone collection. And so, after Tom has taken his pictures – displayed to the world, as they would be, although in this case on the walls of the set – of his final nubile companion of the evening, Nick Shadow, the capitalist Devil himself, shows him pictures of Baba the Turk. The rest you know – save for the twist here that Baba is now played by a counter-tenor. Her whole life is performance, an act, of course, and this takes its place in her line of publicity strategies. There is no especial jolt to our – or at least to my – understanding; that, I suspect, is part of the point. The auction is full of typical metropolitan ‘style’, that of the empty, expensive sort in which the drama has been mired all along: Mayfair, not Whitechapel.

On the other side, however, Ann seems, and I think probably is, more present than ever. She sometimes, earlier on, walks past. Tom appears to see her, but does he? And would what that even mean if he did? She is good, a symbol of goodness, but she is not just that; I felt her more as a character than I can remember doing so before. That is partly a matter of Julia Bullock’s tremendous performance, touchingly pure, and with every word readily audible (far from always the case in this role). But it is partly McBurney’s conception too. She is, perhaps, a social critic too, no mere inegénue. There is indeed, as McBurney suggests in a brief programme interview, ‘dans une certaine mesure une figure révolutionnaire’ to be perceived there too. Baba knows that, it seems. She has her own roles to play, but she is convinced by Ann, and actually sends her on her way to attempt, however vainly, redemption.

Ann Trulove (Julia Bullock) with auction guests behind

Before that, moreover, Ann walks through a typical Tube subway, cleverly conjured up with design technology: a bit of that South Kensington pedestrian tunnel to it, actually, although more ‘desolate’, ‘poorer’, to the non-London, or con-comprehending, eye. That actually means more alive, of course; the homeless people and the busker – playing solo trumpet, in a nice touch – are, for us Londoners, for us human beings, the real story, the real tragedy. And in a final, potentially Foucouldian twist, the man running the show in Bedlam is Nick Shadow’s shadow. Madness has of course always been a way to deal with criticism. Had Tom perhaps an inkling of what was going on; or might, at the very least, Ann have helped him enlighten him had he not fallen ‘mad’? The voices in his head are the voices we hear all around us: ‘unelectable’, ‘sensible’, ‘moderate’, and so forth? They are the voices that will do all they can to prevent us make London, not what it was, but what it should have been, could have been, all along – and in many ways still is.

I almost – almost – believed, then, in the ‘love story’ that comes almost sentimentally to the foreground of work and production alike. Bullock played her part in that, of course. So did Paul Appleby’s lovable, lovably weak Tom: the sort of character one knows one should distrust, and yet desperately wishes to do otherwise. He never seemed quite the author of his own actions; which amongst us is, whilst Nick is at play? More than that, though, his sappy tenor proved just as sympathetic and manipulative as Bullock’s crystal-clear soprano. Kyle Ketelsen’s Nick was every bit as persuasive as he should be – and more so. He was reassuringly ‘normal’, ‘as things are’, until one really looked and listened: just like capital itself, and with all the dangerous, often surprisingly understated, attraction it exerts. Evan Hughes proved an excellent shadow to the shadow: the same, and yet different. A more real ‘normality’ was offered by David Pittsinger’s splendidly sane Trulove; or is Trulove just a better actor, the voice of old-school conservatism? Hilary Summers made for a fantastic Mother Goose: ruler of her own world, not least vocally, and with a splendidly naughty sense of genuine fun. Is she not a ‘revolutionary’ in her way, too? Or are we just meant to think so? Andrew Watts made much of Baba’s staginess; how could he not? But there was definitely a human heart beating strongly there; the appeal to her fans is far from entirely to be dismissed. Alan Oke’s Sellem imparted a fine sense of slightly camp insidiousness: all the better to sell Tom’s goods with. 

The graveyard scene

There was a ruthless dryness to much, not all, of Eivind Gullberg Jensen’s conducting which was not only echt neo-classical Stravinsky, but very much of the dramatic idea. The orchestra, both unlike and not unlike Wagner, was telling us something. A delight in contrivance, moreover, fused perfectly with the score’s well-nigh miraculous forging of continuity out of what ‘should’ merely stop and start. Stravinsky’s cellular method here is, in many ways, not so very different either from his late serial masterpieces or, dare I suggest it, The Rite of Spring. The miracle is his – and, in a way, that of capital too. If the Orchestre de Paris had its soloistic moments and was for the most part commendably sharp of rhythm. If there was certainly nothing wrong with its performance, though, there was perhaps a slight lack of presence, even of commitment, that slightly detracted from the musico-dramatic whole. Maybe it was as much an acoustical matter as anything else: outdoor performances, notoriously, take a good deal of getting used to. There was certainly no such fault to be found with the singers of English Voices, all of whom played their individually directed performances to a tee. They, like the rest of us, were both enthralled and ultimately destroyed by the game afoot.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Royal Opera, 29 March 2016

Image: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

 

Barbican Theatre

Lane/Merriman – Simon Wilding

Algernon Moncrieff – Benedict Nelson
John Worthing – Paul Curievici
Gwendolen Fairfax – Stephanie Marshall
Alan Ewing – Lady Bracknell
Miss Prism – Hilary Summers
Cecily Cardew – Claudia Boyle
The Revd Canon Chasuble, DD – Kevin West

Ramin Gray (director)

Ben Clark (associate set designs, ‘after an idea by Johannes Schütz’)
Christina Cunningham (costumes)
Franz Peter David (lighting)
Leon Baugh (movement)
 

Few comedies are less amusing than operatic comedies, few audiences less dramatically aware than conventional opera audiences. The slightest thing, regardless of intention (which otherwise matters to our reactionary ‘protectors’ of the form more than life itself), occasions riotous guffaws: even, God help us, ‘Contessa perdono’. Is there anything less amusing, more worthy of silent, awestruck listening than that moment in which forgiveness, both human and divine, is sought? The Countess’s response, of course, but that has already been ruined by such cretinous behaviour. The crime is enough to have one reconsider a lifetime’s opposition to capital punishment. Rossini’s comedies: well, they tend to be less tedious than his ‘serious’ operas, but about as funny. As for the ‘joke’ of, say, the interminable second act of Pfitzner’s Palestrina, ‘German humour’ is not sufficient mitigation. For the most part, many seem to forget that comedies need not be uproariously funny; they need not be ‘comic’ and indeed rarely are.

Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest is, then, that rare thing, at the very least approaching unique: a genuinely funny, even hilarious, opera. It even approaches something at least as rare, perhaps rare still: genuine musical surrealism. Oscar Wilde’s play needs no music; nor does Shakespeare. But Wilde can – more on account of a reverence for his wit that fails truly to relish it, to play with it – seem terribly dated, likewise his brand of æstheticism. I am not saying that they are, or are not; they are certainly done no favours by endless revival from callow, indeed dismayingly earnest, undergraduate stagings. Barry’s musico-dramatic sledgehammer not only liberates the witticisms – the play has become, like Shakespeare, too full of quotations – but liberates the wit, by doing something so completely, unthinkably monstrous to it that somehow it emerges stronger, both in its transformation and, at least in my case, how one might once again view the ‘original’. Kagel and indeed Ligeti come to mind intellectually, perhaps, and not only on account of the forty-eight dinner plates to be smashed. Yet it is difficult to think of this as anything but a thing-in-itself, as original, as it were, in the exaltation of its shameless, parodic derivations, as in its ‘originality’. Given the brevity of the compositional period, Barry’s method seems forged in the necessary white heat of inspiration (how æstheticist, even Erwartung-like!), driven and liberated by it.

 

One can take the first of the three short acts – hurrah, an opera that does not overstay its welcome! – as a Von heute auf morgen that raises more than an indulgent smile; or one can take it as a swipe at Schoenberg. One can take it as neither of those things. One can simply, or not so simply, enjoy it. Both tightly organised and anarchically free, one might even say that Webern lives again, with a twist: irrationality, rather than rationality, is both internalised and externalised. And if that sounds Romantic, in a sense it is. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and not just Schiller, is mysteriously parodied, many characters having a go: not just making it fun, but once again rendering it strange. It is not Furtwängler’s way, but it intrigued; it is certainly a great deal more interesting than pieties of Werktreue. (Having said, that perhaps a part for that great menace of musical life, the metronome, with shades of Ken Russell’s Lisztomania, might put in an appearance in a subsequent production?) French Revolutionary culture, aestheticism, Nazism, gender politics: all these and so many more are grist to Barry’s mill. What on earth is Auld Lang Syne doing? Ives with a sense of humour and without the Emerson? Who knows what it means? Is that the point? Is not caring the point? We doubtless talk too readily about deconstructing meaning and so on, but for once that, and perhaps even its reconstruction, seem actually to take place here – and crucially, in performance. Although the opera is less overt about its metatheatricality than some, or perhaps more because it is so genuinely funny, it does not come across didactically. But there is something both bleak and liberating here: if not quite Beckettian, not entirely un-Beckettian too. Wilde edges, or rather is pushed, closer to many of his greatest countrymen than ‘earnest’ light undergraduate comedy might ever conceive. As so often, fidelity lies in infidelity.  

 

Performance and staging seem indissoluble from the work, although who knows? They might, and surely will, prove not to be so; such is the nature of performing art. Ramin Gray’s production has transferred very well from the Linbury Theatre, where it was first seen in 2013, to the larger space of the Barbican Theatre. (The Linbury will re-open in 2018; in the meantime, Royal Opera ‘Linbury productions’ will be seen elsewhere. Next stop: the Hammersmith Lyric, for Mark Simpson’s eagerly-awaited first opera, Pleasure.) It seems to me to do something similar to, and with, the opera that the opera does to, and with, the play. Not having seen the score, I do not know how much is prescribed; I am told that, ironically, and doubtless dialectically, quite a deal has been. As musical figures repeat, a parody of themselves, of something else, or perhaps just for the hell of it, they might do on stage or they might not. A moment of tenderness might be undercut, or might not. Yet there is never, except in a sense I am tempted to think of as æstheticist, or perhaps neo-æstheticist (think of Ligeti’s anti-anti-opera, Le grand macabre), a sense of the merely arbitrary. Arbitrariness is far too important for that. Above all,though, and in case you have not already despatched me to Pseud’s Corner, it is funny.

 

What I have said about the work, about the staging, I shall – you guessed correctly – say also of the musical performances. The Britten Sinfonia were their usual superb selves ‘straight men’ (and women) crucial to the comedy. Whether playing Stravinskian motoric rhythms, seemingly to the power n, or shouting ‘Where is that baby?’ they were an integral part of and commentary upon the drama. Tim Murray’s conducting was at least as impressive as last time too. Score in the head rather than head in the score, he and his band seemed as liberated as Wilde. Benedict Nelson’s Algernon knew and projected the difference, whilst simultaneously rejecting it, between life and art. He and Paul Curievici as Jack offered indissoluble comic and musical timing – and a good line in dance too. The tenderness of certain of Jack’s moments – blink and you might miss them, or imagine them – was not the least of Curievici’s performing achievements. Stephanie Marshall’s alluring Gwendolen and Claudia Boyle’s stratospheric Cecily were excellent foils, but far more than that. Alan Ewing’s pinstriped tour de force Lady Bracknell lost nothing in repetition, not even, indeed particularly not, his post-Chaplin metamorphosis of Schiller into Hitler. Hilary Summers’s voice is ideal for the ‘depth’ of Miss Prism; this wonderful singer proved just as excellent in the ‘lighter’ comedy too. Work, staging, and performances alike came together in their tearing each other apart. Or, alternatively, I have never laughed so much at an opera.

 

Proms Satuday Matinée 1 - BCMG/Ollu - Boulez, Usui, Jolas, and Lee, 25 July 2015

Cadogan Hall

Boulez, arr. Johannes Schöllhorn – Notations II, XI, X (1945, arr. 2011, United Kingdom premiere)

Schöllhorn – La Treizième (2011, United Kingdom premiere)
Shiori Usui – Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. (2015, world premiere)
Betsy Jolas – Wanderlied (2003, United Kingdom premiere)
Joanna Lee – Hammer of Solitude (2015, BBC commission, world premiere)
Boulez – Dérive 2 (1988-2006, rev.2009)

Ulrich Heinen (cello)

Hilary Summers (contralto)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Franck Ollu (conductor)

It might seem churlish to complain about the BBC Proms coverage of Pierre Boulez’s 90^th anniversary. After all, there are a few performances dotted around – although some seem rather oddly programmed, as if embarrassed at the presence of new or newish music. (That could certainly not be claimed in the present case.) Yet I cannot help but wish that someone had shown the imagination and necessary determination to programme Boulez’s electronic masterpiece, Répons: for once, surely a work that might have been revealed to good advantage in the Royal Albert Hall. For that, one alas – as so often – has not only to go elsewhere, but abroad: be it to Paris, Amsterdam, Salzburg… (I have opted for Salzburg next month, and look forward to the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Matthias Pintscher revealing the work in the flesh to me for the first time.)

Anyway, missed opportunities aside – by the way, how about some Stockhausen? I’ve never heard a better-suited ‘RAH work’ than Cosmic Pulses – we heard a well-, often very well-performed Proms Matinée at Cadogan Hall, with no shortage of music that was either new to the country or new to the world. First up were three of Johannes Schöllhorn’s arrangements for ensemble of Notations (the piano originals, not Boulez’s extraordinary orchestral expansions). The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Franck Ollu sounded slightly unfocused to start with, but Notation X had a very keen rhythmic sense. La Treizième was a nice surprise: one bar from each of the twelve added together, to form another, intriguingly unified twelve-bar piece. It actually put me a little in mind of the revisiting of earlier waltzes in Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, though perhaps I am just being a little sentimental there. I liked Schöllhorn’s sous-bois very much when I heard it at the Wigmore Hall last year; we need to hear more of him in this country. A Proms performance of a larger-scale work would be greatly appreciated another season.

Shiori Usui’s Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. will surely face little competition for the foreseeable future in the world of nomenclature. We learned from a brief conversation between the composer and Tom Service that the piece is named after an infectious fungus which works its negative magic upon ants. (Whilst I remember, the printed programmes for the Saturday Matinées are, quite simply, a disgrace: not a single word on either the works or the non-Boulez composers. Can something equivalent to the evening concerts, or at least something better than that not be managed?) In five very short movements – ‘Camponotus leonarci’, ‘Spores’, ‘Pathology’, ‘The Grip’, and ‘Hyphae’ – we heard a considerable array of ensemble colour, very different in each case. There was perhaps a sense of Boulezian éclat, albeit more overtly, or at least conventionally, thematic, and also sometimes more tonal in language. It was elevating to see one newspaper critic rise from his seat and leave after that performance; it will be interesting to see whether his review covers the rest of the concert.

Betsy Jolas is but a year younger than Boulez. We seem to hear her music very little in this country; the United Kingdom premiere of Wanderlied was therefore especially welcome. Wanderlied was inspired by the idea of an old woman (the cello) travelling from town to town as storyteller, the tile borrowed from a 1943 poem by Jolas’s father. Crowds gather around the woman and comment, but two people in the crowd do not like her, yet continue to follow. What emerged was a long-breathed, humorous piece, assure both of craft and emotional expression, timbre not surprisingly an important connecting force between the two, insofar – a big ‘insofar’ – as they may be separated. I thought of it as, in a way, a song without words, or perhaps better a cantata without words. Jolas looked, by the way, almost incredibly sprightly on stage, so we have every reason to hear a good deal more from her, programming permitting.

I wish I could be so enthusiastic, or indeed at all enthusiastic, about Joanna Lee’s Hammer of Solitude. The idea fits, clearly a reference to Le Marteau sans maître – and the participation of Hilary Summers fitted too. Summers proved her usual self, that most individual of voices as communicative with words and notes as one could ask for. Alas, the three movements – ‘The hammer alone in the house’, ‘A presentiment’, and ‘A suicide’ – seem strangely childish, which is not to say childlike, in construction and expression. Word-painting is obsessive, yet basic, almost as if following a guide in a compositional exercise. The (very) sub-Berberian noises at the opening hint at a greater ambition, which yet remains unrealised. The final line: ‘Release complete, relief’. Quite.

 

Finally, Dérive 2. It is the Boulez work I still find the most difficult to come to grips with; I cannot claim to ‘understand’ it and indeed find it almost disconcertingly ‘pleasant’ in its progress. Boulez’s constructivism, albeit a flowing constructivism, came across clearly and, crucially, with structural as well as expressive meaning. The ghost of Messiaen seemed intriguingly to hover, or rather to fly, at times, not least in some of those gloriously splashy piano chords. The ‘lead’ taken by different instruments at different times was, perhaps, more than usually apparent, suggesting almost an updated sinfonia concertante, whereas, for instance, Daniel Barenboim’s performances (see here and here; number three will come in Salzburg next month) have emerged, at least to my ears, as more orchestrally conceived. As is the way with even half-decent performances of such music, I noticed things I had never heard before. Something that especially struck me on this occasion was the timbral similarity – surely testament to Boulez’s work as conductor – to a passage in The Rite of Spring. I shall have to look at the scores to find where and when, or perhaps I shall never re-discover what my ears were telling me on that occasion. Such is a good part of the mystery and the magic of live performance.

Prom 28 - D'Orazio/BBC SO/Oramo: Beethoven, Brett Dean, and Stravinsky, 7 August 2014

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Egmont, op.84: Overture

Brett Dean – Electric Preludes

Stravinsky – Oedipus Rex

 
Francesco D’Orazio (electric violin)

Oedipus – Allan Clayton

Jocasta – Hilary Summers

Creon – Juha Uusitalo

Tiresias – Brindley Sherratt

Messenger – Duncan Rock

Shepherd – Samuel Boden

Speaker – Rory Kinnear

BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Jackson)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo (conductor)

I admit that I came to this concert mostly with the second half in mind. It was a more than pleasant surprise, then, also to find a good deal more to enjoy before the interval than I had expected. It is not, of course, that I do not think the world of the Egmont Overture, but I have increasingly become weary of the state of present-day orchestral Beethoven performance. (Oddly, the problems bedevilling symphonic Beethoven seem less apparent or at least far less widespread in solo and chamber music.) Sakari Oramo’s account with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, then, came as a breath of fresh air. The introduction was full of suspense and foreboding, unfolding at a tempo that simply sounded ‘right’ (which is not, of course, to say that another could not). Already there was a proper sense of the mystery of Beethovenian development. The transition to the main Allegro was well handled, and throughout there was a good sense of formal dynamism. Characterful woodwind and forthright brass (admittedly, not always ideally precise) added a great deal. The ‘Victory Symphony’ at the end – I know that it is not actually entitled as such here – was perhaps a touch harried, but if a shortcoming, it was one that was readily forgiven. This was a real Beethoven performance.

 

Brett Dean’s Electric Preludes, for electric violin and orchestral strings, received its first Proms performance, Francesco D’Orazio joining the orchestra. In six ‘character pieces’, some of them continuous, Dean’s work explores, in his words, ‘the intersection between high instrumental virtuosity of a “classical” nature on the one hand and sound-worlds that are only possible with electronics on the other, all commented upon by an essentially “unplugged” string chamber orchestra’. As a summary, that seemed to me to tally very well with what I heard. The first movement, ‘Abandoned Playground’ is scurrying, at times almost filmic in quality and ‘atmosphere’, though perhaps a little repetitive. Despite its inspiration by indigenous painting from around Papunya, in Australia’s Northern Territory, the second movement sounded – at least, impressionistically, to me – more ‘abstract’, though perhaps matters would be different if one knew the art.  The short ‘Peripetea’ that follows, fast and highly rhythmical, had a sense, both as work and performance, of providing what it says, a dramatic turning-point. A slow movement, ‘The Beyond of Mirrors’, seemed more fully to emphasise electronic sounds, and yet at the same time to engage in ‘traditional’ violin and string fantasy. So too, in another mood, did the following ‘Perpetuum mobile’, which put me in mind almost of electric Prokofiev (the finale to the Second Violin Concerto). Its lengthy cadenza seemed perhaps to outstay its welcome, but there could be no gainsaying, here or elsewhere, D’Orazio’s command of technique, idiom, and expression. Likewise, the BBC SO sounded reinvigorated under its new Principal Conductor. The final ‘Berceuse’ traces an unhurried path from a dark, almost growling opening to quiet ecstasy – or so it sounded here in what seemed to me an excellent performance.

 

There followed an equally excellent performance of Oedipus Rex, in which the singularity of this ‘opera-oratorio’ announced itself as only it can, whether through form, language, or that oppressive atmosphere engendered by the pervasive minor third and its implications. The orchestra and Oramo continued to be on fine form, now joined by soloists, men’s voices from both the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Chorus, and Rory Kinnear, a splendid narrator throughout, declamatory without a hint of the excessive ‘ac-tor-li-ness’ which often comes into play here. Stravinsky’s opening chorus was splendidly attacked by chorus and orchestra alike, truly plunging us into the drama. Motor rhythms and ostinato made one all the more aware than usual of Poulenc’s blatant plagiarism in Dialogues des Carmélites (not that Stravinsky, given his record, need have disapproved). The aggression of neo-Classicism was as apparent in Oedipus’s ensuing claim of deliverance as in, say, the Octet; there is nothing placid about this æsthetic. I especially liked the clearly questioning choral ‘Quid fakiendum, Oedipus, ut liberemur?’ There soon followed what for me was the only real blot on the performance, the dry, wooden solo from Juha Uusitalo’s Creon, not helped by a pronounced vocal wobble. An intriguing, quasi-liturgical sense of versicle and response between ensuing chorus and Oedipus (‘Solve, solve, solve!’ ‘Pollikeor divinabo!’ etc.) swiftly compensated. Brindley Sherratt’s Tiresias sounded ‘old’ in character but without detriment to his fine musical delivery, precise and clear of tone, declamatory yet most definitely ‘sung’. The oddness of Stravinsky’s tenor writing constantly forced itself upon one’s attention, at least as much here as in, say, The Flood, but Allan Clayton coped – indeed, more than coped – very well.

 

The second act brings the extraordinary entrance of Jocasta. I mean it as no disrespect to the rest of the cast when I say that Hilary Summers truly stole the show with her unmistakeable contralto, somehow wonderfully archaic in a Mediterranean sense. Stylistically, she sounded just right, ‘operatic’ in Stravinsky’s utterly personal way (all the more so, the more ‘impersonal’ he might try to be). Oramo’s urgent yet spacious pacing seemed well-nigh ideal here, whilst choral imprecations of Fate hammered home their ritualistic point. Jocasta being joined by Oedipus, we heard what registered wonderfully as both parody and instantiation of the operatic duet. Indeed, it was a strength of the performance as a whole that issues of genre seemed, in unforced fashion, to come so strongly to the fore. Duncan Rock’s arrival as Messenger had one wishing he might have sung Creon too: his was a thoughtful, expressive performance, as was that of Samuel Boden as Shepherd, whose sappy tenor dealt so well with the vocal awkwardness of Stravinsky’s writing as almost to vanquish it. (It should not be entirely vanquished, of course, since it is a crucial part of the work and its ‘expressive’ – to use a loaded word in any Stravinskian context – power.) The weird jauntiness of the chorus, ‘Mulier in vestibulo’ led inexorably, as in performance it must, to the stone death of ‘Tibi valedico, Oedipus, tibi valedico’. Oramo and his forces had much to be proud of in this concert.

Currie/Hodges/Summers/Aurora Orchestra/Ollu et al. - Stockhausen and Boulez, 5 October 2013

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Stockhausen – Gesang der Jünglinge

Stockhausen – Kontakte

Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître

Sound Intermedia

Colin Currie (percussion)

Nicholas Hodges (piano)

Hilary Summers (contralto)

Members of the Aurora Orchestra

Franck Ollu (conductor)

 

Not for the first time, a concert of post-war avant-garde music showed what a thirst there is to hear music from this scandalously neglected area of the repertoire performed. The Queen Elizabeth Hall was sold out, a friend of mine having bought just in time one of the last remaining tickets. Whatever the reasons for not performing this music might be, lack of interest and demand is certainly not one. Whilst some of the selections for the Southbank Centre’s Rest is Noise season have to my mind been baffling – take, for instance, the wildly exaggerated importance soon to be ascribed to the tedious outpourings of minimalism, ‘holy’ and otherwise – the only regret here is that we could not hear more from a period whose music remains at least as bracing, as vital, as it did when first written and first performed. Indeed, as some though by no means all orchestras and halls fall back upon crowd-pleasing aural junk food as their token ‘modern music’, it becomes all the more necessary to hear, as it were, the real thing: Neue Musik, be it Stockhausen, Lachenmann, Schoenberg, or Bach.

Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge proves a quickening experience every time one hears it. We have lost the shock value of a piece of ‘merely’ electronic music; that will probably never return. But we have gained the ability to hear such a piece as a repertoire work, a classic, with both the advantages and dangers that entails. This time around, I was taken anew by the sense, early on though not only early on, of seeming aurally and of course spatially the very company of heaven. Stockhausen’s music might not sound ‘like’, say, the Sanctus from Bach’s B minor Mass, but the effect, the experience might not be entirely different. The flames of the text’s fiery furnace (Daniel 3) flickered as bright as ever, perhaps still more so; I could certainly feel the heat. Later, it was as if we were approaching the sanctuary, or a sanctuary, itself, whatever that might be. Musical? Divine? Were there already premonitions of the cosmogony of Licht? The composer’s heterodox Catholic mysticism seemed almost as strong as that of Messiaen; so, of course, did his technical radicalism.

 

It was salutary to be reminded by Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s informative programme notes that Shostakovich denounced Stockhausen as a representative of ‘decadent capitalist culture’ at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The multifarious disciples of the latter-day St Dmitri would do well to remember that aggressive æsthetic attacks were far from the sole province of the avant-garde. Stockhausen, who began work on Kontakte in the same year as Shostakovich’s attack, was better advised to respond with a work whose compositional riches dwarf anything the Soviet composer could have dreamed of, though a little more than twenty years later, Helmut Lachenmann’s ‘Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze’ would deal with more or less the same issue:

 

Can there be a more presumptuous and, at the same time, ignorant programme than the propagation of a “human art” (in contrast to the up-to-now inhuman ...) and then the claim to be composing ‘finally, again, for the public’? For whom then were Nono’s Il canto sospeso, La terra e la campagna, Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Kontakte, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître, Berio’s Epifania and Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra composed? Reproaching a hermetically sealed music for insiders only repeats the favourite excuse of a public which runs for cover when faced with works like those just names. It runs because it is more affected by the emotive power experienced in these works than it is entertained by the emotions of the collected neo-symphonists.

 

At any rate, dspite a barbaric intervention of premature applause – Soviet methods for dealing with such behaviour might usefully be employed here – Nicholas Hodges, Colin Currie, and Sound Intermedia unleashed a dazzling display of virtuosity that was yet entirely at the service of Stockhausen’s endlessly restive imagination. Even a mobile telephone call for once seemed almost to blend with the array of percussive and electronic sonorities. As with any work worth its salt, one experiences different facets and listens in different ways on different occasions. I was struck here by the contest between what one might characterise as dialectical opposing forces: stillness and hyper-activity, peace and violence, attack and aural reconciliation, intimacy (think for instance, of the almost vocal duet between piano and xylophone) and swarming, swirling, all-enveloping extroversion as electronics and ‘conventional’ instruments enhance the capabilities of each other and indeed of the audience itself. Above all, there was a true sense of the opening up of possibilities, the greatest legacy of a ‘Darmstadt’ that could not have been further removed from that of doctrinaire caricature. (It was almost quaintly ‘retro’ to see a couple of people walk out.) Above all, we were reacquainted with a composer whose sheer inventiveness places him with Haydn.

 

For the second half, Hilary Summers joined players of the Aurora Orchestra under Frank Ollu for what perhaps continues to be the emblematic musical work of the 1950s, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître. For Boulez, the high watermark of total serialism has already passed; as our distance from its origins increases from its origins, we increasingly seem to perform and to hear the work as much as a labyrinthine extension of Schoenberg and Berg, towards whose nostalgia the young(ish) Boulez felt more than a little suspicion, as to Webern’s crystalline purity. The difference of the sound world from anything we had heard from Stockhausen was immediately apparent. So indeed was every aspect of the compositional ‘voice’: again, an indication that there could have been nothing doctrinaire about the composers’ explorations. Exactitude and ‘expression’ were revealed as sides of the same coin, that old Schoenbergian – or indeed Bachian – coin of freedom and determinism. The players, amongst whom we should count the unmistakeable contralto of Summers, revelled in a seemingly limitless array of instrumental combinations. Though there were occasional, quite understandable, instances of hesitancy, for instance in ‘Commentaire II de “Bourreaux de solitude”,’ this was in most respects a commanding performance, those hangmen of solitude uncovering memories, fleeting, perhaps even imaginary, of Ravel’s ‘Le Gibet’ from Gaspard de la nuit, the second ‘commentary’ perhaps the most mesmerising of all. In keeping with the general theme of exploration, new worlds seemed to open up in the double of ‘Bel difice et les pressentiments’. Strands may have been brought together, but immediately they suggested, in true serialist fashion, new avenues to follow. As we know, this work was in many ways just the beginning – both for Boulez and his confrères.

 

The Importance of Being Earnest, Royal Opera, 17 June 2013

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

John Worthing – Paul Curievici

Revd Canon Chasuble – Geoffrey Dolton
Lady Bracknell – Alan Ewing
Gwendolen Fairfax – Stephanie Marshall
Algernon Moncrieff – Benedict Nelson
Miss Prism – Hilary Summers
Lane/Merriman – Simon Wilding
Cecily – Ida Falk Winland

Ramin Gary (director)

Ben Clark (associate designer, after an idea by Johannes Schütze)
Franz Peter David (lighting)
Christina Cunningham (costumes)

Britten Sinfonia

Tim Murray (conductor)

 
The Importance of Being Earnest, Gerald Barry’s fifth opera, was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Barbican, and was first performed in concert, Thomas Adès conducting the London premiere. This production marks the first London staging, though the honour of the first staging went to Nancy’s Opéra national de Lorraine. It may be considered a resounding success, perhaps all the more surprising given the paucity of worthwhile comic operas. (The inability of stage directors to distinguish between the comic and comedy as a form is one of the greatest banes of an opera-goer’s life, but let us leave that on one side for the moment.)

 

Barry may have studied with Stockhausen but it is his study with Mauricio Kagel that comes to mind here, in the work’s anarchic – though, in its compositional control decidedly not anarchistic – irreverence. An almost Dadaistic sensibility perhaps also brings to mind the Ligeti of Aventures  and Nouvelles aventures; smashing of plates, forty of them, must surely offer a reference, perhaps even an hommage.  Humour arises not just from Wilde’s play and what Barry does with or to it, but also from the interaction of ‘action’ and music, seemingly autonomous, until one has decided that it is definitely is, at which point it tempts one to think that it might have something in common with the text after all. Parody, for instance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, whether its opening or the ‘Ode to Joy’, and of Auld Lang Syne, almost inevitably recalls Peter Maxwell Davies, but I am not sure that the method is actually so very similar. For one thing, it seems more to be the tunes themselves that in some strange sense are forming the drama; words at times follow Auld Lang Syne rather than vice versa, resulting in a cyclical process one might – or might not – consider to be a parody of serialism. (I did, but I have no idea whether that were intended.) Stravinskian motor-rhythms power the music along, until it stops – or are they still doing so? And just occasionally, the poster-paint aggression – or is it an affectionate parody thereof? – seems to melt into something more tender. But is that merely wish-fulfilment on the spectator’s part? Is the joke on the audience?

 

Ramin Gray’s production seems to operate in a similar or at least parallel fashion. There are interactions, for instance when the loudspeaker music plays from Algernon’s iPhone. And the action is cut, stopped, made to continue according to some ticking imperative. Moments impress, stick in the memory, for instance the case of co-ordinated tea-drinking. One begins to ask what they ‘mean’, but already knows or at least fears that one is asking the wrong question. Surrealism, or something like it, becomes genuinely funny. Or is it that the funny becomes genuinely surreal? Modern dress works well, banishing any thought that period ‘absurdity’ might heighten the farce, if that be what it is. For disjuncture, by its very nature, continues to bring us up short. Alienation, in work and in staging, both distances and yet brings us tantalisingly close. For, despite or even on account of the artificiality, one senses a deep humanity lying somewhere beneath. (Perhaps like Wilde; perhaps not.)

 

The Britten Sinfonia under Tim Murray proves at least an equal partner to the madness. Brashly rhythmic, lovingly precise, this is an estimable performance throughout from an ensemble whose versatility seems yet to extend itself with every year. That the players are called upon to shout and to stamp their feet almost seems expected. Paul Curievici impresses with great musicality as Jack Worthing, or whatever we want to call him, Benedict Nelson a bluff foil as Algie. Hilary Summers, surely as versatile an artist as the Britten Sinfonia, makes excellent use of her contralto range and tone as Miss Prism, with a splendidly complementary stage gawkiness. Stephanie Marshall’s Gwendolen and Ida Falk Winland’s Cecily shine on the mezzo and soprano fronts, the former often warmly lyrical, the latter seemingly effortless in the aggressively higher reaches of her range. Simon Wilding’s Lane and Merriman offer a nice hint of rebellion, nevertheless handsomely despatched. Meanwhile, Lady Bracknell is played by a bass, not in drag but in a suitably ghastly barrister pinstripe; Alan Ewing rises to the occasion, and somehow seems more real than much of the chaos around him. The cast, as the cliché has it, proves more than the sum of its parts, as is the performance as a whole, however awkward that fitting together or clashing of those parts may be.      

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

Wigmore Hall

Francesco Antonioni – Ballata (2008)

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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