Sāvitri, HGO, 11 August 2020

Image: © 2020 Laurent Compagnon

The Lawn, Lauderdale House

Sāvitri – Esme Bronwen Smith
Satyavān – Alex Aldren
Death – Theo Perry
Dancer – Laura Calcagno 

Julia Mintzer (director)
Eleanor Burke (assistant director) 
Anna-Lou Mary (choreography) 
Ryan Wilce (company manager) 
Charles Ogilvie (props) 

Chorus

HGO Orchestra

Thomas Payne (conductor)

Opera returns to London. As we know it? Yes and no—but then, is that not always the case? Convention dictates that one does not review dress rehearsals, but what is convention in times such as these? More to the point, I have permission to write and should not have dreamed of doing so without. HGO (formerly Hampstead Garden Opera) and its ever-enterprising impresario David Conway deserve our deepest gratitude and heartiest praise for merely conceiving of this project, let alone for bringing it to the garden stage with such zest and conviction. 


First performed in 1916, another time of troubles—also, as now hear ad nauseam, shortly prior to another pandemic—Sāvitri, more importantly, was conceived for outdoor performance, ‘or else in a small building’. No small building here, though a fascinating large building, Lauderdale House, made for a lovely backdrop to events on the lawn below. Theatrical hustle and bustle between rehearsals—arriving just after the first, I saw the second cast—brought to mind of another opera premiered that year, Strauss’s Ariadne, at least in the final version we all know and love. A bird flew overhead, sang cheerily, and: action… 


Birds of the forest, perhaps the Indian jungle, we heard. A woman wrote in red on glass. A man, unseen, singing with perfect pitch and diction, evoked something beyond, physically and metaphysically. Music, drama, opera were reborn before our eyes and ears, both the oneness in veil of illusion of Holst’s Mahābharata piece and that of the endlessly reborn and reinvented bastard progeny of an Athens that never was. In Julia Mintzer’s thoughtful, elegant staging, we were able to make connections, yet never pushed unduly. Sāvitri in her struggle with the Death that would take her husband could stand for the creative act itself, both abstract and concrete (Holst), but also in a time of pandemic could lead our thoughts elsewhere, whether particular or universal. ‘The world has now become a grave.’ 


Were those English, imperial memories we saw and heard? Perhaps, given the summery lightness of costume, orientalist harem pants and all. Above all, however, these were bodies, physical in their fear and trembling, archetypal in the stylised shaping of Anna-Lou Mary’s choreography. Space was rethought, Satyavān approaching our vision from behind, Death heard and occasionally seen from around us, even from within the house: the word, long and lingering, its musical shadows, as well as the character. Yet that use of space flowed, like Holst’s score, Straussian artifice put to one side in favour of something winningly ‘natural’, whatever the undeniable art and craft involved. Likewise Thomas Payne’s keen conducting, alive to the ebb and flow of Holst’s chamber orchestral subtleties—and its harmonies. Harmony, the greatest glory of Western music, Schoenberg’s final word: how we have missed you these long months ohne Musik. 


For the small female chorus sounded as if discovering music for the first time. The primal, wordless sounds from the Burning Bush in Moses und Aron came to my mind, however simpler the particular means; Evensong too, albeit the distinctly superior version of the college and cathedral choirs singing Holst’s own Nunc dimittis (1915, as I later discovered). The Death of Music, even of Anglican music, might yet be stopped, as Sāvitri conquers Death and saves, in quiet ecstasy, her beloved. Chords could be heard in all the evergreen freshness of, say, Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, and yet built and rebuilt in different ways, the ninths and beyond—that word again—of Holst’s imagination gently yet surely staking out their own territory. ‘Art thou the Just One? Art thou Death? Or art thou but a blind spirit, knowing naught of what is round thee? Give me life!’ Music is death, yet is far more than death, just as it is maya, yet far more. Holst, like the Schopenhauerian Wagner, knew that—even as he distanced himself, or thought he did, from that most overbearing of operatic predecessors. We may wait a while for our next Meistersinger, just as for our next Moses. Art, however, will find a way, not only along those paths, but along others not yet seen. We must find a way too.

City of London Choir/Davan Wetton - Elgar, Holst, Thalben-Ball, and Duruflé, 21 June 2018

St Giles-without-Cripplegate

Elgar: Psalm 29, ‘Give unto the Lord’, op.74

Holst: Nunc Dimittis

George Thalben-Ball: Elegy

Elgar: Psalm 48, ‘Great is the Lord’, op.67

Duruflé: Requiem, op.9

Marta Fontanals-Simmons (mezzo-soprano)

John Lee (baritone)

Mark Williams (organ)

Bozidar Vukotic (cello)

City of London Choir

Hilary Davan Wetton (conductor)

The City of London Festival has been missed since its demise was announced in 2016, One concert in particular will remain with me forever: the last time I heard Sir Colin Davis conduct: Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts in St Paul’s Cathedral. There were many smaller events, though, many of them free, most of them dotted around various of the City’s churches. Let us welcome, then, a new festival, Summer Music in City Churches, which seeks to recapture some of that essence and opportunity. In its opening year, a hundred years since the end of the Great War, it has decided to focus on ‘different aspects of … [that] era, and some later responses to war and peace’. This, the opening concert, was entitled ‘Storm and Refuge’; it offered in its first half works by English composers, followed by a later French requiem.

Far be it from me to speak in nationalist terms, but Elgar’s was certainly the finest of the music on offer here. (‘For balance’: the worst would also be English.) The City of London Choir under Hilary Davan Wetton seemed very much at home in two of his psalm settings for chorus and organ, as did organist Mark Williams. The first, Give unto the Lord, benefited from a performance both vigorous and variegated, its tricky corners unfailingly well navigated – occasional early issues of synchronisation notwithstanding. One could hear echoes of the composer’s great oratorios here, yet there was no doubting the singularity of his response to this particular text. Williams’s organ registration choices were apt, indeed telling, perhaps especially his use of reeds. Written in 1914 for St Paul’s, it was succeeded at the end of the first half by Great is the Lord, from two years earlier (Westminster Abbey). Again emphatically through-composed, Elgar’s response to the words proved clear, vivid, even joyous – both in work and performance. These settings are not easy to perform; they are very much worth the effort.

In between came two lesser works. Holst’s 1915 Nunc dimittis (Westminster Cathedral) is a curious piece. It opens intriguingly, in a very different – arguably more ‘modern’, even modernist – tonal language, before lapsing into something a little too close to English Renaissance pastiche. There are worse models than Byrd, of course, but it is difficult to understand how the whole might cohere. It received a full, rich-toned a cappella performance, though, very much in the tradition of Richard Terry’s celebrated Westminster Cathedral choir. As for Sir George Thalben-Ball’s Elegy, the less said the better. It doubtless worked in its plodding way as an organ improvisation; those wireless listeners reported to have called the BBC to ask him to write it down probably needed to get out more. The piece was played very well, though.

Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem probably works best in its version for organ and choir. The composer’s orchestral writing lacks interest and tends to distract rather than elucidate. From the opening of the Introit, what struck me here was how plainchant came more strongly still to the fore. There was a strong sense of building towards the light that will shine upon the souls of the dead, not unlike Fauré (an obvious comparison, yet surely not irrelevant). Climaxes in the ‘Domine Jesu Christe’ were especially well handled: ‘beautiful’ in a conventional sense, but this is hardly a work of avant-gardism. Quiet unease was nevertheless present too. Marta Fontanals-Simmons’s solo in the Pie Jesu (joined by solo cello) was, especially at the opening, sometimes painfully out of tune and weirdly ‘operatic’ in the vulgar sense: a pity. Chorister John Lee did a better, more self-effacing job with his solos, here and in Elgar. Cross-rhythms really told in the ‘Agnus Dei’, preparing the way for quiet consolation and certainty in the return of the ‘Requiem’ music in the following ‘Lux aeterna’. It was good to hear a ‘Libera me’ that did not drag, as it can, leading to an equally well shaped final ‘In paradisum’. If the setting is always more likely to appeal to conservative choral scholars than to a wider musical public, it will doubtless retain a place on the fringes of the repertoire for that reason – and not unreasonably so, when well performed as here.

Birtwistle at 80 (4) - 'Fields of Sorrow': Britten Sinfonia/Brönnimann, 30 May 2014

Milton Court Concert Hall

Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

Holst – Eight Canons: ‘If you love songs,’ ‘Lovely Venus,’ ‘David’s Lament for Jonathan,’ ‘The Fields of Sorrow’
Birtwistle – The Fields of Sorrow
Birtwistle – Melancolia I
Vaughan Williams – Flos Campi

Joy Farrall (clarinet)

Helen Tunstall (harp)
Clare Finnimore (viola)
Britten Sinfonia Voices (director: Eamonn Doughan)
Students from the Royal Academy of Music
Britten Sinfonia
Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)
 

This final concert in the Barbican Centre’s ‘Birtwistle at 80’ series – I managed to attend all but one – presented some of the composer’s music in a more general English context.  Whilst there are doubtless correspondences to be drawn here, I could not help but wonder whether something a little more international might have been preferable. There are strands of pastoralism – albeit of rather different nature – and melancholy in common, but might it not have been more revealing to hear either some music from the more distant past or music from Birtwistle’s contemporaries? The Britten Sinfonia nevertheless offered fine performances under Baldur Brönnimann, joined by students from the Royal Academy of Music for Melancolia I.

 

Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis received an excellent, very ‘different’ performance: perhaps in part, though this is too easy an answer by itself, the result of having a conductor unburdened by a host of ‘traditional English’ associations? The score sounded febrile, almost Baroque (in a positive sense); but Ravel was present too, and, despite the small forces, so was lushness of sound. Structure was admirably clear – and meaningful, developmental in spite of the tendencies to stasis. Novelty of interpretation notwithstanding, the aforementioned vein of melancholy remained.  

 

The interest Holst seems to have held for Birtwistle is understandable. Birtwistle is quoted in the programme as having described his predecessor as ‘a strange, shadowy figure’, who ‘didn’t really ever find himself and suffered from the English label’. No one could accuse Birtwistle of having failed to find himself, but the blurred line between ‘English’ and ‘continental’ music may suggest something in common. One can also imagine Birtwistle having set some of the same texts, especially in the case of the Eight Canons from 1932. I wondered whether the performances from Britten Sinfonia Voices were sometimes a little too bright in character for the texts, imbued as they are with loss. Words were not always as distinctly communicated as they might have been. That said, one had due sense of the musical processes at work, as one did with Birtwistle’s own Ausonius piece, The Fields of Sorrow, which followed on immediately from Holst’s (seemingly unknown to Birtwistle at the time of composition) From the piano opening and English horn response, to the very close, this was a melancholy, but never maudlin, experience, its symmetries seemingly both reflective of and helping to construct an imaginary – ‘mechanical pastoral’? – landscape. ‘Old flowers that were once bewailed names of kings’ came to life – and, perhaps, to death in the final antiphonal exchanges.

 

Melancholia I came in 1976, five years after The Fields of Sorrow. The composer’s tool of ‘stasis in progress’ was audibly present not only in work but also potent, well-shaped performance. Joy Farrell’s performance on clarinets and Helen Tunstall’s on harp were irreproachable, the former perhaps inevitably bringing to mind ghosts of Pierrot, however different the material and its working. Swarming strings, the Royal Academy players significantly augmenting their ranks, offered spatial as well as dramatic distinctions. A return to Vaughan Williams for the final Flos campi brought an apparent echo of the English horn from The Fields of Sorrow. The performance was purposeful, with excellent singing and playing from all concerned; Clare Finnimore made a fine last-minute replacement for the indisposed Maxim Rysanov. Vaughan Williams’s sensual, wordless delight may be very different from Birtwistle’s landscapes, but there is virtue in contrast as well as in correspondence, and in practice one is likely to find, as here, something of both.

In celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee: Clein/Philharmonia/Gardner, 5 June 2012

Royal Festival Hall

Walton – Crown Imperial

Elgar – Cello Concerto in E minor, op.85

Holst – The Planets

Natalie Clein (cello)

Philharmonia Voices

Philharmonia Orchestra

Edward Gardner (conductor)

I arrived at this concert in somewhat curmudgeonly mood. Why, if a concert celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee must be restricted to English music, need the choice be so chronologically restricted? Would it not be more interesting to include some Byrd or Purcell? What of living composers, Birtwistle being perhaps the most obvious choice, or indeed the Master of the Queen’s Music, or, perish the thought, someone a little younger? Was it not a bit depressing that the audience in the Royal Festival Hall was so lacking in younger faces, and might they not have been attracted by a more varied programme? Was it not still more concerning that I failed to spot a single face in the audience that was not white? Those are all real questions, deserving of real answers, of course, and I could add a pedantic query as to why it was thought appropriate to wear evening tails at 3 o’clock in the afternoon; it was nevertheless heartening to appreciate, as the concert went on, that it was not quite so Establishment-focused as prejudices might have suggested.

There was little, I admit, to have suggested that in the opening number, Walton’s Crown Imperial march, which received an oddly charmless reading from Edward Gardner. It was vigorous, rhythmically alert, superlatively played by the Philharmonia, but mercilessly hard-driven, machine-like even. (A republican protest? Somehow I think that would be to clutch at straws.) It was almost as if Gardner were above all determined to show that he was not Sir Adrian Boult, who conducted the first performance and the 1937 coronation performance, when it was employed to mark the arrival of Queen Mary. Just a hint of a musical smile would have been nice, but this was more Wehrmacht than Westminster Abbey. It was good, though, to hear here and elsewhere the Royal Festival Hall organ being put to good use, on this occasion by Richard Pearce.

With Elgar’s Cello Concerto we found ourselves in very different territory. The first movement proved somewhat problematical. Natalie Clein was keenly attuned to its dark, pained lyricism, but Gardner displayed an alarming tendency to fussy micromanagement, almost as if parodying Sir Simon Rattle, when the apparently ‘natural’ wisdom of a fellow knight such as Sir Colin Davis would have been more welcome. The Philharmonia, however, remained on excellent form, even if the performance were often made to sound more lethargic than spacious. Clein brought a greater nervous intensity than one often hears to her reading, but there is nothing wrong with that; indeed, it helped counsel against easy simplifications and generalisations concerning the composer. Nevertheless, she sounded as though she needed a conductor who would rein in certain tendencies towards the distended. The scherzo fared much better all around, the performance sounding reinvigorated without being unduly driven. A fine balance was struck between lightness and propulsion. The ‘Adagio’ seemed to have benefited from that dose of elixir; it was impassioned without mannerism. Perhaps it was less relaxed than ‘tradition’ would dictate, but there is far more under the surface here than most ‘traditionalists’ would ever notice, let alone admit. Elgar’s troubled soul sang relatively freely here, in what emerged as a post-Great War song without words. The finale bore the weight of what had hone before but again largely without the mannerisms of the first movement. The anger of constraint – social and æsthetic? – sounded, but then it always had: think of Gerontius. Twin torments of a soul and a nation whose day in the sun was already nearing its end sounded movingly. I wished from time to time that Gardner would adopt something of Clein’s freer approach – there were phrases that were still over-regimented – but the Philharmonia continued to provide sterling service. There could be no doubt here that there has been no greater English composer of concertos than Elgar.

Reservations over aspects of Gardner’s approach evaporated when it came to The Planets. The brutalism that characterised Crown Imperial was far more apposite to ‘Mars’, whose ominous, chilling tread was served by strings as savage as brass and percussion. (A protest? Perhaps not intentionally, but a note of dissent could not help but make itself heard for those with ears to hear.) ‘Venus’ was properly Debussyan in colour, though there were times, believe it or not, when odd balances favoured harps unduly over flutes. A finely taken solo from leader Andrew Haveron and warm, ardent Romanticism at the movement’s heart contributed to a splendid performance. ‘Mercury’ was, well, dashingly mercurial. Occasionally I wondered whether it might tip into the rushed or garbled, but that danger was just about averted. The briskness of ‘Jupiter’ proved an intelligent way of avoiding misplaced piety; instead, we experienced a lively, alert celebration of sorts, with a welcome sense of carnival. I liked it very much. It was depressing to see so many in the audience so clearly ‘settle down’ for ‘the big tune’, despite Gardner’s highly creditable refusal to milk it, opting instead for touching Elgarian nobility. (Still, a reminder of how England has changed would greet the conservative tendency as soon as it emerged from the hall into Lambeth and Southwark.) Sadly, and not for the first time, some elected to applaud at the movement’s close. ‘Saturn’ exhibited the right measure of mystery and dignity. Tread here was processional, almost liturgical, quite opposed to the militarism of ‘Mars’. Rejoicing, bells-and-all, when it came, remained equivocal, with a welcome hint of Mussorgsky. Near-daemonic possession was the hallmark of ‘Uranus’, its kinship to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice especially apparent. And finally, the strangeness of the opening woodwind solos to ‘Neptune’ was rendered abundantly clear, reminding us that we were not so very far from The Rite of Spring. There was something intriguingly beguiling and not just international but alien to this conclusion. Off-stage voices contributed, of course, but so did orchestral colour and balance. A considerably more questioning affair, then, than I had initially envisaged.

Prom 70: Tetzlaff/BBC SO/Robertson - Bridge, Birtwistle (UK premiere), and Holst, 7 September 2011

Royal Albert Hall

Bridge – Isabella
Birtwistle – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (United Kingdom premiere)
Holst – The Planets

Christian Teztlaff (violin)
Holst Singers
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)

More odd programming at the Proms. It is not irrelevant to see Birtwistle in an English context, there being a strong vein of melancholy in his music to trace back at least as far as Dowland; it was nevertheless unclear that Frank Bridge and Gustav Holst were best choices as supporting composers for the British premiere of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. (The first performance took place in Boston earlier this year.) This is the first piece Birtwistle has explicitly named a concerto, despite forerunners in pieces such as Antiphonies for piano and orchestra. What I shall say is based upon but a single hearing, with all the caveats that must imply, but I was left in no doubt that we heard a masterpiece. The increasing importance of strings to Birtwistle’s tonal palette, as remarked upon in Jonathan Cross’s model programme note, was in evidence from the outset. Cross notes the precedent of Mendelssohn, of whose concerto Birtwistle is fond, in particular its ‘sparkle’ and the way in which the soloist throws the listener straight into the work. I also heard surprisingly strong echoes of Berg, both intervallic and harmonic, and not just at the opening. There also seemed to be reminiscences, whether conscious or otherwise, of Gawain, not least in terms of Birtwistle’s very personal use of metallic percussion. The violin part was throughout performed with outstanding musicality and virtuosity by Christian Tetzlaff; it is in many respects soaringly lyrical, though doubtless it will not have seemed so to tone-deaf reactionaries. For a composer who has long been associated with his native woodwind, it was delightful to realise how gratefully written for the instrument the piece is. Solos spark off orchestral strings and indeed the rest of the orchestra; there is, needless to say, some haunting woodwind writing too. There is an especially exquisite – yes, Birtwistle can be exquisite – not-quite-duet between violin and bassoon, the latter more shadow (Boulezian ombre, albeit in a non-electronic context?) than partner. Rhythm is a predictably strong driving force, but we also hear ravishing oases of reflection: bizarre though this may sound, I was put in mind of the precedent of Szymanowski. At other times, however, the listener is treated to a post-Messiaen world of wind and percussive sonorities, which never, however, sound as harsh as much of the composer’s earlier writing. Above all, as one would expect from the greatest English musical dramatist since Purcell, there is a true sense of the violinist as Faustian protagonist, at least as much so as, arguably still more so than, the soloist in Henze’s Third Violin Concerto (which presents three portraits from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus). A subsiding, moving, tuba line leads us to the final solo pizzicato, completing a tapestry of unusually gorgeous quality. Teztlaff and David Robertson, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra on excellent form, presented the work as the repertory piece it must become.

It is difficult to begrudge an occasional performance of Bridge’s symphonic poem, Isabella, not least since it was premiered by Sir Henry Wood at the Proms in 1907 and has not been heard in these concerts since. On the other hand, I cannot say that I am surprised by its absence. A quiet opening for violas and kettledrums sounds promising, if a little blatantly modelled upon Liszt’s Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, the final symphonic poem written by the form’s inventor. Influences thereafter come thick and fast: Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Strauss, Debussy. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet is clearly a model for much of the brass writing, but Bridge has none of the Russian composer’s melodic genius. The form appears to follow quite closely the example of Keats’s poem, Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil. I wished that it had done so rather more quickly.

The Planets received a good performance: at its best the BBC SO sounded very good indeed, though there were moments when it sounded a little lacklustre, if never so much as it tends to under its principal conductor. ‘Mars’, surely the finest movement in the score, was also the finest in performance: seething in its menace, mechanical in its barbarism, a true premonition of war so swiftly to come. The Royal Albert Hall organ, here and elsewhere, made a fine impact. Alas, elements in the audience elected to applaud after this and every other movement – save, of course, ‘Uranus’, though I am not sure that I should have put it past them then too. ‘Venus’ and ‘Mercury’ benefited from a nicely French sound, perhaps more Ravel than Debussy, and an excellent solo from leader, Andrew Haveron; both movements do, though, tend to overstay their welcome. We heard a bright and breezy ‘Jupiter’, bringing jollity as required; if parts of the score sounded a little like a concerto for orchestra, then that is really Holst’s doing. The ‘big tune’ hit home, sounding noble rather than mawkish. Robertson handled the onward tread of ‘Saturn’ well, also pointing up intriguing consonances with Parsifal. ‘Uranus’ mixed jovial magician with sorcerer’s apprentice to good effect. Perhaps, however, after ‘Mars’, the highlight was the expert, imperceptible way in which the off-stage female voices of the Holst Singers stole into the hall: that was really rather beautiful.