Musikfest Berlin (1) – Monteverdi, L’Orfeo and Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, 2 and 3 September 2017

Philharmonie

Orfeo – Krystian Adam

La Musica/Euridice – Hana Blažiková

Messenger – Lucile Richardot

Proserpina – Francesca Boncompagni

Caronte/Plutone – Gianluca Buratto

Speranza – Kangmin Justin Kim

Apollo – Furio Zanasi

First Shepherd – Francisco Fernández-Rueda

Second Shepherd/First Spirit/Echo – Gareth Treseder

Third Shepherd – Michał Czerniawski

Fourth Shepherd/Third Spirit – John Taylor Ward

Second Spirit – Zachary Wilder

Nymph – Anna Dennis

Ulisse – Furio Zanasi

Penelope – Lucile Richardot

Minerva/Fortuna – Hana Blažiková

Telemaco – Krystian Adam

Eumete – Francisco Fernández-Rueda

Iro – Robert Burt

Eurimaco – Zachary Wilder

Melanto – Anna Dennis

Giove – John Taylor Ward

Giunone – Francesca Boncompagni

Ericlea – Francesca Biliotti

Amore – Silvia Frigato

Umana fragilità – Carlo Vistoli

Tempo, Neptune, Antinoo – Gianluca Buratto

Pisandro – Michał Czerniawski

Anfinomo – Gareth Treseder

Rick Fisher (lighting)

Isabella Gardiner, Patricia Hofstede (costumes)

Elsa Rooke, John Eliot Gardiner (directors)

Monteverdi Choir

English Baroque Soloists

John Eliot Gardiner (conductor)

I am delighted, for the first time to be able to attend – and indeed to report from – the Berliner Festspiele and, in particular, from the Musikfest Berlin. How I rued having neither the time nor the money to be here for its Schoenberg year in 2015. Still, Monteverdi is the focus, if not quite so strongly so, in this, his anniversary year, so how could I resist? (One of the things that first drew me to the music of Alexander Goehr was his twin reverence for Schoenberg and Monteverdi; at last, I had found someone – I now know there are many more of us – for whom the two could stand as equal gods.) And so, although not quite the opening of the festival, the opening of my festival came with the first two of the three surviving operas of Monteverdi, L’Orfeo and Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. L’incoronazione di Poppea will also be given; that I heard in a rather different setting and realisation, at the Komische Oper earlier this year.

John Eliot Gardiner has, of course, for several decades been a byword for English ‘authenticity’ – or whatever it is called now. (Somehow I doubt he childishly defines as ‘HIP’, which certainly reflects well upon him, but who knows?) But has he really? The curious thing about much of what I heard here was how curiously dated it sounded. I am the last person to complain about that in some ways; so far as I am concerned, there are many ways to perform great music well. Yet, if claims to ‘authenticity’ – and yes, I use the word in slightly baiting fashion – have always been dubious, to say the least, here we seemed to have entered a strange twilight world in which, certain yet only certain aspects of instrumental ‘hardware’ aside, any authenticity was to a world of ‘1970s Early Music’. Fair enough, if that is your thing – it certainly seemed to be, for many people in an enthusiastic audience – yet perhaps not quite what was said or implied ‘on the tin’.

What struck me about much of the singing – especially, yet not only, from the Monteverdi Choir as choir – was that it sounded very ‘English choral scholar’, even when it was not. In some ways, I sympathise with a degree of resistance to an all-purpose ‘Mediterranean’ approach to this music, which has no more to do with Monteverdi than any other of the phantasms of ‘correctness’ that have haunted performances of his music over the year. There is something troubling about the claim that Italian – in what meaningful sense was or is Monteverdi ‘Italian’, at least as we might understand the 'nation' today? – musicians will always know best here, or still worse, have the music ‘in their blood’. We all need to go beyond petty nationalism here. On the other hand, the whiteness of tone here really tended too much, at least for me, towards the bland. It was all very well-drilled – arguably too much so – yet sounded for all the world, and despite the presence of female voices, more like something one might have expected from David Willcocks and King’s College Choir than an operatic performance, ancient or modern. I’m not aiming for anything fundamentally different,’ Gardiner claims, quite truthfully, one might say, ‘than I was back in 1964.’ That seems to me rather a sad way to approach performance, be it of Monteverdi or Stockhausen. Gardiner’s strange habit of conducting all the recitatives seemed to attest to a control-freakery that is perhaps not the best claim to ‘authenticity’, or more important, towards drama.

Another curious feature, especially in L’Orfeo, but also in quite a few sections of Ulisse, was quite how slow Gardiner’s speeds tended to be. Again, I am hardly someone to insist on breathless tempi, quite the contrary. Yet, in a performance of the first opera that lasted twenty minutes longer than had been advertised, I missed some expressive variation of tempo; ‘expression’ was conveyed rather more through somewhat arch dynamic contrasts. The orchestral forces used were large and somewhat ‘modern orchestral’ by today’s standards. Orfeo employed six violins, four violas, a cello, a viola da gamba/lirone, a double bass, two recorders, three cornetts/trumpets, five baroque trombones, dulcian, harp, harpsichord/organ, regal, and four chittarones/baroque guitars; Ulisse had more or less the same, minus the dulcian, the trombones, and one of the cornetts, and with a second harpsichord. The orchestral sound tended to be fuller – not only on account of instruments used – in Orfeo, but that is as much a matter of the nature of the work as anything else. And the playing of the English Baroque Soloists was excellent; too often in this music, what one hears is painfully out of tune. Not here: all was greatly assured throughout. I could not help but wonder, though: why not actually use a modern orchestra, given the general ‘smoothness’ – the sort of thing Gardiner et al. would surely decry in, say, Karajan – of approach? Indeed, Gardiner decries in the programme the ‘indulgence of Raymond Leppard’. I should say this was a great deal more indulgent, and a great deal less dramatic – in any sense. The Philharmonie is a large hall; just imagine how wonderful it would be to hear in a more genuinely recreative approach, the Berio Orfeo or the Henze Ulisse, there. After all, what could be more ‘inauthentic’ than performing Monteverdi in a space such as that?

The semi-staging seemed of another, non-'early' era too. ‘It was not a matter of not fully staging the work, but that there seemed to be at the very least implied resistance towards a fuller acceptance of opera as staged, fuller drama – Regietheater, if you must, although the term remains problematical, at least to me. Pretty-ish costumes, especially in Orfeo, somewhat dated body language and contrived interaction: that was about it. Moreover, I had the strong impression that was all Gardiner, credited with co-direction, wanted. Drama, though? Perhaps not so much, and I say that as someone who has found concert performances of the Ring some of the most intensely dramatic experiences of all. Then, looking in the programme afterwards, I read: ‘I have a natural antipathy to the proscenium arch as the only way to present opera. It carries baggage with it, a certain preconception on the part of the audience that the eye should dominate over the ear, and that to me is limiting.’ Straw men, anyone? ‘I think,’ Gardiner continued a little later, ‘an audience’s imagination, once stimulated, is infinitely richer than anything a clever stage director can come up with.’ Maybe it is, but might one not say the same about anything a conductor, clever or otherwise, can come up with? In that case, should we not just all sit at home and read a score (of whatever edition)?

There was more to enjoy in the solo singing, although that tendency towards blandness was not entirely absent there either. Indeed, Orfeo in particular sounded more akin to an oratorio than an opera, of whatever age: the genres are far from distinct, of course, yet even so. There were two serious disappointments: an almost painfully out of tune countertenor, Kangmin Justin Kim, as Speranza in Orfeo, and a strangely miscast – or so it sounded – Lucile Richardot as Penelope. Not everyone can be Janet Baker, of course; indeed, no one else can be. Yet Richardot seemed hardly to possess the higher notes required, sounding merely petulant –hardly Penelope’s thing – above a richer lower, yet highly restricted, range. Her Ulisse, Furio Zanasi, sounded somewhat old, even wooden, some of the time, yet had stronger, more expressive moments too. He made little impression, however, as Apollo, and again gave the impression of having been miscast. Encountering the tenor of Krystian Adam, though, was almost worth the price of admission alone. It is not a big voice, but nor did it need to be. Adam showed manifold clarity, agility, and tenderness in his performances as Orfeo and Telemaco. I certainly hope to hear more from him. Zachary Wilder and Anna Dennis imparted a greatly needed injection of ‘Mediterranean’ chemistry to Ulisse, as Eurimaco and Melanto. In both operas, Francisco Fernández-Ruedo stood out as a tenor not only mellifluous but musico-dramatically astute; his Eumete in particular often proved quite heart-rending. There was definitely a sense of the vocal performances as offering more than the sum of their parts; it was a pity, then, that the framework within which they had to operate was not more conducive to the modernity – and antiquity – of the composer.

Happy 450th anniversary, Claudio Monteverdi!

I have adored, more to the point thirsted for, his music since I first heard it, as an A-level student, the 1610 Vespers one of my set works. (Yes, I have since learned, indeed I learned then, that 'work' was definitely to be placed in inverted commas, especially in this case.) We listened to John Eliot Gardiner from St Mark’s, but I found the performance, indeed the whole approach, rather stiff. I managed to borrow a copy of Gardiner’s earlier recording, and liked that rather more; I still do, unfashionably. However, I still know of no single performance or recording that conveys more than a little of what I imagine of the intimacy, the grandeur, the eroticism, the piety, the richness of verbal and musical meaning: of those and so many other qualities. Perhaps that is as it should be: the ‘work’ is ‘impossible’ to perform in the best sense(s).

Getting to know some other of Monteverdi’s works during those A-level years, I encountered Zefiro torna, which made a lasting impression – although not nearly so much as when I discovered Nadia Boulanger’s legendary recording of this and other madrigals.

Other sacred music seemed almost to cast a magic spell upon me. It remains the sacred œuvre that says most to me before Bach’s – and yet is so utterly different from his in almost every way. Sample, immerse, never ignore.  

I came to the operas later: Poppea, then Ulisse, then Orfeo. I actually knew Alexander Goehr’s Arianna before any of them, being lucky enough to attend a performance in Cambridge. (I even played a tiny, tiny role, or deluded myself that I did, in the performance and, I think, the recording. A friend was working in the studio on the manipulation of the Kathleen Ferrier Lament to be incorporated at the heart of Goehr’s inventive new drama, and I had to listen, as a second pair of ears, for the pitch to be correct.) It was after that that I plucked up the courage to write to him, concerning his father, Walter’s early performances, and he kindly sent me cassettes, including Walter’s Philharmonia Poppea. The knowledge that there was someone else in Cambridge who loved both Monteverdi and Schoenberg emboldened me to listen to more of both and to listen to, indeed to read, more Goehr too.

It is now perhaps those operas, and perhaps above all Ulisse of which I think most often when I think of Monteverdi. Ulisse’s Shakespearean range and depth have rarely, if ever, been surpassed. If they have, then it is surely only by Mozart and Wagner. But I am sure my feelings, my provisional judgements, will change; I hope they will. Monteverdi is, after all, for life, not just for A-level.

'Baroque' choral music: a few recording recommendations

Over on Twitter, someone I follow was seeking recommendations for a recording of Bach's Mass in B minor. Klemperer I offered without a moment's thought as a first choice, with Richter (in any guise) and Jochum (ditto) as alternatives. Not long after, one of my followers tweeted to say how much he had enjoyed listening to Klemperer, and asked if I might offer some more recording suggestions on here from time to time. Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to leave that until a time when I am less manically busy - the beginning of term, indeed pretty much all of term, tending to be less than ideal - but then I am not sure that any time is particularly relaxed, and work tends to expand to fit the time available. Here, anyway, are a few favourites from Baroque and Classical choral music, since the Bach question had me thinking about that repertoire. I have limited myself to one recommendation per work, with two exceptions, which will be explained or at least argued. (Bach's cantatas are a different matter again, since we are mostly dealing with selections.) I certainly do not expect everyone, or indeed anyone, to agree, but I hope that some of these favourites might be useful. Where possible, I have included links to Amazon, which might be helpful to those seeking to explore the recordings.

Monteverdi - Vespro della beate Virgine

Certainly not the earliest great choral work - in a sense it comes at the very end of the greatest era for choral music - but perhaps the first great concerted choral 'blockbuster'. To my mind, at any rate, it is the greatest single choral 'work' - a moot term in this context, I realise - before Bach. Ranging in style from the polyphony of Monteverdi's Renaissance forebears to the madrigalian and operatic sensuality he was furthering and forging, it really has something for everyone. I have adored it since studying it as one of my set works for A-level music. Well represented in the recording catalogue, to my ears it is perhaps on balance still best heard in John Eliot Gardiner's first recording, for Decca. Modern instruments are still employed, though Gardiner would soon forsake them, and the vocal soloists are a starrier bunch, though not inappropriately so, than on his subsequent recording. This Decca bargain also includes a number of other works by Monteverdi and his Venetian contemporaries.



Schütz - Geistliche Chormusik 1648

If not quite the acorn from which the great tree of German music grew, there is enough truth in that - just as there is in Haydn as the 'father of the symphony' - to perpetuate the myth a little longer. Heinrich Schütz not only brought the fruits of Venetian music (from his teacher, Giovanni Gabrieli) to Germany; he not only proved instrumental, if the pun be forgiven, in the founding of what we know as the Staatskapelle Dresden; he also wrote the greatest German choral music before Bach. This 1648 collection is as all-encompassing in its way, more modest but no less profound, as its Monteverdian predecessor.



Carissimi - Jephte

Regularly cited in the history books as an exemplar of the mid-seventeenth-century oratorio, this is a highly dramatic work, telling the Book of Judges story of Jephtha. This 2-CD set offers a variety of equally ravishing works by Giovanni Carissimi.



Purcell - Verse Anthems
No composer, not even Britten, has been quite so at ease, quite so idiomatic, with respect to English word-setting as Purcell. Add to that his gorgeous harmonies, a melodic gift that at times seems almost to presage Mozart, Purcell's fusion of Continental and English styles, and that melancholy which one struggles not to think of in a sense as 'English', and we have the English Orpheus, Henry Purcell. This beautifully sung album includes not only a fine selection of verse anthems - a form now indelibly associated with Purcell - but also other choral works such as the splendid Te Deum and the unforgettable Funeral Sentences, as Anglican in the very best sense as the Book of Common Prayer itself.



Bach - Mass in B minor

Klemperer, as I said earlier, remains, at least in many moods, the ultimate first-choice in a fiercely contested field. There is not the slightest trace of Romanticism to his typically craggy, monumental performance; not that there is anything wrong with Romanticism, but it is not Klemperer's Neue Sachlichkeit way. If one wanted to define musical integrity, one could do worse than start with this and Klemperer's Missa solemnis.



Bach, St John Passion

Eugen Jochum's more Romantic way with Bach - sadly, an envisaged Klemperer St John was never to be - pays particular dividends in this, the more vivdly 'dramatic', at least as the term is conventionally understood, of Bach's Passions. For drama as searing as Tristan and indeed as erotic, come here. Soloists, chorus, and orchestra are without exception superlative.



Bach, St Matthew Passion

I said, go to the St John Passion for drama as searing as Tristan and indeed as erotic; for drama that surpasses even Wagner in both respects, the St Matthew Passion beckons: to my mind, the single greatest work of art in existence. For a dramatic experience words cannot begin to describe, Willem Mengelberg's legendary 1939 Palm Sunday performance cannot be approached. The opening chorus tells us all we need to know about what is at stake; at least until we continue to listen. Sadly, no tragically, it is cut, which is why I offer the alternative of Klemperer's great tableau: a ritual dance of death so involving that it, equally, will change you for ever. Comparisons are utterly odious here in any case; every human being needs to hear both. Often, but not too often, for a world in which the St Matthew Passion may be heard on tap begs more questions than it answers.

 

Bach - Christmas Oratorio

This extraordinary set of six cantatas for the Christmas season, infinitely more 'seasonal' than Handel's Lenten Messiah, is perhaps best heard in the recording by that great Bachian, Karl Richter. Richter's Lutheran understanding informed all his Bach, but little, if any, is greater than this joyous performance. 'Stellar' hardly begins to describe the soloists.



Bach - Magnificat in D major

This Magnificat also exists in 'Christmas' form, in E-flat major, but for 'everyday' usage, not that Bach should ever be relegated to the status of Gebrauchsmusik, the D major version is the one to hear. Once again, Richter is impossible to beat, and may not be equalled. Even Haydn is not more joyous than this.



Bach - Cantatas

The greatest treasure trove of all, from which many works seem to have been lost forever. (And to think what some musicologists fret over!) One might miss other music; one certainly would; however, it would be perfectly possible to live happily on this spiritual bread alone. Haydn's symphonies are perhaps the only point of comparison, but we shall leave them for another day. Richter's set of one cantata for every Sunday and major feast should be a cornerstone of every collection. (However at the price currently being charged, you may be well advised to wait, or at least to assemble from the individual five volumes!) Would that he had been permitted to record every cantata. As a taster - relatively speaking - there is also the set of Advent cantatas, which might be added to as required. Ultimately, one has to hear every one, in which case my recommendation would be Helmuth Rilling's set. But many of the cantatas are best heard on individual recordings, of which a few are offered below. Perhaps this is something I should return to in greater detail, but rest assured that any of these recordings will truly change your life. 'Vocal' might be a better description than 'choral' for much of this music, but let us not split hairs.



Handel - Messiah

For the moment, at least, I shall tear myself away from Bach and turn to his great contemporary, Handel. Messiah remains, of course, his most celebrated, most loved, work, and there is nothing wrong with that, however atypical it might be of his oratorios. Beecham here is hors concours, but for those who cannot take the Beecham-Goossens reorchestration - and they will be missing out on a great deal - Sir Colin Davis is an unanswerable 'straight', and relatively small-scale, recommendation.




Handel - Saul

When I first heard Saul, I thought it the greatest music-drama in the English language. I have since heard Dido and Aeneas and The Mask of Orpheus, but Saul remains, at the very least, a great drama, far more typical of Handelian oratorio than the more celebrated Messiah. Handel's dramatic genius was never greater than in his construction of the character of Saul, flawed, tragic, yet ultimately understandable to us all. And the choral writing is superlative. Sir Charles Mackerras did nothing finer than this; one can picture the action through listening alone.



Handel - Israel in Egypt

This, again, is not typical, but Handel's choral writing does not come any more glorious than Israel in Egypt, double choruses and all. The grandeur that is all too often lacking from modern-day Handel performances is still captured in Simon Preston's recording, despite the relatively small forces: a lesson to us all.



Handel - Theodora

Handel's two final oratorios, Theodora and Jephtha are perhaps more moving than anything else he wrote. So as to try to keep this entry within reasonable bounds, I shall limit myself to Theodora here. (Arbitrary, I know, but there is plenty of material for a second piece, and doubtless for more than that.) This tale of early-Christian martyrdom never fails to move in Johannes Somary's recording, blessed by a cast including Heather Harper and Maureen Forrester.



That is all for now. However, as I said, there may well be a further instalment or two, or I may venture forth into any other period or genre.

Soli Deo gloria!