Prom 42: Mariinsky/Gergiev - Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake

Royal Albert Hall

Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre
Valery Gergiev (conductor)

Copyright: BBC/Chris Christodoulou

I am not one of those who asks, ‘Why perform a ballet score in concert?’ I enjoyed greatly Valery Gergiev’s LSO Proms performance of The Sleeping Beauty a few years ago, Romeo and Juliet from the same forces a little more recently, and have enjoyed more than one concert performance of The Nutcracker. Perhaps this is partly because I am anything but an expert on dance; perhaps it is still more a matter that if I think a score worth listening to, then I am not bothered by what can sometime seem extraneous visual effects. No one in his right mind would say that concert performances were a replacement for stagings, any more than when it comes to opera – though he might care to consider that concert performances of opera sometimes at least have a tendency to superior musical results. Moreover, nobody seems to have a problem with concert performances of Stravinsky’s ballet scores, or Ravel’s, or Debussy’s. And yet, on the evidence of this Prom, Swan Lake may be a different case.


Why so? Well, first, it is not nearly so fine a score as The Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker, despite undeniable historical importance. It has its moments, unforgettable moments, but it also has more than its fair share of longueurs. Heard in concert, which of course was never the intention, it ends up with an awful lot of resounding conclusions, sometimes, or so it seems, every couple of minutes. Introductions to introductions can seem the order of the day. Moreover, it is difficult to deny the vulgarity of some of Tchaikovsky’s score, likewise its occasional lack of direction. (Those who would take Liszt to task, often extremely unfairly, might direct their attention here.) Again, I am sure these faults will generally be mitigated when staged. But there was a particular quality to this performance that did Swan Lake no favours at all. The Mariinsky forces, as has been their dubious tradition, performed the score not as Tchaikovsky would conceivably have recognised it, but in a ‘performing version’ made in 1895 by Riccardo Drigo. Now this might be fair enough, or at least arguable, when staging the ballet, but in concert performance it smacks of laziness: this is what we do the rest of the year in St Petersburg – or indeed, across town at Covent Garden – so this is what you will hear now. Narrative and musical sense are often obliterated; Drigo’s interpolations, often orchestrations of numbers from Tchaikovsky’s Eighteen Piano Pieces, op.72, verge upon – I am trying to be generous – the nonsensical. To his credit, David Nice made no effort to spare Drigo in his programme notes, employing phrases such as ‘stylistically inappropriate and over-extended’. (One other point: it is an excellent idea sometimes to include special notes for children, especially in a work such as this. Must they, however, sound as if they come from a world in which the notorious Section 28 was still a real presence? ‘Marital status: Married – but only for nine weeks, after which he ran away and had a nervous breakdown.’)

What of the mauled score as it came down to us in performance? One would not expect a poor performance of this music from the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre and Gergiev, and we certainly did not hear one, though there was a startling breakdown of ensemble in the first act Scene in which the Princess is announced and commands her son, Siegfried, to marry. The Mariinsky strings glistened with vibrato; so, in true Russian style, did the brass. Gergiev could often prove rather driven, yet there was flexibility to be heard too, not least in the Introduction. That oboe swan solo was always delectably taken, against a backdrop of shimmering strings. There were times, however, when the music simply seemed rushed, as if conductor and players were keen to get it over with as soon as possible, the beginning of the second scene a case in point. At the other extreme, the Pas d’action in which prince and swan fall in love sounds over-extended, or at least did so here, in concert, the operatic origins (Tchaikovsky’s opera, Ondine) a little too clear, with violin aria followed by duet for violin and cello. If there were suspicions of autopilot at times, there could, however, be no denying the glorious blazing of moments such as the ball-scene opening of the second act. Soon after, trombones sounded as if they were intoning Fate itself. Indeed, there were several passages in which Gergiev seemed to draw attention to parallels with Tchaikovsky’s symphonies: a double-edged sword, for the lack of symphonic development, especially given Drigo’s bowdlerisation, came equally to the fore. As for the final scene, I am not sure that the turn to the major has ever convinced me musically. It did not here, for which the musicians can hardly be blamed, but was it necessary, or even desirable, for the brass to blare quite so much?

One should not begrudge a first ‘complete’ performance at the Proms, though the description, as we have seen, is at best misleading. I suspect it might be a little while, however, before we hear a second.

Parsifal: The Search for the Grail, dir. Tony Palmer, 26 July 2010

Purcell Room, Southbank Centre

I started by thinking that this marked a slight improvement upon The Wagner Family, Tony Palmer’s appalling recent film for The South Bank Show. I was soon disabused: for one thing, it was actually made in 1998; more importantly, it managed to be more distorting, more disingenuous, even more poorly put together. Whatever Palmer’s strengths as a film-maker may once have been – despite a large number of errors, his Wagner biopic with Richard Burton is often quite compelling dramatically – he no longer seems to possess them. In a tedious, irrelevant self-justification at the opening of the film, he told us how well he knew Plácido Domingo and how ghastly the BBC was, despite its recent agreement to screen ten of his films. The BBC has indeed a great deal to answer for in terms of its populism, but it is not clear to me that it will be redeemed by screening material such as this. An old-fashioned documentary would have been a hundred times more enlightening.

Still, if Palmer’s rambling introduction were tedious and irrelevant, so was the film itself, to which one should add pernicious, ramshackle, recycled, and a host of other none too complimentary adjectives. At the heart, such as it is, of the film are an outline of the drama from Domingo, delightfully accented, with some additional commentary in which the tenor, Miss World-like, outlines his hopes for world peace, and excerpts from Palmer’s production of Parsifal for the Mariinsky Theatre, with Domingo in the title role, conducted by Valery Gergiev. Domingo sings well, if hardly idiomatically. Some of the other singers sing less well, if hardly idiomatically. Gergiev is better when he made the score sound like Tchaikovsky, worse when he drives it too hard, Solti-lite, worse still when he distends phrases for no apparent reason. The Mariinksy – or Kirov, I think, at this time – brass lack something in refinement and the choral contribution is redolent of the Red Army Choir. We hear quite a lot of the Flowermaidens’ music; it seems interminable and could hardly be less erotic. One prominent maiden looks and sounds distinctly mature. Violeta Urmana’s Kundry impressed me in London; she is done no favours here, however, not least on account of the staging.

For Palmer’s production, from what one can see of it, resembles a parody of ‘traditional’ Eastern European operatic presentations. One of his ‘experts’, Robert Gutman, about whom more, sadly, below, bemoans the alleged fact that some audiences think Wagner’s dramas to be mere mediæval pageants. Perhaps they do; I cannot say that I have ever met anyone who thought such a thing. This is what they receive here, however. Palmer’s animus against Bayreuth belies the fact that that festival has engaged directors from whose table he is not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs. Stefan Herheim’s present production of Parsifal, for instance, is not only far and away the best I have seen of the work in question; I do not think I have seen a superior production of anything. For some reason, or perhaps none, the St Petersburg production sometimes morphs into film footage of actors in a hazy setting some might think redolent of soft porn (without the porn). Perhaps this has something to do with Domingo’s puzzling emphasis upon the ‘magic lake’, perhaps not.

So far, so bad. There is, alas, much worse that must be mentioned, though I shall limit myself. Considerable attention is paid to Karen Armstrong, described as a ‘New Testament scholar’. An ex-nun who has made a media career out of attacking institutional religion and claiming that the basic message of all religions is the same, Armstrong waffles on about how some people preferred the certainty (?!) of the Grail to the challenges of mysticism. No effort, however strained, is made to connect her contributions to Parsifal. There are a couple of clips showing Wolfgang Wagner giving a tour of the Festspielhaus. Again, these are curiously disconnected from anything else, leading one to suspect that they may not have been originally intended for this film at all. It is certainly difficult to imagine Wolfgang lending his approval to such an enterprise. To fill in some time, lengthy excerpts are played, without mention of their provenance, from Palmer’s early Wagner film. No explanation is given as to why we should see quite so much material, or indeed any, of Ludwig II or of the Dresden revolt; nor is any mention made that much of the music from these clips is not from Parsifal at all. Further padding is provided by irrelevant scenes from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Indiana Jones.

A cheap trick Palmer plays more than once is simply to sound excerpts from Parsifal against visual footage from the Third Reich; at least the latter is well choreographed, but what does this prove? Absolutely nothing. Enter Robert Gutman. I had thought he might by now have gone the way of Titurel, but apparently not. The film’s sole ‘Wagner scholar’ – someone might consider him such, I suppose, since he just about edges this side of ‘Wagner and UFOs’ – he proceeds to rant against the evil of Parsifal, completely unchallenged, just as he does in The Wagner Family: further recycling. Gutman’s claims concerning the drama are merely preposterous assertions. No argument is given as to how this pacifist work is actually an incitement to genocide. Gutman however appears so much like a bad parody of a Bond villain, cackling and rubbing his hands with glee – surely a strange reaction to so wicked a work? – that no one could possibly take him seriously.

Believe it or not, there is still worse to come. We have apparently reached the end, but suddenly we move to a strange woman with a nose piercing, singing a pop song about what it would be like if there were a God. Pictures of Rwandan genocide accompany, or rather overwhelm, her excruciating wailings. Horrendous it is, of course, to see such images, but the implication that they have something somehow to do with Parsifal brings offence to a new level. Joachim Köhler seemed to have set the bar high in his Wagner’s Hitler – not, the reader will note, Hitler’s Wagner – in which a monocausal explanation of the Second World War, namely Richard Wagner, is advanced. Palmer here manages to go further. We then return to the final bars of Parsifal.

Not a word is said concerning Wagner’s music in all of this: a strange conception of a music drama. No opposing voices are heard in what is ultimately an embarrassingly poor parody – that word again, I know – of a Nazi propaganda film. At least Goebbels had some skill in the dark arts. Palmer makes Michael Moore seem a model of balance without either his good cause or his (relatively) interesting method of filmic construction. One would rarely watch a Ken Russell film out of concern for historical accuracy; next to this, one would. And one would go to Russell every time were one interested in some degree of dramatic flow and coherence. Perhaps the most obvious question arising is this: why should Palmer involve himself in a production of Parsifal at all, if this is what he thinks of it? If I, perish the thought, considered it to be an incitement to genocide, then I doubt that I should busy myself by foisting pseudo-mediævalist kitsch representations of it upon St Petersburg. Production and film display profound, or rather shallow, dishonesty; the latter alternately elicits seething rage and mere boredom.

The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Mariinsky Opera, 17 October 2008

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Tsar Saltan – Alexey Tannovitsky
Tsaritsa Militrisa – Ekaterina Solovieva
Tkachikha, Weaver – Natalia Evstafieva
Povarikha, Cook – Tatiana Kravtsova
Matchmaker-Crone Babarikha – Nadezhka Vasilieva
Tsarevich Guidon – Sergey Semishkur
Swan-Princess – Olga Trifonova
Old Grandpa – Vassily Gorshkov
Messenger – Andrey Spekhov
Jester – Eduard Tsanga
First Shipmaster – Vladimir Zhivopistsev
Second Shipmaster – Alexander Gerasimov
Third Shipmaster – Mikhail Kolelishvili
Prince Guidon as a child – Rudi Goodman
Prince Guidon as a boy – Misha Goodman

Alexander Petrov (director)
Vladimir Firer (designs)
Vladimir Lukasevich (lighting)

Orchestra, Chorus, and Dancers of the Mariinksy Opera
Leonid Teplyakov (chorus master)
Tughan Sokhiev (conductor)

It cannot be claimed that Rimsky-Korsakov has had a good anniversary year. Messiaen certainly has, which is fair enough; it continues to be a remarkable opportunity to encounter or to re-encounter so many of his works. In England at least, it has perhaps been even more difficult to avoid Vaughan Williams, though some of us have tried our best. By contrast, one would barely have noticed that Rimsky died one hundred years ago. We need not slavishly follow anniversaries, of course, but when a figure is as neglected and frankly unfashionable as Rimsky, we might take a cue to investigate whether such neglect be deserved. Messiaen of course had his awe-inspiring legion of pupils, but Rimsky had Stravinsky and Prokofiev, amongst others. Full marks, then to the Kirov or Mariinsky – and to Sadler’s Wells – for presenting The Tale of Tsar Saltan or, to grant the work its full title, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his Son, the Renowned and Mighty Bogatyr, Prince Guidon Saltanovich, and of the Beautiful Swan-princess (Skazka o Tsare Saltane o sïne ego slavnom i moguchem bogatïre knyaze Gvidone Saltanoviche i o prekrasnoy Tsarevne Lebedi). It was Rimsky’s contribution to the 1899 centenary of Pushkin’s birth, first performed the following year. Sadler’s Wells, incidentally, would mount the British première in 1933.

I do not wish to exaggerate. The Tale of Tsar Saltan is no unacknowledged masterpiece. It does not approach Tchaikovsky, let alone Mussorgsky; indeed, it is many respects what one would expect it to be. The standard of craftsmanship is high, both in terms of form and – unsurprisingly – orchestration. When one considers the sheer ineptitude of some works that continue to hold the operatic stage – Verdi in particular springs to mind – that is worth remarking upon. Nor does the work overstay its welcome: the four acts plus a prologue do what they need to do and that is that. Such self-control is rare and laudable.

Yet there remains a certain emptiness at the heart – should there be one – of the work, such as one has equally come to expect from this composer. Some of the tunes are catchy; others are curiously unmemorable. Even the plentiful use of children’s songs and lullabies and fairground music – surely recalled by Stravinsky in Petrushka – seems to be simply a matter of ‘colour’. For all the jibes of the ‘Mighty Handful’ at Tchaikovsky’s supposed cosmopolitanism, his music exhibits far more Russian ‘soul’ than theirs, Mussorgsky as always excepted. Wagner sometimes seemed a little too obvious a model, mostly the Wagner of the Ring: the ‘Magic Fire Music’, the ‘Forest Murmurs’, and odd bits of processional or ceremonial music from Götterdämmerung. This was very much surface Wagner, though, for there was no motivic complexity to be found here. Perhaps the one real concession to modernity or at least instance thereof, although even this would seem more to be dictated by the tradition of storytelling in the Russian skazka, is furnished by the actors shedding their roles at the end to point out, if not quite a moral, then at least a happy ending: ‘Well, that’s the whole skazka; there’s no more to tell!’ Did Stravinsky have this as well as Don Giovanni in mind when composing the ‘moral’ to The Rake’s Progress?

Yet Rimsky’s very limitations perhaps add something to Tsar Saltan’s viability as a fairy-tale. It is no more than that, despite the oft-encountered mistranslation of it as a ‘legend’ rather than a ‘tale’. The lack of realism and of any attempt to penetrate beneath the surface – not that one cannot do this, as we have known at least from the Romantics onwards – enables something enjoyably fantastical to emerge. Doubtless one could psychoanalyse – and fruitfully – but perhaps one does not actually need to do so.

Certainly the production saw no such need. Apparently based upon Ivan Bilibin’s original sketches for the first performances, the designs were straightforwardly ‘colourful fairy-tale Russian’. Whilst there is plenty of room for other approaches, it is not necessarily a bad thing once in a while to have an opera set where it is ‘supposed’ to be – and there are real gains, such as the congruence between the visual and the musical. I did wonder whether more might nevertheless have been done in terms of digging a little deeper, perhaps presenting a more ‘modern’ slant lacking in the work itself, but for the most part I was content with what was given. The audience, however, seemed to find humour in what was not necessarily intended as such, ruining the all-too-celebrated ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ with laughter and even applause. At least it stopped two women in front of me from pursuing their clearly riveting conversation and from reading their text messages.

Tugan Sokhiev generally seemed at home with the idiom. There were occasions when the music sounded a little too four-square, but for the most part he provided a sure hand on the tiller and conjured up a fine palette of colours from the predictably, yet nevertheless laudably, fine Mariinsky orchestra. The brass sounded splendid when given their head, not least when this coincided with a riot of percussion. At one point, the Rimskyfied coronation scene from Boris Godunov did not sound far away at all. Woodwind solos were especially well taken and there could be no complaint regarding the warmth and brightness of the strings. Rimsky as storyteller in the colourful entr’actes could hardly have wished for more help in shining through.

Moreover, this was a good ‘company’ performance in terms of the singing. There was no one special ‘star’ to the performance, but that is not really the point here. Instead, we could once again marvel at the ability of the Mariinsky to cast from depth. Perhaps most affecting was Ekaterina Solovieva’s beautiful Militrisa, utterly credible as the honest girl who becomes Tsaritsa, the almost archetypal target of her sisters’ envy. Alexey Tannovitsky made a fine Tsar, assuming a gravity that belied his years. Sergey Semishkur nailed the role of the youthful Tsarevich, displaying just the right degree of ardent naïveté. I am not sure that there is much more for the Swan-princess to do than to sound – and to look – beautiful, but Olga Trifonova did that well. Natalia Evstafieva and Tatiana Kravtsova did well enough as Militrisa’s sisters, although their thunder was somewhat stolen by the malevolence of Nadezhka Vasilieva’s Babarikha. Eduard Tsanga showed that he could act as well as sing in the role of the Jester, whilst Vassily Gorshkov pretty much stole the show as Old Grandpa: character-acting at its best, with no sacrifice to vocal quality. So there you have it: an enjoyable and highly musical account of an opera neither trivial nor profound, but worth hearing every now and then.

Edinburgh International Festival: King Roger, 27 August 2008

Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Roger – Andrzej Dobber
Roxana – Elzbieta Szmytka
Edrisi – Sergei Semishkur
Shepherd – Pavlo Tolstoy
Archbishop – Yury Vorobiev
Deaconess – Lyubov Sokolova

Mariusz Treliński (director)
Boris Kudlička (designs)
Marc Heinz (lighting)
Wojciech Dziedzic (costumes)
Tomek Wygoda (choreographer)

Mariinsky Opera Company
Valery Gergiev (conductor)

No one who heard this performance should be under any doubt that King Roger (or Król Roger, in Polish) is a masterpiece. I have seen a great deal of nonsense written about it, including the bizarre claim that there is nothing much in the way of plot. King Roger needs no excuses; what it needs is performances. Covent Garden, are you listening? Probably not, for nothing must interfere with the nth revival of Tosca or La Bohème. (Who actually goes to these things every season?!)

Having been severely disappointed, indeed disillusioned, with ‘Gergiev’s Mahler’, it was a delight to hear Valery Gergiev back on form. He proved himself just as fine a Szymanowskian as Sir Simon Rattle. And his Mariinsky forces were on superlative form too: sultry, seductive, yet precise where necessary too. Gergiev imparted an impeccable sense of forward momentum, without ever driving the music hard. We can all pick out the influences and/or parallels in Szymanowski’s music: Debussy above all here, but also Bartók, Strauss, Wagner, even early Schoenberg. Yet there is undoubtedly an individual voice too, a voice we heard clearly on this occasion. With the possible exception of Elzbieta Szmytka as Roxana, this was not a performance of truly outstanding vocal performances, but there were no weak links either and there was a real sense of a company on stage. Andrzej Dobber was a more than reliable Roger, faithfully served by Sergey Semishkur as Edrisi. After some slightly wayward intonation during the first act, Pavlo Tolstoy impressed as a charismatic Shepherd/Dionysus. Szmytka reminded us of her long pedigree in this music and acted well too.

Mariusz Treliński’s production seemed well considered on the whole. I was not entirely sure why the opera needed updating; it is not as if any of us can have been sated with ‘traditional’ productions. I was less concerned about the loss of the period than that of place, although I should not wish to exaggerate; it seemed a pity though. The sets were generally striking, although the church setting for the first act was uncompromisingly modernistic. Szymanowski’s music had to portray the exoticism all by itself. It could do that, but I did not quite see why a hint of the Byzantine would have been out of place. I was also somewhat at a loss to understand why all the clergy sported mitres. The mise en scène for the second act, however, seemed perfectly to capture the hothouse atmosphere that incites Roxana and eventually even Roger to follow the Shepherd. It is worth mentioning here the hugely beneficial role played throughout by Marc Heinz’s atmospheric and carefully targeted lighting, as well as Tomek Wygoda’s choreography in this particular scene, a fine portrayal of Dionysian erotic abandon. It seems that Treliński purposely downplayed the homoeroticism of this act, wishing the conflict within Roger’s soul ‘to be seen from a wider perspective, as a tale of self-discovery’. I am not sure that we are so overburdened with such material on the operatic stage that this was as necessary as the director seemed to think, although it did no especial harm either. I cared less for the hospital bed setting of the third act: a little bit clichéd perhaps, notwithstanding the justification of Roger’s illness? But the video projections worked well, as did the blinding light of the sun. Although I may have had doubts about some aspects of the production, they in no way detracted from the performance as a whole.