Gloriana, Royal Opera, 20 June 2013

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Elizabeth I – Susan Bullock

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex – Toby Spence
Frances Devereux, Countess of Essex – Patricia Bardon
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy – Mark Stone
Penelope, Lady Rich – Kate Royal
Sir Robert Cecil – Jeremy Carpenter
Sir Walter Raleigh – Clive Bayley
Henry Cuffe – Benjamin Bevan
Lady-in-Waiting – Nadine Livingston
Blind Ballad Singer – Brindley Sherratt
Recorder of Norwich – Jeremy White
Housewife – Carol Rowlands
Spirit of the Masque – Andrew Tortise
Master of Ceremonies – David Butt Philip
City Crier – Michel de Souza
Concord – Giulia Pazzaglia
Time – Lake Laoutaris-Smith

Richard Jones (director)

Ultz (designs)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Lucy Burge (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Paul Daniel (conductor)

 

The Royal Opera offered a strong performance and production, for the most part as excellent as we have any right to expect, of what remains, alas, a very weak opera. Aldeburgh fundamentalists, a highly vocal sect that is yet diminishing with age, will maintain that Gloriana’s dreadful initial reception was to be attributed to a philistine audience of coronation dignitaries and the merely prejudiced. (Richard Jarman, General Director of the Britten-Pears Foundation, writes in the programme of a composer ‘whose musical conservatism was attacked by the avant garde in his lifetime but whose reputation has outlived his critics.’ Well, he would, wouldn’t he?) The way some speak of the debacle, one would think that a a masterpiece of the order of Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus had been slighted. It is certainly difficult to begrudge the opportunity to find out for ourselves, in what is the first time since the brief 1954 revival that the Royal Opera has staged the work, but the flip side of that opportunity proves to be realisation that many of the criticisms levelled at the work in 1953 were justified after all.    

 

Though not really a criticism of the work as such, it is extraordinary to think that anyone could have thought this an appropriate subject for dedication and tribute to a new queen: it would surely have been far better left to stand on its own feet, appearing a few years later, after the composer had had more time to work on it. La clemenza di Tito, far and away the greatest of all coronation operas, may have been written in breakneck time, even by Mozart’s standards, but, wonderful conductor of Mozart though Britten was, he certainly lacked Mozart’s combination of greatness and incredible facility. The opera is certainly not helped by William Plomer’s dreadful libretto, laden down by unconvincing archaisms and cringeworthy rhymes of which ‘duty’ and ‘beauty’ is far from the worst offender; nor is it assisted by all too formulaic scene-by-scene alternation between ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms, which encourages a dramaturgy that barely advances, if indeed it does at all, beyond Verdi. (Half-hearted applause greeted the end of each scene, whilst Richard Jones’s metatheatrical production, about which more below, did its heroic to make the scene-changes of interest.) Schiller or Boris Godunov this conflict decidedly is not. Apart from Elizabeth I herself, and perhaps the Earl of Essex, characters, such as they are, tend to be products of plot situations rather than vice versa.

 

Yet even the manifold dramatic weaknesses do not excuse the weakness of so much of the score itself. Even the mild syncopations of the opening chorus sound shop-soiled: as if drawn from a Britten manual of how to add a little ‘modernity’ without frightening away the horses. Large sections of the orchestral writing seem little more than padding. At their best, there is a kinship in vocal lines to Purcell; much of the time, however, they veer between the merely nondescript and the inappropriately Italianate (as in nineteenth-century Italianate, certainly nothing contemporary). And if Norwich might not always be accepted as a heaving metropolis, does it really deserve the tedium of the ‘masque’? (I could not help but think of those dreadful shows the present Queen and Duke of Edinburgh must sit through when on an official visit, doubtless longing to be taken as quickly as possible to Balmoral or Newmarket.) Dramaturgically, there are signs of hope there: at least Britten is doing something different. Rarely, however, does his formulaic music rise to the occasion; it is actually more interesting when it alludes most strongly to Tudor styles, though the ‘real thing’ would be more interesting still. Matters were not helped by having the first and second acts run together without an interval; it made for a very long time, scene changes included, sitting through pretty insubstantial stuff.

 

That said, there could be no gainsaying the commitment of the Royal Opera’s forces to presentation of the work. If there were times when Paul Daniel might have sped things up a bit, one did not need to know that he had conducted the score before, for Opera North, to hear that he was fully in command of it. Likewise, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and the Royal Opera Chorus, as ever excellently prepared by Renato Balsadonna, responded with enthusiasm and sensitivity that lay almost beyond the call of duty, regal or otherwise. Casting was of great strength, the only real problem being Susan Bullock’s vocal fallibility in the title role; without too much effort, though, one could accept that as reflecting the fallibility of an ageing monarch. Otherwise, Toby Spence proved as fine an advocate as the Earl of Essex could ever expect: ardent, sensitive, headstrong as required. Mark Stone offered a finely-sung, equally finely-acted, darker-hued foil as Lord Mountjoy. It was an especial joy to hear Patricia Bardon’s true contralto, plaintive and full of tone, as the Countess of Essex, with Kate Royal’s Penelope equally well sung, if less clear of diction. (The weird outburst in the final scene, quite unmotivated by what little character development has previously been offered, is certainly not her fault.) Smaller roles such as Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Bayley), Sir Robert Cecil (Jeremy Carpenter), and Carol Rowlands's splendidly shrewish London Housewife offered ample opportunity for care with words and music, however undeserving. Likewise, Brindley Sherratt made the most of the tediously repetitive part for the Blind Ballad-Singer; again, comparisons with a superficially similar role in Boris Godunov are unfortunate, to say the least.

 

Richard Jones pursued his task as director with palpable relish. The production offers a metatheatrical view of staging a 1953 celebration, framed by a small procession of dignitaries. The idea might have been pushed further; as it stood, it did not really do a great deal other than remind us when the work was written. Perhaps that might have been more than the work could have taken, though Christopher Alden’s superb Midsummer Night’s Dream for ENO suggests bravery in staging may be the way forward for Britten’s slighter operas. Designs by Ultz – just ‘Ultz’, presumably like ‘Jesus’, or ‘Voltaire’, his ‘mystery’ enhanced by the lack of a programme photograph – were handsome, colourful, even witty. If we must have the 1950s on stage all the time, this was a model of how to accomplish the task. Lucy Burge’s choreography and the work of various actors and dancers were equally estimable. I could have done without the cumbersome business of each scene being introduced by a gang of children holding up letters to spell, ‘Nonesuch Palace’, ‘The City’, and so on, but apparently some members of the audience found that side-splittingly hilarious.  

 

It is meet and right that opera houses should grant the possibility to reassess works and indeed composers, lest unfair historical verdicts go uncontested. The production earlier this season of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable is a case in point. Yet I suspect that the uninformed vitriol poured upon a flawed yet intriguing grand opéra will be matched this time around by calls of ‘disgracefully neglected masterpiece’. We should all like to find another operatic masterpiece, but wishing does not make it so; for that, we should do better to turn our attention to the future, not least to the new work Covent Garden has commissioned from George Benjamin and Martin Crimp. Works as different as The Minotaur and Written on Skin, masterpieces both, suggest ways forward; yet it does us no harm occasionally to reflect that creation of masterpieces may not only alleviate but also be facilitated by the possibility of failure elsewhere.

Judith Weir, Miss Fortune, Royal Opera, 12 March 2012 (British premiere)

A member of Soul Mavericks
Images: Royal Opera/Bill Cooper

Royal Opera House

Tina (Miss Fortune) – Emma Bell

Lord Fortune – Alan Ewing

Lady Fortune – Kathryn Harries

Fate – Andrew Watts

Hassan – Noah Stewart
Donna – Anne-Marie Owens
Simon – Jacques Imbrailo

Chen Shi-Zheng (director)
Tom Pye (set designs)
Han Feng (costumes)
Leigh Sachwitz (video)
Ran Arthur Braun (movement)

Soul Mavericks (breakdancers)
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Paul Daniel (conductor)


Let me try first to ‘accentuate the positive’ (as the libretto might have it). Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, in a co-production with the Bregenz Festival, where last year it received its world premiere (as Achterbahn), is arrestingly staged by Chen Shi-Zheng. Tom Pye’s colourful designs capture the eye throughout, whether in the initial relative abstraction of the opening scene or the sight – though is it really necessary? – of having a kebab van lowered from the stage. (Could it not just have been wheeled on, at what would surely have been less expense?) The garment factory looks like a factory, and its workers look like factory fodder. Han Feng’s costumes for the most part do the trick, the sharp suit allotted to rich boy Simon for instance presenting an immediate contrast with those around him. Video (Leigh Sachwitz) is put to good use, swift falls in share prices immediately apparent.

Simon (Jacques Imbrailo), Fate (Andrew Watts),
and Tina (Emma Bell)

The Royal Opera fields an impressive cast. Emma Bell could not really be said to inhabit the role of Tina, for there is no character really to inhabit, but she sang with spirit, handling the occasional piece of coloratura with aplomb. Alan Ewing and Kathryn Harries did likewise in the caricatured roles of her parents. Noah Stewart made an impressive house debut as Hassan, the sincerity of his delivery nicely counterpointed by Jacques Imbrailo’s beautifully sung Simon. Andrew Watts did what he could with the sketchily observed role of Fate, and Anne-Marie Owens attended nicely enough to her job as ‘laundromat’ owner, Donna. They all sang well, and Imbrailo in the second act came as close as anyone could reasonably be asked to stealing the show. The breakdancers of Soul Mavericks do a splendid job in their own terms, though whether their inclusion was anything other than a desperate bid to make a dull, inconsequential work more diverting remains at best an open question.

For the plot, let alone its mode of expression, really does not amount to anything much at all. Tina’s parents, Lord and Lady Fortune lose their money in a financial crisis, so Tina decides to make her way in ‘the world, the real world’. Working in a factory (destroyed) and left in charge of a kebab van (ditto), she finds herself at the mercy of Fate, before her luck changes. Fate gives her a lottery ticket. She is on the verge of winning, but, one number out – thirty-eight instead of thirty-nine, or is it the other way around? – she does not. Cue general disappointment. However, Tina is able to call upon Fate to repeat the last few seconds and she wins after all. Simon, however, has already told her it does not matter; he wants him to join her in any case. She therefore tosses her winning ticket into the crowd and leaves with him: it is better, you see, to take a chance oneself than to await a deus ex machina. Nothing, alas, is developed. We gain no insight into any of the characters; instead, we are left with the wisdom of the fortune cookie. This may have its basis in a Sicilian folk-tale (Sfortuna), but in its ‘contemporary’ retelling, Weir’s opera would appear to have lost any of its teeth.

Hassan (Noah Stewart)

Apparently stuck between vaguely neo-Romantic style and not-quite-minimalism, the score offers little to interest, even as orchestral music, let alone as word setting. (Though, as I mention below, the worst of Tippett sometimes sprang to mind, he always had an ear for setting the English language.) The passages when Weir sounds more minimalistic sometimes seem to offer a little more – and believe me, I am surprised to find myself longing for anything more akin to minimalism! – but they never quite seem to cohere into something more than sound-track. At times, I thought Paul Daniel could have offered more in the way of rhythmic precision, but without having seen the score, it is difficult to know for sure. Doubtless it is not the point that almost all of the harmony could have been offered by an unadventurous composer from a century ago. But when precious little goes ‘beyond’ Walton or Shostakovich, for instance, and the only hint of something a little more ‘advanced’ would seem to be the most occasional hint of second-hand Berg and the use of a few drums, then there is perhaps something of a problem. More seriously, though, and despite the use of different sound worlds and indeed different generative material, I found it impossible to discern anything of a particular compositional ‘voice’, let alone for any of the music to lodge itself in my memory. The score certainly does nothing to engage one’s sympathy with either the characters or the apparent ‘moral’.



Simon and Tina

 It is, though, Weir’s own libretto that presents the greatest problem. One could hardly imagine that anyone with the slightest ear for language, let alone verse, let alone verse to be set to music, would not have realised that, at the very least, radical revision was required. If the plot plumbs no depths, the language combines to equal degree banality of expression and concept. There were times when I was put momentarily in mind of Tippett’s late libretti, albeit without the weird eccentricity. Lord Fortune’s ‘You make your own destiny, no pain, no gain’ gives a taste: far from the worst, but typical, and without a hint of satire. References to the need to rid oneself of ‘negative energy’ are bad enough – I should like to say that I thought the phrase was used ironically, but I am not so sure – but a new low is hit by Simon’s entrance into Donna’s ‘laundromat’ to tell her that she had produced the most beautifully laundered shirt. The psychobabble was not even interesting or amusing – at least Tippett would try to explore potentially interesting ideas – but merely dull. For the most part, the language, though not alas the drama, resemble a poorly-scripted soap opera. ‘In the end, we’re all dead,’ we are informed at some point. Quite.

Miss Fortune will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 19 May at 6 p.m.

Le nozze di Figaro, English National Opera, 5 October 2011

(sung in English, as The Marriage of Figaro)

The Coliseum

Count Almaviva – Roland Wood
Countess Almaviva – Elizabeth Llewellyn
Susanna – Devon Guthrie
Figaro – Iain Paterson
Cherubino – Kathryn Rudge
Marcellina – Lucy Schaufer
Doctor Bartolo – Jonathan Best
Don Basilio – Timothy Robinson
Don Curzio – Alun Rhys-Jenkins
Antonio – Martin Lamb
Barbarina – Mary Bevan
Two girls – Ella Kirkpatrick, Lydia Marchione

Fiona Shaw (director)
Peter McKintosh (designs)
Kim Brandstrup (choreographer)
Jean Kalman (lighting)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Nicholas Chalmers)
Paul Daniel (conductor)

Susanna (Devon Guthrie) and Figaro (Iain Paterson)
Images: Sarah Lee

Mozart remains not only the most difficult composer to perform, but also, it would seem, the most difficult to stage. Whether at the Coliseum, Covent Garden, or anywhere else, the number of failed productions should be enough to warn off all but the most experienced of opera directors. Don Giovanni is perhaps the most notorious graveyard of all, but Figaro seems to come close. Whatever her undeniable strengths as an actress, Fiona Shaw seems quite at sea here, though accounts from the Stalls – I was in the Dress Circle – had her laughing uproariously at her own jokes.

A trait shared with many productions is absurdly ‘busy’ behaviour, as if one were unable to hear the life in Mozart’s music without scenic underlining that will always fall short. Much of this activity hails from a wearisome, near-inevitable additional cast of extras. Whilst not so bad as Katie Mitchell’s Idomeneo, where extra-itis reached epidemic proportions, it remains quite unnecessary: the money would surely have been better spent upon providing more strings for an underpowered, pastel-sounding orchestra. One has to wait quite some time before the music – remember Mozart? – is permitted to begin, since characters must try to find a buzzing insect inside a harpsichord. (Yes, I wish I were making this up…) To add insult to injury, the blind man who ‘introduces’ the first act turns out to be Basilio. Apparently, it is intrinsically amusing for someone to be blind, an assumption some, one would hope many, might find offensive. At least it makes a change from another bizarre recent trend, which insists upon turning this stock buffo character into a camp monstrosity that might have had the makers of Are You Being Served? think twice, Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production in that respect as much else the ne plus ultra.

Barbarina’s coarse behaviour suggests that she is more of a drunk than Antonio; I have no idea why. The Count wanders around his garden without his trousers on and attempts to bugger the Countess (whom he thinks is Susanna, of course), though Figaro – intriguingly – emerges a far more central figure in the fourth act than is often the case. Thank goodness for that, since many others are behaving as if they were teenagers out on a (mild) Saturday night rampage.

Peter McKintosh’s designs bewilder. Doubtless some ‘post-modernist’ point is being attempted in having a mix of eighteenth-century dress and vaguely contemporary clothing. It merely ends up looking a mess. The revolving set permits scene-changing, but tends to tempt the production to unnecessary examples thereof. Why, for instance, does the second act suddenly shift to what appears to be a kitchen, rendering nonsensical talk of jumping from the Countess’s window? If the impression of a maze is intended to portray the Count as Minotaur – there are skulls and carcasses all over the place too – then it is difficult to understand why. Perhaps I am being unimaginatively literal about this, but I am unaware that he wishes to kill anybody. Tedious film images portray nothing in particular from time to time, whilst we apparently need a sound relay of fireworks to delay the beginning of the fourth act, since none of us would know what they sounded like otherwise. (If fireworks must be portrayed, a visual impression would have been preferable, and surely would have been better off placed at the end of the act.)

Worst of all, it is difficult to discern any but the most incidental social tension. Da Ponte and Mozart are not Beaumarchais, of course, but this remains a deeply political opera. Here Figaro’s only problem with the Count is that the latter is an unpleasant man unable to keep his hands off anything in a skirt. The French Revolution stands as distant as it does from a wet night in Walthamstow.

If Shaw knows better than Da Ponte, than so does Jeremy Sams, whose ‘versions’ of Mozart operas have become quite a menace. At best, the text is loosely after the plot, weirdly ranging from the occasional correct translation to the language of EastEnders. ‘Where the hell is Marcellina?’ is one unmusical, undignified gem, if I remember correctly. The number of forced rhymes – a few, and I mean a few, members of the audience found them hilarious – is greater than anyone could reasonably be expected to count and I certainly had no intention of trying. Since almost everyone in the audience will know the original, and will be mentally hearing it in opposition to any translation, let alone to this, would it not be more sensible in an age of surtitles to permit Da Ponte to speak for himself?

Musically, things are better, though they ought to be better still. Paul Daniel is a puzzling Mozart conductor. There is life to his reading, at least when it does not race ahead unnecessarily, as in what may well be the fastest fandango on record (needless to say, presented scenically by unnecessary ‘additional’ dancers). Moreover, the astounding finale to the second act veered dangerously close to turning into a trivial forerunner of Rossini. (Nikolaus Harnoncourt, hardly a ‘traditionalist’, has warned against that path, yet increasingly few seem willing to heed him, let alone masters such as Erich Kleiber, Karl Böhm, or indeed our own Sir Colin Davis.) Indeed, throughout the performance, the orchestral sound lacked depth, sounding strangely muted. This is symphonic music in many – though not all – respects, yet it did not sound like it. In a large house such as the Coliseum, one needs a large orchestra; it really is as simple as that. On the other hand, Daniel slowed down beautifully for the Count’s plea and the moment of forgiveness: a magical moment, the only other being the transformation in ‘Dove sono’. That is, sadly, two more magical moments than many performances muster.

Mentioning ‘Dove sono’ brings me to the high point of the performance, Elizabeth Llewellyn’s Countess. An extremely short notice replacement for Kate Valentine – whom I had much been looking forward to hearing – she truly excelled, penetrating to the very heart, in every sense, of Mozart’s greatest miracle of characterisation. Despite the busy-ness around her, Llewellyn managed to impart a considerable degree of stillness: just what the director should have ordered. Whilst this Countess had impressed at Opera Holland Park, she progressed still further here, the handicap of translation notwithstanding. Roland Wood offered a masculine Count Almaviva: temper tantrums the director’s fault, not his. However, he shaded too close to mere speech at times. Iain Paterson’s Figaro, splendid of diction, presented undeniable, truly laudable honesty of character, though there were occasions when he sounded a little on the elderly side for the role. His Susanna, Devon Guthrie, likewise seemed – and this was more a matter of acting than vocal quality – more mature than is often the case or indeed desirable. Lucy Schaufer’s Marcellina, less of an old hag than usual, indeed often seeming younger than her soon-to-be daughter-in-law, proved a cut above the rest of the cast.

I wonder, however, whether the real problem is inability to distinguish comedy from the merely comic (akin to the Rossini problem mentioned above). Comedy is more a matter of form than of making one laugh; if it would be downright offensive to find Così fan tutte amusing, it is surely at least unnecessary to do so with Figaro. It is perhaps no coincidence that by far the best production I have seen is no laughing matter at all, Claus Guth’s brilliant Ibsen-, even Strindberg-like inversion. That, rather than a touch of vomiting in the garden, is the sort of infidelity upon which Mozart’s characters and indeed Da Ponte’s libretto can thrive.

Varèse 360° (2) and (3) - London Sinfonietta/National Youth Orchestra/Atherton/Daniel, 18 April 2010

Queen Elizabeth Hall and Royal Festival Hall

Varèse – Hyperprism, for wind and percussion
Un grand sommeil noir, for voice and piano
Octandre
Offrandes, for soprano and chamber orchestra
Poème électronique
Intégrales, for wind and percussion

London Sinfonietta
David Atherton (conductor)
Cathie Boyd (staging, director, video, lighting)
Elizabeth Atherton (soprano)
Sound Intermedia
Pippa Nissen (video)
Zerlina Hughes (lighting)
Dan Ayling (stage manager)

***********
Varèse-Chou Wen-Chung – Tuning Up
Varèse – Arcana
Nocturnal, for soprano, male chorus, and small orchestra
Amériques

Elizabeth Watts (soprano)
Laudibus
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Paul Daniel (conductor)
Same production team as previous concert

**********

These two Sunday concerts completed the Southbank Centre’s presentation of the complete Varèse, initiated with a London Sinfonietta concert two nights previously. The Sinfonietta under David Atherton played for the first, again in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, after which we walked across to the Royal Festival Hall, to hear the National Youth Orchestra.

Hyperprism opened the Sinfonietta concert, immediately impressing upon us the urban nature of Varèse’s musical landscapes. Brash and virile, it also had its sleazier moments, in which I fancied I could hear a kinship with another Busoni pupil, Kurt Weill. Un grand sommeil seems to be the only surviving work from Varèse’s pre-1921 period, the others having been destroyed in a warehouse fire: myth-making for a year zero that is almost too good to be true, and yet appears to be just that. It was fascinating to hear this Debussyan Verlaine setting from Elizabeth Atherton and John Constable. The former’s diction was outstanding, though she was a little too tremulous in her delivery. For the first time in the series, we heard a stringed instrument, a double bass, in Octandre. The sinuous woodwind opening, especially Gareth Hulse’s oboe solo, contrasted strongly, as it should, with subsequent jaggedness. As so often with Varèse, one heard echoes of Stravinsky: here the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Offrandes, the first of Varèse’s American works, followed. Here, we heard a few more strings (two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and harp), softening the general tone a little, and providing a very tentative bridge with tradition. Elizabeth Atherton seemed more at home in this highly dramatic performance, in which trumpeter Alistair Mackie also shone in his solo work.

One cannot really say anything about a ‘performance’ of the still extraordinary Poème électronique. The last time I had heard it was in a Sinfonietta concert at Kings Place, in which Le Corbusier’s original film was shown. Here the images were more abstract, arguably permitting one to concentrate more closely upon the music, though the former experience was probably the more interesting. At any rate, this sonic tragedy, initiated by tolling bells and culminating in electronic storm-winds, had lost none of its raw, elemental power. Finally came Intégrales: Varèse surely wrote nothing more masterly than this. The performance again brought out Stravinskian antecedents, the Rite of Spring in particular, through the sharp, insistent repetition of rhythmic cells. Oboe solos once again stood out as particularly exquisite, but it was perhaps above all the hieratic nature of the work that shone through, the chorales presaging a sharply materialist version, if that can be imagined, of Messiaen.

And so to the Festival Hall, to hear the NYO under Paul Daniel. Or not under Paul Daniel, in the opening Tuning Up, Varèse’s witty parody of the opening procedure of a typical orchestral concert. I especially enjoyed the quotation from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, but most captivating was the sense of an event coming into life. I am yet to be convinced that the full orchestra – and the NYO was more than full! – presents the best of Varèse, but Arcana is surely the best of orchestral Varèse. What one heard – and indeed saw – most of all was the sheer enthusiasm with which these young musicians, none older than eighteen, approach and execute their task. It is testament to their achievement that no thought of ‘difficulty’ entered the mind: Varèse was above all enjoyable. Once again echoes of the Rite were heard in what sounded like a veritable concerto for orchestra. And at last one heard soaring strings given their head.

The second half opened with Varèse’s last work, Nocturnal. Elizabeth Watts and the vocal group Laudibus gave a committed performance, replete with histrionics of crucifixion. I cannot claim to understand a work I find frankly bizarre – whoever would have linked Varèse and Anaïs Nin?! – but one cannot gainsay its dramatic effect. We then heard the British premiere of the original, 1921 version of Amériques, including offstage brass and music excised from the composer’s final, slightly more practical, version. The sheer extravagance of the orchestration was relished by Daniel and the orchestra, though I think more is probably ultimately less here: interesting but not necessarily to be preferred – unlike, say, Petrushka or The Firebird. Fantastical, optimistic, sprawling, full of incident, this was clearly the America of Varèse’s dreams, even if they were never to be fulfilled. There was also, however, or at least I fancied so, a more Gallic edge to some of the music that would be excised, indicating a soul in transition. It was, then, all the more fitting that, for an encore, we should hear the work which, when Varèse heard it in Turin, convinced him to become a composer: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. And after the complete Varèse, it was perhaps a relief to hear a Debussy performance that was warm, almost Romantic, rather than stridently modernist. The true radicalism of this first piece of twentieth-century music will, in any case, always tell. I suspect that this will not be the last time we shall hear the excellent flautist Joshua Batty so sensitively voice its tones.