Tally of concerts attended 2025

 

No question whatsoever whose year 2025 was: both in his first placing by a country mile and even in the composers who followed him, many with strong associations to him. That latter point must in itself say something about Boulez's influence both on musical life and thinking in general and on my interests in particular. The other major centenary, that of Berio, fared substantially less well: not, I think, what we should have been likely to expecr even 20 years ago. Why that might be is not immediately obvious, at least to me, but it is surely worth considering.

(As ever, one composer appearance in a concert scores; no further performances in that concert do.)

13 Boulez

5 Debussy, Mahler

4 Bach, Ravel, Stravinsky

3 Beethoven, Chopin, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert

2 Berg, Cage, Carter, Dvořák, Mendelssohn, Liszt

1 John Adams, Eduardo Aguilar, Julian Anderson, Benjamin Attahir, Bartók, Orlando Bass, Georg Anton Benda, Berio, Birtwistle, Brahms, Britten, Bruckner, John Casken, Layale Chaker, Anthony Cheung, Peter Maxwell Davies, Anthony Davis, James Dillon, Marcel Dupré, Giovanni Gabrieli, Helen Grime, John Harbison, Hasse, Henze, Simon Holt, Eva-Maria Houben, Dorothy Howell, Janáček, Golfam Khayam, Kurtág, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Ursula Mamlok, Philippe Manoury, Colin Matthews, Cassandra Miller,  Messiaen, Farnaz Modarresifar, Karl von Ordonnez, Purcell, Daniel Purcell, Respighi, Roussel, Kareem Roustom, Saariaho, Schoeck, Schoenberg, Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Stockhausen, Strauss, Varèse, Claude Vivier, Weber, Webern, Weill, Austin Wulliman

BBC SSO/Volkov - Gabrieli, Stravinsky, and Brahms, 11 September 2025

Royal Albert Hall

Gabrieli, arr. Maderna: In ecclesiis
Stravinsky: Requiem Canticles
Gabrieli, arr. Maderna: Canzone a tre cori
Brahms: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.73

Jess Dandy (contralto)

Ashley Riches (bass-baritone)

National Youth Choir

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ilan Volkov (conductor)

Images: BBC / Andy Paradise

A splendid Prom, whose programming was not only fascinating on paper, but grew in fascination, connection, and meaning as the evening progressed, aided no end by fine performances from soloists, the National Youth Choir, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and Ilan Volkov. Both halves opened with Bruno Maderna orchestral arrangements of works by Giovanni Gabrieli. First was the polychoral motet In ecclesiis, published posthumously in 1615, and arranged by Maderna in 1966. The variety yet consequential nature of Maderna’s choices concerning antiphonal responses shone through in ravishing performance. A Monteverdian sultriness to chamber passages, the grandeur of a fuller orchestra, adept handling and communication of metrical changes, and the sheer wonder of hearing this music – at long last – on modern instruments made for a wonderful curtain-opener resounding in Venetian splendour. Less ‘faithful’ passages with woodwind, harp, and eventually tubular bells brought similar joy to the ears. It built magnificently and subsided with discernment. Those sectional and consequential qualities were also to be heard in Maderna’s 1972 revisiting of the Conzon XVI à 12. Warm, lively, and highly rhythmical, it was again full of colour, not in an over-the-top Respighi-like way, which has its place, but in an unquestionable effort to communicate the essential qualities of the music to a modern audience. The intrinsic qualities of Gabrielian brass, married to warm, incisive strings and unfailingly well-chosen tempi, would have given pleasure to all but the most narrow-minded of authenticists. 

In between came one of the greatest jewels not only of Stravinsky’s late, serial period, but of his career, the Requiem Canticles heard at the composer’s Venetian funeral in 1971: of the same time, then, as Maderna’s arrangements and hailing from a less dissimilar musical world than some might suspect, old and new similarly united and inseparable. Intensity of drama and excellence of playing marked the opening Prelude: a clear indication of ‘serialism, Jim, but not as we know it’. It could only ever be Stravinsky, of course, and so it sounded, with fresh energy and commitment. The ‘Exaudi’ came to our ears as the Symphony of Psalms heard through a prism of Webern. There was something also of a musical object, even of a religious icon, to it: fitting in so many ways. The National Youth Choir’s warmth, diction, and intonation here and elsewhere were striking, as for instance in the distilled, almost homeopathic power of the following ‘Dies irae’. Ashley Riches joined trumpets and bassoons for an implacable yet human ‘Tuba mirum’, bassoon duetting continuing, amongst a quartet of flutes, and others in a duly hieratic ‘Interlude’ that unmistakeably echoed the music of Gabrieli (at least in this context). The ‘Rex tremendae’ said or sang all that need be said or sung, serial process joyously apparent. Was that Mother Goose putting in a guest appearance, courtesy of a rich-toned Jess Dandy, in the ‘Lacrimosa’? The composer’s direct Verdian homage in the ‘Libera me’, partly fragmented through unforgettable chatter of choral souls, brought us to a world of crystalline, celestial perfection in the ‘Postlude’, Messiaen a closer kindred spirit than I had ever previously imagined. 

The final work on the programme was Brahms’s Second Symphony, here given a thoughtful, striking, never less than coherent reconsideration by Volkov. It was fascinating to hear the lines of its opening texture after – in more than one sense – Gabrieli, whose music Brahms programmed amongst much alte Musik in his Wiener Singakademie concerts. The first movement unfolded relatively swiftly, though never unreasonably so; indeed, the composer’s marking ‘Allegro non troppo’ would be a pretty good summary of what we heard. Volkov handled the many tempo changes convincingly, likewise other, related changes of mood. Here, quite rightly, was a world of perpetual motivic transformation, always ‘becoming’ in developing variation: Schoenberg rather than Schenker, one might say. This was not an especially autumnal Brahms, but rather vernal music – horn calls and all – with decidedly darker undercurrents. It surprised, though never for the sake of surprise – telling phrasing here, a sudden diminuendo there – and cohered throughout, the BBC SSO’s multifaceted strings an ever-shifting backbone, if such a thing can be imagined. 

An involved (emotionally, intellectually, and texturally) second movement again brought the quality of Brahms’s counterpoint to the fore, the composer moving closer still to Schoenberg, yet also to Mozart. I am not sure I have heard this music sound more volatile, ever threatening to bubble over, its deep melancholy and Innigkeit part and parcel of a greater humanism. The third movement’s inheritance from Mendelssohn and Schumann was beautifully clear, though the other side of the coin was a tale of twists and turns, of continued suppression of darker truths. Its darkness was quite different, say, from Furtwängler’s, yet I could not help but think the older conductor might have appreciated it and nodded approvingly. And for all its ambiguity and complexity, there was a not entirely dissimilar overall clarity, even simplicity, to it. When the final movement erupted, hard driven at times yet always flexible, it proved thrilling and satisfying in equal measure, conceived both dramatically and symphonically, yet perhaps closer in scale and even temperament to a homage to Haydn rather than to Beethoven. It made, at any rate, for a winning, boisterous way to close a concert full of treasure.

And yet, meaning no disrespect to this excellent concert, the most electrifying and necessary item was yet to come: not an encore, though a return to the podium by Volkov, in which, visibly and audibly anxious, he, as an Israeli, addressed the audience in heartrending fashion concerning the genocide in Gaza. He gave those who did not wish to hear opportunity to leave, even in the face of abuse from malcontents. It would be remiss of me not to report this, though the BBC, it seems, has declined to do so. (The broadcast had by that time finished, it seems, although footage is widely available from elsewhere.) By the same token, I do not think this is quite the place to enter into any discussion of his words, other than to say I marvelled at and was inspired by his courage and stand in solidarity with him. His words (I hope I have transcribed them correctly) should now speak for themselves: 

In my heart there is great pain now, every day for months. I come from Israel and live there. I love it: it’s my home. But what’s happening is atrocious and horrific on a scale that’s unimaginable. I know that many of us feel completely helpless in front of it. Innocent Palestinians being killed in thousands, displaced again and again, without hospitals and schools, not knowing when's the next meal. Israeli hostages are kept in terrible conditions for almost two years and political prisoners are languishing in Israeli jails. Israelis – Jews and Palestinians – won’t be able to stop this alone. I ask you, I beg you all, to do whatever is in your power to stop this madness. Every little action counts while governments hesitate and wait. We cannot let this go on any longer; every moment that passes puts the safety of millions in risk. Thank you.

Thank you, Ilan (if I may). The conductor has since announced that he will no longer work in Israel.

Salzburg Festival (4) - Stefanovich, Lečić, Widmann, SWR: Debussy, Boulez, and Stravinsky, 20 August 2025

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Debussy, arr. Bavouzet: Jeux. Poème dansé
Boulez: Dialogue de l’ombre double
Stravinsky: Concerto for two pianos
Boulez: Piano Sonata no.2

Tamara Stefanovich, Nenad Lečić (pianos)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

SWR Experimentalstudio

Michael Acker, Maurice Oeser (sound direction)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

The most radical of Debussy’s orchestral works, perhaps the most radical of all Debussy’s works, Jeux held a special place in Boulez’s conducting repertory. He even served as Myriam Chimènes’s co-editor for this instalment in the critical edition, incorporating several of the revisions Debussy made following the 1913 premiere. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s transcription for two pianos, published in 2005 and taking up the memory of a lost version Debussy mentioned in a letter to his publisher, was given here with further modifications from the performers, Tamara Stefanovich and Nenad Lečić. One piano (Lečić), then the other, then two pianos, quickly dissolving into the sound of one, equally swift in sonic reinstatement as two: this brought different, at least equal challenges to the performers as the magically elusive orchestral score. At times, pitch seemed to gain a certain priority among parameters (as Boulez’s generation would know them) but other substitutes, complements, and contrasts vied for position too, not least the fascinating distinction between piano touch and orchestral timbre. It flickered in different ways, inevitably sounding closer to the piano works, both solo and En blanc et noir, in some ways akin to a continuous suite of études. The narrative was there too, though, both in detail and mood, often insouciant, sometimes languorous, infinitely malleable, always unhurried, yet precise and directed (if neither in a Boulezian nor a Beethovenian way). Seemingly as overflowing with melody as a work by Schoenberg, the piece and its harmonies could barely have registered more irresistibly in a performance both responsive and responsorial (to borrow from the Boulezian future). Sly, ineffable seduction led to a nonchalant closing shrug as perfectly prepared as it was delivered. 

Dialogue de l’ombre double was dedicated to Berio for his 60^th birthday, coinciding precisely with that of Boulez, in 1985, thus neatly combining this year’s two great musical centenaries. Although the most recent performance will well-nigh inevitably stand freshest in one’s mind, I think I can safely say I have never heard a better performance than that from Jörg Widmann, doubling with his recorded self, courtesy of Michael Acker and Maurice Oeser of the SWR Experimentalstudio (another important Boulez link). In some ways – it can probably only ever be some – it may also have been the most faithful to Boulez’s conception, originating in Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de satin in which a double shadow of the central pair Rodrigue and Prouhèze is projected onto a wall, yet surely also inspired by Antonin Artaud’s idea of the glimpse of uncorrupted reality afforded by theatre’s ‘double’, and indeed to the ‘double’ variation form of the French eighteenth century, as well. as the doubling and shadowing in the relationships of work/composer and performance/performer characteristic of all notated music. All were certainly present, from the lighting that created Widmann’s silhouette on the wall to the continuation of Jeux’s responsorial two-piano elements with new means, transforming in the hall around us, more than hinting at the work’s relationship to Boulez’s own Répons. There were surprises too, such as the plunge into darkness at the beginning, the first notes we heard being the double rather than Widmann, who must have come onstage during those magical first arabesques. Perhaps one could see him, perhaps not; my mind’s eye and ear where rightly elsewhere. Unending melody, punctuated and structured in highly visible as well as audible form, created a form of music theatre that yet remained above all music. 

Stefanovich and Lečić returned to the stage after the interval for another outstanding two-piano performance, this time of Stravinsky’s Concerto for two pianos: not the most Boulez-friendly Stravinsky, and thus arguably all the more welcome in this context. Scènes de ballet might have been provocative; this, the more one listened, was thoughtful and productive, complementing as well as contrasting, whatever the two composers might have thought (or said). It would make a fascinating companion piece to Structures one day, perhaps alongside Stockhausen’s Mantra—Mozart or Schubert too. Its quietly ferocious regularity – ‘who me? igniting a debate?’ – made for an opening contrast of equal intelligence and beauty, not least in the chiaroscuro of this performance. The first movement’s surprising yet undeniable approaches to Shostakovich registered with startling clarity, and then Stravinsky pulled another rabbit out of the hat, then another… Much could be learned – in my case, was – from simple observance of the pianists’ body language and again that responsorial quality. The hollowed-out quality of Stravinsky’s tonality shone keenly, even brazenly in the second movement. At the same time, so did its undeniably ‘Russian’ roots, for instance in Petrushka. The final two movements, increasingly involved, offered ever more radical complement and development the more closely one listened. There was play too, of course, categories slyly undermined as soon as they were established. Perhaps this was not so distant from Boulez, even from his Second Piano Sonata, as we might have imagined. 

Thus to Stefanovich’s thrilling, astounding climax. I have heard fine performances of this work but none finer. Indeed, I think it may well have been the most all-encompassing, red in tooth and claw, white in heat, and both desolate and bracing in numerous aftershocks, I have heard, whether live or on record. The work’s beauty and violence were dialectically present from the opening of the first movement. How Stefanovich had the piano yield, melodically and still more harmonically, brought a surprising yet welcome touch of Brahms (perhaps via the unstable ‘model’ of Beethoven). Phrasing too was just as crucial—and revealing, every bit as much so as in Mozart or Beethoven. Artaud was more palpably, viscerally to the fore than in the Dialogue: ‘organised delirium’ (the title both for Caroline Potter’s recent study for Boydell and for Stefanovich’s still newer Pentatone CD tribute: grab both!) As Messiaen recalled his young pupil, ‘like a lion that had been flayed alive’, so not only was the work, not only was the performance, but so were we in audience response. There was a quasi-religious fervour to a fire that also signalled Beethovenian concision (the Fifth Symphony’s first movement, for instance). It was over before we knew, yet remained with us. 

If the first movement in some sense prepared us for the second – the first moment of aftershock – it also could not, given the new paths taken. Given the enormous challenges of communication, Stefanovich’s command of line proved close to incredible. It built on unerring power and a sense of ‘rightness’, that it could not be otherwise. Doubtless it could be; there are always alternatives. In the moment, though, one should (generally) feel otherwise. The third movement, unsurprisingly given its earlier origin, connected most obviously with Boulez’s earlier piano music, yet only as a starting point. Once again, the clarity and direction of what we heard, work and performance, was striking. Reconstruction and annihilation on seemingly endless, yet soon ended, repeat were the hallmark of the fourth movement, at least its beginning, all at once—and yet with Mozartian clarity. Ever transforming, ever bewitching, it stretched mind and ears, inviting them to repay the compliment. It scalded, it froze, liquid extremes imparting simultaneous life and death. The final, undeniable aftershock offered, if not peace, then a sense of human spirit in varied abundance.

 

Hadelich/BBC SO/Oramo - Stravinsky, Mendelssohn, Davis, and Strauss, 24 July 2025

Royal Albert Hall

Stravinsky: Chant du rossignol
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, op.64
Anthony Davis: Tales (Tails) of the Signifying Monkey (European premiere)
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, op.28

Augustin Hadelich (violin)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Sakari Oramo (conductor)

Stravinsky seems unfashionable in London right now. Maybe it is my imagination, or maybe it is a consequence of increasingly non-existent public funding that what once stood at the very core of twentieth-century repertoire is now not considered ‘safe’ enough. I am sure, though, we used to encounter his music more frequently. Like the opera from which it is drawn, the Chant du rossignol seems always to have been curiously neglected. Goodness knows why; both are magical works and not obviously ‘difficult’. Boulez was, of course, a persistent and compelling advocate. It is perhaps especially fitting, then, that the BBC Symphony Orchestra should programme the work in his centenary year for the music festival at which Boulez was a longstanding, greatly valued guest, probably in no composer more often than Stravinsky. 

Sakari Oramo’s predecessor would surely have admired the éclat with which this performance opened and might well have heard more than a little of his own compositional history in what followed. Not that Oramo neglected Stravinsky’s ‘Russianness’ in a colourful, detailed, incisive, and magical performance that also boasted a good measure of Debussyan languor when called for, humour too (for instance in downward trombone slide). Echoes – more properly, pre-echoes – of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring were to be heard in harmony, metre, timbre, and much else. Narrative was clear and meaningful, in what duly sounded as a drama in (relative) miniature. Perhaps, though, it was the haunting stillness at the work’s heart that lingered longest in the memory. Solos – flute, violin, trumpet, and others – were all finely taken by BBC SO principals. I have little doubt Boulez would have loved the harp playing too. 

I cannot recall offhand whether Boulez ever conducted the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, but I imagine he might have done. He certainly admired the composer’s orchestral music, contrasting it and that of Berlioz to Schumann’s, in that one would never retouch or rebalance, given the composers’ perfect scoring. The opening is tricky, though it should never sound so—and certainly did not here, in a beautifully ‘natural’-sounding performance of the first movement that flowed fast without ever sounding rushed. Conductor, orchestra, and the simply outstanding soloist Augustin Hadelich captured Mendelssohn’s world, emotional as well as stylistic, to a tee. A poignant second subject was never remotely sentimentalised. Indeed, all had just the right sort of Romantic ardour and humanism to it. There was a wonderfully fresh sense of discovery too; at times, one might almost have been hearing it for the first time—and doubtless some in the audience were. The movement’s concision once again astonished me: seemingly over before it had begun, and just as dramatic in its different way as the Stravinsky. Transitions between movements were equally well judged, the central Andante given with a rapt lyricism that was far from restricted to the violin. Unendliche Melodie, as Wagner might have been compelled to admit. Like the concerto as a whole, it was deeply moving without evidently trying to be. An elfin finale, as infectious as anything in the Midsummer Night’s Dream music, emerged bright as a button, Hadelich’s playing both splendidly old-world and very much of now. The encore – which I have had to look up – was his own arrangement, effortless in idiom and despatch, of Carlos Gadel’s ‘Por una cabeza’. 

It is probably better to pass over what Boulez might have made of the European premiere of Anthony Davis’s unabashedly tonal Tales (Tails) of the Signifying Monkey, drawn from his opera of the same year (1997) Amistad. Davis clearly has a fondness, as his admirably informative programme note made clear, for unsual metres: dances in 11/8, 13/8, and so on. Likewise for ostinato: perhaps one of Stravinsky’s deadlier legacies. He knows what he is doing in writing for the orchestra too, and deftly brings in sounds from the jazz world. I could not help thinking, though, that what we heard sounded considerably over-extended and might have worked better illustrating a television series. Applause was polite yet reticent; I think the audience had it right. The United States is truly a foreign country, nowhere more so than its musical culture. (Consider Boulez in New York.)

Till Eulenspiegel is a relatively rare example of a Strauss work Boulez conducted. There is an excellent live recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, once released by the orchestra itself and which seems to be available on YouTube too. How different things might have been, had Wieland Wagner’s death not brought to an end the prospect of Boulez and him collaborating on Salome, Elektra, and Ariadne auf Naxos. An endearingly, acutely strange commercial recording of Also sprach Zarathustra suggests they would have been as different from hitherto received wisdom as the Wagner and Mahler that changed the way we hear and understand that music forever. Back to the present, Strauss’s tone poem received a finely judged performance from Oramo and the BBC SO that lacked nothing in requisite virtuosity, yet likewise did not take that virtuosity for musical substance. If I found it occasionally a little hard-driven, there was plenty of flexibility where called for. Episodes were discerningly characterised whilst taking their place in the grander narrative. Counterpoint was admirably, necessarily clear, characters and situations leaping off the page. The BBC may have been in anything but safe hands since Boulez’s time; Radio 3 is now reduced to screaming ‘Adventures in Classical’ from garish banners hung around the Royal Albert Hall. Its eponymous Symphony Orchestra continues to do very well indeed.

Nash Inventions - Stravinsky, Holt, Grime, Davies, Carter, Casken, Matthews, and Anderson, 18 March 2025

Wigmore Hall

Stravinsky: Concertino
Simon Holt: Acrobats on a loose wire (world premiere)
Helen Grime: Long have I lain beside the water (world premiere)
Davies: String Quintet
Carter: Mosaic
John Casken: Mantle (world premiere)
Colin Matthews: C.A.N.O.N. (world premiere)
Julian Anderson: Van Gogh Blue

Claire Booth (soprano)
Nash Ensemble
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Founded in October 1964 by Amelia Freedman at the Royal Academy of Music, a shortish walk away from the Wigmore Hall, the Nash Ensemble is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary season, this the culminating concert in a day’s events of ‘Nash Inventions’ that was but one part, broadly speaking the ‘new music’ part, of that season. As Harrison Birtwistle noted, quoted in the programme, the Nash is and has been unusual in ‘dedication to the old and the new’. Here, no fewer than four world premieres were heard alongside other Nash commissions, plus Stravinsky’s Concertino. 

Stravinsky’s 1920 piece for string quartet received a performance making it sound as new as the day it was born, now of course more than a century ago. Incisive, even aggressive, the Nash’s account showed that rich tone was not inimical to such qualities, quite the contrary. Quite rightly, this singular work sounded unlike anything else, although certain approaches to The Soldier’s Tale made a welcome impression.

Simon Holt’s new work, Acrobats on a Loose Wire, for flute (in the balcony above and behind) and string trio draws inspiration from a painting by Jusepe de Ribera. Its clear trajectory, the flautist moving from piercing piccolo to alto flute and finally to (standard) C flute, seemingly unaware of the string trio on stage proved engaging and brimming with melody of a kind one might almost, borrowing from Wagner, call ‘unendlich(e)’. 

Soprano Claire Booth and conductor Martyn Brabbins joined flute, clarinet, string trio, and harp for the premiere of Helen Grime’s  Long have I lain beside the water in its chamber version. Originally, it was the final song in a cycle for orchestra and solo soprano, to words by Zoe Gilbert. ‘A lament’, to quote Gilbert, ‘by a murderous sister, a tale of jealousy and love,’ it opens with a single pitch passed from woodwind to soprano, other instruments joining around them (descending). Words and music seemed to form an indissoluble union, both as work and performance, whether melismatic or syllabic. In that, they gave a taste – rather more than that – of gripping drama in which every note counted: both song and scena, it seemed. Typically vivid of timbre, it made me keen to hear the larger work from which it comes. 

Next came Peter Maxwell Davies’s 2014 String Quintet. Whether it was quite the right time and place to hear it, I have my doubts. It made for a long evening with this broad span of four movements. Still, if there were few surprises here, there was unquestionably compositional craft. The first movement in particular, entitled ‘Chacony’, might initially have sounded conventional, and the music is naturally distant from the anger of the composer’s youth; its ambiguities nonetheless suggested something more elusive the closer one listened. An oblique ‘Reel’, a broad, sometimes anguished ‘Slow Air’, and the whirlwind of a vigorous closing ‘Stamash’ brought us to the interval. 

Elliott Carter’s 2004 Mosaic, taking a further decade’s step back, proved a fine counterpart in context to the Grime piece. Once again, every note counted in a bejewelled mosaic for flute, oboe, clarinet, harp, string trio, and double bass. It evinced all the vigour of a young composer and all the wisdom of the composer’s actual years in a setting so exquisite one might reach for the word ‘Mozartian’. There was certainly no gainsaying the vibrance of the performance. If every aspect of form were not immediately to be grasped, it was certainly, like a mosaic, to be perceived as a whole. 

Returning to 2024, John Caskeen’s Mantle for piano and wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) offered a different sort of ‘classical’, perhaps in some ways closer to Stravinsky’s brand (though hardly to the Concertino heard on this occasion). Again, one sensed, even if one could not necessarily grasp, the music mapped out before us in another vividly present performance. As with most of the music heard this evening – excepting the Davies Quintet – there was a suggestion of it having covered such ground as might have been expected from a considerably longer piece, its span if not short, then certainly not long. It pulsed with life and clear, sonata-like direction. 

Colin Matthews’s new commission, C.A.N.O.N. for soprano and piano trio, took its leave from a 2022 setting of Christopher Reid’s poem ‘O’ for what would have been Oliver Knussen’s 70th birthday. Its first part, ‘C’ for Claire, did not actually include Claire Booth: instead, we heard a wistful, even Romantic movement for piano trio. Instant contrast was offered with an ‘A’ vocal movement (as with the rest, words by Reid) for ‘Anonymals’, ‘the numberless nameless ones’, but also for ‘Amelia’. Both singer and composer truly used the words to shape music—and, so it seemed, vice versa. ‘N’ for ‘Nightingale’ and ‘Nash’ offered the bird’s voice, I think, first in the trio, then reflected in the vocal writing. ‘O’ was clearly very much the heart of the material; that I could tell before having read the composer’s note. And ‘Narwhals’, once again for ‘Nash’, felt from the outset as a finale, its music founded on yet never merely dictated by the words it ‘set’.

Again without prejudice to any music in particular, I felt the second half might have benefited from one fewer piece. Julian Anderson’s Van Gogh Blue, for which Brabbins returned to conduct an ensemble of flute, two clarinets, harp, viola, and cello, nonetheless made for a characterful and characteristic conclusion. Sparer though also more luxuriant, perhaps more ‘Gallic’ in sensibility, it formed a beautifully crafted homage to Van Gogh’s paintings in musical images of the colour blue from dawn to midnight. The brightness of the latter made for a fitting, somewhat disturbing evocation of Starry Night in light of the painter’s suicide: clarinets again above, a quarter-tone apart.

 

The Rake's Progress, Opéra national de Paris, 30 November 2024

Palais Garnier

Tom Rakewell – Ben Bliss
Nick Shadow – Iain Paterson
Trulove – Clive Bayley
Anne Trulove – Golda Schultz
Mother Goose – Justina Gringytė
Baba the Turk – Jamie Barton
Sellem – Rupert Charlesworth
Keeper of the Madhouse – Vartan Gabrielian
Voices from the Crowd – Ayumi Ikehata, Frédéric Guieu
Solo Voice – Laurent Laberdesque

Director, lighting – Olivier Py
Revival director – Joséphine Kirch
Designs – Pierre-André Weitz
Lighting collaboration – Bertrand Killy

Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus director: Ching-Lien Wu) 

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

Images: Guergana Damaniova / OnP

The Rake’s Progress seems, as Stravinsky admitted, almost ‘to have been to have been created for journalistic debates concerning: a) the historical validity of the approach; and, b) the question whether I am guilty of imitation and pastiche.’ Or so, once, it did—to me, at least, and I think to many others too. I no longer bother about such questions; I am not sure anyone else does either. That does not mean it has ceased to pose us questions. Far from it. Their nature, though, has changed and they tend to focus, quite rightly, on the musical drama rather than ‘legitimacy’ or even timeliness. If in some yet far from all ways, it marked the end of a line, or at least a high watermark, for the neoclassical Stravinsky, with distance, it seems far from the end of a musical line. More to the point, in its very artificiality and neither entirely like nor unlike Così fan tutte – their orchestras, as Stravinsky noted, similar in size – it seems increasingly to move audiences and indeed performers in ways all too readily missed by earlier generations. 

Entirely by coincidence, I had spoken a little about The Rake’s Progress in a session of my undergraduate class on Mozart’s operas earlier in the week, taking it and Der Rosenkavalier as two highly contrasted twentieth-century operas consciously written in Mozart’s wake. It was probably that that had lodged a further Stravinskian utterance in my mind: ‘If the Rake contains imitations, however – of Mozart, as has been said,’ Stravinsky owned, ‘I will gladly allow the charge (given the breadth of the Aristotelian word), if I may thereby release people from the argument and bring them to the music.’ That ‘if’, however is the point; it is actually rarely Mozart who comes to my mind, the coincidences being too obvious, whether in Stravinsky or in Auden (Da Ponte too, of course). If anything, that was even less so here, in a performance led by Susanna Mälkki which felt more remote both from such ‘debates’ and indeed from any performing tradition than another I can recall. There were things I missed:, the polemical Stravinsky, the ultra-referential Stravinsky, much of the archness and the bite, to which somewhat soft-centred playing from the Paris Opéra orchestra contributed (presumably at the conductor’s request). 

Other correspondences nonetheless arose: that of the balletic Stravinsky, not so much the ‘great’ scores of the early century as some closer in time to the Rake: the Scènes de ballet in particular, but also, at a somewhat greater distance, Jeu de cartes and even the Tchaikovskian Fairy’s Kiss. Such neoclassicism makes sense, of course, though it also draws into question the usefulness of the term, since it refers to and indeed means such very different things in different contexts and at different times, all the more so when unmistakeable ostinato kinship with Oedipus Rex (beyond that, also to Poulenc) reared its head. These may well have been as much my thoughts as anything intended; it is difficult to say. But what I did sense, quite strongly, was a more overt sense of sadness – partly tempi, which often felt slow – and even tragedy. It was as if the work, consciously or otherwise, were being assimilated into a more ‘operatic’, even Italianate, tradition such as Stravinsky himself spoke of, that of Verdi, but also at times that of Berg, the latter perhaps ironically, given the contrast Stravinsky himself drew with that tradition, eschewing ‘forms symbolically expressive of the dramatic content (as in the Daedalian examples of Alban Berg)’ in favour of number opera. But then should we ever take Stravinsky at his word, or at least at face value? 

That musical trajectory seemed to proceed broadly in tandem with Olivier Py’s production, here on the first night of its revival. Haunted by death, in the ‘person’ of Tom’s uncle’s skeleton, and also, at the front of the stage, by the memento mori of a skull and hourglass, it too seemed to say or accept that this was less an opera about opera than it was simply an opera. Anne bore Tom’s child, who had advanced a few years by the final scene. Again, there was loss, at least for me, not least in any sense of London, a major character not only in Hogarth but surely at least in Auden too. Perhaps, though, I feel that more keenly as a Londoner, and one should not be restrictive about such things. There was not so much either, though, of city life, even more generically. The production felt not so much abstracted as moving psychology to the foreground, almost to the exclusion of anything else. On its own terms, all was stylishly presented, Pierre-André Weitz’s designs showing a keen eye for colour schemes and correspondences. Dance, both in character and more abstract-interpretative, played a role, heightening that sense of kinship with the composer’s ballets. 

The cast was strong throughout, with a lovely central pair in Ben Bliss’s Tom and Golda Schultz’s Anne. Bliss’s performance engaged one’s sympathies through honeyed tone and acting alike. Schultz presented a stronger, more ‘present’ character than is often the case, and was all the better for it. Iain Paterson’s Nick Shadow was quite without caricature, a more rounded character in the conventional sense, in keeping with broader parameters of performance and production. Love her or hate her, you cannot ignore Baba the Turk, and that was very much the knowing showbiz strategy of Jamie Barton’s assumption of the role. I especially enjoyed Rupert Charlesworth’s auctioneer Sellem, perhaps the most vocally acted of all performances, manner and mannerism conveying so much with relatively little: highly Stravinskian, one might say. Other roles were all well taken, with a keen sense of theatre, chorus members and dancers included. If there were times when I felt the chorus, like the orchestra, lacked Stravinskian bite, that was doubtless in part a consequence of Mälkki’s interpretative stance than performance as such.   

Where, then, does that leave us? Going round in further circles? To an extent, yes; does it not always with this work? Yet the repertoire assimilationism did bring something new, surely to be welcomed, whatever my personal likes or dislikes. Once again, I was led to reflect on how much we, or at least I, might be steered by Stravinsky’s CBS recording, technically flawed yet in possession of qualities it is difficult not to think near-definitive. It is surely a sign of maturity that, however much that may be imprinted on some of our memories, the work and our reactions to it have multiple lives beyond any of its creators. I never sympathised with, say, Boulez’s condemnation to Cage: ‘Have you heard Rake’s Progress? What ugliness!’ though I understood why he might have thought so and perhaps in part wanted to agree. Right now, though, I am grateful to have gone beyond that, as surely we all should have, seventy years on. Debates change yet persist.

Musikfest Berlin (1) - Prohaska/Aimard: Ives, Stravinsky, and Debussy, 1 September 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Ives: 25 songs from the collections 114 Songs and Eleven Songs
Stravinsky: Four Russian Songs; Three Songs from William Shakespeare: ‘Full Fadom Five’
Debussy: Prose lyriques

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Image copyright: Berliner Festspiele, Foto/photo Fabian Schellhorn

My visit to this year’s Musikfest Berlin began with a fascinating, brilliant recital from Anna Prohaska and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, weaving five selections of songs by Charles Ives, like Arnold Schoenberg 150 this year, amongst a set apiece from Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy. There may be about 400 Ives songs to choose from, but the selections were anything but random, whether in themselves or in combination with the other works. I doubt many in the audience will have been familiar with more than a few, but they will surely have won a good few converts: just what an anniversary celebration is for. 

The first Ives set, running into Stravinsky, offered songs of remembrance and autumn, the latter often being a time when minds turn to the former. Yet, just as memories are not always what one might expect, nor was the opening ‘Memories’, written when Ives was still a student at Yale. In two sections – what appear to all intents and purposes to be two separate songs – the first offered a seamless transition from pre-concert hubbub into recital, Aimard arriving on stage to put his music on the piano, declining applause, suddenly joined on the piano stool in a little coup de théâtre by Prohaska. The two then launched into ‘We’re sitting in the opera house, the opera house, the opera house…’. Aimard’s own delivery of the line ‘Curtain!’ brought proceedings, as beautifully acted as sung by Prohaska, to a close, swiftly to be followed by a distinctly New England languor for the second section, ‘Rather Sad’. Just when one thinks one might have begun to get to grips with Ives, if hardly to pin him down, he throws everything up in the air again, whether through the absorbing piano writing – very much Aimard’s thing – of ‘A Farewell to Land’, one line seemingly multiplying in a radical alternative to Schoenberg; the bracing, disquieting liberty of the night in ‘The “Incantation”’; or the tricky, jaunty, yet unerringly ‘true’ speech rhythm, captured by Prohaska to a tee, of ‘September’. Indeed, that sense of ‘truth’, ponderous, even portentous though it might sound, seemed to ring, well, true throughout, in Ives’s harmonies, the obstinacies of his rhythms, and much else. 

It is perhaps more usual to hear Stravinsky’s Four Russian Songs for voice and instrumental ensemble, although frankly one is lucky ever to hear them in any form. I am not sure I have had the opportunity before in concert, likewise with ‘Full Fadom Five’ from the Three Songs from William Shakespeare. In the former, the voice in particular captured once more to a tee this world of Les Noces in miniature. The ease with which Prohaska summoned up the right ‘voice’ for each section of the recital made it all seem so easy, art concealing art, Aimard’s command of metre and its transformation equally fundamental to the performance’s success. A whole new world was brought into life with great personality, alongside and indeed dependent on accuracy and musicality. The late, serial Stravinsky, time-travelling as widely and wildly as ever, was represented by the Shakespeare song: another jewel combining Webern-like process with ghosts of another past, in this case that of English music. Intervallic and harmonic flashes of that world beguiled yet also warned, prior to the celebrated Tempest tolling: ‘Ding dong bell’. 

That song was followed by Ives’s Shakespeare setting of the same text, ‘A Sea Dirge’ richly post-Romantic, for want of a better word, yet still admirably concise. Prohaska’s ‘Hark now’ haunted like a siren, recording an earlier recital and album of hers. Not for the first time, traces of Schoenberg also haunted proceedings, but it was Ives and no one else who set us truly along the path of contrasts between town and nature. ‘The Swimmers’ evoked worlds physical and metaphysical, culminating in a strikingly declamatory declaration that the protagonist was the sea’s master, not its slave. ‘Soliloquy’ proved increasingly expressionist, continuing that at least intermittent Schoenbergian thread. Modern life and its contrasts – alienation is more Mahler’s world – was the stuff in performance as well as text for ‘the New River’, followed by a poignant account of the Matthew Arnold setting, ‘West London’, unusually expansive in this company. The wry ‘Ann Street’ and ‘In the Alley’, the latter’s musical and verbal twist nicely – or naughtily – relished led us to a circus band full of surprises in the song of that name, seemingly aching to be staged and responding well to the soprano’s natural scenic gifts. 

Following the interval, a more impressionist or at least Debussyan Ives evoked ‘Evening’, ‘Mists’ and, in between, the ‘Evidence’ of his own words, preparing the way for spellbinding performances of Debussy’s Proses lyriques. The post-Wagnerian harmonies of ‘De rêve’ breathed a different air, leading us by the hand into a kaleiodoscopic dream world that emerged all the better for its clear-sightedness. The crepuscular tumult of ‘De grève’ and the Yniold-like shift (apparently without Pelléas’s catch) in the final ‘De soir’ offered further instances, as did ‘De fleurs’ in between, of subtle, imperceptible shaping, songs growing out of words and harmony, which in turn seemed to grow out of the shifting light they had themselves engendered. 

Ives’s ‘Berceuse’ made for a nice bridge to the final set, its lack of perfume and striking straightforwardness – which is certainly not to say simplicity – announcing a different voice and path, one leading perhaps from childhood, through battle, and ultimately to the strange heaven of General Booth. ‘Tom Sails Away’ suggested a world somewhere, aptly, between the whimsical and the visionary, that sense of liminality carried through into the next-but-one ‘Slow March’, its quotation of the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul both comforting and jarring. The closing ‘General Booth Enters into Heaven’ one might call a scena in itself, were such Italianate ways not so alien to Ives. It seemed to capture the composer’s brazen individuality and individualism: complex and straightforward, familiar and strange, old and new. Like a Mahler symphony, it seemed to embrace everything, to be like as well as of the world. Aimard gave the last of his own vocal interjections here, ‘Hallelujah!’ Yet it was Prohaska’s question that lingered, unsettlingly: ‘Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?’ It was quite a climax, to be followed only by a taste of the soprano’s upcoming Musikfest concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, in which she will sing more Ives songs, this time orchestrated by Eberhard Kloke. ‘The Cage’ left us asking, quite properly: ‘Is life anything like that?’ If only it were.

RSB/Brabbins - Mendelssohn and Stravinsky, 16 March 2024

Konzerthaus

Mendelssohn: Symphony no.4 in A major, op.90, ‘Italian’
Mendelssohn: Hymne, op.96
Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments
Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms

Denis Uzun (mezzo-soprano)

Berlin Radio Chorus (chorus director: Philipp Ahmann)

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Mendelssohn and Stravinsky might not seem the most obvious bedfellows, but this Berlin Radio Symphony (RSB) concert, originally planned with Andrew Davis but conducted by Martyn Brabbins, offered pause for thought as well as enjoyment. Both composers had fraught relationships either with Wagner or his music—and, by extension, with that strain of musical Romanticism. (Even Liszt, that most generous spirited of composers, could refer dismissively to the ‘opposition’ as ‘leipzigerisch’.) The nature of their (neo)classicism is far from the same, but it offers an interesting perspective, even when the music performed is not so markedly in that mould. One could certainly spill a good deal of ink in discussing the relationship of the two Stravinsky works here to ideas and practice of neoclassicism. That, you will doubtless be relieved to know, must await another day, but such initial thoughts offered a frame through which to hear the works concerned. 

The RSB played Mendlessohn’s Italian Symphony with irresistible élan, string sheen and sunny woodwind a delight throughout. Brabbins was surely on the fast side for ‘Allegretto vivace’, but many conductors are.  Throughout, he imparted a proper sense of development to Mendelssohn’s writing, nowhere more so than in the featherlight counterpoint of the development section proper, though that certainly continued in the recapitulation. There was Abruzzo-like heat too in a reading full of colour and incident, aptly foreshadowing the processional of the second movement, which similarly benefited from transparent textures and a keen sense of direction. A graceful minuet, replete with trio that went properly beyond it in more than one direction, led to a saltarello both disciplined and wild, its contagion as impressive as its chiaroscuro. 

The op.96 Hymne, ‘Three Spiritual Songs’ (as they are known in the version with organ) plus a concluding ‘Fuga’, received a winning performance, mezzo Deniz Uzun and the Berlin Radio Chorus joining Brabbins and the orchestra. Telling detail could be heard without exaggeration, variety in scoring (the opening of the second, an especially lovely ‘hymn’, setting solo voice against woodwind consort) registering in every case. A lively third, with growing sense of jubilation, revealed once again what a fine chorus this is: ideal in weight, balance, and clarity. Much the same could be said of the concluding fugue. 

Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments sounded as seductive and rebarbative as ever, a perfect objet trouvé that find itself somehow chiselled to still further perfection. Apparently ossified lines suggestive of The Rite of Spring were imbued with radically new life, the performance as a whole splendidly alive: a liturgy in itself, to which we were permitted audience if not participation. If Boulez was an ideal interpreter (celebrant?) of this hieratic music, I could not help but think Stockhausen must have loved it too. At any rate, it made for a splendid introit to the Symphony of Psalms, whose similar strangeness registered visually in orchestral layout (famously, no violins and violas, nor clarinets) before a note had been heard. 

It proved another labyrinth, as full of incident in its way, above all in the first movement, as Mendelssohn’s Symphony. Glorious choral sound was well complemented by the orchestra; if there were occasions when the two threatened to go their separate ways, it never quite happened. More to the point, the inscrutability of Stravinsky’s musical devices – utterly characteristic ostinato in the first movement, the double fugue of the second – proved once again to pass all ‘expressive’ understanding, the composer’s ever-surprising ear made musically manifest. What a strange ‘response’ to the text Stravinsky offers in the words from Psalm 150 in the third movement. He would doubtless have said he was not responding at all, but simply setting them. That can readily become play with words, for ‘expression’ here, if hardly Romantic, was no less powerful for being what it was: quite the contrary. Brabbins took the opening daringly slow, providing all the greater contrast with what was to come. Music seeming at times to circle the worlds of the Symphony in Three Movements and even the Circus Polka never seemed remotely incongruous; roots and essence led to a hypnotic, even sanctified close.

The Rake's Progress, Royal Academy of Music, 24 November 2022

Susie Sainsbury Theatre

Tom Rakewell – Ryan Vaughan Davies
Anne Trulove – Cassandra Wright
Nick Shadow – Jacob Phillips
Father Trulove – Hovhannes Karapetyan
Sellem – Samuel Kibble
Baba the Turk – Rebecca Hart
Mother Goose – Georgia Mae Ellis
Keeper of the Madhouse – Duncan Stenhouse.

Frederic Wake-Walker (director)
Anna Jones (designs)
Charlotte Burton (lighting)
Ergo Phizmiz (collage, animation, AI image generation and illustration)
Lottie Bywater (illustration and animation)

Chorus
Royal Academy Sinfonia
Trevor Pinnock (conductor)

Blessed by varied approaches to its staging and performance, The Rake’s Progress seems to remain eternally itself (whatever that might mean, as a sometime Prince of Wales might have put it). Not unlike Stravinsky’s evergreen score, the cleverer and in many respects the more involving the more one knows it, everything may seem to come from somewhere else, and in a sense it does; but equally, in another sense, it does not. It makes for great theatre, almost no matter what, and Royal Academy Opera certainly achieved that, as indeed it did when I reviewed an earlier production here by John Ramster, seven years ago. 

This new incarnation, directed by Frederic Wake-Walker, relies heavily on eye-catching animation (Ergo Phizmiz) and images of present-day London from Downing Street to City towers to (presumably former) local authority buildings in their shadow. In one sense (yes, Janus-faced again), it was not always clear to me what it might all add up to. Another Rake placing London at its very heart, Simon McBurney’s as seen in Aix, for me penetrated deeper. For instance, with cardboard boxes—a very large one being Baba the Turk’s sedan chair—arriving alongside partygoers on Downing Street, I assumed we might have some sort of insight into more notorious parties still; yet instead, we headed somewhere else. The party had moved on—as, of course, so many Covid partygoers urged us to. Perhaps indeed that was the point, for earlier eighteenth-century costumes and Arcadia notwithstanding, this was a Rake for the age of Instagram, chorus members eager to snap pictures of Baba once she had emerged.

The odd thing was that Baba simply seemed to be a celebrity, with no evident reason for notoriety and certainly no beard: a sort of cross between Su Pollard and Lady Gaga. Again, perhaps that was the point. There were plenty of visual jokes, which kept a lively audience amused. And who is to say, after all, that one does not miss the point if one does not remain on the surface level? With boxes strewn across scenes, signs of transitory lives, and bubble wrap emerging ingeniously from them, that certainly did seem to be part, at least, of the point. The melancholy work of Bedlam inmates at the end, refashioning material that once had made up their party clothes, was an excellent touch. 

Stravinsky points both ways, of course; so too, arguably, does Auden. Trevor Pinnock’s conducted a lively and generous account of the score, the Royal Academy Sinfonia sharp, pointed, yet far from inexpressive. Occasionally I missed greater numbers in the pit, but chamber forces had virtues of their own, not least in solo work, where reference to eighteenth-century music(s) in particular truly hit home. The orchestra contributed greatly to the gaiety of the occasion, but also to its poignancy, and not only in the final act. Lost moments of Cosi fan tutte, suspended in musical animation, made their fleeting point almost as strongly as the fatal games of the graveyard scene (for which special mention should go to the excellent harpsichordist Alexsander Ribeiro de Lara). The chorus, very much a collection of soloists, in gesture and musical line, who could yet come together as more than the sum of their parts, was not the least shining light of the evening’s entertainment. 

Nor too were the young soloists, many of them doubtless heading towards careers in whatever remains of the opera business after our Downing Street masters and ‘Arts Council England’ have had their say. Like Stravinsky—Auden too—they may have to emigrate. Good luck to them, if so, if Brexit-Insel continues to treat them as seems likely. Ryan Vaughan Davies was a memorable Tom Rakewell, neglecting neither implied poignancy of situation nor irresistible allure of the moment. Whether one should sympathise or not is perhaps a moot point; it would, however, have been difficult to fail to do so.

Likewise, from other angles, the rest of the cast—who might, after all, on paper seem difficult to like, let alone to love. Cassandra Wright’s Anne combined cleanness and beauty of Mozartian line with the fleshed-out character of his heroines: a combination far from always achieved. Jacob Phillips’s dark and dangerous Nick Shadow involved us, like it or not. Hovhannes Karapetyan’s dark-voiced, seemingly generous-of-heart Father Trulove, Georgia Mae Ellis’s fun-loving yet formidable Mother Goose, and Rebecca Hart’s capricious yet, at the last, deeply human Baba the Turk all added novelty to their roles without departing unduly from what we (fancied we) already knew. Samuel Kibble’s lively Sellem and Duncan Stenhouse’s compassionate Keeper of the Madhouse rounded off a cast with no weak links and excellent interaction. Perhaps, indeed, that was the point.

Andsnes/Hamelin - Adams, Schumann, Debussy, and Stravinsky, 30 May 2022

Wigmore Hall

John Adams: Hallelujah Junction
Schumann, arr. Debussy: Six Studies in Canonic Form, op.56
Debussy: En blanc et noir
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

Leif Ove Andsnes, Marc-André Hamelin (pianos)

 

Two-piano recitals look, feel, and are very different from piano-duet recitals. Sometimes we have a mixture, but even then, performances look and sound very different, for obvious logistical reasons. Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin offered four (five, if one counts the encore) works for two pianos, ultimately taking us to the very limits—sometimes, it seemed, beyond—of what is possible, even with two instruments and four hands, in The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s arrangement is actually for piano duet, but Andsnes and Hamelin reinstate some of the lines necessarily missing, at times giving a full orchestra a run for its money. A deservedly well attended, well appreciated concert heated up an otherwise dismal, late May evening. Maybe the gods were exacting revenge for a strange spring rite of unwitting lèse-majesté at Stonehenge.

 First, though, was neither Neolithic Wiltshire nor the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, but Hallelujah Junction, a truck stop on the border between California and Nevada. I am afraid John Adams’s piece does nothing for me. I could find nothing to signal compositional achievement beyond that of a generic, mid-1990s Channel 4 soundtrack, mixed with all-too-obvious ‘Americana’. As for the sentimental pseudo-Romantic harmonies of the central section, I presumed they were ‘ironic’, though perhaps not. The performance, though, was masterly, rhythmic tests passed with flying colours, not least in the final section in which the two pianists finally came into sync with one another, only to fall out again, ‘like a great malfunctioning mechanical player piano’, to quote Edward Bhesania’s evocative note. That I found diverting enough; the rest was evidently admired by most in the audience and enjoyed by both players.

 Adams over, I could breathe a sigh of relief and had no reservations whatsoever. Debussy’s 1891 arrangement for two pianos of Schumann’s Studies in Canonic form for pedal piano rarely disappoints, but here sheer ‘naturalness’ of musical response was second to none. Bach rightly emerged as the guiding spirit of the first, which paradoxically had one hear all that is not Bach all the more acutely. A melting performance, utterly pianistic, would surely have delighted Schumann and Debussy equally; Bach too, no doubt. From this ‘prelude’, greater pathos followed in the second study, its harmonic riches revealed with wisdom and ese. A winningly impetuous third study, harking back to the wide-eyed Romanticism of Schumann’s ‘Year of Song’ five years previously, filled one’s stomach with the loveliest of butterflies. Limpid, heartfelt, and noble in response, the fourth showed, in the building and subsiding of its more darkly involved central section, the truest virtues of such antiphonal performance. The fifth was resolute in a nicely post-Schubertian way, whilst the concluding study proved both developmental and summative: once more, a fine tribute to Bach.

Debussy’s own En blanc et noir opened as if paying brief homage to Schumann, then pressed on beyond. Its first movement offered clarity, direction, pianistic abandon and control, in as finely complementary duo playing as one could imagine—and then some. Tragedy penetrated necessary abstraction in the second movement, dedicated ‘ au Lieutenant Jacques Charlot tué à l’ennemi en 1915, le 3 mars’. Angels (la vielle France) and demons (war, Ein’ feste Burg) did battle, albeit with due ambiguity. This is music, not a tract, and so it sounded here. Anger, though, was barely suppressed, and why should it be? The scherzando, dedicated to Stravinsky, proved more elusive still, all the more so for resting on a rock-solid rhythmic base, above and sometimes beneath which passes all manner of musical entanglements.

 Debussy and Stravinsky gave a celebrated private performance of The Rite in the composer’s duet version. What it would have been to have heard that, though it is difficult to imagine it surpassing what we heard from Hamelin and Andsnes. Whenever one hears a good performance of the piano version, it is striking just how readily the opening bassoon lines, apparently so tied to their timbre, transfer. Who knows what wizardry is involved therein, but it was close to definitively unleashed on this occasion. More flexible at times than is possible (perhaps desirable) for orchestra, the performance lacked nothing in rhythmic solidity where it counted, its primitivism shockingly immanent. So too was clarity that enabled one to hear me manner of things I had never imagined were there, or so I fancied. Passages sounded closer to Petrushka than usual, surely in part on account of the medium. Others emerged hieratic enough to give Boulez a run for his money. Virtuosity took us to its limits and extended them. Yet for all the pounding, there was much delicacy too, and above all melody, which must lie at the heart (yes, the heart) of any Rite. What emerged more strongly than in any performance I can recall was the sheer tragic impulse of the second part, rooted harmonically, the radicalism of Stravinsky’s cellular organisation likewise becoming all the clearer as it progressed. Hamelin and Andsnes made the Rite strange again whilst remaining true to it: surely the ultimate goal of any performance worth our time.

 As an encore, we heard a tango composer by Hamelin himself, perfectly conceived for and realised on two pianos. Catchy and playful, it engaged in Ravel’s trick of having one ask what might lie beneath the beguiling, glittering surface, before immediately turning the joke on us by pointing out the silliness of the question.

Mavra and Pierrot lunaire, Royal Opera, 17 May 2022

Linbury Studio Theatre

Parasha – April Koyejo-Audiger
Hussar, Mavra – Egor Zhuravskii
Mother – Sarah Pring
Neighbour – Idunnu Münch
Pierrot – Alexandra Lowe

Anthony Almeida (director)
Rosanna Vize (designs)

Lucy Carter, Alan Mooney (lighting)
Anjali Mehra (movement)

Britten Sinfonia

Michael Papadopoulos (conductor)

Images: Helen Murray / ROH

The Royal Opera’s Young Artists Programme celebrates twenty years with a Linbury double-bill of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Mavra and Pierrot lunaire. It is an odd combination: one of Stravinsky’s less-loved works, a very short opera, with a cabaret melodrama that is no opera, yet is probably its composer’s single most celebrated work. If one tried hard enough, one could doubtless fathom a tenuous connection, but then one could probably do so between anything. Director Anthony Almeida, then, is probably right to have left his guiding thread at little more than surface level, concentrating instead on presentation of two unequal halves. 

All too readily underestimated, Mavra, here given in a chamber arrangement by Paul Phillips, is in many ways emphatically a Russian work. If aspects of Stravinsky’s very particular sound world are necessarily lost—it was not solely on account of where I was seated that my experience was piano-heavy—an imaginative realisation, alluding consciously or otherwise to scores such as The Soldier’s Tale, presents other possibilities. Pushkin, in any case, seems unusually apparent, even, perhaps especially, in a staging that emphasises the formalism of something akin to face. Stravinsky always revels in patterns, in allusion, in parody, and in disjuncture: this has it all, musically and scenically. Colour and ‘look’ are to the fore, part of a surface that may or may not preclude discovery of anything beneath. The drag transformation of officer Vasily into maid Mavra amounts in a Warhol-like way to something, despite its essential nothingness. Is that, perhaps what a host of bin bags tell us? It also engineers a connection of sorts to Pierrot, where Almeida has a woman by contrast turn period androgyne. Indoors becomes outdoors; lighting becomes both alternative lighting (moon) and pitch blackness. Reappearance of Mavra’s cast seemed to me a little more forced, the sign interpreter more animated. Pierrot’s presence early on in in Mavra added little other than mild confusion, at least for me. Thought had been given, though, to an attempt to combine; that was enough, really. 

Michael Papadopoulos, members of the Britten Sinfonia, and an able, alert cast captured well the knowing devices of Stravinsky’s score. It twists and turns, so long as one listens, and provides a splendid counterpoise—it certainly did here—to stage action that continues to surprise in its entirely unsurprising course. April Koyejo-Audiger reminded us, throughout, that whatever the games Stravinsky may have been playing, a Russian heart beat, sometimes irregularly, always metrically, beneath. Egor Zhuravskii offered dislocated bel canto contrast and complement. Sarah Pring and Idunnu Münch navigated with wit the fine line between stock characters and their light deconstruction, Glinka and the 1920s. If there were times when I missed the full instrumentation, the youth of this eternally young work nonetheless shone through. 

Stravinsky must surely rank as one of Pierrot’s most quoted admirers. ‘The solar plexus as well as the mind of twentieth-century music,’ he called it, hailing on another occasion the ‘instrumental substance’ that had ‘impressed me immensely. And by saying “instrumental”, I mean not simply the instrumentation of this music but the whole contrapuntal and polyphonic structure of this brilliant masterpiece’. That came through, clearly, in a performance whose lines, reciter’s included, were supremely well balanced, wandering in tonality as in character. A touch more expressionism might not have gone amiss, but there are many worse things than a somewhat classicising Pierrot. Given its all-encompassing yet contradictory nature, the work doubtless resists a ‘complete’, let alone ‘ideal’, performance. It was nonetheless difficult to imagine Alexandra Lowe’s personal combination of speech, pitch, and gesture being readily improved upon.

If Pierrot took a slightly Stravinskian turn, what could be more contextually appropriate? Not that there was not darkness too, likewise catastrophe and sheer weirdness, but the balance had shifted. There will be other Pierrots, other attempts, as Beckett had it, to ‘fail better’, but this will have made new converts, who, like the rest of us, should prepare to be surprised once again by this ever-surprising chameleon of a work.

Alexander Goehr 90th Birthday Concert – Goehr, Richards, and Anderson, Nash Ensemble et al., 22 March 2022

Wigmore Hall

Goehr-Stravinsky: ….around Stravinsky, op.72, for violin, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, and bassoon
Emma-Ruth Richards: de Stâmparare, for solo oboe
Goehr: Largo siciliano, op.91, for piano, horn, and violin
Goehr: The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, op.102, for voice, clarinet, and piano (world premiere)
Julian Anderson: Ring Dance, for two violins
Goehr: Combat of Joseph della Reina and the Devil, for two sopranos, mezzo-soprano, tenor, piano, and viola (world premiere)

Héloïse Werner, Emilia Bertolini (sopranos)

Clare Presland (mezzo-soprano)

Joshua Ellicott (tenor)

Nash Ensemble

Alasdair Beatson (piano/director)

Alexander Goehr will be 90 in August; here the Nash Ensemble, longstanding Goehr champions, got in a little early with a celebratory concert including no fewer than two Goehr premieres and three other of his works. Compared to his two ‘Manchester School’ colleagues, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies—John Ogdon and Elgar Howarth being very different cases—Goehr has latterly, perhaps always, had a raw deal in terms of public and institutional approbation. It is never too late to start setting things right, though; and if it is long past time for our opera houses and orchestras to rise once again to the challenge, this Nash Inventions concert will surely have confirmed the faithful in their habit and made a number of new converts. 

The Nash Ensemble premiered ….around Stravinsky twenty years ago in 2002. It is difficult to imagine a more sparkling, witty, and involving performance than that given here. With Stravinsky’s Pastorale at its heart, Goehr ‘remembers and refers to the piece “around” which it is performed’. And so, first we heard rich-toned solo violin (Benjamin Nabarro), in the movement ‘Dushkin’, which had at least a little, I fancied, of Stravinsky’s singular way with the instrument, albeit more rooted in German tradition (Schoenberg and Bach). Stravinsky himself, as automated music box, roaring towards (first version) and out of (second, as heard here) the Twenties, yielded to solo violin once more, this time an ‘Introduzione’, as eloquent as its predecessor, in character both related and different. Its proportions, not simply temporal, but also vertical and horizontal, sounded just right to me, beautifully handled both as work and performance. For a concluding Rondo, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, and bassoon returned. One might initially have thought this Stravinsky, or at least Stravinsky-adjacent, but distance increased as it went on its merry way: not only a neat but an expressive and enjoyable conceit. 

Emma-Ruth Richards’s de Stâmparare received a fine performance from oboist Gareth Hulse. Based on a Romanian folk song, Hora Spoitorilor, it sang, cried, and in the tradition of the doina, seemed to invoke help or solace from beyond. Microtones woven around its (broadly) tonal core, it remained both direct and ambiguous, phrasing lightly deconstructive or developmental. 

Written in 2012, Goehr’s Largo siciliano stands precisely midway, temporally, between ….around Stravinsky and today. It refers, strikingly and surprisingly, to Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, with what I think of ultimately as a respectful lack of respect. Throughout its sequence of variations for piano, horn, and violin, fascinating shadows and echoes of very different music emerge: melodic lines, rhythms, and harmonies all transformed. There is some splendidly gestural music, not entirely foreign to Messiaen, but darker, Brahmsian tendencies and related variegation are more typical. Indeed, the greater connection that struck me to Messiaen was less harmonic, than pertaining to a way of listening to harmony. (Or perhaps that was just me. At any rate, the analysis lectures I heard Goehr give at Cambridge, in which he argued the importance of mixture chords, as opposed to endless ‘growth’ of harmony in the guise of ‘new’ chords, seemed much to the point.) With counterpoint and harmony in fine balance, developing variation propelled us along a path whose transformational treatment of variations put me in mind of Liszt or the Beethoven of the Diabelli Variations. These were but reference points, though; I do not think there was anything so straightforward as ‘influence’. This may not have been serial music, which had long since become too predictable for the composer, but there seemed to me an idea, maybe even an Idea, at work not entirely dissimilar. Through the voices of three highly independent instruments, a whole world of potentialities opened up—and closed. 

Goehr’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba visits the Queen’s own visit to St Anthony in a Flaubert parody from Ulysses. Immediately, its combination of fantasy and the sardonic captivates, indeed even from its purely instrumental introduction. Full of incident and with a keen sense of musical narrative, it is overflowing with Schoenbergian lyricism that satisfies as much as it beguiles. A typically animated and detailed performance from Héloïse Werner, stepping in at very short notice for an indisposed Claire Booth, extended our understanding not only of Goehr but of Molly Bloom, leading us to the calculated disruption of the wake-up call: ‘You are a poor old stick in the mud. Go and see life. See the wide world.’ 

Julian Anderson’s early Ring Dance (1987) for two violins followed. Its grating—in a positive sense—Hardanger fiddling truly dug into the instruments of Nabarro and Michael Gurevich; or rather, they did, in its service. Work and performance served up an arc clearly felt, experienced, as well as observed, its notes worked for and achieved. Whilst it could hardly be considered spectral music, perhaps some of its processes fulfilled a similar function, not unlike Goehr’s transformations for serialism. It is, at any rate, a work newly released by the composer for public performance, and which he considers ‘to some extent … a prototype for everything I’ve composed since’. 

The second of two premieres was of Goehr’s setting, somewhat in the manner of Janáček’s Diary of One who Disappeared, of a Kabbalistic ‘Jewish Faust’ story, presented some time ago to the composer by Gerschom Scholem and latterly translated by Goehr from German intro English. The ‘combat’—a nod to Goehr’s beloved Monteverdi, in the guise of Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda—of a rabbi with the Devil, the rabbi and his disciples setting out to climb the mountain where the Devil and his consort Lilith live, summoning Elijah, angels, and archangels along the way to help, only to be told that help his impossible, and having succeeded, failing through trickery and temptation at the last is told with dry wit yet expressive generosity (so long as one actually listens). A sweet-toned Joshua Ellicott, as the Teacher, was echoed and elaborated at the first by solo viola (Lars Anders Tomter), and latterly the full ensemble in varied, differentiated fashion, modes of not un-Brechtian Verfremdung lightly worn yet richly and amusingly expressive. The Schoenberg of Moses und Aron and smaller choral works stands in the background of the writing for the three disciples when heard together, yet each (Werner, Emilia Bertolini, and Clare Presland) was given plenty of scope for individual, shiftingly cast portrayal. 

These passages of narration, in which roles merged and separated, fascinated as much as the dialectical, rabbinical wisdom at the musical as well as philosophical heart of the work; indeed, the former seemed to emerge from the latter. Each of ten episodes had its own integrity, yet contributed to ascent as a whole. Viola harmonics, as the Angel Sandalphon vanished, echoing collaboration between the two high angels Metatron (loud) and Katrie (pianissimo), and a sense of time occasionally suspended, yet often pressing on furiously contributed to a work of well-judged proportions, leading ironically in the light of where the evening had begun in violin terms, with victory for the Devil, depravity for the rabbi, and intriguing survival for one of the disciple-narrators. ‘Only I remain to tell the tale.’ Make of that what you will—and that seemed to be the invitation. 

Now, please, for a revival of Goehr’s Brechtian masterpiece, Arden Must Die. ENO, are you listening? In time for the fiftieth anniversary of its 1974 British premiere at Sadlers Wells?