Where the Wild Things Are, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Barbican, 3 November 2012

Images: Mark Allan/Barbican

Where the Wild Things Are


Max – Claire Booth

Mama/Voice of Tzippy – Susan Bickley
Moishe – Christopher Lemmings
Emil – Graeme Broadbent
Aaron – Jonathan Gunthorpe
Bernard – Graeme Danby
Tzippy – Charlotte McDougall


Higglety Pigglety Pop!

Jane – Lucy Schaufer

The Potted Plant/Baby – Susanna Andersson
Rhoda/Voice of Baby’s Mother – Claire Booth
Cat-Milkman/High Voice of Ash Tree – Christopher Lemmings
Pig-in-Sandwich-Boards – Graeme Danby
Lion/Low Voice of Ash Tree – Graeme Broadbent

Netia Jones (director, designs)

Britten Sinfonia

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)



Max (Claire Booth)

Marking Oliver Knussen’s sixtieth birthday came a BBC Total Immersion weekend at the Barbican: a double-bill of Knussen’s two operas written in collaboration with Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are and Higgledy Piggledy Pop! on Saturday, followed by a day of two chamber concerts, a film, and an orchestral concert conducted by the composer himself on Sunday. This co-production of the two operas with the Aldeburgh Festival and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association was a delight. Netia Jones employs a cunning, loving mix of animation and live action to retain as much as humanly possible of Sendak’s celebrated drawings. Sometimes we see more of one than the other, though the principal characters – the boy Max in Where the Wild Things Are and Jennie the Sealyham Terrier in Higglety Pigglety Pop! – are ‘real’ throughout. How much lies their – or our? – imagination? What is real anyway? The use of animation for the monsters save at the beginning and end of the first opera – we see the singers go behind a screen and emerge at the end, and of course we hear the, throughout – heightens our questioning. The screen in neatly reversed in Higglety Pigglety Pop! so that we see the secondary characters both on stage and on film. Again, what is real? Are not both varieties of apparition and/or depiction? In the land of the Mother Goose World Theatre, all the world’s a stage – a tribute, surely, as much to Stravinsky and his Rake’s Progress tribute to Mozart, the latter parodied in Knussen’s final scene, as to Ravel. (Both Higglety and Don Giovanni end 'outside' their dramas, in bright if tarnished D major.) The repetitions of that gala performance, the time-honoured tradition of a play within a play, unsettle as they should. What do they mean? When will they stop? Again, what, and who, is ‘real’? That is very much the stuff of imaginary worlds, strongest for some in childhood, but for many of us just as powerful in subsequent stages of our lives.

 

 

 

Crucially, the sense of fantasy in libretto and production is at the very least equally present in Knussen’s scores, kinship with Ravel especially apparent in Where the Wild Things Are. And we all know who composed the most perfect operatic depiction of childhood... Stravinsky sometimes seems close too, for instance in the fiercer rhythmically driven music of the second scene (Mama and her hoover), the Symphony in Three Movements coming to my mind. And the musical material itself of course delightfully pays tribute both to Debussy’s La boîte à joujoux and most memorably to Boris Godunov, direct quotation reminiscing of the Tsar’s ill-fated coronation when Max is crowned King of all Wild Things.

 

Performance of the play in Higglety Pigglety Pop!

 

Ryan Wigglesworth’s direction was palpably alive to this sense of orchestral wonder and fantasy, his programme notes an exemplary tribute from one composer-conductor to another from whom he has learned a great deal. The tone of performance darkened in tandem with that of the score for Higglety Pigglety Pop! Detail was meaningful without exaggeration, for instance in the subtle pointing up of certain intervals associated with different characters. Those with ears to hear would do so, consciously or otherwise. Moreover, the orchestra’s response was as assured, as disciplined, as generous as the conductor’s direction. The Britten Sinfonia was throughout on outstanding form, thoroughly inside Knussen’s idiom, unfailingly precise without sacrifice to warmth of tone. Despite relatively chamber-like forces, at least in the string section (6.6.4.4.4), one often felt that was hearing a larger orchestra, for this was anything but a small-scale performance. Indeed, accustomed as I am to hearing the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, there were many times when I should not have been surprised to discover that I had in fact been hearing the LSO.

 

Baby (Voice of Susanna Andersson) and Jennie (Lucy Schaufer)

Claire Booth headed a fine cast for Where the Wild Things Are, her Max as quicksilver on stage as vocally. Lucy Schaufer proved every inch her equal as Jennie in Higglety Pigglety Pop! Very much the singing actress, her deeper mezzo tones were perfectly suited to the darkened tones of the score. There is something a little dangerous about Jennie and the acting world of ‘experience’ for which she forsakes her comfortable home – yet in a sense all children must at some point act similarly.  All members of the two casts, however, were richly deserving of praise, a particular favourite of mine Graeme Danby’s surreal, apparently innocent Pig-in-Sandwich-Boards. These performances came across as true company efforts, a state of affairs doubtless deepened by ‘experience’ in Aldeburgh and Los Angeles.

Transition_Projects/OUT HEAR: Ligeti, Musica ricercata, 28 February 2011

Hall Two, Kings Place

Danny Driver (piano)
Andrew Stephen (actor)
Netia Jones (direction/video design)
Nat Urazmetova (video assistant)

Capriccio 1 and 2 (1947)
Invention (1948)
Musica ricercata (1951-3)


This was a wonderful concert! As if the promise of a complete performance of Ligeti’s Musica ricercata were not enough, we had, as has often been the case with Transition_Projects events at Kings Place, a bonus, this time in the place of some even earlier Ligeti piano pieces. One entered Hall Two to see a man, played by the excellent Andrew Stephen, seated near motionless at a typewriter and his projection on the screen behind. Crackling radio-like noises evoked a post-war environment, suggestive of the world in which Ligeti came of age, and more specifically of his father, in the words of Netia Jones’s helpful note, ‘a highly intellectual and cultivated man constantly surrounded by science and research books, who would spend days clattering away on a typewriter’. Such matters remained an abiding interest for Györgi Ligeti; this concert provided a relatively rare opportunity to experience his musical life at the beginning: not as a documentary, but as a fascinating and enjoyable imaginary encounter. Ricercata as research, then, as well as musical form…

The previously advertised Ryan Wigglesworth had at some point been replaced with Danny Driver, who proved a sure guide in our fifty-minute tour. The notes were not merely played, but connected: always a crucial thing, but of particular relevance given the additive plan of Musica ricercata, on which more in a moment. First, however, we heard the bonus pieces: not mere bonuses, of course, but characterful in their own right and enlightening background to the main course. First, a title screen was typed – and screened. Dictionary and technical definitions of words such as ‘contrapuntal’ and so forth appeared on screen thereafter, Ligeti’s autodidacticism brought to the fore. We also saw Driver’s hands at one point. Bartók’s influence was keenly felt, especially in the second Capriccio: sometimes at least a dangerous thing in post-war Hungary, as Ligeti would already have known.




Musica ricercata is a set of eleven pieces, unperformed until 1969, in which each piece has one more pitch class than its predecessor. Thus, the first is restricted to A, with D introduced at the end; the second, E sharp, F sharp, and G, and so on. Bartók is still an audible presence, but Ligeti’s own ricercata is the guiding principle. In Jones’s words, ‘his voracious intellect … [led] to research in many different directions, from his favourite books, What is Mathematics? (Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins) and A la recherche du temps perdu (Marcel Proust) to early compositional techniques and methods. An open-ended research that could last a lifetime … [and] a foretaste of the exhilarating invention that was to come.’

Jones’s projections and Stephen’s stage action genuinely added to the sense of research and invention. The man’s pacing, increasing to running, seemed to liberate our aural imaginations during the first piece, not to restrict them; there was no suggestion that this was what the music was ‘about’, but it worked. Process music this may be, in some sense, but there are different processes at work, so visual processes must vary too. Moreover, it is certainly not merely process music; it is full of character and wit, once more aided and abetted by the visuals. Not that one should forget the musical performance that lay at the evening’s heart: Driver’s clearly insistent alternation between E flat and E natural during the jaunty third piece had its own, ‘musical’ tale to tell. Before the fourth piece began, we even heard an organ-grinder, again through radio crackling, setting up nicely the waltz music to come, even providing an intriguing setting for Ligeti’s exploration of piano harmonics. The ninth piece is explicitly dedicated to Bartók’s memory; however, its low-sounding bells proved equally evocative of two other composers, Schoenberg’s reminiscence of Mahler’s funeral in the last of the op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces. Accompanying this – again, wisely not attempting to translate it into pictures – was a striking image of a man holding a pocket-sized version of himself in his hands, and squashing it. Surrealism would soon be a valued addition to Ligeti’s universe; perhaps it was already. Another aural connection evoked through Driver’s performance was the kinship – intentional? I do not know – between the tenth piece and the finale of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata. (Interestingly, Alexander Goehr dedicated his contemporaneous, 1952, Piano Sonata, op.2, to Prokofiev’s memory.) Finally came the Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi, in which necessarily full chromaticism came delightfully into play with contrapuntal designs and research: musica ricercata in the fullest sense, not just the work, but its performance and presentation too.

Claire Booth - Berio and Poulenc, 25 November 2010

Hall One, Kings Place

Berio – Sequenza III, for soprano
Berio – Petite Suite*
Poulenc – La voix humaine


Claire Booth (soprano)
Christopher Glynn (piano)
Alasdair Beatson (piano)*
Netia Jones (director/video)


On the face of it, Berio and Poulenc do not have that much in common; they probably do not beneath the surface either. However, the programming here made sense in at least a couple of ways – apart, that is, from proving a showcase for the talents and versatility of the ever-impressive Claire Booth. Berio’s early (1947) Petite Suite, the piano interlude between his Sequenza III and Poulenc’s La voix humaine, proved a neo-classical surprise, its melodies and harmonies not so very far removed from Poulenc’s, albeit without the indulgent naughtiness we know and cannot help but love. Debussy, above all Children’s Corner, is surely an influence, Stravinsky too. I cannot say that it is a work I should hasten to hear again: it is ‘interesting’ as juvenilia, but presents none of the challenges and rewards of the composer’s maturity. Nevertheless, Alasdair Beatson performed its five short movements with panache and without condescension. Booth remained on stage but at least had opportunity to rest her vocal chords.

The two principal works have something in common too. La voix humaine is of course a masterly Cocteau-Poulenc collaboration depicting a woman on the telephone, attempting to survive the end of her affair. (I saw a brilliant double-bill with Pierrot Lunaire in Leipzig a couple of years ago.) Sequenza III was written for Cathy Berberian in the wake of her divorce from the composer. Netia Jones’s video imagery helped bind the works loosely together, wisely without forcing the connection. The use of recorded and real-time pictures of Booth alternated with images of greater (patterned) and lesser (1950s cityscape) abstraction. I was not sure what it meant, or indeed what it added, but it did no harm.

The Berio Sequenza is a gestural piece par excellence, a true tour de force of extended vocal technique. But there remains an almost extravagant vocalism, affectionate towards tradition, at its heart, which Booth ensured that we heard. I ought not to exaggerate; this is not the Verdian rapprochement of La vera storia, but nor is Berio’s exuberance solely of a militant avant-gardist variety either. Berio described the work as a ‘three-part invention’ of ‘text, gesture, and expression’: again, this was precisely what we heard. Only a highly-accomplished artist should even consider performing so technically and expressively demanding a work. Booth passed the test with flying colours: a coloratura display of objects found and transformed.

For La voix humaine, she was joined by pianist, Christopher Glynn. I had never heard the work with piano before; there is loss, but there is perhaps also neo-classical, Stravinskian gain too. The instrument’s relative coolness imparts a different but not entirely inappropriate quality to the work, and there could be no gainsaying Glynn’s surety of navigation when it came to the score’s twists and turns, gestural in a gentler way, no doubt, than Berio’s but nevertheless deeply felt. Those ominous Stravinksian ostinati so powerfully present in the Dialogues des Carmelites once again provide structural foundation, as Glynn proved so clearly. I should have imagined the loss from translation into English to have been greater, but in practice, the conversational quality – however much one might have hankered after the delivery of the inimitable Denise Duval – worked well. I was not sure, though, why a few passages remained in French. Just when I thought I had worked out the reasoning, my logic was found wanting. That was a bit odd: all or nothing would have been preferable. At any rate, Booth powerfully conveyed the delusion and depression, to neither of which Poulenc was a stranger. She elicited pity, knowing recognition, and black humour, even though Poulenc’s wish that the music be ‘bathed in sensuality’ was never quite fulfilled. The counterpoint between failures of the telephonic and nervous varieties was at any rate abundantly clear.

Pierrot Lunaire, Transition_Projects, 11 December 2009

Hall One, Kings Place

Emma Williams (flute/piccolo)
Peter Sparks (clarinet/bass clarinet)
Tom Hankey (violin/viola)
Oliver Coates (violoncello)
Alasdair Beaton (piano)

Claire Booth (soprano)
Netia Jones (director/video design)
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

This performance of Pierrot Lunaire was part of a Kings Place series from Transition_projects. The programming has been fascinating, for instance mixing Dowland and Stravinsky, and Bartók with his countrymen, the choreographer Rudolf Laban, and the photographer László Moholy-Nagy. Claire Booth, the soloist in this concert, had also sung in Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres, and would the following evening sing in Scarlatti’s Correa nel seno amato. Unifying these and other concerts was the theme of ‘Darkness and Light’: a spur to imagination, it would seem, rather than an arbitrary constriction, but most welcome if such an interesting range of music proves to be the result. I only wish that I had been able to attend more of the performances.

The present production had first been presented at Wilton’s Music Hall in October 2007. It seems that the praise garnered then was very much deserved. Most importantly, this was a performance that raised questions, rather than answered them. Booth’s excellent performance might well be considered relatively restrained, but hysterical cabaret, though it can work, is not the only way to perform what Stravinsky rightly judged an instrumental masterpiece. Sprechstimme is impossible to define, but it certainly sounded as if it were on offer here; only the occasional note was sung, but pitch was far from incidental. And the words were crystal-clear. Titles, an integral part of Netia Jones’s video design, helped, yet the German was so clear that many would have understood anyway. Moreover, though there was ample opportunity to hear Booth’s words and notes, her part also drew attention to the teeming instrumental invention of Schoenberg’s score, here flawlessly and atmospherically delivered by the players of the Transition_ensemble. Great demands are placed upon the instrumentalists, but technical issues had been thoroughly subordinated to musical demands. Ryan Wigglesworth’s direction was always sure of its direction, imparting a strong sense of unity to what, in lesser hands, can sometimes seem just a succession of poems.

Jones speaks sensibly of her role in this. Pierrot ‘is a highly theatrical work already,’ so her production concentrates upon helping ‘a listener navigate through its treacherous narrative’. One might consider that hardly necessary, but the visual scenes did no harm and heightened that sense of playfulness the director rightly sees as a crucial element to the work. Manipulated, monochrome moving images, of Booth (in ‘real time’ and pre-recorded), of architecture, the moon, the Cross, and so forth, provided a backdrop to the crucial musical events unfolding. I was less sure about the beheading: surely it is a little more than whimsical. But the music, rather than the bizarre verse, is truly the thing – and so it was here.