Hall One, Kings Place
Symphony no.51 in D major, KV 121/196
Concertone for two violins in C major, KV 190
Piano Concerto no.9 in E-flat major, KV 271
Symphony no.21 in A major, KV 134
Imogen Cooper (piano)
Alexander Janiczek (violin/director)
Martin Burgess (violin)
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
This, the ninth of the ‘Mozart Unwrapped’ concerts I have heard, will be the last, although there remain a few still to be heard in December, culminating in two performances of the Requiem from the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. There was much to enjoy, especially with respect to Imogen Cooper’s fine account of the solo part to the ninth piano concerto, though also from the playing of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. However, there were also a few tensions between the performance style of the ASMF and that of Alexander Janiczek as violinist-director. In a nutshell, one had the impression that Janiczek might have been happier directing a ‘period’ ensemble, and that such an ensemble would have been happier than the ASMF to be directed by him.
The symphony ‘no.51’ – the overture to La finta giardiniera plus finale – received a lively reading, if a touch hard-driven. It was well-articulated – clearly a strength of Janiczek’s direction – whilst sometimes verging upon the abrasive, that quality clearly emanating more from director than orchestra. At least vibrato was not entirely eschewed. That said, the second movement, the ‘Andantino grazioso’, was ideally paced: a pleasant surprise indeed. The finale teemed with life, albeit life rather fierce at times. I was put in mind of Stravinsky’s comment having heard Sir Georg Solti conduct what one assumes to have been a typically turbo-charged, unyielding account of The Marriage of Figaro: Mozart is poorer than this.
For the Concertone, Janiczek was joined as soloist by Martin Burgess, though oboist David Theodore’s exquisite solos threatened to eclipse both violinists. I simply wished that Janiczek would calm down a little – and from time to time longed for a larger complement of strings. (The ASMF was truly pocket-sized for this concert: 4.4.3.2.1. As even an acoustical ignoramus such as I knows, eight first violins do not sound twice as loud as four, but they certainly enable smoother performance, even in a small hall.) The finale came off better than the first two movements, its vivacity better suited to the bright-toned approach.
The orchestral contribution to KV 271 possessed many of the lively virtues of the first-half performances, if also some of the drawbacks. Cooper’s contribution for the most part more than compensated for the latter. Exquisitely shaded, yet not afraid to sound bigger-boned when required, it was a Mozart performance more in the mould of Daniel Barenboim than Cooper’s mentor, Alfred Brendel (whose recording with the ASMF and Sir Neville Marriner remains highly recommended). Indeed, more than once in the first movement, I found myself thinking that Otto Klemperer would have approved. Again, there were times when the strings sounded a little undernourished, but that was not too much of a problem until the slow movement, which also suffered from astringent rather than merely muted violin tone. (I have never heard the ASMF sound like that, whether under Marriner, Murray Perahia, Iona Brown, or anyone else.) Such wiriness was quite at odds with the beautifully moulded and subtly variegated performance at the keyboard; solo ornamentation was tastefully handled. But this was deeply felt Mozart from Cooper – no Dresden china here – and never more so than in the cadenza. The finale proved exciting, yet not inappropriately so. There was, rather, to be heard a rollicking relish in Mozart’s melodic and harmonic invention, even though there were times when the orchestra sounded unduly fierce. The interpolated minuet, however, emerged as something truly to treasure, a veritable garden of delights.
It was, perhaps, slightly odd to follow Brendel’s ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ with the Symphony no.21, but opportunities to hear early Mozart are infrequent and therefore to be welcomed. This performance proved something of a tale of two halves, the first two movements happier than the final two. Placing the opening movement on the cusp of the Baroque and Classical brought a welcome sense of CPE Bach’s sensibility to proceedings, and Janiczek’s tempo was well judged. Structure, including Mozart’s playing with our expectations, was properly conveyed. The slow movement was intelligently shaped and nicely shaded, though again I could not help but wish that the director would calm down somewhat. Dramatic flair was nevertheless imparted to the section in the minor mode. It was a pity, then, to encounter a minuet and trio in relatively aggressive mode, as if haunted by the spectre of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Indeed, there were times when the trio threatened to shade into the world of Bartók. The finale, whatever the brilliance of its execution, failed to smile. I could not help but long for the likes of Karl Böhm.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Thursday, 1 December 2011
Belcea Quartet - Beethoven, 1 December 2011
Wigmore Hall
String Quartet no.6 in B-flat major, op.18 no.6
String Quartet no.11 in F minor, op.95, ‘Quartett Serioso’
String Quartet no.12 in E-flat major, op.127
Corina Belcea, Axel Schacher (violins)
Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (violoncello)
The second concert in the Belcea Quartet’s Wigmore Hall Beethoven cycle threw down the gauntlet for subsequent instalments. To hear three such different quartets from different periods of the composer’s career offered variety, to be sure, but the connections one could make – and which, of course, the players, could and did make – were perhaps still more striking.
There have been a good few performances from the op.18 set in which I have felt a little disappointed, but not here. The Belcea enthralled not only in the lively, Haydnesque opening movement, with a touch of Mozart here and there, but also in subsequent intimations of what we have come to consider ‘late Beethoven’. That first movement set up a pattern not only for this quartet but for the recital as a whole, with its individual characterisation of first and second subjects bringing us not so very far from the Mozartian world of the opera house. It was graceful indeed; all I missed was a touch of Beethovenian gruffness – but then, I did not really miss it. The ‘Adagio ma non troppo’ sounded just as Beethoven marked it: a trickier task than it might sound. One might well have added ‘grazioso’ to the description too; in its easy flow, the music looked forward to the slow movement of the ‘Spring’ Sonata, arguably even to the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. Yet the quiet drama of the theme’s development was the thing, vibrato varied accordingly – and convincingly. The whirlwind dislocations of the scherzo and trio, on the other hand, certainly peered forward to the ‘late’ composer, a proper contrast before the desolate Mozartian – even Wagnerian – music-drama of the introduction to the finale. Haydn then returned to view, to put a smile back on our faces, though not irreversibly, for the return of the introductory material once again pointed to the future, in this performance both rarefied and terrifying.
The first movement of the extraordinary ‘Quartett serioso’ moved us from intimations of ‘lateness’ to what seemed to be the real thing – despite the work’s chronological placing. Several times, I was put in mind of the Eighth Symphony, another work that stands upon the cusp. The Belcea players, greatly to their credit and greatly to the performance’s benefit, were not afraid to sound ugly; yet there was also plenty of room – insofar as there is room at all, in this world of breathtaking, almost Webern-like concision – for the sweetest lyricism, albeit always foreshortened, as Beethoven demands. One truly felt as well as observed Beethoven’s concision and its underlying anger. The ‘Allegretto ma non troppo’ received excellent characterisation throughout, ranging from more than a hint of that neo-Classicism that haunts the Eighth Symphony to near-operatic desperation. All was held together by Beethoven, but also of course by the performers. The scherzo and finale were unsparing, in the best sense, nervous intensity emerging from within, without a single break in the guiding thread.
Cross-fertilisation ensured that the first movement of op.127 sounded close to middle-period Beethoven in its forthrightness, the richness of Corina Belcea’s first violin tone certainly helping in that respect. Yet motivic concision retained the connection with the ‘lateness’ of op.95, alongside and in dialectic relationship with an almost ‘traditional’ expansiveness, for which consider other E-flat major works such as the Fifth Piano Concerto and Haydn’s late piano sonata. The slow movement, by contrast and by intensification, sounded ineffably ‘late’, its theme rapt in Gluckian ‘noble simplicity’, yet so much sweeter, both compositionally and instrumentally, and of course so much more developmental. The array of tonal qualities presented by the players almost made one experience the movement as akin to a Mahler symphony, a whole world in itself. Again, line was maintained throughout: inevitable, yet not without surprises. The motivic construction of the scherzo was lain out, for all its protean transformations, with exemplary clarity and, just as important, with dramatic meaning. If the trio exhibited a degree of savage wildness, it always knew – and the Belcea Quartet always knew – where it was going. In retrospect, it seemed but a stormy interlude, though it could not have been more real at the time. As for the ‘finale problem’ faced by every sonata-form composer since Mozart and Haydn, one was tempted to ask, ‘what problem?’ There was a struggle, as there must be, but continued alertness to the twin, dialectically-related demands of character and form made perfect dramatic sense. String quality was variegated, yet never for variegation’s sake, just like Beethoven’s writing itself. And then, to conclude, a touch more Haydn.
String Quartet no.6 in B-flat major, op.18 no.6
String Quartet no.11 in F minor, op.95, ‘Quartett Serioso’
String Quartet no.12 in E-flat major, op.127
Corina Belcea, Axel Schacher (violins)
Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (violoncello)
The second concert in the Belcea Quartet’s Wigmore Hall Beethoven cycle threw down the gauntlet for subsequent instalments. To hear three such different quartets from different periods of the composer’s career offered variety, to be sure, but the connections one could make – and which, of course, the players, could and did make – were perhaps still more striking.
There have been a good few performances from the op.18 set in which I have felt a little disappointed, but not here. The Belcea enthralled not only in the lively, Haydnesque opening movement, with a touch of Mozart here and there, but also in subsequent intimations of what we have come to consider ‘late Beethoven’. That first movement set up a pattern not only for this quartet but for the recital as a whole, with its individual characterisation of first and second subjects bringing us not so very far from the Mozartian world of the opera house. It was graceful indeed; all I missed was a touch of Beethovenian gruffness – but then, I did not really miss it. The ‘Adagio ma non troppo’ sounded just as Beethoven marked it: a trickier task than it might sound. One might well have added ‘grazioso’ to the description too; in its easy flow, the music looked forward to the slow movement of the ‘Spring’ Sonata, arguably even to the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. Yet the quiet drama of the theme’s development was the thing, vibrato varied accordingly – and convincingly. The whirlwind dislocations of the scherzo and trio, on the other hand, certainly peered forward to the ‘late’ composer, a proper contrast before the desolate Mozartian – even Wagnerian – music-drama of the introduction to the finale. Haydn then returned to view, to put a smile back on our faces, though not irreversibly, for the return of the introductory material once again pointed to the future, in this performance both rarefied and terrifying.
The first movement of the extraordinary ‘Quartett serioso’ moved us from intimations of ‘lateness’ to what seemed to be the real thing – despite the work’s chronological placing. Several times, I was put in mind of the Eighth Symphony, another work that stands upon the cusp. The Belcea players, greatly to their credit and greatly to the performance’s benefit, were not afraid to sound ugly; yet there was also plenty of room – insofar as there is room at all, in this world of breathtaking, almost Webern-like concision – for the sweetest lyricism, albeit always foreshortened, as Beethoven demands. One truly felt as well as observed Beethoven’s concision and its underlying anger. The ‘Allegretto ma non troppo’ received excellent characterisation throughout, ranging from more than a hint of that neo-Classicism that haunts the Eighth Symphony to near-operatic desperation. All was held together by Beethoven, but also of course by the performers. The scherzo and finale were unsparing, in the best sense, nervous intensity emerging from within, without a single break in the guiding thread.
Cross-fertilisation ensured that the first movement of op.127 sounded close to middle-period Beethoven in its forthrightness, the richness of Corina Belcea’s first violin tone certainly helping in that respect. Yet motivic concision retained the connection with the ‘lateness’ of op.95, alongside and in dialectic relationship with an almost ‘traditional’ expansiveness, for which consider other E-flat major works such as the Fifth Piano Concerto and Haydn’s late piano sonata. The slow movement, by contrast and by intensification, sounded ineffably ‘late’, its theme rapt in Gluckian ‘noble simplicity’, yet so much sweeter, both compositionally and instrumentally, and of course so much more developmental. The array of tonal qualities presented by the players almost made one experience the movement as akin to a Mahler symphony, a whole world in itself. Again, line was maintained throughout: inevitable, yet not without surprises. The motivic construction of the scherzo was lain out, for all its protean transformations, with exemplary clarity and, just as important, with dramatic meaning. If the trio exhibited a degree of savage wildness, it always knew – and the Belcea Quartet always knew – where it was going. In retrospect, it seemed but a stormy interlude, though it could not have been more real at the time. As for the ‘finale problem’ faced by every sonata-form composer since Mozart and Haydn, one was tempted to ask, ‘what problem?’ There was a struggle, as there must be, but continued alertness to the twin, dialectically-related demands of character and form made perfect dramatic sense. String quality was variegated, yet never for variegation’s sake, just like Beethoven’s writing itself. And then, to conclude, a touch more Haydn.
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Garrick Ohlsson: Handel, Brahms, Liszt, and Scriabin, 29 November 2011
Wigmore Hall
Handel – Suite no.2 in F major, HWV 427
Brahms – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, op.24
Liszt – Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, S 173/3
Scriabin – Trois Etudes, op.56
Fragilité, op.51 no.1
Piano Sonata no.5, op.53
It was not entirely clear what the two halves of this recital had in common, apart, that is, from pianist Garrick Ohlsson, though it was an attractive enough collection of pieces, even if performances only intermittently caught fire. Handel’s F major Suite – not the B-flat major Suite from which Brahms would take his theme – opened promisingly, the ‘Adagio’ first movement delicately Romantic, perhaps sounding more Bachian than one tends to hear (insofar as one hears Handel’s keyboard suites at all). The following ‘Allegro’ received a clean performance, a bit Gouldian for my taste, not least in its unyielding brightness. Murray Perahia imparts greater grace and depth to this repertoire. I missed a proper sense of momentum in the third movement ‘Adagio’, which was also occasionally heavy-handed, a besetting problem for a good part of the recital, The closing fugue certainly boasted contrapuntal clarity, though again, a greater willingness to yield might have elicited more grateful results.
Brahms’s Handel Variations followed. Again, Ohlsson opened promisingly, Handel’s Air actually sounding more elegantly idiomatic than much of the complete suite had done. The early variations set up a variable pattern that would be followed throughout: some finely characterised playing, some less so. For instance, the first variation sounded choppy and – that word again – unyielding, whereas its successor magically revelled in Brahms’s Schumannesque writing, the intimations of his later Haydn Variations wonderfully apparent. The third variation fell somewhere in between. I liked Ohlsson’s shaping of the composer’s Bachian reminiscences (the B-flat minor Prelude from Book I sprang to mind) in the fifth variation, whilst the eleventh, though it rippled pleasantly enough, somewhat lacked poetry. The rich tone lavished upon the thirteenth variation overcame a nearby intervention from a wristwatch chime. (Unforgivably, the same watch would intervene precisely an hour later in the second half.) However, the fourteenth suffered from an unduly abrupt ending: surely a case in which Brahms’s gruffness benefits from a little tempering. It was something of a tonal relief to reach G minor in the twenty-first variation, but execution remained prosaic, lacking fantasy, whilst the final, twenty-fifth variation sounded more heavy than joyous. Much the same could be said of the fugue, in which Ohlsson again declined to adopt a more yielding approach. There was much to be said for his structural grasp, the connection between variations and the theme clear throughout; yet man, even Brahms, cannot live on structure alone.
Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans sa solitude received an increasingly involving performance, though it laboured a little under a weighty opening not entirely free of the ponderousness of which Ohlsson’s sometime teacher, Claudio Arrau, often stood accused by his detractors (for me, quite unjustly). This was nevertheless preferable to mere flashiness, and there was much to enjoy in the richness of tone Ohlsson conjured from the piano: an excellent Steinway ‘demonstration’. He can sustain a line too, as became increasingly apparent. If the central section does not necessarily show Liszt at his most inspired, I have heard it sound considerably less prosaic than it did here. The remainder of the work permitted a degree of poetic fantasy often lacking elsewhere. There were, however, a few unfortunate harmonic hangovers that might have been alleviated by more careful pedalling. (Sometimes even Liszt’s own pedal markings need reinterpretation for a modern instrument.)
The first two of Scriabin’s three op.56 Etudes emerged both glittering and languorous, delicate enigmas vying with an apt degree of skittishness. (That watch alarm this time collaborated with someone towards the back of the hall endlessly rummaging in a plastic bag.) The third, however, emerged in glassy, even brutal tone. Laughter greeting its conclusion bewildered, for whatever accusations of excess one might hurl at Scriabin, a riotous sense of humour is not the most obviously founded candidate. Fragilité was a pleasant enough interlude, but the fifth sonata was clearly the (spiced, even perfumed) meat to this section. Ohlsson’s performance shared both the virtues and the vices of what had gone before. Yet, if his is hardly the most ingratiating of pianism, he exhibited a fine sense of form here, a requirement not always fulfilled in music that can often sound merely elusive, arguably incomprehensible. It was a pity that such elucidation was mitigated by a considerable degree of heavy-handed bludgeoning. As for the charmless Chopin encores, the less said the better.
Handel – Suite no.2 in F major, HWV 427
Brahms – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, op.24
Liszt – Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, S 173/3
Scriabin – Trois Etudes, op.56
Fragilité, op.51 no.1
Piano Sonata no.5, op.53
It was not entirely clear what the two halves of this recital had in common, apart, that is, from pianist Garrick Ohlsson, though it was an attractive enough collection of pieces, even if performances only intermittently caught fire. Handel’s F major Suite – not the B-flat major Suite from which Brahms would take his theme – opened promisingly, the ‘Adagio’ first movement delicately Romantic, perhaps sounding more Bachian than one tends to hear (insofar as one hears Handel’s keyboard suites at all). The following ‘Allegro’ received a clean performance, a bit Gouldian for my taste, not least in its unyielding brightness. Murray Perahia imparts greater grace and depth to this repertoire. I missed a proper sense of momentum in the third movement ‘Adagio’, which was also occasionally heavy-handed, a besetting problem for a good part of the recital, The closing fugue certainly boasted contrapuntal clarity, though again, a greater willingness to yield might have elicited more grateful results.
Brahms’s Handel Variations followed. Again, Ohlsson opened promisingly, Handel’s Air actually sounding more elegantly idiomatic than much of the complete suite had done. The early variations set up a variable pattern that would be followed throughout: some finely characterised playing, some less so. For instance, the first variation sounded choppy and – that word again – unyielding, whereas its successor magically revelled in Brahms’s Schumannesque writing, the intimations of his later Haydn Variations wonderfully apparent. The third variation fell somewhere in between. I liked Ohlsson’s shaping of the composer’s Bachian reminiscences (the B-flat minor Prelude from Book I sprang to mind) in the fifth variation, whilst the eleventh, though it rippled pleasantly enough, somewhat lacked poetry. The rich tone lavished upon the thirteenth variation overcame a nearby intervention from a wristwatch chime. (Unforgivably, the same watch would intervene precisely an hour later in the second half.) However, the fourteenth suffered from an unduly abrupt ending: surely a case in which Brahms’s gruffness benefits from a little tempering. It was something of a tonal relief to reach G minor in the twenty-first variation, but execution remained prosaic, lacking fantasy, whilst the final, twenty-fifth variation sounded more heavy than joyous. Much the same could be said of the fugue, in which Ohlsson again declined to adopt a more yielding approach. There was much to be said for his structural grasp, the connection between variations and the theme clear throughout; yet man, even Brahms, cannot live on structure alone.
Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans sa solitude received an increasingly involving performance, though it laboured a little under a weighty opening not entirely free of the ponderousness of which Ohlsson’s sometime teacher, Claudio Arrau, often stood accused by his detractors (for me, quite unjustly). This was nevertheless preferable to mere flashiness, and there was much to enjoy in the richness of tone Ohlsson conjured from the piano: an excellent Steinway ‘demonstration’. He can sustain a line too, as became increasingly apparent. If the central section does not necessarily show Liszt at his most inspired, I have heard it sound considerably less prosaic than it did here. The remainder of the work permitted a degree of poetic fantasy often lacking elsewhere. There were, however, a few unfortunate harmonic hangovers that might have been alleviated by more careful pedalling. (Sometimes even Liszt’s own pedal markings need reinterpretation for a modern instrument.)
The first two of Scriabin’s three op.56 Etudes emerged both glittering and languorous, delicate enigmas vying with an apt degree of skittishness. (That watch alarm this time collaborated with someone towards the back of the hall endlessly rummaging in a plastic bag.) The third, however, emerged in glassy, even brutal tone. Laughter greeting its conclusion bewildered, for whatever accusations of excess one might hurl at Scriabin, a riotous sense of humour is not the most obviously founded candidate. Fragilité was a pleasant enough interlude, but the fifth sonata was clearly the (spiced, even perfumed) meat to this section. Ohlsson’s performance shared both the virtues and the vices of what had gone before. Yet, if his is hardly the most ingratiating of pianism, he exhibited a fine sense of form here, a requirement not always fulfilled in music that can often sound merely elusive, arguably incomprehensible. It was a pity that such elucidation was mitigated by a considerable degree of heavy-handed bludgeoning. As for the charmless Chopin encores, the less said the better.
Monday, 28 November 2011
Letter published in International Record Review, December 2011 edition
Dear Madam,
I hope that it will not try patience unduly for me to respond to Robert Matthew-Walker’s reply to my letter (November 2011) concerning the movement order in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. It seems to me that the fundamental difference between our positions is that I am perfectly willing to listen to performances that do not conform to my æsthetic preference, holding out at least the possibility that I might be convinced by the artistic result, whilst RM-W dismisses out of hand those that are not ‘correct’. I find the very idea of ‘correctness’ odd indeed with respect to matters of performance. What is the endgame? A final, ‘correct’ performance or audition, after which we shall no longer have any need to attend to the work? Surely Mahler’s music continually challenges us, continually poses problems, which by their very nature resist solution. That is very much part of its greatness.
And yes, if someone were to believe that it made sense to reverse the second and third movements in the Second Symphony, why not let him do so? Why should we wish to act as police rather than as listeners? Many musicologists adopt much more of a post-modernist stance than I when it comes to the concept of musical works. I do not reject it; indeed I strongly hold to it, but not, I hope, in naïve fashion. The essence of a work, the Schoenbergian – or, should one prefer, Platonic – ‘Idea’ changes not only through time but also according to other matters of context. If the Sixth Symphony did not mean many different things to us than it did to Mahler, something would have gone horribly wrong. Few dogmas have done such harm to musical performance as Werktreue, or ‘fidelity to the work’. Sometimes a greater fidelity may be found in ‘infidelity’. That is not to say that one should do whatever one likes; there are good decisions and bad, better decisions and worse, and they might vary according to time and context. But ‘correct’ rarely comes into it.
This is not an issue peculiar to Mahler. We still argue over ‘versions’ of Bruckner symphonies. Moreover, Sir Colin Davis, hardly a conductor given to iconoclasm, goes so far as to reverse the performance order of the middle movements in Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. I am not aware of any warrant from the composer for the practice, which I should not be inclined to follow, but it represents a distinguished conductor’s attempt to deal with what he considers to be the problems of the work. It would not occur to me to be ‘upset’ by Davis’s decision; nor should I harangue others for supporting or following it. Pierre Boulez, who follows what RM-W considers to be the ‘incorrect’ movement order in Mahler’s Sixth, has altered the movement order in Debussy’s Images, giving what seem to me perfectly good reasons for doing so. Boulez tried the ‘correct’ way once and remained unconvinced, so has persisted in concluding with ‘Ibéria’ rather than with ‘Rondes de printemps’. If we wish to disregard those who would follow Mahler, both before and possibly after he changed his mind, then surely we should excoriate those who act without any compositional or editorial ‘authority’ whatsoever in Bruckner and Debussy. For my part, I should prefer to assess and to respond to the performances as performances. What would the point of insisting that Davis or Boulez conform to an understanding of the works that they do not share? It is difficult to imagine that they would give of their best in performance.
I have no wish to ‘ridicule’ Valery Gergiev for following the instructions of Sander Wilkens in the First Symphony, though I have not cared at all for the Mahler I have heard under Gergiev’s baton. (My problem, doubtless.) But I do wonder why conductors, both to my taste and less so, followed a very peculiar textual suggestion. Had they relied upon their musical sense, as opposed to practising obeisance to the exaggerated authority of a collected edition, I do not doubt that they would have acted otherwise. That is very similar to the point I have tried to make concerning the Sixth Symphony: there is so much more to consider when making musical decisions than what lies in versions of the printed score, what the composer may have thought, and when he might have thought it.
Yours etc. ...
(The letter published in the November issue may be read here.)
Recommended recordings:
I hope that it will not try patience unduly for me to respond to Robert Matthew-Walker’s reply to my letter (November 2011) concerning the movement order in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. It seems to me that the fundamental difference between our positions is that I am perfectly willing to listen to performances that do not conform to my æsthetic preference, holding out at least the possibility that I might be convinced by the artistic result, whilst RM-W dismisses out of hand those that are not ‘correct’. I find the very idea of ‘correctness’ odd indeed with respect to matters of performance. What is the endgame? A final, ‘correct’ performance or audition, after which we shall no longer have any need to attend to the work? Surely Mahler’s music continually challenges us, continually poses problems, which by their very nature resist solution. That is very much part of its greatness.
And yes, if someone were to believe that it made sense to reverse the second and third movements in the Second Symphony, why not let him do so? Why should we wish to act as police rather than as listeners? Many musicologists adopt much more of a post-modernist stance than I when it comes to the concept of musical works. I do not reject it; indeed I strongly hold to it, but not, I hope, in naïve fashion. The essence of a work, the Schoenbergian – or, should one prefer, Platonic – ‘Idea’ changes not only through time but also according to other matters of context. If the Sixth Symphony did not mean many different things to us than it did to Mahler, something would have gone horribly wrong. Few dogmas have done such harm to musical performance as Werktreue, or ‘fidelity to the work’. Sometimes a greater fidelity may be found in ‘infidelity’. That is not to say that one should do whatever one likes; there are good decisions and bad, better decisions and worse, and they might vary according to time and context. But ‘correct’ rarely comes into it.
This is not an issue peculiar to Mahler. We still argue over ‘versions’ of Bruckner symphonies. Moreover, Sir Colin Davis, hardly a conductor given to iconoclasm, goes so far as to reverse the performance order of the middle movements in Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. I am not aware of any warrant from the composer for the practice, which I should not be inclined to follow, but it represents a distinguished conductor’s attempt to deal with what he considers to be the problems of the work. It would not occur to me to be ‘upset’ by Davis’s decision; nor should I harangue others for supporting or following it. Pierre Boulez, who follows what RM-W considers to be the ‘incorrect’ movement order in Mahler’s Sixth, has altered the movement order in Debussy’s Images, giving what seem to me perfectly good reasons for doing so. Boulez tried the ‘correct’ way once and remained unconvinced, so has persisted in concluding with ‘Ibéria’ rather than with ‘Rondes de printemps’. If we wish to disregard those who would follow Mahler, both before and possibly after he changed his mind, then surely we should excoriate those who act without any compositional or editorial ‘authority’ whatsoever in Bruckner and Debussy. For my part, I should prefer to assess and to respond to the performances as performances. What would the point of insisting that Davis or Boulez conform to an understanding of the works that they do not share? It is difficult to imagine that they would give of their best in performance.
I have no wish to ‘ridicule’ Valery Gergiev for following the instructions of Sander Wilkens in the First Symphony, though I have not cared at all for the Mahler I have heard under Gergiev’s baton. (My problem, doubtless.) But I do wonder why conductors, both to my taste and less so, followed a very peculiar textual suggestion. Had they relied upon their musical sense, as opposed to practising obeisance to the exaggerated authority of a collected edition, I do not doubt that they would have acted otherwise. That is very similar to the point I have tried to make concerning the Sixth Symphony: there is so much more to consider when making musical decisions than what lies in versions of the printed score, what the composer may have thought, and when he might have thought it.
Yours etc. ...
(The letter published in the November issue may be read here.)
Recommended recordings:
A Celebration of Cornelius Cardew, 27 November 2011
Purcell Room
February Piece 1959
February Piece 1960
February Piece 1961
The Fourth System
Material
Unintended Piano Music
Croppy Boy
John Tilbury (piano)
This ‘celebration’ at the Purcell Room is part of a greater festival devoted to Cornelius Cardew by Morley College, of which further details may be found at http://www.thengineroom2011.com/. Cardew is certainly an absorbing, intriguing figure to read about, progressing from boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, to the Royal Academy of Music, to assistant to Stockhausen on Carré, to composer of the seven-hour-long Great Learning, founder of the Scratch Orchestra, and radical political activist, having engaged in vigorous Maoist self-criticism, finally meeting his death in a mysterious hit-and-run accident near his Leyton home.
Opportunities to hear Cardew’s music are infrequent. John Tilbury, a friend of the composer, has engaged in tireless advocacy, whether as pianist or biographer. There was certainly no reason to doubt in the truthfulness of his performances. (I have seen no scores.) They sounded committed in every sense, born of experience as well as devotion. To my ears – which, I am well aware, are not necessarily well-attuned to the composer’s voice – it was the earlier works that exerted greater interest. Tilbury mentioned in his programme note Cage and Stockhausen as influences on the three February Pieces; they indeed sounded present, though so, I thought, did Schoenberg, especially in some of the harmonies, if only accidentally. (According to Tilbury’s fascinating memorial lecture, Cardew would later, in 1967, write of Schoenberg: ‘From America Columbus brought us back syphillis, or Death through sex; there is no reason why the compliment should not be returned with myself as the humble vehicle, in the form of total serialism - of Death through music. In the case of serialism the damage has already been done, Schoenberg is the bearer of that intolerable guilt.’ Boulez’s ‘Schoenberg est mort’ sounds relatively innocuous by the side of such words.) The nature of Tilbury’s page-turning suggested aleatory writing; whatever the nature of the compositional principles, this seemed attractive, well-crafted music, even if it was difficult to discern great individuality on a first hearing. The Fourth Element, ‘a kind of appendix to the February Pieces,’ involved a ‘prepared’ element to the piano. Again, it was attractive enough, though somewhat repetitive as time went on.
Material is Cardew’s 1964 piano transcription of his Third Orchestral Piece from four years earlier. Though the material is therefore contemporary with the February Pieces, to me it seemed harmonically more conventional, as if the composer were already moving towards a variety of experimental English minimalism. The previously advertised Winter Potato no.1 – there are three such ‘potatoes’, the pieces, according to Cardew, having lain underground for some time – was omitted, though Croppy Boy took its place, albeit as the final work on the programme. Before that, we heard Unintended Piano Music from 1970 or 1971: Cardew apparently ‘slipped [Tilbury] a single sheet of manuscript paper with a few chords and grace notes.’ I am afraid that is rather what it sounded like: muted doodling. Croppy Boy, based upon a revolutionary Irish song, may well have been important to Cardew in terms of his political principles; yet, as piano music, it sounded merely inconsequential to these doubtless-jaded ears.
I am afraid that I was unable to stay for the second half of the concert, which offered instead of other works by Cardew, improvisations by Tilbury and percussionist Eddie Prévost, coming together as AMM, a ‘cloaked acronym,’ which is both ‘the name of a music improvisation ensemble and the embodiment of a philosophy’. On the basis of Prévost’s programme note, it would seem as though AMM has had something of a fractious history, which once included Cardew, who departed from the ensemble – perhaps the philosophy too? – twice. Further details may be found at http://www.matchlessrecordings.com/.
February Piece 1959
February Piece 1960
February Piece 1961
The Fourth System
Material
Unintended Piano Music
Croppy Boy
John Tilbury (piano)
This ‘celebration’ at the Purcell Room is part of a greater festival devoted to Cornelius Cardew by Morley College, of which further details may be found at http://www.thengineroom2011.com/. Cardew is certainly an absorbing, intriguing figure to read about, progressing from boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, to the Royal Academy of Music, to assistant to Stockhausen on Carré, to composer of the seven-hour-long Great Learning, founder of the Scratch Orchestra, and radical political activist, having engaged in vigorous Maoist self-criticism, finally meeting his death in a mysterious hit-and-run accident near his Leyton home.
Opportunities to hear Cardew’s music are infrequent. John Tilbury, a friend of the composer, has engaged in tireless advocacy, whether as pianist or biographer. There was certainly no reason to doubt in the truthfulness of his performances. (I have seen no scores.) They sounded committed in every sense, born of experience as well as devotion. To my ears – which, I am well aware, are not necessarily well-attuned to the composer’s voice – it was the earlier works that exerted greater interest. Tilbury mentioned in his programme note Cage and Stockhausen as influences on the three February Pieces; they indeed sounded present, though so, I thought, did Schoenberg, especially in some of the harmonies, if only accidentally. (According to Tilbury’s fascinating memorial lecture, Cardew would later, in 1967, write of Schoenberg: ‘From America Columbus brought us back syphillis, or Death through sex; there is no reason why the compliment should not be returned with myself as the humble vehicle, in the form of total serialism - of Death through music. In the case of serialism the damage has already been done, Schoenberg is the bearer of that intolerable guilt.’ Boulez’s ‘Schoenberg est mort’ sounds relatively innocuous by the side of such words.) The nature of Tilbury’s page-turning suggested aleatory writing; whatever the nature of the compositional principles, this seemed attractive, well-crafted music, even if it was difficult to discern great individuality on a first hearing. The Fourth Element, ‘a kind of appendix to the February Pieces,’ involved a ‘prepared’ element to the piano. Again, it was attractive enough, though somewhat repetitive as time went on.
Material is Cardew’s 1964 piano transcription of his Third Orchestral Piece from four years earlier. Though the material is therefore contemporary with the February Pieces, to me it seemed harmonically more conventional, as if the composer were already moving towards a variety of experimental English minimalism. The previously advertised Winter Potato no.1 – there are three such ‘potatoes’, the pieces, according to Cardew, having lain underground for some time – was omitted, though Croppy Boy took its place, albeit as the final work on the programme. Before that, we heard Unintended Piano Music from 1970 or 1971: Cardew apparently ‘slipped [Tilbury] a single sheet of manuscript paper with a few chords and grace notes.’ I am afraid that is rather what it sounded like: muted doodling. Croppy Boy, based upon a revolutionary Irish song, may well have been important to Cardew in terms of his political principles; yet, as piano music, it sounded merely inconsequential to these doubtless-jaded ears.
I am afraid that I was unable to stay for the second half of the concert, which offered instead of other works by Cardew, improvisations by Tilbury and percussionist Eddie Prévost, coming together as AMM, a ‘cloaked acronym,’ which is both ‘the name of a music improvisation ensemble and the embodiment of a philosophy’. On the basis of Prévost’s programme note, it would seem as though AMM has had something of a fractious history, which once included Cardew, who departed from the ensemble – perhaps the philosophy too? – twice. Further details may be found at http://www.matchlessrecordings.com/.
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Tosca, English National Opera, 26 November 2011
Coliseum
Floria Tosca – Claire Rutter
Mario Cavaradossi – Gwyn Hughes Jones
Baron Scarpia – Anthony Michaels-Moore
Cesare Angelotti – Matthew Hargreaves
Sacristan – Henry Waddington
Spoletta – Scott Davies
Sciarrone – Graeme Danby
Gaoler – Christopher Ross
Shepherd-boy –Jacob Ramsay-Patel
Catherine Malfitano (director)
Frank Schloessmann (set designs)
Gideon Davey (costumes)
David Martin Jacques, Kevin Sleep (lighting)
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Nicholas Chalmers)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Stephen Lord (conductor)
The swift return to the Coliseum of Catherine Malfitano’s production of Tosca, premiered in 2010, contrasts strongly with the increasingly disposable nature of many recent ENO productions. Malfitano’s staging makes a refreshing change both from the likes of the floundering first-time spoken theatre and film directors often recently engaged by the company, and from the ludicrous, dramatically-null vulgarity of the Zeffirelli brigade. It doubtless helps to have someone at the directorial helm who knows the work from the inside, having sung the title-role a good many times herself. There is nothing here – with the possible exception of the third act – to frighten self-appointed ‘traditionalists’, although in such repertoire and with respect the audiences it tends to attract, I cannot help but wish that someone would occasionally shock the horses. (Just imagine what Calixto Bieito might make of Tosca!) Despite the sometimes bizarre specificity of the libretto, there seems to me no reason why intelligent relocation or abstraction could not work: the opera is not in any meaningful sense ‘about’ the experience of the French Revolution in Rome. Malfitano, however, elects successfully to retain the settings and for the most part the attitudes of the work’s creators, respecting as do they the classical unities.
The first act is therefore set in S.Andrea della Valle at noon, convincingly represented in realistic fashion by Frank Philipp Schlössmann’s designs. The force of Cavaradossi’s painting registers straightforwardly, but none the worse for that. One strongly feels the menace of the Church as pillar of the (re-)established order at the entrance of clergy and acolytes for the Te Deum. (I cannot help but find the anti-clericalism shallow, verging on the puerile, but that is no fault of the production.) Likewise, the second act is set at evening in Scarpia’s quarters in the Palazzo Farnese, furnished as one might expect, though without excess. The third act therefore comes as a bit of a surprise, at least in terms of designs . Doubtless taking as its cue references in words and stage directions to the stars, perhaps even those to the saints in heaven, we see the skies as if from a space ship, though something akin to the battlements is still present. It did not bother me in the slightest, though nor, by the same token, did I find the image revelatory. Throughout, Malfitano’s direction of the characters on stage proves quietly accomplished, providing neither mishaps nor particular flashes of revelation. I do not mean to imply that it is dull, for it is not, but nor does this in any sense approach reinterpretation, for which many will doubtless be relieved. If I found the final melodrama as difficult to take as ever, a not-entirely-fitting conclusion to so well-crafted a score, then clearly I am in the minority; rightly or wrongly, it receives faithful treatment here.
Stephen Lord’s conducting was impressive. Lord is not a conductor I have previously heard, but I should certainly be interested to do so again. Despite the occasional instance of perhaps driving the score a little hard, the full yet variegated sound conjured from the orchestra was as fine as I have heard at the Coliseum for quite some time. Alert to Puccini’s Wagnerisms without overplaying them, there was a fine continuity to Lord’s traversal of the score, which here in both harmony and orchestration at times sounded, to its great benefit, appreciably more modernistic than one often hears. It was not for nothing that both Schoenberg and Berg were admirers. Even Mahler, in his scathing description of a Meistermachwerk, acknowledged the skill of orchestration – an undoubted advance upon so many of Puccini’s Italian forebears – though added that any cobbler nowadays could merely ‘orchestrate to perfection’.
If the singing did not truly scaled the heights, it was professionally despatched. No one is going to replicate Callas, and Claire Rutter wisely did not attempt to try: hers was an intelligent enough stage portrayal, a little lacking in charisma perhaps, likewise in creation of the diva-status of Floria Tosca as singer, but, despite occasional weakness in sustaining her line, there was nothing grievous to worry about. Gwyn Hughes-Jones’s Cavaradossi was not entirely free of crooning tendencies, nor did it revel in subtleties, but it was well enough sung, and would doubtless have sounded better in Italian. Anthony Michaels-Moore seemed to experience vocal difficulties in the first act but his Scarpia sharpened up in the second, albeit without ever quite capturing the sheer danger and malevolence of the most notable interpreters. The smaller parts were all well taken. Choral singing, not always the strongest point recently at the Coliseum, was similarly accomplished.
Floria Tosca – Claire Rutter
Mario Cavaradossi – Gwyn Hughes Jones
Baron Scarpia – Anthony Michaels-Moore
Cesare Angelotti – Matthew Hargreaves
Sacristan – Henry Waddington
Spoletta – Scott Davies
Sciarrone – Graeme Danby
Gaoler – Christopher Ross
Shepherd-boy –Jacob Ramsay-Patel
Catherine Malfitano (director)
Frank Schloessmann (set designs)
Gideon Davey (costumes)
David Martin Jacques, Kevin Sleep (lighting)
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Nicholas Chalmers)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Stephen Lord (conductor)
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| Tosca (Claire Rutter) and Cavaradossi (Gwyn Hughes-Jones) Images: Mike Hoban |
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| Scarpia (Anthony Michaels-Moore) |
Stephen Lord’s conducting was impressive. Lord is not a conductor I have previously heard, but I should certainly be interested to do so again. Despite the occasional instance of perhaps driving the score a little hard, the full yet variegated sound conjured from the orchestra was as fine as I have heard at the Coliseum for quite some time. Alert to Puccini’s Wagnerisms without overplaying them, there was a fine continuity to Lord’s traversal of the score, which here in both harmony and orchestration at times sounded, to its great benefit, appreciably more modernistic than one often hears. It was not for nothing that both Schoenberg and Berg were admirers. Even Mahler, in his scathing description of a Meistermachwerk, acknowledged the skill of orchestration – an undoubted advance upon so many of Puccini’s Italian forebears – though added that any cobbler nowadays could merely ‘orchestrate to perfection’.
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Friday, 25 November 2011
Book Review: Helen Berry, The Castrato and His Wife
This review was originally published here for Times Higher Education. The author, so far as I am aware, is no relation to me...
The Castrato and His Wife
By Helen Berry
Oxford University Press, 312 pp., £16.99
ISBN 978-0-19-956981-6
Published 22 September 2011
The Castrato and His Wife opens with a brief sketch of a documented evening at the London residence of the Spanish Ambassador, the famed ‘Farinelli’ (Carlo Broschi) the prime attraction, then switches to another event from 1735, the birth of Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, with the proviso that we know nothing about that, save that it happened. It is refreshing to see an historian so comfortably move beyond written texts, to embrace visual evidence (Gainsborough, for instance, engravings too) and the world of mentalités. Though Helen Berry claims also to have consulted musical scores, it remains unclear in what respect. No matter: this is a work of social and cultural history, not musicology. (Repeated references to a favoured title role, that of Gluck’s Orpheo conflate Italian Orfeo and French Orphée¸ the latter a tenor version.) Nor is it a biography; perhaps we should think of an extended historical sketch, musing upon transfer from the anonymous, barely documented world of the poor to the realm of books, paintings, and theatres.
That transfer necessitated ‘a very particular and brutal kind of sacrifice,’ the details shrouded in mystery. The Church and its princes claimed no knowledge of the procedure, yet proved willing to taste of its fruits. Frenchmen and Spaniards blamed Italians; how then to account for French and Spanish castrati? The celebrated musical traveller, Charles Burney, ‘was told at Milan’ that the operation took place ‘at Venice; at Venice that it was at Bologna,’ and so on. For the English, needless to say, the practice was a cruel offshoot of Popery and absolutism, yet they happily sampled the proffered exoticism and vocal fireworks as relief from those provided by Bedlam. Following the operation, ‘happily executed’ by an itinerant barber-surgeon, Tenducci headed from Siena to a Neapolitan conservatoire, where he was invested by a priest at confession and Mass, and subsequently built a starry career across Europe, taking in debt, scandal, and imprisonment, as well as powerful patronage, the title of Count Palatine, and acquaintance with Thomas Arne, Johann Christian Bach, and Mozart.
There is much of interest in terms of gender relations: masculinity (or not), of course, but also the ‘quasi-dynastic’ support afforded from elder to younger singers in the absence of biological fatherhood, and the possibility of extra-marital affairs for unhappy wives, which provided ‘a loophole in the sexual double standard’. Tenducci for his part refused to accept that his ‘impediment’ precluded romantic heterosexual entanglement, leading to elopement, marriage, trial and annulment – the latter much to the relief of the Protestant Ascendancy family of his bride, Dorothea Maunsell. Berry proves a diverting guide in piecing together a narrative from sources and – unavoidably, given their partial nature – speculation.
Tantalisingly – perhaps an unfortunate word in this context – recordings from 1902-3 feature the ‘last castrato’, Alessandro Moreschi, musical director of the Sistine Choir. They remain objects of controversy, not only thanks to poor recording quality, but also concerning Moreschi’s vocal quality: was it even very good to begin with, or is he caught too late? Moreschi was certainly not an international star alla Tenducci, though he exasperated Vatican officials with airs, graces, and quixotic cancellations. Moreover, students of the voice vary widely in their assessments – just as they did of course during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, we are reminded of the partial nature of evidence, and the role imagination can and must play. If Tenducci’s voice ‘has been difficult, but not impossible, to recover across the centuries,’ castrati and their histories remind us that voices may mislead. Proponents of the recent ‘authenticity’ craze – so-called ‘period’ instruments and performance styles – might nevertheless do well to listen.
The Castrato and His Wife
By Helen Berry
Oxford University Press, 312 pp., £16.99
ISBN 978-0-19-956981-6
Published 22 September 2011
The Castrato and His Wife opens with a brief sketch of a documented evening at the London residence of the Spanish Ambassador, the famed ‘Farinelli’ (Carlo Broschi) the prime attraction, then switches to another event from 1735, the birth of Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, with the proviso that we know nothing about that, save that it happened. It is refreshing to see an historian so comfortably move beyond written texts, to embrace visual evidence (Gainsborough, for instance, engravings too) and the world of mentalités. Though Helen Berry claims also to have consulted musical scores, it remains unclear in what respect. No matter: this is a work of social and cultural history, not musicology. (Repeated references to a favoured title role, that of Gluck’s Orpheo conflate Italian Orfeo and French Orphée¸ the latter a tenor version.) Nor is it a biography; perhaps we should think of an extended historical sketch, musing upon transfer from the anonymous, barely documented world of the poor to the realm of books, paintings, and theatres.
That transfer necessitated ‘a very particular and brutal kind of sacrifice,’ the details shrouded in mystery. The Church and its princes claimed no knowledge of the procedure, yet proved willing to taste of its fruits. Frenchmen and Spaniards blamed Italians; how then to account for French and Spanish castrati? The celebrated musical traveller, Charles Burney, ‘was told at Milan’ that the operation took place ‘at Venice; at Venice that it was at Bologna,’ and so on. For the English, needless to say, the practice was a cruel offshoot of Popery and absolutism, yet they happily sampled the proffered exoticism and vocal fireworks as relief from those provided by Bedlam. Following the operation, ‘happily executed’ by an itinerant barber-surgeon, Tenducci headed from Siena to a Neapolitan conservatoire, where he was invested by a priest at confession and Mass, and subsequently built a starry career across Europe, taking in debt, scandal, and imprisonment, as well as powerful patronage, the title of Count Palatine, and acquaintance with Thomas Arne, Johann Christian Bach, and Mozart.
There is much of interest in terms of gender relations: masculinity (or not), of course, but also the ‘quasi-dynastic’ support afforded from elder to younger singers in the absence of biological fatherhood, and the possibility of extra-marital affairs for unhappy wives, which provided ‘a loophole in the sexual double standard’. Tenducci for his part refused to accept that his ‘impediment’ precluded romantic heterosexual entanglement, leading to elopement, marriage, trial and annulment – the latter much to the relief of the Protestant Ascendancy family of his bride, Dorothea Maunsell. Berry proves a diverting guide in piecing together a narrative from sources and – unavoidably, given their partial nature – speculation.
Tantalisingly – perhaps an unfortunate word in this context – recordings from 1902-3 feature the ‘last castrato’, Alessandro Moreschi, musical director of the Sistine Choir. They remain objects of controversy, not only thanks to poor recording quality, but also concerning Moreschi’s vocal quality: was it even very good to begin with, or is he caught too late? Moreschi was certainly not an international star alla Tenducci, though he exasperated Vatican officials with airs, graces, and quixotic cancellations. Moreover, students of the voice vary widely in their assessments – just as they did of course during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, we are reminded of the partial nature of evidence, and the role imagination can and must play. If Tenducci’s voice ‘has been difficult, but not impossible, to recover across the centuries,’ castrati and their histories remind us that voices may mislead. Proponents of the recent ‘authenticity’ craze – so-called ‘period’ instruments and performance styles – might nevertheless do well to listen.
Diener/Philharmonia/Kluttig and Dohnányi: Schöllhorn, Strauss, and Mozart, 24 November 2011
Royal Festival Hall
Johannes Schöllhorn – Anamorphoses: Contrapunctus IV, VI, IX, XI, and Canon per augmentationem in contrario motu
Strauss – Don Juan, op.20
Strauss – Four Last Songs
Mozart – Symphony no.25 in G minor, KV 183
Strauss – Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, op.28
Melanie Diener (soprano)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Roland Kluttig and Christoph von Dohnányi (conductors)
‘Schöllhorn, Strauss, and Mozart’: not, alas, a firm of German lawyers, nor even the composers featured in a Philharmonia concert, but rather those appearing in two. The first in a new series of ‘Music of Today’ featured members of the Philharmonia, conducted by Roland Kluttig in five movements from Johannes Schöllhorn’s Bach-reworking, Anamorphoses; the second welcomed back sometime Principal Conductor, Christoph von Dohnányi, for Strauss and a little Mozart.
Schöllhorn’s music was selected by Music of Today’s new Artistic Director, Unsuk Chin, to open her series. (Ivan Fedele and Gérard Grisey are amongst the others who will be featured.) Anamorphoses refers to Schöllhorn’s inspiration in the mannerist technique of having the viewer see different aspects of a painting according to where he is standing: Holbein’s The Ambassadors would be an obvious example. Schöllhorn presents the Art of Fugue in a fashion that for him – and, I thought, for the listener – presents Bach’s music not only as coming from the cathedral, but also from the bazaar. The accordion is a nice touch in that respect, though its employment is far from limited to presentation of ‘street colour’; indeed, its music later forms a significant component of the still, or rather gradually beating, heart to the movements we heard. There is Stravinskian spikiness later on, but just as arresting is the Berio-like technique – I think more of Berio’s orchestration of a Purcell hornpipe and his variations on ‘Ein mädchen oder Weibchen’ than his Art of Fugue transcription – in which wisps of music become apparent, whilst having been ever-present, sometimes submerged. Sinfonia’s treatment of Mahler also sprang to mind, especially in Contrapunctus XI. Performances seemed keenly observed and committed. I should love to hear more – though preferably without the distracting company of the roving telephone-photographer, eventually, albeit far too late, asked to desist from his travels around the hall and even into the choir.
Don Juan opened the second concert and was the only disappointment: not that it was bad, but more a matter of seeming to have caught Dohnányi before he had really found his stride. The Philharmonia sounded tremendous from the opening upwards sweep, but its direction early on was somewhat brusque, four-square even, though the more tender moments were permitted to sing. Zsolt-Tihámer Visontay’s solos as leader were predictably fine. As partial compensation for the lack of narrative swagger, Dohnányi offered a great deal of revealing attention to detail, thematically as much as pictorially, not least in the generative emphasis accorded to the cello line. Ultimately, however, though I was often (relatively) impressed, I remained unmoved.
The Four Last Songs were another matter – as surely they must. (Imagine a performance that did not move; or rather, try to banish such thoughts or recollections.) Melanie Diener showed that she could float a line just as long as Strauss – or Dohnányi – required, without turning the vocal line into just another gorgeous strand of orchestration: the words meant something. When Hermann Hesse’s verse told of the soul unwatched in free flight (‘Und die Seele unbewacht/will in freien Flügen schweben’) that was just what we heard – and felt. Dohnányi’s leadership was resolutely unsentimental, but not without sentiment. ‘Frühling’ evoked springtime, thereby permitting transformation to take place. Through the subtle array of colours in the final stanza of ‘September’, autumnal phantasmagoria turned to weariness – not too much, just enough – in ‘Beim Schlafengehen’, Strauss’s music possessed of unassuming dignity. It moved as Don Juan never had, which is not only a matter of the works’ individual qualities. Likewise, the introduction to ‘Im Abendrot’ was perfectly judged, in a similar vein; I was especially grateful for the rich – not too much, just enough – viola line, and its heart-rending articulation. ‘Ist dies etwa der Tod?’ Maybe, or maybe not: life seemed as much affirmed as denied.
Mozart’s ‘Little’ G minor Symphony was a somewhat odd bedfellow, Strauss’s devotion to Mozart notwithstanding. Either more Mozart or more Mozartian Strauss, perhaps both, might have worked better; as it was, there was a slight sense of the palette-cleanser. That was a pity, since Dohnányi led an impressive performance, hamstrung only by a strangely prosaic slow movement, in which phrase merely followed phrase. The first movement, however, was mightily impressive: vehement, without exaggeration, stylishly accomplished throughout. Structure was clearly delineated, making me keen to hear the conductor in Haydn, especially Sturm und Drang Haydn. Interplay between antiphonally placed first and second violins enthralled; there was a true sense of divine drama through ‘purely’ musical means. The minuet was finely detailed, and taken at a sensible tempo, with no fashionable one-in-a-bar nonsense. (In that connection, how refreshing it also was to welcome a decently-sized orchestra, with ten first violins down to four double basses, though Mozart himself would have welcomed larger forces, a fact the ‘authenticke’ lobby simply ignores.) The trio emerged as wondrous Harmoniemusik, breathing the air of a Salzburg summer’s evening, whilst the finale, fast but not breathless, resumed the non-exhibitionistic vehemence of the opening.
Till Eulenspiegel benefited from the reinvigoration imparted, at least seemingly so, by Mozart; this was a much livelier, more flexible reading than that accorded Don Juan. In Dohnányi’s hands, Strauss’s score sounded full of incident, superbly articulated, the performance blessed with excellent grasp of structure, permitting narrative and character to emerge with proper coherence. It was elegant, witty, and dashing. The trickiness of Strauss’s post-Meistersinger counterpoint was navigated as if it were the easiest thing in the world, which it certainly is not. The Philharmonia’s brass sounded positively Wagnerian, albeit with an apt materialist edge. In this quite outstanding account, I was above all reminded with what surpassing virtuosity Strauss, the reviser of Berlioz’s treatise, composed for orchestra.
Johannes Schöllhorn – Anamorphoses: Contrapunctus IV, VI, IX, XI, and Canon per augmentationem in contrario motu
Strauss – Don Juan, op.20
Strauss – Four Last Songs
Mozart – Symphony no.25 in G minor, KV 183
Strauss – Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, op.28
Melanie Diener (soprano)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Roland Kluttig and Christoph von Dohnányi (conductors)
‘Schöllhorn, Strauss, and Mozart’: not, alas, a firm of German lawyers, nor even the composers featured in a Philharmonia concert, but rather those appearing in two. The first in a new series of ‘Music of Today’ featured members of the Philharmonia, conducted by Roland Kluttig in five movements from Johannes Schöllhorn’s Bach-reworking, Anamorphoses; the second welcomed back sometime Principal Conductor, Christoph von Dohnányi, for Strauss and a little Mozart.
Schöllhorn’s music was selected by Music of Today’s new Artistic Director, Unsuk Chin, to open her series. (Ivan Fedele and Gérard Grisey are amongst the others who will be featured.) Anamorphoses refers to Schöllhorn’s inspiration in the mannerist technique of having the viewer see different aspects of a painting according to where he is standing: Holbein’s The Ambassadors would be an obvious example. Schöllhorn presents the Art of Fugue in a fashion that for him – and, I thought, for the listener – presents Bach’s music not only as coming from the cathedral, but also from the bazaar. The accordion is a nice touch in that respect, though its employment is far from limited to presentation of ‘street colour’; indeed, its music later forms a significant component of the still, or rather gradually beating, heart to the movements we heard. There is Stravinskian spikiness later on, but just as arresting is the Berio-like technique – I think more of Berio’s orchestration of a Purcell hornpipe and his variations on ‘Ein mädchen oder Weibchen’ than his Art of Fugue transcription – in which wisps of music become apparent, whilst having been ever-present, sometimes submerged. Sinfonia’s treatment of Mahler also sprang to mind, especially in Contrapunctus XI. Performances seemed keenly observed and committed. I should love to hear more – though preferably without the distracting company of the roving telephone-photographer, eventually, albeit far too late, asked to desist from his travels around the hall and even into the choir.
Don Juan opened the second concert and was the only disappointment: not that it was bad, but more a matter of seeming to have caught Dohnányi before he had really found his stride. The Philharmonia sounded tremendous from the opening upwards sweep, but its direction early on was somewhat brusque, four-square even, though the more tender moments were permitted to sing. Zsolt-Tihámer Visontay’s solos as leader were predictably fine. As partial compensation for the lack of narrative swagger, Dohnányi offered a great deal of revealing attention to detail, thematically as much as pictorially, not least in the generative emphasis accorded to the cello line. Ultimately, however, though I was often (relatively) impressed, I remained unmoved.
The Four Last Songs were another matter – as surely they must. (Imagine a performance that did not move; or rather, try to banish such thoughts or recollections.) Melanie Diener showed that she could float a line just as long as Strauss – or Dohnányi – required, without turning the vocal line into just another gorgeous strand of orchestration: the words meant something. When Hermann Hesse’s verse told of the soul unwatched in free flight (‘Und die Seele unbewacht/will in freien Flügen schweben’) that was just what we heard – and felt. Dohnányi’s leadership was resolutely unsentimental, but not without sentiment. ‘Frühling’ evoked springtime, thereby permitting transformation to take place. Through the subtle array of colours in the final stanza of ‘September’, autumnal phantasmagoria turned to weariness – not too much, just enough – in ‘Beim Schlafengehen’, Strauss’s music possessed of unassuming dignity. It moved as Don Juan never had, which is not only a matter of the works’ individual qualities. Likewise, the introduction to ‘Im Abendrot’ was perfectly judged, in a similar vein; I was especially grateful for the rich – not too much, just enough – viola line, and its heart-rending articulation. ‘Ist dies etwa der Tod?’ Maybe, or maybe not: life seemed as much affirmed as denied.
Mozart’s ‘Little’ G minor Symphony was a somewhat odd bedfellow, Strauss’s devotion to Mozart notwithstanding. Either more Mozart or more Mozartian Strauss, perhaps both, might have worked better; as it was, there was a slight sense of the palette-cleanser. That was a pity, since Dohnányi led an impressive performance, hamstrung only by a strangely prosaic slow movement, in which phrase merely followed phrase. The first movement, however, was mightily impressive: vehement, without exaggeration, stylishly accomplished throughout. Structure was clearly delineated, making me keen to hear the conductor in Haydn, especially Sturm und Drang Haydn. Interplay between antiphonally placed first and second violins enthralled; there was a true sense of divine drama through ‘purely’ musical means. The minuet was finely detailed, and taken at a sensible tempo, with no fashionable one-in-a-bar nonsense. (In that connection, how refreshing it also was to welcome a decently-sized orchestra, with ten first violins down to four double basses, though Mozart himself would have welcomed larger forces, a fact the ‘authenticke’ lobby simply ignores.) The trio emerged as wondrous Harmoniemusik, breathing the air of a Salzburg summer’s evening, whilst the finale, fast but not breathless, resumed the non-exhibitionistic vehemence of the opening.
Till Eulenspiegel benefited from the reinvigoration imparted, at least seemingly so, by Mozart; this was a much livelier, more flexible reading than that accorded Don Juan. In Dohnányi’s hands, Strauss’s score sounded full of incident, superbly articulated, the performance blessed with excellent grasp of structure, permitting narrative and character to emerge with proper coherence. It was elegant, witty, and dashing. The trickiness of Strauss’s post-Meistersinger counterpoint was navigated as if it were the easiest thing in the world, which it certainly is not. The Philharmonia’s brass sounded positively Wagnerian, albeit with an apt materialist edge. In this quite outstanding account, I was above all reminded with what surpassing virtuosity Strauss, the reviser of Berlioz’s treatise, composed for orchestra.
Béatrice et Bénédict, Royal Academy Opera, 23 November 2011
Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music
Somarone – Nicholas Crawley
Léonato – James Wolstenholme
Messenger, Archbishop – Johnny Herford
Béatrice – Rachel Kelly
Héro – Jennifer France
Don Pedro – Frederick Long
Bénédict – Stuart Jackson
Claudio – Ross Ramgobin
Ursule – Fiona Mackay
John Copley (director)
Tim Reed (set designs)
Prue Handely (costumes)
Geraint Pughe (lighting)
John Castle (Shakespeare dialogue coach)
Royal Academy Sinfonia
Royal Academy Opera Chorus
Sir Colin Davis (conductor).
I wonder a little quite what one would make of the opera, did one not know Shakespeare’s play; in many respects, Béatrice et Bénédict comes across, like Roméo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust, even Tristia, more as reflections upon an original than a fully-fledged drama in its own right. I cannot help, moreover, but think that some of the numbers are a little longer than they need be. At any rate, the work’s pleasures are quite different from the splendours of Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troyens. Nevertheless, John Copley’s direction makes a strong and enjoyable case. This was not, for better or worse, a Regietheater reimagining, but a warm-hearted, sympathetic staging that complemented Sir Colin’s contribution in the pit, delighting the audience with its warmly Mediterranean designs and its fine sense of comic timing. It seemed to me a perfectly reasonable compromise in a conservatoire context to have the dialogue in English, mostly that of Shakespeare; the singers certainly delivered it well, no doubt a measure of John Castle’s contribution as dialogue coach.
Notwithstanding the estimable qualities of the conductor and director, Royal Academy Opera is a draw in itself. This is the third production I have seen there within a year, the others having been Così fan tutte and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Kommilitonen! Though Béatrice et Bénédict proved the finest performance of all, both Così and Kommilitonen! had also proved highly impressive. Moreover, the contrast with Opera North’s unhappy Queen of Spades the preceding evening was stark. Not a single member of the cast disappointed; indeed, each in his or her own way enthralled. Nicholas Crawley offered a sharply-etched, genuinely amusing, characterisation of Somarone, the music master (Berlioz’s own creation), as beautifully sung as it was finely acted. Frederick Long impressed again, this time in the role of Don Pedro; he is fast emerging a versatile, highly-accomplished artist. Stuart Jackson and Rachel Kelly negotiated with aplomb the strenuous demands placed upon them in the title roles, whilst the stars of Jennifer France’s Héro and Ross Ramgobin’s Claudio shone brightly indeed, their lines both ardent yet elegantly shaped in fine Gallic fashion. The sixteen-strong chorus was outstanding: once again, this was a performance that would put to shame many of those one would encounter in the grandest of houses.
It is a sad reflection on France’s treatment of one of her greatest composers that the 1862 premiere of this very ‘French’ work took place in Baden-Baden, but then, even as late as 1990, an act of restitution to open the Opéra Bastille, an allegedly ‘complete’ performance of Les Troyens, would omit its ballet music. The land of Berlioz’s beloved Shakespeare, has often turned out, above all though not solely through the offices of Sir Colin Davis, to be friendlier territory. Let us hope that this new staging will have furnished many on stage and in the audience with newfound or confirmed enthusiasm for the cause. When one considers some of the works that bafflingly continue to hold our operatic stages, Berlioz deserves to be heard far more frequently.
Recommended recording:
Somarone – Nicholas Crawley
Léonato – James Wolstenholme
Messenger, Archbishop – Johnny Herford
Béatrice – Rachel Kelly
Héro – Jennifer France
Don Pedro – Frederick Long
Bénédict – Stuart Jackson
Claudio – Ross Ramgobin
Ursule – Fiona Mackay
John Copley (director)
Tim Reed (set designs)
Prue Handely (costumes)
Geraint Pughe (lighting)
John Castle (Shakespeare dialogue coach)
Royal Academy Sinfonia
Royal Academy Opera Chorus
Sir Colin Davis (conductor).
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| Héro (Jennifer France) Images: Hana Zushi |
A new production of a Berlioz opera conducted by Sir Colin Davis: who would not jump at the chance? I had begun to fear that I might never be vouchsafed the theatrical opportunity, though LSO concert performances of Les Troyens and Benvenuto Cellini remain highlights of my opera-going life. How wonderful, then, to be offered the opportunity to see Béatrice et Bénédict at the Royal Academy, an institution to which, in the words of Jane Glover, Director of Opera, ‘Sir Colin … has given so much … over the years.’ Long may one of ‘the greatest living legends in the world of opera’ continue to do so, for he inspired his young musicians, both singers and instrumentalists, to heights such as one could hardly have dared anticipate. The playing of the Royal Academy Sinfonia was characterful, beautifully articulated, and above all responsive to the tricky twists and turns of Berlioz’s inimitable, fantastical imagination. As it should, the Overture properly set the scene: nervous energy palpable at a level that would not have shamed the LSO, with melting contrast from a daringly slow, quite ravishing played, second group, prefiguring the delights of the Nocturne, ‘Nuit paisible et sereine!’ which ushers the first act to sleep. The thread might have snapped in less experienced hands, but Davis knew precisely what he was doing, and held us – and, it would seem, his musicians – spellbound throughout. Onstage instrumental playing impressed too, not least the evocative guitar-playing of Benjamin Bruant.
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| Somarone (Nicholas Crawley) |
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| Léonato (James Wolstenholme), Bénédict (Stuart Jackson), and Claudio (Ross Ramgobin) |
Notwithstanding the estimable qualities of the conductor and director, Royal Academy Opera is a draw in itself. This is the third production I have seen there within a year, the others having been Così fan tutte and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Kommilitonen! Though Béatrice et Bénédict proved the finest performance of all, both Così and Kommilitonen! had also proved highly impressive. Moreover, the contrast with Opera North’s unhappy Queen of Spades the preceding evening was stark. Not a single member of the cast disappointed; indeed, each in his or her own way enthralled. Nicholas Crawley offered a sharply-etched, genuinely amusing, characterisation of Somarone, the music master (Berlioz’s own creation), as beautifully sung as it was finely acted. Frederick Long impressed again, this time in the role of Don Pedro; he is fast emerging a versatile, highly-accomplished artist. Stuart Jackson and Rachel Kelly negotiated with aplomb the strenuous demands placed upon them in the title roles, whilst the stars of Jennifer France’s Héro and Ross Ramgobin’s Claudio shone brightly indeed, their lines both ardent yet elegantly shaped in fine Gallic fashion. The sixteen-strong chorus was outstanding: once again, this was a performance that would put to shame many of those one would encounter in the grandest of houses.
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| Final scene (some of the singers are from a different cast) |
It is a sad reflection on France’s treatment of one of her greatest composers that the 1862 premiere of this very ‘French’ work took place in Baden-Baden, but then, even as late as 1990, an act of restitution to open the Opéra Bastille, an allegedly ‘complete’ performance of Les Troyens, would omit its ballet music. The land of Berlioz’s beloved Shakespeare, has often turned out, above all though not solely through the offices of Sir Colin Davis, to be friendlier territory. Let us hope that this new staging will have furnished many on stage and in the audience with newfound or confirmed enthusiasm for the cause. When one considers some of the works that bafflingly continue to hold our operatic stages, Berlioz deserves to be heard far more frequently.
Recommended recording:
Wednesday, 23 November 2011
The Queen of Spades, Opera North, 22 November 2011
(sung in English)
Barbican Theatre
Lisa – Orla Boylan
Countess – Dame Josephine Barstow
Hermann – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Count Tomsky, Pluto – Jonathan Summers
Prince Yeletsky – William Dazeley
Pauline, Daphnis – Alexandra Sherman
Governess – Fiona Kimm
Chekalinsky – Daniel Norman
Sourin – Julian Tovey
Masha – Gillene Herbert
Chaplitsky – David Llewellyn
Narumov – Dean Robinson
Master of Ceremonies – Paul Rendall
Chloë – Miranda Bevin
Neil Bartlett (director)
Kandis Cook (designs)
Chris Davey (lighting)
Leah Hausman (choreography)
Chorus of Opera North (chorus master: Timothy Burke)
Orchestra of Opera North
Richard Farnes (conductor)
Opera North holds a special place in my affections: my first full opera in the theatre was the company’s Wozzeck, which I saw as a schoolboy at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. The experience marked me for life. I have never doubted since that Wozzeck is one of the greatest operas ever written, nor have I doubted that opera, whatever the disappointments one may experience in practice, can at its best prove at least as potent a form of drama as any other. It is many years now since I heard a performance from the company, though I have received very good reports from those who have, often comparing its offerings favourably with those on offer from the two principal London houses. I was therefore delighted to have opportunity to see and to hear for myself in Opera North’s first visit to the Barbican Theatre. (More are planned.) The timing was interesting too, affording comparison with Eugene Onegin across town at the Coliseum.
First impressions of Neil Bartlett’s production were preferable to those of Deborah Warner’s Met-bound anodyne crowd-pleaser. There is, at least to begin with, no evident point of view expressed; straightforward storytelling seems the order of the day. By the same token, however, that does not come across as a deliberate policy to play safe, even to condescend. The setting is where it ‘should’ be; costumes are of the period; there is neither jarring nor particular elucidation. It would have been bizarre and not just unwelcome if the audience had followed the practice of a segment of that for Onegin and had drowned out the music by applauding Kandis Cook’s serviceable sets; they simply did their job without ostentation and without sentimental emphasis upon petit bourgeois conceptions of the ‘beautiful’. However, I said ‘first impressions’ above, because there is one aspect of Bartlett’s staging that might distress the literal-minded. It seemed interesting to me, yet arguably out of place in a production that offered nothing more of the same, rather as if the concept had wandered in from elsewhere. I speak of Bartlett’s treatment of the Countess, who emerges a sex-crazed vamp: she certainly would have captured attention in her scarlet gown even if she had not been played by Dame Josephine Barstow. Fitting or not, it was at least an idea, which was more than could be said for anything Warner mustered. The Personenregie, however, was considerably less skilled, or at least its execution was. And If Catherine the Great made her appearance, I am afraid I missed it.
The real problems, though, lay in the musical performances, and above all with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’s Hermann. It did not sound as though this were an off-day, more a matter of having taken on a task that lay far beyond what the voice was incapable of delivering. It would be a matter of taste rather than judgement whether the shouting or tuning proved more painful. This, I am sad to say, constituted some of the most troubling professional singing I have heard; indeed, most student or other amateur performances are executed at a much higher level. He improved slightly during the third act, though he continued to croon in a manner that might have been thought excessive for a West End musical. Some smaller roles were no less approximate and crude, though, by the same token, some proved much better. William Dazeley’s Yeletsky impressed, as did the Tomsky of Jonathan Summers. Perhaps best of all was Alexandra Sherman’s Pauline. Hers was that rare thing: a true contralto. Moreover, she could use it to properly dramatic ends, the song, ‘Podrugi milïye,’ musically shaped and genuinely moving. Orla Boylan’s Lisa had its moments, but sometimes found herself all over the place in terms both of (melo-)drama and of intonation.
The chorus had clearly been well trained by Timothy Burke, and generally acquitted itself well, most of all in the third act, when, despite the translation, choral sound came across as more plausibly Russian than elsewhere. (The translation itself veered between embarrassing couplets and the merely prosaic; in that respect, Martin Pickard’s work recalled what we heard from him for Onegin.) Barstow, as the reader may have guessed, stole the show. Though her tuning was a little awry upon her entrance, and some might have queried the preponderance of quasi-spoken, parlando style, she can still hold a stage. One longed for more, wishing that her palpable commitment had rubbed off on others.
Richard Farnes proved intermittently impressive. There was certainly dramatic drive, sensitivity too, to his conducting. Yet, whilst there were moments in which the orchestra sounded to have just the right Tchaikovsky sound – the opening of the third act, for instance – there were other passages in which the score veered awkwardly between dark, would-be Wagnerism and soft-centred Puccini. A greater body of strings would have assisted: though what was mustered played well, the lack of heft was apparent throughout. Characterful woodwind was offset by variable brass, sometimes blaring, sometimes surprisingly tentative. (Placing outside the pit, at the edge of the stage, doubtless did not help.)
It was just about worth it for the Countess, then, but Opera North’s outing to London proved for the most part a damp squib. And it is surely a little too easy to say that the problem may have lain in staging so ambitious a work. After all, it was Wozzeck, no less, that made such an impression upon me in Sheffield. The stage director of that searing, life-changing Wozzeck? Ironically, one Deborah Warner…
Barbican Theatre
Lisa – Orla Boylan
Countess – Dame Josephine Barstow
Hermann – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Count Tomsky, Pluto – Jonathan Summers
Prince Yeletsky – William Dazeley
Pauline, Daphnis – Alexandra Sherman
Governess – Fiona Kimm
Chekalinsky – Daniel Norman
Sourin – Julian Tovey
Masha – Gillene Herbert
Chaplitsky – David Llewellyn
Narumov – Dean Robinson
Master of Ceremonies – Paul Rendall
Chloë – Miranda Bevin
Neil Bartlett (director)
Kandis Cook (designs)
Chris Davey (lighting)
Leah Hausman (choreography)
Chorus of Opera North (chorus master: Timothy Burke)
Orchestra of Opera North
Richard Farnes (conductor)
Opera North holds a special place in my affections: my first full opera in the theatre was the company’s Wozzeck, which I saw as a schoolboy at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. The experience marked me for life. I have never doubted since that Wozzeck is one of the greatest operas ever written, nor have I doubted that opera, whatever the disappointments one may experience in practice, can at its best prove at least as potent a form of drama as any other. It is many years now since I heard a performance from the company, though I have received very good reports from those who have, often comparing its offerings favourably with those on offer from the two principal London houses. I was therefore delighted to have opportunity to see and to hear for myself in Opera North’s first visit to the Barbican Theatre. (More are planned.) The timing was interesting too, affording comparison with Eugene Onegin across town at the Coliseum.
First impressions of Neil Bartlett’s production were preferable to those of Deborah Warner’s Met-bound anodyne crowd-pleaser. There is, at least to begin with, no evident point of view expressed; straightforward storytelling seems the order of the day. By the same token, however, that does not come across as a deliberate policy to play safe, even to condescend. The setting is where it ‘should’ be; costumes are of the period; there is neither jarring nor particular elucidation. It would have been bizarre and not just unwelcome if the audience had followed the practice of a segment of that for Onegin and had drowned out the music by applauding Kandis Cook’s serviceable sets; they simply did their job without ostentation and without sentimental emphasis upon petit bourgeois conceptions of the ‘beautiful’. However, I said ‘first impressions’ above, because there is one aspect of Bartlett’s staging that might distress the literal-minded. It seemed interesting to me, yet arguably out of place in a production that offered nothing more of the same, rather as if the concept had wandered in from elsewhere. I speak of Bartlett’s treatment of the Countess, who emerges a sex-crazed vamp: she certainly would have captured attention in her scarlet gown even if she had not been played by Dame Josephine Barstow. Fitting or not, it was at least an idea, which was more than could be said for anything Warner mustered. The Personenregie, however, was considerably less skilled, or at least its execution was. And If Catherine the Great made her appearance, I am afraid I missed it.
The real problems, though, lay in the musical performances, and above all with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’s Hermann. It did not sound as though this were an off-day, more a matter of having taken on a task that lay far beyond what the voice was incapable of delivering. It would be a matter of taste rather than judgement whether the shouting or tuning proved more painful. This, I am sad to say, constituted some of the most troubling professional singing I have heard; indeed, most student or other amateur performances are executed at a much higher level. He improved slightly during the third act, though he continued to croon in a manner that might have been thought excessive for a West End musical. Some smaller roles were no less approximate and crude, though, by the same token, some proved much better. William Dazeley’s Yeletsky impressed, as did the Tomsky of Jonathan Summers. Perhaps best of all was Alexandra Sherman’s Pauline. Hers was that rare thing: a true contralto. Moreover, she could use it to properly dramatic ends, the song, ‘Podrugi milïye,’ musically shaped and genuinely moving. Orla Boylan’s Lisa had its moments, but sometimes found herself all over the place in terms both of (melo-)drama and of intonation.
The chorus had clearly been well trained by Timothy Burke, and generally acquitted itself well, most of all in the third act, when, despite the translation, choral sound came across as more plausibly Russian than elsewhere. (The translation itself veered between embarrassing couplets and the merely prosaic; in that respect, Martin Pickard’s work recalled what we heard from him for Onegin.) Barstow, as the reader may have guessed, stole the show. Though her tuning was a little awry upon her entrance, and some might have queried the preponderance of quasi-spoken, parlando style, she can still hold a stage. One longed for more, wishing that her palpable commitment had rubbed off on others.
Richard Farnes proved intermittently impressive. There was certainly dramatic drive, sensitivity too, to his conducting. Yet, whilst there were moments in which the orchestra sounded to have just the right Tchaikovsky sound – the opening of the third act, for instance – there were other passages in which the score veered awkwardly between dark, would-be Wagnerism and soft-centred Puccini. A greater body of strings would have assisted: though what was mustered played well, the lack of heft was apparent throughout. Characterful woodwind was offset by variable brass, sometimes blaring, sometimes surprisingly tentative. (Placing outside the pit, at the edge of the stage, doubtless did not help.)
It was just about worth it for the Countess, then, but Opera North’s outing to London proved for the most part a damp squib. And it is surely a little too easy to say that the problem may have lain in staging so ambitious a work. After all, it was Wozzeck, no less, that made such an impression upon me in Sheffield. The stage director of that searing, life-changing Wozzeck? Ironically, one Deborah Warner…
Sunday, 20 November 2011
More from Baker, Leppard, and the ECO...
This time, Ottavia's lament, 'Disprezzata regina,' from the greatest of all seventeenth-century operas, Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. A fine paradox this: Monteverdi's music is so intimately tied to the words, yet, such are the integrity and intensity of the performance that one should most likely glean their meaning without even a smattering of Italian.
Saturday, 19 November 2011
Janet Baker and Raymond Leppard in Gluck's 'Le perfide Renaud me fuit'
As a pendant to the recent review of Acis and Galatea, here are Dame Janet Baker and Raymond Leppard, again with the English Chamber Orchestra, in the supremely moving 'Le perfide Renaud me fuit', from Armide. Is any of our great musical dramatists, with the possible exception of Schoenberg, more scandalously neglected than Gluck?
For the excellent full collection of Gluck arias from these artists, click on the link below.
For a review of Armide in Berlin, directed by Calixto Bieito, and which might not quite have been Dame Janet's cup of tea, click here. (In relation to which, what tantalising news it is that Bieito will direct Carmen for ENO! Although almost anything would be preferable to another Met co-production...)
For the excellent full collection of Gluck arias from these artists, click on the link below.
For a review of Armide in Berlin, directed by Calixto Bieito, and which might not quite have been Dame Janet's cup of tea, click here. (In relation to which, what tantalising news it is that Bieito will direct Carmen for ENO! Although almost anything would be preferable to another Met co-production...)
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Acis and Galatea, ECO/Leppard, 15 November 2011
Cadogan Hall
Acis – Ed Lyon
Galatea – Ruby Hughes
Polyphemus – João Fernandes
Damon – Richard Edgar-Wilson
Dame Janet Baker (narrator)
Choir of the 21st Century
English Chamber Orchestra
Raymond Leppard (conductor).
There was something charmingly of another age – an apparently gentler age, which, like the pastoral idyll itself, may not ever have existed – to this performance of Acis and Galatea. It was not only a matter of hearing Handel once again from Raymond Leppard and the English Chamber Orchestra, welcome though it was to hear the composer’s music not only on modern instruments, but in a performance that did not treat those instruments as if they must discard all their advantages over predecessors – or, more likely, modern copies – and ape their whining tones, their lack of warmth and tuning, in short their gross technical and musical disadvantages. After all, an age in which Baroque music was not a matter of abrasiveness, of ‘effects without cause’, of hysterical promotion of hair-shirted exhibitionism, did once exist: we have a host of recordings from Leppard and the ECO to show it.
Dame Janet Baker was of course present on a good few of those. Her presence on this occasion as narrator, her delivery, and Leppard’s narration itself fitted into a form of presentation redolent of what some of us might imagine the wireless Home Service once to have been. I am not sure that the experiment is likely to be widely repeated, nor that it should be, consisting as it did in descriptions of the action to come, a little explication of situation, and some gentle humour that might have sounded strained when Abigail’s Party was but a twinkle in Mike Leigh’s eye. A wryer framing might better have suited our age’s world-weary cynicism, and we could have done with fewer recurrent mentions of the plains. (The temptation to include a ‘Rain in Spain’ reference certainly ought to have been resisted.) Nevertheless, it would take a heart considerably harder than mine not to be more than a little charmed – and grateful, if for the first and perhaps last, time, to hear Dame Janet back in the concert hall. Her well-spoken Yorkshire tones remained just as one recalled, similarly her graceful demeanour; I for one was delighted to savour them and should have been equally delighted by the opportunity to have heard a bedtime story in such vein.
I had no qualms whatsoever concerning the performance from Leppard and the ECO, a delight from beginning to end. The Sinfonia was lively and well articulated, breathing air that was as theatrical as it was pastoral; and so it continued. If Leppard’s interventionism in the music of composers such as Monteverdi and Cavalli grew more controversial as his career progressed, it might be thought still more so in Handel. (‘Authenticke’ conductors such as René Jacobs take almighty liberties, but that, apparently, is another matter.) Not unreasonably, Leppard took his cue from Handel’s later practice in post-Cannons performances, for instance at the Haymarket, and added a few parts here and there, not only violas and sometimes other, additional string lines, but even – and this, I admit, came as something of a jolt – a glockenspiel for the chorus, itself the beneficiary of a spot of (re-)composition, ‘Happy, happy! Happy we!’ If the truth be told, the effect was a little de trop, closer to Papageno than to the rejoicing Israelites of Saul; moreover, I could not help but think that the number would have been better left as a duet, which we heard, prior to the entry of the chorus. There are far more grievous sins, though, than the occasional gilding of a lily.
Other decisions were less interventionist, as stylish as the instrumental performances themselves. The poignant delicacy of Galatea’s ‘As when the dove laments her love,’ was as much a matter of dialogue, between oboe and marvellously fruity bassoon, conducted against a chamber organ backdrop, as it was of Ruby Hughes’s limpid and at times radiant vocal delivery. I very much liked the balance between ‘English’, Purcellian directness and the warbling of the sopranino recorder in ‘Hush, ye pretty warbling quire!’ A melting oboe solo in the penultimate aria and chorus, ‘Must I my Acis still bemoan’ proved another highlight. Continuo playing – organ and harpsichord were employed, though not, as once might have been the case, played by Leppard himself – was both reliable and imaginative throughout.
Hughes’s contribution I generally found winning, though there were times when her diction might have been stronger. Richard Edgar-Wilson’s brief appearance as Damon – a part that might without great loss be cut – also suffered a little in that respect, though his coloratura was excellent. There were no such problems, however, from the other male soloists, Ed Lyon as the lovestruck Acis and João Fernandes as the giant, Polyphemus. ‘Love in her eyes sits playing’ was an especially touching example of Lyon’s artistry, which showed that, even in ‘concert performance’ – there was throughout a degree of acting, tending somewhat towards the ‘semi-staged – he knew how to act as well as how to sing a Baroque da capo aria. So much was captured in a gesture, a glance, as well of course as in the shaping of words and phrase, that one needed no more: a Handelian tableau vivant, as Leppard outlined in the programme. The da capo return in beautifully hushed tone, love not only playing but already threatening ‘delicious death’, was truly a moment to savour. On a micro-level, the judgement shown in a revealing crescendo on the second syllable of ‘alarm’ in ‘Love sounds th’alarm’ betokened both musical and dramatic sensitivity. Fernandes’s facial expressions exhibited a degree of the gentle grotesque: amusing, touching even, without becoming merely silly. His theatrical experience showed equally, like Lyon’s, in his way with words; the lightly accented English seemed delightfully apt in context. This again is a singer of whom I should like to hear – and to see – more. In the trio, ‘The flocks shall leave the mountains,’ Hughes, Lyon, and Fernandes all helped to show that Handel is perfectly capable of expressing action as well as mood through music – making it all the sadder that opera seria would rarely offer him that opportunity. The Choir of the 21st Century contributed in lively fashion, though the solos in the opening chorus were a little weak. That was soon forgotten, however, and the sense of playful resolution in ‘Galatea, dry thy tears,’ was theirs as well as Leppard’s. More please!
Acis – Ed Lyon
Galatea – Ruby Hughes
Polyphemus – João Fernandes
Damon – Richard Edgar-Wilson
Dame Janet Baker (narrator)
Choir of the 21st Century
English Chamber Orchestra
Raymond Leppard (conductor).
There was something charmingly of another age – an apparently gentler age, which, like the pastoral idyll itself, may not ever have existed – to this performance of Acis and Galatea. It was not only a matter of hearing Handel once again from Raymond Leppard and the English Chamber Orchestra, welcome though it was to hear the composer’s music not only on modern instruments, but in a performance that did not treat those instruments as if they must discard all their advantages over predecessors – or, more likely, modern copies – and ape their whining tones, their lack of warmth and tuning, in short their gross technical and musical disadvantages. After all, an age in which Baroque music was not a matter of abrasiveness, of ‘effects without cause’, of hysterical promotion of hair-shirted exhibitionism, did once exist: we have a host of recordings from Leppard and the ECO to show it.
Dame Janet Baker was of course present on a good few of those. Her presence on this occasion as narrator, her delivery, and Leppard’s narration itself fitted into a form of presentation redolent of what some of us might imagine the wireless Home Service once to have been. I am not sure that the experiment is likely to be widely repeated, nor that it should be, consisting as it did in descriptions of the action to come, a little explication of situation, and some gentle humour that might have sounded strained when Abigail’s Party was but a twinkle in Mike Leigh’s eye. A wryer framing might better have suited our age’s world-weary cynicism, and we could have done with fewer recurrent mentions of the plains. (The temptation to include a ‘Rain in Spain’ reference certainly ought to have been resisted.) Nevertheless, it would take a heart considerably harder than mine not to be more than a little charmed – and grateful, if for the first and perhaps last, time, to hear Dame Janet back in the concert hall. Her well-spoken Yorkshire tones remained just as one recalled, similarly her graceful demeanour; I for one was delighted to savour them and should have been equally delighted by the opportunity to have heard a bedtime story in such vein.
I had no qualms whatsoever concerning the performance from Leppard and the ECO, a delight from beginning to end. The Sinfonia was lively and well articulated, breathing air that was as theatrical as it was pastoral; and so it continued. If Leppard’s interventionism in the music of composers such as Monteverdi and Cavalli grew more controversial as his career progressed, it might be thought still more so in Handel. (‘Authenticke’ conductors such as René Jacobs take almighty liberties, but that, apparently, is another matter.) Not unreasonably, Leppard took his cue from Handel’s later practice in post-Cannons performances, for instance at the Haymarket, and added a few parts here and there, not only violas and sometimes other, additional string lines, but even – and this, I admit, came as something of a jolt – a glockenspiel for the chorus, itself the beneficiary of a spot of (re-)composition, ‘Happy, happy! Happy we!’ If the truth be told, the effect was a little de trop, closer to Papageno than to the rejoicing Israelites of Saul; moreover, I could not help but think that the number would have been better left as a duet, which we heard, prior to the entry of the chorus. There are far more grievous sins, though, than the occasional gilding of a lily.
Other decisions were less interventionist, as stylish as the instrumental performances themselves. The poignant delicacy of Galatea’s ‘As when the dove laments her love,’ was as much a matter of dialogue, between oboe and marvellously fruity bassoon, conducted against a chamber organ backdrop, as it was of Ruby Hughes’s limpid and at times radiant vocal delivery. I very much liked the balance between ‘English’, Purcellian directness and the warbling of the sopranino recorder in ‘Hush, ye pretty warbling quire!’ A melting oboe solo in the penultimate aria and chorus, ‘Must I my Acis still bemoan’ proved another highlight. Continuo playing – organ and harpsichord were employed, though not, as once might have been the case, played by Leppard himself – was both reliable and imaginative throughout.
Hughes’s contribution I generally found winning, though there were times when her diction might have been stronger. Richard Edgar-Wilson’s brief appearance as Damon – a part that might without great loss be cut – also suffered a little in that respect, though his coloratura was excellent. There were no such problems, however, from the other male soloists, Ed Lyon as the lovestruck Acis and João Fernandes as the giant, Polyphemus. ‘Love in her eyes sits playing’ was an especially touching example of Lyon’s artistry, which showed that, even in ‘concert performance’ – there was throughout a degree of acting, tending somewhat towards the ‘semi-staged – he knew how to act as well as how to sing a Baroque da capo aria. So much was captured in a gesture, a glance, as well of course as in the shaping of words and phrase, that one needed no more: a Handelian tableau vivant, as Leppard outlined in the programme. The da capo return in beautifully hushed tone, love not only playing but already threatening ‘delicious death’, was truly a moment to savour. On a micro-level, the judgement shown in a revealing crescendo on the second syllable of ‘alarm’ in ‘Love sounds th’alarm’ betokened both musical and dramatic sensitivity. Fernandes’s facial expressions exhibited a degree of the gentle grotesque: amusing, touching even, without becoming merely silly. His theatrical experience showed equally, like Lyon’s, in his way with words; the lightly accented English seemed delightfully apt in context. This again is a singer of whom I should like to hear – and to see – more. In the trio, ‘The flocks shall leave the mountains,’ Hughes, Lyon, and Fernandes all helped to show that Handel is perfectly capable of expressing action as well as mood through music – making it all the sadder that opera seria would rarely offer him that opportunity. The Choir of the 21st Century contributed in lively fashion, though the solos in the opening chorus were a little weak. That was soon forgotten, however, and the sense of playful resolution in ‘Galatea, dry thy tears,’ was theirs as well as Leppard’s. More please!
Sunday, 13 November 2011
Handel's 'Hallelujah' Chorus sung as Berlusconi exits stage right
The truly wonderful news is, of course, the resignation of the man who at times seemed close to buying Italy. However, it is more than a little wonderful to hear Handel's role in the celebrations:
Let us hope that the Messiah will soon come in useful on the streets of London too. Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, et al., beware...
(Click here for a reminder of Maurizio Pollini's words against Berlusconi's 'government'.)
Let us hope that the Messiah will soon come in useful on the streets of London too. Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, et al., beware...
(Click here for a reminder of Maurizio Pollini's words against Berlusconi's 'government'.)
Eugene Onegin, English National Opera, 12 November 2011
Coliseum
Madame Larina – Diana Montague
Tatiana – Amanda Echalaz
Olga – Claudia Huckle
Filipievna – Catherine Wyn-Rogers
Eugene Onegin – Audun Iversen
Lensky – Toby Spence
Monsieur Triquet – Adrian Thompson
Zaretsky – David Stout
Prince Gremin – Brindley Sherratt
Captain – Paul Napier-Burrows
Peasant Singer – David Newman
Deborah Warner (director)
Tom Pye (designs)
Chloe Obolensky (costumes)
Jean Kalman (lighting)
Kim Brandstrup (choreography)
Chorus and Additional Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)
Was this ENO? Or had I nodded off and slipped into a living Met nightmare? Actually, ‘nightmare’ is too harsh, too interesting, for Deborah Warner’s production of Eugene Onegin, actually conceived, I discovered, as a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, is just plain dull, a strange throwback to the 1970s or further back still, in which singers sing their lines against a pretty – to some – backdrop in ‘period’ dress that might well have come from a television serial. The ‘period’ in question seems to be slightly later than Pushkin, to no obvious end. Now there is nothing necessarily wrong with ‘traditional’ productions, but this one offered no discernible view upon the work, no discernible insight, save perhaps for a tired, slightly misandrist suggestion that the work might be better off entitled ‘Tatiana Larina’, into the characters and their development, and no discernible provocation or even invitation to think. It is, I think, the first time I have witnessed members of the audience even – I assure you, I am not making this up – applaud a Coliseum set, in this case as the curtain rose for the third act, obscuring Tchaikovsky's Polonaise. (They indulged in plenty of disruption elsewhere too, a selfish couple seated behind me a particular menace, speaking throughout the performance, unresponsive to the iciest of glares.)
Even from a literalist perspective, there are problems beyond the slight ‘updating’. Once one engages upon such a path, fetishising costumes, scenery, and the like, any deviation tends to stand out like a sore thumb. Thus, whilst a more neutral or suggestive space would doubtless double up without too much trouble for the first three scenes of the first act, we are left wondering in literalist mode why Tatiana appears to sleep in a capacious barn. (It will doubtless be more capacious still in New York.) Child ‘extras’ running around for no particular reason are an irritant; they seem to be a favoured device of the director, her ENO Messiah a case in point. Are not the costumes for the celebration of Tatiana’s name day a little on the dour side for such an occasion? Why does the final scene not appear quite where it ‘should’?
More serious is the problem alluded to above, whereby Warner’s sympathies seemed only to be elicited by the female characters. It used often to be a critical plaint that the opera should not have been entitled Eugene Onegin; this production, whether by design or by default, comes across as an attempt to revive that view. Everything is centred upon Tatiana. The subtext – at times, it is barely ‘sub-‘ – of Romantic friendship or more between Onegin and Lensky is ignored. Surely it does not take even a leap of the imagination to appreciate how Tchaikovsky would have understood Onegin’s rejection of Tatiana, herself of course in many respects a projection of male homosexuality. To take at face value without any further probing the description of Onegin as an ‘outsider’ seems in this context merely bizarre: would one not at least ask what is meant by ‘outsider’, just as one would in Peter Grimes? The following words surely speak for themselves:
There was considerable compensation, however, to be heard from Edward Gardner’s conducting: undoubtedly the best I have heard from him at the Coliseum. If I have been spoilt by my most recent two hearings of the work in the theatre, both conducted by Daniel Barenboim, Gardner nevertheless impressed, Shape and sweep almost unfailingly present. There was a fine swagger to the choral numbers and the dances (in which the dancers made a good impression), which the more intimate moments – insofar as the production permitted them to exist – were executed with tenderness and genuine sympathy. If Gardner’s reading did not quite scintillate in the way that some can, there is plenty of scope for intensification as the run of performances proceeds. He certainly has the ENO Orchestra on fine form, though a few more strings would have been welcome. The chorus, trained by Martin Merry, returned to form too, though all suffered from Martin Pickard’s clunky English translation: if we must do without the Russian text and its inimitable sonorities, then we need a superior substitute.
Toby Spence shone out from the cast. (Lenskys often do.) Though his ardent sincerity was somewhat robbed of context by the production, it nevertheless left its mark. Audun Iversen was likewise hamstrung in the title role, though earlier on, fine English diction notwithstanding, he rarely seemed truly to get inside the part even in musical terms. His performance in the third act heated up nicely, however, so maybe first night nerves were a factor. Amanda Echalaz merely seemed miscast as Tatiana. Her high soprano often seemed thin and disengaged; attempts to compensate skirted dangerously close to Puccini-caricature. Claudia Huckle’s often blowsy Olga struck a discordant note in more than one sense. Adrian Thompson, however, made a fine impression with a sensitive rendition of Monsieur Triquet’s couplets, even if one could have done without the assumed 'French' accent. One dry patch apart, Brindley Sherratt shaped Prince Gremin’s aria well. Catherine Wyn-Rogers and Diana Montague contributed a focus to the roles of Filipievna and Mme Larina that was not always present elsewhere. I could not help wishing that they might be offered a little more to do.
For those weary, then, of Konzept-heavy productions, this Onegin might offer some balm; it is certainly worth hearing for Gardner and Spence. Yet there remains ample room for a more ‘traditional’ production that does not forego interpretation, of whatever variety.
The performance on 23 November will be recorded by BBC Radio 3 for subsequent broadcast.
Recommended performances on CD and DVD:
Madame Larina – Diana Montague
Tatiana – Amanda Echalaz
Olga – Claudia Huckle
Filipievna – Catherine Wyn-Rogers
Eugene Onegin – Audun Iversen
Lensky – Toby Spence
Monsieur Triquet – Adrian Thompson
Zaretsky – David Stout
Prince Gremin – Brindley Sherratt
Captain – Paul Napier-Burrows
Peasant Singer – David Newman
Deborah Warner (director)
Tom Pye (designs)
Chloe Obolensky (costumes)
Jean Kalman (lighting)
Kim Brandstrup (choreography)
Chorus and Additional Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)
 |
| Images: Neil Libbert |
Was this ENO? Or had I nodded off and slipped into a living Met nightmare? Actually, ‘nightmare’ is too harsh, too interesting, for Deborah Warner’s production of Eugene Onegin, actually conceived, I discovered, as a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, is just plain dull, a strange throwback to the 1970s or further back still, in which singers sing their lines against a pretty – to some – backdrop in ‘period’ dress that might well have come from a television serial. The ‘period’ in question seems to be slightly later than Pushkin, to no obvious end. Now there is nothing necessarily wrong with ‘traditional’ productions, but this one offered no discernible view upon the work, no discernible insight, save perhaps for a tired, slightly misandrist suggestion that the work might be better off entitled ‘Tatiana Larina’, into the characters and their development, and no discernible provocation or even invitation to think. It is, I think, the first time I have witnessed members of the audience even – I assure you, I am not making this up – applaud a Coliseum set, in this case as the curtain rose for the third act, obscuring Tchaikovsky's Polonaise. (They indulged in plenty of disruption elsewhere too, a selfish couple seated behind me a particular menace, speaking throughout the performance, unresponsive to the iciest of glares.)
Even from a literalist perspective, there are problems beyond the slight ‘updating’. Once one engages upon such a path, fetishising costumes, scenery, and the like, any deviation tends to stand out like a sore thumb. Thus, whilst a more neutral or suggestive space would doubtless double up without too much trouble for the first three scenes of the first act, we are left wondering in literalist mode why Tatiana appears to sleep in a capacious barn. (It will doubtless be more capacious still in New York.) Child ‘extras’ running around for no particular reason are an irritant; they seem to be a favoured device of the director, her ENO Messiah a case in point. Are not the costumes for the celebration of Tatiana’s name day a little on the dour side for such an occasion? Why does the final scene not appear quite where it ‘should’?
 |
| Lensky (Toby Spence) |
More serious is the problem alluded to above, whereby Warner’s sympathies seemed only to be elicited by the female characters. It used often to be a critical plaint that the opera should not have been entitled Eugene Onegin; this production, whether by design or by default, comes across as an attempt to revive that view. Everything is centred upon Tatiana. The subtext – at times, it is barely ‘sub-‘ – of Romantic friendship or more between Onegin and Lensky is ignored. Surely it does not take even a leap of the imagination to appreciate how Tchaikovsky would have understood Onegin’s rejection of Tatiana, herself of course in many respects a projection of male homosexuality. To take at face value without any further probing the description of Onegin as an ‘outsider’ seems in this context merely bizarre: would one not at least ask what is meant by ‘outsider’, just as one would in Peter Grimes? The following words surely speak for themselves:
If I had wished to pass my lifeKrzysztof Warlikowski’s Munich production (reviewed here by Jens Laurson) made explicit what might though need not remain implicit. One can remain relatively reticent, though, and still address this central issue of the opera: take Steven Pimlott’s woefully underrated production for Covent Garden, ‘traditional’ in look, but so much more dramatically alert than Warner’s production. Had the action been centred upon Tatiana in especially dramatic, more revisionist, fashion, I am sure that would have been a valid approach, but Warner’s focus seemed more a default setting than anything else.
within the confines of the family circle,
and benevolent fate had decreed for me
the role of husband and father,
then I should most likely not choose
any bride other than you.
 |
| Onegin (Audun Iversen) and Lensky |
There was considerable compensation, however, to be heard from Edward Gardner’s conducting: undoubtedly the best I have heard from him at the Coliseum. If I have been spoilt by my most recent two hearings of the work in the theatre, both conducted by Daniel Barenboim, Gardner nevertheless impressed, Shape and sweep almost unfailingly present. There was a fine swagger to the choral numbers and the dances (in which the dancers made a good impression), which the more intimate moments – insofar as the production permitted them to exist – were executed with tenderness and genuine sympathy. If Gardner’s reading did not quite scintillate in the way that some can, there is plenty of scope for intensification as the run of performances proceeds. He certainly has the ENO Orchestra on fine form, though a few more strings would have been welcome. The chorus, trained by Martin Merry, returned to form too, though all suffered from Martin Pickard’s clunky English translation: if we must do without the Russian text and its inimitable sonorities, then we need a superior substitute.
Toby Spence shone out from the cast. (Lenskys often do.) Though his ardent sincerity was somewhat robbed of context by the production, it nevertheless left its mark. Audun Iversen was likewise hamstrung in the title role, though earlier on, fine English diction notwithstanding, he rarely seemed truly to get inside the part even in musical terms. His performance in the third act heated up nicely, however, so maybe first night nerves were a factor. Amanda Echalaz merely seemed miscast as Tatiana. Her high soprano often seemed thin and disengaged; attempts to compensate skirted dangerously close to Puccini-caricature. Claudia Huckle’s often blowsy Olga struck a discordant note in more than one sense. Adrian Thompson, however, made a fine impression with a sensitive rendition of Monsieur Triquet’s couplets, even if one could have done without the assumed 'French' accent. One dry patch apart, Brindley Sherratt shaped Prince Gremin’s aria well. Catherine Wyn-Rogers and Diana Montague contributed a focus to the roles of Filipievna and Mme Larina that was not always present elsewhere. I could not help wishing that they might be offered a little more to do.
 |
| Tatiana (Amanda Echalaz) and Prince Gremin (Brindley Sherratt) |
For those weary, then, of Konzept-heavy productions, this Onegin might offer some balm; it is certainly worth hearing for Gardner and Spence. Yet there remains ample room for a more ‘traditional’ production that does not forego interpretation, of whatever variety.
The performance on 23 November will be recorded by BBC Radio 3 for subsequent broadcast.
Recommended performances on CD and DVD:
Saturday, 12 November 2011
Tan/Arensky Chamber Orchestra/Kunhardt - Stravinsky, Wagner, and Ravel, 10 November 2011
Cadogan Hall
Stravinsky – Pulcinella: Suite
Wagner – Siegfried-Idyll
Ravel – Piano Concerto in G major
Melvyn Tan (piano)
Arensky Chamber Orchestra
William Kunhardt (conductor)
This concert marked the final event of the Arensky Chamber Orchestra’s 2011 season, though it will return in 2012 with a spring series devoted to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, ‘The Revolutionaries of Vienna’, a concert devoted to each composer. The concert also marked the expansion of this ensemble of fine young soloists into a full chamber orchestra, previous concerts having been focused upon strings. It was the first in which the ACO’s artistic director, William Kunhardt, conducted – and an impressive job he made of it too.
First off was Stravinsky’s suite from Pulcinella. (Or rather, first off was the ‘Polichinelle’, first of three mini-cocktails prepared especially for the evening: a typically distinctive touch, recipes provided on the back of the programme.) The opening Sinfonia was more graceful, sensuous even, certainly less driven, than one often hears, much to its advantage. One could say the same of a good part of the rest of the suite, though the Tarantella would be properly insistent, standing out all the more on that account. The bizarre individuality of Stravinsky’s scoring – Paul Griffiths once described the ballet as less a work than a way of hearing – was permitted to speak for itself. Solos were well taken, Kenny Sturgeon’s oboe an especial joy in the Serenata. The Scherzino was rhythmically alert and nicely shaded, its changing demands well negotiated by Kunhardt. A smart, stylish Toccata featured excellent wind and brass playing: proof, were it needed, that expansion of forces was working well. Only the Gavotta lacked a little incision, at some times sounding a little tentative. Stravinsky’s inimitable ear for colour was once again restored to our consciousness in the Finale. Special mention should go to leader, Sulki Yu, whose poised, assured manner set the tone for the ensemble as a whole. And if Sir Neville Marriner’s old Academy of St Martin in the Fields recording – a favourite of mine for the suite, as opposed to full ballet – were smoother, this playing arguably possessed greater character.
Following a sip of the ‘Tribschen’, a cream-based cocktail, we moved on to the Siegfried-Idyll, a formidably difficult work to bring off in one overarching span. The players responded to Kunhardt’s sensitive direction with aplomb, their versatility showing in an immediately mellower tone than that adopted for Stravinsky, the arch anti-Wagnerite (at least in theory). Much was beautifully ‘sung’, just as it should be, with real warmth at climaxes, the occasional more four-square moment quickly effaced by the skill and generosity of the music-making on offer.
A Paris Mojito led us into Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto, with Melvyn Tan as soloist. Tan has a rather peculiar podium manner, which takes a little getting used to; I felt, moreover, that he and the orchestra were not always of one mind, especially during the outer movements. Where differences occurred, I admit that the orchestra’s seemed to be the better mind. For instance, the splendidly jazzy orchestral colours of the first movement and Kunhardt’s eager relish to luxuriate in Ravel’s harmonies contrasted with Tan’s more aggressive approach. There was a spellbinding moment of near-but-not-quite-stasis led by the excellent harpist (Anneke Hodnett) too. Tan seemed much more at home in the slow movement, the opening cantilena beautifully handled: performed in more Romantic, almost Chopinesque, fashion than often, but it worked. The orchestra was on fine form throughout, temperature again higher than one tends to hear, but that is no bad thing. If the finale suffered somewhat from an initially plodding tempo – later corrected – there were some riotous orchestral solos to enjoy. If Tan does not seem always to have achieved unmitigated success in transferring full-time to the modern piano, then the increased orchestral forces employed surely compensated.
The ACO has reached the final six from a shortlist of nine hundred for a Sky Arts Ignition Award. Apparently members of the jury were present; they should have been duly impressed.
Stravinsky – Pulcinella: Suite
Wagner – Siegfried-Idyll
Ravel – Piano Concerto in G major
Melvyn Tan (piano)
Arensky Chamber Orchestra
William Kunhardt (conductor)
This concert marked the final event of the Arensky Chamber Orchestra’s 2011 season, though it will return in 2012 with a spring series devoted to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, ‘The Revolutionaries of Vienna’, a concert devoted to each composer. The concert also marked the expansion of this ensemble of fine young soloists into a full chamber orchestra, previous concerts having been focused upon strings. It was the first in which the ACO’s artistic director, William Kunhardt, conducted – and an impressive job he made of it too.
First off was Stravinsky’s suite from Pulcinella. (Or rather, first off was the ‘Polichinelle’, first of three mini-cocktails prepared especially for the evening: a typically distinctive touch, recipes provided on the back of the programme.) The opening Sinfonia was more graceful, sensuous even, certainly less driven, than one often hears, much to its advantage. One could say the same of a good part of the rest of the suite, though the Tarantella would be properly insistent, standing out all the more on that account. The bizarre individuality of Stravinsky’s scoring – Paul Griffiths once described the ballet as less a work than a way of hearing – was permitted to speak for itself. Solos were well taken, Kenny Sturgeon’s oboe an especial joy in the Serenata. The Scherzino was rhythmically alert and nicely shaded, its changing demands well negotiated by Kunhardt. A smart, stylish Toccata featured excellent wind and brass playing: proof, were it needed, that expansion of forces was working well. Only the Gavotta lacked a little incision, at some times sounding a little tentative. Stravinsky’s inimitable ear for colour was once again restored to our consciousness in the Finale. Special mention should go to leader, Sulki Yu, whose poised, assured manner set the tone for the ensemble as a whole. And if Sir Neville Marriner’s old Academy of St Martin in the Fields recording – a favourite of mine for the suite, as opposed to full ballet – were smoother, this playing arguably possessed greater character.
Following a sip of the ‘Tribschen’, a cream-based cocktail, we moved on to the Siegfried-Idyll, a formidably difficult work to bring off in one overarching span. The players responded to Kunhardt’s sensitive direction with aplomb, their versatility showing in an immediately mellower tone than that adopted for Stravinsky, the arch anti-Wagnerite (at least in theory). Much was beautifully ‘sung’, just as it should be, with real warmth at climaxes, the occasional more four-square moment quickly effaced by the skill and generosity of the music-making on offer.
A Paris Mojito led us into Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto, with Melvyn Tan as soloist. Tan has a rather peculiar podium manner, which takes a little getting used to; I felt, moreover, that he and the orchestra were not always of one mind, especially during the outer movements. Where differences occurred, I admit that the orchestra’s seemed to be the better mind. For instance, the splendidly jazzy orchestral colours of the first movement and Kunhardt’s eager relish to luxuriate in Ravel’s harmonies contrasted with Tan’s more aggressive approach. There was a spellbinding moment of near-but-not-quite-stasis led by the excellent harpist (Anneke Hodnett) too. Tan seemed much more at home in the slow movement, the opening cantilena beautifully handled: performed in more Romantic, almost Chopinesque, fashion than often, but it worked. The orchestra was on fine form throughout, temperature again higher than one tends to hear, but that is no bad thing. If the finale suffered somewhat from an initially plodding tempo – later corrected – there were some riotous orchestral solos to enjoy. If Tan does not seem always to have achieved unmitigated success in transferring full-time to the modern piano, then the increased orchestral forces employed surely compensated.
The ACO has reached the final six from a shortlist of nine hundred for a Sky Arts Ignition Award. Apparently members of the jury were present; they should have been duly impressed.
Salzburg Festival, 2012
New Intendant of the Festival, Alexander Pereira, the Festival President, Helga Rabl-Stadler, and Director of Drama, Sven-Erik Bechtolf, announced the programme for next year’s Festival, first in Salzburg, before flying to London to speak at the Residence of the Austrian Ambassador. The 2012 season will see seven new opera productions, plus two concert performances (Il re pastore and Tamerlano, both from period-instrument ensembles). Two will have been presented earlier in the year at the Salzburg Easter and Whitsun Festivals (Carmen under Sir Simon Rattle and Giulio Cesare in Egitto with Cecilia Bartoli, staged by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier), but five will be seen for the first time in the summer, Pereira stating adamantly that revivals will be at the very least an exception during his tenure of office, requiring continued collaboration between the same stage director and conductor.
First of the new productions is Die Zauberflöte, in a staging by Jens-Daniel Herzog. Nikolaus Harnoncourt had stated that he would no longer conduct opera in Salzburg, but Pereira enticed him back with the suggestion that Harnoncourt lead his first ‘late’ Mozart opera on period instruments. (Doubtless reactions will vary on that score: Herbert von Karajan must be rolling in his well-upholstered grave.) Wherever one stands on that matter, there is an intriguing offering to commemorate the two-hundred anniversary of Emanuel Schikaneder’s death: a staging of his ‘zweyte Theil der Zauberflöte,’ Das Labyrinth, oder Der Kampf mit den Elementen, music by the Bavarian court composer, Peter von Winter. Alexandra Liedtke directs; Ivor Bolton conducts the Mozarteum Orchestra.
A rare opportunity is afforded to hear the first version of Ariadne auf Naxos, replete with a good portion of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Riccardo Chailly conducts the VPO, whilst Bechtholf himself directs: a good augury for closer collaboration between music and drama. (Pereira also spoke of wanting to introduce more ballet into the Festival.) Singers include Emily Magee, Elena Moşuc, and no less than Jonas Kaufmann, who will also sing Don José alongside Magdalena Kožená in the Rattle Carmen (staging, Aletta Collins). La bohème appears for the first time at the Festival – Pereira spoke of wanting to banish any prejudice against Puccini – in a production from Damiano Michieletto, conducted by Daniele Gatti; the cast includes Piotr Beczala and Anna Netrebko.
Finally, and this is at least as much a draw as Ariadne, comes Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. Ingo Metzmacher conducts a work that cannot have been played that many times, if at all, by the VPO, in a production by Alvis Hermanis. The cast includes Alfred Muff, Laura Aikin, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Cornelia Kallisch, and Tomasz Konieczny. Though the production will later be seen in Milan, it is surely a high priority in these Felsenreitschule performances.
The Vienna Philharmonic, as usual, also gives five different concert programmes, under conductors Gergiev, Jansons, Muti, Holliger, and Haitink. Heinz Holliger’s programme launches an initiative outlined by Pereira for new commissions to be performed by the VPO: this concert features Berg’s Chamber Concerto and a Gran Partita apiece by Holliger and Mozart. Muti’s concert looks especially promising: two Liszt symphonic poems (Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe and Les Préludes) and Berlioz’s Messe solennelle. Haitink collaborates with Murray Perahia in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, before conducting Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony.
Visiting orchestras include the Israel Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and the Orchestra Mozart under Claudio Abbado. They will both perform in a new, opening week of sacred music, ‘Ouverture spirituelle’,’ which aims to make especial use of the city’s wonderful array of churches, but also to initiate dialogue between Western Christianity and other faiths: Judaism in the first year (hence Ernst Bloch’s Avodath Hakodesh), followed by Buddhism/Shintoism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity. Abbado’s coupling looks highly promising, comprising two works with which he has long been associated: Mozart’s Waisenhausmesse and Schubert’s E-flat Mass, D 950.
Other visiting orchestral highlights include the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim (Beethoven’s Sixth and Fifth Symphonies), the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra with Gatti (Wagner, Berg, Strauss, and Ravel, Frank-Peter Zimmermann the soloist in Berg’s concerto), two performances from the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst, both including a work by Lutosławski, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Chailly in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, and the Concertgebouw in Bartók and Mahler under Jansons. Gergiev will conduct the LSO in the complete Cinderella. (There are others too, so please do check the website!)
Sándor Végh’s hundredth birthday attracts two marathon concerts from ‘his’ Camerata Salzburg – Bach and Mozart; Schubert and Bartók – plus a series of masterclasses, involving musicians such as Steven Isserlis and András Schiff. The Mozarteum Orchestra’s series of Mozart Matinées continues in seven concerts, highlights including a performance of Die Schuldigkeit des Erstens Gebots, a concert of Dallapiccola, Mozart, and Holliger, under the baton of the last-named composer, and a concert of Mozart and Georg Friedrich Haas from Michael Gielen.
‘Salzburg contemporary,’ the re-named new music strand has no fewer than eleven concerts. Holliger, Zimmermann, and Lutosławski all feature this year. Especially notable offerings for me would include two concerts from the ever-excellent Klangforum Wien: Lutosławski, Dallapiccola, Berio, Boulez, and Castiglioni, from Pablo Heras-Casado and Elīna Garanča, and Zimmermann, Ligeti, Eisler, and Stravinsky, under Johannes Kalitzke. Matthias Goerne joins Christoph Eschenbach in Schubert orchestrations and Zimmermann’s Ich wandte mich und sah an alles unrecht, das geschah unter der Sonne (as well as Berg’s op.6 Orchestral Pieces). Thomas Zehetmair, Ruth Killius, and Thomas Demenga perform solo Bach, Zimmermann, and Scelsi.
A wealth of Lieder and solo performances is again offered. Christian Gerhaher in Die schöne Müllerin bodes well, likewise Garanča’s offering of Schumann and Strauss. Kožena intriguingly presents a recital with organ (Christian Schmitt): Messiaen, Peter Eben, Bach, Liszt, and Dvořák. José Carreras and Juan Diego Florez offer a more Latinate perspective; other singers are Goerne, Thomas Hampson, and Thomas Quasthoff.
Daniel Barenboim performs the final four Schubert sonatas in a series of three recitals, also taking in the two sets of four Impromptus, D 935, and D 899. Schiff performs the Goldberg and Diabelli Variations, Pollini the final three Beethoven sonatas, Krystian Zimerman works by Debussy, and Perahia works by Bach, Chopin, and Schumann. The Hagen Quartet offers two all-Beethoven concerts, and also appears in Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, conducted by Daniel Harding, and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. Beethoven’s violin sonatas are performed over three evenings by Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace.
Finally, a few words on spoken theatre, which seems revivified under Bechtholf’s leadership. Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann will, of course, be there, but there is so much else. Andrea Brecht directs Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg – would that the Festival in a subsequent year would stage the Henze-Bachmann opera! – and Irina Brook, Peter’s daughter, stages both Peer Gynt (in English) and The Tempest (in French, from the Bouffes du Nord). Puppet theatre is offered, in the guise of Nuremeberg’s Thalias Kompagnons (Kafkas Schloss), and the Austrian classic, Ferdinand Raimund’s Der Bauer als Millionär, as is children’s theatre (Theatre-Rites: Mojo, also to be seen at the Barbican). South Africa’s Tick Tock Productions presents a new, English-language work Trapped, directed by Princess Zinzi Mhlong. Another premiere offering is Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, from Theater Montagnes. Gisèle Vienne has two productions including music, whilst a Korean theatre group brings – in Korean – Hamlet Cantabile to the Salzburg stage.
Further details, including a good number of performances not mentioned, may be found by clicking here for the Salzburg Festival website.
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