Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Reinhard Hagen
Tannhäuser – Stephen Gould
Wolfram von Eschenbach – Dietrich Henschel
Walther von der Vogelweide – Clemens Bieber
Biterolf – Lenus Carlson
Heinrich der Schreiber – Jörg Schörner
Reimar von Zweter – Jörn Schümann
Venus/Elisabeth – Nadja Michael
Shepherd – Martina Welschenbach
Tannhäuser double in the overture – Stefan Siedler
Kirsten Harms (director)
Bernd Damovsky (designs)
Inga Timm (assistant costume design)
Silvana Schröder (choreography)
Chorus and Supplementary Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Ulf Schirmer (conductor)
Of the ‘canonical’ Wagner Romantic operas and music dramas, that is from The Flying Dutchman onwards, Tannhäuser must surely be the least fashionable. It certainly seems to be the least performed. I had only seen it in the theatre once before, the very same theatre as it happens, though in the Deutsche Oper’s previous production, by Götz Friedrich. How then, did the present performance, from the first revival of Intendant Kirsten Harms’s 2008 production, compare? On balance, favourably in musical terms, less so when it comes to the staging.
I am afraid I found Harms’s direction as confusing as I had in December’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. Both that work and Tannhäuser need a degree of directorial assistance. To clarify or to problematise would seem the two obvious paths from which to choose. Here, it was difficult to detect a unifying idea beyond the refusal to opt for the either/or principle, of which Harms speaks in a programme interview. It seems to me that either this was not pushed hard enough, to go beyond portraying Venus and Elisabeth as ultimately one and the same, or it was insufficient as a Konzept; to go beyond that dichotomy of my own, I might add that the two are not mutually exclusive. So if Elisabeth is ‘revealed’ as Venus – this ‘revelation’ seems especially weak, since it is creakingly apparent all along – then where does that leave Tannhäuser? If the choice between Wartburg and Venusberg were a false one, then perhaps his fate might be considered tragic, yet it did not seem so here. Is he thereby redeemed? Perhaps, but again it is difficult to discern that from the staging. Venus/Elisabeth seems to move centre stage, but is that merely to evade the issue? (In fairness, it arguably makes Elisabeth a more interesting character.)
Moreover, there is no cumulative element to the settings and designs; we simply move from one setting to another: sometimes with a certain mediævalism, which does not seem to be ironised, sometimes not. Stage mechanics are displayed at the act openings, but it is difficult to discern any attempt thereby to frame, to ‘deconstruct’, or to alienate. I have no idea at all why the pilgrims of the first act appear in Hell, mediæval monsters and all, a setting which is difficult to relate to the rest of what we see. A mediæval musicologist friend informed me that a good number of the heraldic costumes for the second act are copied from the Codex Manesse – Walther von der Vogelweide appears in that manuscript himself, I might add – yet, whilst the effect is undeniably colourful, I can discern no dramatic point beyond a further blurring of time and location, a blurring whose point is in turn unclear. Likewise, the point of airborne suspension and gradual, albeit interrupted assumption of suits of armour eluded me. Finding the third-act Elisabeth as a Florence Nightingale character, tending the sick in modern hospital beds, refers of course to the deeds for which the historical figure was canonised, but the connection with the rest of the production, or indeed with the work, remained obscure, at least to me. I can see a good case for highlighting a tension between the Middle Ages, Wagner’s time, and our own, but the decisions here seem merely arbitrary – if a critique of Wagner’s dramaturgy at this time, then it needs to be made clear, and I do not think that it was – and sadly lacking in dramatic tension.
Ulf Schirmer, however, delivered an eminently dependable account of the score. There were no especial revelations – and he was hamstrung by the decision, whoever made it, of performing the Dresden version – but it is no mean achievement to hold Wagner’s structures together and to delineate them so clearly. Moreover, the playing elicited from the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper was often of a very high quality indeed. I was especially taken by the golden glow from the strings – more Vienna than Berlin, I thought – and by the purity of the woodwind, especially during the faux-archaisms, conjuring up, quite appropriately, a nineteenth-century world of ‘early music’.
An initial casting disappointment was that Stefan Siedler, the unusually credible ‘Tannhäuser double’ from the overture –incidentally, is it not a bit of an odd Bacchanale that does not include other men? – turned out to be just that, or rather not that at all. Just when one had thought that one might be able to believe in the stage presence of the central character, he was replaced by an artist of rather more ‘traditional’ build and countenance: a bit like Brad Pitt acting as a ‘double’ for me. Anyway, Stephen Gould did a very good job vocally as Tannhäuser. He could sing the role, which far from goes without saying in the Heldentenor world; he could shape his phrases; there was no appreciable tiring. Nadja Michael, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved a variable Venus/Elisabeth. At her best, she provided just the dramatic credibility often lacking elsewhere. Presence and commitment were very much in evidence. There was too much wayward vocalism, however, to be able to ignore the flaws; some passages from the Venusberg were at best approximate in their tuning. Rather to my surprise, her Elisabeth was probably, on the whole, more successful than her Venus. It is not clear to me that, the production notwithstanding, it is really possible for one singer to do justice to both roles, but that is not Michael’s fault. Dietrich Henschel provided a Lieder-singer’s attention to detail as Wolfram, but his tone sometimes turned dry; I could not help but think that Fischer-Dieskau would have purveyed this sort of interpretation more successfully. I thought it a pity not to have a boy’s voice for the Shepherd, but Martina Welschenbach certainly sang the part well. The chorus, under William Spaulding’s direction, was most impressive throughout, providing both weight and clarity.
But why the Dresden version? Was this the director’s decision or the conductor’s, I wonder? Or should I stop posing either/or questions? I know that many, Christian Thielemann included, claim its virtue to be coherence, yet Tannhäuser remains problematical. Wagner famously told Cosima that he still owed the world a Tannhäuser, and if anything, what Carl Dahlhaus identified, in Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, as the works’ ‘abruptness …, lack of mediation … [and] casualness of motivation,’ is greater in the earlier version, since the later, often Tristan-esque music permits instead the case of Wagner’s music criticising itself, a dramatisation of the Elisabeth-Venus conflict in musical terms. I am certainly not saying that the Dresden version should never be performed, but so much is lost when one forgoes Wagner’s Paris additions: musically and in terms of the history of the work – with, it seems to me, little gained beyond fulfilling an interest in first thoughts. I have heard it responded that we should be quite happy with the Dresden version, had Wagner not made his revisions for Paris, but that is no response at all; one might as well say the same of Leonore and Fidelio, though the situations are different. At any rate, my lament is more a comment concerning current fashions than upon this production in particular. Would someone, somewhere kindly permit us to hear the Paris Tannhäuser?
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Sunday, 14 February 2010
The Gambler, Royal Opera, 11 February 2010
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
(sung in English translation)
General – Sir John Tomlinson
Polina – Angela Denoke
Alexey Ivanovitch – Roberto Saccà
Babulenka – Susan Bickley
Marquis – Kurt Streit
Blanche – Jurgita Adamonytė
Mr Astley – Mark Stone
Prince Nilski – John Easterlin
Baron Würmerhelm – Jeremy White
Baroness Würmerheim – Emma Bernard
Potapytsch – Dawid Kimberg
Casino Director – Graeme Danby
First Croupier – Hubert Francis
Second Croupier – Robert Anthony Gardiner
Gaudy Lady – Simona Mihai
Pale Lady – Elisabeth Meister
Dubious Old Lady – Elisabeth Sikora
Lady Comme Ci, Comme Ça – Carol Rowlands
Venerable Lady – Kai Rüütel
Rash Gambler – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Hypochondriac Gambler – Steven Ebel
Hunchback Gambler – Alasdair Elliott
Aged Gambler – John Cunningham
Six Gamblers – Luke Price, Andrew O’Connor, John Bernays, Jonathan Coad, Olle Zetterström, Michael Lessiter
Fat Englisman – David Woloszko
Tall Englishman – Lukas Jakobski
Richard Jones (director)
Antony McDonald (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costume designs)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Sarah Fahie (movement)
The Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Antonio Pappano (conductor)
The Royal Opera’s new production of The Gambler seems to me close to an unqualified success. This is the company’s first production of what is, save for juvenilia, Prokofiev’s first opera: sadly, not an unusual state of affairs, since it was only a couple of years previously that I had seen the Berlin premiere under Daniel Barenboim, in a fine production by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Only produced once during the composer’s lifetime, there is certainly no good reason to shun Prokofiev’s Dostoyevsky opera now, for it is one of his strongest stage works, as Richard Jones, Antonio Pappano, and an excellent cast demonstrated.
The action is updated to what resembles the inter-war period, so the time of the 1929 Brussels premiere, though I suppose it could be the time of composition, during the previous decade. One might, if one were so minded, question how credible that makes some details of the plot but it works well and looks good taken in itself, and the work is not in any especially meaningful sense tied to a particular period. Antony Macdonald’s designs splendidly evoke the cosmopolitan but empty world of Roulettenbourg’s hotel, whilst Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes permit the eye to assist the ear in the delineation of what can sometimes be rather fleeting characterisation, minor characters coming and going in Prokofiev’s finely observed vignettes. One of Jones’s extra touches is to set the first act in an adjoining zoo, rather than a park. Ideas of animal behaviour and of caging – and a wonderful turn for a performing seal (not real!) – nicely sets up the world we shall explore more fully. Likewise the framing device of the CASINO sign in front of the curtain at the beginning of each of the four acts. Given the recent wrecking acts of what some people curiously term the ‘financial services industry,’ these ideas could hardly be more topical, yet temptation to agitprop, should Jones indeed have felt any, is firmly resisted.
The musical pacing was sometimes just a little fitful during the first two acts. I do not wish to exaggerate, but there were occasions when Prokofiev’s motor rhythms seemed to follow the singers, rather than drive them as they should. There was no such problem following the interval: perhaps partly a consequence of the composer’s ratcheting up the tension, but also a sign that Pappano felt more able to reconcile his colouristic revelations with that increased rhythmic drive so necessary to the depiction of intensified gambling addiction. The more the orchestra was given its head, the better, and the players were certainly on excellent form, revelling in Prokofiev’s virtuosic scoring. For its brief appearance, the chorus was on equally excellent form.
Roberto Saccà captured the difficult balance between Alexey’s weakness of character and his increasing determination. Character progression was also finely observed in Angela Denoke’s Polina, a rounded and, by the end, moving portrayal. Sir John Tomlinson’s inimitable way was well suited to the General; whatever his flaws, one could not help but sympathise. Jurgita Adamonytė and Kurt Streit captured the rootless world of the international demi-monde in their Blanche and Marquis, without resorting to the seductive prospect of the mere stock character. It was, perhaps unsusprisingly, Susan Bickley’s Babulenka who stole the show: a consequence of the role, doubtless, but also of this wonderful artist’s musico-dramatic skills and commitment. Stefania Toczyska had made an equally commanding impression in Berlin; when Babulenka arrives, the clock should stop, as it did on both of those occasions. She sees through the ghastly array of hangers-on and ensures with style that the General will not inherit a sou, whilst movingly evoking the Mother Russia to which she returns. Other characters come and go – this is not a criticism, but an observation of how the opera works – but special mention might go to Mark Stone’s enigmatic Mr Astley, a lynchpin and yet not, and Carol Rowlands’s telling Lady Comme Ci, Comme Ça: concerned or detached, who knows?
My sole cavil relates to the decision to perform the work in English: very much the director’s decision, according to Tomlinson, in the interview he gave me a few days earlier. I can see the arguments in favour, not least the speed of conversation. And I am sure that Tomlinson is right to observe that the Russian language does not have time to colour the music in the way that it does, say, in Mussorgsky. But the sound of the words is very different and nothing can quite compensate for that, even for a non-Russian speaker such as myself. Though diction was generally very good and in some cases, such as Tomlinson’s utterly beyond reproach, one inevitably must consult the surtitles from time and time, in which case one might as well have the sound of the original. In addition, the titles did not always keep pace with the delivery of the words: a little confusing. Nevertheless, this was in most respects a fine achievement, for which three cheers should go to the Royal Opera.
(sung in English translation)
General – Sir John Tomlinson
Polina – Angela Denoke
Alexey Ivanovitch – Roberto Saccà
Babulenka – Susan Bickley
Marquis – Kurt Streit
Blanche – Jurgita Adamonytė
Mr Astley – Mark Stone
Prince Nilski – John Easterlin
Baron Würmerhelm – Jeremy White
Baroness Würmerheim – Emma Bernard
Potapytsch – Dawid Kimberg
Casino Director – Graeme Danby
First Croupier – Hubert Francis
Second Croupier – Robert Anthony Gardiner
Gaudy Lady – Simona Mihai
Pale Lady – Elisabeth Meister
Dubious Old Lady – Elisabeth Sikora
Lady Comme Ci, Comme Ça – Carol Rowlands
Venerable Lady – Kai Rüütel
Rash Gambler – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Hypochondriac Gambler – Steven Ebel
Hunchback Gambler – Alasdair Elliott
Aged Gambler – John Cunningham
Six Gamblers – Luke Price, Andrew O’Connor, John Bernays, Jonathan Coad, Olle Zetterström, Michael Lessiter
Fat Englisman – David Woloszko
Tall Englishman – Lukas Jakobski
Richard Jones (director)
Antony McDonald (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costume designs)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Sarah Fahie (movement)
The Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Antonio Pappano (conductor)
The Royal Opera’s new production of The Gambler seems to me close to an unqualified success. This is the company’s first production of what is, save for juvenilia, Prokofiev’s first opera: sadly, not an unusual state of affairs, since it was only a couple of years previously that I had seen the Berlin premiere under Daniel Barenboim, in a fine production by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Only produced once during the composer’s lifetime, there is certainly no good reason to shun Prokofiev’s Dostoyevsky opera now, for it is one of his strongest stage works, as Richard Jones, Antonio Pappano, and an excellent cast demonstrated.
The action is updated to what resembles the inter-war period, so the time of the 1929 Brussels premiere, though I suppose it could be the time of composition, during the previous decade. One might, if one were so minded, question how credible that makes some details of the plot but it works well and looks good taken in itself, and the work is not in any especially meaningful sense tied to a particular period. Antony Macdonald’s designs splendidly evoke the cosmopolitan but empty world of Roulettenbourg’s hotel, whilst Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes permit the eye to assist the ear in the delineation of what can sometimes be rather fleeting characterisation, minor characters coming and going in Prokofiev’s finely observed vignettes. One of Jones’s extra touches is to set the first act in an adjoining zoo, rather than a park. Ideas of animal behaviour and of caging – and a wonderful turn for a performing seal (not real!) – nicely sets up the world we shall explore more fully. Likewise the framing device of the CASINO sign in front of the curtain at the beginning of each of the four acts. Given the recent wrecking acts of what some people curiously term the ‘financial services industry,’ these ideas could hardly be more topical, yet temptation to agitprop, should Jones indeed have felt any, is firmly resisted.
The musical pacing was sometimes just a little fitful during the first two acts. I do not wish to exaggerate, but there were occasions when Prokofiev’s motor rhythms seemed to follow the singers, rather than drive them as they should. There was no such problem following the interval: perhaps partly a consequence of the composer’s ratcheting up the tension, but also a sign that Pappano felt more able to reconcile his colouristic revelations with that increased rhythmic drive so necessary to the depiction of intensified gambling addiction. The more the orchestra was given its head, the better, and the players were certainly on excellent form, revelling in Prokofiev’s virtuosic scoring. For its brief appearance, the chorus was on equally excellent form.
Roberto Saccà captured the difficult balance between Alexey’s weakness of character and his increasing determination. Character progression was also finely observed in Angela Denoke’s Polina, a rounded and, by the end, moving portrayal. Sir John Tomlinson’s inimitable way was well suited to the General; whatever his flaws, one could not help but sympathise. Jurgita Adamonytė and Kurt Streit captured the rootless world of the international demi-monde in their Blanche and Marquis, without resorting to the seductive prospect of the mere stock character. It was, perhaps unsusprisingly, Susan Bickley’s Babulenka who stole the show: a consequence of the role, doubtless, but also of this wonderful artist’s musico-dramatic skills and commitment. Stefania Toczyska had made an equally commanding impression in Berlin; when Babulenka arrives, the clock should stop, as it did on both of those occasions. She sees through the ghastly array of hangers-on and ensures with style that the General will not inherit a sou, whilst movingly evoking the Mother Russia to which she returns. Other characters come and go – this is not a criticism, but an observation of how the opera works – but special mention might go to Mark Stone’s enigmatic Mr Astley, a lynchpin and yet not, and Carol Rowlands’s telling Lady Comme Ci, Comme Ça: concerned or detached, who knows?
My sole cavil relates to the decision to perform the work in English: very much the director’s decision, according to Tomlinson, in the interview he gave me a few days earlier. I can see the arguments in favour, not least the speed of conversation. And I am sure that Tomlinson is right to observe that the Russian language does not have time to colour the music in the way that it does, say, in Mussorgsky. But the sound of the words is very different and nothing can quite compensate for that, even for a non-Russian speaker such as myself. Though diction was generally very good and in some cases, such as Tomlinson’s utterly beyond reproach, one inevitably must consult the surtitles from time and time, in which case one might as well have the sound of the original. In addition, the titles did not always keep pace with the delivery of the words: a little confusing. Nevertheless, this was in most respects a fine achievement, for which three cheers should go to the Royal Opera.
Monday, 8 February 2010
Interview with Sir John Tomlinson, Royal Opera House, 8 February 2010
Fresh from a morning rehearsal of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, playing the part of the General, and an interview with the BBC, Sir John Tomlinson kindly took time out to speak to me in his Covent Garden dressing room about The Gambler and other aspects of his career. Almost universally considered the greatest Wotan of his generation, it was perhaps inevitable and certainly welcome that the conversation would turn to Wagner, taking in Bluebeard and Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau along the way. I began by saying how delighted I was that The Gambler, Prokofiev’s first completed opera, save for some juvenilia, was coming to the Royal Opera House, the only other time I had seen it being in Berlin a couple of years ago.
JT: Oh yes, under Barenboim.
MB: That’s right, with an almost exclusively Russian cast.
JT: And in Russian, of course.
MB: So I imagine it will sound quite different on this occasion.
JT: Yes, they made a decision to sing it in English this time, because it’s a very wordy piece. It’s a work that is very conversational, with lots of text, and they think it’s important that everyone on stage and in the audience understands every word that’s being said, in the interests of being good theatre. Richard Jones [the director] was, I think, the man who wanted it in English. So it seems to be going pretty well, and you get more of a theatrical feeling this way in the vernacular.
MB: And particularly with a cast that is largely non-Russian, I can imagine that this might help their communication to the audience.
JT: Yes. I’ve actually sung a lot in Russian: Boris Godunov, Pimen, and Khovanshchina. But for this piece, I think there’s a very good case for doing it in the vernacular, because it’s a very fast-moving piece with all these motor rhythms [cue a brief vocal demonstration]. And the Russian language really comes into its own when you have those great sustained passages [cue a brief excerpt from Boris].
MB: Yes, you need to hear it in those works in which almost every other words is Slava [Glory], the Boris Coronation Scene and so on. If you didn’t know what the word meant before, you soon would…
JT: Whereas here, I don’t think the language has time to colour the piece, in a way.
MB: And at this time, Prokofiev’s style is to a certain extent more cosmopolitan.
JT: Well, I’m actually quite surprised by the amount of Russianness in the score: a very impressive score, the orchestration, for example.
MB: Yes, it can be quite stunning; it makes me think of the early piano concertos.
JT: Very virtuoso, almost depicting a gambling addiction. There is incredible energy…
MB: … which can’t really be done slowly.
JT: There’s gambling, there’s love – obsessive love relationships – and high-flying society, spending all the money.
MB: And just thinking about Prokofiev’s style at this time, the vocal writing is very declamatory, isn’t it? That was certainly his stated aim. Does that then present any issues, given that you are performing it in translation, or does English actually lend itself quite well to this?
JT: Yes, I think it works well. And of course, it was first done in French. I never have actually sung this piece in Russian. I did it twenty-seven years ago at the Coliseum, for ENO, in English, in a David Pountney production. And so, whilst I’ve done the opera before, it’s a reasonably long time ago.
MB: Yes, a decent break. I was reading beforehand what Prokofiev had to say when he was writing the music, when it was first going to be performed for the abortive Mariinsky premiere, interrupted by the Revolution, amongst other things, and he is very contemptuous of pretty much every aspect of operatic convention. What he perhaps sends up in The Love for Three Oranges he seems to want to fight against here. Does that come across in the work?
JT: Well, yes, it’s a very theatrical work: there’s no grand opera in it at all. There’s no aria or anything approaching an aria.
MB: You couldn’t really have a disc of highlights. In fact, his Four Portraits and Denouement from the work had to be assembled in an odd way: ripping up pages from the score and ‘dealing’ them, since there were no numbers to extract conventionally.
JT: No, I don’t think you could take excerpts. My big scene is like a mad scene really, without the flute obbligato [as in Lucia di Lammermoor]…
MB: ... or the glass harmonica, as seems to be the new big thing.
JT: That’s right. But you need a lot of voice for this, it’s a bit role in that sense; it’s a big score, with a lot of decibels. So you need a voice with a lot of muscle in it. And you need very clear words and very pure vowel sounds. You need energy too: vocal energy, vocal muscle. It’s written for quite a big part; it’s not a walk in the park.
MB: And it’s a huge cast too.
JT: Well, there’s only really actually half a dozen main characters, but then there’s a million smaller parts.
MB: Having looked down the cast list, they all seem to be taken by different people too, which must make putting the opera on pretty expensive.
JT: It probably does.
MB: It’s certainly not often staged, is it?
JT: It’s a very good piece too. Written by Prokofiev and based on this great book by Dostoyevsky. But it’s an odd piece, a bit of an oddball; it’s unique.
MB: It doesn’t really fit into any of our ready-made opera categories.
JT: There’s something of Pelléas et Mélisande, sometimes, that I hear, and also of course some Russian music, Mussorgsky and so on.
MB: Unavoidable.
JT: And I also hear some Bartók, some of Bluebeard’s Castle.
MB: Which you’ve sung quite often?
JT: Many times, yes.
MB: In Hungarian and in English.
JT: In Hungarian, yes. Oh, and of course, I did do a recording in English. I’ve done more recordings of Bluebeard than any other piece. One with the Berlin Philharmonic and Bernard Haitink, one with [the] Munich [Philharmonic] and James Levine, one for Chandos in English, basically the Opera North set-up, and another from the Proms, with [Jukka-Pekka] Saraste conducting. It’s such a wonderful piece. And I think one of the reasons it’s recorded so much is because it lasts about the length of a CD.
MB: And also, it seems to me, it loses so little by being recorded, by being listened to at home. If anything, the imagination is better at producing it than anything one could hope to materialise on stage. The opening of those doors is almost bound to be a disappointment in the theatre, unless one tries something extremely inventive, not at all obvious.
JT: It’s almost not a real opera; it’s half-way there, a bit like La Damnation de Faust. Whereas this [The Gambler] needs the theatre.
MB: Just to realise what’s going on; it all happens so quickly.
JT: It needs a great director.
MB: And actually, although this is a wholly different piece, though written not so long before, the situation is not wholly unlike that of Rosenkavalier. I remember when, as a teenager, I first listened to the work on CD, I thought it wonderful, but I didn’t really have a sense of what it might be like in the theatre; for one thing, the dialogue passes so quickly. I needed to see it in the theatre before I could really appreciate Karajan and Schwarzkopf.
JT: Yes, I can understand that. Some friends who listened today have likened the General to Baron Ochs. It’s similar, I suppose, in one sense that Ochs is the one character in my normal repertoire – you know, Wotan, Gurnemanz, Hagen – which is not huge in dramatic terms. Ochs is a wonderful acting part.
MB: I saw you in Munich in the role, a couple of years ago [see here].
JT: With Felicity Lott, possibly, was it?
MB: I don’t think it was [racking brains]. Oh yes, I remember, it was Angela Denoke, whom I saw a few minutes before coming in here. She’s playing Polina, isn’t she?
JT: Yes, she is. I think it might well have been her in Munich.
MB: And, of course, in that venerable Otto Schenk production, the one Carlos Kleiber conducted.
JT: With Jürgen Rose’s designs. So in a way, it’s the same sort of character to play, the same sort of world as Ochs’s, I suppose. But it’s different, too. Ochs loves life; he loves women; he loves having lots of women. The General is besotted with Blanche; he loves Blanche; he adores her. And he’s not a multiple ladies’ man. He’s been married a couple of times and is now completely enamoured of Blanche. And that’s what makes him go mad in the end: the lack of money. He loses all of his money. Blanche then goes on to the next rich man; she very much latches on to him.
MB: Really the demi-mondaine.
JT: Yes, as is the Marquis, who’s lending all the money. And my credit-worthiness depends upon the fact that my mother-in-law is going to die any minute. There’s a comedy element there.
MB: It’s actually a similar world to that of Lulu, particularly the beginning of the third act, with the buying and selling of Jungfrau shares.
JT: And, just to return to Rosenkavalier, there’s the similarity in terms of money. The whole story for Ochs is based on him marrying Sophie, so that he gets lots of money. He needs the money so that he can save Lerchenau, which is mortgaged up to the hilt. So there is that. And also, in the end, Ochs is undone and he’s sent packing. In this, the General’s world falls apart, so there is a similarity there.
MB: In a way, whenever the works are set, this seems a world that comes into its own very much in the twentieth century.
JT: And now, too. It’s wonderful: they’ve changed one world from Rothschild to Goldman Sachs. It’s incredibly topical: banking.
MB: We can’t open a newspaper at the moment without coming across the phrase, ‘casino capitalism’, and here this is, set in a casino.
JT: Another thing, just while I think of it: the animals in the production, this Richard Jones production. The first scene, instead of being in a park, is in a zoo, attached to the hotel. So you have the hotel, and part of the complex, a ‘leisure complex’, you have the zoo too. In a way, there’s an analogy between the people and the animals – and a lot of people are wearing furs. And there are the gamblers: the bear market and the bull market. There’s a strong connection between the behaviour of the animals and the behaviour of the people.
MB: And perhaps a sense that everyone is caged in some way by the dictates of capital?
JT: Yes, exactly, so it’s quite an interesting set up.
MB: And a very witty director.
JT: He’s a wonderful director. We’ve rehearsed for weeks – this is a seven-week rehearsal period – and it’s all been so detailed, even to the level of every brushstroke on the floor at the hotel: it’s almost choreographed. Not too much, not too little; not so much as to upstage anyone, but even so… Great concentration, this requires: it takes a long time.
MB: And you sang in his Ring here, of course.
JT: I did. I had a wonderful time. Of course, it was very controversial.
MB: I wonder whether it would be now. My suspicion is that it would be much less so now, because what audiences are used to has changed enormously over that time.
JT: But then, even in the ’90s, audiences were used to a lot of adventurous things, but perhaps it came a decade too early. If he did it now, who knows?
MB: I was an undergraduate at the time, and I remember coming down to London just for Götterdämmerung; it was actually the first time I had come to Covent Garden. And I thought it was amazing.
JT: Ah, you saw Brünnhilde with a paper bag over her head.
MB: Yes, a very powerful image. And yet I had seen it mocked by press critics, who seemed so extraordinarily reactionary and literalist in their attitudes – not all of them, but quite a few. I thought it was a very powerful way of registering the terrible shame she feels in the second act.
JT: People get really hung up on this business of updating productions. You know, there are good productions and bad productions. There’s good updating and bad updating. There’s good conventional and bad conventional. Perhaps there’s nothing worse than a bad conventional production, which is somehow nothing.
MB: The Zeffirelli sort of thing at the Met, where ‘patrons’ applaud the scenery.
JT: Yes. But this is an updated production and it’s a wonderful production. When I do these fundraising talks – we had one last week – there are always questions about: how do you get on with ‘modern productions’? People have really got a thing about that.
MB: A strange idea, that there is some thing, in inverted commas, called a ‘modern production’.
JT: And they’re not the same. Of course you get bad modern productions, but you get wonderful ones.
MB: And so much, it seems to me, depends on the sense of theatre a director has. He can bend the work to his will, he can penetrate to its heart, he can almost do what he likes, if he has a sense of theatre – and, of course, a sense of music, which, sadly, happens less often. Then he can make it work.
JT: A great director is worth his weight in gold – like a great conductor.
MB: Speaking of which, in the Ring, you had Haitink.
JT: Yes. But there were a lot of problems there too. Haitink and Jones didn’t see eye to eye. Bernard basically closed his eyes and conducted gorgeously. But here, Pappano and Jones are very much of one mind.
MB: They’ve worked together quite often, haven’t they?
JT: Yes, in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, for instance, when I played a particularly gruesome character, eating those mushrooms with rat poison.
MB: And Shostakovich, of course, is very different from Prokofiev, isn’t he? Quite different temperaments.
JT: Yes, same country, but quite different. And when was that written? It was written after this, wasn’t it?
MB: Yes, the 1930s, the height of Stalin’s terror. There was the terrible Pravda editorial after Stalin attended the premiere.
JT: I don’t think he liked the scene with the rat poisoning, as a dictator.
MB: Looking over his shoulder and paranoid to begin with… Just to go back to the Ring, I saw Götterdämmerung here, and then went to the whole cycle at the Albert Hall, which was my first time for a cycle. I was utterly bowled over.
JT: A lot of people were bowled over. All these theatrical awards I won were from a performance not in the theatre.
MB: There’s a wonderful irony to that.
JT: Yes. I won the Evening Standard award, the Royal Philharmonic Society award, various others: all for a performance that was not in the theatre. But of course, it was sort of staged – and, at its best, that can be more intensely theatrical. It can be.
MB: Partly, I suppose, because there’s less to watch: no scenery certainly. So gesture, in a way as Wagner had hoped, becomes so much more telling.
JT: It becomes incredibly crystallised, incredibly economic.
MB: Another thing I remember, though perhaps now it is a side issue, is the end: what was so terribly moving was Haitink then speaking directly to the audience and asking for help. I fired off my letter to the Secretary of State the following morning, not that I imagine it made the slightest bit of difference.
JT: This place was in the doldrums.
MB: Nobody knew what was going to happen, whether it would survive – and there was this truly great musical performance.
JT: It was terribly worrying. One forgets.
MB: And it’s not that long ago.
JT: No, ten years.
MB: But presumably, it must feel like a completely different world.
JT: It does. Yes, as soon as the new place opened, within a couple of years, we were onto a different momentum altogether. But I think Jeremy Isaacs is treated a bit unfairly here. It was an incredibly difficult situation. They had to close, for safety reasons. Where was the money going to come from? How do you raise the money? Planning permission: the local Covent Garden community were up in arms about this development; they were protesting on the street. It was a really difficult situation. Money was such a problem.
MB: And giving money to the Royal Opera House is unlikely ever to be a popular cause, especially given the tabloid press here, and of course a New Labour government.
JT: But they succeeded in getting all that money – and look at this development [pointing out of the window]. It’s just perfect: a real home for the company. Always we seem to come back to Wagner though. Of course, Wagner is a magnificent composer: the music is incredible. Whatever other music I do, coming back to Wagner is like coming home. And I think it suits what in particular I’ve got to give: my voice, probably the way my mind works as well. I think it all fits very well with the North European mythology, the way the whole thing is psychologically constructed. It all feels like a completely natural expression of the human condition in a way.
MB: Never more so than in the character of Wotan, but in the Ring as a whole. Every time I return to it, I find so much more than I had found before. It never ends – unlike the gods. So compared to that, Gurnemanz must seem like a bit of a break for you.
JT: In a way. The thing about him is that he’s a narrator.
MB: He doesn’t actually do anything.
JT: The story would take place without him.
MB: I suppose we wouldn’t really know what the story was, but it would take place.
JT: Exactly, whereas Wotan is absolutely the centre. It’s about Wotan from start to finish. When he loses his eye drinking at the Well of Wisdom, when he makes the spear from the World-Ash Tree: that’s the beginning of the story. And the end, the World-Ash, Valhalla burn: that’s the end of the gods.
MB: And in a way, he’s never more present than in Götterdämmerung. You hear him all the time in the music, even though he is never on stage.
JT: He’s there, just waiting in Valhalla. And everybody talks about him. The Norns talk about him; the Norns talk about the end of the gods. They talk about Wotan at the beginning, the beginning of Wotan, and the end that is to come. Then Waltraute comes on and talks about him, thinking with a smile of Brünnhilde. And at the very end, when the ring goes back to the Rhine, due to what Brünnhilde does, perhaps that smile will come again: a smile of acceptance, of love. It’s his dying moment.
MB: And there is the moment in the Immolation Scene when she seems to come to terms with him, singing ‘Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott’: a benediction, in which she puts the god to rest: a coming to terms from the two of them.
JT: It is. Just about…
MB: There’s the element of doubt, too: has she rid herself of her anger?
JT: She just about understands the predicament that he was in.
MB: She says that she’s not wise, but she sort of understands… Have you ever, then, been in a production in which what Wagner wanted to happen actually does, when one sees the gods in Valhalla as it burns? I’m sure I have never seen that on stage: not that one necessarily should, but I can imagine it could have quite an effect, a cyclical effect even.
JT: No, I haven’t: not the gods, but Valhalla. Though in the [Harry] Kupfer production [at Bayreuth, available on DVD], Wotan comes back in the Funeral March, throwing the spear back into the hole. Now purists object to that, because one of the Norns says that, to create the fire that consumes Valhalla at the end, Wotan plunges the spear into Loge’s breast. But, you know, that’s neither here nor there really: it’s powerful theatre.
MB: Which is what really matters, whilst others miss the forest for the sake of a spear from a single tree.
The Gambler opens on Thursday 11 February at 7.30pm and runs until February 25th. Ticket prices are especially enticing, with even the most expensive seats costing only £50. Further details are available from The Royal Opera's Box Office (Telephone: 020 7304 4000) or online here.
JT: Oh yes, under Barenboim.
MB: That’s right, with an almost exclusively Russian cast.
JT: And in Russian, of course.
MB: So I imagine it will sound quite different on this occasion.
JT: Yes, they made a decision to sing it in English this time, because it’s a very wordy piece. It’s a work that is very conversational, with lots of text, and they think it’s important that everyone on stage and in the audience understands every word that’s being said, in the interests of being good theatre. Richard Jones [the director] was, I think, the man who wanted it in English. So it seems to be going pretty well, and you get more of a theatrical feeling this way in the vernacular.
MB: And particularly with a cast that is largely non-Russian, I can imagine that this might help their communication to the audience.
JT: Yes. I’ve actually sung a lot in Russian: Boris Godunov, Pimen, and Khovanshchina. But for this piece, I think there’s a very good case for doing it in the vernacular, because it’s a very fast-moving piece with all these motor rhythms [cue a brief vocal demonstration]. And the Russian language really comes into its own when you have those great sustained passages [cue a brief excerpt from Boris].
MB: Yes, you need to hear it in those works in which almost every other words is Slava [Glory], the Boris Coronation Scene and so on. If you didn’t know what the word meant before, you soon would…
JT: Whereas here, I don’t think the language has time to colour the piece, in a way.
MB: And at this time, Prokofiev’s style is to a certain extent more cosmopolitan.
JT: Well, I’m actually quite surprised by the amount of Russianness in the score: a very impressive score, the orchestration, for example.
MB: Yes, it can be quite stunning; it makes me think of the early piano concertos.
JT: Very virtuoso, almost depicting a gambling addiction. There is incredible energy…
MB: … which can’t really be done slowly.
JT: There’s gambling, there’s love – obsessive love relationships – and high-flying society, spending all the money.
MB: And just thinking about Prokofiev’s style at this time, the vocal writing is very declamatory, isn’t it? That was certainly his stated aim. Does that then present any issues, given that you are performing it in translation, or does English actually lend itself quite well to this?
JT: Yes, I think it works well. And of course, it was first done in French. I never have actually sung this piece in Russian. I did it twenty-seven years ago at the Coliseum, for ENO, in English, in a David Pountney production. And so, whilst I’ve done the opera before, it’s a reasonably long time ago.
MB: Yes, a decent break. I was reading beforehand what Prokofiev had to say when he was writing the music, when it was first going to be performed for the abortive Mariinsky premiere, interrupted by the Revolution, amongst other things, and he is very contemptuous of pretty much every aspect of operatic convention. What he perhaps sends up in The Love for Three Oranges he seems to want to fight against here. Does that come across in the work?
JT: Well, yes, it’s a very theatrical work: there’s no grand opera in it at all. There’s no aria or anything approaching an aria.
MB: You couldn’t really have a disc of highlights. In fact, his Four Portraits and Denouement from the work had to be assembled in an odd way: ripping up pages from the score and ‘dealing’ them, since there were no numbers to extract conventionally.
JT: No, I don’t think you could take excerpts. My big scene is like a mad scene really, without the flute obbligato [as in Lucia di Lammermoor]…
MB: ... or the glass harmonica, as seems to be the new big thing.
JT: That’s right. But you need a lot of voice for this, it’s a bit role in that sense; it’s a big score, with a lot of decibels. So you need a voice with a lot of muscle in it. And you need very clear words and very pure vowel sounds. You need energy too: vocal energy, vocal muscle. It’s written for quite a big part; it’s not a walk in the park.
MB: And it’s a huge cast too.
JT: Well, there’s only really actually half a dozen main characters, but then there’s a million smaller parts.
MB: Having looked down the cast list, they all seem to be taken by different people too, which must make putting the opera on pretty expensive.
JT: It probably does.
MB: It’s certainly not often staged, is it?
JT: It’s a very good piece too. Written by Prokofiev and based on this great book by Dostoyevsky. But it’s an odd piece, a bit of an oddball; it’s unique.
MB: It doesn’t really fit into any of our ready-made opera categories.
JT: There’s something of Pelléas et Mélisande, sometimes, that I hear, and also of course some Russian music, Mussorgsky and so on.
MB: Unavoidable.
JT: And I also hear some Bartók, some of Bluebeard’s Castle.
MB: Which you’ve sung quite often?
JT: Many times, yes.
MB: In Hungarian and in English.
JT: In Hungarian, yes. Oh, and of course, I did do a recording in English. I’ve done more recordings of Bluebeard than any other piece. One with the Berlin Philharmonic and Bernard Haitink, one with [the] Munich [Philharmonic] and James Levine, one for Chandos in English, basically the Opera North set-up, and another from the Proms, with [Jukka-Pekka] Saraste conducting. It’s such a wonderful piece. And I think one of the reasons it’s recorded so much is because it lasts about the length of a CD.
MB: And also, it seems to me, it loses so little by being recorded, by being listened to at home. If anything, the imagination is better at producing it than anything one could hope to materialise on stage. The opening of those doors is almost bound to be a disappointment in the theatre, unless one tries something extremely inventive, not at all obvious.
JT: It’s almost not a real opera; it’s half-way there, a bit like La Damnation de Faust. Whereas this [The Gambler] needs the theatre.
MB: Just to realise what’s going on; it all happens so quickly.
JT: It needs a great director.
MB: And actually, although this is a wholly different piece, though written not so long before, the situation is not wholly unlike that of Rosenkavalier. I remember when, as a teenager, I first listened to the work on CD, I thought it wonderful, but I didn’t really have a sense of what it might be like in the theatre; for one thing, the dialogue passes so quickly. I needed to see it in the theatre before I could really appreciate Karajan and Schwarzkopf.
JT: Yes, I can understand that. Some friends who listened today have likened the General to Baron Ochs. It’s similar, I suppose, in one sense that Ochs is the one character in my normal repertoire – you know, Wotan, Gurnemanz, Hagen – which is not huge in dramatic terms. Ochs is a wonderful acting part.
MB: I saw you in Munich in the role, a couple of years ago [see here].
JT: With Felicity Lott, possibly, was it?
MB: I don’t think it was [racking brains]. Oh yes, I remember, it was Angela Denoke, whom I saw a few minutes before coming in here. She’s playing Polina, isn’t she?
JT: Yes, she is. I think it might well have been her in Munich.
MB: And, of course, in that venerable Otto Schenk production, the one Carlos Kleiber conducted.
JT: With Jürgen Rose’s designs. So in a way, it’s the same sort of character to play, the same sort of world as Ochs’s, I suppose. But it’s different, too. Ochs loves life; he loves women; he loves having lots of women. The General is besotted with Blanche; he loves Blanche; he adores her. And he’s not a multiple ladies’ man. He’s been married a couple of times and is now completely enamoured of Blanche. And that’s what makes him go mad in the end: the lack of money. He loses all of his money. Blanche then goes on to the next rich man; she very much latches on to him.
MB: Really the demi-mondaine.
JT: Yes, as is the Marquis, who’s lending all the money. And my credit-worthiness depends upon the fact that my mother-in-law is going to die any minute. There’s a comedy element there.
MB: It’s actually a similar world to that of Lulu, particularly the beginning of the third act, with the buying and selling of Jungfrau shares.
JT: And, just to return to Rosenkavalier, there’s the similarity in terms of money. The whole story for Ochs is based on him marrying Sophie, so that he gets lots of money. He needs the money so that he can save Lerchenau, which is mortgaged up to the hilt. So there is that. And also, in the end, Ochs is undone and he’s sent packing. In this, the General’s world falls apart, so there is a similarity there.
MB: In a way, whenever the works are set, this seems a world that comes into its own very much in the twentieth century.
JT: And now, too. It’s wonderful: they’ve changed one world from Rothschild to Goldman Sachs. It’s incredibly topical: banking.
MB: We can’t open a newspaper at the moment without coming across the phrase, ‘casino capitalism’, and here this is, set in a casino.
JT: Another thing, just while I think of it: the animals in the production, this Richard Jones production. The first scene, instead of being in a park, is in a zoo, attached to the hotel. So you have the hotel, and part of the complex, a ‘leisure complex’, you have the zoo too. In a way, there’s an analogy between the people and the animals – and a lot of people are wearing furs. And there are the gamblers: the bear market and the bull market. There’s a strong connection between the behaviour of the animals and the behaviour of the people.
MB: And perhaps a sense that everyone is caged in some way by the dictates of capital?
JT: Yes, exactly, so it’s quite an interesting set up.
MB: And a very witty director.
JT: He’s a wonderful director. We’ve rehearsed for weeks – this is a seven-week rehearsal period – and it’s all been so detailed, even to the level of every brushstroke on the floor at the hotel: it’s almost choreographed. Not too much, not too little; not so much as to upstage anyone, but even so… Great concentration, this requires: it takes a long time.
MB: And you sang in his Ring here, of course.
JT: I did. I had a wonderful time. Of course, it was very controversial.
MB: I wonder whether it would be now. My suspicion is that it would be much less so now, because what audiences are used to has changed enormously over that time.
JT: But then, even in the ’90s, audiences were used to a lot of adventurous things, but perhaps it came a decade too early. If he did it now, who knows?
MB: I was an undergraduate at the time, and I remember coming down to London just for Götterdämmerung; it was actually the first time I had come to Covent Garden. And I thought it was amazing.
JT: Ah, you saw Brünnhilde with a paper bag over her head.
MB: Yes, a very powerful image. And yet I had seen it mocked by press critics, who seemed so extraordinarily reactionary and literalist in their attitudes – not all of them, but quite a few. I thought it was a very powerful way of registering the terrible shame she feels in the second act.
JT: People get really hung up on this business of updating productions. You know, there are good productions and bad productions. There’s good updating and bad updating. There’s good conventional and bad conventional. Perhaps there’s nothing worse than a bad conventional production, which is somehow nothing.
MB: The Zeffirelli sort of thing at the Met, where ‘patrons’ applaud the scenery.
JT: Yes. But this is an updated production and it’s a wonderful production. When I do these fundraising talks – we had one last week – there are always questions about: how do you get on with ‘modern productions’? People have really got a thing about that.
MB: A strange idea, that there is some thing, in inverted commas, called a ‘modern production’.
JT: And they’re not the same. Of course you get bad modern productions, but you get wonderful ones.
MB: And so much, it seems to me, depends on the sense of theatre a director has. He can bend the work to his will, he can penetrate to its heart, he can almost do what he likes, if he has a sense of theatre – and, of course, a sense of music, which, sadly, happens less often. Then he can make it work.
JT: A great director is worth his weight in gold – like a great conductor.
MB: Speaking of which, in the Ring, you had Haitink.
JT: Yes. But there were a lot of problems there too. Haitink and Jones didn’t see eye to eye. Bernard basically closed his eyes and conducted gorgeously. But here, Pappano and Jones are very much of one mind.
MB: They’ve worked together quite often, haven’t they?
JT: Yes, in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, for instance, when I played a particularly gruesome character, eating those mushrooms with rat poison.
MB: And Shostakovich, of course, is very different from Prokofiev, isn’t he? Quite different temperaments.
JT: Yes, same country, but quite different. And when was that written? It was written after this, wasn’t it?
MB: Yes, the 1930s, the height of Stalin’s terror. There was the terrible Pravda editorial after Stalin attended the premiere.
JT: I don’t think he liked the scene with the rat poisoning, as a dictator.
MB: Looking over his shoulder and paranoid to begin with… Just to go back to the Ring, I saw Götterdämmerung here, and then went to the whole cycle at the Albert Hall, which was my first time for a cycle. I was utterly bowled over.
JT: A lot of people were bowled over. All these theatrical awards I won were from a performance not in the theatre.
MB: There’s a wonderful irony to that.
JT: Yes. I won the Evening Standard award, the Royal Philharmonic Society award, various others: all for a performance that was not in the theatre. But of course, it was sort of staged – and, at its best, that can be more intensely theatrical. It can be.
MB: Partly, I suppose, because there’s less to watch: no scenery certainly. So gesture, in a way as Wagner had hoped, becomes so much more telling.
JT: It becomes incredibly crystallised, incredibly economic.
MB: Another thing I remember, though perhaps now it is a side issue, is the end: what was so terribly moving was Haitink then speaking directly to the audience and asking for help. I fired off my letter to the Secretary of State the following morning, not that I imagine it made the slightest bit of difference.
JT: This place was in the doldrums.
MB: Nobody knew what was going to happen, whether it would survive – and there was this truly great musical performance.
JT: It was terribly worrying. One forgets.
MB: And it’s not that long ago.
JT: No, ten years.
MB: But presumably, it must feel like a completely different world.
JT: It does. Yes, as soon as the new place opened, within a couple of years, we were onto a different momentum altogether. But I think Jeremy Isaacs is treated a bit unfairly here. It was an incredibly difficult situation. They had to close, for safety reasons. Where was the money going to come from? How do you raise the money? Planning permission: the local Covent Garden community were up in arms about this development; they were protesting on the street. It was a really difficult situation. Money was such a problem.
MB: And giving money to the Royal Opera House is unlikely ever to be a popular cause, especially given the tabloid press here, and of course a New Labour government.
JT: But they succeeded in getting all that money – and look at this development [pointing out of the window]. It’s just perfect: a real home for the company. Always we seem to come back to Wagner though. Of course, Wagner is a magnificent composer: the music is incredible. Whatever other music I do, coming back to Wagner is like coming home. And I think it suits what in particular I’ve got to give: my voice, probably the way my mind works as well. I think it all fits very well with the North European mythology, the way the whole thing is psychologically constructed. It all feels like a completely natural expression of the human condition in a way.
MB: Never more so than in the character of Wotan, but in the Ring as a whole. Every time I return to it, I find so much more than I had found before. It never ends – unlike the gods. So compared to that, Gurnemanz must seem like a bit of a break for you.
JT: In a way. The thing about him is that he’s a narrator.
MB: He doesn’t actually do anything.
JT: The story would take place without him.
MB: I suppose we wouldn’t really know what the story was, but it would take place.
JT: Exactly, whereas Wotan is absolutely the centre. It’s about Wotan from start to finish. When he loses his eye drinking at the Well of Wisdom, when he makes the spear from the World-Ash Tree: that’s the beginning of the story. And the end, the World-Ash, Valhalla burn: that’s the end of the gods.
MB: And in a way, he’s never more present than in Götterdämmerung. You hear him all the time in the music, even though he is never on stage.
JT: He’s there, just waiting in Valhalla. And everybody talks about him. The Norns talk about him; the Norns talk about the end of the gods. They talk about Wotan at the beginning, the beginning of Wotan, and the end that is to come. Then Waltraute comes on and talks about him, thinking with a smile of Brünnhilde. And at the very end, when the ring goes back to the Rhine, due to what Brünnhilde does, perhaps that smile will come again: a smile of acceptance, of love. It’s his dying moment.
MB: And there is the moment in the Immolation Scene when she seems to come to terms with him, singing ‘Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott’: a benediction, in which she puts the god to rest: a coming to terms from the two of them.
JT: It is. Just about…
MB: There’s the element of doubt, too: has she rid herself of her anger?
JT: She just about understands the predicament that he was in.
MB: She says that she’s not wise, but she sort of understands… Have you ever, then, been in a production in which what Wagner wanted to happen actually does, when one sees the gods in Valhalla as it burns? I’m sure I have never seen that on stage: not that one necessarily should, but I can imagine it could have quite an effect, a cyclical effect even.
JT: No, I haven’t: not the gods, but Valhalla. Though in the [Harry] Kupfer production [at Bayreuth, available on DVD], Wotan comes back in the Funeral March, throwing the spear back into the hole. Now purists object to that, because one of the Norns says that, to create the fire that consumes Valhalla at the end, Wotan plunges the spear into Loge’s breast. But, you know, that’s neither here nor there really: it’s powerful theatre.
MB: Which is what really matters, whilst others miss the forest for the sake of a spear from a single tree.
The Gambler opens on Thursday 11 February at 7.30pm and runs until February 25th. Ticket prices are especially enticing, with even the most expensive seats costing only £50. Further details are available from The Royal Opera's Box Office (Telephone: 020 7304 4000) or online here.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Kožená/Schiff - Janáček, Dvořák, Mussorgsky, and Bartók, 6 February 2010
Wigmore Hall
Janáček – Selection from Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs
Janáček – In the Mists
Dvořák – Biblical Songs, op.99
Mussorgsky – The Nursery
Bartók – Village Scenes
Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano)
András Schiff (piano)
The diacriticals are out in force, making this not the easiest of reviews to type on an English keyboard – but what a minor inconvenience from so welcome a change. The Wigmore Hall’s programme is jam-packed with Schubert and Schumann songs, as are other halls’ schedules, yet how often are we treated to performances of songs by Janáček, Dvořák, Mussorgsky, and Bartók? The problem is in good part linguistic. Nevertheless, matters are rather different in the world of opera, so why not in the recital hall? The milieux and repertories do not call upon identical strengths. An estimable opera singer may or may not be equally gifted as a recitalist – I nearly said Lieder artist – and vice versa.
It would be good, then, to hear a wider range of singers tackle such repertoire, yet, on this occasion, there could be no gainsaying the authority of Magdalena Kožená’s contribution. In Janáček’s Moravian folksong settings, one heard the sadness and joy in life, two sides of the same coin: true humanity, both profound and commonplace. Through Love, Promise, Uneasy, Carnation, Tears of Comfort, and Musicians – there seems little point in employing the original language titles on this occasion – she never aestheticised the music, nor did she attempt to sound like a ‘real’ folk-singer. András Schiff’s playing was perhaps surprisingly muscular, though the insistence of his part permitted one to hear the composer’s suggestions of other instruments in his writing.
Schiff’s contribution became more problematical in the solo set of four pieces, In the Mists. It was a strange mix: sometimes a parodically rigid, heavy-handed near-Teutonism, sometimes playing of impressionistic delicacy. Janáček’s twists and turns were loving traced in the opening Andante, but the intriguing echoes of Chopin in the second movement were marred by soon being hammered out. I had expected to hear Schiff more in sympathy with Janáček's style than proved to be the case.
The rest of the first part was devoted to Dvořák’s ten Biblical Songs. I fear I found this too much of a not-so-good thing. This had nothing to do with the performances, but in these settings, Dvořák’s voice does not seem to me at its strongest, a suspicion confirmed by the contrast with the performers’ first encore, a deeply-felt Songs my Mother Taught Me. Here, much, though not all, tends towards the anodyne or insipid; Brahms’s Four Serious Songs these are not. Nevertheless, Kožená sounded committed, from the splendidly declamatory opening of Clouds and Darkness are Around About Him onwards. Schiff in general made the most of piano parts, which sometimes too openly aspire towards the orchestral, though a little more Lisztian Romanticism would have benefited Hear my Prayer, O Lord my God! (Schiff has spoken more than once of his contempt for Liszt, unusual for a Hungarian, though no more creditable for that.) Delicacy was better served than abandon. Kožená, however, proved winningly operatic in her projection. I liked the pastoral quality both artists imparted to God is my Shepherd. And the conviction Kožená brought to the final line of Turn Thee to me and Have Mercy – ‘Nebot’ v Tebe doufám’ (‘… for my hope is in Thee’) was unmistakeable.
With Mussorgsky’s cycle, The Nursery (or Detskaya), we were in very different territory, the voice of the composer immediately apparent. Kožená was very much in her element here, vividly characterising, both vocally and visually. (More puritanical Lieder-devotees might well have disapproved, but these are not Lieder.) She seems to have a particular connection to the world of children’s imagination, having shone in a similar way during a Berlin performance of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. In the Corner showed how readily she could switch ‘character’, very much the old crone and equally much the insolent child, whilst The Beetle left one in no doubt how much apparently little things can matter to a child. With the Doll proved a compelling lullaby, Schiff etching the rhythm unerringly, permitting Kožená to weave her magic above. Nanny’s love for the little monster of the nursery came through in Hobby-horse Rider, as did Schiff’s delineation of the accompaniment’s ‘character’. This was a fine account.
Finally, we returned to folksong, for Bartók’s setting of Slovak songs, Village Scenes. Once again, and even though the melodies are not his, the composer’s voice was unmistakeable from the opening. Schiff truly revelled in Bartók’s extraordinary piano writing, not least the harmonies. The way he shaded into nothingness at the end of At the Bride’s was an object lesson. Kožená’s wild peasant cry in Wedding was quite something, subtly taken up in the piano part thereafter. Lullaby was, rightly, mysterious and troubling: what might sleep bring? Yet with such a compelling narrator, sleep must nevertheless win out. Once again, Schiff imparted just the right character to the final Lads’ Dance, a strong rhythmic profile ensuring that both artists’ contribution would culminate in the requisite frenetic abandon.
Janáček – Selection from Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs
Janáček – In the Mists
Dvořák – Biblical Songs, op.99
Mussorgsky – The Nursery
Bartók – Village Scenes
Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano)
András Schiff (piano)
The diacriticals are out in force, making this not the easiest of reviews to type on an English keyboard – but what a minor inconvenience from so welcome a change. The Wigmore Hall’s programme is jam-packed with Schubert and Schumann songs, as are other halls’ schedules, yet how often are we treated to performances of songs by Janáček, Dvořák, Mussorgsky, and Bartók? The problem is in good part linguistic. Nevertheless, matters are rather different in the world of opera, so why not in the recital hall? The milieux and repertories do not call upon identical strengths. An estimable opera singer may or may not be equally gifted as a recitalist – I nearly said Lieder artist – and vice versa.
It would be good, then, to hear a wider range of singers tackle such repertoire, yet, on this occasion, there could be no gainsaying the authority of Magdalena Kožená’s contribution. In Janáček’s Moravian folksong settings, one heard the sadness and joy in life, two sides of the same coin: true humanity, both profound and commonplace. Through Love, Promise, Uneasy, Carnation, Tears of Comfort, and Musicians – there seems little point in employing the original language titles on this occasion – she never aestheticised the music, nor did she attempt to sound like a ‘real’ folk-singer. András Schiff’s playing was perhaps surprisingly muscular, though the insistence of his part permitted one to hear the composer’s suggestions of other instruments in his writing.
Schiff’s contribution became more problematical in the solo set of four pieces, In the Mists. It was a strange mix: sometimes a parodically rigid, heavy-handed near-Teutonism, sometimes playing of impressionistic delicacy. Janáček’s twists and turns were loving traced in the opening Andante, but the intriguing echoes of Chopin in the second movement were marred by soon being hammered out. I had expected to hear Schiff more in sympathy with Janáček's style than proved to be the case.
The rest of the first part was devoted to Dvořák’s ten Biblical Songs. I fear I found this too much of a not-so-good thing. This had nothing to do with the performances, but in these settings, Dvořák’s voice does not seem to me at its strongest, a suspicion confirmed by the contrast with the performers’ first encore, a deeply-felt Songs my Mother Taught Me. Here, much, though not all, tends towards the anodyne or insipid; Brahms’s Four Serious Songs these are not. Nevertheless, Kožená sounded committed, from the splendidly declamatory opening of Clouds and Darkness are Around About Him onwards. Schiff in general made the most of piano parts, which sometimes too openly aspire towards the orchestral, though a little more Lisztian Romanticism would have benefited Hear my Prayer, O Lord my God! (Schiff has spoken more than once of his contempt for Liszt, unusual for a Hungarian, though no more creditable for that.) Delicacy was better served than abandon. Kožená, however, proved winningly operatic in her projection. I liked the pastoral quality both artists imparted to God is my Shepherd. And the conviction Kožená brought to the final line of Turn Thee to me and Have Mercy – ‘Nebot’ v Tebe doufám’ (‘… for my hope is in Thee’) was unmistakeable.
With Mussorgsky’s cycle, The Nursery (or Detskaya), we were in very different territory, the voice of the composer immediately apparent. Kožená was very much in her element here, vividly characterising, both vocally and visually. (More puritanical Lieder-devotees might well have disapproved, but these are not Lieder.) She seems to have a particular connection to the world of children’s imagination, having shone in a similar way during a Berlin performance of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. In the Corner showed how readily she could switch ‘character’, very much the old crone and equally much the insolent child, whilst The Beetle left one in no doubt how much apparently little things can matter to a child. With the Doll proved a compelling lullaby, Schiff etching the rhythm unerringly, permitting Kožená to weave her magic above. Nanny’s love for the little monster of the nursery came through in Hobby-horse Rider, as did Schiff’s delineation of the accompaniment’s ‘character’. This was a fine account.
Finally, we returned to folksong, for Bartók’s setting of Slovak songs, Village Scenes. Once again, and even though the melodies are not his, the composer’s voice was unmistakeable from the opening. Schiff truly revelled in Bartók’s extraordinary piano writing, not least the harmonies. The way he shaded into nothingness at the end of At the Bride’s was an object lesson. Kožená’s wild peasant cry in Wedding was quite something, subtly taken up in the piano part thereafter. Lullaby was, rightly, mysterious and troubling: what might sleep bring? Yet with such a compelling narrator, sleep must nevertheless win out. Once again, Schiff imparted just the right character to the final Lads’ Dance, a strong rhythmic profile ensuring that both artists’ contribution would culminate in the requisite frenetic abandon.
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Beethoven and Schoenberg (4), 2 February 2010
Royal Festival Hall
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor, op.37
Schoenberg – Variations for Orchestra, op.31
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor)
Staatskapelle Berlin
And so, the final concert, a fitting climax, and a greater tribute, I think, to Schoenberg than to Beethoven, which may have been Daniel Barenboim’s intention all along. Not that his account of the third piano concerto was not excellent, perhaps even, dare I say it, great, for it was. Barenboim employed the string forces he had for the fourth and fifth concertos, starting with twelve first violins and shading down to four double basses: a respectable but far from enormous band, with plenty of body but considerably short of, say, Furtwängler’s practice. Where Furtwängler was immediately apparent, and this was perhaps more so than in any of the preceding concertos, was in the opening combination of urgency and foreboding, doubtless in part a product of the tonality – Beethoven’s C minor daemon asserting itself – but not only that. Barenboim’s command of the long line was very much in Furtwängler’s tradition too: the master’s Fernhören (long-range hearing) not aped but truly practised. The large, arguably too large, scale of the first movement ‘exposition’ – the problem is perhaps that Beethoven has yet quite to reconcile his symphonic ambition with concerto form – was exploited for full dramatic effect: no need to apologise. And where Barenboim has never feared to employ broad brushstrokes, here he carefully but not at all fussily shaded both orchestra and piano. The cadenza was painted upon a grand, truly nineteenth-century canvas. If only the chorus of the bronchially challenged could have been consigned to an earlier century too… Then came the vehement coda, passionately felt – and I refer as much to the necessity of my response as to the performance itself.
The Largo was on just as exalted a level: spacious, serene, sublime. Alas, some cretin dropped an object upon the floor, causing a great clattering during Barenboim’s opening phrase. The line endured. Unfortunately, a mobile telephone intervention very close to where I was seated could not but disrupt the aura – at least for me, though not apparently for the musicians. Let us hope that the perpetrator will be shamed for life: a vain hope, no doubt. Persistent coughing was a confounded nuisance too. Still, Barenboim and his orchestra maintained a fine balance – or dialectic – between grandeur and intimacy. In the closing Allegro, Beethoven has his final reckoning with Mozartian ghosts. Well, not quite final, of course, but there was nevertheless a sense that it might be so in this performance. The twenty-fourth piano concerto of his revered predecessor haunted Beethoven – and must surely have inspired Schoenberg too, with its almost-twelve-note first movement theme – but it was difference as much as homage that resounded here, for Haydn would bid fair to win out in the coda, only to be trumped by Beethoven himself. The Staatskapelle Berlin’s woodwind section was on truly wonderful form, evoking Mozart in Salzburg and Vienna, whilst the strings and piano showed why such utopia was no longer an option. Barenboim ensured that the orchestral fugato passage exhibited clarity and meaning, but the same could be said of his pianism throughout. There could now be no doubt that this was the very same musician as that of the sonata cycle of two years ago.
More than half of the second half was afforded to a spoken introduction, with orchestral examples, to Schoenberg’s towering masterpiece, the Op.31 Variations for Orchestra, from Barenboim himself. I cannot imagine that anyone having bothered to listen, at whatever level of musical, let alone Schoenbergian, knowledge, would have failed to be informed and illuminated by what was, quite simply, a brilliant address. Barenboim announced his ambition to act as a museum guide to an unfamiliar exhibition, to address the ear, the ‘most intelligent organ’, and to show how complexity adds to, rather than detracts from, beauty. He demonstrated how the variations might better be understood as transformations (Veränderungen), in a line from Beethoven’s Diabelli set. Inversions, rhythmical and colouristic transformations, the relationship between Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme were all discussed –and illustrated. Most crucially, fundamental pitches were drummed into the audience’s memory. Someone utterly unfamiliar with serial principles would certainly not have been by the end. Likewise, anyone with ears to hear would never again feel the necessity of a tonal crutch. Post-Brahmsian ends are not dependent upon a Brahmsian language. As Schoenberg himself asked, he speaks Chinese, but what is he saying?
This ultimately would have been to little avail without the performance itself, of course, and I am delighted to report that the latter was every bit as distinguished as the previous occasions I have heard Barenboim conduct the work (both with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, for which, see here and here). Schoenberg’s score veritably teemed with material information, overflowing in its affirmation, yet our guide had ensured and continued to ensure that we were well prepared. The Brahmsian sound of the Staatskapelle Berlin anchored us firmly in tradition, and the right tradition at that, thereby permitted us to step out in to a brave new serial world. How bracing the air of another planet is, and yet how it sustains us! Woodwind reminded us of the serenades of both Brahms and Mozart, from whom Schoenberg learned so much. Barenboim ensured that the work had its due as a colouristic – harps and mandolin, violin and piccolo – masterpiece as well as a structural one: much more impressively than the younger Boulez did, I must admit, but then Boulez found it difficult to hide his distaste for the shadow of Brahms. And yet, the hyper-expressivity Barenboim revealed in the score has a counterpart in Boulez’s own early masterworks; there is common ground with, perhaps even influence upon, Le marteau sans maître. Or so it sounded here. Barenboim is perhaps uniquely placed, both biographically and aesthetically to offer such insights, and he did not squander his opportunity. Moreover, his revelling in Schoenberg’s rhythmic transformations surely gave the lie once and for all to the stupid accusation one still sometimes hears that the Second Viennese School neglected rhythm in its explorations. Indeed, it was a sense of post-Lisztian perpetual transformation that was the hallmark both of talk and performance. For the Variations emerged as constructivist, to be sure, but also searingly dramatic, Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas recalled, and Moses und Aron foretold. The triumph of the great BACH statement in the finale registered almost chorale-like, as if Mahler had somehow conquered his doubts. This performance was gripping, exciting, and profoundly satisfying.
But there was, briefly, more. Struggling, now without a microphone, to make himself heard above a noisy audience minority, Barenboim told of Milan Kundera’s recounting that Schoenberg had believed that, in fifty years time, his music would be whistled as if it were Johann Strauss. Kundera thought that Schoenberg overestimated himself; Barenboim thought that Schoenberg overestimated the future. So much the worse for Kundera, who perhaps overestimated himself, and so much the better for Barenboim. And, after the latter’s introduction, every audience member would at least have been able to sing the theme. Yet Barenboim defied my expectation that we might hear more Schoenberg, or even Webern, and gave a magnificent, edge-of-seat rendition of the Waltz King’s Unter Donner und Blitz polka. The orchestra had never sounded better – except, perhaps, in the Schoenberg.
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor, op.37
Schoenberg – Variations for Orchestra, op.31
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor)
Staatskapelle Berlin
And so, the final concert, a fitting climax, and a greater tribute, I think, to Schoenberg than to Beethoven, which may have been Daniel Barenboim’s intention all along. Not that his account of the third piano concerto was not excellent, perhaps even, dare I say it, great, for it was. Barenboim employed the string forces he had for the fourth and fifth concertos, starting with twelve first violins and shading down to four double basses: a respectable but far from enormous band, with plenty of body but considerably short of, say, Furtwängler’s practice. Where Furtwängler was immediately apparent, and this was perhaps more so than in any of the preceding concertos, was in the opening combination of urgency and foreboding, doubtless in part a product of the tonality – Beethoven’s C minor daemon asserting itself – but not only that. Barenboim’s command of the long line was very much in Furtwängler’s tradition too: the master’s Fernhören (long-range hearing) not aped but truly practised. The large, arguably too large, scale of the first movement ‘exposition’ – the problem is perhaps that Beethoven has yet quite to reconcile his symphonic ambition with concerto form – was exploited for full dramatic effect: no need to apologise. And where Barenboim has never feared to employ broad brushstrokes, here he carefully but not at all fussily shaded both orchestra and piano. The cadenza was painted upon a grand, truly nineteenth-century canvas. If only the chorus of the bronchially challenged could have been consigned to an earlier century too… Then came the vehement coda, passionately felt – and I refer as much to the necessity of my response as to the performance itself.
The Largo was on just as exalted a level: spacious, serene, sublime. Alas, some cretin dropped an object upon the floor, causing a great clattering during Barenboim’s opening phrase. The line endured. Unfortunately, a mobile telephone intervention very close to where I was seated could not but disrupt the aura – at least for me, though not apparently for the musicians. Let us hope that the perpetrator will be shamed for life: a vain hope, no doubt. Persistent coughing was a confounded nuisance too. Still, Barenboim and his orchestra maintained a fine balance – or dialectic – between grandeur and intimacy. In the closing Allegro, Beethoven has his final reckoning with Mozartian ghosts. Well, not quite final, of course, but there was nevertheless a sense that it might be so in this performance. The twenty-fourth piano concerto of his revered predecessor haunted Beethoven – and must surely have inspired Schoenberg too, with its almost-twelve-note first movement theme – but it was difference as much as homage that resounded here, for Haydn would bid fair to win out in the coda, only to be trumped by Beethoven himself. The Staatskapelle Berlin’s woodwind section was on truly wonderful form, evoking Mozart in Salzburg and Vienna, whilst the strings and piano showed why such utopia was no longer an option. Barenboim ensured that the orchestral fugato passage exhibited clarity and meaning, but the same could be said of his pianism throughout. There could now be no doubt that this was the very same musician as that of the sonata cycle of two years ago.
More than half of the second half was afforded to a spoken introduction, with orchestral examples, to Schoenberg’s towering masterpiece, the Op.31 Variations for Orchestra, from Barenboim himself. I cannot imagine that anyone having bothered to listen, at whatever level of musical, let alone Schoenbergian, knowledge, would have failed to be informed and illuminated by what was, quite simply, a brilliant address. Barenboim announced his ambition to act as a museum guide to an unfamiliar exhibition, to address the ear, the ‘most intelligent organ’, and to show how complexity adds to, rather than detracts from, beauty. He demonstrated how the variations might better be understood as transformations (Veränderungen), in a line from Beethoven’s Diabelli set. Inversions, rhythmical and colouristic transformations, the relationship between Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme were all discussed –and illustrated. Most crucially, fundamental pitches were drummed into the audience’s memory. Someone utterly unfamiliar with serial principles would certainly not have been by the end. Likewise, anyone with ears to hear would never again feel the necessity of a tonal crutch. Post-Brahmsian ends are not dependent upon a Brahmsian language. As Schoenberg himself asked, he speaks Chinese, but what is he saying?
This ultimately would have been to little avail without the performance itself, of course, and I am delighted to report that the latter was every bit as distinguished as the previous occasions I have heard Barenboim conduct the work (both with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, for which, see here and here). Schoenberg’s score veritably teemed with material information, overflowing in its affirmation, yet our guide had ensured and continued to ensure that we were well prepared. The Brahmsian sound of the Staatskapelle Berlin anchored us firmly in tradition, and the right tradition at that, thereby permitted us to step out in to a brave new serial world. How bracing the air of another planet is, and yet how it sustains us! Woodwind reminded us of the serenades of both Brahms and Mozart, from whom Schoenberg learned so much. Barenboim ensured that the work had its due as a colouristic – harps and mandolin, violin and piccolo – masterpiece as well as a structural one: much more impressively than the younger Boulez did, I must admit, but then Boulez found it difficult to hide his distaste for the shadow of Brahms. And yet, the hyper-expressivity Barenboim revealed in the score has a counterpart in Boulez’s own early masterworks; there is common ground with, perhaps even influence upon, Le marteau sans maître. Or so it sounded here. Barenboim is perhaps uniquely placed, both biographically and aesthetically to offer such insights, and he did not squander his opportunity. Moreover, his revelling in Schoenberg’s rhythmic transformations surely gave the lie once and for all to the stupid accusation one still sometimes hears that the Second Viennese School neglected rhythm in its explorations. Indeed, it was a sense of post-Lisztian perpetual transformation that was the hallmark both of talk and performance. For the Variations emerged as constructivist, to be sure, but also searingly dramatic, Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas recalled, and Moses und Aron foretold. The triumph of the great BACH statement in the finale registered almost chorale-like, as if Mahler had somehow conquered his doubts. This performance was gripping, exciting, and profoundly satisfying.
But there was, briefly, more. Struggling, now without a microphone, to make himself heard above a noisy audience minority, Barenboim told of Milan Kundera’s recounting that Schoenberg had believed that, in fifty years time, his music would be whistled as if it were Johann Strauss. Kundera thought that Schoenberg overestimated himself; Barenboim thought that Schoenberg overestimated the future. So much the worse for Kundera, who perhaps overestimated himself, and so much the better for Barenboim. And, after the latter’s introduction, every audience member would at least have been able to sing the theme. Yet Barenboim defied my expectation that we might hear more Schoenberg, or even Webern, and gave a magnificent, edge-of-seat rendition of the Waltz King’s Unter Donner und Blitz polka. The orchestra had never sounded better – except, perhaps, in the Schoenberg.
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Beethoven and Schoenberg (3), 1 February 2010
Royal Festival Hall
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.2 in B-flat major, op.19
Schoenberg – Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.4 in G major, op.58
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor)
Staatskapelle Berlin
After the disappointment of the previous night’s Emperor Concerto, this concert marked an indisputable return to form for Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin. It also marked the advent of a Schoenberg popularly, if erroneously, considered more ‘difficult’ than the composer of Pelleas und Melisande and Verklärte Nacht.
The B-flat concerto, numbered second but actually the first, does not represent Beethoven at his greatest, though it certainly demands inclusion in a cycle such as this. I was a little puzzled by the programme annotator’s claim, ‘Beethoven’s later dismissal of his Second Piano Concerto as “not one of my best compositions” now seems a little harsh.’ Does it? I cannot recall encountering anyone who thought this one of Beethoven’s ‘best compositions’, and should doubtless be baffled if I did. Anyway, even if Barenboim and his orchestra could not convince one of that, they certainly made a good case for the work. With an orchestra the size of that employed for the first piano concerto, Barenboim imparted a post-Mozartian sound and style to this performance, spirited if not entirely without untidiness in the piano part. More important, however, were the structural clarity and sharp melodic profile achieved. Woodwind interjections throughout the concerto proved especially delightful. I did wonder at the wisdom of taking us quite so literally into the world of the late piano sonatas during the first movement cadenza, but better that than playing safe and dull; there was at least a fine sense of the exploratory. The Adagio benefited from especially fine orchestral playing, whether woodwind soloists or pizzicato strings. It was expansive, though never excessively so, and was possessed of a true, honest dignity. Barenboim supplied a magical piano touch and an exquisite, chamber-like blend with his players. From the first statement of the rondo theme, the finale displayed a Haydnesque sense of fun and quirkiness. One could never, though, have doubted the identity of the composer, whose first set of piano Bagatelles often sounded especially close to the mood struck here. (How much more than chips from the master's workbench they are!) Again, Barenboim’s keen sense of Beethoven's tonal architecture was readily apparent, enabling modulations and their meaning truly to register. My only cavil was the occasional over-audible gear change.
I have heard Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin play Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces once before: an outstanding performance at home in Berlin. With the best will in the world, the Royal Festival Hall’s acoustic cannot match that of the Philharmonie: a not insignificant loss in music such as this. Nevertheless, the present performance yielded nothing to that in Berlin. The first piece was frenetic, but never too much; the utmost urgency characterised a gripping account; despite the huge orchestra, much playing was of the utmost delicacy. Colours, such as that of the xylophone, emerged, had their day in the sun, and retreated, whichever way one turned one’s ears. Crucially, here and throughout, a sense of direction was always paramount; with Barenboim, we were in safe hands. The cello solo at the opening of Vergangenes began almost as if a Brahms lullaby, stranded in a post-Mahlerian nightmare, yet we soon discovered that there was a great deal of gentle, consoling music in Schoenberg’s remembrance of things past. His myriad of instrumental possibilities, whether soloistic or in combination, truly set the scene for the Klangfarbenmelodie of Farben. And the beauty of that final chord of the second movement had to be heard to be believed. Dissonance, for Schoenberg, was always a matter of comprehensibility, not beauty. If the melody of colours took centre stage in the third movement, a more musico-dramatic impulse asserted itself for the peripeteia of the fourth. The dramatic moment was seized with relish, the spectre of Vienna (Mahler’s Seventh Symphony?) returning with a vengeance. The final piece showed Schoenberg and Barenboim at their most radically post-Wagnerian: unending melody at every turn, every level. Barenboim truly caught the dialectical nature of Schoenberg’s achievement: subtle and furious, wild and attentive, nightmarish and yet affirmative.
Barenboim employed a slightly larger body of strings for the Fourth Piano Concerto than he had for the Second, reverting to the forces of the Emperor. This was immediately a more alert-sounding reading than I had heard him give in Vienna last year, even if the strings of the Staatskapelle Berlin, for all their virtues, could not quite capture the sweetness of those of the Vienna Philharmonic. I took a little while, though not long, to be persuaded of Barenboim’s interpretative stance here. Initially, I wondered whether his dramatic forthrightness, implying a heroism closer than one generally hears to the Emperor, was really the thing for a concerto generally considered more ruminative. Even Barenboim’s tone sounded close to that expected in the concerto that would follow this. However, as with a similar account of the Violin Concerto a few years ago from Frank Peter Zimmermann, the LSO, and Bernard Haitink, I was entirely won over. This was Beethoven the revolutionary – and this is, after all, middle-period Beethoven. The first movement was relatively swift but, more important, convincingly flexible. Woodwind again proved delectable. There were some welcome surprises in the cadenza, which here, following the upsets of the Fifth, showed Barenboim in complete command of his instrument. Unfortunately, he had an equally commanding bronchial partner for a significant stretch of time.
The Furies of the slow movement were unusually angry in a highly rhetorical, almost pictorial account, which nevertheless always placed musical values first: a valuable lesson, not that it will be learned, for Barenboim’s ‘period’ foes. The contrast with the Classical serenity of the piano could hardly have been greater, or more dramatically telling. Part of the secret of success of this performance was surely that Barenboim was better able to conduct the orchestra than he had been in the Emperor, which will always be a struggle when directed from the keyboard. For many, the Fourth would be a bridge too far to play and to conduct, but not for him. The transition to the finale was exquisitely handled, with an unerring sense of rightness, born of deep understanding of where Beethoven is heading and why. The high spirits of what was to follow were all the better for having been so hard won during the mysteries of the Adagio. Now the full orchestral sound confirmed why, for those in the know, this ranks as one of Germany’s greatest orchestras. Again, the movement was more of a Romantic battle between soloist and orchestra than is generally the case, but the strategy paid off handsomely, with muscular responses on both sides. Not that there lacked moments of delicacy and beauty: that wonderful passage when the violas take pride of place, for instance. Once again, Barenboim’s structural command permitted Beethoven’s modulations to register with their full meaning, never more so than in the preparations for the cadenza. The final bars were thunderously exciting. This was fully worthy of a standing ovation.
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.2 in B-flat major, op.19
Schoenberg – Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.4 in G major, op.58
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor)
Staatskapelle Berlin
After the disappointment of the previous night’s Emperor Concerto, this concert marked an indisputable return to form for Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin. It also marked the advent of a Schoenberg popularly, if erroneously, considered more ‘difficult’ than the composer of Pelleas und Melisande and Verklärte Nacht.
The B-flat concerto, numbered second but actually the first, does not represent Beethoven at his greatest, though it certainly demands inclusion in a cycle such as this. I was a little puzzled by the programme annotator’s claim, ‘Beethoven’s later dismissal of his Second Piano Concerto as “not one of my best compositions” now seems a little harsh.’ Does it? I cannot recall encountering anyone who thought this one of Beethoven’s ‘best compositions’, and should doubtless be baffled if I did. Anyway, even if Barenboim and his orchestra could not convince one of that, they certainly made a good case for the work. With an orchestra the size of that employed for the first piano concerto, Barenboim imparted a post-Mozartian sound and style to this performance, spirited if not entirely without untidiness in the piano part. More important, however, were the structural clarity and sharp melodic profile achieved. Woodwind interjections throughout the concerto proved especially delightful. I did wonder at the wisdom of taking us quite so literally into the world of the late piano sonatas during the first movement cadenza, but better that than playing safe and dull; there was at least a fine sense of the exploratory. The Adagio benefited from especially fine orchestral playing, whether woodwind soloists or pizzicato strings. It was expansive, though never excessively so, and was possessed of a true, honest dignity. Barenboim supplied a magical piano touch and an exquisite, chamber-like blend with his players. From the first statement of the rondo theme, the finale displayed a Haydnesque sense of fun and quirkiness. One could never, though, have doubted the identity of the composer, whose first set of piano Bagatelles often sounded especially close to the mood struck here. (How much more than chips from the master's workbench they are!) Again, Barenboim’s keen sense of Beethoven's tonal architecture was readily apparent, enabling modulations and their meaning truly to register. My only cavil was the occasional over-audible gear change.
I have heard Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin play Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces once before: an outstanding performance at home in Berlin. With the best will in the world, the Royal Festival Hall’s acoustic cannot match that of the Philharmonie: a not insignificant loss in music such as this. Nevertheless, the present performance yielded nothing to that in Berlin. The first piece was frenetic, but never too much; the utmost urgency characterised a gripping account; despite the huge orchestra, much playing was of the utmost delicacy. Colours, such as that of the xylophone, emerged, had their day in the sun, and retreated, whichever way one turned one’s ears. Crucially, here and throughout, a sense of direction was always paramount; with Barenboim, we were in safe hands. The cello solo at the opening of Vergangenes began almost as if a Brahms lullaby, stranded in a post-Mahlerian nightmare, yet we soon discovered that there was a great deal of gentle, consoling music in Schoenberg’s remembrance of things past. His myriad of instrumental possibilities, whether soloistic or in combination, truly set the scene for the Klangfarbenmelodie of Farben. And the beauty of that final chord of the second movement had to be heard to be believed. Dissonance, for Schoenberg, was always a matter of comprehensibility, not beauty. If the melody of colours took centre stage in the third movement, a more musico-dramatic impulse asserted itself for the peripeteia of the fourth. The dramatic moment was seized with relish, the spectre of Vienna (Mahler’s Seventh Symphony?) returning with a vengeance. The final piece showed Schoenberg and Barenboim at their most radically post-Wagnerian: unending melody at every turn, every level. Barenboim truly caught the dialectical nature of Schoenberg’s achievement: subtle and furious, wild and attentive, nightmarish and yet affirmative.
Barenboim employed a slightly larger body of strings for the Fourth Piano Concerto than he had for the Second, reverting to the forces of the Emperor. This was immediately a more alert-sounding reading than I had heard him give in Vienna last year, even if the strings of the Staatskapelle Berlin, for all their virtues, could not quite capture the sweetness of those of the Vienna Philharmonic. I took a little while, though not long, to be persuaded of Barenboim’s interpretative stance here. Initially, I wondered whether his dramatic forthrightness, implying a heroism closer than one generally hears to the Emperor, was really the thing for a concerto generally considered more ruminative. Even Barenboim’s tone sounded close to that expected in the concerto that would follow this. However, as with a similar account of the Violin Concerto a few years ago from Frank Peter Zimmermann, the LSO, and Bernard Haitink, I was entirely won over. This was Beethoven the revolutionary – and this is, after all, middle-period Beethoven. The first movement was relatively swift but, more important, convincingly flexible. Woodwind again proved delectable. There were some welcome surprises in the cadenza, which here, following the upsets of the Fifth, showed Barenboim in complete command of his instrument. Unfortunately, he had an equally commanding bronchial partner for a significant stretch of time.
The Furies of the slow movement were unusually angry in a highly rhetorical, almost pictorial account, which nevertheless always placed musical values first: a valuable lesson, not that it will be learned, for Barenboim’s ‘period’ foes. The contrast with the Classical serenity of the piano could hardly have been greater, or more dramatically telling. Part of the secret of success of this performance was surely that Barenboim was better able to conduct the orchestra than he had been in the Emperor, which will always be a struggle when directed from the keyboard. For many, the Fourth would be a bridge too far to play and to conduct, but not for him. The transition to the finale was exquisitely handled, with an unerring sense of rightness, born of deep understanding of where Beethoven is heading and why. The high spirits of what was to follow were all the better for having been so hard won during the mysteries of the Adagio. Now the full orchestral sound confirmed why, for those in the know, this ranks as one of Germany’s greatest orchestras. Again, the movement was more of a Romantic battle between soloist and orchestra than is generally the case, but the strategy paid off handsomely, with muscular responses on both sides. Not that there lacked moments of delicacy and beauty: that wonderful passage when the violas take pride of place, for instance. Once again, Barenboim’s structural command permitted Beethoven’s modulations to register with their full meaning, never more so than in the preparations for the cadenza. The final bars were thunderously exciting. This was fully worthy of a standing ovation.
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Beethoven and Schoenberg (2), 31 January 2010
Royal Festival Hall
Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht, op.4
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.5 in E-flat major, op.73, ‘Emperor’
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor)
Staatskapelle Berlin
This had the makings of a very special concert, though a succession of mishaps in the finale of the Emperor Concerto would certainly have detracted from a ‘star rating’, were one to engage in such assessment. Nevertheless, Verklärte Nacht and much of the Beethoven received fine performances.
The orchestral version of Verklärte Nacht is gorgeous, though I tend to miss the clarity and ensuing emphasis upon the work’s Brahmsian structure of the original sextet. It is testimony to the quality of this performance from Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin that not once did I think in such terms whilst the music was being heard. Barenboim’s account married the advantages of a huge body of strings (from eight double basses upwards) to the persistence of a chamber-style give and take between parts. Though definitely a conducted performance, the players’ accomplishment seemed at least as much a consequence of careful listening to and reacting to one another. Solos were all very well taken. The conductor’s role was almost that of the narrator, moulding the musical events into a consistent musico-dramatic narrative, rather as he had in the performance two nights previously of Pelleas und Melisande. Perhaps the pause before the advent of D major was a little de trop, but I am nit-picking. Far more noteworthy was the beautifully judged ebb and flow Barenboim ensured, with respect both to shorter-term rubato and longer-term tempo fluctuations: never attention-seeking but always telling. The final Verklärung worked the necessary magic. This was a distinguished performance indeed.
So was much of the Beethoven. From the outset, orchestra and pianist/conductor produced just the right sort of heroic, Beethovenian sonority and attack. The distance travelled from the first concerto was plain for all to hear. Barenboim employed a slightly larger body of strings than he had for the earlier work, though not so very much so, with twelve, as opposed to ten, first violins and others scaled accordingly. Urgent without sounding hectic, there was always life within the phrases, which in turn always responded to their predecessors. Some might have considered the rubato deferring the opening of the recapitulation exaggerated, but in heightening the sense of return, it played a structural role. As soloist, Barenboim displayed the occasional fallibility, but in the face of such conviction and the quality of his touch, that mattered little. The hush in the cadenza that is not a cadenza was quite magical, as was the Romantic sounding of horns thereafter. The wonderful veiled quality to the strings at the opening of the slow movement was most certainly special, as was the songfulness characteristic of the movement as a whole: if not taming the Furies, Orpheus was nevertheless amongst us. There was some truly melting piano playing, ensuring that this proved the emotional centre of the work. The orchestra’s woodwind solos were equally worthy of mention.
I was, then, a little surprised to hear the finale commence in a fashion that over-emphasised the bar lines. This is a very difficult movement to bring off, but in the face of what had gone before, I was in little doubt that Barenboim would do so. Had that been my only reservation, I might have forgotten it by now, but the soloist unleashed a series of errors suggestive of a memory lapse. Barenboim is good at covering, but even he could not conceal what had happened, nor could he prevent the orchestra from - understandably - losing its way. The Emperor really needs a separate conductor – even, it would seem, when a conductor of Barenboim’s calibre is at the keyboard. There was a greater level of general untidiness in his despatch of the solo part too. Though the orchestra often sounded magnificent, recovery could only ever be partial. The bassoonist’s prayer was clearly answered, though, given the aplomb with which he carried off his notorious, well-nigh impossible solo. What disconcerted most of all, however, was that a movement that had verged upon breaking down completely was followed by a widespread standing ovation. I cannot imagine that I yield to many in my admiration of Daniel Barenboim, and there remained much to admire in the concert as a whole, but a standing ovation? It rather suggests that many in the audience are simply experiencing the ‘event’ and barely listening to the performance.
Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht, op.4
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.5 in E-flat major, op.73, ‘Emperor’
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor)
Staatskapelle Berlin
This had the makings of a very special concert, though a succession of mishaps in the finale of the Emperor Concerto would certainly have detracted from a ‘star rating’, were one to engage in such assessment. Nevertheless, Verklärte Nacht and much of the Beethoven received fine performances.
The orchestral version of Verklärte Nacht is gorgeous, though I tend to miss the clarity and ensuing emphasis upon the work’s Brahmsian structure of the original sextet. It is testimony to the quality of this performance from Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin that not once did I think in such terms whilst the music was being heard. Barenboim’s account married the advantages of a huge body of strings (from eight double basses upwards) to the persistence of a chamber-style give and take between parts. Though definitely a conducted performance, the players’ accomplishment seemed at least as much a consequence of careful listening to and reacting to one another. Solos were all very well taken. The conductor’s role was almost that of the narrator, moulding the musical events into a consistent musico-dramatic narrative, rather as he had in the performance two nights previously of Pelleas und Melisande. Perhaps the pause before the advent of D major was a little de trop, but I am nit-picking. Far more noteworthy was the beautifully judged ebb and flow Barenboim ensured, with respect both to shorter-term rubato and longer-term tempo fluctuations: never attention-seeking but always telling. The final Verklärung worked the necessary magic. This was a distinguished performance indeed.
So was much of the Beethoven. From the outset, orchestra and pianist/conductor produced just the right sort of heroic, Beethovenian sonority and attack. The distance travelled from the first concerto was plain for all to hear. Barenboim employed a slightly larger body of strings than he had for the earlier work, though not so very much so, with twelve, as opposed to ten, first violins and others scaled accordingly. Urgent without sounding hectic, there was always life within the phrases, which in turn always responded to their predecessors. Some might have considered the rubato deferring the opening of the recapitulation exaggerated, but in heightening the sense of return, it played a structural role. As soloist, Barenboim displayed the occasional fallibility, but in the face of such conviction and the quality of his touch, that mattered little. The hush in the cadenza that is not a cadenza was quite magical, as was the Romantic sounding of horns thereafter. The wonderful veiled quality to the strings at the opening of the slow movement was most certainly special, as was the songfulness characteristic of the movement as a whole: if not taming the Furies, Orpheus was nevertheless amongst us. There was some truly melting piano playing, ensuring that this proved the emotional centre of the work. The orchestra’s woodwind solos were equally worthy of mention.
I was, then, a little surprised to hear the finale commence in a fashion that over-emphasised the bar lines. This is a very difficult movement to bring off, but in the face of what had gone before, I was in little doubt that Barenboim would do so. Had that been my only reservation, I might have forgotten it by now, but the soloist unleashed a series of errors suggestive of a memory lapse. Barenboim is good at covering, but even he could not conceal what had happened, nor could he prevent the orchestra from - understandably - losing its way. The Emperor really needs a separate conductor – even, it would seem, when a conductor of Barenboim’s calibre is at the keyboard. There was a greater level of general untidiness in his despatch of the solo part too. Though the orchestra often sounded magnificent, recovery could only ever be partial. The bassoonist’s prayer was clearly answered, though, given the aplomb with which he carried off his notorious, well-nigh impossible solo. What disconcerted most of all, however, was that a movement that had verged upon breaking down completely was followed by a widespread standing ovation. I cannot imagine that I yield to many in my admiration of Daniel Barenboim, and there remained much to admire in the concert as a whole, but a standing ovation? It rather suggests that many in the audience are simply experiencing the ‘event’ and barely listening to the performance.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Beethoven and Schoenberg (1), 29 January 2010
Royal Festival Hall
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.1 in C major, op.15
Schoenberg – Pelleas und Melisande, op.5
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Thus began Daniel Barenboim’s latest marathon, almost more of a brisk constitutional by the standard of some of his recent endeavours, though mightily impressive to mere mortals: four concerts over five evenings, comprising the five Beethoven piano concertos and various Schoenberg orchestral works. The first Beethoven concerto was the obvious place to start, and so Barenboim did.
I was a little surprised by the size of the orchestra, generous by ‘authenticke’ standards, but nevertheless a little on the small side for one who so reveres Furtwängler, strings proportioned 10.8.6.4.3. Sonority was far from scrawny, but there were occasions when a greater body might have benefited the sonic upholstery. The opening sound was Mozartian, the Mozart of C major pomp – think the twenty-fifth piano concerto or the Jupiter Symphony – though without any real sense of being scaled down. Occasional piano smudges registered without truly mattering; far more important was Barenboim’s overall structural command, never more so than in the expressive slowing during the exposition’s second group, as ‘necessary’ as one could conceive. There was some beautiful soft playing from piano and orchestra during the development section, presaging a truly serene and slow movement. Here the tempo sounded just right, a perfect setting for Barenboim’s long line, whether in phrase, paragraph, or movement. So often this breaks down in Beethoven’s slow movements, but not here. As soloist, Barenboim employed beautifully judged rubato, evincing a proper sense of robbed time, Chopinesque in its quality. His trills demonstrated beyond doubt that the importance of this device is anything but restricted to late Beethoven, whilst the Harmoniemusik emanating from the Staatskapelle Berlin’s woodwind section proved a truly Mozartian joy. What a pleasure, moreover, it was to hear a true slow movement, unhurried and in harmonious proportion with the music framing it. What should come naturally seems to elude most modern Beethoven conductors. Eventually, and rightly, Barenboim punctured a barrage of coughing to open the rondo. This proved lively, bullish even, the woodwind again evoking an updated sense of the outdoor serenade. Crucial were an infallible sense of rhythmic alertness and a clear command of Beethoven’s structure. If the concerto as a whole did not quite ignite as sometimes it has done for Barenboim, this remained an estimable account.
Barenboim certainly did not stint upon the strings in Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, where they were at least double in number compared with the Beethoven. We were plunged in medias res, in what began and continued as a highly dramatic account of Schoenberg’s early tone poem. Perhaps the opening was a little too hasty, though one might equally argue that the impetuosity heard was programmatically suggestive of the eponymous lovers. One could certainly not deny the dramatic thread of Barenboim’s interpretation. Whereas, in December of last year, I had experienced Christian Thielemann’s Berlin Philharmonic performance as revelatory in its Brahmsian quality, this was a reading that remained true to the more typical Straussian, and to a lesser extent post-Wagnerian, conception of the work. Thielemann’s approach I find ultimately the more satisfying, but Barenboim’s terms are perfectly valid and, on those terms, this performance worked very well indeed, gripping in its narration and in its approach to orchestral colour. There were indeed some wonderful Siegfried-Idyll moments to the woodwind contribution, evocations of Till Eulenspiegel too, whilst the massed strings more than once reminded one of Verklärte Nacht, here a true companion piece to Pelleas. A truly magical balance of violin, harps, and flute hinted at the world of Gurrelieder, a work Barenboim surely ought soon to tackle. Lest this all sound unduly focused upon colour, Barenboim emphasised the heightened expressivity of Schoenberg’s language; as Charles Rosen observes in his masterly little book on Schoenberg, the problem for many listeners is too much expression, not too little. The ominous tread that commenced preparations for the end was well judged, though Thielemann’s gravitas may have dug deeper. On the other hand, must one set the one performance off against the other? Surely we are fortunate to have two distinguished Wagnerians prove advocates for Schoenberg. Straussian phantasmagoria, as depicted in Barenboim’s conclusion, can work as well as, if differently from, Schoenberg as ‘Brahms the Progressive’. Moreover, Barenboim’s hints of Parsifal, Act Two especially, proved both musically and dramatically suggestive.
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.1 in C major, op.15
Schoenberg – Pelleas und Melisande, op.5
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Thus began Daniel Barenboim’s latest marathon, almost more of a brisk constitutional by the standard of some of his recent endeavours, though mightily impressive to mere mortals: four concerts over five evenings, comprising the five Beethoven piano concertos and various Schoenberg orchestral works. The first Beethoven concerto was the obvious place to start, and so Barenboim did.
I was a little surprised by the size of the orchestra, generous by ‘authenticke’ standards, but nevertheless a little on the small side for one who so reveres Furtwängler, strings proportioned 10.8.6.4.3. Sonority was far from scrawny, but there were occasions when a greater body might have benefited the sonic upholstery. The opening sound was Mozartian, the Mozart of C major pomp – think the twenty-fifth piano concerto or the Jupiter Symphony – though without any real sense of being scaled down. Occasional piano smudges registered without truly mattering; far more important was Barenboim’s overall structural command, never more so than in the expressive slowing during the exposition’s second group, as ‘necessary’ as one could conceive. There was some beautiful soft playing from piano and orchestra during the development section, presaging a truly serene and slow movement. Here the tempo sounded just right, a perfect setting for Barenboim’s long line, whether in phrase, paragraph, or movement. So often this breaks down in Beethoven’s slow movements, but not here. As soloist, Barenboim employed beautifully judged rubato, evincing a proper sense of robbed time, Chopinesque in its quality. His trills demonstrated beyond doubt that the importance of this device is anything but restricted to late Beethoven, whilst the Harmoniemusik emanating from the Staatskapelle Berlin’s woodwind section proved a truly Mozartian joy. What a pleasure, moreover, it was to hear a true slow movement, unhurried and in harmonious proportion with the music framing it. What should come naturally seems to elude most modern Beethoven conductors. Eventually, and rightly, Barenboim punctured a barrage of coughing to open the rondo. This proved lively, bullish even, the woodwind again evoking an updated sense of the outdoor serenade. Crucial were an infallible sense of rhythmic alertness and a clear command of Beethoven’s structure. If the concerto as a whole did not quite ignite as sometimes it has done for Barenboim, this remained an estimable account.
Barenboim certainly did not stint upon the strings in Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, where they were at least double in number compared with the Beethoven. We were plunged in medias res, in what began and continued as a highly dramatic account of Schoenberg’s early tone poem. Perhaps the opening was a little too hasty, though one might equally argue that the impetuosity heard was programmatically suggestive of the eponymous lovers. One could certainly not deny the dramatic thread of Barenboim’s interpretation. Whereas, in December of last year, I had experienced Christian Thielemann’s Berlin Philharmonic performance as revelatory in its Brahmsian quality, this was a reading that remained true to the more typical Straussian, and to a lesser extent post-Wagnerian, conception of the work. Thielemann’s approach I find ultimately the more satisfying, but Barenboim’s terms are perfectly valid and, on those terms, this performance worked very well indeed, gripping in its narration and in its approach to orchestral colour. There were indeed some wonderful Siegfried-Idyll moments to the woodwind contribution, evocations of Till Eulenspiegel too, whilst the massed strings more than once reminded one of Verklärte Nacht, here a true companion piece to Pelleas. A truly magical balance of violin, harps, and flute hinted at the world of Gurrelieder, a work Barenboim surely ought soon to tackle. Lest this all sound unduly focused upon colour, Barenboim emphasised the heightened expressivity of Schoenberg’s language; as Charles Rosen observes in his masterly little book on Schoenberg, the problem for many listeners is too much expression, not too little. The ominous tread that commenced preparations for the end was well judged, though Thielemann’s gravitas may have dug deeper. On the other hand, must one set the one performance off against the other? Surely we are fortunate to have two distinguished Wagnerians prove advocates for Schoenberg. Straussian phantasmagoria, as depicted in Barenboim’s conclusion, can work as well as, if differently from, Schoenberg as ‘Brahms the Progressive’. Moreover, Barenboim’s hints of Parsifal, Act Two especially, proved both musically and dramatically suggestive.
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Psappha - Peter Maxwell Davies concerts, 23 January 2010
Hall One, Kings Place
Davies – Image, Reflection, Shadow (1982)
Purcell-Davies – Fantasia and Two Pavans (1968)
Davies – Hymnos, for clarinet and piano (1967)
Davies – Piano Sonata (1981)
Davies – Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) (concert performance)
Conrad Marshall (flute/piccolo)
Dov Goldberg (clarinets)
Richard Casey (piano/harpsichord)
Tim Williams (cimbalom/percussion)
David Routledge (violin)
Jennifer Langridge (violoncello)
Kelvin Thomas (baritone)
Here were two concerts from the ever-enterprising Psappha, part of the Kings Place series celebrating Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: ‘Circus Maximus’. The first presented Image, Reflection, Shadow, an 1982 chamber piece for the Fires of London; the second, in two halves, brought us the riotous Purcell arrangement, Fantasia and Two Pavans, Hymnos for clarinet and piano, the piano sonata, and finally, one of Max’s most celebrated (notorious?) music-theatre works, Eight Songs for a Mad King. Even those works for smaller forces can be performed by members of the basic Fires of London line-up, that is Pierrot-quintet plus percussion, so the concerts turned out to be a tribute not only to the composer, but also to the ensemble he co-founded with Harrison Birtwistle, initially as the Pierrot Players.
Image, Reflection, and Shadow, for Pierrot-quintet and cimbalom, came as quite a revelation to me. Though a later work than those that have previously tended to spark my interest, and lacking the outrage factor of many of the composer’s earlier work, this held plenty of interest over its roughly forty-minute span, much more a companion piece to the classic Ave maris stella than a precursor to the myriad symphonies and quartets that have so preoccupied Davies in his Orcadian years. Though written in three movements, these do not correspond to the three words of the title but to the ‘play throughout of mirror and copy’ (Paul Griffiths), much of it based upon writing for three duos of strings, woodwinds, and piano/cimbalom. The build-up of intensity in the opening Adagio struck me as near-Bartókian in its quality, the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta a distant relative, though there was more than a little of Schoenberg’s shadow too. Though the colour of the cimbalom, here superbly performed by Tim Williams, necessarily has its own resonances, there was no doubt that they were being put by the composer to his own ends. Violence and repose could coexist and conflict, as at the end of the first movement. I liked the infectious, catchy quality to the scherzo-like second movement, its textures varied, at times creating a great mass of sound belying the relatively modest forces, at others boiled down to a virtuoso dialogue between cimbalom and piano – and even a cimbalom cadenza, as also in the finale, whose writing could at times itself recall Pierrot Lunaire. Psappha’s performances were committed and apparently expert: an accomplished tribute to composer and work.
I greatly enjoyed the Purcell-Davies Fantasia and Two Pavans, as resounding a riposte to ‘authenticity’ as one could imagine. In that respect, I can do no better than quote Davies:
I have long been fascinated by Purcell’s music, but utterly bored by well-meaning ‘authentic’ performances, which possibly get every double-dotted rhythm right but convey not sense of Purcell’s intensity of feeling, sense of fun and sheer outrageousness. I feel the profoundest respect for the ‘great’ composers of the past, but have no feeling of slavish reverence towards them whatever – after all, they were living, real people, not priests …. Musical purity in these matters is about as interesting as moral purity. I am sure that many people will consider my Purcell realisations wholly immoral.
The brightness of the F major Fantasia truly registered in Davies’s screeching non-authenticity – itself, ironically, imparting a parodic edge on the border of ‘authenticity’ to impressions of the twelfth stop of an old chamber organ. Marimba is a welcome visitor to the consort. But it is in the two pavans, louchely reinterpreted as foxtrots, that the composer most provokes and, more importantly, most amuses. Every note of Purcell is there, but as you have never heard it before. A wonderful touch is the speeding up and slowing down to evoke an old 78 rpm recording. Although a vocalist was not employed on this occasion for the second pavan, there was still a great deal to savour in what again proved authoritative and enjoyable performances.
Hymnos for clarinet and piano was likewise splendidly presented, by Dov Goldberg and Richard Casey. The work holds nothing back; much of it indeed is very loud, though it has its lyrical moments too. Metrical complexity, born of or at least related to, Indian music registers both intellectual and emotionally. Balances shift, sometimes to the ‘advantage’ of one of the soloists, but it is the developmental impulse that resists and its strengthened, here very much in performance as well as work.
The piano sonata must certainly be at least as great a technical and intellectual challenge for the soloist; it was perhaps a little cruel to have Casey more or less immediately embark upon that, following Hymnos. Though there were odd occasions when he appeared to slip, the vision as a whole throughout Davies’s seven-movement, quasi-symmetrical structure was tightly focused. It was revealing to note, both audibly and visually, just how much of the burden the left hand bears, whilst ghosts of piano past, for instance the Schoenberg of the Op.11 Pieces and Debussy, made their presence felt. This is certainly a work written for its instrument.
Though marked as a ‘concert performance’, this is a matter of degree when it comes to Eight Songs for a Mad King. The king was in costume, the players wore bird masks, and we did not have to go without the breaking of the violin in no.7, Country Dance. As the composer has written, ‘Until quite recently, “madness” was regarded as something at which to laugh and jeer. The King’s historically authentic quotations from The Messiah in the work evoke this sort of mocking response in the instrumental parts – the stylistic switch is unprepared, and arouses an aggressive reaction.’ Aggression certainly, and unease, perhaps inevitably, but also a kind of neo-eighteenth-century wonder at what transpires. This is theatre – and theatre with a vengeance. Even the turns from harpsichord to piano elicit their own savage irony. The breaking of the violin comes as dramatic release, permitting the possibility, drum thwacks notwithstanding, that our hero might finally gain some peace. Having broken the cage, might the keeper be defeated? I can pay no greater compliment than to say that, following this performance, Kelvin Thomas valiantly evoking the celebrated extended range of Roy Hart, I immediately wanted to hear the work again.
Davies – Image, Reflection, Shadow (1982)
Purcell-Davies – Fantasia and Two Pavans (1968)
Davies – Hymnos, for clarinet and piano (1967)
Davies – Piano Sonata (1981)
Davies – Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) (concert performance)
Conrad Marshall (flute/piccolo)
Dov Goldberg (clarinets)
Richard Casey (piano/harpsichord)
Tim Williams (cimbalom/percussion)
David Routledge (violin)
Jennifer Langridge (violoncello)
Kelvin Thomas (baritone)
Here were two concerts from the ever-enterprising Psappha, part of the Kings Place series celebrating Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: ‘Circus Maximus’. The first presented Image, Reflection, Shadow, an 1982 chamber piece for the Fires of London; the second, in two halves, brought us the riotous Purcell arrangement, Fantasia and Two Pavans, Hymnos for clarinet and piano, the piano sonata, and finally, one of Max’s most celebrated (notorious?) music-theatre works, Eight Songs for a Mad King. Even those works for smaller forces can be performed by members of the basic Fires of London line-up, that is Pierrot-quintet plus percussion, so the concerts turned out to be a tribute not only to the composer, but also to the ensemble he co-founded with Harrison Birtwistle, initially as the Pierrot Players.
Image, Reflection, and Shadow, for Pierrot-quintet and cimbalom, came as quite a revelation to me. Though a later work than those that have previously tended to spark my interest, and lacking the outrage factor of many of the composer’s earlier work, this held plenty of interest over its roughly forty-minute span, much more a companion piece to the classic Ave maris stella than a precursor to the myriad symphonies and quartets that have so preoccupied Davies in his Orcadian years. Though written in three movements, these do not correspond to the three words of the title but to the ‘play throughout of mirror and copy’ (Paul Griffiths), much of it based upon writing for three duos of strings, woodwinds, and piano/cimbalom. The build-up of intensity in the opening Adagio struck me as near-Bartókian in its quality, the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta a distant relative, though there was more than a little of Schoenberg’s shadow too. Though the colour of the cimbalom, here superbly performed by Tim Williams, necessarily has its own resonances, there was no doubt that they were being put by the composer to his own ends. Violence and repose could coexist and conflict, as at the end of the first movement. I liked the infectious, catchy quality to the scherzo-like second movement, its textures varied, at times creating a great mass of sound belying the relatively modest forces, at others boiled down to a virtuoso dialogue between cimbalom and piano – and even a cimbalom cadenza, as also in the finale, whose writing could at times itself recall Pierrot Lunaire. Psappha’s performances were committed and apparently expert: an accomplished tribute to composer and work.
I greatly enjoyed the Purcell-Davies Fantasia and Two Pavans, as resounding a riposte to ‘authenticity’ as one could imagine. In that respect, I can do no better than quote Davies:
I have long been fascinated by Purcell’s music, but utterly bored by well-meaning ‘authentic’ performances, which possibly get every double-dotted rhythm right but convey not sense of Purcell’s intensity of feeling, sense of fun and sheer outrageousness. I feel the profoundest respect for the ‘great’ composers of the past, but have no feeling of slavish reverence towards them whatever – after all, they were living, real people, not priests …. Musical purity in these matters is about as interesting as moral purity. I am sure that many people will consider my Purcell realisations wholly immoral.
The brightness of the F major Fantasia truly registered in Davies’s screeching non-authenticity – itself, ironically, imparting a parodic edge on the border of ‘authenticity’ to impressions of the twelfth stop of an old chamber organ. Marimba is a welcome visitor to the consort. But it is in the two pavans, louchely reinterpreted as foxtrots, that the composer most provokes and, more importantly, most amuses. Every note of Purcell is there, but as you have never heard it before. A wonderful touch is the speeding up and slowing down to evoke an old 78 rpm recording. Although a vocalist was not employed on this occasion for the second pavan, there was still a great deal to savour in what again proved authoritative and enjoyable performances.
Hymnos for clarinet and piano was likewise splendidly presented, by Dov Goldberg and Richard Casey. The work holds nothing back; much of it indeed is very loud, though it has its lyrical moments too. Metrical complexity, born of or at least related to, Indian music registers both intellectual and emotionally. Balances shift, sometimes to the ‘advantage’ of one of the soloists, but it is the developmental impulse that resists and its strengthened, here very much in performance as well as work.
The piano sonata must certainly be at least as great a technical and intellectual challenge for the soloist; it was perhaps a little cruel to have Casey more or less immediately embark upon that, following Hymnos. Though there were odd occasions when he appeared to slip, the vision as a whole throughout Davies’s seven-movement, quasi-symmetrical structure was tightly focused. It was revealing to note, both audibly and visually, just how much of the burden the left hand bears, whilst ghosts of piano past, for instance the Schoenberg of the Op.11 Pieces and Debussy, made their presence felt. This is certainly a work written for its instrument.
Though marked as a ‘concert performance’, this is a matter of degree when it comes to Eight Songs for a Mad King. The king was in costume, the players wore bird masks, and we did not have to go without the breaking of the violin in no.7, Country Dance. As the composer has written, ‘Until quite recently, “madness” was regarded as something at which to laugh and jeer. The King’s historically authentic quotations from The Messiah in the work evoke this sort of mocking response in the instrumental parts – the stylistic switch is unprepared, and arouses an aggressive reaction.’ Aggression certainly, and unease, perhaps inevitably, but also a kind of neo-eighteenth-century wonder at what transpires. This is theatre – and theatre with a vengeance. Even the turns from harpsichord to piano elicit their own savage irony. The breaking of the violin comes as dramatic release, permitting the possibility, drum thwacks notwithstanding, that our hero might finally gain some peace. Having broken the cage, might the keeper be defeated? I can pay no greater compliment than to say that, following this performance, Kelvin Thomas valiantly evoking the celebrated extended range of Roy Hart, I immediately wanted to hear the work again.
Saturday, 23 January 2010
The Rake's Progress, Royal Opera, 22 January 2010
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Trulove – Jeremy White
Anne Trulove – Rosemary Joshua
Tom Rakewell – Toby Spence
Nick Shadow – Kyle Ketelsen
Mother Goose – Frances McCafferty
Baba the Turk – Patricia Bardon
Sellem – Graham Clark
Madhouse Keeper – Jonathan Coad
Robert Lepage (director)
Sybille Wilson (revival director)
Carl Fillon (set designs)
François Barbeau (costumes)
Etienne Boucher (lighting)
Boris Firquet (video)
Michael Keegan Dolan (choreography)
Rachel Poirer and Milos Galko (revival choreography)
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Westrop)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)
First time around, I had rather liked Robert Lepage’s production of The Rake’s Progress, writing: ‘Lepage made a good case for the updating to 1950s America, for instance through his mention of Stravinsky's great interest in the new medium, delineation of Hollywood's 'false historicism', and citation of an essay in which Auden made clear his opposition to naturalism. The best case, however, was on stage, in which one was perfectly at liberty to consider the parallels between the setting and its original form, yet without feeling unduly constrained.’ A little later, I quoted Lepage saying that he had not ‘“set out to make a piece of social criticism, so the political and social dimension to the production has arisen through choices that seemed right to me”. This is interesting, since the political and social dimension came across strong and clear. Today's “celebrity”-fuelled culture, we were reminded, is in many respects nothing new, although it may somehow be even more vacuous than it once was. Hollywood and advertising, as we saw on stage, pursued this cult from the very earliest years, and the figure of Baba the Turk reminds us that notoriety was a great selling-point - literally - during the eighteenth century too. What could be more Hogarthian, post-war, or contemporary than setting off to the City in search of riches and losing them - and much else in the process?’
What, then, had changed? First, I suspect that the production itself is subject to diminishing returns. The Hollywood trappings – Nick Shadow filming, Tom Rakewell’s trailer, the swimming pool and so on – do not seem to offer up any more upon a second viewing. The loss of London grated rather more than it had, since the replacement did not seem adequate, an especially unfortunate moment coming during the third act when it was suggested that Tom had fled ‘to America’. Had he ever been away? Second, the revival direction seemed to me significantly less sharp than the original. Social criticism might not have been intentional the first time around, but it shone through nevertheless. Here, one wondered whether Hollywood were being enjoyed for its own sake; there was certainly little if any hint of McCarthyism. And third, the audience really did not help. Expecting anything much from the greater part of a Covent Garden audience is doubtless foolish, but this seemed to be an especially unimaginative, uncomprehending bunch. Applause and laughter could be heard all over the place, sometimes at the most truly inopportune moments. (What on earth was amusing about the graveyard scene?) The multiple alienations Stravinsky, Auden, and, one might at least have hoped, the production set before us went as pearls before swine; a friend of mine heard someone next to her exclaim that ‘the show’ reminded him of Hello, Dolly! Many of the people, moreover, would appear to have been deaf – rendering opera an eccentric choice for their evening’s ‘entertainment’ – since they could not even hear when numbers came to a close, applauding some time beforehand, sometimes whistling too (?!). These people, apparently determined to show off however much they have paid for their tickets, do not seem prepared even to attempt to think, and lessen the experience for the rest of us.
The musical performances varied. Patricia Bardon once again proved a strong Baba, touching in a way one rarely experiences, a trouper of the old school. (Stephanie Blythe had pulled out, likewise the anticipated Kate Royal as Anne Trulove.) There was nothing one could reasonably complain about in Kyle Ketelsen’s Nick, but he seemed to take time to warm up. Certainly by the second act, and then especially during the graveyard scene, he seemed properly possessed by the demon and his demons. Rosemary Joshua seemed to me a considerably stronger Anne than Sally Matthews had: purity of voice and character did not this time entail an inability to make her words tell, far from it. Graham Clark’s Sellem was more character actor than singer; his voice faltered alarmingly more than once. But sadly, the principal disappointment was Toby Spence’s Tom. There is a degree of blankness to the character, I appreciate, yet I was surprised nevertheless by Spence’s woodenness. The developmental aspect I noted to Charles Castronovo’s portrayal in 2008 was considerably less apparent. Moreover, there were times when the vocal line was not nearly so well shaped as it might have been. Choral singing improved, but was disturbingly unfocused in Mother Goose’s brothel.
Ingo Metzmacher’s account of the score ultimately proved puzzling, almost a mirror-image of that of Thomas Adès, whose conducting had proved the major drawback a year-and-a-half ago. There was much greater bite to the first two acts, a proper Stravinskian desiccation, which both repels and fascinates. For this, the fine form of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House must be credited. I longed for greater warmth – but that is just as it should be. To give in would be to risk collapse of the neo-classical conceit. However, the Bedlam Scene proved interminable, weirdly sentimentalised. Clearly a contrast was being drawn, but I wish it had not been, since much of the earlier good work was undone. Nothing though could quite detract from the brilliance of the graveyard scene, where Stravinsky achieves the near-impossible in harpsichord writing that does not make one long for the piano. Is this the mask dropping? It is probably just another mask, but at least the question is posed.
Trulove – Jeremy White
Anne Trulove – Rosemary Joshua
Tom Rakewell – Toby Spence
Nick Shadow – Kyle Ketelsen
Mother Goose – Frances McCafferty
Baba the Turk – Patricia Bardon
Sellem – Graham Clark
Madhouse Keeper – Jonathan Coad
Robert Lepage (director)
Sybille Wilson (revival director)
Carl Fillon (set designs)
François Barbeau (costumes)
Etienne Boucher (lighting)
Boris Firquet (video)
Michael Keegan Dolan (choreography)
Rachel Poirer and Milos Galko (revival choreography)
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Westrop)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)
First time around, I had rather liked Robert Lepage’s production of The Rake’s Progress, writing: ‘Lepage made a good case for the updating to 1950s America, for instance through his mention of Stravinsky's great interest in the new medium, delineation of Hollywood's 'false historicism', and citation of an essay in which Auden made clear his opposition to naturalism. The best case, however, was on stage, in which one was perfectly at liberty to consider the parallels between the setting and its original form, yet without feeling unduly constrained.’ A little later, I quoted Lepage saying that he had not ‘“set out to make a piece of social criticism, so the political and social dimension to the production has arisen through choices that seemed right to me”. This is interesting, since the political and social dimension came across strong and clear. Today's “celebrity”-fuelled culture, we were reminded, is in many respects nothing new, although it may somehow be even more vacuous than it once was. Hollywood and advertising, as we saw on stage, pursued this cult from the very earliest years, and the figure of Baba the Turk reminds us that notoriety was a great selling-point - literally - during the eighteenth century too. What could be more Hogarthian, post-war, or contemporary than setting off to the City in search of riches and losing them - and much else in the process?’
What, then, had changed? First, I suspect that the production itself is subject to diminishing returns. The Hollywood trappings – Nick Shadow filming, Tom Rakewell’s trailer, the swimming pool and so on – do not seem to offer up any more upon a second viewing. The loss of London grated rather more than it had, since the replacement did not seem adequate, an especially unfortunate moment coming during the third act when it was suggested that Tom had fled ‘to America’. Had he ever been away? Second, the revival direction seemed to me significantly less sharp than the original. Social criticism might not have been intentional the first time around, but it shone through nevertheless. Here, one wondered whether Hollywood were being enjoyed for its own sake; there was certainly little if any hint of McCarthyism. And third, the audience really did not help. Expecting anything much from the greater part of a Covent Garden audience is doubtless foolish, but this seemed to be an especially unimaginative, uncomprehending bunch. Applause and laughter could be heard all over the place, sometimes at the most truly inopportune moments. (What on earth was amusing about the graveyard scene?) The multiple alienations Stravinsky, Auden, and, one might at least have hoped, the production set before us went as pearls before swine; a friend of mine heard someone next to her exclaim that ‘the show’ reminded him of Hello, Dolly! Many of the people, moreover, would appear to have been deaf – rendering opera an eccentric choice for their evening’s ‘entertainment’ – since they could not even hear when numbers came to a close, applauding some time beforehand, sometimes whistling too (?!). These people, apparently determined to show off however much they have paid for their tickets, do not seem prepared even to attempt to think, and lessen the experience for the rest of us.
The musical performances varied. Patricia Bardon once again proved a strong Baba, touching in a way one rarely experiences, a trouper of the old school. (Stephanie Blythe had pulled out, likewise the anticipated Kate Royal as Anne Trulove.) There was nothing one could reasonably complain about in Kyle Ketelsen’s Nick, but he seemed to take time to warm up. Certainly by the second act, and then especially during the graveyard scene, he seemed properly possessed by the demon and his demons. Rosemary Joshua seemed to me a considerably stronger Anne than Sally Matthews had: purity of voice and character did not this time entail an inability to make her words tell, far from it. Graham Clark’s Sellem was more character actor than singer; his voice faltered alarmingly more than once. But sadly, the principal disappointment was Toby Spence’s Tom. There is a degree of blankness to the character, I appreciate, yet I was surprised nevertheless by Spence’s woodenness. The developmental aspect I noted to Charles Castronovo’s portrayal in 2008 was considerably less apparent. Moreover, there were times when the vocal line was not nearly so well shaped as it might have been. Choral singing improved, but was disturbingly unfocused in Mother Goose’s brothel.
Ingo Metzmacher’s account of the score ultimately proved puzzling, almost a mirror-image of that of Thomas Adès, whose conducting had proved the major drawback a year-and-a-half ago. There was much greater bite to the first two acts, a proper Stravinskian desiccation, which both repels and fascinates. For this, the fine form of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House must be credited. I longed for greater warmth – but that is just as it should be. To give in would be to risk collapse of the neo-classical conceit. However, the Bedlam Scene proved interminable, weirdly sentimentalised. Clearly a contrast was being drawn, but I wish it had not been, since much of the earlier good work was undone. Nothing though could quite detract from the brilliance of the graveyard scene, where Stravinsky achieves the near-impossible in harpsichord writing that does not make one long for the piano. Is this the mask dropping? It is probably just another mask, but at least the question is posed.
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Henze, Phaedra, Ensemble Modern/Boder, 17 January 2010
Barbican Hall
Phaedra – Maria Riccarda Wesseling
Aphrodite – Marlis Petersen
Minotaur – Lauri Vasar
Artemis – Axel Köhler
Hippolytus – John Mark Ainsley
Ensemble Modern
Michael Boder (conductor)
This concert performance of Henze’s latest – he seems now to have stopped speaking of his ‘last’ – opera, Phaedra, marked the end of the Barbican’s Henze weekend and also the beginning of its Present Voices 2010 series, which will also include performances of Peter Eötvös’s Angels in America and Michel van der Aa’s After Life. Many, though not quite all, of the same performers gave the first performances at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden; certainly they seemed very much at home here with Henze’s style and musical demands.
In two short acts, the work re-tells the celebrated tale first of stepmother Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus and the latter’s consequent death, and then of Hippolytus’s after-life as Virbius, culminating in his resurrection as King of the Forest. The autobiographical consonance seems almost too good to be true: Henze fell seriously ill, having completed most of the first act, falling into a coma, or something very close thereto, before rising from his bed one day to start work upon the second act. But such would seem to have been the case – and, one way or another, much of Henze’s output has always been autobiographical in its concerns. We may stand far away from Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer, a warning of the perils of bourgeois leftism and perhaps the high water-mark of the composer’s revolutionary activism, but in this sense, at least, the works have more in common than one might expect.
Christian Lehnert’s libretto seems at times a little too full of its symbolism and general cleverness, though I wonder whether that might be different with a scenic element to the performance . Henze’s score is full of beguiling sounds, using his chamber ensemble in a way that betokens both imagination and experience. Yet I am not sure that it totally evaded the charge of note-spinning, rather akin to certain middle-period Strauss. (I have often thought there to be parallels between the two composers, though Henze would doubtless angrily disavow such a comparison, having once disparaged his predecessor as resembling something akin to a court composer to the last Kaiser.) There was magic, though, in the final scene, in which Hippolytus rises as King of the Forest: not so very far from the transformation of Daphne. And earlier on, I thought I heard a Gurrelieder tribute, when mention was made of a dove, or was it simply my ears tricking me? Some of the rest of the time, however, I wondered whether I was in the world of an updated French Baroque cantata, even though, to be fair, hints and sometimes more than hints of Ulisse-like paganism ensured that it was not all prettiness. The bruitage of the second act (that for both acts was provided by Francesco Antonioni) was in some senses a contrasting relief – and rather an impressive one, by turns realistic and abstract, and with clear dramatic purpose.
Michael Boder clearly knows the score inside out and performed it with persuasive confidence – and delicacy. Likewise the excellent Ensemble Modern, whom we really should hear more of in this country. Phaedra the title may be, but the central character is really Hippolytus (in which case, why the title?). John Mark Ainsley employed his light tenor to advantage, affording a sensitive portrayal, though without much suggestion as to why Phaedra might ever have felt so strongly attracted towards him. Maria Riccarda Wesseling likewise presented an intelligent depiction of Phaedra – I assume one is not supposed to warm to her – though her facial expressions could be distracting. Marlis Petersen offered no such drawbacks in a beautiful, if icy portrayal of Aphrodite. Those more drawn than I to the countertenor voice might still have had problems with Axel Köhler’s squally Artemis. Is that also not partly the composer’s fault, for is this really an appropriate vocal type for such a role today? It can work as something other-worldly, as, for instance, in Goehr’s The Death of Moses, but here it seemed an all-too-easy ‘Baroque’ reference. In any case, it was a relief when for a minute or so, Köhler fell into a perfectly decent ‘character’ tenor. At least as impressive as anyone else was Lauri Vasar, pleasing of tone and intelligent of expression; I certainly wished that his part, that of the Minotaur, had been introduced earlier.
Phaedra – Maria Riccarda Wesseling
Aphrodite – Marlis Petersen
Minotaur – Lauri Vasar
Artemis – Axel Köhler
Hippolytus – John Mark Ainsley
Ensemble Modern
Michael Boder (conductor)
This concert performance of Henze’s latest – he seems now to have stopped speaking of his ‘last’ – opera, Phaedra, marked the end of the Barbican’s Henze weekend and also the beginning of its Present Voices 2010 series, which will also include performances of Peter Eötvös’s Angels in America and Michel van der Aa’s After Life. Many, though not quite all, of the same performers gave the first performances at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden; certainly they seemed very much at home here with Henze’s style and musical demands.
In two short acts, the work re-tells the celebrated tale first of stepmother Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus and the latter’s consequent death, and then of Hippolytus’s after-life as Virbius, culminating in his resurrection as King of the Forest. The autobiographical consonance seems almost too good to be true: Henze fell seriously ill, having completed most of the first act, falling into a coma, or something very close thereto, before rising from his bed one day to start work upon the second act. But such would seem to have been the case – and, one way or another, much of Henze’s output has always been autobiographical in its concerns. We may stand far away from Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer, a warning of the perils of bourgeois leftism and perhaps the high water-mark of the composer’s revolutionary activism, but in this sense, at least, the works have more in common than one might expect.
Christian Lehnert’s libretto seems at times a little too full of its symbolism and general cleverness, though I wonder whether that might be different with a scenic element to the performance . Henze’s score is full of beguiling sounds, using his chamber ensemble in a way that betokens both imagination and experience. Yet I am not sure that it totally evaded the charge of note-spinning, rather akin to certain middle-period Strauss. (I have often thought there to be parallels between the two composers, though Henze would doubtless angrily disavow such a comparison, having once disparaged his predecessor as resembling something akin to a court composer to the last Kaiser.) There was magic, though, in the final scene, in which Hippolytus rises as King of the Forest: not so very far from the transformation of Daphne. And earlier on, I thought I heard a Gurrelieder tribute, when mention was made of a dove, or was it simply my ears tricking me? Some of the rest of the time, however, I wondered whether I was in the world of an updated French Baroque cantata, even though, to be fair, hints and sometimes more than hints of Ulisse-like paganism ensured that it was not all prettiness. The bruitage of the second act (that for both acts was provided by Francesco Antonioni) was in some senses a contrasting relief – and rather an impressive one, by turns realistic and abstract, and with clear dramatic purpose.
Michael Boder clearly knows the score inside out and performed it with persuasive confidence – and delicacy. Likewise the excellent Ensemble Modern, whom we really should hear more of in this country. Phaedra the title may be, but the central character is really Hippolytus (in which case, why the title?). John Mark Ainsley employed his light tenor to advantage, affording a sensitive portrayal, though without much suggestion as to why Phaedra might ever have felt so strongly attracted towards him. Maria Riccarda Wesseling likewise presented an intelligent depiction of Phaedra – I assume one is not supposed to warm to her – though her facial expressions could be distracting. Marlis Petersen offered no such drawbacks in a beautiful, if icy portrayal of Aphrodite. Those more drawn than I to the countertenor voice might still have had problems with Axel Köhler’s squally Artemis. Is that also not partly the composer’s fault, for is this really an appropriate vocal type for such a role today? It can work as something other-worldly, as, for instance, in Goehr’s The Death of Moses, but here it seemed an all-too-easy ‘Baroque’ reference. In any case, it was a relief when for a minute or so, Köhler fell into a perfectly decent ‘character’ tenor. At least as impressive as anyone else was Lauri Vasar, pleasing of tone and intelligent of expression; I certainly wished that his part, that of the Minotaur, had been introduced earlier.
Total Immersion – Hans Werner Henze Composer Day, 16 January 2010
Barbican Centre
Voices
Vocal Soloists from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)
Toccata mistica
Variations, op. 13
Cherubino
Scorribanda pianistica
Fraternité
Symphony no.4
Elogium musicum (United Kingdom premiere)
Huw Watkins (piano)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Oliver Knussen (conductor)
The BBC/Barbican Hans Werner Henze Day began with Barrie Gavin’s film, Memoirs of an Outsider, which includes interviews with Henze and a number of musicians close to him, as well as some ravishingly beautiful footage of the composer’s villa in the hills above Rome. I was unable to see it on this occasion but can wholeheartedly recommend it on DVD, or indeed should it be screened elsewhere.
Voices (1973), is described as ‘a collection of songs’ rather than a song-cycle, which seems just. Rather than being shared between two vocal soloists, the opportunity was granted to a number of singers (mezzos and tenors) from the Guildhall to contribute, which had the additional advantage of greater variety for the listener too. This is Henze at his most politically combative, taking us on a tour of the world’s disadvantaged, their voices hailing from Cuba, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Black America, Greece, Italy, and Germany. From the opening Los poetas cubanos ya no sueñan (from Heberto Padilla’s Fuera del juego) to Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s closing Das Blumenfest, the revolutionary intensity can hardly be faulted. It is a fascinating work, but not perhaps one that has dated so well as some others. To have well over an hour and a half (at least given the breaks required by performance) of such protest songs, without any especially obvious progression tends to reinforce the compendious quality of the enterprise – doubtless part of the point, but even so... That said, some songs, as one might expect, impress more than others and there are moments of great sonorous beauty. The strained beauty of the Ho Chi Minh Prison Song put me in mind of the torture scene from Nono’s Intolleranza, after which the accordion’s entry for Brecht’s Keiner oder alle could hardly have provided a greater contrast. Sharp-edged woodwind added to the evocation of Weimar and indeed of Weill (Mahagonny). Cabaret would return more than once, notably in the languorous, yet properly alienating sleaze – relatively speaking – of Brecht’s Gedanken eines Revuemädchen während des Entkleidungsaktes. No, of course the showgirl does not enjoy what she does; nor does she ‘feel’ anything. The several contributions from recorders proved haunting, fragile in their humanity, not least for the parents having to transport the coffins of the children of Man Quang (Erich Fried’s 42 Schulkinder). Haunting was also the word for Caino, in which accordion and recorder could combine, almost seductive in their disconcertion.
It was difficult not to raise a smile at the deafening bruitage of the free market in Vermutung über Hessen, share the sentiment though one might. Moreover, I wondered, during the lengthy instrumental prelude to the Heine setting, Heimkehr, where Henze sounded at his most Romantic, whether this was really where he had wanted to be all along, likewise in the post-Schoenbergian piano writing of Patria. What disconcerted most, however, was the conclusion, mesmerising purely on its own terms: Das Blumenfest. Was this an attempt at reconciliation? If so, it hardly seemed the place, for what is there to reconcile? I was put in mind of the young Boulez criticising such attempts in late Berg – though Berg, I think, had better reason to be doing so. The performances, however, were all excellent. Singers, players, and Ryan Wigglesworth showed apparently total commitment to Henze’s cause. If I had to single out a favourite, it would probably be Nicholas Allen’s role as master of ceremonies in the savaging of Coca-Cola America (The Electric Cop, ‘for Herbert Marcuse’): a sort of American culture-industry cabaret. The only irritant, and it really was an irritant, was that very small section of the audience, its ringleader a demonstrative man in a pink jumper, which insisted on applauding after every number.
There then followed a second film, again from Barrie Gavin, of a performance of the Requiem, its sequence of nine sacred concertos one of Henze’s finest achievements. The ensuing talk is best skated over. Suffice it to say, it opened with a declaration of lack of expertise in Henze and yet managed to inspire less as time went on. Given that the composer was apparently elsewhere in the building speaking for a radio interview, it seemed a great pity that we could not simply have heard that.
In any case, the evening concert made amends. The first section – there were two intervals – had Huw Watkins present a selection of Henze’s works for solo piano. One thing that struck me – as it had during some of Voices – was how Henze seems unable, or perhaps unwilling, to escape the shadow of Schoenberg when writing for the instrument. There are other voices too, of course, for instance the Scarbo-like opening of the Toccata mistica (1994), and the more Webern-like serialism of the 1948 Variations, but Schoenberg, whatever the ambivalence of Henze’s feelings towards him, never quite vanishes. I had not heard the Variations before and was most impressed: the form and style never seemed to constrict the young composer but acted rather as a spur to expression, Watkins ensuring strong characterisation. The youthful impetuosity of Cherubino (1980-1) was winningly portrayed, which then perhaps made the violence, apocalypticism even, of the 2003 Scorribanda pianistica all the more shocking. It is, for those who might be puzzled, a piano version by Martin Ketz of the Scorribanda sinfonica, and works very well in its new guise.
Fraternité was a ‘message for the millennium,’ as requested by Kurt Masur for the New York Philharmonic. (It remains unclear why it should then have been performed in 1999, more than a year too early, but never mind.) Certain progressions and melodic twists put me in mind of Busoni, though this may simply be coincidence. The post-Bergian orchestral writing is certainly consistent with much of Henze’s practice at the time and there even seemed to be a few hat-tips to Wagner. Kaleidoscopic colours reaffirmed Henze’s mastery of orchestration, but ultimately I do not think this amounted to much more than a postcard message: fine at the time, no doubt, but paling when heard by the side of the Fourth Symphony, an offshoot from the opera, König Hirsch. Here Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave as fine a performance as I can imagine it has received. Henze’s flight to Italy is celebrated, of course, but try as he might, he can only truly celebrate his new-found freedom in a German way. The forest inevitably conjures up visions of German Romanticism for him, from the opening horn-call (almost, but not quite, that for Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony) onwards. The four-movement-in-one structure again refers back to Schoenberg and, beyond him, to the Romantics. Joy expressed in the Mediterranean sun is very much of a Goethe-Mendelssohn tradition too – and all the better for it. Moreover, here, unlike Voices, such reconciliation as there might be does not sound forced or inappropriate; there is instead a lightness of touch, an almost Shakespearian fantasy, which would prove prophetic for a number of works that lay a long way in the future. If only some day we might hear König Hirsch itself…
The final work was Henze’s recent (2008) elegy for Fausto Moroni, Elogium musicum (in full: Elogium musicum amatissimi amici nunc remoti, ‘Musical Elegy for a most beloved Friend now Departed’). Once again, the BBC forces, now including the BBC Symphony Chorus, provided an exemplary performance. Having mentioned the persistence of Schoenberg above, I must do so again, for this almost seemed like a mini-Gurrelieder: weeping, anger, Nature, and finally something akin to apotheosis. Yet, despite the references in Franco Serpa’s Latin text to God, one knows that this remains as deeply pagan as the rest of Henze’s output. Whatever reconciliations he might attempt, some will surely remain several bridges too far. This was recognisably the world of Henze’s realisation of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria – which, as Sir Thomas Allen remarked in a recent interview, ‘You feel that the other versions, correct as they may be with the instruments of the day, you felt that they were coming out of the Vatican somehow. We were in Greece, in antiquity.’
Voices
Vocal Soloists from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)
Toccata mistica
Variations, op. 13
Cherubino
Scorribanda pianistica
Fraternité
Symphony no.4
Elogium musicum (United Kingdom premiere)
Huw Watkins (piano)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Oliver Knussen (conductor)
The BBC/Barbican Hans Werner Henze Day began with Barrie Gavin’s film, Memoirs of an Outsider, which includes interviews with Henze and a number of musicians close to him, as well as some ravishingly beautiful footage of the composer’s villa in the hills above Rome. I was unable to see it on this occasion but can wholeheartedly recommend it on DVD, or indeed should it be screened elsewhere.
Voices (1973), is described as ‘a collection of songs’ rather than a song-cycle, which seems just. Rather than being shared between two vocal soloists, the opportunity was granted to a number of singers (mezzos and tenors) from the Guildhall to contribute, which had the additional advantage of greater variety for the listener too. This is Henze at his most politically combative, taking us on a tour of the world’s disadvantaged, their voices hailing from Cuba, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Black America, Greece, Italy, and Germany. From the opening Los poetas cubanos ya no sueñan (from Heberto Padilla’s Fuera del juego) to Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s closing Das Blumenfest, the revolutionary intensity can hardly be faulted. It is a fascinating work, but not perhaps one that has dated so well as some others. To have well over an hour and a half (at least given the breaks required by performance) of such protest songs, without any especially obvious progression tends to reinforce the compendious quality of the enterprise – doubtless part of the point, but even so... That said, some songs, as one might expect, impress more than others and there are moments of great sonorous beauty. The strained beauty of the Ho Chi Minh Prison Song put me in mind of the torture scene from Nono’s Intolleranza, after which the accordion’s entry for Brecht’s Keiner oder alle could hardly have provided a greater contrast. Sharp-edged woodwind added to the evocation of Weimar and indeed of Weill (Mahagonny). Cabaret would return more than once, notably in the languorous, yet properly alienating sleaze – relatively speaking – of Brecht’s Gedanken eines Revuemädchen während des Entkleidungsaktes. No, of course the showgirl does not enjoy what she does; nor does she ‘feel’ anything. The several contributions from recorders proved haunting, fragile in their humanity, not least for the parents having to transport the coffins of the children of Man Quang (Erich Fried’s 42 Schulkinder). Haunting was also the word for Caino, in which accordion and recorder could combine, almost seductive in their disconcertion.
It was difficult not to raise a smile at the deafening bruitage of the free market in Vermutung über Hessen, share the sentiment though one might. Moreover, I wondered, during the lengthy instrumental prelude to the Heine setting, Heimkehr, where Henze sounded at his most Romantic, whether this was really where he had wanted to be all along, likewise in the post-Schoenbergian piano writing of Patria. What disconcerted most, however, was the conclusion, mesmerising purely on its own terms: Das Blumenfest. Was this an attempt at reconciliation? If so, it hardly seemed the place, for what is there to reconcile? I was put in mind of the young Boulez criticising such attempts in late Berg – though Berg, I think, had better reason to be doing so. The performances, however, were all excellent. Singers, players, and Ryan Wigglesworth showed apparently total commitment to Henze’s cause. If I had to single out a favourite, it would probably be Nicholas Allen’s role as master of ceremonies in the savaging of Coca-Cola America (The Electric Cop, ‘for Herbert Marcuse’): a sort of American culture-industry cabaret. The only irritant, and it really was an irritant, was that very small section of the audience, its ringleader a demonstrative man in a pink jumper, which insisted on applauding after every number.
There then followed a second film, again from Barrie Gavin, of a performance of the Requiem, its sequence of nine sacred concertos one of Henze’s finest achievements. The ensuing talk is best skated over. Suffice it to say, it opened with a declaration of lack of expertise in Henze and yet managed to inspire less as time went on. Given that the composer was apparently elsewhere in the building speaking for a radio interview, it seemed a great pity that we could not simply have heard that.
In any case, the evening concert made amends. The first section – there were two intervals – had Huw Watkins present a selection of Henze’s works for solo piano. One thing that struck me – as it had during some of Voices – was how Henze seems unable, or perhaps unwilling, to escape the shadow of Schoenberg when writing for the instrument. There are other voices too, of course, for instance the Scarbo-like opening of the Toccata mistica (1994), and the more Webern-like serialism of the 1948 Variations, but Schoenberg, whatever the ambivalence of Henze’s feelings towards him, never quite vanishes. I had not heard the Variations before and was most impressed: the form and style never seemed to constrict the young composer but acted rather as a spur to expression, Watkins ensuring strong characterisation. The youthful impetuosity of Cherubino (1980-1) was winningly portrayed, which then perhaps made the violence, apocalypticism even, of the 2003 Scorribanda pianistica all the more shocking. It is, for those who might be puzzled, a piano version by Martin Ketz of the Scorribanda sinfonica, and works very well in its new guise.
Fraternité was a ‘message for the millennium,’ as requested by Kurt Masur for the New York Philharmonic. (It remains unclear why it should then have been performed in 1999, more than a year too early, but never mind.) Certain progressions and melodic twists put me in mind of Busoni, though this may simply be coincidence. The post-Bergian orchestral writing is certainly consistent with much of Henze’s practice at the time and there even seemed to be a few hat-tips to Wagner. Kaleidoscopic colours reaffirmed Henze’s mastery of orchestration, but ultimately I do not think this amounted to much more than a postcard message: fine at the time, no doubt, but paling when heard by the side of the Fourth Symphony, an offshoot from the opera, König Hirsch. Here Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave as fine a performance as I can imagine it has received. Henze’s flight to Italy is celebrated, of course, but try as he might, he can only truly celebrate his new-found freedom in a German way. The forest inevitably conjures up visions of German Romanticism for him, from the opening horn-call (almost, but not quite, that for Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony) onwards. The four-movement-in-one structure again refers back to Schoenberg and, beyond him, to the Romantics. Joy expressed in the Mediterranean sun is very much of a Goethe-Mendelssohn tradition too – and all the better for it. Moreover, here, unlike Voices, such reconciliation as there might be does not sound forced or inappropriate; there is instead a lightness of touch, an almost Shakespearian fantasy, which would prove prophetic for a number of works that lay a long way in the future. If only some day we might hear König Hirsch itself…
The final work was Henze’s recent (2008) elegy for Fausto Moroni, Elogium musicum (in full: Elogium musicum amatissimi amici nunc remoti, ‘Musical Elegy for a most beloved Friend now Departed’). Once again, the BBC forces, now including the BBC Symphony Chorus, provided an exemplary performance. Having mentioned the persistence of Schoenberg above, I must do so again, for this almost seemed like a mini-Gurrelieder: weeping, anger, Nature, and finally something akin to apotheosis. Yet, despite the references in Franco Serpa’s Latin text to God, one knows that this remains as deeply pagan as the rest of Henze’s output. Whatever reconciliations he might attempt, some will surely remain several bridges too far. This was recognisably the world of Henze’s realisation of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria – which, as Sir Thomas Allen remarked in a recent interview, ‘You feel that the other versions, correct as they may be with the instruments of the day, you felt that they were coming out of the Vatican somehow. We were in Greece, in antiquity.’
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Elektra - LSO/Gergiev, 12 January 2010
Barbican Hall
Elektra – Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet
Chrysothemis – Angela Denoke
Klytemnestra – Felicity Palmer
Orest – Matthias Goerne
Aegisth – Ian StoreyFirst Maid – Olga Legkova
Second Maid – Third Maid – Varvara Kravtsova
Fifth Maid – Lia Shevtsova
Overseer, Confidante – Ekaterina Popova
Trainbearer – Ekaterina Sergeeva
Young Servant/Orest's Companion – Andrey Popov
Old Servant – Vuyani Mlinde
London Symphony Orchestra (chorus master: Joseph Cullen)
London Symphony Chorus
Valery Gergiev (conductor)
I nearly stayed away. After Gergiev’s Mahler Ninth and his Bluebeard’s Castle, I found it difficult to feel wild enthusiasm for the prospect of him conducting Strauss in general or Elektra in particular. However, curiosity, a promising cast, and the LSO won out. In the end, I was pleased to have gone, but it was not an Elektra for the ages. It looked as though it was being recorded for LSO Live. Only Elektra-completists should bother; otherwise, stick with Karl Böhm et al.
Gergiev, as so often in ‘uncharacteristic’ territory, did not appear to have reached a settled view of the score. The opening scene made me fear the worse: hard-driven and shrieking, with a far from rounded orchestral tone. Had Solti returned? Not quite, but it was that sort of performance. There were, however, hints of something more interesting: a good ear for colour in more mysterious passages. It may be a cliché, but Gergiev does seem much better with colour than structure. As a whole, the performance was sectional, some way from the symphonic musico-dramatic structure that Strauss inherited and developed from Wagner. Yet, within the sections, direction was often clear. Dance rhythms were often to the fore, a definite advantage. Some tempi seemed a bit odd, slowed down for no particular reason, and Elektra’s Dance was simply rushed: a pity. The LSO itself was on good form, though it suffered to a certain extent from Gergiev’s lack of overall command. I longed to hear what it might have sounded like under a conductor more at home with the score – Dohnányi, Elder, Bychkov, Barenboim, or Abbado… (The list is not intended to be exhaustive!)
Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, whom I heard in this role a couple of years or so ago in Berlin, once again impressed. Simply to get through the part is an achievement, but she did much more than that; for the most part accurate, she acted as much as one could within the confines of a concert performance, both visually and vocally. She tired a little at the end, but one can hardly blame her. (Incidentally, it would have been preferable to have some sort of common policy on ‘acting’: a mix of slightly-staged and oratorio does not really work. Surely Gergiev should have made a decision on this.) Angela Denoke gave a detailed reading as Chrysothemis, accurate and musically shaped, but later on especially she could be over-parted. (What a weird part this is, though, in many respects the sickest of the lot, especially concerning her obsession with bearing children.) Matthias Goerne was a thoughtful Orestes, though I did not think him ideally cast. Someone a little more youthful and vigorous in tone – Simon Keenlyside perhaps – might have worked better. Ian Storey was a change from the usual Aegisth: his voice was not lost and so much less of a ‘character role’, let alone caricature. And Felicity Palmer, perhaps predictably, was superb as Klytemnestra. Deranged, vulnerable, haunted, and utterly malevolent: hers was the finest achievement of the lot.
A couple of other cavils probably ought to be voiced. The London Symphony Chorus, lusty though it sounded, was not well-served – or alternatively, was all too well-served – by coming out into the stalls to sing. Admittedly, my front left stalls seat was particularly vulnerable in that respect – other balances there were often very odd indeed – but the chorus, which should be off-stage, simply overwhelmed everything else. Hearing ‘Orest’ shouted at full throttle like that gave a false impression of Strauss’s score, somewhat redolent of the parade ground. It also seemed odd to have so many Russian singers in the small roles. Gergiev’s habit seems to be to import wholesale his Mariinsky troupe: fine for them, I suppose, but might this not have been an opportunity for some local talent to gain experience? Vuyani Mlinde, the sole exception, was perhaps the most impressive, so that need not have been a concern. I certainly have no wish to be parochial, let alone xenophobic, but the impression given in such circumstances is of a branch of Gergiev Inc. as much an LSO performance.
Elektra – Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet
Chrysothemis – Angela Denoke
Klytemnestra – Felicity Palmer
Orest – Matthias Goerne
Aegisth – Ian StoreyFirst Maid – Olga Legkova
Second Maid – Third Maid – Varvara Kravtsova
Fifth Maid – Lia Shevtsova
Overseer, Confidante – Ekaterina Popova
Trainbearer – Ekaterina Sergeeva
Young Servant/Orest's Companion – Andrey Popov
Old Servant – Vuyani Mlinde
London Symphony Orchestra (chorus master: Joseph Cullen)
London Symphony Chorus
Valery Gergiev (conductor)
I nearly stayed away. After Gergiev’s Mahler Ninth and his Bluebeard’s Castle, I found it difficult to feel wild enthusiasm for the prospect of him conducting Strauss in general or Elektra in particular. However, curiosity, a promising cast, and the LSO won out. In the end, I was pleased to have gone, but it was not an Elektra for the ages. It looked as though it was being recorded for LSO Live. Only Elektra-completists should bother; otherwise, stick with Karl Böhm et al.
Gergiev, as so often in ‘uncharacteristic’ territory, did not appear to have reached a settled view of the score. The opening scene made me fear the worse: hard-driven and shrieking, with a far from rounded orchestral tone. Had Solti returned? Not quite, but it was that sort of performance. There were, however, hints of something more interesting: a good ear for colour in more mysterious passages. It may be a cliché, but Gergiev does seem much better with colour than structure. As a whole, the performance was sectional, some way from the symphonic musico-dramatic structure that Strauss inherited and developed from Wagner. Yet, within the sections, direction was often clear. Dance rhythms were often to the fore, a definite advantage. Some tempi seemed a bit odd, slowed down for no particular reason, and Elektra’s Dance was simply rushed: a pity. The LSO itself was on good form, though it suffered to a certain extent from Gergiev’s lack of overall command. I longed to hear what it might have sounded like under a conductor more at home with the score – Dohnányi, Elder, Bychkov, Barenboim, or Abbado… (The list is not intended to be exhaustive!)
Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, whom I heard in this role a couple of years or so ago in Berlin, once again impressed. Simply to get through the part is an achievement, but she did much more than that; for the most part accurate, she acted as much as one could within the confines of a concert performance, both visually and vocally. She tired a little at the end, but one can hardly blame her. (Incidentally, it would have been preferable to have some sort of common policy on ‘acting’: a mix of slightly-staged and oratorio does not really work. Surely Gergiev should have made a decision on this.) Angela Denoke gave a detailed reading as Chrysothemis, accurate and musically shaped, but later on especially she could be over-parted. (What a weird part this is, though, in many respects the sickest of the lot, especially concerning her obsession with bearing children.) Matthias Goerne was a thoughtful Orestes, though I did not think him ideally cast. Someone a little more youthful and vigorous in tone – Simon Keenlyside perhaps – might have worked better. Ian Storey was a change from the usual Aegisth: his voice was not lost and so much less of a ‘character role’, let alone caricature. And Felicity Palmer, perhaps predictably, was superb as Klytemnestra. Deranged, vulnerable, haunted, and utterly malevolent: hers was the finest achievement of the lot.
A couple of other cavils probably ought to be voiced. The London Symphony Chorus, lusty though it sounded, was not well-served – or alternatively, was all too well-served – by coming out into the stalls to sing. Admittedly, my front left stalls seat was particularly vulnerable in that respect – other balances there were often very odd indeed – but the chorus, which should be off-stage, simply overwhelmed everything else. Hearing ‘Orest’ shouted at full throttle like that gave a false impression of Strauss’s score, somewhat redolent of the parade ground. It also seemed odd to have so many Russian singers in the small roles. Gergiev’s habit seems to be to import wholesale his Mariinsky troupe: fine for them, I suppose, but might this not have been an opportunity for some local talent to gain experience? Vuyani Mlinde, the sole exception, was perhaps the most impressive, so that need not have been a concern. I certainly have no wish to be parochial, let alone xenophobic, but the impression given in such circumstances is of a branch of Gergiev Inc. as much an LSO performance.
Monday, 11 January 2010
Boulez anniversary year and interview
There is an interesting interview with Pierre Boulez in the New York Times from a few days ago. (I am not sure I have ever read an uninteresting interview with him, for there always seems to be some flash of insight.) Notably, Daniel Barenboim contributes, the Barenboim-Boulez musical axis surely having been one of the most enduring and productive of recent - and even not-so-recent - years. Who could disagree with Boulez concerning the lack of adventure, or even interest, in so much programming? A significant segment of typical bourgeois concert and opera audiences, I suspect, and therein lies the problem for anyone with the slightest intellectual and cultural curiosity...
Boulez will turn eighty-five this year. In April, I shall visit Berlin for the Staatsoper's birthday celebrations, which will include Maurizio Pollini performing the second sonata, Boulez himself conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin in works by Boulez, Schoenberg (Barenboim the soloist in the piano concerto), and Berg, and a jointly conducted concert (Boulez and Barenboim) with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Messagesquisse, Anthèmes 2, and Le Marteau sans maître (soloist: Hilary Summers).
Further details of these Berlin Festtage, which will also include Barenboim conducting Tristan und Isolde in a revival of Harry Kupfer's production, and Eugene Onegin in Achim Freyer's bizarre staging, may be found here. Reviews of all performances cited above will follow.
Boulez will turn eighty-five this year. In April, I shall visit Berlin for the Staatsoper's birthday celebrations, which will include Maurizio Pollini performing the second sonata, Boulez himself conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin in works by Boulez, Schoenberg (Barenboim the soloist in the piano concerto), and Berg, and a jointly conducted concert (Boulez and Barenboim) with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Messagesquisse, Anthèmes 2, and Le Marteau sans maître (soloist: Hilary Summers).
Further details of these Berlin Festtage, which will also include Barenboim conducting Tristan und Isolde in a revival of Harry Kupfer's production, and Eugene Onegin in Achim Freyer's bizarre staging, may be found here. Reviews of all performances cited above will follow.
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