Moses und Aron, Opéra national de Paris, 20 October 2015

Images: © Bernd Uhlig

Opéra Bastille

Moses – Thomas Johannes Mayer

Aron – John Graham-Hall
Young Maiden – Julie Davies
Sick Woman – Catherine Wyn-Rogers
Young Man – Nicky Spence
Naked Youth – Michael Pflumm
Man – Chae Wook Lim
Another Man, Ephraimite – Christopher Purves
Priest – Ralf Lukas
Four Naked Virgins – Julie Davies, Maren Favela, Valentina Kutzarova, Elena Suvorova
Three Elders – Shin Jae Kim, Olivier Ayault, Jian-Hong Zhao
Six Solo Voices – Béatrice Malleret, Isabelle Wnorowska-Pluchart, Marie-Cécile Chevassus, John Bernard, Chae Wook Lim, Julien Joguet

Romeo Castellucci (director, designs, lighting)

Cindy van Acker (choreography)
Silvia Costa (artistic collaboration)
Piersandra di Matteo, Christian Longchamp (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Opéra national de Paris and Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine Children’s Choir of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus masters: José Luis Basso and Alessandro di Stefano)

Philippe Jordan (conductor)

 

Moses und Aron remains a ‘special’ work, not unlike Parsifal. There are good reasons for that; as a greatly distinguished exponent of both dramas, Pierre Boulez, pointed out when at work on Parsifal at Bayreuth, Wagner was quite right to loath ‘opera houses … like cafés where … you can hear waiters calling out their orders: ‘One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!’ Such was not merely an offence to the composer’s amour propre, but testament to Wagner’s works’ incompatibility with existing theatrical conventions and norms. Likewise what, Parsifal included, must surely be the most theological of all operas, Schoenberg’s unfinished, most likely unfinishable, masterpiece. There are bad reasons too, though. I have lost count of the times I have heard claims that Schoenberg is ‘box office poison’, or some other such drivel. I could not see an empty seat in the vast Bastille amphitheatre; likewise, the Royal Opera House was full, not a seat remaining, for Welsh National Opera’s two performances in London last year. Stockhausen’s Mittwoch in Birmingham sold out even more quickly.

 

 

The allegedly ‘realistic’ guardians of the ‘possible’, Fafner-like protectors of the strangely uncompelling operatic repertoire and its practices, are no more to be trusted than their political counterparts, still screaming ‘unelectable’ at Jeremy Corbyn, long after his election has procured the Labour Party more new members than the Conservative Party has existing ones. If you do not want to stage Schoenberg or Stockhausen; if you do not want Corbyn to lead your (or someone else’s) party: fine, give your reasons for doing so. Such disingenuousness might have fooled the crowd, easily swayed as Schoenberg’s Children of Israel show, for a while. No longer. Sometimes the impossible is fruitfully impossible, as the apophatic theology of Moses suggests; most of the time, it is simply the weapon of those in power.

The only way to perform such works is, of course, to do them proud. There could be no gainsaying the achievement of the Opéra national de Paris in this case: a fitting achievement in its own right, but also a clear statement of intent from its new leadership under Stéphane Lissner. Signs matter, as Aron would counsel; so, too, does Moses’ Idea. Both are present here, in Romeo Castellucci’s thoughtful production, which opens up mental possibilities rather than closing them down. (Presumably, that is what, as usual, the fascist booing contingent objected to; if they do not wish to be made to think, Schoenberg might not be for them.)

 

 

The first act takes place in front of and, mostly, behind a white curtain, the characters – if we may call them that: somehow it does not quite seem the right word – in white too, although Moses is sometimes black. (Who is he? Or, as the Chorus will ask, where is Moses? Is he the Moses we know from the Bible, Freud’s putative non-Jewish Moses, an all-purpose founding father/Lycurgus, a dictator? How mutually exclusive are those identities?) Moses hears the Voice of the opening, prior to language (prior even to the nonsense language of the Rhinemaidens, for this is the Almighty Himself) and receives his inspiration (as an artist) or his command (as a politico-religious leader) in the clearer light of what we might call day, even if it be darker – one of many dialectics at work here – than the all-too-light world of obscurity, which may or may not be its opposite, or negation. The wilderness of the first act, the strange, flock-like behaviour of the Israelites (sheep, of course, are white, or black…) is an object of dim, perhaps in more than one sense, perception by us – and, one suspects, by those participating too. The commands God issues via Moses – if indeed Moses has not interpreted them himself – are, we should remember, unpresentable, incomprehensible, negatively defined; which is why it seems that we might need Aron in the first place. Words appear in front of the curtain: prohibitions? Some of them, doubtless. Others have more of an unclear status, just like most of what is written in, say, Leviticus, for most of us. To begin with, we can ‘process’ them, even if we cannot understand quite why they are there, or how we should act upon them. Eventually, we can take in but a few, if any, so quickly do they come and go: ‘information overload’.

Red seeps in briefly, via the mysterious, mystifying technology – God at work, or the necessary curse of modern communication and its theory? – that follows upon the initially comprehensible conjuring trick of Aron’s rod. As the Book of Numbers has it, ‘And it shall come to pass, that the man's rod, whom I shall choose, shall blossom.’ But we still have to trust both God, Moses, Aron, and probably their popular reception for that; should we? After all, there is not a single agent, perhaps with the exception of the Divinity – although, as with Kant, how can we know? – which does not err, which does not mislead. (Yes, Moses, that includes you.) Red is blood, Aron tells us, and the technology and – still white – costumes suggest something medical. But is this another conjuring trick? Is it perhaps even the Red Sea, a reminder – to what end? – of Pharoah and the Egypt in which many might place prince Moses himself?

 

Black enters. Or rather re-enters, for it had initially appeared as tape reel from which Moses had initially heard the Voice. Recording is a difficult business in itself; what is it we hear when we hear, say, Boulez conducting Moses und Aron at home? Philosophical questions, perhaps unanswerable, yet which cannot go unasked, continue to present themselves. Commandments, as any reader of the Pentateuch will tell us, issue thick and fast, perhaps too thick and fast. The thickness and the fastness confuse, capture, even enslave: tape here is black rather than red. Its sacerdotal quality is confirmed by its colouristic alliance – Holy Alliance? mésalliance? false friend? Again, how do we know? The epistemological challenge of Moses und Aron… – with the black which increasingly invades the stage and all but Moses in the second act, the obscuring curtain now vanished, drama as more conventionally understood to the fore. Whatever the tar-like liquid might be to Castellucci’s painterly imagination, and sometimes paint is just paint, even oil is just oil, its emergence from and apparent subsidence into, religious marking, from an undeniable achievement, however uneasy, of instrumental reason, marks an Adornian negative dialectic it would be willful to ignore.

 

The totemic object of worship – is it Aron, in fetishistic black, ‘fetish’ both old and new in our understanding? Or is it the (real) bull, apparently having undergone several weeks of dodecaphonic training prior to appearing on stage, and mysteriously disappearing from stage? – is bound to fail; we know that. And yet, we cannot write off – as Moses would do in anger with the words inscribed upon his tablets? – what has happened during Moses’ absence. Nor should we. Collapse suggests a Wizard of Oz, or a new lease of life and death for the Feuerbachian psychology of religion so enthusiastically adopted by Wagner, and so ambiguously retained even unto Parsifal. Aron, the people have made this new god; that is what modern politics and communications do; it is what ancient politics and communications did too. The (recorded) word of a one, true God might have triumphed briefly, just as Orpheus might once have tamed whatever and whomever it was he tamed, but the rest will not have gone away. Politics and religion, art too: are they destined, Beckett-like, to end in failure?

 

The religious rituals we have seen in the meantime, something akin to baptism – the River Jordan come early? – included, seem to have had meaning, but did they perhaps have none at all? Schoenberg and Castellucci continue to answer questions with questions. Not quite Socratic, but not entirely un-Socratic either: perhaps more dialectically Wagnerian? I always smile when I see Schoenberg’s marking of an ‘erotic orgy’. What would an ‘unerotic orgy’ be? A failure? Well, yes, but are both perhaps not failures; what would be success? There is nothing of the crowd-pleasingly ‘erotic’ or, alternatively, of its conservative-crowd-repelling alternative, to what we see on stage; it is restrained, perhaps or perhaps not an acknowledgement of the idolatry of artistic representation. The ritual around the Golden Calf that is not golden seems almost more akin to Parsifal, although I do not of course intend to imply that there is nothing of the erotic to Wagner’s drama. The excess, the twelve-note Meyerbeerian tendencies of the Orgy are countered both scenically and musico-theologically: the row remains, as do the controlling hands of the conductor, the director, and, dare one suggest, I AM.

 

 

Is this partial? Of course it is. But so, equally was the saturation in gold – colour, and the lucre of advertising – of Reto Nickler’s production for the Vienna State Opera (available on DVD). Perhaps a production has to be partial; indeed, it must almost certainly be so. Perhaps, as with the work itself, part of the greatness here lies in failure, in the modernistic fragment. Ours is a fractured, fragmented world, which longs all the more for unity, and might sometimes delude itself into believing it has once again found it. Visions of decidedly un-Sinai like, perhaps Alpine mountains appear like a kitschy mirage, inviting the acrobatic attempt at scaling we witness, still more so inviting the failure and collapse we know to be forthcoming. Is the tent-like image remaining a hint at the religion to come, at tabernacles and temples from which the instrumental reason, domination, and murder of the nation will come?

 

We do not, then, know entirely what is going on, and that is clearly the point, or part of it, or is it? We can certainly tell that what we are seeing is what the director intends to see; even when ‘meaningless’, this is not ‘merely’ arbitrary. Is that subsequent doubt part of the point? And so on, and so forth. If Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, charted the domination of instrumental reason since Homer, did Schoenberg and does Castellucci attempt something similar since Moses? Such might indeed be understood to be part of the meaning of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. And to hear so stunningly played a performance of the orchestral music furthered that understanding further.

 

For this was an astonishing musical achievement from Philippe Jordan and the orchestra of the Paris Opéra: on top form, indeed magnificent form. (With the best will in the world, the smaller forces of WNO last summer at Covent Garden could not begin to match it, estimable though their performance was on its own terms.) I am not sure I have heard a conductor stress the individual nature of scenes and their subdivisions so much as Jordan, suggesting something a little closer to the closed forms of Berg in Wozzeck than I had ever contemplated. ‘Right’ or ‘wrong’, it convinced. There was Wagnerian chamber music, which yet had more than a little hint of the allegedly more ‘autonomous’ writing of works such as Schoenberg’s Serenade, op.24 and the Variations for Orchestra, op.31, and even perhaps of Hindemith, certainly of Bachian counterpoint. (Listen to Götterdämmerung from, say, Karajan or Boulez, or look at the score, if you doubt the preponderance of chamber writing in Schoenberg’s great musico-dramatic predecessor.) There were Viennese waltzes, of all degrees of straightness, evoking Mahler, Berg, even the ‘Marzipanmeister’, as Schoenberg once denounced him, Richard Strauss, although not necessarily in his case with fondness. There was all manner of orchestral colour, especially, although not only, in the Golden Calf Scene; the mandolins (Florentino Calvo and Cécile Duvot) registered more strongly with me than I can previously call, again evoking Schoenberg’s Serenade, but also Mahler, not least his attempt at religious synthesis in the Eighth Symphony. And it was the opening of the ‘Adagio’ to the Tenth Symphony which inevitably came to mind in the closing unison. What should we make of that? A gateway to another musical world? A recognition of the necessity and yet impossibility of further synthesis? The more committed the performance of Moses, the more negative the way that both opens up and vanishes.

 

Thomas Johannes Mayer’s Moses was stentorian, his stage and vocal presence seemingly one physical and intellectual whole. Tragically flawed, noble yet with all the dangers increasingly apparent of charismatic leadership, shading into dictatorship, we saw and heard on one level a political parable all-too-familiar to Schoenberg – and to us too, with æsthetic consequences just as important. It was not only Walter Benjamin who warned of the ‘æstheticisation of politics’. And it was certainly not only a danger, however superior the æsthetics might have been, for Schoenberg’s time. Mayer’s diction, as with that of everyone else on stage, was beyond reproach; his pitch, insofar as that were an issue for the notoriously thorny, negatively ‘unanswerable’ question of Sprechstimme, seemed to me pretty impressive too.

 

That was the case also for John Graham-Hall’s Aron. We think of Graham-Hall as a ‘character’ tenor, a Basilio or a Monastatos, yet his repertoire is far more varied than that, and who would want a ‘non-character’ tenor? (Sadly, many do.) Aron has been portrayed by tenors of many varieties, including bel canto ‘specialists’ – the reality is always more complex – such as Chris Merritt, for Boulez no less, and of course many a Heldentenor. A great strength of Graham-Hall’s performance was his complexity; Aron emerged more as a chameleon than one often sees – or hears. He could adapt, marshal his resources to the situation. Even at the moment of apparent defeat, a Mime-like obsequiousness or infantilism, immediately following upon Moses’ outburst, resolved itself into some of Aron’s initial composure, faith, and/or advocacy.

 

The power relationship, then, continually shifted, according to circumstances. That was just as much the case for the relationships between the two principal characters and others, whether soloists or the chorus. There was not a weak link, and the nature of the work is such that other soloists do not really stand out; that is not to gainsay their achievement. However, there was a triumph at least on the level of that of the orchestra from the chorus. It is difficult to overstate the task a chorus faces in taking on this immense part, or rather these immense parts. José Luis Basso and his deputy, Alessandro di Stefano, had clearly done their work with a thoroughness one rarely encounters, and which, in the modern opera house, is rarely permitted. So had the singers themselves. They seemed capable of doing whatever they were asked, whether by composer, by conductor, by chorus master, or by director. That, of course, contributed immeasurably to the success of their performance, and to the questions such ‘success’ continues to ask of us. If authority can achieve so much, that is both, as Moses und Aron acknowledges, a cause for celebration and a staging-point to catastrophe.

 

 

Ramgobin/Melos Sinfonia/Zeffman - Zisser, Mahler, and Beethoven, 16 October 2015

Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke’s

Na’ama Zisser – Space melts like sand running through fingers (world premiere)

Mahler – Rückert-Lieder
Beethoven – Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92

Ross Ramgobin (baritone)

Melos Sinfonia
Oliver Zeffman (conductor)

An excellent concert from the Melos Sinfonia, opening with the world premiere performance of Na’ama Zisser’s Space melts like sand running through fingers, its title taken from a book by George Perec, the starting point, according to the composer, ‘the way in which we remember spaces that are close to us, and how these change in our memory over time’. That made sense when one heard the short, mostly quiet piece, helping to structure one’s listening.  Opening with just strings, other instruments joined, creating a sound that initially suggested minimalism, but soon became harmonically more interesting than that. Shards, clusters came and went, not unlike, at least on the surface, the Ligeti of Lontano, although without its extremes (or its huge orchestra). Perhaps there was a little neo-Romanticism to be heard too.

 

Ross Ramgobin, whose work I admired more than once at the Royal Academy, joined the orchestra for Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder. First came ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’. Oliver Zeffman drew from the orchestra a bright, magical sound at its opening, Ramgobin singing his part with Italianate legato and excellent German diction. ‘Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder’ was taken urgently, with less emphasis upon the legato line and more upon the way the words inform the vocal line: quite an appropriate distinction to have made between the two songs. The sense of orchestral magic remained. A more Romantic sound was to be heard from the Melos Sinfonia in ‘Liebst du am Schönheit,’ as orchestrated by Max Puttmann, Ramgobin reverting to a more aria-like style. Darkness was the hallmark of both vocal and orchestral performance in ‘Um Mitternacht. Ramgobin’s powerful, somewhat operatic delivery was matched by resplendent brass. ‘Ich bin der Welt abhandedn gekommen’ was placed last, ideally paced, the vocal line imbued with but not overburdened by meaning. Some especially beautiful woodwind playing and a nice piece of closing violin portamento were not the least of the instrumental delights. There then came quite a surprise: as a nod to Frank Sinatra’s centenary, an encore performance of I’ve got you under my skin. Both orchestra (luscious string vibrato and all) and soloist sounded quite in their element, as if this were their staple fare.

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony offers an altogether sterner sort of test, of course, one I am happy to say was handled very well indeed. The introduction to the first movement offered a near-ideal blend of spaciousness and forward motion, attack and precision, with excellent balance too. Zeffman handled the transition to the exposition very well, Beethoven’s harmony doing just the work it should, and ensured the exposition itself was lively without being harried. Rhythm was not treated, as too often it is, as something that stands alone, although it retained a very strong force all the same.  There was highly commendable clarity too; this is clearly a conductor who cares for balance. The development seemed over all too quickly, the composer’s concision apparent for all to hear, and there was true mystery to the recapitulation, even before that coda. The Allegretto was clearly, cleanly articulated, without sacrifice to its essential mystery. Zeffman’s tempo was quick (at least for my taste) yet convincing. Initial low string vibrato proved a tool of expression rather than of dogma, permitting the section’s music to blossom thereafter – and how it did! There was consolation to be heard too, as well as icy chill, from the wind. The scherzo was vigorous, very fast, but never sounding too fast. Zeffman allowed the trio to relax considerably, at least by fashionable standards, and thus to evince true grandeur. It was only in the finale that I occasionally felt myself a little out of sympathy – but then I have felt the same even with Bernard Haitink. Here I missed a more malleable approach to tempo, seemingly wedded as I am to performances such as those of Furtwängler and Barenboim. On its own terms, however, the performance remained mightily impressive, with truly commanding playing and conducting. Zeffman’s insistence on a rock-solid tempo was, moreover, relaxed towards the close, with an accelerando of which either of those favoured conductors of mine might have approved. Joy, then, was quite rightly the overriding sentiment to the close.

Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Glyndebourne Tour, 15 October 2015

Glyndebourne Opera House

Belmonte – Ben Bliss

Osmin – Clive Bayley
Pedrillo – James Kryshak
Pasha Selim – Franck Saurel
Konstanze – Ana Maria Labin
Blonde – Rebecca Nelsen

Sir David McVicar (director)

Ian Rutherford (revival director)
Vicki Mortimer (designs)
Andrew George, Colm Seery (choreography)
Paule Constable, David Mannion (lighting)

The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)

Glyndebourne Tour Orchestra

Christoph Altstaedt (conductor)

 

Strong musical values were in evidence at Glyndebourne’s ready-to-tour Entführung aus dem Serail. A generally young cast sang – and acted – well, giving rise to the not unfamiliar thought from this company that these are names we shall see and hear again. I found Ben Bliss’s Belmonte a little stiff to start with, but he seemed more in his stage element as time went on, revealing a lyric tenor of considerable beauty and sensitivity, both verbal and musical (a false opposition, I know). His third-act duet with Ana Maria Labin’s Konstanze was quite ravishing of tone. Labin’s performance was excellent throughout, Mozart’s coloratura holding no fears for her, but just as important, put to musical and dramatic use. Cleanness and keenness of delivery were as one.

 

The same could be said of their servants, Pedrillo and Blonde. Blondes rarely disappoint; that, however, is no reason not to acknowledge the spirited performance of Rebecca Nelsen, both in vocal and stage terms. I certainly should not wish to get on the wrong side of her. James Kryshak offered a splendidly eager, puppyish performance as Pedrillo. Again, vocal beauty and dramatic purpose were not to be rent asunder. The pair showed excellent chemistry too.

 

Clive Bayley trod Osmin’s line between comedy and a touch of pathos with consummate skill, although the production (more on which soon) did not necessarily help in that respect. Franck Saurel seemed a good actor to me, especially during the rare moments at which he toned things down; however, this Bassa Selim spent far too much of his time shouting and screaming tones of near-hysteria. He may have been following orders, since there was sensitivity to be seen and heard, especially at the end. A pity, though.

 

The Glyndebourne Tour Orchestra under Christoph Altstaedt offered warm, stylish playing: far rarer nowadays than it should be in Mozart. There were no ‘period’ grotesqueries, although a few more strings would not have gone amiss. (Karl Böhm’s Staatskapelle Dresden will surely always remain the model here.) Still, Altstaedt’s tempi and balances were well considered – well considered enough for one barely to notice them. Mozart’s all-encompassing Shakespearean dramatic sympathies were much in evidence, then, to the ears.

 

If you sensed a ‘but’ coming, you were, I am afraid, right to do so. David McVicar’s production, here revived by Ian Rutherford, proves a considerable disappointment. Rarely does it get in the way of the musical performance – to be fair, something not necessarily to be taken for granted – yet, by the same token, it seems to have little or nothing to say. I should be tempted to say McVicar was still languishing in his Zeffirelli period, save for the fact that it now seems too long to be a mere period. Whatever has happened to him is a great pity, since he used to be capable of interesting, theatrically alert productions, his ENO Turn of the Screw a case in point. Now it is ‘light entertainment’, at least for some, to the near-exclusion of anything else, the Royal Opera Trojans a particular low point. Here there is a vague updating to the time of composition, perhaps to underline the Pasha’s status as an Enlightened Despot, but ultimately to precious little effect. One has the distinct impression that it might just have been because the director liked eighteenth-century costumes better than those from a somewhat earlier period.

 

At any rate, we seem to be firmly in the realm of ‘costume drama’, as opposed to putting the history to dramatic work. Orientalism, as in that Trojans production, is reproduced, even heightened, rather than interrogated. If this is not a gift of a work in which to do just that, then I really do not know what is. What should we think of the ruler’s self-revelation as better than his Western charges? And how is it compromised by the fact that he is, by origin, a Christian himself, a ‘renegade’? What of the Janissary music; is it merely ‘pretty’, local colour? If so, does that not in itself raise questions? And what of all those darkly erotic, sado-masochistic suggestions arising from torture and the eagerness with which it is suggested?

 

Nothing, so far as I could discern, on any of those questions or many others. I could only long for what I imagine Calixto Bieito must have made of the work in Berlin. Instead, we have an extravagant barrage of extra actors, children included, and some jarring ‘low humour’. The Mozart family’s correspondence had a celebrated scatological element, but I am not sure that that translates into Osmin belching and farting. One need not go so far as, and would clearly be unwise to imitate, Stefan Herheim’s brilliant Salzburg production – the most recent I had seen, as long ago as 2006, prior to this – in completely reimagining the work as a profound meditation on sexual politics. If the Orientalism is going to remain, though, something needs saying about it – and to it.

 

Grau-Schumacher Piano Duo - Bach-Kurtág, Busoni, and Manoury, 12 October 2015

Wigmore Hall

Bach, arr. Kurtág – Cantata: Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106: Sonatina

Chorale Prelude: Alle Menschen mussen sterben, BWV 643
Chorale Prelude: Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 687
Busoni – Fantasia contrappuntisca, BV 256b
Manoury – Le Temps, mode d’emploi (UK premiere)

Andreas Grau, Götz Schumacher (pianos),

Experimental Studio des SWR (José Miguel Fernandez (sound direction), Dominik Kleinknecht (technician))

 

We do not get to hear music for piano duet or for two pianos nearly so often as we should (although yours truly is already looking forward to a date in March with Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich). There are many excellent works, and if the duet repertoire is often in some respect ‘players’ music’, it loses little when transferring to the realm of public performance; much the same might, after all, be said about the string quartet, or at least Hans Keller claimed so. It was especially welcome to hear a concert in which a major new work, new to these shores at any rate, was performed – and it could certainly not be considered a work for the private sphere.

 

In the first half, though, we heard two very different sides to the existing repertoire. First, for piano duet, were three of Kurtág’s Bach transcriptions. (I have yet to attend one of his and his wife’s recitals, always having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.) They were well chosen and well played by the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, treated as piano music, yet retaining their essential – if you will forgive me, just this once, such an ontological assumption – modesty. The Sonatina from the Actus Tragicus might perhaps have been imbued with a greater sense of mourning, but such is of course hardly the fashion today, when we are fortunate to hear Bach played with any manner of gravity at all. The pair of alto recorders sang out beautifully – I am tempted to say rather more beautifully than in ‘real life’ – against a rock-solid ‘continuo’. Two Chorale Preludes once again provoked sadness that this music is so little known outside organ circles; there really is no excuse for any who consider themselves music lovers not to explore its riches. What one can learn from studying the Orgelbüchlein, and what Kurtág undoubtedly must have, his transcription of ‘Alle Menschen müssen sterben’ simple, straightforward, and perhaps all the better for it; that, at least is how it sounded here. The left-hand (in the original) thirds and sixths sounded smooth but not too smooth, as if attempting, and if so successfully, a sense of legato organ-style. The somewhat backward-looking style of ‘Aus Tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir’ showed what nonsense ‘backward’ and ‘forward’ are in Bach’s case, and how irrelevant ‘style’ alone is in any case. Its rhythmic complication, or perhaps better enhancement, of counterpoint shone through clearly and without mannerism.

 

Busoni was thus well prepared. His Fantasia contrappuntistica was here heard, for my first time, I think, in its version for two pianos. Like, on a much smaller scale, the Fifth Sonatina – as close as I shall get to this extraordinary work as a performer in concert – it marries Bach and Busoni in fascinating and unexpected ways. One can tell the difference, then one cannot; one cares, and then one does not. And yet it coheres with more than a hint of Mephistophelian necromancy; indeed, Doktor Faust came to mind on more than one occasion. So did the still surprising harmonic world of the Sonatina seconda, ‘senza tonalità’, so un-Schoenbergian, a tantalising glimpse of worlds that perhaps have yet to be discovered. There were times when I found the players a little stiff, a little short on magic, but there were others in which neo-Lisztian virtuosity swept all before it. Perhaps it is difficult to know how to approach Busoni’s music; it is certainly some of the most scandalously neglected of the twentieth century. Any niggles I might have had were firmly put in their place by gratitude at the opportunity to hear the workings of this grossly-misunderstood compositional – and musicological – mind.

 

I did not consult my watch, but I suspect that Philippe Manoury’s Le Temps, mode d’emploi exceeded three-quarters of an hour, and perhaps did not come so very far from an hour. I say that not as a complaint, nor indeed as praise, Webern turning in his grave, but simply to give an indication of its scale. It was written for Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher, who with the ever-wonderful Experimentalstudio des SWR, gave what seemed to me a hugely compelling performance, its commitment and, insofar as I could tell, understanding palpable throughout. That this is piano music is never in doubt; there is a joy in exploration of the piano, its capabilities, and its sonorities, often old, and occasionally newer (for instance, by placing a finger on strings inside), which speaks just as it does in the music of Liszt or Busoni. The live electronics are just as important; as Manoury puts it, ‘The two pianos are surrounded by four virtual pianos,’ via ‘a very complex system of sound synthesis, signal processing and spatialisation’. The spatial element cannot help but be felt, of course, and how interesting it is to hear that in the Wigmore Hall, but equally, immediately apparent was its musical quality. Some sort of kinship with what I have thought of as the magic squares of instrumental placing in Boulez’s sur Incises suggested itself, although whether that be simply a sign of my own personal preoccupations I cannot say. Across the span of the work, transformations apparently accomplished, according to Paul Griffiths’s note, by means of Markov chains (‘a process in which movements from one state to another are determined by probabilities’), a dialectic was dramatised, in performance as well as work, between relatively simple, irreducible material (perhaps an arpeggio, bringing Répons, unsurprisingly, to my mind, or a scalic figure) and what sounded to me, trying to make sense of what I heard, as complex yet ‘inevitable’ procedures with respect to tempo, texture, structure, and much else. I half expected the players to begin signalling their decisions to one another, as in the second book of Structures.

 

Indeed, the drama of Manoury’s work possessed a sheer excitement not dissimilar, although – and I do not intend this as a cavil, merely description – it is probably somewhat less concentrated. The possibilities of expansion still inherent in Boulez’s work struck me as, if not entirely, then at least to a greater extent already explored here. The language also sounds more ready to incorporate elements of tonality, perhaps a little after Messiaen, although that I say simply to ‘place’ it, rather than to impute influence. I hope that I shall have opportunity to hear the work, whether from these performers or others, soon, to further an exploration which, for me at least, has only just begun.

Listen to Schoenberg papers online (for two weeks only)

Schoenberg's typewriter

Click here to listen to papers given at last week’s symposium at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna. They will be available online for a fortnight, so hurry or at least canter, whilst stocks last. They include me on Moses und Aron, a paper which will subsequently be developed into a longer piece, talking more about productions, for the Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center, and a wide range of other Schoenbergian studies, ranging from a comparison (in the opening keynote lecture) of some of Schoenberg’s religious ideas with those of Karl Barth, again concentrating on Moses, to the role of Marya Freund (admired by, amongst others, Boulez) as performer of his music, from Schoenberg’s ‘public musicology’ as writer of record booklet notes to the reception of his music in Japan.  

 

Sheldon/Kanga - Berg, Schoenberg, Sdraulig, and Lachenmann, 6 October 2015

Performance Space, City University 

Berg – Piano Sonata, op.1

Schoenberg – Das Buch der hängenden Garten, op.15
Charlie Sdraulig – collector (world premiere)
Lachenmann – Got Lost

Jane Sheldon (soprano)
Zubin Kanga (piano)


This was the first of City University’s free evening recitals I had attended, but I doubt it will be the last. Performances of the Schoenberg and Lachenmann works would drag me considerably further than Islington, and they received fine performances indeed. Added to that, a world premiere and a well-loved apprentice work by one of the most well-loved of all twentieth-century composers, there was much to enjoy.

 

Berg’s early Piano Sonata received a forthright performance from the London-based Australian pianist, Zubin Kanga. It had direction, clarity, perhaps a little less in the way of labyrinthine mystery, but that might also have been a matter of the excellent acoustic of the Music Department’s Performance Space. Even before hearing Schoenberg, Berg’s music sounded here a little more backward-looking, harmonies and their progressions more redolent of Zemlinsky, perhaps, than of the Second Viennese School proper. Perhaps some at least of Berg’s early songs are more fully achieved in themselves. Still, it made an interesting choice as a point of departure.

 

One of the finest twentieth-century song-cycles, Das Buch der hängenden Garten languishes for the most part strangely unperformed. Quite why is anyone’s guess; one would have thought singers and pianists would be queuing up to perform such a masterpiece. But then, one thinks of Erwartung, a work with which it has much in common, and its comparative neglect too… One obvious difference between those two works is, of course, that Das Buch der hängenden Garten is made up of fifteen ‘individual’ songs, however greater the whole than the sum of its parts. A signal virtue of this performance was the way Kanga and Jane Sheldon emphasised that whole, without neglecting semi-individual character to the parts. Indeed, there was something highly musico-dramatic, in a post-Wagnerian sense Schoenberg surely intended, to the laying out of different options, be they harmonic, rhythmic, different forms of vocal production, etc., and tying them together through motivic interaction. From Sheldon, we heard hushed tones that were hushed, purple, quasi-onomatopoeic, and much more; we heard something closer to speech and we heard snatches of operatic vocalism. Above all, we heard what bound them together, both from her and from Kanga’s alert, often rich-toned pianism. The final song proved a climax in every respect. I only wished we could have heard another performance straight away, or perhaps after the interval.
 

Instead, though, we heard the first performance of Charlie Sdraulig’s collector, for solo piano. In his brief note, Kanga quoted the composer as having described the work, his first for solo piano, as ‘an individual in a physical environment; an individual re-enacting an exploratory process, staged in pre-defined territories; an individual performing a choreography; an individual’s touch mediated by their listening.’ That all made a certain degree of sense during the performance, but I am afraid I found the tapping of the surface of the keys wore thin rather quickly. Occasional notes were ‘played’, as we should normally understand, and there was certainly an entertaining element of performance art to what we saw and, to an extent, to what we heard too. Perhaps, though, I was just not on the right wave-length.

 

Not that I have any problem with extended techniques as such, with re-examination of the capabilities of an instrument, with deconstruction and reconstruction of what it does and might do. But Lachenmann’s 2009 Got Lost had all, and more of, the elements of performance art whilst impressing in a very ‘traditional’ way too. In this performance from Sheldon and Kanga, again both excellent, I really gained a sense of the parallels, perhaps even dialectical relationship, between the composer’s deconstruction of his initial texts – Nietzsche, Fernando Pessoa, and a notice concerning the loss of laundry (!) – and some of his musical procedures too. That was probably more intuitive than considered, but listening and indeed performing experience can be mediated in more than one way at different times. Many of the virtues of the Schoenberg performance, not least the array of expression, were apparent once again, renewed, reinvigorated, in a new yet perhaps related context. Expression struck me as something to be considered both in a quasi-Romantic sense and something I might be old-fashioned enough still to call avant-gardist: insofar, of course, as the two are not the same thing, as well as similar. There could be no gainsaying the virtuosity of the performers, but it always seemed focused upon the work and the possibilities it offered. I was reminded of a tribute by Lachenmann to Nono, his teacher, in which the former recalled approvingly the ‘irritation’ experienced by erstwhile colleagues such as Stockhausen at Nono’s having taken up and, yes, preserved ‘the traditional “big” expressive tone, the gesture full of pathos, lyricism, drama and emotion such as has been handed down from Monteverdi, Beethoven or Schoenberg.’

Kožená/Uchida - Schumann, Wolf, Dvořák, and Schoenberg, 5 October 2015

Wigmore Hall

Schumann – Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart

Wolf – Selection from Mörike-Lieder: ‘Begegnung’, ‘Neue Liebe’, ‘Nimmersatte Liebe’, ‘Das verlassene Mägdlein’, ‘Elfenlied’, ‘Verborgenheit’, ‘Wo find ich Trost?’, Auf ein altes Bild’, ‘Lebe wohl’, ‘Nixe Binsefuß’, ‘Abschied’
Dvořák – Love Songs, op.83
Schoenberg – Brettl-Lieder

Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano)

Dame Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

 

Magdalena Kožená seems to be an increasingly controversial artist. I did not hear the Proms Dream of Gerontius, conducted by her husband, Simon Rattle, but much comment focused upon her assumption of the role of the Angel. Some of what was said then seemed relevant to this recital, especially its first half. I was less troubled by the overt emotionalism of her singing; such matters are to a considerable degree a matter of taste. However, there was an unvariegated stridency to much, although not all, of this first half that I found it difficult to warm to, especially when contrasted with the unerring rightness of Mitsuko Uchida’s piano-playing.

 

Schumann’s late Geidchte der Königin Maria Stuart are unquestionably a case of ‘less is more’. Not, alas, so here, at least vocally, ‘Abschied von der Welt’ sounding more like a refugee from the opera house, although the declamatory approach to ‘Nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes’ had worked better. Uchida’s way with Schumann’s piano writing, however, was in quite a different class, as careful, as meaningful, as connected, as if she had been playing his solo music. Indeed, connections with earlier music – the C major Arabeske, for instance, or indeed, Bach’s 48 – announced themselves straight away. In the final ‘Gebet’, it was the piano harmony that told, encasing – not unlike Robin Holloway’s Reliquary for the same songs – the Queen’s plea to the Almighty, preparing the way for that dreadful, sombre close.

 

The selection from Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder opened in urgent contrast, at least so far as the piano was concerned, with ‘Begegnung’. To begin with, that was less in evident vocally, but Kožená captured its later cheekiness well. Planning of the sequence impressed too, with a weightier, more metaphysical note struck in the following ‘Neue Liebe,’ ‘Nimmersatte Liebe’ bringing together qualities from both of its predecessors. Moreover, the opening harmonies of the latter song seemed to prefigure some of those to be heard in Schoenberg’s Brettl-Lieder. Uchida’s piano chimes in ‘Elfenlied’ had one gasp for their melting tone as piano music at least as much as for their pictorial quality, whilst the combination of exquisite sadness and true strength in ‘Wo find ich Trost?’ seemed just right. Kožená by contrast, seemed too ‘public’, at times downright shrill. Musical continuity was once again very much the province of the piano part in the final ‘Abschied’, whose harmonies not for the first time brought Wagner as well as Schoenberg to mind.

 

Dvořák’s Love Songs and their simpler style seemed far better suited to Kožená. With respect to language, I can say little more than that it sounded right. Doubtless those with Czech would be able to say much more concerning what she did with the words, but my impression was a good deal, without it being too much. There was certainly a far more variegated vocal line in, for instance, ‘V tak mnohém srdci mrtvo jest’ (‘Death dwells in so many a heart’), its final line in particular. Uchida’s pellucid tone for the arpeggios and their variants in the closing ‘Ó, duše drahá, jedinká’ (‘O dear matchless soul’) would have justified attendance in itself.

 

Shorn of my favourite ‘Nachtwandler’, which requires additional piccolo, trumpet, and snare drum’, Schoenberg’s Brettl-Lieder nevertheless packed quite a punch. Again, Kožená seemed quite in her element, words, music, words-and-music full of incident, of fun, of ‘life’; Uchida put all of her Schoenbergian experience, lightly worn, to splendid effect. (I cannot for a moment concur with Misha Donat’s claim in his programme note that these songs ‘would be of no more than marginal interest were it not for the fact that out of them grew … Pierrot lunaire.’) The knowing heaviness in ‘Einfältiges Lied’ showed a true meeting of performers’ minds (and the composer’s too). ‘Mahnung’ tilted more towards outright cabaret, Kožená’s voice often coloured by tuning, and not afraid either to shun conventional ‘beauty’ or to speak rather than sing. That tendency was taken still further in the final Schikander aria, a highly ‘masculine’ rendition of certain stanzas and lines not the least of Kožená’s surprises. Janáček’s ‘Lavečka’ was the deceptively simple, profoundly moving encore.

 

Wozzeck, Zurich Opera, 2 October 2015

Captain (Wolfgang-Ablinger Speerhacke) and Wozzeck (Leigh Melrose)
Images: Belinda Lawley

 

 

Royal Festival Hall

 

Wozzeck – Leigh Melrose
Drum Major – Brandon Jovanovich
Marie – Gun-Brit Barkmin
Andres – Mauro Peter
Captain – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Doctor – Lars Woldt
Margret – Irène Friedli
Apprentices – Pavel Daniluk, Cheyne Davidson
The Fool – Martin Zysset
Soldier – Tae-Jin Park
Marie’s Son – Laura Missuray

Zurich Opera Chorus

Philharmonia Zurich

Fabio Luisi (conductor)

  

The greatest opera of the twentieth century? Without a shadow of a doubt, which is strange, given a century overflowing with operatic masterpieces. I have never been to a performance of Wozzeck that has not left me reeling, even when miserably conducted by Antonio Pappano; this visit from the Zurich Opera, giving its new production in concert, was no exception. It was, despite the indisposition of the anticipated Christian Gerhaher as Wozzeck, at least as strongly cast as any I have heard, and benefited not only from excellent playing from the Philharmonia Zurich but, of course, its presence on stage rather than in the pit.

 

One reservation, which I shall get out of the way first: the conducting of Fabio Luisi. Luisi’s career is a mystery to me. I heard him once, as a short-notice stand-in for Christoph von Dohnányi, give a truly excellent performance of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony; such success has never in my experience been repeated. (Perhaps it was Dohnányi’s performance the orchestra was really giving?) Otherwise, it has been workmanlike performances without exception. I suppose it takes some degree of skill to have the audience in no doubt where every bar line falls, but Luisi’s bar-to-bar approach and seeming inability to go beyond a purely literalist communication of the notes on the page are really not enough for Wozzeck, not enough indeed for any score.

 

That the orchestra’s playing was of such a consistently high standard throughout, from cultivated chamber-like playing to shattering climax (d-Moll!) offered considerable compensation, not least because in such a concert setting, one appreciated Berg’s closed forms and their astonishing musical invention all the more. That Wozzeck is, amongst so many other things, as great a musical masterpiece as Pierrot lunaire has never, in my ‘live’ experience as opposed to studying the score and recordings at home, been quite so utterly apparent. Indeed, I could not help but wonder whether Stravinsky might just as readily have chosen Berg’s score as the ‘solar plexus of twentieth-century music’. Nevertheless, it remained a pity not to have a more imaginative, probing conductor, who could have turned the musico-dramatic screws, or even shown some appreciation of what and where they were.

 

The loss of Gerhaher turned out to be no loss at all. Indeed, although I was certainly curious to hear what a voice of such beauty would have made of the role, I cannot believe that the dramatic achievement of Leigh Melrose’s portrayal could possibly have been superseded. Melrose’s Wozzeck in English remains unforgettable, like much else from ENO’s brilliant Carrie Cracknell production. Here, he showed that, in the original language, his match of verbal and musical acuity with first-class acting – yes, although this was a ‘concert’ performance, much of what we saw as well as heard was in character – could, if anything, penetrate still deeper. Much nonsense has been spoken, probably more often written, about Fischer-Dieskau’s allegedly too ‘intellectual’ assumption of the role. One needs a mind to be able to understand and to communicate the darkest, most profound reaches of Berg’s – and of Wozzeck’s. This Wozzeck was as thoughtful and as sensitive as he was downtrodden and, ultimately, angered. Melrose’s appearance in Francesconi’s Quartett at the Linbury Theatre also remains lodged in the memory; quite why Covent Garden does not offer him a role on the main stage is a mystery to me.

 

Wozzeck’s final confrontation with Marie was not the least of the moments when tears involuntarily came to my eyes. (Inevitably, the final scene was the most gut-wrenching of all.) Gun-Brit Barkmin offered an equally fine portrayal of her role. Her Chrysothemis in Semyon Bychkov’s Proms Elektra last year gave British audiences an inviting taste of her artistry. This all-enveloping performance, from siren (anticipations, not least in the Louise Brooks ‘look’, of Lulu?) to terrified, guilt-wracked victim, unabashed sensuality and genuine maternal protectiveness in complex coexistence and conflict, lived both in the moment and in Berg’s astonishing depth of character development.

 

The cabaret-duo of Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s Captain and Lars Woldt’s Doctor, high camp never at the expense of solid musical values, was at least as fine as any I have seen. They really should have their own ‘spin-off’ work. Brandon Jovanovich offered a Drum Major as repellent and yet as alluring in his masculinity as any I can recall too; the sheer power of his vocal delivery had all quake before him. Every member of the cast contributed to a greater whole; here, the advantages of having rehearsed and performed on stage prior to performance were abundantly clear. Last but not least, I must mention the astonishing heft and clarity of the choral performance, again doubtless benefiting from not being dispersed around the stage. Echoes of Weber, turned horribly sour, can rarely have been so disturbingly apparent.

Pelléas et Mélisande (arr. Annelies van Parys), English Touring Opera, 1 October 2015

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Arkel – Michael Druiett

Geneviève – Helen Johnson
Golaud – Stephan Loges
Pelléas – Jonathan McGovern
Yniold – Lauren Zolezzi
Mélisande – Susanna Hurrell 

Oliver Townsend (designs)

Mark Howland (lighting)
Bernadette Iglich (movement)
Zakk Hein (video)
James Conway (director)

Orchestra of English Touring Opera

Jonathan Berman (conductor)

 

In a better world, or even the same world with better audiences, the proportion of performances given by our opera houses of Pelléas et Mélisande and La traviata would at the very least be reversed. As it is, we find ourselves forced to make a virtue out of the relative rarity of performances of a work all consider to be a towering masterpiece. We are grateful when they come, and perhaps treasure them all the more. We are, or at least should be, especially grateful when a touring company with financial resources far more limited than our great opera houses, stages Pelléas, all the more so when it does so with such success. Once again, then: hats off to English Touring Opera!

 

Debussy’s opera is given in an arrangement for chamber ensemble by Annelies van Parys. One could, if one wished, spend the time wishing that one had the Berlin Philharmonic and Karajan, but that would seem a pointless pursuit. What strikes, with respect to a sound that is decidedly un-Karajan-like, although no closer, say, to Abbado, Boulez, or, for that matter, Désormière, is how much it convinces on its own terms. Balances are different, and perhaps not always at their optimum, wind instruments inevitably coming more to the fore without the cushion of massed strings. By the same token, however, solo strings sometimes evoke the Debussy of his chamber music, not least the String Quartet. One hears lines differently and yet, at some level, the same. Malevolence still stretches its fungal tentacles; elegance that is never ‘just’ elegance remains (as so often, when speaking about this work, one is tempted to lapse into French, and say demeure instead).

Two scenes are omitted entirely: a pity, perhaps, although I missed them far less than I should have imagined. Director James Conway takes the radical step of reintroducing words in spoken form at the end of the first ‘act’ (part way through the third). Golaud’s warning to Pelléas in some ways chills all the more for being spoken. Perhaps that is founded on the knowledge of what we ‘should’ be hearing, perhaps not, but I found it an elegant and dramatic solution.

In such circumstances, it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish too strongly between instrumentation and performance. However, the playing of the Orchestra of English Touring Opera seemed to me throughout as alert and as sensitive as anyone could reasonably have expected, perhaps more so. What was being asked of these solo musicians was no mean task, and they played with the excellence we have come to expect. Jonathan Berman’s conducting was another strength. If I say that, for the most part, I barely noticed it, I do not mean that negatively. The ebb and flow of Debussy’s score rather seemed – and ‘seemed’ is surely the operative word here – to take care of themselves, with only occasional awkward corners, which may well be smoothed as the run progresses. One would not expect such a performance to be a ‘conductor’s performance’ as from those great names of the past I mentioned earlier; this was more a matter of subtly enabling and, yes, leading a company effort. In that and much else, it proved a great success.

Conway’s production emphasises, especially in the designs of Oliver Townsend and lighting of Mark Howland, the suffocation of the fin-de-siècle environment from which Pelléas springs. Light use of video (Zakk Hein) enhances rather than distracts. Characteristic wallpaper and costumes remind us that the castle here is as important a ‘character’ as it would be some years later in Bluebeard’s Castle, an opera which owes much to Debussy’s example. Longing for escape in nature and, perhaps, Tristan-esque oblivion may be vain but it is no more real for that. It is striking how much can be done with a single set and clever, well-achieved shifts of lighting: what will clearly be a necessity for touring here takes on unifying, escape-denying, imaginative virtue of its own. There seems, moreover, a hint at least of the road to the Poe opera Debussy would never complete.

I really have nothing but praise for the singing. The cast worked very well together, more than the sum of its parts, which in itself was considerable. At chronological extremes, Michael Druiett and Lauren Zolezzi convinced as ancient Arkel and young Yniold. Arkel’s ambiguity – what really is the nature of his fondness for Mélisande? Is that even the right question to ask – came through very strongly; so too did the boyishness of Zolezzi’s portrayal. Geneviève’s letter-reading generally makes a fine impression; that is no reason not to praise it again when it does, as it did with Helen Johnson. Susanna Hurrell’s Mélisande seemed to hark back in its light, bright quality to early assumptions; she achieved, for me, just the right balance between what might be self-assertion and discomfiting willingness – inability to do anything else? – to act as a blank canvas for male projections. In her first scene, I thought of Kundry; later, I found myself thinking of Lulu. Jonathan McGovern’s Pelléas initially came across with striking, almost but not quite child-like naïveté, and developed into something that was perhaps no more grown-up, but equally striking in its self-absorption: more pathological than one often sees, and all the more intriguing for it. The wounded masculinity of Stephan Loges’s powerfully-sung Golaud, quite contrasting in timbre, was a singular dramatic achievement both in its vocal essence and its dramatic consequences.  ‘Perhaps no events that are pointless occur,’ Arkel says. If a production has succeeded, one’s reply will most likely be ‘perhaps’. And indeed it was.

Pelléas et Mélisande will be performed again in London on 3 October, and will travel to Buxton, Malvern, Durham, Harrogate, Cambridge, Bath, Snape, and Exeter. For more details from ETO, click here.