Il tabarro, Gianni Schicchi, and Le nozze di Figaro, English Touring Opera, 2 and 3 March 2018

Hackney Empire Theatre

Stuart Haycock, Don Curzio; Devon Harrison, Antonio; Ross Ramgobin, Figaro; Dawid Kimberg, Count
Image: Jane Hobson

Michele – Craig Smith

Giorgetta – Sarah-Jane Lewis

Luigi – Charne Rochford

Talpa – Timothy Dawkins

Tinca – Andrew Glover

Frugola – Clarissa Meek

Young lovers – Galina Averina, Luciano Botelho

Stevedores – Luciano Botelho, Ed Ballard, Ian Beadle, Maciek O’Shea, Jamie Rock, Bradley Travis

Song Vendor, Stevedore – Dominic Walsh

 

Gianni Schicchi – Andrew Slater

Lauretta – Galina Averina

Zita – Clarissa Meek

Rinuccio – Luciano Botelho

Gherardo – Andrew Glover

Nella – Joanna Skillett

Betto – Bradley Travis

Simone – Timothy Dawkins

Marco – EdBallard

La Ciesca – Emma Watkinson

Maestro Spinelloccio – Maciek O’Shea

Ser Amantio – Dominic Walsh

Witnesses – Ian Beadle, Jamie Rock

 

Countess Almaviva – Nadine Benjamin

Count Almaviva – Dawid Kimberg

Figaro – Ross Ramgobin

Susanna – Rachel Redmond

Cherubino – Katherine Aitken

Marcellina – Gaynor Keeble

Bartolo – Omar Ebrahim

Don Basilio – John-Colyn Gyeantey

Don Curzio – Stuart Haycock

Antonio – Devon Harrison

Barbarina – Abigail Kelly

 

James Conway, Blanche McIntyre, Liam Steel (directors)

Neil Irish (designs)

Rory Beaton, Guy Hoare (lighting)

Rosie Purdie, Rory Fazan (assistant directors)

Orchestra of English Touring Opera

Michael Rosewell and Christopher Stark (conductors)

 

It is always a joy, or at least has always been to date, to return both to English Touring Opera and to the Hackney Empire. Hellish weather, or rather travel, conditions made the business of returning somewhat less of a joy on this occasion, as did my no longer living in the East End. Once there, however, I was treated once again to two delightful evenings, more than recompense for the travails of the first night in particular.

Sarah-Jane Lewis, Giorgetta; Charne Rochford, Luigi
Image: Richard Hubert Smith

 

Two of Puccini’s Trittico were on offer first. Doubtless some would have been moaning about the loss of Suor Angelica, but then, some will moan about anything: let them. The performance of Il tabarro confirmed my sense that this is one of Puccini’s finest achievements: a perfect tragedy in miniature, penetrating far deeper than many realise. The realism of James Conway’s production struck just the right – or at least a right – aesthetic for the work. We need not set it on the Moon just for the sake of doing so. Hints of an external, Zola-like world are there, but the emphasis lies upon character and action, quite rightly so. And there is no character more important, of course, than the Seine: somehow both the colours of score, orchestral performance, and stage alike seemed specifically to speak of that river, not just a generic one. (Or perhaps it was that anywhere, let alone Paris, would have seemed better than London in one of its collective fits of transport hysteria.)

 

At any rate, Michael Rosewell’s direction of the excellent orchestra – a little short on strings, perhaps, by the standards of a ‘large’ house, yet hardly the worse for it – proved uncommonly attentive to the barcarolle that is there even when it is not, to the Seine, not unlike the castle in Bartók’s Bluebeard, as the most important character of all. All the while, its flow formed and bound the horizons, the possibilities, the ambitions of those we saw on stage, leaving us with the inevitable conclusion that their lives were always fated to be lived and to end in misery. Not that the lighter moments went unnoticed: who can fail to smile at the quotation from La bohème? In any case, darkness without even the possibility of light will often struggle to be darkness at all. Charne Rochford and Sarah-Jane Lewis made for an ardent pair of lovers, hopeful and thus all the more hopeless. Craig Smith sealed their fate with due sadism. A fine ‘supporting’ cast greatly enhanced the chiaroscuro, even as the dramatic scales were ever more tilted towards the ‘scuro’.

 

Image: Richard Hubert Smith

Rosewell and the orchestra seemed equally at home in the scherzo that is Gianni Schicchi. How often does one hear, say, Stravinsky there, thus marvelling at Puccini’s receptivity to the art of his younger colleagues, only to wonder whether one has it the wrong way around? The sharpness of Liam Steel’s staging, holding in equipoise, like the opera itself, the style and fashions of the early twentieth century and the age-old traditions of the commedia dell’arte. ‘Period’ (to Puccini) clothes with clown faces that were both of the time and of another seemed to me an excellent prism through which to conduct, in more than one sense, the drama. No, the ‘joke’ itself is not nearly so hilarious as some seem to think, but who cares? It is the beginning, not the endpoint, of Puccini’s play, as the cast seemed very well to understand. Andrew Slater’s comic timing in the title role did not preclude a sense of something deeper, yet not too deep, beneath the glittering surface. Galina Averina proved quite a discovery as Schicchi’s daughter, Lauretta, she and Luciano Botelho finely matched as a fresh-toned pair of lovers. Again, there was not, as the cliché has it, a weak link in the cast. And more, perhaps than in any performance I have previously seen, Steel, his assistant director, Rosie Purdie, and the cast as a whole showed an affectionate awareness of just what, and what is not, placed in inverted commas here. Thank goodness ‘O mio babbino caro’ fell into the former category: a fleeting moment the more touching for its unquestionable irony. Puccini is so much better than ‘great’ opera houses will generally allow…

 

So too, of course, is Mozart, infinitely so: doomed always to fail in performance, since he demands perfection. If conducting Puccini is a difficult task, its true difficulty only revealed on those few occasions when the music has properly taken flight, then conducting Mozart verges upon the impossible. More depressingly still, the fashion now has become for composers to inflict themselves upon the score, to insert sub-Harnoncourt roadbumps like moles upon the Mona Lisa, and to receive admiring plaudits for the ‘revelations’ such idiocies have afforded to a cast of audience fashion victims. (René who? It is apparently now all about the preposterous Teodor Currentzis.) On the morning of the Puccini performance, I had led an undergraduate class on The Magic Flute, and had found it especially moving to welcome back Sir Colin Davis on DVD to lead the excerpts we watched and to which we listened. It was thus an especial joy, not only to take some of my students to so estimable a Figaro, but to hear it conducted with a warmth and, yes, a wisdom of which Sir Colin himself would surely have approved. Not once did Christopher Stark draw attention to himself; he let the music, however apparently, speak and breathe for itself. The orchestra, again, on excellent form, seemed to love playing for him – just as it should have done. Tempi were broadly ‘traditional’, yet never staid; there were one or two surprises, never unreasonably so, always justifiable within the greater framework of work and performance. Cuts in this work are always regrettable; here we must sacrifice the choruses too. We survived though, as did Mozart. Such losses are a price eminently worth paying for a production that will tour parts of this country far less fortunate, musically or otherwise, than our capital city, snowridden or not.

 

Nadine Benjamin, Countess
Image: Jane Hobson

One might object that Blanche McIntyre’s production is a little on the basic side, but again, one needs to remember that ETO plays to considerably smaller theatres than this. After an initial flourish to the metatheatrical – singers dressing on stage during the Overture – the story is told faithfully, lovingly, and without undue fuss. There is much to be said for that, from time to time. (Not that I should ever want to be without, say, Claus Guth.) Again, the emphasis falls upon the characters and indeed upon the performances – which brings me perhaps to ETO’s signal achievement here. A sparkling cast, with, I think, a majority of non-white faces offered a standing rebuke to the casting practices of pretty much every house in the world, large or small. There were no ‘allowances’ to be made; indeed, it is surely past time to realise that allowances are being made every day to those in a position of privilege. The diversity of the cast certainly did not go unnoticed amongst my students, for which many thanks indeed!

 

I have enjoyed watching Ross Ramgobin’s artistic development for a few years now. He shone at the Royal Academy, and here he shone for ETO as Figaro, in a performance imbued both with good humour and with something deeper, more complicated. His Susanna, Rachel Redmond did likewise, in as graceful and as intelligent an assumption of the role as anyone could have asked for. Nadine Benjamin’s Countess went deeper, of course, as her character must; one truly felt her pain, her dashed hopes, but also the ambivalent joys inscribed upon the other side of the Mozartian coin. McIntyre seemed oddly concerned to present the Count as a stock character, very much in the line of the eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte. I could not really understand why, in what was otherwise a non-interventionist staging. Dawid Kimberg’s performance sometimes seemed a little blunted by that relative neutering, but there was nevertheless much to admire in it. And Katherine Aitken’s Cherubino proved unambiguously a joy, a joy to be experienced in all its youthful, lusting fullness. Once again, there was a true sense of company, not just to the performances narrowly considered, but to the valiant, in many cases life-changing enterprise that is English Touring Opera. If ever a company deserved our support, it is this.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, English National Opera, 1 March 2018

Coliseum

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Trinity Boys Choir (c) Robert Workman

Puck – Miltos Yerolemou

Oberon – Christopher Ainslie
Tytania – Soraya Mafi
Hermia – Clare Presland
Lysander – David Webb
Demetrius – Matthew Durkan
Helena – Eleanor Dennis
Quince – Graeme Danby
Bottom – Joshua Bloom
Starveling – Simon Butteriss
Snout – Timothy Robinson
Flute – Robert Murray
Snug – Jonathan Lemalu
Theseus – Andri Björn Róbertsson
Hippolyta – Emma Carrington
Cobweb – Aman de Silva
Peaseblossom – Lucas Rebato
Mustardseed – Caspar Burman
Moth – Dionysium Sevastakis
 

Robert Carsen (director, lighting)

Emmanuelle Bastet (associate director)
Michael Levine (designs)
Peter van Praet (lighting)
Matthew Bourne, Daisy May Kemp (choreography)


Trinity Boys’ Choir (choirmaster: David Swinson)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Alexander Soddy (conductor)

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Soraya Mafi Trinity Boys Choir Joshua Bloom 3 (c) Robert Workman

 

Twenty-two years is a ripe old age for an opera production nowadays. Production styles date quickly; were the idiotic description ‘timeless’ not already shop-soiled before it tripped off the tongue, it soon would be in this world. More fundamentally, production concerns will quickly transform too. Such is the nature of our ever-changing world and thus of the theatre which, in varying degrees of the oblique, holds up a mirror to it. Robert Carsen’s 1995 ENO production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream looks fresher than I should ever have imagined. Visits to houses from France to China notwithstanding, it might have been new at the Coliseum this March. I wonder, never having seen it before, how much has been revised and restored. Much, I suspect: that, surely, is the business of keeping a production, of necessity far from ‘timeless’, in the repertory. And there is certainly a case, without that descending into mere conservatism, for ENO to ‘curate’ its repertory of productions a little more carefully than has sometimes been the case in the recent past.

 

A giant bed delimits much of the action’s limits. Such an image can hardly fail to suggest something sexual, although, by the same token, it would be disingenuous to claim too much that is overt, or even covert, in that respect. There is a sense of childlike, or at least childish (not the same, as Britten of all composers would surely have known) play to the proceedings too: such, after all, is how children, at least in their (alleged) innocence, will speak of a bed. Beyond that, the Coliseum space is used inventively, occasionally spilling out beyond the stage, yet never merely for the sake of it, and never to the extent of the wearily predictable. Lighting (Carsen himself and Peter van Praet) is sensitive, revealingly suggestive of different worlds, different times; likewise Michael Levine’s designs. There is an almost ravishing beauty to the proceedings of this Athenian forest, from which it would take a sterner soul than mine entirely to recoil.

 

I certainly saw no reason to do so, and found the first two acts fairly sped by. As for the third, perhaps the problem is mine. There are people who complain about alleged longueurs in Elektra (!) and Der Rosenkavalier, their complete absence (to me) notwithstanding, who find the play within a play riveting, even hilarious. I am afraid I find it all too straightforwardly a ‘tedious play’. Oh well: it does none of us any harm to try to understand what others see and hear in something – and, if we cannot do so, simply put up with it for a while. In any case, Alexander Soddy led a knowing, sensitive, often truly magical account of the score throughout. Its allusions to other scores, other composers were clear enough without underlining. What seems to me ultimately far more interesting in Britten – and that is doubtless as much a matter of my own preoccupations as anything else – is the way he constructs his music. That generative, impulse was equally to the fore here. Indeed, although I am far from a paid-up admirer of this opera, I found myself, until the third act at least, fascinated at the interplay between local colour and atmosphere, broadly construed, on the one hand, and that rather sinister build-up of mechanistic forces on the other. None of that, of course, could have been achieved without the excellent understanding of the ENO Orchestra.

 

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Andri Björn Róbertsson Emma Carrington Matthew Durkan Eleanor Dennis David Webb Clare Presland (c) Robert Workman

The cast proved excellent too, with no weak links: a testimony to fine casting as well as to fine performance. The quartet of lovers – Clare Presland, David Webb, Matthew Durkan, and Eleanor Dennis – was handsome in every sense, as vocally refined as impressive of stage manner. One really felt – which is surely part of the point – that one would have been happy with any conceivable outcome to the madness of the forest, and would not necessarily have minded being included oneself. Christopher Ainslie and Soraya Mafi made for an equally finely sung, nicely contrasted king and queen of the fairies, attended to by a properly rascally Puck (Miltos Yerolemou) and outstanding Trinity Boys’ Choir. The rustics and temporal monarchs all had much to offer too. Were I to name them here, I should simply be repeating the cast list above. This was the sort of company performance for which ENO used to be renowned; I hope that it will now continue to be so.

 

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Christopher Ainslie

Miltos Yerolemou 3 (c) Robert Workman

And yet, and yet… you may have felt a ‘but’ coming. If so, your instincts did not err. For Carsen’s production has returned at the expense of Christopher Alden’s brilliant 2011 staging, quite the best I have seen. It did what those of us less suffocated by the post-Britten English musical establishment, more open – like the young Britten, aspirant pupil of Berg – to artistic developments beyond these grey shores, would have thought obvious, yet seemingly no one had dared previously attempt. The sexual darkness not only of Britten’s past and present, but also of this work, was tackled head on, in a boys’ school setting that left one in no doubt there could be no happy endings here. By contrast, chez Carsen – and however unfair the retrospective comparison – everything is a little too well-ordered in its fantasy, a little too blithe in its heteronormativity, a little too distant from shadows of power and the abuses that accompany it.

 

There is no reason in principle, of course, why there should not be room for both approaches, and indeed for many more. Whether, however, we should be papering over awkward cracks specifically now, in the age of #metoo, the Jimmys Savile and Levine, et al. is another question. I never cease to be amazed quite how lightly Britten gets off in this respect, but that doubtless tells its own story or stories. Not that I am suggesting we need necessarily always sit in judgement: a large part, after all, of the role of drama is to explore, to tease out. A dramatic work is neither a court case nor a treatise. There is, though, surely far more to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its ideological framework than is acknowledged here. I hope the decision not to revive Alden was not taken because ‘traditionalists’ and those in positions of power – often one and the same – were ‘offended’, or running scared. Perhaps, then, next time, might we return to Alden, or see something with insights altogether new?

 

Doric Quartet - Haydn, 28 February 2018

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet in G major, op.64 no.4

String Quartet in D major, op.64 no.5, ‘Lark’

String Quartet in E-flat major, op.64 no.6

Alex Redington, Jonathan Stone (violins)

Hélène Clément (viola)

John Myerscough (cello)

I found this a perplexing yet fascinating concert: not the programme, straightforwardly the last three of Haydn’s twelve so-called ‘Tost’ quartets, but the performances. They brought home to me some of the differences between mere taste and judgement. There was much that I – and the friend who accompanied me still more – may not have liked about what was heard here, and that inevitably forms part of our judgement. It clearly should not form more than part of it, though, or criticism truly would be nothing more than consumerism, well or ill ‘informed’. For, by the same token, if often I found the general tone and playing style of the Doric Quartet here strangely inward yet tense, to an extreme that seemed distinctly odd for Haydn, I could not say that it was wrong, nor that many of the players’ other choices did not have justification of their own. I was compelled by these performances to listen, and indeed often to wonder anew at Haydn’s fabled inventiveness, even if many other performances have spoken more touchingly, more personally, even more enjoyably, to me.

There was nothing objectionable, or even unusual, to the playing I heard at the opening of the G major Quartet, op.64 no.4: stylish, cultivated, and clearly considered. The general tone may have been somewhat ‘period’, but it proved varied and never dogmatic. When vibrato was entirely withdrawn, it was for a discernible reason. There was, moreover, a strong sense of formal dynamism to the first movement as a whole. Those of Haydn’s figures with a resemblance to Mozart intrigued all the more on account of the decidedly non-Mozartian use to which they were put. There was a degree of relaxation to be heard in the minuet, still more so, indeed markedly so, in its trio. Again, nothing was taken for granted. Likewise in the Adagio, an austere yet serene song of considerable cumulative power, albeit worlds away from the Amadeus Quartet or the sound I hear in my head. It was worlds away too, I think, from, say, the Quatuor Mosaïques; this had a tension and relative astringency very much of its own. I did wonder, though, whether the players here and, still more so in the finale, might have played out a little more at times. The latter movement’s more extrovert moments told, but neither so clearly nor so joyfully as they might.

The ‘Lark’ Quartet, op.65 no.5, followed. I had heard this recently indeed, also at the Wigmore Hall, from the Jerusalem Quartet. That performance had certainly been more to my taste, and also, I think, more musically revealing (perhaps partly on account of taste). This performance, though, again had me listen and think. The first movement began in playful yet febrile fashion, once more deeply considered, and in many ways so it continued, even when less tonally ingratiating. The development section showed us how many ways there are to develop – well, a few of them anyway – even within a single, concise span such as this. And the return was experienced, by me at least, very much as a return. I have heard the music sound closer to Beethoven, not without benefit, but it need not always do so. The slow movement sounded a note of kinship to that in the preceding quartet, yet sang its own song, no one else’s. There was a splendid sense of involvement to the minuet, in particular to its marriage between harmony and counterpoint. However, sometimes the music seemed in danger of losing its pulse, its impetus. Whilst I can understand the temptation to play around, to linger, I am not sure that it ultimately worked to Haydn’s advantage. The finale was, again, curiously restrained, indeed still more so.

That I was taken by surprise by Haydn’s tonal plan in the first movement of the E-flat major Quartet, op.64 no.6, can only be a good thing. Again, I was made to listen, in a performance that perhaps laid greater emphasis upon counterpoint than harmony – but that is never the easiest of balances to ensure. The passion of the central episode to the slow movement was most welcome, indeed riveting. Its surrounding material was certainly contrasted, but was it perhaps a little too cool? Were the contrasts of the trios in the following movement again overdone? Perhaps. Again, much is surely a matter of taste. I certainly liked the boisterous quality to the minuet, though. The finale scampered along nicely, although there were times when I wished it might have been taken off the leash. Such, though, clearly was not the æsthetic of this particular performance, from which I learned much.

Kavakos/LSO/Harding - Grime, Prokofiev, and Strauss, 18 February 2018

Barbican Hall

Grime: Virga

Prokofiev: Violin Concerto no.2 in G minor, op.63

Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie, op.64

Leonidas Kavakos (violin)

London Symphony Orchestra

Daniel Harding (conductor)

A wonderful concert. Without being didactic – nothing wrong with that, far from it – in its programming, it permitted connections to be made, if one would, whilst concentrating on performing and interpretative excellence. If I have heard better live performances of either Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto or Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, then I must have forgotten them. That seems unlikely.

First, in a programme that more or less corresponded to the traditional, yet now quite rare, overture-concerto-symphony format – it was actually never quite so ‘traditional’ as some like to claim – came Helen Grime’s Virga. Commissioned by the LSO for its UBS Sound Adventures Scheme and first performed more than ten years ago in 2007, Virga takes its name, to quote John Fallas’s excellent programme note, from ‘precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground’. I do not know whether you will believe me – I hope so, dear reader – but I thought of raindrops whilst hearing the piece (for the first time), prior to reading the note immediately afterwards. Indeed, I thought, almost saw, droplets falling or travelling not so much in both as in many directions. Immediately, that is, after an opening éclat which must surely have offered particular appeal to one of the piece’s early advocates: no less than Pierre Boulez. The precision both of work and performance under Daniel Harding would surely have appealed to him too; it sounded not un-Gallic, and indeed not without a little Russianness either. (I do not think it was just the coming of Prokofiev that had me think that.) However, there was something intriguingly Germanic, a little Germanic out-of-water perhaps, to an almost Romantic cello melody, still more so its violin (Mahlerian?) successor, heard without accompaniment. Messianesque tuned percussion incited a Boulezian sense of controlled delirium – or, perhaps, rather the sense that such a state might be around the corner. I mention other composers not because I found the music in any sense derivative, quite the contrary. But just to place it, as I indeed placed it for myself, when hearing it for the first time. Harding and the LSO shaped it beautifully, but this was music, ‘poetic’ in a far from un-Romantic sense, which permitted of such shaping. I very much look forward to hearing it again – and indeed to the LSO’s new commission from the composer, to be heard later this year, conducted by Simon Rattle.

The opening solo of the Prokofiev concerto is surprisingly difficult to bring off. It needs to be direct yet inviting, anything but fussy and yet – a frustratingly vague term, I know –  ‘expressive’. Those things it certainly was in Leonidas Kavakos’s performance; it sounded the easiest thing in the world, as deceptive and yet as necessary an impression as if the melody were Mozart’s. Somehow, without my always being quite sure how, the orchestra and conductor seemed always to complement Kavakos’s playing, as that did theirs. This was clearly a meeting of minds and, I think, of souls too. There was an unusual sense of the ‘Allegro’ as well as of the more common ‘moderato’ of the first movement’s tempo marking, greatly to its benefit. It was flexible, yet directed: flexibly directed, one might say. There was darkness too, without exaggeration: a world of fairy-tales, perhaps, yet we know how deep such tales delve into our psyches, individual and collective. Dead-centred, whether in a single line or double-stopping, Kavakos’s tone was surely a joy in itself, yet there was no ‘in itself’ to it. His counterpoint blended perfectly with that of the orchestra’s soloists, every one of them first-rate.

Egyptian cotton, rather than silk, was my first thought concerning the soundworld of the slow movement, often sentimentalised, yet not here. The pulsating ‘accompaniment’ did all that could be asked of it and more; so did the hemiolas it helped create. Kavakos’s vibrato, the length of his bowing, his fingering, all were perfectly chosen and varied; and yet again, it sounded so easy. (It most certainly is not!) I think I even preferred this to Heifetz. Music and performance alike proved soulful, communicative, yet never narcissistic. Form, once again, was vividly, even magically communicated by all. The finale, taken attacca, offered just the right degree of contrast: very much the next and final chapter. It had – something about which I have been thinking quite a bit recently – very much the character and dynamism of a finale. That might sound a truism, but I do not think it is; it certainly did not seem so in a performance of such distinction. And yet, it was very much the particularity of this finale, castanets and all. The side-slipping ‘simplicity’ of the third movement from the Sonata for Two Violins, op.56, collegially given with LSO leader, Roman Simovic, made for the perfect encore.

Richard Strauss’s music and indeed his æsthetic seem to me all the more necessary by the day. His defence, a musical defence, of art and of music in particular are just what a world, descending further daily into abject barbarism, needs. And of course Strauss knew very much about that – not just after 1933, but over the four-year period of writing this symphony, 1911-15. The darkness, here visual as well as aural, in which the symphony’s ‘Nacht’ opens is, or should be something very special: materialist, yes, and with a Nietzschean spirituality born out of anti-Christian materialism. So it was here. Harding’s way with the opening material intrigued me greatly: more flowing than one often hears, Wagnerian with its unendliche Melodie. I liked it very much. What grew out of it was elemental, magnificent, yet never pompous. It breathed the air of Strauss as much as of Garmisch; it spoke not only of ‘Nature’ in the way that some think it does, pictorially. Nor was the music unduly shoehorned into conceptions, often irrelevant, of what a symphony ‘should’ be. It made its own way, more a symphonic poem, perhaps, certainly sui generis: all the better for it. Paths opened up – and closed – before one’s ears; this was a musical ascent, not just a musical recreation of an ascent.

If I say that I found the performance captivated me still more than one from Bernard Haitink with this same orchestra several years ago, that should give an indication of quite how highly I esteemed it. The LSO certainly sounded warmer, or at least the Barbican acoustic did, and I do not think it was just that. For ‘symphonic’ need not, should not, imply a lack of attention to colour, of which there was as much to appreciate here as in the pieces by Grime and Prokofiev. Fragments from Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier – not literally from those works, but ‘as if’… - dissolved before our aural imagination, just as they had in Verga. Indeed, that coupling came to seem all the more inspired in retrospect. Then Die Frau ohne Schatten came into earshot, above all progressions that might well have come from there – even if, again, they did not. To put it another way, this was not just Strauss’s Alpine Symphony; it was most definitely Strauss.

Olivier Stankeiewicz’s oboe solo, exquisitely moving, made me long to hear him in Strauss’s concerto for that instrument. Indeed, at times, the composer’s ‘Indian summer’ did not sound so distant. At other times, though, quite rightly, it seemed a world away; there was a battle to be fought right here, right now. These are very particular Straussian phantasmagoria here; so they sounded, relished yet thoroughly integrated by Harding and his players. In the Epilogue – Karajan used to say that he conducted the work only for this – everything mattered. Above all, Strauss mattered – more than ever. The lamps were going out all over Europe, across the world. I think we all knew or at least felt what Sir Edward Grey (may have) said next. And yet, there was hope of a sort. For this work offers the best of tests. You cannot really believe in Strauss if you do not believe in it. (You cannot even really have listened to it, I should argue.) If you do not believe in Strauss, can you really believe in music? At any rate, if you do not believe in music, especially now, may God help you.

Damrau/Kaufmann/Deutsch - Wolf, 16 February 2018

Barbican Hall



Images: Mark Allan/Barbican



Italienisches Liederbuch

Diana Damrau (soprano)

Jonas Kaufmann (tenor)

Helmut Deutsch (piano)

Nationality is a complicated thing at the best of times. (At the worst of times: well, none of us needs reminding about that.) What, if anything, might it mean for Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook? Almost whatever you want it to mean, or not to mean. Wolf, one might say, was an Austrian composer, which is or at least was certainly to say also a German composer; yet he was born in Windischgrätz, now Slovenj Gradec. Both names for what was long a Styrian town refer to the Slovene or Wendish Graz, to distinguish it from the larger Graz. And so on, and so forth. Mitteleuropaïsch is more than a collection of disparate identities; it is an identity in itself. It certainly was in the Austrian Empire in which Wolf was born, and it certainly was in the Dual Monarchy in which he grew up. Moreover, northern Italy had long been part, to varying extents, and depending on who was, of that identity too. So too, however, had a romanticised German idea of ‘Italy’, of the Mediterranean, of the South. Look to Goethe and Liszt, for instance – or to Paul Heyse’s selection and translations of songs, as set by Wolf (not greatly, or indeed at all, to Heyse’s pleasure).

 

What one can say is that this idealised ‘Italy’, Tuscan rispetti and Venetian vilote could only have come from without the Italian lands. If ‘German’ constitutes at least as multifarious a multitude of sins as ‘Italian’, these songs remain very much a German evocation of lightness, of sunlight, of serenades, of a ‘love’ that is rarely, if ever that of German Romanticism, although it may well be viewed through that prism. All three performers at this Barbican recital understood that, I think: both intuitively and intellectually. At any rate, the tricky balance between Italian ‘light’, in more than one sense, and German ‘prism’ seemed almost effortlessly communicated – however much art had been required to convey such an impression.

 

The songbook is not a song-cycle, so to speak of ‘reordering’ is perhaps slightly misleading. At any rate, the ordering selected made good sense, grouping the book’s forty-six little songs into four groups, which, if not exactly narratives of their own, made sense as scenes or, if you will, scenas. One made connections as and when one wished; nothing was forced, much as in the music and the performances themselves. Diana Damrau and Jonas Kaufmann opted, boldly yet not too boldly, for a staginess alive to the humour, or at least to the potential for humour without sending anything up or otherwise trying to turn the songs into something they are not. Helmut Deutsch, in general the straight man, perhaps had the ultimate moment of humour, in his piano evocation of a hapless violinist (‘Wie lange schon war immer mien Verlangen), Damrau having ambiguously prepared the way, at least in retrospect, with a lightly wienerisch account. Deutsch provided an excellent sense of structure throughout: non-interventionist perhaps, but none the worse for that. Damrau and Kaufmann, after all, were intended to be the ‘stars’ here.

 

In general, but only in general, Damrau’s performances – roughly alternating, yet with a few exceptions – were knowing, whilst Kaufmann’s were lovelorn. Such is the order of things in this ‘German Italy’. Metaphysics, when they reared their head – more in Wolf than in Heyse – tended to be the tenor’s. Was he right to make relatively little of them? I am not sure that right or wrong makes much sense here. Perhaps it is all, or mostly, in inverted commas anyway. There were a few occasions when I found Kaufmann, especially during the first half, somewhat generalised, but such generality remains a very superior form: more baritonal still than I can recall having heard him, yet with an ardent, show-stopping tenor, even upper-case Tenor, that puts one in mind, just in time, of his Walther (‘Ihr seid die Allerschönste’) or his Bacchus (‘Nicht länger kann ich singen’). And Damrau was perfectly capable of responding, of singing about his singing, as for instance, in ‘Mein Liebster singt am Haus’, to which Kaufmann’s ‘Ein Ständchen Euch zu bringen’ came as the perfect response, and so on. Piano and voice together in the latter song conveyed to near perfection the shallow yet genuine sexual impetuosity of youth. (Or is that just what older people think?) The lightness of a wastrel’s self-pity in ‘O wüsstest du, wie viel ich deinetwegen,’ was likewise finely judged. So too was the cruelty of his beloved in ‘Du denkst mit einem Fädchen’.

 

Yet, as the two archetypes, stereotypes, call them what you will, drew closer towards the end of the first half, there was genuine affection too, or so one thought. The rocking piano in ‘Nun lass uns Frieden schliessen’ suggested, without unnecessary underlining, a peace perhaps all the more interesting, or at least characteristic, for its lack of interest in passing all understanding. For, as that half had climaxed with an acknowledged role for Wolf’s Lisztian Romantic inheritance, so the piano harmonies of the second half took up from that half-destination, taking us somewhere new, briefly darker (the austere Doppelgänger flirtation of ‘Wir haben beide lange Zeit geschweiegen’) and ultimately, once again, ‘lighter’, yet perhaps never truly ‘light’. Sweetness of death (‘Sterb’ ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder’) intervened, yet was it but an act, the commedia dell’arte perhaps, or, as the Marschallin would soon have it, ‘eine wienerische Maskerad[e]’. Increasingly, neither party wished truly to resist, whilst making great play of doing so: on stage as well as in music. An air of Straussian sophistication became more marked, without ever shading into mere cynicism. If the ‘girl’ were always going to win, that was as it ‘should’ be. There were enough qualifications, or potential alternative paths and readings, though, to make one wonder. And then to wonder – ‘lightly’ or no – why one was wondering at all.

 

 

Anderszewski/Philharmonia/Hrůša - Beethoven and Mahler, 15 February 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.1 in C major, op.15

Mahler: Symphony no.5


Piotr Anderszewski (piano)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Jakub  Hrůša (conductor)
 

A frustrating yet far from uninteresting concert, this, the interest lying mostly in moments, corners, even in performative difference. The Festival Hall audience erupted at the end of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, but then London and indeed most other audiences do at the end of any Mahler performance, irrespective of what has actually been heard. Jakub Hrůša is a fine conductor, yet proved uneven here in Mahler. The Fifth Symphony is a very difficult work indeed to bring off; I have heard many conductors come quite unstuck here, not least, in their very different ways, Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim. Probably the best performance I have heard was with the same orchestra as this evening, the Philharmonia, under Daniele Gatti. Comparisons are odious, no doubt, yet Hrůša’s account here seemed very much a work-in-progress: fascinating moments, interspersed with merely loud, fast, even vulgar passages, whose structural role seemed at best unclear.

 

That said, the first movement opened promisingly, with great sadness to the phrasing in particular, although even here the balances were often brass-heavy. The Philharmonia’s string sound was cultivated to a degree, although something a little closer to the sound Rafael Kubelík drew from orchestras – he came to mind not least on account of the Beethoven concerto, on which more below – would not have gone amiss. As I was drawn in, though, there was something more sepulchral, more sinister to be heard and to be felt, almost as if through the harmonic cracks. Hrůša’s Bernstein-like hysteria I liked less, partly because it did not seem to have been born of a Bernstein-like conception of the work; it sounded more arbitrary than anything else. Ultimately, though, this, like much of the symphony, came across as something of a patchwork, not necessarily more than the sum of its parts. There was a keen sense of dualism(s) to the second movement; what I missed here was might mediate between them. Or was I trying to find something that was not there? That I asked the question spoke of a reading to take seriously. And if the music teetered sometimes on the brink of collapse, there is certainly a case to be made for such an approach.

 

The scherzo and thus the second part of the symphony proved nicely enigmatic, if just a little too episodic. It opened in intriguingly materialist fashion, without ever sounding too much like Strauss, at least until the pizzicato marionettes, who surely spoke of something beyond. The impotence of the Meistersinger-ish counterpoint really told too. The close, quite rightly, told us everything and nothing.

 

It was in the third part that doubts really set in – again, despite some thought-provoking moments. Hrůša made a bit of a meal of the Adagietto, not so much in terms of tempo as in succumbing a little too much to the temptation to pull it around. The light shone on its darker corners was, however, well directed. The final movement ideally needed a stronger sense of a whole: easier said than done, I know, yet still necessary. That its mood fell somewhere between gentle humour and mockery was certainly to be applauded, as was the impression of an object of enigmatic fascination.

 

Hrůša seemed on surer ground with Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, and the Philharmonia – somewhat scaled back, yet not unduly – proved quite outstanding here. The problem lay more with Piotr Anderszewski, who seemed unsure quite what he thought of the work. He was quite capable of yielding on occasion, sometimes magically so; by the same token, there was something bracingly modernistic to gleaming, almost Bauhaus-like passages. Others, however, sounded merely brutal. Perhaps it was indicative of a lack of a meeting of minds that Anderszewski seemed at his keenest and most coherent in the first movement cadenza. Hrůša and the Philharmonia might almost have been Kubelík and his Bavarian Radio orchestra, whether in tone or in melodic and harmonic understanding. I should have loved to hear them play Beethoven with another pianist, or with Anderszewski in a different mood – or, indeed, in one of the symphonies.

Jerusalem Quartet: Haydn, 12 February 2018

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet in C major, op.33 no.3, ‘The Bird’

String Quartet in D major, op.64 no.5, ‘The Lark’
String Quartet in G major, op.77 no.1

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

 

Haydn surprises with the unexpected, whereas Mozart surprises with the expected. As with all rules of thumb, there are exceptions, sometimes important enough to have one rethink the entire generalisation. (I remain convinced that I read it once in HC Robbins Landon, yet have been unable to find the source. Please do let me know if you know!) There was no doubting, however, the ‘surprises’, however well one ‘knew’ them already, revealed in the tension of the opening of the first movement to the C major Quartet, op.33 no.3, often known as ‘The Bird’. Indeed, the Jerusalem Quartet’s performance occasionally put me in mind of Bartók. Chirping was no mere tone-painting, of course, but musically generative, just as it would be in the music of the later composer. Throughout, sonata form emerged from and through the musical material and its development, not least the jolt of the recapitulation opening in so unexpected – yes – a key. Tone was varied, at times verging even upon the relatively astringent; there was always, however, a musical justification for what we heard. The throwaway ending was, rightly, possessed of a knowledge that comedy is not only a laughing matter. The ensuing scherzo was heard with a strange, straightforward, almost Beethovenian simplicity and sincerity. Surprises galore followed, with a concision beyond even that of the first movement. The slow movement was taken swiftly indeed, but it worked. If its beginnings seemed again sometimes to hint at Beethoven, the path taken proved quite different. A modulation one can surely only call Schubertian was judged in performance to perfection, telling on account of its integration. Motivic integrity and invention were revealed truly as the agents of comedic drama in a finale that did just what it should, when it should, how it should – without that ever implying there to be no other way.

 

However much there is of Haydn’s music, it is always different. Only to a ear that does not, cannot, listen, will it ever sound ‘the same’. The ‘Lark’ Quartet showed that very well, both as work and as performance. Here, interestingly, the players’ general tone was somewhat different: more modern, even Romantic, although there was certainly nothing anachronistic to it. The contrast with the earlier quartet could only be described as fruitfully dialectical. One size never fits all; there was no attempt to make it do so here. I also noticed immediately how the mood of the first movement’s marking ‘Allegro moderato’ had been captured; tempo is never just, or even principally, about speed. Throughout, an almost Mozartian joy in counterpoint told for itself. The slow movement, here placed second, was again on the swift side for an Adagio but was undoubtedly cantabile. That songfulness was full of integrated incident, worlds away from any lazy all-purpose ‘lyricism’ and all the better for it. The Minuet, again in character as much as mere crotchets per minute, was very much of the allegretto variety. Counterpoint was lightly worn yet generative; so too was the humour of expectation. A Haydn finale, if ever there were one, followed, its moto perpetuo no mere display but musically necessary. Again, counterpoint proved the agent of joy, and vice versa.

 

Following the interval, a performance of the op.77 no.1 quartet breathed the initial sprit of opera buffa, blossoming into ‘purely musical’ delight. The first movement’s tonal structure proved as well judged in performance as in the score, the development’s first modulation the gateway to an exploration such as, one felt, Haydn had never quite conducted before. After The Creation, before The Seasons, he still had so much to say, so many new tonal relations to explore. Beethoven again came frequently to mind in the Adagio, some passages even suggesting his later quartets. The music sang with, through an intellectual complexity that was anything but forbidding; it could hardly have been more inviting. There were surprises galore again in the minuet – a Presto scherzo in all but name – and its trio, the world of the Razumovsky Quartets again close, yet never quite to be confused with what we heard. Invention and wisdom proved quite undimmed in the finale. The minuet from the ‘Sunrise’ Quartet, op.76 no.4, proved a splendid choice of encore, the humour with which its own surprises told as infectious as anything heard earlier. How could anyone not love Haydn?

Theatre of Voices: Stockhausen, 9 February 2018

Hall One, Kings Place

 

Stimmung

Else Torp, Signe Asmussen, Randi Pontoppidan, Wolomydr Smischkewych, Jakob Skoldborg, Jakob Bloch Jespersen (voices)

Ian Dearden (sound design)

 

A Stockhausen performance in London, indeed anywhere, remains an event. Mittwoch in Birmingham went so far beyond a mere event, that I am sure its memory and its ongoing reality will remain with me for the rest of my life. From Chöre für Doris to Klang, you may count me in, not least since there is so much I have yet to experience in the flesh. Stimmung, believe it or not, fell into that category prior to this Kings Place performance. Whereas my companion was already something of a veteran, having attended previous performances in Riga and in London, I had never been in the right place at the right time.

 

Now, however, I was. It was certainly an event – and a musical event at that. However, the experience of Stimmung live reinforced the suspicion I had long held that it was unlikely ever to be the Stockhausen of strongest appeal to me. I am afraid, try as I might, I cannot help but nod agreement to Boulez’s observation: ‘Oh yes, the endless chord, how German.’ Or rather, the obvious Rheingold reference apart, how very un-German. Not that Stockhausen’s apparently minimalist foundation – that B-flat ninth chord in just intonation – proceeds in minimalist fashion, but I keep wishing it would develop into something else. My problem, I am sure, but even in so intriguing a performance as this from Theatre of Voices, I sometimes found it a bit of a trial.

 

Presentation was exemplary. Wolomydr Smischkewych led the singers and ultimately the audience in an initial exploration of overtones, from which this listener – and, briefly, singer – learned a great deal. Whether on a vowel sound or, ultimately, revealingly on a US American pronunciation of ‘weird’, new sonic universes seemed to open up before our ears – and throats. Such was a reminder that for all the New Age baggage to the work, perhaps more of an irritant to some of us than to others, the idea of overtone singing came to the composer from hearing his nine-month-old son, Simon singing in his Connecticut cot. I also heard so much of the foundation for later spectralism. For all the talk of Aztec temples and so on, there is always another side to Stockhausen, a mythology that is not quite what it seems. In that, of course, he is far from unique.

 

The performance was perhaps more attuned to the dramatic qualities, or at least possibilities, of the work than I had expected. For me, that was a definite advantage; the road to La Monte Young et al., whilst I have nothing against it, is not the easiest for me to take. (My companion, by contrast, wished for something still more laid-back, trance-like.) I loved the moments of decision, if you like, generated by the demands of moment form in performance. The closer it came to the actual theatre not only of, say, Boulez’s second book of Structures, but also of Stockhausen’s own Inori and even Hymnen, whose procedures began to seem, to sound closer than I had expected, the more enthralled I was. At other times, I felt a little like someone observing a rite – in this setting, with the performers on stage rather than in the round, something akin to a séance – which not only did I not really understand, but also did not really know how or even whether to enter. At times, I could not help but wonder whether something a little stronger than the wine I had drunk in the bar beforehand would have helped. There was no gainsaying, though, the excellence and commitment of the performances of this, Theatre of Voices’ own ‘Copenhagen version’ of 2006. If I felt bemused, even a little nonplussed, I should certainly give it another try. But first, I think, some Boulez…

Carmen, Royal Opera, 6 February 2018

Royal Opera House

Carmen (Anna Goryachova)
Images: Bill Cooper

Moralès – Gyula Nagy

Micaëla – Kristina Mkhitaryan
Don José – Francesco Meli
Zuniga – David Soar
Carmen – Anna Goryachova
Frasquita – Jacquelyn Stucker
Mercédès – Aigul Akhmetshina
Escamillo – Kostas Smoriginas
Dancaïro – Pierre Doyen
Remendada – Jean-Paul Fouchécourt
Voice of Carmen – Claude de Demo
 

Barrie Kosky (director)

Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Joachim Klein (lighting)
Otto Pichler (choreography)
Zsolt Horpácsy (dramaturgy)
Alan Barnes (assistant director)


Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

At least Francesca Zambello and her donkey are gone. The Royal Opera’s previous production of Carmen worked in its way – not entirely unlike Meyerbeer at less than his best – yet it offered neither ambition nor insight; indeed, it appeared not even to try. Barrie Kosky rarely lacks ambition; insight is often more hit or miss, though. Kosky is a frustratingly inconsistent director: he is capable of outstanding work and something not far from its opposite. This Carmen is neither. First seen in Frankfurt in 2016, it offers an apparently arbitrary mixture of abstract grand opéra – surely the Intendant of Berlin’s Komische Oper should have a little more respect for, or at least understanding of opéra comique – and the irritating silliness of ‘look at us’ variety show routines. A few visually arresting moments, courtesy of Katrin Lea Tag’s designs, notwithstanding, it amounts to substantially less than the sum of its parts, not least on account of its perverse apparent lack of interest in characterisation.



I am not at all opposed to the idea of something adventurous being done with, even to, Carmen. It will always survive. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s recent, superlative Aix staging showed what can be done with a fundamental rethinking of the work. Not the least of its interesting insights was how, if we decentre Carmen, look at the action, in this case already very much in the realm of metatheatre, from the standpoint of, say, Don José, Carmen might actually become a far more interesting character. Kosky seems at times to inch towards the metatheatrical. ‘Don’t we all?’ one might well ask. However, it is only, ultimately, with the insight, if one can call it that, that Carmen is a show, all singing, all dancing – except when, occasionally, it is not. And so, the steps, certainly a fine edifice in themselves, and suggestive both of an amphitheatre and a bullring – are they not often the same thing in any case? – offer a way for the action to look at us, and for the characters not to look at each other. That is pretty much it, though. The loss, moreover, in never really knowing who anyone is – or rather knowing, but not on account of anything the production is showing or suggesting – is great. One can imagine the pseudish Christof Loy doing something like this; indeed, he did in his dreadful Lulu. Kosky is capable of much better than that, though.

 

The lack of realism – as an æsthetic: I am certainly not insisting that one ‘must’ see a romanticised Seville – inevitably hampers the musical performances too. In this weird abstraction, especially when punctuated by lengthy, breathy, soft-porn-style readings from the ‘Voice of Carmen’, over loudspeakers, we lose sight, aural sight too, of connections in the score as much as on stage. Again, it is not that I have a problem in principle with attempting an alternative to the dialogue, ‘edited by Barrie Kosky’ or not. However, the loss of a true sense, whether ‘then’ or ‘now’, of opéra comique, is not compensated for by any other gain. Further misguided performing choices, ‘after the critical edition by Michael Rot, adapted by Constantinos Carydis for Frankfurt Opera, 2016)’, conspire to the general ‘effect without cause’ of making heavy weather indeed out of so ‘Mediterranean’ a work.

 

I have never heard a poor performance from Jakub Hrůsá, a conductor I admire greatly. Here he certainly proved suggestive, in an admirably anti-Nietzschean way, of a ‘symphonic’ Carmen, Beethoven and even Wagner often coming to mind. Whether that really might be what Carmen needs, let us leave on one side; I had my doubts, but there are possibilities here worth exploring. In this context, however, it seemed more another confusing strand. Whilst Hrůsá often drew fine playing from the orchestra, in terms of colour, precision, even harmonic motion, there were perhaps a few too many slips, not least from the brass. Likewise, whilst choral singing was generally good, there were also passages in which stage and pit fell noticeably, disconcertingly out of sync. Such problems I can well imagine being ironed out in subsequent performances.

 

Escamillo (Kostas Smoriginas)

Anna Goryachova sang well enough in the title role, with clean command of line. I could often make little sense of her French, however, without the titles. Moreover, I had the strong sense she would have made more of an impression, if not in a smaller theatre, then at least in a more intimate production. The same could be said of most of the cast: hardly their fault. Francesco Meli’s all-purpose Italianate style had its moments, and in some senses might have been better suited to the staging. One surely wants something a little more idiomatic for Don José, though, and surely less coarse on top. Kristina Mkhitaryan’s Micaëla sounded curiously undifferentiated from Carmen, but again that was not necessarily the fault of either singer. The production offered her little opportunity to show who she was, but again she sang well enough. Quite why Escamillo was turned into a figure of mere camp is anyone’s guess; Kostas Smoriginas did what he could in the circumstances, and yes, you have guess it, did that well enough. Indeed, there were no causes for complaint amongst any of the cast. Ultimately, however, for all the production’s increasingly attempts, somehow both desperate and smug, to ‘entertain’, proceedings quickly became more tedious than anything else. That is an achievement of sorts for Carmen, but a sad one. Carmen’s shrug at the end – it had all been just a very protracted game – said it all really.