Aminta e Fillide and Venus and Adonis, Guildhall, 5 June 2019

Milton Court Theatre

Images: Clive Barda
Cupid (centre, Collin Shea) and chorus

Aminta – Harriet Burns

Fillide – Carmen Artaza

Venus – Sîan Dicker

Adonis – Andrew Hamilton

Cupid – Collin Shay

Shepherdess – Katherine McIndoe

Shepherd – Damian Arnold

Victoria Newlyn (director)

Madeleine Boyd (designs)

Andrew May (lighting)
Karl Dixon (video)

Chorus and Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Chad Kelly (conductor)

The stature of John Blow becomes clearer, it seems, with every encounter. Alas, paucity of encounters remains the problem for many of us. This was the first live performance of Venus and Adonis I had heard, let alone seen; I am delighted to report that it did not disappoint. Indeed, it brought vividly to life what so many of us know intellectually: that if Purcell’s genius will likely always remain the loftiest summit of English Restoration music, it stands far from alone; and that, moreover, Dido and Aeneas owes a great deal to the example of what is rightly considered the first English opera. When one hears Blow’s anthems, many characteristics one has hitherto considered quintessentially Purcellian are revealed to be part of a common musical language; the same is true here, and for dramaturgy as well as musical language.

Adonis (Andrew Hamilton)

Any passable performance of Dido – ‘Tristan und Isolde in a pintpot’, Raymond Leppard once called it – will fly by; so did this more than passable performance of Venus and Adonis. Conductor Chad Kelly seemed very much in his element, continuo and orchestral playing warm, flexible, charged with dramatic meaning and atmosphere. The singers did too. Sîan Dicker sang and acted a splendidly voluptuous Venus: sexier than Dido, yet moving towards similar grief. If the latter were ultimately more generalised, that shows the final distinction between Blow’s opera and Purcell’s and is no reflection upon a fine performance indeed. Andrew Hamilton’s Adonis, perhaps not unlike Aeneas, was similarly imbued with allure: less complex, in his own way more vulnerable – he, after all, meet death – and a blanker sheet for projection in an under-acknowledged reversal of gender norms. Collin Shay’s Cupid fascinated. Presumably in conjunction with director, Victoria Newlyn, Shay presented a god of love by turns sullen, awkward – childish, one might say – who sprang to animated life when finally heeding the call to use his bow. Damian Arnold’s finely sung and acted Shepherd had one wishing there were more for him to do, the chorus from which he sprang exemplary in delivery of notes, words, stage action and that alchemy we call opera. Newlyn’s production presented Venus as an artist(e), her final words delivered movingly almost as a nightclub torch song. Video projections of the random world of Internet dating – iCupid, should we call it? – and a telling contrast between such urban modernity and the decidedly down-at-heel American hunting community from which poor Adonis had been plucked brought to contemporary life dramatic conflicts that have haunted our civilisation however far back we may care to trace.

Cupid, Aminta (Carmen Artaza),
Fillide (Harriet Burns)

I was less sure about her staging of Handel’s Italian cantata, Aminta e Fillide, and ultimately less sure whether staging it had been a good idea at all. This is not a dramatic piece and was never intended to be. Concert performance without stage hyperactivity would surely have served it better. One can try, of course, and I should be delighted to be prove wrong. Frenetic scene changes taking us from airport lounges to early video games were doubtless fun for those taking part, extras included, but seemed only to confirm that less would have been decidedly more. Cupid's linking presence felt forced; still more so did the desultory appearance of Botticelli's Birth of Venus at beginning and end.Here, Kelly seemed more constrained by what has become ‘period’ convention, vibrato-less strings sometimes grating, the music in general more regimented. However, Harriet Burns and Carmen Artaza offered some dazzling singing, especially later on, coloratura and range of colour alike showing what should really lie at the heart of this pastoral. 

Manon Lescaut, Opera Holland Park, 4 June 2019

Holland Park

Images: © Robert Workman

Manon Lescaut – Elizabeth Llewellyn

Lescaut – Paul Carey Jones

Des Grieux – Peter Auty

Geronte di Ravoir – Stephen Richardson

Edmondo – Stephen Aviss

Singer – Ellie Edmonds

Dancing Master – John Wood

Innkeeper, Sergeant of the Royal Archers – Alistair Sutherland

Backing Singers – Hannah Boxall, Susie Buckle, Lara Rebekah Harvey, Ayaka Tanimoto

Shadow Manons – Angelica Barroga, Isabella Martinez, Hanan Mugga

Karolina Sofulak (director)
George Johnson-Leigh (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Tim Claydon (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia

Peter Robinson (conductor)

Manon Lescaut is a curious opera. Its protracted genesis and sometimes unsatisfactory dramaturgy seem ultimately to work against it, whatever the attempted solution. A Leipzig revival of its original, 1893 version suggested that reinstatement of the original first-act finale was certainly not the answer. I am yet to be convinced that it can be made to work, though I shall happily be proved wrong. Perhaps Puccini’s greatest devotees feel the same way I should about La finta semplice, Feuersnot, or Die Feen. The operatic repertoire is full of works, after all, whose potential has been incompletely realised; we do what we can with them and should often be the poorer without them. The gap between potential and realisation can even prove part of a work’s fascination, especially in a knowing production and performance.

Elizabeth Llewellyn (Manon Lescaut) and Shadow Manons

Alas, Karolina Sofulak’s production, ambition notwithstanding, does not come across as engaging with quite enough of those apparently intractable problems – and a little too often seems unclear. The 1960s updating works well enough in theory and has its moments in practice too. A society preoccupied with style and with a strong tension between reaction and liberation has obvious parallels with the eighteenth-century world of the Abbé Prévost. Where Sofulak’s production does score is in trying to make something of the heroine. If only we had something of Manon and Des Grieux’s time in Paris, she might come across as more fleshed out. (Puccini continued to entertain such a possibility for a decade.) Instead, Sofulak offers us a nightclub singer and entertainer who attempts – I think – to take responsibility for her own career, to wrest its control from the lowlifes around her. The idea seems to me a good one; the problem lies, perhaps as with the work, in its partial, confusing realisation. There is nothing wrong with making an audience work, asking it to fill in certain aspects; not everything can be portrayed on stage or indeed in the pit. The clashes between ‘original’ and new setting, though, often seem arbitrary rather than productive. By the time one realises what is happening in the fourth act, that Manon is making her escape from this world, abandoning her lover too, one may have ceased to care. A keener sense of place, even if place explicitly not created, would have helped. One does not need to see Le Havre or the bizarre ‘desert’ outside New Orleans, but if much is to remain the same, either abstraction or knowing, purposive infidelity may need to come across more strongly. Perhaps, though, I was missing the point and might feel differently on a second viewing; it has happened before and will surely happen again.

That difficulty with caring or with otherwise feeling truly involved is part of the work’s problem, at least for many of us. Too often, I found myself wishing that this were Lulu or, somewhere in between, Boulevard Solitude. Perhaps, though, that did credit to much of the musical performance. If, in my heart of hearts, I might prefer a few more strings for Puccini, I could hardly fault the City of London Sinfonia under Peter Robinson, and do not wish to try. There were a few moments when pit and stage fell out of sync in the first act, but that can happen in the finest of houses. More to the point, Robinson and his players pointed up nicely the character of each act, permitting one’s ears to draw all manner of connections between Puccini’s roots, his future, and his influence and affinities. Wagner loomed increasingly large, but so did devices Puccini would adopt more successfully in subsequent works, as well as sounds one might have thought stolen from Debussy, Stravinsky, even Poulenc – save for the fact that, if anything, it must have been the other way around.

Lescaut (Paul Carey Jones), Manon, Geronte (Stephen Richardson)

Elizabeth Llewellyn unquestionably did what she could to have one care about Manon and her plight. If the character remains unsatisfactory, that is in no way to be attributed to Llewellyn, whose typically intelligent, sympathetic performance rose far above the vocal difficulties recent laryngitis occasionally revealed. Paul Carey Jones and Stephen Richardson brought similar depth to their roles as Lescaut and Geronte respectively, again supplying as much implied context as anyone could reasonably ask. If Peter Auty’s performance as Des Grieux proved somewhat generalised and gestural, there could be no doubting his enthusiasm. The Holland Park Chorus combined such enthusiasm with greater precision – vocal and staged; so too did other members of the cast, Stephen Aviss and Alastair Sutherland making a particular favourable impression.

Aimard et al.: Stockhausen, 1 and 2 June 2019

Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room

Klaverstücke I-XI; Kontakte

Stimmung

Für kommende Zeiten

Zyklus; Mantra

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Tamara Stefanovich (pianos)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Marco Stroppa (sound diffusion)

London Voices:

Laura Forbes L’Estrange (sopranos)

Clara Sanabras (mezzo-soprano)

Richard Eteson, Ben Parry (tenors)

Nicholas Garrett (bass)

Ian Dearden (sound projection)

Apartment House:

Simon Limbrick (percussion)

Philip Thomas (piano)
Kerry Yong (piano, keyboard)

Rhodri Davies (harp)

Anton Lukoszevieze (cello)

As Amsterdam celebrated ‘Aus Licht’, not quite the complete Licht premiere we still await, but a generous tasting from all seven operas, those of us unable to attend had to content ourselves with a Stockhausen weekend in London instead. It was certainly an intense couple of days, rewarding too, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard at its heart, just as he had been of the Stockhausen performances at last year’s Musikfest Berlin (three of them reviewed here and here).

I have purposely not re-read what I wrote then, though I shall have a look after posting. The enormity of Aimard’s achievement in the first eleven Klavierstücke, followed here by Kontakte (in a different programme in Berlin), was not diminished by a second hearing, quite the contrary. Indeed, a fundamental theme to everything heard here, in many ways a more diverse offering than in Berlin, was the crucial role played by performance in Stockhausen. Aimard’s ordering remained III, IV, II, I, V, VIII, VII, VI, XI, IX, X. Some people, I know, would have preferred the first four to have been played I-IV, but for me, the order of chronological writing worked well too. The third took its leave from Stockhausen and Webern, but starker, more northern (less Austrian?) Hard on its heels, the fourth initially yielded, almost as if a second subject, but quickly went on its own way: in the same line, yet different. Aimard’s gleaming Yamaha sound seemed ideal for the fusion of musical meaning and serial requirements that lies at the heart of the composer’s art – and thus at the performer’s too; for here was no doubting Aimard’s internalisation of this music, just as there would not be for Beethoven or Messiaen. The second piece sang and struggled, detail of duration and thus of meaning at its heart; the first proved frenetic, especially when not overtly so, in its post-Schoenbergian build-up. Time, then, for a little pause.

There was an intriguingly Boulezian éclat to the opening of the fifth piece, though its development – I think we can call it that, at a pinch – proved once again more overtly Germanic. Much the same might be said of its later chordal progress. The scale was, of course, quite different here from the shorter, earlier pieces; it was made not only to feel so, but necessarily so. An intensely dramatic eighth piece seemed, at least in retrospect, to prepare the way for the artistry with which, in the seventh, repeated pitch was ‘repeated’, or perhaps better, reinstated. (Such was how it felt, anyway.) It was as if this was the moment Stockhausen truly began to itch for the stage, even if it were that of a late Wagnerian ‘invisible theatre’. Aimard’s mastery of resonance already looked forward, fascinatingly, to the second and third concerts of what one would generally, quite rightly, think of as a very different Stockhausen. Then came the sixth, to which, again in retrospect, everything seemed to have been working towards. It sounded generative in a fashion both ‘traditional’ and anything but. How its silences told! How everything else did too, in all its combinations of parameters and their relationships. Monumental was the word for it.

There was opening éclat to the eleventh piece too. By now, there was little way one could not but listen to every note and its relationship to every other – or rather, at least think and feel that was what one was doing. Such was the way Stockhausen and Aimard had led us in. Were those strainings towards electronic sound? Perhaps it was fancy, but is that not too part of musical composition, performance, and listening? Likewise in the ninth piece, albeit in more chordal terms – yet still in terms of something greater. What was ‘old’, what was ‘new’? One asked, even if one could not answer. Finally, we heard the gloved scherzando of Klavierstück X, pyrotechnics and poetry as one: a Feux d’artifice for the atomic age. It was terrifying, thrilling, anything other than consoling. Sheer variety of sound, of voices, of music was very much the thing. And if the final phrase were not quite throwaway Haydn, nor was it quite not that.

For Kontakte, following an interval, Aimard returned (!) with Dirk Rothbrust (percussion) and Marco Stroppa (sound diffusion). Here, virtuosity was returned with interest: à 3, as it were. Theatre was more overt, in every sense, spatial performance and hearing to the fore from the outset. Precision, however, was every bit as crucial, as awe-inspiringly realised, as in the solo piano works. It was interesting to reflect, historically, on how twentieth-century percussion may have paved the way for electronics; such seemed to be part of the ‘moment’ here, at least. At one point, I almost fancied I heard helicopters about to take flight. Structure and its dynamic realisation in time, form, proved dizzyingly circular, yet not quite. This was music-making at its most open, in at least one sense.

Immediately afterwards, we moved from the Queen Elizabeth Hall to the Purcell Room for Stimmung. How one responds to a performance is perhaps an unusually personal thing. I, however, found this London Voices rendition especially involving, the drama heightened, verbal acuity to the fore. There was ritual, yes, but of an approachable kind, perhaps more akin to what we experience in general concert life, less ‘other’. Overtones did their work, but so did words (whatever one thinks of them). There were pros and cons to hearing this after the piano works and Kontakte; for me, on this occasion, the former outweighed the latter.

Likewise, after a good few hours’ break, for the following day’s Für kommende Zeiten. Here, the intuitive music that is not improvisation, the verbal scores that seem both to require reading and performance in just as emphatic a way as the Klavierstücke yet also not to do so, will perhaps always remain a mystery, at least to those of us listening rather than performing. The splendid performers of Apartment House, however, took us on a journey as fascinating, at many times as unexpected, as those to which many of us are more accustomed. We did not hear all seventeen pieces, but seven over about an hour and a quarter, ‘Intervall’, for piano duo (the only piece in which precise instrumentation is specified) proving quite the curtain-raiser, as our blindfolded pianists, Philip Thomas and Kerry Yong, acclimatised and gained their sight, in the process seemingly enabling our hearing to become listening. ‘Verlängerung’, ‘Zugvogel’, ‘Vorahnung’, ‘Japan’, ‘Anhalt’, ‘Spektren’, and ‘Schwingung’ followed. It is doubtless the height of Orientalism to say there were hints of an Orient that seemed to go beyond Orientalism, but such was our illusion.

For the final concert, we returned to the Queen Elizabeth Hall for Zyklus and Mantra. Rothbrust treated us to a mesmerising performance of the former, centre stage in every sense. Relationships again manifested themselves not only as points of interest but as the binding material of the music – if not just as in Beethoven, then in a way one might relate to his music, should one wish. Barriers between tuned and untuned percussion seemed to fall by the way. Here was a new orchestra: no gamelan, but Stockhausen’s own, Rothbrust’s own too. Such was the variegation of timbre and its implications, one could imagine never wanting to hear anything else. This was a cycle that was both just that and so much more.

Aimard returned for Mantra, with Stroppa and Tamara Stefanovich. I found myself making comparisons with Boulez’s second book of Structures, which I had heard – and seen – Aimard and Stefanovich perform in this same hall in 2011. Not that the works have very much in common; it was as much a visual-dramatic way in, and very soon more a contrast than a comparison. Two pianos, two pianists, then, played with bells, became bells and their masters. What was the relationship between acoustic and electronic, between work and performance, between instrument(s) and their performers? Such questions, such contests and collaborations, were part of the drama, but so too was an almost conventional battle royal heard at one point, Stockhausen’s often overlooked (German) sense of humour certainly given a fair hearing in this case. His music proved as obstinate as Beethoven and as strange to us as – well, life on Sirius. Aimard and Stefanovich afforded us as strong a sense of the whole as they might have done in Bach or Brahms; within that framework, there were in equal measure to be heard, felt, even thought, great subtlety and starkness. There was ritual, of course, but again not of an especially esoteric kind. There was no doubting either the composer’s voice or that of his performers. The sense of aftershock following the pianists’ howling proved almost Mahlerian. What did it mean? Who knows? Perhaps the question is as irrelevant as Stravinsky would have us believe, or as the ritual of later Stockhausen works such as Inori might suggest. The ensuing two-piano-plus toccata proved at least as mesmerising as Zyklus; and likewise changed the face of all that came thereafter. Form manifested itself in work, performance, and listening – even if, sometimes especially if, one could not put a name to it. There are, after all, many such mysteries in our world and beyond.

Levit - Beethoven and Rzewski. 24 May 2019

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven: Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, op.120

Rzewski: The People United will never be Defeated!

Igor Levit (piano)

Following Igor Levit’s Goldberg Variations two nights previously, we now relaxed with a little light music. A programme of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations – how often would that appear in the first half of a concert? – and Frederic Rzewski’s The People United will never be Defeated! (not, as I misnamed it in the former review, in a bizarre, unconscious Anglicisation, ‘The People United shall not be Defeated’!) evidently, quite rightly, thrilled pianist and audience alike, eliciting a rare Wigmore Hall standing ovation.

 

First, then, Beethoven’s thirty-three variations on what he may or may not have called a Schusterfleck (‘cobbler’s patch’), the latter theme taken faster than I can recall, yet fleet rather than harried. The first six variations had a sense of an exposition, only to have their parameters transformed, transfigured, blown to smithereens. Smiling yet serious – echoes, I thought of the G major Sonata, op.14 no.2 – the first variation proved beautifully variegated, though never arch. Who could not have smiled at the lovely, throwaway final phrase? Almost pointillistic Mendelssohn in the second was followed by a third variation as seductive as anything in Liszt, its whispered, Schumannesque confidences serving only to remind one that there is little, save in Chopin, that nineteenth-century Romantic piano music does not owe to Beethoven. By the time we reached the fourth variation, Beethoven’s transformative method was clear – and, just as much to the point, felt: not just between variations but within them. The Lisztian sense of two hands becoming one was duly apparent in the fifth variation, the sixth showing harmonic proliferation – variation form notwithstanding – well under way.

 

And so, the stage had been set for what we might think of – and surely experienced as – gigantic development and finale (i.e. development upon development). Beethoven and the idea of Beethoven so condition how we understand German and much other music thereafter – perhaps not Ravel, who spoke of ‘le grand sourd’ – that the very idea of musical development is well-nigh impossible to dissociate from his music. (And why should anyone try?) At any rate, I heard the remainder less as individual variations – and I suspect that was at least in part owed to the performance. All tendencies – modernist, Romantic, Classical, even Bachian – came more into their own, whilst at the same time combining to make the sense of a whole still stronger. Dialectics. Major and minor, oscillation between which Charles Rosen famously discussed as a hallmark of the Classical style, and other dialectical poles truly became the stuff of musical argument. Pauses, syncopations, a simple V-I progression all told: again in themselves and as part of something much greater. Can music go beyond the late Beethoven sonatas? If so – and many would say it does in the late quartets – it did here, just as the Ninth Symphony, in a rare meaningful performance, will beyond its eight predecessors. Indeed, I drew thematic and harmonic connections with the rest of Beethoven’s œuvre, with musical history more broadly; not for nothing did another great culmination, the Missa solemnis, come to mind. The array of contrapuntal procedures heard here, however, was far more developmental; this is not the alienated masterpiece Adorno discerned in Beethoven’s Mass. It is still a set of variations, after all. I am not sure, though, that I have ever heard this work sound so productively difficult and engaging.

 

A bold, confident statement announced Rzewski’s panoramic set of variations, immediately varied. Grand Romanticism, Webern-like pointillism, so much was more or less immediately thrown into the mix, direct and elusive. Here the opposites were more obvious, perhaps, but Rzewski’s – and Levit’s – aims here were different: the desire to give voice recalled to me, perhaps eccentrically, Henze’s song-cycle, Voices. Levit stretched the keyboard, it seemed, to many of its limits, to bring to life a very different world from Beethoven’s, one in which one might see and hear events in Chile on the television, one in which solidarity and class consciousness were both more advanced and more under siege, as well as entirely different in nature. The musical questions were different too – or were they? That there were no easy answers was not the least hallmark of this performance, as well as reflection upon it. Transcendental virtuosity was required – and received. Monumentalism too: perhaps in the opposite direction from Beethoven, Rzewski self-consciously returning at times to hyper-Romanticism. Equally present, however, was poignancy, never more so than in those whistled memories, never quite the same. There could be no passive listening here, any more than political quietism. Is the work ‘too much’? Perhaps, but some might say the same of Beethoven. And what does that really mean? Nothing, probably. Through the piano and through Levit, it seemed, both composers spoke; so too did humanity.

Levit - Bach, 22 May 2019

Wigmore Hall

Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

Igor Levit (piano)

With this outstanding performance of the Goldberg Variations, Igor Levit opened a series of three concerts performing celebrated sets of piano variations. To come are a pairing of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Frederic Rzewski’s set on The People United will never be Defeated, and finally Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia on DSCH.

It struck me from the opening bars of the Aria that this would be a very different performance from that of Levit’s Sony recording. This was to be a performance for here and now, the work rethought and reimagined. Every note of the Aria seemed considered, quite without pedantry, instead freshly discovered: if not prelapsarian – Bach is too human for that – then pristine. This reading proved freer, I think, certainly different, and was very much a reading for the piano, sustained as only this instrument can. Pianists imitating harpsichordists seem to me as misguided as vice versa; they can and should learn from each other, but learning is a very different thing from an attempt to imitate that will always be in vain.

The first variation’s release of pent-up energy made for an ebullient contrast, variegated within a logical framework. (Is that not the essence of Bach?) Its two succeeding variations had a strong sense of succession, the third in particular already integrative of tendencies within the music we had heard up to the point. A pleasing sturdiness characterised the fourth, a sturdiness that yet quested – and how, leading to flawless virtuosity in the fifth: a brilliant moto perpetuo through which, crucially, music was realised. Harmonic twists told without exaggeration in the sixth, laying the groundwork for a finely pointed seventh variation that released Bach’s own caprice (as opposed to being capriciously realised). By the time that we reached the ninth variation, the third of the canons, a grace that elicited reflection – where we had been, would be, but also very much what lay beneath the surface – was, quite rightly, the order of the day. Intimations of a Mendelssohn scherzo in the eleventh, a twelfth variation that spoke of strong kinship with that sturdy fourth, and a thirteenth that presented Bach as inspiration for Mozartian classicism, left-hand voicing that was loved and elicited love, with a spring in its step: the dizzying conspectus of ways in which we might think of, perceive, and respond to variations could not have been more immanent. Energy once more released in the fourteenth invited Levit – invitation graciously accepted – to take all the time in the world for the fifteenth variation: an invitation, as Schumann might have put it, to explore new paths, technical and expressive.

And so, the ‘Ouverture’ sounded very much as such: a fierce, Frenchified exterior heralding just such new beginnings that were yet old. From the seventeenth variation onwards, there was very much a sense of new territory broached within that logical framework: for instance, a twentieth variation whose caprice connected us with the world of the seventh; a twenty-first that sounded both more archaic and more Romantic; and a twenty-second that proved beautifully, reassuringly reinventive, an utterance from the Bach whose well-nigh divine judgement brooks no appeal. Lisztian display in the twenty-third variation and Mozartian (perhaps Beethovenian too) response in its successor prepared the way for Wanda Landowska’s ‘black pearl’, taken slowly, as only a piano can. Composer and pianist alike offered a personal response of pathos that yet revelled in a labyrinthine harmonic imagination that looked towards Mozart’s reimagings of Bach and Handel, even to Berg. This was a slow movement, an Adagio, in the emphatic sense.

Its successor, the twenty-sixth variation, might have sounded conventional by comparison – unless and until one listened. It really grew during its course, too, as did its successor in response; for by now, it was difficult not to think in Classical developmental terms as well as Bach’s own. The twenty-eight variation brought, even at this late stage, a true sense of ringing the changes, not least through Mozartian subtlety in the chromatic melodies of those crossed-hand lines. Heading towards apparent climax, the twenty-ninth variation was of course followed, surprisingly and unsurprisingly, by the rejoicing of the ‘Quodlibet’. It was a moment for taking stock, a time for Bach the Christian, non-exclusivist, synthetic, to remind us of the fathomless world of the church cantatas through good-natured, ‘domestic’ humour. (Beethoven would surely have nodded assent.) At least that was how it spoke to me: to others, it would doubtless have done differently. With the return to the Aria, we heard and felt something that was both the same as before and very much not. It was, rightly, unclear how and why: music, like so much else, is ultimately a mystery. There is no right and wrong, correct and incorrect: not, at any rate, in the way Thomas Beecham’s ‘drowsy armchair pedants’ would have it. Bach’s score had been beautifully, meaningfully brought to life; next time it would be different.

La Damnation de Faust, Glyndebourne, 18 May 2019

Glyndebourne Opera House

Images: Richard Hubert Smith

Faust – Allan Clayton
Méphistophélès – Christopher Purves
Brander – Ashley Riches
Marguerite – Julie Boulianne

Richard Jones (director)

Sarah Fahie (assistant director, choreography)
Hyemi Shin (set design)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Andreas Fuchs (lighting)

Dancers

Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Aidan Oliver)

Glyndebourne Youth Opera

Trinity Boys Choir

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Robin Ticciati (conductor)

There may be a case for staging Berlioz’s ‘dramatic legend’, The Damnation of Faust; it was certainly not made on this occasion. To be fair, here are arguments either way, not least with respect to Berlioz’s own wishes and practice, and there probably always be. This new Glyndebourne production, however, found itself stuck uncertainly, awkwardly, and most of all tediously, between various poles and possibilities. It seemed to lack belief in the work, or at least the wisdom of staging it as it stands, yet at the same time makes changes so half-hearted, arbitrary, and silly that one wishes it had not. Some of Richard Jones’s recent productions – for instance, anon-committal Bohème and a weirdly unfinished Katya Kabanova, both for Covent Garden – have suggested running out of steam; this did nothing to dispel the impression.

 

Much might have been salvaged in the event of a stronger musical performance. Alas, the festival’s music director, Robin Ticciati failed to provide it. I have yet to hear a performance from him that was not at least disappointing. Here, Ticciati offered a masterclass in the perverse art of rendering Berlioz bland and tedious to the point of non-recognition; only the following evening, listening to Colin Davis’s classic Philips LSO recording, did I feel reassured that, yes, I did know the work after all. Such lack of orchestral colour and warmth – the LPO strings sadly wasted through well-nigh absurdist lack of vibrato –married to inability to marry harmony and pulse, on the rare occasion that the latter were discerned, seemed to indicate not so much an æsthetic as mere incompetence. Notes, bars, phrased, paragraphs, even numbers drifted interminably, until suddenly an abrupt, stiff minor – very minor – eruption would occur: quite arbitrary, yet doubtless considered ‘exciting’ by some. Many paths might be taken to ignite the flame of Berlioz’s Romanticism, from Davis to Boulez, from Munch to Markevitch; a prolonged damp squib leading nowhere at all was what we heard here. When it could be heard, the LPO woodwind sounded gorgeous, not least in solo work. Too much, however, was relegated to the status of a dull backing-track to events on stage, such as they were.

 

Singing was better, if often unidiomatic. French is a notoriously difficult language in which to sing, especially for non-Francophone singers, but this was not straightforwardly a matter of nationality. Many of Julie Boulianne’s words were indecipherable, for instance, and she only really came into her own after the interval. Both Christopher Purves and Allan Clayton enunciated far more clearly. If the latter were not ideally cast, straining at the top, there was little doubting his commitment. A few tricky French corners aside, Purves seemed most at home, a sorely needed energising presence. The chorus had a few rocky moments, its female voices in particular; many of the performance’s stronger musical virtues were nevertheless to be found there.

 

What of Jones’s production? It certainly acknowledged the difficulty in staging the work at all, incorporating additional texts, ‘derived from Goethe’s Faust’, by Agathé Mélinand. Derivation, however, was sometimes oblique – not only because they were, oddly, delivered in French. (Surely English translation would have made more sense in this context.) As with much else, I was left feeling that less or (considerably) more would have been better. Having seen Frank Castorf’s Faust (i.e. Goethe) at the Berlin Volksbühne and heard of his work with Gounod’s version, I could not help but find this both non-committal and unfinished. A half-hearted rearrangement, trying to undercut Marguerite’s assumption by following it with ballet music (the ‘Menuet des feux follets’) in which Faust and his devils rejoiced and bared prosthetic genitalia seemed more to proclaim, ‘let us show our feminist credentials’, than actually to do so. Otherwise, a strange domestication, speaking more by default than of conviction, ruled. Presumably the idea was to show an everyday life that might have been Faust’s and Marguerite’s, but never could have been. By all means question, even negate Faust’s – and Berlioz’s – Romantic questing, but it really needs doing with greater verve and belief. This was often as tired as Ticciati’s conducting.

It is difficult to imagine any Berlioz staging of this memorial year matching, let along surpassing, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s magnificiently uncompromising Paris reassessment of The Trojans. If one does, all the better. However, given the uncomprehending hostility with which that met from many, the world seems likely to continue to receive more of what it most likely deserves.

 

Phaedra, Royal Opera, 16 May 2019

Linbury Theatre

Artemis (Patrick Terry), Hippolyt (Filipe Manu), Phaedra (Hongni Wu), Aphrodite (Jacquelyn Stucker)
Images (C) ROH 2019, by Bill Cooper

Phaedra – Hongni Wu

Hippolyt – Filipe Manu

Aphrodite – Jacquelyn Stucker

Artemis – Patrick Terry

Minotaurus – Michael Mofidian

Noa Naamat (director)

Southbank Sinfonia

Edmund Whitehead (conductor)

Hans Werner Henze’s penultimate opera, Phaedra has been fortunate indeed in London since its 2007 Berlin premiere. Astonishingly, this was the third time I had seen the work in London: first a Barbican concert performance; then the Guildhall’s excellent double-bill, coupled with the early radio opera, Ein Landarzt; now a staging at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, from members and one soon-to-be-member of its Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and the Southbank Sinfonia.

Hippolyt and Phaedra

I continue to find it an elusive, even enigmatic work, difficult to pin down – as often with Henze. There is nothing wrong with that, quite the contrary. Immediately obvious works that have little to reveal on subsequent encounters – Tosca, for instance, whatever its qualities – are not the most interesting. Layering of its libretto, by Christian Lehnert, is, for me at least, a little too self-conscious, indeed in that sense itself obvious; that of the score, however, continues to fascinate, both in itself and with respect to Henze’s lengthy career and well-nigh unmanageable œuvre. Conductor Edward Whitehead and the Southbank Sinfonia proved strong in their communication of the score’s textural layering, Schoenberg, Berg, Mahler, and Wagner lying behind or, perhaps better, beneath it, the orchestra’s lines seemingly summoned up like a refined Götterdämmerung oracle. I was put in mind of a remark by Henze from four decades earlier, from an interview with Die Welt given to coincide with the premiere of The Bassarids: ‘The road from Tristan to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and … I have tried to go further along it.’

Henze’s way was always, or usually, though, then to take up another path thereafter, perhaps resuming that earlier path some time later. We perhaps view his way with greater clarity now, or kid ourselves that we do. At any rate, other tendencies shone through too: Weill-like (Hindemith too?) wind and percussion; mesmerising saxophone lines that lured one seemingly to nowhere (a remimaging of Natascha Ungeheuer?); magical forest colours (König Hirsch); and, perhaps most tellingly, towards the close, when Hippolyt surprisingly, disconcertingly returns as Virbius, the transformational magic of Ariadne auf Naxos, Straussian reference clear, but kinship to Hofmannsthal’s ideas (perhaps via Elegy for Young Lovers) ultimately more meaningful. At its best, Noa Naamat’s staging seemed to take its leave from these circles, lines, interactions of musical and aesthetic meaning, a sense of eastern ritual (perhaps a little Robert Wilson, but less formulaic than his work has come) coming into contact and conflict with turning of the wheel. Comparison and contrast with the work of Birtwistle came to mind, as they had on my previous encounters with the work.

Artemis

The singers all proved excellent. Though the work is called Phaedra, I do wonder whether Henze would have been better lending Hippolyt(us)’s name to it. (But then, arguably, Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie is similarly misnamed.) Filipe Manu, due to join the JPYAP next year, proved compelling indeed in the would-be title role, as vulnerable an object of contemplation and, later, as equivocal a vehicle of reinvention as Henze’s earlier Prince of Homburg. Was Hongni Wu’s Phaedra presented too vampishly in this production (not necessarily in performance)? Perhaps, but the deepening of her range of vocal colour throughout the evening offered compensation. Jacquelyn Stucker and Patrick Terry (the programme’s first countertenor) offered strong, detailed performances as Aphrodite and Artemis, whilst Michael Mofidian’s Minotaurus, richly sonorous yet equally careful of detail, left one wishing greedily that he had had more to sing, his persistent stage presence notwithstanding.

Why, then, did I emerge feeling slightly dissatisfied – or perhaps wondering whether I should have done? It may just have been a matter of how I was feeling on the day: it happens to us all. I do not think, though, that it was just that. Did the decision to introduce an interval get in the way? I think it did, making the work seem longer, more drawn out, more sectional than it is. I am not sure that the parameters within which Naamat’s staging had to operate helped in that respect. Though necessarily simple in scenic terms, it paradoxically seemed to dart around somewhat from scene to scene, perhaps through no fault of its own somewhat blunting the underlying ritual power of the score. Perhaps, alternatively, that was actually a reflection of the fragmentary qualities of the opera, of Hippolyt’s partial, flawed regaining of consciousness under his new identity. If I continue to find Phaedra enigmatic, Henze’s genre designation of ‘concert opera’ included, then that will doubtless say something about it, me, the performance, the production, or about any combination of the above. Such, after all, is opera.

Minotaurus (Michael Mofidian), Hippolyt

Jerusalem Quartet - Bartók, 8 May 2019

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.1

String Quartet no.3

String Quartet no.5

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

This was the first of two concerts in which the Jerusalem Quartet would perform Bartók’s six string quartets. If there were slight frustration in my only being able to hear the first, it surely augured well for the second, which I look forward to hearing about, if not, alas, to hearing.

The particular, sometimes competing demands of early Bartók can prove difficult to bring off: no such problem here, in as fine a performance of the First Quartet (1908-9) as I can recall hearing. The opening chromaticism of the violin-duo opening signalled a strongly Schoenbergian presence: one, I think, that endured throughout the quartet and beyond it. For it was not only in the score, though there it certainly was; it was played as such, too, intense yet variegated, in an unmistakeably Austro-Hungarian performance. The Jerusalem Quartet players showed keen ears – and a keen collective ear – for form and structure, expressed without didacticism, born from and living through the notes and their connections. Contrapuntal procedures were invested with dynamism both intellectual and emotional. And how each instrument came into its own through that! New possibilities were signalled and taken in the second movement, which struck a fine balance at its opening between emergence from what had gone before contrast therewith. The finale brought to life a rhetorical disjuncture that had something of Beethoven to it: not in the banal sense of sounding ‘like’ Beethoven’s music, but in spirit, in reinvention. Bartók’s music already seemed to presage the world of Bluebeard, its dramatic flight a product of fierce conviction in performance.

If that final movement, even in the strongest performance such as this, seems nonetheless to go on a little, no one could seriously make such a claim concerning the Third Quartet (1927). Tonality here seemed less on the verge of suspension than beside the point – until it was otherwise. It was certainly motivic working above all that afforded the dynamism in this performance of the opening ‘Prima partie’: dialectical motivic working, that is, in the line of Bach and Beethoven. The music’s emotional intensity somehow seemed both greater and more sparing: surely testament to Bartók’s mastery of form and genre by this stage in his career. The slow-fast ‘Hungarian’ relationship of the first two movements likewise seemed brought to perfection: internalised and thus the more meaningfully expressed. The ‘Recapitulazione della prima parte’ sounded, rightly, not so much as reconciliation but as arbiter and moulder of memory. It was as new as it was old, paving the way for an explosive coda section, as richly developmental within its concise frame as the score from which this magnificent performance sprang.

The Fifth Quartet (1934) had the second half to itself. That uncompromising intensity, intellect and emotion as one, characteristic of both works so far persisted, reinvented itself here too in its first movement and beyond. The players afforded the first subject – I think we can safely call it that – great detail without the slightest suspicion of fussiness, strokes broad, fine, even both, or so it seemed. A pale delirium, increasingly less pale, characterised the response: just as involving, quietly and less quietly generative. Disjuncture and coherence, melodic line and complexity played out in a fashion that perhaps inevitably brought late Beethoven to mind. It made me long to hear the Jerusalem Quartet in Ligeti too. How strange the final poco allargando phrase sounded, yet also how right. I loved the sense imparted in the following ‘Adagio molto’ of a somewhat disoriented and disorienting hymn. (Again, Beethoven’s precedent seemed fruitfully, never oppressively, immanent.) It is ‘night music’, of course, but far more than that. So too is the fourth movement, whose harmony likewise remained fundamental in a not un-Classical way, very much providing a sense of the celebrated Bartókian arch. In between, the scherzo had held harmony, melody, and yes, of course metre in fruitful, riveting dialogue: Haydn for the 1930s. It was Beethoven’s ghost that again lightly haunted the finale, titanic effort to wield material together amply rewarded. But if there were unanimity of purpose, there was equally fierce independence of instrumental voice within that purpose and progress. For work, ensemble, and performance alike, this was emphatically a string quartet.