Le nozze di Figaro, English National Opera, 5 October 2011

(sung in English, as The Marriage of Figaro)

The Coliseum

Count Almaviva – Roland Wood
Countess Almaviva – Elizabeth Llewellyn
Susanna – Devon Guthrie
Figaro – Iain Paterson
Cherubino – Kathryn Rudge
Marcellina – Lucy Schaufer
Doctor Bartolo – Jonathan Best
Don Basilio – Timothy Robinson
Don Curzio – Alun Rhys-Jenkins
Antonio – Martin Lamb
Barbarina – Mary Bevan
Two girls – Ella Kirkpatrick, Lydia Marchione

Fiona Shaw (director)
Peter McKintosh (designs)
Kim Brandstrup (choreographer)
Jean Kalman (lighting)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Nicholas Chalmers)
Paul Daniel (conductor)

Susanna (Devon Guthrie) and Figaro (Iain Paterson)
Images: Sarah Lee

Mozart remains not only the most difficult composer to perform, but also, it would seem, the most difficult to stage. Whether at the Coliseum, Covent Garden, or anywhere else, the number of failed productions should be enough to warn off all but the most experienced of opera directors. Don Giovanni is perhaps the most notorious graveyard of all, but Figaro seems to come close. Whatever her undeniable strengths as an actress, Fiona Shaw seems quite at sea here, though accounts from the Stalls – I was in the Dress Circle – had her laughing uproariously at her own jokes.

A trait shared with many productions is absurdly ‘busy’ behaviour, as if one were unable to hear the life in Mozart’s music without scenic underlining that will always fall short. Much of this activity hails from a wearisome, near-inevitable additional cast of extras. Whilst not so bad as Katie Mitchell’s Idomeneo, where extra-itis reached epidemic proportions, it remains quite unnecessary: the money would surely have been better spent upon providing more strings for an underpowered, pastel-sounding orchestra. One has to wait quite some time before the music – remember Mozart? – is permitted to begin, since characters must try to find a buzzing insect inside a harpsichord. (Yes, I wish I were making this up…) To add insult to injury, the blind man who ‘introduces’ the first act turns out to be Basilio. Apparently, it is intrinsically amusing for someone to be blind, an assumption some, one would hope many, might find offensive. At least it makes a change from another bizarre recent trend, which insists upon turning this stock buffo character into a camp monstrosity that might have had the makers of Are You Being Served? think twice, Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production in that respect as much else the ne plus ultra.

Barbarina’s coarse behaviour suggests that she is more of a drunk than Antonio; I have no idea why. The Count wanders around his garden without his trousers on and attempts to bugger the Countess (whom he thinks is Susanna, of course), though Figaro – intriguingly – emerges a far more central figure in the fourth act than is often the case. Thank goodness for that, since many others are behaving as if they were teenagers out on a (mild) Saturday night rampage.

Peter McKintosh’s designs bewilder. Doubtless some ‘post-modernist’ point is being attempted in having a mix of eighteenth-century dress and vaguely contemporary clothing. It merely ends up looking a mess. The revolving set permits scene-changing, but tends to tempt the production to unnecessary examples thereof. Why, for instance, does the second act suddenly shift to what appears to be a kitchen, rendering nonsensical talk of jumping from the Countess’s window? If the impression of a maze is intended to portray the Count as Minotaur – there are skulls and carcasses all over the place too – then it is difficult to understand why. Perhaps I am being unimaginatively literal about this, but I am unaware that he wishes to kill anybody. Tedious film images portray nothing in particular from time to time, whilst we apparently need a sound relay of fireworks to delay the beginning of the fourth act, since none of us would know what they sounded like otherwise. (If fireworks must be portrayed, a visual impression would have been preferable, and surely would have been better off placed at the end of the act.)

Worst of all, it is difficult to discern any but the most incidental social tension. Da Ponte and Mozart are not Beaumarchais, of course, but this remains a deeply political opera. Here Figaro’s only problem with the Count is that the latter is an unpleasant man unable to keep his hands off anything in a skirt. The French Revolution stands as distant as it does from a wet night in Walthamstow.

If Shaw knows better than Da Ponte, than so does Jeremy Sams, whose ‘versions’ of Mozart operas have become quite a menace. At best, the text is loosely after the plot, weirdly ranging from the occasional correct translation to the language of EastEnders. ‘Where the hell is Marcellina?’ is one unmusical, undignified gem, if I remember correctly. The number of forced rhymes – a few, and I mean a few, members of the audience found them hilarious – is greater than anyone could reasonably be expected to count and I certainly had no intention of trying. Since almost everyone in the audience will know the original, and will be mentally hearing it in opposition to any translation, let alone to this, would it not be more sensible in an age of surtitles to permit Da Ponte to speak for himself?

Musically, things are better, though they ought to be better still. Paul Daniel is a puzzling Mozart conductor. There is life to his reading, at least when it does not race ahead unnecessarily, as in what may well be the fastest fandango on record (needless to say, presented scenically by unnecessary ‘additional’ dancers). Moreover, the astounding finale to the second act veered dangerously close to turning into a trivial forerunner of Rossini. (Nikolaus Harnoncourt, hardly a ‘traditionalist’, has warned against that path, yet increasingly few seem willing to heed him, let alone masters such as Erich Kleiber, Karl Böhm, or indeed our own Sir Colin Davis.) Indeed, throughout the performance, the orchestral sound lacked depth, sounding strangely muted. This is symphonic music in many – though not all – respects, yet it did not sound like it. In a large house such as the Coliseum, one needs a large orchestra; it really is as simple as that. On the other hand, Daniel slowed down beautifully for the Count’s plea and the moment of forgiveness: a magical moment, the only other being the transformation in ‘Dove sono’. That is, sadly, two more magical moments than many performances muster.

Mentioning ‘Dove sono’ brings me to the high point of the performance, Elizabeth Llewellyn’s Countess. An extremely short notice replacement for Kate Valentine – whom I had much been looking forward to hearing – she truly excelled, penetrating to the very heart, in every sense, of Mozart’s greatest miracle of characterisation. Despite the busy-ness around her, Llewellyn managed to impart a considerable degree of stillness: just what the director should have ordered. Whilst this Countess had impressed at Opera Holland Park, she progressed still further here, the handicap of translation notwithstanding. Roland Wood offered a masculine Count Almaviva: temper tantrums the director’s fault, not his. However, he shaded too close to mere speech at times. Iain Paterson’s Figaro, splendid of diction, presented undeniable, truly laudable honesty of character, though there were occasions when he sounded a little on the elderly side for the role. His Susanna, Devon Guthrie, likewise seemed – and this was more a matter of acting than vocal quality – more mature than is often the case or indeed desirable. Lucy Schaufer’s Marcellina, less of an old hag than usual, indeed often seeming younger than her soon-to-be daughter-in-law, proved a cut above the rest of the cast.

I wonder, however, whether the real problem is inability to distinguish comedy from the merely comic (akin to the Rossini problem mentioned above). Comedy is more a matter of form than of making one laugh; if it would be downright offensive to find Così fan tutte amusing, it is surely at least unnecessary to do so with Figaro. It is perhaps no coincidence that by far the best production I have seen is no laughing matter at all, Claus Guth’s brilliant Ibsen-, even Strindberg-like inversion. That, rather than a touch of vomiting in the garden, is the sort of infidelity upon which Mozart’s characters and indeed Da Ponte’s libretto can thrive.

Uchida/LSO/Davis - Haydn, Nielsen, and Beethoven, 4 October 2011

Barbican Hall

Haydn – Symphony no.92 in G major, ‘Oxford’
Nielsen – Symphony no.1 in G minor
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor, op.37


This is the latest of an LSO series in which Sir Colin Davis and Dame Mitsuko Uchida present Beethoven piano concertos alongside symphonies by Haydn and Nielsen. Haydn must rank alongside Schoenberg and Webern as one of the most scandalously neglected of all the great composers of the past, so almost any opportunity is to be grabbed with both hands, especially one involving a master in this repertoire such as Davis. (If you have not heard his Concertgebouw recordings of the twelve London symphonies, you are in for a life-changing experience; if you have, you are still in for another when you listen again.) As for Nielsen: well, I tried…


The Oxford Symphony opened in the vein in which it would proceed, the first movement’s Adagio introduction pregnant with possibility. (Having come from a weekend of Boulez, the parallels were more than usually evident: in the days when he conducted more works from the ‘museum’, Haydn was a particular favourite, often including rarer symphonies, masses, even opera.) Its chromaticism told without exaggeration, a remark that could be applied with equal justice to every aspect of Davis’s reading. The Allegro spiritoso proved vigorous, straightforward in the best sense, Haydn’s music permitted to speak for itself. (What a change from some of the grotesque mannerisms I have encountered from conductors such as Harnoncourt and Rattle – though the latter’s Mozart tends to be worse still.) Haydn’s thematic rigour was lain bare, or rather truly lived. There was, moreover, a grandeur, despite the relatively small orchestra (ten first violins down to four double basses) that another age would have recognised as Handelian. The slow movement flowed nicely, with a central section whose muscular vigour – trumpets, drums, and all – looked forward to those ‘military’ interventions in later works, both symphonic and sacred. Haydn’s contrapuntal mastery was beautifully apparent too, likewise the woodwind magic of the transformed ‘A’ section. The minuet received a model performance: perfectly in command of rhythmic and harmonic motion, whilst the trio’s wrong-footed – or wrong-footing? – rusticism proved all the more amusing for the lack of underlining. Playing it straight is always the better option here, however tempting others may be. The finale was superbly articulated, sunny of disposition, and above all great fun, that fun enhanced by Haydn’s – and the players’ – display of ‘learned’ counterpoint. If Karl Böhm and Eugen Jochum remain my ultimate favourites in this symphony, I defy anybody to hear superior symphonic Haydn anywhere today.


Nielsen’s first symphony opened with astonishingly confident sound from a conductor apparently tackling this repertoire for the first time. If Sir Colin conducted Haydn with vigour but also with the wisdom of maturity, here he sounded like a young, if still wise, man. I cannot imagine the LSO has played it that much recently either, yet it sounded quite in its element. As rhythmically alert as the Haydn performance, the first movement also benefited from ravishing woodwind and resplendent brass. This is not music I find especially interesting, but as strong a case as I can imagine was made. Alas, the following movements, whilst very well performed, seem weaker still as music. The Andante sounds to me akin to a faceless watering down of aspects of Schumann and Dvořák, though Davis and the LSO gave a performance of such burning conviction that I could almost overlook its meandering. If that movement meanders, it does so pleasantly enough, but the scherzo, its debt to Dvořák still more glaring, really seems over-extended, not least on account of the lack of a melodic gift. I wondered whether Davis might have run through the trio a little faster, but that is doubtless not a reaction a Nielsen-devotee would have experienced. The finale emerged in performance with fire and as much direction as could be expected, but its C major conclusion sounded, as I think it must, bizarrely unmotivated: no fault of the performers, though.


Thank goodness, I thought, for the return to great music, in the guise of Beethoven’s C minor concerto. I was a little surprised that the size of the string section reverted to that employed for the Haydn symphony; I am sure Davis employed a good few more when he performed this same work with Yevgeny Kissin in 2007. In truth, this was a more Mozartian performance than that of four years ago: perhaps a matter of Davis’s skill as an ‘accompanist’, bringing out the best in his soloist. For Uchida, especially in the first movement, seemed utterly at home with Beethoven’s lyricism, but sometimes a little less so with the composer’s sterner moments, her first piano entry displaying an unexpected hardening of tone. However, by the time of the long cadenza, magnificently prepared by an orchestra sounding rich beyond its numbers, the soloist seemed fully at ease with all facets of Beethoven’s musical persona: whilst we did not hear, and should hardly have expected to hear, the full throttle of a Daniel Barenboim, there was muscle as well as delicacy, and how Uchida turned the composer’s more lyrical phrases throughout! The slow movement was beautifully poised, again clearly Mozartian in its derivation, yet suffused with a Beethovenian sensibility that peered some way into the world of the Romantic concerto. Firm control of line from conductor and soloist ensured that we heard the Largo as if in a single breath. The finale was equally impressive. From Uchida’s opening statement, one noticed her intelligent shaping of the rondo theme, especially the way she leaned into the A-flat (the second note). Unsurprisingly, Davis proved lovingly alert to the Mozartian tendencies of the Harmoniemusik episode, whilst Uchida played her part here as a true chamber musician.

Exquisite Labyrinth (4) - Hannigan/EIC/Lucerne Academy/Boulez

Royal Festival Hall

Barbara Hannigan (soprano)
Ensemble Intercontemporain
Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble
Pierre Boulez (conductor)


What an embarrassment of riches there has been over this weekend, opening with Rozenne Le Trionnaire’s fine account of the solo version of Domaines, and now climaxing in Pli selon pli, from Barbara Hannigan, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble (another Boulez initiative), and Pierre Boulez himself. This is a work, apparently now complete, whose stature appears to grow with every hearing: there can certainly now be no doubt that it is one of the towering masterpieces of post-war music. But alongside the revisions, it is equally interesting to note Boulez’s transformation of approach as a conductor. His reading certainly does not lack bite, as the ejaculating éclat of both opening and closing chords made clear, but the sonorities seem to have become still more ravishing. More than once I was put in mind of his recent conducting of Szymanowski, and of course his increasingly Romantic approach to the music of the Second Viennese School. For all Boulez’s talk of having devoted too much of his life to conducting, it has clearly enriched his compositional life so greatly that there really are no grounds for such regret and, once again, we heard a conducted performance that was more new composition in the light of recent experience than mere presentation of a work from the museum. (That, by no means incidentally, holds as much for his Wagner and Mahler, his Berlioz and Debussy, as for his own works.)


Following that extraordinary opening chord, we were bathed in the delectable light of Barbara Hannigan’s soprano, her breathing unabashedly sensual, and some truly gorgeous instrumental playing. The Szymanowski-like tapestry unfolded with a perfect balance between clarity and mystery, possibility and purpose: perhaps the essence of what Arnold Whittall has referred to as Boulez’s later ‘modern classicism’. There is something of that quality to his more recent conducting too: contrast the early, angry accounts of Le marteau sans maître and even Pli selon pli, with his more recent work. I do not necessarily prefer one above the other, but experience reaps an undeniably rich harvest. If I thought of Szymanowski, I also thought of Mozart: what ears to envisage such sounds, whether the latter’s Gran Partita, which Boulez has recently recorded with the EIC, or Pli selon pli, let alone to translate such aural imagination into reality! Strings evinced Messiaenesque sweetness, and I fancied that I heard something of a dawn chorus too. The pizzicati of ‘Don’ sounded almost balletic: ‘mellowing’ is not quite the right word to describe the conductor’s development, but a greater willingness to ravish is certainly present and welcome. At another extreme – I was going to say ‘the other’, but Boulez is always more complex than mere binary opposition would allow – there were occasional hints of a viol consort, refracted through the ages.


In the first Improvisation, Hannigan sounded as seductive, as erotic, as a Mélisande, a Salome even, whilst the orchestra surrounding her seemed clearly to draw upon Boulez’s readings of works as apparently different as Das Lied von der Erde – what a contrast with Lorin Maazel’s latest effort in that work! – and Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi. ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ brought a primal scream upon ‘blême’, yet one whose instrumental aftermath both consoled and aroused. Percussion seemed to foreshadow, and yet in performance already go beyond, a work such as Rituel. Of course, the words are almost as beautiful as the music, and the melismatic writing of the third Improvisation heightened our sense of both, especially when so expertly delivered as by Hannigan. Percussion once again came to the fore, both a visual spectacular – the coordination of the players – as well as an aural banquet. ‘Tombeau’ sounded inevitable resonances with other tombeaux, whether Boulez’s own or those of other composers: again I thought of Das Lied von der Erde and Rituel, but also of the bells in Boris Godunov, rejoicing now turned to other ends. The final horn call seemed to evoke Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, one of many farewells to German Romanticism that are yet not quite farewells. For its æsthetic has probably never quite been negated, certainly not by Boulez; via Mallarmé, it may even have been dialectically reinstated, ‘aufgehoben’. Certainly the final blow, cataclysmic yet undeniably pleasurable, suggested less a final full circle than an Hegelian spiral.

Exquisite Labyrinth (3) - Aimard/Stefanovich: the almost complete Boulez piano music

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Notations
Piano Sonata no.1
Piano Sonata no.2

Piano Sonata no.3
Incises
une page d’éphéméride

Structures: Book II

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Tamara Stafanovich (pianos)


A ‘marathon’ indeed, as Pierre-Laurent Aimard put it, though what a marathon, and what a sense of achievement even for us listeners, let alone the performers! Boulez’s ‘complete’ piano music: well, not quite, since, even leaving aside the withdrawn movements of the Third Sonata, we also missed the first book of Structures (admittedly also withdrawn). I should love to hear it in performance: for all the brickbats, it is a high-water mark of post-war serialism and thus a true musico-historical monument. As I once heard Boulez explain, there was very much a feeling at the time that composers such as he, Berio, and Stockhausen, must go through a kind of purgatory, in which even the music of such extraordinary personalities would sound somewhat similar (I am not so sure that it ever did, but never mind…), in order that greater freedom could be achieved on the other side. Would it not have been a thing of wonder to find oneself burned in that purging fire, just once, even if, as Aimard put it, it is not exactly nice music for a Sunday afternoon? Anyway, enough of such rank ingratitude: we heard three concerts throughout that afternoon, in which everything else was present and correct.


Aimard’s contribution was pretty much peerless: what a joy it was to welcome him back to form, in music about which he so clearly, deeply cares. (His spoken introductions to each piece showed great understanding and verbal communication too.) I have certainly never heard the Notations better performed; indeed, I am not sure I have heard them so well performed. Sharply characterised individually, they were also welded in performance as well as in twelve-note organisation into a thoroughly convincing whole. The young composer’s delight in the piano was communicated as brilliantly as his evident delight in the music of Debussy, Bartók, and, perhaps more surprisingly, Schoenberg, especially the Schoenberg of the op.11 pieces. We were of course dazzled by the éclat, which was nevertheless so much more than that, by the staggering mechanisation of the tenth piece, but were equally mesmerised – I am sorry to be using that word again, yet it seems unavoidable in discussion of such music – by the stillness of the ninth, a foretaste in miniature, so it seemed, of the slow movement of the Second Sonata, its air as rare and bracing as that of a mountain lake. Aimard was equally persuasive in his expressively analytical account of the First Sonata. The dialectical games – his own description, so utterly fitting to this music and this mind – between the different types of material both scintillated and beguiled, sometimes both at once. (This is a dialectic, after all!) Even had the pianist not taken such care to explain that productive conflict in words, his musical characterisation would have rendered it vivid to any listener with ears to hear. Freer material – ‘freedom’ is always controlled in Boulez, even in ‘aleatory’ form, let alone here – came properly into conflict with that toccata-like strand in the composer’s piano writing we should hear further unleashed in Incises. Moreover, Schoenberg, I was tempted to say, remained, reports of his death having been grossly exaggerated.


To conclude the first concert, Tamara Stefanovich – still introduced by Aimard – took to the stage for the Second Sonata. One can only admire any pianist able to give an account of this truly titanic work. However, Stefanovich, at least at times, suffered from comparison either with Aimard in the earlier works or with memories of Maurizio Pollini earlier this year in London. Yes, the comparisons are even more than usually odious, yet they were equally unavoidable. I was intrigued to start with by the contrast in touch, Aimard’s echt-modernist Bauhaus gleam followed by hints, and sometimes more than hints, of a heavier, almost old-style ‘Russian’ style. Boulez’s music should by now be perfectly capable of surviving, indeed thriving upon, different interpretative and stylistic strategies. (He himself has shown as conductor what light might be shown upon other composers’ works when a non-traditional æsthetic stance is applied to them. Strauss and Janáček are recent examples that spring to mind.) Yet Boulez as Tchaikovsky became a little wearing, not so much on account of the style itself as the lack of chiaroscuro. There was much that was admirable: for instance, the sense of suspense, hesitancy, as to where the musical dialectic might lead at the opening of the fourth movement, prior to polyphonic disintegration. That betokened true musical understanding. And yet, the whole was not quite more than the sum of its corrosive, Adornian-Mephistophelian parts.


Aimard returned at the beginning of the second concert, to perform the Third Sonata. It remains a formidably difficult to work to come to terms with, not least on account of its incompletion. (Even if one might think differently were one not to know, one cannot, or I cannot, quite erase that knowledge.) This was perhaps a harder-edged performance than that of the First, or indeed the Notations. There was, however, no gainsaying the musical and again dramatic command, as the work’s – and performance’s – twists and turns were navigated. Stefanovich impressed in the opening of Incises, the parallels with Ravel (Gaspard especially apparent) but sadly, there was a sense of skating upon the surface during much of the toccata material. The 2005 une page d’éphémeride, whose Austrian premiere I heard in 2009, remained as full of promise: where will this latest piano project lead? What we have so far sounded suggestively Debussyan here.


Finally came the second book of Structures. Here it seemed to me that Stefanovich was on far better form. Perhaps the extraordinary drama of the work, in which decisions must be signalled by one player to another and then responded to (or not), appealed more to her strengths; perhaps playing with Aimard summoned her to greater heights. Whatever the explanation, this was an unforgettable performance, on a knife-edge – those dialectical games again – but expressive in a way that the trivial Boulez detractors will never understand, since they never actually seem to have the courage to listen to the music, let alone to think about it. The music does not so much move beyond ‘Darmstadt’ serialism as incorporate it and yet show us something new. That ever-expanding universe of serial possibilities is musically and even visually dramatised here, arguably more so than in much of Stockhausen. As for the rumbling, volcano-like ‘cadenza’ with which Stefanovich brought us to the close, that was a tour de force of neo-Lisztian pianism - Funérailles? - to which Aimard could respond with a tentative yet sure Mozartian seduction that pointed the way to the evening’s Pli selon pli.

Exquisite Labyrinth (2) - Gould/Cox/IRCAM/London Sinfonietta/Eötvös, 1 October 2011

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Anthèmes 2
…explosante-fixe


Michael Cox (flute)
Clio Gould (violin)
Sound Intermedia
Carlo Laurenzi (IRCAM computer production)
Jérémie Henrot (IRCAM sound engineer)
London Sinfonietta
Péter Eötvös (conductor)

The second day of the Southbank Centre’s Boulez celebration was composed of a conference, with contributors ranging from Pierre-Laurent Aimard to Arnold Whittall, and this evening concert, focusing on works with live electronics. The derivation from – or perhaps better, expansion and proliferation of – Anthèmes 2 from the original Anthèmes for violin solo, itself derived from the violin part to a realisation of …explosante-fixe..., imparted strong material coherence to the programme as a whole, though just as striking was the astonishing explosion of variety from a single source (ultimately a 1971 kit), arguably still further than that, a single E-flat (German ‘Es’) as a memorial to Stravinsky – and surely also a nod to the opening E-flat of Das Rheingold). If only we could have heard the related Répons too…


First, however we were treated to a conversation between Aimard and Boulez himself. The warmth of initial applause for the composer, suffering from a cold, was striking: a fitting tribute to a career, whether as composer, conductor, essayist, educator, administrator, or simply musical conscience, which continues to dwarf those of so many who have assumed but one of those roles. It was enlightening, especially as a prelude to such a programme, to be reminded of how Boulez has considered electronics above all in terms of a conception of space to clarify polyphony (as opposed to a kind of spectacular spatial tennis, though that may sometimes come into the work relatively incidentally). The method of comparing material whose implications, or many of its implications, Boulez has worked through with those which he has not was delineated as crucial to the composition of those works to be performed – and others, too. Far from coincidentally, the beginning of such explorations was related to his work on the Ring at Bayreuth; indeed, Boulez commented on the inspiration he derived from Wagner: ideas stated in Das Rheingold, only fully exploited in Götterdämmerung. Though this may be more strongly evinced in the orchestral Notations, there is surely precedent for this series of electronic works too. (As a young man, Boulez commented, one has many ideas, but one does not always yet know what to do with them.) Pli selon pli was also discussed, Boulez insisting – and who would need to be convinced?! – that he was not writing algebra, but composing according to the meaning of Mallarmé’s verse, for instance the importance of the number eight, and the dialectic between ornamented and syllabic vocal writing. That, however, was really a story for another day. On all occasions, however, we were to hear how to a certain extent Boulez’s experience as a conductor might, as he put it, have helped ‘destroy’ his experience as a composer. For, as Bakunin, Dresden comrade-in-arms to Wagner, famously remarked, the urge to destroy is fundamentally creative.


Anthèmes 2 was mesmerizingly performed by Clio Gould, Sound Intermedia, and the IRCAM team of Carlo Laurenzi and Jérémie Henriot. I was more or less immediately struck by the Messiaenesque cast of some of the harmonies: something I did not recall noticing before. (Perhaps it was partly a matter of Messiaen having featured so strongly in some of the conference papers.) One hears different things at different times, of course, or at least one does in music worthy of repeated hearings. And from the very outset, I could not help but be seduced by Gould’s exquisite tone, arguably more Gallic in sonority than earlier performances I had heard from Michael Barenboim in Berlin and Carolin Widmann in Salzburg. Actually, there was something of the tennis match spectacular to the electronic to-and-froing, for instance in the second, pizzicato section, but only something, and this was certainly never a sonic ‘spectacular’ for its own sake. Electronics did not merely impress, though; they haunted, too, providing an endlessly fascinating envelope and penumbra for the soloist. Gould’s reading was sharply characterised, offering both contrast and unity, within a fine narrative – for this is, amongst many other things, musical drama – framework: it was playful; it was still; it was so much in between, often all at the same time. One sensed composer and musicians reaching for the skies, very much in line with Boulez’s conception of serialism as an endlessly expanding universe. Instrumentally, one could sense the potential for a full-scale concerto (Anthèmes 3, for violin, orchestra, and electronics, is eagerly awaited), yet at other times one heard a solo work, at others a duet, at others still a successor to the Bach sonatas for violin and continuo. Horizons are for Boulez always there to be expanded. The Queen Elizabeth Hall proved an excellent space for the work and its projection: superior, at least in that respect, both to the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (hardly surprisingly!) and to the the Salzburg Mozarteum’s Solitär space.

This would also be the evening when, long having been fascinated by …explosante-fixe…, I came truly to fall in love with it: surely at least in part a consequence of an equally mesmerising performance from John Cox, electronics again, the London Sinfonietta (including flautists, Helen Keen and Rebecca Larsen), and Péter Eötvös. It might have been a much smaller ensemble than that Boulez employs for his ongoing Notations, but such were the initial and subsequent exultancy that it did not necessarily sound so. Throughout, this would prove a veritable garden of delights – and of almost Haydn-like invention: so many possibilities, some taken, some doubtless remaining. The flute is an instrument I can soon tire of, but not here, not in the slightest. One of the conference papers had suggested that we might profitably understood much of Boulez’s music as being ‘about’ music, but that was not how it sounded here; if anything, this was closer to the ‘absolute’ music of German Romantic æsthetics: music, pure if far from simple. Arnold Whittall’s description of Boulez’s latter-day ‘modern classicism’ came to mind. If Stockhausen in his electronic music claimed to be writing from, for, or to outer space, Boulez proved more evocative of another world, aspirant, fantastic – and, of course, seductive. By the time we returned, or rather turned, to the final ‘Originel’ – generative, but concluding – we seemed to hark back to the delicacy of earlier tombeaux: Debussy, Ravel, even Rameau. The material was transformed by what it had earlier become. Lighting – or rather dimming – was sensitively employed for the ‘purely’ electronic music: it made a point without becoming the point. This must qualify as one of the most exciting Boulez performances I have heard, showing up the nasty carping, whether in France or elsewhere, Boulez and his music still endure, as the risible product of ignorance and envy.

Exquisite Labyrinth (1) - RAM Manson Ensemble/Mälkki

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Domaines (both versions)
Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna

Rozenne Le Trionnaire, Elaine Ruby (clarinets)
Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)


The Southbank Centre’s Boulez weekend, Exquisite Labyrinth, opened promisingly with this concert from the conservatoire players of the RAM Manson Ensemble, if without the blazing assurance that crack professional groups such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Ensemble Modern, and the London Sinfonietta, would most likely have imparted to the music. (That, incidentally, or rather far from incidentally, is one of the many far-reaching legacies of Boulez as conductor from his Domaine musical days onwards: the extraordinary rise in standards of performance for new music.) Still, to have student performers tackling works such as Domaines and Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna at all, is a heartening reminder of how standards have risen at all levels.

Domaines was heard first, in both versions. In the solo version, Rozeen Le Trionnaire proved an excellent guide, as sure of purpose as one must be, in order to bring off a very difficult task indeed. For the soloist must here not only perform, but determine the order of performance, selecting both the placing of the score pages around the stage and one of the two possible ‘pathways’ offered by the passages upon each page: the ‘mobile form’ that was in some respects the composer’s answer to Cage, initiated in the Third Piano Sonata.

In the later version for clarinet and ensemble, Elaine Ruby proved a worthy successor. Indeed, so impressive was the continuity, I did not immediately realise that there had been a change of clarinettist. The visual drama here becomes if not stronger – for monodramas, as Boulez the conductor of Erwartung knows very well, is a searing experience – then perhaps more wide-ranging. (I am not quite sure that is the right word, but at the moment cannot think what is!) The ensemble is split into six groups, of varying size, ranging from the clarinettist, who remains mobile, to sextet. All of the players shone, but the duo of double bass and marimba perhaps especially so. Though electronics are not used, one sensed the foreshadowing of that world in some of the composer’s – and performers’ – timbres. The mirrored enhancement of mobile form was rendered visually and aurally apparent in the finely judged cooperation and mutual incitement from Ruby and Susanna Mälkki. There was a true sense of soloist and conductor sparking music off one another – the former chooses the order the first time around, the latter in the mirrored transformation – and of course off the ensemble too. Boulez may yet have to write an opera, but we were left in no doubt as to his stature as a dramatist.

Rituel is an extraordinary work, of course, another extension of ‘mobile form’, which manages both to sound dramatically spontaneous and predetermined as compositional processional. Perhaps that is not a bad way of considering the possibilities ‘controlled chance’ in Boulez’s æsthetic: it is an opening of doors for the composer as well as the performer. It was here that the RAM players sometimes sounded a little more than stretched: not that anything fell apart, Mälkki’s guiding hand being far too strong for that, more that the demands of keeping together could preclude fuller portrayal of the music’s expressive qualities. One can exaggerate the proximity to Messiaen, but at times it is there. (I was also put in mind of Boulez’s conducting in Munich for the Musica Viva concerts the mediæval Messe de Tournai as a dialogue between ancient and modern, which also took in works such as Bartók’s Cantata profana and Stravinsky’s The Flood: a concert available on Col Legno.) Oboe and percussion, however, were especially impressive throughout. If the music did not quite overwhelm as it might, perhaps it will do so next time, for these players certainly should tackle it again, until it becomes fully embedded in their musical bloodstream.

Coote/Vinke/Philharmonia/Maazel - Mahler, 29 September 2011

Royal Festival Hall

Mahler - Symphony no.10: I. ‘Adagio’
Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde

Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano)
Stefan Vinke (tenor)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Lorin Maazel (conductor)


My response to much of this and last year’s Mahler anniversary bonanza has been to stay away: certainly not out of antipathy, nor out of boredom, nor on account of any other negative reaction to the music of a composer whom I admire as greatly as ever, but simply because there are too many unnecessary performances of that music on offer. Whilst always interested in hearing great or potentially interesting Mahlerians, I simply have no need to hear Maestro x conduct orchestra y in a run-of-the-mill Mahler Symphony no.z. Hearing the symphonies (alas, bar the Tenth) and song-cycles (bar some of the Wunderhorn songs) from the Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, and Pierre Boulez, in Berlin, in April 2007, was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my musical life. When the Philharmonia announced its 2011 Mahler cycle under Lorin Maazel, my enthusiasm was tempered. Nevertheless, I have heard good things, from a variety of sources, many of which I respect greatly, as the cycle has progressed. It therefore seemed time to experience Maazel’s Mahler for myself. On this showing, I am afraid, it emerges as barely preferable to that of Valery Gergiev, the miscast conductor of another (!) recent London cycle.

The opening work, or rather part of a work, the Adagio from the Tenth Symphony was as unbearable as Gergiev’s, albeit in rather different ways. At least Gergiev rushed through his equally micromanaged account; I wonder whether anyone has taken this movement so slowly, whether individually or as part of a complete symphonic performance. Maazel’s reading actually opened promisingly, the viola line tremulous in a good way, suggestive, if we dare follow so Romantically autobiographical a route, of the failing heartbeat more often associated, dubiously or otherwise, with the Ninth Symphony. Thereafter, torpor set in. I have nothing against a daringly slow tempo, but Maazel proved quite incapable of sustaining it, at least meaningfully. Whatever the truth of the minutes on the clock, the music sounded as if it were taken at half-speed, and worse still, a phrase at a time, often with meaningless pauses inserted between those phrases. Worse still again, almost every subdivision of every beat was visibly and, more to the point, audibly, conducted, sapping Mahler’s music of any life. The music collapsed, less under its own (undeniable) weight than under the conductor’s shallowness: there was not even the slightest suggestion that it meant anything, whether or no that ‘anything’ might be put into words. It was, I am sad to say, inert and insufferable. Much of Mahler’s music might well be understood as haunted by death, but that means nothing without the impulse to life, here utterly lacking. Oh for the late Kurt Sanderling, Conductor Emeritus of the Philharmonia…

Das Lied von der Erde was better, though mostly on account of the soloists’ contribution. The first movement, ‘Das Trinklied von Jammer der Erde’, did not initially show Stefan Vinke at his best. Intonational problems compounded the cruel, almost insupportable, challenge Mahler throws at the tenor in this song. However, Vinke improved considerably in the second and third stanzas, the latter evincing the heroism of a Siegfried – or rather the forlorn Mahlerian effort to return to a Siegfried, to which effort's failure the only answer is to fill the wine glass and to drink oneself into oblivion. If only the conducting had not been so regimented; for Maazel, alas, exchanged torpor for brash brutality, the unifying feature being lifelessness born at least in part of that direction of every last subdivision of a beat. Even Sir Simon Rattle at his most tediously ‘interventionist’ rarely conducts quite so fussily. Once again, I longed for Sanderling, still more so for Bruno Walter, cited by Julian Johnson in his excellent pre-performance talk.

The frozen quality, both temporal and sonorous, of ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’ suited Maazel better, if only by default. Alice Coote surmounted a viral infection  in a fine Lieder-singer’s account, equally attentive to words and line. The words ‘Mein Herz ist müde’ were imploring, touching almost beyond words. There was a true sense of this as a song, in which Maazel, mercifully, acted more as ‘accompanist’ than ‘conductor’. (I was again struck by the parallel with Rattle, who often emerges preferably when paying heed to a soloist.) ‘Von der Jugend’ emerged mechanically, but at least there was a Coppelia-sort of life to it, absent entirely during the first part of the concert. Vinke was on good form, by turns playful and nostalgic, doubtless benefiting from the reality that this song is much less of a vocal struggle. If both ‘Von der Jugend’ and ‘Von der Schönheit’ ultimately veered towards the neo-classical, failing to yield as Mahler should, then one could at least appreciate the pointing of the chinoiserie. Meaning in the latter, it must be said, seemed to hail entirely from Coote, not from the podium. Vinke once again showed some strain at the outset of ‘Der Trunkene im Frühling’, but settled reasonably into Siegfried-vein: his was not the subtlest reading, but it was for the most part well enough delivered. Leader Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay provided a delectable solo, but Maazel never proved more than efficient.

It was, then, something of a surprise to hear the baleful opening chords of ‘Der Abschied’ so resounding in menace, movingly responded to by Christopher Cowie’s excellent oboe solo. The problem was that this seemed to have come from nowhere. Mahler’s extraordinary finale needs to be approached, not implanted. One could draw solace that the music, at least to start with, moved fluently, but it rarely moved. Coote suffered a few moments where strain told, not least in a somewhat sour rendition of the words ‘die müden Menschen gehn heimwärts, um im Schlaf vergessnes Glück’, but more important were her palpable sincerity and textual understanding. The final blue light in the distance truly sounded as if it were such in eternity. With the best will in the world, however, it could not be said that her sensibility, even when ailing, was matched by Maazel, despite some fine woodwind playing (and an unfortunate, albeit brief, duet between flute and telephone). The laboured quality of the purely orchestral passages told their own story. Why, I could not help but wonder, did the Philharmonia not offer its Mahler cycle to a musician or musicians better suited?

Exquisite Labyrinth: The Music of Pierre Boulez, Southbank Centre

It would be remiss, to put it mildly, were this of all blogs not to cover the Southbank Centre's coming celebration of the music of Pierre Boulez. Have no fear: I shall be reporting from all of the events. (Click here for a full programme.) The Southbank Centre has been in touch with a podcast heralding what is to come, with contributions from Gillian Moore, Pierre-Laurent Aimard (the series curator), Nico Muhly, and Clio Gould:

Exquisite Labyrinth: The Music of Pierre Boulez by southbankcentre

See also this and many other postings from Classical Iconcolast (here).

Salzburg and/or Paris: Herheim's Meistersinger, 2013

According to an impeccable source (click here), there will be a Salzburg-Paris co-production of Die Meistersinger during Wagner's bicentenary year. (I really should not be publicising this, since I do not want to deny myself the chance of a ticket!) The director will be none other than Stefan Herheim, whose Parsifal, Lohengrin, and Entführung aus dem Serail remain three of the greatest opera stagings I have had the privilege to see. Parsifal, we recently learned, will at last be recorded for DVD release, next year.

Happy Birthday, Sir Colin!

A clip from my performance of the year so far. Click here to read more.

The Passenger, English National Opera, 24 September 2011

Coliseum

Annaliese Franz – Michelle Breedt
Marta – Giselle Allen
Walter – Kim Begley
Tadeusz – Leigh Melrose
Katya – Julia Sporsén
Krystina – Pamela Helen Stephen
Vlasta – Wendy Dawn Thompson
Hannah – Carolyn Dobbin
Yvette – Rhian Lois
Old Woman – Helen Field
Bronka – Rebecca de Pont Davies
SS Officers – Adrian Dwyer, Charles Johnston, Gerard O’Connor
Steward/Elderly Passenger/Kommandant – Graeme Dandy
SS Officer/Kapo – Vanessa Leagh-Hicks

David Pountney (director)
Rob Kearley (associate director)
Johan Engels (set designs)
Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes)
Fabrice Kebour (lighting)
Ran Arthur Braun (director)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Sir Richard Armstrong (conductor)

This is not to be taken in any real sense as a review but rather just as a few observations. ENO’s season, as so often, is a far more interesting prospect than that of its big brother across Covent Garden (three – or four, depending on how one counts – runs for La traviata!) Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, receives its British premiere, in a staging by David Pountney first seen at Bregenz. It is in excellent company, alongside works by Wolfgang Rihm, Detlev Glanert, and ENO’s first ever staging of a Rameau opera, Castor et Pollux (to be reviewed next month).

The problem, I am afraid, is that, on the basis of what I heard, Weinberg’s music is catastrophically inept. It is not merely that it adds nothing to the story; its aimlessness and weirdly arbitrary inappropriateness detract from what ought to be a harrowing tale of Holocaust remembrance. The Passenger is not offensive in the way that Terry Gilliam’s narcissistic Damnation of Faust was – an ignorant anti-German rant that also managed to posit genocide as entertainment – for it is clearly meant well, but the best, or at least most arresting, of Weinberg’s music seems to be heard in the couple of minutes or so before the voices enter, and it is still not very good. Some loud kettledrums at least have an effect. Whatever is one to make of the xylophone runs interpolated later on, though? It is difficult to imagine either musical or dramatic motivation for them: they just come and go. Influences or at least strong likenesses come thick and thin: perhaps most oddly, Shostakovich in jazz mode whilst Annaliese informs her diplomat husband of her wartime activities in the SS. Weill this is not, though it seems pretty clear that there is influence there. Most glaring is a passage – we are on a ship, so I suppose it is deliberate – that sounds lifted straight from Peter Grimes. Hindemith and Busoni might also be present, though the likeness may be coincidental rather than anything else. Otherwise, voices declaim, sometimes break into aria-like writing, whilst thin, irrelevant instrumental lines fill in the space below. Male SS officers veer dangerously close to the unintentionally comic: this does not appear to be an ironic commentary upon their repellent desire to burn human bodies more quickly, merely a product of the composer’s inability to compose appropriate music. A female officer unfortunately reminds one, both in appearance and delivery, of Helga from ‘Allo ‘Allo! What might work in depiction of Occupied France is not, to put it mildly, necessarily the best thing for an extermination camp.

Pountney’s production seems as good as the work is likely to get – and better than it deserves. There would have been a far greater sense of claustrophobia and naked terror, had they not been undermined by the music. Designs (Johan Engels’s sets and Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes) and lighting (Fabrice Kebour) do everything one might have asked of them. Sir Richard Armstrong’s conducting is incisive, the ENO orchestra on excellent, truly responsive form, generating a volume that surprises in the vast expanses of the Coliseum. The singers again make the strongest possible case, Michelle Breedt’s Annaliese properly conflicted and vibrant, insofar as the music will permit that, Kim Begley’s delivery as heedful of text as one would expect, and so on. However, as I said, this is not really a review. For one thing, I left at the interval, unable to drag myself back into the theatre. Perhaps the second act would have proved a revelation. Perhaps not.

Letter to the Guardian: the LPO Four, 23 September 2011

Many thanks to the musicians and academics (some of them both!) who signed this letter to The Guardian: click here.

The text and signatories are reproduced below:

The plight of the four musicians summarily suspended from employment with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (Letters, 19 September) continues. LPO chief executive Tim Walker and chairman Martin Hohmann announced this move as a response to the musicians' signing a letter asking the BBC to rescind a Proms invitation to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra on account of that orchestra's role as an "ambassador" for the Israeli state. To identify themselves, the musicians said they were members of the LPO. They did not claim to speak for the orchestra; nor could anyone reasonably thus have read their signatures, four out of many, in which other affiliations were similarly stated. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Chilingirian Quartet, for instance, have not seen themselves similarly implicated.

The LPO's action raises serious issues of freedom of speech. Yet the management went further still, stating: "For the LPO, music and politics do not mix." The most cursory glance at musical history and, indeed, contemporary musical practice would demonstrate otherwise. As Daniel Barenboim's work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has shown, the contribution of many musicians to create a performance that is greater than the sum of its parts could hardly constitute a more political act. We also note the LPO was happy earlier this year to make a film, introduced by Mr Hohmann, voicing solidarity with Dutch arts organisations facing hardship and extinction from swingeing government cuts: what is that if not mixing music and politics? Whatever our respective views on cultural boycotts, citizens of a democracy should be free to identify themselves with a cause without fear of discipline or silencing. We call on the LPO to reconsider its decision and reinstate these musicians.


Dr Rachel Beckles Willson Royal Holloway, University of London
Théo Bélaud Music critic, Le Petit Concertorialiste
Dr Mark Berry Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Julie Brown Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Gavin Dixon
Dr Michael Downes Director of Music, University of St Andrews
John Fallas
Dr Lucy Grig University of Edinburgh
Dr JPE Harper-Scott Royal Holloway, University of London
Professor Michael Harris University of Paris VII
Dr James Helgeson
Maxim Kosinov Violinist
Professor Erik Levi Royal Holloway, University of London
Jonathan Manson Cellist
Barry Millington Editor, The Wagner Journal
Dr Anna Morcom Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Cornelia van der Poll St Benet's Hall, University of Oxford
Gavin Plumley
Professor Julian Rushton University of Leeds
Professor Jim Samson Royal Holloway, University of London
Roderick Swanston Music historian
Dr Jeremy Thurlow Robinson College, University of Cambridge
Dr Ross Wilson University of East Anglia

P.S. For any French-speaking readers - though I assume if you are readers, you have some English at least! - there is a French translation of the letter at Le Petit Concertorialiste (click here).

Alas, more vindictiveness towards LPO and now OAE musicians...

What a pity that the Daily Telegraph, which today published an excellent letter, in which many signatories protest at the LPO suspensions, should also now publish, albeit only as a blog item, a call (click here) for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to follow suit. The piece is so riddled with errors and general offence, and is so often lacking in logical coherence (basic, let alone dialectical), that it is probably not worthy of further comment, but here are just a few points immediately worth making:

• ' Would they ['the Lefty [sic] music establishment] have responded with equal outrage had the orchestral players been suspended for attacking the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra [etc.] ...?' Leaving aside the question of how many of us calling upon the LPO management to reverse its position could claim membership of any 'establishment', the answer is of course, 'yes'. The issue at hand is not whether we agree with the call from the 'LPO Four' and many others to cancel the Israel Philharmonic Prom. (For what it is worth, I was not at all in agreement with the call to boycott, and I know that many others were not.) It is the suspension of musicians as a consequence merely of having identified themselves as members of the LPO, without any implication that they were speaking on its behalf. I should have the same view no matter what the content of their letter to The Independent. 'Attack', moreover, is a problematical word to have employed, since it might well be read to implying a connection, when there was none, between LPO and OAE members signing the letter and the protests that subsequently took place in the Royal Albert Hall.
•  'the East-Western Divan, whose Arab members represent some of the most vile regimes on the planet'? No, they do not represent any regime: that is part of the whole point of the orchestra. Indeed, many of the young Arab musicians experience great difficulty as a consequence of their membership of this inspiring project. Moreover, but a passing acquaintance with Goethe might have informed our writer that the organisation is called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
• ' Orchestral managements, it seems, are being forced into a corner. No longer will they be able to censure players who publicly associate their brands with offensive or extremist Left-wing views. But Right-wing ones?' And why should they censure players on account of their political opinions, 'offensive or extremist', or otherwise? As for referring to orchestras as 'brands', that is not a conception I or anyone else I know holds of music-making, whether professional or otherwise.
• 'It's not as if the management is short of reasons to take action: defamation of the company name, demeaning the company by behaving in a discriminatory fashion, talking to the media without consent etc.' So an orchestral musician is a slave, who may not speak to 'the media without consent'?
• 'The OAE, it seems, is willing to associate itself with discriminatory views against Israel and Israelis.' Given earlier talk of 'defamation', the orchestra in question may wish to pursue that claim further.
• The mention of anti-Semitism deserves to be treated with contempt, not least given the high proportion, were one inclined to measure it, of Jewish support for the musicians. A classic attempt (which, in a mirror image of the language used here, would doubtless be dubbed 'right-wing extremist') to close off discussion by cynically invoking the dread word should not be permitted to succeed. And no, these are not 'self-hating Jews' or self-hating anyone-elses, another classic, cynical response to such objections.

R.I.P. Kurt Sanderling (1912-2011)

Mozart Unwrapped (8): Mozart for Four Hands - Owen/Apekisheva, 17 September 2011

Hall One, Kings Place

Adagio and Allegro in F minor, KV 594
Sonata in F major, KV 497
Adagio and Fugue in C minor, KV 426
Sonata in D major, KV 448/375a

Charles Owen (piano)
Katya Apekisheva (piano)


This latest ‘Mozart Unwrapped’ concert – Kings Place has chosen Brahms to be ‘unwrapped’ next year – featured piano music for four hands, the first half involving one piano, the second half two pianos. Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva offered generally cultivated readings, though I sometimes found myself wishing for less politeness: this Mozart sometimes veered too close to Dresden china.

The F minor Adagio and Allegro, KV 594, written for mechanical organ, opened with admirable clarity, Mozart’s neo-Baroque chromaticism permitted to tell. The Allegro exhibited a good sense not only of Mozart’s orchestral imitation, not only of typical four-hand texture, but also of his organ writing, strong Handelian influence registering clearly and with purpose. There was lightness of touch but that did not imply superficiality. When the Adagio tempo returned, material sounded properly transformed by what had passed before. As in an opera shortly to come, La clemenza di Tito, even relatively ‘impersonal’ Mozart remains utterly personal.

Hints of Schubert in the textures of the opening movement of the four-hand F major sonata, KV 497, were welcome, though they might have been brought out more strongly. There was, moreover, more than an occasional sense of tentativeness to be heard, from Apekisheva in particular, in certain passages from the Adagio introduction. The performance improved once the main Allegro fell properly into its swing, particularly illuminating attention being paid to Mozart’s inner parts, where much of the joy of his writing for four hands is to be discovered. It was a relief to hear an Andante taken as an Andante, given time to breathe, especially with such a wealth of inner material. However, the slow movement as a whole sounded a little too tasteful, albeit better that than having irrelevant ‘personality’ stamped upon the music in exhibitionistic fashion. Contrapuntal intricacies were well handled, whilst the operatic style harked back (knowingly) to the two-hand F major piano sonata, KV 332/300k. The sense of a concerto finale was there in the third movement, but might have been stronger, more rollicking even. Still, there was much to savour in the complex, almost Schoenbergian working out of inner counterpoint.

The Adagio and Fugue in C minor received a delicate reading, but is delicate what it really needs? (I think especially of a 1947 performance from Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic.) Owen and Apekisheva produced some exquisitely veiled playing, though, especially in the fugue, I could not help but wish they had gone for the jugular. The fugue, oddly, sounded as if it too had been written for mechanical organ, the sense of a Bachian – or Bergian – labyrinth lacking. One could hear a commendable degree of detail, but what did it mean?

The D major sonata for two pianos opened in less tentative fashion, but retained that sense of (neo-classical?) automation. Though the tempo for the first movement was to my mind a couple of notches two fast, the problem was at least as much that it never yielded. The players were technically secure throughout, but, even in a piece that is sunny but hardly full of hidden depths, the music felt somewhat skated over. Much the same could be said of the Andante, taken on the fast side and unyielding. I missed any sense of what was going on beneath the surface: where was the yearning in those operatic phrases? Though marked Molto allegro, the finale sounded more of a Presto – and, more to the point, on occasion a garbled Presto. Such human music must never sound as if engaged in a mere race to the finish; it must always be allowed to breathe. Even when a ritardando was applied, it sounded calculated, adding to the feeling of music by metronome.

Mozart Unwrapped (7): Immler/Melda/Aurora Orchestra/Collon, 15 September 2011

Hall One, Kings Place

Don Giovanni, KV 537: Overture
Die Zauberflöte, KV 620: ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’
Concert Aria: ‘Per questo bella mano,’ KV 612
Concert Aria: ‘Ich möchte wohl der Kaiser sein’, KV 539
Divertimento for two horns and strings, KV 522, ‘Ein musikalischer Spaß’
Piano Concerto no.20 in D minor, KV 466
Symphony no.35 in D major, KV 385, ‘Haffner’

Lara Melda (piano)
Christian Immler (baritone)
Ben Griffiths (double bass)
Samuel West (narrator)
Aurora Orchestra
Nicholas Collon (conductor)

The best came both interspersed and last. First the interspersed: Samuel West’s delightful readings from Mozart’s correspondence. It may seem an obvious thing to say but what an enormous difference it makes to hear Mozart’s letters read by so fine an actor! The characterisation brought without exaggeration to Mozart’s words proved something of a master-class. Letters to Constanze, Leopold, and Mozart’s cousin, ‘Bäsle’ (Maria Anna Thekla, ‘his ‘first love’), gave a taste of the white heat of compositional inspiration and its accompanying mood swings. Not that one would ever think Mozart anything other than lovable: exasperating, perhaps, but as impossible to take against as his music. Puppy-like enthusiasm and melancholy were conveyed in equally moving manner by West.

The concluding Haffner Symphony proved the highlight of the musical performances. Its first movement sounded – it is difficult to imagine it otherwise – brilliant, extrovert, taken and maintained by Nicholas Collon at a well-judged tempo. Aside from a few passages in the development section, the strings, violins especially, were permitted enough vibrato, which had not always been the case earlier on. The Andante was not rushed but kept moving, pulsating with life, whilst the minuet, taken at a quickish three-in-a-bar sounded winningly earthy without crudity, its trio an elegant interlude. Finally, the closing Presto sparkled with Haydnesque brilliance, the players of the Aurora Orchestra revelling in the virtuosity required. Their reading under Collon was impeccably precise, bar one minor, brief lapse of ensemble, and more importantly still, exuded a real sense of the music's direction and purpose, with only the most occasional fussiness imposed upon it.

There had been much to enjoy during the first half too. The opening of the Don Giovanni Overture was taken, as is now the fashion, at an unmistakeably alla breve tempo, yet benefited from a full orchestral sound. (Though the orchestra is on the small side, so is the hall, so it worked.) The Allegro section was urgent, in Collon’s hands perhaps more aggressive than high-spirited, but there is arguably warrant for such an approach. Christian Immler joined the orchestra for two concert arias and ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’. Throughout, Immler’s diction was excellent: one could discern not only every word, but a great deal of meaning behind every word. There was a certain dryness, however, to his vocal delivery, especially in the Magic Flute aria, though the glockenspiel (Simon Lane) enchanted. ‘Per questo bella mano’ benefited greatly from the obbligato double bass playing of Ben Griffiths: a rare chance to hear such virtuosity and musicality from the instrument. It almost sounded seductive! There was humour in the performance but, quite rightly, no silliness: if the combination of bass and double bass is a joke on Mozart’s part, it is better played straight. A rare opportunity to hear the Entführung-style music of ‘Ich möchte wohl der Kaiser sein’ was well taken in a spirited rendition: Immler sometimes acquired greater bloom to his voice, though there remained dry passages. To have such fine diction was a boon in an aria whose interest often lies as much in projection of the words, given its strophic form. To close the first half, we heard A Musical Joke, Mozart’s wicked parody of third-rate composition (and copying). It was played straight, as it must be, so that the humour was Mozart’s alone. Oh, the cultivated banality, the brilliance of the non sequiturs and mistranspositions! Thomas Gould played a superlative role as leader, especially in his slow movement solo passagework. I do not wish to hear this piece often, but when it is performed, may it be in a performance of this quality.

It was a pity, then, that the D minor Piano Concerto – perhaps a piece too many for the programme? – received a lesser performance, more on account of the soloist, Lara Melda, than the orchestra, though there one could not overlook, especially in the first movement, thinness to the string tone (there were only five first violins, boosted to six for the Haffner). At best, the piano part was efficiently despatched, nothing more: there was not the slightest evidence of Melda engaging either with the orchestra or indeed with the meaning of Mozart’s music. Looking ‘soulful’ and moving one’s head around during tutti passages is no substitute for the chamber-music interplay Mozart demands. Even the cadenza (Beethoven’s) was plodding. If there had earlier been a certain orchestral harshness to the opening movement, greater tenderness was permitted in the Romanze: woodwind sounded gorgeous, but the strings sounded warmer too. The piano part remained disconnected, almost as if the pianist were playing along to a Music Minus One recording, the central section heavy rather than stormy. In the finale, the Aurora players truly captured the spirit of Mozart’s D minor dæmon (reminding one of the Don Giovanni Overture, in a programme which, taken as a whole, took a tonal path that echoed its opening piece). I shall draw a veil over the bizarre cadenza. Melda, it seems, won the BBC Young Musician of the Year award in 2010. On the evidence of the present performance, she would benefit from further study before throwing herself further into the limelight.

Suspension of musicians from LPO

The Jewish Chronicle reports that four musicians have been suspended from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, as a consequence of having signed a letter to The Independent (click here and scroll down), which protested at the Proms' invitation to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra to perform this season. The decision, it is claimed, has been made on account of the musicians noting their membership of the orchestra. That seems at best disingenuous: they do not claim to be speaking for the orchestra; they are merely identifying themselves, explaining who they are. Whatever one thinks of the musicians' position on the IPO, they are human beings who have every right to express their views. From an academic point of view, there are terrifying implications for those of us who might on this basis find ourselves disciplined, simply because we belong to an organisation, and the same point extends far beyond the orchestral and academic worlds.

What certainly extends far beyond disingenuousness is the claim by LPO chief executive, Tim Walker: 'For the LPO, politics and music do not mix.' If this were true, he LPO would surely be the only organisation in history to believe such a claim. Has Walker ever heard of Richard Wagner? Or the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra? Indeed, it is difficult to think of a more inherently political act than that of music-making; to claim otherwise is to adopt an ideological position that is 'political' through and through. This has nothing to do with what I or anyone else might think about Israel, Palestine, or any other political issue. I have no intention of discussing such issues here, and I should oppose the LPO's decision every bit as strongly, were I to hold diametrically opposed views on any of these questions. What a contrast, moreover, with Valery Gergiev praising Vladimir Putin and 'great Russia', and holding a 'victory concert' in South Ossetia: Gergiev certainly held that politics and music mixed, and the LSO does not appear to have taken any action - despite, I do not doubt, what must have been at best a mixed reception for their principal conductor's stance. We can take different positions on boycotts, whether of Israel, South Africa, the USSR, the USA, or anywhere else (or at any other time). It does not follow that we should attempt to silence, or at least to discipline, those who think differently.

I cannot help but wonder whether political and/or financial (donor?) pressures have been involved. Perhaps not, but whatever the reasons, the outcome is deplorable. Let us hope that the LPO will reconsider. In the meantime, many of us will have to reconsider whether to attend their concerts: a great pity, since I was much looking forward to a performance under Vladimir Jurowski on 24th. It would certainly be good to hear from Jurowski if necessary, on behalf of his musicians.

I was out of the country when the Israel Philharmonic concert took place, so have nothing to add on the protests that disrupted the performances. However, here is my account of the extraordinary events at the Wigmore Hall, when a concert by the Jerusalem Quartet was continually interrupted. (For what it is worth, and again irrespective of whatever I might think concerning the political issues, I thought that the 'protests', such as they were, did little but harm to the Palestinian cause.)

Mozart Unwrapped (6): ASMF wind music, 14 September 2011

Hall One, Kings Place

Overture: Der Schauspieldirektor, KV 486 (arr. Graham Sheen)
Divertimento no.1 in B-flat major, KV Anh. 229/KV 439b/1
Divertimento no.13 in F major, KV 253
Serenade no.10 in B-flat major, KV 361/370a, ‘Gran Partita’

Academy of St Martin in the Fields

Some good Mozart, followed by some great Mozart. I have no problem whatsoever with the former; indeed, the more I know the latter, the more I appreciate the former, the slightest felicities sparking a joy of recognition that as a mere beginner would doubtless have eluded me. To treat second-rank Mozart as unworthy of attention is an ignorant snobbery to be deplored infinitely more than any initial naïveté that might treat all Mozart’s music as if it were the same. Moreover, this programme of music for wind (plus double bass in the Gran Partita) reminded us that the soloists of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, here without conductor, remain a force to be reckoned with.

First came bassoonist Graham Sheen’s transcription (for two oboes, two clarinets, two horns, and two bassoons) of the overture to Der Schauspieldirektor. The music transferred effortlessly to the new medium, well assisted by a bubbly performance, though it lacked of course the weight that a great orchestral performance from the likes of the LSO or the VPO (under Sir Colin Davis and Sir John Pritchard, respectively) can bring to this woefully underrated score. Instead, fittingly for the programme, we heard the music sound more as a miniature divertimento, with solistic brilliance as compensation, even to the extent of a little clarinet ornamentation at the end.

Next came the first of the five divertimenti for three basset horns. The opening Allegro sounded suave yet not superficial, clean yet not clinical. It seemed as though there was undue compensation for the lack of bite at the very opening of the second movement minuet, but there was much to enjoy in the fascinating details revealed from this chip from the master’s workbench. The slow movement emerged in turn poised and sinuous, whilst its successor minuet and trio enjoyed a good sense of swing. Finally, the rondo boasted a Haydnesque sense of rhythm and fun, though some phrases sang as only Mozart’s can. Here, as elsewhere, there was much to admire in the ASMF players’ dexterity.

KV 253, for two oboes, two horns, and two bassoons, received a fine performance. The first movement’s theme was properly leisurely, the music permitted to breathe, detail permitted to emerge. Much the same could be said of the ensuing variations, the second particularly delightful in its conversational tone, the horns quite magical. The tempo for the slow, fifth variation was just right, well sustained, neither dragging nor rushed. I especially enjoyed the oboe-led trio to the second movement, whilst the finale was simply a joy: not abandoned, but civilised.

The second half was devoted entirely to the great B-flat major Serenade, KV 361/370a. One immediately registered the fuller sound and the right degree of breadth in the first movement’s Largo introduction: I was put in mind of the introduction to the magnificent B-flat major violin sonata, KV 454. The Allegro was taken at quite a lick, but lovably so, so that one could still luxuriate in Mozart’s extraordinary harmonies. If it were not for Furtwängler’s incomparable Vienna Philharmonic recording, there would probably have been nothing to miss at all, but such a comparison is more than usually odious, not least since this was a ‘chamber’ rather than ‘conducted’ performance. The double bass (Lynda Houghton) made its presence felt in the right way, as if it were a true continuo part. Occasional fierceness detracted somewhat, but this remained a superior performance. The second movement flowed, without being rushed, its first trio quartet (!) especially gorgeous. As for the great Adagio: well, I might have wished for Furtwängler’s tempo, but this more ‘flowing’ – to employ the modern near-euphemism – version worked too, the dialogues between Christopher Cowie’s oboe and Timothy Lines’s clarinet exquisite indeed. Better, then, to hear a movement one wished had extended over a little more time, than for it to outstay its welcome. The ensuing minuet smiled and danced. Mozart’s rusticity, unlike Haydn’s, is always secondary, arguably tertiary, but the second trio nevertheless exuded easy charm (which is not at all an easy task for the performers). The Romanza was exquisite, sounding as a true Adagio, and sustained as such, its Allegretto section acquiring considerable urgency without turning breathless. ‘Delightful’, even ‘life-enhancing’, would seem an apt description for the theme and variations, the delight rising upwards from the double bass line to the truly harmonious Harmoniemusik. Cowie’s oboe solo in the slow variation transported one at least as far as the gates of Elysium. After that, the finale had something of a deflationary effect. Molto allegro is an extremely difficult tempo to bring off in Mozart: think of the finale to the great G minor symphony, KV 550. This at times felt a little too boisterous, brusque even, especially from the clarinets, but the performance as a whole remained one to treasure.

OBERTO (Oxford Brookes: Exploring Research Trends in Opera) Inaugural Conference: ‘Beyond Press Cuttings: New Approaches to Reception in Opera Studies’, 13 September 2011

Held at Oxford Brookes University, this study day stood in the shadow of technological as well as intellectual developments, the former most obviously highlighted in a round-table session entitled ‘The Audience as Critic’. Are we now dealing, a point with which Katharine Ellis in her thought-provoking final response agreed, with the death of the (professional, newspaper) critic in an Internet age? (Ellis cautioned that what might be true now should not dictate our response, for instance, to nineteenth-century musical life.) Hugo Shirley and Simon Evans-White drew attention to burgeoning online criticism, sometimes, as John Snelson pointed out, stretching to reviewing the reviewers. But, and this would be a persistent refrain throughout the conference, on what authority, and with what ‘validity’ (a word whose employment Roger Parker criticised)? Olga Pantaleeva focused on a particular production, the Bolshoi’s 2006 Eugene Onegin, replacing a 1944 predecessor, to sometimes personal and sometimes nationalistic controversy. What does ‘fidelity’ mean, and to what, if any, ‘original’ might the term justly be applied?

Reception refers not only to audiences in the opera house, nor only to performance. Charlotte Purkis’s discussion of poetry inspired by Rutland Boughton’s once-wildly-popular The Immortal Hour complemented Cormac Newark’s treatment of various cinematic treatments of The Phantom of the Opera. Other visual responses to opera ranged from Clair Rowden’s survey of Parisian ‘cariculture’ during the 1890s, not least the predictably virulent hostility towards Wagner and a production of Lohengrin, to Carlo Cenciarelli’s probing treatment of opera film paratexts, that is, those things lying upon the threshold of the ‘text itself’. Cenciarelli’s posited friction between medium and context led us from nineteenth-century tableaux vivants to visual and musical techniques employed in DVD presentations of Don Carlos. Flora Willson presented Meyerbeer’s funeral and memorial arrangements as an historical text, culminating in the reception of the composer himself at the Paris Opéra: at the end of the fourth act of its 398th performance of Les Huguenots, the cast, within a performance of the work, crowned with laurels a bust of the composer, previously honoured by massed choirs and orchestras at the Gare du Nord, prior to the return of his remains to Berlin.

Has everything, then, become ‘reception’, and has the term therefore reached its sell-by date? Ellis suggested we might wish in that respect to rid ourselves of the legacy of musicologists such as Carl Dahlhaus. To what extent, if any, is musicology to be distinguished from other cultural criticism? There seemed, however, in the closing, discussion, to remain some hope for the musical work, and not only as a nineteenth-century concept: for, if we do not treat with it, who will?

For more information on OBERTO, click here.

Maltman/Johnson: 'Friedrich Schiller – Ein Leben in Liedern': Songs by Schubert, Schumann, and Liszt, 10 September 2011

Wigmore Hall

Schubert – Elysium, D 584

Der Kampf, D 594

An den Frühling, D 587

Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, D 583

Das Geheimnis, D 793

Dithyrambe, D 801

Schumann – Der Handschuh, op.87

Schubert – Die Bürgschaft, D 246

Schumann – Des Buben Schützenlied, op.79 no.25

Liszt – Drei Lieder aus Schillers ‘Wilhelm Tell‘, S 292

Schubert – Strophe aus ‘die Götter Griechenlands’, D 677

Christopher Maltman (baritone)

Graham Johnson (piano)

A recital of Schiller settings from Christopher Maltman and Graham Johnson seemed an excellent way to open the Wigmore Hall’s new season, and ample compensation for Soile Isokoski’s indisposition. There was indeed much to admire and to interest, but, with the exception of Liszt’s William Tell settings, Schiller rarely seemed to have provoked the composers concerned to scale the greatest heights. Perhaps that is partly a consequence of the ballad form in which a number of these settings were written: it seems less to speak to us – or at least to me – than various other song forms. But even when the compositional level fell somewhat beneath outstanding, one could enjoy Schiller’s verse. Maltman’s excellent diction was of great importance in that respect: at times, it felt as though we were attending a musically heightened verse reading.

The first half was devoted to Schubert and a single song by Schumann, Der Handschuh. the latter vividly pictorial, Johnson clearly relishing the opportunity to paint tigers and lions. Maltman imparted a keen narrative thrust, even a winning feminine impersonation of Fräulein Kunigund. This 1850 ballad was not, however, to put it mildly, the inspired and inspirational Schumann of his celebrated ‘year of song’. The opening Elysium announced an initially Mozartian Schubert, albeit a little hesitantly at first, though soon turning itself into a full-blown operatic narration, Maltman’s stage experience clearly informing his delivery. When hearing of truth rending the veil (‘Wahrheit reisst hier den Schleier entzwei’), that was just what we heard in the music. A rapt stillness accompanied the grim reaper’s sickle falling from his hand, whilst the ‘Donnerstürme’ looked forward to The Flying Dutchman. Der Kampf, which followed, benefited from a strong sense of musical structure on Johnson’s part, Maltman presented an urgent, masculine reading, again not so far from the opera house. An den Frühling, the second of Schubert’s two settings, was charmingly sung, but there might have been greater sensitivity and shading from the pianist. Gruppe aus dem Tartarus emerged hellish than triumphant, a resounding tribute to the power of Maltman’s voice. Dithyrambe showed that he could be boisterous too, the poet’s cup verily overflowing.

Die Bürgschaft, which I think I last heard in concert in a spellbinding reading from Jonas Kaufmann in Munich, was heard in similar vein to the first-half items: highly dramatic, with an acute sense of verbal poetry and meaning. There was fine shading too, both voice and piano sounding truly silvery on the ‘silberhell’ description of the spring, almost as if we had suddenly exchanged a Steinway for a Bösendorfer and a baritone for a tenor. This may be far from Schubert at his greatest, but Schiller was permitted to sing quite movingly his hymn of Romantic friendship. There followed four songs from William Tell, one by Schumann, three by Liszt. The former’s Des Buben Schützenlied received a good-natured performance, but the piano opening to Liszt’s ‘Der Fischerknabe’ immediately announced a new level not only of piano writing, but also of compositional inspiration. Even in the hands of a less than first-rank Lisztian – there are times when Johnson sounds a little too much of an ‘accompanist’ – the composer’s figurations and harmonies cast their seductive magic spells. Maltman evinced a seemingly instinctive command of Liszt’s idiom, including his post-Schubertian harmonic shifts. (Intonation had not always been the strongest card earlier on, but there were no such problems here.) The seduction from the watery depths – ‘Lieb’ Knabe, bist mein! – could hardly have been resisted by anyone, certainly not by me. The pastoral setting, ‘Der Hirt’ struck a winning kinship with Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ, whilst sounding utterly characteristic of Liszt. The final song, ‘Der Alpenjäger’ is less interesting, but its closeness to the dramatic Schubert settings heard earlier provided its own programming justification. Finally, as an epilogue, came Schubert’s Strophe aus ‘die Götter Griechenlands’, in which at last the heart-rending feeling of loss that Schubert uniquely can summon was to be heard, somehow presaging the twin worlds both of the song-cycles and of the Moments musicaux. Eliza Butler’s Tyranny of Greece over Germany seemed more æsthetically justified – whatever Schiller’s steadfast resistance to political tyranny – than ever.