Theatrical Symphony and Symphonic Theatre: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

(This essay was originally published in a 2016 Salzburg Festival programme.)

Theatrical Symphony and Symphonic Theatre

 

JOSEPH HAYDN • Symphony no.49 in F minor, Hob. I:49, “La Passione”

WOLFGANG A. MOZART • Symphony no. 25 in G minor, K. 183

JOSEPH HAYDN • Overture to azione teatrale, L'Isola disabitata, Hob. XXVIII:9

LUDWIG V. BEETHOVEN • Symphony no. 4 in B-flat major, op. 60

 

The nicknames of Haydn’s symphonies are at least as arbitrary as any other musical nicknames, few of them holding even the slightest claim to ‘authenticity’. They have often helped popularise particular symphonies, whilst helping leave others in relative obscurity, yet the homely implications of the ‘Hen’ or the ‘Clock’ have tended to further a patronising myth of genial, ‘Papa’ Haydn, denying the composer the true measure of his radicalism and historical stature. The so-called La Passione Symphony, no.49, in F minor, presents a somewhat different case; however ‘inauthentic’, its title has at least suggested something to be taken with Sturm und Drang seriousness. However, it seems, as Elaine Sisman revealed in a 1991 article (‘Haydn’s Theater Symphonies’), that the title refers to the particular circumstances of a Holy Week performance in Schwerin in 1790 rather than to the work itself. 

The ‘traditional’ view certainly seems to chime with the work’s Baroque near-archaism: Haydn’s final essay in the slow-fast-slow-fast sonata di chiesa form, likewise with the relentless march of F minor, the minuet’s F major trio offering only momentary relief. Sturm und Drang characteristic – syncopation, counterpoint, ‘profundity’ of expression – seem undeniable. HC Robbins Landon, very much in this tradition, described the work as ‘dark-hued, sombre – even tragic’. Sisman’s research, however, has suggested a very different provenance and thus perhaps interpretation; a Viennese source calls the work ‘Il Quakuo di bel’humore’; a theatrical context seems likely. Sisman argues that the celebrated ‘rapid-fire repeated notes and imitiations of the second group’ in the Allegro di molto ‘achieve a light-heartedness that belies the “tragic” minor-mode associations, and recall [the composer, Georg Joseph] Vogler’s remarks about the importance of rhythm in the mood-defining attributes of comedy and tragedy’. Waggish Quaker – at least on the surface – or Christ crucified? How to reconcile? Should we try? Sisman rightly points to discrepancy between compositional intention and appropriation of a symphony or a movement therefrom, also to a ‘substantial disparity in contemporaneous views’ of Haydn’s language, his ‘broadly dramatic style … designed to serve a variety of ends’. We might conclude that the tragicomedy of Haydn’s symphony’s is more all-embracing, even Shakespearean, than condescending ideas of ‘geniality’, occasionally interrupted by ‘seriousness’, would ever have permitted. We can, perhaps should, still hear Passion-like onward tread in the first and third movements, grief-laden, wordless drama(s); likewise Sturm und Drang leaps, disjunctures, even violence in the second and fourth. Let us do so, however, on account of the music and its performance rather than the nickname – and let us not forget the theatre entirely, which, after all, is no stranger to tragedy.

Tragedy is, of course, indelibly associated with Mozart’s so-called ‘little’ G minor Symphony, no.25, just as it is with its ‘great’ successor in the same key, no.40. There is no need to deny a ‘special’ quality both to Mozart in the minor mode – this is, after all, his first minor-key symphony – and indeed to Mozart specifically in G minor. Albert Einstein called it Mozart’s ‘key of fate’: his equivalent, if you like, but also his contrast, to Beethoven in C minor. If Romanticism colours that judgement, that need not be a bad thing, although it is always worth, as with Haydn, interrogating lazy assumptions. As Wolfgang Hildesheimer noted, the ‘game of key speculation … is fruitful and open to all; everyone can play and, by sharing his experiences, can consider himself a winner.’ Let us then, play the game, albeit without claim to interpretative exclusivity.

 

Sturm und Drang syncopated outbursts play their role here too; indeed, they are the very opening material of the Allegro con brio (a marking more readily associated with Beethoven than with the seventeen-year-old Mozart). So does an important, even prophetic, role for bassoons, no longer ‘just’ part of the basso continuo. Chromatic disorientation, just as we experience in the first movement of its first-movement successor in the ‘great’ G minor Symphony, marks the onset of development here too. Bearing in mind Haydn’s symphony, though, as well as Mozart’s operatic experience and future, there is eighteenth-century theatricality as well as Romantic promise in the plunging diminished sevenths of this movement. So too, is there, in the songfulness of the slow movement, its E-flat major consolation in keeping with the expressivity of the ‘love aria’. (Mozart had just written Lucio Silla.)  Muted violins heighten the sense of emotional bonds almost, yet not quite, burst. There is almost neo-Classical austerity in the stark unisons of the Menuetto, the G major Harmoniemusik of its Trio serving as an all-too-brief vision of another, brighter, warmer world, but it is to G minor that we return for the tragic vehemence of the finale. There is no Beethovenian journey from darkness to light here, it is as if Gluck, in his Orfeo ed Euridice, had been able to dispense with the wretched operatic convention of the lieto fine (happy ending). Jens Peter Larsen was probably right to caution against viewing the work, Romantically, as ‘self-confession’; yet, if we take that caution on board, why not, at least a little?

 

There is no questioning the theatrical origin of the Overture, also in G minor, to Haydn’s L'Isola disabitata. The only Metastasio libretto set by Haydn, this 1779 opera opens with an orchestral movement veritably breathing the world (now past – or future?) of Sturm und Drang, although let us once again remind ourselves that our æsthetics are not necessarily to be identified with Haydn’s. The starkness of the opening Largo material recalls in (very) slow motion, albeit unknowingly, that of Mozart’s Minuet, preparing the way, as is the general manner of Haydn’s introductions, for the musical theatrics of the vehement G minor symphonic storm, which leaves our two sisters, Constanza and Silvia, abandoned on a desert island. A curtain-raiser, then, to a curtain-raiser: who says that Haydn, when compared to Mozart, lacks a sense of theatre?

Lack of ‘theatricality’ is an absurd accusation that long bedevilled reception of Beethoven’s Fidelio, some commentators unable to accept that the opera’s concern is freedom itself, or at least the highest bourgeois instantiation of that idea, rather than Mozartian characterisation. That said, there is no denying the symphonic sublation of the ‘merely’ theatrical in Beethoven’s symphonic and operatic work. By the same token, however, the Fourth Symphony, just as much as any of its still-more-celebrated companion works, shows that the relationship between symphony and theatre is properly dialectical. Taking its leave from Haydn, and yet also showing its distance, the B-flat minor introduction to the B-flat major first movement is dark, spacious, flowing in a fashion, which, if Wagner had been more sympathetic to this work, which he rarely conducted, might have suggested: ‘Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit’: ‘Here time becomes space’. Just as it had done, we might add, in Haydn’s ‘Representation of Chaos’ for the opening of The Creation. It is in this symphony as a whole, Donald Tovey argued, that ‘Beethoven first fully reveals his mastery of movement. He had already shown his command of a vastly wider range of musical possibilities than … Mozart or Haydn … But now he shows that these [new] resources can be handled in such a way that Mozart’s own freedom of movement,’ which we might with equal justice call symphonically theatrical or theatrically symphonic, ‘reappears as one of the most striking qualities of the whole’. It has sometimes been said that, in this movement, Beethoven’s melodic gift, however extraordinary, is placed firmly at the service of rhythmic propulsion. Analysis and performance alike will reveal that there is no such hierarchy; one is inconceivable without the other, and above all without the grounding of harmony. Just one instance, in which the timbral, often neglected in Beethoven, plays a crucial part in all these respects: listen to his use of the timpani, as theatrical as it is structurally dynamic. Whilst the development section declines for some time to leave the rare, distant key of B major, timpani B-flats urge the music on, enabling and underlying the orchestral crescendo through which the point of return will eventually come. Not, however, as soon as we might have been led to expect, for struggle and suspense have work yet to do.

 

The second movement is in rondo form, the leisure of its Adagio-progress both contrasting with and seemingly necessitated by the neo-Haydnesque ‘“spin” of the whole [first] movement’ (Tovey again). Ghosts of the musical past – the Eroica, late Haydn – haunt its sterner moments, yet inescapably Beethovenian humanity in the present always wins through, or will do in a comprehending performance that takes Beethoven’s dialectics as a musico-theatrical invitation. Teleology, Beethoven’s fabled ‘goal orientation’ is just as strong as in the first movement; means are both different and yet strongly related. The scherzo – in form, if not in name – is a successor to the heroic funeral games of the Eroica, the apparent primacy of rhythm again enabled, indeed intensified, by the equal primacy of melody and harmony. Beethoven’s abridgement of the final scherzo repeat elicited these words of praise from Tovey: ‘Never have three short bars contained more meaning than the coda in which the two horns blow the whole movement away.’ That is precisely how it feels.

 

If Schumann’s perception, however well-meaning, of ‘a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants’ belittles this symphony as nicknames do those of Haydn, it is perhaps not entirely wide of the mark in pointing to the continuing relevance of Haydn’s humour. That is nowhere more so the case than in the finale. It is not a perpetuum mobile, although its opening suggests that that might be what we are in for; there is rather a Shakespearean quality, taking leave from both Haydn and Mozart, and which ought also to have attracted Wagner’s attention. The apparently tentative slowing down, just before the close, of the movement’s principal theme teases us and our expectations; music breathes the air of ‘all the world’s a stage’, albeit of an aural, invisible theatre. To return to Tovey, ‘Those who think the finale of the Fourth Symphony “too light” will never get nearer than Spohr (if as near) towards a right understanding of the Fifth, however much they may admire it.’

In the Shadow of Beethoven: Widmann, Liszt, Wagner

(This essay was originally written as a programme note for the 2016 Salzburg Festival for this concert, originally to have been performed by Martha Argerich, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and Daniel Barenboim.)

In the Shadow of Beethoven: Widmann, Liszt, and Wagner

JÖRG WIDMANN • Con brio, Concert overture for Orchestra (2008)

FRANZ LISZT • Concerto for Piano and Orchestra no.1 in E-flat major
RICHARD WAGNER • Overture to Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg
RICHARD WAGNER • “Morgendämmerung” from Götterdämmerung
RICHARD WAGNER • “Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt” from Götterdämmerung
RICHARD WAGNER • “Trauermarsch” from Götterdämmerung
RICHARD WAGNER • Prelude to Act I, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg

Unveiling of Beethoven monument, Bonn, 1845. As so often, Liszt's doing...

Before Wagner, before Liszt, before every other noteworthy nineteenth-century composer save for Chopin, stands and stood Beethoven. He now stands before Jörg Widmann too, although with the twist that Widmann also stands between Beethoven and Beethoven. Con brio, Widmann’s 2008 Overture, was commissioned by Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to accompany Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. It plays intriguingly with the remains of tonality without lapsing into neo-tonalism. Moreover, it plays with Beethoven’s tonalities, A major and F major, a third apart, a relationship with distinctly Beethovenian, also Schubertian, resonances. There is throughout a strong and yet elusive sense of Beethovenian presence: allusion wins out over quotation; longing, haunting, perhaps even resistence, over recreation. This is no pastiche. Audible ‘cuts’, as well as a few instances of extended instrumental techniques, are perhaps the most audible signals of Berio-like ‘modernity’ in a temporal sense. What we post-Romantics most associate with Beethoven, symphonic development, is, it seems, no longer possible. Did not Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn, after all, revoke the Ninth Symphony, as a necessary break with the ‘German catastrophe’ that had led him, as composer and as German, and his country, as cultural and political entity, to the darkest night of its soul?

The road to Leverkühn’s act is in good part the road of German musical Romanticism, to which we now turn, although we should recall the problematical nature of ‘Romanticism’ here: a term taken from literature, it does not quite ‘fit’ music analogously, or at least contemporaneously, whilst apparently serving it all the better. It was, after all, Beethoven whom ETA Hoffmann and many other Romantics had most firmly in mind when considering music and elevating it to the status of most exalted of all the arts.

Liszt was one of those Romantics; amongst composers, he perhaps remains still the most underestimated. Some critics, far less so audiences, seem jealously unable to accept that the greatest pianist in history could also have been a great composer, let alone, in a very modern sense, a great sex symbol; they seem unable to appreciate that Liszt, who turned his back on the celebrity and fortune of a world-touring piano recitalist to concentrate upon composition, used his virtuosity, at least in his finest works, to defeat ‘mere’ virtuosity, not to enthrone it. He might, as a nineteenth-century performer, have taken his leave from Paganini’s devilry, but Liszt’s Transcendental Studies have more musical interest in a few bars than all of the violinist’s Caprices; likewise Liszt’s piano concertos vis-à-vis the concertos of Paganini, or indeed those of ‘mere’ piano virtuosi.

The First Piano Concerto was nevertheless written for Liszt to perform in the first instance, its 1855 Weimar premiere – Liszt, in order to work with an orchestra, had ‘retreated’ from the bourgeois marketplace into court employment – conducted by Berlioz. It suggests, both in construction and in the ‘transcendental’ calls made upon the pianist, that, to quote the celebrated motto of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, ‘Res severa est verum gaudium’: true pleasure is a serious thing. Such might in many respects have been the motto too of Liszt, ever conscious of Beethoven’s ghost, ever unable to ignore it, even had he wished. In 1823, the composer was said to have given the twelve-year old Wunderkind a kiss of consecration (Weihekuss).) Beethoven’s was a mantle he must grasp with new means, or perhaps, in Beckettian fashion, continually fail better in his attempt to grasp it. As Liszt put it, new wine – whether that occasioned by new instruments, new instrumental techniques, or different musical material – demanded new bottles.  

That meant, above all else, formally. Liszt’s fondness not only for one-movement structures which contained within them ‘traditional’ multi-movement form was partly inspired by what he and many Romantics saw, rightly or wrongly, as Beethoven’s dissolution of Classical forms and still more so by Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy; however, he was never one to rest content, ensuring that the formal dynamism of each work varied according to its material, or at least attempted to do so. The four short ‘movements’ resemble in some ways those of Beethoven – although he would never have written a four-movement concerto – but their interconnection is crucial. Themes are transformed, one of Liszt’s greatest legacies to the twentieth century, the technique fascinating serial composers beyond Schoenberg, at least as far as Boulez, so that what one hears initially as contrasting lays claim also to unity. The transformation and combination of all the work’s principal themes in the final Allegro marziale animato is no simple matter of recollection, but above all of binding together, within a twenty-minute span, a plethora of musical material – retrospectively or otherwise. Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony is but a stone’s throw away. 

First edition, Vienna: Charles Haslinger

Apparent lack of chamber music in Liszt’s output is only apparent, for, as with Wagner, there is a great deal of chamber music in his orchestral writing; such, in one respect, is the Gesamtkunstwerk. Listen, for instance, to the duet for piano and clarinet in the opening Allegro maestoso of the writing for string quartet in the third section. The ludicrous, malicious claim by Joseph Joachim – he, Clara Schumann, and Brahms were adamant that Liszt was in no way an heir to Beethoven, and behaved quite appallingly to him – that Joseph Raff had orchestrated the piece is utterly false. There are many felicities and originalities of orchestration that we now think of as quintessentially Lisztian, the scherzo’s opening use of the triangle as solo instrument only the most celebrated. Liszt was equally concerned that orchestral blend and rhythm should match that of the soloist. He wrote to Alfred Jaëll that he should only consider performing the concerto after two or three ‘through rehearsals. … In Berlin [a performance by Hans von Bülow] there was still a little hesitancy in the attack of the woodwind instruments, which must function like trumpets at this moment, in a military style, and not like the national guard, helter-skelter!’ Technological, technical, and musical developments were for him, as for Wagner, as for Widmann, as for Beethoven, at least in his imagination’s ear, as one. Even that triangle solo must use an instrument ‘not of too base extraction’ and have ‘not too vulgar a vibration’. The triangle player, then, must too be a virtuoso – to defeat mere virtuosity.

Wagner was no piano virtuoso, although his deficiencies as a pianist and indeed as a composer of piano music have been exaggerated. Where he unleashed his virtuosity, again to defeat the ‘mere’ virtuosity of Parisian grand opéra was, above all, still more so than onstage, in the opera orchestra, the ‘Greek Chorus’, as he put it, of his music dramas: commenting, foretelling, precipitating, contradicting, recollecting, reflecting. Wagner wanted to combine the dramatic means of the greatest of spoken drama, above all Aeschylus and Shakespeare, with the symphonic achievement of Beethoven, whose works, he believed, at least for some time, had taken purely instrumental music as far as it could go. Both music and drama now needed each other. That is, perhaps, less so for the relatively traditional Tannhäuser Overture, although the composer’s subsequent musico-dramatic theorising would often be as much based upon what he had written as upon what he intended to write. Liszt relished transcribing for piano – extremely faithfully, as in the case of Beethoven’s symphonies too – the Overture, and it is remarkable how little is lost. Nevertheless, Wagner’s orchestral writing retains its own allure and majesty, never more so than in the wind. The sturdy, moral, ‘German’ Pilgrim’s Chorus, assailed by the disintegrative, perhaps Parisian tendencies – timbral, harmonic, frankly sexual – of the Venusberg, seems to emerge victorious, but do the brass, does the diatonicism, protest too much? Even in concert, we are both satisfied and longing for more: the sign of a successful Overture.

Joseph Tichatschek (Tannhäuser) and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (Venus); premiere, also 1845

The extracts from Götterdämmerung – ‘bleeding chunks’, in Donald Tovey’s phrase – tell the story of the hero, at least his story in this concluding Ring drama, in miniature. We are first presented with ‘Dawn’ – in Wagner, time, weather, everything, are to be understood materially and metaphysically – on Brünnhilde’s rock. Siegfried has braved the fire, won Brünnhilde, and now must go back into the world ‘to new deeds’; but first, an evocation of that glorious first morning together. His Rhine Journey sends him out into the world, as he must, and as even Brünnhilde, who tragically believes the ring to betoken her marriage to the freest of heroes, recognises, indeed bids him. Where, in the first part of the Ring, Das Rheingold, the Rhine music had sounded relatively uncomplicated, home to the Rhinemaidens, now the contrapuntal complexity of Wagner’s late music – Bach increasingly a rival to Beethoven – is well suited to the greater complexity of the hero’s descent into the world of ‘civilisation’, the realm of the Gibichungs, in which, through Hagen’s machinations, he will find betrayal and death. Political modernity, as Wagner, student of Hegel knew, was as complex as the musical modernity he knew as student of Beethoven. So it is, still more so, in Siegfried’s Funeral March, which dramatically (in every sense) extends Liszt’s method in his own revolutionary tribute, the symphonic poem, Héroïde funèbre. In Götterdämmerung, the weight of memory, the outpouring, combination, in some cases culmination, of motifs is of a different order. Thomas Mann summarised Wagner’s genealogical method here as ‘an overwhelming celebration of memory and mind, from recalling ‘the longing questions of the boy [Siegfried] about his mother’ to the present ‘earth-shakings and thunderings, with the body borne high on its bier’.

The programme ends not, however, with the myth of Siegfried’s obsequies, but with the ‘real-world’ comedy of Wagner’s maturity. In the opening Prelude to Die Meistersinger, we hear five of the work’s principal motifs adumbrated, three of them combined in brazen tour de force contrapuntal mastery at the moment of return to the work’s deceptively wholesome C major tonality. That moment is humorously signalled by the triangle: a recollection of Tannhäuser’s Overture or Liszt’s concerto? It need not be either/or. Wagner’s counterpoint, like his reckless hero, Walther von Stolzing, disregards tradition, themes yoked together as much out of ‘dramatic’ as what he derided as ‘purely musical’ necessity. Sometimes, the better to honour Beethoven (or Bach), it is necessary to disregard him.

A brace of concerts, not reviewed

Alas, I shall not be able to review these concerts. That happens from time to time; I am sure the world will survive, somehow. However, I wanted to add them here as a personal diary item.

 

Prom 70 – Mozart/Bruckner, 6 September 2016 (Royal Albert Hall)
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.26 in D major, KV 537, ‘Coronation’
Bruckner – Symphony no.6 in A major

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
 

LSO/Noseda – Verdi, 18 September 2016 (Barbican Hall)

Requiem Mass

Erika Grimaldi (soprano)

Daniela Barcellona (mezzo-soprano)
Francesco Meli (tenor)
Michele Pertusi (baritone)
London Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Simon Halsey)

London Symphony Orchestra

Gianandrea Noseda (conductor)

Gould/Tiberghien/Aurora/Collon - Paganini, Mozart, Liszt, and Mendelssohn, 17 September 2016

Hall One, Kings Place

Images: Nick Rutter

Paganini – Twenty-four Caprices for solo violin, op.1: Caprice no.5
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.6 in B-flat major, KV 238
Liszt – Années de pèlerinage: Première année: ‘Suisse’, S 160: ‘Le Mal du pays’
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.5 in D major, KV 175
Mendelssohn – Symphony no.4 in A major, op.90, ‘Italian’

Thomas Gould (violin)

Cédric Tiberghien (piano)

Aurora Orchestra

Nicholas Collon (conductor)

Taking as its theme the touring programmes of musical prodigies, this instalment in the Aurora Orchestra’s five-year traversal of Mozart’s piano concerto, opened with the fifth of Paganini’s Twenty-four Caprices. It was well played indeed by Thomas Gould, intonation spot on, and with plenty of rhythmic impetus. Whether it really added to the programme, I am less convinced, but it did not harm in lieu of an overture.

Cédric Tiberghien took centre stage for the rest of the first half, with excellent results. First up was the lovely, shamefully neglected Sixth Piano Concerto. (Just because Mozart wrote greater concertos, there is no reason for us to forget his earlier works, which put most other composers to shame. The same goes for his operas.) A warm, lively orchestral tutti from the orchestra and Nicholas Collon was answered by Tiberghien with charm and precision, the first movement as a whole receiving a variegated performance, in the spirit of forerunners such as JC Bach, yet also looking forward to Mozart’s later works. Passagework as clean, well-oiled, and, just as important, melodically meaningful. The slow movement had the air of a Salzburg serenade, not least on account of its pizzicato strings, but not only on their account. In its way, this is quite a complicated movement, overtly so: it has little of the distilled simplicity of the later Mozart. Tiberghien cared for the cantilena just as much as he would have done in Chopin or Ravel – and rightly so. The finale was played with good nature, and a sense of fun, whilst still being taken seriously. There was something of Haydn (if only to our retrospectively attuned ears) to it, but equally a sense of drama that was entirely Mozart’s own.

 

Liszt’s Le Mal du pays offered a very different standpoint on the travelling virtuoso’s experience. The starkness of its opening seemed already to look forward to the visionary works of the composer’s old age. Tiberghien showed himself finely attuned to Liszt’s rhetoric but also to the sentiments that underlay the rhetoric. Like Liszt himself, he understood the ability of the piano to ‘speak’ and communicated that. Sadness, even bitterness, made for a poignant, pungent interlude. Once again, we were reminded that no one, not even Mozart or Beethoven, did more to make the modern piano and modern pianism what they are.

 

Mozart’s Fifth Piano Concerto opened with the unmistakeable celebratory fizz of the composer in D major. Collon drove the music quite hard, but it could take it. Tiberghien responded in similarly ‘public’ fashion. That is not to say his performance lacked subtlety, quite the contrary; melodic lines were just as finely crafted as in the previous concerto. Mozart’s surprises registered as they should. Attention to detail from all concerned ensured that music which, in lesser hands, might sound ‘conventional’, emerged as anything but. The orchestra, moreover, sounded as if it were enjoying itself: always a good thing. There was an engaging physicality here and elsewhere to its performances. The slow movement’s performance was eloquent. What again can actually prove quite complicated never sounded fussy; it was well directed, imbued with grace, yet with a place too for rhetorical flourishes. In the finale, we experienced a return to, even intensification of, D major extroversion. Display, as previously, was always musically grounded; the ebullience was impossible not to like. Mozart’s extraordinary achievement at the age of seventeen blazed in all its glory.

 

For the second half, we heard a symphony by another celebrated prodigy, Mendelssohn. Collon offered a performance rather in the spirit of his Mozart: colourful, exuberant, full of life. The second group in the first movement had charm too: Mendelssohn should never grimace; nor did he. The development section, moreover, sounded properly cumulative. At the opening of the second movement, Collon and his orchestra seemed keen to highlight Mendelssohn’s interest in Baroque music, Handel as much as Bach. It was not a dogmatic reading, though: there was plenty of ‘Romantic’ colour to come, not least from the Aurora woodwind. Darkness of mood, far from unrelieved, provided a welcome correction to many other accounts. The Minuet charmed, yet never sounded merely placid; there was much to occupy mind and senses beneath the veneer. Its trio proved just as ambiguous, if differently so. A fast and furious finale stood out for the intensity of the orchestral playing. One truly felt the virtues of a chamber orchestra ‘playing out’, of virtuosic instrumentalists coming together to make music.

Hope/Neubauer/Finckel/Han - Mahler, Schumann, and Brahms, 16 September 2016

Wigmore Hall

Mahler – Piano Quartet (movement) in A minor

Schumann – Piano Quartet in E-flat major, op.47
Brahms – Piano Quartet no.1 in G minor, op.25

Daniel  Hope (violin)

Paul Neubauer (viola)

David Finckel (cello)

Wu Han (piano)

Three piano quartet works for my first outing to the Wigmore Hall of the 2016-17 season: all in estimable performances, circling around and, in the second half, meeting the formidable figure of Brahms. Mahler’s early movement caught well in performance the slightly stifling atmosphere of a Brahmsian inheritance, even though written in the mid-1870s. Daniel Hope, Paul Neubauer, David Finckel, and Wu Han offered transparency too: one could always hear where the lines were going – and why. It never really sounded like Mahler, but it never does; indeed, it is difficult to imagine how it could. The movement is what it is, and I have always been greatly fond of it; I continued to be so on this occasion.

 

In Schumann’s E-flat major Quartet, the introduction to the first movement showed itself alert to Beethovenian precedent, soon flowering, at the opening of the exposition proper, into post-Schubertian mode. The path taken thereafter was inescapably ‘later’ – there was some splendidly dark, Romantic playing – but that context had been established, much to the music’s advantage. It is well-nigh impossible not to think of Mendelssohn when an elfin dance, such as we hear in the second movement, comes our way, but it was the differences, Schumann’s singularity, which – rightly – registered more strongly still. This was agile, directed playing, playing that yet yielded to Schumannesque volatility, neither overplayed nor unacknowledged. The Andante cantabile struck just the right note of a romance or intermezzo, its depths undeniable, yet unexaggerated. It might have flowed more easily at times, but that was partly a consequence of having taken the music with proper seriousness. The finale sounded ebullient yet poignant, in its knowledge that a Haydnesque conclusion was both desirable yet by now unattainable. And in that respect, above all, we looked – listened – forward to Brahms.

 

The first movement of Brahms’s G minor Quartet emerged in highly contrasted fashion. Occasionally, I wondered whether its contrasts were achieved at the expense of a stereotypically ‘organic’, Brahmsian line. The performance nevertheless always held the attention and led to such questioning in the first place. The moment of return seemed to me spot on, in Beethoven’s spirit, again without any need for underlining. Style grew out of idea in the Intermezzo; I could almost sense Schoenberg nodding approval. I loved the lilt of Han’s piano playing here. If there were times when I felt tension might have been more consistently upheld, I should not wish to exaggerate. Rich string tone announced the third movement: clearly for the players – as for us – the emotional centre of the work. It was not just a matter of a Brahmsian sound, though; rhythmic command proved crucial too. This was an involved, yet never convoluted, performance. Rhythm is overtly crucial, of course, in the finale, but other elements are just as important to the success of a performance. Here they shone through admirably, melodic and harmonic concerns very much to the fore too. Perhaps the performance veered a little close to the episodic at times, but the movement’s spirit was captured with great success – and not a little virtuosic intensity.

Bauci e Filemone (Gluck) and The Judgment of Paris (Arne), Bampton Classical Opera, 13 September 2016

St John’s, Smith Square

Pallas (Catherine Backhouse), Venus (Aoife O'Sullivan), Juno (Barbara Cole Walton)

(sung in English)

Bauci – Barbara Cole Walton

Filemone – Catherine Backhouse
Giove – Christopher Turner
Chorus – Aoife O’Sullivan, Robert Anthony Gardiner, Robert Gildon
Actors – Marieke Bernard-Berkel, Niamh Adams, Sophie Lyons


Mercury – Robert Anthony Gardiner
Paris – Christopher Turner
Juno – Barbara Cole Walton
Pallas – Catherine Backhouse
Venus – Aoife O’Sullivan
Mechanic – Robert Gildon
 

Jeremy Gray (director, set designs)

Vikki Medhurst (costumes)


CHROMA

Paul Wingfield (conductor)

We have a great deal for which to be grateful to Bampton Classical Opera, here making its annual staged visit to St John’s, Smith Square. Who else is interested in this country is interested in the broader hinterland of opera in, roughly, the second half of the eighteenth century? Gluck, by any standards, one of the most important composers in the history of opera, not just eighteenth-century opera, is all but ignored by our ‘major’, non-touring companies, although English Touring Opera offered a fine Iphigénie en Tauride earlier this year. (I also plan to report from the new staging in Paris in December.) If ‘reformist’ Gluck is so shamefully ignored, however, his earlier and concurrent ‘non-reformist’ self suffers a fate worse still.

 

Giove (Christopher Turner)

And yet, the dividing lines are not nearly so distinct as one might suspect. Filemone e Bauci, here sung in Gilly French’s English translation as Philemon and Baucis, was actually written as one act of a festa teatrale, La feste d’Apollo – not unlike a Ramellian opéra-ballet – whose final act was a revised (shortened) version of Orfeo ed Euridice. Intended for the 1769 wedding of Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, to Maria Theresa’s daughter, Maria Amalia, there was a rich, personal operatic past on which to draw, the Archduchess herself having sung in Viennese performances of two earlier Gluck operas, Il parnaso confuso (performed by Bampton forces in 2014) (as Apollo himself), and La corona. Gluck, moreover, for all the alleged purity of his operatic æsthetic, was far from averse to reusing music elsewhere, and there is some splendidly insane coloratura to be handled here too, no more banished to the dustbin of operatic history than a good number of other aspects of Metastasian opera seria. That La feste d’Apollo immediately followed Alceste – of the celebrated Preface – counsels us against parroting too readily all manner of supposed generalisations, turning points, and so forth, concerning operatic history. That said, whilst Bauci’s one aria offers us coloratura to make the Queen of the Night seem almost an amateur, the rest of Gluck’s style here is relatively simple. As so often, the truth is more interesting, more complicated, than received opinion would have us believe. We might know that in theory, of course, but we also need opportunities to experience that in performance, such as here.

 

It is not, perhaps, the most dramatic of works, certainly of libretti, but Giuseppe Maria Pagnini’s libretto, after Ovid, makes certain interesting modifications – I hesitate to say ‘metamorphoses’ – and Jeremy Gray’s production follows suit; both offer a setting for Gluck’s opera to shine forth, playing with the distance between antiquity, the eighteenth century and our time. Chez Pagnini, Philemon and Baucis – I shall now use the English forms – are not an elderly couple, but a pair of young lovers. They nevertheless show kindness beyond the call of duty towards the disguised Jupiter, and, following a storm of divine petulance, receive their priestly reward. Picking up on ideas of travel, disguise, and liminality, the action takes place – not didactically, but with an awareness of what a change of scene might do, to make us consider meaning – in the strange, modern world of the airport: not an uninteresting substitution for pastoral Phrygia. There can certainly be no doubting the helpfulness of these particular honest airline employees.

 

Mercury (Robert Anthony Gardiner) and Paris (Christopher Turner)

That is also the world, with different, yet related, designs for Thomas Arne’s The Judgment of Paris, Arne Air (‘no frills, plenty of trills’) itself – perhaps – a disguised –version of something else. The work is a little earlier than many, though by no means all, of Bampton’s works. To begin with, I even thought that Arne’s 1742 setting of William Congreve’s competition-entry libretto (1701) might have the edge over Gluck’s. It was a splendid opportunity to hear such a rarity, of course, but, as time went on, and with no disrespect to Ian Spink’s excellent Musica Britannica reconstruction of the dry recitatives and chorus music, Arne’s music, superficially similar to Handel’s, became somewhat predictable and perhaps stood in need of the occasional cut to admit of dramatic flow: quite the opposite, then, to Gluck, whose virtues, as so often, quietly crept up upon us. The witty presentation of Paris making his judg(e)ment as a passenger upon divinely-conjured air hostesses again has the virtue of permitting reflection, without forcing it upon us. Jupiter may be absent in person, but his messenger, Mercury again offers another lightly worn connection between works.

 

Baucis (Barbara Cole Walton)

The playing of CHROMA, under Paul Wingfield, proved excellent throughout. We may have come to expect that, but it is certainly not to be taken for granted. From the typically contrasting material – and its dramatic implications – of Gluck’s Overture to the final Arne chorus we were not only in safe, but colourful, harmonically aware hands, well capable of permitting the operatic action to ‘Sing, and spread the joyful News around’. Barbara Cole Walton proved every inch the star with that fiendish coloratura writing from Gluck. As Arne’s Juno, she took her part in an excellent team of competitors, her Juno complementing and contrasting with Catherine Backhouse’s wise, yet far from un-sensual Pallas, also a rich-toned, good-natured Philemon, and Aoife O’Sullivan’s spirited, highly characterful Venus. Christopher Turner’s Paris (and Jupiter) revealed to us a sensitive, agile tenor: many challenges here, met with formidable success. Robert Anthony Gardiner’s Mercury also impressed, with similar vocal virtues, and a keen sense of the stage. Members of the ensemble all made their mark. This was unquestionably a company triumph; the next Bampton opera(s) is or are eagerly awaited.

 

Why have I been suspended from the Labour Party?

Whilst I was in Bayreuth, that hotbed of Trotskyite subversion, I heard that many friends had received their electronic ballots for the Labour leadership election. Mine did not arrive, but I was told that they were being sent out in batches, for some technological reason I did not understand, and that there was at least another week in which mine would. When it did not, I called the Labour Party. I spoke to a very helpful, very pleasant woman in Newcastle, who told me that my ballot had been sent out – note, she told me that it had, not that it should have been – but that many people whose ballots had been sent out on one particular date (26 August, I think) had not arrived, so they were reissuing them on application. She would resend mine now, although, mysteriously, it might not arrive until the beginning of this week. (What are they doing? Printing out ballots and attempting to squeeze them down a cable?) Today came, and still there was no ballot. I called again, and spoke to another very helpful, very pleasant woman in Newcastle; I do not think it was the same one, but maybe it was. She told me she would resend my ballot again. I wondered whether the problem might have had something to do with my e-mail account, so suggested that she send it to my work e-mail address instead. She said she would do so. A couple of hours or so passed – again, rather odd, for so instantaneous a form of communication – and then a message finally appeared. It informed me:

 

Dear Mark,

You will shortly receive a letter in the post regarding your application to the Labour Party. A copy is attached to this email for your reference.

Best wishes

The Labour Party 

 

I opened the attachment, which read as follows (click on it, if you need to enlarge):

 

So I have been suspended, for some unspecified offence(s). I will not be informed of their nature. I will have no right to appeal. I will not have a vote in the leadership election, despite having begun my attempt to join on the day of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, almost a year ago,

 

What might I have done? My Facebook profile is not public, although a friend discovered the following posting from me: ‘July 6 · London · Mark Berry   has just bought himself some chocolate to celebrate Chilcot Day. The assistant said he had guessed I was “a champagne truffles sort of guy”. Indeed I am, cognac too.’ Perhaps I was informed upon by the friendly assistant in Charbonnel & Walker? No, of course I was not. I can only assume that my alleged offence is to have said, on the day of the Chilcot Report, on Twitter, that I hoped Tony Blair would now be expelled from the Labour Party. I bow to no one in my judgement that Blair is a despicable war criminal, who has no place in any ‘progressive’, let alone socialist political party. Many in the Labour Party would agree with me; many would not. I am hardly alone in having expressed such a view.

 

If not that, I suspect I must be the first person to have been suspended from the Labour Party on account of a controversial – not that I knew it was – opinion concerning the music of Webern. Perhaps you have too; if so, do get in touch. We can form a support group.

 

I am not a politician. I am not a celebrity. I am not a remotely influential person. None of that is false modesty; it is simply a statement of what comes as near to empirical fact as anything will ever do. Whatever I might have done or said that offended, it was certainly not ‘racist, abusive, or foul’. If it were construed as such, it must have been discovered by someone who either wished me personal ill, or wished to disqualify me from voting on account of my political views. Someone looking at Twitter would discover pretty quickly that I was – and am – a proud, although far from uncritical, supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. That, we can all be sure, is why I have been suspended from membership. Those whom the Labour Right term ‘Trots, rabble, dogs’, and are nothing of the sort are, ironically, being treated in a fashion that would have made Stalin blanch. He would at least have offered me a show trial. In fact, let us be realistic: he would never have thought me a person worth bothering about in the first place.

 

I am furious. I am also very hurt. This is the first time in my life I have joined a political party. I, like many others, including many of my students, were genuinely enthused by Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign last year. In the aftermath of what was, to many of us, the catastrophe of a Conservative election victory, there seemed at last to be some hope, however illusory. I registered as a supporter then, and promised that, were Corbyn to be elected, I should definitely join; if he were not, I should decided then. I applied, as stated above, the day of Corbyn’s election, indeed within an hour of that. After quite a lengthy wait, I received a letter from the Labour Party telling me that my borough, Tower Hamlets, was undergoing ‘special measures’ – an interesting euphemism for …? – and I should thus have to provide additional identification.

 

I was irritated by that and was about to leave for Vienna, to take up a scholarship there for a month’s work at the dangerously Trotskyite Arnold Schönberg Center. I left dealing with it until my return, by which time, when I called, I was informed that my application had lapsed. I therefore had to start all over again, and was eventually accepted as a member, something in which I took a degree of pride. That, so far as I was concerned was it. Until, of course, Labour MPs launched their coup against Corbyn and a barrage of legal challenges, etc. followed. Owing to ‘special measures’, etc., I had therefore not been a member before the arbitrarily imposed retroactive cut-off point imposed by the Labour NEC. I was not happy about having to pay its £25 extortion fee to re-register as a supporter, but did so, determined that Corbyn and the Left would not be defeated this way. That, again was apparently that, until this…

 

I am writing this to show that this could happen to anyone. It is indeed happening to anyone. The contempt for democracy, for natural justice, for the slightest of common decency shocks me; I hope that it will shock some of you too, whatever your political persuasion. This, I think, is one of the reasons Corbyn must win. Would you trust the people who have done this? I certainly would not.

 

Prom 65 - Conquer/BBC Singers/EIC/Brönnimann: Bartók, Boulez, and Carter, 2 September 2016

Royal Albert Hall

Bartók – Three Village Scenes

Boulez – Anthèmes 2
Carter – Penthode
Boulez – cummings ist der Dichter

Jeanne-Marie Conquer (violin)

Andrew Gerzso (IRCAM computer music design)

Carlo Laurenzi (IRCAM computer music production)

Jérémie Henrot (IRCAM sound engineer)

BBC Singers

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)

2016 opened with the death of Pierre Boulez; alas, it has only got worse. One might have wished for more from the Proms, at which he conducted about seventy concerts, from 1965 to 2008: a much-needed London Répons, for instance. Let us not, however, be ungracious; this was nevertheless a moving and necessary tribute. It was, moreover, definitely a tribute to Boulez at the Proms, both as conductor and composer.

Bartók always featured heavily in his programming, here and elsewhere; indeed, out of the three previous performances of the Three Village Scenes at the Proms, two, in 1974 (the first ever) and in 1979, the latter with the newly formed Ensemble Intercontemporain, were conducted by him. It is always a great pleasure to welcome the EIC to London. Does it ever give a less than excellent performance? That was certainly not a question that occurred this evening, under Baldur Brönnimann, even if I wondered whether the frenetic passages in the opening ‘Svatba’ (‘Wedding’) were a little too driven. Perhaps it was just the acoustic, or the time needed to come to terms with it. At any rate, the contrast with the broader, weightier passages was stark. The second scene, ‘Ukoliebavka’ (‘Lullaby’) sounded as a lullaby indeed, but not an easy one. Languor, whether from the instrumental ensemble or the female voices of the BBC Singers, was always shot through with unease, even urgency. Woodwind echoes of Bluebeard’s Castle – a work I heard Boulez conduct both here and elsewhere – proved as mesmerising in their way as the ‘real thing’. Echoes of Les Noces, another favourite Boulez work, were clear throughout too, nowhere more so than in the ‘Tanec mládencov’ (‘Lads’ Dance’). It was raucous, yet controlled: art music, not folk music, and rightly so. Precision and spirit, rhythm and harmony: all contributed, as they might have done under Boulez himself, to a splendid performance.

 

Anthèmes 2 was heard here in 2012, as part of Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven and Boulez series. The violin soloist was then Michael Barenboim; here, Jeanne-Marie Conquer proved an excellent, perhaps even superior, successor. The Royal Albert Hall truly came into its own, as much a partner, so it seemed, as the ever-excellent IRCAM sound team. A truly spatial work emerged, a successor as much to Gabrieli as to Stockhausen in that sense; above all, however, this was a performance whose material and its proliferation could only have been that of one composer. At times, we heard a celestial band of violins in sweet harmony across the hall; at others, we heard individual responses from a host of individual pizzicato strings (or so, of course, it seemed), ricocheting in endless variety, endless variegation, serial processes rendered as immediate, as immanent as anyone might imagine. New vistas opened up, the timbral equivalent of one of those moments in a Mahler symphony. Bach’s example seemed perhaps unusually present, but so did difference from that (unacknowledged?) model, that figure we know and love from ‘…explosante-fixe’ taking on roles both familiar and new (even to those of us who thought we knew the work quite well). ‘Mesmerising’ again seemed the word.

 

Boulez and the EIC gave the premiere of Elliott Carter’s Penthode at the Proms in 1985. It does not, sad to say, seem to have been performed there since; it was certainly the first time I had heard the work live. What a work it is, though, and what a performance it received too! The opening viola solo, gorgeously played, sounded almost Bergian in its inspiration, its melodic path, even some of its harmonic implications; likewise when the violin took over, only underlining a perhaps surprising closeness to the world of Berg’s Violin Concerto. As in a work by Boulez, the line was in a state of constant development, the mode of development itself constantly developing. Energy might have been less overtly to the fore than in some of Carter’s works, but was no less crucial, if anything more so, in what I sometimes thought of as a state of rapt development. It was not unlike, if you will forgive me the fancy, a great Beethoven Adagio, in which variegated (Carter’s equivalent to Boulez’s ‘proliferating’?) material above wove its particular magic, yet remained, however intangibly, dependent upon the slower movement – a geological metaphor did not seem inappropriate – below, movement that remained, one felt, in some sense fundamental. I wished it might have gone on longer, even forever.

 

Likewise with Boulez’s cummings ist der Dichter, for which the BBC Singers, this time male and female, returned to the stage: twenty-seven singers and twenty-seven instrumentalists, the three harps pointing to the future of sur Incises. Although it has featured four times at the Proms, the first time (1972) conducted by the composer, this was, I think, the first time I had heard the work in concert. Rectification of a rare omission was all the more welcome in so sensitive, so wondrously clear a performance. One is on dangerous ground, pointless ground perhaps, saying that the composer would surely have approved, but it was difficult not to do so, and surely harmless to think in such terms. I had the impression of a combination of certain qualities of Boulez’s earlier choral music – think of the ravishing world of Le Visage nuptial – with the different concerns of somewhat later musical language. Words were admirably clear, even when, especially when, broken up: it is not a Nono-like path that is followed. There was a true sense, nevertheless, of cummings-like wonder. The work sounded, if not unusually generative in its processes, than perhaps unusually traditional in the nature of those processes. Such things are highly relative, of course, but the impression of anchoring was not at all unwelcome. Brönnimann’s strong sense of direction was palpable, as was the security of every performer. Such qualities sounding as a given, a gorgeous tapestry indeed could be woven above, within, without, beneath. There were passages of relative stillness (again, relative), but there was always something brewing, somewhere. As with the preceding works, the scale, as well as the stature, of work and performance had little or no connection with its mere duration.