Writings
I’ve always believed that my opinion matters less than the way in which it is expressed. Criticism is so very subjective. So my objectives remain the same: share the experience and be entertaining about it.
SATURDAY 4TH SEPTEMBER 2010 PROM 66: BERLIN PHILHARMONIC/ RATTLE
Royal Albert Hall
The Mahler had come the night before – this second Berlin Philharmonic Prom imaginatively chronicled the before and after. Foundations were laid in the sustained unison of strings and wind that is the opening of Wagner’s Parsifal. The Berlin strings have their own built-in acoustic, a resonance, a sostenuto, which can at best defy explanation. But when repeated an octave higher with solo trumpet adding a halo of light to the sound, the Royal Albert Hall was suddenly the Temple of the Grail and the effect of the entire prelude was one of seamlessness, of music removed from time and space where barlines ceased to matter or to exist.
Then to Mahler’s younger contemporary Richard Strauss and the work premiered in this very hall 60 years earlier – Four Last Songs. Karita Mattila’s big shining voice might well have put one in mind of the songs’ originator Kirsten Flagstad had she not so memorably reined it in to radiate her inner-wonderment in a succession of melting phrases woven in and out of pellucid orchestral textures. Such singing was only possible because Rattle and his players were ever mindful of where the voice needed to be buoyed up and where, in middle and lower register (as in the opening of the first song, “Frühling”), the intimacy of the text demands clear space.
Mattila’s performance conveyed a lived-in experience married to great technical accomplishment. The difficult ascendancy of “Beim Schlafengehen”, where “the soul unguarded would soar free in flight”, was blissfully well-tuned, plunging to a seductively chested sound on the phrase “magic sphere of night”. And though she and Rattle courted affectation with the extreme slowness of the final song “In Abendrot” the inwardness of it was special and the orchestral postlude (with its two piccolo larks ascending) serenely transcendent.
Rattle’s decision to segue the three Second Viennese School masterpieces of the second half together to create, as he put it, something akin to Mahler’s 11th Symphony, was a masterstroke. In Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces and Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra we experience an extreme distillation of Mahler’s sound world and expression – more concentrated in the crystalline texturing of the Webern whose protracted funeral march with its climactic resonance of percussion so vividly recalls Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony.
The virtuosity and precision and, most importantly, expressivity of the playing was nothing short of astonishing and as the hammer blows descended (Mahler 6 in microcosm) in the last of Berg’s magnificent Three Orchestral Pieces the thought occurred that only here and now had we ever really heard them as Berg imagined them.
WEDNESDAY 1ST SEPTEMBER 2010 PROM 62: GUSTAV MAHLER JUGENDORCHESTER/ BLOMSTEDT
Royal Albert Hall
Like the Matthias Grünewald paintings that inspired it, Paul Hindemith’s Symphony “Mathis der Maler” sounds somehow, and quite miraculously, to be illuminated from within. That aspect of the piece was exceedingly well caught by the mature, well marinated, sound of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester where no player is older than 26 – going on 60.
But Hindemith’s beautiful symphony, later to become an inspirational opera, is driven by a deep-seated and well-schooled classicism which only comes off the page if the man at the helm – in this case the venerable, highly experienced, Herbert Blomstedt – can somehow transcend the formalities of the writing – the swathes of fugal writing in the outer movements, for instance – and somehow infuse it with real drama. That wasn’t happening. The tormented “ride to the abyss” in the final movement – “The Temptation of St. Anthony” – held no terrors and only at the point where a dazzling shaft of light in tremolando violins marked out the moment of divine intervention did Blomstedt rise above the methodical and urge his players, quite literally, to see the light. Otherwise, for all the beauty of the playing, “elderly” was the word which best described the conducting.
Another word which sprang to mind and one which is surely a complete no-no in any Bruckner symphony, leave alone the visionary 9th, is “literal”. The opening pages – with horns summoning from the depths of the composer’s soul – cannot sound as precisely and four-squarely articulated as they were here. We should not be aware of the notation at all. But we were. And as each brass-laden tutti duly arrived there was another problem – an impression of sameness, of textures lacking definition and direction. I simply couldn’t hear all the inner brass detail or indeed those moments where trumpets seem to bisect the entire orchestra, most notably at the supremely harrowing climax of the slow movement where we must hear, and didn’t, the dissonance of trumpets crunching against trombones. Blomstedt seemed to have saved all his shock and awe for the scherzo whose pounding reiterations were brutal indeed.
Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen separated Hindemith from Bruckner with Christian Gerhaher’s “wayfarer” connecting with his audience through the clarity and brightly inflected tone of his storytelling. Occasionally his performance felt closer to speaking than singing – but that, I guess, is what narrative song is all about.
SUNDAY 29TH AUGUST 2010 PROM 58: CZECH PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/ GARDINER
Royal Albert Hall
If you didn’t know who was playing, the second theme of Dvorak’s Carnival Overture – clarinet in songful counterpoint with the homeliest of tunes in the violins – would have thoroughly given the game away. Only the Czech Philharmonic could phrase this music with such unassuming charm. The conductor would have been harder to identify – if only because Sir John Eliot Gardiner – hardly, one would think, a natural for this repertoire – seemed so completely and utterly at home. Never underestimate Gardiner: his versatility knows no bounds because his musical instincts are second to none. Carnival came off the page like a giant party-popper.
A dramatic volte-face, then, to the dark side with Martinu’s last Symphony (No.6), Fantaisies symphoniques, written in exile in the USA and more than a little redolent of those Hitchcockian dreamscapes that begin with the camera spinning us into dizzying oblivion. Martinu’s whirring orchestra is in a state of perpetual flux, gurgling “underwater” bassoons and queasy ever-shifting harmonies making it hard to get a handle on any of the aspiring themes which struggle to assume supremacy in the midst of so much chaos. Only the sad and beautiful clarinet solo in the final Lento (quietly devastating) really tells it like it is. One long resonance of the tam-tam represents the death knell and the rest is a moving funeral oration. The technical precision of the performance wasn’t always there but the soul was.
The interloper at this all-Czech party, happily ensconced between two intervals, was Grieg. Lars Vogt played the ubiquitous Piano Concerto with conspicuous relish for its poetry and its grandstanding, quite literally flinging his big rhetorical gestures back into the orchestra who in turn attended its folksy themes as they might Dvorak or Smetana.
Speaking of folksiness, it was interesting getting two such different perspectives on the same Bohemian source material with the juxtaposition of Janacek’s The Ballad of Blanik and Dvorak’s 8th Symphony. Gardiner seemed to take a step back and let his cellos radiate in the opening theme of the symphony – but the upping of pace into the main allegro, like an over-zealous furiant, was all him. It was a performance fizzing with the spirit of Czech song and dance. Rollocking trills from horns and woodwinds kicked over the traces in the finale but my take-home moment was that very personal reverie, just prior to the rampant coda, which Gardiner and the orchestra phrased with such deep and abiding affection.
FRIDAY 27TH AUGUST 2010 PROM 56: MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA/ VANSKA
Royal Albert Hall
In a former life when the Minnesota Orchestra was the Minneapolis Symphony and “Living Presence” was a phrase on the tip of every record buff’s tongue, it would almost have come as a disappointment to hear the sophisticated beast the orchestra has now become in an acoustic as generous as the Royal Albert Hall. In those early Antal Dorati recordings a butch and brassy immediacy was everything and such muted and seductively blended sounds as Osmo Vanska now drew from Samuel Barber’s re-imagining of Shelley – Music for a Scene from Shelley – in this the first of their two Proms shows just how far they have travelled since Vanska became their Music Director in 2003.
Barber’s early orchestral essay evolves from a Debussy-like impressionism of diaphanous viola-led strings and muted brasses to full-blown filmic rhetoric in less than ten minutes and in that time the full tonal range of the orchestra was shrewdly showcased. But Barber was not all they brought from back home. A phenomenal young cellist, Alisa Weilerstein, pretty much stole the evening with her extraordinary account of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No.1. Vanska played his part, too, in focusing the pithy, soloistic nature of the orchestral writing (not least the excellent first horn) but Weilerstein was the complete musical actress whose orations from hushed and furtive and fearful to ferociously assertive were gripping in the extreme.
We must cast our minds back to Rostropovich to remember an account of the slow movement as potent and technically accomplished as this. The sad song of the opening emerged as from a frail old voice and Weilerstein’s extraordinary subito piano effects and the way she could drain colour and sound to near-inaudibility (as in the passage in ghostly harmonics) and yet demand attention from the farthest reaches of the hall was astonishing. The huge cadenza was truly her “mad scene” and might just be the most disturbing thing we’ve heard all season.
So were the Minnesotans soundly upstaged by their soloist? Vanska’s account of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony “Romantic” (in the contentious but interesting Korstvedt edition) could hardly have been truer to its nickname and it was good to hear aspects of the piece played with a Schubertian airiness and grace. But Vanska’s romantic notions had much more to do with rural idylls than chivalrous grandeur and Bruckner, for all his spirituality, was tougher and bluffer than this. Sometimes the sound was so “blended”, so refined, that even his best friends might not have recognised him.
TUESDAY 24TH AUGUST 2010 PROM 52: SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ ASHKENAZY
Royal Albert Hall
The prospect of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra getting down under and dirty with Strauss and Scriabin got off to a frenetic start with Vladimir Ashkenazy’s body language perhaps telling us more than we needed to know about the heated carnality at the start of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier prelude. And what you saw was what you heard: all sex, not much love-making.
But this was the dreadful “stitch-up” of a suite often attributed to Artur Rodzinsky, though who was the perpetrator and who should want to perform it says more about their indifference to the opera than it does about the suite. Ashkenazy was somewhat twitchy and short-winded with it – too many accents, not enough legato – drawing attention to its bad edits and the shrieking lack of opulence in the Sydney Symphony string sound. Where was the John Wilson Orchestra when you needed it? And who but the most profoundly unmusical and/or opportunistic being could segue from the rose-tinted duet at the close of the opera into the vulgar waltz mayhem which long precedes it? The irony, I guess, was that this “Viennese Night” horror failed to show-off the orchestra in any meaningful way.
That was better achieved in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major where the many circus tricks for the wind made a lively impression (terrific bassoons and a ballsy first trumpet) and the nocturnal fragrance of that much-feared stratospheric horn solo got a well-deserved thumbs-up from the maestro. Helene Grimaud nailed the spiky jazzisms with real aplomb and spun a dreamy alliance with the expressive cor anglais soloist (Alexandre Oguey) in the slow movement. He certainly carried himself like the proverbial Frenchman in Oz.
But just when we had grown accustomed to Ravel’s blissful succinctness along came that self-important brass oration announcing Scriabin’s Symphony No.3 “The Divine Poem” and another of those infernal trumpet motifs raised high a chivalrous lance to the enduring human spirit. Again ironic because the will to live comes and goes during Scriabin’s protracted 50 minutes. Was music ever so static, even in flight? A mysterious process of orchestral osmosis moves it on but the “hot air” factor is inescapable. So, too, the fatally lightweight Sydney strings. The forest murmuring slow movement is absolutely dependent on them being as good as its word – “voluptuousness”; that was not the case. Would it be too much to hope for that the piece remains “down under” where it belongs?
SUNDAY 22ND AUGUST 2010 PROM 49: A CELEBRATION OF RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN/ THE JOHN WILSON ORCHESTRA
It was as close as we get to being guests on the 20th Century Fox soundstages circa.1955. As the Main Title of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! glided effortlessly into “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” and the John Wilson Orchestra’s burnished trumpets poured on their sun-kissed vibrato the sound, the style, the feel of how this music in these arrangements should go was “right” – every sigh, every swoon, every refined inflection. It couldn’t have been “righter”.
Musical style comes in many guises during an average Prom season and just as last year’s MGM extravaganza showed us how “authentic period performance” extended to screen musicals so this timely tribute to the great Rodgers and Hammerstein (on the 50th anniversary of Hammerstein’s death) took us from stage to screen as only the John Wilson Orchestra knows how.
For me it was Carousel that was most eagerly anticipated – the greatest lyric score ever written for the Broadway stage – and as Rodgers’ intoxicating Waltz rolled out, all twinkling lights and gyrating rhythm in Edward B. Powell’s fabulous arrangement, the final grand reprise had Wilson pointing up the ecstatic counterpoint in tremolando violins so joyously as to instantly spirit me back to childhood.
Billy Bigelow’s famously operatic “Soliloquy” was/is as good as musical theatre gets and Julian Ovenden relished its wondrous collusion of smart, searching lyric and utterly embraceable melody. There’s enough material in this one number for a whole musical and in the final pages as Billy’s worthless life suddenly finds purpose and direction, Rodgers’ musical depiction of his vaulting determination was overwhelming. Wilson and Ovenden made it so.
Ovenden’s romantic interest was the gorgeous Sierra Boggess, a star if ever I’ve seen and heard one, and their “conditional” love duets from Oklahoma! and Carousel struck the perfect balance between “covert flirtation” and desire. Boggess lent her own very personal twist on Julie Andrews for the two numbers written specially for the film, nailing the mix of soprano and chest in “I Have Confidence in Me” like it was written for her not Andrews.
Casting was pretty much spot-on right down to all the solo spots from the Maida Vale Singers. I personally wanted much more of everything from Rod Gilfry in the two great South Pacific ballads, but Anna-Jane Casey creamed the sassy numbers and Kim Criswell unwrapped her whole soprano and then some to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”.
But Wilson and his Orchestra were once again the show-stoppers and thinking of the wowsy dance break from “June is Bustin’ Out All Over” who said Hollywood couldn’t do variation form?
MONDAY 16TH AUGUST 2010 PROM 41: LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ GERGIEV
Royal Albert Hall
It was somewhat ironic that amidst the profusion of orchestral perfumes emanating from Scriabin’s 1st Symphony those seated closest to the orchestra were momentarily overcome by the acrid scent of burning electrics. The illuminated panels across the rear of the Royal Albert Hall platform certainly chose their moment to go on the blink. Not that they were anything like the kind of light-show that Alexander Scriabin had in mind when he began thinking in psychedelic colours. The timing, though, was almost poetic.
And the smell pungent. No matter, Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra had the best part of an hour to freshen the air with an infusion of Scriabin’s scented and sensuous waftings and from the moment Andrew Marriner’s poetic first clarinet began his masterclass in ethereal pianissimi to set this dreamy stream of unconsciousness in motion there was little point in allowing the notion to involuntarily grow that life really is too short. This is a piece where the only kind of momentum is achieved in reverse gear. It’s an aspirational kind of static where the fast music doesn’t get us any further forward and the slow music, with its would-be exalted motifs, prefers to radiate in the possibility of sublimation. Actual sublimation comes with a choral paean to Art, that “free and mighty spirit”, and a perfectly dreadful tune with which Scriabin expects to send us out into the night refreshed and exalted. Me, I had the smell of burning electrics in my nostrils and the exquisite inflections of the orchestra in my inner-ear. But the LSO had barely gotten started.
If Scriabin’s music plays like the soundtrack to some open-ended and really rather pointless psychological thriller Stravinsky’s Firebird is precise to the last tiny detail and so rapt in its supernatural atmosphere that you almost dare not breathe for fear of disturbing the progress of the next note. This time it was David Pyatt’s miraculously balmy first horn that opened magic casements on to the enchanted garden of Kashchey the abominable. The quite remarkable thing about this performance was not the precise and beautiful colourations of the playing but the extraordinary malleability of the whole texture. And even as Kashchey met his thunderous demise and the sound of profound darkness descended, the tremor in Gergiev’s hands suggested that this had been his very own finger-painting all along. Stravinsky liked the word, so I’ll write it now: wow.
WEDNESDAY 11TH AUGUST 2010 TCHAIKOVSKY “EUGENE ONEGIN”
Bolshoi Opera/ Royal Opera House
Dmitri Tcherniakov’s revelatory staging of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin unfolds in rich Chekovian detail and with such an acute behavioural eye that at times one feels more of a participant than an observer. Gone are the old picturesque elements, the jolly farm workers, the formal dance routines. Pushkin’s people are now real people, united by heritage, divided by class. The rural middle classes are warm but provincial – they laugh a lot; the St. Petersburg super-rich are cold, aloof. They all make compromises.
As director and set designer Tcherniakov focuses all the action on two capacious and very different rooms. Two rooms, two social classes, where status is defined by the size of the chandeliers and the presence – or not – of carpeting. Mother Russia’s favourite social pastime – eating and drinking – is at the centre of the action with two enormous dining tables as the visual focus.
The two dreamers – Tatyana and Lensky – connect in ways that no production of this opera has ever shown me before. At Lensky’s humiliation, Tatyana alone reaches out to him. She knows what it is to be surrounded by people and yet still isolated. In act one Tcherniakov has her on stage – silent and “unseen” – even when she is not. And, of course, the great “Letter Scene” is truly a soul-baring confessional addressed directly to the imaginary Onegin, beginning in total darkness and climaxing with Tatyana reaching towards the intensifying light of the chandelier as an icy wind blows in the windows. This is not just youthful infatuation, this is a cosmic moment for her.
The entire production is thus a thrilling mix of naturalistic detail and startling stylisations and so what if Tcherniakov occasionally takes liberties like having Lensky sing Monsieur Triquet’s song as a parody of French etiquette or turning the Lensky/ Onegin duel into a tragic accident. Alexei Dolgov sings Lensky’s aria of lost youth and love quite wonderfully and here too the emotion is heightened by the presence of an eavesdropping dowager visibly moved by the young man’s poetry.
The singing was all pretty special but better yet “authentic” with Tatyana Monogarova a richly projected Tatyana, Mariusz Kwiecien a sonorously assured Onegin, and the great Anatoly Kotscherga a heartfelt and worldly Gremin. What the Bolshoi Orchestra under Dmitri Jurowski lacked in finesse it made up for in colour and intensity. But it was Tcherniakov’s rethinking of the opera that blew me away. It is the finest piece of operatic stagecraft I have seen in years. Roll on his Simon Boccanegra at ENO.
TUESDAY 10TH AUGUST 2010 DEUTSCHES SYMPHONIE-ORCHESTER BERLIN/ METZMACHER
Royal Albert Hall
The music of the night takes many shapes and forms but this beautifully imagined programme was so rich in nocturnal sensations that it seemed to be caught somewhere in that strange netherworld between sleeping and waking. Nachtstück from Franz Schreker’s opera Der ferne Klang is the stuff of dreams – sweet and fearful, sultry and deathly. It’s music that appears neither to begin nor to end but rather to drift indeterminately from one harmonic progression and one textural sensation to the next. To wake or not to wake, is that the question?
The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Ingo Metzmacher embraced the latter with voluptuous intent but the arrival of the extraordinary Leonidas Kavakos entirely shifted perspective. Leaning into the podium as if to whisper some highly sensitive confidence to the conductor, the intimate opening measures of the Korngold Violin Concerto (beginning, as does the Barber Violin Concerto, mid-sentence) seemed almost to suggest that the amorphousness of the Schreker had magically found form and focus.
Kavakos played like a dream eliciting an almost physical pleasure from the trueness of his intonation and the way in which certain phrases, certain chords landed. He and Metzmacher were a wonderfully knowing and instinctive partnership and it’s amazing how their good taste made the piece sound greater as a result. Kavakos always appears so effortless and relaxed that the intensity and transcendency of his playing almost comes as a surprise. The slow movement was about as good as it gets, the chromatic insinuations almost indecently beautiful. The resolution of the harmony on the very last chord was as good an example as I’ve heard in ages of how sexily dissonance can beget consonance.
Actually there was almost too much music in this hothouse of a programme though, of course, the logic of programming Schreker and Korngold alongside the elaborate abstractions and nocturnal bumpings and grindings of Mahler’s 7th Symphony was inescapable. Metzmacher and his orchestra gave an impressively taut and acutely well-heard account of the piece. Narrative tension was not, as is sometimes the case, at a premium and that sometimes problematic balance between the super-refined (the songful guitar and mandolin flecked fourth movement nocturne was quite exquisite) and the super-vulgar was never an issue. Metzmacher even nailed the insane logic of the finale’s maniacal “danceathon” thanks not least to a quite sensational first trumpet.
SATURDAY 7TH AUGUST 2010 NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA/ BYCHKOV
Royal Albert Hall
Looking over the massed ranks of the National Youth Orchestra one might easily imagine that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice had worked some of his magic on the proliferation of instruments. Six bassoons cavorted to Dukas’ jolly tune as images of Mickey Mouse and his industrious broomsticks came back to haunt us.
It was a mighty racket Semyon Bychkov unleashed from his super-sized brass section as the elder magician returned to admonish his apprentice and restore order from chaos but not half as mighty or audacious as that same section delivered with the clarion calls and clattering syncopations which mark out the first of Julian Anderson’s Fantasias. It’s an incredibly arresting start to a piece which sets out to pitch sound against motion in a succession of brilliantly imagined polyphonies and is expressly designed to excite and tantalise and, in the case of the NYO, challenge and exercise. Even the extended “Nocturne” at its heart hums to a profusion of Bartokian insect life, all manner of con legno, slap-pizzicati, knocking and scratching effects conspiring to produce hyperactivity against a calm backdrop.
The Disneyfication of Dukas was as nothing compared to some of Anderson’s more manic, you might even say cartoonish, exertions but even he couldn’t sustain musical interest (as opposed to virtuosity) over this length. Great compositional gamesmanship for sure – but what do you take away from it beyond an unqualified admiration for its technical brilliance? Me, I’d go back to the opening fantasia for brass alone. That’s the bigger piece.
And speaking of bigger, Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique was a brave and risky choice for even youngsters of this calibre and I take my hat off to Bychkov for coaxing a performance of such sophistication from them. The volatility and febrility of the piece demands such flexibility from every section, not least the strings, and Bychkov miraculously had them achieving a lightness of touch and quickness of response that was tantamount to producing a sleek sports car from a juggernaut. More magic.
We might have wished for a little more impetus up the steps of the scaffold (loving the flatulent trombones) and into the midst of the witches’ Sabbath – and what feeble offstage bells announcing the “Dies Irae”? – but it was good to see so many youngsters getting high safely and legally.
FRIDAY 6TH AUGUST 2010 PROM 27: HALLE ORCHESTRA/ ELDER
(Royal Albert Hall)
It was the second outing for a John Foulds piece in one week. But then it does tend to pour rather than rain at the Proms and this was the Halle Orchestra where Foulds’ dad once played the bassoon. April – England implies showers (which are rather plentiful in Manchester) but it’s the sunniness that you go away humming.
Foulds’ piece begins as if whistling a jaunty air; a simple canon or two is about as complicated as the invention gets. You can hear its origins as a piano piece – though not for long. Foulds’ highly individual way with orchestral colour and harmony inevitably proves self-enriching (fabulously so – a true Spring awakening) and the resultant polyphony climaxes with grandiose brass in vigorous counterpoint with busily ecstatic strings. Percy Grainger has been cited. Just so. The great orchestral “rambler” would have thoroughly approved.
He might have had a thing or two to say about Paul Lewis’ exquisite piano playing, too. This was the penultimate instalment of his Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle – the Third Concerto in C minor – and in some ways (thanks to Mark Elder’s characteristic sensitivity) the most “aware” in its orchestral interaction. In the chamber-like refinements of the long orchestral introduction it was almost as if Elder was drawing us into a comparison with Mozart’s very different C minor concerto. For Lewis, too, a diamond clarity and easy elegance characterised the opening paragraphs of the first movement with only the explosive arrival of the cadenza truly revealing Beethoven, the wild visionary. The passage in ethereal arpeggios towards the close of it found Lewis once more transforming the atmosphere in the hall.
In the slow movement’s opening solo the range of dynamics, the weighing of touch and inflection, suggested Beethoven in the moment of composition and Lewis in the moment of discovery. This wasn’t playing which drew attention to itself but rather which absolutely commanded attention.
And an altogether more immodest hero was waiting in the wings. Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero’s Life”), the sacred domain of the great and good of orchestras and conductors, can now count the Halle and Mark Elder as worthy to join their ranks. This was hugely impressive stuff – showy, though never distastefully so, not even in the rollocking “battle with the critics” (I shall maintain a dignified silence) where horns and trumpets covered themselves with glory. There was poignancy, too, in Strauss’ long backward glance over his life and works and for once his “helpmate” – the feisty Lyn Fletcher, the Halle’s leader – was the right sex.
TUESDAY 3RD AUGUST 2010 PROM 23: BBC SCOTTISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ RUNNICLES
Royal Albert Hall
Questions may be raised in the Scottish parliament about the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra bringing an all-English programme to the Proms (one dear soul even felt compelled to wave the Scottish flag) but no one is likely to be arguing about the quality of the music making. Predictably Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending pulled in a massive crowd but it was the concert opener by John Foulds (a Proms first) that really raised curiosity levels.
Dynamic Triptych can never quite make up its mind whether or not it wants to be a fully-fledged piano concerto. The very able bodied pianist Ashley Wass seemed to be splashing on keyboard colour but little of real pianistic interest for much of the opening movement: a fiery toccata-like romp with pile-driving rhythms and flaring horns. There was an air of filmic underscoring about it (The War of the Roses?) and even the cadenza – a hair-raisingly assertive reprise of the two key thematic elements – didn’t really hint at much beyond out and out rhetoric, albeit with a twist of individuality.
But then a quiet dynamism took hold and the opening rumination of the slow movement found the soloist musing on a perfectly beautiful and searchingly harmonised melody prompting strangely erotic quarter-tone slides from the lower strings. The textural ripeness of the piece now grew rather startling and even the imploding climax of the finale was genuinely unexpected.
Enter, then, Vaughan Williams and not one but two masterpieces: Serenade to Music, where the “touches of sweet harmony” proved more happily suggestive of the blend rather than the individuality of the 16 young soloists; and The Lark Ascending whose songful chirrupings – beautifully inflected by Nicola Benedetti – drew 6000 pairs of ears into its confidence. Space – even one as large as this – truly enhances this piece.
But this sasonac Prom will be remembered most of all for Donald Runnicles’ hugely impressive account of Elgar’s First Symphony. The challenges of this mighty piece – not least the precarious tension between tenderness and tumult – can never ever be underestimated. But Runnicles and the orchestra chronicled its multi-layered narrative with great accomplishment. The transition from blustering scherzo into contemplative slow movement was like a door opening onto an altogether kinder world. Each return to the main theme was more healing than the one before and the clarinet’s final inflection seemed to echo the words of Gerontius’ Angel: “softly and gently”.
SUNDAY 1ST AUGUST 2010 ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT/ RATTLE
Royal Albert Hall
A night of love; an hour or two of quiet revelations. As Simon Rattle and his period band – the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – nursed the sensuous, no erotic, harmonies of the love scene from Berlioz’ Romeo and Juliet the realisation dawned once more that without this extraordinary composition and others like it Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde might have remained forever chaste. Two pairs of star-crossed lovers and between them a seismic shift in the evolution of music. Talk about the earth moving.
Rattle’s ability to command our attention and to create atmosphere from that attention was a major feature of the evening. When did we last hear a Prom open in rapt and all-enveloping stillness – a cushion of whispering strings barely moving air, erratic heartbeats caught in the pizzicati of string basses, nine of them ranged across the rear of the orchestra and for now attending only to the music’s excitable pulse. How effectively Berlioz navigates his love scene between tenderness and unfettered ardour and how perceptively Rattle realised not just its warm embraces but also its amazing dying cadences suggestive as they are of those sinking moments where this Romeo and his Juliet feel the cold reality of the approaching dawn.
Tristan and Isolde’s night of love is rather more brutally cut short in act two of Wagner’s opera and here again Rattle’s gripping concert performance sought to prioritise harmonic tension and the music’s other-worldly theatricality. Those brassy period horns sounded at once earthy and cosmic in their dramatic offstage volleys and as Isolde (the marvellously imperious and ringingly secure Violeta Urmana) and Brangäne (the transcendent Sarah Connolly) anxiously acknowledged the timely departure of King Mark’s hunting party a moment of fear descended in barely audible sul ponticello strings and oscillating clarinets as if nature too sensed the fear and folly of the lovers’ illicit tryst. Urmana’s thrilling invocation to the “goddess of love” to bring on the night brought on a feverish eruption from the OAE – and how profoundly that would contrast with the terrible emptiness in the pit of the bass clarinet’s lower register as Franz-Josef Selig’s King Mark movingly chronicled his betrayal.
Unfortunate, then, to once again have to draw attention to the deficiencies of Ben Heppner’s Tristan. The problems that have long beset this fine singer are now so pronounced that the precious timbre and musicality are scant compensation for the distressing insecurities in support and production. Still, Rattle prevailed with a translucent and exalted performance.
FRIDAY 23RD JULY 2010 PROM 9: BBC PHILHARMONIC/ SINAISKY
Royal Albert Hall
It’s the highlight of every “Last Night”, the nation’s unofficial National Anthem, but for its composer Hubert Parry Jerusalem has proved as much of a millstone (as opposed to milestone) as Land of Hope and Glory has for Elgar. There’s no question that his younger contemporary overshadowed him and thoroughly outplayed him at his own game – but Proms like this one can go some way towards redressing the balance and for those of us who’d never heard Parry’s Symphonic Fantasia in B minor (Symphony No.5) a few surprises, to say nothing of a new-found “respect”, were in store.
The really clever, coherent thing about this close-knit piece – four movements linked as one – is the emotional memory that Parry carries forward with the development and transformation of his themes. The second of them – a kind of love-child of Brahms and Elgar – achieves a gorgeous harmonic flowering and deepening significance in the slow movement – and by the time the germinal motif “comes home” on horns at the opening of the finale and a trio of solo strings with harp radiantly restore optimism (or is that hopeful pessimism?) we briefly forget that this is 1912 and the storm clouds of catastrophe are gathering.
The BBC Philharmonic under Vassily Sinaisky were generous in their advocacy of it – and then to be asked to turn up the heat and further the cause of Scriabin’s Piano Concerto might be considered above and beyond the call for one half of a concert. Chopin is the name most often invoked when discussing the pianistic character of this piece but that’s surely to downplay just how “out there” the young Scriabin already was from a harmonic perspective. The deceptively slight Nelson Goerner opened up much intrigue between the hands in that respect and besides his impressive bravura what really came across here was his in-the-moment sense of the keyboard writing’s improvisatory nature. Terrific.
But maybe there was simply too much for the BBC Philharmonic to chew on for one evening because their performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony never really happened. A few too many untidinesses and a certain circumspection about the big moments – not least that of the first movement development spilling over as it does into grief-stricken sostenuto – left one consistently wanting more. Sinaisky managed the fade-to-black at the close well enough but the performance had long felt “spent” in quite the wrong sense.
WEDNESDAY 21ST JULY 2010 PROM 6: BBC SO/ LEWIS/ BELOHLAVEK
Royal Albert Hall
The big occasion often brings out the best in the truly gifted and with so much riding on his much-anticipated Proms cycle of the Beethoven Piano Concertos – the first ever by a single artist – I can honestly say that I have never heard Paul Lewis play better. Prefaced by two heroic Beethoven overtures – a slightly accident prone Egmont and a nippy Creatures of Prometheus – the evolution of the composer from the Mozart inflected elegance of the First Concerto to the romantic mysticism of the Fourth could hardly have been more absorbingly chronicled.
One of the trickiest things to achieve in this music – and one which found Lewis and Belohlavek acting like a mirror image of each other – is the sometimes delicate balance between Beethoven the classicist and Beethoven the visionary. It is so easy – and Lewis always resisted the temptation – to open up too much space in those moments, sometimes fleeting, where romantic curiosity turns to full-blown rapture. The passage in the first movement development where ethereal cascades in the keyboard signal a romantic in the making found Lewis creating his own atmosphere in tempo and through touch alone. The weighing and testing of all such passages precluded any tendency to linger or indulge the moment at the expense of the bigger picture. And yet he infused a sense of great mystery into all these flights of fancy. The first movement cadenza encompassed a huge expressive range and even humour with the last three connecting chords into the recap achieving a devilish moment or two of suspense.
Shape and an unerring sense of proportion kept everything about both these performances on track. Lewis was refreshingly direct, keenly articulate, at all times. And the beautiful central Largo of the First – far removed from everything around it in searching A-flat – felt truly integral not just to this piece but to Beethoven’s continuing evolution as a whole.
Lewis’s intense alliance with the solo clarinet in this movement also confirmed him and Belohlavek as great listeners. And so it was again in the Fourth Concerto where the relationship with the orchestra is even more extraordinary – not least, of course, in the other worldly dialogue between reflective keyboard and stern unison strings in the central Andante con moto. If the relationship with the other orchestras and conductors in the remaining concertos is half as subtle and as accomplished then this cycle could put Lewis into a different orbit on the world’s stages.
TUESDAY 20TH JULY 2010 PROM 5: WDR SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/BYCHKOV
Royal Albert Hall
It was Semyon Bychkov’s last concert as principal conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra, Cologne, and reaching the summit of Strauss’ Alpine Symphony could and should have been a big deal – the Albert Hall is a natural environment for this musical blockbuster. But some concerts – and this was one of them – just don’t aspire to such lofty heights. It was easy to recognise but hard to define why.
First impressions of Viviane Hagner in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto were well founded. The opening was simply too genteel, too polite, to be considered – by any stretch of the imagination – molto appassionato. Indeed the whole of the concerto’s opening paragraph failed to ignite in any coherent way. Hagner played the notes well enough but the imperative of the piece, the undercurrent of romantic ardour, was nowhere. Her slow movement was more interesting for its songfulness in flowing waltz time and the air of decorum and formality did start to slip with the capriciousness of the finale. But too little, too late. And strangely old-fashioned.
You might say the same of Gunther Schuller’s hefty but inconsequential orchestral piece Where the World Ends. So last century, I wryly thought, as its proliferation of chirruping string voices strove to emulate much the same effect as Stravinsky achieved with winds at the start of The Rite of Spring. Here was another pagan invocation of sorts, technically accomplished and, but for the extensive featuring of Wagner tubas, strenuously second-hand. In the final page or two of music one bar broke into a big-band swing as if fleetingly to remind us of Schuller’s jazz interests. A frame of Ellington’s Harlem flashed in my head. Now there’s a piece.
Perhaps it was a mistake to steal Strauss’ thunder by pre-empting it with another big orchestral showpiece but Alpine Symphony made far less impact than it should have done beyond a competent exposition of its pictorial effects. It was a little like experiencing the DVD rather than the big screen theatre presentation. The brass playing in particular was way too safe, horns never quite achieving that extra reach in the climactic summit episode, high-stopped trumpets getting the notes but not the sheer visceral thrill of them. The spirit did not move in this performance and even as the last violin glissando slipped away that intangible sense of achievement felt closer to exhaustion.
MONDAY 19TH JULY 2010 PROM 4: RLPO/PETRENKO
Royal Albert Hall
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra pulled off the not inconsiderable feat of acknowledging both the Schumann and Mahler anniversaries simultaneously with their Prom opener. Mahler’s highly suspect retouching of Schumann’s Manfred Overture may have elucidated some of the inner part writing and added to the supernatural tone with some notable “muting” effects but from the incongruous cymbal splash at the very outset it was like hearing a familiar piece ghosted by another hand. It just wasn’t Schumann any more. No matter, Lord Byron’s troubled hero would be back later in the guise of the great Tchaikovsky.
Before that the ubiquitous “brief encounter” that is Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto got something of a makeover in the creative hands of Simon Trpceski and the RLPO’s dashing principal conductor Vasily Petrenko. Nothing could have been further removed from the flash and rhetoric of the old warhorse approach. Trpceski shimmered over the keys, his nimble articulation lightening and illuminating hackneyed passage-work until phrases began to sing with fantasy once more. His veiled arpeggios made for a diaphanous effect with flute and clarinet in the slow movement and if this immensely refined approach occasionally had one hungry for a little more heft and wide-screen spectacle Petrenko was there with an impressively deep saturation of RLPO string sound.
It was a big feature of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, too, but then how else could Petrenko have achieved such daring breadth with each heavily burdened return of the troubled hero’s theme. Its woebegone appearance at the close of the first movement was arrestingly, almost shockingly slow, horns hammering away below like ominous palpitations before lifting the theme aloft in rip-roaring fortissimo. This was mightily exciting.
But at the other extreme of the dynamic and emotional spectrum Petrenko’s strings and woodwind achieved tiny miracles of deftness with the apparition of the alpine fairy amidst glistening waterfalls in the symphony’s virtuosic scherzo. Granted the pastoral oboe-led third movement Andante lingered a little too lovingly over a melody (an especially fragrant one) which should perhaps convey a less knowing or worldly sense of innocence. But this was nothing if not a performance full of heart, one in which those aching recollections of Manfred’s lost love Astarte achieved a deeper and entirely Russian resonance.
TUESDAY 13TH JULY 2010 RASCH “THE DUCHESS OF MALFI”
English National Opera & Punchdrunk
We journeyed to deepest docklands, a bewildered group of punters and members of the press clutching our precious tickets (all performances sold out in six hours) and a precise set of directions to the mysterious location. WARG Pharmaceuticals handed us appointment cards for a new vaccination programme (slightly unsettling) and we were herded to the doors of “the venue”. Masks were distributed (warning: a big problem if you happen to wear glasses) as were cursory health and safety announcements. But no further mention of vaccination. “I am not mad”, the Duchess of Malfi had famously insisted. Perhaps we too were there for “the cure”. This was, after all, “immersive” theatre.
Well, a series of deserted rooms connected to some sinister treatment programme did not make for comfortable exploration and as the darkness intensified and the spaces grew bigger the sound of less cautious audience members colliding with obstacles or even crashing to the floor was not the kind of music I had hoped to hear. Indeed, so far no music at all save the “white noise” of a moody underscoring track grimly suggestive of dark and dastardly deeds. All would doubtless be revealed but not in any coherent form of narrative. Punchdrunk shows are all about making choices as to when and where you go – which direction, which corridor, which room. I soon encountered an empty bedchamber, a forest of wire trees (magical), a room in which pages of a musical manuscript seemed to float in mid-air. Perhaps Torsten Rasch’s much-anticipated score had literally blown away. Still no live music. Perhaps I had spent too long eavesdropping on a particularly compelling, not to say brutally athletic sex act. I’m pretty sure the Duchess wasn’t involved (in nearly 30 minutes of exploring I had still not encountered her). Would I? I think I saw one of my colleagues (I recognised the jumper) being dragged into an empty room by an unmasked courtier. No such luck.
But suddenly there was music and dancing and a Cardinal. And then I was in a kind of church with pews and a group of mellifluous woodwinds accompanying singing characters I could not identify and words I could not make out. In another room a beautiful threnody for strings was deeply redolent of Alban Berg, the composer Torsten Rasch’s self-confessed idol. As anyone who knows his thrilling orchestral song-cycle Mein herz brennt will know, this man writes most beautifully for both voice and orchestra. I just couldn’t get a handle on his score – probably because Punchdrunk shows eschew linearity and music to some extent – and especially with regard to development – demands it.
I think I saw and heard five or six of the opera’s nine scenes (there is no guarantee you’ll catch all of it unless you wisely follow the musicians) and I did – later rather than sooner – encounter the Duchess (the impressive contralto of Claudia Huckle) in a blackened room (scary) gazing at computer monitors all replicating the same image of a disappearing child (one of hers?). Her twin brother Ferdinand (fearless counter-tenor Andrew Watts), naked and bloodied, pushed me aside.
Punchdrunk’s priorities are to refract the drama and place greater emphasis on the dark and suffocating atmosphere of Webster’s nihilistic play. And if ENO’s part in all of this occasionally seemed incidental to overall effect, the final scene (where we do all arrive together) was jaw-droppingly operatic. No, I will not give away the final coup de theatre except to say that the body count is awesome.
SATURDAY 10TH JULY 2010 BERNSTEIN “MASS”
Royal Festival Hall
Mass is Leonard Bernstein’s most personal, most provocative piece. His daughter Jamie has described it as his “most Lennyish” piece – meaning that it knows no inhibition, that it is everything he was. There are no fudges, no in-betweens, no half-measures. The musical juxtapositions come thick and fast in jarring, crunching, shifts of gear; the cheesy rubs shoulders with the sublime, musical genres are crossed and re-crossed. And Mass has things to say about what exactly a “crisis of faith” – the central plank of its thesis – might mean, not just for him but for us all. It asks the awkward questions, challenges the dogma, the hypocrisy. It’s a 1970s piece with a millennium reach and it will always polarise opinions. But it is Bernstein’s masterpiece – of that I am in no doubt – and this culminating blast of the South Bank’s year-long Bernstein Project came as close to nailing it as we could reasonably expect.
Mass was written in a time of flux defined by the death of a President, the waging of an unpopular war, and the emergence of the flower-powered peaceniks whose passive resistance assumed an almost religious authority. Stephen Schwartz and Bernstein’s words offer their own poetic resistance and the melodies which clothe them – pop, rock, folk, Kurt Weillian, and pure and simple Bernstein – chime well with the scrapbook of photographs which Jude Kelly’s staging offers as a backdrop. There are upwards of 500 people involved in this ceremony of innocence and hope – not least an orchestral from four continents anchored around the National Youth Orchestra – but at the heart of it with their multifarious and ferociously demanding “Tropes” are the Street People, an astonishing bunch of musical theatre voices cast and coached by Mary King. They are the fighting spirit of Mass and they sang the socks off it.
So, too – and how – did the Bernstein figure of the Celebrant – Jesse Blumberg – whose eleventh-hour revelation that he can only relate to his flock when he is one of them brings a spectacular meltdown: the mad scene that Bernstein always wanted to write (his very own Peter Grimes moment?). The catalyst for that is the defining climax of Mass – Dona nobis pacem – where pleas for peace turn into demands and the astonishing rock-driven crescendo on this occasion brought what looked like half the audience to the stage in angry protest to bring the service to its knees in more senses than one.
Marin Alsop – who is now all but the official guardian of this piece – kept her far-flung forces on message with barely a stitch dropped. Sorry, but anyone who can still resist the healing benediction of the closing minutes must be made of stone.
SUNDAY 4TH JULY 2010 MOZART “DON GIOVANNI”
Glyndebourne Festival Opera
The crushing first chord of the Overture plunges us into darkness – a sudden and scarifying blackout. Through the gloom of residual light we can just make out a slowly revolving cube, on each of its sides ornate masonry, an old erotic master, and a door. Is this the House of Giovanni? Or Pandora’s Box? Or both? Paul Brown’s truly amazing set for Jonathan Kent’s new Glyndebourne staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is – like the opera’s anti-hero – full of surprises. It opens, it unfolds, it conceals, it deviously transforms and eventually, inevitably, disintegrates.
But this visual stylisation is thrown into the sharpest relief with Kent’s naturalistic descent into a period where the rock n’roll of the Don’s privileged lifestyle will have seemed particularly enticing. For those with memories long enough to recall the late 1950s, the smell of sexual permissiveness was growing increasingly intense. “Kitchen sink” drama was the new sleaze. And Don G (the eternally suave Gerald Finley) was living it. A Polaroid photo of each sexual conquest (how cool and how sinister is that) helped him keep the memories alive. Instead of one little book of statistics his valet Leporello (the excellent Luca Pisaroni) maintained a selection of albums.
The success of Kent’s update entails the risky strategy of to some extent playing against the reckless dash of the narrative (brilliantly and dramatically underpinned by Vladimir Jurowski’s fizzing engagement with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) and playing the recitative at conversational pace. And with Finley savouring the caress of his words as surely as that of his songs and his experienced touch, the pace was often quite languorous.
All of which made (according to your viewpoint) for a greater contrast and sense of heightened imperative with the musical numbers and the all-singing, all-dancing set – and for sure you couldn’t have wished for a more sizzling hike in temperature in the act one finale as an entirely unexpected premonition of hellfire and damnation devours the Don’s home a couple of hours ahead of schedule.
Jurowski’s choice of the Vienna edition gave Don Ottavio his ravishing “Dalla sua pace”, which William Burden sang decently but not exceptionally, and the elegant Kate Royal’s Donna Elvira (looking dazzlingly in period) got to brave “Mi tradi” with a compelling amalgam of breathless desire and desperation. Anna Virovlansky’s Zerlina was outstanding and her compatriot Anna Samuil – a touch of wildness in the vocal temperament – made quite a fist of Donna Anna’s challenging “Non mi dir”.
The last Polaroid of the evening was of the deceased Don – a souvenir to add to Leporello’s album and lasting evidence that you reap what you sow?
MONDAY 28TH JUNE 2010 MOZART “DON GIOVANNI”
Opera Holland Park
There’s narcissism and there’s narcissism and in his terrific new staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni for Opera Holland Park director Stephen Barlow leaves us in no doubt as to who’s the fairest of them all. There’s only one image in this Don’s picture gallery and it’s replicated over and over in frames large and small. Of course, society made him what he is and society – all courtly airs and dances – makes its own entrance before Mozart’s overture has run its breathless course. The ubiquitous Don is masked – as the devil, who else? – and since a pool of blood already marks the spot where the Commendatore and his assailant will fall there can be no escaping that the devil’s work, to say nothing of his finest tunes, will dominate the evening.
Barlow has opted for a late Victorian setting to best reflect the class and privilege which is at the heart of this turbulent 24 hours. Designer Yannis Thavoris ingeniously complements the handsomely restored façade and leaded windows of the original house with dark wood panelled surfaces, quickly spiriting us from mansion to hotel to tavern. The reckless dash of the narrative is unremitting (keenly propelled by conductor Robert Dean with especial panache forthcoming from the OHP Orchestra’s wind section) but Nicholas Garrett’s Don Giovanni seems to languish in the eye of its storm. He delivers the hectic “champagne aria” from the comfort of his favourite armchair; “La ci darem la mano” has him sustaining an easy mellifluous legato whilst engaged in a sweaty full-blown seduction of Zerlina. The gawky plain-looking girl in glasses (a marvellously engaging and ample-voiced Claire Wild) is suddenly all-woman as the Don lets down her hair and removes the horn-rims. Never mind that her husband-to-be in the next room – a “gentleman” does what a “gentleman” pleases. The fine line between consent and abuse doesn’t exist for the ruling classes. Don G serenades and even the maid and bell-boy quickly succumb.
Only Leporello (a lanky and likeable Matthew Hargreaves) sees him for what he is – though his own self-interest (usually cash) invariably brings him round. The women scorned make free with the embellishments, especially Laura Mitchell’s Donna Elvira who is heard to best effect when she isn’t pushing to fill the space; Ana James’ Donna Anna makes her presence felt with a highly creditable “Non mi dir”. Thomas Walker’s Don Ottavio bites off more than he can chew with his ornamentation of “Il mio tesori”.
But dramatically this Don Giovanni is all of a piece. Barlow has a conspicuous talent: international opera houses should be knocking at his door.
THURSDAY 24TH JUNE MOZART “ZAIDE”
Classical Opera Company
Sadler’s Wells
The bare bones of Mozart’s unfinished opera Zaide comprise one glorious aria for the enslaved heroine – the aspirational “Ruhe sanft” – and an assortment of other numbers which might be considered mediocre by Mozart’s standards but which would more than cut the mustard by anybody else’s. But there’s no surviving text, virtually no last act, and no ending – happy or otherwise.
Enter Ian Page, whose Classical Opera Company was born to boldly go where others might shy of going and whose musical archaeology has purpose and enterprise. Joined by wordsmiths Michael Symmons Roberts (sung text), Ben Power and director Melly Still (spoken text) in the creation of a new libretto what emerges (in embryo, anyway) is Mozart’s answer to Beethoven’s Fidelio – sexual and political oppression in all its unforgiving ugliness. Even as Ian Page’s wiry period band are bristling through the Overture (borrowed like much else from other Mozart – in this case Thamos, König in Ägypten), director Melly Still is enacting a brutally thwarted prison escape. Anna Fleischle’s design offers variations on cages and improvised barbed wire. Lighting (Natasha Chivers) brings little relief from shadow or scrutiny.
There isn’t a whole lot to work with, though, beyond the preponderance (only sporadically effective) of accompanied spoken “melodrama” – and paradoxically the most affecting musical content (other than the rapturous “Ruhe sanft”) arrives in the sketchy final act where Page has borrowed a beautiful aria (invariably cut) from Idomeneo for his hero Gomatz (a creditable Andrew Goodwin) and an equally affecting response from his heroine Zaide in the shape of one of those useful concert arias. There’s even a Cosi moment casting a fleeting shadow over the happy ending: a typically male response (as in modified revulsion) to the sexual favours the women have been compelled to perform for their brutal masters. That has Melly Still written all over it.
Still is skilled in producing those moments of improvised magic that work so well for minimalist touring opera – a blanket that catches our hero’s weary body like the onset of sleep; or the torches that effect a panoply of stars for the young lovers. Still always pushes for truth from her young cast in the tricky dialogue, with variable results, but in Pumeza Matshikiza (Zaide) she has an emotive performer to work with. There are still rough edges and some breathing issues – especially in the aria – but the connection between sound (distinctively creamy) and feeling has bags of potential. And that’s what the Classical Opera Company is all about nurturing.
TUESDAY 22ND JUNE 2010 MASSENET “MANON”
Royal Opera House
No doubt about national identity when the opening ten minutes or so of the drama is given over to an impatient lust for food and wine. Throw in the women and song and you’ve completed the picture. Jules Massenet was well aware of his priorities when he and his librettists Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille set down their extravagant (in length and lushness) take on Abbé Prévost’s novel L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux at de Manon Lescaut. Puccini found more favour and durability with the same sad tale but Massenet had the measure of its Frenchness in music which revelled in the spirit of La Belle Époque a century-and-a-half after the novel was written.
Laurent Pelly takes just about all his cues from the period and flavour of Massenet’s music – its bold juxtaposition of high-flown romance, tawdry melodrama, and low-brow music-hall is inescapable – but he and his set designer Chantal Thomas effect a bold contradiction in what we hear and what we see. The initially disconcerting starkness of the mis-en-scene (muted back-drops, barely a suggestion of location) is eventually revealed as the big idea that the Belle Époque was entirely in the hearts and minds of the society that created it but that like Manon’s dream it was redundant, an illusion. The assorted ramps, steep steps, and off-kilter proportions of Thomas’ settings are the ups and downs of such transient living.
People and attitudes make society what it is, Pelly seems to be saying, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake, be it sexual or otherwise, is ultimately pointless. His stage society is all prying eyes and judgemental stares; money is in appearances and appearances, as we know, can be deceptive. The character of Manon herself is chronicled in a series of “entrances”: in the first she could be Collette’s Gigi, fresh and pert, in the last she is an ignominious bundle of rags, kicked and spat on by those who feel superior. In between comes the woman of Manon’s fantasies briefly made real – and as Anna Netrebko glided down her virtual catwalk, a pink and white soufflé of sophistication, asking and answering the leading question “How do I look?”, her top-hatted admirers swayed to a man as if her perfume was simply too intoxicating to endure.
In moments like this Pelly seized unashamedly upon the “musical theatre” ambience of Massenet’s score choreographing Manon’s “turn” to perfection and giving Netrebko her kittenish head. Antonio Pappano, too, such a master stylist, made deliciously light of the score’s many divertissements. The obligatory ballet, here given a new twist as the rich and lecherous Guillot de Morfontaine (the excellent Christophe Mortagne) “imports” the corps de ballet from the opera to impress Manon, is a gorgeously cheesy 18th century pastiche. There’s a nasty pay-off to the sequence as Guillot’s chums start manhandling the dancers turning the classically poised into the brutishly uncouth.
Musically speaking Pappano didn’t just shape but defined the evening, not just in the gorgeousness and subtlety of the Royal Opera Orchestra’s playing but in the many stylistic enticements he coaxed from his two young stars. Yes, one would like to have heard a few more French vowels from Netrebko but the vocal characterisation was spot on and the singing not just fabulous but meaningful.
So, too, Vittorio Grigolo’s dashing and thrillingly sung Chevalier Des Grieux, his seductive middle-voice covered to beautiful effect in the many subito shadings in mezza voce. The chemistry between him and Netrebko was, well, steamy in the cassock-ripping Saint-Sulpice scene. I was put in mind of the young Roberto Alagna as Gounod’s Romeo. Yes, Grigolo was that good. As house debuts go it was little short of sensational.
FRIDAY 11TH JUNE 2010 DMITRI HVOROSTOVSKY
Wigmore Hall
Dmitri Hvorostovsky dedicated his first Wigmore recital in many years to the great Russian mezzo Irina Arkhipova – a voice which by all accounts set this hall vibrating for days after the event. It’s interesting what the size of a hall and the type of acoustic can do for a voice. The idea that Hvorostovsky could sound hectoring and even at times in danger over-singing Wigmore Hall might have come as a surprise to those of us who’ve heard him more often in far larger venues. It’s not a big voice. So how much was it the immediacy of the hall and how much the weathering of a fine instrument?
For the most part he chose dark, decidedly world-weary, songs from the catalogues of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. “Again, as before, I am alone” set the tone and the tone was oppressive. The high G-sharp was startling, a trifle hard; most of the warmth was paradoxically in the lower register. “The Nightingale” began there and the bitterness was inescapable. It seemed to peak fiercely with “The Heroic Deed” with singer and his “orchestral” pianist Ivari Ilja storming the barricades of despair in search of “patience, love, and devotion”. Hvorostovsky cracked a winning smile after this number as if to indicate how much he relishes a good drama. But we badly needed a lighter song for good behaviour and not even the hectic “Don Juan’s Serenade” – so little time, so many women – exactly fitted the bill so lustful and cynical was it. Glimpses of the famed Hvorostovsky “honey” were heard in the melismatic Borodin-like melody of Rachmaninov’s “Do not sing for me, fair maiden” but, though compelling, I didn’t feel we were hearing him at his best.
In the second half, Tchaikovsky’s “A tear trembles” was bravely direct, the voice presented naked and without “cover”, but then came “No, only the heart” and all one’s happiest memories of this singer flooded back in the enticing portamento of one exquisitely veiled phrase on the words “the one who loved me”. It was an Onegin moment if ever there was one and suddenly Hvorostovsky was right inside the recital. An audible gasp from the audience greeted the eternal final phrase of Rachmaninov’s “In the silence of the secret night”, amazing breath control at the service of both poetry and musical line, and the lightly inflected deftness we had been waiting for all evening came, better late than never, in the Tchaikovsky “Serenade” of his encores. Now he was really warming up.
THURSDAY 10TH JUNE 2010 LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ ELDER
Barbican Hall
At the spiritual centre of this exciting re-match between Mark Elder and the London Symphony Orchestra was Benjamin Britten’s intellectual and emotional kinship with Dmitri Shostakovich. Heartache and bitter irony would be going into overdrive. But first a burst of sunlight and a Slavonic dance or two.
Dvorak’s Scherzo capriccioso, true to its title, plays fast and loose with the traditional footwork kicking over the traces with wicked syncopations that once or twice wrong-footed even the brilliant LSO woodwinds. But Elder had the strings swaying into the second subject waltz with portamento as knowing as it was charming. Surprises were sprung: the harp elaborately bowed to Tchaikovsky, bass clarinet and, not for the last time in the evening, cor anglais (the excellent Christine Pendrill) got to be stars, and Elder really pushed the presto coda and sent it spinning. Ripe and rubicund.
A different, altogether more menacing kind of dance pervades Britten’s Violin Concerto. No one would deny that it’s a piece that takes some unravelling but my goodness does it reward the effort. Daniel Hope, a late replacement for Janine Jansen, had the music to hand – a catalogue of fearful difficulties – but his spellbinding performance suggested someone who has been living with and inside the piece for some time. The intensity of his playing was extraordinary in extremis where so much of the music lies. I can still hear him in the epilogue, a voice of protest in the highest positions of the lowest string as if all attempts were being made to stifle him. And that Spanish dance (Britten’s reponse, it is suggested, to the Civil War) resisting the sensuous pull of his string colleagues with angry and defiant pizzicato stamping. Elder chronicled the arrival of and muted departure of Britten’s first searching Passacaglia with all the compassion of a man currently consumed by the humanity of the composer’s masterpiece Billy Budd which he is conducting so magnificently at Glyndebourne.
Britten’s concerto ends in lamentation, Shostakovich’s 6th Symphony begins that way. Elder and the orchestra traversed the shivering wasteland of the opening Largo with gripping awareness of music effectively suspended in time and space. Numbing solos from piccolo and cor anglais (the composer’s instrument of choice in matters of loss) – emerged as riveting arias. But then Shostakovich sends in the clowns and outrage is turned to toxic satire. The fabulous trenchancy and panache of the LSO in these short, sharp, shocks of slapstick was something to behold. The Red Army Band had joined the circus and didn’t we know it.
TUESDAY 1ST JUNE 2010 BIZET “THE PEARL FISHERS”
English National Opera
For all its singable tunes, lusty choruses, and that duet, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers belongs on the cheese counter of operatic drama. To be frank, there’s not an awful lot you can do with it, theatrically speaking, that Penny Woolcock and her designers, Dick Bird (sets) and Fifty-Nine Productions (video) haven’t done here at English National Opera to help deliver the tourist Far East pot-boiler from page to stage. Woolcock has even introduced a couple of tourists to wander aimlessly through Bird’s teeming ocean-side shanty town, photographing the natives and probably wondering why they didn’t stick to Bali this year. It’s the “Slumdog” treatment, if you like, and whilst the squalor doesn’t for one moment amount to much more than operatic window-dressing it makes a welcome change from the diaphanous prettiness we have come to expect from stagings of the piece.
Woolcock does at least recognise that the sea is as much the main protagonist here as it is in Peter Grimes and she and her visual team have devised some strikingly beautiful stage effects to convey its omnipresence. As Bizet’s wafting prelude spirits us tunefully but not so mysteriously to our exotic location Woolcock adds an extra dimension to the music establishing watery depths through which three aerialists plunge and swim with astonishingly convincing grace and athleticism. Great sheets of silk later emulate the becalmed surface billowing in the inky moonlight as pearl fishers surface and dive again for their precious trade. The incoming storm brings great swells of movement – the oldest “special effect” in theatre rendered new and dramatic.
Dick Bird’s telegraph pole strewn shanty town is arresting to the eye, too, not least when the claustrophobic clusters of wharf-side dwellings part to reveal an entire hillside of twinkling lights – a kind of human anthill. But these visual gestures are as close as we get to real drama – though Rory Macdonald in the pit drives Bizet’s score with impulsive ardour firing up the rabble-rousing choruses and fervent hymns of praise to the god Brahma. The ENO chorus seizes its moments in the limelight. But the brutal truth is that this hoary tale of two men, firm friends, in love with the same priestess is not afforded the musical wherewithal to penetrate much beneath a decorative surface. I wonder if Bizet knew he was in trouble when he summoned up his greatest hit so early in the first act?
Quinn Kelsey (Zurga) and Alfie Boe (Nadir) don’t short-change us with the number, Boe wacking out the top line with a new-found openness and edge to his sound. No question that this bantam-weight lyric voice is growing and darkening quite dramatically though paradoxically I’d like to have heard a little more of the old operetta “enticement” in the phrasing of the aria where he is lost in the rapture of his memories for Leila. But one thing you always get with Alfie Boe, vocally and physically, is truth and honesty. Quinn Kelsey gave us that, too, though with far more reliance on what is undoubtedly a resoundingly fine instrument.
Hanan Alattar (Leila) had a lot to live up to and in a house this size was, I’m afraid, overt-parted in terms of vocal presence and bloom. She spun the arabesques and trills of her high coloratura prettily enough but not everything landed and the sound, often shallow and tremulous, tended to come and go.
Woolcock’s tourists did not hang around, either; perhaps, like us, they realised that Bizet offered a better deal in Spain.
SATURDAY 29TH MAY 2010 NIGEL KENNEDY/ ORCHESTRA OF LIFE
Royal Festival Hall
We’d had the first two movements of Bach’s Violin Concerto in E, Nigel Kennedy and his newly formed Orchestra of Life bathed in a haze of blue light and discreetly amplified as befits a gig not a concert. “What’s next?” says Kennedy, glancing at his play list nestling between the foldback speakers where adoring fans had also left an assortment of messages and CDs for signature. “What about the third movement?” shouted a man in the front stalls. “Don’t like it”, retorted Kennedy. And there was no answer to that.
This half of Kennedy’s Bach and Ellington gig – a celebration of two great extemporisers and the big crowd-puller of Kennedy’s South Bank Polish Weekend – was always going to be a “greatest hits” affair but I for one would happily have forgone some of Nigel’s incoherent ramblings (they must have added a good half hour to the proceedings) for the addition of that third movement of the E major Concerto or all three movements of the D minor Concerto for two violins which Kennedy built up with rapturous persuasiveness – “greatest music in the history of the world” – only to cop-out with just the finale. What about that unbelievably beautiful slow movement, Nigel? I know you like that.
But then it’s no use pretending that Kennedy will ever play ball (he’ll like the football analogy) by the same set of rules as anyone else. And that’s fine. But the minute this man starts playing the violin a different kind of energy, a more positive energy, flows and if it’s Bach on the stands I for one don’t want pick-and-mix or any form of amplification beyond that pure, earthy, life-affirming Kennedy sound – foot stamps and all. And Kennedy’s jazz quintet were there, too, a discreet “continuo” at the heart of his lively ensemble – apart from the bongos, that is. Yes, really: Bach with bongos. Why not? Because, as Kennedy might put it, I don’t dig this music with someone (or so it sounded) clog-dancing in the background. The best of Kennedy’s Bach came when he gently or feistily conversed with his cellist Beata Urbanek-Kalinowska in a group of Two Part Inventions.
And what a stimulating juxtaposition the Duke Ellington second half could have made if the Bach had remained that pure and unadulterated. Still there’s no denying what a gifted jazzer Kennedy is and what a six-course meal he and his Quintet plus one – the amazing marimba and vibes player Orphy Robinson – made of the Ellington classic “In a Mellow Tone”. There was much more where that came from, Kennedy’s electric fiddle whooping up an electric storm of invention. I guess you take him as he comes or not at all.
THURSDAY 20TH MAY 2010 BRITTEN “BILLY BUDD”
Glyndebourne Festival Opera
Britten’s gripping masterpiece begins in fateful indecision oscillating in the violins between major and minor key centres as the old and broken Captain Vere looks into his soul for answers as to why he put duty before reason to condemn the one man who seemed to reinforce his faith in human nature. And just as the librettists E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier afford us privileged access to the workings of Vere’s mind so Michael Grandage and his designer Christopher Oram take us deep into the bowels of HMS Indomitable quite literally gliding the vessel into our midst from the summer of 1797. The darkest recesses of Vere’s soul and those of his ship become one.
Oram’s majestic set puts us inside the hull of the vessel, it puts us on the quarter deck and high on the bridge, and with the lowering of a gigantic wooden frame it imprisons us far below decks where the shadow and undercurrent of this great piece are bred. And with astonishingly atmospheric lighting from Paule Constable (imagine a wash of surreal lamplight illuminating Billy Budd as he awaits his fate) it affords Michael Grandage in his thrilling operatic debut to achieve a filmic transition between the swift moving scenes of the narrative. His blocking has a strength and immediacy that perfectly complements the clarity of his story telling: as in the close of the first act where Billy’s excitement at the prospect of promotion is menacingly undermined, both in the orchestra and on stage, by the lowering presence of the Master-at-Arms Claggart looking down on the boy from his position of privilege and pinning him with his evil eye like some bird of prey.
The big set pieces are marvellously marshalled, too, the thrilling call-to-arms in act two achieving a visceral excitement physically and sonically, its onstage drummers powering us into the attack, the ship’s ensign billowing at the stern. The Glyndebourne Chorus, small in number but mighty and incisive in sound, are, of course, integral to the impact of the show meshing brilliantly with the many named roles to achieve a wonderfully busy and coherent ensemble. Is there anything as uplifting, as overwhelming, as the huge choral swell of the shanty “Blow her to Hilo” when it’s this lustily sung?
Magnificently conducted by the Mark Elder with an unerring sense of the score’s momentum and many moments of stasis the London Philharmonic served him handsomely, queasy bass undulations fathoms below the light-catching streaking and skirling of exposed high woodwind and trumpets.
But it was in the tension of the psychological drama that Elder and Grandage really excelled. Of key roles it’s almost invidious to single anyone out but one should mention the trio of senior officers, Matthew Rose’s Flint, Darren Jeffrey’s Ratcliffe, and the ever-impressive Iain Patterson as Redburn. And further down the food chain, Ben Johnson’s affectingly sung Novice.
Phillip Ens’ Claggart had to work harder than he ideally should to encompass the vocal extremes of the role and a disturbing shift of colour in the upper register didn’t help matters. And Jacques Imbrailo’s slight but refreshingly modest Budd likewise had to dig deep – and did – to surmount the limitations of his bantam-weight voice and ultimately achieve real pathos through the strength of his conviction.
What a marvellous idea to have the old and broken Vere – his inner-turmoil beautifully conveyed in John Mark Ainsley’s achingly sung performance – become an unseen presence in the harrowing final scene as if recalling the terrible consequences of his indecision in hindsight. Powerful, penetrating, deeply moving – a tremendous start to Glyndebourne’s season.
TUESDAY 18TH MAY 2010 PUCCINI “TOSCA”
English National Opera
It comes as no surprise at all that Catherine Malfitano, a once notable Tosca herself, has fashioned a staging of the opera which frees the singers in ways she herself would have welcomed. She even seeks to free the opera from some of the Callas-associated clichés which have clung on to it for decades: the quasi-religious rituals after the death of Scarpia; and even the sacrificial leap itself. It’s just that she hasn’t freed us from the “operatic” clichés. This Tosca is rather as one might imagine Cavaradossi’s painting to be: obstinately old school. The drama – or should that read melodrama – is played out in such a way as to signal and underline every emotion and thought-process. Even where it’s seeking to break new ground it reads like a silent movie – only with sound.
All of which is made odder by the fact that Frank Philipp Schlössmann’s set designs attempt a bolder mix of naturalism and impressionism. Cavaradossi’s painting is fractured in the manner of cubism; so, too, the high-altar of the church which is suggested in a similarly distorted back-cloth receding grandiosely beyond the immediate drama. In act one it is clear that Malfitano wants to suggest the passion of young love but beyond a rather obvious physicality she is hampered by the archly delivered English of Edmund Tracey’s creaky translation. She has virile young voices at her disposal – Julian Gavin and Amanda Echalaz both pumping on all cylinders – and at least the ardour of Puccini’s music is lustily invoked with Edward Gardner ripely and excitingly coaxing his orchestra to swoon and thunder without inhibition. Gardner has such instinctive feeling for everything he touches – there isn’t a tempo or a phrasing here that does not land with absolute conviction. He is ENO’s no longer secret weapon.
So what of Amanda Echalaz, our Tosca, a singer who’s really started to make waves in the last couple of years? Well, you can hear why: the vocal colour – dusky and plangent – makes this a real Tosca voice, and there’s no question that she is brave and exciting in extremis. Her jealousy, her fiery temperament, are easily encompassed by her singing; she is heartfelt and honest on stage. But – and it’s a big but – there needs to be much more light and shade. Her romantic reverie in act one should float lightly, tantalizingly, on the breath – but it’s clear there’s a problem when she’s asked to sing high and soft. And it is for these reasons that her most private and special moment – the act two aria which Malfitano stages very insightfully as a “stolen” frozen moment, not a diva’s timely “turn” – is less than secure vocally.
Her Cavaradossi, Julian Gavin, has a beefy, unstinting delivery, too, but he phrases and shades with laudable generosity and sensitivity, not perhaps as subtle and finessed as he strives to be but telling nonetheless. And Anthony Michaels-Moore’s Scarpia – whose black-caped entourage swoop down on the church choristers in act one like malevolent birds of prey (nice touch) and thereafter remain a sinister presence – does exactly what it says on the tin: he is obsequiously, sadistically, loathsomely mellifluous.
After slaying him Tosca walks proudly, hopefully, not through the nearest exit but towards a vision of the heavenly firmament. She and Cavaradossi are briefly free beneath Schlössmann’s striking “vault of heaven” in the last act and at the close she is very much the high priestess of opera. A little less opera and a little more music drama, though, would have been welcome.
MONDAY 17TH MAY 2010 DONIZETTI “LA FILLE DU REGIMENT”
Royal Opera House
Opera is rarely laugh-out-loud funny; nor is it as consistently witty, as stylish, as quirkily captivating as Laurent Pelly’s staging of Donizetti’s Tyrolean romp, first seen in 2007 and now revived with pretty much its entire original cast once again firing on all cylinders. In the case of Covent Garden darling Juan Diego Florez the volleys of top Cs seem to be what Royal Opera audiences have been waiting for all season as an opportunity to clear their lungs and stretch their legs. But it is his similarly pint-sized heroine Natalie Dessay who turns in the once-in-a-lifetime comic performance as vivandiere Marie – the regimental “daughter” of the title.
From the moment she first twangs her braces (just imagine Joan Sutherland doing that) this diminutive, flat-chested, foul-mouthed firebrand – a cross between Annie Oakley and Calamity Janes, only French – more or less single-handedly dictates the pace and energy of the show. The regiment love her because being one of the boys doesn’t preclude her from dashing away with the smoothing iron on their undershirts and long-johns. Rarely on the operatic stage has so much ironing been accompanied by no many notes. The joy of Dessay in this role is the way speech and song become inseparable, the way the coloratura punctuates the business and drop-dead timing unfailingly lands the gag and the laugh. There are, though, it must be said, worrying vocal problems, more pronounced since her first outing in the role: notably some degree of occlusion and occasional drop-outs in the softer more reflective numbers. They matter less in a ball-breaking characterisation like this, but it would be a shame if they compromised her in less forgiving roles – because she’s a real star and a great comedienne.
Speaking of which, Dawn French is back as La Duchesse de Crackentorp terrorising the language that named her so aptly and affecting the perfect foil to the haughty extravagance of Ann Murray’s ripely spoken Marquise de Berkenfeld whom she loudly reproaches for being “stingy with the chocolate fountains” (surtitled in French, of course). Indeed one might imagine a chocolate flake completing French’s increasingly elaborately wigs.
And Florez’ Tonio? Well, he stops the show twice, firstly with those buttock-clenching high Cs, but again more memorably when he sings for the hand of his true love in tender covered sound which shows just how elegant and heartfelt his artistry can be. A treat.
WEDNESDAY 12TH MAY 2010 LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ GERGIEV
Barbican Hall
One wonders if it was by design or accident that James MacMillan’s new Violin Concerto was programmed here alongside Stravinsky’s Symphony in C? MacMillan seemed to take up precisely where Stravinsky left off recalling the kinetic syncopations and even the melodic flavour of the symphony’s playful first movement. The energy of one happily infected the other.
Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra came to both by way of a languorously seductive account of Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, Gareth Davies’ solo flute stirring from the hush of slumber and nuzzling the opening bars first to elicit only silence (a truly pregnant pause) and then to breathe life into all around at a tempo that might be described as positively post-coital. In turn sultry and luminous, Gergiev plainly wanted the experience to linger.
Stravinsky’s wake-up call was thoroughly in character but not without its dropped stitches. No one comes through the rhythmic thickets and jazzily exposed wind solos of this amazing piece unscathed. Then again you could hear where the rehearsal had gone. James MacMillan’s brand new Violin Concerto – a 50th birthday present to himself and us – was in every sense of the phrase a complete knock-out. It was written for and played, with blinding virtuosity, by Vadim Repin who may well have answered the prayers of countless virtuosos for something new and audacious they could really play the socks off.
MacMillan always comes at music from his own Scottish perspective and this action-packed crowd-pleaser is essentially a compendium of song and dance digging deep into the primitivism of the distant past to unlock memories much closer to the present. There are dizzying, spinning reels, dirges and sentimental plaints with the violin often hauntingly evoking the “vocal” melismas of Celtic folk singers. One moment the fiddler is urging the entire string section to shake a leg, the next he’s in blissful repose with piano and piping piccolo lending a tearful consonance. Wild and wacky, dark and subversive, even brutal – what isn’t in the mix? The audience adored it.
Barring the odd plainchant, MacMillan’s Catholicism was kept well under wraps. Again, did he know he’d be rubbing shoulders with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms? What a piece – as original now as it was in 1930. Stephen Sondheim once said he wished he’d written the “Alleluia”. Him and me both.
TUESDAY 11TH MAY 2010 ANDSNES/ CHRISTIAN AND TANJA TETZLAFF
Wigmore Hall
The series is called “Leif Ove Andsnes and Friends” and for the gifted Norwegian pianist that would seem to be as good a basis as any for meaningful chamber music. But there is more to it than that, of course, and most of “it” is contained in that magic word synergy. A star soloist like violinist Christian Tetzlaff can learn a lot from a natural chamber music player like his cellist sister Tanja – and all three are nothing if not well blended in a work like Schumann’s early piano trio Fantasiestücke. No room for stars there.
It was a good place to start, a good place to establish an integrated sound, because in this piece even the piano is less the leading voice than the textural and harmonic foundation of the sound with the string voices embellishing and enriching, often by way of little canonic responses. It was a handsome, inviting, blend but almost a relief when the string players took the lead in the third movement “Duet” and Christian was at last freed to fleetingly do what he does so well – soar uninhibitedly.
The “Fairytale” centre to this well constructed programme then gave the limelight to Andsnes and Tanja Tetzlaff as Janacek’s Pohadka invoked the dappled natureworld of the composer’s Cunning Little Vixen counterbalancing a verdant lyricism with the tooth-and-claw brutality lurking beneath. The folksy epilogue (a happy ending for sure) sat comfortably with Dvorak’s Sonatina in G where Christian Tetzlaff revelled in the Slavonic dances that got away and happily resigned to another fairytale ending where Dvorak, in his dreams, returns home from America.
But it was late Schumann – Piano Trio No.3 in G minor – which finally brought the accomplished trio into sonic and emotional focus. It’s quite a storm-surge which carries Schumann’s troubled soul into that long dark night but as ever with this composer there is uplift in the music defining him. Andsnes and the Tetzlaffs conjured a rich, brooding sonority from the melancholic slow waltz of the central Larghetto with Tanja’s warmly expressive cello musing restlessly up and down the fingerboard. But it was the return of the opening theme which brought the most soulful harmonies and magically, reassuringly, the healing light of an angelic voice high in the keyboard.
THURSDAY 6TH MAY 2010 LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ DAVIS
Barbican Hall
Familiarity can and does breed contempt – but never where Haydn and Mozart are concerned. It’s one of music’s enduring miracles that the surprises they spring and revelations they conjure do not diminish but rather intensify with repetition – like memories whose pleasure and significance grow with the passing of time. Sir Colin Davis chose two particularly audacious examples and though we may have known them well it still felt like there would be no second-guessing them.
Davis’s Haydn – Symphony No. 97 – was fleshy and content, as C major is wont to be. And as in all things remotely Viennese there was always time for a turn around the room in waltz time. Davis greeted the second subject with knowing delight, a perfect foil to the timpani-buttressed pomp of a rather portly vivace. Another waltz in the trio of the scherzo was more bucolic with yodelling horns. An indication, perhaps, of the hearty, outdoor Haydn Davis likes to suggest – not as light on his feet as he once was but still in rude health.
And the pleasures just kept coming with Mozart introducing a medley of enticing tunes before the soloist in Piano Concerto No.17 – Mitsuko Uchida – had played a single note. But when she did the poise and astonishing clarity of her articulation entirely changed the atmosphere in the hall. The second subject seemed to emanate from an ornate musical box never before opened, its origins and emotional memories unlocked in the simplest imaginable tune with gauche left hand accompaniment. Uchida conveys a unique rapture in this music – and it’s all in the touch and the timing. That extraordinary modulation in the slow movement was truly a frozen moment, the defining chord filling the silence but not a split-second too soon or too late.
And then out of chaos the universe according to Carl Nielsen exploded into being and the “Inextinguishable” Symphony No.4 met the indefatigable – namely Davis and the LSO. It’s like being in at the birth, the big bang, of tonality with this piece. And the only question our ears need answering is whether or not that radiant woodwind theme will prevail to exult in E major.
Davis and the orchestra gave us a wonderfully raw, grizzled, elemental account of this lofty score. But strangely it was not the battling timpani and cosmic climaxes that have stayed with me but that moment in the heart of the slow movement where a simple string trio of violin, viola, and cello remind us of Nielsen’s and our humanity.
MONDAY 3RD MAY 2010 ROLANDO VILLAZON/ GABRIELI PLAYERS
Royal Festival Hall
He’s come through throat surgery and survived From Pop Star to Opera Star (though the jury is still out as to which posed the greater threat) – so on the surface of it an all-Handel programme (strategically tied to his most recent album, of course) might have seemed like a sensible way of nursing Rolando Villazon back to full vocal health: plenty of fast moving coloratura to keep the healing chords supple, lightly inflected legatos, and only the soft-grained period instruments of the splendid Gabrieli Players under Paul McCreesh to surf. So all the more puzzling why these predominantly alto arias were not transposed into keys in which he could sing them?
It could be, of course, that Villazon was deliberately avoiding stress on the upper quadrant of his voice: the few top notes he encountered were merely grazed in the course of his embellishments – but mostly we were firmly in the middle and lower range with way too many phrases simply falling off the bottom end of what was possible for him. The opening Grimoaldo aria from Rodelinda presented the now familiar timbre, invitingly dusky, lightly inflected, with that distinctive “cover” over the whole range. The characteristically elegant dynamic gradations were noted in the opening Accompagnato and his acute sensitivity to the connection between words and sound was certainly apparent. But as he mused on how the shepherd finds tranquillity in nature while monarchs find none in the “purple and gold” was I alone in detecting some huskiness in the vocal production?
It could simply have been the discomfort of those remorseless phrases below the stave. The cadenzas of his first Serse aria “Piu che penso alle fiamme del core” plunged to a low moan that was unacceptable for even a lovesick protagonist; the second was a disaster with first Villazon and then McCreesh dropping the ball. By the time we arrived at the one truly tenorial role of the evening – Bajazet in Tamerlano – Villazon was relying considerably more on text than singing.
It was a relief to hear some free upper register in the shape of his soprano guest Lucy Crowe. She made much of the exquisite pain of those keening chromatics in Cleopatra’s “Se pieta” and she was deliciously indecent in the gleeful “Da tempeste” adding more decorative embellishment than might have seemed possible. Sadly, the star tenor was for the time being consigned to the shadow of his soprano.
WEDNESDAY 28TH APRIL 2010 LONDON PHILHARMONIC/ JUROWSKI
Royal Festival Hall
Prokofiev and Myaskovsky – firm friends, musical polar opposites. Once again Vladimir Jurowski demonstrates the essence of creative programming bringing us two highly contrasted but musically well-complemented pieces and one genuine rarity – Myaskovsky’s 6th Symphony. Once will not be enough, of course – it’s a big and discursive piece to fully grasp at one hearing and its significant flaws make the likelihood of a second pretty remote. But by encouraging our inquisitive natures Jurowski and the London Philharmonic our doing us all a favour and the good news is that there was a decent turn out in support of his enterprise.
Indeed doubly enterprising to have engaged a gifted young soloist – the German-Japanese cellist Danjulo Ishizaka – rather than a crowd-pulling name to play Prokofiev’s amazing Symphony-Concerto in E minor. Here’s a piece for the perennially inquisitive: the only predictable thing about it is its unpredictability. All life according to Prokofiev is here with his deep and abiding sense of fantasy topmost. And it doesn’t matter how well you know the piece, you are always expecting its now brittle, now ravishing, flights of fancy to take you off in a new direction. Its spirit is in essence the most rarefied stream of consciousness.
Danjulo Ishizaka played it with a gripping sense of in-the-moment curiosity – his ardour and terrific articulation fully equal to its demands. But the one thing you don’t want to experience in this piece is a broken string and notwithstanding dangerous levels of stress in the writing poor Ishizaka was just plain unlucky to have the impetus of his performance so rudely interrupted.
Prokofiev was right to tease his friend Myaskovsky over the 75 minute duration of his 6th Symphony. It is much too long – and principally on account of its huge panting allegros which in their physical and emotional instability seem to be working at length through great personal trauma. The gusty winds of change buffet this symphony and Myaskovsky’s own experiences in the very thick of a world war and revolution in quick succession (he was a trained military officer) make the prospect of real inner peace doubly elusive. He does find it, though, in the beautiful trio of the scherzo and the ineffable slow movement and thanks to Jurowski and the London Philharmonic, our tirelessly intrepid guides, the cathartic transfiguration at the close may be long overdue but at least there’s a feeling it’s been earned.
TUESDAY 27TH APRIL 2010 VERDI “AIDA”
Royal Opera House
No candy coloured chiffon, no pyramids, and definitely no turquoise elephants. Zandra Rhodes this was not. And the Covent Garden fashionistas were not happy. But last time I checked Aida was about ethnic strife, bloody conflict, pagan ritual, and barbaric tortuous death. In David McVicar’s dark, dusty staging the triumphal scene is played out under a canopy of mutilated corpses and the celebrated “Triumphal March” brings on a troupe of victorious, still bloodied, swordsmen to flaunt their butchery skills. It isn’t pretty but it’s a whole lot more pertinent than the picture book inspired Cecil B. DeMille approach. What is Princess Amneris wearing this season? Revenge.
The ancient rituals begin as soon as Verdi’s ethereal strings start tracing out their yearning opening motif. A lone god-like figure maintains a vigil before a grey wall-like installation: gold lances are encrusted into it and neon backlit like the rays of the sun. And as the prelude builds to its ominous climax armoured warriors steal in from the darkness to attend the High Priest’s announcement of who will lead the Egyptian forces into battle against the Ethiopians. The dramatic backdrop has been quickly established and in Jean-Marc Puissant’s abstract designs of darkly lowering Rothko-like panels, wonderfully, smokily lit by Jennifer Tipton, a mood of deeply mysterious paganism descends. Colour is muted (barring, of course, the royal purple clad Amneris), blocking highly ritualised, and the dancing (choreographer Fin Walker) animalistic and wilfully erotic. On the eve of battle, Commander Radames is blooded for battle, a ritual sacrifice of Egyptian young men at the hands of young women who use their knives like cruel caresses.
It’s an evening of big, determined voices and alternately haunting and stentorian choral singing all of it excitingly driven by conductor Nicola Luisotti whose predominantly swift tempi convey a brassy, visceral, urgency. In the title role Micaela Carosi has the vocal plangency and big money notes (no surprise she sings the role at the Verona Arena) to dominate all the ensembles thrillingly. The timbre is thoroughly authentic. But as with so many overworked voices of this amplitude the facility to finesse the sound and to spin it high and soft would seem to have long gone. She didn’t sing a true pianissimo all evening and in the crucial testing ground of the great Nile scene aria “O patria mia” the difficult final measures never achieved the rapturous ascendancy that should quite literally take the breath away.
Her Radames was Marcelo Alvarez, a singer whose instinctive musicality and swarthy sound I much admire. Ok, so he didn’t attempt the tricky morendo (“dying away”) on the high B-flat at the close of “Celeste Aida”, opting instead for the simpler alternative of the quietly repeated final phrase. But he did markedly contrast the heroic and amoroso aspects of the aria and throughout the evening he delivered with unstinting ardour and burnished tone. He certainly carried his Aida in the final duet singing a tender mezza voce which at least helped disguise the fact that she was not.
By contrast with these voices the Amonasro of Marco Vratogna was too much of a bantam-weight failing to make the impression one might have expected from his previous showing in this house. The basses, Giacomo Prestia (Ramfis) and Robert Lloyd (The King) were impressive and the Amneris of Marianne Cornetti was, to put it crudely, a ball-breaker brandishing those pneumatic chest tones like they were fashion accessories. Just not Zandra Rhodes.
SATURDAY 24TH APRIL 2010 HENZE “ELEGY FOR YOUNG LOVERS”
English National Opera at the Young Vic
At an inn in the Austrian Alps Hilda Mack waits for her husband. 40 years ago he went climbing without, it seems, declaring that he might be some time. So she waits – knitting, contemplating, hallucinating, while the minutes and hours tick by. Each year the celebrated poet Gregor Mittenhofer comes to visit drawing inspiration from her visions. He essentially feeds off her; he steals her grief. Until, that is, her husband’s corpse is retrieved from the Hammerhorn glacier. Then his focus turns on his mistress Elizabeth and his doctor’s son Toni: first their love, then their deaths. His poem “The Young Lovers” will be more effective as an Elegy.
W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto for Hans Werner Henze’s operatic dream-play cum melodrama has more than an air of the confessional about it. Essentially it takes one to know one, says Auden, and in Fiona Shaw’s terrifically full-on staging his egocentricity is centrestage, his “characters in search of an author” merely minions in the service of the poet Mittenhofer’s art. All are disposable once their parts in his magnum opus have been fulfilled.
In Tom Pye’s vividly effective design and Lynette Wallworth’s evocative video work that drama is effectively played out on an ice crevice whose ever widening fissure threatens to swallow them at any moment. An elaborate ice clock chimes the hours and when Hilda’s waiting is finally over, the frustrated Mittenhofer vindictively shatters it. It’s a big enough coup in itself (the audience is teased into wondering if it really is an ice sculpture) but Shaw deliciously undercuts it with Hilda flippantly freshening her drink with the ice. “Put that in your sonnet, Duckie”, she later mocks.
The immediacy, the urgency and heat of inspiration (or the lack of it), are beautifully caught in each imperative moment of the show. The method in the madness of Mittenhofer (a harassed Lear-like Steven Page), the crazed coloratura of Jennifer Rhys-Davies’ indomitable Hilda which grows more preposterous as she grows more lucid, the lyric flights of Kate Valentine and Robert Murray’s “lovers”, and the refuge of fierce efficiency that is Lucy Schaufer’s brilliant Carolina – Mittenhofer’s secretary. Her final unravelling is chilling to behold. And all the while the brittle and crystalline beauty of Henze’s guitar and tuned percussion flecked orchestra shimmers and galvanises under Stefan Blunier’s energetic direction.
Great librettos make great opera, of course, and Auden finally achieves just that in the “elegiac” moment where his (or should I say Mittenhofer’s) dying young lovers imagine an old age they will never live to see. Funny and deeply poignant.
WEDNESDAY 21ST APRIL 2010 LONDON PHILHARMONIC/ ALSOP
Royal Festival Hall
The platform is empty as the conductor, Marin Alsop, enters with four flutes who then proceed to sit in silence as the first downbeat of the evening produces barely audible but blissfully consonant string chords from celestially far off. A solo trumpet from the rear of the hall then poses a question, repeating it again and again but receiving only puzzlement from the sage-like flutes. This is the mystical world of Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, a question which Leonard Bernstein believed was strictly musical not metaphysical. Is the final triad – luminously tonal – the answer? And what indeed was the question? One woman who left the hall to cough loudly just outside was, in Ivesian terms, almost part of the piece. Perhaps the question had to do with the nation’s health issues?
Whatever. This being part of the South Bank’s Bernstein Project it seemed only fitting that Bernstein himself should be the one to go in search of answers to the unanswered question. Armed with W.H.Auden’s epic poem “The Age of Anxiety” that’s exactly where he boldly ventured with his Second Symphony. Part symphony, part piano concerto, this intriguing odyssey marries the spirit of Auden to the compositional gamesmanship of Bernstein.
It opens with the loneliest sound in the world: two clarinets – nighthawks in a big city – mulling over the big question “What’s it all about? And that question begets another, and another, as Bernstein sets off on a quizzical sequence of variations, each one quite literally coming off the notational tail of the one before. And when that doesn’t bring answers, we party. Only Bernstein could pull a Bebop jam session out of a 12-tone row. This is the devilishly tricky “Masque” section of the piece and the one part of the performance where the steely resolve of the soloist Nicolas Hodges could have yielded more to the music’s insouciance. Easier said than done, of course, but it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
Still, committed playing from the London Philharmonic and much more to come in another of Bernstein’s party pieces – Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. Alsop’s control was exemplary here and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the gradual accelerando over the first part of the finale executed with such skill. But she adopted Bernstein’s now unfashionably upbeat view of the notorious coda and with little doubt that this is in fact a misprint of the true metronome marking and double the speed the composer actually intended the coded message of “triumph under duress” was all but lost in the general rejoicing.
TUESDAY 20TH APRIL 2010 SCHUBERT “SCHWANENGESANG” Maltman/ Johnson
Wigmore Hall
What might Schubert have made of his Swansong? He know nothing of it when he died and might well have thought better of it when he was alive. Nobody knows what he intended to do with the seemingly disconnected songs he left behind and whether or not he envisaged collating them in any meaningful way. They might have formed the basis of one or more narrative cycles in the manner of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, they might have languished in glorious isolation. But the enterprising Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger saw the commercial potential in a commemorative cycle and Schwanengesang emerged as the distilled and fractured last utterances of a haunted soul. The poets, Rellstab and Heine, may have been new to Schubert; the themes of longing and loss were not.
But what makes this “opportunistic” cycle truly startling is the absence of a clear narrative. The drama is in the extreme juxtapositioning of songs whose irony, heartache, and distress emerge in often uncompromising starkness. “Uncompromising” might also describe Christopher Maltman’s disarmingly bitter and hectoring reading with Graham Johnson.
Disquiet and cynicism characterised even the seemingly benign opening song Liebesbotschaft (“Love’s Message”) with Maltman keeping the words artificially light on the breath and making even the whispered sweet nothings sound deceitful. The martial strains, the distant thunder, of Kriegers Ahnung (“Warrior’s foreboding”) struck a similarly ominous note with Maltman rising to one ferocious battle cry, the precursor to an untimely death. What terrible irony in the pay-off line “Sweetest love – good night!”
It had already become apparent, though, that Graham Johnson’s playing was proving uncharacteristically smudgy and bloated rhythmically. Ständchen (“Serenade”) lacked that essential lightness and airiness of touch and rendered the strumming of the poet’s lute or guitar awkward and charmless. No one understands this music better than Johnson but his fingers here were not always in accord with his sensibilities. And as the cycle progressed it became more and more apparent that Maltman, in his determination to wring out the extreme nature of these settings, was inclined towards a two-dimensional approach both in terms of their dynamics and their emotional compass: soft or loud; tender or angry.
Some things were startling: the complete change of voice into bass extension for Der Atlas (“Atlas”) and the stark unisons of Ihr Bild (“Her likeness”) melting into the agonising memory of his departed lover’s smile. But as Maltman’s poet came face to face with the misery of his other self in Der Doppelgänger his anguish might just have been concealing a deeper truth.
SUNDAY 18TH APRIL 2010 NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA/ PAUL DANIEL
Royal Festival Hall
Volcanic eruptions have not been confined to Iceland. The South Bank’s Varese weekend came a full “360 degrees” to its explosive climax with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain going cosmic with the composer’s two orchestral blockbusters. But tuning this gargantuan beast of an orchestra was not the usual well-drilled formality we’ve come to expect. Who could have foreseen the anarchy that would ensue once the principal oboe had sounded his obligatory “A”?
An explanation? Well, this concert began as theatrically as Varese always meant to go on with an audacious parody entitled Tuning Up. And of all the composers that influenced the Frenchman on his emigration to the New World none was more soundly acknowledged here than the great Charles Ives. His raucous collages were joyously celebrated in five minutes of abject disharmony where players leapt to their feet in a bid to make their presence felt (a trumpet blast of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” at one point), parts were brandished, face-offs provoked, and a game of musical chairs almost, but didn’t quite, materialise. If you looked carefully you might have spotted the conductor, Paul Daniel, crouched in the midst of this chaos. The score in his hand betrayed the impression of civil disobedience – the cream of our musical youth had not yet gone off the rails.
The second eruption was accompanied by a flooding of red light and some cursory video. Arcana is a kind of galactic “Rite of Spring” where the cosmos marches to a very different tune. It’s like we’re inside a universe-changing event where intense heat is generated by scything strings and fearless (well, they were here) high-stopped trumpets. Daniel and his young players made something quite spectacular of the big sunburst moment just before the close: a huge harmonic aurora formed and then evaporated before we had a chance to savour it.
But if you thought Arcana was overkill nothing – not even the bizarrely sepulchral Nocturnal – was going to prepare you for the rarely heard original version of Varese’s amazing Ameriques. The sheer “height” of this score (intensified here by the original offstage brass writing) is almost literally skyscraping, its gaudy processional eventually peaking on the notion that in the city that never sleeps none shall ever sleep again. But at its heart (and inexplicably excised in the revision we normally hear) is a fragrant homeland homage to the piece that first inspired Varese to compose – Debussy’s L’Apres midi d’un faune. Daniel and the NYO played it as an encore with a thoroughly grown-up sensuosity.
MONDAY 12TH APRIL 2010 RUFUS WAINWRIGHT “PRIMA DONNA”
Sadler’s Wells
Rufus Wainwright is the past master of “operatic pop”. He writes wonderful and original songs – witty, ironic, insidiously memorable. He might one day write a similarly wonderful piece of music theatre with such songs acting as emotional climacterics within the drama. But Prima Donna is not it. This rather camp confection bears some recognisable fingerprints of the Rufus Wainwright we know and love – kernels of melody and subversive harmony that occasionally knock it off-kilter – but for the most part it’s distressingly derivative: Wainwright wanting to be someone else – a Massenet or a Poulenc – when all of us out there in the dark only want him to be himself.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that Rufus Wainwright loves opera far too much. Everything goes into the mix. His central character is a once celebrated diva, Regine Saint Laurent, now a recluse and living in Paris (where else?) with her faithful manservant Philippe (a stalwart Jonathan Summers). So already we have echoes of Callas, of Sunset Boulevard, of a fading Marschallin or Countess. Indeed anything remotely “operatic”, it seems, is alluded to and/or crudely cross-fertilised with the final through-composed, through-sung, concoction behaving like late Strauss with a Gallic sensibility.
Prima Donna is even sung in French. Wainwright knows and loves the language. But does he flaunt it in the word setting? Not at all. Indeed most of the words are so crass (libretto by himself and Bernadette Colomine) that one begins to imagine that they are sung in French simply to disguise their ineptitude. Whatever happened to his wicked and knowing way with words? In act one Philippe recalls Regine Saint Laurent’s glory days; the lavishness of the apartment “with a Picasso over the fireplace”. Gosh, she owned a Picasso; she must have been wealthy and successful. There are plenty more clunkers where that came from. “In my homeland of Picardie we are wary of men”, sings the pert coloratura maid Marie (Rebecca Bottone, sweetly stratospheric). That gets a laugh. But is it deliberate parody or not? The wistful sub-Canteloube ditty which ensues does make one wonder.
But at last a song – or “aria”, if you must. That is most of all what Prima Donna is aching for. Wainwright seems almost wilfully reluctant to give us what we want – he is far too preoccupied with writing (or attempting to write) grown-up music drama. And although his distinctive voice is evident in a characteristic way with melodic hooks (he gets optimum mileage from his slowly oscillating opening idea) and the accompaniments and shimmering orchestral “grouting” are recognisably his – not least in those “wrong-note” displacements and slightly gawky rhythmic tics – so much of who he is musically is subsumed by who he is trying to be.
Despite director Tim Albery’s best efforts, act one of Prima Donna is dramatically moribund. Most of what it has to say is conveyed in the opening image of rain cascading like tears down the ornate façade of Regine’s Paris apartment (designer Antony McDonald). Act two is decidedly better and delivers the evening’s one genuine coup de theatre as Regine, listening once more the recording of her greatest triumph as Alienor d’Aquitaine, sees her living room transformed into a theatre for the opera’s climactic love duet. But this is, of course, the apogee of her delusion and it is a tribute to the marvellous Janice Kelly in the title role that she actually elicits such pathos in its aftermath.
That she is finally undermined by a quite awful and unnecessary parody of a French chanson in the closing moments (isn’t that what deranged operatic heroines always sing?) shows just how much Rufus Wainwright has to learn before the next time.
SATURDAY 10TH APRIL 2010 LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/ NEZET-SEGUIN
Royal Festival Hall
Fireworks from Handel and Stravinsky but most of all from Yannick Nezet-Seguin in a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that redefined its rhythmic exuberance in ways that made sitting to listen to it an almost impossible requirement. Feet and hands twitched involuntarily throughout the hall. If you hadn’t yet woken up to the fact that the young French-Canadian is as vital a talent as any burgeoning on the international scene then this was the performance to do it.
He started low-key: Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks brought indoors from outdoors with strings now lending decorum to a much reduced wind band. It’s almost impossible not to hear rambunctious original when listening to these notes – the gaudiness of massed oboes, horns, and trumpets rattled along by the din of many drums. This is the courtly alternative where fancy footwork takes precedence over pyrotechnics and the tone is boisterous rather than explosive. It trundled along nicely but our collective powder was kept dry.
There was an air of coolness, too, about Lisa Batiashvili in the ravishing opening measures of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto. They emerged from near-silence in one of Nezet-Seguin’s breathless pianissimi – a tremolando which barely moved air before reaching our ears. Batiashvili’s response was as poised as it was chaste, an almost wilful reluctance to succumb to the enticement of the melody. Then the beast within surfaced in the gruffly overworked G-string and we began to realise that appearances can be deceptive. The scherzo had a devilish glint and ear-pricking clarity – indeed it would be hard to imagine an exposition of the orchestral part more subtly tailored to a soloist. Enchantment, when it finally came in the aerial flutterings of the closing pages, felt earned – and all the more satisfying for it.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more brilliant or revealing account of Stravinsky’s Fireworks. The apparent madness of assembling such a huge orchestra for a mere four minutes of music seemed almost justified and, of course, it effectively lit the touch-paper for the Beethoven Seventh. This was, in a word, combustible. Like the Stravinsky, it was up there with the rare and indelible. Marrying his instinctive understanding of phrasal ebb and flow to thrilling rhythmic impetus Nezet-Seguin willed the LPO to an almost delirious dynamism. His telling and unexpected attacca from the first to second movement and again from bounding scherzo to headlong finale compounded an irresistible urgency that characterised even the sublime Allegretto. Stunning.
TUESDAY 30TH MARCH 2010 PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA/ MUTI
Royal Festival Hall
You always know when Riccardi Muti is in town: the Philharmonia Orchestra is celebrating another birthday. It’s now of pensionable age – 65 – and in fine fettle though this all-Beethoven celebration had a curious air of the bygone and yesteryear about it. We don’t hear many Beethoven performances nowadays that revel in the airs and graces of Muti’s suavely aristocratic but also portentous account of the Third Symphony “Eroica”. This was Muti as hero – the hero’s return, you might say – and it was exactly the kind of performance he might have given, albeit mellowed and matured now, back in 1972-1982 during his momentous decade at the helm of the orchestra.
The trouble is that the world has moved on and our exploration of period performance practice has sharpened perceptions to such a degree that this kind of overly comfortable, self-satisfied reading is no longer challenging. It’s like listening to your favourite old recording over and over again secure in the knowledge that you know precisely what’s coming. Which is not to say that there were no surprises in Muti’s account, just that they were all so cosmetically applied. Until the exultant final pages – horns in brazen overdrive – this performance (the first movement especially) lacked momentum and what can only be described as a defiance of spirit. It was in no sense “revolutionary” but rather triumphantly self-serving.
Of course, there were beautiful details, most in the second movement funeral march where the string basses’ interjections at the start were rendered a mournful cantabile in dedication to the long-serving Principal, Gerald Drucker, who died a few days before. Indeed the great fugal centre of the movement, basses striding magnificently, was a mighty tribute.
But the evening’s real star was Joshua Bell whose account of the Violin Concerto was full of those fresh, in-the-moment “discoveries”, forever searching for expressive new horizons. The shape and purpose of everything – not least the ever-demanding passage-work – spoke of real artistry. Muti, too, provided elegant, exemplary, support whether highlighting the playful interaction with bassoons or laying down a deeply mysterious string bass resonance while Bell trilled high above among the angels. The bravura of the cadenza (his own?) led us into the most extraordinary return, hushed and expectant as if already scenting the loftiness of the slow movement.
And that was exquisite – a fine ribbon of sound accompanying the opening summons in horns and preparing a “reveal” of the main theme as becalmed as it was reassuring.
SUNDAY 28TH MARCH 2010 LSO/ BYCHKOV
Barbican Hall
Not all this year’s bicentennial tributes to Chopin will necessarily be by Chopin. The slow movement of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto is as uncannily Chopinesque as anything the Polish master himself penned – a melody of wistful fragrance heightened by delicious suspensions in the accompanying string harmony. Yes, Chopin had much to teach anyone who ever whispered sweet nothings to a keyboard.
The young Shostakovich did so on a regular basis, accompanying silent movies to supplement his income. Many a consumptive heroine will have faded gracefully to music like this. Denis Matsuev, the hot Russian pianist of the moment, played it here with unobtrusive purity, a nocturne for the break of day rather than the descent of night. It was a good few romantic notions away from being rapturous – but then clarity is Matsuev’s most persuasive attribute. Clarity and rhythmic muscle.
The outer movements of the concerto – kicking off at the gallop with the opening Allegro’s “what shall we do with the drunken sailor” like ditty – were pretty dazzling in their metallic incisiveness. There wasn’t too much humour in the mix – slapstick or otherwise – but the excitement generated with those pile-driving bass ostinati and repeated figures in the upper extremes of the instrument cut through anything that Semyon Bychkov and the London Symphony Orchestra could throw at Matsuev. Paradoxically, as an encore, he played Liadov’s “Musical Box” with more rubato than such mechanisms generally allow – and he even cracked a smile or two in the process.
But this was Bychkov’s debut with the LSO and he launched it in fine style with an account of Dvorak’s Carnival Overture that was nothing if not splashy. An especially sensitive soft-centre was blessed with gorgeous cor anglais and violin solos and little details like Dvorak’s explosive timpani exclamations added spice to the home stretch. Brahms’ Fourth Symphony was rather more challenging and for my money less convincing.
The big danger posed by the outer movements of this piece is the attention to lyric detail at the expense of momentum. Bychkov’s first movement lingered too lovingly over the songful “hot spots” and in the great passacaglia finale the still centre in solo flute, though beautiful, was almost a separate event. Of course there is always excitement and insight with this conductor and the slow movement proceeded most eloquently from misty-eyed horn calls and expectant pizzicati to an exquisite realisation of the cello-led theme, its attendant harmonies in violins and violas tenderly illuminated.
MONDAY 15TH MARCH 2010 JANACEK “KATYA KABANOVA”
English National Opera
London Coliseum
English National Opera’s new staging of Janacek’s heartbreaking Katya Kabanova is cast big: big voices, big performers casting big shadows. Director David Alden has always embraced shadows – deep, lowering, expressionistic shadows – and here with Charles Edwards his designer, Adam Silverman his lighting designer, and Edvard Munch their inspiration, the shadows totally overwhelm the forlorn figures that cast them. There are the hellish red and green tints, too, and even at one point, where Katya’s spineless husband Tikhon is confronted with her infidelity, the silent scream. That shall be the leitmotif for the entire evening.
Alden and Edwards really have stripped their vision of the piece to the bone. A chip-board wall, half painted with door askew, an abstract splash of water from the ever-present Volga, and one sinister relic of Russian poster art – a vision of the devil, pitchfork at the ready to torment Katya for her “sinful act” when the lightening strike of fate seals her destiny.
Her isolation – indeed everybody’s isolation – is something which is made painfully apparent on the unforgiving rake of Alden’s desolately open stage. The sheer distance at which the protagonists are often set apart from each other accentuates their irreconcilability. At Katya’s final meeting with her lover Boris (the excellent Stuart Skelton – ENO’s magnificent Grimes) the moment they look into each other’s eyes for the last time is not one of intimacy but of hopeless division.
Katya essentially inhabits a parallel dreamworld in this piece and in her first and most extensive aria – provocatively begun in front of an iconic portrait of Christ – she is truly “with the angels”. A beatific solo horn ushers her into a paradise that exists only in her reclusive imagination. It’s at moments like these that I would welcomed greater warmth, greater humanity, and indeed vulnerability, in Patricia Racette’s singing of the role. It’s a big and impressively uninhibited instrument she possesses and she gives unstintingly – but it’s pretty unyielding and the acting is somewhat “applied” in that familiar operatic manner which makes the character on stage almost indistinguishable from the performer at her elaborate solo curtain call.
All the performances are writ large bordering on the grotesque, though, and that, for Alden, is an indication of their absurdity and of the entrenched provincialism that has bred them – all, that is, except the youngsters Vanya and Varvara – Alfie Boe and Anna Grevelius – whose refreshing honesty represents a freer tomorrow.
And so the monstrous Kabanicha (indomitable Susan Bickley) is done up like a black widow, hair piled high and severe like a malevolent Norma Desmond. To her, everybody defers: her weak and violent son Tikhon (a terrifically irrational John Graham-Hall) who can never shake off his poisonous inheritance, and the pompous Dikoy (Clive Bayley in Bluebeard mode) who lives for her chastisement.
But the protagonist of the evening is the ENO orchestra attending to every facet of Janacek’s painfully beautiful and brutal score. Mark Wigglesworth conducts it magnificently, with passion and a quiet understanding, where silences become prophecies and a solo string bass line can unlock all the sorrows in the world in Katya’s final moments.
FRIDAY 12TH MARCH 2010 DAWN UPSHAW/ EMANUEL AX
Barbican Hall
It is something of a paradox than Chopin could make the piano sing like few others in musical history but on the evidence his meagre collection of songs could not unlock that effortless facility in the human voice. Pianistic bel canto, yes; vocal, no. Listening to the first half of this oddly schizophrenic recital from Dawn Upshaw and Emanuel Ax the puzzlement grew with each successive song: seven of them, to be precise, each from the collection labelled “Polish” (wasn’t everything?) and none especially grateful for the soprano voice.
Upshaw and Ax are taking this recital on the road to celebrate the 200th anniversaries of Chopin and Schumann but I can only guess that preparation time was foreshortened in some way because the normally super-communicative Upshaw was buried in her copy sounding decidedly uneasy about both the language and the vocal inflections. Even Polish-born Ax, for whom this music is a birth-right, was somewhat tentative and untidy.
But what was going on with Upshaw? One of my favourite artists seemed to be in some vocal distress with phrases poorly sustained, intervals uncertain, and much chesting of the lower register. To be frank, they sounded like sight-readings, although the last two songs – “Faded and Gone”, possessed of a folksy ache, and “My Darling”, a song at last displaying Chopin’s pianistic rapture – seemed to bring the voice and personality into focus. Right now they sound closer to speech than song – or maybe that’s how Upshaw and Ax feel them. At any rate, they need to be more thoroughly digested.
And I would suggest that Stephen Prutsman’s setting of Billy Collins poems Piano Lessons (replacing a previously announced Golijov piece) makes for an odd interpolation into the evening. Funny on the page but hopelessly over-cooked in their musical context the problem here was the separation and dislocation of words killing most of the jokes before their pay-off.
The pay-off of this recital was Upshaw’s Schumann. Suddenly a very different singer was on the platform – involved, engaged, the feeling at last dictating the sound. The child in Upshaw is always full of wonder and when she tells a story you hang on every word. “Mignon’s Song” was particularly fine, not one phrase or emotion ringing false, and with “Dedication” her big hearted delivery filled the hall and stilled it, the central line of poetry “You are repose, you are peace” finding and holding an inwardness that had been conspicuously lacking earlier.
THURSDAY 11TH MARCH 2010 LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ ADAMS
Barbican Hall
The intimations of both Ravel and Stravinsky in Colin Matthews’ opulent orchestrations of Debussy’s gusty Preludes “The Wind in the Plain” and “What the West Wind Saw” made for a quite incestuous feel to this the second of John Adams’ cunningly devised concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra. All five composers cross-fertilised in interesting ways.
Matthews’ take on the Debussy Preludes was governed by a desire to make them as orchestral in texture and as far removed from the piano as was conceivably possible. It’s what the best orchestral transcriptions always do and why Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition at times feels as though the plainer piano original came after and not before. Flickers of “Gnomus” and “Baba Yaga” breezed through the Matthews, the headiness of Ravelian rather than Debussian colours making for an exotic palette.
Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales then generated their own turbulence, the sort produced by sensuous swirling bodies. The problem was, though, that Adams, the conductor, slightly short-changed us on the swoon and salivation of these hedonistic morsels, failing to exploit through phrasing and rubato the full variety of pleasure that they offer. In short, they were rather stiffly, uniformly, despatched.
And this is what sometimes happens when a conductor’s musicality exceeds his technical capabilities. Adams has the understanding but not the natural ability to communicate characterisation and subtext as a conductor. He was frankly hanging on for dear life negotiating the brittle urban counterpoint of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments. Jeremy Denk led by example, keeping a cool head, lending a distinct touch of the Oscar Petersons to the central diversion of Stravinsky’s exquisitely Bachian Largo.
That illicitly languorous jazz of the wee small hours is what lies at the dark heart of Adams’ neon-lit City Noir, here receiving a stonking European premiere. It’s the stuff of film noir and then some, of sleazy LA nights, of dreams and delusions, of dangerously sensuous high-lying strings, yearning alto sax laments and nighthawk trumpets. You could argue that Adams is apt to repeat himself, to be too expansive in that typically West Coast way. But what a talent he has for the big orchestral gesture and what an amazing ride he takes us on in the frenetic final pages of this orchestral triptych. It’s Hollywood’s answer to The Rite of Spring, it’s David Lynch on heat and out of his head careering down Mulholland Drive. I reckon the LSO came pretty close to meltdown; what a dazzling display.
WEDNESDAY 10TH MARCH 2010 ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT/ FISCHER
Royal Festival Hall
It’s one small step for Beethoven and a giant leap for mankind from the First to his Eighth Symphony and to hear both works in tandem on instruments of the period only intensifies the revolution drawing us ever closer to the mighty Ninth. Under the dynamic and enquiring baton of Ivan Fischer – one of the four conductors sharing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s current cycle of the symphonies – it was like experiencing the elegant and benign become exuberantly subversive overnight.
The First Symphony was spry and trim, hints of Haydnesque rebellion evident only in the boldish modulation into the development of the first movement and the unexpected slow introduction of the finale. Fischer and the OAE turned all its corners most charmingly. But then a quick re-tune did nothing to dampen the arrival of the Eighth which doesn’t so much begin as explode from the page.
Stravinsky was quoted as saying that this was his favourite Beethoven symphony – which is hardly surprising since there are moments which come close to suggesting that he might have had a hand in it. The surprises are laid like banana skins, some thinly disguised as faux-pas. But most of all it’s the way Beethoven turns classicism on its head to sound almost neo-classical that Stravinsky would have loved. I loved the way Fischer and the OAE exacerbated the contrasts between the super-lyrical and the gruffly dynamic (super cross-rhythms from cellos and basses in the first movement development, energy seeming to come up through the ground). And there’s no doubt that the coarser woodier timbre of the bassoons (who get to be stars in this piece) makes their apparent misappropriation to suave and songful in the balmy trio of the third movement sound deliciously perverse.
But if we thought all that was revolutionary (and it was) it’s been a while since a performance of the ubiquitous Fifth Symphony steamed into a concert hall with quite the culture shocking force of Fischer’s account. Just when you thought you knew how the first movement went, along comes Fischer with hair-raising impetus to challenge players and listeners alike. Terse, jagged, intemperate, fermatas cut to the quick, a moment like the unexpected oboe cadenza appearing like a delusion of calm.
It was quite something, full of fresh, inquisitive detail and a finale which seemed quite literally to be ripped from darkness and strife and driven to almost delirious jubilation. Wow.
SUNDAY 7TH MARCH 2010 LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ ADAMS
Barbican Hall
What would you imagine the composer John Adams might choose to conduct – apart, that is, from a little something he himself made earlier? Well, the first of two London Symphony Orchestra concerts this week brought no big surprises: Sibelius’ 6th Symphony was in essence a little like returning to his minimalist roots – a bunch of insistent melodic cells and dancing ostinati. Flanking it, as if to reassert that everything Adams writes is essentially operatic, was orchestral music born of opera: Adams’ own Doctor Atomic Symphony and the “Four Sea Interludes” from Britten’s Peter Grimes. Adams, the conductor, had his work cut out.
On a day when the sadly premature death was announced of a truly great Peter Grimes – the remarkable Philip Langridge – this astonishing music might have unfolded with an added poignancy. But as dawn broke over the Suffolk coastline and upper strings cast their first glinting reflections of early light, it was plain that Adams’ composerly precision was going to mark out too many barlines for the music to “evolve” in any meaningfully evocative way.
This is technically treacherous music for any and everybody performing it and the light only catches the water convincingly when the time-beating becomes unobtrusive. Adams spent too much energy ensuring that the devilish syncopations of “Sunday Morning” or the flecks of “Moonlight” landed where they should. He and the orchestra did not make light of anything. It was like someone said of Toscanini in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony – Adams was just waiting for that storm. And when it came it was pretty full-on – until that glorious moment just before the final squall where the violins recall Grimes’ haunting phrase “What harbour shelters peace?” Adams really opened this out and in so doing at last made music.
He and the orchestra were much happier surfing Sibelius’ 6th Symphony. There isn’t a composer alive who doesn’t think that the opening measures of this marvellous piece constitute the most beautiful polyphony we have. It is like turning the pages of some ancient illuminated manuscript – nothing, but nothing, prepares you for the dancing allegro molto which follows. Adams had a ball with it, locking into those motoric repetitions (or doing what comes naturally) and really making rhythm sing. Composers love the gamesmanship and intrigue of Sibelius’ music and Adams revelled in the obliqueness of the first movement’s strange closing measures, its indecision about how to end punctuated with gaping silences. And was there ever a bigger question mark hovering over the final diminuendo in violins and violas?
Adams’ own Doctor Atomic Symphony has slimmed down by 20 minutes since its Proms premiere in 2007. Its continuous one-movement span (echoes of Sibelius’ 7th) is truly an attempt to make something convincingly symphonic of the opera’s “innards”, opening like the main title of some 1940s Sci-Fi movie – all gothic rhetoric and master-the-universe brassiness – and ending with the most beautiful music Adams has ever penned: his quasi-baroque setting of John Donne’s “Batter My Heart” which is about as memorable an act one curtain as anything written since Peter Grimes.
In between these significant bookends comes a highly combustible core of energy (not unlike the bomb itself) offset by evocations of desert tranquillity with solo horn and the whine of bowed vibraphone lending an eerie calm before the firestorm. The LSO were brashly, brilliantly, in their element for Adams and when the great aria did come – bumped up an octave from baritone into the tenor reach of solo trumpet (the eloquent Christopher Deacon) – it was as if the ache at the heart of all things American had found new meaning in a familiar old voice.
FRIDAY 5TH MARCH 2010 HANDEL “TAMERLANO”
Royal Opera House
Whether or not Placido Domingo’s presence would have lifted the dynamics of this decidedly flaccid evening one cannot say. It’s hard to imagine him amidst the dispassionate chic of Richard Hudson’s whiter than white gallery-like setting with its allusions to suns and moons and the universal orb of power. Indeed it is his character – the Ottoman ruler Sultan Bajazet – that we first see lying prostrate in defeat beneath the said orb. A giant foot bears down on it like a football, symbol of how mere mortals are but playthings of the gods. But Bajazet rises in defiance bearing this entire “universe” on his shoulders. And with four-and-half hours to go, that’s just about as dramatic as it gets.
The trouble with Graham Vick’s undeniably poised and stately staging – stylised to within an inch of its life like some exhibit from opera’s minimalistic past – is that it essentially relinquishes all dramatic and emotional liability to the performers themselves. That, you may argue, is what Handel opera is all about: the arias dictate the pace and energy and momentum of the evening. But for that you need singers who can fill a house like Covent Garden and infuse those arias with a very real and immediate sense of their emotional journey. Ivor Bolton and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment offered all the motivation and encouragement they could muster from the pit – but even from my forward position in the stalls instrumental and vocal sound felt diminished by both the scale of the house and the staging.
Who on earth imagined that Christianne Stotijn – a singer whose lack of stage experience was embarrassingly apparent – could dominate the evening as the bloodthirsty Tartar Tamerlano? The voice is anyway in a poor condition with a break so pronounced that every other note is now unrelentingly chested for emphasis. One wonders, too, whatever happened to Christine Schafer’s disarming purity and security of line? As Bajazet’s quietly heroic daughter Asteria much of the singing was strangely occluded and colourless.
Kurt Streit certainly sang Bajazet more incisively than Domingo would have done – and more than filled his shoes in terms of authority and that most elusive of commodities: gravitas. Renata Pokupic – bright, open, and seductive of voice – also made an impression as Irene, Tamerlano’s would-be betrothed.
But without doubt the evening’s most special singing came from Sara Mingardo as Andronico, her cultured soft-grained contralto and wholehearted connection with text possessed of an intimacy that was ultimately somewhat overwhelmed by the scale of the show. That, I guess, was the elephant in the room – a blue one at that.
TUESDAY 2ND MARCH 2010 VIENNA PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/ MAAZEL **
Barbican Hall
It’s interesting, not to say alarming, how variable the great Vienna Philharmonic can be. Give them a Brahms Hungarian Dance – as Lorin Maazel did here for an encore – and they’ll sweep you off your feet, violins gorgeously throaty down on the G-string, stylistic hesitations teased and tantalising to the manner born. But ask them to play Debussy’s La Mer and they begin to sound like amateurs.
Beethoven should be a safe bet, you would think, and for the most part the 6th Symphony “Pastoral” was richly, beguilingly played. But it wasn’t the playing that was the problem. Lorin Maazel, now a sprightly 80, has a long and illustrious musical pedigree but his still exceptional technical facility and photographic memory does not extend to his taste and judgement and what began as an engagingly old-fashioned, amply sounded, account of the Pastoral eventually ground to a halt – heavy and portentous. I turned to my guest and commented: “I thought the Bruckner was tomorrow night?”
Beethoven’s opening movement is subtitled “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arriving in the country”. But how had we arrived? By air-conditioned limo? There was nothing airy or open-aired about Maazel’s delivery of the movement; the string sound was gorgeous but urbane, a country excursion recalled from the comfort of a luxury mansion. Corners were invariably turned with a gentle application of the brakes – another outmoded Maazel mannerism – and even the birdsong of the second movement (especially the mellifluous solo clarinet) was a little too “schooled”.
But in the aftermath of a storm resounding enough to suggest that hurricane Lorin had just blown in, Maazel completely subjugated the joy of the work to narcissism and presided over a “Shepherds’ Hymn” that was inexplicably slow and leaden. No fervour and certainly no uplift.
And so it continued. The last time I heard the Vienna Philharmonic play Debussy’s La Mer was under Gergiev. I thought it was simply ill-prepared. But Maazel faired even worse, his pedantic exposition of the score meeting with hesitancy and insecurity in the orchestra – and one moment of complete disintegration in the middle of the first movement.
No orchestra or conductor could make the dawn sequence of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé – Suite No.2 anything other than ravishing, so perfect is the scoring. I’ve heard sexier accounts, it has to be said, but at least it shimmered brilliantly. Next time, though, a big Strauss tone poem – Alpine or Domestica – might serve Maazel and the orchestra better.
EDWARD SECKERSON
AN AUDIENCE WITH ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER
The Lord works in mysterious ways. For years now Andrew Lloyd Webber has nursed the idea of a sequel to his most successful show The Phantom of the Opera, for years Phantom fans have pondered what might have become of him after that “final exit”. Nightly he vanishes from his subterranean lair deep in the bowels of the Paris Opera House (a.k.a. Her Majesty’s Theatre) leaving only his iconic half-mask as a symbolic reminder of his continuing omnipotence on stages throughout the world: 149 cities across 86 countries. Follow that. Lloyd Webber has.
It’s 10 years on from the fabled “disappearance” and five minutes walk from Her Majesty’s to the Adelphi Theatre where Phantom 2 Love Never Dies is in the final stages of preparation. The man himself – Lloyd Webber, that is – escorts me into the gutted auditorium where an army of technicians and banks of computer screens are rather more suggestive of space exploration than musical theatre. The orchestra will be in situ for the first time and in a couple of hours the show’s big opener will see Coney Island, New York, rise from the ashes of one of its countless fires and reanimate to the strains of a sumptuous bitter-sweet waltz in the grand tradition of Lloyd Webber’s great idol Richard Rodgers’ Carousel.
The Coney Island setting came out of years of think-tanking involving personalities as diverse as Frederick “The Jackal” Forsyth, Ben Elton, the show’s lyricist Glenn Slater and director Jack O’Brien of whom Lloyd Webber says “Anyone directing Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, Puccini’s Trittico, and Hairspray in one year is someone you have to meet.” Actually it was Ben Elton’s idea to carry all of the original characters forward to the sequel. Their identity was already well established globally, he said, and introducing major new characters into the mix would only muddy the waters. He was right.
So who exactly wrote the book? “Well, with a largely through-sung show it’s harder to say because everybody, the whole creative team, are chipping in with ideas. But obviously once Glenn Slater, our lyricist, came on board and the words themselves started flowing then everything began falling into place and the Coney Island setting became more and more dramatically appealing.”
Coney Island in 1907 was pretty much the eighth wonder of the world. It was the mother of amusement parks, the only good reason, said Freud, for making the long trip across the Atlantic. It was somewhere the Phantom, still pining for his one true love Christine Daaé, could fit right in – a decadent playground of freak shows, escapologists, illusionists, and great showmen. It also happened to be the age of Vaudeville. As settings for musicals go this one was a no-brainer. But establishing Coney Island in the minds and imaginations of audiences for whom it was probably nothing more than the name of some faded fairground was the challenge that eventually gave rise to the show’s dramatic opening.
And there’s a rather nice link here between Phantom’s original designer, the late, lamented, Maria Bjornson – whose famous gold proscenium sculptures brought the Paris Opera to Her Majesty’s Theatre – and Bob Crowley who spirits Coney Island’s world-beating rollercoaster from the mists of time and brings the seedy boardwalk to life before our very eyes. Lloyd Webber recalls that when Coney Island was first mentioned it was Bjornson who excitedly hit upon the idea that the Phantom could now reside in one of Coney’s skyscraping towers. From subterranean to high-rise living – a nice twist. From there he could truly be master of all he surveyed. And so at the start of Love Never Dies he has sent for his songbird Christine who travels to New York with her rather dull husband Raoul (remember him?) and son Gustave not really knowing but surely suspecting who might be behind an invitation for her to perform at Coney Island’s newest attraction Phantasma.
Lloyd Webber’s long-held obsession with this project is matched only by the Phantom’s for Christine (remember it was the first Mrs. Lloyd Webber, Sarah Brightman, who created the role) and as we retire to a quiet room over Rules Restaurant he makes no apologies for being the controlling force behind it. It’s the principal reason why his shows are “through-sung”. He’s not happy if the music isn’t driving the evening.
“If you just want ten songs to fit somebody else’s script then I’m not really the composer for that.” To that end his melodies are the dramatic and emotional fabric of his work and in Love Never Dies – undoubtedly one of his best scores – they are intricately woven.
“Once I had the plot it was fairly obvious to me that the first major melodic strand would have to be the Phantom’s song of yearning for Christine. Another decision I made quite early on was that the title song – which was something I originally wrote with this piece in mind and which was first sung by Kiri Te Kanawa – was going to be Christine’s big performance number and should be kept pretty much exclusively for that moment. Then there was the question of how I should handle the moment when Christine and the Phantom first meet again – and there I took the risky strategy of giving the stage to just them for the best part of 15 minutes. The themes that appear there – including the song “Once Upon Another Time” – would be carried forward towards the eventual dénouement.”
That song, that melody, typifies Lloyd Webber’s musical personality. If it was sung in German (as no doubt it will be one day) it could easily be mistaken for Franz Lehar. In fact I’d go so far as to characterise Lloyd Webber’s work a throwback to a bygone melodic style – more gracious, more opulent. His lyric ballads are surely unsurpassed since the heyday of Ivor Novello, Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers. The middle-eight or “release” of “Look with your heart”, another song from the show, is pure Rodgers; it sings and plays like an affectionate homage.
But it’s what I call the emotional memory of these melodies that give them such dramatic potency. The Phantom’s big number in Love Never Dies, “Till I hear you Sing”, is one of the best ballads Lloyd Webber has ever written – an absolute corker – but it stays with you because something about the ache within it won’t let go. When Christine agrees to sing for her mentor one last time she does so to the same tune and the frisson of recognition it engenders makes for a real goosebumps moment. That’s what great melodists do – hard to define but easy to recognise. It’s where the next note seems somehow inevitable the second after you’ve heard it. Rodgers once said “a great melody implies its own harmony” and Lloyd Webber certainly holds true to that maxim.
So where on earth here do these melodies come from? Interestingly he gives me a very similar answer to that which Leonard Bernstein gave me many years ago – that he really has no idea, that the tunes and their attendant harmonies have a habit of creeping up on him while he’s “musing” at the piano. He knows instinctively when he’s hit upon something – it might be the beginnings of a melody, a phrase or two or something more – and even if there is no immediate use for it he’ll write it down and keep it until the right moment calls it to mind. Sometimes the ideas come quickly and easily: “No Matter What” (from Whistle Down the Wind) was one of those – the cash registers were heard ringing before even the last note was down. At other times songs are very much “composed” in response to a specific motivation or brief. With Lloyd Webber’s Eurovision entry “It’s My Time” a catchy hook was not just desirable but required – and anybody that thinks that’s just a bog-standard tune should think again.
I am now doubly curious about the evolution of “ ‘Till I Hear You Sing”: “This took several drafts and it was the tiniest adjustments that made the difference”, says Lloyd Webber. “There are ways it could have gone which would have made it acceptable but ordinary but the use of the flattened 7th made it more intriguing. Other little things like dropping from the key of D to C major affect the listener in ways they can feel but might not be able to identify or explain. I instinctively know when something is right and when it isn’t.”
Actually Lloyd Webber’s melodies readily lend themselves to development but the man himself insists that he is not a symphonic composer but a dramatic one:
“The one thing I have always felt about musical theatre is that it is to an extraordinary degree about construction. Where I have come unstuck sometimes has mostly been to do with the stories not being quite right or not connecting with a contemporary audience. The Woman in White was a perfect example because the central premise, so shocking in Victorian times, didn’t turn a hair with audiences today. I firmly believe that even the greatest theatre songs ever written – like “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific – wouldn’t be known today if they had been in the wrong place of the wrong theatrical vehicle. I once did an album years ago with Sarah Brightman called “The Songs That Got Away” and heard as a collection you’re thinking ‘this is one of the best musicals I’ve ever heard’ but for various reasons each of these songs was buried on account of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. So structure and context are everything – and if you look at a work like Britten’s Peter Grimes there isn’t a wasted or misplaced moment anywhere. As music theatre it’s perfect. Like act two of La Boheme. Anyone considering a career in musical theatre should study that.”
One of the key dramatic moments in Love Never Dies comes when the Phantom starts to recognise an innate kinship with the boy Gustave (echoes of Miles in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw). The tune the boy plays and sings at this point in the show is called “Beautiful” and its eerie Svengali-like chant – truly, subversively, “music of the night” – evolves into one of the principal leitmotifs of the score – quietly sensuous but potentially grand and visionary, too. I am reminded of a very accomplished orchestral piece Aurora by Andrew’s father William Lloyd Webber whose music brother Julian has tirelessly championed over the years.
“It’s interesting you mention that piece because I think it represented a sensuous side to my father’s personality that he was rarely able to show and that I am beginning to realise now was a big influence on me – particularly with this show. It’s made me think about why he was unable to show that side of himself and why I am….”
There are still those among Lloyd Webber’s detractors who resolutely refuse to acknowledge his talent and doggedly insist that his huge international success is the product of clever global marketing and handfuls of formulaic hit songs liberally reprised. How does he feel about that?
“I always think of something Richard Rodgers said to me when I got to know him slightly towards the end of his life. He told me how depressed he’d got by the reviews for The King and I whose score was compared unfavourably with his previous shows. But even he – perhaps the most gifted popular melodist of them all – realised that it’s not always possible for audiences or for that matter critics to take in what they are hearing on a first or even second hearing. Musical theatre history is littered with bad reviews for now classic pieces. But there’s something else and that’s this: my job is to communicate with my audience and frankly should they be expected to recognise that the ordering of the poems in Cats, for instance, is very precisely structured to create a seamless narrative or that the opening of the show is a mock-fugue? It’s like what you say about the melodies: the effect of those repetitions, whether sung or in underscoring, has an emotional not an intellectual purpose.” The subliminal references to Phantom 1 in Love Never Dies will hopefully make aficionados smile.
After opening Love Never Dies Lloyd Webber has one more pressing date with reality TV when the nation-wide search for the little girl in the gingham frock –Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – gathers momentum. Lloyd Webber believes that the classic movie has never successfully transferred to the stage because Arlen and Harburg’s songs were too thinly spread. The respective estates have given him special dispensation to create some additional numbers and if that means batting off a succession of Graham Norton “friends of Dorothy” jokes, then it’ll be well worth it. He’s hugely encouraged that these shows appear to have ignited a renewed enthusiasm for musical theatre among the teenage generation. The Wicked audience could now be ready for the prequel.
But back to the year’s biggest opening night. “I’m genuinely excited”, he says, “to see what people make of Love Never Dies because in so many ways it goes much further than the old Phantom did. Without giving anything away about the ending, it’s like I closed a door when I put the last notes down. I don’t think I’ll be able to go any further down this particular musical path – well, not for a while anyway.”
And long, long after that, will people still be humming “ ‘ Till I Hear You Sing”? Of course, they will.
SATURDAY 20TH FEBRUARY 2010 LONDON PHILHARMONIC/ JUROWSKI ****
Royal Festival Hall
Fateful prophecies and exultant perorations – the enduring spirits of Leos Janacek and Josef Suk ascend from the valley of the shadow of death and another of Vladimir Jurowski’s beautifully crafted programmes for the London Philharmonic makes connections that will profoundly affect the way we hear these works in the future. None of the London orchestras is thinking of programming in quite the same way: for Jurowski, the way works impact upon each other can intensify the impression they make individually. Did Janacek’s highly expressive terseness better prepare us for Suk’s protracted meditation on bereavement – the Asrael Symphony? Of course, it did.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Janacek’s Taras Bulba and his rarely-heard mini-cantata The Eternal Road is the way both pieces achieve transcendency with their feet so firmly planted in the grass-roots familiarity of Janacek’s own back yard, so to speak. The apparent contradiction is marked in both works but especially Taras Bulba where the rough-hewn and seraphically beautiful achieve amazing kinship. Jurowski could not have been more alert to these epic contrasts, the rapt opening finding refuge in the prayers of a high oboe, solo double bass, clarinet, and the muted ruminations of a distant organ. And so the violation of this inner-sanctum by the gruff brasses of the Cossacks proved all the more brutal.
How marvellous to have the reasons for every note so clearly understood. The exultant “shouts” of violins in recognition of “a new dawn for Slavonicism” were marvellously coarse and emotive with a blaze of light coming through with unusual force in the upper registration of the organ.
The word setting of The Eternal Gospel – an earthly and earthy response to the Book of Revelation invoking the 12th-century mystic Joachim of Fiore – is born of the same ecstatic primitivism that eventually fired Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass and with its rough declamation – terrifically taken by the late replacement tenor Adrian Thompson – wonky crusading march, and vaulting soprano (Sofia Fomina) the effect was very much suggestive of pagans who’ve been Christian for about a week.
I’ve heard more spontaneous performances of Suk’s glorious Asrael Symphony but none which felt more organic or which chronicled its thematic transformations more lucidly. And the great major key revelation of the final chorale in muted brass brought with it a surpassing beauty and serenity and the most moving homage imaginable to Suk’s beloved mentor and father-in-law: the departed Dvorak.
SATURDAY 13TH FEBRUARY 2010 LONDON PHILHARMONIC/ NEZET-SEGUIN ****
Royal Festival Hall
There’s a particular way of not just playing but feeling and touching French music. Watching Yannick Nezet-Seguin, without a baton, shape and sculpt Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin Suite in this beautifully proportioned all-French programme was an object lesson in how phrasing and articulation can shift emphasis and weight in ways that you might never have imagined. Hearing is believing – almost.
French music teases and tantalises and Nezet-Seguin kept the exquisite Baroque allusions of Le Tombeau on the breath and off the string, repeatedly taking the sound away as if it really was just a figment of the imagination. At the close of the first piece, fleet and breathless, the effect of the pay off – a fleeting harp glissando, a flash of piccolo, a vapour trail of violin harmonics – left remnants of sound in the air even after it had finished. Not for nothing did Nezet-Seguin hold on to those precious moments before silence.
Gorgeous oboe playing from Ian Hardwick seemed to extend the upper reaches of the instrument’s range. The penultimate movement, Menuet, was close to perfection, its trio unlocking the amazing sonority of muted trumpet over drone bass with clarinets and double-bass harmonics really deceiving the ear in magical ways.
There was so much air around the sound that even the Festival Hall sounded atmospheric – and when the lowering cloud formations of “Nuages”, the first of Debussy’s Nocturnes, rolled in, the precipitation of Sue Bohling’s cor anglais and sustained tremolandi in string basses rendered the whole soundscape overcast in the best sense. “Fetes” was then all light and flashing reflections and though the “Sirens” – the ladies of the LPO Choir – were rather too “present” in this hall, the fade to black was so intense that even the distant rumble of the underground sounded like something Ravel had dreamed up.
The evening yielded two Pavans – Ravel’s, a warm embrace, and Faure’s, cool and poised (though less effective, I think, with chorus) – from which the aching lamentations of Poulenc’s Stabat Mater made for a highly original (and rarely heard) climax to the programme. The fantastic mix of textures and moods in this piece – angelic one moment, all grimacing gargoyles the next – lends it a slightly subversive tone and there’s something sensually Caravaggian about its pained chromaticism. A pity that soprano Claire Booth, a late replacement, lacked the unblemished “spin” the part requires; purity is close to eroticism here and that’s something Nezet-Seguin appeared to have shared with the LPO Choir.
FRIDAY 12TH FEBRUARY 2010 DONIZETTI “THE ELIXIR OF LOVE” ***
English National Opera
You may wonder what the most archetypally homespun of Italian operas is doing in Kansas? But then again what sense does Italy make when they don’t speak our lingo? This is opera in English, remember, and as the good Dr. Jonathan Miller will remind us making sense of the unlikely is the name of the operatic game and finding a good fit for comedy sometimes involves a bit of travelling. So here we are in Kansas where the skies are high and the scrubland flat and where just about the only place to refuel on grub and gas is Adina’s Diner.
She, you’ll recall, is the feisty hard-to-get heroine of Donizetti’s folksy tale and as the curtain rises on Isabella Bywater’s deliciously cinemascopic 1950s set the music may not be quite what you’d expect to be hearing but when the likes of Dean (Martin, that is) could equate moons and pizza pies and still have us believing “That’s Amore” then it’s pretty much open season on suspending disbelief. What really counts is that The Elixir of Love is charming and funny – and Miller’s self-evident affection for the territory and the period (I know, he’s been there before) ensures that it is.
Much of the credit for that should go to Kelley Rourke’s crackingly witty translation. For sure, it takes as many liberties as it fires off rhyming couplets but it does so with irresistible silliness. “You reek of halitosis/ Then take a couple of doses”, recommends the not-so-good Dr. Dulcamara at such speed as precludes anyone challenging the outrageous claims he makes for his fraudulent lotions and potions. That number pointedly doesn’t have surtitles but who needs them when you’ve got Andrew Shore. Arriving by Cadillac in shades and a sharp suit, it’s as if Nicely-Nicely Johnson is taking a break from organising crap games in New York City. Shore’s star turn includes a, let’s just say, ripely characterised duet with Sarah Tynan’s vocally and physically pert Adina which Frank Loesser wouldn’t have disowned.
There are, of course, the lovely Miller details: Nemorino (the personable and vocally engaging John Tessier) turning momentarily into a bass-baritone when swigging the Elixir; the perpetual queue for the outside loo; and a really telling moment between Adina and Nemorino to set up his hit number “A Furtive Tear” which for once doesn’t feel like it’s in the wrong place.
There are some balance problems between pit and stage: Pablo Heras-Casado’s enthusiasm beefs up the orchestra way too much for this house. But even if they don’t sing “Luck Be A Lady”, that’s what we’re all thinking.
EDWARD SECKERSON
THURSDAY 11TH FEBRUARY 2010 PROKOFIEV “THE GAMBLER” ****
Royal Opera House
Like some kind of cosmic roulette wheel Prokofiev’s mighty orchestra starts whirring as the word “Casino” appears, writ large in dozens of flashing bulbs. But Martin Scorsese this is not, nor Las Vegas, but the fictional German spa town of Roulettenbourg where, in Richard Jones’ febrile imagination, it is feeding time at the human zoo. This selection of grotesque, colourfully attired, humanoids are pretty much indistinguishable from the animals unseen inside their cages but for the odd flick of a tail or trunk. But in borrowing the metaphor from opening of Berg/ Wedekind’s Lulu Jones establishes his own menagerie in double quick time. There’s even a performing seal to point up the fatuousness and moral bankruptcy of it all.
Prokofiev’s relentless take on Dostoevsky’s novella is, in short, the perfect vehicle for Jones’ very particular skills. It’s a big, stylised, ensemble piece which turns almost exclusively on a series of compulsive ostinati and like the demon roulette wheel only stops spinning long enough to register the human folly which drives it. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a staging which more successfully replicates the perpetual motion and bold declamatory nature of the score. Jones animates his pathetic parade of caricatures – the cartoon of life – like a master puppeteer. The comings and goings at his Roulettenbourg Hotel – wittily designed by Antony McDonald (circa. 1920s, the time of the opera’s completion) – even suggest an element of schadenfreude as everyone is perpetually eavesdropping on each other’s misfortune. The hungry chorus of affirmation as Alexey appears to have beaten the casino and the system is sung to a kind of robotically synchronised Charleston, a fleeting moment of euphoria before the inevitable crash. Credit will be crunched but for now there’s something to sing and dance about.
This is in many ways a heartlessly sardonic and unforgiving score propelled by the grinding and chugging of Prokofiev’s characteristically machinistic rhythms and Antonio Pappano’s incisive direction. But just when you think that there will be no lyric leavening to ease the unremitting cynicism of it all Prokofiev throws in a moment unexpected pathos that is at once personal and at last real. The scene in which the hitherto indomitable figure of fun Babulenka – the rich aunt on whose inheritance everyone is greedily depending – laments her losses, seems to find Prokofiev, too, in mourning for something irretrievable. Russia, perhaps? It’s a beautiful scene and Susan Bickley took it splendidly.
In such an ensemble piece it’s almost invidious to single out individuals – but one should applaud John Tomlinson’s quivering windbag of a General and Kurt Streit’s suavely malevolent Marquis. Angela Denoke cut a suitably ambiguous figure as Paulina, a women looking to be loved not bought, but it’s a hard voice to warm to and always strikes me more mezzo than soprano with its ample middle and lower registers but foreshortened top.
Robert Sacca (Alexey) has all the top (and the stamina) you could want – and one day will make a splendid Herman in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades – but like Denoke the accented English (a good decision for so wordy a piece) was slightly intrusive. And I can’t help thinking that Jones missed a trick with the final pay-off. No matter – all bets were off long before it came.
EDWARD SECKERSON
THURSDAY 4TH FEBRUARY 2010 MACIEJEWSKI “REQUIEM” **
Westminster Cathedral
It’s quite a story: the exiled Polish composer Roman Maciejewski tenaciously pursuing his dream to complete his “anti-war” Requiem over 15 years and across several countries and only now, a decade after his death, gathering the faithful in Westminster Cathedral during Polska! Year to celebrate its UK Premiere.
I wish I could reveal a happy ending to the story and pretend that the work’s meandering journey to completion had not in any way compromised its coherence – but the reality is rather different and if Maciejewski hoped that during this long gestation his own voice would finally emerge loud and clear, he was sadly wrong. Where is he in this worthy endeavour? The overriding impression left by Missa pro defunctis is the lack of a clearly defined voice.
Many influences manifest themselves: in the Introitus seraphic violins and harps invoke a Faure-like sweetness; the Kyrie is not so much a plea as a spirited request with bouncy counterpoint suggesting the Sanctus of Verdi’s Requiem; the presence of pianos points to Stravinsky and indeed the primitivism of his roaring bass-tuba and stuttering string led Dies Irae plucks a key rhythm and clarinet motif straight out of The Rite of Spring. One could go on.
It’s interesting that unlike Britten in his War Requiem there is nothing in the body of the work, no additional texts, to point up its pacifist message – just a dedication “To the Victims of Human Ignorance” and an epigraph, in Latin, of the words “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” How much more potent it might have been to have set those words – perhaps even at the very top of the piece?
As it is, the focus is on Maciejewski’s protracted setting of the Dies Irae, the “Day of Wrath” – and when I say protracted I mean protracted. The word setting is laborious and long-winded with only flashes of that exotically melismatic writing so beloved of his cherished compatriot Szymanowski. The harmonic language is by and large designed to throw a healing consonant light over everything and to that end a majestic 8-part “Amen” crowns the proceedings with a D-major chord that seems to arrive from nowhere but is welcome nonetheless.
Doubtless the BBC Radio 3 broadcast at 2pm on Tuesday 2nd March will reveal more of the score’s inner workings than a cathedral setting ever can – but at least the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Choral forces under Michal Dworzynski can console themselves at having gone some way towards honouring a forgotten composer’s memory.
EDWARD SECKERSON
WEDNESDAY 3RD FEBRUARY 2010 NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC/ GILBERT**
Barbican Hall
The Americanisation of Magnus Lindberg was just the beginning. The New York Philharmonic was back in town and everything – even the other Finn on the programme, Jean Sibelius – was stamped “made in Manhattan”.
In the case of Lindberg it was by design. The UK premiere of his piece EXPO was created for the New York Philharmonic to kick-start a two-year tenure as composer-in-residence and to celebrate Alan Gilbert’s first season as Music Director. Gilbert was little known on the international circuit when he took up the position but as a native New Yorker, the first to hold the position, there was certainly something to shout about. Lindberg’s EXPO does just that. It’s a swanky, American-accented, “hurrah” beginning with a crack of the whip and hints of a dizzying barn dance in the strings. There’s a brass chorale, as high and it is wide, some big sassy syncopations, and even sleazy muted trumpets. You know exactly where you’ve landed, and the orchestra’s national character – plushy strings and bright opulent brass – is writ large.
The problem is that under Alan Gilbert, that’s the only character we get. On this showing one kind of music is pretty much indistinguishable from another: it’s the New York sound – undeniably impressive – dealing with very different sets of notes in much the same way. The shot-silk backdrop they provided for Yefim Bronfman’s anonymous account of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto was serviceable, more or less, but it conveyed nothing of the work’s quirkily audacious personality and neither did Bronfman. He can and does play the hell out of the notes but what do they communicate beyond a fabulous proficiency and a penchant for demolishing perfectly serviceable Steinways?
The evening’s big “showcase” – and I use the word advisedly – was Sibelius’ Second Symphony and perhaps it was unfortunate for Gilbert that he chose to bring it to London in the same week that Osmo Vanska stormed the capital with his LPO account. It certainly highlighted how much of the work’s national character Gilbert subsumed to an all-purpose glamour. The end result felt and sounded manufactured, cosmetic not organic. The silences didn’t speak, the elemental contrasts in tempo and dynamics failed to grip, indeed the effect was of one colour and one tempo and one expression. Great orchestras and great conductors bring about transformations; Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic merely brought themselves. It wasn’t enough.
EDWARD SECKERSON
TUESDAY 2ND FEBRUARY 2010 STAATSKAPELLE BERLIN/ BARENBOIM *****
Royal Festival Hall
The defining moment in Daniel Barenboim’s unforgettable Beethoven/ Schoenberg experience came from hearing Schoenberg’s exquisitely epigrammatic Five Orchestral Pieces transcend period and style to form a bridge between Beethoven’s Second and Fourth Piano Concertos. At that point in the series Barenboim’s purpose could not have been clearer and the line of succession between two kindred spirits was thrown into startling relief.
The beauty and concision of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto somehow felt and sounded that much newer when set alongside the astonishing distillations of the Schoenberg. Barenboim and his handsome mahogany-toned Staatskapelle Berlin were now at one with every inflection and sonority and even misgivings over the maestro playing and conducting the Beethoven (especially apparent in the “Emperor” concerto on the previous night) seemed to melt away in the loftiness of vision he brought to the Fourth Concerto.
And then came the Third in C minor and just when you were thinking that he was again conflicted and that the first movement felt a little low-key he arrived unassailably at the cadenza and in the final moments achieved such extraordinary shifts of colour in a series of protracted trills that suddenly you knew precisely why we should be in such awe of this man.
The slow movement was as close to perfection as we have any right to expect – a quiet nobility in the keyboard allied to such profundity of sound from the Berlin strings that even the Festival Hall acoustic felt warm and inviting. And what of that exchange between bassoon and flute? Might not Schoenberg have written it? He could certainly have written the piano’s strangely disembodied final utterance.
Only Barenboim would then have dared to programme Schoenberg’s notoriously “difficult” Variations for Orchestra Op.31 as the final piece of the series. Nobody left at the interval. Preceding the performance with an “illustrated talk” that was longer than the piece itself he probably did more for Schoenberg’s cause in twenty minutes than others have failed to do in almost a century. “What am I going to say about a piece that your parents and grandparents before them expressed a wish never to hear again?”
Actually what he said opened our ears to the elusive transformations of Schoenberg’s exquisitely half-remembered waltz theme and sharpened our perception of the work’s bejewelled textures in such a way that the complexity really did add to the beauty. It was an astonishingly virtuosic performance and just in case we didn’t leave whistling the theme, he and the orchestra played us a Strauss Polka.
EDWARD SECKERSON
SATURDAY 30TH JANUARY 2010 LPO/VANSKA
Royal Festival Hall (for The Arts Desk.Com)
Whoever said it was better to journey than to arrive might have been thinking of Sibelius. The arrivals can be pretty spectacular – as here in Osmo Vanska’s tremendous account of the Second Symphony – but the getting there – or not – is what this music is all about. When Vanska conducts Sibelius he doesn’t just traverse the musical landscape, he inhabits it, breathing it in, feeling its pull, overawed at the threshold of where sound becomes silence and vice versa. He is Sibelius’ eternal Wanderer. Barenboim may have stolen the column inches this week but Vanska has stolen hearts and minds. Whether or not you have ever experienced his Sibelius – get thee to the two remaining concerts.
Why is it so special? Well, as a Finn himself Vanska instinctively knows that the two key elements in this music are movement and inertia. You may think this true of all music but in Sibelius the rhythmic imperative, the sense of journeying, of striving, is secondary only to the stillness of isolation. But even when the body is still, the soul journeys on. Moments into his performance of the lean and lucid Third Symphony and Vanska transfixed us with that realisation. The motoric writing for strings was wonderfully keen and defined – not a lazy articulation from any desk of the London Philharmonic – and then one of those uniquely Sibelian moments of “where are we?” in which Vanska had us straining to hear anything at all.
Vanska’s Wanderer is wiry and wired and as he leans excitedly into his first desks of strings, close enough to lay hands on the instruments, it is as if he is attempting to transfuse his energy through some weird kind of osmosis. It works. The excitement is extraordinary but so too the effect on the players when he draws back and does nothing. Listen, he seems to be saying, if you can hear it, it’s too loud. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a more hypnotic or soulful account of the middle movement of the Third Symphony. How can music this simple, this modest, be this profound?
In performance the Second Symphony would ideally come before the third: you feel it moving towards the extreme concision of the third, albeit with bigger gestures. Vanska’s thrilling account was more or less defined by his radical approach to its silences. His respect for them was nothing short of reverential and to that end he bravely and defiantly stretched credibility in his measured approach to the craggy upheavals of the second movement. All of which made for a startling contrast with the Vivacissimo of the scherzo. Again Vanska’s instinct for tempo relationships is second to none. This was a storming performance of the 2nd Symphony but it was a performance of small as well as big revelations: such as Paul Beniston’s first trumpet sounding a kind of plaintive “last post” before the final surge to immortality.
And as if that wasn’t enough for one evening, something equally startling happened between the symphonies – and that came in the shape of Finnish soprano Helena Juntunen. Her choice selection of Sibelius orchestra songs was distinguished by an extraordinary engagement with language and text such as I’ve not heard in a long while. This vibrant lyric voice is both girlish and womanly, innocent and knowing, and possessed of a wonderfully assertive colour in the lower chest register. It’s not a pushed sound but it easily encompasses those dark recesses that Sibelius loves to exploit bringing chilling pay-off lines in songs like “Var det en dröm?” (“Was it a Dream?”) or the soaring “Flicken kom ifran sin älsklings mote” (“The Tryst”).
To hear Juntunen take in the sights and sounds of “Höstkvall” (“Auntumn Evening”) – one of the songs Sibelius himself orchestrated – was to understand how access to this sparest and most penetrating of musical voices is by and large inbred. What a special singer, what a special concert.
FRIDAY 29TH JANUARY 2010 STAATSKAPELLE BERLIN/ BARENBOIM ****
Royal Festival Hall
Daniel Barenboim has earned his adoration. He could stand on one leg and whistle “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” and still bring audiences to their feet. It’s a respect thing, it’s the history he brings to the table, the intellect and theory he now makes so effortlessly practical. His performances – particularly at the keyboard – breathe a different air. You may not always agree with them but you’d be foolish to disregard them.
When he first recorded the Beethoven Concertos with the great Otto Klemperer the best part of half a century ago (yes, really) the idea of programming them alongside works by Arnold Schoenberg might have been viewed as capricious, even pretentious. Now the logic is inescapable: two highly influential composers both able to summarise the past whilst redefining the future. And with Barenboim as teacher audiences are better disposed to learn (and buy tickets). As I say, it’s a respect thing: trust me, I’m Barenboim.
With the Beethoven Concertos he is now resolved to be answerable only to himself. Directing from the keyboard he can shape and mould the Staatskapelle Berlin in his own pianistic image. The opening of the First Piano Concerto was so discreet, so intimate, that the violins’ statement of the first subject might almost have been coming from another room. It felt overheard, self-consciously so, but it did suggest half-remembered Haydn and it did instantly draw us in to Barenboim’s inner world. The really marvellous moments in this performance were visionary and dream-like, as if Barenboim was already scenting the world of Maeterlinck and Schoenberg approaching in the second half.
With the dark shift of tonality into the development of the first movement the pulse slowed almost imperceptibly to take in the uncharted terrain. A chain of descending chords opened magic casements onto an altogether more perfect world and then like beauty confronting the beast a solo bassoon triggered precipitous drama in the piano’s bass register. The only predictable thing about Beethoven is his unpredictability and in that Barenboim is very much a kindred spirit. His sometimes halting rubatos are very “old school” but they speak of rapture and the deepest contemplation. And only an elder statesman could treat the first movement cadenza as his own internal extemporisation of “the story so far”. Actually I’m pretty sure it was his own cadenza, full of mysterious key changes and a grandiose climax which seemed to anticipate the “Emperor” concerto in a couple of days time. The finale brought the odd smudges – but who really cares about those – and the Beethovenian equivalent of Jelly Roll Morton in the jazzy middle section. That really went with a swing.
Strangely enough the distracted dream-world of Maeterlinck’s Pelleas und Melisande as realised in Schoenberg’s early tone poem found a more detached Barenboim as if his fascination with the piece was more theoretical than emotional. The Staatskapelle Berlin offered a sumptuous enough palette of sound but unlike the Beethoven it felt strangely impersonal. Or is that the piece?
EDWARD SECKERSON
THURSDAY 28TH JANUARY 2010 ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT/ JUROWSKI ****
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Beethoven rules again at the South Bank. It’s been ten years since the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment embarked upon its first complete cycle of Beethoven Symphonies but it was long before that that we first began to understand what it meant to hear these audacious pieces played on instruments of the period. The OAE’s current catchphrase “not all orchestras are the same” is a neat way of reminding seasoned concert-goers and first-timers alike that the shock of the new is something that can be rekindled in perpetuity.
Certainly as Vladimir Jurowski laid down the crepuscular introduction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony the explosion of light announcing the allegro vivace was the last thing on our minds. That’s Beethoven for you. The extremes know no bounds, the alternation of darkness and light, elegance and grit can be instantaneous. It’s the immediacy of period instruments, the forwardness of every sonority that throws this music into the sharpest possible relief. The allegros are all fizz and rosin with brassy trumpets and hard-sticked timpani adding their explosive punctuations.
But Jurowski and the orchestra also showed us how much more satisfying it can be when the beauty of the main theme in Beethoven’s tender adagio is achieved in the honesty of the phrasing as opposed to the varnishing of the vibrato. The modern symphony orchestra is a fine thing but we need to be wary of not putting the beauty of the sound before the beauty of the music. It’s as simple – and as complicated – as that.
I mentioned elegance and grit – and they were inseparable in the finale of the Fourth Symphony where the almost unstoppable momentum vividly foreshadowed the all-dancing, all-pulsating, Seventh Symphony to come. And where period instruments really score in a work like that is in the sense of every sinew being stretched in pursuit of new highs and new dynamism. What a thrill to hear those brassy horns stopped high to achieve lift-off at the start of the first movement’s vaulting vivace. I thought Jurowski could have pushed the tempo a little more here – it’s amazing what a difference a hair’s breadth of extra momentum can make.
But then again the sense of reined-in energy finally breaking loose come the finale certainly made for a big pay-off. Jurowski really nailed the storming triple-forte climax to the central development and there’ll no doubt be stomping feet when he and the orchestra power the whole event over to a promenade performance at the Roundhouse.
EDWARD SECKERSON
WEDNESDAY 27TH JANUARY 2010 LPO/VANSKA ****
Royal Festival Hall
For a moment or two it seemed to be Wagner emerging from the chord of E-flat just as he did in Das Rheingold at the start of The Ring. But the chivalrous brassy theme dissipated into a restless, febrile, ostinato and suddenly another equally individual voice was established. So began Osmo Vanska and the London Philharmonic’s Sibelius series “Miraculous Logic” at the South Bank.
And because it began more or less at the beginning with an early and rarely heard tone poem The Wood Nymph we were able to hear just how quickly and readily Sibelius became Sibelius. The wind-swept heart of this compelling opener was full of characteristic fingerprints – a wild ride, piccolo topped and punctuated by fractured brass fanfares. Vanska rejoiced in its nervous energy driving it hard and roughly. But then came an amazing Sibelian hiatus – a moment of suspended silence as if someone had hit the pause button on the CD player. When Sibelius stops its like nature stops; it’s sudden and inexplicable. What followed – a beautiful cello lament offset with spectral pizzicati – was even stranger, an original voice with its own distinct timbre. Small wonder the surging splendour of the coda sounded so self-assertive.
Sibelius was a considerable violinist and his Six Humoresques for violin and orchestra found a way of making the instrument speak that was entirely his own. Their spirit is that of a folksy fiddler in touch with the mystical and Henning Kraggerud played them with great accomplishment and a wonderful sense of the unexpected. There was a natural rapport between him and Vanska, a knowing capriciousness in the exchange of wry smiles. And there was plenty to smile about: who but Sibelius could have come up with the jaunty diversion which has our fiddler whistling nonchalantly in harmonics. The end was pure Sibelian throw-away, a wisp of sound quickly vaporising. I’ve finished so I’ll stop.
The foundation of this series is, of course, the seven symphonies in more or less chronological order and Vanska began that journey here with the most desolate sound in the world – the distant rumble of timpani and hazy clarinet (beautifully taken by Robert Hill) which opens the First Symphony. Vanska’s way with it was nervy and volatile, the first movement anxious and impulsive with any hint of Tchaikovskian amplitude knocked out of the second subject and even the great theme of the finale browbeaten and scarred by the big chill. It promises to be a compelling odyssey.
EDWARD SECKERSON
TUESDAY 26TH JANUARY 2010 JOYCE DIDONATO/ DAVID ZOPEL ****
Wigmore Hall
When the language of love is Italian there are countless different ways of saying “Amore”. Joyce DiDonato pretty much exhausted them all during the course of this intriguing recital but somehow kept coming back with more. Novelties abounded and if indeed it’s true that “all you need is love” then no one was going to leave this recital feeling short-changed – or else.
It takes courage for a big personality mezzo like DiDonato to rein in the sound and effectively switch from oils to water colours for her very first group of Arie antiche. It’s not unusual to hear these songs used as warm ups at the opening of a recital but a voice as ample as DiDonato’s could so easily demolish them that using half the voice and half the amount of air to capture the girlishness of “Danza, danza, fanciulla gentile” presented perhaps the biggest challenge of the evening for her. At the centre of the group was the beautiful “Amarilli mia bella” where the key to hypnotic purity was a pale and interesting sound using very little vibrato and where the tiny melismas conspired with the trills to lend the shivers of delight. David Zobel’s ever-attentive piano, now transformed into a lyre, added to the allure.
We could perhaps have lost the Beethoven group. You would not expect him to be quite himself in Italian song and he was not – the disguise playfully hinting at Mozart or more likely Salieri with whom he studied in Vienna. Interesting, though, to hear him experimenting with two takes on the same text – “L’Amante impaziente” (“The Impatient Lover”) – one flippantly comical, the other full of pathos. DiDonato turned the comparison into an exercise in method acting for the voice.
For me the most pleasurable discoveries of the evening were the art songs of Francesco Santoliquido. DiDonato switched frocks as well as vocal personality swapping demure Grecian blue for a figure-hugging emerald green more in keeping with these exotic blooms. They were scrumptiously singable, Pucciniesque in the best sense with aching cadences deploying tremulous glissandi. From now on in it was a case of ungirdling the voice and flaunting it with a Caruso favourite, “Lolita”, and the inevitable “Spanish Lady” at her ripest.
And, of course, there was DiDonato’s signature Rossini: the “Willow Song” from Otello achingly poignant with limpid groupetti and, as an encore, a storming account of Elena’s final aria from La donna del lago as fresh as if the evening had just begun.
EDWARD SECKERSON
FRIDAY 22ND JANUARY 2010 SIMON KEENLYSIDE/MALCOLM MARTINEAU *****
Wigmore Hall
It was during the Hugo Wolf setting of Mörike’s “An eine Äolsharfe” (“To an Aeolian Harp”) in this marvellous Simon Keenlyside/ Malcolm Martineau recital that it became clear that the ever-delicate art of lieder singing had hit some kind of high, not just for this evening but for the craft in general. It really doesn’t get a whole lot better. As Martineau’s seraphic strumming established the mystery and fragrance of that song and Keenlyside slipped effortlessly from one ravishing head-voice ascent to the next, a sound so honeyed and so enticing that whilst listening to it you can’t imagine that there is a lovelier lyric baritone on the planet, we edged as close to perfection as is reasonable to expect. The last three notes of Martineau’s postlude were as exquisitely placed as they were expectant. The atmosphere in the hall was transfixing.
And that was just one song. This is a partnership which one feels has aged and marinated to the point where it is now fully ready to savour. In the opening group of Schubert songs the intimacy of the playing and singing was a constant source of pleasure, Martineau’s deft touch seamlessly connected to the elegance of Keenlyside’s articulation in those characteristically graceful Schubertian turns. The very last line of “An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht” – “I will no longer be remembered on this fair earth” – found consonance on a cadence that seemed to be the invention of Keenlyside himself, so naturally and unassumingly did he arrive there.
This is a voice of many colours but more importantly a voice where the lyric and dramatic elements are held in such perfect balance. I’ve described the sweetness, the sheer beauty of his elegant mezza voce, but there is a darker trenchancy, too, and that chimed well with vivid imagery of Wolf’s bracing, wind-swept, word setting and the lustfulness of a song like “Der Jäger” (“The Huntsman”).
It was fascinating to hear in such close proximity the Wolf and Brahms settings of “To an Aeolian Harp” – the former rejoicing in rapt vocal effects, the latter achieving its rapture through aspirational melody and harmony. Brahms’ grateful vocal lines rolled out, so free and refulgent, while Martineau’s weighting and placing of chords brought many tiny revelations. Is there a stranger or more haunting lullaby than “Nachtwandler” (“Sleepwalker”)? Or a more startling premonition of Mahler than “Von ewiger Liebe” (“Eternal Love”)? Just two of the questions this terrific recital asked and answered.
EDWARD SECKERSON
MONDAY 18TH JANUARY 2010 DMITRI HVOROSTOVSKY & ANNA NETREBKO ***
Royal Festival Hall
They made for an interesting couple: he, svelte and knowing, his black velvet tails and shock of silver hair suggesting he might briefly have taken leave from Twilight or some other nocturnal vampire tale; she, girlishly innocent and ripe for his attentions. He had maturity on his side, she a completely fabulous instrument and the joy of just simply singing. But not even Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Anna Netrebko could turn an operatic pick-and-mix evening into more than the sum of its parts. From Russia with love, certainly, but how seduced were we by the gift-wrapping?
They both opted for difficult openers. Hvorostovsky chose Wolfram’s “Abendstern” (“O Star of Eve”) from Wagner’s Tannhauser and not even his famed technique could disguise the fact that this difficult legato sits on the fault-line of the voice between chest and head. And why was he smiling, no beaming, so benignly? That’s the problem with removing operatic arias from their dramatic context: suddenly it’s all about putting your best face and voice forward and making an impression for that moment only – a snap-shot, nothing more.
Netrebko arrived with Strauss’ ecstatic wedding gift to his wife Pauline – the love song “Cäcilie” – delivered in gorgeous tone and terrible German. Again the words seemed secondary to a more generalised preoccupation with making a truly grateful sound – and that she did. The evenness and creaminess of that sound throughout the vocal compass is not given to many. But then again the “cover” of the sound can and did dull the sparkle of Marguerite’s “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s Faust. Trills and roulades were somewhat occluded where they need to twinkle knowingly and I’m not sure Netrebko really understood the irony implicit in the number any more than she understood the effect of the ache in the phrasing of “Song to the Moon” from Dvorak’s Rusalka. But she sure knew that the money note was the high B natural at the close.
Hvorostovsky had his “Faust” moment, too, and if you are going to “sell” Valentin’s “Avant de quitter ces lieux” (an eleven o’clock number if ever there was one) then this is the way to do it – with burnished legato and heart-swelling climaxes. His other big party piece (and this really does sit well on its own) was Yeletsky’s Aria from Tchaikovsky’s La Pique Dame – and the long-breathed way it slipped off the vocal chords (his breath control really is second to none) was as good a reason as any for being there.
Actually, the duets were, too. Two extended scenes from Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin gave the chemistry between them a chance. Nedda and Sylvio’s close encounter was shrouded in uncertainty, the inevitable kiss furtively illicit, while the scorching final encounter between Tatyana and Onegin was full of the passion that comes too late, its still centre of regret touchingly caught by both artists.
It’s easy to overlook the orchestra and conductor on these starry showcase occasions – but Lawrence Foster and the Philharmonia Orchestra did a good job with the orchestral “grouting”, Foster bolstering up his stars and even playing hard to get when Netrebko began her now signature flirtations with Lehar’s “Meine lippen sie kussen so heiss”. Hvorostovsky’s answer was to smoulder provocatively with “Moscow Nights”. And I was thinking Twilight again.
EDWARD SECKERSON
FRIDAY 15TH JANUARY 2010 STRAUSS “ELEKTRA”
London Symphony Orchestra/ Gergiev
Barbican Hall
Watching and hearing Valery Gergiev conduct Strauss’ Elektra was truly an unholy collusion of neurotic natures. The overwhelming exposure of the London Symphony Orchestra across the length and breadth of the Barbican platform already ensured an optimal decibel count but from the very first bar as Gergiev flung down the “Agamemnon” motif leaving hollow clarinets like an open wound it was clear just how starkly the festering innards of this amazing score would be thrown into relief. The worming bass woodwinds, the rhythmic twitching of frayed nerve-endings, the things that go bump in the palace of Mycenae as Queen Clytemnestra hovers “between sleeping and waking”, a living corpse awaiting the maggots and moths – these were the horrors Gergiev brought us with an immediacy that is rarely if ever achieved in the opera house. The LSO, scarily impressive, could sense the abattoir.
Of course, the greatness of Strauss’ score is exemplified by the way it clings like rotting flesh to the carcass of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s wonderfully gothic libretto. The words have their own ugly percussiveness and seemed to wrack the bony face and body of Jeanne-Michele Charbonnet’s Elektra as she began her long day’s journey into hellish night. This was very much an actor’s performance, brave and tormented and only a syllable or two away from the madhouse. The concentration of it was extraordinary and quite disturbing from close quarters – but rather more disturbing in the end was the fact that Charbonnet really has only a fraction of the voice required for the role. The words deploy every register to grotesque effect and she shirked nothing but pushed everything and without the girth and resonance of a true dramatic soprano it sounded a little like a new age pop singer in a parody of opera.
One missed particularly the bloom and beauty that must surface in the recognition scene with Orestes. Not only was the infusion of warmth not there in the two-fold utterance of his name but Charbonnet came in early both times. Matthias Goerne meanwhile was apt to sound as if he’d strayed in from Wigmore Hall though his archness was suitably surreal as if he really had returned from the dead.
The sensational Felicity Palmer evoked just that and then some as Clytemnestra, her sepulchral rasps turning the line “my nights are bad” into the understatement of the century. As her other daughter, Chrysothemis, Angela Denoke presented a pale skinned beauty worlds away from the ravaged Elektra, but she was seriously over-parted vocally and patently without the required reach at the top.
But the drama prevailed with a vengeance and the words “there will be blood” were left etched on our eardrums.
EDWARD SECKERSON
SATURDAY 9TH JANUARY 2010 BORODIN QUARTET ****
Wigmore Hall
The Borodin Quartet brings a lot of history to the table – 60 years, to be precise. Personnel may come and go, the balance of personalities may shift, but the identity remains resolutely intact. Perceptions have changed immeasurably since the unforgettable candelight vigil of the last Shostakovich quartet in their legendary London cycle of the 1980s – none of those players are still with us – but this composer is still their collective signature and they play him with a very particular authority, as if the hotline to his every thought it still very much open.
It was shrewd to couple the First and Eighth Quartets, the former’s outward consonance putting a good face on things but fooling no one. Carefree airs, troubled subtext. The Borodins themselves don’t give much away, only the cellist Vladimir Balshin displaying the physicality of rapture and high anxiety. Watching them in this quartet was a little like scrutinising Shostakovich’s own face for tell-tale signs of disquiet. Remember that he came to the string quartet quite late; like Beethoven, they were to be his most intimate confessional.
The great Eighth Quartet of 1960 is easier to read. It’s a declaration of independence pure and simple, stamped from the outset with the composer’s own musical monogram (DSCH in German notation) and a succession of telling quotations from his symphonic oeuvre. Many colours were deployed here in traversing the wastelands of his soul but none more telling than the soft, still voice of consolation heard high in the cello in the approach to the glowing postlude. Why high in the cello and not the violin? Because the intensity of a voice at the extreme of its range better expresses just how much is at stake. The final sunset that the Borodins conjoured here was possessed of an almost supernatural radiance.
Then it was through a glass darkly to Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge Op.133 by way of the vortex that is Schnittke’s String Quartet No.3. Shostakovich is recalled here – the ubiquitous monogram again – along with shards of other musics spanning several centuries, including the key to Beethoven’s fugue. But not even Schnittke’s other worldly machinations – with sul ponticello effects suggesting a rapidly disintegrating radio signal – could begin to prepare us for that.
There is madness in the method of this extraordinary work which cannot and will not decide if it’s a set of variations or a fugue. Only heroic quartets come through it still sounding like they are vaguely in control. And even the Borodins broke a sweat.
EDWARD SECKERSON