John Amis online

PORGY AND DULWICH

2011-12-16T04:59:00.000-08:00

200 Alleynians lustily singing the Gershwin indestructible tunes of Porgy and Bess was thrilling, heart-warming and mind-blowing. No doubt that Gershwin is up there with the great composers. It is a miracle how a Jewish New York boy could conjure up the spirit of the negro world; and make something universal with his music.

We must be grateful to Ed Lojeski for his arrangement even if the opening and the bits between the six numbers are crumbly. The deployment of the voices on the platform and the multitudes in the galleries worked extremely well. Dr. Carnelly stirred the mixture most effectively.

I generally find that adolescents cope better with romantic and twentieth century scores than those of the eighteenth century because Mozart and Haydn need style which grown-ups handle better – adolescents take to Mahler and Shostakovich more easily… or Gershwin. But I found I was wrong because Lesley Larkum got the boys to play idiomatically correctly in the performance of the Mozart Divertimento (there were even some pianissimi in K.138) and the first movement of the Piano Concerto in A, K. 414, which was most elegantly played by Lewis Lloyd. He made beautiful sounds and music… and later proved his versatility by joining the bassoons in the second half. He's a cool and talented Head Boy is Lewis.

Richard Mayo launched the evening with Elgar's once popular, now rarely played, Imperial March, a piece that shows some familiar composing footprints even if Elgar had not quite got into his stride by 1897. Michael Deniran produced good tone in Beethoven's Romance even if his intonation was somewhat shaky – nerves, I would guess.

So, we have to say goodbye to Barbara Lake which is sad, but she marked her departure in fine style. The Wind Band responded enthusiastically in two New York numbers: Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (which is evergreen) and Nigel Hess's Brit view of the American capital, the playing was suitably tangy and a bit brash. Sebastian Chong took a little time to warm up at the piano, the opening lacked continuity (not helped by some rough riffs from the clarinet) but thereafter he gave full measure to Gershwin's masterpieces of an evocation of the twenties. Wonderful tunes even though, as usual in his symphonic works, he found difficulty in wrapping up his sublime melodies and inventive passage work.

Dear present-day Alleynians, I wonder if you realise how fortunate you are at Dulwich with such a lot of music going on under the supervision of Richard Mayo. I was at the college wayback, from 1935 to 1939. True, there was an orchestra of sorts and a choir but music was low in the priorities: there was only half a director of music because Mr. Gayford was also in charge of History. Whereas now you have two orchestras, choirs large and small, a jazz band, instrument facilities and really capable teachers.

Out in the wide world there is recession and financial mayhem but down in SE21 you have an enviable enclave of music making. Boys, you may not continue your musical activities later in life but the discipline of singing and playing instruments, the joy of music, will undoubtedly improve your lives and will to a greater or lesser degree, affect you when you leave Dulwich.

A FINE YOUNG PIANIST

2011-12-16T04:45:00.000-08:00

Alice Sara Ott gave a piano recital on November 22 in Queen Elizabeth Hall. There was nothing unusual about the programme: Mozart late variations (Dupont, K575), an early Beethoven Sonata (opus 2/3), a handful of Chopin Waltzes and the last of the Transcendental Studies by Liszt and his Rigoletto Paraphrase. But the playing was.

Edwin Fischer once wrote that performers "made their greatest impact when they played not in accordance with an interpretation thoughtout beforehand but when they surrendered to the sway of their imagination". That was the crucial quality of Ott's performance. How did she acquire such mastery in her twenty-three years? Her technique was never in question, it was perfect, and what is more, she made beautiful sonorities. Her technique was used as a springboard towards making significant music. And in the second half of her short programme she transported us to a higher plane.

During my long life I have heard Gieseking, Cortot, Lipatti, Horowitz, Richter, Michelangeli, Schnabel, Brendel, Lupu, Perahia and many other great pianists – added to them now is Alice Sara Ott, no doubt about that.

She is German-Japanese but the programme gave no details of her training. She played the Grieg Concerto at the Proms this year and she has been recorded and contracted by Deutsche Gramofon.

Mozart and Beethoven were both great pianists and played on the same kind of instrument (Beethoven, of course, bust strings right and left; Mozart didn't write down his earliest piano works but fortunately LvB did; no less than fourteen of his first twenty opuses are for the piano. Liszt, as we know, played Chopin's music although Chopin did not return the compliment. Isn't it curious that the majority of Chopin pianists do not play the music of Liszt, and vice versa? It seems that young Alice may be an exception to the rule.

Too often we hear Chopin's Waltzes orchestrated for the ballet but their subtleties are not suited for that medium. This rubato – what Fischer was writing about – was what brought life, colour and understanding to Ott's playing of opus 34 and 64. In Liszt she performed climaxes of passion and intensity.

As well as writing about her playing I must report on the enthusiasm in the audience by this handsome, slim girl in a simple white dress. We would willingly have stayed for more than the pair of encores she gave us; LvB's Für Elise and La Campanella, the former limpid and cantabile, the latter exciting to a degree.

All together this was an exceptional experience which quite broke through any critical reserve that I usually have. Alice Sara Ott is already the mistress of her art and if she continues to play like this she will give future audiences the greatest pleasure.

CRITICAL PASTMASTERS

2011-12-16T04:32:00.000-08:00

Having been a music critic for more than sixty years perhaps it is time to spill a bean or two. My first bean is dated 1951 when I was not only London Music Critic of the Scotsman but also organiser secretary of the IMA, International Musicians , which had association premises including a restaurant, in South Audley Street. I organised a 85th birthday luncheon for Ernest Newman (S.Times, articles mostly about Wagner). Acceptances came rolling in, but many of them gave evidence of old emnities: "don't put me next to Eric Blom (Observer); don't put me next to Cardus (Guardian)." A good number turned up but not Richard Capell (Telegraph); he developed a sudden funeral on the day.

Back in the forties Frank Howes (Times) and Capell were like Canutes trying to stem the tide of modernism. Stravinsky and Bortok were anathema. But both papers occasionally accepted crits from temporary stringers, usually from events abroad. Walter Lagge wrote some pithy pieces for the Guardian, William Glock for the Telegraph including a review of the first European performance, in Berlin, of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms in 1930. Glock sent a rave notice but Canute Capell inserted negatives in front of William's words of praise. Later William was an excellent Music Critic of the Observer. That was until his editor, Ivor Brown, warned him: one more article about Britten, Tippett, Bartok and co, and I'll fire you. Next Sunday another piece about Bartok appeared and William was sacked.

Capell (1885 – 1954) had been a WWI correspondent, in 1928 wrote a classic on Schubert's Songs. At some point he had a stroke so that his face was lop-sided (we called him 'mad Caesar') His reviews confirmed that he was sick of the nightly grind, he never stayed to the end, couldn't get back to the card-table in his club soon enough.

Frank Howes had spent thirty-five years on the Times and was showing signs of weariness, his articles conscientious but predictable. Worthy books about RVW and Walton, good committee man, quasi elder statesman, wore sandals, chairman of the English Folk Dance & Song Society. After the Albert Hall UK premiere of Britten's entertaining Scottish Ballad I found myself walking across the park with Frank. He was angry. After ten minutes: "Just tell me, Amis, can this fellow Britten be serious?". Generation gap?

A couple of years after he had retired I met Frank one evening at Covent Garden: "Hello, Frank, nice to see you. We miss you, you know. "Yes, but I'll bet you don't miss my opinions." His successor on the Old Thunderer was William Mann who like many of younger generation of critics, went the other way, hooraying every novelty, regardless of quality. Bill's most quoted dictum was that the Beatles' songs were the best since Schubert.

Scott Goddard (News Chronicle) was sympathetic to the younger composers, and political events like the Aldermaston March. His paper gave him scant space so that he could only report, not comment. His copy was difficult to parse. He was not easy to befriend, not happy with his homosexuality, twitchy and, as was said of Mozart, "as touchy as gunpowder".

The American Cecil ( to be pronounced Ceecil) Smith and his successor Noël Goodwin were likewise kept short of space by the Express although that often seemed ok in Noël 's case. I remember one time during a Cheltenham Festival some of us lads went on a hike, ending up in a pub where Bill Mann sat down at an upright and quizzed us. It was embarrassing that Noël couldn't answer a single question. Enter the landlord with a tray of glasses, starting to quiz us about wine. We were all hopeless, couldn't tell claret from burgundy. All of us except Noël who guessed correctly every time, even one or two vintages. Was he in the wrong job, we wondered?

Noël was also successful with the opposite sex; married to a Bluebell dancer but at every concert or opera he had a fresh snazzy popsy in tow.

Martin Cooper (Telegraph) looked like a retired military man, moustache, bow tie, dogtooth tweed, catholic, dapper, French music a speciality, would never meet performers which I thought a mistake as he was therefore out of touch with the problems entailed in being an artist. It seemed like a divine retribution that his daughter Imogen became a professional, superb pianist, as we know.

Neville Cardus (1885 – 1975), many years on the (Manchester) Guardian, liked you to know that he was also something of an intellectual, larding his copy with quotes from Montaigne or de Quincy, sometimes poncey, one of his books begining "There was a sequestered purlieu…" when he could have just written "There was a park…" But Cardus also had great qualities. Uniquely, he gave you an impression of what it was like to be at the event he is writting about. I found his books move valuable that his reviews (of both music and cricket). My present day colleagues would do well to read in Conservations with Cardus what he says about writing criticism, that reviews should aspire to match the style and quality of the work of art under review.

Sometimes I used to sit with him at Lords in a little triangle of turf (a purlieu?) near the Tavern. While the spinners were on, we chatted. When the fast merchants were bowling we wrote. He was a better talker than listener. One time he was saying "Der Rosen…." when I managed to get a word in edgeways. When I had said my piece he continued "kavalier".

I found his views on life, music, even religion very sympathetic (which means I agreed with him). But he expressed them better than I ever could. Atheists both, we agreed that when we heard great music, we could believe in the Divine.

CHERISHABLE SINGER

2011-12-16T04:17:00.000-08:00

To Parson's Green, SW6, to talk to my favourite baritone, not only mine but everybody's who has had the luck to hear him. His is not the Hans Sachs variety of deeper baritone but the higher one, the type that sings Figaro (Rossini and Mozart), Beckmesser, Eugène Onegin, Pelléas, Papageno, Billy Budd and other roles. The wonderful thing about Sir Thomas Allen is that he made all these roles his own, for his forte is to probe deeply into the characters of these roles, he utterly convinces you that he IS Don Giovanni or whoever he has sung during his long career. His voice is still in good nick but at sixty-seven he has moved on to slightly less taxing roles, moreover he now produces as well as sings character parts (Don Pasquale soon in Chicago). He has the stagecraft and personality so that he can stand still, make no gestures and yet you cannot take your eyes off him. This was a gift he employed in that crucial but difficult role of Don Giovanni, who must be so charismatic that he has seduced hundreds of girls yet he is a murderer and a rogue. He played the role first at Glyndebourne and I was amazed to find that at later productions he did not add to his gestures and stage business but pared them down, subtracting, not adding. He is that sort of artist. He observes people wherever he goes in different countries.

Recently he played in Donizetti's Turco in Italia a character that seemed more Eyetye than any Italian you'd ever seen, follow by playing in the same composer's La Fille du régiment a Frenchman more Frog than any Gaul ever encountered. Mind you, no jambon, no prosciutto.

His voice can be noble, honeyed and everything in between, his musicianship impeccable. Tom is quite tall, imposing with the big features necessary to an actor or singer, both of which he so notably is. He did a stint in the chorus at Glyndebourne and made his debut with Welsh National as Rossini's Figaro. Soon he graduated to the Royal Opera House; at Covent Garden he has sung fifty roles in thirty-five years. He is at home there but he has made lengthy associations elsewhere, twenty-five years at the Met and likewise with Munich Opera where he was recently singing what he reckoned must be close to his 300th Don Alfonso in Cosi fan tutte.

Stagework is only the three-quarters of it; he sings concerts with orchestras and is a consummate recitalist, singing in French (a connoisseurs delight), German, Italian, Czech and Russian. He also sings ballads and the like; his CD he calls Songs my Father Taught me, with titles like Until and Because – Auch kleine dinge! Soon he will be off to Moscow to sing Oktavian's father, Faninal, in Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, a fussy little nouveau riche.

Thomas Allen was born in NE England and he has said: "the very fact that I came from Durham, the coal dust or something, is very much ingrained in me. I don't think I'll ever shake it off, nor do I want to. Its part and parcel of the way I can make my work valid." So he was vastly chuffed to be asked to be Chancellor of Durham University, an appointment he takes up (took up?) in January 2012. He is good company, friendly, no side, funny, voluble, loves boats, machinery, biographies and gardening. He has children, is happily married to beautiful South African Jeanie and they travel together most of the year to wherever Tom is singing, producing or, now, Chancelloring.

He graduated from master-classes to producing. He likes working with young people, passing on wisdom from his long experience. He doesn't like the tendency of present day producers for updates and 'concepts' where what librettists and composers have laid down is ignored.

NOT FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

2011-12-07T03:49:00.000-08:00

Onegin at the Coliseum

Eugeny/Eugene Onègin stands out amongst the operas of Tchaikovsky; none of the others have so securely captured the hearts and minds of audiences. Surely Fate drew him to Pushkin's verse-novel because of the parallel between its story and an event in the composer's own life: a letter declaring love from a young woman. In the opera the recipient rejects her; in life the composer, homosexual though he was, married her. With disastrous result in real life, and a near one in the opera.

Deborah Warner is the director of the new production of the work given for the first time by ENO in the Coliseum on November 12. Onegin is, in any ways, an intimate piece but Warner obviously likes plenty of people onstage; so there were hordes at every opportunity, sometimes to the point of distraction. Tom Pye's handsome set for scene one has in the background of the home of Madame Larins and her daughters Olga and Tatyana a barn with a vast wooden door leading to a foreground big space, not exactly a room but an area that houses farm implements – Tatyana sleeps here, apparently denied a bedroom. workers mill round ceaselessly, making it difficult to focus, for example, on Lensky's lovely song, sung eloquently by Toby Spence. There must have been close to a hundred in the two ballroom scenes, surely not necessary …and expensive.

In Castor and Pollux the previous evening in the same theatre we had three principals whose singing was exemplary: pure streams of tone, untainted by wobbles or inaccurate pitch. But the South African soprano Amanda Echalaz seemed to possess none of these should be requisites of a singer. Her Tatyana looked good and acted well, particularly in the heart-breaking final scene when she affirms that she still loves Onegin, but nevertheless, rejects him. Onegin himself was sung by the Norwegian baritone, Audun Iversen, short on stage presence, long in singing. The minor characters all performed well, suitably directed by Deborah Warner. Chorus and orchestra were tiptop under Edward Gardner so that, with impressive sets and, above all, the masterpiece that is Tchaikovsky's, a (fairly) good evening was had by all.

Tchaikovsky wrote: when I am composing an opera, it means (1) I must not see a soul during certain hours of the day and I must know that no one can see or hear me: I have a habit, when composing, of singing very loud and the thought that someone could hear me disturbs me very much. (2) A grand piano is at my disposal near me, i.e. in my bedroom – without which I cannot write, at least not easily and peacefully.

But to a lady who enquired how Tchaikovsky composed he answered: "Sitting down."

RAMEAU ON THE TROT

2011-12-07T03:45:00.000-08:00

On October 24 the English Opera Company at the Coliseum ventured for the first time into the world of French baroque opera with a run of Rameau's 'tragédie lyrique en musique' – the performance under review was on November 11.

Rameau was born in 1683 and was thus a contemporary of Bach, Handel and Scarlatti; his career was unusual in that for the first half-century of it he composed harpsichord music but was also known throughout Europe as a theorist; but then until he died in 1784 he composed operas, a couple of dozen. Castor and Pollux are brothers, the first a mortal, the other a god and this is a story of sacrifices entailing death, a visit to the underworld, two loved ones and desolation for the woman that love the brothers. At the time of the premiere in Paris in 1737 works like this included dancing; this aspect of the work is included in the music but although the chorus move around there is no actual ballet.

Vocally and musically this performance is outstanding with three magnificent singers, Castor – tenor Allan Clayton, Pollux the god, Roderick Williams, baritone, and Télaire who loves Castor but is betrothed to Pollux – the soprano Sophie Beavan. All three sing and act marvellously and their performance includes vigorous action, fighting and running round the stage, also covering themselves with earth to symbolize visiting the underworld.

The set is like a wooden box, seemingly plywood, with extra partition walls that reveal and conceal.

The music is full of boundless vitality, ingenuity, enchanting orchestration, quirky to a degree, ingenious, passionate and unpredictable; Rameau is part of the line of French eccentrics such as Berlioz, Roussel and Satie. Christopher Curmyn deserves the highest praise for his direction and command of the orchestra which copes with the elaborate decorations in the music. The band, by the way, is raised from the pit so that it is visible – and more audible than usual.

The production is by Barrie Kosky, an Australian who now lives in Berlin and is about to direct that capital's Comische Opera (co-producer of this opera). My colleague in The Spectator advised his readers to shut its eyes to this show, only listen. But I found that the drama is well projected despite all the running about and several scenes that merit an X certificate. Kosky seems to have a thing about underwear: how many pairs of panties did Télaire peel off? We wondered if the production had moved to Knickeragua, were the cast going to sing pubic airs? And did the chorus receive a bonus for revealing its all?

However, nobody seemed to object aloud and the audience seemed delighted with Rameau's endless stream of melody, expressed in marvellous vocal and orchestral sounds.

Wexford Operas

2011-12-07T02:03:00.000-08:00

TWO WINNERS, ONE ALSO RAN

The Wexford Opera Festival has since 1951 been famous for its championing of works rare and neglected. It was started and maintained by the anaesthetist of the local hospital, Dr. Tom Walsh, of whom it was said that he woke the town up at Hallow'een time, having put it to sleep for the rest of the year. A gift from the muses was the discovery in a side street of the city, a Georgian theatre.

At first the local population provided onstage performers and backstage helpers, shifting scenery, making costumes and props, a touch provincial in this south-east corner of the Irish Republic. Nowadays the festival is fully professional and two of the productions this sixtieth year were as fine as could be seen anywhere.

In 1952 with L'Elisir d'amore began Wexford's championship of Donizetti; this year the tally has notched up no less than fifteen operas of the Bergamo master. Gianni di Parigi, for some reason, failed when it was first produced at La Scala, Milan. There seems to be no good reason why it failed, because it is as entertaining and audience-friendly as any Donizetti comedy, no hit numbers but providing a thoroughly enjoyable experience, especially when performed so expertly and given a lively staging as here. There are six good, meaty parts for the performers.

The scene is a country inn where the Princess of Navarra is expected on her way to Paris where she is to marry the Dauphin whom she has not so far encountered. But, wouldn't you have guessed it? He is already here masquerading as Gianni, bribing his way, commandeering all the accommodation and the victuals. She arrives, they fall for each other, and they dine together. End of story line.

The best scene and music occurs in a sequence for three men: the sparky Dauphin (fluent, rather metallic-voice tenor from Uruguay, Edgardo Rocha), Pedrigo, the hotelier, bass, great performer Alessandro Spina, and the Princess' steward, baritone, Alessandro Luongo. The Princess was the delight Czech soprano, Zuzana Markova the page Olivero Lucia Cirillo, mezzo, Lorezza, innkeeper's daughter, soprano, Irish singer Fione Murphy. Good conductor, Giacomo Sagraranti (holy pants?), good, likewise chorus and orchestra.

Amroise Thomas's La cour de Célimène has not been staged, we are told, since its first run in 1855 and maybe the reason for that demise was that at the time the Opéra Comique in Paris was the place where engaged or newly marrieds went for suitable entertainment. Which La Cour was not, for JB Rosier's libretto is cynical and concerns Célimène, so attractive a widow that she has a dozen suitors who have enchanting music to sing, plus two principal suitors, a young besotted Chevalier (tenor Luigi Boccia) and an older Commander who is wooing for gain, Irish baritone John Molloy. Célimène was also Irish, Claudia Boyle, brilliantly full of flounces, mischief, vocal curlicues and colorature; her sister, the Baroness, soprano, American Nathale Paulin, is also mischievous. The Spanish conductor, Carlos Izcaray, certainly knew his onions so that a good time was had by all with this frothy farce which is as French as camembert, Gauloises or Chanel. The set by Paul Edwards was superb, evergreen arches which sprouted mirror doors in the second act. The production was deft, witty and apt – by the Stephen Barlow who has no time to be the conductor of the same name.

But the third opera was a flop. Maria by a little known Polish composer, Roman Skatkowski (1855 – 1925). It proved to be a cardboard turkey, a few good moments but badly constructed and cliché-ridden: loud minor chords, rushing strings à la Tchaikovsky. After this second opera in the 1906 Skatkowski wisely gave up composing and turned to administration.

The plot concerns a Count Palatine who disapproves of his son's choice of wife and arranges for her murder. Maria does not appear until act two and is soon gone in act three, not regretted by your reviewer since Daria Masiero found it difficult to pitch notes and shrieked in an unseemly way. Her husband was an excellent, very tall tenor, Rafal Bartminski; also good were the Count (Krzysztof Szumanski) and Maria's father (Adam Kruszawski). Enthusiastic and able conducting by Tomasz Tokarczyk. Sung in Polish, not an easy opera to direct with the music's constant stop-and-go's. Alas Michale Galeta's production was also cliché-ridden. A sorry evening, especially after the two other successes.

Next year the Festival runs from 24 October to 4 November; Le roi malgré lui by Chabrier, Francesca da Rimini by Mercadante and A Village Romeo and Juliet by Delius.

MALCOLM ARNOLD AT 90

2011-11-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

Malcolm Arnold's 90th birthday was celebrated October 21 – 23 in the Royal Derngate Concert Hall in Northampton, his birthplace. This was the sixth annual festival and the programme included all nine of his symphonies, two on Friday, four on Saturday. Our stick-in-the-mud professional orchestras rarely perform these or any works by Arnold but there are no less than three cycles available on CD.

MA started his career as a golden-toned young trumpeter; was a star in the wartime London Philharmonic. Eduard van Beinum conducted the overture Beckus the Dandipratt and a composer was launched. Bingo! The composer explained that Beckus was a reckless, cheeky urchin …. perhaps without realising that the explanation held good for himself too. There was tenderness in his music but what caught the ears was its exuberance, brilliant scoring of music that buffeted the ears with its plethora of tunes and its joie de vivre. He exploited the highs and lows of sound and was economical with the middle, more congested middle range. He boasted "I have never used a cor anglais in my life".

A most welcome feature of this festival was that all but one of the orchestras were amateur: the Cambridge Symphony, the Slaithwaite Philharmonic, the University of London Symphony, and orchestras from Hull and East Riding (Youth). Never did one find any short comings; Arnold's music is difficult to play; he stretches his players but rewards them also. The names of the conductors were unknown to me but they all came up trumps.

Here are some notes on the symphonies: No.1 (1948) was clearly influenced by Shostakovich's symphonies 2,3, & 4, cocking snooks, it almost bullies its audience – note the characteristic silences and space in the score; No. 2 (1953) is a successful, integrated work, a joy to hear; 3 (1957) is, by contrast, a bit thick and convoluted, not ingratiating – during its composition MA wrote the first 25 of his 113 film score, including the first of the St.Trinians set and Bridge on the River Kwai; 55 minutes of music that took 10 days to write, 16 hours a day but Oscar winning; after completion MA would roister in gargantuan – Rabelaisian fashion with an excess of food, drink and girls, scattering £50 notes to drivers, waiters and so on No. 4 (1950) showed contempt for the Establishment and the critics by including bongos and a pop tune in the opening allegro, kitchy but entertaining; No.5 (1961) has super kitch, a love theme in the slow movement that out Mahlers Mahler and is followed by a little masterpiece of a scherzo that is the essence of Arnold; No.6 (1965) shows the composer's mind disintegrating with obsessive gestures that are alienating rather than entertaining, long notes likes fireworks that eventually explode, brutal brass forays and deafening percussive onslaughts; No. 7 (1973) is sombre and gritty but suddenly relaxes at the end into hommage to the countryside near Dublin where MA was living with his second wife, music that is bog – and jig-Irish; No. 8 (1979) seems to be keeping mental instability at bay, to behave like an agreeable symphony that everybody can enjoy.

No.9 (1986) is the saddest music I know, the creative spirit of a composer totally absent. Conductors and publishers turned it down initially and I only wish the work were forgotten. It reminds me of the final scene of Kubrick's Odyssey film with a man sitting in a chair doing nothing for an inordinate length of time. As a friend and admirer of Malcolm Arnold for half a century I can only listen to it with extreme anguish. Since I couldn't face it in Northampton I fled.

Opera Flicks

2011-11-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

Do you live near a cinema that shows the New York Metropolitan opera performances? They are £25 a go and worth your consideration. I saw Walküre last June in Aldeburgh and Don Giovanni at the Chelsea Curzon on October 29.

The films are advertised as HD but the sound reproduction in Suffolk was 'low' rather than 'hi-fi', loud and distorted; at Chelsea, much better, but still with some distortion – females rather shrill, males satisfactory but still so loud that some neighbours had their hands over their ears at times.

The main advantage is seeing the faces and expressions of the singers instead of the pinhead Lilliputian images if one sits at any distance from the stage. And in the cinema subtitles are legible whereas in the opera house they can be difficult to see.

This Don was a premiere of a production by our own Michael Grandage from the Donmar, sensible though not old fashioned, no surprises or horrors, no updates. Christopher Oram's set began with a multi-floored grid of room like spaces that often gave way to a full stage, same designer's handsome costumes.

The cast was good-looking and good-singing. Ottavio (Ramon Vargas) was less of a wimp than usual and his singing was pleasing. Majca Erdmann was a delightful Zerlina in every way. Marius was a convincing Don, a pity his Leporello was a head taller, Lep (Luca Pisaroni) a very fine likeable character and singer. Anna and Elvira were both very good (Marina Rebeka and Barbara Frittoli) in spite of the mikes not being kind to their voices. There seems to be at present a world shortage of real basses: Stefan Kocan's Commendatore needed more resonant low notes. Fabio Luisi's conducting was first-class.

In time it is likely that all cinemas will have good sound and then these cinema operas will be even more worthwhile than at present (mind you, I've only been to two so far). Here are some names and dates in case you want to venture: Götterdämerung – 11 February, Ernani – 25 February, Manon – 7 April, Traviata – 14 April.

A VIENNESE EVENING IN MELBOURNE

2011-10-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

But one that did not contain a note of any of the Strauss family and began with Johann Sebastian Bach! However, it did contain two numbers by Josef Lanner, a precursor of the waltz, a composer whose work we hear about more than whose music we actually hear: one piece called Die Werber (The Suitors) and another called Die Romantiker, charming, well-wrought numbers though without that extra spark that the Strausses have.

This was a concert given by the world-Class Australian Chamber Orchestra but without it's musical director, Richard Tognetti, who was sorting out musical affairs in Slovenia, in his place was Benjamin Schmid as director and violin soloist, a very good substitute, so that the Double Violin Concerto by the old Leipzig Protestant wrought it's usual spell with the ACO's live- in second violin, Helena Rathbone, to assist him.

After that beginning all was Viennese, starting with a religious lento for strings composed in 1947 by Korngold on his return from his Hollywood triumphs, alas, a rather charmless, stodgy number. H.K.Gruber's Violin Concerto Nebelste in (1988) was not more entertaining either. Every violin phrase seemed determinedly to contain notes on all four strings with so many pizzicatos that one remembered Mum's warning : it'll never get well, if you pick it'. Not so much Nebelstein, perhaps, as Eine kleine nicht Musik. After the interval, we were soothed by the ingratiating A major Rondo by Schubert. The evening ended with the Viennese version of 'A Knees-up: Wien bleibt Krk' (sic) attributed to the Dutch composer, Georg Breinschmid (born 1973) incorporating elements of Viennese sounds but also the sort of music that the city might have heard when the infidels were last at the gates, 7/4 rhythms and gypsy roulades.

The ACO seemed to enjoy the company, musicianship and playing of their Erstwhllelleader, Benjamin Schmid as much as the Melbourne audience in the Old Town Hall did.

Enjoy
Perhaps
Determinedly
Entertaining.

John Amis on Grainger

2011-10-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

DON PASQUALE STILL A HIT

2011-08-26T15:29:00.000-07:00

Which composer would be more insulted by the suggestion that Donizetti was the Lloyd Webber of his day? For in 1840s the Italian composer had no less than four operas running simultaneously in Paris. Berlioz was not the only French composer to complain bitterly.

In 1843 the success of the Don was the crowning success of Donizetti's career, his sixty-eighth opera. There were only two more to come, for his mental and physical health deteriorated rapidly; he died in '48 at the early age of fifty. He must have been a workaholic because for long periods he composed an average of five operas a year.

His reputation has suffered somewhat by comparison with Rossini and Verdi, some think undeservedly, for he was a master of both the comic and tragic genres; of form, dramatic pace and melody. Your Hundred Best Tunes surely contains a plethora and melody, at least a dozen, in Don Pasquale.

So it was good that Opera Holland Park opened its 2011 season with the Don, a season that will continue with chestnuts Figaro and Rigoletto but, as usual for this house, also some out of the way works: Puccini's La Rondine, Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz and, wow!, Catalani's La Wally. Enterprising indeed.

Don Pasquale was in good hands; in the pit Richard Bonynge, lively and well-paced in the pit with the City of London Sinfonia; and on the stage in the title-role Donald Maxwell, ever the consummate professional, master of comic timing, character portrayal and fine singing. This is the familiar plot of an old duffer who marries a placid young girl who turns harridan as soon as the marriage contract is signed. In this opera Norina is by no means the demure nun she seems but a schemer who wants to marry the duffer's nephew – a tenor, wouldn't you know it? That fine soprano from Cork, Majella Cullagh, showed a lovely voice, a burly chassis, a sure handling of vocal pyrotechnics and she fizzed like a dose of Eno's.

South African tenor Colin Lee, was in fine form as lover Ernesto and Richard Burkhard shone likewise as the Don's pal Dr. Malatesta, a party to the fake nun plot.

In spite of being sung in Italian, the general atmosphere of Stephen Barlow's bright production was that of an old-fashioned pantomime but a good time was had by all.

Holland Park's stage is wide but shallow and there is no pit, the band is on the flat; and there are no side walls in the auditorium so if the evening is chilly, take a rug.

BOHEME SHOREDITCH STYLE

2011-08-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

The scene is a big, high, bricked, L-shaped space. The printed programme doesn't give the venue a name it but it is in the middle of Shoreditch and it could once have been part of the Underground. Word of mouth brought a packed audience for Vignette Productions La Boheme. Each of the first three acts will take place in a different position (turn your seat around).

The garette is exceedingly scruffy: filing cabinets, naked light bulbs, a bike, a tin bath, radio sets.. a sofa, lots of wiring. The text is written on the walls and contains words like wanker that Giacosa and Illica didn't, the orchestra of just over a dozen plays Jonathan Dove's clever and adequate boiled-down version lovingly and meaningfully conducted by Stephen Moore. Rould and tumble rules, the opera comes across forcefully, directed by Andrew Staples (whose day job is as a tenor - highly praised in these columns for a recital last year in Provence and for the lead in a Barbican performance of Candide earlier this year). Acting convincing, singing, fresh, bright, clear, youthful; particularly good were the Petersburg Mimi, Ilona Domnich, and the Glasgow Rodolfo, Alastair Digges.

This was in your face opera. I sat within inches of the harp and within spitting distance of the horns; an interesting take on Puccini's harmonies and his telling use of the angelic instrument. This was Puccini almost in the raw and it got across in a fresh and vivid way. 1896 music drama, still giving pleasure and provoking, tears in a 2011 setting.

GARSINGTON MOVES HOUSE

2011-08-03T01:26:00.000-07:00

Yes, as you probably heard by now, the owners of Garsington wanted their house back, so the opera had to move and is now operating on the Getty estate near Stokenchurch at Wormsley. Anthony Whitworth-Jones and the whole shooting match are now installed in a new, comfortable opera house (like Holland Park with fresh air at the sides). But the terrain is beautiful and lush, more so than any other country opera place in the U.K. that I know. Take a rug and a scarf. The food is first-class.

And the music/opera performance was up to the best Garsington standard. The work was Rossini's Turco in Italia on June 28, the other operas this year The Magic Flute and Vivaldi's La verita in cimento which does not mean Truth in Cement but Truth put to the Test (a British first performance).

Rossini was all of twenty-two when Turco was performed at La Scala in 1814 but the Milanese down-thumbed it, causing the composer to signify the fact to his mother on a postcard on which he had drawn a fiasco. But it soon turned into a success (a magnum?)

True, Turco does not contain as many hummable tunes as the Barber but it is an opera that works well on the stage, has a good plot (thanks to Romani) and fine music. It is an ensemble piece, therefore there are not many extended solos – but those there are are very effective, especially the heroine Fiorilla's big outburst where comedy turns serious (Rossini was influenced by seeing Cosi fan tutte in Naples) But irony is the name of Rossini's game as often as not. A link with Cosi is also forged by the presence in the cast of the Poet, an Alfonso near relation, who stirs the pudding, almost pointing the way to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author a century later. Here in Turco we have a doting old husband, a flirtatious wife (Fiorilla) and a pair of exotic lovers: the eponymous Turk and the wife's youthful servant. The cast was consistently commendable, especially Fiorilla – Rebecca Nelson (UK début of a soprano from Texas) and her aged husband Geronino - the wonderful comic, supple-bodied baritone Geoffrey Dalton. The fluent production was by Martin Duncan and the witty sets were by Francis O'Connor. David Parry is a dab hand at anything he conducts. Here with the Garsington Opera Chorus and Orchestra he set the seal on an evening's entertainment that would merit a magnum any day of the week. Bravo, Garsington and congratulations on a successful move!

CENDRILLON

2011-08-03T01:24:00.000-07:00

Massenet's Fairy Story

Jules Massenet held sway in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Cendrillion, saw the light of day in Paris in 1899 (its composer had just had his 57th birthday) and before the century was out it was produced in Geneva. Massenet was a good business man and a crowd pleaser, keeping a watchful eye on the fortunes of his operas, even turning up at the Paris Opéra after performances to check the takings.

He would have been chuffed to find that the Royal Opera House was almost sold out for the second performances (July 7) there of his fairy tale opera based on the Perrault story of Cinderella, a co-production with Santa Fe, Barcelona, Brussels and Lille. Cendrillon, as she is called in France, is a four act piece and at Covent Garden the writing is on the wall, not only on the set periphery but also on various little walls trundled onto the middle of the stage. If I had brought my opera-glasses with me I might have been able to read what the texts were about.

The two principal characters are, naturallement, Cendrillon and le prince Charmant, beautifully sung by Joyce DiDonato and Alice Coote, both mezzo-sopranos capable of moving to higher regions. This was exquisite singing, no wobbles, lovely line, and two voices blending perfectly. Both good actors. There was also fine singing from the Fairy Godmother, a sort of Queen of the Night mark two in range but without malevolence, the singer rejoicing in the name of Eglise Gutierrez. Jean-Philippe Lafont made rather heavy weather of Pandolfe, Cinders' father but the mother was a super fruity contralto, Ewa Podles. Chorus good and the orchestra directed with surety and style by Bertrand de Billy, a former pianist. The sets were fussy, the costumes rather tediously ranged from scarlet to red. Production was o.k., Laurent Pelly.

The music? Well, not one of Massenet's best. Jog-trot, no particular charm or attraction. Well written, everything in its place, thoroughly professional but nothing to savour. And Massenet doesn't do humour, there were long stretches of boredom.

WHITHER ALDEBURGH

2011-08-03T01:16:00.000-07:00

The programmes at the Aldeburgh Festival this year (June 10 – 26) were noticeably better and more interesting than the previous two. However the planners do not include many of the works of Benjamin Britten. Surely Britten is the raison d'être of the festival – or should be. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, excellent pianist though he is, does not promote Britten's music as he surely should. His three years as director are up this June but t'is said that he may stay on further. Why?

True, we had The Rape of Lucretia (concert performance only) this year, the string quartets and the cello suites plus the Donne Sonnets but is that enough? Many of us think not. And what of 2013, the centenary of Britten's birth?

Aimard's chief performance this year were as pianist in three evenings of Schubert songs with Matthias Goerne at the voice: Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and the Schwanegesang topped up by the first song cycle ever, An die ferne Geliebte by Beethoven. Aimard was impeccable but Goerne was not; every forte came near to a bellow; he knows the music, can sing tenderly and quietly but stampedes into the ring too often. Pity, although it was good to hear the music.

One boon these days is that good string quartets are thicker on the ground than they used to be fifty years ago in spite of the medium being so labour intensive and its performers usually underpaid. At Aldeburgh we had three good ones: the Arcanto, Barbirolli and Elias, repertoire ranged from late Haydn to Berg's Lyric Suite and several new works, programmed in the Festival's (successful) effort to get press coverage.

Also new was a commissioned piece from the centenarian Elliott Carter: Conservations, a seven minute orchestral piece with prominent parts for piano (Aimard lui-même) and Colin Currie (rushing madly from xylophone to two marimbas). In the same programme Oliver Knussen – ever reliable and passionately comitted, directed a programme with Birmingham forces (Orchestra and Contemporary Music Group) which began, middled and ended with Stravinsky: Scherzo a la Russe, the Huxley Variations and Petrushka. The Huxley piece and Carter's new piece were, encored, by Knussen rather than the audience, and came into the category of old men's brain games. Also new were Helen Grime's Everyone Sang (brush up your Sassoon) and Charlotte Bray's Violin Concerto Caught in Treetops (brush up your D.G. Rossetti), both composed in contemporary lingua france style (i.e. more intellectual than emotionally significant).

There were interesting side-show: a feature on and in Sizewell, a Caledonia evening – all modes and minor key tunes, very entertaining –and films about or with Mahler, Rostropovich, Steinway pianos and a talk about the brain and music. And there was one superb piano recital: Elizabeth Leonskaya, Russian born, emigrated to Vienna, played the Wanderer Fantasy, two A major sonatas and an Allegretto. In the minor key by Schubert for encore she played the G flat Impromptu; Opus 90. Is there a more ravishingly beautiful piano piece in the world? No wonder Neville Cardus wanted to hear it as he lay dying.

Robert Tear and John Amis 2010

2011-07-05T01:07:00.000-07:00

The late Robert Tear, a wonderful tenor, and sad loss to the music world.

Festival 2011

2011-07-05T00:36:00.000-07:00

Before Aldeburgh a visit to neighbouring Norfolk, beyond the small town of Beccles , three miles up a dirt road into Toft Monks where is a granary with an auditorium seating 1400 and, on a platform, no less than four massive Steinways, 9 footers with pianists Piers Lane, Kathron Sturrock, Hamish Milne and Danny Driver. Items: Bach Concertos for 3 and 4 pianos, Milhaud's Paris Suite for four, two Grainger numbers ditto, an interesting duet by York Bowen, the Brahms Variations usually labelled on a theme by Haydn and ending up with a Chaminade piece for six hands at one keyboard (don't squeeze me till I 'm yours). The performances were Immaculate, obeying a golden rule: when in doubt, play softer, not louder. How did this clutch of grands happen to congregate? Through the enthusiasm and expertise of the landlord, Andrew Giller, who cares, caretakes, maintains, hires out, tunes and loves pianos.

So to my 63rd Aldeburgh Festival and the actual 64th: it began, not with a whimper but with the loudest noise imaginable: Messiaen's Et expecto resurrectionem for woodwind, brass, and percussion that consists of tom-toms of many sizes and three tam-tams of vast dimension. When the three of them crescendo stretto one really thought the end was nigh; if it had been painted it would be a mixture of John Martin and Piranesi.

A FESTIVAL CONCERT RAPE

Why on earth did Benjamin Britten choose to set Obey's The Rape of Lucretia as his first chamber opera in1947 two years after his world-wide success with Peter Grimes? Was it an attempt to be 'with it' or to prove something? And why, with his sensitivity to literature, did he put up with his friend Ronald Duncan's translation. True, it has some good lines and ideas, but it also has some horrors. "Oatmeal slippers of night" for example. And then there is that coda that rather priggishly tries to add a Christian gloss to a Roman tale. ? A rum go !This was a concert performance put together by the conductor Oliver Knussen which was more powerful than any, including the composer's, that I have heard, its impact only impeded by Knussen placing the cast behind the orchestra for the sake of stronger control; the result, as usual, was less power and fewer words audible. Except that the Male Chorus was allowed a frontal position and was wonderfully and clearly sung by Ian Bostridge. But the whole cast, like the 13 piece band, performed superbly with Angelika Kirchschlager in the title-role and Peter Coleman-Wright as the one who does the title-deed. General critical opinion that takes plot and text into account tends to down-thumb Lucretia but music lovers pure and simple can find much to enjoy: the women's trio as they fold linen, the act one finale of goodnights (how Britten loves to make music out of names ,catch phrases, times of day), Tarquinius' ride with it's ingenious representation of the different rhythms that a horse's hooves make, trotting, cantering, galloping and so on, the lulling to sleep of Lucretia with bass flute, the rape interlude with it's chorale risibly in the same metre as our national anthem and throughout the brilliantly inventive use of the 13-piece chamber orchestra. (all this mid June 2011).

Ravel in Spain and Brum

2011-06-20T03:22:00.000-07:00

Maurice Ravel was born within spitting distance of Spain in Ciboure, a seaside village. His mother was a Basque and his Muse frequently crossed the border, slipping into the rhythms of habanera, malaguena, seguidilla or what he originally called a fandango but later changed to Bolero (although it isn't really one). The second half of the concert on 7 June given in its Symphony Hall by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under its young music director, the Latvian Andris Nelsons was devoted to four orchestral numbers: Rapsodie Espagnole, Pavane, Alborada del Gracioso and the aforementioned Bolero which Ravel, its composer, undersold as his 'masterpiece, which unfortunately contains no music'.

Nelsons enjoyed himself enormously, likewise the orchestra and the audience. He really is first-class and the orchestra matches him; bassoons burbling in the Rhapsody, horns fluttering in the Alborada (not quite as good on the orchestra as on the black and white piano), the plaintive bitter-sweet Pavane (better on the orchestra than the piano?) and the Bolero which duly brought the house down.

The first half of the evening consisted of the first of Ravel's operas, L'heures Espagnole (despite its name, it lasts for three quarters of an hour). There are five characters; Concepcion hopes to receive and wind up two of her lovers while her husband, Torquemada, winds up the clocks of Toledo in an official capacity. But there is a fly in the ointment in the shape of a musclely muleteer who has brought in his watch for repair; Torquemada has told him to wait until he returns from his duties. Concepcion solves the problem by getting the muleteer to shift a grandfather clock upstairs to her bedroom. But she has another problem. The young lover is a poet and he spouts his work instead of servicing Concepcion. So up he goes inside a grandfather clock. Number two lover arrives, an old banker whose pendulum is too old to swing. So, like a Feydeau farce, the two non-functional lovers are shipped up and down in clocks until Concepcion asks the muleteer go to the bedroom once more, 'sans horloge'. Bingo!

An initial review in Paris of the 1911 premiere described the opera as 'a pornographic vaudeville.' Why did Ravel, not known ever to have had even the mildest of affaires, compose the piece? Surely because he was attracted by the opportunity to set a witty farce, with a spicy conservational text and the chance of writing a score that could encompass rich orchestral effects such as the sound of many clocks (he loved them and the work opens with the ticking of three of them set at different speeds) and, above all, an ambience of irony, cool, subtle and all pervasive – the very essence of Ravel.

Ravel's music is not difficult; in a way he is a classical composer, not anti-romantic but non-romantic, considering himself an artisan, something like a good architect or jeweller, not a purveyor of personal sentiment. His music is always straightforward, clear and durable.

RAVEL

2011-04-23T03:38:00.000-07:00

Roger Nicholls
Yale, 430 pp

Our foremost expert on French music in general and Ravel in particular, here has written a third book on the composer of Daphnis and Chloe. There was a biography way back in 1977 and a Ravel Remembered ten years later. Much new material has come to light since then. This is the volume to sit on your bookshelf, to be read with great interest and pleasure.

It is well written and tells the reader all he can want to know about Ravel (and thankfully, not more than he needs to know – the besetting sin of so many present day biographers). If it doesn't explain the peculiar charm and strength of Ravel's music, that is because that would be an impossible task. As Mendelssohn said, if you can explain it, it isn't music.

His contemporaries often called him cool but I think they were wrong. Ravel doesn't embrace youth but surely that makes him last longer. And didn't Mozart say that if a composer doesn't entertain, he doesn't get heard?

Ravel is an entertainer, in the fullest sense of the word.

He is neither ethical, not political. Is there such a creator who is both objective and yet deep down a Romantic? He was a consummate artisan capable of making intricate musical jewellery. Knowing Stravinsky's taste, it was surely a compliment that he called Ravel 'the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers'. Actually, in spite of Swiss connections Ravel was French through and through even though the mother he adored was a Basque and came from close to the border with Spain.

Virgil Thomson summed up his friend: "Maurice Ravel was in religion a skeptic, in love a bachelor, in social life a semi-recluse, a suburbanite. He was kind but not foolish, a wit, a devoted friend; his was an adult mind, tender, ironic, cultivated, sharply observant."

Leftish in politics, refusing the Légion d'honneur (although Satie said that all his music accepted (miaow), he was not respecter of persons – as witness his roundly ticking Toscanini off for galloping through Bolero (originally title Fandango, so Nicholls tells us).

Like all famous composers (except Richard Strauss) Ravel was 'vertically challenged', five foot three. And like Gabriel Fauré, he was never without a cigarette in his mouth. Those he travelled with said he was always losing things, tickets, passports, pens. He was quite a useful pianist when young but an indifferent one later on; neither was he a good conductor, strange when he wrote such good piano music, enlarging the scope of keyboard virtuosity.

When I visited his house at Montfort l'Amaury, outside Paris, where he lived latterly I kept hitting my head on the ceiling; it was like a dolls house, built years before he found it, it must have belonged to a dwarf. But it suited the children that he loved so much and was so at home with, both in the flesh and in his music.

Nicholls rehearses fully Ravel's failure, even by the time he was quite well known, to win the Prix de Rome; which was partly his own fault (wouldn't toe the necessary lines) and a national scandal; and how a rivalry was built up with Debussy. Ravel remained above it all but Debussy was sometimes bitchy.

It was a terrible fate that Ravel suffered, gradually losing his ability to compose, finally even to write his name. He was only sixty-two when he died in 1937.

Ravel's music achieved fame during his lifetime for it is the epitomy of every Frenchman's dream and every foreigner's dream of French culture, the dream of perfect unification of sentiment, restrained sensuality, intelligence and superb craftsmanship.

La Stupenda

2011-03-11T07:09:00.000-08:00

A vast crowd besieged Westminster Abbey on February 15 for a service of thanksgiving for the life of Dame Joan Sutherland, La Stupenda. Recordings of her singing Let the Bright Seraphim and Casta Diva sounded thrillingly round the Abbey. Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House were there to play us to our seats (amusingly, playing music inspired by operas about prostitutes – Massenet's Thaïs and Verdi's La traviata, the Abbey is broadminded these days). Dame Joan's conductor, mentor and husband Richard Bonynge read a lesson, so did biographer Dame Norma Major. Bonynge had chosen a Sydney soprano, Valda Wilson, as a fine representative of young Australia to provide the only live solo singing in the service. With great courage she sang Pie Jesu from the Requiem by Fauré and Mozart's Alleluia. She sang beautifully and touchingly with a pure tone, bang in tune.

Sir John Tooley, director at Covent Garden for many years where Dame Joan was a star, gave the Address. The Abbey Choir sang, the organ played and the bells pealed for the great Diva whose singing enriched the lives of all who heard her.

COLISEUM PARSIFAL

2011-03-11T07:06:00.000-08:00

TOMLINSON A GREAT GURNEMANZ

Nikolaus Lehndorff's production of Wagner's Tristan, twice at Glyndebourne, was such a highlight, winning prizes galore and showing that a 'conceptual' interpretation could work if it showed sufficient imagination plus respect for the composer and librettists. So this Parsifal, seen at the London Coliseum in 1999 and now again this February and March, comes as a sad disappointment.

Or course, Lehnsdorff does not change the text, but sort of doing that, he has made this Parsifal as unholy as he can. There is no Christian atmosphere. The first scene, in fact most scenes, are of an unremitting greyness, costumes and sets. Initially we see the back a pockmarked wall, within it a huge chunk of fibre-glass (which moves). Scene two reveals what might be a ski-run descent; for the grail there appears a twenty-foot strip of yellow which chez Klingsor becomes orange (not very imaginative).

Kundry appears first looking like a bag lady, second as a big busted would be seductress who sheds her stiff skirt to lie prone on the floor looking like a ladybird that cannot get up off her back; in act three she is clad soberly in penitent's white garb. Parsifal (Stuart Skelton) sang well enough without showing much fire or charisma. Iain Paterson (he should be the main character) he sang well enough (what a mound of self-pity he is!)

But the star of the performance was John Tomlinson. Gurnemanz can often seem like a wittering old bore; not here though. Every word was clear, every note noble and sonorous, every gesture telling, and every inflection meaningful. Sir John is well into his sixties but this was a performance to salute and cherish, one of the great ones!

The choral singing and orchestral playing was more than adequate but less than memorable – Mark Wigglesworth the conductor. But the balance did not permit the off-stage chorus, the boys, to be sufficiently heard.

But oh! what a masterly score it is! How one waits for those grinding modulations towards the end of act one, the strings so meditative and moving in the act three prelude and the Good Friday Music – more seductive than anything chez Klingsor. Incidentally, there was a positive plethora of flower maidens, flipperly dressed as for a Noël Coward 1932 musical comedy. But there was no vocal seduction, the mezzo Kundry (Jane Dutton) was inclined to shrillness and her voice showed a disfiguring beat. A curious feature of the set of act three was a strip of railway track curving off upstage. Was that to show modern thought in the medieval age, a possible reference to Auschwitz or maybe that the whole cast was taking a journey to heaven by Grailway?

Isn't it curious that so many religious masterpieces have been written by composers not especially known for their adherence to the church: Beethoven, Verdi, Janacek, Debussy, Vaughan Williams, and Britten?

Music on the mind

2011-03-11T07:03:00.000-08:00

Like most people, I suppose, I get tunes on the brain, usually for a short time. Unusually, however, I have had one tune on the brain for over a year, that beguiling little overture from Masques et Bergamesques by Gabriel Fauré, sometimes quite a bit of the opening paragraph, sometimes pared down to the two-note upbeat. This set me wondering about tunes on the brains in general and I have been reading two fascinating books by the American neurologist, Oliver Sacks, the more known being The Man who mistook his wife for a Hat, the other called Musicaphilia. He writes about all sorts of tunes on the brain, quite a few of which are about cases where the music is so loud and upfront that at first the patients try to source the sound to a radio or a band playing outside the window; before realising that the noise comes from inside their own head. One woman hears three or four Irish songs sounding continuously, songs she hasn't heard since she was an adolescent; other patients have heard music continuously sometimes, works that they have not known.

And some patient's brains have somehow turned into radio stations. In many cases the well-known drug L-dopamine can provide relief.

The only famous name – appearing in both the Sacks books mentioned is that of Dmitri Shostakovich. Sacks quotes an article that appeared in the New York Times (no date given) stating that the composer had somehow got a metal chip embedded in his head. And he is reported to have stated that he did not wish to have the chip removed as, if he inclined his head a certain way, he heard tunes that he could incorporate in his compositions.

Interesting – could it be true?

George Shearing died on February 14 at the age of ninety-one, great pianist, great musician, and great jazz man!

Lennox and Freda

2011-03-11T06:59:00.000-08:00

Tony Scotland has written a whopper of a biography of Lennox and Freda (Berkeley of that ilk). What makes it so expansive (575 pp) and expensive (£28) is because Scotland (former BBC Radio Three announcer, partner of Julian Berkeley) has not written only of the composer and his wife Freda but also, copiously, about teachers, colleagues, friends and antecedents. He writes well, sympathetically, critically and guidingly, assessing shrewdly Berkeley's plentiful output of works in many genres, also pointing the way towards good recordings of the many highlights.
A few statistics show the way the biographical wind blows, thus teacher and friend Ravel is mentioned on 30 pages, mentor and friend Nadia Boulanger 70, lover on-and-off Benjamin Britten over 200, friend (also bisexual) James Lees-Milne 30; and there are many pages devoted to Lennox's lovers before he went 'straight'.

The chapters on Freda née Bernstein are shortish until their marriage in 1951 – twenty years his junior. She was pretty, innocent, understanding, Jewish as opposed to Lennox devout (converted) Roman Catholicism – his faith inspired many of his best works. She worked at the BBC as a secretary to Lennox. The story of their gradually entwining lives reads like a cliff-hanger: will he, won't he, and more importantly finally, CAN he? At least she gets him into bed and they begot three lusty boys, Michael, composer and brilliant Private Passions broadcaster, the afore-mentioned Julian, and Nicholas.

For a long time Lennox lacked self-confidence and he was a great ditherer. Domestically he was a duffer (I once had breakfast with him, Laurens van der Post and Desmond Shawe-Taylor on a train. Lennox was utterly flummoxed when confronted with a boiled egg; Desmond had to deal with it for him). Lennox was blessed with youthful good looks, aristocratic, right up to his sixties. Indeed, but for some wrong side of the blanketry on the part of relatives, Lennox might have been a duke living comfortably in a castle, instead of being a modestly wealthy commoner living in Little Venice.

Lennox was a sweet and gentle person and, for all his vacillations, had a good career, producing a large and varied output; he was also a good teacher, adored by his many students at the Royal Academy of Music, pupils as varied as Tavener and Ferneyhough. The marriage was happy and long-lasting although his life ended with a sad loss of mind so complete that he had to be put into care. He died in 1989 at the age of eighty-six, Freda surviving him.

Was he a great composer? Perhaps not quite, but there are many fine works, like the intensely beautiful Four Poems of Tersa of Avila and the marvellous but neglected Stabat Mater. Other excellent and entertaining pieces (not for nothing was he a friend and admirer of Frances Poulenc) are the various concertos for piano(s), the Serenade, the captivating Divertimento, choral pieces and many winning numbers for guitar. The heroic was not for Lennox as he and we realised when his opera Nelson was put on. Berkeley spent a lot of time in France; indeed most of his music seemed to belong to France than England.

LUCREZIA BORGIA

2011-02-20T03:20:00.000-08:00

Pope's Daughter loves son

Difficult not to raise an eyebrow or two when the name of Lucrezia Borgia comes up, recalling naughty things: "the Borgias are having an orgy to-night", "incest – the game the whole family can play" and the father saying to the mother after the son has been diagnosed as having an Oedipus complex "what does it matter as long as he loves his mother?".

It was the first night of a new production by English National Opera of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (January 31). The programme book quotes historians who are now saying that this queen of scrapes and rapes became a loving mother in middle-age, a do-gooder who hadn't poisoned anybody for ever so long.

The plot and libretto are full of dotty antics, the composer knew he was on to a hot number, what with a Pope's daughter renowned for being a whore and a murderer. It was Gaetano's forty-sixth opera; when he composed it he was thirty-six years of age, had eleven years more to live with twenty-four more operas to come. In under forty years there were over forty productions world-wide after the successful première at La Scala, Milan.

Does the music rise above rum-ti-tum and the formulas current at that time (1833)? Yes, quite often, in particular, Lucrezia's last gasp aria and the contralto/trouser-role nobleman Orsini's second act Brindisi (one of the only operatic numbers Clara Butt sang, quite brilliantly too!), given in the Coli, well sung by the American mezzo Elizabeth deShong.

The title-role is long dramatic and brimfull of coloratura. Claire Rutter was up to snuff, carried it off superbly but with the occasional rasp. The tenor, little Oedipus-Schmedipus in the old story, sang bravely with good sound; he was also American, Michael Fabiano. With a little more personal sparkle, he could be a world beater.

Mike Figgis, noted film director, in his operatic debut, brought his projector with him, having made half-a-dozen film snippets (different cast) to add footnotes and background to the mores and deplores current in the Vatican. Often beautiful shots, a coupling and some grisly scenes were shown to 'till-readies' in the orchestral pit. Good idea, this, although some of the old operatic hands resented the celluloid intrusion.

Sets (Es Devlin) and costumes (Brigitte Reiffenetual) were lavish and a visual delight – bravo! Paul Daniel conducted a performance full of nuances and vitality. he also made the English version that was sung, o.k. except for a lot of 2011 words like 'crazy' and 'problem' that jarred a bit as Victor Hugo's original play is set in 1498. Orchestra and chorus in good fettle. A good evening, Donizetti lives.

NOT JUST ONE FINE DAY BUT TWO

2011-02-16T01:44:00.000-08:00

PIERS AND WITHOUT PEERS

Piers Lane is surely at the zenith of his career. The Australian is an artist and a virtuoso as well, provides all the Finger fertigkeit – finger-readiness – that is required but also gets to grip with the meaning of the music he plays, what 'Thomas Mann described as 'the music behind the song'. This was shown especially in his first encore, the familiar Chopin E flat Nocturne, which he delivered like a dream, a romantic poem that owed a lot to the style of the melodies of the operas that were all the rage in the ottocento, the first half of the nineteenth century, when the public swooned at dreamy melodies laced with virtuoso decorations called coloratura.

He began his Wigmore Hall recital January 25 – a packed house – with a handful of the hundreds of little dances that Schubert wrote, ländler that are gay, brisk, alternating with slow ones that catch your heart.

Then came the three Intermezzos and G minor Rhapsodie that make up the opus 119 written by Brahms in his last years when he seemed physically prematurely old. He once said that he never sent his works to the printer until they were 'unassailable'. I remember Alan Rawsthorne, teaching at Dartington, advising his students to study the work of Brahms. He didn't much care for the music but he had to admire the craftsmanship, how the wily old composer solved problems and turned awkward corners. I also recall hearing a pianist – professor of the old school – getting lost in that Rhapsody because he couldn't find the right modulation to lead back to the home key, so that the piece lasted for ten minutes instead of five or six, a feat of improvisation on his part. Piers played this as he did everything else in his recital, note and style perfect.

Opus 110, Beethoven's penultimate Sonata in A flat was played so that it dug deep but also demonstrated the composer's amazing way of intergrating (as Chopin also did) virtuosic decoration in music that is deeply serious; how did LvB manage to invest tonic and dominant progressions so that they sound like statements of spiritual faith?

The programme ended with magnificent playing of the four Ballades of Chopin. Heart, mind, soul, cannons decked with flowers, we got it all, especially in that pinnacle of Chopin's oeuvre, the final Ballade in F minor.

For his final encore, Piers Lane let his hair down and played Dudley Moore's variations on a jingle whose composer is not known: its seven notes have words; the first two are rude then "and the same to you". The late Dud's variations are a witty parody of Beethoven's early-to-middle style, aggressive, imitative, with final cadences ad nauseam. Its crude and funny and it sent us all home in a thoroughly good humour. (Two days late I realised that OF COURSE! The jingle is the first theme of Colonel Bogey.)

TAKACS SUPREME

2011-02-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

The next day in the Queen's Elizabeth Hall the Takacs, resident string quartet on the South Bank, gave one of their regular concerts in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Now unless one writes about the music played and the composers, a review of a Takacs concert these days is apt to be short and sweet. Once the words 'perfection' and 'faultless' have been set down, except, to mention the works played in the recital in question and perhaps mention the date of their next programme. it will be in the same hall on May 20 and will be an all-Schubert affair, with the big G major Quartet and the Trout quintet with double –bass and piano (ImogenCooper will do the tickling); o.k., see you there!

The Takacs now includes only two Hungarians – second fiddle and cello – but the quality remains as good as ever. It is a privelege to hear them. The items on January 25 were by Haydn, opus 71/1 in B flat, Bartok No. 3 and Smetana's E minor, From my Life.

Have you come across that story about Bartok in the twenties meeting Carl Nielsen? After playing some of his music to the Dane Bartok is said to have asked "does it sound modern enough?" but history doesn't tell us the tone of voice or the look on his face. If deadly serious it’s a rather damaging anecdote: if joking, its o.k. But would Bartok make jokes like that?

2011-01-27T08:01:00.000-08:00

AN ANCIENT MARRINER RETURNS

Forty, fifty years ago, Neville Marriner and his Academy of St. Martin's were a constant on our musical scene. Nowadays the orchestra performs more often outside than inside the UK, Sir Neville as conductor is more likely to be heard in Germany, Melbourne or Luxembourg than London. Once upon a time the Academy had more recordings in the catalogue than anybody except Karajan. Therefore their concert in the Cadogan Hall, January 18, was a rarity to be welcomed and, as it happened, cherished.

Ancient he may be – eighty-seven next April – but the calendar was the only sign of age. The music came over fully under control, dynamic, full blooded and compelling, true music making as of old. On the brisk side, bows full or at the tip. The Academy played, it seemed, within an inch of its life.

Marriner's repertoire always tended to avoid the grander designs and deeper emotions although he has had his Bach, Handel and Mozart triumphs and I can recall a powerful Eroica, a searing Metamorphosen and heartfelt Tippett. The concert under review began with a reading of Kodaly's Dances from Galanta that leapt off the page and gripped the emotions.

Next came what might be called the Jupiter of the piano concertos, the C major, K. 503, a work that combines majesty with some tunes that remind the listener that the work dates from the time of Figaro. With the ancient marriner was the youthful German Martin Helmchen who was up to the task with virtuosity at the service of the great score, sensitively nuanced and tastefully decorated.

Finally a performance of Mendelssohn's A minor Scotch Symphony as fine as any I've heard. Felix tilted at Berlioz's discords but his own music has many even if they are discords wearing kid-gloves. The passion of the Octet and that miraculous Beethovenish A minor quartet has been greatly refined. Yet there are storms whipped up and a great deal of yearning. The form of the Scotch is interesting, the tunes catchy and the entertainment factor high. This convincing performance was followed by an encore, Percy Grainger's masterly transcription for strings of The Londonderry Air, surely one of the world's most beautiful melodies, one that never fails to produce a catch at the throat.

Come back more often to our podia, Sir Neville!

ALL OR NOTHING

2010-12-31T10:42:00.000-08:00

Aimez-vous Prokofiev?

Reader, do you find nowadays that some folk like everything that the famous composers write, a blanket hurrah for every opus? This saves discriminating or making judgement but it commits the listener to applauding every contrapuntal bar of old J.S.B., every minuet, ecclesiastic cliché and chunk of dinner fodder that Mozart penned, every battle symphony and occasional cantatas of the Man from Bonn and every sixteen-verse song and tedious finale of Schubert. Fast forward a century or two to consider the vast output of Sergei Prokofiev: Masterpieces galore, lyrical treasures and electric wonders, yes, but also melody-free grim numbers like the Fiery Angel, boring operas and ballets like Semyon Kotko, The Gambler, Betrothal and the Stone Flower, symphonies 2 and 3, comissarselicking cantatas, desiccated stuff where the composer is writing as if suffering from compositional constipation or trying to please his peers who were only too willing to strangle new works at birth, labelling them undanceable, unplayable or 'formalist'.

Of course it is the masterpieces that we remember but the works in the B list get a hearing now and then. On December 17 in the Festival Hall it was the E flat minor Symphony No. 6 that was featured in a BBC concert, excellently played by its S.O. under the persuasive baton of its music director, Jiri Beholavek. This piece received praises in the Soviet until the commissars thumbed it down. Too often it sounds like a badly carved jigsaw, scraps of Romeo & Juliet, the Symphony No. 5, even a cadence from Parsifal, all beautifully and typically orchestrated with the bass entrusted to the tuba and tinkles from harp and celesta. It also has a cheeky finale tune, thumping percussion and an inconclusive ending. Were the comissars right, for once? (As maybe they were earlier when they so brutally humiliated Shostakovich – but wasn't his music getting too brittle, too outlandish in its modernistic gestures?) Brutal, yes, but subsequentently his music was better focused.

What supreme irony it was that Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin – the Master and the Monster!

Before the symphony the world premiere was given of an Oboe Concerto by the French composer Marc-André Dalbavie (b. 1961) played by a Russian virtuoso, Alaxei Ogrintchouk. The concerto – vaguely tonal – begins and proceeds oboeistically with quick runs and roulades, passages of volatility as slippery as a bucket of eels, punctuated occasionally by angular groupings of orchestral support. One waited in vain for some solid musical treatment but the eels prevailed until the end some twenty minutes later. The soloist showed great stamina, like a well-trained athlete, even though he did give mighty gasps at the end of some bouts of semi-quavers. The conductor had to work hard too, but he was up to the task. They finished together! The composer was present to acknowledge the applause and thank Ogrintchouk, for whom the work was written.

TANNHÄUSER

2010-12-31T10:22:00.000-08:00

A Tenor Chairman

Wagner tinkered with Tannhäuser after its premiere in 1845, making a new version in 1861 with subsequent emendations as late as 1875. He was 32 at the time of the Dresden first performance with The Flying Dutchman behind him. By the time of the Paris production he was older by sixteen years plus the composing of Tristan. By this time his style had changed: the overture melds into the new Venusberg music and the difference is almost as big as if a postage stamp had been stuck on top of the Mona Lisa. Its not an opera all of a piece anymore but few listeners would want to forego the wonderful Venusberg episode, a wonderful orgy of sensual music.

But what do you do on the stage? Covent Garden (15 December) plonks a forty-foot table/bed and a corps de ballet weaving and moving sensually, most effectively. Short of actual copulation this was a good solution, an atheletic free-for-all with some movements inspired perhaps by McGregor’s ballet Chroma where extensions of normal body fluctuations seem almost rubberized. With the orchestra going full tilt this was very effective.

From the very start Semyon Bychkov’s conducting was startlingly good, thrilling, thoroughly Wagnerian; he is no speedy Gonzalez; the longueurs towards the end of Act Two and the beginning of the last act still make one wish that Wagner had even more thoroughly rewritten. But the performance as a whole was deeply impressive from the musical point of view.

The production by Tim Albery left much to be desired as if Costcutters had been at work: curtains uninterruptus, no hall for the song contest, no scenery to speak of. The one exception was a duplicate (and probably vastly expensive) replica of the Garden’s proscenium and curtain appeared set some twenty feet behind the real thing. Why? Another feature was chairs. Half-a-dozen in the Venusburg scene and thereafter there were always chairs. Why? And the answer dawned on one. Johann Botha is an XL tenor and so the production was geared so that he could sit down as frequently as possible. Likewise his costume disguised his girth, a long overcoat most of the evening. His voice is rarely lovely but he does sing the notes fairly if squarely; his acting is humdrum. Venus was more than adequately sung by Michaela Schuster – last seen poisoning Adrianna Levouvreur – but here slinking gracefully in black. Elisabeth (Eva-Maria Westbrook) was note perfect but her voice was far from steady. As often happens, it was the lower male voices that provided the most satisfactory singing of the evening: Christof Fischesser as the Landgrave and Christian Gerhaer as Wolfram. Chorus lusty but not very beautiful.

But it was Bychkov’s evening – and Wagner’s.

GOLDEN OLDIE PIANIST

2010-12-31T10:19:00.000-08:00

Since Shura Cherkassky frisked about the keyboard in his eighties we are used to golden oldies and we hear that Methusaleh has booked the Wigmore early next year. Meanwhile we heard Nelly Akopian-Tamarina in the hall giving a recital of Schumann, December 9. With that ‘ian’ in her name there must be some Armenian blood. Her teacher Goldenweiser, who died in 1961, was famous for his fidelity to the text but Nelly was not. I think Schumann would have recognised the passion and imagination in her playing but he might have raised his eyebrows at the liberties she took with his text: rubatissimo scarcely describes her playing of the Arabaske. Every phrase seemed to have some elongation which made the sugar count rise alarmingly. In Kreisleriana and Davidbündlertänze she pulled the text about, leaving out notes, adding some, pausing lengthily. But as the evening went on one succumbed to the poetry she created. She did not lack virility, sometimes her fingers seemed made of steel but at other times she could play a line so quietly it seemed she could not sustain it to the end, but she always did, absolutely exquisitely.

After the David dances sank down to its close there was a ten second silence which spoke of the rapt attention her playing created. This was playing of a sort that one thought had disappeared forever. What a wealth of poetry and passion there is in the piano music of Schumann; surely it looks forward to the symphonies of Mahler with its reflections of life and its intimation of mortality; utterly different but pointing in the same direction.

THE NELSONS TOUCH

2010-12-31T10:15:00.000-08:00

A Hero’s Baton

The programme of the Philharmonia’s concert in the Festival Hall, December 9, looked as if it was put together by a committee. One member wanted Strauss’ ego-trip, Ein Heldenleben, another insisted on the Leonora 3 overture whilst a third pointed out that the great trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger was available, why not get him to play the Haydn Concerto? So .... at the end of the concert were there any complaints?

No, siree, because on the podium was Andris Nelsons, the brilliant young Latvian who is being such a success with the Birmingham Orchestra. His Heldenleban did not eclipse memories of Mengelberg’s superb 1930 recording or Beecham’s performances in London but it was nevertheless a very fine one, full-blooded, thrilling. Critics in the past have been rather snooty about the tone-poem “I say, the fellow is wallowing in self-indulgences”. Well who cares? It has a convincing shape, wonderful tunes, a marvellous musical solo violin portrait of Pauline, Mrs. Strauss as skittish, amorous, a bit perverse, the echt ewige weibliche: it has that rousing battle, followed by that gorgeous urging, surging tune, not to mention a cohort of eight horns (nine with the bumper-up) going ever upward, and then there is that heartfelt code (with a nod towards the Bruch Fiddle concerto) – yes, self-indulgent, but a feast for the ear. Nelsons had a ball, enjoying every moment, crouching, beckoning, jumping, even standing back for a moment as the strings swooped towards heaven or sank down on their G Saiten (G strings). Some think that a conductor should not be seen to emote but who in the audience wants to see the chap on the podium standing stock still while a hundred players in front of him are bowing, blowing and bashing their hearts out?

Hardenberger proved his greatness in the Haydn: liquid tone (something between George Eskale’s cornet sound and Ernest Hall or his pupil. Malcolm Arnold’s true trumpet timbre) and the utmost virtuosity. He threw in an encore: H.K. Gruber’s little concertino, a piece where the beat is continually displaced by syncopation. The composer was there to hear his piece which sounded to me like a corny Thirties Berlin jazz band.

Leonora was beautifully played, dramatic and colourful but also clear in form and exciting. If the committee can produce another programme like this with the Philharmonia on top form with a conductor to match, I’ll be there!

ENGLISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

2010-12-31T10:13:00.000-08:00

It was born the Goldsborough Orchestra in 1948 and re-christened the English Chamber Orchestra in 1960; the finest hours of its distinguished existence were the first two decades when it was practically the house orchestra of the Aldeburgh Festival, playing often with Benjamin Britten as conductor. In those early days Raymond Leppard did memorable work with the orchestra concert at on what Hardy used to call ‘the ancient stave’ but he followed his love to America, taking his fireplace and his talent with him. The good news is that he is returning to conduct the orchestra on May 15th in London’s newest and pleasant hall, the Cadogan, near Sloane Square. Later Daniel Barenboim made it his own for many concerts including the piano concertos of Mozart recorded twice, and later still the ENO played often with Murray Parahia at the piano, another set of the Mozart concertos, repeated with Mitsuko Uchida at the keyboard.

It was in the Cadogan on December 5 that the ECO played a concert in memory of Sir Charles Mackerras who had often worked with the orchestra at many fine concerts. Because of his predilection for Czech music, the first half included two Czech works and the concert was further connected with CM in that his nephew, Alexander Briger, also Australian born, was on the podium. The evening began with the Czech Suite of Dvorak, a pleasant enough piece but one without much fire in its belly nor the composer’s most lyrical song in its heart. After which we hear a flute Concerto by Josef Myslivicek (1737 – 1781) who was a friend of Mozart’s and was all the rage during his lifetime in Italy, 26 opera’s to his name and a composer much fêted and honoured. This concert was a work in D major and it was thought to be its British premiere. And maybe it’s ultimate, for, agreeable though it was, it could surely have been by anyone of a hundred eighteenth century composers, a collection of formulae of the time. (The poor chap lost his nose and died young of syphilis).

The soloist was Australian born, Argentinean Ana de la Vega and she played well, although not without some moments of peccable intonation.

After the interval the Belgian pianist, Olivier Roberti, gave a thoroughly note and style perfect performance of Mozart’s K. 467 the masterly C major Piano Certo of Mozart, a performance which belised his deadpan, professional looks. Maybe a Curzon or Haskil would have lifted the performance onto a higher plane but this was quite acceptable. So was Briger’s conducting of the final item, Mozart’s wonderful Prague Symphony, a work as perfect as the opera that he wrote for that city. Who was it said that “the best things in life are Shakespeare, the sea and Don Giovanni”?

LEON MCCAULEY

2010-12-31T10:11:00.000-08:00

A Fine Piano Recital

It is always a particular pleasure when an artist one has watched growing, achieves mastery. I knew Leon McCauley first as the promising student of Nina Milkina, herself, a great performer of Bach, Mozart and Chopin. Leon has developed into a great pianist himself as shown in his Queen Elizabeth Hall recital on December 1st.

He began with Janacek’s In the Mist, continued with the Brahms – Handel Variations and Fugue, Chopins Impromptus, the four of which make a satisfactory whole, finishing with Samuel Barber’s 1946 Piano Sonata.

The pianist played each of the works as if he was a specialist in that composer. In Janacek’s piece one can see through the mist to the woods and the open-air, also to the salon and the indoors. The Brahms is a happy and fruitful work; strange how one variation reminds the listener of Mussorgsky, another of César Franck!

Was the first Impromptu played too fast, not so much like a butterfly fluttering by more like a swarm of bees in a hurry. But the rest was great Chopin playing, poetic, with the harmonic and melodic intricacies as natural as plant and flower complexities in nature.

I heard the premiere of Berner’d Sonata in Britain when the late, much cherished Natasha Litvin (Lady Spender) played it. Then I thought, it rather turgidly American and overlong, but I was wrong. At seventeen minutes McCauley made it sound not a moment too long. It is romantic music, predominantly emotional, rather reactionary but cogent in its argument.

The Scherzo is brief and as memorial as the one in Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata. The fourth movement, the Finale, begins fugally, continues boogie-woggle and ends toccata-ly.

As an encore Leon played Schumann’s Warum, which, so Myra Hess once told me had to be rendered as Pourquoi? during World War One.

ADRIANA LECOUVREUR

2010-12-31T10:08:00.000-08:00

A Fringe Benefit Returns

Cilea’s 1904 opera Adriana Lecouvreur was seen again 22 November, forsaking her 18th century Comédie Française stage for that of Covent Garden, 100 years after the last time. The opera is quite often played in Italy but is a fringe benefit elsewhere, more likely seen in somewhere like Wexford than London. It is done proud at Covent Garden with a good a cast as you could find anywhere, with a famous conductor and in a sumptuous production.

Adriana is often written off as a potboiler but it is (a little) better than that; not dross – but not gold either, pinchback perhaps. What gets it on the stage is that it is a wonderful vehicle for a starry diva, no doubt the Royal Opera mounted the opera because Angela Gheorghiv said she would like to do it.

Truth to tell, she started off not in her best voice but by the third and fourth acts (its quite long, a three hour job) she was on top form, looking gorgeous and singing like the star she can be, liquid notes, delicious phrasing, captivating, a fair treat for ears that too often have to listen to wobblers and shriekers. Moreover there was also the delectable Jonas Kaufmann, tenor of the decade, as for her two-timing self-professed military hero, Marquis of Saxony. What a voice, what a musician! of course he never sounds Italian but who cares? He is as good a tenor as you will hear (sorry, Domingo!), the voice beautiful, so expressive, so powerful when required, wide range.

With Sir Mark Elder masterful in the pit, the opera sped like an arrow with full-blooded playing to complete a performance to cherish. The subsidiary roles were well taken, too, with Adriana’s rival – a mezzo, match! – the poisoning Princess de Bouillion (by no means a soupy villainess) played well by Micaela Schuster and Allesandro Corbelli as the staunch baritone friend (a friend part often played by Tito Gobbi).

Incidentiatally my companion at the performance was Richard Bonynge who had conducted the work for his wife, Joan Sutherland; and he confessed that he never quite understood the intricacies of the plot – it is a convuluted teaser. But of course (as my mother used to say of any drama or opera “she dies in the end, doesn’t she, dear?).

Donald McVicar’s production is straightforward and Charles Edwards’ sets are imposing, rich and seemingly solid. A few doubts about the music; a few memorable tunes and more development would have put the piece firmly in the repertory and not had us thinking how superior was the talent of Verdi and Puccini.

WEXFORD FESTIVAL - 2010

2010-11-29T01:48:00.000-08:00

Operatic Rarities

One for the head, one for the heart and one for fun seems to have been the watch word for Wexford for the last few decades; and sometimes one for the rubbish bin, as happened this year. This was The Golden Ticket, derived from Roald Dahl’s story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka and all that. It was premiered in St. Louis this summer with some success. The libretto is serviceable (Donald Sturrock) but often descends from childishness to infantilism – “bum rhymes with chewing-gum”. The composer, Peter Ash (50) is an American who lives in London. He has ideas in plenty but they rarely last for more than a few bars; they are fidgety and not ear-catching or memorable. Only at the beginning of the second, final, act is there a longer stretch, horn solo over a pedal point and a couple of choruses, no melodic phrases to catch hold of except for some dallying with “Happy Birthday to you”. Idiom nothing to frighten the horses.

The children in the packed house seemed to like it and so did the grown-ups. But there was nothing to attract the music or opera lover. The production was spot-on, as ingenious as a smart pantomime. Charlie (Michael Kepler Meo) is a clever American boy with a good clear treble. Wayne Tigges was a cane-twirling, bland Wonka without charm. There was a soprano with a fine voice and an ample girth but her name was not apparent. Quite droll were four stalwarts tip to toe in a double bed who indulge in ever so comic wind-breaking. James Robinson’s production included tv screens, balloons, mounds of shifting chocolate, never a dull moment, and a hectic moto perpetuo. The opera put me off sweets and chocolates for a whole day.

The second opera I saw (October 24) was Hubicka / The Kiss. Composers are said to incorporate their feelings and situations into their music. Poor old Smetana was broke, having career and marital problems when he was overnight stricken tone deaf. Next work a tragedy? Not a bit of it – a comedy, this Kiss. About a girl who loves her man but refuses to give him pre-nuptial lip caress. The second act has a red herring subplot about smugglers but it all works out by the end.

How does the opera compare with The Bartered Bride? Hardly. It goes through the motions but lacks the all important lyrical melodic gems of the Bride. Here there is only one gorgeous hit number, a paean to the skylark, delivered superbly by a subsidiary character, Russian Ekaterina Bakanova. The non-oscillating heroine was sung more than adequately by the South African soprano Pumeza Matshikiza, but less than audience charming. Peter Berger was her beau, Slovakian tenor with good notes but not much juice in the voice. Production, orchestra, chorus, cast, conductor (Jaroslav Kyzlink), décor, all up to scratch.

Virginia was the fifty-seventh opera of Severio Mercadante (1795 – 1870), a blood and guts affair set in mid-fifth century Rome. Act one: He, Patrician, loves Plebeian; She loves another of the plebs. Act two: complications, father involved. Act three: heavy death rate, all fall down, end of opera. Scene 1: orgy, Roman style, until two chaps appear in pin-stripes! Scene 2: kitchen sink. Has the producer had an attack of Clever-dickery? No, he is pointing up that today we have parallel problems. But the way that the opera precedes is curious: action is frozen quite unrealistically for long periods until all hell breaks loose (plays by G.B. Shaw). Mercadante started off something like Rossini but his later operas often sound like Verdi. Virginia is the work of talent, a great talent, but it lacks the spark of genius which Verdi had. Mercadante writes marvellously for the voice, there are fine concerted numbers and two fine concertatos. The idiom, the drama, rhetoric, continuity, interesting orchestration (bits for muted brass and percussion, gurgling clarinets, plaintive cor anglais, effective harp-writing – all this keeps the listener alert and responsive.

The star of the show, indeed the star of the festival, was the American soprano, Angels Meade, a dramatic soprano with a full range, only twenty-four, is halfway towards being a Montserrat Caballé, in voice, in style – and girth! Unusually in the score are two leading tenors; singers quite often in unison. Ivan Magri was a fine Appio (did he have a way?), Hugh Russell sang well as the father who stabs his daughter to prevent her getting into more trouble. Venezuelan young conductor Carlos Izcaray is one to watch, exciting and accurate.

Wexford is a seaport town in the south-east of Ireland. The festival was started by a local anaesthetist who, t’was said, put the town to sleep for eleven months but woke it up for Hallow’een. Since 1951 the town’s splendid little opera-house has resounded to the music of operas near and beyond the fringe.

TAKÁS QUARTET

2010-11-29T01:33:00.000-08:00

Bliss was it

Some like concerts by orchestra, some choral, others opera but for many of us a good concert by a string quartet is our idea of heaven. The programme played by the Takács on November 10 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall was perfection itself; it was a pleasure and a privilege to be in the audience.

Two points about the string quartet that struck me are 1) that the quartet repertory is more consistently superior – which is why players stick to quartet playing even though the rewards do not compare with those of other branches of performing, and 2) quartets rehearse far more often than, say, orchestral musicians do. The programme of the Takács was an appetising and satisfying one; Haydn in E flat, opus 77/3, Shostakovich no. 2 and Mendelssohn’s A minor, opus 13. Haydn at his most mature, this was music about music, nothing to do with his private life or emotions, just genial music by a genius.

The Shostakovich is the one where the first movement is labelled Overture; the second is recitatives and cadenza, followed by a theme and variations. There are violent changes of scenery in this work: the music jogs along and then suddenly you are in strange, positively dangerous straits, you wonder where on earth you are going, and then suddenly the sun comes out and you know why he went the way he did.

Was there ever such marvel as the teenage Mendelssohn? The Octet, the overture to Shakespeare’s Dream and the A minor Quartet, opus 13, before he was eighteen. Surely he eclipses Mozart, Britten, Shostakovich (and the infant Crotch)? Also remarkable about the Quartet is that young Felix incorporates memories and near quotes of the late Beethoven quartets, his A minor in particular. And he also puts in code messages and references to a girl that he was in love with (Betty Pistor seems to have been her name).

I came across the result of a cranium scan of Felix taken at that time. “Rather greedy, fond of young children and flirtatious, although music seems to be his chief interest in life”. Hum!

This A minor quartet is surely the work of a genius, completely perfect in shape and content with those typical qualities of Felix the Great, of an ecstatic joyous quickly moving thrust.

Photo by Ellen Appel

POOR DON GIOVANNI

2010-11-15T01:49:00.000-08:00

It is usually a sinister portent when there is stage business during the overture. So it proved on November 6, London Coliseum, for English National Opera’s new production of Don Giovanni. Rufus Norris is an award-winning director in the theatre but this was his début in an opera house. It should be asked: why must we pay his college fees?

He has yet to learn to respect the composer and not interrupt an aria with stage business. Perhaps the management should have asked him before he was engaged: 1) does he like opera and 2) does he like Don Giovanni?

The curtain was up from the start revealing a suspended contraption – something like a railway track of a circle – whose sole raison d’être was to hang some balls on it in the act one finale (by which time we knew whose balls we would like to see hanging there). Don Giovanni ambles on and promptly takes his trousers off (Oh mores, oh Robertson Hare!). Later scenery was wall-like slabs that moved around. One of them removed into a small room complete with gas or electric fire and wash basin. Why? Videos abound. The two big chords at the start of the overture were punctured by blinding flashes of light. The Commentator was no statue but pedestrian. Not long after the Don had disappeared down a the trap door, the rest of the principles popped up through it. I heard a neighbour in the stalls remark “this is f****** nonsense”.

The orchestral playing and musical director was in the safe hands of Kirill Karabits (the programme did not disclose his nationality but did tell us that the is musical director of the Bournemouth Symphony).

Good singing came from Matthew Best as the Commentators and from Andrew Sherratt, a fine Leprello. Iain Peters was a good Don but charmless – I doubt if his shag count would have exceeded a dozen. The three ladies had their moments but on the whole this was mal canto rather than bel. Do singers today never listen and learn from singers of the past? They wobble a lot and have little sense of a lyric line: Katherine Broderick (Anna). Sarah Redgwick (Elivra) and Sarah Tynan (Zerlina). Is it explained by their having to sing so loud because of the vastness of the stage? But then a pianissimo by a well produced voice can project to the back of the house.

Poor Giovanni, since he doesn’t conclude his rape of Anna, his seduction of Zerlina is interrupted and he doesn’t fancy Elvira anymore, his tally of 1003 seems unlikely to augment.

SIR CHARLES MACKERRAS

2010-11-15T01:42:00.000-08:00

A Conductor for All Seasons

Charles Mackerras was a conductor for all seasons, certainly for four centuries of music, his range was extraordinary, from Cavalli to Janacek and beyond: his Handel was alive, crackling and beguiling, his Mozart loving and spirited, his Beethoven sonorous and magisterial, his Brahms warm and grand whilst he excelled in many twentieth century composers from Elgar to Stravinsky, although perhaps his greatest achievement was to introduce Janacek, first to us in Britain and then to the world via opera houses and CDs. Almost from the start of his conducting in Sadler’s Wells he had proved himself a good conductor but as he went on, he became a great one, seemingly an expert in the works of any composer he performed.

Janet Baker spoke for us all when she eulogised Charles at his funeral: “performers develop a bond that grows out a common purpose, to serve the composer as best we can .... I have never known a musician who filled that duty more than Charles did; the burning intention that shaped and drove him had one purpose: to put his gifts at the composer’s service before anything else; he demanded the same dedication from his singers and players; he drove us very hard because he wanted us to match his vision, his search for perfection, and we responded to it.”

Mackerras had great knowledge about the composers whose works he conducted, great knowledge too about the craft of conducting, but with all that preliminary knowledge he also had the true conductor’s gift to communicate with his performers; he was able to energise them, to teach them, lead them, to get the best out of them, to inspire them. Beecham used to say that conducting was a mysterious craft: Charles was able to solve the mystery.

He reached the summit although he didn’t give the audience much to look at, he was a pale looking man, a nice toothy smile but he did not flash like Beecham, leap about like Bernstein, terrify like Koussevitsky or strike poses like Stokowsky. The sound was all, pure music-making, profound and satisfying. There was no middle man between the music and the listener.

Although Charles was born in the USA, he was Australian, reared in Sydney. He made his living first as an oboist. Overseas he made his conducting debut at the Wells conducting Die Fledermaus. Like all truly great conductors he was also a good director of light popular music. He rescued Sullivan’s Cello concerto from oblivion and arranged some of the Savoy opera music for the ballet; his Pineapple Poll was a great success. Starting with Katerina Ismailova in 1963, he often conducted at Covent Garden. He had 5 years at Hamburg Opera. A spell as guest conductor with the BBC Symphony was not a happy time but after that he guested in America and all over Europe.

He was one of the pioneers in decorating eighteenth century music, especially the use of appogiaturas (leaning notes).

He welcomed the opportunity of working annually with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. One of the band’s violinists, Catherine Mackintosh wrote: “How lucky we were to have him inspire us for so long.” It was a marvel that, though terminally ill this year, he was able to go on working. His performances in the summer at Glyndebourne continued until only a few weeks before he died – he had tremendous courage, guts and will power.

Sir Charles worked a great deal with the Philharmonia Orchestra as well as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment so it was fitting that both those ensembles organised a concert in his memory on November 4 in the Royal Festival Hall. The period orchestra began fittingly with Handel’s Fireworks Music, which grand music Charles had recorded back in 1959 (the sessions took place at night, the only time that, for example, 26 oboes could be mustered). A young Czech conductor, Tomas Notopil, conducted a passionate Dvorak Symphony No. 7, Julian Rachlin and Laurence played well in a faultily balanced performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante. The marathon concert programme ended, naturally, with Janacek: the suite from The Cunning Little Vixen that Charles had devised and the final scene from the same opera with Sir Tom Allen singing the Gamekeeper’s song about the renewal of life. This was programmed at Charles’s wish and was directed well by his nephew Alexander Briger. Here one could not help noticing that he has not the gift, like Charles and the truly great performers, of seeming to have more time than lesser artists, more time for notes, nuances and phrasing.

It was good that Judy, Lady Mackerras, was in the audience. Charles would have been the first to acknowledge that Judy, a former clarinettist, had been a wonderful support all their long married life.

KENNEDY THE GREAT

2010-11-15T01:41:00.000-08:00

Vivaldi in Bulk

Nigel Kennedy brought his Polish chamber orchestra for a short tour in November. Reports from the concert in Birmingham spoke of gross unpunctuality, faulty intonation, low jinks, the audience complaining. However the act was throughly cleaned up by the time they reached the Royal Bertie Hall on November 3. There was no reason not to confirm that our Neidge is without doubt the finest violinist playing today, virtuosity, articulation, tone, musicality – he has it all.

But was it wise to play eight concertos by Vivaldi? Surely it is only the supergreats that can survive played in bulk? True, he interposed two of Bartok’s Forty-four Duets for two violins and a sultry moody song of Duke Ellington but even so .... We also had Kennedy the entertain with us. Neidge really can communicate with his off-and-on-the cuff sagacious cracks. Not sure about the shouting, stamping and incressant kissing – can we have too much of that?

His new outfit is called The Orchestra of Life, Brits at the top and bottom, leader Lizzie Hall, double-bass Kai West, and the rest Polish, a prepondererance of gorgeous gals handpicked for beauty and talent, plus plucked continuo. And the orchestra plays, and is directed by Neidge, as if its very life depended on it; this is how music-making ought to be all the time. Two other violin soloists played superbly and deserve to be mentioned: Sonja Schebek and Alicja Smietana, golden blondes, golden tones.

But the whole thing went on too long; three hours of Vivaldi, violinist perfection, spicy interludes and Kennedy the cheeky chappy, the ragamuffin, still punching the air touching fists and behaving like some Pinocchio of the sixties. When I left Neidge and the band were still knocking out encores. I suppose we were lucky he didn’t play the other 592 Concertos of Vivaldi.

WIGMORE THRALL

2010-11-15T01:36:00.000-08:00

Where can you go in London any day of the week and be sure of good music, good music-making, comfortable amenities, couple of bars and a restaurant? The answer is the Wigmore Hall, which started life in 1901 as the Bechstein but changed its name in World War One to that of the street in which it is situated. Every night there are performances and sometimes there are programmes at other times; Sunday mornings, lunch times, maybe afternoon.

In World War Two there were two notable series: French Music, organised by the Free French, programmes chosen and sponsored by the critic Felix Aprahamian, at which one could hear the gamut of French music performed by the likes of Maggie Teyte, the Griller Quartet and, after the Liberation, Pierre Bernac with Francis Poulenc, Ginette Neveu, Yvonne Léfébure and the Parennin and Loewenguth Quartets; and the Boosey and Hawkes sessions at which recent music was heard, John Ireland’s Sarnia played by Clifford Curzon, or Britten’s new Serenade; occasionally there were concerts given by the Boyd Neel or the Jacques string orchestras; these were the plums but the majority of concerts heard were performed by débutantes where the accompanists – Gerald Moore or Harold Craxton, were so much more distinguished than the singers, Ernest Newman the critic suggested that instead of the fliers announcing ‘So-and-so soprano with so-and-so at the piano’, it should proclaim ‘Gerald Moore, piano and, at the bottom the voice: so –and-so’.

To come back to the present, during two weeks in October I heard three strings quartet recitals which gave great pleasure to full houses – the Wigmore is usually sold out.

First there was a lunchtime programme given by the Skampa Quartet (who play standing up, cellist on a platform); two girls, two men, two works: Dvorak’s elegiac A flat, opus 106, and Shostakovich’s number eleven, the latter a curious work consisting of seven short movements played continuously, interesting ideas but not developed, a bit like an hors d’oeuvre without a main dish to follow, intriguing at times, gently ambling, furiously powerful at others, containing a humoreske that cuckoos at us (do they have cuckoos in Russia – what was DSCH trying to tell us?) The girl leader of the Skampa is a splendidly full-blooded player, she really leads, the result being a distinguished group.

In fact all three quartets played in exemplary fashion, faultless. But then quartets rehearse every day as a rule so that the music is really in their blood, whereas orchestras rehearse a programme only two or three times (through of course they may have played the pieces many times). Both the Endallion and Chilingirian Quatrets have been playing together now for forty years or so (‘and it don’t seem a day too long’) but they do not show any signs of old or even middle age except perhaps in their extra maturity and virtuosic performances. The Chilis, as we call them affectionately, played a programme that some found odd: Bartok 4, Haydn in G, opus 77/1, and finishing with Beethoven’s C sharp minor, opus 131, the latter, an Everest of a Quartet, a work of the most intense, concentratrated power combined with moments of spiritual power (maybe there is a God). Isn’t it a wonder that Beethovan could survive creating such a work?

The Endellions also included a Bartok, number 5, flanked by two Beethovens; the early C minor, opus 18/4 and the first of opus 59, the F major Razoumovsky, almost as big a step forward as the Eroica Symphony.

The Wigmore Hall is famous for its perfect acoustic. Most people believe that wood is the secret of a good acoustic. But the Wigmore is mostly plaster with strong dollops of marble and wood, as I found out when making a BBC programme about the hall during which I interviewed an acoustic expert, and Mr. Lake who shifted music stands and the piano for some sixty years after joining the staff in 1902.

When I asked Mr. Lake about the past he said that one of the curoius things was that all the female performers wore hats, so large that much of the sound the singers made went into the thick material of their gear. The other astonishing fact was that accompanists were not allowed into the Green room; they were cooped up in an upper room, awaiting their turn. Even famous and knighted musicians suffered this indignity, be they Landon Ronald or Hamilton Harty.

Arthur Rubinstein once told me this story: as he was finishing the last item in a recital that had gone rather well, he was thinking about the encores he might play. He came off, took a bow, came off and decided to wait a moment or two before going back to take another bow. “Builds up the antipaiciption, you know” he said, “Then just as I was going back into the auditorium, the attendant (Mr. Lake perhaps) said ‘They’ve all gone, sir’ and by George, so they had. I was rather annoyed so when I got back to th Savoy I telephoned a friend to find out what had happened. She said: ‘Oh, it was Margot Asquith. She rose from her front-row seat and addressed the audience, saying ‘Go home, do you want to kill the poor man after playing his heart out for two hours? Go home.”

And they did.

Joan Sutherland

2010-10-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

November 1926 – October 2010

When she first had her singing equipment examined by Ivor Griffiths, famous E.N.T. specialist, he declared he had never seen such a large and perfect set of vocal cords. This gift from heaven was unfortunately complemented by sinus trouble that plagued her all her life. But that naturally beautiful voice from an early age was lucky never to have been tampered with by faulty teaching. Her other stroke of fortune was to be coached, first of all in her native Australia, later in England, by Richard Bonynge, pianist, husband and subsequently her conductor.

In her early days she worshipped the sound of Kirsten Flagstad’s voice and thought she might be a Wagnerian soprano. An obsession to sing in Covent Garden led her, after winning competitions and dates at home, to come ‘overseas’. After several auditions she was accepted by the Royal Opera and in 1952 she sang First Lady, High Priestess and Clotilde (to Callas’ Norma), soon graduating to Amelia, Helmwige, Woglinde (are you with me?), then Aida, Agatha, Lady Rich and Jenifer in The Midsummer Marriage. Many of us still remember her limpid tones in that last-named opera, whose plot she did not understand, and incomprehension that only increased when the composer Michael Tippett explained to her what it was all about.

Sutherland was fortunate in that she not only had Bonynge to coach her but that David Webster, the Intendant of the Royal Opera, believed in her. Richard Bonynge adored the music of the first half of the nineteenth century (Italians often call it the Otto Cento). Webster through she could sing Lucia (di Lammermoor) and persuaded his board to send her to Italy to study the role with Tullio Serafin, Grand Old Man of Italian Opera, who had been Callas’ mentor and conductor. Webster also had the vision to appoint Zeffirelli as director. This great producer took Joan in hand, coaching, coaxing and positively glamorising the tall, still rather gawky, big chinned lass from Sydney. He transformed her into a queen of the stage while Serafin and Bonynge saw to the musical and vocal side. The watershed premiere on 17 February 1959 made Sutherland a star, the audience cheered and cheered. She could command her future, appearing in the world’s most famous opera houses. Yet she did not become a diva in the bad sense, she was a success but she did not inhale, she was a star but with her feet on the earth.

Vienna, Paris, The Met, La Scala, Covent Garden – as someone charmingly misquoted: “the world was her lobster”. Bonynge began to try his hand with the baton. It was precarious at first as he wasn’t able to begin quietly out of town, it was the big houses where she sang. Gradually he improved; and of course it was ever so convenient. Recordings proliferated; and sold well. There was a tenor they liked to work with: name, Pavarotti. And there was a mezzo they also liked: name Marilyn Horne. Towards the end of her career in 1990 her excellent biographer, dame Norma Major, catalogued her performances. Lucia di Lammermoor she sang an amazing 221 times; other statistics:

Tales of Hoffmann – 124
Norma – 111
Violetta - 81
Elvira (Puritani) – 67
Donna Anna – 61
Anna Glavari – 57
Lucrezia Borgie - 51
Anna Bolena – 30
Leonora (Trovatore) – 31
Semiramide – 34
Gilda – 22
Desdemona – 21

And she sang at least another 36 roles.

Your scribe remembers in particular the Lucia premiere, Semirmide at la Scala (at curtain down one o’clock somebody said “if that was a semi-ramide, how long would a whole one take?), a Don Giovanni with Siepi, Lorengar, Kraus c. Böhm – Bruno Walter said he had never seen a better Donna Anna – and any number of Daughters of the Reg. – Joan could let her hair down and be funny, and one of the final Merry Widows in Sydney; she entered smiling and deprecatingly as if to say: “ok, fellers, so I’m an OAP but the music is good, lets have a ball” – and she sang like a joyful bird.

It was a husband and wife team that worked and it also solved the problem of loneliness that many solo artists complained of. Bonynge’s decorations of the text did not please conductors at first; Lorin Maazel baulked at appoggiaturas and Sir Adrian Boult was moved to make his only witticism ever: “mad scenes from the Messiah”.

Her (and mostly their) recordings sold like hot cakes: 37 complete operas, give or take the odd Woodbird and operetta, including such rarities as Massenet’s Esclarmonde.

About practically every famous musician there is gossip or some nastiness: there was nothing about Joan, she was jolly, good company, a real human being, keen on needlework and gardening, rather shy, good sense of humour, doting on her son Adam. Latterly they had lived in the French speaking part of Switzerland, clean air for her troublesome sinus, not far from a convenient airport (Geneva). Their house was right next door to their friend Noël Coward.

It was while gardening last year that she fell, breaking both legs. She was ill a long time, her crippling arthritis got worse and she made her final cadence on Sunday, 10 October, aged eighty-three, la Stupenda is no more.

WOT, NO SHOSI?

2010-10-04T07:25:00.000-07:00

If there were a prize for the most minimal set, it would undoubtedly go to the one seen in Pimlico Opera’s Madame Butterfly seen on September 19 at Grange Park. The curtain went up to reveal a low platform eight inches high that was all Pinkerton and Sharpless had to sit on as they quaffed their whiskey (no ‘milk-punch’). Behind them, one door shaped screen and a curved sheet of (?) plywood – an armchair was added in act two.

Some of the cast looked as if they had only recently donned long trousers, Sharpless/Andrew Ashwin, more like the Consulate office-boy than the boss, Gozo / Toblas Morz a gangling barrow-boy, Suzuki/Helen Sherman, just out of college. But Butterfly was a genuine oriental – Hye-Youh Lee, beautiful face and well able to sustain the very taxing but opportunity –full role that Puccini composed for her. If she could reduce the rather intrusive beat in her voice she would be ideal. That B.F. Pinkerton/Jesus Leon had a good powerful tenor voice, moderate actor; one could not help wondering how he scraped into the US forces seeing that he is, how should one say it gently, vertically challenged. The singers were all up to the mark, especially the married couple in their sumptuous duet in act one, surely the finest love duet that Puccini ever wrote. The result of that duet appeared later in person; the son of the house won all hearts.

I could have wished for more pointing of the themes in act one and a better balance for the Humming Chorus but otherwise Toby Purser directed a performance with the Neville Holt Orchestra that was satisfying reducing the audience, as it should, to tears, even your scribe, seeing probably his fiftieth or more performance of this wonderful opera.

DELECTABLE DONIZETTI

2010-10-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

In a mere quarter-of-a-century Gaetano Donizetti (1797 – 1848) managed to compose over sixty operas as well as a quantity of church music, string quartets etcetera. There were a few duds but mostly it was a success story, particularly the tragedy Lucia di Lammermoor and the comic L’Elisir d’Amore and Don Pasquale. A revival of the last-named had its first night on Sunday, September 12, part of what seems to be a Jonathan Miller residence – Cosi on the Friday and Donizetti on Sunday. In a review of the Mozart, the worthy doctor was commended for not committing the besetting sin of comedy direction: more motion than action, i.e. fidgeting. But it now appears that Jonathan was saving up his fidgets for Pasquale.

The design is credited to Isabelle Bywater but there can be little doubt that Miller inspired the theme. The audience is faced with three floors of a vast dollhouse, three rooms on each side with a central staircase. Traffic is fairly continuous (and ingenious) and the staircase is a kind of perpetuum mobile Upstairs-Downstairs. Apart from the four principals there are three old crones/servants.

Somewhere somebody has listed thirty-six plots which are the basis of most dramas and operas. Don Pasquale is apparently number twenty-eight, the one about the old buffer who weds a girl who behaves like a dove but turns into a hawk as soon as the marriage certificate is signed; she usually ends up with the buffer’s nephew. That is the plot of Pasquale with subplots consisting of a false notary (!) and the buffer’s manipulating friend, Malatesta. Norina reverts to dove status when she falls into the arms of Ernesto the nephew (a tenor, wouldn’t you know).

The music is a delight, genial, a bounty box choc-á-bloc with choice tunes, deft orchestration, great opportunities for the singers with much coloratura and patter in arias and ensembles (even a couple of fine chorus numbers) of impeccable style and shape.

Costa Rican soprano Irida Martinez has a clear voice and no little charm (but her second dress is unbecoming), Paolo Gavinelli is superb in the title-role, S. African Jacques Imbrailo is a marvellous Malatestra. American Berry Banks has been opera’s otto cento bel canto stalwart for yonks but can still get round the notes like nobody’s business even if the voice is losing its sap somewhat. He must be the smallest tenor in captivity. He sang the famous Serenade in the last act quite mellifluously.

Chorus and orchestra helped to make the evening full of pleasure directed by Evalino Pido from Turin, a performance with good tampi, style, precision accompaniment, the only let down was the brash brass playing. Maestro Pido would appear to be one of many conductors who confuses volume with intensity.

Alas, Don Pasquale, premiered in Paris in 1843, proved to be the penultimate opera by the Lion of Bergamo for shortly afterwards he became ill. Syphilis brought on insanity and he was also a prey to onanism which weakened him so much that it could be said that Donizetti died by his own hand.

MILLER MATCHES MOZART

2010-09-21T01:43:00.000-07:00

The new season at Covent Garden opened on September 10 with a revival of Jonathan Miller's modern clothes 1995 production of Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte. The worthy doctor not only directed but had a hand in the lighting and the designs. The set is spacious in off-white, even the furniture, with plenty of cushions to flop on; no daylight, no Naples. This production is worthy of Mozart. Miller never fidgets (as so many produces do in comedy); some numbers contain movement (memorably Fiordiligi's up and down aria, Come Scoglio) but others are sung belessedly fairly still. The two lovers go to war in camouflage army gear, returning kitted out as 'rollers' (or is it 'rockers').

Max Loppert has written that Cosi is the cruellest opera plot but I think audiences mostly accept it as a study in artificiality. But Mozart's score has a life of its own, setting comic words and plot with a depth of tenderness, passion and sensibility that is unique; emotions run deep. We are involved with the characters (as we never are in Rossini, masterly though the music is). This is our world as Mozart draws us into his.

Tom Allen is Don Alfonso, arch manipulator, suave, naughty but nice, Italian to the tips of his fingers (just as recently his hands seem to speak French in La Fille du Regiment). What a master is Sir Thomas, singing well too.

It took a little time to work out which was Fioridiligi, which Dorabella, so sisterly did they look and sing. Swedish Maria Bengtsson was the former, Jurgita Adamonyte from Latvia the latter, two clear-voiced miscreants with charm. Pavel Breslik (Slovak) sang a good Ferrando though his voice is not very tenorish; French baritone Stephane Degout was a melliflous Guglielmo. The whole cast excelled in their comedy so that we all had a good evening, not the least Welsh Rebecca Evans, a nimble voiced Despina.

German Thomas Hengelbrock made an auspicious conducting debut in the house.

The performance was telecast live to over 200 cinemas on the Continent so Europe was a happy place that night. I have a theory that the first Mozart opera one sees becomes one's favourite. Mine was/is Cosi, what was yours? and do you agree?

STEADY, MR BEETHOVEN THAT WAS YOUR FIFTH

2010-09-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

Headine borrowed from the writing of that wonderful humorist, the late Alan Coren. The occasion was a concert given on the last evening of August in the Cadogan Hall by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Not so chamber either, there were thirty-eight of them giving a satisfying and rousing performance of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven.

Writing a programme-note on this work would have to include some reference to 'Fate knocking at the Door', some comments on the political situation in central Europe, the military state of Austria and Germany and, Beethoven's by now whose almost complete deafness and his efforts re combat that shattering disability.

But these considerations can disappear if the performance of the symphony is good enough; and this one was. The playing was very fine led by the director of the A.C.O., Richard Tognetti; the tension never let up; the drama and logic of the work was inexorably revealed, like the flight of an arrow towards the target. From 'fate knocking at the door' to the final clinching, to the series of at least twenty repetitions of the final chord of C Major - like fate slamming the door.

The stamina of the instrumentalists (who stand throughout) was as remarkable as their playing. Moments that stand out were the cellos and basses, their solo bit in the trio of the scherzo where it seemed that the players had remembered that Sir Henry Wood at this point would exhort his men "come on cellos, like a cavalry charge"). Fine, too, was the piccolo's jubilant cry in the finale.

After this stirring, almost exhausting rendition, Tognetti and his players encored with the finale of Mozart's Jupiter symphony, adding 'Match' to 'Game, set'. I think Beethoven would have approved the choice after a concert that pleased an appreciative and distinguished audience (that included Sir Michael Parkinson, Simon Callow, Barry Humphries, Melvyn Tan, and Steven Isserlis).

However I fancy Beethoven would not have approved the Croatian pianist Dejan Lazic's handling of his Piano Concerto No. 4 . He might have said "Why does he slow down for quiet passages and speed up again for the louder ones? and the cadanzas were were horrible, not my style at all, no way, too loud and too many modulations (I bet the pianist wrote them himself).

Lazic has won many plaudits but he only gets them from me for his fluency and his way of playing scale passages in a semi-staccato way, like pearls in a necklace. Needless to say, the audience mopped it up for his is a good example of the Lang Lang school of virtuosity at all costs and in all works.

The programme began with a work for solo violin and strings almost half-an-hour long Vox Amoris which Tognetti had commissioned and played most beautifully. The Latvian composer was Peteris Vasks (b.1946) whose music has been compared to that of Part and Gorecki. The Voice of Love begins quietly, slowly working up to a full climax (via two cadenzas). The material would not frighten the horses for it is quasi melodic but only quasi, meandering in a untuneful, unmemorable way.

This Australian Chamber Orchestra is welcome any time it visits, for it is world class.

YOUTH AND OLD AGE

2010-09-14T03:31:00.000-07:00

In 1947 Ruth Railton founded the National Youth Orchestra. Many years later the Continent cottoned on to the idea. First, the European Youth Symphony Orchestra, whose first concert was conducted by Claudio Abbado. Later still Abbado founded the Mahler Jugendorchester and it was that band that played at the Prom on September 1. The European youth orchestras have advanced the age from adolescents to young players in their twenties. At the Prom there were something like 135 players, two-thirds (and nearly all the strings) were girls, bare-armed in black dresses. There were only four Brits playing, one of them the leader; there were over twenty from France, ditto Spain, the rest in single figures from just about every European country except Luxembourg.

Hearing them and seeing them was an experience to savour, cherish and marvel at. The standard of playing was phenominally high, no weakness anywhere. This of course was due to what a good trainer and conductor can do with a carefully picked and rehearsed body of instrumentalists. That conductor was the American born, Swedish, Herbert Blomstedt, known here more for his recordings than his personal appearances. He is no flailing showman but a craftsman of the old school.

The result was absolutely superb performances of Hindemith's masterpiece, the symphony culled from his opera Mathis der Maler, the opera that got the composer (and Furtwangler) into hot water with the Nazis; after Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a lovelorn Kraut was the racist translation of a neighbour in the stalls) tenderly sung by the honey-voiced baritone Christian Gerhaher, delicately played by a reduced orchestra (only four of the full pack of a dozen double-basses).

The audience in the Royal Albert Hall (where once upon a time Anton Bruckner had given an organ recital) listened in rapt silence to the Austrian composer's final, unfinished symphony. The work is a monument of nobility, strength, spirituality, originality and beauty that can also be called sublime (mind you, some call it a garrulous, start-and-stop bore). It was a privilege to experience, to hear, and see those young women string players all bowing identically 'for the greater glory of God' perhaps, and certainly for the musical satisfaction and elevation of several thousand listeners.

2010-08-26T08:44:00.000-07:00

WIERD AND WONDERFUL

News from the Var

Can you imagine anything stranger than a string quartet transcription of Mozart’s Requiem, K. 626? Perhaps even stranger was that hearing it was a pleasing and moving experience. This weird occurrence took place in a cloister of the Abbaye Royale in Celle, a village on the outskirts of Brignoles, a few miles north of Toulon. The Debussy Quartet played it with conviction differentiating in intensity and decibels between the various strands, the tender moments coming off best. Admittedly the most wonderful moment of all did not quite come off: that amazing crescendo near the beginning of the Lachrymosa where the harmonies and modulations go on and on in ecstasy until you think if it continues you might die (but Mozart did!). I think maybe that knowing the work helped but that is necessarily only a guess. It was a rum experience but more enjoyable than expected. (French Decca have recorded it but if you want the original on a CD get the one on the BBC Legend label conducted by Britten – its shatteringly wonderful).

But wonderful also was my next musical experience in Provence. Pippa Paulik runs a little festival high up in the hills, not far from Grasse, nearer to Fayence. Concerts and operas are given in a little place called Seillans, concerts are given in a small church perched on the summit of a steep hill. The one I went to August 8 was in two parts, the first contained two French chamber septets, Saint-Saëns’ entertaining neo-classical one with trumpet and Ravel’s masterly Introduction and Allegro with Tanya Houghton a virtuosic harpist. The performers are mostly British and excellent. Super excellent however was the tenor Andrew Staples in the second part when he sang half-a-dozen arias as near perfectly as I have heard, short of Tito Schipa and Heddle Nash. Staples is thirty, personable with a beautiful lyric voice supported by consummate musicianship. Please note the name: I think he is a star. He pleasured us with Dalla sua Pace from the Don, the picture aria from the Flute, a Gluck number, Lalo’s magical Aubade and ended with the Prize Song (which he will sing even better in five years time.) Suzy Ruffles supported him in a most appealing way.

Staples also directed two performances of Cosi fan tutte! A small orchestra and chorus performed Bach Brandenburgs, Fauré Requiem, Tippett Spirotuals and an evening of jazz, etcetera; step ten feet away and you can enjoy good French food and drink. Why not go next year?

A QUESTIONABLE DON GIOVANNI

2010-08-26T08:41:00.000-07:00

If Socrates had been in my seat at Glyndebourne on 18 August it is possible that he might, as was his wont, have wanted to ask a few questions about the performance, such as: Why use the Vienna version and not the usual one? Just for a change? It deprives us of Il mio tesoro, adds a lively duet for Zerlina and Leporello and shortens the coda-finale. Why design sets that are so monumental that they dwarf the singers? Mind you, they are very handsome (Paul Brown). Jonathan Kent’s production is also handsome but, as so often nowadays, it ignors the class distinctions and social mores of the times the drama is set in. For example, even supposing that she would listen to a servant’s catalogue of his master’s amorous conquests, Elvira would not forget her social station so much as to go down on her knees in a street – nor allow Leporello to goose her, now would she?

The Don’s amazing escape at the end of act one is made with the aid of flamesshooting up all over the set. But surely the place for flames is when the Don gets his come-uppance at the end and is dragged down to hell?

La ci darem. Why does Don take Zerlina’s hand before he asks the question? Mozartclearly points out the acutal moment when Zerlina gives way; why anticipate it, it spoils the seduction?

O.K. Socarates, thats enough questions. So lets look at the performaers. Glyndebourne’s musical director, Vladimir Jurowski, handed over the nine August performances to Jakub Hrusa, associate conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, who is going to direct the Glyndebourne Touring Opera this autumn; he conducted a stylish, taut performance of the Don, beginning with an Overture whose allegro showed him to be more of a hare than a tortoise, more of an Arturo T. Than an Otto K. Or a Reggie G..The star of this performance came from below the salt; Luca Pisaroni was a brilliant Leporello, so good that he put Gerald Finley’s well sung Don in the shade, rather low voltage, one couldn’t image this Don chalking up 1003 sedutions, seareely 501 ½. Kate Royal’s Elvira had some very luke-warm reviews but she was in good voice on August 18 although I think she was miscast. The Russian Donna Anna, Anna Samuil, warmed up for second act after a dsappointing opening Zerlina, Anna Virovlansky, also Russian, was excellent, it would be a pleasure to darem her mano any day of the week.

So after the questions, the answer is that this was an enjoyable Don, if not a great one. It was certainly an improvement on the last Sussex Don – remember that dreadful dead horse and its all too visible gizzards?

CORAL BROWN(E)

2010-08-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

Born Melbourne 1913, Australian, but not always proud of it. Latterly added an e to her name( it helped her career somewhat). Brown was a frumpy Oz: Browne became an elegant, sophisticated lady. No Ozzie accent except when joking or swearing.

The word originally intended to describe copulating was never far from her lips. She was witty and is remembered as much for her foul-mouthing as for her supreme talent as an ACTRESS.

Statistics
28 plays in Australia
41 in UK
7 in USA
31 films
15 TV
11 radio shows
7 full pages of bibliography

As likely as not her performances in comedies were more success than the plays she acted in. But when she played classics she scooped the plaudits, in Wilde, Maugham, Marlowe, Shaw or Shakespeare. “I have seen some good Macbeths but never a Lady Macbeth as memorable or magnificent as Coral Browne.”

Why did she collect awards and prizes but was never given an Honour? Was it because her reputation led the authorities to fear that she might say to the Monarch, “Thanks for the fucking medal?”

Play after play she showed her superiority on the stage; she was always inside the characters she portrayed, her acting was sparkling and in depth. Sometimes her entrance was applauded and she acknowledged that with a twitch of her left eyebrow. She was married twice: first to Philip Pearlman. Midway in her career, Coral joined the distinguished band of actors who suffered seriously from stage fright.

Asked about her later (rather unlikely) marriage with Vincent Price, the silken-voiced master of horror movies when they were both well over sixty, she explained to a friend that their opening night - was like squeezing a marshmallow into an old leather bag! They got on well, even though when they lived in the States she was Mrs Vincent Price rather than Miss Coral Browne. He was the big celebratory known nationally for his horror, locally for his personal appearances, TV shows, lectures on wine. Coral had her face lifted to the extent that when she smiled “it was a terrible effort to get the gum back over her teeth again. And there were endless dietary attempts to keep in shape” (Diana Rigg). Indeed there was a new diet every week. But the cracks were verbal as well as facial (to a dim would-be-writer) “you couldn’t write fuck on a dusty Venetian blind.”

She starred as herself in a TV film about Guy Burgess called An Englishman Abroad. It won awards for her and the author Alan Bennett. Dream Child was another success in TV ( script: Denis Potter). At 70, Coral was enjoying an Indian Summer. She thought Dream Child one of the three best things she had done, the others being Macbeth and Waltz of the Toreadors. “She was fun to work with” (Prunella Scales).

“I’ve got a hole under my arm from the last op and now another in my leg. And that’s in addition to the holes God gave me. I feel like a fucking sieve.” She referred often to joining the feathered choir.

Faith: She became a fervent Catholic. To a young author asking her for work after a service in Brompton Oratory “get anyway can’t you see I’m in a state of fucking grace.”

She married an actor (later agent) not of the first range, then latish in life Vincent Price. She was apparently a devoted wife, but if these two were the main courses, her starters, side orders and desserts were almost legion - and starstudded; Jack Buchanan, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr., Cecil Beaton, Michael Hordern, Paul Robeson for starters.

She had a lengthy affair with the impresario Firth Shephard; Coral used to say, “Firth is my Shephard; I shall not want; he leadeth me into green pastures; he maketh me to lie down in strange places.” she was his leading lady in many lucrative runs. But she also shephered him for she read plays for him often and persuaded him, to put on several plays that he had thumb-downed. (Like The Man who came to Dinner).

Sometimes she liked to discountenance dressing-room visitors by receiving them in the nude.

She was a good, caring, generous friend but that did not stop her spearing them with her caustic wit and naughty nicknames. Ralph Richardson became Sir Turnip, Laurence Olivier Lord Puddleduck and his wife Lady Blowright.

She said about her roles in films: “either a vamp, a sex-starved wife, a murder victim or somebody’s mother.”

Someone else (in the USA) said: “a talent which combined the impact of an Ethel Merman with the intensity of a Judith Anderson.” She worked at her life, her relationships, her friendships, and her marriages were as successful as her work in the theatre. Under her wicked sense of humour there lurked a great vulnerability.

She was blessed with great good looks rather than outstanding beauty and it is to be doubted that any actress in the long history of British theatre had the art of making more of the gifts she was given by God.

When Vincent Price was asked (memorial service) what were her favourite hymns he said there were too many to mention - and quite a few hers. He did not attend that service but a letter from him was read out:

“I find I miss every hour of Coral’s life – I miss her morning cloudiness, noon mellowness, evening brightness. I miss her in every corner of our house, every crevice of my life. In missing her, I feel I’m missing muh of life itself. Over her long illness, as I held her hand or stroked her brow, or just lay still beside her, it was not the affectionate contact we’d known as we wandered down the glamourous paths we’d been privileged to share in our few years together, we were marching toward the end of our time and we both knew it. But, in our looks, our smiles, the private, few, soft-spoken words, there was hope of other places, other ways, perhaps, to meet again.”

And some lines from a poem by Barry Humphries:

A Choral for Coral
....
Her beauty and her shining wit
Sparkle beyond the grave
The girl who didn’t give a shit
Preposterously brave....
Uniquely-minded Queen of Style
No counterfeit could coin you,
Long may you make the angels smile
Till we all fuck off to join you.

Buxton Festival

2010-08-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

Richard Strauss once said that he couldn't write about Mozart; he could only worship him but in 1931 he made an edition of one of his god's forgotten operas no doubt thinking he was giving it the kiss of life. Was it the opposite? It took many years before Idomeneo began to be revived and performed (notably at Glyndebourne in 1951).

Strauss wasn't above trying to teach him a lesson or two, he added another pair of horns and substituted a concert aria with violin solo, made cuts, moved things around, composed a rather grumpy interlude, added a quote from his Egyptian Helen of Troy when she is mentioned in the third act and gave the work a new finale ensemble.
An interesting exercise, fascinating for Strauss disciples but on the whole I think most of the audience would have been glad if Strauss had not bothered.

As Idamante, Victoria Simmonds was fine but the singing in general was valiant rather than persuasive. Artistic Director Andrew Greenwood directed intelligently, local chorus good, ditto Northern Chamber Orchestra.

Buxton Festival is on a high, interesting programmes, including literary talks by Roy Hattersley, Deborah Devonshire (the Dowager Duchess) with politician David Blunkett (with black dog) and there were interesting operas (the aforementioned Idomeneo and Luisa Miller, to be mentioned later) and many interesting recitals including some of the opera singers, amungst which I caught a thrilling and satisfying piano hour of Debussy played by Pascal Rogé.

He played half a dozen of the more popular Preludes, better performances of which I don't hope to hear unless I get up-graded to the Pearly Portals, and with his wife played, the Petite Suite and shipped us into La Mer, Debussy's own arrangement. This bought tears to my eyes, it was so exciting and heart-warming – they played with zest and style.

Frank Matcham's Opera House is a little jewel, over a 100 years old , a tiny building designed by an architect who never managed to pass his exams but never the less built nearly a 100 theatres (including the London Coliseum).

Nobody seemed to enjoy Peter Cornelius 'The Barber of Baghdad’, pity because it was an interesting choice but it obviously misfired. But Luisa Miller pleased, written in 1849by Verdi, a Sturm und Drang situation with fatuous lines in the libretto that cannot be taken seriously, indeed, director Stephen Metcalf opted for an ironic tongue-in-cheek production, that is until the tragic end. Tenor and soprano are matched against two villains, one of whom is actually called Worm (Wurm). The basis of the plot is Schiller's play Kabale und Liebe which must surely be several cuts above Commerano’s slack libretto. But, in his late 30's, it suited Verdi down to the melodramatic ground, primitive emotions, no hanging about, good tunes and opportunities for singers, including the chorus, Susan Glanville relished and fitted the title role, bel canto with coloratura. John Bellemer reached effortlessly for his high notes and sang his formidable part with guts and style, Luisa's father has a good baritone part which David Kempston sang eloquently. Worm and his wicked boss, the count, added well to the villainy.

Buxton is said to be the highest town in England and it has high ideals for its Festival. It’s a gracious and elegant place.

STRAUSS’S LAST FLING - CAPRICCIO

2010-07-26T03:20:00.000-07:00

Richard Strauss’s last fling at opera was premiered in the dark time in 1942 in Munich, when Germany was in distress and was still causing distress elsewhere. It was also a time of distress for many Germans, not least Strauss, at 78 a world figure but in trouble with the Nazis.

All his life he had tried hard to avoid politics but, being so famous, politics would not avoid him. He feared for the safety of his Jewish loved ones. The Nazis used him and his name when it suited them; eventually they dismissed him and his music as altvaterisch (old fashioned); also he had collaborated with Jewish writers.

As often before, Strauss tried to brush unpleasant things aside, so his 1942 Capriccio looks back to a long gone century for a conversation piece about words and music, which comes first? The plot, if you can call it that, posits a beautiful countess who has two suitors, a poet and a composer. The cast also includes a theatre director, an actress, a dancer, two Italian singers, a prompter and some scene shifters. The idea originally came from the (Jewish) author Stefan Zweig who committed suicide the year of the opera’s premiere. The conductor Clemens Krauss wrote the text of Capriccio in conjunction with Strauss himself; Krauss conducted the first performance and was uniquely rewarded with the dedication of the work (catch Verdi or Puccini doing a similar thing!).

The opera has notable highlights: the prelude played by a string sextet (some premonition here of the masterpiece Metamorphosen), the composer’s sonnet, the Italian singers duet (harking back to Rosenkavalier), a gorgeous intermezzo with horn obbligato, before the soprano’s solo final scene composed in Strauss’s typical D flat lush style. There are also two ensembles of complication, tricky to sing and not setting the world on fire. Some critics have called Capriccio the composer’s finest opera, above the claims of Elektra and Rosenkavalier (discuss?)

This latest addition to the repertory of the Grange, rapidly becoming a rival to Glyndebourne, is more that satisfactory if less than memorable. Stephen Barlow conducts it very well and the large cast is fine with Roderick Williams excelling as the Poet, Stewart Cale as the composer and Matthew Best as the Director. Despite accurate singing, skilled Susan Gritton lacks the cream and the charisma that the part requires. She is the wife, as it happens, of the director Stephen Metcalf who does a first-class and imaginative task in a dowdy set by Francis O’Connor. In the non-singing role of the Dancer Bryony Perkins contributes an enchanting droll cameo, eccentric and zany.

Capriccio is a work for connoisseurs of Strauss and it seemed to please many connoshers in the Grange audience (July 2).

MANON? * MAIS OUI!

2010-07-26T03:00:00.000-07:00

Covent Garden is on a high forgetting the daft Aida there have been three outright winners in Turco in Italia, La Fille du Regiment and now Manon. Bravo, Pappano, bravo Padmore. Keep it up!

In his early forties Jules Massenet added to his earlier success with Manon, seventy performances in the first year, 1884, Paris. He had built his reputation on rather lachrymose religious dramas although he once said he didn’t believe in all that ‘creeping-Jesus stuff’. Funnily enough that was the public’s name for him. Apparently each night of a performance he crept round to the box-office to check the takings. The takings were good for the most part for twenty years. Until Pelléas came along and tastes changed.

Manon’s world is the second empire in this sumptuous no expense-spared production by Laurent Pelly (the cost fortunately shared with three other opera houses). The magnificent costumes and sets breathe the very atmosphere of the demi-monde, Renoir and the grandes horizontales. Manon herself is a “mixture of demureness and vivacity, of serious affection but meretricious preferment” – as Kobbé’s Opera Book succinctly puts it. She ruins the religiously – inclined Des Grieux but dies repenting in his arms.

Darling of the operatic public, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko really takes the stage in the title role, fine voice (perhaps a little too powerful sometimes), but she bulls eyes with her acting, her beauty and the way she wears Pelly’s gorgeous gowns like a denizen of the catwalk. Massenet had many good qualities as a composer, not the least his ability to characterize his heroines with a skilful mix of short notes and winsome harmonies. What easy charm!

As the not yet frocked priest Vittorio Grigolo, from Arezzo, was a worthy foil/lover for this Manon, ardent, impulsive, although he didn’t make one forget the less ardent but more elegant Heddle Nash, anymore than Netrebko made one forget the superior vocalism of Victoria de los Angeles but Grigolo gave a real performance. And so did his stage father, the excellent Christof Fischesser (German for fish eater!), as the Comte des Grieux.

The whole cast, the chorus and the orchestra were on top form under the vivid, stylish Antonio Pappano. A great evening!

John Amis

2010-07-14T03:58:00.000-07:00

New photograph of John for his 88th birthday.

PASSIONATE SHABBINESS

2010-07-06T05:01:00.000-07:00

“Shabby little shocker” was the famous put-down by an American critic, a view not shared by the thousands that enjoy Puccini’s Tosca every year, an opera perennially in the top dozen of any house in the world (except Bayreuth), enjoyed for its melodies, its compelling passionate moments and its sumptuous harmonic orchestral passages. Sardou’s story is admittedly over-melodramatic but most audiences are drawn into the predicaments of the actress Tosca and her painter lover Cavarodossi. It was Puccini’s gift in 1900 to the world and a hundred and ten years later – on 27 June – to the Grange Park Opera in Hampshire, the audience applauded vocifierously a fine performance of it.

The production by Lindsay Posner is inventive in some details but it is straightforward and non-conceptual, Peter Mackintosh’s décor likewise. Speaking personally I must have seen the opera at least ninety times but my sob-count was at least four in the first act. Gianluca Marciano abetted and carried out Puccini’s intentions with an augmented English Chamber Orchestra. Only the Te Deum that ends Act One did not have the required weight and sonority.

None of the singers looked Italian but Claire Rutter was a full-voiced and telling Florian Tosca, Peter Auty a strong, satisfying Cavaradossi. Robert Poulton’s Scarpia was a bit less than menacing and his voice lacked the thread of metal required.

With a juicy Three Oranges and a fruity Tosca, Grange Opera is having a good harvest down in the southern shires.

GRANGE ORANGES

2010-07-06T04:59:00.000-07:00

Prokofiev was thirty when his opera The Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago at the end of 1931. So it was not the youngest Prkfv (his own abbreviation) but it has youth written all over it. He intended to shock and he succeeded. The music is wild, manic, brittle, ironic, fantastic, contains a lot of stimulating, marvellous music; and quite a lot of second-rate stuff, written, as he admitted, in a hurry. It is a director’s dream, giving him room and a need for invention and an ability to make Prkfv’s extravagant demands work. At the Grange, Hampshire (June 26) it gets what is required from the director/designer David Fielding, gets it in spades (some of the cast are dressed as playing cards). A Prince is wasting away: only if he can laugh will his depression leave him. There are some who would like him to die, others wish him to live.

When one nasty, Fata Morgana, pratt falls the Prince laughs. He also sets out on a search for the trio of citrus fruit that Fata Morgana has told him about, although she warns him that the girls released from their oranges will die if they are not immediately given water. No. Three Orange is the girl that the Prince decides is the one he wants to make Princess. Alas, she turns into a rat. All comes right for the final curtain, after futher adventures with a giant cook and members of the audience who express their wishes for fun and games, not tragedy ..

Before the premiere the composer made the best numbers from the opera into an orchestral suite; this proved a popular success, particuarly the tiny, dotty march that we all know and love. The bits inbetween the suite numbers are rather dry and recitativeish, devoid of melody. The rather thin invention of much of the opera, however gave the director his chance to beguile us with every mod. con.: gimmicks, tricks, amazing lighting effects (the ubiquitous Wolfgang Goebbel, of course). There are many characters and a large chorus, all well sung and effective.

The English Chamber Orchestra (not so chamber neither) is put through its paces under Leo Hussain. There is not much real singing but honours go to the Prince (Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts), his dad the King (Clive Bayley) Truffaldino (Gozzi wrote the original story, hence Truffo, well played by Wynne Evans), the P.M. (Henry Waddington) and Fata Morgana (Rebecca Cooper).

The only under-par performance was that of the sur-titles, frequently late or non-existent.

This was a happy event for a summer’s evening.

A BUDD THAT HAS BLOOMED

2010-05-28T05:28:00.000-07:00

Engaging a director and a set designer to make their operatic débuts at Glyndebourne sounds like folly; and when that opera is as difficult an assignment as Britten’s all-male Billy Budd, folly turns to madness. However... the result is a triumph, the production the most successful to date, from the première, which I saw on December 1, 1951 onwards. Christopher Oram’s multi-decked set transports us to a ship of the line in 1797 when the British Navy was fighting not only the French but the threat of mutiny within its ranks (a member of the cast told me that the cast cheered when it saw the set at the first stage rehearsal). Herman Melville apparently based his short story on a true story of those old times when conditions were tense, discipline strict and cruel. In the first act we see the bloody result of a young novice flogged because he bumped into the Bosun, a flinchworthy sight that matches Britten’s pathetic music, a contrapuntal slow tangle that parallels some of Bach’s passion music with on the top line a poetic saxophone where the older composer used the cor anglais.

The director, Michael Grandage is well known for his work both in New York and in London where he runs the Donmar Theatre. His handling of a large chorus of the crew is as masterly as that of the principals, both the lower deck and the officers on the bridge. We see Captain Vere who fails to save the young foretopman Billy Budd from the penalty of hanging from the yard arm when, unable to overcome his stammer to answer the charge of mutiny brought by Claggart, the master of arms, he strikes his superior officer dead. Claggart is a villain of the deepest dye with a homosexual lust for the young sailor.

Nearly every opera that Britten composed had to have a big part for his tenor partner, Peter Pears. There is no parallel to this liaison which gave rise to at least six major operas. The curious thing is that Britten wrote music for Pears so bound up with the idiosyncrasies of the tenor’s voice and musical personality that one still seems to hear that unique voice again in the performance of latter-day singers. Here it is John Mark Ainsley singing very well but with the overtones of the original portrayer of the part of Vere. Jacques Imbrailo from South Africa is every inch and every sound Budd, loose-limbed, innocent, a carefree young man until he is doomed. Phillip Ens, from Canada, is an impressive Claggart, only lacking a hard edge to his voice that would make him into a kind of latter-day Iago. All the smaller roles are part of a cast that realises Britten’s intentions.

But all this excellence is matched by a mastermind directing Britten’s wonderful music (on reflection this grand opera and The Turn of the Screw, chamber opera, mark the summit of this composer’s achievement, despite the fine qualities of his first success in the medium Peter Grimes).

It seems to me that Sir Mark Elder is now at the zenith of his career. In his early sixties, every work he conducts has a feeling of rightness and he gets what he wants out of his performers. He is at home with modern music, he delights in music of the ottocento (1800 – 1850), his English music, Elgar and Delius, is first class and here he gives us a perfect performance of Benjamin Britten. The Hallé Orchestra is fortunate in having his direction and his visits to London’s concert halls and opera houses bear golden fruit and, as here, bring a Budd to glorious bloom.

AIDA

2010-05-12T03:12:00.000-07:00

Grandest of the grand

Rossini said: “Nobody is capable of writing grand opera except Verdi”: and Aida is the grandest of the lot. Intended for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 it was eventually premiered in Cairo two years later. The triumph scene is just that, a miracle of organisation and inspiration. Aida, the Ethiopian slave girl, in love with the general of the army, Radames, but has a rival in Amneris, princess of Egypt and the two fathers, Amneris’ King of Egypt, an d Aida’s father, Amonasro, King of Ethiopia.

Act two scene two is the Triumph scene, celebrating the victory by Radames over the Ethiopians. Verdi juggles with three crowds, the Egyptian public, the priests and the defeated Ethiopians – it’s a sort of Three Choirs Festival, with climax after climax. By contrast Act Three is sung only by the four chief characters, it is the heart of the opera. Aida’s success rests mainly on these two peak scenes.

Verdi goes for your heart and your jugular. Never since has opera gone so straight forwardly, almost innocently, for the listener’s heart in terms that everybody can grasp immediately.

From Don Carlos onwards part of the secret construction is that Verdi concentrates on using, in technical terms, chords of the tonic key and its dominant, not often in root positions but in first or second inversion (unlike Berlioz who mostly uses chords in their root position). If you look at a few passages in the score you may see what I mean. And, of course, as well as the harmony, his use of counterpoint has in every line something meaningful and beautiful. Verdi keeps up a stream of inspired melody. A composer of genius in full flow is carried by some strange force, inspiration? Benjamin Britten once said to me that when he was prepared and in form he felt that the music came from somewhere else, as if he was connected to some grid of inspiration.

The new production which I saw on April 27 by Donald McVicar pulls together the many threads of this opera, so complex yet having the impetus of an arrow. The production is compelling if sometimes congested, as if McVicar is trying too hard. The sets designed by Jean-Marc Puissant are dark and gloomy, in contrast to the vision most of us have of Egypt, which is light and sunshine. The action is menaced by a large moveable wall whose prime object is to mask the coming and goings of the various crowds. The ballet is all wriggling, jerking and leap-frogging, effective if not inspired. Act three, the Nile scene looks like a slanted organ console with a big hole in the middle. No local colour or palm trees – too commonplace, perhaps?

Verdi said that his idea of Amneris was a bit of a devil aged twenty. At Covent Garden in this new production he got a singer looking more like a dowager. Admittedly the American mezzo, Marianna Cornetti, was a replacement but she did us no favours with her singing. Amneris is the most interesting character in the opera, dramatically and musically (Verdi seemed to love mezzos) and it is usually a gift to a singer. But this Amneris had a painful beat in her voice and she wob-bob-bob-bled. The Aida, Micaela Corsi, was not wobble-free either and she sang flat sometimes. Her oboeist in her act three aria, O patria mia played his obbligato solos exquisitely; if he had played like the two ladies sang, he would have had his cards (and I bet they were paid ten or twenty times more that he was). The Radames, Marcelo Alvarez, coped with his difficult part well without impressing with any great beauty of timbre. The best singing came from the two kings, Egypt sung by the company stalwart Robert Lloyd, Amonasro (Ethiopia) sung by Marco Vratogna.

The director in the pit, Nicola Luisotti, held things together but smouldered rather than flamed. The chorus did not sound as fresh as it usually does.

The previous production I saw at Covent Garden was Turco in Italia by Rossini and everything was first-class from beginning to end, cast, staging, orchestra, and chorus. This Aida was mediocre by comparison – win some, lose some – does it always have to be like that?

THREE SYMPHONIES

2010-05-12T03:07:00.000-07:00

Myaskovsky, Copland and Liszt

Thats not a bad harvest for the latter half of a single week in London April 29, 30 and May 1, the middle symphony in the Barbican, the other two in the Festival Hall. At the Barbican Antonio Pappano led the London Symphony Orchestra; for the other two Vladimir Jurowsky the Philharmonic, all performances exemplary.

We don’t hear much of Nikolay Myaskovsky’s symphonies; did he flood the market, with twenty-seven of them? I cherish the only one I know, which is number 6 in E flat minor, Opus 23, 1923, particularly for its helter-skelter scherzo (with a slow flute trio of enchantment) and its luscious slow movement. The opening movement is frantically romantic, full of tension and silent gasping pauses; the finale is a bit of a let-down, so desperately jolly as if sucking up to the party bosses; quoting French Revolutionary songs somehow doesn’t help. Jurowsky conducted it as if his life depended on it. It is a long work, its course stated in the programme to be 75 minutes but Jurowsky passed the post at 62.

Copland kept his symphonic tally down to three and the Third Symphony is also long. By 1946 he had established himself as American’s most prominent composer and felt he had to make a statement. He did. It is a fine work yet has elements in it that are overblown, bordering on the portentous. Some of the finest moments are those in which this urban Jewish composer manages to evoke the wide open parts of his continent with widely spaced ethereal high notes, nothing in the middle, supported by a strong bass. The finale is preluded by the Fanfare for the Common Man which became so popular that it/is often played by itself, even used for commercials! Pappano gave it the works. God bless America!

The cliché has it that the Devil always gets the best tunes but in Liszt’s A Faust Symphony in three Characteristic Pictures the Devil steals the tunes of Faust and Gretchen and twists them, mangles them, parodies them in the finale; the first two movements being portraits of Faust and his loved one. Liszt does not tell the story at all, he sketches the characters of all three, except for one episode in Gretchen when the music seems to be saying: “He loves me: he loves me not”.. Sometimes it appears almost as if Liszt is improvising, not at the piano as he was frequently apt to do but on the orchestra. A section comes to an end and the textures pares down to a single line, as if Liszt was wondering what to do next. Sometimes, notably in the symphonic poem Orpheus and in Gretchen, Liszt put aside his virtuoso habits and his devilish complexities and wrote gentle, purely lyrical music. There are some longueurs in the symphony but on the whole the work goes ahead meaningfully and poetically. The melodic material is memorable. And Liszt makes sure that we know the tunes by repeating them again. Faust, the first movement is dramatic, searching and often frantic; Gretchen is graceful, lyrical and as beautiful as Goethe portrays her. Mephistopoles is Allegro vivace, ironico, he has no tunes of his own but transforms the themes of his victims. How to end?

Liszt sums up with an epilogue of almost political correctitude although he calls it a mystical chorus (with tenor solo) proclaiming that “everything is transitory... eternal womanhood leads us on high!! ... das Ewig weibliche!”.

Liszt finished his Faust Symphony in 1857. At the very beginning Faust has a motive that seems to question, with notes of the whole-tone scale, a device that looks to the future of melody and harmony, a pioneering gesture all Liszt’s own. The transformation of themes owes much to the Symphonic Fantastique that Berlioz composed some twenty years earlier.

The symphony was passionately and superbly played. Jurowsky solved the problem of the final by employing an eighty-strong chorus. Too often the final chorus is sung by a small body so that the performance ends in anti-climax. Not so here; Liszt’s symphony ended powerfully.

FERRIER AWARDS 2010

2010-04-28T05:34:00.000-07:00

Somehow the Wigmore Hall atmosphere is always sympathatic during the annual Ferrier Awards, people come every year and there is friendly support for the singers. The date of the finals was 23 April and the winner was the South African baritone, Njubulo Madlala (28). His voice was the only one of the six contestants that sounded mature with all the registers balanced and he made a warm sound. His programme was chosen wisely to display what he could do best.

A Bellini aria was followed by Butterworth’s song on Bredon Hill, Schumann’s Lied Balsazar, a folksong from the kraal and a passionately warm aria from Leoncavallo’s Zaza (good idea to sing music that the judges might not be too familiar with). His musicianship was impeccable and he didn’t make the mistake that other contestants had made, of singing too loud, and he had ‘the gift to be simple’. He was a winner whose name is worthy to be placed alongside previous winners, who include some of the finest singers of recent times.

Madlala was awarded £10,000; the second prize, half that sum, went to Dubliner Sarah Power with a voice not quite mature but with enough purity and style to win through (though she should beware of a shrill edge to her tone, probably caused by nerves). Bellini again, a bit of Stravinsky’s Rake, R. Strauss and a delightful children’s song by Poulenc with the voice and piano in chattering unison. Anna Cordona her excellent pianist (she won the accompanist’s prize of £3000). I was sorry that the Australian baritone Duncan Rock did not win anything but a lot of sympathy from the audience; he has a good voice and dramatic sense, strong to the point of occasionally hectoring.

To complete the honours: the Song Prize of £4000 went to Manchester soprano Laurie Ashworth with her Strauss, Purcell, Jonathan Dove, Mozart and Je suis Titania from Mignon.

The judges included three eminent singers: Della Jones, Felicity Palmer and Sandy Oliver, pianist Roger Vignoles and administrator Gavin Henderson.

ROSSINI’S TURKISH DELIGHT

2010-04-26T04:01:00.000-07:00

Prodigies? Well, there’s Mozart of course, Mendelssohn challenging Shakespeare, Saint-Saéns with 32 sonatas under his pianistic belt, the infant Yehudi and the brilliant young Dimitri’s first symphony; but then what about the kid from Pesaro not yet had his 5th birthday (Leap Year Baby), already producing his 13th opera and he’s only 21? Ferrara, Milan and Venice had staged numbers one to twelve and here in Milan comes Turco in Italia in 1811, the year Napoleon abdicated, two years before the Barber arrive.

This is a revival five years on of Turco in the Royal Opera House (April 19). The production by Moshe Laiser and Patrise Caurier is lively, imaginative, witty and effective, excellent pit direction by Maurizio Benini.

Rossini called it a dramma buffo. A randy Turk, his old girlfriend, a nifty new Italian pick-up, her ancient husband, a tenor rival and a Poet manipulating the situation as grist for an opera libretto he wants to write. This Poet is a bit of a throw – back to Don Alfonso, a connection with Cosi fan tutte that Rossini and his new librettist Romani allude to. Like Cosi, Turco was a moral feather ruffler, I say!., married woman having it off with an infidel. Tut, tut.

Rossini was a cool cat, more interested in situations than characters but he knew how to cater for his cast and their strengths. The plot bristles farcically, twisting wittily. The music is not Rossini’s finest vintage, there are no melodies to go home with, but the score is tuneful, elegant, merry and professional to a degree, abundant with tricks, sorties, sallies and clichés of the period, formulae which are justified in a winning way. Patter and coloratura (several notes to one vowel) provide pegs for slick singing which it gets nicely here.

Tom (he insists on Sir Thomas) Allen is in brilliant form as the Poet, more Italian than any Italian, up to the mark, down to the wire. But the character who brings down the house is Geronimo, Alessandro Corbelli, a droll to cherish, a baritone to admire. Aleksandra Kurzak, Polish soprano, is his wife, Fiorilla, she has the lioness’ share of the notes with an attractive, athletic voice, stratospheric notes a speciality and she fits the flighty bill. The Turk is glamorous and excellent, Ildebrando d’Arcangelo and no archangel when it comes to speed courting. The outsider Narciso is a tenor to watch, fluent, mellifluous and South African, Colin Lee by name. Zaida who gets the Turk in the end completes the cast successfully, performed by Leah-Marian Jones (she’s Welsh, would you believe it?.)

A happy evening.

VARÈSE

2010-04-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

Still a Modern Pioneer

Of famous composers only Webern left fewer compositions, just twelve, all played during a mini-festival devoted to Edgard Varèse 1883 – 1965. He was born in France, studied with Roussel, d’Indy and Widor. All his early works were destroyed in a fire probably during WW1. In 1915 he went to America, remaining there the rest of his life. He made his conducting début with the vast Requiem of Berlioz.

His music is still startlingly original, strings rarely used in favour of brass and loads of percussion. He writes little that could be called melody, or harmony; his rhythms can suggest a sort of counterpoint, layer above layer. He referred to his works, not as music, but ‘the organization of sound’.

Varèse had few performers and he had lengthy periods of depression but he was sustained by the friendship and support of many visual artists such as Picasso and Giacometti as well as composers like Busoni, Debussy and Schoenberg (though he no truck with serialism). Latterly he excited the interest of Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen, Frank Zappa and Charlie Parker. His music looked always to the future, he was one of the first to use tapes and electronics; enthusiasm for the new was part of his personality.

His works have interesting titles (fancy?) such as Octandra, Hyperprism, Equatorial and Ionisation. The festival (April 16 and 18 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall) opened with the latter piece whose title is explained: ‘the disassociation of electrons from the nucleus of their atom and their transformation into negative or positive ions’ – not exactly non-fluting! The performance were convincingly played and conducted by David Atherton with the London Sinfonietta. Tapes were used and video, devised by Pippa Nissen, on three screens – landscapes, cloud-scapes, moonscapes, Mars-scapes although we were once brought down to earth by a hand putting powder into a glass. Some of the works were sung well by the soprano Elizabeth Atherton, the Sinfonietta Chorus and, sportingly we all thought, by John Tomlinson, authors Huidobro, Tablada, Verlaine and chants from the Mayan.

Was there a downside to all this startlingly original pioneer music, composed at much the same time as the work of those other pioneers, Charles Ruggles and Charles Ives? Most of the audience seemed to think otherwise, applauding vigorously throughout, But some of us found that the ear gets as tired as the brain with works that seem to have no logic, no intimation of climaxes or summation. In the thirties it might have been labeled by the acronym ODTAA – One Damn Thing After Another; rumble-rumble-bang-crash-wallop. Sometimes there were sequences, sometimes beautiful incantatory solos; Varèse can do pianissimo but more often the noise level was extremely high. The first ten minutes were more enjoyable than the last. But there is no doubt that Varèse at his best had a kind of magic. His work has been described as ‘music in the pure state’. ‘tornadoes of sound’ and ‘a nightmare dreamed by giants’. There are designs in the piece for producing grief and anxiety but none for drama. Varèse often thought of his work to be parallel to crystals: “In spite of their limited variety of internal structure, the external forms of crystal are almost limitless.” Just so.

Varèse was without doubt a great original but for the average concert-goer he needs to be taken in small doses.

JULIAN BREAM – MASTER OF THE FRETS

2010-04-26T03:49:00.000-07:00

He was a lad in his early teens when I first met Julian Bream. He was born in Battersea and he sounded like it; he kept his cockney accent all his life (so far) although sometimes he would try to talk posh but it did not disguise his origins. His dad worked in advertising but played jazz guitar. Julian started playing that way but one day Dad brought home the recording of Segovia playing the Tremolo Study of Tarrega; the die was cast. Several doshed folk helped pay his fees for him to go to the Royal College of Music. At that time the guitar was scarcely known straight music apart from the great Segovia. Julian’s personality and his guitar soon had the other students flocking round him, so much that the director actually forbade him to bring his instrument into the College. He played at parties and the girls adored him.

Parties, little concerts, a broadcast or two, gradually he became known. He acquired a contract with RCA Victor and his records sold like hot cakes. He came many times to the Summer School of Music that I organized at Dartington, sometimes with Peter Pears, sometimes just recitals, later on master-classes and with a consort that he formed to play what Hardy called ‘the ancient stave’ my wife Olive Zorian played violin with him) and one year he brought the slightly younger Australian guitarist John Williams. These last two played some happy concerts together and it was fascinating to compare the two players: John a cooler player but technically more reliable whereas Julian was the great communicator even if he took more risks and squeaked more often.

Julian’s contract with RCA was unique. I think. He was able to record what he liked, where he liked and with whom he liked. Julian’s talent and his personality enabled him to get many composes to write pieces for him: Malcolm Arnold, Henze, Walton, Maxwell Davies, Rawsthorne, Tippett and Benjamin Britten.

Some Juliana: mutual friend John Warrack went with Julian to the Royal Academy show one year and they went into one room dominated by a large nude. Julian:”Christ, I know ‘er”. Silence in that room and bystanders waited for the next pronouncement. “What a smashing pair of plonkers”.

While on a longish tour of India (he made time to see a bit of interesting countries) Julian lent his Earl’s Court flat to a singer friend. She found eighteen pairs of evening shoes under the bed, all worn down at the heels, likewise a cupboard containing a couple of dozen dirty evening shirts and a sack full of unopened letters and telegrams.

Down in Dorset there was an annual cricket match (Julian was a good slow bowler), myself one year on Julian’s team playing the local farmers. Julian said they were nice chaps but they argued when the umpire gave them out and wouldn’t walk. Julian got round problem by getting the local Jesuit priest to umpire.

Julian encouraged me to come to the annual English Music Week in the Bavarian Alps at Schloss Elmau. “Great place, nice people, good music, good tucker and I was knee-deep in girls”. I couldn’t refuse and went the following year: it was, they were, it was and he was...

Alas, some of the fire and that power of communication declined after Julian crashed his car on a bridge near home after a convivial evening (“That bridge got smaller that night”) and after a 70th birthday Wigmore recital he decided to retire. Sadly he has become rather reclusive, living alone, walking the dog but not seeing or communicating with his old mates.

Julian was a one-off. His musicianship was profound yet full of joy. Like the greatest of musicians he knew his stuff but played on his intuition. Never routine, never playing to the gallery except sometimes when chatting to the audience, he enriched the repertoire and he enriched the musical experience of his audience. And his programmes were never boring like so many guitarists were. Building up the architecture of the great Bach Chaconne, loving the line of an ancient pavane, savouring the lollipop Malcolm Arnold Concerto, tearing away passionately in a Villa-Lobos study or just frivolling some encore meringue, he was unique.

BARTOK’S RELINQUISHMENT

2010-03-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

After his early days when Debussy and Richard Strauss were considerable influences on his music, especially in the opera Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartok’s more mature music, the music that he is best known for, is marked by the folk music of his native land and what might be called ‘expressive dissonance’. His music became percussive, eastern European rhythms dominated. But from 1939 onwards, the expression and harmonies became gentler, more accessible to ears used to less harsh harmonies and rhythms.

It so happened that in the concert given on March 18 in Blackheath Halls by the Trinity College of Music Symphony Orchestra all three works were composed by the ‘gentler’ Bartok. Curiously, these works did not reflect the more ‘dissonant’ events in Bartok’s life: his flight from Europe to America, his penurious existence, increasing bad health and death in 1945 at the age of sixty-four. The long programme consisted of the 1938 Violin Concerto, the 1945 Piano Concerto No. 3 and the 1943 Concerto for orchestra.

Of the three works, the Concerto for orchestra stands out as perfect; it is like a symphony in five movements yet also a showpiece, as you might expect, for an orchestra. There were a few very minor faults of intonation, ensemble and a lack of virtuosity, but only minor ones. This was a performance that tingled with energy and understanding, the more extraordinary, since the conductor Zsolt Nagy had only three days with the Trinity students.

Mind you, he is an experienced director, well able to pass on his expertise and feeling for the music of his countryman. The violins sounded passionate, led by Tadasuke Lijima. The orchestra plays on the flat in this hall and although one heard the higher sounds and the percussion well, much of what was played in the middle registers was not clear; the violinist, hailing from Slovenia but now living in London, Lana Trotovsek, had the measure of the concerto, musically and technically; likewise the Russian pianist Mikhail Shilyaev. The slow movement of the piano work is marked religioso, a pallid adagio whilst the finale of the violin concerto seems to try too hard and runs out of steam.

Even when he was so broke in New York that at one time he stayed in his flat because he lacked a tip for the lift man, Bartok was too proud to accept charity. The violinist Joseph Szigeti told me that the conductor Serge Koussevitsy only got the composer to accept some money by saying that his commissioning foundation insisted on making a down payment. The première of the Concerto for orchestra in Boston, conducted by Koussevitsky, was a success but during the final afternoon rehearsal one of two ladies in the audience, members of the blue rinse brigade was heard to say “Gee, conditions must be terrible right now back in Europe”.

In the fourth movement there is a passage where Bartok hoped to parody the Leningrad symphony of Shostakovich but when he slyly asked the conductor Antal Dorati if he recognized the tune he was horrified that Dorati said “yes, its Lets all go to Maxims from the Merry Widow”. Which of course it could also be.

LIFE ENHANCING JANACEK

2010-03-19T02:06:00.000-07:00

Catharsis is the word, the release of strong emotions. That definition fits the music of Janacek. Yet until the fifties we knew it not. The Big Four were Stravinsky, Bartok, Schonberg and Hindemith. The latter soon slipped out of prominence. And then in 1951 there was a new name to conjure with: Janacek.

A young Australian conductor, Charles Mackerras, studying in Czechoslovakia had been bowled over by the music of this strange composer. Janacek had come to fame late in life but had then written masterpiece after masterpiece until he died in 1928, aged seventy-four. His music is full of woodnotes wild, totally original although not avant-garde technically, awkwardly written, stretch-players and singers, exciting music, somehow life-enhancing; even his darkest and tragic scores bring joy – catharsis in fact. Young Mackerras persuaded the sensitive director of Sadler’s Wells Norman Tucker to première Katia in the Festival of Britain year.

Janacek had arrived. Not liked at first but gradually gaining acceptance, especially in Katia’s revival in 1954 conducted by the great Rafael Kubelik. His first night was one of the most memorable I can remember. It was as if Ostrovsky’s (the librettist) The Storm had been made palpable. Our emotions were well and truly wrung. At the climaxes it felt as though the roof would crack. The Wells Orchestra, not the best in London, played within an inch of its life. One of the cellists said to me afterwards; “what happened? we can’t play as well as that!”.

One of the amazing things about Janacek is how he brings his characters to life, and his ability to compress the events of the drama. You go through heaven and hell, only to find that the act took barely half-an-hour.

Gradually we got to experience other operas by the Moravian: Jenufa, Vixen, House of the Dead, Makropoulos and even Broucek. And now every opera house produces Janacek. We have gained a master composer. On March 15 Katia was given a new production by the English National in the Coliseum. Production, cast and orchestra did the composer proud in this work, one of many inspired by his love of a woman in an affaire that never really happened; he admitted that it was an invention. Kamilla was cool towards him, she was married, didn’t care for music, especially his. There was no consummation, except, thank God, in the music that positively poured out of him.

When we arrived in the theatre, half the stage was already visible: on one side an obtruding wall with one chair in front of it; and we had seen that before recently in Covent Garden’s Tristan. When the curtain opened fully we saw that the wall went on and on, but the rest of the stage was empty, the cast could either stand or squat. The sparseness of David Alden’s production continued, the cast spotlit unencumbered by furniture. As the action continued there was much and cleverly contrived use of shadows.

Alden was clever with his singers too and they excelled: Susan Bickley made much of the ghastly, hypocritical mother-in-law; John Graham-Hall was a convincing wimpish husband, likewise Clive Bayley as Bickley’s admirer. The tenor-lover Stuart Skelton sang impressively and Anne Grevilius was perfect as Varvara. There was only one disappointment: Patricia Racette, soprano from Texas, was a fine performer, good diction, clear lines, presence but the voice was not listener-friendly. Mark Wigglesworth directed superbly and the orchestra played up appropriately.

It was a good evening at the opera. Hearts were wrung.

AN EVENING OF CHOPIN

2010-03-19T02:05:00.000-07:00

Jacqueline du Pré is remembered in the Wigmore Hall by an annual charity concert; this year’s took place on March 9 and was devoted to the music of Chopin, except for one work, Mozart’s piano trio in E, K. 542 which was a favourite of Chopin ‘s that he played in public in one of his rare concerts. It is one of his most intimate and tender works yet the performance revealed no feeling for style, being brusque and matter-of-fact, curious in that the performers call themselves the London Mozart Trio.

Chopin’s account opened with a peak work, his fourth Ballade in F minor which begins so disarmingly simply and developes in a remarkably convoluting way, almost like seeing a speeded up film of a rain forest, ending with a coda of a cadenza that is a seething mass of modulating brilliance. Evelyne Berezovsky, not yet twenty years of age, a Russian pianist now living in London could see through the tangled paths and guide us on the fantastic journey, the only criticism possible being that she somewhat over-used the sustaining pedal.

In another of Chopin’s recital programmes he played the last three movements of his late cello sonata, a work that often confirms the view that Chopin was not at his best when he added stringed instruments to his palette. Not so on this occasion, for Jamie Walton was thoroughly convincing and so was his pianist, Daniel Grimwood. After the interval Alison Pearce sang three Mazurkas arranged as songs by Pauline Viardot, Chopin’s friend. These are interesting but attention waned because of the singer’s dubious intonation and lack of charm.

Finally Piers Lane played the Fantasie in F minor, Berceuse and the great Barcarolle. Was it the result of waiting two hours in the dressing room that dampened the usual sparkle of this stimulating pianist? All the notes were there …

When the music falls short of interest in the Wigmore I always look at the art-deco frieze above the heads of the artists, commiserating with that central godlike creature who surely cannot be comfortable with his genitals in the grip of a crown of thorns. Beside him is some sort of scribe, copying out music but looking like Pimen (from Boris Gudonov). And beyond him is a naked girl who is suffering, a doctor friend told me, from an inguinal hernia (confirmed by the bulge below her navel).

After looking at the frieze my thoughts wandered to Chopin’s long liaison with Gorge Sand. With her assumption of a masculine name and her scruffy mannish clothes, she might at first be taken for a lesbian. But no, she was apparently a regular man-eater, flitting from one to another if they failed to come up to snuff. She confided her disappointment, for example, with her one night stand with Prosper Merimée. No merry-mating apparently. Yet it looks as if Chopin was often content and productive under her care at her house in Nohant.

For all his dandyish ways and complaints (“I am without my white gloves” he wrote to a friend from Valdemossa) how virile his music is and with genius he could compress his epic visions into small masterworks!!

MESSIAH TREADS THE BOARDS

2009-12-23T05:25:00.000-08:00

First impressions not good; action during the overture; first chorus, stage filled with a bed, nurses, benches, laptops and a woman ironing. This is Deborah Warner’s new production for ENO at the Coliseum, premiere 27 November. Was this to be as distrauting as her St. John Passion (many greetings events, including Jesus having his head pushed into a plate of soup)?

Unusually, I asked friends in the interval their reaction, including fellow critic Andrew Porter, Tex-Prom director Sir Nicholas Kenyon. It seemed we all agreed: dismay had given way to tolerance, leading to acceptance and enjoyment. And we all thought this despite agreeing that there was 30% too much going on. For instance, a coloured child kept rushing rushing around the stage, finally shaking hands with everybody: why?

Sophie Bevon, wonderful voice, skilfully used, sang I know that my redeemer liveth flat on her back in the omnipresent bed fussed over by two nurses (two! Obviously not NHS).

Musically this was an excellent performance: the soloists were all first-rate, clear, fine voiced and impeccable intonation: the aforementioned Sophie Bevon, John Mark Ainstey, Brimdley Shevrett and Harvey Bradford or Louis Watkins (treble). The lioness’ share was powerfully thoroughly taken by Catherine Wyn-Rogers. After Ferrier it seems we don’t bread controls anymore, so there were some underpowered low notes but otherwise it was a performance to remember and cherish. Martin Merry deserves to be mentioned as he trained the chorus up to the skies. Lawrence Cummings conducted with fervour and consummate expertise. ENO is to be congratulated on fielding such a great team. Chorus and orchestra are remarkably versatile; the night before they had performed Turandot, switching imperturbly performing Handle as to the manner born and in baroque style.

Deborah Warner’s production grew on one, she was no iconoclast and most of her updating was convincing. Her handling of the chorus was especially fine: they were individuals yet they were also a group.

The staging worked well (sets Tom Pye), lighting up as from the dim Christ at the beginning was immovative and mind-blowing with video montage and ancient pictorial master pieces.

Thank you, English National; can it be that you are triumphantly emerging from your operatic recession?

A SCHOOL’S MUSIC

2009-12-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

Dulwich College in Town

My old school gave its Winter Concert on Monday 30 November in St. John’s Smith Square. As usual, there was a big pause between items as the performers were in different categories; stage and music stands had to be reset.

First, a symphony orchestra under the College’s director of music, Richard Mayo: Wagner’s overture to Rienzi. The slow and final movements of Weber’s Bassoon Concerto were most expertly played by Leo Baker, making, as required, tender noises up top and rude ones down below. After which a symphonic wind band was set up for Holst’s Second Suite in F, tricky stuff rhymically, especially when the composer counterpoints the Dargason with Greensleaves; however, no casual ties. There followed David Bedford’s Sun Paints Rainbow on the Vast Waves. David (now 72) spent much of his childhood, in Aldeburgh, often with his singer mother’s friend, Benjamin Britten. This piece for wind band has echoes of Peter Grimes and the chord sequence in Billy Budd; at other times Bedford goes minimal and, with three cymbals crashing away, seems to be peering through a (Philip) Glass darkly. Alas, not as enjoyable as many of David’s works.

After the interval of this sold out concert we had some stylish piano playing from Tom Deasy in Saint-Saens Septet with Thomas Wilson on trumpet, a delightful work that often sounds like the composer’s friend and pupil, Gabriel Fauré.
So far, fine, good playing but nothing special. But the finale was quite superb. A madrigal choir of seventy singers on the stage with piano and percussion were flanked by some 200 boys in the balcony in five numbers, Ghanaian, Zulu, American and Aboriginal. The singers had learned these five folk songs by ear under the direction of singing master Dan Ludford-Thomas, a young, sallow-faced, hirsute, spectacled man. He was a real show off but also a performer of superior calibre. The boys sang lustily and musically, their faces radiant with the pleasure they gave the audience and the pleasure of singing with this brilliantly gifted director. The performance lifted the hearts of all present.

One suggestion; the four conductors all bowed but the boys stood, almost glumly. Could they not bow when the conductors does – and perhaps smile?

HOWARD’S BEETHOVEN END

2009-12-02T01:16:00.000-08:00

“Music is the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life”

Beethoven (1810)

The prize for the performance of the year should surely be awarded to Leslie Howard for his playing of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata Opus 106 (November 8, Wigmore Hall). Intellectually, physically, virtuosically and emotionally, this was a towering performance. Recently a critic called op. 106 ‘grim’ but that must be a misreading or mishearing – monumental, visionary, mind-blowing, yes; but grim, no. And that was what was so moving about the performance; sinews there were but also heartstrings. The sheer beauty of the slow movement, which seemed unlikely ever to end (and one did not want it to end) is a miracle of warm, nocturnal music that seems sometimes to pre-echo Chopin. There is aggression in the bitter, brittle scherzo but it is offset by the virility of the opening movement and the colossus that is the final fugue that pounds our minds as if we are in some engine – room of the mind, pistons and cylinders crashing in perfect synchromisation. But man is there too, expressed in Beethoven’s love of humanity.

How was it possible that one man, one brain, one heart, could conceive all those late works, the quartets, the Mass, the grosse Fuge, the piano sonatas, the Diabelli Variations, without his senses caving in with the amount of continual concentration required to pour out this almost superhuman flow of meaningful beauty? 106 is the Mt. Everest of music and very few pianists can achieve the perfection that Leslie Howard produced. The great Schnabel, for example, was in awe of the work and went into retreat for weeks before attempting to play it. Even the Diabelli Variations seem a less daunting task (the Matterhorn perhaps?) but our intrepid Antipodean seemed to take the Hammerklavier in his stride, a virile exposition with a pulsing heart behind it all.

Leslie Howard never ceases to amaze. He has played and recorded every scrap of the music of Liszt and shares that master’s tolerance and relish for the troughs as well as the peaks of music. Otherwise he surely could not have followed op.106 with the third volume of Liszt’s Années de péleriuage (published posthumously). The centrepiece of the set is the wonderful acqueous evocation The Fountains at the Villa d’Este. But the others in the set are empty rhodomontade and meretricious – that word so near and so far from meritorious. And with that comment I salute Master Howard again, wishing him and all our readers a merry trishmas!

HANS VAN BÜLOW

2009-12-02T01:11:00.000-08:00

HANS VAN BÜLOW
A life and Times
Alan Walker
Pp 510, many illustrations price £30

What a man, what a musician, what a life! And what an enthralling book, finely researched! Strange that this is the first life of was such an interesting, chequered existence.

Once Bülow was asked if he knew Richard Wagner. He replied: “Oui, madame, il est le mari de ma femme.” Not only was that true – she was Cosima Wagner – but Bürlow suffered her to produce three girl children fathered by Wagner while he was still legally her husband.

Hans von Bülow (1830 – 1894) was one of the great pianists of his time, greatly admired by Liszt, but also the first star conductor. He had a photographic memory; he was the first to specialize in the piano works of Beethoven (he used to play the last five sonatas in a programme, including that Everest of sonatas, the Hammerclavier.) He raised the Meiningen Orcherstra to be Germany’s finest ensemble, encouraged not only to stet while they played but also to play from memory, even a corker like the Grosse Fuge.

He also possessed a witty, devastating tongue which he used too frequently, often damaging his persona more than his victims. He was intimate with Liszt (in a non-fathering way, with Cosima’s non-mothering way). Walker’s book reads like some fascinating, couplex 19th century novel, a tangled web of liaisons dangérous uses that is utterly enthralling, a “couldn’t put it down volume”.

von Bülow was so generous, forgiving Cosima, continuing to love her, although he had neglected her, so that she fell in the arms of Wagner. He provided money for the 3 children, paid for the legal costs of their divorce and raised huge sums of money for Bayreuth. Eventually he continued to proclaim Wagner the composer whilst excoriating Wagner the man. (like most of us) His capacity for work almost beggars belief. He helped young people and also his fellow composers. (He premiered Tchaikovsky’s famous Piano Concerto when others had refused to perform it.)

His health was bad, fainting fits; he was continually at spas and health centres. Yet he soldiered on, playing and conducting despite bad pianos, bad halls, tiring journeys. He gave over a hundred recitals all over North America, hating performing, yet doggedly raising money (for Wagner’s children).

It seems that Alan Walker has left no stone unturned. Travels, programmes, emotional troughs, good analysis of Bürlow’s compositions and style of piano playing.

As you might gather from the above, this book is highly recommended.

PURCELL IN HIS ABBEY HOME

2009-12-02T01:08:00.000-08:00

350th Anniversary

A celebration of the music of Henry Purcell was held in Westminster Abbey on 28 November (Princess Alexandra was in the audience). It was a kind of home-coming for the composer spent nearly half his life in the Abbey as organist, i.e. director of music, appointed at the phenomenally early age of twenty until the day he died, too early by far, in 1695. (the same age as Mozart).

The programme was called “Hail, bright Cecilia”, the title also of the Ode for soloists, chorus and orchestra that constituted the second half of the evening. One of the numbers of that work is Thou tun st this world below, the spheres above, a soprano solo, exquisitely sung by Carolyn Sampson; Purcell certainly did that. The abbey Choir shone brilliantly in this 50 minute cantata, directed in style by James O’Donnell, Purcell’s successor 3 ½ centuries later, supported by the ‘authentic St. James Baroque (Orchestra understood). Here were flatt trumpets, “amorous flutes”, “airy violins”, chortling recorders and all the ancient continuo conveniences. The soloists were all good, especially the tenor Ed Lyon who salvoed in The Fife and all the harmony of war.

However Purcell not only excelled in all things bright and glorious but also melancholy, the high spot of the evening came in the Burial Sentences with music for the funeral of Queen Mary, prefaced by the awe-inspiring sound of a single drum that resounded eerily round the abbey. In this sad ceremonial there followed a dead march and a canzona for brass, the players atop the choir screen. The aspiring sentences where the trebles reach up & up again were emotionally tingling & thrilling sung by the boy trebles in this amazing piece first performed shortly before Purcell’s own premature death.

Seated in the packed nave we recalled the generosity of Purcell’s teacher, John Blow in giving his office away to his pupil at the age of twenty – and then succeeding him in the post again in 1695. Blow composed an Ode on the death of Mr Purcell which incidentally, in the setting of the composer’s name shows us that the correct pronouncement is Purcell and not Purcell. Alas this subtlety had not reached the lady chaplain who before the music began, welcomed us to the concert of music by Purcell. Tut tut!

This however was the only tiny blot on the evenings splendour of a tribute to our beloved British worthy whose plaque in the Abbey reminds us that he “left this life, And is gone to that Blessed Place where only his Harmony can be Exceeded” (the dubious grammar is sometimes attributed to John Dryden).

Speaking of plaques, last week an elegant stone was here unveiled to the founders of British Ballet. Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, Constant Lambert and Margot Fonteyn. It is to be found on the west side of the choir, near to Charles Dickens.

GHOSTS, FROTH and BREEZE BLOCKS

2009-11-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

Wexford Festival 2009 – late October

Emmanuel Chabrier 1841 – 1893 had a short career, has a short list of works but a big reputation with his tuneful, witty, pastel, quirky music, several operas, delightful piano pieces, a handful of songs and a few orchestral works, including Espana. He was one of Debussy’s three favourite composers, Ravel and Satie said they owed him much, and Poulenc loved him so much that he wrote a book about him. The lad from the Auvergne came to Paris, met all the artists, owned 11 Manets and 6 Renoirs; Manet painted him and died in his arms (on different days!) and Verlaine apostrophised him in a poem.

Wexford, famous for putting on rarely performed operas (and sometimes ones that should be rarely performed) just now paired his Une éducation manquée with La Cambiale di Matrimonio, composed when Rossini was 18. The Chabrier last three-quarters-of-an-hour a frothy little piece that smacks of Weekerlin’s bergerettes and Messager’s brace of pigeons. Characters three: bridegroom, bride and tutor. Tutor has taught him every subject except what to do on his bridal night. Thunderstorms and his inhibitions disappear like a flash of lightning. The issue is somewhat confused because the chap was nicely sung by the soprano Kishani Kavasinghe, the bride by Paula Morriny and the (drunken) tutor by Luca dell Amico, stylish conductor Christopher Franklin. Nice bed designed by Lorenzo Cutuli who cluttered up the stage for the Rossini with heavy blocks of stairs which producer Roberto Reccnia had the cast move around too many times. The second wedding piece gave us an English father (Giovanni Bellavia) trying to palm off his daughter (Pervin Chakar) onto a Canadian visitor (Vittorio Prato). She of course already has a partner and won’t budge. At 100 minutes, the piece is too long but the length was redeemed by the superb singing from all five principals. Quite a feat by the Wexford Management. You can’t expect vintage Rossini but he provides a very drinkable young wine.

When is a tragedy not a tragedy? Surely when nobody dies in the end? Not even when the fat lady sings her heart out. In 1841 Donizetti’s Maria Padilla he had his heroine kill herself but the censors insisted that she die of joy. At Wexford it was not clear if she died at all. Never mind, American soprano Barbara Quintilian had already sung half a million notes, florid bel canto stuff, only a few stratospheric notes off key. The first act curiously gives more prominence to her sister Inez, also a soprano, Ketevan Kemoklidze (Georgian with a name like that). Later the two would duet delightfully (thirds and sixtees in the approved manner).

It is a long opera and since Donizetti only seemed to compose with passion in act two, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to scrap the first. The music is good second-rate Donizetti, not in the same class as Lucia, the Derbyshire lass, but good. What is odd about the plotting and casting is that the part of the girls father, Ruiz, is a tenor although it is more like a baritone role. At Wexford it was quite magnificently sung by Adriano Graziano (Italian name, British passport).

The sets were fatuous. Act One was a vast jumble of breeze blocks with a rectangular frame set askew on top. Mauro Tinti, the décor creator striving for the title of Wexford Clever Dick of the year? He continued his silly tricks: act two has a score of chairs, wired up, so that you know that sooner or later they are going to be sent up into the flies. Then comes act three: nine mortuary slabs. How crass can you get? David Agler, director of the festival should have vetoed the designs. As it is, he conducted a fine performance, full of Italian guts and style.

The third opera at Wexford was The Ghosts of Versailles by the American composer, John Corigliano (b.1938), which created quite a stir when it premiered at the Met, New York in 1991. Quite a lot of the audience in Ireland seemed to like it, partly maybe because the production by James Robinson was excellent. But my view is that this is a rare case where the libretto is better than the music. The plot might be called ingenious and perhaps posthumous. Marie Antoinette, well sung by Maria Kanyova, decides at the end of the opera that, although she has a love match with Beaumarchais, to go to the guillotine again.

The libretto of this opera bufra in two acts is by William Hoffman, based on La mère coupable (1792) by Beaumarchais. The culpability of Rosina, Countess in Figaro, is that she had it off with Cherubino and gave birth to a daughter, Florentine, which has alienated her from the Count, all of whom are characters in this Ghosts, also Figaro and Susanna. The villain of the piece is one Bergéarss who wants to marry Florentine and get her parents guillotined. The opera is episodic with solos, concerted numbers and a near pantomime Turkish section. Rollicking fun. If only the music displayed some passion, some wit! There are allusions, parodies and a big orchestra employed but only at the very end does any meaningful invention support Corigliano’s obvious professionalism. Elsewhere it seems that the composer is all dressed up but nowhere to go. No personality. And it is mighty long. Up to the rise of the curtain I was sympathetic towards Marie Antoinette but by the time it came down I would happily have helped sharpen the guillotine.

One story about Chabrier: on a visit to Bayreuth he was invited to tea by Cosima and this took place in the late Master’s dressing room. Saddled with a huge slice of (German) inedible cake the Frenchman waited until Cosima was out of the room, then slipped the cake into a drawer of the Master’s silk shirts.

A CARMEN PRODUCTION TO RELISH

2009-10-22T02:51:00.000-07:00

Brahms and Tchaikovsky agreed only on one thing: they both adored Carmen. The new production of Bizet’s evergreen masterpiece at Covent Garden is the best of a score of them that I have seen. It is also the best work I have seen by Franscesca Zambello; the designer is Tanya McCallin.

Orange is the colour of the snow (not videophone!). The dark red plush curtains of the Royal Opera House are replaced before the curtain rises by orange ones. The scenery is likewise orange. A vivid orchestral prelude tells us that the French pianist Bertrand de Billy is no goat but a capable conductor. Welcome is the use of the original dialogue and a few bits of linking material that will be new to some.

The production is commendably straight, respects the composer and has imagination. The melodrama comes across, pleases your mind and hits you where it should do. Act One was memorable for the singing and disposition of (I guess) some thirty-five children, singing delightfully/raucously. The set includes a watergutter with real H20 and there is a live horse on stage and a donkey which behaves as it should (and not as it shouldn’t). In Act Two brigands scud up and down walls and in the last act there is a splendid procession that includes a wonderfully kitchy catholic becandled cart complete with a mouthing priest fore and a Madonna aft. When I mention that the cast includes Liping Zhang/Micaela, Changan Lim/Morales and Eri Nakamura/Frasquita you can tell that the Management has scoured the Orient and Africa for singers. (Nice to see Eri again, she was the star of a young artists scheme, performed here who we praised her Manon.)

Alas, Micaela was not quite up to it, whilst Ildebrando d’Argangelo reminded me of the story if a Beecham audition when he asked the aspiring Escmilo of he was auditioning for the part of the Toreador or the bull. Elina Garanca as Carmen was a presence of fiery nature, a real mankiller and a formidable performer if not quite the singer of one’s dreams, often mistaking volume for intensity, of which fault Roberto Alagna was also guilty. His Flower Song was lusty but charmless. But when Don Jose has to turn from being lyric to a dramatic tenor in the last act he came into his own. Despite being a half-head snorter than Carmen she was dispatched as to manner born! The grown-up chorus matched the kids.

Any quibbles ? a few details missed: those bumping/string pizzacati in the quintet, the G string turns on the violins could not be heard but Bizet’s masterly use of percussion came out well, the tambourine in Act Three and the clacking castanets (it seems that no Carmen to-day can be bothered to learn to play them and has to be helped out in the pit).

The production glowed, fired and exploded as it should, on this occasion, the 523rd performance in this house, a performance worthy of its composer. What a masterpiece it is every egg a bird! Every detail showing a master and wonderful counterpoint, deftness, charm and passion in number after number.

FLUTE

2009-10-20T01:42:00.000-07:00

FLUTE
Richard Adeney
Brimstone Press
(PO Box 114, Shaftsbury SP7 8XN)
£12.50, p.222

If the performance is routine, perhaps with a duff conductor, sometimes a solo by one of the players will lift things onto another plane, the orchestra suddenly slips from the routine to the sublime, the spirits soar, life climbs up a notch.

In World War 2 I worked in a humble capacity for the London Philharmonic Orchestra and went to many of their concerts in and around London. There were two players in the LPO at that time who regularly were able to lift the orchestra up by its boot straps and lodge us in heaven, maybe for the rest of the evening. One was the first trumpeter, Malcolm Arnold, before he became known as a composer; the other was the first flute, Richard Adeney. They were both in their twenties, replacing older men who had gone off to fight.

Richard was handsome, an introvert, unlike Malcolm who was quite good to look at, but as extrovert as it is possible to be. But the sound Adeney made, the nuances he effected, the quality of his musicianship was magical; he could put a spell on us all in the audience.

Richard played a decade with the LPO, became freelance for a decade, playing often with the Melos Ensamble. His recording with that group of the Debussy Sonata for harp, flute and viola is still deeply satisfying – with two great players: Cecil Aronowitz and the harpist Osian Ellis. Then came the years with the English Chamber Orchestra, complete Mozart Piano Concerto, first with Daniel Barenboim and later with Murray Perania. In between came years directed by Benjamin Britten; operas, concerts and without a conductor, the three church parables where the players dressed as monks. Came his sixties and Richard packed up his flutes and sold them, exchanging them for photography; he had exhibitions and some of his work is seen in this book. Coming up to 80 he disposed of his cameras. He looks now in very good shape so at dinner the other day asked him to what he attributed his good health. Over the soup he answered “Sex four times a week” but over the coffee he said “John, I exaggerated – twice a week”.

In the book Richard recalls that in his teens he decided that “I wanted three things from life:

first: that I would become the best flute player in the world.
second: to have a huge amount of sex.
third: to make some sense of the mysterious and confusing world.”

Well, his book shows that he has done well on all counts. Certainly as a chamber music and orchestral player he was the tops. And he hasn’t done too badly in the other categories. He writes well and entertainingly, never hesitating to call a spade a bloody shovel. But better than his spicy stories and cuss words, he gives a better idea than I’ve come across anywhere else of what it feels like to play in an orchestra. He doesn’t quite tell us what it is like to be a homosexual but he gets near. The insight and stories about the orchestra and its conductors are enthralling. Strong likes and dislikes, some expected (Sargent), some unexpected (Abbado).

Nobody who has lived thought the musical scene of today and yesterday should miss this fascinating book. R.A. the man is quiet, even a little shut in, self-effacing. But his book comes at you boldly colourful and thought provoking.

TRISTE TRISTAN

2009-10-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

A musical opinion on the latest production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (October 5) would have to register: Tolerable singing, passion in the pit but Sterility in the staging. The villain is the producer/director Christof Loy, whose lack-lustre and lack-lust Lulu, his previous Garden production, should have caused the management of the Royal Opera House, and it’s music director in particular, to cancel Loy’s participation in the present new Tristan. His policy eliminates gesture (which might be thought to be essential in presenting any drama or opera on the stage) and imposes Loy on Wagner’s great work. The concept includes no ship, a posse of actors in evening dress not minding a ship, modern clothes, no daylight, no bed, one chair in act one, two chairs and a table in act two, Isolde removing Brangane’s dress, and a damned great wall that doesn’t fit the stage on one side of it.

The back of the stage is curtained on and off, the foreground is bare. This concept staging was greeted on opening night with booing. Now booing is something surely not to be approved of, but it does indicate that all is not well. This is particularly regrettable because otherwise there is much to be enjoyed. The orchestral playing is very fine indeed under Antonio Pappano. The singing is not perfect, except for an outstanding Kurwenal from Michael Volle. Alas, his is the only voice free from wobble or a beat that prevents the sound from being true. Of course this is a fault common to many singers today, in Wagner in particular. If you were to hear this cast on the radio or a CD it would be more tiresome than in the flesh. The awful thing is that listeners have got used to this. Listening to recordings of singers like Flagstad, Maggie Teyte, Birgit Nilsson or Fischer-Dieskau would point out the difference. So would listening to Michael Volle, fine actor and a bang in the middle of the note singer.

Nina Stemme acts a fine Isolde, and her top and piano notes were beautiful.

Was it chance or by design that the voice of Sophie Koch (Brangane) is so similar to that of Stemme that from a distance it was difficult to tell which was which? Ben Heppner’s voice has not much sap left but he put up a good show. But he is no hero, no lover, no captain of a ship (more likely a tugmaster). I heard somebody say he looked like a hundredweight of condemned meat. Stretched out on the floor Tristan looked like a beached whale (Loy seemed to have no concern for his ageing tenor). Sir John Tomlinson had stepped in for an ailing Matti Salminen. As always he gave a credible performance and we all love him, although his voice is now showing signs of wear and tear, fraying at the extremes (as King Marke).

So, this was a Tristan not only wounded in act two, but throughout by the stage director. Fortunately, Wagner’s music lived to tell the tale and grip a large and appreciative audience.

LE GRANDE MACABRE

2009-10-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

LIGETI ’S SCABROUS OPERA

The last thing we see in this new production of Ligeti’s opera by English National Opera in the London Coliseum, first night September 17, is a hand pulling a lavatory chain. If this suggests that the whole evening has been a load of crap, so be it. This is not so much the theatre of the absurd as the opera of the cloacal.

In Alan Bennett’s play the Schoolmaster observes: When humour has to descend into the lavatory, the writing is on the wall. The writing in the programme book is full of intellectual flim-flam but Ligeti’s theatre piece, premiere 1978 in Stockholm, intends to shock, to stick its finger in your eye. In the following thirty-one years it has had twenty-five different productions in Europe and America staged by thirty-three opera companies. Of modernish operas, only Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes seem to be the ones to have enjoyed such a spate of productions. And, curiously enough, all three of these operas have an orchestral passacaglia at the heart of their scores.

So, although I might prefer, as it were, to pull the chain on Ligeti I must describe a few details. This new production is based on one by the Catalan collective La Fura Dels Baus and has already been seen at La Monnaie, Brussels and the Teatro dell’ Opera in Rome. After six performances in London it will be seen in Barcelona’s Gran Teatro del Liceu and later at the Adelaide Festival in Australia.

The text is partly by the composer himself, after Michel Ghelderode’s play La Balade du Grand Macabre. The décor mainly consists of a 20 feet high fibre-glass figure of a naked woman (with a face somewhat resembling the cricketer Mike Atherton). This monster’s eyes light up, various parts of its body open up and are detachable (foot, backside, nipples) it revolves frequently. Members of the cast go in and out of her (she is called Claudia) and sometimes climb and walk around her – Alfons Flores designed her. The whole production is fascinating, even awe-inspiring, and a miracle of ingenuity. Décor and action hark back to the paintings by Bosch (The Garden of Earthly Delights) and Breughel (The Triumph of Death). Those medieval painters invented surrealism and all kinds of obscenity. But seen moving on a stage they can still produce a frisson of shock, a giggle and eventually, a yawn.

Scene three, for example, begins with Claudia’s bum (excuse me ... and there is worse to come) facing us and in a moment a face appears in the crack of it. It opens up and we see Claudia’s tripes which soon tumble out. No holds are barred and many of them are ingenious. It often appears that the theatrical avant-garde is to be seen in our age in the opera rather than the play house. Musicals sometimes show advanced stagings but they don’t set out to shock quite like Grand Macabre.

But, hey, this is supposed to be an opera! What of the music? Well, there isn’t much. And it doesn’t compare with many other works by Ligeti. The score is not as offensive as the action. There are melodic fragments occasionally, lots of bangs from the percussion, squeaks from the woodwind and so on. The vocal writing does not beguile. The only real music comes late in the proceedings, the afore-mentioned passacaglia, the opening of the fourth and last scene, and towards the end, the orchestra has some interesting material. The work seems to have come to a close (consumetum est is sung) but then there is another fifteen or more minutes which do not add anything dramatically or musically. There are in the score various allusions and parodies but unless you know where they come, you might miss them.

This show contains no musical catharsis, does not grip your deeper emotions, as Grimes or Lady Macbeth; it comes over as a rather childish, unsophisticated, out-of-date exercise in let-it-all-hang-out, a vastly expensive waste of time for those in front of and behind the curtain.

Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke (that tenor who specializes in the bizarre) plays Piet the Pot, Susan Bickley is Messalina, and Susanna Andersson is Venus doubling as Gepopo, Chief of Police. To all of them, my thanks …. and condolences. Baldur Brönimann steers chorus and orchestra efficiently.

I met Ligeti several times and found him charming, highly intelligent, warm, funny and serious. Not a sign of the emotional chips that might have been expected on his shoulder – he suffered under fascism and Stalin, his family all killed. He was also uninhibited; it wasn’t safe for a woman to be alone with him.

What would he have composed if he lived longer? A song-cycle Pee, pot, belly, ho, bum, drawers, a cantata Tourette’s Syndrome or the opera Sodom and Gomorrah? Or perhaps another fine Violin Concerto, more masterly Atmosphères, more interesting piano pieces or further witty Aventures?

A WELCOME DAMNATION

2009-10-02T14:01:00.000-07:00

Traditionally the Devil has all the best tunes, but in Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust the tenor has some good ones and Marguérite has some of the best, haunting, tender, fey. Not that the Devil lacks tunes. Berlioz doesn’t please everyone but the Barbican was full of the faithful on September 22 and they were rewarded with a fine performance in the hands of Valery Gergiev with the chorus and orchestra of the London Symphony in cracking form.

This was part of a series concerts with the baritone Thomas Quasthoff at the centre. Unfortunately he was taken ill at the last moment. Phones rang and Sir Willard White flew from Copenhagen to the rescue. These days Willard looks grizzled as if he might break any moment into Ol’Man River. His bottom notes are sounding a bit thinner now but his top Fs rang out clearly and sonorously. He showed his mettle and his compelling presence. A great performance.

Joyce diDonato proved once again what a great artist she is but I think she was miscast as Marguérite. She is a mezzo with a dramatic soprano top register where surely what is called for is a gentler, more atmospheric sound (Victoria de los Angeles was ideal). The voice of Michael Schade, Canadian tenor, is fluent, French sounding and he was every inch but one a good Faust. But the voice is not ideally lyrical or mellifluous.

What incredible imagination Berlioz shows here, perhaps the greatest Romantic of all! Damnation has often been staged but Berlioz conceived it as a concert cantana with the listener free to follow in his head the dream like sequences. Recall the lady who said she preferred drama on the radio rather than television because the scenery was better. Berlioz kindles fire in the imagination and stimulates the mind, the music dissolving from one venue to another in a way that anticipates the cinema, digging deep into the sub-conscious in this old story using new ways with melodies, shapes, harmonies and orchestrations that appeal (to the faithful).

Always amazing, for example, is the sound of a flute and two piccolos that squirm and wriggle like small fish (actually portraying the will-o-the-wisp).

Of course it is not all imagination; with Berlioz there is an extraordinary organising mind and technical know-how, almost know-all.

Does his inspiration falter a little at the end with the ride to the abyss? Maybe, but Gergiev came near to bringing the finale off, recalling those great Berlioz conductors, Beecham and Hamilton Harty. I remember how Harty got the Berlioz sounds by exhorting the orchestra: “Come on boys, DEVIL!”.

A MODERN MAGIC FLUTE

2009-09-17T02:05:00.000-07:00

A Concert of charm, spice and virtuosity

St. James in Piccadilly is the only Wren Church built on an original site – consecrated 1684. Wren wrote of the church “I think it may be found beautiful and convenient”. Convenient for concerts because of its clear bright acoustic, it was the venue for what was proclaimed as a Concert for Peace given by an excellent pick-up chamber orchestra named MANA – Musicians Against Nuclear Arms, all giving their services. There were speeches needless to say, all in favour of the cause. The programme ended with the only classical work, Haydn’s London Symphony.

The evening began with the suite that Fauré selected from the music put together for a commedia dell’arte entertainment given in Monaco in 1919. By this time Fauré’s deafness was so bad that only the sound of the voice gave him any pleasure, that of the orchestra was a rattling nightmare, high sounds flat, low notes sharp. As usual he enlisted help with the orchestration. Both the first and third of the four movements were rehashes of earlier works. The overture bubbles along in a joyous way, The Gavotte is sturdier than most Fauré. The final Pastoral is the most interesting, less meandering than some of his late music, it is fragrant, beguiling and harks back subtly to the themes of the overture. The conductor was alert to all its charm; this was Levon Parikian, son of the distinguished violinist, Manoug.

Parikian gave a fine accompaniment to the second item, Debussy’s Danse Sacrée et Danse Profane, most exquisitely and eloquently played by the solo harpist, Christina Rhys. Next came the Poem for flute and orchestra by Charles Tomlinson Griffes. This composer died young (1884 – 1920) produced what Virgil Thomson described as ‘first class music’, including a Piano Sonata, and the orchestral Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan and this fascinating Poem. Damrosch, Monteux and Stokowski all performed Griffes. His style changed, at first revealing his Berlin training, later his interest in the East and the dissonance of Schoenberg. Griffes had gone a long way since his sporadic studies with old man Humperdinck. The brilliant soloist here was the Lebanese flautist Wissam Boustany who then played his own solo work …And the Wind Whispered. This was an atmospheric piece in which he made evocative sounds and effects that I have never heard before on the instrument. One seemed wafted away into the realms of nature, the sounds not only recalling the wind but also birds flocking, wheeling and fluttering. This was a rare experience of wild calls and exciting trills. Quite out of the ordinary. The audience was rapt. Levon Parikian is to be congratulated on his direction of the orchestra and his enterprising choice of programme.

WAGNER’S VOCAL WRITING

2009-09-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

Bread and Jam

Rossini once exclaimed how wonderful opera would be if there were no singers, a thought that came to me forcibly when sitting through Tristan, maybe for the last time. When Wagner writes melodically for the voices I enjoy it: the Prize Song, the opening of the quintet in the same opera, act one of Walküre, the choruses in Götterdämerung and so on. But usually the vocal lines are not melodic but are notes from within the harmony. The orchestra has all the tunes. Take, for example, the very end of the Liebestod: the tunes are all in the pit while Isolde has notes compatible with the harmony; in other words, the orchestra has the jam whilst Isolde has to be content with the bread.

Of course the words are important but then why not give them a tune to put them over? After all, if the old man of Busseto could manage that, why not the old man of Bayreuth? Is it because writing melodically harks back to earlier works by Wagner and others (the majority) And what about the standard of Wagnerian singing? How rarely does a singer nowadays match the beauty of sound that a flute, a cello or a horn has. Singers now often rarely sing in the middle of the note: they wobble, they bulge, they are shrill, unlovely. If instrumentalists made the ugly sounds that Wagnerian singers make, they would get the sack, wouldn’t they? Sometimes my colleagues think I am old fashioned. O.K., I am; because the fashion I got used to years ago was one where singers sang in the middle of the note: Flagstad, Vickers, Baker, Shirley - Quirk, Teyte. Why should I be content with out-of-tuneness and wobbles? Of course, there are singers today who sing in tune: mostly in baroque or earlier music: singers like Emma Kirkby, Sansom and a few others.

Ich grolle.

But that doesn’t mean that I doubt for a moment that Wagner is /was a towering genius. The prelude to Lohengrin is a miracle of beauty and totally innovative. Those leit-motives in the Ring really dig deep into a magic world, the shadowy territory of the subconscious. At Glyndebourne (August 18) I was as usual thrilled to the depths of my being by the first entrance of Tristan, the prelude of the opera, the lead up to the love duet, the brooding darkness and shimmering light of the act three prelude – curiously enough, all passages without any voices! Juroski, the conductor, I thought marvellous, even if there was so much emotion in the prelude that it was almost a case of premature whatsit.

A FAITHFUL FIDELIO

2009-09-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

Professor Barry Cooper in his Prom programme note gives an assessment of his character somewhat different from the usual one of a man irascible, intolerant, treating relations badly and his dwelling place (frequently changed, servants fled from his employment) awash with brimming chamber pots. So far, so dubious. But the professor has one perceptive sentence about the music: “its combination of beauty and unpredictability, extreme emotional depth and intellectual rigour, across so many genres, is unsurpassed and probably always will be.”

Beethoven also had the gift, often to be heard in his opera Fidelio, of giving an impression of moral goodness achieved with the simplest of means by the juxtaposition of the two commonest cadential chords, the tonic and the dominant. The performance of his only opera at the Proms (22 August) did justice to the work and that is saying a lot. Daniel Barenboim (now possessing an Palestinian as well as an Israeli passport) conducted his unique East-West Divan Orchestra, a magnificent chorus (BBC & the George Mitchell singers) and a superb cast.

Waltraud Meier personified the central character Leonora (Beethoven’s heroine and his own preferred title to the opera of 1805); her singing and her shining top A’s were memorable (despite some imperfectly tuned lower notes). As well as singing, she narrated Edward Said’s the script spoken in character of Leonora who, dressed as the youth Fidelio, rescues her husband Florestan, imprisoned by the villain Pizarro. This narration replaced most of the opera’s spoken dialogue and that was a pity.

Speaking of replacement, the evening began, not with Beethoven’s final choice from among the four overtures that he composed but with the mighty tone-poem that is the Leonora Overture No.3, a lengthy master work that seems to tell the story of the opera in a gigantic nutshell. The composer finally discarded it and wrote the shorter piece known as the Fidelio Overture which he considered more suitable as a prelude to the domestic first scene of the drama. I think Beethoven was right.

The Australian tenor Simon O’Neill sang Florestan’s de Profundis prison aria with golden tones but seemed to tire subsequently, for in the radiant A major trio following his rescue the gold had turned almost to tin. Ideal throughout was John Tomlinson’s portrayal of gaoler Rocco. Adriana Kucerova was good but her voice was not that of a light lyric soprano (Marcellina at the ironing board) buts more like a Leonora waiting in the wings, i.e. a heavier type of voice – smashing red dress, as seen on telly! Sad to say, neither her would be-lover, Jacquino, nor the villain Pizarro, were up to scratch. But the two gaol birds in the heart breaking Prisoners Chorus were strikingly good, Andrew Murgatroyd and Edwin Price. Orchestra & conductor were on top form and deserved our thanks for some great music making.

Fidelio may not be the finest opera, but much of the score is surely some of the greatest operatic music ever composed; the quartet where all four singers express individual thoughts yet sing the same music, Leonora’s outraged and beautiful aria with three solo horns, the prison aria, the dénoument with trumpet calls, the radiant duet and trio after the rescue, these are Beethoven at his most sublime.

Two details: Beethoven took some inspiration from the ‘rescue’ operas by Cherubini yet the composer he almost quotes here is Mozart. And re those famous trumpet calls which get progressively louder. Why do they? Surely it is the rescuing governor who gets nearer, not the watching trumpeter.

Some friends of Beethoven said that the man was almost as remarkable as the composer. Hearing Fidelio so movingly and eloquently performed it is easy to forget the irritable, untamed, domestic (and don’t forget: frustrated) man and listen in awe and wonder at the noble achievement of this great composer.

FIGARO MARRIES IN HAMPSHIRE

2009-08-17T01:16:00.000-07:00

It is good that music is once more a social affair. Not perhaps to the extent of music-making in the home, as was once the custom. Nowadays it takes the form of concerts and operas in churches, halls, stately and not quite so stately homes, with picnics and glasses of wine.

Last month (August 1) I went to a fairly new venture in Hampshire not far from Basingstoke, in West Green House where a famous Australian Gardener (several books) lives. Her name is Marylyn Abbot and her love of music has led her to put on opera. Last year she invited a group from the famous Drottningholm Theatre (perfectly preserved small opera house just outside Stockholm) to perform; this year Opera Project are in residence for Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and another weekend, a double bill of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Yvonne Kenny as the forsaken Queen) and a mock Opera Pyramus and Thisbe, based on act five of Shakespeare’s magic comedy, composer John Frederick Lampa, a contemporary of Handel.

The gardens of West Green are sumptuously rich, well worth the special journey. There is quite a large lake, around which are several pavilions and a large marquee for gorging and swilling in the interval. A Theatre has been knocked up with seating for 230 and a pit for the band. Not a big pit but large enough for the ten players (single strings, single woodwind and a horn) that Jonathan Lyness, the excellent conductor, has produced a boiled down score for (very skillfull).

I don’t think you would know the names of any of the singers but they were all young, had been well taught to carry the action effectively and agreeably by Richard Studer. Only Mrs Almaviva was not quite up to her solos and the ensembles fairly fizzed along. Amanda Holden’s fine English version was used and a good time was had by all despite dismal weather.

KAT’A HOLLAND PARKOVA

2009-08-11T04:11:00.001-07:00

Mark Twain once said that a Wagner opera started at six o’clock and when it had been going for two and a half hours your watch said twenty to seven. With Janacek it is quite different. After an act during which you are put through an emotional wringer your watch tells you that the act lasted just half an hour. Fanciful, of course but Janacek’s dramas are condensed to the bone. There is urgency but no hurry the characters are in depth, you know them well, you feel for them. Janacek’s material for one act would last two hours if the composer were Richard Strauss or Wagner. I always associate Janacek with Chekhov who similarly condenses and conveys much with minimal material.

Janacek hits you between the eyes (and sometimes below the belt) and so it was at Opera Holland Park on July 30 with Kat’a Kabanova the whole opera hardly exceeds ninety minutes yet by the end we feel that catharsis has happened. The orchestral role is as important as the heroine’s, perhaps more so; surely she is the most neurotic female in all opera: she dithers hopelessly on an emotional precipice, poor darling, before drowning herself, having crassly blurted out her adulterous guilt in front of the convention-ridden neighbours. In her last scene Janacek gives her a soaring phrase that is the ultimate in tear-provoking beauty.

The French soprano Anne Sophie Duprels was thoroughly convincing in the title role, both vocally and dramatically. I had not encountered the conductor before now but I hope to do so again, for Stuart Stratford directed a memorable and satisfying performance, directing the City of London Sinfonia to heights of passion and virtuosity. The composer puts his fiddlers through many hoops, make them scream away up in the rosin and cope with keys that are difficult, and they have to play many diddle-diddle passages with ferocity.

The bitch of a mother-in-law was vividly played by Anne Mason and Tichon likewise by Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts. Usually this wimp of a husband is played by a small singer but here was a big burly wimp; all the more telling to see this giant of a man cringing before his ghastly mother. It was good to see that mother’s lover played by Richard Angus; he is by now a real veteran but still in good voice. And what a voice! It is like the thickest and darkest brown Windsor soup.

At first I thought the movements of the chorus exaggerated but as time went on I appreciated their stylisation as the most Victorian-style hostile mob. Olivia Fuchs direction had both respect for the score and a likely invention; costumes and designs by Jannis Thavoris very good.

What a master Janacek was and how amazing that in the last decade of his life he poured out so many works, operas, string quartets, big orchestral works and a whopping great mass!

PURCELL FAIRY QUEEN

2009-08-11T04:05:00.000-07:00

Jolly Good Show

Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is usually described as a semi-opera in a Prologue and five acts, libretto by anon, an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act one drags a bit; after a breezy overture there is no music for quite some time while actors speak a courtly, rather tedious, conservation piece. This is an expensive piece to put on since it requires actors, a bevy of dancers, many singers, a chorus and a band in the pit. At Glyndebourne (I was there July 10) the super skilled and lively Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was directed from the harpsichord by the great William Christie, a wonderful scholar who energised his forces superbly.

The latter four acts each contain a masque that reflects various stages of the Dream: Sleep, Seduction, the New Day/the Seasons and Marriage, the last an essay in chinoiserie, worth waiting for in a three-hour stint, because it has some of the best music. Most people will know the song of the D-d-drunken Poet, the comic duet of Corydon and Mopsa (enacted on a credible-looking haystack) and Hark, the Echoing Air, possibly The Plaint too. The orchestra has act tunes and the quaintly named Symphony While the Swans come Forward. There are nearly sixty numbers altogether, many solo numbers, ensembles and choruses. Glyndebourne fielded seventeen solo singers, among whom Lucy Crowe and Carolyn Sampson shone particularly brightly. The singing was of a high standard, the chorus was first-rate and a good time is had by all.

Jonathan Kent’s direction (designer Paul Brown, brilliant invention throughout) is serious and rollicking by turn, never in bad taste, always serving the music and the composer. A favourite scene is one where the stage is awash with man-sized rabbits, all rutting away.

The first performance of the work was in London and cost £3000, a figure roughly equivalent to half a million of today’s money. At Glyndebourne no expense was spared: this was a bold choice and a thoroughly successful accomplishment. Sally Dexter was an imposing Titania and the Rustics did their comic stuff winningly, led by Desmond Barrit as a really funny Bottom – their words came over much clearer than the rest of the cast. Incidentally, six singers were recruited from Glyndebourne’s chorus, a feature which worked well.

Purcell’s music never fails in liveliness, tenderness and appositeness, the score is full of heart-easing melodies, catchy rhythms, metrical quirks and daring harmonies. The work is something of a hodge-podge but one fashioned by a genius.

21 July The Fairy Goes to Town

To the Royal Albert Hall, to pinpoint it, for a BBC Prom starting at 6.30 and over-running until 10.30. And the big question was; how would the very, visible Glyndebourne show transfer to the Albert? Answer, very well. Listeners at home missed a lot, of course, because the relay was radio, not telly. But the Radio audience would have heard the outstanding musical performance noted in the previous review and they would have heard 5000 people in the hall roaring with laughter at the jokes and the business; a stimulating thing to hear. In the hall Glyndebourne had done a marvellous, sumptuous, clever job. The site was a large platform covering most of the stage area which existed behind the small orchestra, strings, oboes, trumpets, two harpsichords (William Christie, the director at one of them) but no double basses. (Purcell didn’t use any).

No sets but all the costumes, lavish, eloquent, even down to the monkeys and the rampageous rabbits. Everything was danced, spoken and acted as at Glyndebourne. This was a Prom de luxe, thoroughly enjoyable (every hour of it!) One musical feature that I didn’t mention; Purcell’s clever, dramatic use of silence, gosh, that man was up to so many telling devices. And controlling everything carefully but yet with an air of spontaneity as was William Christie. We owe him much. He’s a master.

YOUNG ARTISTS AT THE GARDEN

2009-07-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

I went to the Summer Programme of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme in the Royal Opera House on Sunday afternoon 9 July. I was expecting a recital of Operatic items, possibly with Papa Papano at the piano. But no, the Welsh National Opera Orchestra had come up for the day and the first half was fifteen staged scenes of Don Giovanni, and after the interval, three chunks of Massenet: the overture from the incidental music for Phèdre, the scene from Werther when the hero returns after Charlotte and Sophie have had their duet; this was followed by the Saint Sulpice scene where Charlotte re-seduces Werther.

These Young Artists are part of an educational programme, the singers being taught their craft and taking small parts in the Big House. The performance was extremely professional and well prepared. Thomas Guthrie was responsible for a minimalist but effective production with good costumes by Ilaria Martello. There were just a few props such as a harpsichord for Charlotte and some cute brolly-drill while the Don sang his champagne–less champagne aria.

Don Giovanni began not too well with ill-balanced chords, the overture played as though volume was a substitute for intensity. This malaise spread somewhat to the singers, possibly wary of projecting their young voices in the big space of the Opera House. A pity because when they did not force their tone, there was plenty of musical understanding, good phrasing, and first-rate acting. Pumeza Matshikiza (South Africa) was a convincing Elvira and sang some of her music very well. Anita Watson (Australia) was plumb accurate but overdid the volume, I found. Zerlina was Simona Minai (Romania), charming but with a voice more dramatic than lyric soprano. The Don, Kostas Smoriginas (Lithuania) was excellent, full voiced , a competent performer and singer, Leporello Vuyani Minde (South Africa) was also good. Rory Macdonald accompanied the singers expertly.

After the interval the orchestral playing went several notches higher as Dominic Grier conducted the fine overture to Phèdre, Massenet in seven minutes invoking fate at the beginning and the end, with three marvellous tunes in the allegro. Zerlina was now Sophie, and Monika – Evlin Leiv (Estonia) showed a good stylish mezzo voice and an excellent dramatic sense. Werther/Changan Lim was adequate but somewhat lacking in charm and style (I came home and played Tito Schipa’s classic tenore di grazia rendition of the Ossian aria, Pourquoi me réveiller.) Daniele Rustioni conducted the orchestra, rousing it to passion.

With the scene from Manor came the star of the afternoon: this was Eri Nakamura (Japan), lovely voice, no wobbles, lovely singer and actress. Good conducting from Rory Macdonald (Scotland – the artists whose nationality I have not mentioned were all home-grown).

So you see, Covent Garden is looking to the future in preparing these young artists and it certainly did these singers proud by giving them everything possible in the way of orchestra, staging and teaching. The large audience gave up its Sunday afternoon and was rewarded with young talent and a good programme well performed.

12 – 17 October there will be Meet the Young Artists Week in the smaller Linbury Studio theatre. There will be a staged production The Truth about Love, an Orchestral Concert, Recital, A Juke Box session and other events. Further information from the Box Office 020 7304 4000; Most of the events are free.

ALDEBURGH AT THE FRENCH ROUNDABOUT

2009-07-10T06:33:00.000-07:00

When Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the new director of the Aldeburgh Festival was asked by a journalist what his reaction to the music of Benjamin Britten was, he answered “Neutral”. I ask you, does that bode good? Isn’t it rather like appointing as director of Bayreuth one who doesn’t much care for Wagner? Mind you, Aimard the pianist gave a superb performance of the Ravel Concerto for piano, left hand. And he did a fine interview with Elliott Carter.

Carter was present and warmly acclaimed – he is 101, the oldest composer around, a genial lovely guy. But his music is not very listener-friendly, not a melodic fragment within hearing distance, too cerebral ever since his excellent Cello Sonata and first String Quartet composed some sixty years ago. There was also an interesting film shown about him and his music; Boulez and Barenboim testified to his greatness; so I listened hard, but alas without even a soupçon of pleasure or comprehension. 15 works of his were played during the Festival (I was there June 12 – 23) and there was a similar number of works by Sir Harrison Birtwistle which meant that listeners who like a melodic fragment or two were disappointed. I remember Sir Harry saying on the radio once: “I’m not in the entertainment business”. True, he aint. But the audience applauded and it was great to have him there. The only piece I enjoyed was his orchestral work An Imaginary Landscape (1971), wild, exciting, with a few scraps of melody and accompanied by a hefty storm raging outside. But note the date; a fairly old work.

Talking around confirmed my view that what Aldeburgh audiences like best is congenial chamber music, classics, string quartets; they were thin on the ground this year. We had 4 Haydn Quartets, 2 of old Ludwig, and the Schubert Quintet but not a note of Mozart.

New works; from Sir Harry a mini-opera The Corridor, yet another Orpheus piece given in this new revamped Hoffmann building. Two singers, Elizabeth Atherton and Mark Padmore were the tragic lovers, a vivid portrayal of the moment when Orpheus takes that fatal backward glance. The six players sat in a line, representing the Shades; a new touch was that Eurydice talked/sang to them. As the first of a two part show Padmore sang 7 songs in Semper Dowland, semper dolens with six instrumentalists, slightly but lovingly tarted up by Sir Harry. The premieres of Elliott Carter were Fratribute, On Conversing with Paradise and Sistribute the latter a work for piano, played in an exciting recital by Croatian Tamara Stefanovich together with the Bartok Bagatelles, Haydn Sonata 46 and Schumann’s Kreisleriana. Really good playing. All Britten’s songs with piano were sung, the most brilliantly by tenor (Michelangelo) Allen Clayton who is surely going to be a big name.

18 works by Britten but no opera, no quartets, no concertos, no orchestral piece. Seems that Aldeburgh can spend millions on new buildings but not a few thousands on Britten. Shame!

Aimard directed a pleasantly whacky evening on June 13, called Collage –Montage. For the first time at Aldeburgh there were played single movements of larger works (remember the BBC’s Music in Miniature): Bartok and Beethoven quartets, Schubert and Stockhausen jumbled consecutively together, a Carter solo bassoon piece, a Bach violin fugue and bits of Kurtag’s Jatekok; Aimard, the Diotima String Quartet, and the Haffner Windquintet were on the stage all the time and gradually items overlapped, the evening ending with the whole lot playing together in an Ives-like mishmash of sound. Very entertaining.

Ravel shone in a memorable programme given by Anthony Marwood (violin), Steven Isserlis (cello) and Thomas Adès (piano) whose new piece Lieux retrouvés proved to be a sort of trio in four movements, music that made more sense and pleasure than his usual. Janacek’s Violin Sonata, & Fauré’s G minor Cello Sonata were topped off by a idiomatic and grand performance of Ravel’s masterly Piano Trio.

Finally, let me mention an enjoyable evening played by the Pears-Britten Orchestra. It was stimulating to see a band of young players enjoying themselves and delighting an audience. Their conductor was Antonello Manacorda, founder of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, quite a show-off but he certainly made the boys and girls play within an inch of their lives. Bach-Webern, Haydn 90, Bartok Divertimto and Mother Goose. So there was quite a lot to enjoy at Aldeburgh; and quite a lot, not to.

Carter and Aimard, photo by Malcolm Watson

NORMA AT THE GRANGE

2009-07-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

Bellini not all Dreamy

When thinking of Norma most of us remember dreamy music, as in the aria Casta Diva, the nocturne-like spell supposed to have given Chopin the impetus for his set of pieces bearing that title (though he was not the first in the FIELD) But Norma is actually full of sturdy stuff right from the splendid overture and that silly march – how frequently does Bellini sound like early Verdi!

The performance at the Grange (I was present July 1) gave a good account of the opera with the English Chamber Orchestra in the pit well conducted by Stephen Barlow. Martin Constantine’s production was pleasantly straightforward although he could not resist the current fad of up-dating: electric light, what looked like Kalishnikovs, but why did the high Priestess of the Druids hang out in a kitchen? There was an impressive set which turned and turned again on a revolve as often as the crescent moon shone and disappeared.

But a good Norma depends on the triangle of principal singers; Norma herself, Pollione, the Roman pro-consul who is the father of her two boys – the biggest wimp in Opera? – and Adalgisa, Norma’s side-kick, for whom he has ditched Norma. These three were all dependable, accurate and en place, Claire Rutter in particular in the title-role. What all three lacked was any sense of magic, the X-factor that catches the heart. Charm was absent. Pollione was wooden (John Hudson) and Adalgise (Sara Fulgoni) seemed to force her tone to greater volume than was pleasing.

I tried, but failed, to forget Rosa Ponselle’s best-selling 78 of Casta Diva and the Covent Garden production with Callas, the equally remarkable Ebe Stignani and Jon Vickers – the only non-wimp Pollione I’ve seen. And later Joan Sutherland was pretty good. They all had that charisma that was lacking at the Grange.

Excellent chorus of Druids. This was the middle of the heatwave but it was a joy in the dinner interval to munch and quaff in the airy marquee with gorgeous trees and wheat fields only yards away. Then more of Bellini’s masterpiece. (Near) bliss!

ELIOGABALO

2009-06-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

Cavalli in Hampshire

First performance in England (Grange Park Opera, June 6) of one of forty or so operas by Cavalli. Who he? Pier Francesco Cavalli 1602-76, probably a pupil of Monteverdi and certainly his successor as Master of the Music at St. Mark’s, Venice. Glyndebourne did his L’Ormindo and La Calisto in hepped-up versions by Raymond Leppard some time ago. This one, Eliogabalo was composed in 1668 but apparently not performed until 331 years later, in Italy. Should we all rush to see the second production? Perhaps.

And who was Heliogabalus? He was a Roman Emperor and extremely bad news; he didn’t fiddle while Rome burned but he was just as wicked while he lived; which was not long; he was murdered in AD222 at the age of just eighteen. The opera is a tangled web mainly concerning three couples, the tangling not unknotted because of gender-bending. Heli (for short) was written for a castrato but since docking is not popular now it was sung at Grange by a female soprano (Renata Pokupic), likewise his military opponent, Alessandro (Julia Riley). The plot sickens with Heli’s nanny Lenia, sung by the tenor Tom Walker (better legs than most nannies); and so it goes on, a regular la ronde of sexes, lovers, mistresses both carded and discarded.

Cavalli’s music is very much of its time, a time when operas were only just beginning to be more than plays with continuous music. If any action there be, it occurs in recitative; there follows sometimes an aria or an arioso, dwelling on the emotion set up in the recit.; love, hate, jealousy, aggression or what have you. There is some comedy aboard, a couple of good numbers on a recurring bass, occasionally a concerted number, rarely a chorus. Alas, Cavalli does not possess the divine spark that Monteverdi’s music has, it rumbles on agreeably but, as a navy man might say, there are not enough shots in his locker. There is a lot of monotony because the various gambits of melody and harmony are not varied enough. Mind you, most of the singing was good and so was the ‘authentic’ orchestra with some nice trumpets, sackbut’s in plenty, harpsichord, harp and those forebears of the double-bass, theorbos whose long necks protrude from the pit like periscopes. Christian Cumyn was the conductor keeping things lively and timely.

I think the voices were miked and the vocal level was formidable. Staging and lighting were highly professional. The director/designer David Fielding had opted for updating (to about 1980) and a jazzy approach. Thus we had a car and a motor-bike on stage, a lift, scenes in a washroom (very mod. Con.) and playboy bunnies rabitting about. Good legs seemed as much a pre-requisite as a good voice.

A good section of the audience (full house) seemed well pleased with the whizzy-dizzy show but some of us were starved of memorable music. Heli was the second offering this season of Grange Park Opera (nr. Winchester) whose season opened with Norma and will continue until August with Flying Dutchman, The Cunning little Vixen and Rigoletto. The venue is a partly crumbling Palladian-type mansion set in glorious Hampshire countryside. Mérite un détour.

A SEXLESS LULU

2009-06-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

There was booing at the close of Covent Garden’s latest new production Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, provoked by a staging that was a no-no, no furniture, no décor but screens, and a singer in the title-role without projection, charm or lustre; and a cast not permitted to make gestures. The singing however was spot-on and the orchestral playing, under music director, Antonio Pappano, was very fine.

The producer/director (I was there for the first of the run, June 4) was Christof Loy who writes in the programme book: “…my recent productions have been increasingly minimalist, aesthetically and gesturally.” Ouch!

But the orchestra in Lulu is gestural in the extreme, like a sea of seething emotions, sensual, some would say erotic. Yet the performers on stage were hamstrung, with no furniture, no props, and no gestures. The three male corpses were not allowed to stay dead; after some minutes they got up and walked off the stage! And the protagonist, Lulu herself, was miscast. No doubt the music staff checked on her voice, that she was capable of coping with Berg’s demands, her music covers a big range from bottom C to the stratosphere. Fine. The Swedish soprano, Agneta Eichenholz, was up to the mark in this respect. But did the staff find out if she could portray this femme fatale – she is too mature to be called a sex kitten, she is more like a sex cat – and could she convince us that she was so wildly attractive to men that they would die in the attempt to possess her? I think not. Without these qualities Lulu can even become boring, especially if drably dressed in a production that lacked suitable realism.

So we had a situation in which the singing and playing was outstanding but the behaviour on stage thoroughly unconvincing.

Within these limits the cast did its best, in particular Klaus Florian Vogt as Alwa, Michael Volle as his father Dr. Schön, and Jennifer Larmore, the faithful lesbian Grafin Geschwitz (now she was sexy all right!)

Poor Alban Berg; he died in 1935 at the age of fifty as the result of a sting (where the bee sucked, there died Berg). He had completed the vocal score of the final act but not orchestrated it. Friedrich Cerha finished it off. What Berg did complete was an orchestral suite in six movements which personally I find more satisfactory than the opera itself. And I have a hunch (unconfirmed) that Berg composed first the accompaniment, the orchestral part of the opera and then added the vocal parts. Because the balance is often faulty, the voices often muddy, the texture preventing the music from projecting its full emotional force, with its slithering strings, sexy saxophone, trenchant piano chords and sensual harmonies.

Also, the plot is difficult to follow on stage, these are so many characters, some without sufficient dramatic substance. And the third act is too long. (Isn’t Berg’s first opera, Wozzeck, superior, a true masterpiece, convincing in a way that Lulu is not, despite its many gorgeous moments of iridescent, orchestral, marvels?)

What a shame that the careful and loving vocal and orchestral preparation of Berg’s final work was let down by a wilful and surely wrong-headed stage director!

DONZETTI IN INGHILTERRA AND HOLLAND PARK

2009-06-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Donizetti had obsessions. Including one with the United Kingdom? Beside Roberto Devereux, which opened the Holland Park Opera season in London on June 2 (I was there), he composed Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth, Lucia di Lammermoor, Maria Stuarda and Emilia di Liverpool (which opens, you may remember ‘among the mountains near Liverpool’) not forgetting Rosamunda d’Inghilterra; that is; six Brit venues out of his seventy or so operas. Roberto was composed in 1837 when its composer was forty years of age, with another eleven years of life to go in his sad life and unique death (which I’ll come to later). The venue of the première was the San Carlo in Naples and Donizetti wrote to his publisher; “it is not for me to tell you now how it went. I am more modest than a whore: therefore I should blush. But it went very, very well. (They also called out the poet).” Ronzi di Begnis who played the part of Queen Elizabeth had a great success; and so did Majella Cullagh, the Irish soprano, at Holland Park. In fact, she triumphed. An impressive stage presence, she sang superbly, coping with the wide range and florid coloratura, her emotions and tones covering the gamut from tender to ferocious. Donizetti repaid her by giving her the best music, particularly the duets with Roberto of the title-role, a fluent and most capable tenor (the programme’s biography lists venues and appointments but, as so often, fails to tell us nationality). Yvonne Howard gave a good account, vocally and histrionically, of Sara, Duchessa di Nottingham, who is Roberto’s love (this opera grants Roberto no wife, as he had in reality). The music for the duets of Sara and Roberto are not nearly of such good quality as those of Roberto and the Queen.

There is banality sometimes in the music but the arias are good and the finale of act two is wonderful music, chorus included; once or twice Donizetti lets rip in a thrilling and passionate way. Richard Bonynge (mispelt in the programme) conducted a tidy performance that showed love and respect for the score. There are some interesting bits of scoring; woodwind introductions, dramatic use of trombone and side-drum. Our national anthem is briefly quoted in the prelude – but nobody stood up.

The season at Holland Park goes on until mid-August and the operas to be performed are: Hansel and Gretel, La Bohème, Orpheus in the Underworld, Un Ballo in Maschera and Kát’a Kabanová.

Lindsay Posner’s direction was free of ‘concept’ and tricks, thoroughly circumspect, frankly on the dull side. Adam Cooper was named as chorographer but was little in evidence. Costumes satisfactory.

It was a most enjoyable evening and the audience, graced by the presence of the conductor’s wife, Dame Joan Sutherland, responded with generous applause.

Donizetti’s death: apparently the composer was something of a sexual athlete – preferring trios to the more conventional duos; in his final mental and physical decline he indulged in onanism to such a degree that he died as a result. He might be said to have died by his own hand.

Dame Joan Sutherland and Holand Park Directors

MAAZEL HITS THE ANVIL

2009-05-01T03:09:00.000-07:00

In case you live anywhere near Basingstoke and haven’t yet visited the Anvil Concert Hall (opened 1994) let me wave a flag for it. First –class acoustic, comfortable, accessible (car-park handy), nice walk-about, helpful bars, interesting programmes and events, 1350 seats. Basic shoe-box shape but no right angles behind platform (Rudolf Steiner would have approved).

On April 3 I heard a concert given by the Philharmonia Orchestra (regular visitor) conducted by Lorin Maazel, the most fascinating director to watch because his technique must be the surest in the world. He is not always the most enjoyable to hear because sometimes he can pull the music about. I find his rehearsals more rewarding than his concerts, there being no audience to watch him.

On this Hampshire visit, however, Maazel did not play to the gallery and his performance of the main work of the evening, Sibelius Symphony no. 2, was exemplary, every detail cared for, but never at the expense of the trajectory of the music as a whole; amazing to be able to follow a cogent argument in sound, the material laid before our ears, fragments at first which gradually build into an aural and intellectual edifice. The tonal juxtapositions and subsequent resolutions that Sibelius composed are deeply satisfying to heart and mind.

Do you, listener, sometimes wish that the finale’s grand tune would come back a third time? But no doubt there are cogent reasons why Sibelius ended the work the way he did; granite-faced old Finn, he knew what he was doing. And so did Maazel and the orchestra; it was superb.

The evening had begun with Fauré’s touching, tender and apposite incidental music for Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas and Mélisande. After which we were regaled with an example of Lorin Maazel’s third occupation. For he began his career as a child prodigy violinist and nowadays his compositions figure in his programmes. Skuttlebutt has it that he paid Covent Garden a quarter-of-a-million pounds to put on his Orwell Opera 1984 which nobody seemed to enjoy. Perhaps he has a deal with the Philharmonia. At any rate at Basingstoke we had to listen for half-an-hour to his Music for Violoncello and Orchestra. On the positive side this was a good show piece for the orchestra which all departments played consummate skill. The work is not discordant all the time but it seems contrived by a clever mind with no heart. The composer writes that a subtitle could be dreamscape. Hm! My subtitle might echo the title of an old musical: One Damn Thing After Another (ODTAA). The cellist Han-na Chang was faultless, coping with difficulty Maazel had thrown in her way; but for quite long periods her cello was silent while trumpets screamed, strings sounded air-raid warnings, tom-toms tom-tommed, a lady rushed about the platform playing a harpsichord and other keyboard instruments, although we could not hear the sounds she mad, anymore than we could hear a player fingering an accordion.

Now in the Thirties and earlier, an audience might have walked out or made rude noises when music like this was performed but today audiences are more polite (frightened?). At any rate Maazel and his cellist were regaled with applause.

Could your reviewer be wrong? He is mindful of the fact that when Fauré’s gentle and perfectly proportioned Pelléas music was first performed in London (Sarah Bernhardt played Mélisande) the Times reviewer wrote that “its continued absence of tangible form, not to speak of it’s actual ugliness” etc. So, you see times and Times can change.

--- John Amis

A TAKE ON HANDEL’S ALESSANDRO

2009-04-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

If that great expert on Handel’s operas, Winton Dean, took three large pages to explain the plot of the Master’s 1726 Alessandro, your scribe hasn’t a hope in hell of reducing it to a paragraph. Presumably Handel chose the story because it contained juicy parts for the two prima donne in the cast, the one long in his company, Cuzzoni, the one he famously threatened to defenestrate if she didn’t mind her ps and qs and the latest Italian import, Faustina Bordoni.

Things were not exactly made clearer by the stage director, William Relton, who updated the action to Oxford in the twenties, dreaming spires but with a touch of blackshirt thuggery from the thirties. The problem of course with Handel operas is the almost complete lack of ensembles and the plethora of arias in that old ABA form. If you don’t do something with them, yawning can set in; and if you spice it up too much, you risk damage to Handel’s beautiful music.

The beginning was not too promising with Alex (for short, kissing Clito in the overture.) And then the first numbers took place in: a) rugger scrums, b) a tea party, c) a sconcing and d) a lavatory. My sense of propriety at this point diminished because the staging was so brilliant, even though, as usual when you start juggling with centuries, the mores, manners and class distinctions go to pot. Once one realised that the producer’s motto was ‘anything goes’ things developed towards the end into a ‘top hat, white tie and tails’ number, one could than relax and let one’s blood pressure alone.

It was all great fun; the singers had good voices and could cope with the coloratura bravura runs, roulades and other vocal devices that Handel composed as well as the wonderful lyrical tunes. Countertenors that sounded musical and the two ladies were excellent. Slim Susanna Hurrell (Roxana) could roll about on the floor and still sing perfectly, and give an exposition of happiness; Sarah-Jane Brandon (Lisaura), more spacious in looks, was wonderfully expressive. Christopher Lowery (Alessandro) had a daffy look but a great commend of his florid countertenor music. James Oldfield (Clito) sounded a beautiful bass voice. But there were also stars in the pit: Laurence Cummings directed the London Handel Orchestra, period instruments of course, purity down below if not up above.

There is probably a halfway house between this foolery and purist straight stuff but until someone with taste, respect and imagination comes along with a better solution this hit-and-miss kind of production will have to do. This one certainly worked, ‘up to a point, Lord Copper.’

- John Amis

DIE FEEN IN PARIS

2009-04-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

It seems that anything composed by Richard Wagner will draw applauding crowds these days. The Ring is always sold out and just now all performances of the first opera he composed, at the age of twenty, are drawing full houses in a Paris run at that lovely Chatelets theatre. I saw the second performance of Die Feen on March 29.

Wagner, as always wrote his own libretto, taking a story by Carlo Gozzi, a tale about fairies and mortals. Arindal as loved by a fairy, Ada, who has him under a spell. Ada wants to hand in her fairy cards and marry a mortal, a tenor natch. To this end, he has to perform some fiendish tasks and suffer some even more fiendish torments from her. Meanwhile back at the ranch his sister Lora is defending Arindal’s kingdom which is going to ruin. It takes 3 long acts before a happy ending is reached; even with cuts Die Feen lasts three hours.

Now Wagner in his prime can last longer than that but by that time he could beguile you, bedevil you with leading motives, orchestral splendour and even occasionally enchant you with melody. But not at the age of twenty. Mainly he serves up the sort of music he was conducting at that period of his life ‘like Weber not under pressure’ Ernest Newman wrote. There are not many memorable moments in Die Feen although the fledging composer was capable of writing a score, suitably planned, but with more than a share of mauvais quarts d’heures.

What made the performance tolerable was the production and much of singing and playing. The Spanish director Emilio Sagi applies imagination, finesse and charm to the staging, décor and costumes to match by Daniel Blanco and Jésus Ruiz. Ada appears in one scene from a vast rose, another scene has a twenty-five feet high chandelier that must have sent the budget sky-high. Sometimes things get rather camp with male bare-chested fairies wearing diaphanous skirts. There are plenty of girls though and the performance begins and ends in swirling pink. Why the hero Arindal spends two acts in a green frock is not explained. Never mind, it was all good fun and helped to pass the time.

The performance of the evening was by the German singer, Christiana Liber with a voice that was strong, pure, bang in the middle of the note and full of drama. Her mortal lover, Arindal was the American tenor William Joyner, extremely competent but no charm or presence. His sister, Lora, was the Georgina-American Lina Tetruashvili whom we commended at Wexford last Halloween as Miss Bad Girl in Snow Maiden. She’s Miss Good Girl in this and a first rate performer to cherish. Ensemble, chorus and orchestra excellent under Marc-Minkowski, a name we know here from CD’s, good to enjoy his work in the flesh.

Signs and portents? Yes, a phrase here and a modulation there, very occasionally; but on the whole, the music of the future was in the future. But in the story line there were also some familiars; forbidden enquiry, a fairy garden, magic weapons, a touch of redemption and a final transfiguration, all of these were to ring a bell.

I hope that Die Feen (The Fairies) will be performed on rare occasions in future. My motto is; let sleeping fairies lie.

- John Amis

PARSIFAL UNSTAGED

2009-03-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Busy Russian at the helm

Asked whether she preferred drama on radio or television, the lady opted for radio. Why? “Because the scenery is better.” Which has a sort of bearing on the question whether opera is better in the opera house or the concert hall. When you consider the disease that besets the majority of opera productions these days when ‘concept productions’ are so prevalent, and when ignorant and unmusical producers are so keen to put their egotistic stamp on their efforts, we can be thankful for concert performances of opera that allow the listener to hear the music and imagine the action.

Of course, a good production is the better of the two options: one that has respect for the opera, one that shows imagination in tune with the work. These thoughts came to mind attending on March 12 a performance of the third act of Parsifal. The London Symphony Orchestra was directed by that busy Russian, Valery Gergiev, the Dapertutto of the conducting world. He is not renowned for his direction of Wagner but although I have heard more inspiring performances this was a clear one, impassioned and technically secure, the players straining at the leash to give of their best. There was a fine sonority to be heard, the strings giving a luxurious sheen to their sound was they bore down on their G Saite (G strings).

The singing of Amfortas and Gurnemanz could scarcely have been bettered: the Russian baritone Evgeny Nikitin tugged at our heartstrings and the Dutchman Robert Holl was a superb Gurnemanz, sympathetic and with a voice as huge as a battleship. The single line that Wagner allotted to Kundry in this act was sung by a member of the LS Chorus. Chorus excellent.

Curious how Debussy and Nietzsche both doted on Wagner, then reneged and became as anti-Wagner as Stravinsky was all the time.

The Parsifal, Russian Sergey Semishkov lacked a true Heldentenor ring but sang his part intelligently (he looked curiously like photographs of an unsmiling Francis Bacon); figuratively I thought of his entrance, immersed in black armour, complete with vizier – as a sort of holy Ned Kelly. I also remembered Ernest Newman quoting Wagner’s comment on contemporary criticism that the text was blasphemous: “the idea of Christ being a tenor … phew!”

MELBOURNE’S NEW CONCERT HALL

2009-03-20T06:37:00.000-07:00

The capital of Victoria has a new music room, a large recital room seating a thousand, no proscenium, just a stage abutting the first row of the audience. All wood: walls, ceiling, floor, even the chair backs. The walls seem to flow, with a two inch indentation looking somewhat like diagrams of ocean charts. A leaflet tells us what to savour – a big bass response. True, a bit too big, supporting horns come at us overbearing. Our old friend Bill Lyne, who ran London’s Wigmore Hall for so long with good taste and success, is quoted as saying; The Elizabeth Murdoch Hall will inspire artists to give their best. Who is Elizabeth Murdoch? the mother of Rupert (but) a much loved lady in these parts, the opening of her hall coincided with her 100th birthday in late January.

In passing: although many are convinced that wood produces the best acoustic, note that our perfect chamber music venue in London, the Wigmore Hall, is not all wood but mostly plaster, combined with wood and marble. My ears tell me that this new Melbourne Hall needs quite a bit of tweeting before it meets the claims made for it. The sound is resonant to the point of crudity, almost bathroom, that is from the circle and from the back stalls, where I sat for two concerts. Only from the third row of the stalls, where I sat for the third concert, did I get a good sound, where the sound flowed naturally. Not only was the bass response too loud but also there seemed to be a favoured octave: A above middle C upwards to top A in the treble clef. Sometimes string sound disappeared.

The programmes that I went to, February 6 -13 were mixed, sometimes orchestral first half, chamber music after the interval. First night we had the Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music but the beautiful score did not jell in performance, despite good singing from local soloists (though the “Elsie Suddaby” soprano fluffed her two climactic top notes). And the final scene of Don Giovanni was not properly coherent and in the Trout Quintet Schubert’s winning music winningly played by Piers Lane with the Goldner Quartet, the string sound often faded away. Another evening the excellent no-vibrato-period-instrumented-Brandenburg Orchestra in toothsome Mozart movements (the slow ones from the Clarinet Concerto and the Elvira Madigan C Major Piano Concerto K. 467) there were the same deficiencies. Only the crystal clear stratospheric Queen of the Night was satisfactory, wonderfully sung by American soprano, Cynthia Siedel (look out for her, she’s the tops). Sitting close to the stage came enchantment in sound and performance: Gidon Kremer and his Baltic Ensemble in a programme called After Bach Adagio and Fugue/Mozart followed by the Bach Chaconne.

At 62 Kremer is still the mature master; knees bent, rather horse-faced (handsome horse mind you) and no kow-towing, he is superior in many respects to the amazing Kennedy, Mutter, Perlman and the gorgeous young girlies. Gubaidolina’s Improvisations on a Bach motive for string quartet were diverting and so were some choice Piazolla numbers. Three of Bach’s Inventions were magically played on a vibraphone by Istvan Petenko. The encore, played by all hands, ragged Eleanor Rigby to rousing effect.

So …. if in Melbourne’s new recital room, try and sit almost on the performers’ laps, or else wait for further tweetings.

Coda: I also attended one late night recital in the adjacent small Salon, a programme given by superb flautist Geoffrey Collins with old friend Roger Woodward, still in the fine fettle, piano bashing as is his wont and as required too often by avant garde composers. No doubt the performers were scrupulously accurate in works by Ann Boyd, Takemitsu and Richard Meale. Not my tasse de thé, to my ears more like stale ship’s biscuits; and really! fluting into the strings of the piano, isn’t that old hat by now?

Audiences: none of these events was more than two-thirds full.

THE VIRTUOSO

2009-03-20T06:30:00.000-07:00

Sonya Orchard, Harper-Collins

The Virtuoso is a remarkable book by a young Australian musician turned novelist – rave reviews before and since the launch last month in Melbourne and Sydney. The unusual format is a sort of biography within a fiction, about a young boy student who falls in love with Noël Mewton-Wood a gifted Melbourner who debuted with Beecham, had a good career, made over a dozen first-class records of concertos, played at Proms, Wigmore Hall and Aldeburgh, great friend of Tippett, Britten and was part of the London Musical scene. He was a depressive and tragically, committed suicide in 1953, aged only 31. The author’s name is Sonia Orchard and she lives in Melbourne with her husband James and their two baby daughters.

Why did Noël commit suicide? His lover-partner, Bill, non-musician, sometime British Council rep in Germany, died of a ruptured appendix and Noël felt guilty. Also he considered, mistakenly, that his career was in decline. He was a remarkable musician with a sure technique, rather in the Clifford Curzon mould, although with more leanings towards contemporary music. Lately critics have praised the recent two-set Decca CDs of his recordings of concertos; Beethoven 4, Tchaikovsky 2, the Shostakovich with trumpet, and Schumann’s solo Kinderszenen, etc. Later this year his complete oeuvre will be issued by Decca, including Tchaikovsky 1, Chopin1, Bliss etc. The slow movement of the Chopin is the best version I know and the Bliss equals Solomon’s. Noël was at his best in the recording studio. He recorded the Busoni on EMI with Beecham conducting. It was with Beecham that he made his debut in London and the old conductor conceded at rehearsal that Noël was right when the cherubic seventeen year old corrected him; “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings” he responded.

The novel story is told by an I, a young male student pianist in love with Noël who has an affair with him. Orchard writes graphically, flowingly, poetically at times and evokes quite remarkably the London musical scene. She tells a good yarn, making many interesting musical points on the way. I think, in fact I am sure, that even those who don’t know his name, will find it a book to cherish and perhaps shed a few tears over. None more than myself to whom Noël left his concert grand piano. The night before he took cyanide he talked to me for an hour on the telephone with not a word about dying.

A link to an Australian site selling the book, http://www.readings.com.au/interview/sonia-orchard

MUSIC IN THE OMAN

2009-03-20T06:25:00.001-07:00

A quarter of a century ago the Sultan of Oman decreed a visit to his capital Muscat of the London Symphony Orchestra; I went as a scribe and hanger-on. Especially for the visit he had also decreed that a large hotel be built with a concert hall in the middle of it. And lo! It came to pass, Al Bustan Hotel, nestling between limestone crags that look naked because there is no soil, therefore no trees so that they look almost unreal, like fibre glass. The LSO was somewhat apprehensive about the visit as it feared that in Arabia there might be liquid but without alcohol in it. But when we arrived off our flight at four in the morning we were greeted in the hotel atrium with the sounds of the harp, the splashing of fountains and the popping of champagne corks. Moreover when the lads and lasses retired to their rooms, they found a bottle of Johnny Walker beside each bed. The week was to be more enjoyable than anticipated! The atrium, by the way, is 115 feet high, the dome hoisting huge chandeliers, the whole hotel de luxe, the cuisine likewise.

The Concert Hall was well designed, spacious, an 800-seater, well upholstered, main colour dark plum with goodish acoustics that have been improved subsequently. The conductor was the former LSO leader, John Georgiadis and before the first of the two concerts he was instructed to stand to await the arrival of the Sultan. He stood for some forty-five minutes. Before the second concert he sat down on a chair to await the equally late arrival of the monarch. The Sultan was not best pleased with the apparent incivility. The Sultan has ruled the state absolutely since 1970. And successfully, his subjects respect him. To quote only one statistic, in 1970 there were three schools in Oman, now there are over a thousand. And by law, buildings have to have national characteristics, such as crenellations, they are mostly white and do not scrape the sky, having a slightly toytown appearance, pleasing.

The Sultan was pleased with the LSO visit but had sensibly decided that Oman must have its own orchestra. So some thirty or so boys were selected to form an orchestra in the future, now called the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra. Instruments to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds were ordered from Boosey and Hawkes, tutors engaged, mostly from the U.K.

So I was keen to hear the result 25 years later; to find what progress had been made. The first thing I noticed was that quite a few of the boys were by now bald. Also that there was nearly a score of girls in the band, looking in their uniforms of headdresses, shawls and draperies of red with green tunics, the colours of the Omani flag, like so many Red Riding Hoods. The programme of the concert I attended on March 2 was quite demanding: the prelude to Verdi’s Nabucco, a suite of Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, not the usual one we hear for strings only but one with full orchestra and harpsichord, and the First Symphony of Sibelius. The conductor was Simon Wright, brother of that Wright who Rogers BBC music and the Proms. He obviously commands the respect of the orchestra and it played proficiently for him, with great enthusiasm; the first tutti in the Verdi nearly knocked the audience out of its plush seats. The first oboe and the bassoons were first class, the strings occasionally dodgy but this was a real orchestra and will improve if it continues to have good visiting conductors, who get on well with the players. Sir Colin Davis was here a little time ago but sadly did not hit it off too well with the band, so that a repeat of his concert in London’s Barbican on March 5 was scrubbed.

I cannot pretend that this orchestra is of international standard yet but I can say that the concert I went to was a pleasurable experience that I would willingly repeat. Simon Wright, conductor of the Leeds Choral Society for many years, did an excellent job; maybe his brother should give him a London concert.

Prokofiev: A life of Music

2009-02-04T01:46:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 18 March 2009
Prokofiev: A life of Music
John Amis and Tait Memorial Trust Awardees

John Amis together with Mary Jean O’Doherty, James Homann, Amir Farid and Claire Howard present an evening on Prokofiev. Works to include Diabolique Opus 4, Toccata Opus 11, War and Peace arias, The Love of 3 Oranges and Songs Without Words. Tickets £23

7 for 7.30pm in Chelsea, London

For tickets and full details please visit www.taitmemorialtrust.org or email info@taitmemorialtrust.org.

DIE TOTE STADT TRIUMPHS

2009-02-04T01:39:00.000-08:00

Interest in Korngold grows apace. His superb film scores (2 Oscars) have made people keen about Erich Wolfgang, 1897 – 1957. His middle name was lived up to, for he was one of the most precocious composers ever. He had a triumphant childhood, adolescence and young manhood in Vienna but was hounded out of Germany and Austria by the Nazis, moved to America where he became a star cinema composer in Hollywood. Mahler, Strauss, Furtwängler, Šibelius and Puccini proclaimed his exceptional qualities, he had a ballet produced at the Vienna Opera when he was still in short pants, Schnabel played a Piano Sonata K had composed when he was thirteen, he was made a professor at the Vienna State Academy and his operas were performed all over the German speaking countries and beyond. In 1920 Die Tote Stadt was premiered simultaneously in Cologne and Hamburg, in Vienna a month later. It was about time that Covent Garden let us see and hear that opera and the British première arrived on January 27.

I prepared for that premiere by listening three times to a CD of the work and I confess to being underwhelmed. The music is, to my taste, unfocused, brilliantly written for the orchestra but altogether too loud too much of the time and with vocal writing that keeps the singers straining at the top of their range, Korngold continually makes Straussian gestures but they lack the melodic potency of the older master and they do not show the same love that Strauss had for the human voice. But on the stage, in an exceptionally fine production, the story is told with the stage know-how of a master.

The story is very much of its time, a time when Europe was still lamenting the mass killing of millions of men so that remembrance of the dead was in many people’s mind (Conan Doyle and all that cult). Die Tote Stadt is about Paul still grieving obsessively for his wife Marie, conserving her memory with portraits of her, even a plaid of her hair. One day, however in the dead city of Bruges (get the connection?) he sees a (dead) ringer of that wife. She is called Marietta, a dancer who might perhaps be cast as Odile; is she immoral because she wants to enslave every man or is she a child of nature? Paul’s grief gives way to infatuation. Paul’s best friend is Frank but he becomes a rival, for he seems also to be having it off with Marietta, she casting sexual favours to all-comers, including a certain Count/Pierrot of a harlequinade (shades of Ariadne auf Naxos). Paul alternates between having his cake and going hungry with grief. All this with the back ground of Bruges and it’s religious processions. Eventually Marietta goes too far in taunting Paul and desecrating the shrine he has created, he strangles her with Marie’s plaid of hair. All a bit sick really. And no catharsis in the music when the whole thing turns out to be a dream. Frank and Paul are friends again and plan to leave the dead city. And Marietta pops in to collect her brolly and some roses she left behind. Quiet ending.

The evening was a triumph of artistry. The production by Willy Decker (from Salzburg and Vienna) was perfect, completely non-concept, entirely at the service of and with respect for the work, imaginative and mind-blowing, totally satisfying, a great evening in the opera-house. Equally commendable was the singing and acting all round. It is Paul’s show and the American tenor, Stephen Gould, was a star, coping with the high tessitura and its jagged line, also living the part. As did also the German singer, Nadja Michael as an utterly convincing Marietta (occasionally doubling as the shade of Marie), delighting in the 1920 costumes and revealing a personality and allure that was captivating. The only quality that would have lifted enjoyment even higher would have been the sort of vocal charisma that earlier singers had, like Maria Jeritza and Richard Tauber in the Twenties. Crowning the evening was the debut in the Royal Opera House of the conductor Ingo Metzmacher; no praise is too high for his handling of the score and our orchestra.

The story was originally a novel called Bruges-la-morte by Georges Rodenbach and the opera libretto was by the composer himself, with the helping hand – only revealed in 1975 – of his father, Julius who, as a feared Viennese music critic, sensibly wished to remain anonymous, fearing that his reputation might harm his son’s. When Die Tote Stadt had its premiere Korngold was twenty three years of age.

Max Reinhardt got Korngold to Hollywood to write extra music for his film ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (Mickey Rooney the best Puck ever) and the composer was able to stay on. The Sea Hawk, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and Robin Hood (Errol Flynn at his best) brought forth wonderful scores from Korngold. He also produced concert works; in 1945 the luscious, high sugar content Violin Concerto (Heifetz’ recording is tops) and the 1951 Symphony in F sharp minor, which I consider a great work, worthy to be spoken of as a successor to Mahler’s Tenth.

MATILDE DI SHABRAN

2008-11-20T01:31:00.000-08:00

Rossini’s Runt?

The background to this opera is readworthy: Rossini composed most of Matilde di Shabran (where dat ? probably Iraq) in 1822 when he was 28 but already famous for his Tancredi, L’Italiana in Algieri, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, La Cenerentola and over a couple of dozen others. The libretto arrived late and Rossini had to call in his mate Pacini to help him finish the score ready in time for the Naples premiere – which was a flop, not helped by the conductor having an apoplectic fit on the day of the dress rehearsal. Rossini could not face going to the second performance but somehow the opera survived and was given eleven productions in Europe and beyond within ten years. So it was not an absolute fiasco (Rossini drew one on a card he sent his mother). Paganini liked it so much he offered to conduct some performances of it, which he did; and he even played in one of them. The horn player did not turn up play his all-important obbligato part in act so Paganini played the notes on his viola. He and Rossinni larked about one evening in carnival time dressing in drag and going a-begging in the streets, quite successfully, not surprisingly since Rossini was quite clever on guitar and Paganini was not a bad fiddler. The composer was presumably glad to receive a few pence since the impresario had refused to pay him for an opera that was not completed. Mind you Rossini did later write in the Pacini bits and they are played at Covent Garden. But somehow as the twentieth century loomed Matilde became neglected.

Francis Toye in his splendid biography of 1935 is dismissive of the opera writing that we need not spend much time on it, although there are some good bits in it, particularly the lighter moments. But there are heavier bits in it. The plot is one of the sillier ones ever hodge-podged together. It concerns Corradino a powerful nobleman who is a misogynist of the direst order who has to take care of Matilde; he nearly kills her but ends up bamboozled and seduced by her, little bossyboots that she is.

The score has a curious feature; a number may start off as a solo but then one character, maybe two, three, four or five, will start chipping in. In other words it is mainly an ensemble piece and as Toye remarked, the lighter moments are the best. Most of it is not first-class Rossini, to stand together with Ory, Centerentola or the Barber but second-class Rossini is surely worth hearing any evening of the week. And here at Covent Garden (I saw it on Armistice night) it holds the attention and delights, enthusiastically conducted by Carlo Rizzi. Juan Diego Florez is a famous tenor these days; he has made several highly acclaimed CDs and he sang wonderfully fluently, articulating every coloratura device that Rossini hurls at him. But on this evening these was not much bloom in the voice; mostly it was a dry sound, papery, not warm or ingratiating. I am told by a musician friend who loves the music of the otto cento that he was seeing M di S for the fourth time in the present run, that Florez played it straight on the first night but that by now he was sending it up, so that the misogynist was ever more ridiculous – but funny, very funny, physically as well as vocally agile.

The singer of the title-role was also wonderfully articulate, able to accept the trump cards Rossini dealt her and to play them with brio. Matilda is not the most sympatric of parts; she reminds me of John Donne’s phrase “self-tickling proud” but Aleksandra Kurzak fitted the bill with spot-on singing and great charm. Sub-plots included a travesty-role prisoner Vessilina Kasarova who sang lustily and a comic poet Isidoro who may, for all I could tell have delivered most of his part in Neapolatan dialect – good voice, Alfonso Antoniozzi. Sergio Tramonti’s single set included two Escher – like staircases which looked beautiful and waltzed about on several turntables. Male chorus at the beginning, women admitted at half time. Thoroughly good, entertaining show. Its sub-title is Bellezza, é cour di ferro – Beauty and (Corradino) Ironheart.

By John Amis
17 November 2008

NEW OPERA HOUSE IN WEXFORD

2008-11-11T14:10:00.000-08:00

Glory be! Wexford has a fine new opera house, sprung Phoenix-like on the site of the old Georgian house, standing tucked away in a little street in this funny old town (pop. circa 120,000) in the bottom right hand corner of the Irish Republic. They didn’t manage to get it up and going as quickly as Glyndebourne; last year they temporized in another building but this year they have a handsome new auditorium with good acoustics lined in black American walnut with comfy blue seats. As previously the foyer is a squash, not enough room for the gentry in bow ties, the furry ladies, the horse-dealers, farmers, gossoons …. and tourists come from far and wide. If it is Halloween then it is festival time in Wexford.

This is an amazing achievement. After all the house exists for opera only for these three weeks in the year and Wexford is only a small town, two and half hours driving (through the rain as likely as not) from Dublin. But its grand fun. So how did they raise the spondulicks – 33 mill. according to one paper, 26 in another? Is it all Eireish money – or did some of it sprout from Brussels?

It all began in 1951 when a certain Dr Walsh decided to wake up the town for a month, whilst in the other eleven months of the year he was the city hospital’s anaesthetist. He started with local produce, The Rose of Castile by Balfe; for some years the chorus and staffing was also local, Irish ladies and fellers on stage, and helping backstage, some with muscles pushing the scenery about, the girls busy with needle and thread in the workshop. Over the years Walsh formulated the policy of putting on operas that were rarely if ever heard in the big opera houses, three in rotation daily so that you could see them all in a weekend with side-shows elsewhere, concerts and the odd lecture. (I myself gave an odd lecture in one of my seventeen visits to Wexford.)

So in the festival there have been operas by composers like Wolf-Ferrari, Spontini, Hérold, Thomas, Mercadante, Zandonai, Goldmark, Fauré, Floyd, Rubinstein, occasionally spliced with early Wagner or rare Rossini, Gluck or Mozart, wonderful and important side-dishes to the staple fare we get at Covent Garden, Coliseum, Glynders or elsewhere.

This year many of us found that the most enjoyable show was at one of the side shows, given in a makeshift local hall seats as first come, first served (like Easy Jet), no orchestra but a good pianist. The opera was a one-acter by Rossini, Senior Bruschino. This is a farce which moves swiftly along with the occasional coloratura aria, hectic choruses and lashings of patter songs. The performance was brilliant, the stars being Marco Filippo Romano in the title-role and Andrea Zaupa as Gaudenzio, both baritones. Alberto Triola’s direction ensured that the action fairly zipped along with a heady flavour like pasta al dente with sparkling Lambrusco. Intoxicating. Another day we had a tolerable Suor Angelica, the weepy runt of Il Trittico by Puccini; but piano accompaniment did the music no favours since it emphasized the constant plonking chordal accompaniments when we needed legato strings.

So, to the big three and hands up, any reader who has even heard of Carlo Pedrotti 1817 – 93, famous conductor in his time, a Verona man who spent much of his time conducting and admining in Turin? Apart from Sibelius and his Symphony No. 8, Pedrotti is the only composer known to have discouraged performances of his own works: ”Ropa vecchia” he called them, “old stuff, old hat”. He was wrong; true his 1856 Tutti in Maschera harks back to the style of Rossini more than it harks forward (!) to Verdi whose Masked Ball was unmasked three years later but it is a conservative sounding piece of great charm and fluency with good if unmemorable tunes, the whole thing beautifully written for voices and orchestra. The plot is farcical, involving singers, an impresario, a sponsoring Turk and two pairs of lovers (Cosi fan) and the whole climaxes gracefully at a Ballo in Maschera. Brad Cooper is an Australian tenore di grazia to watch and admire, Sarah Coburn American, was an excellent prima donna impersonating a prima donna and Marco Filippo Romano was the star of the show (as he had been in Senior Bruschino) as the wily impresario. Sets, costumes, conducting all first-rate.

I saw Richard Rodney Bennett’s The Mines of Sulphur at its Sadler’s Wells premiere in 1965 and later when superbly directed by Giorgio Strehler, in the Piccolo Scala in Milan. The Mines, title from a quote from Othello, not very germane to Beverley Cross’s fluent libretto, a horror story set on the Cornish moors 200 years ago concerning a ruffian’s breaking in and murder, followed by the arrival of a troupe of actors who are made to perform for their shelter, the drama culminating in a threat of plague. A Wexford programme note, counselling for the defence, calls it an opera of sinister charms and lyrical conceit. Acting more for the prosecution, I would say that Mines is a superbly professional job but a child of its time, a time when composers felt they had to compose serially or bust. In other words there is little charm and no lyricism; and that from Bennett who before going atonal and Alban Bergian wrote charming Brittenish songs, piano works, and who later wrote clever tonal film music, Orient Express type. John Bellemer was the commanding raffian holding the action together in the sulphuric moors.

The third Wexford offering was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden, stuffed as full of Russian folk material (real and invented) in its time 1882 as his pupil Stravinsky’s Petrushka was in its time thirty years later. Snow Maiden takes a long time to get going, just as it takes a long time, too long, finishing. In between there are considerable delights, arias, choruses and the famous Dance of the Tumblers. The tumblers were spot-on, which is more than could be said of the chorus (tumbling if not bouncing Czechs, by the way, although the pick-up Festival Orchestra was mostly Irish). The singing was consistently good and wobble-free. Outstanding was the high lyric tenor, Bryan Hywel as the Czar, American but sounding like a real Russian, descendant of the great Leonid Smirnov. Five star performance but then the rest of the cast was good too: Katerina Jalvocova, travesty role of Lel, a bespectacled poetical shepherd; Natela Nicoli as Mother Spring, Lina Telruashvili (has to be Georgian with a name like that) as the sexy Kupava and Irina Samoylova in white tutus and the title role. (not many Western names but no doubt the East Europeans are glad of a job and not too expensive to hire).

Conductor Dmitri o.k. (surname Jurowski, brother of the LPO/Glyndebourne director). Pipes for trees otherwise good sets by Dick Bird with an ominous ship hulk in some scenes. Snow Maiden (she melts in the end) could do with an hour’s cut but the time passed pleasantly with tunes galore.

So, the festival always takes place at Hallowe’en; when it comes round next year, why not pop over for a good time, several glasses of Guinness, Irish hospitality and the next three operas which will be:

Maria Padilla by Gaetano Donizetti

The Ghosts of Versailles by John Corigliano

Il Cappello di Paglia di Firenze (The Florentine Straw Hat) by Nino Rota