Through a glass, darkly

I’ve always disliked turnstiles

2011-12-20T09:42:00.002Z

Download the "freelance" column of the TLS of 15 December here

Voracious modernities

2011-12-20T09:35:00.004Z

Wien Modern, 2011
Konzerthaus and various venues, Vienna

Reviewed in the TLS, 9 December

Although he was a real person, the name of Baron Münchhausen occupies a place in German-speaking culture somewhat similar to that occupied by Swift’s Gulliver in English. Münchhausen’s reputation for far-fetched stories about his exploits during the Russo–Turkish war in the service of the Russian army’s German “generalissimus” Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick, was evidently widespread during his lifetime, but it was his second career as a satirical fictional hero which proved the more lasting. The surprising adventures of Baron Munchausen were published anonymously in English in 1785 by Rudolph Raspe, a professor of the University of Cassel, who apparently fled to London after attempting to rip off one of his patrons. Raspe’s text provides the main source for the further embellished and more explicitly satirical version by the Romantic poet Gottfried Bürger, published in German the following year, and which remains the best-known version in German-speaking cultures. The stories draw on pan-European satirical traditions from Ariosto to Swift and Sterne (all three are referred to in the text, as is Don Quixote, who appears to confront and challenge the Baron and his retinue, which includes Gog and Magog). It has existed in countless different literary versions, as well as in the form of plays, a film (by Terry Gilliam) and even a board game, but not, until now, as an opera.

On the face of it, the Münchhausen tales make an odd choice for an opera. The action is all narrated, and would lose a great deal of its force if the narrator’s persona were to recede from the foreground. But the opera’s composer, Wolfgang Mitterer, is also something of an eccentric. His sound-worlds, techniques and frames of reference – not to mention physical appearance: he is rarely seen without his trademark black woollen cap – all seem worlds apart from the image and music of most Austrian composers. An organist by training, he is unusual if not unique in his use of techniques and materials from across the stylistic spectrum of rock and pop electronica, jazz, and pre- and post-war art music. But the term “eclectic”, still a somewhat dirty word among the compositional and artistic milieux of Vienna, doesn’t really do justice to Mitterer. “Voracious” is probably better. His music has a boundless energy and is both quirky and uncompromising, using processed effects, irregular structures and odd quotations and distortions in order to create music which in some sense reflects and digests the aural chaos of modern life.

Read the full article as a pdf.

I dined with the King and Queen of Sweden the other day...

2011-11-10T10:11:00.002Z

Read the "freelance" column about the Birgit Nilsson Prize from this week's TLS here:

Destiny's Child

2011-11-02T12:25:00.003Z

George Enescu
Edmond Fleg
OEDIPE
La Monnaie, Brussels

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, November 4

What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night? As riddles go, the one posed by the Sphinx to Oedipus is not a particularly hard one. Most of us learn it at primary school. Some children guess it straight off, apparently. A harder riddle is how the story of the Sphinx came into the legend in the first place, or more specifically how it kept its place there in Sophocles’ starkly humancentred treatment of the legend.

In the version of the story by the French- Jewish author and librettist Edmond Fleg, the riddle is different but the answer is the same. Fleg’s treatment of the drama is perhaps the most expansive in existence, covering the entire span of Oedipus’ life to his final transfiguration. The sphinx appears towards the end of Act Two, woken by Oedipus, who senses, after his misadventures at the crossroads, an opportunity to get his destiny back on track. “Je veux sauver la Ville”, he sings, in a brash, cocky manner not unreminiscent of Wagner’s hero Siegfried. “Réveille-toi! C’est le fils de Polybos, c’est Oedipe qui t’appelle!”

The crucial fact that Oedipus is not, in fact, Polybos’ son is left unremarked by the Sphinx, who asks whether there is anything or anyone greater than “le Destin” itself. George Enescu’s music at this point is extraordinary. His lines for the Sphinx veer between Sprechstimme and unanchored glissandi whose unpredictable contours echo her inscrutable malevolence, underlined by a non-committal polyphony in the woodwind and articulations from the céleste. A brief pause follows her question, and then an explosion in the percussion and strings brings the answer crashing down from the protagonist. “L’homme”, he cries, repeatedly. “L’homme est plus fort que le Destin!”

But is he? That, indeed, is the question posed by Sophocles, and Fleg and Enescu refocus our minds on it with striking dramatic clarity in their opera. For while the answer given by Oedipus appears to defeat the Sphinx, she concedes no such thing. Instead she recedes in half-surprised, half-knowing laughter, eventually disappearing in an upward glissando which is continued in the orchestra (by a saw), suggesting a continuity from the human realm of the voice to an inhuman one of purer sound. The uncanny musical textures linger in the noisy jubilations of the following scene, in which Oedipus is given Thebes and its widowed Queen in short order. The events that follow, as is well known, give the protagonist more than sufficient occasion to ponder the reality of his apparent victory.

“When I put down the pen after that scene”, noted Fleg some time later, “I thought I was going mad.” Enescu, too, took lengthy pause after scoring the scene, though this was not due to encroaching insanity but to the practicalities of the composer’s busy parallel career as a virtuoso violinist and conductor. A two-month concert tour separates work on the Sphinx scene from the following coronation scene. Musically, though, the two seem worlds apart, the coronation scene suffused in a blazing daylight of Walton-esque pan-diatonicism, while the preceding scene seems to presage György Ligeti, even Tristan Murail. The entire score, in fact, is criss-crossed by an extraordinary stylistic palette which seems unconstrained by the narrow orthodoxies of musical history. It is closest in spirit perhaps to Berlioz, but the sound worlds evoked in this and other scores stretch far both into future and past.

Oedipe is Enescu’s only opera, and it took him some twenty years to write. It premiered successfully in the composer’s adopted city of Paris in 1937, but never entered the repertoire there, or anywhere else. A staging in Brussels in 1956 followed, at the command of Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, but since then its presence on the operatic stage has been sporadic at best. Certainly, it is an ambitious piece to mount. Casting the title role, in particular, is nigh-on impossible (“anyone except Bryn Terfel is a compromise”, the current production’s conductor told me before it opened), and the complexities of the string writing and the frequent use of quarter-tones require more rehearsal time than most opera houses can manage these days. Still, the case for mounting one of the most intriguing operatic essays of the last century remains convincing, and the management of La Monnaie are to be congratulated. The staging is by Àlex Ollé of La Fura dels Baus, most recently seen here, and in London, in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre. His conception takes its cue from the timelessness of the legend. Alfons Flores’s set opens as a fourtiered frieze, supported by a rough wooden scaffold, populated by life-size clay models and their animated counterparts. The absence of perspective captures brilliantly the primitivism of the Thebes into which Laius and Jocasta’s ill-starred offspring is born. But after the first act, the scaffold moves further back, progressively, opening up to scenes located squarely in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Mérope is a psychoanalyst, the Sphinx resides in a crash-landed Messerschmitt, and the pestilential, mud-caked chaos of the third and fourth acts is inspired, apparently, by the images of the red, toxic sludge which swept across the Hungarian plain last year after an explosion in an aluminium factory. It sounds odd on paper. On stage, it has a tremendous effect.

With the exception of the chorus, the evening is less of a success musically speaking. There is no lack of commitment in Leo Hussain’s musical direction, and he co-ordinates what has evidently been a Herculean effort from the orchestra and cast. But this score needs tighter control if its extravagant gestures are to avoid both incoherence and, perhaps more importantly, drowning out the singers. Dietrich Henschel’s Oedipe, in particular, was barely audible at a number of key moments, and only Marie-Nicole Lemieux, as the Sphinx, and Jan-Hendrik Rootering’s Tirésias succeed in stamping authority on their roles. Still, there is much to marvel at, and Hussain and Henschel save their best for the final act. Following what is Fleg’s oddest intervention in the myth, in which Oedipe exclaims that nothing that has passed is his fault (“Ai-je une part aux crimes ourdis par le Destin quand je n’étais pas né?”), the score changes gear, initiating a passage of marked transparency and balance. Strikingly modern, Oedipe’s attempt at self-exculpation is perhaps not altogether convincing, but Enescu’s luminous score easily overwhelms such cynicism.

Looking back on music's future

2011-10-18T10:52:00.003+01:00

EXQUISITE LABYRINTH
The music of Pierre Boulez Southbank Centre, London

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, October 14

How does Pierre Boulez's music sound through his ears? Of all the difficult and daunting questions his music seems to ask us, this seems to be the most difficult and daunting. If we could hear it as he does, would we be able to trace our passage through - as the organizers of this three-day celebration have it - the exquisite labyrinths of his music? Certainly, there are few composers who make us question the adequacy of our own listening, and this is one of his music's greatest merits, as well as one of its gravest faults.

Much of Boulez's music has a revolutionary quality, in that the composer's main concern seems often to have been to dismantle the way we hear music in general. Even now, pieces such as the second piano sonata are difficult to make sense of other than as gestures which prepare, in a variety of ways, for a music of the future.

It was in fact as the guardian of music's future that Boulez was heralded, initially by his teacher Olivier Messiaen, and later and rather more effectively by himself and the coterie of like-minded colleagues and acolytes swarming around the post-war musical nerve centre of the Darmstadt summer schools. And to be sure, few experimental artistic movements have had as profound an effect as Boulez's on the way their art has been understood more widely, not least by valorizing certain musical
traditions at the expense of others, thereby generating a kind of for-us-or-against-us progressivism which for years marginalized the work of many composers who deserved better.

It is likely that Boulez's activities as a polemicist and, later, as a conductor have had the longest-lasting effects on what audiences listen to, and how. Internationally, Boulez is perhaps better known as a conductor than a composer. His conducting activities, initially conceived as a way of ensuring his own compositions received decent performances, have also eclipsed his composing in terms of time commitments. Boulez has frequently expressed his regrets about having composed less than he would have liked, but, looking back, it is hard to decide whether the relative paucity of his output is really due to conducting or to artistic limitations implied, paradoxically, by the scale of his historical and aesthetic ambitions. A three-day "mini-festival" at London's Southbank Centre offered a rare opportunity to rehearse such questions. As often at such "immersive" events, the omissions from the programme were interesting. Sunday afternoon was given over to Pierre-Laurent Aimard's traversal, with Tamara Stefanovich, of the "complete" works for piano.

Given that description, Structures I, composed in 1951, was a notable omission, particularly so when one considers that this is the work on which principally rests Boulez's reputation as one of the chief exponents of "total" or "integrated" serialism, according to which every strand of the material is derived from a set of pre-compositional decisions. Aimard and Stefanovich did perform its successor, Structures II, however. Composed in 1962, its basic material derives from the earlier piece, but is subjected to different processes, with different implications for
interpretation and performance. Being aware of the theory only takes you so far, though, and I must confess that my primary response to three hours of Boulez's piano music was one of rising resentment. None of the music - which took in the early Notations and all three sonatas - is new to me, and some of it I have studied in detail. And yet I felt my struggle to listen with something resembling adequacy - to anticipate and respond to aspects of form and gesture - was pointless. Far from opening up my ears, I found my hearing closing up, retreating from the monochrome timbre of the instruments and the relentless disjointedness of the music.

If the afternoon's concerts reinforced some of my worst fears about the value of Boulez's music, the same evening's event restored my faith. The final concert consisted of a single work, Pli selon Pli, which Boulez had been touring in Europe for the previous month, taking with him the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and members of the Lucerne Festival Academy. Revised over a period of thirty years, the piece reached its final five-movement form in 1989. The title is taken from a line in Mallarme's sonnet "Rememoration d'amis belges" about the lifting of the mist, "fold by fold", in Bruges, revealing the buildings behind. The metaphor penetrates the entire work. Although it is a setting of three complete Mallarm9 sonnets, this is less a song cycle than a kind of exotically scored symphony during which the poetry comes in and out of focus, eventually finding itself submerged by, or perhaps sacrificed to, a music which comes to draw its supremely sensual textures from the contemplation of death.

Of all Boulez's later works, Pli selon Pli is the one which most obviously lives up to its composer's early promise to create a lasting new music. Its highly specialized instrumentation and technical demands mean that performances are bound to remain infrequent, but the chance to hear it peformed live, and with the kind of total commitment and nervous beauty brought to the vocal part by Hannigan, entails far more than the simple excitement of witnessing a rarity. What it offers, in fact, is an
experience which, in both teasing the mind and saturating the senses, gives ample room to the listener to find his own place in one of the most dazzling encounters between a musician and a poet to have emerged in the past half-century.

Public and private tragedies

2011-09-28T14:22:00.001+01:00

Alexander Medvedev and
Mieczyslaw Weinberg
THE PASSENGER
English National Opera

Giacomo Puccini
IL TRITTICO
Covent Garden

Review in the Times Literary Supplement, September 30

In a review published in these pages on April 1 this year, I wrote that the disappointments of Alexander Medvedev and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera The Portrait should not deter readers from attending the pair’s “earlier masterpiece, The Passenger, which David Pountney will bring to English National Opera in 2012”. There are two errors here, which the article’s otherwise convenient date does not excuse. The Passenger was scheduled not for 2012 but for ENO’s 2011/12 season, which opened this month with a revival of Jonathan Miller’s Elixir of Love (already branded a “classic” after a year), closely followed by its co-production of Weinberg’s opera, first seen at the Bregenz festival in 2010. The other error is that The Passenger is not, as it turns out, a “masterpiece”.

Dmitri Shostakovich, Weinberg’s friend and occasional champion, termed it thus. In the preface to the vocal score, published in 1974, Shostakovich stated that he should “never tire of the opera”, having “heard it three times already”. It is a formidable endorsement, notwithstanding that the three “performances” in question were simply occasions when Weinberg played through the score at the piano, singing the vocal parts himself for the benefit of Shostakovich and other assembled members of the Composers’ Union. The first full performance had to wait until 2006, where it was performed unstaged in Moscow. Pountney’s production is the opera’s first stage incarnation.

The story concerns a chance encounter between a former SS Aufseherin (female camp guard) Lisa (Michelle Breedt), and one of her charges at Auschwitz, Marta (Giselle Allen). The meeting takes place on a cruise ship – Lisa is sailing to Brasil as the wife of the new West German ambassador – and prompts a series of self-justificatory and ultimately self-revelatory flashbacks to her time at Auschwitz. Composed in 1968, the opera thus anticipates a recent trend in approaching the representation of the Holocaust from the perspective of the lowlier ranks among its perpetrators – uneasy but extremely important psychological ground explored elsewhere in Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) and, to a lesser extent, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. But unlike these later narratives, Weinberg’s opera is based on a source – a radio play, later a novel – itself written by a former inmate of Auschwitz. Zofia Posmysz, a Catholic Pole arrested in 1942 for involvement with underground schools, survived largely thanks to being employed as book-keeper to SS Aufseherin Anneliese Franz. At the same time, Weinberg, a Jewish-Polish pianist, fled his native country in 1939 for the Soviet Union. His family were all murdered by the Nazis while his own fate hung in Stalin’s capricious balance on several occasions. Placed under state surveillance in 1948, he wasn’t arrested until 1953, one month before Stalin’s death. This, and his friendship with Shostakovich, saved his life.

David Pountney’s production certainly displays the work to its greatest possible advantage. The set, designed by Johan Engels, is a particular triumph. The blazing white deck of a cruise ship forms the raised centrepiece, encircled by a sea of grey dust, darkness, and grim railway lines along which travels the prison camp apparatus, pushed by the prisoners themselves. The staging thus skewers the story’s central conceit, which is that continuity penetrates the contrast between the gay 1960s pleasure-seekers and the radical inhumanity of the camps. Individual performances were also committed and authoritative, especially that of Giselle Allen and of Michelle Breedt, whose rich mezzo-sporano was impressively capable of expressing conviction and doubt in the same breath; the orchestra, under Richard Armstrong, played wonderfully.

All of which makes the shortcomings of the opera itself all the more evident. The music, after an opening flourish drawn crooked from Peter Grimes, reprised in the second act, proceeds in a dull, percussionrich and mostly tonal vernacular, punctuated every so often by an ironic burst on the saxophone and snare-drum. The vocal lines, though they might well have worked better in Russian, sap energy from the libretto with their clichéd and predictable contours, demanding a great deal from the singers while offering little emotional return. Medvedev’s libretto, meanwhile, turns an extraordinarily powerful story, with a large number of inbuilt psychological pressurepoints, and angles bursting for expressive outlet, into a sequence of trite, painfully unaffecting tableaux. No significant light is shed on the relationship between the guard and her favoured charge, or on the guard’s relationship with her employers, or even with herself – this, after all, is the premiss of Posmysz’s original. The concentration on female perspective does add something, but not as much as it might (and the musical implications are problematic), but everything is laid out in a fixed-focus blur whose indifference has the unfortunate effect of colouring with kitsch those moments which, by virtue of what is represented, should be witnessed with a profound sense of tragedy.

The Passenger was Weinberg’s first opera. Moreover the personal proximity of the subject matter, which drove him to such an ambitious undertaking, might have clouded his judgement. This is understandable, as is Shostakovich’s endorsement – albeit to a lesser extent – when one considers how less well understood and represented this area of history was in the 1960s, and in Russia in particular. But when one considers, for example, the earlier film (1963) adapted from the same source by the Polish director Andrzej Munk, and its extraordinary ability to capture the significant elements of the story while preserving their crucial ambiguity, one’s faith in the relevance of opera to the defining events of the previous century is shaken, to say the least. Certainly, those still hoping for an opera which brings the genre’s peculiar gifts for psychological portraiture and ambiguity to the artistic representation of the Holocaust will have to wait a while longer. Many will, of course, be moved by the spectacle of Weinberg’s and Medvedev’s opera, and by the tremendous but misguided efforts of those responsible for staging it. But in truth it does its singular subject matter a grave disservice.

Weinberg might better have learnt from Puccini than from Shostakovich how to manipulate and focus the operatic lens. The mostly new production of Puccini’s Trittico, or “triptych” of short operas – Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi – with which the Royal Opera opened its new season, showed how effective the genre’s grasp of poetic realism can be in the right hands. The three operas have not been seen together at Covent Garden since 1965. All are now directed by Richard Jones, the last of them (which first appeared in 2007) with an undertone of simmering hilarity, while the first two (both new) proceed with a simpler and profoundly affecting dramaturgical focus on the interlocking social and private tragedies they embody. Each uses a different designer, in three Fellini-esque stagings which proceed from the grimy 1940s, sharply disciplined 50s, and garish 60s. Suor Angelica, set here in a children’s hospital (North European orthodoxy evidently feels nuns come across better when given something useful to do), was extremely moving, not least for the performances of Ermonela Jaho in the title role and Anna Larsson as her aunt, brittle and nervous to breaking point, and for the thoughtful detail of the novice nuns fussing idiotically over the unsightly mess left by the heroine’s private assumption into heaven.

Antonio Pappano, a natural in this repertoire, brought out both the economy and the quickly scaled emotional heights of these scores, which, though still relatively popular, remain under-appreciated as masterpieces of operatic precision. Puccini could be a cynical artist, but his ability to dominate his libretti and captivate an audience knows few equals, and too few imitators.

Far from civilization

2011-09-27T10:34:00.003+01:00

Workshops, improvisation and works in progress animate two European festivals

GRAFENEGG FESTIVAL
Lower Austria

LUCERNE FESTIVAL
Switzerland

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, September 16

“The danger with orchestras is that they will always try to play beautifully. It’s hard, because they are creatures of civilization, and so they naturally want to play beautifully. But you musn’t let them”: musical “civilization” is very much in the Viennese composer Heinz Karl Gruber’s blood, but he is clear about why, for him, the term has become if not quite one of abuse, then at least one signifying a serious default. Art that is “civilized”, for Gruber, is lacking: it isn’t doing its job.

His remarks on the unfortunate civilizing tendencies of orchestras were addressed to the members of a composer-conductor workshop he ran at the 2011 Grafenegg Festival. It is the first workshop of its kind at the five-year-old festival, held each August in the grounds of Schloss Grafenegg in Lower Austria, an expansive neo-gothic folly built in the 1850s by an ancestor of its current owner. Constructed around the remains of a medieval stronghold with a central courtyard, the castle expands through a Renaissance staircase, climbing up to a network of interconnecting rococo chambers abutting halls in baronial gothic style. A small secret doorway in the panelling of the grand baroque library leads into a chapel in perpendicular gothic style, with a fan-vaulted ceiling painted a deep midnight blue, from which golden stars twinkle garishly. Both the paint and gilding – like most of the restoration which, at length, followed the castle’s occupation, ransacking, and subsequent abandonment, in 1955, by Soviet troops – were carried out with the help of government money. The condition of the financial aid was that the castle and its surrounding parkland must be put to some worthy public use. The current Lord of Grafenegg, Prince Tassilo Metternich-Sándor, found the solution to the castle’s survival to lie in opening the house and gardens to visitors, drawing them in with concerts featuring local artists. Alfred Brendel was a regular guest performer.

The tradition flourished, and the grounds now feature a remarkable outdoor stage called the Wolkenturm – a kind of multi- angled sculpture which bursts out exuberantly from the surrounding tree-clad parkland – and an alarmingly severe indoor auditorium, built in record time after the first fullfledged festival (during which it rained). The indoor hall seats 1,400 and the Wolkenturm – a creation of Marie-Therese Harnoncourt (the niece of the conductor) and Ernst Fuchs – seats 1,700, with a further few hundred spilling out in pleasingly un-Viennese fashion on to the grass embankment.

The Grafenegg Festival has grown in just a few years to become a regular fixture for international touring orchestras and artists. This year they welcomed the Concertgebouw, Philadelphia Orchestra and Seoul Philharmonic, among others. As composer-in-residence at the 2011 Festival, Heinz Karl Gruber presented the symphonic poem Northwind Pictures for its world premiere by the Tonnkünstler, with Ian Bostridge and Angelika Kirchschlager among the soloists. But one senses he feels his most important task to be the workshop, which he entitled “Ink Still Wet”, and which he sees as injecting an important dose of musical reality into the festival. He specifically requested his workshop be for composer-conductors. It is by learning to communicate directly the substance of their scores that Gruber thinks composers can best come to terms with the realities of writing music. His method – which consists of abrupt practical advice and tangential anecdote, both boomed out with equal intensity – clearly achieves results. Within the space of a few days, I witnessed an accelerated blossoming of talent among the six chosen composers – four of whom were students, the remaining two established composers already in their fifties. Consisting of six short works for a percussion- rich chamber orchestra drawn from members of the Tonnkünstler, the concluding concert was a genuine triumph for the composers concerned; it was also a forceful vindication of Gruber’s modus operandi of bringing each composer into physical contact with the forces under his direction, and encouraging them through energetic gesture and (in rehearsal) raucous vocalization to demonstrate the authentic source of the musical flow.

Although the items in the programme were works in progress, several stood out. Two of them were by young British composers (In Recognition by Adam Clifford and Exo 2 by Christopher Petrie) and another – perhaps the best, all told – by the Viennese Bernd Richard Deutsch. The Ink Still Wet concert possessed an energy and vitality which the previous evening’s guests from Seoul could not match, however sparkling and brilliantly coloured their rendition, under Myung-Whun Chung, of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. As with the rest of the programme – Messiaen’s Offrandes oubliées and, with Nikolaj Znaider, Brahms’s Violin Concerto – it was a focused, vigorous performance. But unless one feels some substantial interpretative problem has been solved, or progress been made, standard concert programming of this kind rarely has the visceral sense of music being made on the spot that comes naturally to programmes of works, however unfinished, whose ink has yet to dry.

And this is precisely Gruber’s idealistic motivation. He explains that even when a composer eventually succeeds in convincing a conductor to perform one of his scores, after many meek overtures, their role in the musicmaking process remains an advisory and frequently apologetic one. “But it is the conductor who should be apologising”, bellows Gruber, “for always conducting Brahms and neglecting the music of today. It is this music which should and must be the lifeblood of culture. By positioning himself on the podium, the composer can once again place himself at the centre of things.”

Gruber’s vision owes much in outline, if not in content, to that of Pierre Boulez, who is surely the composer most responsible for energizing the field of post-war music by placing himself centre stage. One of the more recent flowerings of Boulez’s career as a composer-conductor is the annual Lucerne Festival Academy, which he established under the auspices of the wider festival in 2004. For three weeks each year, some 130 young (aged under twenty-five) orchestral musicians, as well as a handful of conductors and composers, descend on the lakeside resort. Given Boulez’s standing, and schedule, one might expect the weeks in Lucerne to be taken as a working rest-cure, the grand maître dispensing gobbets of generalized wisdom while others see to the nuts and bolts. The instrumental tuition is undertaken by others – by members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which Boulez founded in 1976 in order to raise standards in the performance of contemporary music – but until this year Boulez himself handled the packed rehearsal schedule himself. Add to this an intensive three-day conductor workshop, and his constant availability to Academy composers, and Boulez, now aged eighty-six, often works twelve to fourteenhour days. Although his direction and advice remain as exacting and acute as ever, one looks in vain for the heartless firebrand of legend. Indeed, I can think of no single figure in a comparable position who exhibits the same levels of patience and open-minded generosity as Boulez displays during these three weeks.

Boulez’s schedule was reduced this year following a cataract operation, though he was still present to rehearse and conduct the Academy Orchestra in a performance of his own Pli Selon Pli, and to take the conducting and composing masterclasses. The remainder of the orchestral programmes was taken by Boulez’s former protégé David Robertson, while the other major project for the orchestra was directed by the 2011 festival’s artiste étoile, the Swiss violist, composer and performance artist Charlotte Hug. I attended one of Hug’s rehearsals for her Nachtplasmen project. There were some perplexed faces among the students, to be sure, and on the podium Hug has neither the natural authority of Boulez nor the focused enthusiasm of Robertson. But then the score from which Hug was conducting, using a codified gestural language previously worked out with the orchestra, was a long rectangular lightbox, suspended obliquely above the heads of the players and showing a constantly changing display of tangled lines and shadowed shapes. The work is effectively an improvisation for a large orchestra. Things weren’t working when I arrived, but they were working beautifully before I left.

The Lucerne Festival was initially established in 1938 by Toscanini as an alternative to Salzburg, then under Goebbels’s control. Both events are of course entirely different today, but there is a sense in which the cosiness of Salzburg contrasts strikingly with the cool and collected modernity which characterizes Lucerne’s festival and which emanates, above all, from the edifice designed by Jean Nouvel to house it. The building, whose sharp lines seem to cut right into the mountain- ringed lake it borders, also houses an art gallery as well as the main concert hall, one of the world’s best when it was completed in the year 2000 and still seen by architects and acousticians, as well as their employers, as the venue to beat.

As at Grafenegg, I attended a number of superb concerts, including Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, both on blistering form, and a memorably intense performance of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet by the Hagen Quartet. Yet what has stuck with me was the work of another quartet, Charlotte Hug’s Stellari Quartet. Their performance of Hug’s Slipway to Galaxies took place in the art gallery, among an installation of the elegantly traced designs in which Hug records her sound imaginings. Like the orchestral work, the piece is improvisatory, much of it revolving around the use of a detached bow to play softly across all fours strings at once. One attunes to the mood as it grows in intensity, and as the light fades, eventually to pitch black. One’s listening eventually maps on to that of the performers, whose minuscule interactions and inter-responses bring with them an inter-personal sensibility of great sensitivity and fineness. After what seems like an eternity (the performance lasts an hour or so), dawn breaks, bringing extraordinary peace and what seemed to me like a new, more open pair of ears. Indeed, though it all seemed as far from “civilized” music as it is possible to get, I would be hard put to think of a work whose effect was at the same time more – how to put it? – civilizing.

Country house ghosts

2011-09-01T12:59:00.003+01:00

From Grimeborn to Glyndebourne

Jonathan Dove
MANSFIELD PARK
Arcola, London

Benjamin Britten
TURN OF THE SCREW
Glyndebourne, Sussex

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, 2 September 2011

Ever since Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy strode manfully from a pond, shirt and breeches soaking wet, in the BBC’s televised Pride and Prejudice of 1995, I have shied away from Jane Austen adaptations. With the exception of Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless, released the same year and which places Emma Woodhouse in the appropriately merciless setting of a high school in Beverly Hills, the sharp edges of Austen’s characters tend to find themselves smoothed off for the screen. So I was not optimistic about Jonathan Dove’s new opera adaptation of Mansfield Park, with Alasdair Middleton as librettist. Jonathan Dove has produced some fine work in musical theatre – his slick airport opera Flight, composed for Glyndebourne in 1998, remains a good testament to his remarkable gifts for writing music and telling stories that immediately grab the attention and hold it. It was more the context of the opera that did not bode well – commissioned by Heritage Opera, Mansfield Park was specifically composed for a tour of England’s country houses. The prospect was one of bonnets, bustles and marble halls echoing with mistuned pianos. In the event, it was sharp, brash, fast, devoid of sentimentality and blessed by the absence of the kind of “agreeable” characters whom Austen declared she spent her time trying to avoid. The music swung, though not wildly, between Bernstein and Britten, and kept the dramatic pace high. Each “chapter” (neither these nor the division into two “volumes” follow the novel) is launched with a kind of musical title page, sung either by the full cast or, occasionally, by the most relevant individuals.

The opera’s major insight is that for much of the novel Fanny Price is not a character, but rather a disappointingly thin echo for the pretensions of others. Her character is not so much developed, in the novelistic sense, as formed by the revealed deficiencies of others. For an opera composer, such a structural device is a gift, because it allows the presentation of Fanny to hover at the fringes of the musical limelight, sceptically echoing in music the postures and perspectives of others. “Fanny Price, Fanny Price” throng the chorus in a kind of battle cry, but Fanny herself remains blank – at least initially. As in the novel, she eventually comes into focus by her refusal to act in the Crawfords’ play, the mezzo-soprano in question – Serenna Wagner – rising to the challenge of presenting a finding-of-voice in Dove’s nicely pitched vocal lines. But her advantage does not last. The rowdy first act finale, celebrating Fanny’s moral constancy, is punctured by the flat call of Mrs Norris, recalling the poor relation to her duties.

Mansfield Park is not an unqualified triumph. There are moments when the attention wanders, simply, if paradoxically, because the pace is kept so uniformly high. Nonetheless, until a card-carrying modernist gives Austen the operatic treatment she deserves, Dove and Middleton’s work will do nicely. Michael McCaffery does a good job of confining the action within a small space, and Elroy Ashmore-Scott’s admirably portable set – consisting effectively of a large screenprint of Austen’s text, which acts as both backdrop and stage – works well.

Aside from Serenna Wagner’s Fanny, Sarah Helsby Hughes stood out for her portrayal of Mary Crawford, the opera’s slipperiest, most dynamic role. Much was cut from the novel, wisely, including the character of Tom Bertram (and thus the entire inheritance subplot), but Thomas Eaglen came across well as the insipid, scarcely marriageable Edmund. By the curtain, he and Wagner looked well enough suited; though to the opera’s credit, you wonder how long it will last. As Austen’s novel, rendered in Middleton’s neat and occasionally painful rhyming couplets, teaches, lovers’ vows “are often broken / forgotten almost ere they’re spoken”.

The oddest thing about Mansfield Park, a country house opera written for country houses, is that it opened London’s Grimeborn festival, which styles itself as the antidote to country house opera. Now resident at the Arcola’s new site in Dalston (great for shouting, less good for singing), Grimeborn struck lucky, managing to book the show after the planned production of Philip Glass’s Sound of a Voice was cancelled with a week to go.

Meanwhile, at the ersatz operatic country house, Glyndebourne’s festival season continued an excellent run with its final summer production: a revival of Jonathan Kent’s production of Britten’s Turn of the Screw of 2006. Like Mansfield Park, The Turn of the Screw is set in a country house. But here the characters are less brittle than the audience, not in the sense of being buttoned up (although they are, of course, this being Glyndebourne), but in the sense of being scared to death by what is a superb musictheatrical tour de force.

The success of this Turn of the Screw, conducted here by Jakub Hr+ša, the music director of Glyndebourne’s touring wing, derives from three factors. The first is that Kent does not shy away from presenting things directly: there is no ambiguity about the nature of Quint and Miss Jessel’s current and former interest in Flora and Miles; there is some but not much ambiguity about the Governess’s grasp on reality, and hence complicity in the death of Miles; and there is no attempt to brush the ghosts into the shadows – they are, after all, manifestly present to the audience as singers on the stage, and any successful director must simply grasp the nettle. But Kent’s directness has the advantage of allowing the air of unfathomable mystery, so central to Henry James’s novella and its unreliable narrator, to re-establish itself in the minds of the audience. A staging that leaves everything too open runs the risk of the audience wondering, simply, what the director was intending. Here, by contrast, we simply wonder what happened, how and why. The mystery runs deeper into our imaginations, and our nervous systems.

The second factor is that the staging is breathtakingly beautiful. This extends both to its painterly but minimalistic tableaux and to the fluid dynamism of the stagecraft. Indeed, while formal ballet would be entirely out of place in a chamber opera of the kind Britten envisaged, Paul Brown’s sets create a ballet all of their own. Thanks to two circle sections which rotate around a central, suspended window frame – which itself pirouettes and arabesques with effortless grace – the frequently changing scenes seem to dance into place, the movement of the props mirrored by the entrance and exit of the characters. Nor are these gestures purely aesthetic: each movement refers economically to the unfolding story, such as the suspended branch which, in the first act, demarcates the outside from the inside of the central window but which, in the second, reinforces the sense that outside and inside have lost their purchase on the representation. Other details are more local but just as effective. Flora’s opensided doll’s house circles round to the back of the set, where its front elevation is revealed as Bly itself. For the lake scene, its lights twinkle weakly across the glass that now lies on the stage, raked just enough for us to see the face of Miss Jessel pressed beneath it.

The third factor is, of course, the music. Britten’s score is a masterpiece of economy, and the greatest latter-day exemplification in opera of the eighteenth century’s chief aesthetic virtue of diversity within uniformity. The tonal material is tightly knit – famously, Britten uses devices derived from twelve-tone serialism – and yet the contrasts of mood and colour in Act One generate sufficient energy to propel the second act’s trajectory with chilling momentum. Hr+ša kept the ensemble and singers pin-sharp at all times. Britten’s music glowed with a cold light.

The casting, too, was impeccable. Miah Persson judged the rising desperation to perfection, not by singing less beautifully but by letting the occasional hint of mania filter through into her voice and body language. In a nice touch, she writes the letter in the dark.

Toby Spence and Giselle Allen both impressed as Quint and Jessel, while Thomas Parfitt was outstanding at conveying the depth of Miles’s confusion, as well as his outward arrogance. Joanna Songi sang Flora in 2006. Her voice is of course different now, but clever acting and direction revealed this to be a wise choice, refocusing interest – as Britten intended – on Flora by showing her as an adolescent girl trapped in the feelings and habits of pre-pubesence. It was Susan Bickley’s Mrs Grose, however, who provided the real psychological counterbalance to Persson. For it is only when Mrs Grose begins to lose her grip on the proceedings that the full force of James’s mystery begins to be felt. Sympathetic and superbly anchored, Bickley took little time to remind us why she remains one of the country’s finest character singers.

Absolutely fabulous

2011-07-28T08:39:00.003+01:00

Voice and ravishment from Massenet to Muhly

from the TLS, 29 July 2011

Jules Massenet
CENDRILLON
Covent Garden

Nico Muhly
TWO BOYS
Coliseum

Luke Bedford
SEVEN ANGELS
The Opera Group

Massenet’s fourteenth opera was conceived in London, in the Cavendish hotel, where the composer and his librettist Henri Cain were staying for the premiere of La Navarraise in 1894. Although the score was more or less complete by 1896, Cendrillon had to wait until 1899 for its first performance at the Opéra-Comique. Julia Guiraudon, a favourite with Opéra-Comique audiences, took the title role in a lavish staging by the theatre’s new director Albert Carré. Though not without his enemies, Massenet was France’s most celebrated opera composer at this time. He and Cain judged perfectly the public’s resurgent taste for the eighteenth century and “le goût exquis”, and their stylish adaptation of Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella” was a success, with forty-nine performances in 1899 alone. It soon spread to other European capitals – Brussels, Geneva, Milan – and across the Atlantic to New York, New Orleans, Buenos Aires and Montreal. A Chicago production of 1911, the year before the composer’s death, starred Maggie Teyte and Mary Garden.

Although Massenet’s reputation has never regained the dizzying heights it occupied at the turn of the century, the fact that Cendrillon has had to wait until now to receive its Covent Garden premiere is a mystery. Laurent Pelly’s glorious staging initially surfaced as a Royal Opera co-production in Santa Fe in 2006, with Joyce DiDonato, as here, in the title role. DiDonato is perhaps the world’s most in-demand mezzo-soprano, so it may have been her diary that has kept London audiences waiting for five years. The 107 years’ silence before that is harder to explain, but it may have to something do with a general mistrust of Massenet as a crowd-pleasing and commercial composer; and with the feeling that Cendrillon in particular, with its rich palette of pastiche and sweetened passions, lacks anything to cut the sugar rush. Certainly, the mid-twentieth century British view of the composer as being suitable only for an audience “which regards music as an agreeable after-dinner entertainment” (Grove, 1954) has endured, and the impetus for the more recent revival of interest has come as much from the United States as from anywhere else. Massenet still lacks a serious, scholarly biography.

Still, even Covent Garden audiences deserve some good postprandial entertainment now and then, and Pelly is the right person to mastermind it, as he proved with last year’s witty and oddly affecting La Fille du Régiment. In the new show, everything is as perfectly suited to contemporary tastes for the exquisite as was Carré’s sumptuous staging in 1899. Perrault’s text is the primary inspiration for Babarba de Limburg’s set, which is stencilled in eighteenth-century lettering on moveable walls so that the story “expands” with the size of the room. The costumes are designed by Pelly himself, together with Jean-Jacques Delmotte, and tailored to a fin-de-siècle setting both in terms of detail – the Prince’s White Tie is adorned with a simple blue sash for the ball, while Pandolfe (Cinderella’s father) slips on a musty brown dressing-gown after returning from it – and more satirically, in their lampoon of the haute couture tradition. The ugly sisters can barely walk in their outfits; the parade of crimson-upholstered princesses is as grotesquely exaggerated as it is beautifully executed; and all the choreography, at this point, is sensitive to the period “shuffles” with which Massenet adorns the score. The tasteful costumes are reserved for Cinderella. The cream satin of her ball gown darkens, in a cleverly practical touch, to ashen grey as it reaches the floor, while her work clothes are brightened by a decorated pinafore.

Cendrillon is based on one of the bestknown of all fairy tales. Arguably, few literary genres are better suited to operatic treatment. Fairy tales have a mythic aspect – an aura of always having been told – which meshes perfectly with opera’s necessary detachment from the literal sphere. As with opera, a fairy tale’s meaning lives in its enactment, in the telling, and in conjuring a way of seeing the world to which, by the spell of tradition, the listener is bound. The genre exceeds its narrative content, in the same way that opera’s performance often exceeds its dramatic content. In Cendrillon, this is almost explicitly demonstrated by the hero and heroine, whose third act duet centres on the refrain, “Et ta voix me pénètre, d’une extase supreme” (“The sound of your voice fills me with rapture”, as the surtitles have it). Clearly, a great deal of the “meaning” of Cendrillon is in the opportunity it affords its audience to be ravished by the sound of two female voices in full flow. Massenet’s insistence on scoring the role of the prince for mezzo- soprano tells us that this an idealised and exquisite love story, but it also naturally highlights the composer’s gift, matched only by Strauss, for this combination of voices.

The voices of Joyce Didonato and Alice Coote are clearly made for each other, and if the opera’s pacing in Acts Three and Four doesn’t quite match the brilliant progressions of the first two acts, then any narrative slackening is more than made up for by the performances. Coote shapes her phrases masterfully; her emotional modulations from languorous disaffection to searing passion consistently produce operatic fireworks. Didonato, though not in the best voice, has the kind of rich, expressive tone and appearance which one can’t help falling in love with, and is well suited to a part whose girlishness, one senses, is only skin deep.

The two leads are more than ably supported by Eglise Gutiérrez’s superbly sexy Fairy Godmother and the fearless stepmother of Ewa Podles, whose powerful contralto counterbalances the airier registers of her stepdaughter and future son-in-law. Among the men, Jean-Philippe Lafont’s troublingly over-affectionate Pandolfe looked the part but had a little trouble singing it. The orchestra revelled in Massenet’s sensuous string textures and were alert to Bertrand de Billy’s light touch in the pastiche passages.

Cendrillon represents, in many respects, the Royal Opera at its best. Brilliant and imaginative casting in a stylish production and an orchestra whose focus and control have few equals, collaborating to produce something capable of appealing to the tastes of all except the most steadfastly serious Wagnerians. It is a shame, then, that when the idea of broadening the appeal of opera is usually proposed, what people really have in mind is strategies blandly conceived to justify the state subsidies on which most houses rely. Opera, the bureaucrats tells us, should “wise up” and echo the wishes and wants of our daily lives if it is to continue to deserve our support. One unfashionable answer to this is to point out that anything great – anything that demands a central place in society’s interlocking value systems – must inevitably echo our concerns if we opt to be concerned by it. But those commissioning and composing new operas are beset by challenges for which such sophistry – however true – provides little consolation.

Two new operas both aim to wise up. Seven Angels (music by Luke Bedford, words by Glyn Maxwell) co-opts Milton’s Paradise Lost into a fable about environmental catastrophe while Two Boys (Nico Muhly, Craig Lucas) depicts a society whose norms are threatened by the way the internet has changed what adolescents get up to in their bedroom. Both works represent each composer’s first opera and the results in each case would have benefited from more time in development. In Bedford’s case, a lack of experience writing for the voice has led to an imbalance between the intricately worked chamber score and the rather featureless vocal parts. A more experienced composer might also have worked more productively with the librettist – as Elena Langer did, last year, when she worked with Maxwell on The Lion’s Face. Maxwell’s libretto for Seven Angels makes for interesting reading – in part because it is laid out in a manner reminiscent of Mallarmé’s poetry – but the plot and characters are awkwardly contrived. The sponsorship by Friends of the Earth is ingenious at a corporate level; less so when it comes to leaving the audience to make up their own minds about the opera.

In Two Boys, while the voices are well served, the orchestra suffers from being given too little to do in the way of driving the story on. Muhly counts Glass, Adams and Britten among his influences, but in terms of flexibility of pacing and providing a musical canvas for the characters’ feelings, it is unfortunately Glass who dominates. Nonetheless, there is much to build on here: Muhly is only twenty-nine. Though experienced for his age, and blessed with astounding musical fluency, he is still developing his talent. What particularly impressed me was the way in which Muhly and Lucas were able to get the exultant quality of their medium to reflect the peculiar intensity of an internet chat-room. They have perceived that this virtual space has its own weird theatricality: in a chat-room, the lack of inhibition associated with the physical presence of others, far from being an obstacle to sexual and emotional intimacy, actually results in a kind of inflation of sensory experience – an insight which the opera’s choirboy villain continually uses to press his advantage.

As a police procedural, built around an incident in which an older boy is thought to have groomed and stabbed a younger boy, Two Boys doesn’t come close to what is frequently achieved on the small screen; one deduces “whodunit” too quickly – and certainly faster than Susan Bickley’s luddite detective. Vocally, though, Bickley is on fine form, and oddly credible as a hard-bitten spinster who, in a nice twist, is offered the solution to the mystery by her semi-senile mother. Nicky Spence also turns in a fine performance as Brian, the older boy, as does the young soprano “Mary Bevan” making a confident debut as his online friend, Rebecca. Bartlett Sher’s production, to sets designed by Michael Yeargan, is slick, sometimes dazzling, while Rumon Gamba, an English conductor of whom we hear too little, has the full measure of Muhly’s score.

Two Boys evidently succeeded in its attempt to reach out to a new public, and one hopes it will enjoy similar success when it transfers to the New York Met for the 2013/14 season. Neither its moral (never trust a sweet-faced choirboy) nor its score were as cutting-edge as they might have been, but what I really missed was something simpler. In its relentless pursuit of a dramatic solution, the music somehow forgot to change gear or create those natural pauses that allow characters to stop, reflect, and sing. In other words, though presented as a fairy-tale de nos jours, it sorely lacked a touch of the fabulous.

The coarseness of true love

2011-07-01T10:38:00.005+01:00

Benjamin Britten’s corrupted innocents

Benjamin Britten
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
Coliseum

ALDEBURGH FESTIVAL
Snape Maltings and other venues

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, 1 July

“Boys”, reads the inscription, centre stage. This is clearly an opera by Benjamin Britten: boys, as exemplars both of beauty and of innocence and ripe for betrayal by circumstance or ill will, are a central feature of Britten’s dramatic landscape. One is not surprised by the inscription – except that the stage is set for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy in which real mishap is conspicuous by its absence. The unavoidable implication is that the production is more about Britten’s private dreams than Shakespeare’s public play.

One of the peculiarities of the operatic stage, which relates to the limited size of the repertoire and the need constantly to represent familiar material, is that directors are often concerned to tell stories that are strikingly at odds with the one told by the libretto. Usually, the contrast is slight, with alterations to the place and period of the original often succeeding in enhancing the audience’s emotional relation to a work’s dramatic content. On other occasions, however, it is quite clear that a director is less interested in rejuvenating a work, or in shining light on neglected features of its composition, than in doing palpable violence to it.

Christopher Alden’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at English National Opera, is an odd example of this. Only in a parallel universe, and one at some remove from our own, could Shakespeare and Britten’s opera be understood to tell a story about cyclical child abuse in a mid-century grammar school. And yet that is the story Alden has told. While Britten’s Theseus enters only toward the end (the part is much reduced from the original play), Alden’s Theseus is the first character on the stage, remaining there to the end. Played by a gaunt, ashenfaced Paul Whelan, he is apparently drawn back to school against his will to witness the grooming of a new victim by Oberon, evidently because the latter has grown bored of his postpubescent former favourite, Puck. Theseus shadows Puck on stage, only occasionally becoming entangled in the action. The implication is that it makes no difference whether we take the character to be dreaming the action or watching it: what is happening to Puck and the boy also happened to Theseus, just as it will happen to others entrusted to the care of Oberon and Titania, master and mistress of the unhappy establishment.

Oberon’s power seems to come from distributing cigarettes of uncertain composition but devastating narcotic effect – the actors are directed to smoke them as if taking a heroin hit. Through their addictive power he controls the other characters, including, courtesy of Puck’s misadventure, the Athenian lovers, here cast as gawky sixth-formers. Why Oberon wishes the foursome well remains one of the production’s several unsolved mysteries, but perhaps it has something to do with repairing the patina of social normality among the school’s leavers, a protective layer with which to conceal and protect the nightmare at the institution’s – and by extension, society’s – heart.

The oddest feature of this morally and artistically troubling adventure is that it actually works. I was reminded of the comment – reportedly made by the wife of the Venetian ambassador at the Viennese premiere of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice – that the great tragic aria “Che faro senza Euridice” could equally well have expressed joy and contentment had only the words been substituted for something different. Here, Britten’s superbly coloured and fleet-footed score seemed all of a sudden to be crawling with sinister intentions, worming their way through a palpably uneasy audience. The hazily contrapuntal string motif, for example, which punctuates the drama with periodic reminders of its strangeness, has rarely sounded quite so effective – or affective – in its new, malevolent clothing. Throughout, Leo Hussein’s admirable conducting led to a performance of the score which was among the most beautiful and compelling I have heard.

On stage, Alden’s concept also made surprisingly clear sense, despite the frequent clashes with the libretto at a literal level. In particular, Shakespeare’s hierarchical organization of the characters found an apt analogue in the structured society of the school, while the Athenians’ expressions of infatuation seemed to fall quite naturally from the lips of Alden’s adolescents. Both acting and singing were also excellent throughout, if not uniformly so. Willard White’s Bottom stood out as the only character capable of eliciting any warmth of feeling, as opposed to the various shades of pity (Puck, played by Jamie Manton), horror (Anna Christy’s Titania) and disgust (Graeme Danby’s games-master Snout) evoked by all the others. As Oberon, Iestyn Davies’s subtle counter-tenor was eerily seductive – one of the best I have heard, in fact, and the perfect aural counterpart to those intriguing cigarettes.

What Britten would have made of all this is another question entirely. What emerges now as a thoughtful, if rather forced, attempt to align Britten’s Dream with other more nightmarish elements central to the composer’s stage work, would understandably have been taken by the composer as a libellous assault on his character and reputation. He would also, without doubt, have been more than hurt by the thought that gossip about his putative paedophilia had developed over the past few decades to the extent that its present hold over the public imagination should be sufficient to corrupt, or expose as rotten, the only one of his operas which unambiguously celebrates innocence.

It was interesting to read, in this connection, that Colin Matthews once put it to Britten that his operas were unified by the theme of the corruption of innocence. “Utter rubbish” was the response, uttered in such a way as to discourage pursuit of the subject. But the thesis is more than tenable, even to the extent – as Alden’s Dream shows – of comprehending ostensible exceptions to the rule. The context of Matthews’s reminiscence was his thoughtful programme note to Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, a star-studded concert performance of which was the highlight of the 2011 Aldeburgh Festival’s opening weekend.

The event also marked a somewhat prodigal return to the festival programme for its founder. Since Pierre-Laurent Aimard took over the artistic direction of the festival in 2009, Britten’s music has rather taken second place to that of Boulez and his colleagues: this year, György Ligeti received the closest focus, with a fascinating day exploring his music and its connections with György Kurtág, Conlon Nancarrow and Steve Reich, among others. And as the Ligeti performances amply demonstrated, the festival’s increasingly international reach has been to its benefit. But with Britten’s centenary fast approaching (in 2013), and given that the composer’s active and profitable estate is one of the chief sources of funding for the festival and its umbrella organization, Aldeburgh Music, it seems prudent as well as proper to welcome him back to the fold; that much of his music in any case fares well by comparison when heard alongside that of his postwar contemporaries is one of the further benefits of mixed programming of the kind that Aldeburgh does so well.

The Rape of Lucretia is unusal among Britten’s operas. This is not because it is supposed to be funny, although there are some Wildean moments in Ronald Duncan’s unrelentingly highfalutin libretto (“virtue in women”, quips Junius to Tarquin at one point, “is a lack of opportunity”). Rather, it is because the dramatic structure is contrived. There are two narrators, one of each gender, who not only set each scene but thereafter are to be heard interjecting with somewhat laboured history lessons, anti-Etruscan propaganda, and psychological commentaries which go some way beyond what the legal establishment refers to as guiding the witness – the male narrator would today probably be found guilty of incitement to the rape. When the roles are taken by Ian Bostridge and Susan Gritton, of course, one doesn’t complain about the narrators’ musical overexposure, but the device does cause one to look around for an explanation.

One of the places one looks for some kind of narrative authority, inevitably, is the music, which is some of Britten’s finest. Composed for chamber orchestra (with one player per part), with a piano for some of the drier recitative sections, it is a supremely responsive score, driving and colouring the action with a freedom and felicity that Mozart might even have envied. During the one section in which the narrators leave the characters to their own devices – the second scene of Act Two, in which Lucia’s maid and nurse arrange flowers for their mistress, unaware of what befell her during the night – the atmosphere of careless joy is so finely wrought through the intertwining of female voices with the higher woodwind and harp that one almost forgets the ironic context. Britten and Duncan’s opera is challenging to stage, particularly when one considers the heartfelt but nonetheless bizarre postlude in which Lucretia’s tragedy is turned into a Christian parable, a religious conversion which ignores the fact that the legend of Tarquinius Superbus enjoyed a much more fruitful moral life in the Roman Republic than it did in Christian tradition (Dante, Cranach, Giordano).

Aldeburgh’s concert performance sidestepped most of the dramatic problems simply by presenting the work as a kind of oratorio, as it were a narrative form richly illustrated with extended examples or reported action. The “direct” action was further demoted by placing the soloists – excepting the two narrators, who stood either side of the conductor – on a raised platform behind the orchestra. One effect of this was, in an odd way, to personalize the work as a sincere statement of Britten’s attitude to true love, and of the fear encircling it where, as in the composer’s case, it dared not speak its name. As Lucretia puts it, “To love was to live on the edge of tragedy”. The performance also highlighted the quality of orchestral writing, as well as the economical, razorsharp direction of Oliver Knussen. Aside from the narrators, who were both wonderful, among the soloists Claire Booth (Lucia), Hilary Summers (Bianca) and Christopher Purves (Collatinus) were superb; Angelika Kirschlager, as Lucretia, was revelatory.

Hearing Hilary Summers’s powerful, open-throated sound served as a good reminder of how rarely one hears proper contraltos nowadays, as did the previous evening’s performance of Mahler’s great final symphonic paean to sensuality, Das Lied von der Erde. Composed for orchestra and solo tenor and either contralto or baritone, the work is far more often performed by a mezzo-soprano. Simon Rattle – who returned to Aldeburgh to open the festival with the orchestra that made him famous (and vice versa), the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – usually prefers to perform the work with a baritone, but on this occasion he chose to bring his wife, mezzo soprano Magdalena Kŏzená.

Kŏzená was suffering from a bad cold, but her performance was powerful for a singer with, effectively, a small voice for the part, and compelling in the final song, breaking slightly at Mahler and Mong-Kao-Jen’s evocation of lost happiness and birds huddled silently, before shifting to the lower registers of the final section. Her vocal partner, the tenor Michael Schade, had an easier time riding Mahler’s rich orchestral textures – a problem exacerbated in the reverberative acoustic of the Snape Maltings – but his strangely smug gestures and rasping timbre only deepened one’s sympathies for Kŏzená. Rattle and his enormous orchestra huddled around her. They gave a raw and vivid account of the score, joyfully rambunctious at times, at others so remarkably balanced one was barely aware of their presence. The work ends with the slipping of the poet’s faltering breath into the vast cycles of nature, but the orchestra saw to it that the embers of human intelligence glowed proudly to the end.

Grounds for banter

2011-06-23T11:18:00.004+01:00

Giuseppe Verdi
La Traviata
Hamlet Trading Estate, Hackney Wick

W A Mozart
The Magic Flute
Garsington Opera

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, 24 June

What do you need to stage an opera? Traditional wisdom has it that, in addition to singers, costumes, sets, orchestra and audience, you need a sizeable theatre, preferably purpose-built. Such wisdom is being questioned. A recent performance by the Crash Ensemble of Gerald Barry’s The Intelligence Park in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin is representative of an increasing desire on the part of companies to mount performances in spaces – such as art galleries or museums – where different habits of engagement prevail and where opera-house glitz doesn’t get in the way. This latter motivation is apparent, too, in a surge of operatic activity in London’s pub theatres, with a production of La Bohème at Kilburn’s Cock Tavern selling out a run of 126 performances last year and winning an Olivier Award, despite the perceived handicaps of an inexperienced cast, a prop inventory comprising a clothes-dryer and a laptop, and an orchestra consisting of a single battered piano. The troupe responsible has since pursued its mission “to bring opera to audiences who ordinarily might avoid it” in Islington’s King’s Head Theatre.

Another company called Go Opera has also taken up the baton, mounting a successful run of La Traviata in a modestly proportioned warehouse in Hackney Wick’s “Hamlet” industrial estate. The site was chosen, according to the programme, less for its Shakespearean associations than for its being a “rich ground in London for neo-colonial fetishistic ruin banter”. That said – assuming something is being said – the warehouse in question is not a ruin but a going commercial concern, counting Mr Chicken and Weldcentre among its thriving neighbours. The aim of the company’s founders Elly Condron and Dominic Kraemer, and that of the director of their first show, Rosalind Parker, has been to “allow the intensities of La Traviata and Hackney Wick to interact”.

What this amounts to in practice is the use of the mezzanine scaffold inside the warehouse – the Act Two confrontation between Germont and Violetta becomes a balcony scene – and the use of video footage, including some of Germont, dressed for a 1920s shooting party, on a bridge crossing the A12. Otherwise, the black tie, May ball-style setting was conventional enough, and the stage direction unusual only because of the moveable “fourth wall”. Audience members were among those invited to cocktails for Violetta’s party, while those seeking a quiet corner from which to observe matters as often as not found themselves inadvertently trespassing on Violetta’s country garden or, in my case, her bedroom.

Joanna Weeks starred as Violetta, giving a committed performance which displayed both confidence and dexterity in “Non sapete” and great subtlety in Act Two’s confrontation with Germont. And while bluster rather than subtlety was Alistair Digges’ chief quality in the latter part, elsewhere there was some commendable singing, not least from Elinor Jane Moran’s clear-toned Annina. All were accompanied by a pianist, with a solo violin to bolster the texture in the more melodic passages. The opera was squeezed into 90 minutes, with little harm caused to the dramatic pacing, leaving the audience plenty of time to soak up the work’s tragic dimension with a house kebab.

Neither 90-minute reductions nor kebabs have traditionally been on offer at Garsington, but judging from reports of the Jamie Oliver-branded catering at the company’s new home at Wormsley Park, home of Mark Getty, a discreetly parked kebab van might do a brisk trade. Abridgements, too, might gain in appeal if the new auditorium’s lacklustre inaugural production of The Magic Flute is anything to go by. Mozart’s paean to the fetishistic banter of freemasonry rarely makes for edge-of-the-seat drama at the best of times. In Olivia Fuchs’s directionless staging, even Jeremy Sams’s evergreen, gently comic translation failed to lift the flagging pace of the second act. The only tension came from a chill north-easterly breeze which blew across the stage, lending an unlooked-for intensity to the trials by fire and water. Pamina and Tamino’s enlightenment, for once, seemed a literal prospect.

Sophie Bevan, who captivated Garsington audiences as Susanna in last year’s Figaro, was the star of the show, rich and steady in the lament (“Ach, ich fühls . . .”), fading to a marvellously controlled, moving pianissimo in the repeat. William Berger also gave a strong performance as Papageno, wrong-footing his audience with a beautifully judged moment of sincerity when his threefold appeal for a mate – directed toward the audience – fell on deaf ears.

Bevan, Berger and Kim Sheehan’s Queen of the Night deserved their applause at the end. But I suspect an equal share of the audience’s delight was directed at the company’s management, who succeeded in raising £3.5 million during the course of a year in order to complete construction of the new 600-seat auditorium. Designed by Robin Snell, who worked on the Glyndebourne rebuild in the early 1990s, the resulting pavilion is clad in dazzling white sails and gives the impression of a graceful cruise-ship anchored in the broad and wooded slopes of the Wormsley estate. Though it lacks some of the ramshackle charm of its predecessor, the generously proportioned stage and superb acoustic are a vast improvement. A genuine pop-up auditorium, it will be dismantled come the end of the season – but, assuming Getty receives his next rent cheque, the next year should it see it pop up again for something rather better placed to demonstrate its many and significant advantages.

Songs without ideas

2011-06-09T11:06:00.001+01:00

Richard Wagner
DIE MEISTERSINGER
Glyndebourne

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, June 10

The Wagnerian ambitions of John Christie, owner of Glyndebourne and founder of the festival on which his house’s fame principally rests, have been a long time bearing fruit. In 2003, some forty years after Christie’s death, the house presented only its first full Wagner opera: Tristan und Isolde, in Nicholas Lehnhoff’s gravely beautiful production. Momentum is now gathering, however; the new season has opened with David McVicar’s staging of Die Meistersinger, conducted by Glyndebourne’s music director Vladimir Jurowski. With a cast of more than a hundred singers and sets built with the kind of eye for detail and permanence that few houses can rival, it is a production that must count itself among the festival’s most ambitious to date.

This is not the first time the burghers of Wagner’s Nuremberg have found themselves wandering the rolling hills of Sussex. Before the festival’s inception in 1934, Christie used frequently to mount amateur concerts for the house’s guests and employees in the great organ room. Among these was a performance on June 3, 1928 of Die Meistersinger, Act Three, scene one, in which Walther delivers, and Beckmesser adopts, his song. All five singers wore full costume. Christie himself – in an extension, one assumes, of the spirit of hospitality – took on the role of Beckmesser. And that unhappy figure is at the centre of McVicar’s production. This shows sound judgement. For although Hans Sachs, the wise cobbler and musician, holds the work together, shaping the images of hope, craft and art Wagner intended his audience to take away with them, it is of course the guild master who forms the drama’s dark heart. Beaten in the second act, humiliated and ostracised in the third, Beckmesser clearly exceeds the broadly comic profile of the drama, unbalancing the opera in the process and reminding us that the work’s rosy conclusion may be less durable than Wagner’s music would have us believe. This imbalance derives from factors internal to the work, but it has been exacerbated by the opera’s wartime performance history and by our own generation’s inability to move beyond the idea that Beckmesser was intended by the composer as an incitement to anti-Semitism.

McVicar’s intention has been to restore some dignity to the part, drawing on the acting and vocal talents of the German baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle. This is a brave and potentially satisfying move, but one that the director has then undermined by his interpretative decision to “cast” Beckmesser, unmistakably, as the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, the most prominent and influential of the “Jews in music” who wounded Wagner’s youthful vanity and later excited his scorn. McVicar’s “idea” is confused by the fact that the urbane and popular Meyerbeer bears no resemblance to Nuremberg’s devious clerk, whom Wagner in any case intended as a caricature of the critic Eduard Hanslick. Far from being an incompetent, rule-bound obsessive, Meyerbeer excelled in the art of adapting himself to the demands of public taste – and it was this very flexibility, mistaken for moral inauthenticity, which aroused Wagner’s suspicion in the first place.

Such a muddled representation would not matter so much were it not for the fact that McVicar’s conception of the work is otherwise rather empty. He has set the action in Biedemeyer Germany, and thus linked the song contest and its attendant dramas to a restorative movement in German culture entirely at odds with Wagner’s own radical programme – the one Sachs is called on to shelter; the production demotes the drama’s ideological landscape to the cosy world of bonnets and bustles and televised Jane Austen. Wagner is many things to many people, but few, apart from McVicar, would argue his strengths lie in romantic comedy. All this should not detract from some fine points. The set designer Vicki Mortimer’s opening tableau – with the congregation’s profile set against a nicely executed triptych pastiche adapted from Dürer’s painting of Jesus among the scholars, and crowned by an intricate rose-vaulted ceiling – is striking.

Some of the singing is excellent, with Gerald Finley superb as Sachs. Kränzle, too, steering clear of the usual cackling and crooning, gives Beckmesser’s ill-fated serenade more chance of success than the imposed interpretation seems to allow and, in the final act, cuts a sympathetic figure, withdrawing from Sachs’s entreaty to forgive and forget. Marco Jentzsch’s Walther, on the other hand, and Anna Gabler’s Eva both lack the vocal presence and flexibility of tone necessary to convey depth – a less than ideal default in a production also bent on sapping both roles of precisely that quality. More seriously, none of the singers is helped by Vladimir Jurowski’s painfully elongated phrasing in the pit. He starts well enough, with a breezy and sure-footed Prelude and opening chorale, but all too soon, like his directorial partner, appears to run out of ideas.

Essays in damnable coherence

2011-06-09T11:02:00.001+01:00

Terry Gilliam's courageously implausible operatic debut

Hector Berlioz
THE DAMNATION OF FAUST
Coliseum

Jules Massenet
WERTHER
Covent Garden

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, May 27

Immanuel Kant answered the central question of his age with uncharacteristic brevity when, in 1784, he set about defining the concept of enlightenment in terms of “man’s emergence from his selfimposed immaturity”. His masterstroke was to look at a well-worn issue from a slightly different angle, conceiving of enlightenment less in terms of accrued knowledge or political organization and more as a state or process of mind. As with many of the philosopher’s precepts, the definition has a strongly moral character. The “immaturity” that obstructs rational autonomy – or self-government according to rational precepts – derives not from any “lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another”.

I know of no specific reference in Goethe’s writings to Kant’s essay (“What is Enlightenment?”, 1784), but it is likely he was acquainted with the text, or at least its basic argument. And Kant’s definition remains one of the best keys to understanding Goethe’s strongly protestant version of the Faust legend, in which the learned doctor is shown to sin less against God than against himself, choosing immediate access to knowledge over the Kantian process of acquiring it. For Goethe, famously, Faust’s misjudgement is forgivable. For Berlioz, who came to know the play in Gérard de Nerval’s 1828 translation (of which Goethe apparently approved), it evidently was not. In his own strongly idiosyncratic setting of the drama, La Damnation de Faust, the clue is in the title: the doctor’s transgressions against the demands both of reason and the heart permit no redemption.

It is interesting that Berlioz felt no compunction about altering the story so profoundly. In a musical context, his disgust at the then-widespread practice of tailoring historical scores to contemporary tastes was frequently expressed. When it came to the texts of his heroes – Virgil, Shakespeare and Goethe – the composer’s attitude was more liberal. As he expressed the matter in his Memoirs, referring to the criticism he received for setting the opening to La Damnation in Hungary, “I would have had no hesitation in taking him anywhere in the world if the work would have benefitted . . . . A person like Faust may after all have any journey ascribed to him, no matter how outlandish, without violence being done to plausibility”.

If Kant’s motto for Enlightenment was “Sapere Aude: Have courage to use your own understanding”, that of the film director Terry Gilliam, whom English National Opera have cleverly persuaded to direct its new staging of Berlioz’s “dramatic legend”, might well be “Demente Aude: Have courage to do violence to plausibility”. The former Python is an interesting choice for the job, given that many have long since written off the work as impossible to stage coherently. But it is precisely this incoherence which appeals to Gilliam. The constant interruption to the flow of action, of a piece with Berlioz’s broadside against the neoclassical pieties of unity of action, constitutes an opportunity to revel in the possibilities of modern stagecraft. Taking the composer at his word, Gilliam rescues Faust from Hungary and puts him firmly back in an Alpine landscape. Following a prologue, in which Christopher Purves’s suave and urbane Mephistopheles identifies mankind’s principle weakness as the desire to achieve his own perfection (and referring to Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” by way of illustration), the curtain rises on another scene borrowed from the visual arts: a mountain valley intended by the designer Hildegard Bechtler to echo the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich.

Yet the production which unfolds is about as far from painterly as it is possible to get. Barely for a second do things stand still. For most of the great choral or orchestral setpieces, Gilliam floods the stage with chorus members, themselves often directed by dancers, while the scenery is either moving or appearing to thanks to the video-artistry of Finn Ross. The historical time-frame moves quickly, too. Although the nineteenth- century setting returns in Faust’s dream towards the end of the Part One, in which the hero imagines himself to be Siegfried rescuing Marguerite’s Brünnhilde, reality – if one can call it that – has meanwhile accelerated: we are carried through a depiction of the First World War, sharply polarised in both comic and tragic guises, all the way to the Nuremburg Rally. As the student Brander’s transformation (by Mephistopheles) into Adolf Hitler nears its completion, Ayrian beauties strike modernist poses in front of a video-montage of scenes from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympia, and a sense of the audacity of Gilliam’s vision is replaced by one of its clarity. The iconography of Nazism has an unusual status. Without an acceptable role in normal contexts, it has become ubiquitous on stage and screen. Gilliam’s task has been to exploit its symbolism and ideology for something more substantial than its shock value. It is a considerable challenge, and yet the director somehow succeeds in creating a work that is dramatically, emotionally and philosophically acute. Gilliam allows the opera’s tragic heart to unfurl at the very point at which the barbarism of Nazi ideology first asserts itself unequivocally – on Kristallnacht, when Marguerite removes her blonde wig to reveal the dark curls beneath. This brings Gilliam’s Faust into direct conflict with Berlioz’s, but the former’s guilt when, along with so many of his countrymen, he turns a blind eye is compelling, and makes good sense of his musical and dramatic fate.

Gilliam’s remarkable operatic debut also testifies to the knowledge and craftsmanship of his designers and associate director, Leah Hausman, as well as to that of an extended company and stage-hands running at full stretch. The aptness and extravagance of the director’s vision for the work might have been guessed at, though the quality of both the set-pieces and their attention to detail are exceptional: the grotesque dance of the First World War heads of state to Berlioz’s colourful take on the Rákóczy march; numerous small touches, such as the soldier who kneels down to share a game with a boy waiting for the transport, both ignorant of what lies ahead, or the twist in the hair-raising motorcycle- and-sidecar race to the abyss (again, brilliantly rendered by Ross’s video projections) in which it is eventually Faust who drives himself to destruction, or the sinisterly comic way in which Mephistopheles, resolutely ignorant of the Kantian virtues, wears a pretied bow-tie.

But in the end, the most impressive thing about the show is the musical quality of the stage direction. Time is found for the more reflective choruses to achieve their dramatic and expressive potential, and space is given to the singers: the surrounding frenetic movement does not impede their often static solos. This allows some fine vocal performances to come to the fore, notably from Purves and Christine Rice, a sensitively drawn Marguerite. Peter Hoare – with a sweep of ginger hair intended to evoke Friedrich’s Wayfarer – is energetically committed to his lead role, but the part of Faust is a thankless one, and it demands a wider vocal range than he possesses. It may be that his acting decided the casting. On the orchestral side, some oddly lacklustre conducting from Edward Gardner failed to drive the score to its expressive limit, but there were moments of beauty nonetheless, not least from the chorus.

The fate of Goethe’s other great tragic protagonist would not, I think, benefit particularly from being set in the Third Reich. Intended by its author as an object lesson in the perils of excessive “sensibility”, the hero of The Sorrows of Young Werther in fact became a poster-boy for the life lived according to the code of feeling, and inspired many unfortunate imitations. Although Faust has proved more popular as a subject for musical treatment, the love-sick Werther’s downward trajectory from a moment’s euphoria to his bungled suicide is more obviously suited to opera – even if, for once, it is the male rather than the female lead who dies.

The Royal Opera’s current production of Massenet’s classic setting, now in its first revival, is also the work of a man, like Gilliam, better known as a film director. In other respects, Benoît Jacquot’s staging could not be less like ENO’s Faust. Profoundly still, the side-lit singers appear on the stage like patches of light and shadow brushed onto Charles Edwards’s Hammershøi-inspired sets, framed to landscape proportions by a second black proscenium. Only one detail is dynamic: when the fourth act opens with a view of the nerve centre of the epistolary drama, Werther’s little room hovers isolated at the very back of the stage area and the crumpled poet himself is barely discernible. Perfectly in perspective to begin with, the room gradually moves to the front of the stage during the course of the intermezzo, with the result that the background perspective eventually appears exploded – a nice design corollary of the hyper-real emotional landscape. Jacquot’s tactful production is well suited to the opera, for the characters can easily lose their dramatic weight; they balance on a thin line between tired stereotypes and trying adolescents: push them too hard and they buckle under the weight of their symbolic burden.

The main story, though, was the return to Covent Garden of the star Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón, whose recent history of delicate operations and embarrassing cancellations has left many wondering whether he will ever regain the form which just a few years ago held audiences spellbound. Werther is a tough role, so the Mexican was evidently confident about his return and, on balance the confidence was justified. The opening found him in diffident voice, but already at “Lorsque l’enfant” we could hear something of the old magic. By the end, abetted by Sophie Koch’s faultless and deeply sympathetic Charlotte, he left no room for doubt. There is not the same raw power as before, perhaps but Villazón’s sureness in the role’s difficult high registers, and subtlety in its even more difficult emotional spectrum, gave sceptics plenty to think about.

London Sinfonietta/Økland/Bourne – review

2011-06-09T10:58:00.002+01:00

"Ahright," said jazz pianist Matthew Bourne, ambling on stage barefoot before fixing the piano with a quizzical stare, as if unconvinced of its loyalty. We were all right, too, after a first half of the Sinfonietta doing good business as usual, with David Hocking's momentous Xenakis Rebonds A and a fluent turn along the twisting byways of Berio's seventh Sequenza by oboist Gareth Hulse. The inclusion of Kaikhosru Sorabji in the programme worried me, but the Fantasiettina Atematica ("little athematic fantasy") for wind trio turned out to be rather charming in its aimless lyricism, and uncharacteristically brief.

Business as usual ceased abruptly with the entrance of the barefoot pianist, but it was here that the real business of the concert began, in a sequence of beautifully crafted and diversely textured improvisations, evocative of styles ranging from Balakirev and Jarrett to Stockhausen but wholly convincing in their centredness...

Read the full review here

Uchida/LSO/Davis – review

2011-06-09T10:58:00.001+01:00

Sir Colin Davis's cycle of Nielsen symphonies with the LSO has not been a hurried affair. Yet if performances over the last couple of years of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies (released on CD earlier this year), together with the latest instalment – of his sixth and strangest essay in the genre – are anything to go by, the cycle's completion over three concerts this autumn will be among the forthcoming season's hotter tickets.

The key to Davis's success with Nielsen's sometimes bewildering music is that he does not seek to impose himself on it too much. Rather, the emphasis is on getting the detail as clear as possible and allowing the overall shape to emerge naturally. By concentrating on fine-tuning Nielsen's oddly turned phrasing, and structuring the often magnificently layered textures, this performance revealed the Sixth Symphony to be significantly more than the sum of its apparently self-contradictory parts....

Read the full review here

Takács Quartet/Cooper/Mitchell - review

2011-06-09T10:56:00.000+01:00

It is not easy to specify which quality, exactly, is responsible for the Takács Quartet's current pre-eminence. I can think of other ensembles with a greater unity of tone, others better disposed to plumb the depths of well-known scores, and still others – though not many – who play with greater energy. And yet every time one is blown away by the rightness and freshness of everything they do. Their feeling for rhythm and gesture, above all, is both so intuitive and thoughtful, that one has the impression of each work as being dreamt, as Wagner's Hans Sachs put it, and composed in the same breath...

Read the full review here

Berlin Philharmonic: A Musical Journey in 3D

2011-05-10T09:46:00.001+01:00

Most of my musical journeys are in 3D, but then I'm lucky enough to hear most of my music live. I am probably therefore not the target audience of this cinema release by the Berlin Philharmonic, which aims to bring the experience of a live concert to those without the habit or possibility of attending one. Even so, this recording of Simon Rattle conducting Mahler's First Symphony and Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, taken from a concert in Singapore's Esplanade last autumn, dazzled on numerous levels.

The last time I heard Mahler's First from these forces was in the Albert Hall, where only the occasional detail of Rattle's virtuosic interpretation reached me. In the cinema, everything is right there, the extraordinary presence and definition of the sound revealing not just the finesse of the playing but also the gutsy energy of performances that, elsewhere, have risked seeming somewhat mannered.

The speakers seem to bundle all the instruments into a ball a few feet in front of your head, from which individual instruments and sections jump out at you like bursts from a flyweight boxer. But that's nothing compared to the video, where the audience perspective is less that of a good stalls seat (which cost £300 or so at the concert) than a helicopter darting silently around a stage that, thanks to the 3D distortion, expands and contracts like a maniac concertina. The depth of the image is bewildering, too: a man two rows in front of me was assaulted several times by the seventh horn's elbow before being jumped on by Sir Simon.

This is all great fun until the sea sickness sets in – but then you can just shut your eyes and enjoy what was a stormingly good concert.

Read the full review here

Caesars and their palaces

2011-05-10T09:38:00.001+01:00

Mozart: La Clemenza di Tito
English Touring Opera

Rimsky-Korsakov: The Tsar's Bride
Covent Garden

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, 6 May

The rich and powerful have mostly paid for opera, so it is perhaps not surprising that they have frequently found themselves portrayed by it. What is surprising is how few examples there are in the existing repertoire in which gods, kings and emperors are painted in an approving or sympathetic light. This trend perhaps reflects modern taste more than it does historical practice: Metastasio’s La Clemenza di Tito, for example, is determined to show its enlightened despot passing every known test for beneficent wisdom with flying colours. And yet of its forty known settings – starting with Antonio Caldara’s in 1734 and concluding with Antonio del Fante’s in 1803 – only Mozart’s retains a claim on a modern stage which has long since lost its affinity for pageantry and panegyric.

Even then, and despite the concert-going public’s general fascination with every detail of Mozart’s final year, Tito has never enjoyed a reputation comparable to that of his other mature operas. It is commonly viewed as lacking the wit of the Da Ponte operas (an admittedly near universal default), the charm of Zauberflöte, or the fire of Idomeneo. Wolfgang Hildesheimer judged the opera, hurriedly put together by Mozart in time for Leopold’s II’s coronation as King of Bohemia, to possess only “a museum-piece kind of beauty”, and he has not been widely contradicted.

James Conway’s new production of the opera testifies both to the short-sightedness of this prevalent diagnosis, as well to the signal strengths of the company he has now been running for a decade. One of the few arts organisations to see an increase in its cenral funding following the Arts Council’s recent revisions of its allocations, English Touring Opera has forged a reputation for intelligent productions which make a virtue of the limitations imposed by modest budgets and the need for flexibility. In the case of Tito, Neil Irish’s set consists of a two movable black walls, a chain curtain, and a giant plastercast mask – cleverly used to represent the idea of the Emperor’s power as something that reflects the people’s will rather than the character of Titus (Vespasian) himself – while the 1940s military and civilian costume is the kind of thing which could quickly by gleaned from a school theatre wardrobe. Yet the design is precise: it communicates the fragile balance of power in a world whose moral compass is changing faster than its inhabitants. More importantly, perhaps, and with the aid of Andrew Porter’s superb English translation, the director and singers have resisted modernization, settling instead for as direct and emotionally truthful a presentation as possible of the characters and their relationships. It would have been easy for Gillian Ramm to overplay the vain scheming of Vitellia, or for James Conway to have insisted that Mark Wilde add a layer of irony to Titus’s almost absurd evenhandedness, but such temptations are avoided. With sharp but unhurried direction from Richard Lewis, the orchestra support some wonderful singing, notably from Charlotte Stevenson as Annio and Julia Riley as Sesto.

A rather different kind of Caesar is at large in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tsar’s Bride (seldom seen outside Russia), in which the menacing presence of Ivan the Terrible is often felt, both in the course of events and in the music (the composer makes use of Ivan’s motif from his first opera, The Maid of Pskov), but which on stage is limited to a walk-on role – indicated by an ambiguous stage direction that calls for a “caftaned stranger” to ride by, staring coldly at the heroine. In Paul Curran’s admirable and thoroughly modern production, his first for the Royal Opera, the Tsar exchanges his caftan for a cashmere coat and his mount for a coterie of leather-clad, New Russian muscle.

The opera is based on a play by Lev Mei, one of a series (including the Maid of Pskov) which sought to enliven national history with romantic fiction. The story is a kind of blurred love triangle, with a geometry even more difficult to make out than that of La Clemenza di Tito, which nevertheless falls apart when the heroine is poisoned just after being chosen by the Tsar. Her final scene, strongly reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa and Donizetti’s Lucia (Korsakov’s score was controversial for its Italianate style and structure), is affecting, a fine vehicle for the production’s star soprano, Marina Poplavskaya. Yet even here, during a denouement of force, there was something earthbound about the music and its smooth, overly languorous interpretation by Mark Elder, so often an unerring champion for less wellknown scores. There are fine performances, notably by the chorus and Ekaterina Gubanova, as Lyubasha, whose unaccompanied Act One “protyazhnaya” (an extended strophic song) turned out to be the evening’s musical highlight, immediately stilling the stage-audience of rambunctious FSB agents with its old-world nobility. Curran’s production makes clever use of the Western prejudice in favour of certain Russian sterotypes, in which effort he is assisted by Kevin Knight’s lavish sets, designed to allow unrestricted views to the upper seats and including a roof-top terrace complete with swimming pool; the hero Lïkov, sung by Dmytro Popov, briefly considers diving into the string section before returning to his premature engagement celebrations. The air of seedy splendour takes one right to the heart of Curran’s conception.

Smith Quartet

2011-05-05T09:47:00.000+01:00

Old Royal Naval Chapel, Greenwich

We often think of the string quartet as a vehicle for abstract contemplation, but the ensemble – and most of its music – originated for dance accompaniment. The concluding concert of the second biennial Greenwich International String Quartet festival, given by the Smith Quartet, offered a rare opportunity to reflect on the continuing importance of dance to post-war string quartet writing.

In a densely packed programme of 10 pieces, ranging from Terry Riley and Michael Nyman to Gabriel Prokofiev and Elena Kats-Chernin, we were given committed performances and much food for thought, although a few of those thoughts were directed at the poor quality of some of the music.

Read the original review here

Hodges / BBCSO / Volkov

2011-05-04T09:49:00.000+01:00

Friday was a great day for British music, not so much on account of the swell of Parry et al billowing under Westminster Abbey's vaults, but because of the UK premiere later that day of James Clarke's marvellous piano concerto. Reflecting Clarke's second career as a painter, the concerto is labelled simply Untitled No 2 and, rather in the manner of an abstract painting, explores a limited number of harmonies and the relation between them. Despite this essentially static framework, the piece unfolds a beautifully balanced, dynamic structure.

More surprising is the work's resemblance to traditional concertos in the phases of dialogue between soloist and orchestra, and the contrasting periods of dense activity and moments of calm which bathe the audience like sunlight. Superbly coloured, this is a piece to hear again and again, and also a wonderful one to get lost in – though not for the soloist, Nicolas Hodges, who, as ever, was masterful in his elegant control of some very challenging material.

Read the full review here

Louis Andriessen: Anaïs Nin / De Staat

2011-04-19T09:52:00.000+01:00

"Even when I possess all," begins Louis Andriessen's new monodrama about Anaïs Nin, "I still feel myself possessed by a great demon of restlessness driving me on and on." Taken from an interview, the words are spoken by Cristina Zavalloni in a YouTube-style confessional video. On stage, the singer herself watches, making tea and indulgently rewinding the bits she likes.

As well as taking us straight to the volatile self-reflectiveness of Nin's character, the idea of being possessed by the will to possess connects with Andriessen's own preoccupation with fluctuations in momentum between performer, music and listener.

On cue, the music flares up with a driving passage, which Zavalloni conducts distractedly for a few bars before peeling off to her chaise longue. The remainder of the work is divided between vocal, instrumental and video passages (consisting of mock footage of Nin's lovers Antonin Artaud, René Allendy, Henry Miller and Nin's own father). While the elements are skilfully woven into a dramatic curve, with the incestuous relationship at its peak, they are kept at a distance musically. The instrumental and vocal writing seldom marry, with Zavalloni's angular declamation and flat American diction jarring against each other as well as vying for control with the motoric accompaniment...
Read the original review here

Beetlemania

2011-04-05T09:43:00.000+01:00

Michael Levinas: La Metamorphose
Opera de Lille

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: The Portrait
Leeds Grand Theatre

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, April 1

The works of Franz Kafka continue to enjoy a rich and diverse musical life, but operatic treatments have been relatively rare. This might seem surprising, bearing in mind the writer’s prominent position in the canon of literary modernism – a canon which composers have taken particularly seriously. At the same time, one can see how the dryness of Kafka’s prose, and the matter-offact way in which the unravelling of subjectivity is depicted, might sit at odds with the more heart-on-sleeve emotionalism usually found in opera. In setting Kafka’s novella,

The Metamorphosis, Michaël Levinas’s approach has been to sidestep this problem altogether. Matter of factness, of any kind, is completely missing. In its place is an unswerving musical and philosophical focus on the “alterity” of Kafka’s transformed narrator, and on the dramatic realization of the way in which Gregor’s changed voice and appearance gradually put him beyond the reach of the sympathies of his family. Levinas’s conception bears strong links to the work of his father, Emmanuel Levinas, and his effort to place ethical experience at the centre of philosophy. For Levinas senior, our ability to respond to what he called the “face of the other” lies at the root of distinctively human consciousness and of the individuation of the self. Taking this as a cue to interpret Kafka, the opera finds in its “metamorphosis” a moral rather than a physical or psychological transformation.

Michaël Levinas takes his central task to be the representation of Gregor’s alienated voice. The part is scored for counter-tenor, but requires the use of both chest and head voice to present the widest possible vocal range. In addition, electro-acoustic processing splits the line to create a kind of partial polyphony, in as many as ten distinct parts. During the second act, the singer is asked at times to sing through a metal spiral, held in the palm of the hand, which refracts the timbre further to produce an uncanny buzzing sound, at once pathetic and compelling.

As well as being effective as a means of representing Gregor’s insect-ness, the multivocal aspect of the role mirrors the polyphonic structure of the work as a whole. The opera is conceived as a series of five madrigals, interspersed with episodes reflecting Levinas’s interest in renaissance techniques, which create a sense of fluid musical stasis entirely germane to the subject matter: Gregor’s awareness of time is frequently noted in Kafka’s story, but in a way that reinforces our sense of the irrelevance a ticking of the clock would be to someone who is an insect. More importantly, the madrigal setting, a form predicated on the idea of different characters united in sympathy, is powerfully expressive of the idea of family. Gregor’s gradual movement beyond the reach of this ethical colloquy is enacted seamlessly in both music and drama, and with an economy at which Wagnerians should doff their caps.

The libretto, on which Levinas worked with Emmanuel Moses (whose father, Stéphane, was also a philosopher), is taken from Kafka’s original without alterations, although the order of events is changed. The staging, by Stanislaus Nordey, does for the “face of the other” what the composer does for the voice. Seen first behind a gauze, Gregor stands at the top of a pole, his naked form framed by a giant suspended cockroach, at the centre of a semicircular room decorated with spider-plant designs. The semicircle rises gradually, disclosing other backdrops, intensifying and echoing the spider designs – a simple device which, in conjunction with Stéphane Daniel’s beautiful lighting, admirably expresses Gregor’s inexorable change, as the black and white lines in the background absorb those of the foreground.

The effects are often moving: when Gregor’s mother reaches out to her estranged child, the arrangement of bodies onstage is uncannily reminiscent of scenes before the cross. The standard of singing, most notably by Fabrice de Falco as Gregor, and Magali Léger as his sister, is high, as is the playing of the Belgian ensemble Ictus. There were just a few times when the electro-acoustic apparatus, controlled by Benoît Meudic of IRCAM, seemed a little ill at ease in the grandly neo-classical setting of Lille’s opera house.

A philosophical issue of comparable significance is the subject of the little-known composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera, The Portrait, which addresses the vexed and contemporary problem of squaring an artist’s voguishness with his actual ability through the lens of the motto, “Sympathy is the only law for mankind”. Unfortunately, as a result of a clumsy adaptation of Gogol’s brilliant novella of the same name by Alexander Medvedev, and an uninspiring and only occasionally diverting score by Weinberg, comparatively little light is shed on the subject. What interest there is comes mainly from David Pountney’s inventive staging – a rare example of a director being let down by an opera – and from the performances by Paul Nillon (as the hero Chartkov) and Peter Savidge, who takes on no fewer than five roles, only four of them male.

Weinberg was a Polish Jew who escaped Nazi-Germany for the questionable refuge of Stalinist Russia. Like his close friend Dmitri Shostakovich, Weinberg survived both the favour and fury of the regime in the course of an extremely productive career. The Portrait, completed in 1980, should not deter operagoers from attending Weinberg and Medvedev’s earlier masterpiece, The Passenger, which Pountney will bring to English National Opera in 2012

Piccard in Space

2011-04-04T09:53:00.000+01:00

There is a squeeze on stage for Will Gregory's new opera. Besides the BBC Concert orchestra and conductor Charles Hazelwood, there are a half-dozen Moog synthesisers and a chorus of lab technicians. The first thing you notice, however, is a nervous-looking chap describing his condition. In unaccented speech he tells us who he is (Paul Kipfer, laboratory technician to the scientist Auguste Piccard) and what he's doing (dreaming, specifically about tomorrow's attempt to enter the stratosphere by hot-air balloon). As the emotional content rises, the vowels stretch into song – "why oh why", "no air, no ground". But immediately he checks himself and apologises: "Sometimes I sing. I don't know why."

This, in a nutshell, is what is good and bad about the Gregory's opera. The movement to song is skilfully handled, but the immediate resort to irony, though ubiquitous in today's art-making, suggests a loss of faith in the materials and a tendency to exploit them as effect. Gregory's classical background and electronic-rock present combine in a score that is versatile, varied and full of wit and energy, but there's little holding it together. The vocal lines are given life by parody – but are elsewhere lacklustre, and the production's continuous resort to comic-strip irony undercuts the intrinsic drama of the tale...

Read the rest of this review here

Chopin: Prince of the Romantics by Adam Zamoyski – review

2011-03-27T09:55:00.000+01:00

A revisionary biography of Chopin succeeds in reminding us of his extraordinariness

"A great, grrreat piece of news is that Little Chip-Chip is going to give a grrreat concert," wrote the cigar-smoking, larger-than-life George Sand in 1841. The news was indeed significant, because Chip-Chip – one of Sand's numerous nicknames for her unlikely lover, Frédéric Chopin – had all but retired from the concert platform. "He doesn't want any posters, he doesn't want any programmes, he doesn't want anyone to talk about it. He is afraid of so many things that I have suggested he play without candles, without an audience on a mute piano."

In the event, the concert, given to an audience of some 300 friends and admirers, was a great success. The tone of the reviews – "heart and genius alone speak" and "[Chopin] should not and cannot be compared with anyone" – shows how the cultish aura surrounding the composer-pianist was well on its way to becoming a fully fledged religion.

Both then and now, Chopin has always been a largely mythical creature. Child prodigy, divinely inspired improviser, poetic genius, his posthumous reputation has been claimed by Poles, French and even Germans, and told in biographies, novels, poems and an opera. During his lifetime, his person was thought to partake of something otherworldly; during ours, his grave remains a place of pilgrimage and veneration.

Read the full review here

Nash Ensemble / Richard Rodney Bennett

2011-03-26T09:59:00.001Z

A composer who has always brought style, humour and professionalism to his notably varied music, Richard Rodney Bennett has distinguished himself on the screen and the cabaret stage as much as the concert platform. His 1985 Sonata after Syrinx for flute, viola and harp, beautifully performed by members of the Nash ensemble as one element of their two-part 75th anniversary celebration of the composer, shows a fluid grasp of form and wonderful ear for instrumentation, together with a feel for lush and densely layered harmonies that both challenge and reassure the ear.

Whatever one's gifts, caution should be exercised in choosing the guests for one's birthday party, lest their talents outshine one's own. In a concert featuring four other British composers and three world premieres, this danger was most apparent in Simon Holt's new string sextet. Entitled The Torturer's Horse, it consists of four sections whose eerie, sustained textures are menaced by the shockwaves sent out by a single moment of violence. Requiring impeccable ensemble, which it duly received, the piece puts radical uncertainty at the service of a powerful and unsettlingly spare beauty.

The second highlight was provided by Michael Berkeley's settings of three Rilke poems, sung by the soprano Claire Booth....

Read the full review here

Emmanuel Ax, Wigmore Hall

2011-03-24T10:00:00.000Z

Something of a star in the US, Emanuel Ax is less well-known in the UK. His on-stage manner is diffident, almost apologetic, but this does not translate to his confident and wonderfully smooth playing. Though his Polish roots have made Chopin an obvious specialism, his broad, firmly bedded legato makes Schubert a natural choice, too.

What marked this all-Schubert recital as something out of the ordinary was its magnificent sense of composure. Extremes of emotion and heavy articulation of gesture were eschewed in favour of long-breathed rhythms and a focus on the narrow (and at times imperceptible) line between melody and figuration. Beginning with the second set of Impromptus, Ax showed how even the most unassuming arpeggio or bass-line progression draws its expressive qualities from Schubert's inexhaustible lyrical flow. The programme was completed by an elegant and poised performance of the "little" A major Sonata, D664, and by a mixed but compelling interpretation of the sprawling masterpiece in B flat, the Sonata D960.

The problems in the latter work derived from a lapse of concentration in the first movement. One or two muddied bass trills and rhythmic hesitancies, insignificant in themselves, seemed to shift Ax's focus from the whole to the part, causing an unevenness in tone and metre. But after a brief pause came a slow movement of breathtaking composure, audacious in its steadiness and the minute control of the voicing. In this, as in the rest of the concert, Ax showed how the rich vein of measured sorrow that runs throughout Schubert's work answers better to a steady gaze than to nervous glancing, offering an instructive reminder that melancholy yields a peace of mind every bit as necessary and valuable as joy.

Read the full review here

What kind of fools were they?

2011-03-15T11:54:00.003Z

from the TLS, March 11

Richard Wagner
PARSIFAL
Coliseum

Mark Anthony Turnage
ANNA NICOLE
Royal Opera House

Il faut méditerraniser la musique”, advised Nietzsche, in his final year of sanity. His immediate model in making this beguiling imperative was Bizet’s Carmen, a work whose music, Nietzsche said, seemed to “come forward lightly, gracefully, stylishly. It is lovable. It does not sweat”. In such terms is the object of praise polished, repeatedly, and with the methodical calm of a man who shines his boots to ensure the person he is about to kick will be able to see his reflection in them.

The subject to be kicked was of course Richard Wagner. The same Wagner whom Nietzsche had previously idolized as the redeemer of Western art had now become the last word in decadence, his works and person reflecting and exacerbating the disease sapping all vitality from culture. Of all the insults levelled by Nietzsche at his idol-turned-bête noire, the most damaging is that of “actor”. Wagner, by an ontological perversion which allowed music to say things it was never meant to, had turned music into a vehicle for which “everything which has to strike people as true, must not be true”.

In his polemical excess, Nietzsche proved himself to be as Wagnerian as his subject. Indeed, when one considers Parsifal, the work which seems to have tipped the philosopher over the edge (“an extravagant, lofty and most malicious parody of tragedy itself”), it is clear that Nietzsche is simply using Wagner’s own categories against him. Few operas depict an inwardly turned, decadent society in an advanced state of selfcongratulation and self-loathing with more exactness than Parsifal, just as fewer still put themselves at such pains to create a musical language of truth and, equally, of deception. At the same time, few scores express the meaning of compassion – the key to the drama on stage and in the pit – so deeply.

Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Wagner’s final opera, in the refreshingly direct English translation by Richard Stokes, began its life at the Coliseum in 1999. Twelve years on, in what is promised to be its last incarnation, it seems only to have grown in composure. The production circumvents some of the most familiar problems associated with the work, primarily by ignoring the issue of its apparent Christianity, neutralizing the racial undertones, and toning down the traditional Wagnerian emphasis on redemption. The focus on the agency and experience of compassion – and consequently on the idea of redemption as a process rather than an achievable state – shines through with luminous clarity. I struggle to remember a musical or theatrical experience in recent years as affecting or thought-provoking.

Download the full article here

LSO / Gergiev: Mahler 9

2011-03-04T11:58:00.000Z

The London Symphony Orchestra's principal conductor has his sceptics, and they are rarely more vocal than when it comes to his Mahler. It's fast, flashy and lacking proper schooling – or so the usual charges run, ascribing to Gergiev's musical direction the stereotypical afflictions of bling-obsessed new Russia.

Read the full article here

Pagliacci, King's Head Theatre

2011-03-03T11:59:00.000Z

Lovers of opera and pubs can now indulge both passions simultaneously. The King's Head is a pub with a theatre in its back room, which is where this performance of Pagliacci took place. But the intermezzo was staged in the bar. Dancing to a crackly recording of Leoncavallo's surging romantic score, Sonya Cullingford and Symeon Kyriakopoulos wound their way around the punters to create a graceful and quietly erotic ballet.

Read the full article here

Brian Ferneyhough Total Immersion

2011-03-01T12:00:00.000Z

The baptismal associations of the Total Immersion series are worth bearing in mind: a day submerged in Ferneyhough's music leaves one's ears quite reborn. The Diotima Quartet took the lunchtime stage for the compact, brief Second String Quartet and the compact but extended set of Sonatas for String Quartet. Supple and spirited, these tightly controlled but loving performances teased out the translucent beauty of these works. First performed in 1967, the Sonatas transformed Ferneyhough's reputation, and the Diotimas made it easy to hear why.

The painstakingly prepared main concert heard the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins in Ferneyhough's two orchestral scores to date: Plötzlichkeit, from 2006, and La Terre Est un Homme, a scandal at its 1979 premiere and scarcely heard since. Sandwiched between them were the third Carceri d'Invenzione, a Pandora's box of delights for chamber ensemble, and the Missa Brevis performed by the BBC Singers, led by James Morgan.

Plötzlichkeit means "suddenness", the experience of which Ferneyhough induces by interrupting each musical process before the mind has had a chance to chart its course. Made up of 111 fragmentary sections, some of which linger tantalisingly, its exploration of recherché textures and flashed colour spectrums is both beautiful and thrilling. La Terre, monumental in its intensity and magnificent in its sheer chutzpah, projects a seething macrocosm of souls struggling against the odds to grace mere survival with meaning. With the BBCSO at their committed, inspirational best, Ferneyhough's violent cry against the void has been answered at last.

CPE Bach: like father, like son

2011-02-25T09:00:00.000Z

Forward-thinking and unorthodox, CPE Bach was once regarded as the superior musician of the Bach dynasty. Guy Dammann argues for an underrated and overshadowed composer

"Bach is the father. We are the children!" No one with a smattering of musical knowledge will be surprised by this remark of Mozart's, made to the Viennese aristocrat and influential patron Gottfried van Swieten. It is well known that Mozart held the composer in the highest esteem and, some would even argue that it was his interest in the contrapuntal, learned style of "Old Sebastian", as he called him, which gave his music its edge.

But when Mozart referred to Bach as his musical father, it was in fact not Johann Sebastian he had in mind, but his second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Indeed, in the second half of the 18th century, the name "Bach" was almost exclusively associated with the initials "CPE".

Born in 1714 to Johann Sebastian and his first wife Maria Barbara, Emanuel followed the example of his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann by qualifying as a lawyer before pursuing a musical career. But his first main job couldn't have been along more traditional lines. He moved from Leipzig to Berlin in 1740 to be a harpsichordist in the court of Frederick the Great. Despite the fact that his appointment seems to have been made directly by Frederick – he was chosen to accompany the newly crowned monarch and musician for his first solo flute concert – Bach didn't appear to make much headway in the Prussian court, never becoming credited as an official composer. Even the visit of his father to Frederick's court in 1747 – the now legendary meeting that led to the composition of the Musical Offering – did nothing to advance the son's career, dogged by quarrels and criticism of his unorthodox and "affected" playing style.

Read the rest of this article here

The sea and the musical mirror

2011-02-10T10:39:00.000Z

From the Times Literary Supplement, 11 February

Harpa Concert Hall
Dark Music Days 2011
Reykjavik, Iceland

Halldór Laxness, a wry commentator on the self-image of his countrymen, once observed that his nation’s newly acquired wealth was invisible to the naked eye in all but one respect. This was back in 1968, when tworoom corrugated iron dwellings still housed the majority of Icelanders, and the diet of dried fish, salted lamb and home-distilled brennivin had remained unchanged for decades. But following a landmark trade agreement with Poland in 1955, imports of a chocolate wafer called Prince Polo began to flood the domestic market. By the 1960s, the Prince Polo had become the nation’s foremost culinary mascot, entirely satisfying – if Laxness is to be believed – the awakened desire for luxury sweeping across the island. Two years after the 2008 crash, there are many among Laxness’ compatriots who rue the day their society’s covetous gaze moved beyond the gold wrapping of chocolate biscuits. Today, visitors to Iceland barely notice the continued presence of Prince Polo on the confectionary shelves. The biscuits were originally distinctive because they were imported at a time when the Icelandic Krona barely figured on foreign exchanges, but now almost everything for sale in Reykjavik is imported. What you do notice on arrival in the capital, however, is the building site on the old harbour front, conspicuous as much by its size – the irregular structure dwarfs every thing else in the city – as by the constant activity which surrounds it in the rush to get it finished in time for the May opening. Reykjavik is a maze of building sites, but almost all of them have fallen silent since the crash.

The building in question, the Harpa concert hall, amplifies the national taste for luxury goods in shiny wrapping by an order of magnitude. Designed by the Danish architects Henning Larsen, and clad by the Danish- Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in glass panels variously angled so as to capture the sky’s changing colour and light, it contains three concert halls each engineered by Artec, the firm behind many of world’s best modern halls including those at Birmingham, Lucerne, Lahti and Budapest. Both the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra and the national opera are due to move in soon after completion, with dedicated administrative offices for each and common rehearsal space. The main auditorium will seat 1,800, have a retractable orchestra pit for staged opera performances, and allow those playing in it – thanks to a system of remotely controlled echo chambers and damping fabrics – to specify a reverberation time of between one and three seconds. Bearing in mind the variety of intended uses, from spoken theatre and conference events, where a one-second delay is considered appropriate, to symphony and rock concerts, which require two or three times that amount, the acoustic engineering will be a key feature in making sure the building can meet the notably varied needs of a country which, with a little more than 300,000 inhabitants, has a population less than one third that of Birmingham’s, and one fifth of Budapest’s.

Though the opening concerts are set for the beginning of May, the building is still a long way from being finished. A major setback came last summer when the Chinese contractors discovered a structural fault in the support for Eliasson’s sculpted exterior, with the result that the whole outer layer had to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch. Even so, amid the buzz of accelerated construction work, it is easy to be won over by the optimistic vision projected by the building’s management. Looking through the salt encrusted glass and down into the mud dyke which, in just a few months, will allow the Atlantic Ocean to lap benignly against the Northern façade, the hall’s music director Steinunn Ragnarsdóttir explained that she was not worried about moving into an unfinished building. “It’s quite usual in Iceland to move into your house before you’ve finished building it. And besides”, she added, guiding my gaze upwards from the rusty embankment to the peaks of Mount Esjan across the bay, “when the house in question has this view . . .”. Ragnarsdóttir’s enthusiasm aside, she and her colleagues will have their work cut out to convince Icelanders that a state-of-the-art concert hall is a genuine priority for the country. Harpa was initially planned as a publicprivate partnership, with the capital outlay provided by Björgólfur Guðmundsson. But Guðmundsson’s fortunes evaporated overnight in 2008, along with those of his bank, Landsbanki, and the city of Reykjavik was left with a multi-billion Krona tab and its natural focal point occupied by an unappetising tangle of mud, steel and unworn hardhats. Evidently, in Iceland, it is not only the banks which are deemed “too big to fail”, and the ownership of the project was eventually fully transferred to the state and city authorities. Nonetheless, there are many who feel that the estimated 23 billion Krona so far invested in the building could have been put to better use in a country now crippled by unemployment and personal and public debt.

Even those who stand most to benefit from the hall’s completion – namely the musicians – have their doubts, suggesting that the hall is too big and that the heavy loan-repayment schedule will tie the management’s hands when it comes to programming. Others point to the recent sudden decision by the cashstrapped Reykjavik city council to axe all subsidy for music education for pupils over the age of sixteen. “Forty years down the line”, one composer told me, “we might just have a world-class concert hall with nobody left who can play in it.”

That prospect is a near-perfect mirror image of the current situation. Iceland’s musical scene is flourishing – thanks, in large part, to hitherto generous levels of support for music students. In addition, the country has a world-class symphony orchestra, but has for 50 years lacked a proper place to put it. Resident since 1961 at the Háskólabiói – the University cinema – the Iceland Symphony Orchestra has been performing in a venue in which the sound does not so much reverberate as crawl to the edge of the stage before collapsing at the feet of the audience.

That this has been particularly hard on the strings was made clear by the first concert of the Dark Music Days contemporary music festival, which since 1980 has taken place in the capital at the end of January each year. The opening work was György Ligeti’s orchestral masterpiece, Atmosphères (1961), a work which relies on an accumulation of string presence; the surface-area of the sound is slowly variegated, generating the impression of an immense, shimmering continuum. Conducted with cool-headed precision by the young composer and conductor Daniel Bjarnason, one of a number of young stars in the Nordic musical firmament, Atmosphères received its first full performance in Iceland. Given how much better the piece will surely sound in the new hall, I hope it won’t be the last. The same goes for Bjarnason’s own Birting, the world premiere of which closed the opening concert. In four accomplished movements, Bjarnason’s shifting and colliding structures echoed Ligeti in the sense they gave of stretched temporality, but here, also, was more of a focus on contrasting musical characters and styles.

Dark Music Days is unusual among contemporary classical music festivals in its lack of an aesthetic agenda, other than that of representing the variety of Icelandic musics on offer. This easy-going approach wasn’t always in evidence. Like every other Western country in the post-War era, Icelandic composers heeded the various edicts of Darmstadt, hoping to compensate the absence of actual listeners and performances with ideological respectability. Some voices flourished: Jon Leifs, one of few Icelandic composers of the mid-century to have forged a genuinely international profile; Jón Nordal (born 1926), who spins intuitive variations on the serialism of his contemporaries; and Jórunn Vidar (born 1918), whose links with Iceland’s musical past are genetic as well as cultural (she is the great-granddaughter of Rejkyavik’s first cathedral organist, Pétur Gudjohnsen), best known for her craftsmanlike, confidently romantic songs.

The diversity of today’s scene is a different matter altogether, however. Often it is reflected in the tastes and spheres of activity of individuals, such as Bjarnason, who are as happy composing for orchestra as for a fivepiece rock band. It also inheres in the lack of suspicion with which composers and musicians from different environments view each other. Part of this has to do with the necessarily restricted size of professional musical circles in Iceland: everybody knows everybody else and, by and large, listens to everybody else, too. Which is to say, everybody knows Björk just as they know Sigur Ros and Jón Nordal. Criticism seems to flow just as freely, but the absence of malice and pointscoring is conspicuous.

Instead of being dispersed throughout the city, next year’s festival will take place in Harpa’s various auditoria. This is good news from the point of view of acoustic quality, but one has the impression that some of the smaller venues will be missed – Alvar Aalto’s beautifully subdued Nordic House pavilion, for instance, which merges with the rough grasses of upper Hljómskálagarður Park in the same way as Harpa's dynamic profile will draw on the surrounding mountains, the sea and sky. One concert here, for the always exquisite combination of soprano, clarinet and piano – performed by Ingibjörg Gudjonsdóttir, Einar Jóhannesson, and Valgedur Andrésdottir – was an exemplary blend of co-operating styles: the highly structured lyricism of British-born composer Oliver Kentish, Áskell Másson’s arabesque of extended techniques in “Leiftur”, and Haflidi Hallgrimsson’s magical sea airs. A final item from Tryggi Baldvinsson, with its clever part-writing and unapologetic nostalgia, had me wondering whether it belonged in the nineteenth-century salon or a TV variety show – whether it would have pleased Gabriel Fauré more than Elton John, say – but the clash of idioms didn’t seem to matter. They just caught the light of the moment.

Arditti Quartet / Jake Arditti

2011-02-09T16:20:00.003Z

Review of Arditti Quartet
Wigmore Hall
3 February 2011

Like other instruments of torture, the scores of Brian Ferneyhough are objects of rare fascination. His sixth and most recent string quartet is no exception. Improbable time signatures measure impossible rhythms, while an array of notations observe constant and extreme dynamic fluctuations. It is, strictly speaking, unplayable, and performers are directed not towards perfection but only towards a kind of improved failure. Obscuring many of the more striking rhythmic figures, and damping the dynamic range to a numb mezzo-piano, the Ardittis' failure ranked fair to middling.

Praise is due nonetheless. Despite its approximations, the performance still successfully conveyed a sense of the work's beauty. Fresh and full, at its heart is a play of gestures which are born of rare grace....

To read the rest of this review at the Guardian, click here.

Artemis Quartet plays Beethoven

2011-02-09T16:18:00.002Z

Artemis Quartet
Wigmore Hall
Thursday 20th January

Opinion remains divided about whether Beethoven's late B flat quartet Op 130 works best with its original last movement – published and often performed separately as the Grosse Fuge Op 133 – or with its significantly tamer substitute. For while there's no doubt that the previous four movements are all designed with the original ending in view, the extreme contrast in texture, style and volume often come as a rude shock, obliterating all memory of the beautiful music which precedes it.

It was a mark of the quality of this performance by the Berlin-based Artemis Quartet, in the penultimate concert of their Beethoven cycle, that the Grosse Fuge ending felt just right....

Click here to read the full article in the Guardian

No bar to spiritual ritual

2011-02-09T16:00:00.001Z

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, January 21st.

Michael Downes
Jonathan Harvey: "Song Offerings" and "White as Jasmine"
Ashgate £35

The writing of “new music” has become a largely secular process. Its goals have often been quasi-technological as much as artistic, and the idea that music is expressive of anything much beyond its own structure – let alone the Romantic conception of music as a mode of access to the spiritual realm – has long ago been passed over in favour of models that bear a lighter metaphysical load. Those composers, such as John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, who conceive of music as a means of expressing spiritual and religious devotion, tend to explore idioms at some remove from the Modernist mainstream.

There are three prominent exceptions. The first, Olivier Messiaen, exercised an influence through teaching and composition over the past forty years comparable only to Arnold Schoenberg’s in the forty years before that. The influence of the second, Karlheinz Stockhausen, has also been extensive; but even his admirers have found his oblique, idiosyncratic spiritualisms somewhat hard to swallow. The third is the English composer Jonathan Harvey, whose stature has never equalled that of the other two, but to whom few would deny an important position in post-war European music. Though close in artistic purpose to Stockhausen, with whom he shares the view that by virtue of its ambiguity and resistance to decoding “all good music is spiritual music”, Harvey does not share his late German contemporary’s Messiah complex. He has his detractors, however. Even so sympathetic a critic as Ivan Hewett has charged him with wanting the impossible when it comes to simultaneously enacting and representing ritual in music, while Arnold Whittall, whose concise 1999 book about the composer has remained until now the principal secondary source, aligns himself with the sceptics, asking how it can be “possible to link these very profound and longstanding spiritual concerns with the concreted specifics of modern compositional techniques – serialism [and] spectralism”? One of the merits of Michael Downes’s new study of the composer is that it skewers this question. Where is the real conflict between the kind of enlightened Anglican- Buddhism which best characterizes Harvey’s interests and the motivation to develop the musical materials of an age? Even if it is conceded that the links between wider cultural modernity and secularism are far from merely incidental, there seems to be no contradiction per se between the methods, sounds and artistic aims of musical modernism and religious sentiment. Much music of the last half century draws on and lends itself to ritual, contemplation and transformative experience. A visiting Martian might therefore conclude that we have been living in the most spiritual of all musical ages.

The principal aim of Downes’s book is to provide an analytical guide to two of Harvey’s works. Both Song Offerings, from 1985, and White as Jasmine (1999) are written for female voice with instrumental accompaniment, and both set texts chosen by Harvey to reflect his own spiritual leanings. Musically, the two song cycles are among Harvey’s most accessible works. The settings – of Rabindranath Tagore (whom Harvey originally discovered through his readings of Yeats) in Song Offerings, and the mystical and devotional bhakti texts used for White as Jasmine – allow the non-specialist reader to enter into Harvey’s spiritualist aesthetic, from which vantage point the music is more likely to make sense.

But it is Downes’s secondary purpose, to provide an outline of Harvey’s musical style and artistic aims, that is most successful. The close focus on the two works lends credibility and insight to the outer chapters. The study of the manipulation of pitches in Song Offerings, to create a web of relations which mirror the spiritual journey embarked on in the text, gives force to the more general observations Downes makes about Harvey’s longstanding insistence on the use of patterns and processes which any ear, with a little guidance, can follow. At one point in musical history, this emphasis on intelligibility would have set Harvey apart from many of his colleagues at IRCAM, Paris’s state-sponsored hive of electro-acoustic musical activity, where Harvey has collaborated regularly since the early 1980s, and still the nerve centre of musical “research” in this area. But Harvey’s use of computers has always been directed toward adapting and transforming elements of instrumental music, rather than generating experimental processes and sound-worlds for their own sake. And in an age where material exploration comes cheaply, Harvey’s developmental, integrative approach may well prove prescient.

If Downes’s book has a fault, besides the odd stylistic aberration, it is a lack of authorial distance. Often it seems that little separates the author’s perspective from that of his subject. Much of the research for the book was interview-based, and Downes has worked before with Harvey on the revision of the composer’s doctoral thesis, submitted in 1964 and eventually published as Music and Inspiration in 1999. But as both amanuensis and apologist, Downes is an articulate and reassuring guide. His readers will soon find themselves better listeners, both to Harvey and to music in general.

Going for a song

2011-01-06T14:34:00.003Z

Covent Garden's Tannhäuser, reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, 7 January 2011

Tannhäuser is often mistakenly described as a naive work. What is true is that each version of the opera is fraught with dramatic, musical and practical problems. It is also conceivable that, between the work’s troubled Dresden premiere in 1845, its disastrous visit to Paris in 1861, and the composer’s confession to Cosima in 1883, twenty days before his death, that he still “owes the world a Tannhäuser”, Wagner ultimately confronted these problems with more success in the other works which it so strongly foreshadows, notably Die Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal.

The confusion stems from the idea at the heart of the opera: the dichotomy between sensual and sexual delight, represented by the Venusberg, and spiritual and moral nourishment, represented by the Wartburg community and enshrined, above all, in the figure of Elisabeth. The opera is often taken to represent a simple choice between the two, to be made by the work’s eponymous hero in the interests of art. If this was indeed what the opera amounted to, then the charge of naivety could be made to stick, but as Wagner’s libretto and stage directions make clear, the choice facing Tannhäuser is a false one. The division between erotic and moral love, between sympathy and sexual desire, is one which should never have come about; and the catastrophic effects of it having done so – above all, according to Wagner, as a result of church teaching – are plain to see. Both Venus’s decadent underworld and the pious see of Herrmann, Landgrave of Thuringia, are closed societies whose greatest fear is also what secretly they long for most. Venus falls in love with Tannhäuser because his song is the one thing that can arouse in her feelings of pity, just as Elisabeth loves him because she understands that his love exceeds the crippled pieties of his rivals.

In the sense that Wagner came to understand his mission in terms of healing this rift in German society, with the theatre as his primary tool, Tannhäuser might be thought of as his most autobiographical opera; an atypically modest one, too, if we consider that Tannhäuser himself is cast as a failure: he fails both Venus and Elisabeth, just as fails in his efforts to communicate what he has learned from his experiences of loving both; he succeeds merely in disrupting rather than winning the central song contest, fluffing in public the lines he delivered so successfully in private in the previous act. Even his final apotheosis and scrambled redemption do nothing to heal the rift, but rather underline Elisabeth’s saintliness and the withdrawal of beauty from the physical world.

In his new production for Covent Garden, the first seen at the Royal Opera since the retirement of Elijah Moshinsky’s short-lived staging in 1987, Tim Albery uses the idea of the theatre itself as the conceptual key to Wagner’s dichotomy. It is an appropriate device, which makes up for what it lacks in originality by allowing the audience to take the work as seriously as it was intended. Michael Levine’s set, with lighting by David Finn, consists primarily of a vast black box, vaguely reminiscent of Wieland Wagner’s minimalist Bayreuth sets and bleakly suggestive of an empty theatre’s untapped possibilities. The main detail comes from a copy of the Royal Opera House’s gilded proscenium arch, complete with curtains, which is used as the frame for the Venusberg ballet and opening scene. In the second act, the arch has been reduced to a kind of sacred ruin, its uneven ground reverently trod by the Thuringians, here cast by Albery as a kind of contemporary renegade army whose heroes wear motheaten evening dress under their dusty greatcoats. By the third act, a scattering of rubble and dust is all that remains of the theatre.

The ballet, added by Wagner to satisfy Parisian tradition, begins earlier than is usual, but to good effect since it redresses the dramatic imbalance further, Jasmin Vardimon’s virtuosic choreography adding considerably to the gravitational pull of the Venusberg. Men, Tannhäuser included, arrive at the theatre, only to be drawn in by the come-hither flourishes of the female dancers. The dance follows a wave motion, developing into a restless circle as the dancers pursue each other round a spinning table, shedding clothing on the way. Though visually exciting, it doesn’t take long before the constant circular motion reveals itself to be driven by the same spiritual emptiness which prompts Tannhäuser to return to Thuringia.

The motion of the ballet contrasts strongly with the static quality of the remainder of Albery’s production. Johan Botha, in the lead role, is a monumental figure. Both he and Michaela Schuster’s imperious Venus disappear, luckily, for the duration of the ballet, but their first-act duet gives the impression less of two lovers taking awkward leave of each other than of two mountains driven apart by tectonic plates. A certain monumentalism also characterizes Semyon Bychkov’s approach to the score. After his success with Lohengrin last year, he has clearly won the trust of the Royal Opera orchestra, who followed his well-balanced but often perilously slow pace with an impressively even beauty of tone. Credit, too, should go to the singers who showed the same steadiness. Botha is one of the few tenors who can approach the role with confidence, but even he began to show signs of wear in the final act. The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, who sang Elsa in Bychkov’s Lohengrin, gave a radiant but appropriately distant quality to the role of Elisabeth. The loudest cheers on the opening night, however, were for the baritone Christian Gerhaher, whose “Blick’ ich umher” was so sustained and focused that one wondered at times why Elisabeth didn’t simply abandon her hopes for Tannhäuser and settle down with Wolfram instead.

Don't shoot the violinist

2010-12-18T10:15:00.003Z

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2010

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, December 17

Until relatively recently, the music of Enno Poppe was not well known in this country, but it has been a regular fixture at Huddersfield since Graham McKenzie became director of the Contemporary Music Festival in 2006. Poppe’s profile maps neatly onto McKenzie’s programming ambitions, which have been both to embrace elements of the experimental fringe, with its emphasis on sound art and visual display, and to strengthen connections with the ascendant generation of composers from Northern Europe. Drawing on his education in composition at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, and in electroacoustic, synthetic and algorhythmic techniques at the city’s Technische Universität, Poppe, now forty-one, has assembled a diverse catalogue, ranging from tightly knit, process-driven works – often with pithy, suggestive titles, such as “Rad” and “Herz” - to more expansive pieces for larger ensembles. Interzone, a multimedia concoction based on the sheaf of writings by William Burroughs which bears the same name, is probably his most ambitious work to date. Since hearing its first performance at the Berliner Festspiele in 2004, McKenzie has wanted to bring it to Britain.

Interzone opened proceedings with a single performance in Bates Mill, a former textile warehouse which, despite a noisy heating system and ankle-snapping draughts, has become one of the festival’s best venues. It has taken McKenzie four years to arrange this performance, and no wonder, for in addition to the twelve-strong force of Ensemble Mosaik the work requires five vocal soloists, a further speaking and singing voice part, an elaborate electro-acoustic rig with a battery of carefully positioned speakers, and two sets of paired projection screens controlled by the video artist, Anne Quirynen, and a technician.

The room buzzes with electrical and nervous energy. The first thing we hear, however, is a disconcertingly understated voice, coming from a figure on one of the screens: “Like Spain, I am bound to the past”, it begins, without a hint of the mock grandeur of Burroughs’s opening, the diction pared to the bone. “One morning you wake up and notice: this is the day you see through compound eyes. It takes some time to realize: you may or may not close your eyes, but there is no way back.”

Burroughs derived the word “interzone” from the international zone in Tangiers, where he lived in the 1950s, and used it for a collection of writings, some of which found their way into his first novel Naked Lunch (1959). Although Tangiers itself figures in the text (which has been adapted into an English and German libretto by Marcel Beyer) and in Quirynen’s multilayered films, Poppe’s notion of Interzone is more concerned with cities in general and what the composer calls “interstices” – the kinds of perceptual thresholds which are most readily experienced when we find ourselves lost in an urban environment. Quirynen’s collaged cinematography is appropriately restless, so that although streets and buildings can be made out as streets and buildings, our recognition of them is never allowed to stabilize. Signs of life appear, recede and reappear, leading to the two final scenes in a Tangiers souk and by a war-damaged wall. In both, our attention is drawn to central female figures, to whom clear visual and emotional access is blocked. We cling to fragments of facial expressions, our ability to sympathize and to identify thoroughly dismantled.

Poppe’s music follows the same design of bewildering collage, but each episode is painstakingly conceived. As in his other compositions, Poppe works by establishing and breaking patterns, using precisely articulated rhythmic motifs alongside and within areas of colour and timbre that vary from ghostly, semi-wordless voices to the swirl of a recorded electronic track. The ensemble is biased towards single reed instruments, with three clarinets and two saxophones, making for an eerily unbalanced sound that softens when broadened out by accordion, horn and flute. The Algerian setting is referred to by a reedy muezzin motif, the microtonal structure of which is absorbed into the overall harmonic spectrum; though dense and complex, the musical language is rarely dissonant, more usually simply amorphous. As with the video, the final two episodes, which consist of a violent frenzy of reeds and percussion followed by a luminous duet for soprano and saxophone, gesture towards an emotional climax – although the emotion, oscillating between fear and desire, is hard to pin down. Poppe had not conducted Interzone himself before this year, but his lead in Hudderfield was impressively clear. And in a work in which everything seems to wrestle with its opposite, his gangly figure, with its mop of red hair and apparently elongated arms, made for a striking visual antidote to the brightly lit and immaculately composed Omar Ebrahim, the narrator on stage and on film.

If much of Western music, with its studied culture of close listening to harmonic and thematic “argument”, may be considered in terms of the sense of individual power and common freedom won by its audience, then Interzone can perhaps be approached as a study of powerlessness, of our failure to grasp phenomenal particulars. By turns aggressive and seductive, Poppe and Quirynen’s audio-visual conjuring of “compound eyes” is a tour de force. And though it may be too soon to call this Interzone a masterpiece, the sense of its having forced entry to an aesthetic sphere from which, as Burroughs put it, “there is no way back”, is palpable. At the very least, it should provide a beacon for composers and audiences who wish to see video technology abetting rather than obstructing artistic intention.

Power relationships of a different kind were explored in a concert given later the same evening by the Bozzini Quartet, in which the first two quartets by the German- Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008) were interspersed with two works by the Irish composer Jennifer Walshe. Both Walshe’s “blurt”, from 1997, and the newly composed “Marlowe S”, begin where Kagel leaves off in his inside-out approach to the genre. The Kagel pieces – from the mid- 1960s – unravel the performance and conversational gestures at the heart of quartet playing, and call for a range of extended techniques, the musicians occasionally exchanging bows for knitting needles and serrated wooden rods. But Walshe’s two pieces raise the stakes further by turning musical performance into theatrical psychodrama. The four instrumentalists are required to enter at different times, experiment with different seats and also to interfere with, or assist, each other’s playing. The cellist has the most fun, turning her instrument upside down before eventually pointing a gun at the first violinist – with an added frisson lent by the fact that, in this case, the cellist and violinist happen to be married. Though more performance art than music, Kagel’s now dated idiom and Walshe’s spry contemporary spin were given the full benefit of the doubt by the Bozzini’s customarily spirited delivery. The concert made an interesting counterpoint to the festival’s other main string quartet concert, in which the Arditti Quartet performed Brian Ferneyhough’s latest essay in the genre.

The Ardittis have been responsible for the premieres of each of Ferneyhough’s six string quartets. The latest, which was given its first performance in Donaueschingen a month before coming to Huddersfield, contained some surprises: its supersaturated expressivity and tangled polyphony yielded moments of stasis and even the occasional consonance. The problem was that you would barely have known it from the performance. So fluent have the Arditti Quartet become in taming the virtuosic heights of composers like Ferneyhough, that they often appear to skate over the music’s purposefully abrasive surfaces. The result is that the expressive intensity and technical density so highly prized in high modernist circles, on account of these qualities’ supposed resistance to commodifiable fluency, can come to seem almost routine. This becomes a problem when one considers that the Arditti Quartet, with their impeccable pedigree and long record of delivering and setting down definitive accounts of works by Feldman and Xenakis, Lachenmann and Ligeti, necessarily exercise an extraordinary influence over the soundworld and technical vocabulary of the contemporary string quartet.

It was good then, that a second concert, showcasing three parts of an ever-expanding work by the Norwegian violinist and composer Ole-Henrik Moe, showed the quartet at their fearless but committed best. This possibly owed something to the fact that Moe, who intended to appear alongside the quartet in the new, third part of the work, had been taken ill. As a result, the quartet’s former second violinist Graeme Jennings, on the strength of a few hours practice and a single rehearsal, stepped in to play the solo part of “Lenger”. The new movement has all the players circling around the highest reaches of their instruments in a tremolando so sustained and rapid that even the best technique is put under severe pressure. That pressure, though, achieves a staggering release in the concluding passage, in which static, barely audible chords seem to lift the texture with irresistible force, as if someone has tripped a zero-gravity switch.

Moe is one of a growing number of Scandinavian composers who bring humour to the otherwise fairly serious business of contemporary art music. The presence of the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen and the Norwegian Rolf Wallin added further to the welcome sense that Huddersfield’s winter mists are increasingly dappled by northern lights.

Abrahamsen’s Schnee (snow) is a series of intricately structured and textured canons for the Ensemble Recherche. Lasting almost an hour, it is a contemplative work which, like Interzone, makes demands on its performers’ sense of rhythm and on audiences trying to follow its closely worked logic. But unlike Poppe’s collage, Schnee produces no sense of moody uncertainty. Rather, as the counterpoint weaves between instruments arranged in pairs around a central percussionist, one feels delightfully light-headed. Rolf Wallin’s recent work, by mild contrast, seems lighthearted. In a well-sculpted programme given by the London Sinfonietta, three works by Wallin – presented alongside solo pieces by Xenakis and Lachenmann, and Sciarrino’s brief “Quintettino” – underlined his stylistic roots as well as his playful originality.

The final pleasure of the festival was Rebecca Saunders’s Chroma, written in 2003 for the vast spaces of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Saunders deploys her players and instruments – a standard ensemble with piano and several percussion rigs, but also a series of clocks and miniature music-boxes – in such a way that the coincidences of sound articulate and reshape our sense of space, which changes as the players move about the auditorium. Made up of “sound-surface” fragments, Chroma amounts to a four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. And although a far cry from the austerity of the Turbine Hall, Huddersfield’s town hall, with its rich acoustic and (like the music) highly decorated interior, proved an ideal venue. Certainly, the members of the German ensemble musikFabrik appeared to have no difficulty negotiating the tight staircases separating the main hall from the upper galleries. Best of all, they performed Saunders’s work twice – very much the icing on the frozen architectural cake.

Click here to subscribe to the TLS, the leading paper in the world for literary culture.

The warped and the woof

2010-12-03T10:56:00.001Z

Alexander Raskatov
A Dog's Heart
Coliseum

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, 3 December 2010

This house is doomed. They’re always singing.” I don’t know whether this line, delivered some two thirds of the way through the second act of Alexander Raskatov’s A Dog’s Heart, was intended as a comment on the improbable economics of the opera house. If it was, then it certainly comes from an improbable enough opera, and this not so much because of the story – an adaptation of a satirical novel by Mikhail Bulgakov – but rather because of Raskatov’s music. While the majority of those on stage are singers, it is true, “singing” doesn’t really capture what they do most of the time. Barking is perhaps a better term for the succession of serrated, melodically disjunct syllables through which Cessare Mazzonis’s libretto gradually makes itself understood.

This is not to say that A Dog’s Heart is a bad piece of music theatre. On the contrary, and as one might expect of its director, Simon McBurney, it is a theatrically innovative and entertaining piece of drama. Raskatov’s score is also often intelligently conceived. The declamatory style, while grating and problematic from the point of view of dramatic pacing, is appropriate to the unsympathetic environment in which the characters exist – especially the Bolsheviks, whose melodic angularity increases in proportion to their dehumanized sensibilities. In the orchestra, too, a rich palette of well-prepared effects, especially in the expanded brass and percussion sections, reflect with admirable immediacy the action on stage.

Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog concerns a Moscow medical professor’s attempt to turn a dog into a man by transplanting the testes and pituitary gland of a recently deceased criminal. The sharp satire it offers of life under Lenin’s New Economic Policy is barely disguised (the boorish dog-man proves to be an exemplar of Bolshevik virtues) and the novel was not published until 1987, more than sixty years after Bulgakov wrote it and nearly fifty after his death. The idea of making an opera out of the story originally came from the director of Der Nederlandse Opera, Pierre Audi. Although he first commissioned Alexander Raskatov, a composer not well known beyond his completion of Schnittke’s ninth symphony and one who had never before composed an opera, it is fairly clear the project was devised as bait to entice McBurney to direct an opera. For it was Audi, as director of the Almeida theatre, who sponsored the rise to prominence of McBurney’s Theatre de Complicite. McBurney has long since been a byword for highoctane, audience-embracing theatre, but he has hitherto refused all attempts to work in an opera house. Audi should be congratulated for winning him over for this ambitious Nederlandse Opera and ENO co-production.

Part of the temptation, from McBurney’s point of view, probably lay in having the chance to work with a composer with flexible ideas about what constitutes an opera. McBurney insisted on workshopping the score, sending the composer back to his drawing board several times before agreeing the final result. The production is well engineered. The simple sets are structured by the projection of interior and exterior backgrounds onto a large, moveable screen, which lends further dynamism to the fast-moving action. The dog is a puppet, modelled on Gioacometti’s “Dog” (1951), and animated by up to four puppeteers. There are also puppet cats, and a litany of directorial quirks which render the human characters more and more puppet-like; an air of hectic visual excitement prevails.

The best idea, though, comes from Raskatov, who gives two voices to Sharik the dog. The first – the only genuinely lyrical voice in the opera – is a counter-tenor, charged with representing Sharik’s inner life and nobly sung by Andrew Watts. The second is taken by the soprano Elena Vassilieva (the composer’s wife) who represents Sharik’s canine voice by growling and screeching through a megaphone. It’s a brilliant touch, the comic value of which is amplified by the way the growls rip through the rest of the musical texture and disrupt our ability to locate Sharik in the swirl of bodies pursuing the puppet. When Sharik the dog becomes Sharikov the man, the two voices are replaced by a single tenor. Peter Hoare, last heard as Gregor in ENO’s Makropulos Case, echoes his character’s bivocal past, and brings great energy to his portrayal of a man whose craving for dignity and sense of moral freedom are undercut by the irrepressible animal desire to snap at flees and chase cats. But even Hoare cannot prevent the musical and dramatic interest from evaporating in the second act when, in the absence of the puppet dog and with a great deal of story still to be got through, the evening’s pace slows to a congested crawl.

Among the other singers, Steven Page as Professor Preobrazhensky, who watches horrified as his creation tears to shreds the trappings of his haut-bourgeois existence, deserves praise for tempering some unwieldy writing with flashes of wit. And the orchestra, under the direction of Garry Walker, do what they can to hold down the rest of Raskatov’s protean, turbulent score. But the music, though peppered with references to sources as diverse as Wagner and Rossini, lacks a sense of autonomous direction and except for the passage that concludes Act One – in which ominous themes in the brass build to a dark and brooding climax during the transplant operation – never seems to generate its own authentic energy. For any opera, even one as unorthodox as this, such a flaw is hard to overlook.

Claire Booth

2010-11-29T10:52:00.000Z

The tradition of presenting innovative, first-rate concerts to derisorily small audiences is now well established at Kings Place. In this case, one would have thought an exceptional soprano like Claire Booth in a one-off performance of Poulenc's infrequently staged but frequently cited telephone opera La Voix Humane, produced by a company that has often sold out other small venues, all priced at little more than a tenner – one would have thought all this could easily fill a modestly sized concert hall. But with some 50 bums on 50 scattered seats, you've got to wonder what the marketing department does all day.

Poulenc's monologue was presented in its piano version (the accompaniment played by Christopher Glynn) as part of a continuous sequence...

Continue reading here

Ensemble Recherche

2010-11-25T10:51:00.000Z

In Schnee, by Hans Abrahamsen, two pianos are dampened with paper and the percussionist spends most of the time rhythmically rubbing on smooth and rough tables. The Freiburg-based Ensemble Recherche were giving the work its UK premiere, along with Murmurs, by Britain's Rebecca Saunders, composer in residence at this year's festival.

The concert was a quiet affair, somewhat inevitably, as both pieces privilege the contemplative and static over the assertive and dynamic. Schnee (meaning snow) explores the idea that our perception of nearly identical patterns causes the imagination to project new forms by itself ...

Read the rest of this article here

Steven Isserlis

2010-11-18T10:50:00.000Z

Steven Isserlis launched his residency at the Wigmore Hall with a series of three concerts for violin, cello and piano, exploring connections between Maurice Ravel, his teacher Gabriel Fauré, and Fauré's teacher Camille Saint-Saëns.

There was a time when Fauré would have counted as the least prominent name, but that time is thankfully past and it is Saint-Saëns whose music now falls in the shadows of others. Isserlis, with this in mind, opened with a performance of his first cello sonata that was passionate in gesture and ravishing in touch.

Read the rest of this article here

Sinfonietta plays Zappa

2010-11-10T10:49:00.000Z

It was halfway through Mémoriale, Pierre Boulez's brief and luminescent chamber concerto for flute, that I noticed the rubber chicken hanging from a microphone next to Oliver Coates's cello.

The chicken, it turned out, did not belong to the cellist, but was part of the various Frank Zappa paraphernalia assembled for this celebration of the rock visionary's 70th birthday. The Sinfonietta performed Mémoriale alongside Varèse's Octandre, as these two composers were among the chief inspirations behind Zappa's expansive musical and artistic imagination. Led by Nicholas Collon, the performances were excellent, enhanced if anything by the informal setting and cabaret-style seating. But what of the results of these influences in Zappa's own music? ...

Read the rest of the article here

Yulianna Avdeeva

2010-11-09T15:21:00.000Z

Critics like to make up their own minds about things. Even so, it never hurts to overhear a spot of post-concert chatter. "That was perfectly exhausting," whispered one woman to another after Yulianna Avdeeva's Chopin recital. She was right: "exhausting" was precisely the word I had been searching for.

You don't expect this from Chopin's music. Though inhabited by remote depths of emotion and disquiet, it never strays so far that you lose sight of its poise. So exquisitely conceived are the majority of his pieces that only bad playing can unbalance them; they should be a balm to the mind, not its undoing.

But Avdeeva's playing is not bad. It is excellent. It recently earned her first prize in the Chopin Piano Competition, making her one of only two female winners, and launching her on a whirlwind of high-profile debuts in the world's music capitals. It's easy to see why: Avdeeva strikes chords with precision, every note perfectly tempered. Her pacing is born of intelligent feeling and clarity of thought, and her ability to finesse Chopin's inner voices puts many to shame.

So why was the concert so exhausting? Briefly, because she terrorised the music. She rattled through four mazurkas as if daring them to strike back, and blazed through the serpentine reaches of the third scherzo as a mongoose might dispatch a cobra. Three Nocturnes rippled with taught muscle rather than light. Only in the second sonata, which is riven with disquiet and restless menace, did she fully inhabit the personality of the music; and again at the end, when she suddenly remembered the most important Chopin direction: sing.

Avdeeva will go far – when she learns that music is about peace as well as war.

Chroma play Crumb and Cashian

2010-11-08T15:22:00.000Z

Although the animal kingdom has always been a prominent source of musical inspiration, the whale is a relative newcomer. Inspired by recordings of humpback whales, George Crumb's 1971 Vox Balaenae, which requires its performers to wear masks, broke muzoological boundaries using an amplified trio of flute, cello and piano. It also calls for a range of techniques novel at the time of its creation, including the simultaneous playing of and singing into the flute in a kind of free imitation of whale song.

On paper it sounds like a deeply suspicious exercise in hippy kitsch, but heard live it rarely fails to bowl one over. This is less due to Crumb's success in depicting the ancient sadness that runs through our encounters with whales than the work's seamless musicality: peel away Crumb's web of symbols and you are left with a beautifully proportioned and beguiling set of variations, and a powerful sense of flow between instruments.

In this respect, Vox Balanae proved an excellent partner to a new trio for piano, violin and cello by Philip Cashian. Entitled Aquila after the swooping eagle found in John Flamsteed's 1729 Atlas Coelestis, its merits do not really derive from any imitation of eagles actual or imagined (perhaps luckily, given that Flamsteed's eagle resembles a grouse). Instead, it thrives ona thrilling combination of precariously balanced mechanical processes, an intuitive chamber dynamic, and occasional fleeting but hard-won moments of rhapsody.

Like much of Cashian's music it makes extreme demands on its players, but the Chroma ensemble were equal to them. Particularly impressive, both in Aquila and the earlier Caprichos, was the way the players skated so lightly on Cashian's many-layered syncopations, allowing the music to exude a tantalising playfulness.

It leaves you feeling exhilarated, if a little clumsy by comparison.

The Road Less Travelled

2010-11-01T17:18:00.004Z

Interview with pianist Ashley Wass in International Piano, Nov-Dec 2010

If you mention the names of Arnold Bax or Frank Bridge in the company of pianophiles nowadays, it won’t be long before the name Ashley Wass crops up. In ten years of recording he has assembled a catalogue of British piano music that is impressive by any standards, all the more so considering how rarely heard much of this music was before he began recording it, and how much better known it is since. Nor is it just a question of numbers. Read the reviews, and you’ll notice how the terms “maturity”, “intelligence”, and even “benchmark” crop up with astonishing regularity.

Wass's recording career began shortly after he won first prize at the World Piano Competition in London 1997, later becoming only the second British pianist in 20 years to reach the finals of the Leeds International Competition. The budget label Naxos, just beginning to flex its muscles as an ascendant power in the record industry, lost little time in snapping up pianist, who was still completing his postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy, working with Christopher Elton and Hamish Milne. His signing with Naxos made him the first solo artist to sign an exclusive contract with the label, debuting with a well-received disc of César Franck’s piano music.

It soon became clear, however, that Naxos had devised a very specific plan for their new signing. From Alwyn’s Green Hills to Vaughan Williams’s Piano Concerto, via complete cycles of Bax and Bridge, Wass’s catalogue tells a very particular story: that of 20th-century British piano music.

It comes as something of surprise, then, to learn that the scenery relevant to his latest disc is not the rolling hills of Elgar’s Worcestershire but the altogether steeper Alpine slopes traversed by Franz Liszt on his 1835 adventure with Marie d’Agoult. For the 32nd instalment of Naxos’s Liszt edition, Wass has recorded the first book of the Album d’un voyageur – the original set of musical recollections of the journey Liszt composed before revising and republishing them in their better known guise as the Années des Pélérinage – together with the three Apparitions of 1834. The disc came out this summer. The reviews, so far, have been uniformly excellent.

“The disc would have come out earlier, in fact”, says Wass when we meet. “My first attempt to record these pieces was three years ago. It was a disaster - the only time, in fact, that I have ever felt completely unhappy with what I was doing. I didn’t like the piano, I didn’t like the venue. Most of all, I didn’t like what I was doing. After a day and a bit, nothing was working so we packed up and left.”

This had never happened to Wass before. Always fastidious and a consummate professional, his other discs had all been recorded smoothly, in two, three days at the most. But there was a much greater pressure, he explained, with the Liszt project.

“This was a crucial disc for me. Here was a composer whose music I loved deeply, which I genuinely wanted to play. I was absolutely adamant that I wanted to get it right.”

There were two reasons for this increased pressure. Although he had previously recorded, with Leon MaCawley, Liszt’s two piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, the Album d’un Voyageur was going to be his first major solo release in international repertoire. And after ten years in the Naxos stable, concentrating almost exclusively on British music, he was becoming increasingly anxious about being labelled as a specialist.

“Naxos had taken me in a direction which I’d never really anticipated. I mean I’d always been interested in travelling off the beaten track, but in all honesty Bax, Bridge, composers like that, they weren’t even on my radar at all.

“I’ve enjoyed doing it enormously, but there’s a momentum - once you’ve done one disc, people send you more repertoire, a pattern develops – and I wanted to stop it before it got too late.”

The second reason is more personal. “It’s always a hard thing to explain, and I’m aware musicians often sound ridiculously vague when they’re talking about things like this, but with some composers you just get the feeling that they are speaking to you personally and that the way you are as a pianist and a musician, you just need to play this music in order to be yourself.

“Take the music of Chopin for example. I love his music in many ways, and I know he is a really exceptional composer, unique in many ways, but somehow his music just doesn’t speak to me in that particular way. But with Liszt, his music is so poetic, almost naïve.”

It wasn’t always like that, though. For years, Wass explains, he had no interest in Liszt at all and numbered himself among the rank and file of those who consider his music rather over the top and self-indulgent.

“I remember at school, walking down the corridors, hearing umpteen people trying to play the Hungarian Rhapsodies, or the B minor sonata. I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. But then, much later, a pianist friend of mind came to stay. I was in the next door room and overheard this music. It was Liszt’s Benediction. I remember just sitting down and thinking, ‘wow, I’ve got to play that’.

“That transformed my understanding of Liszt. It’s the way his music shifts between extreme theatricality and then total intimacy that I find fascinating. In the Album, for example, the way it leads up to this wonderful encounter, this search for inner truth, if you like, in the Vallée d’Obermann, that makes it theatrical. There’s this real sense in which you experience a character who is undergoing some kind of deep change. There’s an amazing honesty, but its often mistaken for sentimentality. I don’t mean theatrical in an arms flaying, head swinging all over the place kind of way. These extremes are just there, in the music.”

Just from talking to Wass, you can tell that he isn’t the kind of pianist whose head swings all over the place when he wants to get “theatrical”. His gestures are restrained, his voice even and quiet. As with his pianism, there’s a clarity of mind and quiet assurance to his conversation that seems to betray a maturity beyond his years. I ask him whether this self-possession has always been with him. Did he always know that he would become a pianist?

“Not really. In fact music came to be kind of by accident, really. Neither of my parents can read a note of music. They ran a guesthouse on the Lincolnshire cost and when I was little they bought a small electric organ, thinking some of the guests might like to play it from time to time. I started playing it a bit, and eventually it became my job to entertain the guests, playing tearoom tunes, that kind of thing.”

His parents may not have been able to read music, but they didn’t take long to realise they had a talented son, organising piano and clarinet lessons, eventually entering Ashley for a scholarship to Chethams.

“That was a shock. Growing up in Lincolnshire, there wasn’t much music around the place really, I mean apart from my ‘Tea for Two’ stuff. And then suddenly I was there in this school, 200 pupils crammed together in this ultra-competitive space where everybody knows what you’re doing before you do. In some ways, I suppose, it really sets you up for professional life because you realise how hard you’re going to have to work if you want to be singled out.”

Wass was indeed singled out, and by no less a talent-spotter than Maria Curcio, the legendary teacher whose famously impeccable pedigree – via Schnabel, Leschetizky, Czerny, and back to Beethoven – was as intimidating as it was inspiring.

“Maria came to give a masterclass one day and she just blew everyone away. If I had to pick the one day that things really changed for me, it would be the day she said that she would like me to come and study with her in London. That was a really big moment for me.”

At the end of the year, Wass left for London to take up a place at the Academy. He had won a scholarship that also allowed him to take extra classes with Curcio, who at that time only taught privately.

“It took me a long time to really understand what Maria was trying to do for me. I was always very reserved, shy even, and limited in depth, and she was always trying to open me up and pull me out of myself. I suppose it wasn’t really until I stopped studying, almost six years later, that I actually came to realise that she had been doing this all along.

“She is still one of my biggest influences. The focus she maintained not just on technique, but hours on sound-production and on thinking about musical structure – these are unquestionably the deepest foundations of my own musical thinking today.”

Wass’s deep respect for his former teacher is clear, but there were times when studying with such a fiercely possessive character her could be rather tricky.

“Maria was a woman who drew her students very close to her. Many of them lived with her, and ate dinner with every night like a big, weirdly close family. Although I lived only a two-minute walk from her house, I never actually told her that because I was wary of getting dragged into the ‘family’.

“A friend of mine lived down the road, and had made the mistake of telling Maria where he lived. After that, he couldn’t get away. If he tried to refuse a dinner invitation, she would always come out with ‘I would never refuse Schnabel’. After he got a girlfriend she refused to teach him any longer. Her students were her children, really.”

Toward the end of his studies, Wass explains that he became frustrated, with the unswerving focus on the classic repertoire of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and with the endless quoting of Schnabel.

“It was always ‘Schnabel told me this’, or ‘Schnabel thought that’, and I began to think, ‘but what do you say? Why don’t you just tell me what you think?’

“At the same time, there were these amazing moments when she didn’t say anything at all. She would just push me aside and start to play, sometimes for ages, as if I had suddenly ceased to exist and she was by herself in the room. Her playing was extraordinary. She could transform a piece at a single touch, and just from listening everything would just fall into place in my own mind as well. That’s really when I learnt the most from her.

“I think I probably owe everything to her, and to Hamish [Milne], one of my teachers at the academy who came from a totally different background to Maria. He’s the one musician about whom I’ve never heard a bad word – that’s almost unheard of in this business – but for some reason he’s never become a household name but he’s one of the most amazing pianists I’ve ever heard. He would also just push me aside and play for me.”

Toward the end of his time at the Academy, Wass was put forward by Curcio and Milne for the London competition, which he won, and then Leeds, in which he was a finalist.

Looking back, Wass is in two minds about the merits of the competition circuit. From sitting on juries himself, he describes the way the system can encourage a certain kind of conservatism because of the way strong musical personalities, especially when they’re still young and not completely formed, usually rub at least one of the jury members up the wrong way. He’s glad, too, that he didn’t do too many.

“I remember at Leeds, at the semi-final when we’d been ushered into a room and told to wait for the decision. They had put out food but of course nobody touched it. Eventually we were summoned into the jury room. They lined up against the wall. It literally felt like we were going to be shot.

“I made it through to the final that time. Even so, I remember phoning my girlfriend afterwards and saying, ‘If I ever even talk about doing another competition, just remind me how I feel just now. I never, ever want to put myself through this again.’”

Luckily, he was rescued, first by the BBC, with the New Generation Artists Scheme, and then by Naxos, with an exclusive contract to record three discs a year. That contract has now expired, and Wass explains his excitement about his new-found freedom.

“I love the way they work at Naxos, and they were always very good to me. But a commitment of three discs a year is bit much if you’re not always dead sure about the repertoire. Moving in another direction seems right now.”

One of the activities Wass says gives him most pleasure at the moment is running the Lincolnshire chamber music festival. There’s a Lisztian element to that too, since during his tour of Britain in 1840, Liszt gave several concerts in Lincolnshire.

“We managed to track down the original poster of one of these concerts. You know, there’s this misconception that Liszt had an enormous repertoire. In fact he didn’t. He just used to play the same things in unfamiliar ways, like the first movement of the Moonlight sonata: fortissimo, prestissimo, the lot. He said he did it because he would get bigger applause that way. Anyway, we thought we might try to recreate that programme we found.”

Another Lisztian project sounds even more unlikely, which is connected to Wass’s annual visit to Restoration House in Rochester.

“This is the only place I ever get to play a fortepiano”, he explains. Just at the mention of the word “fortepiano”, he starts grinning. It spreads to a chuckle. “Last year they asked me to play Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven 6. I thought for a while that it was a crazy idea, but we went ahead with it and, honestly, it was an absolute riot. The colours you can create on that instrument are much closer to the orchestral original. So there’s a plan that I might put that onto disc, maybe next year- that would be quite a departure.”

It would indeed, I think. But then his giggling fortepianist recedes and the serious, scholarly pupil of Maria Curcio returns to his place.

“And Brahms,” he says. “I absolutely have to record some Brahms.”

The disc is available to buy from Naxos here

Ehnes / LSO / Noseda

2010-10-29T15:24:00.000+01:00

The London Symphony Orchestra have programmed no fewer than eight violin concertos for the current season, with guest soloists including Viktoria Mullova and Nikolaj Znaider. Tuesday night's visitor was the Canadian James Ehnes, who put his delicate sensibilities at the service of Bartók's second contribution to the genre. Composed in the late 1930s – with one ear directed toward the rise of fascism, and the other turned to the conservative critics complaining about his progressive, atonal style – the work combines elements of 12-tone serialism, nostalgic lyricism and folk dance, all couched in the swashbuckling rhetoric of the Romantic concerto.

What all this is supposed to be in aid of, I've never been certain. And I'm not sure Gianandrea Noseda is much clearer either. Peering into his score, he seemed hesitant about what he wanted the orchestra to do. Ehnes, despite taking some time to get going, brought some wonderfully distinguished touches to the solo part, but even his exquisite turn of phrase failed to impart more than a fleeting sense of purpose to the work.

More successful was Noseda's smooth and ultimately very powerful account of Prokofiev's sixth symphony and a new piece by Ian Vine. Called Individual Object, the work consisted of a densely structured chord that transformed itself from an angry-seeming gesture into one that shone with clarity. Although an awkward partner to Prokofiev and Bartók, Vine is worth listening out for.

Preludes to an unclothing

2010-10-27T17:02:00.004+01:00

Alexander Goehr
Promised End
English Touring Opera

Reviewed in the TLS, 29 October 2010

Strong testimony to the pitfalls and paradoxes of self-knowledge comes from the fact that two of the words we use to refer to what is most individual about us – our “personality” and “character” – originally refer to what is by definition least individual. The value of a character, in its primary sense of an inscribed mark or, later, a bit of metal type, is that it is a replica, and immediately identifiable as such. Similarly, the function of the persona – the mask worn by actors in the theatre of the ancient world – was to obscure the individuality of the actor in favour of the universality of the character represented. Even in ordinary usage, a “persona” is something that someone constructs and projects, while a character is something we “show”.

In drama, we infer a self from its persona, rather than the other way round. This is perhaps why the interactions we witness in the theatre – despite its institutional commitment to dissimulation – often contain more truth and reality than those we experience in our everyday lives. In this respect, Shakespeare’s King Lear is less unusual in its focus than in its intensity when it concentrates our attention on the relation between the clothing of the self and its “inner being” or essence. When Lear strips himself and his character bare on the heath during “Is man no more than this? . . .”, he is doing so in imitation of Poor Tom’s representation of, as Lear puts it, “the thing itself: / unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, / forked animal as thou are. Off off you lendings! / come unbutton here.” The fact that the audience knows Tom’s nakedness is merely Edgar’s disguise is important, but it detracts neither from Lear’s intention nor the transformative effect of the experience he undergoes.

Perhaps surprisingly, Alexander Goehr is the first British composer to make King Lear into an opera. But had he been the tenth, I suspect his approach would still be unique: he has compressed Shakespeare’s sprawling tragedy into a work of a hundred-odd minutes. Composed of twenty-four “preludes”, or short musico-dramatic numbers, the opera uses a small chamber orchestra, in rather folksy combinations (with two tubas, extra trumpets, a guitar and small pipe organ), and a cast of nine, most of whom are on stage continuously as part of a Graeco-Brechtian chorus. The pace is markedly high, exerting considerably strain on the narrative flow so that each scene almost becomes a small performance-piece in itself – a feature that is reinforced by the picturesque, mildly ironic musical settings, the focus of which is the modification and throwing- into-relief of the characterizations.

Like his former colleagues in the “Manchester School”, Goehr long ago made the journey from young firebrand to establishment figure. Yet unlike either Harrison Birtwistle or Peter Maxwell-Davies, Goehr’s reputation was for many years strongly tied to his academic appointments, first at Southampton and Leeds, and then for fifteen years at Cambridge. It remains an open question whether his greatest musical legacy will prove to be his own body of work or that of his former students, the list of which reads like a who’s who for two successive generations of British composers – Robin Holloway, Bayan Northcott, George Benjamin, Julian Anderson and Thomas Adès – and it is perhaps not surprising that Goehr has suffered, since having to retire from Cambridge in 1999, from the feeling that his world had evaporated. He has also let it be known that his ability to compose was affected by his retirement and that the Lear project was to be his rehabilitation. Furthermore, in suggesting that the opera – which is called Promised End, after Kent’s response to Cordelia’s death – will be his last, and that he identifies with its protagonist, Goehr has turned what was always going to be a difficult project into an intensely personal one.

This personal turn, I feel, is something of a shame, not merely because it mixes up the composer’s fears and foibles with those of his subject, but because the opera’s great strength consists in its being so very impersonal. That is to say, Goehr draws on the representational rather than the expressive strengths of musical drama, as well as on the traditions of Noh and ancient Greek theatre, to produce a work that places persona well to the fore of personality, so to speak. This is not an opera about the grand old man of British music called Goehr any more than it is really an opera about a vain, failing ruler called Lear. Rather it is an opera about the play King Lear, in which some of theatre’s most powerful and persistent themes and characters are absorbed into a world of appropriate symbol and ritual.

For some, this will mark the work out as a self-referential indulgence, sacrificing dramatic credibility for artistic sophistication. But this is to mistake the nature of the work, just as it is to misunderstand the nature of opera itself, which has always invited and required precisely such ritualized elements, whether we are aware of it or not. In his approach to Lear, which does justice to the play’s own concern with masks, characters and personae, Goehr is simply taking the Shakespearean process a little further.

What this does mean, however, is that the opera is not an easy one to follow. Although the entire libretto is taken from the original text, the filleting performed by Goehr’s former Cambridge colleague Frank Kermode, the order of action is altered, often substantially so. It opens with Kent’s humiliation of Oswald (“you base football player”) from Act Two, although neither Kent nor Oswald are in fact named characters in the opera, and ends with an echo of the Fool’s pledge to “speak a prophecy ere I go”. The transplanted opening works well, placing Lear’s tragic journey to self-knowledge centre-stage at the start. “Doth any here know me . . . Doth Lear walk thus?”: the questioning is set to a series of faltering melodic phrases which nonetheless rise as they accumulate. The character of the Fool is also merged with that of Cordelia, which may seem confusing but in fact makes good sense of Lear’s own confusion at the end of the play, when he bears Cordelia’s corpse but seems instead to mourn his Fool. It also allows Goehr to merge the musical characterization of both the Fool and Cordelia in quasi-naïve nursery-rhyme diction which undercuts the intensity of much of the other vocal writing.

All of this chopping and changing, when combined with the pace at which the narrative unfolds, is bound to cause a certain amount of confusion – on a first hearing, and possibly on subsequent ones. But is this confusion of the constructive or unconstructive variety? Is the experience of confusion on the part of the audience itself a part of the meaning of the opera? I think so. Temporary bewilderment, after all, is an excellent device when it comes to realigning our relationship with familiar, canonic texts, and it must also be admitted that one of the strengths of the original play is its profound mistiness. As the critic Marvin Rosenberg put it in The Masks of King Lear (1993), “Nothing is sure in [Lear’s] world, not bonds, power, cunning, wisdom, service, disguise, gold, the gods, men, animals – if they are a different thing; not family, friends, nothing on this side of the grave – and there may be no other”.

Whatever the outcome of this debate, it is to the credit of James Conway’s staging for English Touring Opera, with designs by Adam Wiltshire and lighting by Guy Hoare which give great depth to the Linbury stage, that Promised End’s first production strives at all times for clarity. Reflecting Goehr’s preoccupation with the mythic aspect of the characters, the singers’ faces are masked with thick white make-up and their movements stylized. The clothing and unclothing of the characters is always meaningful, as is the expansion of that meaning into the symbols and attributes through which the characters’ interaction and fluctuating power relationships are expressed. Given that no one really goes off-stage – the resting singers form part of a chorus whose visibility comes and goes along with a set of semi-transluscent screens – any dramatic entrance requires an auxiliary signal, here provided by characters stepping in and out of a tray of sand before singing. The tray itself mirrors the platform that serves both for Lear’s throne and, with the lid removed, the hovel. The ritual with the sand tray echoes cleansing rituals as well as the overall process of the drama, in which Lear comes to be baptised, as it were, in his existential confusion. But the main reason for the success of Conway’s staging lies in its sensitivity to Goehr’s score. Just as the ritual with the sand tray echoes the stylistic and formal divisions between each of the twenty-four preludes, so too the characteristic and rhetorical devices deployed in the music are observed by the stage movement, which varies from primitive dance passages to the awkward stumbling of the blinded Gloucester and dispossessed Edgar.

There are times, for example in the battle scene (which is fought with antlers), when the murky brass timbres and bulbous rhythmic profile are employed by Goehr primarily for atmospheric effect, evocative of a kind of medieval darkness in which the proximity of violence to power is exhilaratingly palpable. But Goehr’s devices are never simply colouristic, and most are explicitly and audibly artful: the Fool’s guitar accompaniment lends her strains a balladic aspect, which is both appropriate in itself and also effective in isolating the character from the world of sound and sense occupied by her interlocutors, while the chorus passages are strung together like snatched madrigals. Overall, despite moments of intensity and angst reminiscent of Schoenberg, the forebear most evidently suggested by the quirky instrumentation and restless contrasts is Hindemith.

Goehr’s score is given powerful advocacy by the Aurora Orchestra, heavily pared down for the occasion and conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth with his usual understanding of texture and pacing. Roderick Earle’s Lear is vocally assured, while the three daughters are all excellent, the contrasts between Lina Markeby as Cordelia and Jacqueline Varsey and Julia Sporsén as Goneril and Regan never clearer than when the youngest daughter is at her most plain and the older “pelicans” at their most seductively operatic.

There is no doubt that Promised End does justice to Alexander Goehr’s long-standing interest in Shakespeare. The vocal lines neither obscure nor hide themselves behind the verse, just as the music captures the underlying menace and strangeness of the play. The restrained, half-Brechtian, half-Beckettian setting may be precisely what is called for in turning the play into an opera. After all, Verdi’s disappointment at never producing a Lear opera has often been echoed, but the process of clarifying and intensifying the drama which is undergone, say, in Verdi and Boito’s adaptation of Othello, is not what is needed in the case of Lear – too much clarity and the essence of the drama becomes forefeit. But if Goehr has called it right when it comes to Lear, I hope he has called it wrong when it comes to this being his last opera. And if, as I suspect may be the case, this exemplary collaboration with English Touring Opera was also partly intended as a calling card for the country’s main opera houses, then I hope it will result in an invitation.

Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela

2010-10-13T10:12:00.001+01:00

Most of those lucky enough to hear the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, when it rolled onto London's South Bank some 18 months ago, were knocked off their feet by the bewildering skill and bursting effervescence of the young players from the barrios of Venezuela.

Not long afterwards, however, the odd dissenting voice piped up. "Shouldn't a youth orchestra be, well, younger than this?" With most of the Simón Bolívar players approaching their 30s, compared to the school-age policy of most national youth orchestras, the disgruntled minority had a point.

In Venezuela – with its mine of orchestral talent nurtured by a legendary "system" that in 38 years has transformed the lives of many of the country's disadvantaged young people – such objections evidently translate as invitations, and this year they duly dispatched a different orchestra.

Younger and less famous, but with the same fearlessness and fizz, the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra are in London at the end of a European tour, performing Beethoven and Prokofiev's fifth symphonies in two concerts. The first thing to strike you is the immense volume: though crammed into every corner of the stage, these players still have room to take a swing at the music. The second is the precision. Beethoven intended fairly lean orchestras to play all but the last of his symphonies; and in the fifth the key is in the consistency of the attack and momentum. But so well schooled are these players that their boom-box sound still allows for extraordinary sharpness and clarity.

To be sure, this isn't the most refined timbre. There's a roughness to the strings and a fuzziness to the brass, and conductor Christian Vásquez's phrasing favours the four-square over the fancy free. Prokofiev's bright colour-palette is also frequently rendered in somewhat murky tones, although his often demonically dispersed rhythms were rarely other than perfectly executed.

But it is less the sense of refinement than that of struggle which is the essential ingredient here. Indeed, if authenticity in music refers, as it should, to capturing the spirit in which a work is conceived, then I have rarely heard the hard-won triumph which concludes each work sound more authentic. And given that Beethoven's subject, no less than Prokofiev's, was man's ability to take his so-called destiny and shake it by the scruff of the neck until it yields to his will, there can be few orchestras better suited to it than this. Bravo!

Opera and the Limits of Philosophy: on Bernard Williams's Music Criticism

2010-10-08T08:35:00.009+01:00

Bernard Williams was working on two very different projects when he was diagnosed with the cancer that ended his life in 2003. He postponed the first, a collection of essays on the subject of opera, in favour of the second, which would turn out to be his last philosophical book. Published a year before his death, Truth and Truthfulness quickly established itself as one of the most intriguing recent defences of the notion of truth in the face of the perceived encroachment of relativism on scholarship and everyday thinking. Instead of offering a theory of truth, Williams put forward an argument for the necessity of truthfulness—of truth-telling and truth-intending—based on the idea that neither individual nor a community of language users can function without prizing truthfulness and its supporting virtues of accuracy and sincerity. His argument was highly unusual in espousing a commitment to truth in evaluative terms—roughly, that it is necessary to uphold truth because being truthful is so valuable to us—and in unfolding an account of truthfulness along genealogical lines similar to those he had used in his earlier and well-known elaboration of ‘thick’ evaluative concepts.

It is not to be regretted that Williams gave priority to this book over his collection of opera essays, especially considering that the latter consisted of articles previously published elsewhere. After his death, the volume was edited by the philosopher's widow, Patricia Williams, and published at the end of 2006 as On Opera, with an introduction by his Cambridge colleague and opera-going companion, Michael Tanner.

There is nonetheless a sense in which one might have wished Williams had been allowed more time to work on the collection (in such as way as to make a whole greater the sum of the parts). Although it is clear in all the essays of which On Opera is comprised (and in particular in the opening essay, ‘The Nature of Opera’) that their author is not only an exceptionally learned and thoughtful student of opera but also a philosopher, the reader misses any sense of a philosophy of opera being advanced or developed. This is all the more of a shame when one considers that Williams himself apparently lamented that the amount of ‘helpful operatic criticism’ was so small. As Tanner puts it,

the questions, which it was [once] routinely assumed that critics should deal with, of the meaning and significance of a given work of art, and also of the art form to which it belongs, simply don’t get dealt with in most of what passes for opera criticism.

At the same time, there is a relatively little material specific to opera in the otherwise burgeoning literature on the philosophy of music. Given that Williams was both a thinker of unusual clarity as well as an opera lover of rare cultivation and critical self-awareness, the volume's failure to offer something approaching a through-composed philosophy of opera seems like a missed opportunity.

This thought should not of course be taken as a negative assessment of the volume. Taken on its own terms—as a volume of musicologically and philosophically thought-provoking essays—On Opera surely makes for required reading for anyone who takes the genre seriously. A number of the essays, such as those on Don Giovanni, Così fan Tutte, Tosca, and Pelléas et Mélisande are classics of opera criticism. Others, such as the transcribed 1974 BBC radio lecture on ‘Mozart's Figaro, A Question of Class?’, or the previously unpublished lecture on Verdi's Don Carlos, might well have become classics too. And while some, such as the commentary on Paul Robinson's 1985 Opera and Ideas,6 or the address ‘Authenticity and Re-creation’ to the International Musicological Society, show Williams as aware of and responsive to recent developments in academic writing about music and opera, most are refreshingly free of reference to intellectual trends or of jargon. They bear instead the mark of an astute mind and passionate listener paying his dues to and teasing out the deeper meaning from some of the operas he loves.

To be sure, Williams's opera criticism counted as a labour of love. This is quite evident in the last of the essays, dedicated to Isaiah Berlin, where Williams applies Schiller's distinction between the ‘naïve’ and the ‘sentimental’ to opera. Williams argued that just as there can no longer (after Verdi) be any naïve operas, so there can no longer be any naïve experience of opera. None the less, he observes, even if the entirety of operatic experience is shot through with reflectiveness, there remains one element left of the naïve. ‘Opera is one case in which love is almost entirely expressed in enjoyment. What you love, you straightforwardly enjoy; you look forward to a performance, or at least one that promises to be tolerably good, with pleasure.’

In Bayreuth, the year before his death, Williams made a remark deeply telling of his interest in opera to his student Lydia Goehr: ‘I know a good deal about music, and a good deal about philosophy, but nothing about how they are connected—nor do I particularly want to.’ Williams's love for opera might in this respect be characterized as ‘naïve-sentimental’ in the sense that he attended to it and wrote about it with the intellectual tools and cultural sophistication at his disposal, but wanted to maintain a distance between his musical passions and his philosophical work. If this is right, perhaps we should not look too closely for connections between his operatic writing and his philosophy. And yet, and this is what I aim to show in the remainder of this essay, the points of contact are potentially illuminating for both sides.

Read the complete essay here, or as a pdf here

From all tears to eternity

2010-10-07T09:16:00.002+01:00

TLS Opera reviews, October 8th

Leos Janacek
THE MAKROPOULOS CASE
Coliseum

Agostino Steffani
NIOBE, REGINA DE TEBE
Covent Garden

No opera shines such a stark light on the incompatibility of human desire and eternal life as Leos Janacek’s Vec Makropulos. The singer-protagonist Emilia Marty is 337 years old; her great age may be the secret behind the legendary beauty of her voice, but it is also the reason for the shrivelling of her humanity into a destructive self-pity. “A 300-year-old beauty – but only burnt-out feeling!”, as Janacek put it, soon after seeing Karel Capek’s hit philosophical comedy at the end of 1922. “Cold as ice! But I’ll warm her up, so that people sympathize with her. I might fall in love with her myself.”

In any decent production of the opera, few could fail to fall in love with Emilia Marty. Christopher Alden’s staging, now revived for the first time by English National Opera (though for an inexplicably short run), is much more than merely decent: it is exemplary. And the sight of Amanda Roocroft’s Marty, alive to the realization that salvation can come only with her death, staggering about the stage as she tries to discard the recipe on which her long life depends, is pathetically moving. The sticky-paper device comes from the lower end of the comic spectrum, of course, and it flies in the face of Janacek’s own stage directions, yet its awkwardness captures the contradictory psychology of suicidal desire, reminding us that Marty’s power is something she has wielded over others, not controlled for herself.

Roocroft has been an excellent interpreter of Janacek for some time now, and her success here comes from bringing something of her portrayals of Jenufa and Katya to the ostensibly very different Emilia. The voice she uses still contains traces of the character as a fourteen year-old girl, the adolescent on whom her father, Dr Makropoulos, physician to Emperor Rudoph I of Bohemia, tried out his potion centuries ago. Alden’s direction takes its cure from this insight into Marty’s vulnerability, which has increased over time: now she seems barely to exist at all except in the gaze of her lovers. Hers is a ghostly permanence. The set – an airy office dominated by an enormous desk, filled with papers and flanked by a gallery of street windows through which Marty’s adoring fans peer with a palpable sense of menace – is unchanged for the three acts.

Janacek’s prima donna can carry the show, but Alden’s gradual shifting of sympathies toward Marty makes this Makropoulos more of an ensemble piece: one which requires significant contributions from the infatuated Gregor and Prus and the lawyer Kolenaty, provided respectively by Peter Hoare, Ashley Holland and Andrew Shore. I also enjoyed the veteran Welsh tenor Ryland Davies’s fluent turn as Hauk-Šendorf, Marty’s lover from her earlier incarnation as Eugenia Montez. Richard Armstrong, booked late in the summer to replace Charles Mackerras, conducted a house band on top form.

Perhaps Marty’s tragedy seems pale by comparison with that of Niobe, queen of Thebes, a monarch famously described by Hamlet as “all tears”. Most who know the myth at all (Niobe lusted after immortality and was turned to stone after seeing her fourteen children killed) will do so because of that Shakespearian reference, but few will likely be acquainted with Agostino Steffani’s opera on the subject. Or even with Agostino Steffani himself, a priest who served the courts of Munich and Hanover as a diplomat and as the composer of seventeen operas. Composed between 1680 and 1709, they enjoyed widespread fame during Steffani’s lifetime, but now occupy one of operatic fashion’s numerous blindspots.

Niobe’s visit to Covent Garden came while most of the Royal Opera were away in Japan. A cynic might suggest that the production, imported from Schwetzingen, is by way of a conjuring trick to keep the new season trotting along until the music director, orchestra and most of the principal artists return from the other side of the world. But such a cynic would need to be both blind and deaf not to enjoy either the dramatic spectacle or the wondrous sequence of carefully constructed arias by which it unfolds. The eighteenth- century composer and theorist Johann Mattheson remarked that Steffani was unusual in devoting such effort to laying out his operas, adding (in 1737) that “nowadays, when everything has to be done on the wing, there are few who take pleasure in exercising such deliberation”. But Steffani does, of course, and the hard work pays off.

The production is dominated by Véronique Gens – a star of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century repertoire and thoroughly imperious in the callous title role – and by the Polish male soprano Jacek Laszczkowski, who plays Anfione, her husband. Originally a castrato role, Anfione – who hands over the reins of power to his wife in order to answer his calling as a musician – is given some of the opera’s finest passages, including a long, ravishing evocation of the music of the spheres, “Sfere amiche”, in which his voice rises out of (and falls back into) unusually elaborate woven string textures. This is one of the work’s longest arias: most are short (very few are da capo), so that both music and drama gain momentum. The pace is kept up despite a peculiar subplot involving Tiresias’s daughter and a wandering prince of Alba which would be pointless were it not musically diverting. Like

Orpheus, Amphion, or Anfione, is a musician whose art transports him to the immortal realms – but transcendence comes at a price; Lukas Hemleb’s slick production cleverly emphasizes the manipulative, suspect side of musical persuasion. The two leads are ably supported, not least by Iestyn Davies’s powerful countertenor Creonte, and by the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble and its director, Thomas Hengelbrock.

Matsuev/LSO/Gergiev

2010-09-27T09:19:00.000+01:00

With arts cuts looming, London's orchestras will be looking to put their best, most distinctive feet forward this autumn. For the LSO and Valery Gergiev that inevitably means their Russian foot – shod on this season-opening occasion not in the exquisite cherevichki of a Tchaikovsky, nor in the brightly coloured valenok of a Stravinsky, but in the shop-floor safety shoe of Rodion Shchedrin.

Nicknamed the Soviet Union's "official modernist", Shchedrin, now 77, is being championed by Gergiev as one of a number of Russian composers in need of post-cold war reassessment. But unlike, say, Alfred Schnittke or Sofia Gubaidulina, Shchedrin's reassessment doesn't do him many favours. It seems harsh to say so, but iron-curtain context made Shchedrin's music seem more interesting than it really is. Take the Fifth Piano Concerto, which places the framework of a romantic-virtuosic concerto at the service of some mightily undistinguished ideas. It is certainly difficult to play, not only for the pianist and orchestra – who must continually wrestle with dense, muddy scoring – but also the piano itself, which barely survived the final cadenza, the muscular Denis Matsuev's assault on the instrument egged on by Bacchic interjections from woodwind and brass.

The concert opened with Shchedrin's best known work, his quirky ballet arrangement of Bizet's Carmen. The score is full of witty details, but Gergiev's uncharacteristically heavy-handed treatment made it sound rather as if the Red Guard had marched into the bullring. Luckily, the concert's second half was a superbly crafted performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Gergiev took severe risks with the tempi, but somehow they all paid off, allowing Ravel's wondrously clever scoring to exhibit the orchestral talent that the first half had done so much to conceal.

Lang/LPO/Jurowski

2010-09-24T09:20:00.000+01:00

There's a moment in the third movement of Mahler's gargantuan third symphony when the music – a rising chaos of shrill woodwind and rioting strings – is interrupted by a lonely, beguilingly simple call from an off-stage post-horn. What makes it extraordinary is the eerie feeling of being woken from a trance, during which some irrevocable change has taken place. For Mahler, the moment signified the arrival of man in the forest. But you don't need to know this to appreciate the episode's uncanny nature.

Looking around me at this point during the London Philharmonic's season-opening, Mahler cycle-launching performance under Vladimir Jurowski, I noticed almost everyone was wearing the same expression: open-mouthed but with fully alert, searching eyes. Not even halfway through this often bewildering work, such levels of engagement are a considerable achievement. You could have heard a pin drop. (Unfortunately, a mobile phone rang instead – though even this did nothing to disturb the atmosphere.)

The performance was everything we've come to expect from the LPO and Jurowski: precise gestures, judiciously paced movement and wonderfully balanced sound. There were moments early on when the strings sounded a little too rough-edged, but elsewhere they brought out a marvellously rosy hue. The brass were spot-on and the woodwind, though so often the apparent butt of Mahler's jokes, excellent. The mezzo Petra Lang, who had also performed Zemlinsky's Maeterlinck songs in an apt but unnecessary first half, dominated the hall with full-bodied Nietzsche incantations before being blasted apart by the jubilant choir surrounding her.

As ever, though, it was the final movement – unfolding like an eternity captured in a single breath – that lingered, spreading its serene and supremely compassionate gaze long after the rapturous applause had died away.

In the Penal Colony

2010-09-20T13:30:00.000+01:00

With Satyagraha and Einstein on the Beach to his name, Philip Glass has participated in some excellent operatic projects. In the Penal Colony, his 2000 adaptation of Franz Kafka's well-known story to a libretto by Rudolph Wurlitzer, is not one of them. Glass's hastily scribbled score, which distributes clumsy, unidiomatic lines between tenor, baritone and string quintet, takes the dramatic tension and philosophical significance preserved in Wurlitzer's libretto and runs it through a mangle. The best that can be said is that it communicates, efficiently, the idea of punishment.

Glass's case, if he has one, isn't helped by Michael McCarthy's production for Music Theatre Wales, which represents the work's UK premiere. Singers and instrumentalists are both amplified, which may have been intended to take the strain off the voices, but doesn't. Omar Ebrahim and Michael Bennett do what they can for the obsessive Officer and agonized Visitor, both eclipsed by Gerald Tyler as the silent prisoner. Some of McCarthy's ideas are spot-on: the Visitor's writing table turns out to be the bed of the torture apparatus, thus putting centre-stage the ideas of writing, death and complicity at the heart of Kafka's story; at the same time, the equivalence between Officer and Prisoner is brought out well in both the costume and movement.

It is sometimes said that pain is simply ecstasy approached with the wrong requirements. The same is sometimes also said of boredom. Both ideas are germane to Kafka's story, but Glass's opera concerns itself more with the latter proposition – which, in a mere 80 minutes, it proves quite wrong. Boredom, however you approach it, really is quite boring.

Last Nights of the Proms

2010-09-13T13:31:00.000+01:00

It's been said that the Great Britain celebrated at the last night of the Proms is a country that no longer exists; that the half-concert, half-Pythonesque ritual is a monocultural fantasy, jingoistic and egregiously sentimental. Saturday's instalment starred a Ukranian violist and American soprano led by a Czech conductor. Behind me were cramped Finnish, Polish and American radio presenters, while before and above me the sea of red, white and blue flooding the hall was comprised of flags representing the UK but also the US, Japan, Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Norway, Denmark and Russia.

Britannia herself was the American Renée Fleming, upholstered in a Vivienne Westwood dress whose soaring breast plates would drown a lesser voice. She had concluded the first half of the evening with some nuanced Strauss songs, but her best performances came in the second half, both in the dazzling vocal fireworks with which she adorned Arne's patriotic ode and also in two arias from Smetana (Dobrá) and Dvorak (Song to the Moon). Fleming's intensity and precision of feeling was a masterclass in itself, and also an inspiration for Jiri Belohlávek and his orchestra, who at last forgot how tired they all were.

Indeed, if anything marred the evening it was the lacklustre playing of an admittedly overworked orchestra, who singularly failed to meet on equal terms Fleming's Strauss or Rysanov's stirring adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Roccoco Variations. This was a particular shame in a programme that was musically more thoughtful than many. Similarly, in the premiere of Jonathan Dove's declamatory and upbeat Whitman setting, Song of Joys – which, in the best tradition of high-spirited English choral music left me feeling slightly queasy – and Parry's Blest Pair of Sirens, Belohlávek revealed his limits as a choral conductor.

The same could not be said of the previous night, in which John Eliot Gardiner held a packed auditorium spellbound for the diverse aural entertainments that make up Monteverdi's 400-year-old Vespers. Gardiner has his detractors but his choir and orchestra's devotion to his often idiosyncratic vision is an inspiration in itself. If ever there was a work, too, in which the depths of expression combine seamlessly with pomp and circumstance, and which plays to the acoustic strengths of the Royal Albert Hall, it is this – a Prom to remember.

Comeuppance cubed

2010-09-02T08:48:00.003+01:00

W A Mozart
DON GIOVANNI
Glyndebourne Festival Theatre
Drottningholms Slottsteater, Sweden

Review from the Times Literary Supplement, September 3

The saying “don’t just do something, stand there” has been attributed to many, Ronald Reagan and Peter Ustinov (exasperated by a graduate from the Actors’ Studio) among them. It has yet to be attributed to any opera director, which is a shame. Many recent productions are brought close to ruin by the constant busy-ness of soloists, unable to sing because they’ve been made to do something else at the same time.

Hyperactivity of one kind and another threatens to derail Glyndebourne’s new Don Giovanni, directed by Jonathan Kent with the festival’s music director Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. It starts well, with the pre-curtain chatter cut short by the auditorium’s descent into darkness and the famous D minor opening motif. Even the emergency exit signs are extinguished for a short time, as if to taunt the opera’s dissolute protagonist with the suggestion that, this time, there will be no escape.

Things continue well, too. The work’s first major challenge comes after Leporello’s buffo number, when the confrontation between Donna Anna’s masked seducer and her elderly protector ends with the fatal wounding of the Commendatore. Mozart’s response is masterful: drastically reducing the orchestral texture, he seems to freeze musical time as the wound is inflicted, shrouding in stillness the stunned trio in which the dying Commendatore and his assailants struggle to come to terms with what has just happened.

Many directors flounder at this point, which is difficult because it is at once an absurd accident and the lodestone of the work’s moral compass. It’s the point of origin of the drama (Giovanni is punished because he murders a nobleman, not because he rapes women) and for the comic-tragic faultline that runs through it. In Kent’s version, Giovanni responds to the Commendatore’s repeated challenges by reaching for a stone and bludgeoning him in a frenzy – the blind, unmediated reaction of a violent psychopath who, after a stunned pause, returns to something like normality.

This is a psychologically astute interpretation. It is also entirely of a piece with the designer Paul Brown’s Fellini-esque styling, revealing Mozart and Da Ponte’s “dramma giocoso” opera as a pitiless enquiry into the vacuum at the centre of mere behaviour. If Don Giovanni is Marcello, trapped in a cycle of objectless desire, Leporello, armed with a Polaroid camera and a black book full of snaps, is clearly Paparazzo, too busy to take notice of his own rising self-disgust.

No one could object to the apt and visually seductive setting. But somehow the production’s strengths turn to weaknesses. The pressure on everyone to disclose the opera’s dark heart squeezes out its comic aspect, essential not merely to so much of the music but also to the pacing and balance of the drama. (Jurowski’s decision to use the more rambling version of the opera Mozart prepared for Vienna doesn’t help). Kent wrenches significance and visual stimulus from every twist and turn, the singers are never still, and the stage is thick with activity: in the centre, a giant rotating cube unfolds like a magician’s box and then implodes into a bewildering maze of angles. It looks like a computer modelling programme that’s just crashed.

There is a point to the frenzied dramaturgy: if ever an operatic hero was incapable of stopping doing something, it is Don Giovanni. But dramaturgical insights are not the same as operatic ones, and in Kent’s production it is the music that suffers. Jurowski’s conducting is assured but lacks fire, as if cowed by the spectacle unfolding on stage. Kate Royal seems miscast as Donna Elvira and mild irritation rather than grief seems to be driving Anna Samuil’s Donna Anna. Gerald Finlay, by contrast, is in wonderful vocal form, and his characterisation is completely at one with Kent’s vision; his tone is cold, empty, frighteningly beautiful.

At the Drottningholm, the great Swedish baritone Loa Falkman gives us a very different Don: an aged rake who accepts the statue’s return dinner invitation because he is too old and tired to do otherwise. Everything has been going against him and the world has long since failed to conform to his expectations of it. Even Lars Arvidson’s exhausted Leporello, strangely reminiscent of Charles Addams’s Lurch, has more luck with the ladies.

Drottningholm is a period theatre and so has no recourse to rotating Pandora’s boxes. But it does have exquisitely painted side panels and hand-printed backdrops. For Johanna Garpe’s production, the theatre has provided exquisitely detailed 1780s costumes by Karin Erskine and backdrops featuring contemporary depictions of Swedish landscapes and palaces – Don Giovanni’s noble seat turns out to be the palace of Drottningholm itself. While the eye delights in the detail, and the ear in some lithe playing from Mark Tatlow’s house orchestra, also in costume, the opera itself rejoices in the picturesque artificiality of the staging. Kent’s production errs on the tragic side, whereas Garpe’s leans gaily towards the comic. Kent is almost exclusively concerned with the Don himself, but Garpe emphasizes relationships. Marika Schönberg’s Anna and Magnus Staveland’s superb Ottavio seem, for once, to understand each other. Don Giovanni reveals himself less by what he does than through his interaction with Masetto, Zerlina and Leporello. The shifting social dynamics, which drive the music as much as they drive the plot, are made transparent by the period costumes. Best of all, though, the singers get to stop doing things and just stand there. And when you’re singing, that often helps.

Hansel and Gretel

2010-09-01T18:52:00.000+01:00

Glyndebourne Festival Opera at the Proms

Laurent Pelly's 2008 Glyndebourne staging of Hänsel and Gretel has seen some action. Initially issued for cinema release, it was revived for this year's festival, relayed to a big screen in Somerset House, London, and has now been brought to the Proms in a semi-staged version directed by Stéphane Marlot. The event also marked the long-anticipated Proms debut of conductor Robin Ticciati.

Pelly's cardboard-city production inexplicably removes all the magic from Humperdinck's fairytale masterpiece, leaving Ticciati and the London Philharmonic to try to put it back. Semi-stagings can work wonderfully, but this one missed the visual and dramatic intensity of the opera house. Only the humorous touches worked, in particular William Dazeley's entrance as the drunken father, staggering through the packed arena before clambering up through the percussion section, or the witch's cottage, a Royal Albert Hall built from junk-food packaging. But one or two belly laughs cannot anchor an entire opera, particularly where the production cuts so squarely, if not deeply, against the grain.

Conversely, where concert performances allow an often welcome focus purely on the music, the preservation here of Pelly's hyperactive stage direction prevented Lydia Teuscher (Gretel) and Alice Coote (Hansel) from making their vocal presence fully felt. When they were allowed to remain still and just sing – for example, in the prayer at the end of the second act – one sensed how much we were missing.

Thankfully, Ticciati again proved himself to be the young wizard of recent legend. He has a wondrous touch in this piece, bringing out not only the light and shade in this often unutterably beautiful score, but all the shades in between. The occasional untidiness aside, his sureness of pacing restored to the experience both the menace and magic that the staging so sorely lacked.

BBC Concert Orchestra / Lockhart

2010-08-30T18:53:00.000+01:00

This was a concert I'll not soon forget. For starters, I took part, contributing wobbly vocals ("You must remember this … ") to composer and arranger Don Sebesky's medley of Hollywood songs. Luckily, my efforts were heard by neither myself nor anyone else, thanks to about 5,000 other people in the audience – including Proms director Roger Wright – who sang along, too, encouraged by the BBC Concert Orchestra's new principal conductor, Keith Lockhart, as part of this light-hearted, light-headed bank holiday concert.

This was Lockhart's first Prom, but he has been working with the orchestra for some time, and the American and his new ensemble read each other perfectly. A beautiful, smooth-toned but unslushy performance of George Butterworth's The Banks of Green Willow proved this; a spirited, superbly paced rendition of Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story underlined it. With the first half given to British music (Arnold, Butterworth, Walton and Graham Fitkin) and the second half to American (Bernstein, Gershwin, Williams, Warren), the programme combined popular appeal with the same imaginative, thoughtful planning given to its more serious counterparts. This was no kitschy "crossover" event, but a nice balance of unsentimental nostalgia and unapologetic joy.

The concert was also memorable for presenting the smallest cellist, playing the smallest cello I suspect this stage has ever seen, gamely leading her section of the BBC's Family Orchestra in the world premiere of Fitkin's PK. Inspired by the Victorian telegraph network that had its international hub in Porthcurno, Cornwall (or "PK" in code), the piece used 12 conductors to distribute morse code-inspired music among the mass of amateur players and singers swelling round the Concert Orchestra. The piece is about communication difficulties. Somehow, it just about hung together.

BBCSO/Robertson

2010-08-27T08:54:00.000+01:00

Unveiling a new work at the Proms can be difficult. First there's the acoustics, which can undo all the best-laid plans. Then there's the audience. Typically they're up for an adventure of some kind, but if turns out to be the wrong sort, they make their feelings known loud and clear.

It's lucky, then, that Mark-Anthony Turnage's latest offering – Hammered Out, a 50th-birthday Proms commission in the form of a 15-minute piece for a large orchestra, which it employs at full tilt from the first – is of the kind to brook no opposition. Reminiscent in some respects of John Adams's popular Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Turnage's ride is faster, but also longer and with more interesting scenery. For, while each of the rhythmic, melodic and timbral cells is explored thoroughly (ie "hammered out"), there's always a new twist emerging. The result is a finely crafted piece with crystal-clear processes and a wealth of resonance. R&B rhythms and rock textures (an electric bass guitar adds to an already expanded orchestra) are bound up in an experience that takes exhilaration to new levels. If there's anyone still wondering why a popular festival like the Proms should concern itself with new music, this piece has the answers – it's only a shame it wasn't programmed for the Last Night.

Turnage was lucky to find an ideal conductor in David Robertson, a musician both consistently upbeat and unfailingly precise with his upbeats. His fleet-footed approach worked further wonders in Barber's Violin Concerto, which he and soloist Gil Shaham steered expertly along the narrow, potholed lanes dividing sentiment from sentimentality. As for Sibelius's second symphony, Robertson's breezy but nuanced reading, executed by a spirited BBC Symphony Orchestra, exposed the cracks in the work, but only because it did it the rare honour of taking it seriously.

Langgaard Prom: Danish NSO/Thomas Dausgaard

2010-08-12T10:48:00.000+01:00

György Ligeti seems to have become the Proms' warm-up DJ, used to sensitise our ears before segueing without pause into the main attraction. Thus it was last year with Atmosphères and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder; and again, a couple of weeks ago, Musica Ricercata No 2 seeped into George Benjamin's Duet for Piano and Orchestra. Last night, though, Thomas Dausgaard played the Ligeti warm-up card twice. The filigree textures of Lux Aeterna – beautifully spun by the 32-strong Danish National Vocal Ensemble – laid the red carpet for the UK premiere of Rued Langgaard's Music of the Spheres. Before this, Ligeti's minute choral settings of "Night" and "Morning" were woven seamlessly into – wait for it – Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. Soloist Henning Kraggerud's charm-filled performance was excellent, but the piece resonated like an interloper from another concert entirely.

Langgard's Music of the Spheres is less a musical work than a collection of sonorous thoughts bound by a mystical concern for the cosmos and man's place within it. Composed in 1916-18, and soon forgotten until its rediscovery by Per Nørgård and Ligeti, its use of chord clusters, extended repetitions and spatial techniques foreshadow many techniques central to postwar music. Over half an hour long, it does interesting things to the ears, but terrible things to the mind.

Frequently clumsy and tirelessly self-indulgent, the work's most powerful evocation of its title consists not in a revelation of some cosmic harmony, but in its apparent indifference to its listeners. Indeed, if the movement of celestial bodies really sounded like this, we'd see rather more interplanetary collisions than we do.

The winding up of Langgard's myriad loose threads was left to Sibelius 5, given a welcome and high-spirited workout by Dausgaard and his players. After three hours, the extended applause given by the capacity audience was richly deserved, but musically the evening was both muddled and muddling.

Technology fetishism is skin deep

2010-07-24T10:50:00.000+01:00

Our shallow obsession with gadgets disguises a conservatism where real change takes place at numbingly slow speed

A milestone has been reached, a Rubicon crossed. With the news, announced on the Guardian's front page on Wednesday, that ebook sales on Amazon have outstripped hardbacks for the first time, I have decided no longer to pay attention to hi-tech company marketing memos dressed up as news stories. That means that next time Mark Zuckerman converts another half billion users to Facebook, Jeff Bezos converts another half million words to Kindle ebook format, or Steve Jobs farts to the left – or will it be to the right this time? – I won't be reading.

It's not that such announcements aren't sometimes genuine news. The latest Amazon press release, for example, does confirm an admittedly fairly widespread suspicion that when consumers buy overpriced shiny gadgets, they spend a certain amount of money using them. IPhone users download apps. ITunes users download songs. Kindle users download paid-for ebooks..

No one could deny that ebook readers are catching on. What surprises me, though, amid the endless "what format do you prefer?" real and e-navel gazing that goes on whenever someone says "ebook", is how slow this catching on process is proving to be. Ebooks are cheaper to produce, aren't made out of trees, don't take up space, don't weigh anything, do fit in your pocket (as a whole library), can be viewed in a customisable font size, are easily annotated, readable in the dark, better, cleverer and better again. But still everyone says, oh I don't know, surely real books are better because, oh I don't know, you can read them in the bath. (To which the answer is yes, but you can't get real books read aloud to you while you have a proper bath).

What news stories like this really show is that the rampant technology fetishism, which runs like e-wildfire through our i-society, is really only skin-deep. To be sure, the fetishism is real enough, evidenced by the way in which our interest is so often more in the medium than its content. "What format do you read your newspapers in?" (not: "Did you read the news today?"). "Does your phone have a wide enough angle to take in the ceiling of the Sistine chapel?" (not: "The Sistine chapel's ceiling is too much to take in in one go"). If the future develops along the lines being laid by the present, the question of the century won't be: "Where were you when Barack Obama was assassinated?" but "Did you read about the dematerialisation of Steve Jobs on the iLavatory Mk 3.14 or Mk 3.14159265? Mk 3.1? Oh dear, you must be distraught?"

But the reality is that these shallow obsessions disguise a simple, pervasive conservatism. Imagine if William Caxton had returned to Westminster with his new printing press and everyone had said: "What's this newfangled nonsense? Hand-copied is much better – you really get the sense you're getting something for your money. (And besides, what are you doing with this euro-tech? You can't trust it you know.")

Sure, there will have been some moaning from the guild of copyists or some such, but you wouldn't have caught Caxton printing questionnaires asking readers whether they like the new technology or not.

It's not just media technology, either. Can you imagine the architects of the great cathedrals trying to get planning permission today, or even obtaining agreement on how best to honour the spirit of the past? Hagia Sophia was built in five years following the destruction of the fifth century church, yet it's taken the architectural, engineering, design and financial might concentrated on Manhattan island nearly nine years to replace the fallen twin towers with this.

We flatter ourselves with endless talk about living at the "cutting edge" in an era of "constant change" and "permanent technological revolution". Most of the time, though, by conspiring to keep capacity at a set distance from potential, the progress implicit in the technological cycle of perpetual upgrading is an illusion we use to distract us from the numbingly slow speed at which real change actually takes place. How else do you explain that, over 80 years after women obtained equal voting rights in this country, we still can't get more than four of them round the cabinet table, or more than one woman for every nine men into our company boardrooms?

Still, at least we can read all about it on the latest iDespair format while waiting distractedly for society to upgrade itself.

How plural a thing is joy

2010-07-15T08:32:00.004+01:00

NOTES TOWARDS A NEW MUSICAL NECESSITY IN ALDEBURGH

Review of 2010 Aldeburgh Festival from the Times Literary Supplement, 16 July

Pierre Boulez came to Aldeburgh this year. Not long ago, such a visit would have been unthinkable. Benjamin Britten (who remains the festival’s guiding spirit regardless of how little of his music features in it) was poles apart from Boulez in both artistic and political terms. They didn’t so much consider each other’s music beneath contempt as not consider it at all. But in recent years, the polarization of contemporary music – between, broadly speaking, a Boulez-aligned progressive element and everything else – has yielded to a stylistic and aesthetic pluralism. This is not to say that musicians aren’t still capable of politicizing their listening, or of being made angry by a composer’s perceived “selling out”. It is simply that the idea of artistic progress has moved far beyond its once narrowly policed borders, just as the idea of the past – an awareness of which is always keenest in those most anxious to leave it behind – has relaxed its grip on the present.

The ground for the master’s visit had been well laid by the recent appointment of a former Boulez protégé, the pianist Pierre- Laurent Aimard, as the festival’s director. Now in his second year at Aldeburgh, Aimard has confirmed the international direction in which the festival has long been travelling. He has also succeeded in furthering Britten’s own contextualizing aims, presenting contemporary works alongside older music. Few things have been more harmful to the reputation of contemporary music – and its appreciation - than its persistent insularity.

The first day of the festival’s final weekend began with an informal interview and concert – in which members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain performed Boulez’s Incises and the early Sonatina for flute and piano – and ended with a period-instrument performance of Bach’s B minor mass, John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in a seamless interpretation which left authenticity purists and sceptics alike gaping in bewilderment. The next day, in a recital by Aimard and the German violinist Thomas Zehetmair, Boulez’s beautiful solo violin piece, “Anthèmes 1”, rubbed shoulders with Schoenberg, Schumann and Mozart; the 800-seat concert hall was full on a glorious Suffolk summer morning. In the afternoon a Swiss vocal group sang obscure sixteenth-century polyphony by Thomas Ashewell and Nicolas Gombert while the evening brought Boulez to the podium to conduct Varèse, Ligeti, Carter, as well as his own “Dérives 2”. Both concerts were packed to the gunnels.

One can never be prepared for someone like Boulez. His identity seems entirely bound up with the paradox, implicit in the idea of artistic originality, of necessity as the flipside of novelty. The aim to wrong-foot his listener – the unswerving article of faith at the heart of his music – is equally evident in his conversation. “I have a great love of accident”, he explained, by way of elucidating his method of building new works. But later, while discussing his attitude to conducting, and in particular his decision to conduct the Ring at Bayreuth in 1966 (a move which shocked his former Darmstadt colleagues at the time), the pendulum swung back: “I simply conduct the music I feel it is necessary to hear . . . I perform what is necessary”. It was perhaps mildly disappointing that the programme Boulez felt “must be heard” on this occasion had so little to connect it to its English setting. Both he and the Ensemble Intercontemporain have worked with George Benjamin (the festival’s other featured composer) and Jonathan Harvey before, and could easily have included something by either of them in the concert. Still, the disappointment didn’t last long: it was good to hear again the shimmering, monolithic harmonies of “Dérive 2”, building to a pulsating final crescendo, alongside glitteringly fresh performances of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto (1970) and Elliot Carter’s new settings of five poems by Marianne Moore. Dérive 2 is composed for eleven instruments and based on material discarded from the earlier Répons (pretty much the entirety of Boulez’s oeuvre consists of material reworked from earlier pieces – “like a family tree”, as he puts it). Its kaleidoscopic surface is wrapped around a single six-note chord. Wagnerian in its exploded miniaturism, and audacity of conception, the work is unusual in that its largely periodic structure allows the listener to gain a foothold amid the ripple and swirl of texture and line, before (and this is less unusual) taking it away again. Emboldened by the warm acoustic bounce of Britten’s bare-brick concert hall, it gathers everything into one continuous, implacable stream. In every possible way, the work is immense, the powerful flow of sound difficult to square with the sight of Boulez’s neat form counting away on the rostrum.

Though not completed until 2006, Dérive 2 was originally intended as an eightieth anniversary tribute to Elliot Carter. Now only months shy of his 102nd birthday, Carter is in as good a position as any to compose a work with the title What Are Years?, a setting of five poems by the American modernist poet Marianne Moore. Scored for chamber orchestra, with an array of pitched and unpitched percussion, the limpid instrumental writing provides a sleek bedding for beautifully measured vocal lines which support the wittily skewed angles of Moore’s verse. In both the poems and the music, detail surrenders itself imperceptibly to confrontation with mystery. In the final, title song, a bird is observed “growing taller” in the act of singing. It sits captive between fear and desire but voices the infinite reach of human longing: “satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy”. The line is carried through a steep crescendo into a resounding chord, amid the decay of which the soprano intones “This is mortality. This is eternity”. Sung with mouthwatering precision and feeling by Claire Booth, Carter’s music seemed as glorious as that of Bach’s mass, heard the night before. Clearly, too, it was “necessary”. Yet couched in a weekend of performances of Boulez’s works, the brief Carter interlude also served as a reminder of the key differences between the European and North American experiences of modernity. The former’s heavy gaze on the imploded certainties of history is shot through with barely concealed agonies, whereas the latter is often suffused with quiet delight, as if the Moderns’ great crisis of subjectivity might, and should, be looked on as an opportunity rather than an occasion for terrible doubt.

Something of this contrast was evident in the pairing of two stage works with which the festival opened. The first, by Boulez’s Italian contemporary and fellow Darmstadt alumnus Luciano Berio, is a musical dramatization of a song recital that goes very wrong when the soloist has an emotional breakdown. Originally composed in 1972 for Berio’s wife, the mezzo soprano Cathy Berberian, Recital 1 quotes snatches of vocal music from Monteverdi to Berio himself, through which the soloist works her way as she struggles to reconcile the ritual of giving a recital with the range of emotion expressed in the songs. A consistently unnerving, occasionally taunting orchestral accompaniment picks away at the patchwork of quotation. While ostensibly depicting an individual’s breakdown, the work opens out into a portrayal of music itself undergoing some kind of existential crisis – as if the possibility of expression had been crushed under the rubble of precedent. It can be played, in part, for laughs, and provides an excellent vehicle for any singer brave enough to rise to the extraordinary challenges it presents in performance – in this case, the magnificently versatile Susan Bickley. But it also comes across as a striking rehearsal of the degree-zero reasoning central to the efforts of the postwar generation, epitomized by Boulez and Berio, to rid themselves of the past.

The second work in the double bill was George Benjamin’s slender chamber opera, Into the Little Hill. A pared-down retelling of the Pied Piper legend, the work lasts forty minutes and is scored for an ensemble of fifteen instrumentalists, and a soprano and mezzo- soprano, who between them share out the roles of the town’s minister, his wife and child, the crowd, narrator, and Stranger (the piper). The concision of both the score and Martin Crimp’s libretto is breathtaking, especially so when one tries, and fails, to conceive of a scene or an interpretative strand that could have been added. The crowd scenes (both singers, in subtle, smoothly aligned dissonance) are full of pitiless baying for an end to the rats; the stranger – a man with “no eyes, no nose, no ears” – is given just enough time for a sense of his mystery, power and avarice to assert itself; the full extent of the minister’s agonies of conscience in obeying the will of the people (in order to regain power himself) is clear, as is the hole blasted through the adult narratives by the child’s inability to understand why the rats are any different from her. Musically, neither a note nor a rest is audibly spare.

The source of the stranger’s power, as we know, is music: the piper is a figure of literal and metaphorical enchantment. And the history of opera, from la favola d’Orfeo onwards, is littered with examples of the genre’s most stubborn (and artistically fascinating) dramaturgical problem: how to depict characters singing or playing music when such singing and playing is an aspect of what is doing the depicting. Benjamin and Crimp’s answer is both economical and an artistic masterstroke: silence. The piper’s magical music is no more audible than his narrated actions are visible, and its seductive force is all the more palpable as a result. Scored for a folksy, almost comic ensemble which includes basset horns, a contrabass clarinet and parts for mandolin and banjo, Into the Little Hill is less an opera than a piece of ritualized musical story-telling. At its heart is the dramatic contrast between the compromised reality in which we accept, as the minister puts it, “all faiths because we believe in nothing”, and the realm of unbridled presence accessible only to the innocent children (and rats), who blissfully follow the piper’s Pythagorean strains to the light that blazes under the hill.

In one sense, Into the Little Hill can be understood as a kind of negative gesamtkunstwerk – a total art work that has renounced all totalizing claims. With the aid of John Fuljames’s minimal staging, the work affords a limitless space and time for the imagination through the bewildering beauty of its gestures. Though the audience are left no less bereft than the townsfolk in the story, the work engenders a strong and emboldening perception of one’s own freedom to pull together each phrase, image or utterance. At the same time, it suggests an easier, more honest relation to history than that which dominates the gloomy horizons of Boulez and Berio. The illusions of the past cannot be brought back, or its horrific losses made good, but the structure of our relation to ideas of infinity and perfection remains the same, brought to being neither through enchantment nor disenchantment, but through the effort to create and comprehend beauty.

Shankar / LPO / Murphy

2010-07-05T08:32:00.000+01:00

Cultural cross-fertilisation between India and the west existed long before 1966, when George Harrison visited Ravi Shankar in Varanasi and long before Shankar himself first visited Paris as a teenager while touring with his brother in the 30s. Why, then, do we consider only the more recent fruits of this process, as in this predictable pairing of Ravi Shankar's new symphony with the first violin concerto of Philip Glass.

Composed for amplified solo sitar and orchestra, Shankar's symphony resembles his three previous concertos in being interesting during the solo passages, considerably less so at other times. A different raga is used for each of the four movements, approximating a traditional symphonic plan. The first two lack meaningful engagement between soloist and orchestra despite a sprinkling of quarter-tones and, in the slow second movement, the flute and harp's echoing of the sitar. The third movement brought some much needed rhythmic excitement, while the fourth, with its extended "alap", or free solo section – elaborated with unshowy virtuosity by Shankar's daughter and pupil Anoushka – afforded a tantalising glimpse of the sitar's real magic. Little of this rubbed off on the orchestra. Shorn of harmonic duties and challenged neither rhythmically nor texturally, they homogenised into a largely wasted force.

Robert McDuffie, the soloist in the Glass piece, bravely attempted, with a range of exaggerated gestures and unintentional microtones, to breathe life into the work. The audience was treated a little more respectfully by Adams's ever popular Shaker Loops, which opened the concert. But David Murphy, who collaborated with Shankar on the symphony, never looked entirely in control throughout. Meanwhile, his players, despite giving a world premiere, looked as if they had heard it all before.

Enchanted evenings

2010-07-01T09:45:00.002+01:00

Times Literary Supplement, July 2

Sergei Prokofiev
THE LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES
Grange Park

Benjamin Britten
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Garsington Manor

Love potion: use sparingly and with caution. There are several operas for which this motto could serve. But whether tragic, like Tristan, or comic, like the works under review, there is always a sense that the potion itself – or simple magic spell, in the case of the Prokofiev – is dispensable. Opera has a way of bombarding the senses, as well as a reputation for implausibility, so that we tend simply to take whatever is thrown at us in much the same spirit as the characters. Disbelief is suspended so very high above the proscenium arch, that the concept of magic has little meaning.

Another, less fortunate effect of this is that while comic operas are plentiful, laughter among the audience is not. Laughter requires strong roots in normality, and as a result tears against the illusion of seamlessness and inevitability that arises when dramatic structure weds itself to musical time. The extent of Benjamin Britten’s achievement in making a funny opera out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream should be weighed accordingly.

Although the adaptation, which was as much Peter Pears’s work as Britten’s, is uniquely sensitive among Shakespearean operas, differences from the original play are marked. The four interweaving storylines remain, but the relations between them are changed. Theseus and Hippolyta retain only a minimal presence, while the tradesmen – or “rustics”, as Britten liked to call them – carry greater weight. This is particularly the case with Bottom. In contrast to the other characters who remain faithful, by and large, to the idioms and diction which Britten alots them, Bottom and, to a lesser extent, Flute are given free rein to parody styles from Purcell to Verdi and even, I fancy, Britten himself.

Like Britten, Prokofiev adapted his own libretto, this time from a comedy by the Venetian Carlo Gozzi. Unlike Britten, the resulting absurdist fantasy, driven at breakneck speed by Prokofiev’s score, bears little comparison in terms of mode and character with the original light-footed stock comedy. It depends on the production, of course. In Grange Park’s new staging, directed and designed by David Fielding, the bombardment of music and badly pronounced French has an ample visual equivalent, with a battery of symbols and references including a chorus of medics in Sigmund Freud masks and giant juice cartons in place of the eponymous oranges, each branded “Innocent”. The references are often cinematic: Truffaldino dresses as Indiana Jones for his adventure with the Prince in a blue police-box Tardis. Likewise, the “ridicules” take their costume and movement from Woody Allen’s butler-robot in Sleeper.

Though musically tight – with the English Chamber Orchestra energetically directed by Leo Hussain – none of the singers dominates proceedings. The Grange stage is a difficult one on which to project, and it’s hard for voices to be heard about the orchestra. Nonetheless, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts is in winning form as the hypochondriac prince turned chivalrous adventurer. And I particularly enjoyed the production’s play on levels of control and puppetry, with the ineffectual sorcerer Tschelio at one end, the audience at the other.

If there is a serious message in Prokofiev’s preposterous fairytale, it is a familiar one: love, however ridiculous its apparent object, is the real agent of freedom. One might point to something similar in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: in Quince and Bottom’s rendition of “Pyramus and Thisbe”, for instance – though this, as Theseus observes, “needs no excuse”. And overall, in Daniel Slater’s excellent production for Garsington, to designs by Francis O’Connor, the mixing of mortal and immortal spheres is more subtly handled than at Grange Park. The set has been tossed from an attic window (aptly, given that this is the final production in Garsington Manor’s courtyard before the company moves next year); the fairies, clad in military apparel drawn from a dressing-up-box, move among a jetsam of patchwork quilts, truckle beds and dusty Persian rugs, a lair of forgotten things which the mortals enter via a wardrobe.

Ultimately, however, the source of the magic lies not with Oberon and Titania, but in the combination of ingenuity and serendipity which Garsington both uniquely requires and offers. Gravity – whose unseen hand closes the wardrobe doors, or allows the characters to enter at speed, and in various stages of dishevelment, down a curving slide – was the prime mover among the special effects, while moments such as the passing aeroplane aiding Richard Durden’s aged Puck in his mission to “girdle the earth”, or the angry blackbird rebuking Shakespeare’s lark, voiced their own ungainsayable charm. James Laing’s soft counter-tenor and George von Bergen’s bright tenor were just right for Oberon and Lysander. Neal Davies and Pascal Charbonneau were vocally assured as well as devotedly funny as Bottom and Flute, and Steuart Bedford, who worked with Britten on the first recording of the opera, conducted lovingly.

The Way to the Sea

2010-06-25T10:28:00.000+01:00

I find myself of one mind with the readers of Bizarre, who in 2003 voted Thorpeness Britain's weirdest village. The brainchild of an Edwardian landowner who sought to sculpt a garden suburb-on-sea, the village, with its Tudorbethan residences and a Peter Pan-themed boating lake, provided the setting, or rather set, for this interactive performance of Britten songs and piano pieces from the 1930s. Centred on the early cycle of Auden poems, On This Island, the production by Netia Jones and Pippa Nissen also used loops from the 1936 documentary The Way to the Sea, to which Auden and Britten both contributed.

The results can be summed up in three words: brilliant, brilliant and brilliant. And very funny. The outside portions consisted of a walk through the village and along the beach, punctuated by clipped cries of "Damnation" from a golfer whose ball was evidently lost in the pages of some PG Wodehouse story. Four canary-yellow tennis players were meanwhile trapped in a repeating cycle of "dyooce" and "vantage", while a commuter waited, out on the lake, to board his train. It succeeded beautifully in conjuring the mingled compassion and condescension that permeated Auden and Britten's nostalgic socialism.

The main event was the concluding recital, which placed tenor Alan Oke – accompanied by the excellent Christopher Glynn – in character as one of the "bald young clerks" Betjeman sought to save from Slough. Performing in front of a postcard video backdrop, Oke sang with wit and vigour, the odd intonation wobble failing to dismantle the spectacle of the clerk leaving his "talk of sport and makes of cars/ In various bogus Tudor bars", to dare to "look up, and see the stars".

University challenge

2010-06-24T10:39:00.001+01:00

Review of Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit in New Statesman, 28 June

Fans of the campus novel keep a special place on their shelves for Morris Zapp, the cocksure protagonist of David Lodge's 1975 novel Changing Places. Zapp is an American professor of English literature whose ambition is to write a series of commentaries on Jane Austen's novels that are so authoritative, they will settle debate on the subject once and for all. By the end of the novel, Zapp's passion has dissipated, his illusions about the nature of literary criticism stifled in the musty corridors of an English red-brick university, lair of the underachieving Philip Swallow. The epitome of all the wishy-washy indecisiveness that sticks in Zapp's craw, Swallow adopts, as his own modest dream of glory, the publication of a collection of his favourite exam questions, "as pregnant and enigmatic as haikus".

Some 35 years on, the ideological battle between Zapp and Swallow through which Lodge characterised the deep identity crisis in British and American universities has been lost and won. The Swallows have long since been pensioned off or, worse, promoted to management. But Zapp has fared no better. His excising of the vagaries of aesthetics from the study of literature has led not to his subject being settled, but to its growth.

By any standards, the past three decades have brought about rampant inflation in humanities research output, fed by a proliferation of critical schools and ideologies. University teaching has been undermined, while the dissemination of research in the humanities across the academy - let alone outside it - has been undermined by the rise of defensively maintained specialisms, often presented as interdisciplinary, but in reality closely insulated by cults of incomprehensibility and obscurity. As a result, fundamental questions concerning the role of arts and humanities education in contemporary society have never been more out of focus than now.

And that, as Zapp might say, is that. Except it isn't. As the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues in this limpid polemic, the vacuum left by conventional ideas about the value of education has been filled by an instrumental conception tied not to the notions of citizenship and moral autonomy, but to short-term economic benefit. The stakes, Nussbaum says, could not be higher. "If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful, docile, technically trained machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticise tradition, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements." The price, in other words, is capitalism's noble partner, liberal democracy.

Nussbaum describes a "worldwide crisis" taking place in education. She identifies the ways in which democracy relies on the values embedded in the arts and humanities. Societies have always used their arts and history as a mirror in which to see, understand and question their own values and desires, their fears and dreams, and their internal contradictions. But the value of the arts, in this respect, is contingent on the ability to think, judge and criticise for oneself.

The citizen educated in the art of following "argument rather than numbers", Nussbaum writes, "is a good person for a democracy to have, the sort of person who would stand up against the pressure to say something false or hasty. A further problem with people who lead the unexamined life is that they often treat one another disrespectfully."

This aspect of tolerance and openness occupies the core of Nussbaum's case. "By generating pleasure in connection with acts of understanding, subversion and cultural reflection", she argues, serious critical study of the arts becomes a crucial factor in the ability to put oneself in another person's place - in order to understand them, to see and feel the world as they feel it, and marvel at its difference, rather than outmanoeuvre them in business or battle.

Nussbaum is a philosopher who has sought to foreground questions of human value over the drier, more quantifiable obsessions of many of her colleagues. But in laying the blame for the perversion of education so squarely with the politicians and their accountants, she is in some respects failing to exercise the capacity for self-criticism that she prizes so highly. The academy must take its share of the blame, too, not least for having failed to educate today's crop of politicians.

In order for it to promote the values and skills Nussbaum describes, education must be considered as a good thing in itself. And for this to be the case, the areas of understanding it takes for its subjects must also be considered as good in themselves. Without this, the whole edifice crumbles. And yet, in the arts at least, it is precisely this notion of the intrinsically good that has been auctioned off by academics, goaded by paymasters envious of the accountability and pseudo-objectivity of the social sciences. As Lodge saw so clearly in the 1970s, the criticism of art and literature - whether in academia or in the equally fraught arena of newspapers and magazines - should never be considered a mere explaining away of phenomena, a decoding of beguilingly gilded puzzles. Rather, it is a matter of helping to see for oneself, through the construction of narratives, perspectives and approaches that do not leave the artwork untouched, but instead touch it all the more deeply, drawing it into meaningful engagement with the wider culture. To ignore this is to embrace the infantile commodity fetishism overrunning us.

Aesthetic value is the reason why objects of beauty are made, and why they must be remade through criticism. Aesthetic value mirrors the way we value each other - which is to say, the kind of value on which the ideas of democracy and moral responsibility are founded - and that is why, when we turn away from it, we turn away from ourselves.

Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Martha C Nussbaum
Princeton University Press, 178pp, £15.95

George Benjamin at Aldeburgh

2010-06-22T08:46:00.000+01:00

George Benjamin Portrait/Into the Little Hill
Snape Maltings/Britten Studio, Aldeburgh

George Benjamin turned 50 earlier this year. A birthday concert with the Sinfonietta in February offered a wide-ranging retrospective. By contrast, the "composer portrait" event at this year's Aldeburgh festival, where Benjamin is the featured composer, offered performances of only two of his works: Shadowlines and Upon Silence. Yet both resonated all the more strongly for being presented against a backdrop of 20th-century works chosen by the composer and presented with short interviews led by the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, artistic director of the festival since last year and an old friend of the composer.

Aimard was the soloist in the first half, moving from the restless harmonic experimentation of Scriabin's Op 74 Preludes to the numinous sonorities, flecked with tragedy, of Messiaen's Cloches d'Angoisse, via Webern's crisp Op 27 Variations. Like the Webern, Benjamin's Shadowlines is a densely contrapuntal work, but one in which entire soundworlds are set against one other as much as individual lines.

Susan Bickley sang Benjamin's setting of WB Yeats's Long-legged Fly at its premiere. Twenty years later, she reminded us why Upon Silence remains one of the composer's most profound offerings. Like the slender opera Into the Little Hill, which transferred fluently for two performances on the Maltings stage in John Fulljames's production, it draws on Benjamin's peerless ability to create tight structure from a haze of colour, harmony from complex, intractable-seeming material, and bright innovation from painstaking craftsmanship. Both works take music and its powers, often abused, for their main subject. It is a subject that Benjamin's contributions of the last three decades or so have further deepened and ennobled.

Conscience at sea

2010-06-10T10:32:00.001+01:00

TLS, 11 June

Benjamin Britten
BILLY BUDD
Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Lucy Walker, ed
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
New perspectives on his life and work
205pp. Boydell Press. £45. 978 184383 516 5

Shortly after the premiere of Billy Budd, at Covent Garden in December 1951, Benjamin Britten wrote to E. M. Forster. “I think you & Eric [Crozier] have written incomparably the finest libretto ever.” For his part, Forster had reservations about Britten’s setting of what, at the time, he considered “his most important piece of writing”, prompted by hearing a play-through of what was originally Act Two (the original four act version was revised to the now standard two acts in 1964). Forster found Britten’s music for John Claggart, the devious Master at Arms who drives the opera’s tragic action, “soggy”: “I want passion – love constricted, perverted, poisoned, but nevertheless flowing down its agonizing channel; a sexual discharge gone evil”.

Opinion remains divided on the merits of Britten’s score. For some, the music is simply too thin, both in terms of ideas and textures, to support the messianic scale of the conflict at its centre. For others it represents his coming of operatic age, when the seamless contrapuntal style he had been developing during the 1940s broke through to his stage music. Two factors favour the second view. The libretto possesses by itself a rare and profound musicality – due in part to the poetry that attaches itself to the jargon of the sea (odd in itself, given that technical language is often held to be the enemy of poetry) – to which Britten responds appropriately, in a manner similar to that of his many songs. Which is to say he sets the text rather than melodizes it. He attends to its rhythms and tonal demands, now and then throwing motivic tidbits to the swabs in the pit where, buffeted against the bantams and sparrowlegs, toplights and halyards amid a fury of belaying and hoisting, the orchestra fills like a sail before a freshening breeze. The second factor is that the opera, unlike Melville’s novella, is framed by a narrative device in which Captain Vere looks back on his past. For Vere the narrator, the sea no longer represents limitless opportunity so much as endless confusion. “I have tried to guide others rightly, but I have been lost on the infinite sea” – the word “infinite” floats on one of Britten’s trademark wave-form melismas. The perspective of confusion is therefore part of what is dramatized and the sparse, groundless counterpoint of the prologue and epilogue infiltrates the rest of the opera.

In Michael Grandage’s new production (the theatre director’s first opera), the old Captain Vere fully inhabits the stage occupied by his younger self. This becomes explicit near the end, when, capless and wigless, lit from elsewhere, he enters Billy’s cabin to witness the last moments of the young saviour he himself could not save; but it is clear throughout from John Mark Ainsley’s restrained, almost timid characterisation – as if the great “Starry Vere” is as distant from himself as from the crew who love him, Billy most of all.

Grandage’s Billy Budd represents, surprisingly, the able seaman’s first visit to Glyndebourne. The staging looks set fair, in part because Glyndebourne always has room for Britten, but also because of Christopher Oram’s magnificently claustrophobic set, a cross section of the lower decks of a ship constructed from steel clad in treated wood. The sense of immensity is coupled, appropriately, with one of indomitability. You'd think twice before decommissioning it. The first cast will be a hard act to follow, in particular the young South African baritone Jacques Imbrailo, making his festival debut as Billy. The London Philharmonic, conducted by Mark Elder, let neither the detail nor the continually rising tension slip.

The immediate source of Vere’s moral confusion – the conflict between a King’s law and God’s – was familiar to Britten, though on a less cosmic scale. In one of several interesting essays in Lucy Walker’s edited collection of “New Perspectives” on the composer, Brian McMahon investigates the motivations behind the composer’s return to England with Peter Pears in 1942. McMahon looks past the authorized narrative, in which the composer’s love for his country was reawakened by Forster’s article about George Crabbe, to consider a variety of psychological and environmental concerns which helped Britten to dress up as pacifism his horror of physical confrontation and his sense of being exceptional. A key factor, hitherto overlooked, is the suggestion that Britten and Pears might well have been conscripted in the United States anyway. McMahon imputes no guilt or innocence to Britten, but simply examines the events and evidence. It is this critical distance, and the absence of the kind of for-or-against defensiveness which has often scarred Britten scholarship, that distinguishes Walker’s volume.

Most of the contributors are unfamiliar names, and the emphasis is less on establishing the composer’s uniqueness than on exploring the various national and international contexts in which his work acquired its meaning. J. P. E. Harper-Scott provides a compelling, if occasionally opaque, comparison of Salome with Tadzio, while Jane Brandon pursues Verdian influences in Britten – a line first suggested to me, and perhaps to her, by Christopher Wintle. One of the more surprising essays – by Maéna Py – concerns the relatively widespread dissemination of Britten’s music in provincial France, beyond the reach of Pierre Boulez’s official disapproval. Beyond earshot, too, one supposes, of Vere and his officers, who make the toast: “The French: Down with Them”. The starry Captain warms to his theme – “France, the tyrant who wears the cap of liberty.” With Billy on his conscience, he might better wonder at the fit of his own cap.

Microbes and Mozart

2010-06-06T11:56:00.000+01:00

Classical music recordings have allowed performing traditions to stagnate – good luck to those using them to treat sewage

Critics such as Norman Lebrecht have been warning of the death of the recording industry which, for better or (often) for worse, has been the major force in classical music for the last half decade. Lebrecht's suspicions have by and large proved correct, receiving further confirmation in figures released recently by the BPI which show an alarming 17.6% drop in classical sales figures since 2009 against a backdrop or a market-share decline, since 1990, from 11% to a meagre 3.2%.

To put this in perspective: a major US release such as Hilary Hahn's recent Bach: Violin and Voice disc, backed by a serious publicity drive (including an appearance on The Tonight Show at the height of the Leno/O'Brien controversy), sold a meagre 1,000 copies in its first week and fewer than 500 in the following weeks. To put this in perspective further: these figures were enough for Hahn to leap to No 1 in the Billboard classical charts.

But if it seems fair finally to say that the classical music record industry is up shit creek, it would be mistaken to assume it's up there without a paddle. Indeed, it may just have been handed a very sizeable paddle: one made, in fact, for no other purpose than paddling through shit. If reports are to be believed, a potentially life-saving new market has emerged in the form of the microbes used in the treatment of sewage. According to Anton Stucki, chief-operator at the Treuenbritzen sewage plant in Germany, his playing of recordings of Mozart's operas will stimulate the bacteria. "We're still in the test phase," he said, "but I've already noticed that the sewage breakdown is more efficient."

Stucki attributes this new phase of the much-trumpeted (but never proven) "Mozart effect" to the idea that the harmony to be found in Mozart's music corresponds directly to the harmony that binds atoms to atoms, molecules to molecules. It's another version of the ancient Greek doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, according to which music is simply a manifestation of the numerical proportions that hold the universe together.

One of the interesting things about such doctrine is that it allowed numerous scholars and philosophers to spend huge amounts of time studying music without ever having to yield to the temptation to hear any. Indeed, according to the ancient and scholastic division of musical learning, the two higher spheres of music – musica mundana and musica humana – had absolutely nothing to do with music as it was actually practised. The third and lowliest, musica instrumentalis, which concerned the kind of music you could actually play, was by and large beneath consideration.

That's all changed now, thankfully, and music is generally considered as less a branch of scientific learning than an art form, charged with human meaning. And one of the chief reasons for this, regardless of the cosmic harmoniousness of the music played, is that music has always been the most collaborative of the arts. It acquires the larger part of its meaning and value from the energy invested into it composing, playing and listening to it: and the live collaboration of the audience with the performer has always been a crucial part of this.

This is why I've always been suspicious of records and have never wasted too many tears over the collapse of the classical record industry in its current guise. Because so much of this live energy is lost in the transfer from concert hall to vinyl or plastic, the art of listening to music, as the philosopher RG Collingwood put it, changes from being one of "collaborating" to one of "overhearing".

Although the golden age of classical record industry produced some wonderful – and of course wonderfully preserved – music making, part of the trouble with it has always been the normative power it has held over the way we hear music, generating myths about "definitive" interpretations, stagnating performing traditions and turning the culture of classical music into a kind of starry-eyed collectors' club. With the passing of these once great gods, recordings are once again becoming what they were always supposed to be: mere records of live events.

So the news from the sewers of Treuenbritzen is good, not because it opens up a new, albeit somewhat smelly, audience for classical music, but because it reminds us that while the music of the spheres and other spinning discs may be excellent for the health of everything from atoms and microbes to planets and galaxies, live music is best saved for the living.

Celibacy: whose bright idea was that?

2010-05-30T10:32:00.000+01:00

Christianity's greatest tragedy is turning a religion founded on a genuine philosophy of love into an excuse for repression

Why does the pope wear underpants in the bath? Because he doesn't like looking down on the unemployed.

I was always fond of this joke, though never more so than when still at school where – this being a Catholic boarding school – unemployment of this variety was rife (albeit not so rife that there wasn't an occasional visit to the job centre).

When it's not the object of irreverent humour, the vow of celibacy – in effect a vow of chastity – undertaken by the Catholic clergy is an issue of great seriousness. We were reminded of its seriousness in March, when the occasionally freethinking cardinal of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, suggested the issue of celibacy should be the object of "unflinching examination" within the church and enforced chastity may be linked with the secretive cultures of sexual abuse being exposed one after the other.

His call was quickly shot down by the Vatican, and Schönborn fell back into line.

But now the humorous side is back on top again, with the report that numerous former mistresses of the Roman clergy recently sent a petition to the pope asking him to reconsider the issue on the grounds that a priest, just like anyone else, benefits from being able "to live with his fellow human beings, experience feelings, love and be loved".

The women of Rome are right, of course, as was Schönborn.

There is simply no question that forcing men and women of the cloth to forego sexual intercourse causes untold problems. As with any physical or psychological force, hold it back in one place and it will come out somewhere else, most likely causing a good deal more damage on the way.

In Catholic doctrine, the virtue of chastity is taken to be the principal foil to everyone's favourite deadly sin, lust. But whether you take the trouble to read the Freudian literature on repression, or heed the folk observation that "absence makes the heart grow fonder (while total abstinence makes it foam at the mouth)", it's fairly clear that chastity is less of a foil than a fertiliser for lust. As most of us know, the best and most common way to satisfy a sexual appetite is – surprise surprise – to have sex. So, the real question is not whether it's a good idea but how on earth it came to be thought a good idea in the first place.

As with much Christian doctrine, the wisdom on celibacy has nothing to do with contemporary accounts of Christ. There are no prescriptions for chastity in the gospels, nor any genuine attempt to pretend that Jesus's various encounters with a certain lady of Magdala were anything other than of the usual kind. It is also clear that most of Jesus's apostles were married, and that in asking them to follow him, he wasn't asking them to abandon their wives and children.

The first official decrees on the matter don't come until the fourth century. At the council of Elvira in AD306, it was decided that a priest who has sex with his wife is not fit to celebrate mass the following day.

This is something I understand. Popular wisdom at school had it that members of the rugby team should abstain from masturbation the night before a match. I abstained happily, from rugby.

But it wasn't long before the council of Nicea decreed in AD325 that priests should refrain from marriage altogether. Soon after this, women were disbarred from the priesthood, more rot set in and congealed into institutional prejudices against flesh in general, and female flesh in particular, that had their roots not in Christ's teaching or in early church practice, but in the resurfacing, in the form of Gnosticism, of an ancient sceptical dualistic metaphysics which pitted spirit against matter and body against soul.

This, to my mind, has been Christianity's greatest single tragedy, turning a religion founded on a noble and genuine philosophy of love into an excuse for repression, oppression and persecution, in which suffering was turned into a cult and hypocrisy into standard practice.

In the meantime, the ancient conception of Eros as the love that bound sexual partners together no less than it was held to bind the flux of cosmos together was erased, substituted for by the idea of love as agape, or disinterested compassion understood as willing duty to God. Yet, even though both terms are ancient Greek, it is only in Christian doctrine that they come to be seen as mutually exclusive. As societies, we in the west suffer hugely from the stigmatisation of the erotic as a category, as if the most primal of our desires could have no meaningful relation with the rest of our lives. But nowhere do people suffer more than in the church itself.

Comic and tragic anecdotes about the evil effects of celibacy in the church abound. They range from the great raping and pillaging Pope Benedict IX – whose near successor Victor III remembered "his life as a pope so vile, so foul, so execrable", that I shudder to think of it – to the de facto genocide of the Albigensian crusades against the Cathars.

But we can't change history, we ought to be able to change today. Many of the monks I knew fell victim to the absurd demands of the faith in one way or another, paying variously with their vocations, their reputations as excellent teachers or scholars, or – in one case – by taking his own life.

Benedict IX's namesake will not shift on this matter, however; just as he is unlikely to shift on any of the other pointless, detrimental and irrational articles of faith to which the Catholic church clings.

Humour, often the best recourse in intractable situations, comes to our aid again. As someone once said of another infamous ban, on contraception: if you can't play the game, don't presume to make up the rules.

Janina Fialkowska Recital

2010-05-29T10:33:00.000+01:00

It is 36 years since Arthur Rubinstein hailed a young Polish-Canadian pianist as "a born Chopin interpreter", yet Janina Fialkowska has never really become a household name. Even before contracting a rare cancer of the shoulder in 2002, she was a pianist whose devoted admirers preferred to keep her to themselves. Now fully recovered, after several years playing one-hand repertoire (an experience she insists, much as Leon Fleisher does, has made her a better musician), she is back and – thanks to a widely acclaimed new Chopin recording – very much in business.

It was not until I heard her play live, however, that I realised quite how extraordinary she is. The long history of performing traditions in Chopin, though extremely varied, tends to move by stealth, with pianists piling further traits on to the practices they have inherited from their teachers and models. Some work, some don't. With Fialkowska, though, you get the impression less that the music is being interpreted than uncovered – as if all the discoloured resins and glues have been removed, everything pulled to pieces and put back together from scratch.

With very light pedal use, some rubato but nothing forced, and a steady emphasis on the music's inner lines that both clarifies Chopin's often exceptionally adventurous harmonies and, ironically, frees up the melody by diverting attention away from it, old warhorses such as the Grande Valse Brillante in A flat, or hardy perennials like the B major Nocturne Op 62, shine with newness.

Fialkowska is also fearless when it comes to tempi. This, combined with the nakedness of her interpretation, means she risks coming a serious cropper in concert. Nothing was spoiled beyond repair, but the third Ballade and second Scherzo could certainly have gone better. That said, I'd rather listen to Fialkowska's mistakes than the painless perfection of many other pianists.

Gerhardt/Philharmonia/Salonen

2010-05-27T09:43:00.000+01:00

It's rare but refreshing to see a soloist from the first half of a concert sit among the audience for the second. Mitsuko Uchida makes a habit of it, as do some younger players. But what I'd never seen, until now, was a visiting soloist return to play among the ranks of the orchestra. Yet Alban Gerhardt, a German cellist in high demand, who had just delivered a ravishing performance of Dvorák's cello concerto, joined the Philharmonia as 11th cello for Sibelius's second symphony.

From the opening bars, you could see why he might. This was no ordinary performance. The symphony clicked as a unity in a way that it seldom does, whether because of Esa-Pekka Salonen's national affinity with the composer, or because he is a master of layering, of liquid tempi and limpid phrasing. The majestic, even stolid, textures you'll find elsewhere, just as you'll encounter the same sense of bleakness and breadth – of a limitless horizon in which ideas take generations to come into themselves. But in Salonen's hands, the aural gaze can meaningfully retreat from horizon to a foreground which, like Finland's wooded expanse, may appear empty, but is teeming with life. Salonen took many sections faster than his colleagues, but was unafraid to luxuriate when appropriate; no stress was out of place, nor was there a phrase which, in its dying breath, didn't find itself resuscitated in what followed.

In this, as in the Dvorák and the opening blast of unreconstructed high spirits from Beethoven's Namensfeier overture, the Philharmonia showed themselves right on the money. The strings, in particular, were in exceptional fettle, in part due to the way the front desks played to each other as much as to us, the chamber-music effect trickling all the way down – in the Sibelius – to the 11th cello.

Carmen at the O2

2010-05-26T09:44:00.000+01:00

With three successful Albert Hall runs, this production of Carmen by David Freeman and Raymond Gubbay has already more than proved its worth in making fully staged opera available to the audiences other companies cannot reach. At around four times the Albert Hall's capacity, the O2 presents challenges of a quite different scale. Freeman has risen to the occasion by stretching his swirling catwalk stage into a full "s" shape and beefing up the crowd scenes. Gubbay's own occasion-rising took the form of booking recently metamorphosed opera star Darius Campbell to appear as Escamillo, albeit only for the Sunday matinee. I couldn't attend the matinee, sadly.

Even so, there is much to recommend here. The crowd scenes – particularly the act IV fiesta, with acrobats and dancers, fire jugglers and even a fire eater – offer genuine theatrical magic, while touches such as the use of real (herbal) cigarettes and some excellent chair-hurling between the quarrelsome lovers show Freeman exploiting the venue's positive attributes. The sound is sensitively done, too, and some cool-headed conducting from Gareth Hancock meant the synching worked as well as could be hoped. The soloists, though, are mixed. Cristina Nassif's Carmen looks the part more than sounds it, and John Hudson (Don José) strains as if no one had told him about the microphone. But Kevin Greenlaw turns in a fine Escamillo, and Elizabeth Atherton's Micaëla is exemplary in communicating delicacy of tone and sweetness of character to 12,000 people of varied attentiveness.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, but since you can eat and drink what you like in your seat, that doesn't matter. As Escamillo plunged his sword into the bull, and José his knife into Carmen, I dipped a final chip into my neighbour's ketchup. It wasn't particularly moving, but it was great fun.

Why shouldn't Fergie sell access to Prince Andrew?

2010-05-24T17:58:00.000+01:00

Flogging influence for cash is an ancient practice in business, and the Windsors have hardly paid for the Duchess's silence

Fergie's in trouble again. She's reliable like that, more so than other members of the royal periphery, and a good target for a sting. When she's in the news, the news is bad news. And bad news for royalty means good news for newspapers.

As usual, she has apologised for the "embarrassment caused", referring to a "serious lapse in judgment". "I am very sorry that this has happened." As usual, the apology is a thinly veiled "foiled again, but I'll be back", her tears and regrets firmly focused on the impropriety of being caught out by the News of the World, rather than on the act in question.

All of which must only add to the sense of outrage seeping from the orifices of News International. But Rupert Murdoch doesn't have a monopoly on that stuff, at least not yet. Even the seasoned Roy Greenslade, on his Guardian blog, has heaped praise on the News of the World for its latest playing of the entrapment card as "in the public interest".

Certainly, it's in the public interest in the sense that the public are interested in it, although not as interested as Murdoch's editors would like. But moral outrage remains both hugely enjoyable for readers and hugely profitable for those that massage and manufacture it. The question is, though: why on earth shouldn't the Duchess of York sell "access" to the Duke for whatever price she wants?

What makes Prince Andrew so special that, as a man of influence in his capacity both as international playboy and British trade envoy, people shouldn't buy an introduction to him if they see fit? And why should it be so shameful to sell this introduction?

One objection seems to be that because Prince Andrew is royalty, he should be above this kind of thing. This is patent nonsense. Down the centuries, men and women of business and society have exchanged much more than money to gain access to court and the powerful figures at its centre. It is different today only in the sense that where the power to influence trade and national public image were once only a small part of royalty's gift, it is now transparently its entirety.

We don't keep our royal family in the style to which they have remained accustomed because we love them, but because, as a nation, we trade on the image they maintain abroad. Prince Andrew's recent appointment as chief sales rep for UK plc is simply the result of a vote for transparency in this respect, as well as a serious misjudgment – one suspects – about his aptitudes.

What about the objection that Fergie has no right to sell access to him? She only married Prince Andrew; she didn't make him or work to acquire him as a saleable asset. Well, aside from the fact that she evidently worked very hard indeed to become his bride, networking is big business today. Sizeable sums change hand all the time for introductions to individuals. Journalists no less than PRs trade on their contact books, and it's no different in the world of headhunting, or indeed in pretty much any other business from international finance to international aid.

More likely to stick is the idea that politicians and those they appoint – of which Prince Andrew is a kind of example – should not be sullied by cash-grubbing. It is more likely to stick because outrage over cash-for-questions episodes, no less than the expenses scandal, appears more justified.

But even if it were the case that Prince Andrew himself was party to the deal – which the palace has categorically stated he was not – it's still true that the way industries and corporations gain access to political power is through expensively maintained lobbying organisations. At the same time, lobbying of one kind or another remains the principal means by which those in power become attracted to one cause or another.

If we want to be outraged by all this, we would do far better to be outraged at ourselves, for participating in a society that long ago auctioned off notions of moral integrity for a kind of social creditworthiness much more suitable to advanced capitalist societies.

All that remains of morality is the kind of facile moralising prurience pedalled by the gossip industry, goaded on by cries of "it's not fair" when the rich and powerful reveal their immunity from the small-mindedness of the masses. As for Fergie, she's simply maxed out on one source of credit. But she'll most likely come up with another, sooner or later.

Henry VIII aside, former bed partners of royalty were usually pensioned off in exchange for their discretion. The size of the purse, and house, sometimes reflected continuing affections, but more often was a simple risk-calculation in which potential for embarrassment is offset against money.

With Fergie, whose potential for embarrassment is probably second to none, yet whose entitlement seems limited to little more than the right to stay in Prince Andrew's house when she's a bit strapped, the Windsors have screwed up, and screwed up royally.

Put these in a sonnet, ducky

2010-05-20T09:00:00.001+01:00

From the TLS, 21 May 2010

Hans Werner Henze
ELEGY FOR YOUNG LOVERS
Young Vic

Thomas Adès
POWDER HER FACE
Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House

Every myth eventually produces its opposite. The story of Pygmalion – according to which the artist’s love breathes life into his work – had to wait until 1842 for its dark side to emerge in the shape of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait”. Here, the perfection of the image is articulated not by coming to life, but by taking life away from a represented beloved.

Gregor Mittenhoffer, the anti-hero of Henze’s rarely performed chamber opera Elegy for Young Lovers, to a libretto by W H Auden and Chester Kallman, sides with Poe on this matter. Mittenhoffer is a poet, somewhat like Chekhov’s Trigorin, who exploits his surroundings and companions for the sake of his verse. He goes so far as to engineer the death of two young lovers, whose affair he has sponsored despite his own romantic involvement with one of them, in order to perfect the “elegy” of the title. Mittenhoffer was apparently modelled by Auden on W. B. Yeats, though the results are in a quite different vein from Auden’s famous tribute of 1939 (“Earth, receive an honoured guest”). He is not a loveable character.

Nor are any of the others, who veer from slavish and shallow to selfish and shallow. The young lovers Toni and Elisabeth expire in paroxysms of self-parody, their union starved of real meaning in the absence of their sponsor. Even the silent roles – the housekeeper and servants of Der Schwarze Adler, the inn where the action takes place – exude pent-up malice. The partial exception is the widow Hilda Mack, whose mystical visions – on which Mittenhoffer has come to the hotel to feast – dry up when her husband’s body is found in tact, after forty years, frozen in a glacier. She blossoms along the profane lines of Graham Green’s Ida (to Mittenhoffer: “put that in a sonnet, ducky”) into an immensely likeable character, and uniquely beyond the poet’s power. This scenario is what Auden and Kallman came up with when asked for a libretto that would allow for “tender, beautiful noises”.

And indeed, despite the absence of genuine tenderness in the libretto, Henze littered the score with beautiful noises, though, as usual with Henze, the style of noise varies enormously, from crystalline twelve-tone passages to lyrical numbers that would not be out of place on Broadway. Beautifully realised by members of the English National Opera orchestra, under the direction of Stefan Blunier, the musical setting also seems to rejoice in its artifice. Traditional distinctions between aria, recitative and spoken dialogue are reinforced, and charm is made more important than passion. The resulting drama, which sets morality and aesthetics tantalisingly far apart, is an engaging curiosity.

In only her second operatic staging, the director Fiona Shaw shows how to put the medium’s high tolerance for symbolism to good use. The set, designed by Tom Pye, is built around a marble square – in which a crack widens as the action progresses – and an icy grandfather clock, which Mittenhoffer smashes in his rage. This act of real and psychic violence ruins the next day’s forecasted fine weather, and conjures a blizzard in which the young lovers eventually freeze to death. Shaw draws fine performances from the soloists, notably Lucy Schaufer as Carolina (Mittenhoffer’s secretary) and Steven Page as the contemptuous poet himself.

It’s not to everyone’s taste. “I prefer my opera sublime”, said one acquaintance afterwards, clearly preferring the ancient model of individual sympathies transported to a higher realm. But operas which combine elements of the sublime with the loveless have their own tradition, and Richard Strauss’s Salome is only the most famous example. Another, Powder Her Face, by Thomas Adès and Philip Hensher, a pitiless depiction of the fall of the Duchess of Argyll, could claim to be one of the most successful operas of recent decades. Returning to the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio in the first revival of Carlos Wagner’s production since its sell-out run in 2008, it is easy to see why. It captures, skewers, and then serves on a lavishly garnished musical plate the prurience at the heart of contemporary celebrity culture. At the same time – and this is reinforced beautifully in Wagner’s and designer Conor Murphy’s semi- Surrealist staging – it reminds us that today’s obsessions are nothing new.

The chamber score, completed when Adès was just twenty-four years old, is more voluptuous than Henze’s – with lively pastiches of Ástor Piazzolla and Cole Porter swirling round a core of Berg and Ligeti – but no less skilfully woven together. The restless sexiness of the textures is mirrored in the production, which seduces the audience with casual but irresistible force similar to that with which the opera’s ill-fated Duchess (a compelling Joan Rodgers) removes a waiter’s trousers. The moment of fellatio is appropriately awkward, but also contains the production’s one glimpse of real beauty: the pair disengage for a dream-like moment and a naked male form spirals up between them. It is a brilliant touch, a carefully measured reminder that our originary thirst for beauty is still linked, by however worn a thread, to the seemingly unanchored web of lust, greed and schadenfreude which the rest of the work takes as its subject.

Elisabeth Leonskaja/BBCSO/Jiri Belohlávek

2010-05-11T12:52:00.001+01:00

Classical music is so crowded with anniversaries just now that it sometimes feels as if the arbitrary turning of the years constitutes the sole criterion of cultural relevance. Take this concert: the culmination of Jirí Belohlávek's quinquagenarial Martinu symphony cycle contrived to take in the bicentenary of Schumann's birth, and even managed a nod at that of Chopin thanks to an encore from the soloist. But it doesn't stop there. Martinu's Fantaisies Symphoniques – often referred to as his sixth symphony – were originally composed for the 75th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, while the opening work, Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, was a tribute to Arcangelo Corelli on his 300th birthday.

With so many different things to celebrate, it's a good thing the music-making was chief among them. Belohlávek's study of his compatriot's symphonies has been one of the season's revelations, shedding considered light on one of the 20th century's most approachable and underappreciated figures. The difficulty with the Fantaisies lies in maintaining the spontaneity – in the rhapsodic melodising, the freeform structures and the beautifully choreographed shifts of timbre – without losing the drive. Conducting from memory, Belohlávek and his orchestra had clearly worked on this piece from the inside out, generating an extraordinary clarity of texture and gesture that left one feeling exhilarated, yet with a curious state of lucid bewilderment.

The Georgian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja was the soloist in Schumann's piano concerto. She is a powerful figure who seems to massage each phrase, but can also produce the most delicately latticed figurations. The key here was in her relationship with Belohlávek's orchestra – and particularly Cho-Yu Mo's wonderfully soft-edged clarinet – which worked with her all the way. As for the Tippett: a fascinating score, marvellously played. Why is so little of his music aired just now? Ah yes: dates.

Above the storms of dandruff

2010-04-30T10:00:00.001+01:00

Review of Varèse 360° from the TLS, 30 April

“Music is the science of sounds, in so far as they are capable of pleasing the ear.” This definition of music, with which Jean-Jacques Rousseau began his article on the subject for the Encyclopédie, was later revised by its author for his Dictionary of Music. In the latter, music became the “Art of combining sounds in a manner pleasant to the ear”. The revision, which privately repeats music’s previous lengthy journey from quadrivium to trivium, is less significant that it might at first appear. The term “science” was employed less strictly in the eighteenth century than now. Moreover, the idea that science could explain both music and the pleasure it affords the ear was widespread at the time. Nonetheless, the change did reflect Rousseau’s conviction that the force of musical experience could not be explained solely by reference to the physical properties of sound, but by understanding, as he called it, the “moral causes and effects” of music. The French-American composer Edgard Varese preferred the term “organized sound” to music, but he was above all anxious to free organized sound from the arbitrary conventions suggested by the phrase “pleasing to the ear”, and from the classical distinction between sound and noise. Searching for an alternative definition of music, he found one among the writings of the Czech philosopher Hoene-Wronski: “the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound”. As to whether he considered music to be art or science, he in fact thought it was both, describing it in his manifesto The Liberation of Sound (1936) and elsewhere as an “art-science”.

This ambivalence between understanding music as art and music as science ran deeply throughout Varese’s career. In a late interview with the composer and jazz musician Gunter Schuller, he recalled that his father had wanted him to study mathematics and physics, and so kept the family piano locked. This did little to deter Edgard, however, who at the age of eleven had already completed an opera (on Jules Verne’s Martin Paz, now lost) and learned to “detest” all “conventional instruments” because of their equal temperament: “ . . . when I first learned the scales, my only reaction was, ‘Well they all sound alike’”. He came across the writings of Hoene-Wronski in Paris, where his teachers included Vincent d’Indy (“an anti-Semite . . . and terribly pedantic musician”) and, at the Conservatoire, Charles-Marie Widor (“a magnificent, open-minded musician”). He was later expelled from the Conservatoire by Gustave Faure, but not before he had acquired a deep love for the music of Debussy (“like a chemist”) and amassed a significant body of work. All his youthful music was lost when the Berlin warehouse in which he stored his manuscripts burned down in 1913. His surviving work – he died in 1965 – amounts to scarcely three hours of music.

Today, Varese is hailed as a cult figure, the miniature proportions of his oeuvre only adding to the sense of his singularity and intensifying the reverence of a fan-base that far exceeds that of any other twentieth-century composer with comparable aesthetic and stylistic intentions. Although his works are perhaps more often discussed than performed – with one or two exceptions – his influence can be felt on the avant-garde fringes of both “classical” and “popular” post-war traditions, from Aphex Twin to Xenakis, and Penderecki to Pink Floyd. Frank Zappa described Varese as the “Idol of his youth”.

This broadness of appeal was evident at the South Bank Centre’s recent weekend festival of the complete works, Varese 360˚. Leather jostled with tweed and Gore-Tex in the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s crammed cloakroom for two sold-out concerts given by the London Sinfonietta, both directed by their co-founder and first music director, David Atherton. At a third concert, in the Royal Festival Hall, it was the stage that was most obviously stuffed to bursting point with the National Youth Orchestra swollen to 180 players (three tubas, nine flutes, nineteen percussionists) for the original and rarely re-visited version of Ameriques (1921), conducted by Paul Daniel.

It is difficult to hear mention of the NYO at the moment without being reminded that they are an orchestra whose players, unlike certain Venezuelan ensembles, are all of school age. It is worth being reminded of this fact because they are very, very good. Although Ameriques is often described as Varese’s “New World” Symphony, with its use of a siren and enhanced percussion intended to reflect the cityscapes of his newly adopted homeland, the old world still occupies a significant a part of its roving stylistic focus. The music requires a level of precision of colouring and timing that few orchestras possess. It was already a mark of the NYO’s ambition and skill that they performed the revised, reduced version successfully in the Albert Hall a few years ago. That they could pull off the UK’s first performance of the original version, in the much less forgiving acoustics of the Festival Hall, suggests skill of another order entirely, and they and Daniel are to be congratulated. The concert also included performances of Arcana and Nocturnal, Varese’s last work, which consists of a faintly nightmarish setting of lines from Anais Nin’s House of Incest.

With stage-smoke pumped up through the orchestra, and some rather lame lighting and video effects (including a recurring blackand- white video sequence of a scientist pouring a clear liquid from one container to another), it is clear that the organizers had sought to capitalize on Varese’s reputation as a kind of pioneering scientist of sound. And given the titles of some of his works – Ionisation, Hyperprism, Densite 21.5 – it is easy to see why. But in fact the composer’s interest in physics and chemistry always remained at the level of inspiration and mythology. He eschewed all quasi-mathematical systems such as serialism, which he thought limiting and reminded him, he said, of Beckmesser’s Tablatur. He understood the structure of his works in terms of the materials, forms and processes to be found in nature (“as a child, I was tremendously impressed by the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy”), but the forms his music takes are not in reality so distant from those created by Debussy and Stravinsky: Varese combines the former’s smoothly-evolving continuities with the latter’s use of rhythmic cells to build blocks of sound. Far away from thematically driven “arguments” of nineteenth- century music, the almost meandering lines and “streams” of sound – whether pitched or un-pitched – recall the pre-tonal world of Guillaume de Machaut and Johannes Ockeghem.

In his use of instruments, Varese’s reputation as a experimental visionary is more justified. His career was pockmarked by frustration with existing forces and excitement at new possibilities. After an optimistic beginning with the choral work Ecuatorial – notable for its use of two of Leon Theremin’s electronic cellos and a bass chorus to chant verses from a sacred Mayan text – the 1930s and 40s were a particularly fallow period, broken only in 1936 by the wonderfully lithe four-minute Density 21.5 which Varese wrote for his friend George Barrere (21.5 is the atomic density of platinum, from which Barrere’s new flute was made). The silence – during which time Varese’s reputation as conductor and composer dwindled almost to nothing – was the result of his growing sense of the inadequacy of traditional instruments to meet his expressive demands, and of his futile efforts to promote research into the development of electronic instrumentation. But the anonymous gift of an Ampex tape recorder in 1953 got the sixty-eight-year-old composer working again, collecting the sound samples he would manipulate to form part of Deserts.

The resulting work, in which four instrumental passages alternate with three pre-recorded sections, received its first performance at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in December 1954, and was received with a degree of mistrust exceeding even that which greeted Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in the same theatre four decades earlier. As one critic put it, “the audience were exceptionally patient: they only protested after a few minutes”. The implications for Varese were serious. Deserts was the first work broadcast in stereo on French radio, and its scandalized reception in the concert hall went out with it, to the left and to the right. The composer was not invited to work in France again.

Varese’s enthusiasm for electronic sound production was less focused on possibilities for generating new sounds than on the degree of control that could be obtained in performance. Instead of having a score interpreted by a player, the electronic instruments of which Varese could mostly only dream would, he imagined, simply execute the composer’s intentions. In this way, he thought electronic music could become more present to the audience because the act of composition would be, in a sense, live and unmediated.

This rather paradoxical-seeming position is easier to understand in the context of the difficulties Varese experienced in working with orchestras, particularly in the United States where for a time he did what he could to encourage the programming of contemporary music. But even when this proved successful, he often found the musicians unable or unwilling to play the score with the degree of professionalism they naturally brought to more traditional repertoire. “I no longer believe in concerts”, he said at one point, or in “the sweat of conductors and the flying storms of virtuosos’ dandruff”.

Things are different now: the London Sinfonietta is one of a now considerable number of ensembles who bring extremes of professionalism to the performance of contemporary music. Their two concerts in the QEH were a revelation. Ionisation, for forty mostly unpitched percussion instruments, is relatively well known and regularly performed. Yet this was the first time I’d been able to hear the piece’s simplicity, the economy with which the rhythms and sonority adapt and expand, crackling – as the composer might have it – with raw electricity. Hyperprism, which began the second concert, was a similar experience. It’s one of the composer’s most demanding scores, the woodwind and percussion assembling constellations of notes and fragmented lines into an extraordinarily coherent, whirring whole.

And yet, contra-Varese, the most remarkable feature both of these performances and of the weekend as a whole was the impression they gave of the exertions of the players, so hotly in pursuit of the precision which the composer despaired of achieving, feeding into the rampant energy of the music. There were no flying storms of dandruff, just plenty of sweat. And whether it came from John Tomlinson struggling to read his score before enacting the mystical rites of Ecuatorial, or the flautist Michael Cox chasing after the long, fugitive lines of Density 21.5, the most remarkable aspect of each concert was how alive it seemed; how much of that living quality would have been lost in recording. It might seem counter-intuitive to say it of twentieth-century music’s greatest futurist, but for this one, you really had to be there.

Thomas Ades recital

2010-04-30T09:30:00.000+01:00

Composers who also conduct often do so differently to their full-time counterparts. Their gestures are simpler – and frequently more useful to their players than the refined curlicue preferred by some career conductors. The composer Thomas Adès also plays the piano differently. He peers diffidently at the score as if seeing it for the first time. Meanwhile, his fingers flash up and down the keyboard in a haze of perfectly struck executions. The result is an unusual limpidity in performance, as if the music is being explained as it is played.

The eclectic (to say the least) programme for this solo piano recital was organised around Adès's new concert paraphrase of his opera Powder Her Face. In the days before recordings, familiarity with the operas of the day was sustained through such piano transcriptions, a practice Liszt elevated into recital showpieces with elaborate riffs on favourite moments all woven together. Adès's paraphrase was strewn with absurd technical difficulties, but it was also a substantial four-movement work in itself. It was of a tenderer cut than the opera, and full of the restless searching charm that underpins his best work.

Liszt's own ridiculous adaptation of Isolde's Liebestod, from Wagner's Tristan, proved a wayward chaperone, as did Janácek's unoperatic second foray, On an Overgrown Path, which lacked the damaged fluency that its greatest interpreters bring to it. But this was more than compensated by a blistering rendition of Prokofiev's hilarious, razor-edged Sarcasms, and by Beethoven's Bagatelles. Composed as respite from the Ninth Symphony, these little works juxtapose the luminous textures of the last sonatas with the back-slapping humour of his early work. Their awkwardness is of a piece with Adès's own – and this performance was a revelation.

Yundi plays Chopin Nocturnes

2010-04-30T09:10:00.000+01:00

Review of Yundi: Chopin Nocturnes
EMI (2CD): 5099960839121

One of Yundi Li’s main assets as a pianist – besides his flawless technique obviously – is that he is both an international superstar Chinese pianist and at the same time not Lang Lang. And while his former label DG’s move to drop the former in favour of the latter in 2008 was entirely understandable from a commercial point of view, from an artistic standpoint it may have been something of a bungle. As this debut release with his new label EMI confirms, Yundi (as he now prefers to be known) really does play Chopin beautifully. And confidently, with a sureness of touch and an easy, unforced rubato that suggest an age much greater than Yundi’s meager 27 years.

Yundi’s laidback style, miles away from Lang’s idiosyncratic extremes, is particularly well suited to the Nocturnes. Not all of them are flawless – the middle section of Op. 9 No. 3 is a wishy-washy haze as, at times, is Op. 15 No. 1, and the lolling G minor from Op 37 is rather plodding – but the ones he gets right really do shine. The first two of Op. 9, for example, are beautifully balanced, the first flowing into the second with the kind of unhurried irresistibility that makes it almost impossible to hear the one without the other. Similarly, the darker-coloured Op. 48 set shows an artist happy to sit back and let Chopin’s finely-wrought phrases emerge naturally: each transition and change of mood is handled with absolute clarity. And if some of the interpretations lack a little in the way of character, that is at any rate far preferable to an excess of it.

Smith Quartet: Philip Glass

2010-04-26T15:28:00.000+01:00

There would be no music without repetition. No note, theme or rhythm can be itself until it has been repeated. But this truth should not be an excuse for repetitiveness. Repetitiveness is the hallmark of Philip Glass's music, and his five string quartets, played here by the Smith Quartet, are no exception. Only the first, composed before the all-important 1967 encounter with Steve Reich's Piano Phase, suggests that there may be merit in variety, with nicely crafted hanging dissonances and textural play. But the uniformity of style in the other works should not be mistaken for uniform quality. Only the fifth quartet stands scrutiny here. The others – including the piecemeal third quartet, comprised of excerpts from the score to Paul Schrader's film about Yukio Mishima, and the trivial response of the second to Samuel Beckett's prose poem Company – range from fair to middling to clumsy.

The gifted Smith Quartet excel in a wide range of modern repertoire from Feldman to Crumb. Yet here they were scratchy, diffident, out of sync and out of tune; attempts at expression sounded misplaced, while the effort to excise it failed too. Glass's figurations – derived from classic, messing-around- at-the-keyboard technique – did not work, turning the musicians into incompetent executors. The valuable sense of space and peace that good minimalism affords didn't arrive because there was nothing solid to build on.

The fifth quartet, played last, worked because it is playable: its energy builds on rather than suffocates the warmth and intelligence brought by the musicians. The lines, ideas and players all bonded, eventually gathering in the luminous gladness that suffuses the final movement – a joyous balm to the ears that couldn't have come sooner.

John Locke: An open and shut case?

2010-04-23T15:27:00.000+01:00

Nick Clegg may be a Locke fan, but philosophers would make terrible legislators – and should stay away from politics

The philosopher Julian Baggini recently observed British politics to be going through a rare phase of philosophical literacy.

Among the various smear attempts on the Liberal Democrat leader, it was revealed that Nick Clegg was sometimes to be found reading John Locke. Baggini rather amusingly concluded that in effect polling day will represent a choice between three philosophers: Hobbes (Brown), Locke (Clegg), and Rousseau (Cameron).

The current crop of prime ministerial candidates may have their failings, but I'd choose any of them over the aforementioned sages. Handed the untrammeled reins of power, it is more than likely that Hobbes would have ended up making a virtue out of tyranny, Rousseau a tyranny out of virtue, and Locke, a closet anarchist … actually, on that basis, I'd vote for Locke.

Still, one needn't examine the lessons of history too closely to realise that the best diviners of truth don't make the best legislators. As anyone who has read The Republic knows, Plato was of the view that because philosophers are guided by truth itself, rather than by the instrumental value of any particular truth, they should therefore be given responsibility for affairs of state. Two spells in Syracuse, spent trying to influence first Dionysius I – responsible for supplying the Greek word "tyrant" (literally "absolute ruler") with its pejorative sense – and later his son Dionysius II both ended in disaster.

Later examples abound. The end result of the philosopher and author of Utopia Thomas More's principled attempts to moderate Henry VIII's ingenious pragmatism is too well known to comment upon. An optimistic attempt by Denis Diderot to guide Catherine the Great in her diurnal activities met with severe disillusionment – the only positive result to emerge from the collaboration was the considerable swelling of Catherine's library. Karl Marx never managed to seize power himself, but those who did so in his in his name are not best known for their rational even-handedness, wisdom or compassion. As for Martin Heidegger. Great philosopher, required reading, Nazi. Need one say more?

But the reason that philosophers and rulers should stay well away from each other is not purely anecdotal. Rather it concerns the contrasting nature of each enterprise. The capacity for abstract thought originates as the suspension of action: in evolutionary terms, humans learned to think in situations where their instincts failed to prompt a course of action. In requiring absolute freedom of thought, therefore, philosophy renounces the possibility of action. Politicians, in turn, must renounce freedom of thought in the interests of limited power to act.

True, there have of course been rulers who have tried to combine complete absolute freedom of thought with absolute freedom of action, but these tend to be rulers given to coining phrases like "final solution". That is not to say Hitler was a great philosopher. But like philosophers, he preferred to see a solution, and to try to bring it about with the greatest possible efficiency, than to waste his time navigating the muddier waters of democratic process.

If philosophers and politicians are to meet, it is perhaps best that they do so in the manner prescribed by Socrates, who described Athenian democracy as "a great a noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly." He reserved the role of gadfly for himself, though he perhaps hadn't quite envisaged being rather cruelly swatted when the horse turned nasty.

But Socrates was right that philosophy's role in politics should simply be as a source of irritation, a reminder that the vastly limited power of our rulers to really effect change in society should be illuminated by a set of ideals that stand outside the murky business of politicking. But as for philosophers themselves taking power? As any good spin doctor knows, truth is perfectly welcome to speak to power, but would be in error if it thought it would get a straight answer.

Philharmonia/Sokhiev/Wigglesworth

2010-04-20T15:26:00.000+01:00

It is nearly a century since the chattering classes of Paris stormed out of Stravinsky and Nijinsky's Rite of Spring. No doubt some clever clogs will try to restage the scandal in 2013, but it's difficult to imagine an audience rioting in a concert nowadays – partly because audiences who are still shocked by the new generally keep well away from it. Thus it is with the Philharmonia's Music of Today series, imaginatively and fearlessly curated by Julian Anderson. These free, short and fascinating concerts precede the evening's "main" Philharmonia event, but the extent of audience overlap is minimal.

Richard Baker, a respected if not overly productive composer, came under Anderson's spotlight with a performance of his new work Gaming, for cello, piano and percussion, and the chamber basset clarinet concerto Learning to Fly. The instruments for Gaming are altered (with Blu-Tack) so that their restricted timbral range coincides. Short, nervous motifs are passed back and forth before rising to a beautifully paced anticlimax in which the listener is lost, carried away in the process. Learning to Fly follows a more traditional fast-slow-fast concerto form, again using distilled and intelligently deployed textures.

The main concert included Shostakovich's lightly sugared second piano concerto, played with feeling and intelligence but a little too blindly by Yevgeny Sudbin (a pianist to watch), and Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, paced and voiced confidently by Tugan Sokhiev. As for the Stravinsky, though it no longer shocks, its minutely constructed primitivisms can still take an audience by the seat of their pants. Sokhiev conducted with cool-headed brilliance, and the orchestra responded with near perfection.

Philharmonia/Denève

2010-04-12T15:25:00.000+01:00

Stéphane Denève is a conductor with a sharp eye for grand dramatic gestures, but his ear for the finer details is not always so sure. His thoughtfully conceived programmes can amount to less than the sum of their parts.

Thus it was here, where the exuberant exoticism of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Paul Dukas's La Péri were contrasted with the more serene world of Mozart's A major concerto K488. An interesting mix, which would have demanded great poise from Rimsky-Korsakov's rambling score for it not to embarrass itself in front of one of Mozart's most effortlessly refined works.

There were fine moments, particularly from Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay's marvellously voluptuous solo violin (aided by theatrical strumming from harpist Hugh Webb), and from principal flute Kenneth Smith and principal clarinet Barnaby Robson. Yet for an orchestra of the Philharmonia's quality, and in a work whose virtuosic orchestration is its main virtue, the ensemble was disappointingly wayward, dissipating the rhythmic drive and sapping the bright colours of their vitality. Without Visontay's fervent advocacy, one would have feared for the yarn-spinning princess's life.

The Mozart was disappointing, too. Lars Vogt can be one of the most exciting pianists of his generation, bringing Gould-like levels of intensity and thoughtful idiosyncrasy to the classical repertoire. As usual, there was much to admire in his playing – notably in the quieter passages of the slow movement – but it married only intermittently with what the orchestra was doing. As for the Dukas, the composer himself pointed out that if the opening gestures come across too clearly, it soon becomes "intolerable". To Denève's credit, after a fine opening fanfare, the results managed to be both far from clear and far from tolerable.

Sharp ears for the light-headed

2010-04-08T08:57:00.002+01:00

from the TLS

Leos Janacek
Katya Kabanova
Coliseum

The Cunning Little Vixen
Covent Garden

The current worldwide popularity of operas by Leos Janacek is in large part a result of our fondness for them here in Britain. Sir Charles Mackerras, who shortly after the war studied in Prague under the conductor Václav Talich (an early promoter of Janacek), has been the key figure in this development since Sadler’s Wells first staged Katya Kabanova in 1951. It comes as a surprise therefore to learn that the recent run of The Cunning Little Vixen – which included the conductor’s 280th performance for the Royal Opera since his debut in 1964 – offered Mackerras his first opportunity to conduct the work at Covent Garden.

At 84, Mackerras’s person may have lost some of its former sprightliness. His music making, however, has lost none. Janacek’s score for his beloved Vixen Bystrouska is a jewel-encrusted thing, at once airily lightheaded and intensely flavoured, and Mackerras allows the orchestra to explore every facet with such clarity and concentration that the audience is able to sit back and let a dizzying sensation of weightlessness wash over them. It is an economical score, in the sense that Janacek constantly reuses and reshapes his material, but there is not the slightest hint of repetitiveness.

The purely musical delights of the experience aside, Mackerras’s approach is well suited to Bill Bryden and William Dudley’s vintage production from 1990, now in its third revival and to which the atmosphere of airy enchantment is key. By modern standards it’s a cluttered staging, which ties the spectacular accoutrements of grand opera – ballet, aerial acrobatics, elaborate machinery, lots of lavishly costumed children running to and fro bathed in a greenish golden light – into a crepuscular representation of animal and human society, where the line between the two is carefully blurred. The advantage of this blurring – beyond its faithfulness to the composer’s intentions in adapting Rudolf Tesnohlídek’s novel – is that it draws our attention to the real love interest in this otherwise cosy vixen- meets-fox romance: namely, the longing of the Forester for his sharp-eared vixen, a blood-lust that mingles with desires of an equally deep-rooted, erotic nature.

This emphasis, in turn, allows Christopher Maltman to give a superbly crafted interpretation of the role, drawing out from his heavy but radiant baritone both the Forester’s violence and his wistfulness. Maltman’s ability to project above Janacek’s often crowded orchestra put most of the other soloists to shame (except the veteran Robin Leggate, appearing as the Schoolmaster and the Mosquito in his 900th performance for the Royal Opera) and made me wonder why we don’t see him on the operatic stage more often. If enchantment is at the heart of Vixen, an equally pervasive sense of disenchantment is at work in Katya Kabanova. The difference in mood aside, the two operas are otherwise strikingly similar. Couched in a comparably breathless style, with numerous points of musical contact, both dramas concentrate on the same themes of yearning for freedom, redemption through love and, of course, violence. If we accept the idea that the key relationship in Vixen is between hunter and prey, we then find that the equivalent relationship in Katya – between the heroine and her beastly mother-in-law – is the one that pulls most of the dramatic weight. This is not to say that Katya’s night of passion with Boris is incidental, but that Janacek, in placing most of it off-stage, understands that Boris is a psychological catalyst, there to endow Katya with the courage necessary for her to escape her torment in the only way possible.

This three-way relationship is precisely rendered in David Alden’s new production for English National Opera, a minimalist staging – a movable wall and a chair or two – with statuesque blocking that couldn’t be less like Covent Garden’s Vixen. The Australian tenor Stuart Skelton, who last year made such an impression as Peter Grimes for Alden at ENO, captures Boris’s essential ambiguity. His clear tone enables him, like Maltman, to float effortlessly on Janacek’s choppy waves of sound, but he also manages to convey the character’s burning lack of conviction, that essential passivity which all but removes him from the moral battlefield. This gives Susan Bickley’s magnificently icy Kabanicha free rein to hunt down the American soprano Patricia Racette’s mousey, rather solipsistic Katya. Light relief comes from the less heated, more knowing partnership of Varvara and Vanya, shared out engagingly between the Swedish mezzo Anna Grevelius and Alfie Boe. Mark Wigglesworth conducted.

Pollini plays Chopin

2010-04-03T09:38:00.000+01:00

Maurizio Pollini
Chopin Recital
Royal Festival Hall
March 1st, 2010

One of the supreme highlights of my concert calendar this year was always going to be Pollini’s Chopin birthday recital. Pollini was the second pianist – after my father – I heard playing Chopin, and my view of the composer – and indeed of pianism more generally – is irrevocably bound up with Pollini’s studied asceticism. Yet at the same time, I was distinctly wary. For if Pollini has inherited his untouchably aristocratic air from Arturo Benedetto Michelangeli, he has also inherited his great mentor’s ability to disappoint. In the event, disappointment was nowhere to be found in a jam-packed Festival Hall, including on the crowded rear-stage “young-persons” section first introduced for Pollini’s Beethoven sonata cycle in 1995/6.

He began, perhaps surprisingly, with the Preludes, opening with a markedly slow C major which set the tone for an interpretation that emphasized the experimental harmonies and tight yet intriguing formal designs of many of these pieces over their immediate emotional appeal. The even clarity, for example, with which he was able to bring the dense counterpoint of the A minor Prelude – aided by a superbly supercharged Fabbrini Steinway – and the sustained dissonances of the F-sharp major was truly remarkable. Of course there were fireworks too, the “fuoco” of the B-flat minor Prelude being predictably if still unbelievably white-hot, but the beauty of Pollini’s playing when on form consists of his combining astonishing technical command with an ability to convey the agonies involved in acquiring it.

The elevated mood was sustained in the second half, which included the first Ballade, the two Op 27 Nocturnes and Eight Études from Op. 25, including completely shattering performances of Nos 11 (“Winter Wind”) and 12 in C minor. Evidently in good humour – with extensive encores, including the third Scherzo – Pollini presented himself, and Chopin, at his best.

Fools on and off the bill

2010-04-01T11:00:00.000+01:00

from the TLS

Gaetano Donizetti

LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR
THE ELIXIR OF LOVE
Coliseum

DON PASQUALE
English Touring Opera

The English word “idiot” is hard to sing. It’s difficult to say why, exactly, but there’s something, particularly about the last syllable, which goes against the grain of the voice. Admittedly the term doesn’t crop up very often in libretti and song texts, but this made its prominence in David Parry’s translation of Don Pasquale and Kelley Rourke’s translation of L’Elisir d’Amore even more striking. Donizetti himself, though his operas spiced with invective, tended to avoid the Italian word “idiota”, preferring terms of abuse with closer links to the world of commedia dell’arte such as “pazzo”, “babbeo”/”babbione” and “matto” (the latter his disparagement for the management of Naples’ Teatro San Carlo, whom he described as a “gabbia di matti” – cage of madmen.)

The idiots in question are in fact very different from each other. Nemorino, the love-sick primo uomo of L’Elisir, is a kind of village simpleton, simultaneously mocked and loved by one and all, whereas Don Pasquale’s idiotic qualities draw more on the ancient Greek origins of the term, where “idiotes” referred to one who, through excess of self-centredness or insufficiency of mental capability, opted out of the democratic process. Certainly, the premise of William Oldroyd’s new production of Don Pasquale for English Touring Opera is that Donizetti’s basso buffo is a serious idiot. To that effect, Oldroyd casts him – rather awkwardly at times, it must be said – as a flamboyant, antidemocratic maestro, bringing him on to conduct the overture with the kind of disdainful, dismissive and often distracted manner that orchestras dread.

If the device is problematic in itself, it does have the advantage of drawing attention to the idea that Donizetti’s plots are worth taking seriously for their dramatic as well as musical potential. Don Pasquale was composed for the Comédie Italienne in Paris, shortly after Donizetti’s appointment in 1842 as court composer to Ferdinand I of Austria. The composer’s stock was at an all-time international high. With more than sixty operas under his belt, and a firmly established reputation for professionalism and trustworthiness, Donizetti had finally reached a point where he expected the opera management to take him seriously. And yet during rehearsals for the opera’s 1843 premiere – with Giulia Grisi and Luigi Lablanche, the brightest vocal stars of the day, recruited to the roles of Norina and Pasquale – the management feared the project would fall flat on its face. Perhaps they had forgotten what comédies italiennes were supposed to be about, but even the librettist Giovanni Ruffini had lost faith with the project to such an extent that he removed his name from the posters. It was of course an instant hit, both in Paris and, very soon, all over the world, Ruffini’s virtuosic libretto finding itself translated into English, German, Bulgarian and even Finnish.

Donizetti’s rise from humble birth in 1797 to international fame by the time of his death in 1848 has been mirrored in recent years by the return of his operas to a prominence that today rivals Verdi and Puccini. In addition to the three productions under review, Don Pasquale and l’Elisir can be found in Berlin, at the Komische Oper and Staatsoper respectively, while new productions of Lucia, Maria Stuarda, and La Fille du Regiment can currently be found in preparation in theatres all over Britain and all over the world. The initial motivation behind this revival of interest came some half-century ago, with sopranos such as Maria Callas and, particularly, Joan Sutherland eager to include Donizetti in their recital and stage repertoire because his vocal writing displayed their finely tuned instruments to such advantage. Recently, however, the emphasis has shifted from Donizetti’s skill in writing for the voice to his more general theatrical gifts, such as his Mozartian command of dramatic pacing and Verdian ability to manipulate the limited formal resources of nineteenth-century Italian opera to profoundly subtle musico-dramatic effect.

Few productions demonstrate this dimension of Donizetti better than David Alden’s no-holds-barred Lucia for English National Opera. Lucia was of course the vehicle originally chosen in 1959 by Sutherland to acquaint Covent Garden audiences with the real meaning of the term “bel canto”. Most productions since then have tended to the glittering roulades of the mad scene. Alden’s production – which, strikingly, was ENO’s first ever Lucia when it opened in 2008 – centres on the heroine’s madness but from a more sociologically sophisticated perspective, ascribing the condition less to the traditional excess of feminine “nervousness” than to the litany of self-destructive pathologies – incest, infantilism, sado-masochism – that form the psychological corollary to the crumbling fabric and fortunes of the Ashton household. Thus Enrico’s attempts to convince his sister to marry Arturo culminate not in his storming angrily from her boudoir, but in his tying her to her bed preparatory to apparently routine sexual abuse. On this occasion, Enrico withdraws in self-disgust, flinging himself against his little sister’s bedroom wall. It is a devastatingly powerful scene, to which the music is of course fully equal with the ENO orchestra responding well to Anthony Walker’s impassioned direction.

Charles Edwards and Brigitte Rieffenstuel’s designs are approachably postmodern, the unhinged darkness of the Victorian setting reinforced by casting that is as much about look as sound. In the case of Brian Mulligan’s Enrico, this results in a faultless representation of brutish arrogance riven by despair and desire. Anna Christy’s occasional vocal limitations are overlooked in favour of a porcelain-doll appearance that plays perfectly to Alden’s vision of a young girl whose childish romantic dreams (her lover Edgardo is cast as a kilt-wearing fairytale hero) have been squeezed from her, leaving behind a husk of shattered sensibility. The production also makes use of Roger Parker and Gabrile Dotto’s critical edition of the score, which reintroduces the glass harmonica (played by Alexander Marguerre) to the mad scene and so gives back to the opera the other-worldy atmosphere Donizetti was aiming for.

Lucia adapts well to English, particularly in Amanda Holden's sleek version. This stops short of of translating the characters' names back to Scott's originals (i.e Enrico, Arturo and Normanno to Henry, Arthur and Norman) - something I'd love to hear done though it probably wouldn't work. Meanwhile, a linguistic collision of a more accidental nature is to be found working its magic in Jonathan Miller’s nearly-new production of the Elixir of Love, staged previously in Stockholm and New York but for the first time in London last month. On the night I attended the young Canadian tenor John Tessier was ill. More seriously, his understudy was also ill, forcing ENO’s casting director John McMurray to explain that as there were no other tenors in the world who knew Kelley Rourke’s English adaptation, the last minute replacement for Nemorino would sing in Italian, the rest of the course sticking to Rourke’s fast and very loose American dialect.

This has happened at the Coliseum before. In 1976 Lucia Popp rescued Idomeneo in this fashion, while Siegfried Jerusalem, rehearsing Erik in the Royal Opera’s Fliegende Holländer in 1985, crossed to Covent Garden’s western borders in order to fill in for Warren Ellsworth as Parsifal. Though present on neither of these occasions, I will wager that the effect didn’t quite have the serendipitous quality of the Lithuanian tenor Edgaras Montvidas standing in as Nemorino. The success derived not simply from Montvidas’s command of the role – which included a mouthwatering “Una furtive lagrima” – but from what it added to the drama in general.

Miller’s transferral of the Italian pastoral to America in the 1950s – in which David Kempster’s GI Joe Belcore plays Dean Martin to Sarah Tynan’s Monroe-esque Adina – works very well indeed. But rather like Miller’s now-legendary ENO Rigoletto, there are times when it all seems a bit too smooth. So the intrusion of an immigrant mechanic singing “Quanta e bella” before Adina’s nonplussed clientele is surprisingly welcome, and lends the staging some much-needed spontaneity, while endowing Nemorino with an allure and mystique that actually makes better sense of the story. Best of all it enables Andrew Shore, a seasoned Dulcamara in both Italian and English, to address Nemorino in Italian when feigning sympathy with his romantic plight, and in English when calling him, among other things, an idiot.

Like Alden’s Lucia, the production made heavy demands on the singers’ acting abilities, and reaps the rewards. The same is nearly true of Oldroyd’s Don Pasquale. But where Lucia and Elixir both frame the action so that the stage-movement freezes during the vocal fireworks, Oldroyd forces his actor-singers to dress, undress and generally rush about while delivering their crowded lines. Though both Mary O’Sullivan and Nicholas Sharrat as Norina and Ernesto produced some lovely sounds, and Dominic Wheeler’s musical direction was quite the equal of Walker’s in Lucia, the production seemed more about visual farce than vocal fantasy, which in the end is too hard on the singers.

St Lawrence String Quartet

2010-03-30T11:20:00.000+01:00

John Adams's new piece, String Quartet, is unusual among his output for two reasons. It is his first proper essay in the genre – though a number of works use similar forces – and it comes unaided by a wacky title. This should not suggest any absence of the wit and character that populates and occasionally overpopulates Adams's work, but it does point to a larger seriousness of purpose.

This performance, by the quartet for which it was written, was its first in the UK. It is clear Adams knows his players, feeding them the kind of strongly variegated material on which they flourish. The familiar pounding rhythms are there, of course, which the players duly pounce upon. But it is the constant trade between the machine-like aspect and the fragile sparks of something more human that elevate the music and its players.

Pieced together like a series of chain reactions, the individual lines set each other off, either fading out forgotten, building to something new, or opening out on to enormous wide spaces such as the wonderful vista with which it closes.

Similar tricks are at work in Ravel's only string quartet which, together with Haydn's Op 54/2, made up the concert's first half. But Ravel didn't so much write for the four instruments as orchestrate for them, marshalling a range of effect, colour and tone that is always staggering in live performance. Where the SLSQ fell down was in needlessly exaggerating every tiny gesture, to the detriment of the flow. Still, their emphatic approach worked well in the Haydn, and – from a group who have spent 20 years refining their youthful exuberance – was not unexpected.

Shostakovich: The Gamblers

2010-03-26T11:11:00.000Z

Shostakovich completed only one act of The Gamblers, an opera intended as a word-for-word setting of Gogol's play. It is not difficult to see why he never finished it. The determination to set every word would have led to a finished work of absurd length. But even without this obstacle, the use of a musical style similar to that of his earlier opera Lady Macbeth would have caused severe displeasure to the Soviet regime of the early 1940s, with consequences only too clear to the composer. It is tempting therefore to suppose this was something of a private experiment with a beloved text. As such, it is a fascinating document of what Shostakovich might have written if left to pursue his own artistic interests.

Vladimir Jurowski deserves enormous praise for bringing the work to the ears of many, myself included, for the first time. The music moves between a pulsing accompaniment – which menaces both audience and singers with its forward drive – and a somewhat kaleidoscopic symphony, with numerous lines competing for attention and timbral shifts illuminating the uncanny alterations of momentum at the heart of Gogol's drama. It deserves a wider airing, especially when handled with such detailed and loving attention. Jurowski's orchestra responded well; the all-Russian cast less so. The great Sergei Leiferkus led the way, allowing magnificently rounded tones to emerge from behind the sea of Russian consonants. But neither he nor any of the others seemed to notice the conductor or his orchestra.

A blistering performance of the suite from Shostakovich's early Gogol setting of The Nose took up the first half together with the first symphony, which was beautifully coloured if rather scrappy in places, in part due to the conducting. If this was a slight shame, it in no significant way detracted from a marvellously rewarding evening.

The delivery of justice

2010-03-17T11:19:00.000Z

The great economist Amartya Sen's focus is on fighting injustice – not defining it. But we still need an ideal concept of justice

My first attempt at a philosophy essay was on the theory of justice.

At the time, I took from the exercise a valuable lesson in the correct application of the epithet "dog's breakfast". But the intervening 20 years have taught me that it wasn't just me who had problems with the idea of justice. Indeed, justice is an example of what philosophers, since a famous lecture by W B Gallie in 1956, have become used to calling essentially contested concepts; concepts, in other words, on the existence and normative force of which we are all agreed but on the definition of which we are bound to disagree.

In his long and distinguished career, the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has steered admirably clear of dogs' breakfasts, preferring to take his nourishment at the high table of Trinity College Cambridge and suchlike. When it comes to justice, like a genteel diner on a strict diet, he prefers to push this tasty but indigestible morsel discreetly to one side and concentrate on enjoying what he knows he can enjoy, like getting rid of injustice. Injustice is like justice in being impossible to define, but unlike it in possessing a "we know it when we see it" quality. And given that the perception of injustice in situations is more or less innate, we should spend our time better trying to put this natural motivation to good use than attempting to trace its conceptual delimitations.

That, at any rate, was one of the underlying thrusts of a talk on "Power and capability", delivered by Sen on Monday night at Demos's annual lecture, just as it is an underlying thrust of Sen's recent book, The Idea of Justice.

But Sen's primary concern, of course, isn't with defending a theory of justice so much as rendering the concept applicable in political practice. As he put it on Monday night, "the task of the theory of justice, in this approach, is not that of speculating – and dreaming about – a perfectly just world, or even about perfectly just institutions, but using public scrutiny to arrive at agreed diagnoses of manifest injustices on the elimination of which a reasoned agreement could emerge."

To this end, Sen's career has been marked by the successful effort – for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998 – to introduce genuinely human qualitative indicators into the language of economics and public policy, for instance in contributing to the establishment of the Human Development Index as more subtle counterpart to straight GDP analysis. Part of his concern on Monday night was to reiterate the way in which, following the implementation, ideas of freedom and moral autonomy can still be made to operate within the largely ends-oriented framework of contemporary policymaking and finance.

As a thinker engaged in the public sphere, Sen deserves undiluted praise in immodest heaps. But as a thinker tout court, one has to wonder whether the essential difficulty of concepts should really place them beyond the reach of inquiry. Indeed, the property of being "essentially contested" applies, in fact, to the majority of our ideals, and yet our lives are still enriched by being partly given to the effort to realise them. Imagine an artist, for instance, whose life's work consisted in the effort to cover up ugliness rather than create beauty. Is justice, in many ways as shapeless a concept as beauty, really so different? The simple fact that we are unlikely ever to live in a perfectly just world doesn't mean that the effort to envisage such a world is necessarily a waste of time. Perhaps Sen, who after all spends a respectable amount of his time quoting Karl Marx, might well agree.

There is a deeper problem with Sen's theory of non-injustice, as it might be called, which concerns the crucial aspect of motivation and its relation to "capability", a term which Sen describes as reflecting "the actual opportunities a person has to do this or be that – things that he or she may value doing or being."

"Capability" is understood as one of the key identifiable and ameliorable characteristics in an unjust situation: one of the things that define victims of injustice as such, in other words, is precisely their lack of power to alter their situation. Redistributing not just wealth but also capability, the theory goes, will therefore not only allow the downtrodden to perceive the injustice of their situation, but to act in such a way as to diminish it.

But what about societies, such as ours, in which injustice on the scale witnessed by Sen in the Bengal famine of 1943 has by and large been eradicated? Through an abuse, effectively, of the surfeit of capability most of us enjoy today, our ability to perceive injustice along the emotional lines delineated by Sen has by and large long since dried up. That is to say, we can see it, but our mindedness to do something about is strictly limited (why else do we keep our aid budgets so low?). Thus it is in precisely such situations that we need concepts of justice to which we can appeal where practical motivation is lacking. Or to reduce it ad absurdam, the more just a society becomes in itself, the more necessary does it become for it to furnish itself with an ideal concept of justice.

Elision

2010-03-17T11:18:00.000Z

Like many, I first came across the Australian aboriginal notion that the land was sung into existence in Bruce Chatwin's 1986 book The Songlines. It's a wonderful idea that I've met since in a variety of musical contexts, all of which left me cold (or shivering from excess of cringing). But this concert from the talented Australian contemporary music ensemble Elision began with a work by Liza Lim in which, for once, the reference made real, non-trivial sense.

Songs Found in Dream uses a small ensemble to evoke the idea of shimmering, a perceptual state in which boundaries between mind and world are at their most fluid. Recruiting a battery of soft scrapes, squeaks and semi-articulations to each episode, Lim visits each area just long enough to make its subsequent metamorphosis meaningful, allowing the ear to focus and refocus in precisely the same way that a heat haze may cause us to see different things in one and the same object. Admirably short and restrained, the piece succeeds not simply because everything works, but because it can be heard to do so.

Songs... shared the stage with five other works, including appetising new pieces by Bryn Harrison and Mary Bellamy. Only Aaron Cassidy's contrived evocation of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze's meditations on Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion came up short. The anchor work was Brian Ferneyhough's 1992 homage to Varèse, with the absurdly difficult violin part played by Graeme Jennings, but a masterful rendition of James Dillon's Once Upon a Time (1980) revealed the latter as the more interesting point of departure.

The Sixteen

2010-03-15T11:18:00.000Z

With Sarah Connolly's celebrated mezzo and Dietrich Henschel's marvellously variegated bass, Harry Christophers had recruited some impressive talents for his performance of Bach's great B minor Mass. But to sing solo with the Sixteen can be an unforgiving experience. The choir are so wholly at one with the conductor and orchestra in tone and detail that any weakness among the soloists tends to be exposed ruthlessly.

This effect is exacerbated in the Mass, whose solo parts are not intended to allow any significant display of individuality of interpretation or character. After an opening Kyrie section in which the 28-strong choir achieved near-perfect balance – the initiative shifting between the five choral parts with the same fluidity and clarity as the violins and woodwind – Connolly's duet with soprano Gillian Keith for the Christe came as a letdown.

Connolly – among the richest toned of mezzo-sopranos, is still no female alto – practically disappeared beneath the musical surface, while Keith, on fine voice, seemed to pursue an expressive plan of her own making. Robert Murray, a fine young tenor, was also shaky and ill defined in the Benedictus. He combined well with Keith in the Domine Deus, though both were outclassed by the exquisitely layered gesturing of the violins and flutes. Fittingly, Connolly redeemed herself in the stark and angular Agnus Dei, producing a polished cry for mercy that no god (or critic) could possibly fail to be moved by.

Clearly, outside soloists are necessary for performances with most choirs. But with a professional chamber choir such as this, surely Christophers could have done better to draw the solo parts from among his own highly trained singers? Certainly, for me, there was no question that the musical highlight of the concert came in the Credo's central chain of virtuoso chorus. Judging by the thrilled response from the packed auditorium, there was no question for the audience either.

Knight Crew

2010-03-09T11:17:00.000Z

I try to avoid school matinees. But for Julian Philips's latest opera – using a chorus of 60 schoolchildren and an orchestra of which two-thirds are young players – an audience with loosened ties and untucked shirts seemed preferable to one with bow ties and stuffed shirts. "Man, what did we come here for?" came an inquiry nearby just before the conductor arrived. Minutes later, no answer was necessary.

The latest offering from Glyndebourne's long-running community opera programme, Knight Crew is based on a story by Nicky Singer that brings Arthurian legend to a contemporary canalside gangland. Arthur is Art, a sickly looking teenager; Merlin is bag-lady Myrtle, and Excalibur an old-fashioned sheath-knife that Art vows to keep clean after Mordec, his older brother and reluctant predecessor as gang-leader, uses it to kill Myrtle.

The transplant works well, particularly in the introduction of a mothers' chorus (drawn mostly from mothers of children in the cast) and its refusal to smooth over Art's conflicts with Mordec and Lance, a stray public-school boy whose penchant for judo keeps him, mostly, out of trouble.

Philips has never shied away from co-opting contrasting musical styles for dramatic purposes, and his score is a riot of references, taking in popular and operatic lyric idioms in a way that allows seamless interaction between professional soloists and chorus. Indeed, part of the magic of the music and of John Fulljames's direction is that it allows influence to flow from innocence to experience as well as vice versa, adding a quality to the solo performances, notably of Yvonne Howard (Myrtle) and Pascal Charbonneau (Art), that would have been lacking with a more experienced supporting cast.

Add to the mix Es Devlin's ingenious stage design and Nicholas Collon's excellent, transparent conducting and the overall effect was exhilarating, and not a little humbling.

Olli Mustonen plays Beethoven

2010-03-05T11:24:00.001Z

Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos. 4 & 5
Olli Mustonen, Tapiola Sinfonietta
Ondine ODE11465

If there is a concerto in the central repertory for which mere virtuosity is necessary but in no way sufficient for a satisfactory performance, then that concerto is Beethoven’s fourth, in G major. For while there are plenty of opportunities to impress with fleetness of fingers, the dramatic effect of the work is entirely contingent on the maintenance of long term rhythmic coherence. And this can only come
from considered partnership between orchestra and soloist.

It helps, therefore, if the soloist and conductor are one and the same person, as in this energetic new recording from the Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen and the Tapiola Sinfonietta, with whom Mustonen now works regularly as a conductor. The present disc concludes the partnership’s set of Beethoven concertos, with discs of the first two concertos and the third, coupled with Beethoven’s piano arrangement of his violin
concerto, both emerging a couple of years ago.

From the outset, you can tell Mustonen’s reading of the fourth will be interesting, simply by the lilting lift that crowns the opening phrase. By the end, the impression is more than confirmed. There is flexibility to Mustonen’s phrasing, both in the solo part and in the orchestra, which allows Beethoven’s well-worked melodies space to breath. But these little touches never interrupt the gradually rising tension which derives far more from harmonic and tonal structure than from any thematic development. The Andante shows Mustonen’s pianism at its most tender and lyrical, while the third movement reveal the Sinfonietta to be as lithe and responsive an ensemble as one could wish for.

The fifth concerto is less striking in terms of its originality but no less impressive for its commitment and subtlety. The rigours of the outer movements are dispatched with brio, reminiscent at times of the Finnish pianist’s Russian neighbours – Kissin certainly, but also Gilels – while the middle movement is quite breathless in its beauty, Mustonen stroking the notes, drawing stretched lines from the piano like a lover eliciting fond reminiscences of the previous movement’s grand passions.

Eletra

2010-03-04T11:30:00.000Z

Elektra
Stockholm Royal Opera
16 December 2009

from April 2010 Opera

Staff have been complaining about lack of space in Stockholm’s Royal Opera for years. The current building, completed in 1892, is short of backstage space and has a smaller stage than many major opera houses. After many years lobbying, there is at least now open discussion of plans to build a new house of some kind.

None of this prevented Staffan Valdemar Holm and Bente Lykke Møller, the team behind Stockholm’s 2006 Ring cycle, from reducing the stage to a narrow two-metre deep strip for their new Elektra. Dark red walls, entirely without adornment, extend high above the proscenium arch and extend nearly the full width of the stage, save for a narrow central corridor extending toward the dark interior of Mycanae’s ill-fated palace.

As stagings go, this must have been on the cheap side. But there is nothing cheap about the idea. A sense of claustrophobia, oppression and immobility, is of course entirely central to the opera’s psychological landscape, and the radical foreshortening of the stage managed to induce all of these emotions before a note had been sung. And though there was nothing comforting about the walls themselves, the cast clung to them, singing with their backs pressed hard against them or creeping to and fro with an awkwardness strongly suggestive of vertigo.

This tendency reached its apogee in the figure of Marianne Eklöf’s Klytemnestra, whose coterie of ladies in waiting was largely dedicated to the task of assisting her in walking, adding a layer of pity to the deep disgust in which she is routinely held. Katarina Dalayman’s Elektra, too, had the awkward, clumpy gait of a teenager shod in Dr Martens two sizes too big – something which lent to her final, life-transcending dance a touch of hilarity and honesty. After all, how would someone whose entire being has long been consumed by the frustrated desire for bloody revenge suddenly find themselves able to move fluently to Strauss’ lurching waltz.

Much of this would have been lost, of course, were the ideas not carried through in some masterful and subtle singing from the lead characters. Eklöf’s entreaties were wonderfully subtle, inviting both revulsion and, more unusually, considerable sympathy in a portrayal that striking in its maturity given the comparative youth of the singer. As for Dalayman, could it be too much to assert that she was born to sing this role? Though lacking some of the raw power of the role’s traditional exponents, her voice is superbly strong and flexible, able to fade with remarkable agility from a searing full tone to something altogether more delicate. In the role, this has the effect of reinforcing our awareness of the singer’s youth and essential vulnerability, adding considerably to the drama. Yet despite this, there was no sense in which – perhaps in contradiction to Strauss’s famous encomium to the opera’s first conductor – Dalayman could not be heard above Pier Giorgio Morandi’s wonderfully lithe house orchestra.

The Gambler

2010-02-25T10:00:00.000Z

Review of Prokofiev's The Gambler, Royal Opera House

The stages of opera houses are no strangers to madness. Indeed, from Orlando to Wozzeck and Lucia to Tom Rakewell, delusion and insanity of one kind or another have come to be staples of operatic psychology. Few works, though, can claim to be as thoroughly estranged from reason as Prokofiev’s early adaptation of The Gambler, a novella by Dostoevsky about the capricious charms of the roulette table and the hollowed-out society that gathers around it. This is not simply a question of individual characters going mad – although that does happen – but of the world in which they operate being depicted as, in itself, radically unhinged. More importantly, the main device in this representation – beyond an adaptation of the story from which Prokofiev has stripped away all humanizing features – is musical. Employing selfconsciously astringent expressionist idioms, Prokofiev’s score is structured as a series of violent headlong descents into the dramatic present which leave the listener gasping for breath, groping for some minimal vantage point to use as a neutral position for reference. Only one is offered, coming in the final act. It depicts with shrill woodwind and piano, quite brilliantly, the metallic rattle and skip of the ball on the slowing wheel, and then the tortuous silence that divides the moment it settles and the number being called.

That the single moment of musical rest offered by Prokofiev is also the opera’s dramatic climax is the stroke of genius that holds the work together. The audience’s world becomes complicit in the madness on stage, the audience hankering after peace with an immodest urgency, like a gambling addict whose sole access to clarity of vision and emotional equilibrium is the brief moment when events are put completely beyond his control. This is the gambling addict’s pathological focus – something that renders the rest of the world colourless, devoid of sympathy – as art.

Prokofiev had completed no fewer than six operas before 1915, when his proposal for The Gambler was finally accepted by Albert Coates as part of his effort to rejuvenate the Maryinsky Theatre. Although the Revolution prevented the production from going ahead (the premiere was in Brussels in 1929), the score was ready in 1917 after an intense period of work during which the composer’s mother, hearing the brutal and frenzied sounds emerging from behind her son’s closed door, began to worry seriously about his mental and musical health. But Prokofiev knew exactly what he was doing: “I have done everything possible”, he explained at the time, “not to burden the singers with unnecessary conventions, in order to afford them freedom in the dramatic realization of their parts. I am aiming only for simplicity”. As promised, the score comes unhampered by arias and set pieces, presenting over two hours of unadulterated recitative. If this makes the music difficult to interpret, the quicksilver pacing and two-dimensional characterizations make it very difficult to stage. Yet the Royal Opera’s new staging is one of several successful recent British productions of The Gambler, although the work has not been heard in London since David Pountney’s staging for English National Opera in 1983. (The Royal Opera have also used Pountney’s translation.)

One reason for this recent surge of interest is obvious: the society pilloried so mercilessly by Prokofiev is, in many respects, no worse than our own. The madness endemic in Dostoevsky’s Roulettenberg (based on Wiesbaden in Germany) is institutionalized, just as individuals today are consumed by an economic practice in which the relation between value, worth and work has been stretched beyond breaking point. If such a factor were enough to recommend the project to Antonio Pappano and his director, Richard Jones, it cannot by itself guarantee the work’s dramatic success. But Pappano’s investment in the score is total – excitingly immediate and yet sufficiently clear-sighted to maximize each of Prokofiev’s minute orchestral effect. And just because it is a difficult score to listen to attentively (Prokofiev’s early conception of opera was that the music should be transparent in respect of the action and “not stand out as an independent element”), it doesn’t mean that The Gambler shouldn’t be great fun to play – which it clearly was.

The interwar-period sets are equally virtuosic. Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes are fashioned in extraordinary detail, combining sophisticated shades of Erté with contemporary grotesques. The result is a riot of sense and reference for the eye quite equal to Prokofiev’s music. Antony McDonald’s artdeco interiors have foreshortened interiors so that the monumental aspects of the hotel, botanic garden and gaming rooms are offset by deceitful distortions of perspective. Jones’s direction, too, acutely emphasizes the skin-deep psychology of Prokofiev’s characters, carried through with some finely judged acting from Susan Bickley as Babulenka and John Tomlinson as the General. (Tomlinson was also Christian Badea and Pountney’s General.) As for the singing: according to Prokofiev, you shouldn’t really notice it. But the Italian tenor Roberto Saccà and German soprano Angela Denoke (who is scheduled to appear as Salome later this season) both make the best of the lyrical scraps left for them by the composer.

One touch that deserves mention is Jones’s addition of an unscripted (silent) acting role for a sunken-eyed caretaker. Attention rests on him for one passing moment, as Alexey mocks the Germans (yes, he goose-steps) for their absurd notion that modest wealth and comfort should be earned by hard work. The janitor haunts the stage almost for the entire duration of the opera, working when he can, watching when he can’t. Only once does he come into contact with the other world, when the General flings him against a wall as he marches back to the casino; the caretaker crumples to the floor before returning to his sweeping. The actor who plays him is, appropriately, uncredited.