I went to a cinema showing of the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve concert – Barenboim performing a Mozart Piano Concerto (26) and conducting as well, plus 4 Ravel pieces, played one after the other – almost, as Barenboim said, like a Spanish Symphony– the Rhapsodie Espagnole, the Alborado del Gracioso, the Pavane, and the Bolero. I loved the whole concert – the Mozart was full of delicate shades and subtle pointing, and the woodwind and DB collaborated happily in matching and varying the themes. It was not, I suppose, a ‘historically-informed’ performance – but so what? the speeds were perhaps leisurely but they allowed the orchestra and DB really to give each phrase its due. And the Ravel was superbly done – it must be the first time I have really enjoyed the Bolero, as each wind lead sought to phrase the tune more individually and subtly than the last. The climax was terrific!
I also listened to Thielemann conducting the VPO New Year’s Day concert on TV………Thielemann is not somebody overflowing with bonhomie, or extrovert showmanship and, conducting the audience in the Radetzky March, he managed to look fierce rather than jovial, I thought…But it’s always good to hear a fantastic orchestra like the VPO being put through its paces on one of the fast Strauss polkas, and, though I wasn’t listening that attentively, the Blue Danube waltz sounded more shaded and varied, and also slower, than it sometimes does. Someone from the BBC Symphony Orchestra once told me how difficult the J Strauss stuff is to play, for an orchestra. The classic New Year’s Day concerts I’ve come across are by Kleiber – I have the 1989 one on CD. There’s a lovely Youtube video of him conducting Die Fledermaus overture – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HDmIFT0pHY.
The Met’s recent La Fanciulla del West was on Radio 3 over the Christmas period, and I listened to it on I-Player. I was again struck by the beauty of the music. Kaufmann has a beautiful warm, rich tone, and great sensitivity to line and text, but sometimes makes me a bit nervous – his voice can waver and crack I find on occasion when he gets into his upper range, and that happened once or twice in this performance, although there was much beautiful quiet singing. Also, Eva-Maria Westbroek sounded a bit squally and approximate at the top of her range, I found. Incidentally I came recently across a new ‘singing-related’ word I’d never come across before….’squillo’. This was in a talk given by a soprano who sings heavy roles – Wagner and Strauss- and is also a singing teacher. She described it as that quality in a voice which allows it to ‘ping’ and to enable it to ride over a big orchestra in Puccini or Wagner or Strauss. I’ve never come across the term before…Westbroek certainly has it!!
Early January 2019
I went to an LSO/ Rattle concert at the Barbican of Sibelius 7, Nielsen 4, and ‘Let me tell you’, by the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, who was there for the performance. I thought it was a very enjoyable but not overwhelming concert: the Nielsen benefited from the bite, energy and the precision that Rattle brings to this sort of music, and the strings of the LSO in the slow movement were very moving (the LSO strings in my view are the only British orchestra’s which stand comparison with the best European and American orchestras). But somehow the great blaze of brass glory that there should be at the end of the first movement and the finale was taken a bit too fast, and to me the manic timpani interruptions sounded a bit too polite. But anyway – that’s just my view… The Sibelius I have always found a bit difficult to listen to – there are so many ideas in a single 20 min movement that I find it a bit tricky to work out how they all relate to each other – but it was very well performed, though the final crunching chord didn’t sound as ambiguous as it sometimes does. In many ways, the biggest surprise and enjoyment was the Abrahamsen piece – broadly tonal (in fact some of it wouldn’t have been out of place in Das Lied von der Erde) but with beautiful and subtle sounds from the orchestra – glinting and sharp, ice-cold some times. The words were in the programme, which helped, and are inspired by Hamlet’s Ophelia (apparently, they all come from the play, but reordered and re-imagined). It has to be said that Hannigan’s singing was completely impenetrable, as you found, if you didn’t have the words in front of you. The words aren’t on the Internet as far as I can see – an indication is given here from Section 5:
You have made me like glass
Like glass in an ecstasy from your light
Like glass in which light rained
And rained and rained and goes on
Like glass in which there are showers of light
Light that cannot end
I really liked this piece, particularly.
And Hannigan’s range and tone were amazing, and really captured, in the last section, the text’s sense of fading into snow. The audience was very enthusiastic about the performance, and there was a chap behind me in the Balcony standing up and shouting ‘Bravi’ at fortissimo levels. And in fact there were a few empty seats after the interval, so some people had clearly come for that work alone. There were some echoey bits which apparently are the Monteverdi stile concitato, the repeated-note emphases, that are used with the text throughout, but particularly about snow coming down in the last movement. I’ve bought the Nelsons recording!!
I had had recommended to me the Cantus Arcticus by Rautavaara a few months ago and there it was, conducted by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla and the CBSO on Radio 3 last Thursday evening on I-Player. I did enjoy listening to it – I thought the mix of bird cries and orchestra could have been a bit ‘naff’, but in fact it was very moving, particularly the ‘migrating swans’ movement. I’ve bought a recording! ‘Mirga’ is very talented and she has a real ability to bring out orchestral voices and colours and opting at the same time for very judicious tempi to do so– see for instance En Saga in the same CBSO BBC-recorded programme (for instance 51.00 to 1.05.00 and onwards), so that there is a kind of inner momentum (can’t describe it but it’s when you somehow get the tempo of a piece absolutely right so nothing is rushed or lingered over too much – I think it’s particularly important with Mozart…..). And beautifully built up to the climax as well….. Had I been listening to this in isolation I might have thought the clarity of orchestral sound had more to do with where the BBC places its mikes, but I heard the same thing happening live when she and the CBSO performed Debussy’s La Mer in Sheffield, a few months – which as I said, was the best I’ve heard live. An exceptional clarity in the orchestral sound….. I also enjoyed – coming back to the Mirga concert last week – the broader than average selection of Peer Gynt music.
I didn’t in the end go to Berlioz’s Beatrice and Benedict in Manchester, and, having heard it on I-Player, I rather wish I had. I am sure I have never heard the work before – it’s a late work and seemed to me to be very sun-lit and somehow expressing Berlioz’s fulfilment as a composer in its approach to the story. There’s a beautiful nocturne at the end of Act 1, in particular. There’s very little anger or violence or conflict, only bright, never cliched, music, sometimes sounding a bit like Mozart. I really liked it. There seemed to be some strange soft music for chorus – I was left trying to work out whether the chorus was hopelessly out of tune, or Berlioz was doing something very innovative – probably the latter. Incidentally, I still remember a wonderful performance of Much Ado about Nothing by the RSC with Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack in 1982, with some of the most memorable stage music I have heard in Shakespeare play. It made me almost skip out of the theatre with joy. There’s still so much Berlioz I don’t know – Benvenuto Cellini. Les Troyens, Lelio (although the latter does sound quite heavy going) and I don’t even know – apart from the famous chorus – L’Enfance du Christ! But I would recommend the Te Deum. Here’s a link to a memorable young-ish Abbado recording on Youtube in St Albans of all places – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QupRUy353oA with the EU youth orchestra (though not that youthful). There’s another Abbado performance with the VPO ten years on also on YT, but somehow English choral singing is always special, and makes the earlier one a better performance. And the boys are giving it the full welly in their bits, which is always thrilling to hear. I doubt if Berlioz was a conventional believer, possibly not one at all, but, in particular, the last movement, with the ‘In te domine speravi non confundar in aeternum’ (In you, Lord, is our hope: and we shall never hope in vain) and ‘iudex crederis esse venturus (We believe you will come to be our judge) being thumped out, in Berlioz’s military band style, in sheer terror – at ‘non, non confundar’ – with an envisaged future of judgement and personal accountability – is very powerful indeed. And actually, whether it involves red devils with horns and tails, or Beckett-like endless recurrence of past failings, the concept of some sort of final judgement, however absurd in scientific terms, does make a sort of emotional sense and a frame for one’s life, as Berlioz shows us through music (and maybe our contribution to climate change is part of that judgement).
Also went to see the Met’s Adriana Lecouvreur at the cinema. After some travel traumas, in the end I managed to see all but the first 10 minutes of Adriana Lecouvreur. I have to say I loved it – silly and fundamentally meretricious though it is. As the commentators said, it depends on stars, and stars with stardust and I thought Netrebko was really superb in playing it for all it was worth. She’s no great actor, but in a sense, the more you ham up the role, the more it’s appropriate to the overall theme. And actually, the end bit struck me as quite moving. She sang beautifully. AN has gone up considerably in my estimation! And Piotr Beczała was really good – he was Bayreuth’s Lohengrin this year, when Alagna stepped down at the last minute. Critics were making a big fuss about Anita Rachvelishvili and she sounded great – but I was surprised how little of her role there is – her presence could have been hammed up a lot more by Cilea and his librettist. Overall, I am really glad I went – and the cast were clearly having fun together, and with a hugely supportive audience. It struck me as a very good case for opera on screen – I would never have bothered to see this live, but in the cinema and for a fraction of the price it was really worthwhile
Early February 2019 I went to hear the Halle in Sheffield last Friday performing Rachmaninov 3. I’ve always liked this work when I’ve heard it, but it’s years since I listened to it in a concentrated way, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it live – certainly not since the 70’s. While it’s got some gloopy, succulent, Rachmaninov tunes, a lot of it is very unsettled – and also unexpected; there are lots of false starts. It sounds very much like the music of exile, not so much because of the trademark melancholy, but because all is so tentative and exploratory. And brilliantly orchestrated. I remember last summer going to Tolstoy’s town house in Moscow (well, it was outside Moscow at the time, but is now just by one of the big ring roads) and seeing, in this modest wooden house, a music room where Rimsky Korsakov, Rachmaninov and other luminaries used to listen to chamber music together in the early 1900’s with Tolstoy – what a fantastic contrast in twenty five years from being there through Revolution, and a complete upending of all he’d known, to being an exile on tour in America and (I think) Switzerland……The Halle, I thought, were in great form – the first movement didn’t linger, the slow movement (with a scherzo within it) was at the heart of the performance, and the last movement (which can drag) kept my attention. I’ve heard it said that R3 is one of the three great A minor symphonies of the early 20th century – the others being Mahler 6 and Sibelius 4. I think that’s right…..The conductor was someone called Daniele Rustioni who is the person in charge of the Opera in Lyon -he seemed unfussy and clear in his leading of the orchestra. There was a very good performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto before the interval – a ferociously competent performance by someone else new to me, Francesca Dego, which I thought was very good but maybe a bit too extrovert in her approach (a lot of thwacking of strings) for what is really a quite intimate piece. And before that the Prelude to Khovanschina – ah, another one of my enthusiasms. I went to a wonderful concert performance conducted by Semyon Bychkov a couple of years ago at the Proms, but never caught up with the recent Welsh National Opera production. It makes the plot of Palestrina seem very straightforward…but there’s some wonderful music, alongside the usual textual wranglings of what Mussorgsky did or didn’t intend at various points.
More early February I went to another very good concert this week in Manchester – the Halle, again, performing VW’s 7th Symphony – the Antarctica one. The first half was a bit dire – though very well played by Stephen Hough; this was Saint Saens’ 5th Piano Concerto, which fluttered along but really was of no consequence at all and pretty boring – in fact I almost fell asleep, which is unusual for me in the concert hall. The best thing in the first half was the encore Hough played – Debussy’s Girl with the Flaxen Hair, which was beautifully judged, full of ripples and colours, and sounding very different from when I’ve heard it hammered out as part of teenage music-making. But the second half was special – this was a bit of a revelation for me. I have never heard the RVW 7th live before and indeed have scarcely listened to it at all, though I have it in CD and digital form – I think I’ve dipped into it once or twice, and found it very grey and unyielding, and with too many VW tics, that make it sound like the 4th or 6th Symphony all the time. But actually, I now appreciate I was wrong – while there are a few places where the music sounds as though it’s just landed from somewhere else (e.g an enormous gong crash followed by stomping organ chords, which you get in ‘Job’ (do you know ‘Job’? – one of my favourite pieces), there’s a lot that sounds unlike anything else he wrote, and it has, while not entirely escaping its film music origins, an emotional trajectory that is about much more than imperial delusions in the snow – perhaps something about (from VW’s perspective, though I don’t agree) the ultimate futility and meaninglessness of human life, in the nuclear Cold War/aftermath of WW2. Anyway, it was premiered by the Halle/Barbirolli 65 years ago, and they did it proud this week – indeed, it’s just about possible that there might have been one or two people, in their 80’s at the performance last night, who were at the premiere! People in Manchester are very tribal and proud about the Halle, so it’s quite possible.
And…..I went to another cinema screening – this time the new Covent Garden Herheim Queen of Spades – So – I asked myself, setting aside the standard question, ‘was this a reasonable interpretation of the opera Tchaikovsky wrote?’, instead, ‘was this an absorbing 3 hours spent in the cinema/theatre?’, and my answer was a resounding ‘yes’. Unfortunately, I had to leave about 15mins before the end, to get back for a church service. Clearly it’s not something that makes the plot very clear to someone who’s never seen it before (I’ve seen it once – see below), but to me, there are three sorts of operas – the type which work well on their own, traditional, terms, which directors would be ill-advised to meddle with too much eg most Puccini, Traviata, Eugene Onegin; the type which need help to be dramatically interesting in our own time, or, at the very least, not look silly; and the type – eg Wagner, Mozart, Britten, Fidelio – that are masterpieces that work well on many different levels, and are capable of many different interpretations. This is all very crude and facetious, of course, but I do think QoS is one of those works which needs a helping hand and could easily seem ludicrous to a modern audience; also it’s got that problematic half hour of Mozart pastiche which doesn’t really move the story forward at all, and which you have to do something about as a director. So I was on the whole very taken by Herheim’s approach – it does illuminate the spirit of the music at many points and there are some really effective coups de theatres – as when Tchaikovsky appears holding a gun, or thrusts away Lisa as his new wife. Hermann and Lisa seem to me slightly cardboard cut-out and not very rounded characters so it made sense to me to have Tch, moving around stage with them. And also when the music is at its most intense, it seems somehow to be speaking to you and moving beyond the characters on stage – it almost seems to need some sort of ‘meta’ narrative. There were some silliness’s – the over-frequent use of the glasses of water – and I was not very taken in by Tch.’s attempts to play the piano and conduct. But on the whole it worked – although the critics seem to have panned it. I though Eva-M Westbroek’s voice was very well suited to the Lisa role, and a slightly wild voice goes well with Russian singing, maybe. I thought by far the best singers on stage were Lundgren, the Yaletzsky/Tch figure and the young contralto who sang Paulina/one of the dancers – and Felicity Palmer of course. I thought the orchestra was super. I would have given it 4 stars if I had been a critic.
BLOGS FROM 2018
More early December 2018: So…. I had an enjoyable evening watching ‘War and Peace’, after a rather dire scramble through the Birmingham Christmas Market, which seemed to focus overmuch on the beer and sausages aspect of that particular cultural artefact. This was a Welsh National Opera production, directed by David Pountney, and felt very much like a ‘team’ effort – lots of people playing 3-4 roles. It’s not a masterpiece – it’s 40 years since it was last on in the UK, and will probably not recur in my lifetime (nor probably would I want to have a second visit to this production…which is not a criticism of the show, far from it, but just a reflection that it’s not a good enough work really to be seen at regular intervals). The basic set was a concave wall, with the opening in the middle used for video images – some specific to this production, such as a hall and chandeliers, and some taken from a 60’s Soviet film of War and Peace, for the battle of Borodino, Moscow going up in flames and the retreat from Moscow. A building exterior wall with large windows dropped down from the flies gives an alternative perspective into the more intimate scenes, such as Andrei’s last illness. The work plods sometimes – some of the 1st ‘Peace’ part, dealing with Andrei, Natasha and Pierre, is very moving and sensitively scored, but a lot of the ‘War’ half is pretty routine, and even Prokofiev’s film scores are more inspired sometimes than some of the ‘War’ scenes – in fact things like Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata are great pieces of music. And yet…it’s also wonderfully orchestrated and there’s often something interesting going on in the orchestra even when the basic material is a bit bland. And there are some stirring tunes – Kutuzov’s hymn to Mother Russia – and, all together, I was never bored, always gripped by what was happening on stage and it makes for a good absorbing evening. The chorus – and chorus members also perform some of the many minor roles (there are about 70 in all) – was outstanding. The stand-out solo performance for me was Mark Le Brocq as Pierre, whose part is less cardboard cut-out than Andrei and substantial enough for him to get into what is a meaty part – I’d not come across his name before but he’s clearly pretty experienced – see http://marklebrocq.co.uk/biography. The Natasha was Lauren Michelle, an American soprano, who was pretty good – lyrical and some lovely soft singing but also able to project (she seems to have both Susanna and Elektra in her repertoire, which sounds a bit unusual). Another Bailey, Simon, was good as Kutuzov, but doesn’t really erase memories of Norman, whose presence and voice in the role I have definite memories of. The orchestra was first rate. Definitely worth quite a long trek for the second time in 40 years. I sat in the second row of the stalls at the side (not good for looking at the surtitles) but had a fantastic view of the stage and also the orchestra, with whom I was more or less nose to nose. You could observe two dramas at once, in fact – what was going on on stage, and the happenings in the orchestra (someone filing their nails while counting the bars, someone’s string breaking, someone else arriving late). Fascinating …….I’ve just thought of another obscure Prokofiev work, which Gergiev and the Maryinski Orchestra performed at the Proms in 2017. This was P’s Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the Revolution – a setting of texts by Lenin and Stalin. It involves a chorus, enormous orchestra including klaxons, and there’s a wonderful moment when the chorus have to replicate the stamp of marching proletariat feet. Poor Prokofiev never heard it performed – the censors kept getting cold feet about the settings of Stalin’s words, and, not able to stamp them, didn’t want to commit themselves to OK’ing it for performance.
Early December 2018: I saw Mark Elder conducting the Halle in the Rite of Spring, Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht, and Satie’s Parade in December 2018. It was great to hear the Rite live – I did hear it in a too-fast and slick performance by the NYPO under Maazel (an over-rated glitzy maestro) at the Proms about 10 years ago but otherwise have not heard it since performances by Boulez in the 70’s. It is an amazing piece, still, and this performance particularly played up the alternately burbling and wailing woodwind. What struck me is how much it is a summation of the past rather than anything looking forward – there’s a fairly obvious link with the Rite back to Rimsky–Korsakov and Scheherazade, I would say, and actually it was the experience of exile that changed Stravinsky’s musical style after the Rite. I went to Russia on holiday earlier this year, and one of the things I’ve never heard properly before are Russian church bells – the combination of high, small multiple bells, and one or two large bells. The interaction between the two sets of bells, operated through strings and pedals by one person, produce complex rhythms, and the first time I heard them I thought – ‘goodness, this is where the rhythms of the Rite of Spring come from’. And Stravinsky was part of the Russian version of the Arts and Crafts movement in Russia at the turn of the 20th century. Verklaerte Nacht is a work that is worth an occasional listen, and very beautiful at some points, but I sometimes think, as I did at the concert, that it goes on for too long and is far less impressive than Metamorphosen in how its themes develop and change. In many ways the most ‘modern’ piece was Parade. This is famous for its odd ‘instruments’ – two typewriters, gun shots, tombola whizzer and tubular bottles – but the music is curiously deadpan and ‘meaningless’ – seemingly without any emotional content. Satie was such a unique character that it’s difficult to be sure if he’s being totally serious – you never know if he’s quietly smirking in the background.
Late November 2018: I went to a great concert last night. The Halle and a Japanese conductor performed Shostakovitch 10 – this is a tricky work to bring off, arguably more so than the 5th, 7th or 8th, and particularly the third movement, which can sound oddly lightweight. And equally the first movement can drag towards the end. I have heard several performances over the last few years, notably one at the Proms with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw conducted by Mariss Jansons. But this one was better than that, primarily because the conductor seemed to pace it so deftly and the 3rd movement had real emotional depth, with the horn tune 12 times repeated calling from another more innocent world. There was a very good talk beforehand by a Shostakovich academic, on the mythologies attached to the symphonies. She wasn’t debunking the one about the 10th – Death of Stalin and freedom – but adding new comments – particularly Sh.’s obsession with Bach at the time, which comes through in a lot of the contrapuntally-based music in the first movement, and the fact that he had written quite a lot of the first movement as a never-completed 9th Symphony in 1944, which he then abandoned, the manuscript of which has only recently been discovered. As if that wasn’t enough the first half included Paul Lewis performing Beethoven PC2. It must be years since I have listened to this work, and I have always thought it fairly slight and 18th century. PL played it to have a lot more emotional depth. The amazing thing about his playing – very much like his mentor, Alfred Brendel – is its crystalline clarity – the enormous precision of the runs, and the consequent sensitive dynamics, changing sometimes from bar to bar.
Early November 2018: I’ve remembered I never sent off my Bayreuth tickets application this year. A very immersive experience, Bayreuth……I went there twice in the 70’s as a student and then not again until 2017. Highlights in the 70’s were seeing Parsifal in the original 1951? production by Wieland Wagner conducted by Eugene Jochum, and Tristan conducted by Carlos Kleiber. I unfortunately have no strong memories of the Kleiber performance but the Parsifal was very special – I can still remember the way the knights emerged out of the darkness in the Grail Castle. James King was a very good Parsifal. And the way Parsifal sounds in the Festpielhaus is unique. Indeed when I went back to Bayreuth in 2017 I had forgotten -ahem as well I might, not having been there for 43 years – how wonderful the sound is, with the wooden infrastructure meaning that you actually feel the orchestra with your feet as well as hear it – and because the orchestra is covered, the sound wells up, with a wonderful bloom on the strings. In 1972 I also went to a Ring cycle – again, few memories (Thomas Stewart was Wotan, James King Siegmund, Gwyneth Jones Brunnhilde). There was a new production by Gotz Friedrich of Tannhäuser, which caused a lot of fuss (it was a socialist production and the old Nazis hated it. Whether in my imagination or for real, I have a mental picture of Winifred Wagner leading a ring of protestors at the performance I went to). In 2017 I went to Parsifal, Tristan and Meistersinger. The Meistersinger, a legitimate exploration of Wagner’s anti-Semitism, was the most thoughtful, innovative and musically sensitive performance of Die Meistersinger I have ever been to as a total experience, even with the Goodall Meistersinger under my belt from ages past. It was fantastically clever, well-rehearsed, and with great word conscious singing, and the Bayreuth dedication of a team focusing on a production for several months really worked on this occasion. As with a lot of the recent Bayreuth productions, you can find it on YouTube. The Hans Sachs was Michael Volle, the Walther Klaus Florian Vogt. The Tristan was enormously rewarding musically – conductor Thielemann with the orchestra on fire, and with Stephen Gould and Petra Lang in the title toles. I wasn’t that keen on the production – it made King Mark into a thug rather than a hurt old man. Parsifal was very satisfying musically and dramatically – set in the contemporary Middle East, and with the excellent Georg Zeppenfeld as Gurnemanz. It was conducted quite swiftly by Helmut Haenchen but beautifully and sensitively played.
The whole Bayreuth experience is pretty immersive – the 4pm start means that you don’t do much else other than go to the opera , and to a talk or the excellent museum at Wahnfried beforehand… I bought a black Festspiele tee-shirt saying ‘enthullet den Gral’ – ‘uncover the Grail’……….
Early November 2018: I’ve just come back from excellent performances of Porgy and Bess at the ENO and a concert performance – but really semi-staged – of Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO performing the Rake’s Progress. It’s over 40 years since I last heard the RP live and I’ve never heard P&B live before, The ENO P&B was energetic, with some great singing – particularly the Porgy, Eric Greene. It was, as Gershwin requested, a black cast, in this case US, South African and UK. I thought, seeing it live, that the libretto was a bit clunky – the 1st act meanders and there’s too much of the ‘now it’s time for a song’ kind of cue. But the energy, the orchestral sound and the tunes win out. The Coliseum was packed – good to see – and a hugely warm reception from the audience to the performance. Oddly enough I occasionally felt there were odd resonances with Peter Grimes – the same emphasis on a closed community and a similar storm scene – I wonder if Britten ever saw it in the States. I was sitting on the Balcony which is my favourite place in the Coliseum – I hate places with overhangs (they cut off the sound) so it’s either the Stalls or the Balcony for me, and the Balcony is cheaper. I found the 1930’s version of black American speech – apparently required by the Gershwins (‘Mebbe dat’s all de breakfast I got time for’ etc) – on the surtitles a bit hard to take, but there we go…., but, even sitting in the Balcony, which is some way away from the stage, you sensed the great waves of energy coming from the cast. ‘Porgy and Bess’, I suppose, is not something you need to ‘interpret’ as a director There’s another interesting issue coming out of the P&B experience for me, which is the question – is there something called ‘opera’ which is different from ‘music-theatre’ or a ‘musical’? To me, and you may disagree, there is simply something called ‘music theatre;’ and everything, everything from ‘Les Mis’ to Parsifal, is on the same continuum, all using words and music to entertain, to instruct, to give a view of life, to change lives with a compelling vision. The criteria one uses to sift the wheat from the chaff would be the same – is this a compelling dramatic experience? are the music and speech working together or against each other? Are the characters on stage believable; do the music and words together make up something that is more than a play with tunes, or a musical piece with words? Am I changed/enriched etc by the experience? How is it sung? How is it played? Is it subtle – is it rich and multi-layered or essentially flat? I can’t for the life of me see more than one art form in the ‘musical’, the ‘opera’ and so forth – but you may not think the same……..But I agree ‘music theatre’ at its best is an amazing art form.The Rake’s Progress at the RFH was great – the only problem being that I had a seat near the stage and got a crick in the neck looking upwards trying to follow the surtitles and the wonderful Auden/Kallman libretto. There was an excellent young Puerto Rican / American soprano called Patricia Burgos and Tom was Toby Spence. All cast members acted fully, with minimum props – Baba had a beard etc. It’s a work I really need to listen to more closely – to understand more about the interface between the pastiche 18th c and the modern, the puppetry and the real….
Late October 2018 – I saw the Walkure from Covent Garden relayed in the local cinema in Sheffield. I thought it was excellent – although Emily Magee maybe wasn’t on quite the same level as the other leads. The Wotan, John Lundgren, I was very impressed by – I hadn’t heard him before. And Nina Stemme is the best Brunnhilde around at present. Stuart Skelton is phenomenal – I saw him about three weeks earlier handling the terribly difficult tenor part in the Glagolitic Mass with ease. I thought the long scene in Act 2 between Wotan and Brunnhilde was acted and sung as well as I have ever heard. I saw the ROHCG Ring production live in 2012 when my reaction was the same as seeing the screening on Sunday – I was gripped by the way that Keith Warner really gets the singers acting and reacting to each other, while at the same time being mystified by some aspects of the production, like the purple wigs. But the magic fire music is one of the more impressive coups de theatre I’ve come across………The orchestra sounded terrific but sometimes I felt a certain stop-start motion to Pappano’s vision of the music – things seem to slow down and speed up in a way that is at times viscerally exciting, but doesn’t always feel ‘organic’. But this is at a high level of interpretative complaint….
Memories from earlier than Autumn 2018
TO BE WRITTEN……….
John's musical journey 