May/June 2019

I went to a – very good indeed – Mahler 5 with Rattle and the LSO at the Barbican in mid-May. This seemed to me to work well – unlike his conducting sometimes with the Berlin Phil, Rattle was not trying to over-beautify it, and the Adagietto felt moving rather than simply sounding lush and wonderful. At the same time, the LSO were ferocious in their attack in the first few movements, and the moment in the third movement when you hear the chorale tune for the first time was profoundly affecting. A five star show! There was also as a bonus an extremely impressive performance of the Britten Sinfonia da Requiem in the first half

And a few days later in Sheffield  the Novosobirsk Orchestra played the Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances thrillingly – the best performance I’ve heard, the players really leaning into the music and playing with precision and passion. They were conducted by Kurt Sanderling’s son, Thomas, and sounded like yet another star Russian orchestra – there are so many of them!

The Halle Mahler 2 in May was a bit of an oddity – it was very impressive and compellingly played for most of its length – indeed for 99% of it. However, at the end, there was one of the only two times in over 50 years of my concert-going, that a professional performance has completely fallen apart. The other occasion was the LSO in about 1971, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting Beethoven 7. He was taking the finale at an incredibly fast pace and somehow two parts of the orchestra got out of synch with each other so that one part ended up about half a bar in front of the other at the end. While the audience applauded, the orchestra seemingly ignored them and were carrying on a furious discussion about who had messed up. On the Mahler 2 occasion, just before the climatic ‘Auferstehn’ cry from the chorus, something happened…..the brass wobbled, one or two tentative voices in the chorus started and stopped, there was an embarrassed silence for about half a second, then Elder got everyone back together and the performance concluded. One person said to me that this might have been when Sir Mark suddenly had a major neck problem that subsequently required him to have 4-5 months off resting – I’m not sure. But somehow, everyone for a moment stood on the abyss of total collapse. I’m afraid it spoiled the whole performance for me.

And, then Stockhausen, and ‘Donnerstag’ aus ‘Light’. in late May This was one of two performances in the Festival Hall, with a French, UK, Swiss cast of singers and musicians. I went there feeling I ‘ought’ to go, as a big event and a major work, but not expecting to enjoy myself or feel engaged. I have to say it was very absorbing, always worth listening to and afterwards, with the brassy Farewell played from the RFH balcony over the Thames, as I walked back in the sunset over Hungerford Bridge, I found the music memorable and wanted to hear more. There was actually an abridged version over ?10 hours of the whole of ‘Light’ a few weeks later in Amsterdam, which I now would have liked to go to, but unfortunately it clashed with my Palestinian human rights 2 week briefing.

I thought the Janacek Cunning Little Vixen performance in late June with Rattle and the LSO at the Barbican recently was extraordinarily good. It was semi-staged, with direction from Peter Sellars, who has a bit of a reputation for whacky and not always fully effective stagings. This one to my mind, within the limits of a concert hall, and the Barbican at that, seemed very good  -there were some effective, sometimes funny, videos of scenes from the natural world when the frogs, badgers, grasshoppers etc were talking to each other, and the characters reacted sensitively and well to each other.  I could imagine some grumbling about the relevance of some of the videos – when the Forester was at home there were pictures of well-heeled mansion flats in ?Maida Vale or upmarket bits of Berlin – but I wasn’t too fussed. The children on stage, sometimes the vixen’s cubs, sometimes animals in the forest, were particularly well-drilled. The strange sexual overtones of the vixen’s relationship with the Forester were well brought out. I have only seen one production of this live before, which was at Glyndebourne and very beautifully staged – though the shortness of the work, the longness of the interval and the quantity of champagne my friend had brought, meant that some of the details were a bit foggy. The general tenor of the LSO production emphasised the misery of the Forester, and his quasi-redemption at the end. The scene where the three men – Forester, Schoolmaster, Parson – regret the passing of time and their increasing age was very moving, and, in that context, the sexual explicitness of what the Vixen and the Forester got up to towards the beginning the more startling – a lot of heavy petting. The Barbican is not a sympathetic hall for voices, I felt, and people like Lucy Crowe, whom I know to have a voice that sounds wonderfully colourful, big, warm and resonant in a place like the Coliseum, and Gerald Finley, another beautiful singer, sounded constrained and small in voice. Nevertheless, Lucy Crowe’s performance of the Vixen was magnetic – well-acted, sung with many shades and variations of colour, and extremely energetically portrayed; she leaped about the stage and there was a very funny video of her chomping away greedily at chicken kebabs as she tricks the chickens. Gerald Finley’s part isn’t enormous, but he was very moving at the end as the Forester, when he surveys the twilight sun in the forest and the beauty, and self-renewal, of nature.

Perhaps inevitably in the context of a performance in a concert hall, though, it was the orchestra which took centre stage and Rattle himself was sometimes part of the action with the animals of the forest – he conducted from the edge of the stage, and occasionally moved into the centre of it all. There were wonderful fluttering sounds from the orchestra at the beginning as the forest stirs, a crisp rhythmic punch in the folky bits, and a great blaze of sound at the end, the more powerful because the orchestra had been subtle and subdued for much of the performance. There were lots of microphones around, so unclear whether it will be on Radio 3 or just recorded for future CD release – if the former, a ‘must-listen’.  It is in many ways a bonkers work which really shouldn’t come off on stage, but I found it more credible as a stage work than the more conventional Katya Kabanova.

I also went to Billy Budd at Covent Garden, in May. I treated myself to a seat in the stalls at CG. Some critics grumbled about the set but I thought that, in a severe way, with a stylised below and above deck performance area, it looked sufficiently naval to be credible; I think a production that completely ignored the naval context would be misguided, to say the least. The set also very effectively gave a claustrophobic and oppressive feel to the action. I thought Toby Spence was mis-cast visually as Vere; he looked far too young, and though his singing was fine, he really couldn’t manage to convey any sense of the older Vere reflecting on his younger self, and things that happened long ago; oddly, there seems to have been no intention on the part of the director to make him look older, which was odd. Jacques Imbrailo absolutely looked the part and sang it beautifully. I heard different views of Brindley Sherratt’s quite unusual Claggart – some people thought his sinister bespectacled and balding presence jarred with context and time, but I thought his appearance was very effective, and he was good at getting across the homo-erotic elements in a fairly subtle way, without hamming it. The orchestra was very good, and indeed, during the gun battle with the French ship, managed to produce the loudest noise I have ever heard in the theatre since Goodall’s Siegfried Funeral March at the Coliseum!