March 2019
More cinema opera in Sheffield this week – the Covent Garden Traviata on Wednesday, which was great! Obviously, I couldn’t compare it visually – either in terms of acting or sets – with the Met one, but I did think Ermolena Jaho was absolutely amazing as an actor, and with the sort of beautiful soft toned and nuanced singing that I haven’t heard so often these days. Obviously, there are vocal pyrotechnics she can’t do so well, and Damrau can (did DD hit a high C at the end of Act 1 or thereabouts?) but I am not that bothered by the lack (at a very, very high level) of dazzling coloratura – EJ clearly lives the part and looked shattered at the end. A great singer (and I am embarrassed to say I have never heard of her before)! The Twittersphere was buzzing – see https://twitter.com/ErmonelaJaho . And I was very struck – I think the tenor made the point – by how much Verdi achieves with what seems at first hearing to be such slight effects – a jogging rhythm on the strings, maybe a bit of woodwind accompaniment. Everything is focused on the vocal line and for the singer to lead on. For me it was a bit of an embarrassing revelation as to how much I have been missing by not listening very much to Verdi over the years. The tenor was fine – not a brilliant actor I thought, but doing all that was needed vocally – and, yes, Placido Domingo was brilliant. At 78, he is definitely a complete phenomenon. You could tell he’s a bit short of breath now and then, but the voice sounded – at least in the cinema – amazingly powerful, and how wonderful to hear that voice again ringing out in all its warmth and richness. And, as you say, he has a marvellous stage presence. The voice just sounded back down the years to the Tosca I think I heard him sing in 1971, and the Fanciulla in 1979 (plus the Otello with Kleiber). It’s a huge pity that all my programmes from that era were left in an attic in the 1980’s in Maidenhead (maybe they are still there). I do somewhere have diaries from that period (not mega-essays, just notes of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, so one day when I have the time I might be able to check and know for sure….)
And so, to the St Petersburg concert on Friday. I’ve heard them a fair amount over the years, starting in? 1970, when their chief conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky (conducted many Shostakovich premieres from the 1930’s onwards) brought them to the Proms to perform Shostakovich 5 (there’s a great Youtube programme about him – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlDFdo3BXvo ). Digressing slightly, the cemetery shown in the film unfortunately is not the same as the one I went to in St Petersburg in 2018, which is a wonderful treasure trove of 19th century Russian cultural figures – Dostoyevsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin and (with the largest memorial) Tchaikovsky – in the grounds of a monastery. Russians have an endearing practice of laying flowers by their cultural heroes every death anniversary, and Tchaikovsky’s was positively festooned with lilies and so forth. They put these often on everyday statues in the big cities – someone had put a cheap bunch of supermarket flowers at the foot of a statue of Prokofiev in the streets behind the Bolshoi Theatre, I noticed.
The St Petersburgers are a wonderful orchestra – the Gramophone a few years ago rated them as 16th or 17th best in the world out of the top 20 (shamefully there’s only one UK orchestra in that list, the LSO – while there are 3 Russian ones), but they do tend to play safe when touring – although I suppose 19th/early 20th century Russian music is what the punters want to hear them play. It was a decidedly unimaginative programme – Prok 1, Rachmaninov PC2, and Tchaikovsky 5 – but marvellously played, in Manchester. And – I do mean marvellously…. the solo horn in the 2nd movement of T5 was beautiful, the soaring strings in the same 2nd movement breath-taking, and the sheer power and velocity/precision of the orchestra at breakneck speeds in the finale of the same was really quite something. The final peroration of the symphony can seem banal and trite if taken too fast – somehow, the orchestra / conductor took it at exactly the speed that makes it moving and an emotional release. The conductor, sadly, was not Yuri Temirkanov (Mravinsky’s successor), now 80, who was ill, but a very competent replacement Vassily Sinaisky (who used to be based in Manchester with the BBC Philharmonic). And the encore was the Khovanschina Prelude, with soft shimmering strings and an outstanding clarinet solo – in a different league, sadly, from the Halle performance a few weeks ago. The soloist in the Rachmaninov was Freddy Kemp – again, a good and sensitive musician, superbly underpinned by the orchestra. Russian orchestras – I remember hearing this for myself at the Proms in 1971 and you can hear it also in the old Melodiya recordings -. used to have some very distinctive sounds – a very nasal, thin, oboe sound, whining, vibrato-y ‘French’ French horns and rasping brass. A lot of that, sadly, has gone now – the horn sounds standard for instance in the T5, but I was pleased to hear the oboes still making a distinctive sound, a lot harsher than UK or German equivalents.
I do admire Russia’s commitment to a high standard of musical culture, even with so many social and political problems to deal with. Although all the big orchestras and opera companies were still on their summer holidays when I was in Russia, I did get to the season’s opening concert by the Vladimir Philharmonic Orchestra (Vladimir is about 200 kiloms from Moscow, which, to my ears, sounded just as good as some of the UK regional orchestras (and of course there are 100’s of such orchestras in Russia). They were performing Beethoven 3, very competently – and they did have more of the vibrato-type horn sound, and piercing trumpets!
Is Russia’s commitment to a high standard of musical culture truly supported nowadays or am I romanticising?. I am not a Russia expert at all, and can only say what I saw – which was:
- A very vibrant musical life; not just the big companies, but plenty of specialist orchestras eg for Baroque, and alternative opera companies
- The one concert I did go to had plenty of young people and all the local dignitaries
- Plenty of funding for the arts – whether from the State or oligarchs, who knows, but all the big concert halls and opera houses that I saw the outside of looked well-maintained.
There’s a really absorbing book – another one by Orlando Figes – called Natasha’s Dance, which I really recommend, as full of insights into Russian culture. The Elizabeth Wilson book about Shostakovitch is very good too – I was less impressed by the Julian Barnes one, which again, seemed to rehash the familiar incidents. But I suppose the Barnes book is an interesting exploration of how all of us are compromised, in one way or another.
More March 2019
The Damnation of Faust performance at the Bridgewater Hall was very fine – not in the Colin Davis class, though (I have his recording with the LSO which I guess is about 15 years old, and which, hearing it after the performance, gives new insights and dimensions to the work through the careful tempi chosen, and perhaps also the balance achieved between the sections of the huge orchestra). But I had forgotten totally what a wonderful work it is – I can’t have listened to it from beginning to end for 30 years, though obviously things like the Hungarian March turn up in concerts, sometimes as encores. The Halle and Elder threw everything at it – there were three adult choirs, for starters, and then at the end, with the angelic chorus coming on, they had the 100-strong Halle youth choir all dressed in red coming down the aisles through the audience. Bachtrack calculated 332 people involved – I was too taken up with the performance to count! A wonderfully ‘big’ sound, anyway – there was also a full sextet of harps, four timpanists and an ophicleide, . I loved the big mezzo arias – the King of Thule song, and the ‘D’amour l’ardente flamme’ with the beautiful cor anglais solo. Rachel Kelly was a late substitute for Marguerite, an Irish mezzo – I thought she didn’t have a particularly outstanding voice but used what she had very thoughtfully and intelligently, really feeling what she was singing. David Butt Philip was Faust – not a great communicator, and rather oddly in the duet with Marguerite having to resort to falsetto at one or two points, though I guess it is a very demanding role. I have always thought of him as being more a classic oratorio sort of singer, but he has apparently done a lot of opera. But it was really the chorus and the orchestra that made this performance so powerful. Laurent Naouri was a very idiomatic and totally idiomatic Mephistopheles – much the best singer, objectively, and projecting the text very well – he captured a very French aspect of this particular Devil. I need to spend time listening to more Berlioz – I have never really listened that much even to Les Troyens, even though I have one of the Davis recordings. And I must read the Berlioz Memoirs again – a very racy read (Actually it has to be said that Wagner’s Mein Leben is also quite fun, though one feels it’s more fiction than fact)
Somewhere I picked up on Stephen Johnson book, published last year, called ‘How Shostakovitch Changed My Mind’, which I bought on impulse via Kindle, and, actually, DID read, for once. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as a must-read – it rehashes pretty well known incidents in Sh’s life. But it is really about SJ’s severe bipolar disorder, and how listening to Sh’s music helped him through that – and it is quite moving about the impact and the reality, ‘somewhere’, of music on people’s lives and minds – how it becomes a communal experience, like the Greek explanation of tragedy, a shared catharsis. Given how omni-present music of all kinds is in our lives, it is in a sense strange that it’s very difficult to say what it is and what it does. Music is not a fact or an object in the world, but something whose meaning is generated by us as human beings, and I guess the same problem I have with trying to describe a piece of music’s impact on me would also be felt trying to describe a relationship, or what someone is really thinking. I was also thinking of Tom Service’s BBC TV programme in 2016 about the Leningrad Symphony. I noticed it was on again –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06vkbcs/leningrad-and-the-orchestra-that-defied-hitler
It has some wonderful interviews with the 4-5 old people who actually went to the first performance of the symphony in Leningrad. Maybe it’s on YouTube?
More early March 2019
The Salonen/Philharmonia concert I went to at the RFH was very good indeed. First of all, it was really rewarding to hear S’s new ‘cello concerto. I think in my lifetime there has been a real shift in contemporary music. In the 60’s-80’s, there was an uncompromising modernism, often from composers based in universities (and therefore with a steady income) or with commissioning from quasi-State entities such as the BBC, who could be doctrinaire about what did or did not pass muster for funding. I have always found people like Boulez, Birtwistle and Maxwell-Davies pretty difficult to get to grips with, and that still continues – Barenboim gave a premiere of HB’s latest piece at the Proms in 2017, and I still found it an impossible ‘listen’. But with the advent of the minimalists, on the one hand, and the younger composers like Turnage, who were unafraid of using rock or other idioms, things have begun to change. I find people like Ades, and now Salonen, are very much more in the great 20th century traditions of Mahler, Shostakovitch, Britten, Tippet, and Messiaen than the Birtwistles of this world. It doesn’t mean their (Ades/Salonen/Turnage etc) work is massively accessible – it’s still quite tough – but it does offer a way in, a point of comparison, that is just not there, for me, in the work of much of the 60s and 70s. However, I am always willing to give the latter a go – I have signed up to a complete ‘day’ of Stockhausen’s massive 7-day opera – ‘Licht’ – in May at the RFH (the whole thing is on in June in Amsterdam but it clashes with something else I am doing). The ‘day’ is Donnerstag, focusing on the Archangel Michael, and about 4 hours long. We shall see….
Back to the Salonen work….it was very enjoyable. There were some beautifully quiet meditative parts for the cello, some marvellous harmonies, a lot of orchestral colour (as you would expect from a conductor like Salonen) and some quietly effective loop-backs of cello sound recorded electronically, that could have sounded a bit contrived but didn’t. There were lots of fresh sounds, from the chugging, twinkling orchestral ‘chaos’ of the opening pages to some of the louder passages with percussion in the third movement. Salonen refers to asteroids, comets and astronomy as images for what he is trying to say in music – I think probably the emotional trajectory of the music is something I didn’t understand fully and would need to listen to the piece again to think more about that. I thought the first and second movements ‘spoke’ to me more clearly than the third, perhaps the second most of all, and the way the ‘cello was used in balance with the orchestra created a real concerto-like dialogue. I am not sure the bongo drums were a good idea…..But I loved the ending! Much of the music put me in a quietly meditative space, and with a sense of wonder, that I very much appreciated – and some of it did sound a bit like Sibelius at odd moments. And I have the chance to listen to it again – it was broadcast on Monday 25th at 7.30pm on R3!!!
Also, there was a superb performance by the Philharmonia and Salonen of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra – again, see what you think. This is a work I know well from recordings, but certainly, experienced live, it sounded up there in the Solti class. Salonen has a reputation as an excellent programmer, and you could see some similarities, both in terms of sonorities and also a certain enigmatic quality, between the cello concerto and the Bartok – which is sometimes folksy, sometimes opaque, sometimes bleak (particularly the unsettling 3rd movement), and occasionally humorous (the famous Leningrad Symphony quote). I don’t think I’ve heard it much live since the 70’s and I appreciated almost as though listening to it for the first time how much of a concerto for different parts of the orchestra it really is – you have to have top-notch woodwind and brass sections to bring it off effectively, and they all have their moments to shine. Again, the emotional trajectory is unclear, and you end up (perhaps the same is true of the Salonen) not trying to make a verbalised ‘sense’ of it, but just enjoying the textures / glimpses of melody as they pass by. I was struck in the performance again by that judicious use of the ‘right’ tempi that allow momentum to be maintained but gives clarity to the inner voices in the orchestra – particularly in the first movement – and I also felt that I was hearing things I don’t normally hear – ie that Salonen’s sense of orchestral balance was acute, bringing out the woodwind almost as equal partners with the strings at times. At the beginning of the 3rd movement I was reminded of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle…..perhaps that’s intentional on Bartok’s part……the lake of tears and his feelings about exile
John's musical journey 